Dr. Peter Attia On The Philosophy and Quality Of Life (Part 1)

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2:03Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:53Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is someone who I've been all over the world. I've met a lot of really interesting, important, powerful, elite performers and leaders over the years. There's sort of a zealot-like figure who's connected to all of them. That's because he is himself one of the best in the world at something that those folks are often quite interested in and certainly have the financial wherewithal to pursue. I'm talking about today's guest, Dr. Peter Atiyah, who, in addition to just being an expert on the science of longevity, his practice works with, you know, I've met princes in Abu Dhabi.

3:43I've met elected officials. I've met professional athletes. I've met billionaires. I've met a number of people who are clients, fans, followers of this guy's work. And I got first connected to Dr. Atiyah through a mutual friend, Tim Ferriss. Peter wanted to have me on the podcast. This was several years ago. And we sat down, we spent like two plus hours when he was in Austin talking about stoicism. He was clearly a fan of my stuff. And we became friends. And then he moved here during the pandemic. And we've gotten to know each other. So this is a long time coming. Peter has been out to the studio before, but we recorded this one remotely because he's got a cool studio.

4:30We've both been really busy. And I just, I really wanted to do this interview. His books come out recently and just absolutely crushed. Outlive the Science and Art of Longevity is a massive bestseller for very good reason. I saw Oprah was raving about it among many other people. I think you got to check him out. He's just a great dude. I'm sure you're familiar with some of his stuff. Maybe you've seen podcast clips over the years or you listen to his podcast, which is awesome. He's got a medical degree from Stanford. He spent five years at John Hopkins, been on the cutting edge of all sorts of scientific and medical breakthroughs for many, many years now, and is just a thoughtful dude.

5:10And I think you're really going to like this interview. It's not going to be about medical stuff. It's not even going to really be about longevity so much, but it's going to be about philosophy and quality of life, which I'm much more excited about. And he spends a good chunk of the last part of the book about. So that's where I go in this interview. Thanks to Dr. Peter Atiyah for coming out. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. You can follow him at Peter Atiyah, MD on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Check out his podcast as well. I'll link to that in today's show notes and check out the new book, Outlive the Science and Art of Longevity.

5:53So my routine is usually archery first thing in the morning, or not first thing, but like that's my first after the kids are in school thing and then work out and then work all day and then rock and then dinner. How are you with, I'm struggling with this lately. Like, obviously I'm very routine focused, especially when I'm working on a book. When I'm not working on a book, I'm a little bit more flexible, but I have found that the routine can almost kind of ossify not into a superstition but it ossifies into like a security blanket that if you don't do it because you can't or whatever it almost causes more distress than than it's supposedly helping you with day to day yeah so for me um there's a lot of rigidity around the workout like the morning workout those never get missed it doesn't matter like that that those don't get miss.

6:50There's no exception to that rule. I mean, within reason, but the rock I'm quite flexible around, right. It's like, look, I want to do it three or four times a week. And if it doesn't happen on a given day, cause we have company or the kids have some change in schedule, I don't, I don't feel rigidity around that. Yeah. Like I try to do the walks in the morning. I like that instead of getting sort of sucked into the phone and I like to get outside and I have found that as my kids have gotten older, the insisting on the walk can be maladaptive as opposed to adaptive. You know, when I could put them in a stroller or carry them in a backpack or whatever, you know, it was this sort of family thing.

7:35And now it's like, you know, do I, what piece am I getting from going the walk versus what dissension am I sowing by getting in a huge argument about having the walk. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, luckily for me, I don't consider the Ruck a workout, even though it obviously is a lot of exercise. So maybe I don't have the same attachment to it that I might place on exercise. And I view it purely as a mental health exercise. Yes. I find that with a lot of, it's weird. I actually think of the exercise that I do also as not exercise. Like when I try to run every day, I started biking more just to sort of give my legs a bit of a rest and then I swim when I can.

8:18But I am almost totally indifferent to whatever physical benefits come from that activity. Yeah. I mean, I would agree with that. I mean, I almost say that even if exercise shortened my life by a couple of years, I would still do it just as much because of the local immediate benefit. But I think when I'm exercising, I do tend to focus on what I'm doing. Right. Whereas when I'm rocking the design for me, by definition, you know, it's the only time of the day when I don't have my phone, for example, which is a very deliberate choice. Cause you would say that's an hour that I could be listening to a podcast or an audio book, which is a very productive thing to do.

9:03But I like the forcing function of you, we're going to take that away so that you really have to focus on, you know, depending on the, sometimes it's just, I think I really, you know, you know, noodle on a problem I'm struggling with, or sometimes I'm focusing on a sensation, you know, I like, um, there are lots of objects of mindfulness that you can also draw into it. I actually, I do find the, I try to do my running in the afternoon for that reason, which is, you know, I work very hard all day on whatever problems I'm trying to solve, whatever creative thing I'm trying to do. And then I find, you know, you hit some point of diminishing returns, you stop.

9:46And then when you do a sort of a repetitive, long duration exercise, walk, whatever, your mind gets back to work on that problem and you find yourself unlocking things or coming up with insights about things that really, I tend to come home, write down, and then that starts the loop for tomorrow. I'm basically creating my to-do list creatively or generating the material I'm going to process the following day in this sort of transitionary exercise mindfulness state that I get from the walk or the run or the bike ride or the swim. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that makes a ton of sense. And you said something to me that stuck with me.

10:35I think you got this from the comfort crisis, But there was something you were telling me about lines, that you liked the lines of the walking, the lack of straight lines. Walk me through that. Yeah, I mean, I think I was actually talking about this with a patient yesterday. I don't know how it came up, but I was perhaps trying to relay to the patient why I think it's important to be outside. And I said, if you just consider it through an evolutionary lens, you know, it's a really, really recent phenomenon that we would be around so much symmetry. And you could almost argue it's another form of comfort.

11:20So obviously being inside and having climate control and all of these things, I don't think anybody is suggesting we undo that, right? Like the world is an infinitely better place with that. But we do need to at least acknowledge that natural selection had no time to prepare us for that. And similarly, right angles and perfect symmetry and a largely absent set of fractal geometry is also a relatively recent phenomenon. on. And I think there's at least plausibility that we benefit from being in the asymmetric nature without perfectly straight lines and right angles, at least sometime in the day.

12:00And so to me, that's kind of part of the perk of being outside is just walking around. I mean, I just came back from a week long hunting trip. So that's been highly, highly amplified where all you're doing is being outside and you it's one of the most boring things in the world frankly at times like you know you're like there was a day when I was literally watching one elk for 10 and a half hours um and there's nothing else you can do I mean you don't even have cell phone reception so even if you wanted to do something else you couldn't um so yeah I just think I think that's just yet another layer to the kind of taking us back to part of the stuff that we did in the past, which isn't always a great thing.

12:47There are lots of things about the past that were just unilaterally miserable. But I do think a lot of what Michael Easter talks about in the comfort crisis really resonates. Well, there's a difference between being present in the sort of Zen Buddhist sense where you're just sort of, there's nothing. And that can be a really great hard reset. And then there's something about walking or hunting or exercise where you're present, but you're also looking and seeing in a way that you're not normally seeing. It's fossil week at my son's school. And so they asked us to bring it. They said, does anyone have any fossils?

13:27And then we were like, boy, do we have fossils? Because we live on this sort of dirt road out in the country. And you walk on the road and from how the cars drive or from a storm, different rocks get sort of kicked up. And we have like dozens and dozens of what they call trace fossils. So like an animal trail then gets ossified and turned into stone or a burrow of something. And so we have all these fossils. And so when we go for these walks, it's not just that we're sort of outside, it's that we're outside and we're looking, right? Like we're looking for deer, we're looking for the signs of rabbits, you know, we're looking for these fossils.

14:04And I think there's something about being so present that you're excluding the normal things that you take for granted and you're actually aware and attuned to your environment in a way that sort of evolutionarily must have been the norm rather than the exception. Yeah. And that happens actually when you hunt. And I noticed this every single time at the beginning of the hunt, my ability to see things and hear things and smell things is horrible. And you know, it's sort of, it's, it's, it's exactly as you would expect within five days, all of a sudden my eyes pick things up that they couldn't pick up before my, my sense of smell, my ability to discern the movement of, you know, an animal or something, it just goes way up.

14:58And yeah, you can only imagine what a lifetime in that environment must've been like, especially when the stakes are higher. Like, let's be clear. It's one thing to be hunting for your food, but the truth of it is I won't starve if I don't get the elk. It's quite another thing when you are both the hunter and the hunted. And now imagine how those sensations are heightened when if you don't catch the prey, you will die. If the predator catches you, you will die. Can you imagine what that sensation is like? Yeah. And it might seem like anxiety would be one of those sensations because you'd be worried.

15:38And yet you'd probably actually have no room for that anxiety because it's not actually a productive sort of emotion. So there would be kind of this awareness, but not awareness in the way that you know, we get worried. You'd be, you'd just sort of be connected and tuned in to what's happening, both because you are looking for what you're looking for, and then you're looking for what might be looking for you. And I think the other thing about it that is you're doing it in a group, right? Like that's the other beauty of the way I think we evolved, right, is that all of that hunting was done in groups.

16:17And these aren't huge groups, but they're small groups. And And I think that also probably alleviates a lot of the anxiety. Yes. Yeah, you're part of a unit in the way that perhaps only people who have sort of military service would also be able to have a connection to or the ability to articulate. But yeah, human beings are sort of individual organisms. And then like a lot of animals function as this sort of group organism simultaneously. And I bet there's kind of an ego death in that that is soothing and also edifying at the same time.

17:03Do you find when you go hunting, one of the experiences I find when I'm hunting is, so first off, you have this sort of awareness. and then when you see the thing that you are looking for, you get that rush, that flood of emotion, the recognition. And then it's, to me, the practice of having to calm down the adrenaline dump because you know it's not going to be productive. To me, I get the most out of hunting just in the unusual practice or the building of that muscle, which I feel like you don't get to so consciously do in the rest of your life. Yeah. I think that's an amazing experience that you're right.

17:46There is no comparison to that in regular life. And certainly with really big game like, you know, Rocky Mountain Elk, which, you know, would be an example of that where all of the best laid plans can go right out the window in the fog of war. And so in archery, especially, this is a much bigger issue. So I only hunt with a bow and arrow. I don't have anything against hunting with a gun. I just don't do it. It's a totally different type of hunting. And I would guess that it's a little bit easier, at least in one dimension, not only the fact that it's a more accurate tool, but the The fact that you get to use it from a much greater distance separates you viscerally from the animal.

18:36And yet in archery, you know, the goal is obviously for the most rapid and humane exploration of the animal. So therefore you want to be as close as possible so that the risk of a subpar shot is gone. Well, anybody who's hunted elk knows that when you're 50 yards or less from an elk during the rut, I mean, you can smell it. You can feel its spit hitting you at times. And by the way, if it gets really angry, it'll charge you and it will destroy you. It could impale you. So you now have to be able to calm yourself down to do something that is very technically hard, which is shoot a bow and arrow.

19:20And, um, I worked, um, with this guy named Joel Turner, who's I think one of the masters of teaching the process of the perfect shot. And you've probably heard of like target panic, right? Target panic is a real issue in anything, but boy, especially in archery. And how do you get out of target panic? Well, it turns out you have to shift your focus from the aim to the process of the shot. And you have to turn it into something called a closed loop process as opposed to an open loop. So an open loop process is something that you do without thinking that can't be stopped mid process. Whereas something that is closed loop, everything you're doing is being done slowly enough that you can stop at any moment and your only capacity is to focus on that thing.

20:20You can't be thinking about anything else. Now that's not an easy thing to do. That in and of itself is a remarkable skill. But once you have that skill, all of a sudden, even when an elk is screaming and, you know, it's just total chaos in the midst of wherever you are, you can sort of focus on the process and not the aiming, which is the thing that you would... By the process, I mean the shot process. Sure.

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21:58That's A-U-R-A frames dot com, promo code STOIC. This deal is exclusive to listeners, and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? They're the number one meal kit in America. They make home cooking easier with chef crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. This fall, they're serving up even more to love. It's not the HelloFresh you remember. It's even better. HelloFresh is bigger.

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23:08They've got everything you need for the recipe that they pick out. There's no last minute trips to the store. Plus, the meals are delicious and easy to make. The best way to cook just got better. Go to HelloFresh.com slash stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com, Stoic10FM, to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. Yeah, the almost insane counterintuitiveness in archery, but I think also in art, of the less you think about the outcome or the thing you are trying to hit, the more likely you are going to be to hit it.

23:57And the converse is also true. If you're thinking about where you want it to go and how you want it to go and all that, what you're actually doing is taking your mind off of that closed loop process, which is the various steps that you do to get the arrow off. and you're not as locked in on each of the individual steps, which is what you have to be doing to be successful at anything that's really hard. Yeah. And there are many things that can't be done truly closed loop because they're happening too quickly, right? So you can't shoot a basketball closed loop, right? If you're shooting a free throw, by definition, once you initiate the shot, There's no point at which you could stop it and then restart it.

24:52It doesn't work that way. Whereas pulling the trigger of a gun, taking a shot with a bow, those are things that are amenable to closed loop thinking or closed loop practice. And those are actually the things that tend to be the hardest. I mean, what makes shooting a gun and shooting a bow really hard is basically an explosion is happening in front of your face and your CNS will do everything and anything to avoid that from happening. And that's what basically creates a precognition movement that leads to the target panic and the apprehension or the anticipation. Yeah. And I find that when I'm writing, the more I'm thinking about what other people are thinking about what I'm going to do, the more I'm thinking about where this fits into the whole, the more that I'm thinking about how this compares to other things that I've done.

25:44And what I'm doing is, if we have a finite amount of cognitive resources, I'm reallocating resources away from the task and putting them towards not only not the task, it's a thing that I don't have anything to do with, that I don't have any say over. And so if we can take that, the task is really hard. And to do it well, it requires as much cognitive resource, as many cognitive resources as possible. The less you think about the outcome, the more computing power you have available for this thing you're supposed to be. Yeah, it's hard. It's extremely hard, especially when, look, the reason you go hunting is to get the animal.

26:34The reason you write the book is because you want people to like it and it's also a business. And so this idea that you have to put aside the thing you are doing it for in order to get that thing, that's a leap I feel like people struggle with quite reasonably because it is almost inherently unreasonable. Yeah. And I think reframing it is just – I mean, the book in many ways would be harder. right? Because, you know, a book you'll, you'll spend years writing. I mean, I, I spent seven years writing one book. It would be so hard for me to truly detach from outcome there. You know, one thing with hunting that I've, cause most hunts are not successful.

27:21I think that's the thing that the average person who doesn't hunt doesn't understand is like, um, under at least the circumstances that we're discussing it, you're going to fail 95 % of the time. So, so how, Maybe more, right? So how do you make sense of that? Well, I think if you only fixate on the outcome, which is success is shooting an animal, boy, it's a tough, tough sport to do. But if instead you realize, no, actually success is that I get to be outdoors for a week and I get to be totally disconnected from the things that would be all the normal stressors of my life. and instead I get to really enhance my senses of sight, sound, smell, and connection to nature, well, that's going to happen whether or not I'm successful, quote unquote, in killing an animal.

28:15And therefore, every hunt could be successful if you reframe it that way. Well, I think one of the problems we have is our view of discipline, right? Which is we think that the discipline or the act is doing the thing, right? So pulling the trigger, firing the arrow, writing the words, we think it's doing the activity that is the sport, but also not doing the thing is part of it, right? So when a batter steps up at the plate, it's not just the pitches that they swing at and hopefully connect with, it's also the pitches that they don't swing at, right? So the pitch discipline to ignore bad pitches is as much the act of being a baseball player as swinging at the right pitch, right?

29:06And so, you know, hunting, you get out there and you go, well, I spent all this money, I flew all this way, I put on this gear, it's cold. Is this the shot that I'm going to take? And the decision to say no, and to know that you might not see anything else, but that that is also the act of hunting, right? Yeah. Is a really key part of it. And I started obviously as a writer, I was a research assistant. And one of the things that was so helpful to me in that process was I watched me bring material to the writer I worked for, Robert Greene. I brought him material and I watched him reject that material.

29:48Like I watched him go, So that's not what I want to put in the book. That's not a story that's good enough for being in the book. Or I like it, but it's not X, Y, or Z. And so that's one of the things I now define my work as, which is it's not just, hey, I found something and I used it, but elimination, right? Deciding that stuff isn't good enough, that I read 10 books on this topic. and what I actually discovered was that that was a dead end, that that's not the direction that I want to go in. That's also a positive creative act. And I think when we can see the not doing as part of the doing, we have a better sense of mastery of the activity.

30:35Yeah. When I was working on the book, especially you'll appreciate this because you've written so many. And even though it was my first book, having written scientific papers, I've been through this before, but not at the same scale because of the actual length. But there's the expression, which I'm sure you've used or heard of, which is you have to be able to kill your babies. And that's effectively what you're saying. Yeah. So one of the things that I found helpful, because I couldn't stomach the thought of absolutely eradicating 80 ,000 words worth of work. So I told myself a story that I believed at the time, but probably deep down knew was false, but it was enough for me to move on, which was, you know what, Peter, the editor is right.

31:28This chapter doesn't really add value, even though you've spent half a year on it. Sure. Go ahead and take it out, but you're going to come up with a second book called Dead Babies that will be all of the crap you didn't get to put in this book. And you'll either put it into another book or you will, you know, blog about it or, you know, whatever you just kind of. And so, so I just told myself that and I got better and better at just eradicating babies. All of my babies were dying. And of course I believe the finished product is indeed a better product than the version that was twice as long that, you know, everybody, you know, took a red pen to.

32:16And of course I'm never going to end up probably writing a book about the dead babies from this book. But that was like the thing I had to tell myself as a first time author of, okay, just focus on this one right now and don't worry. Like that work is not all for naught. Yeah. One writer trick is as you're editing, you set up another Word document and you're creating a file of all the stuff. And you tell yourself, I'm going to add it back in later or I'm going to use it for something else. And every single one of my books has a file like that. And I have never opened them after the book came out.

33:00But it's just about lowering the stakes, right? Because you're saying, I'm not killing the baby. And this is all getting a little - Yeah, this is just, for people, this is too graphic. You're saying, like, I'm not gonna kill the baby. I'm just gonna put the baby in timeout. It's exactly what you're doing. And it actually can be helpful. I interviewed Tom Segura recently, the comedian, and he was saying that the hardest part for the comedian is after you film an hour, You have this material that you know is good, but as soon as it comes out, you have to start over. And so a lot of times what you start with when you're building the new hour is you start with the stuff that got cut from the special, but you know does well.

33:44So actually you can use that stuff to kind of create the basis of the next thing that you do, even if you end up cutting it a second time, which often ends up happening. So it's serving a purpose, and that purpose is more your sort of comfort. So it doesn't feel... Like there's chapters, I'm doing this series on the four virtues now, and there's a chapter that I cut from the Courage book, telling myself it would be in the Discipline book. And then I cut it from the Discipline book, and I told myself that it would go in the Justice book. And I've since cut it from the Justice book. What's the fourth virtue?

34:29Wisdom. And I mean, the reality is, the objective reality is this chapter is just not very good, or it would have made one of the three books at this point. But the process of moving it has actually been kind of comforting and reassuring, because I'm not actually starting at zero. I already have a head start on the next project. are you are you glad you did the book because i mean look the the book is is amazing it it does exist and it's done extremely well but i know it a labor of love would would would be the wrong way to describe it because it sounded like it was quite torturous for you to do but now that you're on the other side are you glad that it all worked out i i am yeah it it um i'm glad i didn't know what it would be like when I started in 2016.

35:18And, um, and there were certainly a couple of points along the way where it almost folded. I mean, it, I mean, it really did. There was a period when I got fired by my editor or my publisher and my agent. Every, I mean, literally everybody just kicked me to the curb in 2020 when I just refused to submit a manuscript. Um, and I really thought that was the death of the project. I really thought that was it. It was no, it was never going to see the light of day and that was fine. And it sort of sat there for nine months. It wasn't until the end of 2020 that it got resurrected when I shared it with my friend, Michael Ovitz, and that led to it landing in the hands of Penguin and, you know, going from there.

36:04So, you know, I don't know where it would be if it weren't for Michael, truthfully. I think there's a pretty good chance it would just be a Word doc buried on my computer that no one would have read. And I'm definitely glad that that's not the case. What do you think it was, being on the other side of it now and sort of knowing what a book needs to be and also what audiences resonate with? And I think the reception has been probably better than you could have hoped. It's a huge hit out of the gate and people love it. So I imagine that it's different than what it was. But I imagine if I looked at a draft from four years ago, I'd recognize a good chunk of what's in here.

36:54So what do you think your problem was? I think the biggest problem I had in 2018, 2019 was was the tension that existed internally between two things. On the one hand, there was the understanding that a book about longevity, and I always wanted this to be the most comprehensive book on longevity, was really incomplete if it didn't address some aspect of emotional health. that if this was just a sort of biohacking bro science dumbass book which it never was but you understand what i'm getting at right if it was just a book about cheating death but spoke nothing at all to kind of the internal or emotional or relational sense of health span it was an incomplete book.

37:57So on the one hand, there was that tension, but it was met by an equal tension of who are you to write about that? You can't even figure this stuff out for yourself. Like, yeah, it's fine for you to write about cancer because you have expertise. It's fine for you to write about exercise. You have expertise. It's fine for you to write about cardiovascular disease. You have expertise. You have no expertise in this other subject matter. And not only do you have no expertise in it, you actually suck at it. Like it's, it's, it's, it's even more removed than that. So I think the biggest thing that was going on for a couple of years there is I just couldn't reconcile those two positions.

38:37But is it, isn't the way through that just a good old fashioned hypocrisy? It is, but I've watched too many of those people, Ryan. And it's like, it's just, I don't know what it is. You know, when you write the book on justice, I'll be very curious because as a high schooler who had no intention of going to college, it started to become really problematic when I was in 11th and 12th grade, right? So people started to worry when a kid who seemed reasonably intelligent was making it abundantly clear he had no desire to go to college. Sure. And I remember probably the end of 11th grade, they made me take this like aptitude test because they were just basically like, okay, you can't be a boxer.

39:25Like I know that that's your life's work and you want to be a professional boxer, but we've got to come up with something vocational for you to do that won't involve you getting brain damage. And so I took this test and the one thing that I remember when the guidance counselor sat me down is he's like, Like we've never seen someone score so high on the justice dimension. Like your sense of what is right must be right and all of that. Like you probably have a career in law enforcement or maybe one day being a judge. And I think an extension of that is I just loathe hypocrisy. And of course, we're all hypocrites at times.

40:08But like my, my, the internal sense of pain, if I feel that is, is so great that I was like, I could never write about this through the lens of like, I've got it all figured out. And obviously, when it's all said and done, the chapter that ultimately emerged to speak to that topic is written as, you know, a person who struggles. And these are the lessons I've learned. And hopefully, my struggles can both be a warning to others, but also maybe provide, more importantly, hope to others that, you know, if I can change, you can change. No, and I want to talk about that because it's a very beautiful part of the book.

40:50But I imagine then that sort of the catch for you was you sensed you had work to do on yourself, but you couldn't do that work or you were afraid to do that work. And you knew that it had to be the final act of the book. And so you were effectively stuck unless you abandoned that part of the book or you had that sort of personal breakthrough. And it took a while for one of those things to win out.

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43:52Yeah, and I think you probably remember this, Ryan, because you use the term breakthrough. I would call it breakdown. I mean, it really took a breakdown. And you're right. It was almost a game of chicken between which of those things could happen first. and um i think in february of 2020 i just had a convenient out when my agent fired me yeah and my publisher threatened me and said if you don't turn this thing in by april um we're going to come after you for the money we've already given you and i was like great here take the money right now because i'm done like sure you don't need to threaten me anymore like i don't want anything to do with this.

44:34So basically, it appeared in that moment that the answer was, I got out of this. I never have to write the book. And oh, by the way, I never have to get fixed. I never have to get help. I never have to conquer my own demons here. Because I can continue to be the way I am without being a hypocrite, because now I'm never going to talk about it. No, it's actually a really great illustration of what Steven Pressfield calls the resistance, It was easier for you to not do the book, to give what I know, as we talked about it, a large amount of money back to the publisher than to sit down and reconcile what you creatively knew you wanted to do or what you needed the book to be.

45:17And then the place that you had to get emotionally to be able to pull that off. It was easier for you to go, fuck the whole thing. I just won't do a book. Right. Yeah, the sunk cost of that was totally irrelevant to me. I was like, yeah, glad to have this over and let's move on. Yeah, Pressfield has a joke in The War of Art, which I guess is maybe not politically correct, but he says something like, it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was to do his painting. God, yeah. Contrast that with Churchill, huh? Yeah, of course. I mean, there's actually this fascinating book called No More Champagne, which is all about sort of Churchill's financial problems.

46:04And literally, as World War Two is breaking out, you can read these letters where he's like arguing with his publisher over contracts. And he's arguing with like the tax service about money that he owes. And, yeah, it is interesting to see them as two artists sort of going head to head. One is the fulfilled, the other the frustrated. But I wonder, though, going back to your struggles with the book, I definitely get that spiritual sort of authenticity impediment. But I wonder how much of that was actually real in the sense that I imagine you could have done a serviceable job and maybe you even tried to do a serviceable job on some of the stuff.

46:51But you do talk about perfectionism in here. How much of that seven-year odyssey that you went through was exacerbated by your own inability to recognize that what you're doing was really good and could be of use to people? because your sort of lens of perfectionism made it impossible for you to see that. I think that had to be a part of it for sure. And, you know, I think probably nobody was more frustrated by that than Bill Gifford, who's my co-author, because, you know, this is a guy who's written several books before, including a New York Times bestseller. You know, he's a great journalist.

47:36And so you'd think that when Bill says, Peter, this is really good. Like let's turn it into the editor. Like that should be validating enough for me. And yet it was the exact opposite of what you'd expect, right? You would expect the non-author to be the one saying, Hey, come on, this is good enough. This is good enough. And the professional to be saying, it's not sharp enough. The thinking isn't clear, but it was, it was always the reverse, right? It was always Bill sort of saying, Peter, like, you know, you're really letting perfect be the enemy of great here or whatever. And, and, um, it's, it's, it's still hard for me because I, that's, that's just a tendency that is, is really never going to completely go away.

48:24Like it's, it's so innate to me to look at something that is 98 % good and notice the 2 % right away. it just is like it it's it's always going to be that way what's different today than four years ago is the negativity around that is a fraction of what it once was so there's there's less self-loathing involved absolutely yeah and and there's also there's much greater awareness of how that permeates into everything else um and you know i was just thinking about this the other day. Like I was like, and it was probably inspired by something you wrote in the daily dad, which I love by the way. And I hope everybody listening is a reader.

49:09Um, but I was like, man, I used to waste so much energy busting the chops of my kids for leaving the lights on like just an endless amount of chop busting. And I was like, what is that about? is it really about the money? Like it can't be like electricity is basically free at this point. Yeah. So the sum total of money saved, if lights are always off versus sometimes off amounts to dollars a year. Okay. Is there some deeper principle of responsibility I'm trying to teach them? Maybe. But, but at the end of the day, I realized like I'm minoring in the major and majoring in the minor right now. And it's partially just my perfectionistic sense of, I hate lights unnecessarily being on.

50:05It might be nothing more than that. And I don't think that's an insight I could have jumped to three or four years ago. Well, the worst part is we often go, okay, it's not about the money, it's about the principle. I'm teaching them the lesson that you can't just go around leaving the lights on, which you may be, But you're also teaching them the lesson that dad is an asshole and he rides me about stuff and he sucks the joy out of the room when he's there because the lights being on or off is more important than being together, noticing their haircut, talking to them about something they did well at school.

50:45And so it's this thing that makes you good, right? You have high standards. You're exacting. You know how things should be. You have this sense of justice or principle. Hey, it's bad for the environment to not turn things off. It's bad for the bank accounts to leave them off. But actually, you just don't have any control over the things that come out of your mouth. And I struggle with that all the time myself. Yeah, I think the one from today was great, right? It was about what are the actions you would take that would increase or decrease the probability that your kids are going to live near you when they grow up.

51:28And I thought a lot about that. I was like, man, like if you want to ensure that your kids move away from you and never move back to live within the same city or vicinity, like here's a playbook for all the things you can do to push them away. And, yeah, I think being a perfectionist parent is really high on the list of tools to drive a wedge between you and your kids when they have a choice as to where they want to live. Well, the stoic idea is, you know, tolerant with others, strict with yourself. So if lights being on or off, the shoes being lined up, you know, the counters being, you know, spick and span, if that's important to you, go ahead and live that way.

52:14But just because you have authority over and a legal ability to make other people who live with you adhere to those same standards, it doesn't mean that you should. It doesn't mean that it's good. And it probably means that as soon as they have the power to not listen to you, that's what they're going to do. Yeah. Yeah, the thing about perfectionism is it's kind of a champagne problem, right? Most people don't have high enough standards. They're lazy and they don't work too hard or they go, oh, that is good enough and it's not good enough. The problem is if that perfectionism is what drives you to be successful and good at what you do, and I'm sure you see this with a lot of the powerful, successful people that you work with, the thing that can propel them to where they are is the thing that is also the source of most of their misery now that they have success and they can't turn it off.

53:21My brother and I talk about this all the time. And it's such a remarkable addiction in that it might be, you know, workaholism and perfectionism might be the most dangerous addictions out there because they're so rewarded externally. You know, there's nobody who's struggling with gambling who's being rewarded for that outside of the immediate reward they get from the dopamine hit when they're actually doing the thing. But the externalities of that are so destructive that, and I'm not minimizing one or the other, I'm just saying that it becomes much more easy for people who care about that individual to draw attention to it.

54:16The same is true, obviously, with alcohol, drugs, things like that. But when your drug is being perfect and working hard and achieving, and believe me, the neuroscience is pretty clear on this, there does not appear to be much difference in terms of the brain chemistry. So when that is your drug, the world rewards you. And I mean, frankly, nobody outside of those absolutely closest to you probably even notices that something is wrong. And then on top of that, I think more of your identity becomes wrapped up in it as well, in the output of that thing. And therefore, any attempt to address it becomes, frankly, an attack on who you believe you might be.

55:06Like, if I am not this, what am I? Right? Sure.

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