Barbell Shrugged - 162- Barbell Shrugged Interviews Tim Ferriss on Creating New Habits, Self Experimentation & Much More!

Episode Date: February 4, 2015

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we talk to New York Times best-selling author of the books 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, and 4-Hour Chef, Mr. Tim Ferriss. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe, standing here with Doug Larson, Chris Moore, CTP behind the camera. We have traveled up to Malibu to hang out with Mr. Tim Ferriss. Tim, welcome, man. It's a pleasure.

Yeah. Thanks for coming up. If you don't know who he is, go pick up his books, 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef, 4-Hour What's Next? 4-Hour Nap.? Four-hour nap. Once you split your day up in these four-hour segments. Yeah, there you go. Tim is one of the things that fascinated me about you is that you serve, you're always doing self-experiments and tweaking from there. And I don't think that's much different than what we've all done, but you've documented it, put it in books, and kind of shared with the world what works for you.

Right. And it's always been a compulsion of mine. I think that it started with wrestling in high school, and I was born premature, so my thermoregulation has always been off. And what that meant was I would overheat and I could only really give it my all for the first period or so maybe the second period so I got very good at cutting weight and towards the end of my high school career got to the point where I was cutting 20 to 30 pounds twice a week to compete which is obscene and not very safe

particularly if you don't monitor certain things. So I became very familiar with sodium, potassium sparing, diuretics, and things of this type so that I could do it the more intelligent way and also rehydration, right? Because dehydration is just one piece of it. So then how do you rehydrate intelligently? I love a lot harder in high school wrestling than MMA where you got 24 hours. What do you have?

Two hours maybe sometimes? Yeah. Or you might have to step right on the mat in which case depending on the regulations you that would change your strategy for cutting weight and rehydrating so it could just be a handful of hours and then it's like all right well why is pedialyte better than gatorade and what are the reasons you have to delve into the science and you have to you have to log for instance uh one of the things that i did which i think is is kind of representative of my style of experimentation, it's not my style,

it's just, I think, a good competitive practice, is that I would practice cutting weight for practices so that I could see the performance impact. In other words, I wouldn't do my experiment on game day, and a lot of people mess this up. A lot of lifters do that. You know what I mean? Lifters do it, MMA fighters do it. I know a lot of people mess this up. I mean, you know what I mean? Lifters do it.

MMA fighters do it. I know a ton of MMA fighters that only cut weight for their fights, and they don't practice it one single time. Yeah, or they take Nubane, or they take some type of stimulant right before the fight. They've never used it in training. They end up overheating. I have athletes who are like, oh, should I take this supplement today?

And it's like competition day. I'm like, have you ever taken it before? They're like, well, no. I'm like, no. I always try to go take a red line before a meet and have a heart attack on platform yeah we saw it happen to a dude really yeah this you know off label whatever the hell they put in there yeah don't shove it down and then listen to pantera at 11 get yourself all hot and bothered for your opener and then go out there and just pass out yeah or whatever on the platform bad policy exactly so i think that experimentation and we were chatting about this a little bit earlier is is really it's just understanding the scientific method and controlling your variables

and uh an experiment isn't a success or a failure you're either confirming or disproving a hypothesis and that's it and so so my, my whole life, my whole writing career, all of my work with startups, all of it is really about testing, finding sort of absurd, outrageous hypotheses to test. Yeah. So you're not just doing the fitness, every aspect of your life. Yeah. It's reflected in everything that I do. And there's a really good book, not mine, called Bad Science, written by a doctor named Ben Goldacre in the UK. And I actually excerpted one or two, no, I excerpted one of his chapters for The 4-Hour Body and then condensed certain aspects of that book into yet another chapter. But it really goes through how media compels people to misinterpret science and how you can separate the noise and the nonsense, the fact from the fiction and so on.

Outstanding book. I really recommend it to people because you hear folks all the time say, X causes this. And when you read the articles, if you've read this book, Bad Science, you're like, there's no way they can prove that. Right. Absolutely no way whatsoever and uh so very very simple things like correlation versus causation and i think what it what it helps you to do is learn how to not fool yourself and one of my idols is richard feinman who wrote a world-class physicist won a nobel prize uh also was part of the team, and he made the announcement, but who discovered the O-ring was the fatal flaw

in the Challenger. That is below a certain temperature. And he said, you know, the most important thing is to not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. Everybody needs to live that code in their life. Yeah, just getting good at testing your assumptions. It's like, okay okay if you think that like

A, B, and C are helping you, Pantera plus Redline plus this keep the Pantera I look more and more like Phil Anselmo every day, five minutes alone always does the trick on deadlift day, you don't need to test it it's just obvious that's right, it's a given, it's a universal law

but getting good at just improving your thinking and so the the precision of your thinking is is tied very closely

to experimentation it's like oh you think that works like let's let's throw it against the wall and see what sticks and actually measure it and I like that idea

obviously then I just latched on to like like Elon Musk was in an interview talking about what are the how do you do

all these things Elon shit it's really impressive he goes so I always just what would a physicist do go back to fundamental thinking like drill down into the most fundamental thing you can't get passed through and then reintroduce complexity and variables from there and always be going back to the foundation of source like test everything make sure this is true it's probably not somebody says you can't do something that's probably not the way it is yeah with respect to something that's something i don't think a lot of people consider is that if you take something like can't do something, that's probably not the way it is. Yeah, with respect to supplements, something I don't think a lot of people consider is that if you take something like creatine, for example,

that's widely considered to be something that works, whatever that means, and it means a lot of different things. But it might not work for you, though. If it works for most people, that still isn't a guarantee it's going to work for you. It might not work for you at all. There's a large variety of people that are non-responders to something like creatine.

So you still have to test it for yourself, even if it's generally accepted to work. Or the other way around. So you have high responders, right? Yeah. And you'll look at a study, let's just say, and I also think the degree of the magnitude of the change that you need depends a lot on your level of competition. So so for instance you could look at beet juice right or beetroot juice and its effect on endurance michael has to be threw up on beach shoes yeah you don't wanna you don't wanna you don't wanna do it you don't wanna be do like a beetroot you have a cake stand or anything beetroot raw egg smoothie then you went and ran or something. Yeah, I did like a 104 degree heat on Fourth of July in the park doing a CrossFit

WOD. Yeah, I yacked up raw eggs and beet juice. Was that punishment for something? He thought it was a good idea, too. It was one of those things. I woke up in the morning. I was out of a lot of typical ingredients. I was like, ah. So you throw up on the hill and go, ah, I totally tested.

I'm throwing up all this red gooey stuff and people around me are like, is Mike dying? It's like, no, it's just beet juice. Don't worry about it. Well, Tim will tell you why to try it again. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, if you look at the studies for beetroot juice, a lot of them show a non-significant, non-statistically significant response.

And just to give you an idea of how to think of this type of thing, it might be 10 elite athletes who are in this, it's an N of 10. And they look at the response, they're like, oh, it was only a, I'm making this up, it was a 5% improvement. It's not statistically significant. Well, it's like, hold on a minute. Or 2%. Let's make it even like a 2% improvement, non-significant. And the reason that it's non-significant is you need a combination of magnitude of change, and then you need the sample size, right? And you can have a statistically significant study with very few people. That's a misinterpretation where people are like, oh, it's only 20 people.

That study's bullshit. It's like, no, no, no, it depends. If they double their strength, that's significant. But the study was underpowered. So you start to look at it, and you're like, well, wait a second. Okay, didn't significant. But the study was underpowered. So you start to look at it and you're like, well, wait a second. Okay. Didn't have enough subjects. It was underpowered. They would have needed like a 30% improvement to be statistically significant in the conventional sense.

Plus, you're looking at elite athletes. 5% is meaningful, but what would the effect be on an untrained athlete? You look at creatine, for instance. Great example. It's like you could load someone, take them through a phase of creatine They could put on for the first time 10 15 pounds of Lean tissue right yeah a lot of it will be retention. You know water retention, but they will get stronger and It's another thing we could talk about but like sort of

Intermuscular physics get really interesting when you start blasting out the sarcoplasm, like adding fluid to the cell. But the point being, beetroot juice can work, and it can work really well. And you only realize, you can throw the baby out with the bathwater if you look at a lot of the reports of these studies, even from people who should know better. So, but to, to, to trade you a story where you're vomiting up beet blood in front of people. I remember I was doing an experiment with trans resveratrol.

So people who drink red wine because they think it's good for them. It might be probably for the social relaxation benefit and not the life extension benefit. Sure. People talk about resveratrol. Is it an antioxidant for the audience? Resveratrol is a component found in red wine that helps to turn on, as I understand it,

a set of genes called the sirtuin genes, S-I-R-T-U-I-N. And those have been implicated for life extension. And there are different ways to turn those on and off. But you'd have to drink like 48 cases of wine or something to really get like a clinically noticeable effect. Testes have been fired up. Those always matter. Yeah, but what's really interesting about resveratrol is that it can be... I found this video of this rat called Super Rat.

And it was nicknamed Super Rat because they fed it massive quantities of resveratrol and it doubled its endurance. And so they had a control rat and super rat. It might have been a mouse. And these scientists put up split-screen video of this mouse getting exhausted and this one just going and going and going and going and set it to the superman music and i thought to myself well

the life extension is really hard to test because you don't know until you die it's very uh it's very hard of as an n of one to test that but i was like i could test the endurance so i consumed uh what would be considered 60 days worth of trans-resveratrol. So two huge bottles. Because I looked at sort of the milligrams per, like a milligram of body weight that they use with the rats, and I just replicated it. And so I downed 60 days worth of these pills. This is a bold move, too.

Yeah, before one workout. So I just sat there and housed all these pills before one workout. And what I didn't realize, and then I got to the training facility. This was in South Africa, like a very sophisticated sports training center. Yeah, they got a huge sports science program. Amazing. And what I didn't realize, and I found this out afterwards, is that one of the ingredients, one of the sort of inactive ingredients,

was left off of the label. This happens a lot with supplements. Oh, I know. And the inactive ingredient, and I of the label. This happens a lot with supplements. The inactive ingredient, and I'm still not 100% clear on why they do this, but they cut it into a lot of products. It was, I think it was Imodin, and that's a laxative. Oh, boy. So I was sitting down, like, getting the ground rules for this running test that I was going to be doing. And I just started sweating profusely.

Like the, oh, sweats. Yeah, like the fear sweats. You know, where you're just like, God. Oh, this, like, rancid, just sheen of sweat coming out of me. And this sports doctor's like, are you okay? I'm like, I'm great. Did you tell him what you had done? Or is this like, you just give yourself.

No, no, no. I didn't tell him. I didn't want there to be any observer bias or anything like that. I think there's a terrible evil within me. So I was like, do you have a bathroom? I cut him off mid-sentence. I did one of these butt-pinching waddles, like a waddle sprint down the hallway,

and did sort of a reverse broad jump through the stall, and I was just total. I did the running test. Needless to say, I wasn't impressing anyone. Sounds like those little baking soda studies, man. Oh, God. Yeah.

Exactly. But experimentation, I think that this applies to people who are considering starting a business, people who are considering quitting a job. There are ways

that you can experiment that are not necessarily binary, right? So you could, if you're thinking about trying to negotiate with your boss for a remote work agreement, you can experiment that are not necessarily binary, right? So you could, if you're thinking about trying to negotiate with your boss for a remote work agreement, you can gather data over, say, a Saturday, Sunday, looking at the number of hours required to complete client projects or whatever your metrics are that you're measured on. And you

can gather that and you can make a case for it, right? It's an experiment. And so I view my life oftentimes as just a series of two week experiments. I find two weeks to be a good period of time for a lot of things. And, they certainly.

Technique works, by the way. I use, that was in the four hour work week. I did that, go, hmm, I hate sitting here

in this fucking cubicle. So one thing I started doing was tracking some of those things. This reminded me. And I presented a case. So yeah, I got the right to start working home. Like, not every other Wednesday things. This reminded me. And I presented a case. So yeah, I got the right to start working home.

Not every other Wednesday at first and every week and then slowly you kind of earn the trust and then you show the data and they let you do it. It's amazing how it works. That's awesome.

Yeah. This shit works. It does. It does work. And you can apply it certainly to all sorts of physical performance whether that be

fat loss, blood testing. A lot of folks know, fat loss, blood testing. A lot of folks get very infrequent blood tests. You know, I go through periods where I'll get blood tests every four weeks or do urinalysis every day. I'm between six weeks and four months for blood work right now. Yeah. And you'll hear from, there's some amazing doctors.

Some of my best friends are doctors, but there's also a lot of really bad doctors and you there's uh there's an expression p equals md which is past equals md and it's like there's just just like you have the top 10 in the class you have the lower 10 who barely scrape by yeah and you'll hear oftentimes like oh well like these fair these following markers aren't going to change for like 90 days 100 days at six months like come back in six months and i'll'll be like, it's just not true. Like you can change blood markers really, really quickly. Just some things in your blood might take longer, but there's a lot of things that will happen really quick.

And some things take a longer period of time. I mean, if you're looking at, say, I think spermatogenesis has like a 60-plus day cycle. Maybe it's a 69-day, oddly enough, or 60 to 70 day cycle. So if you're looking at changes like that, you have to take those into account. But if you're looking at LDL, HDL, the first thing to realize is that those can change very quickly. The second thing to realize is that...

The gusts coming in off the coast of Malibu. Yeah, it is very refreshing breeze. The second thing to realize is that those variables change all the time. So people who get an annual checkup and their doctor will say, oh, my God, this is too high. Well, probably they shouldn't say, oh, my God, but they'll say, this is too high. Jesus. This is out of range, right? This is too low, too high. We're going to prescribe these medications.

And the fact of the matter is before you, say, go on statins, and I'm not a doctor, I don't play on the internet, so work with your professionals, but you should verify that. Do it a second time. There's no harm. Pay the extra money if you have to. Verify before you go on a regimen of statins or anything else. Um, because I've seen people, for instance, who get testosterone replacement therapy and their doctors have drawn blood at different

times of the day. Yeah. That's a big problem because you could start stepping on the scale at different times of the day. Oh yeah. It's, it's, it's especially when you're dealing with something that is, that is released in the way that, testosterone is or a growth hormone, for instance, which you would have to measure through a proxy. But with testosterone, you could see a difference of easily 100 points if you do it on a different day of the week and a different time of the day. So let's say you do a testosterone test on a Monday after a hard weekend of drinking, and you test it at 10 o'clock when you usually wake up at seven. And then you compare that to a before test, which was a Wednesday at seven 30 in the morning or eight in the morning. Oh my God. You're going to think you're,

you know, your balls have fallen off. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking with Kirk, Kirk Parsley on an episode a couple of weeks back, maybe a couple of a couple months back now, who I think you had connected with at some point. And he was saying if you can sleep deprive somebody, even just for one day, you might be able to drop their test by like 30%. Oh, yeah. It's an insane amount. It wasn't much sleep deprivation, too. It was like a couple hours off. Yeah.

Yeah, it's easy. Same with cortisol. Like, you can mess with all that stuff. So if you think you have a big problem based on one of those markers, verify the test. Replicate the result. I mean, that's what engineers do in tech, right? They try to replicate the bug. It's like, well, okay, cool, you're reporting a bug.

If we can't replicate it, it's probably user error. Or it's another problem. It's some type of glitch that you misinterpreted. So anyway, I could go on and on, but I think about that kind of stuff all the time. With all your experimentation and your, I mean, the way I view you after reading some of your books is like you're real big on productivity and efficiency. What are some routines you do in the morning for that productivity and efficiency, and which supplements do you find are good for that? So let me address this. I'll address the supplements first.

The supplements are supplements. They're supplemental. So I don't take any supplements all the time. I think that's asking for trouble and if you think there's no side effect it just means you don't, you haven't

identified the side effect. And so I take no supplements all the time. I cycle on and off of everything because I think that the body's very sophisticated with negative feedback loops. I am currently taking a few things. When I wake up, I'm taking DHEA. It's a very, very small amount. 10 to 30 milligrams. I'm taking...

I will probably warn people in the crowd about that one, too. Yeah, yeah, sure. That's banned by water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And USADA. So if you're competing in a sport that's being tested...

Yeah, you got to be careful. Just stay away from that one. It's over the counter, but it doesn't mean that you can use it in competition. That's right. Those are drugs, folks. He's not taking anything illegal. Yeah, yeah.

And the other thing I would say is just, this is context, is that I'm coming out of a very difficult period of about six months where I had severe Lyme disease symptoms. And so I had deterioration of the joints. I had extreme chronic fatigue. I started having dementia-like symptoms where I was losing my short-term memory. I had trouble recalling names of close friends. I had extreme chronic fatigue. I started having dementia-like symptoms where I was

losing my short-term memory. I had trouble recalling names of close friends. It's terrifying. My knees were so swollen that I had trouble getting up and walking in the morning. So my regimen is not necessarily your regimen, right? But DHEA, I'm taking calcium deglucarate or glucarate. I read these things instead of pronounce them, which is useful for many different things. I'll let you guys read up on it. But pre and probiotics. So probiotics get a lot of fanfare. You don't hear as much about prebiotics.

And I'll be talking a lot more about this at some point. But if you don't have, I think it's helpful to think of your gut, and there are many different microbiomes, but if we're talking about the gut biome, you can think of it as a rainforest. And if the topsoil has been depleted, it doesn't matter if you're taking these amazing plants, i.e. probiotics, and throwing them down your throat because they won't take root. No substrate there. Right. It's important to create an environment in which beneficial bacteria can grow and to accomplish that you can consume

things like resistant starches, like baobab root is quite interesting. You can consume inulin for instance, different types of fiber and Oligofructose? Yeah, that's oligofructose. Oligofructosaccharides. Yeah. And I think that is going to get a lot of fanfare and get a lot of attention in the next few years. We should start marketing our product now. Yeah.

He's like, no, no, no, I already have mine. We're not going to catch up with him. And part of my theory about Lyme disease and why it's so poorly understood is that people, there are many people who have been diagnosed or diagnosed themselves as having chronic Lyme disease. If you talk to most infectious disease specialists or MDs in that area, they will dispute the existence of chronic Lyme disease. They will say, no, there's no proof that that exists. And then that will be countered by thousands or tens of thousands of people who say, what about all these symptoms? Right. Doesn't make any sense that it doesn't exist. And my pet theory currently is that

chronic Lyme is actually chronic depletion of gut flora, among other things. So when people are diagnosed, and oftentimes months of doxycycline or other broadband antibiotics to address Lyme, they fix the Lyme, let's just assume, for the time being, but they never fix their gut. And so they get depressed. What happens, right? If you're producing, if the gut is assisting in production of neurotransmitters, among other things, a lot of people call it the second brain, you get depressed. You get fatigued.

You have digestion problems. You can have joint problems. Sleep problems. Sleep problems. The symptoms overlap with Lyme disease, which makes it a fucking disaster from the standpoint of fixing. Yeah. In any case,

my morning routine, just to talk about, I focus on effectiveness more than efficiency, and I think it's important. I think that our thinking is only as clear as the labels we use and the words we use. For me, I think about it a lot also.

Writing helps. But effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency is doing things well. about it a lot. Also writing helps, but effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency is doing things well. So it's possible to be, to be very efficient, but be efficient at doing the wrong thing. So I try to, in the mornings, uh, my routines are usually focused on a number of things, including clarifying and confirming what those few things are that matter. So I will wake up. I have tea every morning, but I'll usually wake up and I'll have, I'll do 15 to 20 minutes of transcendental meditation.

Then I will start my tea. I'll boil the water, or actually it's 185 degrees, so I get very specific. You have to be specific, folks. Yeah, I get it to 185 degrees. You're going to water and toss on your tea and coffee, you animals. Savages. Savages. Savages. What are you doing to the coffee?

So I have a Cuisinart kettle that allows you to pick the temperature. Oh, nice. And to 185 degrees, then I usually have a combination that, just like you guys saw earlier, I have this stuff. So it's Pu-erh tea, which is an aged black tea, typically from China, combined with turmeric and ginger. And then I like to add in some type of green tea, oftentimes a sencha. And if I'm feeling sick or if I feel like I'm coming down with something, I'll add garlic to that.

So minced garlic, usually. But otherwise, that is sort of my morning tea. And then once I have my tea, I will sit down and I will do one of two things. I'll either use something called the five-minute journal, which was actually created by some readers who made it their muse, their business after the four-hour workweek. But it's five minutes, first thing in the morning, five minutes right before you go to bed. And it's really, really helpful for, I think, priming your mind for the day. And it does that through three things you're grateful for. Forcing you to re-identify your priorities. And then having basically a performance review before you go to bed.

And either that or morning pages. So I will freehand journal. And the intention of that is not to be a good writer. And I think it's particularly valuable for people who never write or don't write, actually. Because it allows you to take the self-defeating talk or anxieties or worries that you have, your preoccupations, and trap them in the form of words on a page so that you can get on with your fucking day.

Yeah. And not have them ricocheting around in your head like a stray bullet. So usually one of those two things. I like to, so let's just say hypothetically, I've been trying to wake up earlier. I've always been a night owl, but let's just say I'm waking up earlier. Struggle with the same thing. So that gets us to, let's just say, 8.30, 9 o'clock. At that point, I like to do some basic mobility work,

focusing currently on sort of ratcheting up to an overhead squatting movement. Yeah. Because I've had a lot of challenges with my thoracic mobility, and I've had shoulder surgery, so just this entire area has been frozen for a decade. It's pretty common for wrestlers, too, to have that. Yeah, I mean, it's like I have little Tyrannosaurus arms, and I also write.

It's a conflagration of problems. You wrestle and write. You're screwed. And then from after that 20 to 30 minute exercise block i will like to focus on uh some type of content uh whether it be writing audio interviewing etc and then lunch and then after lunch is where i do the the grunt work so if there's any grunt work i need to do and by by grunt work, I mean stuff that doesn't require me to really be walking a mental tightrope and all cylinders on. So interviewing, I sometimes, interviewing for research, I would put in that bucket, right? Not

for broadcast, but for research. And on and on and on. So that's sort of the first three to four hour block of most of my days, at least in the last six months. So you try to be by yourself to be the most effective? You find like being alone with no distractions is the way that you're most effective? For me, yes. And I'm actually, part of the reason I'm down here in California,

it's such a goddamn huge state. Yeah, I feel like sometimes you're like Northern California and Southern California. It's a very contentious relationship. I think they're trying to divide the state right now. It's very sort of like Texan in a way. It's like if you had a wimpy Texas, it would be Northern California. You know, like the didgeridoo playing, pot smoking.

San Francisco's are like, oh. You know, this is, we're so different. Which is fine. But the, how the hell did I get over there? So being alone, I find one of my favorite ways to procrastinate is to talk and communicate with other people. So I need to remove the option to do that. And I do that by trying to isolate myself. I think that's another reason that I ended up being a night owl is that I found I was most productive

very late at night where I couldn't procrastinate by IMing my friends. I wasn't getting phone calls. So from 10 p.m. to like 5 a.m. Still,

if I'm under the gun and I need to get a lot of high quality, hopefully high quality writing done, I'll still revert to that. Well, there's some magic

that happens like at 2 a.m. You're in the zone, you're writing, and the house is flat, kids and wife and anybody else in the house are asleep. It's an addicting thing. It's a magic place. And so when I look at the top, in my mind, like high-performing writers, and by high-performing writers, I mean people who kick out high-quality writing on a consistent basis, among my friends, without exception,

that's not true. There are a few journalists who have just been like, had a gun against their head for deadlines every day at X point in time. Those guys are machines. They just,

and women, they're just absolute machines. I can't identify with them. They're kind of terminators. But among people who have not had that journalistic trench warfare experience,

they either go to bed very, very late, like I did for a long time, so they have that quiet time when other people are asleep. So they either work after everyone else is asleep or they wake up before everyone has woken up. And they fall into those two groups. So it's either the night owl camp or the people who wake up at like 4 or 5 in the morning,

write for two, three hours, and then contend with the family, friends, business, et cetera. You just explained a lot of things that seemed like people who are night owls are like, oh, they're just probably trying to get away from busy people or the busy activities of the day. I feel like there's a fight between the night owls and the morning people all the time. They both think they're right and they don't like each other. I would say practically

for people who want to be a writer, I write more now, but for a while you don't get paid to write for a long, long time. You don't get paid to write. So you hustle during the day

and then because you want to create an opportunity for yourself, guess what? Writers write. If you want to be one, you got to put in a lot of fucking writing.

So you will stay up or you will get up and if you don't want to do that, then that's probably not going to happen for you. You can't wish it to happen. You got to sit down and do this for a long time. You got to do the writing time. And I actually do my best drafting and editing by hand. So I would do use a computer. Obviously it'd be hard to get by without it, but

the, I always do my first drafting and my note-taking in the field by hand. And then I'll identify the pieces that I want to put in order for a draft. Sometimes I'll then draft on the computer, but I will always print out and edit by hand. And in fact, you have 100 pages of a friend's, one of my very close friends' books. I'll give him a shout-out, Neil Strauss Strauss who's a 7 time New York Times bestselling author so his new book is going to be amazing I can't say anything about it can I sneak in there while you're doing this

and take a look at the cover but I printed it out and I'll be editing reading and editing today just to help because he's been super helpful with a lot of my books as well I met Neil in Sedona a few months ago maybe he was super generous gave me a lot of awesome advice as well. Yeah. I met Neil in Sedona a few months ago, maybe he was super generous, gave me a lot of awesome advice and Neil's just was more than happy to share.

Neil's really tactical on a very, very good writer. Really brilliant. You know, a list interviewer as well, just from so much time at the New York times and Rolling Stone and so forth. But yeah, just to,

to, to bring it back to that point of sort of being alone, it's more that, I'd say, the writers who really hit home runs consistently, I'm not putting myself in that category, but just observing it, it's like between 10pm and sort of 7am.

And whether they're at the front end or the tail end, they find time when the rest of the world is asleep. And to underscore I think a principle behind that, I think self-discipline and self-control are very overrated.

Or there's an expensive... They're expensive. They're cognitively expensive. So you can have decision fatigue. It's like, okay, you could leave like, alright, left to my own devices, I like Triscuits. Sure. You know, I like ginger cookies. Love them. You know, I could leave them just like laying around my house and rely on self-control, but no, that's, that's a fool's errand because I'll either tax myself cognitively

or I'll break. And so the, I think think putting systems in place that prevent your lesser behaviors is more effective and more efficient in terms of energy preservation than just trying to get more discipline, more discipline. And so by forcing myself to write in such a way that I am isolated, that I have a protected three to four hour block of time. I don't have to develop the self-control necessarily to stay off of Twitter or Facebook or not respond to my friends' texts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because I'm simply choosing

a setting and a system that absolves me of that responsibility. So, you know, the AT&T had a slogan way back in the day, which was the system is the solution. And I think that that's a really, actually a great slogan for life. It's like, if you're finding things taxing and too hard, think about systematizing and process and not just like trying harder. Once you've identified those systems and you know that for input X, you're going to get output Y, then it's like great. I have no problem with hard work. Once you've

built a machine that allows you to get the most leverage, that's great. But otherwise, it's just like your Sisyphus. You're pushing a boulder up a hill that's just going to keep rolling down and knocking your ass down to the bottom. You won't win that. If you don't want to cheat on your wife, you shouldn't hang out at the Playboy Mansion five days a week. There's going to be temptation

there that eventually you're going to crack on. That was only once. That was only once. Let's take a week. Right. There's going to be temptation there that eventually you're going to crack on. That was only once. That was only once. In fairness. Let's take a break real quick. All right, guys. This is Tim Ferriss, and you were listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com.

Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. And we're back with tim ferris you did write the four-hour body i did and in that uh boat you have a chapter on strength and i've heard also heard you talk about hacking the deadlift and yeah and all that kind of stuff and uh to be honest i make fun of the word hack a little bit i think it's overplayed it's just like it's like i had this i mean it's like I think it's overplayed. It's just like, I had this. You mean it's a habit you formed?

Well, no. I think that at this point hack has just become so overused. I don't use it that much because it's kind of like No Fear was all the thing back in the day. It's like, if you're only wearing No Fear stuff, no offense. I mean, it's a cool brand, but it's just like, God, it just got

oversaturated at a point. I wish I would have kept some i know you didn't move on or it's just like you're still collecting beanie babies really like that was that was a thing but not anymore it's what i love uh no so the the the strength components i i really feel like strength is and this is not uh my own you know invented. A lot of people feel this way, but it's sort of the bedrock for all of the other physical attributes. If you're trying to develop strength, if you're trying to develop, I'm sorry, flexibility or endurance, metabolic conditioning,

I feel like focusing on relative strength is a very effective and efficient way to go about it. And it limits your variables, right? So if you're focusing on relative strength, sort of per pound body weight strength, as opposed to absolute, what does that remove for a lot of people? It removes the need to learn how to eat for hypertrophy,

which is actually a big deal for me. This has probably been a strong one all the time, right? Would you call yourself a hard gainer, Tim? I would say yeah, I mean, this is kind of my natural my fighting weight would be 175

cutting down to 165, 160. But I've been as heavy as my very heaviest. I was 215 and not fat. Wow. But that required. You got Bledsoe's PR beat, I think.

But that required eating. I mean, my full-time job was just eating. That's it. I mean, the training wasn't the hard part. It was the eating that was the hard part. A lot of people don't understand that. Eating just consumes your whole life. Not many people have actually plateaued at gaining weight.

A lot of people plateau at losing weight, and then they're frustrated because they can't eat anything. But most people haven't plateaued on gaining weight, and then you're like, what the fuck do I do? And you still try to eat more, and you're not getting bigger, and it just consumes your whole existence. And that's very frustrating because you can't do anything else. It's frustrating.

You feel like you're trapped in the Coney Island hot dog eating competition. You're just like, to what end? You know, this is, I'm not getting any weight, but I'm eating another thousand calories. This is horrible. Yeah. I feel the pain. So, so the point being you remove that entirely when you focus on say, uh, developing, uh, maximal strength or near maximal strength in the deadlift movement as one example so in the four hour body there were a number of chapters that address strength uh one of them was uh basically co-authored by marty gallagher who worked with ed cone oh wow who pulled what was it 902 at 220 yes sumo and conventional stance he's the strongest guy ever, pretty much. What did AJ pull? Over 900.

Or over 800 at least. He benched 900. You might not even know that. AJ's one of the best powerlifters ever. That's amazing. That's incredible. Those are big numbers. Talking about the social media over there. Or the couch. He likes to sit down. So there was that chapter which focused on

the bench press, which has always been a major weakness for me, just with all the shoulder stuff, among other things. But the deadlift protocol was based on the work of a coach named Barry Ross, who's actually based down here. And he was Allison Felix's coach. And she was the first track athlete, at least to my memory, who went from high school to professional track directly. And his athletes have broken, his athletes have broken, I want to say, at least a dozen national and world records.

And the core of their program, and this has been replicated with skaters, swimmers, crazily enough, they focus on conventional or sumo pulls to just below the knees and they're focusing on their weakest range of movement breaking the weight off the floor and then dropping the weight

and what they'll do just break the weight off the floor and then drop and the reason they drop is not I see some people I've spent a lot of time around CrossFit and CrossFitters. A lot of people don't realize this. Like, I used to train with a lot of the early Santa Cruz CrossFit guys in, like, 2000, 2001 because I trained at a Half Gracie Jiu-Jitsu school way back in the day.

CrossFit looked very different back then. But the point being, there's some people who lift in the gym, they're just like, they really want to make a show of it. I'm not saying that it's not like a King Kong reenactment it's they just pull and they drop the reason they drop is to avoid hamstring injuries in the eccentric lower portion because as a track athlete

you have a torn hamstring you're done depending on which black market chemist you have around you and so they would pull from the floor up to the knees roughly and then drop. And they would do two to three repetitions that way. And then they would have at least five minutes in between sets.

But at sort of the halfway point in the break, so let's just say it's two and a half minutes, two and a half minutes at the midway point, they would do some form of plyometric exercise. So they would either be jumping up onto something and back down, or ideally running short sprints. Oh, if they're a track athlete. That's right.

The running is what makes sense. 10 to 15 meters. And you would do this for just a few sets, and then you're done. And he also used this for the bench press and some of the other power movements, but for a track athlete, it made no sense to come all the way down

to sort of regulation touch point. He was looking for like a potentiating effect. Exactly. So they were using sort of what you might see with two or three boards. And it was all of his athletes, including like the 13-year-old old girls can pull like two to three times body weight for repetitions once you're explosive it's easier yeah and i was astonished

because i uh you know i've always like hand strength has been a weakness for small hands and uh it's uh i was just astonished by how quickly i didn't use wraps. Um, how quickly it was able to add, you know, a hundred, 150 pounds to my, my, uh, max deadlift. It was, it was insane. I mean, we're talking like two to three months. That improved your grip strength as well. Oh, incredibly. Yeah. Just unbelievably. Are you trying to pull weight off the ground that you wouldn't normally deadlift? Is this like something that's okay. So like say your max deadlift is 400, you're putting like four 15 on the bar and just trying to break it off the ground. Well, no.

In my case, my hands, if I were doing, say, deadlifts for repetitions, and I'd have to look back at my journals. I mean, I have all this stuff recorded. But let's just say that after four or five repetitions, my hands were the weakest link, and I couldn't pull more than like 315 for a set of five or something like that. I got to the point where I was doing with trap bar, because I ended up experimenting with trap bars, like 475 from the ground for reps with no reps, with just chalk. And it's like, that's a pretty tremendous jump in weight

and doing so comfortably without any injury. And not a lot of fatigue either. Zero fatigue. You would come out of these workouts feeling better than when you went in, which was just a revelatory experience for me. So I find, and what I liked about the protocol, among other things, is number one, you're like total sort of time under tension for a week.

Now keep in mind, this is for a track athlete, not someone who's focusing exclusively on powerlifting. Right, so if you're trying to get better at the squat or deadlift itself, the rules may change a little bit. The rules may change, right, because there's a much more... It's totally different, right? It's like... It's completely different. The contrast in loads is what's important.

But, yeah, what's fascinating about it, though, is that if you were to look at how most people practice partial movements, they're focusing on the maximal strength piece of the range of movement. They're doing rack pulls or something like that. And I'd never seen anyone just practice off the ground to the knees. I just found that juxtaposition so fascinating. We would abide by that.

If you can take something and make it really heavy, but use the minimum amount of load and do the least amount of wear and tear on your body, you can get a really

strong training effect and you're going to keep being able to be strong because you're not beating your dick in every day at the gym. People, they go,

I'm frustrated. I can't do, I'm trying to get stronger. I do this, this, this, this, this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this Monday through Friday. I train two times on Sunday. They're like, dude, you got to do a fuckload less stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And also maybe move fast occasionally. Yeah, definitely. And I think that this is something that I'm going to talk more about with probably Kelly Starrett at some point. But Kelly's the guy to ask about this. But sort of the death of athleticism. And there's a lot of working out for the sake of working out.

There's nothing wrong with that per se. But just to take a slightly different tack on it, what I would say is for me, over time, especially now, I've realized something that I was originally told by, I don't know if you guys know the name, Ken Leisner. Yeah. Dr. Ken. He's in New Jersey, wasn't he? Yeah. Oh, yeah. know the name ken leisner yeah dr ken he's in new jersey wouldn't he yeah oh yeah um i i did

the hardest workout of my life was probably with dr ken having him put me through a workout and i was coming from having trained with this former military guy named matt britsky who's also the head of strength conditioning at princeton at the time and uh so of course dr ken just wanted to fucking hammer me to the floor which he did very very successfully but the point being he had said at one point that the priority of

strength training for sports is injury prevention number one and then secondly it's performance enhancement but number one it's injury prevention and I think that it's very easy when you're chasing PRs to lose sight of that. And, uh, I'm at a point where I don't really care if I can clean 400 pounds. I don't, I don't really care. I mean, I don't care that much, but if I could get back into, into say previous

competition wrestling condition or back to the point where I could do the, uh, the gymnastics and acrobatics that I could do when I was in my early 20s. That's interesting. Having that type of versatility. So that has modified my training approach substantially. And anything that has even a moderate injury potential is out. I don't care about the functional benefit like if there's if I could tear a ligament or tendon and there's sort of

Empirically you look at like the data set and it's like wow people always fucking hurt themselves with X Just not gonna do it. Yeah, I don't care what the performance upside could be It's not gonna be true as I get older Yeah Yeah If you haven't ran a sprint in years and you try to run a full speed

100 yard sprint, if you take a group of 100 people that are in good shape and they ran a full speed 100 yard sprint, it's like guaranteed

fucking 10 of them are pulling a hamstring. Definitely. It's like it's going to happen. Yeah, definitely. So something like that you would just avoid

at all costs or you would strategically build your way back towards it. I would avoid or I would build myself back up to it. So I'm working

with some... I've never been someone who's focused on Olympic lifts, partially because I've always had, I shouldn't say always, but I had reconstructive shoulder surgery and I was just very tentative at best in considering these movements. But I have been working with this incredible

Olympic weightlifter in northern california and a guy named jersey gregorik who's really polish guy just a fascinating character and working with very very very lightweights i mean absurdly lightweights with impeccable attention to mechanics and form and uh it's been fascinating to see the, once you sort of correct alignment and posture and everything is firing properly, even if you're using weights that would get you like kicked out of a jazzercise class,

there's incredible transfer over to other things. And that's been, it's never been my model. Do you know what I mean? My model has always been like, go to failure, puke in a bucket, whatever the fuck. You know, like, if you can walk gingerly out the door after a workout, like, you didn't work out.

And some value to that. Just not the whole story. Yeah, and so I've, but just from wrestling and all this stuff, I've always had that kind of brute force mentality. And I'm at a point where, especially after learning to swim very late in life, 30 plus with total immersion, and that's in the form of body. I talk about that, but rethinking the biomechanics.

The way I got to the point where I could swim long distances swimming was not by working out. It was by viewing it as practice, not workout. It's practice, not a workout. And so more and more, even if I'm doing heavy lifting, for me, I view it as practice, not workout. Because I think it's phrasing it that way sometimes. Changes your mindset. Changes your mindset.

Interestingly enough, I just started changing how I name workouts for Olympic lifts. So we're developing a program right now specifically for bringing like someone who doesn't have a lot of exposure, like years and years of exposure to Olympic weightlifting and good coaching. We're like kind of rebuilding the foundation for that. And yeah, I started naming snatch and clean and jerk stuff under practice. And the workout comes after. It's like the workout comes after the practice. And I find that to be very true. practice and the workout comes after. It's like the workout comes after the practice and so like that

and I find that to be very true it like puts people in a different mindset about what they're doing because people just want to max out all the time. Yeah and it's I mean mind your labels folks it's like if you're going to take one thing away from this mind your labels. I mean those words have a lot of power

and you take a word that people have heard for decades, but they haven't trained before. And you're like, okay, this is a workout that is going to affect their behavior. The things they sacrifice, i.e.

technique. Right. In, in, in replace it with effort, which is a dangerous, a dangerous, a kind of fasted bargain.

You're, you're unknowingly framing that experience and what it should be for them by naming it inappropriately? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And the person who introduced me to Barry Ross was actually Pavel. And I always thought it was Satsulin, but it's Satsulin.

If you search Pavel, this guy's coming up immediately. He is the Pavel. Yeah, he's the Pavel, which is impressive when you consider that. I think it's like Peter in Russian. So it's a very common name, but he is the Pavel. And he, Pavel is...

You just interviewed him on your podcast. I did, I did. And so for people interested, if you just search the Tim Ferriss show and Pavel, P-A-V-E-L, it'll pop right up. It's excellent. It ended up being, for me, and I've read a lot about this stuff, and I don't make any claims to be a world-class athlete or anything like that, but I've interviewed a lot of world-class athletes, and we talked about every aspect, all the attributes, of course,

so let's just say flexible flexible strong uh and so on but we talked about different training approaches and and how they have evolved since say the 80s and what he's focused on in particular because pavel is and i've done some training certifications with with pavel is very very strong and very very flexible and i've noticed that with uh some of the olympic weightlifters that i've that i've spent just they're particularly, and I think this is very uncommon in modern society where we end up in this type of position, it's like kyphotic position. They're sort of hip and thoracic and shoulder girdle flexibility is just amazing. So I'd encourage people to check that out.

I mean, it's one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. And I should just take a step back and say, the reason I started the podcast, there were two reasons. And the first was I enjoyed being interviewed in long form as opposed to doing, you know, I've done a lot of, let's say, short TV morning show stuff. It's like, okay, you have your 15 seconds. The person's looking past your head at a teleprompter. It's like the fakest conversation ever imaginable.

You have to get the three hours in advance to have your head airbrushed. It's horrible. It's a miserable experience. We actually did bring our makeup artist in for you today. Well, I wanted to step out of the glare so you guys would be able to see anything with my reflective forehead. So the first was I enjoyed it. Mark Mara and Joe Rogan and so on.

I really enjoyed being interviewed, and I wanted to see if I would enjoy being on the other side. The second was for all of my books, I've interviewed these guys like Pavel or Brian Orozco, who's an amazing parkour athlete who's competed in American Age Warrior. And these interviews would be one, two, three hours long. So podcast length, but they were never shared with anyone. And I was just like, I would always think like halfway through,

I'm like, Jesus, these gems are amazing. And I can only put 10% of it in the book. And they're just lost. So it's been fun to record like with Pavel. I mean, it's sort of a masterclass that people can go back to that is not going to expire. Right. And we did one with another guy, actually, some of your fans might be interested in, named Josh Waitzkin. So a lot of people won't know this name, but Josh Waitzkin was, if you guys have ever seen the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

Yeah. So he's the little kid in real life. So he was considered a chess prodigy, but he has a sort of learning framework, skill acquisition framework, that he has since applied to push hands, tai chi. He was a world champion. And then also to Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

So he actually co-founded a school with Marcelo Garcia in New York City. Marcelo's. You know Marcelo? Yeah. The phenom. I mean, he's really pretty much the undisputed best Jiu-Jitsu fighter of the last 20 years or in history.

I mean, even the top guys are just like, yeah, he's the guy. I went and grappled with him one time, and it was the first time that I felt like I didn't know anything. I tried to do something, he would just be like, just throw me on the guy. I went and grappled with him one time, and it was the first time that I felt like I didn't know anything. I tried to do something, and he would just be like, just throw me on my side. I would feel like a beginner, like I'd never done anything in my whole life. I'd been grappling for like 10 years. And he would kind of laugh at me and be like,

no, no, no, you still need to try. I'm like, I was trying. He's the nicest guy ever, but then he's just like, and you're like. Dangerous guy. Yeah, so Josh Josh very few people know this he's the

the first black belt under Marcelo oh really and and he applied the same kind of learning methodology to all these things he's done it also

with finance and so I did so I did an interview with Josh Waitzkin and it's it's just the opportunity

to sort of capture those conversations yeah and share them has been really fun oh wow it's just the opportunity to sort of capture those conversations and share them has been really fun. Wow, that's amazing. And you did, can we talk about who you just interviewed? Yeah, definitely. And that'll post on what day? So I did have the opportunity, another reason I'm down here,

to interview Arnie, the man himself, the Terminator, on Earth's first snagger at his house, which was just a surreal, amazing experience. Oh, I'm sure. Oh, my God. That should be out probably February 3rd, first week of February, I would imagine. So you can just subscribe to the podcast on iTunes,

Tim Ferriss Show, and hopefully we can put some links in the show notes. But the Arnold is, I was so fucking nervous for that interview. I didn't sleep. But where do you go from there? After you get Arnold, that's the tippy top, right? Well, he's the man for us.

We lifted weights in the beginning because this fucking guy. Arnold, he's the most natural alpha ever, first of all. It's not contrived. He's just like oozes alpha, obviously. And his factual recall is just like second to none and i've met some some world-class memory athletes who compete you know memorize thousands of numbers and his effortless sort of natural recall is is unbelievable just hardware wise and uh we got into some really really fun stuff and i i don't want to go too deep into this, but we spent probably 15 minutes.

Do you remember in Pumping Iron when he's talking about when he's getting inside, like, Ferrigno's head? And he's like, oh, you know, if it was just three days later, it'd be perfect. And you can see Lou like, oh. And then they're talking about him giving advice and telling people to yell in the showers when they're posing. And he's like, and then I give them the wrong advices and like, ha, ha, ha. And he is a master of psychological warfare. So we talked. We got into that for like 15 minutes.

Did he fuck you up? No, no, no. He's like, these are not the droids you're looking at. No, he didn't. No, we talked about some like how and how he would do that, how he would pick like his targets. And you can build up your own confidence. You can also remove the confidence from other people. And very fascinating, super fascinating conversation.

But so that was definitely a huge highlight for me. But what I want to do with these interviews, among other things, is, you know, I want I Arnie was a dream come true, because, I mean, obviously, we're sort of, I'm a child of the 80s, so. Oh, yeah. You know, Predator and everything else, I mean, that's just like burned.

Oh, Commando. Was that your first question? The saw blades, like, you know. First things first. Predator? I mean, what happened when, I was like, there's a plot hole I need you to fix for me.

No, no, no. I actually, I'll tell you. No, I can't. Oh, come on, Tim. All right. I'll just tell you how I opened the interview. The opener of the interview was, all right, I want to start off by talking about big balls.

That was my opener. There are some crazy stories from that guy. But what I want to do is have you know the arnold's of the world certainly and i'd like to i'd like to there are a couple of guys i i uh who are who should be on the show shortly who are sort of a-listers in the hollywood world but at the same time what i want to do is find the really esoteric crazy edge cases so for instance i've uh i want to get these are like kind of two fantasies of mine one would be like the highest paid custom knife crazy edge cases. So for instance, I've, uh, I want to get, these are like kind of two fantasies of mine.

One would be like the highest paid custom knife maker in the world. I want to find the guy who's like, I only make 20 knives a year. Right. They cost a hundred grand a piece. Right. That's it. And if you want one,

you have to come talk to me. Yeah. Yeah. You have to come and like run an American Ninja Warrior course while I'm like shooting crossbow that year or whatever. Like I want to find that guy. Because people who are the best at what they do, they share things in common. You can always learn a lot from them.

Even if they're the most amazing door handle polisher in a castle somewhere. You can learn something from them. I want to find one of the highest paid escorts in the world, like a call girl. Me too.

No, but the idea is that's a flooded market. At the top end, you're all attractive, so why are you getting paid 100 times more? At some point, there's a point of diminishing returns. After $2,000, what separates the ten thousand dollar girl from the two thousand dollars and it's because there's a point where attributes aren't enough right you get to like the michael phelps level in swimming and you can see this from like high school level it's like oh you got like the slightly chubby kid the very tall kid that this that that

this kid and as you get to higher levels of competition the body types become more and more similar until they all look basically the same. And at the highest point of competition in almost anything, and there are complete freak shows who show up once every 10 or 20 years, but otherwise, it's like, all right, now it comes down to your systems,

your routines, your training, your coaching. Belief in what you're doing. So I would find out from her, I'd be like, all right, who is your coach? Like, seriously, to get to that level. Yeah, yeah. your training your coaching belief in what you're doing so like I would find out from her I'd be like alright who is your coach like seriously to get to that level

like yeah yeah somebody had to teach you something yeah exactly it's just like so I would just I'm really looking forward

to getting some of those really unusual edge cases because they just they're never interviewed and I don't know why well I love that like it's a good advice to athletes

you can go out like if you want to be alifter uh you can go out and find and you should and you should just take whatever money you got and go out and spend time with them because it's being around them you'll learn it like the experiences you said you had but i found that like one of my favorite books ever for let me think of new insights into lifting was like born to run yeah oh yeah it was running it was different but But the way he presented that case of running, I saw all kinds of insights into the thing I loved. I didn't have to go, like, I wouldn't necessarily get a lot of value out of reading more about strength training.

Right. Because the same ideas are just being hashed and hashed and kind of recombined. Yeah. But a whole fresh take is empowering. Oh, absolutely. You see, well, shit, we have nothing in common except almost everything. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. The way we approach this thing we love. Definitely. And I think that that's where the gems are, well, shit, we have nothing in common except almost everything. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The way we approach this thing we love. Definitely. And I think that that's where the gems are, honestly. Because you find, whether it's in strength training, if you get even more niche, say, like CrossFit, or you go into the tech world. It's a great example of this. Yeah. Because I do a lot in tech.

And that's sort of my more financially. I mean, the books have done very, very well and all that, but the startups, that's my main financial gig, is advising and working with startups. But it's an echo chamber, right? So you find these belief systems and, in some cases, sort of cliched expressions

just become the language. And to find a breakthrough, you have to look outside of that echo chamber. And I was chatting with, you know, upcoming interview, this one should be coming up pretty soon, but Matt Mullenweg, who is basically the lead developer of WordPress, and now he's the CEO of Automatic, and WordPress powers, people don't realize this, more than 20% of the entire internet. I believe it, yeah.

And his company is worth more than a billion dollars now, so on and so forth. But when I was talking to him about how he developed systems, it was from reading political science. It was from reading certain political science books that talked about systems and first and secondary and third order effects. Recognizing patterns. Yeah, because if you're just reading the six books from people who are within tech it's they're they're all going

to be you know six of one half a dozen of the other they're going to be we've kind of done the same thing we gotta we look at it we don't go to fitness business like industry things we just we like to look at other business industries yeah and from that. It's like, oh, we learned some stuff from the dating industry. How does that apply to what we're doing over here? Why is anyone in fitness not applying these concepts? It's like, okay, we'll do it. We almost have to.

There's not that many good fitness business books in the world. There's only a handful of them. Until years comes out, Doug, I'm announcing it now. Better business, but no, you don't have it coming out. 10 years from now. Better business by, no, you don't have a business. Coming out. Ten years from now. Better bodies, better business.

There you go. Too busy doing business to write about it. No, but if you want to, who better to teach you how to grow your fitness business to a billion dollars than go find a guy who did it in any other field and has done it several times from a thousand bucks to a billion. He knows how to do it. It'll work for you. That's one example. And at the end of the day, there's giving advice and then there's getting people

to take advice. And those are two very different things. They're very, very different. Sounds like you do that really well, by the way. Like, getting people to take your advice. I've been to more business conferences and conversations with people where they said I was working and then I quit my

job and I started my own thing. I found a muse and I started my own gig. We basically did too and I started my own gig because they read your book. So I actually really want to hear this. Right. Yeah. So the, the, the,

the, the, the good program that you follow is better than the perfect program that you quit. Right. And I think that that's lost oftentimes when you have top performers coaching other people. Because they have maybe 20 years of experience. They have certain odd attributes that make them mutants. And so they're very unforgiving and unyielding oftentimes in what they prescribe. They're just like, this is the program.

If you deviate, I can't help you. And I can't accept you. And that works okay if you have a large group of people because a lot of people quit, five people remain. Those five people are world champions. Well, right. So if you're the Chinese government, you're just trying to find the four people you can put on your gymnastics team.

That's perfect. Right. And it does work in real life. Yeah. But if you're trying to, say, get the highest percentage of people out of a thousand or a million to lose 20 pounds. Yeah. You can't take that approach. It doesn't work. You're running a gym. Yeah. You can't take that approach either. So for me, it's, it's about finding the, the minimal effective dose,

sort of the lead domino that will then trigger all of the other behaviors that I want, but I don't provide them. Uh, I don't provide them all up front because it's overwhelming. Similarly, if I, you know, I've, uh, I've had, uh, readers reach out to me who have lost more than 200 pounds on the slow carb diet. Right. And I never, with people who have that amount of weight to lose, or even like 20 or 30 pounds, if they haven't dieted before or they don't have an exercise habit, I don't prescribe exercise in the beginning because exercise is additive. They have to create time for that. If they don't already have that behavior, they have to eat. And clearly if they're fucking fat, they're already eating. So, so, so, so you have these sort of three blocks of time that are already allocated to eating and you're just changing

the default meal. There's no additional expenditure of time. And the other challenge with that specifically is, and again, thinking of sort of the secondary and third order effects, it's like, why do people fail? Identifying those failure points and removing them to the extent possible well one of the reasons that people fail when they're trying to lose weight is they start with exercise they only have a scale they're not doing body fat composition analysis they start with exercise and two things happen they start gaining muscle so they they they they believe incorrectly that they're not losing fat because they don't see it reflected in the scale dropping. And secondly, they build up their appetite or feel like they've earned a bigger meal.

So they end up eating more food than even they were eating before. When I start training harder, I certainly just naturally eat more. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And I think that in the beginning, it's like, all right, you need to identify the smallest change that will trigger other changes. And then the failure points that you can avoid in the beginning. And I've taken that really seriously.

And I think that's why you see just a high level of adherence. Because if you're considering any new program, like you want to start a podcast. Okay. All right. Well, you want to start a podcast. Okay. All right. Well, you want to start a podcast. Is it going to be effective? Is it going to help you achieve goals related to the podcast? Is it going to be efficient?

Are you going to have the time to do it? Or can you make the time to do it? Are you doing it in a smart way? You guys have your system. I have my system. It's like, is your process going to be good and efficient? And then adherence, are you actually going to make, are you going to continue to make the podcast until you reach those goals? Or are you going to quit after three episodes? Because that's what most people would do.

And almost everyone quits after three episodes. And I think if you look at it, it's just like the dieting. Why do they quit? They try to get too fancy with the equipment, right? They try to add in, they try to add in, they try to do all the post production themselves. And in some, when you look at it, they're trying to adopt too many new behaviors at once. That's it. Too many new skills. One at a time. It's plenty enough. It's just like cooking. You want to learn how to cook? Start with recyclable bamboo plates or paper plates. You don't want to learn. If you never cook, that means you don to learn how to cook it's like start with like recyclable bamboo plates or paper plates you don't want to learn if you never cook that means you don't know how to clean stuff you don't know how to prep stuff you don't know how to entertain guests like don't try to do all

five of those at once just focus on the cooking for god's sake you know yeah and uh people probably hear things like that and they're like no you can't tell somebody's paper plates forever and are you are you suggesting that maybe in that example you're not saying they have to do it forever, but they have to start with this one thing and then they can evolve past it. It's not forever at all. But if you're done, you will do it forever. I've been forced not to now. My wife doesn't dig the paper plates.

He made it like 10 years with just paper plates. It was great when I was single. But no, you do it for the first 2, 3, 4 weeks and you're like, okay, this is now a behavior, like brushing my teeth. I know how to do this. I'm on autopilot, so it's not causing a lot of decision fatigue. Now I can add in a new behavior.

And that new behavior is going to be, and it could be, you know, the sort of rapid prep and cleanup, right? Because I won't bore people with this, but they're really actually very, very smart ways to wash dishes and very stupid ways to do it. And you can learn those from chefs who work, look at that, there's a dolphin out there. Oh, wow.

Yeah, straight. Oh, yeah, there it is. That's pretty awesome. So do a lot of experts, like say a nutrition expert or a fitness expert, see the advice that you're giving to someone who has no experience, and you're trying to make it easy for them to progress through these steps and they look

at that piece of advice and they say that's not good advice because they're operating from this expert mentality. All the time and I'll give you I'll give you a very common example which is so some, a lot of paleo folks get their panties in a twist about the fact that I have

legumes. They're like, oh my God, your fucking small intestine is going to explode like aliens on the person you're sitting across from. Hold on for a minute. Yeah, and it's like, well, first of all, I'm not convinced that's the case, quite frankly. We could have a discussion about the science behind that. But secondly, pure, very strict veganism and very, very, very strict paleo have low adherence rates. When you're trying to take someone from standard American diet to strict anything, what happens?

Well, if they travel at all, they're going to fail. Right? They're just going to fail. If they have a lot of social constraints, family members, et cetera. Get rid of those family members. Get rid of the family members. Get rid of the family members. It's going to be very difficult. So my point to people is like, look, if you're trying to get

as many, I've probably got more people to paleo by using slow carb as the gateway drug than most people who are pushing paleo books. So it's understanding the domino effect and the layering of behaviors.

It's lazy as a coach to try to foist all of that on someone to start with. It is lazy and bad coaching. And it's because it takes more effort to do the hard thinking on the front end to figure out like, okay, how can I maximize results for people individually while maximizing the number of participants who get to that end goal? That requires a lot of thinking on the front end. Yeah. We have coaches and we have programs, and that's one thing they have to focus on a lot is they're always brainstorming, like, what habit needs to happen after this habit?

Yeah. It's like, what's going to be the most valuable and then also the most doable? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that that it's not that hard.

It just requires a handful of questions. And I think that if you want to... God damn, they're all over the place. This is so cool. There's a whole pod of dolphins. Yeah. Wow. This is nice. The benefits of Malibu. Yeah. Wow. This is nice. All right. The benefits of Malibu.

Yeah, seriously. God, it makes me want to go out paddle boarding. So I think the key to teaching and learning is identifying failure points and the smallest behavior that will get you started. It's like, oh, you don't floss your teeth? Like start with flossing your front two teeth. That's it. Like, before you go to bed.

That's it. Two teeth. Start there. You know? Don't be like, I'm going to floss my teeth twice a day. No. If you don't exercise, like, go to the gym five times a week. Like, you know, I'll short that position.

I'll bet against. Like, if you have a group of 100 people, I'll bet against them. Yeah. But it's, on the other hand, and here's the thing to understand is that if you set a lower boundary, people can exceed it and you have to rig the game so people can win it. So, for instance, if I were to say, okay, you've done eight weeks of slow carb. You lost 20 pounds the first month. Very, very common and very achievable for anyone who weighs like more than 180 and has a decent amount of body fat

Okay, you've lost 20 pounds You've lost like 10 pounds the second month You have your default meals down both for in the house outside of the house. Let's say if you go to work or whatever Now let's layer an exercise and the way we're gonna start is either with something at home like all right You're gonna get one if it's a male. Let let's just say he's decently you know has decent skeletal structure it's like all right we can get you like a 53 pound kettlebell or a 35 pound kettlebell or you can say all right you have to go to the gym and you have to you have to spend you know 10 minutes there yeah yeah once a week that's it yeah what's going to happen they're

going to go in and chances are i I'm not a big treadmill guy, but it's a good, it's a good, it's good to use for this example. Say, all right, you have to spend five minutes on the treadmill, ten minutes on the treadmill. Well, if they do, if they go in, they're probably going to end up doing 15 or 20 or 30, right? But if you set the pass-fail mark at, you have to go to the gym three times a week and run five miles.

As soon as they don't do that twice, they just going to quit yeah they feel like a loser too yeah they feel like loser and they're going to go to zero and when i say that they i also mean me like this is not pointing the figure of other people yeah humans in general you have to understand those sort of psychological dynamics it's not that hard to do anyway oh yeah lots of knowledge here, folks. I think we should go ahead and shut this one down and maybe save some information for next time. Because I know you only have so much to talk about. I'm almost out of time. I'm almost out of time.

I know. I'm running out of content. We're going to be out here until the sun goes down. I'm starting to panic. Then I do think that someone does need to go paddle boarding. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming out, guys.

It was a blast. If people want the Tim Ferriss Show, make sure to subscribe to that. Where else can they find you? Yeah, so the Tim Ferriss Show you can find very easily. If you go to 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, you can just click on podcast also. If you want the Pavel episode, it's just 4hourworkweek.com forward slash Pavel. That will take you to a bunch of stuff, including some 15 common questions that were voted up that he'll be answering as kind of a part two. Oh, cool.

And then Facebook. Just facebook.com forward slash Tim Ferriss with two R's and two S's. At T Ferriss on Twitter. And that's pretty much it. We'll link all to that in the show notes, folks. Just go down below and click away. Excellent. Thanks for joining us.

Sweet. Cheers. Thanks for coming on the show.