How Peter Attia Wrote His First Book
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The book basically got trashed before getting kind of resurrected. There's some painful things that you're talking about. I just felt like completely abandoned. My agent had already kind of ditched me. I get an email from the publisher saying, if you don't deliver this thing by April, we're going to come after you. It was very threatening. You got to tell me what's going to make this successful or unsuccessful. Always proceed from objective to strategy to tactics. Don't skip those steps.

You're clearly very conscious of making it real, concrete, and practical for people so that these ideas stick out, they come to life, and they have this practical gravitas, so to speak. Have you noticed the cover? No. A little Easter egg there.

If you're going to write a book, it's going to be an emotional journey. There's going to be moments where you feel like you just have the greatest idea, you've distilled something, and you're super proud of it. And there's going to be other moments of despair and hopelessness. And this conversation with Peter Attia, the author of Outlive, which right now is one of the best-selling nonfiction books in the world, it is all about that emotional journey.

What happens when your agent leaves you, your publisher leaves you? What do you do? How do you fight through a moment where in his case, he didn't look at the book, didn't think about the book for nine months until somebody came into his life and said, hey, you've

You got to write the book. You got to get this thing published. If you're thinking about writing a book and you're wondering what that road looks like, both physically and emotionally, you're going to like this conversation. And one more thing. I'm about to kick off the very final, last ever write a passage cohort. There will not be another one. It starts on October 7th. And if you've been thinking for a while, hey, I really want to enroll and write a passage. Hey, I really want to improve my writing. Well, this is your last chance. October 7th, five weeks.

And if you want to enroll, go to www.writeapassage.com. Let's get into it. This one's good. It's with Peter Attia. You got to tell me about this first sentence. I'll never forget the first patient whom I ever saw die. But I want to start with the story of the dream. Because the way that you begin this book, it sets so much up for the path that you're about to take.

Yeah. So I have really vivid dreams. I know, uh, for, I can usually remember my dreams most nights, which is, I don't think most people can. Um, I'm not like that at all. Yeah. I think that's unusual, but, but I normally wake up in the morning and I can absolutely remember my dreams and I have many dreams that I can remember many years later. Um, but, but this was, this was actually one of the few dreams that I had more than once, even though it may be, maybe showed up in different formats, but it was a dream of, um,

you know, being on the street, kind of a low lit kind of dark, uh, not quite an alley, but just kind of a low lit area, um, with a building that was, you know, probably three or four stories high. So I'm not super high. Um, and then there's a guy up there and he's dropping eggs off the balcony and I'm in my scrubs. Cause this is a dream I had in residency where all I pretty much wore was scrubs and I'm trying to catch the eggs.

and I I'll catch one and then I'll miss two and I'll catch one and I'll miss three. And, and, and so basically the, the dream was one of not being able to kind of catch all of these eggs. Um, and that's really all the dream was. And the reason it shows up in the story, um, at the, at the introduction is I think many years later, I looked back and said, look, one interpretation of that dream could be, um,

that it sort of represented how I felt in medicine, which was, you know, you can save some people, but you can't save everybody. And when you're being asked to save people, you're being asked to save them on a, at the final instance, right? And in many ways, I think that's what medicine 2.0 is, right? Medicine 2.0 is this idea of being able to

to, to have the tools to save people. So if you think about the transition from medicine 1.0 to 2.0, that would be the equivalent of being better at catching the eggs, you know, having, having a, you know, a softer glove and being better at able to, you know, spotting them as they're in the air. But what would ultimately be described in what I would, what I would write about in medicine 3.0 was like, why don't we go to the top of the building and take the basket of eggs away from the

Let me read this.

I'd have relished that job in real life as a young boxer at a pretty mean left hook. But medicine is obviously a bit more complicated. Ultimately, I realized that we needed to approach the situation, the falling eggs, in an entirely different way, with a different mindset and using a different set of tools. That, very briefly, is what this book is about. And you can see the transition there. And this is what I want to get into. Then you have the Desmond Tutu quote.

Where it says, there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in. And then this is what I couldn't believe. It was like one, two, I get it. And then the first sentence of the first chapter goes, I'll never forget the first patient whom I ever saw die. And just the way that that's structured, you got to tell me about how you did that.

Again, I think the book is filled with stories, right? Not because stories are data and the book is obviously got a lot of data in it, but because stories like we're storied creatures, right? Like we, we need a story to anchor us to something. And because the book is about medicine 3.0, I have to contrast medicine 3.0 with medicine 2.0, which is the system we're in today.

And one way to contrast that is to contrast what we are good at and what we're bad at. And what we're good at is dealing with fast death. And what we're not so good at is dealing with slow death. And so,

I wanted to have a story that would contrast that and to make clear what fast death was. And so that's, that story kind of explains a lot of things, right? It's, you know, first of all, it's very early in my training. I'm like a second year medical student, I believe. Yeah, it's early in my second year. And it is interesting.

Very profound. I would say that if you ask any doctor out there, I would bet that almost without exception, they will remember the first patient they saw die. That is not...

Like that's just not something you, you forget. That's not something you, you sort of, um, you know, wash away when it's said and done. That is a really traumatic thing. And especially, um, in the circumstance that I described where you see that person being completely alive and healthy at one moment. And then in an instant, something changes. Do you feel like as you had to write this book,

In certain ways, you had to learn how to write about those emotional experiences. Or do you feel like you had a lot of that in your days of blogging and writing? Because most of the stuff that you had published on your website online is more technical in nature, whereas this has a deep emotional component. And back to what you were saying earlier, it doesn't sound like that was embedded in the first draft that you wrote. Yeah, it wasn't. And it certainly wasn't my intuition to write that way. But I think...

Uh, Bill Gifford was, was I think really good at extracting that from me and encouraging me to, to be more, more liberal in the use of, of, of storytelling. Um, but again, you're right. Most of the writing I had had done before, and frankly, the writing I still do today is, is really not about telling a story in the same way.

Do you feel like you have an aversion to it or do, or did you just not feel like that was the right thing to do for this book at the beginning? Well, I mean, I think my, you know, if you, if you, if any training I've had in writing has been in writing, you know, technical writing, right? So, so there you're really not trying to, to do that. I think that that's, um, it's a different style. And, and I think as such,

You know, like I think you think about the rules of writing a scientific paper, right? Like, you know, this is the way I was trained to write a scientific paper was first you start with what the figures are going to be in the paper. The figures are the most important thing. So you've done experiments, you've generated 50 figures. But these five are the most relevant. First thing we would do is pick those five figures and write the legend for them. What is the caption that's going to go with each one? That's the paper.

Everything else gets filled in. So, you know, then I would sort of write the results, the discussion, and then go back and write the introduction, the abstract, the methods and all of those things. But again, it's, it's, you're, you're not editorializing whatsoever when you do that kind of writing. In fact, any editorializing is, is, is, is really detracting from what you're doing. The data have to speak for themselves and that's the end of it. And, you know, there's a reason we don't write books that way.

you know, even the newsletter that we do right now. I mean, there's a reason we take far more editorial liberty than if we were writing science papers. So in some ways I would say I'm kind of writing right now sort of halfway between maybe where the book is and where a paper would be. But obviously each of these has its own application. Tell me if I'm right. So I think that

I noticed just in the way that the book is structured, it's very deliberate because you have the outcome, then you have the strategy, and then you have the tactics, and you have that Sun Tzu quote that basically underpins that. And I saw that and I instantly said, this guy's background, maybe as a scientist or in some other place, maybe McKinsey, is giving me that clarity in terms of how to think through this. I haven't seen that in a lot of books.

Yeah, by the way, each chapter begins with a quote, but I think the Sun Tzu quote is my favorite about the distinction between strategy and tactics. Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Yes, the art of war is just filled with gems. There was another Sun Tzu quote that I wanted to include, but we just decided that we had to limit it to just one.

Yeah, I think that I think frameworks are really important. So so I would argue that the most novel contribution that that I would put forth from this book is the idea that you can put everything, almost everything, at least into a framework. And so that can be the overarching framework of the book, which is.

Always proceed from objective to strategy to tactics. Don't skip those steps. But then within the chapters, right, you have the frameworks and nutrition, right? CRTRDR, the frameworks of exercise, stability, strength, aerobic base. The more you can make frameworks, the easier it is to both be complete and be exhaustive and sort of minimize your overlapping of ideas and confusion. And how did you think about developing those frameworks? Are they...

things that came out of conversations? Are they things that very deliberately just when you approach a chapter, you're like, we just need a framework for this and I'm going to try to do that. How does that happen? No, I wish I could say it was that deliberate. So first of all, the most, the best substrate for these ideas honestly just comes out of talking to patients, right? So I think what you're probably seeing is sort of more than a decade of

talking to patients and having to explain these things. And, you know, certainly pre COVID because now our practice is virtual, actually have less of this experience, but pre COVID, not only was I seeing patients in person, but I had a whiteboard there. And so I was always on a whiteboard talking to patients, which is kind of an odd thing to be doing as a doctor, but I really love, I, I, I'm very much a person who draws when he talks. And so I,

Most of, I think these ideas have come from, from that, right? Like literally, you know, the four horsemen actually started out as four pillars, right? It was, and then it was like, actually it's three pillars and a foundation because metabolic disease sort of speaks to all of them. And yeah, so, so, so I think just this idea of,

constantly writing, um, you know, the base of a pyramid versus the peak of the pyramid as aerobic base versus peak aerobic fitness. Um, all of these things just lend themselves to, to writing and drawing and doodling. How did you think about the voice and who you were writing to? You could go USA today, you could go technical writing. Like, why did you settle in this medium? I'm sure there's just this constant series of trade-offs. And how'd you think about navigating those? Yeah, that was, um, that was a challenge. Um,

You know, I think I just wanted to, I wanted to write a book that was probably above USA Today and maybe more with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Atlantic, you

But one that anybody could read truthfully, right? Like if you're in high school, you can read this book. And maybe some of the words in there are a little bit bigger, but that's honestly more a function of the fact that we're writing about medicine and science than we're trying to keep it super highbrow. The biggest challenge was honestly how technical some of the medicine stuff is. I remember one funny example where Bill and I argued about this for like a month.

But I was writing about what makes one of the things that makes the liver such a spectacular organ. This is probably in the chapter on fatty liver disease and metabolic disease. And so I'm trying to explain the following concept, which is.

Most critical organs in the body can be supported if they are not functioning fully. So if your kidneys aren't working transiently, you can use dialysis to support the kidneys. In other words, we have a machine that can do the job of the kidneys, not as well as the kidneys, but certainly well enough.

We have a machine that can do the job of the lungs. We have a machine that can do the job of the heart. Even the brain can be put to sleep, right? You can be sedated to the point where the brain is basically doing nothing. Brainstem still has to work, but the liver, that's not the case. So if you ingested a toxic dose of Tylenol, like there's, unless you get a liver transplant, you're going to die within, you know, 72 hours.

And so the technical way to explain what I just said is we do not have extracorporeal support for the liver. Extracorporeal means outside of the body support. So extracorporeal support of the kidneys is dialysis, et cetera. And Bill was like, there's no goddamn way we're using the word extra. I almost lost me and I'm sitting right here.

And I was like, but that's the word. And he's like, who cares? Like it's, so I was like, I, it would take me 10 words to explain it. Like it's just extracorporeal and we can use a footnote. And we just kind of went back and forth and it was sort of like, so there were always that kind of tug, but, but again, you know, I think, I think it's really helpful to have people who you're bouncing these ideas off who are not in your space because any doctor hears the word extracorporeal and they're like, yeah, yeah.

Just like the word brown. Like it's just, it's an easy thing to understand, but, but you know, medicine is a bizarre language and it is, um, it's, it's really quite foreign. And then of course there were certain chapters like the, I mean, God, the heart disease chapter, cancer chapter. I mean, it was really a struggle and I don't know if we got it right, but,

It's a struggle to try to be as true to the science as possible so that you're not dumbing this down to the point of being incorrect or lazy, but not being so technical that you just lose people. In fact, I think in the just before the introduction, I think I may take a look. Yeah, please. Yeah, I remember making a short note about this.

Yeah, the author's note, right? So at the very outset, it says, writing about science and medicine for the public requires striking a balance between brevity and nuance, rigor and readability. I've done my best to find the sweet spot on that continuum, getting the substance right while keeping the book accessible to the lay reader. You'll be the judge of whether or not I hit the target. By the way, that reminds me. You love your archery metaphors, huh? And have you noticed the cover? No. Little Easter egg there. That is an Easter egg. Yeah. That costs, I think, an extra buck.

Doing that? Yeah. The publisher was like, why would we lower the profit on this book by doing that? And I was like, because it's cool. That is cool. You know, because it's cool is kind of an under underrated reason to do a lot of things like that. If I was getting started and I was going to work with a co-author and I sat down, I was like, Peter, you got to tell me, what do I need to know? What's going to make this successful or unsuccessful? What would you say?

you know, they, they just have to have the same sort of excitement and passion for this. Again, I think my experience is a little bit different. I think even by the standards of writing a book, anytime you do that, I'm sure it's really difficult. I do think this one was more difficult than most, both in terms of the length, the breadth. Um, and then on top of that, you know, I'm a perfectionist. I mean, and I say that

with just as much of an attention on the negative side of that. Like there was, I just couldn't let anything go. You know, I just couldn't sort of, you know, if we were going to do so, if we were going to go with something that I didn't agree with, I had to be talked into it. So, you know, you just need somebody who's, who's patient, um, and who really kind of believes in the project. Um, and that's different, right? I mean, I think, you know, I think for some people, their coauthor was basically a ghostwriter.

Exactly. And so in that case, you just have to pick somebody who you like their writing. Well, so I have a policy. I will not have authors on the show who actually got their book written by a ghostwriter. Will not do it. So before I said yes to this, I looked into your relationship and you were deeply involved in this. And I just want to state that outright. Deeply wouldn't be the understatement. Yeah. And what were some of the places where you differed on things where that led to something new?

You know, you can talk about structural differences, the order of where things went in the story. That can certainly matter. I think the biggest probably source of

And I don't say friction in an unhealthy way. I say in a healthy way. The greatest source of friction between me and Bill was always on how deep to go. You want to go deeper, huh? I always wanted to go deeper. Bill always wanted to keep it shallower. And we usually compromised in the middle. But again, it wasn't like we capitulated to that. It was, okay, I hear you. We can't go as deep. Let me pull back a little bit.

And then he would be like, okay, that makes a little bit more sense. I'll grant you that. But then there'd still be this gap. And I'd be like, okay, I'll pull back a little bit. He's like, okay, that's good. But explain it again. Cause I still don't get it. Okay. Here, you know what I mean? So it was, it turned out to be a very, uh, healthy sort of iron sharpening iron approach. And, um, there was never a moment like, uh, you know, uh,

I'm sure anyone who's married can relate to the fact that a lot of the times when you're arguing with your spouse, one person just gives up because they're like, it's just not worth the friction anymore. Like, I don't care that much. Like, if you really like the rug, get the rug. Like, I don't care. But we just never really did that. Right. There was never. And so that made it take a lot longer. That made it a lot more involved.

But I also think it led to a much better result. Google Docs and person meetings? How did that work? All Google Docs and probably, oh God, how many days in person? At the beginning, we did much more in person because we were still...

you know, really going through kind of structure, like diagram, like this, this, this concept needs to come here. How do we get this concept over here? What were you going for in structure? Like what was the North star that you're pointing at? I'm not sure I have a clear answer to that. What I can tell you is there were competing things that I wanted to make clear, right? So I can tell you what I didn't want to do, right? I didn't want to write a book that was just a

how to like do this, you know, eat this, not this book. Sure. Right. Didn't want to do that. That's tactics. Yeah. If anything, the North star was how do you write a book that is on the one hand rigorous enough that the New York times will classify it as nonfiction and not self-help no disrespect to self-help, but I didn't want to write a self-help book.

So I wanted, and you know, the New York times has a very clear designation. Is this straight nonfiction or is it self self-help nonfiction? I wanted to absolutely be in the category of the former, but yet I wanted it to be practical enough that you could follow advice that there was something to do. And so, you know, when that first New York times list came out a week after it went, you know, you always books always come out on Tuesday and then you don't hear for eight days until your list is

I was as interested in which list we were on as I was where we were on the list. And so when we made it to general nonfiction, I was like, we did it. Like that's, that's what we wanted to do. And then tell me more. What else didn't you want to have happen in structure? Well,

I wanted to be able to sort of simultaneously do a few things. Again, one is I really did want there to be practical, like you can do this. Like when you're done with this book, you will have a better sense of what to do. But I also wanted you to really understand the things that were going to be a threat to lifespan and healthspan.

So you, you have to, you have to go kind of deep into heart disease, cancer, dementia, frailty to understand. Cause those are the horsemen. Those are the things that are coming to get you. If you want to win a fight, you have to know your opponent. Right.

Um, and then I wanted there to be an overarching structure to the book so that the person never lost sight of objective strategy tactics, understanding reverse engineering and backcasting, all of those things. Um, you know, clearly understanding the distinction between medicine 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. So, um, all of those things were, were a struggle to sort of figure out how to put them into a book that didn't read like three books, but read like one book where each of those sections was in service of the next.

One of the things that you do a good job of is a lot of this stuff can feel abstract, mathematical, and technical, and you're clearly very conscious of making them concrete. I'll give you an example. So what is the section, the centenarian? Centenarian decathlon. Decathlon. Thank you. So in that section, you could say, oh, I want to be 90, or in my 10th decade, I want to be able to lift 40 pounds, something like that. And you're like, cool. But that's just a number. Right?

Really, then what you say is this is about being able to lift up your grandkid and hold him in the air for 20 seconds. And you do a – you're clearly very conscious of taking the number 40, making it real, concrete, and practical for people so that these ideas stick out, they come to life, and they have this practical gravitas, so to speak. Yeah, I think that probably comes from just how we interact with patients because that centenary in decathlon is –

you know, one of the most important organizing principles of our medical practice, right? So this is something that the patients go through because that's, um, you know, again, in the spirit of objective and strategy tactics, you start with the objective. So they have to be able to define what they want to do in that last decade of life. And, um, and our belief is that

If you can't do that in a very, very specific way, then you can't train in a very specific way. Right. If your goals are vague, if your goal is I just want to do track and field. OK, well, how are you going to train? Like the big difference if you want to be a shot putter or a hurdler or a long jumper or a sprinter. Those are all track and field. Very different. Sure. So similarly, like if a person says I want to be able to play golf well when I'm 90 and walk all 18 holes.

That's a very specific type of training. If a person says, I want to be able to swim a mile in a lake. Wow. That's a very different training. Again, both of those are challenging, but doable if you know how to train for them. So I think that we're, we're really familiar with how to make those things tangible to people. So and again, some of those goals that people will have in their centenary in decathlon are just, you know, what I would call activities of daily living, like being able to pick a grandchild out of a crib.

That's that's an activity of daily living others are more, you know recreation like playing able to play golf and walk all 18 holes and you know Maybe even carry your clubs for one of them just to show yourself that you're tough, you know that kind of stuff So so, you know, you want people to have both of those types of goals and then how did you think about timelessness? I mean, obviously there's a aspect of this book. The science is gonna change things will be different You might even change your mind on certain things but

When I look at the book, the frameworks, the skeleton that the different – I'm stretching for an analogy here. But the skeleton that different things are going to fit on top of, there's a certain timelessness to that. I don't think the four horsemen are going to change anytime soon. How did you think about that? Yeah, that was an absolute and essential goal for the book, right? So when I – when we were getting ready to publish the book, I had sort of –

you know, a handful of goals, but the most important goal, which we don't yet know if it will have realized is I wanted to say in 10 years, I want this book to be relevant, but that was, um,

And, you know, like there are a lot of books you can think of that are relevant more than a decade after they're published. Of course. So so it's not like that's not an impossible goal. But in this space, that's that's you have to be very thoughtful about what you're doing if you want your book to be relevant in a decade. And it won't be relevant by tactics. To your point, tactics are constantly evolving. So it has to be relevant in objective and strategy.

And so another way to think about the strategy is the strategy is the scaffolding. The strategy is the idea. So, you know, what do we learn from centenarians? We understand and learn that delaying the onset of chronic disease is the mathematical equivalent of lifespan extension. That will be relevant in a decade when we understand that.

what health span is about and we understand what threatens health span, we understand the role of backcasting and reverse engineering from the centenary into cath one. Again, techniques will, we better be smarter in 10 years. If not, we've stalled. Um, but, but, but the methodology for how you go about thinking about that will be. And so that's my hope is that in a decade, people would still read this book and still get value out of it. Yeah.

As you were writing some of the more personal stories that show up later in the book, how did you think first about expressing them and second about actually working with them? Let's just talk about the expression part. Like as you were writing those, how did you think about getting those out? Because there's some painful things that you talk about. Yeah. So the last chapter of the book, my writing of that was actually just –

And that chapter had a totally different process than all the other chapters. So there were 16 chapters before it where I would write a section, send a section to Bill. He would make a bunch of suggestions. He would change something. I would change it back. I would go, that's a good idea. Then we would sort of build on them incrementally. Chapter 17, it was totally different. I just spent a year writing it myself in bits and pieces until it was –

I mean, it was almost a book, what I had written. So the chapter 17 that made it into the book is, you know, maybe 20% of what I wrote. But the point is, I just sort of wrote that in, you know, and it's a complicated story, right? Because it was sort of written in pieces, but then things were still happening as I was writing it. And so the challenge there and where I think, you know, Bill was especially helpful was,

In helping me step back from the blow by blow of this story is not necessary. Like we can back this up to 30,000 feet and just hit on certain points and still the point will be made. So that from a process perspective was very different from how we did everything else. Yeah. Well, there's an important storytelling principle here that you don't need to share every single thing that happens. And there's a real art.

in writing stories to say, hey, we're going to zoom in here and we're basically going to slow down time and then we're going to skip over a lot of time. A lot of writing and stories is actually distorting time. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair. Did you find that those more personal sections were more difficult because you didn't have as much experience there or did you just push through it? Oh, no. That was the hardest stuff to write because not the actual writing, but just the

you know, the decision, like, am I really going to write about all this stuff? Um, what, you know, what are the implications of, of, of, of, you know, being this transparent about, you know, all of your faults and all of these other things. So I think that the writing part was easy because it was just in many ways, it's not technical, right? It's just sort of easy to write that stuff. Hard to describe some of it, but fortunately, um,

Because I journal a lot, most of that chapter was easy for me to reproduce because I was literally taking things out of my journal. And in my journal, like there would be diagrams and the diagram would be like, ah, that's what I was writing about. Okay, good. You know, this is easy to do. You know, it is cool because you see your personal story infused throughout the book. And

A lot of, as I see your career, it's a connection between, okay, I was in healthcare for, I was in medical school for some time. I leave something like two years early. I go work at McKinsey. I see what's happening at McKinsey. They're taking risks seriously. Wait, hold on. Healthcare world, you're not doing that. And maybe I'm inferring too much, but I would imagine that you're leaving medical school and there's a certain...

oh my goodness, what am I going to do with my life? And it kind of just works out making the connection there. Yeah. It's funny when I left residency, I, I, I was, uh, I really, I actually had the opposite reaction, right? So I was, you were happy. I was so excited to be sort of turning over a new chapter in my life. I mean, between medical school and residency had been 10 years. And so, um,

In some ways, I actually felt a little disappointed that I had, quote unquote, wasted 10 years. I was sort of like what I'm about to go and embark on now at McKinsey, I could have been doing without anything in the last 10 years. I would have been better off doing a PhD, which was my original plan in engineering, and I would be more well equipped to do what I'm about to do at McKinsey in risk. So I really spent the next few years thinking, OK,

you know, and not, not beating myself up over it, but really thinking like I had made a mistake. Um, and, um,

You know, I justified leaving because I do think sunk costs are a bit of a fallacy. And I thought, look, it's true you wasted 10 years, but, you know, you're going to be 50 one day. So you might as well be 50 doing what you want to do as opposed to, you know, stuck in something that you don't want to do. And of course, I look back and I think, boy, I'm really just glad it all worked out the way it did because it was the right thing for me to leave. I had to leave to come back.

And I had to come back in a way that was very different from the path I would have taken had I stayed. But I didn't have any sense of apprehension when I left. I was like, I was so excited about the possibilities and all the new things I'd get to learn that. Yeah, I was just I mean, it was it was just an incredible, blissful period of my life.

How do you know as a writer, like the pain to write a book, especially this one, it just seems like it was so brutal. How did you know that what you had to say would trump whatever pain that you were going to go through, that it was important or you didn't? No, I don't think, I mean, maybe a more seasoned author or a better author knows that, but I didn't know that. And in fact, even as we were getting close to finishing it, I remember thinking,

It's hard to imagine. I remember thinking if I had known in 2016 what I know today in 2022, I wouldn't have done it. That was my thought. But it was, you know, and it was mostly because, look, in 2016, I didn't have a podcast. In 2022, I'd been podcasting for four years. And in many ways, I

If I had a crystal ball in 2016 that showed me, hey, you're going to have a podcast where every week you get to interview the world's expert on a given topic and you get to, you know, once a month do your own broadcast on this topic. Why would you write a book like, you know, so it wouldn't have been something that made sense through that lens. That said, I still I am happy.

so grateful that, that I did this despite the, the, the, the challenge of doing it and the, the, the opportunity cost. I mean, the things that I had to not do to make this happen were huge, but I also have now seen that a book reaches an audience that

Doesn't necessarily listen to a podcast. I mean, I'm sending this to my parents and I can't tell my parents to listen to your podcast. No. And even if you did, which episode would you send them? Right. Just here, I've curated it down to the 42 episodes that captured the most of this. Right. You can't. So, so look again, I'm just, I'm glad I didn't know how difficult it was going to be before I started.

Um, as, as you might know, because I write about it in the, um, acknowledgements, I mean, the book basically got trashed for a year in that, in that process before getting kind of resurrected. Okay. We got to talk about that. So what happened?

As you know, when a publisher buys a book, there's usually an in-house person that kind of like it's their book, like they're the champion of the book. So when the publisher bought this book in 2016, the in-house editor who bought it within three months was out of that publisher and had taken a job at another publisher. So I think she took a more senior job elsewhere. So immediately we were assigned a new editor who, you know, in her defense, this wasn't her book. Like she didn't buy this book.

Um, I don't think she particularly cared for it. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't, but this wasn't like her passion project. Right. So in some ways you could argue, we were mostly just a liability to the first publisher. They were kind of like, all right, you know, whatever. We paid a bunch for this book and now we're sort of stuck with it. And this guy can't even deliver it on time. Right. Like it's, you know, every time they want something in, I just, I'm like, yeah, it's not ready yet. It's not ready yet. It's not ready yet. And, um,

And so by early 2020, they were getting pretty frustrated. And they basically said in February, and I remember I was in Norway because I was filming that Limitless special that ended up going, that Disney special with Chris Hemsworth. Yeah. And so I remember being in the middle of some

hotel in norway i was stranded there because i couldn't get back because the weather was so bad i don't even know what city i'm like some tiny little city where they had to land the plane in a blizzard and i get an email from the publisher saying if you don't deliver this thing by april um we're we're gonna come after you like it was very threatening um

And I just because it was like the middle of the night in Finland or sorry, in Norway. So I just called my CFO who's, you know, back in the US. And I said, hey, I want you to wire them back the advance because, you know, you I had taken a quarter of the advance or whatever. I said, I want you to wire them back the advance tomorrow morning, just like I'm done with these people. And so she did. And and prior to that, by the way, my agent had already kind of ditched me.

Which again was really weird. Like she, she didn't even tell me, she just had her secretary tell me, you're not going to be working with so-and-so anymore. You're going to be working with this other person. And I'm like, I don't know. I just felt like completely abandoned. Yeah. And I was just super aggravated. And so that was basically the death of the book. I was like, here's your money back. You want to fire me? That's fine. Um,

And so, yeah, this is early 2020, just as COVID is hitting. And I call Bill and I break the news to him. And, you know, I've never asked Bill after all this time has passed what his thoughts were. My guess is it was a bit of a mixture. I would believe that part of Bill was a little disappointed because he felt like we were finally on to something. But I also bet there was a bit of relief, which was, okay, like we're done with this.

You know, we were both sort of exhausted. So that was February of 2020. And then nothing happened again until December of that year, almost a year later. What changed? So I'm having dinner with my friend, Michael Ovitz. Now, a few years earlier, I think two years earlier, but maybe it was just one year, Michael had written a book, which I really, really enjoyed.

and talk about pouring your heart out in a book yeah that book is is raw yeah um i only regret that michael didn't read the audiobook he read the intro and i think the epilogue but he didn't actually read the book right and he regrets it i believe because i think michael has such a great and distinctive voice i was about to say that yeah so i i actually should talk to him into maybe doing a reread of it but

Anyway, Michael and I were just talking and I don't I don't remember how it came up, but somehow because we were talking about his book and I just I just mentioned that. Yeah, I had I had been working on a book and I kind of shelved it. And he was like, I'd love to read it. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I don't know what kind of shape it's in. You really like, you know, I was kind of like, is he just saying that to be polite or does he really want to read it? Sure. Yeah.

And I sort of dropped it. But then I think he emailed me back the next day and said, hey, send me send me that manuscript. So I reached out to Bill and I was like, hey, Bill, I hope you're doing well, buddy. It's been a year. Do you happen to still have what we wrote? Like literally at that point, for all I knew, it could have been dead. It wasn't a Google doc. It was. But it was like I didn't know where I didn't I didn't have access to it. I mean, like I had no idea where it was like that's how little I cared at that point.

And Bill was like, yeah, it's still somewhere. And I was like, is it in one doc or is it because Bill and I had a different doc for each chapter, I think. So I was like, I hate to do this, man, but like how much work would it be to throw it into one uniform document? And how littered is it with comments and misery? And he's like, oh, yeah, no, it's a dumpster fire. And I was like, all right, can you send me one integrated doc? He's so sure.

So he sent, he sent it to me. I sent it to Michael with the big caveat that this is like, it's not a complete book. He said, no problem. So Michael read it, calls me back two weeks later. We're getting kind of close to Christmas 2020. And he says, look, man, this is a good book. This, this has the potential to be a great book. And obviously coming from Michael, that meant a lot. Of course. And I said, well, here's the situation. We don't have a publisher. I don't even have an agent.

Um, and for, and honestly, like I'm just kind of still scarred from the whole process. And he said, well, here's what I think we ought to do. I think I'm just going to take it to one person at Penguin and just get her take on it. And if she doesn't love it and want to buy it, we'll, we'll go shop it around a little bit. So can you give me a cleaned up version? So I said, okay. So I talked to Bill and he agreed. And so then Bill and I spent two weeks cleaning it up.

which was literally like getting all the comments out of it, like, you know, at least putting it in and it wasn't complete. Right. I mean, there was still a lot that was, was kind of missing, but then sent that back to Michael. He sent it to Diana and then yeah, she came back and said, Oh, this is great. We would love to do this. And so the rest is kind of history. Although of course, then the next step was really, you know, kind of,

making some big decisions about like where does chapter 17 go if at all in the book right like there was a lot of discussion about chapter 17 doesn't belong in this book it's you can make that a separate book but let's let's not do that um and and obviously then the then the then the sort of trimming it down and and rewriting some of it um but so that let me think that was starting in 2021 yeah wait is that really possible did we move that quickly

Yes, we did. Yeah. When was the book done? I mean, I took my lifeless hands off of it in December of 22 because that's when I read the audio book. So technically it was done in September of 22. So a year, like 21 months later. Yep. But so then it went into editing, strict editing. But as I was reading the audio book, I was editing.

Now I was editing within the confines of what I was permitted to do. No major edits and every edit, obviously, you know how you go through one P two P three P like in terms of the edits. So once, yeah. So once you're in like a hard, once you're in a PDF editing becomes very difficult, difficult. It's typeset now. So they go through what's called one P two P and then the three P is the final edit at three P. The most you can do is change a comma or a period or a, you know, something like that. Right.

I took the three P edits into the audio. That's what I was reading. And then you changed up. And then I just went nuts. I mean, they were losing their minds and some of the edits had to be done. They were actual mistakes that this, the copy editor has hadn't caught. Yeah. But some of them were like, when you read this out loud,

You realize that sentence is ridiculous. Like that's way too long a sentence. Yeah. And what was the thing that Sam Harris told? Yeah, it's exactly right. Sam said, you are not editing a book until you are reading it out loud. You can read it a thousand times in your head until you read every sentence out loud. You are not editing. And reading out loud is kind of torturous. Oh, it's unbearable. So the only time I ever did it was that one time in my life.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I never I never had the discipline to edit to read out loud when I was editing on a screen. But then so you got to tell me. So you got this 21 month time, but then you're working on a bunch of other things. You got early medical. You got different companies. How in the world did you find time? You have three kids, family. Like, what did you do? It was awful.

um, I mean, it's just, it's nights, it's weekends. It's, um, I did at that point in my life have a dedicated day off. I had one day that was a writing day per week. Okay. And I was able to get those at least three out of the four weeks a month. Okay. So that was a dedicated day on my calendar that I would not see any patients. I would not have any outside calls. I would not do anything for the podcast. It was a pure dedicated writing day. And it was just a

outside of exercising like i'm not doing anything else that day and what do you do on a day like that do you drink more coffee do you work from anywhere in particular no i i contemplated going away to write but for me that would add more stress than it was worth because i don't want to be away from my kids i don't want to be with my family i want to be away from my routine like i'm actually fortunately able to focus when i'm sitting at my desk so i

I just need to not be bothered by email calls, other things like that. But if I have to sit and write, like I'm happy to be sitting or standing at my desk and writing. Yeah. What is an idea that you really polished up through the writing in this book? I think the clarity around that.

how I think about nutrition now is I, I, you know, it's funny. I, if you, if you, if you were to go and read comments about this book from the peanut gallery, I think the most common negative comment people will talk about is, um,

you know, this guy doesn't care enough about nutrition. Like there's not a, you know, he doesn't, he dismisses nutrition outright, which again is completely untrue, right? There are 17 chapters in the book. One topic gets three chapters. That's exercise. One topic gets two chapters. That's nutrition. Everything else gets one chapter. So the, you know, to say I dismiss, uh, nutrition is, is clearly a patently untrue. Um, but what people are probably reacting to is, uh,

I'm not at all dogmatic about nutrition, right? Like I don't have, I don't bring the religious zeal to nutrition that every other nutrition book brings. Like keto, Whole30, that sort of stuff. So if you go and look at the treasure trove of nutrition books out there, every one of them is the same. My one diet is the true diet. Now,

Now, there's 5,000 different variations of that. But every person is going to tell you that their diet is the true diet. For everybody. Absolutely. Like, if you're, you know, you're going to have to be vegan. You got to be carnivore. You got to be keto. You got to be paleo. You got to be low fat. You got to be Mediterranean. Whatever it is, my diet is the one true diet. And so...

You know, I come along and I'm much more agnostic and I want to focus on the principles of diet. I want to focus on the principles, the biochemistry of diet. That's why the first chapter is called nutritional biochemistry, which is a deliberately sort of anodyne way to talk about this and sort of decoupling it from religion as much as possible. But I actually think that some of my best

Clarification internally came from that. In other words, my ability to now speak about nutrition more succinctly is far greater than it was before I wrote the book. I noticed that. And if you can just fill in the gaps here, I'm just going to get started. But you said something, I forget where, but you said...

That part of the reason that you shifted your emphasis from nutrition into exercise is that nutrition is really good at covering your downside, but exercise sort of has this limitless upside. And when I heard that, I was like, oh, Peter wouldn't have said that five years ago. Yeah. Nutrition is a foundational piece, right? Nutrition, if you get it wrong, there's a lot of downside. If you get it right, you're not getting much lift.

So exercise is both of those, right? If you're failing to exercise, there's a ton of downsides. And if you're doing it correctly, you're going to get a lot of upside. So exercise just has a broader dynamic range than nutrition. And the way I sort of think about nutrition is the body is remarkably adept at dampening out the nutritional signal. So for example, if you think about signal processing, right? Let's just say you have a black box that is a signal processor.

It can be an amplifier, put something in, it amplifies and puts out a bigger signal or it can dampen, put something in and it dampens it.

The body is a dampener of nutrition. Right? So you're putting these macronutrients in and it's basically just concerned with how many calories are there, how much protein is there. That's kind of the most important thing it thinks about to the first and second order. Sure, there are third order terms. Maybe what type of fat is in there exactly when you're reading the carbs, how much carbs. But if

If you're getting total calories right and protein right, most of the other stuff comes out in the wash. And honestly, I just don't think people like that message. Like I think people want it to be way more complicated. But anything that's more complicated than that is the fifth, sixth and seventh order term, which is to say they don't matter nearly as much as the first and second order term.

You were talking earlier about perfectionism and you really emphasized the downsides. And it seems like there was some trepidation, some fear early on in writing about the book. It seems like there's something in the confluence of those things. Yeah. Look, I mean, writing a book is really scary, right? I think doing anything from the standpoint of putting anything out into the public is scary. I think most people, if they're being brutally honest, you know,

are afraid of, of my, I put myself in this category, of course, but you're just, you're afraid of being rejected, right? You're afraid of, of putting something out there that, that people are going to disagree with, or, you know, say this sucks or, you know, sort of mock you and all those things. And, um, you know, podcasts are,

sort of at a high enough cadence that they're kind of spit up and shoot out pretty quickly. So clearly if I go back and listen to some of my early podcasts, I like they're impossible to listen to. I'm so bad at it. Um, but luckily like most people kind of forget that, but there's something a little bit more permanent about a book than a blog post or a podcast. And, and then there's also what you said earlier, which is of course my point of view is going to change on things. It has to, right? If it's not changing, then

either, you know, it was a miracle, but I somehow got it all right, which no one in the history of civilization has done. So why would I expect that to be me? Right. Or I'm not evolving. And that's obviously a pretty bad position to be in. So now you realize, well, I'm going to be writing some stuff in here that I'm going to disagree with in, in one year, five years, 10 years. Um, and it's just more explaining to do, you know? So, um,

I think anytime we put ourselves out there, and I would imagine that anybody feels this way, whether you're a singer, a musician, an actor, an author. I mean, whatever it is that you do, if you're doing it in the public domain, you're just sort of opening yourself up for criticism, which is always tough. Has there been somebody who you've looked at and you've said, man, I want to do that? Like, I really admire that about them. Like for me, I really admire saying this to you in the hall when we were walking over. I really admire how you go,

high end and you don't really dumb things down. There's something, I swear, you said this like eight years ago and it stuck with me. It's like most people are focused on the 80-20. I'm focused on the 20-80. And I was like, that's awesome. Are there people, as you were thinking about your book, as you were thinking about the vision that you had, that you looked up to and said, I want to bring that into what I do? There are obviously people who I look at and I think that both their writing and their speaking are so exceptional that...

you know, you just, you wish you could aspire to do it. But I also, I'm kind of realistic and realize like, you know, I could never write like Sam Harris. I can't, I can't speak like Sam Harris. Right. So I just have to, I didn't, I didn't spend a lot of time dwelling on, on that. I basically just said, look,

My voice is what it is. I just need to capture it in writing. Your voice, how you write, how you articulate things. Yeah. I just need to, I just need to provide the best rendition of my voice rather than try to capture the voice of somebody who I think is better than me. I got to ask, you love math. How does that show up in your approach to writing? I think math is harder than writing. I think that

I think that if you look at sort of fluid intelligence, it peaks pretty young in life. And I think that's probably where our mathematical abilities also peak. Yep. Whereas I think writing draws a little bit more on crystallized intelligence, which obviously develops later in life. So yeah,

I'm a better writer today than I was in my twenties, but in my twenties, I was far better at math and not just math, but the abstract nature of thinking about math and thinking of complex ideas and being able to prove something mathematically. But, but I do think that like if someone said to me, you know,

what are the three most important things that a person needs to learn in school? I mean, two of them are writing and math. And I do think that, that if you want to be good at math, you probably need to be structured in your thinking. And I think that most good writers are probably structured in their thinking. It's hard to write well, if you're not, you can't structure your thoughts. Um,

And I think that's also true in sort of doing complicated mathematics. You do need to be able to kind of keep, you know, simultaneously hold multiple thoughts together and also kind of be able to parallel process things and keep one idea here while you work on an idea here and come back to it. That's interesting because when I talk to a lot of people about writing their books, that's one of the things that people continually bring up. It's like,

The amount of information and context that I have in my brain is so much higher than normal. And you have to retain that because a lot of parts are actually connected. They're almost like hyperlinked inside the book. And if you change something on page 19, that could actually impact something on page 274. Yeah. And I know that there are some people whose writing process allows them to do everything with diagrams. Yeah.

And while I did a lot of diagrams, I didn't go that far. Right. Like I didn't have the hyperlinked diagram that showed every single idea across the board. I don't know that I could have truthfully. Like I think a lot of these things kind of come together at the end. Writing a book is a very nonlinear process in terms of.

So if this is like time and this is product, it doesn't look like this. Right. It doesn't look like this. It looks like this. Huh. Right. And so you can be 80% of the way through in time. You're not at close to 80% in terms of product. Is that right? Yeah. What came together at the end for you? I think the biggest blocks were just knowing how to link each chapter.

And then knowing how to strip out what was not absolutely necessary from each chapter. And that, that was just hard. I mean, I, this is the expression I'm sure you've heard a million times before, right? Which is every writer has to learn how to kill their babies. Yep. And I mean, I'm sure there are writers out there that can do that with far less pain, especially probably writers who are really good and who've done it a lot and they kind of trust the process enough. But yeah,

You know, for the amount of baby killing I had to do, I was like, oh, man, like it's just going to lose all meaning if we get rid of this point. And I think that's kind of where I think that's probably where Bill, who was helpful in many ways, was probably singularly the most helpful was, I think, just talking me off the ledge of you don't have to keep this.

It's okay. You're making the point with this one sentence. This paragraph is not necessary. And you're like, but I love that paragraph. Like, it's really good. Look at all the detail it provides. He's like, not necessary. And honestly, like that was probably...

80% of the interaction was, we got to cut this out. Got to cut this out. Got to cut this out. And it's just hard to believe that trimming can make something better. Right. But if you think about it, like that's what carving a statue is. Right. When you're carving a statue, you are cutting things away to see this object better. Mm-hmm.

And that's why I believe that the majority of the benefit is coming in the final 10 or 20 percent of the actual linear time. That's when the chopping block gets the harshest. Yeah. How do you think about the frame for this book? I mean, there's so many different ways that you could approach it. How did you think of structuring the frame?

I think, you know, the reader needed to understand a little bit of the history and the transition. Right. That's medicine 2.0. Yeah. 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0. Like we have to understand that. Yep. An earlier version of the book went into much, much more scientific detail and attempted to tie all of that into the tactics, but it, it was a bit cumbersome. And so we, we,

really toned down a lot of the science so that we could refer back to these principles, but without being so deliberate and explicit. And then a lot of the sort of tactical chapters were, were sharpened, you know, were just turned into kind of

you know, what, what could we, what could we give a person so that when it's all said and done, they've read the book, they, they actually have a roadmap for what they can go and do. The other thing we did is we stripped out a whole section on all of the molecules, right? So there's, you know, there's a fifth kind of pillar in there of every drug and supplement and hormone that you might find in your, in your toolkit. And that went from being a chapter, uh,

to an appendix to just out of the book altogether because it was simply too long. It was, you know, God, I don't, it would have added a hundred pages to this. There's a big lesson here that for people who are really obsessive about a topic, the way that you become that sort of expert is you want to know every single nook and cranny of whatever that topic is. And whether it's a co-author or an editor who can say, Peter, get it out of there.

You need to have a respect of that person, and they also need to respect your expertise. Because if you don't have that, you're just going to delude yourself into thinking that every single person needs to know everything I need to know. And a big implicit meta lesson that I'm taking is that ain't true. I agree. I mean, even by the time I was reading the audiobook, so this is now December of 2022.

I don't think there were many instances where I was like, oh my God, we need this paragraph back in there. Most of the changes I wanted to make and did make, and they were far more than the editor would have loved because it absolutely was painful for everybody, you know, right into New Year's Eve. Um,

We're mostly just like, we can say this a little bit better. We can be a little bit more clear here, but it wasn't like, oh my God, I want that two paragraphs back that we cut out, you know, four months ago. Yeah. You know, it would be a fun exercise. Not that I'll ever do it, but it would be fun to go back and look at all the stuff we cut out and ask like, would the book have been better with this in or that in? Right. And the answer is probably not. What matters in a conclusion? Yeah. You know, I think, I think,

Whether it's the conclusion of a book or the conclusion of a talk, I think you have to have a sense of what do I want the person to do? Not think, do. Right? I think if you're delivering a talk or if you're writing a book, nonfiction, there should be some sort of a call to action. Right?

And obviously there are cases where this is, you know, not, you know, if you're, if you're reading a historical account of Lincoln, maybe, maybe it's just, what do I want you to think? But, but I think for a book of this nature, it has to be, how do I want you to change your behavior? And how do I want your life to be different in six months and one year and five years after you've read this book? And I, and I, I do feel strongly about that. And I, whenever I'm asked to give a talk,

I will usually ask, you know, if I'm invited by some company, hey, come and give a talk to our corporate thing. I will ask, what is it you want them to do different after I speak? And a lot of times they're like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, well, what's the point? Like, am I just entertainment for you? If so, just get someone who can juggle. Like, if you want me to come and speak, there must be something you want as an outcome. What is the outcome you desire?

And I think that's, I think if you're, if you're writing this type of a book, you have to have that point of view. And therefore I think the way the book is written is, is very much in direction with when you finish this book, if you're not firing on all the cylinders as they've been outlined here, and I don't think any person could be, then I want you to have a really clear sense of what you can do different. Right. Um, and, and there's a lot to choose from.

So tactically, how does that show up in this conclusion? Well, I mean, look, I think I end with something quite provocative, right? Which is, and it catches everybody for, for a bit of a surprise because they're not expecting it, but it sort of ends with this idea of emotional health being arguably the most important pillar of health span. And I basically throw it out there as, as if to say like, look, for me, this was the hardest one to address because,

And yet I had to address it. So if you're reading this and, you know, you don't want to exercise, I would urge you to reconsider it. And I think I'm also kind of offering a slightly different take, which is just focus on health span. Like if your quality of life is poor, length of life doesn't matter. And if you focus on

the quality of your life, you will get length associated with it. And again, I think that those two things, which are very related but not the same, are probably not what you would expect if you pick up a book that has the word longevity in the title. Right. There was a categorization thing that mattered that early in the book you said didn't want to be roped in with all the longevity people, but also it's on the cover.

Yeah, it's a term that unfortunately is shorthand for a lot of things that I sort of think are silly. But at least the way I've chosen to define it, which is, you know, in terms of this idea, you talked about math earlier. I used to describe it as the dot product of lifespan and healthspan. But I now realize people don't know what a dot product is. So that's kind of a dumb thing to say. And you have to explain what a dot product is and the difference between orthogonal vectors and, you know, collinear vectors. So I was like, okay.

Okay. It's a function of lifespan and health span. And in that sense,

The way I'm defining longevity is something that I care deeply about. But there's a reason it's called the science and art of, as opposed to the art and science of. So the typical way people write about things is it's the art and science of this. But I wanted science to come first. So it's a little awkward to say it, but the science and art of longevity both acknowledges that there is an empirical art form to this, but it begins in a foundation of science, right? Otherwise, it's just sort of buffoonery. Right.

Tell me about this chapter on stability. And I guess you had a lot of conversations with Beth Lewis to work it out. So I really want to hear about what you do when an idea is not really coming together. Yeah, that was, from a technical standpoint, the hardest chapter to write by far. Because, you know, one, it's a chapter that sort of

lends itself to a video as opposed to a chapter. I mean, I think the entire, I think actually the entire exercise, three chapters are really tough to write, especially the parts that are prescriptive. Um, by the way, this is a bit of an aside, but it's really funny. There's a, uh, an analogy in there about how stability, like stability using a race car. Yeah.

That is something I fought tooth and nail to keep. Bill and Diana wanted that out so badly. And that's one where I put my foot down and said, over my dead body is this analogy being taken out? Like, I really believe, first of all, this book is littered with analogy. That's how I communicate.

Um, and I understand that most people aren't into race cars. So maybe in that sense, the analogy is a bit lost on people, but I do think for most people it's we've, we've, we've simplified the analogy enough so that people get it. But, but again, it speaks to the complexity of explaining stability, which is too easily, um, confused with rigidity and that's right. So when people think you need to be stable, they think like immovable.

That's not at all what it means. Stability is a description of the internal characteristics of an object that allows for forced transmission to move without leaking. So a race car is clearly not, it's very stable, but it's moving. The stability becomes pronounced during the kinetic phase. So it's when it's moving that you appreciate the stability and the lack of energy seep between objects.

the engine, the chassis and the tires. But yes, that was a really hard chapter to write. And it, it also got cut way down. I mean, that chapter went on and on and on. And there were so many other people involved in that chapter because there were so many other people in my journey of kind of getting from, you know, point A to point B, but

But in the end, for the purpose of simplicity, we just brought it down to a handful of stories, talked about Beth. And so therefore, while far less complete, I think it's more digestible. When you talk about finding the essence of something, does it come back to a one-liner? Does it come back to a three-part framework? Does it come back to a diagram? What is that central idea that is sort of a...

Almost like the essence of what you're going to say. I think it varies by topic, truthfully. I don't think I have a clear answer for it is always X, right? I mean, one thing that it always needs to be is at a minimum, you need to be able to explain it to somebody over dinner. Like, I think you haven't.

And notice I say over dinner. Yeah, I noticed that right away. Not in an elevator. That's exactly what I thought. Like people always say, oh, what's your elevator pitch for this? Well, it's like, look,

complex things can't be explained in an elevator yeah right and i think one of the one of the things about our society that is a little problematic is everybody wants an elevator pitch for everything and an elevator pitch is great for some things you know maybe maybe if you have a business that's really simple you should be able to explain it in an elevator pitch um but something that's really complicated probably can't be explained in 30 seconds yeah um and therefore you

Um, if you have a dinner, you actually should be able to explain mostly anything. You know, you can explain quantum physics over dinner. Now, do you understand it well enough to, you know, read a Nobel laureate's dissertation on it? No, but you can, you know, you could get somebody pretty far. Um, and, and similarly, I think, you know, that to me is, I would have a hard time explaining stability in 30 seconds, but if we were having a meal together, I could absolutely explain it. Right.

How did you manage your own notes for this book? Just the references are 38 pages. Yeah, it's brutal. I couldn't believe it. So I can't take any credit for that. So Bob Kaplan, who at the time was my head of research, he and another one of the analysts were kind of in charge of that. So one of the funny discoveries of this process was that the publisher didn't have a fact checker.

And I was like, what are you talking about? I thought you guys are going to fact check this whole thing. And they're like, oh yeah, like we'll fact check some things, but we can't fact check any of the science. I'm like, well, this book is 98% science. So then I had to go and actually hire a fact checker, um,

And, uh, in the end, I'm trying to think we ended up using another one of my analysts who had never worked on anything in the book. Cause you needed somebody who wasn't contaminated by having seen the book in the first place. Sure. Um, and yeah, I mean that took like, and by the way, fact checking is two things. Fact checking is both checking a fact and checking the interpretation of a fact.

Like, so here's the reference from which we pulled this, this concept. A, did we get it right? And B, do you think we misinterpreted the data?

So there was a really long process to get that right. Well, also, one thing I noticed when you talk about studies is you always talk about how the studies are done. There are opportunities in your world where the way that a study was done created some kind of fraudulent data. So a published journal could say something, but the data could be fraudulent. I don't know if that's too far. Well, I mean, fraud's a very strong word because it implies deliberate fraud.

you know, doing something that is deliberately incorrect. That does occur, but it's far less common. Inaccurate. Yeah. The far more common problem is,

and this is incredibly common actually is yeah, the wrong experiment was done. You know, the experiment was done, but it wasn't a great experiment. The control was wrong. The design was wrong. Yeah. The statistics were wrong. The interpretation was wrong. And that's where, that's where we had to go back and be far more thoughtful. And, and, and luckily we do that out of the gate. So there wasn't a lot of, there weren't too many mistakes. But actually one of my greatest points of pride with this book is the

unbelievably few number of mistakes people have caught in it. I just, you know, you assume with a book that's got 50 million references like this one that you're just going to get picked apart. But I mean, it has, it has been a total shock to me that the amount of things people have come back with has been really minor. Um,

And it's a testament to those guys that did this insane amount of fact checking. And how did you manage the notes in your own head? Are you pretty good at memorizing all these things or just keeping the things you read in your head? Is it because a lot of it is the own, your framework? Yeah. So a lot of it is, um, I would be writing something and I, luckily I have a pretty good memory and I would be like, you know, I remember reading a study about this. Right. Hey, Bob, uh,

So I'd write a note in the Google doc in the margin, you know, tag Bob. Hey, Bob, there's a study. I think it's like circa 2014. It was in the journal science. And I remember the figure and it had this in it. Can you go get it? And yeah, so so and sometimes it would be I am pretty sure that this is correct, but I honestly can't find the citation for it. Am I making this up? Can you go find a paper?

And sometimes it's, yeah, you're making it up. That's not right. Okay. Or yes, that's right. Here's a citation. Last question. You, you inserted your personal narrative quite a bit throughout the piece. Like your own transformation is, is infused inside of the book. How did you find the courage to do that? If the desired outcome is change, if the desired outcome is person's going to read this book and a year later, their life is going to be better because they have done something different.

There's probably no better way to, to, to show people that than to show it in yourself. Right. So if, if, you know, if the person's going to read this book and they're going to make a change,

If you can have mirrored that in some way, you're probably going to make it easier for them to do the same. And again, so I think that that's that's probably why it felt like, hey, this is, you know, even though you don't really want to maybe necessarily be as open and honest about some of this stuff, that's that's probably a good way to do it.

Right. You say, if you take nothing else from my story, take this. If I can change, you can. All of this has to begin with the simple belief that real change is possible. That's the most important step. I believed I was the most horrible, incorrigible, miserable son of a bitch that was ever shat into civilization. For as long as I could remember, I believed that I was defective and that my flaws were hardwired. Unchangeable.

Only when I at least entertained the notion that maybe I was not actually a monster was I able to start chipping away at the narrative that had nearly destroyed my life and everyone in my wake. Thanks, Peter. Thank you so much for having me.