OUTLIVE book: A behind-the-scenes look into the writing of this book, motivation, main themes, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you wanna take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you wanna learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. As many of you may know by now, after more than six years of planning and background research, writing, editing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, my first book, Outlive, The Science and Art of Longevity is out on March 28th.
And so for today's episode of The Drive, I'm joined by my co-author, Bill Gifford, to answer a lot of questions that you guys have posed over the past few months on the book. This conversation is really a discussion around the book and the behind the scenes look at the past six years that it took us to write this book leading to where we are today. It includes a lot of details around process that I haven't really spoken about elsewhere and also about really frankly why it took so long.
My hope is that for those of you that end up buying the book and reading it, this discussion today will prove useful. It will provide a lot of the background and hopefully explain why we wrote about what we did and perhaps even why we omitted certain things. Before we get to the episode, as cheesy as this probably sounds, I do wanna thank everyone who's listening for all your support. And I think that without you, there wouldn't be a podcast that's just the truth of it. And frankly, without a podcast, this book wouldn't be half as good as I believe it is. As I note in the acknowledgement section of the book, the best part of the podcast is having this forcing function to learn. I'm forced to prepare in great depth to interview someone or to be basically interviewed in response to the AMAs. And in doing that, I'm generating knowledge that I'm able to translate into this book. And so I really mean it when I say this, if there weren't podcast listeners, there wouldn't be a podcast. And if there wasn't a podcast, there either wouldn't be a book or there would be a book, and it would be a fraction of the book that I believe this has turned out to be. And so without further delay, here's this week's special Outlive episode of The Drive.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:58)
Here, Bill, how are you guys doing?

**Peter Attia** (3:00)
Doing all right.

**Bill Gifford** (3:01)
Doing good.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:02)
This is the first time we've ever done three people in person, so we'll see how it goes.
It should be fun. And I think what we're here to talk about is the book. So by the time this comes out, the book will be out, which is still kind of crazy to think about, more so for probably both of you who have been much more involved in the process. But I think what we did is we collected a ton of questions from the audience on wanting to understand the process of the book, who Bill is, what the cover means, what's talked about, all of that stuff. And so we collected those questions. We're going to cover them today and it should be kind of a fun way to learn more about the book, what's involved, kind of that inside baseball story about it. So with all that said, I think the first thing we should start with is Peter, how's the voice doing?

**Peter Attia** (3:53)
I would say it is like 80% of the way back to normal.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:57)
Do you want to tell people who are maybe unfamiliar how the book tried to kill you through your voice?

**Peter Attia** (4:02)
I think the book has tried to kill us in many ways, but I think most recently between reading the book for the audio book and then getting some virus and then having a hectic travel schedule to try to do some podcasts, I basically just developed the worst case of laryngitis and had a pharyngeal abscess that caused my vocal cords to stop working.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:26)
Oh yeah, which in your profession you kind of need. So it's good that they made their way back.