You're here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know

that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it.

Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that

will help you execute on your dreams.

All right.

Today's guest is the king of self optimization.

A man who is constantly learning and testing new theories in the real world so that he

can improve his skill set and do more.

His ridiculous list of accomplishments is proof that if you approach the world as a

student there's no such thing as the impossible.

Here are just a few of the seemingly unreal, albeit, entirely true highlights from his

resume.

He's a former MTV break dancer in Taiwan, the one time national Chinese kickboxing champion,

the first American to hold the Guinness world record in tango, a horseback archer, Princeton

University guest lecturer, and angel investor who has racked up a serious string of entrepreneurial

maga hits, including Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and Alibaba.

He is an unparalleled, self experimenter, professional note taker, and would be ninth

grade teacher, but you probably know him better for his best selling books "The 4-hour Work

Week", "The 4-hour Body", and "The 4-hour Chef".

Or perhaps you're more familiar with his number one iTunes TV show, or his unbelievably popular

podcast, which has been downloaded more than one hundred million times.

But even if you don't know him from any of that you're certainly going to know him for

his most recent book, "Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires,

Icons, and World Class Performers."

He's been called the Oprah of audio and the Indiana Jones for the digital age, please

help me in welcoming the New York Times best selling author multiple times over, the man

behind the Tim Ferriss Show.

The human guinea pig himself, Tim Ferriss.

Tim: Hey man.

Tom: Awesome my brother, how you doing?

Tim: Good to see you again.

Tom: Good to see you as well man.

Tim: It's all downhill after that intro.

Tom: I'm not so sure about that.

The sheer weight of this bad boy ... Tim: I know.

Tom: ... Tells me that it's not gonna be all downhill from here.

Tim: It was supposed to be one sentence a page.

Maybe a little check out book in the aisle.

I can't help myself.

Tom: Yeah I saw that.

If you had to boil it down to one sentence, what was your purpose in writing it?

Tim: The purpose in writing it was to create the ultimate cliff notes for myself and then

I got about halfway through it and one of my friends was taking a look at it and he

goes, "This is exactly what your readers would want.

Why don't you just publish it?"

And that led ultimately to the book, which is about half new material.

I would say 50 to 60% brand new.

Some brand new recommendations from past guests, new guests that people haven't met yet like

Jack Dorsey, who's a very impressive cat, and Cheryl Strayed and many others but the

six to 10,000 of pages of transcripts got boiled down to about 350 pages in here and

the vetting process was choosing what I had had a chance to apply myself or something

my close friends had applied at the highest levels.

Tom: Some of the people that you've interviewed in the book, Peter Thiel being the first one

that comes to mind of just mega producers or Reid Hoffman.

I mean it is absurd the number of people that you've come in contact with that are just

absolute apex predators in the world of whatever it is that they do.

I mean it's really, really incredible.

Tim: So Amelia Boone, I don't know if you've ever met her.

She's so tough.

My god, she's a three time World's Toughest Mudder champion.

She is full time attorney at Apple.

Tom: Woah.

Tim: She, in the 2012 Toughest Mudder, which is a 24 hour race.

You have to complete a course of obstacles for as many repetitions as you can and she's

done more than 90 miles in that case but it's like climbing ropes and carry-

Tom: 90 miles of obstacles?

Tim: Of obstacles and in eight weeks of after knee surgery more than 1,000 competitors,

90% plus of which are men, she came in second place.

Tom: Oh my god.

Tim: Out of everybody.

Tom: What do you think drives her?

Like that's crazy.

She's super successful but you don't do 90 miles in a 24 hour period without some intense

thing pushing you forward, if you had to guess.

Tim: If I had to guess I think it is pretty simple.

Now with endurance, ultra endurance athletes, one of the common questions is are you running

towards something or are you running from something?

Tom: Yeah, for sure.

Tim: Two things I really like about Amelia.

Number one, what would you put on a billboard if you could put anything on a huge billboard?

Tom: I love that question.

Tim: "No one owes you anything."

[crosstalk 00:04:56] That's her answer, so great, and then her other quote which I had

to put right on the top of her chapter was, "I'm not the strongest, I'm not the fastest,

but I'm really good at suffering."

Tom: Yeah.

Why does that resonate with you?

Because that sits at the core of my being, that very notion.

Tim: Out endure.

You can train yourself to out endure other people.

Tom: It really ... So when I think about what gifts, you've talked about this before.

Like everybody has a superpower and one of my superpowers is the ability to suffer.

Tim: Yeah.

Tom: And it's one of those things that you say and you know it's kinda tongue in cheek

and a little bit funny but at the same time it's my fucking super power.

Like people look at me and say, "Okay, well how have you been able to do this?"

Because truly you spend enough time with me you will know very, very quickly I am not

the brightest person and I don't pride myself in that so that's not like, I don't ... I'm

not torn up about it.

Tim: Yeah.

Tom: Not the brightest person.

Didn't have any extreme advantages or anything growing up.

Certainly not physically more impressive than the next person but my willingness to suffer

is absurd ... Tim: Yeah.

Tom: ... And when you direct that at something that you care about, my whole thing is the

way that I think about it is I'll outlast anyone, right?

On a long enough timeline I can accomplish and when people really start to look at that

but then it comes back to the next question, which I want to know from you is what is the

driver?

What's that thing that makes you be so willing to suffer?

Tim: It's the promise of that crack hit for me, which is the aha moment.

Tom: In you or in you and other people?

Tim: It's both and the reason I get such a high from it is if I can crack the code in

the sense that I find something that saves people hundreds of hours or myself hundreds

of hours in the learning curve for a particular skill or a particular type of recovery or

fill in the bank, just an elegant or non-obvious solution to a longstanding problem, I'm like,

"Okay, I can't wait to see how people are gonna respond when I provide that to 1,000

people and I see, for most of them, the vast majority just go holy fuck."

If you take someone for instance I didn't learn how to swim until I was in my 30s.

I think we may have talked about this.

I grew up in Long Island but I was deathly afraid of drowning because I had some near-drowning

incidents and some lung issues.

Now at this point I was taught by this gentleman named Terry Lockland something called total

immersion, which I first learned from a book which I was introduced to by Chris Sacca who's

a billionaire investor in this book oddly enough.

But you can take someone, which I did with Terry at one point for the Tim Ferriss Experiment,

the first TV show I did.

This mother of two I think, Sarah, who had never been able to swim, couldn't even put

her head under water in the pool comfortably and four days later open water swimming 500

meters in the ocean in like 40-foot deep water freestyle and when you show someone an impossible

like that, it's not only possible but that they can crack it really quickly, that's my

drug of choice.

I just get such a high out of it.

The other thing, why am I willing to suffer?

I'm willing to suffer because I guess much like you I feel like I have my deficiencies.

I have plenty of weaknesses.

To go to the extreme is partially present because I feel like the most interesting things

happen at the fringes first.

Tom: Reading the press kit for your book, I had that overwhelming sense of holy hell,

what you've just spent the last however many years collecting are all of those gems that

either other people just haven't aggregated or they haven't distilled or they haven't

been willing to look at.

Tim: Yeah.

Tom: But now exists in one place, which is incredibly exciting.

Now one of the promises in the press kit was that you could test the impossible in 17 questions.

Tim: Yeah.

Tom: What are some of the questions?

Tim: So the questions are actual questions that coincided with milestones or inflection

points or just a fork in my own life.

It's actually laid out these questions, about 12 of them, coincided with exact points that

I can remember.

Some of them would be, for instance, what if I did the opposite for 48 hours?

This is a question that I ask myself when I had my first job out of college.

Talk about suffering.

I mean my desk was in the fire exit.

It was completely illegal.

I slept under the desk, the whole nine yards and don't regret a minute of it but I was

a technical sales guy.

Outbound sales guy, so we had inside sales and outside sales and my job was to close

deals with CTO's and CEO's for multi-million dollar data storage systems.

At that point storage area networks fiber channel and what I realized at one point was

that all of the seasoned sales guys, who were doing far better than I was doing, were making

phone calls between nine and five.

Those were the office hours and I said, "Well, I'm clearly not doing an effective job mimicking

them.

What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?"

It's a very recoverable experiment.

If it doesn't work, then I can always go back to what I was doing.

Doing the opposite meant making the calls between let's just say 6:30 and 8:30 and then

5:30 to 7:00, 7:30 and it was just a hypothesis.

Maybe I can get a hold of the people I need to get a hold of more effectively when the

gatekeepers aren't there and that's exactly what happened.

I started booking more meetings and closing more deals than the majority of the guys in

the company and it was just from asking that question.

What if I did the opposite for 48 hours and you can apply that to many, many things.

Some of the others would be, well, this is one I asked in 2004.

If I had a gun against my head and could only work two hours per week, what would I do?

I know it's impossible, what would I do?

And that type of ludicrous question was necessary to break my thinking patterns and stress test

my own assumptions of what was possible and you find that that is a learnable skill.

Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize, who's really good at these types of questions.

I mean he's attempting to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity in very innovative

ways.

He would ask, for instance, start ups who come to him for angel investment.

He'll say, "What would you have to do in the next six months," I'm paraphrasing here.

Tom: Sure.

Tim: "... To 10X the economics of your business?"

And if they say it can't be done, he's like I do not accept your answer.

Literally he just says, "I do not accept your answer, try again."

What's very important here is to realize the expectation is not that you'll magically in

10 minutes come up with a plan to achieve your 10 year goals in six months but that

you may get halfway there, right?

Tom: And largely just to shift your paradigm, right?

I know Peter very well and his whole thing is if you're ... Naturally we think linearly,

right?

Until you break out of that and start thinking exponentially, you're never going to get the

kind of breakthroughs that you want.

There's two things I think that people don't understand about being an entrepreneur.

Number one is there's a ton of mundane stuff that you're gonna have to do, like this set.

My wife and I were hand painting it, which is stupid by the way.

It should've been done and sprayed but we found ourselves in a situation where that

shit had to be hand painted.

As I'm going through, literally at 3:00 AM, painting this set I thought this is the part

of being an entrepreneur that people don't see coming.

Tim: That's not on the magazine covers.

Tom: Yeah exactly, so it's like and do you right your willingness to suffer?

Do you gut check?

Do you get through?

And then the other thing is how do you break out of your dogmatic linear thinking to get

through to the big aha moment?

The I have a gun to my head, I only have two hours which then becomes the four-hour workweek

because of a Google test and they thought that it was ridiculous that it'd be two hours.

Nobody's gonna believe that.

I love that story, which then obviously has massive paradigm shifting changes in people

and what I find so fascinating about asking what is it that I would need to do or what

would stop me from executing a 10 year plan in six months is it forces you to sort of

abandon all hope of clinging to what you already know.

That's the only time that you're gonna do something differently is you have to approach

the problem from a radically different way.

Take Uber for a second.

Uber was one of those few ideas that the second I saw it, I was like, "Oh my god, that's so

brilliant," but I had never stopped to ask the question, "What would it take?"

Riding in a cab stressed my ability to suffer, right?

That's how much I fucking hated riding in cabs.

It's just such a bad experience.

Drivers are horrible to you.