2026-11-06 14:07:51
Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, featuring not a guest but a number. As this is episode #888, I couldn’t resist going down a rabbit hole about the number eight and what it can tell us about luck, language, money, and fate. Join me for a nerdy tour of China, Japan, and Korea, including a million-dollar license plate, disappearing hotel floors, a casino room designed around one gambler’s birthday, and the lucky number hiding in Toyota’s name. This is my excuse to dust off some of my East Asian Studies background and indulge a few wonderfully weird interests.
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors.
Tim Ferriss: All righty. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is a special one. It is number 888. That’s triple eight. We’re going to talk about it. This is going to be a rabbit hole of epic proportions, and it’s going to get nerdy.
It’s going to get very bizarre, and that’s the point of the show is I can kind of do whatever I want to do. So I wanted to do something special for 888. I thought about doing some live casting of the I Ching, the oldest of the Chinese classics. It’s a long story. Maybe we’ll come back to that. But let’s talk about luck. If you know anything about the Chinese ideas around luck, there’s one number that stands out. And I couldn’t resist.
So we’re going to talk about a very expensive phone number, disappearing hotel floors, a casino room designed around one person’s birthday, a car company whose name was chosen, or I should say changed, partly for good fortune, and it spans across East Asia. We’re going to dig in. Underneath all of it is one question. How do you design luck?
Can you build it into a skyscraper, a brand name, a license plate? Well, a lot of people would seem to think so. And what happens when a casino and the customer both want the room to make the money? Well, let’s dig in. So it starts with a sound. In Mandarin, the sound is ba, that is eight, the number eight. And I’ll say right up front that of the languages we’re going to touch upon, my strongest is going to be Japanese, then Mandarin, then Korean, which is going to be very weak. I studied it for one year in college, like 30 plus years ago. And then my Cantonese is non-existent. So basically ignore everything I say about Cantonese. In theory, it’ll make sense, but my pronunciation is going to suck.
But back to Mandarin. So eight is ba. Now the word fa shows up all over the place. And you’ll find it in, for instance, a common New Year’s greeting, which is gōngxǐ fācái. Gōngxǐ fācái is like, congratulations, may you prosper. It’s the fā is like to emerge or come out. So departure is like chūfā. And then the cái, the second tone cái, gōngxǐ fācái is riches, wealth, prosperity, all that good stuff. So in a sense, the fācái, to find riches, prosperity, to have all this emerge into your life, gets represented by the fa, which then corresponds to [bā?].
So there you have it. That’s where eight becomes lucky. It’s the resemblance. Now in Cantonese, the match is even closer. I’m not going to try to say it because Cantonese is hard AF, even if you speak Mandarin. But you will recognize some similarities because the writing system is the same. And also Japan and Korea borrowed their writing systems at one point in time from China, and we can dig into a lot of the later developments. But you’ll hear, for instance: Gōngxǐ fācái in Mandarin is going to be something like [Cantonese greeting attempt, repeated; uncertain], something like that in Cantonese. It’s the same characters. So that’s the sound connection and why 8 is such a popular prosperity symbol in Chinese-speaking communities.
And this goes back a long, long ways. However, it was supercharged, it seems, in the 1980s. And especially in Hong Kong, and then it kind of expanded from there. And Gordon Gekko, man, greed is good. Let’s get after the money. And I always have to laugh because some folks who are reading these texts or translated, usually mistranslated texts from, Lao Tzu or whoever it might be, talk about, oh, the East, you know, if you could only look at the contrast outside of the materialist West.
And I’m like, you know, if you squint a little bit and look at some actual proper translations or the original text, man, everybody loves money. And that certainly includes China. So eight great news, eight, eight, eight, three eights, three doses of good fortune. That’s linguistic compound interest. They love it. Now, look, not everyone believes this.
Not everyone believes it equally. But if a customer prefers it, well, guess what? Interesting things happen to prices. So as an example, in 2003, Sichuan Airlines paid 2.33 million yuan, about 280,000 US at the time, for the phone number 8888-8888. So that’s eight eights for a customer hotline.
This is an extraordinary amount of money to spend before anyone has even said your call is important to us. But look, they explain it: the number is easy to remember, and it would make customers happy. Why? Because, well, [eights are?] good luck, like we already talked about. And for those language nerds out there, Sichuan, you might run into this. In, say, the U.S., there are Chinese restaurants that specialize in this particular type of cuisine. Some think of it as spicy. Sichuan means literally four rivers. Sì, yī, èr, sān, sì, Sìchuān. It’s actually an abbreviation related to administrative districts, but that gets to sound too bureaucratic, so let’s just stick with four rivers. Sichuan. In any case, this is the perfect intersection of superstition and marketing, right? Buying a number like this. Now, there are two benefits I should add, by the way, because not only do you get the benefit of whatever the eights mean to the customer, but you also get possibly the benefit of the PR halo and amplification around you buying the number.
So I don’t automatically assume that it was a bad decision, but who knows? My last conversation with Sichuan Airlines was a while ago. So anyway, license plates. In February 2025, the registration mark 8-8 sold at a Hong Kong government auction for 11.4 million Hong Kong dollars. That’s roughly 1.5 million US. Then we get to the calendar.
All right, Beijing Olympics. When are we going to have the opening ceremony? Well, of course, the opening ceremony should start at 8 p.m. on August 8th, 2008. That’s a lot of eights, right, on a global stage. Just so happens, on that same date, Beijing registered 15,646 marriages. So there you have it.
Next we have taking this number, this abstraction. I mean, we could get into where math lives, but that’s a whole separate convo. Maybe we should bring in Michael Levin. In any case, let’s talk about eights being put into the physical world. All right. The part that really gets interesting is when you stop buying lucky numbers and start building them.
For instance, Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower, 88 stories. This is going to be very common around Asia. The architect, Adrian Smith, had said that the client wanted that number because eight was auspicious and it doesn’t stop at floor count. The building also has an octagonal core and eight main superframe columns. So eight is doing double duty. You got the cultural symbolism and then the actual structural work.
It shows up in ordinary apartments as well. Economists studied apartment sales in Chengdu from 2004 to 2006. Apartments on floors ending in eight resold at a premium of about 7%. In the new apartment market, where pricing was uniform, those floors didn’t cost more, but they sold about a week faster instead. And not shockingly, buyers with more eights in their phone numbers were more likely to buy the lucky floors.
Yeah, well, if you like eights, you like eights. And now we can also look at the flip side, though. If eight is lucky, right, that’s the whole premise. Well, it’s not really the premise. It is the topic we’re exploring in this episode. What is the flip side? The flip side is four. So now it’s not because half of eight is four, although we could talk about that. But we’re going to turn towards something a little more morbid, and that is death, because in Mandarin, four is si, and to die is si.
That is a fourth tone and a third tone, respectively. So you have like si, si, si, si. Those are four different things. So four is, as we covered already, si, chuan, si, si. To die is si. Same consonant, same vowel, different tone. This is where heads explode if you’re doing Chinese 101.
Way back in the day before Chinese was super cool. This is in, God, 1996, I guess. And we started with a class of something like 32 students. And within two weeks, we were down to like 12 or 14. People’s heads just exploded. And it will make your throat sore. It doesn’t matter how good you are at memorizing.
If you haven’t developed the musculature to make some of these sounds and tones and stuff, you just can’t do it. So it is actually like weight training in a sense. But let’s talk about four. Well, in the U.S., you might not see a floor 13. Well, guess what? In East Asia, all over the place, you will frequently not see floor numbers with a four.
That’s also true in places like Vietnam, by the way. But let’s talk about casinos. Where designing a place that feels lucky is practically its own art form. It isn’t practically, it is its own art form. This is a very, very important aspect of certain casino architectural plans. And in 2004, Time reported that Sands Macao replaced the slot machines, classic winning 777 with 888.
Then you have feng shui masters. Why not bring in a feng shui master? The design process can get very elaborate. In a 2005 interview, Las Vegas Sands executive William Weidner, sorry for mispronouncing that, I’m not sure of how that’s Americanized, Weidner described designers making 3D views of their plans, putting them on DVDs and flying them to a feng shui master in Kowloon, Hong Kong.
High-tech architecture software followed by an international trip to get the energy reviewed. So feng shui, another language sidebar. Feng shui, a lot of people have heard this. Feng shui, feng shui, that’s a one tone and a third tone, if you’re interested. That literally means wind, water. Feng shui, feng shui. So if some of you are wondering where the word typhoon comes from, pretty interesting.
So in Chinese you would say [táifēng, repeated; pronunciation uncertain]. And then there is false cognates. That’s a whole thing. So it turns out that, in fact, we didn’t get it directly from Chinese. There was this convergence of people calling typhoons the exact same thing. Basically, you had Greek-informed languages, then Arabic and the Chinese all somehow mysteriously converged on the same label for the same thing.
So it became this international global expression used by those involved with the maritime arts. But I digress. Feng shui literally means wind water. But within the context of architecture, you know, a consultant for feng shui might review colors, shapes, entrances, exits, you know, where might you place mirrors, where should things be hard edged or sharp corners versus rounded corners, all of that stuff.
So for instance, at the Sands Macao, a sharp corner got rounded off, had to be done because the consultant believed the point would deflect good chi, pronounced chi, coming in from the Northeast. So if you’ve ever seen the word spelled QI in Chinese, people contort it into all sorts of stuff.
That is chi. It’s not exactly the same character, but like [qìchē; pronunciation uncertain] is car or vehicle. Same pronunciation, chi. That is fourth tone. All right, so the corner of the building became a business decision about where good fortune might go. Get trapped, move, you get it. Now, then there’s the custom version of this. So that’s designing a casino for a populace that you hope to attract to gamble.
But what if you’re a high roller? What if you’re a whale? Because whales get flown in from, say, Vegas on private jets. They’ve got millions of dollars spent on them in some cases because they will spend potentially 10 million plus in a single stay. Well, architect Paul Heretakis, hope I’m getting that right, described a private gaming room his firm designed at the Venetian in 2012.
It’s a private gaming room for an unnamed high roller. A feng shui expert used the gambler’s birthday and zodiac sign to shape the room’s design. So having a favorite chair is one thing. Maybe you have a favorite type of chocolate they put in your room, but having a casino build you a room based on your birth information is an entirely different level of customer service slash seducing of whales.
The same 2016 reporting described Caesars VIP villas with numbers that began with eight and Wynn properties that skipped floors labeled 40 through 49. Remember number four, death, that whole similarity. People don’t like it. Which brings back the question from the top of the show. The player wants the room to be lucky for the player. The house wants the room to be lucky for the house.
So who gets the good energy? Well, I guess both of them do. You know, these players, if you can blow $10 million on a trip to Vegas, chances are you got a lot more where that came from. Casino architect Paul Steelman, who’s designed resorts all over Asia, put it plainly in 2015. The buildings have to be designed for good feng shui for both the player and the casino owner. Now, it might be surprising to hear that even Uncle Sam got in on the action with all these eights.
This enthusiasm reached the people who print our dear American money. One could argue we print too much of that American money, but let’s not get into all that. In 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing offered an uncut sheet of eight $2 bills, all with the serial numbers starting with 8, 8, 8, 8. Face value, $16. Retail price can be yours for $58.88.
And the production limit, 16,888 sheets.
Now let’s go to Japan. Near and dear to my heart. I went there as an exchange student when I was 15. Changed my life and haven’t really formally studied Japanese since. But turns out if you are manga otaku and gariben, you can retain a lot of it.
So the character for eight is the same. So Japan brings over the Chinese writing, which they call kanji, hanzi. But there is a problem. Chinese does not quite work for Japanese 100%. It’s kind of a force fit. Because if you look at, say, Chinese, the grammar is very, very, very simple. So you can say any number of things. The word order is kind of the same as English. I go to school would be I go school, for instance, and there are exceptions. You could say [Mandarin example unclear] or something like that. But suffice to say, the grammar is really simple.
Chinese doesn’t have conjugation as you might think of it. So past, present, future with verbs, as in the English of I went, I go, I will go, that type of thing doesn’t really exist in Chinese, but it does exist in Japanese. So what do you do with those leftover sounds? Because the ideograms from Chinese each have a meaning. But if you’re just trying to force fit Japanese, you need a way to use something phonetic, just like the alphabet in English.
And so over time, over centuries, and that involves Buddhist monks and scholars using something called katakana to annotate different texts, and it involves Heian-period Japanese women using cursive script. There’s a lot that goes into it. But the Japanese figured out, also wanting to promote literacy in the country, two different syllabaries, which are kind of like alphabets. So they are referred to as syllabaries because they’re syllables.
Instead of A, B, C, D, E, it is ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, ma, mi, mu, me, mo, that type of thing. They are syllables. And there are two sets of 46, I think, because it’s been 35 years, that basically allow Japanese people to write Japanese words that don’t transfer well or don’t allow Chinese characters to be overlaid very easily. And they’re used for all sorts of other stuff like sound effects in comic books or foreign words, et cetera, et cetera.
But they still retained a lot of the Chinese characters. And to be basically literate in Japanese, you have to learn the fundamental characters, which are the Jōyō Kanji. And at least when I was there, there were 1,945. So you still got to do some heavy lifting.
Now the character for eight in Japanese is read hachi. So instead of ba, it’s hachi. And there are multiple ways to pronounce this in Japanese. But I’m going to do a little visualization exercise. So imagine the capital letter A. Okay, take out the crossbar in the middle. Now you’re left with this upside down V.
At the very apex of that, let’s call it pyramid, create a little gap. Just erase the very tip so there’s a little gap. Now it looks kind of like a mustache. Two strokes that spread apart towards the bottom. Now that widening shape suggests prosperity that grows over time. There’s actually a word for this in Japanese.
Of course there is. Just like they have komorebi, like dappled light through trees. They’ve got a lot of good words. This one is suehirogari. So suehirogari. So sue is like the end or the future and hirogari is expanding. And this was originally, I shouldn’t say originally, but long ago used to refer to something like a Japanese fan.
So as it sort of extends, it widens or spreads. And that can be applied in a lot of different places. But now, suffice to say, there’s an auspicious widening towards the end, looking out into the future. That character for the nerds out there, who like Japanese, sue, is also matsu.
So you could have, for instance, shūmatsu is weekend, literally. Week, shūmatsu, shūmatsu, or like nenmatsu, end of the year and on and on and on. All right, I’m going to stop that there because I could go on forever. But let’s talk about Japan and 8. 8’s still a big deal. One of the biggest brands in the world had a Lucky 8 story hiding in its name, still has it hiding in its name. All right, the founding family’s name of this company is Toyoda. Toyoda, okay? That’s with T-O-Y-O-D-A with a D. You can probably guess that company became Toyota, [Toyota/Toyoda; pronunciation uncertain], because in katakana, which is one of those syllabaries I talked about, Toyota, Toyota is eight strokes.
In other words, you’re putting pen to paper for eight lines, keeping it simple, that create this name Toyota instead of [Toyoda/Toyota pronunciation contrast; uncertain]. Anyway, you get the idea. The eight strokes are associated with wealth and good fortune. So they changed their family name to a company name that embodied the eight strokes. But we can go way further back.
Japan also has the Shikoku pilgrimage.
We can ask my friend Craig Mod, probably the person who has walked more of Japan than any living human. In this case, the Shikoku pilgrimage is a circuit of 88 Buddhist temples associated with the Kūkai, also known as the Kōbō Daishi. And it just goes on and on, guys. The eights are everywhere. The temple count has its own religious history, but it’s a lovely numerical detour.
88 can take you from casino villas to a pilgrimage around an island and obviously doesn’t end there.
Let’s talk about Korea. This is where I’m going to make all sorts of mistakes. So my apologies to the Koreans who may be listening. I would love a language lesson. I think it is such a cool language and would love to improve my Korean.
But here’s the connection. So the Korean language has two sets of numbers and one of them was borrowed from the Chinese centuries ago. In that set, eight is pal. So kind of like P-A-L, P-A-H-L.
And unfortunately, pal doesn’t sound like any word for getting rich. So the Chinese prosperity pun doesn’t survive the trip to Korea. But Korea ties eight to something even bigger, fate. All right. So Korean fortune telling is built on your birth chart. And I’m sure there are multiple types of Korean fortune telling, just like in Japan, you’ll see them at train stations and other places, like uranaishi. So people sitting at a table and they’ll have paper in front—this is uranaishi, which is fortune-teller. In any case, I’m sure there are multiple types, but one type of Korean fortune telling is built on your birth chart, which is called saju palja. So saju palja is pulled from the Chinese characters. There are four characters, which mean four pillars, eight characters. And just to explain that the four pillars are year, month, day, hour you’re born. And then in the traditional Chinese calendar, each of those is written with two characters.
So four times two is eight. And boom, those eight characters map out your whole life. Now, coming back to why this contortion is helpful. The shorthand, palja, literally eight characters, is the everyday Korean word for your fate, your lot in life. So in Korea, eight isn’t just the sound of getting rich. It’s built right into the word for destiny.
And surprise, surprise, four’s dark side makes the trip too. So in the same set, four and death can both be read sa. So four is not going to be selling on license plates for very, very high prices. And just like you might replace or omit the 13th floor in a place like the U.S., some Korean elevators replace the fourth floor number with the letter F for four. All right, one last thing because I was looking this up myself.
666. Uh-oh. Yeah, we’re going to talk about 666. So 666 is thought of as the sign of evil or the number of the beast in the West. And that comes from the Book of Revelation chapter 13, verse 18. And that is related to challenging the reader to calculate the number of the beast, stating it is the number for a person, its number is 666. So generally, boo, 666, not a good thing in the West. Now, to dismiss one commonly held misbelief, or however you want to put it, as someone who has listened to a lot of heavy metal in his life, there is a hand signal that a lot of people use at heavy metal concerts, which is the ring and middle finger bent towards the palm, thumb wrapped over, pinky and index up in the sky.
Now there are some internet conspiracy theories that claim the curled fingers and extended pinky index, et cetera, form three overlapping sixes. But guess what? This is not true. This heavy metal gesture, so to speak, is actually the mano cornuta, the horned hand, which is an old way of warding off the evil eye. Ancient Mediterranean protective symbol that has been used for centuries in Southern Europe and Italy.
And boom, you can ward off the malocchio, the evil eye or bad luck, or you can use it to protect yourself from somebody with bad vibes, negative energy. You get the idea. So how did this get connected to heavy metal? Well, here we go. Black Sabbath, one of my favorite bands of all time. You might recognize the front man, Ozzy Osbourne from back in the day.
He was famous for throwing up a peace sign during and after concerts. Well, when they got a new vocalist, Ronnie James Dio, when he joined the band in 1979, he wanted a signature gesture. He wanted something he could use, but he didn’t want to copy Ozzy. So what did he do? Well, Dio grew up in an Italian American household, and his very superstitious Italian grandmother used to use that hand signal, the mano cornuta, to protect herself from sketchy people or some odd ball who she thought might be casting bad luck.
So guess what? He borrows grandma’s hand signal and starts using it [at?] concerts. Boom, Black Sabbath becomes associated with that. And then bada bing, bada boom. There you have it. Heavy metal. All right. Why am I getting into all this 666? Well, because 666 is not bad news or bad luck everywhere. In fact, but in Chinese, six-six can sometimes be good luck.
You have [Mandarin phrase; likely liùliù dàshùn], which is similar to something like [Mandarin phrase; likely yílù shùnfēng], which is like a bon voyage. May you have the wind at your back and smooth sailing on your journeys. And this six sounds like it could be [liù?], like smooth, but it could also be lù, like a road, a path.
So when on Chinese New Year, people get these little packets of money in these red envelopes called hóngbāo. Sometimes the amounts will be in sixes. So 600, 666, whatever it might be. So that is just to say that whether a number is good or bad luck really depends on where you are. And actually, there’s a lot of disagreement.
Even within China, you look at different dialects and how things can be pronounced, it comes down oftentimes to just what that sound is similar to across the board. All right, so let’s sign off. There’s one last eight-related detail, also has a six in it. So in Chinese internet shorthand, eight-eight can be bye-bye, because ba-ba sounds a lot like bye-bye.
You will hear that a lot in China, in Taiwan, bye-bye, which you can write in Chinese characters. So after an entire episode about prosperity, fate, and very expensive numbers, I get to sign off with a cheap version, and that is 8-8-bye-bye. So, bye-bye, but you can say [bye-bye la / bā bā liù; pronunciation uncertain]. All right, we’ll leave it at that, guys. Hope that was nerdy enough for you.
I can’t imagine there are going to be show notes on this, but who the hell knows. Maybe we’ll create some show notes. So thanks for indulging. This is the first time in my life that I’ve been able to actually pull out some of the East Asian Studies stuff from the dinosaur age when I was in college. So thanks for listening. And as always, until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, also to yourself.
And you know what? Embrace your weird self. If you’re into all this bizarre stuff like I am, you know, hop into Chinese numerology on Wikipedia. Check out that page. And maybe I will come back to that I Ching live casting, because that is a weird book. If you can even call it a book, that’ll be my cliffhanger. Until next time, thanks for tuning in, guys.
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2026-11-06 06:11:00
For episode #888, I couldn’t resist going down a rabbit hole about the number eight and what it can tell us about luck, language, money, and fate. Join me for a nerdy tour of China, Japan, and Korea, including a million-dollar license plate, disappearing hotel floors, a casino room designed around one gambler’s birthday, and the lucky number hiding in Toyota’s name. This is my excuse to dust off some of my East Asian Studies background and indulge a few wonderfully weird interests.
Please enjoy!
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Want to hear another episode that wanders deep into the culture of Japan? Listen to part two of my conversation with writer, photographer, and walker Craig Mod, in which we discussed discovering pilgrimage trails with John McBride, learning politeness and language in Japan, the Nakasendō experience, Craig’s rules for walking, the Vipassana influence, depopulation and pizza toast, promoting midsize cities in Japan, and much more.
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The post Lucky #888 — My Tour of Designing Luck in China, Japan, and Korea appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-10-28 07:26:50
Please enjoy this transcript of a very special interview with culinary legend Jacques Pépin, available exclusively on YouTube.
Books, people, and resources mentioned in the interview
Legal conditions and copyright information
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors.
Tim Ferriss: Jacques, thank you so much for welcoming me into your home. I’ve seen so many videos here, and you’ve been my teacher from afar through books and videos for a very long time, so thank you for that.
Jacques Pépin: Actually, yes, we did in the other house, but in this house, starting with the pandemic, Tom Hopkins is not here today, but started shooting here and I think we had 200,000, 300,000 people before the pandemic, and we had two million, whatever. We did 10, 12 shows a day. Those shows of three, four, five minutes, just a little recipe too. So yeah, we’ve done a lot of shows here, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You’ve done a ton. And part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show is because when I found you, I was trying to learn how to cook, and I had failed many times. And when I found you, I thought to myself, not only is this an incredible teacher of the culinary arts, but one of the best teachers of any skill I’ve ever seen. And I’m a bit of a collector of teachers. So I wanted to ask you in the case of these videos or just broadly speaking, how do you think about preparation before the camera starts rolling, the setting, the mise en place? Could you speak to that?
Jacques Pépin: Yes. Preparation is very important, but it should be unseen, in a sense, to look natural and it can be. I mean, for me, it’s a question of making sure that I have the ingredients in the right place and that’s it. I mean basically you start cooking and following and I did that when I was doing a show for PBS. I mean, I did a lot of different series of 23 shows. At the beginning of the show, I mean usually the cameraman would come, like four of them, plus the producer and all that to a set. So I usually took them through the show and I say, “I’m going to start with B1, which is burner one.” I put a thing in there and this and that, and I go through the whole show like this with three, four, five recipes. And they think I have the greatest memory of anyone they’ve never seen.
I don’t really have any memory. I go in my head, I say, “I’m going to put that on the stove, and it’s going to take a minute or so,” so I can open the oven. I put that in, and during that time I can—I work it out as a cook following the recipe itself rather than the question of memory. And the same idea there, I try to visualize in my head, when I do a recipe, what’s coming next, and what I need next, and so forth.
Tim Ferriss: I am fascinated by the overlay of skills, the transfer between different skills and arts. And before I did homework for this conversation, I did not know how involved you were in painting. And I looked at a lot of your artwork. “Fringe of the Wood” is one I really like. “Fleur One”, I also really loved. You have some incredible pieces and I’m wondering what similarities you’ve found between the culinary arts and the visual arts.
Jacques Pépin: There are, but I mean, cooking came way before painting. Painting came in this country after, in France I never did. I was in apprenticeship in 1949 so I mean, it’s many, many years ago, over 70 years. But yeah, there are. I mean often, like in a recipe, I think that you have to test all the time. So if I do A and B, put together, I test and adjust, then test and adjust, and keep building the recipe until it’s okay, that’s fine. That’s it. And to a painting, a little bit of the same thing. Sometimes, I start with a color or two, especially if I work in something more abstract, and I kind of react to the color or the painting itself and I add something and I add another thing until I was satisfied with it. Is it good or not? I don’t know, but if I’m satisfied, I’ll stop there. I’m certainly probably better at cooking than at painting, but I’ve been at it longer, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: So one part of your bio, and we’re not going to go through every step because of course we’d be here for probably seven hours if we did that, but one segue that I’d love for you to speak to is your very beginning chapters of learning how to cook. How did you go from that to cooking for the French heads of state?
Jacques Pépin: Well, it’s a question of luck. At that time, certainly the cook was at the bottom of the social scale, quite different than here. I was a cook for several heads of state, I mean three of them, and I had never been in an interview with a magazine or a newspaper or whatever, that did not exist. So now we are genius, we are famous. Not at that time. So anyway, I worked in Paris in some of the—Plaza Athénée, Maxim’s, Fouquet’s, I mean, the great places in Paris.
And then I was drafted in the Navy and that was during the Algerian War, actually. And I was supposed to go to Algeria, and then they didn’t send me, they sent me back to Paris. And the reason was that my brother was already in Algeria, and they didn’t send two brothers at the same time. So I ended up at the head of the Navy thing in Paris and started cooking for the officers there. I had a friend of mine who was working for the secretary of [the] treasurer who came and he said, “Could you come and give me a hand? I have some dinner to do.”
And I’ve never worked in Paris in a big place, so I don’t really know, so I said, “Sure.” So I started doing that, and at that time the government [was] changing at a fairly rapid pace in France under the Fourth Republic. And I ended up being there with one of the heads of treasurer and government change, and he became the prime minister of France. At that time, the prime minister was the highest—
Tim Ferriss: Station.
Jacques Pépin: —post that you could have in France because the president of the Republic didn’t really have much power. I ended up staying there under three different presidents. The one that I started with, Felix Gaillard, lasted six months, six and a half months. And then I came eventually to de Gaulle, and I stayed with him and doing state dinners. Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, MacMillan, I mean, big heads of state, but as I said, never once did I get an interview with a thing, it didn’t really exist. Otherwise, I worked with the head of the house, in that case, Madame de Gaulle, to do the dinner for the week, and for the family and so forth. When it came to state dinner, then we had people from the outside coming to advise me what to do, not too long, or this or that, and so forth.
Tim Ferriss: How did the cooking in that capacity, cooking for the heads of state, most differ from cooking in the restaurants prior to that?
Jacques Pépin: Well, this is more focused here. You’re going to be focused to one person and the type of thing that they want to eat. So in a sense, it’s easier or more complicated depending on the way you look at it. But for me, I felt relatively comfortable in that position. We did dinner usually for six, eight, 10, I think 25, whatever the maximum of what I did. Then we had another organization who came if we had big, big things of over 100 or 200 people.
Tim Ferriss: I want to flash back a little bit to growing up in war-torn France. You previously said that your mother could cook with almost nothing and that informed your, and I think these are your words, not mine, miserly cooking style. Could you give some examples of what you saw your mother do?
Jacques Pépin: My mother would never throw anything out in the refrigerator and it became a bit of my motto too. And what my wife called fridge soup is probably one of the best examples. I open the refrigerator and I have wilted salad and an onion has been there for weeks and all that. We take all of that together with water, salt, put it in a pot to make a soup. She used to call fridge soup that we did and finish with some pasta in it or rice or nothing at all.
So this was a normal thing to do, and certainly my mother, with a little restaurant, would work this way. Also, the fact that she didn’t have, she had a refrigerator with a block of ice at that time. And so she bought meat, and she had to use it within a couple of days and so forth. So yes, things were used, and my aunt and my cousin, it’s all women in my family in France, with the little restaurant, were cooking this way.
And even when I was with the president in France, they were not particularly impressed by me. I remember going to Nantua, which is a town not too far between Lyon and Geneva where my aunt had a little restaurant, going to the kitchen to give her a hand. She threw me out. “You have too much butter. Get out of here.”
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to talk about someone, maybe from the perspective of a lot of people who might read your bio, some unorthodox decisions that you made. And one is being offered a job at the White House to cook for John F. Kennedy and, instead, taking a job at Howard Johnson.
Jacques Pépin: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Could you walk us through how you made that decision?
Jacques Pépin: Well, to start with, when I was in Paris, I worked in Paris for quite a number of years, and I loved America at the time, jazz and so forth. I wasn’t married, but I said, “I think I’m going to go to America for a year to taste America and New York.” I came on a student boat. I found a spot on a student boat, and I remember there meeting one of the teachers who spoke French, and I asked him, I said, “I’m going to be in New York and I need to speak English better. What do you think?”
He said, “Well, there is a school in New York called Columbia University. They say you should go there. It’s a good school to learn English.”
I said, “Okay.”
I came here sponsored by a small restaurant called La Toque Blanche. The owner came to Paris at that point. I met him and he said, “Yeah, if you want to come.”
At that time, for some reason, the French were pretty easy to come. I got a passport and whatever I needed in a few weeks, and I came and I thought I said that I would stay there for a year or two. And so that man, that restaurant there, he didn’t have a job, but he said, “Oh, I have a friend of mine, Le Pavilion. It’s the best restaurant in New York and they need people like you to—I’ll take you there to introduce you to the chef.”
It was Pierre Franey, and Pierre told me, “Well, you want to start tomorrow?”
So I said, “Okay.”
So I started working at the Pavillon and Soulé was the other pretty strong man, you know. And at some point, after a few months, there was some disagreement with the employee, with the union and with Soulé, and he was going to close and so forth. And at the same time, one of the clients of the Pavillon was Howard Johnson, Howard D. Johnson, the father, the one who created the company. So he approached Pierre, he said, “Could you come and work for me?”
Pierre said, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve never done that, but maybe.”
When I heard this, I said, “Can I go too with you?”
So I ended up going with Pierre to Howard Johnson’s, which was a totally different type of job. And we had carte blanche with Mr. Johnson to do to a certain extent what we wanted. So I remember in the test kitchen starting with three chickens, poaching chickens, taking them out to do a chicken, cream sauce, whatever, and finishing with 3,000 pounds of chicken in a thousand-gallon kettle, you know, doing it. So adjusting and doing like that without that was really a fascinating thing. I had never done a recipe before, so I started doing—it was a totally different world, for me, of production, and I ended up staying 10 years at Howard Johnson’s. I learned a great deal in the writing of recipes and American eating habits and all that type of stuff.
When I left Howard Johnson’s, I opened a restaurant on Fifth Avenue called La Potagerie, which did soup in mass production. And then I opened the World Trade Center with Joe Baum as the executive chef. We served 40,000 people a day in different restaurants. Then I was a consultant at the Russian Tea Room. And I’m saying all of that to say I would never have been able to do those types of jobs without the training of Howard Johnson’s. So Howard Johnson’s, in a sense, it was an addition to what I knew and changed my life. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It seems to me, I don’t know if this is fair to say, but that you’ve made some decisions looking at your bio to maximize for learning, right? Learning opportunity. And you seem to be inherently very curious, and it strikes me that it gives me insight into how to teach. And I’m curious, when you’re writing books, I mean, you’ve published so many books and you’ve published classics that have become these iconic, seminal works, how do you think about the right way to teach, say, culinary skills? Because a lot of cookbooks fail, right? People aren’t able to use them. They don’t acquire the skills, they don’t acquire the technique. How do you think your approach to teaching differs?
Jacques Pépin: Maybe because of the training that I had in France in the breaking down of ingredients. It became very important to have the proper technique to do. And those techniques are kind of universal, whether you do French cooking or Italian or Spanish or whatever, an egg is an egg, you poach an egg or peel a tomato or bone out a chicken, that could be applied to any of those.
I realized at some point that those techniques and the way of breaking down things, that fits with my character and what I wanted to do, and this is the way I could teach people. That they would remember, instead of remembering a whole recipe, not remembering how to do that particular thing, how to remember how to poach an egg the right way and so forth. So yeah, I started to emphasize more of the technique than the recipe, but it was lucky. It just happened at that time that people asked me, “Do you want to do this?”
At some point, I started giving classes. At some point in my life, I had a very bad accident. I had 12 fractures. A car accident broke my back, my hip, leg too, and even that arm was totally destroyed, so that my wife signed, at the hospital, removal of the left arm, it was all broken and then they somehow saved it. And most of the shows that I did after, but after that, people don’t realize I can’t really bend it much more than that.
So when I started, it was coincidental at that time where a cookware shop [was] opening in New York with a little cooking school offered in the back and they asked me, starting with, at Bloomingdale’s, “Do you want to come and give a class there?”
I said, “Sure.”
So I came, did a demonstration or two, and then I started going through the country doing this, and I was amazed when I did the—peeled a carrot, and people said, “Wow, that’s how you peel a carrot.”
I said, “Yeah, that’s how you peel a carrot.” So I couldn’t believe—so I said, “Go back to concentrate on the proper way of doing this, on the technique more and more.” And that basically is where I started doing books, and one book after another book and so forth.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to really give you credit here because I study a lot of things. I work with a lot of coaches. I read books about skills I never intend to learn just to see how they are taught. And as someone who’s studied a lot of languages, let’s just say Chinese and Japanese, there are thousands of characters, and you can make millions of different words and so on, but fundamentally, there are, for instance, in Japanese, I think it’s around 114 fundamental building blocks of all these characters. So if you learn those fundamentals, then you can assemble them in many different ways.
And what it strikes me you’re so good at is distilling things down to these fundamental techniques, and then teaching them in a very logical sequence so that people build confidence as they progress. I’m curious, after your accident, was that transition to teaching from being a practitioner in the field to more so a teaching capacity, was that difficult for you? Or did it just come naturally and you found that you actually enjoyed the teaching in some ways more than you did being in the back of house?
Jacques Pépin: No, I think that it was pretty natural and I thought that I didn’t really break it down this way at the beginning, but instead of teaching cooking, teaching how to cook the basic recipe, and if you learn how to poach an egg, you learn how to poach an egg. You can do it Chinese style or Italian or French, it doesn’t really matter at that point. So I was not trying, in fact, to stay French or teach only French cooking, I was trying to teach people how to cook—that is to make your life easier, faster.
I mean, when you’re in a restaurant, as you know, it’s 11 o’clock in the morning, at 12 o’clock you have a hundred people sitting down where you have three cases of artichokes to do. It’s not a question of doing it, it’s a question of doing it in 45 minutes too. So the speed and all that to become very important in the process of cooking, and this is what I wanted to teach. So I started with, as I said, trying to break down the different techniques, and show them how to do, regardless of whether those techniques were more French or Italian or whatever.
Tim Ferriss: I want to talk about a few, I hesitate to call them ingredients. They seem more important, maybe they’re worthy of a different label, but I was looking back at the 90/90 campaign, so 90 years, 90 dinners, this nationwide dinner series that you did, celebrating your 90th birthday, raising money for culinary education, and I’m looking at some of the stats here. So 37 dinners featured chicken, 40 featured egg dishes, and then 30 birthday cakes, and there are many other statistics.
Do chicken and eggs have a special place in your heart and in your teaching? The number of people who have sent me videos when I told them that I was going to be interviewing you related to making omelets, or looking at your artwork and seeing that you have a piece that’s entirely chicken faces, basically, chicken heads. I’m just wondering if these are particularly meaningful to you, or they’re useful as a core of cooking in some way. I’m just curious if you have any special relationship to these ingredients—eggs and chickens?
Jacques Pépin: Well, it seems that I do, but I was born in France in a town called Bourg-en-Bresse and the chicken of Bresse are pretty well known. White plumage, blue feet, and all that. They are considered some of the greatest chicken that you have in restaurants, so the poulet Bresse. So yes, in apprenticeship and before, I was always involved with chicken, and not only killing chicken, plucking chicken, and all that when I was an apprentice. And by extension, the eggs, of course. And the eggs, for me, is always one of the greatest things, an egg, there’s so many variations that you can do with eggs and so forth. So yes, I often go back to chicken or eggs, whether I realize it or not, frankly.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’ll show you the video afterwards. My friend, Jeffrey, I mentioned him before we started recording, sent me a video for you of his daughter and his son both using your techniques. He went to the French Culinary Institute, and has a lot of thanks to send your way. Could you share a bit about your foundation? How did the foundation begin? What is its purpose?
Jacques Pépin: Well, I’m very lucky this way because I do a lot of cooking. I did hundreds of shows and all that, but to put things together, I’m not that great, and my daughter, Claudine, is better than I am for this, and she married a chef. So he was very good at that, and he’s been teaching at Johnson as well for 15 years. And so he took over and created the Jacques Pepin Foundation. At some point, he said, “You’ve done so many, hundreds and hundreds of videos and shows. Who would you like to teach?”
I thought about it. I said, “People who have been a bit, maybe, disenfranchised with life. People who come out of jail, or drug addicts, former drug addicts, people like this.” Yeah, that would be nice. And because I feel that in five, six weeks, if I work with someone, I can show someone how to wash salad and poach an egg and do something and all the basics that you do in the kitchen. And that person, if they stay in that kitchen, within maybe a year and a half, two years, they may be the chef they have become and they have to kind of redo their life too. As we said, in the kitchen, there is no political implication in the kitchen, and so we all go to do the same thing, to make people happy.
And I started doing more of this because of my son-in-law, and he organized the Jacques Pepin Foundation and does a great job with that. And I’ve been happy to work with him, I would never have been able to do that by myself.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ll link to that in the show notes for people as well at tim.blog/podcast. I’ll add that at the end of our chat as well. I wanted to come back, since you mentioned your daughter, I think I’m getting this date right, but 1967. So you publish The Other Half of the Egg with Helen McCully and your daughter is born in the same year. How did becoming a father and a parent change you?
Jacques Pépin: Well, you always cook for someone, and my wife was very good at that. And yeah, we went to restaurants occasionally, but cooking at home was something which was very important. So it reminds me that when I was a kid, coming out of school, you get into the kitchen. This is the place which is comfortable, the place where the smell, the look of the kitchen, the whole feeling of it was part of my life, and I wanted it to be more or less the same for Claudine, which I think it did. She ended up, she didn’t want to have anything to do with cooking, and then she married a chef, of course.
Tim Ferriss: Funny how that works. Yeah.
Jacques Pépin: This is what happens in families. So yeah, she’s a pretty good cook herself without any question. So yeah, it was fine. I mean, as I said, in the kitchen, we always have a good time in the kitchen. We’re the same, everyone looks the same in the eye of the stove, and it’s true. In the kitchen, there is no political implication. You don’t really—[we] have a good time.
Tim Ferriss: What were the first dishes that Claudine cooked as a child? Were there any early dishes or techniques that you remember teaching?
Jacques Pépin: Yes, I can think of it. Yes, I knew that. My brain, after 90, it’s kind of going. I forget things that I knew all my life too. I think that Claudine worked, I think she worked with chickens or with eggs also, like I did. But yeah, when she worked, I remember when she was at BU, Boston University, I ended up teaching there. So she had a little apartment. I went there to cook in her little apartment. And then a couple of them, she invited me. One time she invited me, and the chicken that she bought, she bought the most expensive chicken that she could find to roast for me, which ended up being an old male chicken, the cock, whatever, tough like hell.
Tim Ferriss: Chewy, maybe.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah. So she’s good at cooking in the kitchen and [it] makes her happy. So I never thought when she was in school at BU, and then she went to France, that she was going to marry the chef, but she did.
Tim Ferriss: Destiny, unavoidable. How did you connect with the trinity of American cooking when you got here? That is to say these seminal figures, Beard and Child and so on, how did that come together?
Jacques Pépin: Well, it started again at the Pavillon. When I was at the Pavillon, the time that I stayed there, Craig Claiborne, who started at The New York Times, came to review the Pavillon, did a glowing review of the Pavillon actually. And we closed not that long after, but I lived on 50th and First Avenue, and Craig live on 53rd. So we became friends, and he’s the one who introduced me to someone who lived on 52nd Street, First Avenue, which was Helen McCully, was the food editor of McCall, House Beautiful, and so forth. And she was already a lady in her 60s and she took me under her wing in a sense and became kind of my surrogate mother, said, “Don’t wear this, don’t wear that, do this, do that.”
And Helen spoke with James Beard every day for hours, so she was really much into the New York intelligentsia of cooking. And at some point she called me and she said, “I have that woman here. She has a book, and she sent it to me, and she’s coming—to come next week to New York. And do you want to cook for her in my apartment?”
I said, “Sure.”
She said, “She’s a very tall woman with a terrible voice.” And of course that was Julia Child.
Tim Ferriss: Julia Child.
Jacques Pépin: So I met Julia, and we became friends. In fact, we spoke French more than English. Her French was better than my English at the time. So I stayed friends with Julia for years, and with James Beard as well, but in a different way.[a][b][c][d] The food world, to go back to your question, was very small at that time. I didn’t even know one—except for Pierre Franey and a couple of things—I didn’t know one French chef. Usually, the chef that I knew [from a] different hotel was Swiss, German, Italian, sometimes too. Not that many French, so things changed.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also wild to think about the chance encounters in life, and the incredible luck of living where you lived so close to all of these people.
Jacques Pépin: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just remarkable how sometimes the cards fall in the right way. How did New York change you as a person being there at that time?
Jacques Pépin: I think it challenged me being in New York completely. I didn’t really realize it, but I love America. I love school, and I ended up going to Columbia [in] 1959. I took the subway the week after I was there and found someone who spoke French, eventually, to be able to enroll in English for foreign students. And so I started with this, and went on to school. Remember, I left school in France at 13 to go into apprenticeship after the certificate, which is where you have to go in France, which usually you finish at 14. I had finished at 13.
But I went back to school at Columbia from 1959 to 1972 where I proposed a doctoral dissertation on the history of food in the context of civilization and literature. And at that time, [the] department there, they said, “Food? You cannot talk about food for a doctoral dissertation.” So food was really at the bottom, again, of the subjects that you would have taken. And eventually they gave me a PhD years later, and I started teaching at BU, and Claudine went there and I asked Julia, at some point, to join me. So we talked to the president of BU to create a master of liberal arts with a concentration in gastronomy, which was kind of unique. So he accepted it, and then we started teaching and Julia was teaching there too.
Tim Ferriss: How do you think of—
Claudine Pépin: I cook other things.
Jacques Pépin: Hi, (unintelligible)!
Kelsey Whitsett: She doesn’t just burn tough chickens.
Jacques Pépin: Did you hear?
Claudine Pépin: Yeah! I heard. I’ve been sitting right there.
Jacques Pépin: Oh, you have. Okay. What did I say wrong?
Tim Ferriss: Hi there. Nice to meet you.
Claudine Pépin: Nice to meet you too.
Jacques Pépin: So Claudine’s going to come and correct me, then.
Kelsey Whitsett: Do you want to come sit over here, Claudine? Okay.
Jacques Pépin: What [were] the first dishes that you did? I didn’t—
Claudine Pépin: Well, you traumatized me. I tried to make Toll House cookies with the bag and you changed the recipe.
Jacques Pépin: Oh.
Claudine Pépin: You made me do something else and it didn’t taste like Toll House cookies. That, I very much remember.
Jacques Pépin: See that?
Tim Ferriss: Wow, this made an imprint.
Claudine Pépin: Yeah. I was like—
Kelsey Whitsett: You always say you have to do the recipe exactly as written at least twice.
Claudine Pépin: Right.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah.
Kelsey Whitsett: You didn’t follow your own advice.
Claudine Pépin: My mother—
Tim Ferriss: What are you allowed to do after you do it twice? You allowed to improvise after that?
Kelsey Whitsett: Yeah, probably not with baking though, honestly.
Tim Ferriss: Baking’s, yeah. I remember somebody said to me once, they said. I was like, “How do you decide on sweet or savory if you have to choose one of those paths?”
And they were like, “Well, do you like to fold your socks in your sock drawer?”
And I was like, “What do you mean?”
They’re like, “If so, you might want to do baking.”
Jacques Pépin: I didn’t think you started with something sweet.
Claudine Pépin: Well, no. I think that before that, I did the spinach and the bechamel sauce.
Jacques Pépin: Oh, yes, one time.
Claudine Pépin: Messed that up.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah, I remember.
Claudine Pépin: I didn’t mess that up. I actually changed the world with that.
Jacques Pépin: She did special—she changed my recipe.
Claudine Pépin: I did.
Tim Ferriss: What was the recipe? Or what was the dish?
Jacques Pépin: I mean, the recipe at the time, again, just like I was criticizing—not criticizing, but discussing with Julia, who would do stuff in the older style, because Julia always said we started cooking together. To a certain extent, it’s true. In 1949, I was in apprenticeship. 1949, she came to France, started cooking. So then often when we cooked together, she was still cooking in the old style.
One time we were doing spinach, and so I had a skillet, took a handful of wet spinach, put it in the skillet to cover it. She said, “No, no, no, no. We’ve got to blanch it.” Yes, in France we have big things of water cooking and you put the green vegetables in there, bring them to a boil, boil them, few minutes, drain it, cool it off, press it into a bowl and you have spinach ready to be sauteed or do whatever you want.
But this is old style. I said, “We don’t do that anymore.” But actually, the first time I did it was with her, in a sense.
Tim Ferriss: With Claudine.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah. I said, “Well, we’re going to do spinach cream sauce.” So I did a bechamel, a bit of a roux and some milk and cream, bring it to a boil. I said, “Okay, we’re going to cook the spinach.” She took spinach, she threw them directly into the bechamel. I said, “No, we’ve got to blanch it.”
She said, “Why?”
I said, “Because we blanch them.” I said, “Okay, fine. We don’t blanch them.” So we throw them in there over there, that was the first time we actually corrected.
Tim Ferriss: How did it turn out?
Claudine Pépin: It was good.
Tim Ferriss: It was good?
Jacques Pépin: Very good.
Tim Ferriss: Look at that. All right.
Claudine Pépin: Yeah. All the nutrients.
Tim Ferriss: But you said something I want to come back to, which is you have to do the recipe exactly as it’s described twice.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah, a couple of times. Yes, two.
Tim Ferriss: And then what are you allowed to do after that?
Jacques Pépin: Well, after that you have the taste in your mouth, so you want to reach that taste. If you can reach it in a better way, faster way, that’s okay. That’s fine. But I know people, I’ve seen people cooking with a recipe that they never follow at all, and I don’t agree with that. At least once or twice, do it according to whoever did the recipe did.
Tim Ferriss: So that you have the reference of that taste, and then you can try to get there in a more, I guess, elegant way.
Jacques Pépin: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Well, I like this. I like what’s going on here.
Kelsey Whitsett: I’m sorry. I realize we’re going to make this hell for whoever’s going to edit this, but –
Tim Ferriss: No, no. All good.
Kelsey Whitsett: Let me just give him a little bit of honey.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Kelsey Whitsett: But the other thing is you might decide you like it with more cream or more, you know, with your taste and then you can adjust it, right, Jacques?
Jacques Pépin: Or no cream.
Kelsey Whitsett: Or no cream. Yes.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah.
Claudine Pépin: The only thing that my mother would tell my father when he walked in the kitchen was don’t touch anything.
Jacques Pépin: Oh, yeah. Yeah, my wife would.
Tim Ferriss: All right, I want to hear more about this. I feel like this is gold here. All right.
Jacques Pépin: Yes. Everything’s—
Tim Ferriss: So Claudine just said the one thing that her mother, your wife, would say to you when you walked in the kitchen is “Don’t touch anything.” Why?
Jacques Pépin: Exactly. Here comes that great chef, that I’m there and I come into the kitchen, my wife is cooking. People would think that they would say, “What do you think?” Or whatever.
No, she would say, “Don’t touch anything.”
Tim Ferriss: “Leave me alone.”
Jacques Pépin: That’s the first thing that she would say.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Any other greatest hits, golden stories? There’s so much, I’m sure.
Claudine Pépin: I don’t really know. It was interesting growing up in that household full of cooks, that’s for sure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, what do you think differentiates your dad from other educators, teachers of these skills, of the philosophies and the principles behind the skills? What comes to mind for you?
Claudine Pépin: Truthfully, I think that it’s his equity. I always call my father from, he’s like from carrots to caviar. So if he’s cooking for people who may never afford or have never tasted truffles, he never talks down to anyone because if you can’t afford something, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn about it or want to learn about it.
Tim Ferriss: So that type of meritocratic approach to teaching as opposed to looking down, looking up, looking sideways or whatever the perspective might be.
Claudine Pépin: Think about the quintessential French chef that you see in movies that is like, “Woof.”
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Claudine Pépin: But he’s never been that way. The only time he goes, “Woof,” is if you don’t do it the way he wanted you to do it. Then you might get in trouble, but everyone should be exposed. And he’s always so excited to find something new. I mean, it’s never like, “Okay, we’re French. We’re better than you all.” When you went to China and they put bechamel on the pizza or something?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, can we talk about that? Yeah, what was—
Claudine Pépin: Something crazy. Crazy thing that—there was a buffet, and some people were putting the bechamel on the pizza because they didn’t know not to do it.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah, because I did a creme anglaise souffle for the dessert.
Tim Ferriss: This was in China?
Jacques Pépin: I think they were filling a plate. They keep adding too, I say, “Ay yai yai, the creme anglaise ended up on the roast chicken.” But yes, people do that, but it’s okay.
Claudine Pépin: I’ve never seen anybody more excited to find something he’s never tasted. Still, now. I mean, you might hate it.
Tim Ferriss: Still the most excited person in the room to find something you haven’t tasted.
Jacques Pépin: Well, yes. It’s always exciting to, yes. Yeah. And even to cook with people who have a different point of view that you have. So it’s interesting sometimes to go with someone and have a piece of chicken or whatever it is and say, “It’s perfectly the way I want it.” And for me, it is already too cooked or too this or too that. And it’s a question of taste, also. You can relate to a certain type of taste, which for you is just right, but some other people, no.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve read you quoted as saying that the food of one’s childhood stays with them and becomes more than food. What are some foods from your childhood that you really remember?
Jacques Pépin: Well, the taste of certain types of soup that my mother did, potato, certainly, because just out of the garden, she would have the tiny potatoes and saute them directly. So certain tastes like this stay with you forever. And with ordinary ingredients most of the time, and even a salad, a salad seasoned the right way, which is not that easy. People wash the salad. Sometimes they don’t drain it properly. There’s still too much water in it. They do the mixture of oil and vinegar and mustard. Too much of one thing or too much of the other one, or they mix it too early and then it gets wilted, or the salad is too cold. Sometimes it’s a lot of little things like this to say, “Well, that salad is perfect. It’s mixed just right and mixed at the right moment. The temperature is good. There is no water still in there too.” It doesn’t happen all the time, so yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I feel like I want to indulge in this whole situation that’s going on here. So we’re going to do a little dance here. What are the adjectives that you think best describe your father? I mean, resilient comes to mind for me, curious comes to mind for me. What else comes to mind for you?
Claudine Pépin: Learner.
Tim Ferriss: Learner.
Claudine Pépin: Teacher, definitely.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Claudine Pépin: Impatient.
Tim Ferriss: Impatient, okay. It takes one to know one in my case. I’m also, my mom would say, from out of the box, very impatient. There are different flavors of impatience. So how would you describe [it]?
Claudine Pépin: I don’t think that there’s one thing. Just when he’s run out of patience, or if you’re going on too long to explain something, he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s the point?”
Tim Ferriss: I’m the same way. So I’m very, very similar. I’m not saying that to excuse it in all circumstances, but I sympathize. Sometimes I wonder if the impatience goes along with the learning, right? If you have a hunger for that and you want to get to some type of reward at the end of the rainbow. I mean, I have this voracious appetite also for learning, but there is a certain facet of it that I think is close to impatience also. I don’t know. Just thinking out loud.
Kelsey Whitsett: And it’s partly being a chef too.
Tim Ferriss: Just intrinsic to being a chef is being impatient on some level.
Kelsey Whitsett: Yeah, because every—”Do it now.” There’s no, they’re, “Do it now.”
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Kelsey Whitsett: That’s it.
Claudine Pépin: If he says—
Kelsey Whitsett: Clean it now. Cook it, do it now.
Claudine Pépin: “I’d like to see that book.” It doesn’t mean I’d like to see that book in five minutes, it means get up and get the book. I am the same way because both my mom and my dad were like that. “Do it now” was just always an understood.
Kelsey Whitsett: Yeah, right.
Claudine Pépin: And I can look at my husband who’s much more patient.
Tim Ferriss: The assumed is do it now, not in five minutes.
Claudine Pépin: Yeah. And I can say, “Hey, can you get some wine from the cellar?” And he’ll just sit there, and I’m just seething.
Tim Ferriss: When I was even around 10 years old, I’d be in a restaurant. I drink a lot of water. And if my water glass sat empty for more than two or three minutes, I would just get up as a kid and just walk into the kitchen. This is as a customer, right? I just get up, walk in and go find the water, come out and pour my own water.
Who are some chefs that stand out to you as very skilled technicians or chefs, broadly speaking? Are there any names that come to mind who you respect for different reasons?
Jacques Pépin: Yes. I mean, certainly people like Thomas Keller and Pierre Franey that I work with, but yes, usually chefs who are able to organize a kitchen and make it work flawlessly without, it’s like a ballet and very often a camera will come into the kitchen, and if it’s really a good kitchen like Thomas Keller’s, they’ll probably stay no more than five minutes and say, “Nothing is going on here. Let’s go.” Because it’s like a ballet at work.
They like to see people yelling, which is not really what happens in a kitchen which is well run. But many chefs that we have in this country now, I mean, a name—
Claudine Pépin: José.
Jacques Pépin: Huh?
Claudine Pépin: José.
Jacques Pépin: José Andrés, yes.
Jacques Pépin: José Andrés is different because he has his own style and his own thing and he sticks out in a different way than—
Claudine Pépin: He worked for El Bulli.
Jacques Pépin: I know. Yeah, right. Yeah.
Kelsey Whitsett: Daniel Boulud, Daniel.
Claudine Pépin: Daniel.
Jacques Pépin: Well, yeah. Daniel is, I can associate—
Tim Ferriss: How does, say, Daniel differ from Thomas Keller? How are they different?
Jacques Pépin: I have to look at it in a different way. Daniel will be more, I guess, more French in the sense that the choice of his ingredients. And for me, he’s from Lyon particularly too, so I can feel more of a similarity with him than I would feel with Thomas. Even though Thomas, I remember Thomas when he worked upstate New York in a restaurant called La Rive. His brother came there to put him there when he was 14 or 15 years old. Let him work there in that kitchen for the small French restaurant along the river, upstate New York in the Catskills. So I’ve known him a long time, and he’s a great chef, no question about it.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll reiterate something that you said. I remember the first and only time I’ve been to Per Se, Thomas Keller’s, and I did a tour of the kitchen, which I like to do if I’m allowed to. And it was, as you said, dead silent. It’s like a library. And it had a number of tiled mottos on the walls related to excellence and precision, and it was like being in a library plus surgery at the same time. I mean, everything was very precise. It was very quiet, like you said, a quiet ballet. Food was, of course, impeccable. What does it take to run a kitchen like that?
Jacques Pépin: Well, it takes a lot. Necessarily, it is, in a sense, opposite to a little bistro that you would go to in France or in Italy, and so forth. Where there was one person cooking, you go to the market and get your food and start cutting your food and doing it just like with one person too. So it’s totally different than the organization of a brigade where you have 20 people working, each one assigned to a very specific task in the kitchen, which is what I learned at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, but the opposite of what my mother and all that would do in a little restaurant too. So it’s a different way of looking at the food very often.
At the Plaza Athénée in Paris, we were 48 cooks in the kitchen. We did the lobster souffle, for example, a specialty. I’m sure that 48 of us could have done it. You would never have done which one had done it. Is it good? Is it bad? At that time, this is the way it was taught. And I think that, to a certain extent, this is the way you should teach so people have a body of knowledge that they are. And if someone has talent, you take that body of knowledge, and you transcend it and you put your own primature on this and do your own stuff so it’s slightly different at that point.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re thinking about, for somebody who’s not familiar, right? As you’re mentioning these different stations, and hopefully this won’t. I love the movie Ratatouille, I think it’s a fun film, it’s a Pixar film, but at some point they go around and they name the different stations, right? So I’m using that reference for people who are coming from outside the culinary world. Is it structured on some type of military organization? Is Thomas Keller more like a general or a CEO or something else? Or is cooking really its own world? I’m just thinking about the organization and the flow and the process and all these different responsibilities.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah. At this position where he is now, yes, it would be like a general, like a CEO and so forth, as opposed to if even himself. If you take him to the country and you tell him to serve dinner out of his house or out of a little thing by himself, all of a sudden it’s going to be different. But in a professional kitchen, each one is allowed. I mean, at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, we had eight different types of soup, just the soup, the different consomme and all that. So the structure was very important to follow the rules, which on the other hand, if you cook at home and you have a little restaurant, you do your menu of the day and you work on that, on those tastes, without worrying too much about the way it’s done in term of quantity and so forth.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have any, and feel free to chime in also, right?
Kelsey Whitsett: I mean, somebody like Chef Keller is a teacher too, and that they have a role and they have a duty to teach.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah.
Kelsey Whitsett: That’s part of it. Or it should be.
Claudine Pépin: Yeah, and a mentor.
Kelsey Whitsett: And a mentor, yeah. Especially for Tom, though.
Claudine Pépin: He is always really supportive and happy when somebody he has taught and mentors goes and does something else as opposed to feeling resentful or slighted.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So just to echo since I’m closer to the mic, so Claudine was saying how, in the case of Thomas Keller—
Claudine Pépin: And Daniel.
Tim Ferriss: And Daniel. And I know Danny Meyer, also very similar, super—
Jacques Pépin: And Tom Colicchio and many—
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, many examples, extremely supportive of people who come out from under their wings and go on to do amazing things, as opposed to being jealous, resentful, or sniping in some way or another.
Thomas Keller, just as a side note, since we’re just having a jam session here, one of my favorite ways to cook roasted chicken came from not any dish prepared in his restaurant. Well, it was prepared, but it was for staff meals before service. Just a super simple, high-temperature way of cooking roast chicken. I was like, “Man, that’s so simple.” So few moving pieces, I just—it struck me as so elegant.
Claudine Pépin: Did he do it breast side down and then flip it?
Tim Ferriss: I think he did breast side down, and it was much higher temperature than I would’ve expected. I’d have to go back and look at the exact temp, but I was like, “Oh, interesting.” And I was like, “Man, I would think it would get very dry, but no, it’s just perfect.”
Kelsey Whitsett: I worked for someone that had been kind of a protege of Thomas, and after I worked for him, he always said, “If anybody wants to open their own bakery, here’s all the recipes.”
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Kelsey Whitsett: He will give you his.
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.
Kelsey Whitsett: And that’s the spirit, and that comes from Jacques and him.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay, got it. So just again, I’m relaying different methods just in stories from around the room, but you were saying one more time, who was it? This is somebody you worked with?
Kelsey Whitsett: Yeah, but the point is Jacques always says that chefs are generous.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, chefs are generous.
Kelsey Whitsett: My personal story doesn’t matter. The highest form of the chefs in Jacques’ model would be a teacher and generous and they’re not going to say, “You can’t have my recipe.”
Jacques Pépin: The point is that when you have a recipe that you give to people, you give the same recipe to five different people, you have five different dishes, so it’s not like it’s exactly the same. You give that recipe and everything comes exactly the same. No, it never comes the same, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Everybody’s got their unique fingerprints.
Jacques Pépin: So that’s the point. The recipe is just a way of going, but it’s not the whole thing. The rest of it is what you do with it.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have any mottos or quotes that you try to live your life by? I’m curious if there are any. You see what I’m grasping for here, right?
Claudine Pépin: “You’ll never be as good as you were today.”
Kelsey Whitsett: Well, Jacques always says we are all equal in the eyes of the stove, which is our motto of the foundation.
Tim Ferriss: “We’re all equal in the eyes of the stove,” which is an amazing—and then wait, what was the other one?
Kelsey Whitsett: I didn’t know that one, Claudine.
Claudine Pépin: Yeah, that’s the kiss of death in a restaurant to the chef.
Kelsey Whitsett: Right.
Claudine Pépin: “You’ll never be as good as you were today.”
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean? “You’ll never be as good as you are today.” This is like during service?
Claudine Pépin: “As good as you were today.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Oh, but what does that mean?
Claudine Pépin: “How did you enjoy your dinner?”
Tim Ferriss: Oh.
Claudine Pépin: “You’ll never be as good as you were today.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, “You’ll never be as good as you were today.” Meaning you’re never going to top this.
Claudine Pépin: No. Yeah. But does it mean it was good?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know.
Claudine Pépin: There you go.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a very Confucius-type response. Okay, got it. Yeah, that’s a tough one. I could see that—somebody really having insomnia after getting told that.
Claudine Pépin: Well, if that’s what he says, then chances are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I do want to mention a few things just for people to follow up with. The foundation is jp.foundation.
Claudine Pépin: That’s correct.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ll link to all the social and YouTube and so on.
Claudine Pépin: And there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of free recipes on the website.
Tim Ferriss: Is that on the foundation website?
Claudine Pépin: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So hundreds and hundreds of hours of free recipes.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah, the chefs are generous. We have 300 chefs, right?
Claudine Pépin: Yes. That’s the recipe book, that’s a little different.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah, but I mean they gave their time and they gave—
Claudine Pépin: Yes, but that’s still a different piece. But of my father’s recipes, whether it’s on YouTube, which is free, or through the foundation techniques, you can look it up by book, by show, by eggs or chicken, for instance.
Tim Ferriss: Can you say that one more time? This is on the foundation website?
Claudine Pépin: On the foundation website. There’s just hundreds of hours of free teaching because if what we’re trying to do is to help people in their kitchens or get a job, the idea of charging for that information doesn’t sit well.
Tim Ferriss: It’s antithetical, yeah, to what you’re trying to do.
Claudine Pépin: I mean, we are a foundation. We do want financial support, of course, but we also want to provide hundreds of hours of free learning.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah. I have to say that when I think of it, I am more interested in teaching the home cook than the professional because—I show you how to make a recipe too, which in a professional kitchen, it’s never the same exactly, depending. I work at the Russian Tea Room, I mean the amount of, I had three guys behind the stove. We ended up serving a thousand people sometimes.
Tim Ferriss: God.
Jacques Pépin: So the quantity and all that, all that would look quite different. It’s never the same.
Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that, I mean, we’ve covered a good amount of ground, I mean, I’m wondering if there’s anything else that would be fun to cover or that you guys would like to cover.
Claudine Pépin: I think waste in the kitchen is an interesting thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay.
Claudine Pépin: I thought you were going to start into that. My father will tell a story of working at the Russian Tea Room, and they were doing asparagus something, and the guy just cut the asparagus and threw the bottom away.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay. Well, let’s, what’s the right question to ask, then?
Claudine Pépin: What do you find different between working in a professional restaurant and working in your own home as far as waste is concerned?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’ll ask that.
Jacques Pépin: No, the question is not there. I said I’ll get to the Russian Tea Room, and the bunch of asparagus are there, the broccoli are there, and they come in the way the guy cut the top of it and threw the rest in the garbage. Is it right or is it wrong? It’s both right and wrong. I had three guys behind the stove. There is no way they could peel it and all that. So we do it because this is the way it is there. It is wrong by definition, you don’t throw out food like this, but in a place like this with the amount of production that you do, yes, you have all of your vegetables, you cut the head off the broccoli, you cut the head off the asparagus. The rest goes into the garbage because there’s no way anyone has any time to do it and do anything with it. And it’s wrong, no question.
Tim Ferriss: Some staggering percentage of food production in the US is wasted. It’s like 30%, 40%.
Claudine Pépin: And mostly wasted out of home refrigerators.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Claudine Pépin: Which is sad.
Jacques Pépin: But she won’t do that at home.
Claudine Pépin: No.
Jacques Pépin: No.
Claudine Pépin: She’ll only do it here.
Jacques Pépin: She won’t throw anything.
Kelsey Whitsett: When you’re not looking. No, I try not to.
Tim Ferriss: Well, Jacques, there are going to be a lot of people watching this and listening to this who are inspired to get started, perhaps, watching your videos, tiptoeing into the kitchen to try cooking for the first time. What would you say to them? What would you say to those people who are not yet home cooks but are hoping to learn? Maybe they are looking to create more opportunities for themselves. Maybe they just want to make a meal for their family, but they don’t have the confidence yet. What would you say to them?
Jacques Pépin: Have a glass of wine.
Tim Ferriss: Glass of wine.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah. And don’t make it forward. I mean, it’s good. You know that you’re going to do something and it will come out good, very good, extremely good. Okay, but one way or the other it’s going to be eatable. So just go with it and try to analyze it yourself. Say, “That was good, but I shouldn’t have done that before.” You should try to analyze your food, try to correct it, and next time you do better. So that’s how you learn, I think. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Trial and error. Have a glass of wine. Well, I think that’s as good a place as any to start to land the plane. Certainly, people will check out jp.foundation. I’ll put that in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast as well. Did we miss anything that comes to mind?
Kelsey Whitsett: You could talk to Jacques forever and ever. I think this was great.
Claudine Pépin: I would like to mention that even though, or in addition to him turning 91 this year, he has two more books in the works.
Kelsey Whitsett: Thank you, buddy.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Claudine Pépin: I think that’s pretty exciting.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. All right. So turning 91 this year and you have two more books in the works.
Claudine Pépin: [inaudible].
Jacques Pépin: Well, one of them, I did a book with Julia Child [in] 2000, so 20 years ago, 26 years ago. They want to redo it with more of my drawings, paintings and all that. So it’s great. So we’re doing that. And the second one, I did a book of menu[e][f]s. I don’t know if you’ve seen any book of menus? No?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Jacques Pépin: Well, we should give you one then.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Jacques Pépin: And all that. I have about 12 books here of menus going back more than 50 years. I know there is a menu. She’s five years old and she draws the chickens and all that. Yes. And when people come, we started doing the menu like this. My wife wanted to do that and we asked the people to sign on the other page.
Tim Ferriss: That’s fun.
Jacques Pépin: They were there for dinner. So that’s a great memory. I mean, certainly I have my two brothers who died, my mother, many, many people, my wife, of course, were partners in my life, are in those books of menus. So it’s a good memory to do that at home. So we are publishing that book of menu after with about a hundred menus or 120 menus, yeah. 150 menus.
Tim Ferriss: 200.
Jacques Pépin: 200 menus.
Tim Ferriss: 250. All right, we got there. And we can always do outro audio and stuff that I record after the fact if you think of other things to include. Super easy.
Jacques Pépin: Yes. You want to get one?
Kelsey Whitsett: Well, yes. I already, sincere apologies—
Tim Ferriss: No, you’re good.
Kelsey Whitsett: —to your production.
Tim Ferriss: You’re all good.
Jacques Pépin: Which is done already.
Tim Ferriss: We’re just having a party, I’m good. I’m good.
Jacques Pépin: And the yellow one that I’m using there. Yes.
Kelsey Whitsett: So the delivery date for this will be May, but we’re going to do Jacques’s life and his menus, basically.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, these are cool.
Kelsey Whitsett: That’s a more recent one, Jacques.
Jacques Pépin: It’s not complicated to do. I mean, people do that at home.
Tim Ferriss: These are gorgeous.
Jacques Pépin: Yeah. I do remember people come the year after and say, “What did I cook?” the last time they were here.
Tim Ferriss: This is really fun. When I finish a bottle of wine at home—
Jacques Pépin: Here is—
Tim Ferriss: —I have the friends who make me sign the cork and we save the corks.
Jacques Pépin: —the book of menus.
Kelsey Whitsett: He had done previously, this was so you could fill out your own, but this one is going to be more narrative.
Jacques Pépin: So people can fill out their own menu.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, beautiful. All right.
Jacques Pépin: So we’ll give you one of those.
Kelsey Whitsett: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thank you.
Jacques Pépin: Each one of you.
Tim Ferriss: Well, Jacques, thank you so much for taking the time.
Jacques Pépin: Oh, you’re welcome.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you for having me here.
Jacques Pépin: Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: It’s lovely to finally meet.
Jacques Pépin: Thank you for coming. I don’t know whether I answered any questions.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you did. You did. I think I’m going to take your advice on having that glass of wine at some point, but thank you again.
Jacques Pépin: Thank you. Thank you for coming.
Tim Ferriss: And for everybody listening and watching everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, and as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary. Until next time, to others and to yourself, thanks for tuning in.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Legendary Chef Jacques Pépin — The Pursuit of Mastery, Cooking for Presidents, Meeting Julia Child, and More appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-10-28 04:25:22
This one is a very special interview and is available exclusively on YouTube. Jacques Pépin has been my teacher from afar for years, and it was a real gift to sit down with him in his home.
Jacques Pépin is an internationally recognized chef and the author of more than 30 books, including the bestselling The Apprentice, the award-winning Jacques Pépin Celebrates, and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (with Julia Child). He has appeared regularly on PBS programs for more than a decade, hosting more than three hundred cooking shows. Jacques is a former columnist for The New York Times, and his articles have appeared in countless food magazines, especially Food & Wine, where he is a contributing editor. Before coming to the United States, he served as personal chef to three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle.
Please enjoy!
“Everyone looks the same in the eye of the stove.”
— Jacques Pépin
“There is no political implication in the kitchen, and so we all go to do the same thing—to make people happy.”
— Jacques Pépin
“You give the same recipe to five different people, you have five different dishes.”
— Jacques Pépin
“Preparation is very important, but it should be unseen, in a sense, to look natural.”
— Jacques Pépin
“At that time, certainly, the cook was at the bottom of the social scale, quite different than here. … So now we are genius, we are famous.”
— Jacques Pépin
“My mother would never throw anything out in the refrigerator, and it became a bit of my motto too.”
— Jacques Pépin
“I was not trying, in fact, to stay French or teach only French cooking; I was trying to teach people how to cook to make [their lives] easier, faster.”
— Jacques Pépin
“The recipe is just a way of going, but it’s not the whole thing. The rest of it is what you do with it.”
— Jacques Pépin
“I am more interested in teaching the home cook than the professional.”
— Jacques Pépin
Want to hear another episode with a French-born chef who runs his kitchen more like a ballet than a battlefield? Listen to my conversation with Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert, in which we discussed what he looks for when hiring a line cook, his early days as a “borderline violent dictator” of a chef, taming anger with meditation, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the overlap between Stoicism and secular Buddhism, his morning habits, weighing quality vs. scale, moving to the United States in 1989 without speaking a word of English, calibrating his palate with non-artisanal Swiss cheese, what home cooks should use more (and less), and much more.
The post Legendary Chef Jacques Pépin — The Pursuit of Mastery, Cooking for Presidents, Meeting Julia Child, and More appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-10-22 02:21:02
Please enjoy this transcript of my recent subscriber Q&A. We explore what The 4-Hour Workweek looks like in the age of AI, rebuilding momentum when you’re stuck, navigating friendships, making room for serendipity, and much, much more.
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Tim Ferriss: So let’s hop into it. And the first question I will attempt to address is from Val N. The question is, what does The 4-Hour Workweek look like in a world of agents? Some of you will be familiar with the first book. 20th anniversary is coming up in April of 2027. And here is my answer because I have been asked this in private settings and I’ve thought about it a fair amount. The book structure is laid out as a four step process and that process is D-E-A-L. So the acronym is DEAL. And those letters respectively stand for definition that is defining exactly where you want to go, pointing yourself in the right direction, then assigning or calculating the total monthly income and other numbers that are necessary to design a particular life or lifestyle.
Then, E is elimination, that is removing using 80/20 analysis and other things, all of the trivial many so that you can focus on the critical few. Then there’s automation. We’re going to come back to this, which as the word would imply is using processes, technology and so on to automate as much as possible. When the book came out initially in 2007, that was focused in some respects on virtual assistants, but that gets too much airplay. They are a means to an end. And I still use plenty of humans, but really it is defining the rules and policies that govern your life and your business. And following those with very pristine categories of what you will do and won’t do and only optimizing the things that have been pre-identified and then left with room to breathe as the critical few. So that’s D-E-A. And then L is liberation, which is taking advantage of things using the time and the void that you’ve created in the most enjoyable, but also high leverage ways possible.
And my feeling is that in a world of agents, in the world of AI, and I’m invested in a lot of the frontier labs, I have a lot of exposure to behind-the-scenes conversations with smaller companies that are at the cutting edge, I would say that the first two steps, definition and elimination are going to be more and more important because technology tools and AI in particular are accelerants. They make more of whatever is. And if you do not first identify the critical few, the very, very limited set of things that stand a chance of making a huge difference, AI and so on simply multiplies the useless. It multiplies the unimportant, the trivial, the distracting. And you can end up then trying to automate all of those things.
So far with, I would say the vast majority, and by vast majority, I mean 90%-plus of the use cases I’ve seen, people are taking things that probably shouldn’t be done at all and they’re doing them very, very quickly and using AI to create more work, not reduce work. That is why AI creating infinite leisure time where people spend all of their time basket weaving and painting with watercolors is, I think, a completely false promise. No technology has ever delivered that. Many have been ushered in with that promise, none have delivered. And I think AI will be the exact opposite when used as a blunt force instrument. It will create much more work, much more stress, and you will drown in the unimportant. So definition, elimination, and I would say I’ll stop there for now, but nothing in that book from a principle perspective is new. It was a collection of best practices from, you could say millennia, but certainly several hundred years. And I was acting as a curator of those concepts and they were included because I expected them to age very well.
The tools will change, right? Whether you learn to draw or not, the basic principles of drawing, metaphorically speaking, remain the same. If you then want to use a pen, a pencil, watercolors, acrylic, you still need the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are definition and elimination. All right. I’ll add one resource to that. Read old books that contain principles like The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker would be one that stands out. It’s very short. It is very, very tactic and principle dense and you can update the things that are outdated very easily.
Next question is from David J. Of everything you’ve put into the world that gets quoted back to you, which piece do you wish most people would stop following and what did it cost you to realize you’d got it wrong? I went through all of my books thinking about this question and I would say that there is not a whole lot that I could identify as a blanket answer to that question. And the reasons for that are several. The first is that I really try to write books that will be durable and evergreen. So I am, in the editing process, looking for cuts I can make with anything that is overly timely. I do that in the podcast also most of the time. However, however, however, I would say that it’s important to keep in mind, not just with my book, but with all books you read, in what chapter of life the author was writing said book.
So if for instance, you’re reading many books written by an entrepreneur, you may want to pick up the book that corresponds to your particular chapter in life. I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek when I was 29. I am now 49. And as you approach the tail end of your life, and I’m not quite there hopefully, but with the experience of friends and family passing, with accidents claiming the lives of friends as a plane accident, plane crash did with a friend not too long ago, you reframe things as your responsibilities change, as you have say a spouse, family, grandkids, whatever it might be, as you retire. When you hit these particular milestones, the lenses with which you view the world, the way that you value different things changes of course. And for that reason, I would just be aware of where someone is in their journey when you read books. So that is the caveat that I would add to what I have put out in the world.
There are things that I think are neglected that I wish people would pay more attention to, like the Filling the Void chapter in The 4-Hour Workweek. That I think is a critical step for preemptively heading off a lot of the digital malaise and overwhelm and sense of meaninglessness that is ramping exponentially as we certainly, I imagine, most of you have felt on one level or another. But I will stop there for now and keep plugging through.
Next one is from Daniel and I’m going to try to summarize this because it’s a long question, but Tim, I’m 46 on a difficult crossroads. I’ve built businesses, led teams, et cetera, et cetera. He’s had a lot of professional and personal setbacks. He’s found himself in a state of paralysis. And I’ll skip ahead. I’m highly introspective. I journal, read, exercise, and spend considerable time trying to understand my behavior, but I’ve started wondering whether all this introspection has become another sophisticated form of avoidance. Pause. Tim, interjection. I catch myself often doing the same thing. Here’s back to the question. My question is, when someone has lost momentum and confidence in their ability to execute, how do they rebuild trust in themselves and regain agency over their life? More specifically, what would you recommend doing in the first 30 days to break the cycle of overthinking avoidance and inaction?
Of course, it’s hard to give a catchall answer to this, but I have spoken with friends who are in your situation. I have close friends who have been in your situation. I have friends who are currently in your situation and I’ve been, I think, psychologically in a somewhat similar situation. And what I have seen work is a bias towards immediate small actions. What I mean by that is, and Atomic Habits by James Clear does a good job of outlining this. I think BJ Fogg out of Stanford also does a good job of describing this, is starting with small actions that cumulatively, inevitably will have a larger impact and simply beginning to put action on your daily menu.
So for instance, five pushups before each meal, right? It could be 10 minutes of meditation immediately before bed using an app like The Way or anything else. It could be, and I think this is one of the stronger tactics in the beginning, making an effort to brighten someone else’s day and express gratitude by reaching out, say via phone call or text, better phone call, and thanking someone because the question I think implicitly acknowledges something that is for people like me, for many of you listening or watching perhaps is easy to fall into and that is the trap of self-help becoming self-fixation, which is a recipe for self-recrimination and I think poor mental health overall. So adding in something that is as simple as a call to someone else once a day or in person, could be a barista at a coffee shop, thanking them, introducing yourself, et cetera. Starting to layer in being very conservative, small actions that allow you to rebuild trust in yourself as an agent of change. That’s probably where I would start.
I would do less than you think you’re capable of doing so that you are able to do it daily, do it daily so that you are able to convincingly reclaim the story that you are a person of action. It is rebuilding your identity and you start simple and then over time, as you develop confidence, it’s very hard to trick yourself at the deepest level, so you need proof and the proof is daily action. So as you rebuild that, then I think you will find it easier to take a slightly larger bite and then a slightly larger bite, but do the minimum effective dose first. Start small. As much as it might feel like there’s a rush, you have time over the span of several weeks to develop that muscle. That’s what I’ve seen work for me and for others who are close to me.
All right, next one. This is from, and I apologize if I completely butcher this name, Murod. I am a professor of research of communication in Japan and have been following you for many years, including professionally. My students and I often discuss metacognitive aspects of your podcast in our seminars. And I’m going to skip to the last question because we have a lot of questions to get to, but the question is, if possible, if your podcast was one question only podcast, what question would you end up asking your guest and why? I’ll stick with that. There are more questions, but again, we have a long list.
Well, at first thinking about this question, my question that I came up with was what are you most excited about and why. And then a follow-up, if I had one, would be what keeps you up at night and why? But I revised those and I think you’ll understand why, so I won’t belabor the point, but it relates back to Daniel’s question about action. I don’t want high concept abstract discussions, so I would rephrase both of those. And again, I’m cheating. I could ask either one of these as a one question as long as I’m allowed to ask follow-ups and I think we could have a very fruitful conversation. So rather than what are you most excited about and why, I would ask, what are you most excited about and what are you doing about it? Similarly, what keeps you up at night and what are you doing about it? I’m more interested in when the rubber hits the road what actions is someone taking or what are they considering doing with whether it is the excitement or the concern, the worry, et cetera.
This is from Victor T. Tim, the forces pulling people apart feel bigger than any of us. Old friends are deep in their own rabbit holes with different feeds, values, even realities and AI will probably widen the gap. Tim, interjection. To state the obvious, not only are old friends deep in their own rabbit holes with different feeds, values and realities, so are we. Sad fact, but that is also true. You’ve said, back to the question, you’ve said your best years are the ones where you’ve spent the most time with your favorite people. How do you stay close to people whose world has drifted from yours and how do you decide what’s worth the energy? What’s worth the energy is a much bigger conversation and in the book that I’m about 80%, 90% done with now, codenamed The No Book, right now I really spend a lot of time on that. But let me give you an answer.
And the first is, in terms of staying close to people whose world has drifted from yours, I would say number one, hone your ability to communicate, sharpen the saw, that is your responsibility. So read books, whether that’s like Crucial Conversations, for instance, there are many others I’ll probably mention later in this Q&A podcast. And then, if you’re trying to, I don’t want to say stage an intervention because that implies a certain level of moral superiority, but if you’re trying to reconnect with friends who you feel have drifted maybe into the land of nihilism or pessimism or complaining, let’s just take that as an example, then my suggestion is rather than giving them advice from on high, which very rarely goes well, I would take your own advice first and tell them what you’re doing and/or you could suggest doing things together like social media cleanses, deleting social media apps from your phones. Trust me, you’ll survive, probably thrive in response to that.
Experimenting with things like 30 days or 20 days of no complaining. If you search my 30 day no-complaint experiment and my name, you’ll see how I’ve approached that in books that support it. Could be language, right? You could ask them to check you, raise a finger maybe every time you use an absolute, everyone, no one, A, B and C always does X, A, B and C never does Y. Finger. Ask them to correct you when you mention absolutes because you think it’s reflective of stories you’re telling yourself that are disabling that cause stress or upset you, et cetera, et cetera. And if they’re paying attention, they will get the message without you explicitly judging them, let’s call it for what it is. So that is one of my recommendations. And I suppose to also be Captain Obvious, I will say sometimes people drift too far and it’s very difficult to reconnect. The good news is that there are amazing, thoughtful people all over the world and that is still true and sometimes paths diverge and not all of them are worth trying to salvage, nor are all of them salvageable.
I will say, just as a side note, and it’s going to be a while before this book is out, so I don’t want to tease something so far in advance, but The No Book is in some ways the spiritual successor to The 4-Hour Workweek really built accidentally for the world of AI. I think that it will really help with the definition and elimination and question of what to put energy into because humans are not evolved to deal with infinite optionality and that is what these tools seem to provide. It’s actually very, very, very dangerous. Not dangerous in the world exploding, humans turning into paperclips kind of thing, if you get the reference, but precarious for the human psyche.
All right, let’s keep going and I’ll take a break for live questions in just a little bit, but let me keep running. Next one is from Powell and the question is, how do you distinguish between this needs more time and this is never going to break through and what’s the earliest signal you can act on before you’ve wasted another year? So for many of these questions, I will try to grasp the spirit, the gist of the question and answer it in that fashion. So a very good question. In other words, what do you decide to further commit to even though you’re not seeing obvious fruits from the labor? That could be professional, could also be personal. And how do you separate that from the things that are on some level never going to work?
Well, I think in the case of say a business, I’ll just use that because it’s simpler to unpack, you could borrow say a question from Peter Thiel as a thought exercise first. I know he’s controversial, but he is very smart and has placed a lot of very good asymmetric bets over decades. His question is roughly, and I’m paraphrasing, if you had to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months, what would you do?
Okay, so applying Parkinson’s law, creating a very tight deadline for yourself, and I know this seems impossible, even if it’s just as a thought exercise to journal on or to speak into Wispr Flow, for instance, so it transcribes your 10-minute brain dump and you can throw it into something like Claude for cleanup, how would you answer that? And the point of a question like this is not to produce an answer automatically that allows you to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months. It’s to force you out of your routine ways of thinking. It is to free you from constraints that perhaps you’ve artificially applied to the situation. It’s a way of finding perhaps the non-obvious or as one of my questions I repeat often would go, “What might this look like if it were easy?” Right? These go together.
And then, I would also spec out in advance, are there milestones that I could reach, say in the next six months, that are guaranteed to give me much more energy? And I say that because that is the fundamental currency that gives you endurance. And if you don’t have endurance, you have no competitive advantage. So that is, I think, also a key question. And last but not least, I would ask friends, and if they’re truly kind, not just nice, you can ask them to do this, ask them to red team. Red teaming, you can look up this concept. It’s applied in many different circumstances. The red, back in the day, referred to the Soviets because it was used in a military context, but effectively, I’ll give another example, you could hire hackers to try to break into your corporate system, but they’re still good guys. They’re on your payroll because you are asking them to act as an opponent or a bad actor, right?
So you’re asking your friends, in other words, a question like the following, which I learned from one of the best CPG investors, so consumer packaged goods. Think about anything you might buy in a grocery store or GNC, drinks, food, you name it, right? Very, very, very good. His track record is absolutely absurd, and he’s also built multiple companies to huge exits. And one of the questions that he always asks founders is, “If you guys fail or have a huge breakup in three years, what are the most likely reasons?” The breakup question can really open up a can of worms, but you could ask your friends, “If this company, if this project, if this relationship failed in two years,” you have to force their hand because most people want to tell you what you want to hear. They want to be encouraging even if you’re going in the wrong direction. So you have to force them, you have to paint them into a corner.
So, “If this company, if this relationship fails in two years, what do you think the most likely reasons would be?” That does not give them the option to back out. If they try to back out, then you ask somebody else. But I would really try to force the issue because it is common that friends, thinking they’re doing you a favor, will encourage you to pursue something even if they think you’re terrible at it. Maybe you’re—who knows? You are hoping to be a professional musician as a vocalist, but what your friends aren’t telling you is you’re actually terrible. This happens all the time. Or behind closed doors, they’re like, “Man, I can’t tell him, but nobody’s ever going to buy that.” You want to take all this stuff and bring it to the surface if you can, and questions like that are very helpful.
Okay. Next question is from Brandon D. What is your latest toolkit? Any updates or items [you’ve] discarded related to age-related vision problems since your interview with Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg? Now, this is going to sound a little funny. I have found things. Now, you’ll notice that I’m wearing very, very minimally magnified glasses at the moment. That is because I am on book deadline and it gives me another two hours of endurance, and it is a game of tonnage on some level to finish a book. It’s a lot like a marathon. It’s like, “Oh, you’re 90% done. Congratulations. You only have 50% left.” It’s one of those situations. If I were not on book deadline, I would not be wearing these.
The most interesting technology, the most interesting tool that I’ve come across is something called Oryx, O-R-Y-X, and it is software that allows you to, it’s pretty incredible, fix your near-term vision without changing your lens or anything else. As you get older, your lenses stiffen and they have less accommodation, therefore you end up holding your iPhone and so on at arm’s length and then, you run out of length in your arms, and that’s why you’re turning on the light on your iPhone at restaurants to read the menu and so on. I used the Oryx software, and I’m an investor in this company, which only happened after I tested it because I used it for 30 days, eight minutes a day, and I went from not being able to really read anything at this distance to being able to read a menu with tiny font at night in a restaurant with very dim lighting, and that is fucking bananas.
So the tool is not widely available. They’re still piloting it. It’s based on very good research that has been published. However, if you guys want to try it, I mean, look, there aren’t many spots and it’s not cheap, but I’ll tell you what the deal is, and that’s why I have iMessage on because I wanted to tell you about it. If you go to tim.blog/oryx, O-R-Y-X, and if you’re hearing this after the livestream, you can still sign up for the wait list, so I would encourage you to do that if you’re interested. It works, and for a lot of people, it’s durable, meaning it lasts months, years.
It’s something I’ve never seen before, but they’re basically training your upstream visual processing to get better at distinguishing blurred images and constructing a reality that is sharper. It’s kind of like that fake tool in all of these police crime scenes and television shows where they’re like, “Enhance image,” and you’re like, “Come on.” It’s pixelated. In reality, you wouldn’t be able to enhance image, that’s ridiculous. But with your brain, it turns out that you can do this. And I was so, so skeptical, but if you go to tim.blog/oryx, the use of this on a tablet is usually 1,300 bucks and they’re offering 100 spots for $999. So if you want to try it, give it a go, zero pressure. But that is, I would say, the most interesting thing that I have found. There are eyedrops you can use, certainly, that give you a temporary increase in accommodation of the lens. I think there’s a place for that. You just have to be careful with the version you use because you can increase the risk of certain types of injury. I will leave it at that.
So as soon as I’m done with the book, I’m going to take these off because you want to abstain from using glasses for a period of time to the extent possible to derive maximum adaptation. But I will say I’ve never seen anything like it. It is something that kind of defies belief. So I’ll leave it at that. For those of you who are interested, there are hundred spots, so you can take a look at that. Let me hop out of iMessage and back to our live chat. I’m going to answer a few more questions and then, we’ll come to the livestream. I’m going to plant a seed for you all because I’m going to have a question later that I want your input on, and that is related to doing more unscripted podcasts like The Random Show. I’m interested in knowing what formats you would like to see or that you would watch or listen to. Okay? Don’t post your answers now, but I’m going to ask that later. So we’re going to come back to that, and I’d love to get your comments in the live stream of comments, and people will also have the opportunity to put on X if that’s easier for some reason. Okay. Next question. This is from Luke O. Great question. All these are great questions or I wouldn’t even be reading them. Here’s the question. At this stage in your life, what are you deliberately choosing not to optimize anymore, and why? Well, it’s good to define this term, optimize. I would say that often, it can be thought of as bleeding the stone. I mean, you’re really trying to wring every last drop of efficiency and improvement out of that wet towel. And I still do that in some areas. But your question, I’m going to answer perhaps in a slightly odd way. Rather than telling you what I’m not optimizing anymore, I’m going to tell you what I’m overinvesting in.
Because when you overinvest in things, they crowd out a lot of the things I would put on that no longer optimize list. And I’ll borrow a heuristic from Ramit Sethi, who is better known as a sort of finance guru of sorts, has a great podcast where he interviews couples about various money problems and so on. He’s very, very good at what he does. And I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact wording, but he’ll ask people what would it look like to invest 10 times more in one or two areas that matter most? He is not focused on ultra frugality, or foregoing your lattes, or anything like that. So for me, I am trying to invest 10 times more in my health. What would that look like? This is another absurd question, like the Peter Thiel question. Even if you don’t have an immediate answer, it forces you to think differently about your life.
Investing 10 times more in health, what would that look like? Investing 10 times more in relationships, what would that look like? Those are the two big ones. And if you invest 10 times more in your health and 10 times more in your relationships, there’s not a whole lot left over, which is a good thing. You have less free roaming time to completely burn on wasteful activities that might have a veneer of productivity. So I’m going to leave it at that because I think that is the most high leverage way to approach these things, at least that I’ve found. So focusing on your more to do 10X list as opposed to your not to optimize list. I will revisit this with a question that comes up a little bit later. I’m going to do one more, and then as promised, I’ll get to the live feed. So don’t post your questions yet, but get ready.
This one is, and I’m going to butcher this name, Ridika H. asks the following question, and I’m going to—I’ll read most of it. There’s an appealing idea that the good life is something we can consciously design, identify our values, understand our priorities, eliminate the unnecessary, organize our circumstances accordingly. That would echo certainly the emphasis on the DEAL and the DE of that. That’s my comment. But so many of the most meaningful experiences in life seem to arise from things we couldn’t have planned or optimized for. Do you think there’s a point at which being too deliberate about the life you’re building makes you less receptive to life that might emerge unexpectedly? How do you leave room for serendipity when you’re naturally inclined to be intentional? I do 100% agree that if you over engineer your life, you are almost definitionally less receptive to life that emerges. And first and foremost, I’d say there is no magic answer for this that you apply every day in an ongoing way, at least not for me.
You can have periods of heavily engineered focus and you can have periods of, in my case, reasonably engineered serendipity where I am placing things in my calendar that are likely to produce these chance encounters. And I would say that my approach to this is one that embraces the belief that these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, I may very deliberately try to interview, and by the way, that’s just talking to people, but interview in my case, people who completely disagree with me, have totally different sets of opinions. For instance, someone I know in Austin, perhaps not surprisingly, is politically, from a voting perspective, on the far right. I am not on the far right. I’m not on the far left. I’m very issue by issue, but this particular friend is very, very smart. So to dismiss him as some type of non-thinking knuckle dragger doesn’t hold water.
He’s very, very intelligent and he’s very good at questioning assumptions. So sitting down and asking questions there opens me up to ideas and opinions that are not going to get served up in a feed that has been personalized to reinforce my own biases, which is by the way, every feed on any platform. So that would be one example. And there are, and very interestingly, this is what makes me think sometimes that I’m in a simulation. I wrote down a book I wanted to mention and then someone else asked about the author 10 questions later, of course. I read a book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. This was recommended to me by Kevin Rose. And it was deliberately to offer me a counter example. I didn’t know before I read it if it would be a good or bad example of less over-engineering with intention and planning and blueprinting of your life.
Very much enjoyed it. I think that if you squint a little too hard, you’ll see that Michael must have said no to many, many, many things in order to focus on some of the things that are outlined in the book, which raises questions about overall surrender versus selective surrender. So maybe that’s a conversation I’ll have with Michael at some point, but it’s so extreme in counterbalancing my default way of being in the world that I read that book and I did find it very helpful. Coming back to the over-investing, what would it look like if you invested 10 times more in health and relationships? These are also two things that open you up to serendipity, at least how I approach, let’s just say health, which includes group fitness activities and things like that, coaching and so on, interacting with people I would otherwise never meet in a professional context. So these are all, I think, attempts at coming at your question or the problem that you’re underscoring.
But I do agree with you that yes, if you are overly deliberate, if you indulge too heavily in the illusion of control, you make yourself blind to things that are around you. And it’s a fine line because you can certainly, if you take on the identity of someone who goes with the flow and simply surrenders to everything, you can end up a floating generality as Seth Godin would say, where you indulge every distraction as an opportunity. And I’m certainly writing a lot about that right now and what the sweet spot looks like for me and some people that I know. But I will stop there for now and let’s hop into the live feed. So let me see if I can answer some questions here. It’s going to take me time to read. So there will be some type of delay.
Oh, Rob. Rob M. This is a perfect question actually. “Tim, what do you get from these live streams besides content, et cetera, et cetera?” Part of it is serendipity. I don’t choose the question you guys submit. I’m usually in the business of asking questions. So for me, this is a way to get a gestalt of what you guys are thinking about. I respect and I do respect you guys. My audience tends to be very well read, very curious, often has a bias towards action. And I was able to look at, for instance, I mean, I won’t show this because it’ll dox a bunch of people, but patterns using LLM analysis of the questions that come in. And then I’m able to answer or attempt to answer some of these questions. So for instance, AI comes up in roughly one of five submissions and then it goes into the reasons for that.
Health questions, asking about my protocols, the frequency with which different types of questions come up, and so on and so forth. So these live streams are an opportunity for me to do something I know I enjoy doing. I get energy from these while also being forced out of, I don’t want to call them ruts, but patterns of thinking and asking questions by virtue of getting a bunch of stuff thrown over the transom that I cannot predict. So that would be my answer for that. That’s funny. Somebody’s asking me. “Crimp, sloper, or pinch. How’s climbing going?” I would say pinch. I’m working on my extensor strength after my elbow surgery from a year ago. So I’m very focused on pinch, slopers, still my nemesis, true for so many. And crimping I have to be a little careful with because I’ve got to strengthen the DIP, PIP joints and all of that jazz in my fingers, which I’m working on.
If you’re interested in how to strengthen your fingers, revisit my episode with Dr. Keith Baar, B-A-A-R. His stuff really does work. Who would win in a fight between Tim Tim and Kev Kev? You seem more battle-tested, but Kevin’s got that old man dad strength. It’s an open question. I think I would immediately go for Kevin’s ankles. He’s got huge triceps, but I feel like I could work on those ankles. So TBD. This is a question, “What type of OCD treatment did I mention in a few of my episodes that was helpful?” I mentioned accelerated TMS and you can get it from reputable providers. I’m involved now with a company called Ampa Health because I think their device is very, very interesting for targeting and therapist and user friendliness.
But a lot of ketamine clinics and mental health clinics, let’s just say writ large, will offer accelerated TMS. The protocol that I’ve used, which it was developed by some folks, I’ll probably have on the podcast at some point, is called the ONE-D protocol, O-N-E hyphen D protocol where you preload with a drug called D-cycloserine. It’s a very mild neuro—well, I shouldn’t say mild—neuroplasticity agent, but it increases neuroplasticity before you go into the stimulations and they’ve compressed from say a three to four month duration of protocol down to one week, which is what Nolan Williams and others did at Stanford and elsewhere. And then they have since with this drug assistance, which makes you just more malleable for the changes, compressed it into one day. And Jonathan Downar at Ampa Health was one of the pioneers behind this.
And it is, I would say, most established for treatment of depression. It has also been applied to generalized anxiety disorder, GAD, and it would seem like there are also other applications to OCD, which is in my case, a close cousin of the GAD, and sleep improvement writ large. So that is the protocol. You’re looking for intermittent theta burst, intermittent theta burst. And I could give more specifics, but I’ll probably save that for another time. You can do some homework though. There are places that offer this. It doesn’t have to be the Ampa Health device. There’s BrainsWay, which is, I would say the market leader as far as hardware goes. Then there is MagVenture as far as hardware again. But you should find someone, I think, who’s familiar with accelerated TMS and ideally, and this is based on my personal experience, familiar with the ONE-D protocol and using this D-cycloserine, which is sometimes abbreviated to DCS because most people cannot take five days off work or it’s very expensive to do that or they use up a bunch of their PTO, et cetera.
And the more time you have in the clinic, the more time you’re using clinicians, the more expensive it’s going to be. So those are, I suppose, the main points that I would make on that before getting to other things. Okay. Let’s see. Oops. Milonga Tango or Waltz. I loved the Waltz, which is a very circular form of Tango. I just love the Waltz music. Corazón de Oro, there are many, many songs that I could listen to. I don’t generally listen to Tango music in my off time, and it’s been a long time since I’ve hit the dance floor, but I would say Waltz, Tango, Milonga in that order. I always found Milonga very difficult for some reason.
All right. Okay. Related question to the earlier ones from Daniel. Any developments on medicine is electricity? Yes. Bioelectric medicine. Certainly I mentioned the accelerated TMS. I do think Kevin Tracey and vagal nerve stimulation, most of which is bogus and nonsense online, frankly.
I hope to have some announcements related to that soon. But if you’re getting the cymba concha on the ear, you are able to access some limited portion of the vagus nerve and there’s interesting stuff to be done there. You can also use box breathing or other cold exposure, other types of combinations to improve vagal tone. I recommend The Great Nerve, which is a book by Dr. Kevin Tracey for diving more into that. And then the conversation with Michael Levin out of Tufts I have on the podcast is a great one to dig into. Susan, “Do you see yourself becoming a parent in this lifetime?” Yes. 100%. 100% without any shadow of a doubt. And, “You’re very kind. I think you would make a great or a wonderful dad.” Thank you, Susan. Yes.
Did you see there was a device in Time Magazine 2026 Top Inventions? I assume you’re talking about accelerated TMS and yes, I believe that was Ampa Health. So you can check it out. Ampa Health has a website. You can also take a look at it. Lots of questions about kids. Yes, I’m still keen. 100%. Okay, here’s a fun one. Jacob, “You’re good at answering questions. How have you honed your ability to craft good answers quickly? Do you have certain framework structure for answering questions?” Well, yes, I do have some heuristics that I find helpful. Generally I approach it, and this is borrowing from Tony Robbins who I’m sure was informed by other people, a progression, and I use this for everything, including writing, including working, hard conversations, and that is state, story, strategy. In other words, most people hop straight to the, “What should I do?” Which is the strategy, but let me give you two contrasts.
The first would be, “I am tired. I didn’t sleep well. I’m feeling shitty. I haven’t had coffee.” Fill in the blank. That’s my state. It’s a negative state or a low energy state. The story then tends to be disabling. I can never this. Oh, I can’t focus. I can’t this. I’ll never that. And from that, if you try to sit down and journal on what should I do, you’re going to end up with a poor outcome. You’re not going to get good answers. So in my case, let’s just use your specific question. If I want to be fast in answering, I need my biochemistry to be dialed in. I need to have reliable source of fuel. I need to have stable, either blood glucose or some other form of energy production. And for podcasts like this, I take exogenous ketones about 15 minutes beforehand. You have to be very careful with this stuff.
It’s not good to take it all the time. Every once in a while for a recording, I will do that. I use DeltaG ketones. There’s some concerns around the 1,3-butanediol, which is the most commonly used ketone, let’s just call it for simplicity in the commercial products. But in this particular case, the DeltaG has the 1,3-butanediol bound to BHB, which is then liberated and you get some interesting effects. I do not take more than 15 grams at a time. I think it, in this product, corresponds to the milliliters. So I use the health version of DeltaG. I have no affiliation with this company. And that is very helpful. In the afternoon, I don’t like to re-up with caffeine. I also will use though, now I’m going to immediately prove myself a liar. There are, I think they’re called Nootropicks, P-I-C-K-S, that Chris Williamson manufactures, and they’re these toothpicks that have 25 milligrams of caffeine and it hits you immediately, right?
So I’ll take 25 milligrams, not a nitro cold brew. Let’s just say it five to 10 minutes before I sit down. And I had a meal two hours ago. So I’ve basically provided myself with a slow carb form of glucose supply. I’m taking the ketones on top of that. I have a small amount of caffeine and I got a little bit of movement in earlier today for lactate, which is also something you can use as energy, it turns out. And that’s stage one, that’s the state. And then for answering questions, I would say rule number one is do not rush. And as a counter example, in the podcast when I first started, I would use filler words. So buying myself time as I thought. You don’t need to do that. You can just pause and you can either be silent or you can say, “Give me a second to think about that. That’s a good question. Let me give you a good answer or try to give you a good answer—”
You’re buying time. By the way, you may have noticed that ChatGPT and other LLMs do this. You ask your question, they’re like, “That’s a really smart question. I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Bullshit. Doesn’t care if it’s a good question. Hasn’t been thinking about it. It is buying the entire machinery time to do what it needs to do on the backend, right? So humans, machines, same trick. And then in my case, look, I’ve got copious notes. I’m not doing this off the cuff. I prepared myself for your written answers or—see, I stumbled too. I prepared myself for your written questions. Live stream’s a different thing and I mostly lean on the biochemistry and state for that.
All right. Which film do I re-watch the most and why?
I mean, I’ve seen Spirited Away probably a hundred times. Snatch, probably 100 times. Babe, about the little pig, masterpiece, probably 100 times. These are movies that I play on mute while I’m writing books. So for each book, generally, I will do a lot of writing late at night, but that can feel very lonely, very isolating. So I will throw something up on the TV, and it has to be a movie that I know inside and out so I don’t get distracted. I will let it run, but mute it. That gives me people in the room. And then I will put on my headset, usually over ear. I use my Bathys—where is it?—headset that’s sitting somewhere around here, expensive buggers. And I’ll listen to music, typically something without vocals, like a deadmau5 Work Moar, M-O-A-R playlist, which you can find pretty easily. And then I’ll rock and roll and I pay attention to state there as well.
But that’s why I’ve seen those movies. I loved them in the first place. Then I was like, “Let me pick something that I will enjoy just having on an endless loop all night long.” I might watch Babe, for The 4-Hour Body, I watched Babe like eight times an hour, something like—I’m sorry, not eight times an hour. I watched Babe like eight times an evening. That adds up real fast.
All right. Jonathan, “I thought you looked a touch jittery.” Yeah. No, I’m not jittery. I am just coming into today full of energy. I’m not shifting around too much, although I am having a major back surgery next week, so some of that could be the pain in the low back.
Let’s see. Nora, “Do you meditate? You do TM twice a day for 20 minutes before meals. Great way to go about it.” I do meditate. Right now I’m using The Way app with Henry Shukman. I am involved in that app. I’m a small investor, but I really like a single dedicated teacher with a logical progression of skills.
And I keep them short. You can make them various lengths. I do 10 minutes. I try to do it twice a day. And the twice a day really seems to be the force multiplier for many, many other benefits. And TM first demonstrated that to me. I still use TM on occasion and doing it frequently seems to matter more than doing it for a long time. I’ve chatted with a few people about this. There is an argument to be made that it’s having an effect on vagal tone. So it could be breath work. It doesn’t need to be something that involves you sitting in the half lotus or full lotus with your eyes closed focusing on a candle flame. It could be the breathing alone done twice a day. And the reason that I connected these dots, which could be spurious, maybe I’m making a mistake, is that when you do vagal nerve stimulation, you’re doing it twice a day.
You’re doing it on the same cadence, given the durability of the effect on HRV and so on. So it may not be the exact, and probably isn’t the exact content, of the form of meditation, but something that as a cocktail affects vagal tone. Who knows? There’s a lot more to it. I mean, I certainly think the explanation of skills separating, say, the inside from the outside using labeling, being able to observe things without trying to change them, even if your mind is going insane and your monkey mind is ricocheting around in your skull like a bullet, these are all valuable skills that you can then take outside of meditation. So for me, using something like The Way makes sense. I want skills that can be translated, not just the 12-hour improvement in HRV.
Let’s just say that that is the guarantee for many, many different types of what we would put into the category of meditation. But I think if you were to do box breathing in a cold bath or something like that, which I also do, I think you get some of the same, but not all of the same benefits.
Wow, we got a lot of questions. I’m going to do a few more and then I’m going to hop back into the written questions. Okay, this is a good one. It’s a business name, so I’m not going to read it. I apologize. But what are your thoughts on the book Healing Back Pain by John Sarno? So I know this book very well, and I will say to kick off that I have multiple friends who were plagued by low back pain. In some cases, they couldn’t walk several blocks and they fully credit this book, Healing Back Pain, with fixing them. And that’s non-trivial, right?
That is legitimate. I also know acolytes of John Sarno, and I know people who had rigorous debates with John Sarno directly, and I’ve read the book. Here’s my take. And for people who are not familiar, I would say that the synopsis of the book, and this is going to sound unfair, is that almost all back pain is psychosomatic and that you should go about resuming all of your old activities and its outdated belief system. And if that weren’t the case, back pain wouldn’t move around from location to location, et cetera, et cetera. And he’ll go through the mechanical explanations for back pain, ruptured discs, bulging discs, et cetera, and to his satisfaction, but not mine, knock them off as irrelevant. And he’ll cite research, and I have question marks around this research, that show people with what appear to be mangled spines on MRI are asymptomatic, where people with much fewer injuries, let’s just call them, or deterioration, which he would put in quotation marks, like disc degeneration, are symptomatic, therefore—
And I disagree with that. And I’ve had conversations with some of these folks who are really hard liners and Sarno maximalists, maybe you might say. Sometimes I get frustrated and I’ll say, “If I took a ball-peen hammer to your L5 and just whacked on it like I was trying to chop wood, would that cause pain? Would it cause long-lasting pain?” And they have to say yes. They have to say yes. Not everything is internally generated from the mind. I know people who have had life-changing, durable effects with interventions, whether that’s—and there are risks with some of these interventions, of course—whether that’s fusion, procedures like Intracept or others. Some of it can be PT resolved, depends on the nature of your low back pain. What I would say is the low back and low back pain is, as far as I can tell, the Bermuda triangle of effective diagnoses.
And whenever you’re trying to navigate a complex medical issue like this, in contrast to something like my elbow. My elbow blew apart because it got snapped backwards in jujitsu ages ago, and it turns out my extensors were just torn. This is a carpentry problem. Any decent surgeon can go in and piece it back together and your elbow heals. The low back is a much trickier animal. This applies to many, many, many different medical issues, by the way. I’m not a doctor, don’t play one on the internet, but as a layperson who’s reasonably scientifically and medically literate, I’ll say, when you meet with specialists, they know their tool and therefore they’re going to default to recommending or finding a solution within their tool. The tricky part is that there’s often at least a sliver of truth to what each of them say.
So the PT will say, “This is a muscular problem. It’s not a skeletal and nerve problem.” And they will give you exercises. And some of them might help. The neurosurgeon’s going to want to do what a surgeon does, right. The acupuncturist is going to want to do what an acupuncturist does. If you talk to a Hakomi therapy practitioner or someone in psychotherapy, they’re going to land on the mental or psycho-emotional. They’re going to want to work with that tool. And it’s a case of the multiple blind men holding onto different parts of the elephant. And one says, “It’s a snake,” because he’s holding onto the trunk. The other one’s like, “No, it’s like a rat,” because he’s holding onto the tail. The one holding onto the leg says, “It’s a tree.” And that doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t make them wrong. It just makes their portfolio of techniques and expertise siloed, is limited. So it’s taken me fucking forever to finally land on some converging diagnoses and I’m going to pursue that path.
I feel very good about it. I’ve done six years of due diligence. For God’s sake, it takes forever. And look, I’m going to be very transparent about how it turns out, but I will say that I think John Sarno’s work is very valuable for a lot of people. But I take major issue with any type of largely one-size-fits-all remedy, which implies that in this case, there are almost no mechanical causes of pain. And also on a person-by-person basis, for instance, just to address the MRI argument, different people are differently sensitive. Some people have better smell. Some people are more sensitive to light. Your composition of nociceptors, people can look that up, that’s a fun rabbit hole, nociceptors is different. So the way you feel pain can be very different from one person to the next. And how you magnify or interpret different sources of pain can be very different.
How you think about it, your belief structure, what you avoid, et cetera. I mean, all of these constructs that you develop to cope with pain are real. That is not to dismiss the mental component, but as you’ve probably picked up, I think that Sarno is good at what he’s good at, but he’s holding onto one part of the elephant. And I think it is insulting to imply that it’s all in everyone’s head. That’s where I’ve landed, so—thanks for coming to my TED Talk on Sarno. And again, I have multiple friends who 100% credit that book with solving longstanding back pain that never recurred. So there’s something there.
Let’s see. Stuart McGill, Back Mechanic. Great book. I’m a fan. I’ve spent time with Stuart. He’s very smart. Do I have flat feet? Yes, I do. There’s all sorts of stuff going on. Egoscue Method, yes, it helps. I do use The Egoscue Method. I wrote about it. There’s an entire chapter on The Egoscue Method. I’ll spell that for people. E-G-O-S-C-U-E. I do exercises from The Egoscue Method every night before bed so that I’ll have a better chance of sleeping through the night. They are very, very helpful and continue to be. And actually, this is a great segue. I’m going to go back to the written questions because one of the questions, let me track it down here, bear with me, is related to The 4-Hour Body. So give me a second.
All right. This is a question from Duncan. “Hi, Tim. Do you think the basic principles in The 4-Hour Body still apply to those over 40, over 50, et cetera? Specifically, I’m thinking about Slow-Carb Diet, but feel free to answer in relation to other parts of the book. Thanks for everything.” Yes, 100%. There is very little in that book that I would rescind or revise. It has been shockingly stable and highly predictive. If you go back to when I wrote it, 2008, 2009, it was published in 2010. I was using a first-generation Dexcom or maybe second-generation Dexcom continuous glucose monitor. I think I was one of the first non-Type 1 diabetics to use that device. And a lot of what’s in that book has now become mainstream. The Egoscue Method still stand by it. The Slow-Carb Diet, 100% stand by it.
And I still use the Slow-Carb Diet myself if I need a reboot. That is certainly one of my top picks. I will alternate sometimes with the ketogenic diet for coming back to State, Story, Strategy, look up metabolic psychiatry or listen to my interview with Chris Palmer of Harvard for more on that. But for optimizing state, for stabilizing and maximizing energy production, in my particular case, I find the ketogenic intermittently to be very helpful. So my default, however, is actually a hybrid of those two, which is Slow-Carb Diet with intermittent fasting where I am fasting for at least 16 hours and then I have an eight-hour window of eating, sometimes less. So what that looks like on most days is I will fast up until 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 PM and then start eating and that will go for another eight hours until I finish dinner.
And by the way, you should make sure that you stop your clock when you finish eating, not when you start eating dinner, pro tip. And what that does over time is it, in my case, dramatically changes your say oral glucose tolerance test and insulin sensitivity. It is remarkable how little it takes, four to six weeks and my tests were completely a world apart. So I’m becoming fat and keto adapted through the intermittent fasting and then I’m using Slow-Carb Diet for the rest of the time. And people can look up How to Lose 100 Pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet and that’ll bring up a blog post, read it for free. It’s got all you need with photos, before and after photos. It is still, for my money, the simplest, most reliable diet for recomposition and performance change with the highest likelihood of success because the best diet that you follow is a lot better than the perfect diet that you quit.
And I do stand by that. I’m in prep for surgery. I’m using Occam’s Protocol from that book to increase muscle mass with the expectation that I will have quite a bit of atrophy in the four to six weeks post surgery. So I’m still using almost everything in that book. The one caveat is the PAGG stack. This is a supplement combination. I have no stake in any of it. Could have made a lot of money if I had done it, but I didn’t want people to question my motives. So I did not launch a sports nutrition company along with the book. The PAGG protocol, which is policosanol, alpha-lipoic acid, decaffeinated green tea extract, and then garlic. The only question mark really that I have in that stack is policosanol. I was on the fence, but slightly over the fence at the time of publication.
I’d have to go back and really look at the research that is not funded by some form of industry to fully assess that. But that’s really the only asterisk that I would add to that book. Everything else in my opinion still applies. Could be missing something, but that’s where I land at the moment. Okay. Here’s a question from Matt. “What tools and approaches besides psychedelics have you found most useful for grieving?” I pulled up a book that has helped a lot of my friends after parents have died, after spouses have died unexpectedly. And I have not personally read this book in a long time. It’s been ages. I did look at it when it was first recommended to me, but it’s called On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. It’s by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, David Kessler, who’s the author narrator for the audiobook.
I guess he is the author, co-author and so on. But On Grief and Grieving, you can find it very easily on Amazon, it has 4.7 stars with almost 3,500 reviews. That has been recommended most by people I know, love, and trust. So I hope that is helpful and I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through.
Coming back to the written list. This one’s from Alice. “Hey, Tim, I had my first baby a year ago and motherhood has kicked my ass.” Pause. Congratulations, Alice. Continuing now with the question, “If you were a new parent, which of your protocols would you prioritize and which would you scrap in the interest of familial, personal and marital wellbeing, assuming you have limited financial resources and minimal family help?” There are two things that came to mind for me, and this should sound somewhat familiar because it echoes my answers to the Ramit Sethi question of, “What would it look like to invest 10 times more in the one or two levers that matter most?”
And if you might recall, my answers were health/fitness and relationships. So here are a few that come to mind. There’s an audiobook called Fierce Intimacy by Terry Real. I find Terry to be a beacon of clarity in a world of hand-wavy relationship advice. He’s very opinionated and has a lot of experience. He’s one of the highest paid couples’ therapists on the planet and you can get a lot of his greatest hits through Fierce Intimacy. There’s no print version, there’s no Kindle version. It was something that he recorded based on the core principles and tenets and strategies that he uses with his clients. And I have found that incredibly useful. His other books are also very, very good. So that is one that comes to mind. You could also look at Crucial Conversations, which I mentioned earlier, but if you had to pick one, I’d say listen to Fierce Intimacy.
I’m guessing your time to listen is greater than your time to read text. So Fierce Intimacy would be one. And then from a physical fitness perspective, that’s the next one, is, it is the great force multiplier, not to overuse that, but I recall, and I wrote about this in the introduction to The 4-Hour Body, the first time I spent any time with Richard Branson, well before I interviewed him for the podcast, it was with a small group and somebody asked him, “If you could give one tip for productivity, what would it be?” And his answer was, “Exercise.” And he said, “By exercising every day, I give myself something like three to four more hours of focused productivity.” Now, in your case, it’s not necessarily focused productivity, but it is energy. So I would say from a physical fitness perspective, there are two things you can do that require very little money, no gym membership.
The first I’ll mention that you can check out is from Jerzy and Aniela Gregorek. I’ve had Jerzy, J-E-R-Z-Y, both from Poland who now live in California on the podcast. I was introduced to them by Naval Ravikant. They have a book and a program called The Happy Body, and they’re in their 60s. They can run up trees and grab kites. They can do things that most 30-year-olds cannot do. Jerzy, I want to say he’s now, he’s got to be 70, 71. He can load a barbell, get on an Indo Board, one of those balance boards, and do a full snatch landing ass-to-heels and stand up and repeat while maintaining his balance. I mean, it’s incredible. And they do a lot of things, but they credit most of it to this daily practice of doing a sequence of exercises called The Happy Body.
And you really basically need next to nothing. Maybe a yoga mat, couple of dumbbells, you’re good. Shouldn’t cost you more than $50 to get what you need. And if you can’t afford dumbbells, you can find a way to hold weight, right. You can fill up some jugs full of water or something like that. So The Happy Body. And then the second one is gymnastic strength training, GST. And you can look up coach Chris Sommer, S-O-M-M-E-R. He’s in Tools of Titans. He has also been interviewed on the podcast. A hilarious, salty old dog, just like Jerzy. Kind of specialize in interviewing these salty old dogs. They’re such a pain in my—but they’re so good. Love both of those guys and both of them would laugh hearing me say that. And GST is phenomenal. It is bodyweight exercises. In the modern sort of cool kid YouTube parlance, some of it would be called calisthenics, but it requires very, very little.
You just need a floor. You can do a lot. You don’t need a ton of equipment. And I have been in the best shape of my life in the last few decades when I was combining GST plus The Happy Body plus AcroYoga, of all things, L-basing. If you want to look up that, you can certainly, but that is a little more involved than the other two. So that’s what I would say. That’s what comes to mind.
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2026-10-21 23:57:50
This episode explores what The 4-Hour Workweek looks like in the age of AI, rebuilding momentum when you’re stuck, navigating friendships, making room for serendipity, and much, much more.
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The post Q&A with Tim — The 4-Hour Workweek in a World of AI, Rebuilding Personal Agency, The 4-Hour Body After 40, and More (#887) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
