2025-08-07 01:23:36
This is a very special episode for me, one I’ve been looking forward to publishing for months.
COYOTE is a fast, casual card game I created with the amazing Elan Lee and Exploding Kittens team. It has been my obsession for two years.
Here is a demo:
I worked really hard on every aspect of this one (concept, mechanics, art, you name it)!
You can finally buy it everywhere, including Amazon, Target, Walmart, and 8,000+ retail locations worldwide. It’s been a hit with 100+ test families, my friends, and at conferences around the world. It now produces guaranteed laughs with kids, adults, tipsy people, serious people… who all enjoy unleashing their inner trickster.
If you’ve benefited from my podcast, newsletter, books, or anything at all, please grab a copy or two! It only costs $10-12 and can provide hours upon hours of fun. It takes minutes to learn and 10 minutes to play. Under the hood, it’s also designed to be a good workout for your brain.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Elan Lee, the co-creator and chief executive officer of Exploding Kittens.
We discuss the behind-the-scenes story of making COYOTE, including early misses, finding the right idea, developing it, navigating mass retail, and much, much more.
If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to get a product on the shelves of something like Walmart and Target, or simply create a game, this podcast covers it all.
P.S. One last thing: stick around to the end for a very fun surprise that involves a mystery Hollywood party.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
This episode is brought to you by:
Want to hear the last time Elan Lee was on this show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed the secrets behind Exploding Kittens’ record-breaking Kickstarter success, core gameplay loops, the power of positive constraints, craftsmanship in game design, building superfan communities, and much more.
This episode is brought to you by Gamma! Readers of The 4-Hour Workweek know I recommend delegating and automating tasks that can be done better by someone or something else. It’s why I recommend this episode’s sponsor, Gamma, for creating incredible, professional slide decks better, cheaper, and faster than you ever thought possible. I polled many of you about Gamma on social media, and some of you called it “a game changer,” “mind-blowing,” and “far and away the best product in the category.”
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This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is a financial services platform that offers services to help you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.00% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Account. That’s nearly 10x more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, with savings rates at 0.42%, according to FDIC.gov, as of 05/19/2025. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.00% APY from program banks on your uninvested cash. And when new clients open an account today, they’ll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. Terms and Conditions apply. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.
Cash Account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront is not a bank. The APY on cash deposits, as of 04/30/2025, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to program banks, where they earn a variable APY. Tim receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage. Tim and Wealthfront Brokerage have no other affiliation. Tim reflects his own opinions and Wealthfront does not endorse, sponsor, or promote them. See full disclosures here.
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
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“We don’t make games that are entertaining. We make games that make the players entertaining.”
— Elan Lee
“Your reaction should not be, ‘I’m going to buy that game.’ That’s not our goal. Your reaction is, ‘I’m going to pick up this game, and I’m going to turn it over, and I’m going to read the back of the box.'”
— Elan Lee
“It’s like saying, ‘Is there still space in the book industry? In the movie industry?’ All a game is is an idea delivered in a new way. When are we going to run out of ideas? When are we going to run out of delivery mechanisms? The answer to both of those, individually, is never.”
— Elan Lee
“70 percent of our sales are in-person retail. Only 30 percent are online sales. Totally backwards than what you’d expect for almost any industry.”
— Elan Lee
“We probably work on a hundred games a year, and less than 20 make the cut.”
— Elan Lee
“The way that you build the most effective videos for [games] is you need to inspire, I think, two emotions. One, ‘I understand what those people are experiencing right now,’ And two, ‘I would like to experience that.’ And it took me forever to get to those two sentences. At first it was, ‘Let’s show gameplay, let’s show setup, let’s show a memorable moment. Let’s show people screaming and yelling because they’re having so much fun.’ None of that matters. None of that works. ‘That looks like fun. I could have that much fun.’ That’s it. That’s what you’re trying to show.”
— Elan Lee
The post My Two-Year Secret Project, COYOTE — The Strategies and Tactics for Building a Bestseller from Nothing with Elan Lee of Exploding Kittens (#821) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-07-27 12:06:30
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. (@foundmyfitness), a biomedical scientist and the founder of FoundMyFitness, a platform dedicated to delivering rigorous, evidence-based insights on improving healthspan and mitigating age-related diseases. Through her podcast, website, and YouTube channel, reaching millions globally, she translates complex science into actionable strategies for metabolic health, brain aging, and overall improved healthspan.
Dr. Patrick’s research explores genetic determinants of nutritional response, metabolic health, micronutrient deficiencies, sleep biology, and hormetic stressors, such as exercise, heat, cold exposure, fasting, and phytochemicals. She is an associate scientist and board member at the Fatty Acid Research Institute, where her work focuses on the role of omega-3 fatty acids in metabolic health and brain aging. Her peer-reviewed publications have appeared in top-tier journals, including Nature Cell Biology, The FASEB Journal, and Experimental Gerontology.
By uniting scientific integrity with protocol-driven precision, Dr. Patrick equips individuals and organizations alike with practical, scientifically sound strategies for optimizing health and longevity.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch my interview with Rhonda on YouTube.
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Tim Ferriss: Rhonda, it is very nice to see you again. Thanks for —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Likewise.
Tim Ferriss: — making the time.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I’m excited to be here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I was going back through the archives, doing my homework as I always do, looking at our past conversations. And it was such a trip down memory lane because our first podcast together was podcast number 12 of The Tim Ferriss Show, which was in June of 2014. And then preceding that by a few months, April 2014 was when you had a guest post on my blog called “Are Saunas the Next Big Performance Enhancing Drug?” So well done. That’s become quite the topic.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I know. I like to take a little bit of that claim to making saunas popular.
Tim Ferriss: The godmother, the fairy godmother of heat shock proteins, the context of saunas. And we are going to run out of time before we run out of topics or questions, as always. And what’s so fun about having a conversation with someone like you who is not only very scientifically credible and literate, but who’s actively involved with the science, tracking the science, and have published, is that there’s always more stuff to talk about. Things change. There are new developments, there are new discoveries, there are revisions, which makes me very excited to hop into the conversation. And for people listening, we’re going to cover a lot of things that are very, very actionable and practical. And I just wanted to give people an idea of some of what’s coming. We may not cover it all, but if you’ll bear with me, Rhonda, I’m just going to read some of these because it’s great. How to increase VO2 max and why you should. Looking at VO2 max as a predictor of longevity with high intensity interval training. What type of exercise reduces heart aging by 20 years? Brain aging in the same context or reversing brain aging. The benefits of exercise snacks on glucose regulation and mitochondrial function. We’re going to get a lot because this is something that is a perennial topic for me, but I’ve been really doing a deep dive on all things fasting related, intermittent fasting, metabolic benefits. IF versus extended fasting versus ketogenic diet, et cetera, et cetera.
Daily protein requirements and optimal timing for protein intake. The role of vitamin D and brain health and protection against klotho decline. How a low Omega-3 index is as bad as smoking and what to do about it. Benefits of creatine for brain and muscle health and best practices. Microplastic exposure: the biggest offenders, and so on. It just goes on and on. We could cover so much ground. And the way this conversation came to be, to give people a peek behind the curtain, is we were texting about all sorts of things, including aging parents and what we’re trying and what we’re thinking about what has worked, what hasn’t worked seemingly.
I thought we would just start there if you’re open to sharing because I really gained from our exchanges, enjoyed our exchanges. And for instance, talking about creatine as one example. There are potential applications to preserving or at least halting the decline or slowing the decline of cognitive deterioration. And why don’t we just begin with the personal, because I think that’s the most universal. All of my friends of my vintage or younger — no one is getting younger, so they’re all contending with aging parents and what to do with them, how to help them. Can you speak to just some of the circumstances with your parents and what you have used as interventions that have seemed to have an effect?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I’m one of those people that my parents, neither of them are really physically active. My dad for many years was physically active in the sense that he played a team sport. He was a baseball player and he did it for many, many years all the way into his early 60s and then he just couldn’t do it anymore. So my mother never really got into any sports and she wasn’t the kind of person that would go out to the gym or go for runs or anything like that. And so physical activity really wasn’t part of the equation and neither is really a healthy diet.
But as I started to do a lot of research into these sort of what I think are interventions that are low-hanging fruits, things that are easy for people to do that can have a pretty big outcome in terms of the effect, the size effect is greater than what you have to put in.
So examples of that would obviously be something like a supplement that you could take. That’s the easiest thing you can do is kind of swallow a pill and hope that it has a great effect. And this is where both of my parents are taking a multivitamin. And you might go, “Well, multivitamin? Really what’s that going to do?” And I’ll tell you, we’ve come full circle. 10 years ago, there was a huge splash that was made in the media. A big article came out and it was called enough is enough. Multivitamins are not only useless, they may be harmful.
It was a study that had looked at a variety of different studies. It’s called a meta-analysis that basically said, “Well, all these vitamins that you’re taking are useless.” And in some cases they can be harmful because they can allow cancer to grow faster. I debunked that 10 years ago. But over the course of those 10 years, and as you mentioned in the intro here, science is always changing and revisions are made. We learn new things. And in that 10-year frame, three different randomized controlled trials have come out. And randomized controlled trials are really key because you are comparing this intervention, which in this case was a multivitamin to a placebo because people taking anything are obviously going to want a positive effect. And many people do anticipate that and they can actually change their biology. Placebo is a real thing.
So three trials came out looking at the effect of multivitamins on cognition. And I’m talking the multivitamin that was used was the standard, run-of-the-mill. It was Centrum Silver. I mean it was the same —
Tim Ferriss: Centrum. I knew it was going to be Centrum, yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It was the vitamin that you would go, “That’s the one vitamin that’s not going to have any effect.” It’s like that, but actually it turns out it’s got over 40 essential nutrients in it and it’s also got some other non-vitamins. So things that are like polyphenols, like lutein and zeaxanthin. These are actually really important for eye health, but also the brain. And these three randomized controlled trials were two years long. What they showed was that taking a multivitamin for two years had pretty enormous effects on cognitive aging. These were in older adults. These were adults who were 65 years of age or older. That’s where my parents are.
And after two years of taking the multivitamin, they had improved cognition on a battery of different tests that equated to reducing global cognitive aging by about two years. And on top of that, they reduced their episodic aging by five years. Almost five years. It was 4.8 years. Episodic memory is the kind of memory that’s involved in remembering events, things that happen in your life. And so that’s a big effect. Five years of reduced episodic brain aging, episodic memory, brain aging.
And so I think that anyone that’s concerned about their parents, one of the easiest things that you can do in terms of improving cognition — now I should mention these were older adults, yes, but they weren’t older adults with neurodegenerative disease. So these were older adults that were — otherwise, didn’t have any sort of neurodegenerative disease. That’s also important because once you get to a pathological state, you have to do more things to help improve cognition than just a multivitamin.
I have my mom and my dad on a multivitamin. That’s the easiest thing. Vitamin D is also another no-brainer. I mean 70 percent of the US population has insufficient levels of vitamin D. Older adults are even higher than that. So almost the majority of all older adults are vitamin D deficient. I mean, most people aren’t going outside and even if they are going outside, they’re either wearing sunscreen or just the fact that they’re older affects their skin’s ability to make vitamin D3 from the sun, from UVB radiation from the sun. And so they’re much less efficient at it.
In fact, a 70-year-old makes about four times less vitamin D than their former 20-year-old self. So vitamin D supplement is a low-hanging fruit. It is super easy to bring some up to that level.
Tim Ferriss: Can I ask you a question about vitamin D, because I know you love vitamin D? So here’s my question about vitamin D, and it actually relates to, I believe this is a publication you had in 2019, so we’ll see if things have changed or not, but APOE4 for an Omega-3 brain delivery. So my family, a lot of benefits to having my genetics. Also, a whole bunch of bugs in the code, including quite a bit of APOE4, I’m APOE34. And should that change how I consume vitamin D or consume fish oil or Omega-3s to having that type of status?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I would say vitamin D, there hasn’t really been any effect that I’m aware of in terms of having an APOE4 allele as you mentioned. And for people listening or watching, APOE4 allele, if you have one of those, it can double your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. If you have two of them, you can go up to a tenfold increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. When it comes to fish oil, particularly fish oil, there does seem to be — and this is where my publication came from, but also there’s a lot of evidence that has shown people with APOE4 alleles, they don’t tend to have as much DHA getting into their brains as people without the alleles.
And on top of that, in trials, people with mild cognitive decline, for example, if they supplemented with fish oil and they had APOE4, they didn’t have the cognitive benefits that the people that were not APOE4 had. And so there was this big question in the field as to why that is. And it’s still not entirely known. Although I will say what my take on that is, and in fact I’ve talked to some of the experts in the field as well, is that you have to have a higher dose of fish oil, for one, and it’s better if it’s in phospholipid form. If you’re eating fish, it is in phospholipid form, it’s in triglyceride form as well.
Tim Ferriss: So just for clarity, if you’re taking capsules, it may not be the case, but if I’m eating my can of sardines in the morning, then phospholipid form?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: You’re getting more phospholipid form, exactly. Now, if you are taking your supplement oils, you can actually make phospholipid form, but you have to get to that two gram dose range. That’s when your body is also converting into phospholipid form. And then the other way around that is actually consuming a phospholipid form of Omega-3.
And so that’s something that can be done if you’re supplementing with either krill oil, which I’m not a huge fan of because it’s super — it’s not very concentrated, so you’d have to really take a lot of it. Or you could eat something like salmon roe, which is a really high phospholipid concentration of Omega-3 fatty acids. You might go, “Why phospholipid form?” Well, it turns out the way your brain, you actually get Omega-3 into the brain, there’s two ways. The first way doesn’t require phospholipid form. It’s just this Omega-3 is in a free fatty acid form and it diffuses across the membrane and gets into the brain that way.
The second way actually is through a transport mechanism, and that is phospholipid form. And that’s why it seems as though people with APOE4, their free fatty acid form isn’t going into the brain as well because they have breakdown of the blood-brain barrier early, early on. APOE4 tends to lead to early breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. And when your blood-brain barrier breaks down, it’s hard for things to kind of just passively diffuse as well.
I know that is counterintuitive, but without getting into all the crazy molecular and biochemistry involved, just take my word on that for the two different forms of Omega-3, or you can read that publication as well.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s step back for a second and just get into the parental specifics and then we can zoom out and talk about mechanisms and all sorts of stuff. But if you just had to give a couple of bullets on the things that you feel confident in having your mom and dad continue doing or taking, let’s start with the supplements because like you said, it’s sort of a low-hanging fruit in a sense from a behavioral change perspective. What do you have them doing?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I think you listened to a podcast I did with Dr. Mark Mattson several years ago. I had mentioned that my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017. And that’s an important context to consider what sort of supplements I’m giving my dad. And also the fact that you have to think about compliance. What were your parents? Do you have a parent that’ll take a lot —
Tim Ferriss: I actually do.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: — of vitamins or a few vitamins? Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So with my dad knowing his disease was Parkinson’s disease, multivitamin was in there because that’s already so important just to cover a lot of bases. You’re getting a lot of different vitamins and minerals. And then it was Omega-3, and in fact it was a high DHA and he’s getting about two grams a day. And there’s a lot of evidence that Omega-3 can help with dopaminergic transmission, can help with a lot of brain function, and particularly as it relates to Parkinson’s disease as well as Alzheimer’s disease.
So that was the second supplement that he’s taking. And then the last one that I could really get him to take was ubiquinol, which is a reduced form of CoQ10. Now, coenzyme Q10 is actually something that we have inside of our cells and it’s involved in mitochondrial health. So having a depleted CoQ10 can lead to mitochondrial toxicity. And so taking CoQ10, there’s actually been some early studies with even Parkinson’s disease patients showing that supplementing with CoQ10 can be beneficial. And he’s actually taken those supplements for many, many years now and very, I would say surprisingly, but also I’m thankful that his Parkinson’s disease has progressed very, very slowly.
So it’s been nine years, almost 10 years, and he’s really essentially had this Parkinson’s disease limited to one tremor in his hand. So that’s great. And that’s all I can say is —
Tim Ferriss: That’s great news.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, it’s great news. And you never really know at the end of the day what is the reason for that. But he’s convinced, I’m convinced, his doctor is convinced that he should keep doing what he’s doing and that it seems to be beneficial. My dad is one of those guys that doesn’t like to take a lot of pills. If he would take more, I would give him more.
Tim Ferriss: If he were willing to take more, what would you give him?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I would also give him sulforaphane. Definitely tried, but he doesn’t want to take more pills. So sulforaphane is, it’s a compound that is formed when you eat cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, for example. And it’s formed from something inside of it called glucoraphanin. When you break the plant tissue, when you bite it or chop it up or whatever, it forms sulforaphane.
Sulforaphane is not necessarily in the plant itself, it just gets formed when you break the plant tissue. That’s a technical thing. So I’m just going to talk about sulforaphane and call it sulforaphane as if it’s part of the plant, but it’s not, just so you know. Sulforaphane is, like I said, it’s something that’s formed in these cruciferous vegetables, broccoli sprouts, the young, young sprout of broccoli actually is the best source of it. It has a hundred times more of that active precursor glucoraphanin than mature broccoli. So that’s the best dietary source of it.
Tim Ferriss: Are you growing your own broccoli sprouts or are you doing off the shelf now?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I’m off the shelf now. I used to. It’s work. It’s not that much work, but it is work. But you also, you have to be very fastidious about not having it contaminated, and that’s where the real work comes in. But I like it because there are people that can’t afford the supplement, and this gives them another way to basically get it for cheap. So the reason I really like sulforaphane and why I want both my parents on it and my mom, it has been taking it, we can talk about that in a minute, is because it is the most potent dietary activator of this system that we have called NRF2, which is this major system. It’s basically a transcription factor that activates a lot of different genes inside of our body, and it activates genes that are involved in stress.
Basically, it activates a lot of what are called stress response genes. And these are the things that are activated when you’re doing stress, stressful things like exercise or if you are fasting. So you really want this pathway to be active.
Tim Ferriss: It gives a little bit of stress, right? It’s like chronic overdose of stress, bad, but little doses of stress has this, I guess, what would you call it, hormetic effect. Right?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Am I getting that right?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: You got it. Yeah, you nailed it. Yeah. So essentially we’re talking about what’s sometimes called eustress or good stress. It’s these small doses of stress where your body is responding to that stress by activating all these beneficial pathways that deal with stress, whether we’re talking about antioxidant pathways, anti-inflammatory pathways, pathways involved in clearing out damaged stuff from your cells like autophagy. Just all sorts of beneficial stuff.
And those pathways are activated for a longer period of time than the acute stress that you’re giving it. So in this case, the sulforaphane is a little bit of an acute stress like polyphenols in general are. So the amount of time that you’re ingesting that polyphenol is very small and digesting it. And then the reality is that it’s activating these stress response pathways that last on the orders of 24 to 48 hours, sometimes longer. So you’re having this beneficial effect that’s overall beneficial from that little bit of stress.
And so sulforaphane activates NRF2, and one of the main pathways that it’s activating is increasing glutathione production. And it’s been shown in a couple of different human studies that it increases glutathione in both plasma but also in the brain. Glutathione is the major antioxidant that we have in our body, and it’s very important in the brain. Super important for not only preventing brain aging, but also for dealing with dysfunction in the case of acute injury like traumatic brain injury or in the case of Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, which are other types of injury on the brain.
Glutathione plays a big role there. And so I obviously would want my dad to be taking sulforaphane, and there’s a supplement out there that I use that has been used in many 12 or so different studies. And so it’s been shown to be beneficial across the board. And that is something that I do give my mom. Now, the reason I gave it to my mom, well, I was kind of hoping my mom interestingly has two other types of brain dysfunction problems, but they’re not neurodegenerative in the sense of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are there. It’s kind of like something going wrong in the brain and it affects her motor control. So she has tremors. She has essential tremor, and she has orthostatic tremor.
I have secretly wanted the increase in glutathione to affect those tremors. But when I gave the sulforaphane to my mom, because I knew the placebo effect, I did tell her that we were using it to detoxify these chemicals that are associated with plastic like BPA because that is also something that I’m using sulforaphane for because that NRF2 pathway does activate what are called phase two detoxification enzymes, and it’s been shown to detoxify. Even if you’re living in a city like New York or L.A. where there’s a lot of air pollution, it’s been shown to detoxify benzene. Within 24 hours, people start excreting 60 percent more benzene from their body. Now, benzene needs something that is found in air pollution. It’s also in cigarettes.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. So don’t drink your own urine if you’re taking sulforaphane is what you’re saying.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Definitely don’t do that. But also if you’re living in a polluted place — I tell all my friends in L.A., I am like, you have to be taking sulforaphane. It’s just like a non-negotiable, right? So I told her to take the sulforaphane because I wanted her to detoxify BPA because she does eat a lot of processed foods and stuff, which are found in plastic. Anyway, so she started taking it and she came back to me and told me that it was helping her tremors and that she wanted more.
Tim Ferriss: How long did that take?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Not long. It was actually, I think within a week or so, maybe two.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It was very quick.
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It was very quick. And she is religious about it. I mean she comes — I buy it for her and I give her these bottles and she takes two a day. She takes a certain brand called Avmacol. I don’t have any affiliation with them. They’re a brand that, again, 12 different published studies using their supplement.
Tim Ferriss: A-V-M-A-C-O-L.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Avmacol.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: She takes two of their advanced formula. So she’s taking that. She’s taking the multivitamin, the vitamin D, and she’s also taking the Omega-3. She’s doing great. What’s funny is that I was able to then get her into CrossFit. And I don’t know if it’s because her tremors, I think her tremors have lessened a bit, and so she’s been more active and wanting to be more active. She’s out dancing more. My mom likes to dance. I mentioned how I really wanted to get her into a seniors CrossFit class, and she sees me do it.
I have a coach come to my house and we do CrossFit training at my house. My mom has seen me doing it and she’s been interested in it. I told her that there’s a great seniors class and I would be willing to pay for it and get her in it. It would be huge. She’s been doing it now for a couple of months, maybe like three or four months. She goes three times a week and she loves it. She loves it. She’s made friends there.
Sometimes the coaches take videos and she sends them to me. She sends them to her friends. She’s so proud. She’s doing kettlebell swings. She’s doing wall squats. I mean, it’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Go, Mom. That’s amazing.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s a very different type of atmosphere than your usual CrossFit class would be, right? You’re aware that these are seniors, and so they’re not doing barbell, squatting like heavy weights and stuff. They start out with wall squats and then they’re squatting with just a really light bar and it’s really great.
Tim Ferriss: So let me hop in for a second here and I want to know if there’s anything else to add to that. But we’ve talked about this, you and I. Or texted a hell of a lot about it that I have Alzheimer’s in my family. I now have multiple relatives who are moderate to advanced with respect to Alzheimer’s. Saw my grandmother disintegrate. Terrifying to watch and terrifying to imagine yourself experiencing the same thing.
And also at least one of them is APOE33. And I’m APOE34, so I’m like, “Well, wait a second. If that is where they are right now, and I’m at hypothetically 2.5x greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, AD, I should really double down on paying attention to as much as possible for myself, certainly for them as well.” But the earlier the intervention, the better the outcomes generally. So I’ve been looking at all sorts of things. And just to reiterate a few things you said. So on the Omega-3 side of things, just like with sulforaphane, not all brands are created equal, right? There’s a lot of garbage floating around out there.
Neither of us have any affiliation with this company, but I know our mutual friend, Kevin Rose, had this particular brand tested that, I guess it’s O.N.E. Pure Encapsulations. Is that what you have your parents are taking or did you use a different brand?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So with my dad, he is now taking the Zymogen brand, which is also very good. And the reason for that is because it’s higher DHA, which is what I wanted.
Tim Ferriss: Fascinating.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: My mom is taking the O.N.E.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, got it.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Cool.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, both those brands, by the way, are great. They’ve both been third-party tested and have very high quality fish oil, and I don’t have affiliation with either of them.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ve got my parents on those. I’m taking those. You mentioned lutein and zeaxanthin, which is good for quite a few things. Now, for those people who may be interested, and this probably won’t help me with my particular presbyopia. So age-related visual decline, particularly with near work, reading a book, let’s say, but AREDS2, people could check out studies that have been done on AREDS2. And two of the principle ingredients are lutein and zeaxanthin. So there’s that.
Now, also have been very, very curious about how to activate some of the pathways that you mentioned. Sulforaphane would be a good option for that. Also, looking at, and we don’t have to spend a ton of time on this, but exogenous ketones because ideally, sure, I would have my parents maybe do intermittent fasting or some extended fasts. I don’t think that’s going to happen for a million different reasons, but perhaps exogenous ketones and have looked at that.
This is a work in progress I’ve been doing, and I know you have too. Lots of self-experimentation, but there are some case studies in the literature, one of which you sent to me that are pretty interesting, looking at administration. In other words, giving an older patient with Alzheimer’s disease, oral exogenous ketones. They tend to taste like jet fuel. They’re not tasty. But the effects of, at least in these case studies are pretty remarkable.
Now, granted with the monoester they use in some of these, the off-the-shelf cost per day would be like $150 or something like that. Maybe even more. So there’s sort of a cost question. But I’m just going to throw a couple of more things out there that are on my mind. So you mentioned the exercise piece. This has been so important for me. So I’ve hired a trainer and I realize my parents are kind of sneaky and sometimes a little, I don’t want to say passive-aggressive, but they’ll say they’re going to do something to please me and then they won’t do it.
So getting the trainer to actually pick them up at their house is something that I decided to do because there are a lot of reasons. Exercise is amazing, one of which is the natural release of klotho and people can look this up. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to inject this in the next handful of years. We’ll see in humans. But K-L-O-T-H-O. Also worth checking out.
Tim Ferriss: Anything else that you would add to that or any commentary you want to sprinkle in? Am I missing any criticals?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: There’s definitely commentary.
Tim Ferriss: Multivitamin, yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: There’s commentary, but we can get into that if you want to go dive into the why the ketone esters are beneficial and why the exercise is beneficial. We can go into that because I love talking about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. This is going to be a conversation just between you and me. That’s how I treat all of these things. And I’m very self-interested because I think the personal is the most universal. Maybe that’s just an excuse to make this all about what I want. But we have been texting also because I told you I’ve been thinking about doing a 14-day fast, and actually I ratcheted that back from doing a 30-day fast.
I’ve done 10 days before, water only. I’ve done lots of seven days. And part of the reason is I think I would be better equipped now to do longer fasts because of the intermittent fasting I’ve been doing. And this ties into the conversation around the parents because what I have noticed is, for instance, doing 16:8 fasting, which was, and I’m so sorry, the scientist you mentioned before, whose podcast interview I listened to on your podcast, what was his name again?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Dr. Mark Mattson.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Mark Mattson. Amazing, amazing scientist. Fantastic conversation. A lot of seminal work related to intermittent fasting. So 16:8, what does that actually mean? I did this today, I’ve done this most days now, which is basically eating between, for me it’s like 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. There are arguments that it should be shifted earlier, like noon to 8 p.m. or something like that. But socially, just practically, again, coming back to compliance, like the good system you do being better than the perfect system you don’t, generally it’s like two till, let’s say 9 p.m. is when I eat and then I fast the rest of the time. And for the first five to seven days, pretty grumpy, kind of pissy, I’m not going to lie. Sent some emails that I probably shouldn’t have. But then once I adapted, I did a recent set of labs and they’re my best set of labs that I’ve seen.
I can’t solely attribute it to the intermittent fasting, but the best set of labs I’ve had in ages on things that were very hard to move prior, also did an oral glucose tolerance test and my sort of insulin sensitivity and glucose management, the best it’s been in ages. So I was like, okay, that’s really interesting. The last time I did a seven-day fast, it was kind of brutal. I hadn’t done one in a few years and I don’t think my metabolic machinery was ready for the task, very unpleasant. But I have some chronic inflammation or at least chronic pain in my low back. And after doing that seven day fast, I had four weeks of zero symptoms and that’s the first time in three years that that’s been the case. So I was like, okay, that’s pretty interesting.
So I’ve ended up harassing you with all sorts of questions such as, well, what if I had a little bit of heavy cream in my coffee in the morning, so it’s kind of dirty fasting, but if I did that, what am I accepting as a compromise or a penalty if anything? Because then I think of, say, Longo’s work and others looking at fast-mimicking diets where I’m like, well, wait a second, these people are doing, let’s just say five days of fast-mimicking dieting per month for three months straight. And they seem to have all these benefits that maybe of lower magnitude, but mirror water fasting on some level, but they’re consuming a few hundred calories, let’s just say for simplicity per day of those five days of “fasting.” If you look at the actual meal composition, it ends up being very low calorie keto, basically very low calorie keto with very low protein, like 10 percent or less avoiding animal products.
That’s the basic way that I’ve been thinking of it. And so I was like, well, should I do something like Wilhelmi in Germany who have, again, “fasted thousands of people,” but they do give them bone broth, a little bit of juice, it’s akin to the fast-mimicking diet, but they will do that with people for 30, 60, 90 days or am I better off doing shorter water fasts or maybe even a 14-day water fast? And a lot of the questions came down to, I know this is mouthful, but as you know, I’ve been thinking about this nonstop. I was up until 2 a.m. this morning reading really, really old stuff out of the Soviet Union on psychiatric clinics fasting patients for schizophrenia.
And so that tells you metabolic psychiatry also goes back a long, long, long time, not to mention ketogenic diet for epilepsy. So there are a lot of similarities, but if I want the benefits, as many benefits as possible with the least pain possible, which includes not losing a ton of muscle tissue, which is not always the same thing as lean body mass, what should I do? Right? That’s kind of the open question. And that is a huge, huge mouthful. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
But where is your current thinking when it relates to all of this stuff? And I said earlier at the very beginning that it ties into my parents. Why is that? Because when we looked at some of my relatives and I got my docs to come in and do a real proper full workup, looking at all sorts of things that normally wouldn’t be tested, absolutely some metabolic syndrome in the sense that they’re highly, highly insulin insensitive, like insulin off the charts. And it’s like, okay, well this has been going on for years to get to this point and Alzheimer’s is sometimes called type 3 diabetes. And it’s like, okay, well if I can’t help them, at least I want to try to help myself and other people who might be listening at an early enough stage. So how do you think about all this stuff?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, there’s a lot to talk about here, and I think we’ve got to kind of —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Let’s —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s chew on one bit at a time.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right. Let’s chew one bit at a time and zoom out for a minute and talk about this intermittent fasting concept and why do people want to do intermittent fasting? What are the benefits that they’re looking for? Now, you mentioned some metabolic benefits that you had noticed after doing your intermittent fasting.
So there’s lots of different types of intermittent fasting. You’ve mentioned the 16:8. So essentially you’re talking about not eating food for a period of time, and that period of time can either be 16 hours, it can be 24 hours, it can be longer, in which case it would not be an intermittent fast. It would be more prolonged fast, which you also talked about. But with respect to the intermittent fasting, there are a few things that happen and there are a few reasons why people like to do intermittent fasting. First and foremost, I think most people like doing intermittent fasting is because they want to actually lose weight and the weight that they want to lose is not necessarily their lean body mass. They actually want to lose their fat mass, so they want to lose fat, and that’s a big reason why people do intermittent fasting.
Well, it turns out that intermittent fasting is more of a tool for weight loss. And what I mean by that is that there have been multiple studies now that have looked at different types of intermittent fasting in sort of a community dwelling aspect where people are just kind of free to eat the way they’re going to eat, but they’re supposed to be practicing intermittent fasting. And what it’s been discovered is that naturally, people end up eating about 200 fewer calories per day when they’re doing some form of intermittent fasting. So if they’re eating all their food within an eight or 10 hour period, for example, usually they’ll eat their food within a 10-hour period and then they’ll fast for 14 hours. If they do that, they end up actually eating 200 fewer calories. And so they end up performing what’s called caloric restriction, which we know can lead to weight loss.
And so a lot of the weight loss actually comes from reducing calorie intake, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that’s beneficial from intermittent fasting comes down to calories because it doesn’t. But the weight loss definitely seems to come down to the calories because if you keep calories the same and then have people do intermittent fasting or not intermittent fasting, they won’t lose the weight, but they will have a whole host of metabolic benefits. You mentioned glucose regulation improvements. I mean fasting glucose, postprandial glucose, HbA1c, which is a long-term marker of glucose regulation, their lipids are more favorable, and then they have improvements in blood pressure, for example, that’s another big one that people get with more of a longer type of intermittent fasting. So they’re fasting more like 18 hours and eating their food within a six-hour window. Now that’s another benefit.
Now you go even further, and I know this is something you are very interested in, so beyond metabolic benefits and people want to get then, they want to get into what’s called ketosis. So they want to be making ketones, these things that we’re talking about earlier with respect to taking an exogenous ketone ester, well, you make something naturally when you start to actually burn fat as energy, you start to make something called beta hydroxybutyrate, but it takes about 12 hours or so. It depends on the person. It depends on how heavy of a carb diet they eat or how physically active they are. It can be a range. So if someone’s doing a more ketogenic type of diet, they can actually deplete their liver glycogen quicker than 12 hours. It might even cut it down to like eight if they’re physically active on top of that, you might go down to even six or something.
So there’s a big range here, but for a standard person on a normal diet, they’re going to take around 12 hours before they start to deplete their liver glycogen and then start to immobilize fatty acids from their adipose tissue and use that as energy. And when you start to do that, then you start to get into ketosis, your body starts to then make beta-hydroxybutyrate the major circling ketone. Why do people want that in their system? Because it’s not just a very energetically favorable source of energy. What I mean by that is it takes less energy to use beta-hydroxybutyrate to make energy than it does to use glucose, for example. It takes more energy to actually use glucose, so it’s more energetically favorable, right?
Tim Ferriss: It’s a clean fuel. Yeah. Also, BHB, the beta-hydroxybutyrate, as I understand it, I mean highly anti-inflammatory effects as well, right?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly. That was the next point I was going to make is that it’s called a signaling molecule. So it’s actually a way so your body knows that it’s in this stress mode, okay, there’s no food. It’s food scarcity time. And this is something that it’s evolutionarily tapped into our system, into our DNA where times of food scarcity, when we’re not eating, our body switches into ketosis, beta-hydroxybutyrates produce, and it signals to these other genes to basically make more of something beneficial. So it’s been shown to reduce inflammation. It depresses something called the inflammasome, which causes inflammation. It’s an HDAC inhibitor, so it’s a histone deacetylase inhibitor. So it’s globally affecting gene expression and in such a way that it reduces genes that are involved in making oxidative stress, it actually activates brain-derived neurotrophic factor. That’s the beneficial neurotrophic compound that’s made in the brain that exercise also activates as well.
So it’s doing all these beneficial things. And the other thing that it’s doing is it’s getting into the brain. It’s being used as a very great source of energy. And so you have this sort of bypass where the glucose can then be shunted to be used to make glutathione, that very important antioxidant I talked about earlier that sulforaphane activates.
Well, it turns out when you give your body ketones or your body’s making ketones, your brain actually consumes a lot of that. There’ve been tracer studies that have looked at that. And what happens is because neurons are now using the beta-hydroxybutyrate as energy, glucose is no longer needed. And so that glucose that is there is then used to make NADPH, which is a precursor to make glutathione, and so it’s called glucose sparing. You get this glucose sparing effect. And so that’s another reason why people are interested in intermittent fasting.
And then another main reason, and there’s many others, I’m not going to touch on everything, but the other main reason is it activates repair processes. And what I mean by repair processes is to be in repair mode, you have to be in more of a catabolic state. And we were talking about this earlier, people get so freaked out by the word catabolism.
Tim Ferriss: Last night when I was walking around New York City, we were talking about this catabolism —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And I think even over the last few years, intermittent fasting has kind of gotten a bad rap because people now equate it with, “Oh, loss of muscle mass. I’m going to be catabolic.” Well, in order to be in a repair mode, you actually do need to be in a catabolic mode. And these repair systems are so important for cleaning up all the garbage that’s inside of our cells. And that can be things like protein aggregates. These are things that lead to aggregation like alpha-synuclein, which is involved in Parkinson’s, amyloid beta aggregates, which is involved in Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not the cause. It’s like the cause and the symptom. It’s like both. It’s involved in Alzheimer’s disease and then aggregates in our cardiovascular system that play a role in cardiovascular disease, but it also cleans out even damaged little what are called organelles.
And so mitochondria or an organelle, and these, our organelles get damaged. So you want to be able to repair that damage. And this process of autophagy is the process that does that. And there’s lots of different types of autophagy. So if it’s a mitochondria repairing damage to itself, it’s mitophagy but for all this stuff to be active, you have to be in that more catabolic state, which can be induced by not eating, can also be induced by heavy endurance exercise as well.
Okay. So talking about those sort of outcomes that people are interested in, those different endpoints that people are interested in achieving, I think something that you are specifically interested in is the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting as well as the repair processes like the autophagy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And that’s why I was asking because I don’t really, look, I’m as vain as the next person. I like looking less fat if I can, but it’s not my main driver, right? It’s mental acuity and hopefully staving off on some level things like neurodegenerative disease and even cancer possibly, which has been part of the reason I’ve done a lot of these extended water fasts, which is I realize there are a couple of hops here in terms of speculation, but it seems plausible that you might zap punch a couple of pre-cancerous cells in the nuts by doing that.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Definitely. Not only does autophagy play a role in preventing Parkinson’s disease, but also Alzheimer’s disease as well. Again, this has been shown in many animal studies. We know that autophagy plays a role in clearing away the amyloid beta plaques that are involved in Alzheimer’s disease. And yes, there are some people that have amyloid beta plaques that don’t get Alzheimer’s disease. They may be the more resilient non-APOE4 type of person, but we do know that many, many people do get Alzheimer’s disease with amyloid plaques. And in fact, people that have, again, the SNPs in what’s called the amyloid precursor protein APP, that leads to amyloid beta plaque buildup, they get early onset Alzheimer’s disease. So autophagy plays an important role in clearing away those plaques. And I will say what we don’t have a lot of evidence on is what’s the minimal effect of fasting dose to activate autophagy?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. God, I wish we had this
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right. We don’t. I think what we do know in humans from some of these old studies is that you do see some signal of autophagy activation after 24, 48 hours in humans. Now, does that mean that that is the only amount of time that it takes to activate autophagy? No. So most humans are probably doing anywhere between a 12 to 16 hour nightly fast. There’s a period of time when we’re not eating, and that is when we’re sleeping a little bit before bed autophagy still happens in people, we just aren’t measuring it because we don’t have sensitive tools yet. And so it’s not that I don’t think a 16-hour fast doesn’t activate. I believe it does in human. I believe there’s some autophagy going on. It’s probably not that much. But if you go into that 48 hour fast, then you’re really starting to get more robust activation of autophagy.
Tim Ferriss: Can I throw something else in here just for fun?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So you mentioned sleep, and I’ve been looking, trying to look at Alzheimer’s from every possible angle and found literature looking at disruption of sleep architecture in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and the possible application of Xyrem, I believe it is, which is another, it’s a brand name in a bifurcated schedule for GHB gamma hydroxybutyrate, which you have to be very careful with. It’s a party drug. People die of it because it suppresses respiration. The person who bought my apartment in San Francisco died of a GHB overdose, but it actually is a tremendously interesting compound for increasing, I think it’s deep wave sleep specifically, which does what? It helps the cleanup crew to do its work and to actually take out the garbage cellularly. And so if I could wave a magic wand, I would have my relatives on something like Xyrem, might actually be a different type of sleep medication like the NORA class. NORA, might be DORA.
I would also look at, and this is something obviously not suitable for most elderly people, but potentially lower dose psilocybin or psilocin. And there is some actually very interesting, I don’t want to call them speculative, hypothetical applications of that to Alzheimer’s disease, which you can find on PubMed. And from a mechanistic perspective, they’re super, super interesting. So I just want to double click on the sleep because that is such a critical component, whether you’re fasting or not, to try to ensure that your sleep architecture is not hyperdisrupted, which can be the case with lots of different types of sleep medications that you might take. And if you have really bad insomnia, it’s like, okay, you can do all of these other things, but boy, oh boy, it would make a lot of sense to try to fix sleep whenever possible.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Great. Yeah, so true. The low-wave sleep does activate the glymphatic system, which is cleaning out the amyloid beta aggregates as well. And the last thing I kind of want to mention is you were talking about the intermittent fasting and more prolonged fasting and the muscle mass loss or lean body mass, which people equate with muscle mass, which it’s not, there’s a lot of things going on. So the thing is, when people are doing intermittent fasting, I mentioned they eat fewer calories, which means they’re eating less meals, they’re eating fewer meals, they’re not eating as many meals. And so what ends up happening is people lower their protein intake, and that’s an important signal for maintaining muscle mass and certainly growing muscle mass as well. So it increases muscle protein synthesis, which is important. If people are engaged in resistance training and doing intermittent fasting, they’re not losing muscle mass.
And in fact, they can even gain muscle mass a little bit, not much, but they can gain it too. So I think the key here is that if you’re doing an intermittent type of fast, like 16:8 where you’re fasting for 16 hours, that’s really not a long, long fast. There’s not a lot of concern with losing muscle mass if you’re resistance training. Now a more prolonged type of fast, you’re talking about 14 days, that’s a long fast. And definitely, you’re going to be losing some muscle mass no matter what. Now, how much you lose depends on how, I guess if you can resistance train lightly while you’re fasting, that would be huge because you would be then activating muscle protein synthesis through another signal, which is not protein, it’s mechanical force.
So that, I think, would be really important for preventing the loss of a lot of muscle mass. But what is interesting is that you do lose lean body mass, a lot of it, when you are doing a prolonged fast like that and looking at the old literature and some of the literature that’s been done, a lot of water up to 10 pounds of water rate, which is crazy, you lose that and your organs shrink. And this is something that’s been also shown in animal studies and also by Dr. Valter Longo many years ago, and he’s shown in animal studies, prolonged type of fasting actually causes organs to shrink because a lot of the damaged cells, not only is autophagy getting activated and you’re cleaning out damage within a cell, but cells that are so damaged that autophagy can’t even fix them, they actually undergo death, cell death.
And so you end up getting a lot of cells that die. And then what happens is during the re-feeding phase, and this is key, the re-feeding phase is the growth phase, and this is when you regrow organs, it’s when your muscle mass comes back, you can go back, get your muscle mass gains back. And so having that refeeding phase is really important. And getting the right nutrients, like protein for example, is key for that refeeding phase. But you also lose fat during that fast and you’re losing visceral fat. And you had brought this up last night when we were talking and I did some reading on it because it was like, oh, I made perfect sense because your organs are shrinking, you’re losing a lot of cells in your organs. You’re also losing some of the visceral fat that surrounds the organs, right?
Tim Ferriss: And that can get misclassified. Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly. It gets misclassified as lean body mass. And so you look at this lean body mass and all you think about is muscle. Well, it turns out, muscle’s a small part of that. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s going into that lean body mass. It’s a pretty big undertaking, a 14-day fast. But I’ll say this, and this kind of goes into what you mentioned about the fasting mimicking diet and perhaps even adding cream. We can talk about that as well. I do think, I mean the fasting mimicking diet, you’re not going to get the same amount of autophagy that you would get if you did a five-day fast, water fast, because it’s just impossible.
You’re getting some protein, you’re getting some amino acids that’s activating mTOR, that shuts down autophagy. You’re getting energy, ATP, there’s a ratio called the ATP to AMP ratio, which you want it to be low to activate something called AMP kinase for autophagy to happen. And so when you’re eating heavy cream or eating whatever, fill in the blank, any type of calories, you are changing that ratio. And so that AMP kinase is not getting activated as robustly. Now, the amount of inactivation of those pathways, which then will inactivate autophagy, depends on how much you’re feeding, how many calories that you’re eating, how much of that is amino acids.
Tim Ferriss: And specifically leucine, right? In the case of Longo, really trying to minimize leucine as in an activator of mTOR and so on.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yes, exactly. Yeah. So I think for the cream, if you’re trying to do 16:8, if someone is trying to do 16:8 on a daily basis, and it’s a non-negotiable for having an earlier feeding window because social, just everything compliance wise isn’t going to work and you have to do it later, which means you have to wake up and still be fasting in the morning, then you either have to love black coffee, learn to love it, or try maybe MCT powder, MCT oil, because then you’re not getting the amino acids in there to activate the mTOR, but you can do a small, maybe a tablespoon of it, and so you’ll maybe just get a little bit of depression of autophagy, but not much. That would be my recommendation.
Tim Ferriss: And I also want to clarify for folks listening just to really make it specific. When I have had, I just like saying dirty fasting, I didn’t realize it was an expression, I just think it feels fun like a dirty martini. So dirty fasting is kind of cheating in this way. But when I do that, which is not all the time, I usually have black coffee or tea or something like that, but it is heavy cream, which is almost entirely fat. It is not creamer that you would just pull off the shelf. It is not half-and-half. It is heavy cream, which just from a macronutrient perspective is very, very, very different. And you can really overdo it on the calories also, it’s just liquid fat effectively. But the MCT powder is a good idea.
I tell you what, if you’re open to it, let’s shift gears a little bit. I will just say, I wish somebody, nobody’s going to do this, but would somehow get the ethics board, IRB, etc, to approve long-term human studies, again, in fasting, that would be great because you used to be allowed to do it. There are case studies of people who literally fast for 300 plus days, I mean fat, what is it? 9,000 calories per pound. You can do a lot with that fat. So we’ll see if I do 14 days. If I can do 14 days, then I might just go to 30. But then the refeeding gets really tricky.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I think people are concerned with gallstones. So when you don’t eat for a long period of time, then you’re not stimulating the gallbladder and the gallstone risk increases, which is what I think is the big concern with the long, long fasts. But I mean, if you’re doing something like that once a year, I don’t know if it’s that big of a deal.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean that’s why I was doing a seven-day fast once a year for a long time, and then I took a break for a few years and I did a seven-day water fast and it was so incredibly unpleasant. And I had orthostatic hypotension where I stand up and I felt like I was going to fall over and vision started to get funny and I was like, you know what? Maybe this isn’t for me, but I think it’s because my machinery just wasn’t developed for that. Having seen really stark differences in my mental acuity and sustained focus with the intermittent fasting, I’m like, okay, I feel like doing intermittent fasting, which part of my reason behaviorally for my interest in that also is that getting people to change their diet is fucking hard, meaning their diet composition, the food they eat. So if you can just say, Hey, look, keep eating whatever you want, same thing, but you have to fit it within this window.
It’s an interesting option B that might work for people who otherwise aren’t going to follow a paleo diet or whatever. But if you do the IF, and then what I’ve done is like, all right, do the IF, maybe if you have some grains or in my case legumes and stuff, okay, fine. And then shift to a mostly ketogenic diet for a period of time, then I feel like you’re pretty well teed up for a longer water only fast. Maybe you supplement with electrolytes. This gets into all sorts of controversial territory.
But if you’re okay with it, let’s talk about training for a minute because, and I’ll force a really awkward segue maybe, which is one thing I noticed is that my ability to do Zone 2 training, let’s just for simplicity’s sake, say that for people that you’re on a bike, stationary, is just easier to keep consistent and you’re cycling for 60 minutes at a wattage and a speed that leads you to the point where you could have a conversation with someone on the phone in short, full sentences, but you don’t really want to, right? That’s like the talk test. Intermittent fasting plus ketosis really helps my Zone 2. And then this leads into the question of just training in general. So I have to click on this, what type of exercise reduces heart aging by 20 years? Do you want to start there or do you want to start with VO2 max?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: We can start with VO2 max maybe because —
Tim Ferriss: Okay, let’s do it.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: — they kind of lead in to each other.
Tim Ferriss: Great.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And so people might be going, what is VO2 max? It’s essentially a cardio respiratory fitness. It’s measured by VO, it’s measured or calculated by VO2 max, which is essentially the maximum amount of oxygen you can take up during maximal exercise. And what’s so fascinating about that is it’s a really important predictor of longevity. So there have now been enough studies that have come out looking at cardiorespiratory fitness in the sense of VO2 max and how people with a higher cardiorespiratory fitness have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. In fact, if you have a low cardiorespiratory fitness and you go anywhere above that from low to low normal, it’s associated with a two-year increased life expectancy. And people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness actually have a higher all cause mortality that’s comparable or worse than people with known diseases like type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or smokers, for example.
So in other words, being sedentary is a disease and we need to think about it as a disease and we should be trying to train to improve our VO2 max. And that is something that should be in our minds. And I say this because just having this conversation that you and I are having right now, it takes about 11 milliliters of oxygen per minute, per kilogram body weight just to have this conversation. Now, just sit still and just breathe. It takes about three milliliters of oxygen per minute, per kilogram body weight. And that’s important because as we’re aging, we’re sort of heading towards this cliff of VO2 max. Our VO2 max goes down as we age just naturally. Even if you’re training and doing everything, it goes down.
And once you get to that cliff, everything becomes a maximal effort like talking, you’re out of breath. Carrying groceries to your car from the store, you’re just out of breath. Everything is a maximal effort, and you don’t want to be there.
So you want to start from a higher-up point so that when you’re going down, that cliff is much further away. And that’s where the training comes in because you want to find a training program that’s going to improve that cardiorespiratory fitness, right?
And that’s where you talked about Zone 2 training and that’s the kind of what I would call moderate intensity exercise. So you’re able to sort of the talk test, I like the talk test because heart rate is so dependent on a person’s fitness level. But let’s just say on average, generally people, they’re not at like 75 or 80 percent max heart rate. They’re kind of below that on average.
Now some people may actually be above that, but the talk test is great because you can have a conversation, you’re breathy. You don’t want to have a conversation, but you can or so.
We know that people that are doing that moderate intensity type of training, if they do the standard guidelines of physical activity, which are about two and a half hours a week of moderate intensity physical activity, people that do that for two months, 40 percent of those people still can’t improve their VO2 max.
Tim Ferriss: Just different gears.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, unless they actually add in high intensity interval training.
And that’s where I kind of get into this. I think people should be doing vigorous intensity exercise. That’s the type of exercise where you’re unable to talk, so you can’t have a conversation because you’re going harder. Your heart rate is about 80, 85 percent. It’s above 80 percent max heart rate.
That type of exercise has been shown to improve VO2 max, especially if you’re doing sort of what’s called high intensity interval training, as you know, you’ve talked about this a lot as well. But you’re doing sort of these intervals of going more vigorous intensity exercise, and then you have recovery periods where your heart rate goes down. So there’s been a variety of different protocols out there that have been shown to improve the VO2 max if you do them.
Generally speaking, what’s happening is you’re putting a stronger stress on your cardiovascular system, so on your muscular system, even on your brain. So the adaptations are greater, and one of those adaptations is increasing your stroke volume, so being able to like basically transport oxygen to tissues faster. And that’s an adaptation that happens when you’re going at a harder, when you’re training at a harder intensity.
Tim Ferriss: What do you do personally? What’s your HIIT look like?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So my training is three days week I do some sort of CrossFit training that involves high intensity interval training with it as well. And the high intensity interval training will either be on a rowing machine, or it’ll be on a stationary bike or AssaultBike, or it’ll be like a skier, like those skiers or jumping rope.
And I also do longer intervals, so I’ll do the Norwegian 4×4. So that’s where I do, on a stationary bike, or I do it on a rowing machine actually as well. I do four minutes of as hard as I can go and maintain for that entire four minutes. So this is obviously not an all-out 30-second sprint. I’m just working hard, as hard as I can, and maintain that for four minutes.
And then you recover for three minutes, and then you do it four times. I’m thinking of a variation I do sometimes with my husband. I recover for four minutes because we’re switching on the rower. So I sometimes do a little bit longer recovery.
But that Norwegian 4×4 where you’re doing as hard as you can for four minutes and maintain that intensity for the four minutes and then you recover for three minutes, you do that four times, that’s been shown to be one of the best ways to improve VO2 max.
But you can also do one minute on, one minute off, which I’ve also done. So you do that 10 times. It’s more like a 20-minute workout. That’s also been shown to improve VO2 max.
But also even doing something like 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off like a Tabata, again has been shown.
And I do all of these, by the way, and I do variations of them depending on the week. Most of my exercise is high intensity interval training, CrossFit training, which incorporates, it’s more dynamic. So it’s including like strength training stuff, but it’s like more high intensity.
And then I do a couple of runs. I do like two 30-minute runs a week, sometimes three. And that’s more of my Zone 2 stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a nice roster.
So I’ll share, just for people who might be curious, some of my goals and program at the moment, right?
So I’m about to turn 48 and feel good overall, but have realized that I really hate endurance training, generally speaking. So I’ve neglected that and specifically have neglected the stuff that makes me think I want to puke into a bucket, i.e. VO2 max training. The Zone 2 is like listen to a podcast, maybe I have like a slightly breathy conversation. Like it’s pretty chill. Watch something on Netflix. It’s pretty straightforward.
VO2 max, specifically chatting with Peter Attia, I’m doing the Zone 2, which I do either on a stationary bike or on the treadmill, typically with a rucksack at a lower incline. I found that when I had the speed too high, incline too high, I ended up getting lower back pain just from a like really long stride with my lordosis and stuff.
And then for the VO2 max, doing the 4×4 that you described. And I think I’m getting this translation right, but the way it was described to me was like, all right, for each of those four minutes you have these four-minute work intervals, and then you have three or four minutes of rest, and then you repeat four times.
It’s like first minute you’re like, “Wow, this is a lot of work.” Second minute you’re like, “Wow, this really sucks.” Third minute you’re like, “I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I don’t think I’m going to make it.” And then minute four is like, “I feel like I’m going to die and I’m being chased by wolves.” So it’s like when we say like maximal effort, at least as it’s been, and those are not Peter’s words, but another person that I like a lot.
It’s a lot of work. Like it’s pretty pukey, but I’m going to be doing that, given the longevity associations that you mentioned.
Now, I would love just to get your two cents, and this relates to vitamin D2 a little bit for me where I’m like in these studies looking at VO2 max as a predictor or correlate of longevity, are there other possible confounders, confounding variables that might actually be the real McCoy?
In other words, because you could say, and I know you know all this, but just for people listening, it’s like, okay, well, I’ll make this up. Like women who do Pilates in Manhattan have four years of additional lifespan. Okay, great. So you could conclude then we should all do Pilates to improve lifespan. It’s like, well, wait a second, Pilates is expensive, and maybe they’re also following a better diet and so on and so on and so on.
So are there any confounders that might apply, possible confounders to these VO2 max studies? I’m assuming they’re observational, more than experimental, or sort of intervention-based. So what are your thoughts there?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I mean there’s absolutely a possibility for some sort of confounding factors in any sort of observational study, including the ones I’m discussing. Because, yes, they’re going in and measuring their cardio respiratory fitness, which is better than a lot of observational studies that you’re going off a questionnaire, right? So that’s already sort of one, at least a one up over other observational data.
But at the end of the day, you may have someone that has undiagnosed cancer or some kind of undiagnosed disease because diseases are, I mean, they’re not, they’re supposed to be disease free or if they have a disease, it’s known and so everything’s corrected for. But there’s always the possibility that some people have some disease and that’s why they can’t exercise very well because they’re diseased, and it’s the disease that’s causing them to have a higher mortality rate than the lower cardiorespiratory fitness is.
Studies always try to account for diet and all that stuff, but at the end of the day, you can never really establish causation, right? So that is why we turn to randomized controlled trials. And I will say this is where the heart aging comes in and also this type of training.
Tim Ferriss: Can I do one more thing real quick? Before we get to the heart aging, real quick.
So when I’ve done VO2 max training, my legs grow, my legs grow like weeds, like they adapt and get big. So along with the age-related decrease in VO2 max, there’s also sarcopenia and age-related loss of muscle mass.
So I’m like, I wonder if these people who also have higher VO2 max tend to have a higher percentage of lean body mass or muscle tissue be more heavily muscled than the people without, I don’t know. I mean, that’s just — I’m just kind of poking at it out of curiosity.
Okay, so the heart aging.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: This goes into why randomized controlled trials are important because you can establish more causation from an intervention. And this study was done by Ben Levine out of UT Southwest and Dallas. And really, to me, it’s a seminal, groundbreaking study that isn’t talked about enough.
By the way, he’s just a phenomenal cardiovascular exercise physiologist. I mean, he trained with, like, the biggest giants out there.
And what he did was he took, him and his lab took 50-year-olds that were sedentary. So they’re middle-aged, 50 years old, sedentary, but otherwise healthy. So you didn’t have any other diseases besides being sedentary, which I think is a disease, but they didn’t have any other diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes or hypertension, right? So they were otherwise healthy, just not active. And he wanted to see if he could put these guys on a pretty long two-year training protocol, how would that affect the aging of their heart?
So as we age, our hearts typically shrink in size, and they get stiffer. And that affects not only our cardiorespiratory fitness and our ability to exercise, and I mentioned our cardiorespiratory fitness goes down with age, but it affects our cardiovascular disease risk as well.
So the reason our hearts get stiffer, by the way, does come down to a lot of glucose. So the more glucose stimulation, more glucose is around in your vascular system, it through a chemical reaction forms advanced glycation end products. So this glycation essentially stiffens the collagen that surrounds your myocardium and your pericardium, and so you get like this stiffer heart that can’t respond to stress well.
So you want your heart to be very plastic and malleable and flexible, right? You don’t want it to be stiff.
Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t sound good, yep.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So just like you don’t want your blood vessels to be stiff, right.
So what he wanted to do was see if he could change the structure and the trajectory of these aging hearts. So he put them on a two-year training program, which involved the Norwegian 4×4, by the way. And when you start someone out that’s not physically active and you want them to do the Norwegian 4×4 when you have them doing their interval, their four-minute interval, and this speaks to you as well, or anyone, you don’t have to necessarily go as hard as you can the whole four minutes. But you just have to be working hard that interval.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you do have to last four minutes, right? So —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: You have to last four minutes. So some people even start off, they’re just briskly walking because that’s hard for them, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So it’s all tailored to the individual. So some people get really intimidated where they’re like, “Oh, there’s no way I could ever do that.”
Well, actually these people did do it, and they started out doing the Norwegian 4×4, but they also did a variety of other exercises, including moderate intensity and some more vigorous intensity exercise, as well as some resistance training. And the control group was just this like yoga flexible training sort of stuff that people were doing.
By the end of the two years, these people were working out about five hours a week, and at some point they were doing two Norwegian 4x4s a week, and then they went down to just doing one a week. But over the course of two years, they were getting a lot of exercise, about five hours a week.
And essentially at the end of those two years, the structure of their heart, so the stiffness of it and the shrinking of it was reversed. So their hearts grew and they became more flexible. And it was reversed in such a way that it was 20 years less aging. So their hearts looked more like 30-year-olds than 50-year-olds, which is pretty incredible.
Tim Ferriss: That is amazing. And I think it’s also like, well, you think 50, it’s too late to start exercising.
Well, it’s not too late. I mean you can be in your 90s and get benefits. So I think that’s another really important sort of take-home with that story is that you can reverse your aging of your heart by 20 years if you really put in the effort.
Five hours a week is about what I do, five or six hours a week. It’s a lot of work. I didn’t always do that, but I’ve decided as I started to get into my mid-40s, I’m going to spend less time podcasting and more time exercising because this is my health.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, foundational for everything else, that’s the base of the pyramid.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So let’s park that particular piece of training for a moment. Do you want to piggyback on that and talk about reversing brain aging with exercise? Is it a different type of exercise, or do you get two birds with one stone?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: You do get two birds with one stone. And that’s why I do like the vigorous intensity exercise because when you’re kind of shifting into working out harder, when you’re getting that vigorous intensity exercise, you are shifting somewhat to anaerobic metabolism.
So you’re working so hard that you can’t get oxygen to your muscles fast enough to use mitochondria for the mitochondria to then make energy. So your body goes, I need energy quick right now, there’s not enough oxygen here, and so you start to use glucose outside of the mitochondria as energy, and that’s called glycolysis.
And you’re not just only doing glycolysis, by the way. I mean even if you’re doing an all-out sprint, you’re still somewhat using your mitochondria. It’s not like a black-or-white thing, right? There’s sort of gray here. But the reality is, is that when you’re not going intense, you are not, mostly you’re not doing anaerobic exercise.
So what happens is when you’re doing that, sort of getting in that anaerobic state, what I mean is like you’re not using oxygen to make energy. You’re just using glucose. You actually make something called lactate as a byproduct, and lactate is what’s essential for the brain health.
So there have now been a variety of studies. This was pioneered by Dr. George Brooks at UC Berkeley decades ago. So many studies have now shown this now. It’s no longer a hypothesis, but it used to be called the lactate shuttle hypothesis where, when you start to do this vigorous intensity exercise and you get your lactate levels higher than baseline, baseline, you’re usually about 0.9 millimolar or so lactate.
You start to go above that and well beyond, you’re getting 7, 10 millimolar or 15 millimolar, right? The lactate gets into your bloodstream and it’s used by other tissue. So it goes back into the muscle. It’s used for energy, gets into the brain, it gets into the heart, liver quickly. It happens within 20 minutes. You can do a HIIT workout, see your lactate go up to 15 millimolar, measure it 20 minutes later, and it’s back to baseline. I mean, it’s quick. It gets consumed.
One of the major organs that consumes it is the brain. This has been shown in human studies. Not only is lactate very much like beta hydroxybutyrate, our favorite ketone that we’ve been talking about, because it’s an energetically favorable source of energy. Lactate is used by neurons to make energy, just like beta hydroxybutyrate is very similar. It’s energetically favorable. All that stuff is happening, same stuff. So you’re using the lactate, glucose is being spared, you’re making glutathione.
Lactate is also a signaling molecule. So in the brain, it’s activating brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is important for growing new neurons in the brain, which has been shown in human studies. So there’ve been human studies that have done exercise for even just one year and shown that you can increase the growth of the hippocampus by like one to two percent after that year of training versus losing one to two percent of the hippocampus. That usually happens as you get in older age.
So the lactate is again a product of that vigorous intensity exercise. It’s increasing norepinephrine in the brain, serotonin. It’s a signaling molecule. It’s basically your body’s, your muscle’s way of communicating with the brain, “Hey, I’m really working hard. This is a stressful time. Let’s respond to that stress,” right? So your brain is also working hard during exercise and particularly vigorous intensity exercise. It’s stressful in the brain. Anybody that’s done it knows it.
Resistance training also increases lactate and resistance training is very stressful on the brain. And so it’s like this response to that stress. Your brain is now being communicated from the muscles by lactate, which is the communicator and saying, “Hey, make all this good stuff so that we can not die,” right? That’s essentially the adaptations that are happening.
So that’s why I like to also incorporate vigorous intensity exercise into my program because I am also prone to neurodegenerative disease. I have Parkinson’s disease on my dad’s side, I have Alzheimer’s disease on my mom’s side, so I’m very, very tuned in to neurodegenerative disease and wanting to prevent it and do what I can. And I do think that vigorous intensity exercise is part of that equation because I want to get that lactate, which is so beneficial for brain health.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you about two other things related to brain health since this is on the mind, ha-ha. For the first is related to saunas and the second one is vitamin D.
So with saunas, I was looking back, and I think this is probably summarized by some LLM, so I want to be very careful with citing numbers. But I’m looking at a summary, I believe, of the findings of a large Finnish study published in JAMA Internal Medicine 2015 that followed 2,000 middle-aged men for 20 years. That’s wild. And it looks like, please correct me from memory, you can correct any of this, but all-cause mortality, 24 percent lower risk with two to three times per week. This is sauna use and four to seven times per week was associated with 40 percent lower risk.
And I’ll just cut to the one that’s of greatest interest to me right now. It says in a follow-up paper, using the sauna four to seven times per week was associated with a 66 percent lower risk of dementia and 65 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s. Now at face value, if those numbers are roughly accurate, those numbers seem incredible, right?
And I guess what I’m wondering is how should we think about those results? Because if out of 100 people, two people were getting dementia and now it’s one person, it’s less interesting than other ways of interpreting the data. How should we think about this, and how do you personally use if you do sauna or hot tub or heat stress at this point?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. So those numbers are accurate, By the way. They’re spot on, and there is a dose-dependence there, which kind of strengthens the data. So people that are using the sauna more frequently are having a more robust effect. You mentioned 24 percent lower all-cause mortality, and then 40 percent if they’re doing two to three times a week versus four to seven times a week, they’re having a 40 percent lower all-cause mortality. And the dementia risk is also extremely interesting to me.
And this goes back, Tim, to some of the earliest experiments that I did as a sort of budding young biologist at the Salk Institute where I was working with these little nematode C. elegans worms and injecting human amyloid beta-42 into these worms, and essentially injecting it into their muscle so that they become basically the amyloid beta-42 aggregates and forms these aggregates as these worms age.
And it happens very rapidly because their life expectancy is only 15 days. So within a day or so, they start to become paralyzed where they can’t move their lower half of their muscles, their muscular cells are, and they can only move their nose to feed in this little Petri dish with E. coli bacteria, which is what they eat.
So I would do these experiments and then I would overact, basically when you do a genetic manipulation and you can make them overexpress heat shock proteins, which are something that are robustly activated upon heat stress as the name implies. And sauna has been shown to activate heat shock proteins. If you’re in the 163 degree Fahrenheit sauna for around 30 minutes, you can activate your heat shock proteins by 50 percent more than baseline.
So when I would add heat shock proteins that would be activated in these worms, it would prevent this from happening. These protein aggregates don’t happen. And that’s because one of the things that heat shock proteins do is they help repair damaged proteins that are misfolded and prevent them from aggregating. So you want to have more active heat shock proteins if you’re wanting to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Now, there’s a lot of animal studies that have shown this as well. For example, you can take a mouse and sort of give it Alzheimer’s disease in this similar way. And if they have a lot of active heat shock protein genes, then they’re not getting the Alzheimer’s disease. It delays it, right?
So when I remember reading this study, and it was like one of the things I was thinking about was, of course, the heat shock proteins are activated upon the sauna use that you would probably see a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and even dementia.
There’s other things as well. Cardiovascular health is really improved with the sauna. So sauna sort of mimics moderate intensity exercise. So if you’re having improved cardiovascular health, that means more blood flow to the brain. Lots of things are happening, right?
The one thing I do want to mention, Tim, and this study was, I think it came out in 2020-ish, I don’t remember the exact year, but it was not out of Finland. I believe it was a Polish study. And that study looked at sauna use and dementia risk, and there was very interesting results there.
So they sort of looked at people that are using saunas, but they also sort of categorized them based on the amount of heat, so how hot their saunas got.
So in the Finnish studies and out of Finland, majority of the people are using the sauna at around equivalent of 174 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about what the average temperature of pretty much any of those studies that you cited. That’s about the average temperature that they’re using in, and they’re in there for about 20 minutes.
Now, this other study looked at a wide range of different temperatures, that temperature versus like the really, really high extreme end so people that were doing like 200 degrees Fahrenheit or more.
And this is something that you can see nowadays, like there’s this sort of go all in, go hard or go home, right? So people think that they need to go in a 200 degree sauna. And if they go in a 200 degree sauna, it’s going to be better than going in a 175 degree Fahrenheit sauna, right? Apparently, not the case.
So in that study, again, you saw a protective effect of people that use the sauna, and I think it was also dose-dependent, but I can’t recall, there was a protective effect, but only if they used saunas that were less than 190 degrees Fahrenheit. People that started going into the 190 degrees to 200 degrees Fahrenheit range actually had an increased risk.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So that was something that I don’t know that anyone talks about, but I’ve done really, really hot saunas before. I personally don’t like it. I get headaches, actually. So your head is in there and you have to think about that. Your head is getting heated up. So I don’t know that it’s necessarily good to go in a 212 degree Fahrenheit sauna for your head.
Now I don’t want to say that with certainty because there could be all kinds of confounding factors, but it’s something to keep in mind.
And why do you have to go above 190? Well, 190 is hot as hell. That’s good enough. Like you don’t have to go above that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my default setting, my sauna is 194, so it’s just kind of like — well, I guess I set it some time ago, so it’s just been set at 194, so that’s kind of my default. So maybe I want to dial it back. Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I think 190 is great. Yeah, 190 is great.
So you asked about me and how I use the sauna. Now I should also mention that hot tubs are good as well. And in fact, the study just came out a few weeks ago showing that hot tubs have comparable effects on blood pressure regulation, all these parameters that are looked at with sauna use as well.
And a lot of people ask that question. “Oh, what about a hot tub or a hot bath?” And I think not everyone has access to a sauna, not everyone has access to a hot tub, but a lot of people have access to a hot bath.
And I think if you can get a sort of pool thermometer and keep the temperature of your bath 104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what all the studies use, you have to keep adding hot water. That’s fine.
Tim Ferriss: It’s pretty hot.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: But you want to stay in there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s hot.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, it’s pretty hot. You stay in there for about 20 minutes and you’re going to have comparable effects.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’ll be sweating like you’re in a sauna. Don’t worry about it. Yeah, 104.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly. 104 is hot. And I actually do both. I do a hot tub and I do sauna.
I like to do hot tub at night. It does seem to help with my sleep. But sometimes I’ll do the sauna in the day and I’ll do it after a workout, and it sort of extends my workout. I particularly like doing them after a workout like in the winter when it’s cold and if I work out outside. So that’s kind of how I use the sauna.
I used to do hot, I was doing hot tubs for a while like every night. I don’t do that in the summer because it’s just hot and so I don’t like — I actually shift more to doing cold exposure more in the summer, which is kind of funny. Pretty much the only time I do it is in the summer. Such a wuss. I like doing the heat a lot in the winter.
Tim Ferriss: I would be very curious to see if they measured sperm like motility and morphology for all the males who are doing this. And they’re like, “Good news. You have this incredibly lowered risk of Alzheimer’s. Bad news. You’re effectively sterile from all the heat on your swimmers.”
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Good point. Yeah, there’s been studies that have shown you do lower motility, for sure. The motility rate’s lowered and that those changes are reversed after six weeks of abstaining. So it is reversible.
But also don’t use it as a contraception method, either, because I know some people that have tried that. It doesn’t work. You can still get pregnant.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not so smart. Do you still use, if needed, curcumin or Theracurmin or any of these products? I think Meriva or Meriva was one that you mentioned as a formulation in place of NSAIDs, like ibuprofen or naproxen? Or is that something that you may have changed your mind on?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I actually just did it like a couple days ago when I had a headache, and I didn’t know why. That’s the thing that I go to still, and I mean, there’s some cases where it won’t work, where it’s just like, I don’t know, this is like a really bad headache. I don’t usually get headaches, but if I don’t sleep well or something, something going on or my cycle, I will get a headache and I use it.
I use four of the Meriva, which is a phytosomal curcumin, which increases the bioavailability of the curcumin. I use the Thorne brand just because I like the, I think the brand is reliable, no affiliation with them, but it works for me. It really does. So it’s, I think, 500 milligrams of curcumin per capsule, I believe. And so I do four, so I’m getting two grams.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, cool.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: But I do still use it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, just don’t take it right after your workout, right?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, It doesn’t have the same effect.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it doesn’t have the same kind of COX-2 inhibition as the other does, right?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It doesn’t. Uh-huh. And in fact, I think it helps with DOMs, delayed onset muscle soreness.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m sure, yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And so sometimes, I do use it actually after a really, like, hard squat workout.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I’m glad I asked.
So speaking of not getting enough sleep, let’s hop to creatine because, God, I don’t know where I read this, but that higher doses of creatine, maybe like 25 grams, 20, 25 grams could combat sleep loss or some of the effects of sleep loss.
What should we know about creatine? Creatine has been around for a long time. There are dozens of questionable sports performance, athletic performance products come out every year. Most of them are all marketing, no substance.
Creatine has been used by athletes for a very long time, but for at least the last five years, I have been taking it typically five grams a day, more for the cognitive or potential cognitive benefits.
But what else should we know about creatine? Because what you put in your newsletter not too long ago was forwarded to me, and then you told me via text. I was like, okay, we should probably talk about this. So how should we think about creatine and best practices for different applications?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, it’s funny. As you mentioned, it’s one of those supplements that have been, it was like in the gym bro world forever, and still people associate it with that. But yet it’s been one of the supplements that’s actually stuck, right? It’s worked. And there’s been countless studies showing its effectiveness, particularly with respect to increasing exercise volume.
So in other words, what creatine is, is it’s essentially, it’s stored in our muscles as something called phosphocreatine. When you take creatine exogenously, it’s stored in our muscles as phosphocreatine and then used for energy. So it’s a way to make energy quicker, right? So the more of it you have stored, the quicker you can sort of make that energy.
So what it’s been shown to do is really help with increasing exercise volume. In other words, you can do one to two more reps per set or sets. I mean, you could do an extra set, or whatever it is you’re doing. And that leads to obviously if you’re increasing your workload, you’re going to have increased muscle mass and muscle strength because you’re increasing your workload. It doesn’t work like protein in the sense that you can increase muscle mass because it’s anabolic. You need to put the work in.
So creatine by itself isn’t going to make your muscles grow, but it is going to make you work harder. It’s going to be easier for you to work harder, and so you end up increasing your exercise volume, which then has adaptations on your muscle. And that’s why a lot of people like it because for one, they want their muscles to grow bigger and stronger, and two, some people like to use it during competitions or something because they want to be able to increase that exercise volume as well. It’s also really good for that explosive-power type of exercise, again, because getting that quick mobilization of producing energy.
And I’m just glossing over decades of research and a lot of specifics here, because I want to get to the brain. But it turns out creatine is something that our liver makes a little bit, I think maybe one to two grams a day. It’s also something that’s found in dietary sources, particularly animal products. So it’s high in meat, poultry, fish, dairy, not so much in vegetables. So vegans and vegetarians actually end up — they can have lower creatine if they’re not supplementing with it because they’re not eating animal products. Well, it turns out that it seems as though if you’re supplementing and eating a high meat diet, you’re getting a good amount of creatine. Five grams seems to be about the point at which your muscles get saturated at least over the course of a month or so. So if you’ve been using creatine for a month or two, your muscle stores are saturated, and five grams a day is kind of what’s consumed by the muscle on a daily basis to kind of maintain that.
So I would argue that you might want to go above that to get the brain benefits, and here’s why. Because your muscle is very, very greedy when it comes to creatine. So that five grams that you’re taking — I used to take five grams a day until about last April or March or something like that. So the five grams a day is what’s been shown in countless studies, and that’s probably why you take it. I took it because it was countless studies showing five grams a day was the dose. That was the dose that you needed to get the muscle benefits.
All these brain benefits now coming out seem to be at higher doses, and you mentioned one that was 25 grams, I mean 20 to 25 grams, which is kind of a crazy study where they did about 21 hours of sleep deprivation, essentially. They were barely sleeping at all. And giving them the 25 grams of creatine, 20 to 25 grams, depending on their weight, seemed to not only negate the negative effects of sleep deprivation on their cognition, but it also improved their cognition beyond what their baseline normal cognition is when they were sleeping.
And that’s what was really intriguing to me as well as some of the other studies where older adults are given 20 grams of creatine and it improved their cognition. We now have the first pilot study in Alzheimer’s disease where, again, 20 grams were given to a very small number of people with Alzheimer’s disease. It also improved cognition. It turns out that when you start to go above the five grams and you get into more the 10 grams range, then some of that creatine is getting into the brain versus being all consumed by the muscle. I personally use creatine now. I do 10 grams a day, every day. And what I have noticed, and this could be totally placebo, but I’ll tell you when I don’t do my 10 grams a day, what I have noticed is that the afternoon sleepiness kind of slump I get is completely gone if I take my 10 grams a day. 10 grams. I don’t get afternoon sleepiness. I miss it. I get it.
So it’s not like a stored-up kind of thing. It’s like, no, if I miss it that day, it’s noticeable. If I travel and I don’t have it, it’s noticeable. So I’m hooked on the 10 grams a day. If it’s placebo, I don’t care. It works. On top of that, what I’ve also been doing ever since that study came out with 21 hours of sleep deprivation, I take about 20 grams of creatine when I’m traveling and I have to give a talk or I’m doing a podcast, particularly because oftentimes I’m traveling either to Central Time or to Eastern Time. And I’m giving a talk early in the morning, which is 6:00 a.m. my time. I got to be on my game. So I take the 20 grams and I kid you not, it’s like you get this brain boost, but without the caffeine. It’s hard to explain.
Tim Ferriss: Without creepy crawly ants on your skin, jittery caffeine overdose.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right. Without that jittery thing. And even that, sometimes the caffeine isn’t enough if you’re really jet-lagged, especially if you’re going across time zones.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also for me, it’s like I’m a caffeine fast metabolizer. If I have a cup of coffee, I’m on fire for 25 minutes and then I’m sleepy. I think some of that is actually a glucose response, but that’s a whole separate thing. I’ve been using glucometer when I was doing all my ketogenic experiments and so on. I’m like, wow, if I have too much coffee, there is a huge, which is not that surprising, spike in glucose and then a very predictable subsequent drop off. So it doesn’t end up being net net that helpful for me unless I’m doing a 20-minute sprint on something, which is probably never.
So the creatine is super interesting to me. Let me ask some very specific, maybe mundane questions, but I think they’re practical, which is, when these subjects were taking 20 or 25 grams, was that in one sitting? Was that in multiple divided doses? When you take it, is it in powder form? Is it little sachets that you can take with you on travel days? Is it encapsulated? What does it actually look like?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. With respect to all the studies, I don’t remember if they were in one sitting. A lot of studies are. If they do like a 20 gram, it will be in one sitting. What I do is different. I do five-gram doses. So creatine monohydrate is the form I take. It’s the absolute tried and true —
Tim Ferriss: The gold standard. Yeah, it’s been around —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s the gold standard.
Tim Ferriss: It’s been around forever.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. There’s a lot of other marketing out there that talks about other types of creatine, but that’s really the gold standard. And I had Dr. Darren Candow on my podcast. He’s a creatine researcher at the University of Regina in Canada, and we talked all about this and he really convinced me, creatine monohydrate is the way to go. I asked him about every type of creatine under the sun. But the way I take it is in five-gram doses. And so I do five grams first thing in the morning, and then I’ll do my workout and then I do another five grams about 11:00 a.m. And that’s my 10 grams that I get.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: When I’m traveling, I do have these sachets that, again, Thorne makes. By the way, no affiliation. I mean, there’s probably a million other — I like Thorne because their creatine is NSF-certified, and so it’s free of contaminants. I really like that. So again, find your own favorite brand, but I like this brand. And they have sachets, which are five-gram sachets. And so I will have my 10 grams for the day, or again, if I’m traveling for work-related purposes, I will take 15 to 20 grams depending on how much I need. In that case, I will do two 10-gram doses. For me, I can tolerate that. I don’t have any GI problems with it. Some people do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I was going to bring that up.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. Some people do. I think doing the five-gram doses is pretty easy on the gut. Most people don’t have a big problem with the five grams.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, five is fine.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s when they go above that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I’ll say a few things. So the NSF-certified is a pretty simple cheat code just to use as a filtering mechanism for a lot of supplements. And it is shocking how inconsistent supplement contents are. I mean, I’ve looked at lab reviews of 20 off-the-shelf melatonin products, and it ranges from zero melatonin up to 20x the label amount. It’s just bananas. So I use Momentous creatine, but it’s passing the same hurdle.
And I’ll say good news, you can reduce the likelihood of cognitive deficit from sleep deprivation. Bad news is you could increase the likelihood of disaster pants if you have 20 grams at one sitting. And I will say, maybe from personal experience, maybe I’m just talking about somebody else, but if you really want to increase the likelihood of disaster pants, then you can do a bunch of caffeine, like a double espresso or black coffee with MCT powder, and then have your creatine around the same time. That would be asking, you’re going to want to pack some Pampers in your travel kit if you do that. So yeah, just be aware of the GI stuff.
But I’m excited to up my intake, because the science that you cited in the study or studies in your newsletter seemed really compelling. And it’s also one of those supplements where it’s like, okay, look, I assume this is on the grass list. They generally recognized it’s safe, seems very well-tolerated, over decades and decades of research, assuming you don’t have some who knows, right? Really outstanding kidney dysfunction or something, maybe. So why not, in a sense? It’s also relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of things.
Let me ask you, just because this has been on my mind. With the sulforaphane — I mangled the pronunciation a bit. Sulforaphane. Do you take that better on an empty stomach? Better with food? This has become an issue when I’m doing the intermittent fasting sometimes, especially if there’s something like the AREDS 2, which I’m taking for the eye health, which is supposed to be twice a day. And I’m like, oh, it’s part of the reason why I’ve been doing the, quote, unquote, “dirty fasting,” with a little bit of fat in the form of that heavy cream in coffee, was to try to take supplements earlier in the day that are benefited from some type of fat in terms of absorption. Sulforaphane. Does it matter?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I think if you can take it fasted, that’s great. Some people find it kind of as hard on their stomach and so they like to take it with food, and that’s really the only reason to take it with food is because they get upset stomach. It’s like GI problem. So that would be, again, the only really real reason that you would have to really take it with food.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to loop back around just so people aren’t like, “Ferriss, you forgot about vitamin D.” I wanted to talk about vitamin D. So the vitamin D, I’ve taken vitamin D forever, tend to take 5,000 IU a day. I particularly in the summer get I would say at least an hour in the sun without skin protection. And I built up to that. I’m not an idiot about it. And yet, I am barely — in my labs, I’m always barely squeaking by on vitamin D.
And for almost all of my adult friends who get labs — and this is also race agnostic, right? Everybody is deficient or just on the border of being deficient, even if they seem to be taking a lot of supplemental vitamin D and getting a lot of sunshine. And I have to ask myself, what the hell is going on here? In what set of circumstances is it possible that everyone would be so deficient if they seem to be getting a bunch of sunlight, they’re taking a bunch of supplemental vitamin D? Can you shed any light on this?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I can.
Tim Ferriss: Or is there a problem with this measurement in the first place? Which is why I was talking about proxies and confounders and stuff earlier with respect to some of the other studies. Yeah, so please and please educate me.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yes. Okay. So the way vitamin D is measured, so vitamin D actually gets converted into a steroid hormone, and this steroid hormone, essentially, it’s going inside the nucleus of our cells where all of our DNA is and it’s activating 5 percent of the protein encoding human genome. Many of these genes, it activates Klotho. By the way, you mentioned Klotho. Vitamin D is important for activating Klotho.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Nice.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. So very hugely important for dementia risk, which we can talk about. But to answer your question, so your vitamin D levels are measured by a proxy and it’s called 25-hydroxy vitamin D, which is the precursor to the steroid hormone. So essentially, vitamin D3, which is made in your skin, or if you supplement with it, exogenously gets into your bloodstream. And that vitamin D3 then goes to the liver and it’s converted into 25-hydroxy vitamin D. That’s the major circulating form of vitamin D.
After 25-hydroxy vitamin D is made in the liver, it then goes to the kidneys and it’s made into the actual act of steroid hormone, which is called 1,25-hydroxy vitamin. Well, it turns out the enzymes that are doing the conversion of vitamin D3 into that stable form that everyone gets when they’re getting a vitamin D blood test, that’s what they’re looking at, requires magnesium to work. And there have been studies showing that with low magnesium, it doesn’t happen readily at all.
Tim Ferriss: Interesting. Interesting.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And so 50 percent of the US population has insufficient levels of magnesium. So you’re talking about a coin toss here, right? One out of two. One out of two. You have 50/50 chance a person’s not going to be getting enough magnesium. That’s been shown to actually play a role in circulating levels of vitamin D. There have been NHANES studies and stuff showing that people that have low magnesium intake also have low circulating forms of 25-hydroxy vitamin D. So that’s one thing.
Another thing comes down to genetics. There’s actually a lot of people that have SNPs, very common ones that probably came from more southern areas, that don’t make as much vitamin D3 from the sun exposure because probably they’re getting so much sun, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So essentially, there’s the genetic component as well. And I’ve seen a lot of people’s different SNP makeups, and I know quite a few people that actually have to take a super high level of vitamin D3 to actually get enough vitamin D. And then the other thing is that you mentioned earlier the variation between supplements. There have been studies on vitamin D supplements, and it’s the same problem with melatonin. There’s some vitamin D supplements with a fraction of what is stated in terms of concentration of vitamin D3 on the nutrition facts, and then some of them have 10 times as much vitamin D.
So there’s just this huge variation where you’re like, it says it has 5,000 IUs but it only has 500. So there’s a lot of different factors that could be contributing to that as well. And then there’s also in terms of people getting sun exposure, you said you don’t wear sunscreen, some people do. People that have darker skin pigmentation have melanin. That’s a natural sunscreen. There have been studies showing that, for example, out of the University of Chicago, there was a study that was published a few years back showing African-Americans have to stay in the sun six to 10 times as long as a Caucasian to make the same amount of vitamin D3 from the same amount of sun exposure. Because they have a natural sunscreen, melanin, which is that darker skin pigmentation. It’s a natural sunscreen. It’s also why their skin always looks great as they’re aging. You’re like, “Oh, you’re 75? Your skin looks like you’re 30.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I remember, I won’t mention him by name, but meeting this African-American fellow. And I thought he was 25, and he was 53 and had five big — and the way we got to that is I was like, “Oh, are you married?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I have five kids.” And I was like, “Wait, what? You have five kids? You don’t look Mormon.” Like, “Wait, what’s going on here?” And lo and behold.
So let me dig into some of this real quick. So recommended brands for vitamin D and how much should someone like me potentially be taking as a starting point, because I’m also wary of taking too much vitamin D. I don’t want to overdose on vitamin D. It seems like there are some risks associated with that. Maybe I’m overstating them, but how do you think about that? And then in terms of this rate limiting factor that you mentioned, magnesium, what type of magnesium? How much? How should I think about both of these?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Okay. So first of all, we need to talk about vitamin D levels and what the optimal levels are, and that’s really important for someone to figure out how much they should supplement with. I tend to think anywhere between 40, 60 to 80, 40 to 80 nanograms per mil, you’re in an optimal range. I like 40 to 60. I think that’s my sweet spot, and that’s because there’s lots of studies out there showing all-cause mortalities lower within that range. Fifty nanograms per mil would be great. I mean, that’s a great place to be. If you’re below 30, if you’re about just 30, you might want to try to get up to 40.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s just say for argument’s sake that I’m at 30. I think I’m probably closer to 40, but let’s say it’s 30.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Okay. For someone that’s at 30 nanograms per mil is supplementing with 5,000 IUs a day and getting an hour of sun in the summer without sunscreen, that you probably should be closer to 50 nanograms per mil, I would say, if you’re taking that —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ll check my last labs. I just had them pulled two weeks ago, so I’ll double check.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right. So for someone in that case, you might go up to 7,000 IUs and check and see where you’re at a month later. And if you then are in the 40 to 50 range, then that’s your optimal dose to take. And this is an important conversation to have, Tim, because it really is, there’s an individual component here and people just want to, at the end of the day, they want to — how much do I take? How much do I take?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, you have to get a vitamin D blood test. This is one of those —
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: This is one of those that you have to really measure because, as you mentioned, there’s huge variation there in terms of absorption. And then the magnesium issue, there’s the RDA for magnesium. So for men, it’s about 400 milligrams a day. For women, it’s about 300 milligrams a day of magnesium intake from diet or supplemental sources. If you’re taking a supplement, and also if you’re athletic and sweating a lot and using the sauna, those requirements can go up between 10 percent to 20 percent, depending on how physically active you are. If you’re like the endurance athlete, you’re on the 20 percent higher range. If you’re more just like the average, like I’m a committed exerciser, then you might have to go up 10 percent above that.
So typically, the best forms of magnesium to take are the forms of magnesium that are the organic forms. So that would mean it’s bound to salt, like magnesium citrate or magnesium malate or magnesium taurate. Those are more bioavailable than magnesium oxide, for example. There’s also magnesium glycinate, which is also a very bioavailable form. It’s the form that I take as well. And dose range, you can take 300 milligrams a day and probably not have any GI distress. And so that gets you most of the way there. And then you get the rest from your diet. You’re eating some leafy greens. You’re eating maybe some almonds or something, which are really high in magnesium. If you’re not getting any greens at all, then you’re going to have to go up a little bit more to the 400-450 milligram range, especially if you’re athletic. But that if you’re taking something like electrolytes, you’re getting some magnesium there so you can figure out how much magnesium is in your electrolyte and that can be counted towards it as well.
There’s also magnesium threonate, which is the magnesium form that is allegedly able to cross the blood-brain barrier better than other forms of magnesium that I mentioned. And I say allegedly because it’s animal studies that have shown that. There have been a couple of human studies that were, unfortunately, there’s a conflict of interest. They were done by the makers of the magnesium threonate supplement. So that’s always important to keep in mind. But they have shown that magnesium threonate could improve some cognitive scores if you kind of pulled all the cognitive scores together. And so I think that there’s no reason why if you’re interested in cognition and stuff, trying the magnesium threonate.
A lot of people like it as well. So that’s another form of magnesium, although I do think you should probably take some magnesium glycinate along with that because you don’t want all the magnesium going into your brain. You want some of it going into your liver and activating the enzymes that are converting vitamin D3 into 25-hydroxy vitamin D. So that is something to keep in mind if that form of magnesium indeed is going into the brain more, you want to make sure you’re getting some of the other forms to cover the other bases of other organs as well.
Tim Ferriss: What brand of vitamin D supplementation and magnesium glycinate do you use? Is that also Thorne, or are they other suppliers?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I use Pure Encapsulations for the vitamin D. I have some friends, mutual friends of ours, that like the VESIsorb Vitamin D3. So people that are not able to increase their vitamin D as well, VESIsorb really increases the bioavailability of a lot of things, including ubiquinol, the CoQ10 I mentioned. I should have mentioned that I buy my dad. That’s the form I get for him because it increases the bioavailability. Also, some fish oil, it’s been shown to increase the bioavailability. So VESIsorb Vitamin D3 can be found at Pure Encapsulations. I don’t have an affiliation with them, either. They also have a lot of clean third party tested products as well. And then I use their magnesium glycinate. For the magnesium threonate, I use Xymogen. I like the Xymogen magnesium threonate.
Tim Ferriss: Great. All right, thank you. I’ll get on the magnesium, and I’ll also check my last labs. I mean, I am very bespoke about this stuff, and to your point, you got to check your levels, guys. You can’t just be shooting in the dark here. It’s not a good idea.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Where should we zig and zag to next? Do you want to talk about microplastics and mitigation strategies?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s really a big mess. And the microplastics are now, it’s not just, okay, well, I’m not going to drink out of bottled water, plastic bottled water. If you can get any kind of water filter, any kind of water filter is great. Reverse osmosis is the best because it filters out the smallest, smallest nanoplastics, which are the kind that are actually crossing the blood brain barrier and getting into the brain. In the brain, they’re associated with Alzheimer’s disease and all kinds of things, but we now know they’re in chewing gum. So anything with the word “gum base” is made of a plastic polymer. So if you chew gum, it has to be plastic-free gum. And it’s not the same. I’ll tell you that. But it’s in gum. It’s tea bags. Tea bags. If you make tea with tea bags, all sorts of tea bags, they’re releasing just thousands of microplastic into your beverage.
They’re in essentially everything. And the problem is that it’s very hard to avoid. The best things that you can do to avoid them is reduce exposure, which would be the water filter, try to avoid drinking out of any type of water that’s in a plastic bottle. But it turns out a new study just came out showing it’s also been found in glass bottles. I know. It’s like, are you kidding me? Come on.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Apparently, the paint that’s on the lid of the glass bottle is shedding little particles into the beverage, and those are microplastics because the paint has got plastic in it. And so essentially my take home from this is still, you want to probably use — if you’re traveling and you have to choose between a plastic water bottle with water in it and a glass one to buy, I would still buy the glass one because the particle size is higher. It’s larger in the glass bottles, and that doesn’t get absorbed in the gut very well at all. If any, you actually excrete it through feces.
And so I think the next study that’s going to be done will be to show this essentially. I’m sort of speculating here, but because the size matters, the size of plastics and the plastic bottles are super small, and that’s really absorbed well by the gut epithelia and taken up into the bloodstream and gets to the other organs. Also, the plastic chemicals like BPA are in plastic. They’re not in the glass. So I still think that opting for glass is the best option. Even though that study came out, “Oh, glass has more plastic than plastic bottles.” It’s like one of those sensational headlines. The devil’s in the details, right? There’s always a nuance there. And in this case, the size does —
Tim Ferriss: The size matters. In this case, size matters.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Size matters in this case, for sure. But when it comes to people want to know, is there anything I can do to sort of detox these microplastics? That’s the big concern that people have. Well, if I can’t reduce, if it’s impossible to reduce my exposure because they’re just absolutely everywhere, then can I sort of get rid of them? And unfortunately, there’s not a lot of evidence right now out there that you can perhaps some of this electrophoresis sort of thing where you kind of filter your blood. But who’s doing that? Maybe you’ll do it, but that’s not something that the public’s generally going to do. And I don’t even know that I’m going to do it.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also, even if they were going to do it or willing to do it, it’s not readily accessible or cost-effective for people to use.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So again, your best strategy here is minimizing your exposure to them. And the way to do that for one would be obviously a water filter, top of the list, because the water that’s coming through your tap, through your sink, does have microplastics in it, and that’s a major, major source of microplastic exposure for many, many people. So if you can get any type of water filter again. You can even get countertop reverse osmosis water filters. Those are great for filtering out the majority of microplastics. Big, big, big —
Tim Ferriss: I wonder if the Big Berkey countertop filtration system is effective at filtering out microplastics? I don’t know.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It is. It’s effective at filtering out microplastics. It’s not clear about the nano-nano, like the super, super small size ones. It might. It might not. I don’t know, but it does, definitely the micro size ones, it does filter out microplastics. So the thing with reverse osmosis is it’s really filtering out all, even the nanoplastics as well. Of course, you have to consider re-adding certain minerals and trace elements that are found in water back to your water. And some reverse osmosis companies do that. You can have them put on a filter that’ll just add it back in after it filters out all the microplastics. But you can also just buy mineral drops and put those in your water, or you can take a mineral supplement that has some of these minerals that are taken out as well.
The other thing I do want to mention is that the plastic-associated chemicals are another concern, and that would be like the BPA, BPS. These chemicals are endocrine disruptors. They disrupt hormones. They’re also associated with Alzheimer’s disease or associated with cancer, all sorts of things. And those can actually — I think, actually. This is a big speculation on my part, just based on animal studies. I think sulforaphane plays a role in detoxing BPA from our system, and that’s because of the whole situation where it activates the very same enzymes that do excrete BPA through urine. It does that, and it’s been shown in animal studies, animal studies that are given sulforaphane, and then given a high dose of BPA, it completely blunts the toxicity of the BPA, which is pretty interesting as well.
So the other thing to keep in mind is heat, and I’ll say this. All the to-go cups that you’re out there buying when you go to your favorite coffee shop, fill in the blank for the most part, with the exception of the Blue Bottle Coffee, phenomenal, they’re great, all these paper cups are lined with plastic. And when you add a hot beverage into the plastic lining, it releases all these microplastics into your beverage, and it releases the chemicals like BPA into them, like 50-fold. Blue Bottle Coffee, by the way, they apparently line their cups with sugarcane, polylactic acid, and so they don’t have any plastic.
I remember the other day I went into a Blue Bottle coffee shop and I was like, I really wanted to get a hot tea, and I was like, “Do you guys line your cups with plastic?” And she’s like, “No, we line them with sugarcane.” I was like, “Yes.” So that’s something to keep in mind. You see a lot of people drinking these to-go cups everywhere, and you’re pouring a hot beverage into it. It’s a really, really major source of microplastic exposure because you’re accelerating the breakdown of the plastic. Heat accelerates the breakdown of the plastic, and essentially, you’re doing that in real time, like in an instant, right?
Tim Ferriss: And ditto for the —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Bring your own cup. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — teabags, right? So.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And the teabags, so you have to do loose leaf tea, which is what — now I’m always, it’s got to be loose leaf. I’ll bring my own little — I’ll sometimes open the teabag out and I bring my own little tea steeper thing with me that you can —
Tim Ferriss: Like the little half globes that connect together.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, exactly. Mine are the ones that you kind of squeeze on it and opens up and then closes the clamps back together. But yeah, so I use that because the teabags, again, you’re getting the heat on top of the plastic, polymers that are making up the teabag and accelerating the breakdown of plastic. So you’re drinking plastic beverage.
And there’s all these health consequences now associated with microplastics. You mentioned the brain. It’s been found 20 times — to accumulate 20 times more in the brain than in other organs. And people with Alzheimer’s disease have up to 20 times more microplastics in their brain than people that didn’t have Alzheimer’s disease. And then the same goes for cardiovascular disease. There’s been a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine about a year ago, showing that people that had microplastics in their whatever aortic part that they were doing surgery on, those individuals ended up dying of a heart attack within the next three years versus ones that didn’t have any microplastics.
Anyways, all sorts of interesting stuff. We don’t know enough about it. But I think enough said, we do know that they’re not good and we want to try to avoid them as much as we can, and that they are pervasive. They’re everywhere. It’s ubiquitous.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s some simple things people can do. I mean, this is not necessarily in the same category, but it’s like, look, the effects at least seem to be, I don’t know if they’re well established, maybe there are animal studies on this, but certainly there’s a lot of seemingly compelling evidence pointing to the effects of, say, phthalates as endocrine disruptors on male fertility. And it’s like, look, if you have shampoo or soap with a really strong fragrance, just stay away from it. I mean, they’re very simple guidelines for some of these things that I think can be very helpful.
Yeah, the microplastic stuff is kind of terrifying. I did not realize the gum. I knew about the teabags, the water filtration. Did not realize the gum. I don’t chew a lot of gum, but one of my relatives who has Alzheimer’s has chewed four packs of gum a day for 10 years. And I was like, “Oh, shit. I wonder if that’s a contributor.”
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Wow, that’s crazy. I started chewing gum when I learned about the research showing that xylitol could inhibit some of the S-mutagens bacteria that are involved in cavity formation.
Tim Ferriss: Then a few years later, you’re like, “Goddamn it.”
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, I was able to reverse cavities multiple times, and my doctor was like, “Keep doing it.” I’m like, “Yes, the xylitol.” And then I found out, it was like this year, I found this out, Tim. This year the study came out with the gum, and I was devastated. I mean, I’ve chewed so much gum, so much gum, and I’ve let my child chew it, and it’s like, all I could think about was how great it was for the teeth, and now it’s like, oh my God, this has been a source of microplastics that I had no idea. I did thankfully find an alternative xylitol source of gum that is microplastic-free, but yeah —
Tim Ferriss: It’s like chewing on bark? Is it like chewing on —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s pretty much bark.
Tim Ferriss: — tasteless bark?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s actually made from bark.
Tim Ferriss: That’s awesome.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: No, it’s made from trees, like some kind of sap or something from the bark.
Tim Ferriss: Resin or something, yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds delicious. You can’t just do xylitol mints? You have to chew it? I guess you have to get it up —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: You can do xylitol mints. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: You can do xylitol mints. I have those as well.
Tim Ferriss: Well, just to, on the same thread of you don’t always get it completely right, I was looking at some of the research docs that I have in front of me, and there’s one section that I highlighted, which was each three-hour increase in nighttime fasting was linked to 20 percent lower odds of elevated hemoglobin A1C, this long-term marker of blood glucose. And then one of your bullets was the effects of alcohol in the brain and cancer risk, and so I was reading this document over dinner. I sent this to you, and my time zones are all screwed up, because I just got back from Polynesia, and so I’m eating at 10:00 p.m., first of all, and then I had a glass of wine, so I put the glass of wine on top of my research document with all of this text visible, and I sent it to you and I was like, am I doing it right? You’re not going to always get it right. But let’s talk about — do you want to talk about the booze for a second?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I mean, so alcohol, yeah, and especially since we were talking about APOE4.
Tim Ferriss: Just to depress people after the microplastics?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I know. It’s like, “You can’t have any enjoyment at all if you want to live a long, healthy life.” No, you need to find a good balance, obviously. So alcohol is — it’s a toxin. It’s also a lot of fun. I mean, it’s fun to drink and have a glass of wine. Sometimes it helps — it feels like you’re lowering your stress, lowering some inhibitions. It’s fun to do with a group of friends and stuff.
It’s not so great for the brain though, and certainly, if you’re concerned about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia risk, and I will say that there’s been a lot of mixed research out there looking at alcohol consumption and dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, where some of it says, well, if you’re doing moderate alcohol consumption, you can actually have a protective effect against dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, where it’s like this idea that alcohol, like a glass of wine a day is actually beneficial for you. So you should be doing that.
Tim Ferriss: I wonder if it’s actually the social interactions facilitated by alcohol versus the moderate alcohol itself, I wonder.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, there’s a lot of things going on here. Certainly social interactions, that’s a confounding factor. Also, when people then looked for their APOE genotype, it was found that it was actually in the non-APOE4 carriers that you would find that benefit, not in the APOE4 carriers. And then on top of that, there’s been all this research that, over the years, has looked at moderate alcohol consumption, and depending on the study, that number changes, which is such a big bummer. It’s like, well, what does that even mean? In some cases, it can be seven drinks a day in some cases.
Tim Ferriss: Seven drinks a day?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Sorry, a week.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Oh, my gosh. No. In some cases it’s seven drinks a week for a woman, but for a man, it’s like 14 drinks a week.
Tim Ferriss: I wonder who authored that study.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, exactly. It’s a big difference. But on average, moderate alcohol consumption is more like seven drinks a week. Seven drinks a day would definitely be heavy alcohol consumption. That would be more like substance abuse, substance use or use disorder. Let’s cut the substance abuse part out. Alcohol use —
Tim Ferriss: Why can’t you say abuse anymore? Why do these things have to keep changing? It’s so ridiculous.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: And it’s hard for me because I’m always tripping on my words.
Tim Ferriss: Use disorder sounds better than abuse? I mean, what are the reasons behind this? Do you know?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I guess it’s politically correct.
Tim Ferriss: Because I’m finding all this psychedelic stuff, and it was abuse for a long time, and then all of a sudden, nope. Verboten. Can’t say that. Who knows? Anyway.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s funny. I still have read so much of the literature that I still say abuse, because that’s what I’m familiar reading. But anyways, back to this, what I was saying, which is seven weeks — sorry. All right, we’re going to cut this out, Tim. Seven drinks a week.
Tim Ferriss: How many drinks have you had before this podcast, Rhonda?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, I did have some ketone ester, where there’s a little bit of alcohol that is involved with that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Watch out for the —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: There’s been —
Tim Ferriss: — 1,3-Butanediol. Anyway.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right. There’s something called the sick quitter hypothesis, which is essentially a lot of these studies we’re comparing people that are drinking this moderate alcohol consumption with non-consumers, people that abstain from drinking. And it turns out that many, many, many, many studies did not account for the sick-quitter aspect, which is essentially —
Tim Ferriss: What is sick quitter? Is that English?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: — someone gets sick. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, sick quitter. I got it. Okay.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Sick quitter.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Quitter, yes. So essentially, what it means is they get sick, and so they quit drinking alcohol. And then when they’re filling out their questionnaire, however many years later, whatever, they are asked, “How many drinks do you have a week?” And they say “Zero” because they quit, but they don’t — the question wasn’t asked, “Were you a former drinker?”
Tim Ferriss: The prior drinking habit.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yes, very important. And now, more studies are, when they’re doing the questionnaires, are asking that question. But many, many, many years and many, many studies did not ask that question. And so it’s very possible when you’re looking at these cohorts of people that are comparing moderate alcohol consumption to no alcohol consumption, they’re saying, “Oh, look, there’s a benefit. You have less cardiovascular disease risk. You have less dementia risk if you drink versus not drink. We don’t really know if that’s because these people were former drinkers and did so much damage already that that’s why they’re getting dementia more.
Tim Ferriss: In the non-drinker group.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: In the supposed non-drinker group.
Tim Ferriss: Quote-unquote non drinker group.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right, which could have been a former drinker. But I think at the end of the day, when you look at alcohol and cancer, it’s just unambiguous. Alcohol is now classified as — I think it’s a — is it a group-1 carcinogen? Where it’s known to play a role in causing cancer. There’s no gray area here, and there’s many, many different cancers that it’s associated with. So alcohol does get metabolized into acetaldehyde — that is something that can be a mutagen. It is a mutagen. It can cause cancer.
And so there’s a lot of different cancers that’s associated with breast cancer, colon cancer, for example. Breast cancer is a big one because women’s lifetime risk of breast cancer is already high. I mean, a woman has a lifetime risk of one in eight of getting breast cancer. So if you have a room with eight people, one of those women, if you’re at a dinner party, and eight women are there, then one of those women will come down and be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.
So when you add alcohol consumption on top of that, if you’re talking about moderate alcohol consumption, that risk can go to one in six, which is very significant for lifetime risk. So I do think that alcohol, I mean obviously some people enjoy it, and I don’t know that there’s any amount that’s actually safe, but if you’re really looking for a number, it seems like one or two drinks a week seems to be the safe spot.
I mean, the safest would be zero, right? Zero drinks. But if you’re really not wanting to have the damage, the light drinking, which is the one to two drinks a week, that’s where you’re probably the best off. Talking about a weekend, you have a weekend and you’re doing a glass of wine, maybe Friday or Saturday night. I think that’s the safest if you’re looking for some alcohol consumption. If you’re going above that, just be aware there is definitely a risk of increasing dementia, increasing cancer risk.
However, there are other lifestyle factors that also play a role here, like being obese and exercise. In fact, some of the alcohol and dementia studies that have shown an increase in dementia incidence with alcohol consumption were negated by people that were highly physically active. So I do think there’s other things to consider. You can’t just silo everything, right? I mean, you’ve got to look at the whole lifestyle.
Tim Ferriss: So air squats before gelato and my tequila shots?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me ask you, what is the purported mechanism, maybe it’s known, by which alcohol increases the likelihood that you’ll experience some of these maladies like cancer, dementia, et cetera? Is acetaldehyde acting as a mutagen and therefore just smashing your DNA, so you have these mutations that then proliferate and turn into some type of dangerous cancer? Is there more to the story of mechanism of action?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. I mean, acetaldehyde is one aspect of it. It’s an important one. But the alcohol itself is causing inflammation. I mean, it’s causing gut permeability, essentially. It’s very hard on the gut. And so what ends up happening is you release inflammatory factors into your bloodstream, like the polysaccharide gets released into the bloodstream. Inflammation gets activated. Inflammation is a major cause of cancer and also brain aging. So the brain aging aspect is definitely linked to the oxidative stress component and the inflammation component. Damage is happening to neurons, and I think one of the reasons why people with APOE4 are a little more sensitive to alcohol is because the repair processes in individuals with APOE4 isn’t as robust.
Tim Ferriss: It’s compromised already.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It’s compromised already, right. And so they’re not able to repair that damage that’s being generated from the alcohol, whereas people without the APOE4 somewhat can repair it a little bit better. And then you add the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier on top of that, and then you’re just getting more inflammation into the brain. And neuroinflammation is a major cause in Alzheimer’s disease. I mean, it’s really a known factor now. And you’re disrupting mitochondria, you’re disrupting — just everything you know about to be important for health is sort of affected by alcohol, through a variety of mechanisms.
Tim Ferriss: Do you ever drink?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I don’t drink very much. I used to drink more. Sometimes I go several months without having anything.
Tim Ferriss: I do. So I’m not putting you on the stand here.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, no.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t drink all the time, but I’m just giving you a little leeway.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. I used to drink at least a couple times a week where I would do the weekend thing, but I don’t drink much anymore. Once in a while I’ll have a glass of Prosecco for a celebration. I do enjoy it, but I definitely try to limit it to certainly once a week. But like I said, these days I’ll go a couple of months without having anything, and then I’ll have a social situation where I like to do it. And the great thing about that is I’m so sensitive to the alcohol that I’m such a lightweight, and it’s great because I get one glass of Prosecco and I’m like, “This is amazing.”
Tim Ferriss: So I’ll say, what fringe benefit, and this could be —
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Oh.
Tim Ferriss: Go ahead.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Can I mention one other thing, Tim?
Tim Ferriss: Jump in. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So I forgot to mention with respect to the dementia risk and alcohol, you asked about mechanisms, the sleep aspect, right?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure. That’s a huge one.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yes, it’s a huge one because alcohol does disrupt sleep.
Tim Ferriss: That’s massive, yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Massive. I know people that use it because it helps them fall asleep easier, so it’s definitely something that decreases that sleep latency. People can fall asleep easier, but it completely disrupts. So they have more awakenings in the middle in the night, and it disrupts REM sleep. So there’s every reason to definitely not drink and certainly don’t drink close to bedtime. You want to kind of be able to get rid of the alcohol before you go to sleep. Going back to your picture, you were doing everything wrong, but —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that was, yeah. Am I doing it right? Yeah, that was very much deliberate.
Rhonda, one thing, and I’m so curious if maybe you’ve heard reports of this, I could ask my audience and figure it out. Wasn’t placebo effect because I didn’t expect it, but it seems like when in ketosis past 1.5 millimolars, even above 1.2 for me, and I use a precision extra device to track that. I’ve tried a number of other devices that are remarkably erratic. In any case, I am much more sensitive to alcohol, much, much, much more sensitive to alcohol, which is great, because then I’m a cheap date. I could have my one glass of mezcal or whatever, and I’m good. And I don’t drink super often. I might take three or four weeks off, but then it’ll be like this week I’m in New York City, this is a city of drinking. A lot of people have decided to do ketamine instead, which I think is a Faustian bargain, shitty trade for a number of reasons.
And then I’ll stop. I’ve a party with my oldest friends this weekend. I’m sure there’s going to be drinking, and then I’ll stop for two weeks, and take a month off or two months off or something like that. It’s kind of how I operate these days. But the ketosis seems to sensitize me, which I thought was pretty interesting. I hadn’t noticed that before when I was in ketosis, probably because I wasn’t drinking during those periods.
But on the ketamine substitute, right? “Oh, this is what I’m using now as a healthier alternative.” I think the “Is this risky?” question is often, “Is this risky or is this bad for me?” can be answered in absolute terms, but it can also be answered in relative terms. So zero alcohol might be better than two drinks. Seems pretty unequivocally that’s the case. But if you then ask in relative terms as compared to what, if you’re swapping in another behavior or smoking after your dinner, or — I mean, smoking’s a whole different kettle of fish that we could unpack some other time. Nicotine’s pretty interesting, but lung cancer less interesting. There is the, as compared to what, when people fight another coping mechanism.
So I just wanted to throw that out there as just another question that I think is worth people asking. If they’re going to abandon something, that’s great if you can just delete it without replacing it with something. But if there is a substitute, if there is an alternative or something that you may end up adding to your behavior or your consumption, just to be aware of that, because you have to measure A versus B, not just a versus lack of A. So just wanted to throw that out there. I’ve seen so many people unravel from ketamine and that I feel a moral responsibility to mention it because it can be so, so incredibly addictive. Fast-acting, short duration, and even though it is very successfully used to treat, say, treatment-resistant depression when it’s administered in a clinic at reasonably higher doses for, let’s just say, six infusions over two weeks, something like that. John Krystal at Yale’s done a lot of great research, and his teams and co-authors — used recreationally, it actually increases your predisposition to depression.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I think psilocybin is a better candidate when it comes to something like that, because it’s really not addicting. And I don’t know if you saw this, Tim, but this really — it’s, of course, people may not be aware, but it’s been shown to treat depression as well, and in more than one study.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. The two major applications are major depressive disorder and alcohol use disorder, as it stands right now.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Right. This study just came out, like, gosh, this last two weeks or something showing — is the animal study that psilocybin increased life expectancy by almost 20 percent in mice.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I saw that. And I think that was out of Emory? Am I making that up?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I think it was.
Tim Ferriss: And I remember looking at it because I was like, wait a fucking second. I think they were giving something like five milligrams of psilocybin to these rats or mice. And I’m going to mess up the numbers a little bit, but I was like, wait a second, because I’ve funded a lot of the science, and for humans who are walking around at one, let’s just call it whatever, 125 to 200 pounds, it’s 25 to 30 milligrams. So on a mix-per-kicks basis, are those rats getting the equivalent of 300 dried grams of mushrooms on a monthly basis?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: No.
Tim Ferriss: I was like, let me look at that. Let me look at that a little more closely. And the metabolism is very different, but it’s still non-trivial. I do think those little furry friends are probably tripping balls, even though I — I do think the life-extension stuff is interesting, and I would say just anecdotally, looking at people who have consumed in South America, ayahuasca for decades, they are — can’t prove cause and effect, but almost always sharper than the rest of the people in their age cohort, almost always, which is interesting. I mean it raises more questions than it provides answers.
But the life extension stuff is interesting. And I’ve been funding some science that Chuck Nichols is doing, looking at the anti-inflammatory applications of different psychedelic compounds, and they are profound, really profound. And what makes it most interesting is that it can be achieved depending on the compound, and he’s tested dozens of them with very, very trace quantities, in sub-perceptual quantities. You do not need any hallucination, any sort of reality distortion to achieve the anti-inflammatory effects.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: So like a microdosing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: A microdosing of it.
Tim Ferriss: Even less than what someone would consider a microdose, like a nanodose.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: It’s remarkable. And part of my reason for looking at the fasting, the ketogenic diet, also looking at cold exposure, and most recently, this is a whole separate topic, obviously for another time. I’ll be having a scientist on this podcast soon, super credible, very, very well-cited, to talk about vagus nerve stimulation. But when you look at how fasting, I was talking about this old Soviet work looking at schizophrenia, okay, interesting, ketosis for epilepsy and also all sorts of psychiatric conditions, but also things like potentially rheumatoid arthritis or any number of Crohn’s disease, let’s say in the case of vagus nerve stimulation.
My theory also with psychedelics is that in a lot of cases, the anti-depressive effects, anti-depressant effects, the anxiolytic effects, this would be true for exogenous ketones as well, maybe largely, I don’t think it’s a trivial piece of the puzzle, mediated by anti-inflammatory effects addressing chronic inflammation, including neuroinflammation.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: And so as you said, if you’re chronically suffering from neuroinflammation does not bode well for later life with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and things like this, so I’m trying to throw everything sort of the kitchen sink at this to see what these subjective and then measurable objective effects are. So it’s like, okay, if I did intermittent fasting and I’m doing then cold exposure during — which, by the way, past a certain point seems to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, particularly with certain breathing patterns. Like, okay, if I did that during the intermittent fast, I’m taking the sulforaphane, doing all that stuff, and then the exercise we talked about and once a quarter doing a three to seven — let’s call it probably every quarter. I used to do a three-day fast. I don’t think I’d do a seven-day every quarter. That’s probably once a year.
But just looking at like, okay, and then the curcumin. It’s like, all right. If we threw four or five at this problem and didn’t get too crazy, go “Murica!” Like more is better, we did the minimal effective dose, but recognized there might be a synergistic effect, like what happens, and what can we measure? So I’d like to do, and I’m in the position where I could spend a lot of money just to see, okay, if we take out my white blood cells and then look at their ability to produce cytokines after certain interventions, like, oh, okay, cool, let’s spend the money. Let’s see what happens after you do this stuff for a couple of weeks. Very, very, very, very interested in all of this.
Let’s do this, Rhonda. Where can people find you, find what you’re up to, get into all things Rhonda Patrick?
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I have a podcast. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube. It’s called FoundMyFitness. You can also just search Rhonda Patrick.
Tim Ferriss: One of the OGs. You’ve been doing it for a while now.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Doing it for a while, yeah. And I’ve got a website, foundmyfitness.com. You can find all my stuff there. You can follow me on Twitter, or sorry, X.
Tim Ferriss: I still say Twitter.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I still do it. I still do it. You can call me on X or Instagram, FoundMyFitness, all one word, or look, just search my name, Dr. Rhonda Patrick.
Tim Ferriss: And you have a newsletter.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I have a newsletter. I have a newsletter, yeah. I send out a weekly email that covers some fascinating new either science, health, fitness, nutrition-related study, and usually it’s applicable. Sometimes it’s something that’s misunderstood in the media, and I break it down every week. I sent you the creatine one. We covered a Vitamin D, dementia one as well. I mean a lot of different fascinating studies. So you can again find that on my website, foundmyfitness.com. You can sign up for the newsletter there.
Tim Ferriss: Awesome. Yeah, I took so many notes, as always. I always take a lot of notes when we have our conversations, not necessarily on the podcast, but also in our text exchanges. Very actionable. I so appreciate what you do in the world. You’ve called a lot of things early. Looking at our timelines has been wild, to look back and I’m like, “Wow, April, 2014, talking about the stuff that now all the fitness influencers are ranting and raving about today in 2025.” It’s like, yeah, you’ve called a lot of things early, and I appreciate your ability to simplify without mangling. Simplify without disfiguring the science. I really respect that. It’s not easy to do. It is such a service to people who care about being scientifically literate, but they also care about and benefit from someone who can take what could be impenetrable and translate it without mistranslating it into something that they can test with limited downside and plausible or supported upside. I just think it’s such a tremendous service. So I appreciate you, Rhonda. I really do.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I appreciate you too, Tim. Thank you for all you do, and your podcasts have been great. I’ve listened to them over the years. You’re one of the few podcasts that I’ve listened to, so you’ve got great, insightful, thoughtful questions and I’ve read your books, so I appreciate all you do. So the feeling’s mutual, and I’m glad we get to still have conversations over 10 years later.
Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. I love it. Yeah. The long game. It’s fun to play the long game. So nice to see you, Rhonda. Everyone, we will put links to everything Rhonda Patrick in the show notes. Check her out. You’ll not be disappointed. And as always, until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself, and thank you for tuning in.
All right, so that’s a wrap. Thank you, Rhonda. Really appreciate it.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Same. Thank you.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. — Protocols for Fasting, Lowering Dementia Risk, Reversing Heart Aging, Using Sauna for Longevity (Hotter is Not Better), and a Few Supplements That Might Actually Matter (#819) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-07-24 22:24:15
Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. (@foundmyfitness) is a biomedical scientist and the founder of FoundMyFitness, a platform dedicated to delivering rigorous, evidence-based insights on improving healthspan and mitigating age-related diseases. Through her podcast, website, and YouTube channel, reaching millions globally, she translates complex science into actionable strategies for metabolic health, brain aging, and overall improved healthspan.
Dr. Patrick’s research explores genetic determinants of nutritional response, metabolic health, micronutrient deficiencies, sleep biology, and hormetic stressors, such as exercise, heat, cold exposure, fasting, and phytochemicals. She is an associate scientist and board member at the Fatty Acid Research Institute, where her work focuses on the role of omega-3 fatty acids in metabolic health and brain aging. Her peer-reviewed publications have appeared in top-tier journals, including Nature Cell Biology, The FASEB Journal, and Experimental Gerontology.
By uniting scientific integrity with protocol-driven precision, Dr. Patrick equips individuals and organizations alike with practical, scientifically sound strategies for optimizing health and longevity.
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The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
“After two years of taking the multivitamin, they had improved cognition on a battery of different tests that equated to reducing global cognitive aging by about two years. And on top of that, they reduced their episodic aging by five years. Almost five years. It was 4.8 years.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“A 70-year-old makes about four times less vitamin D than their former 20-year-old self.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“There have now been enough studies that have come out looking at cardiorespiratory fitness in the sense of VO2 max and how people with a higher cardiorespiratory fitness have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“People end up eating about 200 fewer calories per day when they’re doing some form of intermittent fasting.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“If you have a low cardiorespiratory fitness and you go anywhere above that from low to low-normal, it’s associated with a two-year increased life expectancy. And people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness actually have a higher all-cause mortality that’s comparable or worse than people with known diseases like type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or smokers, for example. So in other words, being sedentary is a disease. And we need to think about it as a disease, and we should be trying to train to improve our VO2 max.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“Over the last few years, intermittent fasting has kind of gotten a bad rap because people now equate it with, ‘Oh, loss of muscle mass. I’m going to be catabolic.’ Well, in order to be in a repair mode, you actually do need to be in a catabolic mode.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“50 percent of the US population has insufficient levels of magnesium. So you’re talking about a coin toss here, right? One out of two.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
“A woman has a lifetime risk of one in eight of getting breast cancer. So if you have a room with eight people, one of those women, if you’re at a dinner party, and eight women are there, then one of those women will come down and be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. So when you add alcohol consumption on top of that, if you’re talking about moderate alcohol consumption, that risk can go to one in six, which is very significant for lifetime risk.”
— Dr. Rhonda Patrick
The post Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. — Protocols for Fasting, Lowering Dementia Risk, Reversing Heart Aging, Using Sauna for Longevity (Hotter is Not Better), and a Few Supplements That Might Actually Matter (#819) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-07-02 10:31:32
In this special episode, my friend—and fan-favorite guest—Dr. Peter Attia takes the mic as guest host. Peter sits down with legendary trader John Arnold, widely considered the greatest energy trader of all time. Today, through his foundation Arnold Ventures, John applies the same rigorous thinking to some of America’s toughest social challenges—criminal justice reform, healthcare policy, and K–12 education, to name just a few.
This interview originally aired on Peter’s excellent podcast The Drive. You can check it out at PeterAttiaMD.com, or subscribe to The Drive wherever you get your podcasts.
Please enjoy!
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
[00:00:00] Start.
[00:05:37] Peter Attia’s intro: who is John Arnold?
[00:08:38] John’s background, upbringing, and early entrepreneurial tendencies.
[00:21:16] John’s time and rise at Enron.
[00:33:40] Characteristics that made John an exceptional natural gas trader and how they translate to his philanthropic work.
[00:41:10] The collapse of Enron.
[00:46:46] The success of John’s hedge fund, and his early interest in philanthropy.
[01:02:03] The infamous 2006 trade that brought down Amaranth Advisors.
[01:08:28] John’s analytical prowess and emphasis on fundamentals.
[01:15:13] The decision to become a full-time philanthropist and the founding of Arnold Ventures.
[01:25:03] Education — John’s quest to fundamentally change K-12 education.
[01:30:36] Strategic philanthropy — preventing problems by attacking root causes and creating structural change.
[01:37:50] The criminal justice system — structural changes needed to address mass incarceration, policing practices, and recidivism.
[01:55:07] Re-imagining prisons to reduce recidivism.
[02:02:27] US health care policy — John’s focus on drug prices, and the severe consequences of not making system changes.
[02:20:00] Climate change — the bipartisan role of John’s foundation.
[02:23:52] Advice for young adults interested in philanthropy.
[02:30:52] Parting thoughts.
Who is John?
Arnold Ventures
“Our philanthropic intent is to give away the vast majority of our money during our lifetime.”
An entrepreneur from a young age
“I ended up spending a couple summers just full time on this baseball card, really geographic arbitrage and information arbitrage, that I would have a sense of who the best buyer was for every product.”
Defining arbitrage—
What he wanted to do after college
“I was the guy that was trying to get out of there and into the game as quickly as possible. Every day I was at college, it was one less day that I had to be in the game.”
What that meant to the industry:
In 1995, there were 2 aspects to Enron’s business:
1 – The historical pipeline business
2 – A new “investment bank” side
John first job at Enron
“I found the perfect job for my skill set as my first job. And I think that’s pretty rare, and it happened by accident. I could have very easily ended up a mergers and acquisition investment banker at Merrill Lynch, but I ended up trading commodities at a relative upstart of a company that was just the perfect spot for my skill set.”
How John rose so quickly through Enron
Winter of 1996—“A whole new game”
“I think it ended up being the downfall of the company as well, as there just wasn’t the controls on people who were given too much responsibility, too much of the company’s balance sheet to use without their adequate controls on it.”
“The stress level was intense. I think I’m very good at handling stress, but the stress level was intense to a point of not being healthy.”
How do many traders destress?
Did John experience an “addiction” to the “high” of trading?
What made John such an exceptional trader?
Regarding emotional detachment—
⇒ There’s a saying in the investment world, “Fear and greed drives a lot of price trends in financial assets.”
The confidence spectrum—
How did these traits translate into John’s philanthropy work?
“Everything we’re doing in the foundation is evidence-based, but the evidence is never perfect.”
Book about the fall of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Preceding Enron’s collapse…
Bad decisions—
When did John realize his career at Enron was going to be cut short?
When John was still at Enron…
How John grew Centaurus so successfully
The synergy of market arbitrage plus speculative trading:
The two strands of John’s hedge fund—
1) Providing liquidity and getting paid for the service of warehousing some risks, and
2) Speculative trading – Trying to make a call on where natural gas prices were going next
The moment John realized he’d never have to worry about money again:
When did John first start thinking about philanthropy?
“I always recognized the limited social value of trading. I think there is a need for someone to provide risk warehousing and liquidity to markets, but trying to tell the story about how I was adding value or contributing to society was hard. And that always bothered me.”
When John’s hedge fund started gaining major attention:
John business was all about return (not fees from investors)—
Background
After 2005, two things happened in the industry—
Amaranth’s position in 2006—
So what happened in 2006?
How John thought about the situation:
John has a “third superpower”—an insatiable, bordering on pathological, obsession for knowing everything
In his trading days…
How did John make up for this informational disadvantage?
“Our advantage was that we’re going to invest in the fundamentals more than anybody else is and then overlay that with some good trading.”
3 main reasons why trading natural gas was “easier” than oil:
1) It was this closed system —the molecules, for the most part, just stayed in North America
2) Deregulation got the pipelines out of the business of trading
3) Twice a year, there was a mechanism to get you back close to fair value
Deciding to focus on philanthropy
“I started thinking more about giving the money away than making more of it. That was really the signal to me that I want to be spending my time on the other side of the table and I’m physically and mentally, emotionally exhausted with trading natural gas.”
A hard decision
“When you’ve been playing in Vegas with the $25 table to go back down to the $5 table. It’s just not as emotionally interesting.”
Summary of factors leading to the shutdown of his hedge fund—
“These things came together and it still took me two years to make that call, that it’s time, it’s time to close this up and go find happiness somewhere else.”
Skills in trading that translated to philanthropy:
1-Emotional temperament—not letting your feelings get in the way of what you’re doing
2-Having the right amount of confidence
3-An ability to become an expert in something in a relatively short period of time
K-12 education — the first problem the foundation looked at deeply
The questions John had about K-12 education:
“[K-12] is just the most fundamental issue facing long-term health and viability of this country.”
The theory of change that drives John’s work in K-12:
The theory: Strong and robust systems of any kind have the attributes of biological evolution
In public education—
Arnold Foundation’s theory is that…
If this theory works…
What’s the role of philanthropy?
Role for “strategic” philanthropy
How challenging is doing this kind of strategic philanthropy?
Example, the topic like preschool:
In every area that John has researched, he finds the same thing—
*One main insight from doing the deep digging:
The question for the foundation became: What’s our role? Where could our dollars be most helpful?
John’s frustration with trying to find the “right program” to fund really led him and the foundation down the path of—How do you change and improve the system and the incentives and the rules of a system rather than what’s the next program we can fund?
When the criminal justice system got on John’s radar:
“There is this natural impatience. But I think we’ve been smart enough to realize that it’s smarter to invest wisely tomorrow than do something that’s unlikely to have an impact today.”
How criminal justice system is broken:
John’s take on how we got to the current state of the criminal just system:
Fast forward to today—
Speculating on what accounted for the reduction is crime starting in the mid-90s
What other factors could have accounted for the reduction in crime if not the increase in incarceration?
Of all the mechanisms or tactics that would lead to an increase in incarceration, which of those were perhaps the most responsible for mass incarceration?
How do we solve this problem?
Is the role for philanthropy to try to address the questions of racism within law enforcement?
For a long time, the focus has been on reducing crime rates with no regard for the secondary effects that the criminal justice system causes on these communities and families
A big dilemma: Minority communities have felt both over-policed and under policed at the same time.
Addressing the problem:
Peter’s take on the prison system:
John’s response:
“The nature of prisons has to change. If you wait until the days someone’s released, that’s way too late.”
The foundation’s work on re-imagining prisons
The ROI case
The values case
How is John thinking about health policy in America?
So where is John trying to apply his resources?
The first area John wants to address is drug prices because it’s a topic with:
The foundation is focused on creating a more rational system to price pharmaceuticals that—
The political window:
For politicians to consider health care policies—
Peter’s rant on the US health care:
⇒ For more on the health care system and issues with drugs, see Peter’s interviews with Marty Makary and Katherine Eban
Enormous health care spending—how can we change this?
Without the greatest sovereign default on debt, what is it going to take to change this?
The severe consequences of inflation
“I want to help the world, I want to solve problems, but if the answer is just shovel more money at it, that’s not a sustainable answer in my mind.”
John’s foundation is working on: How do we improve the system without spending more money?
Optimistic about the future — Change happens slowly, then very quickly
“You just don’t have that feedback mechanism in this work that you had in the [natural gas] market and the complete opposite end of the spectrum”
John’s high level thoughts on climate change
How will John’s foundation work on climate change?
Where John thinks they can add value:
Regarding his own kids—
“Whenever you have that checkbook, people look at you differently, and treat you differently. . .because there is always something that they want funded. . .If somebody’s growing up in their teens and their 20s, and is looked at by the rest of the world as a checkbook first, I think that’s a very damaging way to grow up.”
Advice to young adults with an interest in philanthropy:
The post John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy (#818) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-06-26 05:03:09
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Charlie Houpert (@charliehoupert), co-founder of Charisma on Command, a company that helps people develop confidence, charisma, and strong social skills. Originally launched as a 4-Hour Workweek-inspired “muse,” it has since grown into one of the largest platforms for social skills and confidence training, with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers worldwide and more than a billion views across its content in six languages. His flagship course, Charisma University, has guided more than 30,000 members through practical steps to become more magnetic.
Charlie was once voted “Most Likely to Break Out of His Shell” and began studying charisma to overcome his own social anxiety. He now explores the deeper roots of confidence through archetypal psychology, embodiment practices, and more.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
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Tim Ferriss: Charlie, welcome to the show. Nice to be spending some time together.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I thought we would start, as you suggested, since I do not have much memory of this — and that is not to say that I am too big for my britches. I think it was quite a while ago, but how did we first meet in person? This is not our first time meeting.
Charlie Houpert: No, it was a much larger moment in my life than in yours, I think. This is 2011, 2012. I’m working as a management consultant in Washington, DC and I have been a 4-Hour Workweek acolyte for probably six months, like evangelical. “Everyone needs to read this book. We’re all entrepreneurs.” I’ve sold nothing at this point. I’ve got no product, but everybody has to do this.
And I’m out to dinner with my company. We’ve just completed this contract. And sitting there facing the door and Tim Ferriss walks in, and the blood drains from my body. I go cold. I’m working on being more gregarious. My boss sees. He goes, “What’s wrong?” I said, “It’s Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is here,” like the boogeyman walked in. I’ve told him, and he goes, “The 4-Hour guy?” It’s like, “It’s him. Yeah, it’s him.”
So I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, walked over to your table. This is on H Street in DC. And I didn’t know what — I just said, “Hey, Tim, Mr. Tim, I read your book, and it’s changed my life.” And this is even before it really changed my life. And I love your blog, and it was so great.
And you turned and faced me and were very kind. You gave me far more attention than I had anticipated that I would get and asked some questions about what I was doing. And at the time, I was like, “Fuck, I haven’t actually made anything happen.” So I was like, “I’m working on this, that, and the other thing,” and then excuse myself to go to the bathroom where I was like, “Fuck. You fucking ruined it.” And came back out and didn’t have an ask. This is an interesting learning for me, and was just like, “Do you want to get coffee tomorrow?” I don’t even drink coffee. You’re like, “Sorry, I’m in town. I’m just doing The 4-Hour Body. I’ve got some meetings tomorrow, so I can’t do it,” and politely excuse yourself.
But for me, that was — it was a number of things. One, it was like, “Man, I wish that I was able to have that conversation in a way that created more connection between he and I.” And it was also — it’s funny to be sitting here now because at the time I had this projected belief that if you would just feature my business in The Muse, if you would just write about it on your blog, everything would be solved. Units would start flying off the shelf and I’d be taken care of forever. So it’s really cool to be sitting here on the other side of that projection and get to chat.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay. DC. Yeah, I very rarely go to DC. So, I mean, in the multiverse of other infinite possibilities, it is pretty incredible that we met at all because I so rarely go to DC. And I think you can also probably cut yourself some slack in the sense that in those conditions, it’s pretty hard to establish very quick rapport and connection.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. Was I by myself or in a group?
Charlie Houpert: You were by yourself. It was offered up on a silver platter. No, not to say — I reflect and it’s like you’re in town for one day, but the idea that maybe there was something that could have been said to create that connection was like — it was the Inception seed that just kept spinning in my internal safe for the next 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So let’s double click on the management consulting and then how you became an ex-management consultant —
Charlie Houpert: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — or just the path itself. Because I have seen interviews with you, and you talk about, of course, various different things, Charisma on Command, Charisma University. You have this topic area expertise. And we’ll probably touch on some of that, but for a lot of my audience, and for my own personal curiosity, I want to hear about your journey, your personal journey, not necessarily focusing on the content that you’re best at showcasing. And I suspect we’ll probably get to some of that.
But looking back at the early chronology is always fun for me because I remember, for instance — and I want to not make this the Tim Ferriss retrospective show, but that exact experience that you had with me, I have had many times with other people where I’ll just like fumble out some accidental pig Latin. And then I go to the bathroom. I’m just like, “You idiot. That could have been the sentence that changed your life, and you fucked it up.” Not to say that’s what you said yourself, but certainly I have had those types of experiences.
So let’s go back to management consulting. What was that experience like? Just paint a picture. And then I know this might seem like a lazy question, but just take us forward from there.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, every day it felt like a self-betrayal. So I read The 4-Hour Workweek when I was in grad school. And I was in grad school because I was a philosophy major as an undergrad and graduated in 2009 where not only were they not hiring philosophy majors, they weren’t hiring anybody.
So hid out in business school for a year, wound up as a consultant because that’s what you do when you don’t know what you’re supposed to do with your life. And every day putting on that suit felt like a betrayal of myself, especially having read The 4-Hour Workweek at that point.
And so there were these minor rebellions that I would stage. I had a faux-hawk, and I wouldn’t cut it, and I would put it down. There were these subtle passive-aggressive — I let my shoes fall apart. I had my business shoes, but I wouldn’t get new ones. They were ratty and crappy. And it was just these ways of like, “This is not me. This is not right.” And then I would come home from that after sort of sneaking out as early as I could, and I would write in just my own little journal about like, “This is not what I want. I don’t want this life. I don’t want to be the guy who is my boss or the guy who is his boss.”
And so it was in this period of time that I was noticing and experimenting with coming out of my shell at the same time. So I was able to make friends with not just my boss or his boss, but I got close with the president of the company. And it was through just talking about the bars and clubs I was going to at Saturdays, and he was vicariously — we’d meet Monday morning, be like, “So what’d you get into this weekend?” And we had a little rapport there of I-remember-the-good-old-days type of a thing.
And so had that job, wasn’t right, had our fruitful encounter, which didn’t wind up selling anything. And at the time, my first business was a parkour training DVD. I think I even used a service that you’d listed in The 4-Hour Workweek to try to do it and was trying to get that off the ground, selling it through Google Adwords, very step by step, 4-Hour Workweek. It could have been a chapter had it worked. And it was starting to go, but it wasn’t something I loved. And I was struggling with it because my co-founder and best friend was in New York, I was in Washington, DC.
Tim Ferriss: How did you choose parkour at the time? How did you decide on that? And were there any other candidates where it’s like, “Okay, here are the top four. We’re going to strike these out. We’re going with parkour”?
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, there was. I did the little Venn diagram of what do I want that other people might be interested in. I just wrote all of my interests. I hadn’t done parkour, but I liked Casino Royale. That was my level of exposure to parkour.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. One of the best intro sequences of any James Bond.
Charlie Houpert: Yes. So the idea was, “Oh, wow, there’s no parkour gyms. If there are, they’re expensive. Maybe people would want to learn this. I would want to take a class.” And so went out, hired a guy that had done it. Never shot anything before. I mean, there’s so many funny little stories.
He chips his tooth the day before the shoot, so he’s got this lisp before the shoot, and he can’t remember more than a line. So we’re saying lines to him as he’s trying to teach parkour, chopped this footage up into 35 or 40 minutes of how to do a wall run, how to do a Kong, how to do all these things, and made a DVD out of it from TrepStar.
The other things, I mean, I can’t remember what was on there, but it was very much — I was a little bit outside of myself and thinking, “What do other people want?” I hadn’t gotten to the scratch-your-own-itch experience. And what I experienced was that, “Oh, wow. We’re actually selling enough DVDs to break even on Adwords and even a little bit of profit.” Which means if we did a follow-up, we’d be totally in the black.
Tim Ferriss: Follow-up meaning you’re selling to pre-existing customers?
Charlie Houpert: Correct. If we’d made the advanced course or, “Do you want personal coaching,” or something, and I was completely deflated. I was like, “I can’t do this other thing in addition to my job that I don’t love in order to get free of the job. So there was this recursive 4-Hour Workweek mentality, which is like, “Stop doing the thing that you don’t want to do in order to get to the place that you want to be. Just do the thing that you want to do.”
Tim Ferriss: Although, at the same time, just to play with that for a second, the approach of moonlighting just to dip your toe in the water, get a taste of the blood, whatever metaphor you want to use, I think is actually pretty helpful in the sense that you don’t have to act out of desperation. You still have a safety net of some type, but then you can make an informed decision about whether or not you want to burn the ships, so to speak. So just my two cents.
Charlie Houpert: It was an integral step. I very much agree with you. I needed the experience of disliking consulting and then the experience of disliking my side gig to go, “Okay, the next side gig has to be something that I would do for free or I’m paying to do.” And so then it was, “Okay, what am I spending money on?” It’s like, “Well, I go out to these bars, not to drink, to talk to women and try to get them to like me and to make friends.” And I put way more time, effort, attention into studying how our interaction went. I can’t tell you how many times I chatted with my best friend about like, “What if I said this?” We were putting far too much energy, relative to others, into understanding people and how to connect better.
So there was a transition of — my best friend and co-founder was in New York. He was an investment banker. I was in DC. I was a consultant. We would talk every day after work for an hour about the interactions we had, and I was just aching. I didn’t have other friends in DC.
So I went to this president who I had been close to, and there was this moment where I was trying to get the side gig and trying to get a job in New York, and I — I went to Skillshare, and they didn’t want to hire me. And I went to all these companies. They wouldn’t hire me. I was taking weekend trips. And eventually my friend was like, “Why don’t you just quit and go to New York and figure it out there?”
So having settled with that and done the fear-setting exercises and what’s the worst thing that can happen, I came in and I made a pitch to my president, which was, I mean, a lot of 4-Hour Workweek things, which is once it’s already done, people get out of your way. Internally, I was like, “This is done. We’re not talking about if I’m going to New York.”
So I sat down. I said, “Hey, you guys have been really good to me. I appreciate it. I just cannot be in DC any longer. I feel socially like I’m missing something. I want to be with my friends in New York, but I want to transition in a way that is really good for you to repay the kindness that you guys have showed me,” which was true. And we sat there, and he’s like, “You know what? Let’s work something out.” So he winds up saying, “Instead of being an analyst, let’s make you a contractor. Except if you’re a contractor, the base rate that we pay contractors is twice as much as we pay analysts. So we’d have to give you basically a 90 percent raise increase in order to do it, but you’d have no job security and no healthcare. Month to month, you could get fired.”
So I’m like, “Wait a second, I get to go to New York, double my pay, and no healthcare? This is incredible.” So it worked out really well, and I wound up keeping that job working remotely from New York and making one trip every two weeks for a few months as I did this.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a pretty sweet bridge. Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: And it was incredible.
Tim Ferriss: At least for a while.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, it was magical. And it was this showing up with, “Hey, I love you, but here’s what I have to do. And I’m open to something that works for both of us.” Was really powerful.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you this. For people who are listening and they might be thinking to themselves like, “That’s a really interesting bridge,” or just improvement quality of life. Also, you got the income increase. How did you plan for that meeting, basically the pitch/delivery that ended up in a remote work agreement?
Charlie Houpert: Step one was to get clear that it was happening, and I wasn’t there to make him do anything. I wasn’t trying to convince him to force it. So I was able to really come in with the mentality of, “I want to show love to you. I want to support you guys and take care of you, and I’m willing to be flexible. And I can stay another two weeks, but this is happening.”
So it was making sure that, first and foremost, I wasn’t asking him to meet in need of mine. It’s like, “I’m going to meet my needs. How can we work together?” Then it was literally rehearsing it. I ran through the conversation. This was not an outcome that I had ever planned. I thought it was like, “Yes, I’d be willing to stay on for three more weeks, and then come down and do touch points here and there. And I’m happy to get on the phone and talk to the person you have replacing me.”
But I really think it was the pre-established relationship that we had, plus me taking care of my needs, and then saying, “What is best for you? Genuinely, within these bounds, I want to do what’s best for you.” And he came up with that solution. I didn’t suggest it, which was powerful. And I’ve seen that same sort of dynamic play out many, many times in my life
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And I think employees, I know, oftentimes — it’s been a few eons, but I’ve been an employee underestimate their own value or position, and as a result sometimes feel like they need to go hat in hand and expect maybe the outcome to always fall in the boss’ favor. But the fact of the matter is, in the boss’ favor, if you actually work hard and are a decent, let alone a very good performer, it is a huge pain in the ass to replace someone. It is. And for that reason, I think many people are surprised when they have some of these conversations how often they’re like, “Wasn’t even going to ask for that, and look what ended up coming my way.”
Charlie Houpert: You had all that money just lying around. Why don’t you tell me?
Tim Ferriss: Let me open up this chest full of gold coins.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So then what happens — you move to New York?
Charlie Houpert: So I go to New York, and I am splitting time now between what is this new business, which is called KickAss Academy. And this is my brilliant idea. I think we’re going to do — it’s an academy, an online academy where you learn how to live a kick-ass life. And it’s about going out — and it’s heavily Game-influenced at this point. I’ve read Neil Strauss’ The Game.
Tim Ferriss: By Neil Strauss, yeah?
Charlie Houpert: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Great book. I mean, controversial on a number —
Charlie Houpert: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — of levels, but a really compelling — it’s a compelling underdog sort of hero’s journey story, and it’s well written. Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: And to a 23-year-old guy who has been socially restrained and — I won the award for most likely to break out of the shell in college, which is like, “You’re the shyest boy in our 500-person class. Congratulations.” To learn that there was something that I could say or do that would change the receptivity that I got from people, that was so powerful to see in The Game.
So those two books, 4-Hour Workweek, The Game, are really deeply influencing me. I start sharing some of these blog posts. Well, actually, first what happens is the government shuts down, and that sweet contractor gig that I have disappears overnight. So I had four-ish months of gravy and where I’ve been saving twice as much, and then that happens. So I’m in a 396-square-foot apartment, two bedroom in the Lower East Side, bathroom door hits the toilet when you open.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was going to say. If we do the math on that square footage, it’s not a whole lot of space.
Charlie Houpert: No, no. I’m sleeping literally on a blow-up mattress to save money. I’m eating Chipotle and learning how to persuade them to give me more scoops in order to save money. I’m frugal beyond frugal at this point in my life, start Airbnb-ing my own bedroom and then sleeping in, literally — God bless him. My co-founder shares his queen size beds with me so that I can take some nights and make a hundred bucks a night Airbnb-ing my bedroom.
And in the meantime, the beautiful thing is that everything that was taken from me pushes me to the next level of putting myself out there. So I had had all of these writings that I’d been doing in DC about what I believed and what I thought and what I was learning about speaking with women and people, but I was too afraid to really share them.
Tim Ferriss: So were any of those coping strategies that you ended up using, were any of those initially in the fear-setting exercise?
Charlie Houpert: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: Those and others. I mean, I had to play guitar and ask for dollars. That was farther down the list. It was learn how to make a basic drink and bartend, Airbnb the bedroom. I had a list of things.
Tim Ferriss: So for people who have no context on this, just to set the table a little bit, fear-setting, it’s named that because it’s a play on goal-setting, but it’s an exercise. You can find it at tim.blog/ted. I also did a TED Talk on it. So you don’t have to buy anything. You can find it.
But the basic gist is that you have something you’re considering doing right, quitting your job, moving to New York, getting married, getting divorced, whatever it is. Then you write down all of your fears in as much detail as possible. Because the more detailed, the more actionable and preventable, and it’s sort of the nebulous misty fears that we never put on paper, define that tend to be the most problematic. So you make this list in excruciating detail of the worst things that could happen.
Then there’s another column, the next column. You write down ways that you could try to prevent those things from happening. And then in the sort of damage control/mitigation column, which is yet another column, you ask yourself, “If each of these things happened, what could I do to limit the damage or get back on my feet, even if it takes me a while?” And there’s more to the exercise. There are other things. But in the mitigation/damage control column, you have something like “Airbnb my own bed.”
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, Airbnb my own bed, sign up for a ton of credit cards to get the credit card miles and then convert to cash. But I did a lot of things for 50, 60 bucks. Get a job at Chipotle so that you can eat the food there, and that takes care of food and money. So I had a lot of these, and I ran through quite a few. Zeroed out my 401k and IRA and took the penalty at one point a little bit later down the line. So I was doing all of that.
But as things got more and more dire, and I’m going through my fear-setting mitigation strategies, I am confronted with the fears that I have not written down, which is, “Okay, it’s time to put your writing out there.” So, okay.
God, it’s so funny. One of the big mistakes that I’ve made with people that I’ve loved is I’ve tried to prevent and hide from them and support them in not having to confront those horrible, harrowing, entrepreneurial moments of, “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. This isn’t working.” Because it is in those moments of tension and pressure that something pops and you go, “Fine, I’ll be honest and share what’s on my heart.” Because up until then, you’re not going to do it, or I wasn’t going to do it.
Tim Ferriss: So what was the first prototype version of post-parkour entrepreneurship? What was the V1?
Charlie Houpert: It’s kickassacademy.com. And we are here to live a kick-ass life, and no one can stop us, and we will not be average. It’s a 23-year-old manifesto about how all the people don’t know how to do it, and I do. I know the way to do it. It’s a regurgitated 4-Hour Workweek, plus my own iteration of The Game thing.
So I write my blog post, and I haven’t shared any posts. And I remember being in this tiny apartment with my hand hovering over publish, and I published it on this blog post, and I have to run out of the apartment and go down the street and just get away from the computer that, I don’t know, houses the blog post now that it’s on the internet. And of course, I come back and nobody’s read it. And a month later, nobody’s read it.
Tim Ferriss: What was the first blog post?
Charlie Houpert: Oh, gosh. I wish I knew.
Tim Ferriss: Do you recall?
Charlie Houpert: I do not recall. I should have checked before this.
Tim Ferriss: That’s all right. But it’s some kind of how-to thing? It’s like seven rules for et cetera, or —
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, it might’ve been how-to. It might’ve been a declaration of one of my feelings when I was quitting the job and like, “This isn’t what I want.” It was not profound, but it was personal and tender to me, so it was very tough to receive criticism.
Tim Ferriss: And I guess it is maybe — I mean, we’ll get there. Maybe not in terms of readership, but in terms of crossing the Rubicon from not publishing to publishing, hitting that button is a big deal.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, my gosh.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Psychologically.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I’m willing to be seen is the emotional thing that is, I think, for me, has been the challenge endlessly in entrepreneurship the way that I’ve chosen to do it. So we got that post out, and then nobody, of course, read it.
And then the next step was, “Okay, I’m going to promote this. I’m going to go to Reddit. I’m going to go to the forums that are most related. Every man should know.” There was a seduction subreddit. There was a New York City-related subreddit, and I started posting my own things. And now comments start coming in. And so it’s, “Thank you. I like this,” or “Don’t promote your own stuff here,” or — now I’m actually dealing with feedback.
But the next stage was posting, posting. I wrote a little, short pamphlet book, but the real thing that actually started, I think, early — I think you probably know him. I hired Neville Medhora for a day of copywriting to help me design the website and wound up with the first actionable real thing that I did was, “Okay, I’ve got people that read my blog. There’s like 30 recurring viewers. And I want to host an in-person class that will talk about how to talk to a woman in the park in New York City,” which is something that I’m doing with my friend, going out. We’re breaking it down and, “How did it go?” And all that kind of stuff.
So we rent out a room in one of these office buildings for like 60 bucks for an hour, an hour and a half, or something like that. I go to the New York City subreddit. I give away five tickets. They are sold. Sold. People accept them. They accept the five free seats. And then I sell the remaining five seats for five or 10 bucks. I think I might’ve sold it for 10 bucks each. And like an hour before the class, we sold the last one. So we had 10 people in this class, made 50, lost 60 plus cab fare, down 15 bucks, whatever. Go in and give an hour-and-a-half presentation with a PowerPoint on, “This is what to wear, say, do, stand. Here’s how to deal with the fear that’s going to come up. If she rejects you, here’s how to address that feeling.” All of that sort of stuff.
It was just thrilling to do it. But afterwards, four of the 10 people stayed after and were like, “Do you do coaching? Do you guys do this?” And the answer was, “Now we do.”
Tim Ferriss: “Funny you should ask.”
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, “Funny you should ask.” So really had no intention of a — there was not a business idea of there to be an upsell, but there was enough asking. So then it evolved into, “Oh, now we’re doing traditional,” what was around at the time, “dating coaching in New York City,” and we’re finding our rates as we did that. And that was tough. That’s a gig where you’re going out with a dude who’s having the most fearful experience of his life, and he’s paid you to encourage him and support him in facing that fear, which is, “I’m going to go speak to that woman that I’m attracted to at the bar, in the park,” wherever.
And it’s not fun to push someone to do something that they say they want to do, but they’re really grappling with. And then you go out and you show them, “It could look like this. It could look like that.” So we did that for a while and were charging, I don’t know, a hundred bucks an hour as we did.
But again, something else that crept in, same thing with the parkour, was this wasn’t the dream. When I’d sat down and I’d done the fear-setting, there’s another piece of it, which is you write the 10-out-of-10 upside.
Tim Ferriss: You assess the upside. If it works —
Charlie Houpert: If it works.
Tim Ferriss: — what’s the one-to-10 impact? Positively, if it fails, what’s the transient, most likely not permanent impact, right?
Charlie Houpert: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: And so as we’d sat there and written in detail the 10-out-of-10 upside, it was never “You have a dating coaching business that is stressful in New York City.” It was “You get to live on the beach with your friends, do work that you like, when you like.” There was this idea which was silly, that you would have a laptop as you sat on the beach. That’s ridiculous. It’s just like a photo op, but it’s not a good way to work. But I had that idea. I would drink Caipirinhas and I’d do it in Rio. That was the romantic vision. And so again, I found myself having this thing that was working that wasn’t the 10-out-of-10 upside.
Tim Ferriss: So I just want to pause for a second and just say that’s where a lot of people get into trouble, right?
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because they find something that is maybe not even 30 percent of the way to where they want to be, but it has a seductive traction. And there are certain financial realities. It’s like, “Hey, if you need to pay your rent, you need to pay your rent.” But it’s very easy for that to then become something that is a monster you feel you need to feed that you can’t step away from. And in that case, with coaching, you’re still trading time for money, right?
Charlie Houpert: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: At a per-hour rate.
Charlie Houpert: And in person, in a place that isn’t the most fun with guys that are having a challenging time. You know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. If people want to get a really good laugh, you can find it on my YouTube channel, but the Tim Ferriss Experiment TV show episodes are all up there for free. And there’s one, I think it’s just called The Dating Episode, where, a small world, Neil Strauss is sitting in a van with an earpiece trying to give me advice at the farmer’s market in San Francisco as I’m doing cold approaches. Horrible, horrible, and horrifying, beyond terrible. If people want to see what that looks like, knock yourselves out.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So you decide that the one-on-one coaching in person, this is not the 10-out-of-10 that you’d hope for.
Charlie Houpert: Yes. Yeah. And I think the experience — it’s not a great model. It’s really challenging, high intensity, doesn’t create the level of transformation with reliability that you might hope, and people walk away feeling sometimes very stressed about it. And so it was, “Okay. I don’t know what it is, but I said Brazil, with my friends, et cetera.” So again, I’m evangelical. I’m telling everybody I meet, “Have you read the gospel of Tim? There’s this book, The 4-Hour Workweek. You need to do it. Everyone’s an entrepreneur.” That was a mistake and learning it’s not for everybody. I got that in time. So I’m telling everybody, and what happens is one of the guys that attended that first class becomes a friend. It’s probably the most magnetic period of my life where I’m just talking about this ambition. And what happens is not just my co-founder and I, but six people, many of whom I’d met in the last two months, quit their jobs, quit their schools, and agreed they were going to move to Brazil in August of 2013.
Tim Ferriss: How did Brazil specifically become the dream?
Charlie Houpert: So there was one, it’s got great PR, right? It had never been, there’s just this sense that Rio is this romantic, beautiful beach city vibe. And I had, when my company let me go from that contractor role, I immediately said, “Okay, what’s the upside of this?” So I booked a flight to Brazil and met a friend who was traveling. And I spent five weeks in Floripa and one week in Rio. And in that week in Rio, my friend had gone home. I was alone. And it was these experiences of being alone in a hostel, not knowing anybody, that uncomfortable feeling of like, “I want to go home. I want my friends, I want my thus,” whatever. But I stepped outside of myself, went to a co-working space, met a guy, he invited me to stay with him. And I had one of those travel, magical adventures that culminated in meeting a beautiful Brazilian girl and having this fling that lasted few days. And she came and visited and —
Tim Ferriss: I knew that had to figure in somehow. Yeah, all right.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. So had that romantic experience of I showed up feeling empty, and then I walked away with abundance and feeling wonderful.
Tim Ferriss: Whirlwind transformation of a trip.
Charlie Houpert: Yes. So I was like, “That’s where I want to be.”
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So six other people to quit all their stuff, school, job, whatever it might be, okay?
Charlie Houpert: Well there’s 10 total, six who lived together and then four who lived in other places in the same city.
Tim Ferriss: And then what happens?
Charlie Houpert: So we get there. Nobody speaks Portuguese. I speak Spanish. And I’m negotiating rent for looking for a four-bedroom where I can take, they have maids quarters in a lot of these places. So I have the tiny room because that’s what I can afford. But anyway, we settle into a life in Brazil, and my Spanish is converting to Portuguese as quickly as I can. And we are living it. We’re there. It is the thing. We are going to the beach, throwing the American football, making friends.
We’ve got a whiteboard. Every day there’s four questions. Did you do the social stretch that you wanted to do? Whether that’s make a friend speak to a woman you’re attracted to. Just say, be kinder to the guy who serves you acai, whatever it is. There was a social stretch. Did you do your business stretch? Did you do your health stretch? And there was one more thing, which is like, did you do your own personal thing? For some people it was reach out to a family member. For some people it was learn the guitar. So it was like four things. We had this running whiteboard of who had done their growth thing that they need to do.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. I like that.
Charlie Houpert: And it was a really encouraging growth, everyone, it was like if you tried and failed, it was high-fives all around for that year was just amazing. “She didn’t want to talk to you. So cool. Welcome back into the fold. You are welcome here.”
So we’re doing that and from a business perspective, so now all my income is gone because it was all the thing and it was in-person coaching. One or two people agree to switch to online coaching, but it’s not enough. And so for a period, the blog becomes online coaching, which is actually nicer because now instead of just going to a bar and speaking about, did you talk to the girl and what to say, it’s people that are calling in with questions about workplace scenarios. And so I’m speaking to guys older than me using Tony Robbins’ principles essentially to answer questions about experiences that I’ve only barely had. But it’s helpful because there’s this Tony Robbins transformation process that I’m helping with and using. So that becomes a thing. And after months of doing in-person coaching and there’s a whole learning the sales process and being able to ask for money, these are all intermediate steps that had to happen.
I’ll tell you a story about Tucker Max in here as well. But I’ll tell it now.
Tim Ferriss: Almost never boring.
Charlie Houpert: — no time like the present.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, never boring.
Charlie Houpert: So at the time, there’s this program, I think it was called Clarity or something where you could pay people per minute for advice and they would get on the phone with you. And I don’t know what, Tucker was $15 or $22 per minute or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. And so said, I had no money. I was like, “Okay, 200 bucks, let’s get this done in whatever, eight minutes, 12 minutes.” So call him up, say, “Hey, can you help? We’re having trouble getting customers. Can you take a look at our business? What do you recommend?” And he goes, and he goes on to our home page, it’s called Kickassacademy.com. It’s me and my co-founder. He’s got hair down to his shoulders and he’s wearing a pink tank top, and I’ve got a neon green pink top and frizzy hair. And he says, “You guys look like douchebags. No one over the age of 26 is going to want to associate with this.”
And it was so true. It wasn’t packaged in a very digestible way, but in time, as I started to get other points of feedback, I was able to integrate that and there was a transition from, “Oh, wow.” What I realized is all the guys who had come with me, they were one of the captains of the Princeton football team when he was at Princeton. These were successful, cool dudes, but they all had this thing where it’s like they didn’t really want it to be public, that they were learning this kind of a thing.
And so we talked to them, we’re like, “You like us, but you don’t want anyone to know that you, like what’s going on?” We learned that, “Yeah, I do want to get better in my relationships and learn how to talk to women, but I don’t want to broadcast it that way essentially. And I also care about work and I also care about friendships.” And so we did a bunch of interviews and I started tracking what word are you comfortable with? What’s the 10-out-of-10 word that you’re down for? And I had a long list. It was lifestyle design, confidence and charisma came back as like a nine or a 9.5 out of 10. And so I’m going through this marketing course, Eben Pagan’s Marketing Step-by-Step, oldie, but a greatie. Excellent.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Eben’s a smart fella. For a long time has been a smart fella.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, yeah. And he’s got this line that the name of your company is the most important marketing decision you will ever make. And I realize that when I say Kickass Academy to people, they think it’s a dojo where you’re going to learn how to fight. And so through this process, Eben also says you want an alliteration that sticks in the head.
Tim Ferriss: He loves alliteration.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: David DeAngelo, Double Your Dating.
Charlie Houpert: David DeAngelo, Double Your Dating, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. He loves alliteration.
Charlie Houpert: I’ve got alliteration, charisma, and the thing that they want is they want to walk into a room and feel like they do with their best friends. They want to feel comfortable, calm, collected. They want to just be able to turn it on. And so we’re brainstorming and Charisma on Command comes in. Switch the name of the blog, screw up the redirect, so we lose all of our Google juice, whatever. But very quickly conversions, just nothing has changed. And we start converting way better as a result of this.
Tim Ferriss: And this is converting to online coaching?
Charlie Houpert: This is at this point, I forget exactly where we are, but there’s just more interest. People are commenting. Every metric of engagement is up. And the type of person —
Tim Ferriss: Just with the rebrand.
Charlie Houpert: Just with the rebrand, and we took the long hair down a little bit and made it a little bit just, okay, here we are, but we put on a tee-shirt instead of a tank top.
Tim Ferriss: Got rid of the 1980s Miami Vice —
Charlie Houpert: Exactly. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: — tank tops. So let me sprinkle in just a little context on a few things you’ve said. So one is Tucker Max, for people who don’t know the name, he wrote a number of books. I believe his first mega bestseller was, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. And he was the first person, actually, I would say the only person in early 2007. I approached Tucker Max who was part of a panel at South by Southwest, and I was like, okay, there’s this long line of people. I already know Tucker’s pretty prickly, can be, and very direct. And I somehow heard through the grapevine that he was interested in jiu-jitsu or something like that. And at the time, I had been doing a lot of training.
So when I got up there, I was like, “Oh, have you ever trained with so-an-so or so-and-so.” And I used that as a wedge in, and he agreed to have coffee or lunch. I can’t remember what it was, one of the two. And I gave him an early galley copy of The 4-Hour Workweek. And a day later, or two days later, whenever we actually met up in person, he came in and he had a research assistant who was named Ryan Holiday later went on to become a mega bestselling author. Actually one of his books behind me, somewhere here, Tucker said, “Okay, let me explain what’s going to happen.” And he is like, “I can’t prepare you for it because nobody can prepare you for it.” And he just went step by step and basically predicted the next year of my life.
Charlie Houpert: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: He’s the only one who did that. Now, Tucker at the time also was, I think rightly considered a marketing genius and very good at promotion and positioning. Had at the time a massive community, which I believe was based on vBulletin or something like that. So his vote of confidence, maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy on some level, but that’s just a snapshot of Tucker. Then you also mentioned interviewing people, and I want to emphasize that. Interviewing various folks, because the thing that doesn’t scale in the beginning often helps you to scale later. And for people interested in how, for instance, like Brian Chesky and the founders of Airbnb applied that one of the very early Masters of Scale podcast episodes has one talking about doing the things that don’t scale. And that led to the rebrand, at least on some level, right?
Charlie Houpert: Oh, a hundred percent, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So you change the positioning and the branding, Charisma on Command, and everything improves, all the metrics of the website improve. And in the meantime though, you are still in the servants’ quarters in Brazil.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, I’m in the servants’ quarters. I am, at this point, I take out, I contact the HR lady at my old company. I go, “Hey, we had a 401k, right?” She’s like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Can you drain that for me?” She’s like, “That’s going to come with a penalty.” I was like, “Don’t worry, I have no income. My taxes won’t be too much. I’ll just pay the penalty.” So I hit zero, and then I get a little infusion of cash and I’m about to hit zero again. I’m going to broke. I am Airbnb-ing my bedroom, sleeping on a horrible couch. I am teaching SAT tutoring to Brazilian high schoolers. I’m still doing the mitigation strategies in order to make things work.
Tim Ferriss: And in your mind at that time, if you remember, what is your goal?
Charlie Houpert: I have it. I’m living it. This is the beautiful thing as I was reflecting, it was really wonderful. Thank you for having me. It was such a cool opportunity to reflect on this. And I was like, I had it. It was it. That was it. I was broke and I was living it. And I got a tattoo right before this, it’s a paraphrase. It’s right here. I don’t need to flash the audience, but there’s a paraphrase of Thucydides that is, “The secret to freedom is courage.” And he also says, “The secret to happiness is freedom.” That’s a paraphrase, essentially of I think a quote in The Peloponnesian War.
And I was so happy, so broke, so unable to feed myself. And I have tried to remind myself of that is the secret. It’s just like when you step into it and you’re living it, nothing more needed to happen. I would’ve liked the business to do well, and it eventually did, but I was there. So at this time, I’m getting everything that I want in a degree, but also I’m running out of money and I’m planning airline points to get back home.
So what happens is we get this course, it’s from Clay Collins, and it’s about pre-selling an online course. And at the point I’ve done so much coaching that I’m actually getting tired of saying the same types of things over and over again now. Now it’s just happening via Skype at the time.
Tim Ferriss: At the same time, you got to workshop your material.
Charlie Houpert: Yes, and I start to dial — so each stage is important. So I’m dialing it in until I get bored of like, okay, this is what works. This is what creates transformation. But now my role is just robotic at this point. It’s not as dynamic as I’d like it to be. So given that I can do it once and be done, maybe I should just make an online course. Thank God for this pre-selling thing though, because it runs you through this process. At this time, I’ve been posting on the blog, I think we have 5,000 people on the email list, and I follow this template, which is something like, “Hey guys, I was about to go into a cave and make this online course, and I remembered that that’s stupid because I’m making it for you. So before I sit down to record it, I just want to know what is the biggest problem you’re facing related to charisma? If you reply to me, I’m going to make the whole course, but I’m going to make a piece of it for free that I’m just going to give everyone who replies.”
So they come in, they give me all their answers. Step two, you take all of those things, you bucket them and categorize them, and you put them into radio buttons ranking things in one of those survey monkeys, whatever you want. Say, “Hey guys, thank you so much for writing in. I think I have the top things. If you would just vote on which one you most want me to actually make the free piece on that would help me to decide which piece to make for you.” So then I get back, and the first thing it was how to make an amazing first impression, how to feel unshakably confident, how to have a conversation that flows effortlessly, how to tell great stories, how to have body language that’s magnetic and how to be a good leader. And in that order is what they ranked them like number one, first impression, number two, confidence.
So I get this, and they just gave me the outline of my course in addition to all of the specific phrases, questions, things that well need to be answered. So I say, “Hey guys, I’m making a course. It’s going to cover these things. First impressions, how to be unshakably competent, effortless,” all this stuff. “It’s going to sell for eventually, I think I started it at $800. We lowered it to $600, but it’s going to sell for 800 bucks. You can get it for $500, but here’s the catch one. You’re going to have to do a one-on-one call with me,” which is exactly what they want to do. “Two, there’s going to be group interaction throughout the whole time. And three, I really want your feedback throughout the course so that I’m building it exactly to be what you want.”
And so we offer 25 seats like this, and holy, that’s the most money, we make $12,500. We sell out. People are stoked. And for us, “Oh, wow, I was going to make this course.” And what I learned now, each week I get on a call, I talk to several people, and I develop the content that I then send to them, and they give their questions, and it’s this iterative, interactive thing over six weeks. And they, with their questions completely reshape the course I thought I was going to make. I thought I was going to make a course about all these advanced tips and tricks. And of course, where if you’ve done something for a while, you always overlook the beginning phases. You overlook the fear, you overlook all of those things. So we focus way more on getting through that.
And the course as a result is tailored to where my average audience member is, right? The guys that I wanted to work with that I started filtering by calling the company Charisma on Command. And I have all these surveys that have language that then become the sales page on the back end. So do you want to walk into a room and be the guy that people instantly notice and that they’re drawn to magnetically? That’s phrases that they wrote in their descriptions of what they were asking for and wanted. So on the back end of this, I have my outline, I have my course, I’ve gone through it.
And so now I can go record this thing and offer it on the website. So all of a sudden, these blog posts, which had nothing to sell to, have something to sell to. So now actual money can start coming into the business while I sleep. So we’re selling this course, we’re getting one a day or one every other day.
Tim Ferriss: That’s going to pay for your servants’ quarters rent at the very least, right?
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. Yes, correct.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. And much more even at that rate, right?
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. So my $450-a-month rent becomes affordable. I don’t have to Airbnb my bed. And at this point, we pop back, we go to Las Vegas, we’re flipping when summer hits the Northern Hemisphere, we go home. When it hits Brazil, we go back to Brazil. And so we’re just chasing summer basically in six-to-eight-month increments. Vegas, Brazil, Vancouver, Brazil, Columbia.
Tim Ferriss: Where are you from originally?
Charlie Houpert: Pennsylvania. Didn’t go back there.
Tim Ferriss: Pennsylvania. Okay. So how did you choose Vegas? How was Vegas chosen?
Charlie Houpert: We exit Brazil the first time right before the World Cup. Great opportunity to Airbnb the last month of rent. Gets some money coming in.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Charlie Houpert: It was great. And so I go back to Pennsylvania because I need a car. That’s where I’ve left my car. And plan to drive out to Los Angeles. Drive across the country in three days, spend one night in Vegas. That was a lot of fun. Avicii played at XS. Let’s try it again. Stay two nights, say three nights. Stayed there for 10 months, I don’t know, a year. It was good food. It was really fun. We were, at the time, really enjoying going out. We were able to meet and talk to people and do the whole song and dance. And so we wound up getting off campus student housing, which is the only place that had four cheap bedrooms in Vegas for a year outside of UNLV and were in Vegas for that period. So just stayed.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. So I’m curious, what was the durability of that first course or the learnings in that first course? In other words, how much of an annuity has that been, whether it’s, or was it, in revenue or just in terms of core pieces of curriculum?
Charlie Houpert: Numbers over 10 million for sure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: So I’ve rerecorded it and I’ve gotten a little bit better background. I fixed the sound, and one time I was traveling, and so there was a new place every time. So I’ve rerecorded it four times and I’ve tried to change pieces that I didn’t like, but that structure remains. The sales page remains with minor tweaks. It’s not great, but it has been almost 10 years, if not 10 years at this point.
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible. Yeah. Amazing.
Charlie Houpert: And because the problems are very similar, people have questions about Zoom or texting, but it was built off of core human problems that are durable and addressable. And interestingly, the refund rate has not changed over the time, it doesn’t seem to be working less for the people who buy it and apply it. There’s still a sizable refund rate because it’s a go-at-your-own-pace online course, and we have a very flexible refund policy, but it hasn’t increased. So I’d like to rerecord again.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, I’d love to do one more rerecording, but same thing. Keep it going is how I feel.
Tim Ferriss: This might seem like a small detail, but I’m sure folks will be interested. What platform or software do you use to serve the course?
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: How do people, what’s the back end? Or maybe it’s very explicitly through some type of platform that provides this?
Charlie Houpert: I am sure there’s better options now, but we’ve kind of got on, and so there’s inertia. It’s just a WordPress with some plugins. There was a WishList Member plugin, which was hot at the time and since sort of been depreciated, and so we’re rolling off of that. SamCart is the cart. It was one of the only carts at the time that let you do payment plans. Now it’s like everybody will let you do a payment plan, but for our needs, those were the two. So it was a SamCart cart to a WordPress site with a gated content thing that hooked into SamCart.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Makes sense.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So the course starts working, right. Well, at least to the extent that you just described it, which was selling one a day or every other day, you then get to Las Vegas. When do things really start to ramp or when do things start to change?
Charlie Houpert: So I can afford not Main City, US rent at this point. I can live in Vegas. I can’t live in New York. I can’t live in L.A. That’s where we’re at at one point. I think it’s when I’m in Colombia. I had a list of, “Try LinkedIn?” “Try Twitter?” and the third was “Try YouTube?” And I have that piece of paper somewhere. It has a question mark, YouTube, question mark.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, people would love to see that. Given the size of your YouTube presence. YouTube, question mark.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. And so I had no idea. So I post on LinkedIn. I post on Twitter, and I put a video on YouTube. Now, to be fair, I put several videos on one YouTube channel that was me on the beach in Rio with the wind whipping past the lapel mic, and just that didn’t get any views. But I do one video on YouTube that is me analyzing a Bill Clinton debate, and it was one of those community debates where he approaches an audience member. And I talked about the power of his eye contact in that video.
And I didn’t look at it for six months, and I was, one day I found that piece of paper. I was like, “I should review to see how these things did.” I go to LinkedIn and nobody’s followed me, and I go to Twitter, nobody cares. And on YouTube there’s a hundred thousand views and I have 7,000 subscribers or something on this YouTube channel, and I haven’t even looked at it. So that was mind-bending, and I had no call to action. So it had no way to hit me other than I had to log into the YouTube platform, which I hadn’t done.
So I think it was 2016. I did a few videos at the end of 2015, but by 2016, I made the commitment that once a week, every week, I would release one YouTube video, and the first ones, this was, I’d read Essentialism, and it was like, “Just do the thing.”
Tim Ferriss: Great book.
Charlie Houpert: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Greg McKeown.
Charlie Houpert: So good. So good. Read it. Read it four times. Need to read it again.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I have a piece of artwork downstairs in this house that Greg McKeown recommended to me called “The Listener.” People can check it out. It’s a great reminder. But not to interrupt. So you read Essentialism. Excellent book I recommended as well.
Charlie Houpert: He’s got one story about Herbie, which stuck with me so long. I’m setting up to do these YouTube videos once a week, and they’re tedious and I don’t like doing them and I don’t want to. And I read Essentialism, and he tells a story about a Boy Scout troop that was taking a hike. And they’re trying to get to their destination, but they’ve got one, a little bit of a pudgy guy named Herbie, and he’s having a hard time with his pack, and they’re falling behind schedule, so they don’t know what to do.
Tim Ferriss: Herbie’s slow. He’s holding up the whole line.
Charlie Houpert: He’s slow, and so nobody can go. So they realize that if they take Herbie’s pack and they redistribute it amongst some of the adults and the kids that can handle it, the whole troop is able to go double time and get to where they need to do and get back on time. So the question is, is there one friction point in your process that makes the thing un-fun or miserable? And can you spend whatever money or do whatever you need to do to stop this? So the breakthrough was, I hated setting up the camera, and so I didn’t do it immediately, but the next place that we got, I said, “It must have an extra bedroom. I don’t care. I will pay for the extra bedroom. I need to be able to leave this camera up.” And oh, my God, that changed it. It was like being able to walk in, press play and do it was versus 15 minutes of focus. Oh, my God, it was terrible. So that was a breakthrough.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the Herbie Parable, I believe, originated in manufacturing specifically when you have a serial or a linear production process where if there’s a machine in the middle or a lack of inventory at point X that causes that type of slowdown, you need to figure it out, a.k.a. Herbie. But it can be applied to so many different things. And in your case, video production.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. Well, I love watching your work because you so often remind me that there’s emotional Herbies of like, “I don’t enjoy this, so I don’t want to do it.” And so the question of “What if this were 10 times enjoyable? What if I had to have fun doing this?” Those are always the Herbies for me. It’s always, “I don’t like this thing.” “It’s okay, what if you were only allowed to do the thing that you like?” It’s like, “Oh, well then I’d do a lot more of it and I could see some results.”
So we start making these YouTube videos. I do a big one at the beginning that is in January of maybe 2016. I do a video that says, “I think Donald Trump’s going to be the President. Here’s why.” I’m watching his debates. Scott Adams is before me on this, but I’m watching debates. I see the same thing that starts to pick up. Other videos are going, I’m analyzing Conor McGregor. And I think it was from, was January or February or March of that year, the business tripled, and then I think it tripled again within two months.
Tim Ferriss: Is that due to the success of that video, would you say?
Charlie Houpert: Of the videos.
Tim Ferriss: I got it. The cumulative videos.
Charlie Houpert: Yes. So I’m doing Donald Trump, Conor McGregor, taking Game of Thrones characters. We can talk about fame-jacking if you want.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about it.
Charlie Houpert: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you an intermediate question. Just to interrupt my own train of questioning, which is how did your call to action or flow change? Did the funnel change now that people are finding you on YouTube?
Charlie Houpert: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Was it just a link in a description or how did the actual business funnel function?
Charlie Houpert: So it’s evolved, and I’m going to take you up to present day to answer the question. So at first it was, “Hey guys, if you like this, leave a comment, subscribe.” I wasn’t thinking about it. So subscribers, which was, okay, fine. Then it was, okay, you need a tripwire. And the idea in online marketing is that there’s this low cost product that you want to get people onto your email list, give them a taste of something, and then they can buy your low cost product and then they’ll buy your larger product. So we set up this online funnel that was, “By the way, if you like that video and you want to know how to make a great first impression, here’s a free piece of content that’s like four minutes long on the basics of how to do it.” And you get that content. It’s four minutes of how to do it. And then it’s one minute of, “Hey, do you want help implementing this? Buy a section of this larger Charisma University course.”
And then when you’re in that, at the end of that, “Okay, so now you know how to make a great first impression. Do you want to know all this other stuff?” So it’s standard online marketing. Give them a piece, offer them more. Give them another piece, offer them more, solve a problem, offer them help with the next problem.
Tim Ferriss: And for those astute listeners, you may remember that how to make a first impression was straight from the interviews and then the Survey Monkey rankings, right?
Charlie Houpert: Yes, correct.
Tim Ferriss: Which is, for instance, even after writing five books, I have one in my mind that I would like to work on sometime soon. But I think the way I’m going to approach it is actually going back to the origins of The 4-Hour Workweek. And I will maybe, at a place like UT Austin in an entrepreneurship or business class, to workshop it, right?
Charlie Houpert: Hm.
Tim Ferriss: Teach it for a semester.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And you learn really quickly what works and what does not work.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: When you have an audience, whether it’s the one-on-one interviews or in something that you collate and then rank or having an audience who’s unlikely to give you kind of courtesy claps. So TBD. But all right. So I asked you about the funnel, but what else would you like to say about that, if anything? I didn’t mean to interrupt before.
Charlie Houpert: No, no. Well, the funnel has evolved. I think it’s worth saying that there’s so many sacred cows of everything online marketing. This is how you do it. What I’ve since seen is that these videos, without intending to be, they’re mini webinars. They’re 10 minutes of content. I don’t need to take everybody through this multi-step funnel. Here’s a small thing. So what we started doing, a breakthrough a few years later was just, “Do you want to buy our $600 course? Here’s some testimonials.”
And so that was a four X in conversions of just being everyone who’s watched their videos has at this point watched 10 of them and they don’t need to be drip fed this thing, they need to be offered “Jab, jab, jab” that Gary Vaynerchuk calls it, “hook.” Is like, “Dude, we’ve been jabbing for years at this point.” Offer them the product. Don’t offer them the email list. So that was a huge, huge increase to our thing was when I realized, oh, we’ve been just giving value consistently. We don’t need to do the same game that somebody who’s doing paid ads would do, who is just totally cold traffic and you don’t know them at all.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if they walk into the Ferrari dealership, you’re allowed to sell them a Ferrari.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Walk out with a Porsche.
Charlie Houpert: Yes. Yeah. Yes, please. Look, we’ve got them on our email. These are great leads. Call them back. So that was that. The fame-jacking was something that is worth mentioning, it’s since changed. But in order to get traction on some of these social media platforms, you need something that hooks people, and my face in front of a white wall ain’t it. That’s not going to fly for me.
So what we found was, if I can comment on somebody that is known, Conor McGregor, Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, how does Tyrion Lannister, what sort of principles is he applying? Even though it’s a work of fiction. We were able to take a Game of Thrones fan and by the end of it make them a Charisma on Command fan. And so we were able to start fishing in all of these pools that I was interested.
We were doing breakdowns of the Marvel actors and why their interviews were so fun or how come this viral moment where Robert Downey Jr. gets in a tiff with an interviewer as what can you learn about it? So called that fame-jacking, which is basically, look, there’s someone else who was famous, you start with them on the thumbnail, you speak to a broad problem, “How to deal with a rude person,” and by the end they’ve become not just a Robert Jr. fan, but a Charisma on Command fan. That was sort of the goal and that helped a tremendous amount of growth.
Tim Ferriss: You said it’s changed. Is that an algorithmic change? Because I see that playbook being used a fair amount still on YouTube, but how has the game changed?
Charlie Houpert: What I see is that in short-form content, there isn’t the decision to click. There is only what captures attention. And so there’s many things that capture attention. One is Robert Downey Jr. a guy who you know, but another is, can you walk up these sticky stairs on Mr. Beast thing on what it looks like to run with $10,000? So you actually don’t have to sell the click on the short-form content in the same way. And just the Meta people have realized. I think this is what’s beautiful about YouTube.
There’s these incredible titles that are like, “I went to every state’s Airbnb,” or “I sat in a circle for 36 hours,” or “I gave a homeless man 10k.” At the time in YouTube there was this sacred cow belief that it had to look like what you titled a blog article, “How to do something in seven steps,” six things, listicle blog titles. And I think YouTube has started to really find its own formatting identity, which is not what had traditionally worked with blogs. And maybe blogs will start picking it up from YouTube, but I see that you don’t need to do fame-jacking in order to succeed in the same way. There’s many other avenues in order to do it.
Tim Ferriss: I’d love to touch on maybe a few expansions of that just briefly for folks. So you might recall back in the day, this is, let’s just say maybe even pre-Eben Pagan and so on. If you were to look at different types of online marketing, a standard operating procedure was long sales letters with lots of yellow highlights. And that was how you did it. Period. That was the scripture of online marketing. But lo and behold, that isn’t the only way to do things.
And in fact, you can approach it completely differently. Now, if you go through almost any website that sells software as a service, you’ll see somewhere on the product comparison or on the checkout portion when you’re selecting features or plans, they’ll have three options. The middle will say most popular, there’s a very cheap one with half the features you need, there’s a super expensive one that only two percent are ever going to consider, and then there’s most popular in the middle. And while the presentation changes, I would say there are a few takeaways.
Number one is you can always experiment and break the rules. Number two is there’s certain things that don’t tend to change that much. So you can still look at Caples on advertising for copy editing. You can look at old print advertisements from Ogilvy. You can read, for instance, Influence. So there are certain things you can study.
And like if drawing is learning how to see, sure, you might have a crayon, a pencil, a paintbrush, a piece of charcoal, but those are tools that can be adapted based on certain base principles. And then you can feel free. Once you have an understanding of some of these core fundamental concepts, then you can experiment to your heart’s content and you can start to break stuff. I don’t know. I mean, a lot of it because platforms have so much value capture and are so powerful now, I mean, if they do decide they want to promote X, Y, or Z, and they have a template for making you conform to that, then I would imagine there’s a decent amount of pressure to be pushed in that direction.
Last year videos or tweets, whatever tweet is called on X, or whatever it might be, doesn’t get the distribution that you would like. Now, you mentioned shorts or shorter clips not needing maybe the type of cell to be watched ostensibly because there’s shorter duration.
Do you see much of a conversion from shorter clips to viewing of longer clips or subscribers? I don’t know which metric is the one that matters, but I’m curious.
Charlie Houpert: We ran a little experiment. I have not put a lot of energy into shorts because the answer was there’s a couple of things. To your first point, I’m going to come to shorts with all of those Ogilvys, whatever what I have found is that if you take the tried and true ways of doing it and you run it through your own value system and you don’t allow for things that don’t align with yourself, so I’ll just give you a for instance. We used to do discounts because that’s what you do. You do a discount.
And I got an email from a guy who was like, “Hey, I love your stuff, but last week my friend who didn’t buy your thing and was on your email list for 30 days got offered this thing for $400 and I bought it immediately for 600.” And I realized that in a way, we were penalizing our most strident, ardent, willing customers for not sitting on the fence and offering discounts down the line. So I made the decision to chop off discounts. It hurt the business by 20 percent.
But you get an audience of people that has a different degree of trust with you. And so all of these rules, you can win short-term by doing a lot of different things. You can do clickbait titles, you do all sorts of things, but you’re establishing a relationship with every business decision. So I find that running all of those things through the center is helpful. So when it comes to shorts, one of them is I don’t really like shorts.
I’ve never really gotten tremendous amount of value from a short, I’ve gotten value from YouTube videos, blog posts, videos, all sorts of things, but I don’t connect with them. So I haven’t pushed shorts. We did a few experiments, and what I found for the way that we do things is no, that we didn’t see. We got a ton of subscribers, but we didn’t see a strong connection between long-form and short-form and purchases. I’m sure that somebody else could make that happen, but even though that was the way the wave was going, that’s not the way that my wave breaks. I don’t know. That was not a particular trend I was interested in.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think to date I would say, and I’m sure my team would have additional thoughts, but I don’t think we’ve seen any correlation next to no impact whatsoever on short-form success. And by success, I mean some of our shorts have had 100 million views. And then the impact on the long-form interview that it was cut from literally imperceptible. You could not see an impact.
And yet it’s like, “Well, is that now a necessary survival/distribution tactic?” I’m not qualified to say, but also do not feel compelled to focus on clips. We do surface clips from longer interviews, but I do sometimes wonder if it’s to the detriment of the audience that I most like to cultivate, which is an audience who recognizes you cannot achieve any level of mastery nor can you retain anything effectively if all of your information is consumed in ten second increments.
Charlie Houpert: Totally. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Not evolved to do it. It doesn’t work that way.
Charlie Houpert: I totally agree. I’m so curious for you. What do you want from the podcast these days? Because it seems to me, and I’m sure you’ve had this many times like, “Look, I’ve done it. I’m safe. I can survive with the money that I have.” What is success for you at this point?
Tim Ferriss: Well, the podcast, I’ve thought, especially with the 10-year anniversary not too long ago and hitting some major milestones in terms of total downloads and listens and so on, I thought, well, if I were going to pack up my tent and move on, this would be a decent time to do it. However, I suppose for myself I just realized, well, even if I weren’t recording conversations, I would still be having these conversations.
And therefore, for the cost of a microphone and using an service to record a podcast with some basic, I mean, it’s not fancy lighting as anyone can tell if they’re watching me right now, but for the minimal cost of production, especially when you consider that a lot of these conversations I would be having would be via Zoom or FaceTime video. I might be walking around outside having this conversation, but I could also have a headset on where I’m recording. So the lifestyle inconvenience to me of recording the conversations I would have otherwise is close to zero.
And I would say success is having thought-provoking conversations. Ideally, I learn something or feel something from those conversations, maybe both, and then I get to share them. Because the origin of the podcast, I mean, it’s easier for me to forget, but I mean, there are a lot of factors that contributed to it in 2014. But one of them was I was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco at the time and I was having the most incredible conversations with brilliant people. At least people I thought were brilliant. The density of intelligence there is so high.
I mean, there are a lot of issues as well, but it just seemed like such a shame, not too dissimilar. I mean, it’s slightly different, but it’s closer than people might realize where it’s like you’re doing the one-on-one coaching. It’s yeah, it’s good to help one person, but then if I want to convey this to a second person, let alone 200 people, I have to repeat it. And for me, these conversations were sand through the fingers, that I could not in any way convey to someone else.
And I was like, “Well, let me just try to record some of these.” Which is why the first 10 to 15 were with friends of mine also, to make the lift as light as possible. And I feel like I probably, it’s not a probable, I would definitely miss recording because let’s just say I quit the podcast today, next week I would’ve an amazing conversation with someone. I’d be like, “God dammit.” It’s so selfish of me not to just record on an iPhone with a half decent headset to record this thing because fuck, it’s a real privilege to have access to the network that I have access to.
Which doesn’t mean by the way that, I mean, everyone’s going to know every person I talk to, I prefer strongly if they don’t. But success to me right now it’s honestly scratching my own itch. So for instance, I mean, I’m thinking of potentially compiling a whole lot of 4-Hour Workweek-related case studies because very early, very early in my entrepreneurial journey, and I’m not recommending people go buy this book. I think it’s out of print anyway, but Entrepreneur Magazine had this book called Young Millionaires, and it was two to three pages profile of each young millionaire, which meant somewhere between 20 and 35, I suppose.
And it was like, how much cost to start the business? $200. How much they made last year in revenue, next year estimated revenue, type of business. And it ranged from pest control to crime scene clean up to —
Charlie Houpert: Oh, God.
Tim Ferriss: — yeah, pretty gnarly, to cosmetics, to forestry. It was like the range and scope was so inspiring to me. The magic of that and the impact that it had on my psyche I didn’t take it and apply it right away, I was too young, but seeing that it was possible has made me think about assembling effectively a book that would be the [REDACTED].
Charlie Houpert: Wow. Oh, I love that. I love that. I got chills. I love that. Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Because with The 4-Hour Workweek it’s like in the beginning, and even now, understandably with a title like that, people are like, “Yeah, bullshit. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You work more than four hours a week.” I’m like, “Well, I’m not just going to lay outside staring at at the grass rubbing cocoa butter on my stomach.” I like building things and I like having these kinds of conversations, but there are so many other types of pushback in the early stages, keeping in mind, I’ve revised The 4-Hour Workweek, but the last time I did it was 2009.
And the principles really apply. The frameworks still all apply. The technology, forget about it, almost all outdated, but that doesn’t matter. If you grasp the principles, then you can find the methods. But a lot of the types of pushback that people would say, “Oh, well, it’s easy for a single guy than on a single mom.” Or “I have four kids.” Or “I’m in a different country.” Or “I’m in this struggling economy.” Or fill in the blank. For every possible excuse that I have heard, I have received a case study from someone who fits that exact profile who figured it out.
So the idea that I could collect those in some fashion in a compendium just seems A, it would be so much fun and so gratifying for me after almost 20 years of this book being out. And therefore, as always, us having this conversation is a way for me to feel into that and to be like, “Okay, what aspects of this?” Like you said when I mentioned the book, like chills like, “Okay, what pieces of it?” I’m like, “Okay.” I get an extra big smile, so big that my earpiece keeps falling out. Also, I have swimmer’s ear, so my canals are fucked —
Charlie Houpert: Oh, no.
Tim Ferriss: — on my right ear. So it just keeps falling out. But that’s a very long answer to your question. But success for me with the podcast is just recording conversations that I would want to have anyway, which for a successful podcast is maybe harder than people would realize. So hard. Because if you want to protect traction, distribution, and audience size, and ideally grow it, that is more and more every day being dictated by platforms with priorities that are not the same as your priorities.
And if you really double click on that, look at it, study audience capture as well almost every financial incentive would push you to break that rule and choose guests based on the number of Oprah moments or salacious clips you can pull from an interview that you can then use on the platforms to drive some type of growth engine. Although growth for what end is an open question. A lot of people make YouTube work, but in my particular case, I’m just not really video first. So it’s never been particularly strong performing compared to audio. It’s very difficult or I shouldn’t say it’s difficult. It requires constant revisitation to instill the habit of me only having conversations with people I would want to have a conversation with, right?
Charlie Houpert: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: Because if I could have on some completely off-the-wall lawmaker or I could have on, who knows? I could step on a bunch of third rails politically speaking. I could pull from current events and light off some audio and video dynamite with talking about the Middle East. There are many things that I could do, which would get a lot more attention than me finding a Japanese sword maker who no one has ever heard of.
But when you start to put on a mask, adopting practices that are not of your own invention, but because you’re complying with incentives, the concern is not that it just ends up hollowing you out inside, because that can happen, the risk is that you actually become the mask you’re wearing and that those behaviors change how you think and change your own beliefs, which I think is inevitable on some level. So in any case, that’s probably more than either of us bargained for.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, goodness. I’ve wrestled with this endlessly. And I absolutely hit a period where I felt like to a degree I allowed that audience. So at first it was, I wanted to make this video. I think what Bill Clinton does with his eyes is so fascinating. I think it’s so interesting that Donald Trump is probably going to be President. And I love Game of Thrones. And then it was, well, you guys want more Game of Thrones videos, let me do another Game of Thrones — well, you guys really like that one. And what you’re describing to me is not just a business struggle.
It is a legitimate emotional, spiritual struggle to be like, “Do I choose myself in the face of the world offering me all of this temptation to be something else?” And there were periods where the answer to that is I compromised. And it’s like I didn’t kill anyone or do any, but I made the video that I didn’t really want to make and it did really well and then, okay, well, I’ve got to make another one. And I burned out. I had to step away for years and didn’t make videos for years because I believed that I hated making videos. And what I learned was that no, I hated losing my creative well as I chased approval and views and more.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk about the timeline on that. Let’s see. Let me see if these are lining up. So you’re in Vegas, you begin to make these videos, which you enjoyed making, about Bill Clinton. I suppose Bill Clinton came maybe even prior to that, but to use your term fame-jacking, so Jon Snow, real characters or otherwise, Keanu Reeves. Maybe Keanu Reeves came later.
But in any case, those videos start to do very well. You realize that you can offer the higher priced products upfront or reasonably soon with testimonials, and you get conversion. You don’t have to lead someone through a 12-step process. And I suppose what I’m wondering is what does the trajectory look like from there? And how long was it before you decided, “I just can’t do this. I need to take a break?”
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. It’s so funny, this. There’s two lines. There’s the line of when you’ve created the value, which is I created the value sleeping on the couch in Brazil, and then there’s the line of when the money starts coming in, and so there’s a delay. So you’re creating the value and then the money comes in later. But there’s also a delay on the backside, which is you stop creating the value, but the money keeps going up.
And this is every cash cow business that starts cannibalizing itself and not treating customers well, but is still when Marvel makes the next sequel to Marvel movie and it does well, and they don’t realize that they’re eating their own future. So I would say the flip for me was 2018 to when it shifted from I personally want to make these videos and I’m excited and I’m learning something in every video to, oh, I’ve learned what makes them clap, and now I want more claps. I want more clapping. And the money was secondary, but it’s like, “Oh, they like it. They love me.” Every video bigger.
Tim Ferriss: So that was a few years after starting the channel at that point?
Charlie Houpert: Yes. And I’d been doing it weekly. And there was an authentic drive to do it weekly that’s then slowly shifted and it became, “I don’t want to do this.” And then it was, “I definitely can’t do this.” And I, at the time, so many other things were going on in my life, we can go into it or not, but there was a moment probably in 2018 where I needed to have a conversation with my co-founder that said, “Hey, I think we’re no longer in alignment with this business. I’ve been driving the growth with these videos. Your projects have not succeeded in the same way, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of honesty, we have to have a talk about our 50/50 split.”
But money was never the drive. The drive was always be with my friends in Brazil. And so I didn’t care. But as my own inability to have sincere, authentic conflict crept into the business, it cascaded downwards. So I’m avoiding having a difficult conversation with my co-founder. We hire somebody else to cover that up. Turns out years later that we hire somebody who fabricated a bunch of stuff and stole money from the business and all of it was just from this core pattern of not wanting to face the problem and just wanting to squint at it and say, “Everything’s good. The money’s coming in. People like it,” et cetera.
And so what happened was, and again, I was so happy, broke in Brazil, sleeping on the ground, unable to afford food, and then I had the experience, the cliched one of I’ve made more money than I’ve ever made. Everybody wants more, they think it’s all great, and I feel like, I feel awful.
And then I have a breakup, right before my 30th birthday and I’m going to collapse some things. We can go into anything. I am invited to an ayahuasca retreat, I have been having these issues that have not surfaced. I don’t smoke weed, I don’t drink.
I am a straight edge, but fuck it I’ll give it a try. I go headfirst into this ayahuasca experience with no idea what’s coming and that starts what has now been a seven-year process of completely turning my life upside down and having to face everything that I hadn’t looked at, which was, of course, these things in the business, but even more importantly, the patterns of avoidance and people pleasing and seeking that had been birthed in my childhood. And so, hey, happy to touch on all of that. I know it’s broad spanning.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No, we could spend probably two hours on six different facets of that. Let’s start with coming back to the secret of freedom is courage. Was there a catalyzing event? Was there a book you read? How did you go from squinting at the problem? Because this is, I would say shockingly calm, but it’s not shocking because I see it so often. Co-founder challenges, co-founder splits, these happen all the time. And it’s particularly challenging in a situation where you have some accepted 50/50 division because there’s no real tiebreaker. It gets even more complicated when you have governance and board of directors and all that kind of stuff. But I mean, almost no relationship is 50/50.
Charlie Houpert: It would be weird if it was. It’d be so weird.
Tim Ferriss: Actually, that clip I mentioned that got 100 million plus views, it was Brené Brown talking about how marriage is never 50/50. And I would say the question for me that I’m sure people are wondering is how did you go from the conflict avoidant kind of people pleasing, maybe fear-based, who knows, squinting at the problem, hiring people to try to paper it over, et cetera, et cetera, to having whatever come-to-Jesus conversation presumably you guys had? How did that happen?
Charlie Houpert: It took years. And the catalyst was not the business because the sacred center of it for me was never money. It was the friendship. And I was acting out a pattern to try to keep things good with us and he was doing his half of that pattern to keep things good in the way that we thought to do it, which was, let’s not address this. And it was on me to address it because I was the one that was beginning to be frustrated, resentful, subtly trying to influence change, encourage, coach everything other than say, “This isn’t working for me.”
And how did I do that? It was a multi-year process of facing brick by brick those familial patterns of I’m afraid you won’t love me if I say that I’m upset with you. I’m afraid that you won’t love me if I take what I think is my fair share. I’m afraid that I’ll be alone. And I hear it in my voice. I still carry that in me. And if you look at the business, Charisma on Command, even how to make Tim like you in a conversation, how to make somebody like there was this founding belief that, “If I could just communicate clearly enough, do more, say more, be more, that connection would just happen,”
Tim Ferriss: How did you decide it was time? What did it look like to go from doing the work with all these modalities to, “All right, game time — “
Charlie Houpert: Oh, God.
Tim Ferriss: — to have the conversation?
Charlie Houpert: Again, it was pieces. First, it was oblique conversations like, “Hey, I’m not feeling — this isn’t feeling great,” and then seeing what I got back. And then it was more confrontational. And the essential problem was I did not know how to have a boundary and tried to negotiate boundaries endlessly with people that I loved, instead of saying, “I love you,” but pass this line, “It’s not okay with me and I will not comply.” It was, “Well, can you see why that would be fair for me to have this perspective?” So if there was a shift, the big thing that happened was, over these years, I had started to develop a therapeutic relationship with a therapist and a number of friendships where I was being met in ways that I did not think were possible, and to not use therapy language, I felt that people wanted to hear the ways in which I was upset with them or angry and wanted to repair in ways that actually didn’t just paper over the problem but felt good.
And when I brought that possibility, I was like, “Holy shit, this can happen? Let me bring myself,” that was not the result of my conversation with my co-founder. It did not go that way. And knowing that it existed now and then not getting it there made it like, “Okay, this is no longer working. We need to separate.” And so what happened was, first, it was with the friendship, but secondarily with the business, it was tough for me to come back to to say, “I don’t want you to make videos anymore for the business. I don’t feel that they’re aligned with what I want to say.” I made videos for, I don’t know, the first three-ish years and then got burned out. I was like, “Will you please step in?” and always didn’t want to look at the videos.
Whatever, the money’s coming in, I don’t want to see. I actually had to sit down and literally watch them, and not that there’s anything objectively wrong with them, but they’re aligned with what felt right for me. And I had completely abdicated that responsibility of saying, “This doesn’t feel good.” So confronting that I felt so evil and awful and bad for having that perspective. I was being too cruel or too mean, but I had become more grounded in, “Not saying that you shouldn’t make videos ever. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do this, but this doesn’t work for me.”
So we just paused literally making videos on the channel for one year. Business starts to nosedive, right? Not immediately, but the videos don’t get views forever. Business falls off 20 percent, 30 percent, 50 percent. And it was again a question of which — it wasn’t a game. It was, “I just don’t feel good about that.”
And so through that process, we were talking about the future of the business and what I buy, what he sells, we couldn’t find an agreement on who would do what. And I can talk about the negotiation if you want, but we finally settled on, “I’m going to buy the business all out. I’ll pay you for the piece and you’ll have no restrictions. You can make any sort of content that you want on any other channel, but this was going to go, I’m going to take this, I’m going to give you cash.”
And honestly, it’s what both of us wanted. I think the thing that we didn’t acknowledge is that we had fundamentally different drives, whereas mine was more creative expression and his was more financial security. And that split, it’s very tough. It just doesn’t align well, especially what you said. I did not feel he has a different opinion, that we were equally contributing to the financial success of the business. So yeah, it was harrowing more importantly than the business split was that he was my best friend and we’re not that anymore. And so it was going through the wringer. It was Dark Night of the Soul-type challenges. So grateful for it and it was painful as hell to experience.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m sorry you guys experienced that. I would say that, in theory, sometimes in practice, if everything’s going perfectly, 50/50 informally agreed upon sounds great, right? But in practice, it can be very challenging. And if you were to do this again, right? If you were to partner with someone else, let’s just say that it actually made sense, someone came to you with a channel with an equal number of subscribers. They’re like, “Hey, let’s join forces. I think we can 3x,” and let’s just say that conformed with your artistic expression and what you want to do. I would imagine you would have some type of partnership agreement that can function as a prenup in the sense that you would have termination clause, where it spells out what happens in case of a split, which is an area where also conflict avoidant folks get themselves into long-term trouble, not saying you, but in general.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, 100 percent me.
Tim Ferriss: Right? They get themselves into long-term trouble because they want to avoid the short-term discomfort of talking about the ingredients that would go into such an agreement, and man, oh, man, yeah, it can get really, really, really messy. A prenup is always cleaner than a postnup in business and in life. Where do things stand now with the business?
Charlie Houpert: So I’m making monthly payments to him. We agreed on a fixed sum that I would pay over a period of time. I am sole owner and it’s great. It’s exactly what I want. The business for me always has been the crucible of emotional growth. From the moment where, “Am I going to press publish on this thing?” to, “Am I going to do private coaching or am I going to move to Brazil?” and it’s always been the question of, “Can you hold your center in the face of temptation not to?” And there’s a long period where with my relationship with him, I lost it. I lost my center and that’s not his fault. But God, it’s so amazing, I come back and I step into this audience-capture moment where I want to prove myself that I’ve still got it, that I can do it, except I don’t want to make the old bangers that I used to. I don’t want to throw fastballs down the middle to the fat part of the bell curve any longer.
And so I’m facing continually the challenges of letting go of my ego of the guy who did it and having the business that is authentic to me. And I have not sorted through it. Even in preparation for this conversation, half of me wants to sit and dial in my story, so that I’m perfect and I nail it and it hit that punchline. And the other half of me is like, “Dude, go in empty. Go in empty.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I like rough draft.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, rough draft, right?
Tim Ferriss: More than finished 60-minute comedy special on Netflix.
Charlie Houpert: Exactly, yeah, TED Talk.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I appreciate the vulnerability and the candor and I am going to ask you at some point, I’m just going to plant the seed because I’ll let it germinate a bit, which is other critical decisions that you made in your entrepreneurial journey. Could be anything. Could be a tiny detail that ended up making a big difference. Could be anything at all like other decisions or milestones that were really important. I’ll buy some time though.
Charlie Houpert: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: So do you still recommend, I’ve actually never read book, but Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden?
Charlie Houpert: Amazing. So good. Now I haven’t read it in maybe seven or eight years, maybe longer, but if you do read it and you’re crunched for time, you can skip to the chapters on the pillars. He’s got some preparation on what self-esteem is and the history of it. But if you haven’t worked on your self-esteem at all, it’s the first stop to go to. If you have more experience, you might be more familiar with it.
Tim Ferriss: And what should people expect to gain from this? How did you find this book in the first place? Do you remember?
Charlie Houpert: Goodness, that Tucker Max message board was a lot of the books — that was where I found The Game and it might’ve been Six Pillars of Self-Esteem as well. I think it was through something like that, yeah, and I got into, it’s like a 1970s psychology personal development book, but it’s perennial. What people can expect, there’s these exercises that people are discovering the power of, which is sentence completions exercise. So it’ll run you through each chapter and talk about how personal responsibility is a critical element of self-esteem or whatever, but then it adds at the end it’s got these sentence stems, “If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today,” blank.
And the idea is that you can write or speak, just free like, “If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, I would eat healthy. If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, I would call my parents and tell them that I love them,” whatever it is that is honest for you in that thing. And if you go through these, usually the fifth, sixth one, you’re just like, “Oh, damn.” And so some of them were, “I would have talked to that girl at Whole Foods,” and it was, “Oh, crap.” And so there was one, there was a woman who I dated who I had seen her and then I went back and then I did my pillars of self-esteem and I went, “Oh, crap,” and I walked back to Whole Foods and I said, “I had to talk to you. I went home and wrote my sentences and it was, ‘If I had more courage, if I had five percent more courage, I would’ve asked you on a date,'” and that became a relationship.
Tim Ferriss: It’s amazing.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, it’s that sort of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: She’s a slow shopper.
Charlie Houpert: No, no, she worked at Whole Foods. She was at the counter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I was like, “She wearing leg braces?”
Charlie Houpert: No, she was identifiable. She was easily trackable.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Okay. Amazing. All right, so we will link to that in the show notes. This is what I was curious about. What was The Last Psychiatrist blog?
Charlie Houpert: Oh, my gosh, you don’t know this?
Tim Ferriss: No, never heard of it.
Charlie Houpert: To me, he is the secret godfather of bloggers on the internet. A lot of the people that you might’ve liked from cracked.com or whatever, he wrote. It was a pseudonym. People think they know who he is. He’s likely a psychologist or psychiatrist and he has incredibly thought-provoking stuff. Now if you read it, you’re going to go, “Well, that doesn’t make sense and that’s kind of a leap,” but it is very thought-provoking in reading it. And at the time, he stopped writing in like 2013 or something.
Tim Ferriss: But the old posts are still up?
Charlie Houpert: Somebody’s cataloged them because there’s an internet fandom around it, but if I could give you some basic things, I’ll give you one story that I remember.
Tim Ferriss: I think “The Maintenance of Certification Exam as Fetish,” “Ten Extra Seconds Would Have Saved True Detective‘s Finale.” Okay, he’s got all sorts of random stuff.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, he’s all over the place.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 2014 looks like the last post.
Charlie Houpert: He discusses how advertising doesn’t just condition you [to] what you want, it conditions how you learn what to want. So as an example, people will watch a Lexus commercial and they’ll think, “I didn’t fall for that. I don’t want to buy a Lexus,” and his point is, “Yeah, but you think that that’s what a pretty woman looks like, the woman who moves towards the Lexus.” And so he’s got a couple of maxims which are interesting, which is, “If you see it, it’s for you,” meaning if you’re consuming a piece of advertising and you think it’s not impacting you, it’s been split test to make it to your eyeballs. And yes, technically there’s a chance that you’re resisting, but it is teaching you that a watch is a status symbol. And maybe you don’t think you need a Patek Philippe, but you learned that this is what money looks like because the background has a bookshelf. And now you think that books are what make people want things.
So he talks about how two things have happened. We’ve, one, lost the ability to self-reference internally our desires, which is exactly in line with what we were talking about. It’s all mimetic desire, right? “What do you want that you want that you want that I can’t find my own wanting in it?” And he talks about how we have become deeply narcissistic. Just collectively as a society, we see our own reflection and image everywhere and many people do not have the capacity to genuinely love and encounter another, “It’s just what my wife says about me, what my kids say about me,” that sort of a thing.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so that is just thelastpsychiatrist.com. All right, let’s come back to critical decisions or they don’t have to be critical, important decisions. If you were basically teaching a class about your entrepreneurial journey, a seminar, and you were highlighting some of the things that actually really made a difference, maybe they looked small at the time, maybe they looked really big at the time, anything else come to mind that we have not yet discussed?
Charlie Houpert: So a lot of them we have. So allow me to run through the ones because maybe I’ll find something new. So if I really go to critical decisions, there were all of the early ones about, “This isn’t my 10-out-of-10 and I’m willing to let it go.” That was repeated throughout the business. There was this phase of making videos where I had read Essentialism and it became, “Get everything out of my way so that I can do this thing,” and that was rocket ship growth. It was like, “Let shit go awry. Problems are arising. Do not come to me.” And there’s a balance there that I haven’t quite figured out because what happens is a lot of little things go wrong, but the net of me making these videos absolutely obliterates and cancels them out.
And there comes a compounding bill when you’ve just hired that person and just let that culture persist and it becomes — it, at some point, needs to be addressed, which is what eventually did need to happen with the company. But there was a period of just rocket ship growth by letting small problems accrue. There was, getting that extra room was really big, so that I could film the video.
Tim Ferriss: Handling the Herbie.
Charlie Houpert: Handling my Herbies.
Tim Ferriss: That there was the rebranding, of course.
Charlie Houpert: Rebranding early. Yeah, then building the course. Here’s one. There was between V3 and V4, I went to Jay Abraham. He had a private coaching thing. He’s one of these old-school business coaches.
Tim Ferriss: He’s super old school. He has a great book on joint ventures. I haven’t read it in more than a decade, but all the myriad forms that joint partnerships and joint ventures can take. Pretty wild. Some of the negotiating gambits and kind of guerrilla marketing and partnership approaches. Jay Abraham.
Charlie Houpert: So I have private coaching with Jay Abraham. And he asks me, “Who’s the person you most want to take your course?” I say, “Tim Ferriss or Tony Robbins.” And he says, “If Tim Ferriss found your course and took it right now, how would you feel?” I went, “I don’t want him to,” and he said, “That’s a problem.” I said, “Well, it’s not good enough.” He said, “Make it good enough.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s a cool exercise.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. So I went back and filmed it and I still have insecurities and this and that, but I did my best effort to make it okay for Tim, for you. And when it was done, the next video that I made, I spoke about it, and at the end of the video I said, “This is the best I can do. This is the greatest thing that I can possibly make for you guys on this topic,” and conversions exploded. And every ad read after that had a significantly higher like 2x or more lift in conversions and we started getting more testimonials. And it was this, “If you don’t believe in it fully, you’re going to sell it with hesitancy, right?”
So being able to tell the truth and the truth was not, “This is the greatest thing in the world,” is, “This is my absolute best. If you like this blog, this is the best I can offer you.” And at this point, the truth is it’s now longer true. I feel like I can do something better now. So I need to go back, do it again and then be able to honestly say, “This is the best I can do and I’m sure that will have the same impact because I subtly shy away from selling, from offering the thing that I don’t fully believe in,” so that was a big one. It’s tough.
I don’t know how to parse it out, but this plus adding testimonials was a 4x conversion lift when we started adding those at the end.
So we used to have our call to action, it was a 10-minute video and then like, “Hey, if you want to buy Charisma University, it does this, it does this, it does this. It’s got all this in it. Here’s what’s in it.” And then it became, “Hey, do you want to buy Charisma University? Here’s what somebody said about it, ‘This helped me get a promotion. It did this.’ Here’s what somebody else said about it, ‘I got a girlfriend.’ Here’s what somebody else said about it.” And they were just literally photo comments that people had left in the comment section or emails that they sent in and that combined with the, “I care about this more,” was a 4x total conversion lift, which was huge.
There was — the avoidance was something that I had to pay for on the backend, the avoidance of conflict, and not — I think this is one, I didn’t know how to just allow people to know that I was disappointed or upset or hurt or angry. I had to fix everything very, very quickly, a lot of people-please-y tendencies, compounding over time, created a lot of issues.
There was not firing the person who wound up stealing. I knew that I needed to. There was a lot of not firings that were huge.
And then there was the walking away and the returning, which was really, really important and they were both honest. One was like, “I’d rather not have this thing send me money than post videos that I don’t feel aligned with,” which made me like, “Oh, my God.”
When you do stuff that isn’t aligned for money, it signals such a lack of self-belief and self-love. And this is in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem book. When you start trading your beliefs for cash or approval, you’re just sending a signal that, “I can’t be relied on to be myself and be safe and earn.” But when you do things that are detrimental to income, not offering a discount, like saying, “I don’t want these videos to go up,” not to punish anyone, but just because it doesn’t feel aligned, I have felt every time where I’ve dropped into that this power arises in me. And so that was like, “Oh, holy shit.” I felt like a beggar in a weird way. I’m making all this money, but I’m feeling unsafe that I need to beg for more and ride the coattails of this thing that I built that I can no longer do. And as soon as I said, “I don’t want this,” I felt a surge of like, “Oh, fuck, I have more to say. I have more to contribute.” So that was huge.
And then in the negotiation, the big moment was two things. We’d been at deadlock for two years. I made him an offer. It was nowhere near what he wanted. We were just not able to meet. There were two things that happened. One was we’re starting to get into these circular spirals of, “Things aren’t working,” and I paused and I said, “Hey, it sounds like you’re really scared,” and we just talked about our feelings and the fallout of the friendship and the fears that we both had. And acknowledging the emotional intensity of this, that was essential. Pretending that this was a business transaction, that’s a lie. That’s not what was going on here. We were both really afraid. And speaking to that and bringing it to light moves things tremendously.
And then the second one was honestly going to him and saying, “I’m willing to sell the business. I’m willing to sell it, but I need one thing, which is I need no noncompete. I need the ability to go and make anything that I want anywhere.” And that moved us from “I’m trying to buy from him, he wants more money, I don’t want to give him the money,” to, “Make me an offer.” He made me an offer then for that. And I said, “I’ll give you 20 percent more than that,” and it was done deal over and it was that.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Was there anything in particular that led to those two, call it breakthroughs?
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think they’re, after a two-year impasse, I think that wording is appropriate.
Charlie Houpert: Oh, totally.
Tim Ferriss: What contributed to those two things?
Charlie Houpert: Joe Hudson, I have to give a huge shout-out. Have you spoken to Joe?
Tim Ferriss: I have spoken to Joe. Joe. I actually just featured a tweet storm about emotional intelligence that Sam Altman had retweeted at one point. Just shared that in my newsletter I think one week ago, maybe two weeks ago. Yeah, so Joe Hudson, you should explain, though, to folks who don’t know the name, who he is.
Charlie Houpert: Joe’s awesome. It’s funny, I have to admit this. It was Father’s Day last Sunday and I was making the joke. I’m like, “I’m meeting all my dads in one week. It’s my dad and Tim Ferriss and Joe Hudson is going to be here in two days.” And for me, it’s a significant thing because the truth is, and I told you, I had a ton of projections onto you like, “If Tim helps me, it will save me.” And I had the same thing with Joe because Joe’s work was also deeply important to me. And so it’s just really cool to drop some of the projections and meet the people.
So all my dads. Joe Hudson is my third dad. He’s great. He has a thing called Art of Accomplishment and he acknowledges the emotional aspect of business and not only acknowledges it, but points to the fact that, if you ignore it, you will either not do as well as you could or you will do is exceedingly well and feel that empty burnt-out thing that awaits everybody who trades the inner asset for the external one. So his work was extremely helpful. I’d gone through his courses and he offered me, because we’d been in contact, a private coaching session because I’d helped him with some YouTube stuff. And on that, he literally suggested, he said, “Offer to sell. Are you willing to sell?” And he was like, “Then make the offer. Do a shotgun deal where you guys both write a number on a piece of paper and the person who is willing to spend more will take it.”
So just knowing that I had that, I brought that to my co-founder and said, “Look, I’m willing to make a binding agreement about this where I’m genuinely willing to buy or sell.” But it was that shift of, when I needed to buy, he was like, “Well, give me more.” And when it’s like, “Look, I don’t need to buy, but let’s get our way out of this thing,” his number came down essentially is what happened. And there was one final thing that was — I based on loving advice from people who were supporting me, had wanted to buy the business out of net revenue, which is to say, with safety valves on, “If it doesn’t perform, I don’t have to pay you.” And that, we couldn’t find a number for. It just didn’t feel good.
And I had a number come through, a literal number that came to me and I was like, “That’s way more than I’ve been offering him and he said no.” And the next followup was, “Yeah, because you’re going to take all the risk,” and I felt a surge of fear and then that self-belief energy come back and like, “Oh, my God, yes, I want the risk. I don’t want this. If it works, I want this through rain or shine, good or bad. Let me pay the price for not succeeding.” And I’ll take you back to one. It was the burning the boats that finally made the business work at every stage. It was taking the steps that got me to not have the contracting job, to move to Brazil. I’m committed. I care about this enough to suffer and hurt if this doesn’t work out, right?” And so that was also huge in that and it was huge at the beginning of the business.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, what a story. I’m consistently amazed, it happens to me all the time in my own life too, but how a single conversation or a dream, literally this has happened to me when I’ve had a fever and I’ve just been sick in bed where you’re looking at something and then suddenly say a Joe Hudson’s like, “Well, why don’t you just do the opposite of what you’re considering?” and you’re just like, “Oh, shit. Yeah, why don’t I do that?” It’s this revelatory experience of an off menu option suddenly seeming obviously available and viable, right? And it’s like when someone offers you A or B, look for C type of situation. And it’s so easy to say that and it sounds trite and cliched, and even as I would like to think at least how much practice I have at trying to test assumptions or I am testing assumptions, testing assumptions and always looking for side entrances and these off menu options, still there are these moments where you’re blind to what is hiding in plain sight. And it’s fun to hear that Joe was one of the unlocks for part of that.
Charlie Houpert: And by the way, I have to say, if you’re here watching this, I can’t imagine you have it, but if you haven’t read The 4-Hour Workweek, that’s the entire thing. It’s that energy. And I actually think what people are buying from me is that energy in the social realm, “There’s a third option, which is connect. The magic is available,” and I think 4-Hour Workweek is like, magic is available in your career.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. I’ve been asked so many times, as you would imagine, by publishers to go back and kind of fine tune, rewrite that book. And I don’t want to touch it.
Charlie Houpert: It’s too good.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, I appreciate you saying that. It somehow captured lightning in a bottle, and I’m like, “Look, I’m 47 right now. I wrote that when I was 29.” And sure, if I read it now, there’s a little bit of chest puffing, and there’s shit in it where I’m like, “Oh, my God.” It makes me facepalm a little bit. But for whatever reason, that book has just stood the test of time, at least over 20 years or close to it, and resonated with people from so many different age brackets. Going from 15 all the way up to retiree. I don’t want to touch it.
And to your point though, fundamentally, it’s about calling into question all the basic assumptions of career, retirement, slave, save, retire. The deferred life plan. And looking for alternatives that you can effectively prove are, if not realistic, at least possible vis-a-vis these case studies that are already in the book. And the vast majority of those case studies predated the publication of the book. I mean, I think that’s a byproduct of enjoying books that do that on some level.
Let My People Go Surfing, I think, is the title of the book by Yvonne Chouinard. I remember reading books by Ricardo Semler, and Branson, Losing My Virginity. Where it’s like, “Okay.” Everyone says an airline is suicide. He workshopped it, in a sense, because a flight got canceled. He walked around with a sign at an airport offering charters. And then once he had people booked for a charter, he chartered a flight somewhere. And then figured out how to work with, I think it was a Boeing at the time, to effectively cap his downside so that his losses were contained.
But the upside was attractive. And you look at how he structured some of these deals, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that that was possible.” But of course, when you have someone like that who’s scrappy, and also had the life experience of having to pick himself up by his bootstraps, and work with next to no money. It’s like, “Oh, wow.” You just had to ask, and you had to know the right way to ask. And these apparent miracles can happen. It’s just wild. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll put together that book of case studies. I think it’d be fun.
Charlie Houpert: Can I ask a question about that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: So I ask because I have a conflicting relationship with my earlier work. This course is 10 years old. This is exactly what you said. That braggadocious ass. He’s not caveating it enough. There’s this boldness that you can only have in your 20s of, “This is how the world works.” Right?
You haven’t been smashed before, but there’s something beautiful about that as well. That only a 29-year-old can write this book with this much punch, and pizzazz, and clarity. So I’m curious what your relationship is with that version of yourself. And I’m also curious, what is it like when you are to receive gratitude for that? Do you feel that it’s able to land? Does it hit? Does it matter? I struggle with some of this as well.
Tim Ferriss: I have never been particularly skilled or natural at receiving praise, or compliments, or anything like that. And who knows all the reasons? I mean, there are probably many I’m not even aware of. But I think in part, there were certain things that I adopted really early on as core beliefs like, “Look, the good stuff takes care of itself. You just have to fix what’s not working.”
Which, by the way, is not true in a lot of cases. It can be true in a limited sense for certain things, but it’s a very Faustian bargain of a philosophy to live with. But I believe that for a long time. So in sports, if coach wanted to give me a pat on the back, I would be like, “Yeah, that’s great, but that’s already working. So help me fix the stuff that’s not working.” Which is not to say that I never responded to positive reinforcement. But little Scooby Snacks, tiny bits of positive reinforcement, and say language learning. It was very important.
But I often got that reinforcement through the process itself. Not from anyone else. That being receiving praise. So I would say I’m very grateful. I do practice gratitude, and I journal a lot on things I am grateful for. And I basically have run through some type of gratitude list, and also asking myself, “Is this a good day to die?”
When I take off in planes — take off, and land in planes — just as an exercise, I’m kind of like, “Okay. If this is the last rodeo as far as travel goes, how do I feel about what I’m doing right now?” And then assuming that it’s positive, then — and even if not, running through some level of gratitude. So I would like to think of myself as a very grateful person, but I still struggle with receiving compliments and praise.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. What about other people grateful for you?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can be really deeply appreciative. I think there’s also a deep-rooted fear of becoming self-absorbed, or arrogant, or over-weighting my importance in the large-scale cosmic order of things. Which is, effectively, zero. I would like to remind myself. Which I don’t think is a real risk, but nonetheless, that fear is there. So I think that’s also maybe a byproduct. The allowing it to glance off of me, but maybe not fully land is, I think, a consequence of that as well.
Charlie Houpert: I relate. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like, God, you don’t have to go very far. Open your laptop, and go anywhere online. And 99 percent of people out there, I don’t think it’s that much of an exaggeration, but are just saying things with the utmost confidence and self-importance. And it doesn’t seem to help them, and it doesn’t seem to help anyone else, ultimately.
It tends to end in tears. So I love to say I don’t know.
And that would be another reason why I like having these conversations because there’s a lot more that I don’t know than what I know. That was a long riff on the gratitude piece.
In terms of relating to my earlier self, I think it’s probably harder for you with video.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You know what I mean?
Charlie Houpert: I know what you mean.
Tim Ferriss: I think it’s probably a lot harder for you in video. Video is incredibly unforgiving, and video also has so many different components that feed into the end product. You’ve got camera, you’ve got framing, you’ve got lighting, you’ve got editing, you’ve got your stage presence, so to speak, and performance. You have body language. There’s so many different elements on top of the scripting, or not scripting. But the actual delivery of whatever the content happens to be. Set design, depending on what you’re doing.
I mean, there’s so much that goes into it. Whereas, with print on a page, I would say, I still feel very proud of the writing in The 4-Hour Workweek. I mean, I killed myself over that book, and took the writing itself very, very, very seriously. I mean, I hate to say this, but it may even be crisper and tighter than my writing now. So I feel good about the writing, and the presentation.
The teaching of the concepts, which was based largely on many, many, many, many guest lectures at Princeton when I was invited back by one of my professors to speak to an entrepreneurship class. So that’s how I workshopped that particular book. There are small pieces where I’m just like, “Oh, God.” Just the kind of chest-beating confidence, and flamboyance, maybe, of some of the examples. And at the same time, I think that some of that irrational, maybe, exuberance is really effectively infectious within the context of that book.
Charlie Houpert: I think so.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Keep in mind that was however many years. Not that many, really. I mean, we’re talking five or six years after for my purposes in lifestyle design. Cracking the code, or at least figuring out elimination and automation, and all these various things. To an extent that seemed very unusual at the time. I was still really high on that experience. And you can’t be a lukewarm evangelist, or a lukewarm teacher.
I didn’t really view myself as an evangelist. The harder the subject is, the more enthusiastic you better be, or at least enthusiastic and effective as a teacher. If the subject matter takes care of itself, then there are lots of ways that you can perhaps compromise, or not be up to snuff. But entrepreneurship is a full-contact sport, as you know.
And the chapter that I think gets the least attention, if I were to expand something that I would expand, is the “Filling the Void” chapter at the end. People miss that, and it’s so important.
It’s like, look, if you just create a lot of empty space in terms of time, humans are not really designed just to be idle. And I mean, go spend some time with any reasonably intact hunter-gatherer society that might have some plantains and cassava, or something like that. And you’ll see, yes, they do rest quite a bit, but they’re also, by and large, very active. It might be just household stuff, it might be chores, it might be any number of duties, church, et cetera. Especially these days. But idle hands are the Devil’s workshop applies to the mind as well.
So for mental health, I think that that chapter is particularly important, and maybe could have been positioned a little bit differently to underscore it. But that’s the type of chapter, also, that, number one, most readers don’t assume they’re going to have to deal with. They’re like, “Well, that’s once you’ve won the race.” I’ll worry about that once I’ve won the race. Unfortunately, if you build a business, and a machine-to-serve lifestyle, but then it becomes inverted, it’s not exactly straightforward, or it’s certainly not pain-free to fix it at the 11th hour after the fact. So I relate to the book well. It is funny to me when I look back at some of the tech recommendations, and I’m like, “Oh, my God. This is just going to the Natural History Museum and seeing dinosaur bones. Most of these are completely extinct.”
Charlie Houpert: Yeah, I’m wrestling with that. It’s an ability to look back at myself, have all the thoughts that you said, which is, “Ugh. Ugh.” But also, love that part. Like, holy shit, that guy brought me here. You know?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. On the entrepreneurial journey, are there any other books that you would recommend to the mini Charlie, or someone out there? It doesn’t have to be YouTube specific. But if you could only recommend a handful of books. They don’t need to be business books, per se, but they can be.
Charlie Houpert: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Are there any other books that stick out to you?
Charlie Houpert: Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, is excellent.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: Excellent.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have that. Have that downstairs.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That was easy to read. You can read it in small segments.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Why that book for you?
Charlie Houpert: It’s been a minute since I’ve read it, but I’m in that zone of what moved me. I was like, “Oh, that book brought me to tears many, many times.” There were just deep truths about life. Increasingly, I’m into that archetypal, mythic, pseudo religious stuff. Not because of any doctrine, but because of the way that it moves me. So that’s just an example of a 20th century classic tome — not even a tome, it’s a pamphlet, essentially. It’s not that long.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. It’s like a hundred pages, maybe.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 120 at most.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Charlie Houpert: Running Lean helped a lot with the interviews. It’s not the most fun read, but it helped me set up those interviews that I did that identified the stuff in the business.
Tim Ferriss: Running Lean?
Charlie Houpert: Running Lean. You could probably find many books on the topic, but it’s a lean startup thing. And it just has two sections. Here’s the big takeaway. There’s two interviews that you do. You do one interview that is about the customer, and one interview that is about your product. So the first interview is not, “Do you like this? Do you want this?”
It’s, “What are you bothered by? What are you trying to make happen? What isn’t working for you? Where are you hanging out?” And then the second one is, “Hey, I’ve got this idea for you. Does that solve the problems that you identified?” And it helps you run through those. So that was really important back in the day. What were the other ones? Back in the day, Influence by Cialdini was huge.
Tim Ferriss: Outstanding book still.
Charlie Houpert: Classic. Still Dale Carnegie. Still classic.
Tim Ferriss: Which Dale Carnegie?
Charlie Houpert: For me, it was How to Win Friends and Influence People was the one. There’s ways in which I go to it.
I’ve got poetry by Hafez, which again, that hits the part of me that is coming more active today. I love Martha Beck. I saw your interview with her. She’s got several books. Her interview with you is honestly great though. I think it does a lot of the work that you might want to take from some of her books. So I’d recommend that. Let me see real quick. Brandon Sanderson’s in here. I know he was on. That was a great interview as well.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he was fun.
Charlie Houpert: So good. Yeah, I’ll leave it there. And Essentialism. Yeah, let’s not drown people.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. That’s plenty to start with. And Essentialism, I’ll reiterate. It is a really good read. And if you combine that with Richard Koch’s book, The 80/20 Principle. Those two will take you a long way. A really, really long way.
Well, Charlie, we have covered a hell of a lot of ground here.
Charlie Houpert: We did it. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that you would like to mention, or point people to? Where can people find all things Charlie online?
Charlie Houpert: Charisma on Command YouTube channel. If you’re interested in the course, it’s Charisma University. You should be able to just type it in, and it’ll take you to our sales page. I know it didn’t hit, but I spent a lot of time and money. I made a D&D show on YouTube. I dressed up. I wore a cape. I got my friend who does a Trump impression to be a character that is named Tumpy. He’s great. That’s called Improv & Dragons. Don’t expect it to explode. But if that’s your thing, and you want to have a quick laugh, you could check that out as well.
Tim Ferriss: What is your character?
Charlie Houpert: So my character, I called him Sigmund because I was doing a riff on Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. So Sigmund, and his brother Carl. He was a druid. Was he an elf? I forget exactly what his race was. Oh, no, he was a Kalashtar, which is one of those weird ones.
Tim Ferriss: Kalashtar? That must be a new one.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah. They have these dream lives. And so, for me, I was having dreams, and I was like, “Okay. I want to just infuse this with psychoanalysis, and I’m going to give him a German accent, and I’m going to lean into this.” So we had a good time with that. And one day, I hope to actually get people to watch it.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right, man. Well, I think we can begin to wind to a close here. Any last comments, or remarks, recommendations? Anything at all you’d like share with my audience?
Charlie Houpert: Anything else? If I had a billboard. I have to answer my Tim Ferriss question.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it.
Charlie Houpert: I thought about this. I was like, in the moment I’ll find it. What is it? “Don’t think, feel.” And I know that’s counterintuitive to a lot of people, but lately, that’s been my guiding principle is feel my heart, feel my gut, think from my mind, and try to find some union of the three to move forward.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, dig it. I dig it. I’m sure Joe would like that. And I’ll give a shameless plug. Diana Chapman interview on The Tim Ferriss Show for people who want —
Charlie Houpert: Oh, I’ll check it out.
Tim Ferriss: — maybe a framework or two to try to calibrate. To learn how to do that. She’s a very good teacher, and I suppose we’ll cap it there, man.
Charlie Houpert: Beautiful.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks so much for taking the time.
Charlie Houpert: Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Really had a lot of fun.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And for everybody listening, as always, we’ll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/Podcast. Not too many Charlies on the podcasts. So if you just search Charlie —
Charlie Houpert: Charlie Hoehn.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Charlie Hoehn.
Charlie Houpert: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Charlie Hoehn might pop up on the blog, but otherwise, Charlie Houpert will be the one and only. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than necessary. Not just to others, but to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 4-Hour Workweek Success Stories — Charlie Houpert on Building “Charisma on Command” to 10M+ Subscribers, From Charging $10 for Seminars to Making Millions, Living in Brazil, Critical Early Decisions, and The Secret to Freedom (#817) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-06-25 21:44:26
“Do I choose myself in the face of the world offering me all of this temptation to be something else?”
— Charlie Houpert
Charlie Houpert (@charliehoupert) is the co-founder of Charisma on Command, a company that helps people develop confidence, charisma, and strong social skills. Originally launched as a 4-Hour Workweek-inspired “muse,” it has since grown into one of the largest platforms for social skills and confidence training, with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers worldwide and more than a billion views across its content in six languages. His flagship course, Charisma University, has guided more than 30,000 members through practical steps to become more magnetic.
Charlie was once voted “Most Likely to Break Out of His Shell” and began studying charisma to overcome his own social anxiety. He now explores the deeper roots of confidence through archetypal psychology, embodiment practices, and more.
Please enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here. The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
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Want to hear another episode with someone who understands social dynamics and influenced Charlie’s entrepreneurial path? Listen to my conversation with bestselling author Neil Strauss, in which we discussed his creative process, conducting engaging interviews, overcoming writer’s block, maximizing creative output, and much more.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
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The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
“Do I choose myself in the face of the world offering me all of this temptation to be something else?”
— Charlie Houpert
“If you don’t believe in it fully, you’re going to sell it with hesitancy.”
— Charlie Houpert
“Don’t think, feel. I know that’s counterintuitive to a lot of people, but lately, that’s been my guiding principle is feel my heart, feel my gut, think from my mind, and try to find some union of the three to move forward.”
— Charlie Houpert
“When you start trading your beliefs for cash or approval, you’re just sending a signal that, ‘I can’t be relied on to be myself and be safe and earn.'”
— Charlie Houpert
The post 4-Hour Workweek Success Stories — Charlie Houpert on Building “Charisma on Command” to 10M+ Subscribers, From Charging $10 for Seminars to Making Millions, Living in Brazil, Critical Early Decisions, and The Secret to Freedom (#817) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
