3 Tim Ferriss on Meta Learning and Living the Good Life

In the third episode of The School of Greatness I interview a hero for most entrepreneurs, Tim Ferriss. It was five years ago when I was introduced to Tim's international bestselling book The 4-Hour Work Week. My brother gave it to me for a Christmas present while I was recovering from surgery due to a career ending football injury, […] Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Hello everyone and welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, I'm an author, lifestyle entrepreneur, former pro athlete and world record holder in football. My goal with the School of Greatness is to share with you stories from the most inspiring business minds, world-class athletes and influential celebrities on the planet to help you find out what makes great people great. So please leave us a review over on iTunes and join us on the web at schoolofgreatness.com to be notified of each episode when it comes out. Now let's get after it.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  So we're into the third interview for the School of Greatness and I wasn't sure what it was gonna be like actually launching this. I was a little bit nervous and a little bit timid to launch this podcast, but the responses have been great and I'm really appreciative of all your guys' feedback and it's been an amazing ride so far. So I look forward to continually giving you great interviews like the one you're about to hear today from Tim Ferriss. Now what can I say about Tim Ferriss? This guy is a bestselling author on lists like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He's an investor or advisor to Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote and Uber. He holds a Guinness Book of World Records for the most consecutive Tango spins in one minute.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  He won the 1999 USA WKF National Chinese Kickboxing Championship at the 165-pound division. He speaks six languages and in 2008 Wired Magazine called Tim "The Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time." The way I was first introduced to Tim was through his number one New York Times bestselling book, The Four Hour Work Week. Now Tim has had a huge impact on my life as well as many other entrepreneurs in the world and in this interview I discussed the impact he's had on my life as well as cover many of the topics in his latest book, The Four Hour Chef. Now the School of Greatness probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the positive influence of successful entrepreneurs like Tim. So let's dive in.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Tim is over here like working away on his own computer for typing away.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I'm getting edumicated.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  We've got, we're here in New York City at, uh, I won't say the hotel for privacy issues. We're here at a pretty cool little, uh, little spot in Tim's penthouse, so. Living the dream up here. And Tim's getting loose over here.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I did my old man calisthenics.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Awesome. Well, with that, I'm gonna go ahead and start it off. So, thanks again, everyone, for coming on with the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Timothy Ferris.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Mostly the myth, mostly the myth.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Now, Tim, for those of you who don't know, is the number one New York Times bestselling author of The Four Hour Work Week, and also number one with The Four Hour Body, and soon to be number one, hopefully, knock on wood, with The Four Hour Chef.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  He is a, an investor in Facebook, Twitter, stumbled upon, ever known, Uber, et cetera. He's the ultimate lifestyle designer, and I'd say lifestyle entrepreneur. He's traveled all over the world, pretty much lives his life the way he wants, on his terms, and builds cool businesses on the side. So, with that, Mr. Tim Ferris, thanks for coming, my man.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Are you kidding?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  This is gonna be fun.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I am not the man. You could, you could dismantle me at will. This is enormous. Physical specimen of, uh, like Ivan Drago.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  But I'm, I'm really happy to be here. We'll do plenty of Q and A at the end, and I will do my best to stick it through. I've had a, uh, very exciting few weeks, needless to say, with, with The Four Hour Chef. We'll talk about that in just a minute, but very excited to be here. So, I will, uh, how should we man the hardware?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I'll go ahead and start it off, and I wanna, I wanna share a quick story with everyone about, uh, kinda my personal story and how I got introduced to Tim, just so you guys get a whole background of who he is, in case you have no clue who he is. But I remember it was 2007. I was, uh, I had surgery on my wrist. You see the scar right here?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Surgery on my wrist playing football, arena football, and I remember being completely depressed because I had to retire after that surgery. I was in a cast for six months on my sister's couch with three credit cards. Um, and I remember trying to figure out what I was gonna do next with my life. And I know a lot of you members in our, in our audience are always trying to improve your business and trying to grow. So I think you guys will appreciate this. I remember I got the, probably the best Christmas present I'd ever received. And, and granted, I never read, ever. So for me to be able to complete a book is pretty impressive. But I got the Four Hour Work Week that Christmas, uh, from my brother. And, uh, I remember him super excited about it, telling me how he read it on a, on a trip to China or something

• 5:08Speaker 02

  for one of his gigs. And I checked it out. I was pretty skeptical of the cover, but I checked it out and I read it. I read it in three days. And for me, that's extremely fast, being able to never really read that fast. So I was obsessed with learning how to really follow kind of the systems that Tim had created by, uh, you know, the Four Hour Work Week. And granted, for the next three years, I probably worked, uh, 14 hours a day. But I really learned how to set up my lifestyle the way I wanted it to. And it was that that really inspired it. So it's kind of helped me get here where I am today. So it's pretty exciting to have him on. And I hope you guys are excited as well.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Number one.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Let's go into it. So the, the, I think the most important thing to realize is that the Four Hour Chef is a bit of a confusing title, which makes it appear to be a cookbook for food, whereas it's really a cookbook for learning. And this is the book that my readers have been asking me for, for four or five years, a book on accelerated learning. But I needed a context. I needed the proper storytelling. And very much like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, uh, this book is using my adventures in food and flavor and taste and all, uh, looking at these experts around the world to show you how to become world-class in any skill in record time. So.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Cause you're not an expert chef before you started this journey.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I was not only a non-chef, I was an anti-chef. I mean, I, I was of the opinion that I worked to make money so that I could, among other things, afford to go out and not have to cook.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And, uh, which is, which is a fair position to take. But the point being, the, the kitchen is the perfect, and I didn't realize this at the time, but the perfect dojo for maximizing human potential, because it is one of the few places where you use all of your senses. So when you actually, even if you take a week to experiment with, with food, we'll get to the next point, actually.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Um, if you take a week to experiment with cooking, even if you never make another dish again. You will start to hear things and taste things and see things that you've never experienced before. And my, what I took away from that was if I take a short period of time to experiment in the kitchen, uh, my experience of eating goes from HD to IMAX in a million colors. 3D. Right. And that has been really incredible to me, uh, how much that has transferred to other areas of my life. Right. So improving my visual acuity, my hearing, everything. And of course, this translates to whatever skill you might want to learn, uh, the, and all the skills that my readers have asked me about most often are in this book.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  So how to learn a language in eight to 12 weeks, how to tackle sports, like weird ones like Japanese horseback archery, or Chinese kickboxing, or just shooting a three pointer in basketball, or learning to swim, you know, two things I was unable to do for a very, very long time. Uh, number three, you will get into the best shape of your life. So people who read The Four Hour Body or have seen The Four Hour, uh, Body blog posts, such as the Slow Carb Diet, uh, will find that without even realizing it, every recipe in this book is slow carb diet compliant, with the exception of cheat meals, which are awesome because I love chocolate and alcohol and all those things. I love the Vermonster. Oh, yeah, the Vermonster. Oh, I don't mess around. Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  So I compete actually against the mutual friend of ours to eat a 14,000 calories Vermonster in 20 minutes. I don't want to spoil the punchline, but, uh, there are ways to do that without getting fat. So I, I, I go into not only how to learn all of the principal skills of culinary school in the shortest period of time possible, which is actually a small portion of the book, but without trying to follow a diet or anything else, you will get into the best shape of your life, I really think. Number four, it doesn't take much to be impressive. All right. So here's the deal. You do not need to memorize thousand recipes to be better than seventy-five plus percent of the US population. You could learn how to make something like, for instance, the very first recipe in the

• 9:14Speaker 01

  book, which blows people away because they expect it to be complicated. Osso buco, alright, usually with veal shank, thirty, thirty-five bucks on a menu in any Italian restaurant. It's thought to be very complicated. You know, Italian grandmas are like, I could never give you my secret recipe for osso buco. Okay, here it is. I'll tell you what it is. So, preheat oven to three fifty. Okay, get a Dutch oven, it's just a big pot, right? You throw in a bunch of carrots that you've kind of scrubbed and broken in half, alright, easy enough, that takes like thirty seconds. Then you dump in a can of tomatoes, just a can, it's like fourteen ounces, that's just canned tomatoes. Then you put in however many lamb shanks you want, like, three people, three lamb shanks, four people, four lamb shanks.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Then you pour in a, like, three quarters of a bottle of white wine, a bunch of pepper, a bunch of salt, throw it in the oven, you're done. Come back two and a half hours later. It takes less time to prepare this dish than to make scrambled eggs properly for one or two people. And when you have that in your pocket as your go-to meal, you can blow people away. When I first made this osso buco dish for Michael Ellsberg, mutual friend of ours, and he goes, "Dude, you need to open the Tim Ferriss restaurant, this is amazing." And Michael's been to a really good restaurant, and I told him how simple it was, and he, he looked at me like I was telling him Santa Claus' story, I was ridiculous. Alright, cooking is the mating advantage, I won't spend a ton of time on this, I get into it in the book, and I talk about different recipes for seduction and whatnot, whether

• 10:40Speaker 01

  it's a first date, or the person you've been married to for ten years, fifteen or twenty years. But cooking, for men or for women, is the ultimate mating advantage. Whether, not to be too blunt about it, but like, whether you want to catch and keep the one, or just get laid a lot more, cooking is the absolute best investment you can make. And it just takes one or two dishes, like, one week, you're done. And the last is because it's fun, it's really, really fun. To take something from me, uh, that had beaten me many times in the past, so part of the reason that this book only happened now, if it were up to me, if I had all the resources, all the contacts, the experiences that I have now, I would have written The Four Hour Chef first.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Because it is about how to learn anything faster, it is the bedrock upon which everything else lies. But- You know, life takes its course. I had to wait until now to realize that what the best way to teach someone how to learn to be a world-class learner is to perhaps take something that had kicked my ass many times in the past, cooking, and go from start to finish and show them the entire process. Right. And then explain different principles. So those are the six reasons to read The Four Hour Chef, even if you have zero interest in cooking, which I did for thirty-four years of my life. All right. The menu. So the menu is the breakdown of the book, the various sections of the book.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And there are five sections. Meta is meta-learning. That covers all of the crazy experiments I've done and takeaway lessons, immediate actionable items that I've learned with accelerated learning thing that goes from smart drugs to language learning to swimming to meeting the world's best powerlifters, so forth and so on. That's meta-learning. That gives you the bedrock. Then you have domestic, which takes, you know, I'm not going to give you all too much information because I think we're going to go to each in turn. So domestic, which is the domestic, in the kitchen. Okay, wild, which is everything outside of the kitchen. Scientist, I won't

• 12:50Speaker 01

  give away the punchline with that. And then professional. Those are the main sections. Hopefully, this will be useful in some fashion. We'll do Q and A afterwards. All right. So meta or meta-learning is very simple. Meta, this term means up and above effectively. So if you have, let's say, meta-analysis, that is doing analysis of different analyses it's looking at. It's studying the studies, right? So meta-learning is learning how to learn. So if you think about it, you go to school, you're given math, you're given English, you're given this, you're given that. You're never taught how to read properly. You're never taught. I learned the wrong way. Yeah, you're never taught how to learn properly. So this.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Section follows me as I travel around the world from India to Japan to South Africa to the US, all over the place, the UK, to find the world's fastest learners. People who learn a language in seven days well enough to be interviewed on TV. People who can memorize 10,000 numbers. People who go from being unable to swim to being one of the top swim coaches after age 35. People like this. And then trying to discern what their recipe is. What is the blueprint that these people use? What is the process? And it turns out that it is effectively this DISC framework. And so that's the basis of metaling. So you have D, which stands for deconstruction. What are the Lego blocks that you start with?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  How do you break a complex skill down into little pieces? And then how do you test the assumptions? So for instance, I couldn't swim. Very embarrassing, having grown up on Long Island, until a few years ago. And it started with a question, how can I learn to swim without kicking? Because I found that that exhausted me. It didn't propel me. It was a very frustrating aspect of swimming. So that's deconstruction. Selections, what are the 20% that I should spend my time on to get 80% of the results? This is an 80/20 analysis that you've seen in Four Hour Work Week, Four Hour Body. It's the same principle. And so the good news is, if you've read either of my two previous books, you have the toolkit already built in, and you'll make a lot more progress. All right, sequencing.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  This is something I haven't talked about in real, in-depth before, but like, in what order do you learn those different blocks? So the difference between someone who becomes fluent in, say, Spanish in eight weeks and the person who still struggles to speak after eight years is putting things in the proper order. So I talked about that. That's true for golf. It's true for handball, I'm sure. It's true for all sports. Like, do you move your hip when you should move your foot first? Game over. So sequencing is really key. And then the last test is stakes. So how do you create the carrot or the stick so that you'll actually do what you say you're gonna do?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  I think this is the big one.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, stakes is huge. And if you take like Tracy, for instance, from the Four Hour Body, blocked 120 plus pounds, 40 something, mother of two.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  She didn't lose that weight because she had some new amazing program she got from Women's Fitness. She lost that weight because she put together a bedding pool with six of her coworkers for a hundred dollars a piece.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  She didn't want to be embarrassed. Exactly. She didn't want to be embarrassed. She didn't want to lose money. There was something to lose and there was something to gain. Yeah. And there are ways that you can create this very easily, like the website stick.com, S T I C K K dot com. Where you can, you can basically put your money into escrow and it goes to an anti-charity, like a charity or a nonprofit that you hate. Could be pro-life, pro-choice, doesn't matter. Wow. If you don't do what you say you're gonna do. So. That's big. Super profitable. I mean, if, if, if I had the choice between establishing really good steaks or giving you the perfect diet for fat loss, I would choose steaks. Yeah. Ten times out of ten. The battle is, I mean, more than half is taking action. Yeah, yeah. And, and humans, so economics is the study of incentives. People respond to incentives. Right.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  I mean, whether it's like rats, monkeys, humans, we respond to incentives. So set things up so you can win. That's the game of steaks. All right. Domestic, and don't you love the cross-stitching? It's so pretty. All right. So the domestic offers you the building blocks of cooking. This, this is the ABCs. All right. You're in a kitchen, at home. What are the ABCs that can take you from Dr. Seuss to Shakespeare? Hmm. Well, it's technique. It's not memorizing recipes. Recipes, recipes, recipes. That's all you ever hear about in cooking. And most books are organized to provide you with the delusion of recipes. They don't teach you technique

• 17:23Speaker 01

  so that you can cook without recipes. So my goal was, let me put together fourteen core lessons, no more than twenty minutes of preparation each. The average is actually nine minutes. So it's, it's literally the four-hour chef in this case, that will give you all of the most versatile techniques of two years of culinary school. That will enable you to cook thousands of dishes. And four hours. Four hours of total prep time. Two years of, how much is culinary school? Oh God, it's gotta be what? I mean, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars? It's super expensive. It's two years of your life. And the fact of the matter is, when you study people who haven't gone to culinary school, people who have, you're able to pick out the best of both groups. Right. And you can embed them into these lessons. It does not need to take a lot of time.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Uh, and all of these recipes also have four or fewer ingredients. Wow. So it's very, so you're cutting down on grocery shopping. You're cutting down on the cooking time. You're cutting down also or eliminating completely the cleanup. I hate cleanup. Everybody hates it. So I try to remove all those failure points so that people can make, make it through the first few weeks. At which point now they love cooking. It's actually, uh, a study of behavioral psychology more than anything else. Hmm. And that's where a lot of books fail, including most good books. All right. The Wild. So The Wild is let's get out of the kitchen. Let's connect firsthand with ingredients, foraging, hunting, you name it. All right.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  This section is intended, keep in mind, the subtitle of the book is for, so that you have For Our Chef, The Simple Path to Cook Like a Pro, Learning Anything and Living the Good Life. This is more than a cookbook. It, and it is intended in this case, this particular section, to make you very uncomfortable, to push you past and outside of your comfort zone. And this will go through survival gear, uh, reclaiming the manual arts, learning how to build things, learning how to survive. The rule of threes, which applies to water, uh, I'm sorry, shelter, water and food, among other things. This section, uh, is very funny when I was writing this. I had certain friends that thought I was crazy and paranoid for some of the stuff I was going into.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Just basic disaster preparation or preparedness. And then what happens, hurricane sailing. Oh. And then none of those friends are almost all in New York. They're not laughing anymore. They're asking for advance copies of the book. Right. Uh, because you want to be, to be self-reliant. That is the goal of Wild, to be self-reliant. And then to be self-fulfilled, we'll get to that later. You have to understand what the worst case scenarios can be and have at least some form of cheap insurance policy that applies against that. And that could be water, it could be food, could be a shotgun. I'm not gonna get crazy. Huh huh. Uh, but I started looking at all of these different aspects and talking to hedge fund managers,

• 20:14Speaker 01

  talking to survivalists, talking to preppers, talking to police officers and fire departments. And, uh. You ever talked to Bear Grylls? I haven't talked to Bear Grylls. I've talked to, interviewed Bear. Nice. Um, his favorite phrase is, I love it. I love it. Jesus Christ. Very enthusiastic, I'm all for it. Alright, so scientist, the scientist is where you re-enter Willy Wonka. And this is really intended to resurrect your childlike curiosity. And you find that after childhood, like this, this playfulness kind of goes away. In a lot of cases. And speaking personally, for instance, I mean, I always wanted to be a comic book penciler. I wanted to be an illustrator. And I was an illustrator for two years in college.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I paid my way through college by bouncing and illustrating. Wow. And. You left five, five bouncers. I know, sure, tiny, I know, I'm like a little putzian, but, I don't know, which was why I would always be the one who had to fight. Because it'd be like, two huge football players just couldn't fight, and then like little me. You're so like karate. Every drunk, like I used to like, I'd be like, I'm gonna fuck.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Pardon the French, we're learning, apologies. But, uh, the purpose of this section is to bring you back to that childhoodlike curiosity. Asking what if, why not, really playing around with food. Like, what if you made spaghetti out of arugula? What if you wanted to make homemade Nutella and turn it into a powder? What if you want to play around with cheat day? What if you want to create like a beat foam that you can serve in shot glasses? This is where you learn some really, really cool science without ever being intimidated by the science. Not like high school. Simple science. Simple, it's even sophisticated science, but I make it very digestible and bite-sized. So people do not, will not realize how much they're learning as they play around in this section.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Okay. The professional, the professional is the finishing touch, the finishing school. And looks at how the best in the world become the best in the world. Uh, and Hearth and Linear, two examples. Linear at the time was the number one ranked restaurant in the United States, it's about three days or, or so there. And we go through the classics, like what are you missing from your repertoire? The most important fundamentals, let's fill those in. Then avant-garde, like how do we push everything? How do we push taste, texture, appearance, the entire sensory experience? And then drag for, uh, Chacon, I won't spend too much time on, but I have a handful of so-called impossible recipes at the end, which are real recipes.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  For people who are just masochistic who want to test.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Want to try themselves.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And then I won't spoil the, uh, the conclusion of the appendix. I'll leave that to you guys. But that is the outline, that's the outline of the book.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  And, uh, those are the primary sections. It's intended, uh, really to be the third part of a trilogy. And, uh, some of my heroes include Seneca, a lot of people know that. Richard Feynman, an amazing physicist and professor, incredible teacher. And Ben Franklin. Now Ben Franklin had healthy, wealthy, and wise. And I've taken that very seriously for the last fifteen, twenty years of my life. And you have healthy for our, uh, for our body. Wealthy for our work week. Wise for our chef.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  This book is intended to give people the ultimate arc media's lever. To get the most of life for them, the people around them, for their kids. Like double, tripling, quadrupling learning speed.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  And not only achieving more, but appreciating more. And that's another reason I chose food. It's not enough to just rack up the, the, the points in this game that we call life. You have to actually reflect on what you have and appreciate what you have. Otherwise, it's a completely hell of a victory. So,

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Uh, that is the, uh, the rough outline of the Four Hour Challenge.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Very nice. And, uh, I want to get into, we're gonna get into Q and A here in just a second. Uh, but I actually got an advanced copy a couple of days ago. And I've never seen a book this beautifully designed in my life. It's, it's big, first off. It's perfect for either your kitchen, um, or right on your countertop, to be honest, because it's like you can just go through and go to any page and it blows your mind on how beautifully designed and how detailed and how researched everything is. It's a pretty amazing piece of art if you ask me. So, we would, we really want to support him in getting to number one on Amazon.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Can I explain why that's important?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yes, go ahead.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Alright, so the, the, what's important, the reason this is important. Or to me, I'll say important to me. I'm not saying important to everyone, but this is the first major book through Amazon Publishing. And as a result, the book is being banned, being boycotted by almost every bookstore in the United States. That includes 700-plus stores through Barnes & Noble, which makes it effectively the most banned book since Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928, The Age of Love. And the reason that I view this as a very watershed moment, as a very important case, almost like the Supreme Court, now this sounds very dramatic, is that what Barnes & Noble

• 25:33Speaker 01

  is trying to do is make an example of me by saying, "If you try to innovate, if you try to do something that does not benefit our model, not profit our model, we will punish you."

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  And I take issue with that. That pisses me off. And I was eager to experiment with Amazon, intended they would do different things. Number one, Amazon actually cares about their end user. They have relationships with their end users. People like Barnes & Noble typically do not. They do not have any direct connection to their end user. Now, they're good for some things. I appreciate that. However, when they start punishing their end user and punishing content creators, I take real issue with that.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And so, at the very least, what I'm trying to do this week, the book is, I think, the best book I've put together. I have some of my most cynical friends who say, "You know what? I hate to say it, but this is your best book." Like, I really think this is your best book. And I'm extremely confident in the book, and I want to get it to number one book scan. I won't bore the details, but number one book scan is just, for all the people in the industry, I want to send the message that there are different ways to do business. You can innovate. You shouldn't be afraid of these big incumbents.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Okay. So, let me go into Q&A really quickly. We'll spend the next, hopefully, 30 minutes, and then if Tim gets winded up more, then maybe a couple of minutes more. Carolyn says, "Is Tim cooking?"

• 26:58Speaker 01

  For Louis, right now? He's not my type. I like the guy. But to answer Carolyn's question, I do cook a lot now, actually. I almost treat it like... You know, I thought I needed the food for the calories, much like people think they need tea for the caffeine, whereas sometimes they just need the tea ceremony. So I actually use cooking as almost a moving meditation now. Things that really intimidated me, terrified me before, like knife skulls, I actually use to relax, just kind of wow.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Right. So here's a question from Mike. How would you use um your form of meta-learning to learn an in- internal martial art like Tai Chi?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yes, Xingyi. So the uh you could absolutely use it. The same process applies. I'm very good friends with a brilliant guy named Josh Waitzkin, who was the subject of the movie and the book Searching for Bobby Fischer, about a child project. This is Josh Waitzkin. So he's uh he's an incredible guy and he's also a world champion in Tai Chi push hands. So I can say that the uh the meta-learning disc process can be applied to that without a doubt, absolutely.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Um, we got a question here. Nelson Chow is saying, how do you uh how do you something if you don't know where to start? So.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, de- deconstruct.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Uh, the.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Talking about uh.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the beginning of deconstruction is finding anomalies who are good at what you're trying to become good at, who shouldn't be good at it. Whether that means they became good at it in a short period of time, with uh or that means they are, let's say physiological oddities, like 250-pound people who run 100-mile races. You identify those people, there's a process for doing so, and that is the starting point.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Nice. Uh, MT Smith says, do you still stand by your recipe for starting an online business, outlining for our work week, or would you alter it in line with social media?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Uh, I do stand by the recipe. I think uh social media is overrated, is the short answer. I just think that um you have to understand what your metrics are, and direct response marketing and advertising helps you to focus very clearly on cost per acquisition, aver- average revenue per user, things of that type. Social media can be used to tremendous effect.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  All right. So social media can be used to tremendous effect, but I think there are more people than not.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Who are simply doing a lot of hand-waving and not delivering any measurable results from the initiatives they have in social media. So I wouldn't change it all too much. All uh what I would add is that things like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, allow you to market test. Very effectively for an extremely low cost.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Uh, so those are perhaps some of the revisions that I would make.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Uh, Dana saying, have you personally applied your process to learning in instruments?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have, I have, and there are a few I want to tackle, but, uh, I have applied it to instruments. And I consider myself a very non-music person in general, but, uh, the Irish flute of all things.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Was one that I got really into because, I'll tell you why. Because I wanted to be able to practice it whenever I had time to practice.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Break it apart, probably.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  You can stick in your pocket.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And, uh, it's like a recorder, so you can actually practice in those empty moments that you have as opposed to, for instance, a guitar.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Which is more challenging, or the one instrument that actually struck my fancy in college was the drums. Five, five-piece drum kit?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Forget it, like, it's, it's too cumbersome. So for learning the language of music, I found the Irish flute to be really, really compelling. And plus it gave me another excuse to drink alcohol and like stomp my feet on the ground. Listen to the fiddle. Irish bar music is just amazing. Pub music, incredible. Yes.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Ki-, uh, Pavel, I think it is, is saying, Tim, what's your next book gonna be about? What else are you busy with these days?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Uh, Pavel or Pavel, I know Pavel Tatsline, uh, so I would say Pavel. Uh, I don't have any plans for next book. Uh, I have no plans. Right now, honestly, it's about getting this message out and then I am going to disappear and probably go to Southeast Asia or Indonesia for a month or two or three and just get off the grid because I need to, I need to recharge a bit.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Nice. Um, Christina says, when researching for the book, what surprised you the most?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  What surprised me the most is how, uh, is how the best in the world, whether it's cooking, swimming, basketball, or otherwise, were able to simplify their craft.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  So you had, let's say,

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Out of a hundred people, the best person, one person who is best is extremely good at simplifying what they do. And they don't make it seem intimidating. They explain it in terms of fundamentals. They make it seem very approachable. When you get into like the top 5% of the people, then there are a lot of, there's a lot of acting involved. A lot of people will want to make it as complicated as possible, as unapproachable as possible. But the best of the best of the best are really good at simplification.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Right. Interesting. How do you change careers at 56, says Ed?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Uh, well, there's dozens of ways to do that. I would look at Colonel Sanders, when he started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was something like 60 years old.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Really?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  It's never too late.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Wow. Interesting. Uh, I'm already a good cook, says Renee. How much of the book is about learning itself?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Uh, the entire book is about learning itself. But I would also say, even if you consider yourself a good cook, I mean, I'm dealing with people like Grant Aket of Alenia, Mark McConor of Harith, I mean, an entire army of James Beard Award winners and people who are absolutely top of the top of the top. So even if you take a handful of tips from them, whether it's putting a peeled clove of garlic on the end of a fork to use for sauteing, or using surgical lint-free huck towels instead of pot holders, or fill in the blank, if you pick up even a handful of tips from these guys who are really, really impressive, it will make you a far better cook. But the entire book is about learning.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  What's the number of people that you consider as a good base to consider a marketable tribe?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  1,000.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  1,000?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Read 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, it's a free article, you can find it out there. Kevin Kelly's the founding editor of Wired Magazine. Read 1,000 True Fans. It is, if you could only read one article about marketing for the rest of your life, that would be a luxury.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  So Doug is saying are all the recipes low carb compliant?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I'd say ninety percent of them are, but I mean, a big part of the slow carb diet, here's the thing. I love having low body fat, great, like having wonderful sex and blah, blah, blah, fantastic, but here, here's the thing.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  This is after three glasses of wine too, so sex came in out of nowhere, but the, uh, the point being, you can have low body fat, but you really need and I think should enjoy what you eat. So the meat sheet meal options are probably ten percent of the book. So I do view that as a really valuable pressure release valve.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  And just to highlight, it's fun, it's something to look forward to for the entire week, so. I'd say the, the book is ninety percent slow carb compliant, so plenty.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Uh, Chris Johnstone is saying if you had sixty days to make a hundred thousand dollars and had to start from zero, what would you do? So a little riddle, trick question.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a very common form of question. Uh,

• 34:40Speaker 01

  here's what I'd say is there are, there are many elegant solutions, there are no immediate

• 34:48Speaker 01

  silver bullets.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Uh, and at the end of the day, you have to test, I cannot give you the answer. But a hundred thousand dollars, what was it, six months, something like that?

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, no, two months, sixty days.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  All right.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Call it six months.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I would put on your best shoes and start selling door to door, I mean.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  The, but, but ultimately, I think that doing a good self-assessment, identifying what your unique abilities are, if you have any, or if not, developing those abilities, then identifying the thousand true fans you can sell to and developing product. Whether that is a service or a course or coaching of some type. Or that demographic would be your best investment time.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Sixty days, who knows? Uh, I mean, will it happen in two months? Hard to say. You have to throw a lot against the wall before you can do a proper eighty twenty analysis. You cannot do an eighty twenty analysis and determine the twenty percent of things, twenty percent of customers, twenty percent of activities that produce eighty percent of the results that you want until you have tried a lot of things and determined where your weaknesses and strengths are.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'll give you a quick example for that. It took me about two years before I made my first dollar, trying a lot of different things. I was hosting events and doing different stuff online, trying to figure out how to sell the products I was creating, writing books, et cetera. But I really wasn't making any money until I did my first webinar. And then it was that kind of my aha moment that this is all I need to be focusing on. Majority of my time are webinars because this is what's selling the most, uh, my sales for me. So again, finding out what really works for you, but it might take some time. Um, Joseph Kaladik, I think, or Kadlik, I don't know, from Prague, says, hey, guys, the current book, is this connected to the four hour body at all? Uh, my brother lost twenty five kilograms based on Tim's diet, so I wonder if you could benefit from this new book.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, right. It's very much connected. So before our body is effectively, uh, built into this new book. So if someone has followed the slow carb diet and they're looking to expand their vocabulary of flavors, increase the variety of the meals that they have, then this is the book.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  So it's built in.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Uh, Larry, how much of the book is about learning theory and how to learn?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Uh, almost zero is about learning theory. All of it is based on empirical data from the field in learning how to learn different meals.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Uh, Dicky's got a question. Which book would be the best for a thirty five year old ADHD son who struggles with almost every aspect of life? Life. I would say both, but you can.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would say both, honestly. I mean, this first step here, this is, I'm not a medical doctor, but. First step is remove grains, honestly, just to remove grains, try to minimize any autoimmune issues, uh, remove white stuff and grains from the diet, whether you get out of diet, whether you get one book or the other.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Nice, um, Bruno says, Tim, congrats on the book, just purchased mine now, do you have plans to invest or start a businesses in Brazil?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm open to investing in Brazil, I'm fascinated by Brazil, I've spent a lot of time there, probably, uh, well, as far as guests go in your country, you know, maybe three or four months total in Brazil, and I'm a big fan, I mean, it's, it's an incredible economy and incredible country, so I, I do have friends who invest very heavily in Brazil.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Uh, Ryan Malo says, do you discuss smart drugs in the book?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  I, I do discuss smart drugs in the book, uh, I have a piece coming out in Wired magazine, I think hitting tomorrow, uh, which will be about, uh, smart drugs as well, but the smart drugs I find, and I've used them all, I've tried everything, produce side effects long-term, so I try to focus on things that are just scalable and sustainable, but I do talk a little bit about smart drugs.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Uh, Ryan says, Tim, you do a great job simplifying and distilling learning, how do you go becoming one of those teachers you talk about, uh, as being the best of the best, how do you distill teaching?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I study the world's best teachers, and I mean, my, my goal ultimately is not to be the best writer, I don't think I am the best writer, but there's a difference between having clever terms of phrase and compelling prose and being a good teacher, and I want to focus on being the best teacher, so I certainly, uh, aim to be in the top, you know, point zero zero one percent as far as teaching goes, and teaching to me is evaluated not just by how clearly you explain a technique or a principle, but how effectively you get people to take action, there's a big difference between the two.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Uh, Niraj, I think it is, says, how would you apply meta-learning to investing?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  MetLife to investing, easy. You look for the anomaly. So whether that's looking at Joel Greenblatt for event-based investing, which typically manifests, in his case, in hedge funds, looking at some of the more consistently effective investors like Warren Buffett. I actually talk about Warren Buffett a lot and his principles in the Four Hour Chef. The process is the same, absolutely the same. Knowing what you're good at, knowing what you're bad at, knowing where you have, let's say, informational or behavioral or analytical advantage, and then ignoring all the rest.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Chris said, "Do you use LinkedIn to make connections for your book interviews?" Or any suggestions on making a good first connection? And I know you talk about this in your blog about reaching out to busy people.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  And in Four Hour Work Week.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't use LinkedIn specifically for book interviews. At this point, I use predominantly publicists and pitching people I know personally. But in terms of a good first connection, I find that in the tech world, I can only speak to my experience, in the tech world, the least crowded channel is meeting in person, so I go to events.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  You know what I'm talking about.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just, the person who is getting pitched, if your goal is to pitch, needs to trust the messenger before they can trust the message. And that is something that is lost. It does not matter how good your pitch is, how good your story is. If they think that you may embarrass them later by being some idiot.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Then the message is absolutely

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  ... valued to zero.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  And there's a way to connect with people by building rapport through their friends and a number of other ways to do it. At events, like you said, meeting in person, the less you connect with people better, so.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  True.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  How many skills should you work on at once, as Patrick, for example, "I want to write a book, create a muse, learn a language that's super fit, and find the right girl." And again, this is probably a good question.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  If you figure out how to do all that at once, then I want to talk to you.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  That's a good question.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say one or two.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  One or two.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  One or two, max. I mean, I tend to focus on one mental and one physical role at the same time.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  You do three to five, it's probably tough for anything, right?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Too much, too much. Yeah, you're not going to get anywhere. You'll be too scattered.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Doug Bertram says, what do you have to say about the 10,000 hours to be an expert? Turning it on in years?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I disagree with it. I mean, I think it has to do with the specificity of defining expert or world-class. I define world-class as top 5% in the general population. And I think that for almost any skill, you need six months or less to reach that point, if you approach it in a long way.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  So here's a personal one from Allison. Why are you still single? How about, how about being an expert in relationships? Are they so different from other skills you learn?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Uh, alright, so this is three different questions. I'm not single. I've been dating a wonderful girl for a year and a half. Uh, how about being an expert in relationships? I don't feel confident saying that I am an expert in relationships yet. Uh, are they so different from other skills? Yes, they are very, very different from other skills. Yeah, you're dealing with logical and illogical aspects of a partner. So, uh, relationships are, I, I think relationships is too broad. I'd have to get very specific, but... I've been dating a great girl for the last year and a half. And, uh, we've had, as everyone, we've had our challenges, we've had our downs.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I think it's been a very healthy relationship as a whole, but I am in no position to lecture anyone on relationships.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  You've also been writing a book for the last year and a half.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my girlfriend's put up with a lot of BS in her words.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Uh, Jamie just said, uh, just ordered three books. Hey, Tim, what's your favorite, uh, parilla in Buenos Aires?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, parilla, parillada, like a, like a grill house. I would say, uh, uh, that's tough, man. I've had a couple of favorites.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't want to say, or the siga la vaca. I don't want to say siga la vaca because that is, La Visteca, La Visteca is the one. In the same area, it's in, uh, Puerto, Puerto Madero, I think, in Capital Federal. So, La Visteca is the one, but there's also a fantastic place, not a steak place per se, but, uh...

• 44:15Speaker 01

  I think it's Gran Bar Danzon. So Gran Bar Danzon, D A N Z O N, which is amazing.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Nice. Patrick Moore says, for writing a book, should you start small and get ebooks or Kindle, on Kindle or go to the top for publisher?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Look up a conversation between me and Ramit Sethi, S E T H I, on self-publishing versus traditional publishing.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Tara says, other than self-measuring activity to do at eighty, twenty and analysis, any suggestions for good apps, websites or services to monetize and analyze?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Uh, I like Rescue Time, RescueTime.com.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Ever thought about doing a Tim Ferriss movie?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Uh, probably not a Tim Ferriss movie, but I've been approached by screenwriters to do adaptations of some of my books to movies. I'd be up for it. I mean, I like, I like the visual. I think it'd be fun to do, but I'm not in any rush.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Dave said, what's your creative, what's your feedback on your CreativeLive op-ence? It was great from my end, but it meets your business expectations.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  I, I had a great time with CreativeLive books and CreativeLive.com. I really enjoyed it. I haven't even, because I've been right in the middle of a book launch, yeah, I have not even looked at the business ROI of doing it, that's why, to be honest.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Right. Uh, Tim, how do you measure how effectively you're getting readers to take action, if you can even do so?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Uh, there are a few different ways I can do that. So one is by doing something like the recent four-week campaign on DietBet.com to actually look at the average pounds per week lost by readers following a slow carb diet. The second is simply watching the feed. I mean, keeping an eye on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, or having my assistants keep an eye on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, although I tend to do a lot myself, to look for the social proof, someone losing a hundred and twenty pounds, a hundred and eighty pounds, two hundred pounds, whatever it might be, uh, with four-hour work weeks, certainly seeking out those case studies, soliciting those case studies. Uh, those, those would be a few as I go about it.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Nice. Um, a bunch of people were asking, what's the name of the author for the Thousand Truth Fans article?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Kevin Kelly.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Paul says, can Tim expand on that twenty-eighty rule or eighty-twenty rule in DIS?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so choosing the minimum effective dose, uh, for instance, in languages, uh, you could have several hundred thousand vocabulary items, but how do you choose the highest impact, one thousand or one thousand two hundred? So that you can really focus your practice and be perceived as and in fact be fluent in eight to twelve weeks? That'd be example of applying the eighty twenty analysis. If you want to apply eighty twenty analysis to marksmanship, you can do the same thing. Eighty twenty analysis to, uh, basketball, you can do the same thing. In terms of focusing on shot line, eye dominant, et cetera.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  And the, and the process is to apply that, uh, that lens to each of your skills that you're looking for. The, the highest leverage few activities that you can use to produce the greatest results.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  I guess it's KK dot org is the, uh?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kevin Kelly dot org is KK dot org.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Okay. Um, Dan is asking, how do you choose between several options in business and in personal life? I'm not sure exactly.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Big question, Dan. Uh, you have to put together, when people don't have time, it's not that they don't have time. There's plenty of time to do all the things you want to do, so they don't have priorities. So you have to define your priorities very, very carefully.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  All right, let's do two more questions. You still run your own supplement company?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Uh, nope, I sold that in two thousand nine, so I'm done with that. I instead-

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Did you get that or no?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so I, uh, instead

• 48:24Speaker 01

  advise and invest in between twenty five and thirty companies. So I'm definitely not just, uh, sitting out staring at a wall all day.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Um, Troy says, Tim, you're always on point, never seen someone that sharp. From Random, Random Episodes to Creative Live, South by Southwest. You, and even when my buddy asks you if you experimented with pot at midnight in Austin two years ago, I love this long question. Is this sheer intelligence, drugs, diet, exercise, or combo of all? What's your secret?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  You know, I think the, uh, Troy, the s- the secret, if anything, is not fearing loss. So I am comfortable expressing my opinion because I have learned to be attached to only those things that cannot be taken away. And that is learned from primarily Stoic philosophy with focus on Seneca and letters from Stoics. So I really use Stoicism and letters from Stoic as my operating system so that I feel comfortable standing up and not hedging, not hesitating, and expressing my opinion

• 49:37Speaker 01

  or stance on a certain thing, whether I'm right or not, uh, because I recognize that the potential downsides are so few and so minimal.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Uh, let's do one more question. I just saw, uh, Darren saying, Louis, thanks for this. Tim was great as always. And Omar Adams says, what kind of personal development do you do, Benny?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  What kind of personal development do I do? Uh, I follow Eleanor Roosevelt's advice, which is every day, do one thing that scares you. That's it. I think that is the ultimate simplistic approach to self-improvement, personal improvement.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  That's powerful. Other than that, I want to say thanks to Tim. So Tim, I'm gonna let you, you finish it up with the final word.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, all I would say is that, uh, you know, if I had, if it were up to me, I would have written this book first. And I'm thirty-five now and I've had, I've unfortunately had the experience of watching and experiencing a number of my close friends pass away, whether by accident or by disease. Life is short. Life is really short and it's getting shorter every day. And I would just emphasize that all the things you could do, all the things you could read, all the things you could buy, where you should focus is, I think.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Increasing your learning potential, increasing your human potential. And by doing so, you are not only squeezing the absolute amount of life from your years that you have remaining, but you're able to convey that and teach that to the people around you, the people you care about, the people you love. And so I would just say that whether it's through this book or other tools, focus on turning yourself into a master learner. And when you become a master learner, you become a master teacher, and you can spread that to other people. So I view really almost nothing else as high leverage as doing that, turning yourself into a master learner.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And I will close with that. Life is short, make the most of it.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  Very powerful. Tim Ferriss, thanks my brother.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  And thanks everyone for coming on, and go out and grab the book. I'll tell you what, I always enjoy getting to hear Tim speak. And like the man says, "Life is short, so focus on becoming a master learner." I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation, and make sure to support Tim and head over to fourhourchef.com to pick up a copy of his book. Also, check out his extremely popular blog at fourhourworkweek.com. Hope you guys are enjoying The School of Greatness, and make sure to head over to schoolofgreatness.com to be notified of our next episode. And please, please, please, leave us a five-star review on iTunes.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Until next time, thanks for listening, and do something great.