Ep 49: Tim Answers Your 10 Most Popular Questions

Hey folks, Tim here. My bestselling card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing team at Exploding Kittens, just won the Pop Insider Best geeky game of 2025 and also best stocking filler in the Made for Moms Toy Awards 2025. It is on sale everywhere. It's cheap, it's fast to learn, has 4.8 stars out of five. People are loving it. CoyoteGame.com will take you to all the retailers, but you can find it everywhere. It is a game of thinking fast and laughing faster. Think char meets hot potato meets a bunch of brain fun. It's good for your head. It's perfect for families with kids age 10 plus or adults who are kids at heart or don't take themselves too seriously. A lot of adults love this game and as I said, it's available everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target 8,000 plus retail locations, you name it. So please check it out. I loved making it. People are really enjoying it. It has 300 or 400 million plus social views of gameplay online and try it. Enjoy it this holiday season. Check it out coyotegame.com one more time. That's coyotegame.com or anywhere you buy your games. Now back to the episode.

Optimal Minimal at this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question now? I've seen an appropriate time. What if I get the eyes? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Me Tim Ferrous Soul. Hello ladies and germs. This is a new episode of the Tim Ferriss show and it is an experimental episode. I am going to answer your questions and there were 6,831 votes on 305 questions that you all submitted. 533 people submitted questions and they were voted up and down. And I'm going To answer the 10 most popular and there are a few caveats. I may tweak some of the questions or I'll read them literally and then I'll indicate where perhaps I think a better question or more precise question or oblique question could be asked. There are sponsors and notes for the show. I'll get through it very quickly. Number one, if you want to ask me as many questions as you could possibly want in private on Necker island, which is owned by Richard Branson along with Richard Branson and other folks. Incredible mentors for a week. Check out shopify.com Tim go to shopify.com Tim and you can figure out Learn exactly how you can get an all expenses paid trip to Necker island to hang out with me, Sir Richard Branson and a bunch of other folks for business mentoring or whatever you could possibly want really within reason. The second 99designs 99designs.com Tim check it out. 99designs is the largest one stop shop online for any type of graphic design. Whether you need a T shirt, a car app, a logo, website design, an app, fill in the blank, whatever it is. You can in a week or less have many, many submissions from designers around the world. And if you don't get an original design that you love, you pay nothing, you get your money back and you can also get an automatic free upgrade to your submission which gets you bolded headlines and better visibility. More submissions by going to 99designs.com tim and when you visit that you can actually see a number of contests that I've run in the past. I've used 99 designs for years. You can see how I brainstormed and got submissions for the four Hour Body book cover for instance, which went on to become number one New York Times. Now without further ado, here we go into the questions. I am running to get to a movie which for those interested Foxcatcher. I am a lifelong wrestler. I'm very fascinated by the entire saga. I don't remember when it happened, when related to, well, Mr. Dupont and everything else. I shall not spoil the story for those of you who don't know it, but I expect it to be very, very exciting and at the end very sad. Okay, now question number one. This is from Matt. I think it's Coughlin in Costa Rica. If you were to write the four hour workweek 2.0 for 2014, what would you change or update from the original version? Are there new tools, technology, business models or ideas that would make it more adaptable to today's realities? So there are a few things I would say to this. The first is yes, there are definitely tools and tactics that are new. New technologies, new sites that could range from say unbounce. It's just unbounce.com for quickly designing landing pages for testing Things, different offers, etc. Tools like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer. Those are both two competitors who allow you to do very fast split testing of various different things. I used Visual Website Optimizer for all of my most recent email capture testing. Then you have things like Kickstarter. So if you look at the Shopify Build a Business competitions and you can see a bunch of them just by going to shopify.com Tim you'll notice that many of the winners used Kickstarter to fundraise but also acquire customers very, very cheaply. And I would give examples of people who've used Kickstarter for instance, as opposed to traditional financing or bootstrapping. There are then sites like VHX. I think it might just be VHX TV. If it's not that, it's VHX.net for selling video content directly to fans, or would be fans. And what I've realized since the four Hour Workweek came out is that there are many use cases and implementations I couldn't have predicted. And that ranges from super bowl actors, I kid you not, who have used the four Hour Workweek to completely turn the rules of acting upside down, to lawyers, to hedge fund managers, to nonprofits, to families of five who are traveling around the world making more than I could ever imagine. They're really, really incredible. So yes, the tools do change with time. It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure out what those new tools are. I shall probably do an updated version, a 10th anniversary edition, believe it or Jesus. Oh man, getting old. And the other thing is, I'm considering doing an entire book of case studies. Basically a choose your own adventure guide to real world examples of people doing amazing things after reading the Four Hour Workweek. If you have a fun story to tell, if you have a company you've built, a muse you've built and you would like me to consider it for the book, please go to fourhourworkweek.com success okay, so fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out success. There's a form you can submit stuff. I don't know exactly what the timeline is on this, but it's very likely that I'm going to do a book. So bonus points to people who submit soon. Now, as a second side note, I would just say the four Hour Work Week is really about timeless principles. It's not about the shiniest latest gadget or testing mechanism. It is about first principles. And 99% of it is the same today as it was in 2007 when it was originally written. As it would have been, say, close to the birth of Christ with Seneca and the Stoics in Roman times. The principles of effective behavior really do not change all that much. So there you have it. Alright, next question. What is the main communication technique that you use to network with people of higher status, especially before you had success? And unfortunately, unfortunately this gentleman's name was cut off by the printer. I apologize for that. The Answer is volunteering and writing. So when I first moved to Silicon Valley, I volunteered with a group called the Silicon Valley association of startup entrepreneurs. Svase.org and volunteered. And it's amazing to me how many people who volunteer do a shitty job because they're not getting paid. And that is not how you have good opportunities presented to you. I arrived here, didn't know Seoul. I was driving a hand me down minivan that the seats had been stolen out of at least the back seats. It was really ridiculous and embarrassing. But that is to say I was starting from ground zero just like everybody does. And I volunteered. I worked at the front desk, I did way more than I was asked to do and as a result I was given more responsibility, I was viewed as more responsible and therefore became more important to the organization. And over time, and this didn't take a very long time at all, they did weekly events practically over the span of two or three months. Got to the point where I was able to volunteer to run an entire major event. And what that meant was I was able to reach out. I was able to decide on the subject matter for a panel and invite all of the people I dreamed of meeting. So that included everyone from Jack Canfield, co creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, who of course later became very influential and helped me to find my book agent who then sold the four Hour Workweek. And I'm still in touch with Jack after all these years to Ed Byrd, Mr. Creatine. He helped to develop Creatine, the creator of the Pet Rock, the founder of Clif Bar, who wasn't able to come, I think for health reasons, and sent someone in his place, Trip Hawkins, co founder of Electronic Arts and I was the point person. I got to communicate with all of these people and I am still in touch with many of them. Alright, so volunteering is a lateral move that can allow you to really get in touch with people way above your pay grade. And the other is writing. So if you're a good writer, you can do interviews for respectable publications and use that as a foot in the door to have contact with people who you aspire to get to know or emulate in some fashion. Don't ask them for a favorite right after interviewing them or something like that. Develop a real human relationship with them and take your time. Play the long game. That is advice I would give you, Gary Vaynerchuk would give you. Many others would. Don't try to hump their leg on the first date. Okay, next question. And I might not make it to 10. But I'll make it to as many as I can before I have to grab an Uber and scoot out the door. All right, next question. This is Ryan Fisk and the question is roughly what technique do you use to focus on one idea long enough to bring it to fruition? Or if you prefer, what techniques do you use to avoid distraction while working on an idea? Really, you know, it comes down to a handful of things and I could tell you here is a tactic again I want to prefer. I want to focus on principles whenever possible because they're flexible and adaptable and they don't change. The latest techniques, websites, et cetera, they're constantly shifting and it's a war of attrition against yourself. It's very fatiguing. But there are certain approaches, like the Pomodoro technique where you focus for say 45 minutes or I like to do it for even shorter, like 22 or 23 minutes, then take a five minute break. So it's a 20 some odd minute sprint with a five minute break. I like to use that. I could also point to morning rituals. I think that really specking out the first 60 minutes of your day and basically having so that it is scripted, someone else could take your morning routine and execute it like an actor who's winning an Oscar, imitating you to a T. You should not burn any calories making decisions about what you're gonna have for breakfast, about what you're gonna do 10, 15 minutes after you wake up. It should be scripted to optimize your mental state for the rest of the day and you want to conserve your decision making. So the five Minute Journal, this is actually a muse. It was created by a few folks who read the Four Hour Workweek. But the five Minute Journal, it's a hardcover book and you do a few types of journaling first thing in the morning for five minutes or less, identifying your priorities, what you're grateful for, a handful of other things. It's very, very fast and that helps to re clarify your priority, not multiple priorities, ideally for the day. And last but not least, I think this is the most important thing. Why do people get distracted? Why do they jump from project to project to project and quit thing after thing after thing after thing? I think it's because primarily they try to be realistic. And I talk about this in the four Hour Workweek, but they aim for base hits. So let's say they're making $50,000 a year. They're like, alright, I'm going to aim to make $60,000 a year and you're not going to move mountains for that type of incremental change. But if the goal instead is, and it's ideally not totally financial, but is to create a company that makes again, I'm just using numbers because it's easy, $1 million a year, it's hard to fail completely. And that's something I think it's Larry Page says, when you aim high enough, it's hard to fail completely. And you need a goal that will keep you enthusiastic and excited through all of the trials and tribulations and obstacles that pop up. And whether your goal is small or your goal is huge, you will face obstacles and if your dream is uninspiring, you will quit. And I think primarily that is the cause that I would point to for people repeatedly quitting things, their things aren't interesting enough. So there's a great book called the Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz was recommended to me by one of the top product inventors in the United States. He's made millions of dollars. That book was recommended to him by Fortune 500 CEOs. Grab the magic of Thinking Big. Read it and choose sexy, exciting goals or you will quit forever. Alright, next question. Regardless of industry, what is a trend you see developing that you think most people are missing? I'll try to keep this short. This is From Malcolm in D.C. the trend that I think a lot of people miss. And this is speculation on my part, but I think it's informed speculation is the contraction and contamination of cycles. What does that mean? Well, if we look at even the stock market, I think that what we will see and there are inevitable short and long term cycles, whether it be with energy and therefore influencing commodity trading or equity cycles of various types. And you could talk to all sorts of people who would get into Fibonacci sequences and so on and so forth. But I think that the impact of social media and instantaneous dissemination and in a way sort of viral passing of information is underestimated for its impact on contracting cycles. So if you have say a historically seven year cycle, because both exuberant irrational optimism euphoria can spread around the world at sort of the snap of the fingers for some crazy dog video. It's also true with misinformation or information related to say stocks, that ipo, whether it's Alibaba or anything else. Right. And I'm not saying Alibaba is overpriced. Actually I hold Alibaba. But I think that those seven year cycles could become five or even three year cycles or less. And similarly, it could turn out that the recovery periods are shorter. Now there are many, many, many factors that go into this, but I think that there are people out there, macro hedge fund managers and so on, who are really good at considering many, many, many, many different factors that contribute to shifts in the markets. But one that is I think understudied and under valued is the contraction, the, the acceleration of the ups and downs due to social media and other technologies of that type. And when I say the contamination of the cycles, I mean that it is if things were interrelated before and there were unintended consequences of events, right? Whether it's someone, let's say a terrorist blowing up an oil field in Nigeria or quantitative easing or sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the impact of those events that might seem removed from your life, your day to day life is I think going to be. I think the world increasingly represents a house of cards. And previously you could have pulled out one of those cards and the entire thing would have held together. But again, because of the contamination of these cycles and how sort of pervasive and promiscuous information is, I think that that is increasingly less so. Okay, long enough. Next one. What is the one thing you have to absolutely do every day, no matter what your schedule is? This is Vic Dulot, Toronto, Canada. A couple things. Meditate in the morning. Try to do that as soon as I wake up or I'm not going to do it. Transcendental meditation is what I use. But you. But you could check out Guided meditations by a woman named Tara Brach. I think that's how you say her last name. So it's Tara B R A C H And my interview that I did with Maria Popova or Popova Brain Pickings goes into this. If you want to hear more about that you could. But guided meditation is a good place to start. And then at the end of the night and I try to bookend my day with activities in the beginning and at the end. So in the beginning it's to sort of set the state for the rest of the day. A calm efficiency and effectiveness. And at the end it's to sort of wind down and de stress and decompress from the day. So I tend to do very hot baths with Epsom salts. And I'll read something oftentimes in the bath that is not nonfiction. So I'm actually reading, I think it's Naomi Shehab Nye N Y E Poetry. And I am not a poetry reader, but I am reading this specifically to shut down my problem solving mechanism in my head so that I don't have insomnia. All right, here we go. Next question. This is Ronald Yao from New York City. What routines or hacks do you perform to be in a state of flow? All right, this is a good question. Now I will say I've thought about this a lot recently and I don't really like the phrase state of flow or the term flow. I think it's very overused right now and as a result, under defined, it's lost a lot of meaning. So I would like to change the phrasing of the question to what routines or hacks do you perform to achieve effortless output? So flow to me means effortless output. Whether it's when you're drawing and suddenly before you, this amazing piece of art is created that seemingly comes from outside of you. It is an effortless output or in writing or in negotiating flawlessly, effortless output. All right, I'll come back to routine. The first 60 minutes of your day should be robotic, it should be slow, it should be unrushed, and it should be scripted, alright? So decide what the sequence of events is. If you had to give someone a word document to imitate your day perfectly, the first 60 minutes, what would it look like? And there are other things that contribute biochemically. For instance, intravenous glutathione or even liposomal glutathione. For me, it kind of lights me up a little bit. And there are different types of tea, like Yerba Mate with three different stimulants or so with different pharmacokinetic profiles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The last thing, which is not the last in importance is exercise. Alright? So very simply and the answer, this is also the answer to either Julio or Julio from the Netherlands, who asked, how do you kick yourself in the butt out of a lazy, half depressive mindset into a productive and positive mindset? And exercise, exercise, exercise. The brain is an organ, all right? So don't separate mind and body if you want to improve your mental performance, including neurogenesis and increasing brain drive, neurotrophic factor, and all of these very physical, biochemical or even physiological changes. Exercise. So jump on a rower or a bike. It can be a stationary bike for 10 to 20 minutes, that's plenty. When I'm in a funk, one of the first things I'll do is jump into my garage. I have a Concept 2 rower, and I'll jump onto it and I'll. I will literally row for only 500 meters it's nothing. But it is enough to provide me with an injection of neurotransmitters and also vasodilation and large muscle groups like the legs. It's enough to click me out of that funk. Alright, so that is also an important part of flow. I'm experimenting with motion, repetitive motion that is lateral. So whether that's skiing or surfing, something that gives me lateral awareness. And this is true. Steven Kotler's talked about this in the Rise of Superman in his experience with surfing very similarly, which contributed to his recovery from Lyme disease, which I'm very interested in. Okay, so let's keep going. The next one is, if you ever get mentally overwhelmed by things you want to do, how do you get to say, okay, this year I want to concentrate on X. This month I want to focus on. Yeah, without feeling you're missing out on something else. Okay, this is a good question. This is from Stefano in Italy. The uk. So, all right, how do you choose something to do and focus on it without feeling you're missing out on something else? I think the easiest way to address this is to recognize that you are missing out on something else. Always when you make a decision. In fact, if you look at the, the etymology, I always mix this up. Entomology, I think, is insects. Etymology. If you look at the etymology of the word decision, it's related to incision. Decision is to cut away. You're removing other options. And that's not a bad thing. And I think if. Think it was the Heath brothers who wrote Made to Stick, who wrote in one of their more recent books. It's not about thinking outside of the box. You want to look for the right box, the right set of constraints that will facilitate you achieving your different objectives. The point being, there's always an opportunity cost. You choose to do anything, there are other things you are therefore not simultaneously doing okay. And you have to be okay with that. You should be okay with that because that's reality. Until you learn how to clone yourself and teleport and so on, that's the case. So it's okay, you don't have to do everything and you can do anything. But if you, you want to choose the lead domino, this is how I choose. This is how I think of my projects. So for instance, if I can work on a television show, executive producing a television show, or which I did, which was a very difficult process, or I can focus on a book, or I can focus on, say, collecting emails, or I can focus on writing, continually writing blog posts, which do return dividends, or I can focus on investing in startups. Which of those will facilitate all of the others? So if each of those by themselves takes 10 units of energy and a year of time, I'm just making that up. But 10 units of energy and a year of time, which one can I choose as the lead domino so that when I knock it over, all of the other ones take less energy and less time? Does that make sense? And for me, that was television. I focused on television and, and co produced and hosted this show called the Tim Ferriss Experiment. Many of you know that the division that produced that at Turner Broadcasting got shut down. So it's sitting on a shelf. So here's the point. I chose to go after that lead domino and it didn't work out. As of now, I'm working on solving that problem. But do I regret having made that decision? No. And this is another important thing, is that you shouldn't judge your success based on outcomes by themselves, because you can, for instance, go into the stock market, behave very, very badly and dangerously, and have a fluke outcome that's really good. And you don't want to reward that. You don't want to think that you're suddenly a stock market genius because you got lucky. You want to focus on good process, whether or not you have good outcomes or bad outcomes, because there are things outside of your control. So for me, I don't regret having done the tv, even though I spent a year, year and a half, almost exclusively on it. And there were a lot of opportunity costs that cost me millions of dollars not to focus on other things. And I don't regret it because it was the right lead domino. Another way to think about it is which of these problems are really problems. In other words, if you're sitting in a car, metaphorically, and you have a flat tire or a rapidly deflating tire, let's pretend it's the winter. The defroster doesn't work. So the windshield is fogging up and you have a broken driver side mirror. Okay, what should you focus on? If you're very constrained with time, you're in a rush, you don't have a lot of resources, you're by yourself. What should you focus on? Well, what I would say is, do you need to fix the mirror? Do you need to fix the defroster? Do you need to fix the flat tire? Can you. Can you address the. Because keep in mind the problem isn't that the defroster is broken. The problem is that the windshield is fogging up. So, yes, you can fix that. You can open up the windows, for instance. Broken mirror on the left, is that the problem? No. Spotting other cars and so on behind you is the goal. Can you achieve that another way? Sure. You can tweak the remaining mirrors in the car to pull that off. Or you can do the. Do the grandparent thing, like look behind yourself and glance up the window. You can do that. Alright, so that's a solvable problem. The most terminal problem, if not addressed, is the flat tire. So that's where you should focus your time. All right, next one. What elements from the four Hour Body are still important to your daily regimen? What does your workout currently look like? Alright, so right now I'm recovering from Lyme disease. I have ligament tears in my elbows, my hips, my knees. It's fucking terrible. But there are a few things I'm focusing on repopulating my microbiome and I talk about this in the 4 hour body quite extensively. And that means I'm avoiding things like Splenda that disrupt gut bacteria, for instance, and artificial sweeteners. I am also doing micronutrient testing as outlined in the Four Hour Body. So I've identified that I have very low vitamin D, which can be thought of as a hormone in a lot of ways. I have low levels of a few B vitamins. So I'm consuming N acetylcysteine with L methylfolate because I'm genetically predisposed to being a bad methylator. I don't have time right now to go into what that means. And I'm consuming the fermented cod liver and grass fed butter pills that I recommend in the four Hour Body as well. So there's really nothing that comes to mind that I would change necessarily in the four Hour Body other than putting in case studies for every chapter because readers have outperformed me and outdone me in every single chapter in the book. It's been awesome because my goal is to create readers who are better than I am at everything I discuss. Otherwise, what's the point? You're just making the world worse over time. So I'm trying to create students who surpass their teacher as quickly as possible. I want to make myself obsolete as quickly as possible, which is why I don't like the term guru when the media uses that applied to me because barf, last thing I want is people to be dependent on me. That would be the antithesis of what I'm going for. So there are the supplements. As for exercise, I'm focusing on mobility Primarily because I cannot focus on a high degree of strength training with heavy weights, for instance, or even submaximal weights because my elbows are so painful at the moment and I have such sort of tendinopathy and neuropathy that I can't really bend my arms. I can't experience flexion at the elbow while holding onto weights. It sucks really badly. But doing swimming, calisthenics, you can think of yoga without the all the kind of mystical woo woo stuff and breathing exercises while I'm doing these calisthenics, which tend to focus on thoracic spine mobility and hips. So squatting motions. Hip hinges without a kettlebell though. So I'm just doing sort of deadlifting, like hip hinging. Okay, that's that. And then the last question that I'm going to have time to answer is how do you balance your desire to challenge and improve yourself with enjoying, let's see, indulgences provided by a successful life? I think that's it. And I apologize, the name got cut off on this one as well. You know, for me it's pretty simple. I've realized that money is a currency and you can use it as wampum to trade for possessions or experiences. And all things equal, it's better to have more money than less, of course. But I have a very low burn rate in my life and I think that's correlated to a high degree of control over my time. When you have more control over your time, you don't have to compete with the Joneses, with your friends who are investment bankers or management consultants to buy the nice car, because with time you can produce experiences that have the benefit of allowing you to learn things, but that also provide you a huge advantage over possessions, and that is the anticipation of experiences. For instance, I'm taking my entire family on an international trip for Christmas and the anticipation has made this gift incredibly valuable and exciting in months preceding the actual delivery of said experience. Right. So I've realized since I don't have to compete in say, my off hours on the weekend to show my friends my new toys because I'm otherwise consumed with 80 hour work weeks doing something I dislike. And as a result I still drive a used Golf Volkswagen Golf that I bought in 2004 and the antenna was ripped off by a homeless guy and I don't care because I don't listen to the radio much anyway and whatever. And that's not to say that I'm holier than thou ascetic. I do enjoy certain things, so I don't have a ton of expensive habits. But for instance, I love Japan. I'm a Japanophile. I've spent a ton of time there. So I have Japanese armor in my house. I have a couple of Japanese saddles from the 1800s or even perhaps earlier 1700s probably that are worth more than my car because I have a history with something called Yabusame Japanese Horseback Archery. And if you if you search my name and Yabusame Y a B u S a M e you can see video of me learning to do Japanese Horseback archery. It is really dangerous and insane. I don't recommend it. So luxury to me is not owning a lot of stuff. Luxury to me is feeling unrushed. It is designing a life that allows you to do what you want with high leverage with many options. Feeling unrushed. So I will end on that. I'm going to go head to the movie. Speaking of being unrushed, do you have to kind of shimmy or I'm going to get chastity by my friends. So I'll let you get going. Let me know what you think of this format. If you like these questions. Me answering your questions. If you enjoyed this, please let me know and I'll do more of it on Twitter Ferriss T F E R R I S S or let me know on the blog. And thank you so much for listening.