The Tim Ferriss Show - #324: Cal Fussman Corners Tim Ferriss

Episode Date: June 30, 2018

I’ve interviewed legendary storyteller Cal Fussman (@calfussman) on this show before (here and here), but this time, the roles are reversed, and he interviews me!If you are not yet familiar with him, Cal is a New York Times bestselling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the “What I Learned” feature. And this interview originally aired on Cal’s podcast, “Big Questions with Cal Fussman.”Cal has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with the icons who’ve shaped the last 50 years of world history: Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert DeNiro, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pelé, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others.Enjoy!This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. While I often praise this company’s lion’s mane mushroom coffee for a minimal caffeine wakeup call that lasts, I asked the founders if they could help me—someone who’s struggled with insomnia for decades—sleep. Their answer: Reishi Mushroom Elixir. They made a special batch for me and my listeners that comes without sweetener; you can try it at bedtime with a little honey or nut milk, or you can just add hot water to your single-serving packet and embrace its bitterness like I do.Try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/ferriss and using the code Ferriss to get 20 percent off this rare, limited run of Reishi Mushroom Elixir. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you’ll be disappointed.This episode is also brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter, which every Friday features five bullet points of cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and — of course — all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world. It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.***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? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.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.

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small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything 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 boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Long time no see, long time no hear, hao jiu bu jian, or should I say, hao jiu miao ting dao nide xiang yin na. Something along those lines. A little rusty, but I digress. The Tim Ferriss Show is typically where I share the habits and routines of world-class performers, as well as try to spot and discuss the patterns amongst them.

This episode is going to be a role reversal, and since I am a professional dilettante, a professional amateur of sorts, I'm a little self-conscious about this. However, recently Cal Fussman, at Cal Fussman, F-U-S-S-M-A-N, the man who has transformed oral history into an art form, that's not my quote, and it's not his. That's what people say about him, because he's interviewed everyone from Clooney to Gorbachev to Reagan to you name it. He's a big deal. And he is also one of the principal writers, or was one of the senior writers behind the What I Learned column for Esquire magazine forever, which is how he got

to kick the tires and meet many of these folks. He interviewed me for his podcast. He interviewed me in two separate interviews. And in true Cal fashion, he took the conversation to places I never could have expected. He really is a master of the craft of asking questions. And I love speaking with him as a friend, but I also love studying him as an interviewer. Cal said this interview was one of his favorites he's ever heard from me because the way he put it was, quote, we get to learn what made Tim, Tim, end quote. We dug into some of the childhood stories that I typically hold back. I don't like to talk about some of the early days and childhood stuff, but Cal can pry it out of me. Cal said he wanted to build a story to understand what happened to me on my journey, how it explains

where I am now, what makes me tick, and where I still hope to improve and grow. And I think he was able to unearth all of that. So if you're looking for a true world-class performer, someone who is the best at what they do, then you should probably look for one of my other episodes, tim.blog forward slash podcast. There are 300 other people. You can find Jamie Foxx. You can find Arnold Schwarzenegger. You can find chess prodigies like Josh Waitzkin. But if you want to hear about my somewhat odd, maybe quirky path that took me from my days as a wee lad to where I am now, then this may be an episode of interest. Cal is really, really a fascinating specimen. And I've interviewed him twice. So if you want to hear Cal's side of the story, his entire insane meandering adventure of life, which includes taking shots with Hunter S. Thompson and working

alongside Hunter for a period of time, you can hear that at Tim.blog forward slash Cal. And you should absolutely listen to more of Cal's interviews. So check out his new podcast for which I was interviewed, Big Questions with Cal Fussman. So just Google Big Questions with Cal Fussman, F-U-S-S-M-A-N, where he interviews all sorts of folks like Kobe Bryant and Damon John and Seth Godin and on and on and on. And then there's me, Odd Man Out. So without further ado and preamble, I'm kind of stalling with this intro. I apologize, guys. Here is my interview, aka being interviewed by Cal Fussman.

We just went off the springboard, brother. We just went off the springboard, brother. We just went off the springboard. So I've been thinking about this conversation for a long time. And I basically had two ways to prepare, I thought. One, I know you. We've been in the sauna together. We have. Met your mom.

That's right. Met your dad. We've gone out to eat. You won't let me pick up the check. Listen to your podcast. Read your books. So I do, in some ways, know you. And I thought, well, I could do even more research.

Or I could try to just wipe my memory clean and approach this in a way that, well, I really don't know Tim. And I'm going to try and forget a little about what I know and just act like I bumped into Tim Ferriss on the train. Holy shit, it's Tim Ferriss. How you doing? You're pretty good at trains, from my memory. There you go. I'm good at trains. And it's funny, when I went out to see you, I went on a train. And so I thought that would be an interesting way to go. And the more I think about it, the thing that really hits me about you goes to a story about Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. So one's a producer and the other's a filmmaker. They're partners.

And I'm interviewing them in the Claridge Hotel in London. And we're talking. We're having a great conversation. And in the middle of this interview, a fire alarm goes off and water sprouts from the ceiling. In an instant, Ron Howard rushes to, it was like sort of a kitchen in this room, and he grabs a bucket and he puts it under the water. At the same time, Ron Howard ran to the bathroom and got the towels and had them down. And I was just amazed at how they both in a second went in their own directions to solve the problem. And together, they came up with the solution while I just sat there watching this. And the more I thought about it, I thought the genius of Tim Ferriss is he does both at the same time.

You're like two people who would ordinarily need a partner to do the things that you do. And yet you have these skills on different sides of the spectrum that reside inside you. And I'm thinking, how did that happen? So let's start at the beginning. I was talking yesterday to this guy, Wim Hof. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. There you go. I know Wim. Okay. Now, he goes underwater and just stays under the cold for minutes at a time. And when I was asking him how this came about, he explained when he was born, he was born a twin, the

second twin. And he came out basically deprived of oxygen. And he didn't know it until years later, but his whole life became a movement toward the moment he was born with. And I'm wondering, at your birth, did something happen that helped make you who you are? It's quite possible. I don't remember all too much, but as I've been told, I was born premature and ended up in critical care. I still have scars. You can actually see one right on my wrist there. It looks like a cigarette burn.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have another one underneath my left nipple, basically. It's in the rib area, and that is from a respirator. I had, as I understand it, five full-body blood transfusions to oxygenate the blood properly. And I was in really bad shape, very, very, very tiny, and under incubator lights and so on. So I had a lot of, I suppose, trauma, but difficulty coming into the world.

And seemed to have recovered. More than recovered, brother. But I was very, very, very small up until about the end of fifth grade. Very small kid. Very much a runt. So has, I mean, your life has been a good part of it, spent in search of getting the most out of your body. Definitely.

It's a pretty good relation. Well, there is in some direct ways, in the sense that the experimentation and the recording of experiments started with primarily wrestling, which was the only sport I really gravitated towards or actually did well in. I was very hyperactive as a kid. And there were some other mothers who recommended to my mom to drain my batteries to put me into something called kid wrestling. I couldn't do or I really didn't want to do other sports that were team sports because I was so small. I was bullied and beat up and couldn't compete. I couldn't hold my own with other kids. But weight classes exist in wrestling. So the puny little runt could battle the other puny little runt. And then one of them could feel like a winner for a short period of time before they went back to

school and got the crap kicked out of them once again. So I was put into kid wrestling and there was really, there's not much technical mastery when you're a little kid in kid wrestling. It's mostly just flopping around. But at some point in high school, certainly, and just before high school, began taking it very seriously. And I still to this day have some very serious thermoregulatory issues. So I don't respond to heat in a normal way. How do you respond to heat? I appear to have, and I've actually done a number of experiments and been involved in experiments to try to better understand it. I'm very sensitive to say heat stroke, but it doesn't appear because I, at one point,

much, much later after college, volunteered to be a test subject. I'm going to bounce around a little bit here at Stanford University where they were developing a glove for cooling the body. And it was being developed or at least funded by the military. So the general experiment included wearing full military fatigues, helmet, loaded backpack, and you had an esophageal probe, as you would imagine, down your nose. So it's about, I would say, two feet long. And it's a plastic tube that you feed down your nose. So it's about, I would say two feet long and it's a, it's a plastic tube that you feed down your nose, down your esophagus. So your throat can't close or your epiglottis can't close down to get your core body temperature from your heart. So you get as close to the heart as possible. Now, unfortunately for me, the military standard temperature gauge is a esophageal probe, but up the other end. So I also had a two-foot esophageal probe up the other end.

Oh, man. And then you go, oh, it gets better. I knew we were going to get deep here. Oh, I'm just jumping right into it. There's not much foreplay in this podcast. And I then had to go into a sauna. I don't recall the exact temperature and march on an inclined treadmill in the sauna to heat exhaustion. And this was done multiple times and they would track everything. And what was, well, I should say in retrospect, should have been expected. It was miserable, of course.

And then I was completely non-functional for the rest of the day because my brain had effectively shut off when you marched to heat exhaustion. But I hit that heat exhaustion shutdown point at lower temperatures than other people. So I think it's something in the brain, maybe there's some gauge in the hypothalamus or something that is off. But suffice to say, throughout even high school, and we can come back to this, but when I was in Japan, which was a real formative moment, was hospitalized for effectively heat stroke during a judo competition or training in the summer because I was overheating. So all of that is backstory to say that really early on, I realized that heat was not my friend and endurance was not my strong suit.

I just couldn't last. I would overheat in these wrestling matches. So I had to develop techniques and approaches. Wow. And other tricks like getting very good at cutting weight, so that I could level a playing field to actually compete and win in these sports. So if you could figure out how to really be 15 pounds heavier than you were... It would give me a fair shot.

Right. Yeah. And it certainly is an advantage, but I had other disadvantages. But it was an area where I realized most people were not spending a lot of time analyzing anything. Or that's a very fancy way to put it. It was just a low-hanging fruit for me because I was like, all right, well, I'm never going to be the most technical wrestler. I'm never going to be the most persistent wrestler in terms of endurance because I lack the physiology for it.

But how many wrestlers are really going to sit down and try to figure out sodium and potassium and read about potassium- sparing diuretics and figure out the dandelion route is something that, you know, 15 year old can actually get ahold of over the counter, which act, which has the properties of certain prescription medications,

which should achieve the same thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Where did that come from? Uh, I, I,

I've always, at least from high school, been fascinated by nutrition. And that does not come from my family. You know, it's funny because one of the things, when I think of your dad, I always think of the advertising slogan he came up with. Fill your belly at Big Dave's Deli. That's right. That's right. And I won't want to get into the particulars of my family too much just for privacy purposes. But yeah, I mean, I would not say that my parents are nutritional advisors to Olympians.

One other fact about your family. They're taking better care of themselves, but they didn't come from there. I honestly don't know exactly where it came from. It could have been, I'll just speculate here. I've never actually thought about it, which is a good sign in an interview, that I was a puny little runt.

And I was born in the late 70s and then grew up in the 80s well who were the stars in the 80s you have schwarzenegger van damme whoa man they're all these ripped that was the golden era of action films if you think about it you know what i was out of the country then i missed it it all. So this makes sense. Well, the plots are pretty easy to follow. So if you wanted to go back, I said I killed you last. I lied. It's very easy to digest material.

Now I understand the opening of your podcast. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, makes more sense. Oh, exactly. Yeah, makes more sense. Oh, man. So there's one other fact that I just like to bring out because to me it's very interesting. There was like a salesmanship inside your dad. And your mom, you come into the house and, hey, sit down,

let's peel some shrimp and have some dinner. There is a very welcoming quality to her. For sure. And both of these you have. Yeah, they're very different. They're very different people. And as long as we're talking about characteristics, I'm fine with it. I'll give another anecdote which shows the difference.

So my dad loves crossword puzzles. My mom is just incredibly good at also crossword puzzles, but wheel of fortune. So their minds work very differently. I mean, she can see one letter and she'll get it in 10 milliseconds. And I don't, my father also has, and you've experienced this, the closest thing to, the closest thing to perfect factual recall that I've ever encountered up close for extended periods of time. I mean, he remembers the, where every classmate of his sat in every class he had in elementary school. He remembers every word of fill-in-the-blank language that he learned in fifth grade.

And I do not have that. I also don't have the, say, within 10 milliseconds answer wheel of fortune answer ability of my mom. But it stands to reason that if I'm getting genetics from both sides, I'm somewhere in the middle. But what you do have is the ability to make people feel comfortable around you, which if you're interviewing people, you got to have that. Seems to help and and also you understand how to sell what you do so like pieces are starting to come together here can may i add another piece oh please do so i don't know i don't think i've ever told you this. So, all right. So how did I become interested in persuasion

and selling and so on? I've always been a night owl. My mom's theory is, so I've always, I mean, since I was a very, very, very little kid, gone to bed typically 2, 3, 4 a.m. My mom's theory is because that is due to being under incubator lights at night in the intensive care unit or the critical care unit in the hospital as a newborn. Constantly under lights at night. and what kind of television is on at two or three in the morning infomercials i'd be up late at night and it's all paid programming i couldn't go to sleep and there would be these it's ronil. It's fill in the blank. It's Tony Robbins. And I just became fascinated by and asked myself why someone would buy one of these things.

And at the time, of course, I'm not interested in making money. I'm not interested in building a business. I'm a little kid. But nonetheless, you got the pocket fisherman. I'm a little kid, but nonetheless... Oh, this is a big piece, by the way. You got the pocket fisherman. You've got the topic hair powder that you pour on your head. And you're remembering this like your dad would have. Yeah, I mean, I do have...

I have a very visual memory. So my dad has not just visual, but also very textual, if that makes sense. And I know that's coming through the optic system, but I tend to remember anything that engages color and motion very well, which can creep people out because they'll be like, oh yeah, hey, we've met before. Yeah, I remember meeting because we were sitting here and there and you're a third chair from the left and you were wearing this and that.

And if it's a woman especially, the spider sense for psycho goes off in their head, which is not well-founded in this case. It's just the particular type of memory that I have. But yeah, lots of late nights listening to all of these people. This Rompel Peel guy, I don't remember his work. So Ron Popeil, I became later interested in going back and figuring out who these people were. So you had, for instance, the Thighmaster. You probably remember the Thighmaster. I do remember the Thighmaster. And the whole story behind that. who cut his teeth at state fairs a lot of these old old timers the kind of uh

groundbreakers in infomercials cut their teeth at these various state fairs selling to live disinterested audiences who are walking by so they'd have to get attention and first get a crowd and then sell the product right so there was a multi-stage process and they had then translated that to television, which is why almost all these products initially were live demo products, which Tony Robbins differed from. And

so that interested me. I'm like, all right, well, everyone else is doing the slice and dice. I can cut through a can and then I can cut through a tomato because it didn't dull the knife. And as a kid, of course, I have no desire to buy a knife, and then I can cut through a tomato because it didn't dull the knife. And as a kid, of course, I have no desire to buy a knife, but I'm looking at the demo. And then you have, say, a Tony Robbins or maybe a handful of others, but really not many who weren't selling a physical product. And that was interesting to me.

Or like the no money down real estate stuff, which made even less sense to me than anything else. I'm like, well, all right, I don't even know where to begin understanding that conceptually. But they're using this guy who's selling whatever no money down real estate is, is using 1,000 testimonials. Okay, so he's only using testimonials. That's interesting. Why is he doing that?

Oh, man. See, this is what fascinates me because what you just said about first get the crowd, then sell the product is very different from the way a writer or an artist thinks, where they're saying, I got to do this. Somebody's got to help me do it. Somebody give me some money and allow me to fulfill my dream. And they don't stop to think, well, let me get a crowd first, and then I can do what I want to do.

So let me add another layer to this, which is, so that's my life from midnight to three o'clock in the morning. The rest of the time, I, from a very, very young age, wanted to be a comic book penciler. So I wanted to be an artist. I literally wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be an illustrator. You are two people. And I spent all of my time drawing. And that was my goal, was to become a comic book penciler. And I idolized certain artists at the time, specifically pencilers like Jim Lee, who I've been actually, at some point about a year ago,

we were trading email to hopefully have me interview him, which would be a lot of fun. And McFarlane and Eric Larson, and I could go down the list, Simon Bisley, all of these artists were, those were the people I idolized from a career standpoint. I didn't even think about it as a career, but as to what I wanted to do, since I enjoyed drawing and seemed to have a predisposition towards it, that was what I spent the rest of my time thinking about. So you had school, wrestling, comic book penciling, and then I can't sleep, what should I do? Infomercials.

Now I'm beginning to get, the pieces are coming together here, brother. Because I look at myself and I am missing pieces here. I wasn't up at three in the morning watching the infomercials. Now, there are downsides to that. I mean, it's not all upside. No, but think about what that gave you. The notion of get the crowd first, then sell the product. That puts you in control. Yeah, totally. Which most artists, they're out of control. They're always looking for the manager or the publishing house

or the record company to support their dream. Yeah, and from the beginning, I wanted to be, control was really important to me. I mean, very beginning. And not talking about career aspirations, but just trying to control as many variables as possible. People think of me as some type of risk taker with the early stage startups and everything else. I don't view myself that way at all. I think about mitigating

and decreasing risk all the time. So for me, I like to have control, directly or indirectly, over as many variables as possible. That's not always a strength, but at least for me, up to this point, there have been a lot of benefits, certainly. How does money fit into the equation? When you were in high school, how did you see money? Once you start working, so I think my first job was 13 or 14, and I was the floor and machine cleaner at an ice cream shop called Snowflake, which no longer exists, out on Long Island where I grew up. And for people who don't know, I grew up as a townie in the Hamptons, which is a weird place to grow up.

So to grow up as sort of the rat tail wearing townie in a resort town anywhere in the world is pretty odd. And at that time I was getting paid, who knows, whatever it was, like $7 an hour, $8 an hour. And actually, no, I don't know if it was per hour. I think it was per shift because that's what got me in trouble is I got fired from this first job because they, I think it was per shift that I was getting paid because otherwise I wouldn't have been incentivized to do

what I'm about to tell you. If they're paying me per hour, I wouldn't have had any interest in doing things faster. Uh-oh, here we go. Yeah. So I was being told to do things in a stupid way. It was stupid. I'm not going to mince words. I was being told to do things in a very inefficient way so that I would be kept busy for the entire period of time. This was not of great interest to me and seemed stupid. So I, for myself at least, devised what I thought was a much better way, much faster way of cleaning the machines and the floors and so on. And then I would always bring to work, God, I haven't thought about this in a while, a copy of Black Belt Magazine, which was the only martial arts, the most widely read martial arts magazine at the time. This is before any mixed martial arts or anything had entered the scene.

And then I would take my mop, like the mop handle, and just practice made up martial arts stuff. I didn't know what I was doing. Like in the back parking lot where no one would see me. So I do my work. And I say, all right, my work is done. Trying to be Bruce Lee. Yeah, and then it's like, all right, well now, given that the next whatever it is,

Van Damme movie is coming out next week, or I've just seen the latest Stallone movie, and I still weigh 100 pounds, I need to work on becoming Bruce Lee. Needless to say, the boss was not super fond of this. And so he would tell me to do things like, all right, well, I want you to clean it again. And I'd say, well, it's already, it's already clean. You know, the floor is already clean. Give it mine. And, uh already clean, keep in mind. And that was a partnership destined to fail, I'm afraid.

So I was relieved of duty a few weeks or months in. The notion of efficiency is planted at that point. So that was the efficiency, and that was not client-facing. What I mean by that is I didn't have any interaction with the customers there, right? After that, my next job, and I worked many, many jobs as a bus boy and occasionally was given the gift of say, waiting for a table. Uh, but I worked in restaurants and I worked for people who've seen the affair, which I think is a Showtime show. There is a restaurant in that show called the lobster roll. Well, I was a bus boy at the lobster roll, which was one of the highest volume, highest table turnover, which is a good thing in this, in that world. Restaurants on Long Island, certainly out on the East End.

Not, no offense, lobster roll. Some people from the city call it lunch because it has a big sign outside. Just FYI, anybody from Manhattan, nobody calls it lunch out there. It's the lobster roll. And that was brutal. That was brutal. I also worked just to paint the spectrum super low, not low end, but fast food, right?

Fast, high volume. And then I worked at restaurants like the Maidstone Arms, which now has a new name, and many, many others in between. So I had a chance in those circumstances to say at the Maidstone Arms, I remember I had to wear a pink, was it a pink button-up shirt with a black bow tie. Needless to say, I didn't have either of those. So I had to work to afford... To get dressed. To get dressed.

To go to work. But that gave me the ability to interact with diners. So now I can contribute to getting more tips for the table, which ultimately gets divvied up among the people who are front of house and maybe even back of house. So the cleaning wasn't a great fit for me, I don't think, on several different levels. But it actually taught you about efficiency, the way you feel about efficiency.

Or taught me how much I hate inefficiency. Okay. Or maybe reinforced how much I hated inefficiency. Because I'd already been thinking about efficiency within the context of wrestling. I just hadn't realized that that also all applied in other places. Wow. Right?

Yeah, the pieces are coming together. Because if I'm inefficient on the wrestling mat, what happens? Now I'm into the second period, third period, then my body shuts down, then I lose. So I had to think about efficiency. I never would have used that word, but that's certainly... It all comes back to your birth. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I suppose it does. The most efficient to get the most out of yourself. You couldn't afford to just go along like everybody else. No, I would lose. And I don't know where the dislike of losing came from, but I certainly have a strong dislike of losing. So that just doing it following standard operating procedure just wasn't a very attractive option to me. Okay, so here's one thing I do know. You went to study with John McPhee. I had the gift, and I'm not going to say that I in any way deserved it more than other kids at Princeton, but I ended up going to Princeton for undergrad.

Well, take a second to describe who John McPhee is to those who may not know him. Yeah, John McPhee, this may sound like a huge overstatement, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. In the minds of many nonfiction writers, I mean, John McPhee is a god. He is the consummate master of his craft. And he's a staff writer, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker has at least one Pulitzer prize. I never know if it's Pulitzer or Pulitzer, but I like saying Pulitzer.

So I'll say that like it has two umlauts over the U, which it does not for coming into the country specifically, which was about his time primarily in Alaska. John McPhee is so good at nonfiction writing. And the class that I ended up taking, which was a small seminar, so you applied and provided writing samples, was called The Literature of Fact. What a great name, right?

As you would expect of John McPhee. M-C-P-H-E-E. He's so good at exploring and dissecting different subjects that when he writes a book about basketball, A Sense of Where You Are, related to Bill Bradley, it becomes the classic in nonfiction basketball. When he writes a book about tennis levels of the game, it becomes the classic book on tennis.

And it goes on. He wrote an entire book about oranges. He wrote an entire book about a rock. He's written entire books about classically carved canoes. And you would say to yourself, and you may be saying to yourself, I would never read a book about oranges. Oh, yeah, you would. Yes, you would.

Oh, yes, you would. Yeah. And just to dive into one of the examples I just gave, Levels of the Game, it's about one tennis match. The entire book is about one tennis match. Conceptually, it's hard for me to imagine anything sounding more boring. And yet, it is absolutely gripping as a page turner.

And there's a lot more to it, as you would certainly expect. Well, what's it like to be in a class with a God like this? You know, from the first day, I felt it was just a huge gift. And I had a good degree of insecurity going into it. I mean, we're talking about someone who had David Remnick as a student, right? I mean, we're talking about a teacher who has not only produced masterpieces himself,

but produced students, and I'm not saying, I am not one of them. David Remnick being the editor of the New Yorker. That's right, who's produced many students who've gone on to just create incredible, incredible works of art. And I do not think I'm that person at all. But I could draft behind a lot of those people in the class.

So not only was it a gift to learn from Professor McPhee, I can't call him John, it's too weird. There are a bunch of people in my life I just can't call him John. It's too weird. There are a bunch of people in my life I just can't call by the first name. It was also a gift to hear the comments and feedback and reading aloud of other students. I do remember very clearly. So, all right. Princeton students, generally speaking, pretty confident bunch. Sometimes excessively so.

And I remember we had this, the class structure as I remember it was, I want to say one three-hour, two or three-hour group seminar where Professor McPhee would talk about a given subject, some aspect of structure, which he's very well known for, and very visual, very visual in his structuring, which helped me because I like to draw, right? But I recall we also had weekly writing assignments. These were short, few pages, whatever it was, three to 10 pages. I'd already done quite a bit of writing in school, so I was comfortable with that. And we'd all handed in our weekly writing assignments, and we were getting them back. And before he handed them back, I remember he said

he would then later review our writing assignments with us, which was incredible. He said, before I hand these out, this is paraphrasing, I want you to know you're all good writers. So I don't want you to be thrown off by my edits. You're all good. You got into the class. And he handed back our printed pages that we had given him. And in almost every case, certainly in my case there was more red ink than there were words you just saw everybody go holy shit oh man and uh but you leave that class a writer well you leave that class a better thinker because what mcphee does so well, and he has a book that recently came out called The Fourth Draft about his writing process, which is fantastic.

If you're interested in nonfiction writing, if you're really interested, then this book is great. If you're kind of sort of interested in nonfiction writing, more interested in reading nonfiction, then just get Levels of the Game or one of his other books. But he is first and foremost good at clarifying thought. So if you have extraneous words, if you have sentences that are nebulous in meaning, if you have a sequence of paragraphs that logically do not make any sense as a progression. He'll point those out. So it really wasn't providing

you with a fancier set of polished words to use. It wasn't a matter of anything that could be differentiated from clarifying your thinking and putting clearer thinking on paper. I smell efficiency. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, it certainly would be. I mean Yeah. In a way it certainly would be. I mean, in a way it certainly would be and taking out it's and efficiency is one thing. I think also, if you look at my interest in certain martial arts, if you look at my interest in writing, I think that the corollary, or maybe just the, it's not even a cousin,

it's like the twin brother or sister of efficiency is elegance. So that's something I think about a lot. Because in elegance, you also have the art. It's not just the science, right? It's not just the mechanics. It's also the beauty of it and for me uh the ability to make something more beautiful by removing the things that are adding to drag is just such a cool concept all the pieces are coming together here it's such a

cool concept and i mean now that I'm thinking about it, and post hoc, it's easy for me to try to put all these things together, like Kobayashi on the cup. Oh, my God. You know, the usual suspects or whatever. But the red doorknob in the sixth sense. I was there all along. But my interest in Japan also, the elegance and minimalism of Japan,

which I've been obsessed with. Obsessed is a strong word, but I think it applies here. For so long, I think it's just the elegance. And of course, in Japan, you have the elegance of certain artwork and the minimalism. You also have the efficiency. I mean, we're talking about a country that, I think it was during the meiji restoration brought in work workplace efficiency and manufacturing efficiency experts who had been largely ignored in the u.s and elsewhere and the japanese would bring them to japan and then create say the entire corporate corporate and manufacturing design culture of Toyota, which ultimately then displaced

U.S. automotive companies then later on, right? They took what was ignored, incorporated it, made it better, made it their own, and then at least at that time won, right? So all of that was so interesting to me. And the literature of fact, just as a side note, and it's not really a side note because it kind of, in my mind, proves the point. When I took that class, without any perceptible additional effort,

my grades in every other class went up. And I think it's because the thinking, the sharper thinking, translated in every other class went up. And I think it's because the thinking, the sharper thinking translated to every other class. Yeah. And, and so at what point is your ability to control your own journey coming in to play where you can start to live the way you want to live as an artist? Because you had that from the drawing and the elegance and also the ability to navigate the business side so you weren't dependent on others. Yeah, I can give you... Is there a moment?

I can tell you the moment in my life I have felt the richest I've ever felt. And this will relate to everything you just said. So a little backstory. So what were my jobs in college to help pay for expenses and everything else? Well, I had, I had a bunch of jobs. One, I was, I was an illustrator. So I did work, I did illustration, freelance illustration work, including for Princeton University. So for say there was a student orientation manual that needed illustrations so I did almost all the illustrations for that.

I think there were one or two books that I also did illustrations for. Not my preferred type of illustration. There's mostly backgrounds and architecture on campus and so on which is not terribly exciting to me. I prefer doing live action figures and so on, humans, animals, but nonetheless, there was that. Then for fun, this is not part of the job, but relevant. I was the graphics editor at the Princeton Tiger. And the primary reason I took that job, which was fun and it allowed me to just goof off and be a bit of a prankster as a was a satire magazine, much like The Lampoon. It was that I went to visit the offices of the Princeton Tiger,

and they showed me the desk of the graphic editor. Okay, I didn't realize there was a designated desk for the graphics editor, whatever the title was at the time. And I opened one of the drawers and I found a number of drunken sketches from Jim Lee, one of my comic book heroes, who unbeknownst to me at the time had gone to Princeton, had had that job. And after some revelry had come back to the office, sketched out some drawings. And I said, yeah, I'll take this job. And so that was a job, but unpaid.

Then I had a job in guest library, which was, I'd gone from. You know, the pieces are coming together because you'll do a blog and you won't get paid for it. But you know there's something good's going to come out of this. Yeah, or good for other people, or fun for me, or both. And I had a job at Guest Library, which was the library, the attic, as I remember it at least, the attic library of the East Asian Studies Department. And it was terrible. It was like living in a sauna. It was so hot up there. as I remember it at least, the attic library of the East Asian Studies Department. And it was terrible. It was like living in a sauna. It was so hot up there. And I was getting paid whatever it was, $7, $8 an hour. Then I was asked, so by this point,

I was no longer 100 pounds. I had really gotten into physical training and was whatever I was at the time, actually bigger than I am now. So I was probably 180, 190 pounds. And one of my friends said, you know, if you, if, uh, if you want to make some more money, you should safeguard. Now, safeguarding is bouncing, but at Princeton they call it safeguarding. And Princeton has this very odd tradition of eating clubs, which are like co-ed social clubs. Think of them as fraternities and sororities combined. So these co-ed eating clubs where you, as you would expect, eat your meals, where they serve lunch and dinner and so on. And they're all lined up down one street called Nassau Street. And so at least when I was there, students would go out and party and get raucous on Thursday nights and Saturday nights.

For whatever reason, those were the nights. Saturday makes sense. I'm not sure why Thursday. I guess it's a day of recovery. So Thursday and Saturday. And things would happen. People would get in fights. People would get overly, you know,

men would get overly aggressive with women, whatever it would be. So they hired security guards to help keep the peace. And there were two, I remember two different safeguarding agencies as it were. And I chose, I ended up working with one that paid, I think $20 an hour, which to me at the time, I'm like, wow, hitting the big time. So $20 an hour and, uh, long story short, did not enjoy that job. Uh, it was good at it, but I didn't enjoy it because you're nobody's friend. Nobody likes the security when they're drunk. It doesn't matter, even if you're actually helping them.

And one of my very good friends at the time, who was, I want to say, former middleweight amateur boxing champion in the Soviet Union, which is a very big deal. Very, very big deal. I mean, that's a that's a that's a uh you know effectively a professional level boxer and he was a physics graduate student at princeton i imagine that right makes sense on some level comic book character of sorts fantastic guy uh named ilia so if you're out there ilia uh thank you for being such a good friend when we were in school. And he was, I was off duty.

I was not working on a given night when he was. We worked together a lot because I trusted him, he trusted me, and we were good at the job. And good at the job does not mean fighting people, by the way. The good at the job means you don't fight people. You defuse situations that would have fights and you handle simple logistics like uh there was this one uh eating club called tiger inn which was known as being one of the more aggressive eating clubs a lot of football players a lot of big athletes, a very heavy drinking culture. And so as a safeguard, you tended to get paid the most when you worked at, say, TI, as it was known,

or some of these other more aggressive spots. Because if you're just saving the computer science nerds from each other, that's a much lower risk situation. And there were at least two doors, but primarily a front door, which everybody tried to come through, and we would check IDs. And then there was a side door. And so you typically have one guard at each, which were not separated by a ton of space. And Elia was working with someone that night who, for whatever reason, left his post, left the side door wide open,

and there were a number of throwers, meaning track athletes who were shot putters and discus throwers and hammer throwers and so on, who were visiting for a track meet that weekend. And a whole gang of them huge guys had shown up at the front door and ilia had turned them away because they didn't have ids that's part of the job and they got really upset and they were like we're coming back okay what happens they come around the side door and like one guy grabs him by the neck from behind. Another guy sort of punches him in the liver.

It doesn't matter if you're Mike Tyson. These five or six 230-plus pound guys wailing and kicking you. Oh, man. He ended up in really bad shape. That's when I stopped safeguarding. Because I said, A, it's kind of like motorcycle riding. It doesn't matter how good you are on the motorcycle, because there are other people who are bad at driving. Similarly, it doesn't matter if you're

Bruce Lee, Mike Tyson combined. If you're working a two-person configuration and one person leaves the side door. No control, man. No control. You got no control. Zero. You're done. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We got to pause now because Kevin, the manager, tells me it's time to talk about the people who make all this possible, our sponsors. Ah, you know why I'm so relaxed? Because I just solved a problem that's been bothering me for a long time.

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And we're back. So I stopped safeguarding and I started... That's the moment where you're really gripping control over your life? No, no, I'm going to get there. So I realized that I didn't want to go back to $8 an hour in the sauna library. I needed money. So what could I do? Now I should also say simultaneously with all of this, like my interest in entrepreneurship has increased because there were some entrepreneurship classes at Princeton, which I, one of which I joined at the same time

as McPhee's class, which was later called High Tech Entrepreneurship, which had a huge impact on my life with someone named Ed Hsiao, who was a real mentor. But even before that, what I'd started doing as I was making a little bit of money, bussing tables and so on, is I would call the numbers. This is something I didn't do as a kid. Still going to sleep at 3 a.m., right? So I'd see these infomercials, and I would call the numbers, and I had figured out how to take a tiny little microcassette recorder and go to Radio Shack, and I could, I know this is probably illegal, so don't try this at home, kids,

but I could connect it to record conversations because I wanted to know what the scripts were. It's like, okay, well, I knew what happened on the TV. What happens when you call? And if I say no, if they try to convince me and then I say, oh, it's $29.99. Yeah, I can't afford that. What happens?

What do they say? What do they do? And then if they, oh, it's $29.99. Yeah, I can't afford that. What happens? What do they say? What do they do? And then if they send something to me, if I buy something, which I didn't do until college. So in college, then I was like, all right, well, let me try to buy, let me order something. And if I, what's the return process? If I send it back, what happens? Oh, man. If I cancel, what happens?

How quickly does it get to me? Do they use first-class mail or do they use priority mail? Do they use UPS? I wanted to know the details. And ultimately, I have something really, I don't know how common it is. I don't have dyslexia. I can read fine.

But I have some dysgraphia. So Ds, Bs end up getting mixed up, or Ps and Bs get mixed up. I will write letters backwards or upside down. I still do to this day, in English at least. So I had also realized at Princeton, so I have, I have some, some issues with producing text, uh, reading texts a little less so, but the reading volume, this is going somewhere, was so high at Princeton. If you were actually going to do the classroom reading, which I'm convinced 80% of people do not, which is fine. But I, at the time felt like that was a requirement for doing well in school. Now, certainly learning and becoming a better human in a liberal arts education should probably be the priority, but ultimately students want to do well.

And anyone who's gotten into Princeton is probably very competitive. So I was struggling to do all of this reading. There was so much. And towards the end of high school and then leading into Princeton where, you know, on my floor in Forbes, which is one of the residential colleges, I remember kids. Oh, man. Kind of explains a lot that goes on in our world when these people then go on to Goldman Sachs and stuff. But they were like, oh, you got 1,800 on your SAT? Yeah, me too. What did you do for this? And so all these kids on my hallway got perfect scores on their SATs, which I did not. Princeton because I didn't finish them. I was too much of a perfectionist. I actually never finished the test. And I took it multiple times. So we could psychoanalyze that. But this is all going somewhere. So I compensated in a way once I got to Princeton by continuing to look at

accelerated learning and speed reading techniques. So could you accelerate your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension? And there's a lot of voodoo and witchcraft and nonsense out there, but there are a handful of methods for increasing reading speed that make perfect sense. If you're just looking at the, at how the eyes function and how they feed into the optic nerve and how one, through fixation points and so on, saccadic movements, I think is how you pronounce, also the jumps that reading entails, made scientific sense to me. The mechanisms were all plausible.

There wasn't any hand-waving. It's like, okay, no, that just structurally makes sense to me. So yes, efficiency, again. So it's like, all right, well, if your eye travels across a line, and let's say you close one eye and you try to read a line of text, you'll notice these herky-jerky movements. All right, those are these saccadic movements, jumps from fixation point to fixation point.

Your eye doesn't travel in a smooth line across, say, a sentence on a page. It just does not. And if you can then reduce the number of fixations you have per line, well, if you go from three to two, you've just... You're smoothing the line. You're smoothing the line, and you're just going to move a lot faster. So I began doing that for myself, and after my friend got his head kicked in, I said, well, what if I took all this stuff that I've been taking notes on? Because I've always been a three-ring binder where if I were reading a

magazine or an article and I found an advertisement that made me want to buy something, I would take it out and I would put it into a three-ring binder to try to figure out why it made me want to buy it. So I had all of these expedition findings, kind of like the butterfly species and so on that Darwin or someone would collect to analyze later. But in my case, they were advertisements that made me want to buy something. And then I would later try to deconstruct why they made me want to buy something. You're just looking into the whole process of the business side. Yeah, but I hadn't pulled the trigger. I hadn't really tried anything. That's not entirely true. I tried something a few years before that.

I think it was the very beginning of Princeton, which did not work, which was an audio book on how to get into good colleges. And I made a bunch of mistakes. The first of which was coming up with a product I was convinced would sell a million copies and not testing it before manufacturing. So I took all the money I'd made from all this busboying and so on and invested it in manufacturing 400 audio cassette tapes or something like that. I think one or two of which I sold.

One to my mom. I think she had bought it and then later told me. And then one to God knows who I think it was, she had bought it and then later told me, but, and then one to God knows who. So it was, it was a huge loss. I didn't throw out those tapes until like 10 years later, by the way, I was like someday, no, someday people will see, people will realize the gold in this, uh, total failure. And then I, uh, I realized that I could, looking at these various advertisements and so on, do what's called a dry test. And that means you are selling something before you manufacture anything. Secondly, based on buying little things here and there and listening to the phone scripts, right? Because

these operators use decision trees and these scripts. It's like, if the person says no to this, do this. If they say yes to this, do this. If they say yes, then try to upsell them to this. If they say no, then try to downsell them to this. And if they agree to blah, blah, blah, then at the very end, offer them this. If at this point they say, no, I can't do it, then you offer them payment terms, whatever it might be. So there are all these different contingency plans. And I put together, I think it was called, this was right before the dot-com bust.

So this was like before the dot-com bust so this is like 1998 99 and i think i called it speed reading 2.0 or something like that or enhanced speed reading or i can't remember the exact name and uh i i put out this flyers so i printed out these colorful flyers and I promised a, a 300% increase. I think it was a 300% increase in reading speed, which you can measure words per minute reading speed in a three hour seminar, or you got it. This is a four hour work week. This is the foundation of it. Yeah. Or you get, you get, you get 110% of your money back. So if it doesn't work, if it doesn't work,

you make money, right? So you're going to come out of it. You certainly weren't deterred by those original cassettes. Because I had no out-of-pocket expenses, right? So this is a service, which ultimately is why I stopped doing it, but this is a service. which ultimately is why I stopped doing it. But this is a service.

So I then proceeded just so that I wouldn't be caught with my pants down if it actually worked, which I didn't expect it would necessarily. But my downside was so limited that it didn't matter. It was an asymmetrical risk-reward benefit, right? Which is always what I look for, even to this day. It's like, all right, how can I cap my downside? Because if I always cap my downside, if I can really minimize the downside, eventually the upside will take care of itself, right? If I have enough at bats. So I had these flyers all over the place. And then I had my, I guess my

dorm room phone number. I don't think I had a cell phone at that point. And my email address. But I had to find a location. I couldn't afford a location. Because I wasn't think I had a cell phone at that point and my email address, but I had to find a location. I couldn't afford a location because I wasn't safeguarding any longer. And I had $8 an hour. So I was like, all right, there were, I don't think there was any date on the flyer because I wanted the flexibility

of like figuring out how to finagle some type of space. And I found a church in town that had a, I want to say it was a daycare area for kids. Where is this going? That would not be used on Saturday afternoons. There was some period of time in which that was available. And so I went in, God, I haven't thought about this in a long time. And I tithed a little bit. It wasn't very much, but like I tithed some money to the church. And I said, I've noticed you have this space.

And I was just trying to put two and two together. And it's like, is there any time when this is not used? And is there any possibility I could use it? I'm a first time or not a first time. And I said, I'm a aspiring entrepreneur trying this class. I explained the whole thing. I said, I don't know if it's going to work. It might not. Could be two people could be more. I have no idea, but would it be possible to potentially use this space for a few hours and I'll leave it in better shape than I found it when I leave? And thankfully they took, I guess, mercy on me or whatever, had some empathy and they let me use the space or they said I could use the space. And then at that point, emails and calls started coming in.

So now I have to sell on the phone. Oh, all this stuff that you learned from the infomercial. Well, guess what? I've already listened to 100 operators sell on the phone who are backed by companies that are spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on ensuring that the scripts work oh man and this is beautiful so i end up my first seminar with i want to say it was just for the sake of simplicity 30 people so i have a full room of people 30 people, and they come with cash. They've got 10s and 20s and 5s. They come with checks and not a single refund.

So I survive my first three hours. I deliver the measurables. So the key performance indicator for you startup folks out there, the words per minute rate with equal or better retention, at least tripled or in many cases quintupled. And I just remember walking out of that seminar with pockets full of checks and 20s and 10s. I mean, I made $1,500 in three hours. So keep in mind, like I had made the most I had made up to that point. It was $20 an hour doing something that was risking life and limb. Right. And then I go into this church daycare

room and I walk out with $1,500. There it is. And I just remember, and I couldn't even fit, fit them in my pockets. I remember I had to like fold up checks. Your pockets are bulging. Yeah. I had to fold them while I was on a bike. And I remember going straight to PNC bank. It's my fold up checks. Your pockets are bulging as you walk down the street. I was on a bike and I remember going straight to PNC Bank. It's my first bank account. Immediately, I was like, I have to deposit these right away. Going straight to the

bank and having money and checks pressed to the grips on the handlebars because they couldn't fit in my pockets. I had these death grips on my bike as I went to PNC Bank and deposited that. And I mean, it really was that day where I was like, holy shit, this can actually work.

You actually can do this. And I did a handful more of those seminars, but ultimately realized, you have to be in one place to do this. It's a service. So it's still on some level is physical presence, hours in, money out. And so I stopped doing that when I graduated. And so that moment and what might happen with money? That sounds like a springboard in itself.

Because up until that point, had you ever invested in anything? No. No. Actually, I had, with the help of my dad, invested in one company. And man, if I think about it, my investment approach hasn't changed that much. Pixar was my first ever investment. Whoa. Because of – That makes sense, man.

You're the artist. I was the comic book artist. I loved animation. So I knew – I felt like I understood the world of comic books and animation really well. Pixar was coming out with Toy Story. That's your first investment. And that was the first investment I ever made.

The only investment that I recall making until much, much, much later, I mean well after college. I don't like things I can't control, like public stocks. I didn't feel like later I overcomplicated investment for myself. I read a lot of books on investment and it scared me off. Whereas, in fact, my best investments to date have, whether it's like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Alibaba, all these, because I really, really, I play in those sandboxes. I understood them so well,

and I've used all of them. Pixar was my only investment, small amount of money. No, nothing up to that point in terms of external investments. I invested a lot in myself, but... Well, I came into this thinking that you were a one-man partnership, but I see now that there are like five different people in there doing all these different things, having all these different talents.

And neuroses, and difficulties, and weaknesses, which might explain all the voices in my head. And so at what point is it that the four-hour work week is going to be born? Is there a moment in your mind where we could see where everything is leading in that direction, but is there a moment where you know, there it is? The lifestyle or the book? Well, it sounds like the lifestyle led to the book.

Well, so the lifestyle was experienced and enjoyed and then somewhat forgotten. So I had that experience with the seminar. Then I became intoxicated by the possibility of tech millions and billions, because this is keep in mind, 98, 99. Squeezed in your hand. And this was also when a, I'm not going to say classmate, but schoolmate, a few years ahead of me, had sold bluemountain.com for something like $300 or $400 million. And there were a number of other examples like that.

I mean, this is certainly at the top of froth, right preceding the first tech boom. And those numbers were mind-boggling to me. It's one thing to make $1,500. $400 million. It's quite one thing to make $1,500. It's quite another thing to make $400 million. But something should be pointed out here. The same way you were talking about growing up in the era of Schwarzenegger and Van Damme, you're growing up in the era of a kid in college

starting something that can make $400 million. Oh, yeah, yeah. Those were the new heroes, right? And I took this class I had mentioned earlier, High Tech Entrepreneurship with Ed Hsiao, which I had to negotiate with him to get into because I had been... This is highly relevant, so it'll tie in, but I had gone to China. And as

an East Asian studies major, I was first neuroscience, and there's a long story behind the transition, but I do actually think some animal testing is very, very important, but I couldn't do it myself. It wasn't torture. It was just what they would call perfusing rats after injecting them with retroviruses and so on. I couldn't sacrifice the animals necessary to do that, to work in the lab I wanted to work in. So I became an East Asian Studies major, nonetheless taking all of these other classes like McPhee's class. And at the same time, Ed Hsiao enters the picture. And his class, along with McPhee's, were in, I want to say this book was the, something like the Student Class Review Guide. It's not the right name, but it was something like that. So it was similar to a registrar's list of classes you could take, but it was an analog version of, say, Yelp. So students could actually rate these classes and give feedback. And Ed Schau's class was, along with McPhee's, way, way up at the very top of the heap. And he was teaching people how to build businesses, how to

build companies that could get sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. But I had, as an East Asian studies major, taken time to go to China to study at two universities. And I came back and I missed the deadline. I'd missed the deadline for applying. So I wrote a letter to Professor Schall. I said, ultimately, I made my case and ultimately said, I don't need a seat. If the room's full, I can sit on the floor. If you need me to help, I can clean the erasers after class. I will do whatever is necessary.

Please let me take this class. And eventually he did. So Please let me take this class. And eventually he did. So he let me take this class. And that class led me to want to jump in to the tech world. And there was one company that he had invested in called TruSan Networks, which is a storage area networking company. So at the time, what would have been considered mass data storage. So petabytes and petabytes of data.

Oh, my God. Who could imagine? Now you can go to Fry's Electronics and buy a terabyte for $70. But back in the day, we were talking about systems worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars that you'd be selling to, say, American Airlines or to the FBI or whoever it might be, National Geographic Survey. And in that class, we had to do a final project. There were different options for what types of final projects you could do.

One was profiling a company. So I decided to profile TruSan as a way to hopefully get my foot in the door and get a job. Long story short, did the whole final project and tried to get the job and was turned down. And graduated with no job. Parents were very, after all this, parents, parents were very supportive. They're like, okay, take your time. You can come home. But for myself, even after a month or two of no job, after graduation, you're starting to get antsy, antsy and panicky. So every maybe two weeks, I would be emailing this poor CEO, Thomas, at TruSan to try to get my foot back in the door to get a job. And I had heard all these stories of negotiation and so on from Ed also in this class because he taught at

Harvard Business School and he used the case study method. So we were looking at real stories of real companies, tough decisions they had to make, and then the class, each student and the class as a whole would debate what they would do given this decision the company or person's facing. And then you get to read about what actually happened. So rejection, no, no thanks. Sorry, we have an in-house human resources person. They are completely backed up. We have more applicants than we can handle. Thanks, but no thanks.

He was very polite about it, considering how much... But no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then I was going to give up. And I was like, you know, let me just try one more Hail Mary. And I sent him an email, which was along these lines. Hi, Thomas. I realized I left out a few pages on competitive analysis in my final project, which was true. That could relate to how you compete with network appliance and EMC. Those were the two primary competitors. As it turns out, this was the part that wasn't true.

As it turns out, I'm going to be in the Bay Area anyway. They were based in San Jose. I have a couple of job interviews and meetings. Would it be possible to swing by and give you these pages and just thank you for the time that you spent with me when I was doing the final project? Which, of course course he could read right through. I would imagine so. And so he replied back once again, politely, sorry. Thanks, but no thanks. Appreciate the persistence, but we don't have space. Then he had a change of heart and he said, okay, I can meet you on Tuesday.

I think this was the exact time from one to 115. I was like, oh, okay. I can meet you on Tuesday. I think this was the exact time, from 1 to 1.15. I was like, oh, okay. Great, I'll see you there. So I didn't have the money because I had burned through any of the savings from the speed reading stuff. Didn't have a whole lot of money. So I bought a standby ticket to California. On a standby ticket, at least at that time, you didn't check luggage. So I had carry-on only, which meant I wore my ill-fitting suit,

like the only suit I had. I couldn't afford a hotel, so I stayed at a kickboxing gym, which for those of you in San Francisco, this might make sense. There was a gym called Fairtex, which was located on Clementina Street. This is in 99, probably 99, 2000, between fifth and sixth, between Folsom and Howard. That's not a good place to be. It was bad, like a really bad place, but it was cheaper than staying at a hotel to pay for a fly-in kickboxing camp. And you got to live on the upper floor, sleeping on a bunk bed with some of the Thai instructors, which meant I also had to clean my clothing in the sink there, which I did. And it was fine. I didn't have any other meetings. So I very much hastened to set up other meetings so that I wouldn't feel like I had all my eggs in one

basket. But now I had something real to hold on to. Hey, I have an interview in San Jose. 15 minutes. I'm with Truesend Networks. While I'm there, I would love to chat with blah, blah, blah. So I was able to actually set up a couple of meetings and got there at one o'clock and Tom was delayed. I was like, all right, one o'clock comes and goes. 115 comes and goes. 130 comes and goes. And the receptionist, I think her name was Carly. God, she was a sweetheart. She was awesome too. She was really, not a receptionist, she was really the, I mean, what we would call probably chief of staff now. That term didn't exist then. In startups,

she was amazing. And she said, all right, well, Tom's delayed, but he'd love for you to meet with Mark. So I met with Mark, who was the COO, if I remember correctly. Great guy. And we chatted for 30, 40 minutes, however long it was. Foot's in the door. And eventually met with Tom. And it was a very short meeting. Nice to see you again, because he'd spoken at the class. And he said, let me get this just so I'm clear. You're not going to stop bothering me until I give you a job? And I said, yeah, I suppose that's about right.

He goes, okay, great, you're in sales. Wow. So I found out later the second to lowest paid employee at the company. Who was the lowest? One of their part-time receptionists. Because later one of my

friends asked for his paid time off and so someone sent him a spreadsheet with the other names deleted. This is not what you do, by the way, if you're sending someone their paid time off. But it was an Excel spreadsheet and they'd forgotten to delete another tab which had everyone else's compensation and stock options. So my friend's like, dude, you need to see this. He's like, you're the lowest on the totem pole. But I got the job. And that came later. But they didn't have space for me. So I was crammed into a desk in a fire exit,

literally in that tiny doorway in a fire exit. And then I had my, I think we called them systems engineers, who were support for technical sales, which I would be. Brian, who's a really good guy. And yeah, got to it. sales, which I would be. Brian, who's a really good guy. And yeah, got to it. Now that job ultimately disappeared because the company,

like so many at the time, imploded. Rapid growth, 9-11 happens, financing starts to dry up, and... But yeah, we've got another piece to the puzzle here. Saw the death knell. So around that time I saw the writing on the wall and I said, okay, this is going away.

What else do I know? Like I knew the speed ring at the time. And what I did is, this is, I'll try to keep it short, but I looked at my, one of the things I did is I looked at my credit card statements to determine how, how I spent money. Where did I spend the most money? Where was I price insensitive? Like for the small amount of money I was making in the Bay Area,

which was at that time still extremely expensive. I mean, it was because there was so much demand, right? There was less supply than demand. So I had roommates and the whole nine. What do I understand? What could I make that I use myself where I'm price insensitive? So I could go high end as opposed to low end.

And it was sports nutrition, so athletic nutrition. And then during lunch hours, began using the conference lines in empty rooms at TruSan to try to lay the groundwork for this new company that I would make. And I mean, I didn't have the money or the connections for anything. But I did realize through all the cold calling that I did to CEOs and CTOs who were the people I needed to sell to for my job, that nine to five is the worst time to make phone calls. You either want to call, well, and or- Seven in the morning. Yeah, seven in the morning or like 6.30 at night. Because very often the people who started the

companies, the presidents, the CEOs, whoever, were there early or they're late. And the gatekeepers were not. So I started connecting with people in this black box of sports nutrition who really like to keep it a black box for many, many reasons because there are contract manufacturers who make different products for competing brands and so on. Started to figure it out and I had just enough kind of neuroscience background and also certainly experience as a consumer to know what I wanted. And then asked all of my coworkers who also were, I mean, smart enough to see the writing on the wall. Like, wow. All right. If a bunch of inside salespeople have been sold or been fired rather, who I guess in some ways they were sold to other companies, but who had been fired inside, meaning they book meetings for people like me. Their job is outbound phone calls, but they don't leave the office. If a bunch of inside salespeople have been fired,

it's just a matter of time before all the outside people are fired. So this is just the first round of layoffs. And I asked them, I said, hey guys, I think we all know where this is going. I'm trying to start a new company. If I have to, I'll guilt you, but can you please just commit to buying one bottle each? So what did this give me? Then I have 20 of my friends who commit to buying one bottle of something that doesn't exist yet,

which gives me just enough money to... Get the crowd before you sell the product. Yeah, you need to get the crowd because then you've tested the market, right? So are these people willing to actually spend their money to buy this thing I'm thinking about making? Ultimately, through guilt, hopefully product features and benefits, actually needed to do a manufacturing run to give me the confidence that I could then go negotiate and pitch the manufacturer to have them drop their minimum to what I could afford. Because I laid out the vision for what this could be

and that I'd stick with them as a manufacturer. And it's a bet, but it's a low-risk bet for them. It would make a huge difference. I'm sure someone helped you when you were just getting started. There's probably one person you can remember. Please just give me that one chance. And they were very kind. They agreed. And I kept true to my word. The company exploded and I stuck with them. And then they made a lot, a lot, a lot of money because of it. Ultimately, so just to flash forward. So that company, what I thought was going to be a dream ended up becoming a nightmare. The company ended up running me instead

of the other way around. I didn't know how to manage. I did not know how to scale without myself remaining a bottleneck. Very different from having a seminar, which is very simple, fewer moving pieces. And I burned out and I lost a very important relationship. This girlfriend walked out. I had expected to probably propose to. Oh man, everything's going up in flames. Everything's going up in flames. Now, in the meantime, because I'm bootstrapping this, Ed Hsiao had invited me to give this lecture twice a year on how I was growing my company. You're up in flames and now you're coming in to speak about growing your company.

Well, now, but keep in mind, the company itself was successful, but I felt- But you're personally- Unsuccessful. Right, I got it. And I was certainly unhappy. So the mechanics of how to build, I could teach,

but the inner workings and the content and so on were a separate conversation. But I'm doing this twice a year, and the talk is changing as I'm changing. And in 2004, which is when all of these things start melting down, I took what I thought was going to be a four-week trip, one-way ticket to London to either rethink all the systems in the business so that I could remove myself as a bottleneck or shut it down. And it ended up working. And I took notes on all this because I'm constantly keeping notes, right? And started then imparting some of this in these

twice-a-year classes, lectures that I'm giving to students in high-tech entrepreneurship, this class I had taken. And ultimately, that four-week trip turned into 18 months of traveling around the world. And I mean, you know, the siren song of travel. Once you start, it's addictive. So I ended up with no itinerary. I'd run my whole life in 15 minute or 10 minute outlook increments for so many years. And now I no plans so if three people said what are you doing here you should go to galway in ireland because they have an art festival like okay i'll go to galway and so the four hour work week is born that's right so i'm taking notes i'm taking notes

on all this i'm journaling and i remember where i was exactly where i was i was was in an apartment in a place called Barrio Norte in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. And I had a roommate from Sweden at the time, this really funny dude with dreadlocks, a black guy. And he had given me a couple hours to do the class via Skype. And I completely reformulated the class. And I focused instead of on how to scale a business, I talked about what I termed lifestyle design. So how do you start with the end in mind for how you want to spend your hours day to day

in this finite resource? And how do you then reverse engineer that with a company or a career? And no writer would ever think this, man. So I taught this class and one thing I did for every class, and this won't surprise you, because if you'll recall, I did all of these experiments with returning products and everything. So I would, I would want, I would send a feedback form to all the students and what, and I would ask them for different types of feedback. And then one of them was other comments. Do you have any other comments or suggestions or questions? And one of the students in typical Princeton, like dickish fashion, I don't think it was actually a,

a real recommendation. I think it was just a snarky response. It said, I don't understand why you're teaching a class of 30 students. Why don't you just write a book and be done with it? Oh, no. Well, oh, no, but oh, yes. So that then, keep in mind. Yeah, oh, no, but oh, yes. But what's my situation at the time? I have insomnia, as I did before. I can't go to bed until three in the morning. What don't you have in Argentina? I didn't have TV. So my mind would race and come up with potential book. I didn't want to write a book. I had a very horrifying experience with my senior

thesis in college, so I had never wanted to write. I had vowed I would not write. But to get to sleep, I had to write down these chapter ideas and what I thought were just frivolous ideas for chapter beginnings, endings, points I could make, stories I could tell about all these people I'd met during my travels who epitomized what I was talking about. Just to get to sleep, I took it out of my head and put it on paper, which is something I still do today. And finally ended up back in the US and I have this huge stack of paper. Thank God for insomnia. Thank God for insomnia. And I'll give thanks to Jack Canfield here. So several years before,

when I first moved to Silicon Valley, I had volunteered, which is the best way, I think, to build the network quickly in a place you don't know. I had volunteered for an organization called the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, and they did events. So I started just, whatever, taking out the trash. The great thing about volunteering is that most people, because they're not getting paid, do the bare minimum or a little less than the bare minimum. But I went in and I was like, all right, I know I'm taking out the trash, but the iced tea isn't refilled over there.

Let me go refill the iced tea. Literally, that's all I needed to do for the people managing the event to be like, that kid's a go-getter. Let's have him do more. I refilled the damn iced tea. And within a month or two, they were inviting me to planning meetings. And then I said, they asked if anyone would like to volunteer to spearhead the next event, which meant inviting speakers

and I raised my hand and they let me do it. So I got to invite people I wanted to meet, including someone named Jack Canfield who co-created Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold hundreds of millions of copies. So I get back from the US. I haven't bothered Jack in any way. I haven't asked him for anything.

He's still a friend to this day, by the way. And I took some of the notes and I was back in the Bay Area. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was fine. I wasn't upset. I was a very happy guy at that point, very content. Had cash flow from the business. And I sent him a couple of notes and I said, Jack, this student said this. Here's some of my ideas. What do you think I should do with this? I don't really want to write a book, but what are your thoughts? And before I knew it, Jack was like, all right, I want you to meet this guy, Steve. I want you to meet this person, Jillian. I want you to meet this other woman,

blah, blah, blah. And he started making introductions. He said, oh, I think it's great. You should do it. I could see it working on Fox and Friends. And he started, before I could say no, making introductions to potential agents and so on. And ultimately, because I had the time, put together a proposal, which is a business plan, right? Which you're good at. Yeah, which I'm good at. I'd learned how to do. Because you're seeing this

from the bottom of the business process first. Yeah, I could think about finding the market. Who's the market, right? Was it easier for you to write the proposal or the book? The proposal. By a thousandfold. Because the proposal's selling. The book is teaching.

Those are very different things. See, in my case, the book is easy. The proposal just shoots fear through me. Oh, sure. A lot of writers don't feel very uncomfortable selling themselves. But I think the easiest way, or the reason that was easy for me to overcome is realizing that to sell effectively, you don't have to overpromise. You don't have to blow a lot of smoke.

You just have to state the facts using the tools you already have, which is wordsmithing and logical progression and all this stuff that you would get from, say, a class. Certainly from John McPhee. Certainly from John McPhee. Logical thinking, right? You're just taking out the things that are extraneous that might hurt you. You're not covering anything up, but you're presenting the case like an attorney would.

In the most efficient way. Efficient, compelling way possible. So Steve Hanselman, who had just moved from being a superstar editor and publisher to being an agent, ended up signing on for this wild ride. Do you have any idea where this is going at this point? No, no, no. The book was rejected 20, I want to say 20, I lose track of the number sometimes. It was either 27, somewhere between 26 and 29 times it was rejected by editors and publishers. And what are you feeling when these rejections come in?

It was less. You're in sales, so rejections is normal. It's normal. I also. For a writer, that's devastating. So what I had that they didn't have, and this is the reason, rather than feeling sad or rejected,

I felt angry and righteous, which also, by the way, is a double-edged sword. That doesn't always work so well. But the reason I felt I knew I was right and I felt righteous and I was just pissed at these people is because I had data. I taught 20 classes. I had feedback forms. I had the experiences. You had the goods.

You knew. I knew it sold. I knew it could sell. And I knew it worked, more importantly. So it's one thing to say, sell medicine. It's quite another to go through all the trials and so on to ensure the medicine works. I knew the medicine worked.

And they were whatever. You know what? Their rejection letters in some cases are so rude. They were too stupid. Not all of them. Some people were very gracious. And looking back at the proposal, which I've done, quite frankly, it does read a bit like the chest puffing of an overconfident, at the time, 29-year-old, which I was. It is a little much. I'll be honest. I could see why someone who's a very seasoned vet who's had 20 years in publishing would read it and just roll their eyes.

I can understand that. But many of them were too lazy or stupid to ask any questions. And if they'd asked some questions, they would have realized this is a low-risk bet with a high potential return that's been tested. And if they were investors, which they are, by the way, that's what publishers are, they are recruiting talent and investing in talent like just like a baseball team that they should have taken that

bet they didn't now ultimately uh crown just an imprint within random house at the time which i guess is random penguin or whatever it is now uh was my i could not make this up. I mean, it sounds like a cheesy scene from a movie that would, from a screenplay that would not get sold. But last meeting in New York. So I've had a chance to refine the pitch through all these meetings when I'm getting rejected.

You're still getting no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, thank you. No, come back later. Very venture capital. I mean, there are a lot of similarities between publishers and venture capitalists. A lot of polite, kind of soft, nebulous no's. Like, well, maybe if it's successful,

we want this guy for a second book, so I'm not going to be too rude now. Which is smarter than being rude. But ultimately, Heather Jackson, who was the editor slash sort of talent scout, right? Because they're acquiring editors and they are talent scouts. They have to find authors. Had been contacted by Steve and she set up a meeting where at the time the decider was Steve Ross and had this meeting. There are like 20 people in the

room. I mean, it's just a kind of a death star meeting. Much like people may have experienced at say a CAA or WME, right? You walk in, you're just like, wait a second, I thought I was meeting with one person. Why are there 20 people here? At that point, I'm used to it, though. It's like, all right, this is just how publishing works. And went through the whole pitch, the whole nine yards, and seemed to be getting head nods here and there, but I didn't, I didn't feel like it was there like this, this day it was not going to be consummated. Like it was,

it was close, but it wasn't quite there. And so, so I've heard this now from, or Steve, my agent has heard it from other people in publishing who are at crown at the time that this is what made the difference. So at the very end, Steve said, all right, there might've been Heather. It was either Steve or

Heather, but they said, all right, well, this has been a great meeting. Do you have anything else to say or to ask before I wrap up? And I said, yeah, I do. And I said, if you look at my track record, if you look at the things that I've done, I have never half-assed anything. I have an extremely high pain tolerance. So if you take the small bet on this book, I will stop at nothing. I will kill myself to make this a bestseller. I will do everything within my power. I will find other people who can help me with things outside of my power to make this succeed. Did you see it on anybody's face, a reaction? I looked straight at Steve because he was the one who was going to make the decision. And there was a little pause. I said, okay, thank you very much. And then they bought the book. News came, I guess, a few days later, a week later maybe.

They bought it for a pittance, which, good for them. They should, right? I mean, they're in a much more leveraged negotiating position after 27 rejections. Why would you pay a premium? Amazing. Boom. So that was, and I remember when the book came out, and there was a lot, of course, that I'm doing to make sure

that I am true to my word. I didn't expect it. Well, the other thing is, you know, get the crowd. Yeah. Then do the selling. Then you do the selling. So I imagine that you were out

getting the crowd in the meantime. Well, there are different crowds too. And that is, there are different sets of customers even for a single product. So in other words, I knew that to sell to readers, I had to first sell to publishers, right? And to sell to readers, you then have to also sell through publishers to distributors. So I knew that I had to have a story and material for all of those groups. For the book to succeed, it wasn't enough to just sell books to the end reader. I had to know who the customers were who enabled the book to be shepherded to ideal position at a retailer. And you just broke the business cycle down piece by piece. Oh yeah. And even when choosing covers, I took different covers. I went to the borders, which no longer exists, in Palo Alto on University Ave. And I found a book that was the

same size in the new arrivals or the new nonfiction area. And I wrapped it with the different covers. And I did this between, say, 5 and 8 p.m., so prime time. And I would sit there and I'd keep track of how many times each cover was picked up. So I'd give each one, say, 30 minutes, and I'd compare which cover got picked up. So I'd give each one, say, 30 minutes, and I'd compare which cover got picked up the most. Oh, no writer thinks like this. Yeah. Even the title for our work week was not the original title. The original title is terrible. The original title is Lifestyle Hustling. I mean, none of this, we might not even be talking right now if that had been the title. How did that title come into play?

Ended up, actually, you know what? It was Lifestyle Hustling and the Proposal. Then it was Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit, which was the tongue-in-cheek name of my class. That's what I called the seminar because of the sports supplements. And I think it was Walmart or Costco. Someone did not like the title.

The drug, right. Right, so one of my customers, before the book could get to my readers, did not like the title. So in retrospect, thank God for that. They didn't like the title, and Crown had a bunch of ideas, but I don't like making, when possible,

purely emotional decisions based on some type of consensus. I mean, as they say, or I've heard at least, a camel is a horse drawn by consensus. And I instead said, all right, if we need a new title, give me some time, I'll test it. And at the time, it was the golden years of Google AdWords, which could be tested very inexpensively.

And I grabbed about 10 different domain names, URLs. And then I had combinations of different titles and subtitles. And so I put those, I bid on different search terms like retirement, round the world travel, whatever it might be. and then an ad would pop up for my book that didn't exist and it would have whatever lifestyle hustling as the ad headline and then the ad text would be the subtitle and then the link which would be the url for that particular book title which i'd already reserved And Google mix and matches those automatically, so you don't have to manually test all the permutations and combinations.

And for $200 or $300, whatever it was, maybe less, $150 to $300, within a week, I knew that by far what got the highest click-through rate, so it's the same as people picking up a cover and me tracking the pickup rate, the highest click-through rate was four-hour work week, escape the nine to five, so on and so forth. Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, which ended up being the title and subtitle, had by far the highest click-through rate, differential, and standard

deviation. And I took that data to the publisher, and that's what we ran with. Oh, man. Number one, I got to start watching infomercials. Number two, I'm going to have to run off to interview Kobe Bryant. Yeah, I'd say that's important. So I would like to, if it's okay with you,

stop here. Let's make this Tim Ferriss, the early years. Yeah, chapter one. Chapter one, and then come back and do chapter two, starting with the phenomenal success of that book. May I give people a preview of where we are now? So much like, say, a movie, we can be in media rest, and then we can flash back. Teach me, Tim. Teach me.

We'll do Star Wars Episode IV, and then we can do the prequels. Well, I think what has helped me to achieve any modicum of success in these various areas. And I've certainly had plenty of mistakes like the audio books and so on is asking better questions. So first and foremost, I'd like to thank you for helping me to learn how to ask better questions. So that's piece number one. Uh, piece number two is that in many ways by reading writing by people such as yourself, I started interviewing people myself, which I was doing for the books. And so the four-hour work week was the first book. The latest book is Tribe of Mentors. mentors right so if you look back at these people i had the the absolute spectacular luck to meet whether it's john mcphee or ed shall oh i can't wait to read this book i am always asked what do

you what can i do if i don't have access to those people so what i did was went out and found 130 of people who are the best at what they do and ask them the 11 or so questions that I've refined over several hundred interviews to figure out what their secrets are and whether that relates to financial success, investing, physical wellness, training, or otherwise. It's a compilation of profiles of people ranging from, you know, the Maria Sharapovas and Kelly Slaters of the world, world-class athletes of all different types, to heroes of mine I wanted to reach out to, like Dan Gable, who is- A wrestling coach at Iowa.

Exactly. So the McPhee equivalent in the world of wrestling- I got it. Is Gable. So I interviewed Gable and so on, all the way to different types of writers, people like Steven Pinker and so on. all the way to different types of writers, people like Steven Pinker, and so on. It sounds amazing. Teasing out all of their playbooks. So for people interested in that type of cheat sheet across every possible domain you can imagine,

Tribe of Mentors is the latest, which should be out by the time people hear this. So they can find that at tribeofmentors.com and see sample chapters and the list of all the mentors and everything. 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 for 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. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness

before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff

that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun.

Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything 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. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. You might remember Four Sigmatic for their mushroom

coffee, which was created by those clever Finnish founders. And when I first mentioned that coffee on this podcast, the product sold out in less than a week. It lights you up like a Christmas tree, which can be really useful. However, recently I've been testing the opposite side of the spectrum, a new product, and that is their reishi mushroom elixir to help me end my day to get to sleep. As you guys may know, long time listeners, at least I struggled with insomnia for decades. I have a largely fixed that, but still shutting off my monkey brain has never been easy, still isn't easy very often. And I found Reishi, which I've been fascinated by for a few years now, has been very, very effective and calming.

Their old formula, however, Four Sigmatic's old formula, included stevia. And I like to avoid sweeteners, alleners for a host of reasons and i then just pinged them and asked hey guys i would love to experiment with this and maybe actually suggest it but i'd like a version without sweeteners if you'd be open to it if too much of a headache don't worry and they are always game for experimentation so they created a special custom version without the stevia, without sweeteners. Now it is part of my nightly routine. Their Reishi Elixir comes in single serving packets, which are perfect for travel. And in

fact, I'm about to leave the country right now and I have a packet in front of me that's just going to sit in the end of my carry-on bag. You only need hot water and it mixes very, very easily. Here's some recommended copy that they put in the read. So I'm going to read it and I'll give you my take. Quote, a warning for those in the experimental mindset. Reishi is strong and bitter in parentheses, like any great medicine. So if the bitterness is too much, I recommend trying it with honey and or nut milk, such as almond milk. End quote. So I'm going to say no, you should suck it up and you should drink the tea because it's not that bitter. And maybe you should take the advice of old Chinese people when they're criticizing young

when they say, which means you're not able to eat bitterness. Bitter is in many cases, an indication of things that help liver detoxification and so on. Not saying that's the case here, but I've tested this ratio lecture on family members, on friends. Everybody has liked it. It's a little bit earthy. It's not that hard. So I would just say suck it up and no, don't put in honey or nut milk or any of that shit. Just drink the goddamn tea.

It's delicious. I think, right? If you like pu-erh, that kind of stuff, that type of tea, you're going to dig it. So just try it. Okay, back to then my read. If you'd like to naturally improve your sleep, both onset and quality, I think naturally, you might just enjoy this reishi elixir without any sweeteners. It has organic reishi extract, organic fueled mint extract, organic rose hips extract, organic Tulsi extract. And that's it. No fancy stuff, no artificial, whatchamacallit, anything. So check it out. Go to foursigmatic.com forward slash

Ferris and get 20% off this special badge. I don't know if they're gonna be making much more of this since it was made specifically for you guys. So do me a favor and try it out so that they continue to be open to experimenting with me to create products for you guys specifically. Check it out. Foursigmatic. That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com forward slash Ferris. F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Get 20% off the special batch. And you must use the code Ferris

to receive your discount. F-E-R-R-I-S-S. So again, go to foursigmatic.com forward slash Ferris and then use code Ferris for 20% off of this rare, exclusive, limited run of Reishi Mushroom Elixir for nighttime routines without any sweeteners. Enjoy.