Tim Ferriss

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode's guest is the remarkable Tim Ferriss. Many of you know him as the author of five New York Times number one bestsellers, including of course, The 4-Hour Workweek. People sometimes refer to him as the Oprah of Audio, because his podcast has been downloaded more than 500 million times.
He's also got the angel investor golden touch, with stakes in Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo and Alibaba. But this episode isn't completely feel-good pixie dust and unicorns. We delve into heavy topics such as depression and suicide. Tim also explains the role of physical exercise in his wellbeing, why he doesn't use social media anymore, and how to grow a podcast.
After the recording, I came to believe that Tim Ferriss is Arianna Huffington with a bad-ass attitude. We did geek out about John McPhee after we discovered our mutual admiration for his work. I know this is off topic, but after you listen to this episode, do yourself a favor and read any of John McPhee's books. Be forewarned: Tim drops a few F-bombs in the fine Remarkable People tradition of Margaret Atwood. Also, the interview got so hot, a siren went off.

I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People, and now here's the remarkable Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss:
I'm on an undisclosed location – farm - on the East Coast, so I am outside of cities. We're going to have some exciting sounds in the background because at one o'clock the air siren goes off from the fire department but that will end in a second.
Guy Kawasaki:
I like it. We couldn't arrange for a better bureau than that.
Tim Ferriss:
Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
Tim Ferriss is in the house.
Tim Ferriss:
Yes, sir, with the siren. Go!
Guy Kawasaki:
Is that it? That's the whole siren?
Tim Ferriss:
That's it. Just one.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, man.
Tim Ferriss:
Just one screech.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm glad we timed that perfectly. We couldn't have planned that better. I like to first take you back to high school, of all times, and I want you to tell me about the impact of your year of exchange student-ness in Japan.
Tim Ferriss:
It changed everything. It changed everything for me. I had not spent any time outside of the US prior to that. I was born and raised on Long Island, very much confined to a tiny, tiny geography, and I transferred to a different school about halfway through high school, or towards the end of sophomore year.
I had assumed I was bad at Spanish, or concluded I was bad at Spanish. I had some new friends who were in the Japanese class so I decided to take Japanese. I was also more interested in the culture, and six months or nine months later, I was on my way to Tokyo.
I landed in Tokyo. It took me about a month just to accept that I was in Japan. I would wake up every morning and go, "I'm in Japan! I'm in Japan!" I couldn't even wrap my head around it. It taught me so much. It taught me that I could be somewhat self-sufficient and survive and ultimately thrive.
There were other exchange students and I was the only one who lasted a year, which was in question at points because I thought I would go back. It was very difficult because I anticipated that it would be me in Japan, learning Japanese through Japanese classes. In my head, Japanese classes meant Japanese language classes but that's not what happened. I showed up, they gave me a school uniform and then I was in world history, calculus, regular high school curriculum in Japanese. So I didn't understand-
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Tim Ferriss:
... a damn thing. But I have a deep affinity for Japanese culture. I'm still in touch with my host family from when I was fifteen. So I'm still close to my host family, I'm forty-three now.
A lot of my friends from Japan will say to me, (dialogue in Japanese)! They think I have some Japanese-ness, but coming back from that I also realized how much of the rules that we follow, in the US as an example, anywhere, are kind of arbitrary, which side of the street you drive on, how you shower. I mean, in Japan it's a whole different thing.
The whole sequence of events is totally different with showering and bathing and so on. You don't get into the okudo with a bar of soap. That's a big no-no, right? So just the fact that things could be so different and work just as well, if not better, was a huge eye-opener for me. I think that affected everything I did afterwards.
Guy Kawasaki:
You also mentioned that you went through a “dark time,” quote unquote, you call it. What was that dark time, what happened?
Tim Ferriss:
Well, I suffered from extended bouts of depression starting in the early teens. In college, that got particularly bad, which in retrospect is pretty common. A lot of things get magnified in college. Schizophrenia, for instance, usually people begin to manifest symptoms of schizophrenia, which I didn't. It wasn't schizophrenia but in that mid-twenties to late twenties.
So I almost killed myself in 1999. It got that close. I had a whole plan for it, and the only reason I didn't was that the book I had reserved at the library - I was taking the year away from school - but I reserved a book at Firestone Library, which was about suicide, and I forgot to change my mailing address at the registrar. So I was living off campus but the postcard that said, “Your book on suicide has arrived,” went home to my parents. So I got a call from my mom and that snapped me out of the spell.
In this day and age, if it had been right now, I would have terminated myself, because it would have been email or something else. That was the darkest and it's a lot to discuss, but that was certainly the darkest period. But a lot has changed.
Guy Kawasaki:
How did you work through it?
Tim Ferriss:
Exercise was the big constant. What I did after that is, I found a boxing gym in Trenton, which is a pretty rough neighborhood, depending on where you are. I found a boxing gym in Trenton and went there and just got out of my head by getting into my body, basically. That was the first key.
The second key was realizing that if you inflict pain on yourself, especially in the form of suicide - I mean, which might be short-lived pain but nonetheless, it's like taking the hurt you're feeling, multiplying it by ten and converting it into a suicide vest and walking into a room with the people you care most about, and blowing yourself up. There is a wide and powerful impact on those you care about, or at the very least to those people who care about you. It's not just isolated to your own experience. That's something I think that also philosophically was important for me to try to incorporate into my life. The pattern interrupt though was exercise, for sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a great plug for exercise. I surf between two and four hours a day. It's the only thing that's keeping me sane right now.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
But unlike you, I didn't master surfing in four hours or four days, or four weeks.
Tim Ferriss:
It takes longer. Surfing takes longer. I haven't mastered surfing either. There's a really good book called Spark on some of the neurological effects and just biochemical effects of exercise on brain drive, nurture of effect, and things like that. So the effects of exercise are not just on learning but really brain health are remarkable. That book covers a lot of ground, Spark.
Guy Kawasaki:
How did the 4-Hour Workweek book come to be?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. The 4-Hour Workweek, the blessing and the curse that is that title, that book came to be because around 2003 I was asked to guest lecture at Princeton where I went to undergrad, in a class called high-tech entrepreneurship. The professor had been a real critical mentor to me, Professor Ed Zschau. A fascinating guy.
He'd been a congressman, a competitive figure skater, took a couple of companies public, was I think the first or one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. I mean, the guy just did everything.
I came back and talked about bootstrapping entrepreneurship. Because most of his guest speakers were venture capitalists or people who had built venture-backed companies. Doing it with your personal savings and really scrapping, is different. It's just a different journey.
I came back and talked about that, and around 2004 or '05 the content of the lecture, I was giving it once a year… or maybe twice a year? The content kind of shifted to what I later called “lifestyle design,” so talking about beginning with the end in mind. So rather than trying to win this race, compete, and then figure out what's left over, which is your life, what if we started with the end in mind and work backwards? What would it look like? Because my own thinking and decision-making was changing over that period of time.
I left for a couple of years, or about eighteen months, to travel around the world, because I had automated my business at that point, and came back and I had this huge stack of notes, and Princeton students can be pretty snobby and pompous and smug. Look, I'm sure I've been those things too, but at a place like Princeton or Harvard, or any of these blue-chips, you get a fair amount of smug behavior.
I would always send this feedback form via email through Ed, the professor, to students, asking for their comments and feedback. One kid sent this feedback – could’ve been older than me, I mean, there were graduate students in the class too. The comment was something like, “I don't understand why you're teaching a class of forty undergrads and grad students. Why don't you just write a book and be done with it?” I don't think it was a serious recommendation. I think it was, “fuck you.” I don't think it was a serious recommendation, but that stuck in my head.
I had really bad insomnia at the time, so I would wake up in the middle of the night and jot down ideas for chapter titles and stuff like that. I then reached out to a couple of friends who had been authors and one of them was like, "Yeah, you should totally write a book, without question."
I had been traumatized by my senior thesis at Princeton, which everyone has to write. I didn't want actually to write a book. I wanted somebody to just say, "No, you shouldn't write a book." He introduced me to a bunch of folks and everybody turned me down in terms of agents. Except for one guy, Steve Hanselman, who ended up becoming my agent. He had just moved from being an editor to an agent.
We then pitched the book to, I don't know, whatever, twenty-nine publishers, got turned down by all of them, except for one, which was at the end, and that was Crown - then Crown; they've changed their name within Random House - they bought it for bargain basement pricing, split into five installments, which doesn't matter. If your book does well, that doesn't matter. So I was very, very lucky.
I don't know what kind of lightning got put in the bottle for that thing, but it was the right timing, right place. I was in Silicon Valley - techies seemed to grab onto it, getting things done demographic. That put me on the map, to the extent that I've ever been on the map I suppose.
Guy Kawasaki:
So after that, it's to infinity and beyond? That's the Tim Ferriss story?
Tim Ferriss:
To infinity and beyond. Yeah, to infinity and beyond. The four-hour shtick stuck around, and it's going to stick around forever, but I did the four-hour shtick for a few other subjects. I think one key decision that came not too long after The 4-Hour Workweek was deciding to do the 4-Hour Body. Now, that is not an obvious next book because even though it has the four-hour jersey, it's still in play on the court. I knew that there would be a lot of pressure to do the three-hour workweek and the four-hour workweek for single moms, and the four-hour workweek for, whatever… Christians. The 4-hour workweek for ... you just franchise the shit out of it, and that there would be that pressure, internal and external.
So I wanted to… I knew that I could always come back and do that. That option would remain, but if I took advantage of it in 2008, 2009, so one or two years after The 4-Hour Workweek came out, that I would paint myself into that corner and I would have to be the workweek guy forever.
I was like, “Well, if I'm going to take a risk, this is actually a really good time to get it, as long as I get paid in a larger advance,” because I didn't get paid anything for the first one, then let me take the payday but do something in a totally different area, and if it works, I will have the confidence to explore other areas but if I stick with the crutch of what has been successful once, I could be dooming myself to feel constraint to that forever. So that was a really important decision.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying that the 4-Hour Body was far enough away from the concept of the workweek so that it was a stretch?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. I'm saying that if the four-hour thing ... so rather than be a business author, which is what I was considered when The 4-Hour Workweek came out, if I could be someone whose readers follow him in this case for a way of thinking about different subjects, kind of like Malcolm Gladwell, let's just say as an example. Or even a Michael Lewis. They're very different writers but they ... Or John McPhee, right? John McPhee can write a book on oranges and they're like, "Great, I'll read a book on oranges."
Guy Kawasaki:
Or tennis!
Tim Ferriss:
Or tennis, and then they'll read a book on tennis. They're following his thinking, not necessarily the subject matter. So that was, to me, a hypothesis worth testing; could I make it work in another genre completely? A different part of the book store. At that time parts of bookstore mattered.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Did you read John McPhee's book about the birch bark canoe guy?
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, yeah, the bark canoe. Sure. Yes, I did.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, man, I love John McPhee.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, he's great. And the tennis, you mentioned tennis, Levels of the Game. If people want to read a short McPhee book, Levels of the Game is absolutely incredible. If you prefer basketball, you could read A Sense of Where You Are.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, the Bill Bradley book, right?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. I mean, they're both just amazing and you'll get an appreciation for why people feel the way they do about John McPhee.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. How has the pandemic and all its ancillary changes affected, if it has affected, your thinking of the four-hour workweek and productivity?
Tim Ferriss:
That's a good question. Nobody's asked me about that.
My views on the four-hour workweek and my views on productivity may be viewed as two different buckets. I would say that the four-hour workweek, in a sense, the trends and the convergence of trends that are described in the 4-Hour Workweek have been accelerated 1,000-fold in terms of remote work, distributed work - everything has been accelerated.
So the trends that were already in motion, which were just, just beginning to gain traction in 2007 ... where Elance was a platform we would talk a lot about, and so on. This is before people had Zoom. This is before people had fiber. This is before people had 99 ... well, 99designs might have just been getting started, but this was early days. The infrastructure didn't really exist and probably AWS didn't exist or was in its infancy. Rentable infrastructure for startups, and also just the ability to work in a distributed fashion, was hamstrung in a lot of cases. That's changed.
I think the ethos and the trends described in the 4-Hour Workweek, I still stand by completely. I do think the principles still apply more than ever.
Some of what I wrote in that book - I mean, I'm forty-three now. I was twenty-nine when I wrote it, or twenty-eight - I mean, some of it makes me cringe, right? Where you're just like, "Oh, Jesus." Of course. Of course, it makes me cringe. I've been asked by the publisher to go back and revise it, and I don't want to fuck with it because it really struck such a chord with people that I feel like going back and stepping on the butterfly is a bad idea. So I've left it alone. So I left it alone.
On the productivity side, what has become very present for me in the pandemic ... because I've struggled quite a lot, as I think a lot of people have, or as I know a lot of people have. Certainly my struggles, fortunately because I'm in a position of privilege and have ended up where I am, have not been existential. They're not figuring out food or rent or any of these basic necessities, and so many people struggle with that. Some of my family members have struggled this and been laid off from service jobs, for instance.
My struggles have been psychological and emotional. I think when it is easy to busy yourself with going to the office, staying at the office late, working - I mean, I'm not staying in the office. I've always been remote but the point being, when it's harder to BS yourself into believing that you're doing a million things and that all of those things are important, you end up sitting with yourself, in the case of quarantine, at home with your significant other, and if there is stuff that has been safely bubbling beneath the surface for you and your significant other, for you personally, I think all of that has been pulled up to visibility, at least for me, within the context of quarantine.
Productivity is not the end all, be all, because you can be really productive doing something unimportant. You can produce a lot that is not of great value, or you could be focused on the wrong things and still do stupid things very efficiently. So it's reinforced for me the importance of having strong “why's” in place. Understanding the core drivers of why you're spending as much time and energy as you are, on the things you're spending time and energy on.
I'd say, secondly, the importance for me, of some degree of self-compassion because as soon as quarantine hit, there were these stories of Isaac Newton and other people having the most productive years of their lives, creating their magnum opus while in a cottage in the British countryside, or whatever, and that was my bar. I was like, "Okay, that's what I need to do."
I don't think I've been Isaac Newton, I really don't. Most of the time I think I've been kind of a fuckin’ mess, pardon my French, and just being okay with that, and allowing it to be there, instead of trying to not feel things I don't want to feel.
Productivity, it's a morally, an impact-agnostic filter, and 'the why' is incredibly important. My reasons for doing things and 'the why' has become, even more than it was before, which it was, a precursor to trying to maximize effectiveness or efficiency during quarantine.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Tim, how do you define yourself today? What do you say you are?
Tim Ferriss:
That's a damn fine question. I don't think I have a great answer to this. What I would usually say… it really depends on who's asking, because sometimes it's just not even a conversation that I want to have. But if it's just a pleasantry, then I'll give one answer.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, this is Guy Kawasaki's podcast.
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, it's you asking me. It's you asking.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I really want to know!
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. I would say that I'm a human Guinea pig. I just try a lot of stuff, and I'm sort of the first line of defense for my listeners or my readers. That's how I view it.
If there is a problem that… it's very similar to the entrepreneurship in my life experience. It's like, “Okay, I have a problem. Why do I know I have a problem?” Because I'm cobbling together some half-ass solution to something that doesn't really have an off-the-shelf ready answer. I'm like, “Okay, this is stupid. Let me see if I can do a bunch of homework on this, test it a lot, throw a ton against the wall, shoot myself as the human Guinea pig. Then I'll try those 100 things and if ten of them work and two of them really work, then great. Then I'll share that with my audience.” Therefore, while I'm creating stuff for my listeners or readers, I'm also scratching a very personal itch of some type. I mean, that's always been what I do. So if I were to shorten that, I would just say, human Guinea pig. Alternatively I could say I'm a podcaster and sometimes writer.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm curious because I am a writer and sometimes podcaster, but if I had to start today, it's not clear to me I would write another book. I think that podcasting is much more powerful than authoring a book. What do you think?
Tim Ferriss:
I think they're powerful in different ways, and they're powerful for different ways, the explanations of which aren't totally clear to me. For instance, podcasting, each episode of my podcasts, and each episode of your podcasts, I would have to imagine, they hit big numbers. So at least for me, I sit back and I'm like, "Why spend years writing a book when I can prototype and get this stuff out so much more quickly?" What I found is that the half-life of the stickiness of a book, if it works, is just longer than a podcast.
The podcast is - it's not as ephemeral as radio, because at least historically radio appears and then it disappears. It's just like a golf ball in a river going past. Podcasts are different because there is a record. You can go back and listen to them multiple times. They're available, but there's still an incredible power in text. I don't know if that'll change.
It's true also in comparison to video but the price you have to pay as an author is just so high that podcasts are, at the very least, a great way to put off writing. I think I've used them in that way myself quite a lot.
Guy Kawasaki:
I mean, I would make the argument for your case, that I doubt 500 million people have read your books, but 500 million downloads have occurred, or something like that, of your podcast, right? The beauty for me of podcasting is, not just the immediacy. Because I don't know about you, from the time I start till the time I end a book, it's a year and a half or two years, and I know the day it ships, it's wrong. Imagine if you wrote a book about education, the future of education, and it's coming out right now and you wrote it a year ago-
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, you're screwed.
Guy Kawasaki:
... you might just throw that book away. The other beautiful thing about podcasting is, you can sell 52 sponsorships.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, and you get some reinforcement along the way instead of sitting in your bedroom wondering if this thing is going to turn out well a year or two later, or three years later. So there is definitely positive feedback both from listeners and some market validation, or at least personal validation from sponsors along the way. Which on one hand is so appealing, and I think there's also, to quote Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, sometimes it's an opportunity to be seized, and sometimes it's a temptation to be resisted. It's seductive. So I try to keep that in mind but I do enjoy the podcast. I mean, the podcasting, especially in the lazy way I do it, it's hard for me not to enjoy it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. I don't know how you do it, but podcasting has kind of taken over my life. As I look back on my career, and I've written fifteen books and I don't know, given thousands of speeches, I think my podcast is the best work I've ever done, and maybe the most underappreciated at the same time. I'm trying to rectify that.
Do you have to deal, and how do you deal, with skeptics? I'll use my example. A skeptic would say, "You know, Guy, thirty years ago you worked for Steve Jobs. You got on a tsunami and you wrote that thing, and for the last thirty years you've been talking about Macintosh evangelism. What have you done lately? Why should I read your book and listen to your podcast? You're just a one-trick pony." Blah-blah-blah. Have you ever dealt with people who say that? "You're just a guru, you don't really do anything," kind of thing?
Tim Ferriss:
I get all sorts of skeptics. I mean, skeptic would be on the polite side. I get some very aggressive detractors. It depends on the nature of the criticism. I don't want to label all critics “haters,” which is a very natural… I'm not saying that's what you do, but a lot of people are like, "Oh, they're just haters, don't listen to them." Which I think can create a blind spot, when you're getting critical feedback that could be valuable. So I try to listen if the emotional tone isn't just hyper aggressive, which it can be.
If the tone is just, 'fuck you' from the outset, then I just don't have a conversation. Generally, if they're like, “Here's my accusation, what do you have to say?” I'm just like, “I'm perfectly willing to accept that you're right. Let's just accept that you're right. Well done. You've deduced it, Sherlock Holmes. Pass the salt, please. I can use some salt on my salad.” I try not to take the bait if it's just looking for a fight.
If it's just pugilism and they want to have a dance of sophistry, and try to defeat me because they had a lot of gree they never used, which is very common. These folks who had a lot of gree and just they want to bash heads with somebody over dinner to show how smart they are, then I'm like, “No, I'm stupid. Look, my brain is slow. I'm from Long Island, you're going to wipe the floor with me. Let's just have desert and chill the fuck out.” It's sort of cheesy to use that, I think it's the Roosevelt quote, 'the man in the arena,' and so on, but I really try to focus on feedback from operators of some type, people who are actually getting their hands dirty and risking something.
Nothing makes me chuckle more than a journalist who has made a career of taking cheap shots at people or being super snarky, and then they publish a book and they have to face the reality of rejection and difficulty and criticism and they fuckin’ can't handle it. It's like, “Tough, tough rub on that one. Yeah. You should really make sure that you can take it, if you're going to dish it out.”
I don't have a lot of time for those folks. I also, I think early on, went looking for feedback and would obsess over the negative stuff. I've had all of the social apps deleted from my phone for months now. I don't go looking for it anymore.
Guy Kawasaki:
What?
Tim Ferriss:
I don't want to speak for everybody else but if I go on, let's say, Twitter and I'm looking at “@” replies, I could see ninety-nine replies that are incredibly life-affirming and supportive and one that's just, “You're a bald charlatan. You should crawl back into the hole you came from, hashtag 4-hour donkey, or whatever.” I'm like, “Oh, that fucking guy, that fucking guy!” That would bother me for an hour. It's just such a piss-poor use of energy, and to come back to productivity, just briefly, I think a lot more about energy, management, these days than time management certainly.
Energy - it doesn't matter how much time you have, if you don't have the energetic resources to apply to projects within those windows of time. Look, I'm not getting any younger. It's like, energy is at a premium for me, and I expect that's going to continue to be the case. I solicit feedback actively from people I respect, who I know are going to be straight shooters. That could be in the case of some of my writing or other things, like Brian Koppelman, the co-creator of Billions, who co-wrote Rounders and many, many other movies. Or it could be Seth Godin, people who I know don't give a flying fuck about making me feel good for the sake of making me feel good, if I'm asking them for feedback. Sorry. I don't know, am I allowed to curse on this show? I should have asked ahead of time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why not?
Tim Ferriss:
Okay. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if this is family programming. You can put a warning in the intro.
Guy Kawasaki:
The first person to ever drop the F-word on my podcast was Margaret Atwood, so I figure you're in good company, seriously.
Tim Ferriss:
If that can be the association that people have, of me and Margaret Atwood, then perfect. Perfect.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, that is good company to be in. Do you want me to tell you the story of how that came to be?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I was interviewing Margaret Atwood for this podcast and I asked her about her method of writing, her technique. Was she writing a fountain pen on parchment, or was she using a MacBook in Word? She explained it. I said, "So what's your relationship with editors?" She said, "Well, basically, I write my book and I seek feedback from people who are like the characters in my book." Then she says, "Guy, I once wrote a book and there was this young male, and I sent him the manuscript. He said, ‘Margaret, we don't say, 'what in fuck? We say, 'what the fuck?’ So that's why I changed my manuscript." Can it get any better than that?
Tim Ferriss:
That's great! That's really good!
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. A few lighter, quicker questions, your favorite books.
Tim Ferriss:
Favorite books, Dune, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Zorba the Greek, those would be a few.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I don't see any non-fiction in there. Or Seneca, I guess. I mean, I don't see The Effective Executive. I don't see The Innovator's Dilemma.
Tim Ferriss:
The Effective Executive I'll put up there as well. I read a lot, so there's a recency by its... as far as fiction, Little, Big would be very, very high up there. Hard to read but very, very good book. In terms of non-fiction, The Effective Executive, certainly the Seneca letters I mentioned. You can find it in public domain, it's the Moral Letters to Lucilius, or Lucilius, depending on how you want to pronounce it. I've read so much non-fiction in my life, certainly the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch I think is excellent.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you a Bob Torini fan?
Tim Ferriss:
I am. Yeah, I am. I've read his stuff very, very early in my entrepreneurial journey, and I found it really helpful for thinking about add, copy, and positioning, and stuff like that. I am a fan of his, for sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Favorite podcast?
Tim Ferriss:
Favorite podcast: Hardcore History is probably at the very top of the list. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History start with The Wrath of Khan, which is Genghis Khan, the story of otherwise known as Genghis Khan, is just tremendous. The fact that Dan produces a podcast, one episode every few months that is as popular as it is, is so gratifying and life-affirming to me because we are moving in a direction where it's like, “Everything should be true crime. Everything should be this; Listen to the market.” It's, “Listen to the market,” and that grosses me out because it's just going to become what we see everywhere else.
I mean, you're going to have a handful of genres that get a lot of clicks and listens, and no one in their right mind would have ever… if Dan Carlin came to one of the big companies now and said, "This is the show I'm thinking about doing, four-hour episodes in multiple part series, and I'll put out one every few months," no one would have said yes. I would say that's top of my list, for sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
What's your tech setup?
Tim Ferriss:
My tech setup, pretty basic. MacBook Pro, a Roost laptop stand normally, and then Bluetooth keyboard and track-pad or mouse. That's it. I keep it basic.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is that a Yeti mic?
Tim Ferriss:
This is not. I'm used to saying ATR2100, but it's a newer model. This is an Audio-Technica ATR100X, I want to say, which is a USBC mic. I use this for everything.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is this how you would conduct your podcast interview, same setup?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, that's exactly what I would do. I don't have a studio. I have the back of a restaurant or an attic, or an airport lobby. I'm very expedient about the whole thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
What do you want your epitaph to say?
Tim Ferriss:
Epitaph, a teacher who created students better than he was, probably. Something like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Good. I love it. I love it.
What is your procedure in the morning?
Tim Ferriss:
My procedure in the morning is; it sometimes changes but right now I wake up, I sync my Oura Ring with my phone to look at my sleep data. Then I use a device called CorSense, which is the hardware to take another HRV variability reading using an app called Elite HRV, so I'm tracking both of those. Doing a bunch of heart rate stuff right now.
Then go downstairs. I heat water to 180 degrees and make my tea, which this morning was actually some yerba mate - powered yerba mate, so instantized - plus Laird Superfood creamer, unsweetened. It's sort of powdered coconut oil basically or coconut milk. It gives you some MCTs to keep your brain doing something functional. Put that in a YETI rumbler, which will keep it - I think it's rumbler, rambler maybe, which will keep it hot for a couple of hours. Then I sit and I do twenty minutes of breathing. I do twenty minutes of breath work, which is using an app called Breathe, which is, I think, awesome breathing. Something very basic. It's a circle that expands and contracts.
I do breath work for twenty minutes and then I'm off to the races. I'll usually take a walk outside of my push as well. I got my dog right next to me now as we record also.
Guy Kawasaki:
Clearly you don't wake up and immediately start checking email. You said you deleted all your social media.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, I got rid of all my social on my phone, so I definitely don't check social on the phone.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you're way ahead of the Social Dilemma, if you saw that movie yet.
Tim Ferriss:
I just watched about three-quarters of it last night. Yeah, scary.
Guy Kawasaki:
What did you think? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
And also it makes perfect sense. Yeah, I'm only three-quarters into it. I thought it was good. I've interviewed Tristan Harris and I'm acutely aware of a lot of the issues. I'm only three-quarters of the way into it. It paints a dark picture, certainly.
Guy Kawasaki:
No kidding, yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
It paints a dark picture. I mean, if you think you're going to outgun billions of dollars and teams of hundreds of data scientists and engineers who are trying to capture your attention, you're really bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you, literally, I'm now returning to the sub, literally, you have no social media apps on your phone?
Tim Ferriss:
I deleted all of them. Facebook is on here but I don't use it. It's been asking me to update. I have no… let me just take a look… Yeah, I don't have any social media apps on my phone, which is great also because if friends send me, which happens all the time, friends will send me links to stuff on social, I’ll go to it, and say on Instagram it'll prompt you to download the app. You can basically only go in one layer before it blocks you. You can't scroll and go to a bunch of photos. It won't let you engage in that behavior, it'll force you to download the app and I'm not going to download the app so it's very self-regulating in that way, which is great
I'll just tell you, I want to add something to that, which is, I've not had social on my phone for four months. Yeah, three or four months. No downside that I'm aware of. My life has continued. I'm not dead. I haven't lost all my friends. Things are great, so I've been convinced that I don't have a social media deficiency. No blood tests have turned up anything funny.
Guy Kawasaki:
So your downloads are not down or anything like that? Everything is good?
Tim Ferriss:
I think this month will probably be the biggest month in the history of the podcast. So, no, nothing's down.
Guy Kawasaki:
If that’s what it takes, I'm going to quit social media too. I'd be happy to do that.
Tim Ferriss:
Everyone is pissing in the pool. It's not very much fun anymore.
Guy Kawasaki:
Social media, we're both, quote unquote, influencers, right? People have this false belief that if I say, "Go buy my book," or if I say, "Go buy Tim's book," or if I say, “Go buy…” I don't know, “lipstick.” All of a sudden millions of people buy lipsticks, books or whatever. I wish that were true. It's not so true anymore. Maybe it's true for you. It's not true for me.
Tim Ferriss:
No. I think social is very overvalued, unless that's your career where you're an Instagram influencer and you get paid, whatever, 1,700 grand per promotional post, which happens, then fantastic.
I mean, I remember I spoke to this guy who had a multi-million-dollar business built on Facebook pages. I asked him what it felt like and he said, "I feel like I have the most profitable McDonald's on the world, built on top of an active volcano." What he meant by that was, one algorithm change and you're a roadkill. Your entire business is predicated on organic reach that could be removed at any time. It wouldn't let me sleep well at night. So I'd say, email list. Build your email list, folks. That's the way to go.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's good advice. Going a little bit deeper in podcasting, a lot of podcasters listen to my podcast and I would like to know the answer to this question, how do you grow a podcast?
Tim Ferriss:
I will give some answers but I don't want to create the mistaken impression that I know exactly how the podcast is grown. I would say, there are a few things that come to mind. Number one is, pick a format that is dead simple. Pick a format that you are confident you can do 100 episodes of before you quit. Because the podcasting elephant graveyard is full of three to five episodes podcasts where Jimmy, in Wisconsin, decides that he's going to make the next This American Life, and dies under the crushing way of trying to build something that is like a lot of things; it's so elegant and beautiful in the listening experience that you think it might be beautiful and elegant in the editing process, and that's just not true. You can go to the end of This American Life and listen to the credits. Unless you have an army of people to help you, don't try to be This American Life, so figuring out something that makes you excited.
Figure out a subject matter that also gives you some breadth. So format and subject matter, simplicity and format, and some degree of breadth in options for subject matter I think is really important. If I had started the 4-Hour Workweek podcast, oh-oh, my options for interview subjects, my options, they're really narrow. There's something to be said for that.
A counterargument would be, “Hey, look at,” say, “the bigger pocket guys who are really, really good.” You might niche into real estate and go an inch wide and a thousand miles deep. That's an alternate strategy. But you have to pick a strategy that isn't just successful for podcasts in some abstract general way, that it is successful and sustainable for you. You have the perfect strategy because you've done the market research and you're like, “What the market needs is a podcast isolated on dyslexic pets,” and you don't give a shit about the pets, it doesn't matter what the market says, you're never going to make it because there are people like me, or like you, who actually enjoy what they're doing and they're like, "Yeah, I could do this forever. I could do two of these a week forever." You're not going to beat somebody who has that type of staying power and enthusiasm, which is very easy to detect or not detect. So those would be two.
The third would be, at least as far as I'm concerned, optimize for interesting content and compelling content, not celebrity guests. This might seem counterintuitive because there are people who have taken the opposite approach. You might say, "Hold on a second, though. Look at Joe Rogan and look at Dax Shephard, having these huge guests on helps them." My answer would be, "Yes, it helps them and they are native to that environment. These are people they know. They live in that world, so it is both sustainable and interesting for them, but for people who are not in the LA or entertainment ecosystem, to try to get celebrities, it is massively time-consuming." It is possible, it can happen, but it takes fucking forever. Even for me, to get some of these major celebrities on the podcast, I mean, you're talking about a year or two, just to get it done.
Guy Kawasaki:
What, who takes a year?
Tim Ferriss:
I'm not going to mention names but multiple guests have taken that long because they have managers, they have agents, they have publicists and then they have lawyers, and you've got to deal oftentimes with every single one of those people. All those people want to stick their thumbprints on everything to show how much hard work they're doing on behalf of their client, who's paying them a $20,000 retainer a month, or whatever it is. It's exhausting.
Some of those interviews turn out really well, but if you're just getting started you're going to have… or forget about just getting started. If you have a small operation, that is a lot of cycles and it's expensive. I've spent money on lawyers because they're like, "Yeah, we're going to eviscerate your release." I'm like, "This is a standard release. We need this so that we're not exposed from a liability perspective," and that could take forever. So just to prove a point real quick, if you look at my top fifty episodes, I would say half of them are names in terms of guests most people would not recognize.
Still, this is certainly true in text but even in audio, if the episode is really good and you as the host are excited about it, it can travel. It doesn't have to be somebody super famous.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think the most popular episode I've had is Stephen Wolfram, who is a physicist. I would have never, ever… I thought it would be Jane Goodall or someone who's drop-dead famous. By the way, let the record show that I got you Jane Goodall in twenty-four hours, right? I didn't need two years to ...
Tim Ferriss:
We did. We did, and I appreciate that. I appreciate that very much.
Guy Kawasaki:
It was my pleasure.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, very kind intro. She was great, and she'd been on my list for a long time. A lot of it also… this actually brings up another thing, which is part of the reason that worked, is that she had a movie coming out two or three weeks later. So don't chase guests who are not in their promotional cycle, if that's how they operate.
There are some people who will be on a podcast any time, if it's to interest to them. There are many, many other people who will not do any media whatever, unless they're going into a promotional cycle where they're going to do media. So don't bang your head against the wall trying to get someone on your show if they're just off the playing field, which is going to be true for a lot of folks.
Guy Kawasaki:
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed a reporter from the New York Times named Dionne Searcey. She's the one who went to West Africa and did the whole book of Haram. My god, the story she had. I asked her for tips to conducting great interviews and she said, "One thing you should always do, at the end of the interview you ask your subject, 'is there anything that I should have asked you?'" So Tim, I'm asking you that now, is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?
Tim Ferriss:
Is there anything you should have asked me? 'Should' is a strong word. If I were to throw a question at myself, the first thing that came to mind is: What do you care more about now that you cared less about or not at all, say when you wrote The 4-Hour Workweek?
Guy Kawasaki:
Excellent. That's a great question.
Tim Ferriss:
That actually could be the opposite too, what do you care less about? But in terms of caring more about I would just say psychological and emotional health. So being fit, not just financially, not just physically, not just cognitively in terms of learning capacity, but really having an awareness of the flow of your emotions and not compartmentalizing. Having the fluency with feelings, so you can allow things to flow through you.
First and foremost, having some degree of self-acceptance and self-love, which I didn't have for decades. I was just a competitor and that seemed self-indulgent. It ended up being very destructive to have that lens. So books like Radical Acceptance, practices like mindfulness through, let's say, the Waking Up app with Sam Harris. Talking to professionals and doing training like heart rate variability training, to be aware of when my system is overreacting because of a lot of childhood experiences that wired me to be hyperreactive. All of that for me has ended up being the foundational piece upon which everything else can be built. You can avoid that for a long time, but you can't avoid it forever. If you do try to avoid it forever, I think you'll end up being very, in the best cases, professionally successful but personally unfulfilled and often miserable.
Guy Kawasaki:
Would you say that this ‘a-ha’ that you have about this kind of wellness… if a skeptic said, "Well, yeah. If I were Tim Ferriss and I had the world's most popular podcast and I was printing money, yeah, I could be thinking about wellness and mindfulness and my heart rate." But did this cause you to be successful, or once you were successful then you had the luxury of being able to focus on this?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. It's impossible to say. I think that certainly my drive to compete at all costs, has helped a lot of the professional successes to manifest, financially. But I also know people who never had that demon on their back, who have more money than I do. So I don't think it's a prerequisite.
I don't think being a masochist and priding yourself on how much pain you can tolerate is a prerequisite because there are so many counter examples of people I know who don't have that kind of shadow behind them at all times. So I don't think so. I would say also that, if you look at my experiences, say, in the last five or six years when I've taken this very seriously, granted, one could argue that I had already hit escape velocity because I've had successful books and everything else, but in the last five or six years I've done more than I could have imagined, even with my previous pride and pain tolerance and work capacity and ability to focus.
Only since I've begun to accept these parts of myself that I divorced, people can look up, IFS, which is parts work, Internal Family System. Only since I started paying attention to these things, have all of these other pieces fallen into place, where I am achieving more with more ease. That didn't happen until five or six years ago.
It may not be totally causal, but it's completely correlated with doing this type of work myself. So that may be a dissatisfying answer but I think it's very helpful.
I think it's very helpful because I've always seen friends who beat the shit out of themselves all the time and view that as their secret to success, who have actually agreed to experiment with this stuff and figure out that there are gears between park and sixth gear. They can actually use the rest of the transmission, and none of them have complained about losing their edge professionally. They're no longer swinging at every pitch. That's exhausting. Swinging at every pitch like it's going to be a home-run and missing ninety percent of them, but swinging as hard as you can, that's exhausting. So I feel good about it. I think it can help with everything else.
Guy Kawasaki:
To use a surfing analogy, you don't paddle for every wave.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, exactly.

Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you found Tim's interview as remarkable, insightful and funny as I did. He is truly one of a kind.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff Seih, who are also each one of a kind.
Until the next episode, remember to wash your hands, remain a good distance from other people, don't go into crowded restaurants and bars, wear a mask and trust in Tony Fauci. It's so hard to get subscribers, I don't want any of you getting sick and dying.
Mahalo and aloha.

This is Remarkable People.