145: The Interview Master: Cal Fussman and the Power of Listening

This episode is very special to me and features a verbal Jedi who never gets interviewed himself: Cal Fussman. Cal (@calfussman http://www.twitter.com/calfussman) is a New York Times bestselling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire Magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the "What I Learned" feature. The Austin Chronicle has described Cal's interviewing skills as "peerless." He has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with the icons who've shaped the last 50 years of world history: Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert DeNiro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pelé, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others. Born in Brooklyn, Cal spent 10 straight years traveling the world, swimming over 18-foot tiger sharks, rolling around with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and searching for gold in the Amazon. He has also made himself a guinea pig — Cal has boxed against world champion Julio Cesar Chavez and served as a sommelier atop of the World Trade Center. He now lives with his wife—whom he met while on a quest to discover the world's most beautiful beach—and his three children in Los Angeles, where he spends every morning eating breakfast with Larry King. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years and I love audio books. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose between more than 180,000 audio programs. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy! This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you—for free–exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Cal Fussman?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Cal Fussman?

  No, we're seeing appropriate timing.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I have used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing, you will thank me, The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class, it's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim, that's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  ...quiz which only takes two to five minutes and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc., can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible.

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But, I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So, I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim.

• 4:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of various types from all fields, including entertainment, military, academia, research and otherwise, sports, etc. This episode is a very special one, and features a verbal Jedi who never really gets interviewed himself: Cal Fussman. You may not recognize that name, but that is going to change. Cal Fussman, @calfussman, C-A-L-F-U-S-S-M-A-N, on the Twitters, is a New York Times bestselling author and writer-at-large for Esquire magazine,

• 4:53Tim Ferriss?

  where he is best known for being a primary writer of the "What I Learned" feature. Now, "What I Learned," what is this? Well, it is comprised of interviews with icons that you will recognize. The Austin Chronicle has described Cal's interviewing skills as, quote, "peerless," end quote. And I would have to agree with that. I've met a great many writers and interviewers, and Cal is just hands and heads above everyone else. I'm not sure if that makes any sense. I've had quite a bit of wine. It is about 1:00 in the morning in New York City, in the land of chaos, and that sounds like the right expression to use. In any case, Cal has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with icons who have shaped the last 50 years of world history,

• 5:37Tim Ferriss?

  including Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Leo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pele, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others. Born in Brooklyn, and this is the part where the bio sounds unbelievable, and as far as I can tell, it's totally true. Here we go. Born in Brooklyn, Cal spent 10 straight years traveling the world, swimming over 18-foot tiger sharks, rolling around with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and searching for gold in the Amazon. He's also made himself a guinea pig. He's boxed against world champion Julio Cesar Chavez when he was undefeated, and served as a sommelier.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  atop the World Trade Center. He now lives with his wife, whom he met while in a quest to discover the world's most beautiful beach and his three children in Los Angeles, where he spends every morning eating breakfast with Larry King. And that is, in fact, how I met Cal for the first time, was at this particular breakfast at a Jewish jelly with Larry King, where Larry eats Honey Nut Cheerios, and that is it. Go figure. In any case, you guys have to check out Cal. I really love this conversation. He's been a mentor to me in this game of interviewing and asking questions, which is really about not just probing into the lives of others, but thinking more clearly yourself.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  And Cal is really the Obi-Wan Kenobi of this particular area of expertise. So I hope you enjoy. Check him out. I want to help out Cal. He is doing a lot of interesting stuff and expanding outside of writing. So be sure to check out his website, calfussman, C-A-L-F-U-S-S-M-A-N dot com. Say hello on Twitter as well, at Cal Fussman. And without further ado, as I always say after a long intro, please enjoy my conversation with Cal Fussman. Cal, welcome to the show.

• 7:39Cal Fussman?

  Thank you. I have arrived.

• 7:42Tim Ferriss?

  You have arrived, and I'm so excited to have you here because we've gotten to know each other a bit over the last however many months, and it's been such a joy because as I've tried to delve into this craft of asking questions and crafting conversation, I've realized there's a lot to it. And I've been a fan of your work for so many years, and the subtleties are just so powerful. And I thought that this time we could turn the tables and I could interrogate you in public. I love asking you questions about your process, and you've been so generous with your time in terms of reviewing some of my episodes, providing feedback.

• 8:26Tim Ferriss?

  So first and foremost, thank you for your work and for all of the help.

• 8:31Cal Fussman?

  I'm delighted. You're good. You're good.

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  I think I have a lot of room to improve. And so this is, this is one of these episodes where I'm a little self-conscious because I know that I have a very unusual memento-like, sometimes non-chronological approach to interviews. And for that, I'll apologize in advance. But we can do a post-game analysis afterwards. Perhaps we could just start with something that we were discussing before we hit record. So we were talking about the live event that was here in LA at the Troubadour. And we were doing a bit of analysis, what went well, what didn't go as well as planned,

• 9:19Tim Ferriss?

  and so on. And I mentioned that, I suppose, due to also some insecurities of a sort, that I try to, when I do these rare live events, if it's, say, two hours long, I'll stay for an additional two or three hours and do Q and A or something like that. And you said that's straight out of Quincy Jones's book. And so I know this is an unusual place to start, but maybe you could just provide that anecdote, because it seems like you have an endless trove of these types of anecdotes. But why Quincy Jones?

• 9:46Cal Fussman?

  Quincy Jones will go to a book signing, and there'll be long lines of people. And he will not sign his name and move him on next. He will stop, ask everyone who they are, engage in a conversation, and then write a personal note in his book to them. And the line may be around the block. He'll be there till 3:00 in the morning, keeping the people at Barnes & Noble open, because he wants to make it a joyous experience for everybody. So, bravo. You followed the master.

• 10:27Tim Ferriss?

  Inadvertently. The story, of course, if we rewind the clock...

• 10:35Tim Ferriss?

  Begins at the beginning and where did you grow up? I actually am ashamed to admit, I don't know the childhood background. But where did you, where did you grow up?

• 10:45Cal Fussman?

  Born in Brooklyn and moved to Yonkers, New York, where I did second grade and third grade. And that's where I had, when I think back on it, like a pivotal moment, asking questions. Because that time, second grade, was the time that I was sitting in Ms. Jaffe's classroom and she came into the room, she was out for some reason. And when she came in, you could look at her and know something just happened that I don't

• 11:26Cal Fussman?

  know, but it's different from anything I've ever seen before. And this was November 1963 and it was Ms. Jaffe who told the class that President Kennedy had been shot. And so, we all got sent home, found out that he had died. And I just, I really would love to see myself on videotape, like that night. Because like, I knew, man, something is going on here.

• 12:07Cal Fussman?

  They explained to me that Lyndon Johnson was a vice president and he was now to become the new president. And I'm thinking, man, what must it be like to be that guy? What is he feeling? Here he was, I know he probably wanted to be the president, but he couldn't be the president. And then he was a vice president and now the president gets killed and he gets to be the president. So, I picked up a piece of paper and a pencil and I just wrote to Lyndon Johnson.

• 12:41Tim Ferriss?

  You wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson?

• 12:42Cal Fussman?

  Wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson and said, "What does it feel like?"

• 12:50Cal Fussman?

  And about six months later, I got a letter back.

• 12:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 12:55Cal Fussman?

  And it was from his personal secretary, Juanita D. Roberts. And the cool thing about it was, the first sentence was, "Thank you for the friendly thought in writing." So I don't know what I wrote him, but somehow I must have tried to make him feel comfortable that this question was coming.

• 13:18Cal Fussman?

  And then the second question was, "In answer to your query."

• 13:25Cal Fussman?

  And what that said was, she was treating me like I was legit.

• 13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Cal Fussman?

  You know, I had just turned seven.

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

  Bonafide adult.

• 13:33Cal Fussman?

  Exactly. And you know, when you did the interview with Ed Norton, he talked about having a mentor in high school who treated him like an adult.

• 13:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 13:46Cal Fussman?

  And that is what that letter felt like to me. And only now, when people are starting to ask me questions, did this come to me. But that's when I realized that asking questions is kind of natural for me.

• 14:03Tim Ferriss?

  And that was in second grade?

• 14:05Cal Fussman?

  Second grade.

• 14:06Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I have to ask, when you wrote the letter, something you back to second grade, and was it written on paper that had the dotted line in between the intact lines for the lowercase letters? What type of, do you recall what kind of paper it was on?

• 14:22Cal Fussman?

  I don't know. It's probably on loose leaf paper, if I was making a guess. I wish, you know, I was talking to the historian, Robert Caro, who wrote volumes about Lyndon Johnson.

• 14:34Tim Ferriss?

  Also wrote The Power Broker, am I right?

• 14:36Cal Fussman?

  That's right.

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible book.

• 14:38Cal Fussman?

  Exactly. And here, this guy has spent like decades knowing everything about Lyndon Johnson as possible. And I'm telling him this story, and he's like getting goosebumps when I say, "Juanita D. Roberts." "You got a letter from Juanita D. Roberts?" And he started asking me all these questions about the letter and where it could be and how I sent it. And I realized, as he was doing it, yeah, he was made to be a historian.

• 15:16Cal Fussman?

  Nobody else in the world would have gotten that high over the words Juanita D. Roberts, but some people are just born with the proclivity to do certain things.

• 15:28Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think, even if it's God given talent, what makes you or gives you a gift for questions?

• 15:39Cal Fussman?

  I think part of that has to do with the evolution as an interviewer, as a journalist, because as we talk it through, you'll see that I interview differently when I was, say, 18 than when I was 24 and differently in my 40s than I was when I was 20, 25. So it really is like a lifelong voyage of learning about questions and reactions. It's only when I started to think back on that first letter that I realized, okay,

• 16:19Cal Fussman?

  this is, I guess it would sort of be like being a basketball player and you know that you're born with big hands. I can grip, if I go up for a dunk, I can grip the ball with one hand. Carmelo Anthony can't. He, it's like a big secret. He can't get his hands around the basketball. He's great, but it's, some people are just born with big hands and some people don't have big hands. And I'm only now starting to realize, okay, I was kind of born to do this.

• 16:56Tim Ferriss?

  Did your parents facilitate that and cultivate that in any way? Or was it not something, it was a nature more than nurture in the household?

• 17:10Cal Fussman?

  It's a good question, and maybe they did in that my dad loved sports. And I grew up in the 60s at a time where Muhammad Ali came into play. And so that, he was my childhood hero. And in a some sense, that was the start of it. Because he was more than my hero just because he was the heavyweight champ at the world. And he could dance and make sure nobody ever hit him. And then when he wanted to hit you, he could hit you 16 times before you even blinked.

• 17:52Cal Fussman?

  And was more than the fact that he could make predictions with poetry and make you always laugh. His actions made you ask questions. He would take his Olympic gold medal and throw it in the Ohio River. And it would make you wonder, hold it. How is it that a black guy can go win a gold medal in Australia and come back after representing his country and not be able to sit at a lunchroom counter at a Woolworth's next to white people?

• 18:31Cal Fussman?

  He would defy the government and refuse draft induction, wouldn't go into the army, and basically say, hey, I ain't got nothing against no Vietcong. And he would make you think, hey, what is going on over there in Vietnam? So that was a huge, huge part of my childhood.

• 18:56Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have any particular career aspiration? What did you want to be when you were a kid, say, from second grade onward? Were there any particular professions that you knew you wanted to go after?

• 19:10Cal Fussman?

  Two, two things. I wanted to see my face over a column in a big city newspaper. And I wanted to write a magazine story about Muhammad Ali.

• 19:23Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, very prescient.

• 19:26Cal Fussman?

  No, I knew, I knew what I wanted to do. Only later, after I'd done it so quickly. Did I realize, oh, what am I gonna do now? Which we can get to.

• 19:40Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned eighteen and twenty-four, so two very specific ages.

• 19:48Tim Ferriss?

  Take me to, say, eighteen and then twenty-four and contrast your two styles. But if you could tell us where you were at those two points also.

• 19:57Cal Fussman?

  Sure. So like when I grew up, I grew up thinking interview was meet the press. I grew up thinking it was what happened in a locker room after a sporting event.

• 20:09Cal Fussman?

  So I knew in order to achieve my dreams, I need to go to journalism school. I asked around and found out University of Missouri had one of the best. So that's where I went. And I learned to ask who, what, when, where, and why. And went through the whole journalism cycle. This was also an interesting time, was a time of Watergate. So journalists were seen like at the highest point that maybe they've ever been. It was really cool to be a journalist. A journalist actually brought down the president when they caught him lying.

• 20:54Cal Fussman?

  And so it was, it was a great time. And I went into sports. So basically, after I graduated, four months after I graduated, I was sitting ringside when Muhammad Ali won the heavyweight championship for the third time. A year after that, if you lived in St. Louis and you're opening the Post-Dispatch sports section, you saw my face over a column. And a year after that, I went to the big time, New York. An amazing magazine called Inside Sports got started up. It was-

• 21:30Tim Ferriss?

  And how old were you at the time?

• 21:31Cal Fussman?

  I was twenty-two-

• 21:35Tim Ferriss?

  Twenty-two.

• 21:38Cal Fussman?

  And basically, this magazine was really unique. It was was set up in the day that Sports Illustrated was as big as it gets. And it was set up to compete with Sports Illustrated. And it brought in all these great writers. And so I'd be going to the bar at night and sitting next to Hunter Thompson, the gonzo journalist. We'd be throwing back shots. The next morning, I'd be getting up and going on a plane to Pittsburgh.

• 22:06Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, hold on one second. You did shots with Hunter S. Thompson?

• 22:09Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. We're going to come back to that. Please continue. Oh, man.

• 22:16Cal Fussman?

  So it was, this magazine attracted all these writers. And the guy who started it was a guy named Johnny Walsh, who went on to start SportsCenter for ESPN. So he just had, he had one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen at the time. I didn't really even know what a Rolodex was. And I walked into Inside Sports for the first time. It was a Friday afternoon. And I called them up. And I said, hey, like, if I come into New York to work, I'm not asking for a job, just make sure I don't starve. And he said, come on in.

• 23:01Cal Fussman?

  So I showed up at the office at like 4 o'clock. And there was two guys with a dolly stacked with beer. Like case after case of beer. And I got in the elevator right behind the dolly. We, they hit the same floor number that I needed to go to. And they just rolled it out into the offices of Inside Sports. And I said, this is where I need to be. And It, this magazine attracted guys like David Halberstam, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. It just, the best of the best. And basically, I got to sit next to all of them.

• 23:46Cal Fussman?

  I was only a kid, I was 22. And every night, they would, everybody would go across the street to a bar called The Cowboy. Tony, the bartender, was behind the bar. And like, at the, at the time, I like, had no money. So, they would put out these little hors d'oeuvres for people. That, that was like, where my dinner would be if the guys with expense accounts weren't going out later. The mixed nuts and olives. That was dinner. Crappy maraschino cherries. But it was great, because you're sitting next to Frank DeFord, who was like, the big sports writer of his day. A guy named Gary Smith came to work there. He was a National Magazine Award winner for many, many years.

• 24:30Cal Fussman?

  And it was just a blast. It was the best time. Sounds incredible. And then, like a lot of artistic successes, it was not a commercial success. And like a lot of startups, it went belly up. Sounds like The Paris Review and many, many others. There you go. And so here I am in New York, and, and basically, I've now achieved everything I'd set out to achieve when I was a kid.

• 24:58Cal Fussman?

  And I'm looking around saying, what am I gonna do now? Where am I gonna go? I had no idea. Because I knew if I took, inside sports was not a job. It was an experience. It was an, an eve, an event every evening. Who's coming tonight?

• 25:18Cal Fussman?

  And I didn't know what to do, so I, I called up my mom and dad. And I said, you know, I think I'm gonna take some time off and travel. My mom, who's always really supportive, said, oh, Cal, that's wonderful. And little did she know, when I said it, that I wasn't coming back for 10 years. But I didn't know it either. I just bought a ticket to go over to Europe, left with a few guys. And that started a 10-year odyssey of Cal going around the world. Okay.

• 25:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, let's hit pause for a second. I want to do some backtracking here.

• 25:57Cal Fussman?

  Okay.

• 25:58Tim Ferriss?

  So, the first question, we're gonna, and I have not forgotten about Hunter S. Thompson, but when you said, I, please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but I don't need a job, I just don't want to starve. And he said, come on in. Why did he give you such a warm welcome?

• 26:14Cal Fussman?

  He had actually reached out to me. And again, this went back to University of Missouri Journalism. That's where he had gone to school. So, like, and I found all through my travels, this school and its network were, I was always linked to them in some way. And you knew who was really good from that school. Everybody knew it. And so, if I found out that somebody was doing really good work and they were an editor and I knew they went to the University of Missouri, it would be, it's an easy phone call for me to make.

• 26:56Cal Fussman?

  And it's interesting, because I didn't make those phone call, have to make those calls often because there was a, like a nexus. People bumped into people and you were verded to the right place. And so, when Inside Sports folded, ultimately, one of the editors there got the job at the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. But when I was traveling around the world, I basically, I didn't really write.

• 27:29Tim Ferriss?

  And, and I have so many questions about the travel, but the, the preceding contrast, so if we looked at, say, your, how you interviewed and asked questions when you were at the tail end of your first professional gig, and then at the tail end of Inside Sports, what changed?

• 27:51Cal Fussman?

  Nothing, nothing really changed there. Basically, the idea was to get the information you needed for a story, to fill out a story. And so, back in that day, it may be hard, I know it's hard for sports writers to believe it, because they asked me to speak at colleges in front of journalism schools. And in the 70s,

• 28:21Cal Fussman?

  Women's sports like got no coverage at all. They would beg you to go into, to go to their games, go into their locker rooms, whatever you wanted. I was talking to University of Nebraska Journalism School. They can't even interview women's volleyball players

• 28:43Cal Fussman?

  in a very relaxed fashion. They have to go through the Sports Information Office and they won't be able to ask like personal questions. So it's a completely different time. When I would go out to do a story, I might spend like a week, two weeks with somebody. And now that just doesn't happen because of all the proliferation of media and everybody's asking for that time. So it's pretty much shut down. So basically you got to hang with people. And the questions basically filled out the story.

• 29:24Cal Fussman?

  But it, for me, it was very different than the next stage because that first stage was very, who, what, when, where and why and what might have been underneath. What was your childhood like? And it filled, it filled out a sports story. The next step that started when I was about 23 or 24 was completely different.

• 29:47Tim Ferriss?

  And that was, just to place it in the timeline, that was before you left?

• 29:54Cal Fussman?

  Oh, no. This was the moment I left Inside Sports shut down.

• 29:59Cal Fussman?

  And there was actually like a run on the bank.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  Seems pretty common.

• 30:06Cal Fussman?

  People to get their last checks. And right after that.

• 30:13Cal Fussman?

  Was when I decided to start traveling and that's where interviewing changed for me forever.

• 30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Two quick questions before we get there. So the first is, what was it like doing shots and having drinks with Hunter S. Thompson?

• 30:26Cal Fussman?

  It was fantastic. He is like a great, he was a very funny guy and it was all anecdotes. There were a bunch of people in the bar. Everybody was telling stories. It's completely natural. What was kind of interesting about my memory of it is later on, I interviewed Johnny Depp, who played Hunter Thompson, and he just reached into this vegetable plate that was in front of him.

• 31:01Tim Ferriss?

  You're talking about Depp?

• 31:02Cal Fussman?

  Depp.

• 31:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 31:04Cal Fussman?

  And pulled out a carrot and put it in his mouth the way Hunter Thompson had, like, he was smoking like those long cigarettes and he became Hunter S. Thompson. It was like, it was wild. And he said, yeah, it comes out in me every now and then.

• 31:24Cal Fussman?

  The thing about Hunter S. Thompson is you think about him almost as a caricature. But like at the bar, he was like, he was a regular guy, just telling stories. I remember him telling stories of like being a bowling writer in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And, and we'd be laughing about things like that. So it was very human. It was, the conversation wasn't with the caricature of Hunter Thompson. It was with the guy.

• 31:53Tim Ferriss?

  And when you went out to drink with the guys, hopefully with the expense accounts, what was your drink of choice? Did you have a go-to drink?

• 32:02Cal Fussman?

  Back then, it was before I knew anything about wine. Back then, it was Guinness or a Black and Tan or maybe a Gin and tonic.

• 32:17Cal Fussman?

  Those, those were the three things. You know, one time, I remember this really crazy. You want to know why Inside Sports went out of business? They, they had one of the photographers who, who had worked with Sports Illustrated in the past. And so I was sent out on a story with this guy and this guy was saying, oh, I got to show you how to use an expense account. I could see you're a young novice here. And like before we do any work, he was straight to the bar and I'm saying like, are you sure? Like, maybe we should go out and interview with some, no, no, no. And he starts to say, you know, I think we need to have some green chartreuse. Oh, Lord.

• 33:02Cal Fussman?

  What? And like, this guy must have knocked the bar bill. I mean, like, and his point was, look, this is how we do it at Sports Illustrated. Like, if you don't run up a bar bill like this, you know, nobody's going to think you're big time.

• 33:21Cal Fussman?

  Sounds like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was a little, a little like that. But it was all, I guess, day to day event.

• 33:35Cal Fussman?

  And I was like, meeting the athletes that I grew up watching on TV and talking to these sportswriters. And it was one of those times that comes around once in a life. And then when it's gone, you can never really have it again. Because part of it is your naivete making it so grand. And then it was over. The magazine was dead. And oh, man, like, I got, at the time, I thought, I got another like 50, 60 years to live. What am I going to do? So how did you start on travel? I didn't know what to do. And I had met, when I was in St. Louis, a woman from France.

• 34:20Cal Fussman?

  And she she came from Mont Pauier. And she says, oh, like, you have to come visit Mont Pauier and pick the grapes. And so in my mind, I always thought I've got to get to Mont Pauier. And so we bought a ticket, I bought a cheap ticket through Iceland Air. They they would land you in Iceland and then fly you into Luxembourg. And the idea, I guess, was to get you to somehow stay in Iceland.

• 34:51Tim Ferriss?

  It still is. They still sell it. It's like the stopover destination. Stay for a few days, please.

• 34:58Cal Fussman?

  And you know what? People should because a one of the Playboy centerfold photographers told me that that was one of the best places that he'd ever been to in in terms of like, meeting women. He said it was like outrageous. You'd you'd go there on a Saturday night. And everybody knew everybody, but by four in the morning, like, people were naked, doing cartwheels on top of the bar. And like, who would have thought of it from Iceland?

• 35:30Tim Ferriss?

  Iceland, you know, it's a limited number of activities if you're there, depending on the time of the year. But I I actually went to Iceland for the first time with my family to see the Aurora Borealis. About two winters ago. Just glorious, fantastic. Just entirely mystical. Bit of a word defying experience. It really was fantastic. So that's that's maybe the other more brochure friendly side of Iceland. But yeah, a lot of booze, a lot of booze.

• 36:04Cal Fussman?

  A lot of booze. If you're telling me.

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  And elves. They like elves and gnomes also, but booze.

• 36:09Cal Fussman?

  No, that sounds like a magical moment in your life.

• 36:12Tim Ferriss?

  It was, it was.

• 36:14Cal Fussman?

  What, did you have like a notion of what it would be? And then did it top it like by 10 times?

• 36:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the backstory, not to, not to turn this into, well, I guess it is the Tim Ferriss Show. Here we are, but the, the, to digress into my own stuff for a minute is my mom had always talked about wanting to see the Northern Lights before she passed on. And this came up many, many times. And eventually I was like, fuck it. Why haven't we gone to see the Northern Lights? Let's figure it out. And that's how the trip came about. And in my mind, of course, the image was informed by the photos that I'd seen. And it turns out that the colors that are captured by all of the photographs or the equipment that I've seen are very different when you see the phenomenon in,

• 37:05Tim Ferriss?

  in, in, in real life with your own eyes. And it's just the most ghostly, fantastic, meaning like phantasm like experience that I've ever had visually without aid of plants.

• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

  It, we really just got the, the Willy Wonka golden ticket because we showed up and we were there for, I want to say 10 days, which is important because you could have a few days of cloud cover. And if you're only there for a night or two nights, you could go all the way out into the middle of nowhere in Iceland or Norway for that matter, or other places and never see it. But we saw it, I want to say like seven out of 10 nights. It was unbelievable. So it exceeded all expectations. It was really, uh, really a trip to remember.

• 37:54Cal Fussman?

  I just got to ask you one more question. And I like to

• 37:58Cal Fussman?

  what was your mom's, what did your mom's face look like? When she got the view that she wanted to have?

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  A kid in a candy store or the, the description that came to mind first was

• 38:14Tim Ferriss?

  like a baby who opens their eyes and sees like their favorite mobile above them, like just that completely dazzled look where there's nothing else in the world that exists for them in that moment, but just the pure joy of that, that experience. It was great. I mean, one of the most gratifying things for me, certainly that I've ever done for my family, which makes me feel like a bad son, but uh, for saying it, that it took, well, that it took me that long, but it, uh,

• 38:43Tim Ferriss?

  It was a great experience. I will say for those people listening who are thinking about it, when I say there are very limited activities, I really mean it in Iceland. And we stayed at this place called Hotel, I think they pronounce it Ranga, but it's Ranga, R-A-N-G-A, which is in the middle of nowhere. And if you do go, two things to note, it's dark all the time. And number two, there are, there are activities that you can pay for, but they tend to be on the expensive side. So you can take like a helicopter over live volcanoes, which actually was, was phenomenal. Or you can go, you can go, say, snowmobiling, et cetera. But they all tend to be on the pricey side. So you do

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  need to check your budget before you sign up for something like that. And yeah, it was glorious. But the, so Iceland. So you got a cheap ticket on Iceland air.

• 39:36Cal Fussman?

  Cheap ticket on Iceland air and landed in Luxembourg and I was with a bunch of friends.

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  And How many friends?

• 39:44Cal Fussman?

  Let's see, there were, very interesting. I had, I mentioned one, his name was Gary Smith. But for this, for these purposes, I'm just going to say there was a friend who was very skinny.

• 40:00Tim Ferriss?

  Can't wait to see where this is going.

• 40:03Cal Fussman?

  And a friend who was very, who was portly.

• 40:07Tim Ferriss?

  Such an underused adjective, portly.

• 40:11Cal Fussman?

  And I, I am completely, these are my best friends. Okay. The skinny guy, the portly guy. And the skinny guy was just coming off a divorce and had basically felt like his whole life had been constricted in this box around Wilmington, Delaware, and wanted to go out and just see the world, see what every, whatever was out there. And of course, my eyes are open to this because I'm, I didn't know what I was going to do or where I was going to go, but I wanted to see the world too. Mon pase, let's go pick the grapes.

• 40:58Cal Fussman?

  And then the portly friend was a guy who was kind of like the mayor of his job. And the mayor of his city in terms of if you go to the bar in St. Louis, he's a fixture. Everybody loves him, knows him, and it's the bar, the restaurant, everything is very kind of fixed. Right.

• 41:26Tim Ferriss?

  The mic was always his, or he could hold court.

• 41:28Cal Fussman?

  Holding court, but even more than that, it was, you knew, if you were in St. Louis, you knew if you went to Llewellyn's Bar at 8:30, you were gonna see him. And accordingly, where he was gonna have dinner is only one of a few places. If you wasn't at one, you can go to another. You know the bookstore he walked into, the place across the street where we got chocolates. So he lived on sort of a ritual. So now, the three of us are let loose in Europe. Now, the portly guy's only got like 10 days.

• 42:13Cal Fussman?

  He's on vacation from his job. The skinny guy, who'd been working at Inside Sports with me, he's got some time now. And I'm just kind of walking around with my eyes open, wondering where this is all gonna take me. So, we go to this mountainous town, we end up in a mountainous town in Italy. And it had two names, because these countries would get involved in wars, and then sometimes they would be, wherever the winner was, they were named. So, I remember the German sounding name was Dorftirol.

• 42:59Cal Fussman?

  And it had a huge mountain and we found out that on this mountain Ezra Pound, the poet, had lived in this castle. So the skinny guy is like all excited, "We gotta go see Ezra Pound's castle." And so we gotta take a hike up to this mountain and the portly guy's coming along and we're having a great time. We're just talking and breathtaking scenery. And we get to this castle and we meet some people and they say, "Oh, if you would just keep going over this mountain, you will have an unforgettable experience."

• 43:40Cal Fussman?

  There is a farmer there that is living, you literally will go back to the 18th century. That's how this farmer's living. Just keep on going over the mountain and just walking down this trail. Not many people go over the mountain, but if you do, you will find this farm. He will put you up for the night. Sounds like the beginning of a dirty joke.

• 44:05Cal Fussman?

  And so we start to get up to the top of the mountain and now it's like getting darker and darker and darker. And maybe it's eight o'clock. I don't know what time it is, but we've reached like the peak. And now we almost can't even see where we're walking. But the skinny guy knows,

• 44:28Cal Fussman?

  if we get down this mountain, we're gonna have an experience like no other. And that's what he was wired to do. And the portly guy is saying, "Hey, like fettuccine is being served down in the restaurant." And they both look at me, say, "Okay, what are we doing?"

• 44:51Cal Fussman?

  And what do you think I did?

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this is a toughie. I want to say that you that you went for the village, but by the very fact that you asked me.

• 45:03Cal Fussman?

  What would you do? And you love both of these guys and you know that one guy really wants to go over the mountain. The other guy really wants a.

• 45:13Tim Ferriss?

  I say you can always get fettuccine. It's not going away, but uh, easy to say is the armchair. A listener of stories, as is the case right now. What did you do?

• 45:23Cal Fussman?

  Well, I looked at them both and then I just realized, look, if something were to happen like going down.

• 45:34Cal Fussman?

  I'm going, I'm gonna regret it. And I knew in that moment, you know what? There's going to be a lot of those moments where I'm heading over the mountain. That was the moment I knew.

• 45:47Cal Fussman?

  I'm going over the mountain. Not tonight. I'm gonna make sure my portly friend is taken care of. He eats his fettuccine. In a few days, he's getting on a plane. He's gonna go back home, but after that, I'm going over the mountain. And that's what set off the trip. And it became completely addictive. Because I woke up every morning, not knowing what was gonna happen.

• 46:22Cal Fussman?

  And, and then you, you asked before, okay, well, where does the interviewing shift?

• 46:29Cal Fussman?

  So what happened was I had hardly any money.

• 46:35Cal Fussman?

  And I would go to a bus station or a train station. And I would just walk up, say, where's, where's the next train leave out of? Or where's it, where's it headed? And they would say a name. I'd say, okay, I want a ticket. So I would buy the ticket. Didn't, destination had no meaning to me whatsoever. What had meaning to me was.

• 46:59Cal Fussman?

  I've never been there before and I'm going to take this trip down the aisle. The trip down the aisle was where all the stakes were. Because as I'm going down that aisle, I've got to look for an empty seat. Next to somebody who seems interesting. Somebody I can trust. Somebody who might be able to trust me. Because and the stakes are high. Because I know. That at the end of that ride, wherever it was going. That person had to invite me to their home. Because I had no money to spend night after night in a hotel.

• 47:39Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna ask you how you paid for the trip. So it was just savings based until. It was extinguished?

• 47:47Cal Fussman?

  Well, there was very, there's very little money. I, I, I can't. I'm trying to let you know that like the stakes that were involved when I got on that train.

• 47:57Tim Ferriss?

  They were very high.

• 47:58Cal Fussman?

  It was not. It was like an athletic event. Where you were going out and you had, you had to get a roof over your head that night. And I'll, I'll tell you how seriously I took this and I'm going to tell you a story after this, which shows you. What I learned.

• 48:20Cal Fussman?

  I'm walking down that aisle. And I see an empty seat next to a beautiful woman, right? I look at her hands. No rings. She's looking at me. She's smiling at me. She could be a supermodel. I swear. I walked right on by. Because there was no way she was taking me home. There was no way she was taking me home. Now, nobody can see me, but if you saw me, you would know. The supermodel was not taking me home.

• 48:53Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, you know, in fairness, Billy Joel got.

• 48:56Cal Fussman?

  Christie Brinkley.

• 48:56Tim Ferriss?

  Christie Brinkley. So no, no offense to Billy Joel, but he, and I'm not comparing you to Billy Joel. I think you're a very handsome man. But just to say, like.

• 49:06Cal Fussman?

  I'll tell you a story about this. I'll tell you a story about this, that I, I came to later regret that. Alright, so this is years later. And I get set up, um, working at Esquire where I do this What I've Learned column. And I get set up doing an interview with Petra Nemkova, the supermodel. And I'm waiting for her, supposed to arrive at like eight o'clock or something, and, and she's, she's late. So I'm sitting there waiting for her, and then she sits down and we start talking. We have this amazing conversation.

• 49:47Cal Fussman?

  People may not know, but she was in Thailand when that tsunami hit. Uh, in, in like a bungalow with her best friend, uh, who basically lost his life and she was swept away by the tsunami and narrowly survived. This is an amazing story. It took an hour and a half just to tell the tsunami story. And she's, we're telling me these great stories and we're really hitting it off. And finally, and the interview's supposed to go for an hour and a half, like we're at four hours. And it's not an interview anymore. Like we, I feel like completely connected to her, the way I would have been had I been, met her on a bus or a train.

• 50:31Cal Fussman?

  And I said to her, I said, Petra, I, I really, I'm gonna tell you something. I apologize. And she said, what for? And I said, because all those years, those 10 years I was traveling around the world, if the empty seat was next to, it was next to you, I would have walked right on by you just because you were good looking. And she had a very amazing reaction. She grabbed me by the hand and squeezed my hand and she said, well, don't worry, Cal. Tonight, I sat next to you. Which is very cool, but it made me realize, and, and this is, this is really, if you're

• 51:15Cal Fussman?

  a good guy, who's a little scared to approach that woman, you should remember that story because they want to be treated normally. And I, I was talking to another actress about this and, and she really started riding me. She said, okay, so you don't take that seat and now some asshole takes it and I gotta put up that asshole for the next hour and a half. Thank you very much, Cal.

• 51:47Tim Ferriss?

  So you you walked by this woman when you got on the train. Walk down the aisle.

• 51:52Cal Fussman?

  Walk down the aisle.

• 51:53Tim Ferriss?

  You choose survival and housing over the perspective.

• 51:59Cal Fussman?

  Walk by the supermodel. And I'm looking, looking on the car and, oh, okay. That grandmother with no teeth. Eating the crackers out of her purse. There's the winner. So walk up. Sit down next to the grandma. Let's say we're in Hungary.

• 52:22Cal Fussman?

  And this happened in many cultures. But for the sake of the story, and this happened in Hungary. I sit down next to her and

• 52:33Cal Fussman?

  I'll ask her about goulash. Now, of course, she can't speak English. My Hungarian at that point is, hi, how are you? I need to go to the bathroom. And some of the younger people on the train are watching me and grandma try and talk to each other. And naturally, they come over and they start to translate.

• 52:57Cal Fussman?

  He wants to know what makes a great goulash. This grandma's chest just bursts with pride. And now she's talking about her grandmother making goulash, her mom making goulash, all the ingredients that go into goulash, how they gotta be put together just the right way. And then she looks at all these young Hungarians and said, you know, I've been riding on this train for decades. Not one of you has asked how I make my goulash. This American, he asks. You tell him, he has to come to my house because I am going to prepare him goulash so he knows

• 53:43Cal Fussman?

  what it's like to eat goulash in Hungary. All the people on the train come along. Now I'm staying with grandma. Not only does she invite the people on the train, all her neighbors, all her friends, her relatives. Now I'm at the table, a room full of people. They're all surrounding me. The goulash is in front of me and I slowly lift it to my lips. I taste it. My eyes shut and I smile. And there's just a roar from this place. He loves grandma's goulash. So the party goes on for like four days. And during the party,

• 54:28Cal Fussman?

  one of the neighbors says, well, you know, have you ever tasted apricot brandy? Because nobody makes apricot brandy like my father. It lives a half an hour away from me. You gotta come to taste the apricot brandy. That weekend, we're tasting apricot brandy, having a great time. Another party starts. Another neighbor comes over to me. Have you ever been to Kishkenhalis? The paprika capital of the world? You cannot leave hungry without visiting Kishkenhalis. Now we're off to Kishkenhalis. I'm telling you, a single question about goulash

• 55:09Cal Fussman?

  could get me six weeks of lodging and meals. And that's how I got passed around the world.

• 55:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 55:18Cal Fussman?

  10 years, 10 years.

• 55:20Tim Ferriss?

  So what else did you learn about asking questions? Or if you want to tackle it a different way, feel free to take it in any direction. But what are some common mistakes that people make in asking people questions? Whether it's on a train or otherwise. But feel free to tackle either.

• 55:45Cal Fussman?

  You know what, that's a good question for a little later because that's what I discovered later on. At the time, and I'll bring it directly toward hiring people, where questions are being asked of job candidates, like, "What's your biggest weakness?" Which, they've already prepared like, two hours on how to answer that question. You're not gonna get a spontaneous, good response to that. I work too hard. Sometimes I get accused of being too detail-oriented. You got it. You got it. Nailed it. That is the wrong question.

• 56:28Cal Fussman?

  But, we'll get to that, because I wasn't there yet. I didn't even know what I was doing, other than, okay, you've got to figure out a way to make people trust you through your questions. And I no longer had to fill out a story. I didn't need a who, what, when, where, and why. It was just pure curiosity. And then, it zoned into this basic fact: People wanna talk about their lives.

• 57:07Cal Fussman?

  And often, especially if you go to a small town somewhere, people, they may not be able to talk so much about their lives. Because, everybody talks about everybody in these little towns, and everybody knows the gossip, everybody knows the feelings, and you have to keep some things to yourself. But, if this guy comes into your house, and he's from 7,000 miles away, you can open up in ways and tell him things you would never tell people close by, knowing, he's gonna leave.

• 57:48Cal Fussman?

  And keep in mind, this was a day, there were no cellphones, there was no social media, there was no Facebook, there was no... Going on the internet and finding out what this person just told me, it was like a secret.

• 58:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's a safe haven.

• 58:04Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, I was completely safe for these people. Not only that, but I was a safe haven for a lot of women. Because if they were in a small town and they are meeting somebody from their small town, everybody's gonna know about it. But if you meet this traveler, your eyes are gonna be open to this new world. Plus, you can go over to the next town and like have a meal and start talking and get to know each other. And you're kind of free of all the constrictions of where you live.

• 58:46Cal Fussman?

  And so, in a way, like I became handsome.

• 58:52Cal Fussman?

  You know, it's like, I can remember in college going into like a bar in Colorado. And like all the guys were like six foot, I don't know what it was at night, but everybody was like six foot four or taller, you know? And, and like the girls were over six, but I'm just kind of walking around. I'm like much smaller. And like there was, I just realized there was, I don't fit in here. I, like, it's just a different, I'm not handsome here.

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  It's like every Dutch or Swedish party I've ever been to.

• 59:28Cal Fussman?

  Okay.

• 59:28Tim Ferriss?

  Similar feeling.

• 59:29Cal Fussman?

  Okay, so here's, there you go. I'm traveling around, right? And I meet a six foot two Dutch girl. And, and wanna share, wanna share a room as we're traveling? Okay, fantastic.

• 59:46Cal Fussman?

  Like I, it was so easy because we were in a different place.

• 59:52Cal Fussman?

  And you're, once you're traveling, you're a much different person than you are when you're at home. People see you differently and they treat you differently.

• 1:00:04Tim Ferriss?

  You see people differently, too.

• 1:00:06Cal Fussman?

  Uh, yes.

• 1:00:07Tim Ferriss?

  Wouldn't you say? I mean, in a sense that I don't recall who said this initially, but you know, people will travel to the other side of the world to pay attention to things that they routinely ignore at home.

• 1:00:16Cal Fussman?

  Bingo. Yeah.

• 1:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  And it seems like a modern day, or I should say a different manifestation of this is sitting down on an airplane next to someone. And you can get people to open up, or they'll volunteer to open up in ways that they might not to other people because they assume rightly, in most cases, they're never going to see you again.

• 1:00:36Cal Fussman?

  And that's it. A hundred percent. And when you talk about seeing people differently,

• 1:00:44Cal Fussman?

  when you're waking up in the morning and you don't know what's going to happen, and then you meet somebody, like the person becomes like the most fascinating person on the world in that moment. And they feel that because you don't know their life. So you're starting to ask some questions and they're getting this attention. It's like you're, I don't want to say you're making them into a rock star, but they're getting the same kind of attention. The questions that are coming, why did you do that? Like, what, what kind of friends do you have? What's, what's this culture like here? And, and all of a sudden,

• 1:01:24Cal Fussman?

  they're feeling like they're in the spotlight and it feels good. And for women, it feels great. Because also now, and I'm sure if you're feeling boxed in and you meet somebody from afar, and whoa, I wonder what it's like in America. Maybe he'll like me. Maybe he'll take me, he'll take me home with him. Maybe I can visit. And so all of these conversations are just filled with possibilities and potentials.

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Cal Fussman?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:01:55Tim Ferriss?

  In both directions, too, I think. I mean, in my, I remember, just in some of my travels, I mean, you, you come across not just the natives, but you meet other people who are traveling from distant lands and kind of finding their own way in the same way that you are. And you start to wonder like, well, maybe I should visit Turkey. Maybe I should visit the paprika capital of Hungary. And it's just that.

• 1:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  The endless possibilities when divorced from the routine of your life at home that are so exciting.

• 1:02:27Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, it's that. And also, I remember that the skinny guy and I were in Yugoslavia. And this was right before the Olympics in Sarajevo, and it was cold. And I remember, we looked at each other and just, you know, it's like too cold here.

• 1:02:49Cal Fussman?

  We didn't have like winter clothing. And I said to him, "You know, there are camel races in Duz, Tunisia."

• 1:03:03Cal Fussman?

  And like a day later, we were in Tunisia. We just got on a flight and flew to Tunisia and headed to Duz. We missed the races, but you know, the next thing you knew, like we've got pictures of us in like the middle of the Sahara Desert. And so there was just the possibility of, and look, it's even more like that now where you can, you got the internet to help you connect with somebody, you can get on a plane and be in a different world.

• 1:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, couch surfing, I mean, there are cost-free options out there.

• 1:03:44Cal Fussman?

  If couch surfing was here when I was going around the world, I don't know, I might.

• 1:03:53Tim Ferriss?

  Still be going.

• 1:03:54Cal Fussman?

  I might still be going. I'll tell you that it was the end of the trip that changed my style of interviewing again, but it was if, I could have been couch surfing. I can't even imagine the potential I would have had because from what I'm told, like you get raided, isn't it? It's sort of like Uber, you rate the driver.

• 1:04:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:04:16Cal Fussman?

  So you rate the place you stay and they rate the guest. So basically, I'm coming in with all these stories to regale you from these different parts of the world. I mean, I'd get A ratings across, I'd get five stars across the board. And then everybody would want, "Come to my place, please, come to my place." But there was none of that. And every day, you had to get on, I had to get on the train or the bus. Unless people were passing me around, after a while, it became easier and easier because it was, well, you know, I got a cousin here and then I'd get off the train and the cousin

• 1:04:58Cal Fussman?

  would be waiting for me and a party would be waiting for me at his house when I got there. So really, it was like a 10 year party.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  So I do want to get to the, the end of the trip and the impact on the interviewing. But first, and I can't believe I haven't asked you this before, but how did you hone your ability to tell stories? Because you're very good at asking questions, but that doesn't automatically make one good at telling stories.

• 1:05:28Cal Fussman?

  Maybe part of that is through writing because that's what I was doing. I would interview people and then I would have to put what I got down in a specific order or a non-specific order in order to manipulate people into leaning closer. What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen?

• 1:05:50Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning like an in media rest, sort of in the middle of the action type of start to pull them in?

• 1:05:56Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, something that exactly you started to pull them in and then you wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Now you have to go back to the beginning. I suckered you in here. But then there are other more complicated ways where you don't start that way in the beginning and you save it for the end, but you do it in a more nuanced way. It's almost like, okay, I'm, I'm reading, but what, what is something?

• 1:06:23Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give me an example? I'm so curious. Because for people who aren't writers, maybe, I mean, if, and I'm not going to lose track here, but the, I haven't been in journalism school, but when I've taken some writing classes, they talk about like the lead and you get, at least for nonfiction stuff, right? You get a couple of, you get a couple of statistics, you need a couple of quotes, like three people is a trend and then you sort of piece it together. Don't bury the lead, meaning bring this sort of attention grabbing piece to the top and so on. We talked about the, briefly, the in media rest. What would be a more subtle way to approach an opener?

• 1:07:01Cal Fussman?

  Okay. So just say you had a murder story.

• 1:07:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:07:03Cal Fussman?

  All right. And you were operating by that principle in journalism, like put, put it right at the top. And, and then, okay, this horrible thing happened. Let's go back to the beginning and then now you've got to add everything up to see why that moment happened. Another option is to start it in like a very ordinary way with just a twist that tells you, "Something's gonna go on here, I don't know," and you just keep reeling them in slowly.

• 1:07:43Cal Fussman?

  Just give a little more, "Oh, man," and then they met this person, "What's gonna happen now?" And then you save it till near the end of the story. Part of the problem is when you do that in a magazine, like they'll give it away in the headline.

• 1:08:01Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna ask about the headline.

• 1:08:03Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, but you can still use that tactic of telling a story that slowly grabs you in and it just puts out a little bait and it gives you that smell of something interesting here. So let me follow, and then you're dragging the line so that they've gotta keep following it and they're feeling, you know what, there's something, something big is behind here. And make them get to the end and then if you can deliver, I don't wanna say it's orgasmic, but...

• 1:08:43Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it's funny, I was thinking of like this actual analogy, though. It's like instead of the wham bam, thank you ma'am, quick fix. It's like, okay, I didn't think, I didn't think that I needed some tantric sex in two hours of this. Turns out it's pretty great. And then you get the payoff, you're like, you know what, that was totally worth it.

• 1:08:59Cal Fussman?

  That's, that's, you've invented, you've just named it, it's the tantric sex.

• 1:09:04Tim Ferriss?

  The tantric structure.

• 1:09:06Cal Fussman?

  Storytelling. That's it. Sting would love it, you know, six hours.

• 1:09:13Tim Ferriss?

  So at the, at the, at the end of your travels, what happened that affected your?

• 1:09:22Cal Fussman?

  Okay, so I'm going around, I'm going, having a great time. And at this, after 10 years, I mean, I got a pretty good network of people. So I can, I don't really even have to rely on meeting somebody.

• 1:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  Grandmothers eating saltines.

• 1:09:42Cal Fussman?

  Because enough people know me. And when you, when you're in Brazil, oh, there's this Fazenda de Cacao, this farm where they make, grow the cocoa beans. And like, great couple, just go, just go there. We'll, like, we'll send a letter in advance. They'll be expecting you. So I am, at this point, it's almost like, I'm, I'm a guest that's now expected.

• 1:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  Part of the family.

• 1:10:19Cal Fussman?

  But I might, really, I'm part of the family before I even arrived. And I, a friend, the skinny guy, the skinny guy got married. And he decided to take a year and spend it in Cochabamba, Bolivia. So I hear that, and I'm thinking.

• 1:10:41Tim Ferriss?

  Hope his wife did be knew that plan before signing up.

• 1:10:44Cal Fussman?

  No, she did. I mean, that, and that, that was it. Let's do something, we don't have any kids. Let's do something outrageous that nobody expected. And so naturally, I hear Cochabamba, Bolivia. Hey, I was in Peru.

• 1:11:05Cal Fussman?

  Now skinny guy's moving to Cochabamba. Hey, I'll spend a few months in Cochabamba. So I'm there and I get a call from the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. And again, going back to this nexus, the guy in charge had worked at Inside Sports and now he was in charge of his own magazine. And he called me up and he said, you know what? We're doing an issue about great beaches around the world. We know you've been to Brazil before. Is there a story about a beach in Brazil that you could write up for us? And at the time, I said, look, I'm in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

• 1:11:47Cal Fussman?

  You would think it's crazy, but like I was really getting into Cochabamba, Bolivia. It's a completely different culture and there's an Aldeplano that it's a landlocked nation. You're really are experiencing something different as a traveler. But I said, oh, okay. You know what? I said, I heard, I actually heard of a beach in Brazil. You might, you might not want me to go there because you're probably doing this as a travel issue to basically hook up with, get travel agents and airlines so people can go to these destinations. This beach that I heard of is on the north of Brazil.

• 1:12:32Cal Fussman?

  From what I heard, you can't even get there unless you go on like a crude sailing vessel and on muleback. And, and the editor's saying, you know, why don't you just check this place out? So I, I say, okay. And I leave Cochabamba, I go to Brazil and I end up in a city called Fortaleza. Fortaleza. And just as I arrive, the first trip to this isolated beach.

• 1:13:12Cal Fussman?

  Sand dunes that look like they're straight out of the Sahara butted against like the most sparkling waters of the Caribbean. The first tour bus is going to go to this place. They're going to be dune buggies. We don't have to go by mule. We don't need the crude sailing vessels and I'm just right on time. And so first bus leaves midnight, Friday night. And I buy my ticket, get on the bus and I let down my guard and I spoke to the beautiful

• 1:13:54Cal Fussman?

  woman on the bus on the way to the enchanted beach in Brazil and that was the end of the trip. And I would tell you the rest of the story, except it takes two hours to do. We'll be out of, well, you're not doing it on tape, but if digital has any limits, we'll be, we'll be out of there. But that, the important thing about it was that was a moment where my style of interviewing had to change again. Because I was no longer traveling around the world. I, the woman and I got married, we moved to New York, started to have kids and then

• 1:14:35Cal Fussman?

  I began to write for Esquire magazine and all the things that I'd learned on buses, trains, I was then able to project into Esquire's What I've Learned column, which consists of interviews with the most celebrated, accomplished and creative people on earth.

• 1:14:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I have, I have the handy recorder, the H4N on top of one of these, in fact, the What I've Learned, this is the third volume? Is that right?

• 1:15:08Cal Fussman?

  That's the third volume. These interviews have been done for almost 20 years now.

• 1:15:16Cal Fussman?

  With everybody from presidents to premieres to movie stars. Basically, people that you know. And the idea is to, or for me to interview them. And using their own words, show them in a light that you never really knew. So you're, you think you know these people and then you listen to their experiences and you say, whoa, I never knew that about Robert De Niro or Mikhail Gorbachev. And so that is where these conversations on the trains were so important.

• 1:15:59Cal Fussman?

  Because I did not approach these interviews with Woody Allen or Wolfgang Puck, George Clooney, as if I was a journalist. I approached them as if they were sitting on the train next to the empty seat and I just sat down next to them. And that is where the evolution continued. Until, actually very recently, it was 20 years. So it took me like 10 years to understand that an interview was more than Meet the Press.

• 1:16:37Cal Fussman?

  But then another 20 to figure out that it was more than sitting down with George Clooney and having the time of my life. Because a crazy thing happened to me, caught me completely off guard and made me think about interviewing in a whole different way. And this was only very recently.

• 1:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  Can you talk about that or should we keep that off?

• 1:17:03Cal Fussman?

  No, 100%.

• 1:17:04Tim Ferriss?

  Can you, can you mention that just because you brought it up and then we'll, we'll dial back the clock?

• 1:17:08Cal Fussman?

  Sure.

• 1:17:09Tim Ferriss?

  And can I show you something first also? So I've, I've digested this entire thing with highlights and so on, there are notes on writer's block, Jodie Foster's comment, one of my favorites, just for folks, "In the end, winning is sleeping better." I just love that, so good. Highlighted Woody Allen. It just goes on and on. So I, I love this entire compilation and encourage people to check it out. But what What changed so recently?

• 1:17:35Cal Fussman?

  So I was asked to give a speech on a cruise and I never, ever, ever went on cruise, cruises before. In fact, I gotta say, it's almost laughable because there are certain people, like they hear cruise and they turn up their nose. And I think I was one of those people. In fact, I had a friend who's a writer and his wife wanted to go on a cruise and she kept on pestering him, pestering him. And my wife finally said to him, "Why don't

• 1:18:11Cal Fussman?

  you take your wife on a cruise?" And he said, "Because I draw the line." I said, "Oh, man. Maybe I think about cruises that way." And then I was invited to speak on a cruise, but it was a special cruise. It was a cruise called Summit at Sea.

• 1:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, Summit Series guys.

• 1:18:35Cal Fussman?

  Okay, so you know these folks. And so basically, it's a cruise ship filled with 4,000 entrepreneurial minds. And that was wild to begin with. Because I had never, I had limited experiences with entrepreneurs. And then you put yourself on a ship with 4,000 entrepreneurs, your life is gonna change.

• 1:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of potential energy. Yeah, it's like Ted plus Coachella plus infinite amounts of alcohol.

• 1:19:11Cal Fussman?

  There you go. And you can't even get on an elevator without meeting somebody. Somebody on the elevator is gonna say, "What's your name?" "I'm Michael. This is where I work. This is what I do." "Who are you?" I felt at the end of like three days, my head was really, it was like getting pumped up with helium. I was about to explode. It was amazing experience. And like you're sitting down and like at dinner and the guy next to you says, "Oh, this is the rocket ship I'm building. You want to see?" And he pulls out his phone and he shows you his rocket ship. This is like wild. And it was,

• 1:19:55Cal Fussman?

  it was like traveling around the world, except the world came to you.

• 1:19:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think Jane Goodall was there also. I mean, it just goes on and on.

• 1:20:03Cal Fussman?

  And like, the world is coming to you and wanting to hear you and tell you what they're up to. So like, in three days at Summit at Sea, you, you literally can go around the world. And I was totally unprepared for this. I was asked to give a speech called like Decoding the Art of the Interview. And I'd never spoken before, didn't know what it was going to be like. So, but I, you know, I have experiences with Mikhail Gorbachev and Donald Trump and De Niro and Muhammad Ali later on in life, that they're, they're good stories. And so I've been telling

• 1:20:47Cal Fussman?

  these stories as I was traveling around on Saturday nights. And people always, "Oh, tell Ali's story." So I knew, okay, I don't know how to give a speech, but I can tell these stories. And so I go up and I tell my, and, and here's the thing about it. Like, there are 20 events going on at once. Generally, when you look at that What I've Learned column, I'm invisible. I don't write a single word. I just interview them, the subject, and then put it down in their own words. So I'm, I'm not a guy who you would ever see on TV that you would really know. I, I'm invisible.

• 1:21:27Cal Fussman?

  So I'm thinking, you know, yeah, there are people who know what I do. And people in the know will come up and tell me, "Hey, like, I, I respect what you do in, in, in odd ways." But I'm figuring, okay, I'm on this cruise ship, maybe 20 people are going to show up at best. And in fact, I had read Pencils for Promise.

• 1:21:55Cal Fussman?

  By Adam Braun. And he talked about giving, it might have been his first speech. And I guess he was expecting a crowd. And he had maybe six friends attending. And only one person, other than his six friends, showed up. And he went out and he gave this speech. And what he realized was, you give the speech as if that one person is the entire audience. And it turned out that she was so enthused that she later went to work for his charity. So I went in prepared. That book prepared me. If there's one person in there, I don't care.

• 1:22:40Cal Fussman?

  I'm gonna give that person the best. I'm not gonna be disappointed. I'm just gonna go out, I'm gonna tell my stories, give a few lessons, and let's see how it goes. Maybe the same day that I'm supposed to speak, they moved my event. So it's now, even in the program, if you're going to my event, you're going in the wrong place. You're going to the wrong place. So now I'm thinking, okay, I'm down to like 10 people. That's cool. I'll speak to the one. The time for the speech show comes, people start filing in. And I had set up this speech around wine. And there's a reason for it, because when one of the stories, we could get to a little

• 1:23:24Cal Fussman?

  later, I was, I went out to learn about wine by becoming the sommelier at Windows of the World, at the top of the World Trade Center, right before the planes hit it. So I'm very attached to wine. And what I wanted to do was to have everybody drinking a glass of wine while I told these stories. So if I messed up, they were still having a good time. Also, yeah, helps with reality bending also. That's right. So I have, we set it up so that all the wine is there, ready, ready to be served to people as they come in. Like, budgeting for 10 people. Well, no, I said, okay, there are like 150 seats.

• 1:24:04Cal Fussman?

  If 150 people show up, fine, have the glasses and the wine, but let's face it, you may only go through a bottle. So they were all prepared, and placed seated 150, and it's this funky nightclub.

• 1:24:19Cal Fussman?

  And all of a sudden, the time starts to roll around and I'm watching and people are just flooding in. They take up all the seats. And, and I was very specific to the people serving the wine. I set up this speech to have toasts throughout to keep everybody's involvement going. So everybody had to lift their glass and like scream with me. Just to keep everyone engaged. And so I said to the people delivering the wine, "Look, I need you to be able to walk down this corridor down the center and keep everybody's glasses filled because it's bad luck to toast with empty glass."

• 1:25:00Cal Fussman?

  And so, we're all set and now every seat's taken. And they're still like 10 minutes before the speech is set to start and people are still coming in. And now, they're coming down the aisle and they're sitting like at my ankles. And they're filling the aisle, they're cross legging in the aisle.

• 1:25:20Tim Ferriss?

  They're sitting behind the bar.

• 1:25:21Cal Fussman?

  That's right.

• 1:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  Taking up the foot space.

• 1:25:23Cal Fussman?

  To the back, the complete back. And now, there's a line of people out that can't get in. I've become like the hottest nightclub in New York City and I'd never done this before.

• 1:25:37Tim Ferriss?

  What do you, not to derail this, but what do you attribute that to?

• 1:25:42Cal Fussman?

  I, I think what happened is, we-

• 1:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  They switched you with Richard Branson in the program?

• 1:25:50Cal Fussman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just messing with you.

• 1:25:54Cal Fussman?

  No, that's good. We'll have to work that, work on that next time. I think what happened is, we titled it, "Decoding the Art of the Interview" with Mikel Gorbachev and Robert De Niro.

• 1:26:15Cal Fussman?

  And Donald Trump. And naturally, it said, like Cal Fussman has interviewed these people, but people came in wondering, or what's it like to interview Gorbachev? Or De Niro? Or Donald Trump? So-

• 1:26:29Tim Ferriss?

  And we'll definitely dig into some of that, but-

• 1:26:31Cal Fussman?

  Okay. And so, I'm, I'm watching all these people flood in, and now the aisle is completely cluttered. I can't get wine to people. Now, I'm starting to freak out. Because I don't want people toasting with an empty glass. And the back of the room is like, it's getting jam-packed. And so, I just said, "Well, just go out and give your speech." So, the speech, it lasts for about an hour. And it gets a really good response. But what was surprising about it was afterward, like, there's a long line of people to see me.

• 1:27:15Cal Fussman?

  And they're business people. And the first couple that came up, two women, they say, "Okay. You, you taught us about asking questions. We got a problem. We are really passionate about our business. We can't seem to find people to work for us that are just as passionate as we are. What can we do? What can we ask?" I said, "Oh, that's easy. Just tell them the Dr. Dre story." "Dr. Dre's story, yeah." I said, "I was interviewing Dr. Dre, and I said to him,

• 1:27:56Cal Fussman?

  'What's the longest you've gone working on a passion project without sleep?'" And he said, "Oh, man. When I'm working on something I really care about, I'm in the zone. I don't think about sleep. It's just, I go until it's done. Could be 72 hours." So, I said, "Just tell the person you're interviewing..."

• 1:28:23Cal Fussman?

  Dr. Dre, he goes 72 hours. What's the longest you've ever gone on a passion project without sleep? You'll be able to tell something about that person by their answer. And, and look, they may tell you, you know what? I get eight hours sleep every night because I come to work every morning, fully charged. And you're gonna know, hey, maybe that's the right person for a certain job in your company. It's not gonna be the most completely passionate person, but maybe they're the person that's gotta do something nuts and bolts.

• 1:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  They're the, right, CFO, or the guy who interacts with Wall Street.

• 1:29:04Cal Fussman?

  Exactly.

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  Or gal, there it is.

• 1:29:08Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, and, and so you will find out through that answer, something that's gonna help you make a decision. And if your girls are looking, you could tell they're looking at, okay, that's our question. We'll tell them the Dr. Dre story. And then people started coming up to me, like, running successful businesses, who had to hire a lot of people all at once, because the business is doing really well. And you could tell it's, they were nervous. Because all of a sudden, a business that starts with an idea, and only them, is now taking on a thousand people in a year.

• 1:29:51Cal Fussman?

  How are you sure that those thousand people have what you had when you started the company? That, that essence, because if they don't have it, the essence of the company is no longer what you wanted. And guys like that, and women, are, are coming up and, and saying, you know, next time you're in San Francisco, can we get together? Because I can tell there's, there's obviously an issue with hiring. And, and it's funny, because now I'm starting to ask everybody about it.

• 1:30:32Cal Fussman?

  And I'm really becoming very conscious that this is like an issue that's really important to a lot of people.

• 1:30:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's the, it's the challenge. We were chatting before we started recording about Silicon Valley and some of the issues surrounding attracting and retaining top talent. It's, it's the fundamental challenge for a lot of these startups in particular, when you go from perhaps hiring, say if you bootstrap for a period of time, 10 people in a year to hiring 10 people a day or a week. It's, it's a massive challenge putting together a process for that. So question for you about the presentation. So if we were to try to decode, decoding the art of the interview, is that the name?

• 1:31:19Cal Fussman?

  Uh, decoding the art of the interview.

• 1:31:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So if we're going to try to meta that and decode the presentation itself, what story or stories, and I don't think I've heard any of them for that matter yet, did people seem to respond best to? And there's one that I have tucked in the back of my mind because when Alex, mutual friend of ours, asked me if I had heard this story and I said, no, he was just, I'm not gonna say disgusted, but just, just speechless at how I had not managed to hear this yet. But what, what did people respond to best in terms of stories?

• 1:31:58Cal Fussman?

  Interesting. Different people respond differently to the different stories. One, if I was deconstructing the speech, one of the things that I wanted to do was to explain how much you can do with a single question in a short amount of time. And to back that up, I told a story about my meeting with Mikel Gorbachev. So I'll take you back to say, uh, 2008.

• 1:32:36Cal Fussman?

  I think it was February, we're in New Orleans, and I'm in a hotel lobby. I'm all set to interview Mikhail Gorbachev for Esquire's What I've Learned column. We got an hour and a half, and fully prepared, ready to go, couldn't have been happier. And I get a call. I pick up the phone. "Hi, Cal," is the publicist. "Sorry, I have to pass this on, but the interview with Mr. Gorbachev is gonna have to be cut short." And now I'm thinking, "Oh, man, was it gonna be down to an hour?"

• 1:33:18Cal Fussman?

  Because that's the thing, with this What I've Learned column, I can't fluff it up. I can't fill it out. I can't use my words. They have to be Mikhail Gorbachev's words, and they have to be wise words. I need, at the very least, an hour to- Extract it. Yeah, move into his soul in a way that makes him feel comfortable and extract that wisdom. At the very least, 45 minutes. So I say to her, "Oh, okay, okay, how much time do I got?" "10 minutes." "10 minutes? Are you..." I don't wanna say, "Are you nuts?", but it's impossible. I can't do this interview in 10 minutes.

• 1:33:59Cal Fussman?

  "Cal, Cal, look, I understand, but a lot of very important people have been added to the list to see Mr. Gorbachev. There's nothing we can do about this. Do you want the 10 minutes or not?" What am I gonna do, say no? "Okay, I'll take the 10 minutes." So I'm sitting down, and I'm thinking, and the more I'm thinking about this, the worse it's getting. Because, number one, I'm knowing that all-

• 1:34:32Cal Fussman?

  Of my questions are going to be translated into Russian. And all of his answers are going to be translated back into English. We actually have five minutes. Yeah, we're moving down. Plus, you're gonna sit down and you're gonna exchange pleasantries. It's not gonna start in a finger snap. Two and a half minutes. Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't two minutes, but it wasn't much more. And so the publicist leads me into the room. And at this point, I'm thinking, okay, if it's two and a half minutes, like, just do your best. And I look up and like, there he is, Gorbachev. And he's a little older than I remember. He's about 77 at the time.

• 1:35:17Cal Fussman?

  He was in town to speak about nuclear weapons and why they should be abolished. And we sit down and I'm looking at him and I just know, just know, he's expecting my first question to be about nuclear arms, world politics, perestroika, Ronald Reagan. He's just ready. So I looked at him, I said, "What's the best lesson your father ever taught you?" And he is surprised, pleasantly surprised. He looks up and he doesn't answer. He's like thinking about this.

• 1:36:00Cal Fussman?

  And he's, it's as if after a little while, he's seeing on the ceiling this movie of his past. And he starts to tell me this story. And it's this story about the day his dad was called to go fight in World War II. See, Gorbachev had been on, lived on a farm. And it was a long distance between this farm and the town where Gorbachev's dad had to join the other men to go off to war. And so the whole family took this trip with the dad to this town to wish him well as he went off.

• 1:36:42Cal Fussman?

  And Gorbachev is talking about this trip and he's like providing these intricate details. And I'm transfixed, but I'm saying like, "Oh, my God, that's the worst possible question. This interview's gonna be over. He's not even gonna get to town yet."

• 1:37:01Cal Fussman?

  So finally, they do get to town. And Gorbachev's dad takes the family into this little shop. And he gets ice cream for everybody. And Gorbachev starts describing this ice cream and the cup that it was in. It's aluminum cup. And as he's telling me, it's almost like he's got his hand out in front of him and the cup's in it. It's that vivid to him. And it's as if in this moment, we both have this same realization. That cup of ice cream is the reason that he was able to make peace with Ronald Reagan and end the Cold War.

• 1:37:44Cal Fussman?

  Because that cup of ice cream, just the memory of it, is the memory of what it felt like for his dad to go off to war, for him to see his dad going off to war. That cup of ice cream in the memory was the dread that he knew of the possibility of never seeing his father again. And we are looking at each other like, oh, man, this is deep. He didn't expect it any more than I did. Just at that moment, knock on the door. It's the publicist. Publicist comes in, very officious. "Gorbachev, Cal, time for the interview is up." And he looks at it and he wags his finger, he says, "No.

• 1:38:29Cal Fussman?

  I want to talk to him." Publicist puts up our hands. "Yes, sir." And he like backs out, like sheepishly. The door shuts, conversation continues. Now we're getting deeper. 10 minutes later, another knock on the door. This time, the publicist comes in a little slower. "Mr. Gorbachev, Cal." Gorbachev says, "No, I want to talk to him."

• 1:38:59Cal Fussman?

  She backs out. Ten minutes later, knock on the door. This time, she's in a panic. Because the train cars are just piling up.

• 1:39:10Cal Fussman?

  Mr. Gorbachev, please. I've got the mayor of New Orleans right outside. There's a long line of people. We're way behind schedule. And Gorbachev just smiles. And he didn't say anything, but the look on his face was, "Hey, what can I do, Cal?" So I said, "Thank you." Like, I knew I pushed it to as long as it could be pushed. And I left. And the interview was a success in that, you know, it had a little story like that. And people could understand something about Gorbachev that they might never have known. But for me, when I look back on it,

• 1:39:54Cal Fussman?

  what I realized was the power of the first question going straight to the heart and not the head. Because it was that question that went into his heart that took us to that very deep place and enabled the interview to continue to go. And because the interview could go, I was able to fill out the page for Esquire. Otherwise, that would have been it. There would have been no way the interview would have run. So, lesson number one, when people ask me, "What tips would I give?" Is aim for the heart, not the head.

• 1:40:37Cal Fussman?

  Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart in the head, then you'll have a pathway to the soul. And so, basically, the speech was lessons tied to stories that backed them up. And whether it was with Gorbachev or Donald Trump or Robert De Niro or Muhammad Ali, each story allowed the listener to understand something very basic.

• 1:41:09Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna pick a name that we haven't heard yet, just because this is the one that made Alex dance around, because that's all he could do to respond before he insisted that I ask you about it. So Julio Cesar Chavez.

• 1:41:25Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, that's, that's another, that's another story. And it goes back to a time when I was a teenager. And again, as I started out, you knew that my childhood hero was Muhammad Ali. And so I followed boxing. And naturally, I wanted to fight. Where I lived, there were no boxing gyms around. What we had in New York was a tournament called The Golden Gloves.

• 1:41:56Tim Ferriss?

  Golden Gloves, big deal.

• 1:41:57Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, sponsored by the Daily News. The finals sold out Madison Square Garden every year. Now, I had no idea how to fight. And I wanted to do it. So basically, like, a month before the Golden Gloves started, I showed up at a gym that was a few towns over, in a bad neighborhood, and said, like, I want to train for the Golden Gloves. You had to be 16. I'd just turned 16. I entered. And this manager pulled me aside and said, no, no, no, no. That's not the way it works. Like, you don't know how to fight. You don't, you don't know anything about fighting. What you do is, you come here, every night, and

• 1:42:40Cal Fussman?

  we'll teach you. And a year, and within a year, we can put you in with people who have your experience, and you'll learn. And then, a year from now, you'll have some experience, and you can go into the Golden Gloves. You know, if you're good, you'll, you'll do okay. I said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. I came to fight.

• 1:43:02Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, pops, but listen.

• 1:43:05Cal Fussman?

  That's right. And basically...

• 1:43:10Cal Fussman?

  I was not, I wasn't on the tall side, so I was a short guy and very short arms. And, you know, my style was basically, you know, hey, man, I'm just gonna rush across the ring and I'm just gonna start throwing punches. Joe Frazier style. That's right. And you'll see what happens. Because, like, Joe Frazier knew how to fight. Right, right. All I could do was just throw reckless, wild, crazy punches one after another. I was in good shape. So, I could throw punches three minutes around, just start to finish. And it was, it was actually, for the people in the gym, it was kinda comical to watch.

• 1:43:53Cal Fussman?

  Because, you know, everybody knew that when I finally got in the ring, like, one of two things was gonna happen. Like, maybe I'd be able to just simply overwhelm whoever was in the ring, just by sheer virtue of, I'm coming at you to throw everything I got and I'm not stopping. The Tasmanian Devil strategy. That's right. You got it. And so, the month passes or so, and it's time for my fight in the Golden Gloves. And, and there was somebody at this club that was gonna represent me. And I show up to the club, he was gonna drive me into Queens, New York, I was living at Long Island at the time.

• 1:44:36Cal Fussman?

  And I was all set. And so I show up for my manager to pick me up, and he's not there. Lifted the altar. Right. Now, I don't have a manager, I don't have a lift to get into this place, and there's no cell phones. You know, you're standing by a payphone, throwing in quarters, like, who can help me? I gotta get to the fights. I gotta fight. And, you know, of course, everybody in the school knows about this, and, and so, it's at a high school in Queens, but a very large gym arena. It's like a Catholic school. And I managed to get somebody to drive me down there.

• 1:45:21Cal Fussman?

  And, like, arrived just in the nick of time, but now, like, I'm all nervous, just to get there.

• 1:45:28Cal Fussman?

  And I'm able to check in. I wrap my hands, get my gloves on, and out of nowhere comes my opponent in the dressing room. And in the most casual way possible, he just puts out his left hand and says like, "Jesus", like, that was his name. But you can tell, not only like was there a scar down one side of his face, like to his lip, but you could just tell he had done this like 400 times before he was eight years old. Right? This is like checking in for work. That's right. It's complete.

• 1:46:09Cal Fussman?

  And so now I'm starting to like realize, uh-oh, like this could be like a predicament. And I get somebody who's never, I've never met before to work my corner, and this guy has no idea of my style. No idea. He thinks like, okay, I know how to fight. And, and so he, he says, "Okay, kid, listen, you know, we're gonna go in the ring. I want you to just take it nice and easy. You move, move around a little, show them the jab, and, and let's see what happens."

• 1:46:52Cal Fussman?

  So, start to walk in the arena, and this is like mid 70s. And it, in fact, it's not too, not, right around, a few years before the Rocky movie came out, you know, The Great White Hope? Well, I'm like the only white fighter on this card, and 90% of the audience is all white. Okay? So, when I come in the ring, it's like The Great White Hope has like finally arrived. Like, people are standing, cheering, going nuts, and like looking around, and it's like it's surreal.

• 1:47:34Cal Fussman?

  I, I've lost sense of where I'm at. And this, in one ear, I got, "Okay, move around, jab." I, I've, I've forgotten who I am.

• 1:47:47Cal Fussman?

  And we get to the ring, go to the center, get the instructions, and I am like completely lost. I do not know what happened. All I remember was getting up, my, or actually, my eyes opening and seeing like three fingers that were very blurry. And then like I'm hearing four, five, six, and I get up. And now I can kind of see clearly. And Jesus is coming at me. And his right hand comes back and it's like right in front of me,

• 1:48:28Cal Fussman?

  right in front of me. And the bell rings. And so I go back to the corner and now like I'm pissed. Like what, what just happened to me? Like get in there, throw your punches, just go at him. And I'm sitting on the stool, the manager's saying something, I don't even hear what he's saying, because all I'm hearing is myself, just screaming at myself, throw punches, remember who you are. In the meantime, the ref is coming over and he's saying like, son, are you okay? Are you okay? And I'm saying, of course, I'm okay. I'm gonna kick his ass. I'm gonna come out, you're gonna see some punches. Next thing you know, like

• 1:49:09Cal Fussman?

  the referee is like waving his hands and stopping the fight. I didn't respond to him. I was like, I was out.

• 1:49:19Tim Ferriss?

  So this dialogue that you're having with yourself, like that was entirely internal?

• 1:49:23Cal Fussman?

  That's right. I had no idea. I had no idea. The worst part of all this is my dad is in the crowd and he brought like two of his childhood friends.

• 1:49:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 1:49:36Cal Fussman?

  Right? So now.

• 1:49:40Cal Fussman?

  You can imagine what I'm hearing, like anytime there's a family reunion, anytime this comes up, we need a funny story. It's like, "Oh, remember Cal and the Golden Gloves?" And so I'm hearing this again and again and again over the years. And finally, it must have been, well, like almost 20 years later, right after I meet the woman in Brazil. She moves to New York, we get married, and I'm watching the TV. And Julio Cesar Chavez, the great Mexican champion, junior welterweight, 140 pounds.

• 1:50:24Cal Fussman?

  He was like 85, 86 and 0 at that point. And I'm watching him on TV as he's cornering an opponent. I got a big bag of chips between my legs. And at this point, right after the marriage, he's put on a bunch of weight. So I got a beer belly, so I got a beer in one hand, chips in the other, belly between them. And I'm screaming at the TV, "Come on, finish him off! What are you doing? Finish him off, Julio." And my wife looks at me and says, "Hey, like, calm down. We've heard your boxing stories." Because, you know, that was the first thing when my family met her, that they indoctrinated her.

• 1:51:07Cal Fussman?

  You know about Cal and the Golden Gloves, don't you? So I look at her, I look at the TV, and I say, and it's clear what needs to be done here, because I've got to get my manhood back. And I said to my wife, "You know what? You see that guy on the TV, Julio Cesar Chavez? I'm gonna fight him."

• 1:51:32Cal Fussman?

  And so naturally, my wife, like, you're crazy, forget it. You know, we've heard the story, but now I know I have to do this to close this chapter in my life, no matter what. And so.

• 1:51:50Tim Ferriss?

  No, just to place it, at the time, you're writing for Esquire.

• 1:51:54Cal Fussman?

  Mm hmm. Actually, when we moved to New York, I had written, or I was writing for a magazine called GQ. And the editor at the time, or my editor at GQ, was a guy named David Granger, who later became the editor of Esquire. And when he did, he brought me and a bunch of writers with him. So this all started at GQ. And the day after, my wife is laughing at me. I march into David Granger's office and I say, hey, you want to buy a story? I'm gonna go fight Julio Cesar Chavez. He says, what?

• 1:52:35Cal Fussman?

  I give him the background and he said, all right, let me go in and check what my boss.

• 1:52:40Tim Ferriss?

  See what our insurance policy looks like.

• 1:52:42Cal Fussman?

  Oh, they made me, that was the first thing. You're gonna have to sign documents saying, we're not responsible for this. This is all on you.

• 1:52:51Cal Fussman?

  I said, that's fine. And I go down to the Times Square Gym on 42nd Street at the time. And up these rickety old wooden steps. It was like something out of the past. Like you could literally hear each foot that you put down. And then there's like the drumbeat of the bags and, and you walk up there. And since I had followed boxing, I knew who, who people were. And I just start looking around at the trainers. And there was a guy I recognized. His name was Harold Weston. And he had fought Tommy Hearns, the welterweight champion. Tommy Hearns was nasty.

• 1:53:36Cal Fussman?

  Yeah. And he had actually done pretty well. He was a very slick boxer. And he wasn't that tall. And Tommy Hearns was like 6'2", 6'3", tremendous reach and unbelievable power in his hands. And I think that fight went a while. I know Tommy scored a TKO, but Harold had done pretty well, avoiding the punishment. And so I went over to him and I said, "Hey, I'm gonna be fighting Julio Cesar Chavez. You think you can train me?" And now he's just like, "What is this?" Who sent you here? Looking for the hidden cameras?

• 1:54:21Cal Fussman?

  You got it. That's exactly it. And then this guy says he's gonna fight Julio Cesar Chavez. Everybody in the gym is laughing. "Are you a professional? No." I was like, "Are you an amateur? Well, I had one fight in the Golden Gloves 20 years ago. It didn't turn out..." And now Harold's saying like, "Okay, okay. You're really gonna do this, huh? I'll tell you what. You come back tomorrow, like 3 o'clock, and we'll do a little workout. And we'll see." So I come back the next day, and this guy, he just tortured me.

• 1:55:05Cal Fussman?

  The whole point was, "Get out of here. You're not fighting Julio Cesar Chavez. You have no idea what it's like to be a boxer." Like, a little respect for the craft here. And after three, three hours, I mean, literally, I was like reduced to tears again and again and again. And I just kept going. And I remember like getting home to my apartment and like I rang the door, the door opened, I literally collapsed into my wife's arms. And it's like she dragged me to the tub and where she had hot water going. She threw

• 1:55:50Cal Fussman?

  in some eps and salts and I just like laid in there for like three hours, unable to move. And as I left, after, when I left the gym, everybody in gym was placing bets whether I was gonna come back the next day. And I did. And that was the first moment where, oh, like, hey, that's, that's interesting. And he said, okay, like, I understand you're writing this for GQ. He was a fashionable guy. So that lured him in, you know, the style element. And he said, so you're really gonna do this? And I said, yeah. I said,

• 1:56:30Cal Fussman?

  look, I'm just asking for one round with Julio Cesar Chavez. One round. That's it. But I'm going out there and I'm giving it my all. He said, well, look, let me, let me show you like ways to get through that round. Now, remember, he's a slick boxer. I'm gonna teach you how to move and you will survive. If you let, we can do this. If you, look, if he wants, if he's taking this really seriously, you're going down. But who knows? Maybe, we don't know how he's gonna react. Maybe he'll be curious. And I will teach you how to move around the ring and protect yourself so that you don't die.

• 1:57:17Cal Fussman?

  And now, in my mind, I'm also now thinking about the fight between Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard. I don't know if you remember, it was the second fight. No mas. No mas, that's right. Where, in the middle of the fight, we don't know what really happened. It's never fully been explained. In the first fight, they had Duran won by a decision in Montreal. And afterward, he went back to Panama as a national hero. Fifty thousand people waiting for him at the airport. And he just had like a three-month binge party. And gained like 50 pounds.

• 1:57:59Cal Fussman?

  In the meantime, Leonard, after his first loss, went back home and was like training the next day for the rematch. So they, they set it up to have an immediate rematch six months later. And after, with maybe two months left, Duran started to train. Now he had to take off 40 or 50 pounds. He was in no condition to do this, but he dramatically lost the weight. And we'll never know, but he was overweight a few days before the fight. Now, whether he took like Ex-Lax or something to purge his system,

• 1:58:39Cal Fussman?

  or whether after he made the weight, he went out and ate three steaks and a bunch of orange juice. And we know that his stomach was not in the best of shape. But we also don't know if, when he got in the ring, his stomach was bothering him, or Leonard adopted a style that wouldn't allow Duran to hit him, and basically broke Duran mentally. So we don't know if it was his stomach, or his mind, or both. But midway in the fight, Duran basically just throws up his hands and says, "No mas." No more. No more. And Leonard celebrates, and everybody watching.

• 1:59:23Cal Fussman?

  Was in disbelief because for 20 years Roberto Duran had been the epitome of the macho man. He was like Mike Tyson of the lightweights in his era. He just bored straight ahead. Nothing could stop this guy. He was relentless. And to see him quit was like what I felt about my experience in the Golden Gloves. So I basically had to somehow eradicate all that feeling. And I had to do it in a way that's left me with some shred of pride at the end. So Harold says to me, okay, look, I'm gonna teach you how to move.

• 2:00:08Cal Fussman?

  And he was like a very classy fighter. And as he's showing me how to move around and avoid punches, I said, no Harold, no, no, no, it's not, not the way we're gonna do this. No, no. The first time I got in trouble because I didn't go out throwing punches. And that's how I'm coming out this time. I'm coming out to throw punches and I want to do it just like Joe Frazier. Joe Frazier's a short guy, stocky arms, just bobbing, weaving, coming straight ahead. And Harold says, no, no, no, I'm not gonna do this.

• 2:00:48Cal Fussman?

  Because basically now I'm asking Harold to teach me a style that is going to bring all of my energy, full focus, full bore, straight ahead, right at one of the most damaging punchers in- Incoming missiles. That's right. And so he, he's just fighting with me. Like there's no way, I'm not being a party to this. You know, if we do this, we do it smart and you come out alive. Like you're not going in there like- All due respect, Cal. You're not smoking, smoking Cal. Smoking Cal, no. That's right. And I said, no, I want you to teach me like Joe Frazier. And he said, okay, you want to be smoking Joe?

• 2:01:32Cal Fussman?

  I can teach you how to be smoking Joe. And he pulls out a rope and he sets it- From one, the top of the ropes on one side of the ring to the other, and he makes me start bobbing and weaving under this rope. Now, anybody who has never done this before, like, after a minute, your thighs are burning. And, and, and basically, Harold's idea is, I will make him do this so long that he comes to his senses and fights the way I tell him, so I can protect him. But I just, no matter how much it burned, I just got down low and I just bobbed and weaved and moved my head. And then he'd take me to the bags.

• 2:02:16Cal Fussman?

  And now he's teaching me how to throw punches, because I didn't know how to do any of this stuff. And then, you have to get in the ring. And now, like, I'm 35 years old, and all these kids are like 19, 20. They love to get in the ring, because they want to beat the crap out of me. And, and believe me, you know, they were, because I did not know how to fight. But every day, I just kept on going back. I literally trained like a fighter. It must have been for like, four months. And plus, on the other hand, I had to figure out a way to get Julio Cesar Chavez in the ring with me. He, he had no idea this. He had no idea that you're in this intensive training camp

• 2:03:00Cal Fussman?

  with no, no agreed-upon fight. No, not a clue. He doesn't know that I exist. And I am training, like, three hours every afternoon, plus, running in the morning, plus, calisthenics at night. I'm eating just the way Harold's telling me. My weight goes from, I was about 165, now I'm down to less than 147. Closing in on 140, Chavez fights at 140. At this point, he's 87-0, with...

• 2:03:30Cal Fussman?

  I don't know how many knockouts, but I think it was in the 80s.

• 2:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  Very high percentage.

• 2:03:35Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, very high percentage.

• 2:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  I remember also, just as a side note, because I was mystified and just captivated by Julio Cesar Chavez, that at some point, they looked at x-rays of his head, and his skull's like twice as thick as normal human being.

• 2:03:52Cal Fussman?

  That's right. So he was used to coming straight at people and absorbing whatever punishment. They were dishing out in order to land his shots. And, and believe me, when Harold heard that I was doing, and he said, "Look, Cal, there's, I know a guy who fought Julio Cesar Chavez. His name is Juan Laporte, okay? Basically, after that fight, like, Laporte was, was piss and blood for a long time. Because one of Chavez's biggest shots was his left hook to the liver. And he's saying like, "You, you don't understand. Like, this is a professional athlete at the top

• 2:04:34Cal Fussman?

  of his profession." You know, a lot of guys think, "Oh, if I, if I was out on that football field, I would have made that catch." They, you know, they see a professional drop the ball. I, I would have brought that in. And lots of times, they drop passes that the rest of us might have caught. But you don't understand what it's like to be up against a professional athlete until you are. Because even these amateur kids were knocking my head off every day. But I just kept on coming back up them steps, kept on coming back up them steps. Finally, a friend of mine, the skinny guy, writing for Sports Illustrated, had been sent

• 2:05:16Cal Fussman?

  to do a story about Julio Cesar Chavez. So while he's out interviewing Julio Cesar Chavez, he says to him, "Oh, by the way, you know, I got a friend who wants to fight you. Dude, is it okay if he comes and fights you?" Julio says, "Sure." I'm like, "Send him, send him over."

• 2:05:34Cal Fussman?

  He only wants one round. Fine, fine. It'll be great. So now Julio has said yes.

• 2:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, it's like, I'm just imagining, it's like if your second grade self in a different era had written to Tiger Woods being like, "My friend in second grade wants to play you in golf." You're like, "Sure. Yeah, why not? Send him over."

• 2:05:54Cal Fussman?

  Yeah. And Julio is a very, he's a fun-loving guy. So, you know, it was, maybe he saw it as a joke. I don't know. And, and so now, at this point, it's like months I've been training. Now, you look at my body, man. I got a six-pack. And now I'm getting in the ring and I was up against an amateur who was really beating me up badly in the beginning. And then one day, he threw a right hand at my head and I ducked under it and I clocked him with the right hand. And he just went sprawling backward. And now, like, it started to think, "Okay Julio, are you ready?

• 2:06:38Cal Fussman?

  Are you ready for this?" All the people in the gym are laughing. That's all, it's all part of, like, a community where, like, what is gonna happen? And so, at this point, like, GQ meanwhile is funding this. They're funding all the training. And they're gonna fund my trip to Mexico. They gotta send photographers. They'll send my wife. And now I got an entourage coming out of Mexico to fight Julio Cesar Chavez. And he's training to fight Purnell Whitaker. This is like the biggest fighter in his life. And he's actually not really training that hard.

• 2:07:24Cal Fussman?

  Like, we see him, like, we're supposed to have our fight, like, while he's in training. And I'm saying that he's going to different towns and having parties. And so I'm starting to think-

• 2:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  This is after you arrived?

• 2:07:39Cal Fussman?

  This is after I arrived. So, I didn't know. I thought, "Well, maybe he's normally like this." But something in my mind was saying, "Man, if he's fighting Purnell Whitaker, he should be a little more focused than this."

• 2:07:54Cal Fussman?

  And so I'm waiting for this appointed day and Harold West and my trainer knew the president of the World Boxing Council, Jose Suliman, who like set up a weigh-in. And GQ made me a robe and like Julio was very amused by all this. We went out running one morning and the thing about it was Julio trains in Toluca, Mexico, high altitude. So that was my first moment where I said, uh-oh. This might be an issue. Yeah, because I trained really hard back in New York, but all of a sudden at altitude,

• 2:08:37Cal Fussman?

  you're not, you're not the same. And so we're running in the morning and it comes to this day where, okay, we're gonna do it. So I show up, I got my GQ robe on, but they invited kids from their neighborhood in to come witness this. And like the kids thought like, oh, this is a fight. And so Julio is set up, I'm set up, we're ready to go. The one thing Julio said was, look, I can't wear like eight ounce gloves like you're gonna wear because I, like, I'm scared I'm gonna hurt my hands. So I'm just gonna like wear like training gloves.

• 2:09:21Cal Fussman?

  But other than that, and I said, no headgear. Like, I said, this is a fight. I'm coming to fight you. And so he just wanted to protect his hands. And so he had these white gloves. I wouldn't call them pillowy, but there was cushion in there. Twelve or 16 ounces? Yeah, it's something. I don't know if they were 12 or 16, but they weren't eight like mine. That was the only difference. And Jose Suliman, president of WBC, has the guy ring the bell. And all of a sudden, I go charging straight in the style of Joe Frazier right at Julio Cesar Chavez. He looks at me and he's used to coming straight ahead.

• 2:10:05Cal Fussman?

  And now he's saying like, whoa, what's going on? What the hell is this? Now, here's the thing about this. Harold said to me, look, this- You don't understand how good he is, how quick he is. There's just, you have no chance of hitting him. Do you understand me? Like, all the work you did, it doesn't, there's only one chance you have. And I'm gonna tell it to you. You listen to me, you listen to me good. This is the strategy. I want you to throw, just like I've been teaching you. Left jab, right hand, straight right hand, left hook. Okay? He's gonna catch those punches. And I want you to do it again. Left jab, straight right hand, left hook.

• 2:10:50Cal Fussman?

  He's gonna catch those punches. And I want you to do it again. Left jab, right hand, left hook. And he's gonna catch him again. And I want you to keep on doing that. Again, and again, and again. Do it 20 times. And then, on the 21st time, if you're still standing, because we don't know, he may just hit you in the liver and that's the fight. If you're still standing. If you do that 20 times in a row, and you're still there. Go left hand, right hand, and then come back with another right hand. And so, bell rings. And now, he's like circling around, trying to figure out like,

• 2:11:33Cal Fussman?

  who is this lunatic coming at me like Joe Frazier? Bobbing, weaving, snorting. I mean, I could sound like Joe Frazier. And, but he's so fast that, just like Carol says, I throw the left hand, I throw the left jab, he catches it. I throw the right hand, he catches it. I throw the left hook, he catches it. Like, the first time I did it, he said, "Okay, I know what you got." And, I'm just gonna see, like, how much you can take in a little while. But, we'll play this out. We'll play it out. And so, I'm, I keep storming in, I keep throwing these street punches. He keeps catching them. He's moving me around. But I keep throwing these street punches, again and again and again.

• 2:12:17Cal Fussman?

  Finally, like two minutes into the round, I go left jab, right hand. And then, you could almost see him lifting his hand to catch my left hook. And I just throw the right hand, and it just socks him in the jaw. And he looks at me and he like sprawls backward as a way of saying, "Okay, you caught me." "Okay, okay, okay." He goes back like he's staggered and then he smiles at me and says, "Okay, now we're gonna fight." "Now, now we're gonna fight." He comes in on me and he throws a left hook to my liver. I'm telling you,

• 2:13:02Cal Fussman?

  it was like someone took the pipe of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, attached to the vacuum cleaner that was on full blast sucking up and just shoved it down my throat.

• 2:13:14Cal Fussman?

  Down to my stomach and it's like my whole stomach is coming up through my mouth, right? And I said,

• 2:13:23Cal Fussman?

  and the thing about it was, I, I just started throwing punches back. I, it obviously wasn't, it was his way of just saying, "I'm gonna give you just like a little taste." But now I'm firing back because as bad as I was hurt, like this was my moment. Like I had to avenge what happened to me when I'm 16 years old and I'm firing back. Now he's starting to like, now he's starting to hit me. And so Jose Suleman, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding, the round's over. I go back to my corner. My lips are blue. The altitude and that one shot literally took everything out of me.

• 2:14:04Cal Fussman?

  But like in my mind, like, I did, I'm here. I did it.

• 2:14:11Cal Fussman?

  And Julio, like he's training for his fight. He looks over at me and says, "Otro?" "You want another?" And I said, "Si, mas."

• 2:14:23Cal Fussman?

  And we did another one. And then in the second round, he really started like, he was having fun, but he was starting to tag me pretty good. And you could tell, like, Jose Suleman is watching this and he's saying,

• 2:14:39Cal Fussman?

  A minute and a half into the round, ring the bell, ring the bell.

• 2:14:43Tim Ferriss?

  Before we have a gringo casualty on our hands.

• 2:14:46Cal Fussman?

  That's right. And so the bell rings, I go back to the corner and we embrace. He was really wonderful about it. Because what was cool about what he did was he, he treated me, now that I think about it, he treated me like the assistant to President Johnson treated me. He, he didn't laugh.

• 2:15:14Cal Fussman?

  He saw my punches coming, he saw what I could handle. And then when he saw that I had like, I foxed him for a second, he said, okay, I'll lift the game, but I'm, I'm not here to, I'm not here to level him. And so it was a really like wonderful experience. I mean, they, they had been teasing my wife, asking her like how much insurance we had and stuff like that. But at the end, it really, he, he really put, rose to a high level in the way he handled the whole thing. Because at the end of it, I walked out of it after going through everything I did.

• 2:15:55Cal Fussman?

  I, I pushed myself as far as I could go. I got hit in the liver and I came back, I came back. And so now it's just a good story.

• 2:16:07Tim Ferriss?

  What did your, when you spoke to your wife after the two rounds, like later that night, or whenever you actually had a chance to decompress and be by yourselves, how did she describe what was going through her, her head as she watched you guys after the first bell ring?

• 2:16:24Cal Fussman?

  I think she was pretty scared.

• 2:16:29Cal Fussman?

  I think she probably was watching with her hands over her eyes, but with her fingers spread so that she could see. And I, I think she was, she was really proud. And you know, the, the thing about it is you realize.

• 2:16:47Cal Fussman?

  It's not so much about winning and losing. Although, you know, my kids, it's crazy because my kids hear the story and they tell their friends in like junior high school or whatever and their friends, "Did he win?" They have no, they have no concept, but the thing is, I did win because I confronted myself. I had to go up those rickety steps every day. I had to get the crap beaten at me, beaten up out of me every day in order to learn how to duck a punch. And I did. I pushed myself as far as I could go and now I get a great story out of it and there's

• 2:17:29Cal Fussman?

  no more, when I talk about the Golden Gloves, it's just a funny part of the story. It's not something that eats at me anymore. I need that part of the story to set up the ending. So, I'm thankful that happened to me because without that, without A, I wouldn't have done B, which led to C.

• 2:17:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's a healthy way to think about a lot of things, I suppose. If people, even if they're not storytellers or writers, if they think about their mishaps or some of the challenges they've had is the part A they needed to set up part B.

• 2:18:03Cal Fussman?

  You know what? It is a great way of looking at life and man, I have taken a beating so many times. And one of the great things about telling stories is when you realize that, okay, this beating I just took, maybe I can use that to get an advance from a magazine to do something cool. And again and again, I use my mistakes, foibles, humiliating moments to come back and try to make some sense of them and triumph over those moments. And it's, again, you don't...

• 2:18:51Cal Fussman?

  You don't have to be perfect, you don't have to win, but you have to look deep inside yourself and know that, okay, I respect myself for this.

• 2:19:05Cal Fussman?

  And to this day, like, I really do. It gets complicated when people look at, like, the picture, I get a big picture at home, of me hitting Julio, and people look at it and it looks real. It looks authentic.

• 2:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  It is real.

• 2:19:22Cal Fussman?

  It is real.

• 2:19:25Cal Fussman?

  But it lends people to say, what happened? What was the result? The result was I survived.

• 2:19:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so Cal, there are so many more stories that, even if not on tape, I will have to ask you about, but perhaps we'll do a round two. I mean, we have to talk at some point about Muhammad Ali, we have to talk about Trump, we have to talk about Dineer, there's so many other things. The James Beard Award, I mean, the list goes on and on, but I know you have a dinner to get to. Do you have a little bit of time for some of my customary rapid-fire questions?

• 2:19:59Cal Fussman?

  I love those questions.

• 2:20:01Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so I'm going to...

• 2:20:02Cal Fussman?

  I hope I have rapid-fire answers.

• 2:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  They don't have to be, so that's the whole twist on the phrasing of the rapid-fire questions. The questions can be rapid-fire, but your answers can be as long as you would like them to be.

• 2:20:14Cal Fussman?

  I love these questions.

• 2:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so the first that I usually start with is, when you think of the word "successful," who is the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 2:20:23Cal Fussman?

  And you mentioned him during the course of this interview. There are two people. One is this kid Alex Benayan, who's 23 years old. He was in school at USC, and his parents had basically raised him to be a doctor, to the point where, during Halloween, when he was a kid, they would dress him up in scrubs. Just, like, get the point? That's where you're headed. And he gets to college, and...

• 2:20:54Cal Fussman?

  He's got a stack of biology books next to him and he, he just can't do it. He's really smart, but he's just not linked to it. And he starts to wonder, "What am I doing here?" He's going to school at USC, it's a great school. And he starts to wonder about this word "success." And he goes to the library and starts to look at biographies of people who he deemed to be successful, to see what the definition of success was. And he's reading biography after biography and he realizes that the book that I'm looking for doesn't exist.

• 2:21:38Cal Fussman?

  I need to go out and to interview these people to find out what they think success is. And so he did. And on his journey, one of the people that he went to interview was Larry King. And he actually met Larry outside of Whole Foods, went running down, he saw Larry like pushing his shopping cart, went running down the street, "Larry King!" Scared the bejesus out of Larry and asked if he could interview Larry and Larry invited him to breakfast. And when he arrived, Alex said, "I'm writing a book."

• 2:22:19Cal Fussman?

  And Larry said to Alex, "Well, if you're writing a book, then you should talk to this guy. You should talk to Cal, because he's written two of my books with me and he can help you." So Alex did get to sit down to talk with Larry, but I became very close with Alex at that point. And so when I think of success, I think of everything Alex was trying to find out. That's one. The second is another boxer, George Foreman, who you might remember.

• 2:22:55Tim Ferriss?

  My mom's favorite boxer.

• 2:22:56Cal Fussman?

  Really?

• 2:22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:57Cal Fussman?

  Okay.

• 2:22:57Tim Ferriss?

  Cause she remembers old George.

• 2:22:59Cal Fussman?

  George. Now, the old George was a bigger Mike Tyson.

• 2:23:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my God. Terrifying.

• 2:23:06Cal Fussman?

  He was like Tyson was what, six feet maybe? George Foreman was 6'3", 220, and just had a string of vicious knockouts and won the heavyweight title by knocking Joe Frazier down six times. One time, he literally hit him with an uppercut and uprooted Joe Frazier like he was a tree stump.

• 2:23:29Tim Ferriss?

  It looks like a superhero movie. For people, I'm sure you can find footage of it, but if you look at George Foreman, Frazier, you know, knock down or knockout, I mean, just the footage is unbelievable.

• 2:23:42Cal Fussman?

  And you're looking at somebody there who, George Foreman grew up in a very tangled situation. His personality was formed, one, by living in poverty. He would go to school in the mornings with a brown paper bag that had no food in it, and he would blow it up to make it look like there was food in it so the other, he wouldn't be embarrassed in front of the other kids. On top of that, his sisters, his siblings, his sisters would make fun of him. He was, he was younger. They would say, "You a mohawk! You a mohawk!"

• 2:24:23Cal Fussman?

  And George Foreman had no idea what a mohawk meant, but he knew it wasn't good. And he would hear that and he would chase his sisters around when he heard, "You a mohawk! You a mohawk!" And finally, years later, he grew up and he found out what they were saying.

• 2:24:41Cal Fussman?

  George Foreman's mom was married to Mr. Foreman, but they separated for a while. While they were separated, her mom went off with a guy named Leroy Moorhead. Conceived George, conceived George, and then went back to Mr. Foreman. And so, when he was born, his siblings who were Foremans would call you a mohead, you a mohead. And, and so there was this angry part of George. Very angry. To the, to the point where he told me, people would be scared to ask him for an autograph.

• 2:25:24Cal Fussman?

  When he would walk into a place, people would look down. And he had this, this surrliness was a big part of his demeanor. And when he went to fight Muhammad Ali in Zaire, he was an undefeated champ. People feared for Ali's life. And in fact, Ali would not watch George Foreman hit the heavy bag. It was too scary. This guy could hit that hard. And what Ali saw was, George Foreman had so much anger in him that when he came out, he just came out to bludgeon whoever was in front of him. And Ali had a sense that if he could make Foreman expend his energy

• 2:26:08Cal Fussman?

  and not land those punches, have them punches come off his arms. If he could infuriate Foreman to the point where Foreman lost his cool and punched himself out, he figured out a way to win. And naturally, in the heat of Africa, it was basically, Ali set this thing up perfectly. Foreman arrived with a German shepherd.

• 2:26:35Cal Fussman?

  Not knowing that the Zaireans had in their history, a memory of German shepherds being brought in by the Belgians to keep them under control. So the Zaireans immediately hated George Foreman. And a chant grew out of it. Ali Boumaï, Ali, kill him. And the bell rang and George Foreman came at Ali and Ali didn't move. He just kept his back against the ropes with his hands up. This was the rope-a-dope? This was the rope-a-dope. And George Foreman is just slugging away and Ali would like, open his guard up just a little, say, is that all you got? Then close his guard.

• 2:27:17Cal Fussman?

  Foreman just getting more and more infuriated, just punch after punch, first round, second round. Those of us who are watching, and I was watching on closed circuit television on a big screen in St. Louis's time, you're almost crying because you were screaming at Ali, get out of the way, Danz, do something. We couldn't see what was happening, that he was just, he kept talking and George, we couldn't hear him talking. Oh, man, that's it? That's all you got? And Foreman is just throwing shot after shot after shot. And then all of a sudden, in like the fourth round, you see Foreman throw a shot and Ali just duck under it and then just throw a jab straight back in Foreman's face and Foreman's

• 2:27:58Cal Fussman?

  head snapped back and we realized, oh my God, he's punched himself out. As the fight continues, a few more rounds, Ali nails him in one right hand and it's so hot, Foreman's exhausted, Ali nails him with a right hand, Foreman goes down, can't beat the count, and he's crushed. It must be akin to what Rhonda Rousey, for those who are like younger and watch mixed martial arts, what Rhonda Rousey went through after her recent defeat. That's right. Where you think somebody is invincible and then all of a sudden Rhonda back. One head kick, one head kick later. That's right. And George Foreman, for like 20 years, could never get another title shot.

• 2:28:43Cal Fussman?

  He retired and he did something and he told me what he did. And he said, this is the hardest thing when you talk about success. I asked him.

• 2:28:56Cal Fussman?

  About success, I asked him a question about success, but, and he said, "The hardest thing you can do in life is to change your character."

• 2:29:08Cal Fussman?

  And basically, in his early 40s, he came back to boxing, but he was completely different. He was no longer the surly guy, he was a guy who would do ads for eating hamburgers, smiling and laughing.

• 2:29:27Tim Ferriss?

  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, I remember his, I want to say I remember his comeback sort of promotional videos where he'd be going for his boxing run and people would be handing him food.

• 2:29:36Cal Fussman?

  That's right, that's right, that's right. And he starts his comeback at, I think, more than 300 pounds.

• 2:29:43Tim Ferriss?

  Big guy.

• 2:29:44Cal Fussman?

  He's a, he's a big guy and he's in his 40s. And, not, but it's what he changed in his head. Now, he was smiling.

• 2:29:55Tim Ferriss?

  What did he do to change that?

• 2:29:57Cal Fussman?

  He realized that surrliness and that anger is what brought him down against Muhammad Ali, right? So, fast forward, he's 45 years old, and he gets a heavyweight title fight against a guy 20 years younger named Michael Moore.

• 2:30:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I remember, southpaw.

• 2:30:20Cal Fussman?

  A southpaw, who is much faster, a little lighter, but should be able to move around George with ease and just put punches into George's face without George being able to respond. But here's the thing, Foreman came into the ring, wearing the exact red trunks that he was wearing when Ali hit him and put him down.

• 2:30:48Cal Fussman?

  And when Moore's trainer saw that, he recognized it and thought like, uh oh, something's up here. And basically, George didn't waste any energy. He rearranged his character and Moore, for the first nine rounds, just completely outboxed him, moved around. George just kept his hands up, tried to land, couldn't, could barely even land, and his face started to get swollen. And the 10th round started, and his trainer, who coincidentally was Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali's trainer, who was in the opposing corner in Zaire,

• 2:31:32Cal Fussman?

  basically said to him, George, like, you're way behind. You gotta do something. And George just kept moving forward and without wasting energy, just saw one moment, and he threw a right hand, and he still had the power. He still had everything that he had when he was young, power-wise, and he clipped Moir straight on the jaw. And Michael Moore went down and couldn't beat the count. And Foreman went over to the corner, got down on his knees, thanked the Lord. And to me, that was a symbol of success because he changed,

• 2:32:15Cal Fussman?

  he needed to change who he was in order to have that success. And he did it at 45. So that's the best answer I can give you.

• 2:32:26Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, love George Foreman. This just reinvigorated so much more enthusiasm about learning more about George. And I remember, ah, it brings back so many memories, because I remember that fight also, I want to say George used what I want to say was the crab defense. In other words, he didn't hold his forearms together perpendicular to the floor, but they were kind of crossed over in front of his face. Such a good story.

• 2:32:56Cal Fussman?

  Well, it was all designed to, he knew he was gonna endure punishment.

• 2:33:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:00Cal Fussman?

  And he knew he had to do it in a way that expended the least amount of energy. And he knew he just had to put himself in the right position to land that one shot. So, it's a, it's a beautiful story to see somebody take their weakest point and do something within themselves to change who they are.

• 2:33:25Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the history repeats itself, irony of that fight that he won also is that Michael was known as a very angry guy, had a criminal record and probably lost for some of the same reasons.

• 2:33:40Cal Fussman?

  That, that's right. In fact, I'd have to go back and watch the fight, but I'm sure his trainer, who was like aware, was probably saying, you know, if you're way ahead, take it easy, stay away. And he probably said, what are you crazy? I got this under control. Boom, one shot.

• 2:33:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, incredible. What is the book or books that you've given most as gifts, other than your own? Which, obviously for people listening, you know that I'll link to everything in the show notes as well, but.

• 2:34:13Cal Fussman?

  Hard question to answer because it's almost like wine. Every meal, you're going to have another experience with different people, different food. So, if I meet somebody, I like to give books that I've loved. And so, like I mentioned, meeting Alex and, and he says to me, I want, he didn't know how to write a book. And he's, I want to write a great book. I want to, you could just tell it was bursting out of him. And so, I gave him Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, for him to know, okay, if you're gonna, if you've never written

• 2:34:54Cal Fussman?

  a book and you're gonna tell somebody, you want to write a great book, all right, read this and know what a great book is. And so, my, my gifts tend to judge what the person needs and then fill that need. So, if. And they're no different in wine. If somebody's having a steak, I'm probably not gonna give them a reesling. I'll, I'll give them something to complement steak.

• 2:35:21Tim Ferriss?

  If you, so I'll give you more specific circumstance. So let's say that someone came to you and they said, you know what, I'm a bored billionaire and I want to give three books to every graduating high school senior in the country this year.

• 2:35:40Cal Fussman?

  Wow. What a question. Okay. One, one book that people should read. And in fact, I, I got it with me right now and I think, let me pull it out here. One of the blurbs on this book actually says, as Toni Morrison, this is required reading.

• 2:36:09Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that's a strong endorsement.

• 2:36:11Cal Fussman?

  Yeah. And Toni Morrison's a great African-American writer. And this book is called Between the World and Me. And it's by a guy named Ta Nahisi Coats. And it's a letter to his son about being a black male in America. And I think, I think it is required reading just because if we want to like, understand what is going on, we, we see what's happening in Ferguson, Missouri. It just seems like it's a month after month after month, we see protests and problems.

• 2:36:56Cal Fussman?

  And this is just a way of redirecting your eyesight to a place that you normally wouldn't go. And it's an amazing thing about this book because as I'm reading it, I was walking down the street and I passed a news box with the Los Angeles Times in it.

• 2:37:24Cal Fussman?

  And on the front page, there was this statistic that said that basically every juvenile that's incarcerated in the state of California, it costs us $260,000 a year.

• 2:37:42Tim Ferriss?

  That is a lot.

• 2:37:43Cal Fussman?

  And

• 2:37:44Tim Ferriss?

  More than any Ivy League education.

• 2:37:47Cal Fussman?

  There you go. And think of that, if you took that money and put it into lifting that same kid, who knows what would happen? You know, there's DNA involved, there's a lot of stuff involved, but it just made me realize why aren't we putting the resources in before, rather than just paying this money out, we don't even know that we're putting it out. And so it's just a book that makes you see the world differently. Another book that I would recommend, it's a book that I'm reading now.

• 2:38:28Tim Ferriss?

  And just for those people wondering, Between the World and Me, this is a short book. This is about 130 pages, National Book Award winner. I will order that as soon as we finish this chat, but you mentioned the second.

• 2:38:42Cal Fussman?

  Second book, is it okay if I give you two?

• 2:38:45Tim Ferriss?

  You can do two.

• 2:38:46Cal Fussman?

  Because these two are coming.

• 2:38:47Tim Ferriss?

  I can do two.

• 2:38:48Cal Fussman?

  It's just because these are two that I'm reading now, so it's just hot off the press. It's a book called Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln.

• 2:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  I love the title.

• 2:39:04Cal Fussman?

  And I think I'm carrying it around with me as well.

• 2:39:08Tim Ferriss?

  This is amazing.

• 2:39:09Cal Fussman?

  Yeah. You hit me at the right time with this question. It's written by James C. Humes. And there's, for anyone who wants to speak, and if you're a high school senior, at some point, you're gonna have to get up and speak. It's a great book because there's all kinds of tips on everything about speaking.

• 2:39:35Tim Ferriss?

  Subtitle, 21 Powerful Secrets of History's Greatest Speakers.

• 2:39:40Cal Fussman?

  There's this great anecdote in this book that really helped me as I was preparing to give my speech, because it's hard to memorize a speech. And then I'm reading about Ronald Reagan, like, known as the great communicator, American president. Well, you know, when he spoke, he riveted people. And when he was a young man, so you, again, we're talking about basically the same age as the people you just mentioned. What would you recommend for the high school senior? Actually Reagan was just getting out of college, and he got a job in radio in Iowa. And he was very good conversationally on the air, but then it came time to read the

• 2:40:24Cal Fussman?

  advertisements. And for some reason, he was so stiff and awkward reading these advertisements, that the advertisers basically said, "Get him off the air." And they fired him. And he went back to his room, and he's like, feeling horrible about it, because he loved being on the radio. He loved communicating. And he wondered, "What can I do in order to get my job back?" So, I guess FDR was doing the fireside chats, and he realized how riveting those were. So, he got those chats, and he started to read them.

• 2:41:07Cal Fussman?

  But what he did was, he would look at the words, and then, like, almost memorize the phrase in his head, then look up, and then say the words conversationally. So, he wasn't trying to memorize them by reading it off the page. He would just take a few of the words, then look up, give you those words, look down. He would never speak while he was looking down. And then, he went back to radio, and that's how he did his advertisements, and it worked. So, it's a great, the book is just filled with little tips like that, that will make it so much easier for anybody who's got to get up and give a speech.

• 2:41:52Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to, yet another book for my list.

• 2:41:57Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies?

• 2:42:00Cal Fussman?

  You know, it's a really interesting question. I probably would have told you

• 2:42:07Cal Fussman?

  that there's a movie Cinema Paradiso. You love that movie?

• 2:42:10Tim Ferriss?

  Great film.

• 2:42:11Cal Fussman?

  Okay. And I would mention that, but something happened to me recently where a documentary and a movie came together that provided this amazing experience. And the documentary was called Man on Wire, and it was about Philippe Thibault's walk on a wire across the towers of the World Trade Center. And it's amazing documentary. Everything that he had to go through to, almost like a spy, or an espionage agent, figure out how to get up on the roof. We're not even talking about how do you walk a rope. That's one thing, but then to

• 2:42:54Cal Fussman?

  wonder, how do you get to the top of the World Trade Center as it's being built, and get a wire from one side to the other to stabilize it at night when nobody's watching? And the documentary takes you through the whole thing. It's just amazing.

• 2:43:13Tim Ferriss?

  And the way that they pieced it together with the alternating sort of black and white reenactments, just the cinematography and the pacing is genius.

• 2:43:22Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, it's definitely my favorite documentary. But then, last year, Robert Zemeckis did a movie called The Walk.

• 2:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  Was that Joseph Gordon Levitt?

• 2:43:33Cal Fussman?

  That's right.

• 2:43:33Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't seen it.

• 2:43:34Cal Fussman?

  Oh, here's the thing. I saw this movie nine times.

• 2:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  The Walk?

• 2:43:39Cal Fussman?

  The Walk. I saw this movie nine times, but you gotta see it on 3D IMAX. Because one of the innovative things about this film on 3D IMAX is you literally feel like you are on the wire. I mean, people left the theater vomiting.

• 2:44:03Cal Fussman?

  And I knew everything about that story. Because, as you mentioned, I worked at Windows of the World. So when I was serving wine at the top of Windows of the World, every day, I was looking down at basically what Philippe Petit was looking down at when he was crossing this wire. And I seen the documentary, so I knew that basically not only did he walk on the wire, but he laid down on the wire, on his back. That was unbelievable. And it's just, and then the police are coming, and the police had been like haunting him for years, because wherever he would try and juggle or walk the wire, in order

• 2:44:45Cal Fussman?

  to get people to give change, they would be trying to chase him away. And so he had this cat and mouse game going with the police all these years, and now he's on the wire, like, more than a hundred stories above New York City, and the police are there, and they can't touch him. He can do whatever he wants on this wire. And so, like, the tables are turning, and yet, in this movie, when he steps on that wire, I knew everything that was gonna happen on that walk. I'm begging him, "No, don't do it, don't do it, please don't do it." I completely suspended my disbelief, and let me tell you how much.

• 2:45:26Cal Fussman?

  I started taking people, like, night after night, to see this movie, again and again, because I wanna gauge their reactions, and- Gave them motion sickness pills beforehand. I told, I warned them, I say, "If you got a fear of heights, don't come. Go watch Robert De Niro in The Apprentice," or whatever they called that movie. What, what hit me was, there's this one scene in the movie, where he's learning how to walk the tightrope. And this is back in France, it's where he's from, and he's like two steps away from getting back to the platform. And he slips and has to catch the wire with his hand, and he's like 50 feet above ground

• 2:46:11Cal Fussman?

  or something. And he manages to get back to the platform, and he comes down, and his teacher is there. And his teacher basically says to him-

• 2:46:25Cal Fussman?

  It's the last two steps. That everybody, the people who die, they die on those last two steps. Remember that. And in fact, Philippe Petit was paying him to get those lessons. And when Philippe Petit went to give him money for that lesson, the teacher said, "No, this lesson you get for free. This doesn't cost you anything." So I knew, I knew this story cold. I'd read his book, I'd seen the documentary many times, and I'm watching this film. And when he falls down, early on, to get that lesson, it's shot in a way where the pole literally comes out of the screen, right at your head. Okay?

• 2:47:09Cal Fussman?

  So the first time, you're just swooning, not swooning, you're swaying immediately, like to the right or the left to get out of the way. Okay, so now I'm watching the second time. I know this pole is coming at my head. Every time, on the ninth time, pole's coming straight at my head, I'm ducking out of the way. It was that visceral and experienced. And like, the direction was just amazing. I love the acting. And so, if you can see that movie on 3D IMAX, please do. It's just wonderful.

• 2:47:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I guess I'll put out a call or a request to perhaps the people involved with making that film, if they happen to be listening, or if you know the people involved. Since people might not get to see the theatrical release in 3D, talk to the people working with virtual reality. Get in touch with the Oculus folks, or some of these other studios. Dacquere, or whomever might be able to translate some of this to an immersive experience for folks. Because that's coming down the pike, too.

• 2:48:15Cal Fussman?

  Wow, that'd be beautiful.

• 2:48:19Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I feel like we're just gonna have to do around two sometime, but I'll, I'll, I'll ask.

• 2:48:23Cal Fussman?

  You know, I'm gonna come back anytime.

• 2:48:25Tim Ferriss?

  I'll ask, I'll ask, I'll ask three more.

• 2:48:28Cal Fussman?

  Okay.

• 2:48:29Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have a billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would you put on it?

• 2:48:36Cal Fussman?

  One word, listen.

• 2:48:39Tim Ferriss?

  Listen.

• 2:48:41Cal Fussman?

  I don't know what reaction that would get, but I would like to see the reaction on people's faces when they saw that, because I think that people don't, listening is not an art form. Well, it is an art form, people just aren't using it as an art form, but it is an art form. And a lot of great things could be achieved through listening.

• 2:49:10Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? And if you could place us again where you were at 30?

• 2:49:18Cal Fussman?

  Okay, I would not give myself one word of advice, and I'll tell you why. Because if I would have given myself that advice at 30, it would have moved me maybe one centimeter in one direction that put my life in a different place. And I needed to be on a very specific seat, on a very specific bus, at a very specific time in order to meet the woman that became my wife and as the mother of my kids. So I couldn't have, if I couldn't have that moved in any way.

• 2:50:03Cal Fussman?

  I, I needed everything to happen just the way it did in order to have that moment, in order to have the rest of my life. So after that, I'm sure there are times where I've given myself advice, really, I, I, what, the time I need advice was when I was in college and there was so much offered and so little I took advantage of.

• 2:50:28Tim Ferriss?

  So what would your, what would your advice be to either your kids or to people going into college? They say, "Oh, Cal, what should I take? I just don't even know what to do with myself."

• 2:50:41Cal Fussman?

  Okay.

• 2:50:41Tim Ferriss?

  Paradox of choice, I can't figure it out.

• 2:50:44Cal Fussman?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:46Cal Fussman?

  If they want to travel, you got a chance to learn like four languages, five languages. And it's gonna be so relaxed. All you gotta do is just go into the class and then meet somebody from the opposite sex who speaks the language. And you're gonna be going out and talking in the new language. You could do that over and over again in college. You got that time. One of the things that I would, if it was me, knowing that I wanted to be a writer, or knowing that I'm now gonna be speaking, and I'm going to be speaking about questions

• 2:51:31Cal Fussman?

  that people ask when they're hiring, I would love to have studied human behavior. Because I know that when a company is looking to fill a job, if they, if the person doing the interview understands the role that needs to be filled, and understands human behavior, they can ask questions to the applicants that will fill that role in a really good way. That's my hunch.

• 2:52:06Tim Ferriss?

  Have you ever heard the story of the book that Newt Gingrich used to navigate politics? At least one that he's credited with a lot of whatever success he's had? Chimpanzee politics. I'm not kidding. I am not kidding.

• 2:52:22Cal Fussman?

  I'm gonna write that one down. I'm gonna go home and order it.

• 2:52:25Tim Ferriss?

  I am not kidding. So what about as a writer, or to a kid who's graduating from college and says to himself or herself, you know, should I go on to get my MFA? Or continue to say, go to a specialty journalism school or writing school? If they'd only taken maybe one or two classes that required a lot of writing, what advice would you give to them?

• 2:52:51Cal Fussman?

  I would tell them...

• 2:52:54Cal Fussman?

  Just write. And the great thing about it is, okay, and I'm not knocking the schooling because as we talked about earlier, I owe everything to the University of Missouri Journalism School. It set me on my way and then the connections. On the other hand, all you need to do to be a writer is to write. And not only that, but all you need to do is to find places that are interested in taking your writing. Doesn't have to be for much money, but you can go out, especially now. You don't even, you don't even need a physical publication.

• 2:53:38Cal Fussman?

  Now you can just create a blog on the internet and just start writing. So I would advise people to ju, if you want to be a writer, write and just keep writing and keep writing. If you have the means and the will to go to school and get a teacher or teachers that can help you through, even better. But nothing should really stop you from writing and you shouldn't use, well, I need to go to school first as an excuse to put off writing. I need to make the school make me write. You make you write.

• 2:54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If you don't have that intrinsic motivation, it's gonna be hard to

• 2:54:17Cal Fussman?

  It, yeah.

• 2:54:18Tim Ferriss?

  Make anything happen because you won't always have a school teacher to whack you with a ruler.

• 2:54:22Cal Fussman?

  That's right. And not only that, but the other thing is just put yourself in a position where you have no money and you need to write something to make money. And you'll, if you need to eat, and you know, unless you can find a bar that's putting out olives and little chicken fingers, you're gonna write and get paid so that you can eat.

• 2:54:45Tim Ferriss?

  I remember talking to a friend of mine who's a journalist, writes for a number of very well-known newspapers and he always laughs when he, when he, when he has to listen to book authors like myself.

• 2:55:00Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of whinge and pontificate about writer's block and he just scoffs at the whole idea. He's like, I don't have the luxury of having writer's block. He's like, I have a deadline, a deliverable or whatever it is, you know, 4pm, 5pm. He's like, no, I can't muse about the subtleties of writer's block. Uh, because I mean, he has to ship, like he has to, he has to ship words every day or whatever it might be every week. And, um, do you, do you, uh, what are your thoughts on writer's block? If, if, if that's not too general a question?

• 2:55:35Cal Fussman?

  I only had it once.

• 2:55:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:55:37Cal Fussman?

  I only had it once and what happened was I, I was writing for Esquire and working on a column called The Perfect Man. And the idea was basically in line with this conversation. I was going to take all my flaws and all my mistakes and then go to experts who were going to teach me how to overcome them. And then I was going to write about the experience so that everybody could have the collected wisdom. And so I learned how to walk through, using Alexander technique. I learned how to publicly speak by going in a boxing ring with Michael Buffer and announcing a fight.

• 2:56:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a fun gig.

• 2:56:20Cal Fussman?

  That was great. I learned how to lose weight by going to Jack Lalanne, who was the exercise champion of, of his day. And I went through, learned how to barbecue through Stephen Reichlin, author of the Barbecue Bible. And one of the last things I did was go to learn about wine. Because if, if you are a man, you want to have a feeling that you can go into a restaurant with a group of people, the wine list comes to you and you don't feel like, oh, man, what am I gonna do? I don't, I don't know what's what here. And, and then you don't know if the waiter is gonna try and unload a lousy bottle

• 2:57:03Cal Fussman?

  that they can't sell on you or a bottle for a lot of money. You're, you're helpless. So I wanted to learn.

• 2:57:11Cal Fussman?

  Enough to know how to walk into a restaurant with confidence and order what I want. And the solution to that was to be trained to be the sommelier for a night at Windows of the World, which sold for a time more wine than any other restaurant on the planet at the top of the World Trade Center. And I had no idea where this adventure was going to send me, but it took me two years to learn all about wine. Because you then find out you have to go to these places where they make the wine and you have to understand the difference between all of the varietals. And the wine list at Windows of the World, it was like hundreds of pages.

• 2:57:56Cal Fussman?

  To know all those wines, it was almost impossible, but you start to get an idea. And I had like world-class sommeliers teaching me. And for one night, I was the sommelier at Windows on the World. It was amazing experience. And one of the great things I did is I had a guy who I knew come in. He brought his wife. It was like the first couple of the evening. And I seated them right next to a window so you're looking down on New York from 106 stories or whatever. And I had a bottle of champagne, Lordo champagne from France, which it basically was like

• 2:58:40Cal Fussman?

  a $10 bottle of champagne. But nobody knew that. And this had been served at the Assemblée Nationale in France. It was like basic bottle of champagne. But I took it out to their couple. They were celebrating their anniversary. And I walked over with a flourish and I announced that I was serving champ- Lordo champagne and that it had never been served at these heights before and it would never be served at these heights again. And this woman looks at me, she didn't know who I was, her husband did. And she just like broke out in tears.

• 2:59:23Cal Fussman?

  And then the husband had never tasted the champagne before, but they both poured it, they both put it up and...

• 2:59:30Cal Fussman?

  Oh, Cal, like, we never knew what champagne was before this moment. And it teaches you that, like, the wine and the moment are inextricably linked. And I can take a great moment and make a great wine out of it, and I can take a great wine and make a great moment out of it. In any event, the evening transpired and, like, it was really, it was great, but it was all, it was profound, it was also funny. I'd spill wine on people's, there's, down a glass, because I had to be moving really quick. There was, there was a lot of people. And, ah, like, that's inexcusable. That, that should never happen here. That bottle is on the house.

• 3:00:14Cal Fussman?

  And everybody at the table, ah, this is great. And people at the adjacent tables saying, "Come over here, spill some here, spill some here." And we, we get to the night, it's a delightful time, and really memorable. Now, I go home to write the story and, like, start to go through my notes, because it's taken me two years to get this experience. And the planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

• 3:00:45Cal Fussman?

  And I remember going to the Ground Zero, like, a week later. Like, the military took me around in a Humvee. And, like, I still was so, like, overwhelmed that I was almost knocked out when I, when I, when I saw it.

• 3:01:09Cal Fussman?

  Because I remember seeing, like, there was this thin coat of white dust over everything. And you could see on a, in a parking lot, this coat of dust over the cars. And I actually said to the, the guy in the army who was taking me around, I said, "Why, why don't those people come back and get their cars?" And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "Cal, those cars don't have any owners anymore."

• 3:01:42Cal Fussman?

  And it's very hard to explain the enormity, but I just couldn't write. How could I translate this experience of utter joy, learning all about this amazing beverage that transformed lives, meeting all these friends along the way? Wherever you would go, wine would... It was like traveling around the world again. It would just open up a party, and that party would invite you to another party, and another party, and another party. And so there I am, having this amazing experience. And then on top of it, for one night, I was the sommelier. And not only that, but at the end, or toward the middle of the night, somebody...

• 3:02:27Cal Fussman?

  People were pressing $20 in my hand. They thought I was really the sommelier. And a few days later, somebody who came in that night, and nobody knew that I wasn't the real sommelier, somebody came in like three days later and asked for me. And so I was feeling so good about the experience, and right after that, the planes came in and took the towers down. And now, I've got to write the story about this. And the editor, he now knows. He's basically bankrolled this thing for two years. Same guy who bankrolled me going up against Julio Cesar Chavez, bankrolled the wine story.

• 3:03:09Cal Fussman?

  I'm flying around the world, tasting the wines in France, the wines in Italy, the wines in Germany, going to California. And he allowed me to go through the whole experience. And now, he knows something amazing has got to come out of this. Because I saw how much he put in, and we all know this seminal moment in American history, so he's got to step up to it. And I couldn't. I just... I would stare in front of the computer for hours at a time, and nothing would come out. I would... Like, my eyes would be bleeding.

• 3:03:54Cal Fussman?

  And every time I would have to go into the office to see the editor, like, I knew... We both knew. Like, where's the story? Where's the story? Years started passing.

• 3:04:09Cal Fussman?

  And he started to do things to try to like, help me and push it out of me. Whether it was lighthearted or hey, you know, it's like years now. The movie Sideways, which is about wine had come out. Wine is really hot now. Now is the time. So, so the editor is really trying to push this story out of me in the best way he can. It might be lighthearted with a little offhanded joke. It might be, hey, come on, it's years now. We're waiting for the story. Movie Sideways comes out. It's a big hit in the wine world. And now he's saying, you know, this is the time that the story needs to come out.

• 3:04:52Cal Fussman?

  I can't do it. I go to the computer almost night after night and it's the most painful thing because I never had writer's block before. But there was just nothing that would come out of me. It just wasn't, it was like a wine that wasn't ready to be served. It needed to be in the barrel. Only you don't know how long it needs to be in the barrel. And you're feeling all this guilt. And finally, I just took all my, I had these copious notes in boxes. And I put them down in the basement, just, okay, let me just get it out of my face.

• 3:05:33Cal Fussman?

  Cause every time I would go into my office, I would see these boxes and I would just like flinch.

• 3:05:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it seems like a huge just anxiety trigger.

• 3:05:42Cal Fussman?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:42Tim Ferriss?

  Just the undone homework assignment.

• 3:05:44Cal Fussman?

  The ultimate undone homework assignment that your boss has basically bankrolled for a couple of years. And so you basically know that you can't go in with any more big ideas until that is completed. And so it really affected me, but there was nothing I could do about it. And I put these notes away in the basement. And then we had this terrible ice storm. I was living in North Carolina at the time. And

• 3:06:22Cal Fussman?

  Everything turned into mold in my basement. And all the notes like got black. Oh. So I had like no, no notes of anything. Basically, everything had been wiped out. My notes were ground zero afterward. And now, like, how am I gonna do this? But you know, there was a writer, taught me something very early in my career. His name was Harry Kruse. I don't know if you've ever heard him. No. Wrote a book called Feast of Snakes. And if you're a young man, and, Harry Kruse also wrote for Esquire.

• 3:07:02Cal Fussman?

  If you're a young man, and, I don't even know how this book would translate now. But it was a real kind of macho. What was the name again? Feast of Snakes. He wrote another book called Car, about a guy eating a car. This guy was out there. And as soon as I read these books, I just, I gotta meet this guy. I gotta meet this guy. And so I started to tell people, you know, I'm gonna go meet Harry Kruse. And people started looking at me saying, are you sure? I says, well, what do you mean?

• 3:07:44Cal Fussman?

  And he said, well, like, he, his drinking is legendary, plus his drug, the amount of drugs that he puts in his body, you're not gonna be able to stay with this guy. Like, you're really, you're gonna hurt yourself. And so naturally, I get in my car, I drive 20 straight hours down to Gainesville, Florida. This is when I was living in New York. And I go drive right up to his house, and knock on the door, and there's no response. Knock again, no response. And I could almost hear like a snoring. So I just opened the door. Oh my god, in Florida.

• 3:08:27Cal Fussman?

  And Harry is laid out on a lazy boy chair with like an empty bottle of rum on his belly.

• 3:08:37Cal Fussman?

  And I get close to him and he just, his head is just moving around, he's like getting himself out of sleep. He's like, "What do you want?" I said, "Harry, I just read Feast of Snakes. I just drove 20 miles, 20 hours, straight to see you."

• 3:08:56Cal Fussman?

  "Well, why don't you drive over to Gator Gulch and let's get us some alcohol?"

• 3:09:04Cal Fussman?

  I drive over to Gator Gulch, and I think that was what it's called, something like that. And they've already got like a carton filled with alcohol for me to bring back. The usual. Yeah, the usual. I come back and we start drinking and like naturally after a little while, I'd just been driving for 20 hours and now I'm drinking and, and I'm starting to float away and he's getting more lucid. And this is before the drugs came out and I said to him, "Harry,

• 3:09:44Cal Fussman?

  you're a writer. Do you keep a diary? Like, how can you drink like this and do all these drugs and remember anything?" And he looked at me and he smiled and he said, "Boy, the good shit sticks."

• 3:10:05Cal Fussman?

  And it was that line that saved me when I needed to write the wine story because I always knew the good shit sticks. The moments that were truly great were the moments that I needed. And almost 10 years passed.

• 3:10:26Cal Fussman?

  And in a chance meeting with a woman who...

• 3:10:34Cal Fussman?

  Was in a position, it was a terrible position. She had loved her husband. Her husband had died. She was alone. Time had passed. She was ready to go out and meet somebody again. And she said, "I'm older. I've never really dated. I don't know what to do." And I said to her, "Join a wine class. Because you will meet people. And just by the way they talk about their wines, you're gonna know if you should like them or not." And she said, "Wow, that's a good idea." And something in that conversation opened up a pathway.

• 3:11:19Cal Fussman?

  And then I was sitting, I went to a bar and I'm sitting down. And remember, this whole thing started with me just wanting to be able to give somebody instruction. When the wine list came before me, I could give the weight instruction. This is what I want. Without feeling like I didn't know what I was doing. So I have this conversation with the woman. And a couple nights later, I said, "You know what? Let me, let me just write down the good shit. The good shit that stuck." And I'm sitting at a bar. And I'm writing down all the stuff, the good shit that stuck.

• 3:12:02Cal Fussman?

  And the bartender's pouring drinks. And a waiter came back with an Italian dessert wine. And it was a white wine. And the waiter said to the bartender, "Now, the people, they don't like it. They say it's, there's something wrong with it." And so it was vin santo.

• 3:12:34Cal Fussman?

  And so, the bartender was a young guy, and I think that he really didn't know much about wine. He was like a college kid, the bartender. And so, he said, "Well, look, you know, it's not cheap."

• 3:12:52Cal Fussman?

  And I said, "Wait a minute, let me smell that wine," because he brought the wine back. And I said, "Pour me a glass." And so, I swirl it around, I put it up to my nose, and I said, "No, it's no good." And the way I said it, I must have said it with such conviction that the bartender said, "Oh, okay."

• 3:13:16Tim Ferriss?

  You said it the same way that Jesus said his name to you in the locker room.

• 3:13:19Cal Fussman?

  That's right, that's exactly it. I knew this wine was no good, and so, the bartender said to me, "Well, like, how'd you know?" And we got into a conversation, and he had told me that he had been in a choir. He said, "I'm not really a bartender," and he explained that when he was young, he was a singer, and he had actually gone to the Vatican and sang in a choir for the Pope. So I said, "Okay, fine, then you understand this." When you put that wine to your nose, all right, listen to it.

• 3:13:57Cal Fussman?

  You can tell that as there's something in, certainly in the taste, maybe you can get it from the smell, it starts out okay, but there's somebody singing off-key in there. And I don't know if it's the way the wine was stored, but in the middle of that taste of wine are off-key notes. And I don't know, maybe the wine was a little corked, maybe it was just the way they stored it. But as soon as he heard that, like, he realized it translated for him.

• 3:14:37Cal Fussman?

  And, okay, when somebody in the choir's got a voice that isn't hitting what the rest of us are hitting, it's a problem, and he understood that. And he looked at me, and he said, "Thanks."

• 3:14:55Cal Fussman?

  And I knew that was the end of the story. And as soon as he said it, I went to the keyboard and I wrote the whole thing out.

• 3:15:02Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. What was, do you recall the title of the piece?

• 3:15:05Cal Fussman?

  Yeah, it's called Drinking at 1300 Feet.

• 3:15:08Tim Ferriss?

  Drinking at 1300 Feet.

• 3:15:10Cal Fussman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:11Tim Ferriss?

  Cal, you're a great man. You're a very, very generous person and we will have to do this again sometime. But in the meantime, I want to let you get to your dinner and would love to direct people to where they can find you and more about you because you've spent a lifetime gathering, unearthing and telling other people's stories. Of course, you've told some of your own, but I want to hear more and more of these stories. Next time, I feel like we should have some wine.

• 3:15:45Cal Fussman?

  Next time we will do this with wine.

• 3:15:46Tim Ferriss?

  But where can people find you online?

• 3:15:49Cal Fussman?

  Okay, they can go to calfussman.com.

• 3:15:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's C A L F U S S M A N dot com.

• 3:15:55Cal Fussman?

  Dot com and send a message. I'm just starting to speak. Anybody interested in listening to some stories or getting tips on interviewing or tips on interviewing for a job, I'm here.

• 3:16:10Tim Ferriss?

  Go to the website and they can, they can click on the contact form or something like that to let you know. Are you on social media at all?

• 3:16:16Cal Fussman?

  Not, not really. This is all like a new adventure for me. So it's, it's, I don't even know how to promote myself. It's just happening.

• 3:16:26Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'll tell you what, if I can help get Jaco Willink, this former ABC on Twitter, I can, I can help figure out a way to assist you in navigating that. Maybe I can give you the sort of the, the choir a cappella analogy version of this type of thing. Cal, this is so much fun. I always love our conversations and as always, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 3:16:50Cal Fussman?

  It's a beautiful experience. I hope we have many more and let me tell you something. You are really good at what you do.

• 3:16:57Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 3:16:58Cal Fussman?

  Thank you.

• 3:16:58Tim Ferriss?

  I have, well, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and you've been very, very generous with, with your time and with your advice. So I really do appreciate it. And for everybody listening, thank you for listening.

• 3:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 3:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their

• 3:18:45Tim Ferriss?

  own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that Investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't.

• 3:19:28Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:20:13Tim Ferriss?

  them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account, but just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim.

• 3:20:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing, you will thank me, The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf ...pots, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became the Four Hour Work Week.

• 3:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than 180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class, it's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim, that's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy. And until next time, thank you for listening.