#811: 2x Olympic Archery Medalist Jake Kaminski — Lessons Learned and Mantras Used After 1,000,000 Arrows

Jake Kaminski https://www.youtube.com/@JakeKaminskiArchery is a two-time Olympic silver medalist in archery and a longtime member of the US Archery Team. He runs a successful YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@JakeKaminskiArchery, writes training guides, and develops high-performance gear under the Kaminski Archery https://www.kaminskiarchery.com/ brand. Sign up for the Kaminski Archery Backyard Championship here. https://usa.kaminskiarchery.com/pages/events Sponsors: Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim https://helixsleep.com/tim (27% off all mattress orders) AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period) * Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start. [00:06:50] A glimpse into the high-precision world of Olympic archery. [00:11:04] How Jake and I connected. [00:18:27] Jake’s auspicious introduction to archery. [00:21:15] Why you (Yes! You!) should try archery. [00:22:01] The differences between bows. [00:25:19] The admirable proficiency of Shot IQ’s Bodie and Joel Turner. [00:26:24] Ethical bow hunting, performing under pressure, and transitioning from rifle to bow. [00:29:22] Why I wouldn’t have cut it as a competitive archer in Korea. [00:30:14] Mindful archery and training hard to make competition easy. [00:37:00] What Jake did when compound bow archery started to get boring. [00:40:00] Meeting legendary Coach Kisik Lee (KSL). [00:43:06] The upsides of having no social life as a kid. [00:45:20] The welcoming weirdness of archery communities. [00:46:33] For the sake of form, Coach Lee shakes things up. [00:51:21] “I am.” — an affirmation for apathy adjustment. [00:58:11] London, 2012 Olypmics: when it all starts coming together. [01:08:28] How does teamwork play out in archery? [01:15:40] My own experience with Coach Lee. [01:19:23] The trials of training and traveling. [01:27:33] Blank bale practice. [01:31:14] Layering, biomechanics, and other early points of focus. [01:33:03] The underrated importance of follow through. [01:36:40] Coach Lee’s take on follow through vs. release. [01:37:29] Gauging tension and intention as an instructor. [01:38:52] Attention to grouping over hitting the bullseye. [01:40:57] Making adaptations for physical limitations. [01:43:30] The ups and downs of our patented “Jesus take the wheel” instinctive approach. [01:46:24] Warm-up tournaments, barebowing, black bales, and string walking. [01:50:54] Recovering from the disaster that made me rethink Lancaster. [01:55:15] Rebalancing gear: arrows and arrow rests. [02:00:50] The importance of practicing in tournament-like conditions. [02:04:03] Securing convenient fuel. [02:08:17] Lancaster preparation logistics (with special thanks to Heather Kaminski and Rick Simpson Oil). [02:13:17] The glue that holds us together: note-taking and training logs. [02:16:47] Even counterintuitive consistency is key. [02:18:45] Our experience at Lancaster. [02:28:00] “The goal is to do the least necessary, not the most possible.” — Henk Kraaijenhof [02:31:44] Learning by observation and conversation on the practice range. [02:35:35] What’s the Kaminski Archery Backyard Championship, and why should you get involved? [02:40:30] How can you (and why should you) get started with archery today? [02:42:48] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out how they do what they do, the routines, the belief structures, the training programs that you can apply to your own life. And I say "training programs" because my guest today is one of the best teachers and trainers I have found in the last several years in any discipline whatsoever. His name is Jake Kaminski. Jake Kaminski is a two-time Olympic silver medalist in archery and a longtime member of the U.S. archery team with more than a decade of international competition experience. He is very well-known for his technical precision.

• 0:40Tim Ferriss?

  He is meticulous with gear and tuning, also with biomechanics, his deep knowledge of the sport. And with all of that, Jake helped lead the U.S. to Team Silver Medals at both the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Since retiring from Olympic competition, Jake has become a leading voice in the archery world through content creation, product innovation, and educational events. He runs a successful YouTube channel, which is kind of the de facto archery technical channel. People from all over the world have seen this over and over again. He is like the Taylor Swift meets, you name it, Brad Pitt of the archery world. I've gone to events with him because he was my coach and is my coach in archery.

• 1:25Tim Ferriss?

  I had my first competition end of January. We'll talk about that. So he, in addition to that, writes training guides and develops high-performance gear, which he manufactures in Austria. It is as precise as you expect Jake Kaminski to be, under the Kaminski Archery brand. You can find him on YouTube, Jake Kaminski, @JakeKaminskiArchery. Kaminski is K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Website, jakekaminski.com. And on Instagram and Facebook, @Jake_ Kaminski on Instagram, Facebook, Kaminski Jake. We'll link to all that stuff, but really, the big two are the YouTube channel, Jake Kaminski Archery, and then the website, jakekaminski.com.

• 2:08Tim Ferriss?

  And we go all over the place in this conversation. It is really a close examination of real-world learning, because he and I had to work around and towards all sorts of things together. I'll explain how I chose him, how I found him, and much more. In just a second, after a few words from the people who make this podcast possible. Not to be a salty old dog, but then again, that's what I am. But in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own ecommerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man, was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. Huge pain in the ass. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify, which is this

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  episode's sponsor. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Believe it or not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now 10% of all ecommerce in the US is on Shopify, from household names like Mattel and Jimm Shark, to my very own limited edition Cock Punch Coffee. Remember that? Story for another time. Now, back to the early 2000s, then, nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted, even in the last 24 months, the magic that is now possible with AI? Shopify has been ahead of the curve, and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything. Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance

• 3:33Tim Ferriss?

  your product photography. You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates to match your brand's style and create email and social media campaigns to get the word out wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory, to international shipping, to processing returns, and beyond. It's all under one umbrella. And man, oh man, could I have used that back in the day. And if I ever do something like that again in ecommerce, I will use Shopify. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/Tim. Why not learn a little bit more? Shopify.com/Tim. One more time. Shopify.com/Tim.

• 4:21Tim Ferriss?

  As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say, "It's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. What kind of mattresses? What do you do? What's the magic juju?" It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter

• 5:05Tim Ferriss?

  zoned lumbar support, right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring feel. Which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every night that I use it. The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff. And that is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast free shipping, and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out. And now, during the month of May, you can get 27% off anything on their website, so

• 5:47Tim Ferriss?

  site-wide. And with any Luxe or Elite mattress order, you get a free bedding bundle, that is a sheet set and mattress protector. So just go to helixsleep.com/tim. One more time, helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  Jake Kaminsky, nice to see you, man.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, nice to see you too.

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

  So glad to be doing this. We've had, I was joking before we recorded, that we could just treat this like conversation 678, something like that. We've had a lot of conversations.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Might be double that.

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  It might be double that. It's probably double that. If we count texts in the many, many thousands and then videos, it just goes on and on. So let's give people some context. We're gonna do a deep dive into the world of archery. We're going to do a deep dive into the world of high performance, which transcends archery. So if you think to yourself, "Archery, man, I'm not interested in flinging arrows," still listen, there's gonna be a lot here. And we're also gonna talk about your coaching and our experience, coach and student, and what we did with that, which I think is pretty special and fun to unpack. So we're gonna go in a lot of different rabbit holes, but let's start, for people who are not familiar

• 7:25Tim Ferriss?

  with Olympic recurve, what does that mean? What is the sport?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Sure. So the sport of Olympic archery, as I grew up, it was just called recurve, because that was the discipline. But now it's known as Olympic archery, because there's many different disciplines that have spun off from that kind of bow. But essentially, what it is, is a sport of hyper-precision. It's just how good can you work with a machine, your bow, to produce the exact same result every single time at an extreme distance? So when I grew up, we shot up to 100 yards, which is easy to see, it's end zone to end zone on a football field. But now the Olympic distance is 70 meters, or 77 yards, or 237 feet. So that's, you know, about three quarters of the way down the football field. So we're shooting an arrow, that distance, the arrow reaches 12 to 13 feet in the air, in an arcing

• 8:17Speaker 02

  trajectory to the target.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  No magnification?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Zero magnification, no rear sight, in fact. So you don't even have something to align up in the back, other than a string. You're using a blurry string that is very imprecise in your reference.

• 8:31Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who are trying to get an idea of what it means to perform at a very high level, the...

• 8:40Tim Ferriss?

  Center of the target, how large is that? And what does that mean for the amount of motion that is permissible at the arrow point?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  The ten ring, the maximum scoring ring is a 12.2 centimeters or about the size of a CD. You have to not only take into consideration your alignment with that arrow and that bow, but also you have wind. So there's a lot of factors.

• 9:03Tim Ferriss?

  Or precipitation.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Or yeah, anything, anything but lightning.

• 9:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And to hit that ten ring, that 12.2 centimeter diameter ring, it is the margin of error to hit that repeatedly is the diameter of a extra fine ball in an extra fine ballpoint pen.

• 9:19Tim Ferriss?

  So just to put this in perspective, if you're not watching the video, you'll still get it. But if you're watching the video, all right, so you're trying to hit a CD. For those of you remember CDs, it would be like the type of dish you might have under a cup of coffee, maybe something like that. It's small. And then the amount of variance at the arrow tip that will allow you to hit that consistently is smaller than the point of this pen, not the pen, not the diameter of the pen, the actual rolling point in a ballpoint pen.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 9:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's insane.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Correct. And now how often or how many arrows do you have to do that for? And it's because it's not just one, it's more than that. We shoot for a ranking round to seed us in our brackets for the Olympic Games. We shoot 72 arrows, your average, like really high score, you're hitting that ten ring, probably 40 plus times out of 72 times.

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  So it's insane.

• 10:18Tim Ferriss?

  That's the level. I'll give one more bit of trivia that I did not know until we were literally just walking down this hallway, which is that you have also hit the ten ring from three quarters of a football field away while standing on an Indo board.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:35Tim Ferriss?

  For people who don't know what that is, it's like a balance board. Imagine a skateboard deck that you could stand on and there's basically a huge rolling pin underneath it and you place it on the pin and then you have to balance as you wobble. And if you see someone try this for the first time, it's disastrous and comical. And so to be able to stand on that and hit the ten ring, you guys can put the math together. It's just, it is just an extra planetary.

• 11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Accomplishment, it's wild. So let's back up and share some context on how we first connected. So the world of archery is, I'm not going to say it's opaque, because it's not opaque, but it can be difficult to navigate. And when I was first trying to find potential coaches, and I can come back to why I was doing that, I went where? I went online, I went to YouTube. But one of the challenges, as most people will recognize, is that, let's just say for trick shooters, and there's some amazing trick shooters, which is not to discount that as a discipline, but people can take a thousand attempts and then show their best outcome.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  And we were talking about this earlier, but when they actually go to retrieve their arrow, look at the rest of the target face.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Not only retrieve their arrow, just look at the target in frame behind them. Oftentimes, it's like there's a burlap wrap over the target, because people use bagged targets, that's what they're called. And you know how worn out they can get. Yours are nowhere near as worn out as 90% plus of those trick shooters. And yeah, they show you that one impact, but look at the target behind them.

• 12:14Tim Ferriss?

  And what I think what you're alluding to is that if you're hitting the center of the target consistently, you're basically going to carve out a sweet spot, and then you have to replace that portion of the target face, if it's replaceable. There's a lot of, I suppose, selection and highlights online, and it can make it very, very difficult, particularly if you're coming in as a novice, you don't know how to sort or separate fact from fiction, you don't know where to go. And so what I ended up doing was asking myself a question I ask a lot. And for people who've read The Four Hour Chef, which is actually about accelerated learning, this approach will sound familiar, but this is a chance to see it unfold in recent history and sort of in real time, because we're still training.

• 12:56Tim Ferriss?

  How can I find an objective measure for this sport, for this discipline? And there are almost always options. For instance, I've had Susan Garrett on this podcast. She is a multiple time agility champion, so a dog agility champion. She's a multiple national time champion. And that is an objective competition with set scoring, with set penalties, under time, and there's nowhere to hide. So that is how I ended up having Susan Garrett on the podcast versus a million celebrity dog coaches where it's impossible to actually know what you're buying because you don't

• 13:41Tim Ferriss?

  have any of the outtakes, you don't have a lot of objective measurement. And in this case, I was like, all right, well, I think archery's in the Olympics. Let me look this up. Oh, it's in the Olympics. Great. Let me try to use that as a sorting mechanism. And that is how I found your amazing YouTube channel. You want to give it a plug?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just Jake Kaminsky.

• 14:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. I mean, when we've gone anywhere related to archery, it's like trying to move around with The Rock or Lady Gaga or some combination of the two. You just get mobbed because in a world where it can be very difficult to decipher what is legitimate, you offer the bona fides and a lot of really good technical instructions. That's how I found you, then reached out.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Tim Ferriss?

  And then lo and behold, here we are. And it's really worked out incredibly well. And my background, just quickly, it's not that extensive, but I've been bow hunting for at least 10 years, a bit more than that, did rifle prior to that. First hunt ever was with Steven Rinella during the writing of The Four Hour Chef. So thanks to Steve Rinella. People can check him out. Everything Meat Eater, also an amazing writer. And I'll give people a bit of a flash forward and then we can talk about all sorts of stuff, including your kind of training regimen for yourself and development and so on. But began taking bare bow archery. We can talk about what that is, but it's effectively, for the purposes of this conversation,

• 15:08Tim Ferriss?

  it's a competition classification and it dictates that you basically strip off all the stabilizers, the clicker, don't worry about these things, the sight, et cetera, from an Olympic bow.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Essentially all the aids.

• 15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Everything that makes it.

• 15:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you take off all of the performance aids and then you shoot with that particular bow. And I became interested in barebow for a few reasons. I saw it online on YouTube while I was tooling around trying to find something. And there is something called Lancaster Classic. Happens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Or Lancaster.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Lancaster. Yes, exactly. So, and Lancaster Archery Supply is a huge distributor of archery products. And they hold this competition once a year. And it is, for the barebow discipline, I suppose it's the largest in the world.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  I think so. Yeah. I mean, it's at least the most prestigious, I suppose, has the biggest reach. So it gets the most exposure and I think actually the most participation now. At least as of this last year and a couple of years leading up to this, it's taken off. And it is, I believe it's almost the biggest, if not the biggest class as far as the amount of participation.

• 16:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So you've got barebow. They also have compound. They also have Olympic archery, Olympic recurve.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  They have hunting.

• 16:31Tim Ferriss?

  They have longbow now.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:33Tim Ferriss?

  They've got all sorts of stuff. So many different classes. And barebow was interesting to me for a few reasons. I have not done any real physical competition. Well, now I have, but in 20 years, probably. Last thing was Tango in Argentina in 2004, I suppose it was, a long time ago. And I wanted to compete. I love competing. But I thought to myself, all right, I want to take a bit of an oblique approach here. And I think it's a misunderstanding about what I do sometimes, or what I often focus on, even as early as the four hour work week. The goal is not to find the cheap shortcut. The goal is to look for oblique, maybe uncommon approaches to various problems or goals or whatever. That's it.

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  And in this case, I looked at the number of people competing in barebow. And I was like, all right, it's a smaller population at the higher levels. And it is sometimes nicknamed the struggle stick for folks. And part of the reason it has so much viewership online compared to some of these other disciplines is, as they would say, like in barebow, anything can happen.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Literally at any moment.

• 17:43Tim Ferriss?

  At any moment. And if somebody lets their nerves take control, if there's any number of issues, they could really fire. On the target, but out of the bullseye, let's just say by substantial margin, which opens up the possibility for comeback, surprise turns, reversals of fortune, and it makes it fun to watch. And I thought, okay, well, that seems like a fun place to bookmark as a possible competition and ended up competing end of January. We will come back to that and had, I suppose, about six months of real training, real focused training. And so we'll come back to what that looked like.

• 18:27Tim Ferriss?

  But let's talk about Jake. So how did the archery thing start? And why don't you just take that and run with it? And then I might pepper in questions along the way.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  So I grew up in a very small town in Elma, New York, kind of south of Buffalo, New York. And my dad was a volunteer fireman at the local fire department. And they have a spring and a fall gun raffle every year. And, you know, they raffle off guns and a canoe full of beer or whatever else, right? And one of them was a bow and he won the bow gun raffle. And this was, I was five years old. And of course, this was a, you know, hunting bow for an adult. So there's no way a five year old is going to use that. So we found, I think we went to Kmart and bought a bear hunting compound for a kid, just fiberglass, super cheap, very basic. My parents bought me that for my sixth birthday. So on my sixth birthday, after we got hay bales from a local farmer or whatever,

• 19:23Speaker 02

  threw up a target and I shot my first arrow at 20 yards. And 20 yards is more than double the distance that you would really want to have any person, not just a kid, shoot their first arrow. I vividly remember my very first arrow I ever shot because I literally shot an inside out X on my very first arrow.

• 19:43Tim Ferriss?

  You should explain what that is.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  So inside out X, meaning if you have your 10 ring, like the maximum scoring ring, inside the 10 ring is a X ring. It's about the size, it's like a between a diamond and nickel, about that size. And inside out, meaning I put the arrow in the dead center of the target where it did not touch the ring of the X. So it was inside of a dime, roughly, my very first arrow. We won't talk about the next several hundred arrows.

• 20:09Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, thank God for that first arrow, right?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was hooked.

• 20:12Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's kind of crazy. I've heard this story to think like if your first 20 arrows had been all over the place, would it have been a different story? Like, maybe, you know?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 20:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's crazy.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:24Tim Ferriss?

  Who knows?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, really no way to know. And I was with my brother, Matt. He was out there shooting with me.

• 20:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  I don't know if he shot before me, but after I shot the X, he's like, give me that thing. And of course he didn't hit the target either.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then it just kind of started from there. We found that local club that was down the street. It's a JOAD club, a Junior Olympic Archery Development Club. There's many of those around the country in the U.S. They're at local hunting shops, basically, if they have a junior development program. We found that club because that's where the bow was bought for the gun raffle. And luckily, it was about a five-minute drive from our house. And so every Saturday mornings, they had a junior development program. And so I'd go there and start shooting with them. And so every Saturday morning, I'd be there no matter what, because I enjoyed it so much. The progression, it went from shooting compound. So I shot compound for about six years.

• 21:15Tim Ferriss?

  Let's pause for a second, just for people who have no archery contacts. And by the way, my not too secret agenda for this is I want everybody to go out and try archery. It has been such a godsend for me to have that constant for a million reasons. Turns into a form of meditation. It can also be just as frustrating, if not more frustrating than golf. But let's put that aside for now. It has been such a gift to my life to have archery and to be able to train with you. It's really been tremendous. So I have this not so secret agenda of getting as many people as possible who are listening to try archery, which by the way, is very much within reach for basically everybody listening. If you have a smartphone and you're listening to this, you can try archery.

• 22:00Tim Ferriss?

  You do not need to buy anything. But let me explain a term. So longbow is about the simplest thing you can imagine. It's a, let's call it a stick. It's bent and then you have a string attached to it. And you'll see this in many different indigenous hunting cultures. You'll see it all over the world. Recurve, you'll also see all over the world because they figured out, well, you can make the bow a lot shorter and have the ends of the bow recurve out, like kind of towards the target to apply more tension.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  It's like a advanced longbow using laminations of wood instead of just a stick.

• 22:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly. So now you have this laminated bow and you see that all over the world, all over the world. And there are different iterations of that. You've got the, well, slightly different idea, but horse bow, which of course I'm, I'm in love with. That's a whole separate podcast and so on and so forth. So if you imagine like a Robin Hood bow in your mind, I think it was a recurve in maybe the cartoon at least, made out of fancier materials, whether it's carbon or aluminum or something else, then you have the idea of what I'm shooting when I'm doing, say, barebow. And then a compound has various cams. You can think of them almost like cams on a

• 23:17Tim Ferriss?

  weightlifting machine, actually. Yeah, pulleys, pulleys and cams. So it's like when you are in a gym using a machine, pushing or pulling, there's a strength curve. So the amount of exertion required changes over the course of that full range. And in the case of a compound bow, very similar. And what makes it such an efficient, amazing hunting tool, there are a few factors. One is, in the beginning, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard. And then there's a let off. So you might have, I'm making up these numbers, but 60 pound draw weight and then you're holding, what would you say?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Maybe between eight and 12 pounds.

• 23:53Tim Ferriss?

  Eight and 12 pounds.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Depending on if it's a hunting or a competition.

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. So eight or 12 pounds, when you're at anchor and to define that, that's when you have your, very simple terms, your hand that is attached to the string, whether you're using fingers or a mechanical release, when your hand is kind of glued to your face and you always glue it to the same place to set up the rifle barrel, so to speak. And that's one element of what makes compound so interesting. The second is when you have these additional mechanical aids, let's just say, the speed of the arrow is just

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Dramatically more.

• 24:30Tim Ferriss?

  Dramatically, dramatically more.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  The main difference in a compound versus everything else is there's one string on every other bow called a single string bow, whether that be a trad bow, a stick bow.

• 24:41Tim Ferriss?

  Traditional bow, yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. A recurve, a barebow, whatever that is, whereas compound has three strings essentially. When you look at it, you can see multiple strings because The string tension, as you pull it back, it builds, but then it transfers that tension into the cables, which are the other two strings that the arrow is not attached to.

• 24:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And so that then catapults the arrow at an incredible rate of speed when you let it go.

• 25:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And when you go to your local range, which we'll get to, and I recommend you can try all of these different options in a lot of places. And if you can only start with compound, great.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's where I started.

• 25:13Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe you stay with compound.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:15Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and at the highest levels, they do some absurd, absurd things.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:19Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, I just have to give credit where credit is due. So also have had some fantastic conversations with Joel Turner, Shot IQ, his son, Bodhi. Do you want to just explain what he's capable of doing?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Sure. So you know that X that I shot the inside out on my first arrow? So he will shoot that X. So that same hitting that dime for about 120 arrows in a row, essentially, under pressure, when there's $100,000 plus on the line. And you would not know, just looking at the kid, he is just stone cold, ice in his veins. You'd have no idea that he even had a heartbeat just watching him shoot because he's incredible. To be able to hit that thing repeatedly with so much precision and repeatability under pressure, most importantly, it's just, it's ridiculous. We'll get to talking about, a little bit about compound and how there's a, I guess, a less steep learning curve. You get really good, really fast, as far as precision.

• 26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  But still to win with a compound in a competition, it still requires immense amounts of effort and energy and training.

• 26:24Tim Ferriss?

  So we're going to come back to your trajectory in a second, pun intended. But let's mention that briefly because I didn't really fill in the gaps. The compound bow that I used for hunting was fantastic. I thought it was a great transition for me because I was more familiar with rifle and so on. It was actually a fantastic transition. And I would hunt once a year, let's just call it, something like that. Use everything, eat everything, for those people wondering, and the...

• 26:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hop from rifle and so on to compound was actually quite easy.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:01Tim Ferriss?

  I needed to brush up on a few things, obviously learn some technical details, think about back tension a bit, et cetera. But for someone with a sports background, it was pretty straightforward.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:12Tim Ferriss?

  And if you're thinking about the target size, right, the kind of kill zone on whether it's a deer or an elk, I mean, certainly a lot larger on an elk, but you can get to a point, if you have some kinesthetic awareness, very quickly, I would say, within a week for a lot of folks, maybe.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So to be like ethical as a hunter to, you know, know that when you take the shot, you're not going to do the animal any suffering. It will be a very, very painless and fast end.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. It takes more time to get to that point.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Well, depends. It depends on the distance that you're shooting. So say, we'll say 20 yards.

• 27:50Tim Ferriss?

  So what I was gonna say is 20 yards, just, just as people can imagine.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  So 20 yards, your average person, I could get them to hit that pie plate. It depends on the coach, of course, and depends on explanations and the individual person as well. But I would say easily within a week, you're going to hit that thing nine to 10 times out of 10 every time. Within a day, you'll hit it probably six to eight times out of 10.

• 28:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Because it's just easy, relatively speaking, to get to that level.

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And there are a lot of reasons for that, right? I mean, you have the let off, you have the peep, which is

• 28:21Speaker 02

  A rear sight.

• 28:22Tim Ferriss?

  Which is basically a rear sight. It's a tiny circle affixed to the string itself.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  You have a level on the bow.

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  You have a level. There are many things that allow you to do that quickly. But then to get to the highest levels, we were talking about this at lunch. It's kind of like, okay,

• 28:37Tim Ferriss?

  let's get you down the hill on a snowboard. Yeah, within a week, we can probably get you down some easy terrain on a snowboard. Okay, now you want to compete in the X Games? Yeah, all right. Well, good luck. That's gonna take

• 28:48Speaker 02

  About 10 years, right? Yeah. I mean, that's a rule for a reason.

• 28:50Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's, that's, that's Bodie and anyone who performs at that level.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So not to take it away from them, like their proficiency level is insane. And to be able to do it all the time under pressure is even more insane. You know, it's one thing to do it in your backyard, right? And be that. Backyard world champion that so many people claim to be.

• 29:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Right. But to do it in front of other people on a stage with crazy lighting, cheering crowds, money on the line, potentially putting food on your table or not at the end of the day too. That's just a whole lot of added pressure. And so it's different.

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  We'll probably end up talking about Korea later and maybe we can just give a sneak peek. I know we're going all over the place, but I remember you said to me at one point, and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong. If each country could field as many athletes as they wanted for a given sport, that Korea would probably place one to a hundred.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  At the minimum, bare minimum.

• 29:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's basically their, let's just call it basketball, football, baseball, all wrapped into one.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. It is their national sport.

• 29:49Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, they are obscenely, obscenely good. And you said to me before, if you or I were scouted and assessed early on, we wouldn't have made the early cuts.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  No, you would have immediately.

• 30:03Tim Ferriss?

  Cause I'm cross eyed.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Because of your eye dominance.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm right handed, but my left eye is my aiming eye. So I would have been gone.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  And I'd get a little bit too excited. So I would have also been.

• 30:12Tim Ferriss?

  You'd have been cut.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 30:14Tim Ferriss?

  So what are some maybe good decisions or habits that you made early on? Let's just say before you ended up in San Diego, that you think helped you to perform the way you performed in those early stages. I think I can think of one example, but I'll hold it for now, which is where you're placing yourself in the gym and how you're training.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  I would say for me, one of the biggest advantages as a human, not just as an archer, but as a human was the same kind of thing that you saw was a meditative escape. Right. Cause when you're shooting archery, that's the only thing you can focus on. Cause if you're thinking about anything else, your scores go down, your groups open up.

• 30:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You know, if you're meditating poorly, very quickly.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. So I think for me, that gave me a place to kind of go to, like I escaped to archery. So I feel like that was definitely a big factor as to what led to that. Just it naturally worked for me. It wasn't difficult for me. It is hard. It's hard to stay focused on something so simple and repetitive over and over again. But it was very enjoyable because it's just me, the bow and the arrow. I love competing as well. I used to play baseball when I was a kid and that competed with my archery time because I was trying out for the state team in baseball or about to and winning nationals shooting archery. So it's like, kind of had an easy decision there to make because I was already

• 31:42Speaker 02

  winning nationals in archery. So I went with that. But the overall just enjoyment of shooting archery and enjoying that me and the bow and no one else is going to prevent me from beating someone else. It's not like they're interfering with me or trying to prevent me from shooting my arrow. It's very nice. And it's also 100% objective. There is no subjectivity. There's no way for anyone to influence the outcome, other than maybe at some weird position, a judge to make a bad call, but it's almost never happening. It just doesn't happen because it's such a small community and everybody holds each other accountable, which is also another amazing thing about the community of archery. So I think that was a big factor

• 32:23Speaker 02

  there. As far as, you know, what you're alluding to and bringing up and saying is, I choose to make things as difficult as possible when I'm practicing. Like, say if I'm out at a range, I'll choose the lane nearest to the wall. So I have the least amount of space. And we'll probably get into why we do that in a little bit here, but I would suggest you to do the same thing as we were working together and you at first were like, why? Why would I do that? It's much better to just stand by myself out in the open and have no influence. Well, it's because when you're shooting it on a line in a tournament, you have 24 inches of space roughly for yourself and you're the next guy's 24 inches than the next guy. And so you're stacked in there like a can of sardines.

• 33:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we get a photo of me at Lancaster for people who want to see what it looks like. It's like, it's like a Tokyo subway car. You just happen to all be holding bows with arrows. It's very crowded.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  It is, it is, it is. So anything you can do to make things more difficult, to shoot in the rain, to shoot in the wind, to shoot in the heat. I would do because I don't know, maybe I just enjoy torturing myself. I don't know, but I found it to be really important. And once I got to the training center, listening to some of the other successful athletes giving talks at the training center about their success and how things went and what made them successful. A lot of them was leaning into the same kind of thing, training hard to make competition easy.

• 33:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, it's very much an echo of the more you sweat in training, less you bleed in combat.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 33:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's just like, you want to try to make your training harder if possible than your competition. There's there are limits to what you can do sometimes.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 33:59Tim Ferriss?

  We'll talk about that.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  But even still, like the range I grew up on, I would go there more than just Saturdays and I'd shoot there by myself because no one else is there and I'm just shooting. And my coach slash mentor at the time, Harry Stabell, would come downstairs because it was down in like a secondary level below and he'd have a metal ashtray. Back then, everybody smoked and he would just throw it randomly on the concrete ground when I'm at full draw. And I have to regain composure and shoot a shot, right? So there's all sorts of weird stuff that happened all the time.

• 34:30Tim Ferriss?

  Mr. Miyagi, yeah, action going on.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  There's a lot of stuff that happened that definitely would not fly in today's day and age. So it's like, oh, you're dropping your bow arm. That's like a thing that when you shoot the shot, you have to maintain the bow up. You don't want to drop the arm. So he'd take his pocket knife out, flip it open, turn it upside and say, don't drop your arm.

• 34:49Tim Ferriss?

  Put it under your arm.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Under my arm. Or you're grabbing your bow. Something else you don't want to do is hold on to it. There's a grip on a bow, but you don't want to grip it. You just saddle it, right?

• 35:00Tim Ferriss?

  And you're kind of pushing into it.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Correct. And so you're grabbing your bow. Guess what? Thumbtacks were double sided taped on the front of my bow. Didn't grab it anymore.

• 35:09Tim Ferriss?

  That's so intense.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  And it worked. Look, I'm not recommending people do that with their kids, but the also supplement to our conversation, we're going to put a number of videos up on my YouTube page and we'll link to Jake's YouTube page with archery 101, both archery gear 101, just laying out the anatomy of a bow and then technical 101. So you have a couple of pointers which you may not get at some ranges. So that when you have your first, second and subsequent lessons, you'll have some really good, solid fundamentals at least to use.

• 35:48Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well, the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 Next Gen, the same single scoop, once a day product that I use myself, but now with more vitamins, more minerals, and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport, one of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the

• 36:30Tim Ferriss?

  supplement industry. So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit and five of the upgraded AG1 Travel Packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's Next Gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1.com/tim.

• 37:00Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, so you mentioned Thumbtack Billy, I forgot his name, Harry, right?

• 37:06Tim Ferriss?

  And if I'm skipping any important chapters, let me know. But I want to know when KSL entered your life and who or what is KSL?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Sure. So quickly, before we get into KSL, so started shooting compound.

• 37:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Easier sport to get into. Shot that for six years. And then some other of the friends that I developed at the archery range that I was going to, were going to the Empire State Games. It's like a mini Olympics and it's for all of the regions of within New York State and they compete against each other, different events. You go to a place, there's opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies.

• 37:41Tim Ferriss?

  They have this for a bunch of sports.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  It's amazing. I wanted to do the archery thing, but compound wasn't in it, only recurve. And I had really debilitating target panic, basically dealing with aiming in the middle and the irrational fear to aim in the middle with the intention of shooting the shot.

• 37:56Tim Ferriss?

  Which is quite common.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  It's a common thing. So I wanted to shoot recurve because it's a change, something different. Archery was starting to become unfun for the compound side of things because of that target panic. So I picked up the recurve and it has a device called a clicker, which is essentially a psycho trigger that is a both a draw check to make sure your draw length, the distance you pull the bow back is the same every single time, but it also gives you a cue to tell you when to let go. So it allowed me to aim in the middle with more comfort to disassociate from that fear of letting go.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So let me give, let me give people a visual that might help you imagine what a clicker is. It's a flat piece of metal that goes on the outside of the arrow. I actually used one for the first time today and holy God, is it challenging to figure out. But if you were to imagine, let's say you're using a slingshot. Most people know slingshot, but let's say instead of shooting a ball bearing, you're shooting an arrow out of this slingshot. And there's a piece of metal that is leaning against the arrow as you pull it back in the slingshot. Once it flips past the very front of that arrow point, this is not the perfect analogy, but it works and clicks onto another piece of metal, that's when you let go, whether you think you're ready or not. And what that's

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  going to do is standardize how much you pull it back. And it also takes away the decision to let go.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a Pavlovian response that you train in yourself.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Yes and no. I mean,

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  It's more complicated.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. But that is a brief look at it. So I switched to recurve specifically because of target panic and to go to the Empire State Games. So I literally took a bow off the wall. I still have the bow. That was a club bow and took my stuff from my compound, my arrows and all sorts of other things and threw it on the bow and started shooting it for a few months before Empire State Games made the team. I think I won some medals there. I don't remember exactly, but it was a lot of fun. Good time, very good experience and ultimately fell. In love with archery again because it was enjoyable again. So there was no target panic involved and just continued to do that. Shot up through the ranks, started winning nationals as a junior. And then at a tournament called the, well, actually, it was Junior World Championships

• 40:09Speaker 02

  at US Target Nationals. I was shooting against some other people that had just moved to the training center to work with KSL, who we'll get to in a second. And I was the only person to beat the person who was working with KSL. And he came up to me after the match and said, hey, you're pretty good. And I'd like you to come out to the training center and work with the junior dream team. It was a squad at the time that would go out there, maybe once a quarter. And I said, actually, I just applied to become an RA, a resident athlete. I'd like to, you know, move out there full time in a couple of months. And he said, great, I'll keep an eye out for your application and keep it up. And he disappeared. And so KSL is Kisik Lee, my coach, and he is the

• 40:51Speaker 02

  godfather of archery in Korea. He essentially left Korea and went to Australia for a few years. What did he do in Korea? Oh, he was the national head coach of the Korean archery team and formulated the entire program that is the current Korean archery training regiment to develop archers. And to put it as a quick example, as to the type of celebrity level that he is, anytime we would fly to Korea, a limo would show up. He didn't order it, but the limo would show up. We flew there for a tournament and a limo showed up and he said, can't fit the team in the limo. No, thanks. And I'm at a tournament in Puerto Rico. We're in a sauna, me and another archer with some

• 41:33Speaker 02

  other random Korean. He looked Korean and he ended up being from Korea. And he said, oh, why are you guys here? We're here shooting archery. Oh, did you know archery is a national sport in Korea? Yeah, we do actually. And our coach is actually Korean is Kisik Lee. Kisik Lee? Oh, my God, do you have any idea like the level of celebrity and how important he is to the country, like culturally, just random sauna in Puerto Rico, you know, I don't know. So that kind of level. And so he left Korea, went to Australia, worked with them to develop a national program. I think before he was working with them officially, he went

• 42:11Speaker 02

  to biomechanics school to try to apply more efficient movements to his method. And he also, prior to that, to jump backwards, part of the development of the Korean national program was looking at the US program back in the eighties. We were dominant worldwide and hadn't lost a world championship for decades and were just powerhouses on the international scale. And so he mimicked the program that we were doing, or at least the movements, positions, that kind of thing, and implemented that in Korea as a national system that would start from grassroots from day one, no matter what. And then that's why we would be thrown out because we didn't fit the mold. That's how strict they are. So he went to Australia, made a better program, and then ultimately ended up coming to the

• 42:55Speaker 02

  States. And so he just got hired in 2006 in like January. So just before Junior World Championships, I moved out to the training center and started training under Coach Lee in 2006.

• 43:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we're gonna pick up there in a minute, but I want to just pause because you're already doing very, very well. So you mentioned a few things that influenced that, right? You found it appealing, easy to use archery as maybe an escape, right? A meditation. You made training as difficult as possible. Do any other things come to mind that were decisions you made or things you did differently that you think contributed to those successes prior to moving out to the training center?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  One of those things, honestly, was I did not really mesh well socially with other kids. And so I didn't really have a ton of friends. It was a very odd situation. Definitely a lot of it is I'm an intense person as it is. And so I take things very seriously.

• 43:56Tim Ferriss?

  His wife is laughing from around the concrete pillar.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Yes. So, uh, yeah, so I take things, yeah, very seriously. And as a kid, that can make things difficult.

• 44:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Even though talented in sports, baseball, just any throwing sport really, and archery, and just didn't fit in in school. So I basically built a shell around myself, didn't talk to anyone in school. I didn't, because I got made fun of and got a, you know, Just overall not attacked because it wasn't physical really. It just wasn't something I was interested. I wasn't wanting to participate in social life. So I just made a shell around myself and stayed inside of that in school. And archery, I didn't have that identity.

• 44:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. Everybody's like kind of shooting and doing their own thing.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Everybody's doing their own thing. Everybody's as interesting and different and awkward and normal and talented and just human. Right? And so I didn't have that aura of that negative experience of school following me around. So it supercharged my desire to want to do it more because it was just, I was normal. People treated me like a normal human, a normal kid with respect. It was great. Right? So that was ultimately my life. I think that really is what supercharged my desire to want to do it more. Because it was something that I felt happy doing.

• 45:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. And I want to, this is as good a point as any, to say that part of what got me excited about archery was realizing how welcoming the communities are. And they're different personalities, right? It's like compound crew is different from the Olympic crew, which is different from the bear boat crew, which is very different from the horse boat crew. They're all like different, uh, Burning Man camps with super different personalities. But broadly speaking, incredibly welcoming. People are happy to give you advice, give you pointers, help you out. And I mean this in the best way possible. It's also kind of like weirdo Palooza. I mean, it's like,

• 46:00Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 46:01Tim Ferriss?

  And it doesn't matter.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 46:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right? It's like, okay, like there's some dude in a kilt. Okay, whatever. And then there's like some emo chick with a mohawk. Yeah, okay, whatever. And everybody's just doing their thing, shooting. And it's, of course, that's not every archery range.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  No.

• 46:16Tim Ferriss?

  But in Brooklyn, Gotham Archery, great spot, you see everything. And those people will be right next to a dyed-in-the-wool hunter who was born and raised in Montana, who's getting ready for hunting season.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:27Tim Ferriss?

  And everybody's cool.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  So that's, that's part of what I really have enjoyed about it. All right. So, Austin Powers. Fade back to KSL. So you get to the training center and technically you're perfect. And he's just like, let it rip, son. Just move forth, be bold and prosper. Or was there more to

• 46:52Speaker 02

  it? Well, yeah. So perspective is I moved out there, I believe in the end of August of 2016, world championships, junior world championships, the trials that I met him at. It's the first and only junior worlds I'd ever go to. And when we first moved there, we being other people, because I also had another buddy of mine, Dan Schuler, who moved out there with me. My number one competitor head to head since like 14 years old. And we just kind of pushed each other and kept competing and moving up the ladder as we got older and older. So we both moved out to there at the training center at the same time. And Coach Lee said, I won't change your form at all. Don't worry. Train and compete through the world championships, and then we'll work on your form. Because part of the reason of going to the training

• 47:36Speaker 02

  center was to learn from Coach Lee, to really learn how to be a real archer. Because up until that point, my shot cycle, which is a thing that you do for archery, it's the same method over and over again. It's like a, like a mantra, but physically.

• 47:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a physical recipe.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right? In a sense, just like someone who's, let's just say, an Olympic diver, right? They're like, they're going to have their routine, never deviates. They're probably toweling off in the same way. They're putting things in the same place.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Probably fold it the same and put it in the same place on the railing.

• 48:05Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because all of that genuinely matters at a high level, at least to the routine, for sure. And so for archery, my routine prior to that was pull back the bow, anchor, look at the middle, and wait for the clicker to click. There was no activation. There was no mental talk. There was nothing. It was genuinely pull it back, look at the middle and wait. That's it. And so when I was there, there was about that two month time period before junior worlds, and I started shooting phenomenal, like to the level of I could be easily competitive, top two, top three, in the senior division, really starting to shoot high level scores, and frankly, to be a threat to actually medal at junior worlds. So it's very exciting.

• 48:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  And then about two weeks or so before the actual event, before we went down to Mexico, everything changed. Coach Lee just decided, it's time to change your form. And not just change my form, change my equipment, which is another part of it. And so to not exaggerate in the least, the only thing that was the same on my entire setup and in my entire shot process was my riser, the center part of the bow that's made of aluminum that the limbs, the piece that bends, snap into. And the riser and my sight bar, which is the thing that moves the sight. So my sight pin, my finger tab, my arrows, my fletchings, my string, my stabilizers,

• 49:33Speaker 02

  my entire shot process, how I stood, how I fought, what I told myself, everything had changed. And my scores went from nationally competitive as a senior, a threat on the world scale as a junior, to genuinely not shooting that terrible ever, ever.

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, it was the worst you've been.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Literally the worst I had ever shot, even before I picked up my recurve, that for the very first time before going to the Empire State Games. So if I took my scores at Empire State Games, I probably outshot my scores at Junior Worlds in Mexico.

• 50:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, why would Coach Lee do that two weeks before the competition?

• 50:13Speaker 02

  He's an interesting guy, and his reason was, I can't take an archer that looks like that to World Championships. In his defense, my technique was atrocious. A completely arched back and just what we would call a hollow back. So standing very upright, you know, I'm a young kid at the time, just turned 18, barely strength trained ever, you know, I did some planks, that was my strength training, right? And yeah, just couldn't control my body and just didn't look the part. You know, he is known for having very specific looks in his archers, a very specific biomechanically efficient movement with very precise loading of the structure of the body itself to maintain

• 50:56Speaker 02

  the weight of the bow, and I was not doing that in the least. I asked him afterwards and he said, I was embarrassed to bring those archers to Junior World Championships, and he was not afraid to say it. Ultimately, I was there for the Olympic Games, not for Junior World Championships. So how could I ever say no? My ultimate goal is to make the Games, not to do anything at Junior Worlds, but it definitely had quite an effect on my overall mental perspective of how things were going.

• 51:22Tim Ferriss?

  How long did it take you to build back up to the same scores or superior scores?

• 51:29Speaker 02

  I would say probably three to four years.

• 51:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God. So what are you saying to yourself mentally over that period of time? Cause I would imagine that would could be incredibly demoralizing.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:43Tim Ferriss?

  And you would have, I would think, moments of doubt. And I'm curious what kept you going and how you kept yourself going during that period of time? Because I mean, look, I think I'm a glutton for punishment and have pretty good pain tolerance, physical and mental, but I don't know if I could do that.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  To put it in context, so it took me three to four years to get back to zero, square one. Whereas my buddy Dan Schuler, three months.

• 52:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe less.

• 52:17Tim Ferriss?

  Huh.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I don't know why, but maybe three months or so for him. So I see somebody who went out to the training center with me at the same time. I was at the same level, if not potentially a little bit better, at least the way I saw it than him. And then extend my timeline times 15 times. That's how long it took me, much longer to take me to get back to zero. And so, yeah, it was definitely very difficult mentally and emotionally for sure, because it was more than challenging, to say the least. And not only that, adding in physical challenges too. Because prior to moving to the training center, I was maybe shooting maybe 100, 120 arrows at the most I could ever shoot in a single day. And I would maybe shoot that once a month.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  I would shoot often, don't get me wrong, but maybe it would be 50 to 60 arrows a session at the most.

• 53:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  And I thought I was doing a lot and never strength training. I went to the gym at school and did planks and I don't even know what, some very basics, maybe wall sits or something like that, like really just not strength training. So moved out of the training center, started shooting upwards of 400 to 500 arrows every single day. Strength training three days a week on the track, doing morning workouts six days a week and shooting overall six days a week. So, super crazy amounts of load, develop tendonitis, tendinosis in shoulders and dealing with all sorts of inflammation issues. Still deal with a little bit of that today and I have learned a lot of things to deal with that. But at that time, I'm going to the sports medicine for hours a day. So I do prehab rehab exercises

• 53:49Speaker 02

  every single day and I'm the only one complaining of the pain in my shoulders and all sorts of other things. Whereas all my other teammates are shooting just as much, if not more arrows than me with just as much, if not more draw weight, going to the gym, doing all the same things and none of them had to go to sports medicine. Very few of them were even sore enough to feel like they needed to ice or do anything. And I'm there having to do all sorts of different things. It was a big, big struggle and a challenge. And I don't know really what pushed me through exactly. I can't really put my finger on the pulse of that, but I think a lot of it actually have to attribute to my sister, Liz. She was approaching things with a different mindset than pretty much

• 54:32Speaker 02

  that I have ever heard of in the past, trying to like manifest things instead of just going through the motions, instead of just doing it and hoping the outcome changes, but to try to just overall bring what you want into fruition and to not just hope that it's going to happen. And so a big part of that was actually using affirmations. And I had no idea what they were at the time, but she started bringing me into that mindset of using positive affirmations to kind of change everything. You know, I was dealing with being on depression medication and all sorts of other things because if I had to pick one word to describe to you how I felt during that timeframe, it was apathy. Yeah. Just a lack of anything. And so, fast forward to the

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Positive affirmations using I am period. So we check our hand placement and our grip every single shot to make sure it's exactly the same thing.

• 55:22Tim Ferriss?

  So he has I am tattooed on basically, let's just say the back of the hand, the webbing between the index finger and the thumb on the left hand, which you're going to check every time.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Correct, because that's my bow hand. I want to make sure my bow hand placement is precise in the grip. And so it's not just I am, it's I am, period. It's a statement, right? And so what is I am? I am is whatever you want to be. So for me, it was I am an archer. I'm an Olympian, period. So changing my overall habits and mindset started with just self-talk.

• 55:56Tim Ferriss?

  And would you do that at basically that point in your shot cycle?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like trying to, when you're shooting an arrow, there's a difference between trying to hit the ten ring and trying to not miss the ten ring. There's also a difference between fighting for position and owning a position. And so ultimately, how is your approach? And so if you approach from the stance of it has happened and you are, you are that person, then your habits just change. And so genuinely, it was like, I am an Olympian, period. Okay. I'm not yet, I'm not using the standard thing when I ask people, so what do you want to be? I want to be an Olympian. Okay, great. You're going to always want to be one. Let's change that thought to be I am an Olympian, because then your habits

• 56:44Speaker 02

  change. And so my habits changed to be more of a, an approach of looking at myself from an honest perspective of, am I doing the right thing? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I strength training enough? Am I putting in enough effort? Am I being honest with myself? All of those things, because if a champion would do whatever it was and I wasn't doing it, I changed that. I made a decision to make that change. I think a lot of it that took me out of that spiral, that negative spiral was just believing.

• 57:14Tim Ferriss?

  And using the present tense affirmations, positive affirmations?

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yes, never a future tense, because the future tense is just, you're just setting yourself up to continue to want that. It's not done. If it's done and you shoot from that position of, I have arrived, I am that, I am what I want to be, then Everything else can click.

• 57:35Tim Ferriss?

  And for people listening, this is not the first time that affirmations have come up on this podcast with people who are top performers. It can be a really powerful tool. And to this day, I mean, I'm still kind of like chasing the dream here, but my best ever day of shooting was a day early on when I started using affirmations. And for me, it was, I am a top Lancaster competitor. All right. And it was every single shot.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:59Tim Ferriss?

  And we'll talk about practice scores versus competition scores at some point. But it is remarkable what that can contribute to, like what it can do. All right, so you're rebuilding, rebuilding three to four years. Good God, I mean, it's an entire college experience, basically. Talk about brutal. But you've made all of these decisions. You've had all this training. You've got Coach Lee's input. You have the positive affirmations. You've developed, maybe fine tuned your shot sequence, right? You're no longer just staring at the middle of the target and waiting until the clicker clicks. When does it all come together?

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Ultimately, it really came together in 2012 at the Olympic Games in London. So put it in perspective, as we talked about Korea already, Korea is a powerhouse now. What the US was in the eighties, Korea is today, just dominant for decades at this point.

• 58:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so just put that in perspective, like if we take, could be the, the women's team or the men's team, like how dominant? If you look at their medal record over time, what does it look like?

• 59:08Speaker 02

  With the exception of the, the Korean men, the Korean women haven't lost a gold medal, individual or team round. And I think like 28 years or something crazy. It's, I, I don't know exactly. It's an absurd statistic.

• 59:22Tim Ferriss?

  It is as impeccable a record as a country can possibly have.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Correct. The only reason that I say with the Korean men is an exception is because they didn't have an individual male Olympic gold medal for quite some time. They just recently got one finally.

• 59:36Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  I don't know. Yeah. Maybe the pressure.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. There's a lot riding on it. There's also a lot of benefit for them to perform well, but there's a lot of pressure.

• 59:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I would also, for sure, I didn't really think about this because I guess on the one hand, you could say, well, wait a second, they've been shooting 700 arrows a day since they were a fetus. Why can't they handle the pressure? But at the same time, you told me, I can't remember who it was. You don't need to mention them, but what did someone say to you to calm you down before one competition? I can cue you. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Tim Ferriss?

  What is it?

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, no one gives a shit.

• 1:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning in the US about?

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Meaning I'm not LeBron.

• 1:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  I'm not Kobe. I'm not Michael.

• 1:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Right? No one's watching. No one cares.

• 1:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So relax. Take some pressure off yourself.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  I believe he actually said, no one cares.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  So in contrast, right? If you're a top Olympic competitor in Korea, you are LeBron. You are Kobe. Everyone cares and everyone is watching.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:35Tim Ferriss?

  So it's a tremendous amount of pressure.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah.

• 1:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's a lot of pressure no matter what. Okay. So 2012.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  So 2012, the Korean men, then because of the team. So we're leading into the team rounds because that's, that's where we're heading here.

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  And how does that work? Is it like the cumulative points of three people who go round robin?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  So we do round robins, head to head, single elimination for elimination. We do that individually. We also do that as a team. So you, you seed yourself in the ranking round. There's 64 men competing, one through 64, one verse 64, two verse 63, and so on.

• 1:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's like an NCAA bracket.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Correct. That's how you decide the individual champion. Team round, it's your three archers combined score that ranks you as a team amongst the other teams. And then it's, there was 12 teams at the time. And so you then same thing, just like the, uh, March Madness style bracket. It's single elimination and head to head. And so you shoot three archers together as a team. You shoot in rotation. So you step on and off the line and you have a very limited amount of time to shoot your arrows. So there's no time to second guess, no time to let down, and you have to be a well-oiled machine to execute properly.

• 1:01:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I would just say, so let down for people who may not get that, if you pull back and you make a mistake or you didn't set up properly, it doesn't feel right. You can choose, if you're practicing, let's just say, to let down, which means slowly bring the string back to the bow and start over.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  You essentially abort the shot.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  You pull back, you're like, eh, something doesn't feel right.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  The wind's blowing harder. I had a negative thought popping in my head.

• 1:02:08Tim Ferriss?

  Which is what I had to do over and over again today because I over drew.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:12Tim Ferriss?

  And clicked the clicker when I was not prepared to release the shot.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:16Tim Ferriss?

  So not having any wiggle room.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  No wiggle room. There's just really no time to second guess and you just have to go for it. So after the ranking round, Korea was ranked first and the United States was ranked either third or fourth. So that means that we would meet in the semifinals. And so that meant whoever won the semifinals would go for gold and then the loser of that match would have silver. And then the loser of the semifinal match would have the chance to win bronze in the next match. And so we were seeded to meet Korea in the semifinals. And so the first question that we got asked as a team, and the coach included Coach Lee, was, so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze tomorrow?

• 1:02:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's just the assumption.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  That is the assumption.

• 1:03:02Tim Ferriss?

  That's such a dick question.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like, I don't even know who the actual media outlet was, but it's like, so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze? It's like, have you been watching at all? We are at the US men at that time, we're ranked number one in the world as team, as a team round, because we were winning World Cup events, which are world ranking events leading up to that, and doing quite well. The Koreans were ranked second in the world. And we had beat them several times on the World Cup scale. But of course, everybody's just assuming that they're going to be dominant because they had won for the last, I don't know, decade straight or more. And so it was a interesting wake up call all of a sudden to be like, what? Can you ask that question again?

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  So it was just a shock, to say the least, but the power of positive affirmations, by that time, I started changing my thought process and talking not just, I am an Olympian, period. It became much more powerful and actionable and timely. So tying SMART goals into positive affirmations of, I am an Olympian, or I am 2012 Olympic champion because I run my mental program more than any other archer, period. So it's not just, I am, not just, I am an Olympian, I am an Olympian at this specific time, at this specific event, for this specific reason. And that specific reason is something that I've identified as a absolute

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  crucial thing to do every single shot in order to succeed. That's how I ended up talking to myself at that timeframe, to that level of detail. So. Of course, whatever our response to the media was at that time, I'm not exactly sure.

• 1:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  What did Coach Lee say?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Well, we had a lot of opportunity to talk to a lot of media leading up to the event. So we get to London 15 days before the start of the competition. We're there training and media is there asking us questions during sessions that we book. And so the Korean media was coming in, asking Coach Lee questions about basically the same kind of thing. How's it feel to win silver before we haven't even shot an arrow yet, essentially? And he started saying things in Korean, responding to them as their questions were in Korean as well. And you could just see the shock of this reporter's face, right? And even the cameraman's like, just this response. And so after the media left, we asked Coach Lee, so what did you say to them? He said, let's just put it this way, I don't think I'm going to be welcomed back in Korea.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  So I don't know what he said. He didn't really fill in the details there. But the idea was essentially that the power that we had as a team of the confidence, not just the archers individually, the archers as a team. Because we were really the first and only team to compete as a team in that tournament. So normally it's individual, it's an individual sport. That's what it is. That's what the prestige is. And you happen to have three individuals that come together to compete as a team. But they're just still shooting as individuals. If somebody shoots, say, worse than the others, it's easy to kind of point fingers and be like, that's the reason why we didn't win. Because it's an individual sport. It's like, we're a team. We win as a team, we lose as a team. And so we had that genuine change.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Our main focus was team rounds. It was not individual, the three of us. Because there's 12 other teams and there's 64 other individuals. You only have to win three matches to be in the medals in team rounds. Whereas you have to win five or six matches to be in an individual medal. And so statistically, much easier to medal as a team than as an individual. So we genuinely trained every day, once we selected the team, leading up to that event as a team. Encouraging each other, learning each other's shot. Not just learning each other's shot, but during this head-to-head match play, there's no time for equipment failures. So if your equipment breaks, you can't go fix it. So usually you have a backup bow and the backup bow is just there and it's kind of working.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  You do your best to make it as good as your primary bow, but it's your backup bow for a reason. It's just doesn't shoot as well for whatever reason. And Coach Lee basically said backup bows are pointless because if your main bow breaks, you're mentally just going to be shot. So what's the point? Don't even bother setting up a backup bow. And so we actually shot each other's primary bows as our backup bows.

• 1:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  So I shot Brady's bow and I shot Jacob Wookie's bow.

• 1:07:24Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hold on a second.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Tim Ferriss?

  So how similar are your draw lengths and like your ape index, right? In terms of like-

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Not at all. But the thing is I'm using-

• 1:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  Ape index is, anyway, you guys can look it up, but it's just like your, your physical proportions are not the same. And at that level, certainly everything is-

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Everything matters.

• 1:07:42Tim Ferriss?

  Customized.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  For sure. Not just that, the balance of the bow, the feel of the grip, the sight pin, all of those things. And so the thing that is constant is our arrows. So we use our same arrow.

• 1:07:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  And our clickers, the device that's a draw check is, was roughly in the same place.

• 1:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  I think the only exception was one of us and Brady chose to not even bother with a clicker when he was shooting one of our bows as a backup. He would just pull back, control the shot and execute good shots and deal with that.

• 1:08:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Whereas I used their clickers. And essentially I learned that, I think Brady's bow, maybe I hit low eight. So about eight, 10 inches low at 70 meters. So I would just aim high eight with his bow. And Jacob Wookie's, I'd have to aim like low right, blue or something crazy to actually have the arrow land in the middle.

• 1:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  So we just, you know, played this game, right? And so it was, you know, just this level of intimacy per se as a team that no one else had in the world because they all trained as individuals, not as a team.

• 1:08:38Tim Ferriss?

  So a quick couple of questions then, because I guess to- Even me, listening, I'm like, well, it's still kind of an individual thing. I used to wrestle way back in the day. And it's like, okay, yeah, you're a team and you want to be supportive. The backup bow using someone else's primary as your backup is super interesting. This is the first time I'm hearing of it. Are there any other strategies where, let's just say, I'm making this up, but okay, it's like the wind is gusting and the first person up is going to have to deal with the brunt of it. You think so you pick the person who seems to be best in high winds. I'm making that up. I have no idea. But are, is there any other strategy that you can build around the team?

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, so for us, the wind is actually was part of it. We'll get to that in a second. But if you approach team rounds as an individual, you're working on your own shot and that's it. So you, you either shoot a 10 or you don't. And your teammate, who is also your opponent in individuals, either shoots a 10 or he doesn't. And that's just how it normally works. But what we did was we worked with each other to understand a little bit more about each other's shot cycle, each other's mental approach, what makes someone better than doesn't. Like, do you want to hear your name when you're at full draw? Like, come on, Tim, shoot a 10. Or do you want just, all right, strong shot? Something that's general, but not specific to you. And so there's little things that you learn, but then also there's a supreme trust in each other.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  And so in team rounds, you have to communicate with each other how the shot went. And then ultimately, where did the arrow go compared to how the shot went? And then the next shooter makes adjustments based on that because the wind is always changing.

• 1:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  I see. Right. So each person is a feedback mechanism for everyone else.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. And also the coaches too, because he has this third person view. He's not shooting, but he's able to look at stuff, the wind blowing in different areas. And actually the very specific thing that Coach Lee did with the wind that we couldn't as archers because of a piece of clothing choice that he made different than us at that day. The day being when we shot for medals. If we just fast forward to the actual medal rounds, we are in the semifinal match against Korea. We almost lose our first match. We're very close to actually losing and just barely squeaked by by a point or two. And but there was no doubt that we were ever gonna lose, at least in my head. I had no fear of that. I was so supremely confident because of this affirmation, the power of it,

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  that there was never a doubt, even when we were behind in the match. It just was like, it's supposed to happen this way, apparently, you know? And once we got to the semifinal against Korea, everybody said that was the gold medal match of the games, actually. Because everybody wanted to see that. Korea was powerhouse, US was ranked number one, it's the Olympic Games, what's gonna happen, everybody's watching. We actually had, I think, the highest viewership of any Olympic sport at the 2012 Olympics during that match. That's wild. They put us on TV because we were the first medal of the US, our first chance to get a medal. And, you know, back then it was Twitter and I had comments saying, "I love my sports team", whatever it is, the Sabres, or the Buffalo Bills, or whatever. You know, people from my hometown and they're like,

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  "I have never stood on my couch and screamed at the TV, but I did when I saw archery at the Olympics." That's incredible. Yeah, so, cool stuff. So the wind. Usually we have a windsock. The windsock is not a calibrated windsock. So, meaning if it's at a certain angle, it's a certain speed. We don't do that in archery, for whatever reason. But it's always at 50 meters. So the distance we shoot is 70. The flag is, you know, three fifths of the way downrange, or so. And it's always on a specific pole at a specific height, and you have, you know, every so often they're placed. And so you have a general, consistent reference as to what the windsock's doing and how you can guess where to aim. And that's ultimately as best as you can do is guess.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  And so, we were shooting at Lord's Cricket Ground. And on the pitch, where they bowl the ball back and forth to each other, the people who stand on that, the lawn care people, are anointed by the Queen to be allowed to stand on the hollowed ground. The lawnmower is anointed by the Queen to be allowed to mow her grass. But because our windsock and the stand that held that windsock was not anointed by the Queen, or whatever they call it, it was not allowed to be there. So they put it in a different location than it ever had been at any other event. We're also shooting in a stadium. Within the stadium is another stadium inside of that stadium where the archery fans are sitting. And the stands go down probably 50 meters. There's several thousands of people in the stands.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  And it kind of fans out towards the target. And so we're guessing, we're genuinely guessing where to aim. Ultimately, before that match, Coach Lee was like, trust me, I know where you need to aim. Okay, you're not shooting. How do you know? I'm the leadoff. Jacob Wookiee shoots second, Brady Ellison shoots third. And I have to do my job when I lead off to shoot a supremely confident shot.

• 1:13:48Tim Ferriss?

  Clean shots that you can depend on, so that you can use that to calibrate for everybody else.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Correct. Or be so in tune with my shot when I make an error, I know or can essentially estimate where that arrow should land. And then compare where it actually lands to where it should land. And then suggest to Jacob Wookiee where to aim. So to give you an idea, as a quick sidetrack, when I let go of the string at 70 meters, I can tell you within the size of about a baseball where that arrow is going on the target the moment I let it go. Because I've shot so many arrows, I verified where it went on the target, looking through a spotting scope. And attributed my feeling of how the shot went to where it landed. And so I can just tell you exactly where it's going to go. And so that's my job as leadoff. Coach Lee's wearing shorts. We're wearing pants.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  He can feel the wind blowing on his leg hairs and he's like, aim left nine. Okay.

• 1:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  That's wild.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So good luck finding any other team that has ever worked that closely together. We ultimately ended up winning and then went on to lose the gold medal match by a fraction of an inch at 70 meters away. But I mean, ultimately everyone came up to us afterwards and said, that was the gold medal match, regardless of how the actual medals end. So supreme confidence in that positive statements, those positive affirmations of just supreme faith and belief in the process. As it's happening, even if it's not going well, like our first match when we were losing, we were behind the first several ends of the match. And the matches are only four ends.

• 1:15:19Tim Ferriss?

  So an end is somebody getting up and shooting a group of arrows.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Correct. So as a team, that would be each archer shoots two arrows. So that's a total of six arrows. That's an end. And then a cumulative score at that time was shot. So whoever had the highest score of 24 arrows after four ends, because that's the total amount shot, that team won and advanced in the match.

• 1:15:40Tim Ferriss?

  It's an incredible story. That's crazy. I've never heard a bunch of these. This is wild. Like in all the time we spent together. It's nuts. Just for comedic relief, because you mentioned the Korean media interviews and them looking shocked talking to Coach Lee. So I'll just share a sidebar on Coach Lee. A little bit of interaction. So flew to San Diego because we did a little bit of training together and I wanted to meet this famous Coach Lee. Why not?

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I made the introduction and said, hey, Coach Lee.

• 1:16:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Tim would like to work with you.

• 1:16:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And so I landed in San Diego and a few things that are, I think, fun to share. So the first is, we needed this outdoor range and I'm going to be shooting mostly at 20 yards, so 60 feet, let's just call it roughly. And we hang out for 45 minutes. I'm taking copious notes. He's giving me some pointers and then we stop and he's like, okay, I think you have plenty to work with and I don't think you need my help anymore. And I was like, uh, excited, flown down, planning to be there for a week or something. Five days, something along those lines.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Not just to be there for five days, but to-

• 1:16:49Tim Ferriss?

  To be there explicitly to train with him.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  And so at some point, I'm like, got a bit creased, fallen. I'm like, oh, man. Letting my head hang like Eeyore. I'm like, oh, fuck. I do feel like I need more help. And we start talking about, somehow we get talking about firearms and guns. And he is very interested in marksmanship and all things firearms. And so he gets more excited and we're chatting, we're talking about this, that and the other thing. And then he asks me, so what brings you to San Diego? And I was like, well.

• 1:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe this sounds strange, but I flew here to train with you. And he's like, oh, okay. Tonight, Korean barbecue. So we go out to dinner and end up having an amazing time training with him. And he's really one of a kind. Yeah. And also, the reason I was mentioning the shocked look on the faces of the Korean media is you do not worry about Coach Lee speaking his mind. Oh, no. He is so direct. You do not have to worry about him sugarcoating things. And to give you an example, later I ended up driving to his house, behind which he has all these targets set up. And basically, I was the only non-Asian there, absolutely, 100% the only non-Asian. Korean army. Which is, which is fine. It was just Korean army. Yeah.

• 1:18:12Tim Ferriss?

  And tons of Korean kids, also some like Taiwanese kids and Chinese kids, but they're all 12 years old. And shooting by my standards, especially at that point, incredibly well. And I'm off in the corner, like getting some pointers from Coach Lee and just looking like a total remedial case, which is fine. And then at one point, he wants to give like pep talk to the kids. And he's like, Tim, Tim, come over here. Okay. And so we all stand in a circle and he's giving this very Coach Lee motivational talk, which is like 60% inspiration, 40% you need to shape up or ship out, toughen up kids. And at one point, I'm wondering why I'm in this circle.

• 1:18:54Tim Ferriss?

  And he points to me and he's like, he's like, look, this is Tim. And he is an old man, a very old man, and he's here training, seriously. And I was like, oh, I see. If I can be a inspirational slash like warning tale for these, these amazing young children with so much promise, I'm in. I'm in for it. I'm in for it. But it's just so endearing. And the guy's genius. He's really one of a kind. Okay. So those are my Coach Lee stories. Thank you, Coach Lee. Let's talk about. Your coaching and what we ended up doing.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Tim Ferriss?

  And all the experiments along the way, because you mentioned, for instance, you know, Coach Lee's feeling the leg hair and the movement and you're providing feedback. You're getting familiar with the one another's shot cycles. The little things matter. It is hard for me to explain verbally just how many tiny, tiny, tiny details make a huge difference with archery. And just the way you hook your fingers on the string, the exact placement, how far it is from the fold of one joint, the amount of curl of the fingers, how much you use your, you're using, in this case,

• 1:20:11Tim Ferriss?

  index, middle and ring finger, the degree to which you can see or not see as a coach, my nail on my ring finger. And the difference that makes, the angle of the back of the hand and the difference that makes. The level of detail is really unbelievable when you want to start training and performing with precision. Okay, so I find you, we meet up and then ultimately about six months out from Lancaster, decide to take it seriously. Now, there are a few constraints, right? One is you live in Florida, I do not live in Florida. So we have limited in-person training, although I think we did a good job with that.

• 1:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say, maybe on average, was it like a few days a month? Or like a week every six weeks, something like that?

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Probably somewhere in that timeframe. But we, I think I was maybe there for three to four days, once every six weeks.

• 1:21:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. And we're doing a lot of virtual training. I travel a lot. So if there are awards for most varied training environments, I think I would win that one hands down.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  For sure in the barebow division.

• 1:21:24Tim Ferriss?

  In the barebow.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely. The only exception would be like your professional archer who is traveling the world competing.

• 1:21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  But that's the only exception. And then there's no one doing that in barebow.

• 1:21:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, I was.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Not even remotely.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I ended up bringing my roller bag, which looks like it's carrying an assault rifle. Customs do not love this bag.

• 1:21:45Tim Ferriss?

  Like, sir, what's in the bag?

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  Sporting a gear.

• 1:21:48Tim Ferriss?

  Sporting gear is the answer. That's how you get your bow and arrow through customs. But I traveled all over the place, all over the country, in the US certainly. And I would check my targets. And often it's just a big cube of foam. And they'd be like, sir, what's in the box? And I'm like, there's nothing in the box. And they'd be like, sir, need you to be serious right now. What's in the cube? I'm like, it's solid foam. And they're like, yeah, but what's inside it? I'm like, foam. This would go on and on and on. And, you know, going to Hawaii, going to Canada, going to the UK, where I ended up going on this pilgrimage trail, Cotswolds Way. And at every tiny inn, I would have to negotiate,

• 1:22:33Tim Ferriss?

  try to pitch my little heart out to shoot in the backyard or anywhere. I ended up shooting from inside a hotel to outside the hotel. I ended up shooting from outside a hotel through the living room, through the kitchen into a laundry room where I hit a target.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Pickleball courts.

• 1:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  Pickleball courts. Tennis courts.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  Batting cages.

• 1:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  Batting cages, right? Where you have like kids whacking balls with aluminum bats and screeching and hooding and hollering.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Eight feet from you.

• 1:23:02Tim Ferriss?

  Eight feet from you. So if you want, if you want distraction training, that's a great way to do it. So we had some things to work around, but the forcing function was for me, and this is always the case, the magic of a deadline. And having a competition on the books, which I wasn't 100% committed to. But I was like, let me behave as if, let me train as if I'm going to compete. It's like, I don't want to embarrass myself. I don't want to embarrass you. Let's see how it goes. But I remember probably a few months out, like paying the registration fee. And I'm like, okay, now my name is online for everybody to see. That probably means I should go. And then the question is, all right, what do you do if

• 1:23:42Tim Ferriss?

  you have six months to train? And few things come to mind immediately. Number one is you're always going to have things to work around. So it could be logistics, could be in my case, my left shoulder, which was reconstructed in 2004, and it was a real limiter, had many different physiological limiters. Right now, I have a bunch of torn extensors. I mean, they're probably going to require surgery in my right elbow, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. It's like, okay, well, we will have to just work around it. And lo and behold, you can work around. You might have to make some compromises. Okay, fine. But it's like, if, for instance, as we experienced, if shooting with a particular stance causes my back to seize

• 1:24:26Tim Ferriss?

  up and it's producing a lot of incredible pain, okay, we'll make a few compromises on that in order to minimize that. And then that's going to trigger a whole chain of other adaptations that we need to make. And like you, I guess, as a kid, I very quickly found it meditative. Archery was almost like taking a break from my monkey mind. And particularly when you start to focus on, and this is something we focused on pretty early, want to give Joel Turner again, credit shot IQ in terms of like the boot up sequence and blueprinting your best shots, really having a script for your checklist, like your pre-flight checklist, as you're going

• 1:25:08Tim Ferriss?

  through your entire shooting motion, and having, for instance, positive affirmation, where do you put that? You want to put it in the same place every single time. And then I would say also recognizing that given some of the physical limitations, it's like, okay, I can't do 500 hours a day. Forget it.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  We started at 60 something arrows a limited day, I think.

• 1:25:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, max.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was the absolute max.

• 1:25:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  And A lot of that had to do with, you know, very typical Tim Ferriss fashion, as I know now, to overdo everything to 11 out of four.

• 1:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was basically doing like a Mr. Olympia pose down every time I was trying to shoot the arrow. So there was a lot more tension in the system than was necessary. Which is, I just in fairness, in my own defense, really common. Go to a range and watch especially guys who have a little bit of muscle shooting these things and it's like, whoa, okay, this guy's like trying to Hulk his own shirt off.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  But for you, the challenge was you had actual injuries, actual limitations. So how much were those affecting the system versus the excessive tension? And it was this back and forth juggling to figure out what was what?

• 1:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  What was what? Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of detective work. And for instance, in the left shoulder, you have two titanium screws. Had the whole arm ripped out doing some combat sports stuff a million years ago. And my arm ended up sticking out of my chest, basically. And I won't get into all the gory details, but suffice to say, when you tack down the shoulder with these screws, you create some limitations. And as a consequence of that, I had a lot of tendinosis in rotator cuff muscles, infraspinatus, superspinatus, they're a mess, really, really tangled up. So what that means is like, okay, how do we work around this rather than do I need to stop? I mean, look, there are times when you need to stop, like right now with this elbow that requires surgery, I'm probably going to have to take a break from the hard stuff for a little while, two to three months.

• 1:27:09Tim Ferriss?

  But outside of that, it's like, okay, how do we work around this? And that took a bunch of different forms, including like rather than trying to whack out, I mean, we ultimately got to the point when we were training in person, at least that we were doing what 200 plus arrows on some days?

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Tim Ferriss?

  And there were many aspects to that. And then we can talk about some of the technical stuff, but just from the physical workaround perspective, when I started practicing, there were a few things that I would do. And all of this, we talked about, and I was building off of your advice. So rather than doing one session, break it into two sessions. And also start and end your sessions with blank bail practice. Do you want to explain what blank bail is? Because this avoids the target panic that you mentioned earlier. And I think is an incredible tool that I found in very, very helpful. What is blank bail practice?

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  So blank bail is, so the bail, the target bail is blank. There's no target face on it, nothing to aim at, not even a spot, a shadow, a hole or whatever. You can do small amounts of aiming per se, but it is not for the sake of precision. It's not trying to hit the ten ring or anything like that. What it does is it removes the aiming requirement or the aiming distraction from the process.

• 1:28:29Tim Ferriss?

  And when you were at the high level using blank bail practice, how far away from the target do you stand?

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  Generally speaking, for blank bail, I would be eight feet or so from the target. So you're never going to miss. And so you're just simply going through repetition. It's like a palate cleanser almost. So you go through your motions, you go through your shot process, but you're not aiming at anything. So you can confidently move through the movements without being careful or over analytical or get yourself in a bind that can happen when you're aiming at a target. So it allows you to ingrain your technique to a level that really trains the subconscious brain to try to take over when you're in pressure situations. And it also allows you to put in a lot more repetition without so much time spent walking the distance to go down to the target.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  So for me, going down to 70 meters takes a bit of time to walk that distance. So instead I can just walk eight feet, pull my arrows and pick up my bow and immediately start shooting again. So that's what it meant to me. And the amount of training at blank bail really depends on what you're working on at that time. But generally speaking, more is better because it really allows you to focus on the process and ingrain your steps. You know, you talked about the level of detail with just the hook alone. To be able to ingrain that to be automated to where you grab the string and you don't even have to think about it, you have to put in the reps. And so if you're putting in the reps and you're distracted by aiming, it can take away your focus on that grip, on that hook or whatever it may be.

• 1:30:00Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. So I could use it for warming up in the beginning of a session, say the beginning of the first session. And then towards the end, I'd be like, okay, look, I got, as anyone competitive is likely to do, overly fixated on the scoring and the aiming, the performance.

• 1:30:18Tim Ferriss?

  Let me end on a good rep. And so, ending the training practices with blank bail just allowed me to settle the snow globe a bit. Focus on the biomechanics, particularly something, I mean, at least I took this approach in the training session. If I notice, oh, you know what? I am collapsing a little bit, meaning losing back tension in the following way. A, B, or C is happening, or maybe I'm not pulling my bow hand pinky back enough. And therefore I'm landing right or whatever. I'm just going to focus on that for my blank bill. That's going to be my most important cue. Particularly in the beginning, because if you try to incorporate too much too quickly,

• 1:31:02Tim Ferriss?

  you're going to get the Mac ball of death beach ball, right? You're not going to be able to divide your attention and maintain any type of performance in the beginning. So a lot of what I found so valuable with your coaching was the layering. When do you choose to introduce certain things? And I also really liked the focus on biomechanics. So the blank bill, you could think of in a way as if, let's just say you're, I don't even know if they do this, but I'm making it up. Let's just say you're a major league pitcher. And it's like, all right, you're trying to focus on some aspect of your throw without the distraction of trying to put it right into the sweet spot of a catcher's mitt.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  Then let's just say you had a very, very large net hanging. It's like 20 feet just hanging down and you were just throwing the ball into this net and working on the biomechanics.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  It would be similar to like dry fire training with a pistol.

• 1:31:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, very similar. Yeah, similar to dry firing, which you should never do with a bow. We talked about that in our video.

• 1:32:08Tim Ferriss?

  Unless you want your bow to explode, literally, don't do that. And I'm trying to think in the early stages, what, because it was a detective process. And you know, my mind is a little unusual at times and I process things a little differently. So do you recall like what some of the early? Most important things were that we focused on in training?

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  A lot of them were conceptual things, not necessarily technical, physical, but thought process, how does the shot go? What should you be trying to achieve kind of things? So a lot of those are really setting up kind of the process of how to shoot a bow, not necessarily how to shoot tens with a bow.

• 1:32:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  So how to shoot tens with a bow comes later, I think. I'm not sure about that, but...

• 1:32:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and tens, just if people are getting distracted, just think about shooting ball size.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So not how to put it in the middle, how to shoot a good shot, right? And so there are some really key factors that are super important to actually shooting a good shot. One of those is follow through. It's a very simple thing to explain. If you think of somebody, say, throwing a ball or kicking a ball, the moment of contact of the foot hitting the ball when you kick the ball is when you let go of the string for shooting archery. Or when you let go of the baseball when you're throwing it, that's the moment you let go of the string in shooting archery. And so follow through is what happens after that motion. No one ever in any other sport, including baseball and soccer, stop their motion of their foot or their arm the moment they let go of the object or make

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  contact with it. Just doesn't happen. Same thing with golf, right? So the stuff happens afterwards. That's a follow through motion. That is a maintaining of your... In archery, we call it tension and direction. You maintain that through follow through. So tension and direction being pull back the bow, it's wanting to collapse you. So you have to build tension against the bow, the system, and whatever direction that is going, back with the string hand and forward with the bow hand, that tension and direction has to maintain exactly how it is when you're at full draw through the release until the follow through finishes. So that would be the principle of like tension and direction and just follow through in general. It's a very simple concept to imagine,

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  but it's quite difficult to kind of implement. So we worked a lot on the technical aspects of how to apply that physically throughout the months or years we've been... Been working together for a couple of years now, but really that last six months leading up to Lancaster, trying to hone that in to be fluid, one motion, not fake, not two points. So not letting go of the string, losing all that tension of the string hand and then faking a follow through motion. So it's like, for those that are watching, the, the motion would look something similar as, so the hand touching the face at anchor, the fingers opening, the arm not moving, and then moving back in a second motion. So a good follow through would be the same fluid backward motion of the elbow,

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  the same exact time that the fingers are pushed out of the way of the string. And then that tension just continues until you run out of range of motion with the shoulder.

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, imagine, just for a visual for folks, if you had like a Theraband or a giant rubber band, and you got into an archery position and you're holding that rubber band at max tension, the way that it would simulate holding the string of a bow. And then you closed your eyes and somebody walked up and just cut the rubber band.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:35:39Tim Ferriss?

  What would happen? And the arms kept going, obviously. You didn't expect it. And that would be what you then have to do consciously on some level. It should take care of itself if you're using.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  The proper thought process.

• 1:35:52Tim Ferriss?

  Proper thought process and proper tension in the back and on the arm.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Even if the tension is improper in the back or the arm, the follow through will happen if you have that concept of maintaining whatever tension it is, right or wrong, when you're at full draw, but you continue through, through release.

• 1:36:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, and this also relates to the inner monologue.

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right? So when you're at anchor, okay, so you've got your, the strings fully pulled back. Again, for people listening or not familiar with archery, your hand is glued to your face or under the jaw in the case of Olympic archery. Okay. Now at this point, what are you saying to yourself or what do you sometimes say to yourself?

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  For me?

• 1:36:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  There's a lot of different options, but basically just continued motion. Yeah. Continue the back shoulder moving around and behind me and the bow moving forward. Yeah, or like finish the shot. Correct, or finish the shot. So one of the things that I talked to Coach Lee about somewhat recently, when I had dinner with him a year and a half ago or so, was, so anything new to share? And well, he chuckled first and then his response was, you're not going to like this, or others won't like this, actually. And he said, release is not a step anymore. We do not release the string. And I said, tell me more. He said, well, if you follow through and your main primary focus when you are at full draw, before you let go of the string is to follow through correctly, the release will take care of itself. If you maintain and execute a good, proper follow through,

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  your release is good. But if you're focused on the release, you cannot then switch your brain fast enough to the follow through motion, because the follow through is frankly a reaction, not an action. So it tells you everything about the tension that you've built up in the system when you're at full draw. So it's my job to watch you and see the motion that the elbow moves and the hand moves and the bow hand moves and all sorts of different spots of the body, even your head movement. The moment the string comes off your fingers, what direction does a particular body part move? And that the motion of that body part tells me the tension that you have at full draw. Because I've shot enough arrows and I've watched enough people with enough intention and attention to look at their form, analyze it, and just overall just watch.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  I can see where the tension is built. And then a lot of the stuff that we did working together was, when you're at full draw, I'm behind you and I'm like, I'm making motions and doing things to feel what you're feeling. So I can assume that if the hand's coming out, there's a change of tension going outward of the release hand coming away from your face when you let go, instead of maintaining that line along your neck as it comes back off your face. So if I mimic what you're doing, I get a bit of an insight as to what you're feeling. And then I can communicate with you nearly at the same language, hopefully. Maybe not using the same words, but at least trying to meet you where you're at. Tap the muscle I should be feeling as a primary mover when I'm supposed to feel it.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  Correct, yes. And I only get that based on looking at what you're doing and just overall trying to really just tear down the shot and see what's happening on the inside. Yeah. So flashing back then, thinking about.

• 1:38:57Tim Ferriss?

  Say the six months leading up to Lancaster, a couple of things. So one is I, for a very long time, people are going to find this pretty funny. Number one, I didn't care about hitting the bullseye. I did care about grouping, right? So I wanted arrows to land very close to one another.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:39:16Tim Ferriss?

  But if they were bottom left, top right, my assumption was, and I'm sure this is based off of conversations we had. If you're shooting consistently, if you're getting good groups consistently, it's not just a one off, kind of lucky bunch of arrows, then moving that on the target face is, I'm not going to say necessarily simple, but it ended up being pretty straightforward.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:39:42Tim Ferriss?

  As we got further down.

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:39:44Tim Ferriss?

  But doing the blank bill, got to the boat with the blank bill, or granted, it's like for me, 10 feet away, 12 feet away, whatever. That these arrows were just getting clumped, like right on top of one another. Even if I shot, I know this is maybe not your favorite thing, but I did this too. Like sometimes releasing with my eyes closed.

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:40:01Tim Ferriss?

  And then how long before Lancaster did I start aiming with the crest of the arrow tip?

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so about two weeks. So, so what Tim was doing was, was having blind faith that the arrow would land in the middle by using instinctive aiming per se.

• 1:40:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was also doing a few things that you recommended because in fairness, we tried to have me aim earlier. And I had, for the first time, target panic with the understanding that the tip is always going to move. But I had, I started to develop this anxiety around shooting.

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  Cause you didn't want to let it go when the point wasn't right on the middle.

• 1:40:43Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, wasn't right on the bullseye, so to speak. And I also didn't have the biomechanical control.

• 1:40:51Tim Ferriss?

  And the conditioning, which had to compensate for all sorts of things to do it effectively.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Right. And we also hadn't adjusted your bow either.

• 1:41:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  We did make compromises within your equipment to help work with the shoulder.

• 1:41:05Tim Ferriss?

  We did a bunch of stuff with that. We won't necessarily get into because it gets really technical. But a lot of things that would confuse even certain experienced folks like the upper and lower limbs, right? Where you would attach the string, switching those and making all sorts of tweaks.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Tim Ferriss?

  To the equipment to compensate or to allow this compromised shoulder to function.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  To work with you.

• 1:41:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 02

  Not against you.

• 1:41:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, because for instance, like the more weight, there's a point of diminishing returns. But since you can't put stabilizers on a bare bow, people add weight. They just have to keep the weight very close to the bow because this ring has to be able to pass over the whole thing for you to use it in competition. But people add quite a bit of weight and it helps to stabilize things. But I could not tried, but I couldn't do it. My shoulder would develop all sorts of pain and tendon issues and just couldn't do it.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  And ultimately you could only shoot 60 arrows in a session.

• 1:42:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Couldn't put in the amount of arrows that was actually required to be proficient.

• 1:42:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, we're going to make yet another trade off, which is I'm going to sacrifice some of the stability

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  in order to be able to add more volume.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  But the point was to allow you to work with the system. And because when we first started aiming, you started aiming early on that distraction because you weren't yet there physically pulled you out of the process.

• 1:42:39Tim Ferriss?

  If we were to lay out step by step, every single checkpoint that I go through or you go through. I mean, I

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  We'd be here for three hours.

• 1:42:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we'd be here for three hours. It's like 25 steps. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but yeah.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  25 steps for my hook.

• 1:42:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I mean, actually you're right. If I were to go through like every single checkpoint, it's like

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  Hundreds of hundreds.

• 1:42:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like a hundred checklist points for every shot. And until you have a critical mass of those steps on autopilot, you cannot add more steps. And

• 1:43:13Tim Ferriss?

  Therefore, given the compressed timeline we were dealing with, it was also like waiting for my nervous system to adapt.

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:43:19Tim Ferriss?

  And for that reason, like sometimes if you're trying to grease the groove with a particular motor pattern, it's like, okay, like lighter limbs are fine. Dial it down. And then, so in terms of my instinctive approach, found a compromise was, all right, you're not going to try to put the arrow tip or the crest of the arrow on the bow side. Again, for simplicity, just saying that. However, there are a few things you are going to do. You're going to burn a hole into the very center of the target with your eyes. And you're going to, people think of shooting an arrow if they haven't had a lot of experiences, like pulling back and letting go.

• 1:44:00Tim Ferriss?

  But you have this equal and opposite action in pushing forward with the bow hand. And there's a lot of technical detail that goes into how you do that. But basically pushing a portion of your palm, kind of the right next to your lifeline in the meaty pad of the thumb, let's just say roughly.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  Kind of where your wrist meets your palm.

• 1:44:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. And pushing that also, so you're burning a hole into the target in a very dead center, and you're pushing that point on your palm also towards the exact center of the target.

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  Despite whatever you're seeing as far as your sight picture.

• 1:44:41Tim Ferriss?

  And your sight picture, right. So where, don't worry about where the tip of the arrow is. And maybe I said it, maybe you said, I can't remember. Ended up calling this the Jesus takes the wheel approach. You know, Jesus take the wheel. And it was shocking to see what happened because more often than not, I would shoot better with that type of approach.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it worked surprisingly well.

• 1:45:08Tim Ferriss?

  It worked surprisingly well.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Until.

• 1:45:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's it worked surprisingly well until I guess we just decided, I mean, there were just, it wasn't reliable. I mean, to give you an idea, and this will mean more to people who have shot some arrows. But when I was hitting, and I had some pretty good scores, I mean, in practice, like, I don't know.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Into the 270s, I believe.

• 1:45:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 270, so like 540.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  270 out of 330. So decent. And and you're the goal for where you were wanting to be was 250 to plus.

• 1:45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  So you were in excess of your score goal for Lancaster.

• 1:45:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I wanted to qualify for the top 64 shooters.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:45:44Tim Ferriss?

  At Lancaster. We trained using my Jesus Take the Wheel approach for up until a few weeks before Lancaster, because I was a little gun shy after having so much trouble with trying to hold the point in one place or roughly floating.

• 1:46:00Speaker 02

  And Jesus taking the wheel was working so well.

• 1:46:02Tim Ferriss?

  It was working really well until we started having really variable lighting conditions. And we started dialing in the technique and the biomechanics for more precision.

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  And when we went to some test events, essentially, not not a test event per se, but like a local club shoot.

• 1:46:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  See how things are going.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's a great point. So, I mean, I don't recommend this, guys. So if you can do a ton of warm up tournaments before the big tournament, I highly recommend doing that. Just didn't really work out that way. But we went to a number of league nights and it won two small events at the eastern range in Salt Lake City, which is awesome.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  I think you shot like Utah state shoots or something like that.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  I went in and basically just like audited the thing, right? To try to get competition condition experience. And there are a few things that we noticed. So one is, in that environment, the bail, the canvas upon which you put the target, right? The backstop is black. And all of a sudden, my eyes started doing funny things. And I couldn't see the arrow tip as well. Now, the reason that's relevant is I wasn't trying to place the tip of the arrow in the center of the target, but I would try to see it. So that I could tell if I was roughly in the center of the target, right? So I would pay attention to the left, right?

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  And just really quick, for those that don't know, with Bearbow, you use the tip of your arrow as your aiming reference. Part of the game is there is no sight. So you're using the tip of the arrow as your aiming reference. And then you're placing that in a particular place every single time to shoot a group in the middle.

• 1:47:41Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. So all of a sudden, and thank God we did these test events, which I always have done in any other sport also. You just do not know what's going to happen and how you're going to respond in competition conditions until you do it.

• 1:47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Tim Ferriss?

  So there are a few things I think we did right. There are a lot of things we did right, but doing those warm up tournaments, thank God those were there. And with the black bail, the black background, that ended up being-

• 1:48:07Speaker 02

  Wasn't just a black bail, it was also a black stand. And the wall behind it was also black. It was just all out, just dark.

• 1:48:14Tim Ferriss?

  It was dark. And so I could not reliably track because my arrow tip, people who have done Bearbow are going to find this funny. It was like three feet below the center of the target. I mean, it was really, really low.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  But you could still see it.

• 1:48:29Tim Ferriss?

  I could still see it.

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:30Tim Ferriss?

  But it was hard to discern with that particular black bail and everything around it. So what ended up happening in competitions, I was all over the place.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. It wasn't even just the black background that was different. It was also the lighting condition too, because the light was very different compared to other places you shot in. So the way you actually perceived objects in space was slightly different. And you could not adjust. It was all over the place, as you said.

• 1:48:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  But the main thing was your first few shots were so low.

• 1:49:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  And with Bearbow, we do what's called string walking. For those that don't know, string walking is essentially you're not pulling the string back right next to the arrow. You're actually going down the string, walking down the string. And that affects the trajectory of the arrow. So you can essentially use the arrow point as your sight. So you sight in by walking up and down the string.

• 1:49:20Tim Ferriss?

  So put it another way, if you had a sight on your bow or on your gun or whatever, you take some shots, assuming your technique is decent. And then based on where it, okay, it landed bottom left, and then you adjust the sight to move that point of impact.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:49:35Tim Ferriss?

  Can't do that in barebow.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no actual aiming reference.

• 1:49:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're not allowed to use a sight. So what do you do? Well, the first thing is for left, right, you do have something called the plunger. You think of it just as kind of a screw that it's much more than that, but it pushes the arrow left or allows it to be more flush right. So you can use that to adjust your left, right. But how do you adjust your up, down? Got a problem? Okay. Well, the way you do that, and there are a lot of different approaches to this, but you're crawling. So that means you're using your thumb to basically move your fingers down from the back of the arrow to, let's just say, the further down you go, the further down on the target it's going to land and

• 1:50:19Tim Ferriss?

  so on. And it needs to be very precise. This is part of what makes barebow so frustrating. And so difficult. Like, if you're, I mean, one millimeter, right? Like above or below a line.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  So you have laser etched marks on your finger tab, the thing that protects your fingers from the string, and it's a flat piece of metal. And you were trying to be as precise enough to crawl to the top of the laser etched line versus the bottom of the laser etched line, and it's less than a millimeter wide.

• 1:50:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And that makes a difference.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Big difference.

• 1:50:50Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:50:52Tim Ferriss?

  Point of impact.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So keeping all this in mind, when I got into those lighting conditions, with everything at play in competition, it was a disaster. I mean, it was all over the place.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  It was the worst score you had shot by a long shot.

• 1:51:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I was like, oh, fuck me.

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  This is three weeks, two weeks before Lancaster.

• 1:51:14Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe three, maybe three weeks out.

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:17Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, well, keep this up. I'm definitely not going to Lancaster. Cause I will just, it'll just be a complete clown card disaster.

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  Heather and I were looking at, my wife and I, we were looking at each other after that day and we're like, Really hope Tim still wants to go to Lancaster.

• 1:51:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that was the most frustrated I think you guys have ever seen me. It was probably after that.

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  There was a lot of statements you were making in regards to never being on such an emotionally, an emotional roller coaster from day to day.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  Because that timeframe was, was really challenging for you.

• 1:51:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it was wild because I would go from one setting and we ended up shooting at a CrossFit gym from 7:30 to like 10:30 at night. That was the only time and the only location that we could find. And thank you to those guys. What a lifesaver. Chris Spielor, I think it was Park City Fit. Amazing gym. The cleanest gym I've ever seen. It was like.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could eat off.

• 1:52:14Tim Ferriss?

  You could eat off the floor. It was incredible. So thank you to those guys. So we were training late at night, very different lighting conditions, but I would have a day where I'm like, man.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  I can't miss.

• 1:52:24Tim Ferriss?

  I can't miss.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Tim Ferriss?

  Like I am so far above. I have so many more points than necessary than I need to qualify for the top 64.

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  Which was your goal?

• 1:52:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, even if I'm 10% off of this, I'm good. And then went to this tournament or mock tournament on the, in the case of the league nights, and it was unmitigated disaster.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  Like, like a hundred points under what you wanted to be.

• 1:52:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I was just like, what the hell is going on? So the reason that I sometimes compare it to golf, even though I've only played golf a few times, it's like, you're looking at this, you're like, okay, there are a hundred different checkpoints. Which one is it? If it's even one of those hundred.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01Tim Ferriss?

  And that's the detective work.

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  And so I'm looking at you and everything going down the list. Try this, try this, try this, try this, try this, try this. And then it's like, maybe you should start aiming, I think.

• 1:53:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  Because that's really the only thing that we haven't done up until this point.

• 1:53:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. So we went through the list. It was like, nope, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. All right. So two weeks out, we start aiming and it started working.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  Because you had developed your technique enough that you didn't have that aiming distracting you from the process, from what you needed to do. And a lot of that work that we did beforehand, when you were. Instinctive aiming, I don't think we really quite covered that, but instinctive aiming is, you know, the tension and direction of the bow arm and just staring and burning a hole with your eyes, but your subconscious brain like takes over and just makes the arrow land in the middle. It's like throwing a ball. You don't have a sight to aim with when you throw something or throw an object at something. Through repeated motion, you you make adjustments.

• 1:53:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  And you don't even do that consciously. Same thing with archery when you're shooting instinctive, per se.

• 1:54:03Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. And there's some amazing instinctive shooters. They don't tend to go to competition for reasons we could get into, but for instance, I don't want to name him. I don't want to dox him, but this amazing guy from Albania at one range I went to, and this guy all day long with his hunting bow, like a trad hunting bow made out of wood, just drilling the center of this target for two hours straight, every time I saw him. And he would kind of pull back and then as soon as he got his finger to the corner of his mouth, he would release and that was it. And the guy's just a beast. I mean, incredibly good. So we finally started aiming. And I want

• 1:54:44Tim Ferriss?

  to mention a couple of other things that I think were key to ultimately being very happy with performance at Lancaster, even though of course I always want to do better. But the first I would say is standardizing a handful of things. So obviously the shot sequence and anchor and aiming system and all of that. The second was experimenting in mock tournament conditions because we also discovered, for instance, that when we went from, we upgraded from a very, very narrow arrow. So the shaft of the arrow and therefore the head of the arrow as well, in this particular case,

• 1:55:26Tim Ferriss?

  because they're not broadheads or anything, going from a very, very thin arrow to a maximum allowable.

• 1:55:33Tim Ferriss?

  Javelin sized arrow. And what's the reason for that?

• 1:55:37Speaker 02

  So basically in archery, when you touch the higher scoring ring where your arrow lands, you get the higher value. So all you have to do is touch that ring. You don't have to break the line. You don't even have to be inside out. You just have to touch it and that's enough to get you the higher score. And statistically speaking, somebody did a study and analysis of scores across the board at indoor archery tournaments. And if you're in that range of score where you were actually targeting to be to be at Lancaster, there's a very statistically significant impact on your score going up by a tremendous amount. I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of eight plus points every 30 shots, which is a massive jump at that 280,

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  270 range, somewhere in there. The bigger arrows make statistically speaking, a huge difference. At the highest level, the guys that win the tournaments when they're shooting, say, one or two points down from perfect, they do not make any difference at all. Like statistically, it's a zero sum. There's no, no additional benefit to shooting the fat arrows.

• 1:56:41Tim Ferriss?

  But for me.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  But for you, statistically, it made sense.

• 1:56:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it made a lot of sense. What that meant though, is we had to adjust a bunch of the gear. And when you put the arrow on your bow, I'll just keep it simple, you have an arrow rest. And we had an arrow rest that had been working great. Fantastic. It had been working so well with the little tiny darts that I had been using. Once we put the much heavier arrows on, and I mean, I guess, what is the model of those arrows?

• 1:57:14Speaker 02

  So the arrows you were using was the Easton RX7. And before that, you were using a Easton Avance, Avance, I don't know how to say it. Basically, you went from an arrow that was smaller than the diameter of your average pen or pencil to a something that was three pens combined, almost.

• 1:57:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  As far as the diameter is concerned. So big, big difference there.

• 1:57:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And, and much heavier.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:57:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  Not just a heavier arrow, but also a heavier point. Because there's a lot of technical stuff here, but. As an archer, you want your arrow to fly perfect and you can adjust parameters of the arrow, the stiffness of the arrow, how resistant it is to bending, the point weight, the knock weight, the fletching size, the arrow length, all sorts of things to make the arrow work with the bow so they fly perfectly straight. Because ultimately, you don't want it to have a tendency to go one direction. You want it to have like a forgiveness. So if you make a mistake, it's not going to deviate far from the middle.

• 1:58:11Tim Ferriss?

  And what we discovered when I did my, I guess it was probably the first time did the tournament conditions, a few things. Number one, my instinctive shooting was not going to work.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:58:24Tim Ferriss?

  It was all over the place. On top of that, with the much thicker arrows, which are much heavier, the arrow rest, which in this case is a fallaway, it was a fallaway rest. What was the model on this?

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  So for those bare bow listeners out there, it is the sniper arrow rest, Z-N-I-P-E-R. So it is a magnetically controlled dropaway arrow rest. So for those that don't know archery, a dropaway arrow rest is a rest that holds the arrow and supports it when you're at full draw. But the moment you let go, it snaps down out of the way to give the arrow the maximum amount of clearance as it's going by the bow.

• 1:58:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  For bare bow, you use it because of the awful flight of the arrow that happens due to string walking when you go down the string and you don't pull it straight back. So what was happening was, and this is not a design flaw of that rest, it's just, we literally hit the absolute limitations of the system. Because you have to make it stiff enough, hard enough to drop, to hold the arrow up so you don't accidentally bump it when you're moving around. But you want it to be soft enough so it drops when you let go of the string. And because the arrow was heavy, and more importantly, the point weight was so heavy, it was not dropping.

• 1:59:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  So also bare bow shooters that are listening, we were using the 2315 size RX7. So the stiff 420 versions, the 420 spine versions, and we had to run heavy point weights to break the spine down. Ideally, we should have run the 21 size arrows, I believe, that, I forget the exact spine, I think it's 570 or somewhere in there, much weaker. And we should have shot those light point weights, but I don't know if they are even available yet. They are or were on backorder at the time. So I couldn't get you the arrow for the lighter point weight. So we literally just hit a roadblock of the arrow rest not working with that arrow setup.

• 2:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  And how much can it change your impact at 20 yards if the arrow rest does not fall?

• 2:00:16Speaker 02

  Six inches.

• 2:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:17Speaker 02

  So if, if not more.

• 2:00:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, game over.

• 2:00:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 2:00:20Tim Ferriss?

  You're done.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're ten ring again.

• 2:00:21Tim Ferriss?

  So that's part of the reason.

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Tim Ferriss?

  In addition to my instinctive aiming, completely shitting the bed and not working, given all the factors we've already talked about, I'd say one out of every four shots, maybe?

• 2:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36Tim Ferriss?

  Was, was not falling.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  And so mentally, you're struggling with the aiming.

• 2:00:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Then all of a sudden, the equipment's not working. So it's just adding insult to injury. And it's just making this mental struggle so much worse.

• 2:00:50Tim Ferriss?

  So I should highlight that it, there are so many reasons in any sport to mimic or rehearse competition conditions. But in the case of archery, one is you want to get used to being crowded. Right? If you're training by yourself, it's not the way it works at any of these larger tournaments. Like you're going to be on a line and literally could have somebody, I don't know, how far away were folks with me?

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  Uh, less than a foot.

• 2:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  Less than a foot.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 2:01:15Tim Ferriss?

  In front of me and behind me.

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:01:17Tim Ferriss?

  And I mean, you just want to hope if you're right-handed, you don't have a left-handed person right next to you on your right side, because you're going to basically be eye-gazing them the whole time. It's really distracting.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  Although I encourage you during your training at Gotham to go find a left-handed guy and stand right in front of them.

• 2:01:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. So I did that.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I had the practice. That is one reason. Another is to see what happens to your mental state. If and when, I guess it's not really if, I mean, at my level, when you make mistakes.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  At my level too.

• 2:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like, what, what happens?

• 2:01:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And those play poker, like, do you go tilt, monkey tilt? Like, how bad does it get? And can you recover if and when that happens? And I was just, like, the wheels came off.

• 2:02:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it did.

• 2:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  The wheels came off. I was like, aren't you stupid? Fuck this game. I didn't say that, but I was.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  I think you did inside.

• 2:02:11Tim Ferriss?

  I, inside, I was definitely, I was not happy. And then it was really, I think, a combination of, I mentioned a few things. We talked about the tournament conditions. And with each mock tournament or league night that I did, the scores went up. So everything was trending in the right direction. And I was trying, I mean, I. Used AI and all these tools to find every possible shop within an hour and a half driving distance and what kind of targets are they using? Can I bring my own target, which we ended up doing, right?

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you went and shot a blue and white face league night, an NFA league night, and shot a colored face. So instead of shooting the five arrows that everyone else shot, you were shooting three arrows. I was running a timer manually behind you, keeping tabs on, you know, your actual pacing, because within tournaments, like a simple little added change is just a time limitation. And even though you may never even remotely come close to running out of time, just knowing that there's a time limitation is enough to make you panic.

• 2:03:11Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's another thing that happened to me, right?

• 2:03:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  So given, let's just say, you know, six months of serious practice, now it's like two weeks out starting to aim, and I still have a lot that is manual. It's not yet automatic. So I am a pretty slow shooter.

• 2:03:27Speaker 02

  Well, because you have to think through everything.

• 2:03:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. And so how much time do you have for how many shots?

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  You have two minutes to shoot three arrows.

• 2:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, which sounds like a lot.

• 2:03:36Speaker 02

  There was oftentimes you had three to five seconds left.

• 2:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  Which is not a good feeling. You'll see the timer and it's like, what happens when it goes from green to yellow?

• 2:03:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so 30 seconds less, a yellow light comes on that's way brighter than the green light. Green is meaning you're just standard time left.

• 2:03:52Tim Ferriss?

  And what happens to a lot of people, what happened to me initially is I would rush through that shot.

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Tim Ferriss?

  And let it rip. And I would still have 15 seconds left, but I rushed it and it would not be a good shot.

• 2:04:01Speaker 02

  It was a change to your process.

• 2:04:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. All right. So other things. Mentioned standardizing as much as possible. So one was, and look, guys, I'm not proud of this, but I'll admit it, figuring out expedient fuel that you can get or bring with you everywhere, right? Especially with the amount of travel I was doing, that was actually very good practice. And it's like, okay. Let me know like how much caffeine I can tolerate. What am I going to use? Does it help at all? Because oodles and oodles of liquid anxiety does not help you shoot better, which is why also why beta blockers are not allowed in competition unless you get deliberately fat enough that you have a prescription for them. That's a whole separate story. There are actually people who do that, just like the sprinters in the Olympics who, oh my God,

• 2:04:47Tim Ferriss?

  happened to all be narcoleptics.

• 2:04:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 2:04:49Tim Ferriss?

  So they can take Medafinil. What a coincidence. All right. Putting all that aside. So what does that mean? That means that I wanted to be able to fuel myself from things I could get at any convenience store, almost any gas station. So it would be some form of basic protein. Don't judge me, but like, you know, maybe it's like muscle milk or whatever. And then having almonds. I had tolerated Maui Newey venison sticks really well. We knew that I could digest that reasonably quickly. So always traveling with that. Then figured out a couple of other things. So I'll give a couple of shout outs because these products end up being really, really helpful. So Peak T, P I Q U E, which are basically, if you think about matcha as whole leaf,

• 2:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  these are Pu, E, Oolong, they're all whole leaf. They're powdered, so you can mix them instantly.

• 2:05:39Speaker 02

  Even in cold water?

• 2:05:40Tim Ferriss?

  Even in cold water.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  Even if you're combining it with other things. So I figured out the timing for using that, using glutamine, which is incredibly cheap. And I use Momentus glutamine, also the next one I'll talk about. And for muscle recovery and soreness, it is incredibly effective. I wrote about this in the Four Hour Body. I know you're pretty skeptical at first.

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  I mean, the amount you were taking was insane.

• 2:06:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was a lot.

• 2:06:10Speaker 02

  After doing a little bit of research on my own and with the help of Heather, we saw that it was good for people with leaky gut syndrome.

• 2:06:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  At very high doses. So it's, if it's okay for that, then it's got to be all right for the overall GI system, right? So it's like, let's give it a try. And we started trying it as well after seeing you. Pretty much take an entire bottle of it in a day. Well, it actually makes a massive difference for muscle soreness.

• 2:06:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Speaker 02

  And it's amazing.

• 2:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's wild. So I would say when I'm doing, when we were doing hard training and look, talk to your medical professional. I'm not giving medical advice here, but I was using a scoop, which is say five grams of creatine, three or four times over the course of a full training session, I would say. And then what we figured out reasonably late, this was a lucky discovery, ended up playing around because I had used this actually on very, very long hikes, which is something called Fuel, also by Momentus. And that is a combination of electrolytes and let's just call them more slowly digested carbohydrate

• 2:07:18Tim Ferriss?

  and a handful of other things, but it's basically like Bugatti Kool-Aid for mental and physical performance. And it was visibly noticeable when I was on this cocktail and when I was not. I'd start getting shaky and then if I had, and I timed this, I had everything on a schedule and I knew how long it took me to digest because the last thing you want to do is have like three protein bars and then get up to shoot and you have all this blood in your stomach.

• 2:07:46Speaker 02

  Or even worse, a crash and then you're like, oh, emergency fuel. How long does it take to come back?

• 2:07:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So figuring all that out was key and I would just travel. Like I would have the fuel, the glutamine, the peak. I would have bottles of water so I could mix all of that on my own with a shaker bottle. And these ended up being, I think, really key to also reducing the decision fatigue and possibility for logistics challenges.

• 2:08:16Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:08:17Tim Ferriss?

  And that's why with Lancaster, like most high level competitors, how early, like how far before their first shooting do they arrive at Lancaster?

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  Most pro shooters?

• 2:08:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:31Speaker 02

  Forty-five minutes? Half hour?

• 2:08:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:08:34Speaker 02

  An hour?

• 2:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  When would their, but when would their plane land?

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. A few days.

• 2:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:40Speaker 02

  You know, you know, well, it depends. Depends on the season. Because if the season's really crammed in, you may land the night before the competition starts because one just ended somewhere across the world.

• 2:08:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  But ideally, you try to get there a couple of days early. So that way you shake off the jet lag, you get used to the bed, you just get used to where everything's laid out. And you know, you kind of just see how things are going. But if you've been to the event before-

• 2:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  How early did we get there?

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

  Ten days, twelve days early, I think. Something like that.

• 2:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  And so, again, this is just if it's helpful for folks. I do this whenever I'm competing in anything new, right? So figure out where you are, figure out your food options, figure out your bed. For instance, I slept really poorly on the hotel mattress. So ordered a pillow topper, got that all figured out. Where are we gonna practice?

• 2:09:26Speaker 02

  How long does it take to drive from your hotel to the venue?

• 2:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  How does that differ with different times of day?

• 2:09:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  And-

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  What does it look like, the venue? So we did a lot of different things too. We went to the venue early and checked it out after hours when no one was there. We're the only ones walking around except for the Zamboni cleaning the floor.

• 2:09:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:44Speaker 02

  Right? And so we're checking it out. And so you get an idea of what the field looks like, what the lighting looks like, where the bathrooms located.

• 2:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Bathrooms are. This is not a small thing, right? Because when you're shooting at this particular tournament, on each bail, you have four targets, A, B, C, D. So you're shooting with three other people, you all score one another. And I'm simplifying things a little bit. But basically, you're switching back and forth. Two people shoot, and then the next two people shoot, and then the next people shoot. And you alternate back and forth. So you may not have a whole lot of time to get to the bathroom. How crowded is the bathroom?

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:10:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Where is the least crowded bathroom?

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  Where's the secret bathroom?

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  Figuring all this out ahead of time, because I recognize, look, I don't have a lot of time under my belt. I've trained my ass off to the extent that my body would handle it. Like I pushed my body. And I do need to give a huge thank you to Heather, who is a top-tier- Manual therapist, magician with soft tissue and no way that I could have made it to Lancaster without her help.

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  You were on the ragged edge.

• 2:10:51Tim Ferriss?

  I was run pretty ragged. Yeah, I mean, I had kinesiology tape all over me, a couple of other recovery tools that were really helpful. One, I really didn't anticipate because I had no exposure to it, but this is, I guess, full spectrum cannabis.

• 2:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oil.

• 2:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  Was it Rick Simpson?

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, R S O, Rick Simpson oil, I believe, is the name of the guy that came up with this.

• 2:11:13Tim Ferriss?

  And what was fascinating for me, you do not feel any psychoactive effects whatsoever. Topical, to be clear.

• 2:11:19Speaker 02

  Topical, yes. It does not cross the blood brain barrier.

• 2:11:22Tim Ferriss?

  Don't fall for, don't fall for the marketing campaigns for the archery.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:11:26Tim Ferriss?

  THC sponsors. And you don't feel any psychoactive effect. Obviously do not break the law where you live, so pay attention. But in terms of reducing or eliminating muscle spasms, incredible, incredibly effective. And also, if you're going to get, let's just say, massage therapy, do not get necessarily, Heather would be able to speak more intelligently to this, but incredibly deep hardcore work right before you're going to train. I mean, there are different types of massage for flushing.

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, you don't want to overly lengthen the muscle because then you can lead that joint that it's supporting or around to become potentially unstable, which results in a potential, serious potential for an injury to the joint, like an actual injury.

• 2:12:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You can also get really sore, as I was saying.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Increase your inflammation.

• 2:12:15Tim Ferriss?

  Which does not help with anything, right? My main issue was like my shoulder or my wrist or my forearms would just be on fire. They'd be all swollen like a pufferfish. And it's like, okay.

• 2:12:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  This is our first day of four days of training.

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:12:30Tim Ferriss?

  We need to fix this.

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  And how do we fix this? From an outsider's perspective, that it was fascinating to see with. Unlimited ability to just make things happen. What you can do to maximize your potential to perform. So what can you control? Can you get that bed topper? Can you get there 10 days early? Can you see the venue? Can you, you know, have the Bugatti of electrolytes? Can you get the things that actually make a difference? And have you experimented enough leading up to the event to know how you respond? And if you take enough detailed notes, you know exactly how you're going to respond. What is the lag time? What is the delay? How many days after I shoot this 300 arrow day? Am I going to be sore and unable to shoot properly?

• 2:13:15Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 2:13:15Speaker 02

  So many different things.

• 2:13:17Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, this is as good a point as any to mention the glue that holds us all together, which is note taking and training logs.

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  Yes, entirely.

• 2:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  This is such a pivotal thing to consistently performing under pressure. You might get hot once and shoot great and win a tournament. But if you didn't know what you did that led up to that, how are you going to repeat it? And so you have to blueprint, as Joel says in his system, the shot IQ. How do you blueprint an ideal shot or an ideal tournament? And leading up to that, a training session, whatever it may be, what can you do to replicate that every time?

• 2:13:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. And a few things that were surprising to me. For instance, if I felt like I'd just been put through a meat grinder, I would maybe left to my own devices, look back one training session, maybe two training sessions. But often it's five days ago, five training sessions ago. You have to look back further than I would have expected. That is going to be beyond your memory.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  For sure. Right? How many arrows did you shoot?

• 2:14:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  What did you do that day? Did you strength train as well? How about massage therapy? What did you eat? Whatever it is, you've got to know. If you don't know, you're guessing.

• 2:14:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. And also, we're mentioning a lot of these different things. Most of these are not expensive in the grand scheme of things.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:14:39Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, the only one that might be out of range that I used quite a bit is the low intensity continuous ultrasound.

• 2:14:46Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:14:46Tim Ferriss?

  There are these devices that basically put a very light ultrasound stimulus through these electrodes. And there's a SAM device, there are a number of other ones that is LICUS, L I C U S, Low Intensity Continuous Ultrasound. People can look it up. That one's a little pricey, but there's a whole lot you can do that is not expensive. Almost everything I've mentioned is well within reach.

• 2:15:11Speaker 02

  I mean, you're doing it right now. You got a pen and a paper.

• 2:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14Speaker 02

  That's like the weapon right there. You know, that is so important. I've encouraged so many people I work with that come to me for coaching to take detailed notes. And I can't tell you how few do. And you're the only one that I've ever seen take a sufficient level of detail of notes on how the training session went, what you did, and how you ultimately felt. And then just being able to look back and see. I can't tell you how many times you pulled it out and said, let me look back to San Diego when I went and visited Coach Lee and he told me to go away after 45 minutes. Oh yeah, this is what we worked on. Interesting. Okay, let's make sure I'm doing that today.

• 2:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:15:49Speaker 02

  Three months later or more than that.

• 2:15:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, that ended up being such an important key to everything. And I would log the workout, give you just a couple of tips. I mean, this is going to seem really rudimentary. And it's like, yeah, duh. But very few people do it. When did you work out? When did you do your training?

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  Time of day.

• 2:16:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. When was your last meal prior to that? Like, write this stuff down. You are not going to remember. And then going through training, it's like, well, if you had a period of shooting really poorly, and then you tested a number of things to fix it, what happened? So for instance, that pulling back on the pinky of the bow hand ended up being something when I got fatigued.

• 2:16:30Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  I would start to lose that tension.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:16:33Tim Ferriss?

  And it would have a whole cascade of negative effects. And I was like, okay, interesting. For whatever reason, that cue seems to fix a lot.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:16:42Tim Ferriss?

  And there were a handful of things that you're only going to discover if you are taking those types of notes.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  And I think this applies to way more than archery. If you're not Really paying attention to what you're doing and maximizing your chances for success. And ultimately maintaining what you're doing and training or leading up to an event, whatever it may be. If you change everything at the event, because I'm at the event, I should probably clean up my diet. Why would you do that?

• 2:17:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's too late.

• 2:17:11Speaker 02

  It's too late. If you're eating Cheetos at home, as much as you shouldn't be eating Cheetos at home, you should probably just do it at the tournament. If you drink seven up or you have a beer the night before, or whatever it is, you should probably continue to do that. You don't want to all of a sudden sober up at the event, deal with withdrawal syndromes from not having enough sugar because you used to have Cap'n Crunch for breakfast. I don't know, whatever it may be. You might want to just maintain the same thing. And so this applies to so many things, not just archery.

• 2:17:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And also, if it's helpful to people, when I would take notes, I mean, you can even kind of, I won't show off all this because some of these are top secret in this one, but I also basically draw a little square, you've seen these, in the bottom right of each page in this training log. And my training log is actually like this big. It's larger paper.

• 2:18:00Speaker 02

  It's like bigger than an eight and a half by 11.

• 2:18:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a large notebook. And in that bottom right corner, I, so I'm not only taking notes, I'm also reviewing all of those notes after the session. And in the bottom right, I am putting my next actions or key takeaways to focus on for the next workout. And so when I land at the gym, or in this case, the range, the next day or two days later, I know exactly where I'm picking up. I do not have to spend any time on that. All right. So we're doing all this stuff. Chugging Muscle Milks and fuel and glutamine and peak tea and learning to aim.

• 2:18:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:18:43Tim Ferriss?

  Like a big boy.

• 2:18:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:18:45Tim Ferriss?

  Then what happens at Lancaster? What's the goal? What are the expectations, hopes? Like, from your perspective, I'd be curious to hear.

• 2:18:52Speaker 02

  I would say my number one hope was just that you'd be happy with how it went, no matter what. Because ultimately, there's no way to know how it's going to go. Would it be great if you made the cut? Would it be great if you won the event? Sure, that'd be cool. But. How is it going to go? No one knows. Competition is very interesting. It really is. It's just unknown until you do it.

• 2:19:14Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick side. So I remember, I don't want to mention his name, but I was training somewhere and I saw my first barebow shooter who is, in my eyes, really good. And in practice, just incredible. And do you remember what you said to me after that? I can tell you.

• 2:19:32Speaker 02

  Uh, go for it.

• 2:19:34Tim Ferriss?

  Practice scores don't matter.

• 2:19:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Now, on some level, consistent practice scores are one indicator.

• 2:19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  But competition is just a different.

• 2:19:44Speaker 02

  It's a totally different animal.

• 2:19:45Tim Ferriss?

  Different animal.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  And so you can expect to falter. You hope to do well. But ultimately, it's, you know, looking at where you were, you really hit rock bottom three weeks before the event, right? So from there, there was an upward trajectory and you were heading in the right direction. So that's a lot of stuff that I remember I was reminding you about. You're headed in the right direction. You just have to maintain your focus on these things. Do not get distracted by anything else. Each arrow is its own. You give it the care that it deserves. The arrow that you just shot does not affect the next and the arrow that you're about to shoot doesn't affect anything. It's just its own individual thing. Treat it with care. It's a 60 arrow round, not a one arrow round. So it's really unimportant what happens on each individual arrow. Ultimately, it's how you control the whole event,

• 2:20:30Speaker 02

  how you maintain focus, whatever it may be, just composure. Ultimately, is what's required to succeed. It's not about being perfect. It's just about maintaining what you do in practice better than the next guy. That's who wins. And so that was just the main focus that I was trying to hammer home to really say, this is what you need to lean into and avoid any of this other distracting thoughts. It's not Lancaster. It's nothing. It's just another venue. You're just shooting arrows. Nobody's interfering with you. It's you and the bow and no one else. So ultimately, nobody's going to prevent you from succeeding or failing, except for yourself. So you've just got to get out of your own way and let it happen. You've already put in the time. You put in the effort. Just go have fun. Just shoot some arrows and maintain composure.

• 2:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, I was nervous, but I also came into it feeling like. I cannot imagine with the limitations that I have, having taken this more seriously. Like I've done the prep I was humanly capable of doing.

• 2:21:28Speaker 02

  So ultimately, it was just, there was no expectations. I don't like to have expectations when it comes to competition because it's just, it adds a level of pressure, distraction.

• 2:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, I can also say for myself, I hadn't done a proper, large competition in a super long time, right?

• 2:21:47Speaker 02

  You said 20 years.

• 2:21:48Tim Ferriss?

  20, 20 years, 20 plus years. And for me, I was so curious. I'm like, is that gear gonna click? Is there gonna be another gear? Ultimately, there was, and I was very happy to see it because I had not seen it in the mock tournaments.

• 2:22:04Speaker 02

  No, me neither, for the record.

• 2:22:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And part of that, though, for me was, okay, now this is a real competition, right? This is what we've been training for. Adding extra pressure to myself now, much like changing your diet last minute, is not going to help. The training's been done, and so coming into it, I don't even know if I've told you guys this, maybe I did, but I basically just told myself, this is just, treat this like training with distraction. That's it. This is just another training session with a lot of distractions.

• 2:22:40Speaker 02

  It's healthy.

• 2:22:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I have had my best competition performances, whether it was, you know, going to the Worlds in Tango or the National Championships in Sancho Chinese Kickboxing, when I've done that. And having high hopes, certainly.

• 2:22:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:22:58Tim Ferriss?

  But the mental prep that I did for that was, my pass fail here is not the score, it's how well I can recover and keep my calm.

• 2:23:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  That was it. And I was like, Okay, I have a lot of room for improvement because I remember throwing a tantrum of epic proportions when everything went sideways at Easton.

• 2:23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:22Tim Ferriss?

  In fairness, that was pretty rough.

• 2:23:24Speaker 02

  It was rough.

• 2:23:24Tim Ferriss?

  That was rough.

• 2:23:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I felt bad too.

• 2:23:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was bad.

• 2:23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:29Tim Ferriss?

  It was really bad. And I was like, okay, so this is it. This is like a meditation practice.

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:23:35Tim Ferriss?

  And success is viewing it as training with distraction and just keeping calm. And if I get excited, that's okay, just like reeling it back in.

• 2:23:47Speaker 02

  Everyone's gonna get it.

• 2:23:48Tim Ferriss?

  So Heather was sitting there with a mutual friend. And what Heather was saying is she was looking at me and she's like, wow, Tim is overstimulated. And it's very easy to be overstimulated there. I mean, it's

• 2:23:58Speaker 02

  So loud.

• 2:23:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's so loud. It is a cavernous space. There are how many shooters?

• 2:24:03Speaker 02

  There was close to 600 shooters on the line at one time.

• 2:24:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and what Heather was saying is that when I crossed the line, the strata of the line to shoot, there was just this like calm that washed over me and she was saying those.

• 2:24:17Speaker 02

  You were just

• 2:24:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, my

• 2:24:18Speaker 02

  High eyed, walking around.

• 2:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, my eyes were

• 2:24:20Speaker 02

  Beforehand.

• 2:24:21Tim Ferriss?

  Saucers beforehand.

• 2:24:22Speaker 02

  And the moment, yeah, the moment you crossed, it was just like, this is what I do.

• 2:24:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:26Speaker 02

  This is how it's gonna go.

• 2:24:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:28Speaker 02

  And it was just, it was the first time, genuinely the first time where it was just like you held, you held your shit together.

• 2:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so that was an experience.

• 2:24:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, oh, oh yeah, I've done this before. Because I guess, and we'll, we'll get to this, but it's like historically, like I know I don't have a technical advantage over everyone there. These, some of these guys have been shooting forever.

• 2:24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And I was like, okay, well, how can I try to stack the deck? And we already talked about a lot, right? Nutrition.

• 2:24:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sleep.

• 2:24:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:24:58Tim Ferriss?

  Taking away handicaps that I can easily remove. Then I was like, okay, well, being consistent for 60 arrows.

• 2:25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  Which means trying to contain the fluctuations in energy. And also contain the fluctuations in emotional reactions.

• 2:25:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember taking the first few shots and I'm standing on the line and there's a person 12 inches in front of me and sweet, sweet people, but her arrows are sticking out and literally jabbing me in the stomach like the, you know, the knocks, the back of the arrow. And I'm like, that's distracting. And then there's a guy right behind me who has a huge longbow. He's in the longbow division.

• 2:25:39Speaker 02

  He's holding it sideways.

• 2:25:40Tim Ferriss?

  He's holding it sideways right in front of me, so I can't even lift my bow. Meanwhile, the timer's going.

• 2:25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And I'm like, oh, man. Okay. But then I was able to, I think in part from visiting the venue, in part from doing the Eastern comp prep and having the black bales, which they also had at Lancaster, walking in that late night when the Zamboni was there.

• 2:26:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:26:06Tim Ferriss?

  Because it's indoor lighting.

• 2:26:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  To see what the lighting is like.

• 2:26:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Let my eyes kind of adjust and feel it out, not worrying about the bathroom, not worrying about nutrition. And it took a little bit of shooting to, to get comfortable.

• 2:26:21Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:26:21Tim Ferriss?

  With the process and the turnaround speed from one pair to the next pair, shooting on the same bail. But ultimately ended up with a, I think it was exactly 500 points, right?

• 2:26:34Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 2:26:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:35Tim Ferriss?

  I think it was exactly, look, somebody could find it online. It's easy enough to find. But I ended up with 500 points. It's not anywhere close to my practice high scores, but that's fine. But it was my best tournament scoring.

• 2:26:48Speaker 02

  And you're, most importantly, in my opinion, the best performance.

• 2:26:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:51Speaker 02

  You've had. It's not about the outcome. It's about the performance.

• 2:26:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  If I shoot beautifully, in my opinion, and someone else outshoot me, I have to be happy with that.

• 2:27:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  I did the best I can.

• 2:27:02Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean? I think I'd have to go back and look. I don't know what number.

• 2:27:06Speaker 02

  I think you were 80th.

• 2:27:08Tim Ferriss?

  Eighty something.

• 2:27:09Speaker 02

  Eighties in there. Yeah. So you're, you know, not quite at 64 where you wanted to be, but.

• 2:27:13Tim Ferriss?

  It was really fun. And just the fact that I didn't lose it, right, irrecoverably, was a huge highlight. And also we ended up, because I'm a glutton for punishment, you know, doing, I guess it was the next day, maybe? Maybe it was a day later, but doing a bunch of practice.

• 2:27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  And figuring some stuff out. Where I was like, oh, okay.

• 2:27:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:27:34Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like automatically some of these tweaks.

• 2:27:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:27:37Tim Ferriss?

  Would lead to a higher score.

• 2:27:38Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:27:39Tim Ferriss?

  And if I can basically just get my practice scores closer to my competition scores, or maybe you frame it the other way, then if I'm able to maintain my composure, it's like, okay. Like, I think certainly like a 540 or something like that is. Should be enough to get into the top 64 for sure.

• 2:27:58Speaker 02

  You would think so.

• 2:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  You would think so.

• 2:27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, great experience. Thanks so much for the amazing coaching. Heather, thank you for keeping my body in one piece. And I'm just trying to think of what else we could mention, just in terms of approach or anything else that's worth adding. I think, you know, one approach maybe, and this is particularly given some of my orthopedic issues and just like tendinosis limitations and so on.

• 2:28:27Tim Ferriss?

  This isn't totally right, and I'll explain the modification, but this actually comes from a very famous track coach with many, many world records to his athletes' credit. Hank Kreijenhoff or something like that, I believe is Dutch. I'm sure I'm messing up that, but it's in the Four Hour Body if people are looking for the actual name. And he said, effectively, my goal is to do the least necessary, not the most possible. And the way that ties into the training is I found if I really, really overdid it, then I might need four or five days off if my shoulder's really inflamed and problematic. So it's like, okay, how can we use smaller doses with higher frequency?

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 2:29:09Tim Ferriss?

  To make this work.

• 2:29:10Speaker 02

  Ultimately, that's super beneficial in archery. So if I were to wave a magic wand and try to make things better the next time, it would be doing archery more often. So it's not about how many arrows you do in one session, it's how many sessions in a week can you do? And how many days in between each session are there? Anything more than one is too many, in my opinion. So if you could standardize your schedule better, better for the sake of archery performance, that of course requires sacrifice elsewhere. Time hanging out, time working, whatever it may be, it's a challenge.

• 2:29:47Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, for the competition, I mean, that was a commitment, right?

• 2:29:50Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%.

• 2:29:51Tim Ferriss?

  Because it was like, unless my body failed for a period of time, which happened with alarming regularity. But I mean, certainly when we're looking at the training in Utah and...

• 2:30:05Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of other places. I mean, certainly in person. I mean, it was kind of like two and a half to three hour.

• 2:30:10Speaker 02

  It was intense sessions and in Tim's famous last words, one more end.

• 2:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  One more. Yeah. One more end. It's like one more bunch of arrows and I'd be like, one more end. Okay.

• 2:30:20Speaker 02

  Three hours later.

• 2:30:21Tim Ferriss?

  All right. One more end. Three hours later. Okay. One more end.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  One more end, which by the way, that ended up for solo training being important to me because you gave me the advice of, and this might sound a little counterintuitive, but not setting a minimum number of arrows you need to shoot, but a maximum number of arrows. And it's like, when you hit that, you're done.

• 2:30:40Speaker 02

  Yes. No matter what. No matter if it's your best day ever and you cannot miss and you're just enjoying archery more than you've ever enjoyed in your entire life, you have to stop. But also if you're struggling, you've got to push towards that upper end of that limit because of you need to put in the reps.

• 2:30:57Tim Ferriss?

  Where I got into trouble was let's just say I wanted to shoot a hundred arrows as a minimum. And I would go, if I were shooting poorly,

• 2:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  and I got to a hundred, I'd be like, I'm not ending on that. It's terrible. Yeah, exactly. Whip my back. I'm not ending on that terrible shitty end. There's no way. I want to end on a good rep. So I push and push and push and more often than not, it would just continue to deteriorate. And then I would end up with some type of inflamed shoulder, inflamed X, Y, or Z that now keeps me out of training for three or four days.

• 2:31:31Speaker 02

  Or potentially hit you real hard five days later as you started.

• 2:31:34Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So not worth it.

• 2:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:37Tim Ferriss?

  But that takes a lot and it to beat a dead horse, it comes back to also the journal, the notes, training logs.

• 2:31:45Speaker 02

  But something that was interesting that you kind of discovered watching people on the practice range the day after you competed or whenever that was, and you learned some things, you were watching a couple of different shooters out there. There was a, I think the number one ranked bare bow shooter that won the ranking round that year and set the, the new Lancaster record for the ranking round. You were watching him shoot. You first pointed him out to me and said, hey, keep an eye on him. See if there's anything that he's doing that maybe I should start to work on as, you know, just maybe there's something I'm missing. And, you know, I watched him for two arrows and I think I just walked right over to him. I said, hey, how's it going? What's your name? How long you been shooting? Oh, I was a successful recurve archer because his form looked recurve like there's a very

• 2:32:29Speaker 02

  distinct look to that. And he shot as a junior competitively nationally, I believe for Canada, if I remember correctly. And then he shot all through college, shooting recurve competitively. And then he started shooting compound for a while and kind of set down the bow, came back to it like four or five years later and started shooting bare bow. And so he already had a decade plus of archery experience doing essentially the same thing, the same kind of form. And then you pointed out some 13, 14 year old Korean kids or something like that, Korean American kids that were just pounding, like they're, they're just stacking the arrows in at the center.

• 2:33:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And when you say stacking, it's

• 2:33:10Speaker 02

  Shooting six arrow ends in the size of the okay symbol that you can make with your fingers, basically. Like, and that's impressive, especially at that age.

• 2:33:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:18Speaker 02

  And so same kind of thing, you know, you're like, I pointed him out, look at these guys, you know, I bet you they're shooting X amount of arrows a day for, you know, 300 plus arrow. I'm just guessing. They shoot a lot. I can tell. So I went over to their coach who didn't really want to respond to me. So then I went to the kids directly. I was just like, how much you shoot? How long you been shooting?

• 2:33:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, which is possible because we have to go pull our arrows at the same time.

• 2:33:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:33:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So you can have a conversation.

• 2:33:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And even if not, it's the practice range. And again, we talked about the community. They're very welcoming. People are willing to discuss and communicate because it's just, everybody is in the same game. They're all struggling, quote unquote, with the same thing that you're struggling with. And so they're just in a different stage. And so you can learn from their experience if you ask them the right questions and hopefully they're willing to share.

• 2:34:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the kids are super friendly.

• 2:34:05Speaker 02

  Super friendly. And so, hey, how long you been shooting? Five years. How many days a week do you shoot? Six days a week. How many arrows a day do you shoot? Two to 300 arrows every single day. That's why they're good, Tim.

• 2:34:18Tim Ferriss?

  Well, now, okay, now I'm gonna get back on the on the witness stand, defend myself. Uh, not defend myself.

• 2:34:24Speaker 02

  Not that you weren't good, it's just.

• 2:34:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, I'm good. I mean, they're doing a lot of volume.

• 2:34:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:30Tim Ferriss?

  But that was despite having technique that was not great.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  Now, to my untrained eye, I'm like, I can't tell.

• 2:34:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I said this, this and that. They should do these things. You know, they, despite these issues, they're still able to do well because they've put in sustained reps for a very long period of time. So they're able to just default to what they do.

• 2:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:49Speaker 02

  And you had six months.

• 2:34:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:51Speaker 02

  They had five years.

• 2:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  There's a huge difference.

• 2:34:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's a different thing.

• 2:34:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's just you get looking, you look experienced from experience. You don't just get it. You've got to make that groove, as you said, in the brain and really make that neuromotor connection strong enough to where it just fluidly happens. That's why an expert is an expert. They've done the same thing thousands and thousands and thousands of times. I can't tell you how many, I'm well over a million shots the same way. Same technique, same thought process, same thought at full draw. So it's, yeah, an immense amount of effort and work over time. Sustained effort is what really makes you good. Yeah. But that's true for everything.

• 2:35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, it's been a hell of a journey. It's not over. It's not over. But, uh, we might bounce around, might ask some more questions. Uh, but do you want to talk about the backyard championship?

• 2:35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:48Tim Ferriss?

  So what the hell is the backyard championship?

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  So everybody loves to be a backyard world champion per se, because everybody, like I said, practice scores don't matter. Right? Everybody can shoot well in their backyard. Everybody's happy to tell you how they've shot so well in their backyard and post their pictures of their targets all over social media. Or potentially not just their backyard, but the range they shoot at or their club. And that's great. Like, I'm all for it. I love that people are proud and passionate about what they're doing. And so we're forming this thing that we're calling the Backyard Championships, which is essentially a digital tournament. We're going to have two events this year, an indoor event and an outdoor event. And essentially, you will, with a honor code and a buddy system, hopefully, submit your scores after you sign up for the actual event.

• 2:36:35Speaker 02

  And after you submit your scores, we'll have a digital leaderboard that people can essentially rank themselves amongst other people throughout the world. And it'll be bracketed male, female, adult, kid, different disciplines, compound, recurve, barebow, you name it, just stick bow, horsebow, I don't, whatever it may be. As we identify important disciplines, we will make sure to have that available so you can compete against other people shooting a similar bow. So this kind of ties into encouraging others to pick up a bow and shoot archery. And as Joel Turner told me, it's archery. Try it.

• 2:37:11Speaker 02

  Meaning it doesn't matter what style of bow you shoot. You can shoot horsebow with your thumb. You could shoot a trad bow. You could shoot a compound with a scope and a level and a release aid and huge stabilizers. It's archery and it's really, really fun. And this is hopefully going to make it more accessible to more people to show up at their local range, rent a bow, go shoot some arrows, get a score, get it posted on the internet and just see how it goes. Cause it's really fun to build a community. And then within that, we're going to have a Discord server that is exclusive for people who are competing at the event. So we'll be able to have people discussing back and forth, maybe bragging rights, things like that. And ultimately it's nothing really being awarded other than bragging rights of being a backyard champion.

• 2:37:52Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So I'm excited about this. I want to recommend everybody, archery, try it. I'll echo Joel, who by the way, is an amazing, we don't have time for this, but an amazing thumb shooter. He's got a gnarled Franken thumb because he does it so often, but you can check that out. In fact, the oldest way of shooting, probably I would say is a thumb release. So you can check out Joel and his monster thumb and his, and his system as well. Shot IQ. But coming back to this, the backyard championship, a few things I want to say. Number one, this is an opportunity to have an end goal, right? It doesn't have to be Lancaster, as it was in my case.

• 2:38:31Tim Ferriss?

  Which also, it's not where I started out.

• 2:38:33Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:38:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right? I just wanted the meditative practice. And quite frankly, this sort of blast from the past of using a tool, granted with some modern materials that humans have used for thousands of years, upon thousands, upon thousands. And I think it is really therapeutic for a lot of people who try it. And it's just fun.

• 2:38:56Speaker 02

  It is.

• 2:38:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's really fun. So now you have the chance to have some type of goal related to giving archery a shot.

• 2:39:05Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:39:06Tim Ferriss?

  And if, if you don't have your backyard championship setup and you don't have your own gear, that's no problem whatsoever. I didn't buy my own gear for a long time. And you can go to a local range and the folks are almost always incredibly welcoming, ready to help. Try a bunch of different stuff.

• 2:39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Try a compound.

• 2:39:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Try a recurve.

• 2:39:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:26Speaker 02

  Try a horse bow.

• 2:39:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:27Speaker 02

  Whatever.

• 2:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  Try them all out and it will give you a regular, at the very least, I mean, this is going to sound like an oversell, but it will give you a regular meditation practice. Maybe you have trouble sitting on a cushion, closing your eyes and doing it that way. A lot of people do. Try this. It, for me, was such an unlock for tabling my monkey mind for an hour or two. It's really remarkable. So I encourage people to try it out.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  And this, uh, the backyard championship allows you to shoot multiple different disciplines and submit multiple different scores. So if you have a compound, a recurve, a bear bow, a long bow, a horse bow, whatever you got, you can submit a score for each discipline for indoor and outdoor. And once you submit your score, we have these really awesome quiver pins that we'll send to you as well. So you can show that you actually participated in the, the backyard championship. So.

• 2:40:20Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Where should people go?

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  Just head to my website, jkaminsky.com. Everything will be available there as far as the info, the leaderboard, all that info will just be all right there.

• 2:40:29Tim Ferriss?

  All right, perfect. All right, everybody, check it out. The very least, go to range, pick up a bow.

• 2:40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, have a good time.

• 2:40:35Tim Ferriss?

  Take some intro classes. They do fun stuff. Some places they'll blow up balloons or throw on the black lights. There's a lot of fun to be had. Also, if you have kids, this is an awesome activity to do with your kids.

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And on your YouTube channel, we recorded a video that'll be coming out soon or will be already.

• 2:40:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and that and that will show gear 101 from Jake and then also technique 101.

• 2:40:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you're really not sure and there's nobody nearby or they're not sure how to help you, you'll at least have a basic understanding of the equipment to be safe and to also have a lot of fun, too. So it'll be great.

• 2:41:12Tim Ferriss?

  So check that out, jkaminsky.com, folks. YouTube channel. I guess people can find it through the website. Is that the best way to do it?

• 2:41:17Speaker 02

  On the on the website, you can just search Jake Kaminsky as well. It'll pop up on YouTube Direct. It'll pop up on any internet search as well. Very prevalent as far as the the search engine results.

• 2:41:28Tim Ferriss?

  Easy to find. Jake Kaminsky, K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I.

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:41:33Tim Ferriss?

  Kaminsky.com. Once again, thanks so much to you and Heather.

• 2:41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's been a hell of a

• 2:41:39Speaker 02

  Quite a journey.

• 2:41:40Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome adventure and trip and has reinvigorated me in so many different ways. And also, I will say, it's given me so much energy, in a sense. It's been such a recharging activity that it's it's given me a lot that I can then apply to other places.

• 2:41:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:00Tim Ferriss?

  I cannot tell you, like, I've had some, you know, challenging family issues, meaning medical issues, over the last, let's call it six months in particular year. And having this as a way, again, to just take a break from that for a period of time, to have a constant, right? I don't need to rely on an entire team of people to gather for a rec soccer game. It's like, no, I can just book time off in these lanes, meaning where you would stand and practice at a range. I mean, sometimes it's like 10 bucks an hour. I mean, it's like, it's not, it's not going to break the bank.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:35Tim Ferriss?

  And rentals are generally very, very affordable. And I can just take a break. I can go in two hours, just quiet my mind. And it's been such an incredible tool. So I want to thank both of you guys again.

• 2:42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:48Tim Ferriss?

  For that. Anything else you'd like to add? Any closing comments before we wind to a close?

• 2:42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, archery is difficult. It's single sided rotational and static. So it's not exactly good for you. I mean, it's great because it clears your mind. It's activity. You've got something to focus on, but it can be a bit much for the body. So taking care of yourself is super important.

• 2:43:08Tim Ferriss?

  And part of that, I'll give it another plug, jkaminsky.com. Watch Jake's videos on technique.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:15Tim Ferriss?

  Because if you are doing the same thing over and over and over again, you know, just imagine you had a pebble in your shoe and you refuse to take it out and you take 10 steps. Okay, you're fine. Maybe you walk to Starbucks and back, you're fine.

• 2:43:26Speaker 02

  Thousand.

• 2:43:27Tim Ferriss?

  You walk a thousand miles with that, you're going to have a big problem with your foot.

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  And that is true with really any repetitive motion. There are a lot of sports with repetitive motions.

• 2:43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:37Tim Ferriss?

  Also applies to archery.

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  And the problems I think are very easy to avoid.

• 2:43:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:44Tim Ferriss?

  With with a few basic pointers that you follow religiously.

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I've got a, an academy of sorts coming out. It's like a Jake Kaminsky Academy that'll teach you the technique. It is currently available as far as like form advice that I give on my YouTube channel, but this academy is an ultra premium, high production quality that once you buy into the system, you have lifetime access. So as you develop as an archery, you can come back and check it out as often as you'd like. So that's something that is in the works and we're, we're getting very close to launching that, that'll also be available on jkaminsky.com as well. And, uh, you know, as Joel Turner said, either way, it's archery. You should try it.

• 2:44:26Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. Well, thanks again, Jake. So nice to see you.

• 2:44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:30Tim Ferriss?

  And I trained with you Heather.

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  A lot of fun.

• 2:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you again. And folks listening, show notes, we're going to have links to everything as per usual, tim.blog/podcast. I can pretty much guarantee you, there will not be another Kaminsky on the podcast as of yet. So you can check that out or just search Jake. I don't think there are many Jakes in the podcast library. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, also to yourself. If you're on the line and shoot a terrible shot, don't go full monkey tilt and puncture yourself in the groin. Not worth it. Be kind and.

• 2:45:10Tim Ferriss?

  I appreciate the other hidden chuckle from behind the pillar.

• 2:45:15Tim Ferriss?

  And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me

• 2:45:58Tim Ferriss?

  by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic.

• 2:46:40Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. What kind of mattress is it? What do you do? What's the magic juju? It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support, right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring. Feel, which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains that I create.

• 2:47:25Tim Ferriss?

  And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every night, but I use it. The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff. That is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast free shipping and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out. And now during the month of May, you can get 27% off anything on their website, so site-wide. And with any luxe or elite mattress order, you get a free bedding bundle, that is a sheet set and mattress protector. So just go to helixsleep.com/tim. One more time, helixsleep.com/tim.

• 2:48:09Tim Ferriss?

  With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 2:48:13Tim Ferriss?

  Not to be a salty old dog, but then again, that's what I am. But in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man, was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. Huge pain in the ass. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify, which is this episode's sponsor. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Believe it or not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now 10% of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify. From household names like Mattel and Jimm Shark, to my very own limited edition Cock Punch Coffee. Remember that? Story for another time. Now, back to the early 2000s, then, nobody even thought of AI.

• 2:48:58Tim Ferriss?

  Who could have predicted, even in the last 24 months, the magic that is now possible with AI? Shopify has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything. Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates to match your brand's style and create email and social media campaigns to get the word out wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping.

• 2:49:34Tim Ferriss?

  Processing returns and beyond. It's all under one umbrella. And man, oh, man, could I have used that back in the day? And if I ever do something like that again in e-commerce, I will use Shopify. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/Tim. Why not learn a little bit more? Shopify.com/Tim. One more time. Shopify.com/Tim.