Author and Podcaster: Tim Ferriss

There's a difference between persuading someone. Two purchase a product and debating with someone who has no intention of ever changing their mind. I wasn't making that my job, which I think a lot of people do. They make it their job to convince the world and you shouldn't convince the world, you should convince the people who match most closely to what you're providing. Yeah. So I came to believe really early on that it's not about the number of people who don't get it.

It's about the number of people who do get it. From MPR is how I built this. show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Guy Roz and on today's show, how Tim Ferris, as an entrepreneur, author, investor, and podcaster.

to a multi-million dollar brand. 2007, a completely unknown writer named Tim Ferris published an obscure book. Called The Four-Hour Work Week. The book basically outlined how Tim escaped the 9-5 grind. by outsourcing most of his job to other people. The small number of influential critics who even noticed the book

were not charitable. Wired magazine called it formulaic, and that was generous compared to other reviews. But none of that ever worried Tim Ferriss because he had a plan. He had spent nearly a year mapping out how he was going to get his book into the right hands and maybe turn it into a bestseller, with almost no marketing budget and no major push from the publisher. Now think about this for a moment. There are more than a millian books published each year. Fewer than ten of those books sell more than a million copies.

In fact, the average book sells just a few hundred copies. And yet Tim Ferris An unknown writer and entrepreneur who lived in a small apartment in San Jose, California. Would go on to sell more than two million copies of the Four-Hour Work Week. That book sat on the New York Times bestseller list for four years. And although Tim was a small time entrepreneur before the book came out, after its success,

He turned his attention to building a business around his own brand. A brand that is really about Tim's own curiosities. Tim as a guinea pig. He spent the past 15 years trying to figure out how to master everything from starting and running a business to foreign languages, to cooking, to bodybuilding, to Chinese kickboxing, to tango dancing, and much more. And he doesn't pursue these things as a gimmick. Tim methodically outlines his process. He collects copious data on himself. He analyzes it and uses it to get better and more efficient at Whatever he tries. And he does all this because he believes that almost anyone who is reasonably motivated.

can master these things too. Since 2007, Tim's written four other books and has launched a podcast, all of which focus on self-improvement and learning from the highest performers on the planet. He's also become one of the most outspoken voices on the uses of certain hallucinogens to help treat depression and PTSD, which we'll hear about a little later. Anyway, Tim was born in the late 1970s and he grew up in eastern Long Island. His dad was a real estate broker and his mom was a physical therapist, and as a kid, Tim saw the contrast between his parents and neighbors who worked at the shops and farms around town.

And the wealthy people who came to the Hamptons. for vacation. For me it was normal. I didn't realize how strange that environment was. And I worked in restaurants growing up. and got to see the best and the worst of

Manhattanites. I mean you would just see you'd see some great behavior. Uh, remember Billy Joel used to tip like twenty bucks for a cup of coffee and that just blew my mind. That was That was just a display of generosity and wealth beyond my wildest imagination. And then you had you know, the Duchess of such and such would show up and just cause a huge mess with a table of

fifteen people and then say I tip very well. Better luck next time to the server and leave zero tip. I saw that too. Yeah. So and uh I worked uh one of my first jobs was at the lobster roll. Where they filmed a lot of the affair. Yeah, this T V series. So that was one of my jobs was a bus boy. At the lobster roll. I guess um from from from you've talked about this before, but I guess you were you were born pretty premature.

And so as a result of that you were Small when you were a kid and had had a bunch of health issues. And what kind of what kind of health issues? I had

severe allergies and respiratory issues. My left lung collapsed. Wow. When I was born. So I had respiratory issues growing up and was until I hit puberty kind of the slowest, one of the slowest, smallest kids. In in every grade.

There was a Um a lot of bullying up until sixth grade. Actually remember exactly when that stopped, but up until sixth grade. Because you were'cause you were little? 'Cause I was little. Yeah, I was tiny. So Yeah, spent a lot of time sitting on the step by the classroom reading instead of going out to recess just'cause it was so tremendously unsafe for me to wander around. Uh the the swing sets and stuff.

It's like being let out into the prison yard. I remember that. What was it uh what was a thing that They kind of Changed. Oh, that's easy. Uh I I mean I remember

the last day of fifth grade, I had this amazing teacher named Mrs. Talmadge, and I was sitting up in the front of the class. I was the last kid left in class. This was the bell. Right. at the beginning of summer breaks everybody had run out. And I had terrible sunburn. And these two bullies walked out and one of them goes,

Have a good summer, Tim, and slaps my back really hard with an open palm. and I held it together until they got outside of the classroom and then I just started bawling'cause it hurt so badly. And Mrs. Talmage Who had this kind of raspy. voice she had a bunch to say that I couldn't really absorb because I was crying and then she said one day you'll show him you'll show him to me and I was like okay okay I went away to camp that summer And I grew something like five inches and gained like forty pounds of muscle because puberty hormones just flooded my system and

came back and sixth grade was just My year of joyful vengeance. I mean So the bullying stopped pretty quickly in the beginning of sixth grade. And school came pretty easy for you when you were a kid? I Did enjoy school and I don't know how much of that is intrinsic. My parents didn't have much budget for new new

toys or new bikes or anything like that. But they said to my brother and I We always have budget for books. So my parents cultivated This Love of reading.

Very early on. And as a result, I did. Well in school and focused on school. I I read that um When you were fifteen, you went to Japan.

for a year as an exchange student, which is pretty cool. I mean that I those programs existed, but like Tell me about That What did that what did that do for you? That year for me

completely changed the trajectory of my life and the way that I I had never spent any extended time outside of the United States. And Went to Japan speaking

Very basic. Japanese and I was the Where's Waldo. American in this school of let's call it A few thousand Japanese students wearing a school uniform.

And That year help me to see how many of the rules that we follow are really social constructs and kinda arbitrary, right? Driving on the right side of the road versus the left in Japan or

bathing rituals, right? Even the grammar of Japanese is so different from English in the sentence structure. All of these behaviors and habits that I'd never questioned. Before became this comparison, side by side comparison with everything I noticed in Japan. So when I came

Back. I was looking at everything in the US and in my life with very fresh eyes. And I mean it must have a significant impact'cause I know that you went on to major in

at Princeton for college. And and I know you've talked about this a bit in the past, but um you know, I guess college was not an easy time for you that that you Um you struggled with

Depression and at times it got It got to a point where it was was pretty crippling and and I I think it started

beginning even in in high school, I recall extended periods of w what you might consider depression. But By the time I got to College. The symptoms worsened. W what were the symptoms?

Uh Extreme fatigue. a certain feeling of Hopelessness. And it's

Depression is really one of those Experiences that For someone who's ex who has had a an experience of the darkness and depression. No explanation is needed. And for someone who hasn't, it's no explanation will really suffice. But

It would be like looking through. sunglasses at all times and sort of hearing everything through earmuffs, if that makes any sense. This kind of muffled Slightly out of focus. Like sensory lens. And I would say probably twice per year I would have

multiple weeks of this type of This type of depressive episode. Did you ever go see Therapists or psychologists when you were In high school or in college.

Yeah. I Did not. And uh this is undiagnosed, essentially. Yeah, I was undiagnosed.

Uh and We can talk about You know, when it got particularly Dangerous which it did. In college.

Where I decided, quite clinically, honestly, that If I was going to struggle with this For the rest of my life and this darkness. was inescapable that there was no point.

And so I began not not just fantasizing about suicide or having suicidal ideation. I planned it. I mean I had Dates in the calendar. And I request a book from

Fire Stone Library. on suicide, I can't recall. the exact title and it was already checked out by some other student, so it was unavailable. But I put in a request. And the way Firstone Library alerted you your book was available is they sent you a postcard, so you'd get a postcard in the mail.

And I'd forgotten to change my emailing address with the registrar And it was still my home address with my parents and the postcard. Went home to my parents. Which said, Tim Ferris, your book Such and Such and Such and Such on suicide is now available. And my mom called me.

with a really shaky voice and asked me about it. And I lied. I said that a friend from Rutgers had requested it because it wasn't available at their library. So I did some some fancy footwork to kind of wiggle my way out of telling the truth, but the phone call from my mom snapped me out of my sort of delirium. And made it really clear that If I were to kill myself, it wasn't just Something that would affect me.

It would be like strapping on a suicide vest and walking into my parents' house and blowing everyone up. Um And That is what Led me to course correct. But if you think about

that, you know, the sheer chance, just the luck involved in that happening is pretty outrageous. And if that had happened today, for instance, it would have been an email alert and I wouldn't be here. I know we we talked uh About this, um When I was a guest on on your show.

Um about this period in life, this like Late teens to mid to late twenties. It's particularly vulnerable. Period. For a variety of reasons. There's societal pressures and

our brains are changing and there's a bunch of bunch of things happening. Do you think For you that that was Why you were In that state of mind.

Well I think it was a combination of Darkness meaning seasonal depression. Plus Uh

Feeling Everything has been building up. prior to Princeton to getting into a school like Princeton. And now my parents, extended family have all helped me.

to attend this expensive school. This has been a significant, huge commitment and sacrifice on the part of not just my parents, but other people in the family. And Now it seems like I'm gonna fail. I felt just helpless and hopeless.

But let me add. A note. On the light side. Yeah. Which is I have not suffered

An extended depressive episode in Let's see here. Something like six to eight years now. So There are I I have found tools and approaches that really seem to mitigate

Yeah. And and we're gonna talk about Some of those approaches um. a little later on. Um But uh but obviously you were

obviously able to to pull yourself out of depression. at the time because I mean you did Uh you did graduate college. You you made it through. I made it through, dragging a leg behind me. I made it through. And you moved to um you moved to to San Francisco Um in two thousand. This is sort of like right before the

Dot com crash. D did you move out there to get into that world? Is that what your ambition was? Uh yeah, I did. I did. I had tremendous Professor Ed Shao, Z-S C H A U. This is amazing. Polymath. For more competitive.

Ice skater to taking a few companies public was one of the first computer science. Professors. was a congressman for a term or two. I mean the guy had done everything. And he taught a class. in high tech entrepreneurship.

And I wrote my final project. on a portfolio company of his. called Trousan Networks, which was based in San Jose. And the the CEO was scarcely

older than Some of the students in the class. I mean, he was tw I want to say twenty three at the time. Wow. Extremely charismatic. It's spoken to the class. This is a this is a a data storage company? So data storage company. Okay. I uh Ended up Pitching myself to the CEO, I looked back, I want to say it was something like 26 emails.

and just got rejected, rejected, rejected. And the upshot was he said, you're just not gonna stop bothering me until I give you a job. Is that is that is that what I should take away from this? And I said, yep, that's about right. And he goes, Okay, great, you're in sales. You can have a technical sales position. Right. And uh That's what I did. So that's how I got the job. Why did you want to work for this company? Sounds so boring. Data storage? Like that's what you were like desperate to go work at after this like Yeah. Well this I'll tell you it didn't have anything to do with the industry. Okay, I got you. What drove that interest Number one.

That someone not much older than myself was running this. Number two, and I can't remember if it was Ed Shaw or someone else who gave me this advice, but they said, look for a growing industry. Doesn't matter what it is. If it's growing quickly and you're able to join early, you are going to learn a tremendous amount as you watch companies grow. Which still applies today. That's great advice, by the way. Which still applies, right. So I joined I was employee number fifteen or twenty five, something like that, and was able to watch it grow to

Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred. So you get there, you're you're working for true sand networks. A sexy data storage company. And what were you doing there? I was what would be considered outside sales. So we had inside sales, which was like boiler room, if you can imagine that. So inside sales is a bunch of people making phone calls. Yeah. smiling and dialing to book meetings for people like me. And then I was outside sales. So I would team up with my engineer

And we would go out to try to close deals. And uh was pretty good at it. But you didn't actually last that long, though. You lasted like a year, right before you were let go. Well, yeah, I mean I lasted a year, but uh almost everyone at the company lasted about a year. They started letting go entire divisions. So they let go of They were part of the dot com crash. Oh yeah, absolutely. So there were just large swaths of the office that would disappear from week to week towards the end. And uh kinda saw the writing on the wall. So I I started thinking of plan B options and and what I might want to do next, uh, well before I was I was let go, but Somewhere between yeah, a year to a year and a half.

after joining that company. I mean it sounds like you your intention was to just use this opportunity in this experience to kind of launch the next thing and and that That you almost went there with the ambition of starting something yourself. Was that was that the plan?

Or was there no plan? Yeah. Yeah, that was the plan. That was a plan. That was a plan. I wanted to learn as much as possible to build something myself. And Ultimately The way I decided what I was going to start is I looked at my own

spending because I was making I want to say I was making 40 grand a year. I had a little bit of money, but I wasn't rich by any stretch. I mean, I was operating on a budget. But I looked at my credit card statements. And

I was spending hundreds of dollars. Per month. I mean probably 400 plus per month. on sports syllabus. So I was price insensitive because training in sports really intensely at the time, doing uh kickboxing and jujitsu and some other stuff. What were you taking?

Well it was Creatine, at the time I was probably taking what were referred to as pro-hormones, protein, powders, and like a whole spectrum of products. So I decided to look into starting a company. that would scratch my own itch. And in fact I had cobbled together supplements for myself when I was in college. So I had ordered raw materials, I'd ordered stuff from Europe, I had combined things myself in my dorm room, which looked very sketchy. Just powders. Yeah various pills and powders and potions that I would get from all over the place.

So I had a lot of familiarity with this particular world, the landscape, the players, how things were sold. Because that is where I spend money. Got it. Okay, so you're You're thinking of starting a business where y you're gonna uh sell some kind of sports supplement, right? And and so Well

What'd you do next? Well Like the best time to start a company is when you have a job. Uh I knew this was a good window. So I began when I realized I was gonna get fired. because everyone was getting fired.

I would say about maybe a month or two before I started using these empty conference rooms during lunch hour to make phone calls to contract manufacturers to make phone calls to. biochemists who are c who are available As contractors, reaching out to anyone and everyone to try to figure out how things were formulated, how things were made, what type of insurance was needed. what the minimum investment was

All these things. While I was still employed. Mm. And uh so the first and Ultimately only product.

that I made was Intended to be initially a smart drug. So this was not a muscle drug. This was well your brain muscle, but it was not for like big muscles. It was to gate. Cobbling together various ingredients. to improve reaction speed. Reaction like

to anything. Attentional. applications and improve starting time off the block, say sp as sprinters, and improve performance in And what what were the what were the ingredients, by the way? What were the basic ingredients?

What some of the some of the ingredients would be Things like uh vimpocetine uh vinca, which is an extract of vinca minor. And other compounds uh phosphylcerine, which inhibits cortisol release on some level. It's actually pretty good for sleep. I still use that. Now so it's important

for me to just point out for a second, for the first six months or so of trying to sell this Product which was call Brain Quicken. So very on the nose name. I got all of my co workers who were like ch secretly Cheering me on.

to start this company to commit to buying a few bottles up front so that I knew I could afford them manufacturing. Important point. I'm just imagining myself as your as your friend or colleague at that time and you're like, yeah, I'm working on this like brain stimulant that's gonna improve reaction time and I'm experimenting with this and and vitaprine and cortisol, this and that. I would be like I'd be like Tim, keep that like away from me. Like you're nuts. You're just putting this stuff in your body. Like you're just testing this on your body like a I mean I would be terrified to take this stuff. Why would anybody want to why would anybody commit to buying a bottle of this stuff? Like what kind of peace of mind could you give them? Yeah. That's a very fair question. Fair question. It's super fair, right? Like you you just imagine me like twenty dumping powder all over the dumping powder into a funnel in my bathroom next to the mirror. Right. Right. So the the peace of mind came from uh this uh gentleman, I wish I could remember his name. I found

during one of my lunch hour conference call sessions, who was a biochemist who worked extensively with different brands trying to get into trader shows. And so he he was the adult supervision, uh, in terms of formulation. So everything in the product was on what's called the Grass list G R A S generally recognized as safe, I guess. I I was not playing it fast and loose with selection of ingredients nor sourcing ingredients. And That was the peace of mind because ul I was not gonna be touching these products in terms of I'm not packing capsules in my living room couch right there. You wanna have you wanna have good manufacturing practices and have this done by professionals. So you know, you know and this is really how a lot of brands are started, whether it's

supplements, whether it's clothing, whether it's cosmetics, right? It's not the entrepreneurs sitting down and figuring out by themselves all the specs of what these products will look like. You have an entire industry set up to assist someone in arriving at what they would consider a good product. And just and just to clear, the the plan was to try to make this and then Try and pitch it to Like Trader Joe's and G N C and put on the shelves there.

The plan was initially to to do actually what a lot of direct to consumer brands do now as a playbook, to sell direct to consumer. for better margins and to develop direct relationships with customers and then The objective was to create enough consumer demand that people would ask at retail for this product, at which point then you sell at uh retail through wholesale accounts а мі юар

At this point, twenty three, twenty four, maybe close to twenty five. Mm-hmm. And you have no money. So What was your entry point into getting these contract manufacturers

And this biochemist to even work with you. Like did they not know the page? Did they not know like was it all over the phone? Like where did you get the confidence? Like were you just kind of Putting on a deeper voice, like what what are you doing to me? Like what are you how Yeah, how are you doing how are you convincing them to work with you? This is like serious science. Yeah. You have to Remember that my job

was selling multi million dollar storage systems to CEOs and CTOs of sometimes major companies. I got really, really good at sales. Yeah. So I bought every book you can imagine on sales. I read every biography I could find on people considered to be good salespeople like Richard Branson. I made a real study of it and I kept meticulous logs of everything that worked and didn't work. imagine an athlete recording every workout. I recorded

what I did that worked when I was selling to CTOs and CEOs. over the phone or in person. So I had scripts or openers that worked. I would keep track of Times of day that worked. Turns out that almost all of my Co workers made calls between nine to five. Well, who else is working from nine to five? Every gatekeeper to the CTO or CEO.

And if you just came in an hour early and stayed an extra hour after work your chances of getting the decision maker on the phone w went up like t you know a hundred fold. So I made the bulk of my calls. before the work day and after the work day. So all of that I used

exactly to a T to get a hold of, for instance, the president of this one contract manufacturing company. I called after hours. I called at like seven PM. Yeah and he picked up. But uh Getting them on the phone is one thing. Convincing them to take you on as a client is quite something else. And I couldn't afford their minimum orders. So I had to pull on the heartstrings a little bit and say I know there are a million reasons why you should say no to me, but I'm sure when you were coming up

At some point someone gave you a chance. Uh huh. And open the door. gave you an opportunity to prove yourself and that made all the difference. I'm just asking for one chance. Like the downside risk to you is this, this, and this. It's very minimal, but if this works. Like I am gonna be a client of yours for years and I will use you exclusively, which, by the way, is exactly what happened, and I did make good on that.

I mean it's it's it's interesting because at that time in your life this is like two thousand Four. So I'm I'm a a couple years older than you, but around that time I was a foreign correspondent. And uh I I lived in a world of journalism, so there's a lot of skepticism. Like your natural response to something is you you approach it with skepticism. And so I would have been mortified to do something like this, because I would have thought, God, people are gonna question me and ask me about my expertise and they're gonna wanna know how I know how to do this and I I'm just you know I I'm not a scientist. Like was any part of you did any part of you have self doubt? I didn't have a whole lot of self doubt.

About the product just because I had effectively compiled the same motley assortment of ingredients and taken them myself as a competitive athlete in college. So I I didn't have a whole lot of doubts about that. Did I have doubts about the company doing well? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean you know I was I was always very good about cash flow. I never took outside funding I it was all bootstrapped, uh but the feedback loop was really long. I was doing most of my advertising through magazines and I mean

You're committing to the advertising. I mean sometimes like a month before printing, then it's printed, then it goes out, then you sort of wait for people to buy this magazine until you think you've reached the tail end, and then you look at your results. It's very slow, particularly compared to what you can do now. Online. So you were advertising in in a lot of like fitness magazines'cause you realize that that's really where you've ha you've got to kind of Target your

And what was the value proposition? What did it What did it promise to do? The value prop was improving reaction speed. Uh and power output. So I I advertised in Black Belt Magazine. I advertised in powerlifting USA. There were a handful of niche publications.

I worked with on a on a really consistent basis. So all right, so you um Presumably you start to go to the contract manufacturer and well maybe they're sending it to you, but you're picking up like pallets of Bottles of supplements of these supplements.

Yeah, initially I was doing a lot myself. Later we had warehouses and call centers and you know the whole nine yards, but in the beginning I would pack and mail out these products, which were sealed. So I wasn't I wasn't messing with the contents of any of these bottles, but I would pack them up and ship them out priority mail. So you would get like an email or somebody would order from through the website. And this is pre Shopify. It was super janky. Yeah, it was really janky in the B. So you you would go in and See like somebody you you have mail and somebody would would have ordered two bottles and then you would get'em and pack'em into like a puffy envelope and then

put a label on it and send it out yourself. That's what you did at the beginning. That's what I did. I remember the day I knew things had to be outsourced when I had a a larger than normal day and I had all these boxes that I needed to get to the post office. And my car wasn't working, so I put them all in a garbage bag. Like a huge hefty garbage bag and got on my motorcycle. And

rode to the post office with this gigantic Santa Claus sized sack hanging off of one of the handlebars and almost killed myself and I was like, Okay, pfft that's enough. We need to professionalize this outfit a little bit. Let me come back. Just a moment. Now Tim goes on to build Brain Quicken to the point where it starts to burn him out. And how his new ambition to work less and live more?

leads to an entirely new career. Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz and you're listening to How I Built This. And PR. And one more thing, the New York Times best selling book, How I Built This, is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement

to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect. Started out at the very bottom. Check out how I built this the book. Available wherever you buy your books.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2004 and Tim Ferris is hustling to get his sport supplement Brain Quicken into major retailers. And he doesn't really care if people like me or you or anyone are skeptical about the product as long as it's resonating with his target audience. Athletes. Athletes really are binary, right? I mean most athletes only care if something works. That's it. They try it. If it works, great. If it doesn't, it's it's out. It's they're not in it to have debates, they they want to improve times or lift totals or whatever.

But honestly I concluded and this translated to a lot of things later too that There's a difference between persuading someone to

Purchase a product and debating with someone who has no intention of ever changing their mind. Right. Right. I wasn't making that my job, which I think a lot of people do. They make it their job to convince the world and you shouldn't convince the world, you should convince the people who match most closely to what you're providing. Yeah. So I came to believe really early on that it's not about the number of people who don't get it, it's about the number of people who do get it. And at this point were you Were you still running the business out of your apartment in in San Jose?

At that time I was in Mountain View. And then later to San Jose and then eventually up to San Francisco. But at that point I was out of a tiny apartment complex in Mountain View. Right across the street from The Jack in the Box. Perfect. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's right. So was there a a turning point like

Did something happen like all of a sudden you just Like a slow burn. It was slow. Until

I developed a playbook that could be repeated. And uh it was it was pretty straightforward, uh, actually. It came down to Managing cash flow. I mean this is not gonna be super surprising. One of the benefits of this product category is that the margins are very healthy. Even if you use top tier ingredients, you can have very healthy margins. It's like movie popcorn. It's like movie popcorn, except with drugs. And and uh secondly

If you get to a point where you can negotiate very effectively for advertising, which I did. You can sometimes buy, say, a full page advertisement for A tenth of rate card? So let's say then

That I get a page. That is priced. At twenty K. Four. Two K.

Mm. Then I go to one of the best known larger retailers or e tailers out there. So I might go to the

I'm making this up, obviously, but let's just say BobSupplements.com. He is a wholesale account who's buying at forty percent off of my List price. And I say. Yeah. I have a full page ad coming out in XYZ magazine.

Rate card is twenty thousand dollars. I will make you the exclusive retailer. I'll put your eight hundred number. Your website in the ad. If you pre commit to fifteen thousand dollars worth of product. In that case

Even before a single customer has called, I have effectively locked in. thirteen thousand dollars. Right, and uh I've removed a lot of risk. Tim, how did you learn to do that at such a young age? Did you was it from that sales job, being around those people? It was part of the sales job. Another thing that I did when I was really young. Uh

I had terrible insomnia when I was a kid. I would not be able to fall asleep and when I was a kid I would stay up. Now what? If we're thinking about early eighties, what was on television at two or three in the morning? Infomercials. Infomercials. Correct. I became

Fascinated by infomercials. How does this actually work? And Even in high school and college, I would sometimes order products from infomercials or call their numbers to see what types of scripts they used. I had this fascination with

systems and what worked and what didn't, which is pretty easy to discern. Like if somebody advertises all the time for months or years on end, something is working. They have to pay for those ads in some fashion. And uh I started putting together what is sometimes called a swipe file. Swipe meaning steel.

Any time I was persuaded to buy through an advertisement, through a phone call, through whatever it was, I would Say in the case of a magazine, tear the advertisement out. put it into a three ring binder. and collect everything that persuaded me to buy and then I would study those ads and and circle what I thought

the salient points where that compelled me to buy. And I would also track everything that happens. So let's say I bought a product. I might buy two of them. and then return one to see what their return process looked like, to see what their refund process looked like. And so I I collected.

In terms of capping downside, That was in the case of advertising and to negotiating the price down and then getting a guaranteed minimum from the retailer That was just a discovery, and then once I figured out that it worked, because I'd thrown a million things against the wall and only a few of them worked, I was like, this is something I think I can replicate. What's so interesting is that like

Taking You know, calling up these these like infomercial call numbers and analyzing the script and taking out ads and circling them see that's not Normal like most of the Kids and teens. Um on on homeland, you know, like circling

I'm wondering if if'cause I think it's obviously really smart, right? You you started to recognize patterns and you were studying different approaches that would then serve you Well

Later, but I can't imagine you were thinking one day I am going to be doing something like this. So I will need to know how to do this now. It sounds to me like you were just really interested in it. You were just like, how does this work? I think the drive to replicate it. And the interest in doing it myself actually came up really early.

Uh when I was a kid suffering from insomnia, I wasn't thinking that. I was just watching these things'cause they were on. But later Because My family uh didn't have much money, right? Like money was a thing. Uh it was a point of contention, it was sometimes a point of stress. It was uh not really a whole lot of conflict, but it was a concern, right? This was a

A fair amount. And I think in my mind If you have money, all these issues and problems you might have in life for yourself or for your family just go away. That was what I

Yeah. Concluded. So the drive to make money Came in. early for me. Which makes sense. And I mean because I'm sure you are passionate about the mission of brain quicken or maybe maybe you weren't, but but ultimately it was a way for you to

Or living. Yeah, and I was I mean passionate may not be the the right Word, but I uh I believed in the product.

And I would not have been able to do it. had I been slinging God knows what uh I don't think I would have had the endurance. To keep going in that case.

And at what point. Did you have to hire somebody to help you? Like a year in or or less. Uh, I didn't do a whole lot of hiring. I had a virtual assistant. It was just me and

Uh were you still Packing the stuff too, or or w was the contract manufactured? Dealing with the logistics. There was contract manufacturing that would get shipped to a fulfillment center, which was coordinated with call centers, and these people were all independent contractors. But I was still

A bottleneck for a lot of decisions. Right? I mean, I would get calls from the fulfillment center. They're like, hey, this Olympic athlete needs this thing overnight to Croatia. What should we do? Because there wasn't a policy in place for how to handle that. You know, I got these daily questions that just suffocated me. So I would say early mid two thousand four is when I broke, basically. I mean that's when I kinda burned. Because you were just w you were working all the time. I was working all the time. Oh yeah.

And my girlfriend at the time who I thought I was gonna get engaged to, etc. Left? She broke up with me because I never saw her. I mean I can't blame her in retrospect, but She gave me this, huh? Dear John Plaque. It was basically one of these three sided

photo holders from Target or someplace like that. And she had created this piece of artwork with like a photo of my head cut out. It was quite elaborate and it said business hours end at five PM. Well. put that on my desk as a reminder, which she encouraged me to do as she exited stage left. And I was like, Okay, well What I'm doing isn't working.

And by and you're doing pretty well, right, like you, I think. Your business was doing like forty thousand dollars in revenue a month at that point. Yeah, I i yeah, it was doing like forty to I would guess a hundred, maybe even slightly more per month. Wow. So it was doing really well. I mean you were making it the salary of a partner at a law firm when you were Twenty six, twenty seven? Yeah, and I and you know I saw a path to grow that.

in multiples, keeping in mind that that's one product. The normal playbook would then have me create a whole line of products which you can sell, guess what, to the same distributors, to the same retailers. But I was already a human bottleneck, so I was just you. Were you selling the products At retailers now. I mean at mo mostly at retailers rather than direct to consumer.

I I don't remember the exact split, but it was at both. It was both direct to consumer and at retailers, which was becoming a real thing, and at retail and internationally. So it was also being sold internationally at this point. Did you like the operational side of it? Or was that the part that That you didn't like. Uh I would have to say I didn't like it just because that would have been a contributing element of having no time. I mean I had no time.

I was waking up super early to communicate with customers in Europe and so on, I would stay up extremely late to communicate with clients in other time zones, the only breaks I would take or like f you know Can of beans in the morning, maybe lean cuisine for forty five seconds at lunch.

And then thankfully some type of exercise for you know an hour, hour and a half. Stop at Jack in the Box on the way back. Take a shower and then keep working. I mean I just never stopped working. And

Relationship ended for me. It also just put into stark relief the fact that the objective isn't to have the money. The objective is whatever you to have whatever you trade the money for, whatever it represents to you. And I telescoped out a few years. I'm like, what does this look like?

A year from now, three years from now, five years from now. And it just Everything gets worse. My health gets worse. My psychological well being gets worse. Like uh so I need to change something. Yeah. But presumably you still wanted to make money, you still wanted the business to operate, so What kind of things did you put in place to to allow you to do that?

Well There were some really simple things. For instance that I sent out an email to my fulfillment center and said From this point forward, in effect, please assume that if a problem can be fixed for less than

$100, just go ahead and fix it. Charge it to my account. that type of providing of guidelines for autonomous decision making. Uh and The fixes required a lot of hard thought, but the implementation of most of them was actually very, very simple. Firing a bunch of my high maintenance customers. That was another thing. You know, a handful of my 20 wholesale customers were producing like 90% of the negative emotions that I felt with my customers. So but they were really lucrative. So I had uh I put up with a lot of nonsense and bad behavior and Basically sending a a letter to those folks saying

Here are the policies going forward. If these terms don't work for you and your company, we're happy to make a referral to another company who can blah blah blah blah blah. And almost all of those belligerent customers did a complete 180 about face and went on best behavior. One or two cursed me out and I fired them. And Just with That decision alone, the emotional experience that I had working completely changed. But what's really important is that I had arrived at a point where I'd committed to either

Untangling the mess and extricating myself as a bottleneck or shutting down the business. I had come to Point of acceptance. and a willingness to do that if I couldn't figure it out. But but I mean you didn't um you didn't shut down the business. I mean you you kinda got it to the point where you you were able to travel and then you

you ended up traveling for like the next eighteen months or so, like starting in London and then to Ireland and Berlin and and and then Argentina. And w was that I mean was that your idea to kinda do like a total reset on the way you've been living your life. Up to that point. Yeah, while I was traveling. So what I've done up to that point is scheduled my entire life in

ten or fifteen minute outlook. Increments, right? Or calendar increments. And everything was extremely regimented. And when I landed in London I wanted to do the opposite of what I had done up to that point. Yeah, I went to an Irish pub and liked the music.

If you really like this, you should go to Dublin and I said, Okay. And I got on a easy jet flight or a Ryanair flight, landed in Dublin. and went to another pub and they said, What the hell are you doing in Dublin? Galway has the art festival about to start. You should go to Galway. And I said, okay. And I got on a bus and went to Galway, knowing nothing about Galway.

And Bounced around like that. determined by chance encounters with people along the way. And a friend of mine born in Panama, invited me to Panama, I go to Panama and one of his best friends was half Argentine and said

If you want the best wine, the most beautiful women and the easiest ability to live like A king on dollars you should go to Argentina and I said Yeah. Good sales pitch. I initially planned on being in Argentina for four weeks. I was not planning on being there for a long time.

How long did you stay? Nine months. Wow. Without knowing anybody and you would start out a y at a youth hostel and that's how you would kind of Start to meet people and

Yep. That's exactly what I did. And I would use activities to build Friendships quickly. I had

Curling. In Ireland. I had different types. I did kickboxing and jujitsu and Berlin. I did then Tango in Argentina, which I I I actually

had a strong bias against when I first got there. I had no interest in learning Tango because my impression of it was all based on true lies and movies where it looked Super cheese ball and over choreographed. But it got so Damn hot in Buenos Aires at one point. And I was waiting for a friend of mine to finish his Spanish class. So I walked into this tango music shop that had air conditioning and this chain smoking woman who is the owner.

got so pissed at me eventually'cause I was just loitering in there, pretending to look at CDs and stuff that she asked she's like, Hey, hey kid, if you're gonna hang out here all day, might as well pay me ten pesos and take a tango class upstairs. And I was like, uh, okay. And uh That was it for me, I realized Yeah, thank you just consumed me from that point forward. I mean you you were just following your curiosity everywhere you went. Like you would just find something that was interesting and then you would just kind of

Follow that. Yep, that's exactly that's exactly what I did. But but you were also like not just taking tango classes, like you then eventually would compete in the Tango World Championships and Got an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for most consecutive tango spins, like that's like taking it to a different level, like a competitive level. Is that what where did that come from?

It came from a few things. I wanted to get better tango. And for me getting learning skills has a blueprint. And it's There are certain approaches that just improve your rate of learning. So I collected video clips of myself dancing, of other instructors dancing, teaching certain techniques, and then each night I would take that footage. and I would put them into different folders based on the type of technique. Then based on the video, I would take notes in a tiny little notebook that I could fit in my back pocket, and I would try to use these techniques in the wild. Which often backfired.

Then I would take notes on what went wrong. And I mean I d I practiced like six hours a day. I mean I had to take days off because my feet would get bruised because the shoes are really, really thin. And uh I loved it. I really I really loved it. I I mean it sounds almost like I'm trying to think about about this from like the Using an analogy as a journalist? I would have written a profile about you, right? And I would have done all of that work.

I would have looked at videos. studied you, I would have followed you It's almost like you did that a about yourself. Like you told yourself the entire time that you were Studying yourself.

Yeah, I mean how do you the real question I was trying to answer and implement was how do you observe yourself? So wrapped up in our own experience. that we can't really deconstruct what went well or what went wrong. No. And There are some really simple fixes to that.

And I learned a lot of this through languages, honestly, including the fact that you're always gonna have plateaus. When you try to Add More difficult skills. And

Then you'll have another inflection point, then a plateau, maybe a dip, and then an inflection point. So that became something I expected rather than something that discouraged me. In the case of sports. Use a video camera. It seems so obvious, but like how many people have taken tennis lessons or fill in the blank lessons and have never seen video of themselves. Yeah. So there there are some.

Really basic. approaches to Increasing your ability to see yourself. So so all right. So you're having this experience and while you're overseas you you realize you can have a a much r richer, more fulfilling life without having to work on this all this all consuming business all the time.

And And is this when you start to think you might write a book about this whole experience? The book was nowhere on my radar during The travel period.

But I had taken notes along the way. Because I have always taken notes. And I ended up with this huge stack of

of material. So I at one point emailed Jack Canfield, who was co author or co creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul. because I had gotten to know him by volunteering. А нон профітс

And I reached out to him and I was like, Jack, here's what's going on. Do you think there's anything here to chew on? Should I even look into this? Hoping that he would just kinda snuff it out. If that makes any s I didn't really want to write a book, but when you when you wrote to Jack, you said what? Like I think I think I want to write a book about my experience or how to run a business. Like what was the what was the elevator pitch? I had mocked up. A front and back cover, which I think is an excellent way.

to force some clarity on the book itself, right? So the elevator pitch was the back cover. And it and it really Came down to creating more time. more wealth and doing it through systems and working smarter instead of working harder. That's what it came down to.

And He introduced me to a couple of agents and they all said no. And then one who had been a very successful editor, but was only newly an agent had some follow-on conversations and

He thought I had legs, and so we pursued it. Just to see what the hell would happen, really. And it kinda it started to become exciting to me. But just to clarify, I mean like to make it quote unquote sexy or interesting, you were gonna include personal anecdotes of kind of your adventures overseas to to illustrate how you could Live a more fulfilling life. And own your time.

Yeah, uh uh to give concrete examples of what this looks like in the wild because the the abstract High level conceptual stuff is Boring. Okay, so you You have this book idea.

And You Start to shop it around to a bunch of different publishers. And what's their response when you when you sent the proposal around? Uh the response was mostly Who the hell is this kid?

No, emphatically. Saved a few of those. So the book was turned down. Somewhere between twenty six and twenty nine times. It's turned out a lot. And my pitch got better. Right, I can if you think about how I took notes

on phone calls. I took notes and video on Tango. I took notes and did postmortems on every meeting we had with every publisher. So we were able to tweak and iterate and refine the pitch by the time we got to Crown. Who Was the publisher.

It was very polished and uh They said yes and bought it at a very, very Advantageous. Trevor Burrus, Jr. But the upside, the royalties would would go to you, but they got a good deal. I was fine with that. As they should. And um

The book was called The Four Hour Work Week. Right, that was what you called it. Yeah. And The main thesis of the book. is for those who haven't read it, essentially is that Time is the most valuable thing you have. It's not

having a lot of money. It's having time and the freedom to choose what to do with your time. Yeah, the thesis is time is a non renewable resource. Money is renewable. Can always make more money later time.

Haven't figured that out just yet. And Whether you want to work four hours a week Ten or eighty. There are certain principles. and tactics you can use.

to dramatically increase your per hour output. And That was the book. And when it came time to to actually launch the book.

I mean. Just like you you done with Tango and Brainquick and and so many other things, um From what I understand, you you basically made a systematic study of how you were going to launch it. Yeah. Yeah, and I and uh Once I'd shipped the final manuscript,

to the publisher, I you know, I sat down and made a study of book launches and I interviewed Best selling authors, and one of the questions I asked was What type of promotion or marketing Delivered. Much better results than you expected.

And Which deliberate. much worse results than you expected and One of the patterns that was spotted at the time was that Television was decreasing in importance.

That Blogs, these things called blogs. increasing in importance and impact. So I decided to take

all of the budget I'd allocated for the book launch, almost all of it, and to go to in-person events. To try to put myself in the path of I wanted to achieve a surround sound effect of sorts, at least that's what I call it, which is

choosing four or five outlets that nearly every one of my target demo at the time consumed on a daily or weekly basis, tech meme, tech crunch, et cetera. Gizmoto so that I would appear to be everywhere, even though in reality that was not the case. So I had some very clear quantifiable.

to hit. And ended up getting early copies of the book. Two

Many of the most influential bloggers of the time. And a few of them ended up Writing about it. Which provided a toll hold in

The tech entrepreneurial community of Silicon Valley. But how did you Given that you are an unknown writer. Right.

You did not have a access to national media. You were not a celebrity I mean, how were you gonna convince these or how did you even get these outlets to cover the book at all and to cover you? Well, it was a progression, right? So I think when people try to launch Oftentimes they think that the more customers I have, the more prospects, the better. So everyone's gonna be my customer. Right. And when everyone's your customer, no one's your customer. You don't have any focus. So for me, I I thought to myself, well

Really my first Target. is let's just let's just call it. twenty to thirty-five year old tech savvy males in a handful of major cities like San Francisco. And I know how to reach those people because I'm being highly specific. If I knock over that domino, then the next domino to fall will be

twenty to thirty five year old tech savvy females in the same cities. So I went after the bloggers first. And What I would do is just Go to these events. I'd kinda loiter around, I would try to end up in a small group of people who were talking. I would buy drinks when I could.

And uh eventually somebody in the group would say Who the hell are you again? Like you've been sitting here for an hour listening to everybody else. Like, what do you do? And I go, Oh, I'm working on my first book and um I'm here trying to learn more about blogs, right? I would leave it at that. This is really important. And then if anybody followed up and said, Well, what's the book about? Then I would tell them. And then maybe give them an example and at the end of it, if they seemed interested. I would say If you'd like, I can send you an early copy and I can put a post-it note on the five or ten pages that I think would be most interesting to you to take 20 minutes to check out.

And Nick says sure. Great. And so I I just repeated that over and over again and sent out 20 to 40 of them with post-it notes, right? I had to put in the work. And uh That set the ball in motion.

Let me come back in just a moment. How a book turns into a brand and have a four-hour work week starts to take over Tim's entire work week. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

Welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2007, and after a very carefully crafted marketing campaign. Tim's book The Four Hour Work Week is launched into the world. And just a short time later. It starts hitting all kinds of milestones like The New York Times bestseller list.

It happened very quickly. So it happened in the first week or two, I wanna say. And I remember Heather Jackson, my editor. calling me and telling me and uh I was so exhausted. I had just done a radio satellite tour. where you are just on the phone doing radio interviews all day long.

and drinking pots of coffee and I was so wiped out and it was six or seven o'clock. Eastern and She said. Hey there, mister New York Times best selling author, something like that. And I remember just saying to her, I was like, Heather Please don't with me. I just I I don't have it in me right now.

And she's like no, you hit the list, you hit the list and I remember I was leaning against the wall and I sort of slid down the wall. on my back and just like sat on the floor and I was like, This might change things. This might change things and then It took Until

August. for the book to Become The monthly Number one.

bestseller in the business category. That book ended up spending four years. on the New York Times bestseller list. It's just like This Kind of self perpetuating.

phenomenon and and I wonder why. Why do you think I mean Even though you promoted it and you had this really great strategy. That only takes you so far. Like w what was that? Why? Why do you think it became this phenomenon?

Well, I do think that it was Perfectly. timed. And I think that it's appealing to fundamental desires people have and it's also Painting a really humanized picture of

the pain and the struggle that people experience because I was telling not only my story, but I'd gathered case studies. I talked about lawyers who had been caught in groundhog day and even though they were making money were miserable and then they gave it all up, supposedly, to start a surf school in Brazil. I gave these case studies which were real examples of people who had passed through this gauntlet of self doubt and criticism from colleagues, family, pushback from significant others.

to redefine themselves. And to create these lives. When this became a phenomenon, you became Famous. Overnight. I mean pr pretty quickly. Not overnight, but pretty quickly and and much in demand as a speaker

as a consultant, um you really became iconic figure, certainly in Among a certain type of of Silicon Valley.

Tech worker. Did you like that? Did you like all of a sudden becoming Kinda famous? I like aspects. Uh it's

I was Bewildered and flattered. Mm. just shot so far beyond anything I could have anticipated that I was Also uh caught very unprepared. I don't I don't know if you can prepare for something like that, even if you do.

that it was coming, but The amount of inbound. That you get. When a book hits the New York Times bestseller list and stays on that list for a period of time.

Is Incredibly exciting. Speakers bureaus, interviews. Foreign rights. Movie rights, I mean all of these things come in, and I had no idea how to handle any of it. So there's part of me that thought I finally reached escape velocity. This is what I've always wanted.

And uh quickly learned that there were a lot of downsides and compromises, privacy issues, crazy people, stalkers, death threats, I mean nuts. Not so experiences that I would not have envisioned being part of the package. And also criticism. You got criticized. Um Tech Bro a lot of critical negative reviews. Did you notice that? Did you ignore it? Did you internalize it? Was the positive

Response so overwhelming that it kind of shielded you from the negative response? I wasn't shielded. No. At that point I wasn't shielded and I didn't in in the beginning I didn't make an attempt to shield myself from this so I felt like it was my job to to answer questions and uh correct misperceptions and uh felt very confident in the book. I think that If I look back at a lot of the mistakes I made early on. There were moments when

I wanted to convert the people who shoute the loudest that they hated my work, but they weren't actually people I admired in general. And fortunately on the other side of the ledger. There were tech entrepreneurs and CEOs and people I respected tremendously.

Who found something of value in the book. they found it compelling enough that they would speak positively about it. And that Offset. I think the the criticism.

When this came out. And the the demands for speaking and interviews and consulting and appearances and all these things. At what point did it become clear to you that this for better or worse? That your business was now Tim Ferris Inc. and not

supplements or the next thing. It was actually U as a personality were gonna be the brand. Uh well. About a year after the book came out.

I realized that I had Sign up for A journey I didn't necessarily want to be a part of 100%. What I mean by that is I said yes to everything and I was traveling every three to

five days to some speaking gig, God knows where I was exhausted all the time. I was also repeating myself a lot. And Then I would say about

Two years in. So let's just call it two thousand nine. I stopped doing a lot of this. So the I was being pulled in the direction of Author, speaker, leader, speaker. Which is a very tried and true path. I mean this is how a lot of authors make the majority of their income is through speaking. But uh

The biggest risk was that I would become the four hour workweek guy. and paint myself into a corner and that I would Knowingly or unknowingly. become this. Kind of talking.

A sock puppet regurgitating. the same lessons I'd already covered in the first book forever. So I made the Difficult decision, but in retrospect, great decision to stop doing almost all speaking. Like I really don't do any speaking and haven't for a very long time. I do almost none. And instead That is what took me into the world of

Angel investing and advising and becoming involved with startups. So that all started around two thousand eight, two thousand nine. Yeah. It was part of Diversifying my identity. because I I was very worried that if I went all in as the book by the four hour workweek.

That My entire self worth. And My ups or downs. my depression or lack thereof would hinge on having a successful second book.

So part of my diversification. of my identity and worth was also getting into the investing. But but I mean clearly you did understand the value of of the four hour concept as a brand because 'Cause the next two books.

would be around that concept. I mean you did the the four hour chef and the four hour body with With all kinds of suggestions on on losing weight and physical training and and stuff like that. Yeah. Exactly. So in an effort to give myself an entirely new domain in which I could explore my personal and professional life.

I decided to Cel the for our body. Which was a huge reach. I mean, we're go we're jumping completely out of The work. category into f diet and fitness. So it's about all things physical improvement related, modification related, everything from breath holding to vertical jump to ultra endurance to

Fat loss, you name it, right? All these mini chapters. I also want to point out that Before our body came out. right at the birth of or just before the birth of The quantified self movement.

and biohacking and self-tracking. I mean these were effectively non existent. That provided a few incredibly powerful Inevitable trends.

that were going to surge and provide a lot of rocket fuel to this book. And It ended up working. Uh and once it worked, it gave me creative license and it also gave me credibility with publishers and others to do whatever the hell I wanted as long as it had a focus on Efficiency and effectiveness.

This is really where you kind of I think begin to I mean, you'd always been experimenting on yourself, right, with supplements and different things and But this is really where you Kind of become a

for a while known as is like a human guinea pig. Did that annoy you? Did did you think that that was It wasn't really explaining describing what you Do or did it?

I was all for it. I described myself that way also. One peculiar aspect of my hardware is that I Enjoy.

Figuring out the puzzle. I enjoy being the human guinea pig who tries a thousand things and then puts together the Cliff Notes index card version for my friends or readers. I get a high out of that. Yeah. I I will say a lot of the things that I do also are just to see if it's possible. So for instance, I I have

reduced capacity in my left lung from complications when I was born premature. And the story I've always told myself is I Can't hold my breath. as long as so-called normal people. But Then I spent time with David Blaine, who had learned how to hold his breath for I want to say fourteen plus minutes, and was able to get to a point.

Combining Practice and technique. I got to the point where I can hold my breath for five minutes plus. You can tra you you've come to believe you can train your the human body. to do things that we think are impossible.

That's right. And What I think gets lost in the shuffle is that when you do something like that, Or you learn how to memorize a shuffle deck of cards in like 60 seconds or 120 seconds, which is is a very trainable skill that is known, like the the mechanics of no of learning something like that are known. It shakes the foundation of

the other stories the other impossibles that you have in your life. Yeah. Do you do you think that I mean You're really smart guy.

You were a really good student and You've got a good brain. Do you think that the fact that you like to learn new things and you And you do learn them. Is because you've got a good brain or do you think that

These are skills that anybody could acquire. I think these are approaches to learning that anyone, almost anyone can use, assuming they don't have physical disabilities, right? I mean if you're and even if you were blind, uh or deaf, I have fans who use these techniques and just adapt them. So a good brain helps. Tremendously. But I have seen I'll give you a real example.

at a racetrack in Northern California. I saw a McLaren supercar. get beaten around the track in a race by a Driving instructor in a Miata. Hm okay. So there is even in a field that you would assume is

dependent entirely on Horsepower. and engineering of a superior vehicle. Even in A discipline like that.

Skill. can be and technique can be a real deciding factor. So I would say that І май експерієс I do think almost anyone can apply these things. Uh in in the same way that you don't you don't need to

Understand how A microwave works. Two. Follow. the quick start directions in the manual to use the microwave. Right.

You don't have to be a neuroscientist. Two. learn how to memorize a shuffle deck of cards. You just need a system. And

those systems exist. So I'm I'm a collector of And a tester of these systems. That's at the end of the day, I think, largely what I do. W I think really remarkable about Your

Journey. Is that you did actually Like you are really not known as the four hour guy anymore. Like you are and and and you've written other books since then and they've been very successful, but really

Today you're m most widely known as a podcaster. Yeah. And this is something you kinda just started as a whim in twenty fourteen. Yeah. The Tim Fair show was really just started out as a fun project.

to improve my ability to ask questions, which I was going to use in writing books later anyway, if I wrote more books. the part of the process of writing books that I actually enjoy the most, which is talking to the experts. All the hardest work comes after that. But Teasing out the insights and

habits of these world class performers is really what I love to do. that I think is really interesting about uh I mean there's so many interesting things about about your podcast, but but one of the things that you've talked a lot about is psychedelics and and your your use of them to help help you with depression and um

And earlier we talked about your time in college and we didn't we didn't go into this, but I know that you had experimented with Are they called mushrooms? I mean I I'm not super. And did that kind of just continue? For the rest of your life after that was it a kind of a regular thing or was it on and off or It was on and then off because it was at the time, this is in college and I think a fair number of people have had this experience.

It was not. Supervised it was not. m methodical. I mean it's like a bunch of college kids reaching into a Ziploc bag and grabbing God knows how much. No scale involved. And I had a number of incredibly positive experiences and then I had a very, very terrifying experience.

that showed me that these things are very powerful and need to be or should be done and controlled safe environment. So I I've I've been fascinated by the therapeutic potential of these compounds and what they might elucidate about the nature of mind and consciousness. For a long time I stopped though. in any way consuming psychedelics for

good stretch of time, let's just call it eight or ten years. But uh I found someone, I was able to get a reference to someone who is highly recommended for Guided. mushroom experiences and I was able to surrender to the experience and to come out of it feeling completely safe.

And uh that Marked. the beginning of a very, very deep study of uh these compounds, uh both experientially but also from the research perspective. And it was around the same time that I became very heavily involved in supporting the scientific research. uh in a number of different institutions.

And Look, for people who aren't familiar with it and I I met, I mean I'm not, you know, I'm I'm I'm boring, you know, like I'm a dad with two kids and But I've read enough about it to understand that actually Uh there's a lot.

For us. To learn, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I will say just a few things. To provide a little bit of context. So the first is that

Silocybin, which is the Psychoactive. molecule, one of them certainly within the mushrooms we've been talking about, so called magic mushrooms. Has been

Granted. Breakthrough therapy. designation for uh the treatment of depression. And

There are risks. If you have a family predisposition to schizophrenia, say, and you're taking these things in your twenties, it can trigger it. There are risks. Right. And uh so I should point out the legal side effects. of these compounds are significant. Uh for most people listening, certainly in the United States, uh these are schedule one and illegal to possess or use and certainly to distribute in many, many places. So you you need to be aware of that. So I don't recommend these loosely or in any cavalier way I discourage people from psychedelics more than I encourage. I I wanna I wanna turn to something slightly different.

Um three for a little bit of a curveball, but But y you've talked about your parents support. You know, clearly you have a They were really important to you as a child and Clearly you have a good relationship with them. And uh I wonder, um I mean, you know

Did you ever think that by this point in your life you would be a parent? Uh No. I didn't. Uh uh the thinking about kids was off the table for me up until very recently.

And Quite frankly. I felt Up until a few years ago.

Two in good faith bring another life into this world. So I Took it off the table.

I should say first and foremost that Four. A long time. certainly with my close brush with suicide in college. I assumed I wouldn't make

It passed thirty. And then there was a point where I assumed uh probably not going to make it past 40, whether it's dangerous hobbies that I have, or something else. Probably won't make it to forty, so I should really make this time count. And uh

It's really only with the support of my girlfriend, who I love very dearly. that I've arrived at a point where I feel like that's a possibility. So I would I would like to have kids. And I think that I've taken that emergency break off. Only because I've reached a certain level of self acceptance and self love, which are things I

Never. Seriously. In my twenties, or maybe even in my thirties. I mean, I viewed those the idea of self-love as as self-indulgent, a recipe for complacency. And uh I've certainly changed my mind. I think that if you don't love yourself completely, how are your kids gonna learn to love themselves completely? So that's that's a project that I I certainly don't impose on anyone else, but I take it very seriously for myself.

Um Tell me. When you think about um When you think about like all of the things that you've packed into your Forty three years. That's a lot of stuff. And you're

You know, he's got Several more chapters ahead of you. Um, including maybe fatherhood. How much of that of of of what's happened to you do you think Is because of how hard you worked and how smart you are and how much do you think is

Just Because of luck. Oh. You know? I wish I had a

Enough self awareness. And perspective to give you uh you know, seventeen percent, thirty five percent and quantify it to him. You're pretty good in the problem. I could figure out how to quantify it, but Uh I think there's a tendency among people who have some modecome for success when they're asked a question like that in public to say, Oh, it's all luck.

Uh or believe their own hype to the extent that they think it was all grit and determination and planning. I think it's gotta be a mixture. I do think there are a handful of things I've done right.

And the fact of the matter is, I've gotten a lot wrong. Like I have made so many mistakes and have brought myself to the brink of destruction. I mean, not just once, but multiple times, right? I mean a lot of days I just like roll out of bed and I I look like Eeyore and then I like get up and somehow manage to like get to a basic level of Consciousness by jumping into a cold pool and like eating a handful of walnuts. And then I like putz around and I'm not sure what to do for three hours. And then I spend the next three hours like beating the hell out of myself in my own head because I'm so unproductive.

And on and on and on, right? That is the majority of my days look something like that. Oh. Despite that I think that I am very good. At thinking about

Bet And experiments that have limited downside that have incredibly high upside if they work out. And I put those in a calendar. And I try a lot of things and

For that reason I I would really hope that where I've ended up is not all luck, because there's nothing to be learned there. Right? There's nothing to be learned. And I I don't think it's all luck. I guess just to to keep doing what I'm doing, I have to tell myself some version of that story. But I think it's true. I think it's true.

That's Tim Ferris. Entrepreneur, author, investor, and host of the podcast. By the way, there are so many incredibly challenging things that Tim's tried over the years that we didn't even have time to get into them. Like, for example, He learned a form of Japanese horseback archery.

He also worked as an MTV breakdancer in Taiwan. And in less than a week. Tim learned how to play drums well enough. to perform the song Hot Blooded at a sold-out concert. with the band Horner.

And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can write to us at hibtnpr.org. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at how I built this or at guy, and on Instagram, we're at guy.Roz. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramteen Arab Lui. Thanks also to Liz Metzger, Dereth Gales, JC Howard, Julia Carney, Neva Grant And Jeff Rogers.

Our intern is Faris Safari. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this. This is NPR.

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