pound a day diet barnes and noble



male speaker: so about fiveyears ago, i had the pleasure of introducing a new author toan authors at google talk. and this author's namewas tim ferriss. he had a new book that hadjust come out called "the 4-hour workweek." itwas a surprise hit.

and it spent about four yearson the bestseller list. not too long after, he had asecond book called "the 4-hour body," which was a little bitmore about hacking the body, weight loss, nutrition.

a lot of people i knowhere at google have lost a bunch of weight. i myself have lost about20 pounds doing that. so i'm very excited to havetim here for his new book, "the 4-hour chef." it's a bookthat starts with cooking and then goes into foodin general. it's also a bit of a primer onapproaching any topic and learning it and learningit towards mastery. and tim's here to talkabout the book, but

also about other topics. and we'll have a lotof time for q&a. and so i'm very excited tohave tim here today. please join me inwelcoming him. [applause] timothy ferriss: thankyou, kind sir. trevor was subjected to someof my experimentation also throughout this book withrespect to food, which in the beginning was not verypleasant at all.

male speaker: [inaudible] timothy ferriss: so it's beenfun to visit google as many times as i have. and certainly in the firstvisit, i had a lot more hair and many fewer book sales. but this book is perhapsthe most exciting to me of all three. so i'll start off with a verydramatic trailer that i think gives a basic sortof overview.

and then we'll jump into thepresentation, which i'll try to keep really short, oras short as i can. and then a bunch of q&a,because that's when i have the most fun. so let's do the trailer first. [video playback] timothy ferriss: all right. so the presentation's alldownhill from here. that was courtesyof adam patch.

adam patch directed anddid the post on that. there are a few things thatcame up in that video that will reappear throughthe presentation. it was all filmed in seattle,at delve kitchen. so if anyone's interested inmolecular gastronomy, things like that, chris young, who usedto run the experimental kitchen for the fat duck inlondon when it became number one ranked in the world, helpedwith all of that, as well as with the sciencesection.

but let's start atthe beginning. so "the 4-hour chef, acceleratedlearning for accelerated times--" this bookof the three has the most confusing title and subtitlecombination, i think. and that is because for the lastfour or five years, my readers have been asking mefor a book on accelerated learning, mostly because of mytalk about smart drugs and language acquisition andthings like that. the problem is, writing a bookon learning without a good

context is really boringto read and even more boring to write. so i ultimately chancedupon thinking of cooking for a few reasons. the first was it wasa skill that i had quit many times before. i had failed at it many, manytimes before, despite trying, much like swimming, which wascovered in "the 4-hour body." secondly was--

i think as many people feelthese days in a digital world-- there's a certain senseof angst that i felt every time i closed my laptop. i'd accomplished a lot ofwork, but i had nothing physical to show for it. and i really wanted to reclaimmy manual literacy and build physical things. and i thought that wouldbe woodworking. but there's always an excuse notto go to oakland to do it.

and i didn't want some crappybird house in my living room, anyway. and i saw my girlfriend cookingone night, and i said, that can be my dojo. that can be where i learn touse my thumbs for something besides the space bar. and it turned out to be reallylife-altering for me to reclaim that part of myself. and lastly, because foodinvolves all five senses, you

can really use it to create sortof a spidey sense in all of those senses, whichis pretty wild. and it transfers to almosteverything else. and this shot, this opening shothere that you guys can see, it's two pictures,identical pictures. this is the entranceway toalinea restaurant in chicago, which at the time i wrotethe book was number one ranked in the us. and i spent three days there.

and in alinea restaurant, theytest every assumption possible, every conventionpossible. you get menus at the end insteadof at the beginning. when you walk in, noone greets you. it's this red hallway,completely soundproof. until you get to the end,nothing happens. then motion sensors open ahidden door, and people greet you by name. everything's been tested,including the business model.

and i encourage people to lookat next restaurant for how they sell out their entireseason for the restaurant in, in some cases, 10 to30 seconds online. it's very, very cool. the guiding tenet when lookingat sports performance, when looking at work performance,when looking at learning performance is this. so "whenever you find yourselfon the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."and my job over the

last five years, but certainlysomething i've obsessed on for 15-plus years, is finding theanomalies, finding the freaks-- you know, the peoplewho are really good at what they do despite having poor rawmaterials or very informal training or no trainingat all. this is to give people-- howmany people have seen this video before? a handful. ok.

this is in south africa. this is just to give you an ideaof what i do to myself in the name of experimentation. i had been effectivelytold-- this is the side of my right leg. i'm recording this with a flipcamera, in cape town at one of the top sports scienceinstitutes. and i had been told, in effect,through navigenics and other types of dna testing thati lacked the ability to

produce fast twitch musclefiber properly. so this genetic determinismwas very depressing. but that didn't squarewith my experience in sports, for instance. i'd been an all-american inhigh school in wrestling. so i decided to skip all ofthe theory and just remove samples from my leg. and the way it works with abiopsy is they insert a hollow tube, slightly larger than apen, into your leg, apply

suction, pull the tissuein, and then rotate it to cut it out. and i'm not going to run thisfor very much longer. but last time i showed this, iactually did it at a lunch meeting, which wasmy long island sophistication coming out. in any case, i'm not goingto go too deep into the results here. -all right.

who wants to sign up? i'll come to this in a second. the punch line to that is thatsomething along the lines of more than 40% of my muscle fiberwas in fact fast twitch muscle fiber, type iia, whichis fully trainable. so the raw materials you startwith, perhaps the skills that you've put on the shelf becauseyou couldn't master them or couldn't even getstarted learning them, do not seal your fate.

and the way you get around thatfate, the way you sort of head-fake what you think areyour limitations, is by testing assumptions. this is another shot fromalinea restaurant. and this is one ofthe last courses. this has been platedby grant achatz. so chef grant achatz,a-c-h-a-t-z, is really worth taking a look at. and i look at him very closelyin the professional

section of the book. but when jean-georgesvongerichten, who's a very, very, very world-class chef,who runs many restaurants including abc kitchen in newyork city, was asked, who do you fear among your colleagues,it didn't take him more than a split secondto say grant achatz. he does things i can'tunderstand. i don't understand how hecreates the things he creates. for instance, they wantedto test plating.

why don't we havebigger plates? well, they couldn't fit a4-foot-diameter plate through the doorways to andfrom the kitchen. so instead, they found aspecial, effectively food-grade latex from a sex shopin paris and imported it to create tablecloths wherethey could use the entire table as a plate. and on the right-hand side,you see a dark chocolate pinata that is shattered onthe table and releases all

this liquid nitrogen and crazystuff, which is just awesome. and it tasted good. a lot of these food-as-theatershows end up producing really crappy food. but alinea does nothave crappy food. this is an exampleof transfer. when you start to thinkcreatively about food-- because i was an anti-cookmy entire life. even a few weeks prior tostarting research for this

book, i had two friends who arevery good cooks come over to help cook dinner. they said, grab the wineand we'll talk about business, catch up. they came over, and i hadmustard and white wine in my fridge, including some, like,biohazard unidentifiable food. and they asked me wheremy olive oil was. and i said, olive oil. olive oil.

oh, it's in the freezer. it's in the freezer. why is your olive oilin the freezer? i really was startingfrom ground zero. and when you start to thinkabout food creatively, anything creatively,it transfers. so this was about halfwaythrough my meal at alinea. we had been stuck in designgridlock on the cover. and it just came to me afterone of their more inventive

dishes that the cover could besomething like this on the left, which i sketched out. and then it turned intothe final cover. so even if you hate cooking,hopefully you love food. and taking even a week toexperiment with all of those senses in the kitchen, even ifyou stop after that week, will take a lot of your life thatis currently in black and white and turn it into high def,which is a really cool effect that is persistent.

this is something yousaw in the trailer. this is one of my old friendswhen i inhaled something through nasal inhalation. this is vasopressin, which isan antidiuretic hormone. it's prescribed as desmopressinto kids in some cases who bed-wet pasta certain age. i used it starting freshman yearin college to ace chinese character quizzes. and it has very interestingapplications

to short-term memory. so i would take two shots andflip through a book almost as quickly as i could turn thepages and score a 95 to 100%. it was pretty cool. now, as you might imagine,snorting antidiuretic hormone is not the best long-termstrategy. and pretty quickly thereafter,headaches set in and all sorts of issues, because i was testinga whole slew of other drugs at the same time.

and i started to focuson method. i didn't continue with-- well,that's not entirely true. i'm still interestedin the drugs. we can get to thatif you guys want. but the point being there areactual methods, recipes, that the world's fastest learners useto learn what they learn, whether that's daniel tammetin the uk, who learned icelandic in seven days wellenough to be interviewed on tv, whether that's ed cooke, whoplays a pretty big part in

the book, who trained joshuafoer from zero to national memory champion in the us,which was chronicled in "moonwalking with einstein."there is a method to this stuff. tango, fighting, marksmanship,cooking, languages-- there are methods. and this was the common methodthat i distilled from many of these different experts-- disss.

this is an acronym, of course. and it stands fordeconstruction, selection, sequencing, and stakes. and i'm going to breeze throughthis pretty quickly. i'll give a few examples ofwhat i mean, then a few take-aways, and then wecan jump into q&a. but this is the basic process. deconstruction is takingsomething very big and intimidating, like learninghow to swim.

i couldn't swim untilthree years ago. and i grew up on long island. how embarrassing is that? but i was deathly afraidof swimming. i'd had a couple ofsemi-drowning experiences, have trouble withmy left lung. so i took swimming and broke itdown into, ok, what are the arms doing in freestyle? what are the legs doingin freestyle?

learning to swim is too big,just like learning a language. and then, what are myfailure points, my personal failure points? why haven't i learnedthis already? so for me, it was every timei went in to try to take a class, i would be givena kickboard. and they would say, all right. do a couple laps. and then we'll getyou started.

and i would flail aroundlike a drowning monkey. and i wouldn't move. and i would just be embarrassed,exhausted. and i would quit. so it's like, all right. how would i learn to swim ifi had to avoid kicking? and it gives you a specificityto then look for the answers. and through a friend of minenamed chris sacca-- who some of you may know--

a very astute investor, who wasterrible at swimming and then completed an iron man, ifound total immersion method, which, guess what? doesn't really use kicking. so deconstruction is takingsomething really big and making it more tackleable. selection is a common threadthrough all of the books that i've written. this is the 80/20 analysis.

so what are the 20% of tools,activities, approaches, coaches, whatever it might bethat will get you 80% or more of the outcomes, the resultsthat you want? this is really easily appliedto languages. like most people, when i studiedspanish in junior high and whatnot, i was terrible. i couldn't string a basicconversation together for 30 seconds after threeyears of studying. and i concluded i wasbad at languages.

no. not so. i just had thingsall mixed up. if you instead look to someonelike michel thomas-- m-i-c-h-e-l thomas, his originalaudio recordings, who was a holocaust survivor,then an intelligence officer in europe-- you could acquire the basics ofspanish grammar in two or three days.

and then if you used flashcards, like vis-ed.com, v-i-s, hyphen, e-d dot com, which arehigh-frequency word lists and flash cards, you could becomefunctionally fluent in a language like spanish in 8 to12 weeks without that much difficulty. and i say that now because i'veapplied this to japanese, mandarin chinese, german,spanish, and so on. it's very replicable. sequencing--

this is something that i don'tthink has been addressed very well by other books. and there aren't really manybooks on accelerated learning to begin with. sequencing is kind ofthe secret sauce. so a friend of mine, forinstance, josh waitzkin-- does anyone know that name? he was the basis for a book anda movie called "searching for bobby fischer." he's one ofthe most incredible chess

players in the world. he opted out of the scene afterall of the attention from "searching forbobby fischer." but the way he was originallytaught chess by his first really formal coachwas backwards. he learned from theend game first. so instead of starting withopenings, which everyone does, he began with pawn and kingversus pawn, to learn flexible principles and techniques thatcould apply everywhere.

and as a result, his rate ofprogress was much faster. when i learned tangoin argentina-- which was a completeaccident-- but from my first class to theworld championships was five and a half months. and part of the reason i wasable to make that rate of progress is because i lookedat how to play with the sequencing. and i learned the femalerole first.

i learned how to follow beforei learned how to lead. and it allowed me to progressmuch, much faster. there are a lot of very goodcoaches who had also focused on sequencing. stan utley, who is a verywell-known short-game-- ie putting and whatnot-- golfcoach, says people come to me all the time. they say, how's my form? how's my form?

can you correct my form? he's like, your form is fine. you're just moving thepieces out of order. so playing with sequencingis really important. and then stakes is alsovery neglected. one of my friends, aj jacobs,writes for "esquire." he's a hysterical, hysterical writer,a very good writer too. "the year of living biblically" is one of my favorites.

but when he was trying to loseweight-- so he's a jewish guy. he gave one of his friendsa check to the kkk for $1,000 in his name. and he said, if i do not hitmy weight-loss goal, i want you to mail this to the kkk. that is what we callan incentive. so for most people, they'relike, oh, i'd love to learn to play the guitar. i'd love to lose weight.

but if you fail at those things,nothing happens. you don't get fired from tryingto learn the guitar. you just don't do it. so an easy way tocreate stakes-- betting pools with friendsare one way. but you could alsogo to stickk.com. i have no affiliationwith it-- s-t-i-c-k-k dot com. it was originally set up byor conceived of by a yale

professor as a commitmentstore. here's how it works. take an amount of money thatwould be painful to lose, because you'll work a lot harderto avoid the stick than you will to get the carrot. put in some money. it goes into escrow. then you choose your goal. let's just say it's guitartwice a week.

great. then you choose yourmost merciless friend to be the referee. and if you don't-- oh no. what happened? [feedback] man. tech support?

"eyes wide shut," anyone? so we'll have to reclaimthe screen somehow. i'm not sure. i didn't touch anything. i can also riff withoutit, but it would be nice to get that back. where the hell was i? oh. all right.

so escrow. then you choose ananti-charity. so you have your mercilessfriend who is going to referee and confirm or deny that youdid what you said you were going to do. and then you choosean anti-charity. currently the most effectiveanti-charity is the george w bush congressional library. right below that--

this is from the stats. i'm not taking a position. i'm just saying. right below that youhave pro-choice, pro-life, duh, duh, duh. so whatever nonprofit you wouldrather nuke than give money to, choose that. and then if your friend oranother referee says you didn't follow directions,guess what?

that money goes to thatnonprofit in your name on the record forever. you will perform miracles. people who have no instructionwhatsoever, it's just like, no. i'm not even going to tellyou how to lose weight. but you have to lose weight orthis will go to the kkk. man, miraculous. so how many people here wouldlike to, let's say, learn to

play guitar? i think that's pretty common. i would. anybody? so go on youtube and searchaxis of awesome. so the axis-- audience: [inaudible] timothy ferriss: yeah, right? so axis of awesome isa comedy troupe.

it's a musical comedy troupe. and they will play almost everypopular pop song that you can imagine usingfour or five chords. so guess what? those four or five chords areyour minimal effective dose. that is where you should investyour time to have early wins and get the most positivefeedback possible, as well as getting 80% or more of theoutputs that you would want, especially in that beginningnovice stage.

from a sequencing standpoint-- i'm just kind of making this upas we go along until we get visuals, if we get them. it's not a big dealif we don't. in the case of, let'ssay, cookbooks-- and i want people to believethey can become world class in almost any skill within sixmonths if they apply themselves properly. and by learning how to learn,you also by default

learn how to teach. so you can teach yourkids and whatnot. one of the ways that you'llnotice this has been taught indirectly through the book isfixing some of the common problems with cookbooks. many how-to books in general arewritten to be convenient for the author to write,not a logical progression for the reader. so why do people quit cooking?

let's say, knife skills, areally, really common reason for people quitting. why? because they're introducedtoo early. so there are ways to postpone itat a point when the student will be ready. additionally, i don't careabout why people pick cookbooks up. i care about why theyput them down.

and what i did right from theoutset before even starting writing is i polled my facebookand twitter followers to identify the fiveor six most common reasons people quit. so what do we have? shopping, too muchcleanup, too much expensive gear, et cetera. and it's very important whenyou're trying to lose fat or whether you're trying to learnsomething quickly to only

adopt one new behaviorat a time. so if you guys take anythingaway from this, let it be, well, first, 80/20. and then secondly, onebehavior at a time. so if you look at, let's say,the research that bj fogg has done the persuasionlab at stanford-- or really anywhere else. if you try to take, forinstance, people who are over the age of 50 and teach themto quit smoking by texting,

your failure rate's goingto be sky high. because you're trying to teachthem two new habits, texting and quitting smoking. yay. when most people try to learnto cook, what are they in fact doing? just ignore this. ignore this. they're not trying to adoptone new behavior.

they're trying to adoptgrocery shopping. and of course they don't knowwhere anything is, because they never do it, so ittakes them an hour longer than it should. then prep time. pain in the ass, especially ifyou don't know knife skills. then cooking, then cleanup. of course everybody gives up. of course.

that's like i've neverlost weight before. i want to lose weight. i'm going to go to the gymseven times a week. i'm going to changeall my meals. i'm going to get the mostexpensive personal trainer i can find. and then add two more to that. of course it fails. so a side note-- if you want tolose fat quickly, 30 grams

within 30 minutes of wakingup is the first change you should make. that's how my dad started. he went from 5 pounds of averagefat loss per month to 17.85 in the first month andthen lost a total of more than 90 pounds. so just a protein shake firstthing when you wake up. don't even change your meals. if you have a lot of weight tolose, don't exercise for the

first 8 to 12 weeks. the grammar of any language-- this is the 80/20 oflanguage learning. there's a fascinating guy-- i talk about him brieflyin "the 4-hour chef"-- named cardinal mezzofanti. anyone heard this name before? so cardinal mezzofantiis a hyperpolyglot. by some accounts, hespoke 72 languages.

he's been tested prettywell in at least 32. there's actually a book abouta lot of this stuff called "babel no more," i believe itis, which is outstanding. the way that he learned theselanguages without using really any written materials to speakof was he would have native speakers translate thelord's prayer into their native language. and in that tiny little lord'sprayer, he could pick out almost all of the mostimportant grammatical

constructions in theentire language. i actually ended updoing the same thing, but with 13 sentences. so in effect, just to makelanguage, because it's so intimidating to people,graspable-- if you can translate these 13sentences, you have enough grammar to have a pretty longconversation assuming that you then add in the wordsyou need. and if you study somethingcalled the linkword mnemonic--

there are different types ofmnemonics-- the linkword mnemonic by gruneberg,g-r-u-n-e-b-e-r-g, you can learn 200 to 300 words a daywithout too much trouble. and if you consider you needabout 1,200 words to seem fluent, like a week or two,you're off to the races. i'm not kidding. this is my muppet face, asmy girlfriend calls it. and this is to illustrate theminimal effective dose in terms of gear.

so one of the things that ialways found very frustrating about cooking, they'd be like,ok, you ready, excited? you're enthusiastic? let's kill that enthusiasm,because you have to buy $4,000 worth of stuff. and you don't even know ifyou're going to keep cooking. but have fun spendingthat money. and that's like, oh, youwant to try cycling? here, buy this $4,000tour de france--

it just makes no sense. so if you look at a few of thethings i have here, this is about all you need tocook really well. for part of the research, i wentto the oberoi grand in kolkata, india. and that was one of the bestchefs in the country. he did all of his prep with a$20 victorinox knife and two stainless steel pans. you could buy all of thatfor $35, $40 in the us.

here you have a microplaneon the left-hand side. you have the rada cutlerycleaver, which is a $9 to $12 knife which is perfect forlearning knife skills. do not spend a fortune on knivesuntil you've decided you're actually goingto continue cooking. then you have that blue towel,which i found through tom colicchio's gang. that is a surgical, lint-freehuck towel. it's not designed for cooking.

it's designed for hospitals. they're about $1 apiece. they are gold. they can be used for a milliondifferent things. then you see that littlevegetable peeler. that is a kuhn rikonvegetable peeler. the star peeler was theoriginal version. a guy named joe ades soldmillions of them in union square in new york city.

find videos of him online. it's amazing. then a couple of siliconspatulas. a probe thermometer,super critical. if you never want to undercookor overcook food ever again, just get a probe thermometer. when in doubt, cook it to140 and you're fine. there are a coupleof exceptions. then a peltex, which is likea slotted fish spatula.

and then a cast-irondutch oven. that's pretty muchall you need. and you could startwith a lot less. on the right-hand side-- any coffee geeks? there's got be at leastone or two. so i spent a few days withstephen morrissey, who was the 2008 world barista champion,works at intelligentsia coffee now, also helped design thecoffee program at eleven

madison park, which has become abig selling point for eleven madison park. so here are some of thethings we tested. i'm not going to gothrough each one. but if you want to make a reallyamazing cup of coffee and you don't want to get toodown, stuck in the weeds, here's my recommendation. for one or two people, allyou need is an aeropress. it was designed by a mechanicalengineer out of

stanford who also developed theaerobie, the aerobie, that frisbee, same guy. aeropress. and then get, obviously,good coffee. get a conical burr grinder,which does not have to be expensive. you could get a hario handgrinder or a porlex. they're probably $20,$30 a piece. and then 12 grams of freshlyground coffee to

200 grams of water. and the water should be between175 and 180 degrees fahrenheit. and you're done. that's all you need toknow for the basics. you can get in the weeds, butthat will produce one of the best cups of coffee you'veever had in your life. anti-griddle-- this is just a point i wantto make about home versus

professional chef. professional chefs need fancygear in some cases, because they have to produce 100, 200,300 of the same dish a night. and they have to be extremelyconsistent. at home, you can create thesame thing but use a super-ghetto macgyverapproach. so there's something calledthe anti-griddle, which is manufactured by a companycalled polyscience. and it's used at alinea.

it's a surface that can belowered to about negative 40 and you can make all sortsof crazy stuff. the way they did the recipetesting before the anti-griddle existed, and theway that you can replicate the results at home without spending$2,000, is using a block of dry ice and abaking sheet on top. or you could use the backof a metal spatula. and then you can make thesethings, for instance. take a few minutes.

these are like those peppermintgirl scout cookies, those super crackaddict cookies. they're like that, buteven more addictive. and you can make them inabout five minutes. but you can do this at homeand replicate a lot of the things that would cost$5,000 to $10,000 with just a few dollars. this is one of the last pointsi'm going to make. and that is the approachis the same.

this process, thisblueprint for meta-learning, applies to tango. that was my instructor for awhole host of reasons in argentina when i wascompeting, named-- not the woman, although thatwould've been nice. gabriel misse, on the left-handside, gabriel misse, m-i-s-s-e. if you ever want togo to argentina or take tango classes, look for that guy. he's one of the few tangoinstructors whom the old

guard, like the old-schoolmilongueros, really love, as well as the new guard,like [spanish] guys, they all love him. here's me, on the floor. what am i doing? i'm practicing the motion ofsauteing, on my knees with dry beans in a skillet. i'm not cooking. the most stressful way to learnnew skills is to try to

learn them while you're underpressure to produce a meal. so this is an example ofno-stakes practice. like practicing cutting skillswith a lettuce knife, for instance, which is pretty muchexactly the same shape as a chef's knife, but youcan't cut yourself. on the right-hand side here,if we want to talk about guns, we can. but i'm not goingto go too nuts. this is an m&p .45,smith & wesson.

that is the real gun. then above it, we have a pelletgun and a bb gun, both manufactured by smith & wesson,that are replicas of the same thing, which allowedme to practice at home so i could then transfer allthose results to the range, or zombies. so no-stakes practiceand transfer-- the process is the samefor all these skills. and of course, last butnot least, simplify.

learning does not haveto be complicated. cooking does not haveto be complicated. and what i noticed-- i mentioned this earlier-- isat the very highest levels, when i met the best of the best,they kept things really simple for me. they didn't say, no,you can't do it. they didn't say, no, it'lltake a lifetime to become a good cook.

they said, look. if you want to dedicate yourlife to it, you have to do what i do. but to be one of the mostamazing home cooks out there does not take verymuch time at all. it does not have tobe complicated. that is a gurkha regiment kukriknife, for those people wondering, a nepaleseknife used to chop people's heads off.

that is related tosimplification because the act of deciding to simplify-- decision is relatedto incision. decision is removingpossibilities, applying positive constraints, likethe 80/20 analysis. so i'll end with one exampleof simplicity. this is an ash cake. so these are cakes. they're like scones made fromacorn flour, cooked directly

on a bed of coals. and this was done in the santacruz mountains, with an incredible guy named cliffhodges, who actually has engineering degrees from mit,but runs a company called adventure out in santa cruz. you guys should allcheck it out. made these, brush offsome of the ash. the most delicious sconesi'd had in years. and it was done right on a bedof coals in the mountains.

so find the elegance in thechaos and simplify to the extent possible. and that is the end ofmy presentation. thank you. timothy ferriss: so i would loveto do q&a. that's when i so the mic is right over here. if anyone has any questions,i would love to hear them. and they don't have to berelated to anything in this presentation.

yeah. i think we're just going to[? have this ?] because they want to record the questions. audience: have you appliedthe dsss thing to coding? and if so, what do you startwith in terms of sequencing? timothy ferriss: i have notspent a lot of time tackling coding, just because i've spentmost of my time in the natural languages. but i did have a veryfun experience with

chad fowler, who-- i guess it was railsconf, amongother things, that he used to run-- where he taught me the basicsof ruby using analogies from hindi, which he speaks. and the way i would startis by looking at-- from the deconstruction step,i would look for people who have had the fastest rateof progress in a short period of time.

so rather than trying to emulatethe best coders-- so for instance, i remember oncei asked a friend of mine, daniel burka-- i think he's here rightnow, in fact-- about the basics of css. and he's like, all this stuffis second nature to me. i don't remember the problemsthat i had in the beginning. so looking for people, let's sayin the world of swimming, instead of michael phelps, you'dlook at someone like

shinji takeuchi. but in coding, i would belooking for people who have made tremendous progress ina short period of time. and that could be by contactingsomeone like code academy and asking themfor case studies. there are a number of different approaches i could take. but i haven't delved too deeplyinto programming. the reason this book took me solong to write partially is

i didn't have the contacts andresources that i have now to meet the people iwanted to meet. but it's also because i'd triedother frameworks that always fell through withdifferent subjects. and this is the only one thathas held up so far. so i think it could apply. audience: so in short, findsomeone that's an expert at it and kind of ask them whatthe end sequence-- timothy ferriss:or model them.

there's a list of 10 to15 questions in the deconstruction section that irecommend running through, whether as a thought exercise inusing google, let's say to just do searches, which canreally be all you need, or whether you're actuallyreaching out to people in person. that list of questions helpsbreak down where the archimedes levers might be whereyou can accelerate your progress comparedto, let's say, a

conventional cs training. yeah? audience: hi. so your book is self-publishedon amazon, right, and not in bookstores? timothy ferriss: it is thefirst major book through amazon publishing. so it's not self-published. this is a confusing aspectof it because

amazon has so many options. amazon publishing is based innew york and competes directly with all of the othermajor publishers. so they sign authors and provideadvances and do all of that stuff, which is why there'sbeen such a strong response, positiveand negative. so it's being boycotted atretail by all of barnes & noble and a lot of indies. but there are some stores, likehastings and a handful of

indies throughout the country,that do carry it. audience: ok. and so what were your businessdecisions for that? timothy ferriss: the businessdecisions were for me that i like experimenting. i mean, i'm sort of anexperimentalist. and i'd done the traditionalmodel twice. i know what's involved. i know how to do it well.

it's just not very interestinganymore. and i wanted to trysomething new. and amazon has direct accessto all of its customers. when you think of traditionalpublishing, they are b2b companies. so you'll have thevp of sales at an imprint of simon & schuster. they sell to the head categorybuyer at barnes & noble or books-a-million.

they do not have anyrelationship with their end users. and i wanted to see what couldbe done through amazon, given that it's a completely newlandscape, and just try something different. so we'll find out very shortlythe results of that. but it's been fun. i mean, it's allowed me to dothings very aggressively that i otherwise probably would nothave even thought to do, like

partnering with bittorrent toprovide hundreds of megabytes of extra content andvideo and whatnot. it's forced me to improvise. and i just enjoy that. that's kind of whatgets me excited. audience: thanks. timothy ferriss: thank you. audience: so one of my favoritethings about your other books are that you findthese universally accepted

truths, and you affirm someof them and negate others. so in "the 4-hour body," youkind of negated the idea that calories in equalscalorie out. but you affirmed the idea thata high protein intake's important to muscle growth. during this book, what are someof your favorite truths that you found thatyou affirmed and some that you negated? timothy ferriss: that'sa good question.

i want to talk aboutthe calories in, calories out for a second. so even in "the 4-hour body"when i ate whatever it was, like 7,000 calories in12 hours, people were like, ah, that's bs. so i wanted to do thatagain in this book. so just two quick examples. one was i connected with somecompetitive eaters, like the number two ranked guy in theworld and a few others, and

had a vermonster-eatingcompetition with a bodybuilder. so the vermonster is this thingfrom ben & jerry's. it's 14,000 calories, 500grams of fat, ice cream, bananas, brownies, cookies. it's just beyondbeyond excess. and so we ate that in20 minutes or so. and so i did that first. and then the very next day--

oh, and the competition was tosee who could finish it the fastest and who could gain themost weight simultaneously. the next day i did-- and i measured my body fatbeforehand, with an ultrasound analyzer that the yankees use. the next day, i did a newyork city food marathon. so i wanted to try this idea ofa food marathon, which was 26.2 iconic dishes. the 0.2 is cookies.

26.2 iconic dishes-- i like cookies-- in 26 locations in 24hours, all walked. and so i did both of those. that was probably another 12,000to 15,000 calories. and then i had lower body fatthe next day, using all the stuff in "the 4-hourbody," like the alpha lipoic acid [? one. ?] some of the things that werefascinating to look at in this

book, things that were mayberefuted or shown to be not complete, shown to beincomplete-- like searing a steak, for instance. if you want the perfect sear ona steak, you're producing this maillard reaction. and part of what you need forthat is low moisture. and what you usually hear is,ok, you get the steak to room temperature. then you sear it and cookit and whatnot.

well, one of the best ways toget that perfect sear is actually to put the steakuncovered in the freezer for 45 minutes. because it's the driestenvironment that you have in your house. it's like antarctica. so it will evaporate all thesurface moisture content. then you sear it. and then you put it in the ovenat 200 degrees and just

let it rock until youhit 135 degrees. and you'll have the best steakyou've ever had in your life. so just different ways ofsequencing things like that. in the world of learning,there's so many myths, and partially because those mythsare very profitable to commercialize. so the idea that children learnlanguages faster than adults so you shouldmimic how children learn language is nonsense.

like, have you talked to athree-year-old recently? they have a lot of work to do. i'm sorry, kid. not good enough. so the idea that someone whoalready has an l1 native language needs to learn theway a baby learns is ridiculous. and you could use 8 to 12 weeks,but there are companies like rosetta stone thatcapitalize on the fact that

it's perceived as complex. so it's like, oh, youthink it's complex? we have three or four sets thatcost $200, $300, $400 apiece that we can sell you. in learning, there areso many myths. in cooking, i would say someof the myths relate to-- not even myths, but just gaps. i have never seen a systematicway of learning flavors like you might learn foreignvocabulary.

i've never seen it. i tried to find it. so it's like how do you actuallylearn to be able to recall and identify flavoris really, really tricky. so i reached out to this groupof researchers at-- i think it's the monell sensoryresearch institute. and they pointed outa few things to me. for instance, there are not onlytaste receptors in the mouth but in the throat,in the stomach, even

in the small intestine. and there were a few flavorslike cloves, for whatever reason, that i couldn't peg. i just couldn't remember them. basil was another. so what i ended up doing wascrushing them, steeping them like tea, drinking it like awine snob and aerating it and all that, and thenswallowing it. and as soon as i used all ofthese taste receptors, it was

just like [snap] done. those would be a fewthat come to mind. audience: thank you. timothy ferriss: yeah, thanks. audience: i've heardyou on podcasts and youtube things as guests. do you have any plans or haveyou ever thought about doing your own podcast or youtubechannel or anything?

timothy ferriss: yeah. i've thought about podcastsinstead of a youtube channel. i've thought about it. but i'm very wary of creating amonster that i have to feed. if i enjoy it, like, oh, thisis awesome, every week or every day doing a podcast,having amazing guests, i think it would be fun until i decidedthat i wanted to take a break and then had to perhapsface the backlash. but i really enjoy joerogan podcast.

i've been on the joe roganpodcast twice, three hours each time. and it just gives you--it doesn't have to be three hours long. but it gives you an opportunityto reach a depth of discussion that you justcan't do if it's three minutes on "the today show." so i have thought aboutthe podcast. i've thought about the podcast alot, especially because this

silly thing that kevin rose andi have done for a couple of years now called "the randomshow," which is kind of like whatever we want to do--it's this really silly random discussion that wedo via video-- has ended up being prettywell received. so i've thought aboutthe podcast, but nothing concrete yet. audience: so one of your books,"4-hour body," you had mentioned something about--

you're measuring a lot ofthings, which is great, and trying to make decisions basedon that and coming up with simple rules of thumb. but for example, something likedon't drink milk because it has low glycemic indexbut somehow it raises insulin a lot. but that's the protein in milk,from what i understand, that, like all protein, actuallyraises insulin too. but on one side, you recommendsomething like, oh, eat, say,

steak or something like that,because that's good. but that's also goingto raise insulin. so some of those, you couldmix the signals. timothy ferriss: well, no. it's a good point. i mean, whenever you're dealingwith multivariate testing, whether it's a websiteor your body, it's extremely easy-- you have to becautious about number one, isolating nutrients and drawingconclusions on those

nutrients, like beta carotene inthe '80s, which produced a lot of side effects whenpeople started ingesting it in isolation. because at the time, sciencecould only measure a few of the things in those whole foodsand not the others. and those cofactors endedup being very important. in the case of milk-- particularly skim milk. so i have fewer issues with,let's say, whole-fat milk.

but if you're looking at theglycemic load, glycemic impact of a meal, milk will tend tobe on the lower end of the range, but it's highlyinsulinogenic. when you get into trouble inparticular is when you have high insulin combined withprocessed carbohydrates and, let's say, trans-fatty acidsis when you get into pretty well-established territoryfor causing damage. if you eat a fatty rib eye,depending on your rate of ingestion, it shouldn't spikeyour blood glucose much.

so if your insulin, which is astorage hormone, is relatively high, but you're notspiking your glucose at the same time-- which that would not do, ascontrasted with, let's say, whey protein isolate-- then you should be ok. but i would say-- just to lay out my generalapproach, if we're talking about physical testing-- wouldbe look at pubmed and clinical

research when possible toidentify experiments that i can do quickly on myself. track predominately onemetric, ideally no more than two. and if it produces a magnitudeof result that is interesting for n equals 1, like subjectequals 1 study, or for even shorter studies-- i'm sorry, for, let's say,limited studies of 5 to 10, 15 people, you can producea study that is

statistically valid. if the magnitude of change ishigh enough, the p value will be less than 0.05. if it turns out safe and doessomething interesting, i'll then test it on, let's say, 20to 100 of my followers, which we just did. there will be some data comingout probably next week. we tested the slow-carb diet onmore than 1,000 people and had them track five or sixdifferent habits so we could

actually correlatewhat produces the fastest rate of fat loss. and then i'll subject that tomy friends who are either scientists-- like i'm involved with fundingsome studies at ucsf in adam gazzaley's neuroimaginglab right now. but the challenges,of course-- there are so many studies thatif ever completed with actionable results willtake 5, 10, 15 years.

but people want to makedecisions now. and i think that whether that'show you respond to caffeine withdrawal and waysthat you can facilitate that or otherwise, thereare some pretty-- i think-- reliable waysto self-experiment. but it's challenging. it's always challenging. audience: in a book aboutlearning and everything, i know you're big on supplementsand nutrition and exercise.

do you have any recommendationsfor creating a good healthy mind and everythingfor retaining all this stuff that you'repicking up? timothy ferriss: so supplementsor things for a healthy mind. yeah, i do have somerecommendations. it depends on how faryou want to push it. i'm pretty aggressive, soi've tried everything. like modafinil--

i'm like, eh, it's all right. but there's some really crazystuff you can do if you want to get really aggressive. that's provigil, verypopular amongst ceos in silicon valley. but the starting pointis nutrition. that 30 grams of protein within30 minutes of waking up will actually really facilitatemental performance, as well, throughout the day.

secondly, a very cheapneurological insurance policy is 5 grams of creatinemonohydrate per day. this is particularly trueif you're a vegetarian. that has been shown-- and thisis in clinical research-- to be very promising treatment forminimizing the symptoms of or in fact delaying the onset ofneurodegenerative diseases like alzheimer's, parkinson's,et cetera. so 5 grams of creatinemonohydrate, which will also make the gym more interesting.

there are things you can getaggressive with, like deprenyl and whatnot. but i would suggest stayingaway from any of the prescription dementia drugs,because i don't see there being a real reason to. there are some over-the-counterthings you can use that are very-- and i'm no doctor, nor do iplay one on the internet. so caveat emptor.

do your own homework. but for instance, there are acouple of combinations, like artichoke extract and forskolin,which you can get at gnc, which when combineddo some pretty amazing things for the brain. i would just make sure youbudget 10 to 12 hours to sleep that night, because you'regoing to need it. and then whenever you'reconsuming anything that might increase mental performance,like let's say the racetam

class of smart drugs-- sopiracetam is kind of the granddaddy of this racetamclass of smart drugs. then you have phenylpiracetam,which is popular among biathletes because it increasescold tolerance and is also very stimulatory. if you use something like that--and this is true for sports nutrition or anytype of supplements. this doesn't apply just to thiscrazy stuff that i do. if it is improving yourperformance by burning your

fuel faster, you have toreplenish that fuel. and a lot of people skip thatpart of the equation. and they end up having reallybad side effects or just feeling tired. so if you take something likephenylpiracetam, you want to combine it with a cholinesupplementation. and if you want something withhigh choline content, like whole eggs. get whole eggs froma very good source

and consume the yolks. i can go on and on about it. but i would say in general,high protein intake. and if you're looking toincrease consolidation and retention, take a look at luciddreaming and how you can increase your percentageof rem sleep. so sleep, like the inactivephase in the learning process, is very important. and there are people who'veexperimented with things like

huperzine a or galantamine. i wouldn't recommendgalantamine, necessarily. there's some pretty gnarlyside effects. but huperzine a, which isan acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, by some accountsincreased rem sleep. so you can actually end upaccelerating, let's say, your retention of foreignvocabulary, which is pretty cool. there are also flotation tanksaround the bay area, like

sensory deprivation tanks, whichhave some really cool applications for acceleratingstuff like that which require no drugs. maybe a plus. so those are a coupleof ideas. audience: awesome.

pound a day diet barnes and noble,appreciate it. timothy ferriss: of course. male speaker: let's allthank tim for coming.

timothy ferriss: thanks forcoming out, everybody.