#1961 - Peter Attia

**Joe Rogan** (0:20)
And my buddy Brigham actually bought it for me when I moved here. And I was like, wow, what a cool sign. Wouldn't that be nice if it was in the studio behind me? And so, it wasn't on purpose. It wasn't by design at all, and so once he did it. But the UFO was his idea. Yeah, it was before we even decided to call it the mothership. But I'm easy to figure out. I mean, I got a fucking Bob Lazar UFO on the desk. I got fucking stars on the ceilings. I have an alien head in the sky. Yeah, I'm a dork. It's easy to, I mean, it's not like, wow, how do you know you like UFOs?
I'm fucking obsessed. I'm absolutely obsessed. I think it's the only thing that's going to save us.
So Outlive, The Science & Art of Longevity. This is a big one, buddy.
There's a lot of information in this.

**Peter Attia** (1:13)
Not a lot of pictures.

**Joe Rogan** (1:14)
No pictures?

**Peter Attia** (1:15)
No, there's some.

**Joe Rogan** (1:16)
I need pictures.

**Peter Attia** (1:16)
There's some, there's some.

**Joe Rogan** (1:19)
No, it's, is it out now?

**Peter Attia** (1:22)
Out today.

**Joe Rogan** (1:23)
Today, beautiful. How long did it take you to write this?

**Peter Attia** (1:25)
Six years.

**Joe Rogan** (1:26)
Wow, six years. And I know that's like six years of actual work, too.

**Peter Attia** (1:33)
Yeah, I mean, I rewrote it twice. So there's kind of version one, version two, this is version three.

**Joe Rogan** (1:37)
What did you change?

**Peter Attia** (1:39)
So the first version got basically thrown out by the publisher because they said, this is way too technical. There's no narrative, there's no story. It's being written to just a very tiny sliver of the world. Basically, it's like the book you would write to scientists or maybe physicians. So then there was kind of version two.
So that version is completely gone. I don't think there's anything from that that made it into version two. Version two was the skeleton of this book, but it was about 50% longer. I mean, it was a massive book.
And that's the kind of version that I'd say was circa 2020
And this version is just basically better because it's shorter. A lot of stuff got taken out of it that I think was not absolutely necessary.
And I just sharpened my thinking. I mean, I think that's what writing is. I think writing just makes you ask the question, like, is this necessary? And does this help the reader understand something? And if not, get it out. So the expression is kill your babies. You've got to be able to read something that you've worked really hard on and put a ton of time into and say, I gotta nuke it.

**Joe Rogan** (2:49)
Yeah, I think that's with everything.

**Peter Attia** (2:52)
Yeah, totally.

**Joe Rogan** (2:52)
It's fiction, with comedy, with it. I'm sure it's that way with music. You just, there's a certain point in time you have to edit things and get...
With comedians, it's a real issue, because some comedians like certain parts of a bit. I'm like, well, that bit fucks your bit up. I know it gets like a little bit of a laugh, but it fucks it up because of this. Like, yeah, I kinda like doing that. I'm like, listen, don't look at it like it's yours.
Look at it like if you were outside of you. Like, I edit the shit out of my stuff. If you look at it like it's outside of you, like how would you approach that?
But that's very hard to do because if you write something, I mean, six years, right? Three different versions. Just a lot of you invested in this book. So it's like, it's very difficult to just like chop stuff up and you know, and just fucking throw it away all the time and all the thinking and.

**Peter Attia** (3:46)
And there was a whole appendix that never made it in. So one of the things I wanted to do was pick like the 20 most important drugs, hormones, supplements that I think are relevant and write just quote unquote, 10 pages on each.
And I didn't go into it thinking it would be 10 pages. I thought I'm just going to write the essentials on these 10 things, you know, kind of rapamycin, metformin, you know, nicotinamide riboside, you know, those sorts of things. But then it turned out I was taking me like, you know, eight to 10 pages per, and the publisher's like, yeah, there's no way you can have a 200 page appendix on a 450 page book. So like all of that work, gone, just scrapped.