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Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life

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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: Michelle, at long last, here we are.

Michelle Khare: Here we are, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: So nice to meet you in person.

Michelle Khare: It’s so nice to meet you too. This is so exciting and surreal for me. So thank you for letting me infiltrate your podcast studio today.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely, I am thrilled. It looks like about three years ago that I first put you and your channel in my newsletter, 5-Bullet Friday, and I think it was probably even before that, that one of our mutual friends, Adam Grant, had been telling me repeatedly, “You have to have Michelle on the show.” And the reason that I was so excited to put you in the newsletter — I don’t even remember the line, I went back and I looked at what I said exactly. And one of the things I said was, “I’m so happy that someone finally cracked this premise and did it right.” But since people probably have no idea what I’m talking about, although I would have already said something in the intro, what’s the logline, so to speak, for —

Michelle Khare: Of Challenge Accepted?

Tim Ferriss: Of Challenge Accepted. What is it?

Michelle Khare: Challenge Accepted is a show where I attempt the world’s toughest stunts and professions, and that can range from learning and attempting Harry Houdini’s deadliest trick, the water torture cell, to training with the Secret Service for a week, to most recently, I recreated Tom Cruise’s stunt from Mission: Impossible, where I was hanging off the side of a military aircraft as it was taking off.

Tim Ferriss: And you have more than six million followers, more than a billion views, and I’m going to read — you know what? We’ll probably just skip the intro because I’m basically getting into it anyway.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: “Michelle hopes to prove that, with enough dedication and failure, anything is possible”. And that’s one of the characteristics that I most appreciate about the show, is if you have a breakdown, if you’re flat on your back, if you stumble and fall, it’s in there, right? That’s a feature and not a bug.

Michelle Khare: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: So it’s not just the highlights, it’s also the low lights. And since we’re already getting into it, I’m just going to read this paragraph. All right. “Michelle’s work has earned multiple Streamy awards, including Show of the Year, has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Vogue India, and more. In 2025, Challenge Accepted made history — congratulations — successfully petitioning to join the primetime Emmy ballot. Michelle was named a Time100 honoree for her impact as a creator and storyteller.” Let’s rewind way back. We were chatting a little bit before we got started about Shreveport, Louisiana.

Michelle Khare: Oh, yes. Shout out Shreveport.

Tim Ferriss: And I mentioned I had been there and you were like, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Michelle Khare: Yes, there’s not much there.

Tim Ferriss: Why was I there? Why had I been there? And why does that tie into your background a little bit, your history growing up? Well, I was just saying, if you want to hop into it, because I’ll, I suppose, answer my own question, which is the reason I was in Shreveport is because they have very compelling tax incentives and other incentives for filming. So what was your first exposure to “the business,” broadly speaking?

Michelle Khare: My very first exposure to the business was my dad is a big, big movie and television lover. He actually learned English after immigrating from India by watching films, even on the plane from India to America. And so, growing up, because there’s not much to do in Shreveport, every Friday night we were at the movies. It didn’t matter if it was a blockbuster or a very low-rated Rotten Tomatoes B-side movie, I saw everything. Kids’ movies, PG13 up, we saw it all. And then we would go to a pizza shop and talk about the movie afterwards. Again, there’s nothing to do in Shreveport, so this was like the pinnacle of entertainment.

And so, just naturally, I started experiencing a homegrown little film school, if that makes sense. We printed out the AFI Top 100 Movies, and had them in our living room, and we would check them off as we watched them, me and my dad. And what was special is as I got a little older, all these tax incentives started happening, bringing films to New Orleans and to Shreveport. We got a lot of Twilight knockoff movies, I think one of the Scary Movies was shot in Shreveport. And so our town experienced this little economic art renaissance, which was really exciting. And so, all of our friends and family members were becoming extras in movies and TV shows, and feeling very excited about all of that. And so, one of my first jobs was I had an internship on a movie starring The Rock, it was a movie called Snitch.

It came out in 2013. And I think I was like so low on the call sheet, I was like, it was after all the PAs, it was PA intern. It was the last person on the call sheet was me, and I was just getting coffee for people and learning. And it was an incredible experience, and I loved that because I got a window into the traditional scope of what it could take to tell a story at a higher Hollywood level. And that’s what I hope to bring a lot of to what we do, even on Challenge Accepted today, is this midpoint of digital freedom, ownership, but structure and understanding and respect of the history of where our visual storytelling medium has come from.

Tim Ferriss: Part of the reason I said I’m so glad somebody finally cracked this is, you’ll know this, some people may not, there are basically two reasons why I’m doing this podcast, or the catalysts that led to this podcast, and they both relate to ownership in a sense. The first was The 4-Hour Chef, which was basically just a suicide mission of a deadline, a book that should have taken three years was done in a year, and that’s just physically effectively impossible. So, ran myself into the ground with that.

Michelle Khare: Because you are self-testing all of these things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. I was doing everything in the book, full of experiments, and somehow thought it would be a good idea to try to learn photography, to do hundreds of photographs in the book myself, which turns out to be a craft in and of itself that takes a lot of time, if you want to be even halfway decent.

Michelle Khare: Yeah, I agree.

Tim Ferriss: And what ended up happening in that case was distribution got hamstrung. I expected some of it because it was a book, it was the largest title that had been acquired by the then very nascent Amazon Publishing, and because people, in some ways, rightly fear Amazon as this omnipowerful, omnipotent entity that controls all of these different aspects of, in most cases, distribution, but now Amazon Publishing was going to be competing with the big publishing houses for author talent, and this scared the hell out of everybody. So, I expected that there would be, say, boycotts by Barnes & Noble, I did not anticipate it would include all of the big box retailers and much more.

So, the book basically, I don’t want to say it died on the vine because it did as well as it could have, but at the same time, roughly — this is the part I haven’t talked as much about. I had been filming and then debuted in 2013, The Tim Ferriss Experiment, right? And The Tim Ferriss Experiment had me doing these experiments, as you might expect, on a weekly basis. And that was through a startup within Turner broadcasting, called Upwave. But there were all of these problems internally at Upwave, ultimately, that got shut down. There was a regime change, and then what happens? The catalog of episodes, if it succeeds, the new leadership’s not going to get any credit, and if it goes poorly, they’re going to get all the blame. So it just got locked up.

And it took me two years or three years to get back the rights and then “self-publish” on Apple, and it did very well at the time. But what you just said is so important, I want to underscore it for people. Because I’ve heard you discuss, and I want to give a shout-out to Colin and Samir, two of the best interviewers out there, in my opinion, especially when it comes to creator economy, and the nuts and bolts of making things in this modern era, I really want to give them due credit. When you’ve had conversations — and I’m going to talk for a second, I apologize.

But when you’ve had conversations with some of these larger, let’s call it traditional outlets or platforms, and you start to talk about your production schedule, they’re like, “Well, wait a second, it takes you six months or a year, or — fill in the blank, in their mind, excessively long period of time, could we compress it into a week?” And you have figured out very artfully how to have largely complete editorial control — there are some constraints, depending on how you want to go about it, with partners and sponsors and things like that. But largely you control your schedule, your direction. Actually, you do completely, right? You’re choosing positive constraints, depending on your objectives. But what ended up happening with The Tim Ferriss Experiment is like, okay, we have a week for each one.

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: And so I would be in compression pants and putting on DMSO and all this crap because I had a ton of injuries from one episode, but we were already going into post, and then we’d have a day of travel, and then I’m starting the next episode, and it was impossible. It was just physically, I’m still contending with injuries from that. We might talk about that with respect to some of the stuff that you’re doing, I want to hear about it. But there were two issues, right? There was the production side control problem, and then ultimately, didn’t control distribution. And for those reasons, those two straws that broke the camel’s back, I was like, fuck this. And I’d used podcasts to launch The 4-Hour Chef, and I thought to myself, you know what? I like RSS feeds. I like this idea of being able to do whatever I want, be myself.

If I want to curse, I can curse. Not that that’s ultimately — I suppose it can be an art form in and of itself, depending on where you grow up. And that’s how we ended up here today, right?

Michelle Khare: Just so I understand, you were human guinea pigging 4-Hour Chef and shooting Tim Ferriss Experiment at the same time?

Tim Ferriss: They were basically back to back, and there was probably some overlap. So I was doing pre-production while I was finishing The 4-Hour Chef because I’m a glutton for punishment.

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: For people who haven’t seen that, it’s my first four-color book, it’s something like 600, 700 pages, cut down from like 1,000 probably. And the biggest difference, I’d say the absolute biggest difference between The 4-Hour Chef and the books that came before it, The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body, is that in the case of The 4-Hour Body, I did all of the experiments, then digested it all, combed through everything, and compiled the book. In the case of The 4-Hour Chef, I was still, because of the deadline, doing a lot of the experiments as I was already beginning to write the earlier sections of the book, which is a very risky gambit.

And then, on top of that, because I did not know — and I thought this was actually a good idea, although there were a lot of pitfalls. Because The 4-Hour Chef was a huge gamble, particularly from a distribution perspective, I expected I was going to get kneecapped in certain ways. And I was like, well, if this doesn’t work out the way I want it to, I still have the benefit of the doubt and the eyes of most people, and I can use the success of the prior book, and the blog at that time — remember blogs, people? To parlay that into the television. So, I was like, let me get the deal before The 4-Hour Chef fully comes out so that I have the leverage that might become a question mark once it’s published.

Michelle Khare: Oh, my gosh. Okay. So, for those of you, I feel like there are so few people in the world who can truly empathize with what you put yourself through. I’m thinking of Morgan Spurlock, the true pioneer of whatever it is we’re doing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, rest in peace, Morgan.

Michelle Khare: And rest in peace, my gosh. David Blaine is another that comes to mind. And I think what people don’t realize when they watch your content or even mine is that it’s not filmed in a vacuum. Life is happening. As you mentioned, you’re not just going to Japan to learn Yabusame for five days, you’re struggling with the jet lag, and then you’re also probably answering questions and emails about what next week’s episode is going to entail. And that is a level of professional athlete that is so unappreciated.

Tim Ferriss: Well, thank you.

Michelle Khare: I much empathize with that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I really appreciate that.

Michelle Khare: We were talking about decisions.

Tim Ferriss: Decisions, yeah. So, decisions, and then we’re going to go back chronologically.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And thank you for saying all that. And I was also building initially the writing side of things based on, in some ways, models from, let’s call it experiential journalism who came before me. And there were quite a few. Usually it was done with some type of satirical or humor twist, like A.J. Jacobs would be a great example for people who don’t know, The Year of Living Biblically, I think, is an amazing, amazing book.

Michelle Khare: Incredible. I met him a couple months ago and I said, “You need to do that again and make it a YouTube video, it would bang.”

Tim Ferriss: He’s such a sweetheart. He is such a sweet guy. Morgan Spurlock, for people who might not have recognized the name immediately, Supersize Me, really a sort of a genre breaking, category redefining, experiment, and many more who came earlier from a writing perspective, but questions.

Tim Ferriss: So, what I would love to know, and this is going to get in the weeds a bit, guys, but we’re going to zoom out and get the genesis story as well. But part of what I’m so curious about is you have in some ways the dizziness of freedom, right? You have a paradox of choice challenge, where having complete lack of constraints can be almost as bad if you don’t have a framework for figuring it out as having too many constraints.

So, when you have things running concurrently, you might, as I understand it, be working on two or three challenges at the same time, right? You’re doing post-production for one, maybe you’re doing planning for another, and you’re in the middle of a third. First of all, how far in advance do you plan your editorial calendar?

Michelle Khare: The editorial calendar for Challenge Accepted can be anywhere from 12 to 15 months out from idea to upload. And an example of concurrent things happening would be, there was one day where I had to do astronaut training for a NASA episode. So, naturally, I began my day by going up in a fighter jet in the middle of nowhere in California, flying around, having no idea what I was getting myself into.

Tim Ferriss: Hope you took your Zofran.

Michelle Khare: Yeah. I threw up while —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There we go. There we go.

Michelle Khare: I exited the plane, we finished filming that, I got in my car, drove three hours back to Los Angeles, and had a ballet lesson. I think that is just a good window into what one day of life is like, and often training for multiple things at once. But when you have a situation, and a privilege, honestly, of the gift of choice and getting to choose how you use your time, I like to maximize my output for each year, as far as, it really comes down to something that I learned early, which is the more milestone memories you experience, the longer life feels.

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Michelle Khare: And I’ve realized that that goes hand in hand with my business. The more milestone memories I create and can capture and turn into stories, it actually is a better episode. It leads to more revenue, more opportunities. And so, I’ve merged those together. But it comes from, I am an athlete, I am a person who operates in an environment where you give me a coach, you give me a training plan, I’ll follow it. I’ll do exactly what you tell me to, and I really thrive in that environment. And being a business owner is such an oppositional to that, because now you are both the coach and the athlete at the same time. And so, what I’ve had to do is, and I’m stealing this term from one of my other friends, is put a Formula One team around myself.

A Formula One team, we love Max Verstappen, he’s an incredible driver, and he’s not able to do what he does without the support of all of the mechanics and engineers. So, what I have done at every step in my life is try to find who are the best people to put around myself to continually challenge me, whether it’s business, personal, relationships, content, story, and assembling that team is really important to me. Those are the people who help me decide, how do I spend each minute of a calendar day?

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to double click on a few things here and we’re going to go all over the place, folks, so —

Michelle Khare: Buckle up.

Tim Ferriss: Buckle up. Right. It’s not quite going to be the vomit comet for astronaut training.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Hopefully it’ll be a little —

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It’ll be more like a tour through the countryside with lots of interesting sites and vistas. But a few things come to mind that I want to mention and then ask about. The first is that, and Colin and Samir made this point, you exemplify something that I hope continues to gain traction, which is a focus on quality over quantity.

Michelle Khare: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Because there was a point where it’s like, hey, you have to post 50 times a day, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to vlog 20 minutes every 12 hours, no matter what you do.

And you’re borrowing a lot of the best storytelling techniques and production quality of “traditional,” right? But also applying it to this digital native environment, which has a lot of its own upsides and also potentially long-term damaging temptations, which you have to be aware of, and I think you very much are. And when you’re publishing fewer videos, however, in a sense, not in all senses, but in some senses, you’re fighting the drive of the algorithm. And there are economic incentives that drive the frequency with which a lot of people publish.

So, when you’re doing less, and again, hat tip to Colin and Samir, it’s like you are — I want you to modify this because it’s been a minute since you spoke with them. But you can keep the lights on to some extent with AdSense, and the ad revenue from that, then you’ve got brand partners, right? And that’s part of the reason why it seems like it’s helpful to have an editorial calendar out for a period of time, right?

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Because you can have some type of, I don’t want to call it sales process, but you have sort of forward looking thematic opportunities to look for those types of deals. And then you’ve got your app among other things. And I’d like to hear you talk about that. But when you’re going to break a mold and you’re trying to do something that people say can’t be done, like traditional TV on the internet or whatever it might be, you may have to find a new approach to financing what you want to do.

And so I’d love to hear you speak for just a moment about kind of what you have had to build and how you’ve had to think differently in order to do what you want to do. And then I do want to return to, and you can mention this in your answer if you want, but when you have certain episodes that take a day to film, right? Some that take a week, some that take six months, some that take a year to set up, how the hell do you create like a Gantt chart or whatever to actually do that? And my understanding is like production is one of your superpowers, right? So that is a very gigantic half page question.

But yeah, if you could speak to basically how you make it work.

Michelle Khare: How we make it work.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Because a lot of creators, I think, are succumbing to the culture of cortisol drive where they feel like they have to keep up, keep up, keep up often in terms of just frequency. And I think that’s a really dangerous game to play for a lot of reasons. Somebody else is always going to be able to sacrifice or be willing to sacrifice their entire lives to publish more frequently. So that can’t be your sole metric, right? So how do you do what you do? And how do you have to think differently, operate differently?

Michelle Khare: How do we operate differently? Our business is super antithetical to what most creators are doing. And I started in that place that you’re referring to, uploading multiple long form videos a week. I mean, I was uploading before TikTok existed, so it was all long form. Then of course, short form came along. But what happened at the beginning of my career was I was trying to grow my channel to create financial and personal stability. I had taken a big risk by leaving my job. And as a part of that, the first entry point was stability in some sense.

So I was making videos about anything I thought would perform well, and still with my own lens, of course. But I would have this strategy of, I’m going to do three videos a month for the studio, if you will, which is a term from traditional TV and film where a big director will do a big blockbuster movie and then the studio will allow them to do their passion project. So I would do that for myself where once a month I would do a passion project. And at the beginning of my channel, it was, I would DM stunt performers like Tom Holland’s stunt double, and asked them, “Would you train with me for a week? And can we make a video together?”

And it was cool because we were targeting communities that were undervalued and unseen often. I mean, many stunt performers aren’t allowed to share their work. And so giving them an opportunity to highlight their work was helpful to them and exciting for them and exciting for me selfishly, because I want to learn how to do all these incredible stunts and make an amazing story about it. And I saw a market opportunity because when you see BTS stuff from movies, it’s very —

Tim Ferriss: Behind the scenes.

Michelle Khare: Yeah, behind the scenes. My apologies.

When you see behind the scenes content from big Marvel movies, it’s very manicured and very short, and I really wanted to give space and breathability to this experimental process. And what ended up happening is those passion projects started outperforming the things I expected to just perform well. And it got to this point where I was limited resource wise, just like my own time even, of being able to do more of that passion thing. And I just decided, we decided as a team, we’re only going to focus on Challenge Accepted. Let’s just try that for a few months.

Tim Ferriss: And when did it get named Challenge Accepted?

Michelle Khare: It got named Challenge Accepted after Challenge Accepted existed. So when you go back and look at season one of Challenge Accepted, which is a while ago now, I think we went back and named it that because we’re like, “Oh, yeah, this was the beginning of this show,” which is so funny. But we were doing many things on the channel and we decided to strip away everything and only go in on that. And that is where a true inflection point came on the channel.

I would honestly say, Tim, you were asking earlier about key decisions, I think a lot of the inflection points of my life have happened when my back has been against the wall. Not in a place of “I get to make a decision,” but more like, “I have to make a decision because everything’s going to break if I don’t.” And this was a risky decision to make, to go all in on a show where I am physically committing myself for up to months at a time. At this point in 2026, 2025, we released eight to 10 episodes per year, that’s my upload cadence. And so every opportunity is a big bet. But what I have found is that when I did that, something even more special happened. It created something unique. And I have found that defining something unique can be even more valuable than consistency or mass viewership.

We’re very blessed that Challenge Accepted does get a lot of views and we feel strong about the bets that we make on these episodes. But, I have found that creating something special attracts even more people to want to support it. And so now what we ironically have on the channel is a scarcity mindset for advertisers that if you want to be in an episode of Challenge Accepted, there are 10. The train’s going. Are you getting on or are you getting off? Because we only have so much inventory to sell, we’re able to sell it at a premium, and it makes what we’re doing so one of one. And that’s always been my big thesis is whatever we do has to be one of one.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. A few things come to mind as you’re talking. One is the importance of owning or creating, even better yet, a category. So this category of one idea, Blue Ocean Strategy, I think, is a good — at least at the time I read it, which was a long time ago, 10 years ago, pretty good exploration of this. But separately, as I look at the landscape now, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about podcasting. “If you were to start now, what would you do?” And I could throw out sort of examples of what I might do, but just from a broader kind of meta level, I say, I think it would be very difficult for me to do now or start now what I started in 2014, which was kind of a broad exploration of deconstructing world-class performers in an interview format. Now there are 600 of those.

And if you want something that is sustainable, and this is not exactly the right way to frame it, but premium from a partnership perspective, from a CPM perspective, from a whatever perspective, the best examples that I would try to model are shows like yours. Although I’m not really — I’m kind of shy with video, so I probably wouldn’t do video first, but it would be a show like yours. I mean, if I were 20 right now, I’d be like, “That’s what I want to do.” If I could have a job, it would be Michelle’s job.

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, honestly, it would be — but if you want to look at some other examples where I probably wouldn’t pursue it, but they’re doing excellent jobs. Acquired, for instance, Founders, David Senra, highly focused, long form, very hard to replicate because there’s so much God damn work, right?

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Which is true with yours also. It’s like, “Oh, you want to spend six months making a video?”

Michelle Khare: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. It’s a lot easier to publish frequently without thinking as hard about the lead time of doing something that’s very complex.

Michelle Khare: Right. And that was part of the strategy with Challenge Accepted too, is you see many people copying one another online, in any form of art, people are copying constantly. And part of our defensive strategy was how do we do something that is so crazy? No one would be crazy enough, I don’t think, to run seven marathons on all seven continents in one single week and make a documentary about it and go through all of the production headache of that, or call the FAA 300 times to get permission to hang off the side of a military plane to recreate the Mission: Impossible stunt.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Michelle Khare: It’s almost like the things that feel so untouchable instantly become opportunities for story, because it’s a great story to try and overcome that. And also the second mover scenario will at least take them so long to catch up to us to get there.

Tim Ferriss: Right, because you’re going to be the comp. They’re going to say, “Oh, it’s like Challenge Accepted, but dot, dot, dot.” And that is going to be very difficult for other people to overcome. And I want to explore this a little bit more because it’s, I think, so critical and you see it in a lot of different places, sometimes the hard thing is the easier thing long term. Meaning, if you solve a very hard problem upfront, it makes your life a little easier or a lot easier long term. And this applies everywhere.

There’s an amazing, amazing guy. You should meet him at some point. Jerzy Gregorek and his wife, Aniela Gregorek, they’re Polish emigres. They immigrated to the US with like 10 or 100 bucks in their pocket. They were political refugees, landed in California, and still to this day, they both have multiple world records in Olympic weightlifting. And I would say they’re both around mid-60s and Jerzy can get on an Indo Board like a balance board with a fully loaded barbell and do a perfect Olympic snatch, like ass to heels and then drop the weight and repeat while balancing on a board. He’s got to be at least 65 now.

His wife, Aniela, who also, as I mentioned, has a bunch of world records can — her daughter’s, I guess, ball got caught in a tree a few years ago and she just ran up the tree and got it and came down. I mean, they are incredible physical specimens. They take no prescription medications. And the reason I’m bringing them up is that Jerzy has this expression, which is, “Hard choice is easy life. Easy choice is hard life.” And so it applies in physical training and health. It applies in creation, broadly speaking. It’s like with what you’re doing, you’re creating a moat that is very defensible in a lot of ways. It applies to startups where it’s like, okay, sure. Yeah, you can vibe code and create something in 20 minutes. And that’s interesting and you should experiment with that. And the barrier to entry has been lowered dramatically on the production of say an app, but the barrier to attention has never been higher.

Therefore, there is actually something to be said for the hard startup being the easier startup where if you’re solving a hard problem that requires a really good team, like hardware and this, that and the other thing, most people are never going to attempt it. Therefore, you actually have a margin of safety in some respect if you can execute. So I just wanted to mention that because I see this all over the place where if you spend the time to work on something hard upfront, it buys you a lot of safety is at least one way that I think about it.

And you’ve talked about assembling this Formula One team, but let’s rewind because I’m sure some people are like, “Well, if I don’t have any money and I’m just getting started, how do you afford to hire the Formula One team? That sounds expensive.” So let’s go back a little bit. Before you became active on YouTube, what were you doing?

Michelle Khare: What was I doing?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: Gosh, so I grew up in Shreveport, got my first taste of the film industry there. I went to college at Dartmouth, and then while I was in college —

Tim Ferriss: Good school.

Michelle Khare: Yeah, it was great. And while I was in college, I did some internships in the industry, but I also did an internship at Google. And so there I sort of saw the behind the scenes of the platform I guess I upload to now, which was really interesting. And as I was mentioning to you, Tim, a lot of things that have driven key moments in my life have been moments when my back has been against the wall. And one of those moments for me was when you do a Google internship, at the end of the summer, like many big internships, you find out if you get the job. You can go into your senior year of college like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m rocking. I got the job. I’m set. I can chill out the last year.”

And there was one day where they called everybody from my internship class, letting them know if they got the job and we’re all in a big text chain together and everyone’s like, “I got it. See you next year, blah, blah, blah.” I get my phone call —

Tim Ferriss: Sounds stressful.

Michelle Khare: I didn’t get the job. And I would say that this was pivotal and ironic now that I’m so embedded in YouTube in a completely different way. But what it forced me to do was my whole life had been about, as an athlete, finding a coach, doing exactly what they tell me to do. In school, it was, “Here are all the books to do while on the SAT. I will do them. I will wake up at five in the morning over the summer and memorize everything and do it.” Because that’s the formula to success.

Tim Ferriss: Executing to plan on the formula.

Michelle Khare: Exactly. And I think it’s part of the immigrant mentality of the holy trinity of doctoral lawyer engineer is because those are systems for safety. And also from my family, like with many immigrant families, they know so intimately what instability feels like. And so that led me on the course that eventually led me to BuzzFeed, which was in many ways sort of the first creative risk I had taken on myself. And at the time it was the fastest growing YouTube channel in the world.

Tim Ferriss: What was the job that you had at BuzzFeed?

Michelle Khare: So I started as an intern again, And eventually I became a producer at BuzzFeed. And producer is such a strange term, even in traditional, but what it meant at BuzzFeed was doing everything. So I was responsible for everything from ideation to filming, editing, uploading, and I didn’t have any of those skills. Even though my homegrown Shreveport, Louisiana, shout out Vivek Khare, my dad putting on his little AFI film school in our house, it did not cut it for what we needed to do. But what I loved about that was you had to learn every part of the process. Unlike when I interned on a traditional film set, it’s very specialized. There are unions. You don’t even touch equipment from a department that’s not yours.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen that. You get yelled at.

Michelle Khare: And you do get yelled at, and there are great reasons for that. But the learning environment was so important for me to learn, when you ingest footage, you can accidentally delete it all. That sucks. I needed to learn all of those processes because even today, now, we have an amazing team, a massive production team, and it helps me as a leader to be able to empathetically chat with each department. We’ve all been at companies or on film sets where the director or CEO has never done the jobs of anyone that they’re asking to do a job for. And I like being able to talk to the sound person in my basic understanding of what are the frequencies we’re on. Is there anything we need to adjust about this set that is disruptive to the way you have the boompole set up? I like knowing all of the details and being able to think critically about each department so everyone can succeed.

Tim Ferriss: So this is going to be a leading question, but I’m going to try it anyway. Do you think it’s fair to say that if you had not had the BuzzFeed job and you’d gone straight from not getting the gig at Google to YouTube, that the outcome would have been very different?

Michelle Khare: Exponentially different. Yeah. I don’t think I would have succeeded.

Tim Ferriss: So I want to spend a second on this simply to say, because I get asked about starting companies all the time. And someone’s like, “I’m graduating and I’m going to start my company.” And I think they’re sometimes surprised and a lot of professors disagree with me on this, which is fine because I think that makes for interesting conversations. But my default recommendation is do not start a company right after school. Go get an MBA or a master’s degree in X where you get to do every job where someone else is paying you for it.

Michelle Khare: Exactly. It’s a little, paid graduate school.

Tim Ferriss: So that you are learning to learn, make all your dumb mistakes or make your first massive round of dumb mistakes on someone else’s dime. And if you immediately start your own company, you’re also not necessarily going to get the breadth of experience in a more mature — and that by mature, that could be 10 or 20 or 30 employees, it doesn’t have to be a gigantic company. But get that experience first and then increase the odds of your own success at that point by going and starting your own gig.

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: I’m curious if you think that still applies, for instance, in the world of, and I know this is painting with the broad brush, but YouTube. If somebody came to you and they said, “I want to get really good at…” The world has changed so quickly in terms of video and entertainment and visual storytelling. With a startup, I would still tell someone, “Hey, if you can…” I know we’re all painting this dystopian picture of Mad Max in 10 years. Let’s just, for the time being, for planning purposes, assume that’s not going to be the case, work at a startup first, then start your own startup.

But in the world of visual storytelling, would you suggest people get a job kind of working at a place like a BuzzFeed or something like that before making the leap into YouTube now? Or is there a better way to learn the skills necessary to do in-depth, long-form stuff?

Michelle Khare: I definitely think having experience working for someone else in the field that you want to be a part of is so educational, not just to be in the mail room and see how things work, but also to define a core tenet list of what you enjoy about the company and all the little things you don’t like. When I left my job, I had a very clear list of, “This worked great for this company, but at my company, I’m never going to do X, Y, or Z.” And that was super, super helpful to define company culture, to ensure people’s voices are heard, to keep employee retention high. And I think that’s why with Challenge Accepted, our sets operate so differently, that everybody has a digital mind of we need to shoot it this way because it will perform well, or we’re thinking critically about retention and the intro and whatnot, but we’re also thinking about storytelling as a medium has been solved. Traditional Hollywood, they clearly did something right, and let’s learn from that.

It’s as simple as breaking for lunch every six hours. It’s as simple as making sure we have enough pre-production meetings. And those are the things that were pain points for me at prior jobs, and I’m able to apply them in this really special space where we have an amazing, amazing culture and work environment where people can hopefully feel that they’re able to express themselves artistically, experiment, and learn at the same time.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m trying to figure out where to go next because I think it’s probably going to be fear-setting just because I want to hear how that factors into things. Why don’t we just go there because I’ve read about the whiteboard of fears and other things. I’m sure we’ll spend a second on cycling also.

But the way that this interview ultimately happened was because of an X exchange. I put up a post about YouTube channels. Are there any YouTube channels out there that have some type of intersection with The 4-Hour Workweek. Or anything in it? And that’s how we ultimately personally connected.

How does fear-setting fit into the story?

Michelle Khare: Well, well, Tim, it fits into the story in a few ways. Challenge Accepted at its core originally began by me taking a whiteboard and writing all of my fears out and then connecting each fear to a circumstance that would cause me to address it, not just as a personal self-help type of thing, because I am a very anxious person internally, but more specifically because it makes for a better story.

We realized very early on showing the vulnerability, showing the fear, that’s a key part of Snyder’s beats of storytelling. So starting with the all is lost moment of the story led us to unlock really, really fascinating episodes and we would structure the thesis of each of like, “I want to be a firefighter, but I’m not brave enough.” Okay, that’s an interesting story and we’re thinking about that in every piece of the edit, every piece of the pre-production. And that is the climax of the emotional core of when I finally go in a burning building, why we care so much. It’s the same in the Mission: Impossible project. I would love to be in a Mission: Impossible movie, but am I actually brave enough to strap myself to the side of a plane like icon Tom Cruise? Okay, I’ve got to do that first.

But I actually brought something, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: You brought something?

Michelle Khare: I brought something to help demonstrate fear-setting.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Michelle Khare: I’m going to bring it out now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it.

Michelle Khare: I’ll describe it for the audio listeners.

Tim Ferriss: Oh. I recognize the colors.

Michelle Khare: This is not a plug. Unfortunately, you are dealing with a fan in the chair opposite from you, but reading The 4-Hour Workweek changed my life. This is the original copy I have from 2016. I was a bit young when it came out in 2007, so I didn’t have that version, so this might be slightly revised. But I went back into my archives and I found this email. The date is, what is today? March 31st, 2026. The date of this email — I’m not making this up. March 18th, 2016. It has been exactly 10 years since I sent this email.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Okay.

Michelle Khare: I have to shout out my therapist, Jody, because she’s the one who told me to read your book. And I wanted to read a section of my fear-setting to you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. Amazing.

Michelle Khare: Now, as you know, because these are your memories and your brain, this was prior to the define, prevent, repair chart of your 2017 TED Talk.

Tim Ferriss: TED Talk.

Michelle Khare: So this isn’t even in a chart. These are just a couple of questions that you had. But I wrote here, this is so crazy, “My dream is to leave my job, start a YouTube channel, somehow succeed, own my ideas, and start a company where I can grow as a storyteller and help other storytellers grow without traditional barriers to entry.”

Number one, define your nightmare. I’m just going to read a few of the highlights.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please. Oh, yeah. No, take your time.

Michelle Khare: Define my nightmare was going broke. Never figuring out what I’m best at since I find the most joy in trying everything rather than specializing. People not thinking I’m funny. And the last one is actually not being funny. And of course, I went through the steps of repairing the damage.

Tim Ferriss: Well, do you have any examples there?

Michelle Khare: Yeah, of course.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Because, I want to give a quick —

Michelle Khare: Oh, do your spiel.

Tim Ferriss: No, no, not spiel. Just like a quick context trapper. So fear-setting is a pretty straightforward thing. It’s basically borrowed from the stoics. I’m not the first person to look at this. I just tried to systematize it for myself. It was in The 4-Hour Workweek. And it’s like goal setting, but it’s identifying your fears very specifically and then making them as concrete as possible, then talking about what you might do to prevent them and/or repair them if they inevitably happened. And the objective here is to, in a sense, demystify and take your fears from being this nebulous cloud of anxiety to something that you can put under a microscope to test.

Michelle Khare: Yes. So the first part is defining the nightmare. The second is what steps would you take to repair the damage even temporarily? And here I had using my savings from my Google internship.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: So I did have savings from that. And then making sure that my resume or LinkedIn was ready for other jobs in the industry. Number four. Oh, this is number three. If you were fired from your job today, how would you get things under financial control? And I said that I would temporarily use my savings and if that didn’t work out, aggressively apply for other jobs and listed some other companies I would reach out to. This is where it gets very intense.

What are you putting off out of fear? I’m putting off quitting my job. I’m putting off reaching out to all the people I need to make this dream a reality because it means I have to say it out loud. I’ve reached out to some people, but I know I can do better. What is it costing you financially, emotionally, physically to postpone action? I’m under emotional, high stress. I want to tell stories that really resonate with other people. I want to be around people who share creative joy in the same values of quality that I do. I am unhappy in an environment where I feel like people feel the opposite.

What are you waiting for? So this is the last section. I’m waiting for a false sense of security to inspire me to take a leap, a brand offering to collaborate, someone else offering financial stability, et cetera. But I’m actually being challenged and invited to create my own security for the first time. I have — oh, this is crazy to read. I’ve continually found success in other people’s rubric of success, but I’ve actually never found happiness. I’ve never designed my own rubric of success. And that’s because I don’t trust myself to define success. I’m scared to assume that responsibility.

That was my fear-setting chart. It’s a very personal process.

Tim Ferriss: It is.

Michelle Khare: I know you and anyone listening who have actually done it can empathize with that. I’m a very emotional person, as you can see from my videos. It’s real. Anyways, I was so excited to share that with you.

Tim Ferriss: I’m so moved by you sharing that, and I really appreciate you bringing that.

Michelle Khare: Yeah, of course.

Tim Ferriss: And you fucking did it. Awesome. Right?

Michelle Khare: God, that’s crazy. Guys, it works. It actually works. Wait, I didn’t tell you the funniest part of this. Here was the funniest part. So this has obviously been on my bookshelf for 10 years at this point. And I am a copious, like you, hand writer, note taker. I beat up my books. I write in the margins and proof. I mean, you can see the wear and tear on this thing. But when I opened this, there was absolutely no annotation. And I was like, why is this? And I felt stumped on it. And it wasn’t until I found this email where it was revealed.

Okay, this is how I wrote to my therapist with the chart. OMG, all caps. I am obsessed with The 4-Hour Workweek, several exclamation points. I just got the book on Monday from my coworker and I’ve been reading it incessantly every night. Here’s my fear-setting exercise. I stole this book apparently. And I said, I called my therapist last night before the recording. I was like, “Who would I have borrowed this book from? I have no idea whose book is in my lap right now, but it’s been on my shelf for 10 years. Whoever it is, I’m so sorry.”

By the way, I did buy all of your other books, so I did contribute to that economy, but I have a stolen Tim Ferriss book.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.

Michelle Khare: I can contribute to the cycle and donate it to a library or something, but —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. That is so good.

Michelle Khare: It’s so funny because the person from my job who let me borrow and steal this has no idea how much they impact me because I don’t even remember who it was. I mean, we were all in a bullpen with 30 desks. I probably just borrowed it from someone who sat next to me, but —

Tim Ferriss: So here’s a follow-up question on the fear-setting. And this isn’t a trick question because when people experience any ambitious or scary journey for themselves, often the same thing, it’s not a straightforward line-up into the right. It’s a bumpy path.

Michelle Khare: No.

Tim Ferriss: After doing that, when did you take action towards realizing the dream? And what was — it could have been a very small thing, I don’t know, but what was the kind of defining first step that kind of set you on the actual path to realizing what you laid out?

Michelle Khare: I took action pretty immediately, but it took me a year to quit my job. And I’ll define what the difference is. I took action immediately by, this might be crazy, this was a Tim Ferriss experiment. I really resonated with what you wrote about coming to terms with the worst possible outcome. And so I decided I’m going to train myself for the worst possible outcome.

Tim Ferriss: I love it. Yeah.

Michelle Khare: So I moved into a studio apartment with a roommate. I cut — financially stripped down. I mean, I didn’t have much anyways, but stripped as much as I could to simulate. If I’m truly failing at this and having to live in a Hollywood apartment with a bunch of roommates, I’m just going to get used to that. I’m going to get used to it right now. I’m going to cancel all of my memberships and figure out how to stay healthy with just myself, just myself in this small place.

I am also going to commit to working on my own stories after work, on the weekends, because if I can’t do it now with stability, I need to prove to myself that I actually give a shit about this, really. And I did that for an entire year, growing a little bit of a personal savings, but also growing mental and physical stamina towards — I’m already in — it’s still a place of safety, of course, but I am in a situation where I think I can handle this. I got this.

LinkedIn is up-to-date, little resume is up-to-date. I am so ready. I have defined, prevent, and hopefully we don’t got to go to that third column repair. And so then a year later, exactly, I quit my job. And when I quit, I had two months of videos backlogged, ready to go. Also, legally, for the record, on my own machine, not company resources. All of that was ready to go.

And I knew what my first big project would be, the training with the stunt doubles. I had a shoot date ready. I had taken — I only had like three months of savings at that point, and I had allocated this is going to be for the dream project. My first risk on my channel, nothing will touch that. The rest is for operating daily life expenses. And I said, “I got three months to make this work.” And like you said, like we’ve been talking about, sometimes you got to put your back against a wall and go.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I love this. So this is, I feel like we were separated at birth. So a few things. I’ll say number one to try to, I’m not a paragon of self-awareness, but I will say that I, for different reasons, have a certain hypervigilance focus on safety and security, which might sound strange to people listening, but I’m always trying to risk mitigate, right? I’m actually, I don’t view myself as a big risk-taker.

I have done a few things that have ended up with me accumulating injuries that maybe in retrospect shouldn’t have done, but broadly speaking, I’m always trying to mitigate risk, which underscores this entire fear-setting exercise, right? Because it’s not just about convincing yourself. It’s also, in my mind, completely intertwined with what you did, which is preparing and training yourself and your circumstances, right? So when I flash back to starting my first company, it’s like, how did I start the first company?

I started my first company during lunch hours, evenings and weekends, basically, while still doing my other job and doing my other job well, but I wanted to have a head start so that I wasn’t beginning from scratch after quitting a job, right? So I did that. By the way, you’re simultaneously developing skills as you’re doing that and proving that you don’t need the crutch or the training wheels of your company to enable you to do those things, right?

So the moonlighting aspect, this is another thing that, at least in my mind, maybe conflicts with how some listeners might think about me, but there’s a difference between — I’d be curious to hear you speak to this. There’s a difference between putting your back against a wall. In other words, like highly pushing yourself to make a decision and like burning all the ships and burning all the bridges.

And the way I would frame the difference is when like a year to the day almost, right? You quit your job and you’re setting up this groundwork and you have some videos ready to go and you were in — where were you at the time? This was in —

Michelle Khare: In L.A.

Tim Ferriss: — in L.A. So you’ve got probably COBRA, right? You might have some residual healthcare after you quit. I’m not sure how it was set up benefit wise, but like in my company, I knew I had at least like a handful of months where I wasn’t going to have to pay for my own healthcare. And in that case, right, as you’re thinking about what could I do if this fails, right? If it doesn’t work out, what could I do? You’ve got your LinkedIn and resume ready to go, right?

And in my fear-setting, and for a lot of people, it’s like, well, I could get like a temp waitering job. I could bartend. I could sell a bunch of my furniture. I could sell my piece of shit used car and take public transport. I could whatever, right? Sleep on an air mattress in a friend’s room. So in a sense, you’ve proven to yourself that the permanent irreversible risk is actually low, right? While at the same time propelling yourself towards this defining decision, which is like taking the leap.

Michelle Khare: And I think the emotional stability of that decision is important. You want to be able to brainstorm, what should I do in the worst case scenario from a place of safety, which is what I had at the job still. So I was able to be creative about thinking about solutions without being panicked at the same time in that situation.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. What an amazing story. What fun. And it’s a recipe, right? It’s replicable. It’s going to be different for every person, but it is actually, it’s a formula that works, like a lot of things. And I want to also mention a few things that come to mind just to draw some parallels. So you mentioned BuzzFeed where you learn to do all of these different jobs, right?

And there’s a benefit to that above and beyond the expertise of say spot checking your team’s work or something like that. Your team will also respect you more because they know you have done the thing you are asking them to do, which you did kind of mention in passing, but it’s really important. I think of, I have some PTSD memories of this book, but The 4-Hour Chef, which confusingly is a book about accelerated learning, actually tried to do a lot with that book, but very proud of it.

I think it worked. But the reason I bring it up is there’s a chef who’s profiled in that named Grant Achatz who was basically one of two superheroes in a sense. I mean, they both have super powers, right? You had Grant Achatz, the chef wunderkind genius, and then you have Nick Kokonas, who I’ve become very close friends with, who is a former genius options trader in Chicago who then decides to get in touch with Grant. He’s magical at cold emailing, which I want to talk to you about, very good at cold emailing.

And they got together and Nick is from a business kind of challenging and redesigning of systems perspective, incredible. But the reason I bring it up is that Grant can work every station in the restaurant better than everybody else, which is not to say automatically that I or you can do that with all of our team members, but he’s, at the very least, incredibly good at each of the stations so that he can when need be, improve systems, change things.

He can also teach and coach. He can give feedback. And if he gives feedback, people take it seriously because they know he’s done it himself and he knows what he’s talking about, right? So there’s a huge advantage to that and it makes your mistakes, later, less expensive, also, and it allows you to hire more effectively, whether that hiring is a contractor or full-time. Okay. I just wrote this down and I have to mention it because basically I’m like living vicariously through you now —

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — in a sense because your channel’s like, “Oh, my God.” If I could have sort of self-authored a path to doing that, like, oh, man, what an amazing thing.

Michelle Khare: Oh, my gosh. Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: I know there’s a lot under the hood and behind the scenes that I’m sure is very difficult, which we’ll talk about. But if you have not connected, and maybe you’ve graduated on from the stunt work and so on, but Damien Walters, have you seen Damien Walters?

Michelle Khare: No.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I don’t know if he’s still in the game, but Damien Walters, he’s a former high-level British gymnast who then entered the world of stunt work and just has the most insane yearly highlight videos that he put out for a while. This is an older vintage, right? But he’s been doing it a long time. But in any case, I thought he could be incredibly fun to connect with at some point.

Michelle Khare: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve never really interacted with him, so I can’t —

Michelle Khare: I have so much love and heart for the stunt community. That’s really where the channel started. And even the stunt coordinator that I work with today, his name is Steve Brown, and this is how crazy the world is, right? Back in 2016, so a few months after I sent this email, I went to a kebab shop in L.A., sat down at the counter, and was just eating dinner by myself. And I remember I was really critically thinking about this decision of going off on my own and applying this.

And this guy comes in, sits next to me, we just start talking, have a nice conversation, go our separate ways. I go on to start my channel and do what I’m doing. He goes on to choreograph and do stunts and lead stunts for Logan, several Marvel projects, and most recently, all of the Avatar films. That guy also does all of the stunt coordination on our channel.

Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.

Michelle Khare: And it’s amazing that when you meet people who are passionate, you know when you meet a flavor of a person before they have hit their peak moment, it’s special to connect with them and rise together. And that’s what’s been awesome about Steve is between his Avatar movies, he’ll come over and strap me to the side of a plane or throw me in the Houdini tank and make sure that everything’s okay because we have that kebab friendship.

Tim Ferriss: Well, this speaks also to putting yourself in the center of the action, right? And I’ve had very famous investor named Bill Gurley on the show before sat where you’re sitting right now, legendary investor and he talks about this a lot, which is putting yourself where the action is, right? So if you want to have those types of connections, it’s less likely to happen in a small town in Montana than it is in Los Angeles, right?

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Similarly, depending on your industry, IRL still matters a lot, right? As much as we would like to think it doesn’t, it’s like if you want to be in certain games in tech and you want to have access to the talent, et cetera, still to this day, in a lot of instances, you have to be in San Francisco or somewhere near San Francisco. That’s just where you have to be.

Michelle Khare: And this is coming from the virtual guy.

Tim Ferriss: It is. It is. And yet, if you look at what the virtual guy did, because I was trying and wanted to get involved in tech and then ultimately angel investing, where was I? I was in the Bay Area for 17 years. If I had not done that, I think my success would have had a 0% likelihood. I mean, literally 0%. If I look at how a lot of the ultimately best advising or investing relationships came together, they almost all started with chance encounters at the equivalent of a kebab shop, right?

I go to a barbecue at someone’s house and accidentally bump into someone and spill their drink and start a conversation and then boom, that turns into one of the most — ends up defining 30% of my net worth. And sure, there’s luck involved, but you have to provide a, and I’m borrowing this term from someone else, but surface area for luck, right?

Michelle Khare: So what have we learned? Barbecue, kebab, spilling drinks, key to success. 30% of Tim’s network.

Tim Ferriss: Chapter one. Chapter one. Bump into people. Actually, it really could be. The other thing I wanted to mention is you talked about, in a sense, and this is not the most elegant way to put it, but like practicing poverty, right? That was one of your fears, right? It was like running out of money. So you move into the apartment where you’re sharing a studio with someone else or multiple people and you get rid of your memberships and so on and you prove to yourself, number one, you can certainly survive. Number two, probably it’s not that bad. You can figure it out.

And sure, maybe if you’re depending on the roommate, I mean, you might want to get rid of said roommate, but it reminded me of, not to belabor this, but since the genesis of fear-setting is stoic philosophy and the stoics, Seneca the Younger talks about practicing in this way. A very close friend of mine, Kevin Kelly, who was the founding editor of Wired magazine and fascinating person on all levels. Also has a big Amish beard and has spent time with the Amish to study how they accept or reject technology, et cetera, et cetera. Really interesting guy.

But he also, I don’t know if he does it anymore, he’s got to be mid-70s now, but he used to routinely spend periods of time, I want to say every year where he would just camp out in his living room in a sleeping bag and have like instant coffee and instant oatmeal and just do that for like a week and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, great. Yeah, I don’t really need that much.” And by doing that, it gives you courage, which I think is a practiced skill, right? Your subconscious has to believe that you can do something. You can’t just read books and suddenly have confidence in all situations. And I mean, you’re, I think, a walking example of how you can do that.

So my question for you, Formula One team. All right. Formula One is expensive, right? It’s like these cars in some cases are like what? $250 million when you start to add everything in, pricey. Yes, very high performance. But when you quit your job and you’re like, “I have three months.” How did you assemble or enroll the help that you needed in the early days, the first three to six months after quitting your job, or did you just do everything yourself? I don’t know. So what did it look like in the early days?

Because once you get some momentum, I’m sure you get some money coming in. Okay, you can start to add, you can start to upgrade, you can start to do various things, but in the beginning you’re very capital constrained, right?

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: What do you do? How did you assemble the help that you needed or enlisted?

Michelle Khare: I think — this is a strategy I employ for every challenge I take on now. And hindsight is 2020. And with that 2020 hindsight, I think it comes down to having three people on your Formula One team, and it doesn’t need to be fancy. It’s really a coach, a mentor, and a cheerleader.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Michelle Khare: What does that mean?

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Michelle Khare: In a specific episode of Challenge Accepted, the coach is the most important person that I want to find before we pursue an episode. In a recent episode, I attempted to get a black belt in taekwondo in only 90 days. And in martial arts, that’s a somewhat controversial thing to even attempt to do. And so I knew I could only do it with the blessing of a really respected master. So objective number one was to find the best master and coach in the world. And I think it’s important to find someone. And again, I’ll give an example for what I did in that specific situation, but that’s number one for me because this is the person I’m going to be spending all of this time with and learning from them.

The second person is a mentor who is different from the coach. This is a person who has most recently done the thing you’re trying to do. So for me, that’s other students in the black belt class. They’re my mentors. They have gone through this process. They know what it feels like to break a brick with their hands and get through that. And it’s important that it’s different from the coach because coaching is a different skillset and art form from mentoring.

Tim Ferriss: Also, it’s harder for the coach to put themselves in your shoes because so much of what they do is second nature and they’re probably decades removed from the experience you’re about to have.

Michelle Khare: You want someone who has the experience of leading somebody to that finish line of greatness, and you also want someone who knows what it feels like to be the man in the arena. And then the third person is a cheerleader, which is someone who is completely detached from the outcome. So for me, that’s my best friend, Olivia. It could be a sibling, friend, family member, someone who is going to root for you and love you no matter whether you succeed or fail.

So that’s how I approach every single challenge on the channel. Meta-wise at the beginning of the channel, what was that for me? It was the mentor figure or figures for me were other people who had recently started channels and were just a few steps ahead of me in the process. Maybe they had 50,000 subscribers, maybe they had 100,000 subscribers. They were people I met at little meetups at, rest in peace, the YouTube Space, which doesn’t exist anymore, but those peer groups were really special and important to me to keep me motivated and to just reach out to people.

Even today, reaching out to other creators, “What do you guys think of this thumbnail? What do you think of these titles?” Having people who are just a couple steps ahead of you or on similar playing fields can be so, so helpful in that process. The cheerleader for me at that time was my sister, Madeline, who was one of the only people I told I was going to quit my job and fully believed in me. And then the mentor, sorry, the coach figure for me when I was starting from ground zero was cold emailing people I respected.

Now that’s not the same as having a coach who’s with you every day in the way Master Ree is training taekwondo with me every day, but I saw those as coaching opportunities because they were people light years ahead who had the mentorship component of, not the — the teaching component, I should say, of being able to advise even in small doses.

Tim Ferriss: What did those emails look like?

Michelle Khare: Okay. I love a great email. You mentioned that you have an amazing cold emailer. I need to see their art and their work because I love comparing notes on emails. I personally believe that a really well-written email can open any door and —

Tim Ferriss: I agree, by the way. I mean, assuming the person sees it, right? There’s some friction, but people underestimate what they can do.

Michelle Khare: I agree. And there’s something about an email that’s different from an Instagram DM or — I don’t know. I love an email. I love a Google Calendar. This is where we’re talking about true passions to emails. So at the beginning of my channel, when we didn’t have millions of subscribers and we wanted to collaborate with institutions like the FBI and the Secret Service, and ultimately we became some of the first YouTube channels to ever do that. Came from not a producer, not a friend of a friend sending email, but me sending a cold email.

And an example of that is I wanted to do a video with the FBI, so I went on fbi.gov. I called the 1-800 number of the FBI, which by the way, is for crime tips, which I didn’t realize. And I pitched them this idea over the phone and they’re like, “So I’m here to receive crime tips, but I can connect you to someone else.” And I wasn’t anticipating that. I thought it would kind of be a dead end.

Tim Ferriss: So I just want to pause here for the specifics. Ring, ring, hello, FBI 800 number. What are you saying?

Michelle Khare: Hi, my name is Michelle Khare. I know this might come off as a little strange or unexpected, but I was trying to contact someone in your department who might work with film and television. I’m a content creator online. We have several hundred thousand subscribers and I was hoping to talk about a collaboration.

Tim Ferriss: All right, great.

Michelle Khare: And usually they’re like, “YouTube, what?” But this person was generous enough to connect me to someone else and we kind of got kicked down a few different routes, but we ended up connecting with someone called The Hollywood Guy. This is a job at the FBI.

Tim Ferriss: He’s just like, “How did I get stuck in this department every email that comes over the transom about some kind of film, television thing.”

Michelle Khare: It’s The Hollywood guy. And now this is the person within the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is assigned to documentaries or even scripted shows to ensure that the seal of the FBI is accurately and not displayed, not misrepresented, or shown in a derogatory manner. This is the guy who did the McDonald’s Monopoly HBO documentary. He was the FBI’s representative for that. Amazing docuseries.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with this. Monopoly, like the game Monopoly?

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God, you’re not familiar. What is this called? Oh, the documentary. It’s called McMillion$.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Michelle Khare: Have you heard of this doc?

Tim Ferriss: I mean, what is it about Happy Meals or something?

Michelle Khare: Riveting documentary series.

Tim Ferriss: McMillion$? Okay.

Michelle Khare: Oh, Tim, you’re going to love it.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. So there’s probably some fraud involved and the FBI gets involved. Who knows?

Michelle Khare: Okay. Do you remember in the ’90s, 2000s, there was the Monopoly game at McDonald’s where you could peel off the sticker and see if you won a vacation or a bunch of money. Turns out all of the winners of that were all related in some way.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, they figured out how to game the system.

Michelle Khare: They’re all family relatives or friends of friends or people within this group of people that they hired to win. I don’t want to reveal how they did it because it’s riveting, but the documentary tells the story from the perspective of the FBI agents who uncovered it.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So Hollywood guy gets an email. Hey.

Michelle Khare: So this guy just did McMillion$, an incredible docuseries for HBO, gets an email from me, YouTuber. And effectively what happened was he was like, “Well, I’m retiring in a couple months. Let’s try it out.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s so —

Michelle Khare: “Let’s try it out.”

Tim Ferriss: — wild how these things work out sometimes.

Michelle Khare: It’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Now, so that, again, this surface area for luck, right? You have to have some pinballs in the pinball machine —

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: — for the possibility of something like that happening. Is there anything else in your email or communication with the Hollywood Guy that you think increased the likelihood of him saying yes?

Michelle Khare: I do. I do. I think a great email, and a cold email, specifically, has to have some key components. The first is the subject line needs to show your value to the reader. For me, right now, it would look, like, something, I’ll be totally honest, “Collaboration with Michelle Khare (this many followers).”

In the beginning, that was a small number for me, but I still put it in the subject line. It could be a number of views, it could be collaborated with X, Y, and Z institutions. It just needs to be enough for the reader to see some value in what you’re doing.

Then the body of the email is three paragraphs. Very short paragraphs. In fact, three blocks of two sentences each. I wouldn’t even call it a paragraph. The first paragraph is one sentence about who you are, and your legitimacy. It has to be encompassed in one sentence. “Hi. My name is Michelle Khare. I’m a content creator with this many followers, and I’ve done this, this, and this.” Very succinctly proving your value.

Second sentence of that first paragraph, what are you asking for or offering to the other person? And, ideally, you’re doing both, you’re offering something. The second sentence of that email to the FBI would be, “I’m reaching out to inquire about an opportunity to film a collaboration for my channels.” What you’re offering there is access to our audience. “In the eyes of many of the people we collaborate with, it’s a marketing opportunity potentially.”

Tim Ferriss: Recruiting opportunity.

Michelle Khare: Right. Something like that. Paragraph two is two sentences or less of what you want to do. This would be the details of, “We’re hoping to do a shoot following just a few days of the academy embedding in existing activities, ultimately, leading up to a final scenario as follows academy protocol.”

So, that second paragraph is about a window into the vision you hope to come to together. And a peek at some of the resources you might be asking for. And, ideally, you do it in such a way that you show you’ve done your homework. I’m not just cold emailing the FBI hoping to do a video with them. I know very clearly I’ve watched everything I can online about what does the academy take to do? What are the activities? What are the ones that are best for camera? So, you’re showing your — it’s an opportunity to flatter them, and to put them at ease. We speak the same language. So, there’s that.

Paragraph three is the call to action. Two sentences or less. “Would love to hop on the phone. Let me know a good time. Here’s my phone number. Text me any time.” I think that’s, honestly, potentially, the most important part. “Here’s my phone number. Text me any time.” This is an anti-Tim Ferriss tactic potentially.

Tim Ferriss: Not when I’m sending cold emails —

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: — to people who are very busy that I want to —

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — connect with.

Michelle Khare: And what that does is say, “I’m available. I don’t know you, but here’s my phone number.” It exhibits, “I’m trusting you.” And it says, “You don’t have to respond with a crazy detailed formal email back to me. Hit me up anytime. We can talk on the phone.” It removes the barrier to entry for them to have to come back to you.

And then have a nice email signature.

Tim Ferriss: What is a nice email signature?

Michelle Khare: Just in a sans serif font. Maybe add a little color.

Tim Ferriss: With no Comic Sans? I’m kidding.

Michelle Khare: No Comic Sans, no Times New Roman. Tim, it’s not 2007 anymore.

Tim Ferriss: No. I saw this photograph — I have a lot of friends who work at Google.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And there was this big printed out sign to employees talking about snacks or things in refrigerators, and it was in Comic Sans. And then someone else took a marker and wrote on it, they were like, “This is Google, and it is a serious place of work. Please do not use Comic Sans.”

Michelle Khare: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: I just thought it was pretty funny, because there are a lot of people with high IQ at Google who may not have the social graces. But I have to agree on Comic Sans.

So, let me say a few things about this email.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: I, in some ways, owe my entire career as it is to cold emails. And what you learn in crafting cold emails is directly translatable to in person and talking to people. In a way, it’s the same thing. There are some differences, but I want to highlight a couple things that you just said. Number one, including your cellphone. I am shocked by how many emails I get that are actually somewhat interesting that get surfaced by my team, because I have people who triage my email, that do not have a phone number.

And I’m like, “I don’t have time to have a bunch of…” My team does not have time to do a bunch of back and forth to figure out a time to talk, even though, you didn’t even offer a time to talk, and, blah, blah, blah. Archive. I just don’t have time for it. Like, this seems interesting, but it’s not definitively interesting. If you gave a cellphone, I would figure out a way to maybe call you, and in five minutes, I’d be like, “Hey. I have three quick questions. Interesting, but this is it, five minutes.” And in a friendly way, obviously. If it’s important to you, include your cellphone.

Michelle Khare: And I think it’s important to include it, this is just me personally, as the final sentence of the email, not tucked under your name.

Tim Ferriss: No.

Michelle Khare: You want to —

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Michelle Khare: — truly invite them.

Tim Ferriss: Make it explicit. 100% agree.

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So, I want to just mention a couple of direct parallels between what you just mentioned as this formula — and if you’re open to it, maybe we could share a few examples or a template of —

Michelle Khare: Ooh, a downloadable PDF on Tim.blog.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. PDF or a blog post or show notes.

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Just, so, people can actually see it.

Michelle Khare: Yes. Of course.

Tim Ferriss: And I will just draw a few parallels. So, number one, you need credibility upfront. And one way to think about this, and I always — if I’m thinking about reaching out to someone who is above my pay grade, and, trust me, there are plenty of people who are way above my pay grade, the first thing in the subject line —

I’ll give a tip that I sometimes use. So, let’s just say that — who knows? All right. Somebody knows Mr. Beast or Tom Cruise, or whoever it might be. Now, practically speaking, everything is going to have to get routed through someone else for Tom Cruise, and if you do get their personal information, they’re going to be very annoyed.

But where I’ll start with the subject line is one of two places or both. So, you mentioned the credibility indicator in the subject. Right?

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll use that, but if we actually have someone in common who actually recommended I connect —

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: — but they haven’t made the intro, I will say, for instance — it would be, again, just to use the Tom Cruise example, who I think would make an amazing interview, but like, “For Tom Cruise via mutual connection” —

Michelle Khare: Ooh.

Tim Ferriss: — “Tim Ferriss,” whatever the credibility indicator is. Right? So, I will mention the mutual connection first, because subject lines often get truncated on mobile or elsewhere. So, if they just see, “For Tom Cruise from Tim Ferriss,” he’s going to be like, “Who the fuck is Tim Ferriss? Archive.” But if it’s —

Michelle Khare: See the name data.

Tim Ferriss: If it’s, “For Tom,” or, “For Tom Cruise via” person who actually made the suggestion, and then my name, you —

Michelle Khare: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: — have a huge advantage, because chances are it’s going to get truncated, or —

Michelle Khare: I love the via.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: I’ve done, “Referral from X.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: And then my stuff after.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: But I like the via, because it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to have to vet, and call that person up. You know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, that brings up another point, which is if you’re going to mention mutual connections, and I’m shocked by how many people violate this, you better actually know — assume the person you’re emailing is going to immediately text those people.

Michelle Khare: And they will.

Tim Ferriss: And I, certainly, will. And I would say nine times out of 10, that person is like, “Either I have no idea who that person is,” or, “I met that person once and we shook hands at a party. I don’t know them at all.” And I’m like, “You’re gone. You just misrepresented,” implicitly or explicitly.

But when I’m writing an email. Right? I’ll have that subject line. If there is a via, I’ll include that name. And in the subject line, I’ll keep it short as possible. Then always default to Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Something. Like, something that I really appreciate about you, because it doesn’t cost anything is you are very default polite, and, even though, it makes me feel like an old bastard, you were like, “Yes, sir.” And you used sir with me a couple times when we came in.

And, no. No. But you’re always better off being on the safe side. And so, I am consistently surprised, and maybe this just makes me a salty, crotchety old bastard, but when people are like, “Hey, Tim. Yo, bro. Yo, Ferriss,” or whatever. I’m just like, “Did we go to PE” —

Michelle Khare: Someone says, “Yo, Ferriss?”

Tim Ferriss: I’ve got so many guys, it’s always guys, who think that that —

Michelle Khare: Like, founder bro type?

Tim Ferriss: It could be anything, but think that, like, shoulder slapping, immediate camaraderie is helpful. I will say that’s a very risky gambit. Maybe it works one out of 10 times. In my case, I’m just like, “This is a liability.” Right?

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Because here’s how I think about is I’m like, “Well, even if it doesn’t bother me that shows a general lack of awareness, and if they’re going to ask me to connect them with someone, or they’re going to work with anyone who I care about, and they pull that, it’s going to put…” It’s a reputational risk.

And so, most of the time that’s going to be an auto archive. It’s going to be like, “You know what?” The people you’re reaching out to, if they’re really busy, and if they’re well-known enough that you think to email them, have more opportunities than they can even look at.

So, your job number one is don’t do anything stupid.

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t do anything that’s going to disqualify your email. Right?

Michelle Khare: And the, “Yo, Ferriss” of it all, emotionally, feels as if a stranger is coming up to you at the airport and giving you a hug. “Whoa. Wait. Who are you?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: “What?” Like, that’s what it feels like.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Just another pro-tip, because we’re in Austin, and this is man bun, baggy pants/bitcoin, ayahuasca, CrossFit central is don’t just walk up to someone you don’t know and say, after they offer a hand, “Oh, I’m a hugger,” and just go for the hug. Don’t do that. Just really don’t do that.

Michelle Khare: Right. Right.

Tim Ferriss: Assume you’re in Japan and they’re going to strike you down with a sword if you do that. The person who wants the most distance wins that conversation. It’s like skiing in the back country with an avalanche risk, or something. Whoever is the most concerned gets to veto.

But let’s come back to the cold email. So, we’ve got the subject line, different subject lines for different purposes. In the first line, it’s going to be a credibility indicator. All right. A couple of points on this. Right? So, you’ve got your credibility indicator in the subject line, potentially, which I will also do, be like, “For interview (1 billion plus downloads).” Right? In the case of the podcast. Right? Something like that.

Michelle Khare: Right. And I’ll note for if you don’t have a billion downloads, or millions of followers, in the beginning for me it was examples of the work.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: That would, at least, show I’ve done my homework, no one’s watched this, but it looks really, really good and it’s beautifully edited.

Tim Ferriss: Yup. So, I am going to come back and ask you about, just to plant the seed, the mentors in the very early days when you didn’t really have much. Right? Like, what that email looked like. We’re going to come back to that.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll give my example. When I first got to Silicon Valley, I volunteered for organizations that had name cache. So, I volunteered for, for instance, TiE, The IndUS Entrepreneur. Last time, I’m sure people checked, I’m not Indian, but TiE, super well-known at the time, maybe still, entrepreneurial organization. Like, the per capita density in the Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley with talent was fucking bananas.

Michelle Khare: Shout out.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: Those are my people.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. And so, I volunteered there. And then I could say, “I’m emailing someone in tech,” and it would be for so-and-so via TiE or The IndUS Entrepreneur. And I wouldn’t even put my name, because who the hell am I? And that gets the email open. So, I would volunteer and then do things on behalf of the nonprofit as a way of establishing some kind of relationship. Ideally, inviting them to speak or something like that. All for free, by the way. Right? Like, some of the highest paying jobs you’ll ever get, you don’t get paid for in the beginning, in my opinion.

Michelle Khare: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: It does pay in dividends —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.

Michelle Khare: — in ways you don’t expect.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I did that, and, ultimately, had, for instance, Jack Canfield, who co-created Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold hundreds and hundreds of millions of copies, and then they, ultimately, sold as a franchise, but I met him through an email like that from the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. And we are still friends to this day, 25 years later, or whatever it is, and he’s the one who introduced me to the agent who, ultimately, sold The 4-Hour Workweek after, like, 26 rejections.

So, long-term greedy, not short-term greedy. Right? Like, you don’t need to be paid upfront for something that will, ultimately, be very, very important to your life.

Right. To the email. For the credibility indicator, and, guys, we’ll give some templates just, so, you don’t have to piece this together in a Memento fashion, but I like to, and I suggest, include some text that establishes who you are. If someone says, “Hey. Here I am,” link, and sketchy attachment, I’m like, “I don’t have time to go on some scavenger hunt to figure out who you are.” Right?

So, include a line or two on who the hell you are. Do you know what I mean?

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t require them to click through and find this, this, and this, and this, and this.

Michelle Khare: A hyperlink to here. Uh-uh.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not enough.

Michelle Khare: You know what I mean? When it’s, like, “Click here.” No. It should be, “And I’ve done this thing,” hyperlink the, “And I’ve done this thing.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Exactly.

Michelle Khare: So, if I want to learn more —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And just to give people some intel on that, one reason for that is that it just takes more time for someone, and you need to remove the reasons for them to say no. And you might think to yourself like, “Who the hell doesn’t have 30 seconds or a minute to click through,” and I’m like, “Somebody who gets 1,000 emails a day.” That’s answer number one.

And number two, anyone who is reasonably well-known has a lot of phishing attacks. Like, they have people from different vectors, who are trying to get them to click on links that are very dangerous and intended to steal information, or set the team up for social engineering.

Michelle Khare: I have been a recipient of a false, “You’re invited to the Tim Ferriss Podcast” email.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Those. That’s a very clever scam. Do you know how that works?

Michelle Khare: No.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So, how that works, because these are still going around, I think the jig is up, because people have realized most of these are fake, but — so I’m guessing the email was like, “We place people,” or, “We’re inviting you on the show” either if they’re not very sophisticated, they’ll be like, “It costs this much to go on the show,” and then anyone who knows me should be like, “Well, that doesn’t sound right.” But there’s this pay-for-play thing, which most people will sniff out.

The other one is, “Let’s get on a Zoom call, and discuss.” And what happens is you get on a Zoom call, and they somehow figure out a way to get you to provide, basically, screen access, not just sharing screen, but screen access, and they’ll take you to your Facebook page, or something like that, and they will hijack your Facebook page, then use it to promote a crypto scam on a large page, and then hold that for ransom also to get money from you.

So, this is just a way of saying —

Michelle Khare: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: — “Guys, include some fucking text.”

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Right? And then, to your point again, be very clear about the ask. The number of emails I get that it’s, like, even if they establish, “Hey. I’m credible,” but I’m not a president or the CEO of a Fortune 50 company. It’s, like, “Okay. This might be kind of interesting.” Right? If it’s, like, Rick Rubin, who I did his first interview on a podcast ever in Asana, but if you’re like, “Oh, it’s fucking Rick Rubin,” and he’s like, “Hey. Let’s jump on the phone,” you’re like, “Yeah. Okay. Fine. As long as I can confirm that’s who the person is.”

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But otherwise, assuming that you, who is cold emailing is not Rick Rubin, which is likely, then be clear about your ask. Right? If it’s like, “Would love to discuss something vague, let’s hop on the phone to discuss. How’s next Tuesday at 2 P.M.?” I’m never going to respond to that. Right?

Because if you can’t write a professional first cold email, I’m skeptical of everything that’s going to follow.

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Right? You’re not placing a value on the recipient’s time that you’ve thought through. Does that make sense? So, it’s, like, be really clear in the ask. And then when I close, again, to your point — right? Make yourself — and, by the way, you can use a burner, or you can use Google Voice, you can spin up a Google Voice number very easily from any G Suite, et cetera, et cetera. But have a number. Right? Where somebody can reach you. Do not just bury it in your signature. Make it explicitly clear. “Feel free to text me anytime.” Right? “We can schedule or just feel free to hop on the phone. I promise it will not take more than 10 minutes.” By the way, if you say that, do not go over 10 minutes.

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then I almost always say, “If you’ve read this far, I really appreciate it. And if you’re too busy to get back to me, I totally understand.”

Michelle Khare: Okay. That’s a great learning. I’m going to add that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: Love that.

Tim Ferriss: And by displaying as little or zero entitlement as possible, you get a much higher response rate. Why? Because your cold email is an audition for everything else to come. So, if you’re like, “Here’s this vague email. How about next Tuesday or Thursday at 2 P.M.”, it’s like, “Bro, slow down. You’re humping my leg already. We haven’t even established who you are, or what you want.” And that reflects a certain lack of awareness, and business savvy that is going to be a problem later. Right?

Michelle Khare: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: That’s how the train of thought goes. And that’s it. Here’s another pro-tip, if you send that email, do not follow up two days later with, “Bumping this up,” and then do that two days later, “Bumping this up.” You get to do that once. Right?

Michelle Khare: I think it’s got to be, at least, a week.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’ve got to wait, and you’re allowed to do it once, and then just assume they’re not interested. And that’s okay. Move on. The world is full of great people, and if people are not responding to your email, it’s probably, common denominator, a problem with the email.

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You know what I mean? So, in the beginning, when you were reaching out to mentors, you just quit your job —

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: — what are you saying in the email?

Michelle Khare: Here’s an example, I sent a cold email to Hank Green, who is just —

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Michelle Khare: — one of the great people.

Tim Ferriss: Describe who Hank Green is.

Michelle Khare: Hank Green is if sunshine, and joy, and a human encyclopedia were bundled into one person. Just one of the smartest, coolest, groundbreaking people, especially, in the YouTube world, ever. He came and gave a talk at Buzzfeed once when I worked there. And maybe this while I was still working there, or shortly after I left, I sent him an email — and this is actually counter to everything we’ve discussed. I wasn’t explicitly reaching out about a business idea, or anything, or trying to get something from him.

But I wanted to get to know him. And so, I sent him an email saying that, “I’m learning as I consider pursuing my own creative endeavor, and I’m curious what was the most formative pinpoint for you as a child to pursue this profession?”

And it’s just a fun question, honestly. There’s not much strategy here. And he sent back a multi-page answer. And I think he —

Tim Ferriss: What was your subject line? Do you remember —

Michelle Khare: What was the subject line?

Tim Ferriss: — roughly or what might —

Michelle Khare: The subject line was, “Hello from Michelle Khare,” or, “Hello from Michelle Khare (Buzzfeed)”.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

Michelle Khare: So, using the title of some form of legitimacy. But he sent me this multi-page response. And at the end said, “Thanks for the thoughtful question. No one’s asked me before.” And so, sometimes I find that people are excited to share themselves. And, of course, in him sharing that story I learned a lot about how I could find creative inspiration, or even find parallels with someone who, externally, I don’t have a lot of overlap with. And I think that was awesome.

And now, today, where I know him in a more friendly capacity as peers in the space, it’s really special to have those email — like, these emails like this are so crazy to go back on. So, even if you send a cold email, and never hear back, it might make for a great story later.

Tim Ferriss: And guess what? You’re practicing your ability to craft emails, and your ability to communicate. And this would be, like, I interviewed Brandon Sanderson, one of the most legendary fantasy —

Michelle Khare: Oh, gosh.

Tim Ferriss: — writers in the world, who is prolific. And I think he wrote I think it was five books before he even attempted to publish one.

Michelle Khare: He, intentionally, said, “I’m not publishing my first several books” —

Tim Ferriss: That’s right.

Michelle Khare: Isn’t that right?

Tim Ferriss: That’s right. And I did just a huge romp with him. Met up at his HQ in Utah. Fascinating, brilliant guy. But the point is maybe your first five to 10 cold emails are just to improve getting better at cold emails.

And, by the way, something I did also is I would ask people who I had not sent those cold emails, but who are better-known folks, I would be like, “Hey. Would you mind taking a look at…” I would do this at events. Sometimes I’d be like, “This is going to seem like a weird request. Don’t worry. It’s not anything super bizarre, but would you be willing to critique this email? I’ve sent this to a couple of people. I haven’t gotten a response,” or, “I only got one response. How would you change this?”

And that is a very concrete question, and it’s also not clearly a question that’s just setting up the thing you actually want. You know what I mean? Because sometimes people do that via email. They’ll be like, “Hey. I loved your sweater. How did you train your dog?” And then five seconds after I reply to that, they’re like, “So, anyway, I was thinking of having myself on your podcast.” I’m just like, “You asshole. Clearly, you’re just setting it up.” So, just be aware of that.

Michelle Khare: [inaudible 02:01:07]. You got clickbaited.

Tim Ferriss: I got clickbaited. So, a few things. Hank Green, I don’t know him personally, but I remember seeing him at VidCon once. And there are two things I want to say. One is just, “What a sweet guy. Seems like a really sweet human being.” Number two is you reached out with, let’s say, a mentoring question to someone who already has demonstrated that they mentor. Does that make sense?

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Right? So, that will make your life easier in the beginning when you’re sending out these cold emails. The other thing is if you do get a response from somebody, treat it like you’re not at a sex party, you are dating someone in the 1800s. Right? This is like Downton Abbey. Do not reply five seconds later with, like, “Oh, great. Now here are 10 more questions.” Don’t do that. Right?

Michelle Khare: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Be patient. Life is —

Michelle Khare: And thoughtful.

Tim Ferriss: And thoughtful. Life is long. If you want these relationships — I’ll also say, “You do not need to have 100 relationships with people who are steps ahead of you.” If you actually develop genuine, mutually respectful communication with a few people, you, in most cases, in a lot of cases, you are set. Right? So, it’s, like, “Don’t be greedy. Don’t be a greedy little piglet. Don’t be in a rush.” And I’ve, certainly, had to learn that by fucking that up over and over again, because I’m constitutionally very impatient. I want to get stuff done very quickly, and some things do not lend themselves to that.

You mentioned Snyder’s Beats of Storytelling I think.

Michelle Khare: Don’t quiz me on that.

Tim Ferriss: I won’t quiz you on it, but as far as storytelling goes, as far as developing narrative arcs, it does not need to be a book, but it could be, are there any particular resources you would point people to? Where you’re like, “Okay” —

Michelle Khare: Oh, gosh.

Tim Ferriss: — “I know there’s being in the trenches and working on it, and testing, and split testing, and using warm audiences in the beginning,” et cetera, but if you’re like, “All right. Look, if you want to do something analogous to what I’m doing on YouTube…” Right? And there are other examples of people who put out very few videos. Right? For this, sort of, longer form, narrative arc storytelling. If you were teaching a class on that, what’s the syllabus? What do you tell people to read or watch?

Michelle Khare: A challenge — like, reality —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: — docu, class — okay. Welcome to my class. On the syllabus, we’re going to be studying a few things. First of all, I’m going to make everyone watch Survivor, and every week we’re going to discuss it. First of all, because it’s the best ever. I’m obsessed with Jeff Probst. And I think that part of reality doc, in particular — Survivor is a reality competition show, but there’s a lot that can be learned in doing your own vlogs, or self-filmed, human stories. They do an excellent job at taking hundreds of hours of footage, and pulling out the story beats that make sense. You watch an episode of Survivor, it might feel like things are just happening, and they are, but they’re also curated from thousands and thousands of moments, storylines that were left on the floor.

And so, I think Survivor is an amazing lesson in, first of all, hosting. And, second of all, killing your babies in a way. We know on that island they’re out there for a month and a half. A lot’s going to happen that’s not going to make the edit. But why have the producers chosen this storyline to tell? Why is it engaging? Why is this the act break for the commercial?

I think that’s number one, selfishly. Probst is the GOAT.

Tim Ferriss: Also, sidebar, Probst is an excellent example also of creating defensible IP. Right? Which a lot of people don’t realize.

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: They’re like, “Oh, isn’t he just the host guy?” It’s like, “No. No. No. No.”

Michelle Khare: No. He’s the Einstein of that operation.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: It’s amazing. And when you watch his hosting, it’s so masterful, because he is a fan, and also a researcher of the people on the show. You see him at tribal council. He is recounting things that have happened decades ago. He knows the details of the contestants’ life, and he asks a question, not as a leading question, but as a way for the contestant to open up. I think that is incredible interviewing.

And it’s something that I studied too. I did a show called Karma on HBO, which was a kids’ survival show produced by J.D. Roth, which another huge reality legend, and, again, I think people watch these shows and think the hosts are just there to say lines and deliver information to the audience, but there is a massive amount of research. You have a binder of every kids’ head shot, where they’re from, your family, you’re taking notes, you’re sitting in MCR, which is this trailer with hundreds of video feeds as it’s happening live. So, that when you go to meet with the contestants what things to ask, and how long to sit with them.

So, I think that’s just masterful story — not from just a great host, but also a producer.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So, on the syllabus, you’ve got —

Michelle Khare: We got, “We’re watching some reality shows.”

Tim Ferriss: Yup. This is, like, Robert McKee, I guess, the story seminar with Casablanca. He’s like —

Michelle Khare: Nice.

Tim Ferriss: “We’re going to walk by this second by second.”

Michelle Khare: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: “And look at what’s going on.” All right. So, we got Survivor as one part of the syllabus.

Michelle Khare: Survivor is one part of the syllabus. Part two is we are going to study Snyder’s Beats, and we’re going to study the Save The Cat of it all.

Tim Ferriss: Those two books are so good.

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And I have some screenwriter friends who are like, “Yeah. They are really good,” and others who are like, “Please, no. Don’t suggest it.” I haven’t practiced as much as you have, or other folks, but I’m like, “These make it very tangible.” Right? And, I guess, not to interrupt.

Michelle Khare: Right. I think it’s important to understand the bones of a story. What are the hills and the valleys? What is the all is lost? And I think a lot of people look at that material, and think it only applies to scripted content, but it is so important in any piece.

Tim Ferriss: It’s storytelling.

Michelle Khare: It’s storytelling.

Tim Ferriss: It applies to books. It applies to all of it.

Michelle Khare: Yes, exactly. I would even go as far to say that a five-second vine hits all of the piece — if it performs well, hits all of the pieces of a story arc in just a few seconds. It sets a premise, it upends it, and there’s a resolution where the character is changed by the end. Even a video of a cat leaping off something and doing something crazy has a beginning, middle, and end where the cat is different at the beginning and the end of that, America’s Funniest Home video clip. That’s why we like it. That’s why we laugh. That’s why we engage with it. I think it’s really important to understand that. Part three of the syllabus, let’s see. I feel like if we have to have three parts of the syllabus. The third part of the syllabus would be an area of the class where everyone brings a piece of work released online within the last week that impacted them.

This would be the assess and dissect portion of the class. Why did this YouTube video speak to you? Oh, well, I just Googled, I wanted to learn about how the coronavirus spread originally, and I saw this video on Chris God. Okay, but let’s break it down. What was interesting? What was the title? What was the thumbnail? Why did this TikTok speak to you? Why did it stand out? I would want people to bring things that performed well or didn’t, so we can understand resonance. Resonance, as you mentioned earlier, attention is such a very, very valuable and finite and rare resource these days that I would want a discussion component of the class to talk about relevant impact in recent media. That would be the wackiest class ever, but that’s what we’d be doing.

Tim Ferriss: If you had, and I know we’re doing this on the fly, but let’s just say project assignments, right? I’ll buy you some time because I’m going to — I know this is on the spot, but the most formative writing class that I took, and I really only took one seminar ever focused on writing. I got very lucky in college, but there were two components to the class. There were these once weekly lectures, two or three hours long, pretty long, on writing with a tremendous focus on structure, primarily. Then there were reviews of work that we had already submitted. Each week we had a writing assignment and typically in the range, like 3 to 10 pages, but let’s just call it three to five pages. You would write your piece, then you would submit it at the beginning of the lecture.

Then you would have a one-on-one with the professor, in this case, John McPhee. If people haven’t read John McPhee, they should. Just tremendous. If you want to read something short, Levels of the Game, it’s incredible. He’s won one or two Pulitzer Prizes, just a phenomenal writer, can make anything interesting. Wrote an entire book on oranges, for instance. Another one on hand-carved wooden canoes and another one on the geology and nature of Alaska.

Michelle Khare: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just incredible. The Levels of the Game is about basically the entire game of tennis, but told through the lens of one match involving Arthur Ash. But coming back to the story, so we had the lecture, then we have these writing assignments. You turn in whatever your new assignment is at the beginning of each of the lectures. Then you have your one-on-one with Professor McPhee. He gives you back your printed out writing, which typically will have, at least in the first few weeks, more red ink from his edits and notes than what you put on the page. It is brutal, brutal, but incredibly helpful. Okay? You’ve got these writing assignments and the writing assignments are all over the place, but it might be something as seemingly simple/difficult as find a sculpture on campus and write three to five pages on it. We’re like, “Ah, can you give us any more direction?” He’s like, “No.” So everybody would take a slightly different approach because you’re like, “Wait a second, should I write about the history? Should I write about the subjective experience? Should I write about — “Mm-mm. Oh, oh.”

But no matter what I do, I have to think about structure and some of the points that he’s made in class. Then at the end of the seminar lecture, we would share our work. We would actually read out loud some of our work, and then —

Michelle Khare: After the revisions have been applied from it?

Tim Ferriss: No. This would be — I guess I’m probably screwing up the chronology a little bit in the lecture. We would read something that has not yet been corrected and then subject it to peer review and get his comments. There were a couple of different ingredients, and he’s taught this. He doesn’t teach it any longer, but taught it for 15, 20 years, very infrequently, like once every year or two. I got very lucky. This is a very roundabout way of asking if there were like an assignment component where people are doing their own work, what are perhaps some of the things you would have them do?

Michelle Khare: The assignment component of the class would be making the content?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: I would require all of the students to make an account if they don’t already have one on some platform. At the beginning of the class, I would want them to set and define the type of content. I would want them to define, why is this uniquely yours? How is this different from what other people have done? Then at the same time, how is this data backed by what other people have done? Then from there it would require them to actually make and produce videos. If the purpose of the class is become a YouTuber, let’s say. I would ask them to make and produce the videos weekly and actually post them so that we could do some peer review of course, but then actually see how does it play live in the world. I would also want them to do data analysis at the end and try to make educated guesses on why something did or didn’t perform well and receive critique and feedback, not just on the data and performance, but specifically the work itself. Why did this introduction work or not work? How could the technique be improved next time?

Tim Ferriss: You know what I was thinking could also be fun, you’d have to have a pretty small class to make this work, but assuming the videos are short and they’re doing it weekly, have them show the videos in class and then make predictions. What is your hypothesis? Do you know what I mean?

Michelle Khare: Like you can invest in videos.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, what are your — then they can choose to modify the video or not based on feedback or your thoughts or something. You obviously want to let them learn their own lessons, but I think that would be a good way of refining the thinking process.

Michelle Khare: Someone’s got to teach this class.

Tim Ferriss: You are infinitely — you actually made this whole format work, so I think it’s you.

Michelle Khare: Only if you’re a guest lecturer.

Tim Ferriss: Sure. I mean, yes. The guest lecture is all the fun with none of the heavy lifting.

Michelle Khare: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I’m very much into that. Are you still — I want to mention two books, and I’m curious if they’re still relevant, because they came up in doing research for this conversation, Radical Candor by Kim Scott and the Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono. Do either of these ring a bell?

Michelle Khare: Yeah, of course.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right, got it.

Michelle Khare: My boy, Edward, with his hats.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go. How did these both factor in? Because these were basically the two books that I was able to find mentioned by title. Some of them I think were mentioned by people you work with and not directly by —

Michelle Khare: But maybe Garrett mentioned one of the hats.

Tim Ferriss: It was Garrett.

Michelle Khare: The Six Thinking Hats, I don’t even remember where I learned or heard of this concept or — oh, I actually think this was Jody. Shout out, Jody.

Tim Ferriss: Your therapist.

Michelle Khare: Jody puts me on all the great books. I was coming to her talking about just various problems I was facing, and she told me of this concept of the Six Thinking Hats. Effectively, I might butcher this, but it is a way of looking at a problem by filtering only by thinking type. For example, we’re going to put on a yellow hat and look at this potential idea, and the yellow hat means we’re only going to say things that could go well by pursuing this idea versus when we put on our black hat, that is we’re saying all of the things that could go completely wrong. It’s six different techniques of being able to assess and determine if an idea is good or how to solve a problem.

That thinking was really helpful to me as someone who often, prior to understanding this, would immediately go to black hat. This is coming from the mentality of everything’s going to go wrong. I’m going to fail at everything. I’m a person who, growing up, always defaulted to black hat. No, no, no, no, no. It’s not going to work. That doesn’t inspire creativity. That does not inspire entrepreneurship. It also gives an unfair shot to an idea that Respun may provide a new idea altogether.

I think this is also something I learned from a design thinking class. I might be crossing my wires here, but another class I took at Dartmouth was design thinking were similar to your writing class. It was an engineering class where every week we would have some wacky assignment, like the professor would give us each a sheet of poster board and say, “Next weekend you come to class, it has to be a chair. Turn this poster board into a chair that supports your body type. You can’t use any glue, any scissors, any other structural components. You can make cuts to it and shape it, but that’s it, and it has to support your body weight.” That class taught me a ton about myself before that class would look at that and say, “Not possible. Why am I even trying it?” Professor Roby really forced us to think critically through how could something be possible. That concept of the six hats is really, really impactful to me.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s pause there for a second because this book, believe it or not, was incredibly helpful to me in my first few years of building my first business and trying to figure out what I might be good at. But also as a solo operator effectively. Had lots of contractors, but as a solo operator, for the most part, effectively turning myself into a virtual board of directors with different perspectives by using these different hats, because I also default to black hat, which I think has its place, right? Part of the genius of this approach is you’re not saying, “Oh, that’s negative thinking, shame on you. Let’s only look at the bright side.” No, you have to realize it. It’s saying there’s a place for that, but there’s going to be a set time for it, and we’re going to go through each of these six. I haven’t read it in decades, but Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats, he also had, I believe, a book called Lateral Thinking, which I found helpful.

I don’t know how those would age for me if I read them now. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, God, have you haven’t seen this movie? I haven’t seen 20 years. Let’s watch it.” Within 10 minutes, I’m like, “Oh, God, this is not as good as I remember.” There are definitely others. Well, it’s very NPC, but airplane and others that actually do age shockingly.

Michelle Khare: Well. I wonder what other hats are. I haven’t looked at this in such a long time, because I feel like we just —

Tim Ferriss: I can’t recall what the specifics are. I mean, if I had to guess, I’m imagining one is analytical by the numbers. One is emotional. I mean, I’m imagining there’s probably some version of that, but it stuck out to me because I was like, “That’s really interesting that this book which not a lot of people reference actually also popped up in both of our timelines professionally.” That’s super interesting. All right. Radical Candor.

Michelle Khare: Okay. Kim Scott. It’s like Tim, Adam Grant, Kim Scott, these are Mount Rushmore for me. Kim Scott is just phenomenal. I mean, I thought Radical Candor, and I know many of these works have been critiqued and refreshed in many ways, but her quad chart of how to provide feedback to people was really instrumental to me because effectively what happened was I quit my job when I was 23. I’d never made it to a — I mean 23, a managerial position in a corporate setting. I never had any manager training.

Tim Ferriss: Could you give an example of how Kim’s teaching or frameworks look when applied for an example?

Michelle Khare: Kim talks about four types of management and giving feedback to people. The quadrant I identify with the most is ruinous empathy, which is the idea of you are so nice to everyone around you that when you need to give critical feedback to someone, they might leave the meeting feeling like, “Wait, am I actually doing great? I don’t know, because you’re sandwiching compliments or downplaying the critique and you’re not direct enough.” And so transforming that into radical candor is about being more direct with feedback. Some of the things that Kim has helped me very applicably work through are workshopping, giving critical feedback to people, and hearing live feedback from her on, “Cut off that sentence, that’s fluff.” That is so, so amazing. I think an applicable setting here or an example of this would be…

Let’s say we have a collaborator on set who’s very, very good at what they do but they don’t compliment or uplift other people when they do a great job.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. Good at execution, maybe a little prickly around the edges.

Michelle Khare: Just a little prickly or they don’t — internally, they’re thinking that person is doing a great job, but they’re not vocalizing it.

Tim Ferriss: I see. Got it.

Michelle Khare: And so, it creates an environment on set where everyone’s like, “Oh, does this person not like what I’m doing?” Stepping in as a manager of the feedback, it’s a tough piece of feedback because how do you say, “Dude, I just need you to go out of your way and provide positive feedback to people.” It can be as simple as that. But what Kim, for example, taught me in this specific situation is communication exists on two wavelengths. It is, first of all, the wavelength of communicating the need, the tactical information, but there’s another wavelength that’s equally as important, which is the emotional component. And so, being able to define that with that person and say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job communicating, but there’s an emotional side you’re completely missing that’s actually really important to that communication,” was really helpful because it provided necessary value to that action for that person rather than just like, “I got to tell people they’re doing a good job. I got to take an hour out of my day and send nice emails.”

Tim Ferriss: Giving them the why as opposed to [inaudible 02:27:16].

Michelle Khare: Exactly. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: This could include full-time and contractors, what does your org chart look like, so to speak? What is the team?

Michelle Khare: I mean, I remember reading 4-Hour Workweek and the whole virtual assistant chapter blew my mind. We do have someone in Singapore, which is funny. Our internal team full-time is intentionally tight. It’s seven full-time staff. That is myself, Garrett, who’s the chief creative officer, Nick, head of production, three editors, and an assistant for me. But we have what I call a slinky operation where that’s where it is when it’s tight. But when we get ready to do a big project, it balloons up very quickly. But what’s cool is all of the people that are on the internal team are department heads. When it’s time to recreate the Mission: Impossible stunt, each of us know how to staff up a camera team of seven people, stunt team of six people, and build that out to a team of 50 who come in to do that one specific project, and then we slink you back down.

Tim Ferriss: Your head of production would be responsible for the scoping and finding and hiring of those people?

Michelle Khare: Sometimes. Also, just within our entire team, we’re all very connected and embedded in the industry. The team I just mentioned is pretty much half people from the traditional entertainment world. Nick, for example, the head of production, came from working at Broadway video under Lorne Michaels and did Taco Bell Super Bowl commercials, so he understands feature film, high budget commercial world. Then people like myself or our editor, Ryan Gonzalez, we come from the digital-first world. Our training was at a content studio where it was fast output, but you know how to do everything. Bringing those worlds together is a really special and cool environment, intentionally set, because that is exactly the midpoint I want to occupy, is the bridge between the two worlds.

Tim Ferriss: Right. I’m curious how you — the context by my question is how you separate responsibilities in a sense. With the understanding that on a small team, you’re going to end up wearing a lot of hats, not to be confused with Edward de Bono, but when shit needs getting done, people are going to roll up their sleeves, and I imagine at that size, do whatever. But for instance, you could pick the episode, right? It could be any episode, but where do your responsibilities — say, how are they different from chief creative officer as one example?

Michelle Khare: We have a giant spreadsheet called the Areas of Responsibility Chart, which I learned from a book called The Great CEO Within. Again, I’m trying to learn all this Silicon Valley management stuff on my own. I even called my YouTube partner manager and I was like, “Can I please sit in on the YouTube corporate management training the next time it happens?” She said I couldn’t. I’m trying to piecemeal it all for myself and learn from people like you and Kim. But in that book, it details actually making a giant chart that outlines every single action that the company takes. This can go from, in our case, something as big as decides if brand deal is worth taking, all the way down to takes out the trash. Who is going to be doing all these things? This is, I think, hundreds of responsibilities.

Tim Ferriss: What would be some, just so I understand? Because it’s not a role that I’m familiar with, like chief creative officer.

Michelle Khare: For chief creative officer in this chart, for Garrett, that includes — Garrett’s role as a whole within the company is to define the creative tone and thesis of everything that we do? He is overseeing the story for each of the episodes, he’s directing the episodes and post, but he’s also making sure that if we’re updating our brand book or we’re having our Emmys four-year consideration event in a couple weeks, he is going through all of the marketing materials and confirming, yes, this fits the tone and the style of Challenge Accepted. This tells one cohesive story. What we don’t want is a channel or a show that is chaotic or unpredictable.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, disjointed or —

Michelle Khare: Exactly. We [inaudible 02:37:37] wanted to hit a certain level of quality of storytelling. For Garrett, that means on a macro level, overseeing those decisions, but also on a micro level, approving edits and directing edits to make sure the stories we’re telling hit that bar of excellence too. He’s like chief creative officer and chief storyteller in a way.

Tim Ferriss: Then head of production, what percentage of the time for head of production is spent on in production episodes versus planning beforehand and post-production, would you say?

Michelle Khare: Oh, that’s hard. I would need to ask Nick exactly, but Nick primarily spends — when we green light an episode and we’re now in preparation to go shoot it, a lot of his time is spent assembling the crew, getting insurance permissions. In the case of the Seven Marathons project we did where we ran seven marathons on all seven continents in one week, he was handling all the logistics of the local crews we were working with.

Tim Ferriss: I love how you say that as we, the royal we.

Michelle Khare: Shit, I mean, it was a team effort. It was a team effort. Many people did it besides me, but —

Tim Ferriss: Of course. There is a certain level of physical brutality.

Michelle Khare: I did it with the help of an amazing team. He’s also figuring out permissions and cash flow working with our branded partners. He’s sort of touching many things, more like including head of ops in a way, I would say. The physical operation of the company itself.

Tim Ferriss: When you look out three or five years, and I imagine you’ve thought about this because to the best I can tell, you do like planning and spreadsheets and editorial calendars. I imagine that you’ve given this some thought, but it strikes me that this — I mean, this is a very demanding job that you have. And the company can — and the kind of strategic vision and where you go can go in a lot of different directions. So three to five years from now, what would you be happy with in terms of what your life and the channel looks like? And maybe the channel is too constraining. But I’m just wondering, three, five years out, understanding a lot of things can change technologically and otherwise, but what does it look like?

Michelle Khare: What does it look like?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You have a magic wand, and you’re like, “Okay…”

Michelle Khare: I have a magic wand.

Tim Ferriss: “…to some extent, I want to preserve the option that it’ll turn out this way.” Bing.

Michelle Khare: Ooh. It’s worth noting that I’m so privileged to be happy now. I love what I do. I love how our industry is evolving. I love being a part of that evolution of when you hear the word content creator, what that means and the social expectation of what that profession is. I’m really, really proud of, and excited for, the future of the evolution of that. And the convergence specifically of traditional and digital. A future for myself, first of all, I want to be doing this as long as I possibly can. I look to people like Tom Cruise, David Blaine, Jeff Probst again. They’re in their 50s and 60s and they have just decided they’re going to keep going. Richard Branson, he going out there. And I find that exciting and inspiring.

And also, I look forward to a world where the names of the people that I just mentioned are all men. And I look forward to helping lengthen the list of women who have longevity and careers like this too. So I think a future for me, external to the channel, is participating in that bridge. Supporting legacy studios and companies in understanding our world, and helping burgeoning creators find inspiration and solace and a path forward in a very seemingly nebulous career.

I love sharing with other creators the wins and the learnings and, “Don’t do what I did. Here’s my Google Excel spreadsheet. Skip all of the stuff I had to learn.” And so that mentorship component of giving trajectory and systems to younger creators is really, really important to me, and something I’m passionate about. In addition to having to lead by example and practicing what I preach, I look forward to the next three to five years because I know that’s the sphere of where I’m headed. That’s where our arrow is headed. I don’t know where the arrow’s going to land very specifically, but I am so excited about the ride.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I’m going to be the detective here for a second.

Michelle Khare: Oh, do you have a magnifying glass?

Tim Ferriss: Not in a spooky way. Well, I do have my brand new fancy spectacles. But part of the reason I’m asking is that you have to make decisions around how many episodes you pursue, how much they overlap. And for instance, against my, quote, unquote, “better financial interest,” there was a point where I had decided, well, in my best interest, I had realized pretty quickly, well, I make X amount per episode of the podcast, especially during the golden era of 2020 COVID and the two or three years that was just an absurd embarrassment of riches for anyone who was doing something reasonably defensible.

At that point, I was like, “Well, four is pretty easy for me to do per month.” If I want to increase the annual revenue of this thing, which is very high profit margins to do things with the foundation and my employees and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I could just do two more episodes a month, easy, right? And if I wanted to double it, I can do eight. There are other ways you can double it. And I’ve looked at those levers too. But suffice to say, it was very self-evident to me at the time that it was going to be very easy to grow if I so wanted it to grow.

So I ended up at different points doing six, seven, eight episodes a month or doing different types of batch recording. And then a few things happened. About two or three months into doing this, yes, there were more financial resources to bring to bear on the funding science through the foundation and many other things. We could do fancy off-sites for the team and fly to these very far-flung, fun, exotic places, yes, which we can still do. But what I started to notice is there was this very subtle, energetic change. I wasn’t exhausted, but I started maybe dragging my feet a little bit. I started to feel, I noticed when I put a fine point on it, that it was becoming a job in the unpleasant sense. Does that make sense?

And it’s very, very easy for this to happen in people who have small operations that are not dependent on — or in some cases like venture financing or something like that. And I also recognized that I could make it work by, in my case, batching these episodes together, but when I batched them together, I didn’t actually get to retain and study and use and apply what I was learning from these people in these conversations.

Michelle Khare: That’s a really fatiguing day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Or week, right? And so I decided that I would step back to four or five a month. And I’m in a fortunate financial position to be able to make that type of decision, but it was really important for not just the longevity of the podcast, which is now 11 years or 12 years, whatever it is, but my enjoyment of it. And I’m just curious how you think about what drives the actual work product of the show. Because your priorities may change, I have no idea. For some people, if they’re thinking about family, then you have family consideration, you also have the professional motivations. You can end up getting driven by your team in some cases where it’s like you want to offer them the opportunity for advancement and increase scope and so on, but that can end up steering the ship sometimes.

So there are a lot of pitfalls that are hard to spot because they are gradual in terms of their onset. So I’m curious how you think about the actual work schedule, the number of episodes, the amount you take on, because I hear all the top level priorities, which are awesome, and the vision for three to five years, I think you can do all of those things.

Michelle Khare: Oh, thank God.

Tim Ferriss: But —

Michelle Khare: Tell me if you don’t think it’s possible.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t think it’s possible if the show ends up taking on lots of features and obligations and scope creep —

Michelle Khare: I agree.

Tim Ferriss: — and splintering, that just removes the time and energy required to do those things.

Michelle Khare: I have a lot of empathy with what you’re saying about, “Oh, I can just fit in one more recording. I can fit in one more shoot day.” I mean, even separate of the channel, this didn’t impact the channel, but last year I was on a plane 73 times. Maybe not that high for many of the guests who have been in this chair. It was a record for me, at least.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot of flights.

Michelle Khare: It was a lot of flights. And I told Kim this, and she said, “How many vacations did you go on?” And I couldn’t answer it. I’d think that’s a sign. I went on — I did a couple things, but she gave me some advice at the beginning of this year. She’s like, “The next time you’re sent abroad, your assignment is…” And I need someone to say your assignment is for me to take it seriously. “Your assignment is you need to take at least six hours of a day. You don’t have to stay an entire extra day, take six hours of a day to do something for yourself.” And I did this last week. I was in Italy for a speaking engagement and my friend Olivia and I took six hours and we saw the whole city, and it was incredible.

And I think that avoiding the scope creep is something we’ve had to be very, very precise about. As you mentioned, there are so many shiny objects around. Oh, you should just do this collab and start a merch line. Or even, in our world, there’s a temptation of promote this product and big check comes in. Well, I don’t know if I agree with this product and maybe I won’t do it. And I think being really brutal about, if I don’t protect this, all of it falls apart. Not in a way of fragility, but in a sense of, if I take the brand deal for a lot of money, for the thing I’m not 100% on, it fractures trustworthiness. That, as we both know, is something that cannot be bought back. It’s so precious to what we’re doing. Or even the idea of we’ve had so many people come to us say, “We’ll license the Challenge Accepted brand and we’ll start a kids channel and we’ll run the whole thing for you.”

And these pitches sound great on paper when I know I’m not going to like the first few things you do. I’m going to have to get in the weeds. I’m going to have to be giving feedback. And you know what? I don’t have time for that. I have to remain really focused on the tip of the spear, which is making Challenge Accepted the best show it possibly can for all of the reasons that are emotionally important to me, financially important to the team, and socially important to our industry. So we’ve had to say no a lot, which I know you’ve been writing a lot about recently. But the saying of no is something I’m still learning how to do. And I think that has been why the show has lasted so long.

I have never — I’m literally knocking on wood, I don’t even know if this is real wood. I’m knocking on wood right now. I’ve never experienced creator burnout in the way that many of my colleagues have. Many of my colleagues have had a time where they hit the wall and have to take months off entirely. That’s never happened to me because all along the way, it’s been a fast growth, but still slow and steady. You can look at the growth of our channel and it’s not like I blew up on TikTok overnight. It’s been slow and steady. And for that, I feel fortunate because I’ve had the slowness to be able to make those adjustments, to acknowledge scope creep, where I’m being asked for more things and still learning how to practice that better.

Tim Ferriss: So few thoughts pop into my head. The first is that more so than with most, I actually have — I’m very confident that you’ll figure it out. And I’ll tell you why.

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: The first is that — not that I’m like — who the fuck am I? I’m just saying, there’ve been a lot of people in that chair and I’ve met with a lot of creators and writers and so on, of different types. Number one is that you have an inbuilt novelty in the format of the show. So a lot of the YouTubers I run into who are just crashing and burning, they have a few things stacked against them. One, they chose something that was interesting to them five or 10 years ago, but it is a fairly narrow lane. And at some point, they get tired of being that person, or they pretended to be something in the beginning and they got a lot of positive feedback and they’re —

Michelle Khare: But it’s not who they are, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — fatigued because they’re wearing a mask.

Michelle Khare: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And there’s more to it. There’s audience capture issues and other things. But you have an inbuilt novelty in the nature of the show itself.

Michelle Khare: Every episode, my whole life changes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: Right now, I’m training for Taekwondo Nationals. I’m going to take a flight back to L.A. and go to taekwondo training for three hours tonight. Every day is different and varied and interesting. And I feel lucky that my life changes frequently, to adjust for that.

Tim Ferriss: So this is something I wanted to take a moment to point out because willpower, discipline, all these things, yes, they sound great. And I agree with a lot of folks that ultimately systems beat certainly dreams and even goals. I mean, you have to have an idea of where you want to head, but inherent to what you chose to do, there’s a kind of cycling and rejuvenation to it, right?

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I just wanted to highlight that because it’s a feature —

Michelle Khare: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: — of what you chose to do. It’s not just something you have to fit in in the empty pockets with something that is uniform from start to finish. So I think that’s one thing I wanted to mention.

And then separately, just as an anecdote, guest lecturing, you mentioned. So the guest lectures at Princeton High-Tech Entrepreneurship that turned into The 4-Hour Workweek, the notes from that class, was based on a talk initially called Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit, because my first company was sports nutrition. The through-line of that lecture from start to finish, because I was one of the few entrepreneurs my professor invited, maybe the only one who bootstrapped. Everyone else was venture-backed. And that’s why it was interesting to him. Because I was like, “Ed,” who’s Ed Zschau, amazing guy I’ve had him on the podcast, said, “I don’t think I have anything to offer. I’m only a few years out of college. I’m bootstrapping this thing. It’s a lot smaller than any of the other companies that get highlighted by these CEOs who are taking companies public, et cetera.” And he said, “Well, that’s kind of the point.”

Michelle Khare: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: “You’re closer to the students, so they can see emulating or borrowing from what you’re doing more easily than they can someone who’s 20 years older and has taken four companies public.” But the —

Michelle Khare: And aligned with your through-line of owning everything you do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: That’s a really special component.

Tim Ferriss: Owning, yeah, exactly. And there are times where like debt and venture and all that stuff, I’m just constitutionally allergic to it. It doesn’t make me feel safe and pleasant.

Michelle Khare: Same.

Tim Ferriss: So I generally avoid those things.

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t even have a credit card until a few years after college because I thought, foolishly, that if you have no debt, you’re going to have good credit. That’s just not how it works. So I had to get credit cards. But I have never carried a balance except for like a very short period. The reason I bring that up though is that in my class, it changed over time, this two-times-per-year guest lecture, it kind of followed what I was learning. The one thing that never changed was how I started it.

And how I started it every time is I’d say, “How many people here want to be a salesperson?” And this is Princeton, right? It’s in an electrical engineering operations research finance class, and no one raises their hand. They’re like, “Salespeople? Yuck.” And I’m like, “Okay, how many people here want to be good at negotiating?” Every hand goes up. I’m like, “Okay, how many people here want to be good deal-makers?” Almost every hand goes up. I’m like, “Guess what? They’re all the same thing.”

Michelle Khare: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Good news, bad news. You’re all going to have to be salespeople.

Michelle Khare: It’s true. It’s true.

Tim Ferriss: Whether you’re selling a position, whether you are selling yourself as a romantic partner, whether you are trying to persuade someone of anything and everything, the skillset is the same. And because you have that ability and you also have the — you’ve honed the ability to communicate with the cold emails and everything else, you have a lot of practice with that. And you have someone like Kim Scott in your corner on the honesty — you can take it too far, but honesty above people-pleasing, right?

Michelle Khare: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: This — what did you call it? It was the, not insidious empathy, but something close.

Michelle Khare: Ruinous empathy.

Tim Ferriss: Ruinous sympathy.

Tim Ferriss: That is where I tend to lean also, or have historically. And if you are trapped in that quadrant and you start to see the ship heading towards this iceberg of burnout for you personally or overall, you’re kind of fucked. Like, that’s not the time to learn how to steer the ship, which means these other quadrants, right?

Michelle Khare: And you write about that in your upcoming book too, about how when you say yes to everything, you become resentful towards other people when it’s actually you creating the problem.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I’m going to be diving back into the — it’s a placeholder name, but The No Book, 850 pages, that’s going to get hacked down. It’s going to be, just as a teaser, it makes me so happy. I literally just got a text about this two days ago. I’ve had quite a few test readers read that book and it’s rough around the edges, but they read this book like six months ago, a year ago, and they text me to be like, “Look at how I am still using this stuff.” So I’m excited to get it out because it’s super — as we were talking about, template emails and so on, it’s really tactical. It’s not just hand-wavy stuff. So I’m excited about it, but you have sort of these —

Michelle Khare: And I promise I’ll buy it, I won’t steal it on accident.

Tim Ferriss: I’m okay with stealing my books. Well, I mean, it’s not okay because you’re stealing it from someone else, but —

Michelle Khare: Correct. It was not stolen from a Barnes & Noble.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: It was stolen from the desk of a coworker.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So I have confidence you’ll figure it out because you have the toolkit for correction. And I think part of what a lot of folks miss about saying no, it’s not like — saying no is a lot like working out. It’s not like you figure it out and you do it for a week or two and then your problems are solved.

Michelle Khare: It’s a practice.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a practice. It’s not only a practice, but 99.9% of the population, sure, there are a few exceptions, but are going to fall off the wagon occasionally. So the question is, how do you get back on the wagon? So in the case of say a book on no, a lot of the book is case studies of people and their toolkits for renegotiating. It’s like, if you’re reading the book, it probably means you say yes to too much stuff and over-commit.

You’re probably still going to do that. It’s kind of like AA and alcoholics. Once an addict, always an addict. You’re probably going to do that again. So the question isn’t, how do I avoid it permanently from this point forward? It’s, how do you actually correct it and how do you renegotiate commitments? How do you cancel things? And really —

Michelle Khare: Which is arguably harder than saying no out the gate. Once you’ve committed to something —

Tim Ferriss: It is. It’s basically signing up for long-term pain instead of short-term pain. But you’re going to deal with both.

Michelle Khare: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Which is why Kim Scott is, and Kim’s teachings, are so valuable. I have to recommend — I don’t know if it was with respect to Kim specifically, but A.J. Jacobs, who I mentioned earlier —

Michelle Khare: I love him.

Tim Ferriss: — wrote this long Esquire piece called, and his poor wife, but the title of it is called “I Think You’re Fat,” and it’s like 30 days of experimentation with radical honesty or something like that.

Michelle Khare: Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw him give a presentation last fall and he included this anecdote.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And “I Think You’re Fat” is like — when his wife was like, “How do I look in this dress?” And also, the point is, his wife has put up with so much with his experiments, but she’s like, “Are you even listening to me?” And he’s like, “No. Honestly, I stopped listening five minutes ago and I’m thinking about A, B, and C.” Oh, what a saint his wife is, but also makes for pretty good reading because everything in excess kind of becomes its opposite.

I want to kind of talk about wishlist stuff —

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — because you never know who’s listening to this podcast. You just never know.

Michelle Khare: Okay, okay.

Tim Ferriss: I am constantly surprised. Maybe you can give some backstory, but have you met Mindy Kaling yet?

Michelle Khare: I have not met our Lord and Savior, Mindy Kaling yet. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Why did I even come across this? Yeah.

Michelle Khare: I know why you came across this, and it is because my first Twitter handle was @MindyKalingFan, I think. It’s since changed to my name. It’s normal now. I think I’ve deleted all the tweets, maybe. I would love to meet Mindy Kaling one day, when we’re talking about wishlist items for a few reasons. I feel like we have sort of traveled the same path in different flavors. We went to the same college. I obviously admire her work. We’re both Indian women in entertainment. And seeing someone like her on a show like The Office was instrumental to me as someone from Shreveport, Louisiana, who didn’t see someone like me on Disney Channel.

And I think that’s why the mentality I had of approaching a job like this was so black hat, if we’re going to go back to that. I was very negative on the idea of doing something in entertainment because I didn’t see a path or an example forward for someone like me. And factually, that’s incorrect. I mean, there’s a very thriving industry of Bollywood and there are many, many amazing women in entertainment. But something shifted for me when I saw her success, and felt that parallel path of, we’re going to the same school. And seeing how she took her opportunity at The Office and spun it into her own production company and new shows that continued to uplift and elevate female-centered stories, I think is incredible, and something that I look up to often when I think about how I started at a media company and am now doing my own thing and hoping to shift culture and expectation of what it means to be an Indian woman in entertainment and also what it means to be a content creator on the internet.

I love upending people’s expectations. It’s one of my secret favorite things to do. I love when people hear that I’m a YouTuber and then they go watch Challenge Accepted and are pleasantly, hopefully, pleasantly surprised by what they see, and wouldn’t expect that maybe from someone on the platform. And I think about how she and Shonda Rhimes and other incredible showrunners have done that.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Mindy, if you’re listening.

Michelle Khare: Mindy, yo.

Tim Ferriss: And there are definitely a few people on, or who have been on this podcast, like B.J. Novak who know Mindy. So if you guys are listening.

Michelle Khare: Oh, my God. I’m obsessed with both of them, as a unit. They’re amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, B.J. is incredible. B.J. is also incredible. I mean, The Office, I mean there are a few examples like this, but it’s kind of like the PayPal Mafia where you’re like, “How did all these people come out of this?”

Michelle Khare: The PayPal Mafia.

Tim Ferriss: How is it even possible that this density of talent was in one place at the same time? It was crazy. All right. Well, let me ask a question, right? Let’s just say Mindy’s listening and she’s like, “Maybe I’ll check her out.” Which episode should she start with?

Michelle Khare: Okay. Let me think.

Tim Ferriss: And that applies more broadly to people listening.

Michelle Khare: More broadly.

Tim Ferriss: But where should Mindy go?

Michelle Khare: This is a really tough question. For Mindy specifically, I’m going to recommend “I Try Tom Cruise’s Deadliest Stunt” because Mindy is in the Hollywood world, and I think that’s the most Hollywood episode we’ve done. It’s an episode where I strapped myself to the side of a C-130 to become the first person to recreate the stunt that Tom did for the Mission: Impossible franchise. And I truly am hanging off the side of a plane. And what’s interesting about that story is not just the stunt, which is cool, of course, but it’s an amazing story of being an underdog. The only people who have accomplished this previously are literally Tom Cruise and Paramount Studio.

And so to come at it from our angle was me sending more crazy cold emails. It was calling foreign militaries at three in the morning asking if they would lend us a plane. Those are the phone calls I’m making. And additionally, when you’re doing something that’s only been done once before, or in some cases has never been done before, you have to get really creative with the training and testing, which maybe you experienced in all of your work too. How do you prepare your body to do something like that? And it led us to training in wind tunnels. But even more interestingly, I had to go to a specialized optometrist who fabricated custom scleral contact lenses for me to wear, because for this stunt, you don’t wear goggles. And so there was a dedicated person on set called a lens technician, and his only job was to insert and remove these massive contact lenses that went over my eyes.

Tim Ferriss: That sounds so uncomfortable.

Michelle Khare: Because when you’re up there at multi-hundred mile per hour winds, even just a tiny pebble could blind you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

Michelle Khare: So I think it’s a really cool story of being a little bit of an underdog and accomplishing something great in an unexpected way. So I hope you watch it, Mindy.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. All right. This is going to sound, it’s a non-sequitur/sequitur, but people should study, take a look at peregrine falcons and how their eyes and noses and nostrils are evolved. It’s fucking wild. And aircraft have actually been designed based on peregrine falcon evolved —

Michelle Khare: Why do I feel like —

Tim Ferriss: — form.

Michelle Khare: — you’ve spent a week in Mongolia training falconry?

Tim Ferriss: I would love to do that. I had my first experience with falconry on New Year’s Day this year, so it’s fresh in my mind.

Michelle Khare: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: Got to work with some amazing hawks. There are different birds that are appropriate for different levels of training, and it’s not necessarily the easiest bird. In some cases, they’re going to give you slightly more stubborn or difficult birds because if you have a very easy bird, you don’t actually develop the trainer technique that you need to use for a spectrum of birds. It would be kind of like giving, if you give everyone a really intrinsically motivated, high-energy dog, like a Belgian Malinois to train, that is like bred for being very, very, very, very trainable, you’re going to develop a false sense of confidence around your ability to do that with other breeds.

Michelle Khare: I see.

Tim Ferriss: So yes, I’m interested in falconry.

Michelle Khare: Have you seen that meme that went viral recently that’s like, “You hit at a certain age and all of a sudden you’re obsessed with birds”?

Tim Ferriss: That’s really funny. Maybe that’s what’s going on. Next thing you know, I’ll just like smoking a pipe on a porch talking about World War II all the time. I don’t know.

Michelle Khare: There you go. That’s in your future, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Worse things could happen. All right. So here’s — I’m going to ask more, I want to ask more episode questions, but before we do that, anyone else that you’d like to sort of invoke?

Michelle Khare: I’m going to invoke.

Tim Ferriss: Are there any other partners, companies, people, anything that you’d like to check out your work?

Michelle Khare: This is such a special opportunity to do that. There are many people I would love to meet. And generally, as we move into this really exciting new chapter for the company and content creators in general, I’m excited to meet with anyone from traditional media who is excited to join forces. So that’s just a general statement. But if I have one shout-out, here’s the shout-out I’m going to ask for, The Royal Nanny School in England. We have been wanting —

Tim Ferriss: You’ve been working on this one for a while.

Michelle Khare: — the Norland College, we’re your biggest fans. We’ve been wanting to collaborate for years. If you see this, hit me up.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible. Perfect.

Michelle Khare: Okay. Let me tell you about the Norland nannies. You’re going to appreciate this, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I’m ready.

Michelle Khare: You know Mary Poppins, the silhouette with the pleated skirt and the little hat. It is based off of a real school called the Norland College where these are the nannies that are trained to serve billionaires and royal families. So when you look at — and they wear that outfit. So you look at footage from this school, and it’s literally they’re wearing this outfit and hat pushing a pram stroller while also wielding a gun because they have to protect the kids. So they know defensive driving. It’s like Secret Service meets Butler Academy, which you shouted out in the 5-Bullet Friday. So it’s two amazing worlds coming together. I think more people need to know about it. So I’m very passionate about it.

Tim Ferriss: And I imagine the fact that they’re like, “No, thank you. We don’t need that,” makes you just want it that much more.

Michelle Khare: Of course it does, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Michelle Khare: But also, I respect it. What have we been talking about? Saying no. So I have to respect when someone else says no too. But also, I’m just letting you know, we’re still available, still interested and excited. Love you guys from afar, big fan.

Tim Ferriss: Of your episodes, when you look back, and you can’t say all of them, that’s disallowed, that answer is no good, no fly, if you did not have a YouTube channel, but you had a thriving career, so you had some money, which of those, you can pick two or three, of the experiences that you would pay to have looking back?

Michelle Khare: That I would do again in a heartbeat?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, do again or you’re like, “Okay, I only get to pick two or three, but I would absolutely pay for these if I had to.”

Michelle Khare: I would pick, first of all, the black belt challenge. So this video, I had 90 days to try and get a black belt in taekwondo. Part of this came from a personal passion of having done all of these stunts and working with a lot of stunt performers, all of them come from world-class martial arts backgrounds. And I realized I had never actually taken the time to learn a martial art from the ground up. And that it was lacking in my performance and mental fortitude and I wanted to experience that. So what do I do? I make it a challenge so that I can devote my whole life to it.

And that experience changed me. When I look at clear before and after, from having put your body through a lot, there are moments when you have a photo before and after, my body changed. But there are moments in life when you as a person change before and after, and that can’t be captured by a photo always. That was one of those for me.

Getting to study with Grand Master Simon Rhee, one of the greatest martial artists on Planet Earth, took me under his wing, and did what most instructors would have never done, which is believe in me and push me to try and actually get a black belt in 90 days.

And we were talking about politeness, I think martial arts has taught me all of that. When you bow to the mat before you step on. When you yes sir, yes, ma’am, everything. It might sound gimmicky to someone on the outside, but it does become a practice and an automation and a way of life. And that’s something I’m really proud of as a now black belt and grateful for it. I would pay to do that again.

And in fact, I am because we’re doing a sequel. So I am paying to do it again. I’m trying to qualify for nationals this year with Master Rhee. So I’m very excited about it. I would recommend it to anybody.

Michelle Khare: The other one I was going to say that I would pay to do again, for the experience I had ultimately, not when I was going through it, is the Houdini challenge. So for that, I had six weeks to learn how to hold my breath and pick locks to attempt Houdini’s water torture cell. Which famously is hanging upside down in a glass box filled to the brim with water, escaping a series of lock picks with one breath of air. And that I would say is probably among the most physically challenging challenges I’ve done.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure.

Michelle Khare: Free diving, breath holding is a level of athleticism that is so bizarre to me. Because when you’re in a workout class and it gets hard, they say, “Keep breathing.” This is the one time you can’t do that. You’re holding your breath.

So I was having to learn how to push through that. Having breath hold, a time of — ultimately, I got to 3:30. And most Navy Seals, two, three minutes is pretty good. Houdini’s best time was also 3:30.

But on the production side, it was a really fascinating challenge because it was the first time we creatively designed our own obstacle and solution. So in the beginning, we spent months trying to connect with other magicians on Earth who own a water torture cell. There are not many.

And ultimately, we came to the conclusion of designing our own, which was really, really incredible and creatively challenging. How do you create a glass box that can be filled with so many gallons of water and maintain the structural integrity when there’s a person inside? And function with all the locks and the hinges with water as an involved substance? It was a huge, huge engineering challenge for our team.

And I’m really, really proud of the final result. Because both of those things are things I would have never guessed that 2016 me would have been able to do. First of all, holding my breath that long. Second of all, taking the creative liberty to design something that was inspired by a work of history, but also our own.

Tim Ferriss: Next question. So this one you may not want to answer.I would understand why. I have a little bit more freedom in answering this for myself, so I can also go first and buy some time.

Michelle Khare: Challenge accepted. Let’s hear it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So which one would you pay not to do again?

Michelle Khare: Oh, gosh.

Tim Ferriss: One or two. And the one I would say, for me, just to offer it up is, and holy shit, did I make a mistake, this was episode one of the Tim Ferriss Experiment, in terms of filming. And keep in mind, we had, I think it was 11 or 13 episodes or 10 or 13 episodes that we filmed in that number of weeks. So I mean, it was every week we were filming.

Michelle Khare: As a viewer, I never realized that it was 13 consecutive weeks.

Tim Ferriss: It was consecutive weeks.

Michelle Khare: That’s crazy.

Tim Ferriss: And the first one was parkour. And there were a couple of inherent problems with that. Number one, even if you tried to prepare your body for it, the impact of falling onto hard surfaces is very hard to train your body for. Even over the course of, say, a year with proper technique because of the connective tissue adaptations and sort of ligament and tendon adaptations that need to take place, which required quite a bit of time.

Secondly, the promise of the show was I haven’t cheated. So it’s like I can’t pre-prepare for it if I’m showing what it’s like to start from zero. And I am still contending with injuries from that week to this day. 12/13 weeks later.

Michelle Khare: No way. Wow. You guys shot that at Tempest, right?

Tim Ferriss: What was that?

Michelle Khare: Tempest?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Amazing gym.

Michelle Khare: Incredible.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, those guys are amazing. Tempest free running, check it out, it’s incredible.

Michelle Khare: Yeah. But I will say I have dropped from the monkey bars and pulled my back. It’s crazy.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I ended up tearing multiple heads of the quadricep in both legs.

Michelle Khare: And then you continued filming for 12 weeks after?

Tim Ferriss: For 12 more weeks. So you can imagine —

Michelle Khare: And that included the Yabusame episode. That’s different?

Tim Ferriss: No, the Yabusame episode is actually from a totally different TV show, a pilot of which was filmed right after the first book came out, it might’ve even been before. I think it was right after the first book came out. So that was a completely separate thing with a production company in Singapore. It was kind of wonky to be honest.

Michelle Khare: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: But the Yabusame was way earlier. Back when I had hair or a little bit of hair. I was white knuckling.

Michelle Khare: Okay. Because all of my experience, transparently, of the show has been in online rips because many of this material is no longer available.

Tim Ferriss: All of the Tim Ferriss Experiment stuff, I got the rights back for a launch on iTunes, as it was called back then. And it was the number one nonfiction show when it launched for a while, which I was very happy about. Although it was excruciating, you can imagine, talking about negotiating with a big behemoth where you just don’t really have any leverage whatsoever. And they were helpful, but a lot of employee changes and so on that made it difficult. And then ultimately getting the rights back completely so I could just release it for free on YouTube.

But which would you pay not to do, any come to mind?

Michelle Khare: What would I pay not to do? I have a few answers for this actually. First one is chess. And again, I recognize the people who have sat in this chair, I feel like 99.9% of people in the Tim Ferriss sphere, everybody plays chess. Everybody is on chess.com. When you go to these entrepreneur events, there’s always a chess board. Everyone loves chess. So I feel a little shameful saying this. Chess was very challenging for me.

Tim Ferriss: There are plenty of people on this show who don’t like chess, including people who used to be professional players.

Michelle Khare: Really? Oh, my goodness. Now, I loved many aspects of it, but the challenge for that was originally I had one month to prepare for a competition. And I did the month of training. I got to the competition. I didn’t do as well as I had wanted. And something about the episode just felt empty.

And I think, you and I both know this, you know when you haven’t gone the distance with something, you haven’t given it your all. And I knew that deep down. So I continued training for nine more months, 10 months in total I believe, to achieve this goal of my Elo rating. And finally did it. And I was like, “I’m good.” I am so good on the London system, all this stuff. I was studying so hard. And I’m so glad I did it, but I’m good to be a casual chess player. Good to be a casual chess player.

I think the other one I don’t think I’ll do again is one that hasn’t come out yet. Which makes it interesting I suppose. The most challenging physical thing I’ve ever done is the seven marathons on seven continents in one week. Which is going to be coming out this April, a three part series on the channel. We’re so excited about it. Specifically within that, the Antarctica marathon is —

Tim Ferriss: Sounds terrible.

Michelle Khare: — something I probably won’t do again. People got frostbite when we were out there. It was insane.

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure they did.

Michelle Khare: But the sneaky sleeper marathon is — most people think Antarctica is the worst when they hear about this challenge. But the sneaky one is marathon number six, which is in Colombia. And the reason this one is so crazy is because historically people have gone to the hospital from heat exposure. It’s marathon number six, so you have five other marathons in your body that you have done in the five previous days before. And they actually schedule this marathon to happen overnight to try and avoid the sun. But because our flight was slightly delayed, we started around 3:00 AM. And that meant we were literally racing against the sunrise. And the slower you go, the more heat exposure you have. So it was 100% humidity. It’s so hot. And psychologically, you feel like you’re at the finish line because tomorrow’s the finale, tomorrow’s Miami, tomorrow’s race number seven. But really number six is the unexpected one.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that sounds brutal.

Michelle Khare: What’s crazy about that is there are the most unexpected people who do this marathon. Okay. There was a guy, you’re not going to believe this, there was a guy named Adrian, for whom his first marathon he ever ran was marathon one of that week. He knew some of the race organizers and just decided to come along. And originally he was going to run half-marathons and just decided, “I’m going to go for the full.” That’s crazy to do your very first marathon in a week where you’re going to do seven. Yeah. So that was nuts.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There are sort of breeds and then there are breeds also. I mean, there are mutants for each of these disciplines. There are mutants for all these disciplines we have discussed. And you meet some folks, and you mentioned stunt work on Avatar, but I remember, I’ve met people who are professional high jumpers. And I’m just looking at them and I’m like, “We are not the same species.”

Michelle Khare: No.

Tim Ferriss: Just like your attachment points and where your Achilles is.

Michelle Khare: Built different.

Tim Ferriss: Everything is different. I mean, that’s true for every discipline, including chess of course.

Michelle Khare: There’s an 83-year-old man named Dan Little who does this event. It was his fourth time doing it.

Tim Ferriss: The seven in seven?

Michelle Khare: Seven in seven. He’s done it four times. He’s 83 years old. He’s this guy named Dan from Oklahoma. And just the most incredible person you’ll ever meet. So joyful and excited. And he’s the last person on course every day. He takes seven or eight hours to do the full marathon. And he is smiling the whole time. I think that’s one of the coolest things about our job, our jobs, is perspective, the people you meet. It really redials your compass.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, if you’re the average of the people you spend the most time with, choose those people really carefully.

Michelle Khare: Gosh. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I mean, the older I get, it’s not that surprising, but the more I enjoy spending time with people who are doing things like that, not necessarily in that much of an extreme. But it could be like Arthur Brooks, who we were just talking about, because there was some footage from a prior interview of mine up there. He’s a busy guy. Or Adam Grant. But they take fantastic care of themselves. And particularly with each passing year it seems as you get older, the sort of entropy that leads people to gather and just complain about their new aches and pains or how little time they have or how busy they are with the kids, whatever it might be, increases.

And I try, and I’ve succeeded fortunately, I have a lot of friends who are counter examples, and I’m like, “Okay, if there’s only one counter example in the world, okay. Well, maybe it’s just inevitable.” And I’m like, “If I’ve gathered five to 10 close friends who are all counter examples, that’s something you can do.” Because all of these people, from a personality perspective, from a life perspective, from a financial perspective, very different. Which means if you want it badly enough, you can be the counter example. And I find that super uplifting.

Michelle Khare: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a couple of very quick questions and then we’ll land this plane.

Michelle Khare: Okay. This has been so fun.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m really happy to spend time together. You mentioned McMillion$. Other favorite documentaries? I know you like documentaries. Are there any other documentaries that stand out to you?

Michelle Khare: My favorite one is Free Solo.

Tim Ferriss: Free Solo, that’s so good.

Michelle Khare: So good. Alex Honnold, what you doing? Talking about counter examples here. I am just endlessly inspired by him as a person. And I think Jimmy Chin’s work, directing, filming, it’s just outstanding given the care and the sensitivity of the subject nature.

Tim Ferriss: Terrifying.

Michelle Khare: And how he executed it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So for people who maybe watched the recent live Netflix climbing of Taipei.

Michelle Khare: Taipei.

Tim Ferriss: Go watch Free Solo if you haven’t seen it. And fun fact, I actually interviewed Alex about six months before he did his Free Solo ascent of El Cap.

Michelle Khare: I just got chills.

Tim Ferriss: And he was in that white van that is in the movie. And freaked me out because he parked outside of my house. And I was like, “Who’s in this creepy van with no windows parked in front of my house?” And it’s also before he got media training. So if you want to see pre-polish Alex.

And I want to give a nod also, Free Solo is an amazing movie, to Chai Vasarhelyi. So Chai is married to Jimmy Chin. She is, I mean, in a lot of ways, the filmmaker. And Jimmy obviously, without his expertise and these crazy complicated rigs and the ability to climb and actually be suspended around Alex and so on, I won’t ruin anything with spoilers, there are a lot of adjustments that needed to be made with that, but that is a fantastic one.

I think it was The Dive, they’ve also had some follow-up films that are just incredible.

Michelle Khare: I remember seeing a tweet when Alex did the Taipei climb that was like, “Everyone’s freaking out about this. What if I told you this is actually not the craziest thing he’s ever done.” Referring to Free Solo.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, it is so far not the craziest thing in the sense that, watch the El Cap climb, it is infinitely hard. To any really, really seasoned climber, yes, it’s risky to climb with no ropes. Yes, the tower is dangerous if you make a mistake. From a technical perspective, from a technical perspective, it’s actually not that difficult. Doing what he did on El Cap is very much in the death defying category.

Michelle Khare: Yeah. I’m out. I’m sure people ask you this too, but people are always like, “What’s something you wouldn’t do?” I’m like, “I’m going to let Alex Honnold own the category of whatever it is he’s doing.” I think that category is well covered.

Tim Ferriss: The category of things I wouldn’t do is pretty broad. And it gets broader every day. After a few very scary avalanche experiences with back country skiing and heli-skiing where people have gotten really injured and could have been buried. I’m done. Avalanche risk, if there’s any real avalanche risk, I’m out.

Michelle Khare: So you’re out from Everest?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, there are many reasons I’m out from Everest.

Michelle Khare: Okay. There are many reasons I’m out from Everest too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no, there are a lot of reasons I’m out from Everest.

Michelle Khare: Yeah. People ask me all the time —

Tim Ferriss: Not the least of which is plenty of people have already done it, why would I?

Michelle Khare: Exactly. I think the story’s been told.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Why would I risk my life for something that’s not even going to be a notable footnote for anything or anyone?

Michelle Khare: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: Book or books you’ve given most as a gift or recommended a lot, any books come to mind?

Michelle Khare: have recommended Radical Candor to pretty much everybody I know who’s a content creator trying to figure out their business. The other one is The Great CEO Within, which is a really fast and easy read. And for anyone who didn’t start in Silicon Valley or a startup culture or a startup of any kind, was really helpful to me to just understand here’s what a company is and how it works. And then I’ve given Adam Grant’s Originals to a few people too.

Tim Ferriss: Dig it. All right.

Michelle Khare: I would say this, but I feel like that’s cheating, so I’ve tried to exclude it from my answer.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s fine.

Michelle Khare: So I can’t say that, but obviously I talk about it all the time.

Tim Ferriss: If you could have one giant billboard anywhere, obviously this is metaphorically speaking, with anything on it, it could be a quote, nothing commercial, but could be a mantra, quote from someone else, a picture, anything, question, what might you put on that?

Michelle Khare: I feel like this one has been overused at this point, but one that was really helpful for me starting my channel was, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” Very simple. Again, overused at this point. But I love that one because it’s what I return to when things are hard in any aspect of life and especially when I’m doing a challenge. It’s a way for me to remind myself, this is the struggle I asked for to make myself better at the thing I want to be better at. And it’s also a reminder to move forward through it and not shy away from it.

As we talked about, Challenge Accepted was born out of writing my fears on a whiteboard. And so for me, I have a very intimate connection with that sentiment. And I think about it even in an exterior capacity when I get nervous about something, personal life, business, whatever, exterior to the challenge itself, I return to that often.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I have quotes related to that.

Michelle Khare: Let me hear them.

Tim Ferriss: Etched onto driftwood, ranging from Anaïs Nin to others all over my house.

I think I’ve done enough talking today, so I’m going to keep the focus on you. Michelle, where can people find you, where would you like to point people to?

Michelle Khare: You can follow me @michellekhare on everything. And the three-part series of my experience attempting seven marathons on all seven continents in one single week will be coming out on my YouTube channel in three consecutive weeks throughout April and May. And we’re going for a primetime Emmy this year, which I’m really excited about.

Tim Ferriss: So exciting.

Michelle Khare: We’re on the ballot for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special. It’s a very long title for a category. And I’m excited about it for a lot of reasons, most of which is I want to be a part of a future where it’s not unheard of that a YouTube channel is going for something like this. And that’s why I’m excited about it for myself and other creators.

Tim Ferriss: I’m excited for you.

Michelle Khare: Thank you. So if you’re a voter, please vote for me.

Tim Ferriss: I’d vote for you. I’d vote for you. And just for people who may miss this, Khare, K-H-A-R-E.

Michelle Khare: Oh, yeah, yeah. M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E K-H-A-R-E.

Tim Ferriss: Michelle, is there anything else you’d like to say, any parting words, anything you’d like to add before we wind to a close?

Michelle Khare: I want to say thank you, Tim. It was really special to go back through the archives and realize that your impact in my life started 10 years ago. And to almost to the date be meeting you 10 years later is really full circle and affirming for me. And I hope that anyone listening can hear the very grassroots fear-setting chart that I had for myself in the beginning. And I think it’s a special moment for me to reflect on the length of time it takes to do something special. And how that commitment can lead you somewhere unexpected.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you for that. And I have to say, it makes me so deeply happy, I mean, joy is probably a better word, I get so much joy out of the fact that you exist and you’re doing what you’re doing. Because it tests a lot of assumptions about a direction that I would view as pretty dystopian about online content creation. You’re putting out long form, positive, life affirming, nonfiction where you show that failure is not a terminal sentence, it’s just feedback along the path. And I just love that you’re doing what you’re doing. And I’m such a fan of your work, such a fan of Challenge Accepted. And I hope you keep doing it for a super long time.

Michelle Khare: Me too. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right, everybody, until next time, we’re going to put show notes, including some template emails for people, in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. I assure you if you search K-H-A-R-E, there will be only one response. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life (#860) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life (#860)

2026-04-08 05:53:07

Daredevil Michelle Khare lives life to the extreme in Challenge Accepted, amassing more than 6 million followers and more than 1 billion views. Across the show, you’ll see Michelle attempt everything from Tom Cruise’s Deadliest stunt to Harry Houdini’s water torture cell to trying to earn a black belt in taekwondo in only 90 days. Michelle hopes to prove that with enough dedication and failure, anything is possible.

Michelle’s work has earned multiple Streamy Awards, including Show of the Year, and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes,Vogue India, and more. In 2025, Challenge Accepted made history successfully petitioning to join the Primetime Emmy® ballot. Michelle was named a TIME100 honoree for her impact as a creator and storyteller.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

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

Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life

Additional podcast platforms

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

Transcripts

SELECTED RESOURCES FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Michelle Khare:

Podcasts & YouTube Shows

Selected Challenge Accepted Episodes

Cold Emails: Best Practices

1. Subject Line

Your subject line should establish credibility, relevance, or a real mutual connection immediately.

Good Options

Collaboration with [Name / Brand / Project]
[Your Name] x [Recipient / Company]
Referral from [Mutual Contact] | [Your Name]
For [Recipient] via [Mutual Contact] | [Your Name]

Rules

If you have a real mutual connection, put it first.
If you do not have big numbers, use your strongest real credibility marker: institution, publication, notable past work, relevant partnership, role, or a strong example of work.
Do not exaggerate or invent a connection.

2. Greeting

Default to respectful and slightly formal.

Use

Dear [Name],
Hello Mr./Ms. [Last Name],
Hello [Name]

Avoid

“Yo, Ferriss”
“Hey bro”
Fake instant familiarity

3: Paragraph 1: Who You Are + Why This Matters

Keep this to two sentences max.

Sentence 1:

Who you are, plus one clear line of legitimacy.

Sentence 2:

Why you’re reaching out, and ideally what you are offering the other person.

Template

My name is [Name], and I’m [role] at [company/project], where we [one-line credibility marker]. I’m reaching out about [specific opportunity], which I believe could be valuable to you because [clear benefit].

Important

Do not make the recipient click around just to understand who you are.
The email itself should carry the basic credibility.
Hyperlinks can support your point, but they should not do all the work.

4: Paragraph 2: The Idea

Again, keep this to two sentences max.

This is where you explain:

what you want to do
why it is relevant to them
why you are a serious person who has done the homework

Template

I’ve been following [specific work / initiative / project], and I think there is a strong opportunity to [specific collaboration or angle]. My hope would be to [briefly describe scope], in a way that is useful for your team and worthwhile for your audience / recruiting / brand / mission.

This paragraph should make them think:

“This person understands what we do.”

5: Paragraph 3: Clear Call to Action

Keep this to two sentences max.

Be specific. Do not ask vaguely to “discuss something.” Do not bury your phone number in the signature.

Template

Would you be open to a quick call next week to see whether there’s a fit? Feel free to call or text me directly at [number].

You can also add:

Happy to keep it to 10 minutes. (If you promise 10 minutes, keep it to 10 minutes.)

6. Easy-Out Line

Use this at the end:

If you’ve read this far, I really appreciate it. And if you’re too busy to get back to me, I totally understand.

Best Practices

Keep the body short: three short paragraphs, roughly two sentences each
Show credibility early
Make the value to them explicit
Make the ask specific
Hyperlink intelligently, but do not rely on links alone
Avoid attachments unless they are absolutely necessary
Include your phone number explicitly
Put the phone number in the final sentence, not buried in the signature
Use a clean signature
If you promise 10 minutes, keep it to 10 minutes

Follow-Up Rules

Send one follow-up only
Wait about a week
Do not keep sending “bumping this up”
If they do not respond, move on

Sample Email

Subject: For [NAME] via [MUTUAL CONTACT] | Collaboration with [COMPANY]

Dear [NAME],

My name is [YOUR NAME], and I’m the [ROLE] at [COMPANY], where we [ONE-LINE CREDIBILITY MARKER]. I’m reaching out about a potential [FEATURE / COLLABORATION / PROJECT] because I think it could introduce your work to a highly relevant audience that would genuinely care about it.

I’ve been following [THEIR TEAM / THEIR PROJECT / THEIR WORK], and I think there is a strong opportunity to turn it into a concise, high-quality piece that is both accessible and accurate. My hope would be to [DESCRIBE THE SCOPE], in a way that is useful for your team and worthwhile for your audience / brand / recruiting / mission.

Would you be open to a quick call next week to see whether there’s a fit? Feel free to call or text me directly at (555) 555-5555.

If you’ve read this far, I really appreciate it. And if you’re too busy to get back to me, I totally understand.

Best,
[YOUR NAME]
[ROLE]
[COMPANY]

Books

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss
The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building by Matt Mochary
Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step by Edward de Bono
Levels of the Game by John McPhee
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs

Films & TV Shows

People

Companies, Colleges, & Organizations

Concepts & Frameworks

Areas of Responsibility (AOR) List (from The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary)
The Coach / Mentor / Cheerleader Framework
Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month by Tim Ferriss
Framework from Six Thinking Hats
“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” — Jerzy Gregorek
Increasing Your Luck Surface Area by Jason Roberts
Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean Strategy from Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Ruinous Empathy from Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Snyder’s Beats Story Structure from Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder
“Sometimes you need life to save you from what you want.” — Brandon Stanton

Relevant Reading

Michelle Khare Is on the 2025 TIME100 Creators List | Time
How Michelle Khare Has Redefined Content Creation | YouTube Blog
Visit Shreveport-Bossier
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies | American Film Institute
Robert McKee Writes His Own Ending | The New Yorker
This Dangerous Trick Wowed Houdini’s Fans | Smithsonian Magazine
I Think You’re Fat by A.J. Jacobs | Esquire
Peregrine Falcon: The World’s Fastest Animal | Wikipedia

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:00:24] Challenge Accepted: The logline and why breakdowns stay in the edit.
[00:03:05] Growing up in Shreveport, LA: Friday night movies, the AFI Top 100, and interning on Snitch.
[00:06:15] Podcasting: While “easier” than writing books, it’s a heck of a lot more work than meets the ear.
[00:21:24] Quality over quantity: 8–10 episodes a year, scarcity as strategy, and building a defensible moat.
[00:31:47] “Hard choices, easy life.” — Jerzy Gregorek, calling the FAA 300 times, and why no one copies you when the barrier is insanity.
[00:35:32] Dartmouth to Google.org: the Fermi estimation faceplant and not getting the job.
[00:37:10] BuzzFeed as graduate school of the internet.
[00:40:37] Work for someone else first: My case against starting a company right out of school.
[00:47:28] The stolen book: Michelle pulls out a battered 2016 copy of The 4-Hour Workweek and reads her fear-setting chart aloud.
[00:51:10] “I’ve never designed my own rubric of success” — the nightmare, the repair plan, and what Michelle was putting off out of fear.
[00:56:59] Practicing poverty: studio apartment, stripped-down life, moonlighting for a year, then the three-month-savings leap.
[01:06:58] Kebab-shop destiny: meeting stunt coordinator Steve Brown in L.A. — now he does Avatar and straps Michelle to planes.
[01:09:04] Surface area for luck: Bill Gurley, Kevin Kelly’s sleeping bag, and Seneca on voluntary discomfort.
[01:12:44] Coach, mentor, cheerleader: the three-person Formula One team you actually need.
[01:17:20] The art of the cold email — and cold-calling the FBI tip line to meet “The Hollywood Guy.”
[01:21:55] Michelle’s three-paragraph, six-sentence formula for emails that open any door.
[01:26:15] My cold email playbook: the “via” trick, include your damn cell number, and why “Yo, Ferriss” is an auto-archive.
[01:36:24] The fake Tim Ferriss Podcast phishing scam: Zoom calls, screen access, and hijacked Facebook pages.
[01:40:58] Emailing Hank Green, Brandon Sanderson’s unpublished novels, and why your first cold emails are just practice reps.
[01:46:37] Michelle’s storytelling syllabus: Survivor, Snyder’s Save the Cat, and peer review of whatever went viral last week.
[01:48:44] The magic of Jeff Probst, and dissecting the bones of storytelling.
[01:53:12] John McPhee’s red-ink writing class at Princeton.
[01:58:38] Six Thinking Hats broke Michelle’s pessimism; Radical Candor taught her how to give feedback.
[02:07:20] The slinky org chart: Seven full-timers that balloon to 50 for a shoot, then compress right back.
[02:21:21] Scope creep, saying no to big checks, and why Michelle has never hit creator burnout.
[02:30:34] My No Book teaser: 850 pages on renegotiating commitments and getting back on the wagon.
[02:33:31] The Mindy Kaling manifesto: @MindyKalingFan, The Office, and shattering expectations for Indian women in entertainment.
[02:40:38] Wishlist shout-out: Norland College, where Mary Poppins meets Secret Service.
[02:42:48] Episodes Michelle would pay to relive.
[02:47:40] Episodes Michelle would pay to skip.
[02:52:15] Seven marathons, seven continents, one week.
[02:57:10] Free Solo, Alex Honnold in the creepy van, and things both of us would never do.
[03:00:38] Books gifted most: Radical Candor, The Great CEO Within, and Adam Grant’s Originals.
[03:01:21] Michelle’s billboard.
[03:02:45] A primetime Emmy run and parting thoughts.

MICHELLE KHARE QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“My big thesis is: Whatever we do has to be one of one.”
— Michelle Khare

“The more milestone memories you experience, the longer life feels.”
— Michelle Khare

“I have found that defining something unique can be even more valuable than consistency or mass viewership.”
— Michelle Khare

“A lot of the inflection points of my life have happened when my back has been against the wall. Not in a place of ‘I get to make a decision,’ but more like, ‘I have to make a decision because everything’s going to break if I don’t.'”
— Michelle Khare

“I personally believe that a really well-written email can open any door.”
— Michelle Khare

“I think it comes down to having three people on your Formula One team, and it doesn’t need to be fancy. It’s really a coach, a mentor, and a cheerleader.”
— Michelle Khare

“When I hit upload, I feel like, ‘Man, I gave it my all. That is the best story we could have possibly told with the resources available to us, and it is the best version that I, as an artist, could have put forward with the time available to me.’ I need to feel that. Otherwise, I’m not upholding the expectation of our customers, our viewers, and I’m not actually doing what I set out to do when I quit my job to do all of this, and it’s a disservice to myself.”
— Michelle Khare

“I love upending people’s expectations. It’s one of my secret favorite things to do. I love when people hear that I’m a YouTuber and then they go watch Challenge Accepted and are, hopefully, pleasantly surprised by what they see, and wouldn’t expect that maybe from someone on the platform.”
— Michelle Khare

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Want to hear another conversation about building a career you actually love? Listen to my most recent interview with legendary investor Bill Gurley, in which we discussed investing in the AI era, going where the action is, lessons from Bob Dylan and Jerry Seinfeld on finding your calling, building a career through passion rather than a formula, the power of open-source strategies as competitive weapons, and much more.

The post Daredevil Michelle Khare — How to Become a YouTube Superstar, Open Impossible Doors (FBI, Secret Service, etc.), Craft Jedi-Level Cold Emails, and Use Fear-Setting to Change Your Life (#860) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More (#859)

2026-03-27 00:46:23

Please enjoy this transcript of another in-between-isode, with one of my favorite formats: the good old-fashioned Q&A.

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Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More

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

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

Tim Ferriss: All right. Hello, everybody. Thanks for making it. We’ve got lots of questions that were pre-submitted. There’s a lot to cover, and I will begin with saying there are many, many questions about AI. It is certainly the topic of the hour and I would like to provide a few caveats and I’ll do that by leading in with a question. How many of you invested in or even know of, Diamond Rio? Diamond Rio? Anyone? MPMan F10? Come on, now. You guys must remember MPMan F10. These are MP3 players that predated the iPod. And Jobs famously changed it from “speeds and feeds” into “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Also, had the industrial design engineering supply chain wizardry, along with his marketing genius, of course, all to bring to bear on this thing called the iPod, which then produced, you guessed it, some of you wizened, gray-haired folks, but youngsters not realizing iPod leads to podcasting.

Yes. That was the genesis of this podcasting term. And the reason I bring this up is that I do not consider myself a bleeding edge investor or even in a lot of instances, a bleeding edge user. I like to be on the dull edge. And I would say that the iPod is a great example of that because if you looked at some of the technological trend lines, you looked at a few different pieces of hardware that had somewhat de-risked solid-state MP3 players. The timing was right for something to be taken from very, very niche and unwieldy to mainstream. And certainly, we’ve seen that unfold. And I view AI very similarly. And in some respects, it is very amenable to that approach because things are changing so incredibly quickly. If you hated a model three weeks ago, it might do exactly what you need today.

And with all of that, I just want to say I do not view myself as an AI expert. I think if you’re looking for someone who seems to be the Nostradamus of AI, you should read up on Leopold Aschenbrenner. You can look up “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.” It was penned and published online June 2024. And the number of actual hits, predictive hits that Leopold had is staggering. It is just really about as close to clairvoyant as you could possibly be. So Leopold Aschenbrenner, and you check him out, if you’re looking for what’s coming. If you’re looking for what I have observed personally as a muggle, someone who is non-technical, I’m not writing white papers, but I get to watch a very large audience and I have a lot of friends I can lean on, many of whom are technical, I can fill you in. All right. That’s a whole lot of preamble. So let’s hop into it.

All right. First question is from Hugo. “In a world full of tools, systems, and AI, what human abilities or habits are becoming more valuable, not less?” So I’ll try to keep this pretty short. I would say the relational, the tactile, anything IRL, in real life, that can be extended also to, for instance, in my case, informational advantage, offline informational advantage. A lot of the LLMs are slicing and dicing the internet. One might argue all of them are doing that. And whether you are looking at longevity in professional terms, if you’re looking at longevity in creative terms, I think putting on the lens of looking at what you can do in IRL that currently, now that certainly robotics are on the edge of some type of Cambrian explosion, so who knows, maybe it’s iRobot three years from now, but for now, the kind of offline differentiator is a big deal.

And I would say the relational side, certainly the harnessing of awe, wonder, et cetera, nature immersion, which sounds like I’m suggesting everybody disappear off into a commune in the woods or become homesteaders or something. That’s not what I’m saying. But for instance, the fact that I have people I can text for very narrow types of expertise, even though they have the access of a generalist, allows me to have an informational advantage because none of that is online. Conversely, if you’re using ChatGPT or Claude to try to assess a given public company as a good or a bad investment or somewhere in between, you can rest assured that many, many people, perhaps even millions of people have already done this, and therefore you’re going to be reading more or less the same thing as many others. So that’s my stab at that first question. A lot of this is going to boomerang back in future notes. Let me take a sip of my sipping ketones. Excuse me.

This was sent to me by a scientist and he was like, “Mix 10 milliliters into 250 milliliters of water. DO NOT CHUG,” in all caps, written with a marker on this experimental container of ketones. So, we’ll see. If I start seizuring, it’ll make for a great short on social media.

All right. Next question I’m going to take a stab at is, this is from Jeff. “With a pre-throat clearing, not financial advice ‘disclaimer’ already granted to you by virtue of this question, where should a small investor be looking to invest in public markets as AI continues to eat our white collar jobs in the coming months and years?” All right. I know I indirectly already gave the caveat. I am not giving any investment advice because that is a terrible thing to do if you’re not a registered financial advisor and all that stuff. I’m none of those things.

So this is for informational purposes only. Number one, you shouldn’t gamble, and I do kind of view it as gambling, or invest anything you cannot afford to lose completely because AI is moving so incredibly quickly and there’s a lot of whipsaw reactivity in the markets. ChatGPT comes out with something that connects to some type of industry in an oblique way and suddenly six public stocks lose billions and tens of billions of dollars of market cap. There’s a lot of craziness. So as certainly has been said before me, the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So don’t play with anything you’re not willing to lose. There are people talking about what’s been termed halo trades, trying to look for things that are less likely to get disrupted or destroyed, kind of the Warren Buffett approach to non-tech investing by and large, seize candy, railways, et cetera.

But I would say that, initially sparked by conversations with Kevin Rose, and I hesitate to even mention this, but I do think Google is in a very interesting position, Alphabet, the artist formerly known as Google. Alphabet is in an interesting position to, in some respects, kind of own the full stack. Engineers aren’t going to like that I’m using that term, but they have distribution, they have hardware in terms of TPUs. They have incredible, unparalleled access to information. They’ve got Demis Hassabis and DeepMind internally. They’ve got the ability to spin things out like Waymo. There’s just so much going on within Alphabet that I find it very fun and terrifying to take a close look at. And I say that also because it is completely unclear, I would say, how exactly Google compensates for or plans for shifting to some type of ad revenue from AI generated responses or an AI-based, LLM-based platform versus what we use today in the browser, right?

And that’s inevitably going to happen. So the bull case is very exciting for Google and the bear case is also pretty compelling, I would say. But as I’m looking at stuff out there, I tend not to screw around in the public markets. I just don’t feel like I have any advantage whatsoever compared to everybody else who’s fine slicing things. But in conversations with friends and looking at it pretty closely, I do think Alphabet’s pretty interesting. So there you have it. I’m not saying invest in it. You could really lose money and it might be that they lose for a while until they win. It could be they lose completely. So there is that.

Next question’s from David. “What are the top three things you should never use AI for?” I would say any skill you want to preserve in your head, you should probably not use AI for. So I use AI for editing right now. You very quickly end up on a slippery slope. So if I create a rough draft as I did with the self-help trap, for instance, I would then take that, feed it into these models, and give them a personality. You are an editor from The New Yorker. This is your name, right? Maybe it’s a famous editor or the person who worked with Robert Caro, whatever it might be. I mean, that’s, again, not to compare myself to those people, but I want a good editor.

Give me feedback on this rough draft. What the model will do, because I want to keep you using the model, of course, is it will give you all the feedback and then it will say, “Would you like me to incorporate all of these changes and draft a version that uses all these things?” And that’s where I have deliberately hesitated. I’ve also played around with it, and frankly, it’s very good, but therein lies the danger because if you want to preserve your ability to synthesize, and this will tie into questions shortly about creativity, I do think that it makes some sense to exercise caution, and there are already scientists and researchers looking at the negative cognitive impacts of depending on AI, much like your ability to navigate has probably deteriorated since using Google Maps. And I would say net, each individual is more enhanced, augmented using these tools.

But if you do want to keep certain muscles strong and able, that’s where I would hesitate. And look, you can always change your mind later, but if you lose it, it’s a hell of a lot harder to reclaim it. So that’s where I am at the moment.

Oh, CJ. CJ’s question. “Do you, Tim, think AI is capable of creativity in the sense that humans are?” Well, I would argue here, and I’ve read all these books on creativity, I’ve looked at some research, which tends to be pretty soft, I would say. If I were being less generous, hand wavy about creativity or flow. I mean, I feel like a lot of these are poorly defined. So we could even go so far as to say, I don’t think we understand what creativity is in humans, right?

Could machines have the equivalent of the muse visit them? Is there a way to engineer that? When we create these metaphors for ourselves, are we really just using poetry or abstraction to try to verbalize something that’s actually pretty discreet and replicable if you just operate from a sort of bottoms up approach with reinforcement learning and this, that, and the other thing? Maybe. I just don’t know.

The second question that CJ had though is the one that I think is worth not necessarily spending more time on, but I would underline this because I underline it for myself. “As a writer and with the explosion of AI-generated content out there now, how do you rise above the noise?” All right. It’s pretty simple and I will answer that by way of a story. I was spending time, a little bit of time, drinking a Paloma with a very well-known photographer. He is one of the most commercially successful photographers in the world, and he was laughing and telling a story of how he gets approached by photographers.

They could be amateur, but very often they’re professionals who want to know how they can become better photographers and they’re asking all of these gear related questions. And his answer is, just put more interesting stuff in front of the camera, make what’s in front of the camera more interesting. And the equivalent of that, at least for me as a nonfiction writer, is doing interesting things. Go out in the world, do interesting things, or observe interesting things in real life and write about those things, do experiments, et cetera. I mean, there are many ways to skin this cat. It could be, let’s just say, Travels with Charley, amazing book by John Steinbeck, road trip in a makeshift RV with his dog, Charley.

All right. Incredible book. And as it stands right now, I think it’s a ways off that a humanoid robot is going to get into a car with a canine companion, robotic or flesh and bone, and do something like this. Anything that is analysis-based is relegated to the machines at this point. They’re so good. The AI, broadly speaking, LLMs being one manifestation of that, are just too good. They’re so good. And we’ll talk about how I use some of those tools a little bit later. So do interesting things and write about them. That’s the short answer. All right. There are certain questions where I don’t feel like I have good answers or informed answers. I could make up some bullshit and spin a yarn and make something that seems to hold water, but I’m not going to do that. So I’m going to — I apologize if I’m skipping some of your questions, but I don’t want to give you any type of false confidence in my answers.

All right. So this is a question from Maneal. “How are you keeping up with all the new AI tools? Where do you keep your focus? Have you set up OpenClaw, and if so, what’s your workflow?” Okay. So, I am not keeping up with AI developments. People who do this full-time as the C-suite executive teams of the best known companies in the world have trouble keeping up. So I am definitely not keeping up or trying to keep up. I feel like as soon as I’m doing that, I’ve already lost. So, it’s not how do I win the game, it’s choosing the right game, which might sound cliched, but does that mean I’m ignoring everything? No. With something like OpenClaw, due to security concerns, I let friends of mine be the first — elect to be some of the first monkeys shot into space. So I’m going to read from a friend of mine who I texted, right? This is about this question right before we started recording.

All right. So about OpenClaw, he played around with OpenClaw. His name is Chris Hutchins. He’s been on the podcast. He has a podcast called All the Hacks, which he has used to explore some really fascinating stuff. If you’re a points nerd or like travel, it’s a good one. He goes a lot further than that. But one of his episodes is “I Built an AI Assistant That Works While I Sleep,” and he explains what he did with OpenClaw. However, here’s what he texted to me. “In the last week, Claude’s desktop app has shipped a bunch of features that do a lot of what OpenClaw can do in a more user-friendly way, schedule tasks, remote access, et cetera. So that could be a good beginner way to start. But with all AI projects, I suggest going in with a use case.” This is, again, Chris texting, and then he documented his whole journey with building a basic app through OpenClaw, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and leveling up his knowledge each time. We’ll link to that episode in the show notes. You can find it pretty easily.

Here’s what he added to that. “For OpenClaw, I’d say you absolutely don’t need a fancy computer. I ran it on a 2012 Mac mini for the first few weeks, but if you have an old computer and you want to set it up and test it out at home, great, but until you feel confident, one, don’t give it access to things like email, credit cards, et cetera.” And there are some hilariously tragic stories of this gone awry that you can find on your own. Okay, that was my director’s commentary. “Two, don’t install random skills you find on the internet. Three, go to Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera, and get advice about how to set it up securely. Four, every time I’ve gotten stuck, I’ve been able to use Claude Code in the OpenClaw Directory to fix things.” So there you have it. That is by virtue of texting Chris Hutchins, an answer on OpenClaw.

And what I could also do is give some examples of, internally, how we’re using stuff. So I have an employee who is very interested in these tools and I have wanted to encourage that as long as we’re not completely demolishing our own security from the inside out. So he’s played a lot with Claude Code and other things. And I asked him for some use cases that I could share with you. So I will pull those up right now. All right. And this alludes to a term, defines a term that Chris used. All right. So one thing I did — this is my employee. “One thing I did earlier today was build a skill, quote, unquote, “skill,” fancy name for a text file. In this case, inside Claude that will generate the PDF and Word versions of an IO, that’s an insertion order for a podcast sponsor, if I only give it the missing items from the IO, for instance, company name, official company name,” da, da, da, da.

“It fills it out automatically and creates a PDF. It’s a small save in time,” but this is something he repeats a lot, “and there may be a better way to do it, like a template and HelloSign or something.” I also have been working on a project doing a 20-year, roughly 20-year retrospective deep dive and analysis of all my angel investing, right? Are the stories I tell myself about my report card accurate? Are they completely false? Are they somewhere in between, et cetera, et cetera. And for that project, coming back to his text here, it’s been really crazy to just tell it, quote, “Here’s an API key,” and it will figure out how to connect to a given service like Gmail. And if you have an API key for a product, you can easily start using it in Claude as it will simply write itself a script. And one of the wildest things, and this is — I’m paraphrasing here, but it can ingest an absurd amount of data and convert it into something useful, and it can also enrich data in some very interesting ways, right?

So if I’m trying to figure out, okay, via email introductions, who introduced the winners, who introduced the losers, who introduced the zombies that just can’t seem to die after years of struggling, or take off for that matter? And then is there a signal, say, looking at the education levels, the schools, the alma maters of founders? What about single founders versus two founders versus three founders? Things like this. Location, geography, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is there any signal to any of this?

Another example, which might apply to more of you, the Google Calendar integration has also been helpful. In other words, updating a calendar entry from Claude or creating multiple at a time, so using Claude to add calendar entries. Now, in my case, I have a bunch of different calendars and different people on my team add to different calendars. One thing that helps us a lot, and maybe someday I’ll share this. For right now, I’m probably not going to, but I have a document, a Google Doc that is the 10 commandments of my calendar basically, and it’s rules around formatting, what to include, et cetera. Secondary points of contact, cell phones, time zone always indicated in the headline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are lots of different rules, but he can use that or other people on my team can use that to then automatically check calendar entries through Claude Code and fix them as needed.

So some people have joked that The 4-Hour Workweek should be rewritten as The 4-Minute Workweek. I think there’s something to it, and there’s a temptation to do an entire section on use of AI in place of virtual assistants and so on. The problem with that is that as soon as the ink had metaphorically dried on that paper, it would already be out of date, so I’m not going to do that, I don’t think. So there you have it, and the API key is a really important component to all of this.

Also, and I’m sure some of you have figured this out, but with Claude Code, and Chris Hutchins alluded to this as well, for debugging, for instance, we did a website redesign and there was an issue with a form, no idea why, and we wanted to fix it very quickly and we weren’t sure how long it would take for support to get back to us. So he was able to dump all the code at the time into the model and just figured out how to fix it, and there are many, many, many other examples of that. Yeah. And many of these things are not quantum leaps, but they are, much like anything else, just automating little paper cuts so they don’t add up ultimately to a huge gash in your calendar.

Okay. Back to work, Tim Ferriss. All right, let’s look at other things. This is a question from Becky. “What would you say to someone who wants a career jump? Sometimes I feel I get caught in a loop of same pay range, same experiences, same mid-level opportunities. How can I start increasing my income opportunities and skills this year?”

Okay. So I reached out, as I often do, texted a couple of people about this, because this is going to be a huge, huge, mega, mega, meta problem for people moving forward, and it’s going to increasingly, I think, be pervasive. People are going to wonder what they should do next, which then informs upskilling. And there’s a later question so I might as well explore it here related to encodings in the Jim Collins episode, question around encodings. And I might come back to that, but suffice to say, some of these personality tests and things like Enneagram are actually very helpful, and things like StrengthsFinder and so on.

And there are two startups I’m involved with because I recognize just through questions like this from Becky, which are the canary in the coal mine. It’s not really a canary in a coal mine. It’s like there was one whisper, now there are 10, then there were 100, now there are a thousand. This question is coming up more and more, and a lot of folks are going to, in one way or another, need to zig and zag, even though they might not expect it right now, and a lot of that’s going to be due to AI job displacement.

So the two startups that — and again, I mentioned that I’m an investor in these so I’m biased, but the reason that I invested in these is to answer this question, or more specifically, to help people answer this question. So the first one is called Apt, A-P-T, and you can check that out at tryapt.ai. So Tryapt, T-R-Y-A-P-T.ai. I had the co-founder and CEO create a code, so if any of you guys want to try it, ultimately, it does cost money to get all the results and to get this AI-guided mentor around your strengths and so on, which you discover or uncover through the process of going through this. But you can get 50 percent off with TIM50. That’s the code to use. T-I-M-5-0. All right. So if you want to take a look at that, you can check it out.

The other is Oboe, so OBOE.com, and that is entirely focused on accelerating skill acquisition and learning. So I think these two actually go together really well. You could use Apt first and then Oboe, and I’ve played around with both. There’s a lot that’s going to be coming into both of these, but might be worth checking out. Honestly, if I were to tell you to go buy What Color Is My Parachute or something, you might glean something from that, but I feel like in very dynamic times, with so much shifting sand with respect to technology, you probably need something a bit more or benefit from something that is more dynamic and personalized from the get go, as opposed to you having to do lots and lots of heavy lifting with a fixed format. So that’s what I would say, Becky, and definitely let me know what you think, because if something’s broken or if you love something or you hate something, all that stuff can get fixed.

All right, next one. This is from Jeff, and we will do some live questions. These ketones are actually doing something, which is good because it’s 4:00 p.m. and I don’t want to have any caffeine. Yeah, fortunately, it doesn’t taste too much like jet fuel.

All right. Let me do one more. Jeff. Okay, this is the question.

“You’ve worked across books, podcasts, and experiments that each attracted their own communities. What have you learned about proactively shaping a community’s culture, not just growing an audience? And how has direct interaction with people changed the way you enter creative flow today?”

The last piece is probably the hardest answer, but I can tell you that I think that proactively shaping a community’s culture actually helps you to build an audience, but to what end? Not build an audience like, oh, I’m aiming for two million, three million, 10 million YouTube subscribers. I don’t like renting audience in a way that’s dependent on algorithms, and you can look at a lot of the biggest YouTube channels. Their average views per video have cratered, even though they have huge numbers of subscribers. You see that with engagement on X and other places.

However, one thing that never goes out of style is “1,000 True Fans” by Kevin Kelly. You can read it for free at kk.org, and therefore, I will focus on the proactively shaping a community’s culture. In my case, I think it’s pretty simple. I treat a closed community like I would a dinner party at my house. So somebody walks into my house, and this is a shoes free house, because who wants dog shit and bubble gum on your kitchen floor? I don’t, so the shoes come off at the door. So let’s say somebody comes in and they’re like, “No, I’m keeping my boots on.” They come in tracking mud all over the place. They sit down at the dinner table, they kick their feet up on the table and start calling people assholes or something. That person’s going to get dragged by their hair out and then they’re never coming back in.

So that’s a bit of maybe a melodramatic example, but zero tolerance policy for broken windows. Even Malcolm Gladwell and others have written about this, but when these minor infractions are permitted, I’m going to pull out a fancy term that tech people like, the Overton window, the broadness of what is now allowable behavior shift? Or I shouldn’t say shift. It’s a fucking window. It’s not supposed to get wider or shorter, but it moves in a more aggressive behavioral direction. So if you allow minor infractions, you’re going to get moderate infractions. You allow those, you’re going to get major infractions.

So from the very first days of, say, the blog, the comments section has guidelines and it’s like, Remember the Fonzie? We’re going to be cool, like that. If you’re an asshole, we’re going to boot you and blacklist you, and you can criticize me but don’t be a dick to other people, and if you are, you’re gone. It’s zero tolerance and you have to enforce that. If you don’t, people are crafty. They’ll learn how to manipulate you because you are asking to be at least abused by not enforcing your own rules. So that’s the first one. You have to excise the cancers and remove the poison. You just have to, because the default state of pretty much the entire internet now, because it’s been allowed and encouraged through various gamifications on social platforms, is just being loud, obnoxious, awful, so you have to set rules to counterveil that.

Also, and Jeff, I think you’ve experienced this, if you have a private community of a hundred people or 200 people or 50, it doesn’t really matter, and you charge $5 a quarter, $5 a year, it doesn’t really matter, but if you have some very nominal costs, people opt in who generally want to contribute and be in an environment of positivity. That’s my experience generally. So having some very, very nominal fee at the door I think is incredibly helpful, and you find that also with events.

I’ve done plenty of live events, don’t really do them anymore for a lot of reasons, but very, very rarely in the past, I would throw these live events for book launch parties, hundred people, 200. If people can RSVP to an event, your abandonment rate or no show rate is going to be sky-high. If you force them to pay $1 to hold their spot, suddenly the no show rate goes down to low single digits. So I don’t think there’s any rocket science here, but the tough part is being willing to enforce, and maybe you give someone a two strikes or out policy, but frankly, I find that that can metastasize.

For instance, I have a lovely dog. It was a stray two months ago, adopted her, and she’s really smart. She’s part Anatolian Shepherd, it would seem, and if she realizes, for instance, that she can pit me against my partner and that she doesn’t actually have to listen to sit until the third time, she’s not going to listen to the first two. She’ll just stare at you defiantly and then sit the third time. Humans are the same way. They’ll do that too. If they know they have two strikes, you’re going to get more bad behavior because they know they can get away with it once.

All right, so there you go, and let’s go to — we’ve got plenty more questions, but I am going to — let’s go live to some live questions, and I apologize that there’s so much in the chat, so I’m going to have to — oh, yeah, the crown means top fans. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you, top fan. All right, let’s throw out some live questions and I’ll give it a shot. If you already posted one, please post again because I can’t scroll up and go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.

Favorite color? Green, right there. Green, green, green. Specifically, it’s the color of late morning light, like 11:00 a.m. sunlight around August coming through maple leaves. That is the color, the sort of translucent green. All right.

Future of Varlata. Okay, for those who don’t know. Also Coyote. Coyote continues to do really well. I feel like I have done mostly what I can do with Coyote at this point, and it’s in steady state. The reviews on Amazon and elsewhere are great. It continues to sell well through the distribution channels. I wish in retrospect, earlier on, I had really focused on, even though there are plenty of adults who enjoy it, focusing on families that have at least one or two kids in that eight to 15 range, and that would have helped with escape velocity sooner, but hindsight 20/20. I’m really, really happy with how it’s turned out.

And then Varlata, honestly, now that the AI tools are getting good enough, about six months ago, I was planning on creating a movie trailer for effectively a script, I’ve got the whole thing in my head, focused on Tyrolean. If anyone — this is The Legend of Cockpunch. Now I think I will, for obvious reasons, lean towards Legends of Varlata, but focusing on the relationship between Ty and his father and all sorts of craziness that ensues. So I’ve got a whole movie script in my head and concept art that I haven’t really done anything with from some of the top Magic: The Gathering and D&D artists you can imagine, so we’ll see. We’ll see. I could see screwing around with that this summer.

Yes, shout out to Jeff for keeping the CP community humming. Happy to spend some time there as well. All right.

“If I could only pick from the books on the shelves behind you, what book would you want everyone in this group to deep dive into or dive deep into?”

Man, I have those books up there for a reason. I have thousands of books. I’ve donated most of them. These are the ones I keep up for me to look at. Give me a second. I’ll tell you. Okay, great. So I’m going to give answers that may not be satisfying to some folks, but that’s okay. I’ll give you one that I suppose you might expect from me. So one is going to be The Effective Executive from Peter Drucker, classic, old, short, incredible bang for the buck. However, the other books, I would say, again, talking about what you do in a world of AI, do more interesting things. There’s a book back there called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who won, I believe it was the Booker or Pulitzer Prize for another of his books called Arctic Dreams. Of Wolves and Men is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read, and it really shattered the mold. It redefined what, let’s just call it nonfiction nature writing could be. It’s just an incredible, incredible book. So there’s one, but again, this is choose your own adventure, pick and choose.

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, I mentioned it earlier, is hilarious. Also an incredibly accurate and enjoyable, warts and all, ride through the US. What a quirky, weird-ass country. So that’s another one, pretty fast read. And then there are entire shelves back there related to animal tracking and so on, because I’ve done a bunch of that. I don’t think most of you should probably spend a lot of time on that.

If you haven’t read, I’ll simplify the title here, Alice in Wonderland, you should go read Alice in Wonderland. Read the whole thing, not just quotes from it. I have a collector’s edition back there. And then there are a few actually that I was going to mention for one of the questions you guys submitted as an answer. The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch, that just never gets old. It just does not get old, and there’s another book of his up there called Living the 80/20 Principle. It might be Living the 80/20 Way, but he really walks the talk, and if you haven’t heard my podcast with Richard Koch, K-O-C-H, he’s also one of the best investors I’ve ever met. He’s had, I don’t know if he’s disclosed the actual amount, but he is — I know a lot of the world’s best investors and he is quietly way up there in the pantheon. So also a practitioner, he’s on the field, so worth paying attention to him.

All right, Of all the places I’ve traveled to, which have been the most breathtaking? There are so many. Queenstown, New Zealand at the right time of year I think is incredible, but you name it, you name it. I think Upstate New York honestly, The Gunks and that entire region where a lot of The Last of the Mohicans, the book certainly, I don’t know about the filming of the movie, but that takes place in that region. You can put me anywhere. I think so many places are beautiful. Take a couple of drawing classes. That makes things much more beautiful overall, like gesture drawing classes. Get some live nudes, keep it interesting. You may get an obese dude with his schwanz all over the place, so just so you know, it’s not automatically going to be a Victoria’s Secret model, but that’s okay. Can’t win them all.

All right. This is from Hilca. All right. I’ll abbreviate a bit because this was a long question. I’m only going to hit the first part here, but, “I’m a bootstrap founder in Replit’s Race to Revenue flying into San Francisco next week to pitch and network for a few days. If you were in my shoes and wanted to squeeze the maximum long-term leverage out of that short trip, what specific things would you do before, during, and after the event to, one, have the right conversations, and two, turn them into real opportunities rather than just great chats?” Okay. “Bonus, how has your bootstrapped versus VC changed lately for tech software?”

I think it’s just getting cheaper and cheaper to make software, so I think we’re going to see a lot of self-funded startups. Good news, barrier to entry technically, also economically is much lower. Bad news, the barrier to attention and actually getting people to use your stuff has never been higher. So there is that, but I do think that we’re going to see huge self-funded bootstrap companies, assuming that there aren’t just a few gods, AKA, super intelligence AI beasts that eat everything. All right.

But coming back to your question about network, this has also never been more true, I think, in real-life wins. Everything else is too crowded. So there is a talk I gave. I don’t think there’s any video. You don’t need video, frankly, but there was a talk I gave at South by Southwest, we’ll link to this in the show notes, but if you search my name and “How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time,” this will pop up. This is a talk I gave, who knows, seven years ago, 10 years ago at South by Southwest describing exactly what I did at South by Southwest 2007 when I launched The 4-Hour Workweek. And my entire budget for that book for launch and marketing and so on was spent on a few trips to, I think it was Web Summit, maybe something expo, Blog Expo, and then South by Southwest.

And there’s an approach described in that that I think is very, very effective, and it’s still surprising to me no matter how many times I talk about certain things, people just don’t follow it. If I’m like, “Hey…” If I wanted to shill some shitcoin and be like, “It’s going to the moon,” people would buy it immediately. But if I’m like, “Hey, here’s this thing. It actually takes some hard thinking and you need to plan for it, but it’s so much more effective long term than all of this hustle culture bullshit three-card monte that you want to do every day for 10 hours,” it’s like the upfront stuff really matters a lot.

In this case, I really recommend this talk, “How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time.” And that sounds like YouTube clickbait, but it’s actually true. A lot of friends, who are still friends of mine almost 20 years later, came from South by Southwest 2007, and a couple of those events I flew to. These were not just transactional interactions. And there is a way to approach this. You definitely need to study any sessions and attendees beforehand.

The good news is — good news, bad news — is that — have the right conversations? You don’t need to worry about. You have no idea how to have the right conversations. Your goal is to meet people who are hopefully world-class at what they do, simpatico with you, meaning you guys will actually get along. Could be extracurricular interests, side hobbies. It could just be the way the two of you are programmed. And there are other kind of general strategies, like talking to moderators of panels instead of the panelists. Everybody floods the panelists. The moderator gets orphaned. And in many cases, the moderator is just as impressive, and certainly the moderator knows everybody on the panel and lots of people on other panels and everywhere else. So there are a couple of tips in that that I would suggest checking out.

All right. Next question’s from Alex. “My company’s growing quickly. There are a lot of things that I need to be doing to hit escape velocity and be able to hire to manage at the top.” I think that’s manage. It says “mange,” but I assume you don’t want mange. “How do I choose what not to do?”

All right. Well, the good news is we already talked about a couple. So 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch, I would read that. The Effective Executive, absolutely read that, and it’s really going to give you frameworks for better discerning yourself what to do and not do. The other, depending on the scope, current scope and scale of the company and then the ambitions, especially if it’s venture-backed, is to read a book called The High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil, E-L-A-D G-I-L. Arguably, one of the best certainly, angel investors in the last few decades. I mean, his hit rate is absolutely insane. He’s invested in at least 40 unicorns, also a tremendous founder and operator in his own right. You can check him out. Has a pretty wicked biology background on top of everything else. So those are a few that come to mind.

And then maybe last but not least, it’s been a long time since I read it, but The Blue Ocean Strategy, probably worth checking out. Because if you choose to compete in a crowded category, you just have a harder road ahead of you. So creating a category of one in a sense, much like Cirque du Soleil back in the day. I’m expecting you’re not dealing with Eastern European acrobats, but you get the idea.

All right. This is from JC. “When exploring somatic or psychedelic healing spaces, what specific questions or observations do you use to quickly distinguish between a highly competent, grounded practitioner and a narcissistic guru?” Tough. A lot of good actors out there.

The first thing that comes to mind, and obviously with all the usual caveats, these things are powerful, you can definitely destabilize yourself, they’re illegal in most places, et cetera, so don’t break any laws, talk to your doctor, blah, blah, blah, but you could ask practitioners or you could ask someone who’s had two trips and they’re suddenly acting like a messiah proselytizing everybody. You could ask them the same question. But specific to clinicians or practitioners, ask them what types of adverse events they’ve seen. What are the most concerning adverse events that they’ve seen?

A simple way to put that is, how do you handle freakouts? What do you do when somebody really loses their shit? And if their answer is, “People don’t lose their shit. There aren’t any adverse events,” they’re either lying, delusional, or very inexperienced. Maybe all three. Those are not mutually exclusive. So I find that to be a pretty quick, necessary but not sufficient way to use a particular line of questioning to separate seasoned practitioners who are honest from those who are neither of those things.

Of course, do your own homework. I don’t think anyone who’s new to this, and by new, I mean, they have not been doing it more than a decade, ideally multiple decades, makes the fly list for me. It’s just become too goddamn trendy. So I would just say, probably unfairly, but I would be biased towards people who have been doing this since before Michael Pollan’s exceptional book, How to Change Your Mind. That might be the cutoff for before and after.

Let’s go back to live questions.

Yeah, Kumaré. Great documentary. Fred recommended. Everybody should watch Kumaré. K-U-M-A-R-E. I won’t ruin the surprise. Check that out. It’s a great film. I liked it so much that way back in the day, there was a startup called quarterly.co, which sent out boxes of goodies to people who subscribed, and I would hand-curate all these things that I really liked. It was kind of like a 5-Bullet Friday, but on a quarterly basis where you get all my favorite things shipped to you in a box. Very difficult business to make work. But at one point, this also dates me, it tells you how long ago it was, I reached out to the filmmaker who made Kumaré and we figured out a way to make it work that I would ship something like 3,000 USB drives, each of which contain this movie, to my subscribers. That was one of my items that I sent. All right.

All right. Lots of questions about conferences. I don’t have a particular take on conferences these days. I apologize. I’m not tracking it actively. There are always interesting meeting places in person, so I don’t believe that’s outdated. South by Southwest has gotten very large and quite corporate. Doesn’t mean you can’t have interesting interactions, but I would look for the events ideally that are fewer than a thousand people, fewer than 500 even better, if you can.

All right. It’s from Chris. If I “weren’t an author and podcaster, what other careers or industries would you have pursued?” I wanted to be a comic book penciller for ages, and still do. Some, actually, of my art pads right back over there where I love to do live gesture drawings, honestly. It helps me get out of my head. Somebody will be up there, they’ll hold a pose for like 60 seconds at a time and then change, or two minutes or five minutes at a time. You really can’t get in your head. There’s just not enough time for it. So I really, really enjoy that. But I wanted to be a comic book penciller and was an illustrator through a good part of college, helping to pay for expenses, things like that, illustrating books and so on. So the prospects then were not very attractive financially to do that, especially after my extended family paid a fortune on my education. So I shifted gears, but certainly felt a draw towards that.

“What kind of dog is Molly?” Molly is a rescue mutt. She is a Labrador, Bloodhound, and a Pit Bull mix. Then I’m sure there’s a Heinz 57 of other breeds in there.

In terms of training, honestly, I put up some basic training videos on YouTube if you just search my name and dog training, but the books that I have found most helpful are Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. I think everybody should read that. I think the back copy says something like, “Whether you want to stop your cat from jumping on the table, train your dog to do X, or convince your mother-in-law to stop nagging you, the instructions are all the same.” It’s something like that. It’s pretty funny. But Karen Pryor brought clicker training, audible cueing of that type, from marine mammal training, dolphins, orcas, et cetera, to dog training, or at least she’s one of the people responsible for that. Really fantastic book on behavioral change and shaping behavior overall.

And then listen to my podcast with Susan Garrett. Susan Garrett, G-A-R-R-E-T-T, is impressive because she has won, I want to say, I don’t know, five to 10 national dog agility championships, even though she herself is much older than most of the human competitors who have to kind of run alongside their dogs, and she really, really knows her stuff. So those would be, I would say, two places that you can start, two or three places. All right.

All right. Well, very kind comment here. “All of your works hold so many lessons on protection and nourishment, the root of being a father.” I feel that way. Thank you. My friends have been, my closest friends are like, “Yeah, you know what? You’re going to be a great dad.” So that’s part of the reason why I’m headed that way, even though word on the internet is that I’ve self-helped optimized myself into being single and miserable. That’s not true. So all those trolls can suck a dick. It makes me feel like I’m drinking tequila. Beware of those ketones, guys.

All right. More on my thoughts, this is from Cindy, on Enneagram, dating, and business peeps. I think Enneagram, look, it might be tech-friendly astrology, but I’ve seen it used at Shopify. I’ve seen it used at Dropbox. I’ve seen it used by more than one person to meet very good matches in intimate relationships, and I think there’s something to it. I mean, it is a tool. I would say that I try to be as tool-agnostic as possible, but I found the Enneagram, and there are other options, of course, as one good option for identifying your own blind spots for, say, your partner, and this could be someone you work with, a superior, subordinate, colleague, what your likely blind spots are, where you’re likely to be oversensitive, and therefore how you might want to handle things internally, like meetings, decision-making, conflict resolution. And that’s pretty interesting, and it has been tested on a pretty large scale within places like Shopify and Dropbox, unlike many other things.

So I find it interesting and the app that I mentioned earlier, tryapt.ai, code Tim50 for 50 percent off. I don’t get any affiliate kickback or anything. That’s just to save you guys some money. They incorporate the Enneagram, so, pretty interesting. I was telling them, I was like, “Hey, once you figure out this kind of business career mentoring side, you could very easily have a matchmaking capability built into it.” All right.

Quantum computing I find fascinating, amazing, and terrifying in equal measure. I have not done much in the quantum computing world. I have looked at maybe how certain cryptocurrencies are more prepared to be quantum-resistant than others. I’ve looked at stuff like that. I mean, not to mention all of our other fancy passwords that we currently use and security, but I have not really gone super deep. I feel like that’s an area, much like fusion, where you really want to be as technical as possible wading into those waters. I did a podcast with Steve Jurvetson ages ago, who was one of the first investors in D-Wave, but yeah, I mean, people are talking about AI, but man, when quantum actually hits —

And the joke has been with fusion, for instance, that fusion is always 30 years away. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Now, I could be proven wrong, but I also think that’s true with quantum where people are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that shit’s never going to work.” I’m like, “Ah, we’ll see.” Look at Google’s — excuse me. Look at Alphabet’s investments into quantum computing. It does raise some questions. Very interesting and also pretty scary to imagine what post-quantum looks like. All right.

Bear with. This is a good question. “How do you maintain so many friends despite your countercultural ideologies?” My friends and I, I think, have maybe implicitly, and this is maybe survivorship bias, but agreed that as long as you’re civil, you can disagree on all sorts of stuff, and I surround myself with friends who are going to push back. And this includes my oldest friends. This isn’t just like fancy friends that I’ve accumulated since the podcast or anything. This also applies to my oldest friends from high school and college.

So I would also say that most of my friends are pretty adaptable in light of new information, but if some — I don’t spend a lot of time around blowhards who are like, “I’m an X, I’m a Y. I’m a liberal and that person’s a neocon,” or, “I’m a conservative and that person’s a libtard,” or whatever. I don’t hang out with those folks because that, while I recognize that level of simplicity is appealing in a very chaotic, messy world, it’s not particularly an accurate reflection of reality and the gradations in between extremes and it’s certainly not very helpful unless you are playing the political game and that’s just a quiver, an arrow in the quiver that you have to use.

But otherwise, I just stay away from that stuff, which doesn’t mean I don’t — I certainly don’t steer away from controversy, but I ask myself, “Is this…” And this applies to watching news or social media.

And I know I’ve said this before, but I haven’t had any social media apps on my phone for probably three or four years. And the way I feel about the news in The 4-Hour Workweek is probably 10x more intense now in terms of my selective ignorance around mainlining “news.” Because if it’s not relevant to your life and if you are not going to make a decision differently or take action because of it, or maybe avoid action because of it, if there isn’t some kind of follow-up, you don’t need it is my general feeling.

And that’s going to become not just a, maybe, perceived luxury. I’ve been doing this for decades now, and I wouldn’t consider myself ineffective in the world, but it’s going to become a survival imperative. If you want to remain sane, you can’t doomscroll 24/7. There’s no way. You can’t doomscroll even a few hours a day. So I’ve seen some crazy, crazy physiological data from people on and off of social media, like blood tests and mental health assessments and so on, like HAM-D, CAPS-5, all this kind of stuff. It’s not good, guys.

So I’m getting up on my soapbox now, but yeah, and we were talking about that no-asshole rule. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they’re an asshole, but if someone is really throwing sharp elbows for no reason, it’s like they’re out. I very freely have an inflow and outflow of friends. There are certain friends who have remained in the inner sanctum, and I for them too because they reserve the same right, for years and decades and decades now, but it’s like — and people are allowed to have off days, but it’s like if someone has suddenly adopted being an asshole as part of their personality or identity in service of “keeping it real” or something, I don’t have time for that. All right.

Let’s see. Somebody asked about podcast interviewing a female screenwriter. Yeah, sure. Depends on the screenwriter, but was actually reaching out to two female screenwriters not too long ago. Don’t think I heard back. So what are you going to do? But let’s see.

Yes, this is a comment by Tim. “This sounds super simple, but my longest, latest relationships share a common sense of humor. Married for 33 years and that’s foundational. Same goes for oldest and longest-lasting friendships.” Yeah, 100 percent. Humor is just reflective of so many other qualities, and there’s a difference between humor and just like a kind of cynicism, quippy cynicism. I’m not so much into that, but if there’s a fast banter and people also are good at making fun of themselves, not all the time, but in the right dose, it generally bodes well.

What inspired my most recent blog post? @FugacityLabs. This is on “The Self-Help Trap: What I Learned from 20+ Years of ‘Optimizing’ Myself,” optimizing on quotation marks. Might’ve been improving. We split test a bunch of different headlines. But what prompted that is just seeing how, at worst, miserable, at best, constantly anxious or self-doubting so many people are in the self-help, self-development world, and I feel like we are all sitting on a slightly too-warm stovetop of baseline anxiety due to the technological tectonic plates that we’re dealing with, and certainly the kind of algo-driven personalized feeds that will just pour gasoline on your limbic system. And coming back to what we can control, it’s like, okay, sure, I can suggest people delete social media apps off of their phones. Realistically, most people are not going to do that. And there are some upsides. If you have the ability to moderate with these tools, you can stay connected with friends, et cetera, et cetera. Although I become more and more dubious of those defenses.

If people were able to, instead of just looking at screen time by app to see what actual usages, the use cases that they’re spending time on with a given app, I think that would be very illuminating. In any case, in lieu of that, what else can you do? What other levers can you pull? And I think the in-real-life relational component is the lever that makes all other levers easier in a way. So that’s what prompted writing that blog post. All right.

Very nice question. How can we help you, whether here or in the Discord book forum? Just try to be — go first with people, to quote Gabby Reece. I interviewed Gabby with Laird Hamilton, one of the kings of big-wave surfing, and I think her billboard answer was, “Go first. Just smile and say ‘hi’ first. Just do that.” I’d say helping the world to be just one percent brighter in some tiny way. Tip the breeze, like leave a $20 as a tip once a month somewhere. I know that’s not necessarily trivial money for folks, but it’s, like, give somebody an absurd tip. If they’re really good, really kind. Or it doesn’t even — like have a nice tea tip of a $10, right? Something like that. It doesn’t need to be money. You get the idea. All right.

Do I have any news to share about The No Book? Yeah. I’m going to put on my diving goggles and get back into it in the next probably month or two, pretty soon. I have a couple of other things, and I’ll have — I foresee at least one big announcement related to other projects coming up in the next few months, but going back in. Wish me luck.

Let’s see. Okay. Let me think about — this is a question from John. “Still love the 17 questions.” People can find those 17 questions. I think they’re in Tools of Titans, maybe Tribe of Mentors, but also on tim.blog. There’s a PDF with the 17 questions I most often ask myself.

“I’ve got one. A question that I would probably add is some version of ‘What is the most generous interpretation of this?'” I have been trained since a wee little lad to be pretty anger forward, let’s just say, if I were a wine. Very anger-forward. And the way that shows up, there are, to get fancy, myriad ways this shows up. One is that some days I can just feel like the entire world is conspiring to make me annoyed. And obviously that’s not true, right? But if it seems like someone is ripping you off, right? Which does happen. Most of the time, it’s probably just a misunderstanding.

So what’s the most generous interpretation? If you feel like your significant other did something to annoy you, or they always do X, they never do Y, like, okay, well, what’s the most generous interpretation of this? And I’m borrowing this from other people, but I feel like that is a very helpful question. And you could pair that with a bunch of other ones. I think Krista Tippett, great podcaster by the way, but Krista Tippett, one of the OGs, On Being, I believe, is her podcast. And I believe it’s Krista. I might be misattributing, but at least I’m not saying Oscar Wilde or Abe Lincoln that she said, “Anger is pain shown in public,” something like that. So you can apply that to yourself too if you’re a little anger-forward. And that doesn’t mean naval gaze, and you have to do 12 years of therapy to figure it out, but what is the most generous interpretation of this, whatever this might be? I would add that to my questions.

Let’s see. Okay. “If you go to a city and you have two days, what are your go-to activities?” Bicycle tour. Bike tour, for sure. One of the best ways to meet locals, figure out what’s fun that isn’t just a glossy photo posted on Instagram or a super expensive three Michelin star restaurant. Bicycle tour. Also hang out with — you don’t have to actually stay at a hostel, but go talk to the manager of a hostel or somebody who works the front desk and has been there for a couple of years. They’ll have lots of great recommendations.

Okay. Where does accumulating wealth fall on my scale of overall success? Zero. It’s like, look — I mean, a lot of wealthy people make a lot of excuses as to why they need to keep making money like, “Well, I could give money now, but if I compound at such and such, compound on an annual growth rate and da da da, and then I’ll give it away when I’m dead basically, or yada, yada, yada.” I just don’t buy it. Working dogs who have been chasing a rabbit around a track their whole lives in sixth gear get very good at chasing something at sixth gear, so they want to continue doing that.

I’m not holding myself up as some enlightened being. I’ve just had the benefit of seeing so many people crash and burn or just end up with this existential malaise because when they actually pause for a second, if they do pause, and sometimes life forces you to pause with a divorce or medical emergency. They have this maybe sense of hollowness or certainly not a sense of fulfillment. I’ve just seen that so many times. It’s like, “Accumulating wealth, who cares?” It’s just like, how many people can give you the full name of Alexander the Great? It’s like nobody’s going to remember you. Nobody’s going to remember me. Nobody’s going to remember us. It’s okay. It’s totally fine. It’s actually very freeing. It’s like everybody should read, I think it’s Percy Shelley, Ozymandias. I’ll let you guys — yeah, Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias.” Everybody should find this. O-Z-Y-M-A-N-D-I-A-S. So good. Everybody should read “Ozymandias.” All right.

All right, what do I prioritize instead of wealth? Relationships. And this sounds so trite, but it’s like there are people who say that and then you go visit them, and you’re like, “Holy shit, their kids hate them, and they never see their best friends.” Or their “best friends” are constantly a different roster because, as Arthur Brooks would put it, “They’re deal friends, not real friends,” right?

But I mean, the past year review really helps to make this point for me over and over again. And if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, just search my name and “past year review.” But thinking about it’s like, okay, who are the 10 most important people in your life? Did you spend as much time as you would like to spend with them last year? If the answer’s no, invest in those 10 before you invest in anyone else, right? And track the results. Then you look back, and look at the number of peak positive experiences, energetically, emotionally, whatever it is, over that quarter, that year. It’s not something you have to do all the time. And you’re like, “Oh, yeah, doubling down on those 10 really made my year so much better. Blocking out time with those people in advance made it so much better. Okay, let’s do more of that.” So yeah, that’s about it. Yeah. It might have been Tara Brach who talked about the angers, fear on the outside. Who knows? Some smart person who’s a lot chiller than I am said that.

All right, David, here we go. “As a soon-to-be father, I’m thinking a lot about parenthood. If you started a family, what would be the top three values or lessons you’d hope to instill in your children?”

I have thought about this a lot and I’ve been able to watch what has worked and what has not worked. I think optimism, resourcefulness, and lots of physical activity. Lots of physical activity. You got to run that dog. A tired dog is a happy dog. So yeah, optimism. I think Mike Maples Jr. was the first person who really underscored this. He has a bunch of kids who have turned out well. Optimism’s kind of number one. It’s like the mother quality that enables all else.

Resourcefulness, I would say, I think Maya Angelou actually said courage is sort of the mother quality because everything else at its breaking point depends on it. So I had something which is like no failure only feedback. Just encouraging them to try stuff. Positive reinforcement. Try stuff, try stuff. I mean, this applies to dog training too, but some of my friends who have never had dogs get all pissed off and get their knickers in a twist when I compare kids to dogs. I know they’re not the same, but you know what? Shaping behavior is pretty similar across mammals. Anyway, optimism, courage/try a bunch of shit, it’s fine. It’s just feedback. And then resourcefulness. And I think if you have optimism and you’re willing to try a bunch of stuff, AKA, use courage in certain ways, then I think resourcefulness is a byproduct of that. So those would be the things I would focus on, and lots and lots and lots and lots of physical activity, together as a family, right?

Okay. Let’s see. Rachel, “Thought I’d throw out an odd question this time. Have you ever been on a treasure hunt or geocache? What’s the weirdest, coolest, most unexpected thing you’ve found out in the wilderness? Could be something natural or unnatural.”

Well, a black bear stole a leg from my elk last year. That was pretty annoying. And we found it chewed into all sorts of mangled contortions. That was a bummer. I don’t want to have sloppy seconds after a bear has gotten into your elk leg, just pro-tip. I’ve been on treasure hunts and geo cashes.

I would say the thing that comes to mind, which is somewhat unrelated to your question, is that if people are like, “What’s the most interesting way you’ve lost money?” Because I do get my face ripped off then and again, part of the early stage investing game. I invested in treasure hunters, very famous treasure hunters who were searching for sunken Spanish galleons full of gold bars and all sorts of stuff. And ultimately, one of the people involved just absconded with all of the investor money, and it turned into this like, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? fucking debacle, but makes for a story. So once again, don’t bet money you cannot afford to lose, especially when it involves Spanish galleons.

Oh, good lordy, lordy, lordy. Let’s see. This is coming back to encoding. Cindy. “You and Jim Collins talked about encoding.” This is a term that Jim uses, which is somewhat comparable to strengths, like what are your innate strengths, right? So we spoke about that. “I’d love if you’d go deeper on the topic, share more about how it resonated with you personally and give additional practical advice on how people currently locked into work or career situations can progress with a plan towards living fully within their encoded selves.”

I find that asking your best friends, could be family members, could also be employees. 360 reviews can be very brutal. You can listen to my conversation with Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb about how brutal that can be. It doesn’t have to be brutal, though. I would say that a couple of questions come up that I have asked close friends, some of my best friends, people who know me really well. When have you seen me at my best, or when do you see me at my best? But it’s good to have practical examples or concrete examples from the past, not just like, “When you tend to do this, you tend to do that.” It’s like, “No, give me an example. When have you seen me at my best? When have you seen me at my worst? What stories or memories come to mind?” Then, “What is easier for me than for other people? What do you see in me that I find easier than most people?”

Jim didn’t like that question, because he wanted it all to be internally, individually referenced, but this is how I do it. I actually do find that aspect helpful, because then you’re not only finding strengths, you’re finding strengths that allow you to potentially compete. And I just like having both, if I can. And then you could ask you to what — this is very closely related to the last one, but, “What strength or ability do I discount in myself?”

There’s certain things. A friend of mine was making a point about something related to startups recently. And I was like, “Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t strike me as particularly special because A, B, and C.” And he’s like, “That’s the problem.” He’s like, “You can’t see it because you’re the fish swimming in the water.” And I was like, “Huh, okay.” And then I bounced it off a few other people, and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s like a fucking weird superpower of yours, and I don’t understand it.” And I was like, “Oh, never really realized.” So, “What strengths or ability do I discount on myself?” This is you using that question for somebody else, or not harness, right? It could be discounting, could just be like, “What strength or ability am I not using that I have?”

And one question that can infer a lot of the answers to these others also is if I weren’t doing X, whatever your current gig is, like, “What could you see me doing?” Right? And I feel like if you ask enough people who know you well enough and who aren’t going to bullshit you, who will also be willing to answer questions about your weaknesses, right? In other words, example given, “When have you seen me at my worst?” If they can’t answer that, they’re not going to give you fully candid advice. So I would say those are a few of the approaches that I’ve used, and I’ve found them very helpful.

Geocaching. A lot of people here into geocaching. Yeah, I mean, sure, it’d be fun. I’ve also dreamed about doing orienteering courses, which I think could be super, super fascinating.

This is the last question. I think it’s a good one to end on. “Is courage external or internal? How do you teach it to kids?”

I think courage is learned. You have to practice it. And if you’re not afraid, it’s not courage, right? If someone’s fearless, they’re, by definition, not using courage. You have to be afraid of something. So you can edge yourself, and you can edge kids into that, right? It’s not like, “Hey, you’ve never been in the water before. Let’s take you up to do cliff diving.” It’s like, no, no. Yeah. I mean, that’s unhelpful fear with severe consequences. It’s like you can stare-step into it.

But I don’t think courage is a decision. I don’t think courage is something you get from reading a book. I don’t think courage is something that you can develop abstractly. I think you have to prove to yourself that you have it, and the only way your subconscious will believe it is if you are actually doing things that are uncomfortable. That’s it, which means it is learnable.

And there may be some set point that contributes to it in one way or another, right? If you’re Alex Honnold, and your amygdala is basically asleep, it’s like, “Okay, well, right, that explains a few things.” But it’s also something that you can very sequentially sort of expose yourself to, just like you would to build a tan or to get stronger in the gym. I think it’s through action, right? It’s like progressive resistance that you develop courage, and it’s very — I’ve seen my friends do this with their kids and this is also why the physical activity is very, very helpful to prove to kids, or help them prove to themselves that they can do hard things, right? Like, okay, sure. You could wait until they can sit down with calculus and try to figure that out. Or you could be like, “Yeah, that thing that you’re nervous about doing,” like hitting a baseball, climbing a whatever, 5’9″ in an indoor climbing gym. “Yeah, okay. Well, let’s get after it.”

All right. I will stop there guys. I appreciate, somebody asked, “When is Alex Honnold coming on the podcast?” I had him on about six months before he free soloed El Cap. So if you want to listen to Alex Honnold before he got media-polished, my podcast is a good way to start. Great guy, but it was before he got polished for prime time. And that’s about it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, appreciate you taking the time, and thanks for all the great questions. And be safe out there. Be just a bit kinder than is necessary. To others, yes, but to yourself also. Go first. Smile. Say, “Hi.” Thanks, everybody.

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

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More (#859) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More (#859)

2026-03-26 21:20:07

Welcome back to another in-between-isode, with one of my favorite formats: the good old-fashioned Q&A.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

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

Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More

Additional podcast platforms

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

Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Books

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez
Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People by Elad Gil
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper
Living the 80/20 Way: Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More by Richard Koch
Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss
What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles

Poetry

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Essays & Articles

The Creativity Elixir: Is Genius on Demand Possible? by Tim Ferriss
Past Year Review by Tim Ferriss
The Self-Help Trap by Tim Ferriss
17 Questions That Changed My Life by Tim Ferriss
Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead by Leopold Aschenbrenner
1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
The Diamond Rio PMP300: Can This Classic 18-Year-Old MP3 Player Still Cut It? | Ars Technica
How Steve Jobs’ Messaging Changed the World | What’s Your Message?
Audible Revolution: Why Online Radio Is Booming | The Guardian
Investors Are Piling into the ‘HALO’ Trade: Here’s What That Means and What They’re Buying | Investopedia
Alphabet Stock: Is It Time to Buy the Dip? | The Motley Fool
GPS Stole Our Sense of Direction. AI Is Coming for Our Sense of Self. | TheHumanist.com
Use Google Workspace Connectors | Claude Help Center
This Is the Way to Use Claude Code for Debugging | r/ClaudeAI
Malcolm Gladwell on Criticism, Tolerance, and Changing Your Mind | The Marginalian
Why the Enneagram Personality System Is Being Used by Top Tech CEOs and How It Can Help You by James Brett | Medium
The Timelines: When Can We Expect Useful Quantum Computers? | Introduction to Quantum Computing for Business
Krista Tippett: “Anger Is Often What Pain Looks Like When It Shows Itself in Public.” | Twitter
Maya Angelou: Courage Is the Most Important Virtue | Big Think

Films & Documentaries

Free Solo (2018)
Kumaré (2011)
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

People

Breathtaking Places

Tools, Apps, & AI

Startups & Companies

Podcasts, Talks, & Instructional Videos

All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins
Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #692
Assessing Risk and Living Without a Rope — Lessons from Alex Honnold | The Tim Ferriss Show #160
Chris Hutchins, Deal Master — Helping Tim Burn 15M+ Miles and Points, Flipping Costco Gold Into Five-Star Trips, Flying to Japan for $222, Tech Tools and Tricks, and Avoiding The Optimizer’s Curse | The Tim Ferriss Show #815
Dog Tips and Training with Molly by Tim Ferriss
Guy Laliberté, Founder of Cirque du Soleil — The Power of Belief, Street Gangs, Wild Tales from Las Vegas, The Dangers of Nurturing Fear, and Dancing on the Cliff | The Tim Ferriss Show #700
How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time by Tim Ferriss at South by Southwest
I Built an AI Assistant That Works While I Sleep | All the Hacks
Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck | The Tim Ferriss Show #856
Joe Gebbia — Co-Founder of Airbnb | The Tim Ferriss Show #301
Laird Hamilton, the King of Big-Wave Surfing (Plus: Gabrielle Reece and Brian MacKenzie) | The Tim Ferriss Show #89
On Being by Krista Tippett
Richard Koch on Mastering the 80/20 Principle, Achieving Unreasonable Success, and the Art of Gambling | The Tim Ferriss Show #466
Richard Koch — Revisiting the 80/20 Principle, The Power of Optimistic Journaling, Studying History to Improve Investing, and The Grand Beliefs of Winners (Plus: The Toxic Beliefs of Losers) | The Tim Ferriss Show #680
Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures | The Tim Ferriss Show #317
Susan Garrett — Master Dog (and Human) Trainer | The Tim Ferriss Show #200

Frameworks & Concepts

Games

Relevant Resources

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:02:12] Why I tend to choose the dull edge over the bleeding edge of tech.
[00:04:27] Leopold Aschenbrenner: The closest thing to an AI Nostradamus.
[00:05:32] What humans still do better than AI.
[00:07:55] The bull and bear case for Alphabet.
[00:11:30] Three things for which you should never use AI.
[00:16:05] Can AI be as creative as humans?
[00:17:01] Rising above the AI content flood.
[00:19:19] Chris Hutchins on optimizing workflow with OpenClaw and Claude Code.
[00:22:02] AI under the hood at Team Ferriss
[00:26:37] Making career jumps in the age of AI displacement.
[00:30:20] Cultivating a respectful community of 1,000 True Fans
[00:34:49] Dog training as community management.
[00:36:03] My favorite color
[00:36:21] Coyote’s steady state and the future of Cockpunch/Varlata.
[00:38:03] Essential reading from my own bookshelf.
[00:40:48] Most breathtaking places I’ve visited.
[00:41:44] Optimizing time and networking effectively at conferences.
[00:47:34] Choosing what not to do when your company’s growing quickly.
[00:49:12] Psychedelic practitioner red flags (and why you should watch Kumaré).
[00:52:35] The career I’m pursuing in an alternative universe.
[00:53:29] Dog training the right way with Molly the rescue mutt and Susan Garrett.
[00:55:28] Thoughts on Enneagram for matchmaking.
[00:57:02] Quantum computing: Fascinating, terrifying, and probably not 30 years away anymore.
[00:58:18] Maintaining friendships across ideological lines.
[00:59:49] The compounding upsides to selective ignorance.
[01:02:04] In-common humor: The glue that binds the most resilient relationships.
[01:02:36] The inspiration behind my blog post about 20+ years of “optimizing.”
[01:04:28] Simple ways to make the world shine brighter.
[01:05:16] The No Book.
[01:05:37] The 18th question: “What is the most generous interpretation of this?”
[01:07:42] The best way I’ve found to experience a new city with limited time.
[01:08:18] How “Ozymandias” informs the priority I place on wealth accumulation.
[01:09:59] Relationships over riches.
[01:11:16] What I consider the top three values for kids: Optimism, resourcefulness, physical activity.
[01:13:04] Weirdness in the wilderness and succumbing to a shipwreck scam.
[01:14:21] Ask your best friends when they’ve seen you at your best — and what superpower you’re blind to.
[01:17:33] Is courage internal or external? Can it be learned?
[01:19:27] Parting thoughts.

This episode is brought to you by Our Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro! Many nonstick pans can release harmful “forever chemicals”—PFAS—into your food, your home, and, ultimately, your body. Exposure to PFAS has been linked to major health issues like gut microbiome disruption, testosterone dysregulation, and more, which have been correlated to chronic disease in the long term. This is why I use the Titanium Always Pan Pro from today’s sponsor, Our Place. It’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating. This means zero “forever chemicals” and durability that will last a lifetime. Our Place is having their biggest sale of the season! Save between 10% and 40% sitewide now through April 12th. Head to FromOurPlace.com/Tim to see why more than a million people have made the switch to Our Place kitchenware. And with their 100-day, risk-free trial and free returns, you can shop with total confidence.

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Want to hear my case for being a world-class learner over a specialist? In the last Q&A, I shared my AI workflow for research, my current supplement protocol, lessons learned recovering from surgery, why I’ve changed my mind about intermittent fasting, Austin vs. San Francisco for startups, philanthropy insights, the origin story of this podcast, and much more.

The post Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More (#859) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858)

2026-03-19 13:51:30

Please enjoy this transcript of another wide-ranging Random Show episode, recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose! We cover our recent Zen meditation retreat with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, the fascinating science of vagus nerve stimulation, my recent back pain breakthrough, balance-training tools, tendon-strengthening protocols from Swedish rock climber Emil Abrahamsson, the emerging research on photobiomodulation, urolithin A supplementation, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol for cognitive longevity, podcast recommendations, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird feeder obsession, and much more.

Kevin’s full bio

Legal conditions/copyright information

The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip Strength Tools, and More

Additional podcast platforms

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

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

Kevin Rose: Okay, ready?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wait, wait. So we’re rolling?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, we’re rolling.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: Three, two, one.

[CHIME]

It feels, actually, really good.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like my bowl is a little smaller than yours.

Kevin Rose: That’s always been the case.

Tim Ferriss: You want to kick it off?

Kevin Rose: Hello, friends and family, colleagues. That was amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Very prominent ejaculation projection show.

Kevin Rose: Welcome to The Random Show.

Tim Ferriss: Welcome, folks, to another episode of The Random Show.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Couch audition edition.

Kevin Rose: That’s right. ADU back-of-my-place edition.

Tim Ferriss: Why do we have these fancy bowls?

Kevin Rose: So this is —

Tim Ferriss: For people not looking, these are meditation bowls.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Got a bunch of script. Presumably that’s Tibetan or Sanskrit or something.

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And you have a little corner, but that’s not the bad corner. That’s the Zen corner.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is Zen corner. Would you say bad corner?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you don’t need to put kids in the bad corner.

Kevin Rose: Did you used to have to do that as a kid?

Tim Ferriss: In school, I got sent to the bad table all the time.

Kevin Rose: Oh, there was a table.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. And then the teacher in kindergarten sent me to the bad table with a bunch of other kids who were really bad, and then forgot that she had decided it was the bad table and just left us at the bad table for the entire year.

Kevin Rose: And so she —

Tim Ferriss: It might explain a lot of psychological issues —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — that I’ve carried with me.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So this is not the bad table. This is the meditation area. And I have bowls over here that I just use. I just like the sound of a good — I mean, you heard that. Hopefully, it came through and didn’t distort the mic, but a well-rung bowl — it sets the tone for the beginning of the meditation and then also at the very end.

Tim Ferriss: It’s also just perfect for a podcast in Southern California.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Nice to be in person.

Kevin Rose: It plays well in the whole, yes, SoCal environment. There’s bowls per capita out here and crystal shops are very high.

Tim Ferriss: High density. High density, man.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Another beautiful day in SoCal.

Kevin Rose: Beautiful day.

Tim Ferriss: Been doing a lot of walking. Where should we start off with? We’ve got tons.

Kevin Rose: We just came back from our retreat.

Tim Ferriss: We did. We did. You want to describe the format?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we’ve done a couple of these retreats. This is the second one where it’s just a small group of people that are interested in meditation and that want to go a little bit deeper in the world of Zen. You and I both talked about The Way and Henry Shukman a ton. The Way being his app. And Henry’s just a great leader, great Zen master. And it was accompanied by Valerie, another Zen master.

Tim Ferriss: This is in Mountain Cloud.

Kevin Rose: Mountain Cloud Zen Center.

Tim Ferriss: Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we flew out there, small group, got together. And it’s kind of like if a proper Zen retreat is like 5:30 cushion in the morning and then you’re off at 7:00 p.m. and it’s hardcore, like no talking, shitty food. This was not that. We had a good chef that was there and we were allowed to ask questions in between sits. The sits were purposely time bound to call it maximum of 25 minutes and then a walking meditation, then another 25 minutes that was like the max.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me interject just so we don’t get into hyper bougie territory too fast. So the chef was not our chef. He’s actually, as I remember, this is a former, I think, James Beard award winner who decided to forego the accolades and the attention.

Kevin Rose: How is that less bougie than what I was going to say?

Tim Ferriss: Well, you said we had a nice chef and people might assume that we’re bringing in a chef. This is a chef who actually —

Kevin Rose: He lives there locally.

Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s the point I’m making. He lives at the Zen Center and has chosen a life of simplicity working with local ingredients and so on. And he is also normally there. It’s not like we had our own dedicated —

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: — chef.

Kevin Rose: That’s right. That’s one of the things.

Tim Ferriss: That’s not in my house. I ate venison jerky sticks most of the time. Lentils out of a can still stick.

Kevin Rose: And you chugged my freaking ketones about five minutes ago. Tim just goes to my fridge and he’s like, “Okay, what are you up to?”

Tim Ferriss: I want to see what Kevin’s up to. I want to see the evidence.

Kevin Rose: Okay, we’ve got a little something gluten here. We got some Repatha.

Tim Ferriss: A little Repatha, what else do you have?

Kevin Rose: He’s like, “Oh, ketones.” And he starts chucking my ketone esters.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I unwrapped it and I was like, “I probably should ask if I can drink this, but I’m guessing this has been in there for weeks.”

Kevin Rose: Dude, that stuff that you drank is like — so they make several versions of that. That’s like the full on — F16 isn’t the latest fighter jet. Whatever the Gen 5 fighter jet is, F22.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the highest intensity. This is the deltaG brand ketone monoester, which is BHB, which is kind of what you want, bound with something called 1,3-butanediol, which I will say if you see that on the ingredient list of your supplement for exogenous ketones, treat it like a shot of tequila. You really want to use it in moderation. There’s mounting evidence that it’s pretty unhealthy for your liver. So just use in moderation in terms of ketone supplementation. But hey, right before a podcast —

Kevin Rose: By the way, I’m —

Tim Ferriss: — it’s a great time for me to take like 15 grams. I will not do 30 because, and I talked to you, she’ll probably come up again, our mutual friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick about this. I don’t think I’m talking out of school here, but when you take, when I take, and this is true for her as well, and I suspect other people, the full 30, the entire shot, rather than decreasing anxiety, it actually, for me, spikes it. And I think that could be related to a very rapid rise and then trough afterwards. But who knows? The point is, keep it moderate.

Kevin Rose: You’re the first person to tell me that it impacts liver function. And I have more often than not had elevated liver enzymes, surprise surprise on the whole drinking front typically, but it’s something I watch. And when did you hear about that? Because I’d never heard that could be the case with ketones.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I, fortunately, by virtue of doing the podcast and also being incredibly interested in science, interact with a lot of researchers, so I get to have chats with them once I get to know them better about pre-publication data. Studies that are underway, and they never want to talk about them publicly because you have to check all the boxes, and science is also very much about not fooling yourself when you make a certain hypothesis. But the first whispers of this were from, and still are, from animal models, where you can basically dose mice with 1,3-butanediol and give them the equivalent of fatty liver disease.

Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not good. And I’m sure I’m oversimplifying that.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: The point is treat it like ethanol. Treat it like not even tequila, moonshine, like you’re drinking moonshine and you wouldn’t want to do that every day.

Kevin Rose: It tastes like moonshine.

Tim Ferriss: Or cough syrup. Cough syrup moonshine.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that is just to say, I think they still think there’s a time and a place for it. I’ve been experimenting with other versions like ketone salts, Dominic D’Agostino. He’s also the co-author in some of the papers that are describing this.

Kevin Rose: He tried bath salts for a while too. That was a very odd version of Tim that came out.

Tim Ferriss: If it’s good for McAfee.

Kevin Rose: Just eating the flesh off of us.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Eating people and eating —

Kevin Rose: Wasn’t that a thing that happens?

Tim Ferriss: — in the median in Florida. It’s always a Florida man.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So Florida man, duh-duh-duh. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Eats another person. Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Shooting someone’s face off after bath salts. Stay away from bath salts, kids. So yeah, I came in nice and fully loaded today.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Awesome. Well, I am glad that you’re feeling better because you also might not have made today.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a sidebar. I may have had a glancing blow of eggplant to which I’m deathly allergic and woke up in the middle of the night, incredibly sick last night. So I’m glad I’m here.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I brought my EpiPen for dinner later.

Kevin Rose: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Learned my lesson. Bring your backup.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the retreat, let’s finish that off real quick.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: So we got together. What did you learn this time around? Because we’ve done this twice. You’ve dabbled in the world of Zen. You’ve always said, correct me if I’m wrong, but meditation’s been a hard thing for you typically. Where are you now with your practice?

Tim Ferriss: Well, what I would say is, first thing, speaking as a very much still a novice on any level, I would say that meditation is like sports or exercise. “Do you like exercise?” Well, what kind of exercise? Meditation, there’s so many different ways to meditate or explore mindfulness. There’s the Vipassana approach. There’s Transcendental Meditation. There’s Zen, which is very much its own thing, and you know more about that than I do.

But what I do find helpful about the retreats is you can describe what is going on when you’re sitting still with your eyes closed, trying to focus on something, in the case of, say, the breath, or trying to just observe whatever that comes up. And the feedback that you get from someone like Henry or Valerie, where you can do a 25-minute sit and then take a short break, talk about it, and they can say, “Well, given that you experienced this, this, maybe you had restlessness. Maybe you had, in my case, this sort of planning compulsion.” So rather than memories or fantasies about who knows what, not necessarily people can run wild with that, but I default to plans, like things I need to do.

And it’s like, okay, well, if that’s coming up, then Henry might say, “Why don’t you try in the next sit, which we’re going to do in 10 minutes or five minutes, A, B, or C?” And then you do it and you provide feedback. And so you’re able to really polish the stone moving forward. And similar, I suppose, to a lot of what we might call transcendental experiences, which sounds fancy, but it’s really just perhaps not fixating on the self or interrogating what this thing is that we call the self, which you can do through meditation. You can also do it with, or maybe you’re forced to do it in some cases with psychedelic experiences or other things, breath work.

When I was there at the retreat, you might remember this, I was getting very frustrated and I was like, “Where’s all this frustration coming from?” And while I was there, I was like, “I don’t know how much I’m getting out of this right now.” But when I got back to “real life” in Austin, I had like three to five days of this just kind of blissful, calm attention where I was able to get everything done. I need to get it done. There was no rushing, there was no looping in any kind of future tripping. And I was like, “Well, that’s very interesting.”

And it also holds true for, say, breath work, psychedelics. There are many different things that you could look at. And interestingly, maybe this is one way to think of it. I mean, in a sense, there are a lot of parallels between different methods for entering what people might consider a trance state. And I don’t think meditation is exempt from that, depending on what it is. But if it’s a concentration practice, it’s like for sure, you’re using a mantra or you’re using something you’re repeating in the case of TM in the same way that you might use rhythmic drumming and you can go some pretty weird places and then you come out of it, you’re like, “I don’t know what to make of that. “

And sometimes the payoff is what you notice in the next unfolding week or two or three or whatever the duration might be.

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: So that was very invigorating for me. And also Henry at one point used a prompt in response to, I’ll give a great — this is a real world example of something that happened to me, something I experienced in a sit and then Henry’s response, right? So I use The Way all the time, full disclosure, we’re both involved with it. I mean, it’s really because —

Kevin Rose: Henry’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: — more than anything else, it’s just I think it’s good for humanity and people to learn from somebody who is really deliberate about layering on progressive skills that you can take outside of the meditation. But one of the practices is labeling. So if, and there are a million different ways to do this, but let’s just say talk comes up in the mind and you label it radio or talking. And then if some kind of video comes up in the mind, images, you’re imagining something or planning something or remembering something, “okay, that’s video” and so on and so forth.

But for me, as someone with very well-established OCD, I can just end up being like, radio, radio, radio, video, radio, radio, radio. And it turns into, instead of a helpful thing, a very interruptive, stressful thing. And at that point in the retreat, clear — it was three to four days, something like that. It was very short. Henry said, “Okay,” well, he moved into the next sit and he said, “Just be still. Just be still. That’s it. That is the focus. Just sit still.” Did that for two consecutive sits. I just focused on that and it was remarkable how much everything calmed down. I was like, “Okay.”

Well, just like exercise, some people, sure, can go to the gym and do full sprinting workouts on an incline treadmill. Not everybody can do that. And other folks are well-suited to yoga. Some people are well-suited to different types of lifting, et cetera. And everybody should probably spend a little bit of time in each of those compartments if they can, but it’s not like everyone is equally suited, for instance, in my case, to the open monitoring stuff, like, well, just sit there and notice all the things that come up.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I came out of the retreat thinking, you know what? Something along the lines of Transcendental Meditation, not necessarily with that branding, but using a koan, using “Just be still” as a concentration practice that I repeat really gives me a lot of payoff. If I just sit still for 10 to 20 minutes, twice a day — did I tell you my theory on this?

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: So one of my theories, because I’ve been going super deep on bioelectric medicine and different ways of using electricity in place of pills, basically, and medications, which I think is really the next frontier in a million different ways. People check out Michael Levin at Tufts and some of the crazy stuff he’s able to do. But related to meditation, I did this deep dive with someone named Kevin Tracey, who’s a very credible scientist, very widely cited, helped discover and explore a lot related to TNF alpha and all sorts of things.

And he is incredibly knowledgeable of vagus nerve stimulation, not the bogus bullshit kind, which is 99.9 percent of what you see on the internet, but using, say, implants the size of an omega-3 capsule in the neck, which is where the vagus nerves run. It’s really like two transcontinental cables running down either side of the neck. Each one has about 100,000 fibers. And if you put an implant in that’s giving continuous stimulation on and off, on and off, it’s not 24/7, it’s incredibly effective for things like rheumatoid arthritis. And actually it was FDA approved. It was on the cover of The New York Times —

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: — the day that I interviewed him. And that raises the question, how? Why? What’s going on? And it just so happens when you stimulate the vagus nerve, you activate something called the inflammatory reflex and you can in effect prevent damaging cytokine storms, decrease systemic inflammation of all different types. That word inflammation is kind of an umbrella term for a million different things.

And I remember chatting with one of my friends who’s a professor, he was using the 10% Happier app by Dan Harris, and he was meditating twice a day. And then after like one or two weeks, he’s like all of his aches, which were debilitating. He had a lot of musculoskeletal issues. They just went away. And one way people might try to explain that as like, “Well, you’re becoming more present to your feelings and maybe it was psychosomatic.” But I think it might actually be when you sit still and you inherently end up breathing rhythmically, because you can also stimulate your vagus nerve with say box breathing and other things, that you do that twice a day. If you were to use an implant or let’s just say either ear-based or neck-based stimulation of the vagus nerve, guess how long it lasts? Roughly 12 hours. So you do it twice a day, you’re getting full coverage.

Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.

Tim Ferriss: And so if you’re getting full coverage, and there’s a lot more to it, I won’t dig too deep right now. If you’re getting twice a day, vagus nerve stimulation from sitting and focusing on breathing, even if you don’t realize that you’re entraining your breathing, I think that might have explanatory power for some of the benefits people see from meditation.

Kevin Rose: That’s fascinating. So I bought one of the vagus nerve stimulators that hooks onto my ear. Have you seen that one? And you feel that this little tiny pulse of current that’s happening.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So people who are not watching this may have trouble envisioning this, but I’m actually in communication with a couple of scientists in Scandinavia. I don’t want to dox this guy because I don’t think he’s public with it yet, but there are two ways currently, non-invasively, to stimulate the vagus nerve that are commonly known. One is the neck where you really press some type of device. There are a number of them out there, mostly used for migraines or cluster headaches, and it’s pretty unpleasant. You stimulate the neck and it actuates superficial muscles in your face and it pulls your face down. And I used one of those for probably four to six weeks. Didn’t see any systemic benefits.

A friend of mine doubled his HRV using one of those devices. He had some, I’m not going to call it PTSD, but he had some overactive sympathetic drive and the vagus nerve stimulation is associated with the rest and digest parasympathetic.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Which is also why right now I stimulate it before bed, five minutes twice a day.

Kevin Rose: I know you do.

Tim Ferriss: For the ear — Jesus Christ.

Kevin Rose: No, I’m talking about the device.

Tim Ferriss: For the ear, there’s something called the cymba concha. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And people can see most of the research —

Kevin Rose: This little bit right here?

Tim Ferriss: Most right here.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And you can look this up online. You kind of want the portion of the cymba concha that is closer to your sideburns, let’s say.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And then you need another piece that is grounding and/or completing the circuit, and that’s got to be touching your skin. The contact point is incredibly important.

Kevin Rose: Are there any of these that you like that are consumer available? Because a lot of this stuff you mentioned —

Tim Ferriss: You can DIY it with components off of Amazon and maybe I’ll make that available to folks. The reason I hesitate to do that is that it’s easy to get wrong and you can — I just don’t want to be responsible for people trying to put current through their heads. There are a lot of people who DIY trying to do TMS and stuff.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is the one I —

Tim Ferriss: Or TDCS and they reverse polarity. And you can fry your brain, not with the vagus nerve stuff necessarily, but you got to be really careful with stimulation.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of this one, Nuropod?

Tim Ferriss: Uh-uh. I haven’t seen it.

Kevin Rose: I mean, it’s basically, if you look at who’s involved on the scientist level, it’s crazy. The number of —

Tim Ferriss: N-U-R-O-P-O-D. Let me see the world’s-most studied wearable vagus nerve stimulation.

Kevin Rose: A hundred plus international, UCLA did a study there, Penn —

Tim Ferriss: Okay. That’s interesting. I’d have to check it out.

Kevin Rose: It’s interesting, but I will say, just to be honest with people —

Tim Ferriss: Have you noticed anything?

Kevin Rose: I’ve owned this thing for about a year and a half. I did it for about two weeks for 30 minutes a day and I didn’t notice anything.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m looking at — it’s hard for me to see the placement on the earpiece. The placement is very, very, very specific.

Kevin Rose: It clips right here to this lobe right here.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I don’t think that’s in the right place.

Kevin Rose: But you feel a little ticky, ticky, tick, like shock, almost.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t think you’re — look, this is my first time seeing it, but I don’t think you’re going to be necessarily hitting as many fibers as you would want if that’s the placement.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But who knows? Look, a lot of fancy names on the website, maybe I’ll take a look at it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s worth it. You can borrow mine, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Because I want something I can recommend to people.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I can’t recommend this because it’s not done anything for me. But when I was doing the research for the most — this one, they’ve clearly paid for studies to be done. Obviously, that’s a huge grain of salt because who’s doing the studies and what are their biases and whatnot. But I’ll let you borrow mine and see if it does anything for you. It is a $900 device, which is like, “Shit. That’s a lot of money to spend.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m using a prototype of one from Scandinavia right now. On Amazon, look, I’m sure people can find some instructions for this. You can DIY something for like 20 to $25 worth of components on Amazon. It is not hard.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just a small tense unit.

Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s do that.

Tim Ferriss: Cables, the placement is very challenging to get right. And I did not see much in terms of results from me, even with a lot of professional guidance using that.

Kevin Rose: I want to tell you about something related.

Tim Ferriss: But can I stop for a second?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, please.

Tim Ferriss: Try breathing.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Do box breathing.

Kevin Rose: So that’s what this is?

Tim Ferriss: Or something like that. Do that twice a day.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: This is why also in The Great Nerve, which is a book written by Kevin Tracey, it’s a great book. There’s an extended chapter about Wim Hof. And Wim Hof is a very controversial figure, but well-known for breath work. And you see some of the same effects in terms of controlling immune response so that it is not excessive with respect to various types of cytokines and so on. You can do it with breath work. So what are we looking at?

Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of HeartMath?

Tim Ferriss: I have heard of HeartMath. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Okay. I went to a little mini retreat where they were doing a bunch of different modalities in terms of different therapies and things to just really let you be the best version of yourself. And one of the things that they did was they gave you a HeartMath device and they had a whole class on it. And I was like, “Yeah, I heard of that thing before. I never tried it.”

And so I hooked it up to my ear and it measures your HRV, but what blew my mind was that the app, once you launch it, it’s like, “Follow this box breathing and we’re going to watch…” You get to watch your HRV in real time. And dude, when I followed it, just as it was telling me what to do, the HRV just shut up. And then I would try and trick it and I’d be like, I’d follow up, but I’d think of something really stressful and my HRV would go down.

So I’m telling you, this is the coolest device I have owned in a while and you lock into this coherence mode as you do this breathing and it’s pretty awesome. It’s 250 bucks. I’m not an investor or anything, but heartmath.com.

Tim Ferriss: Heartmath.com. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And 60-day money back guarantee. Well, I want to say that because I hate recommending stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Affiliate code Kevin 40 percent.

Kevin Rose: Exactly. TimTim, 20 percent off. I hate recommending stuff when people spend their money, but I will say this with the one thing that I was really-

Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard good things about HeartMath. I don’t know who’s involved. I did, maybe you didn’t know this, for a period of time, maybe it was about three months I did training for this specifically, I think it was before any retail options were available, with a doctor named Leah Lagos, who has a book about this. And we actually in real time would do a video call and identify what type of breathing specifically would have, in real time, the biggest impact on HRV.

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: And there is something to this. There’s definitely something to this. I can’t speak to HeartMath, but I’ve heard of it before. So don’t worry about the device for stimulation, the point being try meditating twice a day for 10 to 20 minutes. And if you’re like, “Ugh, meditating, God, I’m allergic to that word because it gets used so much,” Try breathing. Use HeartMath or something else. There’s not a whole lot you need to worry about. Andy Weil has some very good breathing exercises.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, 4-7-8. Yeah. So I have box breathing and 4-7-8 on my app Oak that’s still in the App Store and it’s 100 percent free. There’s no way you have to pay for anything on the app. So if you just Google Oak, you can find it. And it has like six different breathing techniques on there you can do.

Tim Ferriss: I think here’s a hypothesis-slash-bet. I think that if it hasn’t been demonstrated already, I haven’t done a full lit search for this, I think there are breathing patterns, if you repeat them in the morning and at night, twice a day, roughly 12 hours apart for like 10 to 20 minutes, that you will see a lot of benefits for things like chronic pain.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I think it is — I really feel very confidently. So it’s exciting.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Sweet.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what else you’ve got.

Kevin Rose I’ve got crazy things. I mean, I just had my birthday a few weeks ago, which is crazy because I’m marching towards 50 really quick.

Tim Ferriss: I know.

Kevin Rose: And so are you.

Tim Ferriss: Getting dragged through the —

Kevin Rose: I know.

Tim Ferriss: — doorway. With your fingernails leaving lines on the linoleum.

Kevin Rose: It’s really scary. Well, what’s crazy is, dude — okay, so when Tim and I first started hanging out, whatever, 15 years ago, 17 years ago, maybe 20, I don’t even know how long it’s been.

Tim Ferriss: It must be close to 20 years ago.

Kevin Rose: Close to 20 years ago, every time you walk into Tim’s house, he tackles you with some kind of new jiu-jitsu move to take you down. And in the last three years, he’s been carrying a ball for his lower back where he’s like, “I can’t move.” And it’s like old man Tim has appeared and that old Tim that would tackle you with the jiu-jitsu move is gone.

Tim Ferriss: The gentle art, not so gentle it turns out.

Kevin Rose: But I know one of the things that I want to really focus on for this next decade is balance. Balance obviously is such a key thing and it’s the number one way that people as they get older in their 60s, 70s, and beyond are actually permanently injured is by falling and breaking a hip and things like that. So two things to show off.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible increase in risk, all-cause mortality if you’re older and you break a hip.

Kevin Rose: Yes. It turns out breaking hips are not good. So check this out. This one right here I’ve had for a while.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t fall on your ringing bowl.

Kevin Rose: So can you imagine? I smashed my face on the ringing bowl. So I’m going to show you how this works.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, geez.

Kevin Rose: Have you used this before?

Tim Ferriss: I have. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so are you good at these or no?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, I feel like a parent watching after you.

Kevin Rose: Move this. All right, how well can you do the balance boards?

Tim Ferriss: I haven’t done it in a long time. There’s one called the Indo Board, which I have and I’ve fucked around with it. I don’t think today is the day.

Kevin Rose: Well, so let’s check this out. So five minutes a day, there was some research that was done around people with ADHD and it dramatically improved their symptoms, which I have a ton of.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can’t really —

Kevin Rose: But I want to know if you can do this. I want to see if you can do these squats.

Tim Ferriss: You have to pay attention if you’re on this thing.

Kevin Rose: Could you do these?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. Never tried it.

Kevin Rose: And then the tippy-toes. So I do 50 squats like this.

Tim Ferriss: I should also point out he has some history as a skateboarder.

Kevin Rose: I do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which helps.

Kevin Rose: Let’s see, let’s see, Tim —

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I’m going to —

Kevin Rose: You’ll be okay. I’ll hold your hand when you go up. Come on, just give it a shot for a second.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you some Depends. I’ll give you some Depends and give you a walker so you can get up there.

Fuck, man.

Kevin Rose: Okay. So one foot there.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. I got it.

Kevin Rose: Jesus. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, fuck. Hold on.

Kevin Rose: There you go. It’s got blockers, so you won’t slide off the end.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: Lean hard right, harder on the right foot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like —

Kevin Rose: It’s hard, isn’t it?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m nervous about falling over.

Kevin Rose: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: There we go.

Kevin Rose: Now the squats.

Tim Ferriss: This is kind of like slackboarding where you need a couple of days to get your nervous system in order.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing how your nervous system adapts to it?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s really —

Tim Ferriss: There’s a crazy video people should check out. I think maybe it’s not online. There’s a guy named Jerzy Gregorek, had on the podcast, he’s got to be 70 something right now, but he was 67. He could stand on one of these at 67 with a fully loaded barbell with like 150, 200 pounds. He weighs probably 130 and he could do a perfect form Olympic snatch —

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — landing with ass to heels and then stand back up and do repetitions.

Kevin Rose: So dude, when I was just in Japan last week —

Tim Ferriss: All right, there we go. That’s enough.

Kevin Rose: When I was just in Japan last week, I was out there and I was at this event. Whoops. I was at this friend’s birthday party that Tony Hawk’s also friends with. So I was hanging with Tony and he’s like — last time I saw Tony, I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” Because —

Tim Ferriss: Tony Hawk, one of the most legendary skateboarders of all time, for people who don’t know.

Kevin Rose: People definitely know who Tony Hawk is, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You might be surprised.

Kevin Rose: I mean, a lot of people definitely know.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of people know who Tony Hawk is.

Kevin Rose: So Tony —

Tim Ferriss: For the youngsters.

Kevin Rose: Last time I saw him, he had a cane and I was like, this was probably like eight months ago or whatever. And I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” And he’s like, “I just got a couple screws put into my hip.” And he had this injury and I was like, “Holy shit, man.” In my head, I’m like, “Oh, the fucking legend.” Pushing himself in his 50s to do — he’s still doing whatever, 720s on the half pipe in his mid 50s. Fucking crazy.

And I saw him up at Hokkaido and we’re going snowboarding, he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going boarding today.” He has no cane, no nothing. And I’m like, “Do you have pain? Do you have pain? Do you feel pain? What are you doing in your mid 50s doing vert snowboarding?” You know what I mean? And he’s just like, “Yeah, my wife jokes that I should have a shirt that says ‘Always in pain’ or something like that.” And I was just like, that is a — some people are built like that though. Have you ever seen his shins?

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he looks like a Thai kickboxer.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. He has been hit so many times by the board, it’s insane.

You and your birthday, when I was at your birthday in New York probably about, I don’t know, maybe seven, 10 years ago, you had a slackline in your backyard.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And I couldn’t do it at all at not even one step because it is very much a nervous system practice.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a nervous system practice.

Kevin Rose: So I found this online. It’s like a little home one. Do you have one like this?

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. I have played around with these. These are pretty sweet. So I have not used the smaller ones. I had one between trees, same company, Gibbon. And just for people who’ve never played with this, if you’re going to try it, don’t do an hour thinking that you’re going to figure it out in one day. Actually, my belief is you need sleep cycles for your nervous system to try to integrate it. So you’re better off doing a few minutes every day and gradually you’ll figure it out. But that’s cool. Very portable. So obviously a lot easier to set up and take down a gigantic thing between two trees with ratchets and everything.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to get one because again, on the balance front, they’ll have a little QR code there at the end that you scan and they give you about 20 or 30 different exercises that you can do with it. Like the toe taps where one foot is on and you need to tap of toe on each side of the bar.

And you’re right. And there’s this weird thing and I noticed this in my kids where they got those little hoverboards for Christmas so they can just kind of zoom around and they’re seven and eight. And day one, like eating shit, helmets, full gear. And day two, my youngest is just like whoosh-shoom, just flying over the place.

Tim Ferriss: Totally figured it out.

Kevin Rose: But it took a couple of days of that kind of adaption and that muscle memory to kind of kick in, which I think all these things do. But yeah, this has been awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for people who might want to try slacklining, don’t get on a slackline really far off the ground, number one, but a lot of rock climbing gyms have slacklines set up. So you can potentially get someone to show you the basic ropes, pun intended, of walking on a slackline over there. And it’s called Gibbon. Pretty sure this is why it’s called Gibbon because if you see really good slackliners, they do this with their arms as they’re walking across. And what does that look like? It looks like a gibbon, this monkey.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you can see footage of Gibbons walking across rope on small suspension bridges. Pretty fascinating stuff. So try it out.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw something out there.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s do it.

Tim Ferriss: Because it’s related to rock climbing. Well, a couple of things, since you brought it up. So for the last two days, we’ve been hanging out a little bit and you have not seen my little blow up Pilates ball that I usually put behind my low back.

Kevin Rose: Well, I just mentioned it a few minutes ago. I do see it. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but you haven’t seen it.

Kevin Rose: I know. So what’s going on?

Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems like, and this is not going to apply to most people, and this is a work in progress, so it’s not definitive, but I ended up meeting with a neurologist and surgeon in Austin.

Kevin Rose: And you’ve injected baby seal stem cells into your spine.

Tim Ferriss: No, no.

Kevin Rose: It’s going to be some shit like that.

Tim Ferriss: No. It might apply to a very, very small fraction of the people who are actually listening to this. He did imaging. He used to be in a clinic where they ran trials and studies related to something called Bertolotti’s Syndrome. And Bertolloti’s Syndrome is incredibly uncommon, most specialists in his profession might see one or two cases in their entire careers, but he’s seen hundreds. And he looked at my imaging and he said, “You may actually have Bertolotti’s Syndrome.” And he pointed out, they had very advanced imaging, the first time it came up, it corresponds perfectly to where I point to when people ask me where I have pain.

And it’s, in effect, where you have a transitional segment. So it’s like a lumbar vertebra that’s behaving like a sacral vertebra or vice versa. And let’s just say it’s L5 and the transverse processes, I think it’s transverse processes on both, try to form a pseudo joint. So they basically lay on bone and other material to try to create what is then called a pseudo joint. And if you look at textbook cases of Bertolotti’s, you’re like, “Yeah, of course that’s going to hurt your lower back.”

And as a way of testing the hypothesis, he said, “Well, before we even consider any interventions, let’s try to hone in on whether that is accurate or not as a diagnosis. The way we’ll do that is there are some nerves that affect that area specifically, there’s no radiating effect or anything down the leg, let’s put in effectively a nerve block and then see what happens. We’ll put in a nerve block…”

Kevin Rose: What is a nerve block?

Tim Ferriss: Basically stops the area from transmitting pain signals.

Kevin Rose: But what does it mean though when you put in a nerve block?

Tim Ferriss: Well, you lay down, in my case, on your face. I hate when anyone is messing with my spine, man. I’ve had so many things done to me and I’m usually cool as a cucumber, but when needles are in or around my spine, I really get the fear sweats. I don’t like it at all. But in this case, that was required. So you get a — in this case, it was, I think it was lidocaine, small amount of lidocaine to numb the surface.

Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.

Tim Ferriss: Then they’re going through quite a bit of deep musculature. So they go in and then they’re putting, in this case, and obviously you need specialists for this —

Kevin Rose: It was a baby seal.

Tim Ferriss: Prilocaine, baby seal semen. No, it was Prilocaine and something called Kenalog. But none of those specifics are the punchline. The punchline is, after he did the injection, he said, “Okay, this particular portion of the cocktail is going to last 18 hours, and then you’re going to get probably two weeks of effect from the Kenalog, something like that, which is a cortisone shot basically.”

And he said, “I want you to do all of the things that you think will most piss off your back. All the things you’ve been avoiding,” which for me are sitting on hard surfaces, sitting with a slightly flexed back, like if you’re sitting on a bar stool and you’re kind of like this, any of those, stretching in that position, sitting on the floor with the dogs, certainly things like heavy deadlifts, squats. So I did all of that stuff for three days straight, zero pain.

And I’m like, “Holy shit.” After having so many specialists from different disciplines say like, “Yeah, I know you point to that, but that’s not the spot. It’s actually because there’s referral pain from this, this, or this.” And just having so many people dismiss how precisely I could point to where I felt the most pain, which was consistent over years. And for the first time, he’s like, “If we look at the imaging right here, it is exactly where you are pointing with your finger.”

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m cautiously optimistic.

Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: This is the first time in six years. Also, there are different tools that work for different people. Sometimes it requires multiple tools. A lot of people have benefited from the work of John Sarno, but that school, for instance, in effect, says none of the imaging really maps to symptoms well, it’s all in your head. So do cognitive training and reconditioning to solve it because —

Kevin Rose: That’s the guy that Howard Stern got his back problems fixed through, right?

Tim Ferriss: It might be. A lot of people benefit from that stuff, but it’s also infuriating to be told every type of back pain is in your head. I’m like, “Really? If I took a ball peen hammer and smashed one of your vertebrae, that would be in your head?” I guess technically since the brain is governing pain, fine, but this is the first time with a relatively simple but precise intervention, I guess it’s been about five days, it’s like I can do everything with no pain.

Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So what does that mean?

Kevin Rose: Well it could be the cortisol shot. That’s the one thing that’s like, hmm?

Tim Ferriss: Well, that is —

Kevin Rose: You probably had that before, right? Or no?

Tim Ferriss: No, I haven’t, but here’s the thing. So that’s going to have —

Kevin Rose: Anti-inflammatory.

Tim Ferriss: — yeah, anti-inflammatory, it’s also going to basically kind of, for lack of a better term, like puff up the pseudo joint in a way that sort of reverses the chronological age or development of that in some ways from a symptom perspective. But this is where I’ll offer people something they can potentially look into, obviously with the help of really, really, really good doctors. If that shot continues to deliver benefits, and I can do all these things pain-free, which is the case right now, then there’s something called radiofrequency ablation, RFA, which is used to, in this case, temporarily, completely incapacitate those nerves.

So they go in, they apply radiofrequency ablation, and that should last for like a year to a year and a half, hopefully. And the hope in that case is, okay, with a year, year and a half, and I’ve spoken to multiple people and they’re like, “Even if you resume a lot of your activities and stare step into it that previously caused pain, you shouldn’t structurally make that worse.” Because that was a concern.

And I think that’s enough of a period of time where you could effectively reprogram your pain patterning, right? Because for years now, it’s like if I sit on a hard surface, my brain is like code red, DEFCON 5, you are about to not be able to sleep for six to seven days.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you’re going to have trouble walking and sitting and standing. So super exciting.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So you mind if I continue my TED Talk for a second?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So I also had long overdue surgery, I think I might have talked about this last time, but on my extensors, right? So the forearm extensors. So this would be considered like tennis elbow, like 20 plus years overdue, from a sports injury. And I’m back to rock climbing. I’m not great at rock climbing, but I love it. I just love rock climbing, feeling really good.

And if people have never seen something called Abrahangs, so like Abraham, but Abrahangs, go on YouTube, find this Swedish rock climber named Emil Abrahamsson, so Abrahamsson, S-S-O-N, he is a monster, very competent rock climber, does like V13 problems and probably much more, incredible explainer of things and dives into a lot of training. And he, along with the help of this scientist named Keith Barr, B-A-A-R, who I’ve actually had on the podcast, developed or tested this protocol for improving tendon strength.

And it is the simplest, lowest impact thing you can imagine. It’s basically 10 minutes, twice a day, and he does a bunch on a hangboard, but let’s keep it simple. Let’s say you’re hanging on, could be a pull-up bar, could be a door jamb, could be the underside of some stairs, whatever, and he’s hanging with like 30 to 85 percent of his weight, so his feet are still on the floor, does that for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, and you do it 10 times, that’s 10 minutes, and then you do it again later in the day, and his before and after strength in endurance tests are mind-blowing.

This is already a guy who we could say is a high level climber, and to see the before and after is crazy. So you don’t always have to kill yourself to adapt in really, really interesting ways. And that’s something I’ve really, really benefited from. But the low back has been a limiter for the last few months, because hanging from a bar, if I don’t engage the abs, it could cause some issues with the low back and spasming.

So I bought this thing recommended by a friend of mine, Nick Norris, who’s also been on the podcast, former Navy SEAL, called the NUG. And the NUG is, it’s about the size of a gigantic bar of soap, it’s a piece of wood, and it has different depths of grips on it, like 25 millimeters, 20 millimeters, and you can move it around really easily. And basically you could keep it in a jacket pocket. And as long as you have a carabiner, like one of those things that kind of clicks on, you can do all sorts of exercises while you’re traveling. And at home I have basically a plate loading pin that you can load plates on.

Kevin Rose: Like this?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So that you can basically do like a single-handed deadlift with different weights.

Kevin Rose: And so this is the same as essentially doing the hanging board?

Tim Ferriss: It’s similar, right? You’re going to be, I’m looking for the same kind of loading, but what you can also do is take this thing that you can fit in your pocket and attach it to like a low cable machine. That’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, actually.

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: And just like get the weight off the ground, the stack off of the resting position and then I was doing 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off.

Kevin Rose: And you only have one of these?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because I’ll do one hand and then I’ll do the other.

Kevin Rose: Oh, amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So I’ll be like, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 second rest, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds rest.

Kevin Rose: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And I think a lot — yeah, the website is Frictitious Climbing, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but like friction, Frictitious Climbing. They have the NUG, they have a bunch of other items that you can use while traveling for this, which are really, really interesting. So that’s another one that I’ve been traveling with. I’ll let you go and then —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just a fun little tool to play with. Do not overdo finger training. You do not want to tear a pulley or something in your fingers. So less is more, less is more, less is more. This is, I guess, something like 30 to 85 percent of body weight. And obviously, or maybe it’s not obvious, that’s with two hands, so if you’re doing it with one hand, it’s going to be 15 to 40 percent.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing. Oh, this is cool. Thanks. I already just ordered it by the time you’re done talking about it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s fun to play with.

Kevin Rose: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: What you got?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of things. One, I was hanging with Craig Mod in Japan and you’ve had Craig on the show before.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Craig.

Kevin Rose: Craig is —

Tim Ferriss: Amazing, amazing guy.

Kevin Rose: I don’t think there’s anybody that understands Japan the way that Craig does, in terms of the back country and just like the little artisans and all the stuff that he’s into.

Tim Ferriss: Craig has walked probably fair to say like thousands of miles of different trails and pilgrimage paths in Japan. It’s very likely he has walked more of Japan on foot than any other person.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So he was out here visiting, he actually stayed in this house for a week when he was out here in L.A. And I walked in and he’s got all his little toiletries sitting out. It’s sitting out, he puts it all in Japanese order where it’s got a little nice little cloth and it’s got all this shit —

Tim Ferriss: He even dresses like a Japanese person now.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know. So I mean he’s lived there for 25 years, so that makes sense. But I saw his toothbrush and I was like, “That is a dope looking toothbrush.” And I got you one.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow, look at this.

Kevin Rose: So you can get these on Amazon. It’s got a really wide head. He said it’s his favorite Japanese toothbrush.

Tim Ferriss: So for people who can’t see it’s like the toothbrush bristles are almost in a square. I mean, it’s very square-like as opposed to being more elongated.

Kevin Rose: And so you get three of these for $11.50 on Amazon. And what does it say in Japanese?

Tim Ferriss: Premium care. Premium care.

Kevin Rose: Premium care. Oh, Toaster’s here.

Tim Ferriss: Premium care.

Kevin Rose: Hey, buddy.

Tim Ferriss: Hi, buddy.

Kevin Rose: Look at old man Toast.

Tim Ferriss: I was just saying hi to him earlier. Toaster is now 15. I was just saying to Darya that the last time we did a podcast sitting on a couch was at your place in San Francisco back when Toaster was a puppy and he chewed through the XLR cables on the Zoom.

Kevin Rose: Yes, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Hey, buddy.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, he can’t hear anything anymore. And sadly, his back legs are falling out from underneath them now. But look at that. He’s still a good dude. Look at that.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like he recognized me because I’ve seen him so many times.

Kevin Rose: Oh, for sure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What a sweetheart.

Kevin Rose: He’s such a good boy.

Tim Ferriss: So yes, premium care.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I got you one of those and there’s a three pack for $11.50. I think it’s great. It’s a fantastic toothbrush.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. [Tim says something in Japanese]. Yeah, okay. Cool. I dig it. Thank you.

Kevin Rose: Speaking of all things Japanese, so I am hesitant to give this up. So if you want to get a —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, low in stock, only one left.

Kevin Rose: Well, hold on, let me tell you why. So first of all, check this out. Check out this jacket.

Tim Ferriss: Cool. All right. Oh, nice.

Kevin Rose: You feel how heavy that is?

Tim Ferriss: Feels almost like a — I know what this is. I know what this is.

Kevin Rose: So this is a fireman’s jacket in Japan.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And this is a heavy, dope fireman’s jacket. It’s vintage from like —

Tim Ferriss: This would be hard to rip. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: — the 1970s.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Kevin Rose: And so I found a store on Etsy.

Tim Ferriss: How did you even think to look for this?

Kevin Rose: Because I love this style of jacket.

Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese fire jacket.

Kevin Rose: I didn’t type in, fireman jacket. I typed in, Japanese jacket on Etsy. And so this importer, they import the coolest vintage Japanese.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll just wear this.

Kevin Rose: Everything from jackets to — you know how they used to do that patch mill work where they take stuff? They would patch quilts out of old material?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So everything from little tiny shrines to wicker baskets. Dude, check out the store. Let me just show you this store real quick. And the only reason I’m plugging it is —

Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese Indigo dyed Kendo jacket.

Kevin Rose: So they’ve got all the little dolls. Look at these different types of indigo dyed blankets.

Tim Ferriss: So what’s the seller?

Kevin Rose: The seller is just an importer from Japan. Or exporter.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t want to give the name?

Kevin Rose: No, I will. Well, here’s the deal. It’s so inexpensive. In the States, if you were to buy this jacket from a designer called Visvim, which is like a well-known Japanese designer, this style of jacket would be — oh, gosh, it’d probably be $2,500 for that jacket.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. It’s more expensive than my car.

Kevin Rose: No, it’s not. They sell these jackets on there for — here’s one for $92. Look at this. Vintage 1960s jacket, $92.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s cool. Watch out, buddy.

Kevin Rose: You okay, bud? He needs a little help.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think you’re ready for the slackboard, my friend.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There you go. Okay. I know, I know.

Kevin Rose: That jacket’s dope. But I just wanted to get this out there because I think if you’re looking to buy vintage fun things in, you can’t scroll.

Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. I know. I’m being an idiot.

Kevin Rose: If you’re looking for just various objects around your house that are vintage from Japan, this place is insanely inexpensive for all different types of things.

Tim Ferriss: Blue Heritage Japan?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Etsy name is Blue Heritage Japan.

Tim Ferriss: 4.9 stars, thousands of reviews.

Kevin Rose: But look at some of this stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s cool. These hanging tapestries for stores and stuff, those are fun.

Kevin Rose: So anyway, I just thought it was a fun shop that — and you know it’s legit because when you get the package, it’s actually shipped directly from Japan. Oftentimes you’ll find some of these places that make a Japanese style jacket and then you find a little tag that says made in China on the inside of it or something. So anyway, look at this farmer’s washy paper basket. But wouldn’t that be cool to have in your house sitting around somewhere? That’s just awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I guess these guys are based in Canada, looks like. CA.

Kevin Rose: Oh, no, that’s just because I’m logged in the Canadian store. They’re based in Japan.

Tim Ferriss: Why the hell are you logged into the Canadian store?

Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I was on VPN.

Tim Ferriss: You better close those porn browsers.

Kevin Rose: No, I was in Japan and they were firewalling me off of some stuff, and so I had to use a VPN.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: I’m being dead serious, I’m being dead serious. It wasn’t porn, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Thou doth protest too much. All right. Should I hop in?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, go ahead.

Tim Ferriss: All right, cool. So I want to recommend some podcasts for people. And these are two that I continue to revisit. One is a miniseries by 99% Invisible, one of the OGs, Roman Mars, and he’s got some co-hosts. It is a series on The Power Broker. So The Power Broker by Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It’s a biography of Robert Moses, who basically shaped modern New York. And this book is considered the quintessential book to read if you want to understand state and local politics, especially power wielding in New York.

And it’s a legendary book. It’s 1200 pages. I’ve never made it through. I’ve never even really put a dent in it. And then what 99% Invisible does, they walk you through the whole book and give you their highlights. They interview Robert Caro himself who got to meet Robert Moses multiple times and they have guest appearances by people like Conan O’Brien, who’s a huge Robert Caro and Power Broker fan. It’s a wonderful series.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: And I think there are 12 parts. I had listened to it ages ago, but they only had three episodes out and then I just petered out because I didn’t want to wait months for the next one to come out. Now they have the full 12. So that’s one. And then the other one is a podcast called STEM-Talk. And if I want to find interesting scientists doing things that I think I might be able to apply to my life or the lives of loved ones, and certainly there’s a lot of stuff that’s out on the edges that is not yet ready for any clinical applications. STEM-Talk is just incredible. And my latest discovery there is a really fascinating scientist named Dr. Francisco Gonzalez-Lima, who’s at UT Austin.

One of the many reasons I’m interested in his research is that he has a very different view on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and thinks, as I do, that people underweight and researchers underweight, how you might think of Alzheimer’s as a vascular disease and including mitochondrial dysfunction. And the more I dig into this, the less compelling I find amyloid beta plaque, amyloid beta plaque for a whole host of reasons.

Kevin Rose: It’s pretty widely accepted now that that is a byproduct of something gone wrong and not the cause of it, right?

Tim Ferriss: But still, I do think a lot of doctors and scientists would view it as a byproduct. Nonetheless, a lot of the treatment options like Donanemab infusions or otherwise are focused on removing plaque. But you can remove a lot of plaque —

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t do shit.

Tim Ferriss: — assuming it doesn’t kill people because there are —

Kevin Rose: The side effects are huge.

Tim Ferriss: — risks of RA and stuff. And you may not see any change in cognition whatsoever.

Kevin Rose: What do you think of the Bredesen protocol?

Tim Ferriss: Look, Dale Bredesen, I don’t know much about Dale, so you should illuminate me. Let’s get to that in a second.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Tim Ferriss: But what I have seen, let’s just say in the case of some of my relatives, I’ve got three relatives with Alzheimer’s right now, one who’s disintegrating very quickly, one who’s in hospice, and another who’s in the early but rapidly advancing stages. I gave one of them actually the exact same ketone that I had before we sat down, only 10 grams because I didn’t want to risk them getting dizzy, which can be a byproduct and falling, but I gave them 10 or 15 grams and within 20 minutes, longer sentences, faster speech, this is someone who’s giving like one word, two word responses, and that lasted for about an hour, hour and a half. So if plaques, even if we’re talking about tau and so on, if those were solely responsible, that shouldn’t work. But I don’t want to be dosing my family with ketones constantly for a lot of reasons. It’s like, “Okay, well, what else can we do?”

And this Dr. Gonzalez-Lima has looked at low dose methylene blue and also photobiomodulation using lasers or LEDs right on, in most cases, the right prefrontal cortex.

Kevin Rose: By the way, do you know that they’re selling methylene blue on freaking Amazon now?

Tim Ferriss: That’s scary.

Kevin Rose: I know. They didn’t used to because they were scared to do it. Now there are supplement companies that are selling straight up methylene blue on Amazon.

Tim Ferriss: That’s scary. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Although the safety profile, it’s been used for a very long time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s got like 120 years of research, but if you overshoot the therapeutic window, you can fuck yourself up.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. 100 percent. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: So in this case, it’s low dose, ideally plus photobiomodulation, and you’re hitting two aspects of the electron transport chain that should be synergistic for mitochondrial function and also glucose metabolism. And so that’s really got my attention right now.

Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this on Amazon. Look at this guy drinking a big pitcher of it.

Tim Ferriss: Guy’s drinking a shaker bottle full of methylene blue.

Kevin Rose: With the goldfish.

Tim Ferriss: Dude.

Kevin Rose: Methylene blue is what they use for fish tanks, right? To color the water blue.

Tim Ferriss: Is it?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, they were using it in fish tanks.

Tim Ferriss: Well, if it’s good enough for the fish tanks, I guess. Be careful.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, look at it. Here it is. General disease prevention for fish.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, disease prevention. Oh, you know, hey.

Kevin Rose: If it works for fish.

Tim Ferriss: Those pet stores figured it out.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Be very careful, folks.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: If you overdo, this is true for a lot of things. You basically have a response curve where a hormetic dose, like a very small amount is good for you, like iocaine powder in the Princess Bride, or it helps with immune function and so on.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: If you take too much, it has the opposite effect. So you could, I believe, I don’t think I’m getting this wrong, handicap your mitochondrial function by taking too much.

Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this. 15 milligrams of methylene blue with 75 milligrams of vitamin C NeuroPro. I’m not recommending this. This is just one on Amazon.

Tim Ferriss: It’s All over Amazon. God, that’s terrifying.

Kevin Rose: What would be considered a microdose in your opinion?

Tim Ferriss: I’d have to go back and look at his actual research. People should listen to the STEM-Talk episode with Francisco Gonzalez-Lima.

Kevin Rose: There’s a picture of someone putting it in her purse.

Tim Ferriss: Like an EpiPen.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’ll just take this to go.

Tim Ferriss: Take this to the spa.

Kevin Rose: By the way, the comments — it’s so funny you’re on this because literally two days ago, I was in here reading the comments and they’re like, “I’m peeing blue now.” You pee blue.

Tim Ferriss: You do pee blue. And that’s actually a way individually that you can begin to identify your customized dose.

Kevin Rose: Oh, you shouldn’t be peeing blue.

Tim Ferriss: No, at what point you go from blue to clear. You can figure out basically what the half — I’m probably using not exactly the correct terms, but figure out what the half life is in your body so that you’re dosing at the right interval.

Kevin Rose: They call this bro science, by the way, when two guys that don’t have —

Tim Ferriss: Well, I am pretty closely echoing. Yes, it is broscience, but it’s bro science with citations, meaning don’t trust exactly what I’m saying, but go listen to the episode and read his research.

Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this.

Tim Ferriss: Methylene blue gummies. Fuck.

Kevin Rose: They’re selling gummies now of methane blue.

Tim Ferriss: Terrifying.

Kevin Rose: Anyway.

Tim Ferriss: Just because it’s a supplement doesn’t make it safe, folks.

Kevin Rose: Amen. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Hemlock, all natural. Turns out, shouldn’t have too much of it.

Kevin Rose: Hemlock?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, killed Socrates.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just like arsenic, all natural. Don’t go take a shaker bottle full of arsenic. So yeah, be careful out there, kids. But that definitely has my attention right now because I think about say parental risk, my mom’s cognition is slipping, but she’s APOE e3/e3. Her APOE allele profile is 3/3. I’m 3/4, my brother’s 3/4, which means we got the four from my dad. He’s sharp as a tack. He’s incredibly sharp and he’s older than my mom. So it’s like, all right, they both have metabolic dysfunction. So that’s equalized. The fasting glucose and all that’s terrible. It’s like, what’s going on? Well, you do inherit mitochondria from your mom and mitochondria are a very big deal. So looking at different levers that I might experiment with in my mom that could also potentially be applied preventatively in me and my brother.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Dale Bredesen protocol is pretty awesome. He wrote a book about six or seven years ago, maybe it’s closer to 10 now.

Tim Ferriss: Nicotine enemas, am I right?

Kevin Rose: Exactly. That’s all it is. Which you tried for the first time today.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t exactly that, but yeah.

Kevin Rose: So the one thing I like about, it’s called The End of Alzheimer’s, is the name of his book, is that he’s —

Tim Ferriss: Understated.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Won’t sell any copies with that title. But what he came up with is he said, “Okay, listen, what we’re seeing in the brain is the byproduct of something going haywire. It’s either blood-brain barrier breaking down, allowing bad shit in. It could be bacteria. It could be a whole slew of different things.” It could be, like you said, an issue with blood flow and it could be, what did you call it? A vascular type issue.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And he thinks it’s like three or four. He thinks it’s either vascular, which sauna, other things like that help with. CocoaVia, like other ways to make sure that you have vascular health. Obviously the mitochondria thing is another one that he’s huge on. And then he also thinks it could be toxin-related as well.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Rose: And talking about how to get those toxins out of your body, but his protocol is very common sense.

Tim Ferriss: What is it?

Kevin Rose: It is essentially a handful of supplements, which are all the ones that you’ve basically talked about along with, it’s like a lightweight keto. So just making sure you go into lightweight ketosis like five days a week. And then obviously no sugar, no refined carbohydrate, it’s eliminating all that shit. Turns out exercise, like intense exercise, is very important. And he’s shown now over the course of a decade that he’s taken people. Actually, you know Kelly Boys who we were on the —

Tim Ferriss: Retreat with.

Kevin Rose: — retreat with. She’s an awesome meditation — she teaches something, this form of relaxing yoga.

Tim Ferriss: Yoga Nidra.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. As an aside, her father, I think she’d be okay for me to share this, we’ll double check, but her father had mild cognitive impairment 10 years ago and they were, of course, really worried. They put them on the Dale Bredesen protocol and he’s scoring better now than he was when he first took the test. 10 years later.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And she’s like, “Yeah, he still has issues here and there.” But he’s I guess in his 80s now or something, but that’s what you want.

Tim Ferriss: Makes a difference. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Even if we can say, okay, mild cognitive impairment, it’s progressing. My mom is in this situation. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but thankfully she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She has some form of dementia. She remembers me, kids’ names, stuff like that, the important things. She would have a hard time telling you what the name of my dog is. There’s little things that slide through the cracks. She’s sadly really overweight, didn’t really want to do that. But the point is, if we could see this stuff early enough where you still have enough of your wits about you to take action, because compliance is huge, as you know. How hard is it to get your family members to go do high intensity exercise?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Can I pause for a second?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of the reason why the methylene blue and the photobiomodulation are so interesting because for instance, there’s a device that is actually worth investigating on some levels called the Cognito device. It’s a headset and it was developed by scientists out of MIT and it’s 40 hertz, I believe, both visual and auditory stimulation, and in Rhesus monkeys, pretty recently in the last year, they showed a lot of plaque clearance enhanced by this, right? But that’s still, if I’m understanding correctly, people fact check this, but that’s still predicated on the theory of disease for Alzheimer’s that by removing plaque, you get clinical outcomes, right?

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: The photobiomodulation — well, before I get to that, as I understand it, this is an hour a day of wearing this device on your head. My mom’s not going to do that. There’s no fucking way, right? Nor any of my relatives. However, the photobiomodulation, it’s like eight to 10 minutes, right? Laser or LED. LED is a little harder to make —

Kevin Rose: And do you have to go in to do that or can you get a device that does it at all?

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to buy a device and I’m not recommending people do that. You can really damage your eyes with lasers and so on, but right now, it’s not like you can go to a clinic and be like, “Hey, I’d like to have this treatment.” Just doesn’t exist. So let me be the guinea pig before anybody does anything, but you get this device and I’m sure it’s going to be very expensive. Some of these lasers, they’re like $30,000. But eight to 10 minutes, and you can see, even after a single session, you can see multiple weeks of effect. It’s crazy.

Kevin Rose: And so it just sits right on top of — into the eye or on top of the —

Tim Ferriss: No. Well, there are devices that go through the eyes, but this one, what makes it so mystifying in a way for me is that it’s actually pointed at the forehead as an infrared laser. It’s so fascinating. And there are peer reviewed published studies on this, which you can find. Anybody who looks up Gonzalez-Lima will find it. So it’s exciting. It’s super exciting because there’s certain things. I know that my mitochondria are funky. And I know that through different types of endurance testing, different types of, obviously all sorts of stuff done through doctors and tests and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s something funky with the mitochondria. And I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s try to get ahead of that.”

And actually related to that, to invoke, I said she would come back. Rhonda Patrick, also, I was texting with her at one point because I was listening to STEM-Talk, that podcast I mentioned, and I came across a scientist discussing something called urolithin A.

Kevin Rose: Of course, Mitopure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Mitopure. And two years ago, maybe it was two years ago, she was pretty bearish on it, but there’s a lot of new research, or I shouldn’t say a lot. There’s new research that’s come out and also met with a couple of biotech people in Boston who are very respected. I’m not going to dox them because I don’t want to, but they basically did this comprehensive analysis and landed on three or four things and one of them was urolithin A.

Kevin Rose: Right. I take 300 milligrams a day.

Tim Ferriss: 300. How did you choose 300 milligrams?

Kevin Rose: Because that’s what all the studies are done on — or no, sorry, so 500 to 1,000. I take 500 milligrams a day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Clear then you’ve been taking a higher dose.

Tim Ferriss: I was like 300?

Kevin Rose: I’ve only been doing these things for three months to see some results. So bear with me people, I was close. it was 200 milligrams off.

Tim Ferriss: What’s a little strange is that if you buy the bag, you can get this on Amazon. I’m not recommending you do that. Jury’s still out, but I’m like, “Hey, I want to hit mitochondria from as many reasonably plausible mechanisms or angles as possible.” You can get Mitopure. It’s expensive AF. It is very expensive.

Kevin Rose: I was going to tell people that the one that people talk about the most in this world that has done a lot of clinical studies around it, your Urolithin A is this company called Timeline, who doesn’t say — they trademarked the name of it, which is Mitopure. The problem is it’s freaking expensive.

Tim Ferriss: It’s very, very expensive.

Kevin Rose: And I don’t know, is there another company that’s out there that has high quality? Because I’m not going to put shit into my body, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: But I would like to know, is there any company that has —

Tim Ferriss: When you say expensive, it’s like 60 count is $125, right?

Kevin Rose: Right. And you’re taking two a day.

Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So that’s 30 days.

Tim Ferriss: And most of the studies actually have people taking a thousand a day. So if you’re taking a thousand a day, the prices are going to add up. But again —

Kevin Rose: I would trust Pure Encapsulations if they offered some of it. I haven’t seen anybody — there’s no other brands that I’ve seen that — you know the household names like the Thorns, the Pures, the ones that —

Tim Ferriss: And this is a single SKU, well, not a single SKU, but a single compound company. They have a lot vested in IP protection and so on.

Kevin Rose: But it can’t be synthesized. They don’t own urolithin A. Obviously that’s something that anyone can produce.

Tim Ferriss: Well, urolithin A is also —

Kevin Rose: urolithin A, I mean.

Tim Ferriss: — what’s called a postbiotic. If you were eating tons of pomegranates and walnuts and so on, there’s certain things that in your gut, biomicrobes will be converted into, in part, urolithin A. The problem is that there’s a high degree of variability. So if Kevin eats two handfuls of walnuts and I ate two handfuls of walnuts, we’re not going to get the same amount of urolithin A out. Fortunately, urolithin A is very orally bioavailable, which is why the supplementation potentially makes sense.

Kevin Rose: What’s interesting is actually Pure Encapsulations does make one, and when you go and look at the label, they actually buy Mitopure for theirs.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, There you go.

Kevin Rose: So they use Mitopure in theirs.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Mitopure in this case is almost like an industrial grade supplier in so much as Creapure. If you’re buying Creatine, I use Momentus Creatine, they’re a sponsor of the podcast, but I like their stuff and everything is NSF certified and third party analyzed. Creapure is this supplier, just like maybe Mitopure is, that’s providing something that is very pure and properly assayed and so on and so forth. Okay. So Pure Encapsulations, it’s not cheap either. That one’s 80 bucks.

Kevin Rose: 80 bucks, but so that’ll get you — hold on. Let’s just do the math here. So $80 of 60 pills. And, again, it is 250 mgs per two pills, so that’s half the dose.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so if you wanted — well, per two pills, so if you wanted a thousand a day, that’s eight per day.

Kevin Rose: It’s 160. Oh, thousand a day, yeah, eight a day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s eight a day, 60 capsules.

Kevin Rose: But it has other shit in there, too. I don’t want all this other stuff, the resveratrol and whatever.

Tim Ferriss: So, yeah, it’s expensive. That 80 bucks is going to last you like 12 days, something like that. In any case, guys, the jury is out.

Kevin Rose: The jury is out.

Tim Ferriss: But it’s interesting enough that I added it into the rotation. And I routinely take things out of the rotation also.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.

Tim Ferriss: This one I’ve been taking for probably six to eight weeks.

Kevin Rose: What’s the number one thing that you’ve kept in rotation for the longest time? I have two, vitamin D, obviously, because my levels are chronically low without it. And I think, at this point, it’s a no-brainer to get your levels where they should be. And then I would say curl-ups is another one that I have had in for a long time —

Tim Ferriss: CocoaVia is interesting, yeah.

Kevin Rose: — just because it looks really interesting in terms of vascular health, and then I think, well, obviously, your high-quality omega-3. Outside of that, I don’t know what else I’ve had. What’s been in your rotation forever?

Tim Ferriss: I mean, a lot of them are dictated by genetic analysis and blood biomarkers in some way. Right? So, outside of prescription stuff, because I am taking things to not die of cardiovascular disease, because everybody in my family gets smoked by some kind of cardiovascular disease, and I’m, like, “Yeah. I’m no spring chicken.”

Kevin Rose: Are you taking Repatha, too?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m taking Repatha.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Where do you inject it?

Tim Ferriss: In the thigh. I hate it. It’s so painful.

Kevin Rose: Oh, really?

Tim Ferriss: I find it so painful.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God, dude, I can tell you a secret.

Tim Ferriss: What’s the secret?

Kevin Rose: How often are you — how long do you let the alcohol dry for?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it’s the alcohol.

Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you —

Tim Ferriss: I’ve done thousands of injections in myself.

Kevin Rose: You got to let it because, if you would just like swipe, swipe, swipe and then go pop, it hurts because it’s pushing the alcohol down into the cuts.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe I’m not waiting long enough because I’m impatient. It’s possible because —

Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, oh, are you letting it come to room temperature, too?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did let it come to room temperature. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Okay, because you know it takes five times as long to inject it if you don’t.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, there’s the prescription stuff. It’s not going to apply to too broad a number of people, and I don’t want anyone aping it and getting themselves into trouble, but there are like a few prescription meds for lipid profile specifically, in my case, cholesterol absorption, hyperabsorption. But I would say supplement-wise, omega-3, I honestly try to get that from fish when I can. I eat a lot of canned sardines and mackerel and stuff, which ties into the keto and Fasting Mimicking Diet diet stuff. Vitamin D, yes, although I’m pretty skeptical of like the entire planet having vitamin D deficiency frankly. I do take it though. And then there’s some B vitamin complex stuff.

Kevin Rose: I do that, too.

Tim Ferriss: I’m a shitty methylator, so that’s a good idea.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.

Tim Ferriss: And creatine, although I end up looking kind of like a puffy fat baby if I eat too much of that stuff.

Kevin Rose: Wait. Are you doing five grams?

Tim Ferriss: It depends on the day, right? So like I took five grams today. If I’m training, I’m going to use at least 10. I’m doing weight training. And then, if I have a crazy travel schedule ahead of me where I’m going to be in like London for one day and Sweden for one day, I’ll be taking probably 20 to 30 grams a day —

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: — because my sleep’s going to be so screwed —

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — just to compensate for the sleep deprivation.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit. Good luck.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Kevin Rose: Good luck making it to the toilet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Don’t —

Kevin Rose: Creatine jacks your stomach up, right?

Tim Ferriss: Don’t combine. Actually, I’m fine with creatine. If I get —

Kevin Rose: You told me at one point it was messing you up though.

Tim Ferriss: Well, there was the story of me — what did I have? I was in San Francisco. This is probably TMI, but whatever. We’re all friends here, right? So I was in San Francisco. I had my Volkswagen Golf. It got broken into like three times for change. I was so annoyed. San Francisco for the win. And, in any case, I had to run to an international flight, and I was stressed out because I was running behind. And I was, like, well, just before I go, I’m going to have double espresso, 10 grams of creatine, and then I had MCT oil.

Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, my God, dude.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m driving on my way to the airport like in a massive rush. I don’t have time for anything. And I leaned to do a little squeaker, and just —

Kevin Rose: Oh, no.

Tim Ferriss: — full disaster pants.

Kevin Rose: In an Uber?

Tim Ferriss: No. In my own car.

Kevin Rose: Oh.

Tim Ferriss: I park in long-term parking and —

Kevin Rose: Did you grab a new pair out of your thing, just wipe and go?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, all right, I can’t believe I’m talking about this to millions of people. But I basically took the underwear and like some rags that I had, like did what I had to do for like emergency field triage —

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — tossed it under my car, put on my pants —

Kevin Rose: Throw it in the trash.

Tim Ferriss: — put on my pants. No, I literally was about to miss my flight. I put my pants on commando style and then ran on and got on the flight.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And I was just, like, “I’m sorry, everybody.” I know this can’t be too much of a wonderful cologne for anyone near me.

Kevin Rose: Oh, God.

Tim Ferriss: We might need to edit some of that. So, yeah, don’t do those three at once. If you’re getting Creapure creatine, I don’t find it to mess up my stomach at all. Totally fine. If you combine it with caffeine and MCT oil —

Kevin Rose: MCT oil is the devil, dude.

Tim Ferriss: All bets are off. All bets are off.

Kevin Rose: That stuff just goes straight through you. I don’t know a single person that can do high-dose MCT and has been, like, “Oh, my stomach’s fine.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. You’re going to — high risk. You should just pre-order the subscription of Depends.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Let me mention one other thing. So, related to all the mental health stuff, it sounds like we’re doing like tons of stuff, millions of things. It’s actually not that complicated for me. Right? There are a few supplements that I’m taking consistently, the creatine, the Urolithin A, et cetera. There are a few things I’m considering like methylene blue. If photobiomodulation with the lasers or LEDs is something that you can experiment with once a week or once every few weeks and track changes over time, let’s do that, and before and after cognitive testing. Intermittent ketosis, which I find easiest to do through intermittent fasting, frankly, which I’ll be doing when I travel also. I find it to help with jet lag.

And then there’s the exercise, right? And so what kind of exercise? I did a podcast with Dr. Tommy Wood recently. Fascinating guy. People should listen to that episode. But 4×4 Norwegian, high-intensity training, which is like you’re basically doing — I guess it would be considered zone four. You’re really maxing out your heart rate. And you’re doing four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on. You’re repeating that four times. And it is very much puke inducing. It’s a lot of lactic acid.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: The problem has always been, or one of the problems has always been that, if I’m traveling, stationary bikes in hotels are just terrible.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: They will destroy my knees. They’re just too inconsistent in terms of settings and stuff. So I was texting with Tommy. I don’t think he’d mind me saying. I’ll have to double check with him. But I asked him, I said if — in the conversation we had, I was, like, “Well, what are the drivers here? Is it VO2 max, because talk about VO2 max, VO2 max, VO2 max?” And he said, “Well, lactate actually seems to be a big driver, like lactic acid, right?”

Kevin Rose: Driver of what?

Tim Ferriss: Driver of the cognitive changes, like the neuroanatomical and vascular changes. And he’s, like, “Okay.” “Well, hold on a second.” I was, like, “If that’s the case, there are certain ways of weight training. Like if you do 20 rep squats in slow cadence or any number of different things, like you are going to be brimming with lactic acid. Could that possibly achieve the same effect?”

Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?

Tim Ferriss: What’s that?

Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?

Tim Ferriss: Klotho is another part of it.

Kevin Rose: Because klotho has been shown — like HIIT is what creates klotho in humans.

Tim Ferriss: Well, klotho is another piece. I don’t think it’s the only piece. I mean, look, I can’t wait for us to have proper injectable klotho or that lever to pull. But, in the meantime, I guess, right now, today, what I’m saying is like high intensity interval training when you’re traveling is not always the easiest thing to do.

Kevin Rose: Right. Right. Right.

Tim Ferriss: But, like for instance, when I go back to my hotel tonight, can I do like a couple of sets of very high repetition leg presses and just basically have lactic acid pouring out my eyeballs? Yeah, I can do that.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I can do it in like five minutes. Right? And there are many open questions about it, but that’s the approach I’m taking. And what’s really cool about the Norwegian 4×4 that Tommy describes, and I think I’m remembering this correctly, is that, if you do it, I think it’s three times a week for six months, you can observe the effects, the beneficial effects for like five years afterwards.

Kevin Rose: Wow. Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: Isn’t that fucking crazy?

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: The durability of the effects are just nuts.

Kevin Rose: Okay, this is what I get to — I’ll start by like 1×1 or something. And you could go in 4×4?

Tim Ferriss: There ain’t no way in hell I’m doing 4×4.

Kevin Rose: 4×4, if you’re doing it properly. I use a Morpheus chest strap. But you’re assuming a certain level of like baseline cardiovascular fitness to do 4×4.

Tim Ferriss: Not really because, I mean, look, you don’t —

Kevin Rose: It’s subjective.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t blow yourself apart, but it’s heart-rate based, right?

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So, if you get winded and your heart gets gone walking up a flight of stairs, like you’re not going to need very much to get into the proper zone. I will say, for me, and this comes back to the mitochondrial discussion, and I’ve had doctors who are, like, “That’s nonsense. It’s all mediated by the lungs.” It’s actually not mediated by the lungs. It’s all like heart stroke volume. I’m, like, “My legs crap out first before my heart rate gets to where it needs to be.” My legs are the weak link.

Kevin Rose: Oh, dude.

Tim Ferriss: I feel that fatigue in my legs.

Kevin Rose: I’ve got boots for you tonight. Can I put the boots on while you have dinner?

Tim Ferriss: Are these the —

Kevin Rose: The ones that go all the way up the leg.

Tim Ferriss: — Normatec?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, Normatec.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll try them. Yeah, I’ll try them.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever tried them?

Tim Ferriss: I have. I love those.

Kevin Rose: Oh, they’re so good, man. For people who don’t know, real quick, just a quick aside, they just squeeze and then move the blood around in your legs. They’re great for recovery.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like if you want to feel like a Kobe cow —

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — just throw on some Normatec boots, have a cold beer while you’re doing it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. And we could do both of those things tonight.

Tim Ferriss: I mean that’s —

Kevin Rose: That’s it from my side.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot —

Kevin Rose: I can do the doom-and-gloom AI shit, but I don’t want to talk about that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. Let’s save the doom-and-gloom for next time. I think you’re getting contagions from one of our other friends. I left out something that’s kind of important.

Kevin Rose: I’ve just got to make sure what you’re talking about. We have a buddy that just like we text with. And we love you if you’re listening. But he’s, like, “The world is ending.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot of — I lean dystopian anyway. It’s like I don’t need any feeding that hypervigilant. Like I need to become John Connor. Like I don’t. Plus, it’s like, can I do anything? What am I going to do? What’s Tim going to do?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly. Meditating.

Tim Ferriss: The fuck, the genie is out of the bottle, folks, so we’ll save the doom-and-gloom for next time. But, in terms of an actionable thing, like something I just did before coming here, let’s say you want to experiment with this lactate as lever for cognitive longevity, right? That’s interesting. Okay, and let’s just say, furthermore, to your point, right, everybody’s getting older. And, believe me, maybe you’re like a 20-year-old dude and feeling immortal. Those like popped-up joints and broken bones will add up, and they will come back to haunt you like the ghost of Christmas past. So, if you’re trying to minimize injury risk, right, there are a couple of different ways you can do it. One that I’ve been a proponent of for a long time is slow down, right? Five seconds up, five seconds down, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down.

Kevin Rose: Time under 10 is just huge, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so it’s like, look, if you’re not a competitive powerlifter, consider moving slowly. What that requires you to do is lower the weight. You’re also not going to be using momentum. The second thing you can —

Kevin Rose: Testosterone?

Tim Ferriss: Not for lactate, but, yeah, I mean, sure, when in doubt, yeah, testosterone.

Kevin Rose: When in doubt.

Tim Ferriss: When in doubt.

Kevin Rose: 200 milligrams once a week.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a joke, people.

Kevin Rose: Well, first of all, if you have it — well, anyway, don’t do that.

Tim Ferriss: So the second thing you can do, which I’ve been experimenting with, which Tommy would use this all the time, especially when traveling, is blood flow restriction cuffs.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And so —

Kevin Rose: I used to have some of those before my fire happened.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so —

Kevin Rose: I would blood flow. I got the automatic ones that would automatically keep the pressure, too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to use, like, a hand pump. I’m using the KAATSU —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, mine are digital KAATSU. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — K-A-A-T-S-U, C4. I’m using the C4 because I’m, like, I don’t want another app on my phone.

Kevin Rose: Did you get the app? Oh, I got the app.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t want —

Kevin Rose: That’s nice.

Tim Ferriss: No. Like, look, if people want apps, they can. I’m kind of along the Bill Burr lines of, like, “I need to install a fucking app to use my toaster now? Like, please, shoot me.”

Kevin Rose: What about having a hummingbird feeder?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, we’ll talk about that.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Let me finish the blood flow restriction. We’re all over the place. All right. So the blood flow restriction, all it is is a cuff. It inflates and it causes a partial occlusion. Right? It’s cutting off circulation to your arms or your legs. And there’s a lot of really good science on this. You can check it out. But what you can do when traveling — and I’m trying this right now. Tommy Wood, by the way, is a phenomenal athlete, endurance and strongman in addition to being an incredible researcher. I don’t know where they breed these people like Dominic D’Agostino, same thing, like 500-pound deadlift for 10 reps after a seven-day fast. Like who are these people? Anyway, Tommy is a beast. When he’s traveling, and he doesn’t lose muscle when he’s doing this, he’ll use blood flow restriction. And he’ll bring bands.

Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.

Tim Ferriss: He’ll just bring a bunch of bands. And I got to tell you.

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t take much. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I like to think of myself as reasonably strong. I’m not a world-class powerlifter, but I think, like generally, pretty strong guy. I put on those cuffs today. And I was, like, “I think I’ll just bump it from light up to medium.”

Kevin Rose: Like 20 pounds?

Tim Ferriss: Ah, well, it has a different metric. It has a different —

Kevin Rose: The band strength?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in terms of like there’s —

Kevin Rose: Extra large or extra strong or whatever?

Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember. Yeah, I mean, if you use the KAATSU bands. There are many other brands. Tommy uses a different brand. You can find it in the podcast. We can put it in the show notes. But, suffice it to say, it’s like you’re using very, very light weights. And it’s like I can probably do hammer curls with like 40-pound dumbbells, let’s just say.

Kevin Rose: With those on?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: That’s what I was going to say. That’s way too much weight.

Tim Ferriss: I’m saying, normally, with reasonable cadence, not swinging around, I can probably do hammer curls with 40 pounds without too much trouble with the blood flow restriction bands on.

Kevin Rose: Like, literally, 20 pounds is all you need.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, 10 pounds.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I was doing like 30 reps and then take a 15-second rest, then 20 reps, 15-second rest, like 10 to 50 reps.

Kevin Rose: So you have the C4s, these bad boys?

Tim Ferriss: I’ve got the C4s, yeah. And, look, KAATSU is expensive. These are, what, yeah, $1,259. Like that is expensive. There are other options that are not that expensive. But then the one that really was humbling is I was, like, “Okay, I’ll just do pushups for like triceps,” just because I only brought the armbands. I didn’t bring the leg bands and everything this time around. I can just do like walking and lunges. Trust me, you can smoke yourself doing those. But I was doing pushups, and I was, like, “Well, let me start moderate. I’ll just start on like a bench that’s about 18 inches off the ground. I’ll do some pushups.” And I did like 25, and I’m, like, “Wow, that’s a lot harder than I would expect,” right, because like, on the ground, I could probably do, I don’t know, 40, good form, 50 pushups. And I did 25. I was, like, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable.”

And then I went to do the next set, got like five, and I was, like, “Oh, I can’t do it.” And so then I increased my — basically elevated myself to make it easier. Right? And I’m doing it on, like, the seat of a hamstring curl machine. Did like 12. Couldn’t do any more. And then I got to the point where I was literally doing pushups. It’s so humbling on like the railing of the stairs. I was basically standing up straight, and I did 30 reps, and I was, like, “This really…”

Kevin Rose: Okay, real quick —

Tim Ferriss: “…keeps your ego in check.”

Kevin Rose: 20-second version, why is it working? Why is restricting blood flow working? Why is it building more muscle?

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s doing a few different things. It’s also increasing capillary density and vasculature. It’s having a whole host of effects. I, to be honest, don’t —

Kevin Rose: But doesn’t it increase HGH as well, localized?

Tim Ferriss: It might. It makes you sweat your balls off, too.

Kevin Rose: And then had another question.

Tim Ferriss: Not to get too technical, but

Kevin Rose: Could it work? Could that work?

Tim Ferriss: Kevin’s asking me if you could use blood flow restriction on your —

Kevin Rose: I didn’t want to bring it up unless it was with —

Tim Ferriss: — on your Schwantz.

Kevin Rose: So, listen, I think —

Tim Ferriss: I think it sounds like a terrible idea.

Kevin Rose: No. Listen, they have rings that you can put around your schwonks and — but, listen, hear me out.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, I know those exist.

Kevin Rose: I just literally Googled that there is smooth muscle tissue in there. If you’re telling me that you’re putting bands on your arms doing lifts, if you —

Tim Ferriss: How are you going to do lifts with your Schwanz?

Kevin Rose: You have to have a schlonks erection.

Tim Ferriss: And then you do some shaolin monk — like —

Kevin Rose: Well, if you have the band —

Tim Ferriss: — like curl-ups?

Kevin Rose: I’m just saying this is a theory.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I guess you could like do manual resistance. You could push it down and then bring it back up.

Keving Rose: Push it down, five seconds up. Do you know what’s crazy? Obviously, everyone knows this is a joke, but it might not be, you know what I mean?

Tim Ferriss: Do not —

Kevin Rose: Like this could be real.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, do not wrap duct tape or anything —

Kevin Rose: Well, they have rings that they sell at stores.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think you can try that and then report back in the next show.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever used one of the rings?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think so.

Kevin Rose: You have to.

Tim Ferriss: No. I mean, I would. Why not? Yeah, I mean, why not? As long as you’re not going to completely — I mean, it’s not going to just fall off.

Kevin Rose: Apparently, it locks the blood in.

Tim Ferriss: Well, obviously, yeah. What else would it be for?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously, for people that don’t know, pre-Viagra era.

Tim Ferriss: We’re talking about cock rings. We’re speaking in fucking riddles here. It’s like that’s what they’re called.

Kevin Rose: We’re speaking in Zen koans here. What is the sound of one —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. This really fucking went in the gutter, yeah, quickly.

Kevin Rose: Well, we’re almost at the end of the episode, so —

Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds.

Kevin Rose: Hummingbirds. Okay. So, before we started the show, Tim was, like, “You’ve got to mention the hummingbirds,” and I’m like —

Tim Ferriss: Well, I looked at your draft, and I was, like, “You’ve got to talk about your hummingbird thing.” You’ve sent me a bunch of these videos.

Kevin Rose: Dude, they’re so cool. Okay. So, essentially, for Christmas, I got my kids a hummingbird feeder with a digital camera built in. And the cool thing about it is it charges from the sunlight and then also — so the camera just always stays on. And then also it detects what — in this case, it’s the hummingbird, but they have for normal birds as well. But it’ll tell you the variety of hummingbird that landed and then uses AI. And then you could name them. And so we have one named —

Tim Ferriss: Tony is back.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly, and we have one named Sunset. Our girl’s named it Sunset because it has this beautiful red neck, and we’re like — I’ll get a text notification. “Sunset is drinking…”

Tim Ferriss: Is this the one?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s the one, Birdbuddy. It’s the Birdbuddy Smart Solar Pro Hummingbird Feeder. And it’s fun, people, because these things are so beautiful and —

Tim Ferriss: The videos are amazing.

Kevin Rose: The videos are amazing. And then they play with each other. And you watch them hovering. And you get full audio. You see the little — their tiny tongues like sticking out. It’s just amazing. It’s really cool.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the videos were quite cool.

Kevin Rose: And then I got the one that is for just standard birds which has bird feed that comes down, and the motherfucking squirrels are taking it over.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, they’re just mercenaries.

Kevin Rose: They are ruthless. Dude, they jump. Like there’s nothing you could do to keep them out of it. They will spring onto it. And then you see they’re like — sadly, they look out because they don’t want to get attacked, and so all I have is squirrel ass on my freaking camera. I’m, like, “Goddammit, how do I get rid of the squirrels?”

Tim Ferriss: Have you heard of Mark Rober? Does his name mean anything to you?

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: He created like the ultimate squirrel ninja warrior course in his backyard.

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: He put it on YouTube. Let me — yeah, there we go. All right. Mark Rober, squirrels, I think he had the same problem. Here we go. Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 Ninja Warriors.

Kevin Rose: It’s supposed to keep them out?

Tim Ferriss: People have to check this out. Oh, hold up, no ads, no free ads.

Kevin Rose: I got to pay for my pro.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re not paying the $5 a month.

Kevin Rose: I’m not logged in. I’m not logged in to the pro.

Tim Ferriss: You’re buying $7,000 Japanese vintage jackets but you won’t pay $5 to get rid of these goddam ads.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, just click “skip.”

Tim Ferriss: All right. So, here, hold on a sec.

Kevin Rose: Whoa.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, look at this setup.

Kevin Rose: This is like MrBeast for squirrels.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, look, these guys just get —

Kevin Rose: My God, it’s totally MrBeast for squirrels. Like he’s having them go through all these obstacle courses.

Tim Ferriss: They stick their heads through and then they get a photo taken. All right, we’ll link to that.

Kevin Rose: People, you have to watch this video.

Tim Ferriss: Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 by Mark Rober.

Kevin Rose: Dude, this is —

Tim Ferriss: R-O-B-E-R.

Kevin Rose: — 144 million views.

Tim Ferriss: See, this is the kind of shit where I’m, like, “I should have come up with this idea.” Like this is too good. All right. Solid.

Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds and cock rings.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. We covered it all this time, people.

Tim Ferriss: Brought to you courtesy the Random Show.

Kevin Rose: Brother, good to see you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good to see you, too, man.

Kevin Rose: Glad you’re —

Tim Ferriss: Good to see you, too.

Kevin Rose: Glad you’re feeling better. And, yeah —

Tim Ferriss: To be continued.

Kevin Rose: To be continued.

Tim Ferriss: All right, folks, we’ll put everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Random Show. It’s going to be one of those. Search for cock rings. It’ll be the only result on tim.blog. And, until next time, take care of —

Kevin Rose: For now.

Tim Ferriss: — yourselves. Be nice. Be a little kinder than is necessary to yourselves and to others.

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

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858)

2026-03-19 03:44:03

Welcome to another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose!

We cover our recent Zen meditation retreat with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, the fascinating science of vagus nerve stimulation, my recent back pain breakthrough, balance training tools, tendon-strengthening protocols from Swedish rock climber Emil Abrahamsson, the emerging research on photobiomodulation, urolithin A supplementation, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol for cognitive longevity, podcast recommendations, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird-feeder obsession, and much more.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

Eight Sleep Pod Cover 5 sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: EightSleep.com/Tim
AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim
Cresset family office services for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs: CressetCapital.com/Tim