Meet the Stanford Surgeon Turned Podcaster — Peter Attia

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 AA the author of outlive which right now is one of the bestselling non-fiction 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 n months until somebody came into his life and said hey 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

this one's good it's with petera 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 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 maybe maybe showed up in different formats but it was a a dream of um you know being on the street kind of 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 not super high um and then there's a a guy up there and he's dropping eggs off the balcony and I'm in my scrubs because 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 the dream was one of not being able to kind of catch all of these eggs 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 it 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 and when you're being asked to save people you're being asked to save them on a at at the final instance right like and and 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 spot botting them as they're in the air but what would ultimately be described and 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 guy let me read this the reason why it goes back to my dream about the falling eggs in short it had finally dawned on me that the only way to solve the problem was not to get better at catching the eggs instead we needed to try to stop the guy who was throwing them we had to figure out how to get to the top of the building find the guy and take him out 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 22 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 the book is filled with stories right not because stories are data and the book has 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 um 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

um 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 secondy year medical student I believe uh yeah it's early in my second year um and it is very profound I would say that if you ask any doctor out there I would bet that almost without EX C 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 describe 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 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 it certainly wasn't my it wasn't my my intuition to write that way but I think uh bill gford 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 you 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 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 um 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 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 um and you know there's a reason we don't write books that way uh you know even even the newsletter that 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 um a paper would be um 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 sunu

quote that that basically underpins that and I saw that and I instantly said this guy's background Maybe is a scientist or in some other place maybe McKenzie 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 that each chapter begins with a quote but I think the sunzo quote is 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 sunzu quote that I wanted to include but we just decided that uh we had to limit it to just one yeah I I think that I think Frameworks are really important so so I 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 um but then with each within the chapters right you have the the the Frameworks in nutrition right CR trdr the Frameworks of exercise stability strength aerobic base like the the more you can make Frameworks the easier it is to both be complete uh and be exhaustive and and and and sort of you know 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 I wish I could say it

was that deliberate so first of all the most the the best substrate for these ideas honestly just comes out of talking to patients right so I think what you're 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 preo because now our practice is virtual actually have less of this experience but preco not only was I seeing patient 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 I'm very much a person who draws when he talks and so most of I think these ideas have have come from from that right like literally

you know the Four Horseman actually started out as four pillars right it was and then it was like actually it's three pillars and a found Foundation because metabolic disease sort of speaks to all of them um 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 too you could go USA Today you could go technical writing like why did you settle in this medium I'm sure they're just just this constant series of trade-offs and how do 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 and maybe more with the Wall Street Journal the New York Times the Atlantic

um but but but one that anybody could read truthfully right like if you're 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 but that's honestly more a function of the fact that we're writing about medicine and science then we're trying to keep it super high brow um the biggest challenge was honestly how technical some of the medicine stuff is um you 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 brain stem 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 extracoporeal support for the liver extracoporeal means outside of the body support So extra extracoporeal support of the kidneys as dialysis Etc and bill was like there's no goddamn way we're using the word extra you 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 extraoral 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 extracoporeal and they're

like 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 of course there were certain chapters like the I mean God the heart disease chapter cancer chapter I mean it it was really a struggle and I don't know if we got it right but it was a 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 um that you just lose people in fact I think in the just before the introduction I think I I I may I take a look yeah please yeah I 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 cost 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 it's 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 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 some 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 their co-author was basically a ghost writer 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 ghost writer 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 de deeply would 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 Str structural differences the order of where things went in the story that that can certainly matter I think the biggest probably source of friction and I don't say friction in an unhealthy way I say healthy in a healthy way the greatest source of friction between me and Bill was always on how deep to go H right so I think 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 was n 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 because I still don't get it okay here you know what I mean so it was it turned out to be a very U healthy sort of iron sharpening iron approach and um there was never a moment like you know I'm sure anyone who's married can relate to the fact that a lot of 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 but we just never really did that right there was never and so that 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 in person meetings how did that work uh 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 Northstar that you're pointing at I'm not sure I have a clear answer to that what I can tell you is there were comp eating 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 non-fiction

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 non-fiction or is it self self-help non-fiction 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 a Tuesday and then you don't hear for 8 days until your list 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 non-fiction 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 I I wanted to be able to sort of simultaneously do a few things um 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 health span so you you have to you have to go kind of deep into heart disease cancer dementia Frailty to understand because 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 Lo 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 and you're clearly very conscious of making them concrete I'll give you an example so what is the the section the centenarian centenarian de cathlon to cathlon 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 lbs something like that and you're like cool but that's just a number 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 I think uh that probably

comes from just how we interact with patients because that cerian de cathlon 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 um 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 okay well how are you gon to train like a 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 the 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 um familiar with how to make those things tangible to people so um and and and again some of those goals that people will have in their centinary and de cathlon are just you know what 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 being able to play golf right 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 of this book the

science is going to change things will be different you might even change your mind on certain things undoubtedly 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 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 an essential goal for the book right so so you know when I when we were getting ready to publish the book I I had sort of um you know a 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 that was and 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 to be relevant in a decade and it won't be relevant by

tactics to your point tactics are constantly evolving so it 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 uh 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 decade um when we understand what health span is about and we understand what threatens Health span we understand the role of backcasting and reverse engineering from the centinary into cathlon again techniques will we better be smarter in 10 years if not we 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 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 cuz there's some painful things that you talk about yeah so the the last chapter of the book um my writing of that was actually just um that that chapter had a different process than all the other chapters so there's 16 chapters before it where I would write a section send a section to bill you know he would 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 the chapter 17 that

made it into the book is you know maybe 20% of what I wrote um but I but the point is I just sort of wrote that in you know and and it's 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 um The Challenge there and and where I think you know bill was especially helpful was in helping me step back from the blowby 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 a 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 slow down time and then we're going to skip over a lot of time a lot

of writing and stories it's 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 you know that was the hardest stuff to write because not 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 and all of these other things so I think the the writing part was easy because it was just in many ways there 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 hm 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 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 McKenzie I see what's happening at Mackenzie they're taking risks 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 it had been 10 years and so in some ways I actually felt a little disappointed that I had quote unquote wasted 10 years I was sort of like what I what I'm about to go and embark on now at McKenzie 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 Kenzie in Risk so I really spent the next few years thinking 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 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 um and I had to come back in a way that was very different from the path I would have taken had I stayed um

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 uh 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 I didn't you didn't no you you 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 this 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 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 so it it it wouldn't have been something that made sense through that lens that said I still I I am so grateful that that I did this despite the the the challenge of doing it and 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 and even if you did which episode would you send them like like just here I've curated it down to the 42 episodes that capture 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 U 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 as you know when when 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 so when the publisher bought this book in 2016 um the in-house editor who bought it within 3 months was out of that

publisher and had taken a job at another publisher so I think she took a 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 it 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 um and I remember I was in Norway because I was filming that Limitless special that ended up going that Disney special with Crim 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 a 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 going to 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 um 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 um and so she did and um and prior to that by the way my agent had already kind of ditched me um 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 oh man and I'm like I don't know I just felt like completely abandoned 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 after all this time has passed what his thoughts were my guess is it was a bit of a mixture I would I would I would believe that part of bill was a little disappointed because he 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're 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 um now a few years earlier I think two years earlier but maybe it was just one year Michael had written a book um 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 audio book he read the intro and I think the epilog 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 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 um I just I just mentioned that yeah I I had I had been working on a book and had kind of shelf 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 but uh 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 um 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 hope you're doing well buddy it's been a year um do you happen to still have what we wrote like literally at that point for all I knew it could have been dead it a Google doc it was but it was like I didn't know where the I 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 dock or is it because Bill and I had a different dock for each chapter I think okay 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 no it's a dumpster fire and I was like all right can you send me one integrated doc he's goes sure so he sent he sent it to me I sent it to Michael with the big caveat that this is like this is 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 um and I saidwell 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 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 um I mean I took my lifeless hands off of it uh in December of 22 because that's when I read the audio book so 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 right 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 2p 3p like in terms of the edits so yeah so once you're in like a hard once you're in a PDF editing becomes very diff difficult it's types set now so they go through what's called 1p 2p and then 3p is the final edit at 3 the most you can do is change a comma or a period or you know something like that right I took

the 3p edits into the audio that's what I was reading and then you changed St from there and then I just went nuts and I mean they were losing their minds and some of the edits had to be done they were actual mistakes that just the copy editor has hadn't caught yeah but some of them were like when you read this out loud you realize it just do that sentence is ridiculous like that's way too long a sentence yeah and what was the thing that Sam Harr told yeah it's exactly right Sam said you you are not editing a book until you are reading it out loud you 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

I don't want to be away from my kids I don't want to be away from my family I want to be away from my routine like I'm I'm actually fortunately able to focus when I'm sitting at my desk so I just need to not be bothered by email calls

other things like that but if I have to sit and 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 the clarity around how I think about nutrition now is I 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 Gallery I think the most common negative comment people will talk about is 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's 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 patently untrue um but what people are probably reacting to is 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 Whole 30 that sort of stuff so if

you 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 there's 5,000 different variations of that but every person is going to tell you that 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 lowfat you got to be Mediterranean you got 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 uh sort of uh anod way to talk about this and and 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 EMP 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 um so so exercise is is is both of those right if you're failing to exercise there's a ton of downside 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 and and the way I sort of think about nutrition is um the 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 H 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 but 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 yeah 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 emphasize the downsides and it seems like there was a some trepidation some fear early on in writing about the book seems like there's something something in the Confluence of those things yeah look I I mean writing a book is really scary right I think doing anything for from the standpoint of putting anything out into the public is scary um I I think most people if they're being brutally honest uh you know are afraid of of I put myself in this category of course but you just you're of 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 um 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 I think think anytime we put ourselves out there and I would imagine that anybody feels this way whether you're a singer a musician uh an actor an an author I mean whatever it is that

you do if you're doing it in the public domain you're you're just sort of opening yourself up for criticism which is it's 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 highend 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 8020 I'm focused on the 2080 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 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 I'm kind of realistic and realiz 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 I 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 um 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 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 um I 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 I'm a better writer today than I was in my 20s but in my 20s I was far better at math um and not just math but the abstract nature of thinking about math and thinking of complex ideas and being able to prove something mathematically um but but I do think that like if someone said to me you know what are the three most important

things that 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 if you can't structure your thoughts um and I think that's also true in in in in sort of doing complicated mathematics you you do need to be able to kind of keep keep you know simultaneously hold multiple thoughts together um 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 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 hyperlink inside the book and if you change something on page 19 that could actually impact something on page 274 yeah and and I know that there are some people whose writing process allows them to do everything with diagrams um and while I did a lot of diagrams I I I didn't go that far right like I didn't have the hyperlink diagram that showed every single a across the board um I don't know that I could have truthfully like I think a lot of these things kind of come together at the end uh writing a book is a very nonlinear process in terms of uh so so so if if this is like time and this is product it doesn't look like this it doesn't look like this it looks like this huh right and and and so you can be 80% of the way through in time you're not at close to 80% in terms of pro 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 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 um 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 and honestly like that was probably 80% of the interaction was we got to cut this out got to cut this out we 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 and that's why I believe that the majority of the benefit is coming in the final 10 or 20% of the 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 that frame I 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 yeah um 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 really ton down a lot of the science so that we could refer back to these principles but without being so deliberate and explicit um and then a lot of the sort of practical 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 and they've read the book they they actually have a road map 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 being a chapter 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 100 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 no 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 metal lesson that I'm taking is that ain't true I agree I mean I I I even by the time I was reading the audio book so this is now December of 20122 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 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 MH um 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 yeah what matters in a conclusion yeah you know I 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 H not think do right I think if you're if you're if you're delivering a talk if you're writing a book

non-fiction there should be some sort of a call to action um and and obviously there are cases where this is you know not you know if you're if you're if you're reading a historical account of Lincoln maybe maybe it's just what do I want you to think right 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 month months and one year and 5 years after you've read this book MH 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 um 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 and 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 um and

I basically throw it out there as as if to say like look for me this was the hardest one to address 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 um 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 the length

of life doesn't matter and if you focus on the quality of your life you will get length associated with it um and again I I think that those those two things which are very related but not the same um 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 say I 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 health span but I know realize people don't know what a DOT product is so that's kind of a dumb thing to say then you have to explain what a DOT product is and the difference

between orthogonal vectors and you know colinear vectors so so I was like um 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 um 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 it's a little awkward to say it but the science and art of longevity both acknowledges that there is an empirical art art form to this but it's it 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 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 is this analogy being taken out

like I really believe s 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' 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 right that's not at all what it means right stability is is a is a description of the internal characteristics of an object that allows for Force transmission to move without leaking right so a race car is clearly not it's very stable but it's moving right 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 seat

between the engine the chassis and the tires um but yes that was a really hard chapter to write um 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 in the end for the purpose of Simplicity we just brought it down to a handful of stories talked about Beth um and and so therefore while far less complete I think it's it's more digestible when you talk about finding the essence of something does it come back to a oneliner does it come back to a three-part framework does it come back to a diagram like what is that central idea that is sort of a almost like a the essence of what you're going to say you're looking I think I think it varies by topic truthfully I don't I don't think I have a clear answer for it is always X right

um I mean one thing that it always needs to be is at a minute you need to be able to explain it to somebody over dinner huh like I I think I think you haven't and and and and notice I say over dinner and not not 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 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 um if you have a dinner you you actually should be able to explain mostly anything um you know you can explain quantum physics over dinner now do you understand it well enough to you know read a Nobel laurates dissertation on it no but you can you you know you could get somebody pretty far um and and similarly I think you know that to me is I 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 the just the references are 38 Pages yeah it's brutal I couldn't believe it so um I I can't take any credit for that so Bob Kaplan who at the time was my head of research um 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

that the publisher didn't have a fact Checker and I was like what are you talking about I thought you guys were 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 I'm trying to think we ended up using another one of my analysts who had never worked on anything in the book cuz 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 and by the way factchecking is two things factchecking 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 mhm so there was a really long process to get that right

well also one thing I notice 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 create created some 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 is a very strong word because it implies deliberate um uh you know doing something that is deliberately incorrect that does OCC but it's far less common inacurate yeah the far more common uh problem 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 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 um 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 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 factchecking 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 um there's a study I think it's like circa 2014 uh it was in the journal science and it I remember the figure and it had this in it can you go get it mhm 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 a person's going to read this book and they're going to make a change if you can have mirrored that in some way um you're probably going to make it easier for them to do the same um and and again I so I think that that's that's probably why it it felt like hey this is you know even though you don't really want to maybe necessarily be as 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 as possible that's the most important step I believed I was the most horrible incorrigible miserable son of a that was ever shat to civilization for as long as I could remember I believe 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 I'm going to show you two things first this equation second a dart and a peach a dart and a peach which one's more memorable well the reason I'm showing you this is because in the next few minutes I want to show you how to bring

numbers to life in your writing and to do that I'm going to read you a quote from a book that I love called Rocket Men by Robert kerson and it goes like this craft and his men wanted Apollo 8 to fly just 69 Mi above the lunar surface the same altitude at which the command and service modules would operate during a future Landing mission that required almost unimaginable Precision equivalent in scale to throwing a dart at a peach from a distance of 28 ft and grazing the very top of the fuzz without touching the fruit skin now I don't know about you but that paragraph buzzes for me it is filled with life why instead of relying on

numbers to illustrate scale kerson used a visual analogy I was a struck when I read it and I want to show you why it works everybody can visualize the dart everyone can visualize the Peach from a distance of 28 ft would it be like to graze the very top of the fuzz without touching the fruit skin and you'll notice that kerson is writing for a general audience here that that's why he chose this Peach and dart analogy because it doesn't require an astrophysics degree to understand but check this out we have the setup and we have the analogy and here's the setup it's all gray it's not quite as interesting and right in the middle he basically has the break and the Divide but the setup is really important because the setup is doing a lot of the manual labor for the life that the analogy brings later on and I want to show you how connections are being built here so check this out so we have a poate up here and that equals the dart

in the analogy below these two are connected and then we have the lunar surface right here and that is equal to the peach but a visual and easy to understand analogy isn't enough this analogy is distinctive too that's why it's so alive and because you can so clearly see the dart just barely touching the fuzz you can instantly appreciate the difficulty of what what these astronauts were trying to accomplish come to think of it this room from here to the wall something like 15t I don't even think that I could throw the dart and hit the Peach from that far away it kind of reminds me of how one of my teachers as a kid they wanted us to appreciate the scale of space so instead of giving us a bunch of equations like this a bunch of numbers they took us to the black top where we used to play kickball and every kid was separated at the scale of the solar system so one kid was the sun who might have been 5T away

from Mercury another was Saturn and then no one wanted to be Uranus they did this so that we could see the scale of space instead of learning it through numbers now they could have gotten us to memorize the numbers but we all would have forgotten them after the first test but even today I can still remember what it was like to yell over be like yo Jupiter what up so what does all this mean for your writing well there's a saying in the world of publishing that every formula that you have every one of these they cut the number of Book Sales in half true not I don't know but even if people mean it tongue and cheek there's definitely some truth to it I'd rather read an analogy like the Robert kerson one that he wrote about darts and peaches then see a mathematical formula about it no question give me darts and peaches every day so whenever you're writing whenever you're trying to show scale whenever you're trying to bring

big numbers to life make the details concrete help the reader see what you're saying ask what's my Dart what's my peach bring it into human proportions with some kind of analogy that takes the abstract and makes it concrete okay hope you enjoyed that well I got no peaches I got no darts and I definitely have no equations but I do publish one of these writing examples every week on writing examples.com and if you go to the top of the page you enter your email all just send you the latest one whenever it goes live