#860: Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life

24:34How we make it work.

24:35Tim Ferriss:Right. Because a lot of creators, I think, are succumbing to the culture of cortisol drive, where they feel like they have to keep up, keep up, keep up often in terms of just frequency. And I think that's a really dangerous game to play for a lot of reasons. Somebody else is always going to be able to sacrifice or be willing to sacrifice their entire lives to publish more frequently. So that can't be your sole metric. So how do you, yeah, how do you do what you do? How do you have to think differently, operate differently? How do we operate differently? Our business is super antithetical to what most creators are doing.

25:10And I started in that place that you're referring to, uploading multiple long form videos a week. I mean, I was uploading before TikTok existed, so it was all long form. Then, of course, short form came along. But what happened at the beginning of my career was I was trying to grow my channel to create financial and personal stability. I had taken a big risk by leaving my job. and as a part of that the first entry point was stability in some sense so I was making videos about anything I thought would perform well and still with my own lens of course but I would have this strategy of I'm going to do three videos a month for the studio if you will which is a term from traditional tv and film where a big director will do a big blockbuster movie and then the studio will allow them to do their passion project.

26:08So I would do that for myself where once a month I would do a passion project. And at the beginning of my channel, it was, I would DM stunt performers like Tom Holland's stunt double and ask them, would you train with me for a week? And can we make a video together? And it was cool because we were targeting communities that were undervalued and unseen often. I mean, many stunt performers aren't allowed to share their work. And so giving them an opportunity to highlight their work was helpful to them and exciting for them. And exciting for me, selfishly, because I want to learn how to do all these incredible stunts and make an amazing story about it.

26:49And I saw a market opportunity because when you see BTS stuff from movies, it's very... Behind the scenes. Yeah, behind the scenes. My apologies. When you see behind the scenes content from big Marvel movies, it's very manicured and very short. And I really wanted to give space and breathability to this experimental process. And what ended up happening is those passion projects started outperforming the things I expected to just perform well. And it got to this point where I was limited resource wise, just like my own time even, of being able to do more of that passion thing. And I just decided, we decided as a team, we're only going to focus on Challenge Accepted.

27:35Let's just try that.

27:37Tim Ferriss:And was it, when did it get named Challenge Accepted? It got named Challenge Accepted after Challenge Accepted existed. So when you go back and look at season one of Challenge Accepted, which is a while ago now, I think we went back and named it that because we were like, oh yeah, this was the beginning of this show, which is so funny. But we were doing many things on the channel and we decided to strip away everything and only go in on that. And that is where a true inflection point came on the channel. I would honestly say, Tim, you were asking earlier about key decisions. I think a lot of the inflection points of my life have happened when my back has been against the wall.

28:16Not in a place of, I get to make a decision, but more like, I have to make a decision because everything's going to break if I don't. And this was a risky decision to make, to go all in on a show where I am physically committing myself for up to months at a time. At this point in 2026, 2025, we release eight to 10 episodes per year. That's my upload cadence. And so every opportunity is a big bet. But what I have found is that when I did that, something even more special happened. It created something unique. And I have found that defining something unique can be even more valuable than consistency or mass viewership.

29:05We're very blessed that Challenge Accepted does get a lot of views and we feel strong about the bets that we make on these episodes. but I have found that creating something special attracts even more people to want to support it and so now what we ironically have on the channel is a scarcity mindset for advertisers that if you want to be in an episode of challenge accepted there are 10 the train's going are you getting on are you getting off because we only have so much inventory to sell we're able to sell it at a premium and it makes what we're doing so one of one. And that's always been my like big thesis is whatever we do has to be one of one.

29:47Yeah.

29:47Tim Ferriss:A few things come to mind as you're talking, you know, one is the importance of owning or creating even better yet a category. So this category of one idea, blue ocean strategy, I think is a good, at least at the time I read it, which was a long time ago, 10 years ago, pretty good exploration of this. But separately, as I look at the landscape now, I've had a lot of people ask me about podcasting. If you were to start now, what would you do? And I could throw out sort of examples of what I might do, but just from a broader kind of meta level, I say, I think it would be very difficult for me to do now or start now what I started in 2014, which was kind of a broad exploration of deconstructing world-class performers in an interview format.

30:37Tim Ferriss:Now there are 600 of those. And if you want something that is sustainable, and this is not exactly the right way to frame it, but premium from a partnership perspective, from a CPM perspective, from a whatever perspective, the best examples that I would try to model are shows like yours, although I'm not really, I'm kind of shy with video. So I probably wouldn't do video first, but it would be a show like yours. I mean, if I were 20 right now, I'd be like, that's what I want to do. Like if I could, if I could have a job, it would be Michelle's job. I mean, honestly, it would be, but if you want to look at some other examples where I probably wouldn't pursue it, but they're doing excellent jobs, acquired, for instance, founders, you know, David Senra, highly focused, long form, very hard to replicate because there's so much goddamn work, right?

31:32Tim Ferriss:Yes. Which is true with yours also. It's like, oh, you want to spend six months making a video? Like, let's see. It's a lot easier to publish frequently without thinking as hard about the lead time of doing something that's very complex. And that was part of the strategy with Challenge Accepted too, is you see many people copying one another online in any form of art. People are copying constantly. And part of our defensive strategy was how do we do something that is so crazy? No one would be crazy enough, I don't think, to run seven marathons on all seven continents in one single week and make a documentary about it and go through all of the production headache of that.

32:12Or call the FAA 300 times to get permission to hang off the side of a military plane to recreate the possible stunt. It's almost like the things that feel so untouchable instantly become opportunities for story because it's a great story to try and overcome that. And also the second mover scenario will at least take them so long to catch up to us to get there. Right.

32:38Tim Ferriss:Because you're going to be the comp. They're going to say, oh, it's like challenge accepted, but dot, dot, dot. And that is going to be very difficult for other people to overcome. And I want to explore this a little bit more because it's, I think, so critical. And you see it in a lot of different places. Sometimes the hard thing is the easier thing long-term. Meaning, if you solve a very hard problem up front, it makes your life a little easier or a lot easier long term. And this applies everywhere, right? There's an amazing, amazing guy. You should meet him at some point. Jersey Gregorik and his wife, Anjela Gregorik, they're Polish emigres.

33:23Tim Ferriss:They immigrated to the US with like 10 or a hundred bucks in their pocket. They were political refugees, landed in California. And still to this day, they both have multiple world records in Olympic weightlifting. And I would say they're both around mid-60s. And Jersey can get on an indo board, like a balance board, with a fully loaded barbell and do a perfect Olympic snatch, like ass to heels, and then drop the weight and repeat while balancing on a board. He's got to be at least 65 now. His wife, Aniela, who also, as I mentioned, has a bunch of world records. her daughter's ball got caught in a tree a few years ago and she just like ran up the tree and got it and came down.

34:10Tim Ferriss:I mean, they are incredible physical specimens. They take no prescription medications. And the reason I'm bringing them up is that Jersey has this expression which is hard choice is easy life, easy choice is hard life. So it applies in physical training and health. It applies in creation, broadly speaking. It's like with what you're doing, right? You're creating a moat that is very defensible in a lot of ways. It applies to startups where it's like, okay, sure, yeah, you can vibe code and create something in 20 minutes. And that's interesting and you should experiment with that. And the barrier to entry has been lowered dramatically on the production of, say, an app, but the barrier to attention has never been higher.

34:58Tim Ferriss:Therefore, like there is actually something to be said for the hard startup being the easier startup where if you're solving a hard problem that requires a really good team and like hardware and this, that and the other thing, most people are never going to attempt it. Therefore, you actually have a margin of safety in some respect if you can execute. So I just wanted to mention that because I see this all over the place where if you spend the time to work on something hard up front, it buys you a lot of safety. is at least one way that I think about it. And you've talked about assembling this Formula One team, but let's rewind, right?

35:38Tim Ferriss:Because I'm sure some people are like, well, if I don't have any money and I'm just getting started, how do you afford to hire the Formula One team? That sounds expensive. So let's go back a little bit. Before you became active on YouTube, what were you doing? What was I doing? Yeah. Gosh. So I grew up in Shreveport, got my first taste of the film industry there. I went to college at Dartmouth. And then while I was in college, I did school. Yeah, it was great. And while I was in college, I did some internships in the industry, but I also did an internship at Google. And so there I sort of saw the behind the scenes of the platform, I guess I upload to now, which was really interesting.

36:25And as I was mentioning to you, Tim, a lot of things that have driven key moments in my life have been moments when my back has been against the wall. And one of those moments for me was when you do a Google internship, I don't think I've like talked about this much, but when you do a Google internship at the end of the summer, like many big internship, you find out if you get the job and you can go into your senior year of college like oh my gosh I'm rocking I got the job I'm set I can chill out last year and there was one day where they called everybody from my internship class letting them know if they got the job and we're all in a big text chain together anyone's like I got it see you next year blah blah I get my phone call I didn't get the job yeah and I would say that this was pivotal and ironic now that I'm so embedded in YouTube in a completely different way.

37:21But what it forced me to do was my whole life had been about, as an athlete, finding a coach, doing exactly what they tell me to do. In school, it was, here are all the books to do well on the SAT. I will do them. I will wake up at five in the morning over the summer and memorize everything and do it because that's the formula to success.

37:43Tim Ferriss:Executing to plan on the formula. Exactly. And I think it's part of the immigrant mentality of the holy trinity of Dr. Lawyer Engineer is because those are systems for safety. And also from my family, like with many immigrant families, they know so intimately what instability feels like. And so that led me on the course that eventually led me to BuzzFeed, which was in many ways sort of the first creative risk I had taken on myself. And at the time, it was the fastest growing YouTube channel in the world. What was the job that you had at BuzzFeed? So I started as an intern again, and eventually I became a producer at BuzzFeed.

38:27And producer is such a strange term, even in traditional, but what it meant at BuzzFeed was doing everything. so I was responsible for everything from ideation to filming editing uploading and I didn't have any of those skills even though you know my homegrown Shreveport Louisiana shout out Vyvette Kare my dad putting on his little AFI film school in our house it did not cut it for what we needed to do but what I loved about that was you had to learn every part of the process unlike when I interned on a traditional film set. It's very specialized. There are unions. You don't even touch equipment from a department that's not yours.

39:09Tim Ferriss:I've seen that. You get yelled at. And you do get yelled at. And there are great reasons for that. But the learning environment was so important for me to learn. When you ingest footage, you can accidentally delete it all. Like that sucks. I needed to learn all of those processes because even today now we have an amazing team, a massive production team. And it helps me as a leader to be able to empathetically chat with each department. We've all been at companies or on film sets where the director or CEO has never done the jobs of anyone that they're asking to do a job for. And I like being able to talk to the sound person in my basic understanding of what are the frequencies we're on?

40:01Is there anything we need to adjust about this set that is disruptive to the way you have the boom pole set up? Like I like knowing all of the details and being able to think critically about each department. so everyone can succeed.

40:15Tim Ferriss:So this is going to be a leading question, but I'm going to try it anyway. Do you think it's fair to say that if you had not had the BuzzFeed job and you'd gone straight from not getting the gig at Google to YouTube, that the outcome would have been very different? Exponentially different. I don't think I would have succeeded. Yeah, so I want to spend a second on this simply to say, because I get asked about starting companies all the time. And someone's like, I'm graduating and I'm going to start my company. And I think they're sometimes surprised. And a lot of professors disagree with me on this, which is fine because I think that makes for interesting conversations.

40:58Tim Ferriss:But my default recommendation is do not start a company right after school. go get an MBA or a master's degree in X where you get to do every job where someone else is paying you for it. Exactly. So that you are learning, learn, make all your dumb mistakes or make your first massive round of dumb mistakes on someone else's dime. And if you immediately start your own company, you're also not necessarily going to get the breadth of experience in a more mature, or by mature, that could be 10 or 20 or 30 employees. It doesn't have to be a gigantic company. But get that experience first, and then increase the odds of your own success at that point by going and starting your own gig.

41:53Tim Ferriss:And I'm curious if you think that still applies, for instance, in the world of, and I know this is painting with a broad brush, but YouTube, if somebody came to you and they said, I want to get really good at, and the world has changed so quickly in terms of video and entertainment and visual storytelling. With a startup, I would still tell someone, hey, if you can, I know we're all painting this dystopian picture of Mad Max in 10 years. Let's just, for the time being, for planning purposes, assume that's not going to be the case, work at a startup first, then start your own startup. But in the world of visual storytelling, would you suggest people get a job kind of working at a place like a BuzzFeed or something like that before making the leap into YouTube now?

42:35Tim Ferriss:Or is there a better way to learn the skills necessary to do in-depth, long-form stuff? I definitely think having experience working for someone else in the field that you want to be a part of is so educational. Not just to be in the mailroom and see how things work, but also to define a core tenant list of what you enjoy about the company and all the little things you don't like. When I left my job, I had a very clear list of, this worked great for this company, but at my company, I'm never going to do X, Y, or Z. And that was super, super helpful to define company culture, to ensure people's voices are heard, to keep employee retention high.

43:22And I think that's why with Challenge Accepted, our sets operate so differently that everybody has a digital mind of we need to shoot it this way because it will perform well or we're thinking critically about retention and the intro and whatnot. But we're also thinking about storytelling as a medium has been solved. Traditional Hollywood, they clearly did something right. And let's learn from that. It's as simple as breaking for lunch every six hours. It's as simple as making sure we have enough pre-production meetings. And those are the things that were pain points for me at prior jobs. And I'm able to apply them in this really special space where we have an amazing, amazing culture and work environment where people can hopefully feel that they're able to express themselves artistically, experiment, and learn at the same time.

44:18Tim Ferriss:Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Folks, tax season is upon us. Fun, fun, fun. It always has a way of forcing us to look at our finances, whether we want to or not. And if you're dreading that moment, it's a lot to pull together. There are ways to make your finances easier and far less stressful. Today's sponsor, Monarch, is the all-in-one personal finance tool. It's used by a bunch of my friends. It's used by my employees designed to help make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life together in one dashboard on your phone or laptop. One person on my team has tried four other budgeting apps, said linking everything together on Monarch was by far the easiest.

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47:28Tim Ferriss:So I'm trying to figure out where to go next because I think it's probably going to be fear setting just because I want to hear how that factors into things. Okay. Why don't we just go there? Because I've read about the whiteboard of fears and other things. I'm sure we'll spend a second on cycling also. But the way that this interview ultimately happened was because of an X exchange. I put up a post about YouTube channels. Are there any YouTube channels out there that have some type of intersection with the four-hour work week or anything in it. And that's how we ultimately personally connected.

48:08Tim Ferriss:How does fear setting fit into the story? Well, Tim, it fits into the story in a few ways. Challenge accepted at its core originally began by me taking a whiteboard, writing all of my fears out, and then connecting each fear to a circumstance that would cause me to address it. not just as a personal self-help type of thing, because I am a very anxious person internally, but more specifically because it makes for a better story. We realized very early on, showing the vulnerability, showing the fear, that's a key part of Snyder's beats of storytelling. So starting with the all is lost moment of the story led us to unlock really, really fascinating episodes.

48:54And we would structure the thesis of each of, Like I want to be a firefighter, but I'm not brave enough. Okay. That's an interesting story. And we're thinking about that in every piece of the edit, every piece of the pre-production. And that is the climax of the emotional core of when I finally go in a burning building, why we care so much. It's the same in the Mission Impossible project. I would love to be in a Mission Impossible movie, but am I actually brave enough to strap myself to the side of a plane like icon Tom Cruise. Okay, I've got to do that first. But I actually brought something, Tim.

49:31Tim Ferriss:You brought something? I brought something to help demonstrate fear setting. Okay. I'm going to bring it out now. Yeah, let's do it. I'll describe it for the audio listeners. No, I recognize the colors. Okay, unfortunately, you are dealing with a fan in the chair opposite from you. But reading the four-hour work week changed my life. this is the original copy I have from 2016 I was a bit young when it came out in 2007 so I didn't have that that version so this might be slightly revised but I went back into my archives and I found this email the date is what is today March 31st 2026 the date of this email I'm not making this up.

50:18March 18th, 2016. It has been exactly 10 years since I sent this email. I have to shout out my therapist, Jodi, because she's the one who told me to read your book. And I wanted to read a section of my fear setting. Oh my God.

50:34Tim Ferriss:Amazing. Now, as you know, because these are your memories in your brain, this was prior to the define prevent repair chart of your 2017 TikTok. So this isn't even in a chart. These are just a couple of questions that you had. But I wrote here, this is so crazy. My dream is to leave my job, start a YouTube channel, somehow succeed, own my ideas, and start a company where I can grow as a storyteller and help other storytellers grow without traditional barriers to entry. Number one, define your nightmare. I'm just going to read a few of the highlights. Oh, yeah. I'm going to take your time. Define my nightmare was going broke.

51:17Never figuring out what I'm best at. Since I find the most joy in trying everything rather than specializing. People not thinking I'm funny. And the last one is actually not being funny.

51:35And of course, I went through the steps of repairing the damage.

51:38Tim Ferriss:Do you have any examples? Yeah, of course. Okay. Because for just I want to give like a quick. Oh, do your spiel. No, no, not spiel. Just like a quick context wrapper. So fear setting is a pretty straightforward thing. It's basically borrowed from the Stoics. I'm not the first person to look at this. I just tried to systematize it for myself. It was in the four-hour work week. And it's like goal setting, but it's identifying your fears very specifically and then making them as concrete as possible. Then talking about what you might do to prevent them and or repair them if they inevitably happened.

52:10Tim Ferriss:And the objective here is to, in a sense, demystify and take your fears from being this nebulous cloud of anxiety to something that you can put under a microscope to test? Yes. So the first part is defining the nightmare. The second is what steps would you take to repair the damage even temporarily? And here I had using my savings from my Google internship. So I did have savings from that. and then making sure that my resume, LinkedIn, was ready for other jobs in the industry. This is number three. If you were fired from your job today, how would you get things under financial control? And I said that I would temporarily use my savings.

52:54And if that didn't work out, aggressively apply for other jobs and listed some other companies I would reach out to. This is where it gets very intense. What are you putting off out of fear? I'm putting off quitting my job. I'm putting off reaching out to all the people I need to to make this dream a reality because it means I have to say it out loud. I've reached out to some people that I know I can do better. What is it costing you financially, emotionally, physically to postpone action? I'm under emotional high stress. I want to tell stories that really resonate with other people. I want to be around people who share creative joy in the same values of quality that I do I am unhappy in an environment where I feel like people feel the opposite What are you waiting for?

53:47So this is the last section I'm waiting for a false sense of security to inspire me to take a leap A brand offering to collaborate Someone else offering financial stability, etc But I'm actually being challenged and invited to create my own security for the first time. I have, oh, this is like crazy to read. I have, I've continually found success in other people's rubric of success, but I've actually never found happiness. I've never designed my own rubric of success and that's because I don't trust myself to define success I'm scared to assume that responsibility that was my fear setting chart it's a very personal process I know you and anyone listening who have actually like done it can empathize with that i'm a very emotional person as you can see from my videos it's real anyways i was so excited to share that with you i am so moved by you sharing that and i really appreciate you bringing that yeah and you fucking did it also right god that's crazy

55:14Tim Ferriss:like guys it works it actually works wait i didn't tell you the funniest part of this here was the funniest part so this has obviously been on my bookshelf for 10 years at this point and i am a copious like you hand writer note taker i beat up my books i write in the margins and proof i mean like this is you can see the wear and tear on this thing but when i opened this there was absolutely no annotation and i was like why is this and i i felt stumped on it and it wasn't until i found this email where it was revealed okay this is how i wrote to my therapist with the chart. OMG, all caps. I am obsessed with the four-hour workweek, several exclamation points.

55:57I just got the book on Monday from my coworker and I've been reading it incessantly every night. Here's my fear-setting exercise. I stole this book, apparently. And I sat and I was like, I called my therapist last night before recording. I was like, who would I have borrowed this book from? I couldn't, I have no idea whose book is in my lap right now, but it's been on my shelf for 10 years. Whoever it is, I'm so sorry. By the way, I did buy all of your other books, so I did contribute to that economy, but I have a stolen Tim Ferriss book.

56:32I should like contribute to the cycle and donate it to a library or something.

56:38Tim Ferriss:Oh my God. That is so good. It's so funny because the person from my job who let me borrow and steal this has no idea how much they impact me because I don't even remember who it was. I mean, we were all in a bullpen with 30 desks. I probably just borrowed it from someone who sat next to me. So here's a follow-up question on the fear setting. And this a trick question because when people experience any ambitious or scary journey for themselves, often the same thing, it's not a straightforward line up and to the right. It's a bumpy path. After doing that, when did you take action towards realizing the dream?

57:30It could have

57:30Tim Ferriss:been a very small thing. I don't know. But like, what was the kind of defining first step that kind of set you on the actual path to realizing what you laid out? I took action pretty immediately, but it took me a year to quit my job. And I'll define what the difference is. I took action immediately by, this might be crazy, this was a Tim Ferriss experiment. I really resonated with what you wrote about coming to terms with the worst possible outcome. And so I decided I'm going to train myself for the worst possible outcome. I love it. So I moved into a studio apartment with a roommate. I financially stripped down.

58:17I mean, I didn't have much anyways, but stripped as much as I could to simulate if I'm truly failing at this and having to live in a Hollywood apartment with a bunch of roommates. I'm just going to get used to that. I'm going to get used to it right now. I'm going to cancel all of my memberships and figure out how to stay healthy with just myself, just myself in this small place. I am also going to commit to working on my own stories after work, on the weekends, because if I can't do it now with stability, I need to prove to myself that I actually give a shit about this, really. And I did that for an entire year, growing a little bit of a personal savings, but also growing mental and physical stamina towards, I'm already in still a place of safety, of course, but I am in a situation where I think I can handle this.

59:12I got this. LinkedIn is up to date. The resume is up to date. I am so ready. I have defined prevent, and hopefully we don't got to go to that third column repair. And so then a year later exactly I quit my job and when I quit I had Two months of videos backlogged ready to go also legally for the record on my own machine Not company resources All of that was ready to go And I knew what my first big project would be training with stunt doubles I had a shoot date ready. I had taken I only had like three months of savings at that point. And I had allocated, this is going to be for the dream project.

59:58My first risk on my channel, nothing will touch that. The rest is for operating daily life expenses. And I said, I got three months to make this work. And like you said, you know, like we've been talking about, sometimes you got to put your back against the wall and go.

1:00:14Tim Ferriss:I love this. So this is, I feel like we were separated at birth. So a few things. I'll say, number one, to try to, not that I have, I'm not a paragon of self-awareness, but I will say that I, for different reasons, have a certain hypervigilance focus on safety and security, which might sound strange to people listening, but I'm always trying to risk mitigate. I don't view myself as a big risk taker. I have done a few things that have ended up with me accumulating injuries that maybe in retrospect shouldn't have done. But broadly speaking, I'm always trying to mitigate risk, which underscores this entire fear-setting exercise.

1:00:56Tim Ferriss:Because it's not just about convincing yourself. It's also, in my mind, completely intertwined with what you did, which is preparing and training yourself and your circumstances. So when I flash back to starting my first company. It's like, how did I start the first company? I started my first company during lunch hours, evenings, and weekends, basically, while still doing my other job, and doing my other job well. But I wanted to have a head start so that I wasn't beginning from scratch after quitting a job, right? So I did that. By the way, you're simultaneously developing skills as you're doing that and proving that you don't need the crutch or the training wheels of your company to enable you to do those things.

1:01:49Tim Ferriss:So the moonlighting aspect, this is another thing that at least in my mind, maybe conflicts with how some listeners might think about me, but there's a difference between, I'd be curious to hear you speak to this. There's a difference between putting your back against a wall. In other words, like highly pushing yourself to make a decision and like burning all the ships and burning all the bridges. And the way I would frame the difference is like a year to the day almost, right? You quit your job and you're setting up this groundwork and you have some videos ready to go. And where were you at the time?

1:02:28Tim Ferriss:This was in LA. So you've got probably Cobra, right? You might have some like residual healthcare after you quit. I'm not sure how it was set up benefit wise, but like in my company, I knew I had at least like a handful of months where I wasn't going to have to pay for my own health care. And in that case, as you're thinking about what could I do? If this fails, right? If it doesn't work out, what could I do? You've got your LinkedIn and resume ready to go. Yeah. Right? And in my fear setting, and for a lot of people, it's like, well, I could get like a temp waitering job. I could bartend. I could sell a bunch of my furniture.

1:03:06Tim Ferriss:I could sell my piece of shit used car and take public transport. I could whatever, right? Sleep on an air mattress in a friend's room. So in a sense, like you've proven to yourself that the permanent irreversible risk is actually low while at the same time propelling yourself towards this like defining decision, which is like taking the leap. And I think the emotional stability of that decision is important. You want to be able to brainstorm what should I do in the worst case scenario from a place of safety, which is what I had at the job still. So I was able to be creative about thinking about solutions without being panicked at the same time in that situation.

1:03:51Tim Ferriss:Yeah, exactly. What an amazing story. What fun. And it's so, it's a recipe. It's replicable. It's going to be different for every person, but it is actually, it's a formula that works like a lot of things. And I want to also mention a few things that come to mind just to draw some parallels. So you mentioned BuzzFeed where you learn to do all of these different jobs. And there's a benefit to that above and beyond the expertise of say spot checking your team's work or something like that. Your team will also respect you more because they know you have done the thing you're asking them to do, which you did kind of mention in passing, but it's really important.

1:04:36Tim Ferriss:I think of, I have some PTSD memories of this book, but the four hour chef, which, which, which confusingly is a book about accelerated learning actually tried to do a lot with that book, but very proud of it. I think it worked. But the reason I bring it up is there is a chef who's profiled in that name, Grant Ackett's, who was basically one of two superheroes in a sense. I mean, they both have super powers, You had Grant Ackett, the chef Wunderkind genius. And then you have Nick Kakones, who I've become very close friends with, who is a former genius options trader in Chicago, who then decides to get in touch with Grant.

1:05:20Tim Ferriss:He's magical at cold emailing, which I want to talk to you about. Very good at cold emailing. and they got together and Nick is from a business kind of challenging and redesigning of systems perspective incredible but the reason I bring it up is that Grant can work every station in the restaurant better than everybody else which is not to say automatically that I or you can do that with all of our team members but he's at the very least incredibly good at each of the stations so that he can, when need be, improve systems, change things. He can also teach and coach. He can give feedback. And if he gives feedback, people take it seriously because they know he's done it himself and he knows what he's talking about.

1:06:08Tim Ferriss:So there's a huge advantage to that. And it makes your mistakes later less expensive also. And it allows you to hire more effectively, whether that hiring is a contract or a full-time. Okay, so you, I just wrote this down, and I have to mention it because basically I'm living vicariously through you now. Oh my God. In a sense, because your channel is like, oh my God, like that's, if I could have sort of self-authored a path to doing that, like, oh man, what an amazing thing. Oh my gosh, thank you. I know there's a lot under the hood and behind the scenes that I'm sure is very difficult, which we'll talk about.

1:06:48Tim Ferriss:But if you have not connected, and maybe you've graduated on from the stunt work and so on, but Damian Walters, have you seen Damian Walters? No. Okay. I don't know if he's still in the game, but Damian Walters, he's a former high-level British gymnast who then entered the world of stunt work and just has the most insane yearly highlight videos that he put out for a while. This is an older vintage. He's been doing it a long time. But in any case, I thought he could be incredibly fun to connect with at some point. That's awesome. I've never really interacted with him. I have so much love and heart for the stunt community.

1:07:32That's really where the channel started. And even, you know, we like the stunt coordinator that I work with today, his name is Steve Brown. And this is how crazy the world is, right? back in 2016. So a few months after I sent this email, I went to a kebab shop in LA, sat down at the counter and was just eating dinner by myself. And I remember I was really critically thinking about this decision of going off on my own and applying this. And this guy comes in, sits next to me. We just start talking, have a nice conversation, go our separate ways. I go on to start my channel and do what I'm doing.

1:08:15He goes on to choreograph and do stunts and lead stunts for Logan, several Marvel projects, and most recently, all of the Avatar films. That guy also does all of the stunt coordination on our channel. It's amazing that when you meet people who are passionate, like, you know, when you meet a flavor of a person before they have hit their, their peak moment, it's special to connect with them and rise together. And that's, what's been awesome about Steve is between his avatar movies, he'll come over and strap me to the side of a plane or throw me in the Houdini tank and make sure that everything's okay.

1:08:59Because we have that, we have that kebab friendship. Well,

1:09:03Tim Ferriss:this, this speaks also to putting yourself in the center of the action. And I've had a very famous investor named Bill Gurley on the show before I sat where you're sitting right now. Legendary investor. And he talks about this a lot, which is putting yourself where the action is. So if you want to have those types of connections, it's less likely to happen in a small town in Montana than it is in Los Angeles. Right? Right. Similarly, depending on your industry, IRL still matters a lot. as much as we would like to think it doesn't. It's like if you want to be in certain games in tech and you want to have access to the talent, etc., still to this day, in a lot of instances, you have to be in San Francisco or somewhere near San Francisco.

1:09:51Tim Ferriss:That's just where you have to be. And this is coming from the virtual guy. It is. It is. And yet, if you look at what the virtual guy did, because I was trying and wanted to get involved in tech and then ultimately angel investing, where was I? I was in the Bay Area for 17 years. If I had not done that, I think my success would have been, would have had a 0 % likelihood. I mean, literally 0%. If I look at how a lot of the ultimately best advising or investing relationships came together, they almost all started with chance encounters at the equivalent of a kebab shop. I go to a barbecue at someone's house and like accidentally bump into someone and spill the drink and start a conversation.

1:10:33Tim Ferriss:And then boom, that turns into like one of the most, ends up defining 30 % of my net worth, right? And sure, there's luck involved, but you have to provide, and I'm borrowing this term from someone else, but surface area for luck. So what did we learn? Barbecue, kebab, spilling drinks. Yeah, exactly. Key to success, 30 % of Tim's net worth. Chapter one, chapter one, bump into people. Actually, it really could be. The other thing I wanted to mention is you talked about, in a sense, and this is not the most elegant way to put it, but like practicing poverty. That was one of your fears, right? It was like running out of money, right?

1:11:08Tim Ferriss:So you move into the apartment where you're sharing a studio with someone else or multiple people and you get rid of your memberships and so on. And you prove to yourself, number one, you can certainly survive. Number two, probably it's not that bad. Like you can figure it out. And sure, maybe if you're, depending on the roommate. I mean, you might want to get rid of said roommate, but it reminded me of not to belabor this, but since the genesis of fear setting is stoic philosophy and the stoics, Seneca the Younger talks about practicing in this way. Very close friend of mine, Kevin Kelly, who was the founding editor of Wired Magazine and fascinating person on all levels.

1:11:52Tim Ferriss:Also has a big Amish beard and has spent time with the Amish to study how they accept or reject technology, et cetera, et cetera. Really interesting guy. But he also, I don't know if he doesn't anymore. He's got to be mid seventies now, but he used to routinely spend periods of time. I want to say every year where he would just camp out in his living room in a sleeping bag and have like instant coffee and instant oatmeal and just do that for like a week. And he's like, oh yeah, great. Yeah. I don't really need that much. And by doing that, it gives you courage, which I think is a practiced skill.

1:12:32Tim Ferriss:Your subconscious has to believe that you can do something. You can't just read books and suddenly have confidence in all situations. And I mean, you're, I think a walking example of how you can do that. So my question for you, Formula One team. All right. Formula One is expensive, right? It's like these cars in some cases are like, what,$250 million, right? When you start to add everything in. Pricey. Yes, very high performance. But when you quit your job and you're like, I have three months, how did you assemble or enroll the help that you needed in the early days? The first like three to six months after quitting your job?

1:13:12Tim Ferriss:Or did you just do everything yourself? I don't know, right? So what did it look like in the early days? Because once you get some momentum, I'm sure you get some money coming in. Okay, you can start to add. You can start to upgrade. You can start to do various things. But in the beginning, you're very capital constrained. Yes. What do you do? How did you assemble the help that you needed or enlisted? This is a strategy I employ for every challenge I take on now. And hindsight is 20-20. And with that 20-20 hindsight, I think it comes down to having three people on your Formula One team. And it doesn't need to be fancy.

1:13:42it's really a coach a mentor and a cheerleader okay what does that mean yeah in a specific episode of challenge accepted the coach is the most important person that i want to find before we pursue an episode like in a recent episode i attempted to get a black belt in taekwondo in only 90 days and in martial arts that's a somewhat controversial thing to even attempt to do and so I knew I could only do it with the blessing of a really respected master so objective number one was to find the best master and coach in the world and I think it's important to find someone and again I'll give an example for what I did in that specific situation but that's number one for me because this is the person I'm going to be spending all of this time with and learning from them the second person is a mentor who is different from the coach.

1:14:40This is a person who has most recently done the thing you're trying to do. So for me, that's other students in the black belt class. They're my mentors. They have gone through this process. They know what it feels like to break a brick with their hands and get through that. And it's important that it's different from the coach because coaching is a different skill set and art form from mentoring.

1:15:10Tim Ferriss:Also, it's harder for the coach to put themselves in your shoes because so much of what they do is second nature and they're probably decades removed from the experience you're about to have. You want someone who has the experience of leading somebody to that finish line of greatness. And you also want someone who knows what it feels like to be the man in the arena. And then the third person is a cheerleader, which is someone who is completely detached from the outcome. So for me, that's my best friend, Olivia. It could be a sibling, friend, family member, someone who is going to root for you and love you no matter whether you succeed or fail.

1:15:49So that's how I approach every single challenge on the channel. Meta-wise at the beginning of the channel, what was that for me? It was the mentor figure or figures for me were other people who had recently started channels and were just a few steps ahead of me in the process. Maybe they had 50 ,000 subscribers. Maybe they had 100 ,000 subscribers. They were people I met at little meetups at, rest in peace, the YouTube space, which doesn't exist anymore. But those peer groups were really special and important to me to keep me motivated and to just reach out to people, even today, reaching out to other creators.

1:16:28What do you guys think of this thumbnail. What do you think of these titles? Having people who are just a couple steps ahead of you or on similar playing fields can be so, so helpful in that process. The cheerleader for me at that time was my sister, Madeline, who was one of the only people I told I was going to quit my job and fully believed in me. And then the coach figure for me when I was starting from ground zero was cold emailing people I respected. Now that's not the same as having a coach who's with you every day in the way Master Rhee is training Taekwondo with me every day. But I saw those as coaching opportunities because they were people light years ahead who had the mentorship component, teaching component, I should say, of being able to advise even in small doses.

1:17:18Tim Ferriss:What did those emails look like? Okay. I love a great email. You mentioned that you have an amazing cold emailer. I need to see their art and their work because I love comparing notes on emails. I personally believe that a really well-written email can open any door. I agree, by the way. Assuming the person sees it, right? There's some friction, but people underestimate what they can do. I agree. There's something about an email that's different from an Instagram DM or I don't know. I love an email. I love a Google calendar. This is where we're talking about true passions to emails. so when at the beginning of my channel when we didn't have millions of subscribers and we wanted to collaborate with institutions like the fbi and the secret service and ultimately we became some of the first youtube channels to ever do that came from not a producer not a friend of a friend sending email but me sending a cold email an example of that is i wanted to do a video with the FBI.

1:18:30So I went on FBI.gov. I called the 1-800 number of the FBI, which by the way, is for like crime tips, which I didn't realize. And I pitched them this idea over the phone and they're like, so I'm here to receive crime tips, but I can connect you to someone else. And I wasn't anticipating that. I thought it would kind of be a dead end.

1:18:53Tim Ferriss:So I just want to pause here for the specifics. Ring, ring. Hello, FBI 800 number. What are you saying? Hi, my name is Michelle Carey. I know this might come off as a little strange or unexpected, but I was trying to contact someone in your department who might work with film and television. I'm a content creator online. We have several hundred thousand subscribers, and I was hoping to talk about a collaboration. All right. Great. And usually they're like, YouTube, what? But this person was generous enough to connect me to someone else. And we kind of got kicked down a few different routes. But we ended up connecting with someone called the Hollywood guy.

1:19:35This is a job at the FBI.

1:19:37Tim Ferriss:He's just like, how did I get stuck in this department? Every email that comes over the transom about some kind of film television thing. It's the Hollywood guy. And now this is the person within the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is assigned to documentaries or even scripted shows to ensure that the seal of the FBI is accurately and not displayed, not misrepresented or shown in a derogatory manner. This is the guy who did the McDonald's Monopoly HBO documentary. He was the FBI's representative for that amazing docuseries. I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with this. Monopoly? Like the game Monopoly?

1:20:20Oh my God. You're not familiar. What is this called? I think the documentary, it's called McMillions.

1:20:25Tim Ferriss:Okay. Have you heard of this doc? I mean, what is it about Happy Meals or something? Riveting documentary series. McMillions? Okay. Oh, Tim, you're going to love it. I got it. So there's probably some fraud involved and the FBI gets involved. Okay. Do you remember in the 90s, 2000s, there was the Monopoly game at McDonald's where you could peel off the sticker and see if you won a vacation or a bunch of money. Turns out all of the winners of that were all related. Oh, they figured out how to game the system. They're all family relatives or friends of friends or people within this group of people that they hired to win.

1:21:08I don't want to reveal how they did it because it's riveting. but the documentary tells the story from the perspective of the FBI agents who uncovered it.

1:21:20Tim Ferriss:Right. So Hollywood guy gets an email. Hey. So this guy just did McMillions, one of the, you know, an incredible docuseries for HBO gets an email from me, YouTuber. And effectively what happened was he was like, well, I'm retiring in a couple months. Let's try it out. It's so wild how these things work out sometimes. It's amazing. Now, so that, again, it's like surface area for luck, right? Like you have to have some pinballs in the pinball machine for the possibility of something like that happening. Is there anything else in your email or communication with the Hollywood guy that you think increased the likelihood of him saying yes?

1:22:03I do. I do. I think a great email and a cold email specifically has to have some key components. The first is the subject line needs to show your value to the reader. For me right now, it would look like something, and I'll be totally honest, collaboration with Michelle Carre, parentheses, this many followers. In the beginning, that was a small number for me, but I still put it in the subject line. It could be a number of views. It could be collaborated with X, Y, and Z institutions. It just needs to be enough for the reader to see some value in what you're doing. Then the body of the email is three paragraphs, very short paragraphs.

1:22:47In fact, three blocks of two sentences each. I wouldn't even call it a paragraph. The first paragraph is one sentence about who you are and your legitimacy. It has to be encompassed in one sentence. Hi, my name is Michelle Carre. I'm a content creator with this many followers, and I've done this, this, and this. It's very succinctly proving your value. Second sentence of that first paragraph. What are you asking for or offering to the other person? And ideally, you're doing both. You're offering something. Second sentence of that email to the FBI would be, I'm reaching out to inquire about an opportunity to film a collaboration, for my channels.

1:23:32What you're offering there is access to our audience in the eyes of many of the people we collaborate with. It's a marketing opportunity, potentially.

1:23:41Tim Ferriss:Recruiting opportunity. Yeah, something like that. Paragraph two is two sentences or less of what you want to do. This would be the details of, we're hoping to do a shoot following just a few days of the academy, embedding in existing activities, ultimately leading up to a final scenario as follows academy protocol. So that second paragraph is about a window into the vision you hope to come to together and a peek at some of the resources you might be asking for. And ideally, you do it in such a way that you show you've done your homework. You know, I'm not just cold emailing the FBI hoping to do a video with them.

1:24:23I know very clearly I've watched everything I can online about what does the academy take to do? What are the activities? What are the ones that are best for camera? It's an opportunity to flatter them and to put them at ease. We speak the same language. So there's that. Paragraph three is the call to action. Two sentences or less. Would love to hop on the phone. Let me know a good time. Here's my phone number. Text me anytime. I think that's honestly potentially the most important part. Here's my phone number. Text me anytime. This is an anti-Tim Ferriss tactic potentially.

1:25:00Tim Ferriss:Not when I'm sending cold emails to people who are very busy that I want to connect with. And what that does is say, I'm available. I don't know you, but here's my phone number. It exhibits, I'm trusting you. and it says, you don't have to respond with a crazy, detailed, formal email back to me. Hit me up anytime we can talk on the phone. It removes the barrier to entry for them to have to come back to you. And then have a nice email signature, you know? What is a nice email signature? Just in a sans-serif font. Maybe add a little color. No comic sans? I'm not kidding. No comic sans, no times in your room.

1:25:40Tim, it's not 2007 anymore?

1:25:41Tim Ferriss:No. I saw this photograph. I have a lot of friends who work at Google. And there was this big printed out sign to employees talking about snacks or things and refrigerators. And it was in Comic Sans. And then someone else took a marker and wrote on it. They're like, this is Google and it is a serious place of work. Please do not use Comic Sans. I just thought it was pretty funny because there are a lot of people with high IQ at Google who may not have the social crisis. but I have to agree on comic sans. So let me say a few things about this email. Okay. I, in some ways, owe my entire career as it is to cold emails.

1:26:24Tim Ferriss:And what you learn in crafting cold emails is directly translatable to in-person and talking to people. In a way, it's the same thing. There are some differences, but I want to highlight a couple of things that you just said. number one including your cell phone I am shocked by how many emails I get that are actually somewhat interesting they get surfaced by my team because I have people who triage my email that do not have a phone number and I'm like I don't have time to have a bunch of my team does not have time to do a bunch of back and forth to figure out a time to talk even though you didn't even offer a time to talk and blah blah blah blah blah blah archive I just don't have time for it.

1:27:11Tim Ferriss:This seems interesting, but it's not definitively interesting. If you gave a cell phone, I would figure out a way to maybe call you. And in five minutes, I'd be like, I have three quick questions. Interesting. But this is it, five minutes. And in a friendly way, obviously. If it's important to you, include your cell phone. And I think it's important to include it, this is just me personally, as the final sentence of the email, not tucked under your name. No. You want to truly invite them. Make it explicit. 100 % agreed. So I want to just mention a couple of direct parallels between what you just mentioned is this formula.

1:27:48Tim Ferriss:And if you're open to it, maybe we could share like a few examples or a template of - Oh, a downloadable PDF on Tim Not Blog. Yeah, exactly. PDF for a blog post or something, or like show notes, just so people can actually see it. Yes, of course. And I will just draw a few parallels. So number one, you need credibility upfront. run. And one way to think about this, and I always, if I'm thinking about reaching out to someone who is above my pay grade, and trust me, there's, I mean, there are plenty of people who are way above my pay grade. The first thing in the subject line, I'll give a tip that I sometimes use.

1:28:21Tim Ferriss:So let's just say that somebody knows, you know, Mr. Beast or Tom Cruise or whoever it might be. Now, practically speaking, everything's going to have to get routed through someone else for Tom Cruise. And if you do get their personal information, they're going to be very annoyed. But where I'll start with the subject line is one of two places or both. So you mentioned like the credibility indicator in the subject. I'll use that. But if we actually have someone in common who actually recommended iConnect, but they haven't made the intro, I will say, for instance, it would be, again, just use the Tom Cruise example, who I think would make an amazing interview.

1:29:01Tim Ferriss:But like for Tom Cruise via mutual connection, Tim Ferriss, comma, whatever the credibility indicator is. So I will mention the mutual connection first because subjects lines often get truncated on mobile or elsewhere. So if they just see for Tom Cruise from Tim Ferriss, he's going to be like, who the fuck is Tim Ferriss? Archive. if it's for Tom or for Tom Cruise via person who actually made the suggestion and then my name, you have a huge advantage because chances are it's going to get truncated. I love the via. I've done referral from X and then my stuff after, but I like the via because it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to have to vet and call that person up.

1:29:49Tim Ferriss:Yeah, exactly. Well, that brings up another point, which is if you're going to mention mutual connections, and I'm shocked by how many people violate this, you better actually know, assume the person you're emailing is going to immediately text those people. And they will. And I certainly will. And I would say nine times out of 10, that person's like, either I have no idea who that person is, or I met that person once and we shook hands at a party. I don't know them at all. And I'm like, you're gone. You just misrepresented implicitly or explicitly. But when I'm writing an email, right, I'll have that subject line.

1:30:22Tim Ferriss:If there is a via I'll include that name in the subject line. I'll keep as short as possible. Then the always default to Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. something like something that I really appreciate about you because it doesn't cost anything is you are very default polite. And even though it makes me feel like an old bastard, you said you were like, yes, sir. And you used sir with me a couple of times when he came in and it's no, but you're always better off being on the safe side. so I am consistently surprised and maybe this just makes me a salty, crotchety old bastard but when people are like hey Tim, yo bro, yo Ferris or whatever I'm just like, did we go to PE class?

1:31:07Someone says yo Ferris?

1:31:08Tim Ferriss:I've got so many guys it's always guys who think that Like founder bro type? It could be anything but think that like shoulder slapping immediate camaraderie is helpful I will say that's a very risky gambit. Maybe it works one out of 10 times. In my case, I'm just like, this is a liability, right? Because here's how I think about it is I'm like, well, even if it doesn't bother me, that shows a general lack of awareness. And if they're going to ask me to connect them with someone or they're going to work with anyone who I care about and they pull that, it's a reputational risk. And so most of the time, that's going to be an auto archive.

1:31:48Tim Ferriss:is going to be like, you know what? The people you're reaching out to, if they're really busy and if they're well-known enough that you think to email them, have more opportunities than they can even look at. Your job number one is don't do anything stupid. Don't do anything that's going to disqualify your email. And the yo-ferrous of it all emotionally feels as if a stranger is coming up to you at the airport and giving you a hug. Whoa, wait, who are you? What? Like, that's what it feels like. Yeah. You know, just another pro tip, because we're in Austin and this is like kind of man bun, baggy pants slash like Bitcoin, ayahuasca, CrossFit Central.

1:32:27Tim Ferriss:It's like, don't just walk up to someone you don't know and say, after they offer a hand, oh, I'm a hugger and just go for the hug. Don't do that. Like, just really don't do that. Right. Assume you're in Japan and they're going to strike you down with a sword if you do that. The person who wants the most distance wins that conversation. It's kind of like skiing in the backcountry with avalanche risk or something. Whoever's the most concerned gets to veto. But let's come back to the cold email. So we've got the subject line, different subject lines for different purposes. In the first line, it's going to be credibility indicator.

1:33:01Tim Ferriss:All right. A couple of points on this. So you've got like your credibility indicator in the subject line potentially also, which I will also do, you know, be like for interview parentheses, 1 billion plus downloads, right? In the case of the podcast, right? Something like that. and i'll note for if you don't have a billion downloads or millions of followers in the beginning for me it was examples of the work yeah that would at least show i've done my homework no one's watched this but it looks really really good and it's it's beautifully edited yeah so i am going to come back and ask you about just to plant the seed the mentors in the very early days when you didn't really have much, right?

1:33:43Tim Ferriss:Like what that email looked like, we're going to come back to that. I'll give my example. When I first got to Silicon Valley, I volunteered for organizations that had name cachet. So I volunteered for, for instance, Thai, the Indus entrepreneur. Last time, I'm sure people checked, I'm not Indian. But Thai, super well-known at the time, maybe still entrepreneurial organization, like the per capita density in the kind of Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley with talent is fucking bananas. And - Shout out. That's my people. Exactly. And so I volunteered there. And then I could say, I'm emailing someone in tech and it would be for so-and-so via Thai or the Indus Entrepreneur.

1:34:28Tim Ferriss:And I wouldn't even put my name because who the hell am I? And that gets the email open. So I would volunteer and then do things on behalf of the nonprofit as a way of establishing some kind of relationship, ideally inviting them to speak or something like that. All for free, by the way, right? Like some of the highest paying jobs you'll ever get, you don't get paid for in the beginning, in my opinion. I love that. It does pay in dividends in ways you don't expect. Yeah. I did that and ultimately had, for instance, Jack Canfield who co-created Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold hundreds and hundreds of millions of copies.

1:35:02Tim Ferriss:And then they ultimately sold as a franchise. but I met him through an email like that from the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. And we are still friends to this day, 25 years later or whatever it is. And he's the one who introduced me to the agent who ultimately sold the four-hour work week after like 26 rejections. So long-term greedy, not short-term greedy. You don't need to be paid up front for something that will ultimately be very, very important to your life. Right. to the email for the credibility indicator. And guys, we'll give some templates just so you don't have to piece this together in like a memento fashion.

1:35:40Tim Ferriss:But I like to, and I suggest, include some text that establishes who you are. If someone says, hey, here I am, link, and like sketchy attachment, I'm like, I don't have time to go on some scavenger hunt to figure out who you are, right? so include a line or two on who the hell you are do you know what i mean yes don't require them to like click through and find this this and this and this and this and this a hyperlinked here uh-uh it's not you know what i mean when it's like click here no it should be and i've done this thing hyperlink the and i've done this yeah exactly so if i want to learn more yeah and just to give people some intel on that.

1:36:28Tim Ferriss:One reason for that is that it just takes more time for someone and you need to remove the reasons for them to say no. And you might think to yourself, who the hell doesn't have 30 seconds or a minute to click through? And I'm like, somebody who gets a thousand emails a day. That's answer number one. Number two, anyone who is reasonably well-known has a lot of phishing attacks. They have people from different vectors who are trying to get them to click on links that are very dangerous and intended to steal information or set the team up for social engineering. So I have been a recipient of a false you're invited to the Tim Ferriss podcast email.

1:37:05Tim Ferriss:Oh yeah, that's a very clever scam. Do you know how that works? No. Okay. So how that works, this is because these are still going around. I think the jig is up because people have realized most of these are fake, but so I'm guessing the email was like, we place people or we're inviting you on the show, either if they're not very sophisticated, they'll be like, it costs this much to go on the show. And then anyone who knows me should be like, well, it doesn't sound right. But there's kind of like this pay for play thing, which most people will sniff out. The other one is let's get on a Zoom call and discuss.

1:37:38Tim Ferriss:And what happens is you get on a Zoom call and they somehow figure out a way to get you to provide basically screen access, not just sharing screen, but screen access. And they'll take you to your Facebook page or something like that, and they will hijack your Facebook page, then use it to promote like a crypto scam on a large page, and then hold that for ransom also to get money from you. So this is just a way of saying, guys, include some fucking text. Right? And then to your point again, like be very clear about the ask. The number of emails I get that it's like, Like, even if they establish, hey, I'm credible, but I'm not like, you know, a president or the CEO of a Fortune 50 company.

1:38:24Tim Ferriss:It's like, if they're like, okay, this might be kind of interesting. If it's like Rick Rubin is, you know, I did his first interview on a podcast ever in his sauna. But it's like, if you're like, oh, it's fucking Rick Rubin. And he's like, hey, let's jump on the phone. You're like, yeah, go. Okay, fine. As long as I can confirm that's who the person is. Right. But otherwise, assuming that you who's cold emailing is not Rick Rubin, which is likely. then be clear about your ask. If it's like, would love to discuss something vague, let's hop on the phone to discuss how's next Tuesday at 2 p.m. I'm never going to respond to that.

1:38:53Tim Ferriss:Because if you can't write a professional first cold email, I'm skeptical of everything that's going to follow. You're not placing a value on the recipient's time that you've thought through. Does that make sense? So it's like, be really clear in the ask. And then when I close, again to your point, Make your cell phone. And by the way, you can use a burner or you can use Google Voice. You can spin up a Google Voice number very easily from any G Suite, et cetera, et cetera. But have a number where somebody can reach you. Do not just bury it in your signature. Make it explicitly clear. Feel free to text me anytime.

1:39:29Tim Ferriss:We can schedule or just feel free to hop on the phone. I promise it will not take more than 10 minutes. By the way, if you say that, do not go over 10 minutes. And then I almost always say, if you've read this far, I really appreciate it. And if you're too busy to get back to me, I totally understand. Okay. That's a great learning. I'm going to add that. Yeah. Love that. And by displaying as little or zero entitlement as possible, you get a much higher response rate. Why? Because your cold email is an audition for everything else to come. So if you're like, here's this vague email, how about next Tuesday or Thursday at 2 2pm is like, bro, slow down.

1:40:12Tim Ferriss:Like you're humping my leg already. You haven't even established who you are or what you want. And that reflects a certain lack of awareness and kind of business savvy that is going to be a problem later. That's kind of how the train of thought goes. And that's it. Here's another pro tip. If you send that email, do not follow up two days later with bumping this up and then do that two days later, bumping this up. You get to do that once. Right? I think it's got to be at least a week. Yeah. You got to wait and you're allowed to do it once and then just assume they're not interested. And that's okay.

1:40:47Tim Ferriss:Move on. The world is full of great people. And if people are not responding to your email, it's probably a common denominator, a problem with the email. You know what I mean? So in the beginning, when you're reaching out to mentors, you just quit your job. What are you saying in the email? Here's an example. I sent a cold email to Hank Green. who is just one of the greatest people. Describe who Hank Green is. Hank Green is if sunshine and joy and a human encyclopedia were bundled into one person, just one of the smartest, coolest, groundbreaking people, especially in the YouTube world ever. He came and gave a talk at BuzzFeed once when I worked there.

1:41:32And maybe this was while I was still working there or shortly after I left. I sent him an email and this is actually a counter to everything we've discussed I wasn't explicitly reaching out about a business idea or anything or trying to get something from him But I wanted to get to know him and so I sent him an email saying that I'm learning as I consider pursuing my own creative endeavor and i'm curious What was the most formative pinpoint for you as a child to pursue this profession? And it's just a fun question, honestly. There's not much strategy here. And he sent back a multi-page answer.

1:42:18What was your subject line?

1:42:20Tim Ferriss:Do you remember? What was the subject line? The subject line was, hello from Michelle Carey parentheses, Buzzfeed. So using the title of some form of legitimacy. But he sent me this multi-page response. And at the end said, thanks for the thoughtful question. No one's asked me before. And so sometimes I find that people are excited to share themselves. And of course, in him sharing that story, I learned a lot about how I could find creative inspiration or even find parallels with someone who externally I don't have a lot of overlap with. And I think that was awesome. And now today, where I know him in a more friendly capacity as peers in the space, it's really special to have those emails.

1:43:08Like these emails like this are so crazy to go back on. So even if you send a cold email and never hear back, it might make for a great story later.

1:43:17Tim Ferriss:And guess what? You're practicing your ability to craft emails and your ability to communicate. and this would be like i interviewed brandon sanderson one of the most legendary fantasy writers in the world who is prolific and i think he wrote i think it was five books before he even attempted to publish one he intentionally said i'm not publishing my first several books that's right that's right and i did a just a huge romp with him met up at his HQ in Utah. Fascinating, brilliant guy. But the point is maybe your first five to 10 cold emails are just to improve getting better at cold emails. And by the way, something I did also is I would ask people who I had not sent those cold emails, but who are better known folks, I'd be like, Hey, would you mind taking a look?

1:44:15Tim Ferriss:I would do this at events. Sometimes I'd be like, this is going to seem like a weird request. Don't worry. It's not anything like super, super bizarre. But would you be willing to critique this email? I've sent this to a couple of people. You know, I haven't gotten a response or only got one response. Like, how would you change this? And like, that is a very concrete question. And it's also not clearly a question that's just setting up the thing you actually want. You know what I mean? Like, because sometimes people do that via email. They'll be like, hey, I loved your sweater. What was your, you know, How did you train your dog?

1:44:47Tim Ferriss:And then like five seconds after I replied to that, they're like, so anyway, I was thinking of having myself on your podcast. I'm just like, you asshole. Like clearly you're just setting it up. So just be aware of that. You got click baited. I got click baited. So a few things. Hank Green, I don't know him personally, but I remember seeing him at VidCon once. And there are two things I want to say. One is just what a sweet guy. Seems like a really sweet human being. number two is you reached out with let's say a mentoring question to someone who already has demonstrated that they mentor does that make sense yes right so that will make your life easier in the beginning when you're sending out these cold emails the other thing is if you do get a response from somebody.

1:45:38Treat it like you're not at a sex party.

1:45:44Tim Ferriss:You are dating someone in like the 1800s. This is like Downton Abbey. Do not reply five seconds later with like, oh, great. Now here are 10 more questions. Don't do that. Right? Like be patient. Life is long and thoughtful. Life is long. If you want these relationships, I mean, I will also say you do not need to have a hundred relationships with people who are steps ahead of you. If you actually develop genuine, mutually respectful communication with a few people, in a lot of cases, you are set. So it's like, don't be greedy. Don't be a greedy little piglet. Don't be in a rush. And I've certainly had to learn that by fucking that up over and over again because I'm constitutionally very impatient.

1:46:31Tim Ferriss:I I want to get stuff done very quickly. And some things do not lend themselves to that. You mentioned Snyder's Beats of Storytelling, I think. Don't quiz me on that. I won't quiz you on it. But as far as storytelling goes, as far as developing narrative arcs, it does not need to be a book, but it could be. Are there any particular resources you would point people to where you're like, okay. Oh, gosh. I know there's being in the trenches and working on it and testing and split testing and using kind of warm audiences in the beginning, etc. But if you're like, all right, look, if you want to do something analogous to what I'm doing on YouTube, there are other examples of people who put out very few videos, but this sort of longer form narrative arc storytelling.

1:47:19Tim Ferriss:If you were teaching a class on that, like what's the syllabus? Like what do you tell people to read or watch? Challenge except like reality, docu, class. Okay, welcome to my class. On the syllabus, we're going to be studying a few things. First of all, I'm going to make everyone watch Survivor. And every week we're going to discuss it. First of all, because it's the best ever. I'm obsessed with Jeff Probst. And I think that part of reality doc in particular, Survivor is a reality competition show, but there's a lot that can be learned in doing your own vlogs or self-filmed human stories. They do an excellent job at taking hundreds of hours of footage and pulling out the story beats that make sense.

1:48:06You watch an episode of Survivor, it might feel like things are just happening and they are, but they're also curated from thousands and thousands of moments, storylines that were left on the floor. And so I think Survivor is an amazing lesson in, first of all, hosting, and second of all, killing your babies in a way. We know on that island, they're out there for a month and a half. A lot's going to happen that's not going to make the edit. But why have the producers chosen this storyline to tell? Why is it engaging? Why is this the act break for the commercial? I think that's number one, selfishly.

1:48:44Propes is the goat.

1:48:45Tim Ferriss:also sidebar Propt is an excellent example also of creating defensible IP which a lot of people don't realize they're like oh isn't he just the host guy it's like no no no no he's the Einstein of that operation it's amazing and when you watch his hosting it's so masterful because he is a fan and also a researcher of the people on the show. I mean, you see him at Tribal Council. He is recounting things that have happened decades ago. He knows the details of the contestant's life, and he asks a question, not as a leading question, but as a way for the contestant to open up. I think that is incredible interviewing.

1:49:31And it's something that I studied, too. I did a show called Karma on HBO, which was a kids' survival show produced by J.D. Roth, which is, you know, another like huge reality legend. And again, I think people watch these shows and think the hosts are just there to say lines and deliver information to the audience. There is a massive amount of research. I mean, you have a binder of every kid's headshot, where they're from, their family. You're taking notes. You're sitting in MCR, which is this trailer with hundreds of video feeds as it's happening live so that when you go to meet with the contestants, you know what things to ask and how long to sit with them.

1:50:17I think that's just masterful story. I'm just a great host, but also a producer.

1:50:22Tim Ferriss:Okay. So it's on the syllabus you got. We're watching some reality shows. This is like Robert McKee, I guess, the story seminar with Casablanca. He's like, we're going to walk by this second by second. and look at what's going on. All right, so we got Survivor as one part of the syllabus. Survivor is one part of the syllabus. Part two is we are going to study Snyder's Beats and we're going to study the Save the Cat of it all. Those two books are so good. And I have some screenwriter friends who are like, yeah, they are really good. And others were like, please, no, don't suggest it. I'm like, I haven't practiced as much as you have or other folks.

1:51:01Tim Ferriss:I'm like, these make it very tangible. And I guess it's not to interrupt. Right. I think it's important to understand the bones of a story. What are the hills and the valleys? What is the all is lost? And I think a lot of people look at that material and think it only applies to scripted content. But it is so important in any piece of content. It's storytelling. It's storytelling. It applies to books. It applies to all of it. Yes. Exactly. I would even go as far to say that a five-second vine, if it performs well, hits all of the pieces of the story arc in just a few seconds. It sets a premise, it upends it, and there's a resolution where the character is changed by the end.

1:51:45even a video of a cat leaping off something and doing something crazy has a beginning middle and end where the cat is different at the beginning and the end of that America's Funniest Home video clip and that's why we like it that's why we laugh that's why we engage with it and so I think it's really important to understand that part three of the syllabus let's see I feel like we have to have three parts of the syllabus. The third part of the syllabus would be an area of the class where everyone brings a piece of work released online within the last week that impacted them. This would be the assess and dissect portion of the class.

1:52:27Why did this YouTube video speak to you? I wanted to learn about how the coronavirus spread originally, and I saw this video on as a god. Okay, but let's break it down. What was interesting? What was the title? What was the thumbnail? Why did this TikTok speak to you? Why did it stand out? And I would want people to bring things that performed well or didn't so we can understand resonance. Resonance, as you mentioned earlier, attention is such a very, very valuable and finite and rare resource these days that I would want a discussion component of the class to talk about relevant impact in recent media.

1:53:08So that'll be the wackiest class ever, but that's what we've been doing.

1:53:11Tim Ferriss:If you had, and I know we're doing this on the fly, but let's just say project assignments, and I'll buy you some time. I know this is on the spot, but the most formative writing class that I took, and I really only took one seminar ever focused on writing. I got very lucky. in college, but there were two components to the class. There were these once weekly lectures, two or three hours long, pretty long, on writing with a tremendous focus on structure primarily. And then there were reviews of work that we had already submitted. So each week we had a writing assignment. And typically in the range, like three to 10 pages, but let's just call it three to five pages.

1:54:04Tim Ferriss:And you would write your piece. Then you would submit it at the beginning of the lecture. Then you would have a one-on-one with the professor, in this case, John McPhee. If people haven't read John McPhee, they should. Just tremendous. If you want to read something short levels of the game is incredible it's won one or two pilitzer prizes just a phenomenal writer can make anything interesting and wrote an entire book on oranges for instance another one on hand-carved wooden canoes and another one on the geology and nature of alaska is just incredible the levels of the game is about basically the entire game of tennis but pulled through the lens of one match involving Arthur Ashe.

1:54:50Tim Ferriss:But coming back to the story, so we had the lecture, and then we have these writing assignments. You turn in whatever your new assignment is, the beginning of each of the lectures, and then you have your one-on-one with Professor McPhee. He gives you back your printed out writing, which typically will have in the first few weeks, more red ink from his edits and notes than what you put on the page. It is brutal, brutal, but incredibly helpful. Okay. So you've got these writing assignments and the writing assignments are all over the place, but it might be something as seemingly simple slash difficult as find a sculpture on campus and write three to five pages on it.

1:55:32Tim Ferriss:And we're like, ah, can you give us any more direction? He's like, no. So everybody would take a slightly different approach because you're like, wait a second, should I write about the history? Should I write about the subjective experience? Should I write about, uh-oh. But no matter what I do, I have to think about kind of structure and some of the points that he's made in class. And then at the end of the seminar lecture, we would share our work. We would actually read out loud some of our work. After the revisions have been applied? No. This would be, so I guess I'm probably screwing up the chronology a little bit in the lecture.

1:56:06We would read something that has not yet been corrected and then subject it to peer review.

1:56:12Tim Ferriss:and get his comments. So there were a couple of different ingredients, and he's taught this. He doesn't teach it any longer, but taught it for 15, 20 years, very infrequently, like once every year or two. So I got very lucky. So this is a very roundabout way of asking if there were like an assignment component where people are doing their own work, what are perhaps some of the things you would have them do? The assignment component of the class would be making. the content. So I would require all of the students to make an account if they don't already have one on some platform. And at the beginning of the class, I would want them to set and define the type of content.

1:56:55I would want them to define why is this uniquely yours? How is this different from what other people have done? And then at the same time, how is this data backed by what other people have done? And then from there, I would require them to actually make and produce videos. If the purpose of the class is become a YouTuber, let's say, I would ask them to make and produce the videos weekly and actually post them so that we could do some peer review, of course, but then actually see how does it play live in the world. I would also want them to do data analysis at the end and try to make educated guesses on why something did or didn't perform well and receive critique and feedback, not just on the data and performance, but specifically the work itself.

1:57:42Why did this introduction work or not work? How could the technique be improved next time?

1:57:48Tim Ferriss:You know, I was thinking it could also be fun. You'd have to have a pretty small class to make this work, but assuming the videos are short and they're doing it weekly, like have them show the videos in class and then make predictions. Like what is your hypothesis? Do you know what I mean? Like you can invest in videos. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, what are your, and then they can choose to like modify the video or not based on kind of feedback or your thoughts or something. You obviously want to let them learn their own lessons, but I think that would be a good way of refining kind of the thinking process.

1:58:20Someone's got to teach this class.

1:58:22Tim Ferriss:You are infinitely, you actually made this whole format work. So I think it's you. Only if you're a guest lecturer. Sure. I mean, guest lecturer is like all the fun with none of the heavy lifting. Exactly. I'm very much into that. I want to mention two books. And I'm curious if they're still relevant. Because they came up in doing research for this conversation. Radical Candor by Kim Scott. And The Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono. Do either of these ring a bell? Yeah, of course. Okay. All right, got it. My boy Edward with his hat. Yeah, there you go. So how did these both factor in? Because these were basically the two books that I was able to find mentioned by title.

1:59:08Tim Ferriss:Some of them, I think, were mentioned by people you work with and not directly by you. Or maybe Garrett mentioned the Bono hats. It was Garrett. So the six thinking hats, I don't even remember where I learned or heard of this concept or... Oh, I actually think this was Jodi. Shout out, Jodi. Jodi puts me on all the great books. I was coming to her talking about just various problems I was facing, and she told me of this concept of the six thinking hats. And effectively, I might butcher this, but it is a way of looking at a problem by filtering only by thinking type. So for example, we're going to put on a yellow hat and look at this potential idea.

1:59:59And the yellow hat means we're only going to say things that could go well by pursuing this idea. Versus when we put on our black hat, that is we're saying all of the things that could go completely wrong. And it's six different techniques of being able to assess and determine if an idea is good or how to solve a problem. That thinking was really helpful to me as someone who often prior to understanding this would immediately go to Black Hat. And this is coming from the mentality of everything's going to go wrong. I'm going to fail at everything. I'm a person who growing up always defaulted to Black Hat.

2:00:38No, no, no, no, no. It's not going to work. That doesn't inspire creativity. That does not inspire entrepreneurship. And it also gives an unfair shot to an idea that Respun may provide a new idea altogether. I think this is also something I learned from a design thinking class. I might be crossing my wires here, but another class I took at Dartmouth was design thinking, where similar to your writing class, it was an engineering class where every week we would have some wacky assignment. Like the professor would give us each a sheet of poster board and say, next week when you come to class, it has to be a chair.

2:01:18Turn this poster board into a chair that supports your body type. You can't use any glue, any scissors, any other structural components. You can make cuts to it and shape it, but that's it. And it has to support your body weight. And that class taught me a ton about myself. Before that class, we'd look at that and say, not possible. Why am I even trying it? And he, Professor Roby, really forced us to think critically through how could something be possible. So that concept of the six hats is really, really impactful to me.

2:01:53Tim Ferriss:Let's pause there for a second because this book, believe it or not, was incredibly helpful to me. Really? In my first few years of building my first business and trying to figure out what I might be good at. But also as a solo operator, effectively, had lots of contractors. but as a solo operator for the most part And effectively turning myself into a virtual board of directors with different perspectives by using these different hats. Because I also default to black hat, which I think has its place, right? Part of the genius of this approach is you're not saying, oh, that's negative thinking.

2:02:38Tim Ferriss:Shame on you. Let's only look at the bright side. No, it's saying there's a place for that, but there's going to be a set time for it. And we're going to go through each of these six. I haven't read it in decades, but Edward De Bono, Six Thinking Hats. He also had, I believe, a book called Lateral Thinking, which I found helpful. I don't know how those would age for me if I read them now, right? Sometimes it's like, I'm like, oh God, you haven't seen this movie I haven't seen in 20 years? Let's watch it. And within 10 minutes, I'm like, oh God, this is not as good as I remember. there are definitely others like well it's very un-pc but airplane and others that actually do age i'm trying to remember what the other hats are i haven't like looked at this in such a long time because i feel like we just sort of i can't recall what the specifics are i mean if i had to guess i'm imagining one is like analytical by the numbers one is like emotional i mean i'm imagining there's probably some version of that it stuck out to me because i was like that's really interesting that this book, which not a lot of people reference, actually also popped up in both of our timelines professionally.

2:03:44Tim Ferriss:That's super interesting. All right. Radical Candor. Okay. Kim Scott. It's like Tim, Adam Grant, Kim Scott. These are like Mount Rushmore for me. Kim Scott, I mean, is just phenomenal. I mean, I thought Radical Candor, and I know many of these works have been critiqued and refreshed in many ways. But her quad chart of how to provide feedback to people was really instrumental to me because effectively what happened was I quit my job when I was 23. I'd never made it to him. I mean, at 23, like a managerial position in a corporate setting. So I never had any manager training. Could you give an example of how Kim's teaching or frameworks look when applied?

2:04:37Tim Ferriss:For an example. Yes. Kim talks about four types of management and giving feedback to people. And the quadrant I identify with the most is ruinous empathy, which is the idea of you are so nice to everyone around you that when you need to give critical feedback to someone, they might leave the meeting feeling like, wait, am I actually doing great? I don't know, because you're sandwiching compliments or downplaying the critique and you're not direct enough. And so transforming that into radical candor is about being more direct with feedback. And so some of the things that Kim has helped me very applicably work through are workshopping, giving critical feedback to people and hearing live feedback from her on cut out that sentence that's fluff you know like that is so amazing i think an applicable setting here or an example of this would be let's say we have a collaborator on set who's very very good at what they do but they don't compliment or uplift other people when they do a great job.

2:05:56Tim Ferriss:Good at execution, maybe a little prickly around the edges. Just a little prickly or internally they're thinking that person is doing a great job, but they're not vocalizing it. And so it creates an environment on set where everyone's like, oh, does this person not like what I'm doing? So stepping in as a manager of the feedback, it's a tough piece of feedback because how do you say dude I just need you to go out of your way and provide positive feedback to people and it can be as simple as that but what Kim for example taught me in that specific situation is communication exists on two wavelengths it is first of all the wavelength of communicating the need the tactical information but there's another wavelength that's equally as important, which is the emotional component.

2:06:49And so being able to define that with that person and say, hey, you're doing a great job communicating, but there's an emotional side you're completely missing that's actually really important to that communication was really helpful because it provided necessary value to that action for that person rather than just like, so I got to like tell people they're doing a good job. Like I got to take an hour out of my day and sending nice emails.

2:07:16Tim Ferriss:Giving them the why. Exactly. Exactly. What is your, and this could include full-time and contractors. What is your org chart look like, so to speak? What is the team? Yes. I mean, I remember reading for our work weekend and the whole virtual assistant chapter blew my mind. We do have someone in Singapore, which is funny. Our internal team full-time is intentionally tight. It's seven full-time staff. So that is myself, Garrett, who's the chief creative officer, Nick, head of production, three editors, and an assistant for me. But we have what I call a slinky operation where that's where it is when it's tight.

2:08:02But when we get ready to do a big project, it balloons up very quickly. But what's cool is all of the people that are on the internal team are department heads. So when it's time to recreate the Mission Impossible stunt, each of us know how to staff up camera team of seven people, stunt team of six people, and build that out to a team of 50 who come in to do that one specific project, and then we slink you back down.

2:08:32Tim Ferriss:And your head of production would be responsible for the scoping and finding and hiring of those people? Sometimes. Also, just within our entire team, we're all very connected and embedded in the industry. So the team I just mentioned is pretty much half people from the traditional entertainment world. Nick, for example, the head of production, came from working at Broadway Video under Lorne Michaels and did Taco Bell Super Bowl commercials. So he understands feature film, high-budget commercial world. Then people like myself or our editor, Ryan Gonzalez, we come from the digital first world. So our training was at a content studio where it was fast output, but you know how to do everything.

2:09:21And so bringing those worlds together is a really special and cool environment, intentionally set because that is exactly the midpoint I want to occupy is the bridge between the two worlds.

2:09:34Tim Ferriss:And I'm curious how you suppose the sort of context upon my question is how you separate responsibilities in a sense with the understanding that on a small team you're going to end up wearing a lot of hats not to be confused with Edward de Bono but when shit needs getting done people are going to roll up their sleeves and kind of I imagine at that size do whatever but for instance on the you could pick the episode, right? So it could be any episode, but where do your responsibilities say, how are they different from chief creative officer as one example? So we have a giant spreadsheet called the areas of responsibility chart, which I learned from a book called the great CEO within again, I'm trying to learn all this Silicon Valley management stuff on my own.

2:10:21I even called my YouTube partner manager and I was like, can I please sit in on the YouTube corporate management training the next time it happens? And she said, I couldn't. So I'm trying to piecemeal it all for myself and learn from people like you and Kim. But in that book, it details actually making a giant chart that outlines every single action that the company takes. And this can go from, in our case, something as big as decides if brand deal is worth taking, all the way down to takes out the trash. Who is going to be doing all these things? So this is, I think, hundreds of responsibilities.

2:11:07Tim Ferriss:So what would be some, just so I understand, because it's not a role that I'm familiar with, like chief creative officer? So for chief creative officer in this chart, for Garrett. Garrett's role as a whole within the company is to define the creative tone and thesis of everything that we do. So he is overseeing story for each of the episodes. He's directing the episodes in post, but he's also making sure that if we're updating our brand book or we're having our Emmys for your consideration event in a couple of weeks, he is going through all of the marketing materials and confirming, yes, this fits the tone and the style of Challenge Accepted.

2:11:46This tells one cohesive story. What we don't want is a channel or a show that is chaotic or unpredictable. Exactly. We wanted to hit a certain level of quality of storytelling. So for Garrett, that means on a macro level, overseeing those decisions, but also on a micro level approving edits and directing edits to make sure the stories we're telling hit that bar of excellence too so he's sort of like chief creative officer and chief storyteller in a way

2:12:17Tim Ferriss:and then head of production what percentage of the time for head of production is spent on kind of in production episodes versus pre-planning beforehand and post-production would you say oh that's hard i would need to ask nick exactly but nick primarily spends when we green light an episode and it's we're now in preparation to go shoot it a lot of his time is spent assembling the crew getting insurance permissions in the case of the seven marathons project we did where we ran seven marathons on all seven continents in one week he was handling all the logistics of the local crews we were working with say that is we the royal we i mean it was it was a team effort it was a team effort many people did it besides me but of course there is a certain level of physical brutality i can't i i did it yeah with the help of an amazing team and he's also figuring out permissions and cash flow working with our branded partners.

2:13:27So he's sort of touching many things, more like including head of ops in a way, I would say. So the physical operation of the company itself. When you look out three or five

2:13:42Tim Ferriss:years, I imagine you've thought about this because to the best I can tell you do like planning and spreadsheets and editorial calendars. So I imagine that you've given this some thought, but strikes me that this, I mean, this is a very demanding job that you have and the company and the kind of strategic vision and where you go can go in a lot of different directions. So like three to five years from now, what would you be happy with in terms of what your life and the channel looks like? And maybe the channel is too constraining, but I'm just wondering like three, five years out, understanding a lot of things can change technologically and otherwise.

2:14:27Tim Ferriss:But what does it look like? What does it look like? Yeah. You have a magic wand and you're like, okay. I have a magic wand. To some extent, I want to preserve the option that it'll turn out this way. Bing. Ooh. It's worth noting that I'm so privileged to be happy now. I love what I do. I love how our industry is evolving. I love being a part of that evolution of when you hear the word content creator, what that means, and the social expectation of what that profession is. I'm really, really proud of and excited for the future of the evolution of that and the convergence specifically of traditional and digital.

2:15:11A future for myself, first of all, I want to be doing this as long as I possibly can. I look to people like Tom Cruise, David Blaine, Jeff Probst again. They're in their 50s and 60s and they have just decided they're going to keep going. Richard Branson, he going out there. And I find that exciting and inspiring. And also I look forward to a world where the names of the people that I just mentioned are all men. And I look forward to helping lengthen the list of women who have longevity and careers like this too. So I think a future for me external to the channel is participating in that bridge, supporting legacy studios and companies and understanding our world and helping burgeoning creators find inspiration and solace and a path forward in a very seemingly nebulous career.

2:16:13I love sharing with other creators the wins and the learnings and don't do what I did. Here's my Google Excel spreadsheet. Skip all of the stuff I had to learn. And so that mentorship component of giving trajectory and systems to younger creators is really, really important to me and something I'm passionate about. In addition to having to lead by example and practicing what I preach, I look forward to the next three to five years because I know that's the sphere of where I'm headed. That's where our arrow is headed. I don't know where the arrow is going to land very specifically, but I am so excited about the ride.

2:16:57All right.

2:16:57Tim Ferriss:I'm going to be the detective here for a second. not in a oh do you have a magnifying glass not in a spooky way well I do have my brand new fancy spectacles but part of the reason I'm asking is that you have to make decisions around how many episodes you pursue how much they overlap and for instance against my quote unquote better financial interest there was a point where I had decided well in my best interest I realized pretty quickly Well, I make X amount per episode of the podcast, especially during the golden era of 2020 COVID and the two or three years that was just an absurd embarrassment of riches for anyone who was doing something reasonably defensible.

2:17:48Tim Ferriss:At that point, I was like, well, four is pretty easy for me to do per month. Okay. If I want to increase the annual revenue of this thing, which is very high profit margins, to do things with the foundation and my employees and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I could just do two more episodes a month. Easy. And if I wanted to double it, I can do eight. There are other ways you can double it. And I've looked at those levers too. But suffice to say, it was very self-evident to me at the time that it was going to be very easy to grow if I so wanted it to grow. So I ended up at different points doing six, seven, eight episodes a month or doing different types of batch recording.

2:18:28Tim Ferriss:And then a few things happened, right? About two or three months into doing this, yes, there were more financial resources to bring to bear on like the funding science through the foundation and many other things. We could do fancy off-sites for the team and fly to these very like far-flung, fun, exotic places. Yes, which we can still do. But what I started to notice is there was this very subtle energetic change. I wasn't exhausted, but I started maybe dragging my feet a little bit. I started to feel, I noticed when I put a fine point on it, that it was becoming a J-O-B in the unpleasant sense.

2:19:10Tim Ferriss:Does that make sense? It's very, very easy for this to happen in people who have small operations that are not dependent on, or in some cases, like venture financing or something like that. And I also recognized that I could make it work by, in my case, batching these episodes together. But when I batched them together, I didn't actually get to retain and study and use and apply what I was learning from these people in these conversations. It's a really fatiguing day. Yeah, or week. And so I decided that I would step back to four or five a month. And I'm in a fortunate financial position to be able to make that type of decision.

2:19:52But it was really important for not just the longevity of the podcast, which is now 11

2:19:59Tim Ferriss:years or 12 years, whatever it is, but my enjoyment of it. and I'm just curious how you think about what drives the actual work product of the show because your priorities may change. I have no idea, right? It's like for some people, it's like if they're thinking about family, then you have family consideration. You also have the professional motivations. You can end up getting driven by your team in some cases where it's like you want to offer them the opportunity for advancement and increased scope and so on, but that can end up steering the ship sometimes. So there are a lot of pitfalls that are hard to spot because they are gradual in terms of their onset.

2:20:44Tim Ferriss:So I'm curious how you think about the actual work schedule, the number of episodes, the amount you take on, because I hear all the top-level priorities, which are awesome, and the vision for three to five years. I think you can do all of those things. Oh, thank God. but tell me if you don't think it's possible well I don't think it's possible if the show ends up taking on lots of features and obligations and scope creep I agree and splintering that just removes the time and energy required to do those things I have a lot of empathy with what you're saying about oh I can just fit in one more recording I can fit in one more shoot day I mean even separate of the channel this didn't impact the channel, but last year I was on a plane 73 times, maybe not that high for many of the guests who have been in this chair.

2:21:40It was a record for me, at least.

2:21:42Tim Ferriss:That's a lot of flights. It's a lot of flights. And I told Kim this and she said, how many vacations did you go on? And I couldn't answer it. You know, I can think that's a sign. I did a couple things, but she gave me some advice at the beginning of this year. She's like, the next time you're sent abroad, your assignment is, and I need someone to say your assignment is for me to take it seriously. Your assignment is, you need to take at least six hours of a day. You don't have to stay an entire extra day. Take six hours of a day to do something for yourself. I did this last week. I was in Italy for a speaking engagement and my friend Olivia and I took six hours and we saw the whole city and it was incredible.

2:22:24and I think that avoiding the scope creep is something we've had to be very very precise about as you mentioned there are so many shiny objects around like you should just do this collab and start a merch line or even in our world there's a temptation of promote this product and big check comes in well I don't know if I agree with this product and maybe I won't do it and I think being really brutal about if I don't protect this, all of it falls apart. I don't, not in a way of fragility, but in a sense of if I take the brand deal for a lot of money, for the thing I'm not a hundred percent on, it fractures trustworthiness.

2:23:09That, as we both know, is something that cannot be bought back. It's so precious to what we're doing. Or even the idea of we've had so many people come to us say, we'll license the Challenge Accepted brand and we'll start a kids channel and we'll run the whole thing for you. And these pitches sound great on paper when I know I'm not going to like the first few things you do. I'm going to have to get in the weeds. I'm going to have to be giving feedback. And you know what? I don't have time for that. I have to remain really focused on the tip of the spear, which is making Challenge Accepted the best show it possibly can for all of the reasons that are emotionally important to me, financially important to the team, and socially important to our industry.

2:23:53So we've had to say no a lot, which I know you've been writing a lot about recently. But the saying of no is something I'm still learning how to do. And I think that has been why the show has lasted so long. I have never, I'm literally knocking on wood, I don't even know if this is real, with? Knocking on wood right now. I've never experienced creator burnout in the way that many of my colleagues have. Many of my colleagues have had a time where they hit the wall and have to take months off entirely. That's never happened to me because all along the way, it's been a fast growth, but still slow and steady.

2:24:38You can look at the growth of our channel and it's not like I blew up on TikTok overnight. It's been slow and steady. And for that, I feel fortunate because I've had the slowness to be able to make those adjustments, to acknowledge scope creep, where I'm being asked for more things and still learning how to practice that better.

2:24:59Tim Ferriss:A few thoughts pop into my head. The first is that more so than with most, I actually have, I'm very confident that you'll figure it out. And I'll tell you why. The first is that not that I'm like, who the fuck am I? I'm just saying I've like, there've been a lot of people in that chair and I've met with a lot of creators and writers and so on of different types. Number one is that you have an inbuilt novelty in the format of the show, right? So a lot of the YouTubers I run into who are just crashing and burning, they have a few things stacked against them. One, they chose something that was interesting to them five or ten years ago, but it is a fairly narrow lane.

2:25:43Tim Ferriss:And at some point, they get tired of being that person. Or they pretended to be something in the beginning, and they got a lot of positive feedback, and they're fatigued because they're wearing a mask. And there's more to it. There's audience capture issues and other things. But you have an inbuilt novelty in the nature of the show itself. Every episode, my whole life changes. Right now I'm training for Taekwondo Nationals. I'm going to take a flight back to LA and go to Taekwondo training for three hours tonight. Every day is different and varied and interesting. And I feel lucky that my life changes frequently to adjust for that.

2:26:24Tim Ferriss:So this is something I wanted to take a moment to point out because willpower, discipline, all these things, yes, they sound great. And I agree with a lot of folks that ultimately systems beat like certainly dreams and even goals i mean you have to have an idea of where you want to head but inherent to what you chose to do there's a kind of cycling and rejuvenation to it yeah i just wanted to highlight that because it's a feature of what you chose to do it's not just something you have to fit in in the empty pockets with something that is uniform from start to finish, right? So I think that's one thing I wanted to mention.

2:27:05And then separately,

2:27:07Tim Ferriss:this is an anecdote, right? Guest lecturing you mentioned. So the guest lectures at Princeton High Tech Entrepreneurship that turned into the 4-Hour Workweek, the notes from that class, was based on a talk initially called Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit because my first company was sports nutrition. The through line of that lecture from start to finish because I was one of the few entrepreneurs my professor invited, maybe the only one who bootstrapped. Everyone else was venture backed, right? And that's why it was interesting to him. Ed is Ed Schau, an amazing guy. I've had him on the podcast.

2:27:40Tim Ferriss:So I don't think I have anything to offer. I'm only a few years out of college. I'm bootstrapping this thing. It's a lot smaller than any of the other companies that get highlighted by these CEOs or taking companies public, et cetera. And he said, well, that's kind of the point. You're closer to the students so they can see emulating or borrowing from what you're doing more easily than they can someone who's 20 years older and has taken four companies public. And aligned with your through line of owning everything you do. That's really special. Yeah, owning. Yeah, exactly. And there are times for debt and venture and all that stuff.

2:28:15I'm just constitutionally allergic to it.

2:28:19Tim Ferriss:It doesn't make me feel safe and pleasant. So I generally avoid those things. I didn't even have a credit card until a few years after college because I thought foolishly that if you have no debt, you're going to have good credit. That's just not how it works. So I had to get credit cards. I have never carried a balance except for like a short, very short period. The reason I bring that up though is that it changed over time. Two times per year, it's guest lecture. It's kind of followed what I was learning. The one thing that never changed was how I started it. And how I started it every time is I'd say, how many people here want to be a salesperson?

2:28:54Tim Ferriss:And this is Princeton, right? It's an electrical engineering, operations, research, finance class, and no one raises their hand. They're like, salespeople? Yuck. And I'm like, okay, how many people here want to be good at negotiating? Every hand goes up. I'm like, okay, how many people here want to be good deal makers? Almost every hand goes up. I'm like, guess what? They're all the same thing. Good news, bad news. You're all going to have to be salespeople. It's true. It's true. Whether you're selling a position, whether you're selling yourself as a romantic partner, whether you are trying to persuade someone of anything and everything, the skill set is the same, right?

2:29:34Tim Ferriss:And because you have that ability and you also have the, you've honed the ability to communicate with the cold emails and everything else, you have a lot of practice with that. And you have someone like Kim Scott in your corner on the honesty, you can't take it too far, but like honesty above people pleasing. This, what did you call it? It was the, not insidious empathy, but something close. Ruinous empathy. Ruinous empathy. That is where I tend to lean also or have historically. and if you are trapped in that quadrant and you start to see the ship heading towards this iceberg of burnout for you personally or overall, you're kind of fucked.

2:30:17Tim Ferriss:Like that's not the time to learn how to steer the ship, which means these other quadrants. You write about that in your upcoming book too about how when you say yes to everything, you become resentful towards other people when it's actually you creating the problem. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to be diving back into the placeholder name, but the notebook, 850 pages. That's going to get hacked down. It's going to be just as a teaser. It makes me so happy. I literally just got a text about this two days ago. I've had quite a few test readers read that book and it's rough around the edges, but they read this book like six months ago, a year ago.

2:30:54Tim Ferriss:And they text me to be like, look at how I am still using this stuff. So I'm excited to get it out because it's, as we were talking about template emails and so on, it's really tactical. It's not just hand-wavy stuff. So I'm excited about it. But you have sort of these... And I promise I'll buy it. I won't steal it on accident. I'm okay with stealing my books. Well, I mean, it's not okay because you're stealing it from someone else, but... Correct. It was not stolen from a Barnes & Noble. It was stolen from the desk of a co-worker. Yeah, so I have confidence you'll figure it out because you have the toolkit for correction.

2:31:27Tim Ferriss:And I think part of what a lot of folks miss about saying no it's not like saying no is a lot like working out it's not like you figure it out and you do it for a week or two and then your problems are solved it's a practice it's a practice not only a practice but 99.9 percent of the population sure there are a few exceptions but are going to fall off the wagon occasionally so the question is how do you get back on the wagon right so in the case of say a book on no like a lot of the book is case studies of people and their toolkits for renegotiating it's like if you're reading the book it probably means you say yes to too much stuff and over commit you're probably still going to do that it's kind of like aa and alcoholics like right like once an addict always an addict like you're probably going to do that again so the question isn't how do i avoid it permanently from this point forward it's how do you actually correct it?

2:32:23Tim Ferriss:And how do you renegotiate commitments? How do you cancel things? Which is arguably harder than saying no out the gate. Once you've committed to something. It is. It's basically signing up for long-term pain instead of short-term pain. But you're going to deal with both. Which is why, you know, Kim Scott and Kim's teachings are so valuable. I have to recommend, I don't know if it was with respect to Kim specifically, but A.J. Jacobs, who I mentioned earlier, wrote this long Esquire piece. called and his poor wife it's but the title of it is called i think you're fat and it's like 30 days of experimentation with radical honesty or something like that oh yeah yeah i saw him give a presentation last fall and he included yeah and i think you're fat is like when his wife was like how do i look in this dress and also you know point is his wife has put up with so much with his experiments she's like are you even listening to me and he's and He's like, no, honestly, I stopped listening five minutes ago and I'm thinking about A, B, and C.

2:33:24Tim Ferriss:Oh, what a saint his wife is. But also makes for pretty good reading because everything in excess kind of becomes its opposite. I want to kind of talk about wishlist stuff because you never know who's listening to this podcast. You just never know. I am constantly surprised. Maybe you can give some backstory, but have you met Mindy Kaling yet? I have not met our Lord and Savior, Mindy Kaling. Okay. Why did I even come across this? I know why you came across this. And it is because my first Twitter handle was at Mindy Kaling fan. I think it's since changed to my name. It's normal now. And I think I've deleted all the tweets.

2:34:07Maybe I would love to meet Mindy Kaling one day when we're talking about wishlist items for a few reasons. I feel like we have sort of traveled the same path in different flavors. We went to the same college. I obviously admire her work. We're both Indian women in entertainment. And seeing someone like her on a show like The Office was instrumental to me as someone from Shreveport, Louisiana, who didn't see someone like me on Disney Channel. And I think that's why the mentality I had of approaching a job like this was so black hat, if we're going to go back to that. I was very negative on the idea of doing something in entertainment because I didn't see a path or an example forward for someone like me.

2:35:00And factually, that's incorrect. I mean, there's a very thriving industry of Bollywood and there are many amazing women in entertainment. it. But something shifted for me when I saw her success and felt that parallel path of we're going to the same school and seeing how she took her opportunity at the office and spun it into her own production company and new shows that continued to uplift and elevate female-centered stories, I think is incredible. And something that I look up to often when I think about how I started at a media company and am now doing my own thing and hoping to shift culture and expectation of what it means to be an Indian woman in entertainment and also what it means to be a content creator on the internet.

2:35:46I love upending people's expectations. It's one of my secret favorite things to do. I love when people hear that I'm a YouTuber and then they go watch Challenge Accepted and are pleasantly hopefully pleasantly surprised by what they see and wouldn't expect that maybe from someone on the platform and I think about how she and Shonda Rhimes and other incredible showrunners have done that

2:36:14Tim Ferriss:Alright Mindy if you're listening Mindy and there are definitely a few people on or who have been on this podcast like PJ Novak who know Mindy so if you guys are listening I'm obsessed with both of them Like as a unit. Yeah, BJ is incredible. BJ is also incredible. I mean, the office, I mean, there are a few examples like this, but it's kind of like the PayPal mafia where you're like, how did all these people come out of this? How is it even possible that this density of talent was in one place at the same time? It's crazy. Let me ask a question, right? Let's just say Mindy's listening. She's like, maybe I'll check her out.

2:36:54Tim Ferriss:Which episode should she start with? Okay, let me think. And that applies more broadly to people listening, but where should Mindy go? This is a really tough question. For Mindy specifically, I'm going to recommend, I tried Tom Cruise's Deadliest Stunt because Mindy is in the Hollywood world. And I think that's the most Hollywood episode we've done. It's an episode where I strapped myself to the side of a C-130 to become the first person to recreate the stunt that Tom did for the Mission Impossible franchise, and I truly am hanging off the side of a plane. And what's interesting about that story is not just the stunt, which is cool, of course, but it's an amazing story of being an underdog.

2:37:41The only people who have accomplished this previously are literally Tom Cruise and Paramount Studio. And so to come at it from our angle was me sending more crazy cold emails. It was calling foreign militaries at three in the morning asking if they would lend us a plane. Those are the phone calls I'm making. And additionally, when you're doing something that's only been done once before, or in some cases has never been done before, you have to get really creative with the training and testing, which maybe you experienced in all of your work too. How do you prepare your body to do something like that?

2:38:17And it led us to training in wind tunnels. But even more interestingly, I had to go to a specialized optometrist who fabricated custom scleral contact lenses for me to wear. Because for the stunt, you don't wear goggles. And so there was a dedicated person on set called a lens technician. And his only job was to insert and remove these massive contact lenses that went over my eyes. because when you're up there at multi-hundred mile per hour winds, even just a tiny pebble could blind you. So I think it's a really cool story of being a little bit of an underdog and accomplishing something great in an unexpected way.

2:39:00So I hope you watch it, Mindy. Amazing.

2:39:03Tim Ferriss:All right. This is going to sound, it's a non sequitur slash sequitur, but people should study, take a look at peregrine falcons and how their eyes and noses and nostrils are, evolved. It's fucking wild. And aircraft have actually been designed based on Peregrine Falcon evolved. Why do I feel like you've spent a week in Mongolia training falconry? I would love to do that. I had my first experience with falconry on New Year's Day this year. So it's fresh in my mind. I got to work with some amazing hawks. There are different birds that are appropriate for different levels of training. And it's not necessarily the easiest bird.

2:39:43Tim Ferriss:In some cases, they're going to give you slightly more stubborn or difficult birds because if you have a very easy bird, you don't actually develop the trainer technique that you need to use for a spectrum of birds. It would be kind of like, if you give everyone a really intrinsically motivated, high-energy dog like a Belgian Malinois to train that is like bred for being very, very, very, very trainable, you're going to develop a false sense of confidence around your ability to do that with other breeds. So yes, I'm interested in falconry. Have you seen that meme that went viral recently that's like, you hit a certain age and all of a sudden you're obsessed with birds.

2:40:25Tim Ferriss:That's really funny. Maybe that's what's going on. Next thing you know, I'll just like smoking a pipe on a porch talking about World War II all the time. I don't know. There you go. That's in your future, Tim. Worst things could happen. I want to ask more episode questions, but before we do that, anyone else that you'd like to sort of invoke? Like any other partners, companies, people, anything that you'd like to check out your work? This is such a special opportunity to do that. You know, there are many people I would love to meet. And generally, as we move into this really exciting new chapter for the company and content creators in general, I'm excited to meet with anyone from traditional media who is excited to join forces.

2:41:13So that's just like a general statement. But if I have one shout out, here's the shout out I'm going to ask for. The Royal Nanny School in England.

2:41:24Tim Ferriss:You've been working on this one for a while. We have wanted the Norlin College. We're your biggest fans. We've been wanting to collaborate for years. if you see this, hit me up. Incredible. Okay, let me tell you about the Norlin nannies. You're going to appreciate this time. I'm ready. You know, Mary Poppins, the silhouette with the pleated skirt and the little hat. It is based off of a real school called the Norlin College, where these are the nannies that are trained to serve billionaires and royal families. And they wear that outfit. So you look at footage from this school And it's literally they're wearing this outfit and hat, pushing a pram stroller while also wielding a gun because they have to protect the kids.

2:42:12So they know defensive driving. It's like Secret Service meets Butler Academy, which you shouted out in the Five Bullet Friday. So it's two amazing worlds coming together. I think more people need to know about it. So I'm very passionate about it.

2:42:27Tim Ferriss:And I imagine the fact that they're like, no, thank you. we don't need that makes you just want it that much more of course it does tip but also i respect it yeah what have we been talking about saying no so i have to respect when someone else says no too but also just letting you know we're still available still interested and excited love you guys from far big fan of your episodes when you look back and you can't say all of them that's disallowed that answer is no good no fly which if you did not have a youtube channel but you had a thriving career so you had some money. Which of those you can pick two or three of the experiences that you would pay to have looking back?

2:43:08That I would do again in a heartbeat?

2:43:10Tim Ferriss:Yeah, do again. Or you're like, okay, I only get to pick two or three. But I would absolutely pay for these if I had to. I would pick, first of all, the black belt challenge. So as this video, I had 90 days to try and get a black belt in Taekwondo. Part of this came from a personal passion of having done all of these stunts and working with a lot of stunt performers. All of them come from world-class martial arts backgrounds. And I realized I had never actually taken the time to learn a martial art from the ground up and that it was lacking in my performance and mental fortitude. and I wanted to experience that.

2:43:58So what do I do? I make it a challenge so that I can devote my whole life to it. And that experience changed me. When I look at clear before and after, you know, from having put your body through a lot, there are moments when you have a photo before and after. My body changed. But there are moments in life when you as a person change before and after. And that can't be captured by a photo always. That was one of those for me. getting to study with Grandmaster Simon Ray, one of the greatest martial artists on planet Earth, took me under his wing and did what most instructors would have never done, which is believe in me and push me to try and actually get a black belt in 90 days.

2:44:43And we're talking about politeness. I think martial arts has taught me all of that. When you bow to the mat before you step on, when you, yes sir, yes ma 'am, everything, it might sound gimmicky to someone on the outside, but it does become a practice and an automation and a way of life. And that's something I'm really proud of as a now black belt and grateful for it. I would pay to do that again. And in fact, I am because we're doing a sequel. So I am paying to do it again. I'm trying to qualify for nationals this year with Master E. So I'm very excited about it. I would recommend it to anybody.

2:45:19The other one I was going to say that I would pay to do again for the experience I had ultimately, not when I was going through it, is the Houdini challenge. So for that, I had six weeks to learn how to hold my breath and pick locks to attempt Houdini's water torture cell, which famously is hanging upside down in a glass box filled to the brim with water, escaping a series of lock picks with one breath of air. And that, I would say, is probably among the most physically challenging challenges I've done. Free diving, breath holding is a level of athleticism that is so bizarre to me because when you're in a workout class and it gets hard, they say, keep breathing.

2:46:08This is the one time you can't do that because you're holding your breath. So I was having to learn how to push through that, you know, having breath hold time of ultimately I got to 3.30 and most Navy SEALs is like two, three minutes is pretty good. Houdini's best time was also 3.30. But on the production side, it was a really fascinating challenge because it was the first time we creatively designed our own obstacle and solution. So in the beginning, we spent months trying to connect with other magicians on earth who own a water torture cell. There are not many. And ultimately, we came to the conclusion of designing our own, which was really, really incredible and creatively challenging.

2:46:58How do you create a glass box that can be filled with so many gallons of water and maintain the structural integrity when there's a person inside and function with all the locks and the hinges with water as an involved substance. It was a huge, huge engineering challenge for our team. And I'm really, really proud of the final result because both of those things are things I would have never guessed that like 2016 me would have been able to do. First of all, holding my breath that long. Second of all, taking the creative liberty to design something that was inspired by a work of history, but also our own.

2:47:39Tim Ferriss:Next question. So this one you may not want to answer because I understand, I would understand why. I have a little bit more freedom in answering this for myself. So I can also go first and buy some time. Challenge accepted. Let's hear it. Yeah. So which one would you pay not to do again? Oh gosh. One or two. And the one I would say for me just to offer it up is, and holy shit, did I make a mistake. This was episode one of the Tim Ferris experiment in terms of filming. Okay. And we keep in mind, we had, I think it was 11 or 13 episodes or 10 or 13 episodes that we filmed in that number of weeks.

2:48:15Tim Ferriss:So, I mean, it was every week we were filming. As a viewer, I never realized that it was 13 consecutive weeks. It was consecutive weeks. That's crazy. And the first one was parkour. And there were a couple of inherent problems with that. Number one, even if you tried to prepare your body for it, the impact of falling onto hard surfaces is very hard to train your body for, even over the course of say a year with proper technique because of the connective tissue adaptations and sort of ligament and tendon adaptations that need to take place, which require quite a bit of time. Secondly, the promise of the show was I haven't cheated.

2:48:58Tim Ferriss:So it's like, I can't pre-prepare for it if I'm showing what it's like to start from zero. And I am still contending with injuries from that week. No way. To this day. Wow. You guys shot that at Tempest, right? What was that? Yeah. Tempest? Amazing gym. Incredible. I mean, those guys are amazing. Tempest free running. Check it out. It's incredible. Yeah. But I will say I have like dropped from the monkey bars and pulled my back. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, I ended up tearing multiple heads of the quadricep in both legs. And then you continued filming for 12 weeks after. For 12 more weeks. And that included the Yabusami episode.

2:49:42Tim Ferriss:No, you know, the Yabusami episode is actually from a totally different TV show. A pilot of which was filmed right after the first book came out. It might have even been before. I think it was right after the first book came out. so that was a completely separate thing with like a production company in singapore it was kind of wonky to be honest but the abu salmi was way earlier back when i had hair or a little bit of hair i was white knuckling okay because all of my experience transparently of the show has been in like online rips because it's many of this material is no longer available yeah all of the Team First Experiment stuff.

2:50:19Tim Ferriss:I got the rights back for a launch on iTunes as it was called back then. And it was the number one nonfiction show when it launched for a while, which I was very happy about, although it was excruciating. You can imagine talking about negotiating with like a big behemoth where you just don't really have any leverage whatsoever. Oh, yeah. And they were helpful, but a lot of employee changes and so on that made it difficult. And then ultimately getting the rights back completely so I could just release it for free on YouTube. But which would you pay not to do? Any come to mind? What would I pay not to do?

2:50:57I have a few answers for this, actually. First one is chess. And again, I recognize the people who have sat in this chair. I feel like 99.9 % of people in the Tim Ferriss sphere, everybody plays chess. Everybody is on chess.com. When you go to these entrepreneur events. There's always a chess board. Everyone loves chess. So I feel a little shameful saying this. Chess was very challenging for me.

2:51:20Tim Ferriss:There are plenty of people on this show who don't like chess, including people who used to be professional players. Really? Oh my goodness. Now I loved many aspects of it, but the challenge for that was originally I had one month to prepare for a competition and I did the month of training. I got to the competition. I didn't do as well as I had wanted. And something about the episode just felt empty. And I think you and I both know this, you know, when you haven't gone the distance with something, you haven't given it your all. And I knew that deep down. So I continued training for nine more months, 10 months in total, I believe, to achieve this goal of my ELO rating and finally did it.

2:51:59And I was like, I'm good. I am so good on the London system, all this stuff. Like I was studying so hard and I'm so glad I did it, but I'm good to be a casual chess player. Good to be a casual chess player. I think the other one I don't think I'll do again is one that hasn't come out yet, which makes it interesting. I suppose the most challenging physical thing I've ever done is the seven marathons on seven continents in one week, which is going to be coming out this April. The three-part series on the channel. We're so excited about it. Specifically within that, the Antarctica marathon is something I probably won't do again.

2:52:43People got frostbite when we were out there. It was insane. I'm sure they did. But the sneaky sleeper marathon is... Most people think Antarctica is the worst when they hear about this challenge. But the sneaky one is marathon number six, which is in Columbia. And the reason this one is so crazy is because historically people have gone to the hospital from heat exposure. It's marathon number six. You have five other marathons in your body that you have done in the five previous days before. And they actually scheduled this marathon to happen overnight to try and avoid the sun. But because our flight was slightly delayed, we started around 3 a.m.

2:53:28And that meant we were literally racing against the sunrise. And the slower you go, the more heat exposure you have. So it was like 100 % humidity. It's so hot. And psychologically, you feel like you're at the finish line because tomorrow's the finale. Tomorrow's Miami. Tomorrow's race number seven. But really number six. is the unexpected one. Yeah.

2:53:56Tim Ferriss:Yeah. That sounds brutal. What's crazy about that is there are the most unexpected people who do this marathon. Like, okay, there was a guy, you're not going to believe this. There was a guy named Adrian for whom his first marathon he ever ran was marathon one of that week. He like knew some of the race organizers and just decided to come along. And originally he was going to run half marathons and just decided I'm going to go for the fulls. That's crazy to do your very first marathon as in a week where you're going to do seven. So that was nuts. Yeah, there are, you know, there are sort of breeds and then there are breeds also.

2:54:37Tim Ferriss:I mean, there are mutants for each of these disciplines, right? There are mutants for all these disciplines we've discussed. And you meet some folks and you mentioned Stuntwork on Avatar, right? But like, I remember you know I've met people who are like professional high jumpers and I'm just looking at them and I'm like we are not the same species no just like your attachment points and like where your Achilles is different everything is different and that's true for every discipline including chess of course there's an 83 year old man named Dan Little who does this event it's it was his fourth time doing it.

2:55:16Tim Ferriss:The seven and seven? Seven and seven. He's done it four times. He's 83 years old. This guy named Dan from Oklahoma. And just the most incredible person you'll ever meet. Like so joyful and excited. He's the last person on course every day. You take seven or eight hours to do the full marathon and he is smiling the whole time. And I think that's one of the coolest things about our jobs is perspective. The people you meet, it really redials your compass. Yeah. I mean, if you're the average of the people you spend the most time with, it's like choose those people really carefully, you know? Yeah.

2:55:58Tim Ferriss:And I mean, the older I get, it's not that surprising, but the more I enjoy spending time with people who are doing things like that, not necessarily that in that much of an extreme, but it could be like Arthur Brooks, like who we were just talking about, because there was some footage from a prior interview of mine up there. He's a busy guy or Adam Grant, right? But they take fantastic care of themselves. And particularly with each passing year, it seems as you get older, the sort of entropy that leads people to gather and just complain about their new aches and pains or how little time they have or how busy they are with the kids, whatever it might be, increases.

2:56:37Tim Ferriss:And I try and I've succeeded. Fortunately, I have a lot of friends who are counterexamples. And I'm like, okay, if there's only one counterexample in the world, okay, well, maybe it's just sort of inevitable. And I'm like, hey, if I've gathered five to 10 close friends who are all counterexamples, that's something you can do. Because all of these people from a personality perspective, from a life perspective, from a financial perspective, very different, which means like if you want it badly enough, you can be the counter example. And I find that super uplifting. Let me ask a couple of very quick questions and then we'll land this plan.

2:57:13Okay. This has been so fun.

2:57:16Tim Ferriss:Yeah. I'm really happy to spend time together. You mentioned McMillions. Other favorite documentaries. I know you like documentaries. Are there any other documentaries that stand out to you? My favorite one is Free Solo. So good. Alex Honnold, what you doing? Talking about counterexamples here. I am just endlessly inspired by him as a person. And I think Jimmy Chin's work directing, filming, it's just outstanding given the care and the sensitivity of the subject nature and how he executed it. Yeah. So for people who maybe watched the recent live Netflix climbing of... Taipei. Taipei. Go watch Free Solo if you haven't seen it.

2:58:01Tim Ferriss:And fun fact, I actually interviewed Alex about six months before he did his Free Solo Ascent of El Cap. I just got chills. And he was in that white van that is in the movie and freaked me out because he like parked outside of my house. And I was like, who's in this like creepy van with no windows parked in front of my house? And it's also before he got media training. So if you want to see like pre-polish Alex, and I want to give a nod also, Free Soul is an amazing movie, to Chai Vasarely. So Chai is married to Jimmy Chin. She is, I mean, in a lot of ways, the filmmaker. Jimmy, obviously, without his expertise and these crazy complicated rigs and the ability to climb and actually be suspended around Alex and so on.

2:58:53Tim Ferriss:I won't ruin anything with spoilers. Like there are a lot of adjustments that need to be made with that. But that is a fantastic one. I think it was The Dive. They've also had some follow-up films that are just incredible. I remember seeing a tweet when Alex did the Taipei climb that was like, everyone's freaking out about this. What if I told you this is actually not the craziest thing he's ever done? Referring to Free Solo. I mean, it is so far not the craziest thing in the sense that watch the El Cap climb. it is infinitely hard. To any really, really seasoned climber, yes, it's risky to climb with no ropes.

2:59:31Tim Ferriss:Yes, the tower is dangerous if you make a mistake. From a technical perspective, it's actually not that difficult. Doing what he did on El Cap is very much in the death-defying category. Yeah, I'm out. Yeah, people can - I'm sure people ask you this too, but people are always like, what's something you wouldn't do? I'm like, I'm going to let Alex Honnold own the category of whatever it is he's doing. Yeah, yeah. I think that category is well covered. The category of things I wouldn't do is pretty broad and it gets broader every day after a few very scary avalanche experiences with backcountry skiing and heli skiing where people have gotten really injured and could have been buried.

3:00:11Tim Ferriss:I'm done. Like avalanche risk, if there's any real avalanche risk, I'm out. So you're out from Everest? Oh, there are many reasons I'm out. Okay, there are many reasons I'm out from Everest too. Yeah. No, there are a lot of reasons I'm out from Everest. Yeah. People ask me all the time. Not the least of which is like plenty of people have already done it. Exactly. I think the story's been told. Yeah. Why would I risk my life for something that's not even going to be a notable footnote for anything or anyone? Book or books you've given most as a gift or recommended a lot? Any books come to mind?

3:00:43I have recommended Radical Candor to pretty much everybody. I know who's a content creator trying to figure out their business. the other one is the great CEO within which is a really fast and easy read and for anyone who didn't start in Silicon Valley or a startup culture or a startup of any kind was really helpful to me to just understand here's what a company is and how it works and then I've given Adam Grant's originals to a few people do I would say this but I feel like that's cheating so I've I tried to exclude it from my answer, so I can't say that. But obviously, I talk about it all the time.

3:01:20Tim Ferriss:If you could have one giant billboard anywhere, obviously, this is metaphorically speaking, with anything on it, it could be a quote. Nothing commercial, right? But it could be a mantra, a quote from someone else, a picture, anything, a question. What might you put on that? I feel like this one has been overused at this point, but one that was really helpful for me starting my channel was everything you want is on the other side of fear. Very simple, again, overused at this point, but I love that one because it's what I return to when things are hard in any aspect of life and especially when I'm doing a challenge.

3:02:00it's a way for me to remind myself this is the struggle I asked for to make myself better at the thing I want to be better at and it's also a reminder to move forward through it and not shy away from it as we talked about challenge accepted was born out of writing my fears on a whiteboard and so for me I have a very intimate connection with that sentiment and I think about it even in an exterior capacity, when I get nervous about something, personal life, business, whatever, exterior to the challenge itself, I return to that often.

3:02:35Tim Ferriss:I have quotes related to that etched onto driftwood from ranging from Anais Nin to others all over my house. I think I've done enough talking today. So I'm going to keep the focus on you. Michelle, where can people find you? Where would you like to point people to? You can follow me at Michelle Carre on everything and the three-part series of my experience attempting seven marathons on all seven continents in one single week will be coming out on my YouTube channel in three consecutive weeks throughout April and May. And we're going for a primetime Emmy this year, which I'm really excited about.

3:03:15We're on the ballot for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special. It's a very long title for a category. And I'm excited about it for a lot of reasons, most of which is I want to be a part of a future where it's not unheard of that a YouTube channel is going for something like this. And that's why I'm excited about it for myself and other creators.

3:03:42Tim Ferriss:I'm excited for you. Thank you. So if you're a voter, I'd vote for you. Vote for me. I'd vote for you. and just for people who may miss this, Kare, K-H-A-R-E. Oh yeah, yeah. M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E, K-H-A-R-E. Michelle, is there anything else you'd like to say? Any parting words? Anything you'd like to add before we wind to a close? I want to say thank you, Tim. It was really special to go back through the archives and realize that your impact in my life started 10 years ago. And to almost to the day be meeting you 10 years later is really full circle and affirming for me. And I hope that anyone listening can hear the very grassroots fear-setting chart that I had for myself in the beginning.

3:04:35And I think it's a special moment for me to reflect on the length of time it takes to do something special. and how that commitment can lead you somewhere unexpected.

3:04:47Tim Ferriss:Thank you for that. And I have to say, it makes me so deeply happy. I mean, joy is probably a better word. I get so much joy out of the fact that you exist and you're doing what you're doing because it tests a lot of assumptions about a direction that I would view as pretty dystopian. about online content creation. You're putting out long form, positive, life affirming, nonfiction where you show that failure is not a terminal sentence. It's just feedback along the path. And I just love that you're doing what you're doing. And I'm such a fan of your work, such a fan of Challenge Accepted. and I hope you keep doing it for a super long time.

3:05:46Me too. Thank you, Tim.

3:05:48Tim Ferriss:Yeah. All right, everybody. Until next time, we're going to put show notes, including some template emails for people in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. I assure you, if you search K-H-A-R-E, there will be only one response. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

3:06:41Tim Ferriss:found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday.

3:07:16Tim Ferriss:Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Most Americans, that's a lot of you people listening and certainly overseas, I suspect it's similar. Roughly 95%, according to some studies, do not meet the recommended daily fiber intake. Fiber, you might think, well, that's about staying regular. But in fact, fiber is one of the most overlooked metanutrients, I would say, for everyday health and fitness. It supports digestion, helps keep blood sugar stable, and feeds critical gut bacteria that affect nearly every aspect of life.

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3:10:19Tim Ferriss:That's fin.ai slash tim.

3:10:25Thank you.