0:00[music] You are now tuned in to the addictedtosuccess.com podcast where geniuses, entrepreneurs, and next-level game-changers share their juicy little secrets on achieving massive success. This is the advice you wish you heard years ago. Be prepared and take note as we expose the realness and the raw of what it takes to be successful on addictedtosuccess.com.
0:25Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the addicted to success podcast. Now, today I have with me the human guinea pig, absolute amazing best-selling author, uh entrepreneur, investor, speaker. I mean, dude, you have so many titles. How do you keep up with all these titles?
0:42[laughter] Tim Ferriss.
0:44Yeah, uh no, it's great great to be here. Yeah, the one thing you learn after [clears throat] years of writing books is how to write a very self-congratulatory bio. So, I suppose I should probably cut out a couple of the the commas and titles that I have in there, but you know, one step one step at a time.
1:00Once you know, the day that the publisher asks you to write the about the author bio is the day that you get very good at patting yourself on the back.
1:08[laughter] I love it, man. I love it. So, I had the opportunity to uh check out the trailer of your new TV show, The Tim Ferriss Experiment. And I love it, man. I absolutely love it. I I believe that part of success is learning new skills.
1:24And I love how you just like you focus on learning as fast as you can, right?
1:29So, tell me a little bit about this show first. I'm really intrigued. Like, what where are you going with it and and where can we see this show?
1:36Yeah, absolutely. So, the context uh is kind of funny. I had never really planned on doing any TV or or or um taking that step because I was always approached with just ridiculous proposals to do really embarrassing things in reality TV, and it never made any sense. And then [clears throat] I had a broadcaster, Turner Broadcasting, approach me and they asked the question nobody had asked and they said, "What would you do in television if you could do anything?" And I was like,
2:06"Hmm, that's a good question." So, my two ideas were number one, I'd like to have a sort of action-packed show with really high stakes where I show like the the max limits of accelerated learning where I'm just killing myself to try to learn these insane skills in a week or less with really good teachers.
2:26And the second show idea was a show about how to become Jason Bourne. And uh because I love The Bourne Identity and I I I could go through that movie and name the skills that I wanted to learn.
2:38So, I ended up then Oh, and the third piece was I only want to make something that I would want to watch. And one of my favorite shows for a long time was No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, which was a really gritty, very cinematic, and now he does uh Parts Unknown.
2:53And the production company is called Zero Point Zero. So, I ended up being able to combine all three of those things uh where I I have a show in which I'm trying to tackle notoriously punishing skills one per week and I have typically three to four days to try to go from zero to the final test and uh I'm also learning or attempting to learn skills like, you know, tactical shooting, rally car racing, uh language learning. So, it's a set secretly. It's
3:23like a secret set of Jason Bourne skills. There's a little bit of Jason There's a little bit of James Bond thrown in there as well like the professional poker. And uh for those people who have who who don't uh have an example perhaps, the uh the way the stakes are set up.
3:36So, the show's intention is to show you how to get superhuman results even if you're not superhuman. So, if you don't have great genetics or great budget, how do you learn these complex skills really well in a extremely short period of time? And what is the toolkit? What is the accelerated learning toolkit that you can apply to anything? Um And I I I have a lot of face plants and injuries and and make a lot of catastrophic mistakes in this TV series, too. So, I want people to see that. It's not always hitting home runs.
4:05But, I might say have drumming. That was one episode. And Stewart Copeland is one of the top 10 drummers of all time is is one of the teachers. And then 4 days later, I have to play on stage to a sold-out audience with the band Foreigner. And those are the types of of pressures that and I got the digital distribution rights for the show. So, I am putting out all 13 episodes at once kind of House of Cards style on iTunes. And then I have bonus content
4:34that I'm going to put somewhere else. So, iTunes, if you just search The Tim Ferriss Experiment two Rs, two Ss, or go to iTunes.com/timferriss with two Rs and two Ss. And then I'm going to be taking extended scenes and interviews and all sorts of gems that I wanted to put in, but couldn't because of the time restriction at 4hourworkweek.com/tv. It's all spelled out 4hourworkweek.com/tv.
4:57So, that's that's the current plan, man. And you know, after a year of trying to get the rights that I now have, I'm just so stoked to finally be putting it out because um you know, it's I think it's a solid show, man. And I usually don't kind of say that type of thing about stuff that I make myself, but this is the kind of show that I would have wanted to watch and that I would watch and that I do watch. So, to that extent, I'm super happy and I
5:26hope people feel the same way cuz I don't watch a lot of TV, but this is reflective of what I would watch.
5:31Yeah, I love it. I love it, man. And if you don't mind, we'll uh share the trailer along with this podcast. Think that'll be Yeah.
5:36awesome and uh yeah, go for it. The the crowd can you know, check it out and you know, it's not an amateur show as well. I don't it it has really good production. I love how they kind of slow the bullet down as you should. been on it. It's yeah.
5:48yeah, yeah. I mean, when we did the tactical shooting, yeah, we have an incredible team. I mean, these are the guys who did Anthony Bourdain's uh not Anthony Bourdain's Anthony Bourdain's stuff. And I In that particular episode, the three-gun shooting episode, which is kind of like speed golf, but swapping between real firearms, shotguns, AR-15s, assault rifles, handguns, and so on.
6:07Uh which is wild. And you're timed. You have to run through this course and swap guns. It's insane. It's like real-world Halo or Call of Duty or something. But uh when we did that, we had for a day this insanely complex and expensive camera that can capture at, you know, like 10,000 frames per second. So, you get to sh- you get to see like the actual shotgun shell Oh, not the shell, but rather the payload coming out of the barrel and then slowly
6:35spreading. It's incredible. I mean, the the footage is really really wild. So, yeah. Yeah, we had It's It's a high production value. You don't get much higher.
6:43Beautiful. Are you probably tempted just to record the whole thing in like slow motion like that?
6:48[laughter] Well, I Yeah, it's I wanted to record some really ridiculous things like, you know, shaking my head and having my my jowls flap around in ultra slow mo, but um we were we were definitely on tight deadlines to get what we needed. So, they couldn't, you know, set up a $5,000 shot just to shoot my cheeks flapping in the wind. But uh yeah, slow mo slow mo is amazing. It It uh It can be used for a lot of things.
7:12Excellent, man. Excellent. So, you know, knowing what you know now and also the experiences that you've had, if you weren't doing this, if you weren't an entrepreneur, you weren't an author, what would you be doing?
7:24Okay, so I can't be Ooh, not being an entrepreneur is tough because uh you question.
7:28Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I couldn't be an entrepreneur or an author So, I have to have a job. Is that right?
7:35I have to have an employer?
7:37Yeah, I mean, you've had a lot of experiences now, so I would I would probably I would be either a marine biologist or I would be a comic book penciler. I'd say Wow.
7:49Maybe one of those two or storyboard artist for say a Pixar or something. Tough job to get but if we're if we're talking about yes, hypothetical fantasy scenarios then then perhaps one of those two.
8:02And do you have skills in these areas already?
8:04I do have some experience. I wanted to be marine biologist for about 10 years. So I don't have a whole lot of training but that's what I wanted to be when I was a little kid. And I still have a huge affinity for marine life and just I'm fascinated by by all types of marine life especially sharks cuz of course as a little boy that was what I was into.
8:23And um for comic book penciling, I wanted to be a penciler for also I'd say five or 10 years and I was a paid illustrator in college for a period of time. So as a college student I would create illustrations and drawings and designs for a number of books that my university put out and also was the graphics editor of a satire magazine at the at Princeton University. So I do have some background there but my skills have atrophied horribly. So I make no
8:50claims to be pro level at all. But I did have the same job as Jim Lee I suppose DC Comics now who is one of my favorite comic book artist of all time. So he he held the same we used the same desk in the in in the office of the Princeton Tiger but that's probably about as as close as our skills get since he's a pro.
9:12Excellent man, excellent. So during the Tim Ferriss experiment, did you have any aha moments? Like something popped up and you're like, oh my god, I didn't realize this.
9:22Yeah, I I had tons of aha moments. I probably had you know, a dozen an episode. I'm trying to think of a few that come to mind and I mean these are more kind of sound bite maxims. The the tools sometimes take a bit more to explain, but for instance, with the drums, one of the key breakthrough moments was learning to play the song, not the drums. So so given that I had such a short time frame,
9:49really spending more time on analyzing the anatomy of the song and figuring out what parts repeated and what parts changed so that I could limit my focus uh turned out to be just as important as learning the technical aspects of just working on the drums.
10:06Uh and uh that was a real breakthrough for me because I assumed I had to be very technically proficient with the basics before moving to say sheet music, but given 4 days as a deadline, you really don't have the leisure of taking that approach. So we had to flip things around, and uh that was that was a major breakthrough.
10:28Uh there were breakthroughs in in all of these skills. So for instance, in three-gun shooting, uh which was a blast, uh literally, I guess, uh the importance of reloading. So people think of like the boo boo boo boo boo all this being the the fast part, but if you are really fast at that, if you have cat-like reflexes for that component, but you have a slow reload, you're toast. You're done. You're going to lose. And so you have to get very very good at reloading, and it's kind of those in-between spaces, similar to
10:57music, where the the pauses are what make the music. You know, music is the space between the notes, some people would say. Uh you learn in these skills when you're working with a world-class teacher to focus on aspects that are neglected by by many other people. So let's say it's swimming. There's an episode on long-distance swimming, and I didn't learn to swim until my 30s properly. So I was actually one of the coaches and helped take this woman who really wasn't comfortable putting her face underwater to hopefully, and I'm
11:25not going to give away the punchline, but swimming open water in the ocean in like 50 ft of water or something like that, uh over a half-mile course. It's like, so how do you do that in 3 to 4 days? Well, you can't just focus on propulsion and kicking harder, kicking more, pulling harder. It doesn't work. You have to focus on the biomechanics and say the the duration of each glide, right? So that's the in-between space again. And it's like, how do you take your stroke rate down from like 20, 30 strokes per
11:55lap to 10 or 12 or something like that. And um that's the theme that recurred over and over again with with a lot of these teachers in a lot of these episodes.
12:05Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. And what would you say is another component that you would need to implement apart from just learning new skills? Is there anything else you'd have to bring to the table every time you are you're setting out to achieve success?
12:21Well, in the case of the the TV show, we filmed 13 episodes in I think 16 weeks or something suicidal like that. It was insanity. So we're filming If yeah, if you want a 4-hour workweek, don't work in television. That's one tip. But we were probably doing 12 to 16-hour days minimum each day, Monday to Friday. Saturday was basically a work day also. I was an executive producer, so I was reviewing stuff every night as well after all this. And then we'd fly to the next
12:50location. We had to move tons and tons of equipment, like whatever, 27 boxes of equipment. And Sunday was sort of planning day, and then it was back to it was right back to the grind and the next skill the next day. And um I got really beat up in some of these. I mean, parkour, which is sort of like breakdancing meets ninja running through a city, jumping off buildings and stuff.
13:11Really dangerous and uh it turns out and I got very injured. So the I had an entire suitcase full of recovery assistance, ultrasound machine, electrostimulation, DMSO cream, all sorts of pills and potions, compression pants, something called voodoo floss that you can wrap around your knees to to decrease inflammation. It went on and on and on. So, for me to sustain that
13:37level of intense effort and physical output over 16 weeks got to can't even in retrospect just gives me PTSD thinking about it required paying a lot of attention to physiological stuff and tools that I could use to to basically add an extra day of recovery in effect when I didn't have an extra day of recovery. So, those were those were those were also very very important.
14:05And I and I and I and I and I think in a general sense, if you're striving for a massive amount of say business success, however you define that, let's just say double, tripling, 10Xing revenue, you have to pay attention to the the highest value asset and that is your physical body.
14:22It doesn't have unlimited capacity and your neurotransmitters don't replenish perhaps as quickly as you would like and you have to learn how to have these intense bursts of activity, but also these recuperative moments where perhaps you take a 30-minute nap in the afternoon, perhaps you go for an hour-long walk after work at a certain time with a friend to decompress and basically meditate for that period of time.
14:43I think these built-in pauses for recovery or you take a hot bath every night with Epsom salts for instance. I do I do pretty much all of these things. Even though people from the outside looking in are like, "Wow, that guy is just like breakneck constantly shooting things out of a can." It's like, "I can't sustain that." And I've learned this in the last say 10 years without building in these breaks and recovery points.
15:03Yeah, beautiful. And one thing as well that I noticed, I watched I think it was a day in the life of Tim Ferriss. I saw you do TM, which I also do as well, transcendental meditation, which is amazing. How's your experience been with that?
15:17It's incredible. I mean, I just did 20 minutes this morning. So, I find transcendental meditation very helpful. I don't think that everyone needs to use Transcendental Meditation. Just tm.org for people who want to learn more. Uh there are aspects of it that bug me. Some of the kind of guru worship stuff that you have to go through in the beginning.
15:34Um and you don't have to worship it, but they have the you know the pictures of the Indian guy with a big beard, and that's all fine. But uh Vipassanā meditation, some type of mindfulness practice, I find to be a complete game changer. And people can use apps like Headspace or Calm to do guided meditation. Start with something really short. Start with 3 minutes, 5 minutes every morning. It makes an enormous difference. And um I find that sometimes I misbehave and I don't do it.
15:59Uh but when I do 5 days to 7 days in a row, um there's a cumulative effect that is really tremendous for me, where I just feel in the zone uh after that point if I maintain it. Um but there is sort of a ramp up period. Um and uh it's it's been instrumental in maintaining to the extent that I'm prone to it a level head while I'm trying to do all these very aggressive things.
16:25And quite a few of your uh books are bestsellers, right?
16:29Well, all yeah, all three of them.
16:30All three of them. Congratulations, man.
16:32Yeah, I've had a have a good I've had a good good tear.
16:35I love what you did with the uh the launch of the 4-Hour Chef. How you uh banded with Ryan Holiday, who I've also had on the uh the podcast, and and you guys uh launched it through uh torrents, man. I love that. I love that idea.
16:47Yeah. Yeah, we had to go guerrilla because uh it was boycotted. Since it was the first major book out of Amazon publishing, it was boycotted by Barnes & Noble and Target and Walmart. And almost all of the retailers, which made it very, very challenging to to uh to do my thing during launch week and move a lot of hard copies. So, you know, when when a when an obstacle pops up, you got to go over it, through it, or around it. And uh Ryan was a good partner for that.
17:14Yeah. And you were the first to go, so you know, you got to do something groundbreaking, right?
17:18Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, all right, well, if you know, if you're not going to let me follow your rules, then I'll have to make my own rules. And so, torrent was a was a really fun way to kind of shock and awe everybody and uh it worked. It worked. It worked really well. I think it was the like it's downloaded, I don't know, three or four million times. So, that definitely Wow.
17:38Yeah, packed a punch.
17:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. I love it.
17:42So, what would your tips be for writers nowadays? Like just the process, maybe even like your little rituals you go through, the the creative process.
17:51Uh for sure. So, I think like a couple of things. I'll make some recommendations, book recommendations. Um get a book called Bird by Bird. That'll help you manage the psychological and emotional challenges of being a writer. There's also some very good tactical stuff, especially for fiction.
18:05Bird by Bird is a must-read. Uh On Writing Well, I think is a good book. Uh if that's too dry for you, then I think it's just On Writing by Stephen King is phenomenal. And I actually want to reread that uh shortly. It's it's it's a it's a splendid book. In terms of process uh and patterns, what I've noticed is most prolific writers who are very good, they put out good product, write between 10:00 p.m.
18:31[clears throat] and 8:00 a.m. somewhere in that range. What that means is either they go to bed very late, which is what I normally do if I'm on book deadline. I don't do that right now because it screws up my whole day and makes me feel lethargic and so on. But, if I'm under the gun and I'm writing a book, I will write very, very late and go to bed late.
18:49Other people, like the author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, a friend of mine who wrote a best-seller, wake [snorts] up early and they'll write for a number of hours in the morning before most people are up. And I think that's the key is you're writing when your distrac- your distractions are fewer. You have fewer IMs coming in, fewer email, fewer voicemails, etc.
19:08People are just asleep. And so, you have that uninterrupted block of time to do synthesis.
19:12Uh my process uh in terms of um beverages and whatnot usually includes something like like tea uh and I I will combine that with occasionally depends on where I am in my life, but you know, a glass of Malbec. It's important not to have more than two glasses because your writing will not get better. Uh Although Hemingway used to say write drunk, edit sober. I got to say, when you write if you write drunk, it usually turns out crap. So, don't do it. But, I would have a glass of Malbec and then
19:40either yerba mate tea, uh which I would sip very uh consistently and slowly through a gourd, which is basically has a straw called a bombilla or bombisha that has holes in it. Uh or I would have something like this. So, this is um puer tea with turmeric and ginger in it.
19:59And uh then I'll pour this into a cup like this with a say tablespoon of coconut oil, which converts the brain likes coconut oil. The MCTs, the medium-chain triglycerides in coconut oil are super helpful. So, you make that little cocktail and uh you sip it and it it helps grease the wheels. And then I will very often listen to one or two albums on repeat in my headphones. And then I'll have a movie in the background on mute, a movie that I've seen like 100 times and that makes me feel less lonely
20:28when I'm writing. Um so, I did that with Casino Royale, did it with The Bourne Identity, and then with Babe, movie about the little pig for whatever reason.
20:35[laughter] I love that you've seen that 100 times, have you?
20:39Oh, hundreds, not just 100. Hundreds.
20:42[laughter] Oh, that's hilarious. That's hilarious.
20:46So, do you What What's your views on uh nootropics? Because I think that's uh that's kind of like a debatable subject.
20:54Oh, for sure. I would say it's uh it's a divisive it's a divisive subject, right?
21:00It's uh it's a very complex subject and I think people can do a lot of damage to themselves. So, nootropics or smart drugs are drugs and they they have a strong biochemical effect. But, what I would argue is that not just the standard portfolio of pharmaceuticals like the hydrogenes, the modafinils, the silteps, etc. Uh those are not the only smart drugs.
21:24So, the the yerba mate that I mentioned has three different stimulants as I understand it, caffeine, which we all know, theobromine, which is found in dark chocolate, and then theophylline, which is found in green tea. And by having all three, they peak at different points. So, you get this very even-keeled. If you sip it slowly over time as you write, you get this very even-keeled performance advantage. Like a like a a 10% or 20% uh boost for 2 to 3 hours. So, my preferred smart drug is
21:52actually just yerba mate tea. And I like uh my brand is Cruz de Malta, the Maltese cross. I get it with with the sticks, con palo. And um it's a wonderful ritual, too. Just as a wind down or a wind up in the morning, depending on what you need.
22:09I uh also saw a video with you where you went into the gym. I think you What are you doing? You're just like basically Rack pulls. I was doing rack pulls. That's right. Yeah, yeah. And so, and you went in you you were only in there for literally like 5 minutes. You're like, "All right, I'm finished." And you go.
22:24When I'm at the gym, man, I'm working out for like 40 minutes. And for me, I'm finding it hard to put mass on, to be honest. I'm kind of like a hard gainer.
22:32Am I doing something wrong?
22:33I would limit it to 15 to 20 minutes max, two or three times per week. And the hard part isn't the working out. The hard part is the eating. So, I would focus on Occam's protocol, which is in the 4-Hour Body, and which is very minimalist. Try that for 2 3 weeks and see how you respond.
22:50And uh if that fails, then I would I would have some comprehensive blood testing done, as well as have a a gastrointestinal sort of uh fecal matter test, so that you can identify if there's some type of digestive issue, say with your, you know, gallbladder or who knows what that might be preventing you from absorbing certain things or metabolizing certain things. But, usually Occam's protocol and a bunch of food um solves 99% of those cases.
23:17Okay, thanks, man. Thanks for the advice. I appreciate that.
23:21And so, also, I'm not sure if you had a chance to check out my website addictedtosuccess.com. Uh one of the top self-development websites online.
23:30And we we get around about 2 million views a month, which I'm pretty happy with. Uh if you're in my shoes, what would you do with that kind of traffic?
23:40[sighs and snorts] Huh. So, the short answer is I am very biased towards giving people things for free or things at very, very high prices. And I find that the kind of $5 to $50 price range, if you're handling the fulfillment yourself, is rife with headache. Uh it means you have to handle a lot of customers. It means
24:09you're going to have to scale out customer service of some type if you want to be responsible.
24:14And uh you will have a lot of complaints, no matter what. Even if it's the perfect product at the perfect price, 10% of the people who buy it will find a reason to make it their full-time job to send you complaints via email and other other ways of messaging. So, my preference has been to focus on free content for developing uh developing my platform, but all I mean, first and foremost, helping people get very good results with the advice that I
24:43give, with the recipes that I supply after meeting with all these uh and deconstructing these these world-class performers. So, tons of goodwill in so much as I put out free content that I could have charged for, right? That other people would charge for.
24:57And then I might do an event like I did where I charged $10,000 a seat in some cases. And it was on the sort of the future of content marketing. And uh if people bought in the first X number of days, it was 7,500, then it went up to 8,500, then it went up to 10,000. And because I'd built up so much goodwill and I had that audience, I was able to sell out the entire event from one 750-word blog post. And I think that you only get that if you've if you've
25:26established a level of credibility and reliability through the content that you put out. And and and then you aim for you you decide on what the way I did it was I decided on the price that I wanted um to sufficiently kind of winnow down my audience to a smaller number, like 200 people or whatever it was. And uh and then I decided what I would have to do to make that worth two, three X the price. Does that make sense?
25:55Yes, it does. [snorts] And and what I also did is I had people apply to be part of the event before producing the event. So I didn't have any cash outlay whatsoever until I knew that it was going to fly and that people were interested. And uh and then we we took it from there. So that's that's my preference. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat, mint thousands, hundreds, millions, I'm sure, of different ways to generate revenue. That's my preferred method. Just for maximum income for minimum headache, that's that's my that's that's been my general preference.
26:25I love the uh ready, fire, aim approach.
26:27Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's like don't test early. Test early and test often. There's no reason not to. In this age, there's so many incredible tools for testing.
26:37Uh you could you could test if you have an email list even before you put it on the blog, you could test to a smaller subset and see how people respond before you put it out with the big guns on the blog. Uh you could if you're going to create a product, thinking of creating a product, you could test it on Kickstarter. And if you can't sell it on Kickstarter, you're not going to be able to sell it anywhere else, and you save yourself the trouble. So, there are many different avenues out there. You could use a tool like Unbounce, for instance, to create landing pages and to split test copy to see what works and what
27:05doesn't. Um there are many options that make it foolish to invest a ton of money up front, generally, to say prototype and buy inventory and so on before you have sold a single unit. Do not make that mistake.
27:20There's no reason not to.
27:21Love it, man. Great strategies. Thank you for sharing that with us.
27:25Now, we're reaching the end of the interview, and uh I always end the interview with this question, which usually goes down pretty well. And the question is, if you were to deliver your last 30-second speech to the world, what would that last 30 seconds sound like?
27:40That's a huge question. Uh let's see.
27:43Um you are better than you think. Always test assumptions, especially your own.
27:51Uh and as as Richard Feynman said, Nobel Prize winner, uh the most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. So, if you feel like you must do something, you should do something, you're limited to options A and B, ask yourself, what if this weren't the case? Ask yourself, what if I did the opposite? Ask yourself, what if I just tested this for 2 weeks? I could always come back to where I am now.
28:16And ask the absurd questions. You know, what if uh what is preventing me from achieving my 10-year goal in 6 months, for instance, which is a question from billionaire Peter Thiel. And uh don't shy away from being unique, being yourself, being in the minority, because as Mark Twain said, "When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." Good luck, and don't give up.
28:41That would be something. That would be what I'd say.
28:43Excellent. Thank you so much, Tim.
28:46And for anybody that's listening or viewing this right now, make sure that you pick up the four-hour workweek, the four-hour body, the four-hour chef, whatever, man. Get Get at least one of the books, and I'm sure you're going to want to pick up the next one and then the one after that or before that. So, thank you, Tim. Thanks for joining us today, man.
29:04Oh, my pleasure. And for people who who might not feel like curling up with a big book, you can get a pretty good taste of of my style of doing things by by checking out the TV show. So, the Tim Ferriss Experiment 21 minutes, check it out. Choose one that you think will get your adrenaline going. And if you if you like that, you'll like the books, and you'll certainly like the other episodes. So, check it out on iTunes or on 4hourworkweek.com/tv.
29:27I'll be putting up a bunch of free stuff there as well.
29:30Excellent. Thanks, Tim. Cool.
