#817: 4-Hour Workweek Success Stories — Charlie Houpert on Building “Charisma on Command” to 10M+ Subscribers, From Charging $10 for Seminars to Making Millions, Living in Brazil, Critical Early Decisions, and The Secret to Freedom

Charlie Houpert is the co-founder of Charisma on Command https://www.youtube.com/user/charismaoncommand, a company that helps people develop confidence, charisma, and strong social skills. Originally launched as a 4-Hour Workweek-inspired “muse,” it has since grown into one of the largest platforms for social skills and confidence training, with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers worldwide and more than a billion views across its channels in six languages. His flagship course, Charisma University https://www.charismaoncommand.com/coc-charisma-university/, has guided more than 30,000 members through practical steps to become more magnetic. This episode is brought to you by: Patagonia https://www.patagonia.com/tim's call-to-action to protect America's public lands. Go to Patagonia.com/Tim to learn more and act now https://www.patagonia.com/tim. Monarch Money https://www.monarchmoney.com/tim track, budget, plan, and do more with your money: MonarchMoney.com/Tim https://www.monarchmoney.com/tim (50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM) LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 1B+ users: https://linkedin.com/tim (post your job for free) * Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start. [00:06:44] Charlie meets the boogeyman (me). [00:10:11] Why defaulting to management consulting after college felt like daily self-betrayal. [00:13:21] Leaping into parkour training via DVD as a first business attempt. [00:15:45] Moonlighting vs. burning-ships entrepreneurship. [00:16:54] Negotiating remote work with a 90% raise. [00:21:22] Charlie moves to New York and kicks off KickAss Academy. [00:22:16] Airbnb survival tactics while living in a 396 sq. ft. apartment. [00:23:26] Using the fear-setting exercise and other disaster-mitigation strategies. [00:26:11] Charlie’s first blog post and crossing the publishing Rubicon. [00:28:26] How Charlie’s first in-person class prompted an accidental business model. [00:34:21] 10 go-getters make an ambitious move to Brazil. [00:32:14] The daily growth whiteboard system. [00:37:58] How a harsh Tucker Max consultation galvanized the rebranding to Charisma on Command. [00:44:39] From financial downturn to pre-selling a course for $12,500. [00:50:44] Finally making enough money to chase summer in six-to-eight-month increments. [00:52:00] Enjoying the sustainable benefits of creating timeless content. [00:54:05] How Bill Clinton seduced 7,000 people into following Charlie on YouTube. [00:55:46] How Greg McKeown’s Essentialism helped solve Charlie’s “Herbie” problem. [00:58:26] Evolving funnel flow and fame-jacking. [01:03:46] YouTube algorithm changes, short-form content, and maintaining audience trust for the long term. [01:10:58] Why I still create this podcast. [01:19:30] The dangers of succumbing entirely to audience expectation over authenticity. [01:21:42] The catalysts that led to time off, an ayahuasca retreat, and a seven-year transformation process. [01:30:26] Making the transition from 50/50 partner to sole owner. [01:35:16] Recommended reading: Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden [01:37:32] The influence of The Last Psychiatrist blog. [01:41:46] Jay Abraham coaching: “Make it good enough for Tim Ferriss.” [01:43:52] How testimonials added a 4x conversion lift. [01:44:31] Coming to an agreement with the co-founder. [01:47:20] Joe Hudson and the Art of Accomplishment. [01:51:57] Why I stand by The 4-Hour Workweek without further revision, warts and all. [01:55:06] Exercising gratitude even when receiving praise is difficult. [01:59:15] Relationship with earlier work: video vs. writing. [02:02:05] Don’t miss “Filling the Void.” [02:03:56] More recommended reading. [02:06:43] Improv & Dragons. [02:08:06] Charlie’s billboard: “Don’t think, feel.” [02:08:57] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct how high performers do exactly what they do, how they arrived where they are, the skills, the habits, the tools, everything that went into their journey to mastery of some type. And this episode is an experiment. I've done this long ago, once or twice. People enjoyed it, so I am doing a four-hour work week case study, a success story. And this is a fun one. Charlie Houpert is the guest's name. You can spell his last name, H-O-U-P-E-R-T. He is co-founder of Charisma On Command, a company that helps people develop confidence,

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  charisma, and strong social skills. His journey from step one is pretty fascinating. There are a lot of challenges along the way, ups and downs, and I think it mirrors the paths of many who have implemented the four-hour work week, including sticking points. And some people don't overcome those, but he was able to problem solve, or at least endure through some of them. So it's very, very instructive. Now, Charisma On Command, originally launched as a four-hour work week-inspired muse, has since grown into one of the largest platforms for social skills and confidence training with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers worldwide and more than a billion views across its content in six languages.

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  His flagship course, Charisma University, has guided more than 30,000 members through practical steps to become more magnetic. And I'll give you a teaser. It didn't just work out of the gate. It didn't initially have that branding. And there were many side alleys, many attempts. Example, parkour VHS tapes, instructional, and a whole bunch of other stories and examples that I think people will enjoy. Charlie was once voted most likely to break out of his shell and began studying charisma to overcome his own social anxiety. He now explores the deeper roots of confidence through archetypal psychology and body practices and much more.

• 2:08Tim Ferriss?

  You can find Charisma On Command at youtube.com/charismaoncommand. And you can find Charlie at Charlie Houppert, H-O-U-P-E-R-T, at Charlie Houppert on Instagram and X. And now, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible before we get to a wide-ranging conversation with Charlie. Thanks for listening.

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  I am always asked by listeners, readers, you name it, what helps me to reset, feel grounded in a world of chaos and doom scrolling, recover from setbacks, we all have setbacks, or simply feel at peace. And without a doubt, the answer is always the same. That is going into nature, usually with my pup, Molly, ideally, but I do a lot of solo journeys as well, solo trips out into the wilderness. And for many millions of Americans, myself included, our national park system is the best single place to do just that, which is why what I'm going to tell you is very, very important to me, very near and dear

• 3:14Tim Ferriss?

  to me. So I appreciate you paying attention. So let me just mention a few things. Our public lands cover nearly a third of our country's landmass. And with more than 433 national park sites, there's a ton to explore, whether you're fishing, hiking, or just camping with family. I've been all over the place. I have actually planned trips just around visiting national parks. And the best thing about our parks is that as Americans, we collectively own them. This means we can visit and enjoy them anytime we want. And you may not realize this, but this is a uniquely American invention. And in fact, there is

• 3:54Tim Ferriss?

  a documentary series by the legendary Ken Burns called The National Parks: America's Best Idea. And you can check that out for more. But the point is this, for more than a century, our government has protected our public lands by holding them in a public trust. But it's becoming harder and less safe for us to access these awe-inspiring places. Now, we are at a precipice. We are at a really key inflection point. And whether it goes up or down, will depend on what people like you, people like me, do. Congress is preparing to vote on a bill that would force the sale of millions of acres of public lands

• 4:36Tim Ferriss?

  to, among other things, fund tax breaks for billionaires. So, don't love the sound of that. And if approved, the bill would trigger the largest single sale of national public lands in modern history. So this is a big deal. And it is very timely. So please join me and many thousands of other Americans who are speaking up to protect our public lands. Visit patagonia.com/tim to learn more. One more time, check it out. Please take 10 seconds and do it. Patagonia.com/tim. This message was brought to you by Patagonia.

• 5:10Tim Ferriss?

  Traditional budgeting apps, they can be interesting. Yeah, they can be helpful. I've tried out a bunch, but they don't compare to the complete financial command center that you get with today's sponsor, Monarch Money. And a number of my friends have recommended them publicly, have recommended it to me. And I had my entire team basically test this app out and they're all still using it. Monarch is like your own personal CFO, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop merely earning and start growing. For instance, one person on my podcast team has tried four other budgeting apps, said linking his accounts, which includes banking, investments, and crypto, had never been easier. And Monarch had the cleanest, simplest, yet most complete UI he's ever seen. It made him want to track

• 5:52Tim Ferriss?

  his finances. Monarch was named the Wall Street Journal's Best Budgeting App of 2025, and it's the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts with more than 30,000 five-star reviews. So get control of your overall finances, the whole shebang with Monarch Money. Use code TIM at monarchmoney.com. Just type it into your browser for half off of your first year. That's 50% off of your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Optimal minimal.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

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

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 6:27Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 6:31Speaker 01

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

• 6:44Tim Ferriss?

  Charlie, welcome to the show. Nice to be spending some time together. And I thought we would start, as you suggested, since I do not have much memory of this. That is not to say that I am too big for my britches. I think it was quite a while ago. But how did we first meet in person? Yeah, this is not our first time meeting.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  No, it was a much larger moment in my life than in yours, I think. This is 2011, 2012. I'm working as a management consultant in Washington DC. And I have been a four-hour work week acolyte for probably six months, like evangelical. Everyone needs to read this book. We're all entrepreneurs. I've sold nothing at this point. I've got no product, but everybody has to do this. I'm out to dinner with my company. We've just completed this contract. And sitting there facing the door and Tim Ferriss walks in. And the blood drains from my, from my body. I go cold. I'm working on being more gregarious. My boss sees, he goes, what's wrong? I said, it's Tim Ferriss. It's Tim Ferriss here.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Like the boogeyman walked in. I've told him and he goes, the four-hour guy? It's Tim. Yeah, it's him. So I, you know, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, walked over to your table. This is on H Street in DC. And I just said, you know, hey, Tim, Mr. Tim, I don't.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  I read your book and it's changed my life. This is even before it really changed my life. And I love your blog and it's just, it was so great. You turned and faced me and were very kind. You gave me far more attention than I had anticipated that I would get and asked some questions about what I was doing. And at the time, I was like, fuck, I haven't actually made anything happen. So I was like, you know, I'm working on this, that and the other thing. Then excuse myself to go to the bathroom where I was like, fuck. Fuck, you ruined it. And came back and I didn't have an ask. This is an interesting learning for me. And it was just like, do you want to get coffee tomorrow? I don't even drink coffee. You're like, sorry, I'm in town. I'm just doing the four-hour body. I've got some meetings tomorrow, so I can't do it. And politely excused yourself.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  But for me, that was, it was a number of things. It was like, man, I wish that I was able to have that conversation in a way that created more connection between he and I. And it was also, it's funny to be sitting here now because at the time I had this projected belief that if you would just feature my business in the muse, if you would just write about it on your blog, everything would be solved. Like, units would start flying off the shelf and, you know, I'd be taken care of forever. So it's really cool to be sitting here on the other side of that projection and get to chat.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, DC, I very rarely go to DC. So, I mean, in the multiverse of other infinite possibilities, it is pretty incredible that we met at all because I so rarely go to DC. And I think you can also probably cut yourself some slack in the sense that in those conditions, it's pretty hard to establish very quick rapport and connection.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know, was I by myself or in a group?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  You were by yourself. It was offered up on a silver platter. No, not to say, you know, I reflect and it's like, you're in town for one day, but the idea that maybe there was something that could have been said to create that connection was the inception seed that just kept spinning in my internal safe for the next 10 years.

• 10:11Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so let's double click on the management consulting and then how you became an ex-management consultant, or just the path itself. Because I have seen interviews with you and you talk about, of course, various different things, charisma on command, charisma university, you have this topic area expertise. And we'll probably touch on some of that, but for a lot of my audience and for my own personal curiosity, I want to hear about your journey, right, your personal journey, not necessarily focusing on the content that you're best at showcasing. And I suspect we'll probably get to some of that. But looking

• 10:56Tim Ferriss?

  back at the early chronology is always fun for me because I remember, for instance, and I want to not make this the Tim Ferriss retrospective show, but that exact experience that you had with me, I have had many times with other people, where, you know, I'm just like, fumble out some accidental pig Latin, and then I go to the bathroom and just like, you idiot, that could have been the sentence that changed your life and you fucked it up. So, not to say that's what you said yourself, but certainly I have had those types of experiences. So let's go back to management consulting. What was that experience like? Just paint a picture and then...

• 11:39Tim Ferriss?

  I know this might seem like a lazy question, but just like take us forward from there.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Oh, every day it felt like a self betrayal. So I read the four hour work week when I was in grad school and I was in grad school because I was a philosophy major as an undergrad and graduated in 2009 where not only were they not hiring philosophy majors, they weren't hiring anybody. So hit out in business school for a year, wound up as a consultant because that's what you do when you don't know what you're supposed to do with your life. And every day putting on that suit felt like a betrayal of myself, especially having read the four hour work week at that point. And so there were these minor rebellions that I would stage, like I had a faux hawk and I wouldn't cut it and I would put it down. There were these subtle passive aggressive, I let my shoes fall apart. I had my business shoes, but I wouldn't get new ones. They were like ratty and

• 12:29Speaker 02

  crappy. And it was just these ways of like, this is not me. This is not right. And then I would come home from that after sort of sneaking out as early as I could. And I would write in just my own little journal about like, this is not what I want. I don't want this life. I don't want to be the guy who is my boss or the guy who is his boss. And so it was in this period of time that I was noticing and experimenting with coming out of my shell at the same time. So I was able to make friends with not just my boss or his boss, but like I was got close with the president of the company. And it was through just talking about the bars and clubs I was going

• 13:08Speaker 02

  to at Saturdays. And he was vicariously, you know, we'd meet Monday morning, be like, so what'd you get into this weekend? And we had a little, a little rapport there of, you know, I remember the good old days type of a thing. And so had that job wasn't right, had our fruitful encounter, which didn't wind up selling anything. And at the time I was, my first business was a parkour training DVD. I think I even used a service that you'd listed in the four hour work week to try to do it and was trying to get that off the ground, you know, selling it through Google AdWords, very like step by step four hour work week. Like it could have been a chapter had it worked and it was starting to go, but it wasn't, it wasn't something I loved and I was struggling with it because my co-founder and best friend was in New York. I was in Washington DC.

• 13:54Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose parkour at the time? How did you decide on that? And were there any other candidates where it's like, okay, here are the top four. We're going to strike these out. We're going with parkour.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  There was. I did the little Venn diagram of what do I want that other people might be interested in? I just wrote all of my interests. I hadn't done parkour, but I liked Casino Royale. That was my level of exposure to parkour.

• 14:17Tim Ferriss?

  One of the best intro sequences of any James Bond.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yes. So the idea was, oh, wow, there's no parkour gyms. If there are, they're expensive. Maybe people would want to learn this. I would want to take a class. And so went out, hired a guy that had done it, that never shot anything before. I mean, there's so many funny little stories. He chips his tooth the day before the shoot. So he's got this like lisp before the shoot and he can't remember more than a line. So we're saying lines to him as he's trying to teach parkour chopping that, chopped this footage up into 35 or 40 minutes of like how to do a wall run, how to do a kong, how to do all these things and made a DVD out of it from Trupstar. So the other things, I mean, I can't remember what was on there, but it was very much, I was a little bit outside of myself and thinking, what do other people want?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  I hadn't gotten to the scratch your own itch experience. And what I experienced was that, oh, wow, we're actually selling enough DVDs to break even on AdWords and even a little bit of profit, which means if we did a follow-up, we'd be totally in the black.

• 15:19Tim Ferriss?

  Follow-up meaning you're selling to pre-existing customers?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Correct. If we'd made the advanced course or do you want personal coaching or something? And I was completely deflated. I was like, I can't do this other thing in addition to my job that I don't love in order to get free of the job. So there was this recursive four-hour work week mentality, which is like, stop doing the thing that you don't want to do in order to get to the place that you want to be. Just do the thing that you want to do.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Although at the same time, just to play with that for a second, the approach of moonlighting just to dip your toe in the water, get a taste of the blood, whatever metaphor you want to use, I think is actually pretty helpful in the sense that you don't have to act out of desperation. You still have a safety net of some type. But then you can make an informed decision about whether or not you want to burn the ships, so to speak. Just my two cents.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  It was an integral step. I very much agree with you. I needed the experience of disliking consulting and then the experience of disliking my side gig to go, okay, the next side gig has to be something that I would do for free or am paying to do. And so then it was, okay, what am I spending money on? It's like, well, I go out to these bars and not to drink, to like, talk to women and try to get them to like me and to make friends. And I put way more time, effort, attention into studying how our interaction went. I can't tell you how many times I chatted with my best friend about like, what if I said this? What if, you know, we were, we were putting far too much energy relative to others into understanding people and how to connect better.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  So there was a transition of, my best friend and co-founder was in New York. He was an investment banker. I was in DC. I was a consultant. We would talk every day after work for an hour about the interactions we had. And I was just aching, like I didn't have other friends in DC. So I went to this president who I had been close to. And there was this moment where I was, you know, trying to get the side gig and trying to get a job in New York. And I, it was, I went to Skillshare and they didn't want to hire me. And I went to all these companies. They wouldn't hire me. I was taking weekend trips. And eventually my friend was like, why don't you just quit and go to New York and figure it out there? So having settled with that and done the fear setting exercises and what's the worst thing that can happen?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  I came in and I made a pitch to my president, which was, it's, I mean, a lot of four hour work week things, which is, once it's already done, people get out of your way. So I was internally, I was like, this is done. I'm, we're not talking about if I'm going to New York. So I sat down, I said, hey, you guys have been really good to me. I appreciate it. I just cannot be in DC any longer. I feel socially like I'm missing something. I want to be with my friends in New York, but I want to transition in a way that is really good for you, to repay the kindness that you guys have showed me, which was true.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  And we sat there and he's like, you know what? Let's work something out. So he winds up saying, instead of being an analyst, let's make you a contractor. Except if you're a contractor, the base rate that we pay contractors is twice as much as we pay analysts. So we'd have to give you basically like a 90% raise in order to do it. But you'd have no job security and no healthcare. Month to month, you could get fired. So I'm like, wait a second, I get to go to New York, double my pay and no healthcare. This is incredible. So it worked out really well and I wound up keeping that job, working remotely from New York and making one trip every two weeks for a few months as I did this.

• 18:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's a pretty sweet bridge. Yeah. At least for a while.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Oh, it was magical. And it was this showing up with, hey, I love you, but here's what I have to do. And I'm open to something that works for both of us was really powerful.

• 19:03Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you this for people who are listening and they might be thinking to themselves like, hmm, that's a really interesting bridge or just improvement in quality of life. Also you got the income increase. How did you plan for that meeting? Basically the pitch slash delivery that ended up in a remote work agreement.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Step one was to get clear that it was happening and I wasn't there to make him do anything. I wasn't trying to convince him to force it. So I was able to really come in with the mentality of, I want to show love to you. I want to support you guys and take care of you and I'm willing to be flexible and I can stay another two weeks, but this is happening. So it was making sure that first and foremost, I wasn't asking him to meet a need of mine. I'm going to meet my needs. How can we work together? Then it was literally rehearsing it. I ran through the conversation. This was not an outcome that I had ever planned. I thought it was like, yes, I'd be willing to stay on for three more weeks and then come down and do touch points here and there. And I'm happy to get on the phone and talk to the person you have replacing me.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  But I really think it was the pre-established relationship that we had plus. Me taking care of my needs and then saying, what is best for you? Like I generally, within these bounds, I want to do what's best for you. And he came up with that solution. I didn't suggest it, which was powerful. And I've seen that same sort of dynamic play out many, many times in my life.

• 20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. And I think employees, oh, I know oftentimes it's been a few eons, but I've been an employee, underestimate their own value or position. And as a result, sometimes feel like they need to go hat in hand and expect maybe the outcome to always fall in the boss's favor. But the fact of the matter is, in the boss's favor, if you actually work hard and are a decent, let alone a very good performer, it is a huge pain in the ass to replace someone.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:04Tim Ferriss?

  It is. And for that reason, I think many people are surprised when they have some of these conversations, how often they're like, huh, wasn't even going to ask for that. And look what ended up coming my way.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  You had all that money just lying around. Why don't you tell me?

• 21:19Tim Ferriss?

  Let me open up this chest full of gold coins.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:22Tim Ferriss?

  So then what happens? You move to New York?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  So I go to New York and I am splitting time now between what is this new business, which is called Kick Ass Academy. And this is my brilliant idea. I think we're going to do, it's an academy, an online academy where you learn how to live a kick ass life. And it's about going out and it's heavily game influenced at this point. I've read Neil Strauss's The Game.

• 21:44Tim Ferriss?

  By Neil Strauss, yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:46Tim Ferriss?

  Great book, controversial on a number of levels, but a really compelling, it's a compelling underdog sort of hero's journey story. It's written, it's well written.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  And to a 23 year old guy who has been socially restrained and I've won the award for most likely to break out of a shell in college, which is like, you're the shyest boy in our 500 person class. Congratulations. To learn that there was something that I could say or do that would change the receptivity that I got from people was, that was so powerful to see in the game. So those two books, For Our Work Week Game are like really deeply influencing me. I start sharing some of these blog posts. Well, actually first what happens is the government shuts down and that sweet contractor gig that I have disappears overnight. So I had like four-ish months of like gravy and where I've been saving twice as much. And then that happens. So I'm in a 396 square foot apartment, two bedroom in the Lower East Side.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Bathroom door hits the toilet when you open.

• 22:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, if we do the math on that square footage, it's not a lot, whole lot of space.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm sleeping literally on a blow up mattress to save money. I'm eating Chipotle and learning how to persuade them to give me more scoops in order to save money. I'm frugal beyond frugal at this point in my life. Start Airbnb being my own bedroom and then sleeping in like literally my, God bless him, my co-founder shares his queen size beds with me. So that I can take some nights and make a hundred bucks a night Airbnb in my bedroom. And in the meantime, the beautiful thing is that everything that was taken from me pushes me to the next level of putting myself out there. So I'd had all of these writings that I'd been doing in DC about what I believed and what I thought and what I was learning about speaking with women and people. But I was too afraid to really share them.

• 23:26Tim Ferriss?

  So were any of those coping strategies that you ended up using, were any of those initially in the fear setting exercise?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, those and others. It was, I mean, I had play guitar and ask for dollars. That was farther down the list. It was learn how to make a basic drink and bartend Airbnb the bedroom. These were all, I had a list of things.

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  So for people who have no context on this, just to set the table a little bit. Fear setting, it's named that because it's a play on goal setting. But it's an exercise, you can find it at timnuplog slash Ted. I also did a Ted talk on it, so you don't have to buy anything, you can find it. But the basic gist is that you have something you're considering doing, quitting your job, moving to New York, getting married, getting divorced, whatever it is. Then you write down all of your fears in as much detail as possible. Right? Because the more detailed, the more actionable and preventable. And it's sort of the nebulous, misty fears that we never put on paper or define that tend to be the most problematic.

• 24:33Tim Ferriss?

  So you, you make this list in excruciating detail of the worst things that could happen. Then there's another column, the next column, you write down ways that you could try to prevent those things from happening. And then in the sort of damage control slash mitigation column, which is yet another column. You ask yourself, if each of these things happened, what could I do to limit the damage or get back on my feet, even if it takes me a while? And there's more to the exercise, there are other things, but in the mitigation. Slash damage control column, you would have something like Airbnb my own bed.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, Airbnb my own bed. Sign up for a ton of credit cards to get the credit card miles and then convert to cash. I did a lot of things for 50, 60 bucks. Get a job at Chipotle so that you can eat the food that you're there and that takes care of food and money. You know, there was, so I had, I had a lot of these and I ran through quite a few. Zeroed out my 401k and IRA and took the penalty at one point, a little bit later down the line. So was doing all of that, but as things got more and more dire and I'm going through my fear setting mitigation strategies. I am confronted with the fears that I have not written down, which is okay, it's time to put your writing out there.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  So, okay, God, it's so funny. One of the big mistakes that I've make with the people that I love is I've tried to prevent and hide from them and support them and not having to confront those horrible, harrowing entrepreneurial moments of, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, this isn't working. Because it is in those moments of tension and pressure that something pops and you go, fine. I'll be honest and share what's on my heart because up until then you're not going to do it or I wasn't going to do it.

• 26:12Tim Ferriss?

  So what was the first kind of prototype version of post parkour entrepreneurship?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:19Tim Ferriss?

  What was the V1?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  It's kickassacademy.com and we are here to live a kick ass life and no one can stop us. And like, we will not be average. It's a 23 year old manifesto about how all the people don't know how to do it and I do. I know the way to do it. It's a regurgitated four hour work week plus my own iteration of the game thing. So I write my blog post and I haven't shared any posts. And I remember being in this tiny apartment with my hand hovering over publish. And I'm, and I published it on this blog post and I have to run out of the apartment and go down the street. And, you know, just get away from the computer that, I don't know, houses the blog post now that is on the internet.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  And of course, I come back and nobody's read it. And a month later, nobody's read it.

• 27:09Tim Ferriss?

  What was the first blog post? Do you recall?

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh, I wish I knew. I do not recall. I should have checked before this. It was-

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's all right. But it's some kind of how to thing? It's like seven rules for et cetera?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it might have been a how to. It might have been a declaration of one of my feelings when I was quitting the job. And like, this isn't what I want. It was not profound, but it was personal and tender to me. So it was very tough to receive criticism.

• 27:33Tim Ferriss?

  And I guess it is maybe, I mean, we'll get there. Maybe not in terms of readership, but in terms of crossing the Rubicon from not publishing to publishing, hitting that button.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 27:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Psychologically.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  I'm willing to be seen is the emotional thing that is, I think, for me, has been the challenge endlessly in entrepreneurship, the way that I've chosen to do it. So we got that post out and then nobody, of course, read it. And then the next step was, okay, I'm going to promote this. I'm going to go to Reddit. I'm going to go to the forums that are most related. Every man should know there was a seduction subreddit. There was a New York City related subreddit. And I started posting my own things. And now comments start coming in. And so it's, thank you. I like this. Or don't promote your own stuff here. Or, you know, now I'm actually dealing with feedback. But the next stage was posting, posting. I wrote a little short pamphlet book.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  But the real thing that actually started, I think, early, you might even, I think you probably know him. I hired Neville Madora for like a day of copywriting to help me design the website. And wound up with the first actionable, real thing that I did was, okay, I've got people that read my blog. There's like, you know, 30 recurring viewers. And I want to host an in-person class that will talk about how to talk to a woman in the park in New York City, which is something that I'm doing with my friend, going out. We're breaking it down and how did it go and all that kind of stuff. So we rent out a room in one of these office buildings for like 60 bucks. For an hour, an hour and a half or something like that. I go to the New York City subreddit. I give away five tickets.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  They are sold. People like sold. People accept them, right? They accept the five free seats. And then I sell the remaining five seats for five or 10 bucks. I think I might have sold them for 10 bucks each. And like an hour before the class, we sold the last one. So we had 10 people in this class, made 50, lost 60, plus cap fare, down 15 bucks, whatever. Go in and give an hour and a half presentation with a PowerPoint on, you know, this is what to wear, say, do, stand, here's how to deal with the fear that's going to come up. If she rejects you, here's how to address that feeling, all of that sort of stuff. It was just thrilling to do it, but afterwards, four of the 10 people stayed after and were like, do you do coaching? Do you guys do this? And the answer was, uh, now we do, right?

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  Funny you should ask.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, funny you should ask. So really had no intention of, you know, there was not a business idea of there to be an upsell, but there was enough asking. So then it evolved into, oh, now we're doing traditional, what was around at the time, dating coaching in New York City. And we're finding our rates as we did that. And that was tough. That's a gig where like, you're going out with a dude who's having the most fearful experience of his life. And he's paid you to encourage him and support him in facing that fear, which is, I'm going to go speak to that woman that I'm attracted to at the bar, in the park, wherever. And it's not fun to like, push someone to do something that they're really like,

• 30:49Speaker 02

  they say they want to do, but they're, they're really grappling with. And then, you know, you go out and you show them, hey, it could look like this, it could look like that. So we did that for a while and we're charging, I don't know, a hundred bucks an hour as we did. But again, something else that crept in, same thing with the parkour was, this wasn't the dream. When I'd sat down and I'd done the fear setting, there's another piece of it, which is you write the 10 out of 10 upside.

• 31:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you assess the upside. If it works.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  If it works.

• 31:17Tim Ferriss?

  What's the one to 10 impact? Positively, if it fails, what's the sort of transient, most likely not permanent impact, right?

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yes. And so as we'd sat there and written in detail, the 10 out of 10 upside. It was never you have a dating coaching business that is stressful in New York City. It was you get to live on the beach with your friends, do work that you like when you like. There was this idea, which was silly, that you would have a laptop as you sat on the beach. That's ridiculous. It doesn't, it's like a photo op, but it's not a good way to work. But I had that idea. I would drink caipirinhas and I'd do it in Rio. That was like the romantic vision. And so again, I found myself having this thing that was working that wasn't the 10 out of 10 upside.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  So I just want to pause for a second and just say, that's where a lot of people get into trouble.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Because they find something that is maybe not even 30% of the way to where they want to be. But it has a seductive traction. And there are certain financial realities. It's like, hey, if you need to pay your rent, yeah, you need to pay your rent. But it's very easy for that to then become something that is a monster. You feel you need to feed that you can't step away from. And in that case, right, with coaching, you're still trading time for money, right? At a per hour rate.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  And in person, in a place that isn't the most fun with guys that are having a challenging time. You know, like.

• 32:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If people want to get a really good laugh, you can find it on my YouTube channel. But the Tim Ferriss Experiment TV show episodes are all up there for free. And there's one, I think it's just called the dating episode where a small world, Neil Strauss is like sitting in a van with an earpiece, trying to give me advice at the farmer's market in San Francisco as I'm doing cold approaches. Horrible, horrible and horrifying beyond terrible. If you want to see what that looks like, knock yourselves out.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

• 33:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 34:06Tim Ferriss?

  And find your next great hire right there on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/Tim. That's LinkedIn.com/Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 34:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so you decide that the one-on-one coaching in person, this is not the 10 out of 10 that you'd hope for.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Yes. And I think you know the experience. It's not a great model. It's really challenging, high intensity, doesn't create the level of transformation with reliability that you might hope. And people walk away feeling sometimes very stressed about it. And so it was, okay, I don't know what it is, but I said Brazil with my friends, et cetera. So again, I'm evangelical. I'm telling everybody I meet, have you read the Gospel of Tim? Like this book, The Four Hour Week, you need to do it. Everyone's an entrepreneur. That was a mistake in learning it's not for everybody. I got that in time. So I'm telling everybody and what happens is one of the guys that attended that first class becomes a friend. It's probably the most magnetic period of my life where I'm just talking about this ambition. And what happens is not just my co-founder and I, but six people, many of whom I'd met

• 35:14Speaker 02

  in the last two months, quit their jobs, quit their schools, and agree that we're going to move to Brazil in August of 2013.

• 35:21Tim Ferriss?

  How did Brazil specifically become the dream?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  One, it's got great PR. I've never been in it. There's just this sense that Rio is this romantic, beautiful beach city vibe. And when my company let me go from that contractor role, I immediately said, okay, what's the upside of this? So I booked a flight to Brazil and met a friend who was traveling. And I spent five weeks in Floripa and one week in Rio. And in that week in Rio, my friend had gone home. I was alone. And it was these experiences of being alone in a hostel, not knowing anybody, that uncomfortable feeling of like, I want to go home. I want my friends. I want my thus, whatever. But I stepped outside of myself, went to a coworking space, met a guy. He invited me to stay with him. And I had one of those travel magical adventures

• 36:09Speaker 02

  that culminated in meeting a beautiful Brazilian girl and having this fling that lasted a few days. And she came and visited and

• 36:15Tim Ferriss?

  I knew that had to figure in somehow.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  So, you know, had that romantic experience of I showed up feeling empty and like, and then, and then I walked away with abundance and feeling wonderful.

• 36:29Tim Ferriss?

  Whirlwind transformation of a trip.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yes. So I was like, that's where I want to be.

• 36:33Tim Ferriss?

  So six other people quit all their stuff.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:36Tim Ferriss?

  School, job, whatever it might be. Okay.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Well, there's 10 total, six who live together and then four who lived in other places.

• 36:43Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Like in the same city.

• 36:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then what happens?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  So we get there. Nobody speaks Portuguese. I speak Spanish and I'm negotiating rent, looking for a four bedroom where I can take, they have mates quarters in a lot of these places. So I have the tiny room because that's what I can afford. But anyway, we settle into a life in Brazil and my Spanish is converting to Portuguese as quickly as I can. And we are living it. We're there. It is the thing. We are going to the beach, throwing the American football, making friends. We've got a whiteboard every day. There's four questions, you know, did you do the social stretch that you wanted to do? Whether that's make a friend, speak to a woman you're attracted to, be kinder to the guy who serves you acai, whatever it is. There was a social stretch. Did you do your business stretch? Did you do your health stretch?

• 37:31Speaker 02

  One more thing, which is like, did you do your own personal thing? For some people, it was reach out to a family member. For some people, it was learn the guitar. So it was like four things. We had this running whiteboard of who had done their growth thing that they need to do. That's cool. I like that. Yeah. And it was a really encouraging growth. If you tried and failed, it was high fives all around for that year. It was just amazing. She didn't want to talk to you. So cool. Like, welcome back into the fold. You are welcome here. So we're doing that. And from a business perspective, so now all my income is gone because it was all the thing. And then it was in-person coaching. One or two people agree to switch to online coaching, but it's not enough.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  And so for a period, the blog becomes online coaching, which is actually nicer because now instead of just going to a bar and speaking about, did you talk to the girl? What to say? It's people that are calling in with questions about workplace scenarios. And so I'm, you know, I'm speaking to guys older than me using Tony Robbins principles, essentially to answer questions about experiences that I've only barely had. But it's helpful because it's this Tony Robbins transformation process that I'm helping with and using. So that becomes a thing. And after months of doing in-person coaching and we, you know, there's a whole learning the sales process and being able to ask for money. These are all intermediate steps that had to happen. I'll tell you a story about Tucker Maxx in here as well, but I'll tell it now.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Almost never boring. Never boring. So at the time, there's this program, I think it was called Clarity or something, whereas you could pay people per minute for advice and they would get on the phone with you. And I don't know what Tucker was, 15 or 22 per minute or something like that. I don't remember exactly. And so said, I had no money. I was like, okay, 200 bucks. Let's get this done in whatever, eight minutes, 12 minutes. So call him up, say, hey, can you help? We're having trouble getting customers. Can you take a look at our business? What do you recommend? And he goes and he goes onto our homepage. It's called kickassacademy.com. It's me and my co-founder. He's got hair down to his shoulders and he's wearing like a pink tank top and I've got a neon green pink top and, you know, frizzy hair. And he says, you guys look like douchebags.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  No one over the age of 26 is going to want to associate with this. It was. So true. It wasn't packaged in a very digestible way, but in time, as I started to, you know, get other points of feedback, I was able to integrate that. And there was a transition from, oh, wow. What I realized is all the guys who would come with me, they were like, one of the most, the captain of the Princeton football team when he was at Princeton, like, these were successful, cool dudes. But they all had this thing where it's like, they didn't really want it to be public that they were learning this kind of a thing. And so we talked to him, we're like, you like us, but you don't want anyone to know what's going on. And we learned that, yeah, you know, I do want to get better in my relationships and learn how to talk to women, but I don't want to broadcast it that way, essentially.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  And I also care about work and I also care about friendships. And so we did a bunch of interviews and I started tracking like, what word are you comfortable with? Like, what's the 10 out of 10 word that you're down for? And I had a long list. It was lifestyle design, confidence and charisma came back as like a nine or a 9.5 out of 10. And so I'm going through this marketing course, Evan Pagan's Marketing Step by Step, oldie but a grady, excellent.

• 40:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Evan's a smart fellow. For a long time has been a smart fellow.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And he's got this line that the name of your company is the most important marketing decision you will ever make. And I realized that when I say Kick Ass Academy to people, they think it's a dojo where you're going to learn how to fight.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  So through this process, Evan also says, you want an alliteration that sticks in the head.

• 41:14Tim Ferriss?

  He loves alliteration.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:16Tim Ferriss?

  David DeAngelo.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  David DeAngelo, double your dating, right? And so I've got alliteration, charisma, but the thing that they want is they want to walk into a room and feel like they do with their best friends. They want to feel comfortable, calm, collected, like they want to just be able to turn it on. And so we're brainstorming and charisma on command comes in. Switch the name of the blog, screw up the redirect, so we lose all of our Google juice, whatever. But very quickly, conversions, just nothing has changed and we start converting way better as a result of this.

• 41:49Tim Ferriss?

  And this is converting to online coaching?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  This is, at this point, I forget exactly where we are, but there's just more interest. People are commenting, like every metric of engagement is up and the type of person-

• 42:01Tim Ferriss?

  Just with the rebrand?

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Just with the rebrand and we took the long hair down a little bit and made it a little bit, okay, here we are, but we put on like a t-shirt instead of a tank top.

• 42:10Tim Ferriss?

  Got rid of 1980's Miami Vice.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 42:15Tim Ferriss?

  Let me sprinkle in just a little context on a few things you've said. So, one is Tucker Max. For people who don't know the name, he wrote a number of books. I believe his first mega bestseller was I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. And he was the first person, actually, I would say the only person, in 2000, early 2007, I approached Tucker Max, who was part of a panel at South by Southwest, and I was like, okay, there's this long line of people. I already know Tucker's pretty prickly, can be, and very direct. And I somehow heard through the grapevine that he was interested in jujitsu or something like that. And at

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  the time, I had been doing a lot of training. So, when I got up there, I was like, oh, have you ever trained with so-and-so or so-and-so? And I used that as a wedge in. And he agreed to have coffee or lunch, I can't remember what it was, one of the two. And I gave him a early galley copy of The Four Hour Work Week. And a day later, or two days later, whenever we actually met up in person, he came in and he had a research assistant who was named Ryan Holiday, who later went on to become a mega bestselling author, actually one of his books behind me somewhere here. And Tucker said, okay, let me explain what's gonna happen. And he's like, I can't prepare you for it because nobody can prepare you for it. And he just went step by step and basically predicted the next year of my life.

• 43:40Tim Ferriss?

  He's the only one who did that. Now Tucker, at the time, also was, I think rightly considered a marketing genius and very good at promotion and positioning, had at the time, a massive community, which I believe was based on V. Bulletin or something like that.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 43:59Tim Ferriss?

  So his vote of confidence, maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy on some level, but that's just a snapshot of Tucker. Then you also mentioned interviewing people and I want to emphasize that interviewing various folks because the thing that doesn't scale in the beginning often helps you to scale later. And for people interested in how, for instance, like Brian Chesky and the founders of Airbnb applied that, one of the very early Masters of Scale podcast episodes has one talking about doing the things that don't scale. And that led to the rebrand, at least on some level.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%.

• 44:39Tim Ferriss?

  You change the positioning and the branding, charisma on command, and everything improves, right? All the metrics of the website improve. And in the meantime, though, you're still in the servants quarters in Brazil.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm in the servants quarters. At this point, I contact the HR lady at my old company. I go, hey, we had a 401k, right? She's like, yeah. I was like, can you drain that for me? Like, she's like, that's going to come with a penalty. I was like, don't worry, I have no income. Like, my taxes won't be too much, I'll just pay the penalty. So I hit zero and then I get a little infusion of cash and I'm about to hit zero again. Like, I'm going to broke. I am Airbnb my bedroom, sleeping on a horrible couch. I am teaching SAT tutoring to Brazilian high schoolers. Like, I'm still doing the mitigation strategies in order to make things work.

• 45:28Tim Ferriss?

  And in your mind at that time, if you remember, like, what is your goal?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  I have it.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  I am living it. This is the beautiful thing, as I was reflecting, it was a really wonderful thing for you for having me. It was such a cool opportunity to reflect on this. And I was like, I had it. That was it. I was broke and I was living it. And I got a tattoo right before this. It's a paraphrase, it's right here, it's, I don't need to flash the audience, but it's a paraphrase of Thucydides that is, "The secret to freedom is courage." And he also says, "The secret to happiness is freedom." It's a paraphrase essentially of, I think, a quote in the Peloponnesian War. And I was so happy, so broke, so unable to feed myself. And I have tried to remind myself of that is the secret. It's just like when you step into it and you're living it, nothing more needed to happen.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  I would have liked the business to do well and it eventually did, but I was there. So at this time, I'm getting everything that I want in a degree, but also I'm running out of money and I'm planning airline points to get back home. So what happens is we get this course. It's from Clay Collins and it's about pre-selling an online course. And at the point, I've done so much coaching that I'm actually getting tired of saying the same types of things over and over again now. Now it's just happening via Skype at the time. At the same time, you got to workshop your material. So each stage is important. Like, so I'm dialing it in until I get bored of like, okay, this is what works. This is what creates transformation. But now my role is just robotic at this point. It's not as dynamic as I'd like it to be.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  So given that I can do it once and be done, maybe I should just make an online course. Thank God for this pre-selling thing though, because it runs you through this process. At this time, I've been posting on the blog. I think we have 5,000 people on the email list. And I follow this template, which is something like, hey, guys, I was about to go into a cave and make this online course. And I remembered that that's stupid because I'm making it for you. So before I sit down to record it, I just want to know, what is the biggest problem you're facing related to charisma? If you reply to me, I'm going to make the whole course, but I'm going to make a piece of it for free that I'm just going to give everyone who replies. So they come in, they give me all their answers. Step two, you take all of those things, you bucket them and categorize them

• 47:45Speaker 02

  and you put them into like radio buttons, ranking things in one of those survey monkeys, whatever you want. Say, hey, guys, thank you so much for writing in. I think I have the top things. If you would just vote on which one you most want me to actually make the free piece on, that would help me to decide which piece to make for you. So then I get back and the first thing it was how to make an amazing first impression, how to feel unshakably confident, how to have a conversation that flows effortlessly, how to tell great stories, how to have body language that's magnetic and how to be Be a good leader and in that order is what they ranked them, you know, number one, first impression, number two, confidence. So I get this and they just gave me the outline of my course in addition to all of the specific phrases, questions, things that well, need to be answered.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  So I say, hey, guys, I'm making a course. It's going to cover these things. First impressions, how to be unshakably confident, effortless, you know, all this stuff. It's going to sell for eventually, I think I started it at 800, we lowered it to 600, but it's going to sell for 800 bucks. You can get it for $500, but here's the catch. One, you're going to have to do a one-on-one call with me, right? Which is exactly what they want to do. Two, there's going to be group interaction throughout the whole time. And three, I really want your feedback throughout the course so that I'm building it exactly to be what you want. And so we offer 25 seats like this and that's the most money we make $12,500. We sell out. People are stoked and for us it's, oh, wow, I was going to make this course and what I learned.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Now each week I get on a call, I talk to several people one-on-one. And I develop the content that I then send to them and they give their questions and it's this iterative, interactive thing over six weeks. And they, with their questions, completely reshape the course I thought I was going to make. I thought I was going to make a course about all these advanced tips and tricks. And of course, if you've done something for a while, you always overlook the beginning phases. You overlook the fear, you overlook all of those things. So we focus way more on getting through that. And the course as a result is tailored to where my average audience member is, right? The guys that I wanted to work with, that I'd started filtering by calling the company Charisma on Command. And I have all these surveys that have language that then become the sales page on the back end.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  So like, do you want to walk into a room and be the guy that people instantly notice and that they're drawn to magnetically? Like that's phrases that they wrote in their descriptions of what they were asking for and wanted. So on the back end of this. I have my outline, I have my course, I've gone through it. And so now I can go record this thing and offer it on the website. So all of a sudden, these blog posts, which had nothing to sell to, have something to sell to. So now like actual money can start coming into the business while I sleep. So we're selling this course, we're getting, you know, one a day or one every other day.

• 50:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's going to pay for your servants' quarters rent at the very least.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and yes, correct.

• 50:41Tim Ferriss?

  For sure, and much more at that, even at that rate.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my $450 a month rent becomes affordable, right? I don't, I like, I don't have to Airbnb my bed. And at this point, we pop back, we go to Las Vegas, we're flipping. When summer hits the northern hemisphere, we go home. When it hits Brazil, we go back to Brazil. And so we're just like chasing summer, basically in six to eight month increments. Vegas, Brazil, Vancouver, Brazil, Colombia.

• 51:07Tim Ferriss?

  Where are you from originally?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Pennsylvania, didn't go back there.

• 51:10Tim Ferriss?

  Pennsylvania, okay, so how did you choose Vegas?

• 51:13Speaker 02

  We exit Brazil the first time right before the World Cup. Great opportunity to Airbnb the last month of rent, get some money coming in. It was great. And so go back to Pennsylvania because I need a car. That's where I've left my car. And plan to drive out to Los Angeles. Drive across the country in three days, spend one night in Vegas. All right, that was a lot of fun. Avicii played at XS, let's try it again. Say two nights, say three nights, stayed there for 10 months. I don't know, a year. It was good food, it was really fun. We were at the time really enjoying going out. We were able to meet and talk to people and do the whole song and dance. And so we wound up getting off-campus student housing, which is the only place that had like four cheap bedrooms in Vegas for a year,

• 51:57Speaker 02

  outside of UNLV, and were in Vegas for that period. So just stayed.

• 52:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm curious, what was the durability of that first course? Or the learnings in that first course?

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:09Tim Ferriss?

  In other words, how much of an annuity has that been? Whether it's, or was it, in revenue or just in terms of? Core pieces of curriculum.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  I mean, numbers over 10 million for sure. So I've rerecorded it and I've gotten a little bit better background and, you know, they fixed the sound and one time I was traveling and so there was a new place every time. So I've rerecorded it four times and I've tried to change pieces that I didn't like, but that structure remains. The sales page remains with minor tweaks. It's not great, but it has been almost 10 years, if not 10 years at this point.

• 52:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. Yeah, amazing.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  And it's because it's like, the problems are very similar. They had, people have questions about Zoom or texting, but it was built off of core human problems that are durable and addressable. And interestingly, the refund rate has not changed over the time. Like it's, doesn't seem to be working less for the people who buy it and apply it. There's still a sizable refund rate because it's a go at your own pace online course and we have a very flexible refund policy. It hasn't, hasn't increased, so I'd like to rerecord it again.

• 53:14Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'd love to do one more rerecording, but same thing, keep it going is how I feel.

• 53:19Tim Ferriss?

  This is, might seem like a small detail, but I'm sure folks will be interested. What platform or software do you use to serve the course? What's the backend or maybe it's very explicitly through some type of platform that provides this?

• 53:35Speaker 02

  I'm sure there's better options now, but we've kind of got on and so there's inertia. It's just a WordPress with some plugins. There was a wishlist member plugin, which was hot at the time and has, you know, since sort of been depreciated and so we're rolling off of that. Sam Cart is the cart. It was one of the only carts at the time that let you do payment plans. Now it's like everybody will let you do a payment plan, but for our needs, those were the two. So it was a Sam Cart cart to a WordPress site with a gated content thing that hooked into Sam Cart.

• 54:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:05Tim Ferriss?

  So the course starts working, at least to the extent that you just described it, which was selling one a day or every other day. You then get to Las Vegas. When do things really start to ramp or when do things start to change?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  So I can afford not main city US rent at this point. I can live in Vegas. I can't live in New York. I can't live in LA. That's where we're at. At one point, I think it's when I'm in Colombia, I had a list of like, try LinkedIn, try Twitter. And the third was try YouTube and I have that piece of paper somewhere. It has a question mark. YouTube? Question mark?

• 54:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man, people would love to see that, given the size of your presence. So YouTube, question mark?

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so I had no idea. So I post on LinkedIn, I post on Twitter, and I put a video on YouTube. Now, to be fair, I put several videos on one YouTube channel that was me on the beach in Rio with the wind whipping past the lapel mic and just that didn't get any views. But I do one video on YouTube that is me analyzing a Bill Clinton debate. And it was like one of those community debates where he approaches an audience member. And I talked about the power of his eye contact in that video. And I didn't look at it for six months. One day I found that piece of paper. I was like, I should review to see how these things did. I go to LinkedIn and I've got, nobody's followed me. And I go to Twitter, nobody cares. And on YouTube, there's 100,000 views and I have like 7,000 subscribers or 3,000, something like on this

• 55:35Speaker 02

  YouTube channel. And I haven't even looked at it. That was mind bending. And I had no call to action. So it had no way to hit me, other than I had to like log into the YouTube platform, which I hadn't done. So I think it was 2016. I did a few videos at the end of 2015. But by 2016, I made the commitment that once a week, every week, I would release one YouTube video. And the first ones, this was I'd read Essentialism, and it was like, just do the thing.

• 56:01Tim Ferriss?

  Great book.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 56:02Tim Ferriss?

  Greg McKeown.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  So good. So good. Read it. Read it four times. Need to read it again.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I have a piece of artwork downstairs in this house that Greg McKeown recommended to me called The Listener. People can check it out. It's a great reminder. But not to interrupt. So you read Essentialism. Excellent book. I recommend it as well.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  He's got one story about Herbie that stuck with me so long. I'm setting up to do these YouTube videos once a week, and they're tedious. And I don't like doing them. And I don't want to. And I read, reading Essentialism, and he tells a story about a Boy Scout troop that was taking a hike. And they're trying to get to their destination. But they've got one little bit of a pudgy guy named Herbie. And he's having a hard time with his pack. And they're falling behind schedule. So they don't know what to do.

• 56:45Tim Ferriss?

  Herbie's slow. He's holding up the whole line.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Slow. And so nobody can go. So they realize that if they take Herbie's pack, and they redistribute it amongst some of the adults and the kids that can handle it. The whole troop is able to go double time and get to where they need to do and get back on time. So the question is, is there one friction point in your process that makes the thing unfun or miserable? And can you spend whatever money or do whatever you need to do to stop this? So the breakthrough was, I hated setting up the camera. And so I didn't do it immediately, but the next place that we got, I said, it must have an extra bedroom. I don't care. I will pay for the extra bedroom. I need to be able to leave this camera up. And oh my God, that changed it. It was like being able to walk in, press play and do it

• 57:31Speaker 02

  versus 15 minutes of focus. Oh my God, it was terrible. That was a breakthrough.

• 57:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the Herbie parable, I believe, originated in manufacturing, specifically when you have like a serial or a linear production process where if there's a machine in the middle or a lack of inventory at point X that causes that type of slowdown, you need to figure it out, AKA Herbie. But it can be applied to so many different things. And in your case, video production.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. I love watching your work because you so often remind me that there's emotional Herbies of like, I don't enjoy this, so I don't want to do it. And so the question of what if this were 10 times enjoyable? What if I had to have fun doing this? Those are always the Herbies for me. It's always, I don't like this thing. It's okay. What if you were only allowed to do the thing that you like? It's like, oh, well, then I'd do a lot more of it and I could see some results. So we start making these YouTube videos. I do a big one at the beginning that is in January of maybe 2016, I do a video that says, I think Donald Trump's going to be the president. Here's why. You know, I'm watching his debates. Scott Adams is before me on this, but I'm watching debates. I see the same thing. That

• 58:44Speaker 02

  starts to pick up. Other videos are going. I'm analyzing Conor McGregor. And I think it was from, it was January or February or March of that year, the business tripled. And I think it tripled again within like two months.

• 58:56Tim Ferriss?

  And is that due to the success of that video?

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Of the videos.

• 59:01Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Cumulative videos.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Yes. So I'm doing Donald Trump, Conor McGregor, taking Game of Thrones characters. We can talk about fame jacking if you want.

• 59:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's talk about it. Let me ask you intermediate question, just to interrupt my own. That's a creative questioning, which is how did your call to action or flow change? Like, did the funnel change now that people are finding you on YouTube?

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  Was it just a link in a description? Or how did the actual business funnel function?

• 59:33Speaker 02

  So it's evolved and I'm going to take you up to present day to answer the question. So at first it was, hey, guys, if you like this, leave a comment, subscribe. I wasn't thinking about it. So subscribers, which was, okay, fine. Then it was, okay, you need a tripwire. And the idea in online marketing is that there's this low cost product that you want to get people onto your email list, give them a taste of something, and then they can buy your low cost product and then they'll buy your larger product. So we set up this online funnel that was, by the way, if you liked that video and you want to know how to make a great first impression, here's a free piece of content that's like four minutes long on the basics of how to do it. You get that content, it's four minutes of how to do it. And then it's one minute of, hey, do you want help implementing this?

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Buy a section of this larger charisma university course. And then when you're in that, at the end of that, okay, so now you know how to make a great first impression. Do you want to know all this other stuff? So it's standard online marketing. Give them a piece, offer them more. Give them another piece, offer them more. Solve a problem, offer them help with the next problem.

• 1:00:35Tim Ferriss?

  And for those astute listeners, you may remember that how to make a first impression was straight from the interviews and then the Survey Monkey ranking.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Yes, correct.

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, for instance, even after writing five books, I have one in my mind that I would like to work on sometime soon, but I think the way I'm going to approach it is actually going back to the origins of the four hour work week. And I will maybe at a place like UT Austin in an entrepreneurship or business class to workshop it, right? Teach you for a semester. And you learn really quickly what works and what does not work.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Tim Ferriss?

  When you have an audience, whether it's the one on one interviews and something that you collate and then rank, or having an audience who's unlikely to give you kind of courtesy claps. So TBD, but I asked you about the funnel, but what else would you like to say about that, if anything? I didn't mean to interrupt.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  No, no, well, the funnel has evolved. I think it's worth saying that there's so many sacred cows of everything, online marketing. This is how you do it. What I've since seen is that These videos, without intending to be, they're mini webinars. They're 10 minutes of content. I don't need to take everybody through this multi-step funnel. Here's a small thing. So what we started doing, a breakthrough a few years later, was just, do you want to buy our $600 course? Here's some testimonials. And so that was a Forex conversions of just being like, everyone who's watched our videos has at this point watched 10 of them. And they don't need to be drip-fed this thing. They need to be offered jab, jab, jab. Gary Vaynerchuk calls it right hook. It's like, dude, we've been jabbing for years at this point. Like, offer them the product.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Don't offer them the email list. So that was a huge, huge increase to our thing was when I realized, oh, we've been just giving value consistently. We don't need to do the same game that somebody who's doing paid ads would do, who is just totally cold traffic and you don't know them at all.

• 1:02:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if they walk into the Ferrari dealership, you're allowed to sell them a Ferrari. You don't have to let them walk out with a brochure.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, please. Okay, we got them on our email list. These are great leads. Call them back. Yeah, so that was that. The fame jacking was something that is worth mentioning, which is, it's since changed, but in order to get traction on some of these social media platforms, you need something that hooks people. And you're my face in front of a white wall, ain't it? That's not going to fly for me. So what we found was if I can comment on somebody that is known, Conor McGregor, Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, how does Tyrion Lannister, what sort of principles is he applying? Even though it's a work of fiction, we were able to take a Game of Thrones fan and by the end of it, make them a charisma on command fan. And so we were able to start fishing in all of these pools that I was interested.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Like, we were doing breakdowns of the Marvel actors and why their interviews were so fun. Or like, how come this viral moment where Robert Downey Jr. gets in a tiff with an interviewer? What can you learn about it? So to call that fame jacking, which is basically, look, there's someone else who is famous. You start with them on the thumbnail. You speak to a broad problem, how to deal with a rude person. And by the end, they've become not just a Robert Downey Jr. fan, but a charisma on command fan. That was sort of the goal. And that helped a tremendous amount of growth.

• 1:03:46Tim Ferriss?

  You said it's changed. Is that an algorithmic change? Because I see that playbook being used

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Tim Ferriss?

  a fair amount still on YouTube. But how has the game changed?

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  What I see is that in short form content, there isn't the decision to click. There is only what captures attention. And so there's many things that capture attention. One is Robert Downey Jr., a guy who you know. But another is can you walk up these sticky stairs on Mr. Beast thing or like what it looks like to run with $10,000? So you actually don't have to sell the click on the short form content in the same way. And just the meta, people have realized, I think this is what's beautiful about YouTube. There's these incredible titles that are like, I went to every state's Airbnb, or I sat in a circle for 36 hours, or I gave a homeless man 10K. At the time in YouTube, it was still kind of, there was this sacred cow belief

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  that it had to look like what you titled a blog article. How to do something in seven steps, like, you know, six things, listicle blog titles. And I think YouTube has started to really find its own formatting identity, which is not what had traditionally worked with blogs. And maybe blogs will start picking it up from YouTube. But I see that you don't need to do fame jacking in order to succeed in the same way. There's many other avenues in order to do it.

• 1:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  I want to touch on maybe a few expansions of that just briefly for folks. So you might recall back in the day, this is, let's just say, maybe even pre-Evan Pagan and so on. If you were to look at different types of online marketing, a standard operating procedure was long sales letters with lots of yellow highlights. And that was how you did it, period. That was the scripture of online marketing. But lo and behold, that isn't the only way to do things. And in fact, you can approach it completely differently. Now, if you go through almost any website now that sells software as a service,

• 1:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  you'll see somewhere on the product comparison or on the checkout portion, when you're selecting features or plans, they'll have three options. The middle will say most popular. There's a very cheap one with half the features you need. There's a super expensive one that only 2% are ever going to consider. And then there's most popular in the middle. And While the presentation changes, I would say there are a few takeaways. Number one is you can always experiment and break the rules. Number two is there are certain things that don't tend to change that much. So you can still look at capes on advertising for copy editing.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  You can look at old print advertisements from Ogilvy. You can read, for instance, Influence. So there are certain things you can study. Like if drawing is learning how to see, sure, you might have a crayon, a pencil, a paintbrush, a piece of charcoal. But those are tools that can be adapted based on certain base principles. Then you can feel free. Once you have an understanding of some of these core fundamental concepts, then you can experiment to your heart's content, right? And you can start to break stuff. I don't know. I mean, a lot of it, because platforms have so much value capture and are so powerful now.

• 1:07:16Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, if they do decide they want to promote X, Y, or Z, and they have a template for making you conform to that, then I would imagine there's a decent amount of pressure to be pushed in that direction lest your videos or tweets, whatever tweet is called on X, or whatever it might be, doesn't get the distribution that you would like. Now, you mentioned shorts or shorter clips not needing maybe the type of sell to be watched ostensibly because of the shorter duration. Do you see much of a conversion from shorter clips to viewing of longer clips or subscribers? I don't know which metric is the one that matters, but I'm curious.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  We ran a little experiment. I have not put a lot of energy into shorts because the answer was there's a couple of things. To your first point, I'll come to shorts. With all of those Ogilvies, whatever, what I've found is that if you take the tried and true ways of doing it and you run it through your own value system and you don't allow for things that don't align with yourself. So I'll just give you a, for instance.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  We used to do discounts because that's what you do. You do a discount. And I got an email from a guy who was like, hey, I love your stuff. But like, last week, my friend who didn't buy your thing and was on your email list for 30 days got offered this thing for $400 and I'd bought it immediately for 600. And I realized that we were, in a way, we were penalizing our most strident, ardent, willing customers for not sitting on the fence and offering discounts down the line. So I made the decision to chop off discounts. It hurt the business by 20%. But you get an audience of people that has a different degree of trust with you. And so all of these rules, like you can win short term by doing a lot of different things. You can do clickbait titles.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  You do all sorts of things, but you're establishing a relationship with every business decision. So I find that like running all of those things through the center is helpful. So when it comes to shorts, one of them is, I don't really like shorts. I find that I've never really gotten tremendous amount of value from a short. I've gotten value from YouTube videos, blog posts, videos, all sorts of things, but I don't connect with them. So I haven't pushed shorts. We did a few experiments. And what I found for the way that we do things is no, that we didn't see, we got a ton of subscribers, but we didn't see a strong connection between long form and short form and purchases. I'm sure that somebody else could make that happen, even though that was the way the wave was going. That's not the way that my wave breaks.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  That was not a particular trend I was interested in.

• 1:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think to date, I would say, and I'm sure my team would have additional thoughts, but I don't think we've seen any correlation next to no impact whatsoever on short form success. And by success, I mean, some of our shorts have had 100 million views. And then the impact on the long form interview that it was cut from, literally imperceptible.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  You could not see an impact.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:10:16Tim Ferriss?

  And yet, it's like, well. Is that now a necessary survival/distribution tactic? I'm not qualified to say, but also do not feel compelled to focus on clips. We do surface clips from longer interviews, but I do sometimes wonder if it's to the detriment of the audience that I most like to cultivate, which is an audience who recognizes you cannot achieve any level of mastery, nor can you retain anything effectively if all of your information is consumed in 10-second increments. Not evolved to do it. Doesn't work that way.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  I totally agree. I'm so curious for you. What do you want from the podcast these days? Like, because it seems to me, and I'm sure you've had this many times, like, look, I've done it. I'm safe. I can survive with the money that I have. What is success for you at this point?

• 1:11:11Tim Ferriss?

  The podcast, you know, I've thought, especially with the 10-year anniversary not too long ago and hitting some major milestones in terms of total downloads and listens and so on. I thought, well, if I were going to pack up my tent and move on, this would be a decent time to do it. However, I suppose for myself, I just realized, well, even if I weren't recording conversations, I would still be having these conversations. And therefore, for the cost of a microphone and using an online service to record a podcast with some basic, I mean, it's not fancy lighting, as anyone can tell if they're watching me right now.

• 1:11:56Tim Ferriss?

  But for the minimal cost of production, especially when you consider that a lot of these conversations I would be having would be via Zoom or FaceTime video. I might be walking around outside, having this conversation, but I could also have a headset on where I'm recording. So the lifestyle inconvenience to me of recording the conversations I would have otherwise is close to zero. And I would say success is...

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  Having thought provoking conversations, ideally I learn something or feel something from those conversations, maybe both. And then I get to share them because the origin of the podcast, I mean, it's easy for me to forget, but I mean, there are a lot of factors that contributed to it in 2014. But one of them was, I was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco at the time. And I was having the most incredible conversations with brilliant people, these people I thought were brilliant. The density of intelligence there is so high. I mean, there are a lot of issues as well, but it just seemed like such a shame, not too dissimilar. I mean, it's slightly different, but it's closer

• 1:13:10Tim Ferriss?

  than people might realize where it's like you're doing the one on one coaching. It's like, yeah, it's good to help one person. But then if I want to convey this to a second person, let alone like 200 people, I have to repeat it. And for me, these conversations were like sand through the fingers, right? That I could not in any way convey to someone else. And I was like, well, let me just try to record some of these, which is why the first 10 to 15 were with friends of mine also to make the lift as light as possible. And I feel like I would definitely miss recording because I would, let's just say I quit the podcast today. Next week, I would have an amazing conversation with someone and I'd be like, God, I'd be like, you know, it's so selfish of me not to just click record

• 1:13:55Tim Ferriss?

  on an iPhone with a half decent headset to record this thing. Because fuck, you know, it's a real privilege to have access to the network that I have access to. And which doesn't mean, by the way, that everyone's going to know every person I talk to. I'd prefer strongly if they don't. But the success to me right now is it's honestly scratching my own itch. It's like, for instance, I mean, I'm thinking of potentially compiling a whole lot of four hour work week related case studies because very early, very early in my entrepreneurial journey, and I'm not recommending people go buy this book. I think

• 1:14:36Tim Ferriss?

  it's out of print anyway, but Entrepreneur Magazine had this book called Young Millionaires. And it was like two to three pages profile of each young millionaire, which meant somewhere between 20 and 35, I suppose. And it was like, how much cost to start the business? Like $200, you know, how much they made last year in revenue, next year estimated revenue, type of business. And it ranged from like pest control to crime scene cleanup.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  To, yeah, pretty gnarly, to cosmetics, to forestry. It was like, the range and scope was so inspiring to me that the magic of that and the impact that it had on my psyche, I didn't take it and apply it right away. I was too young. But seeing that it was possible has made me think about assembling, you know, effectively a book that would be like the.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  Wow. Oh, I love that. I love that.

• 1:15:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  I got chills. I love that. Oh, my God.

• 1:15:38Tim Ferriss?

  Because with the four hour work week, it's like in the beginning, and even now, understandably with a title like that, people are like, yeah, bullshit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, you work more than four hours a week. I'm like, well, I'm not just gonna like, I'm not just gonna lay outside staring at the grass, rubbing cocoa butter on my stomach. I like building things and I like having these kind of conversations. But there are so many other types of pushback in the early stages. Keeping in mind, I've revised the four hour work week, but the last time I did it was 2009. And the principles really apply. The frameworks still all apply. The technology, forget about it, like, almost all outdated, but that doesn't matter. If you grasp the principles, then you can find the methods.

• 1:16:21Tim Ferriss?

  But a lot of the types of pushback that people would say, oh, well, it's easy for a single guy, like, I'm a single mom, or I have four kids, or I'm in a different country, or I'm in this struggling economy, or fill in the blank. For every possible excuse that I have heard, I have received a case study from someone who fits that exact profile, who figured it out. So the idea that I could collect those in some fashion in a compendium just seems, A, like, it'd be so much fun and so gratifying for me after almost 20 years of this book being out. And therefore, as always, us having this conversation is a way for me to feel into that.

• 1:17:07Tim Ferriss?

  And to be like, okay, like what aspects of this? Like you said, when I mentioned the book that like chills like, okay, what pieces of it? I'm like, okay, I get an extra big smile so big that my earpiece keeps falling out. Also have, I have swimmer's ears, so my, my canals. Oh, no. On my right ear, so it just keeps falling out. But that's a very long answer to your question, but success for me with the podcast is just recording conversations that I would want to have anyway, which for a successful podcast is maybe harder than people would realize. So hard.

• 1:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Because if you want to protect traction, distribution and audience size and ideally grow it, that is more and more every day being dictated by platforms with priorities that are not the same as your priorities. And if you really double click on that, look at it, study audience capture as well, almost every financial incentive would push you to break that rule and choose guests based on the number of Oprah moments or salacious clips you can pull from an interview that you can then use on the platforms to drive some type of growth engine, although growth

• 1:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  for what end is an open question. A lot of people make YouTube work, but in my particular case, I'm just not really video first, so it's never been particularly a strong performing compared to audio. It requires constant revisitation to instill the habit of me only having conversations with people I would want to have a conversation with. Yep. Right? Because. Oh, my God. Yeah, because if I could have like on some completely off the wall lawmaker or I could have on, who knows, I could step on a bunch of third rails politically speaking, right? I could pull from current events and light off some audio and video dynamite with talking

• 1:19:20Tim Ferriss?

  about the Middle East. There are many things that I could do, which would get a lot more attention than me finding like a Japanese swordmaker who no one has ever heard of. But when you start to put on a mask. Adopting practices that are not of your own invention, but because you're complying with incentives. The concern is not that it just ends up hollowing you out inside, because that can happen. The risk is that you actually become the mask you're wearing. And that those behaviors change how you think and change your own beliefs, which I think is inevitable on some level. So in any case, that's probably more than either of us bargained for.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  No. Oh goodness, I've wrestled with this endlessly and I absolutely hit a period where I felt like, to a degree, I allowed that audience. So at first it was, I wanted to make this video. I think what Bill Clinton does with his eyes is so fascinating. I think it's so interesting that Donald Trump is probably going to be president and like, I love Game of Thrones. And then it was, will you guys want more Game of Thrones videos? Let me do another Game of Thrones, Carrie. You know, like, well, you guys really liked that one. And what you're describing to me is not just a business struggle. It is a legitimate emotional, spiritual struggle to be like, do I choose myself in the face of the world offering me all of this temptation to be something else? And there were periods where the answer to that is I, I compromised.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  And it's like, you know, I didn't kill anyone or do any, but I made the video that I didn't really want to make and it did really well. And then, okay, well, I gotta make another one. And I burned out. I had to step away for years and didn't make videos for years because I believed that I hated making videos. And what I learned was that I hated losing my creative well as I chased approval and views and more.

• 1:21:17Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about the timeline on that. You are, let's see, let me see if these are lining up. So you're in Vegas, you begin to make these videos, which you enjoyed making about Bill Clinton, about, I suppose Bill Clinton came maybe even prior to that. But using, to use your term, fame jacking. So Jon Snow, real characters or otherwise, Keanu Reeves. Maybe Keanu Reeves came later, but in any case, those videos start to do very well. You realize that you can offer the higher priced products upfront or reasonably soon with testimonials and you get conversion. You don't have to lead someone through a 12 step process.

• 1:21:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I suppose what I'm wondering is, what does the trajectory look like from there? And how long was it before you decided, I just can't do this? I need to take a break.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  It's so funny, you know this, there's two lines. There's the line of when you've created the value, which is like, I created the value sleeping on the couch in Brazil. And then there's the line of when the money starts coming in. And so there's a delay. So you're creating the value and then the money comes in later. But there's also a delay on the backside, which is you stop creating the value, but the money keeps going up. And this is every cash cow business, you know, that starts cannibalizing itself and not treating customers well, but is still when Marvel makes the next sequel to Marvel movie and it does well. And they don't realize that they're eating their own future. So I would say the flip for me was 2018 to when it shifted from, I personally want to make these videos and I'm excited and I'm learning something in every video to, oh, I've learned what makes them clap.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  And now I want more claps. I want more clapping. The money was secondary, but it's like, oh, they like it. They love me, right? Every video bigger.

• 1:23:04Tim Ferriss?

  So that was a few years after starting the channel at that point?

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Yes, and I'd been doing it weekly. There was an authentic drive to do it weekly that's then slowly shifted. And it became, I don't want to do this. And then it was, I definitely can't do this. And I, at the time, so many other things were going on in my life. We can go into it or not, but there was a moment, probably in 2018, where I needed to have a conversation with my co-founder that said, hey, I think we're no longer in alignment with this business. Like I've been driving the growth with these videos. Your projects have not succeeded in the same way, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of honesty. We have to have a talk about our 50 50 split. But money was never the drive. The drive was always be with my friends in Brazil.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  And so I didn't care, but there was a, as my own inability to have sincere, authentic conflict crept in to the business, it cascaded downwards. So I'm avoiding having a difficult conversation with my co-founder. We hire somebody else to cover that up. Turns out years later that we hire somebody who fabricated. A bunch of stuff and stole money from the business and all of it was just from this core pattern of not wanting to face the problem and just wanting to squint at it and say, everything's good, you know, like the money's coming in, people like it, etc. And so what happened was, and again, I was so happy, broke in Brazil, sleeping on the ground, unable to afford food.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  And then I had the experience, the cliched one of I've made more money than I've ever made. Everybody wants more. They think it's all great and I feel like shit. I feel awful. And then I have a breakup right before my 30th birthday and I'm going to collapse some things. We can go into anything. I am invited to an ayahuasca retreat. I have been, you know, having these issues that have not surfaced. I don't smoke weed. I don't drink. I'm a straight edge, but fuck it. I'll give it a try. I go headfirst into this ayahuasca experience with no idea what's coming. And that starts what has now been a seven year process of completely turning my life upside down and having to face

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  everything that I hadn't looked at, which was, of course, these things in the business, but even more importantly, the patterns of avoidance and people pleasing and seeking that had been birthed in my childhood. And so happy to touch on all of that. I know it's a broad spanning.

• 1:25:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, there's, we could spend probably two hours on six different facets of that. Let's start with coming back to the secret to freedom is courage, right? Like, was there a catalyzing event? Was there a book you read? How did you go from squinting at the problem? Because this is, I would say, shockingly common, but it's not shocking because I see it so often. Co-founder challenges, co-founder splits, these happen all the time. And when you have, it's particularly challenging in a situation where you have some accepted 50 50 division because there's no real tiebreaker. It gets even more complicated when you have like governance and board of directors and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  But, I mean, almost no relationship is 50 50.

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  It would be weird if it was. It'd be so weird.

• 1:26:18Tim Ferriss?

  And actually, that clip I mentioned that got 100 million plus views, it was Brene Brown talking about how marriage is never 50 50. And I would say, the question for me that I'm sure people are wondering is how did you go from the conflict avoidant, kind of people pleasing?

• 1:26:37Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe fear-based, who knows, kind of squinting at the problem, hiring people to try to paper it over, et cetera, et cetera, to having whatever come-to-Jesus conversation presumably you guys had.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Tim Ferriss?

  How did that happen?

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  It took years and the catalyst was not the business because the sacred center of it for me was never money, it was the friendship and I was acting out a pattern to try to keep things good with us and he was doing his half of that pattern to keep things good in the way that we thought to do it, which was let's not address this and it was on me to address it because I was the one that was beginning to be frustrated, resentful, subtly trying to influence, change, encourage, coach, you know, everything other than say, this isn't working for me. And how did I do that? It was a multi-year process of facing brick by brick, those familial patterns of like,

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  I'm afraid you won't love me if I say that I'm upset with you. Like, I'm afraid that you won't love me if I take what I think is my fair share. I'm afraid that I'll be alone and I hear it in my voice, like, I still carry that in me. And if you look at the business, charisma on command, even like the how to make Tim like you in a conversation, how to make somebody, like, there is this founding belief that if I could just communicate clearly enough, do more, say more, be more, that connection would just happen.

• 1:28:06Tim Ferriss?

  How did you decide it was time? Right, like, what did it look like to go from doing the work with all these modalities to, all right, game time?

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Have the conversation?

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Again, it was pieces. It was first, it was oblique conversations, saying, hey, I'm not feeling, this isn't feeling great, and then seeing what I got back and then it was more confrontational and the essential problem was I did not know how to have a boundary and tried to negotiate boundaries endlessly with people that I loved instead of saying, I love you, but like, past this line is not okay with me and I will not comply. It was, well, can't you see why that would be fair for me to, to have this perspective? So, if there was a shift, it was, the big thing that happened was, over these years, I had started to develop a therapeutic relationship with a therapist and a number of friendships where I was... Being met in ways that I did not think were possible and to not use therapy language.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Like, I felt that people wanted to hear the ways in which I was upset with them or angry and wanted to repair in ways that actually didn't just paper over the problem, but felt good. And when I brought that possibility, I was like, holy shit, this can happen. Let me bring myself. That was not the result of my conversation with my co-founder. It did not go that way. And knowing that it existed now and then not getting it there made it like, okay, this is no longer working. We need to separate. And so what happened was, first, it was with the friendship, but secondarily with the business, it was tough for me to come back to, to say, I don't want you to make videos anymore for the business. I don't feel that they're aligned with what I want to say.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  I made videos for, I don't know, the first three-ish years and then got burned out. It was like, will you please step in? And always didn't want to look at the videos, you know, like, whatever the money's coming in, I don't want to see. And when I, I actually had to sit down and literally watch them. And not that there's anything objectively wrong with them, but they weren't aligned with what felt right for me. And I had completely abdicated that responsibility of saying, this doesn't feel good. Confronting that, I felt so evil and awful and bad for having that perspective. Like, I was being too cruel or too mean, but I had become more grounded in, not saying that you shouldn't make videos ever, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this, but this doesn't work for me. So we just paused, literally making videos on the channel for one year.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Business starts to nosedive, right? Like, not immediately, but these videos don't get views forever. Business falls off 20%, 30%, 50%. And it was, again, a question of like, which, it wasn't a game. It was, I just don't feel good about that. And so through that process, we were talking about the future of the business. And what I buy, would he sell? We couldn't find an agreement on who would do what. And I can talk about the negotiation if you want, but we finally settled on I'm gonna buy the business all out. I'll pay you for the piece and you'll have no restrictions. You can make any sort of content that you want on any other channel, but this is gonna go. I'm gonna take this. I'm gonna give you cash. And honestly, it was, it's what both

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  of us wanted. I think the thing that we didn't acknowledge is that we had fundamentally different drives, whereas mine was more creative expression and his was more financial security. And that split, it's very tough. You know, it just doesn't align well when, especially when what you said, I did not feel he has a different opinion that we were equally contributing to the financial success of the business. So yeah, it was harrowing. He, more importantly than the business split was that it was my best friend and we're not that anymore. And so it was, it was going through the wringer. It was Dark Knight of the Soul type challenges. So grateful for it. And it was painful as hell to, to experience.

• 1:31:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm sorry you guys experienced that. I would say that in theory, sometimes in practice, if everything's going perfectly, 50/50 informally agreed upon, sounds great, right? But in practice, it can be very challenging. And if you were to do this again, if you were to partner with someone else, let's just say that it actually made sense. Someone came to you with a channel with an equal number of subscribers, like, hey, let's join forces. I think we can 3X. And let's just say that conformed with your artistic expression and what you want to do. I would imagine you would have some type of partnership agreement that can function as a prenup in the sense that you would have a termination

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  clause, right? Where it spells out what happens in the case of a split, which is an area where also conflict avoidant folks get themselves into long-term trouble. Not saying you, but like in general.

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  100% me.

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  100% me. They get themselves into long-term trouble because they want to avoid the short-term discomfort of talking about the ingredients that would go into such an agreement. And man, oh, man. Yeah, it can get really, really, really messy. Like a prenup is always cleaner than a postnup.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Tim Ferriss?

  In business and in life. Where do things stand now with the business?

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  So I'm making monthly payments to him. We agreed we want to fix some that I would pay over a period of time. I am sole owner and it's exactly what I want. The business for me always has been the crucible of emotional growth. Like from the moment where, am I going to press publish on this thing to, am I gonna do private coaching? Or am I gonna move to Brazil? And it's always been the question of can you hold your center in the face of temptation? Not to. And there's a long period where with my relationship with him, I lost it. I lost my center and that's not his fault. But God, it's so amazing. I come back and I step into this audience capture moment where like, I want to prove myself that I still got it,

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  that I can do it, except I don't want to make the old bangers that I used to. I don't want to like throw fastballs down the middle to the fat part of the bell curve any longer. And so I'm facing continually the challenges of letting go of my ego, of the guy who, you know, did it and having the business that is authentic to me. And I have not sorted through it. Even in preparation for this conversation, half of me wants to sit and dial in my stories so that I'm perfect and I nail it. And I, you know, it hit that, hit that punchline. And the other half of me is like, dude, go in empty, go in, go in, go in empty.

• 1:34:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I like rough draft.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, rough draft, right?

• 1:34:41Tim Ferriss?

  More than like finished 60 minute comedy special on Netflix.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. Ted Talk. Welcome.

• 1:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I, I appreciate the vulnerability and the candor. And I am going to ask you at some point, I'm just going to plant the seed because I'll let it germinate a bit, which is other critical decisions that you made in your entrepreneurial journey, could be anything, could be a tiny detail that ended up making a big difference, could be anything at all, like other decisions or milestones that were really important. I'll buy some time though. So do you still recommend, I've actually never read this book, but Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon?

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  So good. Now, I haven't read it in maybe seven or eight years, maybe longer. But if you do read it and you're a crunch for time, you can skip to the chapters on the pillars. He's got some preparation on what self-esteem is and the history of it. But if you haven't worked on your self-esteem at all, it's the first stop to go to. If you have more experience, you might be more familiar with it.

• 1:35:44Tim Ferriss?

  And what should people expect to gain from this? How did you find this book in the first place?

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  Goodness, that Tucker Max message board was a lot of the books that I that was where I found the game and it might have been six pillars of self-esteem as well. I think it was through something like that and I got into, you know, it's like a 1970s psychology, personal development book, but it's perennial. What people can expect, there's these exercises that people are discovering the power of, which is sentence completions exercises. So it'll run you through each chapter and talk about how personal responsibility is a critical element of self-esteem or whatever. But then it adds at the end, it's got these sentence stems. If I took 5% more responsibility for myself today, blank. And the idea is that you can write or speak just free. Like if I took 5% more responsibility for myself today, I would eat healthy.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  If I took 5% more responsibility for myself today, I would call my parents and tell them that I love them, whatever it is that is honest for you in that thing. And if you go through these, usually like the fifth, sixth one, you're just like, oh, damn. And so some of them were, I would have talked to that girl at Whole Foods and it was, ah, crap. There was one, there was a woman who I dated, who I had seen her and I went back and then I did my pillars of self-esteem and I went, oh crap. And I walked back to Whole Foods and I said, I had to talk to you. I went home and wrote my sentences and if I had more courage, if I had 5% more courage, I would have asked you on a date and that became a relationship.

• 1:37:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's that sort of stuff.

• 1:37:16Tim Ferriss?

  She's a slow shopper.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  No, no, she was, she worked at Whole Foods. She was, she was at the counter. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wearing leg braces or she's shopping for so long.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  She was easily trackable.

• 1:37:27Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay. Amazing. All right. So we will link to that in the show notes. This is one I was curious about. What was the last psychiatrist blog?

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, you don't know this?

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  No, never heard of it.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  To me, he is the secret godfather of bloggers on the internet. Like a lot of the people that you might've liked from crack.com or whatever, he wrote. It was a pseudonym. People think they know who he is. He's likely a psychologist or psychiatrist and he has incredibly.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  Thought provoking stuff. Now, if you read it, you're gonna go, "Well, that doesn't make sense." And that's kind of a leap, but it is very thought provoking in reading it. And at the time, he stopped writing in like 2013 or something.

• 1:38:10Tim Ferriss?

  But the old posts are still up?

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  I don't even know if the old websites, somebody's cataloged them because there's an internet fandom around it. But if I could give you some basic things.

• 1:38:19Tim Ferriss?

  Think the maintenance of certification exam is fetish, 10 extra seconds would have saved true deductives finale. Okay, he's got all sorts of random stuff.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Oh, he's all over the place.

• 1:38:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 2014, looks like the last post.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  He discusses how advertising doesn't just condition you what you want, it conditions how you learn what to want. So, as an example, people will watch a Lexus commercial. And they'll think, "I didn't fall for that. I don't want to buy a Lexus." And his point is, "Yeah, but you think that that's what a pretty woman looks like, the woman who moves towards the Lexus." And so, he's got a couple of maxims which are interesting, which is, "If you see it, it's for you." Meaning like if you're consuming a piece of advertising and you think it's not impacting you, it's been split tested to make it to your eyeballs. And yes, technically, there's a chance that you're resisting, but it is teaching you how a watch is a status symbol. And maybe you don't think you need a Patek Philippe,

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  but you learned that this is what money looks like because the background has a bookshelf. And now you think that books are what make people want things. So he talks about how two things have happened. We've, one, lost the ability to self-reference internally our desires, which is exactly in line with what we were talking about. It's all memetic desire. What do you want that you want that you want, that I can't find my own wanting in it? And he talks about how we have become deeply narcissistic collectively as a society. We see our own reflection and image everywhere. And many people do not have the capacity to genuinely love and encounter another. It's just what my wife says about me, what my kids say about me, that sort of a thing.

• 1:40:04Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So that is just the last psychiatrist.com. All right, let's come back to critical decisions, or they don't have to be critical, important decisions. If you were basically teaching a class about your entrepreneurial journey, a seminar, and you were highlighting some of the things that actually really made a difference, maybe they looked small at the time, maybe they looked really big at the time. Anything else come to mind that we have not yet discussed?

• 1:40:31Speaker 02

  So a lot of them we have. So allow me to run through the ones because maybe I'll find something new. So if I really go to critical decisions, there were all of the early ones about this isn't my 10 out of 10, and I'm willing to let it go. That was repeated throughout the business. There was this phase of making videos where I'd read essentialism and it became get everything out of my way so that I can do this thing. And that was rocket ship growth. It was like, let shit go awry, problems are arising, do not come to me. There's a balance there that I haven't quite figured out because what happens is a lot of little things go wrong, but the net of me making these videos absolutely

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  obliterates and cancels them out. And there comes a compounding bill when you've just hired that person and just let that culture persist and it becomes, it at some point needs to be addressed, which is what eventually did need to happen with the company. But there was a period of just like rocket ship growth by letting small problems accrue. There was getting that extra room was really big so that I could film for the video.

• 1:41:37Tim Ferriss?

  Handling the Herbie.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  Handling my Herbies.

• 1:41:40Tim Ferriss?

  There was the rebranding.

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  The rebranding early. Yeah, the course, the building the course. Here's one. There was between V3 and V4, I went to Jay Abraham. He had a private coaching thing. He's one of these old school business coaches.

• 1:41:56Tim Ferriss?

  He's super old school. He has a great book on joint ventures. I haven't read it in more than a decade, but all the myriad forms that joint partnerships and joint ventures can take, pretty wild. Some of the negotiating gambits, kind of guerrilla marketing and partnership approaches. Yeah, Jay Abraham.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  So I have private coaching with Jay Abraham, and he asks me, who's the person you most want to take your course? I say, Tim Ferriss or Tony Robbins. And he says, if Tim Ferriss found your course and took it right now, how would you feel? I went, I don't want him to.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  And so he said, that's a problem. I said, well, it's not good enough. He said, make it good enough. So I went back. That's a cool exercise. Yeah. So I went back and filmed it and I still, you know, have insecurities and this and that, but I did my best effort to make it okay for Tim, for you. And when it was done, the next video that I made, I spoke about it and I said, at the end of the video, I said, this is the best I can do. This is the greatest thing that I can possibly make for you guys on this topic and conversions exploded. And every ad read after that had a significantly higher, like 2X or more lift in conversions. And we started getting more

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  testimonials and it was this like, if you don't believe in it fully, you're going to sell it with hesitancy. So being able to tell the truth, and the truth was not, this is the greatest thing in the world. This is my absolute best. If you like this blog, this is the best I can offer you. And at this point, the truth is, it's no longer true. I feel like I can do something better now. So I need to go back, do it again, and then be able to honestly say, this is the best I can do. And I'm sure that that will have the same impact because I subtly shy away from selling, from offering the thing that I don't fully believe in. So that was a big one. It's tough. I don't know how to parse it out, but this plus adding testimonials was a 4X conversion lift when we started

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  adding those at the end. So we used to have our call to action. It was a 10 minute video. And then like, hey, if you want to buy charisma university, it does this, it does this, it does this, it's got all this. Here's what's in it. And then it became, hey, you want to buy charisma university? Here's what somebody said about it. This helped me get a promotion. It did this. Here's what somebody else said about it. I got a girlfriend. Here's what somebody else said about it. And they were just literally photo comments that people had left in the comment section or emails that they sent in. And that combined with the, I care about this more, was a 4X total conversion lift, which was huge. There was the avoidance was something that I had to pay for on the backend, the avoidance of conflict. And I think this is one, I didn't know how to

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Just allow people to know that I was disappointed or upset or hurt or angry. I had to fix everything very, very quickly. A lot of people pleasey tendencies. Those compounding over time created a lot of issues. There was not firing the person who went up stealing. I knew that I needed to. There was a lot of like not firings that were huge. And then there was the walking away and the returning, which was really, really important. And they were both honest. The one was like, I'd rather not have this thing send me money than post videos that I don't feel aligned with, which made me like, oh my God, when you do stuff that isn't aligned for money, it signals such a lack of self-belief and self-love. This is in the Six Pillars of Self-Esteem book. Like when you start trading your beliefs for cash or approval,

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  you're just sending a signal that I can't be relied on to be myself and be safe and earn. But when you do things that are detrimental to income, like not offering a discount, like saying, I don't want these videos to go up, not to punish anyone, but just because it doesn't feel aligned. I have felt every time where I've dropped into that, this power arises in me. And so that was like, oh, holy shit. I felt like a beggar in a weird way. I'm making all this money, but I'm like feeling unsafe that I need to beg for more and ride the coattails of this thing that I built that I can no longer do. And as soon as I said, I don't want this, I felt a surge of like, oh, fuck, I have more to say. I have more to contribute. So that was huge. And then in the negotiation, the big moment was two things.

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  We'd been at deadlock for like two years. I made him an offer. It was nowhere near what he wanted. Like we were just not able to meet. There were two things that happened. One was we're starting to get into these circular spirals of things aren't working. And I paused and I said, hey, it sounds like you're really scared. And we just talked about our feelings and the fallout of the friendship and the fears that we both had. And acknowledging the emotional intensity of this, that was essential. Like pretending that this was a business transaction that we were like, that's a lie. That's not what was going on here. We were both really afraid. And speaking to that and bringing it to light moved things tremendously. And then the second one was honestly going to him and saying,

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  I'm willing to sell the business. I'm willing to sell it, but I need one thing, which is I need no non-compete. I need the ability to go and make anything that I want, anywhere. And that moved us from, I'm trying to buy from him. He wants more money. I don't want to give him the money to, okay, make me an offer. He made me an offer then for that. And I said, I'll give you 20% more than that. And it was done deal, over. And it was that.

• 1:47:19Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Tim Ferriss?

  Was there anything in particular that led to those two, call them breakthroughs? I don't think there, after two-year impasse, I think that wording is appropriate.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Oh, totally.

• 1:47:31Tim Ferriss?

  What contributed to those two things?

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  Joe Hudson. I have to give a huge shout out. Have you spoken to Joe?

• 1:47:37Tim Ferriss?

  I have spoken to Joe. Joe, I actually just featured a tweet storm of his about emotional intelligence that Sam Altman had retweeted at one point. Just shared that in my newsletter, I think, one week ago, maybe two weeks ago. Yeah. So Joe Hudson, you should explain, though, to folks who don't know the name, who he is.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  Joe's awesome. You know, it's funny, I have to admit this. It was Father's Day last Sunday, and I was making the joke, I'm like, I'm meeting all my dads in one week. It's my dad and Tim Ferriss and Joe Hudson is going to be here in two days. And it's, for me, it's a significant thing, because the truth is, and I told you, I had a ton of projections onto you. You know, like, if Tim helps me, it'll save me. And I had the same thing with Joe, because Joe's work was, it's also deeply important to me. And so it's just really cool to like, you know, drop some of the projections and meet the people. So all my dads, Joe Hudson's my third dad. He's great. He has a thing called art of accomplishment, and he acknowledges the emotional aspect of business. And not only acknowledges it, but points to the fact that if you ignore

• 1:48:37Speaker 02

  it, you will either not do as well as you could, or you will do exceedingly well and feel that empty, burnt out thing that awaits everybody who trades the inner asset for the external one. So his work was extremely helpful. I'd gone through his courses, and he offered me, because we'd been in contact, a private coaching session, because I'd helped him with some YouTube stuff. And on that, he literally suggested, he said, "Offer to sell." Like, are you willing to sell? And I was like, "Then make the offer. Do a shotgun deal where you guys both write a number on a piece of paper, and the person who is willing to spend more will take it." So just knowing that I had that, I brought that to my co-founder and said, "Look, I'm willing to make a binding agreement about this, where I am genuinely willing to buy or sell." It was that shift of like,

• 1:49:20Speaker 02

  It was, I needed to buy. He was like, well, give me more. And when it's like, look, I don't need to buy, but let's get our way out of this thing. His number came down, essentially is what happened. And there was one final thing that was, I, based on loving advice from people who were supporting me, had wanted to buy the business out of net revenue, which is to say, with safety valves on, if it doesn't perform, I don't have to pay you. And that, we couldn't find a number for. It just didn't feel good. And I had a number come through, a literal number that like, came to me. And I was like, that's way more than I've been offering him. And he said, no. And the next follow up was, yeah, because you're going

• 1:49:58Speaker 02

  to take all the risk. And I felt a surge of fear and then that self belief energy come back in like, oh my God, yes, I want the risk. I don't want this if it works. I want this through rain or shine, good or bad. Like, let me pay the price for not succeeding. And I'll take you back to one. It was the burning the boats that finally made the business work at every stage. It was taking the steps that got me to not have the contracting job to move to Brazil. I'm committed. I care about this enough to suffer and hurt if this doesn't work out. Right? And so that was also huge in that. And it was huge at the beginning of the business.

• 1:50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what a story. You know, I'm consistently amazed. It happens to me all the time in my own life, too, but how a single conversation, or a dream, or, I mean, literally, this has happened to me when I've had a fever and I've just been sick in bed, where you're looking at something, and then suddenly, say, a Joe Hudson's like, well, why don't you just do the opposite of what you're considering? And you're just like, oh shit, yeah, why don't I do that? Like, it's this revelatory experience of an off menu option suddenly seeming obviously available and viable. And it's like when someone offers

• 1:51:23Tim Ferriss?

  you a A or B, look for C type of situation. And it's so easy to say that, and it sounds trite and cliched. And even as, I would like to think at least, how much practice I have at trying to test assumptions, or I am testing assumptions, testing assumptions, and always looking for side entrances in these.

• 1:51:46Tim Ferriss?

  Off-menu options, still, there are these moments where you're blind to what is hiding in plain sight. And it's fun to hear that Joe was one of the unlocks for part of that.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  And by the way, I have to say, if you are here watching this, I can't imagine you have it. But if you haven't read The Four Hour Workweek, it's the entire thing is like, it's that energy. And I actually think what people are buying from me is that energy in the social realm. There's a third option, which is connect. The magic is available. And I think Four Hour Workweek is like, magic is available in your career.

• 1:52:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. I've been asked so many times, as you would imagine, by publishers to go back and kind of fine tune, rewrite that book. And I don't want to touch it, mostly.

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  It's too good.

• 1:52:31Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I appreciate you saying that. It somehow captured lightning in a bottle. And I'm like, look, I'm 47 right now. I wrote that when I was 29. And sure, if I read it now, there's a little bit of chest puffing and there's shit in it where I'm like, oh my God, it makes me facepalm a little bit. But for whatever reason, that book has just stood the test of time, at least over 20 years or close to it, and resonated with people from so many different age brackets, going from 15 all the way up to retiree. I don't want to touch it. And to your point, though, fundamentally, it's about calling

• 1:53:13Tim Ferriss?

  into question all the basic assumptions of career, retirement, slave, save, retire, right, the deferred life plan, and looking for alternatives that you can effectively prove are, if not realistic, at least possible vis a vis these case studies that are already in the book, which, and the vast majority of those case studies predated the publication of the book. So I do, myself also, I mean, I think that's a byproduct of enjoying books that do that on some level, right? Let My People Go Surfing, I think is the title of the book by Yvon Chouinard. I remember reading books by E Ricardo Semler and Branson, right,

• 1:53:55Tim Ferriss?

  Losing My Virginity, where it's like, okay, everyone says an airline is suicide.

• 1:54:03Tim Ferriss?

  He workshopped it in a sense because a flight got canceled. He walked around with like a sign at an airport offering charters. And then, once he had people booked for a charter, he charted a flight somewhere and then figured out how to work with, I think it was a Boeing at the time, to effectively cap his downside so that his losses were contained, but the upside was attractive. And you look at how he structured some of these deals and it's like, oh yeah. It wouldn't have occurred to me that that was possible, but of course, when you have someone like that who is scrappy and also had the life experience of having to pick

• 1:54:48Tim Ferriss?

  himself up by his bootstraps and work with next to no money, it's like, oh wow. You just had to ask and you had to know the right way to ask and these apparent miracles can happen. It's just wild. So we'll see. Maybe I'll put together that book of case studies. I think it'd be fun.

• 1:55:06Speaker 02

  Can I ask a question about that?

• 1:55:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  I ask because I have a conflicting relationship with my earlier work. Like this course is 10 years old. I look at it, I, ah, that's exactly what you said, that braggadocious ass. He's not caveating it enough. There's this boldness that you can only have in your twenties of this is how the world works, right? You haven't been smashed before, but there's something beautiful about that as well, that like only a 29 year old can write this book with this much punch and pizzazz and clarity. So I'm curious what your relationship is with that version of yourself. And I'm also curious, what is it like to receive gratitude for that? Do you feel that it's able to land? Does it hit? Does it matter? I struggle with some of this as well.

• 1:55:50Tim Ferriss?

  I have never been good at receiving. I shouldn't say good. I have never been particularly skilled or natural at receiving.

• 1:56:01Tim Ferriss?

  Praise or compliments or anything like that. And who knows all the reasons? I mean, there are probably many I'm not even aware of. But I think in part, there were certain things that I adopted really early on as core beliefs, like, look, the good stuff takes care of itself. You just have to fix what's not working, which, by the way, is not true in a lot of cases. It can be true in a limited sense for certain things, but it's a very Faustian bargain of a philosophy to live with. But I believed that for a long time. So if in sports, coach wanted to give me a pat on the back, I would be like, yeah, that's great, but like, that's already working. So help me fix the stuff that's not working.

• 1:56:43Tim Ferriss?

  So I was always, which is not to say that I never responded to positive reinforcement, but like little Scooby snacks, tiny bits of positive reinforcement. And say, language learning is very important, but I often got that reinforcement through the process itself, not from anyone else. And that is, that being receiving praise. So I would say I'm very grateful. I do practice gratitude and I journal a lot on things I am grateful for. And I basically have run through some type of gratitude list and also asking myself, you know, is this a good day to die?

• 1:57:28Tim Ferriss?

  When I take off in planes, take off and land in planes? Just as an exercise, I'm kind of like, okay, this is the last rodeo as far as travel goes. Like, how do I feel about what I'm doing right now? And then assuming that it's positive, even if not, running through some level of gratitude. So I would like to think of myself as a very grateful person, but I still struggle with receiving compliments and praise.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. What about other people grateful for you?

• 1:58:01Tim Ferriss?

  I can be really deeply appreciative, but it doesn't. I think there's also a deep rooted fear of.

• 1:58:09Tim Ferriss?

  Becoming self-absorbed or arrogant or overweighting my importance in the large-scale cosmic order of things, which is effectively zero, right? I would like to remind myself, which I don't think is a real risk, but nonetheless, that fear is there. So I think that's also maybe a byproduct. The allowing it to glance off of me, but maybe not fully land is, I think, a consequence of that as well. It's like, God, you don't have to go very far. Open your laptop and go anywhere online and like 99% of people out there. This is, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration,

• 1:58:47Tim Ferriss?

  but are just saying things with the utmost confidence and self-importance. And it doesn't seem to help them and it doesn't seem to help anyone else ultimately. Right? It kind of tends to end in tears. So I love to say, I don't know, particularly. And that would be another reason why I like having these conversations, because there's a lot more that I don't know than what I know. And then it was a long riff on the gratitude piece. In terms of relating to my earlier self, I think it's probably harder for you with video.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:59:23Tim Ferriss?

  You know what I mean? I think it's probably a lot harder for you with video. Video is incredibly unforgiving. And video also has so many different components that feed into the end product. You've got camera, you've got framing, you've got lighting, you've got editing, you've got your stage presence, so to speak, and performance. You have body language. There's so many different elements on top of the scripting or not scripting, but the actual delivery of whatever the content happens to be. Set design, depending on what you're doing. I mean, there's so much that goes into it. Whereas with print on a page.

• 2:00:05Tim Ferriss?

  I would say I still feel very proud of the writing in The Four Hour Workweek. I mean, I killed myself over that book and took the writing itself very, very, very seriously. So I think it, I mean, I hate to say this, but it may even be crisper and tighter than my writing now. So I feel good about the writing and the presentation, the teaching of the concepts, which was based largely on many, many, many, many guest lectures at Princeton when I was invited back by one of my professors to speak to an entrepreneurship class. So that's how I workshop that particular book. There are small pieces where I'm just like, oh, God, you know, the kind of chest-beating

• 2:00:50Tim Ferriss?

  confidence and flamboyance, maybe, of some of the examples. And at the same time, I think that some of that irrational, maybe, exuberance is really effectively infectious within the context of that book. I think so. And for me, at that time, keep in mind, it's a few, that was however many years, not that many, really. I mean, we're talking five or six years after, for my purposes in lifestyle design, cracking the code, or at least figuring out elimination and automation and all these various things,

• 2:01:29Tim Ferriss?

  to an extent that seemed very unusual at the time, I was still really high on that experience. And you can't be a lukewarm evangelist or lukewarm teacher. I didn't really view myself as an evangelist. But the harder the subject is, the more enthusiastic you better be, or at least enthusiastic and effective as a teacher. If the subject matter takes care of itself, then there are lots of ways that you can perhaps compromise or not be up to snuff. But entrepreneurship is a full-contact sport, as you know. And, you know, the chapter that I think gets the least attention If I were to expand something that I would expand is the filling the void

• 2:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  chapter at the end. People miss that and it's so important. It's like, look, if you just create a lot of empty space in terms of time, humans are not really designed just to be idle. And I mean, go spend some time with any reasonably intact kind of hunter gatherer society that might have some plantains and cassava or something like that. And you'll see, yes, they do rest quite a bit, but they're also by and large, very active. Might be just household stuff, might be chores, might be any number of duties, church, et cetera, especially these days. But idle hands or the devil's

• 2:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  workshop applies to the mind as well. So for mental health, I think that that chapter is particularly important and maybe, maybe could have been positioned a little bit differently to underscore it. But that's the type of chapter also that number one, most readers don't assume they're going to have to deal with because they're like, well, that's like once you've won the race. I'll worry about that once I've won the race. Unfortunately, if you build a business and a machine to serve lifestyle, but then it becomes inverted, it's not exactly straightforward, or it's certainly not pain free to fix it at the 11th hour after the fact. So I really to the book, well, it is funny to me when I look back at some of the tech recommendations and I'm like, oh my God, this is just like going

• 2:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  to the natural history museum and seeing dinosaur bones. I mean, these, most of these are completely extinct.

• 2:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm wrestling with that. It's an ability to look back at myself, have all the thoughts that you said, which is ugh, ugh, but also love that part. Like, holy shit, that guy brought me here.

• 2:03:56Tim Ferriss?

  On the entrepreneurial journey, are there any other books that you would recommend to the mini Charlie or someone out there who is, doesn't have to be YouTube specific, but if you just had, you could only recommend a handful of books. They don't need to be business books per se, but they can be. Are there any other books that stick out to you?

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Khalil Gibran, the prophet.

• 2:04:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 2:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, have that downstairs. That is a good book.

• 2:04:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:25Tim Ferriss?

  Easy to read. You can read it in small segments. Why that book for you?

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  You know, it's been a minute since I've read it, but I was just like, I'm in that zone of what moved me. I was like, oh, that book brought me to tears many, many times. There are just deep truths about life. Increasingly, I'm into that archetypal mythic pseudo-religious stuff, not because of any doctrine, but because of the way that it moves me. That's just an example of like a 20th century classic tome, not even a tome, it's a pamphlet, essentially.

• 2:04:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like 100 pages, maybe 120 at most.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Running Lean helped a lot with the interviews. It's not like the most fun read, but it helped me set up those interviews that I did that identified the stuff in the business.

• 2:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  Running Lean.

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  Running Lean. There's, you could probably find many books on the topic, but it's a lean startup thing and it just has two sections. Here's the big takeaway. There's two interviews that you do. You do one interview that is about the customer and one interview that is about your product. So the first interview is not, do you like this? Do you want this? It's what are you bothered by? What are you trying to make happen? What isn't working for you? Where are you hanging out? You know, like, and then the second one is, hey, I've got this idea for you. Does that solve the problems that you identified? And it helps you run through those. So that was really important back in the day. What were the other ones? Back in the day, Influence by Cialdini was huge.

• 2:05:44Tim Ferriss?

  Outstanding book, still.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  Classic, still Dale Carnegie, still classic.

• 2:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  Which Dale Carnegie?

• 2:05:51Speaker 02

  For me, it was How to Win Friends and Influence People was the one. There's ways in which I go to it. And then let me think of ones that have touched me or moved me more today. I've got poetry by Hafiz, which that hits the part of me that is coming more active today. I love Martha Beck. I saw your interview with her. She's got several books. Her interview with you is honestly great, though. Like, I think it does a lot of the work that you might want to take from some of her books. So I'd recommend that. Let me see real quick. Brandon Sanderson's in here. I know he was on, that was a great interview as well.

• 2:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he was fun.

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  So good. Yeah, I'll leave it there. And essentialism, yeah, let's not drown people.

• 2:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it's plenty to start with. And essentialism, I'll reiterate that one. It is a really good read. And if you combine that with Richard Kosch's book, The 80/20 Principle, those two will take you a long way. A really, really long way. Well, Charlie, we have covered a hell of a lot of ground here.

• 2:06:46Speaker 02

  We did it, yeah.

• 2:06:46Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything else that you would like to mention or point people to? Where can people find all things Charlie online?

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  Charisma on Command YouTube channel. If you're interested in the course, it's Charisma University. You should be able to just type it in and it'll take you to our sales page. And I just, you know, just, I know it didn't hit, but I spent a lot of time and money. I made a D and D show on YouTube, which was a D and D. I dressed up, I wore a cape. I got my friend who does a Trump impression to be a character that is named Tumpy. He's great. That's called Improv in Dragons. Don't expect it to explode, but if that's your thing and you want to, you want to have a show, a quick laugh, you could check that out as well.

• 2:07:27Tim Ferriss?

  Who, what is your character?

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  So my character was, I called him Sigmund because I was doing a riff on Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. So Sigmund and his brother Carl, he was a Druid. Was he an elf? I forget exactly what his race was. Oh, no, he was a Kalashtar, which is a, he's one of those weird.

• 2:07:43Tim Ferriss?

  Kalashtar, that must be a new one.

• 2:07:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. They have these dream lives. And so for me, I was having dreams and I was like, okay, I want to just infuse this with psychoanalysis and I'm going to give him a German accent and I'm gonna, I'm gonna lean into this.

• 2:07:58Speaker 02

  So we had, we had a good time with that. And one day I hoped, I hoped to actually get people to watch it.

• 2:08:05Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. All right, man. Well, I, I think we can begin to wind to a close here. Any last comments or remarks, recommendations, anything at all you'd like to share with my audience?

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  Anything else? If I had a billboard, I have to answer my Tim Ferriss question.

• 2:08:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 2:08:22Speaker 02

  I thought about this. I was like, in the moment, I'll find it. What is it? Don't think, feel. And I know that's counterintuitive to a lot of people, but lately that's been my guiding principle is feel my heart, feel my gut, think from my mind and try to find some union of the three to move forward.

• 2:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, dig it. I dig it. I'm sure Joe would like that. And I'll give a shameless plug. Diana Chapman interview on the Tim Ferriss Show for people who want.

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  I want to check it out.

• 2:08:51Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe a framework or two to try to calibrate, to learn how to do that. She's a very good teacher. And I suppose we'll, we'll cap it there, man. Thanks so much for taking the time. Really had a lot of fun. And for everybody listening. As always, we'll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Not too many Charlies on the podcast, so if you just search Charlie. Charlie Hohn. Yeah, Charlie Hohn. Charlie Hohn might pop up on the blog, but otherwise Charlie Houpert will be the one and only. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than necessary, not just others, but to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

• 2:09:34Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I am always asked by listeners, readers, you name it, what helps me to reset, feel grounded in a world of chaos and doom scrolling, recover from setbacks, we all have setbacks, or simply feel At peace. And without a doubt, the answer is always the same.

• 2:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  That is, going into nature, usually with my pup Molly, ideally, but I do a lot of solo journeys as well, solo trips out into the wilderness. And for many millions of Americans, myself included, our national park system is the best single place to do just that, which is why what I'm going to tell you is very, very important to me, very near and dear to me. So I appreciate you paying attention. So let me just mention a few things. Our public lands cover nearly a third of our country's landmass. And with more than 433 national park sites, there's a ton to explore, whether you're fishing, hiking, or just camping with family. I've been all over the place. I have

• 2:11:45Tim Ferriss?

  actually planned trips just around visiting national parks. And the best thing about our parks is that as Americans, we collectively own them. This means we can visit and enjoy them anytime we want. And you may not realize this, but this is a uniquely American invention. And in fact, there is a documentary series by the legendary Ken Burns called The National Parks: America's Best Idea. You can check that out for more. But the point is this, for more than a century, our government has protected our public lands by holding them in a public trust. But it's becoming harder

• 2:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  and less safe for us to access these awe inspiring places. And now we are at a precipice. We are at a really key inflection point. And whether it goes up or down will depend on what people like you, people like me, do. Congress is preparing to vote on a bill that would force the sale of millions of acres of public lands to, among other things, fund tax breaks for billionaires. So don't love the sound of that. And if approved, the bill would trigger the largest single sale of national public lands in modern history. So this is a big deal. And it is very timely. So please join me and many thousands of other Americans who are speaking up to protect

• 2:13:08Tim Ferriss?

  our public lands. Visit patagonia.com/tim to learn more. One more time, check it out. Please take 10 seconds and do it. patagonia.com/tim. This message was brought to you by Patagonia.

• 2:13:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:14:05Tim Ferriss?

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