The One With Tim Ferriss - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #13

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Hey everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. What's up? What's up?

We got a very special guest tonight, don't we?

Yes, we do. We do. We have a very, very special guest. A person that you know is one of the most incredible writers in the world in my opinion and just a very smart, brilliant dude. And he's also a friend of mine and yours, Dean. So we can goof around here, but his name is Mr. Tim Ferriss, the best selling author of two fantastic books.

I was going to say time, don't.

Sell them short there.

Two time New York Times bestseller and everything else.

Bestseller.

Mr. Tim Ferriss, who's somewhere in some hotel on a cell phone. Hopefully going to sound really high quality.

For all of us.

Tim, first off, thanks for joining us.

And where are you?

What are you doing?

I am outside in Palm Springs on my iPhone. And yes, you heard me correctly, Joe. I have actually purchased my first iPhone about 10 days ago. My first smartphone alert the media compared to my Flintstones clamshell phone that I had prior to this. It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you, thank you.

And by the way, you wrote the four Hour Workweek and your latest book, the Four Hour Body, which are both fantastic. We'll talk about those a little bit. But we're going to really ask you about marketing but going to your phone, your smartphone, I remember having a conversation with you, I don't know, not too long ago about them actually being called dumb phones because of the way that they control most people's lives. And I think one of your methodologies for not just getting invaded by, I don't know, maybe technology, emails or whatever was to purposely not have a smartphone. Was that your reason for it or what?

That was one of several reasons. Because I didn't feel like I had the discipline, quite frankly, and the self control at that point. If I had email in my pocket to not check it constantly, I realized a few things. Not to dwell on this subject, but with the iPhone, number one, it's actually not terribly convenient to type on the iPhone, which is almost self correcting in a way because it's such a pain in the ass that I want to minimize the amount of typing I do. Second is I have not set email up on the iPhone and I've also just limited the number of apps that I've downloaded and the type of apps that I've downloaded. So so far it's Actually been much more helpful than harmful. And it is on Verizon also, which to my knowledge does a very poor job of transmitting calls overseas. So that was another concern of mine. I didn't want to have an international phone when I traveled. And I just came back from four weeks in Columbia, Panama and Jordan where I had no computer, no phone and no calendar, which was fantastic. But that's my piece on my new adoption of smartphone. Wow.

Is that an exclusive? Is that a world premiere announcement?

That is a world exclusive. Absolutely.

You heard it here first@ilovemarketing.com okay, so let me say to everyone listening, if you're listening from itunes, you can actually get the complete transcripts of this conversation on ilovemarketing.com and I've done a really great interview with Tim on the Four Hour Body for Genius Network and I'm going to post a link for free for people to listen to my interview with Tim on his book the Four Hour Body about fitness and female orgasms and all kinds of crazy stuff. You can also buy that interview on Amazon if you want the money to go to the Make a Wish foundation because we do that also if you want to make a donation. So just wanted to give everyone that. And then Tim, let's talk about what I love marketing is all about, which is marketing. What's your definition of marketing? What's the Tim Ferriss? What do you think of when you hear the word marketing?

I think marketing is very frequently confused with selling. I think it's also confused with pr. And marketing to me is very simple. It is identifying and understanding a group of people and matching a product or service to those people. And that product or service doesn't need to be a paid product or service. It could be a book, it could be a blog post, it could be a message, it could be propaganda, it could be a political viewpoint, it could be a car, it could be an iPhone app, it could be any number of things. But ultimately it is identifying and understanding a group of people well enough so that you can match what they need to them. And I think the article that most reflects how I feel about marketing is one called 1000 Truth Fans, which is written by Kevin Kelly, who is founding editor of Wired magazine. And the point he makes is that if you are able to identify and reach your thousand true fans, the thousand people who are most likely to be your early evangelists, early adopters and proselytizers, then your marketing job is done and you can focus on other things like improving your product. I think that's Very true. Certainly in a digital age, there's never been a time when that has been more true. So that would be my definition of marketing. I like it. Yeah. Finding the right people and then fitting the right product would be a simple way to put that. Yeah.

You know, and it is very interesting because it's a lot of what Joe and I have been talking about on the first several episodes of I Love Marketing is talking about, you know, finding the need that your audience has, understanding.

It more than they do.

We've been talking about the Robert Collier letter book and he phrases it that you want to enter the content conversation that's already going on in your prospect's mind. And that's kind of what you're just saying.

Right.

Understanding what people want and being able to match either your service or somebody.

Else'S service to them. Yeah. And understanding what people need also. And I think there's often a big difference between what people want and what people need. And I'll give you a very, very clear example of that related to the four Hour Body. I observed very early on that in terms of behavioral change, getting people to make substantial changes in diet, exercise, medication, whatever it might be that they did not respond to health. It was too long term, it was too far off, it was too nebulous. So I appealed instead to vanity and performance, oftentimes looking at sex, et cetera, and to optimize something like sex, it would naturally lead to take this blood test to identify deficiencies of these various types. And in the process the side effect was health. So I gave them what they needed in terms of health improvement. But I did it via what they wanted and that's what I sold them, which was the appearance and performance. So I think that you need to understand both of those two things. And they're sometimes overlapping and sometimes completely non overlapping.

Well, if you had my favorite banner of the year was Eat like Santa, look like Jesus.

That was the top performer of the banners that we tested. That's brilliant though. That sums it right up.

Let me ask you about that though, because first off, a couple things based on what you said. I love to always think of the term sell people what they want, give them what they need. And a lot of times it's one of the, I guess in a lot of ways the Flintstones vitamin, probably not maybe the best vitamin in the world, but the concept of make it taste sweet so that kids will eat it, you know, give them what they want, you know, which is something that tastes good, but you know, hopefully what's in it is what they need, blah, blah, blah. Well, in the same way, with information or leading people into things, I mean, we've had to figure out how to do that. I mean, after all, I've taught, you know, carpet and upholstery cleaners how to market a service that nobody wants to buy. And Dean, you know, does it with real estate. So in a lot of ways, do you believe that as it relates to health and fitness, that people really, the things that they need the most are the hardest for them to sell or to accept. And that's why marketing and great copy and these roundabout ways to actually get people to pay attention is so important.

Or how do you think about that? I think that marketing. So the marketing piece is identifying the group. I think that the second phase is then identifying the need and the want. Then the third phase is then crafting the message to match those three effectively. And the crafting of the message, I consider the selling portion to differentiate it from the marketing but equally important skills. Of course, it does you no good to know exactly what someone needs and then to fumble over your words and never get anywhere when it comes time to verbalize it. I think that good selling, good copywriting, let's say, deconstructs a problem effectively. So to be a very good copywriter, you have to understand behavioral psychology. What that means is, if someone says, I want to be successful, that is a terrible goal. It is undefined. There's no timeline. There is no clear next step. How will you know when that has been realized? You won't, because it's so poorly defined and in the copywriter's head, they will use questions or very well defined characteristics, prerequisites, perhaps of success in the copy itself, to then sell whatever product or service will provide what that person needs. I mean, there are certainly unethical marketers who will sell crap that doesn't do anything for anybody. But assuming that we're dealing with ethical people. So I think that really understanding what motivates people and what results in change in action is understanding human nature, behavioral psychology, and that you need to translate that to the written word or whatever medium you choose. Yeah.

You know, let me.

First off, great.

And I want to ask you about. You just said ethical marketing, because I just want to get your perspective. This may seem like an aside, but I think it's a really important thing. Like how would you define ethical marketing versus unethical? Let me set this up as an example. Whenever you become very famous and you really have contrarian thoughts, or you just put Any sort of how to information.

Out into the world.

You're clearly going to attract, I think a lot of either envious, jealous, crazy people that start attacking you. And you've got this gigantic new book called the Four Hour Body. I mean, it's over 500 pages. It's for the price point. I can't imagine where anyone could compile that level of information, even if they don't agree with everything in it. I mean, it's a hell of a deal. I mean, you got this. It's some of the best money someone could ever spend on some of the most cutting edge information on whatever vanity, performance, exercise, health, fitness, orgasm, you name it. And you still have people that will be like, oh, all he's trying to do is sell a book. He's just a marketer.

I mean.

How do you respond to that when you read those sorts of things?

To those I don't respond if someone has a legitimate correction or criticism, meaning that from my perspective, people can dislike you and they will, regardless of what you do, if you have enough exposure, but they shouldn't misunderstand you. So your message should be clear and it should be honest. And that's perfectly fine. If someone misunderstands me, however, if they say, hey, you said this, but then later in the book you said this, and the two seem to conflict that I need to address and I will address. But for the people who start their one star Amazon review with I haven't read the book, but I don't spend too much time worrying about those people. Coming back to the original question of what's ethical and what isn't, I think that ethical is identifying rather than manufacturing a need and then providing a solution as opposed to an expensive product that generates revenue solely for the marketer. And there's an anecdote that I think illustrates what would be unethical. And this is an anecdote related to a very famous infomercial person. All of you would know the name. I'm not going to give his name, but he told a story in a pitch meeting at one point for a new product. And he said it was a long story about how this can of tuna fish was sold from one person to the next for $1. And this story started to develop about this tuna fish and how amazing it was and how rare it was and how the other cans had been sold and then it was sold for $5 and then 20 and all the way up until it was $500 a can. And finally somebody says to himself, my God, I need to eat this tuna fish, it must be amazing. And he opens it and it's completely spoiled and rotten. And the moral of the story from the standpoint of this infomercial marketer was the tuna fish isn't for eating, it's for selling. Totally. Sadly, there are a lot of unethical marketers out there and there are a lot of unethical people. It's not the domain of marketers alone, certainly, but. And I think that identifying a legitimate need and satisfying that need with a product that delivers as promised is ethical. And anything that deviates far from that, or even only a few degrees from that is unethical.

Yeah, totally. And you know my thoughts on it too, because I have to throw in my 2 cents on this is whenever. If you're in the information education, how to sort of business, I think as long as what you're putting out into the world gives people at a bare minimum, a reasonable to an absolute guaranteed possibility of success. If they follow your advice, use your product, use your service, then you're operating in an ethical manner. And that's kind of where a lot of the how. For instance, with carpet cleaners as an example. This may sound weird, but I think it applies to every part of business. If I sell a marketing course to a carpet and upholstery cleaner, be it a seminar, DVDs, online, whatever, and just templates here, use this sales letter, use this offer and they don't use it, they'll be like, well this marketing stuff doesn't work. But these same sort of individuals would not go to their Ford or Chevy dealer and say I bought a van to carry my carpet cleaning equipment around and I don't have any business and it's your guys fault. They don't blame the equipment manufacturer, but they always blame the how to person. And it's kind of like, well, I join a gym, I go into the gym, I look at the equipment, I.

Never lift the weights.

But gyms don't work, they just don't work. But I see a lot of information purchasers tending to have this opinion of the efficacy of something when they haven't even tried it. And that's the part that always frustrates those of us that are in the advice giving business. You know.

I think, I mean this is, it's similar almost acting as a physician, you can prescribe medication, but if they don't take the pills and then they call you back and say the prescription didn't work, it wasn't an issue with the prescription, it was an issue with following the prescription, which just to perhaps point out another perspective on that, which is why I think it's extremely important for people who deliver any type of how to content to realize that the perfect program, the perfect solution, is the best solution that will have the highest compliance rate. And for that reason, it's exceptionally important for people to, I believe, to test their prescriptions on as large a data set of people as possible. That could only be 10. It would preferably be 100 or 1000 or what have you to ensure that the abandonment rate is as low as possible. On the other hand, just to play devil's advocate, I remember taking a writing class with a Pulitzer Prize winner named John McPhee, who's a staff writer at the New Yorker, and we were talking about background knowledge necessary to understand a given story. So if you write a piece of about, let's say, a sailing trip, how much explanation do you provide for someone who has never been sailing? You go into great detail to explain what every single piece of equipment does, et cetera. And the question that he raised was, does it matter if there are people who don't get this? And I've come to the conclusion that not always. It's perfectly fine. And this is something I do in my books. I'll throw in inside jokes that only five people on the planet are going to get. It doesn't always matter if a percentage of your readers don't get a piece, provided that it's not a critical ingredient in the prescription that you're providing. Right, Right.

Yeah. Well, also, I mean, in today's day and age of massive amounts of data available, thrown at people, conflicting things. I mean, I remember this overhead I used to use. And when I say overhead, literally on an overhead projector that it says get through with an offer that is so interruptive that it keeps on interrupting until action is taken because there's so much clutter that is out there. I guess one of the tools of your trade, and the tools of the trade of any great marketer is words. It is copy. And you mentioned copywriting earlier and I wanted to get your perspective. And then I'll shut the hell up and let Dean ask some questions here. Your perspective on copy, because you are not just a good writer, you are a fantastic writer and you communicate very well. And people always talk about how great your books are and how great your blog is and you are just a wordsmith, but you learned how to do it. And we talked in the very beginning of I love marketing, we talked about the absolute importance of words of copy, be it video, be it audio or be it written. And I wanted to have you talk about that because you are one of the best writers of the last decade in terms of best selling books and communication.

Well, that's very kind of you, first of all, to say. And what I'd like to emphasize to anyone out there who's a copywriter, an editor, an aspiring writer, or aspiring to be a better communicator for that matter, that it is a learned skill. And in my case, very early on I read all the Dan Kennedy books, I read the John Caples books, I read scientific advertising, Claude Hopkins, if I'm not mistaken, and really made a study of wordsmithing in this particular case for the purposes of selling product, but continued to train myself as a writer. And what you find is that writing practice and having someone to correct your writing and pull out the superfluous words, the unnecessary filler, the unnecessary redundancy and repetition, et cetera, improves your thinking. And that words are a reflection of thinking. And if you can elicit a certain set of words or questions in a prospect's mind, that is as close to thought control as you will probably ever come. And it is your responsibility therefore, to use it for good as opposed to evil. Certainly it can be used for evil. And I think that Goebbels, who is the propaganda minister for the regime, would be a very good example of that. Exceptional wordsmith, exceptional communicator, but he used it for extremely malevolent purposes. And that it is exceptionally valuable, at the very least to take a writing course. It does not need to be a copywriting course. My suggestion would be to find the best teacher you can find, regardless of genre of writing, and if possible, take a seminar or hire them to correct your writing and they will give you assignments. It doesn't matter if it's fiction, it doesn't matter if it's journalism or investigative journalism. To give you an example, when I was doing my undergraduate work in school, took this class with John McPhee and within the span of about four weeks, all of my grades in every other class jumped. And it was because of the more precise thinking that was produced from this writing class. It was extremely clear to see. So I really view few things as more important than practicing writing. No matter how painful it is for you, no matter how bad you may believe yourself to be, it is one of the few ways to capture thought and edit and improve your thought available to anyone. So I'm a huge believer. And to that end, beyond the copywriting Books. There is a book called. There are two books, actually I'd recommend. One is called On Writing well and it's by Zinser. I think it's Z I N S S N E R. Something along those lines. They just published a 25th anniversary edition. Fantastic book on writing and therefore saw it, as well as a book called Bird by Bird, which I think for anyone in a creative, in any type of creative endeavor, and certainly I think good marketing is within that umbrella, covers a lot of the emotional psychological challenges that such people go through. And Bird by Bird is written by Anne lamotte, who is a fantastic writer and has saved a number of my friends and me from imminent nervous breakdowns when finishing manuscripts. I've given it to two friends and both of their books have gone on to become New York Times bestsellers. Not to say it was responsible, but their books were very close to being abandoned effectively, as was my first book, certainly because of the pressure and ambiguity of deadline and so forth and so on. So those would be two recommendations. Yeah.

In the book by On Writing well, I just pulled it up here and it is by Zinser. Z I N S S E R William Zinn. SER yeah. And God, you got to love technology.

I have.

On Writing well, because you recommended me to that before. But Bird by Bird I never had. And I just ordered it.

I never heard of that.

How fancy is fascinating though, Tim, that you're saying your study of all the great marketing writers and I think that really helps in being able to shift somebody's mind. And I don't think it's an accident that I think it's. James Patterson was a copywriter before becoming a writer.

He's the guy that's written all the like, you know, bazillions of copies. Yeah, I mean, that's the guy. Yeah, that's. Yeah, he's the magic maker.

And do you know that that's true that he was in. He was a copywriter.

I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah. So that. But I could provide a similar parallel, which is. And perhaps some people listening to this may not realize, but I was a direct response. I was a director. I was the CEO of a direct founder and CEO of direct response based company that sold sports nutrition products for quite a few years and have spent millions of dollars on direct response. It started with that type of testing. I do think there are a few suggestions I might make. In those early days, what I found very useful, in many cases more useful than reading the how to books on copywriting was I created what is referred to sometimes as a swipe file. And every time I bought something and that purchase was elicited by an advertisement, if it was print or if it were radio, if it were television, I would make a copy and put it into this swipe file, this collection of ads that caused me to buy or to call for more information or to sign up as lead gen or whatever it might have been. And then I would practice and I wouldn't necessarily use these ads, and you certainly don't want to violate anyone's copyright and so forth. I would practice mimicking these ads. And then I might mimic, let's say three or four ads. And this is just drafts on a piece of paper for my own print advertising in this particular case. And I did a lot of big print, all the way up to big ads in USA Today and so forth. And then I would try to combine my favorite elements of those ads into one ad that was original to me, and I would use that. So I do think finding the examples that inspire you, whether that's inspiring you to call a phone number, go to a website, place a purchase, or to change your behavior to go somewhere else, what are the words that persuade you? And keep a file of these things, it's really valuable. And it's also fun to look back at the things that have influenced what persuaded you.

I have to echo what you just said about the swipe file because it's one of the first things I learned early on from Gary Halbert and Gary, when he used to, you know, Gary was a brilliant copywriter and me and Dean both studied. You know, Gary, that's what actually led to me pretty much being in this business. What led me to Dan Kennedy and which, by the way, we made an announcement on the last I Love Marketing podcast that Dan Kennedy, who's not spoken at one of my events in quite a few years, is actually speaking at our first ever I Love Marketing event in September, which is super cool.

Very cool. Yeah.

And he'll be a guest in probably a few weeks here on I Love Marketing. But Gary said he would have people come to him and say, I wish I could write world class copy like you. I wish I could do it. And Gary would say, you want to be a world class copywriter? You want to write ads like this? And people would be like, yeah, okay, here's some ads. He had a swipe file. Go ahead and write these word for word until it's just in your subconscious. And he literally, he would train people that way, handwrite them. He'd give them a sales letter. He'd give them an ad and he'd like write it. And by writing it and modeling it and looking at it. So I think every serious marketer, or even not so serious marketer should have a swipe file. I mean, I have a huge swipe file at my office and it's been worth millions.

It pays dividends to imitate. And also I would recommend, when possible, emulate people that you would like to be like. Also, there can be unintended consequences of modeling someone's thought process. You tend to, to some degree, become that person. So you have to be careful. It sounds weird, but it's very true. I certainly see that with employees surrounded by bosses. I mean, they take on the personalities of their leaders. And that person, that leader doesn't need to be present. They can be through the printed page, for example. What I would say, just to provide another examp, is that when I was writing the Four Hour Workweek, I wrote several chapters, four or five and then ended up throwing them away because I couldn't find my voice. And the way that I fixed that, I would go from this extremely pompous, like Princetonian ridiculous long word prose, which is horrible. Then I'd flip to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and do Three Stooges slapstick prose, which was equally bad. I was like, oh God, I could not solve the problem. I just couldn't take my personality as is and put it on the page. It didn't work. I wasn't able to do it. And the way that I got around that was by imitating writing I felt I admired, that I wanted to emulate on some level. That included Neil Strauss at the time. So portions of the game, and he's since become a very good friend. I included some travel writers, Pico Ier and a few others, Rolf Potts. And I practiced writing as close as I could to their voice. And what I found is that took my mind off of my own preoccupation, number one. But it also allowed me to find a certain degree of balance, meaning equilibrium and confidence in the flow of my writing. So I was less concerned about getting stuck with writer's block. I was just copying someone. So how intimidating is that? It wasn't. And as a result, I was able to jump that hurdle and ultimately find my own voice, which was really just a rediscovering of my own voice and feeling comfortable using that voice. And then the book came from there. So I hit the same problem and used my own version of a swipe file in the form of the books that had most influenced my thought process and my writing style to get me out of that rut.

Yeah, I like it, I like it. I mean, there's a huge lesson and I hope everyone really picked up on the importance of that. And just not like, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Because a lot of people, people will hear something like that. But truly, all the great copywriters and great marketers, they learn from the giants. You go out and you look at it and I've never considered junk mail ever. Junk mail. Before the Internet was ever created, my biggest marketing lessons came from promotions I would get all the time because they wouldn't keep sending it to you if someone wasn't giving them money because that costs money to put in the mail. And people, people think of junk mail as junk when in some cases it could be the best marketing lesson delivered to your doorstep for free that you can look at and say, huh, what's going on here? What are they saying? Why are people responding? That sort of thing.

Oh yeah, yeah. I used to buy products off of television, radio just to see how they would follow up, just to see how they shipped, to see which fulfillment centers they came from, to call back and see where I was routed to, to cancel and see if there was a cross sell or an upsell. The best I could have ever purchased.

I remember we used to do that same thing, you know, respond to all the direct response things that offered free reports or offered, you know, free books or free anything, like lead generation to see how people followed up with it, you know.

Yeah, it really pissed me off, Dean, because you were calling my office every.

Week.

Back before the Internet and I'd have to spend all this postage just to send you my promotions for you to blatantly rip off.

It was really uncool. Just a search replace and put Dean instead of Joe. Exactly. Brilliant. What a fantastic vault of free R and D. What I was going to say also is that I haven't stopped doing that in so much as I have a repository of copy that I like, Website design that I like. I happen to use Evernote to clip all of it off the web so I can look at it offline as well. Photographs of packaging. I also use Evernote to capture that. Full disclosure, I'm an advisor, but I used the product before I ever became an advisor. And that's now my swipe file. It's just a hell of a lot easier to organize than a big three ring binder. Right? Yep.

I like it, Dean. Talk about. I'd love to ask, and I'd like to get your perspective on this. Dean created in the real estate industry originally this model which applies to any business called before, during and After. What to do before the sale, what to do during the Sale, what to do after the Sale. I'd love to have you talk about your book. I mean, you got two gigantic best sellers and there's a lot of people in the fitness world that really, they're just pissed because they think they have the greatest thing in the world. And they're like, Tim Ferriss, he's got this number one selling book and most people think, I think it's amazing. You also have a lot of people that are just kicking themselves because they can't figure out what the hell you're doing. So there's stuff that you did before you launch a book, what you do during and what you do after. I'd like to get your perspective on it and with full disclosure, Dean came up with that model. So I want to give him credit because it's a great, simple way of looking at the stages of the business.

I would say there are a few things I don't. It's very common for people moving into any new area, whether that's real estate, whether that's writing, whether that's fitness and exercise, etc. They view their qualifications, background, lack of qualifications, predisposition, resume, whatever it might be, as a weakness. And, and I do think that not only can you position your weaknesses as strengths, but that in many cases your weaknesses are strengths. It's not a misrepresentation. So in my case, I knew that I wouldn't be able to and I never wanted to. I never had the desire and never thought it was necessary to compete with the other fitness and diet books out there. I wanted this book to be so completely different that it wouldn't even be compared to these other books. And to a large extent, I think that's. That's been accomplished extremely well. And to give you an example leading into the before. So in the before, I would view the before as the introduction to the book. Let's just look at it that way. In the introduction of the book, I say very clearly, I'm not an MD, I'm not a PhD, but there are a few ways you should look at that lack of qualification. Number one is I don't have an academic career nor a product line to protect. I do not have any set fixed opinion to sell to you. And at the same time, I'm a meticulous data cruncher with access due to the first book to many of the best doctors, scientists, athletes, coaches in the world. So I have better data, period. And ultimately, if anyone tells you you should do three reps of 12 or, or eat X number of grams of bananas or protein or whatever it might be, you need to ask them why that's the case. And in most answers they will not have good evidence. So I was able to point out my differences and be very frank about some of my real weaknesses perhaps. So I stated very clearly up front and I do think that this is extremely powerful in a world where people can fact check everything you say within milliseconds on Google. As I said, I'm not going to get everything right. I'm exceptionally confident in the how to, but the why, to the mechanisms, etc. No doubt, just as we laughed at people who made conclusions 50 years ago in various areas of science, I will make mistakes and I'll join in the laugh with you and then I will fix these errors and improve the book with your feedback. So I think that the framing is very, very important in terms of during the sale, if we want to talk, I think the marketing. So we talked about marketing the way I defined it, my most valuable readers, let's just call them my customers, are not the people who read one third of the book and then put it down. For someone to really endorse a book, the requisite steps are they read the book and this is a 600 page book. They don't have to read it all certainly, but they need to get through the entire thing, take action, show some type of result and then tell people about it. That's actually asking a lot of someone. It's really a lot to ask. And to get people through that meat of the book, I also broke it down into very concrete small steps and I reiterated those steps multiple times to make it as low resistance as possible. But I would say from a launch standpoint, I really focused on relationships over transactions and that's very cliched and a lot of people say it without meaning it. But if you look at the allies I had for this particular launch. Joe, how long have we known each other? Oh God, probably four or five years. Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the friends that I made in the process of learning about publishing and book launches and so forth for the four hour workweek, I'm still friends with those people. And I think there's a lesson to be drawn from that, which is it's one thing to seek out the people who can most help you. And it's quite something different to find the people who are the best at what they do, with whom you also share a lot of common DNA. Because the people in the latter category are going to be fun to spend time with, you will have a very high likelihood of becoming long term or lifelong friends with these people. And assuming that you also meet their ante and try to be the best that you can do and don't produce bullshit and then try to force it upon them, they will be willing to help if it makes sense. And it's not I scratch your back, you scratch mine, it's if it makes sense. And this comes back to the marketing. So I'll give you an example. I did quite a lot with Gizmodo, which is an enormous, enormous tech blog, for the launch of the four Hour Body. At first glance, the four Hour Body has nothing to do with Gizmodo at In reality, when I was writing the book, I thought to myself, what could I do that would be awesome for Brian, the editor at Gizmodo, to introduce to his readers? And it wasn't the sole determining factor in my content. But I said, all right, here's three or four things I could do. I'm equally excited about all of them. Which one would be awesome for him to unveil to his readers? I looked at implanting a continuous glucose monitor into my side to look at my blood sugar 24 7. That's perfect for his audience. And I thought about it extremely early on. And then when I spoke to Brian, this is true for everybody I spoke to, I said, look, I think this could be really cool for your audience, but absolutely no pressure at all. If you say no, I won't take it personally. And believe me, that's the case. Let me know what you think. And if there's anything that I can customize, if there's anything else I could provide, let me know. But if it's not a fit, I won't take it personally. And that was the vantage point from which I tried to set things up. But these are all now good friends of mine. They happen to be extremely good at what they do. So that was a bit of a rambling answer, but I think that the setup is not just for a launch. It's for a very good relationship with all of the constituent parts that constitute a good relationship. In any case, I think that if people spent more time going sort of an inch wide and five miles deep with 10 people, they would get much further in life and have A more pleasing life than trying to accumulate the largest Rolodex possible. So they can spam everybody one week before they have something drop, which is what almost everybody does.

And that's the perfect transition into the after unit of this, which would be the relationship that you build with the audience that you end up developing because of this. So I'd really like to hear your perspective on. Because we kind of introduced when we were talking to you earlier about the. We had Gary Vaynerchuk on last week and we talked about how he's got.

A very.

Hard to model approach to communicating with people with a daily video, which is 14 hour a day tweeting, and the one to one kind of relationship with that. And you've kind of built a great relationship with your audience, but not on that frequency of a basis. And I think I know that you made a conscious choice to.

Not have.

A blog that posted five times a.

Day and to have a blog that.

Posted once or twice a week. Maybe you can share a little bit about your perspective on that.

Absolutely. It was a very conscious decision. The first was, and this was not completely accidental, I knew that if I wrote a book called the Four Hour Workweek, it was an insurance plan of sorts against slipping back into my old behaviors. So right off the bat, if people are a fan of the philosophies and the writing, they should insist on some level that I follow my own advice. So I think that I bought myself a certain level of permission by doing that, first and foremost. Secondly, I think it's very helpful for people to at times take a step back and realize that Mark Twain was wiser than many would give him credit for. He said that. I'm paraphrasing. But whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. And I think that the most common or most highly recognized accepted path to doing just about anything is typically neither the most effective nor the most efficient, and to look for the outliers. So in terms of frequent communication, I haven't for some time seen Steve Jobs asking for feedback on his Facebook fan page or plying people on Twitter doing any of these things. It's not necessary for all people. And you need to do a very have a very clear inventory of your strengths and weaknesses and decide where that tool fits into your toolbox, if at all. But it's like a crayon versus watercolor versus marker versus something else. These are tools. In my particular case, what I promise my readers is that I will never give them half Assed material. I will never do a mediocre job of creating the best possible content and doing the most in depth research that I can. That is my promise to my readers. I don't promise that I'm going to babysit them. That's the last thing I want. And I've said that before. I, in fact, have said I do not want to be your guru because that implies that you're dependent on me for answers. And I am training you to be dependent on nothing but yourself. Therefore, think for yourself. And I give tough love in that respect. I mean, I don't pat people on the head and say everything's going to be alright if they're not following the rules. And some people get upset about that. But ultimately I think that the vast majority, and again, it doesn't matter how many people don't get it, it matters how many people do get it. So if you hit 90% of your audience, even if you whittle that down to the most loyal 1000, you will never have to worry about finances ever again. So stick to your principles. As an example, I said, if you can't provide me with two days of meal plans, exact meal plans, you can't show me your blood work, and you haven't done the diet for four weeks exactly as described. Do not put a post here saying, what am I doing wrong? I don't understand. The diet doesn't work because you say you're doing it to a T, but you're eating bananas and doing all sorts of other stuff that has no place on the diet. So here's the guideline, if you have to ask, don't eat it. And I do that. I do that. And some people laugh, some people get upset. The vast majority are like, okay, good point, fair enough. And to my readers, I do interact with my readers, but I also set expectations. And I think this is where people get very confused about what they should or shouldn't do as follow up, whether it's with a product or with anything else, content, blog, etc. Is I set the expectations very clearly that when I reply, I will take it seriously and I will reply, but don't expect me to reply all the time. Partially because I've built a community here of intelligent people who can provide as much, if not more valuable feedback than I can. And so far that's worked. It's worked very well. According to a couple of different analyses, I have the highest comment quality score of any tech blog out there there, which I'm very, very proud of. And I Don't. This is very closely related. I allow people to criticize. I allow people to attack me in some cases if there's actually a lesson to be taken from it. And that lesson may just be my other readers seeing how I respond to the attack. But I do not allow readers to attack one another. Criticism is fine, attacks or not. And that is because of the broken window theory, which was discussed widely when New York really went through many of its improvements, particularly around Times Square and in the subway systems. They were trying to address violent crime and they started with repairing broken windows and removing graffiti and, surprise, surprise, actually decreased violence crime. The theory being that if you allow one broken window to remain broken, people assume that it's on some level permitted. More broken windows come about, then the graffiti, then the petty crime, then the robberies, then the rapes, then the murders. And in blog environments and social environments, I think that's also very true. So if I allow people to attack one another, it will spiral out of control very quickly and turn into an exceptionally unhospitable place. Now, in terms of follow up and setting expectations, I just want to reiterate that point because whether you are managing board meetings, I met with about 25 top CEOs today and we were in a session talking about board meetings and board members and how to manage that process, etc. And one of the key takeaways was you need to have very clear set expectations, very, very clear, so that if you have a board meeting with investors, let's say once every quarter, you don't drop some bomb on their lap as a surprise on the day of the board meeting. So you might provide them with weekly or monthly metrics. You might meet with each one of those people for breakfast individually before you go to the board meeting. Similarly with the blog, if I put up a post and I say, guys, I'm detaching, I'm disappearing for four weeks, not going to be on telephone, on computer or on a calendar. Have an awesome time while I'm gone. I'll see you when I get back. That automatically ensures against the vast majority of complaints and issues that might come up if I suddenly just went into radio silence without having said that. So I think that in the blogosphere certainly, which is my main habitat, it's exceptionally important to do that.

Hey, you know, can I ask you something, Tim? Because I'm not 100% sure on your blog. Me and Dean were just talking about this.

I was just going to say we.

Were just talking about this.

We actually did a follow up podcast which was actually the last episode, which was kind of our thoughts on the Gary Vaynerchuk interview we did with him. And a lot of it. We addressed comments that people had made anonymously. Do you allow anonymous comments, or does everyone have to identify themselves?

We actually only had the one person who was anonymous.

That's where the most maybe, per se, negativity came from. But we still allowed it to be posted up there.

Yep. I allow anyone to submit a comment with an email address. And that doesn't prevent all spam. Certainly it doesn't prevent all anonymous venom from being spewed at people, but it goes into moderation. So I do have comment moderation, and that's important to me for maintaining the integrity and helpfulness and general ambiance of the comments section of my blog. I view it as my living room. And if some idiot comes to my house for a dinner party and gets ludicrously drunk and starts kicking tables off my counter, you know, the guy's gonna go and he's gonna be. He's not gonna be invited back. You know, like you would allow them.

To kick the bananas off. Because it seems you have a very hurtful opinion about bananas.

Hurtful?

Yes, I do. You know, I was young, I needed the money. I don't want to talk about bananas. But. Yes, bananas. You can kick the bananas outside of my house. And the other thing is, so I don't invite negativity into my life unnecessarily. There's plenty of that in the world already. So that's my general policy. Gotcha. Do you have any thoughts on.

And this is more so for myself, but also, I think our listeners are interested in it because we talk about this stuff. You take like Seth Godin, who has. You introduced me to Matt Mullenwig, the founder of WordPress. Great guy. He spoke at one of my events and I asked him about Seth Godin. He's like, well, seth doesn't use WordPress, but he has one of the biggest blogs out there and I love his blog. And he doesn't allow comments on it. And you do. Pros and cons from your perspective.

Pros and cons. Let me give you the pros first, because someone might ask, well, why the hell do you allow comments? Because quite frankly, I don't know what my traffic would look like without comments. It might be higher. Who knows? Maybe it would force people to comment on it elsewhere. There's that possibility. I have spent the amount of time that I have interacting with my readers, cultivating my readers, banning the idiots, because I have learned more through my readers and most of them contact me through the blog and made more fascinating connections and had more amazing experiences through my readers than I could possibly ever deliver to my readers. So it's something that gives me tremendous enjoyment. That is the reason I provide comments, among other reasons. They also teach one another. And there are a host of other benefits. On the con side, you do need to learn to brush off very harsh attacks, and that is going to happen. It doesn't matter whether you are blogging for Greenpeace or Save the Whales or any number of things. You will get extremely hateful comments and you need to learn to brush that aside. Or you need to have somebody approve comments for you and filter out the hatred which is going to be directed at you personally, typically. And then you can go onto the blog and respond to those people in kind. I handled moderation personally for years, and only up until about a month and a half ago did I experiment with having someone else moderate the comments. And I still see the comments that are moderated, but I don't see the negative comments or the spam, et cetera, that come in. I shouldn't say negative. There are plenty of negative comments that we approve, but if they're hateful or spiteful or completely unproductive, then they don't make it in. And it hasn't really affected my mental state one way or another when I was moderating my blogs. For those people who are using WordPress, I'll give just a recommendation because I can fly through moderated comments. I'm very, very fast at it. And in WordPress I could go through several hundred comments in 20 minutes or like 30 minutes, I'd say. And the way that you do that is you would select for trackbacks or pingbacks and do a quick scan to see if there are any traffic sources that are of interest. Then you can delete all of those because they're just confusing, quite frankly, to people in the comments section and don't add much value. Then I would go to the pending category and scan through again and you can establish a blacklist for words like fuck, asshole, et cetera, which will immediately put things either into spam or into moderation. And then you scan through and you look for certain things. I set my comment rules so I have a blurb at the bottom of each post above the comments that says, all right, here are the comment rules. Don't put your business name in your personal name field. Not allowed. Too spammy. Number two, don't put your URL in the text box itself, like put it in the URL field. And so I can scan very quickly and see if anyone violates those things and they get removed immediately. Or I might give them a warning. But at this point in my life, life's too short, so I usually just delete them. And those would be a few guidelines also for moderating. But I find that the interactions by readers is my reward for spending three years on each of my books. Honestly, I mean, it's so awesome to me. I'll give you an example. I put up a post on learning how to swim, which then later became, with some modification and a couple of additions, a chapter in the Four Hour Body. Put this up during the Olympics when Michael Phelps was competing and in the first 50 comments or so, maybe the first hundred, there was a comment from a silver medalist, Olympic silver medalist, with suggestions for training. Then there was a comment from the national team coach, swimming coach, with suggestions and so forth and so on. I mean, it's just. How can you possibly get that any other way? I can't imagine how. Yeah, you would have missed out on.

That if you didn't have the ability for comments. I think there's something to that.

Well, I, you know, I would. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. That's kind of where I was going with it. Let me ask you that, because we told our listeners that we would get your perspective on the Gary Vaynerchuk sort of method of social media and being out there all the time. And you know, there's so much technology, there's so many tools, there's so many Facebooks and Twitters and just places where you can connect, LinkedIn, all that sort of stuff. And you know, there's only so many hours in the day. And you know, I know you're a Peter Drucker fan and there was a quote that I mentioned on the last one. One of my favorite ones is there's from Peter Drucker. There's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all. Oh yeah, people can be, you know, they can become an expert in a lot of things, but at the end of the day, does it lead to something? So you have literally become one of the top identifiers of work that matters. Having impact. The Pareto Principle. What would you advise to our listeners about how to stay on the cutting edge and use technology and not have it use you as it relates to marketing?

Sure. I would say that effective use of any of these tools relies on extremely non cutting edge skills. So you need to learn how to communicate with the written word or with the spoken word. And the best way to improve the spoken word is through the written word. And buying a shinier car when you don't know how to drive is not going to help. So I would suggest a few things. Number one, Gary loves the interaction that he has with his followers. For example, on Twitter, I enjoy it, but not as much as he does. So he'll do that 14 hours a day and interact in these various ways. He really lives and breathes and loves that. So I don't find fault with it. If you're enjoying what you do more than anything else you could be doing, in many cases you're not wasting time. It may not be productive in the literalist, Calvinist sense of the word, but life is intended to be, I think life exists to be enjoyed. So among other things, from a practical tactical standpoint, what I would say is choose one tool and get very, very good at using that tool and then that becomes the heartbeat and you direct everything else back to that heartbeat. In my case, it's my blog that is the core nexus of my existence online. And I do interact on Twitter, I do interact on Facebook. It's typically sharing something that's of value, some type of link or stat, probably 80% useful links or polling in questions to get answers and maybe 20% just a day in the life or a glance at the life of Tim Ferriss, because people are interested in that and it all directs back to the blog for other people, like a top YouTuber, for example, their home base is YouTube and they'll have a blog. But the purpose of the blog is to feed people back to YouTube. They'll have a Twitter account, but the purpose of that Twitter account, at least on some level, is to drive people back to that YouTube page. So become very good at using one of those tools, become expert, become one of the best in the world if you can. And that might mean just within your niche, that's fine. And then you can expand your sphere. But if you're mediocre at all of them, you could add 100 more tools. You could watch every article on TechCrunch and create a new account at every single new service and it would not have any real lasting impact of any sort of.

I think that's great. And you know, ties in with what, because Gary would say it's about what your, your DNA is. You know, like Gary's DNA is wired to be engaging in dialogue with people on in any way possible, in person, on Twitter, on Facebook, on, you know, any way possible. And so for some people who see that you can't force yourself to be.

That just because somebody else is, you.

Know, it comes absolutely naturally to him.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like executive management styles. You look at Steve Jobs, he's not like, if you look at Steve Jobs, he's not Bill Gates. You look at Bill Gates, he's certainly not Richard Branson. I mean, they have different styles, they like different things and they have different strengths. And it makes no sense to mimic to a handicap someone you are not. It makes sense to, in some cases, practice behaving as someone might. But then you need to assess how effective you're being and how much you enjoy it. And that's going to be very, very individual.

Totally. You know, Tim, we've only got a few minutes left here and you know, all of us have one thing in common. All very, very handsome fellow.

What I was going to say, the.

One thing we have in common is that we're all out there wanting to teach and share and educate people. And we're very much the same ourselves. We all like learning really cool things and useful things. So with. I love marketing. What we're wanting to do is me and Dean believe that marketers are saviors when used in the right way. Nothing happens, happens without marketing. And it brings to the world many, many valuable things. You're a teacher, you're a writer, and you're also really, really interested in education and learning. I know you do a tremendous amount of stuff in that space and you support what you consider the cutting edge organizations that are helping children. What are your thoughts on learning and your thoughts on, you know, because everyone listens, wants to learn, in this particular case, that I love marketing. They want to learn about marketing. And you've really studied a lot about how to effectively learn and develop skills. And I wanted to get your perspective on how all of our listeners just effective methods, strategies, techniques, mindsets when it comes to learning a skill.

Yep. I would suggest a few things. The first is, and these are very, on some level, subjective perspectives. I mean, I have my own approach to learning, but I have found it to be rather replicable. And so far many of my readers have tried to model it and certainly I borrowed from many, many people like Michelle Thomas and others. So I'm standing on the shoulders of giants as well. But a few thoughts related to learning. The first is that you can learn for a purpose, you can learn for enjoyment, and you should strive, I think, to enjoy the learning process even if there's no lasting benefit. And I know that sounds very odd, but that's how you will. That's how you will enable yourself to practice learning the skill of skill acquisition. To give you a perfect example, I have spent time in Greece. I've spent time in Turkey, both times with Matt Mullenweg, although that sounds very romantic. And I spent a lot of time studying and practicing Greek and Turkish in both of those places. Do I remember even 100 words of either language? Absolutely not. But I had a fantastic time while I was in country playing around with those languages and getting people to open up and making an ass of myself. And the joy of learning, I think learning without enjoyment is very hollow in certain respects. Now, in terms of the actual process of learning or acquiring a new skill, the first thing I would say is you need a. Just like anything else, I would suggest having a deadline and a very specific goal. So I was studying Arabic recently and I'll still continue to study Arabic. And the objective at the time, I wasn't able to do this because I had to go to the Middle east for only one week as opposed to four, but was to come back and interview a friend of mine in Arabic on my blog. And so that gave me a very specific objective. I could write out the questions that I wanted to ask in English and that I knew exactly what I had to be able to pronounce properly in Arabic. And it gave me a roadmap for accomplishing that. Secondly is recognizing that with any skill, it's often what you learn that's most important, not how you learn it. So in language learning as an example, there's a real obsession with methods. Should I use Rosetta Stone? Should I use Berlitz? I was a curriculum designer for Berlitz for a while. As a sidewalk note in Japanese and English, should I use pimsleur method? Should I use this other method? Whereas the better question to ask is what are the thousand highest frequency words that I should learn to be functionally fluent in the shortest period of time possible. And once you have the material identified, the method is of great secondary importance. So identifying, applying the 8020 principle to language, whether that's grammar or vocabulary. And I'll give you an example. There are ways to cheat, not in an unethical way, but in a very practical way. So if you want to learn a language like Spanish, for example, you should learn the verbs to want, to need, to like, to dislike. And once you learn those, rather than having to conjugate 100 different verbs. You can just say, I need to eat, I want to this. And you can just tag the infinitive on the end. So there are ways to cheat. The other point I would make is that you want to look for anomalies. So with any type of skill, let's say it's long distance endurance running, so ultra marathons, I would seek out the best in the world, or which is easier. Seek out someone who is the best in the world five years ago, something like that, so they're no longer in the limelight. And seek out any type of training methodologies online that they've written about or had described through other journalists. Develop then a list of questions. For example, do you still train using this particular protocol? Have you trained anyone in the last few years? I'm not asking you to train me, but if you have trained people in the last few years, how has your training approach changed? And then ask them, have you trained anyone who doesn't look like a runner? Have you trained someone who's 5, 10, 230 pounds? If so, how did you train that person differently? And I try to find a coach who can take people who are not genetically or otherwise predisposed to a specific skill and make them world class or very, very good. And then I try to figure out the replicability of their method. And then I test it, and I test it on myself. And this approach, I think, is very effective for me, at least, because I'm playing detective number one. I'm not just sitting down and memorizing flashcards, although that might be part of it. I'm trying to find a better mousetrap. I'm trying to find a better way. And I think that that curiosity bleeds over into better retention, better reach, call more cues from a mental standpoint for all sorts of different mental operations and so forth. So I could go on and on for hours and hours on this stuff because I'm so OCD about it. But the love of learning, I think, comes from experiencing a sense of wonder. And I think that to experience wonder, which is a real. It's really almost extinct in modern life. It's sad. But a friend of mine a few years ago, a very, very, very smart guy named Josh Waitzkin, who is the chess master, incredible. He's the basis for the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, said to me this year, I want to really focus on wonder. And I think one of the ways that you can rediscover wonder is by writing down a list of things that you Are, let's just say, in a physical capacity to keep it simple, what you're most insecure about. What are the things that you've decided you will never be good at? What are the things you decided you can never change? And for me, one of those things was swimming. I couldn't swim. I was completely incapable of staying afloat for more than a few minutes. Couldn't swim two laps. And then I set out on this process of discovery to find the anomalies, to find the training methods, and eventually did find total immersion and went from swimming two laps to swimming 40 laps per workout in the span of seven to 10 days. And I remember a friend of mine, Chris, had set me. What Chris and I do every year on New Year's Eve is we set each other New Year's resolutions. And his resolution for me was, you have to swim a 1km open water race by the end of this year. And at that point, I couldn't swim. And so I said to him, okay, fine, I'm going to do that. You have to go the entire year without having any stimulant stronger than green tea, no coffee, no espresso, nothing. So we both agreed. And I remember later that year in the summer on Long island, the day I wasn't able to get to a proper race because the closest one was in Bonaire, and I was like, you know, I'd arrive at six, that's a race at eight. I was like, no, I think I'll take a pass on that. But what I did instead was I went to the ocean on Long island and swam a little bit over a mile, which is like 1.6km from no mistake, and something like that, and got out of the water, was not tired, was not stressed, and just felt like the king of the world. And like, that was a real moment of wonder. I had this glow, this complete glow after glow effect for. For at least a week afterwards. And so finding those moments so that you associate learning and that entire process with these moments of extreme bliss is how I would try to get people to become better learners. Because the only way you become a better learner is by trying to learn many different things. So that's a long answer to a short question, but it's a subject that I'm very, very fascinated by and passionate about.

I love it. And I wonder how anyone could possibly not love marketing. And if you're still wondering about it, you need to wonder about it more until you get to the point where you manifest the deep love and appreciation that the whole Subject deserves and that was not meant to be taken seriously.

I'm going to give you an amen. Hey, we're ready to write.

Dean, anything else you want to ask or say to Tim and then we will recommend that people read his blog and all that stuff because it's fantastic. Anything else you want to ask before we.

Yeah, absolutely. Tim, it's been great. Thank you very much for sharing with us. I think everybody, especially even this stuff about learning your models and the way that you approach it, I found that fascinating, very valuable.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

And I will say, Tim, you used to have the Four Hour Blog as when the Four Hour Workweek came out. Now you've incorporated the Four Hour Body. So what do people learn when they go to your blog? I mean, what's the point of it? I know there's a lot of things, but it's the way you could summarize what is your blog and Tim Ferriss about. What do you represent, what do you.

Do, what do they get there? The title of the blog I think is actually still accurate, which is Experiments in Lifestyle Design. And that is very broad on purpose, which incorporates trying to find better ways to design an ideal lifestyle, trying to find better ways to improve your quality of life, which could be learning a language, it could be improving income or profiling a company that that has come out of the Four Hour Work week, for example. There are many, many out there looking at better ways of solving common problems. What are the best ways, the fastest ways to get from point A to point B with very very common problems or very very common goals. And fortunately I have access to a lot of good people and a lot of good resources. So I can I have the opportunity to play the guinea pig for things that other people may not have the access to test or may not have the funding to test. And I'll go out and do it and then I'll report back. And if it sucked and it didn't work, I'll tell you and I'll tell you how I think it can be fixed. It did work like the last post that I just put up which is on how to create a movie trailer for your product. I created a trailer movie trailer for the four hour body which took it from 150 on Amazon to 30 and then later led it partially to number one. It certainly contributed went through exactly how we produced, how we filmed, how we planned, how we storyboarded the entire trailer so that people can go and do the same thing if they so desire. And the blog is about sharing learning experiences of those types of.

Yeah, it is really awesome. So if you're not already a reader of Tim's blog, we highly recommend you go there. And like I said earlier, I've done a couple of great interviews with Tim. I'm going to post it up for free on ilovemarketing.com my interview with you on the Four Hour Body. We just really appreciate you talking about your perspectives on marketing. And yeah, you put out some awesome stuff. So thank you very much. Any famous last words? I mean, who do you like better, me or Dean? Or anything you'd like to wrap up with?

I dislike you both equally. No, I'll give you another Mark Twain quote that I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is something along these lines. I might mangle it a little bit. But what hurts us isn't what we don't know, it's what we know that just ain't so. Test assumptions. That's what I spend a lot of my time on and really enjoy. And I think that also opens up the wonder factor. So test those basic assumptions. The things that you think you can't do, the things that you think you shouldn't do. You know, obviously within the realms of ethics and law, don't be an idiot about it. But really, those constraints that you've set for yourself that you believe to exist, tax test those. And there are easy ways to do it. So I'll leave it at that. Awesome. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Tim. And to our listeners, give us your comments and anything from you.

Dean.

Are we done?

That's perfect.

Thanks guys.

Thanks. Sa.