of introducing a new author to an Authors at Google talk.

And this author's name was Tim Ferriss.

He had a new book that had just come out called "The

4-Hour Workweek." It was a surprise hit.

And it spent about four years on the bestseller list.

Not too long after, he had a second book called "The 4-Hour

Body," which was a little bit more about hacking the body,

weight loss, nutrition.

A lot of people I know here at Google have

lost a bunch of weight.

I myself have lost about 20 pounds doing that.

So I'm very excited to have Tim here for his new book,

"The 4-Hour Chef." It's a book that starts with cooking and

then goes into food in general.

It's also a bit of a primer on approaching any topic and

learning it and learning it towards mastery.

And Tim's here to talk about the book, but

also about other topics.

And we'll have a lot of time for Q&A.

And so I'm very excited to have Tim here today.

Please join me in welcoming him.

[APPLAUSE]

TIMOTHY FERRISS: Thank you, kind sir.

Trevor was subjected to some of my experimentation also

throughout this book with respect to food, which in the

beginning was not very pleasant at all.

MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]

TIMOTHY FERRISS: So it's been fun to visit Google as many

times as I have.

And certainly in the first visit, I had a lot more hair

and many fewer book sales.

But this book is perhaps the most exciting

to me of all three.

So I'll start off with a very dramatic trailer that I think

gives a basic sort of overview.

And then we'll jump into the presentation, which I'll try

to keep really short, or as short as I can.

And then a bunch of Q&A, because that's when I

have the most fun.

So let's do the trailer first.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

TIMOTHY FERRISS: All right.

So the presentation's all downhill from here.

That was courtesy of Adam Patch.

Adam Patch directed and did the post on that.

There are a few things that came up in that video that

will reappear through the presentation.

It was all filmed in Seattle, at Delve Kitchen.

So if anyone's interested in molecular gastronomy, things

like that, Chris Young, who used to run the experimental

kitchen for The Fat Duck in London when it became number

one ranked in the world, helped with all of that, as

well as with the science section.

But let's start at the beginning.

So "The 4-Hour Chef, Accelerated Learning for

Accelerated Times--" this book of the three has the most

confusing title and subtitle combination, I think.

And that is because for the last four or five years, my

readers have been asking me for a book on accelerated

learning, mostly because of my talk about smart drugs and

language acquisition and things like that.

The problem is, writing a book on learning without a good

context is really boring to read and even

more boring to write.

So I ultimately chanced upon thinking of

cooking for a few reasons.

The first was it was a skill that I had

quit many times before.

I had failed at it many, many times before, despite trying,

much like swimming, which was covered in "The 4-Hour Body."

Secondly was--

I think as many people feel these days in a digital

world-- there's a certain sense of angst that I felt

every time I closed my laptop.

I'd accomplished a lot of work, but I had nothing

physical to show for it.

And I really wanted to reclaim my manual literacy and build

physical things.

And I thought that would be woodworking.

But there's always an excuse not to go to Oakland to do it.

And I didn't want some crappy bird house in my

living room, anyway.

And I saw my girlfriend cooking one night, and I said,

that can be my dojo.

That can be where I learn to use my thumbs for something

besides the space bar.

And it turned out to be really life-altering for me to

reclaim that part of myself.

And lastly, because food involves all five senses, you

can really use it to create sort of a Spidey sense in all

of those senses, which is pretty wild.

And it transfers to almost everything else.

And this shot, this opening shot here that you guys can

see, it's two pictures, identical pictures.

This is the entranceway to Alinea Restaurant in Chicago,

which at the time I wrote the book was number one

ranked in the US.

And I spent three days there.

And in Alinea Restaurant, they test every assumption

possible, every convention possible.

You get menus at the end instead of at the beginning.

When you walk in, no one greets you.

It's this red hallway, completely soundproof.

Until you get to the end, nothing happens.

Then motion sensors open a hidden door, and people greet

you by name.

Everything's been tested, including the business model.

And I encourage people to look at Next Restaurant for how

they sell out their entire season for the restaurant in,

in some cases, 10 to 30 seconds online.

It's very, very cool.

The guiding tenet when looking at sports performance, when

looking at work performance, when looking at learning

performance is this.

So "whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,

it's time to pause and reflect." And my job over the

last five years, but certainly something I've obsessed on for

15-plus years, is finding the anomalies, finding the

freaks-- you know, the people who are really good at what

they do despite having poor raw materials or very informal

training or no training at all.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

This is to give people-- how many people have seen this

video before?

A handful.

OK.

This is in South Africa.

This is just to give you an idea of what I do to myself in

the name of experimentation.

I had been effectively told-- this is the

side of my right leg.

I'm recording this with a Flip camera, in Cape Town at one of

the top sports science institutes.

And I had been told, in effect, through Navigenics and

other types of DNA testing that I lacked the ability to

produce fast twitch muscle fiber properly.

So this genetic determinism was very depressing.

But that didn't square with my experience

in sports, for instance.

I'd been an All-American in high school in wrestling.

So I decided to skip all of the theory and just remove

samples from my leg.

And the way it works with a biopsy is they insert a hollow

tube, slightly larger than a pen, into your leg, apply

suction, pull the tissue in, and then rotate

it to cut it out.

And I'm not going to run this for very much longer.

But last time I showed this, I actually did it at a lunch

meeting, which was my Long Island

sophistication coming out.

In any case, I'm not going to go too deep

into the results here.

-All right.

Who wants to sign up?

TIMOTHY FERRISS: All right.

I'll come to this in a second.

The punch line to that is that something along the lines of

more than 40% of my muscle fiber was in fact fast twitch

muscle fiber, type IIa, which is fully trainable.

So the raw materials you start with, perhaps the skills that

you've put on the shelf because you couldn't master

them or couldn't even get started learning them, do not

seal your fate.

And the way you get around that fate, the way you sort of

head-fake what you think are your limitations, is by

testing assumptions.

This is another shot from Alinea Restaurant.

And this is one of the last courses.

This has been plated by Grant Achatz.

So chef Grant Achatz, A-C-H-A-T-Z, is really worth

taking a look at.

And I look at him very closely in the Professional

section of the book.

But when Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who's a very,

very, very world-class chef, who runs many restaurants

including ABC Kitchen in New York City, was asked, who do

you fear among your colleagues, it didn't take him

more than a split second to say Grant Achatz.

He does things I can't understand.

I don't understand how he creates the things he creates.

For instance, they wanted to test plating.

Why don't we have bigger plates?

Well, they couldn't fit a 4-foot-diameter plate through

the doorways to and from the kitchen.

So instead, they found a special, effectively

food-grade latex from a sex shop in Paris and imported it

to create tablecloths where they could use the entire

table as a plate.

And on the right-hand side, you see a dark chocolate

pinata that is shattered on the table and releases all

this liquid nitrogen and crazy stuff, which is just awesome.

And it tasted good.

A lot of these food-as-theater shows end up producing really

crappy food.

But Alinea does not have crappy food.

This is an example of transfer.

When you start to think creatively about food--

because I was an anti-cook my entire life.

Even a few weeks prior to starting research for this

book, I had two friends who are very good cooks come over

to help cook dinner.

They said, grab the wine and we'll talk about

business, catch up.

They came over, and I had mustard and white wine in my

fridge, including some, like, biohazard unidentifiable food.

And they asked me where my olive oil was.

And I said, olive oil.

Olive oil.

Oh, it's in the freezer.

It's in the freezer.

Why is your olive oil in the freezer?

I really was starting from ground zero.

And when you start to think about food creatively,

anything creatively, it transfers.

So this was about halfway through my meal at Alinea.

We had been stuck in design gridlock on the cover.

And it just came to me after one of their more inventive

dishes that the cover could be something like this on the

left, which I sketched out.

And then it turned into the final cover.

So even if you hate cooking, hopefully you love food.

And taking even a week to experiment with all of those

senses in the kitchen, even if you stop after that week, will

take a lot of your life that is currently in black and

white and turn it into high def, which is a really cool

effect that is persistent.

This is something you saw in the trailer.

This is one of my old friends when I inhaled something

through nasal inhalation.

This is vasopressin, which is an antidiuretic hormone.

It's prescribed as desmopressin to kids in some

cases who bed-wet past a certain age.

I used it starting freshman year in college to ace Chinese

character quizzes.

And it has very interesting applications

to short-term memory.

So I would take two shots and flip through a book almost as

quickly as I could turn the pages and score a 95 to 100%.

It was pretty cool.

Now, as you might imagine, snorting antidiuretic hormone

is not the best long-term strategy.

And pretty quickly thereafter, headaches set in and all sorts

of issues, because I was testing a whole slew of other

drugs at the same time.

And I started to focus on method.

I didn't continue with-- well, that's not entirely true.

I'm still interested in the drugs.

We can get to that if you guys want.

But the point being there are actual methods, recipes, that

the world's fastest learners use to learn what they learn,