The Tim Ferriss Show - #257: Physical Training, Dating Strategies, and Stories from the Early Days

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Starting point is 00:03:38 a million or so subscribers and a 60 plus percent open rate. So people seem to really dig it. It's free, always will be. I send out a few bullets of cool things that I'm exploring each Friday. So if you want to check that out, go to Tim.blog forward slash Friday, get a lot of exclusive stuff, see things first, et cetera. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. Okay. So moving on to a handful of questions and we will cover physical training, we will cover interview prep, we will cover educational reform, and much more. So let's dive right in. First question, which was upvoted quite heavily, is from Jeremy Sen, and I will try to summarize

Starting point is 00:04:22 this. Quote, you've jumped around a lot between different exercise slash training programs throughout the years, powerlifting, gymnastics, acroyoga, Olympic weightlifting, swimming, et cetera, and talked to enthusiasts from all over the spectrum, Poliquin, Pavel, Jersey, summer, et cetera. So how have you, in the words of Bruce Lee, absorbed what is useful, discarded what is useless, and added what is specifically your own, especially now that you're close to 40? Yes, very close. How do you see your exercise programming looking into your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond? Thanks. All right. Now, I think that if we're looking from the macro to the micro,

Starting point is 00:04:59 I have thought about this a few different ways. And I've spent in the last few years a lot of time very deliberately with older males who have maintained a high level of physical performance. Whether that's Laird Hamilton or Jersey, Gregorick, Art Devaney, and others who are in their 60s, in some cases, 70s, 80s. In the case of, say, Don Wildman, who I'm still going to hunt down an interview at some point, he was thought of by Laird as a mentor who now heli skis or heli snowboards, I think one month a year in his 80s. I look to these people to try to identify what is working, what has worked, and what they have let go. So number one, I would say the purpose of training is priority one, injury prevention, priority two, performance enhancement, and then everything else, third and beyond. What this means is I am going to focus less on demonstration of strength and more on development of strength.

Starting point is 00:06:05 So demonstration of strength might take the form of, say, a flat bench press where you have a very, very large back arch and you're minimizing the range of motion so you can move the most weight. And rather than use that, and there are certainly applications, particularly if you have a lot of proper instruction from a good power lifter like Mark Bell, for instance. I'm going to err on the side of anything that I can do to develop strength that helps with injury prevention. So this will take the form of very unsexy movements like the step-ups and working on internal femur rotation and so on that you might find through, say, Orion Flaherty, who's been on the podcast. We talked at length about this using the trap bar

Starting point is 00:06:53 deadlift, for instance, to improve ground reactive force for sprinters and runners of all types. Ryan is now the, I believe, head of performance or director of performance at Nike and has a lot to share about preventing injuries. So tim.blog forward slash Ryan, if you want to listen to that. I'm also going to focus on, and this ties into Jersey and his work with Olympic weightlifting, I'm going to focus on in the case of the squat, for instance, very full range of motion as to the heels, knees projecting forward, chest upright, Olympic style, high bar or overhead or front squatting versus just a parallel, very heavy low back squatting. Okay. And the objective here, among other things, is to develop strength through a full range of motion as full as I can perform and to increase that functional range of motion by improving, for instance, the ankle dorsiflexion and achieving this within a loaded

Starting point is 00:07:59 position in the lower squat with the knees projecting forward. So really working on that ankle flexibility. And that is a common recommendation or focus, say across a number of these folks, whether it is Pavel with Cossack squats or Poliquin as a warmup to a squat workout, doing calf stretches, finishing on a contraction, or in the case of Jersey. So these are very, very consistent things. And another part of that is working up the chain. So if you are warming up or training, working from the ground up in an effort to minimize injury, what does this mean? This means that I might use a, for instance, slant board designed by Eric Orton, O-R-T-O-N. You may recognize the name. He became very well known

Starting point is 00:08:51 as the trainer in Born to Run and wobble boards and so on with a host of exercises that really only take five to 10 minutes, which you can use as a warmup or as a finisher. I tend to use them as a warmup and then slowly working up from the ground to the higher extremities. All right. And of course, I'm not a professional trainer. I don't do that, but I do have a lot of wide exposure to folks. What other types of development of strength, not demonstrations of strength, might I focus on for injury prevention? As I get older and also to compensate for many years of wrestling, I am looking at still incorporating specific movements from gymnastic strength training, GST, all right, so Coach Sommer, or people may laugh even from say Pilates, really technical Pilates for thoracic mobility and rotation. The rotation I think is neglected by a lot of folks.

Starting point is 00:09:54 And if, if gymnastic strength training or Pilates, God forbid, makes you recoil in horror, you can look at some of the exercises that say Eric Cressy uses for warmups. Fantastic, fantastic trainer and athlete in his own right can really pull one hell of a deadlift. Check him out. Cressy, C-R-E-S-S-E-Y. Or for Stegen and others. All right, like the, I think it's the walking Spider-man warm-up and where you will see that type of thoracic rotation which i think is very very neglected every week i will do one or two heavier weight training sessions this does not mean that i'm going for one repetition maxes but it might mean that i'm using a maximum weight in say the two-handed kettlebell swing which i which is a consistent staple and will continue to be a maximum weight in, say, the two-handed kettlebell swing, which is a consistent

Starting point is 00:10:46 staple and will continue to be a consistent staple in my exercise diet for, say, maximum repetitions with good form up to, let's just call it 20 reps. It could be more, it could be 50. So two days ago, I just did something like somewhere between 80 and 100 reps in a single set with 53-pound kettlebell. And then I will use progressive resistance and increase that as I go. Pretty light at the moment. All right, so weight training one or two times per week. As you get older and your hormonal profile is less and less conducive to muscle growth

Starting point is 00:11:21 or preservation, I view this as hypercritical for countering sarcopenia, so age-related loss of muscle. If you want to prevent broken hips and all these things that tend to happen in older people, this is, I think, an incredibly important exercise habit to develop and protect from encroaching commitments otherwise. Then I would say the remainder would ideally be outdoors. I've realized the benefit, and Rick Rubin, legendary music producer, has underscored this, sun exposure first thing in the morning and so on, but two to five times a week of some type of outdoor exercise, which you could view as recreation. It doesn't have to be super intense, whether that's swimming, paddleboarding, running, or otherwise. All right, and there you have it.

Starting point is 00:12:09 That's pretty much it. But I have learned that even though I have viewed exercise as medicine, in some cases, bitter medicine to be dosed, not necessarily to be enjoyed, that as you get older, the enjoyment component, I think, becomes, at least for the people that I've surrounded myself with, more and more of a critical criterion. And part of that is surrounding yourself with a group of people who enjoy and participate in, for instance, hot and cold and underwater weight training in the case of Laird and his whole gang with XPT, which you guys can check out XPT training. If you want to check out Jersey, I mentioned him already, tim.blog forward slash Jersey. That's an interview also involving Naval Ravikant. And then if you want to listen to Art Devaney, who is, I think, in his late 70s,

Starting point is 00:13:04 about to turn 80, something like that, still crushing it. That is Tim.blog forward slash art. And hopefully that helps. All right, let's jump to the next question, which is related to interview prep. Connor Sweetman asks, Hey, Tim, I'm a longtime listener, first time caller. What's your process for interview preparation? How do you study up on your subjects and come up with questions? I have experimented with many different approaches and hired in some cases,

Starting point is 00:13:38 researchers to help me refine my approach. For instance, I hired a researcher from Inside the Actors Studio to go through transcripts of my early interviews and to recommend how I might structure things differently, missed opportunities, and asked him how he helps James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actors Studio, to prepare. And one of the things that he will do is go through, say, Wikipedia entries and look for the most arcane or understated point that might be found in a bibliographical point. know Edward before I interviewed him, but I wanted to start somewhere that was very rarely used as an entry point in an interview that ended up being surfing. I don't know if that's in his Wikipedia or not. It might be, but I look for a starting point that will show I've done my homework because as someone who's been interviewed hundreds of times now at this point, I immediately put people into the, they've done their homework category or they haven't done their homework and they're

Starting point is 00:14:51 mailing it in, or they're relying on me to perform and they really haven't put in the effort to ensure this will be a good conversation. I want to demonstrate that I've done my homework and looked at the nooks and crannies of their lesser explored bio beforehand. So that's very typical. I also listened to one or two long form interviews whenever possible, whether that is a Charlie Rose, Larry King, or inside the actor studio or something comparable by long form. I mean more than 20 minutes. Then part of the prep can be leaning on either the person helping to facilitate the interview or the interview subject themselves. And I will ask them beforehand, and that could be a week beforehand where I'm gathering material, or it could be just in the

Starting point is 00:15:39 five or 10 minutes before we start. And I will ask them, what are two or three of your home run stories, meaning stories that you've told that have gotten a fantastic response from audiences before? Or if you tell them at a dinner, people tend to retell that story that you've told. What are two or three of those? And don't tell me what the story is, but what is a prompt that I could use to bring up the home run story? Sometimes they will provide me with the cues or I will listen to the long form interviews that I mentioned and identify two or three stories I want to include in my interview. Nine times out of 10, I don't want to know the answer, but I also want to ensure for

Starting point is 00:16:23 the listeners that they are guaranteed two or three moments of gold. And that is where this type of preparation is very, very helpful. In front of me, I will have typically two pages. So I will have a notebook opened to a single spread with five to 10 questions or topics I want to explore based on everything that I mentioned. That'll be on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, I will have rapid fire questions that I want to ask specifically. And that could include some of the usual suspects. What is the book that you've gifted the most to other people in the past? And I won't explain why that's a better question than

Starting point is 00:17:06 what is your favorite book, but it is for many, many different reasons and so on. So I'll have five to 10 on the left-hand side that are original topics slash question points, and then five to 10 rapid fire on the right, which may have some originals based on their idiosyncrasies. And then I'll track time. So if I'm doing a phoner, so I'm say calling them via Skype and recording with Ecamm call recorder, I will typically watch a device or just my clock and say segment a 90 minute interview into three 30 minute segments. And that helps me to think about my topics and so on for say 30 minutes. And then the next segment is fan questions from say social media interspersed with some of my own follow-ups and then rapid fire for the last 30, something like that. I almost always like to have

Starting point is 00:18:02 a rough blueprint of how I'm going to break down time so that I can hit the high points that I want to hit. And within all of this, you have certain objectives or signposts, say for the Jamie Foxx episode, the first Jamie Foxx episode that I did, which ended up being a voted podcast episode of the year on Product Hunt in 2015. You can listen to that if you want. I highly recommend it just for Jamie. He did the performance, but tim.blog.com. Jamie, worth the time. The magic of someone like Jamie is you prompt them and then he will tell an incredible story. If you want to turn the story in some cases into something very highly tactical, you want to set aside, and I did in this case, a good 40 to 50% of the time just for follow-up questions.

Starting point is 00:18:54 And in the follow-up questions, there are a few follow-up questions that I like. There are many good follow-ups, of course. What did you learn from that is a really easy one. What did you learn from that? How did easy one. What did you learn from that? How did that feel? Or how does that feel? Also a really good one. If they tell a story about something they did and it reflects a skill, where did you learn how to X? You did A, B, and C. Where did you learn how to do that? How did you pick that up? And then we dig into examples. So if they say, well, it's really important to mean what you say and say what you mean or something like that,

Starting point is 00:19:31 what would be an example from your life where you've applied that or where it's been really, really important? What might be another example? These types of follow-up questions can really lead you to a lot of gold. And when in doubt, you can always follow Ricardo Semmler's or Ricardo Semmler's, depending on how you want to pronounce it, policy of why, why, why, you know, asking why three times, but making sure you don't do it in a really annoying way. So those are a few of the ways that I think about prep and management of interviews. Whatever you do, don't be lazy. Don't be lazy. Because people who have had a lot of interviews. Whatever you do, don't be lazy. Don't be lazy because people who have had a lot of interviews in particular or anyone really smart will know immediately if you've done your

Starting point is 00:20:13 homework or not. And there you have it. So those are a few recommendations and study, study, study, study good questions. Write down good questions. Keep, say, an Evernote file or something where you collect questions, which is what I do. If I'm reading an in-flight magazine and I'm reading an interview and I catch a really good question, wow, that's awesome, fantastic. I will put that into my collection of questions. And I've accumulated many, many different questions over time and then modified them to suit my own style, so to speak. All right. Next question.

Starting point is 00:20:51 Your greatest superpower that you've never talked about. How did you connect with all of your friends? All right. The networking question is a good one. And I think that it's worth a reference to another more comprehensive discussion. So I did put together a post to answer this question because I get it so much. How to build, and this is the title, how to build a world-class network in record time. I want you guys who are interested to check it out because it does go into some depth. Tim.blog forward slash network.

Starting point is 00:21:29 And it tells the story specifically of what I did at South by Southwest, which is a big conference, in 2007, which led to the tipping point for my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and directly led to it being published in more than 40 languages and being on the New York Times bestseller list for about four and a half years straight. And it came from, in large part, a handful of decisions and commitments made at that one conference. So the good news about networking per se, which I think comes off as a

Starting point is 00:22:03 dirty word for a lot of good reasons, is that if you, if you play the long game, if you're not a dick, you don't dismiss people. And, uh, you think about it strategically, really, if you follow a handful of guidelines for one or two well-chosen events, you never have to network again again In fact, you don't have to collect all the useless business cards that just sit in your pocket Which is really ineffective most of how people approach this I think is is ill-conceived all right, and This person elaborated in the question It seems like one of your greatest superpowers is connecting intimately with a lot of great people Being friends with guys and gals like Chris Saka Kevin Rose Rose, Daria Pino, et cetera. How did you do

Starting point is 00:22:47 it? How are you still doing it? I, the reason I wanted to bring up this elaboration is that Kevin Rose introduced me to Chris Saka. Kevin Rose also introduced me to Daria Pino, who is now his wife. And you don't have to know everyone with, I think, developing human relationships. You want to go an inch wide and a mile deep, not a mile wide and an inch deep. And if you have even one person in your close circle of friends who is the hub effectively, then you, if they develop a high degree of trust in you, may have access to those other people if you need it. But it's not the sole driver or main driver for the friendships I develop. Nonetheless, that is how I might think about it. All right, next question. And if you want to, again,

Starting point is 00:23:38 dive into that, I've gone into it at length, tim.blog forward slash network. Next one, in your TED Talk, smash fear, learn anything. You spoke about working on changes to the educational system. What did you find and are you still working on it by jrock717? What I found was that educational reform is a quagmire of political interests and difficulties and roadblocks. So yes, I am still working on it. I do have some

Starting point is 00:24:06 big plans in the next 12 to 24 months. Some of them require a lot of war chest capital. In the meantime, I have looked far and wide for specific companies in this case, in that the gap, the examples that I'll give nonprofits that function like very lean, effective for profit startups. And so there are two that I'm on the advisory board of that I encourage everybody to check out. The first is donors choose.org. Uh, that's the reason I was on Steven Colbert some time ago with a group of other folks. So you can check out donorschoose.org, some incredible supporters like Michelle Obama and Oprah and so on, uh, founded in fact by my, one of my wrestling partners from high school, Charles Best. It's just an incredible, incredible story and a really impressive organization. So donorschoose.org, you can

Starting point is 00:25:02 check that out. That is mostly K through 12, uh, high need classrooms in the United States. Then quest bridge, which is lesser known questbridge.org. And I'm on the, uh, Western U S advisory board along with Reed Hoffman, uh, co-founder of LinkedIn and so on, who has been on this podcast before questbridge.org is very, very, very clever and elegant in how they identify and source high talent. Uh, but in some cases, economically disadvantaged kids from around the U.S. to get them free scholarships to top schools. And this is not principally a funding problem. People think that getting qualified, but in some capacity disadvantaged kids into great schools is a money problem. It's not a money problem. In principle, it is a sourcing problem, finding the talent and getting them to apply to the schools when in many cases they don't have the social support or even the expectation,

Starting point is 00:26:09 the understanding that it's an option, even though they might be the next, say, Elon Musk. So QuestBridge.org has a number of different approaches they use to source these kids. And I want to say two years ago, they put about half of the economically disadvantaged kids into the Ivy League. And I'm sure someone out there will fact check it, but it's not far off if it's off at all. So questbridge.org, really awesome organization. And then on the curriculum side of things, I do focus a lot and I have historically focused a lot on meta learning. How do you teach someone how to learn more effectively, more quickly?

Starting point is 00:26:50 I talked about this at length for about 150 pages in the meta learning section of the four hour chef. Uh, that is important, but the main issues holding back the, the United States educational system right now are primarily political in my mind. So those are thornier to deal with. And I am going to take a stab at dealing with them.

Starting point is 00:27:17 But this is not the forum right now where I can air my grievances. I don't think that would be productive. I'd rather just fix the problem. And maybe that means doing it quietly. Maybe it means doing it loudly, but the timing isn't right yet. All right. Next one. This is related, but very quickly. It's Tim as a current student, I've stumbled upon many problems with the current educational system, how it's run. I was encouraged to hear and it's someone who is frustrated as a current student with educational system. And I want to just point out one thing because there is a, I think an excessive focus maybe on curriculum here and it's a cautionary note just because something is hard or sucks doesn't mean it's wrong. All right. So there's a criticism which is,

Starting point is 00:28:07 is fairly levied against say most educational curricula in the U S say K through 12, which is it's, it's one size fits all. How can we possibly judge all these kids on standardized testing? And yet when you get out into the real world, guess what? You have to compete and you have to compete very often with objective measures that take the form of tests, which take the form of interviews, which have set questions and so on. These are the realities you have to grapple with. So if you want to compete in a free market and be effective and win, you have to learn how to

Starting point is 00:28:46 operate within sometimes a system that you feel sucks and is unfair and doesn't capitalize on your strengths. Nonetheless, you have to learn how to deal with that. And that is part of a good education as far as I'm concerned. So for instance, when I was at Princeton in the East Asian Studies Department, taking Chinese 101, Chinese 101 at Princeton, at least when I was there, was two things simultaneously. Tremendously, tremendously effective. Very famous among East Asian Studies Departments and nationwide, perhaps even worldwide, for being effective. Really putting out and producing students who could speak Chinese well. Specifically, they had extremely good pronunciation. And the other side of that

Starting point is 00:29:33 coin is brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal. I remember going in Chinese 101 first day, I want to say there were 60 students. And this was before Chinese was as popular as it is today. This is, I guess, God, it's probably 1996, 95, 96. And at the end of a week, I think we had 12 or 14 students remaining. And it was absolutely brutal. And the amount, the sheer volume of practice that we put in on tones specifically was just crushing. And I think it was something like five or six different lessons per week. And it might have seemed to many students in the class to be draconian and extremely archaic because of the sheer amount of repetition invested in some of these tones. In retrospect, it's totally necessary. It's like physical conditioning. You just can't say something like yes, you or not sure what the retro flexive tongue, unless you've developed

Starting point is 00:30:40 the musculature and physiology required. And no matter how much you practice in one day, it's a lot like slacklining actually, you're not going to be able to do it at the end of one day. You have to develop that over time by putting in reps. So just because something is hard or sucks doesn't mean it's wrong. That is the moral of that story. All right. Next question is, where's the line between stubbornly pursuing an idea, which isn't working and the patience and persistence needed to actually make it work. In other words, when you should give up versus when you should push on, this is from J F Kearns. And, uh, this, this is such an important question and one that so many people struggle with that I actually reached out to a bunch of past guests on the podcast who I admire and thought might be

Starting point is 00:31:32 able to give really good answers. And they responded with their answers in audio. So there's an entirely separate episode dedicated to this question. And I think the title is probably how to quit or when to quit rather. And if you go to Tim.blog forward slash quit, you can get their take on when you should persist and when you should give up on an idea that isn't working. All right. Next question is, as I turn the page, dream podcast guests, Who are your top five guests you'd love to have on the show but haven't? Why do you want to dig in on their success habits in life? This is from

Starting point is 00:32:12 GTH 2006. Real quickly, off the top of my head, I would say Oprah, Howard Stern. Those two off the bat because I think they're masters of their craft. And even though they're very, very well known, underestimated or underappreciated for just how good they are at digging several layers deep, when so many people in that position of interviewer can coast on the first answer to a simple question. So those are two, two Jedi who I would love to interview at some point. Then there are a few athletes who are interesting to me, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi, I lived in Argentina his, his very first season and I've watched him with great interest ever since. Both of those athletes are very fascinating to me. And it would be fun also as a former soccer player to perhaps introduce many people in the U.S. to some of the cooler aspects of soccer. The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, I think would be high on the list for many, many different reasons. He's just been able to develop so many different skills. He really is a polymath in a lot of

Starting point is 00:33:33 respects that I'd want to dig in on many different facets of his life. So offhand, that is five people. So I'll leave it at that. Next, can you channel your inner Cal Fussman and tell a story from your brain quicken slash travel days that perhaps has not made it into any books or interviews? This is by Dr. Sergo. Sure, I can do that. And for those of you who don't know Cal Fussman, Cal is the master interviewer extraordinaire

Starting point is 00:34:03 who has interviewed everybody from Muhammad Ali to Gorbachev to Al Pacino to everybody for the What I Learned, is that it? Something like that, the column in Esquire. I just came out of a sauna and I'm a little dehydrated. In any case, if you want to hear some of Cal's stories, and he's going to crush me because he's so good at it, but tim.blog forward slash cal, C-A-L, we'll take you there. Okay, so a story from the early days. Brain Quicken, which was my sports nutrition company way back in the day that preceded the four-hour work week and so on. What story? I'll tell you a story that takes place in new orleans so i had decided at one point to go

Starting point is 00:34:48 from direct to consumer to retail or to at least augment direct sales with some type of retail presence for uh these sports supplements that uh were being produced and then later sold in about a dozen countries but in the very early days i was trying to figure out retail and what spliffs are and what co-marketing is and so on and so forth. And it was recommended to me that I go to a trade show called the GNC Show of Strength. I'm pretty sure I'm getting this right. And it was in New Orleans. I'd never been to New Orleans. I did not have any employees at the time. And I was able to wrangle a friend of mine, Jason, into taking some time off of work, I think a Friday, to join me for a weekend to help man the booth. And I promised I'd pay for meals and booze and so on.

Starting point is 00:35:39 And as soon as we got there, I realized that I was extremely underfunded. There were these other gigantic booths from all these large brands that you'd recognize. And they had 10 to 15 people, they had booth babes, as they call them, you know, attractive women hanging out just to pull people in. And these huge $100,000 plus displays. And I had nothing. We literally had arrived with the pre-shipped product and a tablecloth and a table. That was about it. So I needed to tap dance and improvise very quickly. So we did a few things. Number one, we realized that I could not afford to rent everything from the venue because how they make their money in part is much like how the movie theaters get you

Starting point is 00:36:32 on the concessions. They tell you, they sell you a ticket for whatever it is, seven to 12 bucks. And then they get another 20 or $30 out of you with popcorn and candy and drinks and so on. When you go to a trade show, you often look at the cost of a booth and you're like, okay, this is my cost in the beginning, which is a very, very painful lesson and mistake. And then you get there and you're like, oh, I just need a chair. How much is that? And they're like, yeah, it's $120 a day. Like, wait, what? Oh, you need a table? Yeah, that's,400 for the weekend, and so on and so forth. All right, so we went to a hand-me-down shop somewhere in a very questionable neighborhood

Starting point is 00:37:15 in New Orleans and bought a used couch, and it was so filthy that we bought some cheap linens to cover this thing with, and then had to effectively hitchhike to find a truck that would take it to the venue which we were able to do couldn't get into the venue because it had just closed 30 minutes earlier we had some delays in getting this couch and literally left it on the sidewalk and hoped that it wouldn't get stolen overnight so that we could then very first thing the next morning quietly and quickly usher it in and hopefully not get caught. Also went to a best buy and I'm not proud of this, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We bought a TV knowing that there was a return

Starting point is 00:37:59 policy, 30 day return policy, because it was ultimately going to be a lot cheaper than renting the venue. Got this TV and realized I had a VHS tape, shows you how old things were then. And we had a VHS tape of Muay Thai kickboxing matches from Thailand, which really had not been widely distributed in the US at that point. And it was like, it was a knockout highlight reel. So we had somehow procured a table, we had the couch, and I looked in my luggage for other props we could use. So I had a TV from Best Buy, where we were we were playing fighting fighting nonstop and knockouts, which would grab people's attention. I had three Captains of Crush grippers in my bag. And these are hand grippers that go up to, I think at the time, the number four gripper required 365 pounds to close, something like that,

Starting point is 00:39:01 which I cannot close. But I had a whole collection of these in my bag. So I took these out and I put them on the table with the pounds required to close for each one and a free bottle of, uh, at this point, I think it was body quick because it'd been repositioned for athletes, a free bottle, or maybe it was free case. If you could close the number four gripper and you have to keep in mind at this event, the show of strength, you had power lifters, arm wrestlers, Brock Lesnar was there for some other booth and so on. And this became a macho test for people who would then go grab their friends and bring their friends back to see who could close stronger grippers.

Starting point is 00:39:43 And I also ended up befriending across the way, and there was another booth, and there were these very attractive women running the booth who'd been hired by the company, but the company reps were off just getting shit-faced on Bourbon Street or something like that. So I would take bathroom breaks and I would say, would you guys mind, or one of you just manning my booth for five minutes while I go to the bathroom? And I said, and if anybody comes by, like, here's the brochure, if you'd be so kind, they were like, sure. Like, we know what you're doing. And I was pretty explicit about it. I said, look, we could use all the help we can get. And they were like, no problem. That's fine. And so they would come over during my bathroom breaks and spend five to 10 minutes helping to get more meatheads to the booth.

Starting point is 00:40:29 And it ended up being a very successful show. And in this particular type of show, it wasn't the individual trade show goers, the people who bought a day pass that you cared the most about, because in many cases, those folks just wait until the last day and then come around trying to buy everything at remnant prices. So they'll come by the last day and they'll say, hey, can I buy each of these bottles for 10% of your asking price? That is how a lot of this works. You go to the show to meet the other, in my case, exhibitors. You want to meet the distributors at the time, people like Europa, for instance. And you want to meet other people who can teach you how the business works. For instance,

Starting point is 00:41:09 I befriended a few people at other companies who were very generous, more senior folks, certainly in that world, who were willing to show me their pricing sheets. How did their pricing work for retailers? How did their pricing work for distributors? What types of costs were baked in versus separate and so on, which was extremely valuable. So I viewed my payment for the trade show and all the costs incurred as continuing education. I was paying for an MBA class over a weekend to teach me the specifics of how the business works. So I could take that back even without any end user orders and improve the business, which I was able to do. All right. Hopefully that, uh, hopefully that helps. Or if you guys like that story,

Starting point is 00:41:59 that is one of many, uh, let's see. Next one is from Fenderbender87. Hey, Tim, Joe Rogan is a world class comedian, podcaster, and sports commentator, float tank extraordinaire, etc. Will he be a guest on the podcast at some point? I'd be interested to hear you interview him to see if you can explore what it is that makes him successful at his many endeavors. Absolutely, 100% would love to have Joe on the podcast sometime. I have tremendous respect for him and think he's just done an amazing job in navigating, innovating, and succeeding in so many different worlds. Whether it's balancing the podcast with an incredible schedule of commentary and standup performances, keeping in mind that the performances require, I'm assuming months, maybe even years of developing

Starting point is 00:42:54 material. So that is the end product, which in and of itself takes a lot of time, but then there's all the development and testing and working a material that goes into it. So he would be, uh, he would be in my top five list for the podcast. And I hope to make that happen at some point. Uh, very impressive guy all around for sure. Next question is from import underscore learn Python. Okay. Do you still observe screenless Saturday? You mentioned going screenless years ago. Curious if you're still following that practice. Yes, I do follow this. So the screen free Saturdays is how I usually refer to it. And that was yesterday for me right now. I am recording this on a Sunday and it's turned into, I would say, I still call it

Starting point is 00:43:47 screen-free Saturday for myself, but it is mostly referring to no laptop and no social media. So I will still use my phone for texting, for using apps like Uber, for instance, to get around. These are things that are hard to go without. And particularly in a place like San Francisco, where I have no car, I do not own a car. So it's important that I have my phone. And if I forget it, which I have on a few occasions, looks like I'm doing a couple hours of walking. And that's okay. But I still do this and it is typically every Saturday that I do this. I try to go the entire day without any exposure to laptop and any exposure to social media. You will occasionally see things pop up in my social media on Saturday that have been scheduled in advance with the understanding that I'm not going to be

Starting point is 00:44:45 on social on Saturday. So yes, I find the screen free Saturday to be an incredible part or just incredibly important part of my weekly routine. Next question. And last question for now is from Amanda piece dating strategies. What is your current experience and what recommendations do you have? Well, first observation would be, I think dating strategies for men and women are probably quite different. But a number of suggestions or more, not suggestions, thoughts off the top of my head. So the first is, if you want to know how I think about relationships these days, then my conversation with Esther Perel is probably a good place to go. And you can find that tim.blog forward slash Esther. She wrote mating in captivity and is just incredible. She's endlessly fascinating and a

Starting point is 00:45:47 brilliant, brilliant woman. If you're going to use, say, an app during my periods of being single, I've found Bumble to be very, very effective. I do like the fact that it puts the ball in the female court in my case, which I think benefits both sides and prevents a lot of time wasting for me so that I can assess if there are prospects or not very, very quickly. I would also suggest that in the interest of time, you avoid dinner dates. If you are having your first round interview, so to speak, with someone, there's a good chance, there's a very non-trivial chance that they will disqualify themselves extremely quickly. Or you will meet them and you'll say, wow, okay, those photos were 10 years

Starting point is 00:46:37 old and 50 pounds ago. I'm not attracted to this person. And if that is a disqualifier, you would prefer to learn that over, say, a coffee date, meeting for coffee, than you would over what you then may get roped into as a three or four hour commitment. So I do recommend coffee or tea dates whenever possible. And if you're going to go on a dinner date, I think this is particularly true if you're male and you want to make it less intimidating for a woman, as well as not a zero-sum game for yourself. You should make it a group activity. So you can have some type of group dinner or a fun activity with your friends. So if it say goes poorly with your date, then you still had a fantastic evening with your friends. And if it goes well, and you want to continue the evening with your date, then you talk to your friends beforehand. You say, Hey, if this goes really

Starting point is 00:47:41 well, I may want to split off from you guys and we'll grab some drinks and you guys will not join us. And then you have that option as well. If you are dating and, or I should say you were single, and let's just say you just got out of a very long relationship and are not interested in becoming emotionally attached or having anyone else get emotionally attached to you. I remember being given advice at one point that I think is very helpful for such cases. And that is no dinners at all, no sleepovers. That's it. So no dinners, no sleepovers.

Starting point is 00:48:19 So if you do coffee, then the next step would be drinks, potentially, right? If you drink, but no dinners, no sleepovers. If you want to avoid then the next step would be drinks, potentially, right? If you drink. But no dinners, no sleepovers. If you want to avoid emotional entanglement, if you're in a place where you just got out of something very, very heavy and serious, for instance, and you want to take a break from any of that psychic load, no dinners, no sleepovers.

Starting point is 00:48:41 Let's see. What else? I would say for men out there, this was a few years ago i observed this i want to say maybe two years ago i took a period of time where i was completely dry meaning i wasn't drinking any booze and i wasn't really going out at all. And I remember at one point just deciding that if I got very frustrated with online dating and just dropped it entirely, I was just going to go celibate and enjoy my single time solo. And when people would engage from say old messages that were sent on Bumble or some other app, I would say, you know what? Would love to hang, but I'm pretty boring these days. I'm not

Starting point is 00:49:32 drinking any booze, but if you want to have some tea, sure. We could have like a quick tea date, but I'm probably going to be very, very uninteresting. And for whatever reason, and just speculating, I think it's because it reduced the fear factor or the threat factor that women may experience when men want to have a lot of booze. And that variable can create a fear factor, understandably. When that was removed, the sort of acceptance rate, the number of women who wanted to meet up seemed to me to be abnormally high, meaning two or three X the norm versus, Hey, let's get drinks. So there is perhaps something to be learned there, uh, strategically, tactically speaking. So that is really about it. I do think that dating is very different for men

Starting point is 00:50:29 and women. And that there have been books that have helped friends of mine in the past. I've also read them. The Way of the Superior Man is one that I disagree with probably 30% of it or don't particularly agree with it. But there are takeaways that I think can be applied. Generally, in terms of matching, I find that you want to look for people who are of equal polarity from a 50-50 masculine feminine. And this is going to get all sorts of people uh all riled up because this isn't very pc maybe i don't really care i care about what works and this is what has worked for me

Starting point is 00:51:11 meaning if you imagine say a slider bar and in the very center if you have the slider in the very center that represents perfect androgyny if 50 have 50% masculine traits, 50% feminine traits in a single person. All right. Of course we can be any combination of those. And if you are say, personally, I'm just making this up, right? But you are 80%, you feel like arbitrarily, you are about 80% feminine characteristics, 20% masculine characteristics. You will generally have, at least in my experience, the most success with someone who is equally polarized in the opposite direction. All right. So if you're 80% feminine, 20% masculine, you're looking for 80% masculine, 20% feminine. And when you find someone a little closer to the androgyny line,

Starting point is 00:52:06 then similarly, they will have the most compatibility and in some cases, attraction with someone who is only slightly on the other side, just as they are. So maybe it's a 60, 40 split. So that of course is just because it's precise, doesn't mean it's accurate, but it is a useful heuristic, at least for me, when thinking about, say, looking at a number of potential dates, trying to identify who I will have the most attraction and compatibility with, just based on a very cursory look at their hobbies, behavior, how they write, and so on. So there you have it, folks. Hopefully this was not totally boring. Please let me know. And you can find show notes to anything I've talked about, books, links to other episodes, et cetera, in the show notes, as always at

Starting point is 00:53:00 tim.blog forward slash podcast, which also has show notes to every other episode. And if you want to ask me questions and get them answered on the podcast like this, please subscribe to Five Bullet Friday. That is where I source these types of questions from you guys. And it's always free and it's super short. It's five bullets of stuff that I'm exploring, experiments I'm doing, favorite recent purchases, et cetera. And you can find the newsletter, Five Bullet Friday, tim.blog forward slash Friday. So there you have it.

Starting point is 00:53:33 And as always, thank you so much for listening. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, founded by the genius Finns who lit the internet on fire. And you may have heard of their mushroom coffee, which features chaga and lion's mane, which is taken Silicon Valley by storm. I use it pretty much every day, either that or the chaga, which is decaf, a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now,

Starting point is 00:54:15 this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their products sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you would get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid

Starting point is 00:54:56 reflux or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong, but caffeine free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something. You can try a sample packack, which is great also. Right now by going to foursigmatic.com forward slash Tim. That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com forward slash Tim. And use the code Tim, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive

Starting point is 00:55:37 anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out. This episode is brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for blogging, writing online, creating websites, everything. I love WordPress to bits. My site, every site just about that I have is run on WordPress. And the lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. The very first episode in particular is amazing. The second, I took a ton of notes on, so you should check it out. But WordPress, where do I even begin? I mean, The New Yorker uses it, Jay-Z, Beyonce, they use it, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, Time. Whether you are looking to create a personal blog, a business site,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #257: Physical Training, Dating Strategies, and Stories from the Early Days

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