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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Addicted to Success podcast. Now, today I have with me the human guinea pig, absolute amazing best-selling author, entrepreneur, investor, speaker. I mean, dude, you have so many titles. How do you keep up with all these titles? Tim Ferriss.
Yeah, no, it's great, great to be here. Yeah, the one thing you learn after years of writing books is how to write a very self-congratulatory bio. So, I suppose I should probably cut out a couple of the commas and titles that I have in there, but you know, one step at a time. Once you know, the day that the publisher asks you to write the about the author bio is the day that you get very good at patting yourself on the back.
I love it, man. I love it. So, I had the opportunity to check out the trailer of your new TV show, The Tim Ferriss Experiment. And I love it, man. I absolutely love it. I believe that part of success is learning new skills. And I love how you just like you focus on learning as fast as you can, right? So, tell me a little bit about this show first. I'm really intrigued. Like, where are you going with it and where can we see this show?
Yeah, absolutely. So, the context is kind of funny. I had never really planned on doing any TV or taking that step because I was always approached with just ridiculous proposals to do really embarrassing things in reality TV, and it never made any sense. And then I had a broadcaster, Turner Broadcasting, approach me and they asked the question nobody had asked and they said, 'What would you do in television if you could do anything?' And I was like, 'Hmm, that's a good question.' So, my two ideas were: number one, I'd like to have a sort of action-packed show with really high stakes where I show like the max limits of accelerated learning where I'm just killing myself to try to learn these insane skills in a week or less with really good teachers.
And the second show idea was a show about how to become Jason Bourne. And because I love The Bourne Identity and I could go through that movie and name the skills that I wanted to learn. So, I ended up then... Oh, and the third piece was I only want to make something that I would want to watch. And one of my favorite shows for a long time was No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, which was a really gritty, very cinematic, and now he does Parts Unknown. And the production company is called Zero Point Zero. So, I ended up being able to combine all three of those things where I have a show in which I'm trying to tackle notoriously punishing skills one per week and I have typically three to four days to try to go from zero to the final test and I'm also learning or attempting to learn skills like, you know, tactical shooting, rally car racing, language learning. So, it's a set secretly. It's like a secret set of Jason Bourne skills. There's a little bit of Jason, there's a little bit of James Bond thrown in there as well, like the professional poker. And for those people who don't have an example perhaps, the way the stakes are set up.
So, the show's intention is to show you how to get superhuman results even if you're not superhuman. So, if you don't have great genetics or great budget, how do you learn these complex skills really well in an extremely short period of time? And what is the toolkit? What is the accelerated learning toolkit that you can apply to anything? And I have a lot of face plants and injuries and make a lot of catastrophic mistakes in this TV series, too. So, I want people to see that. It's not always hitting home runs.
But, I might say have drumming. That was one episode. And Stewart Copeland, one of the top 10 drummers of all time, is one of the teachers. And then four days later, I have to play on stage to a sold-out audience with the band Foreigner. And those are the types of pressures that... And I got the digital distribution rights for the show. So, I am putting out all 13 episodes at once, kind of House of Cards style, on iTunes. And then I have bonus content that I'm going to put somewhere else. So, iTunes, if you just search The Tim Ferriss Experiment, two Rs, two Ss, or go to iTunes.com/timferriss with two Rs and two Ss. And then I'm going to be taking extended scenes and interviews and all sorts of gems that I wanted to put in, but couldn't because of the time restriction, at 4hourworkweek.com/tv. It's all spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com/tv.
So, that's the current plan, man. And you know, after a year of trying to get the rights that I now have, I'm just so stoked to finally be putting it out because, you know, I think it's a solid show, man. And I usually don't kind of say that type of thing about stuff that I make myself, but this is the kind of show that I would have wanted to watch and that I would watch and that I do watch. So, to that extent, I'm super happy and I hope people feel the same way cuz I don't watch a lot of TV, but this is reflective of what I would watch.
Yeah, I love it. I love it, man. And if you don't mind, we'll share the trailer along with this podcast. Think that'll be...
Awesome, and yeah, go for it. The crowd can, you know, check it out and, you know, it's not an amateur show as well. I don't... it has really good production. I love how they kind of slow the bullet down as you shoot. It's been on it. It's, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we did the tactical shooting, yeah, we have an incredible team. I mean, these are the guys who did Anthony Bourdain's stuff. And in that particular episode, the three-gun shooting episode, which is kind of like speed golf, but swapping between real firearms, shotguns, AR-15s, assault rifles, handguns, and so on, which is wild. And you're timed. You have to run through this course and swap guns. It's insane. It's like real-world Halo or Call of Duty or something. But when we did that, we had for a day this insanely complex and expensive camera that can capture at, you know, like 10,000 frames per second. So, you get to see like the actual shotgun shell... Oh, not the shell, but rather the payload coming out of the barrel and then slowly spreading. It's incredible. I mean, the footage is really, really wild. So, yeah, we had... It's a high production value. You don't get much higher.
Beautiful. Are you probably tempted just to record the whole thing in like slow motion like that?
Well, yeah, I wanted to record some really ridiculous things like, you know, shaking my head and having my jowls flap around in ultra slow mo, but we were definitely on tight deadlines to get what we needed. So, they couldn't, you know, set up a $5,000 shot just to shoot my cheeks flapping in the wind. But yeah, slow mo is amazing. It can be used for a lot of things.
Excellent, man. Excellent. So, you know, knowing what you know now and also the experiences that you've had, if you weren't doing this, if you weren't an entrepreneur, you weren't an author, what would you be doing?
Okay, so I can't be... Ooh, not being an entrepreneur is tough because...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I couldn't be an entrepreneur or an author... So, I have to have a job. Is that right? I have to have an employer?
Yeah, I mean, you've had a lot of experiences now, so...
I would probably... I would be either a marine biologist or I would be a comic book penciler, I'd say.
Maybe one of those two or storyboard artist for, say, a Pixar or something. Tough job to get, but if we're talking about, yes, hypothetical fantasy scenarios, then perhaps one of those two.
And do you have skills in these areas already?
I do have some experience. I wanted to be a marine biologist for about 10 years. So I don't have a whole lot of training, but that's what I wanted to be when I was a little kid. And I still have a huge affinity for marine life and just I'm fascinated by all types of marine life, especially sharks, cuz of course as a little boy that was what I was into. And for comic book penciling, I wanted to be a penciler for also I'd say five or 10 years and I was a paid illustrator in college for a period of time. So as a college student I would create illustrations and drawings and designs for a number of books that my university put out and also was the graphics editor of a satire magazine at Princeton University. So I do have some background there but my skills have atrophied horribly. So I make no claims to be pro level at all. But I did have the same job as Jim Lee, I suppose DC Comics now, who is one of my favorite comic book artists of all time. So he held the same... we used the same desk in the office of the Princeton Tiger, but that's probably about as close as our skills get since he's a pro.
Excellent, man, excellent. So during The Tim Ferriss Experiment, did you have any aha moments? Like something popped up and you're like, oh my god, I didn't realize this.
Yeah, I had tons of aha moments. I probably had, you know, a dozen an episode. I'm trying to think of a few that come to mind and I mean these are more kind of sound bite maxims. The tools sometimes take a bit more to explain, but for instance, with the drums, one of the key breakthrough moments was learning to play the song, not the drums. So given that I had such a short time frame, really spending more time on analyzing the anatomy of the song and figuring out what parts repeated and what parts changed so that I could limit my focus turned out to be just as important as learning the technical aspects of just working on the drums. And that was a real breakthrough for me because I assumed I had to be very technically proficient with the basics before moving to say sheet music, but given four days as a deadline, you really don't have the leisure of taking that approach. So we had to flip things around, and that was a major breakthrough.
There were breakthroughs in all of these skills. So for instance, in three-gun shooting, which was a blast, literally, I guess, the importance of reloading. So people think of like the boo boo boo boo boo all this being the fast part, but if you are really fast at that, if you have cat-like reflexes for that component, but you have a slow reload, you're toast. You're done. You're going to lose. And so you have to get very, very good at reloading, and it's kind of those in-between spaces, similar to music, where the pauses are what make the music. You know, music is the space between the notes, some people would say. You learn in these skills when you're working with a world-class teacher to focus on aspects that are neglected by many other people.
So let's say it's swimming. There's an episode on long-distance swimming, and I didn't learn to swim until my 30s properly. So I was actually one of the coaches and helped take this woman who really wasn't comfortable putting her face underwater to hopefully, and I'm not going to give away the punchline, but swimming open water in the ocean in like 50 ft of water or something like that, over a half-mile course. It's like, so how do you do that in three to four days? Well, you can't just focus on propulsion and kicking harder, kicking more, pulling harder. It doesn't work. You have to focus on the biomechanics and say the duration of each glide, right? So that's the in-between space again. And it's like, how do you take your stroke rate down from like 20, 30 strokes per lap to 10 or 12 or something like that. And that's the theme that recurred over and over again with a lot of these teachers in a lot of these episodes.
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. And what would you say is another component that you would need to implement apart from just learning new skills? Is there anything else you'd have to bring to the table every time you are setting out to achieve success?
Well, in the case of the TV show, we filmed 13 episodes in I think 16 weeks or something suicidal like that. It was insanity. So we're filming... If you want a four-hour workweek, don't work in television. That's one tip. But we were probably doing 12 to 16-hour days minimum each day, Monday to Friday. Saturday was basically a work day also. I was an executive producer, so I was reviewing stuff every night as well after all this. And then we'd fly to the next location. We had to move tons and tons of equipment, like whatever, 27 boxes of equipment. And Sunday was sort of planning day, and then it was right back to the grind and the next skill the next day.
And I got really beat up in some of these. I mean, parkour, which is sort of like breakdancing meets ninja running through a city, jumping off buildings and stuff. Really dangerous and it turns out I got very injured. So I had an entire suitcase full of recovery assistance: ultrasound machine, electrostimulation, DMSO cream, all sorts of pills and potions, compression pants, something called voodoo floss that you can wrap around your knees to decrease inflammation. It went on and on and on. So, for me to sustain that level of intense effort and physical output over 16 weeks — even in retrospect just gives me PTSD thinking about it — required paying a lot of attention to physiological stuff and tools that I could use to basically add an extra day of recovery in effect when I didn't have an extra day of recovery. So, those were also very, very important.
And I think in a general sense, if you're striving for a massive amount of, say, business success, however you define that, let's just say doubling, tripling, 10Xing revenue, you have to pay attention to the highest value asset and that is your physical body. It doesn't have unlimited capacity and your neurotransmitters don't replenish perhaps as quickly as you would like and you have to learn how to have these intense bursts of activity, but also these recuperative moments where perhaps you take a 30-minute nap in the afternoon, perhaps you go for an hour-long walk after work at a certain time with a friend to decompress and basically meditate for that period of time.
I think these built-in pauses for recovery, or you take a hot bath every night with Epsom salts for instance. I do pretty much all of these things. Even though people from the outside looking in are like, 'Wow, that guy is just like breakneck constantly shooting things out of a cannon.' It's like, 'I can't sustain that.' And I've learned this in the last, say, 10 years without building in these breaks and recovery points.
Yeah, beautiful. And one thing as well that I noticed, I watched I think it was A Day in the Life of Tim Ferriss. I saw you do TM, which I also do as well, transcendental meditation, which is amazing. How's your experience been with that?
It's incredible. I mean, I just did 20 minutes this morning. So, I find transcendental meditation very helpful. I don't think that everyone needs to use Transcendental Meditation. Just tm.org for people who want to learn more. There are aspects of it that bug me. Some of the kind of guru worship stuff that you have to go through in the beginning. And you don't have to worship it, but they have the pictures of the Indian guy with a big beard, and that's all fine. But Vipassana meditation, some type of mindfulness practice, I find to be a complete game changer. And people can use apps like Headspace or Calm to do guided meditation. Start with something really short. Start with three minutes, five minutes every morning. It makes an enormous difference.
And I find that sometimes I misbehave and I don't do it. But when I do five days to seven days in a row, there's a cumulative effect that is really tremendous for me, where I just feel in the zone after that point if I maintain it. But there is sort of a ramp-up period. And it's been instrumental in maintaining, to the extent that I'm prone to it, a level head while I'm trying to do all these very aggressive things.
And quite a few of your books are bestsellers, right?
Well, yeah, all three of them.
All three of them. Congratulations, man.
Yeah, I've had a good tear.
I love what you did with the launch of The 4-Hour Chef. How you banded with Ryan Holiday, who I've also had on the podcast, and you guys launched it through torrents, man. I love that. I love that idea.
Yeah, we had to go guerrilla because it was boycotted. Since it was the first major book out of Amazon Publishing, it was boycotted by Barnes & Noble and Target and Walmart, and almost all of the retailers, which made it very, very challenging to do my thing during launch week and move a lot of hard copies. So, you know, when an obstacle pops up, you got to go over it, through it, or around it. And Ryan was a good partner for that.
Yeah. And you were the first to go, so, you know, you got to do something groundbreaking, right?
