#257: Physical Training, Dating Strategies, and Stories from the Early Days

In this episode, I answer the most upvoted questions from subscribers to 5-Bullet Friday https://tim.blog/friday/, the newsletter I send out every week. It explores five cool things I've found, including apps, books, gadgets, albums, articles, new hacks or tricks, and -- of course -- all sorts of weird stuff I dig up around the world. It's free, it's always going to be free, and if you want to check it out, you can go here: tim.blog/friday. https://tim.blog/friday/ If you're a longtime listener to this podcast, you'll find at least one or two actionable pieces of information here. If you'd like to listen to the last round of questions I answered, it can be found here https://tim.blog/2017/07/05/myers-briggs-diet-mistakes-and-immortality/. This time around, we discuss physical training, interview prep, networking, education reform, and much more. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by WordPress https://WordPress.com/Tim, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites -- everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. Whether for personal use or business, you're in good company with WordPress https://WordPress.com/Tim -- used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress https://WordPress.com/Tim offers "the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim https://WordPress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today! This podcast is also brought to you by Kettle & Fire https://kettleandfire.com/tim, the first shelf-stable (never frozen) bone broth that uses 100 percent grass-fed, organically grazed animals. Recommended by past guests like Dom D'Agostino and Amelia Boone, Kettle & Fire is slow-simmered for 20+ hours, so the bone broth is packed with collagen -- 19 times more than its closest competitor -- and other key proteins and amino acids. Need that slow carb diet boost? Take a look at kettleandfire.com/tim for 20 percent off your entire order https://kettleandfire.com/tim!

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  No, we're seeing appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for blogging, writing online, creating websites, everything. I love WordPress 2 bits. My site, every site just about that I have, is run on WordPress. And the lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. The very first episode in particular is amazing. The second, I took a ton of notes on, so you should check it out. But WordPress, where do I even begin? I mean, The New Yorker uses it, Jay-Z, Beyonce, they use it, 538, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, Time. Whether you are looking to create a personal blog, a business site, both, neither, something else,

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  you'll make a huge impact when you build your website on wordpress.com. And directly from some friends at Google, I'm not going to quote them by name, but they say that WordPress offers the best out-of-the-box SEO, that's search engine optimization imaginable. So if you're on WordPress, you immediately have a leg up on everybody else on search engines and so forth. In my experience, I'm no medical doctor of search engine optimization, but I will say that I used WordPress for years and fell in love with it to the extent that I became very close friends with Matt and then became an investor slash advisor to Automattic, which runs wordpress.com.

• 1:53Tim Ferriss?

  That is how much I believe in this, and that's how a lot of my most successful products and investments have come about, because I'm in love with X and then I seek out X. Nearly 30% of the internet is run on WordPress. And that includes everything from the huge Sites that I mentioned to neighborhood sites. And it is super easy to get started. There's no need to worry about security or upgrades or hosting. They offer 24/7 support and handle all of that, which allows you to focus on creating the highest quality content you can with the least amount of friction. I don't have to worry about downtime. I don't want to have to worry about getting emergency emails if I'm on vacation or something like that. And WordPress is my go-to solution for all of this.

• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

  I trust all of my most important text on the internet to WordPress. And they can't buy that with a sponsorship. They can't buy that with anything. I want uptime, uptime, uptime and quality. And that is what I have selected after everything that I've looked at. So check it out. Go to WordPress. That's W O R D P R E S S dot com. WordPress.com forward slash Tim to receive 15% off of your website today. That's WordPress.com forward slash Tim.

• 3:12Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, founded by the genius Finns who lit the internet on fire. And you may have heard of their mushroom coffee, which features chaga and lion's mane, which has taken Silicon Valley by storm. I use it pretty much every day. Either that or the chaga, which is decaf, so it's a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing.

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So.

• 4:36Tim Ferriss?

  If you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something. You can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim and use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out.

• 5:20Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. How dare you call me a gentleman. And welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job typically to deconstruct world-class performers from all different spheres, to tease out their habits, routines, and so on, that you can apply and use in your own lives. This episode, I'm going to answer some of your questions by popular demand. And these questions were sent to me and voted upon by subscribers to my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday. It is pretty popular. It's got about a million or so subscribers and a 60-plus percent open rate. People seem to really dig it. It's free, always will be. I send out a few bullets

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  of cool things that I'm exploring each Friday. So if you want to check that out, go to tim.blog/friday. Get a lot of exclusive stuff, see things first, et cetera. tim.blog/friday. Okay, so moving on to a handful of questions. And we will cover physical training, we'll cover interview prep, we will cover educational reform, and much more. So let's dive right in. First question, which was upvoted quite heavily, is from Jeremy Sen. And I will try to summarize this. Quote, "You've jumped around a lot between different exercise/training programs throughout the years, powerlifting, gymnastics, acro yoga, Olympic weightlifting,

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  swimming, et cetera, and talked to enthusiasts from all over the spectrum, poliquin, pavel, jersey, summer, et cetera. So how have you, in the words of Bruce Lee, absorbed what is useful, discarded what is useless, and added what is specifically your own? Especially now that you're close to 40?" Yes, very close. How do you see your exercise programming looking into your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond? Thanks. All right. Now, I think that if we're looking from the macro to the micro, I have thought about this a few different ways. And I've spent in the last few years, a lot of time, very deliberately, with older males who have maintained a high level of physical performance,

• 7:25Tim Ferriss?

  whether that's Laird Hamilton, or Jersey, Gregorik, Art Davaney, and others who are in their 60s, in some cases 70s, 80s. In the case of, say, Don Wildman, who I'm still going to hunt down and interview at some point, who is thought of by Laird as a mentor who now heli skis, or heli snowboards, I think, one month a year in his 80s. I look to these people to try to identify what is working, what has worked, and what they have let go. So number one, I would say the purpose of training is, priority one, injury prevention. Priority two, performance enhancement.

• 8:08Tim Ferriss?

  And then everything else, third and beyond. What this means is, I am going to focus less on demonstration of strength and more on development of strength. So demonstration of strength might take the form of, say, a flat bench press, where you have a very, very large back arch, and you're minimizing the range of motion so you can move the most weight. And rather than use that, and there are certainly applications, particularly if you have a lot of proper instruction from a good powerlifter like Mark Bell, for instance, I'm going to err on the side of anything that I can do to develop strength that helps with injury prevention. So this will take the form of very unsexy movements,

• 8:53Tim Ferriss?

  like the step ups and working on internal femur rotation, and so on, that you might find through, say, Orion Flaherty, who's been on the podcast. We talked at length about this, using the trap bar deadlift, for instance, to Improve ground reactive force for sprinters and runners of all types. Ryan is now the, I believe, head of performance or director of performance at Nike. And has a lot to share about preventing injuries. So tim.blog forward slash Ryan, if you want to listen to that. I'm also going to focus on, and this ties into Jersey. And his work with Olympic weightlifting, going to focus on, in the case of the squat, for instance,

• 9:38Tim Ferriss?

  very full range of motion, ass to the heels, knees projecting forward, chest upright, Olympic style, high bar or overhead or front squatting. Versus just a parallel, very heavy, low back squatting. Okay. And the objective here, among other things, is to develop strength through a full range of motion, as full as I can perform. And to increase that functional range of motion by improving, for instance, the ankle dorsiflexion. And achieving this within a loaded position in the lower squat with the knees projecting forward. It's really working on that ankle flexibility.

• 10:20Tim Ferriss?

  And that is a common recommendation or focus. Say, across a number of these folks, whether it is Pavel with Kosik squats or Poliquin as a warm up to a squat workout, doing calf stretches, finishing on a contraction. Or in the case of Jersey. So these are very, very consistent things. And another part of that is working up the chain. So if you are warming up or training, working from the ground up in an effort to minimize injury. What does this mean? This means that I might use a, for instance, slant board. Designed by Eric Orton, O-R-T-O-N. You may recognize the name. He became very well-known

• 11:05Tim Ferriss?

  as the trainer in Born to Run and wobble boards and so on with a host of exercises that really only take five to 10 minutes, which you can use as a warm-up or as a finisher. I tend to use them as a warm-up and then slowly working up from the ground to the higher extremities. All right. And of course, I'm not a professional trainer. I don't do that, but I do have a lot of wide exposure to folks. What other types of development of strength, not demonstrations of strength, might I focus on for injury prevention? As I get older and also to compensate for many years of wrestling, I am looking at

• 11:48Tim Ferriss?

  still incorporating specific movements from gymnastic strength training, GST. All right, so Coach Sommer. Or, people may laugh, even from, say, Pilates, really technical Pilates, for thoracic mobility and rotation. The rotation, I think, is neglected by a lot of folks. And if gymnastic strength training or Pilates, God forbid, makes you recoil in horror, you can look at some of the exercises that, say, Eric Cressy uses for warm-ups. Fantastic, fantastic trainer and athlete in his own right can really pull one hell

• 12:28Tim Ferriss?

  of a deadlift. Check him out, Cressy, C-R-E-S-S-E-Y. Or Forstegen and others. All right, like these. I think it's the walking Spider-Man warm-up where you will see that type of thoracic rotation, which I think is very, very neglected. Every week I will do one or two heavier weight training sessions. This does not mean that I'm going for one repetition maxes, but it might mean that I'm using a maximum weight in, say, the two-handed kettlebell swing, which is a consistent staple and will continue to be a consistent staple in my exercise diet for, say, maximum repetitions with good form up to, let's just call it 20 reps. Could

• 13:11Tim Ferriss?

  be more, could be 50. So, two days ago, I just did something like, somewhere between 80 and 100 reps in a single set with 53-pound kettlebell. And then I will use progressive resistance and increase that as I go. Pretty light at the moment. All right, so weight training one or two times per week. As you get older and your hormonal profile is less and less conducive to muscle growth or preservation, I view this as hypercritical for countering sarcopenia, so age-related loss of muscle. If you want to prevent broken hips and all these things that tend to happen in older people, this is, I think, incredibly important exercise habit to develop and protect from

• 13:56Tim Ferriss?

  encroaching commitments otherwise. Then I would say the remainder would ideally be outdoors. I've realized the benefit, and Rick Rubin, legendary music producer, has underscored this, sun exposure first thing in the morning and so on, but two to five times a week of some type of outdoor exercise, which you could view as recreation. It doesn't have to be super intense, whether that's swimming, paddle boarding, running, or otherwise. All right, and there you have it. That's pretty much it. But I have learned that even though I have viewed exercise as medicine, in some cases bitter medicine, to be dosed, not necessarily to be enjoyed, that as you get older, the

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  enjoyment component, I think, becomes, at least for the people that I've surrounded myself with, more and more of a critical criterion. And part of that is surrounding yourself with a group of people who enjoy and participate in, for instance, hot and cold and underwater weight training, in the case of Laird and his whole gang, with XPT, which you guys can check out, XPT Training. If you want to check out Jersey, I mentioned him already, tim.blog/jersey, that's an interview also involving Naval Ravikant. And then if you want to listen to Art Devaney, who is, I think, in his late 70s, about to

• 15:18Tim Ferriss?

  turn 80, something like that, still crushing it, that is tim.blog art. And hopefully that helps. All right, let's jump to the next question, which is related to interview prep. Connor Sweetman asks, "Hey, Tim, I'm a longtime listener, first time caller. What's your process for interview preparation? How do you study up on your subjects and come up with questions?"

• 15:46Tim Ferriss?

  I have experimented with many different approaches and hired, in some cases, researchers to help me refine my approach. For instance, I hired a researcher from Inside the Actor Studio to go through transcripts of my early interviews and to recommend how I might structure things differently, missed opportunities, and asked him how he helps James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actor Studio, to prepare. And one of the things that he will do is go through, say, Wikipedia entries and look for the most arcane or understated point that might be found in a bibliographical point. So let's just say that in the case

• 16:31Tim Ferriss?

  of Edward Norton, and I happen to know Edward before I interviewed him, but I wanted to start somewhere that was very rarely used as an entry point in an interview. That ended up being surfing. I don't know if that's in his Wikipedia or not. It might be. But I look for a starting point that will show I've done my homework. Because as someone who's been interviewed hundreds of times now at this point, I immediately put people into the "they've done their homework" category, or they haven't done their homework and they're mailing it in, or they're relying on me to perform and they really haven't put in the effort to ensure this will be a good conversation. I want to demonstrate that I've done my homework

• 17:14Tim Ferriss?

  and looked at the nooks and crannies of their lesser explored bio beforehand. So that's very typical. I also listen to one or two long-form interviews whenever possible, whether that is a Charlie Rose, Larry King, or Inside the Actor Studio, or something comparable. By long-form, I mean more than 20 minutes.

• 17:37Tim Ferriss?

  Then part of the prep can be leaning on either the person helping to facilitate the interview or the interview subject themselves. And I will ask them beforehand, and that could be a week beforehand where I'm gathering material, or it could be just in the five or 10 minutes before we start. And I will ask them, what are two or three of your home run stories? Meaning, stories that you've told that have gotten a fantastic response from audiences before, or if you tell them at a dinner, people tend to retell that story that you've told. What are two or three of those? And don't tell me what the story is, but what is a prompt that I could use to bring up the home run story?

• 18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Sometimes they will provide me with the cues, or I will listen to the long form interviews that I mentioned, and identify two or three stories I want to include in my interview. Nine times out of 10, I don't want to know the answer. But I also want to ensure for the listeners that they are guaranteed two or three moments of gold. And that is where this type of preparation is very, very helpful. In front of me, I will have typically two pages. So I will have a notebook opened to a single spread with five to 10 questions or topics I want to explore, based on everything that I mentioned. That'll be on the left hand side. On the right hand side, I will have rapid fire questions that I want to

• 19:06Tim Ferriss?

  ask specifically. And that could include some of the usual suspects. What is the book that you've gifted the most to other people in the past? And I won't explain why that's a better question than what is your favorite book, but it is for many, many different reasons, and so on. So I'll have five to 10 on the left hand side that are original topics slash question points, and then five to 10 rapid fire on the right, which may have some originals based on their idiosyncrasies. Then I'll track time. So if I'm doing a phoner, so I'm say calling them via Skype and recording with eCam call recorder,

• 19:46Tim Ferriss?

  I will typically watch a device or just my clock and say segment a 90-minute interview into three 30-minute segments. And that helps me to think about my topics and so on for say 30 minutes. And then the next segment is fan questions from say social media interspersed with some of my own follow-ups and then rapid fire for the last 30, something like that. I almost always like to have a rough blueprint of how I'm going to break down time so that I can hit the high points that I want to hit. And within all of this, you have certain objectives or signposts, say for the Jamie

• 20:29Tim Ferriss?

  Foxx episode, the first Jamie Foxx episode that I did, which ended up being voted podcast episode of the year on Product Hunt in 2015. You can listen to that if you want. I highly recommend it just for Jamie. He did the performance, but tim.blog/jamie, worth the time. The magic of someone like Jamie is you prompt them and then he will tell an incredible story. If you want to turn the story in some cases into something very highly tactical, you want to set aside, and I did in this case, a good 40 to 50% of the time just for follow-up questions. And in the follow-up questions, there are a few follow-up questions that I like.

• 21:12Tim Ferriss?

  There are many good follow-ups, of course. What did you learn from that is a really easy one. What did you learn from that? How did that feel? Or how does that feel? Also, a really good one. If they tell a story about something they did and it reflects a skill, where did you learn how to X? You did A, B, and C. Where did you learn how to do that? How did you pick that up? And then we dig into examples. So if they say, "Well, it's really important to mean what you say and say what you mean," or something like that. What would be an example from your life where you've applied that? Or where it's been really, really important? What might be another example? These types of follow-up questions can really lead you to a lot of gold.

• 21:57Tim Ferriss?

  And when in doubt, you can always follow Ricardo Semler's, or Ricardo Semler's, depending on how you want to pronounce it, policy of "Why, Why, Why?" You know, asking why three times, but making sure you don't do it in a really annoying way. So those are a few of the ways that I think about prep and management of interviews. Whatever you do, don't be lazy. Don't be lazy. Because people who have had a lot of interviews in particular, or anyone really smart, will know immediately if you've done your homework or not. And there you have it. So those are a few recommendations. And study, study, study, study. Good questions. Write down good questions.

• 22:39Tim Ferriss?

  Keep, say, an Evernote file or something where you collect questions, which is what I do. If I'm reading an in-flight magazine and I'm reading an interview and I catch a really good question, wow, that's awesome, fantastic. I will put that into my collection of questions. And I've accumulated many, many different questions over time and then modified them to suit my own style, so to speak. All right. Next question. "Your greatest superpower that you've never talked about. How did you connect with all of your friends?" All right. The networking question is a good one.

• 23:17Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that it's worth a reference to another more comprehensive discussion. So I did put together a post. To answer this question, because I get it so much. How to build, and this is the title, how to build a world-class network in record time. I want you guys who are interested to check it out, because it does go into some depth. tim.blog/network. And it tells the story specifically of what I did at South by Southwest, which is a big conference in 2007, which led to the tipping point for my first book, The Four Hour Workweek, and directly led to it being published in more than 40 languages and being on the New

• 24:01Tim Ferriss?

  York Times Bestseller list for about four and a half years straight. And it came from, in large part, a handful of decisions and commitments made at that one conference. The good news about networking, per se, which I think comes off as a dirty word for a lot of good reasons, is that if you play the long game, if you're not a dick, you don't dismiss people. And you think about it strategically, really, if you follow a handful of guidelines for one or two well-chosen events, you never have to network again, in effect. You don't have to collect a lot of useless business cards that just sit in your pocket, which is really ineffective.

• 24:44Tim Ferriss?

  Most of how people approach this, I think, is ill-conceived. All right. And this person elaborated in the question, "It seems like one of your greatest superpowers is connecting intimately with a lot of great people, being friends with guys and gals like Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose, Daria Pino, etc. How do you do it? How are you still doing it?" The reason I wanted to bring up this elaboration is that Kevin Rose introduced me to Chris Sacca. Kevin Rose also introduced me to Daria Pino, who is now his wife. And you don't have to know everyone with, I think, developing human relationships. You want to go... An inch wide and a mile deep, not a mile wide and an inch deep.

• 25:26Tim Ferriss?

  And if you have even one person in your close circle of friends who is the hub effectively, then you, if they develop a high degree of trust in you, may have access to those other people if you need it. But it's not the sole driver or main driver for the friendships I develop. Nonetheless, that is, that is how I might think about it. All right, next question. And if you want to, again, dive into that, I've gone into it at length, tim.blog/network. Next one, in your TED Talk, Smash Fear, Learn Anything, you spoke about working on changes to the educational system. What did you find and are you still working on it? By Jrock717.

• 26:08Tim Ferriss?

  What I found was that educational reform is a quagmire of political interests and difficulties and roadblocks. So, yes, I am still working on it. I do have some big plans in the next 12 to 24 months. Some of them require a lot of war chest capital. In the meantime, I have looked far and wide for specific companies, in this case, in that the examples that I'll give nonprofits that function like very lean, effective, for-profit startups. And so there are two that I am on the advisory board of that I encourage everybody to check out. The first is donorschoose.org.

• 26:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's the reason I was on Stephen Colbert some time ago with a group of other folks. So you can check out donorschoose.org. Some incredible supporters like Michelle Obama and Oprah and so on. Founded, in fact, by my, one of my wrestling partners from high school, Charles Best. It's just an incredible, incredible story and a really impressive organization. So donorschoose.org, check that out. That is mostly K through 12, high-need classrooms in the United States. Then QuestBridge, which is lesser known, questbridge.org. And I'm on the Western US Advisory Board along with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

• 27:35Tim Ferriss?

  and so on, who has been on this podcast before. QuestBridge.org is very, very, very clever and elegant in how they identify

• 27:46Tim Ferriss?

  And source high talent, but in some cases economically disadvantaged kids from around the US to get them free scholarships to top schools. And this is not principally a funding problem. People think that getting qualified, but in some capacity disadvantaged kids into great schools is a money problem. It's not a money problem in principle. It is a sourcing problem. Finding the talent and getting them to apply to the schools when in many cases they don't have the social support or even the expectation, the understanding that it's an option, even though they might be the next, say Elon Musk.

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  So questbridge.org has a number of different approaches they use to source these kids. And I want to say, two years ago, they put about half of the economically disadvantaged kids into the Ivy League. And I'm sure someone out there will fact check it, but it's not far off if it's off at all. So questbridge.org, really awesome organization. And then on the curricula curriculum side of things, I do focus a lot, and I have historically focused a lot on meta learning. How do you teach someone how to learn more effectively, more quickly? Talked about this at length for about 150 pages in the meta learning section of The Four Hour Chef.

• 29:12Tim Ferriss?

  That is important, but the main issues holding back the United States educational system right now are primarily political in my mind. So those are thornier to deal with, and I am going to take a stab at dealing with them. But this is, this is not the forum right now where I can air my grievances. I don't think that'll be productive. I'd rather just fix the problem. And maybe that means doing it quietly, maybe it means doing it loudly, but the timing isn't right yet. All right. Uh, next one. Uh, this is related, but very quickly, uh, it's Tim, as a current student, I've stumbled upon many problems with the current educational system, how it's run.

• 29:56Tim Ferriss?

  I was encouraged to hear da, da, da, da, da. Uh, and it's someone who is frustrated as a current student with educational system. And I want to just point out one thing, because there is a, I think, an excessive focus maybe on curriculum here. And it's a cautionary note, just because something is hard or sucks doesn't mean it's wrong. All right, so there's a criticism, which is, is fairly levied against, say, most educational uh, curricula in the US, say K through 12, which is, it's, it's one size fits all. How can we possibly judge all these kids on standardized testing? And yet, when you get out into the real world, guess what?

• 30:41Tim Ferriss?

  You have to compete, and you have to compete very often with objective measures that take the form of tests, which take the form of interviews, which have set questions and so on. Uh, these are the realities you have to grapple with. So if you want to compete in a free market and be effective and win, you have to learn how to operate within sometimes a system that you feel sucks and is unfair and doesn't capitalize on your strengths. Nonetheless, you have to learn how to deal with that, and that's part of a good education as far as I'm concerned. So for instance, when I was at Princeton in the East Asian Studies Department, taking Chinese 101. Chinese 101 at Princeton, at least when I was there, was two things simultaneously.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  Tremendously, tremendously effective, very famous, uh, among East Asian Studies Departments and nationwide, perhaps even worldwide, for being effective, really putting out and producing students who could speak Chinese well. Specifically, they, they had extremely good pronunciation and...

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  The other side of that client is brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal. I remember going in Chinese 101, first day, I want to say there were 60 students. And this was before Chinese was as popular as it is today. This is, I guess, God, it's probably 1996, 95, 96. And at the end of a week, I think we had 12 or 14 students remaining. And it was absolutely brutal. And the amount, the sheer volume of practice that we put in on tones specifically, was just crushing. And I think it was something like five or six different lessons per week.

• 32:26Tim Ferriss?

  And it might have seemed to many students in the class to be draconian and extremely archaic because of the sheer amount of repetition invested in some of these tones. In retrospect, it's totally necessary. It was like physical conditioning. You just can't say something like "也许" or "那是什么事情?" with a retroflexive tongue unless you've developed the musculature and physiology required. And no matter how much you practice in one day, it's a lot like slacklining, actually, you're not going to be able to do it at the end of one day. You have to develop that over time by putting in reps. So just because something is hard or sucks doesn't mean it's wrong.

• 33:12Tim Ferriss?

  That is the moral of that story. All right. Next question is, "Where's the line between stubbornly pursuing an idea which isn't working and the patience and persistence needed to actually make it work? In other words, when you should give up versus when you should push on?" This is from J.F. Kearns. And this, this is such an important question and one that so many people struggle with that I actually reached out to a bunch of past guests on the podcast who I admire and thought might be able to give really good answers. And they responded with their answers in audio. So there's an entirely separate episode dedicated to this question.

• 33:56Tim Ferriss?

  And I think the title is probably "How to Quit," or "When to Quit," rather. And if you go to tim.blog/ quit, you can get their take on when you should persist and when you should give up on an idea that isn't working. All right. Next question is, as I turn the page. Dream podcast guests, who are your top five guests you'd love to have on the show but haven't? Why do you want to dig in on their success habits in life? This is from GTH2006. Real quickly, off the top of my head, I would say Oprah, Howard Stern. Those two off the bat because I think they're masters of their craft and even though they're

• 34:39Tim Ferriss?

  very, very well-known, underestimated or underappreciated for just how good they are at digging several layers deep, when so many people in that position of interviewer can coast on the first answer to a simple question. So those are two Jedi who I would love to interview at some point. Then there are a few athletes who are interesting to me. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi, I lived in Argentina, his very first season and have watched him with great interest ever since. Both of those athletes are very fascinating to me and it would be fun also as a former

• 35:21Tim Ferriss?

  soccer player to perhaps introduce many people in the US to some of the cooler aspects of soccer. The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, I think would be high on the list for many, many different reasons. He's just been able to develop so many different skills. He really is a polymath in a lot of respects that I'd want to dig in on many different facets of his life. So offhand, that is five people. So I'll leave it at that. Next, can you channel your inner Cal Fussman and tell a story from your brain quicken slash

• 36:04Tim Ferriss?

  travel days that perhaps has not made it into any books or interviews? This is by Dr. Sergo. Sure, I can do that. And for those of you who don't know Cal Fussman, Cal is the master interviewer extraordinaire who has interviewed everybody from Muhammad Ali to Gorbachev to Al Pacino to everybody for the what I learned? Is that it?

• 36:28Tim Ferriss?

  Something like that. The column in Esquire. I just came out of a sauna and a little dehydrated. In any case, if you want to hear some of Cal's stories, and he's going to crush me because he's so good at it, but tim.blog forward slash Cal, C A L, will take you there. Okay, so a story from the early days, Brain Quicken, which was my sports nutrition company way back in the day, that preceded the four hour work weekend and so on. What story? I'll tell you a story that takes place in New Orleans. So I had decided at one point to go from direct to consumer to retail, or to at least augment direct

• 37:06Tim Ferriss?

  sales with some type of retail presence for these sports supplements that were being produced and then later sold in about a dozen countries. But in the very early days, I was trying to figure out retail and what spliffs are and what co-marketing is and so on and so forth. And it was recommended to me that I go to a trade show called the GNC Show of Strength. I'm pretty sure I'm getting this right. And it was in New Orleans. I'd never been to New Orleans. I did not have any employees at the time. And I was able to wrangle a friend of mine, Jason, into taking some time off of work, I think a Friday, to join me for a weekend to help man the booth. And I promised I'd pay for

• 37:51Tim Ferriss?

  meals and booze and so on. And as soon as we got there, I realized that I was extremely underfunded. There were these other gigantic booths from these large brands that you'd recognize. And they had 10 to 15 people. They had booth babes, as they call them, you know, attractive women hanging out just to pull people in. And these huge $100,000 plus displays. And I had nothing. We literally had arrived with the pre-shipped product and a tablecloth and a table. That was about it. So I needed to tap dance and improvise very quickly. So we did a few things. Number one,

• 38:36Tim Ferriss?

  We realized that I could not afford to rent everything from the venue because how they make their money in part is much like how the movie theaters get you on the concessions. They tell you, they sell you a ticket for whatever it is, seven to 12 bucks. And then they get another 20 or 30 dollars out of you with popcorn and candy and drinks and so on. When you go to a trade show, you often look at the cost of a booth and you're like, okay, this is my cost in the beginning, which is a very, very painful lesson and mistake. And then you get there and you're like, oh, I just need a chair. How much is that? And they're like, yeah, it's a hundred and 20 dollars a day. You're like, wait, what? Oh, you need a table? Yeah, that's, that's 400 dollars for the weekend. And so on and so forth. All right.

• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  So we went to a, we went to a hand me down shop somewhere in a very questionable neighborhood in New Orleans and bought a used couch and it was so filthy that we bought some cheap linens to cover this thing with and then had to effectively hitchhike to find a truck that would take it to the venue, which we were able to do. Couldn't get into the venue because it had just closed 30 minutes earlier. We had some delays in getting this couch and literally left it on the sidewalk and hoped that it wouldn't get stolen overnight so that we could then bury first thing the next morning, quietly and quickly usher it in and hopefully not get caught.

• 40:03Tim Ferriss?

  Also went to a Best Buy and I'm not proud of this, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We bought a TV, knowing that there was a return policy, 30 day return policy, because it was ultimately going to be a lot cheaper than renting at the venue. Got this TV and realized I had a VHS tape. Shows you how old things were then. And we had a VHS tape of Muay Thai kickboxing matches from Thailand, which really had not been widely distributed in the US at that point. And it was like, it was a knockout highlight reel. So we had somehow procured a table.

• 40:46Tim Ferriss?

  We had the couch and I looked in my luggage for other props we could use. So I had a TV. From Best Buy, where we were playing fighting, non-stop, and knockouts, which would grab people's attention. I had three captains of Crush grippers in my bag, and these are hand grippers that go up to, I think at the time, the number four gripper required 365 pounds to close, something like that, which I cannot close. But I had a whole collection of these in my bag. So I took these out and I put them on the table with the pounds required to close for each one, and a free bottle of, at this point, I think it was Body Quick,

• 41:31Tim Ferriss?

  because it had been repositioned for athletes. A free bottle, or maybe it was a free case, if you could close the number four gripper. And you have to keep in mind, at this event, the show of strength, you had powerlifters, arm wrestlers, Brock Lesnar was there for some other booth, and so on. And this became a macho test for people, who would then go grab their friends and bring their friends back to see who could close stronger grippers. And I also ended up befriending across the way, and there was another booth, and there were these very attractive women running the booth, who'd been hired by the company, but the company reps were off just getting shitfaced on Bourbon Street or something like that.

• 42:15Tim Ferriss?

  So I would take bathroom breaks. I would say, "Would you guys mind, or one of you just manning my booth for five minutes while I go to the bathroom?" And I said, "And if anybody comes by, like, here's the brochure, if you'd be so kind." And they were like, "Sure, like, we know what you're doing." And I was pretty explicit about it. I said, "Look, we could use all the help we can get." And they were like, "No problem, that's fine." And so they would come over during my bathroom breaks and spend five to 10 minutes helping to get more meatheads to the booth. And it ended up being a very successful show. And in this particular type of show, it wasn't the individual...

• 42:52Tim Ferriss?

  Trade show goers, the people who bought a day pass that you cared the most about, because in many cases, those folks just wait until the last day and then come around trying to buy everything at remnant prices. So they'll come by the last day and they'll say, "Hey, can I buy each of these bottles for 10% of your asking price?" That is how a lot of this works. You go to the show to meet the other, in my case, exhibitors. You want to meet the distributors at the time, people like Europa, for instance, and you want to meet other people who can teach you how the business works. For instance, I befriended a few people at other companies who were very generous, more senior folks, certainly in that world, who were willing to show me their pricing sheets. How did

• 43:35Tim Ferriss?

  their pricing work for retailers? How did their pricing work for distributors? What types of costs were baked in versus separate? And so on, which was extremely valuable. So I viewed my payment for the trade show and all the costs incurred as continuing education. I was paying for an MBA class over a weekend to teach me the specifics of how the business worked, so I could take that back even without any end-user orders and improve the business, which I was able to do. All right. Hopefully that helps.

• 44:11Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you guys like that story. That is one of many. Let's see. Next one is from Fenderbender87. "Hey Tim, Joe Rogan is a world-class comedian, podcaster, and sports commentator, float tank extraordinaire, etc. Will he be a guest on the podcast at some point? I'd be interested to hear you interview him to see if you can explore what it is that makes him successful at his many endeavors." Absolutely, 100% would love to have Joe on the podcast sometime. I have tremendous respect for him and think he's just done an amazing job in navigating, innovating, and succeeding in so many different worlds, whether it's balancing the podcast with an

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  incredible schedule of commentary and stand-up performances, keeping in mind that the performances require... I'm assuming months, maybe even years of developing material. So that is the end product, which in and of itself takes a lot of time. But then there's all the development, testing and working on material that goes into it. So he would be, he would be in my top five list for the podcast and I hope to make that happen at some point. Very impressive guy all around for sure. Next question is from import underscore learn Python. Okay. Do you still observe screenless Saturday? You mentioned going screenless years ago.

• 45:39Tim Ferriss?

  Curious if you're still following that practice. Yes, I do follow this. So the screen free Saturdays is how I usually refer to it. And that was yesterday for me. Right now I am recording this on a Sunday and it's turned into, I would say, I still call it screen free Saturday for myself, but it is mostly referring to no laptop and no social media. So I will still use my phone for texting, for using apps like Uber, for instance, to get around. These are things that are hard to go without. And particularly in a place like San Francisco, I have no car.

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

  I do not own a car. So it's important that I have my phone and if I forget it, which I have on a few occasions, looks like I'm doing a couple of hours of walking. And that's okay. But I still do this and it is typically every Saturday that I do this. I try to go the entire day without any exposure to laptop and any exposure to social media. You will occasionally see things pop up in my social media on Saturday that have been scheduled in advance with the understanding that I'm not going to be on social on Saturdays. So yes, I find the screen free Saturday to be an incredible part or just incredibly

• 47:06Tim Ferriss?

  important part of my weekly routine. Next question and last question for now is from Amanda Peace. Dating strategies. What is your current experience and what recommendations do you have? Well, First observation would be, I think dating strategies for men and women are probably quite different. But a number of suggestions or more, not suggestions, thoughts off the top of my head. So the first is, if you want to know how I think about relationships these days, then my conversation with Esther Perel is probably a good place to go.

• 47:50Tim Ferriss?

  And you can find that tim.blog/esther. She wrote "Mating in Captivity" and is just incredible. She's endlessly fascinating and a brilliant, brilliant woman. If you're going to use, say, an app during my periods of being single, I've found Bumble to be very, very effective. I do like the fact that it puts the ball in the female court, in my case, which I think benefits both sides and prevents a lot of time wasting for me, so that I can assess if there are prospects or not very, very quickly.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  I would also suggest that, in the interest of time, you avoid dinner dates. If you are having your first round interview, so to speak, with someone, there's a good chance, there's a very non-trivial chance, that they will disqualify themselves extremely quickly. Or you will meet them and you'll say, "Wow, okay, those photos were 10 years old and 50 pounds ago. I'm not attracted to this person." And if that is a disqualifier, you would prefer to learn that over, say, a coffee date, meeting for coffee, than you would over what you then may get roped into as a three or four-hour commitment. So I do recommend coffee or tea dates whenever possible.

• 49:13Tim Ferriss?

  And if you're going to go on a dinner date... I think this is particularly true if you're a male and you want to make it less intimidating for a woman, as well as not a zero-sum game for yourself. You should make it a group activity, so you can have some type of group dinner or a fun activity with your friends. So if it, say, goes poorly with your date, then you still had a fantastic evening with your friends. And if it goes well and you want to continue the evening with your date, then you talk to your friends beforehand, you say, "Hey, if this goes really well, I may want to split

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  off from you guys and we'll grab some drinks and you guys will not join us." And then you have that option as well. If you are dating and, or I should say, you are single, and let's just say you just got out of a very long relationship and are not interested in becoming emotionally attached or having anyone else get emotionally attached to you. I remember being given advice at one point that I think is very helpful for such cases, and that is, no dinners at all, no sleepovers. That's it. So no dinners, no sleepovers. So if you do coffee, then the next step would be drinks, potentially, right? If you drink. But no dinners, no sleepovers.

• 50:41Tim Ferriss?

  If you want to avoid emotional entanglement, if you're in a place where you just got out of something very, very heavy and serious, for instance, and you want to take a break from any of that psychic load, no dinners, no sleepovers. Let's see, what else? I would say for men out there, this was a few years ago, I observed this, I want to say maybe two years ago. I took a period of time where I was completely dry, meaning I wasn't drinking any booze, and I wasn't really going out at all.

• 51:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember at one point just deciding that if, I got very frustrated with online dating and just dropped it entirely. I was just gonna, I was just gonna go celibate and, and enjoy my single-time solo. And... When people would engage from, say, old messages that were sent on Bumble or some other app, I would say, you know what? Would love to hang, but I'm pretty boring these days. I'm not drinking any booze, but if you want to have some tea, sure. We could have like a quick tea date, but I'm probably going to be very, very uninteresting. And for whatever reason, and just speculating, I think it's because it reduced the fear

• 52:01Tim Ferriss?

  factor or the threat factor that women may experience when men want to have a lot of booze and that variable can create a fear factor, understandably. When that was removed, the, the sort of acceptance rate, the number of women who wanted to meet up seemed to me to be abnormally high, meaning two or three X the norm versus, hey, let's get drinks. So there is perhaps something to be learned there strategically, tactically speaking. So that is really about it.

• 52:38Tim Ferriss?

  I do think that dating is very different for men and women and that there have been books that have helped. Friends of mine in the past, I've also read them. The Way of the Superior Man is one that I disagree with probably 30% of it or don't particularly agree with it, but there are takeaways that I think can be applied. Generally, in terms of matching, I find that you, you want to look for people who are of equal polarity from a 50/50 masculine feminine. And this is going to get all sorts of people all riled up because this isn't very PC maybe. I don't really care.

• 53:22Tim Ferriss?

  I care about what works and this is what has worked for me. Meaning if you imagine, say, a slider bar and in the very center, if you have the slider in the very center, that represents perfect androgyny. If 50% masculine traits, 50% feminine traits in a single person, all right.

• 53:42Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, we can be any combination of those. And if you are, say, personally, I'm just making this up, right? But you are 80%, you feel like arbitrarily, you are about 80% feminine characteristics, 20% masculine characteristics. You will generally have, at least in my experience, the most success with someone who is equally polarized in the opposite direction. All right? So if you're 80% feminine, 20% masculine, you're looking for 80% masculine, 20% feminine. And when you find someone a little closer to the androgyny line, then similarly, they will have the most compatibility and, in some cases, attraction with someone who is only

• 54:27Tim Ferriss?

  slightly on the other side, just as they are. So maybe it's a 60/40 split. So that, of course, is, just because it's precise, doesn't mean it's accurate, but it is a useful heuristic, at least for me, when thinking about, say, looking at a number of potential dates, trying to identify who I will have the most attraction and compatibility with, just based on a very cursory look at their hobbies, behavior, how they write, and so on. So there you have it, folks. Hopefully, this was not totally boring. Please let me know. And you can find show notes to anything I've talked about, books, links to other episodes,

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  et cetera, in the show notes, as always, at tim.blog/podcast, which also has show notes to every other episode. And if you want to ask me questions and get them answered on the podcast like this, please subscribe to Five Bullet Friday. That is where I source these types of questions from you guys. And it's always free, and it's super short. It's five bullets of stuff that I'm exploring, experiments I'm doing, favorite recent purchases, et cetera. And you can find the newsletter, five bullet friday, tim.blog/friday. So, there you have it. And as always, thank you so much for listening. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic,

• 55:55Tim Ferriss?

  founded by the genius Finns who lit the internet on fire. And you may have heard of their mushroom coffee, which features chaga and lion's mane, which is taken Silicon Valley by storm. I use it pretty much every day, either that or the chaga, which is decaf, a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them

• 56:40Tim Ferriss?

  because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water and oddly enough, only includes 40mg of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you would get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening.

• 57:23Tim Ferriss?

  I find chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner in my kitchen. You can try something. You can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim. And use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out. This episode is brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for blogging. Writing, writing online, creating websites, everything. I love WordPress 2 bits.

• 58:08Tim Ferriss?

  My site, every site just about that I have is run on WordPress. And the lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. The very first episode in particular is amazing. The second, I took a ton of notes on, so you should check it out. But WordPress, where do I even begin? I mean, The New Yorker uses it, Jay-Z, Beyonce, they use it, 538, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, Time. Whether you are looking to create a personal blog, a business site, both, neither, something else, you'll make a huge impact when you build your website on WordPress.com. And directly from some friends at Google, I'm not going to quote them by name, but

• 58:52Tim Ferriss?

  they say that WordPress offers the best out-of-the-box SEO, that's search engine optimization imaginable. So if you're on WordPress, you immediately have a leg up on everybody else on search engines and so forth. In my experience, I'm no medical doctor of search engine optimization, but I will say that I used WordPress for years and fell in love with it to the extent that I became very close friends with Matt and then became an investor slash advisor to Automattic, which runs WordPress.com. That is how much I believe in this, and that's how a lot of my most successful products and investments have come about.

• 59:34Tim Ferriss?

  Because I'm in love with X, and then I seek out X. Nearly 30% of the internet is run on WordPress. And that includes everything from the huge sites that I mentioned to neighborhood sites. And it is super easy to get started. There's no need to worry about security, or upgrades, or hosting. They offer 24/7 support and handle all of that, which allows you to focus on creating the highest quality content you can with the least amount of friction. I don't have to worry about downtime. I don't want to have to worry about getting emergency emails if I'm on vacation or something like that. And WordPress is my go-to solution for all of this. I trust all of my most important text on the internet to WordPress.

• 1:00:18Tim Ferriss?

  And they can't buy that with a sponsorship, they can't buy that with anything. I want uptime, uptime, uptime and quality, and that is what I have selected after everything that I've looked at. So check it out. Go to WordPress, that's W-O-R-D-P-R-E-S-S dot com. WordPress dot com forward slash Tim to receive 15% off of your website today. That's WordPress dot com forward slash Tim.