Behind The Scenes Of The Tim Ferriss Experiment: 15 Pounds Of Muscle, Turmeric Tea, Urban Evasion & More!

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. I just emerged from five days immersed in a wilderness survival program with my children and needless to say, I was completely unplugged and didn't do much podcasting during that time. So in lieu of today's normal podcast, I'm releasing a special interview with the one and only Tim Ferriss in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

As long as you manage your sodium and potassium and so on, I can get by on say, 6 hours instead of 8 hours of sleep and operate with no handicap. I did the four or five blood tests a day with the precision extra for my ketone levels and I feel like now, after doing that for two weeks or so, that I can tell roughly where my ketones and glucose are. There's no biochemical free lunch. Whether it's with smart drugs or anabolics or otherwise. The body is very, very smart and will come compensate by downregulating receptors or decreasing natural endogenous production of fill in the blank. And in almost every case, there's some type of social or financial pressure reward or some type of loss or punishment.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and today I am presenting to you a guy who is no stranger to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show, Tim Ferriss. Now, three years ago, Tim appeared on this show with Ray Kronice. In the episode, Tim Ferriss and Ray Kronise explained how to manipulate your body's temperature to burn more fat. Then two years ago, he returned with the Tim Ferriss cold thermogenesis episode. Well, now Tim is back because believe it or not, he knows how to do more than just freeze his balls off. As a matter of fact, Tim, who is who's well known as a relentless self experimenter and author and now TV star, has just launched the Tim Ferriss Experiment, which is available on itunes and probably other places too I would imagine. And so far I've watched the tactical shooting episode, the rock and roll drumming episode, and I've queued up the urban escape and evasion episode to watch next. Now, if you want to check out any of the episodes or any of the resources Tim and I talk about, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tim. Tim. You can check out everything that Tim and I talk about today, but Tim is also up to other things. The last time I saw you, Tim, you were eating copious amounts of cheese at a castle in Napa Valley. And so I think that's a perfect place to jump in. What is the deal with the cheese?

You know, I've dialed back on the cheese a little bit because I felt like I was having it pushed through my pores like a human cheesecloth. But I have been experimenting with ketosis and the ketogenic diet again. After about a 10 year hiatus. I followed the cyclical ketogenic diet in college, in parts of college and experimented with different types of carb loading combination of ketosis. But this time around I'm doing pretty much plain Jane ketosis, but measuring it this time around with better tools like you and I have discussed. So instead of using the keto sticks in your analysis, using the precision extra primarily for beta hydroxybutyrate, but as part of that, as you are very familiar, you consume 70 to 80% of your calories, typically from fat. And it's a very boring diet for the most part. But cheese is a very easy, portable way to have fat on the go. And it's a lot less messy than having kerrygold splattered all over your laptop and books in your backpack. That was the explanation for the cheese?

Yeah. And fewer diaper moments potentially compared to MCT oil, right?

Yeah, much frequent disaster fans for sure.

I'm curious though. When I had Peter Attia on the show, we talked about how ketosis is definitely advantageous for economy and efficiency, particularly for endurance. Now, I know you're not a big triathlete or marathoner, so what was your motivation for using ketosis?

Yeah, my motivation was multifold. Number one, with the new tools at my disposal for measurement, I really just wanted to look at blood marker changes in following the ketogenic diet. And secondly, I knew I was coming up on a TV launch for the Tim Ferriss experiment and I wanted to be number one, very sharp mentally and the brain runs very well with ketones and wanted to be able to operate at a high level cognitively, even in sleep deficit or compared to my normal requirements. Pretty typical that as long as you manage your sodium and potassium and so on intake in general, that means increasing your sodium intake pretty dramatically. I can get by on say 6 hours instead of 8 hours of sleep and operate with no handicap mentally. Those were a few of the incentives and reasons for wanting to use the ketogenic diet. Lastly, it just makes scheduling a lot easier in so much as I don't have to take an hour long lunch break if I'm on a ketogenic diet because I can simply have coconut oil in key and be fine fasting in multiple days if necessary, but generally speaking, having one primary meal at dinner time. So for a host of reasons, it was the optimal diet for a very breakneck schedule that was highly dependent on cognitive performance.

Now, I'm curious, you mentioned that you were tracking some biomarkers or planning on tracking some biomarkers as you do ketosis. Have you done much of that yet, like taking blood measurements?

I have some stuff pending and what I have noticed, I could probably pull some of them up, but I don't want to chew up too much time.

My motivation for asking is that when I did ketosis, two biomarkers that I actually was a little bit disappointed in were thyroid and testosterone. And of course those can manifest in symptoms like being cold a little bit more often or low libido, for example. Have you experienced any deficits like that in ketosis?

It's interesting that you ask because the two things that come to mind because I've done a lot of blood testing and what was very interesting to me about my response to ketosis, but not my response to ketosis was similar in so much similar to my fasting experiments insomuch as both of them seem to make my sex hormone binding globulin skyrocket. For those people who are not familiar with sex hormone binding globulin, among other things, it can render your total testosterone very irrelevant because it will bind to androgens like testosterone and you don't get some of the nice benefits of that. Anabolic and androgenic. Now at the same time though, I was looking at my blood tests and I'm not doing anything. I'm not taking any extracurricular pills or injections at the moment. My testosterone, my free testosterone, obviously these lab values and ranges depend on the lab you're using, but went from somewhere around 720 to way up at the top end of the range at like 960 or 970, my testosterone has actually substantially increased. But if you look at my fetril and binding globulin, I think with the LabCorp results, the highest range of normal is something like 50. And my sex hormone binding globulin was 100. I don't know what to make of that. I will say though, that I have been in the last week or so, been experimenting with basically carb backloading at the end of a ketogenic day where I'll wait, train and then have a higher carbohydrate fuel during dinner. I did this partially because I was at an extended friend's birthday party and didn't want to be that one guy who didn't enjoy any of the food. So I was like, all right, if I know I'm going to party at night, I'm going to fast primarily for the beginning of the day. And I probably put on 15 pounds of muscle since you saw me and that was not that long ago. It's been pretty fascinating. Sort of inadvertent or haphazard carb backloading plus like 2/3 ketosis has been kind of interesting.

That's interesting that you settled on that because backloading is basically what saved me from a lot of the deficits I was experiencing during ketosis. And basically backloading, really it's essentially cyclic ketosis ketosis. What I found for testing is that you can easily be back in ketosis by the next morning after falling out of the low or no carb scenario in the evening. And especially if you stack that carb backload post activity. It's extremely anabolic, which is probably why you experience the muscle gains. And that's interesting with sex hormone binding globulin as well, that it still stayed elevated because I guess. Well, my question for you is are you doing more like calorie restricted ketosis where you're getting into ketosis because you're so low on calories, or are you achieving it more from just shoving so many fats into your body that you're generating an ungodly amount of ketones.

I like to kick start it with fasting. So it's not low calorie, it's zero calorie. I like to kickstart ketosis with very low calorie. But if you look at my total daily caloric consumption, I do not think I am sub maintenance at all because my dinners can be pretty massive. I had two dinners yesterday that was mostly two social engagements, but two very high fat dinners. What I find is that the muscle gain has been very surprising to me just because my protein intake is so low compared to any type of conventional weight training wisdom, if you want to call it that, maybe in quotation marks would say pound one gram of protein per, say desired pound of lean body weight or something like that. I'm getting nowhere close to that. I'm getting probably, I would say at Most a gram per kilogram of body weight. I'm getting 50 to 70 grams of protein per day. Maybe on the high end. I've just been kind of dumbfounded at how rapid the muscle gain has been, which, I mean, obviously there's a highly anabolic component to insulin and carb backloading and so on, but I've still been kind of puzzled and it's been really fascinating to observe.

Yeah, it's very strange because it actually doesn't really follow what you would expect from a biochemical standpoint. There was a study, I believe it was, at University of California back in 2008, where they had women on a calorie restricted, 800 calorie a day diet and they were still packing on lean muscle. So there's something going on biochemically that we don't quite yet understand as far as like satellite cell proliferation and muscle fiber maintenance or growth even in the absence of calories. So that's interesting.

Yeah, it's really. Yeah. Anyway, we could geek out on this for a long time, but yeah, it's very odd but very exciting to me at the same time.

Yeah, interesting. Well, I'm excited to see some of the results that you get. Are you eventually going to release on your blog any results of blood tracking or biomarkers or things of that nature?

I might. I'm definitely tracking it all and logging it all. But what form that will take, I'm not sure. In terms of writing, I feel like I still have more research to do and the fact that I can't pinpoint why I'm gaining as much muscular weight as I given my intake will bother me. So I feel like I need to do some more testing to at least come up with some hypotheses. But I am logging all the data. So I have blood tests and all that stuff.

And to your knowledge, no one is secretly injecting horse steroids into your right butt cheek or anything like that?

You know? Yeah, I've been waking up with bruises on my upper outer quadrant of my right buttock, but besides that, it's so weird. So are you the bovine use only toothpaste? Maybe. I don't know.

Speaking of waking up bruises on your butt cheek, do you actually do any daily quantification these days of other variables? Like we have a lot of listeners who self quantify things like sleep and heart rate variability, things like that. And obviously, you know, there was an entire section of the Consumer Electronics show this year devoted to just wearables. Are you really using many of those things or doing much tracking and self quantifying these days, aside from tracking some of these ketosis markers, I am not.

And part of the reason is that the vast majority of the wearables right now are accelerometers. I just don't find accelerometers very interesting if it's being used for counting steps, for instance. But what I've been trying to do is develop a. To basically synchronize my perception with tracking devices. What I mean by that is I did maybe four or five blood tests a day with the precision extract for my ketone levels. And I feel like now, after doing that for two weeks or so and noting down my mental state and my mood and my irritability on a 0 to 10 scale and so on, that I can tell roughly where my ketones and glucose are. In fact, if you want to see, this is not pure luck. I mean, there's a little bit of luck. But if you watch the last random show I did, this video shows like, you know, I bet your ketones are at 0.3 millimolars. And he tested it, he was 0.3 millimolars. And for myself, I'm like, okay, I can kind of tell when I'm now between 1.1 or 1.7 millimolar strength. Right. So I'm doing the tracking to calibrate my brain and observational skills so that I no longer need the device. But right now I'm not wearing any trackables or anything like that.

Okay, well, this, this podcast was originally going to be sponsored by Precision Extra Ketone Monitoring. But I'll have to, I'll have to let them know.

If you could get me some strips for less than $5 a piece, I'd be really excited.

Seriously? Yeah. I switched to breath for a while during my experimentation, then settled on the same thing as you did, that it's pretty easy to feel whether or not you're in case ketosis and even in a deep state of ketosis once you get to know what it actually feels like. Yep. So in addition to using ketosis for accelerating learning or for enhancing focus, concentration, et cetera, during your filming of the Tim Ferriss experiment, did you use other things like neurotropics, smart drugs, supplements, things of that nature?

Yeah. So during the experiment I was following slow carb with the Saturday cheat day and not ketosis, just because the travel schedule and so on was so insane that I found it at the time. And also because I was actually, for a host of reasons, mostly convenience related. I Just found slow carb to be a more compatible diet for that period of time. The other tools that I use, and I think this is actually an important point to make for folks, is that you don't need to be in ketosis, that is deep ketosis, to produce ketones. I would consume, I would very often fast until lunch while filming. And I would have coconut oil, sometimes a tablespoon or two of caprylic acid, which is sort of fractionated version of MCT oil.

Yeah. Damn tasty stuff.

Oh, it's delicious. JF oil. It's not quite as bad as the synthetic ketones, but it's pretty bad. I would have that with tea, which was puyrh tea, which is a fermented black tea, plus turmeric and ginger that is still, to this day kind of my morning cocktail. And particularly with coconut oil. It really just sets the tone for the rest of the day. I didn't use a ton of pills and potions partially because or outside of, in some cases, prescription medication that I had to take from all the injuries. I mean, so in the parkour episode, like I tore three out of four quadriceps in those legs, had partially torn ACLs, torn infraspinatus in my left shoulder, torn flexor muscles in my right forearm. It was a mess. So I had anti inflammatories and I had some really powerful painkillers and whatnot that I did not end up using. But I had them just in case. Jujitsu, same story, kind of like broken floating rib on the first day of five days of shooting with Marcelo Garcia, like the Michael Jordan of the sport. So I didn't want to put a heavy burden on my liver by adding anything additional if I was taking any type of, say, even ibuprofen.

Yeah.

And that having been said, there were a couple of episodes where I had a respite from the physical abuse, like the language learning episode where I had to try to learn Tagalog Filipino well enough in three or four days to get interviewed on live TV in Tagalog for six minutes, I guess, which is a long time. I was playing around with a stack that works for me, although it's a very controversial stack that some people feel biochemically doesn't make sense. But ciltep is the general name of the stack, but it includes typically, I think it's Forskolin and artichoke extract is another way to sort of MacGyver a similar effect if it's combined with say, caffeine. And I respond very well to that. But what I have found is that there's no biochemical free lunch. Whether it's with smart drugs or anabolics or otherwise. The body is very, very smart and will compensate by downregulating receptors or decreasing natural sort of endogenous production of fill in the blank. That is problematic. If I am filming 13 episodes in 16 weeks and I need to be on point every single day, I can't afford to have two down days. Whether you're taking ecstasy or taking Modafinil or whatever, for a lot of people there is a neurotransmitter and biochemical recovery period where you suck for a period of time. I couldn't afford that. I was predominantly, occasionally messing with something like a soltep or even a hydrogen. Obviously guys, I'm not a doctor, don't play around on the Internet. Hydrogen is very interesting, but that's a prescription medication, typically in Europe used for dementia and things like that. But predominantly, I can count on maybe one hand the number of times that I use that stuff. I was relying primarily on fats and different types of stimulants found in tea. I also use the yerba mate, which is very interesting because you have not only the pharmacokinetics of caffeine where you have just a grass. Imagine that people listening. That shows you where it peaks and where it starts dropping off. I'm a caffeine fast metabolizer. If I have coffee by itself without fats, I crash within about 20 to 30 minutes. When you have something like yerba mate tea, you have not only caffeine, but you have theophylline, which is what you find in green tea, theobromine, which you find in dark chocolate. And all of those combined since they have different graphs and different peaking periods and half lives and whatnot, I get a nice two to three hour period of like a 20% mental gain. So I was mostly taking that type of moderate approach because I was trying to ensure that I wouldn't crash and screw up a very insane felding schedule.

Now, you mentioned something interesting there about caffeine metabolizing. And we've certainly intervened folks from genetic testing services before and have mentioned the fact that some people are slow or fast caffeine metabolizers. But you talked about how mixing coffee or caffeine with fat seems to slow the effect in terms of how that actually works. Have you looked into that at all to talk to other fast caffeine metabolizers who have found the same thing, or was that just something you came upon.

I haven't. It's something that I chanced upon. And I think that there are a couple of ways to look at it. One of my heroes is Richard Feynman, the physicist, and he has a quote along the lines of, the most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. So I think that on one hand I'm inclined to want to say, okay, hypothesis A is that there's something fat soluble in coffee that binds to, say, coconut oil, and that affects the metabolizing. The metabolizing of the caffeine or whatever. It could be that something in the coffee besides the caffeine is making me tired 30 minutes later, and that is what is being somehow balanced and excreted. Who knows? It could also be that the fat is not excreted. The effects of caffeine, it's just that the MCTs are getting converted into ketones around the same time that I would normally crash, so that I'm actually still crashing. But the coconut oil is compensating for that by juicing the system with keto. I don't know which of those is accurate. I just know that if I add a tablespoon or two of coconut oil, oddly enough, and this could be proportional, sweet placebo effect. I find that the coconut oil appears to be more effective with the tea that I use, and butter appears to be more effective with the coffee that I tend to drink. That can be complete bs, but for whatever reason, that is generally how I combine things.

Dr. Yeah, that's interesting. My understanding of it from a caffeine standpoint is that there are a couple of psychoactive terpenes in coffee. Cafestol and Kawaol are these terpenes, and I believe they're carried across the blood brain barrier when enveloped in fats. And those are normally not molecules that you would feel if you had a cup of coffee in the absence of fats. And so I think that's kind of the trick to this whole blending whatever, any caffeine source, like a yerba mate or a coffee, with an oil oil source, like an mct. But it's real. I'm a fast caffeine metabolizer, but I honestly don't really do a lot of fats blended with coffee. But this has made me think a little bit about maybe starting to do that a bit more. Now. I want to make sure we get a chance to talk about a few of the very cool adventures that you've been on during the course of filming the Tim Ferriss experiment. For example, you did Jiu Jitsu and one of the things that you wound up up doing as part of your rapid learning of Jiu Jitsu was a choking challenge. What exactly is a choking challenge and how'd that go down?

Yeah, the choking challenge was I'm in New York City right now and it was held here at the Marcelo Garcia Academy, which is one of the most dominant competitive Jiu Jitsu schools in the world. Marcelo Garcia is, I think, a ten time world champion. He's pretty much the undisputed best grappler in the world. Many people think who's ever walked the face of the planet. And so I was training with him and at the end of those four days, I had to roll with this world class brown belt who's now a black belt, just choked out one of the Gracies to try to apply the guillotine choke as many times as possible. And I think it might have been a three minute period of time or maybe 60 seconds, I can't remember. Call. The point was during the week to try to learn the macro from the micro. And I think this applies to many, many different things. But to not try to learn Jiu Jitsu per se, because it's too broad, just like learning Spanish is too broad. But you could learn Jiu Jitsu through the lens of this one technique, this one submission, called the guillotine choke, which Marcel is very famous for, his particular variants on the guillotine, is really brutal and called the Marcelo Team, really technical. Could I learn the trans, the timing, the setups for all of Jiu Jitsu by focusing on this one technique. And that was the choking challenge. But you can do the same thing with say, trying to learn a foreign language by learning how to translate one poem, like your favorite poem or your favorite one page, fill in the blank, right? I mean, it could be the Declaration of Independence into that language. Cardinal Mezzofanti, who is a famous hyper polyglot, learned by some accounts he was tested in, I think 32 languages, but was purported to speak up to 70. He used the Lord's Prayer. So his version of the guillotine for learning languages was the Lord's Prayer. And he would have native speakers translate for him into the Lord's Prayer. And that's how he started picking up all these languages. The token challenge was trying to throw the guillotine onto these monsters. He marked the war at the Academy.

That's one thing that I noticed was that in many of the episodes, like in the Jiu Jitsu episode, you have to literally go in and fight with monsters. In the open water episode, you had to go out into the choppy surf. In the drumming episode, you had to perform live on stage in front of this massive crowd. And you seem to always have some kind of a drastic consequence or embarrassing outcome at stake when you specifically are learning something. Why do you think it is that more people don't set up this risk component when they're learning new things or trying to achieve a goal?

I think there are several explanations. One is that they don't really want to do it. It's just something on their wish list. And I have those too. Like, I've wanted to be able to do side splits between chairs like Van Van since I was 12 and pretty much every year somewhere on my, like, it would be really awesome if lists, but it would be really awesome if it's kind of like someday when I have time and all the circumstances are perfect type list. I think that's one category. The second category is that people don't understand how valuable those incentives are are in setting the stakes and how effective that can be at driving behavior change. I think it's people are like, what? So and so bets his friend? Or they have a running agreement that so and so will pay his workout partner $5 if he misses a workout. Like, I don't give a damn about $5. That's not going to change my behavior. But in fact, it probably would. They underestimate the psychological mechanisms at play. And as an example, AJ Jacobs, who's writer for Esquire, is a buddy of mine, very good writer, and he's Jewish. But to finally lose weight, he knew what to do. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote a check to the American Nazi party for $1,000 and gave it to one of his friends. And he's like, all right, if I don't lose X number of pounds by Y point in time, I need to mail this into the party. And then I would put his name on record as having donated to the American Nazi Party. He lost the weight. Long story short, though, I think we love to drown ourselves in how to. But the why to is a missing component that is really easy to engineer. Make a betting pool with some friends. You're there. I mean, it doesn't have to be complicated.

Did you stumble upon that strategy or did it seem like hardwired into you as just something that makes logical sense as you grew up and as you began learning things?

It's something that I think I was intrinsically aware of, but really didn't start to think of as technique that could be used very elegantly until I had to think about how to get hundreds of thousands of people to change their diets and to lose weight. It's a very gnarly problem because it's harder for a lot of people who seem to change their diets than to quit smoking. It's really just insane on some level when you look at how difficult it is. And I wanted to make it easier. So I started looking at outliers who had never been able to follow the diet and then suddenly lost £120. I was like, well, what are the triggers? What are the commonalities across these anomalies? And in almost every case, there's some type of social or financial pressure, whether it was a reward or very often some type of loss or punishment. It wasn't enough to be like, if you do this right, you will win this money. It was like, if you do this wrong, you come in second place, you're going to lose the money you put into the pot. You have five people who have a weight loss competition over a quarter. You're not only eligible to win, but there's also potential for loss. I think the stick, as opposed to the carrot, is really undervalued in the US because we like to give everyone a trophy. But in fact, I think we will try a lot harder to avoid losing $100 than we will to make $100.

It makes sense. Well, over in the show notes, by the way, if you're listening in, I'll be sure and put a link to the Nazi party for those of you who are wanting to lose weight fast. So a few other questions about the TV show, Tim. Parkour is something that fascinates a lot of people and we have a lot of active listeners who would love to be able to. To move like that and tackle obstacles like that. What was one of the bigger tips you learned in Parkour? Like, for example, running up a wall is something that I think a lot of people would find a pretty cool skill to be able to do. Is that something you were able to master or did you pick up any other little tips or tricks that lend themselves to being able to be described via audio?

Yeah, absolutely. I think running up a wall is an interesting example, and I did get to practice this a lot, where the physics that you think would propel you up a wall, namely like running up to the wall and then kicking off, but in a straight line upward, don't actually work that well. So you're Trying to redirect forces, you're actually making an impact on the wall. Let's just say your shin is at hypothetically 30 degrees off of the wall as opposed to parallel to it. And then as you pop somewhat directly up using a lift, almost like a reverse glute ham raise or something like that. It's kind of like a reverse hyper. It's like a reverse hyper movement on one leg. You're using that terminal kind of hamstring movement, like kicking one leg back to then elevate your hips so that you can land on top of the wall on your feet as opposed to do on your chest. Right. So with parkour, whether you're doing something called a cat to cat, which is like jumping, kind of like broad jumping, and then landing on a wall where you catch with both hands on top, or the movement that I was trying to tackle, which is very insane but beautiful looking, called the Double Kong, which is obviously unlike a single Kong. Two Kongs in a row. Are you saying Kong Kong, like King Kong?

Okay, double Kong. Interesting.

Double Kong. It is an amazing move. And people can see that on YouTube. They can check out. What I was trying to do in four days was learn to do a double Kong. That's how I tore one of my legs really badly. But you're constantly thinking about whether your hips are highest, shoulders are highest, or otherwise, and the relationship between sort of hip and shoulder elevation in Parkour and also redirecting forces. So how can you take sprinting towards something and change that horizontal movement into a vertical gain? And the Kong is a great example of that. So those are a couple of things that you can take a look at. But parkour was definitely the episode in which I got most injured, for sure.

Interesting. I'll find a video of a double Kong move if anybody wants to see what that looks like and put it in the show notes. How about urban escape? This one looks really cool. I've always wanted to take one of these urban escape and evasion classes because they look fascinating. And you can see, for any of you listening in, you can see if you go and watch the commercial of Tim, I believe, escaping from a zip tie by using a paracord. But in terms of evasion, the evasion component of urban escape, how do you actually lose someone fast when you're out in the streets or in an urban situation?

Yeah. If you're trying to lose fast someone quickly, there are a lot of different techniques can be used. But number one, you have to blend in or become difficult to spot. Part of There are a couple of easy approaches there, right? So if you have a hoodie or something like that, just lose the hoodie so that you change your appearance slightly. Going the wrong way down one way streets as a pedestrian makes it a lot harder for you to be followed by car, as does going through parking structures. If you have a little bit more time to prepare for such a thing, you can acquire other items that are very helpful, like a hard hat and a clipboard, for instance. Anything that can give you that position of invisible authority that people ignore is really effective for getting into just about any location you can imagine.

Are you allowed to do that during the class? Can you go into, say like whatever, a home hardware store and get a hard hat and a clipboard?

I would imagine you're allowed to do it. I mean, in my case, I was being pursued by people in a car, so I actually saw a Greyhound bus dropping passengers off and ran over. Well, I didn't run over to it because it made it too obvious, but I walked over to it briskly walked over to it like I was trying to catch the bus. And then there's a guy getting off the bus. I was like, hey man, he looked like he was pretty hard up for cash. Had a baseball cap. And I was like, I'll give you. Can I give you 20 bucks for your baseball cap? And he's like, sure, absolutely. And so I bought his baseball cap. And I mean, that right there is a very, very easy switch, but it makes it incredibly more difficult for you to track someone just with that simple type of switch of headgear. But even that episode, we covered everything from it. You saw the zip ties and we did handcuffs. We did getting out of duct tape, we did lock picking, getting into cars that you can borrow in quotation marks in case of emergency. Very fun episode to do.

What organization did you go through to do your urban escape innovation course?

I went to. I worked with Kevin Reeve, who is On Point tactical, and there are.

Yeah, there are quite a few, I believe. I subscribed to their blog, the On Point Technology.

Kevin's legit. He's very good with outdoor survival as well. He's one of the nation's best trackers. So the FBI and other law enforcement organizations have used him and his services in the past to try to find missing children and fugitives and so on, which is pretty cool. So he's as comfortable out of doors as he is in the urban jungle now.

You also have an episode in which you are shooting a pistol, a rifle and a fully Automatic something called tactical shooting. And I've heard you remark before that that was one of your favorite things that you did during the TV show shooting. Why was that your favorite?

It was definitely one of my favorites. Surfing with Leonard Hamilton is pretty high up there too. But the tactical shooting was really fun because I was competing against a friend. In this case, I had a friend along for the ride, Kevin Rose, who's always hilarious and very smart and very good at hacking this kind of stuff as well. I enjoy anything that involves marksmanship, so archery shooting, I just really enjoy how subtle it is and how the little things make a huge difference. So if you're holding a handgun incorrectly with a, a short barrel like that, as soon as you teach someone how to hold a handgun correctly, they go from grouping, that is how close their shots are together, it's the size of a wall to grouping, that is a dinner plate. And then you make one small tweak on top of that and then suddenly they have groupings within 3 inch circle. And you can make progress very quickly by minding the details. And I get very excited about anything that allows me to do that. Where you can make quantum jumps with tiny improvements and changes. And then there is just the Jason Bourne like aspect, the swapping between handguns, assault rifles and shotguns as you run through a course as quickly as possible, shooting targets at different distances. And there's something very gratifying about shooting metal targets also, as opposed to paper targets where you're shooting stainless steel. So you hear the ding, ding, ding of hitting the target. Gratifying. Yeah, it's super, super fun.

Have you caught much flack from the anti gun movement?

You know, I mean, some people get their knickers in a twist about it, other people find it interesting. And my point is, I'm not. This is not a political statement that I'm making. I'm treating it as a sport just like as you would treat the biathlon, say in the Olympics. So there have been some people who get their feathers ruffled, but that's fine. I think that. All right, on the Internet, 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. So you just have to expect that in advance so you don't change how you approach things.

Well, I'll use as the featured image of this post, for any of you who want to go check it out, a photo of Tim posing next to the targets with what appears to be a machine gun. It was a very cool episode. I recommend that folks check it out. So, Tim, I've got one Last question for you. Kind of coming full circle. The last couple times you were on the show, you actually were doing cold showers and cold thermogenesis. And I'm asking this because I started doing this like, whatever three years ago around the time that I first had you on the show. And it's been hard for me to actually stop. It's like I have this habit now of just taking a cold shower every day and kind of exposing myself to something cold every week. Are you still doing much of that, like experimentation with temperature manipulation?

I am, yeah. The cold is really addictive because it's such an incredible mood elevator, among other things. I still do cold exposure. Just swimming in the ocean here, not so Long New York, which is probably 52 degrees or so, something like that at this time of year. But I've also been playing around a lot with heat, heat acclimation and trying to trigger heat shock proteins and things like that. Dr. Rhonda Patrick was the person who turned me on to looking at that in a methodical way as a means of, say, increasing growth hormone and so on. Over the last few months, I've been doing a lot of not only heat exposure through dry sauna and steam rooms, but doing contrast therapy where I will go. Actually did this in my last podcast where I interviewed Rick Rubin. Going from sauna or steam room to ice bath back and forth is something that I've been experimenting with.

That's amazing. Quite a lot. That's Wednesday morning for me. I've got a giant cold swimming pool outside in my backyard next to a hot tub. And going back. Well, my strategy is eight minutes of swimming in the cold and then I'll go two minutes into the hot tub and do breath holds in the hot tub and then go back into the pool. And three times through is about a 30 minute routine. And you feel amazing afterwards.

Oh, you feel incredible. Like all your worries just melt away. And I think that there are very inexpensive ways to do it too. I mean, you could use a lot of crossfitters, will use a garbage can and getting the ice is a hassle. If you live in a city that Instacart operates in, you can use an app to order ice. That's the only thing I use Instacart for, is buying bags of ice. And then you have that. You can pair it with a hot shower if need be. It doesn't have to be super expensive, but I am still definitely very keen on playing with temperature and I'll be doing more of that as well.

So folks, if you learn anything from this episode, it's that Tim Ferriss approves of you basically sitting in a garbage can. You could probably set one up in your front driveway full of cold water to enhance your biology. And he's still doing it. So all of the resources, I took a lot of notes on everything from siltep to yerba mate to the double Kong parkour move to the Tim Ferriss Experiment TV show on iTunes and you can check all that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tim Tim and Tim, thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, my pleasure, man. And if I could just leave one more suggestion for people also if they want to see the, you know, the books, the podcast, the TV show all in one place, you can also check it out@itunes.com Tim Ferriss they put all of my various tentacles in one location for convenience sake. But yeah, definitely. Also in your notes, people should check out the double prompt. It's an insane move. Nice.

Okay. Itunes.com Tim Ferriss this is Ben Greenfield and Tim Ferriss signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy day.

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