Joe Rogan Experience #1735 - Peter Attia

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumming) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. (rock music)

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Hello, Peter.

   3. PAPeter Attia0:13

      Hello, Joe.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      Good to see you.

   5. PAPeter Attia0:14

      Likewise.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      (laughs) Um, we're fucking neighbors, man. How you liking the move?

   7. PAPeter Attia0:21

      Loving it.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:21

      Uh, you've been here a year now, right? A solid year?

   9. PAPeter Attia0:23

      A little over, yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:24

       Yeah? Loving it?

   11. PAPeter Attia0:26

       I don't know why it took so long.

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:28

       Yeah, it's a different world, right?

   13. PAPeter Attia0:30

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:30

       Like, when you live in a place that only has a million people, it's like, "Oh." Like, "Wow, this is, uh... You could do everything here." ...

   15. PAPeter Attia0:37

       And if I, if I'd done this three years earlier, I could have paid half as much for my house too, that's the other thing that's like just-

   16. JRJoe Rogan0:41

       Right. (laughs)

   17. PAPeter Attia0:42

       ... would have been so smart to have done this in 2017.

   18. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       Well, lucky you did it then and not now, 'cause now it's even harder.

   19. PAPeter Attia0:49

       Oh.

   20. JRJoe Rogan0:49

       It's harder to find a house. It's almost impossible.

   21. PAPeter Attia0:53

       Yeah, I mean, every person we introduce to our real estate agent says the same thing, which is like...

   22. JRJoe Rogan0:58

       You have to build.

   23. PAPeter Attia0:59

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       Yeah, it's that, it's that wild, which is, uh, I guess, good. I don't know. You know? It's, uh, it's tricky, 'cause, you know, Google's building their... They have this gigantic sail-looking building-

   25. PAPeter Attia1:12

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:12

       ... near the river. Have you seen it?

   27. PAPeter Attia1:13

       Oh, yeah, yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:14

       Yeah. So there, there's gonna be a bunch of wokesters running around from that place. They're gonna have to fill that building up, you know?

   29. PAPeter Attia1:20

       (laughs)

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:20

       And then, you know, you got... Is there a more woke corporation than Google?
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   (laughs) …

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      all the wrongs of the world. You're doing it on a fucking device that's made by child slaves.

   2. PAPeter Attia15:05

      (laughs)

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:07

      Like, sorry. You wanna buy an iPhone? You gotta get something that's essentially made by people that are getting slave wages. They're working 16 hours a day in a building that has nets around it to keep suicide people from jumping off the roof.

   4. PAPeter Attia15:21

      Mm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:22

      That's Foxconn. That's where they make 'em.

   6. PAPeter Attia15:24

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:24

      They don't make 'em here. They're, they're not making 'em in Ohio with, you know, folks that are in a union that get paid, you know, great wages and benefits, and can take care of their families. Uh-uh. No. No, we wanna try to keep the bottom line nice and low.

   8. PAPeter Attia15:37

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:38

      So, in order for you to tweet about social justice, you have to do it on a device that's made by people that are not much better than slaves.

   10. PAPeter Attia15:45

       Oh.

   11. NANarrator15:46

       (laughs)

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:46

       Not, not much well o- not more well off. They're really not. It's fucked. It's crazy that there's no outrage to that.

   13. PAPeter Attia15:54

       Well, the outrage is silent. That's the problem. I mean, we're all, you know... I, I guess I should be more vocal about it. You should be more vocal about it. Everybody should be more vocal about it, 'cause I... There's no way the majority of people are looking at this and thinking it's reasonable.

   14. JRJoe Rogan16:07

       No, they're not. But th- it's just convenient.

   15. PAPeter Attia16:08

       But we're d- we're not doing enough about it.

   16. JRJoe Rogan16:10

       But we're not doing anything about it.

   17. PAPeter Attia16:11

       Yeah. Th- yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan16:11

       Like, what... There's no one, no one has made a push to make a phone in America. Unless there's something I don't know about. Is there a phone made in America? Let's see if there is a phone made in America. I bet there is not one. I'm willing to bet there's not one. And if it is, it's a piece of shit.

   19. PAPeter Attia16:29

       (laughs)

   20. JRJoe Rogan16:29

       I heard Elon's thinking of making a phone. There was a, there's some talk of a Tesla phone. If that happens, he might be, like, the only one. If Tesla does that, they might be the only ones that could sway people from iPhones.

   21. PAPeter Attia16:44

       Yeah. (laughs) I think you're right. Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan16:46

       Right? If anybody can... 'Cause it's hard. Like, Samsung has some amazing phones. Their cameras are incredible, but people look at that green text coming in, they're like, not doing it. You know? But if, like, someone like Elon convinced people to switch over to Signal, which is probably better for everybody anyway, to have some peer-to-peer e- encrypted application. Librem 5 USA. Is this a... This is a, um, this is a Linux phone, isn't it?

   23. PAPeter Attia17:16

       Yes.

   24. JRJoe Rogan17:17

       Made in the USA. E- electronics with a secure supply chain. That's r- what does that mean?

   25. PAPeter Attia17:26

       Mm-hmm.

   26. JRJoe Rogan17:26

       Made with a secure supply chain. What does that mean?

   27. NANarrator17:28

       You want a smartphone built outside China and the walled gardens of Google and Apple, this may be for you, according to The Register.

   28. JRJoe Rogan17:34

       So, it's real?

   29. PAPeter Attia17:35

       Yeah, I just Googled... There's a-

   30. JRJoe Rogan17:37

       32 gigabytes? Get the fuck outta here.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yeah. …

   1. PAPeter Attia30:00

      of that, like-

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      Yeah.

   3. PAPeter Attia30:01

      ... you would have... You have no care in the world, you know?

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:02

      Right.

   5. PAPeter Attia30:03

      You care about wind.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:04

      Yeah.

   7. PAPeter Attia30:04

      You care about-

   8. JRJoe Rogan30:05

      Right.

   9. PAPeter Attia30:05

      ... scent, you care about-

   10. JRJoe Rogan30:06

       Predators.

   11. PAPeter Attia30:06

       ... other things and-

   12. JRJoe Rogan30:07

       Did I tell you about the mountain lion I saw?

   13. PAPeter Attia30:09

       No. (laughs)

   14. JRJoe Rogan30:10

       I didn't tell you. When we were in Utah, I saw a giant mountain lion, fucking giant. Like, as big as me. It was huge.

   15. PAPeter Attia30:18

       What?

   16. JRJoe Rogan30:18

       It was huge.

   17. PAPeter Attia30:19

       How far from you?

   18. JRJoe Rogan30:20

       We, we were in a truck, luckily, and it was about 30 yards away.

   19. PAPeter Attia30:24

       ... my friend, Colton, spotted it. Uh, we were driving and he hits the brakes, he goes, "That fucking mountain lion!" And I'm like, "Where?" And then I see its eyes 'cause it was starting to get dark out, but it was still light and its eyes were glowing. And, uh, I put up the binoculars to take a look at it, like closer through the windshield. And I was like, "Holy fuck!" It was huge. I did not know they got that big.

   20. JRJoe Rogan30:45

       Oh, they get to 200 pounds.

   21. PAPeter Attia30:47

       Oh.

   22. JRJoe Rogan30:47

       (clears throat) The one that I saw previously, I saw one in Santa Barbara and it was probably like 70 pounds, 60 pounds. It was pretty small. And then I saw another one in Colorado, but it was so brief, it was, it was hard to tell and that one seemed the same size. Seemed like a smaller juvenile one. This was not a juvenile. This was a 100% full grown tom with a big old pumpkin head and huge paws and the forearms were wild. Like that was the weirdest thing, like looking at his f- his forearms were as big as my thighs. I was like, "Fuck, look at this fucking thing."

   23. PAPeter Attia31:20

       Elk killer.

   24. JRJoe Rogan31:20

       And it was just looking at us, you know, and it was under a tree. A- and, you know, we, uh, opened up the car door and tried to like get film of it and look at it closer and it took off and it was so big. 'Cause I was thinking like, if I was out there on my own, you know, 'cause people do that all the time, they hunt solo and they don't carry a weapon, you know? Like Colton didn't have a weapon. I only had a bow and arrow. And here's this giant-ass fucking cat. Like, if we zigged when we should have zagged and all of a sudden we're on top of this thing and it decides to pounce on us, fuck.

   25. PAPeter Attia31:57

       (laughs) That better be a good tripan.

   26. JRJoe Rogan31:59

       Yeah. Did you see that video of the guy who shot the, uh, mountain lion in the face?

   27. PAPeter Attia32:03

       No.

   28. JRJoe Rogan32:04

       Jamie.

   29. PAPeter Attia32:05

       (laughs) It's, uh- (laughs)

   30. JRJoe Rogan32:07

       (laughs) He's hunting too and, uh, he's got a Glock out and he's telling this mountain lion, "Hey, back up, back up." And it's not even... It's a smaller one, like a 90-pound one, but he- he's saying to it, "Hey, fuck off, like get outta here." And then it- it makes a move on him and, you know, he drops his phone, you hear crack, crack. You hear m- l- like one shot. One shot. Um, and then you see the thing twitching on the ground and it's got a bullet hole in its face.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. PAPeter Attia45:00

      takes a minute to die.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:01

      Mm-hmm.

   3. PAPeter Attia45:02

      There... In other words, there's still a minute of stress in its life.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:04

      Oh, these guys, they head shot 'em.

   5. PAPeter Attia45:06

      They head shot 'em at night.

   6. JRJoe Rogan45:08

      Oh.

   7. PAPeter Attia45:08

      So they're using night vision, they're 200 yards away-

   8. JRJoe Rogan45:11

      Silencers.

   9. PAPeter Attia45:12

      Yep. It's (imitates silencer) and-

   10. JRJoe Rogan45:13

       Yeah.

   11. PAPeter Attia45:14

       ... it's... The animals are so unstressed that if there's like... They'll shoot a group, there'll be 12 of them there, right? And they'll have the sniper, he shoots one, Billy goes down. The other 11 don't even move.

   12. JRJoe Rogan45:24

       Wow.

   13. PAPeter Attia45:24

       They just... Yeah. "Uh, where'd Billy go?" I don't know. Boom. Then the next guy gets it.

   14. JRJoe Rogan45:27

       He's taking a nap.

   15. PAPeter Attia45:28

       Yep.

   16. JRJoe Rogan45:28

       Yeah. Wow.

   17. PAPeter Attia45:30

       And then they process on site. So there's a USDA inspector with the sniper for every single shot. Every carcass is examined. It has to be a perfect kill.

   18. JRJoe Rogan45:39

       That's a great way to get meat. It really is. If you wanna think about an ethical way for you to consume meat, if you're one of those people that doesn't wanna buy factory farmed meat, get some of that. It's... I can't... I mean, next to hunting, that is about as good as you can get.

   19. PAPeter Attia45:53

       Do you find your taste for, like, non-wild game has gone down?

   20. JRJoe Rogan45:59

       Well, when I eat a fatty piece of domestic beef, I think of its... Like a sloppy, lazy person. Like I'm... Like, you know what I mean? Like if I, if I see an athlete and then I go, "Wow, that guy looks like he's in shape." And then I see a sloppy, lazy person, I'm like, "Oh, poor sloppy, lazy person."

   21. PAPeter Attia46:16

       But I just, I just find that, like... And again, we're lucky, right? We get to hunt these animals. We get to eat the elk, we get to eat the axis deer. These are, you know, along with maybe pronghorn and a few others, this is about as tasty as it gets. But boy, I, I find that even a really nice rib eye just doesn't taste as good as it, as it did to me five years ago.

   22. JRJoe Rogan46:34

       Yeah. Well, it's missing a lot of... It's missing a lot of nutrition. It's not... If you look at the dark red meat of elk, like elk, like a, a back strap from elk is a dark red l- Mm-hmm.

   23. PAPeter Attia46:49

       Like, I, I took a photo a couple days ago of, uh, some back strap from, uh, the elk I shot in California this year. I just cooked it up and-

   24. JRJoe Rogan46:59

       This was your 415? This was your-

   25. PAPeter Attia47:01

       Yeah, that giant one. Amazing.

   26. JRJoe Rogan47:02

       Yeah, it was huge. This is so much meat. And this, this... What I do is I'll, I'll cook like a bunch of pieces like that and then, uh, I'll eat it throughout the week. Like I ate this in the morning.

   27. PAPeter Attia47:12

       How, how did you, how'd you prep that? Did you do that on the Traeger?

   28. JRJoe Rogan47:15

       Yes.

   29. PAPeter Attia47:15

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan47:16

       I cook it on a Traeger at 265 degrees. I've, I've tried a bunch of... The reason why it's black and on the outside is I'm using a, a rub called, uh, Traeger's, uh, Saskatchewan, I think?
5. 1:00:00 – 1:12:57

   Right. …

   1. PAPeter Attia1:00:00

      as a, as a trainee, that's amazing, right? Like that's, that's what you're there for. That's why I went specifically to that program, was to be able to learn to operate on people who are shot or stabbed. Um, but, you know, it, it does take its toll on you, right? You just feel like there's no end to this. Like, um-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:16

      Right.

   3. PAPeter Attia1:00:17

      I mean, it's a war zone out there and y- y- yeah. I mean, there were... I remember there were times when, you know, you'd, you'd be a part of, like, a heroic rescue of somebody and they go out the door and they come back a week later with a gunshot wound to the head and they're dead.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:32

      Wow. God.

   5. PAPeter Attia1:00:32

      And you're like, "Ugh." I mean, come on. Um, so yeah, I was, I was just frustrated by, with everything in medicine when I left. I was super pissed. My wife was like, "You know, you bitch and moan about this so much. I think you have two choices. You should either fix it or leave." And I was like, "Well, I can't fix it, so I'm leaving." Um, so I left and joined a company called McKinsey and was recruited there to do healthcare, but ended up, because my background's in math, doing credit risk. And this was right as, this was like the two years building up to the mortgage meltdown.So that became my day job and my night job. I mean, that was all-consuming for two years. Um-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:01:08

      What was your night job?

   7. PAPeter Attia1:01:09

      No. Meaning like we worked 24/7.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:01:10

      Oh. Oh.

   9. PAPeter Attia1:01:11

      Like I, we, I would run a team of analysts in India during the night and then a team in San Francisco during the day. And all day, all night, we were kind of trying to basically figure out how bad this thing was going to be.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:01:24

       So you saw it coming?

   11. PAPeter Attia1:01:25

       Oh. Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:01:25

       How far out?

   13. PAPeter Attia1:01:26

       Um, so by August of 2007, it was clear that the prime market was going to implode. Uh, and I still remember the day, Thursday, November 15th, uh, 2007 is when I had a sense of what the magnitude was going to be. The thing I didn't know was when. I couldn't... I knew it was gonna be the next 18 months, but I... It wasn't like I could say in September, which is when it ended up happening, right? It was 10 months later. I couldn't say in September the bottom's gonna fall out.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:00

       Was there anything that could have been done that would have mitigated the impact on the economy and society and, you know, repossessions, and-

   15. PAPeter Attia1:02:12

       Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a really good question because at the time, in November of '07, we... And, and I want to also be clear, the reason we knew with such clarity how bad this was is we were work... We had a client, our client was the largest u.... I guess I could s... Probably the largest US home lender in prime real estate and we had all the data. So we're able to see stuff that's not publicly available, but they didn't see it. But when we went back and looked at the analysis, we were... We figured out that every... That starting in 2004, starting in the second quarter of 2004, every loan that was being originated was behaving differently than in the entire history of mortgages. So this is a, a really interesting analysis. It's called the vintage analysis. Um, if you bundle mortgages together and look at how they behave, for all of time, they behave in a certain way. For about the first 18 months, none of them default. So 18 months after a person buys a house, historically, there's no chance of default. Then defaults start to rise, and they rise for about the next two to three years, and then they never default again. So the vintage curve looks like this. This is cumulative loss rate.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:03:28

       Mm-hmm.

   17. PAPeter Attia1:03:29

       So what's the reason for that? So the reason nobody defaults in the first 18 months is because historically, you really make sure that the person who you're selling a house to or giving a loan to can afford it. You do a really extensive background check on them. And if something's gonna go wrong, it's unlikely to go wrong in that first 18 months because of how much you've documented their income and employment and stuff like that. Then you get into an area where some people are gonna default. And then the reason three, four years out, there's no more defaulting is because by that point, people have enough equity in their home that if they run into trouble, they can always sell the home and the bank gets their money back. So again, you go back in time, every vintage curve for every single mortgage looked like this. Really boring. We went back and plotted all the vintage curves going back to the year 2000, and they all looked... And then in Q2 2004, so you plot these in three-month vintages, they started doing this.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:04:27

       Explain to people that are just listening.

   19. PAPeter Attia1:04:29

       Uh, meaning they started to... Instead of going up and then flat again, they just kept going up and up and up and up and up, but they actually did it at an exponential rate. So they didn't just go up straight, they would go up exponentially.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:04:41

       Mm-hmm.

   21. PAPeter Attia1:04:41

       In other words, there was no end in sight to the explosion of losses. So the losses started happening immediately and they never slowed down. They accelerated with time. So this is looking at a chain reaction. And this was one of five models that we built to try to understand what was going on. And they all pointed in the same direction, which was catastrophic outcomes basically for loans that became originated after 2004. So by the time we're in 2007, when we show all this data to them, obviously they didn't believe it, right? They said... Well, 'cause the punchline was horrible. The punchline was, "You're gonna lose more in the next 18 months than you've made in the last 10 years." And that was like, you know, they were like, "That's not possible." Um, and the, the rea- I had to be the one to tell the, the, the head of the bank, right? Because... And even though I was only like... There's a hierarchy at McKinsey, there's like senior partners, junior partners, and I was just like a lowly manager who ran the analysts. And the senior partner would normally be the one to present such an outrageous finding to the board of a bank. But he was like, "You should present this." And I said, "Why?" And he goes, "Well, you, you understand the technical details of the model better. And also you used to be a cancer surgeon, so you're used to giving bad news."

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:06:02

       (laughs)

   23. PAPeter Attia1:06:03

       "I think this is not gonna go very well. So-"

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:06:06

       Oh my God.

   25. PAPeter Attia1:06:07

       "... you, you do this." And it did not go well. It was not well received. Um, in re- they could have done something. Yes, they absolutely could have done something. It wouldn't have stopped all the damage, but it would've minimized the damage, because remember, there was still another 10 months of horrible loans being originated, horrible loans being securitized. Um, and they were mispriced. I mean, ultimately that's the problem with this, is it was just a mispricing game. They didn't know how to price the risk of the loans they were making.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:06:38

       And how many people were predicting this the way you were?

   27. PAPeter Attia1:06:42

       Well, look, a lot of people way smarter than me were predicting it. Remember, I was an idiot. All I knew was how bad this was. I had no clue how one could make money off this 'cause I wasn't thinking about it through that lens.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:06:53

       Oh, I see.

   29. PAPeter Attia1:06:54

       Remember-

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:06:54

       But some folks were. There was-

Episode duration: 3:21:48