The Tim Ferriss Show - #197: Drunk Dialing -- Ladies Night Edition!

Episode Date: November 1, 2016

By request, we have another drunk dialing episode (the most recent one can be found here, and the original can be found here). This one is a little different as it's a Ladies Night edition. Some of you may have noticed that ladies were absent from the last drunk dialing fiasco. Why? It's just math. Looking at the results of a recent poll of 11,463 respondents, my audience is 84.04% male, 15.83% female, and .13% other. The people who sign up first get called first. The last time, three out of the 20, which is exactly 15%, were female. Unfortunately, those women (and several guys) did not pick up. This time around, I decided to try the "ladies night" format. In this episode, we discuss: Language learning Exercising with (or around) injuries Viral marketing Handstands and handstand training How I decide my experiments (and what gets shared afterward) Teaching disabilities vs. learning disabilities The craft of writing: common mistakes, goals, etc. Please enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Business. Vimeo Business has all of the prior benefits of Vimeo Pro, including VIP support. Whether you make videos for a living, run your own company, or simply want to amp up your video marketing, Vimeo Business is here to help. It has more than 280 million creators and viewers worldwide and makes it easier to share your videos with a global audience and connect with professional video makers to bring your stories to life. Vimeo Business allows you to upload up to five terabytes and store your videos in one secure place, add up to 10 team members to your account for easy collaboration, and gather feedback with seamless review tools. You can even add clickable calls to action and capture email addresses directly in the player, which can help you generate leads and drive conversion for whatever you're trying to optimize, such as a newsletter or a sales page. Check out vimeo.com/tim10 to save 10 percent on Vimeo Business. This podcast is also brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is a bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim and enter "Tim" in the "how did you hear about us section."***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement,

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else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is normally my job to deconstruct world-class performers of various types, of all ilks. This time, we have a slightly different episode. By request, we have another drunk dialing episode, where I meander gin in hand, Hendrix this time around, to my table where I record myself getting inebriated, dialing to many

of you via phone and fielding your questions. Now, this is ladies night edition. Why is this ladies night edition? Well, the ladies were absent from the last drunk dialing fiasco. And why is that? Well, I thought I would explain a few things, because it's just math, among other things. So I'm looking at the demographics, a result of a poll on WUFU here. And we have 11,643 respondents. So pretty, I would say, statistically representative. My audience is, as it stands right now, 84.04% male, 15.83% female, and 0.13% other. I will leave that to your imagination. And what that means is a few things. If we look at the math, last time people submitted their names, phone numbers, et cetera, and it's first come,

first serve. The people who sign up first get called first. And three out of the 20, which is exactly 15%, were female. Unfortunately, those women and several guys as well did not pick up. So if I go to voicemail, I call the next person. That is what happened. So this time around, so that the ladies would not get crowded out by all the dudes, I did a ladies night edition. And we talked about quite a lot. We talk about language learning. We really get into the weeds on language learning. We talk about exercising with injuries or around injuries. We talk about viral marketing, my thoughts on that, my criticisms of that, perhaps. Handstands and handstand training, how I decide what to experiment with, how I decide after that what to share with you guys, teaching disabilities versus learning disabilities, and the craft of writing, common mistakes, goals, etc. So I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did. Of course,

the blood alcohol content helps. And that is enough prelude for now. So without further ado, as I always say, after a long introduction, please enjoy volume three, ladies night edition of drunk dialing with Tim Ferriss. Uh, hi, is this Glynnis? Am I getting that right? You are totally getting that right. Sweet. Tim Ferriss. Yes.

Hi. Yes, miss. Yes, ma'am.am uh where am i reaching you where are you located in uh in toronto toronto that's a fine town i like toronto it is a fine town i've spent some time there there's a lot of good food yeah lots of lots of good yeah good companies good Good companies, good people, good coffee. I dig it. Totally. How can I help? What can I answer or just lie and try to make something up to answer? Okay. So my question was about, I've read The 4-Hour Body, love it, have used the diet off and on for a little while now. And the thing I have a cervical disc that is like basically permanently bulged,

so I can't do the kettlebells and I have knee problems. so squats long-term are not a good thing for me. So I guess I'm wondering what your advice is for people who want to stay active as they recover from injuries, or if their bodies are just not as keen on some of the sort of basic HIIT workouts and that sort of thing. For sure. A lot of those types of movements. Yeah. Well, you're catching me at a good time for this because I am in the process of recovering from two injuries as we speak. I have a, I'm sorry. That's okay. I have a sprained ACL in one knee, so I cannot squat at the moment. And I have a torn left lat slash rib, which is extremely

uncomfortable, needless to say. And I have been addressing this question for myself. So here is the short answer. The short answer, and I'll elaborate on this, is do what you can. I'm also sitting about 15 feet from someone who is riddled with injuries, just like me, who is dealing with the same thing and giving me the middle finger slash stink eye. The answer is do what you can. And what that means is, and I'm inclined to this as is everyone else, I think to, particularly if you have an injury with a primary mobility joint, say something that helps you walk like a knee or a prime mover, meaning a large muscle group like a quadricep or a lat or something like that to just stop.

And to be frank, I've been a lazy ass and I have not done a whole hell of a lot in the last two weeks, but I just started yesterday and in the last few days focusing on things that I can do, such as long walks, such as effectively stiff-legged deadlifts, very slow stiff-legged deadlifts that prevent the – They're doing a lot of the work that say kettlebell swings would do, but they're non-ballistic. So I'm using a trap bar deadlift. This is something you step inside of. It's sometimes called a hex bar deadlift. You could Google that and see what I'm talking about. But I'm doing very slow, controlled deadlifting movement with a hex bar, which is putting less sheer force strain on, say, lower back. Cervical bulging disc is a non-trivial issue. So obviously, I should say, to cover my own ass as much as yours,

is talk to your medical professional first. You're in Canada. It shouldn't cost much, although you may have to wait for like 17 months, but do your best. Good news is you guys can get everything over the counter. So there's that. But there are things that you can do, right? Whether it is just calf raises or something else. In the

case of injury, my general recommendation is swimming, number one, which is something I've also been doing. And if you're not a swimmer, I recommend checking out total immersion swimming. It is a method of swimming. I've written a post on that with my highlights. I think it's how I learned to swim in 10 days and so can you or some infomercially sounding headline like that. But I didn't learn to swim until I was in my early 30s. So it's a good introduction to that. The second guideline that I would provide is low low speed so you're performing slow motion movements and this could mean five seconds up five seconds down 10 seconds up 10 seconds down there have been a number of interesting uh exercise science studies performed with elderly

women for instance who are recovering from... I'm not saying that's you. I'm not saying that's you. Are you saying I'm old? No, no, no. I'm not that drunk. You sound what? 15, 16? No, I'm kidding. Oh, yeah. Totally. That's probably shooting a little... I'm getting a shake of the head over here. I'm getting the director cut, cut, cut. I'm TV a shake of the head over here. I'm getting the director cut, cut, cut. I'm not saying, all right, anyway, I'm not going to keep it.

Once you're in a hole, stop digging. All right, moving on. The point being that they were recovering from, say, hip fractures and things of this type. They could not impose any erratic forces as reflected in, say, a force plate, right? Where they're lifting a weight with momentum and going from zero to 120 to X. So I think that very slow tempo or slow cadence lifting is particularly helpful when recovering from injuries. And in this particular case, in my case, I am doing this as well. When you limit your cadence to 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down,

you are going to be using lighter weights by necessity to do that. Particularly if you're aiming for, let's just say, seven to 10 repetitions to temporary muscular failure. And all that means is you're no longer able to pull it up, right? Or contract the muscle, shorten the muscle. And there's, I think it's Doug McGuff, I may be getting this wrong, but Body by science is a book that discusses this at some length uh before our body discusses it as well but body by science i'm just doing a quick search here for you is uh it is doug mcguff m-c-g-u-f-f and uh there's also the super slow, I believe it's a company, maybe an organization that emphasizes very specifically this type of slow cadence lifting.

And for recovery purposes, I think it is extremely flexible and it allows you to work around injuries in a meaningful way. So those are a few of my thoughts. In addition to that, you can add, we're talking about resistance training, but you could add stretching protocols that are strengthening at the same time, meaning they're not limited to passive long duration stretching. And that would include programs like Gymnastic Bodies, which was created by coach Chris Sommer, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am currently incorporating some of that as well.

And I'm pretty messed up at the moment. But those are the things that I am reincorporating at the moment. Okay. And those are the primaries that come to mind. Okay. Cool, man. Yeah. And let's see.

What else? Yeah. And, uh, let's see what else, uh, what now you're dealing with the disc and any other injuries that, uh it's been better for a long time. Like I've been able to run and stuff like that, but the cervical disc bulge, um, was quite major. Like I was in the hospital for it, um, with a pinched nerve and, you know, like, um, like eight weeks of physiotherapy, well, no, like three months of physiotherapy and 18 months. Um, um, uh, I'm looking at an 18-month healing process, and I'm eight months into that right now. So that is the primary. It just, it sort of completely threw me for a loop because most of the things that I did to work out, it had just been shut down. How did that disc bulge happen? Do you know? Was it an acute event or was it

something else? It was an acute event when it happened. It was one night I ended up in the ER because it went out far enough to pinch a nerve. What instigated that? My one-year-old son was sleeping

on my chest and I was crunched against the backboard, the headboard. Ouch. Those kids are vicious. Which was not the first time that, yes, they are. And that was not the first time that's happened. Um, so what they think is that it was sort of like a buildup over time that it had been gradually bulging more and more.

And then it was just one night night it finally just completely slipped out. So, so it wasn't a specific thing. It was, yeah, it's called being a mom. Yeah. Full contact sport.

That one. Yeah. Yeah. Cervical use. Of course, I'm very, very conservative when it comes to any type of cervical issues, because you're dealing with nerves that then affect things like respiration and heart.

Yeah. Like I still don't have feeling in part of my thumb. Yeah. So I would take it slow, whether that is, and certainly get cleared by your GP, but I think that extremely slow cadence lifting and swimming would probably be my go-tos, as well as some degree of controlled stretching program that incorporates strength building, which is effectively mobility, as Coach Summer would describe it. So the ability to exhibit strength at the end ranges, not just passively move through them. Those would be my recommendations for now, but I'm no doctor, I'm no trainer, but that's what I'm prescribing myself. Okay, cool. And the walking. And the walking.

Goddamn the walking. Okay, yes. Very underrated. If you need something to do while walking and you're sick of my voice haunting you in your dreams because of my podcast, no, you can listen to Hardcore History. Hardcore History is the way to go. Oh, okay. I was going to ask you what your recommendations are. Oh, yeah.

Hardcore History, start with Wrath of the Khans. If you can't find that for whatever reason, Prophets of Doom is a good episode as well. I think that's still available for free. But the Wrath of the Khans is worth purchasing if you have to. Okay, cool. Yeah, my husband is obsessed with podcasts. Like, obsessed.

And Dan here? Yeah, he'll go off the rails with Dan Carlin then. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Apparently he's already obsessed with Dan Carlin. So there you go. There you go. But I'm sort of like only a couple of podcasts. Oh, yeah. Well, then he can, he can convert you to Dan Carlin. Okay. Yeah. Blueprint for Armageddon. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. That's a long series. My favorite is probably Wrath of the Khans, but I started with Prophets of Doom.

If you start with Prophets of Doom, which I believe is available for free, just give it like 15 minutes. There's a lot of foreplay involved. It takes a long time to warm up, but then it gets really, really good. So just be patient. Okay, awesome. Yeah, well, hopefully that is helpful. but then it gets really, really good. So just be patient. Okay.

Awesome. Yeah, well, hopefully that is helpful. And I wish you all the best and good luck with recovering from your injuries. Yeah, same to you. Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you submitting your name and number. Have a good night. Watch out for those one-year-olds.

Watch out. They're vicious. Yeah, thanks. They're worth it, too. All right. Bye. Okay, bye. Hi, is this Giovanna?

Yes. Is this Tim? This is Tim. Good evening. I don't know what time it is where you are. Where are you? I am in Switzerland in Luzern, and it's 4.11 in the morning. Wow. Up for the cows. Up to milk the cows.

Well, I am glad to chat with you. Thanks for staying up or waking up so early. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be up this early for i for not for a lot of people well i am honored and flattered how can i help what uh what might i be able to answer for you so i uh i was wondering i mean before i saw the the article you posted a few hours before the drum dial thing about studying languages. But now I have another question related to that article. How about studying a few different languages at the same time? Which languages do you want to study at the same time? Well, I'm actually, right now I'm in switzerland so i lived in u.s for a

few years and so i kind of got my english to some level some nice level and now i want to get my german to that same level academic level and i'm also studying french and i mean i kind of know some french and italian and hungarian so of course hungarian is tougher than those other ones i think yeah for sure and of course i'm not gonna do them all at the same time. But I noticed, for instance, I'm studying like French and German at the same time. And I don't know, I tried to do some Hungarian in the meantime. And I get kind of I get the words confused sometimes. And now I'm thinking maybe I should just, you know, focus on one language. Like how, if you learn languages in a short amount of time, how do you, I don't know,

when you have to perform or like talk that language, how do you not confuse it with others? Yeah. I don't know. No, I think you learn them. If you learn them at roughly the same period of time. Yeah. So there are a few really interesting questions here.

I'll make a couple of recommendations off the bat. There's one, it's a bit dense. There are some things to be taken from it called The Loom of Language. This is a very thick book. It's in English, which might be worth looking at. There's also a book called In Other Words, just for people out there, since people will be listening to this, who may not think as adults, they're well-equipped to learn languages called In Other Words, which is co-authored by

someone named Hakuta, H-A-K-U-T-A. There are a few approaches that I've used. I actually have an entire folder on my computer that I've kicked forward since 2005 on language learning. And it includes a bit on this just from my own notes that I took in 2004, 2005, when I was studying Spanish and German and a few other languages roughly the same time within the same three-month period. My approach has been, first and foremost, to focus on dialogue whenever possible

so that you are refining your conversational abilities and idioms, idiomatic use of the language, instead of reading, say, in many classrooms, they use newspapers and things of that type. So two of the tools that I use for simultaneously reviewing one language and learning a new language. In other words, I would not recommend going from ground zero in two languages simultaneously. I think that's very difficult.

Yeah, for sure. And in fact, the closer they are, the harder it's going to be. So for instance, if you're studying, what is your native language? Serbian. Serbian. Okay. So I actually had a Serbian roommate in Berlin. Really?

Yeah. She was great. She spoke great German, so it's not impossible. And she made fun of me, actually, for the approach I'm about to describe. There are two different tools I use. One is movies, but I can explain specifically how. The second is comic books. And there are, to be more precise, a number of comic books that are translated into multiple languages. They tend to be Japanese. So for instance, One Piece, there's a comic called One Piece.

And if I look at my wall, I have One Piece on one of my bookshelves in four or five different languages. I also did that for Cowboy Bebop. That's another comic book and a few others. What I would do is say I had developed a decent level of, in this case, Spanish first, and then I went to, no, I'm sorry, German first, and then I went to Spanish-speaking countries like Panama and so on. I wanted to review my German to consolidate it and give it more sticking power, but I wanted to learn Spanish as my new language. What I would do is I would have two versions of the same volumes of that comic book. So let's just say they have one piece volume one, two, three, four, five. I would buy one, two, three, four, five in Spanish,

in German, and in English. And then I had, of course, electronic dictionaries and things like that. So I would read the comic in my new target language. And if I didn't understand something, I would go to the same page, the same frame, the same sentence in the last language that I studied. So in this case, I was reading in Spanish. And then if I didn't understand something, I would go back to German. And I would look at the comic book in the same frame. And the first volume is going to take you forever. It might take you a few weeks, but within two or three months, you will probably be going through a volume in, let's just say, six to 12 hours. You'll be very, very fast. And comic books, like I mentioned, are one of the tools. The other is movies. Now, in the case of, say, learning, I'm just going to use an example that a lot of readers will identify

with because they are in English-speaking countries, Spanish. A lot of people who try to learn Spanish will watch movies in Spanish with English subtitles. That is only appropriate for very high levels of proficiency. I think it is much more helpful because if you mishear something, you'll make mistakes. If you don't quite catch something, you will also make mistakes and you can't look it up. But if you watch, for instance, movies you know very well with subtitles in your target language, then you can make very, very, very fast progress. So I used Die Hard, for instance, the first movie. I'm dating myself a little bit to learn not only Japanese at points, but also

Chinese and to review. So that helped me with the writing systems, but it also helped me with idiom. It helped me with conversation, et cetera, just like the comic books. So those are a few of the recommendations that I would make. The post that you saw, I'm not sure which language learning post it was, Benny Lewis, who's L-E-W-I-S, whose nickname is the Irish Polyglot, is also worth looking into. He has some very interesting approaches and he speaks many, many languages. So he would also be, I think, a good resource to ping on Twitter or elsewhere. So, and what do you think about like listening to the music and translating it? Would you surround yourself completely with some language like, you know, put your phone on Spanish, for instance, or, you know, do things like that to kind of get into that world or...

Yeah, no, I can tell you. So my approach, and there are many different approaches, there are different ways to skin this cat, as we would say in English. I don't know where we got that from, by the way. But anyway, I suppose, middle English, we like skinning cats. But the point I was going to make is that you have to find an approach that works for you. There are different approaches. My preference is not to do immersion unless I am in the country. I think it's too much work. I would rather bust my ass and try to get an extra week in country where I can immerse myself 24-7 in a real environment as opposed to simulating it here. So I do not change the settings on my phone. I've tried all that. I find it more inconvenient than helpful, and it's more inclined in my case to make me frustrated and quit.

So there are, however, people who have become very, very good. For instance, Japanese, there's a site called All Japanese All the Time, A-J-A-T-T. And this young guy became incredibly good at Japanese by doing exactly what you just described. uses internet radio very much for the same reason, this sort of simulated immersion environment. But I've never done that. I find it too frustrating to stumble in the beginning in that particular way. I would prefer to take, for instance, that time and apply it to doing Skype video sessions with someone who can help me work on pronunciation to get my pronunciation as dialed as possible before I go into a native environment. My general progression would be pronunciation with set phrases that are very useful. So memorizing, say, 20 to 50 set phrases that are high frequency that you can use all the time then moving to say present tense original sentence construction and using auxiliary but they're what are called

auxiliary verbs or helping verbs so for instance in it's probably true in it's probably true in French I don't speak French it is true in German it's certainly true in French. I don't speak French. It is true in German. It's certainly true in Spanish. You can learn the conjugations, if you know what I mean, the declinations for the verbs to want, to need, let's say should, for instance, there are a handful of them. And that allows you to then learn the infinitives of all the other verbs, basically, and put them at the end. So in other words, if you just learn to say, I want, you want, he wants, she wants, they want, we want, etc., then you can add to eat, to read, whatever it might be. And by mastering those auxiliary verbs, which is something that I learned from a guy named Michelle Thomas indirectly through his materials,

M-I-C-H-E-L-T-H-O-M-A-S, you can amass hundreds of verbs, but only learn the conjugations for five or six, say. That is a cheat that allows you to make a lot of progress really quickly. And then I would work on basic grammar. But past that point, you need to be amassing vocabulary at a pretty rapid clip. So I use flashcards also from, and I prefer physical flashcards at this point. There are good programs like Anki. Duolingo is fantastic overall for everything. But I use flashcards, physical flashcards

from a company called VizEd, V-I-S hyphen E-D dot com. Yeah, I read that in your article about the flashcards. Yeah, I love the things that you can touch and see and write and things like that. It works better with me. Yeah, that's my particular preference anyway. I do apologize. I probably should jump off in a bit just because I have to call quite a few people. But I'm happy to answer one more thing.

Okay. So how do you get to a much higher level? For instance, I have really good basics of German right now. And I want to get to academic level, like B2, for instance, or maybe C1. What's your, I don't know, how do you get completely into, completely fluent in one language in some shorter period of time? Yeah, this is a longer. If you have all those.

No, I understand. Yeah, it's a longer conversation. But I would say that you can study for the test, right? If you have to try to use non-teachers, in other words, use a tandem format, that's what they call it in German anyway, where you are teaching someone your language while they're teaching you theirs, which may or may not work for you, but perhaps you help them with English and they help you with German. I have found translation of very specific sentences that are preparing you for the test to be most effective. That's probably beyond the scope of this conversation. It would require a lot of explanation, but most native speakers cannot teach their native language. So you have to enable them with very clear instructions.

And the best way to do that, that I have found, is trading translations in areas that you have already identified you need help with. So effectively, all they're doing is saying, that sounds funny or that sounds correct. This is how you should fix it. That's all they're doing is giving you, for instance, a sentence in English. So let's just say they're of an equal level in English as you are in German. And you might be working on the subjunctive case, right? This is a more advanced skill. So you're saying if I had a million dollars, then I would do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The hypothetical case, this is the subjunctive. In German, in Spanish, it's a more advanced skill. Or reported speech,

you might be doing, he said to her that she should do this, this, and this. It's a more advanced linguistic construction. Then they would give it to you in English and you would translate it into German. So A, you would correct their English so they get a benefit out of it. And then you would try to produce the same sentence in German and they would correct it, right? But you're practicing for the test in either case. So hopefully that helps. So there's no, yeah, there's no cheating in that. Well, there are cheats in the sense that you can use mnemonic devices. And I think Ed Cook, C-O-O-K-E, is a good guy to look to for that.

He has a company called Memrise, M-E-M-R-I-S-E. Ultimately, I think you can do it in a very short period of time. Certainly three to six months is more than enough time. I think you can, it in a very short period of time. Certainly, three to six months is more than enough time. I think you can, as opposed to three to six years. But you have to have the deliberate practice focusing on the right things. Okay. So, hopefully that helps. But I will let you get to sleep since I need to get drinking and smiling and dying.

Okay. What are you drinking tonight? I am drinking Hendrix Gin and Canada Dry Club Soda, which is probably bottled in Hoboken, New Jersey or something like that, but it says Canada Dry. Don't sue me, Canada Dry.

Nice. Yeah. So good luck with your German. Viel Spaß. Ja, ja. Dankeschön. Bitteschön and sleep well. Maybe I'll talk to you again soon.

Yeah. Have a good night, Tim. Nice talking to you and all the best. All right. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye. Hi, is this Samantha? Oh my God, is this Tim Ferriss? It is Tim Ferriss.

This is the best day ever. I'm so excited. Hello. Hey, how are you? Where are you at the moment? I'm in my house in Ottawa. Ottawa, good town. That's Shopify country over there.

It is. Actually, I just found out we're like one degree of separation. I've been super excited about it since I found out. Sweet. Yeah, you guys have the coolest place to ice skate I think I've ever seen. That gigantic, what is it? I guess it's a river reservoir? It's a canal. reservoir that canal canal that's like eight miles or whatever long that you can scoot around what are those things called uh help me out here not badger uh something tails they're oh beaver tails beaver tails can you explain for all of the yanks in the audience what and everyone who's non-canadian what is a beaver tail uh it's basically just fried dough smothered in butter and then topped with sugary toppings so delicious it's so good and so bad for you and it's only proper to eat in the winter while you're on the canal skating with hot chocolate like you should have cold hands warming up with like

beaver tail and some and some hot chocolate it's fantastic that sounds so good. So how can I help? I am well on my way to inebriated and ready to self-immolate. So please help me to destroy myself. No, I'm kidding. What can I answer for you? Well, I have recently took some advice from you and I quit my job and I really hated what I was doing and who I was with and all that stuff. And I went out on my own and somehow became an actress totally accidentally and a model also by accident, not what I was looking for. But I also own this little lifestyle brand and I want to work on viral marketing. So I'm really trying to destruct and understand this whole like elements of viral marketing

and how I can get more. So I just did my first Facebook live video, not yesterday, but the day before. And I got myself more than 2000 views, which I was pretty proud of, but I haven't, like, I haven't been able to convert it. Right. So I don't, I haven't made sales from this yet. So viral marketing is a very, I think, commonly misunderstood and also overused term that doesn't make it a valuable concept. There are a few people I would recommend taking a look at who have discussed this quite a bit. Two who come to mind, and I'm sure there are many others since my memory is somewhat impaired at the moment. One is Andrew Chen. Andrew Chen is currently on the growth team at Uber,

but for a very long time wrote about this type of thing. The second, actually now I'm thinking of three. The second is a guy named Andy Johns. I think it's Johns plural. It may maybe singular, but very, very smart guy about such things. Let me just do a quick Google machine search. Yeah, Andy Johns. And he's currently the vice president of product at Wealthfront, but has worked at many,

many different companies in the growth teams at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, et cetera. And let me think here. The third person now I've displaced because I thought of Andy. I may come up with the third person, but those are two who are very good to start with. Okay, fine. A foundational essay that I would suggest reading, and this is free, which will give you, I think, a good core principle to keep in mind when doing any of this is 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. That is on his site, kk.org. If you just search 1000 True Fans, it should pop right up. But the basic idea is for viral marketing to work, and he doesn't use that term, I don't think, but you need a core group of super fans,

true fans, to recommend what you do to other people. That is pretty much it. And I think that to echo something that Seth Godin said on my podcast, to go big, you really want to initially aim very, very narrow. And to that end, one thing that may be helpful is reading a particular chapter in a particular book, very short, this will take you like 15 minutes. It's called The Law of Category, that is the chapter in a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. And some of the examples are outdated. I would read this in the original edition. Andy Johns, by the way, if you want to follow him on Twitter is, I just found this, at Ibringtraffic, which is a pretty good say that's worth listening to. The law of category chapter will reiterate a lot of what you would find. And I think these are complementary in a book called, I believe it is just the Blue Ocean Strategy.

And a lot of it is superfluous, but I'd say 40% of it is very, very useful. And it discusses effectively how to niche yourself properly so that you are the number one or number two player. And if you're not the number one or number two player, you have to choose a different niche or create a different category. So those are a few starting points. I make no claims to be a viral marketing expert, but I do think I'm pretty good at getting word of mouth. Absolutely. And I view them as very, very close cousins. Beautiful. Can we talk about doing handstands? Doing handstands? Sure. I would say I'm at best 10% qualified to give advice on handstands, but yes, I'm happy to attempt to lie, cheat, and steal my way through giving you a legitimate answer. Okay. So I'm working on it. I want to get away from the wall and that's what I'm having trouble

with. And I know it's definitely me just being a little bit afraid, but, um, my former career was being a barber and I had a lot of repetitive tension and I couldn't do a lot of that type of work because it hurt too much. So now that I'm away from that line of work, I'm super strong all of a sudden. Uh, but I'm just having a hard time with the balance part, I guess. And I'm, I'm just having a hard time figuring it out. Okay. So a few things. I would recommend, and I'm borrowing from a guy named Coach Summer, Chris Summer, S-O-M-M-E-R, who I interviewed on my podcast. So I definitely recommend listening to him because he is your handstand master. A few exercises that helped me very greatly. One would be, and you're going to have to look these up, an exercise called cast wall walks.

This is going from a handstand facing towards the wall into a pushup by walking your feet down the wall and back up. The key, however, is maintaining a hollow and protracted position. And this is discussed in my podcast with him, so I won't belabor it here, but protracted really means your shoulders are pushed forward. So if you imagine hugging a telephone pole, in effect, your shoulders should be in that position. It's extremely exhausting. It's actually best to do at the end of a workout. into a handstand position, but your thighs are basically against your abdomen. You're in a tuck position, almost like you're doing a front flip or imagining someone doing a front flip, i.e. front tuck in a diving competition or something like that, where you're completely

compressed into this fetal position. Your legs are going to be in that position while you're maintaining the handstand. And then you bring your feet down when you lose your balance, and then you jump and tuck back up. You hop back up into that tuck position. Tuck hops are really, really helpful. And I would encourage, it's challenging to do handstand practice on a soft surface, but another exercise that I have found helpful and you can, you can do this on a mat is where you walk, you're effectively walking the length of a mat. And I did this exercise with a coach named Sam. She was great at a place called athletic playground in Emeryville for people in the Bay Area who want to check it out. And it involved keeping your, basically, imagine you have your arms, you're standing up, you have your arms overhead, extended, and you raise your shoulders as high as you possibly can

by your ears. Okay, you're going to maintain that the entire time. And you would then place your hands down, kick one leg up. So your legs are scissored, switch them and bring the opposite leg down. If this makes any sense at all, and then you stand back up and you take another step and you repeat until you get to the opposite end of the room. But I would say to keep things simple, since we don't have video on this audio program, that you should focus on hollow body rocks and tuck hops. I think those are two very good tools. And then at the end of a workout, if you are feeling ambitious,

you can try cast wall walks. All of this stuff is borrowed from coach Chris Sommer. Thank you so much for calling me. I want other people to have a chance, so I'm not going to keep you. But thank you so much. It was awesome. Of course. My pleasure.

Thanks for spending the time. Hey, anytime you're in Ottawa, call me. Rock on. Go Ottawa. All right. Have a nice night. Thank you. I will.

Thanks. Have a good night. Bye. Bye. Hi, is this Ashley? It is, Tim. Ashley, yes, this is Tim. How are you? That's good. It's pretty hysterical.

Okay. Here I am. You're in California. Or no, you have California. Sweet. Yeah. No, I'm actually in Annapolis, Maryland right now. I was asleep. I got a 5 a.m. train to Manhattan. Wow. I'm getting up to do this. Let's do it.

Yeah, let's do it. Well, good crabs in Maryland. I like Maryland crabs. Yeah, I live in D.C. No, that's the right way to do it, right? I mean, you live in Maryland or you live in Virginia and then you hop, skip, and jump into D.C. Exactly.

How can I help or try to help Virginia and then you hop, skip and jump into D.C. Exactly. Yeah. How can I help or try to help? Yeah. You know, I think it's fascinating. Right. So I'm struggling with I'm personally not struggling, but I'm struggling with and definitely from a career standpoint, this concept of what I call infobesity. Right. And I think there is a lot of conversation around it.

And I don't know if you've heard it used in like sort of the Silicon Valley area and the tech space, but in the nutrition space, what I've been seeing definitely instead of like introducing people to how helpful and helpful nutrition, you know, their nutrition is for their body. It's really this like, wow, we have so much information. And so, you know, I use the term infobesity and that we're all suffering from infobesity regardless of our health status. And, you know, it's drowning the quality of information. Right. So that's a larger, like more of a country conversation. But I find where you are and a certain segment of my clients and I also just find it like an interesting dilemma. Right. If you're interested in experimenting, if you're interested in taking it to the next level, if you're interested in really understanding how your body works and what you can do with it, that dance between

information and even like finding new things, you know, and learning about yourself with it being too much, right? And sort of not the orthorexia that people are talking about, this pursuit of perfect, but really just this idea of taking in so much information or in a certain sense, guinea pigging yourself. So what made me think about it was I absolutely love the podcast that you just did on the rapamycin and metformin. And I've heard one of those presentations and it was so interesting because the doctors and scientists were saying, oh yeah, the conclusion of which is, yeah, we don't take those, you know? And I thought one guy's piece was really good because he's like, so,

you know, I'm not diabetic, I'm healthy. And so I think the piece for me is, and this is very much to your audience or when I'm, you know, working with people more in the performance space is where is that space of saying like, you know, discovery and experimentation is fascinating, but at the same time, I actually am healthy and I am right now, you know, doing well. So let's not shake that up, right? You know, so let's not so let's not bring in more information or the newest thing and the acquisition of knowledge could be different than like testing it out on yourself.

So I was curious for you personally, how do you vet that space? You know, how do you decide what you are willing to do versus turn around and say, that's super cool, I'm fascinated by it, but I'm not going to do that. And then the other part is when you're thinking about what you deliver for your audience, where do you draw that line in terms of vetting information?

Sure. All right. So there's a lot to tackle here. Let me take, yeah, it's good. No, no, no, no, no, no. I like talking about this stuff. So I mean, part one is how do I think about my own experimentation and what do I decide to undertake or not undertake? So how do I vet that? And part two is what do I choose to convey to my audience or attempt to teach and how do I vet that? Let me have some gin first. Hold on. Yeah.

What kind of gin? This is Hendrix. I'm a big fan of Hendrix gin. Very simple, Hendrix and soda. I'm a simple man. But this is probably doing the opposite of rapamycin at the moment. Let's see. So the first part is maybe a correction of a misperception, not from you, but from a lot of people. I think that I'm very often viewed as a daredevil, risk-taking, cutting-edge experimenter. And I don't view myself that way in the sense that most of what I test has a lot of literature to elucidate at least a plausible mechanism of action and a directional error of causation. That is a fancy way of saying that if I am considering, for instance, using a substance, whether it be rapamycin or metformin or otherwise, there is a lot on PubMed, on clinicaltrials.gov, etc., that I can use to determine the potential upside and potential downside of an experiment. That's not true for all things,

certainly. But generally, I am not the first of 100 monkeys to try something. I'm a big fan of looking at underexplored applications or off-label uses of well-tested substances, diets, exercise regimens. Does that make sense? Totally, yeah. So for instance, I may look at resveratrol and its potential applications to endurance instead of longevity i may look at exogenous ketones like i have keto force and a bunch of weird ketone esters in sketchy crazy looking breaking bad containers in my refrigerator probably don't need to be in my refrigerator, but the point being, I am looking at their potential application in my life to anti-inflammation and breath hold times. They're unrelated, but those two particular areas, even though they're not explicitly designed for those things or sold for those things. Yet, at the same time, I have a

good understanding, I would say, or a sufficient understanding of the potential downsides. I think I understand the worst case scenarios in taking these, at least in the short term. So those are for me personally. I try to be on the dull edge when it comes to compound selection. If we're talking about, say, drugs or different types of food supplements, et cetera, I try to be on the cutting edge of new applications of known substances, training regimens, diets, etc.

So, for instance, you take the ketogenic diet that was originally developed primarily for epileptic children. This is not very well known. The Charlie Foundation, for instance, has done some great work in this area. And I have very close friends of friends who have stopped horrific, say, epileptic episodes where they're having seizures tens or hundreds of times a day by modifying their diets. It was originally designed for that application, but then we started looking at body recomposition, and then we started looking at body recomposition and then we start looking at say military applications of exogenous ketones to people who need to use rebreathers or something crazy and esoteric like that. As far as what gets conveyed to my audience, I really try to

ameliorate the problem presented by infobesity, right? And that was the first, you know, this is actually the first time I've heard that term, but information overload, I think, is often a consequence of striving for perfection instead of good enough. And I'll give you a perfect example of that. I do think that paleo or the ketogenic diet have some tremendous applications. I also think that strict paleo, just like strict veganism, or the ketogenic diet done properly, because it's a very binary diet, are going to have, at best, a 10% to 15% compliance rate, meaning of every 100 people I might try to convey the prescription for these diets to of every 100, at best, I'm looking at 15 people who succeed. That is not acceptable to me. I think that there is probably a smarter way to convert people to a more intelligent way and healthful way of eating. And for me,

that is the slow carb diet. The slow carb diet may be viewed as a poor man's option compared to these others, but I know that I can get a marginally better outcome, but a vastly greater abandonment rate. first and foremost is what is the likelihood of injury, right? I want to minimize the likelihood of injury, which is why I tend to avoid or at least provide great disclaimers for anything involving, for instance, breathing exercises or breath hold training. Because the downside is you have a shallow water blackout and you die. It's a very, very significant downside risk. So what is the downside? If it's too great for too high a percentage of my readership or listenership, I don't share it. It's just not worth it. I mean, trying to follow the Hippocratic Oath to the extent that I can, even though I'm not a medical doctor. The second is, what is the

adherence rate? What is the likely adherence rate? So for me, the priorities are per thousand people or per hundred people, what percentage will actually follow what it is that I am prescribing? It doesn't matter how good it is if the adherence rate is abysmally low, right? So adherence, number one, how many people are going to do this? Effectiveness, number two, does it produce the results desired and promised? Number three, efficiency. Is it efficient in its use of time and other resources, capital, et cetera, right? So those are the three checkboxes, or I should say gates through which I pass in my head all of my potential prescriptions to my audience. So you have safety, adherence, efficacy, and efficiency. That's how I think about it. And going through those

checkboxes in that order, I tend to provide a very minimal dose of information for any particular first step. You can always invite complexity later and you can make the complexity digestible to a very high percentage of people who have already gone through the minimal and intermediate. But if you try to impose that upon someone who is just opening their mind to a novice level of understanding, you're 99% out of a hundred are going to fail. So that's, that's how I think about it. Yeah, it's really fascinating. I think one of the things you do in that way is take, uh, my sense has been from the guests and from having listened for quite some time is really taking that information and number one, offering it in a targeted, at minimum targeted or a hyper-targeted way. And then the second part is really providing how to actually implement it.

And I think that that's what's missing from a lot of the information that's out there is that it's not delivered. You know, we know that more information is not the answer. It's really how to implement it into your life, into one's life, that's going to actually result in action. And I do see that. I think the other part is, I think your guests also have a level of credibility, either from personal, both, I think, from personal experience and then also the professional side. So it's pretty fascinating. Well, it's super cool. You know, for me, I just, I think it's an area that I'm really passionate about

because I think we are definitely overloading the brain, which obviously has such a connection to the gut. And so we just see people that are not moving forward or moving forward successfully. And I think your example about paleo or certainly in the ketogenic space is really spot on. So thank you. Yeah, thanks. No, I appreciate it. I think that people can do more than they believe possible. They just can't do it all at the same time. And so what I try to focus on a lot is what I consider the magic ingredient that is very widely neglected, which is sequencing. In other words, you can choose the

right information. So you do an 80-20 analysis and you figure out which 20% of the information or exercises or foods or whatever it might be. Supplements produce 80% of the results you're looking for, changes in biomarkers, whatever the hell it might be. But putting those in a logical order or a progression where you get maximum adherence, that is really for me the secret sauce. I spend a lot of time thinking about that. All right, we have 10 things out of 100 that are disproportionately important. How can I put these 10 things in a particular order so that for every 100 people who start with step one, I have the maximum number who get through step 10? And I hate to say it, but most of the instructional information out there does not give a shit about this, or they just don't take the time to really consider it.

They put the onus on the learner, and I think that's a problem. And I think as Eric Weinstein, who I had on the podcast, really brilliant PhD physicist, mathematician, he said, we talk about learning disabilities all the time. We never talk about teaching disabilities. I think if you look at most non- Oh, that's fascinating. I miss that. Oh, that is great. Oh, yeah. He's great. That's a fun episode. And if you look at the nonfiction books out there that are prescriptive, i.e. how-to books of some sort, if you look at classes, if you look at the teaching that fails, it is very often because they don't think about this

progression. They just take the 10 things and they've identified what's important, but they teach them willy-nilly in some order that is convenient for them, but not a logical progression for the learner that minimizes quitting or overwhelm. So that is how I think about a lot of this. Hopefully that is helpful in some fashion. It totally is. And I think it's going to be moving forward to continue to address this topic and work to help people.

I think I've done a less stellar job than you just did. So this is helpful to me from a practitioner standpoint. I love that teachability piece. But the other part is, you know, just sort of looking at when you ask someone whether or not something is applicable from a nutrition standpoint, it's, you know, it really is, who are you right now? And, you know, I often, I have like great examples of people who have jumped on things and, you know, who, because it's not applicable to them right now.

I had a funny example was when the study that came out about fish oils being problematic for prostate or potentially problematic. Science wasn't great. I had all these emails from people, but you put me on this stuff. Should I stop it, et cetera? And then I went through and like 85% of them were women. And I was like, hold on a second. Like if you find your prostate, you know, let me know, you know, that kind of a thing. So I think we, you know, that's like the macro example, but on a smaller scale, I think people are trying to really figure out what's that sequencing, what should they be doing right now? And I think that the more that we can get to that,

if that's just, that's awesome.'s awesome. So yeah, really cool. What you should be doing right now is more obvious. So I'm excited to listen to this episode. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed the gin. And I am going to put myself to sleep because we know that that's an important part of the sequencing. But I really appreciate that. Yeah, it gave me a lot to think about. No, my pleasure. And I would add one more thing, which is I think that it's important to make people coachable and improve adherence to help

them develop a basic scientific literacy. So there's a great book called Bad Science that I recommend to a lot of people by Ben Goldacre. I did one or two appendices in the four-hour body that are related or actually adaptations and excerpts from this book. But I think perhaps one of the most important concepts, and Navdeep Chandel from the Metformin-Rapamycin and conversation mentions, but the, the difference between, we won't get into it right now, but the difference between relative risk versus absolute risk, I think is really important for people to understand because the media fucks that up constantly. So it can, it can set off alarms when they don't need to be set off and let things slide when they shouldn't slide at all. So I will leave it at that and I'll let you get some sleep. Yeah. But I appreciate you taking the time. Thanks. Have a great night.

I appreciate it. You too. Take care. Bye-bye. Marissa, this is Tim Ferriss calling. Good evening. Hello. Wow.

Emotion. How are you this evening? Good, good. I've never been so happy or excited to talk to a drunk man, but I guess this is the first. Well, I've never been so excited to be drunk and calling someone in the Bay Area, so here we are. Oh, wonderful. Very good, very good. We meet at last. How can I help? Well, I have a couple of questions. I'll be fast. I know that you have other ladies to talk to

entrepreneur and investor you're both and I know they're not mutually exclusive but which one would you say that you paid off better for you for a better freer life and when I say better not necessarily money but experience and abundance of life. That's my feeling. I would say entrepreneur because being an entrepreneur offers you more opportunities and more diverse contexts to expose yourself to being uncomfortable and developing comfort with uncertainty. And I think that having the experience of building something yourself as an entrepreneur, trying to persuade others, trying to negotiate effectively in many different areas makes you a better investor, more than practicing investing with other people's money certainly helps you to

be a more effective entrepreneur. I think that A, in this case, being an entrepreneur helps you to be a better investor than being an investor, at least in many different contexts, would help you to be a successful entrepreneur. So my answer would be the entrepreneurship. But I should just underscore that I don't think everyone should be an entrepreneur. The idea of starting a company is, I think, romanced and perhaps dramatized to a great extent in the US on the covers of magazines and everything else. And the mistake that people make, which they can't be faulted for, is they end up only reading about the success stories. And there are a lot of failure stories. They just don't end up being

written about generally as cover stories for magazines. And it's a difficult route. There are many people who've developed incredible skills, built incredible lives, and helped to improve the world without ever starting a company of their own. And I think that it's a matter of embracing and cultivating your own strengths and having or developing the self-awareness to identify those and not just doing what is fashionable in this sense, or I should say in the current day, which is starting a startup. So I'll get off my soapbox now. Sorry for being so long-winded.

It is a side effect of the alcohol. Please continue. That's perfect. No, that makes perfect sense. And I guess that's the reason why a lot of us don't do it. And then the next question is, do you go with a service or a product? And there are many choices down the line, but also the alternative of not being an entrepreneur is also boring. So that's kind of, you know, tossing up options, which leads me to the next question.

I know that this could go on forever and I don't want to take too much time, but it's so hard to change gears from somebody who, you know, I don't do, I'm not an employee, but, and I can, I can, I don't say that I'm an entrepreneur either because I don't have a startup company, but somewhere in between I'm trying to change gears. Why is it so difficult to change gears and make the change? And I guess in different words, finding that muse, and I know that I've read your four-hour week book, and somehow I get stuck in the information overload. So it's where to start is kind of the question that lingers. Sure. Yeah, I think that the fallacy that stops a lot of people, and this is propagated by a lot of media, a lot of keynote speeches, a lot of TV,

is that you have to choose one or the other. What I mean by that is people think of employee and entrepreneur as mutually exclusive. So they feel like they need to quit their full-time job, jump headfirst into the dark water, not knowing the depth, and figure out being a full-time entrepreneur. And that's not necessary at all. I think that the most important chapter in the 4-Hour Workweek is the chapter on fear setting. And it discusses a gentleman named Hans, who goes from his legal career to building a surf company in Brazil. But the fear-setting exercise, which is really identifying the worst-case scenarios and how you could recover from them, is more important than goal-setting and smart,

specific, measurable, achievable, blah, blah, blah. I think that identifying where you have the emergency brake on and elucidating your specific reasons for being fearful is exceptionally important, A. And then B, realizing that I think the best way to start a company and to become an entrepreneur is to do it in your off hours. Start by developing something in the evenings, on the weekends, and testing it with a very, very small group of people. And once you have traction that you think could supplant or replace your full-time income from your job, whatever that might be, then and only then, once you've

sufficiently proven to yourself and others that you have a product and a market that will pay for that product, do you continue? I think that The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber is a very good book to read as it relates to product versus service. I know that's not the specific question you asked, but you mentioned it earlier. Whenever possible, I think that service inherently has more operator bottleneck and is more likely to leave you feeling like you cannot at any point leave your business alone. Which is, that's what I mean, the service business. That's why I was talking about that. I have to be there to serve it. Yeah, so I think that The E-Myth Revisited is a very good book for you to read because it talks about being a technician versus being a business owner

and how to work on your business instead of in your business. I think it's a very helpful book. And that would be one starting point that I would, I think, recommend for you, just based on the very little that I have gleaned from what we've talked about so far. Image Revisited, that's the name? The E-Myth, so it's E-Myth Revisited. Oh, the Myth, yeah. Exactly, by Michael Gerber, G-e-r-b-e-r and um okay okay one quick

question one quick question um if you were to do it all over again what would you change first very general question yeah no no this is a great question and you know i have asked a lot of people this question myself and i'm going to give a very unoriginal answer, but I'm really happy with where I am. I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't jinx it. I think that if I were to, maybe a different approach to answering that question is, and it might seem like a dodge, but what advice would I give to 30-year-olds in general? I'm a 39-year-old guy right now. What advice would I give to my 25, or what advice would I give to a group of 25-year-olds or 30-year-olds? And I think the answer is, the answers would include, one, as a meta principle to guide other decisions, you are

the average of the five people who you associate with most. So choose the people you surround yourself with, the people you associate with very, very carefully, which is easier said than done. But I think that is a principle that overlays many other decisions. Second, learn how to negotiate and persuade. I think that that is part and parcel with learning to communicate well in a written format. You need to get good at writing and persuading. Let's see.

Secrets of Power Negotiating is one book. Ideally digested in audio. There is audio. That is by, it is Richard Dawson, I believe, D-A-W-S-O-N. I found that exceptionally helpful. Getting Past No is another book that I would would recommend which is the more realistic counterpart to getting to yes i won't get into all the history of those two books but getting past no i think is very helpful and uh there's a book by i want to say william zinsner i've had too much gin to pronounce that properly but uh On Writing Well is the name of the book. It's been celebrated for decades now. I think it had its 25th anniversary post-publication a few years ago. On Writing Well is a book that I have revisited several times and found very

helpful for written communication. Those would be a few of the things that I would generally recommend and certainly underscore for myself at that age as well. Yeah, and I second that because it's actually the persuasion and the negotiation and I only learned it late in life. So I wish I'd known that before,

but then I have to catch up now, but it makes sense. Yeah, it takes practice. It all takes practice. Very good. Sí, toma práctica, todo toma práctica. Muy bien. Bueno, podría haber hecho esta conversación en Lumpardo, pero no creo que sea justo para todos, porque no todos entenderán

eso, pero estaría emocionada de hablar con ustedes en Lumpardo, pero bueno, en otro momento. La próxima vez, entonces. La próxima vez y que estés también en Curda. Bueno, gracias, muchísimas gracias. Bueno, hasta la próxima.

Muchas gracias por el trabajo increíble y por no dejar que se te acerque la cabeza, lo cual es muy humilde. Bueno, gracias por tomar el tiempo. Es un placer hablar contigo y buena noche y buena suerte. Lo mismo aquí. The same here. Goodbye. Okay, bye-bye.

Hi, is this Liz? Yes. Liz, this is Tim Ferriss. How are you? Oh, my God. I'm great. How are you? I'm good.

Are you in Florida? Are you in Florida? No, I'm actually in charleston top carolina but i'm from florida oh that's where the tricky phone number comes in charleston's great have you been have you been to husk by chance oh my god yes we love husk so so so good it had like we went there the month that it or we tried to go to months that it opened but it was like booked for that entire month yeah yeah they have more bacon and pig products and butter than you can shake a south carolina stick at that place is intense i had brunch there and i was like all right i'm not gonna eat for the next two weeks so good though very good yeah yeah good choice

on town that is a cool town i've been very very drunk there before so it's a very coincidental that i am well on my way right now let me stop talking and let me allow you to start talking what can i answer for you or help you with okay well i'm quite honored to be talking to you i'm a long time listener and reader. Thank you. Yeah, this will probably make me an even more insufferable fangirl, according to my friends. So, okay. I want to be a writer. I've always wanted to be a writer.

I'm just now allowing myself or getting myself permission to admit that. And I'm actually halfway through The Magic of Thinking Big, which I'm reading per your recommendation. And it's been incredible, changed my perspective, motivated me. I'm finally writing and creating what I want to create. And I just recently watched your speech that you gave in 2009 called how to blog without killing yourself. Yeah. Yeah. That was from WordCamp. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That WordPress event. And okay. So it was super helpful. And I know that most of it is still relevant, but what I was wondering is now, since it was seven years ago, I wanted the question, the updated, or I wanted the updated answer to two questions that are related. Number one is what is the one piece of really bad advice that you hear people, you know, repeating a lot

that has kind of been accepted as mainstream, you know, by the mainstream as good advice or best practice. And number two, piggybacking off of that, if you had to start your blog again today in 2016, what are the top three ways that you would grow your readership? Woo, that's some heavy lifting for my blood alcohol content, but let me do it. Let's see how I do. All right, so the first one, let me try to make this, however, useful instead of just me mentally masturbating with too much booze. So first is, are you writing fiction or nonfiction? I'm writing nonfiction. Some of my heroes and influences are people like Glennon Doyle Melton of Monastery or Jenny Lawson of The Blogist or Laurie Duchene of Tiny Buddha, people like that. Okay. So what kind of stuff are you writing right now?

It's mostly essays. I like to say it's creative nonfiction. I feel very much a combination of liking to write things like yourself that are very practical, things you can implement, things that are helpful, but also just loving the art, the magic that is writing and the stringing of words together. So I don't really want to write anything that's just totally flowery and beautiful, but unhelpful. And so I kind of am trying to write both. I really identify with what you said in one of your most recent podcasts where I just like to write. I write things.

I have been writing every day, but I mostly just write things that it's more painful to keep them inside of me than it is to finally write them down on paper. Yeah, that's the good stuff to write. So are you hoping to write books or blog? What is the format that you are currently thinking of? This will affect the advice that I give. Okay. I'm writing a blog. I will say that my hope is to become a traditionally published author because of all the benefits that I know that that brings. But I am starting with a blog and just want to focus on that at least for the next three months. Okay. What is your most popular piece that you have written to date? And that does not mean likes and retweets necessarily. It could just be which have your friends liked the most,

but what piece that you've written thus far has proven most popular or to have the best response or that you're happiest with? It could be any, any of those or all of those. Um, I wrote a piece that I really like and that I think most people like called why we should all think about death more. Um, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Um, and that I think most people like called Why We Should All Think About Death More, which is pretty much what it sounds like. And I also wrote just an e-book that I give away for free called Get Naked, Why the World Needs You to Be a Little More You, which also did pretty well. I think it's been downloaded. I don't know. For me, it did pretty well. I think it's been downloaded.

I don't know. For me, it did well. It's been downloaded like 300 times, which, you know, I thought was fine for what I was doing. So those two, I guess. Okay. All right. So the first question was related to bad advice that I've heard given out a lot in the world of writing and or publishing. Is that a fair paraphrase?

Okay. Yeah, yeah. I've been researching a lot, and there's a lot of bad advice out there, and I want to make sure that I steer clear of it. Yeah. All right. So there are two that come to mind. The first I'm actually stealing or borrowing from Stephen Dubner, who I had on my podcast, and I had a follow-up question for him, which I ended up, and I ended up putting his answer in the new book, Tools of Titans. That's the latest and greatest. But I asked him the same question and his answer was,

write what you know. So you hear that a lot, write what you know, write what you know, write what you know. And he said, why would I want to write what I know when I know so little? I want to write about the things that I don't understand or know so that I have, in effect, I'm paraphrasing, the excuse to explore and experiment in those new worlds. Why would I want to write about what I know? It's so little of what's out there. And I agree with him about that. If you look at my trajectory and I think why my books have succeeded in part, at least, it's because I do experiments in worlds and in involving things that I have no right to experiment with. They're completely outside of my normal world. And for that reason, it's new to me,

it's exciting to me. And guess what? If it's new and exciting to you, there is a decent chance it's going to be new and exciting to your readers. If it is old and hackneyed and a thousand times rehearsed and rehashed and old news to you, that sentiment is going to be conveyed to your readers. So for me, I think exploring and conveying that excitement of the novelty and the uncertainty and the potential danger, whatever it might be, is a very powerful elixir for creating good pros and ultimately useful information. So that's number one. Write what you know. Not always good advice. Explore what you don't know, I think, might be, in many cases, better advice. Explore what you don't know, I think might be in many cases, better advice. The second,

and this is extremely boring, but I do think it's practical, is book tours. I've never done a traditional book tour. This is probably putting the cart before the horse because you have some goals to check off before you get to book tour. But I've never done a physical book tour. I just have not found it worth the expenditure of time, money, and energy to help my readers or to help a given book. I find it more useful to focus on the virtual in many cases. So those are two things that immediately come to mind. Which book writers, which authors of books do you most hope to emulate?

Are there any that come to mind? Sure. Well, are you familiar with Glennon Doy doyle melton she's um i am not okay she just came out with her newest memoir it was chosen for the oprah book club which like instantly made her you know super famous um she's been making the podcast rounds too she runs a blog called momastery um well elizabeth gil, I'm sure you've heard of her. Oh yeah, sure. Okay, so she's one who's writing.

I just, you know, absolutely admire. She's a hero of mine, read all her stuff. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild. I really like her memoirs and her podcast is great. So, you know, this might be making myself sound a lot better than I am, but I like to think that those women are. So, you know, this might be making myself sound a lot better than I am,

but I like to think that those women are people in, you know, who's, I don't know, whose path I'm trying to follow, women whose writing I'm trying to emulate to some extent, obviously, with my own unique take. But that's the kind of essay-like memoir that I like to write, but also, again, bringing a little bit of a practical take so But that's the kind of essay-like memoir that I like to write. But also, again, bringing a little bit of a practical take so that it's not just all flowery and beautiful. I'm going to stress test you a little bit. Okay. And I would ask the same if you were a male caller. I would be inclined to ask this. So

you mentioned a bunch of female writers. Are there any male writers that you have read that you might emulate or practice emulating i really like mark manson are you familiar with him mark manson uh oh wait i'm not gonna get this right what is it why i don't give a fuck the subtle art of don't give it not giving a fuck is that it yeah yeah yeah yeah that's, the subtle art of not giving a fuck. Is that it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. The subtle art of not giving a fuck. That's him. So I really like him.

His take on self-help or whatever. Why do you like him to drill into it? Oh, I like, well, I guess it's his voice. He's so honest. He's so raw. He's so funny and helpful. I mean, all of those things. He just gets down to the heart of people. And he's not for everybody, but he's certainly for me. okay if you could just be a little careful with the face on the phone we're getting a lot of beeping um okay that'd be great uh don't don't worry about it that's like my signature move as well but um so so here's what i would suggest is try to have, in terms of role models and people you want to emulate,

two current day authors who are relatively new. You've already checked that box. Two authors or writers who have lasted at least 20 years. So find maybe one female, maybe one male. It doesn't really matter, in my opinion. John McPhee would be my usual go-to recommendation. M-C-P-H-E-E. He's been a staff writer for The New Yorker for several decades.

He's won at least one, maybe two Pulitzer Prizes. Everything he writes makes me want to cry in my pillow and put Poser as a brand on my forehead. He's amazing. And then study some folks who have lasted 100 or more years, meaning really long-standing folks. The sort of breezy conversational style of a lot of contemporary writers will not last the test of time. And I'm not saying that's true of anyone you mentioned, but I think it is very much worth studying people who have stood the test of time. It's very hard to go wrong by emulating that. And if you want a short introduction to, say, John McPhee, two recommendations.

One would be a book called Levels of the Game, which is an entire book about one tennis match. It sounds super boring, and it will probably be one of your favorite books you've ever read. It's incredible. Did he write that? Did John McPhee write that? Yeah, he wrote that. And then the second is a collection of interviews. I should say it's probably one interview spread over multiple segments, but it is called The Art of Nonfiction, and it is an interview with John McPhee or several interviews from the Paris Review. And it is absolutely phenomenal. You can also search his name, John McPhee, on my blog. For those people listening, just go to 4hourworkweek.com

forward slash blog or search Tim Ferriss blog and it'll pop up. Search John McPhee. I have a couple of articles, at least one from the Princeton Alumni Weekly that I've reprinted on my blog with permission about the craft of nonfiction writing that I think are very, very helpful. So those would be a few recommendations. If you can create a successful blog or a mega successful single post, you can get a book deal. In the world of nonfiction, that is true. Okay.

And I think Mark Manson's a perfect example of that. Right, yeah. Yeah, there are many such cases. So the traditional publishing game can be shortcutted very effectively if you produce a single blog post that is mega successful or a blog itself that as a corpus is successful per se, which let's just call that 500,000 to a million uniques per month. Then you can get a traditional book deal. Pretty much no problem. So those are a few of my thoughts. And if you're going to write a book, get the book bird by bird. It will save your sanity and keep you tethered to reality so that you don't tailspin out of control and self-destruct. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I love Anne Wilmot. She's great. Yeah. Agreed. Well, thank you. I've got so many notes. I've got so many great ideas.

Yeah. Thank you so much for your time and for calling me. Am I the last person? No, I'm going to keep going. I think I'm going to do one or two more. We'll see how it pans out. We'll see when my brain decides to go offline. When that happens, then I'm done. Okay, great.

All right, thanks for your time. I hope that helps. Okay, thank you. Well, I won't talk to you later. I'll hear you later on your podcast. All right, bye-bye. Okay, bye. Hello, is this Lillian? I'll hear you later on your podcast. All right. Bye-bye. Okay. Bye. Hello.

Is this Lillian? Yes. Is this Timmy? It is Timmy. Oh, you sound like my mom slash PE instructor. How are you? Oh, no. Okay.

So, which glass are you on? Oh, which glass? This is like six or seven, I would say, of Hendrickson soda. Oh, I'm getting really drunk, Timmy. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. I'm very, I'm warmed up. Where are you at the moment? I'm in Washington, D.C.

D.C.? But I'm not from here, so I'm from Lebanon. I'm from Beirut. From Beirut. Well, charrafna. Nice to meet you. Oh, look at that. Yeah, I got a few words here and there.

Maybe it's Kalem Arabi. That's about it. Well, you never see so many things. So you're up late. I'm drunk and it feels late. Let's have some fun. How can I help? Well, you know, I think the thing I really wanted to talk to you about was that I discovered you, I think, three years ago. And I became so obsessed with optimization. And I just became like crazy.

And then I realized like I completely burnt out. And then I started hating you a lot. And now I'm like a good place. But I just want to know how do you optimize so much and keep a sense of joy and novelty in your life also being here for the past two months because I'm here on a short trip I kind of understood a bit like life here is very different than life back home. And if optimization is about controlling variables in a complex system, this is kind of feasible here.

Well, back home, it's not as much. So I don't know. Let's just talk about that. If it makes some sense. Sure. Well, let me ask you first, how is life different in Lebanon compared to here? I would start with the internet speed. That's like kind of shit. You know, if I'm writing and I'm feeling like optimistic about something or I'm working and then I just wait for shit to load,

I just lose my track of thought. And then all my optimization goes down the crapper. Another thing would be like transportation. That kind of shit. We don't have public transportation. So there's just more outside of your control. Exactly. So very much variables outside my control, very much controlling of my life.

So I would say a few things. So the first is that there is, I think, a misperception that I try to optimize everything. And I think it's important for us to define optimize. So let us define optimize in the context of efficiency as getting things done in the least amount of time possible. There are domains in my life that I seek to optimize. Generally, those are processes, tasks that I do not enjoy spending time on.

And then there are things that I do not optimize, right? I don't watch my favorite TV shows on 2X. I don't read, I don't speed read poetry. I don't boil myself in water because I want to spend less time in my hot bath by increasing the temperature. Yeah, yeah. Right. You know, I'm not trying to, well, I was going to say ejaculate as quickly as possible, but maybe that's too much alcohol. I'm not trying to have the fastest sex possible, for instance. Sorry, use the E word, it happens. So the point being that the efficiency is most important

when you're trying to multiply outputs and particularly when there are tasks or processes involved that you do not enjoy. So I don't make myself miserable by optimization specifically because it is compartmentalized and limited to a specific subset of activities in my life. Does that make sense? And I think secondarily, the commonality between, say, rules that I would follow here and rules that I would follow in Lebanon or in many other places are the same. And that is you have, for instance, strategies and tactics.

Above those two, you have a layer, which would be first principles. And the first principles that I follow could really be codified in the philosophical system of Stoicism. I mean, I have a quote from Marcus Aurelius on my refrigerator. I'm looking at it right now. It's on the right-hand door that I see every morning when I remove anything from my refrigerator. And I think the core or one of the core tenets of Stoicism, whether you're looking at Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, or otherwise, is close to what people in the US at least would know well as the serenity prayer. And a big component of that is identifying the things you can change versus the things that you cannot change. So in Lebanon, the things you cannot change would include

shitty transportation, shitty internet. We just keep changing and piling up. Yeah, yeah. Here, they might be different things. But nonetheless, there are still factors that are either within your sphere of influence and control or outside of your sphere of influence and control. So separating those are very important. So those, I would say, are two observations just offhand in response to your comments.

Number one, relating to how not to be miserable optimizing. So IE, choose your targets wisely. And then secondly, the commonalities or the common operating system that you could run independent of environment, meaning here or in Lebanon or in Ethiopia or in Japan, it doesn't matter. And it's just a higher level of abstraction, if that makes sense. There are certain tactics you may not be able to use. You may not be able to stream video effectively in certain places, but you can still use the higher levels, the higher first principles that you're imposing upon in a top-down fashion all the rest of the decision-making that you employ. That seems pretty legit. And actually, I've heard you say one before, but I just wanted to raise the issue. Have you been to our part of the world since? I haven't been to Lebanon.

I've wanted to for a long time. What are you waiting for? I have Lebanese friends. They told me not to go because it was dangerous. Everyone has Lebanese friends, and I don't trust those Lebanese friends. I've heard so much crap about them. Well, you know, they said to me,

they're like, well, you know, due to A, B, and C factors, I would not recommend that you go right now because it may not be the safest place for you. We just have a trash crisis and trash is eating our streets. That's totally fine. We still party hard. We still eat good food. Yeah, I would like to visit. I'd love to go to Beirut

at some point I've been to I've spent time in Jordan that's yeah that's about as close as I've gotten so far you should come to Cairo

there's a startup event this December and I think it's gonna be awesome yeah maybe so and it's pretty close December will be tough because I have my book launch

in December and oh yeah Christmas congrats on that I'll be thank you I'll have my book launch in December and Christmas. So I'll be some, thank you. I'll be a bit occupied in December, but never been to Egypt. I would love to check it out. That will be a TBD, no doubt, but I may be spending.

I think you'd enjoy to see like just the chaos there. And I'd love to see your perspective about like just how people can like survive in a place like Cairo. Like every time I visit, I'm just amazed. You'd be shocked. I'm sure I would be. But I'll have to brush up on my Arabic before I head over. But I guess Egyptian Arabic should be the easiest, I would imagine, to kind of pick up

because most of the movies and music and so on are produced in Egypt. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. Very true. We will see. We will see. But yeah, I would say that, yeah, optimization can make you miserable and it will make you miserable if you apply it to all things, for sure.

Yeah. Because you will. Yeah, I think I missed out on that part. Like, don't optimize the shit you enjoy. Good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Savor the shit you enjoy,

which means very often that you are doing the opposite of optimizing, right? You are actually de-optimizing. We should find a word for that. Yeah, you're elongating. You're distending. Distending sounds a little odd and anatomical. But you're

extending the time involved for the things you enjoy. So, that's my take. Well, thank you. For sure. I appreciate it. And I appreciate taking the time.

So thanks for dropping in your information. Thank you. Have a good night. All right. You too. Bye-bye. Ciao. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do.

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