Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design Blog. Tim is an author of 5 #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, investor (FB, Uber, Twitter, 50+ more), and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (400M+ d…
November of 2008. I had more hair, a flip phone, and absolutely no idea what was coming.
Let the cymbals of popularity tinkle still. Let the butterflies of fame glitter with their wings. I shall envy neither their music nor their colors.
— John Adams Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife
“If I’m not famous by 30, I might as well put a bullet in my head.”
That’s an actual sentence I spoke to one of my closest friends. At the time, I was 28.
Fortunately, unlike during my darkest period in college, I wasn’t serious about suicide. Nonetheless, the sentiment was real. I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.
As luck would have it, I got to test this hypothesis.
Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose), rejoins me for another episode of “The Random Show.” In this one we explore the language of relationships, polarity, energy management, difficult conversations, finding peace and patience, the importance of self-compassion, the search for palatable decaf coffee, panic-selling, serving the moment, and much more!
This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Calm. What did LeBron James tell me was the single most important element of his training regimen? Sleep. Whether you’re an athlete, programmer, or student, healthy sleep is essential to peak performance. It strengthens your immune system. It improves cognitive functions like problem-solving and decision-making. It gives you creativity and energy.
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
The year is 1992, Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m curled up in a fetal position on a filthy carpet in a very cluttered apartment. I’m in horrible withdrawal from a drug that I’ve been addicted to for several years now.
In my hand I have a little piece of paper. It’s dilapidated because I’ve been folding it and unfolding it, to the point that it’s almost falling apart. But you can still make out the phone number on it.
I am in a state of bald terror. If you’ve ever had an anxiety attack, that’s what this felt like.
I’d been having a nonstop anxiety attack for the last five years. And I’d never been in a darker or more desperate place than I was that night. My husband was out running the streets, trying to get ahold of some of the stuff that we needed, but I knew if he succeeded, he was not going to share.
And if I could, I would jump out of my own skin and run screaming into the streets to get what I need. But right behind me, sleeping in the bedroom, is my baby boy.
“If I can’t run it, then I don’t want to own it.” — Sam Zell
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own life. This time, we have a slightly different episode. I will not be the one doing the deconstructing. Instead, we have a takeover by my very good friend, Peter Attia.
As longtime listeners of the podcast know, Dr. Peter Attia (@PeterAttiaMD) is a former ultra-endurance athlete, a compulsive self-experimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is also one of my go-to doctors for anything related to performance or longevity. Peter also hosts The Drive, a weekly, ultra-deep-dive podcast focusing on maximizing health, longevity, critical thinking, and a few other things. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
This episode is also brought to you by FreshBooks. I’ve been talking about FreshBooks — an all-in-one invoicing+payments+accounting solution — for years now. Many entrepreneurs, as well as the contractors and freelancers that I work with, use it all the time.
FreshBooks makes it super easy to track things like expenses, project time, and client info, and then merge it all into great-looking invoices. FreshBooks can save users up to 200 hours a year on accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Right now FreshBooks is offering my listeners a free 30-day trial, and no credit card is required. Go to FreshBooks.com/tim and enter “Tim Ferriss” in the “How did you hear about us?” section!
This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Brave, the next-generation Web browser. Brave was built by a team of privacy-focused, performance-oriented pioneers of the Web at the direction of Brendan Eich (co-founder of Mozilla Firefox and creator of JavaScript) and Brian Bondy. Brave now has more than 10 million monthly active users — including me.
Brave gives you unmatched speed, security, and privacy. Whereas other browsers suck up your data — profiling and tracking you across the Web and using that information to manipulate your decisions — Brave operates up to six times faster by blocking ads and website trackers, preserving your anonymity and protecting you from this surveillance economy. Brave also includes options such as Private Window with Tor for those seeking advanced privacy and safety. Intuitive and easy to use, Brave allows you to import bookmarks from other browsers with one click, and all your favorite Chrome extensions are available with Brave. Listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can easily upgrade their browser for free right now by going to Brave.com/Tim.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
Donald Knuth, a renowned mathematician and recipient of the Turing Award (considered the Nobel Prize of computer science), retired from using email in 1990.
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
I want to make 2020 a year of smarter decisions.
To make that a reality, I’ve been pondering how much I want to specialize in speed versus finding targets that don’t require speed. That is why I bolded and underlined the above lines in Donald’s post.
Looking back over the last decade, I have made many good fast decisions, but I have nearly never made good rushed decisions. The former can be made from a place of calm, whereas the latter come from a place of turbulence and blurred judgment.
How can we create an environment that fosters better, often non-obvious, decisions?
There are many approaches, no doubt. But I realized a few weeks ago that one of the keys appeared twice in conversations from 2019. It wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that I noticed the pattern.
To paraphrase both Greg McKeown and Jim Collins, here it is: look for single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of other decisions.
As Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, Robert A. Iger (@RobertIger) is the steward of one of the world’s largest media companies and some of the most respected and beloved brands around the globe. Since becoming CEO in 2005, Iger has built on Disney’s rich history of storytelling and innovation with the acquisitions of Pixar (2006), Marvel (2009), Lucasfilm (2012) and 21st Century Fox (2019), and the landmark opening of Disney’s first theme park and resort in Mainland China, Shanghai Disney Resort in 2016.
Always one to embrace new technology, Iger has created an ambitious direct-to-consumer strategy that leverages Disney’s unparalleled creative content across new platforms, including the new Disney+ streaming service, ESPN+, Hulu, and Hotstar.
This podcast is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs.
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
“One of the biggest challenges we face is staying kind with profound disagreement—and staying kind when a mechanism has been set up to make money and power out of hate.” — Penn Jillette
Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous, Emmy Award-winning magic duo and Las Vegas headliners Penn & Teller.
Together since 1975, Penn & Teller’s live show spent years on Broadway and is now the longest-running headliner show in Las Vegas where it plays nightly at The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino. The pair has been awarded Las Vegas Magicians of the Year an amazing eights times.
As part of Penn & Teller he has appeared on hundreds of shows, from The Simpsons and Friends to Billions. He recently co-wrote an episode of the Emmy-winning Netflix series Black Mirror.
He co-hosted the controversial Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! which was nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards, won him a Writers Guild award, and was the longest-running show in the history of the network. He currently co-hosts the CW Network hit competition series Penn & Teller: Fool Us! which was nominated for a 2017 Critics’ Choice award.
Penn’s latest book, The New York Times Best SellerPresto! takes an insightful and very humorous look at his recent weight loss journey. His previous book, God No! Signs You Might Be An Atheist and Other Magic Tales, spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
His weekly podcast, Penn’s Sunday School, was the number one downloaded podcast on Apple Podcasts during its debut week, and was named a Best New Comedy Podcast by Apple Podcasts.
On the big screen, Penn produced the critically lauded 2005 documentary The Aristocrats, which features over 100 of the biggest names in comedy telling their versions of the dirtiest joke in history. He produced Tim’s Vermeer, which follows the journey of an eccentric inventor determined to solve one of the art world’s oldest mysteries. The Sony Pictures Classics release was nominated for a BAFTA and was shortlisted for the 2014 Oscars. He has recently completed the documentary Gambler’s Ballad profiling magic legend Johnny Thompson.
Penn & Teller have their very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and triumphantly returned to Broadway recently with Penn & Teller On Broadway, which was the highest-grossing non-musical for the entirety of its run.
This episode is brought to you by Brave, the next-generation Web browser. Brave was built by a team of privacy-focused, performance-oriented pioneers of the Web at the direction of Brendan Eich (co-founder of Mozilla Firefox and creator of JavaScript) and Brian Bondy. Brave now has more than 10 million monthly active users—including me.
Why Brave? Because Brave gives you unmatched speed, security, and privacy. Whereas other browsers suck up your data — profiling and tracking you across the Web and using that information to manipulate your decisions — Brave operates up to six times faster by blocking ads and website trackers, preserving your anonymity and protecting you from this surveillance economy. Brave also includes options such as Private Window with Tor for those seeking advanced privacy and safety. Intuitive and easy to use, Brave allows you to import bookmarks from other browsers with one click, and all your favorite Chrome extensions are available with Brave. Listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can easily upgrade their browser for free right now by going to Brave.com/Tim.
This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Hiring can be hard, and it and be super expensive and painful if you get it wrong. Today, with more qualified candidates than ever — but also more noise than ever — employers need a hiring solution that helps them find the right people for their businesses. LinkedIn Jobs provides just that by screening candidates with the hard and soft skills you’re looking for so you can quickly find and hire the right person.
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
I rediscovered nature, recommitted to writing, experimented widely, scuttled many things that have weighed on me for years, and greatly improved my overall investing. Most important, I deepened my relationships with my family, my girlfriend, her family, and my closest friends more than in any previous year. 2019 was a year of surprising business growth. But more surprising still, it was a year of developing a greater sense of inner peace, and the two have rarely come together in my life.
Much of this wouldn’t have happened without reading the right things.
In the information game, the race doesn’t go to the swift, it goes to the selective.
This post will share the most impactful articles and books that I’ve read in the last 12 months.
It wasn’t in the shower. It wasn’t while meditating under a tree. It was while sitting in the bathroom.
As I held the toilet paper in my hand, I realized that it was single-ply. Clearly, I had long ago decided to save money by cutting this corner. “We are not in a position to indulge in such excesses!” I imagine I might have thought, shifting my shopping gaze from comfy double-ply Charmin to a war-ration house brand of single-ply.
Of course, here’s the problem: single-ply is a fool’s bargain. It’s a translucent sham. If you don’t want to shove your fingers directly into the pit of despair, you need to fold it over itself again and again, defeating any cost savings. And even if you did save $5 per month, isn’t the extra $5 worth trading 30 days of butt-sanding for 30 days of butt-caressing?
To make any headway with this, I first had to look backward…
“If disruption is what you seek, cognitive island-hopping is a good place to start, mining the interstices between academic disciplines.” — Steve Jurvetson
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types — from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books — the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors — in the form of books — from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.
Steve Jurvetson (@FutureJurvetson) is an early-stage venture capitalist with a focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation. Steve was the early VC investor in SpaceX, Tesla, Planet, Memphis Meats, Hotmail, and the deep learning companies Mythic and Nervana. He has led founding investments in five companies that went public in successful IPOs and several others that were acquired for a total of over a $100 billion in value creation.
Before founding Future Ventures and DFJ before that, Steve was an R&D engineer at Hewlett Packard and worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT, and management consulting with Bain & Company. He currently serves on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX, and D-Wave.
This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring Lion’s Mane. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet.
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
