From the Archive: Tim Ferriss on Possibility, Mentors, and the DISS Learning Framework

25:48take a quick break if you like this episode i'd really really appreciate it it means so much to me please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast email me at altitra gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed thanks

26:11i don't know when you were a kid if you remember like there was this comic book series called Secret Origins. And it was all about the secret origins of the superheroes. And it was one of my favorite comics. So let's see your secret origins. So you were running a company called Brain Quicken. And I can surprise that this is where you developed a lot of the ideas that eventually turned into the four-hour workweek. So Brain Quicken was essentially a nutrisuitable company of sorts that you were doing direct mail. What was that company that you were Yeah, Brain Quicken was my first real company, I suppose, if you want to talk about something with any kind of scale or organization.

26:53I had a couple of harebrained ideas before that. The company still exists, by the way. I just went to the website. I was thinking of ordering some medicine. Yeah, it's not bad. I actually still use the product. I developed the product originally for myself while an undergrad at Princeton for my own smart drug use because I got nervous about all of the somewhat illicit substances I was importing under the FDA personal importation policy. So it was sort of my legal catch-all biochemical aid. Brain Quicken was a single-skew company, and it aimed to define a category. The category was non-stimulant-based pre-workout products.

27:30I originally began as a sort of no-tropic smart drug company, and I very quickly realized, and I developed this, by the way, with basically selling the hell out of the vision and having people help me for free while I was still employed at a startup I knew was doomed to implode during the startup, the dot bubble and dot crash. So I did not just leap into the ether and cross my fingers. I developed the product and the basic manufacturing approach and all this stuff. I want to just mention that this method of being at one job while developing another, let's say, business on the side, is extremely common, and this is for the listener's benefit really, but for everybody, you know, in Silicon Valley, in New York, anywhere.

28:16I stayed at HBO an entire two years while completely developing my first business, totally on the side at night, in the morning, locking myself in the conference room whenever I could find spare moments. So it's a very common story and it's also how you mitigate risk. Absolutely, definitely. And I mean, in the beginning, you do have to hustle a little bit and don't be afraid. This is one thing that I've noticed is a lot of would-be entrepreneurs are afraid to ask their family and friends to help them. And in my particular case, I had very good friends at this company and I just said, hey guys, I know this is going to sound weird, but I've bought you booze in the past.

28:52I need you guys to commit to just buying one bottle of this stuff so I can actually afford my first manufacturing run. And they're like, whatever, fine. Okay. And it wasn't a big deal. And I had the web designer at the company. It's an easy sell. You say it's going to make you smarter and your business succeed. Yeah, right. So what I realized very quickly when I got out into the wild and started doing testing is that Americans do not want to be smarter in general. It's really, really hard to sell an intelligence aid in the US. It's brutally hard. And I spent a lot of money on print advertising, radio advertising before I learned that lesson.

29:30And the way that I figured out the sort of right turn to make it work was I had a lot of NCAA athletes and professional athletes who would purchase the product, try it for some cognitive effect, and then ended up getting performance gains in primarily sports that involved reaction speed of some types of tennis, track and field, et cetera. And it took me a long time to finally basically observe the obvious, which was this has the potential to be a non-stimulant pre-workout product, which is actually, in fact, one of the sort of off-label uses I had implemented myself. And so I repositioned the whole thing for people who are, number one, very price insensitive athletes, and number two, who are very affordable to reach on a sort of cost per acquisition basis because I could go after very targeted specific sports like powerlifting, boxing, MMA at the time, which was very nascent.

30:25And in fact, sponsored a number of the UFCs. If you look at some of the very early UFCs, you'll see BodyQuick, which was the reposition product, or BodyQuicken on the turnstiles or the corner buckles in the UFC, which was on pay-per-view and everything else. That company was built out. It was mostly direct response, but as you probably would imagine, once something is successful in direct response, you start getting wholesale inquiries. It ended up with distribution in about, I'd say, 12 to 20 countries or so. Were you in GNC or any supermarkets or anything? It was in some supermarkets. It was mostly an independently owned either sports nutrition or vitamin shops of various types.

31:04And how long did it take you to make this transition from brain quick into body quick? And when did you make the switch? It took about six months, I'd say. Six to 12 months to figure it out and to really also just find my feet as an entrepreneur. The disadvantage that I had at the time, which people don't have now, is I literally had an extremely long testing cycle with, say, print advertising and whatnot. I had to wait weeks or months to get sales data to determine if something was working or not. Did print advertising work at all? Print actually did work. And I think that many of these avenues that are thought of as very quaint and old-fashioned are fantastic opportunities for the right companies.

31:48I think my general approach with customer acquisition is go where the fewest people are fishing. If you can go after inventory that is undervalued because it's out of fashion, you can find some tremendous deals. So even though it's most expedient to test on, say, Facebook or GladWords, whether it's contextual advertising or pay-per-click in other fashions, I think there's tremendous opportunity in offline advertising or radio, for instance. And a number of my startups, like reputation.com, had done tremendously well with direct response advertising off of the web. And so anyway, that's a longer answer perhaps than was intended.

32:29But that's how the company got up and running. And eventually, you developed a lot of the automation and productivity hacks, if you want to look at them that way, systems out of necessity. because I got to a point in 2004, and I'm sure you've been there before, where I was doing really well financially, and I was completely miserable. I mean, just utterly miserable. And destroying my relationships, and a long-term girlfriend at the time broke up with me because all I did was work. What did she say? Did she just walk out, or did she insist on more time from you? She gave me, I actually still have this.

33:10She gave me what looks like a plaque of sorts, although it's actually one of those photo holders that you could get at Target that have the three panes and they fold out to stay standing on top of a mantle or whatnot. This is incredible. I had a collage made of a photograph of my head and then a bunch of construction paper. And it was me running with a briefcase with papers flying out of it. and underneath it said business hours end at 5 p.m. with an exclamation point or three after it and you know that it was love and very creative it was very creative but it was it was effectively you know a dear john letter or it was an ultimatum in disguise that i didn't recognize at the time because i had my head so far up my ass and she left and honestly it was i was so i lacked so much self-awareness at the time and you know i probably still do in some ways that it came as a complete surprise that she would not want to be in an intimate relationship with someone who worked from like 7 a.m.

34:10to 9 p.m. I can see that could be a problem. I mean, you were obviously affected by this. Did you try to win her back? Did you say I'm going to cut down my hours? No, I tried to win her back later. This is somewhat tragically amusing. So I started the transformation or the reassessment that is sort of the beginning of the four-hour work week, which was buying this one-way ticket to London to kind of spec out three to four weeks to either redesign the business and extricate myself or shut it down. That was the objective. Could you have sold it at this point? At that point, probably it wasn't even in my mind as an option.

34:49If you want to talk about reality being negotiable and the possibilities and being limited by your own beliefs, I assumed it couldn't be sold. So I didn't even look at that option, which ended up being completely unfounded. And as soon as I started doing a lot of angel investing and advising much later, 2007 plus, I realized, holy, this doesn't have to be so damn complicated. I can sell this. And I sold the company in 2009, which was much easier than I could have possibly imagined. Did you tell me what in 2009, what did you sell it for? Yeah, I don't talk publicly about the sales price. It wasn't enough.

35:20We won't tell anyone. Yeah, right. No, it was a decent chunk of change, but not enough to say retire on if I believed in the concept of retirement. but it was a comfortable chunk of change that reflected a nice multiple on revenue. There's always a longer story related to the sales. The sale, well check this out. So the sale, think about the timing of this. So the conversation for the sale started, I'm guessing, early to mid 2008. And I might be screwing up the timing, but a number of the financiers who were putting money into purchasing the company were based in London. All right, so what do we run into now?

35:54So we have a pound sterling dollar conversion rate that's very important to this transaction. So what else happened in 2008, 2009? Everything collapsed. The whole world collapses. And all of a sudden, the deal is in jeopardy because they're upside down. The deal is suddenly 2, 3x more expensive than anticipated. So we had to do a bunch of really unorthodox stuff, meaning sort of a partial payment at one point with a promissory note contingent upon the certain triggers like the exchange rate reaching a certain parity and like all this crazy stuff, which was a great exercise. It ended up panning out, thankfully.

36:35Were you scared? I mean, those types of negotiations, for me, I find to be the most stressful. Of course. It was very stressful, not entirely for financial reasons. And I'm sure there are people listening to this who can understand. This had become my baby in so many ways. And it was a baby that I didn't want to spend any more time with. There was that. But nonetheless, I had dedicated so many years of my life to building it that I had an irrational, on some level, attachment to seeing it taken care of. And being caught in this limbo was very, very stressful and uncomfortable for me. Did you get like angry at anybody?

37:12Like you don't seem like an angry sort of guy. Did you scream at anybody in the middle of this? No, I didn't. I didn't scream at anybody because and maybe this is odd, but I deal with catastrophic circumstances very, very well. So I was never in the military, but I always thought I might actually operate well in a sort of high stress combat environment. I've been around car accidents. I've seen people just get dismembered in front of me and I've been able to respond. I've done some EMT training. I'm able to respond really well in disasters. I don't get angry. Where I get angry is with the really small stuff that I know is a result of human beings being idiots or being irresponsible or not delivering things on deadline.

38:02drive me absolutely insane. And I'm trying to get better at that, but I have such an extreme level of impatience for people who are competent but behave as if they were incompetent. That's what I get upset about. Like very talented people who deliver stuff habitually late makes me so f***ing angry. It's disproportionate perhaps to the stimulus. Well, like what do you do? Do you yell at them? Do you fire them? What do you do? I fire them. I don't yell typically because it doesn't get you anywhere and it just causes more problems. But I get upset. I do get upset. I'm just like, you knew this. You promised this other thing.

38:43And yet, here we are with a number of large problems that were created because you didn't do what you said you were going to do. That's unacceptable. Well, let's talk about this on an industry level because you've dealt with several industries that are filled with intelligent, competent people, but the industries themselves are so fractured and incompetent almost structurally that it's hard not to turn these intelligent people into incompetent people. And I'm talking about both publishing and television. So Brain Quicken, you experimented on yourself, you developed all of the techniques in the four-hour workweek, which I'm sure everyone's read it, but if you haven't, I really encourage people to read it because it's incredibly useful for creating a four-hour workweek, which you successfully essentially turned Brain Quicken into for you.

39:31That was your four-hour workweek job. Yeah, well, just a quick funny side note on that. Of all the titles we were considering for the book, so one of the original sort of 12 titles or so was the two-hour workweek, and my publisher thought that was too unrealistic, so we settled on testing the four-hour workweek. Yeah, you know, somebody once asked me, or no, I might have written about this once. I said you would have, I was just guessing, I said you probably would have called it the zero hour work week if you could, but that wouldn't have been realistic. So through testing, I know you figured out four was like the right number.

40:08Because, you know, people don't want to work. Like people want a zero hour work week. Well, the other thing is that I was in 2005 spending two hours, literally two hours a week managing all BrainQuicken related stuff. That's a whole separate conversation on testing titles and whatnot. But did your testing technique for Choose Yourself? Because my initial title was the Choose Yourself Era. And I had this weird problem where I couldn't say the word era. It sounded like error. Or it sounded like, you know, one editor said, is this a book about anthropology? So speaking of Tucker Max, he said, why don't you test it against pick yourself?

40:46And I didn't really like pick yourself either. I was like, pick your nose. So I said, OK, let's just do Tim Ferriss' this technique. So we did choose yourself, pick yourself, the choose yourself era, and then like 10 other titles. And then we did the same thing with subtitles. And that's how we came up with the title and the subtitle. So thank you for the idea. Of course. Yeah. It's great to trust your gut, but you should verify with numbers. I don't trust my gut at all. You know, I'm a former day trader by profession and I ran a hedge fund and I quickly learned my gut is filled with all sorts of toxic bacteria and I totally needed to rely only on software.

41:22So I didn't trust my gut at all. My gut was always wrong. But I took you off course. You were talking about publishing TV where otherwise very competent people sometimes are cornered or put into a position where they can't do their best work. Right. Because we both know very sore people in publishing. It's not their fault. So I don't want to blame anybody. But, you know, one thing about you is that you reinvent yourself quite a bit. So you say Brain Quicken was your baby, but at some point you decided, you know what? I'm also going to, not only am I going to sell these nutraceuticals, but heck, I've never done it before.

41:55I'm going to write a book. And you went ahead and did it like from, you know, why you're running Brain Quicken. Why did you decide you're going to, that everybody in the world needs to hear what you have to say about this? You have to have a certain ego to write a book. Well, I wish I could take credit for it. Honestly, I was a reluctant writer. My senior thesis during undergrad almost killed me. I actually took a year off away from school, partially just to work on this thing because I was convinced I would never finish it. And I vowed to myself after graduating that I would never write anything longer than an email ever again, which clearly has not panned out.

42:31But the way the book came together was, number one, I'm a compulsive note taker. So hypergraphia, maybe if you want to give it a diagnosis. I have I have dozens and dozens of notebooks. I take notes all the time. I record notes. And it's very, very, very hard to find me at any time, anywhere, without a pen or something to write with handy. And I collected all of my notes on these learnings and tactics and different tests and so on as I was streamlining Brain Quicken and removing myself from it as a bottleneck and putting systems in place. So I had all these notes. simultaneously beginning in, I want to say, 2003 or so.

43:12So keeping in mind that I started the company, I guess, 2000, 2001. Starting in 2003, one of my former professors, a great guy named Ed Schau, Z-S-C-H-A-U, who'd been a congressman, competitive figure skater, had taken companies public. At the same time, no less. I'm not kidding. This guy is, he is the world's most interesting man. He taught a class that I took called high-tech entrepreneurship. And starting in 2003, I believe, he invited me to come back once or twice a year to talk about self-funding or bootstrapping as opposed to venture backing. And I was going to these classes and I had to come up with content.

43:49So I started testing a lot of the material that would later become parts of the book, The 4-Hour Workweek. But I never had any intention to write the book. After all these classes, I would send email feedback forms. I wanted to get feedback. How could I improve it? What did you like most? What did you like least? Et cetera. Just to teach the class more effectively next time. And at one point, one of the students, this is Princeton, you got to keep in mind, there are a lot of snarky people there and a lot of pompous people there. And I'm sure I was probably a bit of both when I was there and maybe afterwards.

44:20But the point being, a student gave some feedback in the other comments or any additional comments, which was, I don't understand why you're teaching a class of 50 students. Why don't you just write a book and be done with it. And I don't think that was actually a serious recommendation. It sounds like a little bit of an F you there. I think it actually probably was. And nonetheless, it planted this seed. And I had no desire to write a book, but I was up late one night, and this is probably 2004, 2005. And I started looking at books and book proposals and book publishing. I was like, you know what, I have a couple hours to kill.

44:58Let me just have a glass of wine and I'm going to check this out. So I started messing around with it and looking back at my notes and just coming up with book titles. I like headlines. I did direct response for years. I'm like, you know what? Let me just like what would chapter headlines? Oh, this is really funny. Ha ha ha. Probably a little drunk at this point. Like, what would I call the book? Blah, blah, blah. Very, very much just an exercise in fun. It wasn't intended to be anything. And then at one point I sent Jack Canfield a note and we had had this very intermittent sort of philosophical exchange.

45:30I would contact him for asking him for very real advice on some life decision or philosophical decision that I needed to make. It was very seldom something super specific or an introduction or whatever. And I asked him one of these questions, and then at the end of the email, I was like, hey, this student recommended I write a book about blah, blah, blah. I mocked up a cover and a back cover. Pretty hilarious. What do you think? and pretty much right out of the gate, he said, well, you should totally do it. I could see it on Fox and Friends. You know you should talk to, is this person, this person, this person?

46:03And before I knew it, the cat was kind of out of the bag, if that's even an expression. I don't know if it sounds right. And he'd made introductions to a couple of potential agents, all of whom said no. A number of gay people get his butt. Why did they say no? Well, I wasn't even trying to sell the thing, but they were like, what were some of the reasons? This doesn't fit into a clean category. I don't know where this would be slotted. This isn't what publishers are looking for. All the same kind of routine lines that you hear in both publishing and television and movies, right? It's just the same stuff.

46:38A number of them gave me good advice, even though they said no, which I appreciate it. Like saying no is fine, but I do appreciate some parting advice, which a number of them gave me. And then I ended up signing with Steve Hanselman, who was just becoming an agent at that time and had been a superstar editor and it acquired a bunch of really fantastic books in his previous career as an editor. Like you, the owner's man, you own a bunch of really big winners. So that's how the whole thing got started. I was never intending to write the book. There was no courage on my part in jumping into the deep end that way.

47:10I was sort of goaded, not goaded, but spurred along and very inadvertently ended up trying to sell a book. And at this point, did you have the title or had you done that testing yet? No, I hadn't done the testing yet. The title, this is probably another reason I was turned down. It had a horrible original title. Oh my God. And I'm so glad it didn't pan out. It was called Lifestyle Hustling. I mean, this is like the worst imaginable title for me. I came up with far worse titles to test later. Yeah, there was like the drug dealing one, drug dealing for fun and profit. Drug dealing. Oh, so it was Lifestyle Hustling at the very beginning at the proposal stage.

47:48and then I think when it got sold, it had drug dealing for fun and profit, which is problematic on many levels, but I still like that title. I actually, I still like that title. I still think I could have made it work, but it wouldn't have spread as far and wide as the four-hour work week. Oh my God, so how can you now do something that has that title in whatever form? Like what can you do? Like a podcast with that title or a supplementary report? Yeah, I mean, I could do a new nutraceutical line. It's just called drug dealing for fun and profit. Oh, you know, seriously, actually, like right now, here's where you can buy the ingredients.

48:28Here's how you can package them. Here's how I would use Google ads or Facebook ads or ClickBank to put together an info product and sell it. Like, here's how from scratch, you know, bring Quicken in a box. Drug dealing for fun and profit. it. I've had a lot of people ask me for that. The liability is just so off the charts. I was like, yeah, there's no way, man. You're kind of on your own. I'm sorry. We're just brainstorming. No, no, no, no. I love brainstorming. But I'd say, since I've also talked about that title so much, I'd be amazed if there aren't 100 squatters all over it at this point.

49:02So on to the next thing. Okay, so you did the book, you sold it, it became a bestseller. And then for our body, I feel like you're starting to figure out what your core message is, which is really, again, not necessarily about, you know, four hour work weeks or losing a lot of weight, which you cover in the four hour body, among other things, or, you know, learning how to learn what you cover in the four hour chef. But again, it's this idea that let's, let's question the impossible. And is it really impossible? And if not, how can we get through it? And it seems like you start, you get closer and closer to that core message.

49:37Right, absolutely. Because the four-hour body, I could have very easily done the four-hour work week, part due or whatever. And that would have been the layup and the easier path. But I really did not, by that point, and this is, I'd say, 2008 or so, 2009, when I'm starting to think about perhaps another set of subject matter. and I was so sick of talking about email autoresponders and so on ad nauseum in every interview that I wanted to take a complete lateral move and do something entirely aside from business. So you wrote a book about orgasms. So I wrote a book including two chapters on female orgasm which got the book pulled out of Costco as a side note but the four-hour body really represented an obsession of mine that predated the 4-Hour Workweek stuff by 10 plus years.

50:33So it was very appropriate. The question was, and even after the 4-Hour Workweek, this is a book that sold into 40 plus languages, millions of copies or whatever. It was a hard sell to make the 4-Hour Body work with retailers and everything like, well, we know what you did in business, but hey man, that's not even the same category. This thing is going to fail. You know that the book is going to be too big. You know that fitness and health and all that, they don't sell internationally. You can't sell those. they don't translate well on and on and on and i'm not saying that was feedback from the publisher this is feedback from in some cases successful authors who literally would like spit up their drinks and be like what it's how long it's a hardcover it's what like that's never gonna sell they never slot those in blah blah blah never never never impossible impossible impossible it's like have you tested these things what evidence do you have for that oh really that's interesting what data have you seen what evidence do you have for that and what did you see well no i would ask them this and it would just be a blank stare.

51:28They would be like, no, well, everybody knows that. It's like, really? How do they know that? Because they repeat it so often, they believe it to be true. And that's typically the answer. So yeah, the four hour body ended up outselling the four hour workweek by a large margin and by for a long period of time. And it might still even be outselling the four hour workweek. That's really interesting. Did not know that coming into this, that the four hour body had out. So how many, how many copies did the four hour workweek sell? Oh boy. You know, I'd have to check on numbers. I used to be on top of this on like a weekly basis.

51:58Four hour work week. I mean, it's in the, it's got to be in the millions, but I don't, I don't even know. I couldn't even begin to tell you what the exact numbers are. Because I feel like with the four hour work week, you were really touching into something that was impactful in a historical way in the sense that, you know, what we saw in 2008, 2009 was the death of corporatism. This idea that if you're loyal to your nine to five job, the corporation is going to be loyal to you. So that whole connection that had essentially replaced the family connection a hundred years ago was now dying. So people actually needed to figure out how to work a four hour work week.

52:35And so I felt in terms of societal impact, that was a very powerful book and it triggered a huge revolution in thinking about essentially work. The four hour body is great. It just surprised me it's no more than the four hour work week. not in total at this point keeping in mind that the four-hour workweek had a head start by many years you know three years and then there was the revised edition the expanded and updated edition of the four-hour workweek which was full of case studies which i'm thinking of actually i'm thinking i'm doing a completely separate book just of case studies which i think would be just amazing totally should because the world has changed too like now you really can create a four hour business, you know, that it's so easy now.

53:18It's so easy. And it's different than it was 10 years ago. Totally different. I mean, now, don't get me wrong. I think the principles, even the tools in the four hour work week, especially the expanded and updated edition still work. But there are other tools and other approaches. I mean, for instance, I've helped a number of companies and people with Kickstarter campaigns. And these are companies that are now doing in some cases$500 ,000 a month or a million dollars a month in sales. Kickstarter just didn't exist and similar options, whether it's Indiegogo or using things like Celery to do pre-order campaigns where you're not charging credit cards but doing it in an organized legal fashion.

53:55Not only that, but the scope of businesses that can be created by using the flexible principles in the four-hour workweek, 80-20, Parkinson's, a lot of the systems thinking is so far-ranging. People think company, they think product. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I know actors who have used this for their careers. I know lawyers who've used this. I know designers who have used this. I know YouTube stars who have used this. I mean, it's so far reaching. And so to show people the spectrum of all of those options, I think would be really fun. Well, it's interesting because the four hour work week, you're right.

54:31Every principle and like the 80-20 rule you refer to, you know, throughout your books and throughout a lot of different things, all of these rules and principles though are incredibly valuable. But right now in particular, it's like taking those and you can almost make like a four hour pedia of all the different types of businesses that can be started and exactly how like plug and play exactly how people can do it. And I think that would be an incredible idea. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. So you fantasize about doing four hour work week. What would you even call it? You can't call it the eight hour work week.

55:05You have to come up with a really good title here. Yeah, I'm going to come up with a good title, but let's call it, no, I wouldn't call it anything. I'll tell you, because people, here's another sort of publishing tip that people might find helpful. If you have an audience or you're being watched for what you're going to do next, you should get into the habit, in my opinion, of using red herrings in some cases. So after the four-hour work week, I became very acutely aware of how painful it can be to have people squat on your intellectual property or infringe on your intellectual property and use your photographs and use your trademarks to sell stuff that you have no association with, many things that could be very damaging to you.

55:46That's been an ongoing battle. So typically, for instance, when I published The 4-Hour Body, prior to that, I put up a post announcing what the new project was going to be because I wanted to marshal resources and find interviewees and so on. But I didn't use the real title because I knew that people would immediately go to Twitter, they would immediately go to Instagram, had it existed at the time, grab handles and grab URLs to try to squat on them to extort money from me later. Or to simply attract traffic from searches at a later point in time so they could monetize it with advertising. There's just a lot of unethical behavior that is automatic.

56:25It's triggered in hundreds and thousands of people when you give people advance notice about what you're going to do. if you haven't already secured every possible imaginable permutation. And to save myself that labor, when I announced it, I called it, I think, becoming superhuman or something like that because I wanted to provide them with fodder as a false lead.

57:01So once you put out 4-Hour Body, did suddenly everybody start registering the 4-Hour Investor, the 4-Hour President, all the different permutations there? Yeah, I mean, people have tried that and done that. Ultimately, I've registered trademarks for four hour as a prefix. So there is going to have to be and there is some ongoing stuff that I won't bore you with. But I hate that it comes down to this. But there is going to be a legal reckoning for almost all of these people. There are fights worth fighting. And then there are fights not worth fighting. But there are also battles you have to fight to maintain your intellectual property rights, unfortunately.

57:38Man, I almost feel like registering the three and a half hour work week right now. you know you can go for it but i'll get i'll give it to you for free if you go i i appreciate that the you know i would just say this guys it's like you can ride on someone else's coattails it's intellectually lazy and i find unethical it's like try to create something of value if you leave this planet without creating something original of value i view that life as having being wasted and squandered along the same lines we all have critics focus on the people who get it not the people who don't get it. And if you're trying to decide sort of which side of the fence to fall on as a supporter or detractor, just watch Ratatouille and listen to the Anton Ego speech at the end, which is the final review of Gusteau's restaurant.

58:25But basically, he says, the piece of work that we critics designate as garbage is worth less than what we're designating as garbage. You can either focus on building something of value or propagating other things of value that you find, therefore sort of increasing the karmic value you add to the universe, or you can nip at people's heels and sort of spread vitriol and spit acid, which net-net really does no good for anyone. And I highly recommend, you wrote a post on this once which I've referred to because at some point it gets painful for anybody who's trying to put themselves out there and they start to get just criticisms that are riding those coattails.

59:05They're criticizing for no other reason than riding the coattails. And you wrote a very good post a few years ago about dealing with the haters that I thought was very good. Yeah, how to deal with haters. And it pulls from quotes from Colin Powell and some of the Stoics and some of the top sports agents in the world. Just to point out that if you're doing everything right, if you're doing your job well, 90 % of what's said about you will have some negative tinge to it. I mean, it sounds unbelievable and outrageous. And that's just the nature of anonymity and the internet. And to contend with that, you have to arm yourself philosophically and tactically to contend with that type of landscape.

59:45It's very, very tough. There are times when the turkeys get you down and it's very tempting. Some will be lucky. Some will hit the right buttons that were in you from birth or from whatever, and they'll just get lucky. If a thousand people criticize you and you're looking at all of them, one of those thousand is going to seem like your mother yelling at you and that's going to be painful. Yeah, it'll trigger something. So, I mean, I think the post is just how to deal with haters or seven principles on how to deal with haters, something like that. If you search on Google, it'll pop right up just my name and how to deal with haters.

1:00:19And it's just a pragmatic toolkit for people who want to create value, but who are not going to be Pollyanna-ish about it. Recognize you're going to have, for every supporter you have, someone in the opposite camp who's charging at you, who just verbally and emotionally wants to put you on a spear. And you have to get accustomed to that. Even if you're a nonprofit, for God's sake, I mean, it's like you see some unbelievable stuff. Well, and you had the common, almost the elephant in the room. Tim Ferriss doesn't really work four hours. He's the hardest working guy I know. So people, I would see that criticism of you, which is oddly a criticism that you didn't work four hours, even though that's not really what your book's about.

1:00:59Your book is about putting these systems in place. So if you have a business like BrainQuicken, you can have 36 hours to do things you enjoy or 38 hours or whatever. Yeah, no, exactly. And then I think that I very, first of all, I don't go looking for the negative stuff and there's plenty of positive stuff too. I don't go looking for the negative. I think that's a bad habit. I very rarely respond to the negative, particularly if it reflects someone who hasn't done even a modicum of research. If they haven't read the book and they're criticizing me based off of the title, there's really nothing to be talked about.

1:01:32A general principle in life, I think, is that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. Does that make sense? It's a waste of breath. It's a waste of time. I totally agree. And one thing I will add to that is what I call the 24-hour rule, which is that if you do respond to the haters like that, then you've kept the issue alive for another 24 hours instead of just letting it die. Yeah, starving it of oxygen. Also for just very specific search engine rules, you do not want to add Google juice to something by drawing attention to it. And there are many people who will write really hateful, ridiculous kind of articles about me that are devoid of content just because they want me to respond and send traffic to their sites.

1:02:18And I just never respond to those things. And they end up attracting people who are hateful to their sites, which is their own form of punishment. Like that audience is going to turn on you. That's a very good point, actually. For those people that haven't heard the 4-Hour Workweek. The reason that 4-Hour Workweek has been praised by hedge fund managers, some of the top venture capitalists in the world, very publicly, I mean, in the New York Times, and these types of people, not because they want to work four hours a week, but because they want to maximize their per hour output. That is the point of the book.

1:02:48You maximize your per hour output and then what you choose to do with that new toolkit is up to you. And in my case, I don't want to sit around and stare at the wall watching paint dry for the rest of my life. So I have the luxury at this point of doing with my time whatever I want to do with my time. And I choose things like writing on the blog. I love doing it. I love interacting with my audience. or I spent a ton of time on experimenting and trying to capture that for people because I view myself as a teacher first and foremost. I always wanted to teach. I thought it was going to be ninth or 10th grade, but instead ended up being via books in the blog.

1:03:21So let's talk about that because you've also said often writing, and a lot of authors say this actually, writing a book is a very unpleasant experience. So you're used to going out there and doing things in the world. And when you write a book, you have to essentially spend a year or two or more sitting behind a computer for hours a day doing brain activity into this computer. It's painful. Yeah, it is painful. It's a very isolating process. I mean, for me, it's like being in solitary confinement. And it's not always unpleasant. There are rare moments where you bottle the lightning and you have just a streak of a few hours where you're really on fire and you're putting together some of your best stuff and it's funny and you're making yourself laugh.

1:04:03And I love those moments, but they do not constitute the majority of the time spent writing. Particularly with your books, your books are almost like they're packaged books. Like 4-Hour Chef is a work of art. It's just a beautiful book all around. What is there, 700 or 800 photos in there? How many photos were in the 4-Hour Chef? I think there are 1 ,000 plus photographs. I actually, just to be a glutton for punishment, probably took 20 % to 30 % of those myself, probably 20%, just to try to learn photography, which was in retrospect kind of a foolish, masochistic decision. I had fun, but it was too much additional work.

1:04:40And it has a few hundred illustrations. So that book, part of the point of that book for me was to create a beautiful physical object, which not surprisingly is very challenging to do. It's really involved. But the act of writing, I find painful most of the time. There are the moments where you, because as a writer, if you're a solo writer, if you don't have a co-author, there are times when you are the architect, where you're designing the cathedral and it's this really inspiring, exciting period. The vast majority of the time, you're the bricklayer. And that is really tough grunt work. And then there's, of course, at the end, you can look upon this hopefully beautiful structure that's highly functional and admire it for, you know, look back with pride on it for years and decades, ideally.

1:05:36But it's a very tough process. Now, what I would say is you don't necessarily choose or I don't necessarily choose my projects based on the ratio of pleasure to pain. This might sound weird, but I think there's value from going through pain. And I voluntarily introduce pain to my life in the form of unpleasant workouts or meditating when I really don't want to meditate, when it's the last thing I want to do. That's when I most need to meditate. And I remember I was told once, if you don't have 30 minutes to meditate, you need three hours. And that's similar to a quote from Gandhi, actually. So Gandhi told all of his advisors, I need an hour a day to meditate.

1:06:19And his advisor said, you know, no, Gandhi, you don't have an hour. And then Gandhi said to them, okay, now I need two hours to meditate. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So if the way that relates to writing is I enjoy expanding my sphere of comfortable action. And you only do that by subjecting yourself to discomfort and pain and challenging situations. I think there's a real danger when you have even the barest level of success. Like you said, when you have a nine to five job and there's the risk of becoming comfortable and complacent, that is a very dangerous place. It's a really dangerous place to sit.

1:07:00And I wonder if that's what got you out of the, let's call it the four hour genre. Like you went from four hour chef to essentially doing a TV show. which by the way isn't called the 4-Hour TV Show no it's not and it's called the Tim Ferriss Experiment and actually the latest update on that we can talk about all sorts of aspects of this but I'm really happy that I started the podcast in the last few weeks which I've been hoping to do for more than a year probably two years and thank you for a lot of your advice related to the podcast by the way because of some internal issues at Turner Broadcasting the launch of the TV show has yet again been delayed and postponed with no particular sort of launch date in its place.

1:07:44So it's been... I know I've been very upset because I only was able to see the Stuart Copeland episode. I wanted to see the poker episode, actually. The poker episode is awesome. I am working tirelessly. So any of you who were kind enough to offer support with the show in any way, I am fighting my ass off. The Turner people and I want a lot of the same things. It's really just a matter of figuring out how to allocate resources. I won't bore you with all the internal stuff that all the people on the Turner team who want to see this show get out in the open as well. Big companies are hard. Big companies are just very challenging.

1:08:22Not only if you're interacting with them from the outside, but they're very resource rich. There are reasons to work with big companies, but they're very challenging political animals. Let me give you an idea. Let me give you an idea to do. because like if you if you if you end up on you know headline news or true tv or any of these kind of like channels on you know channel 187 on cable you're gonna have 10 000 viewers so what you should do you have a huge blog just tell them you'll sell for five bucks an episode do a louis ck sell for five bucks an episode every episode i'm a buyer everybody i know is going to be a buyer all your readers are gonna be buyers that's how they're going to make their money on this Yeah, I'm working on it.

1:09:06I'm working on it. So I'll figure out a way to, I'm really working hard to figure out a way to make it work. So I remain confident. And part of the reason I remain confident, I'll tell you, is when people come to me to ask about books, 90 % of the time, if not more, the questions are all related to marketing and PR. And I don't want people to discount the value of those things, but the marketing and PR potential is decided by the product. and I spent so much freaking time on this show and these episodes and the teachers and the lessons and the tools and all this stuff. I know it can find a home.

1:09:48I know the product can speak for itself. That's why I'm not freaking out completely. And I feel like with books, for instance, or any type of content, you have to focus on the content first and foremost, especially in a world that has social media available as these Archimedes lovers and rebroadcast platforms. If you have a really good product and you can pick your 1 ,000 first fans properly and target them, and everybody should read 1 ,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. Not everyone agrees with it. I happen to think it's genius. It's a very short piece. It's the only thing I think you probably ever need to read about marketing if you had to pick one thing.

1:10:29You can have an enormously successful product. And this goes for blog posts as well. One good blog post, I'd love to hear your thoughts because I know for my blog at least, there have been a handful of posts that made the blog. They just, like I put the time or the emotion or whatever into the posts and literally one blog post can change your life completely. I really strongly believe that. That's very true, but it's a little bit of the 80-20 rule. So like 20 % of your posts will get 80 or 90 % of the traffic to your blog. it's hard to know sometimes in advance. I love writing, for instance, my very personal stories.

1:11:08And I think that's my best writing, but that's not necessarily the most popular post. So I write for, so I can get this kind of creative outlet, but I also write these other posts that I know have a lot of value and will get a lot of traffic and so on. No, agreed. I'm going to be writing a post soon about blogging and the lessons that I've learned because I've now just crossed the 500 post barrier, which kind of blew my mind. And what I've realized, I was looking at questions that people wanted me to answer in this post, this sort of recap of the last many years blogging, and I realized you don't always write for other people.

1:11:47You should, I think, in some cases, write for yourself. And so there are posts that I've written that are really just for me. Even if I only have 100 readers for that particular post, there are posts that I want to put out there. And there are some posts I've put out that are like collections of resources that I think are really valuable that get next to no response. I mean, literally one to five comments. And these are posts that take 100 times longer to write than some of the emotional outpourings that get 700 comments. A little bit of it is a supply and demand function. So you're actually not incredibly personally revealing on your website.

1:12:28You know, even though you're very personal, like you discuss every way you experiment on your body, you discuss how you learn the languages, how you learn to be a chef. You discuss the brain quick and stuff in your books. But I'm sure through all this process, let's say TV or selling the business or some part of this process, you probably got depressed at some point. And you know what? I want to read about when Tim Ferriss got depressed and how he got over it. Oh, definitely. And actually, one of the posts that I put up that I expected to get a decent response that just received an insanely overwhelming response that you might find entertaining is actually exactly about this.

1:13:11It's called the productivity, in quotation marks, productivity tricks for the neurotic, manic, depressive, and crazy, and then in parentheses, like me. It has almost 800 comments. And it's about a really dark period that I went through. What was going on? Well, let's see. It's been a while since this published. This was sort of the end of 2013, November that it came out. And I sat on the post for months. I actually kind of put it together. And then I was too self-conscious to publish it. You know, the advice I gave Kamal when he wrote Love Yourself, he was a little nervous about publishing it, you know, because it's very revealing.

1:13:51And I said, you know, Kamal, I don't even hit publish on something unless I'm scared what people will think of me when I publish it. So, but, you know, to be fair, Kamal did think about it for a while before publishing it. But I know, and the reason I'm asking you about depression is because I know you then tweeted his book shortly thereafter, after he published it. So I knew you must have been going through something. Oh, yeah. And I read the whole book. It's a great book. The quote that got me to publish this post, and this is in line with what you just said, this is from Neil Gaiman, who's one of my favorite writers.

1:14:22Sandman is the all-time best. Oh my God. Sandman, American Gods. I mean, the list is so long. The Graveyard Book is one of the best audiobooks I've ever heard in my life. He narrates it, and he's just a world-class narrator. Oh, I'll pick that up. I have all of that. It's so good. This is one of the few books ever of any genre, fiction or nonfiction, that as soon as I finish the audiobook, I was tempted to just go right back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing again. So Neil Gaiman, here's the quote. Quote, the moment that you feel that just possibly you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

1:15:00End quote. That's a great quote. And basically, I went through a point, this was last summer, I guess, where I had a dozen friends or so come over for my birthday. I was on the East Coast. And I stayed in bed on the very last day when I knew people were leaving. I stayed in bed until the very last point, like basically my head under the covers, hitting snooze and whatever, because I was afraid of being alone. And I felt very lonely. And I was just having all these different facets of self-doubt. And I wanted to put a post together talking about this because I think it's dangerous for people to look at their virtual role models, whether they view them as successful people or heroes or whatever it might be.

1:15:43And because of the selection bias of the content that these people put out, to assume that they don't have, quote, normal people problems, if that makes sense. And I wanted to just take people through a bunch of the horribly inefficient behaviors that I have, as well as just walk them through a handful of these deep-rooted insecurities and horrible behaviors that I have trouble managing. And to point out that despite that and all of that seemingly dysfunctional stuff, I'm able to achieve like bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet. So it's not that I'm able to do seemingly big things because I've eradicated all of these foibles and very human weaknesses.

1:16:30It's despite them. Maybe on some level because of them, I don't know. But that was the entire point. the point of the post. And I don't want to, it's a decently long post. So I don't want to bore everybody by going through a kind of paragraph by paragraph, but that's the basic idea. And if people search my name and neurotic and crazy, it'll probably pop right up. Well, let's also talk about more recently then with TV is a lot of work and you shot, I don't know, how many episodes did you, did you shoot already there in the can? 13 episodes, excluding all the promotional stuff, which is much more than that.

1:17:03And I, you know, the episode that I saw was a half hour, but that must have been 200 hours worth of work or more easily. That was a very intense period and completely not financially driven because TV pays horribly. It was 12 to 16 hour days. That's not what does it pay? Like what they did. They give you a budget for the show and you take like a producer's fee. Yeah. I was an executive producer and a host. Can't get into the numbers because I'd be in breach of contract, but it's not much. I'll just put it that way. It was one of the, from an opportunity cost standpoint, if we're looking at it that way, it was not a good decision.

1:17:39But it wasn't a financial decision for me. I wanted to, before I'm in a wheelchair, capture some of these things on camera so that people can learn from them, hopefully. The point being, it was for each episode that is 21 and a half minutes, right? It's a 30-minute TV show. Subtract the commercial time. 21 and a half minutes, roughly 22 minutes. It was five to six days of 12 to 16-hour days for every episode. And that, keep in mind, is just the production. That's excluding the reviews of the rough cut and all the notes and refinement, all the reviews of the fine cut, all of the refinement and changes and everything.

1:18:14Sending screen flows, sending notes, sending story points that I want to make sure are included. Graphics feedback, screenshots with diagrams. I mean, all of that stuff. It was a tremendous amount of work. And I'm very happy. I don't know why you did it, actually. I've shot a pilot before for HBO. It is too much work. I'll tell you what. I wanted to do it because I'd wondered what it would be like for years and years and years. And now I know. And I worked with a fantastic team. I mean, in the field, these people were not anything less than A-grade. I mean, we're talking 0.0, all of Anthony Bourdain's stuff.

1:18:53They are really lean. They're really fast. They're really, really good. and even if you are working with the best people, it is a tremendous amount of time and what I would say is, I'm glad I did it. I wouldn't do it the same way in a second season. If I were to do it again, I'll just say that. If I were to do it again, what would I do differently? What I would do differently is, instead of doing 13, and I should also mention, reality TV in the sort of conventional sense does not take this much time because the whole thing is scripted. For all these other shows, like the Kardashians or whatever, it's all scripted.

1:19:31It is a scripted show. It's not reality. It's not spontaneous. If you get a phone call on camera, do you realize the probability of that happening naturally? They'd have to film 24 hours a day. It's all scripted. If you see a bunch of people standing in the kitchen having a debate and one person's always stirring some random s**t, it's scripted. It looked like you had a lot of cameras on you. They piled a lot of cameras into your room. They had two camera guys for each episode, two DPs, who were trained to do the dance of crossing in that way without getting each other in their respective shots.

1:20:05It's actually really tough. It's something that ZPZ is very famous for. It's super hard to pull off. But the point being, we were capturing that much footage because we were trying to do things spontaneously and make it true to life, which it was. It was very verite, but really time consuming. What I'd do differently if I were to do it again is I would make the show at least twice This is long. So it'd be an hour long. And I would space out the production so we weren't on a crash schedule. I mean, literally, it was 13 episodes, one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other, flying all over the United States.

1:20:35It was very exhausting. If I were to do it again, I would do half as many and I would make them an hour long. And I would make it six days of shooting with at least two days of no cameras, just me practicing stuff.

1:20:51and that's generally how I would approach it. Were you ever scared that an episode would fail? For instance, let's just take the drumming one that you just wouldn't learn how to drum well enough to play for Foreigner? Oh yeah, definitely. And actually that's an important component of the show. I don't want it to be the Tim Ferriss highlight reel. I want all the nervous breakdowns and everything to be in there. So there were episodes that didn't work out. Like what? Can you say which one? I'm not going to spoil the punchline. I'm going to wait. But there were episodes that did not work out. There were episodes where I got really badly injured.

1:21:23This is intended to be true to life and show people, if you're going to question the impossible, you're not always going to come out looking like a superhero. I mean, there are cases where it's like, oh, holy s***, like that limiter is actually very, very real. God, I can't wait to watch the poker one. Can we buy the poker one from Turner and just release it? I'll fall Turner myself. I'll keep you posted, man. I'm working on it right now. So I appreciate that. I'll let you know what's possible. I'm on top of it. So now, though, that it's not quite hiatus, but you're in the kind of like deal hell with them.

1:21:56This lets you this freed you up to do the podcast like now you've just started this podcast. Yeah, I am doing I'm having so much fun with the podcast podcast. Great, by the way, I'm having so much fun. But it's on top of that proven to be a godsend because I'm actually not in any kind of negotiation hell with the Turner guys because they want, in many ways, the same outcome that I do. So it's just a matter of taking a lot of big company stuff and navigating it to get to that end point. So I'm confident that something will be figured out. Talk to me in a month or two and I'll have a better idea.

1:22:32But the podcast has just reminded me of how good it feels to have complete dictatorial creative control. Yeah. I hope you should never give that up again. Like even if you did another TV show, just sell it off your site. Again, Louis C.T. style. No, exactly. I mean, it's just, I've realized that I love having creative input from other people. I love working with other people. It's very difficult for me to not have final say in all things creative. It's really tough because I feel like there is no one on the planet who knows my audience better than I do. I know them so well. I spend all day every day on some level thinking about them because they are me.

1:23:16I am them. I've been in this for so long. I'm not always right, but I got to tell you, if someone's going to guess, if someone's going to gamble, I'm the right person for my audience. And I just love that with the podcast, I have absolute 100 % decision-making power to test anything I want. If I want to test a new mic and it turns out shitty, like shame on me. But you know what? What the f***? That's what this format is for. And I've been testing all sorts of locations and mics and audio and everything. And it's been so much fun. And as long as I'm having fun, the podcast will find an audience.

1:23:52Will it be number one on iTunes? I mean, it was when it first came out. I mean, it's still top 10 or 15 or whatever. Will it stay there? I don't know. But will it find an audience? As long as I'm having fun and I'm enjoying the creative process, it will. Well, I can guarantee you this. it's going to have a bigger audience than Headline News 2 or whatever because cable just has a smaller audience than the podcast world at this point. Yeah. I think that particularly for my audience, it's about digital and it's about on-demand and binge capability, not scheduled watching. I just really feel like that is how I consume content and when in doubt, create what you would want to see yourself and distribute it the way you would want to consume it yourself, right?

1:24:39It's kind of simple. So it's interesting because I sort of feel like your crew beer, you know, kind of forked off, probably in some ways similar to mine, although, you know, you've had such amazing successes. But I have this writing career. I write these books. I do this podcast. And I'm also on the boards of several companies, including a public company. I'm an advisor, an investor in many companies, an angel investor, you've also had this fork where because people viewed you, I'm assuming, as an authentic voice that they could trust and they love your content, people started hiring or bringing on you as an advisor or an investor.

1:25:19So you're an advisor to Twitter, to Uber. And my assumption is this, without really specifying exact numbers, my assumption is this is actually really the bread and the butter, although you've done well with everything else. How did you get involved with Twitter? Twitter was an investment that was 2009. The Twitter story, well, there are different ways that I get involved with companies and there are different things I do with companies. If people want to see my portfolio, they can get a very good look at pretty much everything by going to just angel.co. It's AngelList. Angel.co forward slash Tim.

1:25:55You can see all my stuff. In fact, you can even invest in some of the deals that I do through their syndicate. The way I got in touch with Twitter was living in Silicon Valley, building the relationships over time with lots of close friends that I have who are very often in tech. At one point, being told of this opportunity to buy Twitter stock from an employee who was leaving and wanted to buy a house. And it really came down to the reputational capital that I built. And I was asked if I would like to buy some of the stock. And of course, I said yes. Or I shouldn't say of course, because it wasn't actually clear.

1:26:30There Twitter was very, very overvalued at that point in time. And I looked at that investment as marketing budget as opposed to a purely financial investment. By being associated with Twitter, there was a reputational gain to be had because access was very, very hard. And it just so happened that Twitter, despite any of the recent challenges they've had just since the last lockup expired, has been a huge success for me. And I'm still very, very confident in the platform. Other ways that I've connected with companies would include through my followers and my readers. So I will occasionally poll readers.

1:27:05In one case, I polled my readers for updating resources in the four-hour workweek prior to the 2009 expanded and updated launch. And that is how I identified Shopify as an extremely fast-growing, promising, and elegant e-commerce solution for people who wanted to get online quickly. And I connected through that chatter via social media with the CEO, Toby, and then we connected in person at a speaking event and I became an advisor. These are awesome examples because people often ask, how do you monetize a blog? And the worst answer is advertising. The best answer is building an authentic voice that then allows you to communicate with your audience and find opportunities like this.

1:27:48That is the way you monetize a blog. Yeah, definitely. And if you're in a rush to do it, it's not going to work. You can't run out and make people feel like pay-for-play hired guns in a transactional way. You have to build legitimate relationships with people to explore areas that you want to explore. And I think that doesn't mean it has to take 10 years. I think you've done an incredible job of building a diehard reader base with the content that you put out. I mean, I've been very, very impressed with how well you've done that. And oh, my God, it's really, I mean, one of the most outstanding examples.

1:28:25And I have to say it's worked really well for me in terms of me finding opportunities similar to those. It also reminds me of the way you communicate with the readers. It reminded me of a few years ago, Chris Sacka made a tweet. I was like three in the morning and he basically tweeted, who's programming software right now? And what are you working on? And people who responded, he considered investing. and I don't know if he invested in any of them, but that was like an interesting way to find out who's that intense working, you know, at three in the morning on a software product. Oh yeah, and Chris Saka is one of the, easily in my mind, one of the smartest tech investors in the world today.

1:29:04I mean, it absolutely put him in the top 10, maybe top five that I've ever met. I mean, he's a brilliant guy and he actually has taught me a lot about how these things work. He's also hilarious to follow on Twitter. So Chris Saka, S-A-C-C, I think it's just at Saka. But the... What have you learned from him? Because he learned a lot from Ron Conway, who said that he admits in a letter that he was one of the most successful angel investors ever. Yeah, I mean, we could go on for a long time with what I've learned from Chris. But let me take a step back and mention one more thing. Monetizing the blog, because this is something that comes out all the time.

1:29:39I just want to emphasize to people, monetizing is money is an intermediate. It is wampum, right? It is something that you trade for possessions, experience, access to interesting people or resources. You don't need to have money as that intermediate necessarily. So my blog is interesting for me as a learning tool. For me, I learn a ton from my readers, but also because I can oftentimes get access to people and things I would otherwise not be able to access, even with money. and that is why monetizing the blog, squeezing every last dollar and cent out of that traffic is not my highest priority.

1:30:21I just think it's important for people to keep that in mind. That's incredibly important and I always view money as a side effect. Like when you take medicine, you're looking for completely other things and just by accident, you're going to have some side effects to it. The only way to monetize a blog is to not monetize it, to almost delay gratification as much as possible while you build up authenticity trust and so on in the process. Absolutely. And so coming back to Chris, what I've learned from Chris is there's such a long list of stuff, but I think arguably the most important is the people you invest in.

1:30:56And you're really investing in people, not ideas, because ideas are a dime a dozen. And that's even being generous. I mean, anyone can come up with great ideas. It's the implementation that's important. So if you're could pass two types of tests. And I'm pretty sure that Chris mentioned at least one of these to me, but this is the general gist at least. You know, kind of the beer test and the mall test. What are these? The beer test is, would you invite them out to have beers? Like, would you actually want to spend two to three hours with them, hanging out, shooting the **** talking? Would you find that at least, you know, stimulating?

1:31:36Would you do it on a somewhat regular basis? If the answer is no, given the speculative nature of startups, Let's just say that you invest in 10 founders where you think the company has great prospects, but none of them pass the beer test. But they're really hard-hitting, driven CEOs. If 9 out of 10 of them fail, that means if you're splitting your time across those 10, 9 tenths of your time is going to be spent with people you dislike. It's going to be a very unpleasant time because when a business is failing, that's when you see someone's true color. So you better be able to be comfortable with them.

1:32:10Exactly. So there's the beer test, and then there is the mall test, which is very closely related. So that is if you're walking around at the mall, and this person is walking the other way on, let's say, the opposite side of the mall. So you're on the same level. So you're not 10 feet away, but you're close enough to make eye contact. Do you, number one, run over and be like, oh my god, hey, what's up, how are you doing, and actively engage? Number two, do you give them the wave and head nod and keep moving? or do you cover your face because you don't want to interact with them? And if it's anything other than number one, you really shouldn't do it.

1:32:46And it's closely related. So does this work all the time? No. But does it prevent you from wasting your life on people you should not spend all of your time with? Yes. And you don't have to, coming back to that $15 billion plus companies per year idea, you don't need to take every good company. You don't need to get involved with every good opportunity. You just need really a handful of good bets. And you can wait. You can afford to wait for those bets. You can afford to wait for the confluence of great opportunity, great market, innovative product, and cool people. You can actually wait for it.

1:33:28And if you can't wait for it, it means that you're banking on angel investing to pay your mortgage, which you shouldn't in the first place. Right. That's a very important lesson too. Tim, I really appreciate it. You've been so generous with your time. This has been a great podcast. So again, Tim, thanks so much. I really think throughout all of your career, everything that's in there, you've explored what's possible versus the imaginary probable. And this podcast was great. So thanks very much. Yeah, my pleasure entirely. Anytime. And I've been looking forward to this for weeks now. So And yeah, two R's, two S's.

1:34:04There's another Tim Ferriss, who's a great writer, science guy, actually, who lives like five miles away from me. So there's a lot of confusion, but. Oh, I've got to remember that. I always get confused. Yeah, I'm the Tim Ferriss with two R's and two S's. So people can hope people chime in and check out the podcast and happy to come back anytime. Okay, thanks a lot, Tim. I'll talk to you soon. All right, buddy. Thanks. Bye.

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