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Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — Niels Hoven of Mentava (Tim Coaching Session)

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Tim Ferriss: Niels, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Looking forward to this.

Niels Hoven: Thanks so much. I appreciate the chance to be here.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And it was fun for me to take a trip down memory lane in a sense, because I remember exactly where I was when we first had our very initial long conversation about Mentava and I got super amped. I was in British Columbia walking around a friend’s cabin. I remember exactly right next to a river, freezing cold outside, snow on the ground. And digging back into the website, looking at the testimonials, watching some of the videos of kids, I was like, “Yes, I remember very clearly why I invested so long ago.” It feels like ages ago. It was quite a while back. And we will get to the bio. I actually want to use part of this working session to go through the bio as I have it here intended for me to read, because I think the wordsmithing may apply to other places, including the website, including potentially paid acquisition.

But before we get to that, why don’t you—let’s hear it from your mouth. What is Mentava? What is the latest draft of your quick explanation of what Mentava is?

Niels Hoven: All right. The latest draft is that Mentava is software that is designed to let kids learn as fast as they’re capable of learning instead of just at the pace assigned to their age. And the first product we have is our early literacy software, which is designed for kids, preschoolers, as young as generally three to get to a second-grade reading level.

Tim Ferriss: And what is a second-grade reading level? Let’s just say I’m a first-time parent. I don’t know what it means. What is an eager to learn, reasonably smart second-grader doing with their reading by the end of second grade?

Niels Hoven: Our finish line is basically able to read easy reader books on your own. So think Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, the Elephant & Piggie series, the conscious competence level of being able to read.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. And what are some stories? And I recognize these are not RCTs, right? So for the people out there who are going to try to needle everything, a lot of these are anecdotal of course, but you also have data in terms of performance on the app, right? It’s not just a subjective measurement, but could you just give some stories related to kids learning to read faster than one might expect?

Niels Hoven: Right. We had a set of two-year-old twins who were reading Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, these early reader books before their third birthday. We have a three-year-old who—

Tim Ferriss: That I saw, where they were standing…

Niels Hoven: Oh yeah, you just retweeted that video.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The parents were projecting the game onto some large screen and the two twins were basically just playing and competing with each other to read. Wild. They were so excited to read.

Niels Hoven: It is really adorable. It’s funny, there’s so much fear around, but if I give my kid these academic opportunities when they’re so young, are they going to stress out? Are they going to freak out? But no, it’s actually fun. Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.

Tim Ferriss: And just as background, well, why don’t you tell one or two more stories and then I want to hear how Mentava came to be, not the Iliad version, like the abbreviated version, but maybe you can give a few more examples because people might say, “Okay, fine. You got the Wonder Twins, but we need more than the Wonder Twins.” So what else have you seen?

Niels Hoven: We had a three-year-old who learned to read in about three months. We had a kindergartner who was behind and his mom asked us, “Can we use this software to help him catch up?” And she came back to me a little later and said, “Yeah, he’s reading now. The teacher says she’s never seen a kid catch up so fast.” What was the phrasing? She was like, “The teacher didn’t actually say this, but I could read between the lines. I could tell that the teacher really wanted to say your kid was just a terrible reader.” The teacher didn’t say that. The parent was like, “But I could read between the lines. I knew what she wanted to say.” And the teacher said she’d never seen anyone catch up that fast.

And the thing that actually really stuck with me from that one was the mom was saying the kid used to come to her and tell her, “Hey mom, there’s this kid in my class who’s so smart. He’s able to read and do all these things.” And then she said, “He came back to me the other day and said, ‘Mom, I can read like he can read now.'”

Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.

Niels Hoven: That was just really neat.

Tim Ferriss: I was watching the two-minute, maybe three-minute demo. I’m not sure. It’s pretty short. I don’t think you guys publicize or use it much, but the demo video that you sent over.

Niels Hoven: It’s a terrible demo, but yeah, it’s out there.

Tim Ferriss: It’s terrible except there is one slide, let’s call it, it’s text that is a testimonial that is kind of below the fold on laptop on your love letters section with all these parents sharing their experiences, which is roughly more progress in one week with my daughter than in roughly six months of kindergarten. And that’s bananas, but it’s not so bananas as to be outside of the realm of possibility. And you become somewhat of an adept in the sport of sparring with critics on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. And we may chat about that, to what extent it’s helpful to engage in or even provoke the culture wars. But I have seen a few. I think there’s one notable. You’re good at responding to the critics in a way that gets people to sign up for Mentava. And there was someone who said like, “The learning process, I have a four-year degree that was earned because learning is complex and you cannot simplify it and we’re not focused on outcomes. We’re focused on all this hand wavy stuff.” And certainly—

Niels Hoven: This was an educator who said something like, “You will never convince me that results are the driver of education. You’ll never convince me that efficacy is supposed to be one of our goals.”

Tim Ferriss: People can watch the documentary Waiting for “Superman” if they want to see the part of the sorry state of things. But I was introduced to you. How was I introduced to you? It was Eric Ries, I believe, of The Lean Startup.

Niels Hoven: Also one of our investors.

Tim Ferriss: Also one of your investors because I think he knew or intuited that I’m very much on the same page. You can learn things much, you meaning adults, but also humans, broadly speaking, can learn things much, much, much more quickly than conventional wisdom would suggest. And I could go off on this long list of things, but how do you do it? How do you do it? How did Mentava come to be, short version, and why does it work? How and why does it work?

Niels Hoven: Short version of how it came to be. Mentava started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids, so we both have full-time jobs. We’re locked down in this 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn. They’re young kids. They’re these little sponges. They want to learn to read. They want to do math, but I have a full-time job. I don’t have time to teach them and be their teacher every step of the way. What I really want is I want them to be able to teach themselves, which aside from just being practical in that situation is just this life skill that I feel is really, really important. And so, I started looking around for software or apps that could support my kids as they’re learning, and there just wasn’t very much out there. I found a couple of things that were okay and we made it work, and it was honestly surprising how well they were able to learn despite using software that really wasn’t designed for having kids teach themselves.

And so, other parents noticed what I was doing. They asked me questions about it. I pointed them to the same software, and some of them had some success and some of them didn’t. And really what I realized as all of this was going on was that the problem was in the design of the software. No one is designing software for three and four-year-olds to be learning on their own. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it’s really, really hard. But my background is in games. I spent a long time designing games and designing tutorials, and it’s just design problems all the way down. I felt like this is a problem that I could solve, that I wanted to solve for myself, that I wanted to solve for other people, and that’s where Mentava came from.

Tim Ferriss: And what’s the magic sauce? Why does it work? Why is it better than the 12 other things that I’ve seen you rate from a scale of, I think, 1 to 10 in different ways and giving your reasons?

Niels Hoven: Right. I think the key things that Mentava brings to the table is an extremely optimized curriculum and a lot of really good motivation design. I think the curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems. We know how to teach reading. You teach kids letter sounds and then you teach them to blend them together. And honestly, for $15, you can get a book off of Amazon that will let you do that. You have to be the teacher. It’s a lot of heavy lifting from the parents’ side, but it will get the job done. So it’s kind of unconscionable that this has been a debate in education for a generation, but this is very much a solved problem. So we take phonics, we optimize it, we teach it really nicely. We make really good UX. We make it really easy for two, three, and four-year-olds to use.

Tim Ferriss: And this is on, typically, a tablet?

Niels Hoven: Yeah, on an iPad, just as an anecdote is where the bar is hanging in terms of low hang design. In one of the apps that I was using before we built Mentava to have my kids learn, if you have a two-year-old, if you have a three-year-old and they’re using an iPad, they kind of brace it on their belly and they hold it there while they’re tapping away at it. And a very common situation that happens is their little tubby toddler belly hangs over the edge of the iPad and you get all these extraneous touches at the bottom of the iPad. And in one of the apps that we were using, every time that happened, the app would crash. It was just a tap. So you have this—

Tim Ferriss: Belly crash.

Niels Hoven: —two-year-old toddler belly constantly crashing the app. And so we take into account all these little things where you have a kid who doesn’t know how to read trying to use these educational apps. The other piece that we really bring to the table is motivation. I think there’s a lot of people really don’t understand how sophisticated motivation design is. But if you look at video games, if you walk into a casino and you walk through the slot machine aisles, human motivation is kind of a solved problem. We know how to get people to do the things that we want them to do over and over and kind of, I don’t know exactly how to say that.

Tim Ferriss: You mean like variable reward or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design?

Niels Hoven: Right. The slot machine example is probably the crudest example. It’s the easiest way to motivate someone because the metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it’s like trying to get someone to jump through a hoop. And so, you can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop. And so, slot machines are kind of the purest example of this where they dangle the biggest reward you could possibly imagine, which is like a million dollar jackpot, and they’ve moved the hoop as low as you possibly can, which is just press this button over and over again. And so for that specific use case, it has been solved. And so our goal with Mentava is, okay, the hoop we want kids to jump through is learning all of these phonic sounds and learning to blend them together.

So how, through really good user experience design, can we lower that hoop as low as we possibly can? And then what can we dangle on the other side of that hoop to make kids want to come back and do this every single day? And for that, we use a lot of insights and design principles from game design about helping kids feel motivation, about visualizing the progress that they’ve made, about twiddling the right reward centers in the brain in just the right way that we celebrate their intrinsic motivation rather than trying to replace it extrinsically.

Tim Ferriss: So Niels, let’s move next to your bio. And if you could indulge me, which might end up seeming like a very pedantic exercise, I’m just going to go through and tell you how I would change certain words because I think we’re going to talk a lot about these magical things that allow us to produce images in brains at a distance. All words. All right. How do you pronounce your last name correctly? Remind me.

Niels Hoven: Hoven.

Tim Ferriss: Hoven. All right.

Niels Hoven: Hoven.

Tim Ferriss: Niels Hoven. On X, if you want to see front lines of the culture wars, @NielsHoven. He’s the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support unusually fast learners. This phrasing, unusually fast learners, I would actually just scrap unusually and go straight to fast learners. Part of the reason for that is that when I saw this on the website, I was like, “Well, what is unusually fast?” Even if I consider my kid fast, maybe unusually fast is what, 1 out of 100? 1 out of 1,000? And I stumbled. So I made note of things that I read twice or that I stumbled over. And this is a subjective take, but since I’m in the midst of having just recently cut an 870-page book to 350 and now I’m doing all of the fine tuning, this is how my brain is calibrated at the moment.

Okay. So software to support unusually fast learners or support fast learners. High achieving kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. I would also, I think high achieving for me at least, I think about pegging to letter grades in high school or college. I might just replace that or you could scrap high achieving. When in doubt, take it out is another writing dictum. So it’s like kids, high achieving kids, eager kids maybe, right?

Niels Hoven: Oh yeah. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system. And again, I recognize this might be a little laborious for a second, but it’s going to tie into things that come up later. Okay. Niels created Mentava to allow top performing students to achieve their potential. I think we can scrap top performing also, students to achieve their potential. Great. Now I would actually scrap this entire second paragraph, which I’ll explain in a moment, but while most education companies focus on raising the floor, Mentava’s mission is to remove the ceiling. I have very strong opinions about this. I know it’s on the website. I get the turn of phrase and I understand why there’s a degree of clever wordsmithing here. I don’t like this as a positioning for you because what I ended up stumbling over here, I was like, raising the floor, remove the ceiling, remove the ceiling. I guess that’s as high as the best performing students.

So raising the floor, does that mean accommodating and helping the lowest performing students? I ended up dissecting it and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. So I’ve read that line a lot, but let’s move on. Is my understanding of that correct? Am I actually understanding that sense as it’s intended?

Niels Hoven: Yeah, basically you are. I think one of the challenges we are struggling with is how we kind of target what we see as more of a niche audience that deeply values education, is willing to pay for it and has kids that are being unsupported academically. And so we’ve been playing with different turns of phrases to try and speak to these people, but I agree. I don’t think we’ve found the right one yet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would also say, I think it’s a big niche, frankly, which you may have already concluded, but their early literacy software, meaning Mentava’s early literacy software for preschoolers is used and trusted by some of the most influential people in the world. Don’t love that. We can come back to that just because it’s something that anyone could claim unless you have things to point to, right? And maybe you do. We can come back to that. Mentava blends careful curriculum design with best in class motivation design. I think, for instance, we are not that far from the beginning of the new year. I think doubling down on motivation design if you’re going to do more X posts around January would actually be very interesting and do some very interesting things there that would drive conversions, but developed through years of experience building mobile and I’m guessing the way you pronounce this is AAA games.

I don’t actually know what AAA games are, but that sounds like a good thing and I have heard it before. This is, I think, the money shot in some respects. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. That says you know what you’re doing very, very clearly. So I would be inclined to scrap that whole second paragraph and then move up the third. And then it goes to mentava.com and it has all the links and everything else. So M-E-N-T-A-V-A, if people are wondering. But I don’t want to belabor the intro, but we are going to spend a lot of time on messaging.

And you very kindly sent a skeleton framework that we could use for going into the conversation. I think we already checked off kids can learn much faster than people think. Problem two, I think, is maybe not immediately obvious to folks, but the problem, and if you don’t mind, I’ll just read it. We waste the low pressure elementary school years and then pour on pressure in high school. And it’s like, okay, maybe I agree with that. Okay, waste low pressure. How should we capitalize on low pressure and are we accidentally turning it into high pressure if we add something like this? I mean, looking at the kids playing it, at least the video I’ve seen, it wouldn’t seem that way. I do like, I know I’m kind of spoiling the delivery by offering the punchline, but if you don’t mind.

Niels Hoven: Yeah, go for it.

Tim Ferriss: So you had two, right? You had two sub-bullets under that. Schools actively slow down fast learners. Yes, 100% agree. They wouldn’t let my son learn algebra, et cetera. Is that your son, your actual son?

Niels Hoven: My son, yep.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. Early acceleration means less pressure later. That I think is super, super, super interesting as a point that could be really used, maybe not in exactly that form. And then number three solution. Mentava lets kids accelerate without requiring parents to become teachers or taskmasters. And that’s through, as you pointed out, the very finely tuned curriculum and motivation design. And I would agree that schools are surprisingly bad at both.

Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the current challenges? How would you lay out the hierarchy of problems to solve, opportunities to capitalize on, however you would like to phrase it or list it out? Where should we go next?

Niels Hoven: Zooming way out. We’ve built a product that we are really proud of that when our customers use it, they rave about it and they tell their friends about it. I think we have not figured out. We are really good at product design and we are not so good at marketing. We are trying to explain a problem that a lot of parents don’t realize that they have, that their kids could be doing so much more, that their kids are going to be held back when they get to elementary school. By the time parents realize that they had this problem, that their kids are bored and not achieving their potential. It’s kind of too late to—or the biggest opportunities to do something about it are now behind them. And then for even the parents who are looking for a product in this space that can help support their kids’ learning, they’re not experts.

And what differentiates our software from a lot of the other stuff out there is really nuanced. And so, how do we differentiate what we feel is a premium product when the differentiates is really nuanced and in thousands of small decisions that customers can’t look at themselves? It’s kind of like trying to explain what makes this video game better than this other video game. It’s a very hard thing to explain or has been for us.

Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s a thousand decisions that add up to a very distinct feeling maybe on some level. Okay.

Niels Hoven: We found a lot of the parents who came to us immediately sort of already feel this problem intensely because sometimes it’s immigrants who come to the US and then are just shocked at how much worse the education system is here than what they experienced. So they just see this immediately and they’re like, “I am not going to have any part of this. I need to start addressing this right away.” Or it’s people who already care about motivation and just recognize that their kid is capable of doing more than they’re doing. We have a lot of parents who are in Montessori who send their kids to Montessori school because they love the values there, but they’re like, “But Montessori school doesn’t focus on academics. My kids could be learning to read and they refuse to give them any phonics, so I want to do it at home.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So let me just say what’s top of mind and then we can go in a lot of different directions because I think that the fixes in a way are going to be a lot like your product design. I don’t think there’s one thing. I think there are probably myriad things that when moved five degrees in the right direction might reach this breakthrough or step function distinction where suddenly you have better retention, more referrals, et cetera. That’s just my intuition looking at everything in front of me and the website and so on.

Niels Hoven: That sounds right to me.

Tim Ferriss: But let’s start with what came to mind for me, which is related to something that you have, I think is kind of like one of your pain points, which is how do we solve a problem before the customer knows it exists? And a way to rephrase that would be like, how do we educate people about the problem? And there’s a framework, you may have heard it. It was actually introduced to me. I met a doula the other day, someone who’s somewhat like a midwife who helps the birthing process and she was talking about this acronym BRAIN, and it was benefits, risks, alternatives, what does your intuition say, and then N is nothing. What if we did nothing? What if we didn’t do anything about this?

And so, I’ve been applying that to more things and I’m like, “Well, what if you didn’t do any education in—” Rephrasing that, what if that were not the problem? And the reason that comes up for me is when I imagine I want to have kids at some point, it’s like, okay, I would hope my kids are eager learners and curious and maybe have a little embedded software that gives them an advantage. It’s like, okay. I don’t know if you’ve run into this, but my hesitancy, if I had any, I don’t think I would have a ton. I think I would just pay the price and use Mentava, but is I want my kids to be socially intelligent. I want them to be in school with other kids. I’m not going to have child neuro taught by private tutors or whatever. I mean, hopefully not child neuro, but that’s a whole separate conversation.

The point of that being, I want them to be kids and to have time socially. But if I push them three, four years ahead, is school going to be even worse for them because now they’re just sitting there staring at the clock waiting for school to be over? And if so, how do I check the box of maximizing intellectual development while also allowing for kids to be kids plus the social development?

Has that come up at all or is that—

Niels Hoven: This has come up.

Tim Ferriss: Because for me, I’m like, fuck yeah. Let’s pour gasoline on this eagerness to learn. And these kids want to go, go, go and they’re being held back. They’re these thoroughbred racehorses locked in the gate. They’re just not being let out to run. It’s like, “Sure, I want that kid to run, but then what? What form does school take if I give them such a head start?” How do you think about that?

Niels Hoven: So a big part of the reason we’ve designed Mentava the way we did is because of exactly this. So when I was in third grade, I was ahead of my class in math and my school only went up to third grade. So before third grade, in second grade, I would go to the third grade class for math and then I would come back to my classroom. But in third grade, there was no classroom for me to go to. So I started doing independent study in third grade. During math class, I would go to the back of the room, I would study out of a math book for the hour of math class, and then I would come back and join my class for the rest of the day. And I did that for the next four years all the way up until I rejoined classes in seventh grade for pre-calculus. And then I took calculus in eighth grade.

And so, those four years of being able to learn on my own at my own pace allowed me—I didn’t have any homework. I got to go as fast as I wanted. It was really incredible. It also built this skill of teaching myself that I depend on today. And that’s why I think you look at a lot of the other alternative schooling startups that are happening where they’re trying to develop an entire schooling ecosystem that would run parallel with public schools. And I actually really believe in the institution of public schools. I went to public schools. My children go to public schools. I just want them to be supported and allowed to learn at their own pace there.

So to me, really, the ideal case is let’s let our kids go to public school with their peers from their neighborhood. And then for an hour a day during math class, they study Mentava. They do math Mentava for an hour. They get to go at their own pace, and then they rejoin their same age peers for the rest of the day and have a good time.

Tim Ferriss: Am I wrong? As an Austinite, I feel like it may not be exactly this, but Alpha School uses sort of adaptive software on tablets for a portion of the day.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I think I’m getting that right. But you would also want something that scales that people can use now as opposed to moving to a city that has Alpha School, which is going to be great, but also very expensive and limited capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Niels Hoven: So Alpha School’s big insight is essentially the same as ours, that if you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very small amount of time. When my own son was in third grade, after a lot of back and forth, we finally got permission from one amazing teacher for him to do independent study during math class from an app during the school day. And he finished eighth grade math while he was in third grade. And that’s just the pace of what kids are allowed to do, capable of doing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So let’s hop into it because I love what you’re doing. I have since the beginning. It works. I’ve seen plenty of videos and enough testimonials and the design. This is going to sound maybe arrogant because I’m certainly not an educator, I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not a UX designer, but I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah. From a micro progression logical sequencing perspective, it just makes sense.”

It’s very hard to make and when you see it, you’re like, “Oh yeah. That makes sense like many things.” So I want to be as maximally helpful as possible here. Let’s hop into a real customer. And I’m going to give you an example of a real prospective customer because as chance would have it, it’s such a small world. It’s crazy.

So we’re doing this kind of live workshop on this podcast episode. I’ve only done two of these. You are number two. Number one, I don’t think you’d mind me mentioning is Jake Becraft of Strand Therapeutics. He’s developing mRNA as a programmable layer in medicine and doing all this crazy stuff that’s amazing with cancer.

And Jake is very, very smart, so not shockingly. His kid is also pretty smart. And he reached out to me because he saw me as an investor on the website, and he’s like, “Of course you’re an investor in Mentava.” He’s like, “All right. Well now, I want to ask you about it.” And I encouraged him to try it and then never heard back.

And so I reached out to him, and I was like, “Whatever happened? Did you try Mentava?” And then I just want to read his feedback, and we’re going to just take a bite of the apple from a bunch of different directions because again, I don’t think there’s one—as much as I wish this were the case, like, “Okay. We’re going to change unusually fast learners to fast learners,” and boom, automatically conversion and everything like quadruples. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

But here’s what he said, “Yes, I did.” So they have a 14-day trial period and also try to see if your kid is ready. He put that in quotation marks. A few thoughts. Number one, I won’t give his kid’s name, but let’s call his kid Rob. Rob was super young, two years and two months, but he taught himself the whole alphabet at 17 months so he figured why not try?

Two, there’s a “sequencing milestone” that they explain is important. Rob was likely not fully there. Three, let’s see. Their curriculum sort of made the sequencing tests more difficult than I think they need to be, and then pushed him to easier curriculum, which I couldn’t figure out how to override. That was one sort of annoying part, but it makes sense to make sure people fail fast and don’t pay before the kid is ready.

Four, we ended up pausing at the end of the trial with the plan to restart in three months, which will be soon. Five, he still points to the iPad. This is the most important part of the whole thing by the way. Well, I think there’s a lot in all these bullets, but here’s the last one. He still, this is his son, Rob, still points to the iPad and says he wants to play the letter game.

So clearly, Mentava had some pull for him. So the kid wants to use it. But one question I had, I guess there are two things that pop to mind. Well, before we get to the suggestions, can you explain the 14-day trial period and the sequencing just for folks so they have an idea of what this looks like? People go to the website. They’re like, “Oh my God, totally want to try this.” And so they click on the 14-day trial period. What happens, and what is the sequencing?

Niels Hoven: I think there’s not a question about the user flow, which we know is bad and more about a question of the experience that they’re having as they engage with the software. Is that what you’re asking?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yep.

Niels Hoven: Okay. So the point of the 14-day free trial is that we know we are not good at explaining what differentiates our software. We think what works best is just get it in the hands of the customer and let them try. So I think within 14 days, we think that’s enough time that a customer can figure out if this is going to be a good fit for their family or not.

A very common problem is exactly what happened with Jake where he has a kid who is probably not developmentally ready to learn to read. And so we want the parents to recognize that during the free trial. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the developmental milestones, kids are able to learn letters and letter sounds quite a bit earlier than actually being able to blend those sounds together and be able to read.

So very common that you could have a kid who’s a year and a half, two years old, knows all of their letter sounds, but they are not actually capable of learning to read because they can’t blend those into words. We’ve figured out that there’s a test that we can give the kids to see if they can understand the concept of left to right reading order, basically the idea that directionality is important.

So what do we do is we show them a couple emojis. We show them dog fish, and we show them fish dog and we say, “This one is dog fish. This one is fish dog.” And then we ask them, “Now, we just told you, which one of these is dog fish, and which one of these is fish dog?” And what we found is that for older kids, this is an obvious question.

Of course, you just go this way, “This one is dog fish, and this one is fish dog.” But for younger kids whose brains haven’t connected those neurons or whatever, this is a nearly impossible question. And so in the Mentava experience, fairly early on, you purposely hit this wall where we’re asking your kid, “Do you understand dog fish, fish dog?” And if they can’t, we boot them over to, “We’ll just teach you letter sounds,” and we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness.

I think we send the parents an email. We might not. I hope we send the parents an email explaining this developmental readiness issue and ask them to try again in three to six months.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So that was going to be one of the questions I wanted to hit on. And I’ve got plenty. So don’t worry folks who are listening. We’re getting into the weeds quickly, but the weeds are where we have to play this game. What share of failed trials come back like a Jake? And are they prompted three months later or are they just told when the kid doesn’t pass the hurdle, try coming back in three months? I guess how proactive is the outreach and what percentage?

Niels Hoven: There’s zero proactive outreach.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to hit something that is going to be related to all of this, which ultimately is going to fold into mock-ups and redesigns of the website as well. But let me give you just a brain dump of some things that I think might be helpful, and I’ll prompt some of them with questions. All right. Is Mentava free for schools or in some capacity free for teachers? Is there any free option? Is there anyone who can use Mentava for free?

Niels Hoven: We have pilot programs running with schools right now. We’re not charging the schools who are in the pilot program. I would like to give Mentava to schools for free. Our philosophy is that if you want to use us as essentially a private tutor to accelerate your kid, that’s going to be expensive. But if you’re a school just using us as a tool to support your teacher, we’d like that to be cheap or free.

We are in the process of getting—may actually have just gone live of having self-serve signups for teachers so that they can get it for their classroom. The main issue we have there unfortunately is just fraud. What prevents just a random parent from saying, “I’m a teacher. Let me sign up and get this for free.” And so that’s why we haven’t really scaled that or pushed it aggressively.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I would say a few things. The first is that if, in fact, you end up offering it at very low cost or for free to schools, even if it’s in some limited fashion and people need to check a bunch of boxes, that could be a useful flak jacket for offsetting the premium cost of the product, which is what right now? What is the cost?

Niels Hoven: I don’t think we’ve mentioned this. So this is a $500 a month product, which I think many people are shocked when they first hear, but also, we have a lot of customers who are like, “Oh, we let go of our tutor. We don’t need our private tutor anymore because we’ve replaced it with your software. You guys should be charging more. This is great.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I don’t think the cost is a problem personally, and we can come back to that. But I do think the free for schools and teachers is interesting. The other thing I would say is that—I probably shouldn’t mention them specifically, but I know someone who has created a spectacularly successful app, and it’s pretty expensive.

On an annual basis for an adult, it’s going to be in the hundreds of dollars, and it’s very, very successful. And he set a policy very early on, which was if you can’t afford it, send an email to this email address, explain why. And chances are, you’ll get it for free. And the fraud has been unbelievably low.

People do email, and I’m sure some of them are fraudulent. But on the margin, it is so unimportant. It’s so trivial and the cost of delivering the product to a handful of fraudulent customers who are unethically kind of abusing things is so low that maybe it doesn’t matter.

At the very least, I think it could be worth the test. I don’t want to belabor this particular point because I don’t think it’s the most important of those we have to talk about. But it might not matter.

Niels Hoven: I think I know exactly the app you’re talking about and I do know that it’s a great program.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a great app. Yeah. I’ll just give another example. Long ago, when I started my first, let’s call it, real business, I offered a 110% money back guarantee if the product didn’t work and never questioned it. Just did it unflinchingly because frankly, the time that it would take me to police it would be so much more expensive than a certain degree of fraud.

Even if it’s like 10%, 20% even of the people who requested it were fraudulent. Also, I should say in this case, this is a hard product being shipped via regular mail, and they would be able to just keep the product because having them ship it back and paying for shipping, it just wasn’t worth it given the cost of goods. People were much better behaved than I expected.

It really didn’t cause a problem. Assuming the product is good, this isn’t a returns situation. So you could offer something like that, frankly. I think that the 110% back is really underutilized, but I feel like you were going to say something else. Yeah.

Niels Hoven: We have something along those lines, but not exactly. When people write, so sometimes, people do the free trial. And then they write into us and say “Essentially, we love the free trial, but we just can’t afford it. Do you have any scholarship programs or anything like that?”

And what we’ve been going to right now is Mentava costs $500 a month, but if you tried the free trial and you loved it and you really want to keep using it and you’re motivated enough to write us, we’ll tell you that you can have Mentava for $100 a month, but we would like you to send us a video of your kid every week using Mentava, enjoying Mentava that we can use in social media, in marketing, because we want to run those ads, but we want to make sure that we have signed releases for any kids that we put into advertising or social media.

And we don’t police that aggressively. I would say not everybody participating in that program has been sending us all the videos we would like them to send us. But like you said, mostly people are pretty good about it.

Tim Ferriss: Where would you like to go next? I can pull up lots of things. We can look at the website. I want to come back to the readiness check. Is there any reason to have people sign up and then do the readiness check as opposed to do an abbreviated readiness check, a two-minute, “Is your kid ready?” type of quiz?

Niels Hoven: I like that idea a lot. We’ve been talking about that for a long time, just put the readiness check directly on the website.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because if you had, is your kid ready, take the two-minute quiz, you could still accomplish the data capture of email address and so on and verification so that you can communicate with those people.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I think that’s reflected in some of the mock-ups that I sent over. On the price, I don’t know if you guys have approached this. I really think that selling the parents relief, not just the kid’s speed is a big deal, that you don’t have to be the teacher because the 500 can be anchored in a few different ways. $500 a month. Is it the same or is it less than a tutor? Well, let’s just say it’s the same.

And let’s say they’re equally effective, but there’s one difference. And one is you’re giving a kid a fish, meaning the teacher is motivating the kid versus you’re teaching the kid to fish, meaning the kid is becoming a self-motivated, self-directed learner, then Mentava still wins, even if they’re equally effective.

And then furthermore, it’s like if you have all these other tools and let’s just say they’re—as you mentioned, you can get books, I don’t know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, who knows? And then you’re going to put in that time. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be an absent parent. There are plenty of ways you can spend time with your kids. But if you want to create a self-directed learner and you also put a value on your time, if you can afford $500 a month, it’s also kind of a no-brainer, right? But we can look—

Niels Hoven: I think that’s very true. I think we need to lean into that more because we’ve had people I know personally who could absolutely afford Mentava. Usually, they are parents of only one child. This is their first child, and they say, “I tried Mentava. It works, but I really want to be the one to teach my kid to read.” And so they opt in with another product where they get to be the teacher. They actually want to be the teacher. But for a lot of parents who are busier, who have multiple kids see that value immediately. They cannot be the teacher for every single one of their kids. They want their kids to learn on their own, and we’re the product for that.

Tim Ferriss: I love teaching. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I absolutely love teaching. But the selling point for me, if I were the stand-in parent, would be extrinsic reward/pressure, teacher making the kid study versus kid becoming self-directed and excited about learning.

I’m like, “Well, that’s a very easy choice for me.” They’re going to have plenty of time with teachers. They’re going to have plenty of time with me coaching them or teaching them or going out and being curious about things in the real world. But it’s like if that. How many minutes a day or per week? How much time do you suggest?

Niels Hoven: Fifteen to 30 minutes a day, depending on age.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So okay, look. You got all day with your kids from when they wake up to when they go to bed, depending on the day and schooling and so on. But it’s like 15 to 30 minutes is just getting them closer to being stoked about learning and able to actually take that stoke and put it into practice. It’s like, okay.

Niels Hoven: Okay,

Tim Ferriss: Is that worth $500 a month? Yeah. For a lot of people, I think the answer is yes.

Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I just brain dump and then—

Niels Hoven: Yeah, I love it.

Tim Ferriss: Then I want you to steer the ship a little bit.

Niels Hoven: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: So the two minute, is your kid-ready quiz right up front, I think, would be an amazing email capture tool, but it would also be in service of the parents who are running at light speed with a million different things, exactly the kind of people who are probably considering something like this.

I think it’s the type of thing that might also get shared, right? So in a sense you have user generated marketing, lead gen and a filter all at once. The selling the parents relief, not just the kids speed, as I mentioned, like the you don’t have to be a teacher, how much is your time worth? Maybe there’s something there. One of your lines that—I think this is from the website, tell me, but we don’t push kids, we stop making them wait. I think that’s an amazing line.

Other words I’d be a little more careful with, right? So the unusually fast learner, the gifted, any IQ elite top 1% kind of stuff, I think artificially constrains your market in a way that is unhelpful to Mentava and unhelpful to parents. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. Because the kid doesn’t need to be a super genius to use Mentava and benefit from it. So I really like the idea of paying attention to that language so you aren’t accidentally excluding a lot of parents whose kids would benefit from the product.

The free to school story, if that ends up being tenable, I think is—it’s a decent adjunct to other things you’re doing, but it’s also an example of playing defense instead of offense in a way. Does that make sense, right?

Niels Hoven: It does make sense.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like if people say this is just for rich kids, it’s like, “Okay. Fine.” This is not what you’re doing, but if you just focused on people who make 500K a year or more, that’s a huge market. You’re fine at $500 a month. It’s like you don’t. And it isn’t just for rich kids, but I think that given the fact, and if I say anything, I’m not supposed to say publicly, stop me, but you guys have four full-time employees. I’m sure you have other contractors. You guys are going to be spinning a lot of plates, wearing a lot of hats. If you have a lot of unqualified leads emailing you, asking questions, requesting special treatment, that time is incredibly expensive for you guys internally, right?

Niels Hoven: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I would just be inclined. If I were talking to someone, I had two glasses of wine, so I’m playing a little loose, and someone’s like, $500 a month, I’d be like, “Well, do you want something that really works and makes your kid not just stoked, but capable of learning faster, or do you want a video game that is disguised as education that’s going to do nothing for them?” If you want that, sure. There are a thousand other options.

If you actually want something that works with people who understand product, then suck it up. How much did you spend on your kid’s pants last month? How much does your stroller cost? Really? You’re not going to spend. Come on. So that’s how I would sort of hopefully productively bust their balls.

That’s how I would do it. I’d be like, “Yeah, if you want something that works and you want something that the kid is going to request, as opposed to something that kind of works, that requires you to be a nag and police that the kid might push back on” it’s like, “How much is removing all that brain damage worth to you?” And I understand that’s probably not the text you put on the homepage, but let’s see.

So on the online, you have done a good job of using X specifically, I would say. And the two examples you sent me of social media that had converted was basically a response, if I’m remembering correctly, two examples of responding to people, right? Someone called basically what you’re doing, snake oil and you’re like, “Well, here’s a video of snake oil.” And it was the twins, the two-year olds or two and a half year olds reading.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then there was the other one with the educator. Those are good examples. I wouldn’t have any critique around those. I would say that jumping into the culture war, even if it gets a lot of views, in a sense, forces readers to pick a side instead of picturing their own child, which is why I think the video of the two twins works so well.

So that’s just a side note. And I know you have math coming so that you can move from the perception of reading app to learning for kids who are ready to move faster or something like that. I think we can leave that alone for a moment. We can come back to that, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it because I think you get it, and you’re branching out, and it makes sense. The pricing against tutors, I have hired—look, I had two different coaches this week for rock climbing.

I am a connoisseur of teachers and coaches and tutors. I’ve used probably a hundred plus coaches of various types. And getting a tutor, managing a tutor, scheduling with the tutor, none of that is free. Even if the hourly cost of that tutor is commensurate with the cost of Mentava. However, there are other ways to make the price case, but this is one of those examples of what if you did nothing, coming back to that brain acronym that I love so much.

It was the first acronym. I’ve heard all these SWOT acronyms, like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, all this stuff. But this was the first one where one of the prompts was, “What if you did nothing?” And I was like, “That is such a good question. What if you didn’t justify the price and you were just like,” Let’s just find—” And look, this is going to be very unappetizing, maybe a turnoff for some people listening, but this is how Uber started. This is how a lot of companies start, is go after the easy customers, the people who have plenty of budget.

Later, you can use the initial cohort of wealthy people to subsidize product development, then you get economies of scale, you have more employees, blah, blah, blah, dot, dot, dot, and then you have more offerings at lower cost. But rather than trying to convince the edge cases, it’s like maybe you just talk about the efficacy and take a different tack, I think it’s tack as in the sailing, to get that done.

Look, I could give you six different examples of how you could make the price, could justify the price, but let me keep going. This is coming back to the parent’s role because the parent’s buying it, not the kid, right? Not to overly state the obvious, but you don’t have to teach, you don’t have to nag.

Now, you don’t have to teach, might accidentally elicit a sense of guilt in parents because they’re like, “Oh, I’m just trying to foist the responsibility of education onto an app. I’m a terrible parent. What’s wrong with me?” But if it’s you don’t have to nag, you don’t have to police, you don’t have to reward, you don’t have to give cookies because the kid’s just going to want to play this game, period, full stop, that’s what we spend our time on, right?

That’s a huge one, right? Because some parents—I love teaching. I want to teach a lot. So if the selling point to me where you don’t have to teach, I’d be like, “Oh, does that make me a bad parent? I actually do like teaching. Does that mean I’m not engaged with my kid?” But nagging and policing, nobody wants to do that.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So choosing things that are an easy hell yes for parents, I think, makes a difference, and that’s where the words matter. And that you don’t have to teach. You don’t have to nag. Beats the book. That beats the live tutor. It beats all that stuff. It’s not like, “I don’t want to take the piano lesson with teacher X.” It’s like when you have Jake’s kid being like, “I want to play the letter game. I want to play the letter game.” And he’s like, “Man, we just have to wait a few more months and then, okay, then you can play the letter game.”

Niels Hoven: I kind of want to hop in on this because maybe this is my pathological honesty because I do believe we built a really delightful product that kids will want to use most of the time. But absolutely, sometimes, you do have to push a nag, I think, way less than anything else. But I’m reluctant to say you won’t have to push a nag.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I think that that is where you finesse, right? I’m coming in as—I’m not blind because I’m familiar with the product, and I’ve looked at the website and everything else, but I’m not a parent with a kid who has used the product.

So instead of saying that, you can say parents don’t want to nag. They don’t want to police. They want a kid who can learn as fast. They want a kid who can learn at their own speed, even if that means fast. You can say that.

Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a truthful statement, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you a bit of trivia that not many people know. So my name in Chinese is—well, it was Fei Ting Chung. Now, it’s Fe Yu Chung. And the reason I have that name is because Fei is for Ferriss, right? So there’s some alliteration, but Ting Chung is Very Honest because I would just blurt things out that were clear or honest to me. And so my teacher was like, “Good God, you are a pain in my ass.” Okay. Your name is like Ferriss Too Honest, basically.” I was talking to you, I can’t mention which, but talking to another startup I’m involved with, and they’re about to have a huge launch, and I was like, “Exaggeration is death. Do not exaggerate.” I was like, “Because if one statement can be falsified and it’s a casual statement, it’s going to call into question every other claim you make, and your competitors are going to fuck you.” And they should.

If you’re exaggerating and inflating your claims, like, “Hey, you’re going to reap what you sow.” So I am on the same page. I think there are ways to word it where it is a completely truthful statement. And it may not be nag and please. It may be something else.

No one wants to force their kid to learn. What would it be like if your kid wanted to learn and use it? You get the idea. And you could come up with 10 of these and just split test it with an Optimizely or whatever. You’d probably have something homegrown that does a better job, but you get the idea. All right. Feel free to stop me.

Is there a way to get an indication of how many sessions are initiated? Coming back to, yeah, sometimes, you have to push a little bit or prod or prompt. Maybe that’s a nice delicate word to use, your kids. But do you have any idea of what percentage of sessions are initiated by a child versus a parent? I don’t know how you would have that.

Niels Hoven: I think they’re probably 100% parent initiated. We’re talking mostly three and four year olds here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Right, right. Running around like chickens with their head cut off. Yeah.

Niels Hoven: I think it’s the sort of thing where it’s just like the parent is responsible for saying, “Oh, it’s that time. Let’s do our Mentava again.” And rather than it being a battle, then your kid is like, “Oh, okay. I guess I’ll put down my Legos and do Mentava.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So I’ve noticed in the investor update emails, and I’ll add my personal preference here, but I will, I think, speak for a lot of investors. So I have a lot of portfolio companies and I don’t invest all the time, but they add up. If a company’s going to be successful, mega successful, it usually takes 10 to 12 years, in my experience. So that means if you’re investing every year, you start to gather portfolio companies. The reason I mentioned that is that I get probably 10 to 20 investor updates, a month. And some of them are super long, yours are not super long. But if you have investor asks, I would put them at the very top. I would skip all the updates. I would skip all of the numbers. I would skip the runway. I would skip the new hires. I shouldn’t say skip. I would defer. I would put it lower down.

But if the intent, because most of the people who are getting that, outside of your major investors, if you’ve got board members, sure, give them the nitty-gritty. But the vast majority, I don’t have voting rights. So the only way that I can really impart influence is by trying to be helpful, but I also am in an inbox with a million other things. So having the asks at the very top will get more help. I know that seems self-evident, but almost no founders do it. So that’s just a quick suggestion.

But the reason I brought up the investor updates also is that I feel like I’ve seen in a number of the investor updates, something along the lines of, we just need to figure out how to drive more conversions through, I want to say paid advertising. And maybe I’m misremembering, but that leads me to a question which is what channels actually convert and retain? TikTok, X, referrals, search, paid advertising. What is actually working best for you guys? Which might not be working well, but what is of the available options, what is working best for you guys? At not just conversion, because you could get garbage leads that sign up for trials and then don’t convert. But for actual paying customers who are retained, what seems to be working best so far?

Niels Hoven: I think our best customers are X, and word of mouth. And I think the reason for both of those is that our message gets in front of people who are receptive to hearing it. I would say that a big part of our struggle is top of funnel. How do we raise awareness with the right people? And I think what tends to happen on X is that, I get in an argument with someone who is basically arguing that kids should not be learning, or kids are learning too fast, or something like that. And then the entire internet piles on and I am kind of like the loud voice saying that kids should be learning as fast as they can learn. This is our thinking. I think people hear that and believe in the mission and because it’s hard to make sophisticated product decisions about these nuanced products, they hear the mission and they’re like, okay, this is a company that believes in a mission of very accelerated learning, which is something that I believe in too, that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about.

I’m at least willing to go out and try their software. And I think that’s why we get people from X. And we have not been able to replicate that on, say, Meta ads. I think Meta’s algorithm, basically, you give them your ads, you give them your videos and they put them in front of the people who engage with those videos the most. And so we absolutely have content that goes viral, that people engage with, that gets a lot of interaction and even gets very, very cheap leads, but they’re not qualified leads. So they’re not getting in front of the right people who care deeply about accelerated learning, and are willing to pay for it.

Tim Ferriss: Here’s a tagline that came to mind. Less nagging for parents, faster learning for kids.

Niels Hoven: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: You’re not saying no nagging. Faster learning for kids. You probably put the kids first, right? Faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, or something like that.

Niels Hoven: I like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Faster learning for kids, less brain damage for parents, whatever. You could test a bunch of them.

Niels Hoven: I think one of the things that really sets us apart is our motivation design and our way to keep kids motivated and engaged. And we really have not found a way to talk about that in a way that gets any sort of traction. I’ve tried, but a lot of the arguments that I get into are around topics like accelerated learning or phonics. Phonics is a big cultural touchpoint right now. But nobody really seems—

Tim Ferriss: Really? There’s a war going on about phonics I didn’t know about?

Niels Hoven: There is a huge war about phonics. For the past 30 years, schools have been debating over whether or not phonics is the right way to teach kids.

Tim Ferriss: It seems like something you could test.

Niels Hoven: Yeah. And they have tested it. Basically everybody outside of education, everybody in cognitive science, everybody in the rest of academia, completely understands that phonics is the only way to teach reading. Academia and teachers and schools have been the one holdout refusing to teach phonics, saying that all we have to do is teach kids to love reading, that if you show them a picture of a puppy and they say dog, then they got that right. They’re reading because they understood the gist, they have comprehension.

Tim Ferriss: Slippery slope of that one.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Understand. Wow.

Niels Hoven: So we have not found a way to, we think that motivation is one of our biggest differentiators and just have not found a way to talk about that that engages people. But maybe this less nagging for parents is that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I will say that, this may not matter, there may not be much collateral damage, but when I have seen some exchanges, I think that some percentage of the observers of those arguments might feel like it’s Mentava versus teachers. And I don’t think that’s a great fight.

Niels Hoven: Agreed.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Because there are plenty of teachers too who are just as frustrated as the parents, in a lot of ways. They’re hamstrung. But, you know, so it goes.

Niels Hoven: We try very hard not to position ourselves as Mentava versus teachers, although I know it doesn’t always come off that way. But to a big part, I think teachers are the victims here too. They were told in teacher’s college that phonics will turn kids off of reading, and they believed what they were told, and they went out and taught to the best of their abilities, the best they knew how.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s come back to the word of mouth. This is something that everybody wants, but sometimes it’s difficult to get high resolution on the mechanisms of word of mouth.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any insight on what that actually looks like? At what point, this is I think perhaps a helpful question, at what point do people suggest that someone else checks out Mentava? Is it after they’ve been on the app for three months, six months? Is it as soon as they sign up and they are on 48 hours? At what point throughout their experience of Mentava do people share with others? Do you have any idea?

Niels Hoven: We get that wow moment within the first week where parents, sometimes it’s the first day, sometimes it’s the first week, but very quickly the parents realize, if it’s good for the family and the kid, parents realize very quickly, “Oh my God, this software actually works.” Going from there to word of mouth, we have a lot of parents say to us that they tell their friends about it. There’s some reluctance to tell their friends about it, because there’s a certain amount of shame around using a $500 a month app. There’s this sort of cultural shame around using your resources to allow your kids to get ahead. I have friends who can afford private school, who know that their kid is not getting a good education in their local public school, but they insist on sending them there because they feel they have a responsibility to not give their child an advantage. And I don’t know, there’s some deep-seated self-hatred there, but.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. God, I wish they would take the money they’re not spending on their kid and put it into therapy first. But I mean, that maybe come off a little callous.

Niels Hoven: We have tried incentivized referrals.

Tim Ferriss: That’s what I was going to ask about. What is the incentive that you’ve tried?

Niels Hoven: I believe we did as big as, if your friend signs up, we will give them a free month and we will give you a free month. So that’s basically, that’s $1,000 user acquisition cost. And we sent out coupon codes to our entire customer base, and we got zero referrals. Even though we know that customers are actively referring friends, we have a lot of people who sign up. I do an intro call with almost every customer who comes on board. And so we know that a lot of people came because they saw their friend use it through word of mouth, but the incentives didn’t drive, they drove zero.

Tim Ferriss: What do you attribute that to?

Niels Hoven: My guess is that our customer base at $500 a month is fairly wealthy. And so that $500 bonus that they get is not as valuable to them as the social currency that they either gain by referring this, or sort of lose by telling someone about this product that they feel guilty about using. And so I think that, yeah, it is an incentive, but they already had very strong incentives to tell their friends about it if they would love it or were reluctant to tell their friends about it.

Tim Ferriss: What makes the people who do refer through word of mouth different from the archetype that you just described? The people who have some shame around it, and they don’t want to burn social capital because what if their friend’s like, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize you’re such a rich asshole.” Or whatever. What makes the other people different, the ones who talk about it?

Niels Hoven: I don’t know if they’re different. What I’ve heard from the people who do refer their friends is that they’re very selective about who they mention it to. They have specific ideas about which of their friends would be receptive, and they tell those friends about it. And my theory is that they tell those friends about it anyway to help their friends out, and the $500 is not a driver of behavior.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay. Have you done multiple tests? Did you just do one incentive test?

Niels Hoven: Yeah, we just did one.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I do think the devil’s in the details with a lot of these—

Niels Hoven: That could be a two.

Tim Ferriss: Right, I mean, for instance, one free month versus $500 credit, which sounds better? $500 credit sounds better, but it’s the same thing. Also, and this may be unappetizing, but if the cost of delivering the product is zero, which makes a bunch of assumptions, around the associated costs of various things and customer support and duh duh duh duh. But if the cost of development is high, but the cost of delivery is low, you can afford to do very limited, first 100 people to get it, use a little scarcity, free year, if you refer three people. $6,000 value, if you get three people to sign up, whatever. I’m pulling that out of my ass.

Niels Hoven: Yeah, we can be more generous.

Tim Ferriss: But it’s like, if you tried that and you limited it to the first hundred people, you know your maximum downside cost. It’s not this open-ended fog of scary expense because you’ve already set a cap. I am a big fan, I mean, sometimes you have critical weaknesses, some Achilles heel that needs to be fixed. And I think that there are, I think the website hops to mind for me as an example of that, which I don’t fault you for because you’re doing so many things at once, but we will get to that. But also for me, I’m like, look, if something isn’t working, and it’s just continually not working, which is not the case with the incentives because you only tried it once, I think that’s worth testing. And also, it’s because that is related to one of the two means that has proven most effective for acquiring customers who are retained, X and word of mouth.

But X is time-consuming. You got to write, you got to engage, you got to respond. Maybe you get lucky and there’s an easy one that really pulls some weight, but you got to keep feeding the monster. Whereas if you figure out some type of flywheel that involves—and incentives are just one tool in the toolbox, but really focusing on how you can facilitate word of mouth, and particularly if there’s a prompting at that first peak of magic, the wow experience, if that’s within 48 hours, boom, they get an email, or a notification of some type. If it’s one week, it’s within one week.

And I think that could obviate the need for paid advertising. There are plenty of huge brands with monstrous ARR that never spend a dime on advertising, because they figure out the small levers to pull that in concert create a flywheel of some type for this type of referral generation. We will put these up for people watching the video. If you’re on audio, I’m afraid you’re going to have to really use your imagination. Would you like to talk about the website or would you like to talk about any other challenges, goals? We’ll probably touch on a lot of it as we look at the before and after on the website, but is there anything else that you would like to cover before we get to the website?

Niels Hoven: I guess, do you have any thoughts about very, very top of funnel? Just as parents are first exposed to Mentava, how we might want to think about positioning ourselves or messages that you think might reach out broadly?

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Top of the funnel, it’s like, get as many parents who see this sentence to be interested in Mentava, is that the question?

Niels Hoven: I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: Or is it a question of marketing channels? Because a big top of the funnel is not always a good thing, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: If it creates a bunch of noise and garbage applications that are going to—

Niels Hoven: Yeah. I’m not saying go broad. I’m saying what sort of messages might get the attention of the specific kind of customers we want, if they’ve never heard of Mentava before?

Tim Ferriss: Well, this is going to seem like a lazy response, but it’s usually where I like to start because you’ve thought a lot more about this than I have. What is on your short list at the moment, for how to do that?

Niels Hoven: I think the two that we’ve been playing with are teach a kid to read, teach a preschooler to read, which we don’t love because we feel like it doesn’t differentiate us well. The other one that I think does differentiate us is talking about the mission, talking about acceleration, talking about schools not supporting fast learners, but then there’s kind of a deeper—

Tim Ferriss: How are people seeing this?

Niels Hoven: What’s that?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In terms of top of the funnel, the phrasing that you were just mentioning, or the taglines, how would people see these across all marketing? Facebook, X, website, everywhere, or somewhere else?

Niels Hoven: Say TikTok, X, and Meta, Facebook, Instagram ads are where we get the most volume.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, look, my beginner’s eyes, uninformed, knee-jerk response would be, “My daughter made more progress in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten.” You start with the testimonial. And not to be too Glengarry Glen Ross, but for those who haven’t seen the Alec Baldwin sequence, it’s very short, you should watch it. But AIDA, A-I-D-A, “Do I have your attention? Are you interested? Have you made your decision for Christ?” Got to watch the clip, folks. I’ll link to it in the show notes. And then action is the last piece, right? But that type of testimonial is what I would use.

Niels Hoven: That makes sense.

Tim Ferriss: That’s what I would test.

Niels Hoven: We haven’t tried that. That makes a lot of sense. We’ll go for it.

Tim Ferriss: Because you hit a few things at once with that. If a company says, “We are the best,” you’re like, “Of course you’re going to say that. What do you give me next to prove that you’re the best?” Testimonial gets around that. And fortunately, you’re not dealing with a medical product or something where you have structure function claim restrictions, which are very important to have. And thank God we have the FDA and FTC and all that stuff. But in this particular case, I don’t think you have too many restrictions about how you can use testimonials, assuming you have written permission from the people who provided those testimonials. And man, the mock-ups that were created for the website, for a revision of the website, are one thing. But if you were like, “You know what? We can’t make. I’m afraid the internet is broken. We cannot create any new pages.” I’m like, “Bummer.” I’m like, “Okay, then make your main page the testimonial page.” That’s what I would do.

Niels Hoven: We’ve talked about that.

Tim Ferriss: I would make the main page the testimonial page. And then you have a persistent popup in the middle of the screen that’s like, “Is your kid ready? Take the two-minute quiz.” If I’m playing with applying constraints, if we cannot create a new website, is the current homepage the one that should be the homepage? Maybe, maybe not.

Niels Hoven: I feel like I’m getting too into the weeds, but I feel like this is exactly where your expertise is coming through that yeah, of course, starting with the testimonial. If I did a short video, like a, I don’t know, a 60-second-long TikTok video, where would you go after the testimonial? What would the beats of that video be for you?

Tim Ferriss: Well, here’s my hot take, and it could be totally wrong. I mean, everything I’m saying could be wrong. But my hot take is that the people who can spend 500 a month, and are busy and value their time and their kid, this is not going to be a fair assumption for everyone on TikTok, but I don’t think that is where the people making the buying decisions are spending most of their time. I could be wrong. I mean, there are younger men and women I know who spend plenty of time on TikTok. Do you have any idea of who is making the purchase decision? How many males versus females are actually putting in their credit card information to buy this right now? Which, look, that’s a very heteronormative question, but you guys get the idea.

Niels Hoven: I think it’s roughly fifty fifty judging from the customer calls that I do. In the beginning, it was very heavily male, but I think that was just my audience at the time, and now it feels a lot more balanced.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you probably don’t have this information. Any idea on the age, the sweet spot age range using past customer data of your current customer avatar? If I said to you, okay, guess what? You only have one opportunity to ever sell Mentava, that’s the bad news. The good news is I’m going to put you on stage in front of an audience of 5,000 people, but they all have to be of one particular demographic/personality/—

Niels Hoven: Yes. Give me—

Tim Ferriss: —makeup. Give me the census data, right?

Niels Hoven: Give me age 35 to 45, first generation immigrants who work at tech companies, who value education, who see it as a ladder to a better life, and are willing to pay money to make their kids successful.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m guessing those people are not on TikTok. So the beats of the video, honestly, it’s a tough one for me to answer off the cuff, but I think in part because, it may not be the right medium. Where I think video matters is showing actual kids using Mentava and learning with Mentava. Here’s a crazy question, and I think I failed my computer IQ test for the day, because maybe it’s something obvious. Is it possible to turn on audio for the current video that is right in the middle of your homepage when I open it?

Niels Hoven: That’s a good question. I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: In Chrome, I kept trying to figure out how to turn on the audio because I’m like, it’s not really—

Niels Hoven: Oh, is it possible for you to turn on the audio?

Tim Ferriss: I wanted to hear what the kids were saying while they were using the software, but I could not figure it out, which could be user error.

Niels Hoven: That was a request that we were planning to do. I don’t know if it may not have gotten done. Yeah, that was an oversight. Good catch.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that does nothing for you. And it is, at least on a 13-inch MacBook, that is the entire screen on Chrome.

Niels Hoven: Brutal.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, okay. So if we come back to the website, and I’ll just give people a visual description, and I’m sure we’ll throw it up. It’s got a very familiar layout, which I think is, there’s nothing wrong with this familiar layout, but you got Mentava company name top left. You have a menu bar at the top, parents, teachers, about reviews, case studies, sign up, login, and then you have get started at the top right. Then you’ve got the giant video playing with no audio, and a cute little character, presumably from the Mentava app itself. And then under the video that is auto playing, it says, “Most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling. Mentava was built for unusually fast learners. Try it for free.” And the try it for free is a button. Okay.

If we were to look at a heat map of what I just described, meaning what is clicked on the most, do you have any read on which elements I just mentioned get clicked the most? Yeah. Which doesn’t, at least my experience was didn’t do anything. Yeah. Okay. I think, and I’m sure they’re called something else now, but way back in the day, you could get a heat map and it would be so called because, things would get redder and redder and redder the more they were clicked. And so you could, at a view, look at a website and with these tiny little circles indicating clicks that were colored in the way I just described, you could get a pretty good idea of what people were clicking on or trying to click on, right?

Well, if it works for you, let me pop open some mock-ups that were created using Claude in an incredibly short period of time. It is just insane what you can do these days. Shout out to Lenny Rachitsky, who had some really good tips on how to use these LLMs for design, turning your LLM into a, or maybe your AI into a world-class designer. All right, so I’m looking at the website right now, and if I go right now, a 13 inch, I did not look on mobile, which I probably should have. But on the MacBook, which is kind of my workhorse daily driver, the try it for free is where the screen ends, right? So my world of Mentava on first contact is what I just described. And then if we scroll down, you got best reading app for kids, and you got all these amazing testimonials, which I think do a hundred times more for you than what I just described.

Now, if we go to the mock-ups that I sent over, and we can play around with these because they’re not perfect, but you’ll notice a couple of differences. So I’ll point out some of those differences. So instead of get started in the top right, which is that button, and I still, well, it’s replicated in another place on the homepage, but it’s, “Is my child ready?” Instead of get started, maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. Something that’s very easy to split test. Then the actual tagline on this mock-up, I don’t love, I’ll be honest. I like it more than the, “Most education companies try to lift the floor. We want to remove the ceiling.” I do prefer what is in the mock-ups to that, but it’s not where I would put it. I think maybe—what was it? Less nagging for parent, faster learning for kids.

Niels Hoven: Faster learning, less nagging for parents.

Tim Ferriss: Less nagging for parents is maybe what you test, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Okay. I don’t like that because ready and read throw me off. Frankly, they’re just. I know that sounds ridiculous given we’re talking about learning to read, but they’re too similar. So I would not use that phrasing. But then below that, we get an idea of what we’re actually talking about. Because when you say most education companies try to lift the floor, we want to remove the ceiling, it’s like, well, who are you selling to? What is it? Education company? Is it a clinic? Is it a company that sells consoles to nursery schools or daycare centers? It’s not as clear, whereas Mentava’s expert reading instruction for your child. Oh no, no, no, no. It’s just too wordy. Mentava is expert reading instruction, that’s terrible, but your child will actually want to do, right?

So you could say Mentava teaches reading that your child will actually want to do, or something like that. 15 to 30 minutes a day, a coach on call, and nobody in your house has to be the teacher. It’s not quite right, but below that you have two buttons, take the two-minute readiness check, and then how it works. And then a video that could auto play or not, but I would definitely have audio on there. So that’s one option. And then right below that, and I’m not convinced this is the way to do it, but it makes it very explicit below the readiness check, $500 a month per child. Most families finish in 6 to 12 months, free 14 day trial, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s one approach. You could also, rather than make the $500 fine print, you could just lead with it. Mentava is, you could have what we had before, faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, if you want something that works and not something that’s cheap, right?

Niels Hoven: Right. We have absolutely had luck leading with the price. We’ve had customers tell us we use you because you cost $500 a month, because we knew there’s no way you could be a scam if you managed to charge that much money.

Tim Ferriss: You can’t survive. You can’t survive for years if it’s not working.

Niels Hoven: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. Some of these other mock-ups I sent you, I do like the tagline on the second one better than the first one, for children who are ready before school is. A bunch of the other copy would be replaced, and I think that one is too sassy looking. It looks like it’s trying to sell a tablet, which is not what you guys are doing. Watch the 60-second demo or whatever. The “Not a score” mock-up I don’t particularly like, but I do like in the third option, leading with the testimonials.

Niels Hoven: I like that too.

Tim Ferriss: Right? So for instance, let’s imagine maybe the first mock-up, but some kids are ready to read before school is ready to teach them. Man, that’s a mouthful. It’s a tongue twister for me. If it were faster learning for kids, less nagging for parents, make your child love learning, right? Whatever, something like that. And then on the top right, much like the third mock-up, there was this big testimonial which was like, my daughter learned more in one week with Mentava than six months in kindergarten. And then there was another one maybe for—you pick it, you’ve got a million of these testimonials. You’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the testimonials. Maybe if I were going to pick from the ether one other type of testimonial, I saw a number of testimonials that were like, we got rid of our tutor and did this.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe that’s the other one. Right? Just so you address that, what about this? What about the comparable, the cost of it? You just have a testimonial do some of that heavy lifting for you. I mean, you have so many good testimonials. These are real testimonials.

“Tim Ferriss: “Last fall he didn’t know how to read his letters. Now he can read his baby brother a book before bed.” Like what? WTF? Are you serious? “You guys changed our lives. There’s not a world where I could teach a child to read without your app.” I mean, these testimonials are crazy. So aesthetically you have some choices to make. Some of these are a little too sterile. The last page of mock-ups I think are a little more friendly, like the second to last one would be a little too busy and a little too like, did our web designer take LSD? But you get the idea. I’m just going to note what I like about these things. So the testimonials, I would 100% test having the testimonials very prominent. And just looking at your homepage as a print advertisement effectively, you want to have a clean visual progression through the piece.

Generally people are going to be pulled through a graphic and then to the largest headline, then to the second largest. So making sure that the visual tracking isn’t too pinball machine. So frankly, it’s like if I were going to be really nitpicky and try to pull something from Ogilvy, I would say the—look, you could have the video on the left instead of the right and then the headline on the right if we’re talking about people who track from left to right with reading. But what I do like about this third one is that it’s got a couple of bubbles on top of the kid learning, 15 minutes a day. These would have to be fact checked obviously and audited to make sure. But 15 to 30 minutes a day, a real coach for you on the couch in pajamas, whatever some of the main features are, and then take the two-minute readiness check. Can you speak to the real coach or the coaching aspect? Is that a thing or is that just a hallucination?

Niels Hoven: Yeah. So when you sign up, we have the Mentava parent app and even during the free trial, we prompt you to book a call with me and chat about where do you think your child is stuck on? What have you been having issues with? How is the free trial going? And then you have the parent app where you can chat with us 24/7 and we will get back to you as fast as we can. We use that a lot for customer support, but also parents are confused about whether their kids are engaging the right way and we can let them know and get them back on the right path.

Tim Ferriss: How much do you sacrifice, and you can tell me what the exact bracket is, but on this third mock-up, something that was put right above the headline, not saying that’s the right place for it, but a reading program for curious three to seven year olds. Is that an accurate description of the product? Would you say that’s the sweet spot in terms of ages or what is the ideal age range?

Niels Hoven: I’d say three to five.

Tim Ferriss: Three to five. Okay, great. So reading program for three to five year olds. How much do you lose by saying three to five? That’s maybe not the right way to phrase the question. But for instance, Jake came in. What I’m trying to figure out is how much noise and time-consuming activities are introduced by having people try this too early versus just saying, you know what? It’s not for two year olds. That’s going to be like 90% failure rate so let’s just say three to five. Do you feel like that would help or hinder results?

Niels Hoven: I’m very comfortable saying it’s probably not for two year olds. I think the two-year olds that this works for, although we’ve had a couple, are very rare.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. So if you were to give an age range right up front as a way of discouraging people who are ultimately maybe going to be frustrated, would three to five be the bracket? Would it be two and a half to five?

Niels Hoven: I would actually say three and a half.

Tim Ferriss: Three and a half. Okay, great. And none of these design ideas are permanent decisions, right? It’s a living, breathing website, you can change it. But what I’ve found with the startups I’ve worked with and also just with all the stuff that I’ve launched myself is being very clear about who you are for and who you are not for makes everything else easier, particularly when you are explicit about it.

Niels Hoven: Can you give some examples of what that means? Because we want to do that, but I think we’re not sure how.

Tim Ferriss: Well, what that means is if someone says, like in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, which I think crossed your path many, many years ago, in the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, it’s like I would get these questions when I did media around or even from my editor early on. It’s like, well, how can employees in big companies use this? And I’d be like, frankly, it’s not ideal for them. There are things they can use and let’s just say 20% of it I think is going to be very, very valuable to them, but it’s really designed for people who are in a job but want to experiment with designing their own lifestyle vis-a-vis starting a company of some type, ideally product and not service. And that happens to be a huge market. You don’t have to please everyone. And even if you tried, it’s not going to be possible. So that would be one example.

In the case of, for instance, there’s a company that I’m involved with, it’s probably 30% of my protein calories called Maui Nui. Maui Nui Venison, wild harvested venison from Hawaii. And it’s the most nutrient dense red meat you can buy, period, full stop. And it’s expensive. It is. If you think Mentava is expensive, no way. Maui Nui Venison is much more expensive. But in my case, I’m like the one place—when I have kids, it’ll change. But healthcare and nutrition and exercise, I’m not going to try to get the Goldilocks perfect amount. I’m happy to overspend to ensure that I am getting the best. And it turns out there are plenty of people who fit that bill. Even if you just had professional sports teams, collegiate sports teams at the high end and military, that can still be a really sizable business. So that’d be another example. They don’t hide it. You very quickly determine that this is going to be expensive.

Niels Hoven: So it’s not so much like a framing of the messaging. It’s just like price tag is there, they’re unapologetic about it. It’s just not something they pay attention to.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I would say that there is one facet, which is price. I’d say price, it’s just a very clear delineator. So rather than use four paragraphs to describe something that is probably accidentally going to insult a bunch of people one way or the other, it’s just like—I think there are ways that you could skin the cat. Oh, that’s a terrible expression. I wonder where it came from. I think about a lot of these things, like you can have your cake and eat it too? I’m like, where does that come from? If you have your cake, of course you’re going to eat your cake. Why is that double dipping? It doesn’t make any sense. In any case, the point is you could say something—I mean, maybe there’s something about, I’m sure there is, I would just have to spend more time on it, but the teaching your kid to fish as opposed to giving them a fish, right?

Traditional education gives your kid a fish and forces them to eat it. What if they loved learning how to fish and all it took was 15 minutes on a tablet and you did not have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m shooting from the hip here, But I do think that there are—I mean, I’ll take another stab at it. Another stab would be for parents who realize that the education system in the US is broken in one fundamental way: eager, fast learners cannot learn at their own pace. It’s not perfect, but it’s edging directionally, I think, towards something useful.

Tim Ferriss: There are tons of examples, right? And you could look at punk rock bands, you could look at fashion brands. How do they position? Very often, they’re very good at making a stark contrast between our people and not our people, which this is coming back to the do nothing. That may not be a task worth spending a lot of time on, but there are a lot of ways that you can distinguish. I think who you’re for is a lot more important than who you’re not for, stating who you’re for.

I’ll give you an example. This is something I’m working on right now myself because the book that I was alluding to, it’s primarily a book on saying no. Which I’m working on the positioning of this right now, because the first third of the book is how to identify or create the few things to say yes to that actually make all the difference. So it’s not exclusively a book on saying no, it’s a book on making really high leverage decisions. However, the crux of the book, because there’s so many, it’s very easy to say yes. I mean, just everyone’s got promiscuous over commitment in their lives and a lot of tech is designed to push us into the realm of distraction, infinite distraction. But with saying no, I’m going to get a bunch of pushback and I address this pushback in the book, but I’m going to get lots of things right off the cuff on social. I would bet my entire net worth on it, which is must be nice, you’re already successful so you can just say no.

I’m too kind for that. You’re just saying this after the fact. I bet in the beginning you had to say yes to everything. There are a couple of pieces that I feel very confident are going to come up and I have somewhat of a binary choice. I can try to respond to all those and I can try to convince them otherwise, which I could. I could do it, but it’ll be very time-consuming and it’s not going to make me particularly happy. I’m not going to enjoy it, let me put it that way, because I’ll have to do it repeatedly over and over and over again because I’m like, did you read my blog post? No, of course 99 out of 100 people did not. Well, 999 out of 1,000, probably, even worse ratio, didn’t see it. Or I can just say, you know what? You’re right. This is for people who’ve had just the bare modicum of success where they have figured out maybe one thing they’re good at where they have too much inbound and too many requests of their time. That’s who this book is for.

That, by the way, is still well over a hundred million people. I do not need to worry about an audience for the book, but if I try to boil the ocean and somehow homogenize it into appealing to everybody, the game is lost. I’m dead. So these are the types of things I’m thinking about where it’s like, okay, well, if I’m stating who it’s for, how precise do I get? How much do I reduce the aperture of the description? And it might make sense to really, really reduce it. I mean, when I launched The 4-Hour Workweek, I was like—in the background, in my mind, I was like, I am pitching this to 20 to 35 year old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. Phase one. Phase two, same kind of psychographics, female, same city. Next, same thing, New York. And then the sort of sphere of available readers was expanded to a handful of other major cities. And then before you know it, okay, fine. Then 16 year olds in Oklahoma are reading it and 60 year olds in Sri Lanka and so on. But if you try to start there, you’re fucked.

Niels Hoven: So when you have this very specific idea of who you’re trying to reach, what are the specific behavioral changes does that drive for you? Is it specific messages that you’re hammering on or—

Tim Ferriss: Marketing in that case, right?

Niels Hoven: Where you’re running ads or the messages that you’re running?

Tim Ferriss: All of it. I always like to look for the uncrowded channel. So in my case, I don’t think this would be appropriate for Mentava, but when I’m launching something, I often look for, always look for, don’t always find, but I always look for the fast-growing undervalued channel. And if I can’t find that, or even if I can, I then ask—and that could be channel or format. Then I ask what is the most uncrowded path to communicating with the taste makers in that sphere? So I’ll give you a concrete example.

In the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, which was published April 2007, 20-year anniversary coming up next year, which is insane, but there was this relatively new thing that had hit a critical mass and it was called a blog, which is short for web log. When I reached out to bestselling authors to ask them about their recent launches and I asked them what was a waste of time, what under delivered, what over delivered, what surprised you, what came back was TV is becoming less important for prescriptive nonfiction or nonfiction in general, NPR marketplace, there are a handful of NPR shows, and there’s this new thing, it’s really weird. They’re called blogs and I did this thing I never expected. I put this excerpt up, I did a little interview, sold more books than some gigantic morning show in New York City that gets all the fanfare.

And I was like, okay, well, I think I’m going to push all my chips in on this thing called blogs after I heard that six or seven times. And then the question was, well, how do I communicate with bloggers? And the answer was not email because that was the most crowded channel. So I spent my marketing budget basically for The 4-Hour Workweek flying to conferences to meet these people in person. WebExpo, can’t recall where that was held, but I spent all my time in the lounges, didn’t really do anything in the panels. And at the time, I’m not going to give the whole Dr. Evil life story, but met Robert Scoble. I have a lot of rules and thoughts around this type of approach, but flash forward, I’ll give a different example, 4-Hour Chef.

4-Hour Chef was launching in 2012. I asked the same questions, reached out to people, asked them the questions I already mentioned, and they said, you know, radio’s getting less important. It’s not having quite the same effect on sales as my last few book launches, but I went on this one thing called a podcast, and I was like, huh, okay. Well, I’d heard of podcasting, but I thought it came to the fore for a brief moment and then kind of flickered out and died. But that wasn’t true. It was just very, very early innings in podcasting in 2012. And when I launched The 4-Hour Chef, I was on Joe Rogan before Joe Rogan was Joe Rogan. Back in 2012, it was like, Joe Rogan, you mean the guy who used to be on Fear Factor? Like that was the reference. It wasn’t like, oh, the guy who was in the Oval Office and pushed through the executive order and is on every major news outlet every day where they’re quoting his podcast?

Man, this is incredible. I mean, that whole story is amazing. So Nerdist, Marc Maron, Adam Carolla, these OGs in the game, I was able to see the effects of that firsthand. Now later I took that experience and used it to inform starting my own in 2014. But for each book with Tools of Titans—no, was it Tools of Titans? I also did a bunch of experiments with BitTorrent with 4-Hour Chef and gave away the audiobook for free and all these experiments. They don’t all work out. I don’t think the BitTorrent experiment really panned out as I would’ve hoped, but that’s how I workshop. I do think, and look, you’re the CEO of the company, you don’t necessarily have the time to do this, but I imagine that you have the opportunity on these calls that you get on with the live coaching. I think in-person workshopping is just the fastest way to get feedback, real feedback.

Because sure, you can get feedback that is measurable in the forms of clicks and so on, and you can use user testing and see how people are reacting to a website, which I think is interesting. If you have a webcam on, you can look at their face and where they pause, which is not going to be transmitted if you’re only getting click-through data or click data in the case of a heat map, let’s say. But when you’re talking to people in person and trying to explain what you do, it’s like, do they lean in or do they lean back? Do they follow up with a question or they’re like, oh, interesting. If I’m at a party and someone’s like, what do you do? I’m like, I write books. 99% of the time, even if they don’t want to talk to me, they’re going to ask, what kind of books?

On the other hand, if I’m like, I’m an accountant, and I have some accountants I love, but if I’m like, I don’t really want to be at this party, and they’re like, what do you do? I’m like, an accountant, they’re like, oh yeah, that must be a job. There’s no follow-up and you can get a feel for which messaging is working. Or if you give them a paragraph and then two or three people at a bar, you’re just having casual conversations with at an event, they all ask about the same little thing that you’ve been discounting that has been a minor cameo in your messaging as opposed to the leading headline. And you’re like, you know what? Maybe I should test that.

Niels Hoven: Yeah. Actually, that’s brilliant. And it makes me think of comics, like trying out at open mic nights. I’m leaving so much on the table. I’m doing all these intro calls with our new customers. I should be asking them, if I said this, how would you have reacted to it? What were the pain points that got you to sign up? I should be at networking events, trying more taglines and seeing what gets people interested in having longer conversations with me.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re going to be having these conversations anyway. And just like it’s more signal if you ask someone to buy and they actually pay as opposed to do you prefer A or B? Similarly, it’s not bad to ask, do you prefer A or B, but the fidelity of that signal isn’t as strong in my opinion. It’s not as reliable as if you mention a few lines and then just wait. And if they don’t follow up and two or three people don’t ask follow-up questions, that’s a problem. But if they latch onto something, you’re like, okay, that wasn’t organic. That was a proactive move on their part. It wasn’t in response to a question. They’re not trying to appease me necessarily. Maybe they are, maybe there’s a component of people pleasing or just being social, but that’s why you have to talk to more than one person.

And I’m like, The 4-Hour Workweek was workshopped. I mean, I didn’t intend on writing a book, but it was notes from a class that I taught twice a year. It was a guest lecture. It wasn’t an ongoing class, but I got to see what didn’t work. It was very much like a standup comic. If I tried a joke and it fell flat twice, I was like, kill it. Yank it. That’s got to go. It’s not working. So I’m not sure if that’s helpful, but there are other things you can use. I mean, for instance, with some of these mock-ups or if you’re testing copy options, I think it’s most valuable if it’s on your own website because you control it and you can try to discern intent to purchase.

However, there are many services that do this. I don’t know how I ended up finding this one. There’s one called PickFu, P-I-C-K-F-U. We’ll put the branding aside, but instant consumer feedback, split testing and market research. And so they’ve got their fancy social cred with these logos, HBO Max, L’Oreal, Wayfair, et cetera, have supposedly used it. But you can, I believe—I think it’s PickFu that’s allowed me to do this. It might have been another similar platform, but basically picking Amazon Prime members and then serving up— You can spec out your demographics, and then it just surfaces three options. And the reason this can be helpful—well, there are a few reasons. I use this for split testing different aspects of the design and packaging around the Coyote card game, which I created with Exploding Kittens, which came out, I don’t know, a year or two ago, which was a really fun experiment.

I’ve never had anything in thousands of Walmart and Target stores, which is super fun, but you’re not going to get much data from Amazon, and you don’t really want Amazon to be your debutante ball where you show up in your new dress for the first time and see if people like it. I do not like taking that type of risk. And there was internal debate. I mean, there were diverging opinions. And in the case of Mentava, it’s like, I don’t know what your traffic looks like. So if you are going to get a statistically significant signal with which you’re going to make an important decision about something, you might just not have the volume necessary.

Maybe you do, but maybe you don’t. And in this case, it’s like, look, if I want 5,000 people to vote on something in 72 hours, I can do that. It’s a function of cost, and maybe it’s like 500 bucks, 600 bucks. It’s very affordable. And you could very easily—I can’t recall what the competitors are, but you could use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to ask, what are the three most compelling competitors to PickFu with similar pricing? Because some of them are going to be very, very, very expensive intended for large enterprise. They do the same thing, frankly. It’s gussied up a little bit in a tuxedo and you have to do a sales call or they demo and then quote you a price. If you see that and you’re just looking for fast, quick and dirty, then I wouldn’t proceed. But these are all different tentacles that are all out probing that bring information back to the central brain that then determines which I want to split test in a place with higher stakes, but better signaling for purchase intention, which would be your website, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you can do it really fast. I’m famously impatient. I do not want to wait weeks and weeks and weeks. So I’m like, okay, cool. 72 hours over the weekend? Great. I’ll just let this run and then on Monday we can look at it because if we got—and if it’s an edge case where we’ve got something that’s like, okay, well, it’s like 49% or 51%. Don’t be too cheap on this because you can get a false positive on something. I mean, you did more math by eighth grade than I did throughout all of high school, so I don’t need to tell you about statistics. But the point is, don’t do the bare minimum because very often the results will flip when you get just a larger sample size.

Niels Hoven: These tips are so helpful because I think it makes me realize how many opportunities we’re leaving on the table to iterate with our messaging and get it dialed in. So I’m pretty excited about this.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s throw out a prompt for people who are still listening or watching this. Let Niels know. Look at the website, mentava.com, check it out. Of the things we’ve talked about, what has resonated? What should the tagline be? What language or features or anything have resonated most? Just let them know on X, right? Tag him @NielsHoven. That’s @N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. And trust me, Niels will be paying attention.

Niels Hoven: I will be.

Tim Ferriss: So check it out. Is there anything else that we should cover? I mean, I feel like we have hit a lot. I don’t feel like we need to spend a ton of time on competition. I mean, I did a competitive analysis, but I do feel like you’re heavily differentiated. But if there is a particular competitive snag that you run into and you’re like, oh God, Newman, they brought up whatever again, then we could talk about it. But if not, then we probably don’t need to spend too much time there, right? I mean, you got the cheap reading apps. I don’t think we need to spend time on that. Teach yourself books and kits. We got live online tutors. Then, we’ve got kind of like the super mega, super comprehensive localized options like Alpha School which are just a different category altogether.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m not sure we need to spend time on that. Big fan of Alpha School, by the way. It’s just a different thing.

Niels Hoven: They use us—my kid is using their homeschool program right now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Cool.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Niels Hoven: They’re investors also.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, nice. I didn’t realize that. That’s—

Niels Hoven: Yeah. Joe Liemandt was like, “I will take your entire round right now if you let me.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. Yeah. Joe is very smart.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Funny story, he may not realize this. Probably doesn’t. Why would he? But I almost ended up working for Trilogy Software out of college. The reason I fell in love with Austin is because I made it to the finals round of interviews and they flew out the finalist to Austin and gave us a whole whirlwind tour and kind of—I don’t think it was wining and dining, mostly just dining, but they made it really fun.

I didn’t make the cut. In retrospect, I guess, thank God, right? Blessing in disguise. Kind of forced me to really scrap for a while which was good for me. I’ve been in Austin for more than a decade, still haven’t connected with Joe. So that’ll happen eventually.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Anything come to mind that we should cover? I’m not sure if there’s anything outstanding. Just while we’re here, if there’s anything else that you’d like to chat about.

Niels Hoven: Is there—do you have any insights on getting in front of people who aren’t actively looking for your product or who aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, like don’t know they have the problem yet?

Tim Ferriss: Tell me more about that.

Niels Hoven: The issue about parents not realizing how much school is going to hold back their kids until they’re—like, it’s too late or that your best opportunities for acceleration are even before your kid gets to school.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So the question is any thoughts on how to get in front of those people?

Niels Hoven: Yeah. They say you want to be the painkiller. You want to solve the problem that your customer knows they have. I think for a lot of our customers, they don’t realize that this is a problem yet. They don’t realize how far their kid is from their potential or one of the strongest reasons I have for teaching your kids to read early is because when they hit school, your school is going to try and hold them back. And being able to say, “My kid can already read. You need to give them more opportunity,” is one of your strongest negotiating levers.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s a great point. I really like that. Let me do a Rashomon multi-directional thing on this question. The first is coming back to like, “What if I did nothing?” One position I could try to take, it might not be justifiable, is the people who are using your product understand the problem. So just spend a bunch of focused time on the referral engine for those people.

Then, you don’t have to explain anything because chances are they’re not going to have to explain anything either because their cohort of friends, i.e., parents with kids, will be cut from the same cloth. Then, it’s a question of, “How do you congregate the converted versus how do you convert the non-believers?” which I think is—I think that may be a better question but—

Niels Hoven: I think there is a lot there about, like, giving our customers the tools to let their friends know about this problem that maybe their friends don’t know about yet. They are going to have that opportunity to explain it if we can give them the words for it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I—I would also say that the—if you had a two-minute readiness test, make it interesting, make it—if the parents never end up using Mentava, how can you make that as illuminating and useful as possible so that people—that would be a worthwhile thought exercise. Namely, how can I make this two-minute readiness test or, like, “Is your kid ready?” or—there’s probably a better question to ask, better wording for that, but is there a—I cannot tell you. There was this thing a couple of years ago, I don’t remember what it was selling. It was definitely selling something to be clear. This was not just some questionnaire online for fun, but it was like—this is a bit risque. Hope those three-year-olds aren’t listening to this but—

Niels Hoven: I cannot wait.

Tim Ferriss: It was like a sex compatibility test and you would take this thing and then your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse would fill it out or whatever. And then—

Niels Hoven: Oh, Mojo Upgrade. I remember it.

Tim Ferriss: And then, it would tell you like, “Oh, you’re a Switch,” and, “This person is a that,” and, “This person is a this,” and, like, “You might be into all these things,” and it was—people got very excited about it and they shared the test. The point of that business was not to provide tests. It was selling something else. I can’t even remember what it was. I didn’t buy it. But in one of the more awkward transitions of my podcast career—let’s now come back to children.

If you made—I think it would be very—it could be fun to try to create a readiness test which is not sexy enough. It would have to be called something else. But a test that people could take in two minutes that would give them information that they would find valuable or interesting or fascinating, to the extent that they would want to share the free readiness test with their friends.

Because then, they’re not saying, “Hey, I’m not automatically one of those rich assholes who is just going to spend, who can burn $500 a month,” which is not what I think. I think it’s a fantastic investment, right? But they’re not risking that social judgment by recommending someone take a free two-minute test. So I think that’s another opportunity potentially. And then, where are you based, Niels?

Niels Hoven: I’m outside Seattle.

Tim Ferriss: Outside Seattle. All right. So in Seattle, you probably have some organization like this. If you were in the Bay Area, just because I’m familiar with the Bay Area and I’ve been there for so long, you mentioned first generation, immigrant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I would go speak at the Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE, in Silicon Valley. I would be—

Niels Hoven: Sorry. What did you say? The what entrepreneur?

Tim Ferriss: Indus, I-N-D-U-S. Let’s see if it still exists. The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE, nonprofit organization. There it is. So tie.org, T-I-E, .org. Wow. Well, let’s see here. The world’s largest community of entrepreneurs. I’m interested. Now, about the genesis of TiE. Yeah. So let’s see. Board of trustees. Who’s on the board of trustees? I’m expecting—I have high expectations, TiE. Let’s see who we got. Yeah. Founder of Infosys. Yeah. Baller. Okay. Oh, this website—they could use a website upgrade. Here we go. Jensen Huang. I believe TiE is one of the most extraordinary communities known to any industry.

I mean, they’ve got some good testimonials. But the point of this is that back in the day when I lived in Mountain View and I would go volunteer for TiE because it was the only way for me to punch above my weight class and meet people who would otherwise be completely unreachable, it was basically all Indians, right? Fine. Great. But if you want to talk about first or second generation immigrants who are all in on learning, like this about as—it’s about as warm an audience as I can imagine.

Niels Hoven: That’s great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you can check it out. But the point being, if you were like, “Hmm. All right. Well, look, I’m going to take a trip anyway to the Bay Area,” or maybe they have a chapter. Let’s see. Chapters. I mean, it’s freaking Seattle. Come on. I would think it’d be—well, they got Nairobi. They’re going to make me scroll through all the countries. Man. All right. Come on now. There is—I’m boring the hell out of people. Yeah. There’s a Seattle chapter.

Niels Hoven: All right.

Tim Ferriss: But the—and all over the US, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, et cetera. So I would just say pitch to your dream customer or get up and talk and do—see if you can get on the main stage at one of TiE’s large events and give a presentation. This is another way that you can test things. Give a presentation. If it’s good enough, if it’s not, then too bad. Try again.

But if it’s good enough, which does not have to be great, but if it’s—I suspect you’d have a very warm audience. And then, you see what people ask you. You see what people mention and you see what people ask you afterwards, right? And then, you’re hearing from the converted exactly what they want to know to join your church and I’m just like, “Man.”

Niels Hoven: I feel like this is the bread and butter question to ask you. How do you get on the main stage at these events when you don’t have a track record?

Tim Ferriss: I think you do have a track record. I think you’re underselling yourself. I think you point to some of these—I think you point to your pedigree, right? So in other words, that third paragraph where I was like, “Use that sentence: Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems where he ran the highest grossing mobile game in the world in 2011.” If—well, first of all, it seems like TiE has branched out way beyond Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley which is great. But depending on who you’re pitching, you have to customize to who you’re pitching, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But I would say it may be easier than you expect, right?

Niels Hoven: So I didn’t even know that this is a thing. So people reach out to organizations and say, “I know you have a conference coming up. I would like to be a speaker there and here’s what I do.”

Tim Ferriss: People definitely do that.

Niels Hoven: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, look, I have not done this type of legwork in a very long time. But yeah, just cold email and pitch them.

Niels Hoven: Okay. Cool.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, it’s—you want to make sure it’s thematically related to what they’re doing, right? But they have the TiE Global Summit, TiEcon Silicon Valley. Maybe TiEcon Silicon Valley is more interesting because you could use it as a recruiting tool simultaneously, right? Depending on what your priorities are at the time. Definitely going to be a high density of venture capitalists, although perhaps you don’t need that at this point. Yeah. Let’s see, tieglobalsummit.org. What I would say is don’t be too attached to getting on stage and spending an hour talking about how Mentava was born and this and this and this, right? Maybe it’s the behavioral optimization or—what did you call it? Motivation engineering? There’s a term you used that I’m blanking on.

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe it’s that, right? Maybe it’s commentary on disrupting and innovating education in the United States and, “Oh, by the way, I’m the founder of this startup,” and you spend two minutes on that. But like, “How did we get here?” Okay. Now, I’m giving a broader talk about my thoughts on education and where it’s possible to stick in door wedges, so that we can gain a foothold in something interesting. I am really just shooting from the hip here, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah. You—

Tim Ferriss: But there are lots of things because you—I mean, look, you could have some side hobby—I’m making this up, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s just say you bump into the chairman of the board of trustees of TiE and—I don’t know. He is about to go on a trip and you’re like, “Huh. Seems like he’s got an Olympic archery recurve bow that he’s taking with him. Isn’t that interesting?” You get into this whole archery and you’re like, “You know what? I’m into archery,” and he’s like, “Would you come speak on archery?” and the answer should be, “Absolutely. I’ll get on stage and talk about how to learn, how I approach the task of learning archery. And oh, by the way, I work at this company and here’s a minute on Mentava.” It’s like, “Yes, the answer to that one’s yes.”

As long as you have a very clear idea of what constitutes a success, getting on stage to talk in front of an interesting audience is not enough, right? What constitutes success? Is it recruiting? Is it feedback from people when you get offstage? If that’s the case, guess what? You probably want an earlier speaking slot as opposed to a closing speaking slot. You probably don’t want to be speaking on the last morning when a lot of people have already left, if they’re coming in from out of town, this type of thing.

I’m not, by the way, saying that you should focus on TiE, even though I do think it’s, at least when I was exposed to it, a very interesting organization. Again, an uncrowded channel. It’s like, “I might have been the only white person volunteering there.” I was like, “That’s ridiculous. This is an absolute goldmine of brilliant people and world-class entrepreneurs,” and it’s like, “Why isn’t everybody here?” So it’s cool to see that they’ve grown so much but—

Niels Hoven: I think what’s coming through so much out of these conversations with you is that it’s like an exercise in thinking out of the box. It’s like, “Okay. I know what the goals are.” It’s like, “Where are the open channels? Where are the—where were the opportunities that nobody else is looking for? Where are the shortcuts?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s like—I mean, it might not even be going to TiE, but you look at their team and you’re like, “Oh, look at that.” I’m looking at the board of trustees and you might realize like, “Oh, wow. Kamal Agarwala follows me on X. Maybe he’d be open to hopping on a phone call or a Zoom,” and then—or maybe you look at the bios and Anita is mother of three and you’re like, “Where do the Indian moms in the US congregate? Are there WhatsApp groups? Are there message boards? Are there whatever?” And I’m not saying this is a good idea, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But I do think there is value and I did this—you might recall. Very early on, I mentioned The 4-Hour Workweek and the whatever the range was I gave, like 20- to 35-year-old tech-savvy males in San Francisco. That’s very specific and—but the target isn’t the market, right? So the initial target is lead domino that you tip over that makes the rest easier to tip. The eventual market can be infinitely large, but the reason for being so specific—there are many reasons. I gave a few already.

Another is that I can achieve a surround sound effect for a very small number of people where they feel like I am ubiquitous and that there is a perceived momentum that is very helpful, right? Because at that point in time, going back 2007, if I was on Gizmodo, TechCrunch, I think it was 42 or 43 Folders, Merlin Mann and a few other places at the same time, as far as Silicon Valley technorati were concerned, I was everywhere, right?

Niels Hoven: Right.

Tim Ferriss: There are other ways to approach that, right? It’s like, “Okay.” Like Jdate for Jewish dating, okay? That’s like they’re very, very clear on who it’s for and you could— I mean, look, it’s like India is a subcontinent, right? It’s a gigantic place. So I’m not trying to paint with a broad brush. But it’s like, “Okay. Maybe I try to create a surround sound effect in a critical mass within the Indian communities in the United States.”

I’m not saying that’s a good idea, but that is—I would say that’s a very achievable—or at least it’s very concrete, right? It’s more precise than parents who want their kids to learn faster from a marketing perspective. Because then, you can figure out, “Well, maybe I sponsor a TiE event. Okay. Maybe there’s some app that they’re particularly fond of for cohesion.” I don’t know what that would be. Again, making this up as I go.

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe there is—who knows, right? This is going to sound antiquated, but Facebook groups or something. Who knows? And you’re like, “Okay. Well, maybe I or my wife can become active or somebody on the team and offer free trials in exchange for feedback and—” Nothing sneaky, nothing underhanded. It’s just like I—people underestimate, I think, the power of a surround sound effect for a very focused group. This just happens to be the thing that popped into my head, but there could have been a dozen other examples.

Niels Hoven: Yeah. I think this resonates a lot because if that surround sound effect is going on, then at some point you’re like, “I keep hearing this name. I keep hearing this product. Let me go see what this is all about. I’m curious. I want to look into it.” That’s all we need, that first hook.

Tim Ferriss: Well, also, again, I’m stereotyping here but this is my lived experience. It’s like I would be very—I would put a lot of money on black that the management organizers of TiE care a hell of a lot about education and education for their kids. I would put a lot of chips on that and maybe that’s the way to make the ball roll downhill as opposed to pushing it uphill, right? You don’t need to convince them. They are convinced. They just don’t know that you exist.

Niels Hoven: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: You know? And then, you can focus on the stuff that’s really fun to focus on. I mean, a lot of this is really fascinating and, at some level, fun to focus on. But it’s like then you can focus on making it as good as possible for them. I think that’s more—I think that’s quite a fun piece of this whole puzzle, right?

Niels Hoven: Cool. I like this a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s an approach and it’s a very human scale approach, right? I’m not suggesting something that requires hiring McKinsey. I’m not suggesting something that requires outsourcing analytics to some board, which I’m certainly not averse to, but it’s the amount of intelligence that you can absorb both explicitly. But also, kind of implicitly and intuitively by spending time in some of these concentrated environments. You’re like, “Oh, okay. For at least this subset of Indus diaspora entrepreneurs, these are the questions and comments that come up when I use this two minute spiel that I ever find on Mentava.” That’s valuable. That’s really valuable.

And then, there are ways online that you can also convert that into very targeted paid advertising, right? This has turned into an infomercial for TiE, but it’s like maybe they have a newsletter, maybe they have—these are relatively low cost things and it’s—I mean, look, I—I’m going to get in so much trouble for this, but it’s like, look, I’ve gone to—went to two universities in China. Also, probably, you could find an equivalent for first generation in the US, Chinese parents who are all in on education, right?

Niels Hoven: Yep. Yeah. We had—

Tim Ferriss: Chances are, if they made their way here, which is hard AF, they’re going to care a hell of a lot about giving their kids as many advantages as possible and there’s no convincing. They just don’t need—

Niels Hoven: Yeah. We had one customer who was, I think, Chinese, possibly Vietnamese, and she was saying she loved Mentava because she does not speak English very well. So she’s like, “I probably wouldn’t be able to teach my kid to read. So I give them this app, I sit next to them, I do my work, and I just—just to make sure that they kind of stay on task.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s super cool. So those are some of the things that I would be thinking about. I mean, I only know my toolkit, right? So I have lots of blind spots, tons of blind spots. But I will say that this is—I think this type of product, even though I don’t yet have kids, hope to remedy that soon, but this is the type of business I like a lot, right?

Because you have premium pricing, you have to build a product that allows you to charge premium pricing, so there is upward pressure on product quality. And you can find very discrete populations that are already converted, right? It’s like this is not—Education is not a nice to have. By hook or crook, one way or the other, sure, you might get lucky and your kid is like the Ramanujan of self-study. But in most cases, kids are going to need nudges in the right direction. They’re going to need tools, they’re going to need guidance, and it’s like people are willing to pay for that if they have the means, right?

Niels Hoven: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So in any case. Niels, people can find Mentava, obviously, at mentava, M-E-N-T-A-V-A, .com. Check it out. Who knows? Maybe the website will be revised by the time you see it, but they can find you on X at @nielshoven, N-I-E-L-S-H-O-V-E-N. I was dying to ask you about Beauty and the Geek, honestly, but I’ll save that for our round two.

Niels Hoven: All right.

Tim Ferriss: That’s round two. Anything else that you’d like to say or point people to? Any requests you’d like to make of people listening or watching before we wind to a close and land the plane, at least for now?

Niels Hoven: I think my one request to people, whether or not they try Mentava, is you will have to advocate for your child throughout their lives, especially when it comes to education, and never ever let anybody make you feel guilty for advocating for your kid.

Tim Ferriss: Love that. That is a great place to close. Niels, thanks for taking the time, man. Great to see you.

Niels Hoven: Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Love Mentava, the mission behind it, the purpose behind it, the ethos. Not to mention the product. I mean, go look at these testimonies on the website. It’s bananas. To everybody listening, we’ll include links to everything. Probably not the sex compatibility tests, but we’ll include links to just about everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. If you search Niels, N-I-E-L-S, or Mentava, it will be the only result, so you’ll find it there. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than it’s necessary to others. But also, to yourself. Make sure that your compassion includes yourself and thanks for tuning in.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — Niels Hoven of Mentava (Tim Coaching Session) (#882) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — Niels Hoven of Mentava (Tim Coaching Session) (#882)

2026-09-11 04:36:47

This episode is a bit different. It’s a live, unscripted working session with a founder, and I’ve only done one other earlier this year.

Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners. Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system, and Niels created Mentava to allow students to achieve their potential. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems, where he ran the highest-grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. He has a graduate degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

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Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — Niels Hoven of Mentava (Tim Coaching Session)

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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

Show Notes

Connect with Niels & Explore Mentava

Mentava | Mentava’s Reading-Readiness Guide | Niels’s Story | Niels on X

Books

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
Hop on Pop: The Simplest Seuss for Youngest Use by Dr. Seuss
Elephant & Piggie: The Complete Collection by Mo Willems
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Tools & Products

People

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Start.

[00:01:32] What Mentava is—and the toddlers reading before age three.

[00:08:31] Game design, slot-machine motivation, and lowering the hoop.

[00:11:54] Tim’s red pen: rewriting the bio and positioning.

[00:16:59] The real problem: wasted early years, high-school pressure.

[00:23:55] Learning at your own pace—and “what if you did nothing?”

[00:29:32] Dog-fish, fish-dog: readiness, failed trials, and follow-ups.

[00:35:06] The $500 price, school pilots, and videos-for-tuition scholarships.

[00:41:39] Teach a kid to fish: selling relief, not nagging.

[00:47:49] Viral posts, the culture-war trap, and why exaggeration is death.

[00:55:05] Put the ask on top: investor updates and what actually converts.

[00:59:35] The thirty-year phonics war—and it’s not with teachers.

[01:01:10] A $1,000 coupon, zero takers: why the referral bribe flopped.

[01:08:04] Lead with the love letters: testimonials, homepage, and who’s buying.

[01:20:03] “No scam charges $500 a month”: pricing and who you’re not for.

[01:34:16] Uncrowded channels and workshopping like a standup.

[01:42:08] Don’t let Amazon be your debutante ball: testing what sells.

[01:46:42] Alpha School, the competitive map, and the eager investor.

[01:48:39] Reaching the already-converted: be the painkiller, TiE, surround sound.

[02:08:18] Niels’s charge: advocate for your child, unapologetically.

“Kids are these little sponges. They want to learn everything.”

— Niels Hoven

“The metaphor for motivation that I like to use is it’s like trying to get someone to jump through a hoop. You can either increase the size of the reward on the other side or you can lower the hoop.”

— Niels Hoven

“If you allow kids to learn at their own pace, you can pack the entire school day into a very small amount of time.”

— Niels Hoven

“Everybody in cognitive science—everybody in the rest of academia—completely understands that phonics is the only way to teach reading.”

— Niels Hoven

“Being able to say, ‘My kid can already read. You need to give them more opportunity,’ is one of your strongest negotiating levers.”

— Niels Hoven

“Never ever let anybody make you feel guilty for advocating for your kid.”

— Niels Hoven

Want to hear another episode with someone fixated on the outer limits of how fast humans can learn? Listen to my conversation with chess prodigy and The Art of Learning author Josh Waitzkin, in which we discussed initiating flow states, cognitive biases, fixed versus growth mindsets, the hazards of a rigid identity, presence in parenting, cultivating quality as a way of life, the principle of scarcity in the learning process, thematic interconnectedness in education, and much more.

This episode is brought to you by Fin! Fin is an AI agent that delivers high-quality answers and helps resolve complex queries that your customers may have. Rapidly-growing companies like Anthropic (the AI lab behind Claude) rely on Fin to deliver accurate and thoughtful customer support to millions. Fin is built using custom models trained on thousands of customer interactions, and it understands the complexity and nuance of customer service like no other agent. You feed Fin your internal knowledge and policies, it learns your rules, and it can start supporting your overstretched support team. And because every business runs things differently, Fin is fully self-manageable. See the difference Fin can make for your business with a free trial at Fin.ai/Tim.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting Shopify.com/Tim.

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, your cash can earn 3.30% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account from its network of program banks. That’s 8 times more interest than a typical savings account at a bank, according to FDIC.gov as of 05/18/2026 (Wealthfront’s 3.30% APY vs. 0.38% average savings rate). Right now, for a limited time, Wealthfront is offering new clients that use my sign-up link an additional 0.75% boost over the base rate for three months, meaning you can get up to 4.05% APY, limited to a $150,000 balance. Terms & Conditions apply. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.

The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC (“Wealthfront Brokerage”), member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The 3.30% Base APY on cash deposits is as of January 30, 2026, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum balance. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where it earns the variable base APY. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new Cash Account clients) when you direct deposit $1,000/month plus maintain a funded investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms and conditions apply. Full details for both promotions at wealthfront.com/promo-terms.

Tim Ferriss, who is not a client, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage LLC for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, which creates an incentive that results in a conflict of interest. Tim expresses his own opinions and Wealthfront does not endorse, sponsor, or promote them. This ad may not reflect the experience of other Cash Account clients, and similar outcomes are not guaranteed. Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Securities investments: not bank deposits, not bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. See full disclosures here.

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The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tales of Overcoming the Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More (#881)

2026-09-05 11:30:44

Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode about overcoming mistakes and failure. What do you do when your work is rejected, when the big bet fails, or when the path ahead suddenly disappears? As you’ll hear in this episode, setbacks can often present opportunities if you know how to look for them.

Legal conditions/copyright information

Tales of Overcoming The Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

BJ MILLER

Tim Ferriss: Now, I hate to focus on something maybe superficial, but you said riding your motorcycle. Now I apologize if this sounds like a weird question, but you have three limbs that have been damaged. How do you ride a motorcycle?

BJ Miller: So, yeah, so you know, this was sort of a long dream that recently came true.

Tim Ferriss: Congratulations. I mean, it’s awesome. I’m just so curious about the logistics.

BJ Miller: Thank you. Well, it’s interesting you ask, because right now there’s – the man who helped make this dream come true, Randy, he ended up being my patient and our resident at Zen Hospice Project not long after he converted my motorcycle. So there’s a lot to this story, my friend.

So cheers to Randy and his family and his wife, I mean, and his mother, [inaudible] who I might be seeing next week actually. But so that’s one piece of the story. But the other is, I love two wheels. I love gyroscopic lifestyle. I love the feeling of it. So I’ve always loved riding bicycles. And then I’d always wanted to get on a motorcycle, but I kept going to shops and, you know, people would sort of look at me and no one got into it. I could never find a mechanic who was willing to take it on and try to help make it happen.

A fellow named Mert Lawwill, who’s an old motorcycle racer champion, sort of legendary in that world, he happens to live around here. He lives in Tiburon. And he built a prosthetic component. I don’t know what the story that inspired Mert to do this, but he’s a machinist himself and a handy fella, and in his retirement he got into this business of building this prosthetic component that lends itself very well to mounting an arm onto a bicycle or a motorcycle.

So the first piece of this puzzle was discovering Mert’s invention and getting a hold of it myself which allowed me to get my prosthetic arm attached to a handlebar in a very functional way.

Tim Ferriss: Now does that connection – so you have throttle, rear brake and then typically front brake on the left. How are those controls modified?

BJ Miller: So, okay, so Randy, what he figured out, so first was to get the arm piece and then what Randy figured out was – and then – well, then Aprilia, and I know Honda had made a version of this as well, but Aprilia makes a model, the Mana, M-A-N-A, that is clutchless. So that was a huge –

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

BJ Miller: – piece to get out of the way. So this is essentially an automatic transmission. So do away with the clutch and gear changes. So that’s a huge piece of the puzzle out of the way. And then Randy figured out a way to splice the brakes, front and rear in a certain ratio into a single lever. So I’m doing nothing with my prosthetic feet except hold on to the bike.

I’m doing nothing with my prosthetic arm except for hold on to the bike. So all the action is in my right hand. Brakes the one lever, and then Randy built this box and moved all the controls, the turn signals, horn and all that stuff, over to the right side of the bike in good distance for my thumb to reach them. So I have throttle, brake lever and then the turn signal box all going with one hand.

Tim Ferriss: That’s so awesome.

BJ Miller: That’s it, you know. Away you go!

Tim Ferriss: I just have to pause here for a second and just ask everyone listening, what bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want. Like, please, write in, tell us on social media why these are real excuses. With #bullshit afterwards. Oh my God, man, that’s such a great story. I’m so glad I asked about it. And what a really fantastic work-around. Man! Congrats, that’s awesome.

BJ Miller: Well, thank you, and thanks Randy and thanks for the folks at Scooteria, the bike shop in the city. I mean I – a lot of people helped me make this come true. And it took a long, long time of trying to find the right folks to make it happen, so Amen.

Tim Ferriss: Amen to that.

TERRY CREWS

Tim Ferriss: When I was looking at your history and your book and your back story, one thing that I paid attention to as a pattern was an uncommon degree of self reflection. And so, I want to rewind the clock a little bit back to high school. And one of the stories that you put in Tribe of Mentors is related to my question related favorite failures or a failure that set you up for later success. Could you tell us a little bit about that please?

Terry Crews: Man, yes. In 1986, that was my senior year in high school. And I went to Flint Academy. And it was a classy school, but we were highly ranked in the state. And I used to be a basketball player. Hard to believe now. Basketball was a big sport for me. But I was the starting center on this team. And what was wild is we were picked to go all the way in the state. We had a super star on our team.

And we had a really, really good team. But we played against a school who decided not to play. It was the district championship. And it was right at the beginning of the playoffs. And these guys would take the ball down the court and pass the ball to each other at the top of the court and wouldn’t play. And we had a coach who was like well, you know what, I’m going to beat you at your own game. So, we stayed in the zone. So, we’re sitting there the whole time. And I’m telling you, it was the most boring game of all time. We just sat there with our hands up, and they passed the ball. And if anything happened, somebody went and got it, and you scored two.

It was just a mess. So, the score was really, really low. And they were up 47 to 45. And it was, literally, under a minute. And I’m freaking out because, now, we’re going to – it’s evident we’re going to lose because I’m going man, this is a dumb defensive strategy anyway. We should have been going after it. But what happened is a guy threw the ball. Their guy threw the ball cross court, I intercepted it. And with literally five seconds left to go, and I take the ball all the way down the court. You got to understand. I’m thinking I had visions of oh, my God, this is the thing. I’m the hero. The heart is like pounding. I’m already at the party. You know what I mean? And I go with this layup, and I bring it up there, and it’s totally – it gets around the rim, and it rolls off. And let me tell you that place goes nuts because it was the upset of the year. And I collapsed in a heap. And I know my life is over. And you got to understand. And this is another thing. Shame among men. It’s like how could you do that, man?

Other players were yelling at me. The coach – I was in the locker room, and he was like you had no business taking that shot. And I stole the ball. It wasn’t like – we didn’t have a shot anyway. But he was like you had no business taking that shot. You should have passed it. Man, it’s your fault. And everybody in the room was like yeah. And they didn’t let me off one – and I remember just going oh, my God. And I went in the paper. And the paper, the next day, it was like Terry Crews had a shot, and he missed. And let me tell you, it was the most dark – when you’re 16 years old, I was beyond crushed.

And one guy was taunting me. I got in a fight after it at school and the whole thing. And I was just like this is awful. It’s horrible. And so, it was a couple of days went by, and I was in the deepest funk. I’m sitting on my bed, and I shared my room with my brother.

But, for some reason, he wasn’t there because I always remember him being there. It was kind of crazy. I don’t ever remember being alone, except that time. And I remember being alone and just thinking about I should have passed it. I should have passed it. Maybe I messed up. And what else could I have done? And then, another little voice. It said I took the shot. I took the shot. And I was like I did. I did. And I kept thinking, it was like, man, look, when you had the chance, when everything was on the line, you took your shot, man. You did that. You did that. And all of a sudden, I was like that’s right. I took it. And I learned, from then on, I said, man, wait a minute.

If I win or if I fail, it’s going to be on my terms. It’s going to be up to me. If I have the opportunity, I have to go for it. And then, I felt really good about losing the game. It was real. Now, you can call it reframing. A lot of people have scientific ways or psychological ways to do things. But I learned always to kind of reframe things so that it’s to your advantage. You know what I mean? And you look at these things like wait a minute, you took the shot, man. And this is another thing because what’s so crazy is that no one ever remembers that game. It’s one of the least important things in my life. But the lesson I learned is still guiding me today. The fact that go for it. Take your shot. Take your time.

When you get that thing, when you have that opportunity, don’t mess it up because this is another thing. And I want to tell you, Tim, the scariest thought ever is one thing that blew me away is that you really do get what you want. And let me tell you what I mean. There have been times when you can be self destructive. And you think it’s something else, or you think – I discovered, for a long time, if I show up late for something twice, I don’t want it. And you get what you desire. Everything about you, you get what you want. Now, the way your life is, truthfully, you want it. Now, that’s hard to say because a lot of people are like no way. There’s so many other obstacles. There’s this and this and this and this. But the truth is, if you wanted something different, you’d change it. And that hit me. Like it’s scary because, if I failed, or if I showed up wrong or messed up on something, I was like I didn’t really do what it took to get it. And, again, that comes from taking that shot way back in high school. But now, I realize, okay, get rid of any what I call self sabotage, and you can achieve whatever you need.

Tim Ferriss: This is such a pattern that I’ve seen across interviews that I’ve done. We were talking about Jamie Foxx back stage. But it goes all the way across the spectrum, say Debbie Millman who is a well known graphic designer. And she realized, at one point, and then, made her mantra busy is a decision. You’re disallowed from complaining responding to someone when they say how are you with a complaint that you are busy because that’s a consequence of your decisions.

TIM MCGRAW

Tim Ferriss: I would love to flesh out the humanizing of Tim McGraw a little bit, because for people who may not know your career, they might be like, “Man, this giant just gets off the Greyhound bus and then it’s like he’s hitting a double and a triple and a home run and it’s just endless home runs. Green lights the whole way.” And I’m curious if there are any favorite failures, things that didn’t work, that ended up teaching you something important or laying the seeds for something later, or if there was ever a period of feeling plateau or stuck-ness and how you dealt with it?

Tim McGraw: There’s both of those. I think failure that I learned a lot from was my first album, which we always say went wood. I think we had one song that made it to 38 off of that album.

Tim Ferriss: Went wood.

Tim McGraw: Yeah, it went wood, so no hits on it. And so the label just sort of forgot about me after that. And so I was slowly gathering songs, but I learned a lot. I learned what I didn’t want to do.

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Tim McGraw: The way to make music, I learned what I didn’t want it to sound like. So I slowly started gathering songs from songwriter friends of mine. Not really big songwriters, just friends of mine who were songwriters. Slowly started collecting songs. The label never even called me after the album came out because it didn’t do anything. Didn’t talk to them at all. So I collected these songs and I went to Byron. I said, “All right, I’m ready to go record these songs.”

Tim Ferriss: Who’s Byron again?

Tim McGraw: My producer, Byron Gallimore, that we produced together. I said, “I’m ready to cut these songs.” And he goes, “Well, has Curb heard them, are they approved?” I says, “Nope, we’re just going to book a session and go cut the album.” And so we booked the session.

Tim Ferriss: So it was like an album on spec?

Tim McGraw: Yeah, and we billed Curb. We billed Curb for the whole thing, we cut the album, did all the artwork. Had the CD ready with the artwork done and turned it in to them. And of course, they hit the roof because we had spent a bunch of money making an album that we weren’t approved of. And then they listened and it was the Not a Moment Too Soon album. And then they listened to the album and then they were all on board.

And the good thing about that is the first one didn’t work. The second one, I said, “I want to do this my way and to do this — and had “Indian Outlaw” — I’m going to do the songs I want to do. I’m picking all the songs, doing the songs I want to do. We’re going to cut them the way I want to cut them. And if it fails, it fails on my terms this time.” And luckily it worked.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s why you didn’t reach out for approvals because you’re like, “I don’t want some album by committee.”

Tim McGraw: No. No. It never works. Not for me. I’m sure it works for other artists, but anytime I’ve done that, anytime that I’ve let somebody else talk me into a song, whether it be a record label head or somebody else, talked me into a song that I knew wasn’t right for me, it’s never worked. It’s never worked. And there’s been tons of times where people didn’t like the song at all and it worked.

Tim Ferriss: How did you decide, or when you say you knew what you didn’t want it to sound like, can you say more about that?

Tim McGraw: Yeah. Well, you can go back and listen to my first album, you can figure it out. I just knew that there were three songs on the first album that they sort of let me run loose with.

Tim Ferriss: Well, they’re also like what other people hear and then there’s what you hear and what it means to you.

Tim McGraw: Absolutely. And you also realize quickly in this business that you think when you move to town, you find your producer, you get a record label, you get all those things and everybody knows what they’re doing. That’s not necessarily the case.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds a lot like book publishing.

Tim McGraw: Yeah. Most of the time the artist knows what they’re doing and then everybody sort of follows the artist that gets successful and starts doing what they’re doing. But there are great people like, boy, without Byron Gallimore, I wouldn’t know my right hand from my left. He’s my partner in the studio and I can’t imagine making a record without him. But you find out very quickly if you don’t have an idea about what you want and how you want to make your music and how you want it to sound and how you want your career to go. And if you don’t get into control of that and you don’t do it the way you want to do it, it might work, but it’s not going to work for long.

And there have been times in my career where I’ve sat back and decided, “All right, I’m going to let this float and let other people make the decisions. Everything’s fine for now.” And sure enough, if I don’t get involved, it doesn’t go the way I want it to go.

Now I’ve got people around me now that’s been around me for 20, 30 years that I trust. But even still, if they don’t get regular input from me, nobody knows what’s in your head. Nobody knows exactly what you picture, even though you might think they do. They don’t.

I mean, they can get close, but you have to stay involved. And I’m learning that more more, and these last few years have been tough for me to be involved as much as I want to be because I’ve been battling, just trying to get my health back. And I’m fortunate that I have the right people around me that helps me through those periods. But when your focus is on and you’re paying attention to what you’re doing and you know what the path is, it makes it easier for everybody around you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What about the periods of stuckness outside of the most recent injury period and the surgical, obviously the multiple surgeries?

Tim McGraw: Well, the biggest period of stuckness and the biggest period where I thought, besides this period where I thought it might be over is when I went through a whole legal battle with Curb Records, that was a very dark period in my career. They kept extending my contract by putting greatest hits albums out. So every time I would turn in an album that would be the final album for my contract, they would drop the greatest hits, which didn’t count against the contract. So I think they ended up putting like 10 greatest hits albums to keep me from dropping my album.

So finally, I decided I either had to bite the bullet and try to go to court with them and get out or be stuck with them. And either way, I’m taking a chance on my career.

And we battled for a couple of years and I had to pretty much rebuild my career after that. And that was a scary time because momentum’s a tough thing.

And I heard a quote the other day, it was actually a Landman. I was watching it and —

Tim Ferriss: It’s a great show.

Tim McGraw: A great show, and Sam Elliott was talking to Billy Bob and says, “You know that monkey at rodeos that rides on the back of the border collie and the border collie just runs around and runs around and the monkey’s just hanging on for dear life, and he can’t let go because he’ll die so he’s got to hold on?” He looked at Bill, he said, “You’re that monkey.”

And I looked at Faith, goes, “Jesus Christ, I’m that monkey.” So I feel like I’m that monkey. But I don’t know that if it’s intentional, if it’s innately in you, but there’s something about even when you know you need to take a break or even when you know you need to slow down, when things are rolling, there’s this sixth sense in your body that knows you can’t let the momentum stop because it’s so hard to restart, even if consciously you’re not thinking that, there’s something in you that keeps it driving because you don’t want the ball to stop rolling and it’s because you’re scared, because you’re scared if the ball stops rolling, you’ll never get it rolling again.

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Tim McGraw: So that was a time when that was happening to me and I thought, “Boy, it’s going to be hard to restart the momentum.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tim McGraw: And then after these surgeries, it was another one of those times.

Tim Ferriss: Legal battles, it’s just exhaustion upon exhaustion.

Tim McGraw: Oh, it’s just crazy.

Tim Ferriss: And sometimes you can’t avoid it, but if you can avoid it.

Tim McGraw: Yeah. I don’t want to be involved in legal battles unless it’s just —

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely.

Tim McGraw: But I was at a point in my career that if I didn’t do something, my career was going to be over.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tim McGraw: And if I did do something, there was a chance it would be over.

Tim Ferriss: It was still a risk.

Tim McGraw: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What were some of the most important things in retrospect that you did to rebuild your career, regain that momentum afterwards?

Tim McGraw: Well, choosing the right partner, for one thing, which was Scott Borchetta, who happens to be the son of Mike Borchetta, who signed me on my first deal.

Tim Ferriss: A small world.

Tim McGraw: I know. Who I signed with on Big Machine afterwards because I knew he was a hard worker. So that certainly being first, but I was also recording the best album I think I’d ever recorded in my life while all this was going on. Once I was cleared to record. And so I had an album ready to go by the time all the dust was settled —

Tim Ferriss: It was settled.

Tim McGraw: — I had an album ready to go and Scott Borchetta was ready and the album worked and the juice was back.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible.

Tim McGraw: Yeah. But a lot of that was my team, kept fighting for me the entire time. When I went to Scott, to his label, he knew what had happened and he fought really hard because he didn’t like what had happened either.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would imagine that also injected a helpful amount of piss and vinegar to demonstrate, to really relaunch in a meaningful way.

Tim McGraw: Oh, yeah. I think it turned me up to 12 after that. I mean, it kicked me into high gear for sure. And that’s the way I feel now. After all of this and worrying about being able to come back and worry about if I did come back, what’s my show’s going to be like? How I was going to be able to perform? Was I going to be able to be me again?

Now I feel like that same way I felt after coming out of Curb and starting with Big Machine and getting the ball rolling again. I feel like that we’re right on the edge of just tipping that ball over the hill, that boulder over the hill and let it go again.

Tim Ferriss: I am so curious because you must get approached all the time one way or another from musicians at different stages in their careers. Maybe it’s the son of a friend or the daughter of a fill in the blank, or it could be someone who’s just coming up. Maybe they’re trying to be an opener for you. Who knows?

Tim McGraw: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Someone who is earlier in their career, I imagine the advice you might give them has changed over time, but if they want to be more than a flash in the pan —

Tim McGraw: Take charge.

Tim Ferriss: — to really last. Yeah. What advice do you give them?

Tim McGraw: Take charge.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Can you say more?

Tim McGraw: Take charge of your career.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tim McGraw: Take charge of your career. Take charge of what you do. Be confident in your decisions. Listen, of course, you want to listen to people. Listen to people that know what they’re doing, but ultimately you have to make the decisions and you have to make your choices and you have to make the right choices for you. And nobody can do that but yourself.

And if you just coast, you might have a career for a little while, but if you want a long career, you’re going to have to take charge and ownership of it and you’re going to have to guide it. And you’re going to have to have your finger on the button all the time and you’re going to have to say yes or you’re going to have to say no. And you’re going to have to use your skills to manage people. You’re going to have to use your skills to be managed.

And both of those things can happen simultaneously and they have to happen simultaneously. You have to listen to smart people. But if you don’t have a vision about what you want to do, if you don’t have a plan about what you want to do, if you don’t act on it every day, it’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.

And you can do all those things and it’s still not happening.

JESSICA LAHEY

Jessica Lahey: So I wrote The Gift of Failure, it was my first book. I didn’t know how to write a book. I mean, knowing how to write a book is a learned skill, right? So the idea that a journalist who’s used to writing 1,200 words because suddenly write 70,000 and do it perfectly the first time around, I had it in my head — my fantasy was I would hand my first draft in and my editor would come back to me and she’d say, “Well, there’s no edits here. I mean, this is it. We can publish early. This is perfect.” What happened instead was this. I turned my book in on time, on October 31st, and on November 1st, I went on a horseback ride with my husband. My friend of mine has horses that she lets me borrow sometimes.

I was thrown from the horse and I landed on my head and I lost my memory and lost my ability to read for a little while. It was bad. It was really bad. Didn’t remember that I’d finished a book the day before, all that sort of stuff. So I had some post-concussion syndrome that was really depression and stuff. Then I got a call from my editor. Actually, I got an email from my editor, asking me to come to New York for a talk. No, yeah, that’s not good. My editor is like — oh, I just idolized her. She’s like a grande dame in publishing. She’s amazing. So this wasn’t going to be good. I went and what she said was this. Oh, God, it still makes me want to throw up.

She said, “This book is unpublishable.” Then she said the worst part. That wasn’t the worst part. What she said was, “We need to think about bringing in a ghost.” Now, a ghost means a ghost writer. I am a professional writer and she wants to bring in a writer to help me write my book. So I didn’t throw up. I was actually very proud of myself for that. But I said, “Look…” and I didn’t cry, which was also a huge thing. I said, “Before we do that…” I needed some extra time anyway because of the head injury. That really got in my way for a while, so we had some extra time to play with. I said, “Give me two chapters, give me a probationary two chapters and tell me everything I did wrong and what you want this to look like.”

I filled a notebook. I sat in her office for — I was in there for over an hour listening to how bad I was, to how much I stank as a writer, essentially. Luckily, she was also lovely and she said things like, “This happens with a lot of journalists. You’re used to writing in short bursts and so you end up writing this very fragmented, large thing that doesn’t hold together as a whole. Your writing is fine. It’s your organization that sucks and that’s what you need help with.” So she gave me those two chapters and I went home and I read over a notebook full of how badly I suck as a writer and I digested it and I turned it into essentially a checklist of what not to do again. Those two chapters turned into four, which turned into six, which turned into the whole book, no ghost writer, which turned into a New York Times bestselling book.

That’s not the best part of the story. The best part of the story for me was that when she bought my second book, I turned that book in on time. My agent was a little nervous because she knew I’d been a lot to handle the first time, right? My editor’s having to line edit an entire book, because I’m a ton of work. But I had run my second book through the what not to do again to-do list filter, and the book was so clean that she wanted to move up my publication date.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Jessica Lahey: So it’s not that I’m a great writer. It’s that I was humble enough to say, “Teach me how to be better. I will take it to heart and I will be able to be objective about it and I will use it and I won’t make the same mistakes again.” So when I handed in not only Gift of Failure but then the next book, I was able to show my editor that I learned from my mistakes. And what was really sweet is she referred to me in a recent email as a dream author because I learned from my mistakes.

DAX SHEPARD

Tim Ferriss: You’ve been very forthcoming with a lot of your challenges over time. You do something that I respect a great deal, which is not leading with solely the highlight reel. I think that that’s a real service to people who are suffering, as we all are in various ways, often self-inflicted wounds. And I wanted to know if you have perhaps a favorite failure? And what I mean by that is a mistake or something at the time that you viewed as a failure, that in some way set you up for success later. If there’s anything that you gained from tremendously, that at the time seemed like a shortcoming or a failure or a mistake?

Dax Shepard: I mean, the one that jumps out immediately and is most relevant to this conversation is, I was heartbroken when CHiPs didn’t open. Because back to my identity crisis, I had a three-year stretch where in my mind I decided I wasn’t an actor anymore. I was a writer-director, and I liked that. It felt loftier. Well, and substantively, I feel a lot more pride over having written a script than having acted. I do think it’s harder, so some of it’s worthwhile. But I had decided I was a writer-director and that was going to be the next 10 years of my life. CHiPs had tested really high at Warner Brothers, and they immediately put me on another movie that I took over from some other people, and so I was doing that.

And then overnight that ended. I did not have that identity anymore. And they had already commissioned CHiPs 2. I was already beginning to write that. And I got very depressed for three or four months, maybe more. I started doing math and thinking, “Okay, could I retire now? Could I be done now? Live on this amount of money?” Blah, blah, blah. That’s what I was spending most of my time thinking about is whether I was completely done.

And that’s when I wanted to do the podcast. I was ruminating on so much stuff. I was thinking about my own life and identity and trajectory and the failure, and then I started it in the wake of that. And I think because I was so interested in failure at that time—I say often on the podcast, I have nothing to learn from someone holding an Emmy over their head. I’ll never be holding an Emmy over my head, but I can relate if that person cheated on someone they loved and regretted it. I can relate to the failures that led up to that. That’s something I can learn from. And that’s how I learned from people in AA. I don’t ever learn from someone telling some victory story, it’s always how they fucked up and realized it.

And so now in hindsight, had I had the thing I wanted, which was being a writer-director, it’s so time-consuming. My kids were one and three when I finished that movie, maybe two and four; and I would have been gone. I would have taken bigger movies. I would have been way more into that. Ironically, I would have ended up making less money.

This thing that I had no desire to do and this complete collapse of this identity I had and desire turned out to be something that allows me to be with my kids a ton. I’m at home all the time. My wife can take work out of town if she wants. I can travel and do this. This life that came out of this epic failure, this 20-year pursuit, turned out to be something better than I had even thought to imagine. I didn’t even know that this could exist.

Yeah, that’s a very obvious one for me now that I look back and go like, “Fucking thank God that thing failed.” I would have been writing that movie, then directing that movie, then trying to get them to give me $100 million to do this one. Well, and by the way, the movie business is collapsing, so I would have been doing all that in a time it’s almost impossible to do that. Yeah, I got so lucky in that thing not performing, crazy enough.

Tim Ferriss: What a story. It makes me think of something a friend of mine said, I can’t recall who it was, but sometimes you need life to save you from what you want.

Dax Shepard: oh, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, what a great story.

Dax Shepard: Well, even if you go through your own life, right, and you think of the times you got exactly what you wanted and then the times you didn’t get the thing you wanted. And what I know most is that I don’t know what’s best for me. The things I got that I wanted did not turn out or result in anything I had forecasts or dreamt of; and yet, all these things I didn’t want to do.

I didn’t want to be on TV. I had decided in my egotistical mind I was a movie actor. I didn’t want to be in TV. I reluctantly was on this show Parenthood because I was at a lull in my career. Best experience I’ve ever had as an actor, opened up the doors for me to act and so many other things. Without question, the best thing that ever could’ve happened to me as an actor, and it was the thing I didn’t want to do. And I got to do the exact thing I wanted to do, ride wheelies motorcycles in a movie I directed, and it fucking didn’t turn out.

CATHY LANIER

Cathy Lanier: So I went from a talented and gifted student with straight As to failing literally every subject the first quarter of seventh grade. I was chronically truant. I think I was averaging 19 days a quarter that I was actually showing up for school. My mother didn’t know because the school never notified her, and by the time she got home from work at 6:00 p.m., we were all sitting around pretending to do our homework. So my poor mother had no idea until about midway through the eighth grade I was so chronically truant that I was failing all of my major subjects.

So meanwhile, while I’m skipping school, I’m hanging out with the wrong people, much older crowd, friends of my older brother and just an older crowd and just getting in trouble. And I fall in love with a much older boyfriend at the time, think I’m in love, and we want to get married and run away and get married. And so by the time I was in the ninth grade, I’m 14 years old, found myself pregnant. My boyfriend at the time had given me a diamond ring. We were engaged, we’re going to get married, so we run away. He was 26 at the time. I was 14. My mother, when she finds out, was going to have him arrested. She was going to put him in jail. So I run away from home and think, “Well, we’ve got this. We’re going to get married and we’re going to have the baby and everything’s going to be great.” The mind of a 14-year-old. Obviously things didn’t work out that way.

Interestingly, I went to my father who had been out of the picture most of my life and asked for him to sign for me to get married. Because of my age, one of my parents had to legally sign over my legal guardianship to my husband. So they literally signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. So my dad, thinking he would have one less child to pay child support for, because once he signed over my guardianship, he —

Tim Ferriss: Right, cuts the child support bill.

Cathy Lanier: — paid $100 less a month in child support. So he signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. We got married the day after my 15th birthday. I was eight months pregnant at the time.

So I guess fast-forward a little bit, a year and a half later, I was back at home. My mother was taking me to GED classes at night. I was sneaking to go to GED classes when I was still married. My husband didn’t approve of me going to school. So once we separated, my mom made sure I stayed in school, got my GED. And she would bring her typewriter home from work and she taught me how to type on the kitchen table. So she taught me how to type and take a little shorthand, and I went and got a job as a secretary. I lied about my age. I got a job as a secretary when I was 16, so started working as secretary and then worked as a waitress in the evening in a bar. Also lied about my age to work in a bar. That was the only option up in the area where I was working. So for the next several years, I worked two jobs as a secretary and a waitress.

And my motivation really was my son. It was kind of a significant moment for me, and I’ve had a few in my life. When my son was born, I had never babysat before, I’d never held a baby. I didn’t know anything about babies or children. And when he was born, he was such a good baby. His crib was at the end of my bed in my bedroom. And I’d wake up in the morning, and he’d be awake and he’d just be looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. Not crying, nothing. He would just be looking at me. So about three weeks into this —

Tim Ferriss: That is remarkable. Yeah.

Cathy Lanier: Yeah, about three weeks into this experiment, I’m looking at him one morning, and it just dawns on me for the first time that I’m a parent and that that helpless little baby was completely reliant on me. And my mother always stressed the importance of education and work to us, and here I was, my husband didn’t allow me to go to school, I would never be able to get a job, and I’m looking at this poor little innocent baby and I’m thinking his whole life depends on me, and what am I going to be able to provide with a ninth grade education? Not much. So that was a aha moment.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to resist the temptation to ask 300 questions about the last few minutes that you shared because we’ll end up spending all of our time there if I do that. But I am curious for you, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes at that young age, when you — and we don’t need to get into the details unless you’d like to share, but when you separated from your then-husband, when that happened, what did you think was going to become of you? What did you envision your path would be at that point? I have to imagine that it would have just been incredibly challenging. I don’t know. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I read that when you were a young girl, you dreamed of being a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

Cathy Lanier: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: And then flash-forward, you go through this entire tumultuous experience and you land back at home. Where did you think your life was headed? Where did you think you were headed at that point?

Cathy Lanier: Well, I knew that with a ninth grade education and a single mom that I had zero chance of being able to do what I thought was most important in the world, and that’s take care of my son. And when I first moved back home, I got my GED, but I still was not able to easily find a job at my age. It was 16, almost 17. I had to wait till I was 16 and nine months to take the test to get the GED. Interestingly, you needed 255 to pass the test. I got 256. I passed it by one point.

Tim Ferriss: Oh my God. Talk about —

Cathy Lanier: There’s another little footnote of my life.

Tim Ferriss: — these Sliding Door moments. Holy cow, right? Okay.

Cathy Lanier: So I knew that my mother had always stressed the importance of education and work, so I knew I had to go back to school, and I wanted to go to college. I didn’t want my son to be subject to the same crappy neighborhoods and the same crappy schools that I went to. I wanted him to have a real chance, and I knew if I was going to do that, I had to go back to school and get a college education. If I didn’t do that, I was standing in the same food stamp line my mother stood in with me. I remember the first day I went to get food stamps, going to the big white building by Prince George’s Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid, and I was like, “This is not my path. This can’t be my path.”

And so when I got my job as a secretary, they offered tuition reimbursement to go to college, so I started at community college. I just started taking one class a semester, and that’s where it started, one class a semester. And they reimbursed me for it.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, for people who don’t have context, we’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and understandably you got a lot of balls to juggle. And I remember hearing just pieces of your story. This was, God, it has to be, what, more than a year ago now, I’m sure. Time flies. But it’s been a long while. And I just remember thinking to myself, “God, I hope someday that we can have this conversation on the podcast,” so I want to thank you again for doing it.

How do you then go from there — what is the connective tissue, sort of the catalyzing events that ultimately get you into law enforcement? What are the first few dominoes that get tipped over that start to push you in that direction?

Cathy Lanier: So to be fair, my family’s a public service family. My father was a firefighter. My oldest brother had become a firefighter right out of high school. My other brother was a police officer. I was working as a secretary. I was taking that one class a semester working as a secretary, trying to get my son in private school. I wanted him in private school. I did not want him going to those schools. I was still living in the same crappy neighborhood, but I wanted my son in a good school.

And I saw an ad — I was 23 years old. I saw an ad in the Washington Post for the Metropolitan Police Department; they were hiring. And what caught my attention — it’s a full page ad in the Post. Half of the page said tuition reimbursement. I’m like, “Oh my God, tuition reimbursement. I’m paying for one class a semester. Going to take me 30 years to get a degree.”

So I went with a friend, and we went and stood in line. They were hiring a thousand cops. This was during the crack cocaine wars in Washington, early 1990. 500 murders a year. DC was known as the murder capital of the world at the time. So I just went and stood in line with a thousand other people, went and took the test, and I came out — I want to say I came out like 60 out of a thousand people on that test. So they called me right away. I was the only white female in the room. This is back in the early ’90s. Washington DC was about 89% African American.

So I mean, I felt the same drive my mother felt taking care of us is that I have a son that needs me, he needs me to provide for him, and the only way I’m going to do this is get a good job, government job, not a bad option, and go back to school and get my degree. So I got hired by the Metropolitan Police in 1990, started walking a footbeat. My first day out of the academy was the Mount Pleasant riots. So my first day out of the academy, I went to work and didn’t come home for five days. It was great.

JANNA LEVIN

Tim Ferriss: I like that. That rings true to me. Let’s use this as a segue to an answer that you provided very graciously in my last book, Tribe of Mentors. I asked a question in the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? So I’m just going to read this and then we’ll dive into it. So these are your words. “I used to resent obstacles along the path thinking if only that hadn’t happened life would be so good. Then I suddenly realized: life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path. Our role here is to get better at navigating those obstacles. I strive to find calm, measured responses and to see hindrances as a chance to problem-solve. Often I fall back into old frustrations, but if I remind myself this is a chance to step up, I can reframe conflict as a chance to experiment with solutions.” What led to this realization?

Janna Levin: Oh, man. I mean, gosh, it is one of my best, you know, how we might all have these certain boulders we nail into the wall to cling to. This is one of them for me very much so. I think we struggle with the idea of who’s privileged and who’s not privileged? What opportunities have you been given? What have you earned? And we all have a different balance of that. I definitely had feminist parents, I had intellectual parents. I had a lot of ups and advantages. And when I came to blocks in the road, I really didn’t like that I had people to stand up on me and demand, “What do you have to say about being a woman in science?” It really bugged me. And I thought, “But you’re not talking about all these leg ups I had from all these other people and how I look around and I don’t see a lot of diversity. Why should I only talk about the hardship in my road?” It bugged me instinctively.

And I think that what I realized was I had been sold because of my kind of comfy childhood and idea that life is great, and just don’t screw it up. And that’s false. Life is not great for most people, and they have to do a hell of a lot more than not screw it up. They have to build bridges, and pave ways, and do things no one’s ever thought of. And fight poverty, and find solutions. And I just thought the people that have taught me the most have done those things and that we have to stop fantasizing that we’re — my dad always said, my dad was from a tougher upbringing. And he always said, “Life is unfair.” He told me that all the time. Oh, my God, it’s so hilarious. I can totally hear him saying it, “Life is not fair. It’s not about fairness. Nobody told you you were owed fairness. No such thing.”

And it really taught me to think that, “Oh, life is a series of obstacles. It’s not a paved path.” And the obstacles are what make you and when I’ve really screwed up with something like that, I felt really deep shame. Nobody had to tell me to be ashamed. I felt really ashamed. And when I’ve succeeded in that, I felt really good, and nobody needed to tell me I should feel good about it. It’s just obvious. And so I started to see life as a series of obstacles that were test trials, teaching modules of how to be a better person and to pave the way behind you, not in front of you. And it’s really been a pretty important principle for me, I guess. That when I see something happen I don’t think, “This is so unfair. Why are they doing this to me?” That I think instead, “Okay, am I able to rise to figure out a solution to this?” And I’m not always able to do that. But when I do, I feel like it’s genuine progress.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s an enabling lens of agency. Right?

Janna Levin: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I mean, we talked about it a little bit before recording, but I mean, there’s certainly you are whoever you are. And some people certainly much more than others, you’re going to run into boots in the face.

Janna Levin: Boots in the face. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then the question is: what do you do when you run into a boot in the face? And —

Janna Levin: Yeah, so I think it’s very interesting that certain people with privilege are enraged by a boot in the face because they were told that they had the road paved ahead of them. And it’s an advantage to not think that. So then when the boot is in your face, your immediate reaction isn’t like, “How dare you? I deserve this. I’m owed this opportunity.” That your reaction is instead, “Oh, that’s who you are. You’re the guy with the boot and what can I do to go around you? What can I do to go over your head and to be okay with that?” I think a lot of us cling to the degrees and the accolades and trust me, it’s helped me and my wife to have those things. So I’m not dismissing them. And I’m really grateful for them. But if you’re not going to get that accolade, big deal.

Learn how to pivot, move away from the boot, the boot actually has no power unless you insist on continually pushing against it. Unless you consider it your only avenue forward. And you’re just going to keep pushing until the boot and convince the boot and that, forget it. Move to the left and figure out something else, and go over their heads. And that’s really, really liberating. That took me much longer to realize and it’s super liberating. Suddenly they’ve got no power over you if you’re not interested in the avenue that they offer.

Tim Ferriss: I loved your answer in the book, and I love your explanation. Life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path. It’s actually very relieving in a way.

Janna Levin: It is. And it makes you less resentful. Like why did this happen to me? And this is an unfair. No, it’s not. It’s an opportunity to develop yourself. It’s exciting.

BOYD VARTY

Tim Ferriss: I want to bring up one of the lines from The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life that — it certainly pops to mind quickly when think about this book. I’m sure it’s a line that a lot of people bring up. I know it’s a line that Josh has brought up and I’d love to just hear you explain why this is in the book and why it matters. Quote, “I don’t know where we’re going, but I know exactly how to get there.”

Boyd Varty: Oh, I love that. Don’t you?

Tim Ferriss: I love it. Absolutely. It really, if you take a moment to pause and contemplate, the implications are pretty profound. So I’d love to just hear you riff on this and why and how this ended up in the book?

Boyd Varty: Well, there were two things that Renias used to say regularly. The one,
“Hi ta kuma”: “We will get it.” And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he would have when the track was cold or the track was — we weren’t making progress. I would look at him and you’d say, ah, hita xikuma, we’re going to get this. And then often he would say too, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.” And what he’s saying, he’s talking to the dynamic of tracking, which is… It’s an interesting, energetic dynamic. He is profoundly committed to finding that animal, but he hasn’t allowed that commitment to become a burden of some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he’s getting. And you can think in a vast wilderness as trackers, we also talk about the first track, in a vast wilderness, 360 degrees of wild terrain.

All he needs is the next first track and then the next first track and then the next first track and the next first track. And he’s able to dial down the infinite possibilities of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence and then another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign. So he doesn’t know where it’s going, but he knows how to get there. The next moment of presence. The next thing I know to do. And it might be a good segue there just telling you a little bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years, but let me know —

Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.

Boyd Varty: — if you want to go there.

Tim Ferriss: Dive in.

Boyd Varty: So I had these encounters, Tim, whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning this art form and really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere and then watching how consistently good trackers delivered an outcome. They found the animal they were looking for. And at that time as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill. And then through my early 20s, I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters and the result of that was that by the time I was about 23 or 24 years old, I had found myself frozen by trauma.

I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward and in the way trauma limits options, I felt my myself extremely limited. I did not have access to a lot of emotionality. I did not have access to different choices. I was stuck. And at that time I was very lucky to meet a woman who came on safari and she became my first mentor. And the reason I guided her was because Alex, my friend, who also features in the book, he had guided her a year before and he said to me, she’s a martial artist.

And I was very interested in martial arts, as I know you are. And so I went into the guide room and in the guide room, there was this board where every guide got their name put next to the clients who were coming in. I rubbed off someone else’s name and I put my name next to her, to guide her and that moment absolutely changed my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck and she arrived on the safari and we went out the first two days and she said something on the second day that I felt something in me like really moved. We were driving along and I was telling her about the restoration of the land and she said, “I really understand this and I believe the restoration of the planet will come out of a transformation in human consciousness.”

And the minute she said it, whatever my grandfather knew or my father knew, or my uncle knew when he saw that leopard, I felt that thing move inside of me, that idea struck me very dear deeply. And then on about the fourth day, I’d driven back to the camp and I’m in my safari gear, I got my rifle. I’m the guide, I’m rugged guy. I’m out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me and she said, “I’m ready to talk to you.” And I was sort of taken aback. I said, “Well, what, what do you mean?” She said, “I can see what you’re carrying and I can see how stuck you are and I want you to know that I can help you and I’m here.” I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you’re in one of those places, but I’ve felt myself becoming really uncertain and then I felt tears starting to come to my eyes. And then there was this moment where this woman is hugging the safari guide and just consoling me.

And she was an incredible healer and she was exceptionally adept at transformational processes. And so she started to teach me how to move through the trauma and the suffering that I was stuck in. And as that happened, my relationship to tracking started to change and I started to see this art form in a different way and I realized that I was looking for something and all of the skills and the mentality of the was highly adept to being in a transformational process. The first thing that you will have to do, if you want to go track a lion in the wild, is you will have to become super uncomfortable with unknowns.

You’ll have to give up all the ways you try to know what to do and say, I don’t know how to do this. All trackers operate using unknowns to almost bring them to life. You will need to develop your track awareness. Track awareness is teaching yourself to be attuned to a very specific set of signs, metrics but self-generated. Like when I was a kid, Renias would take me out to a game path and you would say, walk down that game path and tell me what you see. And I would come back and I would say to him, I saw a herd of impala walk there and he would say, “Heh mfana, famba uya languta futhe.”: “Young boy, go look again.” And as I was walking away, he would say, “phuza mati phela.” He’d say, “Put your head down like the way an animal drinks.” “Put your head right down against the trail and look like you drinking water, like an animal.”

And I would come back and I would say, “I can see where the herd of impala walked, but they actually walked over the tracks of a leopard. And I can see where a mouse ran across the path. And then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground.” And each time I walked down that path under his guidance, there was more information. And that idea became very important to me. The idea that there is information in your life, if you are looking for transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so, what do you need to attune to in transformational processes? Things that make you feel expensive, things that make you feel alive, letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards. Noticing what you’re curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that make you feel more alive.

So I started to see through the eyes of the tracker, the first track. The first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of where that animal might be or letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next thing you know to do and the next thing you know to do. If you watch great trackers, they drop into what I call the following state. And it’s so beautiful, if you watch Alex and Renias in the following state. The following state could be the find almost as constant creative response to what is occurring. If the track cuts left, Alex will click and he’ll say, “I’m on the track.” If it cuts right, Renias will be on it. They’re getting a sense of the mood of the animal. They’re using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving.

And in that way, like almost feel the animal as it’s walking out ahead of them at the same time, they are vectoring and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead. When you watch them, they’re almost having fun in it, they’re playing, they’re playing on that track. And so you will need to develop the following state in your own transformational process. How can you play? How can you be creative with not knowing what you’re trying to create or this place you’re trying to get to, but being open and willing and aware and attuned. You will almost certainly lose the track and I’m sort of saying this to see how the tracker came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing.

You will lose the track. You’ll be in the middle of it thinking I’m deep in the following state, I’m right on track, and then so suddenly it’ll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really that there is something inside of you that knows. There is a part of you, you might call it your wild self. You might call it the track of your life, or as native people call it your medicine way. A part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself and sifting away, the layers of socialization, all the things you should do, all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you, became really what the core of my own journey to healing was.

And I live like that to this day as a tracker, trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning and trying to fall into the following state with what energizes me, makes me curious and pulls me forward.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tales of Overcoming the Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More (#881) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Tales of Overcoming the Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More (#881)

2026-09-04 21:43:52

This is a special episode about overcoming mistakes and failure. What do you do when your work is rejected, when the big bet fails, or when the path ahead suddenly disappears? As you’ll hear in this episode, setbacks can often present opportunities if you know how to look for them.

Enjoy!

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Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

Tales of Overcoming The Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

Show Notes

Connect with BJ Miller:

Website | LinkedIn | Twitter
BJ’s appearance on the podcast: 153

Connect with Terry Crews:

X | Facebook | Instagram
Terry’s appearances on the podcast: 587, 287

Connect with Tim McGraw:

Website | X | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | TikTok | YouTube
Tim’s appearance on the podcast: 852

Connect with Jessica Lahey:

Website | X | Facebook | Instagram
Jessica’s appearance on the podcast: 553

Connect with Dax Shepard:

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard | X | Facebook | Instagram
Dax’s appearance on the podcast: 480

Connect with Cathy Lanier:

LinkedIn
Cathy’s appearance on the podcast: 862

Connect with Janna Levin:

Website | X | Facebook | Instagram
Janna’s appearance on the podcast: 445

Connect with Boyd Varty:

Website | X | Instagram
Boyd’s appearances on the podcast: 832, 571

Books

A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death by BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger
Manhood: How to Be a Better Man — or Just Live with One by Terry Crews
Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Tim Ferriss
The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed by Jessica Lahey
The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence by Jessica Lahey
The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty

People

Timestamps

00:00 — Introduction from Tim
01:23 — BJ Miller: Making an Impossible Motorcycle Dream Real
05:35 — Terry Crews: Why You Have to Take the Shot
16:28 — Tim McGraw: Failing on Your Own Terms
27:31 — Jessica Lahey: From “Unpublishable” to Bestseller
31:48 — Dax Shepard: When Failure Saves You From What You Want
38:11 — Cathy Lanier: Rebuilding a Life
47:33 — Janna Levin: Life Is the Obstacles
54:36 — Boyd Varty: Finding the Next Track When You’re Stuck

Quotations from This Episode

“I love two wheels. I love the gyroscopic lifestyle. I love the feeling of it.”

— BJ Miller

“If I win or if I fail, it’s going to be on my terms. It’s going to be up to me. If I have the opportunity, I have to go for it.”

— Terry Crews

“If you don’t have a vision about what you want to do, if you don’t have a plan about what you want to do, if you don’t act on it every day, it’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.“

— Tim McGraw

“It’s not that I’m a great writer. It’s that I was humble enough to say, ‘Teach me how to be better. I will take it to heart, and I will be able to be objective about it, and I will use it, and I won’t make the same mistakes again.'”

— Jessica Lahey

“What I know most is that I don’t know what’s best for me.”

— Dax Shepard

“I remember the first day I went to get food stamps, going to the big white building by Prince George’s Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid, and I was like, ‘This is not my path. This can’t be my path.'”

— Cathy Lanier

“Life is not great for most people, and they have to do a hell of a lot more than not screw it up.”

— Janna Levin

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.”

— Boyd Varty

Want to hear another episode with someone who turned getting unstuck into a life’s work? Listen to my conversation with author and life coach Martha Beck, in which we discussed the amazing and brutal results of telling zero lies for 365 days, how to do a beginner “integrity cleanse,” owning your right to say no, honest alternatives to saying no, finding joy in the body, want versus yearning, the opposite of anxiety, Internal Family Systems, lessons from lion trackers, and much more.

This episode is brought to you by Incogni: erase your personal data from the web and prevent scams, fraud, and identity theft! Incogni automatically removes your information across 420+ data brokers (1,000+ additional sites covered in their Unlimited plan), and they keep it scrubbed automatically. Deloitte has independently verified the headline numbers (245M+ removal requests), and the company adheres to AICPA SOC security standards, with an A+ rating from the BBB. And with their Unlimited plan, if you find your info on a site they don’t automatically monitor, just send them the link, and their privacy team will handle it. Protect yourself now with Incogni. Go to Incogni.com/Tim to get 60% off their annual plan.

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The post Tales of Overcoming the Odds, and How to Turn Losses Into Wins — Tim McGraw, Terry Crews, Dax Shepard, and More (#881) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Relationship Tools That Work — Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Dr. Sue Johnson, Terry Real, and More on Conflict, Repair, and Lasting Love (#880)

2026-08-21 14:48:08

Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode devoted to one deceptively simple question: How do you stay close to your partner over time through the inevitable exhaustion, misunderstanding, conflict, disappointment, and change?

Legal conditions/copyright information

Relationship Tools That Work — Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Dr. Sue Johnson, Terry Real, and More on Conflict, Repair, and Lasting Love

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

ESTHER PEREL

Esther Perel: So, this is a question from Gregoire Frifri via Facebook. “I would love to ask her how to foster marriage longevity. Any exercises, routines, or habits would be great, especially around fostering deeper emotional relationships.”

That is the first basic – appreciation. Simply saying a lot of nice things, not taking things for granted, not forgetting to say please and thank you just because it’s the person that you live with, making compliments, holding hands, kissing, stroking, sending sweet notes, buying flowers, preparing breakfast, bringing the coffee to bed – all those sweet things that people do that basically let you know that they live inside of you, that you’re thinking of them even when they’re not there.

These daily appreciations go a long way, and sometimes, it’s a real diligent effort to keep doing them. And then, I am a strong fan of letter writing. I think that when you fly away, when you’re away, sitting in a café when you just have a moment, drop a note that’s not just on the birthdays and on the anniversaries, but your own musings about you, your lives together, your dreams, where you’re going, how you met, what you remember, what you fancy – that is very much the telling of the story of the couple. There’s a lot of intimacy in there.

Touch is a major experience of intimacy. I think when you do that, humor, and things that encourage the other person in which you recognize them at their most authentic – go do this thing. This is similar to something you really like. Take a few more days. “You always wanted to take this class – go take this class.” These are ways in which you encourage the other person to be the best version of themselves, and vice versa. Be your best version of yourself with them. The things that are really basic are what makes a relationship sustain itself and be more nurturing.

Next, Alicia Kinea Eidelberger asks via Facebook, “How do you lessen arguments in your marriage?” Look: I think it’s all about the art of speaking and listening. Now, there was a sculpture a few years back by Bruce Nauman, and it was a World Peace product. He had 23-inch monitors with faces of the most diverse group of people – diverse races, ethnicities, genders, ages, all of it – and every single person – every face was saying, “I’ll talk, and you listen. You’ll talk, and I’ll listen. They’ll talk, and we listen. You’ll talk, and we listen.” And, it just showed you the robustness of this most difficult art, which is often harder than speaking, I would say. But, to some people, speaking may be the hardest thing.

In a relationship, you can often get the daily hassles in which you are grinding at each other, and in which there’s a friction going on. Don’t sweat the small things. That’s probably really important in terms of how people deal with arguments in a relationship. I would say don’t complain, ask. Behind every criticism, there’s often a wish. If you believe that your partner has done something wrong – that they didn’t pay a bill on time or anything – and you wish that they had done it right, instead of acting them to correct it, you basically tell them they can never do it well, that they’re doing this on purpose – just ask them to do it better next time.

Rather than “Would it kill you?”, something as simple as, “Do you think that next time, you could set a monthly alert so that you don’t forget?” It’s a very different tone. It’s a very different way of relating to the person. There’s no contempt in that one. We know from the research of John Gottman that contempt is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Actually, I’m going to give you the four horses because they’re really important. They are criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness. Those four are pretty much the killers in the land of arguments and relationship decline.

Try not to talk with categoricals of always and never, all or nothing. That is probably one of the most important changes in vocabulary. Banish them. “I always have to ask you.” “You never do this.” The moment you say, “You never,” the other person is going to come up with the one time that they know and that they’ve done it, so that they can defeat your argument rather than understand that you’re asking them to do it more often, which is exactly why I say, “Ask, don’t complain.”

Add some humor. There’s nothing that’s going to defuse your arguments more than just putting some perspective into it and not taking yourself so seriously. Show empathy. At the end of the day, assume that your partner has the same interests as you – to solve the stresses in your relationship. For that to happen, it’s important that both of you understand and appreciate the other person’s point of view. Do you really think the other person wants you to purposefully be annoyed, hurt you, or let you down? Probably not.

It’s all of that shift that takes you out of relationships that are mired in bickering, chronic low-intensity warfare, or high conflict. There’s a range there. Imagine I ask you, “Has your arguing turned toxic?” Does your partner keep telling you that you can never do it right, or that they can never do it right by you, that every little conversation about who should set the table will end up in a blowout about how dysfunctional your relationship is, or that two minutes into a fight, one of you is saying you should get a divorce or break up? That’s what I’m calling a high-conflict couple.

The opposite of the argument is coming in and saying, “I want to listen to what you have to say. I want to apologize. What can I do to make this better?” Not “What can you do to make this better?” Shift it around, and you’ll have magic happening.

BRENÉ BROWN

Brené Brown: The other two hacks that I think have saved our marriage besides just showing up and using some of these things, like what’s working, what was hard is the 80/20. So everyone says marriage should be 50/50. It’s the biggest crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s never 50/50. Ever. And so what we do is we quantify where we are. So if Steve comes home and he’ll be like, “I got 20.”

Tim Ferriss: Just in terms of energy.

Brené Brown: Just energy, investment, kindness, patience, “I’m at 20.” And I’ll be like, “I’ll cover you. I got you, brother. I’ll pull the 80.” Sometimes we come home, which we have done a lot, and my mom has been sick, and I’ll say, “I’ve got 10,” and like, Steve two days ago said, “I’m riding a solid 25.” So we know that we have to sit down at the table any time we have less than a hundred combined and figure out a plan of kindness toward each other.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I love that.

Brené Brown: Yeah, because the thing is, marriage is not something that’s 50/50. A partnership works when you can carry their 20 or they can carry your 20. And that when you both just have 20, you have a plan where you don’t hurt each other.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re threadbare, right?

Brené Brown: Yeah. And so what we’ll say is I’m like, “I’ve got 10,” and he’ll be like, “I got maybe 25.” We’re like, “Put all the groceries that are supposed to be great and healthy in the freezer; we’re ordering out. Get the housekeeper here an extra day, and we’re canceling anything with people that we really actually don’t like.”

Tim Ferriss: So how can we create some buffer in the system?

Brené Brown: We do that. So like, and then we’ll like a day or two later I’m like, he’ll be like, “I’m riding to 60,” I’m like, “Oh, my God, work is kicking my ass. I’m still at 20.” He’s like, “I got you, but we’re a spare of 20. So let’s ask Charlie if he wants to skip water polo practice today and let’s all turn in at 8:00.” Like, huge. The other thing I would say too, that now I’m thinking about that, is we made a determination very early there’s kid-focused families, parent-focused families, and family-focused families. We’re a family-focused family.

So that means that if you want to do water polo, Eagle Scouts, tennis, and skeet shooting, and then that comes to the family, and the family agrees what will keep the family healthy. Like we can, you know, I’ve got a book launch, I’ve got this, Steve’s got patients, he’s taking on others, you know, he’s a pediatrician, he’s doing this. So what works for our family right now is you can do two extracurriculars and I’m going to have a two-week tour, not a four-week tour, but we put the family as the system that we serve. It’s not the kids at the parents’ cost or the parents at the kids’ cost. It’s the family and it is remarkable.

Tim Ferriss: How do you weigh, if you do it all the voting system, so to speak, right? So if you all come to the table, does everyone have equal vote in the decision-making process with respect?

Brené Brown: No. This is a dictatorship! Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. No. Like, we don’t even bullshit around that. It’s like when my kids, like if I say like, “Oh shit,” my kids are like, “Ooh, you can’t say that.” I’m like, “I say anything I want. You can’t say that. And when you’re old enough, you can do whatever you want.”

Tim Ferriss: “You get your cursing license!”

Brené Brown: Yeah, right now I can totally do that. Watch me.

BRAD FELD

Tim Ferriss: So if we’re talking about links and breaking these artificial causal links, let’s talk about another, what seems like a pattern interrupt, and that is your life dinners. Can you describe what these are?

Brad Feld: Yeah. This was another thing that came out of me and Amy’s weekend in Rhode Island. So she said to me, as we’re walking, “I want to have dinner with you once a month. Not a date night, but let’s do dinner once a month. Let’s do it on the first night of every month. And I just want a commitment for that.” And I hem and haw, “Oh, gee, I don’t know whether I’ll be in Boulder or Boston or New York or the Bay Area or whatever.” And she looked at me and she said, “Do you have a calendar, an online calendar?” Knowing full well I did, of course. And I said, “Yeah, I have an online calendar.” She says, “Does it have the ability for you to make a recurring calendar appointment?” I said, “Yeah, the online calendar lets me do that.” She says, “How about if you make an online recurring calendar appointment from 6:00 p.m. Colorado time to 10:00 p.m. Colorado time on the first day of a month and have it repeat forever?” I said, “Okay, I guess I can do that.”

So we did that. And so every month on the first day of the month, we have what we call life dinner. Now, 20 years of life dinners later, so what is that, 1,000-something life dinners, which is awesome, by the way, we have a little flexibility. There are definitely nights where we will have it on the second or the third because something’s going on. But we really commit to it. We used to go out to dinner. Now, a lot of times we just do it at home. Time of COVID, we for sure do at home. We often, not always, but often start with a gift exchange, and the gifts could be trivial little things. Once she gave me a remote control fart machine. She’s picked up a lot of jewelry and art from it over the years and books. One dinner she gave me a Range Rover. So it’s a full spectrum of little to big.

Tim Ferriss: I really hope it was the same dinner that you gave her the — oh, no, you didn’t give her the fart machine. That would have been less popular. Right.

Brad Feld: I think the Range Rover was to make up for the fart machine, but the fart machine was years earlier. And we sit down, and if you’re a fan of software development, and you know what Agile is, we essentially do — the first half is a retrospective of the previous month, and the second half is sprint planning for the next month. So again, very deliberately not a date night. We have plenty of those. This is let’s talk, each of us, you go first, or I go first, doesn’t matter, about the last month, and what happened, and what was good, and what was bad, and what we were unhappy about, and what we wish we’d done differently, and what we regret, and what we’re really satisfied with, anything. Just retrospective.

This powerfully interesting — because we started to learn that if Amy did something that really annoyed me on the 21st of the month, in the moment, I didn’t have to react and cause us to have a three-hour personal meltdown on the 21st of the month. I could wait nine more days or 10 more days, and it could be — 11 more days. It could be part of our life dinner. And it gave us a marker for being able to resolve the conflicts that we would have with each other or express things, positive and negative, that we hadn’t said in the moment.

The forward sprint planning part of it is not go through the calendar for the next month, but talk about goals, aspirations, what we might want to do differently, what we’re feeling in the moment that’s making us uncomfortable about the future, what we’re not afraid of, what we’re worried about happening in the future, what’s causing us, in the moment, real anxiety about the future. And anybody out there has had any therapy or done meditation, literally just naming the thing oftentimes gets rid of a lot of the anxiety. Just labeling it, just calling it out, and saying it out loud.

And so these dinners, sometimes the conversation, the life dinner part of the conversation might go five or 10 minutes, and sometimes it might go three hours. And sometimes there was laughter and sometimes there were tears and sometimes there were both. And it’s just such now, 20 some odd years later, a comfortable way to reground ourselves as a couple, roughly every 30 days, in what is a very, very challenging and complicated world.

JIM DETHMER

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the candid or uncomfortable conversations that are the most important to have, if any come to mind, aside from what we’ve been discussing?

Jim Dethmer: So as you look at your close relationships, whether it be with your parents or with your siblings or children, this idea of, are we willing to be candid? Now I want to say something here, Tim, because people misunderstand this. They think that if I’m below the line, if we keep using that language, then people will say, “I don’t have a problem being candid. God, you ask anybody in my world, they’ll tell you I’m candid. I tell it like it is.” But what they’re really saying is they’re kind of living a scorched earth policy where they tell the truth all the time, but they’re rigid and righteous about being attached to their truth. So we don’t call that candor. What we call candor begins with the ability to differentiate facts from stories, facts from data, facts of what is totally unarguable. Facts are that which all reasonable people would agree to. Facts, the facts of life, stories are judgments, opinions, beliefs, interpretations that we make up about the facts. So for example, or that typical thing would be, I walk in the house, Debbie’s standing there.

Fact, a video camera would record that the corners of her mouth are turned down slightly in what one could call a frown. That’s a fact. Video camera would record it. Now my mind starts making up stories. Debbie’s upset with me. I did something wrong. She’s going to criticize me. And now I start reacting to the stories, defending, justifying, explaining, reacting to the stories, even though the stories are all made up in my mind. So candor, practicing conscious candor, first you differentiate fact from story, and then you reveal your stories, holding them lightly. So from below the line, I want to be right about my stories and prove that I’m right because my ego identification believes it can only survive if it’s right. So what that would look like is from below line, I’d say, “What are you upset about? I’m only 10 minutes late and I know I forgot the milk, but God, I was very busy.”

So now I’m revealing my story that she’s upset in a reactive modality while holding tightly to my story that A, she is upset at me and B, she shouldn’t be. That’s truth-telling. That’s not what we’re talking about at all. Candor, I differentiate fact from story, and here’s what this might look like. I walk in the house and let’s say I’m above the line and present, which I might not be. I might say something like this, “Hey, when I look over, it looks like you’re upset. I’m making up the story that you’re upset and rather than get all scared and reactive to that, first thing I do is just want to tell you I’m making up that story and I want to check it out with you. Are you upset? And by the way, when I make up the story that you’re upset, I noticed I get defensive.

Furthermore, probably what I really get scared because I don’t want you to be pissed off at me, but I’m going to reveal myself to you, Debbie, not from being right. This act of candor is an act of incredible vulnerability. I’m going to let you know me. I say all the time. I’m going to let you know what’s going on on Planet Jim. My thoughts, beliefs, interpretations, wants, desires, so you can know me. Not so that I can prove I’m right.” And by the way, this kind of candor goes hand in hand with conscious listening.

People always want to say, “I want a more candid relationship with my partner.” I say, “Great. Before you start revealing, start listening. Start becoming a person to whom others will reveal themselves candidly because you see them and you hear them and you get them. Then as they feel safe to reveal themselves, you’ll find that the relationship becomes more safe for you to reveal yourself.” So candor and conscious listening go hand in glove. But again, it’s a cocommitment, right? Debbie and I said we want to remove all barriers to closeness. One of the barriers to closeness is not revealing ourselves to each other. It’s so easy to hide out for fear of being rejected, for fear of being criticized, the risk. And Debbie and I had been practicing candor for decades, Tim, and there’s almost always some edge of candor where I could reveal a thought or I could reveal a judgment.

In our case, specifically about our children, because it’s our second relationship. Debbie has four boys. I have two girls. Well, sometimes I have judgments about her boys. It’s always risky to say to her, “Hey, I just want to tell you. I’ve got a judgment coming up in me about so-and-so,” because she cares about her boys and she’s irrationally involved with them just like I am with my girls. Every time I practice vulnerability in candor in my intimate relationship, there’s a modicum of fear that comes up because who knows how she’s going to react. We do have decades now of practicing, so pretty good chance that we’ll work it through. So that’s what candor is. Differentiate fact from story, hold your story likely, and reveal to the other for the sake of being known, not for proving you’re right, and practice deeply listening so the other person trusts you enough to reveal themselves. That’s a short primer on candor.

SHEILA HEEN

Sheila Heen: My guess is that you’re familiar with research by John Gottman up in Seattle?

Tim Ferriss: I have some familiarity, but please provide an overview.

Sheila Heen: An overview and just a connection to the question that you just asked. He invites married couples into his lab, and he invites them to talk about an issue that’s stressful between them, to have a difficult conversation, essentially. Hooks them up to heart monitors and videotapes and all of that. Then he says that he can watch for five minutes and predict with their different numbers based on his different studies, but 90-ish, 90, 92 percent accuracy, whether they’ll divorce within three or five years.

Part of the reason I name this is that, for me, it really says it’s not just that we have difficult conversations in our most important relationships. Those conversations are the relationship. That if we find a way to have them productively or constructively, then the relationship will thrive, whether it’s a personal or professional relationship, and/or is where we start to disengage because you just don’t get it and you won’t listen, and the relationship starts to fray.

What Gottman is listening for are what are the indicators that he’s listening for that tell him which direction it’s going to go. One of them is that as a conversation gets heated and starts to escalate, one of the spouses will often make a joke, but the purpose of the joke is that it’s an invitation to step outside this argument and to see it for what it is, to see what’s happening, which is that this is the conversation we usually have and how it usually goes. So often it’s a little bit of an inside joke, but humor — by the way, I listened to your conversation with Anne Lamott, who I absolutely adore.

Tim Ferriss: She’s a treasure.

Sheila Heen: She is a treasure. And what does she call it? Laughter is carbonated —

Tim Ferriss: Holiness.

Sheila Heen: Holiness, yeah. So laughter also in the brain just gives us a little bit of instant perspective that we suddenly see the absurdity of our own behavior in many cases. So it’s an invitation to just name what’s happening. It’s like a meta move. For instance, with my husband, who also teaches negotiation, by the way —

Tim Ferriss: I’d love it to be a fly on the wall for some of those.

Sheila Heen: Yeah, you can imagine. So we fight about how we fight. That’s the fight we usually have.

Tim Ferriss: This is like my friends’ kids. My friends are therapists, and their kids are like, “Stop therapizing me.”

Sheila Heen: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: “Stop therapizing me.”

Sheila Heen: Exactly. So we’re like, “Yeah, you’re not listening. Oh, well, those difficult conversations, huh?” Yeah. So that’s the fight we have.

Tim Ferriss: “Stop putting your BATNA in my face!”

Sheila Heen: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: That’s the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, folks. Inside joke.

Sheila Heen: Exactly. That was very nice inside baseball joke. Yeah. Waving your BATNA around in a romantic relationship is not usually a successful strategy. You know, there are a lot of people who’d find me very appealing.

One of the jokes that he and I make when we have the wherewithal to do it is like, “Why will you not just admit I am good and you are bad? That is what this is about, right? It’s about who needs to apologize, whose fault this is, et cetera.” So as things escalate, your ability to just name that underlying dynamic sometimes makes the other person laugh, and you can step out of it for a moment. Then that gives you the opportunity to say, “Look, obviously we’ve had this conversation several times. I’m not understanding why,” fill in the blank. “I’m not understanding why what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense. Help me, genuinely, help me understand that.” Or “I’m not understanding what you’re most worried about here.” That often helps.

It needs to be a genuine ask. You can’t say like, “What are you worried about?” Because that’s really a hot question. It’s like, you shouldn’t be worried about anything. Why are you being so stupid as to be worrying about something? As long as you can step outside, see, oh, I’m not being curious right now. And I don’t have to pretend that I agree to do it. I think that’s really the key. And I don’t have to say there’s no truth, but from where I sit, I can only see some of the pieces of the puzzle. You have the other pieces of the puzzle. Putting those pieces on the table for discussion is how we figure out what we have to work with. Then at the end of the day, we still might not agree about this, but it might open up new options for how we handle it.

DR. SUE JOHNSON

Tim Ferriss: Could you walk us through what a hold me tight conversation is?

Dr. Sue Johnson: A hold me tight conversation, very briefly, is a bonding conversation. The tricky part is that, as adults, some of us have never seen this conversation. So it’s a dance that is foreign to us. We’ve never had it with our own parents. We’ve never had it with siblings. We’ve never had it with previous lovers. And we get married, or we get committed to a partner, and it’s reasonable that we don’t know how to go there because many of us, it’s just not a drama that we’ve ever seen enacted.

A hold me tight conversation is where one person is able to open up and reach for the other person and share vulnerabilities; talk about their needs and fears in a way that pulls the other person close. It helps the other person reach back and respond.

Tim Ferriss: Could you give any examples of phrasing, or questions —

Dr. Sue Johnson: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — or guidelines you provide?

Dr. Sue Johnson: Of course.

Tim Ferriss: I know I would love to know, and I suspect others would too.

Dr. Sue Johnson: Well, when you don’t trust, you don’t feel safe, and you’ve never seen a hold me tight conversation, the way it usually goes just naturally as human beings, I catch myself doing this with my husband, if I’m upset about something, like he’s been going to bed very early, and that means that we don’t have our snuggle time, we don’t have our little chat time, okay, and it doesn’t seem to bother him at all. It doesn’t seem to bother him this isn’t happening. So this will go on for a couple of weeks. And even though I’m doing this work, there’s a certain point where I start to get self-protective and I start to blame him in my head. And I say, “He’s always too busy. He’s got his lists. He’s got lists, and he’s a man and he’s got lists. And all he cares about is his list of tasks. And he’s just into problem-solving. And he doesn’t think about me at all.”

And this dialogue would go in my head. So I turn to him and I say, “You’re going to bed very early these days.” Listen to my voice. It’s the emotional music. He says, “No, I’m not,” because he hears the threat in my tone, I say, “Yes, you are. And you’ve been going to bed for weeks. And I guess it doesn’t matter to you that we’re not having those close moments.” And listen to me, I’m on the attack and we are acutely sensitive as human beings to signs of rejection, or abandonment by the people we love, acutely sensitive. That’s how we’re wired. So he hears that he’s blown it. He hears it that I’m rejecting him. I’m telling him he’s done something wrong. So he says, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.” I say, “Oh, let me guess, you have to go to bed because you’re so tired.” Right. So we’re off. Right? Okay.

That is the typical demand-withdraw, demand-defend dialogue that you’ll see in a distressed couple. And it’s totally predictable. You can also have it with your kids. I can remember a glorious argument I had in Starbucks with my adolescent son that was just a perfect example of the way distressed couples talk to each other. So I’m blaming and pointing fingers and he’s rolling his eyeballs and basically telling me what a dreadful mother I am. So you can have it with anyone, but with partners it’s very predictable, and it has everyone feeling completely threatened and unsafe and unable to dance together. If you shift that into a hold me tight conversation, the way it would go is that I would be more able to tune into my own needs, more aware of my own needs, accepting of my own needs. And I would realize, oh, I’m really missing those conversations with John. We’ve been married for 32 years. We’re both very strong people, so it’s been quite an adventure.

So, I think, oh, I’m missing those relationships with John and maybe he doesn’t miss them. And oh, that makes me feel really somehow anxious and uncomfortable if he doesn’t miss them, because the big question in love relationships is, are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Can I count on you? Maybe those conversations don’t matter to him, but they really matter to me. So I am aware, on a different level, of me and I’m specifying, that scares me a bit that maybe these conversations don’t matter to him. I can tune into my own emotions. And then I take the risk and reach for him and say to him, “I’m open.” I say to him, “You know what? We haven’t been having our usual talks late at night and somehow, it doesn’t look like you miss them. And somehow that makes me feel really uncomfortable. It almost feels like I’m not sure that that closeness matters to you.”

And so I could get angry about it, but actually what’s happening is it scares me a bit because I need those conversations. Now I’ve talked about my fears and my needs. I can only do that if I have some model that it’s okay to do that, that doesn’t mean I’m a wimp, or mentally ill, or weak, or pathetic. From my point of view, it’s strength to do that. And that’s what we teach: I need strength to do that. And that’s what securely attached people can do. They can reach from a position of vulnerability. So I say that to him, and that pulls him; he says, “Oh, you’re right. Yeah. Yeah. I do want those conversations. I’ve just been so exhausted and I’ve been doing this and I haven’t wanted to tell you how stressed out I am.”

So then it becomes reciprocal. I say, “Oh, I didn’t know that you were so stressed out about this decision we’ve made and that it’s taking up all your energy and you’re worried about it.” So then we start to have an open, responsive, engaged conversation where we can share vulnerabilities, comfort each other, and you’re literally better at tuning in to each other. And I think that’s because when I feel safe, I can tune into you. When I think about the people I can dance with in tango really well, it’s the people I feel emotionally safe with. And I know that there’s no mistakes, because mistakes don’t matter, we’re just playing. Then I relax. I’m in my body. I tune into their cues and we move together naturally. So, that’s what happens. And it’s a hold me tight conversation.

And it cascades. Each time you have this conversation, your nervous system goes, “Ah, this is comfort. This is home. This is safety. This is what I need.” And you see your partner as a resource. You see your partner as somebody who can provide this safety, comfort, caring, reassurance, social support, if you want to use a psychological formal term for it. You see your partner as this person and your partner connects, and you know how to do this dance. This dance is innately rewarding. It creates joy in people.

You don’t have to persuade people to keep doing it, like going to the gym, or meditation, or their communication skills. People will do this. Once they know how to do it, they’ll keep doing it. And that’s why I think we get good follow-up results, because once you start having these conversations and it’s very moving sometimes to see people’s response, like people will start to cry and say things like, when they discover these hold me tight conversations, people will say, I’m thinking of one man who said, “I never knew that you could talk to somebody like this. I never knew that you could ask for these things and that she wants me to be vulnerable to her. I never knew that. I never saw that growing up. I didn’t know people did that.”

And then he wept and he turned to the therapist and said, “I’ve been alone all my life, haven’t I?” And that — what attachment science tells us is that emotional isolation is toxic for human beings. We found out that in the pandemic, but we still don’t get it. I wish we would get it on a different level. It’s toxic for human beings. It’s not who we are. And when people start to have these hold me tight conversations, all kinds of amazing things happen. They don’t just understand how relationships can be and how you can shape relationships, don’t have to just have them happen to you, you can shape love, they understand something very deep about themselves. Couples grow each other. In safe relationships, couples grow each other. I watch severely traumatized people learn to trust another human being by having these hold me tight conversations with their partner, and it changes everything. Because they have a secure place in life for the first time. They feel seen, they feel accepted, they feel held.

And once you feel seen, accepted, and held, there’s a natural human growth process that happens. Attachment science is all about development of the personality. There’s a natural growth process. So we tune into that natural process in the hold me tight conversation. And those conversations predict over study, after study, after study, after study, those conversations predict success in EFT, they predict more secure bonding, they predict better sex, more sexual satisfaction in couples, they predict any measure of good, positive functioning you can imagine. Those bonding conversations predict all the good results we get in EFT and they predict results at follow up.

TERRY REAL

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, I imagine that’ll give you a lot of payoff over a lot of miles. What is, another term that I’d never heard before, being exposed to your work, normal marital hatred?

Terry Real: I got this from Ed Tronick, infant observational researcher. Ed, along with Berry Brazelton, was the first generation — you know, since Freud, what we said about child development all came from listening to adults. We didn’t watch any kids. And he was one of the first people to actually plunk a video camera in front of mothers and infants and then fathers and infants and actually look at what happens. And when he came up with, I borrowed and it’s central to RLT, which is the essential rhythm of all relationships is harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness. That’s where the skills come in, how to move from disruption to repair.

Our culture doesn’t teach it. Our culture doesn’t even acknowledge that this rhythm, a good relationship is all harmony. Just like a good body is pure or a good body is like a 20-year-old body. A good sex life is like what you had when you were two weeks into the relationship. No, all harmony is bullshit. Bullshit.

One of the things I like about you, Tim, is you tell the truth. You know what? You go to a cocktail party and you go, “Oh, there’s Harry and Shirley. They’re in their 80s. They still have sex, they love each other.” Makes me — one of these days I’d let you go to a cocktail party in here, “There’s Harry and Shirley. They actually split up for a year. He fell in love with another woman. He couldn’t take it because she was such a drunk. But then she got into AA and got sober and the two of them are really doing reasonably well. Aren’t they cute?” Just once, I’d like to hear that.

So we don’t deal with reality. The father of couple’s therapy back in the ’50s said, “The day you turn to the person who’s next to you,” it was assumed it was your marriage, “and you say, ‘This is a mistake. I’ve been had. This is not the person I fell in love with.’ That,” said Framo, “is the first day of your real marriage.”

So here’s what I want to say about disharmony. You ready? It hurts. It’s dark. You can really, really feel like, “What the hell did I get myself into? This is such a disappointment. And guess what? Your partner’s probably feeling that about you, too. So I talk about normal marital hatred. When you’re in that dark phase, you hate your partner. That’s okay. Don’t kill yourself or her. That’s okay. I’ll teach you how to get through it, but it’s part of the deal for many of them. And here’s what I like to say, I’ve been going around the world talking about normal marital hatred for, oh, my God, what? 30 years. This is true. Not one person has ever come backstage and said, “Terry, what do you mean by that?” It’s okay, kids. Don’t sweat it. You can get through it. It’s normal. Relax.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the first steps or tools that you would recommend to someone listening who agrees with what you’re saying, but has had no models for repair, has never learned how to use any type of approach for repair? And this is something that your help, well, your direct help, and then also your books have really helped me with because I did not grow up in a household with repair, right? It was basically, one person screams, then the other person goes to fix, which they don’t really want to do, but it’s their attempt to basically quell the disaster and fury, and that’s it. Then everybody’s kind of upset, and it never gets addressed. That was the model growing up. So what do you suggest to people who want to start with repair?

Terry Real: Of course, I’m tempted to say, “So are you a screamer or a fixer?” But I won’t. Leave that alone.

Tim Ferriss: I’m a fixer. I’m not a screamer.

Terry Real: Oh, wow. Okay. Lucky for your partner, but —

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah.

Terry Real: The problem is the resentment that builds up.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Terry Real: Yeah. Okay. So, repair. First of all, I like to say I have a number of bitter pills to swallow, but if you swallow them, things will be a lot better in your life. And here’s one of them. Repair is a one-way street. Everybody gets that wrong. It’s not a dialogue. It’s not, well, these are your issues with me. Well, these are my issues with you. No. You have your turn, but not then. Take turns. So if you have a disgruntled partner, you are at their service — that’s the first thing to master. I like to say, Tim, you’re at the customer service window. Somebody comes to the customer service window and says, “My microwave doesn’t work.” They don’t want to hear you say, “Well, my toaster doesn’t work.” They don’t want your excuses. Fix the goddamn microwave. Tend to your partner and bring them back into repair with you, then hours later or maybe, or the next, then they might have some interest in what you’re — but tend to them. Put yourself aside and tend to them.

What does that look like? Two things. First, do I get it? Listen. Don’t argue. Don’t rebut. Listen. Empty the well. “I’m sorry you feel bad.” That’s beautiful. Compassion. “I’m sorry you feel bad. I love you. I don’t want you to feel bad. Help me understand. What feels bad? What’s it like for you?” Okay, and then you reflect, “This is what I hear you say. Did I get it?” Yeah, good enough. Good. Two, “Is there something I could say or do right now that would be helpful? What would you like?” Who says that? And then if anything short of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, give it to them. Be generous. So those are the basics. I could be more specific, but —

DIANA CHAPMAN

Tim Ferriss: I would like to, if you’re open to it, shift a little bit to relationships. And I want to ask you specifically about your partnership with Matt. So here’s one of your superpowers, as listed from Mr. Jim. “Creating and sustaining a wonderful, intimate partnership with Matt, her husband and lover, since they were teenagers. Have her talk about the risks she and they were willing to take to keep the relationship alive and vital, growing, and intimate.” If you are game to talk about that, I would be very interested to hear more.

Diana Chapman: Yeah. Well, it’s a challenge. It’s both a great gift to be with a partner since you were young and get to grow up together. There’s a lot of shared memories and shared friends, and there’s a sweetness that it started out with you get to keep. And there’s also a great challenge of the fact that we are different people who evolve and change. And so several times, at least three key times in our relationship, we’ve been willing to let it all go, and we’ve basically killed it off. Just said, “The relationship as it was is done. Now let’s just check and see, is there a relationship? What is the relationship that wants to happen moving forward? Maybe it’s just friends, co-parents. Maybe it’s lovers, staying married. What is it?” And so we have a lot of courage, both of us, to be willing to let go of what’s not working and trust that the right form of the relationship will reveal itself. And it just so happens that it continues to be us married.

And we play around often. Sometimes we’ll get up in the morning and I’ll say something like, “Hey, you want to be married today?” And he’ll say, “Oh, well, what would that mean? What kind of a husband do I need to be?” And we’ll giggle and play around with, “Well, how about this and this?” And then we choose.

And we are always choosing over and over again, and we always are willing, kind of to the point of using the work with Byron Katie of, I’m willing to open to the possibility that not being married is just as okay as being married.

And what that has created is an incredibly vital, creative, ever evolving, passionate marriage, in which we’re freed up to keep exploring new ways of being together.

And I am really proud of my relationship. I think it’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done, is the marriage that I have. We get a lot of feedback that it’s an inspiring marriage to a lot of people who look to it. And I do think it comes with the courage to say no.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned at least — I think you said three times that you’ve had this type of conversation. I would like to zoom in on the first conversation. Were you both already prepared and trained to initiate that type of conversation? Did one side initiate the, “Hey, let’s decide if we want to remain as is, or if we want to take one of these other forms?”

I’m just wondering for people who are listening, who have never had one of these conversations — maybe they’ve been at the breaking point, but they’ve never had this conversation.

Diana Chapman: I initiated it. It wasn’t Matt’s idea. I said, “Hey, this isn’t working for me, the way we’re in a relationship. And there’s a different kind of a man I want to be with than how you are. And I want another possibility.”

And so I didn’t know how to do all this. I was just toddling around, trying to figure this out. And I said, “I don’t want to do it this way anymore.” And so I thought that might mean that we needed to be separated and that we needed to end the marriage.

And I was willing to. We actually got some support from counselors about telling our kids that we were going to divorce. Because that’s the only direction it seemed like we were going to go.

And then I had this great advice from a friend who said, “Okay, Diana, I love you both. If you think divorce is what needs to happen, that’s great. But I hear you complaining that there’s a certain man you want him to be that he’s not.” And she said, “Who is the woman you would need to be to call forward that man?”

And my stomach dropped, and I though “I don’t know about that. What?” And I realized, “Oh, I would need to be a different woman.” So we said, “Let’s kill off this old marriage and let’s see if we can create a new one. And I’m going to keep asking myself, who do I need to be to call forward the man I want to be with?”

And about six months later, I was with the man I wanted to be with. And I remember saying to him, “You really changed.” And he said, “No, you really changed.” And the truth is we both really changed.

But I was really grateful for that first conversation of being willing to let it go, and then getting the feedback of, “Hey, if you’re the creator of who’s showing up over there, who do you need to be?”

And for many months I felt like I was going to throw up 24/7, learning to be a much more vulnerable, needy woman, who called forward the man who could protect and lead, in a way that I hadn’t been willing to be in the past.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you for sharing all this, by the way. Very courageous and vulnerable. And how did you figure out who you needed to be? Who that woman was, to call forth the version of your husband or the man who you wanted to be with?

Did you have help? Was it obvious once you sat with it, in terms of the changes that needed to be made on your side or the things you needed to cultivate or drop? How did you arrive at the answers?

Diana Chapman: At first I didn’t know. I just knew I was really scared when I asked the question. And so I knew that my fear — I believe that fear, when we’re present, is an intelligence that says, “Something needs to get learned. Something needs to get learned.”

So when I had that fear, I thought, “Oh, wow, something needs to get learned. I don’t know something here.” And so that was my first clue that her question was powerful, is the fear that arose in me. And then I just kept asking the fear, “What needs to be learned?”

I just kept being really broad in that curiosity. I got into a state of wonder. “I wonder who I would need to be to call forward the man I most want to be with.” I just kept asking that. “I wonder.”

And I let it be okay that I didn’t have to know, because I didn’t know. I’d been with him for a long time and I didn’t know. So I had to be willing to listen and learn from something greater than my own experience so far.

And so it was in that level of curiosity that I just found my way. And it was just baby steps. A little bit here, a little bit there, and we’ve had several versions of that often. Or not often, but the three versions were all some version of me — something needs to get learned for the next evolution here of this relationship.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have recommended resources or practices that couples can seek out or embrace so that they are better prepared, if they get to these decision points? Or just overall in with respect to nurturing a healthy co-created relationship? Are there any books, any particular practices that you would highlight for folks?

Diana Chapman: Well, Matt and I studied with Gay and Katie Hendricks for years at the Hendricks Institute. They did a lot of relationship work. They still do a bit of it. But I learned so many tools there on how to get off the Drama Triangle.

I learned about personas and about how I get caught in these personas that then unconsciously require the persona of my partner to show up in a certain way, that then I complain about. And I learned about how to unwind those or shift them when I wanted to.

I learned about the importance of feeling my feelings. I learned about really questioning my stories. I learned about polarity and how important it is to honor polarity that shows up in couples, and making sure that I honored both sides of the polarity equally.

For example, a lot of couples argue about money. And almost always there’s one that we call the gas and one who’s the brake, and somebody who’s more free-flowing with money, and somebody who’s more controlling about money. And can we honor these polarities and can we see the value in both of them?

Because usually I was the one who wanted to spend the money and my husband wanted to hold onto the money. And we would get into a battle about, “You’re keeping me from having joy in my life because you’re so stingy about money.” And he’d say, “You’re going to make us all broke because you’re just so unconscious about spending it.”

And so honoring that those two sides of the polarity are actually allies that are here to create just the right balance to take care of ourselves and have fun. And so those are all different skill sets. There’s so many different tools.

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Relationship Tools That Work — Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Dr. Sue Johnson, Terry Real, and More on Conflict, Repair, and Lasting Love (#880) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Relationship Tools That Work — Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Dr. Sue Johnson, Terry Real, and More on Conflict, Repair, and Lasting Love (#880)

2026-08-20 04:57:24

This special episode is devoted to one deceptively simple question: How do you stay close to your partner over time through the inevitable exhaustion, misunderstanding, conflict, disappointment, and change?

This episode is brought to you by:

Eight Sleep Pod Cover 5 with dual-zone temperature control, so each partner sleeps at their perfect temperature