[REPLAY] Peter Attia, M.D. - How to Live a Longer, Higher Quality Life

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:47)
In 2010, I got fat. Because I am a research junkie at heart, I started investigating ways to lose weight. If you, like me, like to do deep research, you know the thrill of finding ideas and people who have arrived at unique or contrarian solutions to common problems. This episode is not about weight loss, but I mention it because it was by finding and devouring the work of this week's guest, Peter Attia MD, that I reframe the way I think about health, period. Now usually I would describe someone's career chronologically. Instead, what I'll say about Peter is that he is obsessed with mastery, a topic which we will discuss in detail. He has applied his pursuit of mastery to the fields of medicine, surgery, performance athletics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, racing, swimming and many other areas. Peter's mission and the topic of our conversation is to understand and improve our lifespan and what he calls our healthspan. Healthspan which is a proxy for quality of life is where we spend a lot of our time during our conversation, specifically in the areas of mind, body, spirit and performance.
We discuss what we can learn from studying centenarians, the problem of progress in science, a drug called Rapamycin which Peter thinks may be revolutionary, eating, the importance of muscle mass, the idea of distress tolerance and the many similarities between health and investing.
I went into this conversation hoping to emerge with a framework for thinking about health and well-being that I could share with you. Peter delivers in spades. I'm going to re-listen to this one several times to pull out ideas which I can put into practice. I hope you get as much out of this talk as I did. Please enjoy this awesome conversation with Peter Attia. Oh, and one more thing. Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode which you can find at investorfieldguide.com forward slash Attia, A-T-T-I-A. I've included several links to great thought provoking videos and articles on the topics we cover. Okay, off we go.
I'd love to start with this idea of wealth.
I start with wealth instead of health because I think that obviously health is going to be an important precursor for happiness and wealth. But I'd love to hear first if you had to define the very concept of wealth, how you would do it and maybe a bit about how the answer to that question might have evolved for you in the course of your career.

**Peter Attia** (3:09)
It's actually kind of funny you asked this question. It makes me feel like you've been listening in on my private conversations over the past month because I thought about this quite a bit.
I was having a discussion with a close friend a week ago and I said, I have the interesting distinction of every time I've been at a fork in the road in my life where I had to choose between a financial opportunity that had bigger upside and then another opportunity that had more bliss. I always went down the path of bliss and unfortunately, those things are mutually exclusive, of course, but in the situations I was always faced with, it was do X or do Y, X will have bigger payoff, Y will probably be more blissful. I just always followed the bliss, bliss, bliss. Because of the compounding nature of things at the end of 20 years, you look back and you go, gosh, there's a lot less money in the bank than would have if I had done such and such. Then I had this epiphany, which I actually ended up tweeting, I think I sent out a tweet about it, which might even be, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe you saw that tweet, maybe that's what made you think this, which was, what if you totally changed the way you defined wealth and didn't define it by anything that had to do with money or success or even satisfaction, but simply defined it by the number of great people in your life? I thought of this metric and I was like, well, we use this term, like I'd take a bullet for that person, but what does that really mean? I thought, in practical terms that I understand, it might be, would you donate a kidney to somebody? Because I've been, I used to do those operations and I know what it's like to take a.