Tim Ferriss: 10 Years Later...

28:18So I do think, like many things. This is a matter of, of, of repetition, but I don't think it, it doesn't take all too many. I mean, I think if you were to do it for an hour, uh, you could very quickly be at ease with being ill at ease. Maybe, maybe you could, but you know, look at me, I, I have, I would take at least a year or two. I think you'd be better. I, you know, James, I'm going to challenge you there. I think you would be better than I was. I think that you, I hope you take this the right way, I think you care less about what people think of you than I do. I, and I, and I try very hard not to be affected by, like, what was the worst rejection you got?

28:58They weren't that bad. That's the thing. You just get people who are like really uncomfortable and anxious. They're like, sorry, sorry, I'm busy. I'm on my way somewhere. And then they, they split and they just, they don't talk to you at all. There was no, you know, no one threw ice cream in my face or what about though, What about when you took it to the next step though and said, okay, you like this sweater? Can I have your phone number? Well, there were some steps in between that I managed to flub on a couple of different occasions. When I got to the phone number point, and I only asked a few people because I was a coward, but they gave me their number because I'd created some type of context or established some type of common interest, blah, blah, blah.

29:39You know, so they, they were actually less terrifying than I expected they would be. And which is, of course, silly, but you have to keep in mind, all of my, all of my horrific failures from junior high and high school came back to haunt me when I tried to revisit this because I have, I have tried very, very hard to design a life where I don't have to do cold approaches. It's that, that's how much I dislike doing cold approaches. So of course, that's exactly what Neil wanted me to do. It's sort of like step number one, write a bestselling book and then go to lots of parties about the book. That's the best technique of all.

30:17Well, I mean, you could do that. I mean, you might end up dating people with questionable motives if that's your – if I took a copy of my book and like threaded it around my neck and then people would ask me, I'll be like, oh, this thing? Yeah, let me tell you about this. But yeah, dinner. Dinner's my game. Cold approaches. I could use some work. But I think it's – I like people to see the failures because it's one of those cases where whatever I manage to do right is due to a toolkit that I've tried very hard to refine over time. it's not because I knock it out of the park at all of my at-bats.

30:59You know, I screw up. I screw up more than most people I know. It's just that when you see the highlight reel in a bio or the book that's the end product, you don't see everything that goes into it and all of the face palming and sort of stumbling that went on in the process. Okay, so the 12th episode I was curious about because I played quite a bit of poker in my life. And did you star from scratch in your knowledge of poker? I did. Yeah, I had never played a hand of poker. I had literally never played at all. So Phil Gordon is obviously a great player, and he was helping you. Yeah, Phil's made, I think, I don't know, three or four million in purse.

31:42And he is a former computer science guy. So he was just the perfect person to sit down with me and could really walk me through the fundamentals. but also sequence things in the right fashion and understanding that the challenge at the end of the week was to play heads up, you know, one-on-one against a couple of professionals for thousands of dollars in my own money. I think it was$1 ,500 total or$3 ,000, something like that, which is real cash. And as you know, probably, you behave very differently, and your psychological state is very different when you're playing with your real money versus play money or no money.

32:19And also heads up versus a full table, statistics becomes much less important and your actual reading of the body language and everything becomes much more important. And that's incredibly more difficult. It's super hard. All of the factors are hard. So poker was one of those that really was one of the many skills. This was not the only one that addressed a phobia of math of mine that I've had since I had since ninth grade. I had a very ball busting teacher in ninth grade math who, for whatever reason, a female teacher, a very good teacher. She had an axe to grind with all the male students in the class.

33:02And almost all of them opted out of math after that that I'm aware of, including me. So part of the reason I went to Princeton undergrad was because – and I don't talk about this much, but Princeton didn't have a math requirement. I would think – you're an analytical kind of guy. I would think math would be sort of natural for you. It's not. It's not. And I enjoy using math in the context of certain types of split testing and analytics and just self-tracking with blood tests and so on. But that's usually writing down numbers and doing basic arithmetic. The probabilistic thinking and mental calculation required of poker, because I did do some table play as well.

33:45It wasn't all heads up. But that was very counter to my own programming. I've tried so hard to avoid it for so long. But poker is fascinating to me because it's not just dependent, obviously, on the math. It's dependent on many different factors, including patience. And different people have different styles of play. But statistically, the amount that you or the percentage of hands that you fold is just mind-blowing, right? And people get bored, and then they start betting, and then they make bad decisions, and they lose a lot of money oftentimes, not always. But that self-control was interesting to me because I don't have – what I don't have any trouble doing is being bored for a long period of time if I have a system that requires that.

34:33I'm okay with that. So that's actually – So math can give you that at the table. But when you're heads up, you can't do that at all. It's the reverse strategy. Well, no. You can – I mean when – I don't want to give away too much. But I folded a lot in heads up. And there, I was running a lot of math in my head. I mean, I'm sure not nearly as much if you're doing a high stakes game with eight people at a table, but I was running a lot of math because the blinds, and I don't want to, you know, this might be inside baseball for people who've never played poker, but the blinds, which are basically the required bets, right?

35:10That you must put out on the table so that there's something to play for. Those were going up every, I think, 10 minutes or five minutes. Uh, so the, the, the, the decisions I made had to change accordingly. Um, and again, this is, this is speaking from the standpoint of a novice, but they're pretty interesting results. I got to say it was a, it was a very fascinating experience. Uh, I loved Phil's style of coaching. Um, the being in Vegas for two weeks straight, because I did another episode in Vegas was a little much for me on the strip being on the strip for two weeks. I felt like I had to go sort of take a delousing bath every night and then go find where I'd lost my soul at the end of that period of time on the strip.

35:56Yeah, Las Vegas is like this alternate reality. It's hard to get used to it, I think. It is. The 13th episode looks fascinating. And particularly the way it's shot in the trailer, you're like a superhero practically. So it's urban evasion and escape. So I guess the idea is what happens if you're kind of kidnapped and handcuffed and a bag is put over your head and you're far away from anybody who can hear you scream and you are supposed to get out of that situation? And obviously you had never done that before. No, I hadn't done that before. And the context for that is really the fact that at one point, the people at Turner very kindly asked me, and this is something no TV people had ever asked me before, which was if you could do anything in TV, what would you want to do?

36:51Usually I've had people involved in TV come to me and say, hey, here's what we're doing. We're looking for a host or we're looking for a judge. Do you want to do it? And there was zero creative input from me. So the answer, one of my answers to the folks when they asked me that was, I'd like to create a show about becoming Jason Bourne and how people can become Jason Bourne. And there are definitely some James Bond elements in there. But if you look at the show and all the episodes, you have language learning, rally car racing, escape sequences and stuff. Well, you have the art of parkour, which is, I don't know if I said it right, but that's like where you're kind of jumping around from wall to wall like Jason Bourne.

37:32Yeah, exactly. Or the initial chase scene in Casino Royale, you know, basically ninja plus breakdancer over obstacles, which is, that was a really painful episode. The escape and evasion was sort of the final piece in the puzzle. I was like, okay, well, let's really figure out. And I wanted to learn this stuff, quite frankly, because I travel to a lot of places where there are kidnapping risks also. And I'm doing less of that, but I've historically spent a lot of time in South America and in Central America. And those are real risks. I mean, those are industries in many of those countries. And you'll have organized crime with relationships at the airport who will read flight manifests to determine who makes promising targets.

38:14And they'll use Google and other tools to establish that. So I wanted to learn for very practical purposes, what happens if I am kidnapped or if I am hooded or if I have zip ties tied around my wrists, my ankles? How could I conceivably get out of such a situation or just as important, prevent it in the first place? So that was – or for instance, hot wiring a car. That was very fun. Uh, just the, the kind of, um, being kidnapped, handcuffed, hooded, everything. Is it possible to escape that? Uh, it is with, with, uh, some basic preparation. And, uh, in many cases you don't even need a lot of tools.

38:57You could just use your body. And in fact, I mean, for instance, if you have someone wrap like seven layers of duct tape around your wrists and your arms, which is very common in say hostage situations, that's very easy to get out of with no tools. astonishingly enough. So it is possible. What's the trick? I don't want to give away the show, but I personally want to know the trick. Okay. The trick is, and there are a lot of physics involved. I'll give you the basics, but what you have to do is sort of form fists with your hands, apply pressure outward with your wrists, and then slam the space in between your elbows into your own ribs.

39:35And clearly you can do some damage to yourself. You could even break ribs. But if your choice is that or getting out, then that is one way to do it. And I was able to do that on the first try, I'm pretty sure. The duct tape was surprisingly easy to get out of. The others are more challenging, especially the handcuffs. And if the handcuffs are behind the back, it's even harder. And we used official issue, I think, Smith & Wesson police handcuffs. But I'll put it this way. I don't think that it's possible necessarily to mitigate for all disaster scenarios, but it's cheap insurance and smart insurance, in my opinion.

40:14And it's also fun to have a basic repertoire of techniques that could address a handful of common situations.

40:36so so throughout all of these and and okay so there's there's tactical shooting there's starting a business there's open water swimming there's surfing there's golf okay let's talk about golf for a second nobody can possibly teach me to go from 140 golf to like 100 golf like what happened like what happened in that show? That show, we used a lot of motion capture to do very biomechanics oriented analysis to see, for instance, which parts of my body were moving in what plane at what speed and what order, which is very important. If you're looking at say the kinetic chain and like, do you move your knee first?

41:19Which knee? Do you move your hip first? and what order should those happen. And we also did a lot of drilling and practice on principles that are oftentimes overlooked in golf. And I do not golf. I don't know how to golf. This was ground zero and up. So like before this, if you went to an 18-hole golf course, what would you shoot? I wouldn't even know what number to give you, like quite honestly. I mean, I had never played on an 18-hole golf course ever. Are you allowed to say how you did by the end? Can you say the score, what you shot by the end? I'm not going to – we did not do like an 18-hole course.

41:54There were other goals. Okay. But I'll leave that one for the folks to see. That was one where we had a miracle of sorts, which was pretty amazing. But I'll let people check that one out. Now, from the beginning of the series to the end, did you find yourself getting better at the process of learning, kind of like the meta aspects of it? Definitely. Absolutely. Is it sort of like the difference between learning like a fourth language from learning a third language? You know, if you learn 10 languages, I'm sure the 10th is easier than the ninth. Yeah, it's very similar. And also, I learned a lot about managing the process, right?

42:33I mean, this is a team I hadn't worked with before, with a schedule I hadn't been on before. And so I started to figure out like, okay, how do, at what point should I interrupt training? or should I ask for a half a day of training without any cameras so that it's uninterrupted? Because really, I mean, a day of filming meant I maybe got three to four hours of practice. I mean, it was very insanely compressed. So when people, when I say doing something in a week, for many of these skills, I only had maybe 12 hours of total practice. It was really, really stressful. But I did learn, for instance, that given the compressed timeframe, at the end of the second day of practice that night, I would have like a physical, complete physical sense of, of overwhelm and basically a mini nervous breakdown.

43:20Like it was very, it was very predictable. Like, because you were afraid you were going to fail at the goal. I was afraid I was going to fail, but it was also just an information overload point where I was hitting my, my, my biology. I mean, my neurophysiology, maybe it was depletion of neurotransmitters. I don't know the exact cause mechanically, but I was reaching a point where very predictably at the end of the second day at night, I would have the equivalent of a complete system shutdown. And that would require me to prioritize sleep, for instance, more on the second night than on some of the subsequent nights because I needed that period of adaptation.

43:58And I could take things like supplements like Hooperzine A to increase REM sleep to help with the skill consolidation and stuff like that. Wait, what's that supplement? I don't think I know it. Hooperzine A. Obviously, it's very powerful. So I'm not a doctor. Don't play one on the internet. So talk to your medical professional. But Hooperzine A is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. It inhibits the breakdown of acetylcholine. And in the lucid dreaming community, which has been verified in sleep labs and so on, it's the ability of becoming conscious that you're dreaming when you dream, which has really fascinating implications for skill acquisition, but you can induce lucidity with greater frequency if you use Huberzine A, it would appear.

44:40And for me, since I'm using sleep and REM sleep, which some people speculate or theorize is involved with memory consolidation and skill acquisition, I wanted to use Huberzine as sort of an unfair advantage to increase the rate at which I would absorb these new skills. But that would be much more, I didn't use it for the entire time of filming because I go, I cycle on and off of it. I think it's a very powerful pharmaceutical. But these are the types of things that I figured out given the constraints and the length of the show. On which day, for instance, should I increase my protein intake because I need to handle muscular repair, but might not have opportunities to do so otherwise.

45:25So I started having the production crew help get me isopure whey protein drinks so that I could take those every three to four hours if I was doing something very, very intense, like the Brazilian jujitsu or the parkour or something like that. Because I realized if I waited until after filming to consume protein, it was too late. I already had a lot of microtrauma and I would be incredibly sore the next day. So I started traveling with, you know, ultrasound unit and electrical simulation unit and so on. And I should also say that a lot of the extra footage I was able to get ahold of. And what that means is instead of having just 22 minutes, I have hours of bonus footage, including extended interviews with say the golf instructor, uh, extended demos and all sorts of amazing footage that we just couldn't include because of, uh, space constraints.

46:13So that stuff is all going going to be at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash TV, just all spelled out F-O-U-R. So it seems like, like I know from, let's take a basic example like chess. So they've done all sorts of studies on what makes the difference between a chess amateur, a chess master, and a chess grandmaster. And the main thing is a chess master and a grandmaster is able to do a lot of pattern recognition. So for instance, you know, a castled king is like a, is considered a chunk of knowledge. And so rather than like an amateur who's studying where every piece is on the board, a master might be familiar with what to do in 10 with 10 ,000 knowledge of 10 ,000 chunks.

46:59And a grandmaster might have knowledge of a hundred thousand kind of chunks of knowledge. And do you find that it works the same way in all these other fields? absolutely a hundred percent and uh i do think however because i noticed you were doing that on the first episode the the drumming it was like you were extremely quickly trying to chunk the basic elements of drumming as opposed to just hitting the the drums for instance right instead of playing notes identifying how to break it down to the pre-chorus the chorus so that you have these sort of discrete containers that are more manageable than a thousand discrete pieces And absolutely you see that in the rally racing.

47:36It would be where are you looking? How are you positioning your body? And what are the chunks in the visual field that you pay attention to as opposed to ignore? In chess, it could be exactly what you described among other things. In fact, one of the bonus clips, there might be a little bit of this in the episode, but there's an extended scene. You'll love this. There's a bonus clip. I went to Washington Square Park where they have all the speed chess. Oh man, I grew up in Washington Square Park I should have gone out there And watched you go at it And well, I brought a grandmaster with me Who played one of the guys And he played without looking at the board And it's an amazing exchange Who did you bring with you, can I ask?

48:21Maurice Oh, Maurice Ashley Yeah, Maurice Ashley, who is amazing He's like Morpheus He's one of the coolest cats You could ever imagine He's so awesome. And what's great about Maurice is that he also knows how to smack talk back so that he was not a sitting duck for taking any abuse. And so he's just like slowly smashing this guy. Actually, not so slowly, very quickly. And the guy's trying to shit talk to throw him off. And he's like, oh, well, don't get so funky now. And he's like watching him. Yeah, it's awesome. It's such a cool exchange. But the chunking into these discrete pieces is very accurate.

48:56With languages, same story, right? And that's why there are examples online. If you're a native English speaker, for instance, can you read this jumbled text? I don't even know if you would find it if you Google that. But there are examples of like, can you read this sentence? And the letters are all kind of out of order in each word or they're upside down. But your brain decodes the words so that you can read the sentences because your eyes are so accustomed to the morphology of certain words, like the D with the uptick, like the upstroke on the D, that it can decipher what the page is trying to say, even though everything is written incorrectly.

49:31It's so fascinating. But here's the problem a little bit, though. So, like, let's take chess as an example. It could take two or three years of solid practice for, or more than that, depending on talent levels and other things and who your instructor is. It could take years to learn those 10 ,000 chunks to play at a master level. And yet, like, let's take drumming. you're playing in front of an audience of thousands in a week? Well, I'd say two things to that. The first is there are definitely skills that allow you to fake it sooner than others, obviously. You can fake playing the drums a lot sooner than you can fake playing the violin, for instance.

50:13And that's absolutely the case. It doesn't mean that drumming isn't difficult, but on a level of complexity, there are certain things you can fake sooner than others. or to the untrained eye or ear, things that you can do with certain skills. I would say, though, with chess, I would absolutely maintain that what I said in The 4-Hour Chef, which is within six months, you could get to top 5 % in the general population if that became basically your full-time priority. Excuse me. Allergic to the 10 ,000-hour rule. So I do think that chess is a very particular example. I think chess is perhaps the hardest of the skills that I participated in to get into the top 5 % in the world who are not treating it like a master or grandmaster track.

51:08for a lot of reasons, but I think that chess is, you can get very good at chess and beat almost every civilian you play with in six months or less, no doubt in my mind whatsoever. I really believe that. I agree with that. I think it's probably six months for that, and then it's a whole, but that's probably true for poker as well. Oh, it's true for all of them, and I think that, But I think my job is to – there's something called a sigmoid curve that applies to a lot of natural systems, options trading, and also learning where you basically have – imagine an S where you grab the two ends of the S and stretch it out horizontally so it looks kind of like a step.

51:52That is what learning generally looks like where you have very slow gains, very slow gains, next to nothing, next to nothing. then you have this like Cambrian explosion of skill development, where all of a sudden you go from not being able to communicate with anyone in Spanish to, Oh my God, I just held like a 30 second conversation, massive breakthrough, or you win your first game of poker, whatever it is. And then you very quickly flatten out again, and you have this point of diminishing return. So my job is to, there are people like Josh Waitzkin, for instance, we talked about this in the show.

52:22It's really fun juxtaposition. His job is to get people from like 99 to 99.999. My job is to get people from zero to top 5 % in the world in six months or less. And I think that I can do that. I'm good at it. And I've spent, if people ask me like, oh, well, what are you really good at? Because you're just a jack of all trades. You're a dilettante. It was just dabbling in all these things. I'm like, no, no, no, you're missing the meta here. The skill that I'm refining is meta learning. It's the toolkit. It's like you can use a saw or a hammer or a screwdriver to build all sorts of things, anything.

52:57And I'm trying to refine those tools that other people can use, whether they want to learn Spanish, Japanese, how to cook, Japanese horseback archery, rally racing, poker, you know, Excel spreadsheets, doesn't matter. So let's take language as an example. So like episode three in the season is you are learning basically Tagalog, the Filipino language, in the period of a week. So how did you get yourself? And let's talk about it from a meta level rather than the specifics of the language. What were you thinking going into that, like how you were going to do it? So going into it, I needed to first know thy opponent.

53:39I really needed someone who could help me deconstruct the language, help me know what is most difficult for native English speakers, what is easiest for native English speakers. if there are ways I can cheat. So for instance, if there's something very difficult about it, is there an alternative construction that I can use, which will still be proper Tagalog that will not make my head explode because I don't have time for that head exploding component, right? If I only have, in this case, it was like three or four days. It was insane. That's incredible. I can't believe it. Oh my God. Were you scared?

54:14I was terrified. I was terrified for all of these. And I've done a lot of crazy things. I've done a lot of very aggressive things in my life, but I'm still human. I'm very – I don't want to be publicly humiliated, especially on television. Would you have been publicly humiliated? Like would they have aired it if you failed? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They would have aired it. Absolutely. And I don't win in all these episodes. I should make that clear. I have breakthroughs in every episode, but some of them end catastrophically. So not all of them. Yeah. And I want to tell me one episode, which ends catastrophically.

54:50Parkour. Um, that was, that was bad. I I'm still, this is a year and a half later. I'm still contending with injuries that I had from that episode. Um, yeah, really, really, uh, some, some gnarly, gnarly long-term joints. Did you try on the show in pain? Uh, I didn't cry. I definitely wince and close my eye and drop to a knee and so on. Uh, and I I spent a lot of time on a PT table. So you have footage of me getting treated by doctors as well. Oh my God. It's like the$6 million man now has to, that team has to come in. Oh, I know. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was, it was a process of breaking myself down and then rebuilding myself over the weekend for the next, the next episode.

55:35So, so, so, so the Filipino language. So you're great. You're, you're understanding the opponent and breaking it down in the same way you would approach, say tennis. Um, and, uh, the, the, the next step would be selecting the highest frequency vocabulary and grammatical construction so that I am getting sort of 80 % of what I need from 20 % of the content, right? Is that a memory thing? That is a memory thing. So I worked with some incredible people like Ed Cook, who trained a writer named, uh, Josh four who wrote moonwalking with Einstein to become the national memory champion in the United States in one year.

56:17So I had Ed cook helping me with some of the techniques. I of course have a lot in my own back pocket just after, after years of doing this. And, uh, so using mnemonic devices, memory, memory tools and devices to memorize, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of words, uh, in one or two days, it's very, it's very achievable, but very intense. Uh, and then, uh, practicing in live environments as much as possible. So in LA, I stayed with a family that spoke Tagalog. That was a key component. And then really trying to predict like, okay, what are the questions they are most likely to ask me in an interview, right?

56:55And this is something you can do anytime you learn a language. They're going to be asking you questions like, why did you choose to learn X? Where are you from? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Where did you grow up. So I had to make sure that I wrote, I wrote out my biography, right? Like here's Tim's life story. And then basically broke it down into responses to questions. And I was like, all right, I need to learn at a very minimum as a starting point, all of this. And then stalling tactics, right? So what are the techniques that you can use in Tagalog that are like, oh, that's a good question.

57:30Well, I'm really glad you asked that. You know, give me a moment to think about that. I want to give you a good answer. If I'm having trouble recalling a certain phrase or word, right? How do I buy time so that I have 10 seconds to try to process? These are all approaches that you can use in other skills. So you can buy time in many different ways. You can find coping mechanisms. But perhaps the most important thing to do with all these skills is look for unorthodox teachers and practitioners who are good at it, who shouldn't be good at it. So someone who has very little training, who's really good at it.

58:04Oh, sorry. Let me just say one more thing. Or for instance, if you're trying to learn how to swim, like study amputees. How do people without legs swim? And that will teach you more about biomechanics than all of the so-called best practices and traditional swimming manuals combined. And if you're looking at ultra endurance running or running marathons, find someone who's really, really big who can do it and has good time. because they are compensating for sort of bad God-given build and genetics for this particular sport with technique. And you can't copy attributes, right? Like Michael Phelps' hands and feet size, you're not going to get that just by taking growth hormone or something.

58:42So you have to make up for it with technique. So, so, okay. So that's very interesting. So let's take something like basketball. Okay. So, uh, uh, neither you or I are six foot eight or anything like that. So how would you, and basketball is not in your series at all. If you were told today, okay, Tim, you've got five days to become a basketball champ, or at least, you know, compete with the next a little bit, what would you start doing? I would, well, the next is a tall order, but I would say I would focus on, I would do an assessment, like almost like a business. So I would do a SWAT assessment, right?

59:23I'd have sort of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. What are the things that could go right? What are the things that could go wrong? Given that my vertical leap is X and this, this, and this, this profile, what would I have to focus on to even be a team member? And ultimately, it would probably come down to passing and perhaps long distance shots. And as a side note, I did actually tackle this in the four-hour chef because I had always viewed basketball as a huge embarrassment and failure of mine. and it was something I was very embarrassed about because I was a wrestler. Wrestlers are cavemen.

59:55We can't dribble and do layups. And I was ridiculed by a PE coach back in like junior high when I tried to try out for the JV basketball team. So I just shelved it. And I had these very, very bad sort of negative self-image problems related to it. Ultimately, you can break it down and I would focus on shooting. I would focus on shooting and passing, most likely, and how it can compensate for my weaknesses. So I think that – and there's a very interesting piece I think that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker about non-obvious basketball strategy that was used by some, I think, entrepreneur, Indian fellow who coached his daughter's basketball team.

1:00:37He had never played basketball before, and I think he took them to an undefeated season. So there's team-level strategy and then there's personal strategy, and both would have to interplay so that I would not embarrass myself and everyone else on the court. But that's how I would think about it. Would you look for like the Harlem Globetrotters has some smaller players. Would you look for their techniques of what they were doing? Absolutely. Yeah, I would look for the shortest guys in the game. I would look for the oldest guys in the game. Ideally, someone who matched my sort of phylogenomics or whatever.

1:01:12I mean, I'd try to find a white guy who is, if I could, might not be able to. But I try to find someone who matched me attribute wise as closely as possible to model. If I couldn't do that, though, I'd still be looking for outliers, people who are older, people who are slower, people who are shorter, et cetera, because I would be in that bucket. And then I would try to identify who their mentors and coaches were, because if I talk to their NBA coach, he's not going to be nearly as helpful necessarily to me, given my skill level, than their high school coach, right? who was dealing with teams with far lower skill sets and less refined technique and less experience.

1:01:54So I would certainly not shy away from going to a high school coach who had dealt with shorter people who went on to become superstars. Absolutely. So, okay, so now what happened? They canceled the show. Obviously, you wanted to buy the rights because you wanted to share this with the world. How did you go about getting the rights? I've never actually heard of anybody getting the rights to their show back. Yeah, it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and money. Did they say no at first? They didn't say no so much as we don't want to do a deal with Tim Ferriss, but they were considering many different options for the show.

1:02:36And the reason it took so long is partially because they were shutting down the entire division. So they were more occupied with the priority of letting people go, negotiating severance packages, and providing a soft landing for all of that than making deals for divesting themselves of the show, which was probably written off by that point anyway. So it wasn't like they had a P &L obligation to do a deal. The way I got it ultimately was by trying to understand the incentives of everyone involved and then also ultimately working with a lawyer who had done a lot of deals with Turner Broadcasting so that he was familiar with what they could do, couldn't do, and so on.

1:03:23You basically used your technique of learning on learning how to buy the rights of your show. Yeah, exactly. It was exactly that. And I just read a quote from Thomas Edison yesterday that I thought was just so perfect. It should be my life mantra, which is when you think you've examined, or no, I said, when you've examined all of the possible options, just remember, colon, you haven't. And I was like, man, isn't that the truth? Well, so you're releasing all the episodes today, April 28th, 4hourworkweek.com slash TV. I think the valuable obviously I'm sure you edited this great all the storytelling is great but for me the valuable thing is to kind of understand how you meta-learned how you kind of learn to learn because I think that's where education needs to go so I actually think this is an incredibly valuable series for not only myself but my children I'm going to have I'm going to force them to watch it even though you're a guy and they only watch stuff with girls in it right now but I'm going to force them to watch it Well, I will tell you that some of the folks involved with the show, I had dinner with one of them and they asked their two daughters if they wanted to watch the show and they were totally hooked.

1:04:42And these are like 10 and 12 years old. So I think there's something there, man. I hope so. Okay. Well, good luck. I can't wait to see these. All right. Thanks so much, James. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Tim.

1:05:01Thank you.