2026-02-20 15:55:54
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Tish Rabe (@tishrabebooks) the New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 children’s books, with more than 11 million copies sold. She has written for Sesame Street, Disney, PBS Kids, Curious George, Clifford, and many more. In 1991, following the death of Dr. Seuss, she was asked by Random House to write The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library, a series of science books for early readers that were the brainchild of Dr. Seuss, who died before he could finish the first one. Tish has written more than 50 Cat in the Hat books as well as books for the Grinch and the Lorax. She now heads her own children’s book publishing company, Tish Rabe Books.
Books, music, and people mentioned in the interview
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Tim Ferriss: Tish, it is lovely to finally connect. I’ve really been looking forward to this, and thanks to my old friend and your new friend, Elan Lee, here we are. We made it happen.
Tish Rabe: We made it happen.
Tim Ferriss: So thank you for making the time.
Tish Rabe: I’m really excited to be meeting you.
Tim Ferriss: And I don’t even know where to start. We could start with the 200 children’s books, more than 11 million copies sold. We could start with the 300 children’s songs. But maybe we can, I suppose, start the journey with what you studied in college. Were you always intending to end up where you are now or where did the story start in a sense?
Tish Rabe: Where did the story start? As a matter of fact, I did not start out to be a children’s book author. I started out to be an opera singer. I went to college to be an opera singer. So that was my plan. I had a great plan. In high school, I tell the kids I talk to a lot that I had two things I loved. I love to sing and I love to write. So all through high school, I was, are you going to be a singer or a writer? A writer or singer? And finally, I had to apply to college and I really knew in my heart I wanted to be a singer. So I have a four-year degree in opera with a minor in jazz. And the funny thing, everyone always asks me, “So how did you end up being a singer and ending up being an author?”
And the very short story is I came to New York and I was auditioning everywhere. And my high school music teacher got a job as assistant music director on Sesame Street, season two. And I went to meet him and told him I was auditioning and he asked me if I could type. And I said, “Yes, I can sing and I can type.” So I got a job as music production assistant at Sesame Street and all I wanted to do was sing with Jim Henson’s Muppets. And my first job was hiring the jingle singers in Manhattan to sing with Jim Henson’s Muppets. So I sang all day. I sang when I typed and I sang when I filed and I sang when I answered the phone. “Sesame Street, may I help you?”
Well, after a year, everybody was so tired of listening to me sing all the time that they said, “Would you like to sing on Sesame Street with the Muppets?” And I was, “Yes.” So I sang with the Muppets, I sang on the show, I sang on the albums, and I sang on the specials. So I sang on everything, and it was just so much fun.
And my first big break was I sang with Oscar. “I love trash, everything dirty and dingy and dusty, anything ragged and rotten and rusty. Oh, I love, I love, I love trash.” And I don’t know that my parents ever got over it, to tell you the truth.
Tim Ferriss: The big break.
Tish Rabe: Oh, boy.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me ask you, when you got the job on Sesame Street, when you first got that job, what did it feel like at that time for season two? And I’ll tell you something that I haven’t told many people, which is I have a season one staff jacket from Sesame Street because a friend of my family who lived nearby when I was growing up worked on Sesame Street in the early days. So I grew up going next door as a little kid, hearing her stories, looking at her Emmys. And my love affair with Sesame Street in a way began before I ever started watching it. So I have a long history.
Tish Rabe: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: What did it feel like to be there in the earliest stages of Sesame Street? What was the vibe like, the environment?
Tish Rabe: First of all, the most creative environment anyone could ever be in. Basically, Jon Stone, who was executive producer and Jim Henson and all the puppeteers and all the muppeteers and everybody were so creative, they just made stuff up all day long. Another interesting thing to share is that they were very worried that this show was going to bomb. A six-foot yellow bird, a monster that only eats cookies, a grouch and a trash can, a multiracial cast. How do we think this is going to go in 1969 or whatever? And Joan Ganz Cooney, who created the whole thing, just let them be creative. Whatever you guys want to do, go ahead. And it was so much fun to be a part of it. And I believe in my heart that my background on Sesame Street is how I can do what I do today because I was enveloped with this every single day.
And one of the interesting things that happened was Sesame Street, they needed books, they needed toys, they needed merchandise. Who knew this was going to be a massive hit? And they literally asked the staff if they had ideas for books. And I, courage, oh, what the heck? I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll go down and try. And I went down to the book department and I told them about when I was a little girl and I broke my great-grandmother’s teapot and it shattered into a million pieces. And my mother came in and saw the broken glass and she said, “I’m not mad or anything. I love you more than any teapot.” And I went down and I pitched my idea to Sesame Street books and it’s your classic, right? You pour your heart out on this story and there’s dead silence. Nobody moved. So I’m standing there going, okay, that went well. And from the back of the room, the editor for Sesame Street Books said, “Could you make it a story for Bert?” And my very first book, here it is.
Tim Ferriss: Look at that.
Tish Rabe: And The Broken Teapot, it’s out of print, but I have a few. And in this book, Bert breaks David’s favorite teapot, spends the whole book trying to get it fixed. And in the end, David says he’s afraid David’s not going to be his friend anymore because he broke his favorite teapot. And David says, “You’ll always be my friend and can you help me in my restaurant next week?” And at the time it got just great awards and letters because it’s easy to have things be about stuff. And that message obviously was that their friendship meant more than this teapot. But that was book one.
Tim Ferriss: So let me peel back the layers a little bit on what you mentioned, this wellspring of creativity, just being steeped, I suppose, to borrow the tea, steeped in this creativity. What did that look like? Were people just ad libbing all the time like Robin Williams times the number of staff? Were their meetings different? What did that actually look like in practice when you went to work?
Tish Rabe: It was one of the first TV shows that had educational research behind it. So we had topics. We were going to try to teach every single season. There was a notebook like this thick with what are we trying to teach kids? Obviously numbers and letters, but compassion and sorting things by shapes and whatever it was. And then you would watch the writers just come up with stuff and it was absolutely fascinating and they just kind of made stuff up as they went along. But the big thing I learned from the Sesame Street writers, and it has saved me many, many, many times, is that they wrote the endings first. So they used to look at Abbott and Costello movies and Marx Brothers movies and they looked at everything and they used to tell me, “Okay, Abbott and Costello are pushing a piano across a bridge in the jungle with a gorilla coming across the bridge at them. How did they get there?”
So as a children’s book author, I always write my last page first. So in my I Believe Bunny books, my inspirational books, one of them ends with just like the “I believe bunny, you may get a surprise, you can make a difference, even a bunny your size.” Then I wrote the whole book about how he helps his friend who can’t swim and blah, blah, blah, blah, and then end at that page. It’s a very important page in children’s books because it is the last page they hear before the book is shut, go to sleep, take a nap, go out to play, whatever. And I always write the last page first, always.
Tim Ferriss: Did you have much interaction with Jim Henson?
Tish Rabe: Yes. I worked for Jim for years and somebody said once he was a gentle giant with a mind of steel. He’s a great businessman, but so creative and so nice to all of us because we were low in the totem pole. I mean, we were production assistants and he just worked and worked and worked and worked. And he would do a Sesame Street day and then fly to London and do The Muppet Show and then fly back. He just worked all the time, but he was just very, very nice to me, always.
Tim Ferriss: Did you learn anything about him or how he managed, anything that stands out that distinguishes him aside from just being a man possessed with his work, which certainly doesn’t surprise me?
Tish Rabe: I think the thing was you could just watch his creative mind. The creative minds on Sesame Street, when I was there, something would happen and they would just make something else up and the sense of humor and the lightness of what they were doing, it was almost like, oh, and by the way, we’re teaching kids. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah, okay.
The other thing they did, which was really something is they were one of the first to double level humor. So they wrote stuff that was funny for kids, but had all kinds of stuff in it for adults because all these studies had done if parents watched the show with their children, the kids learned more because the parents were there to help them and that kind of thing. And some of the early children’s shows, no parent would be caught dead sitting in front of, but Sesame Street was so nuts that everybody loved it and that really, really made a difference, big difference.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The double-level humor.
Tish Rabe: Double level humor. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I remember first being struck by that, not to make my side of the story all about Robin Williams, but was Robin Williams and the songs in the first Disney animated feature of Aladdin and just how many levels there were to that and how effective it was because parents would go back, take their kids to the theater multiple times in this case, obviously watch the television show. How did your music training, if it did, help what you ended up doing not only at Sesame Street, but afterwards? And I suppose I’m just asking if some of the tools or sensitivities that you developed actually ended up being assets as you moved forward with these other supposedly separate art forms.
Tish Rabe: Well, one thing that I used to do, the songs were all prerecorded and so the muppeteers, puppeteers would go and record their songs in advance. So now you’re Big Bird and you’re going to sing a song on Sesame Street, but they are doing their dialogue. So how are they going to know when the song starts? So I would stand next to one of the cameras and count them off. So measure one, two, three, four, and then they would sing.
So Caroll Spinney could see me enough to know that when I pointed to him, he had to sing the song, the prerecorded song, move the costume, move the puppet so he was singing the song. And the first few times I did it, I was scared to death. I was only 21. I think this is going to be the one. I’m going to go one, two, three and start him and it’s going to be the wrong place. Oh, no. But that’s really where my musical training came in. And also, the jingle singers in New York in the ’70s, literally you’d come into a session, to this day I’ll never forget it, and literally they would sing it through once. We are the sound of the sound of the count, count, count, counts down. Four part harmony, and they’d look at each other, say, “You take the root, I’ll take the third, you take the fifth, and then somebody do the octave. One, two, three, go.”
And I remember holding on with a thread to this thing, but it was just — and the other thing that I love about those early days, back then we had orchestras. I’ll never forget this, the Christmas special, full orchestra and Caroll Spinney was trying to sing “I Hate Christmas.” So he’s behind this microphone and he’s going, “I hate, I hate” — finally, they said “Let’s take a break. The whole orchestra, let’s take 10 minutes.” Everybody just give him a minute. And I was standing next to him when he moved over and opened the case and took Oscar out of the case. I was standing right next to him. I had the music and everything. So everybody comes back, all these violins and cellos and clarinets, and they started it again and Caroll moved over and Oscar sang “I Hate Christmas.” Perfect. I never got over it. I was like, whoa. But this kind of stuff went on every single day, all day.
Tim Ferriss: And when you were working on Sesame Street, what was the reaction from people at the time when they would ask you, “What do you do?” I don’t know the magnitude of the success when you joined versus later on in your time there, but just to paint a picture for people, because there are, I’m sure, some older folks who listen to this podcast who maybe even had really, really early exposure or maybe are much older and had really young kids who were exposed to Sesame Street. Then there are some in the middle who certainly remember watching it, and then there are some who have probably never seen it.
Tish Rabe: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: But what was the reaction that you would get from people when you told them what you did for a living?
Tish Rabe: Well, it’s funny. When I tell the story that I got to New York and I was auditioning and it was going okay, I would get a jingle here, a jingle there, but I couldn’t support myself. And I am convinced, I went home one Thanksgiving to my hometown. I’m from Needham, Massachusetts outside of Boston, and I literally got out of the car and my mother told me that she had read that my high school music teacher had gotten this job. And she said, “You’ve got to get all dressed up and you’ve got to go see him and he hasn’t seen you since you left high school four years ago, you’ve been in college.” And I have to say, it took a lot of guts for me to go and come see him again. And he’d buy me lunch once a week because I wasn’t eating, the whole thing.
And I think when I look back, it was timing and luck to a lot of extent because would I ever have walked into Sesame Workshop and said, “Do you have a job for me?” No. I was convinced I was going to be a star, it was just a matter of time singing. And back then, I’m sure they still do this, you would audition and they would literally let you sing nine notes. So you go, “Oklahoma, where the wind goes…” Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Really?
Tish Rabe: I am dead serious. Anyone who auditioned, that was it. And you were there and you had your music and everything. So the fact that I actually was able to get a job in music on a television series was just magic stuff.
Tim Ferriss: And was the public’s reception at the time, so you have this sort of confluence of factors and synchronicities that get you in the door. You still have to prove your mettle so you get the job. And was it just the belle of the ball at that point, Sesame Street, or was it still in kind of growth mode? So some people knew it, but not all people. Where was the public awareness of Sesame Street when you joined?
Tish Rabe: Well, I think when I started, it was just really taking off, literally. And I don’t think anyone recognized that it was — as I said, they weren’t sure how it was going to go. And something a lot of people don’t know about Sesame Street is it was originally created to help every child learn their alphabet and their numbers because there was a disparity between kids who had came into kindergarten knowing their letters and their alphabet and the kids who came in not knowing and started behind before they even got started. And I don’t think anyone really realized that this was going to have such a huge impact because kids now then were going into school and singing the numbers song, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, alligators went to the alligator picnic.” This went on all day long. So the kids now, there was more of an even playing field when the kids all hit kindergarten and people just didn’t see it coming and it was true.
Tim Ferriss: What happened that led you from Sesame Street to —
Tish Rabe: All that followed?
Tim Ferriss: All that followed. Yes, exactly.
Tish Rabe: Well, among my other things that happened is I was at Sesame Street and as soon as I started writing my Bert and the Broken Teapot book, I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing.
Tim Ferriss: And this is just on your own time or was it —
Tish Rabe: Well, people started hiring me. I wrote for Scholastic and I wrote for Houghton Mifflin and Random House and everybody.
Tim Ferriss: How did you make those contacts?
Tish Rabe: I was working on Sesame Street and then I produced Big Bird in China. I was part of the crew that went to China with Big Bird in China and then —
Tim Ferriss: 1982, something like that?
Tish Rabe: 1982, correct. And then I was senior producer for 3-2-1 Contact, which was another whole story. And then I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing. And I ended up at Random House as their director of video. This was back in the VHS days. And once I was in there directing all the videos, back in the day, they used to just take the artwork for the book and move the camera around. It’s called animatics. And I produced all the music and all the voiceovers and everything for that, but now I’m in Random House. So I’m an author, proven author, and I happen to work there. So in the hallway, they’d say, “Could you write a book about butterflies?” And, “Sure, when do you need it?”
So it was kind of a two-way thing. I was working as a producer, a television producer, also, with 3-2-1 Contact, that’s when I started writing songs because 3-2-1 Contact was a science series and it took more time for us to explain to other composers what we needed than just to write it in house. So I wrote songs about electricity and mammals and anything you needed. My favorite was the producers would come into my office and they’d say, “We need a song.” I said, “Okay, okay, what’s it about?” Never forget this. And the producer looks at me and says, “The gestation period of different animals.” I said, “It’s singing for me already, the gestation…” So I wrote a song called “I’m Waiting For My Baby” << I’m waiting for my baby, feels like a long, long time >> And we just took stock footage of chimpanzee and an elephant and chyroned, that was back in the day we called it chyroning, the amount of time, elephant two years, whatever it was to have a baby. And then at the end it was << And baby, you are worth the wait >> So we made stuff up, and of course, happily for me, I sang a lot of it. So that was fun too.
Tim Ferriss: If we open the hood and look at the workings of making a song, what does that look like for you? When they are successful, do they have common patterns where you start with something?
Tish Rabe: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And then there’s second, there’s something else, and third, there’s something else. What did that process end up looking like for you?
Tish Rabe: Mm-hmm. Well, the first thing I did back and have done a lot of is, perfect example, what’s the science, what are we trying to teach a child in this song, right? And then I always make sure that I have a verse and then what we call a B section. So the song goes somewhere and then comes back. That’s always very, very key, and it’s interesting —
Tim Ferriss: So you decide on those two pieces first, the first thing?
Tish Rabe: Yes, what are we trying — “Cord of Wood.” That’s a perfect example. I wrote a whole song about it, a “Cord of Wood.”
Tim Ferriss: I would love an example, that would be good.
Tish Rabe: I can only remember how it goes, but a “Cord of Wood.” Well, you could find out how many toothpicks are there in a cord of wood, how many picnic tables can you make out of one cord of wood. So you’ve got to figure out what you’re putting in for the science and how you’re going to make it rhyme and that kind of stuff. It certainly helped me that I had been a singer so long that I was so used to singing rhyming lyrics.
One quick thing to share, because very few people know this. While I was at Sesame Street, the executive producer asked Joe Raposo, Joe Raposo wrote the theme and he wrote all the big songs, and he said, “I wonder how Kermit feels. Have you ever thought of how Kermit feels living on this crazy street with all these nutty people?” And Joe Raposo went home and wrote “Bein’ Green.” But the big thing about “Bein’ Green” is all of us who write songs for kids have end rhyme.
MUSIC: Sunny day.
Sweepin’ the clouds away.
On my way to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?
Tish Rabe: Everything rhymes at the end, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Tish Rabe: “Bein’ Green,” there’s not one rhyme.
MUSIC: It’s not easy bein’ green.
Having to spend each day.
The color of the leaves.
When it would be nicer to be red or yellow or gold or something much more colorful like that.
Tish Rabe: It’s totally talking. There’s not a rhyme in it. And he came into the office and sang it for the first time, and people were thunderstruck, and of course it became a mega hit. So yeah, I just started writing songs about everything.
Tim Ferriss: What possessed him to break the mold? Had that been done before or was that something that struck him? I’m wondering if you know the backstory of why.
Tish Rabe: It’s funny. I always felt that, this is a longtime memories of these things, but I sort of felt like maybe one of the writers kind of challenged him. There’s only one other song any of us could find, and it’s “Moonlight in Vermont,” also doesn’t rhyme at all. But I don’t know if someone said, “Yeah, why don’t you write about how Kermit feels about living on this street and not have end rhymes?” I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone challenged him or he just went home and said — I mean, the man was a genius. Whether he went home and just said, “I have an idea. I’ve got nothing else to do this afternoon. I’ll try to write a song that doesn’t rhyme.” I don’t know. But I’ll say one thing that was really amazing is basically Joan Ganz Cooney told them all, she had faith in them, “Just do it, just go.” So it was so free-flowing that people just made stuff up. I have a favorite song, people always ask me my favorite song that I did not write. It’s called “I Just Adore Four.”
MUSIC: I just adore four.
The number for me.
I just adore four.
It’s, let’s see, less than five, more than three.
Tish Rabe: And the other thing is the lyrics were so grown up, right? I mean, that’s hilarious, but the kids just ate it up. They just understood it. They understood what that meant. So it was wonderful because every day you went into work, you had no idea who’s going to come up with what today, but it’s funny.
Tim Ferriss: How many drafts or versions made the cut? I’m wondering in such a free-flowing creative environment where you’re allowed to throw anything against the wall and you’re given permission, people say they believe in you, my assumption would be that you come up with a lot of ideas and not all of them work.
Tish Rabe: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m wondering how many versions you might come up with before you end up with one that makes it to air.
Tish Rabe: Well, the real challenge on that show was the curriculum was king. So yeah, you could go off and write a story about your lamp, but if it didn’t — whatever the curriculum of the day was, today it’s seasons or cooperation, or I don’t know, whatever they were, that was true. They had to get that by that team and it was a whole team. The other thing they did a lot of is focus groups. They played stuff for kids, and this was groundbreaking at the time. I mean, and they tell stories about how Oscar was originally orange and the kids didn’t really like it. Whatever it is, they changed stuff, and that was really — so although it looked easy, there was a lot of background on what they could do and not do and that kind of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: So the focus groups, I mean, that does sound really innovative for the day, especially with kids. But I imagine if you’re trying to sell shampoo and you’ve got Bob the adult in your focus group, you’d be like, “Bob, how much would you spend to buy Hartz shampoo?” or whatever it would be, and Bob can give you an answer. What types of reactions or feedback were they looking for when they —
Tish Rabe: Well, it was great. They wanted to know things like, did the kids walk away understanding that ABC-DEF-GHI is ABCDHEHI — because they always wanted to pay attention to the fact that if they made it too sophisticated, the kids would be lost. So that’s a very fine line because by doing the double-level humor, like “I Just Adore Four,” genius, Joe Bailey wrote that one, that they didn’t leave the kids lost because that was not the point. The point was to teach them and get them ready for school.
Tim Ferriss: Curriculum.
Tish Rabe: Curriculum. Oh, boy.
Tim Ferriss: Curriculum. Number one. There’s a question that I could ask about songwriting, but I could also ask it about book writing. So could you explain how Dr. Seuss enters the picture?
Tish Rabe: Yes. So as the years went by, I kept, as I said, writing for everybody, never turned down a book offer. We’d be scholastic, we need a book on butterflies in a week, and I’ll go, “Okay, a week. How long is that going to take me? How much am I going to earn an hour?” Whatever it was. But I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and in 1991, I always go by how old my kids were, I guess they were like three and four, I submitted a rhyming book to Random House. I was there. I was the senior producer for home video. I was singing on all their TV stuff and I was singing on VHSes for them. Anyway, I was right there and I sent in a manuscript for a book.
“Maurus O’Raurus was a Brachiosaurus who had the best voice in the dinosaur chorus. He liked to play tennis and swim in the sea, but mostly he liked to eat fresh broccoli.” Okey dokey. And the end of that one was, so his friends tried to get him to eat something else and he said — his friends go, “Broccoli’s fine. It’s got color and crunch, but you eat it for breakfast and dinner and lunch.” They talk them into eating something else and the last line is, “So one thing is true and you cannot deny it, like it or not, you won’t know until you try it.” Fine. Type it up, walk down to the book department at Random House, hand it to the book department, and hear nothing. And I tell the kids, this is before texting, voicemail, we’re used to using payphones at this point, and I didn’t hear a thing. So I go, “Well, that didn’t really work, but okay.”
So I finally get my courage up and I call and I finally get somebody on the phone in that division and I say, “Tell them who I am.” “Oh, oh,” she said, “we were supposed to call you.” I said, “Well, nobody called me.” I said, “I was sitting right here, but nobody called me.” And she said, “Okay.” I’ll never forget it. She said, “I have bad news and I have good news. What would you like to hear first?” And I said, “Well, I’ll take the bad news.” And she said, “We cannot publish Maurus O’Raurus Brachiosaurus because we are the rhyming home of Dr. Seuss.” Okay, all right. “However,” she said, “how would you like to write a new series for Dr. Seuss?” And it took me — sure, you never say no, never turned down a freelance job, and they literally handed me Dr. Seuss, not me. Dr. Seuss wanted to write a series of books for kids about science in rhyme for early readers, four- to seven-year-olds, and died before he could finish the first one.
So they handed me a stack of research on mammals, a huge stack of research on birds. They said, “We are so far behind with this because we’ve been trying to find someone who can write in his rhythm and his rhyme scheme.” And Maurus O’Raurus Brachiosaurus was both, thank goodness. And they said, “Can you have two books ready in four months?” And I carried all this stuff, I carried all this stuff home and I went, “Well, okay.” And I just started writing Is a Camel a Mammal and Fine Feathered Friends and I never stopped after that.
Tim Ferriss: What an incredible opportunity. I mean, talk about just the right ingredients at the right time. My brain will not let it go unless I ask. So the Maurus O’Raurus, still think — I mean, this sounds like a great book, but that couldn’t fly because Dr. Seuss basically had exclusivity on that nature of rhyming book. Is that —
Tish Rabe: For Random House, yes.
Tim Ferriss: For Random House, for Random House.
Tish Rabe: Yes, and not only did he write exclusively for Random House, but he created the Beginner Book series which other authors also wrote. So he was head of the whole thing. And one thing to share about him which is, and there are many authors that do this, but he was an author illustrator, and I’m clear to tell everybody I write the words, but I do not draw the pictures. I had heard, I missed meeting him by one year, but they used to tell me that he would come in with a brand new book, let’s say Horton Hears a Who, whatever, and literally art directors and the editors at Random House did not have to do anything. They didn’t have to fix it. They didn’t have to tell him to fix the elephant. They didn’t have to do anything. They were so perfect when he showed up with them, and so that is always amazing that he could do both.
I actually never spoke to him, but I spoke to his widow, Audrey Geisel, and she called me because — to this day, I could never forget it. She called me, I felt like on the phone, I couldn’t believe I was actually talking to her. And she said, “Do you remember when years ago in the ’50s, they did this study where they had pregnant moms talk to their babies and sing to their babies?” When the babies were born, they recognized, and the dads too, they recognized their voices and they waved their little hands and their eyes linked and stuff, and what they used on the study was they all read The Cat in the Hat, the original Cat in the Hat book. So here we are. It’s 2008, I think. Audrey Geisel called me and said, could I read all 41 of Ted, Ted Geisel’s Dr. Seuss books and write a book with references to all of them?
Tim Ferriss: That’s hard.
Tish Rabe: And she wanted it called Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! to be read in utero. I’m sitting there going, “Okay, sure.” So I went and read all of them. Horton Hears A Who, If I Ran The Zoo, If I Ran The Circus, Yertle the Turtle, Thidwick the Moose, I read them all and I wrote Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! and turned it in. And I love this story because by then my kids were in middle school, I think, and I was going to pick them up from school and I had my car keys in my hand. My phone rang, it’s Random House. They said, “We are sending the files to the printer for Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! We need a bio from you, really short, and it has to be funny and we need it right now.”
Well, I’m going at the — so I just said, “You’ve got to give me two minutes.” And I hung up the phone, never forget it, and all of a sudden I thought, “Oh, wow.” And I called them right back and I said, “Tish Rabe’s a mom who thinks that it’s cool to be home rhyming rhymes while her kids are at school.” And they went bananas. They’re like, “Done.” I said, “Okay” I just make this stuff up. It’s what I do all day. And Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! is a bestseller, flies off the shelf. So Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! Very sweet.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go!
Tish Rabe: And the other thing, just real quick about that, I am very careful to say to everyone, you do not have to have kids to write for kids. Many, many, many fabulous authors did not. However, the last page of Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go! I don’t even know who drew it because I don’t think Ted drew it, but there’s a little pregnant mom, Seussian little pregnant mom sitting there, and I had two kids. I have a son and a daughter, and at the end I wrote, “It’s a scrumptious world and it’s ready to greet you. And as for myself, well, I can’t wait to meet you.” And I really have to say, I think if I’d never had kids, I don’t know that I would have come up with that. That’s the last page in this bestselling book, but it just flew off the shelves. It still does.
Tim Ferriss: So when you got that first assignment, here you go, pile of research on birds, pile of research on fill in the blank. Couple of questions related to that. So you can tackle whichever one you’d like to tackle.
Tish Rabe: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: So one question is, how on Earth do you pick what to include out of these many, many stacks? Because you have to be really selective. The other question is, what guardrails/rules do they give you to keep you within the universe and tone and feel of Dr. Seuss?
Tish Rabe: Well, a couple of things. The first thing about what to put in the book, they did the research for me for the first two books, but for all the many, many books I wrote after that I did my own research. What I did that really saved me and surprises a lot of people is I went to the children’s department in the local library and pulled everything they had on the topic because already it’s not in rhyme, fine, but it’s already been simplified, right? So I would get a spiral notebook for every book and write and write and write and write the facts about space, the facts about insects which I knew nothing, and get them all written down and then figure out if anything popped as a rhyming potential word. One of my very proudest was, “When birds want to go on a winter vacation, they all take a trip and they call it migration.” Because at one point I was writing down the birds migrate and migration, I thought, “Oh, vacation in a way.” So that was one thing.
As far as guardrails, there are two kinds of rhyming in children’s books and migration and vacation is perfect Seussian rhyme. Farm and barn is what they call a slant rhyme. It’s close, but it’s not a pure rhyme. Dr. Seuss insisted on two things. The rhythm had to be perfect. “On the 15th of May in the jungle of Nool, Horton the elephant sat in the pool.” Doesn’t vary, it never varies, and the end rhymes are pure, right? Nool — something Ted did, and I did as well, is if he was in trouble for a rhyme, he made up a word. So in the sleep book, one of my favorites is, “Have you met the Van Vlecks?” Or something like that. “When they sleep, they yawn so wide, you can see down their necks.” So he made up the Vlecks to — so in my book, Oh, the Pets You Can Get, “Oh, the Pets You Can Get takes place in Gerplets where they know quite a bit about caring for pets.” So I made up Gerplets to homage to Ted because when you’re in trouble, make something, that’s what he did.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a clever fix and that became his trademark, or was his trademark.
Tish Rabe: It was. I mean, it was genius. I mean, he just made this stuff up all the time. So those were the two things. I had to get what the facts were for the books, keep it simple, make stuff that rhymes to the kids, and what really works well about rhyme is there are kids that would not have ever known what the word migration meant, but they loved the rhyme and they remembered the rhyme. So it’s a very, very successful — I mean, after that, every single one of my books rhymes because of that. It works.
Tim Ferriss: It is their first exposure to a mnemonic device, right?
Tish Rabe: Mm-hmm. Always, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ve done — I mean, I think you would blow me out of the water. I have so many questions about how your mind works, but I did a bunch of cognitive testing recently with a pretty well-vetted, studied battery of different tests, and I’m 48, but I aged 20. Now the only reason I aged 20 is because I have these mnemonic devices. I’ve trained myself to be able to do it, and rhyme is a fantastic, in some ways, instinctive example of that. Have you always had a mind for rhyming, or is that a trained muscle? And also your recall. I mean, good Lord, you have just incredible recall. Have you always been that way? Are there people in your family like that? Could you speak to that?
Tish Rabe: I had a phenomenal English teacher in high school. So in high school, for me, Needham High School, Needham, Massachusetts, not only did my music director end up getting me my first job in New York, but Mr. Allen, my English teacher, was phenomenal. And what he used to have us do is write poems, sonnets, we wrote plays, and it helped me understand the format and also how to figure out end rhyme and limericks. I have a book that is still not published. I think I’m going to end up publishing it myself, but I sort of built on the Maurus O’Raurus book and I wrote a whole book for him, three, actually for Nickelodeon, that are in limerick rhyme.
“Have you met Maurus?” And I changed him to an oopsisaurus because he’s kind of clumsy with a 12-foot tail. But anyway, “Have you met Maurus? He’s an oopsisaurus, a dinosaur if you can’t guess, but sometimes he bumps things and sometimes he thumps things and sometimes he makes a big mess.” So the entire book’s in limerick rhyme. But yes, that background, and I mean, I am sincere saying that I was really torn between majoring in English in college and being a writer or a singer. I’m very happy I decided to be a singer because now I can do both. But yeah, amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Do you think the ability to construct rhyme came from that education and the practice in the English class, or do you just have the equivalent of some type of perfect pitch for —
Tish Rabe: For rhyming?
Tim Ferriss: — rhyming out of the box? What do you think?
Tish Rabe: Well, I will tell you, this is funny, because when I first started, my husband bought me a computer program that was called A Million Gazillion Rhymes, seriously. And I would sit there all day long and type the word in, “What rhymes with antenna? Anything? Hello?” Then over the years, I have gotten to the point where now I just know what they rhyme.
But speaking of mnemonics, I think you’ll get a kick out of this, this is a page in my bestselling solar system book, Dr. Seuss, right?
Tim Ferriss: All About Our Solar System.
Tish Rabe: All About Our Solar System. So things are going fine and I write this mnemonic, “You’ve seen all the planets, now here is a trick to remember their names and remember them quick.” And I write the whole thing, “Mallory, Valerie, Emily, Mizas just served up 999 pizzas.” So far so good. Except pizza stood for Pluto. So I get a call from Random House. Pluto has been demoted. And I’m like, “What?” I’m on the phone. And they said, “Can you fix this? But we can’t get the illustrator to change the art.” So Emily here, Valerie — what are their names? Mallory, Valerie, Emily, Mizas was holding pizzas. So I’m like, “Okay.” So I changed it to “Mallory, Valerie, Emily, Mickels just showed us 999 nickels.” And all the art guy had to do was change the pizza boxes to nickels, saved. But I’m like, “What? What do you mean Pluto? Give me a break. Seriously?”
Tim Ferriss: Pluto’s been demoted. Come on, guys.
Tish Rabe: We went from nine planets to eight? I’m not prepared for this. So this kind of stuff goes on all day. This is what I do for a living, but it is fun. You have to keep your sense of humor.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to move on to asking you more about the craft, but if you don’t mind me asking, what is your age at present?
Tish Rabe: At the moment, I am 74. I’ll be 75 in July. And I started my own company when I turned 71.
Tim Ferriss: 71. And we are definitely going to talk all about that. Do you have siblings?
Tish Rabe: I do.
Tim Ferriss: Is everyone in your family as razor sharp as you are? That’s a hard question. I don’t want to throw your siblings under the bus, but I’m so curious to what you attribute being — you’re sharper than 99 percent of my friends —
Tish Rabe: I appreciate that.
Tim Ferriss: — who are my age or younger.
Tish Rabe: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m wondering to what you attribute that.
Tish Rabe: My parents got married as World War II was starting. And when my father came home, he was a prisoner of war, they wanted to start a family. And they had two little boys and a little girl, and the little girl was me. And my father used to come home and play piano for about a half hour after work, but I do not come from a musical family at all. My mom was an English major, so she loved to write, so she was a writer, but music was not a thing in our family. My brothers didn’t play much and it was fine. They played sports.
Well, supposedly, when I was seven, I was in first grade, my father was playing the song he played every single night. It was my mother’s favorite. And I just stood up and started singing with him. And they still talk about it. It was a song called “Tammy,” from Tammy and the Bachelor movie. My mother loved it. “I hear the cottonwoods whispering above, ‘Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s my love.'” My brothers were doing their homework, they stopped. My mother was doing something in the kitchen, she stopped. My father stopped. I was like, “I don’t even know what just happened.” And I was just encouraged from day one to pursue music and writing. So it was very receptive. And I’ll be honest, when I went to college, I told my mother, “I’m going to get a degree in singing.”
Well, now you’d say, “Well, what are you going to do to eat? That’s nice, but if you don’t make it on Broadway, what are you going to do?” I was the only one in my class, Ithaca College, class of ’72, that did not take an education backup. I didn’t want to teach music. I didn’t want to teach kids do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. I wanted to be a star on Broadway. It’s just like, “Are people missing this? What part of this are you guys missing?” So I literally was convinced I would leave college and come to New York and within a year, name and lights, piece of cake. Only anybody as nuts as I am would think that, but hey. And my parents never blinked. They said, “Sure, if you think this is going to work, good luck.” Anyway, so it just has always been a part of my life.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to be a neuroscientist way back in the day and was a major in the department and the whole nine yards. Things ended up taking a turn and I ended up where I am now, but I’m still very involved with science. And the more I look at music, the more I talk to musicologists who are in dialogue with neuroscientists, the more important and/or therapeutic life-giving music seems to be.
Tish Rabe: It is.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s impossible to say you pull this one lever and you get X, Y, or Z result. But it seems to be a commonality that musicians or people who engage with music regularly just retain their faculties and hone their faculties a lot longer than people who don’t.
Tish Rabe: That’s true.
Tim Ferriss: That’s just my impression.
Tish Rabe: Well, the other thing that’s huge is that music is unbelievably helpful to teach kids and the sound of it and the rhythm of it and the rhymes. Every single one of the books I’ve created myself has a song in it. And what I do is I write them to public domain melodies because people know these songs, most of them. And the first book I created was a little book about going to sleep. So I wrote a lullaby, “Night is here, today is done, it’s time to sleep, my little one,” to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
Tim Ferriss: So smart.
Tish Rabe: And it really works. And I really encourage everybody. I get this all the time. Everybody’s always, “Yeah, but you’ve got this beautiful voice and you sing all the time and I can’t sing.” And I just try to say to everybody, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, you can sing. It doesn’t matter if it’s croaky, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, the only voice your child wants to hear is yours.
They want to hear you sing to them. And yes, I have me singing them on my website and I try to help everybody learn to sing them, but at the end of the day, it’s your voice resonating in their ear. I forget how I said it in here, but it’s like, “That is the voice that every little kid wants to hear. The sound of your voice when you read and sing is what your child loves more than anything.” It’s in Sweet Dreams here, but —
Tim Ferriss: What made Sweet Dreams work? What makes it work? And maybe even more broadly, what makes lullabies work? What are the other ingredients? You mentioned the mapping to a public domain melody is really smart. That makes so much sense at a lot of levels. What else makes that book work?
Tish Rabe: I started my own company right during COVID, 2020, right? COVID’s flying around and what am I going to do? And I turned 70, now what? And I was introduced to a program. A friend of mine said, “You have to meet the people at Pajama Program.” It’s now called Beyond Bedtime, but then it was called Pajama Program. So I went in and I found out that they give free pajamas and storybooks to kids facing adversity. Many kids are not having any pajamas, any storybooks. So I kind of went in to meet with them thinking, “Well, maybe I could do a fundraiser or get my girlfriends to send in some pajamas or something.” And they said, “What we really need is to help parents learn how to get their kids to go to sleep.”
And I said, “The best thing that works for this is to write a storybook they’ll read to their kids and then put the tips in the back and they’ll read them too.” And then I put them all in rhyme. So 30 to 60 minutes before you tuck them in is the perfect time for their bedtime routine to begin. And what’s happening is parents read the book and they read the tips out loud to the kids. So the kids are going, “Oh, 30 to 60 minutes. Mom, we’re supposed to be in bed now.” And then, of course, you sing a lullaby because singing is so restful. And now it’s been out for a couple of years, everybody knows the songs. The kids know it. The kids at school, they sing it in school, daycare. So yeah, it’s very, very powerful.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come to starting your company and the reasons behind that.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you start a company at 70?
Tish Rabe: At 70, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And there’s nothing wrong with that —
Tish Rabe: I know. What are you? Nuts?
Tim Ferriss: — I’m just curious what the reasons were behind that.
Tish Rabe: Well, it’s funny. I ended up marrying a guy I met in high school. That high school, it shaped my whole life.
Tim Ferriss: It produced so many —
Tish Rabe: It produced everything.
Tim Ferriss: — crown jewels.
Tish Rabe: So many jewels. My husband and I live in Mystic, Connecticut, and he’s an avid fisherman. So during the fishing season, he fishes three to four days a week. So I’m sitting there going, “Well, what am I going to do? Let’s think.” And I really felt that I had some ideas for books that the other publishers weren’t doing. One book I’m very proud of is called Love You, Hug You, Read to You. It was my very first book, and it’s a board book. And I had begged all these publishers I work with to do a book with what they call dialogic reading. And dialogic reading has little questions. So you’ve got the adorable mommy cat reading to her little kittens, and the little thing below says, “What do you think the little kittens are thinking?”
And that helps the child go, “I think they just love that their mom’s reading to them.” And it sets up a dialogue. That’s why dialogic reading — I couldn’t get anyone to let me write a book for them, so I finally said, “Well, then I’ll just do it myself.” What I’m doing now with my books is I have the ability to do what I want to do and the messages I feel never got out there. It has been a huge learning curve or spike because I always just turned the words in and somebody magically, a year and a half later, sent me 10 copies of the book. Now I’ve got to find an illustrator and a printer and a shipment thing and be on Amazon and sell books on my website, but I absolutely love every minute of it. It is so much fun. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, this is going to be, I suppose, maybe off-topic, my listeners are going to be like, “Why are you asking about fishing?” What does your husband love so much about fishing?
Tish Rabe: Oh, well, first of all —
Tim Ferriss: I went on my first wilderness outdoor survival training trip in Montana specifically, and the guide brought along something called Tenkara rods, which are these very simple rods with a Japanese design. They are simplicity itself. And we would just stop at random holes and give it a shot. And I found it so therapeutic that it was my first real enjoyment of fishing. I’m just wondering what your husband gets out of it.
Tish Rabe: We have four children and two live in Boston and two were living in Manhattan. So we picked Mystic, Connecticut because it’s kind of in the middle and it is the best fishing in New England because we are right on the ocean and next to Rhode Island and Block Island and all of that stuff right around.
And he goes out and they have the best time and they catch sea bass and all these different kind of fish and it’s out in the water, beautiful ocean. He’s got a 24-foot boat, the whole thing. And he brings back fish and we give it away and he cooks it and it’s just really fun.
Tim Ferriss: I love it.
Tish Rabe: But he literally leaves at seven o’clock in the morning and gets home at 4:00.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a full day.
Tish Rabe: I was like, “Well, I better do something or I’m going to go nuts.” And I tell you, there is nothing like giving a book to a child who doesn’t have a book. I am on this lifetime mission of trying to get free books to kids who don’t have any. And I have to say, having started at Sesame Street, when that idea was to lift everybody up and help everybody and teach everybody how to read, it’s amazing to me we’re here at 2026, but I’m doing what I can to make sure kids get books, as many as possible. Read, read, read.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about Alaska and Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart. What is the context on what I just mentioned? Can you tell the story?
Tish Rabe: The aegis of this book is interesting. As I think I told you, I am the child of a World War II hero. My dad was in college when he enlisted and he was in engineering. He’s an engineer. They made him a navigator and a navigator in a B-17 sits in the front with the pilot and shows them the maps and stuff like that. And his plane was hit by enemy fire. He burst into flames and he jumped out and was arrested and spent a little under two years in a German prison camp. That’s when he came home and they had my brothers and they had me, two boys and a little girl, the little girl was me. And all through the years writing children’s books, I had wanted to write a book for military kids and military families in honor of my father, but also because I felt no one understands this life. No one understands the sacrifices they go through.
And I’m the grandmother of two little girls who are five and three. And I got thinking about what it means to my granddaughter when my son is away on business for two days, and the military kids see their parents, their moms and their dads, go for a year. And I tried everything. I tried Department of Defense, Department of Education, the Naval bases. I’m like, “Can somebody help me do this?” Fast-forward, I’m starting my own company and I got clearance to go on the base at the Groton Naval Base, which is right next to Mystic, Connecticut. I went into their library, I got permission to go into their library. I read every single book for military children in the library and didn’t see anything that was helpful for this topic.
And I was literally leaving and the librarian said, “What are you here for?” And I said, “I want to write a book for military kids.” And she said, “Oh.” And she smiled at me and she said, “You just need to reach out to United Through Reading.” And I looked at her and I said, “United Through Reading? Okay.” United Through Reading records deployed service members reading books to their kids, hold it up, read the book. Then they send the video recording home to the child with a free copy of the book so that they can all read together. And when I heard this story, I said, “It’s lovely that they’re reading Cat in the Hat and There’s No Place Like Space, that’s all nice, but I want them to have a book that reflects their story. ‘This is where I am, I miss you, but I’m fine. You’re fine. I’m fine. It’s fine.'”
And the first thing I did was I interviewed service members, spouses, partners, and kids. It took me months. I have notebooks full of this stuff about what it’s like to walk away from your three-year-old and hope you’ll be back to see her someday, to serve our country and keep us safe. And I got inspired to write the book. And the people I interviewed gave me tips to put in the book for young families facing this for the first time. And one of my favorites was an early interview, she said, it’s in here. “When my husband leaves, he traces his hand on paper and I put it up next to the door so the kids can give him a high five every time they leave.” Really.
So Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart, helping military families send love from far away. I was honored to write it. I’ve received a lot of big awards for it and it’s really a passion project for me because I cannot imagine my son walking away from my granddaughters for a year, but it happens every day.
And then the funny thing about Alaska, this is really funny, here’s Alaska. I actually was going to —
Tim Ferriss: Alaska is a little stuffed dog.
Tish Rabe: He’s a little stuffed dog. I went to buy my granddaughter a little present and he literally fell in my bag and I’m looking at him and going, “Well, he’s awful cute.” And then I thought, “Wow.” I was right in the middle of writing Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart. A lot of service members have to leave their pets. It’s horrible. Because they get relocated, and sometimes can’t take them with them.
I said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to have the Bear Family have a dog.” There he is, right there, and have him adopted from a shelter. Then I thought, “Well, there’s a lot of training in Alaska.” I Googled. One thing, all of you, if you ever want to create a character, first thing you do is Google the name. Because, for me, if I find out that I was going to name him Tony, I’ve put in Tony the dog, and there already is one, I would name him something else. It’s just not worth the hassle. I put in Alaska, and the only thing that came up was Alaskan Huskies, but not the name Alaska. I named him Alaska.
But the cool thing was, I sent one of these little dogs to my art director and my illustrator. From the first minute, she was able to put him in the book the way he really looks. That’s him getting adopted from the shelter. One of the things that happens to service members is they all said to me that the hardest thing is missing their families, and missing the day-to-day little stuff. In the Bear Family, Daddy Bear is on a location, and they adopt Alaska while he’s gone. In the last page of the book is Alaska jumping on him because they just met. This is like —
I also wanted to have this little dog, so the kids are reading the book, and they also have a little soft guy to go with it. He’s on my website. Right, Alaska? “Yes.” Anyway, yes, really inspired to write that one.
Tim Ferriss: Is the best place for people to find the book and Alaska at tishrabebooks.com? Where would you suggest they find the book?
Tish Rabe: Yes. The book and Alaska are on tishrabebooks.com. We have e-commerce all set up. You’re just ready to go home, right, with anybody?
Yes, that was another fun thing. Who’d ever made a plush dog before? The nice thing was the only thing they had to do was put his little bandana on because this is the real dog I found, but he says Alaska, and the name of the book. They didn’t have to build a whole new dog to adopt.
Tim Ferriss: The spelling, folks, I’ll just remind you. Rabe is R-A-B-E, so T-I-S-H-R-A-B-E, books.com. What else can people find on your website? What else will people find there?
Tish Rabe: There’s a lot going on in my website. I have a lot of books in development. I just started my company. This always makes me laugh. This one is called Days Can Be Sunny for Bunnies and Money. I got a call from a bank in Ohio. They wanted something for kids, because financial literacy is a huge thing. You’ve got to start young. I came up with these three bunnies. They’re triplets. Honey Fern likes to earn, Sunny Dave likes to save, and Funny Ben likes to spend.
Anyway, the thing goes on. At the end, they also give some of their eggs to the library. This is them giving them eggs to the library. I love doing content-based books, something that’s going to teach somebody about something. I’ve got a big new book coming out in a month. That’s actually all about Central Park, New York.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no kidding?
Tish Rabe: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Fun.
Tish Rabe: It’s a rhyming storybook. Central Park You Can See is the Best Place to Be, that’s coming out.
Tim Ferriss: How did that come about?
Tish Rabe: It was funny. We moved here to Mystic. I’ve never had this exactly happen before, but I joined the small business, The Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce, right?
Tim Ferriss: Uh-hmm.
Tish Rabe: Because I thought, “Well, I’m running this tiny company by myself. Maybe there are other people who are running small companies who could help me with advice or something.” I go to this coffee shop to meet their head of membership, the Mystic Chamber of Commerce head of membership. Honestly, I think she’s going to want me to put something about me on her website or something.
She literally looks at me and says, “We have a huge anniversary coming up. Would you write a children’s book about our town?” I remember looking at her. It was February 8th. I’ll never forget it. I said, “Well, sure.” I said, “When do you need it by?” She looks at me, and she goes, “July?” I remember looking at her going, “Ah, sure, when you need it.”
Anyway, here it is. Mystic by the Sea is the Best Place to Be. But the thing that was amazing, and this has never happened to me before, we’re at Mystic Seaport, in a coffee shop. I’m looking right at her, beautiful, beautiful young woman. She says, “Can you get it done that fast?” I thought, “Aye.”
All of a sudden, I saw four seagulls fly over her head, right in the middle of a coffee shop. Obviously, they weren’t real seagulls. But in my head, I saw four seagulls. I got to my car. I said, “I’ve got it.” It’s a family of seagulls who fly all over Mystic looking at the seaport, the aquarium, the boats, blah, blah, blah, blah. I wrote the whole thing in two days. This is downtown Mystic.
Who knows where these ideas come from? I don’t know. But that was the first time I ever had a complete hallucination in a coffee shop.
Tim Ferriss: Then, was Central Park something that you wanted to do or did that come to you a different way?
Tish Rabe: I work with a friend of mine whose name is Jennifer Perry. She was this vice president and publisher of Sesame Street Books for a long time. As soon as I started Tish Rabe Books, she came on as my executive editor. But interesting thing about her, she is a trained greeter, G-R-E-E-T-E-R, greeter, at Central Park in New York.
She came to me, and she said, “Every single family comes in with the kids in the stroller,” and blah, blah, blah.” The first thing they ask is, “What should I show my kids? Where should I take my children?” She said, “They need a book. They need a rhyming children’s book.” I was kind of like, “Okay.”
Literally, Central Park is 843 acres of open land, lakes, and waterfalls. How to get that into 24 pages? I was like, “Sure, I got it.” It’s taken a bit for us to get that done, but it’s coming out in a month, and a half.
Tim Ferriss: Exciting. Very exciting.
Tish Rabe: I’m working on a big campaign, which is going very well, to get people to help me fund free copies of the Central Park book to kids in underserved neighborhoods in the five boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn.
Again, when I met your friend, Elan, from this group in New York, this influencer’s group, I met a young woman who said, “I’ll help you do this.” It’s on the landing page of my website. We are absolutely crowdfunding enough money to give a book to every first-grader in the underserved communities —
Tim Ferriss: Wow, I’m kind of excited.
Tish Rabe: — of the five boroughs in New York. Very exciting.
Tim Ferriss: I love that. I may have a group that could be also maybe of interest or could be interested in the book itself.
Tish Rabe: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: DonorsChoose.org, which I was involved with. I suppose, I still am, but was involved with for ages, in any case.
Tish Rabe: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Certainly, we’ll link to the website, and link the crowdfunding separately for people who would like to contribute to that.
You mentioned 24 pages. Is that the canonical length?
Tish Rabe: Uh-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: That’s probably not the right modifier, but is that the default length of most children’s books?
Tish Rabe: They’re all kind of all over the place. The Dr. Seuss books, these books are 42 pages. What’s happening is hopefully, we hope, hope, hope, is that parents read to their kids when they’re going to sleep or when they’re home from school. It’s kind of tricky because if they’re too long, it gets too much.
Starting my own company, I thought, “Well, let me start with 24 pages.” The interesting thing also to share, we do other languages, here’s Sweet Dreams in Spanish, and also pace of not a million words on a page, kids love to turn pages. There’s a whole kind of part of this that’s just how it works.
Tim Ferriss: Adults like to turn pages too.
Tish Rabe: Exactly. Exactly. They go, “Are we going to see more artwork here or what?”
The other thing I urge people who want to write a children’s book is to really think about the illustrator. I had worked with Gill Guile in London on a number of books. We did the Huff and Puff train books. I knew for this book, which is all about reading, snuggling, and going to sleep, that she was the perfect illustrator.
A book like Bunnies and Money, it’s supposed to be funny. It’s this wacky group of kids. This is another kind of artwork. It really depends on what your message is, and what your style is, of who you pick.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re stuck on a book, if that ever happens, but let’s just say something’s not working, what’s your go to move? Do you change the idea, the meter, the sentence? How do you start to get unstuck, if something doesn’t work?
Tish Rabe: I did a presentation to a group of writers called Girls Write, W-R-I-T-E, Now. I had young women in the room with me, and then we had Zoom calls across the country. It was the first time anyone has asked me if I get writer’s block. No one has ever asked me that. This was a couple months ago.
I remember thinking, “Yes, I do.” What I do is if I get hired to write a book, and I still write for other people, I just finished another book for Harper Collins. If they say, “We have to have your first draft by April 1st,” I write in, “It’s due February 15th.” Because I know there’s going to be a day when I cannot do this. I can’t figure it out. It’s not going anywhere. I’m stuck. When that happens, I stop.
If I just say, “I cannot think one more minute about what Funny Ben spends his money on,” just a for instance, I will let it go, work on something else, work on another book, do something. Because it is true. You get circled in, like a self dissolve in. You’re just so, so consumed by it.
This is a great example of that. This is interesting. This is the one that I wrote, Oh, the Things You Can Do That Are Good for You! This was the only time that I got this assignment. Honestly, Tim, I thought that is the most boring idea I have ever heard.
The American Academy of Pediatrics wanted a book about go to sleep, eat healthy, exercise. I thought, “Oh, I can’t.” Oh, my God. First of all, you cannot write this stuff without sounding preachy. “Do this, do that, do this, do that.”
I got my courage up, and I called Random House. I said, “How would you feel if I created my own Dr. Seuss’ characters like Zing singing Zans who loves washing her hands?” My editor at Random House said, “We cannot call Mrs. Geisel, and say that you, mother of two, living in Connecticut, are going to start writing Dr. Seuss characters. All you can do is write the whole book, 42 pages, all rhyming, and we’ll submit it to her. If she turns it down, you’ve got to start over.” I go, “Oh, great. Okay.”
I write the whole book. Here’s one. Here’s the Zing singing Zans who loves washing her hands. “Wishly, washy, washly, wish, squishily, squashily, squashily, squish. Wash your hands carefully. It’s up to you. You soap in warm water. It’s easy to do. Rinse them, and while we all sing this refrain, germs from your hands will slide right down the drain.”
For sure, fine. Okay. I turn this in. I go, “Oh, boy.” I told my husband, “Plan B does not exist.” I had the Sneeze Snicker Sneeze who loves brushing her teeth. Anyway, they loved it. Thank you, Mrs. Geisel. They put it out.
Michelle Obama funded 16 additional pages with exercises and all kinds of stuff she loves. But that was a perfect example of, “What am I going to do?” I said, “This is so boring.” It turned out to be a huge bestseller, but it is funny.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to land the plane in just a few minutes. This has been so fun, but I wanted to also ask you, 1982, Big Bird in China, what was that like?
Tish Rabe: That was really an extraordinary situation. We were the first crew allowed into China, the first film crew. A couple news guys had been in, but it was the first time anybody walked into China with a six-foot yellow bird, among other things.
Somehow, we got permission to shoot this thing. I don’t know how. We walked in, and they shipped one Big Bird costume. I was, I wonder what I was, associate producer at that point, I guess. They literally said to us, “You cannot shoot this bird in the rain. They’re hand painted. They’re hand-dyed feathers. If it starts to rain, you’ve got to pull Caroll Spinney out of it. You’ve got to put it somewhere dry.”
I thought I really knew what I was doing. I scheduled 13 rain days. We were there a month in China. It poured the first 13 days. I mean, poured, not just a little rain. We would literally push him out, and have him do one line.
“I don’t know. Should we go this way or that way?” Move! Pull him back in, and change him. It was nuts.
Okay. But it did win the Emmy for best special for NBC. It was a 90-minute special. That was another thing that was crazy. We got all the way back —
Tim Ferriss: That’s long.
Tish Rabe: Oh, my God. We got back with all this footage. First thing NBC said, “You know, maybe it should just be an hour.” We’re all looking at each other because it had had a really complicated plot. He’s looking to find the Phoenix; at the end, he finds the Phoenix. How do you cut the middle out?
Anyway, we did air as 90 minutes. But for us, it was just crazy. I mean, absolutely everything that possibly could have gone wrong went wrong. But we came home with it somehow, but it was really something.
Tim Ferriss: How long were you there until?
Tish Rabe: We were there a month. There’s no coffee. You guys, you can’t have a film crew with no coffee. You just can’t. The first day, everyone’s looking at me and going, “Where’s the coffee?” I’m like, “Coffee? We’re in China. No, tea is tea. Have a cup of tea.” They didn’t want tea. They wanted coffee. I said, “Well, you guys are going to have to get it together because it’s not going to happen.” Oh, man.
Tim Ferriss: 1982.
Tish Rabe: It was crazy, 1982.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Tish Rabe: I sing a song on that one. I sang the Monkey King song on that show. But anyway, it was crazy, crazy.
Tim Ferriss: How fun. What an experience. What an experience.
Tish Rabe: The only thing I would say real quick is there was a five-year-old little girl from China, and she has the lead. She and Big Bird travel all around. She spoke no English, zero. She didn’t even know how to say “Hello.” They taught this to this little girl by rote. She finally understood what “I love you” meant, finally, by the last day of the shoot, whatever.
But we would send them scripts, and then we would change the scripts. But then we met her, and she’d memorize the original ones. You’d be out in this shooting outdoors, and all of a sudden she’d say, “I don’t know, Big Bird. Let’s find out.” We’d go, “We cut that. Didn’t we cut that a year ago? Wait a minute.” It was crazy. We shot at the Great Wall of China at 4:00 in the morning. Anyway, that’s another whole story.
Tim Ferriss: What a wild experience.
Tish Rabe: Wild.
Tim Ferriss: I was in China at two universities in 1996, I guess it was. It is just a different experience entirely now. I can only imagine 1982.
Tish Rabe: The interesting thing for us was, yes, there’s a billion people. But back then, they were all walking everywhere and bicycles. Now, of course, it’s cars. But just the sheer volume of people was just amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Mind-boggling. Yeah.
Tish Rabe: Mind-boggling.
Tim Ferriss: I got there at the tail end of the bicycles. I got to see people in big green jackets. It gets cold depending on where you are. It can get really chilly. But what a wild experience.
Tish Rabe: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Tish, let me ask you a question. This is a metaphorical question, but it’s a question I like to ask guests. That is, if you could put a message, could be lyrics, could be a line, a quote, a mantra, anything at all on a huge billboard for lots of people or lots of kids to see, does anything come to mind that you might put on that billboard?
Tish Rabe: Wow. I would say right now, I would say, remember the children are our most precious gift. I get concerned about the way the world is going. I just want everybody to remember that they are the most precious part of our world. Because they are the future, they are the dreams of the future, and we must take good care of them. And read, read, read.
Tim Ferriss: Read, read, read. Read, read, read. I hope you keep writing, writing, writing as well.
Tish Rabe: That is the plan, I have to say.
Tim Ferriss: That is the plan.
Tish, is there anything else you’d like to mention? Any closing comments, anything at all you’d like to cover or point people to before we —
Tish Rabe: One thing I would like to say, I have another big book coming out. It’s called Kindness is Caring, Friendship is Sharing. It is written with International Rotary Clubs. Rotary clubs are all across the country, all around the world. It comes out in three weeks. It’s a gentle story. It takes place in Africa, a little zebra. It’s about just that. Friendship, caring, sharing, and making the world a kinder place.
I think the world has never needed it more. I’m very proud of it. It’ll be out in three weeks. I just think we all have to be kind to each other, and I’m doing the best I can to make that happen.
Tim Ferriss: We do. Rotary Club, amazing, amazing organization also.
Tish Rabe: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: We have some very, very old friends who I met who came through Rotary Club.
Tish Rabe: The other thing, too, that’s fun about it is it’s a book for kids. But when young parents read it, we’re hoping that they see it, learn about Rotary and say, “Well, let me find a Rotary in my community.” We can get some new members, and keep going. We’ll see.
Tim Ferriss: I love it. I love it. Tish, you’re such a joy to spend time with.
Tish Rabe: Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Tish Rabe: You too. It was fun.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you so much. Everybody listening, we will link to all things in the show notes, but do not miss going to Tish Rabe Books. It’s T-I-S-H-R-A-B-E, books.com. Contribute to the crowdfunding, and buy a few books while you’re at it. We’ll link to all of your social media, and so on. But people, definitely check out TishRabebooks.com. We’ll link to other things that have come up in this conversation at tim.blog/podcast. You’ll be easy to find. You’re the only Tish.
Tish Rabe: I know. I know. There’s only a few of us out there, which is a beautiful thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, beautiful. It makes it very easy to find you.
To everybody listening, as always, this is how I close my shows. Be just a bit kinder than is necessary when you stop listening and go on with your day, not just to others, but also to yourself.
Tish Rabe: That’s lovely.
Tim Ferriss: Tish, what a wonderful, wonderful time. I really appreciate you making the time to have this conversation.
Tish Rabe: You’re welcome then.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I hope we cross paths again.
Tish Rabe: Yeah. I’ll end with what I say to the kids. Reading and writing, books are so exciting. Read a book or write a story, start right now.
Tim Ferriss: That’s how we close. Perfect!
Tish Rabe: Thank you so much.Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tish Rabe — 200+ Children’s Books, Getting Picked for Dr. Seuss, Lessons from Early Sesame Street, How to Write 300+ Songs, and More (#854) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-19 04:50:43
Tish Rabe (@tishrabebooks) is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 children’s books, with more than 11 million copies sold. She has written for Sesame Street, Disney, PBS Kids, Curious George, Clifford, and many more. In 1991, following the death of Dr. Seuss, she was asked by Random House to write The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library, a series of science books for early readers that were the brainchild of Dr. Seuss, who died before he could finish the first one. Tish has written more than 50 Cat in the Hat books as well as books for the Grinch and the Lorax.
Trained as a professional singer, she began her career as the music production assistant for Sesame Street in its first seasons and was hired by Jim Henson to sing for the Muppets. She has written more than 300 children’s songs for broadcast television, is an animation head writer and scriptwriter, was a creative consultant for the Cartoon Network, Scholastic, and HBO Family and now heads her own children’s book publishing company, Tish Rabe Books.
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“Tish Rabe’s a mom who thinks that it’s cool to be home rhyming rhymes while her kids are at school.” — Tish Rabe
“You do not have to have kids to write for kids.” — Tish Rabe
“My first job was hiring the jingle singers in Manhattan to sing with Jim Henson’s Muppets. So I sang all day. I sang when I typed, and I sang when I filed, and I sang when I answered the phone. ‘Sesame Street, may I help you?’ Well, after a year, everybody was so tired of listening to me sing all the time that they said, ‘Would you like to sing on Sesame Street with the Muppets?'” — Tish Rabe
“There is nothing like giving a book to a child who doesn’t have a book. I am on this lifetime mission of trying to get free books to kids who don’t have any.” — Tish Rabe
“Remember: the children are our most precious gift. I get concerned about the way the world is going. I just want everybody to remember that they are the most precious part of our world. Because they are the future, they are the dreams of the future, and we must take good care of them. And read, read, read.” — Tish Rabe
“I really encourage everybody. Everybody’s always, ‘Yeah, but you’ve got this beautiful voice, and you sing all the time, and I can’t sing.’ And I just try to say to everybody—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—you can sing. It doesn’t matter if it’s croaky, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, the only voice your child wants to hear is yours.” — Tish Rabe
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Want to hear another episode with someone who knows how to make people of all ages light up? Listen to my first conversation with Elan Lee, co-creator of Exploding Kittens and the mutual friend who introduced me to Tish, in which we discussed how to raise millions on Kickstarter, deconstructing mega-successes, secrets of game design, the power of positive constraints, the delights of craftsmanship, turning fans into superfans, and much more.
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2026-02-13 13:40:28
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Jordan Jonas (@hobojordo). Jordan grew up on a farm in Idaho, rode freight trains across the US, spent time in remote Russian villages, fur trapped and travelled for several years with nomads in Siberia, and won Alone Season 6, after being the first contestant to truly thrive in the wilderness and harvest big game. He now leads people from all over the world and all walks of life on extraordinary outdoor adventures, facilitating once-in-a-lifetime wilderness expeditions, hunts, family adventures, and team-building events.
Books, music, and people mentioned in the interview
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: Jordan, great to see you, man.
Jordan Jonas: Good to see you, Tim. Good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ve upgraded our interaction to in person because for those who are listening, we had some audio glitches, some technological woes, and we just decided to do it in person. So here we are.
Jordan Jonas: Fun.
Tim Ferriss: And I have twice the number of pooches, meaning two versus one since you last saw me, got a stray adopted a few days ago. We’re also drinking what people might think are ridiculously heavy pours of whiskey, but this is not whiskey. This is Lake Missoula Tea Company, Lake Missoula Breakfast. It is delicious. Just a bit of caffeine, a little bit of a topper, let’s call it.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. We just both arrived in some city we’re not from.
Tim Ferriss: At high altitude.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And we’re just getting back into the groove of the conversation. So we are going to get to Russia, but first I wanted you to, and they just tie together, I suppose, explain what we have here on the table besides the tea. Because you made the joke, even if the interview’s not going very well. Might as well have this —
Jordan Jonas: — the handle this way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the handle is pointed towards you. What are we looking at?
Jordan Jonas: What we’re looking at is an axe. It’s one I’ve kind of designed specifically using the knowledge and experience I have had in Siberia in particular with the native folks and such. It’s got some unique features, some that I’ve really grown to love. So in the forest, first off, just to set the foundation, the one tool you need is an axe to give yourself a chance at survival.
Tim Ferriss: More than a knife.
Jordan Jonas: More than a knife because you can do all the things you can do with a knife. You could get a fire, you could build some traps, you can get through the ice. It just kind of gives you the ability to do everything, maybe not as well as you want. But as the Natives would say, “The one tool you need is an axe,” and I concur. So the problem though is that a lot of people in the States don’t know what a good axe is. And so you’ll go buy one at Lowe’s and go home. It just doesn’t do the job you need. So I designed one that has all the features I like. It’s kind of a Siberian axe head shape with some of the Evenki modifications.
Tim Ferriss: The Evenki being the native people.
Jordan Jonas: The Evenki are the Natives, nomadic folks that I lived with, they live in the woods all the time, so they kind of know what they like. And so some of the features of this axe in particular, most interestingly is it’s sharpened from one side.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a single bevel.
Jordan Jonas: It’s a single bevel grind, which means you have to have a right or a left-handed axe based on what you are. But what that allows you to do is when you’re in the woods, very often you’ll be carving things, whether you’re building a sleigh or building a trap or building whatever it might be. And it really helps it work as a planer and really helps do accurate work that way. It also on most trees that you chop down in the woods, they’re quite narrow. You’re rarely chopping down a giant cedar tree. You’re going to be chopping down things about the size of your arm, and a couple swings with this bevel design and you can slice right through them.
Tim Ferriss: Assuming it is matched to your dominant hand?
Jordan Jonas: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So that it’s sticking instead of deflecting.
Jordan Jonas: Exactly, exactly. So if you picture a bevel hitting against the tree, if it’s ground off on that side, there’s a bit of a deflection. And by grinding it from the opposite side, when it hits that tree, it just bites right in.
Tim Ferriss: I guess you have some experience with deflection.
Jordan Jonas: Deflection. Yes, we do. And yeah, just to finalize a few last points, you’ll notice on a lot of American axes, they have a narrow eye.
Tim Ferriss: And can you describe the eye? The eye is basically — you have the axe — what would you call it?
Jordan Jonas: Blade.
Tim Ferriss: Blade. Right. There’s the hole through which the handle would fit.
Jordan Jonas: On a Siberian axe, it’s quite wide, which allows you in the field to repair it with a solid piece of wood. And you can slide the handle through like a tomahawk. From the top, the handle goes all the way on. That way, when you swing, the pressure is always tightening the head. You don’t need wedges and all that, which is a cool design. There’s a bunch of other little nuances to the design. I don’t want to bore you too long, but Tim knows, he’s been up in the woods with me and we got to use it a bunch. I got to show him how to use it.
Tim Ferriss: It’s incredible how versatile an axe is. I mean, the number of ways that you used it. Also, just side note, I never really thought about this, but for people who are wondering about this bevel description that I gave, you could think of — there’s certain chef’s knives, especially Western chef’s knives that are double beveled. They’re sharpened from both sides in. So if you buy a cheap knife sharpener, it generally looks like a V. You’re sharpening it from both sides. But if you look at a lot of Japanese chef’s knives, single bevel, given the way they use it in cutting fish kind of horizontally.
And I recall seeing you when we first went out, our first day in the wilderness in Montana and just a quick sidebar, one of my friends, because the forecast was fantastic. It was a bluebird day and it was his first time going out on a real camping trip and he’s like, “I think I might just leave the rain gear at the rental spot.” And I was like, “That is the last thing you — just put it at the bottom. Stick it somewhere.” And then it was torrential downpour.
Jordan Jonas: We got a legit downpour.
Tim Ferriss: We got hammered. And even though it wasn’t particularly cold, you end up feeling cold very, very quickly. And when we arrived at, I suppose, the first camp, which maybe was sort of a premature stop because of the cold and the rain.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was pretty chilly.
Tim Ferriss: And it was incredible how quickly, number one, my friend Mike and I both were having trouble zippering our jackets, even though it was not even winter. And then watching you use the axe to, maybe you could describe this, but when you take a larger stick, people think of fire building and they think of perhaps having like the fat wood and then you have some type of cotton ball or tinder, but when you’re out in the woods, you’re not necessarily sure you could pack these things, but if you’re improvising, what blew me away was how you use the axe to create feathers. Can you explain what that is?
Jordan Jonas: You want a really sharp axe once you get control of it, they’re dangerous. We’ll go to the deflection story. But once you’re a master of the axe, you can go in a downpour, torrential downpour, chop down a dead standing tree because you might see dead trees on the ground, but it’s amazing, particularly in the spring when they’ve spent a whole winter absorbing moisture, it’s amazing how wet they will be. And so dead standing, find something, chop it down, and then split it, chop a smaller piece out of the middle, and then split that open. And once you’ve got it split open, you’re to that dry wood, and it never gets wet because it was standing. And so you then split that piece open a couple of times, you get a nice edge on it. And then with the axe, you can just run your axe down that wood with the right amount of control and practice and make some really fine curls that’ll catch a spark. So you don’t even need a lighter or you don’t need anything like that.
Tim Ferriss: And what was also counterintuitive to me is you don’t even have to take those off of the split piece of this internal wood.
Jordan Jonas: Easier if you don’t. It’s easier if you leave a big bundle of this curled wood.
Tim Ferriss: So imagine guys, if you would, you have, let’s just for simplicity’s sake, right? Say that you have a fully intact log of wood that’s about the thickness of your arm, and there are very particular ways to do this safely, like leaning it against a larger fallen tree.
Jordan Jonas: There’s a lot of nuance here.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of nuance, but you split that in half. So now you have, if you’re looking kind of down the barrel of each of these split pieces, they’re half circles. And then you chop those into even quarters, let’s say. Then you stand one up and you’re using the axe, which takes a lot of fine motor control to kind of shave down these thin pieces of wood that then curl as you’re pushing it down and then you go a little bit higher, you do the same thing, you do it again, you do it again. You end up with all of these — it almost looks like a fiddle head fern or something where they’re all rolled together and then —
Jordan Jonas: And then in fire making too, in survival in the woods, it’s great to have a lighter. It’s great to have matches. They all make it so much easier to start a fire, but they’ll occasionally fail you and they’ll fail you when you need them the most. And so I always carry also just a ferro rod, which is very — it just makes sparks, basically. You scrape it and it makes sparks. But with that, you need a fine paper thin material to catch the sparks and light it up. And that’s what you’re making with the axe curls.
And so we were in a big downpour and even that can be difficult because when it’s really raining, you got to be really careful that you’ve made all these curls, that they don’t get soaked before you get the spark on them. So we made a quick tripod, draped a tarp over it and tucked under that to actually build our fire, made a few sparks and got that burning. You can then make some not so fine curls, make some really quick rough ones and throw that on top. It catches, and pretty soon you have a fire, which is amazing how life-giving it is in those situations. Everybody’s depressed and wet.
Tim Ferriss: Particularly like soaking wet, hands aren’t really functioning, and then the fire, once you get a critical mass and you’re able to warm your hands, my buddy Mike, I remember he said, he’s like, “Yeah, no wonder we’ve worshiped fire for so long.” Obvious. All right, so this axe, and I’m thrilled to have one of these, and we’ll put up an additional shorter video on my YouTube channel, which is just Tim Ferriss. What is your YouTube channel?
Jordan Jonas: Hobo Jordo, actually.
Tim Ferriss: And we will explain why.
Jordan Jonas: I have an Instagram at that too, which I also put videos up on.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll put up some videos of the axe and maybe have you demo some of the more non-obvious ways of using it. Before we get to the rewind and looking at how on Earth you ended up in Russia, let’s not let go of the loose end of the deflection story. So what does it look like if you get over-enthusiastic and you don’t quite have the control yet?
Jordan Jonas: An axe has a learning curve, especially when you have a really well-made axe and you’re swinging it hard to get the jobs you need done, done. When I did go to Russia, I was a little in over my head. I had grown up on a farm and used an axe more than probably your typical American, but not like they do over there by any means.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, these axes are as sharp — they’re sharper than most kitchen knives you would find in an Airbnb. I mean, they’re very, very sharp.
Jordan Jonas: Yep. And so they just use them way more than I would. And I was trying to keep up, I was trying to be productive and in doing so I was in a hurry. So this is going to take a slight bit of a backstory, but the Natives over there will build these huge 30 kilometer circumference fences out of only logs interlocking. They have no nails, nothing up there because there are none around. And so there’s a specific technique to doing that. Partly that involves chopping a tree down and then you step your foot on it and then you split that tree on that cut end. So you’re taking a big swing and swinging right where your foot sort of is. And that tree is not flat like it was cut with a saw. It’s got an angle like it was cut with an axe. And so there’s a real deflection possibility there if you don’t have it down.
And so I’m trying to keep up, smack, hitting my boot. And we’re in the middle of Siberia. I can’t get another rubber boot. We’re working in swamps. It was very disappointing. Went home, had a cut on my foot, back to home which is a tipi, had a cut on my foot, kind of bandaged it up, tried to patch my boot as best I could. Go back out next day, same thing. And then make a long story short, I chopped the heck out of my boots. And then finally one of the native guys was like, “Hey, you know what, Jordan? I think five years ago I left a boot upside down on a stump, five miles that way.” And so we spent a whole day, we got our reindeer, packed them up, rode these reindeer up and over the mountain. Sure enough, there’s a stump with a boot upside down on it. And these are natural rubber boots. And so I could like, it was smaller than my foot, but I could squeeze my foot in there and I was like, “Great, this is awesome.”
Back at it another day or two and swing, I chopped it. And I was so frustrated. I mean, it was annoying that I cut my boot open. I got mad and I swung with one hand at the tree and then here comes — it deflects off and rips right into my knee and I hammered my knee. In the long run, I went and got checked out many months later, but I mostly severed the MCL, split the bone. It was quite a gnarly injury and I was stuck out there. I had to crawl back to the tipi. I knew I was kind of in shock. So I was like, “I got to get back to the tipi before I feel this,” which was a couple kilometers away. So I kind of just bailed out, told everybody like, “Hey, I’m going back to tipi.”
And then I got there and man, it was a lot of pain. I had had surgery on my other knee not long before, so that was my good leg I chopped. And then I was stuck in that tipi for several days. I couldn’t even move. Even to poop, I had a plastic bag, I had to go in that and then roll to the edge of the tipi and stuff it out. I couldn’t even stand on either leg. It was pretty miserable. And they were out building that fence. So it was a few days later, they finally came back and I was still recovering on the tipi floor.
Tim Ferriss: What did you do or what did they do in terms of “first aid?” They’re like, “Here’s a poultice made of God knows what, slap it on, walk it off, you’ll be fine.”
Jordan Jonas: Which is mostly what it was. It was very simple. We went over to a spruce tree that was bleeding a bunch of sap out and went over there and scraped a bunch of that sap off with the axe and then just put that on my wound. This is right at the start, right when I got it, packed the wound with that sap. Then I went back and shockingly enough, we’re out in the woods and the dirt and the rusty axe or whatever, it never got infected at all. Healed up as best it could. A few days later when they came back, Andrei, one of the native guys, brought me a little cane he carved for me, which was nice. And so then the next couple of days I caned around and then got to where I could get back out on the fence again and help out. But it was quite a lesson. That was my first time with them and yeah, I was in over my head a little bit, high learning curve.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a memorable lesson.
Jordan Jonas: Memorable lesson. I was pretty miserable in that tipi for a few days.
PREROLL?
Tim Ferriss: So it sounds like you got close to quite a few of the locals and can you describe, hopefully this is enough of a cue because you told me about this when we were out in the woods in the mountains, but it involves the — we picked up a few Russian words on this trip and I think one of them was durak. So if that’s enough of a cue, in terms of warm welcome, what was your first arrival like?
Jordan Jonas: This was probably 2005 or ’06, and I was heading over to Russia the first time and didn’t know what to expect, but we land in the Moscow airport and instead of having like a bus or something come up to our airplane, it was like a farm tractor, this blue farm tractor and a wooden trailer. And I was like, “No way!” We get off the plane and we’re climbing into this trailer. And so of course I took a picture and this officer standing over there, durak, which means, like, idiot. That was the first greeting in Russia. Came over to my phone, made me delete it, and welcome to Russia. So that was fitting, fitting start.
Tim Ferriss: I guess it’s not that different from how you would probably get treated at JFK.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, totally started taking pictures. Fair enough. Fair enough. A little bit of cultural ignorance.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So let’s go back then to the impetus, the catalyst, just as a skeletal backstory that we’re going to dive into, but where’d you grow up?
Jordan Jonas: I grew up in Idaho, on a farm in North Idaho for the most part.
Tim Ferriss: So did you grow up learning Russian from family members, then studying in school and then going to Russia?
Jordan Jonas: No, I never thought particularly a lot about Russia, although I was really into history. And so I had read a lot about World War II, Russian war memoirs, all this I’d read and really was impacted by The Gulag Archipelago. So I had a familiarity with Russia, but it was never a destination that I had thought about. And lived a fairly typical beginning of life, got a job when I was 13, worked, work, worked. And then when I was about 18, my brother invited me to ride freight trains, so that kind of sent me on that path.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to skip forward from there and come back to why —
Jordan Jonas: Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: — Hobo Jordo.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So what on Earth happened that led to actually getting on a plane?
Jordan Jonas: I grew up in a Christian household and I had seen the fruit of that path in my life. I’d seen it in people around me, my family history, I really valued it and it was really meaningful to me. But as I was a teenager and growing up, I had a lot of questions that I hadn’t had satisfactorily answered.
And so I found myself, although I really valued Christianity and saw it as very good, I found myself in a place where I was struggling to connect with it on any level. And so I was in a fairly dark place as a young man there. And I remember at that time I had read this particular verse and it basically said, “He who follows the path of righteousness and is in the darkness continue.” And that struck me at the time because like, okay, there’s people that try to do the right thing and are still in darkness and that, so that’s okay. But it didn’t answer a lot of the questions I had and I didn’t want to bulldoze it all because I had seen that it was good. And I also knew I was young and ignorant.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by bulldoze it?
Jordan Jonas: Well, I didn’t want to take my faith and Christianity and everything that it meant and just —
Tim Ferriss: Discard it.
Jordan Jonas: Say I’m going to discard it and go my own way as an 18-year-old or whatever.
Tim Ferriss: What types of questions did you have?
Jordan Jonas: They were actually fairly simple. And this goes to the next answer, but my two main questions were one, like surely, though, your Earth is not 6,000 years old? And then two was I just had a hard time matching up Old Testament ethics with Christ’s message and I just didn’t know how to do those things. And so I had a lot of what I would call cultural baggage. There was a lot of baggage with my faith, but because I recognized it as good, I was like, “I’m going to try to stick with it, but I have to separate the baby from the bath water.” And that’s kind of a daunting task because it’s kind of a lifelong journey of faith, but I was given a great boost by the fact that actually Jesus did, He said in one part of the New Testament, He says, to give a summary, “But what’s the point of the law and the prophets? What is all this for?” And He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.”
And so I was shocked when I read it because I was like, “Wow, wait a second. He takes all the bath water and throws it out for you and leaves you the baby, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.” That was the whole point of the law and the prophets and everything else. And so I didn’t have to figure everything else out at the time and I was okay with seeing if that would play out. And like I said, I’d seen enough fruit that I didn’t want to bulldoze it.
Tim Ferriss: What kind of fruit had you seen for yourself?
Jordan Jonas: My mom, for one, was like a real woman of faith and we’d always had like single moms come over and live at the house and she would always work to give gifts, Christmas gifts to prisoners’ children that are out. Always had her acting in the world in love. And in my own life, as a young man, you’ve got this thing, this ideal that’s pushing against your natural lust and this and that. It kind of throws a wrench into your natural tendencies, whether that be to anger or to — it overlays your life with a love ideal. And I saw that as good.
I chose at that time with those two bits of information that like continue even in the darkness and that I can like put everything else on pause, the only thing I need to, like, accept or not accept is like, love the Lord, that core. And I was like, “I’m okay with accepting that.” And then I had this really deep prayer that like someday I just wish I had the faith to match, but I didn’t actually know if I per se believed it. I just knew that I’m going to do it anyway.
In that time I was also traveling and going to New York and going to Virginia and running all around and I had heard of this opportunity to go to Russia and build an orphanage. So that was the first thought of Russia. And again, it was distant and I didn’t think much of it, but I did pray, “Well, if you want me to go Lord, you’re going to have to give me a sign because I don’t have any reason to go.” And then I went to New York, it was kind of a flippant prayer, I think. I went to New York and met a Russian there and she had offered to give me Russian lessons because the topic came up. And I did, and I don’t know what it was, but I think it was maybe either putting a face to a vague idea or an act of God or whatever you want to call it, but for some reason it hit me really emotionally.
I went back to my apartment there, my sister’s apartment and just would cry like, “Oh, man.” I felt like a heavy burden for — it wasn’t even directed at her, it was directed at this vague idea of going. And I couldn’t tell. Even at the time, I was like, “This could just be…” I couldn’t quite explain it, but it could be explicable, but also I could just accept it as the kick that I prayed for. And so I kind of did. And again, I still didn’t have the faith to match. Then I remember going, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go. I’m taking it as an answer.” I bought a ticket for a year and headed over to — I didn’t even really know where. And there was a guy over there, Justus Walker, awesome dude. He was heading up that orphanage building project. And so that was my only connection.
And then I remember on the train, it was hard for me to go because I had a girl I had to crush on and I wanted to pursue my education and maybe become an officer in the Marines, all these things I had ideas for. And then I was on this train and had given all that up on the Trans-Siberian Railway chugging across. And I remember just like, “Lord, if I could have one thing, someday give me faith to match my willingness to sacrifice.”
Anyway, so that was my kick into Russia, kind of open-ended and I just had one thing I was grasping, like, love your neighbor as yourself. Let me see if I can implement this in the world in whatever place I am. I wasn’t trying to per se do anything other than that. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Tell me if this is a fair read. I’ve often said to myself and to other people, and I absolutely borrowed it from someone else, I did not come up with this. But the general maxim that it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting, so act as if.
Jordan Jonas: Act as if. That’s very much so.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Jordan Jonas: And I think particularly when you’re dealing with something like apathy or love, or like how do you relate in the world? Like one thing that was clear is like, oh, well actually if you’re going to actually love things, it’s an action and so if we’re going to do this, let’s try to — you can’t be stagnant in that orientation, but I think that’s a good summary. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: How did you go from orphanage to Evenki?
Jordan Jonas: I went over to help Justus Walker build this orphanage, super — and that was neat, but it was just me. And he needed a lot of groundwork laid and wells dug, but he eventually had a crew lined up that was going to come over and actually frame the thing and put the thing up and do all that. So I was there kind of doing the groundwork. We dug a well and did all this stuff, but it was still pretty preliminary. And I was there for a few months. I really enjoyed being in Russia, but I was struck by the fact that I actually really want to live with Russians. And so I told that to Justus and he was like, “Well, let’s call the neighboring village.” He called him up and the guy was like, “Whoa, yeah, absolutely send the American over. My wife’s in the hospital and I need someone to watch my kids.”
Tim Ferriss: How long had you been there at that point?
Jordan Jonas: About three months, I would guess.
Tim Ferriss: How much Russian did you speak at that point?
Jordan Jonas: Very little, very little. I was trying to pick it up, but that was part of the problem is Justus was so much — he’s one of the most well-read people I’ve ever been with, so it was so fun to just talk to him and so —
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot easier than working on your ABCs.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, exactly. And so I was not doing it to the — and when you first go to a country, you’re so struck by how much you can communicate non-verbally and then you all of a sudden hit a wall. Okay. I wanted to get past that as fast as possible. So I went to that little village and was fully immersed in Siberian village life right there. It was pretty funny because I hadn’t dealt with kids before or anything like that. Yura had to go back to his lumber mill job. And so he was a big Russian dude with a big handshake, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.” And showed me around and here’s the kids, a five-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl, introduce, have some tea. Then the next day he’s already off to work. He pointed me where the grocery store is. So I was in the deep end trying to take care of these two kids. I’d never done that before, grocery shop for him. I didn’t even know the language. And yeah, that was my splash into Russia proper, I guess, in that regards.
Tim Ferriss: And then how do you get into reindeer territory?
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah. So then these guys would all — Yura had been to prison before and his —
Tim Ferriss: Who was that?
Jordan Jonas: Sorry, the Russian guy.
Tim Ferriss: The guy with the big hand.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, the big Russian — and his neighbor’s name was Igor and he had also been to prison. And these are all guys in Siberia with pretty storied pasts. They really enjoyed having me over there. For one, I was really trying to just work hard and, it was so random for them to have an American that they would kind of tug-of-war me back between their two houses.
Tim Ferriss: Pet American?
Jordan Jonas: They both became like families to me. They both had kids and both were a lot of fun in different ways. But Igor, the second family there, had been in prison with a native fur trapper from the far north. And they were really close because they’d found God in prison together and this and that. And so he was always telling me, “You’ve got to go north and meet my fur-trapping buddy.” So after that year of living in Russia, right at the end of it, Yura, the trapper came through town to sell furs and we met and he invited me up to live with him. So I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to go home to America, renew my visa, earn some money, and then I’ll come back.” And so I went back and headed straight north, more or less. And then I was in even more over my head.
Tim Ferriss: So what was the first day like when you land, first day, first week, when you land in the far north? Now this is in Siberia proper?
Jordan Jonas: Well, we’ve been in Siberia the whole time. But it was just incrementally further north in kind of central Siberia.
Tim Ferriss: How cold does it get in the northernmost region?
Jordan Jonas: Well, far north where I would end up being with the nomads, it’d get to negative 58, negative 60s, like kind of the cutoff, but chilly. But it was — oh, first getting to the north was funny. Well, one thing I was struck by, honestly, when I got to Russia was there’s a lot of drinking and every bit I went further north. Every time I would get used to it at one place, I remember driving in a village in the first village I was with Justus and we were just cruising along on a cold winter day in the bus and it swerves around this guy laying in the road, but we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I was like, “Whoa, it’s cold out. We’ve got to stop.” And the lady across from me and I could make out with my bad Russian. He’s like, “Ah, he’s a drunk. He’s dead.” I was like, “Whoa.” Stop.
And so it was kind of intense, but you kind of recalibrate at the new norm. And when I went to the next northern village, it restruck me again. I was like, “Oh, there’s chaos.” And that first week was that because I was with Yura and he was showing me around. And we go to this first house and I think even — it might have been even on the way from the airport, but pick up some random drunk guy and he holds up his phone, “Listen to this.” And just his wife just chewing him out and cussing him out. He’s like, “That’s the fury of a Russian woman,” because he’s been missing for who knows how long.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. How can I summarize some of what we were talking about at dinner last night?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Correct me if I get anything wrong. Like in the Evenki, you have these sustenance hunters, trappers, et cetera, with encyclopedic knowledge —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I’m aware of that.
Tim Ferriss: — and wherewithal.
Jordan Jonas: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just mind-boggling, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it is.
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t had an opportunity to spend time in that region of the world, but certainly in Central and South America, and Africa, and so on. When you start to look at, let’s just say, Shanghain trackers in South Africa, there are levels, and then the Kalahari bushmen, and then there are levels, and it’s unbelievable how fluent they are in their environment.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: And at the same time, many of these groups have an Achilles heel —
Jordan Jonas: That’s what it feels like.
Tim Ferriss: — which is alcohol. And to put it in perspective, what is the percentage of deaths attributable to homicides, suicide, or alcohol-related accidents?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, the statistic I heard for the northern native villages was 30 percent of people die from homicide, suicide, or — it’s really, and having lived there a long time. Like actually I appreciate you stepping back a little bit because I don’t want to air dirty laundry, and not put the proper context. I love those people, and they’re my friends. And many of my friends have that issue. But it has really tangible consequences when it’s at that level, and it’s —
But yes, it was amazing, because these people — you’d go in the village, and they’d be on the ground drunk for weeks on end. Just binges that could only be broken by taking them back out in the woods. But when they get in the woods and sober up, these are like the coolest, most knowledgeable people. And then, people that you would say are happy, and living a fulfilled life, and also just really open, and pleasant, and quick to become family, basically.
But it’s almost explicable, just in the cultural tumult that they’ve had to endure over time, because it was just in the ’30s that, basically, the Soviet Union and Stalin really grabbed a hold of what had been long before just the traditional way of life, that continued forward alongside Russian fur trappers. And they grabbed hold of it with an iron fist. Force collectivized that all the people that were spiritual leaders of any kind, Shamans and everybody else got sent to prison camps. Anyone that was really productive. So anyone that had more than 500 reindeer were sent to prison camps as Kulaks.
And so they just gutted the intellectual and spiritual soul from them, and then built these villages they forced them to be in. And then instead of them having reindeer, and being people existing freely out in the wilderness, they turned them into collective farms. So now, you’re hired as a reindeer herder to herd the government’s reindeer. And your wife might be hired as a tipi worker to live in the tipi. And so they just restructured the life. The kids now, don’t live with you in the woods. They go to boarding school. Separated the families, and then somehow, they actually made that work. And to some degree, the reindeer, while less independent than they were prior, they flourished in that they had big herds of reindeer. And people were productive and alcohol was banned. So they were quite productive.
And then the Soviet Union collapsed, and overnight all the reindeer just became for the highest bidder. So the Russians, and people from out of town that had a lot of money, just came in and bought all these reindeer that were grandpa’s and grandma’s blood and sweat, and just butchered them, and sent them to the meat shops. And the reindeer herders scraped together what little bit of money they could, and bought a few reindeer, and went back into the woods. The family I lived with — Evon Victorovich was the old man when I first got there, and he was blind, but he was the guy that had gotten some of these reindeer. Took his sons out of the boarding school, and raised them in the woods.
Jordan Jonas: It gave me a real appreciation also for the traditional ways of life, because I could see it in villages where reindeer herding hadn’t been hung onto, and they just felt like black holes. Like everybody was just drinking, and there was nothing to do. They don’t have an outlet to flourish with something they’re proud of in their native ways. So it felt pretty dead-end, but the village with the reindeer herding, it had this whole thing. And the reindeer herders out there, because of that, even the people that don’t do it, are proud to be reindeer herders. And they have a place to send their kids in the summer, and people have this — there’s a little bit of cultural momentum that’s really enriching.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s unpack this word, and this animal, and the significance of reindeer.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because it’s come up a ton, and people are like, “What is up with these magical reindeer problem?” So first of all, just to paint a picture for folks — and this might not help, but how similar are reindeer to caribou for people?
Jordan Jonas: Very similar. They’re almost — you probably wouldn’t recognize the difference, but they do have a slight genetic, just from separation. So reindeer are technically in the old world, and caribou are the similar animal, but in the new world — so Canada. And they can breed with each other, but the results turn out poorly. They get the worst traits of both. And then, in the old world, more so than — well, in the old world, the reindeer were domesticated very long ago, like 10,000 years ago. So there’s actually become a bit of a domestic strain of reindeer. Like the Natives now can’t domesticate the wild ones. And if a wild one comes in and breeds with theirs, then it’s always going to be wild. So it’s been a way of life long enough that there’s some even genetic separation between the wild, and the semi-domesticated.
Tim Ferriss: What is the role of the reindeer? Why are they so important? Is it analogous to say bison for some of the Plains Indians in North America? Is it different?
Jordan Jonas: Well, if it’s analogous —
Tim Ferriss: I guess it is actually — it’s different because of the domestication.
Jordan Jonas: Exactly. I was going to say, it’s analogous in that their whole cultural stories and everything are all connected with the reindeer, like with the bison. But it does differ, because the reindeer, actually, practically make living in the woods in the taiga, and those remote northern forests, a thing. It makes it possible to exist out there year round, and have transportation. So they ride the reindeer like you would horses. And then, they also, in the wintertime, ride them with sleighs. They provide meat when the hunts don’t go well. They provide the furs that — so they provide everything. They also provide the cultural context. Like you could go out there, sure, and set up a tipi, and live, and bring in noodles, and it’d be just fine, but it would feel fairly dead without the rhythms of life that are created by the reindeer. So they’re really core to that.
Tim Ferriss: Sort of the rhythms.
Jordan Jonas: To the rhythms. But also they’re very practically — I always hated snowmobiles, because they’re going to break down, and then you’re going to be stuck 40 kilometers from camp. And like you said, your hands aren’t working. You got to try to work on this little thing. When you had a reindeer and a sleigh, no problem. And so, you can — they really make — and this is a point that is interesting to make, that I learned living in the woods for a while is, you’re home. You’re just already home, wherever you are. And so, when you have your reindeer, you’re not lost, you’re home. Where you are is home, and you’re able to take that, and really embody it, and become a part of the wilderness in that way.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to get back to hopping trains in a second, but you passed over Gulag Archipelago.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re like, “It had an influence. It had an impact on me.”
Jordan Jonas: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: It seems like that might be an understatement. I don’t know? For people who are wondering, this is not a light, breezy, 100-page read. And we’re going to come to that in just a second, but what did your childhood education look like?
Jordan Jonas: I was homeschooled. So my mom took it real seriously, and she was pretty hands-on in teaching us. And I, for whatever reason, really got into history as a young kid. So even — probably, was 12, I read this big — I remember it was my first real thick book, but it was about Iwo Jima in World War II, and those battles. And then, I got really into those memoirs. Read a bunch of German memoirs from World War II, which were always crazy, because they had to go through so much. And then, the Russian ones, because I was — anyway, got into all the memoirs, and then, somehow came across The Gulag Archipelago. And I was fairly young. I was probably 17, 18 when I first read it. And it impacted me in a lot of ways that were relevant to my little spiritual path that I was on before, because a lot of what he talks about is, that happiness can’t be our ultimate goal in life. We have to have purpose.
Tim Ferriss: Could you, just for people who — and certainly I’m not intimately familiar with it, but what it’s written about?
Jordan Jonas: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a guy who was on the front in World War II, and wrote a letter back criticizing Stalin. And of course, he got checked, and he got arrested, and sent to Gulag, which were the Soviet prison camps that snaked their way all through the Soviet Union. And they were particularly harsh on political prisoners, as opposed to crime prisoners. So they would send these guys out to, basically, death camps, and have them mine, or do the labor basically, that kept the thing going.
But they were designed to be really brutal and dark places, just the way — the fact that even because the political prisoners were the bottom of the rung, they allowed the rapists, and those guys, to rule the roost, and set the rules. And so, they degraded into some pretty terrible situations. But this was all unknown, basically, to the West. And he was a brilliant mind, and over his eight or however many years he was in the prison camp, had an encyclopedic ability to like remember. Maybe he wrote down, I don’t know, but all these stories of people who had been through all these situations.
And when you read it, I was just struck by it. Like, “Man, there’s all these little paragraphs about this lady. That lady should have her own book.” That’s a crazy amount of tragedy, and story all packed in those books.
Another example of something that really stood out was like, when you get in prison, everybody says to themself, “I’m going to survive.” And then, that’s just like a little — then you add, at any cost to the end, almost nonchalantly. And then, pretty soon you start down this path where you’re, basically, stomping on others to survive, because you need to look out for number one. Survival of the fittest. And everybody, basically, adopted that mentality. He’s like, “Except for these occasional…”
The corrupt Orthodox church had somehow created these babushkas. These old ladies that didn’t allow their soul to go down that path. And he’s like, “They all died, but they all were a light…”
Tim Ferriss: In the darkness.
Jordan Jonas: “…in the darkness on their way.” And then, it gets at the point of, yeah, you could lose your life, but don’t lose your soul. And happiness can’t be your ultimate goal. That can be taken from you by a health change, or by getting thrown in a gulag, or by whatever it is. You have to have something deeper, and so forging a purpose.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to talk about the homeschooling, because you don’t — not that there is a single mold —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — but there are certain, I suppose maybe, archetypes that people might have in their heads, as to what constitutes a rugged mountain man, effectively. And I was chatting with my girlfriend last night, and she was like, “He doesn’t really fit my vision of like a rugged mountain man.” Which is not — she’s not saying you’re not rugged, but when you’re talking about — and I’m sure we’ll get to this. Like Assyrian history, and reading Gulag Archipelago as a 17-year-old, these are not terribly common things that get woven together. How did your mom do the homeschooling? What did a week look like, or the lesson plans? Does that make any sense?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just wondering, because homeschooling, I think, for a lot of people in the United States, seems like an aberration. But when you look at some of the people whose books we read, a lot of them had some equivalent of homeschooling.
Jordan Jonas: You know what I think, it is like a — public school, there is a standard, and everybody’s going to be taught to that standard; there’s a minimum bar. Homeschooling allows for more divergent options, both on the negative and the positive. You keep your kid at home, and not teach him anything, and go on. But also, you can really focus on your kids’ unique interests and abilities, and they can really excel and develop those in a way you wouldn’t in the public school realm. So because I was really into history, we leaned into that, and I had the time to, because honestly, in a public school setting, you burn up so much time going to recess, just dinking around. Whereas, I could get done with my actual academic schooling in just a couple hours in the morning, a few hours maybe. And then, go on to my interests.
And so it allows you to do that. And she taught us — initially, she was really hands-on, and then the older we got, it was more hands-off, where we had to be more self-taught, and follow whatever curriculum she had. And then, the last two years of school, so my last junior and senior year, I went to a public high school, and got that experience too.
Tim Ferriss: Got socialized.
Jordan Jonas: Got socialized. Which was an odd experience. I’m not sure what I think of the socialization.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, prefer to be an indoor cat here. Not really an indoor cat.
Jordan Jonas: No, so with homeschooling though, I think it has a really awesome thing. I think it’s great that it’s an option in the country. The one thing if you’re homeschooled you have to focus on, its weakness, which is like community, and friends, and developing that. So for people that think that’s an interesting option, just know that that’s its weakness, and account for that in how you organize. So that’s what we do with our kids.
Tim Ferriss: How do you account for it with your kids?
Jordan Jonas: Well, we’re really active in trying to be the catalyst for community in our town. We’re always ready to hang out, and we’ve got them in jiu-jitsu, and we got them in gymnastics, and got them in all the things. And then, make phone calls, crew foster hiking trips with the other families, and make sure we’re, multiple times a week, getting the kids together with their friends. You just really put effort and focus on that.
Tim Ferriss: It also strikes me that the ability to build community and social bonds, and therefore socialize, but not in some oddly artificial environment is dependent on activities. And maybe this is particularly true for boys, I don’t know? But what I observed when I was at your house, I just remember your kids’ cousins visiting, and they were always outside doing something, which I think is important, right? They’re not just sitting around talking. That’s not actually natural for most humans, including adults, to just do that all the time. There were shared activities. And then, when the cousins left, I guess it was your middle child who was just crying, and it was so adorable, but just such heartfelt, deep connections.
And similarly, it’s like when we were out in the woods, and we were sitting around, your brother was there. Maybe he had a thing or two to do with the jiu-jitsu influence. I don’t know? Another reason to never start fights. You would not see him, and be like, “Oh, I’m terrified of that guy.” And yet, he could absolutely bend you into a pretzel, and cause lots of orthopedic lifelong problems. So we were out there, it was getting your brother, a couple of llamas, one with a slightly lopsided head, and prone to falling over. It’s a long story. And then, just a few guys, right? Two of my close friends, we were all around a fire, and I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was your brother, maybe it was Mike. But oh, I get it. I see why. This is, again, it’s not saying this is a purely gendered thing, but this is what he said, because it was all guys.
Jordan Jonas: Mike, I know it was a good point.
Tim Ferriss: Mike probably. And he said —
Jordan Jonas: No, it was Matt.
Tim Ferriss: It was Matt—okay—who said, “Now I see why guys like fires so much, because they can connect, and talk without making eye contact.” You can just look at the fire. Having something that is ancillary.
Jordan Jonas: I thought it was a fun observation of — paid a little more attention to it ever since, but it does just give you something, a third party to, “Hey, we should start a little fire on the table here. That might be a…” Yeah, for sure. Having a common activity like that. And we are fortunate enough to just be able to live in a place that’s really conducive to sending the kids outside. And it’s something I’ve obviously tried to foster in them. So, they do spend a lot of time just running around, and being creative. And they don’t have — one thing I’ve avoided a bit is phones, and stuff like that. And I think it is fairly low hanging fruit, because you can see how they affect us in our everyday life. We get distracted, and we get disoriented with them, I would say. And with kids, it’s even so much more cute. So they have to go out, and run around and play, and have fun.
Tim Ferriss: While you’ve also engineered this — I mean, that’s a very fancy term to use, but you’ve designed that into your life as a deliberate environment and place.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it’s been intentional.
Tim Ferriss: You could have been in a lot of other places.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And as for instance, I’m training this very large puppy right now. Although, I think I’m being trained a lot more probably. In any case, very different personality from my other dog. Probably, mixed with Anatolian Shepherd; very stubborn. And when you’re trying to train a dog like that, I remember a dog trainer said to me, “If you’re using treats,” as an example, right? “You have to tip with 20s, because the bar is crowded, right? There are a lot of distractions.” And when I think about kids, and of course, I do not have kids yet, I hope to in the very near future.
But if you’re sitting in an apartment in the city, and you’re like, “Kids, you can’t use your phone.” What are you offering them as an alternative? It’s like, what is the alternative that is more compelling, and you’ve deliberately put yourself in an environment where you have quite a lot to choose from.
Jordan Jonas: Right, right. And that has been intentional. And obviously, that is a — so, it’s probably more difficult if you have a small apartment, and you live in a city. I imagine it takes a lot more hands-on going to the park, or there’s a lot of creative outlets in learning to paint, learning an instrument, learning of this or that, that may scratch that itch. For me, I did have it as a high priority to let the outdoors be a big part of our life. So I moved where that was possible, and I have structured our life as such. I got the llamas we were joking about initially, so that I could take the family out on one, two-week-long trips rather than — because I just couldn’t carry enough gear to take them out for shorter. So it’s been really intentional, and it’s been great, but it’s something to work out in a more urban context. Yeah, but I guess it’s not where I’m at.
Tim Ferriss: Llamas. People might be like, “Llamas, really? Are we in the Andes? What’s going on?”
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Why llamas instead of —
Jordan Jonas: That’s a great question.
Tim Ferriss: — instead of horses?
Jordan Jonas: You know the reindeer history now, when I first got back from Russia, I thought it would be amazing to pack with reindeer in America. So I lived in Idaho, and there was a law against packing — against owning reindeer north of a certain border. I contacted my legislature there, and oddly responsive. Pretty soon I was in meetings with the government officials, and they overturned the law. So now you can own reindeer in North Idaho. Unfortunately, part of that was, they had to be in a high fence. So it ruined the ability of what I was envisioning to hike around with them.
Tim Ferriss: So you couldn’t pack them out?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I couldn’t load them full of gear, and pack up in the woods. So then, your only other options are horses, and llamas. And I honestly just hadn’t grown up with horses, and there’s quite a learning curve on them. They’re dangerous. Everybody that does a lot with horses has some kind of stories of getting hurt on them.
Tim Ferriss: For people who have no idea, how big are llamas?
Jordan Jonas: They’re about 350 pounds.
Tim Ferriss: They’re a lot smaller.
Jordan Jonas: They’re a lot smaller. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: They’re a lot smaller, and I’m sure there are cases where they might, but they tend not to kick.
Jordan Jonas: They’re very safe, and you can have mean angry llamas, of course. You can have a bad, bitey dog. But if you have a good llama, they’re oddly chill animals. You go up in the woods, and they don’t tear up the ground. They sit there quietly. The kids can ride them. So in that way, they’re quite nice for kids. Obviously, adults can’t, but they can pack the gear, and I can walk without gear as long as I want to. There’s great advantages of horses, and I love them, but for me, the low maintenance, and low risk of a llama, just — I was like, “Well, if I can’t have reindeer, I guess that’s the next closest thing.”
Tim Ferriss: Are there any terrain, or sure-footedness advantages to llamas? I’m thinking about, for instance, like horses versus donkeys. It seems like there are some advantages of using donkeys over horses.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. The main advantage of llamas —
Tim Ferriss: Everybody should follow Hobojordo on Instagram, because you have photos of the aftermath of some horses going —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, they’re sketchy, man.
Tim Ferriss: — cartwheeling down an incline.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t want to be caught up in that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. It’s easy to get killed, I think. This is a common historical theme. So-and-so got bucked off the horse, and the fourth Crusade ended, or whatever it was.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Jordan Jonas: But the — where were we going with that?
Tim Ferriss: Advantages of llamas on terrain.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, on terrain. Yeah. So with a horse, you have a metal shoe on the bottom. And metal, particularly on rock, is pretty —
Tim Ferriss: Slippery.
Jordan Jonas: — slippery. And so, you’ll do a lot of slipping and sliding on rocks. The llamas have a soft pad with two little claws. They look like little raptor claws in the front. And so, it’s actually quite interesting to see how they work.
Tim Ferriss: They’re very small.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, they’re small little paws, but you can stick on a wet rock, and that soft pad will grip, and they can walk up and down the rocks. Or if you’re in mud or soft dirt, you see those two little front claws dig in like a raptor claw, and they can climb up that. And that way, they’re — yeah, the terrain issues are pretty great. They’re not quite — the other pack animal people use is goats. And those are nice, because you can really go over boulders, and they can hop from this to that. They’re somewhere in between a horse and a goat, as far as their off-roading abilities.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like you would have to have a whole caravan of goats for carrying capacity.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, and goats also are always with you. With a llama, I can tie them up, and go hike up this way, and that way. The goats are always with you. You can’t tie them up, and you can’t leave them anywhere. Chaos will ensue, but they’re funny little critters, but they weren’t my cup of tea.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s hop to purpose, which I feel like looking back at your family history, looking back — and is it fair just to tie up one loose end with Gulag Archipelago, how analogous is it to Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it’s real similar. I think it’s the thicker version of that. Gulag Archipelago light would be that Man’s Search for Meaning.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Okay. Could you give us a bit of your family history? And you can go back to your grandmother, you could kind of start wherever you want. The purpose specifically made me think of your dad, and the reinvention of purpose, which I think is a pressing need for a lot of people in a fast moving modern environment where they feel like they’re on very unstable ground perhaps in a lot of ways. But let’s go back. I threw out this term Assyrian, but most people don’t. It’s not a familiar word.
Jordan Jonas: There’s a kind of, I guess you would almost call it the indigenous people of the Middle East before kind of the Arab takeovers, and stuff where Aramaic speaking Assyrians is what they’re called. So, that’s what my family was. They lived in Northwestern Iran, kind of near a lake called Lake Urmia. And during the chaos of World War I, there had been the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, and all these people who had been under the Ottoman like colonial yolk were seeking out their independence, and their freedom, and breaking off. And in all that chaos, basically I think what happened was it was an easy time to get rid of a entire people group. Actually Anatolia, you have an Anatolian Shepherd was a pretty diverse place up until then. After that time, it was basically just Turks, and Kurds left. The Greeks, the Assyrians, the Armenians kind of got all ran out of there in what —
Tim Ferriss: What were the reasons for running them out?
Jordan Jonas: It’s complicated. History’s not black and white. They were minorities because those groups were Christian overall, living in under the Ottoman umbrella. And so sporadically at times they would live okay, and then at times there would be big massacres. And over the course of centuries, there were just constant — it wasn’t a pleasant way to live, I guess, would be the quick way to put it. And so there was sporadic massacres kind of all the time.
And then, so when World War I happened, you couldn’t blame them for wanting independence. And there were better, and worse — a lot of those Christian minorities joined with the British, or the Russians to try to forge out their new nation states that were forming from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. And at the same time, nationalism was really rising, and there was a big Turkey for the Turks movement, like we don’t want other people here.
And that was ultimately the movement with the most power. And so when the Russian Empire collapsed from the Bolshevik Revolution, they kind of left a vacuum in these areas that they’d kind of provided a bit of a defense for. And because of that crazy nationalist fervor that was going on, the Turks decided that they would just kill, or expel all the minorities who — of course, some of them had been problematic, and that there was like these freedom movements everywhere, but collective punishment at a massive scale. And obviously my grandparents were kind of out of it because they were in Urmia, in Iran, but when the Russian presence left there, the Turks went into there, too. And it was basically, at that point, it was just kind of an uncontrolled, what ultimately would be a genocide. It killed like 750,000 Assyrians, and a millions plus Armenians. And it was quite a disaster.
My family was — so my grandma and grandpa, both of them would ultimately be for all practical purposes, sole survivors like their families were completely wiped out. My grandpa was in a village when they were coming in, and burning it down, and his dad was in a wheelchair, basically put a money belt on him, and told him just — he was 17, told him just run, and don’t look back. And he looked back to see his dad’s house on fire with his dad in it. He never knew what happened to his sister. Ended up getting taken in by some Jesuit priests, and kind of raised in there. And then my grandma had a different story where they — so the Ottoman Empire was still kind of conscious of like trying to put on a image to the world. And so instead of — I mean, there was plenty of just straight up massacres, but instead of — they called them deportations, but they were kind of deportations to nowhere.
So, they just drove people out into the desert, and marched them around until they died. And so my grandma, and she had seven siblings, and a mom, her dad was taken off to be shot, and then they just drove them around in the desert until all but the mom, my great-grandmother, and one sister of my grandma were left. The baby just had died, and the mom fell down, and was like, “I just can’t go on anymore.” And my Shalem, my grandma, and Shushan picked her up, and like, “We got to keep going.” At some point there, they split off from the guards, or whatever, stumbled through, and were actually ended up being rescued by a British military outpost type thing. I don’t know. And then they were taken to a refugee camp. Mom, and the sister never recovered really from just the trauma. And then grandma was sent to Baghdad, and raised in a refugee camp.
And so these two people kind of lost everything. Even their like, I mean, the Assyrian people nation kind of almost vanished. Aramaic is what they speak. It’s like almost a gone language now. It’s very just small fragments of it hanging on. So, they kind of lost everything, and then they met in Baghdad somehow, and got married, immigrated to France right before World War II, and then the Nazi invasion happened, and there was a whole, they have a whole series of stories from kind of the deprivation at that time. They were already poor immigrants arriving there, and then to like go through that whole Nazi occupation. And then they eventually made it to America, and actually died not long after. So, my dad was 10 when his parents died, and was raised by his sisters. But what I find something to be that I think about a lot is that they had ended up having 11 kids, so they had a really big family, and I would go to all these family unions with my aunts, and uncles, and my dad, and this, and that.
And they were just the most joyful, fun, like so much love, and joy, and family, and all this. It was a real bright spot in my childhood. And then it was just that Jonas family stuff. And then, and you almost take it for granted until you step back, and you’re like, “Wait a second, we’re one generation from…” This is my grandma, and her grandpa had their entire families wiped out, and lost their whole culture, and had to immigrate, and give up everything, and then had to do that again. But somehow they’ve raised a really joyful family, like a full of people, and our conversations were never about like, “Those people did that to us, and like this is what happened.” Hate was never the common language. It was always love, and family. And there’s like some old grainy videos of grandma, and grandpa, and they’re just laughing, and they raised rabbits, and eating rabbit around the table, and laughing.
And you think, “Well, that’s so interesting.” I don’t know what cross they bore. And I know my dad said his dad used to always sit in his closet, and pray. And he’s like, I’m sure he had like a lot to deal with, but they didn’t pass it down one generation, which is impressive. And not only did they not pass it down, they built, and put into the world something really beautiful, which is my family, including my dad. And so leading into what you’re talking about, dad, but it’s something that I think about regularly more than you would think, because maybe I have a history, and orientation, but just the fact that that’s a legacy that I have that we all have, it’s shared humanity, but what a thing to be able to live up to.
I don’t have to be defined by the hardship and the tragedy in a negative way. It’s like you can expect, you can see how other people have risen to that occasion, and come out of it, and create it. And so when I find myself in a hard situation in the past, or now, or whatever, you have that to look at, and hang on to.
Tim Ferriss: Having a choice.
Jordan Jonas: You have a choice of how to relate to it. I mean, there were so many people, and there’s just like, you have every right to be fully traumatized, and never recover. You know what I mean? There’s no judgment on my front for that. But on the other hand, it’s like, what about those few people that did somehow recover, or what? I don’t know what you would call it, but they somehow built something in the world in spite of the unimaginable horrors, watching your family get killed, and raped, and all the things that went on. And then just being able to build a loving family was pretty impressive.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about your dad. I mean, whether by nature, or nurture, or both, he made seemingly some pretty remarkable choices as well.
Jordan Jonas: He grew up as, obviously, a son of immigrants in America, and they was raised by mostly his sister out on a — and so all I think he really wanted was a family, and stability, and wanted to work hard. And you know, his most joyful moments when I was growing up was just when he’d come home from work, and we’d run out, and give him a hug. I think that was his life most fully lived, was just being a provider, and being able to — he was an engineer, so he was a smart guy, and being able to just create a family. That’s really what he wanted. He was very family oriented. But then it was interesting because when he had also had childhood diabetes, and polio, so he had some health issues, and he wasn’t great at managing his diabetes well. So, when he was probably about — I mean, I was pretty young, I guess, still a teenager probably.
He started to get the sores on your feet that you get. And then basically because of the degrading situation with his feet, he lost his job, and all of a sudden he had to watch as my mom had to go back to school, which was something that was very difficult for her because he’s just not academic, but no longer could Dad be the provider. He was basically somebody we had to care for because he ended up losing his foot, and this, and that. And it was like a 12 year process of his health degrading, and it was really hard for him. Mom’s going to school, and we had to go to the food bank, and I remember him just like crying like, “Oh, I failed.” The one thing he wanted to do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, brutal.
Jordan Jonas: But I remember, and then his foot finally recovered, and he, and I went out in the woods, and we were splitting wood, and he like crushed his foot into the log splitter, and it was like, oh, deflate your sail. So then they just amputated his other foot. And so basically he lost his ability, his physical ability to pursue his purpose in the world. And that was really difficult for him to do. He had to watch his family suffer, and this, and that. But then it was interesting over the years to watch him — well, so from my perspective as his son, from my mom’s perspective, as his wife, we never lost sight of his purpose. We knew who he was in our lives. It was never about the money he was bringing home, or this, or that. It was like, man, what an encourager, and what a joyful person, and all that. And we never lost sight of that. He did. But then it was interesting to see over the course of those 12 years of health degradation, how it was almost like his — he had to refine his purpose, and he did.
And then when his health was at its worst, then he was on dialysis, and in tons of pain, and stuff was in a way when his like, what would you call it, spiritual giftings, or something were at their peak. He was really able to — I could hear him at night crying in pain, and like, “Oh.” And then in the morning he would, “Oh, Jordan, you’re doing great, and this, and that, and let’s read this Psalm together, or let’s do this.” He was very much — he refound his purpose in pouring into us, and into facing the loss of his health, and his own death with joy. And that’s what he did. He finally was like, “Man, I’m in too much pain. It’s too degrading to have me rolling him off the bed, take him to dialysis.” He’s like, “I’m just going to stop going to dialysis.” And that was a hard decision for him, but when he did, it was just like, “All right, let’s just party for the next two weeks.”
He was diabetic, so finally he could eat all the crap food he wanted, and we all had tons of laughs, and he was kind of full of joy right up until the end. And you’re like, “What a cool legacy to see someone face all that, and see purpose, not in their life even, but even in how to face death.” And the way he did that.
We’re all going to be in the same position where we lose our, whether our health, or whatever inevitable suffering is coming down the hatch. I now have a template for how to face that in a way that I’m still putting into the world some kind of light, because I could see that it’s not only possible, but I could see the template for doing that. And so it’s interesting having seen that, too, it really makes you take — no, be grateful for the blessing I have now, and that I do know what I love to do, and that I have an opportunity to share it with others, and to — I know even my purpose now as it is, but I also know that’s going to have to evolve with inevitabilities of aging, and everything else. And so it’s interesting to make sure your priorities now are in such a way that as you have to shift directions, that you’ll be able to make that adjustment. They should rhyme, you shouldn’t have to — it’s not going to be something completely different. It’s just going to evolve into a little bit different angle.
Tim Ferriss: When you think of your dad’s purpose changing over those 12 years, is one way to view it as him going from prioritizing how he acted in the world, like how he does things in the world to how he then supports, and teaches the rest of you in the family? I mean, was he taking on more of a teacher role? Was it a supporter role? I mean —
Jordan Jonas: Maybe not explicitly, but definitely implicitly. His gifting was that he really was an encourager, and was really joyful, and people enjoyed being around him, and he was able to lean into those skills, those gifts in spite of the fact that he couldn’t walk, or that he didn’t have hands, or whatever. And so yeah, I think you lean into those giftings that you have that are not dependent on your ability to produce, which is great while you have it.
Tim Ferriss: How long after he stopped dialysis, how long did he last after that?
Jordan Jonas: It was about a week. It wasn’t as long, even, as we expected. It might be up to two weeks, or whatever, I think it was about a week in, his temperature just spiked, and then that was it. We were all around.
Tim Ferriss: Did you, at the time, understand his decision?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, to be fair, I mean, to be honest, I actually, he was really struggling with it because he was also a man of faith. And I remember him reading, he was like, “Boy, it says…” Because he really was having a hard time hanging on, because it’s the pain, the amount of pain he was in, and stuff, but he was like, “It says here, the Lord will never give you more than you can bear.” And I remember actually in conversation with him, “Well, that’s actually not true, dad. Everybody that’s died was given more than they can bear. It says it won’t tempt you beyond your ability to bear,” which is a different thing, you’re kind of on a different realm there. And so we had that conversation. So, it’s not that I was — I wanted him to hang on as long as possible, but I also wanted him to have the freedom to —
We talked a lot about how it’s weird in the modern world where you have this choice that we’ve never had in the past where you have to now choose when to stop going to dialysis, or stop doing this, or that, or you can just drag on your inevitable downfall kind of forever. And so I think it was ultimately, it just came down to the fact that he wasn’t ever going to get better. He recognized that. He was in a lot of pain, and I think he wanted to free — I mean, you can only do that for so long, and I think he wanted to like, in a final act, kind of free us up too, probably.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to use some of the kind of promises, and perils of modern healthcare, like you said, to extend the runway sometimes in cases where the quality of life just entails so much suffering, or lack of awareness that it raises a lot of ethical questions that we didn’t have to face 200 years ago, 300 years ago. Just to take a closer look at modern living, and specifically where I want to go with that is maybe we could take it to our trip in the mountains, because particularly since we weren’t doing any hunting, if you’re hunting, then you have to time your rhythm with your quarry, and it’s a different situation.
But I remember asking you at one point, I was like, “So when are we waking up tomorrow?” And you’re like, “Well, when we want to wake up.” And I suppose the — and this comes back to the Evenki as well, and living in a settlement where you are managing someone else’s property, or an employee of the government versus having more flexibility in the way you structure your life in your days, right? I would just love you to hear you riff on sort of overstructure versus too little structure versus where humans kind of naturally fall.
Jordan Jonas: The first glimpse I got of this way of life that we’ve lost in the modern context was actually riding trains where it’s like, you wake up in the morning, I don’t have anything I have to do. I just got to figure out where to get food, and water, and that’s basically it.
Tim Ferriss: So, could you — can you give us like a minute, or two of just like how on earth did you end up hopping trains?
Jordan Jonas: The quick minute, or two of that was that my brother had, for whatever reason, done it for years. He hitchhiked, and didn’t like relying on people to pick him up. Somehow he heard about riding trains, jumped on one, and probably a lot to do with this freedom that we’re about to discuss, just loved it. And in 10 years, he basically, seven, or eight, or 10, however many years, he just rode trains, and at some point when I was 18, or so, invited me to go along, and so I did, which was probably a fork in my road just from having a job, and doing the stuff to all of a sudden —
Tim Ferriss: It’s a pretty wide fork.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. But why you glimpse what I think is the appeal there is that, yeah, that rhythm of life that humans are designed for, that we’ve lived for as long as humans have been around, it’s like that then I would really get immersed in again living with the Natives later where, yeah, you wake up, and you have things you have to do, but there’s no particular schedule. They’re all directly tied to your existence right now. You’re not working to make money to put in your 401k so that later this — it’s just all very direct. It’s like, “Oh, let’s go catch some fish today. We’re hungry, or the reindeer might be getting away. Let’s go herd them back.” And you kind of have these activities that are directly related to your life, and in that, you would know the proper terminology, but it feels like your dopamine, and your serotonin, and all that kind of stuff is just lined up properly.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you’re living the way that we have evolved to live.
Jordan Jonas: Exactly. And so you’re in the right mold basically for that. And so, and I’ve described it before, but when you’re successful on a hunt, or when you get into some good fish, and you’re in that rhythm, so you just couldn’t be more joyful than that. There’s just no more, that’s it. That’s your max human experiences. This is amazing. Yeah. And we didn’t have to earn a bunch of money, and it’s just so much more accessible in a way, which is interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it also makes me think about, sorry to jump in, but when you were talking about your brother, and his German shepherd who had never done any herding, and a couple of goats running amuck, and your brother started trying to gather them, and the German shepherd just clicked into what it is evolved, or I should say artificially evolved to do, and boom, it was off to the races.
Jordan Jonas: Fully into rhythm of life.
Tim Ferriss: Knew exactly what it needed to do, and humans are not that different.
Jordan Jonas: No, we’re not. And we have so many layers on top of that simplicity that sometimes it gets — it all feels like hacks, as we know, like even you look on your phone, “I got seven likes.” It’s just a little hack of our berry picking receptors, but it’s less, but you never quite fully get there. But with the — it was always a little bit hard to articulate. I was like, just life feels just more realistic. You’re more like in the world, but it’s a little bit difficult to articulate, but it is —
Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems very tangible in the sense that you’re dealing with few So, fewer layers of abstraction. You’re not like, I’m going to do this thing to then ensure this other thing that will give me more happiness in the future. It’s like, I know I’m going to need to eat in a few hours, or I’d prefer to eat, you don’t need to eat in a few hours. You can fast, but you’re like, “I kind of like to eat. I’d like to be warm.”
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’d like to sleep tonight. So, it’s like, okay.
Jordan Jonas: Cause, and effect are very related.
Tim Ferriss: It’s very easy to track. And not just track, but like have the gratification of individual cause, and effect.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s very tangible. And it was so much so that, this is only a working hypothesis, but when I was living with the Natives, I had the issue that it wasn’t my native language, and as much as they were — I love those people, and they’re my friends. It wasn’t like my family. It wasn’t the people that you grow up with. But I was like, I wonder if everybody would choose this way of life if it was in a little bit more pleasant climate, and with the two modern —
Tim Ferriss: A little bit. Maybe negative 20, and not negative 50.
Jordan Jonas: Modern medicine, and food security are amazing. But aside from that, it’s like, I wonder if people wouldn’t choose this way of life. Even people that just have no idea that they might like the outdoors.
Tim Ferriss: Can I give like a sidebar experience that sometimes comes along with this? You were talking about a little bit earlier today, but can you talk about the bear incident specifically that you were mentioning earlier with your friend with the gun?
Jordan Jonas: This was a time where we’d kind of gone out in the woods, and we’d taken a bunch of the younger dudes that were living in the village, and kind of drinking. And my fur trapping buddy has his big fur trapping territory, and he was like, “Oh, we should get these kids out there, and just like spend a summer, and have them living off the land.”
Tim Ferriss: And just because I’m curious, is this sable, or what are they?
Jordan Jonas: Sable’s what they fur trap. So, we were out, spent a summer out on that territory, invited a handful of these guys, and it was great. We had a horse out there, and cutting hay for it, and all that with the sigh, and living off the land basically all that we fished, and hunted. Well, one day we came out. I heard my buddy was sleeping, and he woke up, and he was like — and you could hear the dogs barking like crazy out. Well, we woke up, and I thought, “Man, that dumb dog, it just barks at every squirrel, this, or that.” And so I didn’t get up, and look. Well, then my buddy goes out to brush his teeth, and runs back, and he goes, “There’s a bear out there.” So, I jumped up, and we look out, and a bear, just 150 yards, not far at all from our cabin had killed a moose.
Tim Ferriss: What kind of bears are we talking about?
Jordan Jonas: These are brown bears, just some kind of brown bear in Siberia, and they — бурый медведь.
Tim Ferriss: Bigger than a black bear.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Bigger than a black bear, some kind of a grizzly. And then so we come out and the bear took off up in the woods and they’re like, “What is that laying over there?” And sure enough, it was big, fresh, warm moose. We’re like, “Oh, no way.” So it was a windfall for us. So of course we cut it up and take it back to camp. We dug a big pit into the permafrost as a makeshift fridge, and threw the meat in there. And then a few days later, that bear came back with a vengeance like he knew —
Tim Ferriss: Was not pleased.
Jordan Jonas: Knew he was not pleased. He came back. But first sign was one of our dogs just ran into the little cabin and under the bed or whatever. And then the other one we started hearing barking outside, and then the bear was — it was a lot of tall brush in the area, and so I could just hear the bear just, ripping through the brush and then ripping this way and that. And I was like, oh, it was pretty intense right off the bat. And I was like, holy crap. So I grabbed the SKS, which is like a assault rifle is basically what they used to hunt over there. And I run out of the cabin and like go kind of towards where the dog’s barking. I figure the bear was over there.
So I’m walking over towards this bark. And then Yorka, one of the younger guys was behind me. And when we just hear this, “Vroosh.” the bear was right behind us and snorted. And we’re like, “Whoa,” like flip around. And then it just pump charged through the alders and we’re like, “Oh, well that was crazy. What’s the dog barking at banging?” And so then you could hear this kerfuffle out in the woods. I was like, “Oh, here, you take the gun. I’m going to take my little three megapixel camera I had at the time.” And I —
Tim Ferriss: I love that that’s your reflex. “Let me go and take some photos.” Seems —
Jordan Jonas: Like, “You’ve got to get this on film!
Tim Ferriss: — like a great, perfect time.
Jordan Jonas: It was a bad choice in the end. Yeah, anyway, I gave the gun to Yorka. Same thing. We’re kind of paying attention to where we last heard the chaos. And again, the bear was behind us like move and snorted again. And Yorka just took off running with the gun. And he full on ran and disappeared from my sight. I had had my knee issues we discussed earlier, so I actually couldn’t run, nor would I want to from a predator. So I kind of just stood there. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just here without —
Tim Ferriss: Now what do I do —
Jordan Jonas: — be eaten with my stupid camera.
Tim Ferriss: — with my 3.5 megapixel camera.
Jordan Jonas: And so anyway, he was gone a long — it felt like a very long time. It was probably 30 seconds to a minute. Like a good enough long time that I was like, “What in the world?” And then finally he comes back and his knees, he’s like, “I can’t do this. My knees are shaking.” I was like, “You got the gun, don’t run.” And then right as I said that, the bear stood up in front of us and he just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and filled this whole magazine into it and it took off. And we ended up getting it, which then I laughed at him because we were joking around. But they had always been telling me like, “You know us with Evenki, one shot, one kill.”
And then it was like Vietnam and we’re like, “Tu tu tu tu.” But then it was super funny. It was pretty intense. And then it was also interesting because I was the first bear that I was with them with when they killed and they had this whole ritual because how they honored the bear. The Evenki word for bear is grandpa. Or maka. And then they would take the eyeballs out. They took the eyeballs out and put them under a rock so that when the spirit of the bear came back, it wouldn’t see who did what to it.
And then the funny better part was they took the intestines and threw them in the river. So when it did come back, it would be the neighboring village that the intestines floated to that caught the wrath. But yeah, that was a pretty intense little moment there.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to do one more story. I mean, these are all going to be stories. But we’re going to do one more story and then — some of the native hunters are better than others. I’m going to cue you. This one also involves moose, if I’m not mistaken. Canoe.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, this is great. Yeah. This is another hilarious story. So there were these two in their mid-60s women that were going to come out to the tribe. So there’s the village, the native village, 500 people. It was about a 12-hour float from a place that’s a common stop that the nomads often stop.
Jordan Jonas: So they had found out that we were going to be there. So these old ladies were going to come out and visit the tribe. Well, they got in a — it’s just a 12-hour float, so you don’t really need much. You get there at the end of the day and can eat when you get there. So all they brought, as any native did, would be an axe. And so they untied their rope. It was an aluminum boat and jumped in the boat and were just floating along. Well, picture these two senior citizen women floating down and there’s a moose swimming across the lake —
Tim Ferriss: Jackpot.
Jordan Jonas: — and as you do, they thought, “We’ve got to kill this thing. We’ll be the heroes!” or whatever. So they rode up next to it and with the rope that was attached to the front of their boat, they lassoed over the — I don’t know if it was the antlers or the neck of this thing. But at the same time, they had the axe, they pictured themselves like chopping it in the neck and trying to kill it. Well, it, of course, got traction on the shore on the water before they were able to pull that off and took off into the woods and skied these ladies in this boat behind them, like several hundred yards up into the woods before it finally went through these two trees and snapped the rope off and it disappeared.
And those ladies just were gone for a few days. They had to sit by the side of the river till the next people — they couldn’t carry their boat, so they just sat there until finally somebody floated by that could help them drag their boat back to the water. And the lady, they made it out. The lady was very funny because we then had to get back to the village eventually. By land, it was like a 30 kilometer reindeer ride and that poor lady — and I had the same problem. I would always fall off the reindeer, but she was the only other person that apparently had that problem.
Because they just put the saddle on loosely. It’s not like a horse saddle where you kind of cinch it up. They just throw it on and it kind of wobbles. But they get used to it and so they can kind of ride along. And it took me a long time to get used to, but obviously it took her also a long time. And I was walking, but we were in the rain and that poor lady, every time we crossed a river or a puddle or anything, it was a swoosh. And they keep lifting her back on, but it was very funny. But yeah, that was a great, great story. There are different breed of people that when grandma sees the moose swimming across the river, decide to go —
Tim Ferriss: Goes to hatchet it in the neck.
Jordan Jonas: — go to axe it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a little bit about Alone, which is probably the only, let’s call it reality TV show that I’ve watched two full seasons of, in the last —
Jordan Jonas: Which were they?
Tim Ferriss: — decade. Six and seven.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because the word on the street, otherwise known as the internet, was that season six, which you were a part of, and season seven were kind of —
Jordan Jonas: The high points.
Tim Ferriss: — two of the highlights.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: With some insane events that transpire in these two seasons. If you ever have to, I had to — well, had to. I chose after elbow surgery to do hyperbaric oxygen treatments for a host of reasons. Sidebar on that, if you’re going to do that, needs to be hard shell, medical grade, typically like two to 2.5 atmospheres don’t do any soft shell stuff. It’s a waste of time. But what do you do? You’re just sitting there, and especially in a hard shell, you can’t bring anything in, but they set up TVs. And so my guilty pleasure turned into watching these multiple seasons of —
Jordan Jonas: Alone.
Tim Ferriss: — of Alone. So for the season that you were a part of, because the format of the show changed a bit over time, but it was referred to along the lines of kind of the Super Bowl of survival, right?
Jordan Jonas: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: And in your particular season, season six, what was the format?
Jordan Jonas: The quick summary of the show is yeah, the 10 people go out in the woods all by yourself. You sell film at source, and you get to pick 10 basic tools like an axe and a ferro rod and a sleeping bag, and a few things like that. And then they drop you all off in different areas in the wilderness. And the person that lasts the longest wins. And hypothetically, indefinitely, I think maybe there was a year cutoff. But hypothetically a year plus you might stay out there if people really get into a groove. So yeah, that was the format of the season. It’s a fairly simple concept but —
Tim Ferriss: What was the location?
Jordan Jonas: Northwest territories, Canada. So we were just south of the Arctic Circle, right at the —
Tim Ferriss: Not warm, ultimately?
Jordan Jonas: Not warm, not warm. But conveniently, very similar parallel to where I was in Siberia.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it seems like having watched two seasons and some other shows also that were — I mean, Alone is my favorite. I mean, you learn so much if you’re into any degree of —
Jordan Jonas: Which is a great show, honestly.
Tim Ferriss: You really learn a lot because you get to see a lot of different approaches, and what seems to work and what doesn’t. And there are multiple approaches that seem to work.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Like —
Jordan Jonas: Just don’t build a cabin.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jordan Jonas: Just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: Just DIY. I mean, no, seriously. Don’t try to build like Abraham Lincoln Log Cabin, that image in your mind, don’t try to do that. But then you got Stone house in season seven. I probably wouldn’t have tried to do it because I’d be afraid of blowing a gasket. For sure. But it worked. Very different from the shelter that you built.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about the tools for a second. Because there were things that would not be obvious to someone watching the show that I found interesting. For instance, when we were out in the woods, you showed me — this is going to require a little explanation. So you’ll have to explain what basic Paracord could be used for.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But you’ve got this, looks like a transatlantic cable of paracord that —
Jordan Jonas: Which was not allowed on the show.
Tim Ferriss: It was not allowed.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, you had to have basic paper —
Tim Ferriss: But it’s a single chord that has like fishing line and filament and all sorts of things.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Super handy little —
Tim Ferriss: I’d never seen it. What is that called?
Jordan Jonas: It’s called survival cord. And it has a tinder material inside of it you can pull out. It’s kind of a wax coated thing. It catches spark well and then it has a snare, like Kevlar cable, so you make a snare. And then it has a fishing line and then the regular string that usually comes in the paracord. And paracord is just a string that has an outer sheath and then a bunch of little inner strands that are more like individual strings and they’re kind of twisted together and make for a strong rope. Or you can break it down into useful bits.
Tim Ferriss: Turn it into a gill net.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Turn into a gill net, which is —
Tim Ferriss: Which seems to be one of the winning stuff.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. A gill net’s hard to beat. It’s such a passive way of collecting food and they’re effective.
Tim Ferriss: What is a gill net?
Jordan Jonas: A gill net is a — it’s just a big net that you throw in the water and set in the water in such a way that fish swim and by get caught in it. And fish can’t back up, so when they swim into a net, if it’s sized properly to their body and gills, they’ll get caught in it and they just sit there.
Tim Ferriss: So just for definition of terms, snare kind of similar, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: In the sense that you’re trying to get a given animal around the neck. And you have to size it properly.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. So snaring is another. In an actual survival situation, it’s kind of not the golden ticket, but incredibly important. It’s also usually illegal in most places because it’s really effective. But if you’re really starving, it would be — yeah, you’d size to what you were trying to catch. So like a hare would be about the size of your fist. You make a piece of wire, or if you only have string, loop about that big, set it on the trail and do some things to try to —
Tim Ferriss: So sorry, I’m laughing because another story just came to mind. So in another example of footage you’re not going to see on the show, so I give them points. A medical team would come out and check on participants. And I can’t remember the exact parameters, but if you’re like losing too much body weight or —
Jordan Jonas: They’d schedule occasional visits to get your SD cards, give you new batteries, and then just make sure you’re not critically in danger with your health.
Tim Ferriss: Of organ failure or something like that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Now, I think you were telling me that at one point when they were doing a medical check for you, that you’d set up — remind me of what this is called for squirrel —
Jordan Jonas: A squirrel pole.
Tim Ferriss: A squirrel pole, because squirrels like to run up things. And then across something else —
Jordan Jonas: Exactly. And if you have a power line in front of your house —
Tim Ferriss: So yeah, explain how you just roughly, how you build this thing and why?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, for whatever reason, squirrels are — they just love running up things and then across things. And so that’s why you see them running on the power lines and everywhere. And so you can take advantage of that to catch them by clearing all the branches off of a couple trees and then running a pole between those two trees, and then throwing a couple snares along that pole. And eventually some squirrel will run up and zip across, especially if you see one in the area.
Tim Ferriss: What does that look like when a medical check is being done right behind?
Jordan Jonas: It was kind of funny because it was early on. It was like maybe the second week or something. And they still had this crew member guy who I thought was hilarious because they really — of course, it’s Alone, so they try to be really stoic. They don’t want to give you actual human interaction. But this one guy was just like, “Whoa, hell yeah. This is awesome.” You really liked what was going on out there, but they all come walking in —
Tim Ferriss: Your setup?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. For the medical check and scared a squirrel and it ran up and hung itself, and it was like sitting there kicking while the guys walked by. But he was, yeah that one British guy in particular, “Oh, hell yeah.” I was like, “Oh, man, thanks guys.” And so that was kind of funny, but they accidentally helped me cheat there and —
Tim Ferriss: So how long did you ultimately last?
Jordan Jonas: 77 days, that was —
Tim Ferriss: 77 days.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And is it fair to say that last is the wrong word to use? Because my understanding and conversations with you is that it was — of course the television has to be edited in such a way that everyone is going through this crucible with coming close to glancing off the breaking point that it’s on.
Jordan Jonas: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: But it doesn’t seem like it was that hard for you.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it really wasn’t. It could have been, you know, it’s the woods, you never know what’s going to happen. But man, it was going really well. I actually, I snared a bunch of rabbits, had like 20 something plus rabbits before I got the moose, which I got a moose at day 20. And then from then on, I really nailed the fishing and I just was piling up food like crazy. And just because of my previous experience for years at a time in Russia, I wasn’t a couple, few, three, four months there just didn’t seem like a long time away from the family. Because I knew our relationship was strong, and Janahlee could handle it. And I’d come back and we’d catch up and it’d all be good. But I bore a lot of stress because I didn’t know how long the show would last, so I was —
Tim Ferriss: Which is something that changed in season seven.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. It was a big difference in season seven, but in the next season they capped it at 100 days. Which had that been my season would have been interesting because once you get the moose, I could have just basically partied and enjoyed myself. But because I got this moose, it was a lesson I learned, a lesson that I learned on Alone —
Tim Ferriss: That was the first large mammal harvest on the show, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, yeah. And something that I really noticed out there was I should have been more present in the moment, because I did allow myself to stress about this future. I was like, “Okay, I got a moose. Now I’m getting fish.” Surely somebody else is. So man, we’re going to be out here six, eight months and I lost some fat, so now I’m going to lose. So I can’t be out here eight months and lose. So I was bearing a lot of stress because I didn’t actually, as much as I would advise myself if I were to go on again, just be in the present, don’t worry about that future.
What happened is, yeah, I was gunning for 140 days before I even thought it might end. And hadn’t even allowed the thought to cross my mind that it would. Had a lot of food to get there and then it ended at day 77. And I can’t say I ever thought I was going to win. I went out there to win because I wasn’t like trying to prove anything. But I was just, you try to keep going in your stride, just see what happens. I’m just going to go out there and see if I can be sustainable. And I was genuinely shocked when it ended and thought it was going to go quite a bit longer, so —
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me tackle a couple of things because there are a number of details that I think might be instructive to get into. So first let’s talk about the basic tools.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There was, I’m amazed, I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but like one of your competitors made a shocking decision, which was to not bring a ferro rod.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And that was a very risky maneuver. Ended up making it work, but in part he was very good with something called Bow drill. Look up Bow drill online, but it’s using friction to create a fire, but if you’re accustomed to using softer wood, and then you go into alpine territory and it’s much, much, much harder wood, you got a problem on your hands.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. He was able to find a cedar board, which doesn’t grow up there.
Tim Ferriss: You’re allowed to use anything that you find, so tin cans or barrels or whatever it might be. Effectively human garbage or things that have been washed up on the shore. So 10 basic tools, what did you choose to bring?
Jordan Jonas: I took an axe, a saw, a Leatherman, which is like a multi-tools, it’s a knife and pliers and stuff. And a frying pan and a ferro rod, a sleeping bag, a bow, an arrow. You get like bows and arrow. A fishing kit, trapping wire and Paracord. And trapping wire was just a thin gauge, solid, stainless steel wire.
Tim Ferriss: And then you could create the gill net out of the paracord?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. So I thought about bringing a gill net, but then I just thought I’ll bring a Paracord, I can make a gill net and the Paracord will come in handy for other things too.
Tim Ferriss: What are some common mistakes? If you look at what people choose to bring, what are certain things they choose to bring? Let’s leave aside a gill net, right? Because we already covered that you can create that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What are some other, would you say, mistakes, common —
Jordan Jonas: I mean, I always, with my own biases, always think when someone doesn’t bring an axe I’m like, “Really?” But I have my own — how are you going to get through the ice and how are you going to — they’re so handy. But I brought a saw, which in hindsight, I probably should have just brought a gill net and had two instead of making the one and have — anyway, but I do think not bringing a fire starter is a poor choice, because it’s just so much stress. You have to bear so much stress of not letting your fire go out, and everything’s harder. So you have to be really conscious of the fact that things like staying hydrated is super important. And so if there’s an extra step to hydration, you’re going to drink a little bit less water.
Tim Ferriss: So just to be clear, if you’re drinking out of a natural source, you want to boil that water?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, you typically will want to boil it. So if you’re going to boil it, and then you have to start a bow drill fire to boil your water, then all of a sudden —
Tim Ferriss: You’re also burning a lot of calories.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. It just becomes a stressor. You don’t want your fire to go out at night because you got to wake up. So I think that’s a big one. Some people are really good with bow drills, but I still think it’s not worth it.
Tim Ferriss: A ferro rod it’s a lot easier?
Jordan Jonas: It’s not worth the trade-off. Well, I was really into bringing a bow. I mean, you do need practice with a bow to be effective with it. But I can’t tell you how much time I spent enjoying myself just hiking through the woods because I could maybe shoot a squirrel or maybe get a grouse, you know —
Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s something that stood out to me is that — and I think one of the stronger competitors in season seven did something very similar where it wasn’t that you would necessarily go out on a dedicated large mammal. Or let’s just say you wouldn’t go out on a dedicated hunt. But if you went out to do anything, you just bring the bow.
Jordan Jonas: Take the bow. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: In case —
Jordan Jonas: Because it’s like on your way to your fishing spot or on your way to get firewood, and it just gives you always something to do, and it gives you always that, “Oh, is there a rabbit or is there…” So you’re more engaged. Whereas if I hadn’t taken the bow, there would have been a lot of time where I was like, “Boy, what do I do?”
Tim Ferriss: How many arrows are you allowed to bring?
Jordan Jonas: Nine.
Tim Ferriss: Nine. Interesting.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I don’t know why. Seems like a lot or a little. I don’t know why they chose nine.
Tim Ferriss: What committee had a long debate that landed on nine? But that’s actually a decent —
Jordan Jonas: A substantial number of arrows.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a decent number.
Jordan Jonas: I never had an issue with them.
Tim Ferriss: What type of tips did you bring?
Jordan Jonas: So I brought blunt tips, which are —
Tim Ferriss: Kind of like judo points?
Jordan Jonas: Judo points, except they weren’t specifically judo points —
Tim Ferriss: You’re right.
Jordan Jonas: — to get in the nuance. But yeah, you don’t want a sharp blade when you’re shooting small game because you don’t want to just shoot right through the animal. You want to hit it and blunt force, kind of knock it out and kill it. And so for small game, I had five of those and then I had four broadheads.
Tim Ferriss: Broadheads.
Jordan Jonas: Which are just sharp blades.
Tim Ferriss: How many blades?
Jordan Jonas: Two blade, they were VPA, like just solid steel, broadheads. just so that they were tough and I could — yeah, we were sharpening them on the fly and all that.
Tim Ferriss: So the moose, so corralling or fencing, I mean, fencing gives people an image that maybe is not exactly the right image.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But animals are really good at taking the path of least resistance.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Jordan Jonas: It’s something you employ when you’re trying to snare them, when you’re trying to do anything to catch an animal. You just take advantage of the fact that we all take the path of least resistance.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you do?
Jordan Jonas: So I was actually out there, and I’d done a lot of calling, a lot of placing my shelter in the proper wind location, and doing all this to try to make a moose encounter happen. And I had set up a trip wire that would signal a tin can so that it would like, if a moose came by, I would know. And then I went out, had a 40-yard shot at a moose and I missed. And long story short, it was a big fail on my part. But I remember watching that moose run away just like, “Oh, you’re idiot. How’d you do that?”
You get used to screwing up and failing when you’re in the woods like that by yourself, whining isn’t going to help. There’s nobody else you can blame anything on. It’s like you literally better solve your problem or you’re screwed. So I was like, I was disappointed I missed the moose. But at the same time, I was immediately it’s still running away. I was like, “How do I make this happen again?” It just made me more determined to learn from what I just did. And then as I was watching it run away, it just kind of dawned on me that there’s — I mean, I don’t know how far apart, but say 500 yards. There’s just kind of hills, two hills. It’s not like there were cliffs or anything.
But hills, the animals are going to go through the low point there because it’s easy. And then I just remember, “Oh, we built those fences in Russia. Should I really?” Because what had happened is it had come on kind of unexpected path, so I wasn’t really quite set up to get him. But I was like, “Well, I guess I’m not here to starve. I’m here to make it happen.” I’m an action oriented person in that way. So I went over there and decided to try to build one of those fences and funnel the — because I remember even the Natives saying before guns, they used to funnel animals with fences like that to hunt them.
Tim Ferriss: So could you explain, when you say fence, that might involve chopping down some saplings and kind of knocking —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Sort of real basic.
Tim Ferriss: — them over, so that you’re creating obstacles, something like a moose does not want to have to step over or navigate so they go kind of where you intend them to go.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. So I had kind of set up that same tin can alarm system and then I had found a nice shooting bush that I could shoot from and get to with relative cover. And then I built a fence, but again, it was just, I hadn’t even finished it when it ended up working. But it was just, with the Natives, we’d do four rows. So four rows of arm thick logs kind of stacked in such a way that they hold up into a fence looking thing —
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so it did look like more of a fence.
Jordan Jonas: It did look like a fence when it’s done. But I just initially did one rung. So the first rung and ran it all the way across.
Tim Ferriss: How long did that take to create?
Jordan Jonas: Probably a couple of days.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, it sounds like a —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was a —
Tim Ferriss: — good amount of work.
Jordan Jonas: — lot of work and I was like, it was a calorie risk and expenditure, but it was clear I wasn’t going to win if I was starving. And so I was just, I wanted to get food. And so I built that funnel and then actually not long after I was out pulling a — again, I hadn’t even finished it yet. I was pulling a rabbit out of a snare of all things, and I heard that can clank. I was like, “Oh, something’s coming no way.” Ran over there, snuck up to the bush and that moose just came strolling along my fence to the opening where I was and I worked amazingly well. It was the morning after I’d spent the whole evening calling the moose and was able to put an arrow in it and —
Tim Ferriss: What was the distance on that?
Jordan Jonas: Like 24 yards.
Tim Ferriss: See, I mean that’s like —
Jordan Jonas: Doable.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the payoff. 40 yards, I mean, look, I mean —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Recurve and wind in it —
Tim Ferriss: — I do a lot of recurve and I would not put money on myself for a 40-yard shot on a moving target.
Jordan Jonas: Nor would I, but when you’re starving —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, sure. Why not?
Jordan Jonas: You have to have a couple of shots. It’s actually doable. You can kind of correct. But in my miss, I had only had one arrow with me at the time, so yeah. So I hit it and it was actually felt like a really good shot, but he took off and I was like, “I’m going to wait an hour, let him kind of just calmly…” If you’re bow hunting, one thing you realize is a lot of times the animal doesn’t see you when you shoot it and it’s quiet and it gets hit. It doesn’t know what happened. So it’s going to run over somewhere and like lay down. It doesn’t feel good.
And so usually that first place it lays down, because it doesn’t think it’s getting chased per se, it just lays there. And then it slowly bleeds out and it’s about as calm of a way you can probably go as a wild animal. But what happens if you get too eager and start running after this animal you put an arrow in, is it’ll, if it sees you, it’ll then know it’s getting chased and they’ll get this second wind and just take off and run. And by then they’ll no longer be bleeding as much and very often people lose animals like that. So fortunately I was aware of that, waited a good long time.
Tim Ferriss: You waited a while also. So I mean more than an hour, ultimately, that —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was about an hour and then I started tracking it, and great blood trail and then it just started to dry up. And the ground had been like an old burn and so it was hard and there weren’t tracks. And I was like, no way am I going to lose this moose. You start getting stressed like no way. And I had lost its blood trail and I was just sitting there thinking, I was like, well the last thing I can do is it’s going to take the path of least resistance once again, particularly when it’s wounded. So I just did it a few times where I stood in the woods and then you just kind of walk through as if you were going to go, where does it take you? And go with the flow.
And sure enough, 500 yards up or whatever there it was laying there, oh, no way. Ducked down and it was still alive. And so I was 50 something yards away and I was like, man, I can either try to stick another arrow in it, in which case it’s either going to run away. Maybe I kill it or maybe it charges me. And you got a 30 percent chance of each. So I said my best bet is to just watch it and let it calmly finish its process. And so that was a very long couple of hours honestly watching it.
It would stand up and my heart would sink like, “No, no, no.” And then it would lay back down and be like, “Ah yes.” Stand up, very emotional roller coaster. And finally it stood up and tipped over and we were talking about earlier, but the joy that I felt was irreplaceable. And you almost can’t match it. Just that demon of starvation that for three weeks now just chewing at you, “You’re going to starve, you’re going to starve.” Slayed that!
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. How much meat do you get off a moose like that?
Jordan Jonas: Oh, it was hard to say. I probably had, I’d be a little bit guessing maybe 400 or 500 pounds. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a big animal.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, big animal. And then you have all the bone marrow and the brain and organ stuff. Talk about, I don’t know if people like eating liver, but I got myself sick of it. You got the liver the size of my body, and there’s no way to preserve it. So you got to eat that thing first, oh —
Tim Ferriss: Why can’t you preserve the liver versus other things?
Jordan Jonas: Usually things that are really bloody, like you have a lot of blood in them spoil fast. So same with like fish. If you catch a fish, there’s a blood line in there that you want to scrape out or it’ll spoil.
Tim Ferriss: Right, okay, yeah.
Jordan Jonas: And the gills carry blood, so you want to rip those out or it’ll spoil. Any animal that you’re going to preserve, you just want to make sure it’s bled really well. And liver for whatever reason is just —
Tim Ferriss: Saturated.
Jordan Jonas: — saturated. And there’s no way to drain it, you know, so — Oh, man, I had plenty of vitamins there for a while.
Tim Ferriss: God, I’m just thinking of the OD of vitamins that you have.
Jordan Jonas: I know. Yeah. It was a little bit of a concern and —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For you adventurous eaters out there, don’t eat a polar bear liver in one sitting.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, that’s fatal.
Tim Ferriss: Vitamin A will do you in. So you mentioned you had some fat stolen.
Jordan Jonas: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Noticed some very unique earrings on your wife this morning. These may tie together.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, they do. It so happens, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What were the earrings?
Jordan Jonas: Man, so you’re out there and things are going well, but you’re still living on the edge, and little mistakes can be the difference between surviving or not. And so, even the process of keeping yourself hydrated, like we talk about, is elaborate and involved and thought out. Walk into your fishing hole, it’s like, “Oh, I better take some ash so I can sprinkle on the really icy spots.” Everything’s thought out, and so the last thing you need is this whole extra variable coming in and adding a bunch of difficulty.
Well, one morning I went out and I had set my meat out on a shelf with this kind of half-hearted — not half-hearted, but maybe a bear will come and if a bear comes, I can shoot that from my shelter, so I could maybe double up and get it, almost like a ready-made bait pile. But I hadn’t even really thought about the fact is that there’s wolverines up there, and that they might show up and I might not hear it or notice it as much.
And so I came out one morning and had I stored probably 90,000 calories worth of fat in this gallon jug. I don’t know how much is in a gallon, but full gallon of fat. And I came out and it was the day, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to render that fat.” And I come and I started looking around like, “What are these tracks?” Like, huh, that’s interesting. And then you slowly start to have something dawn on you like, “No.” And then I noticed my jug was gone, and then I was like, “Oh, those are wolverine tracks.” And like, “Oh, no.” Ran down the tracks. Pointless. That thing’s long gone.
And so I came back and I was like, “Oh, no, I’ve got a wolverine here.” And one thing you notice about the woods, when you have meat, every forest freeloader knows you have the meat. And so like, all the jays, and all the wolves were coming around, and the wolverine now, and just everybody’s coming to get your meat. And that wolverine, they’re known as being some of the most ferocious animals on earth, and they’re like that honey badger video everybody’s seen, but they’re much larger and on steroids.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like — I guess it is technically in the weasel family.
Jordan Jonas: Weasel, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like if you took a weasel and put it on every performance enhancing drug imaginable, like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV, and gave it on top of that, just like a very irritable, combative demeanor.
Jordan Jonas: I mean, they’re not huge, like 40 pounds or whatever, but they fight off wolf packs, they take down full-grown moose.
Tim Ferriss: So just think about that for a second, guys. 40 pound animal. How much does a moose weigh?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, like a thousand pounds.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, that’s insane.
Jordan Jonas: You just grab on, and there’s been stories of them holding onto a moose’s neck for days until the thing suffocates of blood loss and die. Just like —
Tim Ferriss: So terrifying.
Jordan Jonas: And so, they make up for their size and just being aggressive. And that was my first time of really dealing with one like that. And he kept surprising me with how bold he was. You kind of figure, okay, that’ll take care of it. And then all of a sudden, whoa, right in front of me, he’d run by and grab a chunk of meat and run off. No way. And so, basically it came down to the fact that it was either me or him on this island, and that was very clear, and he was claiming my meat and this and that. And I made a long trip wire again for him.
Tim Ferriss: With the can.
Jordan Jonas: With the can, which proved to be a really useful tool. And then one night I heard that thing clank, came out of my shelter. This was after the previous night of the similar situation happening and I didn’t take a shot at the wolverine because he was behind a bush. And so this next night I was like, if I get a chance, I’m going to take it. I came out and he was behind a bush. I could see his eyes glowing, and I just sent an arrow in there, and it ricocheted through and hit him, but I could see him spinning around. I didn’t know what was, exactly how I had hit him. So I just grabbed the axe and ran over there, and I got over there and he lunged at me, and I could see —
Tim Ferriss: And you had pinned him to the ground.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, but he had been pinned to the ground and both the part of the arrow was stuck in the ground and part of it was hung up in the alders, so it caught his lunge, and I swung and it eviscerated him, and then he spun around and was like grabbing at his own injury, and then I swung again and again. But I definitely have that mental image of his teeth and his jump right at me.
Tim Ferriss: It’s good he was pinned.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was good he was pinned. I mean, I think I would have still won, but it would have been a lot more of a — we would have both suffered a lot more.
Tim Ferriss: I think you would have suffered a lot more.
Jordan Jonas: I would have suffered a lot more. I was hoping I would win. But no, it was intense. It was a very primal moment. That’s all I would say about it. The moose was so thoughtful, and the wolverine was just one of those things where you’re like, what just happened? Like, that was crazy. I can’t believe that just happened. Anyway, it solved this problem that had been harrowing me for weeks by that point, and was pretty liberating.
Tim Ferriss: And now his claws have been turned into your wife’s earrings.
Jordan Jonas: And so I had to make some earrings out of those claws, a gift to my wife. They’re pretty nice.
Tim Ferriss: So, to bring in something that I don’t think people would pick up on watching season six, there’s a point where, as I think you put it to me when we were out in the woods, you were like, in effect, right? Up to that point, you’d been making plans, executing the plan, sort of living on offense, if that makes sense. But you kill a wolverine, and so there’s this kind of mystery in the show people might not immediately pick up on, which is not the only wolverine around, right?
Jordan Jonas: Right, right. Yeah. We were allowed to kill one wolverine.
Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s the thing, right? You had tags.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, the tags, you still have to follow these rules.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not something that is —
Jordan Jonas: I wasn’t able to kill every wolverine out there.
Tim Ferriss: It is artfully omitted from the final cut.
Jordan Jonas: So I only had about a day of relief before I heard another wolverine. I was like, no. But this time I was in defense, and it just so happened to line up with the time of year where I had this very tangible mental shift that went from me being in that, when you’re in fight or flight. I was in fight. I was in like a proactive mode, like you say, making plans, making things happen. Well, now the ice was freezing on the lake and I couldn’t go out and fish. And so, couldn’t fish.
Tim Ferriss: At least in the normal way.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, in the normal way. Well, I couldn’t even go walk on the ice to ice fish yet. So there’s a couple week period there where it’s just hard to fish. And then I had all the rabbits I needed, honestly. I had so much protein with the moose that there’s no reason for me to go kill or snare rabbits, so I didn’t do that.
Tim Ferriss: Also, AKA toilet paper, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What did you use for toilet paper?
Jordan Jonas: The rabbit feet. I hate to say it, but it was quite luxurious.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, good to know.
Jordan Jonas: Your imaginations can carry the rest. And then this wolverine came and I had to only play defense, and it was a very tangible shift that I went, from being able to be in control of my own destiny, to all of a sudden being on this, what felt like a downhill trajectory. It’s like, I’ve collected everything I can collect, and now I just see what happens and try to defend against the wolverine, and all I can do is wait for the ice to — it felt like a very different frame of mind, and that was a more difficult moment period to get through.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, all these animals have optimized to steal food, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, that’s all they do, is scavenge.
Tim Ferriss: And so, especially something like wolverine, it’s like, you can take the bark off of the pillars holding up your elevated platform, but —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, I made a cool platform the Evenki had showed me. I had built a bunch of them with the Natives, and.
Tim Ferriss: A participant in a later season almost killed himself trying to copy that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a certain technique to how to build them, which was useful to know, to do it safely. But you’re also calculating not using unnecessary calories. And so, I should have finished it. There’s actually, you box in that raised platform and then you build a box on top, and it’s pretty everything-proof. But of course, again, that wolverine kept surprising me. So I had built the platform, done a few tricks to try to keep it from getting up there, and then it got up there. By then it was like, shoot, I should have built the thing. But anyway, so, yep, learning on the fly and trying to react accordingly.
Tim Ferriss: Most people in modern life, they have their — I’m making this up, right? Random meal, but they’re like, salmon or chicken breast, some veggies, maybe some pasta or sweet potato, who knows? But you mentioned the fat being stolen.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And people can look up something called rabbit starvation too, but how important is fat?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, you learn that really fast, also. And that was the first time just solely living off the land that I had, where I didn’t have any noodle backup or anything like that, for an extended period of time. So I was curious how long you could live off a rabbit. I was curious, all this kind of stuff. And what I learned quite quickly was, your body needs fat right away, and every day you’re burning your fat reserves or fat you’re bringing in. The protein it’s actually more attainable out there. There’s a lot of little animals and a lot of things, even mushrooms have protein in them, but the fat is the bottleneck of survival. For sure. And so, that’s why we love it, I guess. It just proved, and it was so interesting to observe the animals, is how homed everybody was in on just the fat. The wolverine, the crows, the jays, everything would just try to get the fattiest part of your fish or your meat.
Tim Ferriss: Eyeballs.
Jordan Jonas: Brain, skin. And they would leave the chunks of meat. Like a big fish, they’d strip the skin off, eat kind of the fatty belly area, the eyes.
Tim Ferriss: Grizzlies do the same thing too, right? Like when they’re grabbing salmon.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: If they’re plentiful enough, they eat the brain and just leave all the meat.
Jordan Jonas: Yep. It’s pretty interesting. So yeah, that’s the fuel of the forest out there.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so let’s talk about some new projects. Well, first of all, not really first of all, but lest I forget, where can people get one of these incredible axes? I have one. People, do not just run around your living room swinging this like a toy. It’s not a toy.
Jordan Jonas: It’s a tool.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s a uniquely designed — I don’t want to say all in one, but multipurpose tool.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I think if people take the time to learn it and learn its nuances, it’s like, you’ll love it, but there’s a learning curve to it because it is like a kind of a finely-tuned —
Tim Ferriss: Machine.
Jordan Jonas: But at JordanJonas.com. I have a website, Jordan Jonas, and JordanJonas.com/axe, you can get that. There’s two versions. This is a little bit smaller version. It’s easier to carry when you’re backpacking and stuff. And then I have like the fuller, bigger version, that if you’re on the farm or car camping, things like that, has a little more heft.
Tim Ferriss: And then if people, and you and I have to book some time before this goes live so that I don’t screw myself here, but if people want to experience what it’s like to go into the wilderness with you, which I highly recommend, if you can do it, guys, you will learn a ton. You will not be able to absorb everything. There’s going to be a lot that you pick up and are able to practice, which was so fun. I mean, not just some of the finer details of fundamental survival skills, but learning how to use a relatively simple tool like a Tenkara rod, but just learning how to utilize a simple tool well, right? Same with the axe. So, how can people learn more about —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, same deal. It’s the Instagram, follow along, YouTube.
Tim Ferriss: Jordan Jonas, also.
Jordan Jonas: Instagram. Yeah. JordanJonas.com is where I have access to sign up for courses and sign up for, there’s hunts available there and stuff that people can guide you on. But yeah, they do book pretty quick. This season’s booked, but I’m all about taking people out on private trips and stuff. You just have to kind of get in early or wait for my schedule to come out for next year and try to squeeze in. But yeah, I love them, man. It’s been such a cool way to share what I love. I talked about it earlier with the purpose. It’s kind of like, I’ve had this stage of my life. The purpose is defined and trying to share the lessons that I’ve gained with others, and I really enjoy it, find it meaningful, and I know people get a lot out of it, so I would love to see some folks out there.
Tim Ferriss: So, speaking of purpose, the book. What are you up to? Why write a book?
Jordan Jonas: My wife and I talk about it fairly often, that it’s like, we have a life that is very good, very full, and on a lot of levels, I would say, emotionally, spiritually, on the family, it’s a big blessing. When I was on Alone too, it kind of struck me. I was like, well, how’s this situation that’s so difficult, or, I mean, even life-changing for people — it just kind of felt like another trip to Russia. It felt very normal for me. I was like, I wonder what prepared me in life to make this kind of unusual situations seem normal.
Tim Ferriss: And just to provide the counter to that, I mean, people break on this show. In a lot of different ways, sometimes in very traumatic fashion.
Jordan Jonas: Mm-hmm. And so, it made me a little bit introspective about what had prepared me for it well. And in thinking about those things, I was like, man, there really are some patterns of my being that have created — and Tim, if you guys listen, know he’s really good at naming things and putting a place on it. But have created a reservoir of resilience that I can tap into and that is well-exercised. And I just thought it would be really interesting to share with people through the story of my life and all these kind of fun stories, but also some of the keys to living a life well, really, but by building resilience that’ll help that.
And what is interesting is, you want to build that resilience before you find yourself in the situation, because once you find yourself in the situation, it’s often a little late. And so, the key is to come through hard times and trials — anybody can get through it, but you want to get through it and be positive and be putting light into the world. So it’s me trying to help —
Tim Ferriss: Like your grandparents.
Jordan Jonas: Like my grandparents, like my dad. It’s me trying to help people learn the lessons that I’ve learned, that might help make their reservoir of resilience fill up, so that they’re able to confront things as they come. So it’s a fun project. I got, Harper Collins and I partnered up on it, and it’ll be what I work on this year. So, it’s been fun starting.
Tim Ferriss: What’s the tentative pub date plan? Any idea?
Jordan Jonas: Early, start of 2027. So, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s exciting.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it is exciting. First book, so it’s a fun new project.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to, for people who — I really encourage people to watch seasons six and seven. There’s a Reddit thread titled, quote, “Can we agree that Jordan from season six is the best contestant to ever play the game?” And it just goes on and on and on and on.
Jordan Jonas: You’ll find some disagreement.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. I mean, it’s Reddit, so of course, there’s plenty of disagreement.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah, fun.
Tim Ferriss: But you mentioned hardship, and earlier this morning we were chatting, because I was in Tennessee, and was with very, very skilled and podcaster and kind human, Shawn Ryan, and found this folded up piece of paper in the chair I was sitting in, and it ended up being a copy of the Serenity Prayer. And I have long been a fan of the Serenity Prayer, in part because it has echoes of and reinforces a lot of my reading in Stoicism. What I didn’t realize is that what I thought was the Serenity Prayer is actually just a small piece of it. Are you able to pull it up on your phone by chance?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it’s a great prayer. So I’ll read the full thing here. It says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Then it goes on, “Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as the pathway to peace, taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him in the next.” It has a lot of interesting concepts there. Not everyone, but most people are familiar with the start.
Tim Ferriss: The very beginning, right?
Jordan Jonas: The next one is like, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time. There was that lesson I got slapped with on Alone, where it’s like, I’m worried about the future and worried that — ended up not coming. And then accepting hardship as the pathway to peace, as we were discussing this morning, it’s quite a profound bit of wisdom in there.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot in there.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just, it’s wild. I mean, some of my favorite, maybe concepts, maxims from Buddhists, philosophy, from Stoicism, I mean, it is so neatly wrapped into the Serenity — Stoicism. It’s so beautifully put and it just kind of blew my mind that I had such a partial understanding of it, because I only knew, I think like most people, the very beginning and not the rest.
Jordan, people can find you at JordanJonas.com, J-O-N-A-S. They can find you on Instagram and YouTube @hobojordo. Makes me laugh every time I say it. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything you’d like to add? Ask my audience?
Jordan Jonas: We’ve all been noticing lately that the political division is ramping up more and more. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that so many people I know and love over the years have vastly divergent political opinions, but when you filter each other through politics, you’re really likely to see people as avatars of an ideology rather than as fellow humans. I see that right now it seems like with immigrations, the hot topic at the moment.
Of course, I believe we should keep track of immigration and who comes in, and people who take advantage of the system shouldn’t because there’s a social contract and a trust that has to be shared and maintained in a society. But at the same time, I have a personal belief based on my faith that I should help those in need when I have the ability. In my personal life, I’ve chosen to take on, for example, in my case, a couple who were Russian asylum-seekers, didn’t want to go to the front in Ukraine, so they fled.
But I don’t expect others to be forced via the government and taxation to live out my morality. And I don’t judge or think ill of those who don’t because I know there is a genuine sacrifice there. So I don’t use politics to vicariously fulfill my moral obligations that I feel good about myself without having to make the personal sacrifices that a personally lived-out ethic in the world requires.
If I have the government fulfill my morality, it costs me nothing and I can even find myself in a situation where I’m judging people who might actually practically be doing more to bear the actual burden of what I think is right in the world. So I think if more people approach their morality on a personal level actively, but also take responsibility for it in their lives, the reality has a way of tempering the extremes and it cuts in every direction.
If someone on the right has a really strong opinion about abortion, it’s like foster children, adopt, support single moms. If someone on the left has a really strong opinion about wanting an open border, well, take in an immigrant family, support them using your own means and social connections. Get to know the complexity that comes when you do all that, and you’ll find you’ll actually understand people that don’t because it is a sacrifice and you’ll be less judgmental and probably less self-righteous.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a little bit lately. Working that out is my favorite part of my spiritual path of Christianity. It’s like, I don’t have a law. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, usually. I’m supposed to filter the real world through this ideal of love your neighbor as yourself, love Lord your God. And in doing so, I’m constantly like, what does it mean to love your enemy? It’s not realistic. What’s it mean to give to everybody of us? That’s not realistic, but it makes me wrestle with this thing, and in that it all comes to life. Whereas I could just, you know, I could have chosen to throw it out at some point, and throw all that wrestling out with it, but I would have lost a lot of what provides meaning and value in my life, also. So I don’t know, working that out in your life is super valuable.
Tim Ferriss: It strikes me, I mean, this framing of wrestling with God. And look, I know I’m getting over my skis here a bit, but it’s the people who wrestle with X, who foster a type of introspection that I think often leads to decisions that are better aligned with their truest of true values.
Jordan Jonas: Right, right, right. Yeah, it gets a little dangerous when you know for sure. So it’s, embrace that struggle, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know attribution, but it’s like, admire the seeker of the truth, beware the person who’s found the truth.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, there are times when it’s like, to have solid values or principles that you choose to live your life by, but at the same time, to wrestle and to ask questions, under what circumstances would this not be right, and to cross examine. It’s asking a lot of people, I recognize. It’s asking a lot of anyone, but —
Jordan Jonas: Because it’s easy to just have a formula to follow. The highest path is to work it out.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I admire how you have tried to work it out. I think it’s a very thoughtful approach. It’s not an easy approach. And I just love what you do in the world, man. I feel like you’re reintroducing people to a lot of core, evolved sensitivities that make humans human. And when you do that, the abstractions and the concepts that people are willing to go to blows over on social media just fall away as what they are, which is typically some type of artificial line in the sand that people have chosen and been encouraged to take on as some type of team identity. And that just falls away when you simplify things and put people in an environment where they can see that. I think it’s really beautiful, and people don’t have to live in Montana to do that.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: There are ways to seek it out. So, I appreciate you taking time on the show, man. It’s great to see you.
Jordan Jonas: Tim, it’s been fun getting to know you and hanging out with you in the woods and here, and really enjoyed it. It’s an honor.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m excited, man. I can’t wait to pack in my own axe now, next time, and make absolutely sure I don’t stick it into my foot. So, to be continued. Thanks, Jordan.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And for people listening, we’ll link to all sorts of things in the show notes at Tim.blog/podcast. Just search Jordan, and there may be one other Jordan. And you can certainly search Jonas. There’s not going to be another Jonas. He’ll pop right up. Until next time, as always, just be a bit kinder than is necessary, to others, yes, but also to yourself. To quote Jack Kornfield, “If your compassion does not include yourself, then your compassion is incomplete.”
Jordan Jonas: Indeed.Tim Ferriss: Thanks for tuning in.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Jordan Jonas, Champion of Alone — The Art of Survival, Lessons from Nomadic Tribes, Hardship as the Path to Peace, How to Handle Rogue Wolverines, and Why Not to Photograph Attacking Bears (#853) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-12 04:31:00
Jordan Jonas (@hobojordo) grew up on a farm in Idaho, rode freight trains across the US, spent time in remote Russian villages, fur trapped and travelled for several years with nomads in Siberia, and won Alone Season 6, after being the first contestant to truly thrive in the wilderness and harvest big game.
He now leads people from all over the world and all walks of life on extraordinary outdoor adventures, facilitating once-in-a-lifetime wilderness expeditions, hunts, family adventures, and team-building events.
He has a wife and three children and focuses on living life to its fullest with them.
Please enjoy!
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“In the forest … the one tool you need is an axe to give yourself a chance at survival.”
— Jordan Jonas
“[What] I learned living in the woods for a while is: you’re home. You’re just already home, wherever you are.”
— Jordan Jonas
“When you’re in the woods by yourself, whining isn’t going to help. There’s nobody else you can blame anything on. You’d literally better solve your problem or you’re screwed.”
— Jordan Jonas
“We’ve all been noticing lately that the political division is ramping up more and more. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that so many people I know and love over the years have vastly divergent political opinions, but when you filter each other through politics, you’re really likely to see people as avatars of an ideology rather than as fellow humans. … I think if more people approach their morality on a personal level actively, but also take responsibility for it in their lives, the reality has a way of tempering the extremes and it cuts in every direction.”
— Jordan Jonas
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Want to hear another episode with someone who knows what it takes to survive in the wild? Listen to my most recent conversation with MeatEater host and author Steven Rinella, in which we discussed true wilderness skills and survival, essential gear for any adventure, the psychology of preparedness, how to source water and food in the backcountry, freeze-dried food secrets, and much more.
The post Jordan Jonas, Champion of Alone — The Art of Survival, Lessons from Nomadic Tribes, Hardship as the Path to Peace, How to Handle Rogue Wolverines, and Why Not to Photograph Attacking Bears (#853) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-05 16:01:40
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Tim McGraw (@thetimmcgraw), a Grammy Award-winning entertainer, author, and actor who has sold more than 106 million records worldwide, with 49 number-one singles and 19 number-one albums. You can find tickets for his upcoming Pawn Shop Guitar Tour at TimMcGraw.com.
Books, music, and people mentioned in the interview
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: Tim, it’s so nice to finally meet in person.
Tim McGraw: You as well, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Really fantastic.
Tim McGraw: Absolutely. Big fan.
Tim Ferriss: Likewise. And I have not been to Nashville in so long and it’s just lovely around here.
Tim McGraw: It’s incredible and it changes every day. I mean, I get lost. Anytime I come downtown, I get lost because everything looks so different.
Tim Ferriss: Franklin looks like it’s just had facelift after facelift after facelift.
Tim McGraw: I know. And when I first moved here in ’89, all of that, Cool Springs, all that stuff was still all countryside. And I remember land being not very expensive out there, and I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, I’m thinking, “Man, if I could just buy some land out here and build me a little cabin, find me a club gig, everything would be great,” and then cut to two years later and it’s just everything’s through the roof. I mean, it’s just going crazy. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all.
Tim Ferriss: You just offered me the perfect segue because —
Tim McGraw: Well, that’s what I’m here for.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you. You know, I appreciate this tango that we’re getting started here. I was looking back, you were kind enough to answer some questions for Tribe of Mentors.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, your book, yes.
Tim Ferriss: My last book. And I was going back to reread it and I looked at your bio, and at the time it read, “Tim McGraw has sold more than 50 million records,” dot, dot, dot, and all of these amazing accolades. And then I looked at the more recent and it’s more than 106 million records worldwide. Your longevity is mind-boggling on a number of different levels.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, me too. It’s mind-boggling to me too, people are still putting up with me.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m wondering, how have you thought about, or how has your creative process changed over the years? What has remained the same? What has changed? Because there’s so many ingredients that you have to get right for you to, not just last, but succeed over the decades that you have.
Tim McGraw: Well, one thing that doesn’t change is great songs. That’s the first check — should be the first check on any artist’s list. I mean, I write, I write for every project and I’ve been lucky enough to have some success with some of the things I write. But for me, the song always has to win. And wherever the song comes from, that’s what it’s going to be. And I listen to songs constantly. I’m constantly listening. Constantly writing, constantly listening. I’m hard on my own songs, that’s probably why I haven’t cut as many.
But my process is pretty much the same. I think material wise, I look for different kinds of music than I used to. I still like fun songs, and if I find the right fun song, I’ll do it, but it’s tougher, at a certain age, to sing about Daisy Dukes and tailgates all the time. It just doesn’t quite ring true to me. But every now and then something comes along that’s funny and you just do it because you’re an artist and you’re telling a story and you do it. But I gravitate more towards songs now that not only have meaning to me, but I think people can find a deeper meaning in their own situation, in their own life.
Tim Ferriss: I would love for you to, if you could, maybe unpack for us a song.
Tim McGraw: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: It could be any song. And what I’m angling for is, of course, the genesis, but also what do you do when the muse goes a little quiet, right?
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because you can’t just, as a working musician be like, “Well, I’m going to wait a year for lightning to strike.” There’s probably some process behind it. And I am not a musician, but I’m deeply interested in it. One of my favorite albums of all time is Graceland by Paul Simon.
Tim McGraw: Oh, God, yes. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I was listening to his backstory as he explained how a number of those songs came together and I was just mesmerized.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So could you tell the story of any song that comes to mind and the genesis?
Tim McGraw: Oh, wow. Probably “Live Like You Were Dying” would be a good place to start because that song came to me, it was right after my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer, glioblastoma, and Tim Nichols and Craig Wiseman sent that song to me. They wrote it about my dad when they found out that that was happening and sent it to me, and I never played it for my dad. He was sick at the time, I just felt that it was not appropriate to play a song about dying to your dad who was dying.
Although I’m sure he would have loved the idea of having a song that was about him or inspired by him. I didn’t play it for him, I had the song, and in his last days, he was at our farm, in the cabin at our farm, that’s where he wanted to be for his last days, and spent a lot of time with him. And I think it was right around two to three weeks after he passed away that we went to the studio to record. And we recorded in upstate New York at a place, right outside of Woodstock, at a place called Allaire Studios.
It’s beautiful. It’s an old Dutch farmhouse and barn up on top of a mountain. Beautiful. We had like three foot of snow. We were there for three weeks. We sent two semi trucks full of Persian rugs and furniture and just decked the place out for the band and myself for three weeks while we were cutting. And my dad’s older brother, Hank, I invited him to come hang with us because Tug had just died and I know he wasn’t doing very well. So I invited him to come hang with us while we were recording. And it was probably six or seven days into the recording process, and we would start late and we’d go till three or four in the morning recording.
And I remember it was about one in the morning and I had this glass booth built in the middle of the studio so I could see everybody. And there was fireplaces at each end, and the fireplaces were roaring. I had my glass booth in the middle, we were cutting this on. My uncle Hank was smoking a joint. If you know my uncle Hank, he’s passed away, he passed away last year now, but he was an All-American athlete, three sports, played pro baseball for 13 years, greatest guy in the world, looked just like Sam Elliott, but was a pothead from day one. So I watched him and he was sitting over there and I just got to thinking, I thought, “This might be a good time to cut ‘Live Like You Were Dying.'”
So we’d just finished a song, we were doing some overdubs. I gathered everybody around and I gathered Hank around and I asked everybody what their opinion was, if they felt like tackling that song. And so about 2:00 in the morning, we cranked it up and then before the sun came up, we had that song done and it was so tough because I’m sitting in the booth, in the glass booth, recording the song, directing the band, getting the parts right. And I can’t help but watch my Uncle Hank the entire time that we’re doing it. And he’s just in a puddle over in the corner. And then he’s laughing. And then he starts telling stories about Tug after.
So we recorded the song, we got finished probably about four or five in the morning, and then we just sat and listened to Uncle Hank tell stories about Tug for the rest of the night. And I have to believe that all that magic of that night, of Hank being there, Tug had only been gone for a couple of weeks, and then Hank telling the stories afterwards, I have to believe that all of that went into that record.
Tim Ferriss: There’s so many different aspects to that, each of which you could unpack. When you mentioned it seemed like a good time or it might be a good time, why did it seem like a good time? Was it a feeling? Was it a feeling inside of you —
Tim McGraw: It was a feeling.
Tim Ferriss: — as you looked at your uncle?
Tim McGraw: As I looked at my uncle, it just felt like that I was being told to cut this song. Everything, the vibes coming off of him, what I was feeling at the time, and I think we had just cut something really up-tempo and pretty rocking. And I don’t know, it was the mood, the snow outside, the fireplaces, my uncle sitting there, being so late at night maybe, there was a melancholy that sort of struck at that time. I’m sure there were some other factors that might have been involved that struck about that time, when you’re in the studio that late. But it just felt like there was magic in the air at that moment and we wanted to capture it. And we always like to say, “You could have the greatest song in the world, the greatest band in the world, greatest singer in the world — which I am not — but you could have all those factors and it still not work.” And we always say, “Sometimes God just walks through the room.”
Tim Ferriss: All right, I want to pick up on that thread and then we’re going to go back to some of your family history.
Tim McGraw: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Because I mean, millions upon millions —
Tim McGraw: That could get convoluted.
Tim Ferriss: — upon millions know your music, but I think fewer know the origin story. So we will get to that. But I also want to ask, when is the first time when you felt God walk through the door with one of your songs, where you’re like, “Oh. Oh, okay. I think maybe we have some lightning in a bottle here.”
Tim McGraw: I would like to say it was “Don’t Take the Girl,” but I didn’t feel that way after we recorded it, because I never felt like I captured exactly what I wanted on that record. Until we finally finished it. When we finally finished it, I felt like we had it, but in the process of it, I felt like a struggle on that song. But “Indian Outlaw,” because I had that song for my first album and nobody liked it. The label didn’t like it, James Stroud didn’t like it, Byron liked it, but I couldn’t talk James into letting me record it and I couldn’t talk the label into letting me record it.
Tim Ferriss: What were the reasons they gave you?
Tim McGraw: They just said it was too controversial and it was a bad song. It wasn’t country music, it won’t work on radio. All the things that they were right about. I heard that song the first night I moved to Nashville. I got to Nashville at one or two in the morning on a Greyhound bus, walked down to the Hall of Fame lounge and hotel where I ended up staying for a couple of weeks, walked into the bar and everybody was closing down, the band was packing up, and Tommy Barnes and Max D. Barnes were sitting at the bar. I think it’s Max D. Barnes. He’s sitting at the bar, the bar’s closing down. So I walk in and just ordered a beer and she said, “We just had last call, but I’ll give you a beer.” I sat down, so I started talking to these two guys.
So Tommy says, “Do you have a room?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Let’s go and play some music.” So me, Tommy, and Max Barnes went up and started playing music.
Tim Ferriss: Within stepping off the Greyhound.
Tim McGraw: Within stepping off the bus and Tommy played “Indian Outlaw” and “I Don’t Want To Be There In The Morning When She Wakes Up And Finds Me Gone,” which I ended up cutting both of those. Have three more songs of his that I heard that first night that I’m going to cut eventually. But “Indian Outlaw,” heard that first night and I started playing it immediately. Learned it, started playing it in all the clubs around town, the honky talks around town. When we would go travel and play clubs all over the country, I was playing that song and we’d end up having to play it two or three times a night, four times a night because people loved it so much. And I kept telling the label, when I was going in to cut my first record, this was before I had a record deal or anything.
Tim Ferriss: So you knew it worked.
Tim McGraw: I knew it worked. I didn’t have any say so on the first album.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: So when we went and cut the second album, “That’s what we’re cutting. Period.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: And when we cut it, I felt like, “This is either going to work in a huge way or it’s going to ruin my career forever.” Luckily it worked.
Tim Ferriss: And it worked.
Tim McGraw: And I think the fortunate thing, it worked, and I think that what kept me from being sort of a novelty act, that had this sort of funky, weird song that made some noise, was being able to come right behind it with “Don’t Take the Girl.” I’ll forever believe —
Tim Ferriss: It was the one, two.
Tim McGraw: — that the combination of those two songs is what set my career in motion and gave me momentum that I probably couldn’t have gotten any other way.
Tim Ferriss: How would you describe both of those songs as a one, two punch? So the first one for people who don’t know, why was it potentially controversial or different?
Tim McGraw: Well, because it was, and I understood why it was controversial because it was stereotypical and it was sort of a play on Native American stereotypes and there was a lot of controversy around it. And I understood the controversy and I wasn’t upset about the controversy. In fact, I met with several Native American leaders that some liked the song, some didn’t like the song. And my answer was, “Look, I understand what your concerns are, the song’s not meant to be that way. I understand your concerns. My opinion, if you need to go after me in order to raise attention and awareness to your cause, by all means, use my song for that.” So if you like it or don’t like it, if you could make something good happen for it from it, then by all means I’m not going to be offended.
And now when I play Native American casinos, I always, when I meet with the elders or the chiefs before the show, I always say, “I have “Indian Outlaw” on my set, but I’m happy to take it out if it’s offensive,” and invariably, 99.9 percent of the time, “That’s why we hired you is to sing that song,” so they love it. So it’s been really good to me.
Tim Ferriss: And what about the follow-up straight, the one, two?
Tim McGraw: Oh, “Don’t Take the Girl.”
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Tim McGraw: That song was just so powerful and such a great story. It was the epitome of what country music is all about. A great story that gets right to the heart of the matter, that hits right to the emotion, that leaves it a little open-ended and makes you guess a little bit about what happened. But to this day, singing that song, there are times where it chokes me up, still, every time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: And that song was one of my first stances as an artist to where I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing or not, but it was my first opportunity to perform on the CMAs after “Don’t Take the Girl” came out. And Walter was the guy who used to run the CMAs. Remember Walter? They wanted me to do “Don’t Take the Girl,” but they only gave me three minutes and the song’s five minutes. And I was trying to explain to them that there’s no way to sing this song without telling the complete story or it wouldn’t make sense. So I actually turned down my first opportunity to perform on the CMAs —
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild.
Tim McGraw: Because I couldn’t do the whole song.
Tim Ferriss: Was that an obvious choice or did you second guess that choice after you turned it down? The next day or the next hour, were you like, “Oh?”
Tim McGraw: No, I think it was an obvious choice.
Tim Ferriss: It was obvious?
Tim McGraw: Yeah. And I wasn’t too worried because the song was doing so well. And I just thought there’s no upside here to doing part of this song. It’s not going to do anything for me and it’s not going to do anything for anybody else.
Tim Ferriss: A few things come to mind for me. The first is that in a digital world, or what we perceive to be virtual, folks try to do a lot virtually, and you can do a lot in terms of testing and this, that, and the other thing. But still, if you can get front of live audiences to test your material, whether you are a musician, a comedian, even in my case, as a writer, my first book was turned down 30 plus times by publishers —
Tim McGraw: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Not an exaggeration, but because I had taught the material in front of classes for years and years and years, I knew that it worked.
Tim McGraw: You knew it worked. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I knew it worked. That is the only reason that —
Tim McGraw: You had a practical sense that it worked.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I could see it and I’d honed it and I’d taken out the equivalent of jokes that didn’t work, doubled down on the ones that did. And that still is just so incredibly valuable having that real time feedback, especially when you’re playing multiple times a night.
Tim McGraw: So in your process, when you’re writing a book and you’re talking about trying material out people, do you have an idea or a nugget of what you want to do and then you just start riffing on it around people just to sort of get feedback?
Tim Ferriss: I do. I would say that these days I will often test on the podcast to see —
Tim McGraw: Like segments or parts?
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. See what resonates or doesn’t resonate. So for instance, I’m considering doing a huge collection of case studies from the first book, because of course people hear “The 4-Hour Workweek” and they’re like, “Bullshit. That guy is a liar.” And I get it, I get it. It’s a controversial title, and deliberately so, but there are hundreds and thousands of case studies. And so for every reason someone might have why they object to the title, “I’m a single mom, I’ve got five kids, I have this, I have that, I’m 60 and not 20,” I have an example that has walked the walk in their shoes, right?
Tim McGraw: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So that said, a book is a huge commitment. I still find writing so difficult and I know you’ve had experience with this. So I will put together a few episodes on the podcast where I’m basically testing different sets of questions with case studies and I’m going to see, all right, look, I enjoy doing this, but how does the audience respond? At the same time, I would say for me, I think it’s very dangerous to ask your audience, or really anyone, if you have developed a creative muscle and you value it, “What should I do?” Because then you can get shaped by the masses in a way that really leads you down, I think, a lost path. In my case, I might have two or three things I’m excited about. Then it’s a question, which of these three? And I will feel good about any of these three, then it’s okay.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I test that. I still think to this day, and I’ve thought about potentially approaching UT Austin to do a class, it’s because the feedback is so fast, they can’t fake it. Even if they say they like it, if you look at their face and they are spacing out, checking their phone, you’re like, “Mm-mm.”
Tim McGraw: Yeah, it’s not working.
Tim Ferriss: Not working.
Tim McGraw: Not working. Yep.
Tim Ferriss: It is not working.
Tim McGraw: Like you said, you try things out, musicians, comedians, writers, I do the same thing. If I run across a new song that I really like, I would have the band work it up and say, “Let’s play it a couple times live and see what their reaction is.” Now, there’s a caveat to that, because I’ve been doing this for 35 years now, so when you have songs people expect to hear and then you throw a new one in on them, sometimes the reaction’s not exactly what you want it to be, but it’s not necessarily the reaction that you’re going to get if they know the song. So there’s a little bit of a —
Tim Ferriss: A balance.
Tim McGraw: — a curve that you have to put on it when you’re doing it. Yeah. Back again also to not letting the audience determine what you do is a big — that’s really true because, like you say, you can get lost. If you start chasing what you think people want to hear, then you’re, I think you’re in trouble.
I think you’ve got to chase what you want to hear and what you want to play. And look, my taste is not going to match up with everybody’s taste and probably less and less people’s tastes as the days go forward. Who knows? It may grow more, I don’t know. But I have to cut stuff that speaks to me. If it doesn’t speak to me, especially if I didn’t write it, if it doesn’t speak to me and I can interpret it in a way that speaks from my heart and speaks to someone else, if it doesn’t speak to me first, there’s no way I’m going to make it speak to somebody else.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It turns into a guessing game.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Tim McGraw: And people can spot that a mile away. Whether they realize it or not, they can.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It just strikes me how similar. If you’re pursuing creative expression and longevity, by the way, in so many disciplines, it’s the same thing. It is just the same thing, right? Whether it’s podcast, whether it’s music, whether it’s writing. Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, hilarious cat, Breakfast of Champions, et cetera, people can pick up any of his books, they’re really fun to read. And he used to say, along the lines, I’m paraphrasing, but “If you open up the window and try to make love to the world, you’re going to catch the flu.” Basically —
Tim McGraw: You catch more than the flu.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re trying to — catch more than the flu, if you’re trying to appeal to everybody, you’re lost.
Tim McGraw: You’re lost.
Tim Ferriss: And at least you know you have an audience of one if it’s resonating with you and the personal can be so universal.
Tim McGraw: Well, and again, we’re so lucky as artists, writers, musicians, whatever you are as an artist, because that’s therapy. You have your own built-in therapeutic machine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So there’s the aspect of creative longevity, right? How many years you’ve been doing this again?
Tim McGraw: 35, I guess. Somewhere around there.
Tim Ferriss: 35.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So 35 years. So you have creative longevity, right? How do you continue to follow the right scent trail, which is very personal, and not get lost? Because there’s going to be a lot of temptation, a lot of external forces, expectations, right? So there’s that, which we’ve spoken to a bit. Physically, I know a lot of people are going to want me to talk about this, I want to talk about it. How do you think about physically being capable to do what you do? I mean, you are still performing. That is intensely physical. I have never performed as a musician on stage, but I know a few and it’s jaw-dropping —
Tim McGraw: Even when you’re not running around, it’s physical.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s physical.
Tim McGraw: Because of the energy that you’re exp — and in my case, I can’t sit still when I’m performing, so I’m all over the place. But yeah, focus is the biggest word I think in my vocabulary when it comes to what I do for a living, because the times where I’m not focused are the times things aren’t working. And I tell you that the last three years have been tough to focus with what I’ve gone with —
Tim Ferriss: With surgeries and —
Tim McGraw: With the surgeries. I’ve had four back surgeries and double knee replacements. And tried to work through all of it, and did work through all of it. But there was a moment in time back in the spring this year, after my third back surgery, that — or was it last year? All the years are running together. Anyway, after my third back surgery, when it just didn’t work. That I thought that I was going to really be looking at not being able to do this anymore because I can’t imagine not doing it the way that I do it. I can’t imagine — there’s no way that I’m going to go out there and sit on a stool and sing for an hour and a half. It’s physically impossible for me to do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re a kinetic creature.
Tim McGraw: And I don’t know that anybody wants to see that from me. And so if I can’t go do the shows the way I do shows, and the way that I have fun doing shows, then I’m not going to give everybody what they’re paying for, and I’m not going to get satisfaction out of it. So there was a time where until the last back surgery that actually worked, knock on wood, that I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it back. And not make it back the way I wanted to make it back. But now my focus is back, my body’s back, my brain fog’s clearing up from all the anesthesia. So I’m feeling like I’m back on a good path. I’m actually feeling like I’ve got a second wind now and something to prove. Which is good for me because I need that. I want to be the underdog. I want to be the guy nobody expects for it to work. I want to be that guy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Make yourself a little hungry.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, absolutely. Metaphorically. And literally when I’m working, I like to be hungry. I don’t like to eat before I go on stage because I like to be hungry for that reason, because metaphorically it works for me.
Tim Ferriss: I just had my first real experience with falconry and —
Tim McGraw: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: And the falconer was very clear, he’s like, “You need that bird to be hungry if you want it to hunt. It will not perform otherwise.”
Tim McGraw: If you’re sated, you’re not going to do much.
Tim Ferriss: And actually, “Fed up with someone,” is an expression taken from falconry because if the bird is fed up, it won’t listen to you.
Tim McGraw: Ah.
Tim Ferriss: Fed up with. It’s from falconry.
Tim McGraw: I’ll have to remember that, that’s just a good little piece of knowledge.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: I love those little details.
Tim Ferriss: There are all these little words from falconry. Hood winked also, when they put the hood on —
Tim McGraw: Ah.
Tim Ferriss: Also from falconry. So focusing in Tribe of Mentors, you mentioned, “My gym is how I get refocused.”
Tim McGraw: That’s my meditation.
Tim Ferriss: And you talked about this five rounds of 12 exercises with the bar complex, kind of adding weight and then going back down.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Do you still do that or has your training changed over time? You also mentioned a pool workout. I’m not sure if you still do that —
Tim McGraw: I do.
Tim Ferriss: But what is the training regimen? What has it looked like and what does it look like now?
Tim McGraw: Well —
Tim Ferriss: Maybe it’s changed.
Tim McGraw: It’s changed a little bit. I have to be a lot more deliberate and a lot more careful. I’m sure that my workout routine, my three workouts a day, and that’s how —
Tim Ferriss: Three workouts a day?
Tim McGraw: That’s what I did for a long time, especially on the road touring.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Tim McGraw: So look —
Tim Ferriss: Was that just like before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner?
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Really?
Tim McGraw: Yeah. And they were distinctly different exercises. And the afternoon exercise was sort of an outdoor CrossFit thing with the whole band. So that was like an hour and a half. Then I would do my two-hour workout in the morning.
Tim Ferriss: Which was mostly weights?
Tim McGraw: Mostly weights and some cardio. And then before lunch would be running the arena or stadium stairs and doing a discipline at the top of each stairs.
Tim Ferriss: What’s a discipline?
Tim McGraw: A pushup or a squat.
Tim Ferriss: I see. I see.
Tim McGraw: Or an ab or something. And so you run all the stairs and then we’d take a break and eat, take a nap or whatever. And then at 2:00, 2:30, we go out for an hour and a half and do the outside stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Border collie. You needed a working dog that’s got to run.
Tim McGraw: So that being said, I’m sure that I hastened all of my injuries. But I remember specifically when it happened, when we shot 1883, that was pretty physically demanding. And that wore us out pretty good. That was six months, six days a week, 16 hours a day, pretty much solid. And at the time I was doing shows while we were doing, because I’d had shows booked. So I would work ‘till filming until 7:00, run and jump on a plane, go do a show, get back at 3:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the morning, get up at 4:00, try to get a workout in and then be in the makeup trailer and go to the next day.
Tim Ferriss: Can’t imagine why you wore yourself out.
Tim McGraw: Not only was I tired though, I was strangely uncomfortable on stage during that because I had this big beard on and people didn’t know what I was doing because we were filming a show that wasn’t out yet. So people didn’t know what I was doing. And I’d put on about 10 pounds.
Tim Ferriss: So you didn’t explain it?
Tim McGraw: No. I tried to a couple times, but — then I’d put on about 10 pounds of weight because there’s just protein everywhere. I mean, it wasn’t fat or anything, but because I was working out steady work, but they always had steak and stuff.
Tim Ferriss: It wasn’t fat for people who haven’t seen the series. I mean, that hotel scene with the, I guess kind of like the pajamas or whatever it is. “You want to fuck with anyone else? Want to fuck with my family?” You do not look fat.
Tim McGraw: But I’m standing on stage and I’ve got this big dyed black beard and I’m thinking, these people are thinking that I’m dying my beard to look young because my beard’s gray. I mean, my beard’s snow-white. And I had this big black beard on and then I would put on this — I was just so uncomfortable on stage and worn out and tired of this.
Tim Ferriss: Were you uncomfortable because it didn’t feel right to you or because you knew the audience was a little off kilter?
Tim McGraw: It didn’t feel right to me. And I could tell that they were trying to figure out what the hell was going on too. So it was uncomfortable. But we got through them and it wore us out. And I tweaked myself a little bit a few times with my knee. And I’d had some knee trouble before. And at 20, I had a meniscus done, scoped on my left knee. And at 30, I had a meniscus on my right knee, but they hadn’t bothered me.
And I think my problem is I have really high pain tolerance. And then I remember specifically we were in Montreal and I think it was three weeks into the tour, maybe four weeks into the tour, we were in Montreal and my knees were hurting, my back was hurting, things were starting to fall apart.
And I remember turning, just a normal turn and felt both my knees, just felt like they exploded. And I went to bed that night and I woke up the next morning and from my hips to my ankles, my legs were twice the size that they were before I went to sleep. Swollen.
Tim Ferriss: That’s terrifying.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. And so I got up and went to the gym. So I spent two years in the gym just on the treadmill, doing anything I could to try to stay in shape where I had to lean over the treadmill to walk because I couldn’t stand up straight, just to get walking.
Tim Ferriss: Brutal.
Tim McGraw: And then doing the show, we finished out the tour where they literally had to carry me backstage. I’d get on stage, fake it through the show without acting like I was limping too badly, and then they would carry me back to the bus after the show. And then right after that tour, I had to spend a month just sort of prepping myself for surgery. And then I went straight in and had the double knee replacements.
Tim Ferriss: Brutal.
Tim McGraw: And then another back surgery after that.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t want to turn this into a Tim Ferriss confessional, but so I have the pain tolerance you mentioned, having high pain tolerance, blessing and a curse.
Tim McGraw: It’s a curse.
Tim Ferriss: Because I’ve had multiple, just had elbow surgery a few months ago, which I should have had probably 15 years ago.
Tim McGraw: I’ve had one of those.
Tim Ferriss: I just kept like, “I walk it off. It’s fine.” And shoulder reconstruction, and I won’t turn this into my litany of complaints about things, but —
Tim McGraw: I just did.
Tim Ferriss: But the back in particular, I’ve had crippling back issues for the last three to five years, which were precipitated by this crazy accident long ago where I basically caught a huge dresser falling off the loading bay of a shipping truck because I wanted to prevent it from shattering on the ground and it twisted my body around and basically tore my lat off of my body. It was a horrifying accident. But I suppose looking back, because I’ve wondered this, I have a friend, his name is Kevin Kelly, founding editor of WIRED magazine, great guy. I would say for his entire life has basically done no offense, Kevin, no exercise, except for lots of walking. That’s it. Lots of walking. He has, as far as I can tell, no aches and pains.
Tim McGraw: Well, walking is the best exercise you could do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, he’s in his got to be early to mid 70s now. And so I look back and I’m like, I wonder what I would’ve done differently because I had a lot of intense training back in the day. I used to compete in judo and all these various things, took quite a few lumps from all that. And I look back and I’m like, “All right, what would I have done differently?” And I think there are certain things I would’ve toned down, probably would’ve given a slightly different prescription, would’ve still been pretty aggressive because I don’t know if I would be where I am now otherwise without that. So looking back during the, just over the decades, what would you have changed about your training in retrospect, if anything?
Tim McGraw: I would’ve been smarter about it probably.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In what way?
Tim McGraw: Well, I would’ve trained less for sure and paid more attention to small aches and pains instead of waiting until they were debilitating.
Tim Ferriss: Big aches and pains.
Tim McGraw: And big aches and pains. I would’ve waited for that. Although, as you said, I honestly believe that if I hadn’t decided that I was just going to get myself back in shape, because I’d always stayed in shape, but after having kids and stuff, you’re eating chicken nuggets all the time. I sort of let myself go for a little while. And then I did a movie called Four Christmases, which I’ve never seen, still haven’t seen to this day.
Tim Ferriss: Why is that?
Tim McGraw: Because I think I weighed 215 when we shot that movie.
Tim Ferriss: How much do you weigh now?
Tim McGraw: Right now I’m 170. But we went to see another movie and I’d taken my kids and they were small and completely not even thinking about my movie. And of course, the very first trailer that pops up is Four Christmases, the movie that I’d just done, and my face pops on the screen. And my daughter looked at the screen and looked at me. She said, “Geez, Dad, you need to do something.” Because it looked like you could stick a pin in me and I would’ve just flew across the room. And that’s when I decided to get back in shape. But I do think that, and people will argue with me about this, but I believe it to my core, that had I not done that and decided to change my lifestyle, changed my workout routine, the way I looked and took care of myself, that I don’t think my career would’ve lasted this long.
Tim Ferriss: When was that?
Tim McGraw: Early 40s. Like 42, 43, somewhere around there.
Tim Ferriss: How old are you now?
Tim McGraw: I’m 58 now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, that’s insane, man. You hear this, I’m sure, from lots of people, but you are in great — I mean, you look like you’re in great shape and not hitting on you, but I —
Tim McGraw: That’s okay.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. But what has your workout looked like? And I won’t belabor this too much longer, but I feel like mind, body, brain, these are all the same thing. They’re all a super-organism.
Tim McGraw: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: And the exercise is a fundamental pillar of all of it for me and for you, I suspect. So what has your exercise regimen looked like for the last, let’s call it year or something?
Tim McGraw: Year. Well, there was about six weeks where I didn’t do anything at all, which was almost impossible for me to do. And that’s probably why some of my back surgeries didn’t work as well as they should have because I tried to go back too soon and get back in shape.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the story of my right meniscus too.
Tim McGraw: I’ve tried to cut it down to two hours a day, but that includes — I usually walk an hour or 30 minutes to warm up because for my knees to get going, my back to get — so walking is always my start out, whether it’s 30 minutes or an hour just to walk, to loosen everything up and do a lot of body weight stuff and a lot of stretching. I’d never lift heavy weights. I don’t do heavy weights at all. I try not to do dead lifts anymore because of my back. Although the doc says I can do them light, but I’m still scared of them.
I do a lot of body weight stuff and a lot of circuit training and then just try to do everything I do with intent and purpose and discipline and make sure everything’s lined up properly when before I never would do that. I mean, I knew what I was doing. I’ve had some good trainers in my life, so I knew what I was doing, but you get in a hurry and you fall back and start doing the same old stuff and you don’t think, you don’t put your head into what you’re doing. Now I just have to be a lot more conscious about how I move and what I do.
Tim Ferriss: And are those two hours all in the morning typically?
Tim McGraw: In the morning, yeah. If I don’t do it in the morning, it’s tough for me to do it. And then that also includes, because the older you get and especially with injuries, you got to really try to — every advantage you can get. I do a lot of red light therapy, red light, hot therapy, steam, cold plunges. I do a lot of that. So that’s a good 30 minutes at the end of the workout to get all that stuff in because I do multiple circuits of that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We have a similar recipe and two or three of the smartest athletes and trainers I know who used to be absolute monsters in the gym. I mean, they are power cleaning, 300, 400 pounds, I mean, just monsters, front squatting, 400, 500 pounds. And now they do lighter weights. These are guys now, I would say kind of late 40s, early 50s. They do lighter weights. They use blood flow restriction cuffs, and they are in fantastic shape. They’ve lost a little bit of muscle mass because they’re not eating like 12 chickens a day, but that’s fine. Probably good for your longevity too.
Tim McGraw: For sure. And my goal when I work is I never want to be big. I don’t want to be a big —
Tim Ferriss: Muscle cube on stage?
Tim McGraw: No, I want to be athletic, you know what I mean? And yeah, the whole big muscle thing, I don’t want to — I’m not going to fall into that. I’m too skinny for that anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think there’s a point where probably as a musician, it just raises more eyebrows and more distracting than helpful. So let’s go way, way back as promised, my delayed gratification for the audience. Sorry, it took me this long, guys.
Tim McGraw: No worries.
Tim Ferriss: But the exercise for me is so present every single day and would love to talk. Maybe after our recording, we can talk more. But for the deadlift, for instance, like Zercher deadlifts or Zercher squats where you’re holding the barbell in front really has protected my back in an interesting way for a lot of good reasons. But we’ll see if we come back to that.
Tim McGraw: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: If we go way, way back, I would — I mean, not to —
Tim McGraw: Back far enough that I can remember.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, back — oh, you’ll remember. You’ll remember. So could you tell the story of finding your birth certificate?
Tim McGraw: Oh, God, yeah. Wow. Yeah. I’d gotten home from school and Mom kept —
Tim Ferriss: How old were you at that time?
Tim McGraw: 11. I was 11 and Mom had kept in her closet like a Crown Royal bag that was full of coins, but she always put it in different places because we were always — because you had the concession stand at school, for a quarter you could get a candy bar back then, or like 10 cents, you could get a Coke.
Tim Ferriss: And just so people can put you in space, where were you at the time?
Tim McGraw: In Louisiana, a little town, Start, Louisiana where I grew up, a little farming community. I mean, it’s just a caution light and a cotton gin. That’s where I grew up. And so I was in her looking for the little bag, trying to find some quarters or something to go buy a candy bar at the store or something. And I found the bag and there was a box right next to it, opened the box and right on top was my birth certificate. And I didn’t think much of it. And I started looking at it and I saw McGraw where a line had been drawn through it and right above it written by hand in pencil with Smith, which was my stepdad’s name. And then it said Dad’s occupation, professional baseball player. And of course, being 11 years old and growing up, we were like low, low, middle class and didn’t have any money and seeing something like that, it was just so hard to register.
It didn’t seem real. And oddly enough, I had three baseball cards on my walls and on my wall in my room. His was one of them because he was one of my favorite players.
Tim Ferriss: Tug.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. So I instantly called my mom and I could tell that it hit her like a ton of bricks. She was at work and I’m like, “Mom, what is this, my birth certificate? What does this mean?” And then she was like, “Oh, my God.” That’s all she said. And she said, “I’ll be right home.” And then she came home and we went for a ride and she told me the whole story.
Tim Ferriss: What was the story?
Tim McGraw: Her junior summer in high school and her mom had just left her dad, my grandpa, and they were staying in a motel that had a pool with the outdoor, like a motor court motel they were staying in. And it just so happened that my grandmother and my mom were staying there, but it just so happened that the minor league team, Jacksonville Sons, the minor league team for the Mets, all the ball players were staying in that hotel as well. So Tug and my mom met at the pool and sort of dated over the summer. And when he left and got called up or whatever and left, she found out she was pregnant. My mom was a dancer and she had just gotten invited to try out for Where The Action Is by Dick Clark, which was like his first show, the precursor to American Bandstand and all that stuff.
So my mom had just gotten a letter inviting her to audition for it, and she had just found out she was pregnant with me. And then I have her senior portrait that she took that they always take at the beginning of the senior year. And she had just found out two days before the senior portrait that she was pregnant with me. And every time I look at that portrait, I can see it in her eyes. I can see that her whole future had just disappeared in front of her.
And she told me the whole story and said that she hadn’t talked to him since and hasn’t heard from him. And I said, “But I’d like to meet him.” So she got in touch with his lawyer somehow or his agent somehow and he was still playing at the time. And they arranged somehow, Mom borrowed a car from her boss and some money from her boss. He said he would leave tickets for us and have lunch with us. And we drove there, he met us for lunch. We talked for a little while and he just said, “I’m not your dad. I don’t think I’m your dad, but we can be friends,” kind of deal.
And went to the game. I had a Pete Rose magazine where Pete Rose was about to break the hitting record, that I brought with me, and he took me in the clubhouse, and Pete Rose signed that. So I got to meet Pete Rose. Got to throw the ball a little bit with some of the guys for batting practice. And my mom had got me a McGraw shirt made and a Phillies hat and all that stuff. So she had me all decked out. So the next year, we met, never saw him after the game or anything, never heard from him again. So of course I was obsessed, as an 11-year-old kid would be about something like that.
Tim Ferriss: What were the emotions that you felt at the time? Was there anger? Was there confusion? Was there admiration? What was the mixture of emotions that you felt?
Tim McGraw: I think at the time, I don’t think there was anger. I think there was some affirmation in it because we grew up in a very dysfunctional life. The guy who I thought was my dad growing up was an alcoholic and very abusive to my mom and to me. And then the second stepdad was worse than the first one. So we grew up in really scary — the commercial you see now when footsteps are coming home and kids are scared, that’s the way our house was when you’d hear the truck drive up. So for me, there was an affirmation of why I felt like I didn’t belong with that guy.
So it wasn’t a confusion. I don’t think I was young enough to register confusion. I think I was more, certainly it was more about the excitement of finding out that your dad’s a professional baseball player, and certainly in the circumstances that I was growing up in. So for me, it was sort of a ray of light in a lot of ways.
So the next year they were playing in Houston again, and I asked Mom if I could go see the game again. So she got in touch with the agent again and said he would leave two tickets, but he’s not going to see us. So he left two tickets and then it was in Houston, which was the only time I’d seen him play. Cut to the first time I saw him play, he came in and gave up a grand slam. The first time I saw him play.
But the bullpen is right along right by the stands. I mean, the stands are to that desk where the bullpen is.
Tim Ferriss: 10, 12 feet away.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, you’re right there. So he was warming up. So he wouldn’t see us before the game or anything. So he was warming up in the bullpen and my mom says, “Why don’t you go down and say hi to him? He’s warming up in the bullpen.” So I walked down to where he was warming up and I was as close to me and you as you were to him and he’s warming up. So I was yelling at him, “Tug, it’s Tim.” And he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t look at me or acknowledge me. And so I just sort of dropped it after that. Went back home. I didn’t use McGraw. I used Smith.
Just sort of forgot about it. Didn’t forget about it, but not even — only a handful of my friends even knew about it. I didn’t tell very many people about it. Then I got embarrassed, I think, after that, that I was just sort of thrown away.
Tim Ferriss: What happened? What changed?
Tim McGraw: Well, when I was 18, graduating high school, we didn’t have any money for college. I was counting on sports scholarships and I had a few, but I was small. I graduated high school. I was 5’10” barely and 140 pounds and getting football scholarships and basketball scholarships thinking this is probably going to work out when I get to the next level, at my size. So she was going to call about paying for college, see if he would pay for college. This is a long story. She was going to see if he’d pay for college.
I was staying out of it. I was too busy with my life. And then I remember the last high school football game, getting ready. I’m down on the field, getting ready for the game to start. We’d already ran through the banner and done all that stuff. And somebody taps me on the shoulder and it was my mom. I’m on the sidelines getting ready to go out and play. I’m like, “Mom, what are you doing here? We’re about to play a game. You can’t be down here on the sidelines.” She goes, “Well, I heard from Tug’s lawyer today.” And I said, “Okay, Mom, can we wait until after the game and we get home to talk about this?” Played the game, got home, and we talked a little bit about it, and then we talked about the next morning, and the deal was they’d sent a contract and they said that he would pay $300 a year towards my college, and that I would never be able to contact him again.
And if I did, the money would — anyway, $300 a year for college, and you can’t contact me anymore. And that to me was enough to say, “You know what? Fine. My only request is I don’t even need the money. $300 a month is not going to do anything. I don’t need the money, don’t need anything. My only request is that he has to meet with me one last time, and then if he wants me to sign a contract to leave him alone, I’ll do whatever.” And so we flew to Houston or drove to Houston, drove to Houston. He had retired at this point, and I just graduated high school, so I was as tall as him. And we walked into the hotel and Mom said, “Well, there’s Tug standing, checking in over there.” And he had somebody with him who was his lawyer/agent. So I walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around and looked at me and said, “Hi, Tug. I’m Tim,” because he hadn’t seen me since I was 11.
And I introduced myself to the guy standing next to him, and the guy standing next to him turned completely white because I looked just like him. So he knew that the gig was up.
Tim Ferriss: The gig is up.
Tim McGraw: So we sort of spent the day together hanging out a little bit, and then we went to dinner that night, he, Mom, and I. And then there was a point during dinner, just small talk where I asked Mom if she could leave us alone and let us talk for a minute. And of course, Mom didn’t want to do that. And I assured her that I had this, this was fine. And as soon as she left, I just looked at Tug and says, “Look, I’ll sign your contract. I’ll never talk to you again. I won’t bother you. I just have one question for you.” And I asked him, “Do you think you’re my dad?” And he says, “Yes, I believe I am.” And he said, “We’ll tear the contract up.” And then I didn’t hear from him for a year after that.
But after that, we ended up starting to see more of each other. And me going while I was in college, I would drive up to Philly and visit and got to know my little brother Mark and my little sister, Cari, which was great to come out of that. But this is what I’ll get back to. At the end of the day, I get asked a lot, and you said it right. A lot of people now don’t know the story. They knew it at the beginning of my career, but a lot of people that know my career now that know who my dad was, they think that I grew up in that world and I didn’t. So I’m glad we’re talking about this because a lot of people can understand now that I didn’t grow up in that world. But the long and short of it is when people ask, “How could you have anything to do with your dad? How could you have not hated him? How could you have just not turned your back on him?”
My answer always is he gave me something that was so precious and that was hope. Whether he meant to and he didn’t or knew it or any of those things, he gave me a reason to think that I can get out of the situation that I was in, that if he can do that, then I have it in me to do something. And so for that reason alone, I couldn’t hate him.
Tim Ferriss: Hope. Man, it’s a bedrock of everything else.
Tim McGraw: If everything else is gone, if you’ve got hope, you’ve still got a chance.
Tim Ferriss: I remember talking to a friend of mine, he’s got a couple of kids now mostly grown. I think they’re all grown, if I think about it. I mean, the older I get, the younger people seem.
Tim McGraw: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But, they’re adults.
Tim McGraw: Tell me about it.
Tim Ferriss: And he said, and we went for a hike at one point, and he’s just a really sweet, very smart guy. And I asked him, I’m like, “All right, what would your advice be to an aspiring parent?” Me. I don’t yet have any kids, but I really am looking forward to that, building family. And he said, “It’s really simple. Your job is to love your kids. They don’t owe you anything. It’s not their job to love you. Number two, you have to teach them to be optimistic. That’s it.”
Tim McGraw: Yes. Those two things make perfect sense.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. Your vision of their life and your expectations of their life, don’t let it cloud your love and guidance for them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I have lots of questions about family because it’s top of mind for me, but I want to ask you about guitars. Here’s why. Because I was looking up on the way here, Yo-Yo Ma, famous cello player. Picked up cello, probably got handed a cello, at age four.
Tim McGraw: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: All right. My understanding is you did not do that with guitars.
Tim McGraw: No. No.
Tim Ferriss: So how did this music thing come about?
Tim McGraw: Well, the music thing came about because of my mom’s love for music because from my earliest memory of the time I can remember my mom was always singing and playing records around the house and always had the radio wide open. So I knew every song on the radio and she would encourage me to sing. She always wanted me to sing along with her on the radio. So I knew every song on the radio, would sing with my mom all the time. We’d walk around the house singing, singing in church. I mean, my friends used to give me shit all the time playing baseball because I played shortstop and the whole time I’m out there, I’m singing songs and playing around. So I was always singing to the point to where my sisters were always like, “Shut up. Just shut up. Just stop singing.”
And I still do it to this day. Somebody can say a word and I’ll sing a song that’s got that word in it. It’s just in me, I can’t get it out. So it was always something, but I was in the same category that you were thinking, that the guys you hear on the radio, guys that have been doing this since they were three or four years old, they’re trained musicians. They’re guys that —
Tim Ferriss: Jackson Five.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. This is something you can’t just do unless you’re trained to do it since you were a little kid. So I got into college, that’s when I realized when I got into college and I went out for the first football sort of round up and to see everybody when I looked around and thought, “All right.”
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to get killed.
Tim McGraw: “I’m going to be meat on the practice squad, never see the field and get the hell beat out of me and spend all of my time here.” So I ended up not playing ball, joined a fraternity, pawned my high school ring, and bought a guitar for 20 bucks.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you decide to get the guitar?
Tim McGraw: Because I thought, I love music, I love singing, chicks might dig it if I got a guitar and learned to play a few songs.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So it wasn’t so far ahead as to, “This is my career plan.”
Tim McGraw: It wasn’t a career move. This was —
Tim Ferriss: A social move.
Tim McGraw: It was a move, but it wasn’t a career move. And I thought I could play some clubs around town. It’d be fun to do. I even thought, look, my biggest dream I could have here is get a house gig somewhere where I’m making money every week and playing music.
Tim Ferriss: And remind me where were you at the time?
Tim McGraw: I was in Louisiana, Monroe.
Tim Ferriss: In Louisiana.
Tim McGraw: At Northeast Louisiana, which is ULM now, but back then it was Northeast Louisiana University.
So I bought the guitar and all of my friends had moved away for the summer. It was my freshman summer in college. I had a job where I worked four hours a day to plant nursery in the mornings, just moving stuff. And I’d come home and I’d watch CMT and watch where their fingers were on the guitars.
Tim Ferriss: Early YouTube.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, early YouTube. And then on music sheets, they’d had these little guitar fret things where it would show you where your fingers went. So I spent a lot of years where my fingers were in the wrong position, but I would still make the chord. And my buddy, my roommates would hide my guitar for the longest time because I was so bad. But then when I started getting pretty good at it, they would hide it. I couldn’t find it. But when chicks would come over to the house, they would grab my guitar and bring it to me and want me to start playing songs.
Tim Ferriss: Dance, monkey, dance.
Tim McGraw: Exactly. So over that summer, I learned about 50 songs and I just started playing, just me and a guitar at this little catfish house called Cock of the Walk. And that was my first gig. And that’s how I paid my rant for a while.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So what was the first —
Tim McGraw: And by the way, I am still a terrible guitar player. I can play well enough to write my songs and play —
Tim Ferriss: You made it work for you. When was the first inkling or the first sign, feeling maybe where you’re like, okay, I think this could be a thing?
Tim McGraw: First off, the encouragement I got from my friends in college, my fraternity buddies, which that could go either way. When you’re trying to play guitar and sing songs from your buddies in a fraternity, that could go the wrong way. But when it didn’t, when they were encouraging me and they were giving me credit and telling me how good I was, to me, that was a big deal for a bunch of guys to tell you, your friends to tell you that when you’re just trying to figure it out and you don’t even know anything about it really. For them to tell you that you’re good and they want to hear you do it and they ask you to sing all the time. So when I started playing clubs and stuff, I would get good reaction from the crowds and then the owners would come over and say, “Hey, would you want to come back?”
And, “You guys are the best band we’ve had.” Stuff like that. And then I took a military science class and —
Tim Ferriss: Military science, like strategy —
Tim McGraw: Yeah. Strategy.
Tim Ferriss: Studying past generals.
Tim McGraw: And I got to know the instructor, Captain Whitehead was his name. He was an army guy and head of the ROTC and everything there. And all the guys in the class were ROTC guys, ROTC. And anyway, we took the class and it was tactics and we were in the field doing stuff. We’d spend the weekend tracking, even doing all the stuff, repelling, all kinds of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Cool course.
Tim McGraw: It was a great course. And at the end of the course, everybody was asked to vote who was our platoon leader. Well, I got voted by all the ROTC guys as the platoon leader for the class for the year, so I was the top student in the class. And so Captain Whitehead took a big interest in me, but he thought I should be a Marine, so he kept taking me to the Marine Recruiting office. So I visited the Marine Recruiting office quite a bit, filled out all my paperwork. And one night I decided I had everything packed. I sold everything I had, sold my car, water skis, shotguns, sold everything I had.
I think I ended up with about $3,000. I had my guitar, one suitcase and my Marine paperwork sitting on my dresser. And I said, “When I wake up in the morning, I’ll decide whether I’m going to move to Nashville or join the Marines.” And I fell asleep, woke up the next morning, looked over, got up, picked up the Marine paper, tore it up, put it in the garbage and went and bought a Greyhound bus ticket and ended up in Nashville.
Tim Ferriss: I have so many questions. Why did Captain Whitehead think you should be a Marine?
Tim McGraw: I don’t know. I guess because I did well in the class and we got along well. He kept coming to our fraternity house and hanging out with us. We just got along well and he liked me. As a matter of fact, we played, it had to have been 15 years later after I had a lot of success. We played the military base in San Diego and it was huge, it was packed. And I’m singing and playing and I’m standing in the front of the stage. And I look down and Captain Whitehead’s right at the front of the stage. And I got to say hi to him and talk to him a little bit afterwards. He just says, “You would’ve been a good Marine.”
Tim Ferriss: “You missed the boat, son.”
Tim McGraw: No, I didn’t.
Tim Ferriss: I’m kidding. The platoon leader piece is interesting to me. What do you think, even if you had to speculate, why did that happen? Why did they vote you platoon leader?
Tim McGraw: I don’t know. I mean, I just enjoyed it. I think I enjoyed it.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think? Because presumably, a bunch of guys in the class or a bunch of people in the class.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. I think there were a few obstacles that I was able to figure out in moving stuff and how to build a bridge across. Just little things that I was able to figure out, or if I wasn’t able to figure out, just acted like I did and took charge of it and got it done. But I don’t know. It’s one of those things that was really interesting to me and it made sense to me. And when you step into something you don’t know anything about and all of a sudden it clicks and makes sense, it just made sense. And it really sparked my interest into being in the military because I thought, “Wow, if I can be around all these guys who want to do this and this works out, maybe this is a career path for me.” Thank God I didn’t. But I have so much respect —
Tim Ferriss: I mean, who knows?
Tim McGraw: My sister was in the Army, she was Army Intelligence. Cousins, uncles, so I’ve got a long history of military family.
Tim Ferriss: What was it that morning? It was a long time ago, of course, but it seems like such a Sliding Doors moment. Such an important fork in the road. What was it that led you to tear up the paperwork?
Tim McGraw: I thought that I could always go back to that and I can’t always go back to the music. Because there’ll come a point where that’s just gone, that’s passed. But the hardest part was having to call my mom, because my mom was really intent on me making something out of myself because of how hard our life was growing up and how hard her life was. I mean, she worked three jobs and going to work with black eyes and busted lips and just all the struggles that a single abused mom — well, not single, but abused mom has to deal with. She was pretty single for all intent and purpose. But I had to call her, I was in pre-law. My joke now is that I have paid more lawyers in my life than I would’ve ever made as one.
Tim Ferriss: I believe that is probably true.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, so I had to call my mom and I was scared to death because I knew how badly she wanted me to complete school and go to law school and I know how badly she wanted that for me. And for her, because of the sacrifices that she had made, because people had wanted her to give me up for adoption, all sorts of stuff. And she was a 17-year-old girl then that hung onto a kid.
Tim Ferriss: Tough woman.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. But I called her and told her what my plan was, and braced myself, fully expecting my little Italian mom to give me a good wearing out, because she can do that. And what she said, it’s going to make me cry, what she said, but she said, “Son, I’m surprised you haven’t done it already. And if you don’t, you’ll never know, so you should go.” And it was so shocking and unexpected that it gave me all the confidence in the world that I needed. And then when I first moved here, back to where you think everybody grows up since they were a little kid with a guitar in their hands and singing, and that’s how they become famous, when I first moved here and started going to clubs and sitting in, I was thinking, “Wait a minute, I can hang with these guys. I can hang with these guys. I can find my niche here.”
Tim Ferriss: How many shows do you think, how many gigs had you played up to the point that you got on that Greyhound bus?
Tim McGraw: I mean, a year or two of gigs. I don’t know, 100 maybe at clubs. Mostly just me and a guitar, some with a band. I actually went to Jacksonville for about six months, because my mom had moved to Jacksonville after I started college because she had just went through another divorce and it was a terrible divorce. So she moved to Jacksonville, which is where she grew up. Jacksonville Junior College had just won the Junior College World Series. Coach heard about me a couple years ago back in high school. He knew my mom somehow. Anyway, invited me to come to play baseball at Florida Junior College.
So I thought, “All right, this is getting old here. I’m playing music, I’m not really going to class like I should. Maybe I should go out there and try and play baseball, see what happens.” So I moved to Florida, same thing. Showed up, was going to play baseball, hung around for a little while. Realized that I really didn’t want to do that because I was playing clubs at night there too, and just decided to go full-time, start playing clubs in Florida. Did that, then I moved back to Monroe, played for about three months and then moved to Nashville.
Tim Ferriss: I’m curious what Nashville did for you, because it makes me think of Bob Dylan before he was Bob Dylan. But moving from Minnesota to, I think it was Greenwich Village, moves to the epicenter. He’s like, “I’m going to find Guthrie and I don’t know how I’m going to make it work, but I’m going to figure it out. And I’m going to the center of the action.” And that story was really laid out for me in detail by this very, very impressive investor and fascinating human, Bill Gurley, who is in Austin.
But he has a book coming out soon called Runnin’ Down a Dream, which is about pursuing passion and finding that lightning in a bottle for yourself. But one of his sections is on going to the epicenter, going to where the action is. And I would love for you to describe what effect Nashville had. I mean, in a sense, you already sort of showed some of what can happen by the fact that you get off the bus, you go have a beer after last call and then bodda-bing, bodda-boom —
Tim McGraw: You hear a great song.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. And songs that end up making my career. I think instantly it just lit a fire under me. And when you jump into a pool of people who are like-minded and who are all chasing the same thing, there’s just such an energy that you get from everybody that’s doing it. Tracy Lawrence, Kenny Chesney, and I were best friends, and we ran around together everywhere. None of us had record deals and we would compete. All these clubs, you could get up and sing and you could win $50, whoever got the most hand applause. So we were always competing to get real money.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Tim McGraw: Try to outdo — Tracy usually always won, because he was the best singer out of all of us at the time. But just running around, being involved. Every night, being at somebody’s apartment, playing music, writing songs every day, out every night, singing in all these clubs. It was just an immersion experience of art where you learn so much, you learn from different singers. You hear somebody sing and you think, “Wow, how did they do that? How can I?” You imitate people, you figure things out. You see what somebody’s doing on stage, you see how somebody’s singing, you see how somebody’s songwriting.
It just becomes this sort of gumbo of all this magic that you find. And it just comes into every pore of your body and you just open yourself up to it and just try to learn as much as you can. And it can be heartbreaking too, at the same time. And then also recognizing where you’re getting held back. It’s where you start realizing you need to put more aspirational people around you, as opposed to people who are just being happy doing what they’re doing. And I try to tell this to my daughters all the time.
Tim Ferriss: That sounds like it could be very difficult.
Tim McGraw: It can be difficult because it’s not about dropping friends, but it’s about gathering friends that inspire you to be, that people that you want to be like, they have traits that you want to emulate.
Tim Ferriss: Could you describe an instance of when that happened and how you navigated it?
Tim McGraw: I don’t know if I can describe an instance.
Tim Ferriss: Or just why that even occurred to you, I guess, and how you went about finding those people.
Tim McGraw: Well, because I needed to learn, for one thing. Because I knew nothing about the music business, how to make a record. I knew nothing about anything except for how to sing along to the radio and then play some songs I learned on the guitar. And I was an amateur, period, at everything. And so I just wanted to be around people who knew what they were doing and people who could teach me things and people that were willing to teach me stuff. And people that, if I wanted to compete, if I can’t compete with this guy who’s playing in a club in downtown Nashville, then I’m not going to compete with the guys who have record labels that are selling millions of records.
Tim Ferriss: How did you find those people to learn from?
Tim McGraw: I think it’s just a matter of just being out and being around people, and just learning who the people are, who are going to be aspirational to you and inspirational to you, and who the people that are going to hold you in place.
Tim Ferriss: Do any people kind of stand out in those, I don’t know, first five years, let’s just say?
Tim McGraw: Well, Mike Borchetta stands out. Mike Borchetta is who signed me to my first record deal at Curb Records. And he was somebody who I walked off the street, had a demo of a few songs. He tried to kick me out of his office and I made him listen to the songs.
Tim Ferriss: How did you get into his office in the first place?
Tim McGraw: The way I got into his office, and oddly enough, it was because of Tug. Because a guy named Bruce Windell was a friend of Mike Borchetta’s and he happened to be a friend of Tug’s. So Tug was talking to Bruce Windell one day and Bruce says, “I know a guy named Mike Borchetta down in Nashville. Maybe I can get him a meeting with Tim.” And that was it. So I got his phone number and that’s all they gave me. So I kept trying and trying and trying to get a meeting with him, I couldn’t get a meeting with him. So it was during Fan Fair one year and —
Tim Ferriss: What is Fan Fair?
Tim McGraw: Well, Fan Fair, now it’s the big thing they have at the stadium every year where everybody plays. But back then, Fan Fair was when you would just sit and stand in a booth for three days and sign autographs for thousands and thousands of people that would come through. This was going on when, of course, I wasn’t signing autographs, I didn’t have a record level. So I decided I’m going to go by Curb Records and see if Mike Borchetta is in his office. And I’d had a demo of these —
Tim Ferriss: After him not returning anything.
Tim McGraw: After him not returning my calls. And I have to back up just a little bit because there was this little place called Po’boy Don’s in Tallulah, Louisiana, that was in the middle of a cotton field. And it was just a little wood frame shack, but it was like a convenience store/deer butcher shop/crawfish boil kind of place. And in the back of the store, they had a bunch of stumps and an old wood stove, and there were a bunch of guys all in their 70s and 60s that were all playing country music. And I happened to be out in that area one day and it was in the middle of nowhere. And so I stopped in and sat down and started playing guitar with these guys, so they kept inviting me to come back.
It was about 30 miles from school. Every Thursday night, it ended up being five or six cars of my fraternity brothers. We’d all go to this little hole-in-the-wall place with all these 70 year old guys and they would give us free beer and crawfish as long as I would sit back there and sing with them. And it ended up that place getting packed and packed and packed where there were just people there every Thursday night, and it just became a really fun thing.
So when I moved to Nashville, Po’boy Don, who owned that, and it was a farm or two and he owned all the farmland around and just, he played the bass in the thing. And it’s his store and he just really loved me and loved to hear me sing. So I needed a demo. I didn’t have a demo, didn’t have any money for a demo. So I called him and he sent me $3,000 to record a demo. So I recorded a demo and that’s the demo I played for Mike Borchetta when I walked into his office. Anyway, I sit down, he said, “Well, leave the CD with me.”
Tim Ferriss: So you’re just, “Knock-knock, anybody home?”
Tim McGraw: Well, I walked past the secretary because I saw he was in his office. And I walked past the secretary. She goes, “Excuse me.” I said, “I’m just going to say hi to Mike.” I walked in, I said, “Hi, Mike, how you doing?” He said, “Who are you?” Then I told him my name and he goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” He says, “Call me next week and we’ll meet.” I said, “Well, I have my demo here. I’d like for you to listen to it.” And he goes, “Well, leave it on the desk and I’ll listen to it.” I says, “Well, can you listen to it now?” And he goes, “No, I’m headed out to Fan Fair, I got to go.” I says, “Well, can you just listen to part of a song?” He goes, “All right, I’ll listen to a song.” So he put the song in and halfway through the first one, he goes, “You got a record deal, kid.”
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Tim McGraw: And that’s how I got a record deal.
Tim Ferriss: Halfway through the first song.
Tim McGraw: Yeah, halfway through —
Tim Ferriss: Was it the first song on the demo?
Tim McGraw: Yeah, first song on the demo. And then it was convoluted after that, but I got a record deal. So I got my foot in the door, so it started from there. But he was somebody that, when a guy who runs a record label, and you know nothing about how that works, and it’s the first record label I went to, sits down and listens to half of your demo, which you’re not even sure is any good, and says you have a record deal, well, I think you get exponentially better in that instant.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. You’re given wings in a way.
Tim McGraw: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: The mustard seed.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We’re going to hop around a little bit because we could go a million different directions. I mean, we could spend 20 hours talking about your career and still not run out of material. I believe it might have been in Parade, it could have been in a different interview, but correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ve said that your wife saved your life, along those lines.
Tim McGraw: Oh, God. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Why is that?
Tim McGraw: Because I was running pretty hard. I was running hard back in the day.
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?
Tim McGraw: Well, I was drinking a lot, which, that didn’t stop after we got married, but she beat it out of me after a while. But I was just doing everything. I was a kid in a candy store, especially after I got successful. And never had any money before, never been around any of that stuff before. And then all of a sudden it became a tool that was useful until it wasn’t. And when Faith came along, I was burning it wide open when we met. And she started tapping the brakes for me.
Tim Ferriss: How did she do that in a way that didn’t repel you?
Tim McGraw: Well, look at her.
Tim Ferriss: Well, right, yeah. I mean, she’s got a lot on offer, this is for sure. But I would imagine, we don’t know each other well, but that strong-willed guy, high-gear, high-intensity, high-velocity kid in a candy store. Faith is incredible on a million different levels and you also have a lot of options around. So what allowed her to dial some of those things back, which ended up being really important long-term for you and for both of you, without scaring you off in a sense?
Tim McGraw: Well, A, I knew that I was at a point where I needed to slow down.
Tim Ferriss: All right, got it. So you had the self-awareness.
Tim McGraw: I had the self-awareness that I needed to slow down at the time. B, when we met, we were 28 years old, so we were a little older and we both had success. And then C, once I met her, I didn’t want to lose her. I just didn’t want to lose her.
Tim Ferriss: What was it about her?
Tim McGraw: She’s just magic, she’s magic. Not just her singing and her looks and all that. Of course, that’s all a bonus, but as a person, she’s just magic. She just lights up a room, and she lit me up and still does. And I wouldn’t be the same artist had I not met her. I certainly wouldn’t have the career that I’ve had, had I not met her. I certainly wouldn’t have lasted as long. I wouldn’t have lasted as long. I would have burned out really quickly, I think. Especially if I had lost her during that time after I found her, if I had lost her because of not sort of bringing myself around a little bit. Then I definitely would have been in a downward spiral.
Tim Ferriss: You guys met at 28. When did you change the drinking?
Tim McGraw: It took a while. I mean, it certainly calmed it down quite a bit. And it fluctuated. It would be times where it was not bad, then times where it was bad. And then it just got to where it just got out of control, and that’s when she set me down. Well, actually, she sat me down a few times, but actually there was one morning in particular where I woke up and realized that it was 7:00 in the morning. I was going to have to take the kids to school soon, and I realized I had a bottle of whiskey in my hand at 7:00 in the morning.
I had the bottle in my hand and I walked straight back to the bedroom and told her that I need help. And she goes, “All right, let’s do it. I’m with you.” And she stuck by me the whole time. And look, it’s not been a linear path, as anybody knows that’s ever gone through that kind of thing. It’s not a linear path. There’s always pitfalls and steps backwards and steps forwards, but she’s a rock. She’s a rock.
Tim Ferriss: You know, this is just a random thought, but at some point, if you haven’t met Laird Hamilton and his wife, Gabby, Laird Hamilton’s —
Tim McGraw: I know who Laird is, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In any case, a lot of parallels in your lives.
Tim McGraw: Yeah?
Tim Ferriss: And I think also, Gabby Reese, who used to be a professional volleyball player. In any case, just a lot of parallels. I mean, intensity, right?
Tim McGraw: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: High gear. And it’s very common, at least among my friends, certainly, and even in my case way back in the day, it’s like that type of intensity can also get misapplied or reapplied to something like alcohol.
Tim McGraw: Absolutely, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s not always a selective intensity.
Tim McGraw: No, it’s not a selective intensity. And then when it becomes a physical dependency, then you’re in trouble.
Tim Ferriss: Then you’re in trouble.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: How has fatherhood changed you?
Tim McGraw: Wow. Well, you certainly see with different eyes and it changes what your definition of love is, more so than even getting married, I think, when you have children. Because there’s such a responsibility and a weight that comes with all the brightness and the light and the love that causes you to realize that that’s your true eternal life, is your children, and how they carry their perception of you forward. And it’s a scary proposition because you’re not going to do it right, nobody does it right. You just hope you do 30 percent of it right, and you just show up. But I think the thing that it changed more than anything, and I think anybody would tell you this, and it’s pretty simple, is it takes a lot of the selfishness out of you.
And part of you has to have that, I guess, in order to succeed and to push forward, but boy, it takes a lot of selfishness out of you and puts a lot of drive and passion and responsibility and thinking of the future in your path, which provides more structure for you. And what I’ve also found out too, is as the kids grow up, and Faith and I both have found out, that structure was so good because you had to be on the ball, you had to get up every morning at 6:00, you had to make breakfast, you had to take your kids to school, you had to help with homework, you had to go to practices, you coach softball.
All those things that keep you in a good, balanced routine. So when the kids start leaving the house, all of a sudden you start, “What am I going to do with the rest of my day?” Now I don’t have to get up at 6:00.” So it can take away some of your focus and it can take away some of your routine and it can take away a little bit of drive once the kids are out of the house. And it comes back, but at first you’re sort of lost and sort of figuring out, “What do I do with my time here?”
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got a few chapters to get through before I get there.
Tim McGraw: And then after about six or eight months, a year, then you realize, you and your wife, you realize you’re home alone, then the fun begins.
Tim Ferriss: How did you decide to be a father in the sense, how did you set rules for yourself or goals, hopes without necessarily a model for it? Part of the reason I think that I’ve delayed building a family for as long as I have is that, God bless my dad in certain ways, but I wanted to do things differently if I did it at all, very differently. And since I felt like I had no role model, I felt like I had no confidence that I would be a good father. And so I was like, “Well, fundamentally, if I’m helping bring some life into the world,” if they didn’t ask for it necessarily, I mean, we can debate, gets into some deep philosophical territory and religious territory quickly, but I wouldn’t want to do a bad job or more harm than good. And so I’ve waited and waited and waited and —
Tim McGraw: Well, you’re going to do a bad job.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: I mean, everybody does a bad job. There’s no training manual, but I was in the same boat. I didn’t know if I was going to be a good dad or bad, I didn’t know what kind of dad I would be. I knew that I wanted to be a dad and I wanted to be a good dad, and I knew that I didn’t want my children’s life to be like mine was. So I think in a lot of ways, maybe that the life that I had growing up prepared me to be a better dad because of what I knew I didn’t want to do. And I found this business has really made me find out that learning what you don’t want to do and what doesn’t work for you is better than knowing what does.
Tim Ferriss: All right, I’m going to grab that and run with it because there’s an expression in Japanese — I went to Japan as an exchange student — called hanmen kyoushi. Hanmen kyoushi is like “opposite teacher.” It’s basically like an anti-role model and they show you what not to do. So I’m wondering if there professionally have been any experiences, a tour, how you made a song or even chose a song in the first place that really taught you what not to do? Like an event, a song, a performance, a commitment, a partnership, anything where you’re like, “Hmm, okay.”
Tim McGraw: Oh, I’ve put myself in plenty of positions that I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know if I can specifically say what not to do. I can say be prepared all the time is always a good thing, but I can tell you my most embarrassing moment in the music business.
Tim Ferriss: All right, let’s do it.
Tim McGraw: It might be the best way to go, is Bruce Springsteen, who I’m a huge fan of. And he’s a friend and I’ve known him for a long time, one of the greatest guys in the world, just sweetheart. MusiCares, you know what MusiCares is? Where they do a big concert the night before the Grammys to raise money and it honors a specific artist and other artists come in and do their songs. Bruce was being honored, so he called and asked if Faith and I would do “Tougher Than the Rest” together as part of the thing. And of course we said, “Yes, we would love to do it.” So everybody’s doing their songs and there’s Sting, there’s all the big guys. Playing Bruce’s songs. So we do “Tougher Than the Rest” and we do a great job on it and everything turned out good. And we’re sitting at Bruce’s table and we’re talking, and Bruce says, “Hey, man, at the end of this, we’re going to do ‘Glory Days.'” He says, “Everybody’s going to come on stage and just sing along with the chorus.” He said, “You think you and Faith would want to come up to and do that?” And I say, “Sure, we’ll come up and we can do the chorus.” We sing along the chorus of ‘Glory Days,’ so we’re up there, we’re on stage and we’re all singing along. Bruce is in the second chorus, and he looks over at one artist and he’s like, “Hey, come sing the second verse.” And the artist is like, “Mm-mm, no.”
So he looks at another artist like, “Come sing the second verse.” And that artist is like, “Mm-mm, no, no, no.” On the microphone, he goes, “Hey, cowboy hat, come sing the second verse.” And in my mind, I’m thinking, “All right, it’s ‘Glory Days.’ I know it, but I don’t think I’ve ever sung it.” And Bruce’s phrasing is some of the hardest phrasing in the world, the way he writes. And I thought, “All right, I can get through the second verse of this, I can figure it out.” The words were up there.
So I step up and I have no idea where to come in. I don’t know the phrasing, I don’t know anything. And everybody who is anybody in the music business is out there. And I’m standing there with that, when your mom has caught you doing something or your wife has caught you doing something really bad. And where all the blood rushes out of your body and you’re gut punched. So I couldn’t sing the song, I’m just like — and Bruce comes up beside me, he’s like, “Ba, ba, ba,” like that. And then he starts singing the song. So then I stepped back beside Faith. Can I stand up?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: I stepped back beside Faith, embarrassed. And I stepped back beside her and this is what Faith does. She stepped away from me. Luckily, we were able to go, they shot it in a way because it’s always recorded and released and everything. So they shot it in a way that I could go back and fix the vocal where it didn’t look like I screwed it all up. But boy, I didn’t have fun that night at the hotel after the MusiCares thing.
Tim Ferriss: Did you get a lot of ball busting after that?
Tim McGraw: I did, I did. But none worse than mine, what I did to myself, because it was really the most embarrassing moment. There are a few moments where you feel like you’re over your head sometimes. And it usually works out well, but boy, I tell you, performing on the Oscars was one of those moments where everything just seems, your body defies you. You think you’ve got it under control and when you start, everything goes. It worked out, everything was fine. I did a good job, but in the moment you’re feeling like, “It’s falling apart on me right here in front of everybody.”
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.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But if you do all those things and it doesn’t happen, back to your second album, right? It’s like you’re taking the risk that you fail on your own terms, as opposed to gambling on something that doesn’t resonate for you.
Tim McGraw: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: That someone’s talked you into.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So that seems to be a piece of it. Right?
Tim McGraw: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: There’s, as you said, having your finger on the button, being willing to say yes and no.
Tim McGraw: Be willing to say no is a big deal. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you think people are bad at that?
Tim McGraw: Saying no?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Tim McGraw: Because people want to please people.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: They want people to like them. I mean, I want people to like me, but if you don’t learn to say no, not in a mean way or not in a bad way, but just say, “No, that’s not right for me.” And that’s back to knowing what’s right for you and what isn’t right for you.
There could be something that on the surface, everybody that works for you says this is the perfect thing, but you’ve got to know whether it is or not. And sometimes you don’t. You know you can’t get it right all the time. There’s plenty of times you get it wrong, but I think if you go with your gut, there’s a caveat to all of this too, because there are plenty of artists who succeed, who don’t pick their songs, don’t have any involvement in their production, really don’t have any involvement in their management, don’t have any involvement in their stage design, and they just show up and do their thing.
There’s plenty of artists who do that and are successful. So there’s always exceptions to the rule, but I think for the most part, the artists who have been around for a long time, the artists I know who have been around for a long time, they take control of their careers.
Tim Ferriss: I interviewed quite a long time ago, he’s since sadly passed away, but Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks from the UK, large religious figure, very well —
Tim McGraw: If you’re a Lord Rabbi, you’ve got to be a big religious figure.
Tim Ferriss: He’s a big deal and very good at conflict resolution, incredibly open-hearted man. And I recall at one point with me, he shared this quote, which I’m going to paraphrase, but it was effectively like one of the most important things in life is to be able to distinguish from an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted.
Tim McGraw: Because they can look awful a lot alike.
Tim Ferriss: They can look very similar, and what I’ve seen over and over again with like all the startups I’ve been involved with, when I’m talking to authors who are just getting started, especially if they have a flicker of something that might ignite, is that as soon as there is a certain velocity of success, there are a lot of temptations that can pull you away from the thing that you spent so much time getting good at that brought you to that point.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m wondering if there are any categories of things, so for me, for instance, after about a year or two of getting very distracted, speaking engagements was one of those things where I was like, “I’m just going to end up on the road doing speaking engagements, talking about the same thing every day for the rest of my life if I actually continue to say yes to this.”
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s very seductive because they pay really well.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I was like, “All right. So I’m going to say no for a year, that’s it, so that I can focus on these creative projects, writing.” Are there any things along those lines at a point where you’re like, “Okay, I need to say no to this, that, or the other thing?”
Tim McGraw: Yeah. There have been times where I probably should have said no and didn’t. I mean, there’s been times where I’ve got myself into too much work, but I’ve gotten pretty good, I think, at saying no. I think the older I get, I don’t know about wiser, but the older I get, the more apt I am to say no, mainly because you get to a point where I don’t care to be more famous.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think there’s a point of diminishing returns.
Tim McGraw: So you look at things under those lenses like, “All right. Well, this will give you higher visibility.” All right. I’ve got plenty of visibility. I don’t need to do that. The only thing that it gets into is, all right, you got to sell tickets to your concert.
So then there’s some things that you would probably say no to that you’ll say yes to just because you got to pay everybody. So there’s some compromises that you have to make to your, not principles, but to what you’re willing to do work-wise. But yeah, the older you get to more, it’s easier to say no because you know more about what the outcome’s going to be and whether the outcome’s going to be beneficial enough for the time or it’s not.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk about putting people in seats and tours. You have the upcoming Pawn Shop Guitar tour this summer.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You’ve got new music in the works.
Tim McGraw: In the middle of working on an album right now. In fact, next week I’m in the studio again.
Tim Ferriss: So could you talk about, just tell us more about both, and then I mean, you’ve got family, you’ve obviously you have your lovely wife, you still have a lot going on.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I’d love to know, and I’m sure the audience would, more about both of these, right? Where can they learn more? When can they expect things? And then also how you actually schedule your time, structure your time, these days.
Tim McGraw: Yeah. Well, album wise, like I said, we’re in the middle of an album and the album’s going to be called Pawn Shop Guitar as well. It’s a song I wrote back to the story I told you where I got my first guitar where I pawned my high school ring my freshman year of college and bought the guitar.
Luckily for me, my grandfather found out about it and went back and got my ring for me, although I don’t know where it’s at now. I think my wife has it somewhere. So I wrote the whole song around that story and we were looking for tour titles, trying to find the right tour title. I thought Pawn Shop Guitar was good. We all thought it was good just because of the story that it told and it conjures up some good imagery.
So we start that tour, I think it starts in July. The tour starts in July. I think we’re doing three or four stadiums and sheds. The Chicks will be out on the stadium tours with us. And I’m a huge fan of those guys.
We did a George Strait tour together years ago and then they opened for me on one of my tours years ago and just a huge fan of their music. And I’m excited to get out with those guys.
And then we’re doing sheds for the summer and then we’ll do some more shows as well. We’ll be doing some fairs and festivals and it’s going to be a busy year. I mean, a lot, and there’s a couple movie and TV projects in the works.
And then my oldest daughter’s working on a Broadway — she’s a Broadway actress and singer, so she’s working on some stuff. My youngest daughter’s a singer. She’s an actor. She’s in Landman.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no kidding?
Tim McGraw: She just toured, opened for Brandi Carlile on her European tour last summer. My middle daughter works for Earth League International, a big nonprofit. She sings as well, but she’s more of the brainy — actually went to Stanford, got her master’s degree from Stanford. Worked in Congress for a long time. So they’re all doing well.
Tim Ferriss: Seems like this fathering thing you’ve done pretty well. I mean, they’ve turned —
Tim McGraw: They really got a good mom.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Tim McGraw: And then my nephew, Timothy Wayne, is out there doing well too. He’s a singer. I’m the worst singer in the family, for real. I mean, that’s legitimately not a joke.
Tim Ferriss: Why do it? Now that might sound like a strange question but —
Tim McGraw: Why do what?
Tim Ferriss: Touring. It’s so grueling. I have to imagine, right? Very demanding.
Tim McGraw: It is.
Tim Ferriss: It’s physically demanding. It’s psychologically demanding. Is it something you feel on stage? Is it a quickening that you just can’t get any other way? What is it that keeps you going back?
Tim McGraw: Well, you can’t get it any other way, that’s for sure. And they’re always good, but every third show or so, you have that one show that’s like, “This is why I do it. This is why I do it.”
And you’re right, touring is more grueling. Touring is more expensive. You pay for everything. You’re doing three nights in a row, but it’s your stage, your design, your ideas, the way you want it to look, all those things. That’s the fun in it for me, is building the stage and putting the show together.
And that’s also the hardest part is putting the set list together because after 35 years and a ton of records, you’re never going to get everybody’s favorite song in. Somebody’s always going to miss a song that they wanted to hear because you can only do, what? 22, 23 songs in a show at the most, and when you’ve got 70 or 80 singles and a bunch of number ones, you can’t get them all in.
Tim Ferriss: You can’t. You can’t get them all.
Tim McGraw: So you just try to create a ride and an emotion and an experience and that’s the fun part for me is try to create a movie for everybody to see.
Tim Ferriss: On those magic nights, just a few more questions and then we’ll land the plane, but what does that feel like? I’m so curious because I’ve played sports. I’ve had flow states in various contexts, but I’ve never experienced anything with that type of environment.
Tim McGraw: Well, that’s what it reminds me of is sports. It certainly reminds me of football before the games. And it reminds me of the locker room, it reminds me of just when you get your uniform on and you feel like you’re 10 foot tall and bulletproof.
It’s when I put the cowboy hat, it’s like Superman’s cape. You put the cowboy hat on, you’re ready to go. But there’s a symbiotic relationship that happens. And to me, art is magic. That’s what real magic is, is art, any kind of art.
And the magic happens when you’re up there and everything’s going great for you, and you can tell everything’s going great for the audience. And you have this symbiotic electrical relationship where you’re all in this groove together and you’re all sort of in suspended animation for a while, where you leave the world outside and all of a sudden we’re all in this fantasy world that we create, that we’re all living in for this hour and a half.
And when that happens, when the whole world just sort of shuts down and you’re in this make believe world that all of a sudden becomes the real world that you’re in for an hour and a half, two hours, where nothing else exists except for that world, then you’re in a movie. Then you’re in this alternate universe that there’s nothing but joy.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a utopia that you are able to create.
Tim McGraw: Yes. Yes. On the good nights.
Tim Ferriss: On the good nights.
Tim McGraw: And sometimes you think it’s not a good night because your ears don’t sound great or your voice isn’t doing what you want it to do. And sometimes those turn out to be the best nights. I mean, my best basketball game I ever had, I think I scored 52 points and I had the flu and it kept trying to get the coach to take me out of the game because I thought I was hurting the team. I thought I was playing terribly. Then he showed me the book after the game.
Tim Ferriss: Tim, if you could have a billboard, metaphorically speaking, put anything on it for millions, billions of people to see, right? Could be a quote, could be a mantra, could be scripture, could be anything, right? It could be an image. So anything non-commercial.
Tim McGraw: “Humble and Kind.”
Tim Ferriss: “Humble and Kind.”
Tim McGraw: “Humble and Kind.”
Tim Ferriss: Tell me more about that.
Tim McGraw: Because that song to me represents so much, the video too, so much of what the world needs and what we don’t have right now is humility and kindness. And of course, love should be in that as well. But without humility and kindness, we’re lost and we seem to be lost right now. And so that song to me is a beacon in a lot of ways.
That one and “Live Like You Were Dying” to me are songs that don’t belong to me. I just happen to be lucky enough to be able to sing them for people. They belong to everybody. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Hear, hear. “Humble and Kind.” Tim, we’re going to link to everything related to Tim McGraw on the show notes. You’ve got lots of that.
Tim McGraw: Not everything.
Tim Ferriss: No. We’ll leave out your OnlyFans page, but we have X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. You’re not hard for people to find. But is there anything else you’d like to point people to? Anything you’d like to say? Closing comments, public complaints, anything —
Tim McGraw: I have plenty of public complaints, but I’m not going to air them.
Tim Ferriss: — stand-up comedy, raw material, anything you’d like to say before we come to —
Tim McGraw: Well, first I want to thank you for having me —
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely.
Tim McGraw: — and allow me to be a part of your book —
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.
Tim McGraw: — one of your books.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Tim McGraw: And enjoy listening to you, and I hope we can do it again.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. It’s been such a pleasure. I’ve wanted to connect in person for years. So much fun.
Tim McGraw: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I hope it’s not the last time. I love Nashville, so I’ll be back.
Tim McGraw: Good. Well, and when you’re back, we’ll talk again.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Absolutely.
Tim McGraw: I’ll cook dinner for you one night.
Tim Ferriss: I’m in.
Tim McGraw: Or have Faith cook dinner for you. It’d be better. Although I’m a pretty good cook.
Tim Ferriss: That is a deal for sure. And everybody listening, we will put links to anything and everything we can find. Obviously, all the ways to find what you’re up to, the tour, the music when it’s ready. And so —
Tim McGraw: There is one new song, to interrupt you, that people can find that we didn’t put on streaming or anything. You can only find it on my socials, but it’s a song called “Different” that I think people should listen to.
Tim Ferriss: All right. We will find “Different,” and we will link it in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for folks. And as always, until next time, this is how I close almost every episode, a bit kinder than as necessary, not just to other people, but also to yourself. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete as Jack Kornfield has said. And also as always, thanks for tuning in guys. See you next time. Thank you, Tim.
Tim McGraw: Thank you. Adios.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tim McGraw — Starting Late with a $20 Guitar, Selling 100M+ Records, and 30+ Years of Creative Longevity (#852) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-02-05 02:13:15
Tim McGraw (@thetimmcgraw) is a Grammy Award-winning entertainer, author, and actor who has sold more than 106 million records worldwide, with 49 number-one singles and 19 number-one albums.
He is one of the most-played country artists since his debut in 1992. He’s been named Nielsen BDS Radio’s Most Played Artist of the Decade for all music genres and also had the Most Played Song of the Decade for all music genres.
Tim has four New York Times bestselling books and has acted for both film and television, including the movies Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side and Paramount Network’s Yellowstone. He recently starred alongside his wife Faith Hill and Sam Elliott in Yellowstone’s prequel—the three-time-Emmy-nominated 1883.
You can find tickets for his upcoming Pawn Shop Guitar Tour at TimMcGraw.com.
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“I ended up not playing ball, joined a fraternity, pawned my high school ring, and bought a guitar for 20 bucks. I thought, ‘I love music, I love singing, chicks might dig it if I got a guitar and learned to play a few songs.'”
— Tim McGraw
“The song always has to win.”
— Tim McGraw
“We always like to say, ‘You could have the greatest song in the world, the greatest band in the world, greatest singer in the world—which I am not—but you could have all those factors and it still not work.’ And we always say, ‘Sometimes God just walks through the room.'”
— Tim McGraw
“If you start chasing what you think people want to hear, then you’re in trouble. You’ve got to chase what you want to hear and what you want to play. … If it doesn’t speak to me first, there’s no way I’m going to make it speak to somebody else.”
— Tim McGraw
“We’re so lucky as artists, writers, musicians, whatever you are as an artist, because that’s therapy. You have your own built-in therapeutic machine.”
— Tim McGraw
“If everything else is gone, if you’ve got hope, you’ve still got a chance.”
— Tim McGraw
“Maybe the life that I had growing up prepared me to be a better dad because of what I knew I didn’t want to do. And I found this business has really made me find out that learning what you don’t want to do and what doesn’t work for you is better than knowing what does.”
— Tim McGraw
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Want to hear another episode with someone who took charge of their career by learning to say no? Listen to my conversation with Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, in which we discussed lessons from his father, 30+ years of diary notes, the art of catching greenlights, getting “unbranded” from Hollywood typecasting, and much more.
The post Tim McGraw — Starting Late with a $20 Guitar, Selling 100M+ Records, and 30+ Years of Creative Longevity (#852) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
