Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1108 - Peter Attia
Uploaded: 2018-04-24T22:42:53.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1108 - Peter Attia' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-04-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1108 - Peter Attia' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-04-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1108 - Peter Attia

four three two one hello peter hello joe what's going on man a whole lot you
were just telling
me something that is one of the most ridiculous things i've ever heard that you
swam from maui
to lanai right and you're the one of the only humans to ever do that i'm told i
was the first
person to swim from maui to lanai and back the one way is a pretty famous swim
race that's done
every year you're the first person to do it the round go back fuck dude why'd
you do that how long
you got it started when i was a boy they told me i couldn't do it what what
made you want to do that
that's a ridiculous proposition um so i got into i decided in it's gonna sound
silly i read a book in
january of 2004 about this woman named penny dean who still to this day holds
the record for the
fastest crossing of the catalina channel so swimming from catalina island to
san pedro or to uh not you
typically swim to point point vicente and she had done it in like seven hours
and 20 minutes and i was
like that's amazing how far is that as a crow flies it's 21 miles with the
currents it's a little longer
and i was like you know i really want to do this um but i got to learn how to
swim first that seems
that's three miles an hour swimming she is a phenom penny dean had a stroke
rate of 90 strokes per minute
which i mean that might not mean anything to someone who doesn't swim but like
to turn to have a hand hit the water every you know third of a two-thirds of a
second is a
remarkable case yeah i can't hold a cadence of that for 100 yards wow and she
did it for 20 miles
yeah what a beast she's out of control yeah there's certain people like that
man that freak me out i think
i think marathon swimming might be one sport where if if you just look at the
numbers i think women are
better than men well there's that woman who swam from cuba to the united states
right she was the
first person and she didn't she do it like at a fairly advanced age yeah i mean
she's of course
got an amazing pedigree of swimming and this wasn't her first rodeo right right
right why why do you
think women are better than men at that i mean those of us that i i'm not a
member of this community
anymore but when i was it was one of our favorite topics of discussion i think
uh thing opportunities
or ideas that were put forth were higher pain tolerance something about being
you know evolving
to be able to give birth um just means they can tolerate pain a lot higher um i
think another thing
i've heard is buoyancy you know women are naturally going to have more body fat
which provides insulation
when you do these swims you're not allowed any wetsuits or aids of any sort so
shorts you're
like you're in a speedo and a single latex cap and that's it and so if you can
have a little and
so i think women's hips because they're going to have more fat on their hips
they they it corrects
one of the big buoyancy issues that we have in swimming we we didn't evolve to
swim we're horrible
at it naturally because we swim like this we drag our hips through the water
and if you think about
the importance of aerodynamics in most of the things that we think about
whether it be archery or race car
driving or cycling you know in water it's that much more important because the
density of water is
you know thousands of times greater than air so swimming is just a hundred
percent about avoiding
drag wow so well that totally makes sense um i just have been fascinated
forever with people that are
capable of pushing their brain to do things that other people just don't think
are possible like a
you know bigfoot 200 race or like any of those things but the swim one is
particularly crazy because
you can't stop right right like if you're running an ultra marathon and you
just want to sit down for a
couple minutes and just take a break you can do that but if you're swimming
there's not a damn thing you
can do you could tread water is about as good as it gets but you can't touch
the boat or the kayak or it's
an immediate disqualification oh god
that's so crazy man that is such a wow so you heard about this woman doing and
that's what i read
this book and i was like i really want to do this at the time i was uh i was
actually in my residency
in baltimore and i was like you know i really want to do this and i'm gonna
have to learn how to
swim to do it so i started taking swimming lessons and then um i mean to make a
very long story short
basically by about the summer of 2005 i entered my first swim race which was a
two mile swim race
in lake rest in virginia and i did it i was like oh my god i just swam two
miles in the open water
you know it was hard but i was like okay that's the proof of concept now you
just got to figure out
how to make it 20 25 miles and uh so i just you know went completely psycho and
ratcheted up the
training and and then in october of 2005 i did my first catalina swim wow that's
got to be a pretty
good feeling though when you're done that you are capable of pushing yourself
to what most people think
is an impossible distance yeah i mean people you asked a moment ago why do you
do this i would say
that in life um velocity means very little acceleration means everything so
what do i mean by that right
like if you're going 650 miles an hour in an airplane you don't actually feel
it you only feel when speed
changes right so i've always had this theory that emotionally that's also true
like happiness is only
interesting when it's juxtaposed with sadness and so the feeling of crawling on
the shore after you've
been swimming for 12 to 14 hours is amazing but what makes it especially
amazing is that six hours earlier
you thought you were going to die so you start these swims in the middle of the
night to avoid the
shipping traffic so that first swim boat drops you off at catalina island it's
midnight that's a
darkness you can't imagine like you can't even see la from catalina you have to
swim for six hours
before you even see the lights of los angeles really yeah what do you see the
stars and the
phospho like bioluminescent organisms in the water whoa which is incredible i
mean that's worth the price
of admission so every time your hand comes through the water you're pulling and
ripping these little
things and you're seeing the sparks and you can't tell where the water ends in
the sky starts in other
words the stars and the bioluminescence looks like one cylinder wow so for the
first few hours that's cool
but then you know on my first swim the water was incredibly rough um i had only
swum in the ocean
for two weeks before the swim i did all my training in a swimming pool so and a
lake on the east coast
so now i look i wasn't used to how to keep the salt water out of my mouth right
so then i was like
puking my guts out and then my uh while you were swimming you're puking your
guts out yeah yeah how does
that work you just stop and puke and then keep swimming wow and then uh but
then my tongue started
to get really swollen from the salt water because again as i would learn later
on i would go on to do
many more of these swims but what i learned is the importance of spitting the
water out of your mouth
very quickly so in a in a freshwater pool or lake you get away with more but in
the ocean you swallow that
salt water you're gonna get sick as hell so all this stuff's going on so by
five in the morning
you've been swimming for five hours you're getting cold you're i mean you know
frankly just physiologically
like your cortisol levels are at a nader you're just you feel horrible it's
like it's a really bad feeling
and you're not even halfway there and it's like you don't know if you can do it
and blah blah blah
blah well if six hours later you're now crawling out of the water feeling like
you've done this amazing
thing that that's emotional acceleration that's like the greatest contrast i
know what you're saying
i mean i've never experienced that but i was uh explaining the other day to a
friend of mine about
this uh camping trip that we went on in montana when it was like nine degrees
outside it was freezing cold
we stayed out there for five six days and then when we finally got to a hotel
room i took a shower and it
was the most amazing shower i've ever experienced in my life and that's a small
thing right i know but
you take a shower every day and it's like a big deal yeah when you do it in
that setting or or think
about the the meal you've had if you've been in a similar situation yeah or
starving or lost at sea
yeah yeah yeah i can't imagine that's a so now that you've done how many of
these have you done these
crazy swim races or swim i mean several yeah usually these major major ones are
not races you're you're on
your own you have to you go to the federation that oversees that body of water
and you say hey i want
to do this and then you you know you go through all the channels to do it like
they have to have an
observer there and they you follow these official rules so that you can be
registered as someone who's
actually completed it right and someone's there to make sure you didn't you
know you did it correctly
um i don't know i've probably done all in probably like a dozen of these but
probably like
six of them really long ones what's the longest well i that's a good question
what is the maui one was
20 miles there and back so 40 miles total no no it's a the maui channel is a 10
mile channel so round
trip is 20. the bigger question is time in the water because you rarely get to
swim these in a straight
line so the maui lanai one i wanted to go maui lanai molokai maui to do the
triangle and that would have
been 30 miles as a crow flies but we just you know boat captain wasn't willing
to do it at night
because of the tiger sharks and during the daytime we couldn't physiologically
figure out how one could
suffer against those the wind because the wind gets so brutal in the middle of
the day
so even the one that i did which was just the there and back i ended up
swimming for 12 hours because
on the the the first way crossing where there was no wind took me four hours
and then it took eight
hours to get back because i was swimming like the hypotenuse of a triangle
right like the currents going
this way so i had to swim this way just to go in a straight line and i still
kidding i almost missed maui
jesus christ so i almost got swept out to molokai just because the current was
about 1.7 knots which is
about as fast as i can swim maybe two knots
fuck
that is a ridiculous thing man why are you doing this this is this is maniacal
well i don't do it anymore i mean it was certainly uh it was an amazing season
of my life but
i think once my daughter was born which was 10 years ago this summer that's
when i
i only probably did two of these after she was born because then the training
just got so i just you
got to live in the water if you want to do this sport like you gotta including
the winter you know
like you know even in san diego where i live it's still you know 55 degrees in
the water and you're
going to spend three four hours a day in the water freezing you know it's just
so i was like you know
i just don't have the the the drive to spend 25 hours a week swimming yeah what
was the what was
going on in san diego when that guy got bit in half by a shark a couple years
back they were training
for something yeah that's funny you remember that that was may of 2008 i
remember that like it was
yesterday so at the time i lived in san francisco and this is actually just
before i swam the maui thing
now that i think about it that was 10 years ago i swam the maui thing in uh june
of 06 at june of 08
so i'm doing all my training in a swimming pool up in san francisco because i
don't want to acclimate
to very cold water i actually want to be in warm water but i needed one long
ocean swim of like 14 or
15 miles as my like last training swim so i came down to san diego to do it and
just by bad luck i came
down a few days after that guy was killed now this was a guy i 