2025-11-22 01:50:00
This blog post is a very special holiday edition of 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter!
I dislike shopping, but I do love finding the perfect gift. Finding that gift, though, gets harder with time. Those damn adults seem to have everything. So… If you’re having trouble thinking up great options, below are some goodies that deliver. I’ve recommended or gifted all of the below to my close friends.
I also reached out to some of my favorite companies to get special deals for subscribers. I use all of these products on a daily or weekly basis, depending on the season and activity. Literally everything I mention below lives in my home somehow. Each sponsored bullet is indicated with a star at the end of it, just like this sentence.*
Happy holidays! 
Awareness: Conversations with the Masters by Anthony de Mello. Non-fiction, 184 pages. I’ve gifted this at least 50 times, so I’ll keep gifting it.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Fiction, 416 pages, which go very quickly. #76 on the NYT’s list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. This was a new find in 2025.
Gold by Rumi and Haleh Liza Gafori. Poetry, 112 pages. A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, an American poet of Persian descent. Read 1–2 poems before bed each night and thank me later.
Tune Up Fitness – Alpha Ball. This was recommended to me by Nsima Inyang, a mutant among mutants. The Alpha Ball solves a few different problems at the same time: (1) It’s precise. Foam rollers are big amorphous objects. It can be hard to get them to certain spots (e.g., hips—TFL, glute medius, piriformis), which the Alpha Ball can easily access. (2) It’s compact enough for luggage and travel. This also means I can use it against a wall for spinal erectors, rear of the shoulders, etc. (3) It has a Goldilocks density: not too hard and not too soft. The firmness hits the sweet spot—hard enough to work out deep knots but not so aggressive that it causes excessive pain or bracing. I’m writing this from Japan and literally have it in my suitcase five feet from me.
Coyote the card game (38% off), which I co-created with Exploding Kittens. It just won the Pop Insider “Best Geeky Game” of 2025 and also “Best Stocking Filler” in the MadeForMums Toy Awards 2025 (UK). If you have any kids or relatives aged 8–15, you can start playing—and laughing—in minutes. Think charades + hot potato + brain fun. The game is available at Amazon, Target, Walmart, Exploding Kittens, and more.
It’s currently the cheapest it will probably ever be, at $7.99–$9.00 for Black Friday savings. Buy it here!
Momentous Creatine Chews. I’ve relied on Momentous products for years now, and I take their creatine as a daily staple for strength, recovery, and—particularly—brain health. Recent studies have highlighted how creatine can support cognitive function, even boosting performance when sleep deprived. Creatine works best when taken consistently, and Momentous Creatine Chews make it as close to effortless as possible. I typically aim for 5 grams per day.
Each tablet contains one gram of Creapure® creatine, the gold standard for purity in sports science. Like all Momentous products, the Chews are NSF Certified for Sport®, meaning independently tested for purity, safety, and label accuracy. Use code TIM from this page for 35% off your first subscription order and 10% off of future orders.*
Maestri House Rechargeable Milk Frother. OK, I never expected to have a frother in this newsletter, but this is a great example of “there is always a market for the best.”
It also reminds me of sage wisdom from Kevin Kelly, found in his tiny, practical book titled Excellent Advice for Living:
Take note if you find yourself wondering “Where is my good knife?” or “Where is my good pen?” That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
I’ve owned a lot of frothers for coffee and tea. Most of them are cheap, or I got them for free. They break, batteries stop charging, or they simply have two modes: completely off and outboard motor. Even the “tap here for three different speeds” types will backfire and spray coffee all over the place a third of the time. This Maestri House device fixes all of these problems. It just feels great to use. Plus, anything with “LunaFro” in the name…
Titanium Always Pan Pro. Many nonstick pans can release harmful “forever chemicals”—PFAS—into your food, your home, and, ultimately, your body. Teflon is a prime example; it is the forever chemical that most companies are still using. 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 Our Place. It’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating. This means zero “forever chemicals” and durability that will last a lifetime. There is no degradation over time like traditional nonstick pans. Now through December 2nd, Our Place is having their biggest sitewide sale of the year, including significant discounts ($100 to $825) on their non-toxic cookware sets. Go to FromOurPlace.com/Tim now to shop Our Place’s Black Friday sale.*
Elgato Wave:3. Based on reviews, I picked up this microphone for a last-minute virtual recording on the road. It’s easy to pack and looks great on camera. Most impressive to me, it seems to cancel bounce and echo far better than my pro studio gear. Go figure. Their tech black magic can work wonders, but there’s one bug to look out for: when you first plug in the mic, it will often auto-select to speaker or headset mode, and you need to press the big button on the front to ensure you’re actually recording on microphone.
Premium MGO 1000+ Mānuka Honey from Manukora. I love this smooth and creamy Mānuka honey, and I use it before bed to help with sleep. Per the late Seth Roberts, PhD, and for reasons unclear to me, a tablespoon of honey and two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar mixed into hot water (or decaf tea) before bed seems to dramatically accelerate sleep onset time.
Eight Sleep Pod 5 Ultra. Several years ago, I started using the Pod Cover for cooling and heating while I sleep, and it has transformed my sleep quality. It’s also probably saved quite a few marriages, since you can change your “zone” and not your partner’s. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 5 Ultra. The Pod 5 Ultra automatically tracks your sleep time, sleep stages, HRV, and heart rate. In addition, the all-new Blanket and Pod Pillow Covers expand the Pod into a head-to-toe sleep experience with real-time temperature regulation. Many of my listeners in colder climates enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech, and sleep at your perfect temperature. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim and save $700 on the Pod 5 Ultra by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. This special offer is valid until December 1st.*
TANK® M3 Push Sled. This is, bar none, the best sled I have ever used for pushing or pulling. It isn’t cheap, but I use it infinitely more than the cheaper sleds I’ve bought in the past. 10–15-minute workouts in the morning sun have become my favorite way to set the stage for a great, mood-elevated day. The ease of rotation and traction makes it perfect for even a gravel driveway like mine. From the description: “Designed with patented Mag-Force
Resistance Technology, the TANK M3 delivers scalable intensity, accommodating many fitness levels while minimizing the need for weight plates and clunky user swaps. The TANK M3’s three-wheeled design glides effortlessly across turf, rubber, or concrete, ensuring smooth operation on any surface. Ergonomic multi-position handles allow users to switch grips seamlessly, enhancing comfort and workout variety. Real-time performance monitoring helps users track progress and training metrics with an oversized digital screen to empower better workouts.”
The Way. This is an easy one. I’ve explored a lot of meditation practices over the years. My current hands-down favorite, and the easiest way to get back in the habit, is The Way, taught by Zen Master Henry Shukman. Using the app for just 10–20 minutes a day has reduced my anxiety more than I would have thought possible with any app. Try it for a week, and I think you’ll notice something similar. Here are 30 sessions for free, no credit card required. Henry’s 10-minute sessions have become one of the highlights of my day, and I know it’s now true for other “non-meditator” friends, too. I recently chose to invest in The Way, given all the above, and I’ve been working with Henry and his team to make the app as good as humanly possible. If you want to gift an annual membership, it costs $99.99 and is worth every penny. Inside the app, tap ‘My Way’ and then go to ‘Account information.’ Then tap the ‘Gift’ button to buy a gift membership for someone.
And there you go! 11 of my favorite things that make great holiday gifts. I love them all and hope you do, too.
Have a wonderful weekend and wonderful holiday season, everyone!
Much love to you and yours,
Tim
The post My 2025 Holiday Gift Guide: 11 Gifts to Make Your Holidays Extra Fun, Relaxing, and Delicious appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-20 00:38:41
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
This time around, we have a bit of a different format, featuring the book that started it all for me, The 4-Hour Workweek. Even though it was published in 2007, it was one of Amazon’s top-10 Most Highlighted Books of All Time last time I checked in 2017.
Readers and listeners often ask me what I would change or update, but an equally interesting question is: what wouldn’t I change? What stands the test of time and hasn’t lost any potency?
This episode features three timeless chapters from the audiobook of The 4-Hour Workweek:
(1) The chapter on taking mini-retirements, which challenges the deferred-life plan and shows you how to distribute recovery and adventure throughout life instead of saving it all for retirement.
(2) “Filling the Void,” which addresses what happens when you actually achieve lifestyle design and must face the unexpected emotional and philosophical challenges of having a lot of time on your hands.
(3) “13 Mistakes of the New Rich,” where I outline the most common pitfalls I’ve seen people encounter when implementing the book’s principles.
The chapters are narrated by the great voice actor Ray Porter. If you are interested in checking out the rest of the audiobook, which is produced and copyrighted by Blackstone Publishing, you can find it on Audible, Apple, Google, Spotify, Downpour.com, or wherever you find your favorite audiobooks.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
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.
This episode is brought to you by Gusto! If you’re a small business owner looking to simplify payroll and HR tasks, Gusto could be the game-changer you need. Gusto is an all-in-one payroll, benefits, and HR platform designed specifically for small businesses. Gusto automatically files federal, state, and local payroll taxes, handles W-2s and 1099s, and offers straightforward health benefits and 401(k) options for nearly any budget. With an intuitive interface and features like time tracking, onboarding tools, and direct access to certified HR experts, Gusto saves time and eliminates headaches so you can focus on what matters—growing your business. As a special offer to listeners, new customers get Gusto free for their first 3 months. This is the perfect time to choose Gusto to take care of your team and stay compliant. See for yourself why 9 out of 10 businesses recommend it. Get started now! Terms apply at Gusto.com/terms.
This episode is brought to you by Momentous high-quality creatine! I’ve long benefitted from creatine for athletic and gym performance, and now I’m increasing my daily intake to enjoy the cognitive benefits as well. A pilot study in Alzheimer’s patients demonstrated that supplementing can increase brain creatine levels in just 8 weeks, improving measures of memory, reasoning, and attention. And a double-blind, placebo-controlled study found that creatine can restore aspects of memory and attention within hours in adults who are sleep deprived. I use Momentous Creatine made with Creapure®, which is sourced from Germany and has the strictest lab standards to ensure it’s at least 99.9% pure. And try Momentous’s Creatine Chews—clean chewable tablets with 1 gram of Creapure® creatine per chew—and their whey protein isolate and magnesium threonate, all of which meet their same, exacting standards. Check out Momentous for yourself and get 35% off your first subscription order with code TIM at LiveMomentous.com/Tim.
This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. Go to shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim.
Want more timeless tools from The 4-Hour Workweek? Listen to this episode on The Art of Refusal and The Low-Information Diet. These elimination strategies are the foundation that creates the freedom for mini-retirements—teaching you how to protect your most valuable resource (time) by saying no to both people and the endless stream of information competing for your attention.
The post The 4-Hour Workweek Principles — 13 Mistakes to Avoid, The Art of Mini-Retirements, and Navigating the Dizziness of Freedom (#836) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-14 02:21:49
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Ben Patrick—better known as “Kneesovertoesguy” (@kneesovertoesguy)—the founder of Athletic Truth Group (ATG), an online and brick-and-mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of debilitating knee and shin pain (including multiple surgeries), he rebuilt his body and performance, going from a sub-20″ vertical to a documented 42″ leap. Over the past 15 years, Ben has coached thousands of clients (from weekend warriors to pro athletes) across 50+ countries, sharing his stepwise method via social media and ATG’s coaching system. He is the author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. His mission now: democratize pain-free movement by making tools, systems, and education accessible to everyone, especially high-school students.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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.
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
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Tim Ferriss: Ben, nice to see you.
Ben Patrick: Hey, brother. Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Nice to finally spend time together. We did a bit of a workout overview, recorded some video so people will be able to find that and we’ll put links in the show notes. We’ll talk more also about things you might pin for people who want a visual reference here. But let’s go back in time. Nicknames. We were chatting a bit before recording. What was the nickname that we were discussing and who gave it to you?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me Old Man. I was so stiff it would take me so long to warm up compared to other players. I knew I wasn’t built well for basketball. I thought I could work my way, so I was just doing crazy workouts from the time I was maybe nine years old, so by 12, chronic knee pain. So even by high school I couldn’t get low in my legs. So I think during all that puberty time, things weren’t forming right, because I was so stiff I wasn’t getting into my legs the way I should started calling me Old Man. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So we’ve got Old Man Patrick in high school. Flash forward now you’re known as Knees Over Toes Guy. So something happened in between those two. What were the, and we can approach this any number of ways, you could explain why the name or you could talk about maybe catalyzing moments or findings that set you on the path that led you to become Knees Over Toes Guy.
Ben Patrick: Absolutely. And as you alluded to on my Instagram, YouTube, it’s pinned where this kind of stuff we’re talking about, someone just can just go look at it and see it visually, almost in order. So the chronic pains and stiffness, doctors did think around 14 probably something happened I should have had surgery on, didn’t have surgery, different things started stacking up. By 18, I then did have surgery, partial kneecap replacement. Part of my kneecap was just floating there. Quad tendon reattached and then had a meniscus transplant. And then it took about a year and a half because I was so extreme, so stiff, I was immobilized and really couldn’t even run for a year and a half. That set off a chain of things. By then, my right knee was hurting worse than my left knee ever had.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that happened when I had my left shoulder surgically reconstructed after the year, year and a half it took to finally rehab the left, the right was screaming.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So I was in a pretty dark place because considering my right knee hurt worse than my left knee ever had, I’m like, I probably need surgery on the right knee now. And I had gotten from the surgeries and I had stayed on painkillers and my parents didn’t know. My girlfriend didn’t know, who’s my wife now.
Tim Ferriss: You staying on the painkillers.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, right. I was just popping them. And then I stumbled on some stuff from Charles Poliquin, who you had on your podcast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Spent a lot of time with Charles back in the day.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. And he had various information that was very clear that it was like, no, no, no. What we’ve, in the fitness world had all been taught of don’t let your knee over your toes. He had stuff saying “No, this is actually the athletes.” He helps them prevent injury and rehab with training that position.
Tim Ferriss: And just for people who are trying to imagine what this means. So if you were to say be in a squat position, keeping your shins vertical where your knees are aligned over your ankles, that would be the, let’s just call it pre-exposure to Poliquin, sacred cow. At least in a lot of the exercise science worlds. Do not let your knees travel over your toes. Right?
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Keep your shins vertical. So Charles is saying quite the opposite.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, and good point there. It was totally understandable why that occurred. 1970s exercise science is becoming a thing in school and they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee. So what went into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes. Now, for someone to compare, think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs, stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes, every single step you take downstairs.
So when I started studying Charles Poliquin because of what I had been through, for me instantly, I knew there was something here because I had tried all the mainstream methods of no knees over toes. So the first thing then that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging a sled backwards. So every step I take, my knee is over my toes, but I’m not — it’s almost like if someone walked backward up a hill to rehab rather than going down the hill. And that’s actually the progression of the rehab, is walking backwards trying to add resistance to walking backwards, which is gentler to then I use a slant board, but someone could really, you could roll up a towel to elevate your heel. You could start with your heel flat, you don’t have to even elevate the heel to start where you actually work on stepping down. So you’re actually controlling the motion at your pain-free level of stepping down.
Even if you can’t, I couldn’t do a six-inch step. I could maybe control a couple inches and you’re using high repetitions as if you were a gymnast.
Tim Ferriss: When you say you can only do a couple of inches, could you just paint a picture for what that means?
Ben Patrick: Let’s say you’re walking down the stairs, each stair is probably six inches. I couldn’t control that motion without pain. I had to clunk my way down the stairs. Ease up pressure with the upper body. I couldn’t control step-by-step without my knee hurting, but someone could do less than a six-inch stair. So the walking backward as a warm-up, you’re getting circulation, we’re talking maybe stacking up 100, 200 yards backward, which didn’t hurt. And then was getting circulation, getting some strength. So that was what I felt like, okay, I can get off the painkillers now because I have this way of naturally reducing the pain and getting some strength going in a knee pressure position.
Tim Ferriss: And let me just sidebar quickly for folks. I have only, in the last handful of years, I’d used sleds a lot, but I was always pushing, and it’s only in the last handful of years and you have met these guys as well, but Nsima Inyang and Mark Bell, and of course, Mark Bell used to train with who? He was at Westside Barbell, Louie Simmons, and you mentioned his name when we were recording earlier. I have come to appreciate just how incredibly therapeutic this pulling of the sled is, which you could do with a harness around the waist. You could do it with a vest, you could simply hold on to, I guess that’s typically how I’ve seen Mark do it, for instance, where you’re effectively just holding onto handles with a strap that attaches you to the sled for rehabilitation, for prehab, for building in some insurance policy for the knees. It is just incredibly effective but also, so elegant and so simple and hard to hurt yourself.
Now, of course, talk to your doctor. I don’t pretend to be one on the internet, but that’s all I wanted to say, was personally, I can also vouch for this. Did you come across that through Poliquin?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So Charles Poliquin was interviewed for this article where he helped an Olympic athlete who wasn’t going to be able to compete in the Olympics and they started going backward with the sled often because he could recover fast and he was able to get back and actually win a medal at the Olympics. So I’m not advising someone to rush, but that was a unique case where this might be the guy’s only chance —
Tim Ferriss: You have a constraint.
Ben Patrick: Ever. Yeah. So that sold me on it. And then once I was experiencing it, I was like, okay, I can see there’s something here. It’s not like that solved all my problems. That was enough for me in my state to be willing to get off the painkillers and then start exploring further stuff. And then —
Tim Ferriss: How long did it take you to get off of the painkillers after you started doing the sled work?
Ben Patrick: Well, I remember after the first week of doing this, I then intentionally got off. That didn’t mean all my pain was gone, but it was like I wanted to experience this route and not try to shield the pain anymore. So within a week I knew, okay, there’s something different here of progressing the knee over the toes rather than avoiding the knee over the toes. And the sled at least, gave me something. It was hard. I didn’t really want to think about any further progressions, but that gave me something I could do, didn’t hurt.
And to give someone an idea on the safety, we can’t say anything is 100 percent safe, but real numbers at the gym, I eventually made, coached thousands of group training sessions. So it wound up being, I counted like over a hundred thousand times that I coached people on the sled. No one was ever hurt doing the sled. It could happen. To give you a visual that we actually did, which was I feel like the best visual to explain to people. My mom is 71. We put 1,000 pounds on the sled, and had her try to drag it backwards. She couldn’t budge it but she was fine.
Tim Ferriss: People are going to be wondering why you would do that to your mom. Why did you do it?
Ben Patrick: I feel like that actually — more people are like, “Oh, now I get why it’s safe,” because the thousand pounds that she’s trying to drag is not bearing down on her. So when you’re trying to drag a weight, it probably has less potential to body build and create that breakdown that turns into new muscle tissue and stuff. But it has more potential for getting into something with safety and without pain. So that was my stepping stone. Charles Poliquin, this was before social media, so I didn’t actually see any videos of any of the stuff. I had to really decipher articles. I had to self-teach based on information he had put out. And through my just self-experimenting, I was able to get to where I could play basketball really hard without my knees hurting.
Tim Ferriss: What other ingredients were added to the cocktail outside of the backwards sled pulls?
Ben Patrick: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got the backwards sled pulls. Then it was really clear that he was getting people into a full range of motion squat. And that was also something that growing up my whole life in basketball was like, don’t do any deep squats. Your knee goes over your toes. So it was sort of, don’t go below 90 degrees and don’t let your knee over your toes, were the two prevailing things. And I went to six, eight, 10 trainers. So this is not just like a, look, maybe that was bad luck that none of those trainers knew differently. It does seem like it was the prevailing way and having been on basketball teams now, having coached, I could safely estimate that 99 percent of basketball teams don’t squat with a full range of motion.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw out a Poliquinism. He had quite a few of these, at some point, I’ll tell you the origin story, how I connected with Charles, which is pretty funny, but this is one of his lines. And this is, I’ll give credit where credit’s due. This is from Outside online, but “Strength is gained in the range it is trained,” right? Very Seussian, as they put it. And you just see this over and over again.
And I’ve interviewed, for instance, Coach Christopher Sommer, who used to be the men’s national gymnastics coach. And you look at a lot of, say, cases of what people might consider inflexibility. And it’s just the body being very smart to guard itself against injury where it is weak at the extent of your range of motion. And when you start to develop strength at the end range, all of a sudden — your “flexibility” improves because the body is very, very intelligent and it’s guarding you against injury.
So sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to mention the Poliquinism, because I think it puts a fine point on some of what you’re saying. It’s like if you’re never getting into a full squat position, if you ever engage in anything that puts you into those positions, your foot slips while you’re playing intramural soccer, who knows, right? You’re going to be potentially in a world of hurt.
Ben Patrick: No, I appreciate that. And I think to make it an effective podcast for people, please keep chiming in. Even for our body, this is the mindset, the efficiency, the 80 percent of the results from 20 percent. This is the stuff that helps me make my system. So it’s hugely inspired by that. And outside of my videos, I don’t have a ton to say here, so please keep it coming. Make it interesting for people.
Tim Ferriss: I think you’ve got plenty to say. I’ll keep prompting, but please go ahead.
Ben Patrick: On the deep squat. What I have to offer is lots of experience trying to help people who can’t figure out how to apply this stuff. Deep squats hurting is super common. People feeling like they don’t have the mobility to get into a deep squat. Elevating your heels a bit can help people get lower on a squat and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.
Tim Ferriss: Do you recommend people do what people would envision as a normal squat? So both feet on the ground, same plane? Or one exercise that you’re very well known for, right, the ATG split squat or front foot elevated split squat. Would you have them start with that in place of the prototypical squat? How do you think about that?
Ben Patrick: I see it in relation to age, almost like a Perverse system, meaning my kids are three and five, their squats are incredible. I’m not like wait until you — so it’s almost like in youth, my whole system for the knees is, if I can have you comfortable and able to be getting stronger, controlling a full range of motion squat where you feel like you don’t have to stop before you get all the way down, but also where you feel like you don’t have to bounce to get out of it where you’re able to own it. You can control it all the way down, pause and then explode up without pain, able to get stronger. Kids naturally have that.
And so when I’m coaching, I volunteer at a school. I’ve had to coach 50 kids at a time. I set up 10 slam boards. Some kids need to elevate the heel, some don’t. They’re able to back their heels up, whatever they want. Everyone can get down into a deep squat without pain. Some need to hold some weight out in front of them to get down there, but the younger they are, 100 percent can do it. All little toddlers can deep squat.
Tim Ferriss: Why does the weight in front of you help someone can get into a squatted position — whether the heels are elevated or not?
Ben Patrick: It’s simply a counterbalance. So when you go to squat down and you think about that for someone with knee pain, you think about that pressure, holding the weight down in front, you can actually lean back a bit, your knee doesn’t have to go as far over your toes. So I’m trying to help people get better at knees over toes, not work through pain in the process, gradually coax that ability or if they’ve already got it, we can fortify it super easily.
So a progression using common weights is, let’s say you hold because it’s mostly going to be adults listening to this. Let’s say you roll up a towel on the floor and you lift your heels up onto it to simulate some more of that mobility to get low and you hold a 25 pound plate out in front of you, you get where you can lower down pain-free in a squat, let’s say five reps controlling down. Okay, now let’s say you hold a 45 pound plate, not all the way out in front of you, just in front of your knees. Get to where that’s pain-free, five reps let’s say. Okay, now you hold a 45 or more pound kettlebell not far out in front of you, but above your thighs now.
Tim Ferriss: Closer to your center of gravity.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. And then depending on a person’s goals, what would be even closer than that would be a bar on front. So depending on sports goals, I find with all students, I want them to be able to hold a kettlebell and get down in a deep squat without pain. That’s a pretty good, I have to get down and pick up one kid, two kids, I got a third kid on the way. I have to squat down because if you’ve got to pick up two toddlers, you can’t just bend your back over. You can for one, think about trying to pick up two little bodies. You got to deep squat. So I got a deep squat with some load. Saying everyone has to barbell squat, that’s just not true, but I do think it would be a common sense goal for everyone to be able to hold a kettlebell and squat all the way down without pain.
Tim Ferriss: So, I want you to fact check me if I’m off base here, but I would like to come back to the split squat for a second. Particularly with that front foot elevated. So imagine that you had some place in your house, I’m making this up, where there’s one step up, maybe it’s from living room to the kitchen or vice versa. Could just as easily, as we did earlier, be two thick 45-pound plates. If they’re like the bumper plate style, so whatever that might be, six to eight inches, whatever the height happens to be.
So you’ve got one foot on that. Then you have your other leg as far back as is pain-free and you go down into a squat to the extent that you can be pain-free in that range of motion and your knee, if you build up to it, maybe you’ll get there naturally quickly, your front knee is going to project way over your toes. And the reason that I wanted to come back to this is A, because I’ve derived so much value from this and so much pain reduction in the back. And the third is from a form perspective, I wouldn’t want people who have never explored really deep squatting to jump into doing squatting where they’re rounding the low back at the bottom most portion of the squat.
So just to paint a picture for folks, maybe they’ve heard these terms, but if you imagine your hips, your pelvis, like a glass of wine, if you’re pouring wine out the front, that’s anterior pelvic tilt. If you’re pouring wine out the back, that’s posterior pelvic tilt. If you go into the bottom of a squat, especially if you’re loading yourself up with a barbell or something and you have a lot of posterior pelvic tilt, some people call that the butt wink at the bottom, you can really hurt yourself. And I was guilty of that at one point. And I like the safety profile and I don’t want to make anything sound risk-free, of course. But of all the exercises that I’ve seen, especially under control, slow cadence, the front foot elevated split squat, it seems harder to commit cardinal sins where you’re going to injure yourself. Is that a fair statement?
Ben Patrick: I think so. And that was, for someone listening who is confused on what we’re talking about, now you understand where I was when I was 19 trying to figure this out without seeing visuals. So I have, by far, made the most step-by-step free videos on how to do that and how to use — a stairwell is a near-perfect device. You have balance to hold on to reduce the load. You have scalable steps to use —
Tim Ferriss: Which is what I did in the beginning, right? I had my front foot two steps up, holding onto a railing with one hand and then just worked the way down.
Ben Patrick: That’s how my mom has mostly done them. She’s 71. If you see her sprint, it’s like “I’m going to need to see a birth certificate.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild. 71, your mom can sprint.
Ben Patrick: My mom is more impressive than — I try, I can’t get — my mom can get more views than I can when I talk about it.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so just to give voice, certainly this pops into my mind. I’m like, wait a second. All right, so do you just come from thoroughbred genetic stock? This sounds outrageous. Has your mom been sprinting her whole life? Did she have a period where she couldn’t do it?
Ben Patrick: Exactly. So I started training her because her hips were deteriorating. She’d then had a fall, chronic hip issue began. And so I’ve been training my mom for going on eight years. And I wound up at my gym. I had a whole women’s class, people of all ages, grandmas, young mom, everything in between. And then my dad is more like me, Mr. Fragile, the broken bones, the knees, the knee tears.
Tim Ferriss: I think that’ll be my new podcast name. The Mr. Fragile Show.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. When I was a kid, I went to a speed class to try to get faster and he signed up with me. And this is a youth speed class, so there was no warmup structure. It was just, okay, here’s the first run.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
Ben Patrick: And he didn’t get to his second step and pulled his hamstring. So I come more from his fragile side. My mom’s been working from a desk for 50 years, so we don’t really know what — she ran when she was a young girl.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Ben Patrick: Probably pretty athletic, but didn’t keep doing sports or anything and just generally ate well, stuff like that. But now the hip is deteriorating and I’m like — I remember going to visit her after she had a fall and I’m like, I was getting worried, had her start coming to the gym. So she fell in love with the sled. Eight years, she’s been sledding regularly. She’s very gentle with her program. She spends maybe 10, 15 minutes a day. And similarly, I work out only twice a week. It’s a bit different for me because I’m raising toddlers, running a business. So it’s like I know I can carve out my time to exercise twice a week. Me and my mom, we do all the same exercises, basically, just at different levels. But that split squat, she credits with fixing her hip problems. She’s got great mobility with the grandkids.
She’s slowly coaxed my dad along, so my dad does different pieces of the programming to fix up old pains and stuff. So there’s some mixture of good genetics. Definitely not — my dad never was able to grab the rim or anything like that.
And I was the same in basketball. I went through my high school career unable to grab the rim. And now, it’s not that much proof, but okay, I’m 34, I’ve been dunking for over a decade without having any problem. Your video guy filmed me dunking out on that concrete court. And for me, it’s the fact that I can go play. And that’s what I trained for. We don’t really know, genetically, do I have good genetics, bad genetics, somewhere.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not trying to— It was more “My 71-year-old mom is sprinting.” I’m like, “Wait a minute. Hold the press.” I just wanted to unpack that, so thank you for that. If I were to ask your mom, all right, you can only pick three or four exercises, that’s it, that you get to continue with. You’ve had eight years to trial and error and try a bunch of stuff, what do you think she would respond with, of the three or four?
Ben Patrick: I know she would do the sled, forward and backward. That became a way of life at our gym and she’s kept it up ever since. I know she would do that full range of motion, which varies based on the person what that means, but where you’re not stopping short, you’re embracing your flexibility. Full range of motion split squat. I know those would be her top two, and then I know she would throw something in for the posterior. I’ll have to ask her what is her favorite today.
Tim Ferriss: If you just had to hazard a guess, what do you think she might choose?
Ben Patrick: I think she would choose the way that we use that back extension machine because she works from a desk. And so, particularly when you put that full split squat, which stretches the front of the hip, with then where you’re getting to squeeze those glutes, that sets that pelvis, that it’s almost like whether someone has posterior or anterior, it seems to benefit everyone because you’re getting both sides of that equation. I think she would do that one.
Tim Ferriss: All right. And again, just a reminder for folks, we’re going to link to everything, and you’re going to have videos pinned, and just search Kneesovertoesguy for all the platforms and you’ll find those.
What else did you pick up from Poliquin, if anything comes to mind? Let’s start there, and then I’ll trade with you.
Ben Patrick: So many gems. That’s a tough question.
Tim Ferriss: It is. Sadly, Charles is no longer with us.
Ben Patrick: I know.
Tim Ferriss: I actually got the phone call about it pretty much immediately after he died, which was very sad, very tragic, way too early. But anything else come to mind? I could buy you some time if you want.
Ben Patrick: No. So I mean, he was trying to master everything from, he was helping bodybuilders, athletes. The thing he told me, so only one time when I finally had the money and freedom to go see, he came to America, did a seminar, and he said — this was towards the end. And he said his only regret was not getting into flexibility sooner. And you know he was a wealth of strength, knowledge, a lot of that strength relating to range of motion. That definitely left an impact on me, that he wished he had gotten into that sooner.
And the conclusions that I’ve come to is you can see my style of training. The way I stretch wouldn’t be how someone would normally think of stretching, but just the idea of your strength and your flexibility, really getting those into harmony, to where the positions that you’re flexible in, you feel strong in those positions.
And so I’ve really explored that deeply now, compared to, let’s say, look, people are going to have way more experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman, these kinds of things. And Charles had way more experience there than me. So I think that was — if someone goes to my pages and sees the style that I train, I feel like that was the gem that was just what I needed that gave me now the systems that I love.
Tim Ferriss: And also getting strength and flexibility or mobility in harmony can sometimes mean that you’re training both at the same time. Right? Often can mean that. And we were recording earlier, and not that I’m going to win any gold medals in the split squat, but my range of motion is pretty good, all things considered. And I credit that to doing the movement.
And also I gave him a shout-out when we were recording, Jerzy Gregorek, some credit where credit is due, who holds multiple world records or did in Masters Olympic weightlifting. He’s got to be close to 70, if not 70 now. He can still do — he can stand on a balance board, like an endo board, with a fully loaded barbell, and do an ass to heels Olympic snatch at his age. It is unbelievable. His wife also holds a few world records. She can do the same thing. Their sustained athleticism is just beyond incredible.
And for ankle mobility, he had me doing basically one or two reps on the minute overhead squats. So I’m holding a barbell overhead, but we’re talking bar, maybe plus five pounds on either side. Very light weights. Just doing one rep on the minute for 10 to 20 minutes. That’s it. And by greasing the groove in that way, I went from basically zero ankle mobility, lots of injuries, still a lot of lateral instability, to being able to do what we did earlier, which is frankly years after I did that training. It’s been really durable, which is wild.
So one of the points that I hear you making that I see reflected in a lot of what you do is that you don’t necessarily have to do, you absolutely don’t have to do for most things, an hour of strength training every other day, plus an hour of stretching every day or every other day. You just do not. That is not necessary for most people at all. The surface area for injury goes up also when you’re throwing everything and the kitchen sink with lots and lots of hours.
And certainly, I mean, I had conversations with Charles back in the day where we would talk about some of these professional athletes, let’s just say NFL players, who have five, six percent body fat. They destroyed the combine. They’re these absolute phenoms. And I would ask him, “What do they eat for their diet?” And he’d be like, “Oh, Wendy’s for breakfast, Burger King for lunch, McDonald’s for dinner.” I mean, you have to be very careful that you’re not modeling your training on mutants.
So I’ll just pull out a couple of things from Charles. So I first met Charles because he reached out to me after reading The 4-Hour Workweek, my first book, and he had applied a lot of it to his business and his productivity. And I think at the time, he didn’t realize this, but I had been exposed to tons of his stuff, just as you had, through magazines way back in the day.
And he reached out, and he’s like, “You don’t know who I am.” And I was like, “Well, actually, that’s funny. Because I do know who you are.” And then we connected, and Charles ended up in The 4-Hour Body. He introduced me to myofascial release and active release technique. And there’s some before and after photos with internal rotation on the shoulder in The 4-Hour Body that are unbelievable. They look like they were staged because the gains in range of motion are so significant.
He was right about so many things. Wasn’t right about everything. But there are so many things that Charles did that ended up being proven out through studies, and data collection later, and exercise science in other fields. It’s pretty remarkable. I mean, he got a lot of things right.
Ben Patrick: He was so dedicated. I forget the exact number, but he learned a bunch of different languages so that he could read —
Tim Ferriss: He spoke a lot. Yeah.
Ben Patrick: — essentially everything that had been written about exercise.
Tim Ferriss: In the source language.
Ben Patrick: Right.
Tim Ferriss: What a maniac. Also cantankerous as fuck. Oh my God, he was so salty. And part of his charm. One of a kind.
Who else has influenced your thinking on exercise and movement, just broadly speaking, your way of training?
Ben Patrick: Charles was really cool about crediting where he learned different things, and so that’s something I’ve kept in. And it also gave me the idea that, okay, there might be real gems in quite a few areas. So I know you’ve talked about gymnastic rings. Okay. Doing rows and pull-ups with gymnastics rings, I do one set to burn out of each per week. That saves me so much time and gives me a pretty balanced upper back for my goals. So there’s a gem that Poliquin didn’t teach me, but his general mindset of learning.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just going to pause to ask you to repeat something you told me earlier. Where did Charles figure out the backwards sled pulling?
Ben Patrick: Oh. Oh, man. That’s such a cool story.
Tim Ferriss: Do you want to talk about pulling from unusual places?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So Charles went to the source, Westside Barbell in Ohio led by Louie Simmons, who was creating the strongest powerlifters in the world. And Louie was jealous of these Finland powerlifters of their squats. And they said that their secret weapon was their day job was dragging trees. So Louie invented the idea of dragging weight as a form of exercise. And then, that became a way of life at Westside Barbell. One of Louie Simmons’ disciples, Dave Tate, who made the, if you’ve heard of EliteFTS, they made the prowler style slide, all kinds of amazing stuff. I’m going to see Dave in two weeks, actually, for the first time.
Dave has a quote that’s like, “We didn’t have warm-ups.” It was Louie Simmons just telling him, “Hey, before you train, go out to the parking lot and drag the sled.” He’s like, “We didn’t have shit called warm-ups. It was called the stuff you do before you train.” And people were like, “How many sets and reps is that?” “I don’t know. It was X amount of times down the parking lot.” “Oh, how long was the parking lot?” “Don’t know.” So it was cool, the history there.
But it’s cool how Charles Poliquin would just go to the source. He’d go to the source in Europe, or Ohio, or wherever it was. He would go to the source. And then it was, like I told you, it was this article of where he used the backward sled for knee rehab for this Olympic athlete that kind of, I don’t know, that kind of gave me a stepping stone to all this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If people also want to look up Louie Simmons and his writing online, a lot of amazing tidbits to be found to this day in a lot of his writing. And Westside Barbell, for a period of time, it was just one of those factories for mutants that — and of course, there’s some selection bias if people are traveling to the Mecca to station themselves there to train. There’s a little bit of selection bias. But the results were just so incredible. And the number of world records broken and the number of innovations, whether that’s, say, chains to provide more resistance as you get into stronger ranges of motion with, whether it’s deadlift or anything else. I mean, bands and so on. I mean, a lot of what you see that is propagated throughout the gym universe started there, or at least was codified and formalized in some way there.
Ben Patrick: Yep. So that was a great one. One that I think would be inaccurate if we missed, there was a bodybuilder named Bob Gajda. G-A-J-D-A.
Tim Ferriss: Bob. Don’t know that name.
Ben Patrick: Gajda. Okay. He was Mr. Universe right before bodybuilding really blew up. And now, these are his words. He worked at the Chicago YMCA. His passion was helping get kids off the streets, off drugs, doing bodybuilding. He’s Mr. Universe. He goes into the lockers one day and sees people shooting up drugs, steroids. This was the beginning of steroids. And when I say this, people are like, “Oh, no. Bob was on steroids too.” Look, this is Bob’s story.
Bob’s story is he stopped — what you can look up is he was Mr. Olympia when he quit. Not a lot of people are going to quit right when, guess what he was getting offered? The first protein shake deals. So there wasn’t money in what he was doing. All of a sudden, there was money in bodybuilding. And guys were doing steroids, and he quit. So when someone turns down money, I feel like there’s a — I believe what he’s saying. And he wound up then getting into, sort of like my passion, of helping people enjoy life without breaking down. And he invented this device that he called a DARD. D-A-R-D. I think it was Dynamic Axial Resistance Device.
Tim Ferriss: It rolls off the tongue.
Ben Patrick: It didn’t catch on. By the time I was studying this, you couldn’t even buy it anywhere. It didn’t turn into a business that worked out. But it allowed you to do the opposite of a calf raise and strengthen the front shin muscles.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, got it. Right. Tibialis anterior.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So one of the things I do that’s really unusual, and Charles Poliquin did calf training, did tibialis training, lots of coaches have done this. Bob was the creator and really had a big impact on me. And in my workout style, which I hadn’t seen anyone doing, I go from the resistance forward and backward, like with the sled, to then working my lower leg muscles. So with the sledding, you’re pushing through your feet in various ways. I mean, you’re working all kinds of stuff.
But my mindset was like, “Okay. Move the body forward and backward, then start addressing the body from the ground up.” Let’s get some extra — before we even get into the knees. I found extra de-sensitization before getting into the knee work by doing the lower leg work after the sled work. Maybe it was just because the sled burns your legs and you get a little break. But we can’t say it’s a bad thing to have some extra ability in the front and back of our shins.
And so, an equipment company reached out, said, “Is there anything…” This is when The Kneesovertoesguy was starting to catch on on social media. “Is there anything that doesn’t exist, that you think should exist?” I’m like, “Yeah, there should be these DARD bars.” But I told him, “Call it a tib bar,” to make it simple for people because it’s the anterior front tibialis. Tibia is your shins.
Tim Ferriss: Calling something a DARD also. I’m going to Hell. But it’s a hard one to sell.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So with the Kneesovertoesguy stuff, I could see, okay, I’ve got a pretty good skill here at helping people understand this stuff. And so, I’m like, “I think tib bar.” And now, it’s a pretty common device. You can even go on Amazon and buy tib bars. I mean, there’s like 10 sellers now. I have by far the lowest price for an American made tib bar. I don’t sell the most tib bars.
Pretty much anything that I make in America, someone’s going to make more money copying in China. And that’s actually, at first, it seemed annoying, but now I’m like, it’s actually pretty cool. Everyone wins. I can make a nice living pursuing American-made on everything I do. And people are going to copy it, because the price is going to be higher American-made. All right, everyone wins. You can get it cheaper from someone making it in China.
And that doesn’t mean all my stuff is made in America. I’m pursuing all my stuff made in America. And anything on my website, I don’t play games with people, it says ATG USA. Then you know, if it says that, it’s made in America. So this was a really cool device, particularly for rehab.
But even for me, what I showed you in my video, you can put your butt against the wall with no equipment whatsoever, raise your toes, and do that for a while, and burn out, and get a reverse calf raise, a tibialis raise.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just paint a picture for folks. So if you have your — you’re standing facing away from a wall, maybe your heels are a foot away from the wall, your heels?
Ben Patrick: One to two feet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, one to two feet. Then you lean back against the wall. Now take your upper back off of the wall. So it’s just your hips and low back against the wall so you’re not cheating. Your legs are locked, right? Your knees are locked.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then you’re lifting your toes to the greatest extent that you can. And the nest point that you added to that, where I was like, oh, that’s actually very smart, and it’s particularly, I would say, helpful for someone like me, who has basically torn everything in both ankles, to me, he’ll hook some nonsense way back in the day, that basically lifting the foot as much as possible, then going down on the pinky side, then coming up and going down on the big toe side, and alternating back and forth like that, I could see helping also with some of the lateral stability issues that I have.
So we were chatting a bit before recording about some of your different pieces of equipment, and I told you that I really liked your wrist bar. So the wrist bar is, imagine a baton you would hand off to someone in a relay race, but at one end, half of it is thick enough. I don’t know what the exact diameter is. Let’s call it two, two and a half inches. So that you can plate load, you can put an Olympic plate on that and then secure it, which makes it very interesting because you can work with progressive resistance.
And for me, that was important and will be important. I’m six weeks after elbow surgery, so I’m not quite there yet. But for sort of supination and pronation, whether I’m doing isometrics or otherwise. And it’s very small, very portable. And one of the advantages, we were chatting a bit — well, why don’t you just tell the story, and then I can add some color if need be.
Ben Patrick: Well —
Tim Ferriss: I put this bar in 5-Bullet Friday, which is my newsletter that goes out to two million-plus subscribers.
Ben Patrick: There’s a few moments I look back at just sheer luck, like when you won something at the fair that you thought you wouldn’t have done it. And one of those highlight just lucky moments is we’re just seeing the wrist bar sales just going nuts. So my staff are like, “What the heck is going on? Why are we selling so many wrist bars?” And we quickly traced down that it was because of you. So that’s like an all-time business moment. And that’s made in America, so we were able to basically just make them to order and just quickly service everyone.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So that last part is important, right? Because I think you mentioned it was more units than the history of the bar up to the point or something.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I try to give people a heads-up if something is going to land in the newsletter, because what can end up happening, as one of my fans termed it, the hug of death. So the hug of death can take a number of different forms. It could be a website crashing. But it could also be where someone has a long lead time on ordering inventory. Let’s just say they’re getting it from China. And not that that’s intrinsically bad, I’m not saying that that is.
But let’s just say for them to get an order, they have certain minimums and so on. And they believe that these sales from the newsletter are going to continue at that velocity. And they only had 100 in stock, now they order 2,000 because they expect to be able to move those and they don’t. The hug of death is, “Uh-oh. I’m not going to make this money back.” And companies, small companies in particular, can go under if they misgauge stuff like that. So you had the advantage where you’re making them, I mean, from a global perspective, right around the corner, so you could do just-in-time inventory.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, we didn’t even have to order a batch. We were just able to fulfill the orders. Awesome. Awesome family in Minnesota who does stuff for a variety of people in fitness, but reached out to me a few years back and has really helped me to make some cool stuff American-made.
Tim Ferriss: What other principles, topics, exercises, would you like to talk about? Maybe one way to edge into a starting point for that is before coming here to do this recording, and we did some movement earlier, I did what I’ve done a number of different times. Because your name has come up over the years and I’ve looked at your videos and watched a lot of them. Sorted your videos by most popular. I’m sure a lot of people do that as a way to produce a manageable shopping list of videos.
So my question for you is, which videos were not anointed by the YouTube gods or, for whatever reason, have not had the views that you would like, where you’re like, “If I could point out one video that I wish people paid more attention to.” Could be any video. But your greatest hits don’t need the help, in a sense. Maybe you’d like to mention one of them. But if there’s a lesser known video where you’re like, “Man, this one’s really, I think, quite important, and it hasn’t had the visibility.”
Ben Patrick: Well, so I just made a video really recapping all my knowledge because of going on this podcast. I didn’t say it in the video, you don’t want to jinx it. Like, “Hey guys, I’m going on Tim Ferriss,” and then you get canceled. But I made it for this podcast. And it happens to be doing really well. I’ve found that the videos I put out that really hit home and help people then, long-term, wind up doing well. So for me, it’s almost like my experience has been the better videos do have more views.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Ben Patrick: Because I try to be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title. What I have to look out for, which I’ll still have to check it on your video, because who knows on your staff who’s going to title it, is people have me on or whatever. And then it’s like, I found one, and they’ve since corrected it, but it said knee pain. It said “Fix knee pain guaranteed in 60 seconds.” The only —
Tim Ferriss: I won’t have a video with that title.
Ben Patrick: Caps. “The only exercise you’ll ever,” caps, “NEED.” And sure enough, the guy, great channel, great guy, very busy, naturally hired a professional company. And then, it actually alerted him and he found a bunch of lies like that in the titles. So because of that, yeah, you can get a lot of views if you lie in the title. And even for me, I’m not saying this from a point of perfection, there was one that was so hard. I think I’ve kept it up, and sometimes I go back and forth, but I had titled it—this was four or five years ago—”How to Make Yourself a World-Class Athlete.” And I use all these stories of people who weren’t world-class athletes and made themselves world-class athletes. But still, that was the closest one I can remember that I feel like was potentially a lie.
Tim Ferriss: Now, you’ll pin the video that you referred to, which is the recap of a lot of what we’re talking about visually. Do you recall the title of that?
Ben Patrick: Yeah, a Minimalistic Workout Program with Sets and Reps. That’s how I title things now. There’s no —
Tim Ferriss: No fluff.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So what’s funny is that, so now to get views, it really is about the content itself, not the title. So it doesn’t say, “Knees over toes,” it doesn’t say, “fix knee pain,” because there’s these keywords used to get views. So it just says, “Minimalistic Workout Program with Sets and Reps,” and it’s doing great.
But that’s the most recent one I made for this podcast for someone to not beat around the bush, get all the key information. It even gives you sets and reps. It gives you my actual program. It’s not a theoretical program. These are the two workouts I do a week. All the people I train are on very similar versions of this.
Tim Ferriss: And I want to give people a taste of some of what we recorded earlier in case they don’t see it. And in effect, I’ll summarize, but feel free to jump in because I’m a stickler for detail and I like exact recipes, it could be my OCD screaming at the back of my head, which is pretty often, but the point you made, or at least that I heard, was you’re not really a magic sets and reps guy in terms of some Goldilocks perfect protocol.
And the reason I bring that up is that just like you can regress range of motion in a movement, you can regress the volume. And what I would say is that in pain-free range of motion, a little bit can go a long way. So if you look at something and you’re like, “Ah, I don’t have time for three sets of this or five sets of that,” or whatever it might be, okay, fine. Well, maybe you start with one set. And I know people who have gotten into tremendous shape coming from a baseline of zero, right?
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: No athleticism, nothing, and they’re like, “Ah, I don’t have time to go to the gym. I don’t have to do that.” I’m like, “What about one push-up before bed? What about one push-up? Is there a reason you can’t do one push-up?” And they’re like, “Yeah, of course I can do one push-up.” I’m like, “Okay, great. Do one push-up,” and then turns into two and then it turns into whatever.
And I know one guy, within a few months, he was doing 50 push-ups before bed and he was seeing real results and then that was the unlock. So that’s a long-winded way of just saying don’t get fixated on your limitations. You can always scale down.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, yeah. My starting system is one to two sets, and then I found for myself, one to two sets I can maintain great. Only on exercises that I’m planning to put more weights on. I’ll go a couple more sets just to actually — you’re probably still only talking one or two sets, really, because they’re —
Tim Ferriss: Like work sets?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. Just to make sure people safely take their time. Now, I simply wouldn’t have believed 15 years ago that now I’d be doing only two workouts a week, 45 minutes dunking and stuff. So I wouldn’t have believed it. So if someone thinks we’re full of shit, I would’ve thought we were full of shit. That also doesn’t mean that higher-volume programs can’t work.
Number one, I see all the different exercises as a beautiful freedom with different inputs and adaptations, and I see all of fitness as positive and then I see even all people’s viewpoints of then how to program that up as positive. I don’t do the comparing teardown, what’s — the program you stick with that works for you and your goals is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the program you stick with is the best program.
And I want to reiterate what you’re saying because I write books to be references for myself basically. If I can find a book that does the job already, writing is way too hard. The research is way too arduous. It takes way too long. I don’t want to write a book. It also turns out to generally be a terrible way to make any money, even if your books do very well. So there’s just way too much of pushing boulders up the hill for me to write a book unless I feel like I’m gathering things that I need and can’t find somewhere else. That was the case with The 4-Hour Body.
And this minimum effective dose, the concept, the MED of finding the minimum effective dose, and you can look at many comparables. It’s like there’s a certain temperature at which you boil water. You don’t need to get it 30 degrees hotter. If you go outside, there’s a point at which you start to adapt in the sun and develop a tan. You don’t need or want to stay out another hour and you progress and you start to extend the duration, et cetera.
It turns out that you can apply this almost everywhere. You can apply it to language learning with the highest frequency words, you can apply it to, for instance, I was asking on X, back when it was Twitter, people for favorite chapters in The 4-Hour Body because I was curious about possibly updating things, although there’s not a lot that needs much updating it turns out, and people gave various examples. There was a — I think it was an NFL player who was benched and got back to playing professionally using the pre-hab chapter and Occam’s Protocol — Occam’s Protocol is like 20 minutes twice a week resistance training — and a handful of other things.
There’s another guy who chimed in, and I understand you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I’ve seen multiple examples of this. He got to, I think, a 475-pound deadlift using the Barry Ross protocol in the book. And Barry Ross coached Allyson Felix and many other sprinters. It is the most minimal thing you could possibly imagine, and a crux piece of it is doing deadlifts to the knee and then effectively dropping the bar so that you’re not risking any type of hamstring strain, and doing two to three sets of two to three reps. That’s it. And you’re taking big, fat powerlifter rests in between those sets. The amount of strength that you can build doing that is head-spinning.
Ben Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So I just want to emphasize that “I don’t have enough time” doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny if you’re willing to scale back, and in fact, you can do a lot more with very little than you might suspect.
To your point, there are also volume-based approaches. And I mean, Poliquin, we talked about Poliquin. He did a lot of high-volume stuff with his athletes. Not everyone is going to tolerate that very well, nor is it going to be compatible with their schedules necessarily. So you find what works for you and ultimately the program you stick with is the best program.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, The 4-Hour Body had a massive, massive effect on me. And this phase of life, it’s like 2-Hour Body for me, and because it’s the strength, the flexibility, the circulation, the cardio, all this stuff wrapped in one. Yeah, I mean, I don’t do any other therapies. I don’t have to take any supplements. Those couple hours go a long way for me.
And then what are my goals? For me, being a dad and then really focusing on my business, treating people well, and doing good, it takes a lot of time and energy because if you turn a blind eye to your business, that’s rarely going to happen on its own.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, very rarely. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So it’s like those are my goals. I also don’t want to spend any time having to rehab stuff, and knock on wood, it’s 12 years now, no knee or back problems. It was like 15 years ago that I got into this, and I would say my biggest mistake was treating it as short-term rehab and being like, “Oh, great,” and then trying to go back to the methods I used to do.
Whereas now for me — because you had the question in the video of like, “So is this a warmup for the work?” And they’re like, “That’s the workout.” And then you get better at those things, and some of these things we’ve mentioned, whether it be then finishing with a set of ring rows to a good burnout. That’s going to take what, a minute, and goes a long way.
So the efficiency of sledding and what I use at home is a resisted treadmill forward and backward. I look at the clock. Three, four minutes have gone by that I’ve done three sets forward and backward, catching my breath between each set. I’m pumped and my lungs have had a great workout, my legs are warmed up, springy, fast, all this stuff.
So 4-Hour Body, you can see in my passion, this is more along my passions in life is almost helping people that don’t want so much stress on the body to then be able to focus on other things.
Tim Ferriss: Or stress on the schedule, right?
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Stress on the family.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I would say that if I were to, and it’s just these things are too long and most of it, the vast majority of what’s in The 4-Hour Body, I feel, is very defensible. It’s become more defensible over time —
Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: — which has been cool to see since it came out in 2010. But if I were to add a few things to it, I would add sled work or analogs, like the resisted incline treadmill. I would add a chapter on intermittent fasting.
Ben Patrick: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: I would add a chapter on, it might not be a chapter, but maybe a sidebar on various hip activities, exercises, things like glute medius work, just things that you can do to stabilize everything else in effect that I did put some of in Tools of Titans with, say, some of Peter Attia’s exercises and so on.
Ben Patrick: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: I would probably add a chapter or a sidebar on Zone 2 training, which I still, to this day, find to be the most boring thing in the world, but if I have to drag myself or whip myself to do anything, that would be on the high-whipping scale.
And I think that’s about it. And there are probably chapters that I would pull out to simplify, to further simplify things. And that’s about it.
Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, these things are so reliable and I would say to someone, for instance, again, this is going to sound like nothing, but if you have access to a sled — and people can look at the resisted treadmill that you have also through ATG. How much does that cost?
Ben Patrick: 600.
Tim Ferriss: 600, right. So I mean, it’s, on the grand scale of things, not just affordable as an investment, but also space-efficient because the biggest knock against the sled is that you need space and the sleds are not cheap, particularly the sleds I really, like the Torque sleds, which I own. I love them. But here in Austin, I don’t have the space for one. But let’s just pretend you have access to one of these. Let’s call it a sled for simplicity, just so people can visualize it.
Over this past summer, I did sled work where effectively, as prescribed by Peter Attia, if I’m doing VO2 max training, I would want to do four minutes on, four minutes off. You could make it five or six or whatever. It depends on how hard you’re pushing. And let’s just say it’s four minutes on, four minutes off for four rounds or five rounds or six rounds. And I would do that with the sled and I would push. This was on a gravel driveway with mechanical resistance. You don’t need to add much weight.
And so what we’re talking about, just to do the math, let’s just say it’s 15 minutes, which often it would end up being 15 minutes because I would run out of gas, but 10 to 20 minutes, let’s call it. I was doing that every other day, fasted after a little bit of caffeine. And my God, can you get in good shape just from doing that.
Ben Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, it sounds — and I’m sure there are some very high-level athletes or people who are doing 600-pound squats or 900-pound deadlifts who are going to laugh hearing me say this, but you might be surprised how much your legs will grow and how much stability you will develop doing this, and how much body fat you can lose just by making that the first thing you do, and in my case, I’m getting sun exposure at the same time, for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning. And then let that afterburn work for a bit.
I would typically do that in the mornings and I would take some, a very — I’m talking like 300 milligrams of essential amino acids instead of branch-chain amino acids, but that’s a longer story. And I would do the workout and then I would hold off on eating for a few hours and then break my intermittent fast at 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. But feeding that way and then doing weight training typically before my second and last meal of the for dinner, gaining muscle mass, not losing muscle mass.
And the total, I mean, we’re talking about weekly time, if I’m doing it every other day, it’s three or four, let’s call it, days a week, so that’s an hour. And then the weight training’s probably, since I’m doing some rehab as well because of some current back issues, we’re talking about two to three hours a week. That’s it. That’s it. And it’s split up also into very manageable doses. It’s not like I’m asking you to do a three-hour or two-hour workout at once.
But it is really, to this day, there’s still things I come across, like the, in my case, I’m still elevated, but the front foot elevated split squat, or the ATG split squat, or, for instance, the exercise that you showed me earlier which is basically a seated, let’s call it, more constrained version of a Romanian deadlift standing, people can find this on your pinned video, I imagine, so I won’t belabor the description, or sled work where I still find these things that are like — I think to myself, “My God, if I just did these and that was it, the sort of return on invested time is so much better than the long tail of 30 exercises that I could try to do.”
It still makes me smile and blows my mind to this day how some of these things are just so inherently, given their risk-to-benefit ratio, so high-yield and it’s really wild.
Ben Patrick: Yep. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s still, to this day, it’s like I do my two workouts a week. I’m just totally stoked. And sometimes I still have that “wow” feeling every time because I’m like, “It’s unbelievable.” And now I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s not like, “Wow, I could just train like this.” I have been for a while and the results are insane.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re playing sports, right? In terms of —
Ben Patrick: I try once a week to play some basketball. Right now, that means playing with the best kids at the school that I’m volunteering at. So it’s two workouts a week, try to play basketball once a week, and raise toddlers.
Tim Ferriss: Before you play basketball, any type of warmup that you do for that or has your training provided the warmup?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So first and foremost, the training provides a warmup. I don’t have any special warmup. From what I’ve learned training-wise, I try to at least have systems. And to recap incredibly fast, my systems, because you’d actually ask me what are my total principles, and it’s just three total principles as far as I can see, which is the forward and backward resisted movement; and then the training from the ground up, just reminding myself even if it’s one set, “Okay, I’m going to hit the lower legs before I go to the upper legs”; and then the third one being the strength through my mobility, and then I just flow that to the upper body and I’m done.
That’s the training principles. If you add all of that up, forward and backward, ground up, because most of us has probably not done as much work for the lower body and lower legs as for the upper body, so we’re restoring some natural balance there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I need to do a lot of work on the lower legs.
Ben Patrick: Right. We could say that your body’s inputs would think that you didn’t want to get as strong in the lower legs as the upper. So by doing that, you’re what? You’re restoring some balance to the body.
Tim Ferriss: A quick piece of trivia for people who might find it funny. Go look at really early photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger posing, and some of them have him standing in water where water’s up to his knees because he was so embarrassed about his lower leg development.
Ben Patrick: Whoa.
Tim Ferriss: Alas, I haven’t figured out how to wade through swamps up to my knees to cover my lack of development in the lower legs.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, most of us haven’t. It’s almost like we’re telling the body, “Hey, I don’t want to be as strong proportionally in the lower legs as everything above it.”
And then the amount of foot pains and different chronic pains that I’ve had people who had for years that are gone now just from restoring that balance, it’s really cool. And then the third one being training the strength through the mobility, as I said. So those three.
But what’s the strength through mobility again? We’re restoring that natural balance because when we go into weight training, our body starts to shift towards strength in certain ranges but not others. So all of it together just means my whole philosophy is just to have balanced ability in the body, forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs, upper legs.
So that’s how I train. That makes me healthy that I can just go play basketball. But because of all that, I try to be sensible about it and do a sort of segmented warmup of like, okay, dribbling in place, then dribbling in motion. Now what’s a little more pressure than that? It might be shooting. So it’s just super basic. Someone could do that for any sport. It’s like you take the forces and you just segment them into an obvious warmup, so there’s no special —
Tim Ferriss: Magic.
Ben Patrick: — basketball warmup.
Tim Ferriss: No magic sauce.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, we’ve covered quite a bit. Ben, is there anything else that you’d like to cover? Any other topics you’d like to jam on? Anything that comes to mind?
Ben Patrick: I think more for you, which is, for me, as or more important than any of this exercise stuff is you’ve managed to become this giant without bashing other people, without playing games that you know are lower integrity. So you must have some sort of — because I’ve had to set up for myself, “Okay, I need to make sure that my posts don’t have any lies to try to start arguments or that there’s nothing intentionally trying to start arguments.” And there’s these things like this that I’ve had to piece together.
But I think of you, and sometimes I’m blank after that, apologies for being blank, but it’s like there’s not a lot that I can look to and go, “Here’s a guy who’s succeeding in ways that I want to succeed,” helping people, but with your integrity. And to me, that’s more important than the rest because I feel like that’s the trickle-down that makes life shitty for a lot of people is the more and more leaders who then lose their integrity, I think that’s more important than all of the rest because that affects everything.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thanks, man.
Ben Patrick: So what’s your — do you have a —
Tim Ferriss: What’s my process?
Ben Patrick: I mean, yeah, what’s your thoughts on that? I mean, even if you just think about it, you’ll share some unusual information compared to what normally is going to be on a podcast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m happy to riff on it. I would say that there are a few things that come to mind, and I’ll maybe get there by way of example.
So there was an episode I recorded a long time ago with a fellow named Balaji, who’s very smart and he’s known for a great many things. He’s actually been very accurate in predicting a lot of geopolitical events and so on. Also happens to be incredibly technical and familiar with cryptography and crypto and so on. And I did an episode with him and it just exploded. And there were many reasons for that, but it ended up being, I think at the time, the most popular episode of the year.
Ben Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: And there were a number of trend lines at the time. People were at home, this was during COVID, crypto was on everyone’s radar. All of a sudden people are using various means of finding something to do, including trading or, quote, unquote, “investing.” And I used “quote, unquote” because it wasn’t always investing. So there were many things that contributed to this episode doing well.
And I remember having a chat with my team internally and they were like, “Here are four or five other guests who are also involved with crypto who we think would be very, very strong.” And I paused in that moment. And there’s this quote, it may be incorrectly attributed, but there’s a quote that I have started almost every presentation I’ve ever given. So it’d be kind of hilarious if it were not attributed properly. I think it’s attributed to Mark Twain, but, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” It’s roughly along those lines.
And so I looked at what was happening around me and I saw a lot of podcasts focusing on crypto, I saw a lot of media focusing on crypto, and I looked at, in my mind, telescoping forward, what would be the implications of me having these four or five people on? There would be a definite short or intermediate-term reward. Lots of downloads, very happy sponsors. I could probably increase my rates. I mean, there would be real financial rewards.
Okay. What are the trade-offs? Because there are always trade-offs. Always. And you make any decision, just like literally from the perspective of decision, meaning cutting away, related to incision, you’re choosing one option among many, there are trade-offs.
So what are the trade-offs if I commit to doing four or five more episodes on crypto? One is that I start to filter out anyone in my audience who’s not interested in crypto most likely. Some will be willing to indulge me because they have followed the podcast for a long time and want to see how I tackle it. But after four or five episodes, after a month or two, I will basically have culled my audience of anyone who is not particularly interested. That is a very large sacrifice, number one, because I want a diverse audience.
Number two is that I would be training myself to succumb to audience capture. And there’s some great pieces that have been written about audience capture, but the way I would describe it, actually, I’ll give — and I apologize that I can’t remember the author’s name. It’s a really fantastic piece. But he starts with this example of a YouTuber whose channel focused on him gorging himself, just eating these kind of absurdly large meals. And he started off pretty thin and ended up, as he was rewarded for these videos and as it became the corner he was painted into, as he felt he needed to continue to rack up views serving people what they wanted, he destroyed his health completely. Became obese, put on this mask, and if you wear a mask long enough, you become the mask. I think that’s something that people miss. And I recall, just as a side note because I want to try to answer your question, but there’s a lot to it.
I remember I interviewed Andrew Zimmern, who he’s been on TV for decades now. Amazing guy, very smart. His life story’s incredible for people who want to check out the podcast episode. And he said to me at one point, because I was delving into television and I’m paraphrasing, but, “Be very careful about what you do in that first episode because if you pretend to be something that you’re not and it’s successful, you’ll feel the obligation to continue to do that. And there are a lot of risks related to that.”
And furthermore, if you’re training yourself to respond to audience demands or whims or trends instead of some type of internal compass, and simultaneously you’re training yourself, and these are often related, to basically pursue the option that has the most economic upside. I feel like particularly if you’re in the online media game in any capacity. And by the way, you don’t need to have a business to succumb to this. You might just have a personal page and you’re being trained by the platform to be in the vanity Olympics.
And these algorithms are so good. And I know a lot of data scientists and PhDs who work at these companies, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight, psychologically. So if you encourage yourself to be captivated by those incentives, you’re lost. You’re just lost at sea, you’re going to be lost. And it’s a lot easier to get lost than it is to get unlost. And that has a trickle-down effect. So if I make decisions based on — and it’s very hard, and I’m not always perfect, if I allow myself to be steered by the most extreme things, perhaps, that guests say, what am I going to do? I’m going to optimize for extreme.
And then if I’m optimizing for extreme, why am I doing that? It’s for views. Why do I care about views? It could be vanity, it could also be for CPMs and advertising. It could be for product sales. Well, what’s going to happen to my headlines? They’re going to become the National Inquirer, for people old enough to remember that. They’re going to become the most clickbaity, exaggerated, indefensible set of claims you can imagine. And you don’t have to be a data scientist to realize this, just go look at what you’re served up in your personal feed on YouTube, and chances are there’s going to be a lot of nonsense or a lot of misleading.
And what I’ve learned is that when you develop an awareness of this, not that I’m holding myself up to be some paragon of personal excellence and integrity, but I recognize that it’s a lot easier to get hooked on a drug than to get off of said drug. And make no mistake, you’re being trained by the platform, you’re being trained by your audience. Those are all drugs that are very addictive and there are lots of rewards for pursuing that. But to come back to what I said earlier, there are lots of trade-offs. And for me, also on top of that, I would say that I have worked so hard to ensure that my audience feels they can trust me. There’s certain lines once you cross, if you do not deliver on the promise of a headline, if you do not deliver on the promise of a title, if you make a recommendation that costs someone time, money, or, God forbid, causes some type of injury, you’re done. You’re dead to that person and for good reason.
So I feel like with a great audience, and that could be a small audience, it could be a big one, comes great responsibility. And I should say also, this isn’t because I’m some type of saint, it’s also being long-term ambitious. For me, the greatest insurance plan, the greatest choose your metaphor, safety net, but also propellant for doing well long-term is not doing anything, and you’ll make mistakes, but really trying hard not to do anything that will compromise the trust that your audience puts in you. That could be readers, it could be listeners, it could be viewers, it could be anything.
And for that reason, I’m very cautious about what I recommend. I’m very cautious about who I have on the podcast. I’m very cautious about chasing any type of trend. Hence that what I think is a Mark Twain quote, it could be someone else, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” So in the case of the crypto episode, that was massively successful. I could have milked that, but it would’ve been the equivalent of killing the golden goose.
And those are a few ways that I think about my life that is, at this point, toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube, you can’t really put it back in from a public exposure perspective. There are lots of trade-offs, privacy-wise and so on, for being public facing. Although a lot of folks who are long-term listeners and viewers will notice that I’m not doing even a tiny fraction of the video that most of my colleagues or peers, certainly the up-and-comers, and there are costs to that. So I have my reasons for doing that. I want to have a family soon. I do not need any more facial recognition. I do not. I want to be very cognizant of protecting the privacy of my family. But have I left a lot of money on the table? Yeah, I have. But what are you using the money for in the first place?
And it’s like, “Why, why, why?” Just keep asking why. Why, so what, why is that important, then what happens? And if money fundamentally — I mean, it’s sort of a story, right? It’s like this abstraction, but it’s a currency that we can use to trade for other things. Now having that in savings could provide you with psychological reassurance for any number of reasons. Family, childhood scarcity, who knows? So there could be that. Otherwise, you’re trading it for things and experiences which ultimately translate to feelings. It’s like, “Okay, where else could you get those feelings? Do you really need those incremental dollars with those trade-offs?” So for me, I decided that I didn’t.
Keep in mind, The 4-Hour Workweek details my first real business, which was in sports nutrition. I know the supplement world inside and out. And when I launched The 4-Hour Body, I had a huge audience from the first book that was waiting for my next book. I could have made tens of millions, maybe a hundred million plus by launching a supplement brand to capitalize on every one of my main product recommendations. I’d be lying if the thought didn’t occur to me, especially at that time because even with the success of The 4-Hour Workweek, royalties are very slim in a traditional deal.
And the temptation therefore to do something like that was huge. I was like, “This is how I can secure my entire financial future.” And I decided not to do it. Why? Because if I had launched a supplement brand, everyone would’ve — not everyone, but a lot of people rightly would’ve said, “Well, we’re asking a barber if we need a haircut. This guy is showing his bags, he’s selling exactly what he’s recommending. How can I trust anything this guy says?” And I was like, “That is too deep a cost. I’ll find another way to do it.”
Ben Patrick: I mean, that’s remarkable because it would’ve been a shoe in.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it would’ve been a shoe in, for sure.
Ben Patrick: Similarly, you’ll know when I sell out if I’m selling a joint supplement but t’s not that I have anything against supplements, it’s that it wasn’t actually part of my journey. So if I now sold a supplement, I want to know what effect I get from the exercises. And yeah, that would be the easiest business route as the Kneesovertoesguy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I wish. Maybe it’s just can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, I consume a ludicrous number of supplements. I do consume a lot of supplements. So clearly there are brands that I trust, typically would’ve been third party verified, things have been tested because my God, it is the Wild West, folks. There’s no enforcement. So really do your homework on the supplements that you take. But that is all just a long way of saying there are some good players in the supplement sphere. But if I’m combining that, in my case, with a book that is purported to provide unbiased information, you can’t believe those claims if I’m selling exactly the thing that I’m recommending. Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that I’ve ethically compromised in some way, but people would be right to question it.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, you wouldn’t have. You would’ve made a great supplement line.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Ben Patrick: You would’ve been honest, but the integrity point would’ve been out. That’s what I find remarkable. And that’s what, if me going the rest of my career, I see that actually as the not boasting about just doing things along those lines. Because, as you know, I mean, how many young people ask you for advice and then how many of these people become successful? You leave this trickle down impact that, at this point, for me, it’s like that’s really what it’s about. And for my kids and then helping them learn these same values. Man, I feel like that’s a whole podcast to unpack, but I appreciate you digging in there because it’s very unusual. You would’ve cashed out big, but that integrity wouldn’t have been as trustworthy as you said.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. There are times that I’m like, “Fuck, that would’ve been so much money.” It’s not easy for me to walk away from that, right? There are times that I’m just like, “Oh my God.” I remember when The 4-Hour Body hit number one New York Times and just kept going, kept going. And this book was published 15 years ago, and even Gary Brecka put out a video about some components of The 4-Hour Body and had this huge resurgence, got back on a bunch of bestseller lists. And I’m just like, “Man, can you imagine the annuity this thing would’ve been? Good Lord.” But I don’t regret it.
And I’ll say two things in addition to that, to build on this. Number one is when people think about losing trust, which is losing your reputation, right? At least for me, there are many ways to think of reputation. I mean, I guess suppose you could have an Al Capone reputation. There are many different types of reputations. But if you have a reputation for being trustworthy, losing that trust does not mean that you do something so bad that everyone says, “I can’t trust Tim. I can’t trust Ben.” All that needs to happen is they ask themselves once, “Can I really trust Ben? Can I really trust this video? Can I really trust this? Can I trust this advice that Tim has given?”
As soon as there is a question, you’ve lost the trust. And as soon as there is a seed of doubt, it is very hard to reclaim. Now, if I’m talking about long-term being, long-term greedy, or long-term ambitious, because of that trust and, for instance, being very clear on situations, say, in San Francisco where I lived at the time, having friend DAs, as some people call them. So NDA, non-disclosure agreement, friend DA is basically if someone tells you something in confidence, even if they don’t emphasize that you need to keep it confidential, basically not sharing things that anyone says to you.
And becoming a known quantity is someone who’s very good at discretion, who does what he says he is going to do on time, those were ingredients that led to ultimately the angel investing and being able to invest in a lot of these startups and work with a lot of these founders. Inherently I would be exposed to a lot of really confidential private information that’s critical to their business success. So developing that trustworthiness through actions over time and people telling other people is what allowed me to do the angel investing, which ultimately, returned much more than any supplement business ever would have.
Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: So don’t overestimate the value of the dollars in your bank account and don’t underestimate the value of having a consistent reputation for being trustworthy. And there’s so many ways to fuck that up. And who knows, maybe also I’m very hyper vigilant, I’m very aware and over aware and probably over emphasize dangers in the world. So maybe it’s worked to my advantage in the sense that I’m like, “If you don’t have your word, if people feel like they can’t trust that, you’re done. It’s going to be Mad Max for you and not in a good way.” I’m not sure exactly, but this is how I’ve thought about some of it.
Ben Patrick: It’s a right characteristic. The world would be a lot better if more leaders did that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I’m sure I’ll continue to make tons of mistakes. But the question I’d encourage people to ask, and I ask this in my personal life, I ask this in my professional life, it’s like, “Okay, if you continue to do this, if you continue to do X, whatever X is, and let’s just say you do two percent more of it, or you do it with two percent more intensity every week or month over time, three years from now, what does that look like?” Be very aware of the trend line and the way it compounds. So in the case of say, YouTube titles, if you’re exaggerating two percent and people accept that and you get better results, you think you’re going to stop at two percent? Of course you’re not going to stop at two percent. Now it’s going to be four percent. And eventually you’re going to cross a line without realizing that you’ve crossed that line.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, that explains a lot. And that’s how my wife and I run our business together. She’s really much more of a business genius and thank God. But even on the integrity stuff, it’s hard to explain in a way. Okay, if I was in any country, I would want, just based on all my observations of being in business, I would want to be supporting local businesses and stuff. So we’ve got this passion for making stuff in America that really, from observing everything in this last year, and now she’s just off to the races. Just crushing it in terms of it takes calls and networking and finding people and continuing because you’re told, “No, no, can’t make this, can’t make this.”
And then you find the person who can make it. You find the factory, you find the technology that you can — if I was in Canada or if I was in China, I would feel the same way. It’s something that’s important to us. But I like your two percent thing. If we keep putting two percent more energy on that. Because when you were describing this, I was thinking, because this is something that’s on our minds a lot, and I’m thinking three years. Wow. I’m like, “Three years from now, life is going to be amazing.” I don’t know what the exact numbers will be but the amount —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it applies to the good stuff as well.
Ben Patrick: We’re breaking through all kinds of stuff that people aren’t able to make here that now we’re actually getting. And it’s so cool. You can go to the factory, see the people, see the person. Like when you blew up our wrist bar sales, for us, it makes us happier. We like it. And I like your rule. What does it look like a few years from now if we keep putting a little more? And I’m like, “That’s a life I really like.” The numbers won’t be gigantic, but they’ll be good and we’ll be super happy about it.
Tim Ferriss: And also it’s like enough is enough at some point. And what enough means will differ from person to person. But generally speaking, money’s not going to solve all the problems you think it will. And what you need to live an amazing life is much less than most people realize. And then if you cross the finish line, so to speak, with annual income or savings or some combination invested capital and low cost index funds, whatever it might be, whatever gives you the sense of sort of psychological safety, once you get close to that or you get there, which can be a lot less than you might realize. And there’s an exercise called dreamlining that if you search my name and that, you can find it, it’s costing all this stuff out. You’ll realize that the other pieces of the puzzle that are so important are not in any way addressed by money.
And you have to work on those separately. And part of the way you work on those separately is doing things that you feel good about that make you feel good about yourself. And so for instance, if part of that is making things in the US, that in and of itself can more than offset the additional cost that’s incurred compared to doing it overseas. The actual benefit, and particularly since you’re doing it with your wife, the benefit to your family collectively. And if you’re proud of that, the way you radiate that to your kids, that’s a lot, right? That’s valuable.
Ben, so nice to spend time together. Really nice to spend time together.
Ben Patrick: As you can see, I could grill you on this whole side of things, but I appreciate it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, definitely. Where can people find you online?
Ben Patrick: Kneesovertoesguy on YouTube and Instagram are the best places where you can just go and learn everything that I know.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect. All right. We’ll link to those in the show notes. People will be able to find that. You’ll pin the video that gives people an overview of what we recorded earlier. We’ll also link to the video we did together so people can check that out because that was a lot of fun. And thanks for taking the time.
Ben Patrick: Dude. Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, as always, we will link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Ben Patrick, or if you want to type out Kneesovertoesguy, probably pipe — I’ll try that again. It will probably pop right up. But you can search Ben Patrick and you’ll find everything we’ve spoken about. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to you, yourself.
Ben Patrick: Nice.Tim Ferriss: Thanks for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy) — 20-Minute Workouts That Produce Wild Results, From Chronic Knee Pain to Dunking Basketballs, Lessons from Charles Poliquin, Bulletproofing the Lower Body, and More (#835) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-12 09:09:02
Ben Patrick, better known as “Kneesovertoesguy” (@kneesovertoesguy), is the founder of Athletic Truth Group (ATG), an online and brick-and-mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of debilitating knee and shin pain (including multiple surgeries), he rebuilt his body and performance, going from a sub-20″ vertical to a documented 42″ leap. Over the past 15 years, Ben has coached thousands of clients (from weekend warriors to pro athletes) across 50+ countries, sharing his stepwise method via social media and ATG’s coaching system. He is the author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. His mission now: democratize pain-free movement by making tools, systems, and education accessible to everyone, especially high-school students.
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“I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me Old Man. I was so stiff. It would take me so long to warm up compared to other players.”
— Ben Patrick
“In the 1970s, exercise science was becoming a thing in school, and they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee. So what went into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes. [But] think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs, stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes, every single step you take downstairs.”
— Ben Patrick
“So the first thing that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging a sled backwards.”
— Ben Patrick
“I try to be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title.”
— Ben Patrick
“My whole philosophy is just to have balanced ability in the body—forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs, upper legs.”
— Ben Patrick
“Elevating your heels a bit can help people get lower on a squat, and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.”
— Ben Patrick
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Want to hear another episode with the coach who inspired Ben’s breakthrough? Listen to my second conversation with Charles Poliquin, whose radical knees-over-toes philosophy helped Ben overcome chronic knee pain and get off painkillers. We discuss his favorite mass-building program, nighttime routines for better sleep, how to differentiate terrible trainers from the best, and much more.
The post Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy) — 20-Minute Workouts That Produce Wild Results, From Chronic Knee Pain to Dunking Basketballs, Lessons from Charles Poliquin, Bulletproofing the Lower Body, and More (#835) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-06 15:16:51
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with David Baszucki (@DavidBaszucki), the founder and CEO of Roblox. TIME named Roblox one of the “100 Most Influential Companies,” and it has been recognized by Fast Company for innovation on their “Most Innovative Companies” and “Most Innovative Companies in Gaming” lists.
Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution, where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leader in educational physics and mechanical-design-simulation software.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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. Watch the interview on YouTube.
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Tim Ferriss: David, so nice to see you. Thank you for taking the time. I’m excited to have this chat with you.
David Baszucki: Hey, Tim, it’s great to be on the show, and when we started chatting before I came on, I had read one of your books literally 10 or 15 years ago and it got me inspired to do kettlebells and I did some this morning.
Tim Ferriss: And I saw photos of your beautiful kettlebell collection. Could you, just because now I can’t not take the bait, how did you jazz up your kettlebells that you ended up sending me a photograph of?
David Baszucki: So just to frame it, I’m pretty sure in your book you made your own travel portable kettlebell with some pipes that you could screw together, which I think —
Tim Ferriss: From a plumbing shop or a hardware store, that’s right.
David Baszucki: Yeah. So I have five kettlebells and we use them a lot at my gym and have fun. They’re all made of iron and so we took them over to an auto place where they make low riders and do custom paint jobs of sparkle cherry red, sparkle orange, sparkle green. And so there are all these really beautiful automotive sparkle colors and it just makes them a lot more fun.
Tim Ferriss: And a lot of folks perhaps who are coming into this podcast will assume that we connected because of the amazing business and innovation story of Roblox, but that’s not actually how we connected.
David Baszucki: No.
Tim Ferriss: We connected because we have a friend in common, Dominic D’Agostino, some listeners may recognize as, effectively, Mr. Ketone, master of all things exogenous ketone related and an amazing scientist in his own right on a number of different levels.
And I had also had Chris Palmer of Harvard on the show a while back related to something called metabolic psychiatry, and your name and your Baszucki group kept coming up over and over again. And that is the thread that I pulled on, which ultimately connected the two of us. And I think I had mentioned your name, I’d invoked your name several times on the show including on The Random Show, and that’s how we got connected. So maybe as a way of just setting the table for a little bit of the metabolic health discussion, and everybody listening, we will get to Roblox and all of that of course. But this I think is something that will probably strike a chord with a lot of people listening on a lot of dimensions.
So as a way of setting the table, perhaps you could describe early in your son’s freshman year at college, what happened?
David Baszucki: Yeah, thanks Tim. And I’m going to share that my son and my family are comfortable sharing this story and so I feel I have some flexibility. But you could imagine as a parent of a high school student who had just started at UC Berkeley, all of the hopes and dreams of a parent of a student going off to school and a student that’s been very successful in math and science and academics and athletics and how much hope a parent has for that student going off to school. And like any other student, my son Matthew at his freshman year at Berkeley, it brought back memories of when I had started school. He hit it pretty hard. He was in computer science, he was rushing a fraternity, and there was a lot of demands I could see from afar it just seemed on him. The studies, the creativity, what a rush would be at a college like Berkeley and all of that.
And that was a time when he entered what I would call his first manic episode. We got some cryptic texts from him that were very alarming. We got some texts from some of his friends in his fraternity and dorm. I went to get him and he had entered what you would call a manic episode.
And for us, a manic episode is something that no parent has ever seen before, and is really something very surprising and weird and different. And he had entered this and what he had started on was really an eight or a nine-year journey with us over eight or nine years that involved some of the wildest stuff you could ever imagine. It involved him going to the hospital several times. It involved us not quite knowing how to really care for him. It involved trying to navigate the medical system. It involved going to Stanford and having him being locked up on the psych ward, and really started this journey that if we rounded out was only solved through ultimately getting him on a ketogenic diet.
Coincidentally, we ran into another CEO founder who said they got progress on their bipolar with a metabolic diet and a ketogenic diet, and that seemed like the craziest thing I had ever heard about. How is it possible after eight years and hospitalizations and very difficult times and complete disruption and I would say possibly concerned, would our son ever go back to school? Would he ever work? Would he ever integrate? We worked with Dr. Palmer and others and he tried a ketogenic diet, and literally within three weeks or four weeks, we saw progress that we had never seen with any drug or medication. Mind blown, really, and a miracle. And that was really the catalyst of starting our whole adventure down the ketogenic route.
Tim Ferriss: And if we flash forward then a bit to December of 2017, why was December so significant?
David Baszucki: We were now into a bit of a situation where our son had run away, had flushed all his meds, literally streaming on social media, streaming as he had run away. Had subsequently caught a bus, had made his way down to San Diego, had lived in, I think a lifeguard shack in San Diego. We had some monitoring of him. I knew he was full-blown manic at that time, and I tried my first try to come down and pluck him off the street with the help of some police and get him into a hospital.
Given the laws of our situation, I got to San Diego near some of our relatives, called in the cops, but he was pretty convincing. He said, “Hey, I’m free. I don’t want to go to the hospital.” I knew he was completely out of his mind and he ran away, and the police wouldn’t grab him, he just went running away from his dad. And so that was pretty scary.
Following that, we got a report that he had then hitchhiked to Los Angeles from San Diego. He had a phone and a laptop and that was it. And the communication started getting more sparse with him. In retrospect, it’s really scary because I think in retrospect, what I know now, I would’ve flown down there and hired 200 people, rented a hotel room and started searching all of Los Angeles, just go to every Starbucks in Los Angeles. Let’s find this guy. In the moment that I would say for one or two days, didn’t quite figure out what to do except we have a son who’s gone AWOL in Los Angeles.
This was a terrifying thing, a powerless kind of thing, here we were family with all of the resources in the world. And then by some miracle, he texted me from a Starbucks once again full-blown manic episode. And I was just able to work with him and to say, “Hey man, it’d be fun to buy us a latte together. You want to just chill out there for a couple hours? I’ll come down, we’ll buy a latte, it’ll be fun.”
And surprisingly. He said, “Sure, I’ll just chill out here.”
I’m like, “Oh, shit, he’s going to chill out there.” So flight, rental car, like SWAT team stuff.
I’m on the airplane, I’m sitting next to someone and they’re saying, “Hey, why are you going to L.A.?”
I said, “Oh, my son is AWOL with bipolar. I think I have an hour to get to him and to pick him up.”
So I pop into the rental car, just drive flying over there. I get to this Starbucks and there is my son, just a street person of your son. Nothing except a plastic Safeway bag with his laptop and a cell phone and a charger that he’s sleeping in a Starbucks with. And I’m just like, “Oh my gosh.”
And so now I’m thinking, okay, I can’t call the cops because I’ve been through this before. I cannot lose this guy. So my son and I got into this, I’m saying, “Hey, we should go see your relatives in San Diego. That’d be fun.”
He’s like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s go see the relatives. You don’t mind if I get some smokes, man, do you?”
I said, “No, man, we need some smokes. Let’s get some smokes.” So we buy cigs, we buy Diet Cokes, we get in the rental car, he’s just smoking, completely manic and we’re going to see a relative.
Now I’m driving to San Diego texting 30 people at the same time, texting my wife, texting his uncle who’s a psychiatrist in Carlsbad. And during this 60-minute drive, I’ve got his uncle lined up as a hot stop so, “Yo, hey, we should go see Uncle Alex.”
“Oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s go see Uncle Alex.”
So I’m able to get Uncle Alex warmed up, and so we come in hot to Uncle Alex who’s a psychiatrist, and yeah, let’s just grab a dinner with Uncle Al. Good, so we’re rolling. So then we’re hanging out, and then we got to figure out how do we get my son into a hospital without the cops coming and having him run away? If he runs away, what are we going to do? So he had had a lot of adventures on the street and his hands were really beat up. I don’t know if he was punching a concrete wall or what he was doing, but his hands were really beat up.
So Uncle Alex, who’s pretty savvy, says, “Matt, man, we should go out, get a good steak dinner, what do you think?”
And Matt, thank goodness said, “Oh yeah, I’m really hungry. Let’s get a big steak dinner.”
And then I look at his hands, I say, “Hey, Matt, man, your hands are pretty beat up. We should just stop and get those checked out on the way to the steak dinner. Just, we’ll pull into the hospital, check out your hands.”
And Matt’s like, “Cool, let’s go do it.”
Oh my gosh. We’re texting, we got the hospital lined up and we pull in and just go into the hospital. They know we’re coming, go into this waiting room, but now we’ve got 30 minutes to keep Matt together in this waiting room so he doesn’t run away. “Let’s go have a smoke outside. Let’s do all of this stuff.”
Finally, after what seems like a lifetime, the doctor comes in, “Yeah, we’re ready.” The doctor’s preflighted just like, “Oh yeah, let me see your hands.” And this doctor, I forget their name, but she was a genius. She’s just like, “Matt, it just seems like maybe you want to take a rest for a day or two, just get off the street.” And wow, that was huge.
Tim Ferriss: And he was open to it.
David Baszucki: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, man. Yeah.
David Baszucki: And he could have ran out of there. I think that started the journey of some, what is called insight in some level of insight where a bipolar person has a small inkling that things are not quite right and they want to participate in treatment. And this thing called insight is this very valuable thing that when someone does not have a sliver of it, they will run, they will sleep outside, they will not participate in the journey. That’s what led to ultimately many drugs, many interventions, and finally us finding ketogenic therapy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thank you for the context and the story. I actually read something that your wife wrote or shared on metabolicmind.org and did not know this particular episode, this chapter in your family’s history. And it struck me for a couple of different reasons and I won’t read it all, but if you’d indulge me for a second, I mean, I’ll just read a little portion of this, which complements what you already described, but this is from your wife.
“At 4 a.m. the Friday before Christmas, I lay curled up and crying on my bedroom floor, convinced my son was no longer alive.
“Matt, then 21, had been a star in elementary and high school, but he began experiencing insomnia and panic attacks. After a manic episode led to a hospitalization at age 19, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Two further hospitalizations and 10 different medications failed to provide stability.
“That December of 2017, escalating into mania, Matt had left home, cut off contact, and wandered the streets, eventually taking a bus from the Bay Area to Southern California. From his increasingly alarming Snapchat and Instagram posts, we knew he had no money, and that he’d slept one night behind a dumpster and another in a lifeguard tower. As dawn broke that Friday morning, his social media channels had gone silent and his three sisters hadn’t heard from him in 18 hours.”
This makes me quite emotional as well because I’ve had two or three friends basically follow this exact same pattern with bipolar, and I can only imagine the effect that would have on a family. And for people who also hear you mention metabolic psychiatry or ketogenic therapy or diet, and it might sound like some type of hand wavy panacea because they don’t understand perhaps some of the plausible mechanisms, what is actually happening? Why did this intervention help your son when so many other things had failed, or at least what is your best understanding of that?
David Baszucki: I want to take a step back, and your audience may be familiar with what a ketogenic diet is, but in the big picture, almost all of us live our lives day-to-day burning glucose, and we have monitors. Too much glucose can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. And society I think is just learning about glucose and how it brings energy to the body.
Now, interestingly enough, the body has a second way of generating energy called ketones, and most people never touch their ketones. It’s a more primitive way of generating energy. It’s a way of generating energy that we all go into if we don’t eat for a day or two because there’s no more glucose, we go into ketosis. But it’s also a way of generating energy that people who live far up in the north and eat seal blubber all day long aren’t getting any glucose, they’re not getting any carbs. And so they eat that seal blubber and they go into this thing called ketosis.
It’s arguably something that is closer to the way we lived as primitive people than the way we live today. We arguably live today with more carbohydrates in our diet because about 10,000 years ago, we had this thing called the agricultural revolution and the agricultural revolution in this amazing thing. Humans figured out they could generate a lot of food that was support a lot of people. It was an amazing invention, but it was more carbs than what the traditional diet has. Being in ketosis comes from fasting or eating very low carbs and more fat than we would be used to. What happens when someone is in ketosis is you run on ketones, this alternate energy pathway, and you get very consistent energy and very clear energy, especially to your brain.
The thesis would be, I guess my thesis would be, there are a lot of people around, arguably interestingly enough, with bipolar people who have pretty big brains, people who are trying to process a lot, and if they’re not getting consistent energy to their brain, which could happen from glucose spike, glucose crash, glucose spike, glucose crash, one might argue that what people see in bipolar is actually just a little bit of a symptom of not having enough brain energy to their brain. So keto, what we did with Matt and people have been exploring with keto diets for a long time for epilepsy. Also, I like to think when those Aboriginal people would run 300 miles in America a thousand years ago with a bag of pemmican, that was pretty keto food. That was high fat, low-carb food and allows people to go pretty far without crashing.
We put Matt on a keto diet and we worked with a dietician and Dr. Palmer, and this is a diet less than 20 grams of carbs per day, which is almost unfathomable for modern people, right? Because a quarter of a Coke probably has 20 grams of carbs. And also a diet that probably had more fat than protein, which is also something that we’re not used to because I think the last 50 to 100 years, we’ve migrated to less fats in our diet as well, somewhat. So we migrated Matt to what is called a ketogenic diet. And after 20 plus meds and treatments and all of it, we started and he started to see results from this diet, which was an absolute miracle.
Tim Ferriss: How do you make it as easy as possible to follow a ketogenic diet? And I say that as someone who’s spent probably upwards of a year in nutritional ketosis, and I always see the benefits, but I typically come off of it at some point because I find it difficult for compliance depending on travel and various things. But still, for instance, over the next month, I’ll probably spend two to three weeks in nutritional ketosis, and there are a lot of reasons to do that. People should also listen to Dominic D’Agostino or Chris Palmer, but activates anti-cancer pathways. It directly, quite aside from the anti-inflammatory effects and just the ability to starve certain types of cancerous cells of glucose, there’s so many upstream benefits. You develop this mitochondrial and metabolic machinery that has some durability if you’re in ketosis even for say four to six weeks, something like that. How do you make it as easy as possible?
David Baszucki: So this is, it’s hard, right? And another Matt story that we shared publicly is as we learned about ketosis and how you monitor your diet, and at this point Matt had been on eating primarily food that had been measured made by a cook. We know all of the ingredients so we could measure the carbs, the fat, and the protein. We went on a trip to Mexico as a family for a week, and we thought we had it right in the restaurant, but where we were wrong is possibly me, somewhere in the family, we forgot that avocados, even though they have a lot of fat in them, carry some carbs more than we expected. And so we were a couple of days into the Mexico trip, everything was cool. Matt was eating fish, olive oil, butter and some avocados. Those avocados had more carbs than we expected and nudged him out of this, for him, very strict ketone zone.
I think he arguably is good at a ketone level of two or 2.5. We weren’t measuring at the time, we didn’t have a ketone measuring device, and we can talk about that. And so all of a sudden here we are, day three or day four, and Matt’s starting to get some manic symptoms, more trouble sleeping, which is an early warning sign, a little more agitation and things are starting to get a bit edgy and we didn’t know what’s going on. And then we identified, oh my gosh, we’re a little off on the diet.
The next two days, Matt went to just literally small amounts of fish and butter, asking the chef, “Get more butter, more butter for my fish and more olive oil,” and he popped right back in and I just saw the correlation and how tight it was. So you’re exactly right. It’s very hard, especially if we’re going to restaurants or things like that. I am not as strict as Matt. I feel my life doesn’t quite depend on it, but I am also a huge advocate of some of the things you mentioned, sharpness of focus, just body weight control, consistency, energy in the afternoon, all of these good things that come from it. So when I go into a restaurant, the first thing that comes out in a restaurant is the big thing of bread. You have to push that aside, just get that out of my face.
You have to know how to order specifically. Yeah, I’ll take the burger without a bun and some extra mayo and maybe some extra butter and eat the burger with the mayo and the butter and maybe the lettuce and the tomato and all of that. But the bun and the fries are not fully keto aligned as well. Matt is even more strict. He’s gone pretty keto to the point of carnivore as well, which is very heavily animal type products. So I’d say it does take some practice, but I think once you get used to it and you can figure out how to maneuver in a restaurant, I think you’re in pretty good shape. The hardest thing for me would be, say we were to go to a wedding or something and you’re not fully controlling the menu and you’ve got all these friends around you and it’s all of this special food. Sometime in that case it’s kind of hard to do that unless you just don’t eat anything and sometimes you have to figure that out.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just speak personally for people who might be curious. I mean, what I’ve ultimately found easiest and Dominic, Dom has some good recommendations related to this because he’s spent a hell of a lot of time in nutritional ketosis, but basically two huge salads a day, intermittent fasting, so I just have two meals somewhere between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. I have two huge salads, lots of olive oil, with a sliced ribeye on top of it, and it does the trick. You have to be a little careful, like you mentioned, in terms of protein fat ratios. If you consume a ton of protein at one sitting, you can knock yourself out because the liver, through gluconeogenesis, converts all those lovely amino acids or some of them right back into glucose.
David Baszucki: My son knows that and I figured that out as well. Protein is not a complete free lunch. You will pick up that glucose effect.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Where have you landed in terms of measuring ketone levels? So for people who are wondering, I’ve used the Precision Xtra device, but then you end up having to do a million finger pricks, which is fine. Eventually you start to feel the level. I’m sure Matt, at this point, can tell when he’s at two millimolars or 2.5 millimolars, which is pretty high for people who are wondering, it’s actually pretty challenging for me to get there unless I’m fasting, so he must be very tight on the controls to get to two to 2.5. But once I hit, I know what it feels like on a Precision Xtra for me to get to 1.2, 1.3 millimolars. In terms of mental sharpness, I can feel the click over to that mode. What do you use for measurement now, or what would you recommend people use?
David Baszucki: Yeah, and we should come back to knowing what it feels like because I do feel, and this might sound a little wacky, I can either do an optimism simulation or a very minor, obviously with all due respect to people who are clinically depressed, a minor depression simulator by how far I go into ketosis or how far I glucose crash and I feel I can set both of those moods a little with my diet. Once again, not obviously the level of depression of people who truly suffer it, but touch on the edges of that.
So I, like you, initially tried some of the finger prick stuff and what’s interesting with fingerprint stuff is best practice would be twice a day check your ketones, kind of stuff. For many of your audience, they’ve probably tried CGM, which are continuous glucose monitors now, which are a complement to ketosis, and those are things where you just slap it on the back of your arm, hook it up to your mobile phone, and you get a graph of your glucose level for two weeks that you can look at. That’s a gentle early sign of ketosis if your glucose is just not spiking, but it’s not the full picture.
What has started coming out now, and it’s surprisingly not available in the United States, are continuous ketone monitors, CKMs, they’re available for sale in Canada. They’ll probably be approved in the next year in the US and, I’ve got to be honest, I’m in a smuggling ring bringing CKMs —
Tim Ferriss: “It fell off the back of a truck.”
David Baszucki: — into the United States.
Tim Ferriss: I might need to join that WhatsApp group.
David Baszucki: Yeah, I’ll send you a CKM and, just like a CGM, you can watch your ketones 24/7 throughout the day and then really see where they’re at. They’re very close to probably what you would assume, right? You’re probably one, 1.5. Matt’s two, 2.5.
I also find it hard to really pop up over in that one to 1.5 zone. I’ve got to really push it to get there, but there’s definitely a feeling, there is a feeling. For me the feeling is one of not irrational optimism, but a little bit of a calm optimism that we can do this and things are going to be okay. And I’m excited about challenges that, I would say when I’m glucose crashing, may seem completely untenable and challenges that seem completely untenable, this is impossible to solve. In a moderate level of ketosis, it’s like, “Hey man, it’s chill. You’ve got food, you’ve got shelter, you’re not going to die. You can solve this thing. Let’s go do it. It’s going to be exciting to solve this challenge.” And so I can feel that feeling.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ll just mention a couple of other things that people might find interesting. Having done a lot of ketosis since 1998 or so, that’s when I first started. I was actually doing a weird, for some people weird, approach to it, a variant called the cyclical ketogenic diet because I was training in athletics, so I would do about 18 hours of, after a glycogen depletion workout, of carbohydrate loading so that you could take advantage of insulin and so on for packing on a little muscle while you’re doing the ketogenic diet.
But the point of that is a few things that I’ve seen repeatedly and it’s N of one, but you do see some of this reported in the literature as well. Number one, I need less sleep. I, actually on average, I would say spend two to three hours less time in bed and I wake up feeling fully refreshed. I wake up and I am awake versus waking up and needing 60 minutes to get up to speed. That is a clear benefit. A weird one that people shouldn’t screw around with too much, but my breath hold times double at least.
David Baszucki: Can I ask, because this scares the crap out of me? What’s your breath hold time?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my breath hold time. If I did it right now, my breath hold time would probably be 45 seconds. I have a really compromised left lung from being born prematurely. I have something analogous to emphysema in my left lung, but when I did, I’ll give you two examples of breath holds. So one was after doing 10, and these are not breathing exercises that put me at risk of a shallow water blackout, but breathing exercises for 10 to 15 breaths along the lines of Wim Hof and then doing a breath hold on the exhale when at about three millimolars in terms of ketone or BHB concentration. That was like two minutes, 50 seconds. So I went from basically 45 seconds to two minutes 50 and had a friend right next to me who is a witness to this, and I’ve done it many times since.
I don’t think extended breath holds are great for your brain. I did another experiment when I was on day nine of a 10-day water fast and I was probably around five, I want to say four to five millimolars. I was really deep and there’s a point at which you could argue the really high concentrations are perhaps not great for you, but I was on day nine of a 10-day water fast and I did a hard shell hypobaric oxygen treatment where you can get up to 2.4 atmospheres, 2.5 atmospheres of pressure. And I was doing that for other reasons, but I thought to myself, well, let’s see what we could do in this type of environment. So I did a bunch of, let’s just call it Wim Hof breathing, breath hold on an exhale and I stopped at nine minutes because I was just terrified myself. I thought I was going to cause an aneurysm or something. Felt totally fine.
David Baszucki: So heavy ketosis, arguably a little lower metabolic rate. If you’ve just gone nine or 10 days without food, you’re probably a little skinnier, like less stuffed.
Tim Ferriss: A little bit.
David Baszucki: And then you’re saying in that hyperbaric chamber you pushed two or two and a half times as much oxygen into your body? Damn.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, nine minutes. And that was without feeling any impulse to breathe. I stopped because I was like, you know what? I’ve never gone anywhere close to this long without breathing and I’m not getting paid for this, so let me just stop and call nine minutes a good breath hold. Yeah.
David Baszucki: Can I ask what you think your average sleep is per night?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my sleep is terrible. It’s really fractured. Sleep for my entire life has been a problem. So I would say that generally I’m spending probably nine hours in bed. I have a latency, so the onset to sleep I would say, and I wear an Oura ring, so I’m able to track some of this. You could debate maybe the accuracy of the algorithms and so on, but around, yeah — there you go. Showing me an aura rig. So I would say 47 minutes to an hour plus for me to get to sleep, that would be an average night. It could be much longer. I probably wake up two to three times per night. And overall, if you look at my sleep score, like the absolute maximum would be around 90. It’s much more frequently. This is on the kind of aura rating scale, but 90 would be an absolutely best night of sleep for me.
It is more typically in this 60 to 70 range. So sleep is a real problem more than almost anything else. I mean there are a few things that contribute to dramatically improved sleep quality. One is zero caffeine, not a little caffeine, zero caffeine, even at very small quantities, I find that my sleep is interrupted. That is a pretty tough pill to swallow or not swallow for me, to be frank. But in addition to exercise and all the levers you would expect, sun exposure, a huge one for me for improving sleep quality, if I get at least 45 minutes of sun exposure. But ketosis just does a lot of heavy lifting on the sleep side of things. And it’s not possible for me to isolate variables here, but I have clinically diagnosed OCD and a lot of ruminative looping. When I am in ketosis, the volume on that goes from a 10 to a two.
So although I haven’t tracked it with an Oura ring, I would suspect my sleep latency is dramatically improved, right? I’m falling asleep a lot faster because my brain isn’t basically saying, oh, finally I have been waiting all day to tell you so much. It’s not that kind of situation quite as much. And then there’s a lot of other things going on, and I would say to folks, not to devalue therapy because I have therapists, I engage with therapy, but if you have some of these fundamental physiological issues, let’s just say with fuel utilization, talk therapy in and of itself is probably not going to fix those things.
And whether that’s looking at, for instance, I have three relatives with Alzheimer’s disease right now, and I’ve done some experiments with providing them with exogenous ketones, so supplemental liquid ketones in this case that they can drink. And if I give them 25 to 30 milliliters of BHB bonded to 1,3-butanediol, there are some real concerns around 1,3-butanediol. Just to make it clear, I think there could be some real liver toxicity from extended use, but putting that aside for the moment, give this to a relative with Alzheimer’s and within 20 to 30 minutes, longer sentences, verbal acuity, noticeably, very noticeably improved. They’re telling stories instead of giving one answer, one word answers.
David Baszucki: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: It’s incredibly noticeable. And for instance, I slept like dog shit last night. Not to get too technical. But I just had a ketone salt mix prior to this conversation and it’s like I can feel it now. I can tell when the light switches come on. And there’s a reason Alzheimer’s is sometimes referred to as type three diabetes. And furthermore, I mean I don’t want to dox this scientist, you might know who I’m talking to, but I don’t think he’s been public about this, where there’s also — there might be some explanatory power in various types of infections as catalysts for certain types of what we would term psychiatric disorders.
And if your glucose metabolism is compromised in some way— And people listening, we’re not going to talk about ketosis the whole time, but honestly, if this is the only thing you take from this conversation, I think for a lot of you it will be well worth it — I’ve had Lyme disease twice and there’s a bunch of ridiculous woo-woo nonsense around Lyme disease and quite a few infectious diseases. Not everyone has Lyme disease. You might just be depressed. There’s a lot of overlap with symptoms for various syndromes. But growing up on Long Island, I had two absolutely verified cases of Lyme disease and other coinfections. Then you take a bunch of antibiotics and you do kill that infection despite what people might say. Nonetheless, you might experience what people call long Lyme disease, like long and what, in retrospect, I’ve realized that a lot of my longer duration symptoms, I think were probably neuro-inflammation, probably microglia, but who knows?
There could be other aspects to it. What solved my symptoms, that came after Lyme disease, was three weeks of strict ketosis, very strict ketosis. And I formed a bunch of pet theories or hypotheses as to why that might be the case because this was 10 years ago, but only recently — well, let me back up. Had at least four, maybe five friends or their wives who had actual proper documented cases of Lyme, a hundred percent success rate of getting rid of their cognitive symptoms and joint pain with strict ketosis. I’m not saying it’s a cure all, but it’s four for four or five for five at this point.
David Baszucki: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, long-winded way of saying, it’s such an accessible intervention, obviously do it with doctor supervision and neither you or I play a doctor on the internet. But man, it’s right there. It’s right there in front of you and accessible.
David Baszucki: I feel the same thing about sleep. And I feel 10 years ago I used to fear insomnia because that could mean a bad day, but I’ve never correlated this with ketosis. But I now know I can have three nights of what might be considered bad sleep, but I’m not as afraid of it. And now if I wake up at 2:00 a.m. I just listen to some interesting thing I want to listen to, a book or a podcast or something, and I fall back to sleep and I actually feel it’s just like a free learning period rather than something to be afraid of. And I no longer have those days, maybe 10 or 15 years ago where I’d just wake up and just go, it’s going to be a terrible day. I’m exhausted.
And then on the talk therapy thing, the way I sometimes think about this is, it’s kind of interesting that we first go to talk therapy rather than what I would call mechanical therapy. Mechanical therapy is what’s up with the machinery in your brain? Your brain is a machine. And talk therapy, with all due respect, in many cases, very, very valuable. But in many cases, if the machinery is not functioning, not getting enough energy, has a core at the molecular level thing going on, talk therapy is not going to do anything. And so I think that the physiological mechanical should always be the first place to go and in many cases, boom, that can take care of quite a bit.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would actually go further because there have been many periods in my life where I’ve, I don’t want to say ignored, but for periods of time, developed a blind spot related to the mechanical therapy. Looking at examining the engine and oil levels and so on, instead of just trying to improve my driving technique.
And I would go further and say that there are times when, and keeping in mind people, please, I do talk therapy regularly, so I’m not knocking it. I view it as necessary but not sufficient. It can actually put you into a precarious position because if you’re doing a lot of talk therapy but making no progress, you can develop almost a learned helplessness and the self-flagellating can get worse where you’re like, well, wait a second, I’m working with this great therapist. They’re giving me all the tools. Why am I of such a fucking failure? I thought I was so smart. Why can’t I figure this out?
And you can end up in this very dangerous, in some cases, situation where you feel like you cannot fix things because you’re unable to use the talk therapy to fix whatever the underlying issue is. Whereas in reality, it could be a purely physiological issue. Or you at least need that base level of physiological support before you can begin to do some of the higher level functioning and reorienting.
Let’s shift gears. You mentioned listening. This is going to sound like it’s out of left field, but it’s sitting right in front of me. So I might as well ask, this is actually from Lifehacker back in the day. Lifehacker.com. And I want you to tell me if this is still true. “I tend to work well,” this is quoting you, “whenever I’m listening to pure ambient noise, like those you’d find on the Atmospheric Calm playlist on Spotify. It’s my go-to playlist if I need a quick boost in creativity or productivity.” Do you still have any playlists that you listen to of that type?
David Baszucki: I still listen to Atmospheric Calm on Spotify. I am unable to function with anything other than ambient noise in the background. And so ambient means no lyrics, no words, no people saying stuff. For me, if I want some chill music, it’s got to be spa music, ambient music. I can’t get distracted by that.
Tim Ferriss: All right, I’m going to try that playlist because you and I are the same in that way. If there are lyrics, forget about it. It’s just generally not going to work for me.
Let’s talk about Roblox. So there are a million different entry points here. The most obvious one would be to say, David, tell me the genesis story of Roblox. And I do want to hear the genesis story, but I might want to start with one that’s also sitting right in front of me. And maybe we could just start with this. This is under the heading of the future. Why don’t you give people an overview of what Roblox is for those people who have no idea whatsoever? And then the future I have here procedurally generated real-time worlds, aka dreaming in real time, that’s just too attractive for me not to leap into. So what is Roblox? And you could give some stats and figures if that helps give people an idea of the scale and scope of this. And then could you elaborate on the future as I teed it up?
David Baszucki: So hey, the out of the box big picture thing here is humans are just compelled to try to figure out ways to connect and communicate. And we didn’t used to have language and then we figured out language and we could sit around the campfire and communicate and tell stories. And then we tried to communicate at a distance and we had smoke signals or semaphores, and then we figured out writing and the mail system and we had the Pony Express and all of that, but we still wanted to communicate more at a distance. And then we had the telegraph system and then we had the telephone system and we use that a lot. And then we have text. And then in the midst of COVID, all of a sudden video, what we’re doing right now got to be more. And it’s just this core human thing of wanting to connect with people both real time and whatever.
And technically we’re not quite done. Technically, there’s going to be more. And it’s not necessarily dystopian. It could arguably very positive, whether it’s the holodeck we’ve seen on Star Trek or some of those things where maybe instead of a video call, I’m hanging out with my dad and we’re walking around ancient Rome together even though he’s in Carmel and I’m here. Or maybe he feels like he’s right in my office together. And so behind all of Roblox is what I feel is this unstoppable wave of technology that is going to happen. And we have graciously landed in this opportunity to usher it in, initially coming from what seems like a gaming platform, like people playing together, but arguably a platform that, if it’s done well and if it’s done safely and with civility and with scale, can be a very important, not just play, but working platform, communication platform, lonely kid with cancer in the hospital connection platform, lonely kid who’s having a hard time finding their people and finding them digitally platform and maybe even a way to experience music or political rallies even.
So the good news is, it’s good to be in a company with just a big thing happening behind it. The way Roblox presents today is you could think of it as a 3D gaming play platform with about 120 million people on it every day where all of the games, all of the creations, are made by people on the platform, whether it’s a 12-year-old hobbyist, whether it’s a team of 50 people making 10 million dollars a year, where it’s everything in between.
And where, through these user created experiences, about three percent of all the gaming in the world is now starting to happen on Roblox. And gaming is a pretty big market. What’s really beautiful about it is that we see emergent games like you would expect with user generated things where maybe we have a traditional view of what games are. But on Roblox, a top game is Dress to Impress, like a fashion game where you pick clothes out for five minutes and you compete in a fashion show or, what was recently hot, Grow a Garden, where your garden is always growing in the background and you’re tuning it and you’re trying to make it better.
So it’s really a fascinating, interesting journey. I think it started with a combination of great people and just a big vision. It’s an enormous responsibility because there’s probably nine billion hours of people on our platform every month. And at peak times there’s over 40 million people.
And from day one, we’ve built this as a platform for all ages. So we have nine-year olds on the platform. All of their communication is filtered. They’re not able to share images, but they are able to go play hide and go seek. And we put enormous effort on safety and civility with all these things. And we actually, I think have done something very lucky, is unlike almost every other social platform, you name it, it’s 13 and up. We’ve accepted that we have young people on the platform from day one and really built the infrastructure around that rather than denying that. So it’s a really fun company to run, it’s in a really big interesting market. I think we’re going to see people doing virtual 3D work on the platform.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by 3D work? What would be an example of that?
David Baszucki: I just think as, over time, Roblox gets more and more photorealistic and more real-time rather than having a video call. What’s interesting about a video call with 20 people is we see 20 windows and only one or two people can talk at the same time because it gets all confusing. But in a 3D Roblox world, we’re all in the same space and we kind of hear us all at the same time, just like the real world. So I think over time some types of video calls will get replaced with 3D calls. We’ll see music concerts. If you’re not live, you’ll be there in a 3D holodeck type version with your friends dancing and seeing everything around you.
And I do think we’ll ultimately see political rallies where, in addition to the stadium of a hundred thousand people within the rules and the laws of the state where that political rally may be occurring, we may see both a video version, a physical version, and a 3D version where you can be there with your friends and go to that. So I really do think we’re at the start of just used to be the phone and now video is pretty big. And someday 3D is going to be pretty big too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
I can’t remember. Alan Key? I might be getting the attribution wrong.
David Baszucki: Alan Kay?
Tim Ferriss: Kay. Alan Kay. Is that “The best way to predict the future is to create it”?
David Baszucki: I think the future, in many ways, we sometimes don’t have the hubris to feel many things are inevitable. And so, one other way to predict the future I think is many things are just inevitable. There are enough smart people around that the wheel was inevitable and one could take credit. I invented the wheel, but that wheel was probably going to get invented by thousands of different people anyways. And I think we have a little bit of the same vision at Roblox. We are working on something that is inevitable. We are participating in building it, but I don’t think we would lay claim to being the inventors of it.
Tim Ferriss: Although I’m fascinated by the Incan Empire, it seems like they never landed on the wheel idea. It’s like what they were able to accomplish without the wheels is totally bananas. But that’s — go figure.
David Baszucki: Yeah, that is bananas. That is. But then again, if they would’ve survived, they might’ve come across it.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. Maybe they just ran out of runway. So let me ask you, since a lot of entrepreneurs are listening to this, and I’m sure even if they have not played Roblox, they have heard of Roblox and the numbers you’re providing our mind-boggling numbers in terms of the breadth and size of Roblox and where it’s going. You mentioned the creator community, and I’ve got some numbers in front of me, like Roblox creators earned more than one billion dollars in the past year, and this, in a sense, open development community seems to be key to growth. How early on did you figure that out? Did you try to do things internally for a while and then prototype it and then pour gasoline on it? Or was that just from the very first sort of nascent stages of this product of the company, part of the plan?
David Baszucki: I believe one has to always be innovating in a company like this. And part of building a company like Roblox is those innovations have to be happening year after year. One almost needs a system for innovation. We, along the way, with the way this economic system called the developer system, Roblox was always what is called a user-generated content platform, which means creators are making stuff, people are learning STEM, people are getting excited. Even the ego burst of having three friends play a game can really motivate a young person to get into computer science. And so, initially, you could say Roblox ran on the excitement of having friends see what you’re working on.
We initially had a much more primitive economic system, a club membership thing, like some much older virtual worlds from young people. And we had one of these moments that we’ve had so many in the company where one number is going great and one number is not going so great. And, at this point, we had one number going great, which is user growth and hours growth, but we had this other number going not great, which is revenue. And that was really —
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain what the membership — what that looked like at the time just so I have an understanding?
David Baszucki: The membership, the early membership model was, if you subscribe for $5 a month, you get some cool stuff, you get some skins for your website, you get more places to build stuff so you could build more. But that was actually a very dangerous revenue model because there should never be any impediment to building and creating. That should just be unlimited and free. So we had arguably a primitive revenue model. We weren’t making building free. And it was like selling a little extra cool thing like extra chrome on your car or something. And that was getting stale and tired.
And what we learned in that is, sometimes, your intuitive, big picture, very difficult thing is the right solution, but we did what many other entrepreneurs would do, which is, like, “Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a revenue problem. We need to forensically diagnose this. Let’s look at the 50 things. What did we change? What did we break? Oh, we can’t find anything we broke. Okay, let’s spend three more months making a list of all the small little tweaks we can do to improve revenue. Oh, let’s stack rank them. Okay, there’s 50 things. Well, okay, let’s do the top 10 of those. Oh, my gosh, those aren’t working.” And then, in the back of our heads, we had been saying there’s one thing that’s really difficult, which is we need a digital economy, virtual currency. We need players to be able to buy Robux. We need them to be able to go into any game and use their Robux. We need the creators to sell things for Robux.
Whatever they could think of, we have to trust that these creators, in a pizza delivery game, they’re going to sell us a scooter for anyone who wants to deliver pizzas faster. We’re going to have to trust that, in Bird Simulator, they’re going to sell the ability to turn into an eagle faster than if you just play. And so, all of a sudden, okay, let’s go do the big strategic thing. This is going to take a while. Let’s just go, go, go, go.
Tim Ferriss: Were there any sources of inspiration who led you to consider the digital economy Robux route? Were there any antecedents or influences?
David Baszucki: You could say Adam Smith. Like, literally, the way our economy works, people have some currency. They buy things. When artists or creators make stuff, people decide what they want to buy. People are very creative in making that. We are literally inspired by the real-world economy, and so we said we have to have kind of a microcosm of the real-world economy. What was exciting is, even though we knew this was going to take two or three months to build, the second we committed, like, “Forget all these fixes, forget all of these little things, we’re going all in at what we think is the big strategic fix to this problem.” It was very relaxing and fun. It was just like we’re —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can see you getting visibly excited. I’m just wondering, with such a seemingly dramatic move, number one, am I over dramatizing the risks involved in doing it? Is it more like, hey, it seems big, and it is big, but it’s actually not that risky, number one? Number two is how did you decide internally to hit go on that decision?
David Baszucki: I think we were smaller. We had 20 people. We had spent three months trying to find what we broke. We’d spent three months trying the top 10 of the 50 stack rank things and we were like okay. But I think we had hope and conviction that, if we built this right, we would build essentially a system that, if Roblox grows, our economy will grow. And we’re not going to be day in day out trying to fix the economy. If we build this system, we can get back to making Roblox fun. We are always working on safety. We continue to focus on that, focus on those things, because we’re going to build a system that’s going to scale with the system. And, by the way, that did turn out to be true. If we typically double the number of users or the number of hours, we’ll generally double the revenue. The system just —
Tim Ferriss: Got it. So, in this case, the numbers that were looking good, that you mentioned before, hours played, is now directly correlated with another number which looks good —
David Baszucki: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — which is the revenue —
David Baszucki: Revenue —
Tim Ferriss: — as opposed to diverging because one is subscription per month or whatever the interval was. Got it. Okay.
David Baszucki: We wanted to get to a point where revenue equals K times hours. And that was the hope.
Tim Ferriss: What’s K?
David Baszucki: Just a constant. Pick a number.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay. Got it.
David Baszucki: Revenue equals some multiple times hours. So then, psychologically, what was exciting is, a few days into this, it’s like pretty relaxed. Right? We’re obviously risking wasting three months on this, and we’re risking that this won’t work. But the opposite side of it is, “Oh, my gosh, we really can imagine this thing working. And if this thing works, it’s really going to work. And this one thing is going to work really, really well.” And it’s a pretty complex feature. We needed digital currency. We needed users to be able to buy digital currency. We needed anyone’s game. In your hide-and-go-seek game, you needed a facility to be able to sell a flashlight for five Roblox. We needed the facility for you to take all of your Roblox and turn them into cash to support your living as creator. We needed a discovery component to see what are the interesting games that you can spend Robux in.
We needed developers to do all of this stuff, so we had to build all of this in parallel. But what was interesting is we had kind of some secret rocket engine behind it and that for the first time ever, as a complement to this feature, you or I could imagine making a living on Roblox because, before, we were hobbyists and, all of a sudden, whoa, if I could make five grand a month with my Roblox game, I might just work on that full time rather than an hour a day. So we felt there would be a secret afterburner here that people would work harder on their Roblox game. So, fast-forward, and we got within a day of shipping and we were, like, “Okay, it’s like we’re kind of hoping this works. I hope this works.” And then like, now, the dev community had heard about it. Everyone’s really excited about it. And the day we shipped it, I would say, within four hours, we knew it’s going to work just like boom.
Tim Ferriss: Was that a revenue metric? Was it just an adoption metric? How did you know it was going to work?
David Baszucki: It’s, oh, my gosh, of the top a hundred creators on Roblox, 22 of them already have Robux features. Oh, my gosh.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it, like integrated that quickly.
David Baszucki: Yeah. Oh, my gosh, a bunch of users have already bought Robux in the first four hours. Oh, my gosh, people are spending Roblox in these places. Oh, my gosh. And so, yeah, it was a little example of what we would call doing the hard thing and taking the long view. It’s a little bit like, when the strategic thing is right, everything else follows. And, metaphorically, it’s a little bit like, first and foremost, if you’re having a mental health crisis, work on your body and your machinery maybe before you work on the talk therapy. Like get the strategic things right first.
Tim Ferriss: And when you were about to ship to make this virtual economy a reality, this digital economy, prior to shipping, did you have a framework for how you would decide whether it was pass, fail? In other words, was it time-bound, like, “We’re going to follow X, Y, and Z metrics for four weeks. And if it’s not working, we’re going to roll back to the prior version?” What was the plan B. Or was there nothing like that?
David Baszucki: I feel, this one, we’ve got conviction. I think what actually happened is, in the back of our minds, we all really knew this was the right big way to go. It was just so much work that we constantly kicked the can down the road, tried to fix things, tried to do the small things, and then, finally, when we accepted reality, we got to do the right, big-picture thing, all of a sudden, it’s like, “Okay, we accept the reality. We got to do the strategic thing,” and then it was all good. And then I think we started believing this is going to work.
Tim Ferriss: All right, let me ask a question about this digital economy. So you talked about different creators making a living and many of them are doing much more than making a living on Roblox. Some of them are fantastically successful. And one of my employees sent me his two kids’ favorite games and then Dad’s favorites. One of them is a game you mentioned, Grow a Garden. And you also mentioned Dress to Impress, which shows up for one of them. There are a bunch of other ones.
Well, you know what, just for fun, there are a couple that show up a bunch. The Mimic, 99 Nights in the Forest, and there are many more. But I wanted to talk about Grow a Garden specifically, because Grow a Garden was also the game that came up when I was in a text thread with my friend Kevin Rose. And Kevin’s an amazing entrepreneur, a fantastically successful investor, and he kept sending me these videos, these screen captures or iPhone videos, I don’t know which, of playing Grow a Garden with his little girls. And he just loves the game. He’s got to be one of your biggest spenders, I would have to imagine, based on some of the conversations I’ve had with him.
And he had a question, and I would love to know how you think about this as sort of the Fed and the president and everything involved at the top of the pyramid for this digital economy. His observation was that, when something like Grow a Garden comes out, and I apologize that I haven’t participated in the ecosystem quite so I can’t speak to this, but, once something is really successful, a lot of copycats come out, a lot of clones sort of come out. How do you think about handling that type of situation where people might go to an imitator believing it to be the original, they spend money, et cetera, all of these possible complications, or maybe ensuring that creators are incentivized to put the time into developing their games. If they fear they might be cloned, how do you think of handling a lot of these issues which get handled offline as well, of course, with the USPTO. And you have drug development and certain types of rules and regulations around IP. How do you think about handling that in your digital economy?
David Baszucki: Yeah, so I would say, first, more and more, from an IP copyright standpoint, things that are typically IP and copyrighted like the name Grow a Garden and things like that, or avatars or things like that, the same protections exist on our platform that would exist in any other platform. What is trickier is barring a name or a trademark or a copyright, a form of game play that’s traditionally not been protected. I’m not a lawyer, so I might not be giving the exact right thing, but if I made an experience on Roblox called Water Your Plants a Lot and Create an Amazing Garden, and it kind of works like Grow a Garden, that’s a little hard to protect.
What we do find, and we work a lot on it, is people who make similar type experiences do try to draft on the main experience. They get very creative. We have the ability because, when people search for Grow a Garden or when they look for it and they type that in, we can see a lot about all of the games, the game that matches exactly like Grow a Garden. Or even if someone types in the word “garden”, we know pretty well that there’s one game on Roblox with the name “garden” in it that has 25 million people playing at the same time. And there’s a bunch of other games with the word “garden” in it that have 10 people playing, and so we can be pretty intelligent in really showing, like, “This is Grow a Garden even if you type ‘garden’, and here’s a few small other ones.” But we would not block Dave’s Try to Create a Garden game even if Grow a Garden were there.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the other best decisions? I’m also going to ask biggest mistakes after this. I’m just going to plant that seed, because I often ask people what are their favorite failures or mistakes. In addition to the implementation of the digital economy, what have been some of the best decisions? Those could be design features. Those could be related to business model. They could be related to org chart of the company and how you thought about that. It could be really anything, but some of the best decisions that, since made, have contributed to the success of Roblox.
David Baszucki: I think one of the best decisions we’ve made is trying to optimize creator revenue over profits actually. And so, when I’m running Roblox and we have our CFO and our board and we have a lot of options and we’re making billions and billions of things flowing through the company, we end up with this really interesting decision where we’re trying to keep our employment cost as efficient as we can. We’re trying to keep the cost of running Roblox as efficient as we can. We’re trying to have really many interesting ways to efficiently purchase Roblox without that costing a lot. And we end up with two final places the cash can go. One is it can go back to the developers or the other is, quote, we can make profit.
And, time and time again, I think we’ve leaned a bit on the direction of “Let’s move back more to the creator community” rather than being a ridiculously profitable company. We do generate cash, and we put some cash in the bank. But, generally, we’re trying to create that creator community. And I think that goes hand in hand with, when we think about designing the product, we have groups that work on our simulation engine, and the user experience, and the economy, and trust and safety. Our economy team’s been pretty gracious in that their goal is to generate revenue. But the real primary goal is to make Roblox engaging and interesting and fun, not at the expense of revenue. And so our economy team has been very gracious in a sense saying, “Yeah, the primary goal is still user engagement, not making money.” So I think that’s been a good decision. We have —
Tim Ferriss: Now, could you say more about that because people might have —
David Baszucki: Well, you could imagine if you were —
Tim Ferriss: — questions about that?
David Baszucki: If you were the head of Roblox economy and you said, “Hey, Dave, for my job, all I want to do is make the most money.” That seems like a logical thing for that economy team. What I would say is, “Well, we want to be careful. We like you, for every feature you build, to make sure that it’s neutral-to-positive on fun as well, and that, if you come up with a wacky feature that people get confused and just spend a lot of money and they’re not quite as happy, but we make more money, that would fail all of our metrics. And so, in a sense, we can make more money, but we really want to move all of the things. We want to move fun. We want to move how much people enjoy Roblox at the same time.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it also seems, tell me if I’m misreading this, like playing the long game in the sense that, if you want to build the largest company possible, if you want to have 10 percent of all gaming content on Roblox, if you want to go beyond that.
David Baszucki: I would say, subject to constraints, actually, because what our mission is is connect a billion users with optimism and civility. And so there’s some pretty big guardrails around that in that we would not just take the billion daily users. We would take the billion daily users if the average user on our platform might come away with a higher level of civility than if they hadn’t even played. We are actually trying to teach civility at the same time we’re growing the company.
Tim Ferriss: And what I was going to say is not mutually exclusive with that. I was just going to say that you need the game developers to be happy for the long-term interest of everyone involved, including Roblox, right? So you don’t want to kill the golden goose by pulling out as much profit as possible.
David Baszucki: No. We think the more efficiently we run the company, the more of the money flowing through that flows to the developers. It’s a much better long game than just trying to be a hyper-profitable company.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the missteps or mistakes along the way that have stood out for you?
David Baszucki: Generally, missteps happen either not taking the long view and sometimes trying to do too much rather than doing less better. I’ll share a classic mistake that’s really hard to get one’s head around. Maybe five to eight years ago, there’s a whole category of gaming that was around being in a clan and making points and having rankings and all of that. And those are features that are beautiful within a single game or beautiful within certain games. But, arguably, those are features that aren’t necessarily something we should have been building as a platform. We should have trusted the developers to, like, “You go build your game with that stuff,” rather than us saying, “We want to be in the gaming business rather than the platform business.” And so we spent a lot of time building out some of that kind of clan ranking functionality, clan point stuff, and we threw it all away because it was trying to do too much on the platform.
We’ve done many, many things well. One thing we did really well was Roblox was initially a PC/Macintosh company. And there was a time when people did not believe that 3D stuff should happen on a phone. Phone games were two-dimensional, more puzzle-type thing. And there was a technological leap that, just like with the iPhone, all of a sudden, websites that were used to being these big PC websites, with a pinch and a Zoom, would work on an iPhone, the exact same website. There’s no more of this separate mobile-web stuff. It was a huge innovation. And I think we did it right, thinking that this 3D immersive, metaverse, holodeck stuff will ultimately work on a phone as well. And most Roblox games run on a phone or a big screen at the same time. And that has really, I’d say, turned to pass and worked out really well for us.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you have confidence in that when others didn’t?
David Baszucki: It just seemed inevitable. I think the reason we felt it was inevitable is people were watching movies on their phone at that time. And movies are kind of three-dimensional. And games are starting to approach movies. It just seemed inevitable. But, you are right, that was a little bit of me and a couple other people in the company believed it. But that was a pivotal time when probably 90 percent of the company said, “No way is this one going to work,” but we took the risk on it.
Tim Ferriss: What was the risk?
David Baszucki: Distraction.
Tim Ferriss: Distraction?
David Baszucki: Yeah, like we’re going to spend all this time on this iPhone version of Roblox. But that same kind of stuff taking that big, long leap, the very — there was a really fun, very simple game called Survive the Natural Disaster on Roblox. And early on in the prototyping phase, I had a version running on a very old iPhone. And it was that same feeling as the virtual economy. It’s just, “This is going to work.” Boom. Now, iPhones and Androids are the biggest platforms for Roblox.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The inevitability part is worth underscoring. I’ll just share a quick story, which was in 2008 or 2009 when I first met Tobi, CEO of Shopify. This was when they had nine or 12 employees, something like that, and Harley as well. And I ended up becoming an advisor to the company, which was pretty good timing. But the point of the story is that the way I decided to look at that really seriously was, number one, I asked my fans how I should update my first book related to e-commerce specifically. And they mentioned Shopify over and over again, but I took a look at it.
And, to borrow from this wild man, hacker/investor named Pablos Holman, he often will look out and he says, “Okay. Well, what’s going to happen next year is pretty hard, maybe, to predict with any precision. But what might happen in 10 or 20 years can be a little bit easier.” If you ask yourself, “Will there be more or less e-commerce?” I think it’s pretty obvious, right? At that point, more. Will there be more phones? Will there be more broadband connectivity? Yes, and yes, like if you had to choose a yes or no. And pretty soon, when you start to add up a few of those, you come to the conclusion that this seems like an inevitability. It also seems inevitable that someone’s going to win in this space, so why not bet on the horse that my readers have recommended over and over again? And that was the decision process. There was more to it, of course. I mean, Tobi is a genius, and Harley is amazing, but —
David Baszucki: But if it was Tobi from Shopify, you probably also had some intuition that this is the type of person that can make that happen.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean, it can’t just be a good idea. I mean, the team was critically important. And Tobi is one of the best first principles thinkers and systems thinkers —
David Baszucki: Tobi is a —
Tim Ferriss: — I’ve ever met in my life.
David Baszucki: — very systems thinker, absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. But the inevitability part, I sometimes just like to point out to folks, like, yeah, I’ve done a lot of angel investing in this and that, and I’ve had some luck, but you can train yourself to ask some of these questions to narrow down the list of players you might consider just based on these inevitabilities. And if you can’t find an inevitability, it’s like, okay, maybe you just opt out of that particular playing field, whatever that might be.
Let me ask a couple of questions from one of my employees. This is, again, the father who plays with his kids. We can do just a couple of these. Are there any games that maybe aren’t super popular, but you particularly like? Are there any games that are not sort of the greatest hits that a lot of people listening would know where you’re, like, “Yeah, I am actually a fan of this game or that game?” Any come to mind?
David Baszucki: Yeah. I think what I’m a fan of, and I’m hoping that happens more on Roblox, is more nichey content that super fans would have. So there’s a couple simulations. One is, and I forget the name, but it’s a simulation of a full airline company. And it’s a simulation, it seems unbelievable, but a simulation where you go to the airport, you buy tickets, you wait in the lounge, you get on the plane with everyone else, you take your seat, you go on a flight for an hour, you get served with a flight attendant, and everyone plays a role. You’re either a passenger. You’re a flight attendant. You’re a pilot. You’re an executive in the airline.
That kind of thing really blows my mind just because of the potential for amazing role playing. And, yeah, I think the potential for individuals to, “Hey, there’s a role for everyone.” There’s the first-class passengers. That’s a role. There’s also the baggage handler or whatever. I think that’s really fun. I also like model railroading. And I think I like all the railroad games on Roblox because that — there’s this hobby 30, 40, 50 years ago before we had computers that people would make all these model railroad sets in their Midwestern basements. And they don’t do that anymore. But I like the idea that that hobby can go digital on a platform like Roblox.
Tim Ferriss: How many games are there, roughly, on Roblox?
David Baszucki: The number is almost meaningless because it’s millions and millions and millions, and so what it turns into is more these crazy numbers. Like how many people make more than a million dollars? I think that’s pretty big. How many people can make a living. And that’s thousands and thousands that can make a living. How many make any money at all? We will validate that I’m giving you the right number, but that’s tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. And then how many are making cool stuff to show off with their friends? That’s in the millions. So there’s a lot.
Tim Ferriss: All right, this is another one, again, from my employee. What are things kids can do to be extra safe on Roblox or I guess, by extension that parents could do to ensure their kids are extra safe on Roblox?
David Baszucki: So this is a big one, and I think we are really working to keep kids on Roblox actually. And this might sound counterintuitive, but we’re really working to keep people in a place where text is filtered and we can monitor critical harms and where there’s no image sharing or video sharing. I would say, the backstory of the industry right now is there are a lot of 10-year-olds who have phones. And there’s a lot of 10-year-olds who can install software that is for 13-year-olds. And a lot of that software allows more open communication, unfiltered communication, and sharing pictures. We’ve all heard there’s a lot of things that go on on the internet that are really terrible. When people start sharing images, they can get blackmailed, they can start trying to meet someone in the real world.
So we’re working really hard to just stay on Roblox. And I would say, there are controls for parents as far as if you only want your kid to communicate with the people you pick, we will offer that for you. But I would say, we accept the responsibility and the challenge that not all kids are talking with their parents. And there are so many kids out there who when they’re 10, they get handed an iPhone and they go try a bunch of stuff, and we have to build Roblox in a way that is as safe as possible for those kids.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. What does the future hold, do you think, just for safety precautions or other technological innovations that might just help you to manage the entire system in that way to mitigate risk?
David Baszucki: I think we’re rapidly approaching a position where what is going on is in addition to all of our investigators, and in addition to all of that, the advancements in AI that we’re bringing forward on our platform. And some of the things we’ve committed to make this essentially not just a very, very, very, very, very good system, but a system that we almost take for granted. One thing that we have in the works right now, by the end of this year, using AI, using age estimation, using the camera on everyone’s phone, we’re going to know pretty well the age of everyone on our platform.
And in addition to filtering all text on our platform, and in addition to monitoring for critical harms, we’re going to start clustering people by ages just so unless you happen to know that person who’s a farther age away, we’re not going to let you communicate at all. So I think we’re going to zero in on that. So I do think, over time, both on the communication and the content side as well, we’re going to get to that well beyond very, very, very, very, very, very good type system.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, how long have you been embracing, how long have you been an AI shop, I suppose is one way to put it? Roblox. How long have you had elements behind the scenes, exactly?
David Baszucki: Behind the scenes, Roblox is a hundreds of different AI model shop. We build them ourselves. We have built all of our own texts, safety models, all of our own voice safety models. A lot of the models we use for figuring out what is a cool game to play. We’ve built our own translation system that is starting to translate from one language to another. We have started to debut some of the more, I wouldn’t say more exciting, but more futuristic stuff, which is 3D creation by AI, so that even if you or I aren’t used to using 3D tools, we can talk about things and have those be created. And we have more coming.
As you said earlier, I think you use something like procedurally generated, real-time dreaming. We have our eyes on that. And I think beyond, I would say, oh, can I use AI to make a game? It’s interesting to think if someday, will AI literally create an evolving game as we’re walking around, almost as if you and I are in a dream world or the Holodeck talking about the Holodeck and just have that fill in around us?
Tim Ferriss: And that’s another thing that seems kind of inevitable, right? Why wouldn’t that happen? It seems like, I don’t know, you’re holding a finger up, so what do you think?
David Baszucki: I think you’re exactly right. I think a long time ago, if we read a comic book, we would see Dick Tracy with a TV set on his watch. And we would just say, that’s completely crazy. We’ll never see a TV set. And now we have a smart watch. And a long time ago we had HAL in 2001, and no one’s ever going to be like that. And arguably, the AI systems today are better than HAL in 2001. So yeah, I think the average consumer, you, or me, or other people, if we have a crazy vision of some future technology, there’s a good chance we’re going to figure out how to build it someday.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. The Impossibles are worth questioning, particularly within the realm of AI. I was listening to a professor, well, Fei-Fei Li, I believe her name is.
David Baszucki: Absolutely. I know they’re working on a beautiful, wonderful idea of a company.
Tim Ferriss: They are, and she’s incredible. We were actually at Princeton at the same time. And she had Andrej Karpathy as a student at one point. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that. But the point is they were generating descriptions from images, and Fei-Fei I think at one point, she talked about this in her TED Talk, was saying, “What if we could generate an image from the description? So go the other direction.” And even at that time, which was not that long ago, if you think about it, Andre was like, “Yeah, no, that’s impossible. That’s not going to happen.” And yet here we are, really just in the blink of an eye.
So a lot of these things, like the holodeck you’re talking about, it’s like, sure you guys are working on this. There are other people working on some version of this. The ability to walk around Rome or something with a friend or to be in their living room with very, very lightweight hardware, it’s like, man, this stuff feels like it’s just around the corner. Who knows? People have said that about fusion for a long time, but I think in this particular case, it’s just so technologically-enabled and the development is so rapid that it’s hard for me to imagine a future without these things. I mean, how far away do you think these things are? The holodeck has come up a couple of times, how far away, if you were a betting man?
David Baszucki: There’s some various things to think about, right? How long till a Hollywood movie is maybe AI generated? Three to five years maybe, crazy. How long before there’s a product where instead of whatever you like, TikTok, Shorts, Reel, Spotlight, whatever short form video product you like, how long before some of that activity rather than you thumb scrolling, you’re watching a continuous video of your dream rather than all of those, who knows? That’s going to be kind of crazy.
I think one of the things we have our eyes on that is technically very difficult. How long could we support a photo realistic music concert with 100,000 people in the same stadium? Where if you and I were on the other side of the stadium and I waved a flag, you could see me and we could have a full simulation of how that concert. We’ve got our eyes on that. I’m not going to make a prediction, but that’s a really big technical lift to build that kind of technology out. But I think that’s going to happen as well. How long before my glasses have full AR overlay and I’m getting a lot of feedback? We’re starting to see early signs of that. So there’s a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe.
Tim Ferriss: I know a lot of friends who have gone from private to public, and it’s not to say it’s a bad thing. In a lot of ways, it can be an incredible thing, but you have more voices at the table in some respects. And I’m wondering how you think about preserving some of the, or ensuring that some of the constraints and values you put in place early continue even with those additional voices at the table.
So for instance, you mentioned TikTok, question from another friend was around Roblox Moments. And then they said, “Context, Moments has recently released beta short-form video format similar to TikTok.” And then I think back to when you were talking about STEM and some of the games that my friends use with their kids, which relate to critical thinking and so on. And I know nothing about Moments, so you could describe it. But when I hear similar to TikTok, I think, man, well if kids are able to use that instead of something that is STEM-focused, that’s quite a battle for attention. And I’m not sure who wins there, maybe the TikTok analog wins. How do you think about product development moving forward?
David Baszucki: Yeah, so one thing, I think that there’s a separation on intention in that historically side-by-side, the big thing I shared with you about this desire to connect, I think there is also a desire to tell stories and consume stories. And a lot of consuming stories is a bit of a different emotional head space, chilling out, watching a movie, watching a TV show, scrolling through short-form video, things like that. What I think is exciting is people have different mental models of I want to go hang out with people and do stuff together, or I want to be by myself and consume stuff by myself. And that gives me some positivity on building a connection platform because that desire, I think, for people to be with friends and meet and hang out with friends is always going to be there.
On the Moments thing, the reason we created Roblox Moments behind the scenes is there’s a couple things going on. People are looking for ways to find cool Roblox content. And one of the ways to find content is see what your friends are doing or see what other people are doing and jump into that. And so we think it is a gentle way to help people find more interesting stuff. You mentioned STEM on that side. I do feel once again, behind the scenes of everything that’s happened on Roblox from then to now, if we were to tabulate the number of new entrants into computer science, or graphic arts, or economics that had been inspired by Roblox, it probably is in the millions given just that experience that people have had on our platform.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the challenges of being a public company CEO?
David Baszucki: If your machinery is functioning, you can keep making those, I would say, bigger, more optimistic decisions. I think when we talked earlier about you’re feeling you’re in ketosis or you’re feeling you’re not in it, I think there’s a little bit of a connection to if the machinery is running properly, the decisions tend to drift a little bit more long-term and strategic because you’re not in fight or flight. Whereas if you’re in a glucose crash and you’re a little more fight or flighty, those decisions can tend to lean more tactical and that long-term thing’s going to be —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a good point.
David Baszucki: The long-term thing’s going to be impossible. Everything’s an emergency, let’s just do, do, do, do, do. And so I think trying to stay in the right balance of long-term decision making is a big thing.
Tim Ferriss: So for people who may not be watching the video and perhaps they’ve seen photos of you, but when we had our conversation a while back, this was our first conversation discussing the possibility of doing this podcast together. Biohacking came up as one topic we could explore. Maybe you could speak to some aspects or elements of your self-care routine. Because you obviously take good care of yourself, clearly exercise. What does the regimen look like, what does a week in the life look like in terms of when you are performing at your best, supporting the machinery?
David Baszucki: A lot of it is just trying to have some form of movement every day. As you said, get some sun every day. On the diet side, definitely pretty much two nights ago I had a glass of wine. I could definitely feel it. So try to keep very, very low on the alcohol. I would say, try to stay in moderate ketosis, have the workouts fun and set up, and a balance of those things. It’s not that complicated though. Like you I’m trying to eat in that say, 1:00 to 6:00 window and trying to know generally what pieces I would eat. Trying to more get to bed at 9:00 rather than 11:00 type thing. Pretty simple.
Tim Ferriss: What do your meals look like? I imagine maybe you have some commonalities in meals from day to day.
David Baszucki: Mine are very similar to yours. I would say, low carb everywhere, fair amount of meat, fair amount of eggs, fair amount of butter, coupled with lettuce, veggies, stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss: And what about non-negotiable exercise? Do you have a weight training three times a week? Do you have something else that is sort of non-negotiable?
David Baszucki: CrossFit three times a week, hiking with a weighted vest three or four times a week, pretty simple.
Tim Ferriss: And you’ve got your Oura Ring on. What kind of stuff do you track for yourself? Are you recording these workouts? Are you just doing the workout of the day as prescribed by the Crossfit Gym? What type of stuff are you doing?
David Baszucki: Yeah, I’ve got a trainer that I’ve got a dialogue and my whole thing set up in my garage. So we have a fun little thing going on there. On my Oura Ring, somewhat similar to when you were talking about your sleep score. I don’t look at my Oura thing maybe more than once a month because I actually don’t want to get freaked out by how bad my sleep scores are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good idea. Good idea.
David Baszucki: So I’m like you. I’m in the 60 to 80, 60 to 90 zone on the sleep, and I try on the sleep just not to worry about it.
Tim Ferriss: So when you say you don’t look at it more than once a month, what are you doing once a month? Are you crunching that yourself, just scrolling through the Oura Ring or are you exporting the data and doing something with it?
David Baszucki: I’m just looking at the Oura Ring. What I’m mostly looking for once a month, is that the Oura projected stress score, the Oura projected cardio age. I’m looking for what’s my lowest heart rate while I’m sleeping. I’m looking at HRV, just do a scan of those things, maybe temperature. But nothing too much more than that. I would say, I’ve spent quite a long time wearing a CGM or a CKM to dial in my diet and watching those type things. That would be my biggest recommendation for people is to wear a CGM if you can. I think you can buy them on Amazon right now because it’s pretty interesting.
At Roblox, we give everyone a CGM. And —
Tim Ferriss: Which CGM do you give them?
David Baszucki: I think it’s FreeStyle or whatever. I don’t know. Or I think they can buy either one. The other thing we do at Roblox is we have pretty good snacks, but we label all of the snacks at Roblox on two axes. One is the whole food axis, and not all whole foods is necessarily metabolically what I would call metabolically good. Like fresh-squeezed orange juice might be whole foods. We also —
Tim Ferriss: Hemlock’s a whole food too.
David Baszucki: And then we also put it on another axis, which we just picked up the Good Energy axis. It’s not a strict keto axis, but it’s pretty close to that. And we’ve got the Casey Means book from that and all of that. So every snack at Roblox is either, is it whole energy or not? Is it whole food or not? And what’s surprising is with that, with talking about it at company meetings, with giving out the CGMs, I get all kinds of Slacks from engineers saying, “Oh my gosh, my life’s been changed. I’ve been wearing the CGM. And we used to eat just white giant plates of white rice every dinner. And we’ve read a few books and I’m not eating that. I lost 30 pounds and I feel so sharp. And that’s amazing.” And then I’m like, so actually we’re getting a lot of that from employees in the company.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is remarkable how much stabilizing your glucose metabolism and just how far that goes, touches every aspect of your life. David, just a few more questions then we’ll wrap right up. This is just kind of a couple of rapid fire before we land the plane. Favorite books or books that you’ve gifted or recommended a lot to other people? Are there any books that come to mind?
David Baszucki: One of our board members gave me this book called The Infinite Game, and it’s the original infinite game book. There’s some follow ons from it about how to implement the infinite game, so I forget the original author.
Tim Ferriss: So there’s a book by Simon Sinek, which is The Infinite Game. The original Finite and Infinite Games, I believe, is Carse.
David Baszucki: Yeah, that’s the one, the original. And so that one really got me into thinking fun, play, Roblox is a long game. It’s not a short game. That one I think really got me thinking, so I’m a big fan of that.
Tim Ferriss: Were there any books that had an outsized influence on you as an entrepreneur or a company builder?
David Baszucki: What’s interesting is I’ve never really ever liked any business books ever.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I feel you. I feel you.
David Baszucki: The books I was obsessed with in my youth were the books about Magellan, and Captain Cook, and Mutiny on the Bounty, and Joshua Slocum, and just all of these crazy explorers, Amundsen, and Scott, and all of that stuff. For some reason, that was my go-to category.
Tim Ferriss: Probably in some ways a more helpful set of reading than the typical business books where you have complete information in retrospect, whereas these people just forging off into the unknown, are dealing with catastrophe, and challenges, and curveballs at every turn.
David Baszucki: Amundsen versus Scott is such a balance of knowing how to play the long game and being prepared versus not, and it’s a great comparison.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, two last questions. This one is the billboard question. If you could put, metaphorically speaking, a message, a question, a quote, anything on a billboard to get the message to millions or billions of people, anything non-commercial, could be a mantra, something you live by, anything at all, what might you put on that billboard?
David Baszucki: You know what, I’m thinking metaphorically right now, just off our whole conversation and then popping back to Surrealistic Pillow. I don’t know if everyone would get it, but how about feed your head?
Tim Ferriss: Feed your head, yeah. Yeah. Feed your head.
David Baszucki: That’s what ketosis does.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. God, I was kind of on the fence about whether or not to do ketosis before my next trip to Mexico. And I’m thinking it’s time to get into ketosis. David, is there anything else that you’d like to say or point people to? Anything at all? Anything you’d like to ask my audience? Of course, people can find Roblox, R-O-B-L-O-X.com, Roblox. They can find you on X @DavidBaszucki. We’ll link to all of these things as well as YouTube and Baszucki Group. Is there anything else you’d like to say or mention before we wind to a close here?
David Baszucki: No. I want to thank you for having me on, and I think going back to your earlier book, I just want to also think, one other thing I really remember is your mixing of, I forget what kind of oil you were mixing with your coffee really early on.
Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah. Could have been MCT oil, could have been any number of things that I was experimenting with.
David Baszucki: Yeah. And I think you were onto something there because I have my coffee with whole cream, which is zero carb, which I think has some overlap with your MCT oil. So my takeaway would be, if you want to dabble in ketosis, go buy some whole cream for your coffee rather than half and half.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, heavy cream, just to be clear, it’s not half and half. Heavy cream, which sometimes coffee shops will have in the back. It is effectively pure fat and man, is that stuff delicious, also. But back in the day, with kids with epilepsy when it was hard to get them to maybe choke down the butter and this, that, and the other thing, heavy cream, that was the key to the kingdom of feeding your head. David, thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate it. And for folks listening, we’ll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And feed the machine, feed your head. It doesn’t always have to be something you think your way out of, sometimes you have to fix the physiology. Thanks for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: David Baszucki, Co-Founder of Roblox — The Path to 150M+ Daily Users, Critical Business Decisions, Ketogenic Therapy for Brain Health, Daily Routines, The Roblox Economy, and More (#834) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-05 08:07:04
David Baszucki (@DavidBaszucki) is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox. TIME named Roblox one of the “100 Most Influential Companies,” and it has been recognized by Fast Company for innovation on their “Most Innovative Companies” and “Most Innovative Companies in Gaming” lists.
Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution, where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leader in educational physics and mechanical-design-simulation software.
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“[Our son with bipolar] tried a ketogenic diet, and literally within three weeks or four weeks, we saw progress that we had never seen with any drug or medication. Mind blown, really, and a miracle.”
— David Baszucki
“One other way to predict the future, I think, is many things are just inevitable. There are enough smart people around that the wheel was inevitable.”
— David Baszucki
“Roblox was always what is called a user-generated content platform, which means creators are making stuff, people are learning STEM, people are getting excited. Even the ego burst of having three friends play a game can really motivate a young person to get into computer science.”
— David Baszucki
“If you’re having a mental health crisis, work on your body and your machinery, maybe, before you work on the talk therapy. Get the strategic things right first.”
— David Baszucki
“If we were to tabulate the number of new entrants into computer science or graphic arts or economics that had been inspired by Roblox, it probably is in the millions, given just that experience that people have had on our platform.”
— David Baszucki
“What’s interesting is I’ve never really ever liked any business books ever. … The books I was obsessed with in my youth were the books about Magellan and Captain Cook and Mutiny on the Bounty and Joshua Slocum and just all of these crazy explorers, Amundsen and Scott and all of that stuff.”
— David Baszucki
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Want to hear another episode exploring the groundbreaking power of metabolic psychiatry? Listen to my conversation with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer, in which we discussed his pioneering work using ketogenic diets to treat psychiatric disorders, the brain energy theory of mental illness, extraordinary case studies of recovery from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, how mitochondrial function affects mental health, and much more.
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