2025-11-14 02:21:49
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Ben Patrick—better known as “Kneesovertoesguy” (@kneesovertoesguy)—the founder of Athletic Truth Group (ATG), an online and brick-and-mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of debilitating knee and shin pain (including multiple surgeries), he rebuilt his body and performance, going from a sub-20″ vertical to a documented 42″ leap. Over the past 15 years, Ben has coached thousands of clients (from weekend warriors to pro athletes) across 50+ countries, sharing his stepwise method via social media and ATG’s coaching system. He is the author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. His mission now: democratize pain-free movement by making tools, systems, and education accessible to everyone, especially high-school students.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Ben, nice to see you.
Ben Patrick: Hey, brother. Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Nice to finally spend time together. We did a bit of a workout overview, recorded some video so people will be able to find that and we’ll put links in the show notes. We’ll talk more also about things you might pin for people who want a visual reference here. But let’s go back in time. Nicknames. We were chatting a bit before recording. What was the nickname that we were discussing and who gave it to you?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me Old Man. I was so stiff it would take me so long to warm up compared to other players. I knew I wasn’t built well for basketball. I thought I could work my way, so I was just doing crazy workouts from the time I was maybe nine years old, so by 12, chronic knee pain. So even by high school I couldn’t get low in my legs. So I think during all that puberty time, things weren’t forming right, because I was so stiff I wasn’t getting into my legs the way I should started calling me Old Man. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So we’ve got Old Man Patrick in high school. Flash forward now you’re known as Knees Over Toes Guy. So something happened in between those two. What were the, and we can approach this any number of ways, you could explain why the name or you could talk about maybe catalyzing moments or findings that set you on the path that led you to become Knees Over Toes Guy.
Ben Patrick: Absolutely. And as you alluded to on my Instagram, YouTube, it’s pinned where this kind of stuff we’re talking about, someone just can just go look at it and see it visually, almost in order. So the chronic pains and stiffness, doctors did think around 14 probably something happened I should have had surgery on, didn’t have surgery, different things started stacking up. By 18, I then did have surgery, partial kneecap replacement. Part of my kneecap was just floating there. Quad tendon reattached and then had a meniscus transplant. And then it took about a year and a half because I was so extreme, so stiff, I was immobilized and really couldn’t even run for a year and a half. That set off a chain of things. By then, my right knee was hurting worse than my left knee ever had.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that happened when I had my left shoulder surgically reconstructed after the year, year and a half it took to finally rehab the left, the right was screaming.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So I was in a pretty dark place because considering my right knee hurt worse than my left knee ever had, I’m like, I probably need surgery on the right knee now. And I had gotten from the surgeries and I had stayed on painkillers and my parents didn’t know. My girlfriend didn’t know, who’s my wife now.
Tim Ferriss: You staying on the painkillers.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, right. I was just popping them. And then I stumbled on some stuff from Charles Poliquin, who you had on your podcast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Spent a lot of time with Charles back in the day.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. And he had various information that was very clear that it was like, no, no, no. What we’ve, in the fitness world had all been taught of don’t let your knee over your toes. He had stuff saying “No, this is actually the athletes.” He helps them prevent injury and rehab with training that position.
Tim Ferriss: And just for people who are trying to imagine what this means. So if you were to say be in a squat position, keeping your shins vertical where your knees are aligned over your ankles, that would be the, let’s just call it pre-exposure to Poliquin, sacred cow. At least in a lot of the exercise science worlds. Do not let your knees travel over your toes. Right?
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Keep your shins vertical. So Charles is saying quite the opposite.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, and good point there. It was totally understandable why that occurred. 1970s exercise science is becoming a thing in school and they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee. So what went into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes. Now, for someone to compare, think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs, stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes, every single step you take downstairs.
So when I started studying Charles Poliquin because of what I had been through, for me instantly, I knew there was something here because I had tried all the mainstream methods of no knees over toes. So the first thing then that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging a sled backwards. So every step I take, my knee is over my toes, but I’m not — it’s almost like if someone walked backward up a hill to rehab rather than going down the hill. And that’s actually the progression of the rehab, is walking backwards trying to add resistance to walking backwards, which is gentler to then I use a slant board, but someone could really, you could roll up a towel to elevate your heel. You could start with your heel flat, you don’t have to even elevate the heel to start where you actually work on stepping down. So you’re actually controlling the motion at your pain-free level of stepping down.
Even if you can’t, I couldn’t do a six-inch step. I could maybe control a couple inches and you’re using high repetitions as if you were a gymnast.
Tim Ferriss: When you say you can only do a couple of inches, could you just paint a picture for what that means?
Ben Patrick: Let’s say you’re walking down the stairs, each stair is probably six inches. I couldn’t control that motion without pain. I had to clunk my way down the stairs. Ease up pressure with the upper body. I couldn’t control step-by-step without my knee hurting, but someone could do less than a six-inch stair. So the walking backward as a warm-up, you’re getting circulation, we’re talking maybe stacking up 100, 200 yards backward, which didn’t hurt. And then was getting circulation, getting some strength. So that was what I felt like, okay, I can get off the painkillers now because I have this way of naturally reducing the pain and getting some strength going in a knee pressure position.
Tim Ferriss: And let me just sidebar quickly for folks. I have only, in the last handful of years, I’d used sleds a lot, but I was always pushing, and it’s only in the last handful of years and you have met these guys as well, but Nsima Inyang and Mark Bell, and of course, Mark Bell used to train with who? He was at Westside Barbell, Louie Simmons, and you mentioned his name when we were recording earlier. I have come to appreciate just how incredibly therapeutic this pulling of the sled is, which you could do with a harness around the waist. You could do it with a vest, you could simply hold on to, I guess that’s typically how I’ve seen Mark do it, for instance, where you’re effectively just holding onto handles with a strap that attaches you to the sled for rehabilitation, for prehab, for building in some insurance policy for the knees. It is just incredibly effective but also, so elegant and so simple and hard to hurt yourself.
Now, of course, talk to your doctor. I don’t pretend to be one on the internet, but that’s all I wanted to say, was personally, I can also vouch for this. Did you come across that through Poliquin?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So Charles Poliquin was interviewed for this article where he helped an Olympic athlete who wasn’t going to be able to compete in the Olympics and they started going backward with the sled often because he could recover fast and he was able to get back and actually win a medal at the Olympics. So I’m not advising someone to rush, but that was a unique case where this might be the guy’s only chance —
Tim Ferriss: You have a constraint.
Ben Patrick: Ever. Yeah. So that sold me on it. And then once I was experiencing it, I was like, okay, I can see there’s something here. It’s not like that solved all my problems. That was enough for me in my state to be willing to get off the painkillers and then start exploring further stuff. And then —
Tim Ferriss: How long did it take you to get off of the painkillers after you started doing the sled work?
Ben Patrick: Well, I remember after the first week of doing this, I then intentionally got off. That didn’t mean all my pain was gone, but it was like I wanted to experience this route and not try to shield the pain anymore. So within a week I knew, okay, there’s something different here of progressing the knee over the toes rather than avoiding the knee over the toes. And the sled at least, gave me something. It was hard. I didn’t really want to think about any further progressions, but that gave me something I could do, didn’t hurt.
And to give someone an idea on the safety, we can’t say anything is 100 percent safe, but real numbers at the gym, I eventually made, coached thousands of group training sessions. So it wound up being, I counted like over a hundred thousand times that I coached people on the sled. No one was ever hurt doing the sled. It could happen. To give you a visual that we actually did, which was I feel like the best visual to explain to people. My mom is 71. We put 1,000 pounds on the sled, and had her try to drag it backwards. She couldn’t budge it but she was fine.
Tim Ferriss: People are going to be wondering why you would do that to your mom. Why did you do it?
Ben Patrick: I feel like that actually — more people are like, “Oh, now I get why it’s safe,” because the thousand pounds that she’s trying to drag is not bearing down on her. So when you’re trying to drag a weight, it probably has less potential to body build and create that breakdown that turns into new muscle tissue and stuff. But it has more potential for getting into something with safety and without pain. So that was my stepping stone. Charles Poliquin, this was before social media, so I didn’t actually see any videos of any of the stuff. I had to really decipher articles. I had to self-teach based on information he had put out. And through my just self-experimenting, I was able to get to where I could play basketball really hard without my knees hurting.
Tim Ferriss: What other ingredients were added to the cocktail outside of the backwards sled pulls?
Ben Patrick: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got the backwards sled pulls. Then it was really clear that he was getting people into a full range of motion squat. And that was also something that growing up my whole life in basketball was like, don’t do any deep squats. Your knee goes over your toes. So it was sort of, don’t go below 90 degrees and don’t let your knee over your toes, were the two prevailing things. And I went to six, eight, 10 trainers. So this is not just like a, look, maybe that was bad luck that none of those trainers knew differently. It does seem like it was the prevailing way and having been on basketball teams now, having coached, I could safely estimate that 99 percent of basketball teams don’t squat with a full range of motion.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw out a Poliquinism. He had quite a few of these, at some point, I’ll tell you the origin story, how I connected with Charles, which is pretty funny, but this is one of his lines. And this is, I’ll give credit where credit’s due. This is from Outside online, but “Strength is gained in the range it is trained,” right? Very Seussian, as they put it. And you just see this over and over again.
And I’ve interviewed, for instance, Coach Christopher Sommer, who used to be the men’s national gymnastics coach. And you look at a lot of, say, cases of what people might consider inflexibility. And it’s just the body being very smart to guard itself against injury where it is weak at the extent of your range of motion. And when you start to develop strength at the end range, all of a sudden — your “flexibility” improves because the body is very, very intelligent and it’s guarding you against injury.
So sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to mention the Poliquinism, because I think it puts a fine point on some of what you’re saying. It’s like if you’re never getting into a full squat position, if you ever engage in anything that puts you into those positions, your foot slips while you’re playing intramural soccer, who knows, right? You’re going to be potentially in a world of hurt.
Ben Patrick: No, I appreciate that. And I think to make it an effective podcast for people, please keep chiming in. Even for our body, this is the mindset, the efficiency, the 80 percent of the results from 20 percent. This is the stuff that helps me make my system. So it’s hugely inspired by that. And outside of my videos, I don’t have a ton to say here, so please keep it coming. Make it interesting for people.
Tim Ferriss: I think you’ve got plenty to say. I’ll keep prompting, but please go ahead.
Ben Patrick: On the deep squat. What I have to offer is lots of experience trying to help people who can’t figure out how to apply this stuff. Deep squats hurting is super common. People feeling like they don’t have the mobility to get into a deep squat. Elevating your heels a bit can help people get lower on a squat and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.
Tim Ferriss: Do you recommend people do what people would envision as a normal squat? So both feet on the ground, same plane? Or one exercise that you’re very well known for, right, the ATG split squat or front foot elevated split squat. Would you have them start with that in place of the prototypical squat? How do you think about that?
Ben Patrick: I see it in relation to age, almost like a Perverse system, meaning my kids are three and five, their squats are incredible. I’m not like wait until you — so it’s almost like in youth, my whole system for the knees is, if I can have you comfortable and able to be getting stronger, controlling a full range of motion squat where you feel like you don’t have to stop before you get all the way down, but also where you feel like you don’t have to bounce to get out of it where you’re able to own it. You can control it all the way down, pause and then explode up without pain, able to get stronger. Kids naturally have that.
And so when I’m coaching, I volunteer at a school. I’ve had to coach 50 kids at a time. I set up 10 slam boards. Some kids need to elevate the heel, some don’t. They’re able to back their heels up, whatever they want. Everyone can get down into a deep squat without pain. Some need to hold some weight out in front of them to get down there, but the younger they are, 100 percent can do it. All little toddlers can deep squat.
Tim Ferriss: Why does the weight in front of you help someone can get into a squatted position — whether the heels are elevated or not?
Ben Patrick: It’s simply a counterbalance. So when you go to squat down and you think about that for someone with knee pain, you think about that pressure, holding the weight down in front, you can actually lean back a bit, your knee doesn’t have to go as far over your toes. So I’m trying to help people get better at knees over toes, not work through pain in the process, gradually coax that ability or if they’ve already got it, we can fortify it super easily.
So a progression using common weights is, let’s say you hold because it’s mostly going to be adults listening to this. Let’s say you roll up a towel on the floor and you lift your heels up onto it to simulate some more of that mobility to get low and you hold a 25 pound plate out in front of you, you get where you can lower down pain-free in a squat, let’s say five reps controlling down. Okay, now let’s say you hold a 45 pound plate, not all the way out in front of you, just in front of your knees. Get to where that’s pain-free, five reps let’s say. Okay, now you hold a 45 or more pound kettlebell not far out in front of you, but above your thighs now.
Tim Ferriss: Closer to your center of gravity.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. And then depending on a person’s goals, what would be even closer than that would be a bar on front. So depending on sports goals, I find with all students, I want them to be able to hold a kettlebell and get down in a deep squat without pain. That’s a pretty good, I have to get down and pick up one kid, two kids, I got a third kid on the way. I have to squat down because if you’ve got to pick up two toddlers, you can’t just bend your back over. You can for one, think about trying to pick up two little bodies. You got to deep squat. So I got a deep squat with some load. Saying everyone has to barbell squat, that’s just not true, but I do think it would be a common sense goal for everyone to be able to hold a kettlebell and squat all the way down without pain.
Tim Ferriss: So, I want you to fact check me if I’m off base here, but I would like to come back to the split squat for a second. Particularly with that front foot elevated. So imagine that you had some place in your house, I’m making this up, where there’s one step up, maybe it’s from living room to the kitchen or vice versa. Could just as easily, as we did earlier, be two thick 45-pound plates. If they’re like the bumper plate style, so whatever that might be, six to eight inches, whatever the height happens to be.
So you’ve got one foot on that. Then you have your other leg as far back as is pain-free and you go down into a squat to the extent that you can be pain-free in that range of motion and your knee, if you build up to it, maybe you’ll get there naturally quickly, your front knee is going to project way over your toes. And the reason that I wanted to come back to this is A, because I’ve derived so much value from this and so much pain reduction in the back. And the third is from a form perspective, I wouldn’t want people who have never explored really deep squatting to jump into doing squatting where they’re rounding the low back at the bottom most portion of the squat.
So just to paint a picture for folks, maybe they’ve heard these terms, but if you imagine your hips, your pelvis, like a glass of wine, if you’re pouring wine out the front, that’s anterior pelvic tilt. If you’re pouring wine out the back, that’s posterior pelvic tilt. If you go into the bottom of a squat, especially if you’re loading yourself up with a barbell or something and you have a lot of posterior pelvic tilt, some people call that the butt wink at the bottom, you can really hurt yourself. And I was guilty of that at one point. And I like the safety profile and I don’t want to make anything sound risk-free, of course. But of all the exercises that I’ve seen, especially under control, slow cadence, the front foot elevated split squat, it seems harder to commit cardinal sins where you’re going to injure yourself. Is that a fair statement?
Ben Patrick: I think so. And that was, for someone listening who is confused on what we’re talking about, now you understand where I was when I was 19 trying to figure this out without seeing visuals. So I have, by far, made the most step-by-step free videos on how to do that and how to use — a stairwell is a near-perfect device. You have balance to hold on to reduce the load. You have scalable steps to use —
Tim Ferriss: Which is what I did in the beginning, right? I had my front foot two steps up, holding onto a railing with one hand and then just worked the way down.
Ben Patrick: That’s how my mom has mostly done them. She’s 71. If you see her sprint, it’s like “I’m going to need to see a birth certificate.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild. 71, your mom can sprint.
Ben Patrick: My mom is more impressive than — I try, I can’t get — my mom can get more views than I can when I talk about it.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so just to give voice, certainly this pops into my mind. I’m like, wait a second. All right, so do you just come from thoroughbred genetic stock? This sounds outrageous. Has your mom been sprinting her whole life? Did she have a period where she couldn’t do it?
Ben Patrick: Exactly. So I started training her because her hips were deteriorating. She’d then had a fall, chronic hip issue began. And so I’ve been training my mom for going on eight years. And I wound up at my gym. I had a whole women’s class, people of all ages, grandmas, young mom, everything in between. And then my dad is more like me, Mr. Fragile, the broken bones, the knees, the knee tears.
Tim Ferriss: I think that’ll be my new podcast name. The Mr. Fragile Show.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. When I was a kid, I went to a speed class to try to get faster and he signed up with me. And this is a youth speed class, so there was no warmup structure. It was just, okay, here’s the first run.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
Ben Patrick: And he didn’t get to his second step and pulled his hamstring. So I come more from his fragile side. My mom’s been working from a desk for 50 years, so we don’t really know what — she ran when she was a young girl.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Ben Patrick: Probably pretty athletic, but didn’t keep doing sports or anything and just generally ate well, stuff like that. But now the hip is deteriorating and I’m like — I remember going to visit her after she had a fall and I’m like, I was getting worried, had her start coming to the gym. So she fell in love with the sled. Eight years, she’s been sledding regularly. She’s very gentle with her program. She spends maybe 10, 15 minutes a day. And similarly, I work out only twice a week. It’s a bit different for me because I’m raising toddlers, running a business. So it’s like I know I can carve out my time to exercise twice a week. Me and my mom, we do all the same exercises, basically, just at different levels. But that split squat, she credits with fixing her hip problems. She’s got great mobility with the grandkids.
She’s slowly coaxed my dad along, so my dad does different pieces of the programming to fix up old pains and stuff. So there’s some mixture of good genetics. Definitely not — my dad never was able to grab the rim or anything like that.
And I was the same in basketball. I went through my high school career unable to grab the rim. And now, it’s not that much proof, but okay, I’m 34, I’ve been dunking for over a decade without having any problem. Your video guy filmed me dunking out on that concrete court. And for me, it’s the fact that I can go play. And that’s what I trained for. We don’t really know, genetically, do I have good genetics, bad genetics, somewhere.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not trying to— It was more “My 71-year-old mom is sprinting.” I’m like, “Wait a minute. Hold the press.” I just wanted to unpack that, so thank you for that. If I were to ask your mom, all right, you can only pick three or four exercises, that’s it, that you get to continue with. You’ve had eight years to trial and error and try a bunch of stuff, what do you think she would respond with, of the three or four?
Ben Patrick: I know she would do the sled, forward and backward. That became a way of life at our gym and she’s kept it up ever since. I know she would do that full range of motion, which varies based on the person what that means, but where you’re not stopping short, you’re embracing your flexibility. Full range of motion split squat. I know those would be her top two, and then I know she would throw something in for the posterior. I’ll have to ask her what is her favorite today.
Tim Ferriss: If you just had to hazard a guess, what do you think she might choose?
Ben Patrick: I think she would choose the way that we use that back extension machine because she works from a desk. And so, particularly when you put that full split squat, which stretches the front of the hip, with then where you’re getting to squeeze those glutes, that sets that pelvis, that it’s almost like whether someone has posterior or anterior, it seems to benefit everyone because you’re getting both sides of that equation. I think she would do that one.
Tim Ferriss: All right. And again, just a reminder for folks, we’re going to link to everything, and you’re going to have videos pinned, and just search Kneesovertoesguy for all the platforms and you’ll find those.
What else did you pick up from Poliquin, if anything comes to mind? Let’s start there, and then I’ll trade with you.
Ben Patrick: So many gems. That’s a tough question.
Tim Ferriss: It is. Sadly, Charles is no longer with us.
Ben Patrick: I know.
Tim Ferriss: I actually got the phone call about it pretty much immediately after he died, which was very sad, very tragic, way too early. But anything else come to mind? I could buy you some time if you want.
Ben Patrick: No. So I mean, he was trying to master everything from, he was helping bodybuilders, athletes. The thing he told me, so only one time when I finally had the money and freedom to go see, he came to America, did a seminar, and he said — this was towards the end. And he said his only regret was not getting into flexibility sooner. And you know he was a wealth of strength, knowledge, a lot of that strength relating to range of motion. That definitely left an impact on me, that he wished he had gotten into that sooner.
And the conclusions that I’ve come to is you can see my style of training. The way I stretch wouldn’t be how someone would normally think of stretching, but just the idea of your strength and your flexibility, really getting those into harmony, to where the positions that you’re flexible in, you feel strong in those positions.
And so I’ve really explored that deeply now, compared to, let’s say, look, people are going to have way more experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman, these kinds of things. And Charles had way more experience there than me. So I think that was — if someone goes to my pages and sees the style that I train, I feel like that was the gem that was just what I needed that gave me now the systems that I love.
Tim Ferriss: And also getting strength and flexibility or mobility in harmony can sometimes mean that you’re training both at the same time. Right? Often can mean that. And we were recording earlier, and not that I’m going to win any gold medals in the split squat, but my range of motion is pretty good, all things considered. And I credit that to doing the movement.
And also I gave him a shout-out when we were recording, Jerzy Gregorek, some credit where credit is due, who holds multiple world records or did in Masters Olympic weightlifting. He’s got to be close to 70, if not 70 now. He can still do — he can stand on a balance board, like an endo board, with a fully loaded barbell, and do an ass to heels Olympic snatch at his age. It is unbelievable. His wife also holds a few world records. She can do the same thing. Their sustained athleticism is just beyond incredible.
And for ankle mobility, he had me doing basically one or two reps on the minute overhead squats. So I’m holding a barbell overhead, but we’re talking bar, maybe plus five pounds on either side. Very light weights. Just doing one rep on the minute for 10 to 20 minutes. That’s it. And by greasing the groove in that way, I went from basically zero ankle mobility, lots of injuries, still a lot of lateral instability, to being able to do what we did earlier, which is frankly years after I did that training. It’s been really durable, which is wild.
So one of the points that I hear you making that I see reflected in a lot of what you do is that you don’t necessarily have to do, you absolutely don’t have to do for most things, an hour of strength training every other day, plus an hour of stretching every day or every other day. You just do not. That is not necessary for most people at all. The surface area for injury goes up also when you’re throwing everything and the kitchen sink with lots and lots of hours.
And certainly, I mean, I had conversations with Charles back in the day where we would talk about some of these professional athletes, let’s just say NFL players, who have five, six percent body fat. They destroyed the combine. They’re these absolute phenoms. And I would ask him, “What do they eat for their diet?” And he’d be like, “Oh, Wendy’s for breakfast, Burger King for lunch, McDonald’s for dinner.” I mean, you have to be very careful that you’re not modeling your training on mutants.
So I’ll just pull out a couple of things from Charles. So I first met Charles because he reached out to me after reading The 4-Hour Workweek, my first book, and he had applied a lot of it to his business and his productivity. And I think at the time, he didn’t realize this, but I had been exposed to tons of his stuff, just as you had, through magazines way back in the day.
And he reached out, and he’s like, “You don’t know who I am.” And I was like, “Well, actually, that’s funny. Because I do know who you are.” And then we connected, and Charles ended up in The 4-Hour Body. He introduced me to myofascial release and active release technique. And there’s some before and after photos with internal rotation on the shoulder in The 4-Hour Body that are unbelievable. They look like they were staged because the gains in range of motion are so significant.
He was right about so many things. Wasn’t right about everything. But there are so many things that Charles did that ended up being proven out through studies, and data collection later, and exercise science in other fields. It’s pretty remarkable. I mean, he got a lot of things right.
Ben Patrick: He was so dedicated. I forget the exact number, but he learned a bunch of different languages so that he could read —
Tim Ferriss: He spoke a lot. Yeah.
Ben Patrick: — essentially everything that had been written about exercise.
Tim Ferriss: In the source language.
Ben Patrick: Right.
Tim Ferriss: What a maniac. Also cantankerous as fuck. Oh my God, he was so salty. And part of his charm. One of a kind.
Who else has influenced your thinking on exercise and movement, just broadly speaking, your way of training?
Ben Patrick: Charles was really cool about crediting where he learned different things, and so that’s something I’ve kept in. And it also gave me the idea that, okay, there might be real gems in quite a few areas. So I know you’ve talked about gymnastic rings. Okay. Doing rows and pull-ups with gymnastics rings, I do one set to burn out of each per week. That saves me so much time and gives me a pretty balanced upper back for my goals. So there’s a gem that Poliquin didn’t teach me, but his general mindset of learning.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just going to pause to ask you to repeat something you told me earlier. Where did Charles figure out the backwards sled pulling?
Ben Patrick: Oh. Oh, man. That’s such a cool story.
Tim Ferriss: Do you want to talk about pulling from unusual places?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So Charles went to the source, Westside Barbell in Ohio led by Louie Simmons, who was creating the strongest powerlifters in the world. And Louie was jealous of these Finland powerlifters of their squats. And they said that their secret weapon was their day job was dragging trees. So Louie invented the idea of dragging weight as a form of exercise. And then, that became a way of life at Westside Barbell. One of Louie Simmons’ disciples, Dave Tate, who made the, if you’ve heard of EliteFTS, they made the prowler style slide, all kinds of amazing stuff. I’m going to see Dave in two weeks, actually, for the first time.
Dave has a quote that’s like, “We didn’t have warm-ups.” It was Louie Simmons just telling him, “Hey, before you train, go out to the parking lot and drag the sled.” He’s like, “We didn’t have shit called warm-ups. It was called the stuff you do before you train.” And people were like, “How many sets and reps is that?” “I don’t know. It was X amount of times down the parking lot.” “Oh, how long was the parking lot?” “Don’t know.” So it was cool, the history there.
But it’s cool how Charles Poliquin would just go to the source. He’d go to the source in Europe, or Ohio, or wherever it was. He would go to the source. And then it was, like I told you, it was this article of where he used the backward sled for knee rehab for this Olympic athlete that kind of, I don’t know, that kind of gave me a stepping stone to all this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If people also want to look up Louie Simmons and his writing online, a lot of amazing tidbits to be found to this day in a lot of his writing. And Westside Barbell, for a period of time, it was just one of those factories for mutants that — and of course, there’s some selection bias if people are traveling to the Mecca to station themselves there to train. There’s a little bit of selection bias. But the results were just so incredible. And the number of world records broken and the number of innovations, whether that’s, say, chains to provide more resistance as you get into stronger ranges of motion with, whether it’s deadlift or anything else. I mean, bands and so on. I mean, a lot of what you see that is propagated throughout the gym universe started there, or at least was codified and formalized in some way there.
Ben Patrick: Yep. So that was a great one. One that I think would be inaccurate if we missed, there was a bodybuilder named Bob Gajda. G-A-J-D-A.
Tim Ferriss: Bob. Don’t know that name.
Ben Patrick: Gajda. Okay. He was Mr. Universe right before bodybuilding really blew up. And now, these are his words. He worked at the Chicago YMCA. His passion was helping get kids off the streets, off drugs, doing bodybuilding. He’s Mr. Universe. He goes into the lockers one day and sees people shooting up drugs, steroids. This was the beginning of steroids. And when I say this, people are like, “Oh, no. Bob was on steroids too.” Look, this is Bob’s story.
Bob’s story is he stopped — what you can look up is he was Mr. Olympia when he quit. Not a lot of people are going to quit right when, guess what he was getting offered? The first protein shake deals. So there wasn’t money in what he was doing. All of a sudden, there was money in bodybuilding. And guys were doing steroids, and he quit. So when someone turns down money, I feel like there’s a — I believe what he’s saying. And he wound up then getting into, sort of like my passion, of helping people enjoy life without breaking down. And he invented this device that he called a DARD. D-A-R-D. I think it was Dynamic Axial Resistance Device.
Tim Ferriss: It rolls off the tongue.
Ben Patrick: It didn’t catch on. By the time I was studying this, you couldn’t even buy it anywhere. It didn’t turn into a business that worked out. But it allowed you to do the opposite of a calf raise and strengthen the front shin muscles.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, got it. Right. Tibialis anterior.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So one of the things I do that’s really unusual, and Charles Poliquin did calf training, did tibialis training, lots of coaches have done this. Bob was the creator and really had a big impact on me. And in my workout style, which I hadn’t seen anyone doing, I go from the resistance forward and backward, like with the sled, to then working my lower leg muscles. So with the sledding, you’re pushing through your feet in various ways. I mean, you’re working all kinds of stuff.
But my mindset was like, “Okay. Move the body forward and backward, then start addressing the body from the ground up.” Let’s get some extra — before we even get into the knees. I found extra de-sensitization before getting into the knee work by doing the lower leg work after the sled work. Maybe it was just because the sled burns your legs and you get a little break. But we can’t say it’s a bad thing to have some extra ability in the front and back of our shins.
And so, an equipment company reached out, said, “Is there anything…” This is when The Kneesovertoesguy was starting to catch on on social media. “Is there anything that doesn’t exist, that you think should exist?” I’m like, “Yeah, there should be these DARD bars.” But I told him, “Call it a tib bar,” to make it simple for people because it’s the anterior front tibialis. Tibia is your shins.
Tim Ferriss: Calling something a DARD also. I’m going to Hell. But it’s a hard one to sell.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So with the Kneesovertoesguy stuff, I could see, okay, I’ve got a pretty good skill here at helping people understand this stuff. And so, I’m like, “I think tib bar.” And now, it’s a pretty common device. You can even go on Amazon and buy tib bars. I mean, there’s like 10 sellers now. I have by far the lowest price for an American made tib bar. I don’t sell the most tib bars.
Pretty much anything that I make in America, someone’s going to make more money copying in China. And that’s actually, at first, it seemed annoying, but now I’m like, it’s actually pretty cool. Everyone wins. I can make a nice living pursuing American-made on everything I do. And people are going to copy it, because the price is going to be higher American-made. All right, everyone wins. You can get it cheaper from someone making it in China.
And that doesn’t mean all my stuff is made in America. I’m pursuing all my stuff made in America. And anything on my website, I don’t play games with people, it says ATG USA. Then you know, if it says that, it’s made in America. So this was a really cool device, particularly for rehab.
But even for me, what I showed you in my video, you can put your butt against the wall with no equipment whatsoever, raise your toes, and do that for a while, and burn out, and get a reverse calf raise, a tibialis raise.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just paint a picture for folks. So if you have your — you’re standing facing away from a wall, maybe your heels are a foot away from the wall, your heels?
Ben Patrick: One to two feet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, one to two feet. Then you lean back against the wall. Now take your upper back off of the wall. So it’s just your hips and low back against the wall so you’re not cheating. Your legs are locked, right? Your knees are locked.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then you’re lifting your toes to the greatest extent that you can. And the nest point that you added to that, where I was like, oh, that’s actually very smart, and it’s particularly, I would say, helpful for someone like me, who has basically torn everything in both ankles, to me, he’ll hook some nonsense way back in the day, that basically lifting the foot as much as possible, then going down on the pinky side, then coming up and going down on the big toe side, and alternating back and forth like that, I could see helping also with some of the lateral stability issues that I have.
So we were chatting a bit before recording about some of your different pieces of equipment, and I told you that I really liked your wrist bar. So the wrist bar is, imagine a baton you would hand off to someone in a relay race, but at one end, half of it is thick enough. I don’t know what the exact diameter is. Let’s call it two, two and a half inches. So that you can plate load, you can put an Olympic plate on that and then secure it, which makes it very interesting because you can work with progressive resistance.
And for me, that was important and will be important. I’m six weeks after elbow surgery, so I’m not quite there yet. But for sort of supination and pronation, whether I’m doing isometrics or otherwise. And it’s very small, very portable. And one of the advantages, we were chatting a bit — well, why don’t you just tell the story, and then I can add some color if need be.
Ben Patrick: Well —
Tim Ferriss: I put this bar in 5-Bullet Friday, which is my newsletter that goes out to two million-plus subscribers.
Ben Patrick: There’s a few moments I look back at just sheer luck, like when you won something at the fair that you thought you wouldn’t have done it. And one of those highlight just lucky moments is we’re just seeing the wrist bar sales just going nuts. So my staff are like, “What the heck is going on? Why are we selling so many wrist bars?” And we quickly traced down that it was because of you. So that’s like an all-time business moment. And that’s made in America, so we were able to basically just make them to order and just quickly service everyone.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So that last part is important, right? Because I think you mentioned it was more units than the history of the bar up to the point or something.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I try to give people a heads-up if something is going to land in the newsletter, because what can end up happening, as one of my fans termed it, the hug of death. So the hug of death can take a number of different forms. It could be a website crashing. But it could also be where someone has a long lead time on ordering inventory. Let’s just say they’re getting it from China. And not that that’s intrinsically bad, I’m not saying that that is.
But let’s just say for them to get an order, they have certain minimums and so on. And they believe that these sales from the newsletter are going to continue at that velocity. And they only had 100 in stock, now they order 2,000 because they expect to be able to move those and they don’t. The hug of death is, “Uh-oh. I’m not going to make this money back.” And companies, small companies in particular, can go under if they misgauge stuff like that. So you had the advantage where you’re making them, I mean, from a global perspective, right around the corner, so you could do just-in-time inventory.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, we didn’t even have to order a batch. We were just able to fulfill the orders. Awesome. Awesome family in Minnesota who does stuff for a variety of people in fitness, but reached out to me a few years back and has really helped me to make some cool stuff American-made.
Tim Ferriss: What other principles, topics, exercises, would you like to talk about? Maybe one way to edge into a starting point for that is before coming here to do this recording, and we did some movement earlier, I did what I’ve done a number of different times. Because your name has come up over the years and I’ve looked at your videos and watched a lot of them. Sorted your videos by most popular. I’m sure a lot of people do that as a way to produce a manageable shopping list of videos.
So my question for you is, which videos were not anointed by the YouTube gods or, for whatever reason, have not had the views that you would like, where you’re like, “If I could point out one video that I wish people paid more attention to.” Could be any video. But your greatest hits don’t need the help, in a sense. Maybe you’d like to mention one of them. But if there’s a lesser known video where you’re like, “Man, this one’s really, I think, quite important, and it hasn’t had the visibility.”
Ben Patrick: Well, so I just made a video really recapping all my knowledge because of going on this podcast. I didn’t say it in the video, you don’t want to jinx it. Like, “Hey guys, I’m going on Tim Ferriss,” and then you get canceled. But I made it for this podcast. And it happens to be doing really well. I’ve found that the videos I put out that really hit home and help people then, long-term, wind up doing well. So for me, it’s almost like my experience has been the better videos do have more views.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Ben Patrick: Because I try to be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title. What I have to look out for, which I’ll still have to check it on your video, because who knows on your staff who’s going to title it, is people have me on or whatever. And then it’s like, I found one, and they’ve since corrected it, but it said knee pain. It said “Fix knee pain guaranteed in 60 seconds.” The only —
Tim Ferriss: I won’t have a video with that title.
Ben Patrick: Caps. “The only exercise you’ll ever,” caps, “NEED.” And sure enough, the guy, great channel, great guy, very busy, naturally hired a professional company. And then, it actually alerted him and he found a bunch of lies like that in the titles. So because of that, yeah, you can get a lot of views if you lie in the title. And even for me, I’m not saying this from a point of perfection, there was one that was so hard. I think I’ve kept it up, and sometimes I go back and forth, but I had titled it—this was four or five years ago—”How to Make Yourself a World-Class Athlete.” And I use all these stories of people who weren’t world-class athletes and made themselves world-class athletes. But still, that was the closest one I can remember that I feel like was potentially a lie.
Tim Ferriss: Now, you’ll pin the video that you referred to, which is the recap of a lot of what we’re talking about visually. Do you recall the title of that?
Ben Patrick: Yeah, a Minimalistic Workout Program with Sets and Reps. That’s how I title things now. There’s no —
Tim Ferriss: No fluff.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So what’s funny is that, so now to get views, it really is about the content itself, not the title. So it doesn’t say, “Knees over toes,” it doesn’t say, “fix knee pain,” because there’s these keywords used to get views. So it just says, “Minimalistic Workout Program with Sets and Reps,” and it’s doing great.
But that’s the most recent one I made for this podcast for someone to not beat around the bush, get all the key information. It even gives you sets and reps. It gives you my actual program. It’s not a theoretical program. These are the two workouts I do a week. All the people I train are on very similar versions of this.
Tim Ferriss: And I want to give people a taste of some of what we recorded earlier in case they don’t see it. And in effect, I’ll summarize, but feel free to jump in because I’m a stickler for detail and I like exact recipes, it could be my OCD screaming at the back of my head, which is pretty often, but the point you made, or at least that I heard, was you’re not really a magic sets and reps guy in terms of some Goldilocks perfect protocol.
And the reason I bring that up is that just like you can regress range of motion in a movement, you can regress the volume. And what I would say is that in pain-free range of motion, a little bit can go a long way. So if you look at something and you’re like, “Ah, I don’t have time for three sets of this or five sets of that,” or whatever it might be, okay, fine. Well, maybe you start with one set. And I know people who have gotten into tremendous shape coming from a baseline of zero, right?
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: No athleticism, nothing, and they’re like, “Ah, I don’t have time to go to the gym. I don’t have to do that.” I’m like, “What about one push-up before bed? What about one push-up? Is there a reason you can’t do one push-up?” And they’re like, “Yeah, of course I can do one push-up.” I’m like, “Okay, great. Do one push-up,” and then turns into two and then it turns into whatever.
And I know one guy, within a few months, he was doing 50 push-ups before bed and he was seeing real results and then that was the unlock. So that’s a long-winded way of just saying don’t get fixated on your limitations. You can always scale down.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, yeah. My starting system is one to two sets, and then I found for myself, one to two sets I can maintain great. Only on exercises that I’m planning to put more weights on. I’ll go a couple more sets just to actually — you’re probably still only talking one or two sets, really, because they’re —
Tim Ferriss: Like work sets?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. Just to make sure people safely take their time. Now, I simply wouldn’t have believed 15 years ago that now I’d be doing only two workouts a week, 45 minutes dunking and stuff. So I wouldn’t have believed it. So if someone thinks we’re full of shit, I would’ve thought we were full of shit. That also doesn’t mean that higher-volume programs can’t work.
Number one, I see all the different exercises as a beautiful freedom with different inputs and adaptations, and I see all of fitness as positive and then I see even all people’s viewpoints of then how to program that up as positive. I don’t do the comparing teardown, what’s — the program you stick with that works for you and your goals is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the program you stick with is the best program.
And I want to reiterate what you’re saying because I write books to be references for myself basically. If I can find a book that does the job already, writing is way too hard. The research is way too arduous. It takes way too long. I don’t want to write a book. It also turns out to generally be a terrible way to make any money, even if your books do very well. So there’s just way too much of pushing boulders up the hill for me to write a book unless I feel like I’m gathering things that I need and can’t find somewhere else. That was the case with The 4-Hour Body.
And this minimum effective dose, the concept, the MED of finding the minimum effective dose, and you can look at many comparables. It’s like there’s a certain temperature at which you boil water. You don’t need to get it 30 degrees hotter. If you go outside, there’s a point at which you start to adapt in the sun and develop a tan. You don’t need or want to stay out another hour and you progress and you start to extend the duration, et cetera.
It turns out that you can apply this almost everywhere. You can apply it to language learning with the highest frequency words, you can apply it to, for instance, I was asking on X, back when it was Twitter, people for favorite chapters in The 4-Hour Body because I was curious about possibly updating things, although there’s not a lot that needs much updating it turns out, and people gave various examples. There was a — I think it was an NFL player who was benched and got back to playing professionally using the pre-hab chapter and Occam’s Protocol — Occam’s Protocol is like 20 minutes twice a week resistance training — and a handful of other things.
There’s another guy who chimed in, and I understand you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I’ve seen multiple examples of this. He got to, I think, a 475-pound deadlift using the Barry Ross protocol in the book. And Barry Ross coached Allyson Felix and many other sprinters. It is the most minimal thing you could possibly imagine, and a crux piece of it is doing deadlifts to the knee and then effectively dropping the bar so that you’re not risking any type of hamstring strain, and doing two to three sets of two to three reps. That’s it. And you’re taking big, fat powerlifter rests in between those sets. The amount of strength that you can build doing that is head-spinning.
Ben Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: So I just want to emphasize that “I don’t have enough time” doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny if you’re willing to scale back, and in fact, you can do a lot more with very little than you might suspect.
To your point, there are also volume-based approaches. And I mean, Poliquin, we talked about Poliquin. He did a lot of high-volume stuff with his athletes. Not everyone is going to tolerate that very well, nor is it going to be compatible with their schedules necessarily. So you find what works for you and ultimately the program you stick with is the best program.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, The 4-Hour Body had a massive, massive effect on me. And this phase of life, it’s like 2-Hour Body for me, and because it’s the strength, the flexibility, the circulation, the cardio, all this stuff wrapped in one. Yeah, I mean, I don’t do any other therapies. I don’t have to take any supplements. Those couple hours go a long way for me.
And then what are my goals? For me, being a dad and then really focusing on my business, treating people well, and doing good, it takes a lot of time and energy because if you turn a blind eye to your business, that’s rarely going to happen on its own.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, very rarely. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So it’s like those are my goals. I also don’t want to spend any time having to rehab stuff, and knock on wood, it’s 12 years now, no knee or back problems. It was like 15 years ago that I got into this, and I would say my biggest mistake was treating it as short-term rehab and being like, “Oh, great,” and then trying to go back to the methods I used to do.
Whereas now for me — because you had the question in the video of like, “So is this a warmup for the work?” And they’re like, “That’s the workout.” And then you get better at those things, and some of these things we’ve mentioned, whether it be then finishing with a set of ring rows to a good burnout. That’s going to take what, a minute, and goes a long way.
So the efficiency of sledding and what I use at home is a resisted treadmill forward and backward. I look at the clock. Three, four minutes have gone by that I’ve done three sets forward and backward, catching my breath between each set. I’m pumped and my lungs have had a great workout, my legs are warmed up, springy, fast, all this stuff.
So 4-Hour Body, you can see in my passion, this is more along my passions in life is almost helping people that don’t want so much stress on the body to then be able to focus on other things.
Tim Ferriss: Or stress on the schedule, right?
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Stress on the family.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I would say that if I were to, and it’s just these things are too long and most of it, the vast majority of what’s in The 4-Hour Body, I feel, is very defensible. It’s become more defensible over time —
Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: — which has been cool to see since it came out in 2010. But if I were to add a few things to it, I would add sled work or analogs, like the resisted incline treadmill. I would add a chapter on intermittent fasting.
Ben Patrick: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: I would add a chapter on, it might not be a chapter, but maybe a sidebar on various hip activities, exercises, things like glute medius work, just things that you can do to stabilize everything else in effect that I did put some of in Tools of Titans with, say, some of Peter Attia’s exercises and so on.
Ben Patrick: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: I would probably add a chapter or a sidebar on Zone 2 training, which I still, to this day, find to be the most boring thing in the world, but if I have to drag myself or whip myself to do anything, that would be on the high-whipping scale.
And I think that’s about it. And there are probably chapters that I would pull out to simplify, to further simplify things. And that’s about it.
Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, these things are so reliable and I would say to someone, for instance, again, this is going to sound like nothing, but if you have access to a sled — and people can look at the resisted treadmill that you have also through ATG. How much does that cost?
Ben Patrick: 600.
Tim Ferriss: 600, right. So I mean, it’s, on the grand scale of things, not just affordable as an investment, but also space-efficient because the biggest knock against the sled is that you need space and the sleds are not cheap, particularly the sleds I really, like the Torque sleds, which I own. I love them. But here in Austin, I don’t have the space for one. But let’s just pretend you have access to one of these. Let’s call it a sled for simplicity, just so people can visualize it.
Over this past summer, I did sled work where effectively, as prescribed by Peter Attia, if I’m doing VO2 max training, I would want to do four minutes on, four minutes off. You could make it five or six or whatever. It depends on how hard you’re pushing. And let’s just say it’s four minutes on, four minutes off for four rounds or five rounds or six rounds. And I would do that with the sled and I would push. This was on a gravel driveway with mechanical resistance. You don’t need to add much weight.
And so what we’re talking about, just to do the math, let’s just say it’s 15 minutes, which often it would end up being 15 minutes because I would run out of gas, but 10 to 20 minutes, let’s call it. I was doing that every other day, fasted after a little bit of caffeine. And my God, can you get in good shape just from doing that.
Ben Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, it sounds — and I’m sure there are some very high-level athletes or people who are doing 600-pound squats or 900-pound deadlifts who are going to laugh hearing me say this, but you might be surprised how much your legs will grow and how much stability you will develop doing this, and how much body fat you can lose just by making that the first thing you do, and in my case, I’m getting sun exposure at the same time, for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning. And then let that afterburn work for a bit.
I would typically do that in the mornings and I would take some, a very — I’m talking like 300 milligrams of essential amino acids instead of branch-chain amino acids, but that’s a longer story. And I would do the workout and then I would hold off on eating for a few hours and then break my intermittent fast at 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. But feeding that way and then doing weight training typically before my second and last meal of the for dinner, gaining muscle mass, not losing muscle mass.
And the total, I mean, we’re talking about weekly time, if I’m doing it every other day, it’s three or four, let’s call it, days a week, so that’s an hour. And then the weight training’s probably, since I’m doing some rehab as well because of some current back issues, we’re talking about two to three hours a week. That’s it. That’s it. And it’s split up also into very manageable doses. It’s not like I’m asking you to do a three-hour or two-hour workout at once.
But it is really, to this day, there’s still things I come across, like the, in my case, I’m still elevated, but the front foot elevated split squat, or the ATG split squat, or, for instance, the exercise that you showed me earlier which is basically a seated, let’s call it, more constrained version of a Romanian deadlift standing, people can find this on your pinned video, I imagine, so I won’t belabor the description, or sled work where I still find these things that are like — I think to myself, “My God, if I just did these and that was it, the sort of return on invested time is so much better than the long tail of 30 exercises that I could try to do.”
It still makes me smile and blows my mind to this day how some of these things are just so inherently, given their risk-to-benefit ratio, so high-yield and it’s really wild.
Ben Patrick: Yep. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s still, to this day, it’s like I do my two workouts a week. I’m just totally stoked. And sometimes I still have that “wow” feeling every time because I’m like, “It’s unbelievable.” And now I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s not like, “Wow, I could just train like this.” I have been for a while and the results are insane.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re playing sports, right? In terms of —
Ben Patrick: I try once a week to play some basketball. Right now, that means playing with the best kids at the school that I’m volunteering at. So it’s two workouts a week, try to play basketball once a week, and raise toddlers.
Tim Ferriss: Before you play basketball, any type of warmup that you do for that or has your training provided the warmup?
Ben Patrick: Yeah. So first and foremost, the training provides a warmup. I don’t have any special warmup. From what I’ve learned training-wise, I try to at least have systems. And to recap incredibly fast, my systems, because you’d actually ask me what are my total principles, and it’s just three total principles as far as I can see, which is the forward and backward resisted movement; and then the training from the ground up, just reminding myself even if it’s one set, “Okay, I’m going to hit the lower legs before I go to the upper legs”; and then the third one being the strength through my mobility, and then I just flow that to the upper body and I’m done.
That’s the training principles. If you add all of that up, forward and backward, ground up, because most of us has probably not done as much work for the lower body and lower legs as for the upper body, so we’re restoring some natural balance there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I need to do a lot of work on the lower legs.
Ben Patrick: Right. We could say that your body’s inputs would think that you didn’t want to get as strong in the lower legs as the upper. So by doing that, you’re what? You’re restoring some balance to the body.
Tim Ferriss: A quick piece of trivia for people who might find it funny. Go look at really early photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger posing, and some of them have him standing in water where water’s up to his knees because he was so embarrassed about his lower leg development.
Ben Patrick: Whoa.
Tim Ferriss: Alas, I haven’t figured out how to wade through swamps up to my knees to cover my lack of development in the lower legs.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, most of us haven’t. It’s almost like we’re telling the body, “Hey, I don’t want to be as strong proportionally in the lower legs as everything above it.”
And then the amount of foot pains and different chronic pains that I’ve had people who had for years that are gone now just from restoring that balance, it’s really cool. And then the third one being training the strength through the mobility, as I said. So those three.
But what’s the strength through mobility again? We’re restoring that natural balance because when we go into weight training, our body starts to shift towards strength in certain ranges but not others. So all of it together just means my whole philosophy is just to have balanced ability in the body, forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs, upper legs.
So that’s how I train. That makes me healthy that I can just go play basketball. But because of all that, I try to be sensible about it and do a sort of segmented warmup of like, okay, dribbling in place, then dribbling in motion. Now what’s a little more pressure than that? It might be shooting. So it’s just super basic. Someone could do that for any sport. It’s like you take the forces and you just segment them into an obvious warmup, so there’s no special —
Tim Ferriss: Magic.
Ben Patrick: — basketball warmup.
Tim Ferriss: No magic sauce.
Ben Patrick: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, we’ve covered quite a bit. Ben, is there anything else that you’d like to cover? Any other topics you’d like to jam on? Anything that comes to mind?
Ben Patrick: I think more for you, which is, for me, as or more important than any of this exercise stuff is you’ve managed to become this giant without bashing other people, without playing games that you know are lower integrity. So you must have some sort of — because I’ve had to set up for myself, “Okay, I need to make sure that my posts don’t have any lies to try to start arguments or that there’s nothing intentionally trying to start arguments.” And there’s these things like this that I’ve had to piece together.
But I think of you, and sometimes I’m blank after that, apologies for being blank, but it’s like there’s not a lot that I can look to and go, “Here’s a guy who’s succeeding in ways that I want to succeed,” helping people, but with your integrity. And to me, that’s more important than the rest because I feel like that’s the trickle-down that makes life shitty for a lot of people is the more and more leaders who then lose their integrity, I think that’s more important than all of the rest because that affects everything.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thanks, man.
Ben Patrick: So what’s your — do you have a —
Tim Ferriss: What’s my process?
Ben Patrick: I mean, yeah, what’s your thoughts on that? I mean, even if you just think about it, you’ll share some unusual information compared to what normally is going to be on a podcast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m happy to riff on it. I would say that there are a few things that come to mind, and I’ll maybe get there by way of example.
So there was an episode I recorded a long time ago with a fellow named Balaji, who’s very smart and he’s known for a great many things. He’s actually been very accurate in predicting a lot of geopolitical events and so on. Also happens to be incredibly technical and familiar with cryptography and crypto and so on. And I did an episode with him and it just exploded. And there were many reasons for that, but it ended up being, I think at the time, the most popular episode of the year.
Ben Patrick: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: And there were a number of trend lines at the time. People were at home, this was during COVID, crypto was on everyone’s radar. All of a sudden people are using various means of finding something to do, including trading or, quote, unquote, “investing.” And I used “quote, unquote” because it wasn’t always investing. So there were many things that contributed to this episode doing well.
And I remember having a chat with my team internally and they were like, “Here are four or five other guests who are also involved with crypto who we think would be very, very strong.” And I paused in that moment. And there’s this quote, it may be incorrectly attributed, but there’s a quote that I have started almost every presentation I’ve ever given. So it’d be kind of hilarious if it were not attributed properly. I think it’s attributed to Mark Twain, but, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” It’s roughly along those lines.
And so I looked at what was happening around me and I saw a lot of podcasts focusing on crypto, I saw a lot of media focusing on crypto, and I looked at, in my mind, telescoping forward, what would be the implications of me having these four or five people on? There would be a definite short or intermediate-term reward. Lots of downloads, very happy sponsors. I could probably increase my rates. I mean, there would be real financial rewards.
Okay. What are the trade-offs? Because there are always trade-offs. Always. And you make any decision, just like literally from the perspective of decision, meaning cutting away, related to incision, you’re choosing one option among many, there are trade-offs.
So what are the trade-offs if I commit to doing four or five more episodes on crypto? One is that I start to filter out anyone in my audience who’s not interested in crypto most likely. Some will be willing to indulge me because they have followed the podcast for a long time and want to see how I tackle it. But after four or five episodes, after a month or two, I will basically have culled my audience of anyone who is not particularly interested. That is a very large sacrifice, number one, because I want a diverse audience.
Number two is that I would be training myself to succumb to audience capture. And there’s some great pieces that have been written about audience capture, but the way I would describe it, actually, I’ll give — and I apologize that I can’t remember the author’s name. It’s a really fantastic piece. But he starts with this example of a YouTuber whose channel focused on him gorging himself, just eating these kind of absurdly large meals. And he started off pretty thin and ended up, as he was rewarded for these videos and as it became the corner he was painted into, as he felt he needed to continue to rack up views serving people what they wanted, he destroyed his health completely. Became obese, put on this mask, and if you wear a mask long enough, you become the mask. I think that’s something that people miss. And I recall, just as a side note because I want to try to answer your question, but there’s a lot to it.
I remember I interviewed Andrew Zimmern, who he’s been on TV for decades now. Amazing guy, very smart. His life story’s incredible for people who want to check out the podcast episode. And he said to me at one point, because I was delving into television and I’m paraphrasing, but, “Be very careful about what you do in that first episode because if you pretend to be something that you’re not and it’s successful, you’ll feel the obligation to continue to do that. And there are a lot of risks related to that.”
And furthermore, if you’re training yourself to respond to audience demands or whims or trends instead of some type of internal compass, and simultaneously you’re training yourself, and these are often related, to basically pursue the option that has the most economic upside. I feel like particularly if you’re in the online media game in any capacity. And by the way, you don’t need to have a business to succumb to this. You might just have a personal page and you’re being trained by the platform to be in the vanity Olympics.
And these algorithms are so good. And I know a lot of data scientists and PhDs who work at these companies, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight, psychologically. So if you encourage yourself to be captivated by those incentives, you’re lost. You’re just lost at sea, you’re going to be lost. And it’s a lot easier to get lost than it is to get unlost. And that has a trickle-down effect. So if I make decisions based on — and it’s very hard, and I’m not always perfect, if I allow myself to be steered by the most extreme things, perhaps, that guests say, what am I going to do? I’m going to optimize for extreme.
And then if I’m optimizing for extreme, why am I doing that? It’s for views. Why do I care about views? It could be vanity, it could also be for CPMs and advertising. It could be for product sales. Well, what’s going to happen to my headlines? They’re going to become the National Inquirer, for people old enough to remember that. They’re going to become the most clickbaity, exaggerated, indefensible set of claims you can imagine. And you don’t have to be a data scientist to realize this, just go look at what you’re served up in your personal feed on YouTube, and chances are there’s going to be a lot of nonsense or a lot of misleading.
And what I’ve learned is that when you develop an awareness of this, not that I’m holding myself up to be some paragon of personal excellence and integrity, but I recognize that it’s a lot easier to get hooked on a drug than to get off of said drug. And make no mistake, you’re being trained by the platform, you’re being trained by your audience. Those are all drugs that are very addictive and there are lots of rewards for pursuing that. But to come back to what I said earlier, there are lots of trade-offs. And for me, also on top of that, I would say that I have worked so hard to ensure that my audience feels they can trust me. There’s certain lines once you cross, if you do not deliver on the promise of a headline, if you do not deliver on the promise of a title, if you make a recommendation that costs someone time, money, or, God forbid, causes some type of injury, you’re done. You’re dead to that person and for good reason.
So I feel like with a great audience, and that could be a small audience, it could be a big one, comes great responsibility. And I should say also, this isn’t because I’m some type of saint, it’s also being long-term ambitious. For me, the greatest insurance plan, the greatest choose your metaphor, safety net, but also propellant for doing well long-term is not doing anything, and you’ll make mistakes, but really trying hard not to do anything that will compromise the trust that your audience puts in you. That could be readers, it could be listeners, it could be viewers, it could be anything.
And for that reason, I’m very cautious about what I recommend. I’m very cautious about who I have on the podcast. I’m very cautious about chasing any type of trend. Hence that what I think is a Mark Twain quote, it could be someone else, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” So in the case of the crypto episode, that was massively successful. I could have milked that, but it would’ve been the equivalent of killing the golden goose.
And those are a few ways that I think about my life that is, at this point, toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube, you can’t really put it back in from a public exposure perspective. There are lots of trade-offs, privacy-wise and so on, for being public facing. Although a lot of folks who are long-term listeners and viewers will notice that I’m not doing even a tiny fraction of the video that most of my colleagues or peers, certainly the up-and-comers, and there are costs to that. So I have my reasons for doing that. I want to have a family soon. I do not need any more facial recognition. I do not. I want to be very cognizant of protecting the privacy of my family. But have I left a lot of money on the table? Yeah, I have. But what are you using the money for in the first place?
And it’s like, “Why, why, why?” Just keep asking why. Why, so what, why is that important, then what happens? And if money fundamentally — I mean, it’s sort of a story, right? It’s like this abstraction, but it’s a currency that we can use to trade for other things. Now having that in savings could provide you with psychological reassurance for any number of reasons. Family, childhood scarcity, who knows? So there could be that. Otherwise, you’re trading it for things and experiences which ultimately translate to feelings. It’s like, “Okay, where else could you get those feelings? Do you really need those incremental dollars with those trade-offs?” So for me, I decided that I didn’t.
Keep in mind, The 4-Hour Workweek details my first real business, which was in sports nutrition. I know the supplement world inside and out. And when I launched The 4-Hour Body, I had a huge audience from the first book that was waiting for my next book. I could have made tens of millions, maybe a hundred million plus by launching a supplement brand to capitalize on every one of my main product recommendations. I’d be lying if the thought didn’t occur to me, especially at that time because even with the success of The 4-Hour Workweek, royalties are very slim in a traditional deal.
And the temptation therefore to do something like that was huge. I was like, “This is how I can secure my entire financial future.” And I decided not to do it. Why? Because if I had launched a supplement brand, everyone would’ve — not everyone, but a lot of people rightly would’ve said, “Well, we’re asking a barber if we need a haircut. This guy is showing his bags, he’s selling exactly what he’s recommending. How can I trust anything this guy says?” And I was like, “That is too deep a cost. I’ll find another way to do it.”
Ben Patrick: I mean, that’s remarkable because it would’ve been a shoe in.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it would’ve been a shoe in, for sure.
Ben Patrick: Similarly, you’ll know when I sell out if I’m selling a joint supplement but t’s not that I have anything against supplements, it’s that it wasn’t actually part of my journey. So if I now sold a supplement, I want to know what effect I get from the exercises. And yeah, that would be the easiest business route as the Kneesovertoesguy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I wish. Maybe it’s just can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, I consume a ludicrous number of supplements. I do consume a lot of supplements. So clearly there are brands that I trust, typically would’ve been third party verified, things have been tested because my God, it is the Wild West, folks. There’s no enforcement. So really do your homework on the supplements that you take. But that is all just a long way of saying there are some good players in the supplement sphere. But if I’m combining that, in my case, with a book that is purported to provide unbiased information, you can’t believe those claims if I’m selling exactly the thing that I’m recommending. Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that I’ve ethically compromised in some way, but people would be right to question it.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, you wouldn’t have. You would’ve made a great supplement line.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Ben Patrick: You would’ve been honest, but the integrity point would’ve been out. That’s what I find remarkable. And that’s what, if me going the rest of my career, I see that actually as the not boasting about just doing things along those lines. Because, as you know, I mean, how many young people ask you for advice and then how many of these people become successful? You leave this trickle down impact that, at this point, for me, it’s like that’s really what it’s about. And for my kids and then helping them learn these same values. Man, I feel like that’s a whole podcast to unpack, but I appreciate you digging in there because it’s very unusual. You would’ve cashed out big, but that integrity wouldn’t have been as trustworthy as you said.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. There are times that I’m like, “Fuck, that would’ve been so much money.” It’s not easy for me to walk away from that, right? There are times that I’m just like, “Oh my God.” I remember when The 4-Hour Body hit number one New York Times and just kept going, kept going. And this book was published 15 years ago, and even Gary Brecka put out a video about some components of The 4-Hour Body and had this huge resurgence, got back on a bunch of bestseller lists. And I’m just like, “Man, can you imagine the annuity this thing would’ve been? Good Lord.” But I don’t regret it.
And I’ll say two things in addition to that, to build on this. Number one is when people think about losing trust, which is losing your reputation, right? At least for me, there are many ways to think of reputation. I mean, I guess suppose you could have an Al Capone reputation. There are many different types of reputations. But if you have a reputation for being trustworthy, losing that trust does not mean that you do something so bad that everyone says, “I can’t trust Tim. I can’t trust Ben.” All that needs to happen is they ask themselves once, “Can I really trust Ben? Can I really trust this video? Can I really trust this? Can I trust this advice that Tim has given?”
As soon as there is a question, you’ve lost the trust. And as soon as there is a seed of doubt, it is very hard to reclaim. Now, if I’m talking about long-term being, long-term greedy, or long-term ambitious, because of that trust and, for instance, being very clear on situations, say, in San Francisco where I lived at the time, having friend DAs, as some people call them. So NDA, non-disclosure agreement, friend DA is basically if someone tells you something in confidence, even if they don’t emphasize that you need to keep it confidential, basically not sharing things that anyone says to you.
And becoming a known quantity is someone who’s very good at discretion, who does what he says he is going to do on time, those were ingredients that led to ultimately the angel investing and being able to invest in a lot of these startups and work with a lot of these founders. Inherently I would be exposed to a lot of really confidential private information that’s critical to their business success. So developing that trustworthiness through actions over time and people telling other people is what allowed me to do the angel investing, which ultimately, returned much more than any supplement business ever would have.
Ben Patrick: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: So don’t overestimate the value of the dollars in your bank account and don’t underestimate the value of having a consistent reputation for being trustworthy. And there’s so many ways to fuck that up. And who knows, maybe also I’m very hyper vigilant, I’m very aware and over aware and probably over emphasize dangers in the world. So maybe it’s worked to my advantage in the sense that I’m like, “If you don’t have your word, if people feel like they can’t trust that, you’re done. It’s going to be Mad Max for you and not in a good way.” I’m not sure exactly, but this is how I’ve thought about some of it.
Ben Patrick: It’s a right characteristic. The world would be a lot better if more leaders did that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I’m sure I’ll continue to make tons of mistakes. But the question I’d encourage people to ask, and I ask this in my personal life, I ask this in my professional life, it’s like, “Okay, if you continue to do this, if you continue to do X, whatever X is, and let’s just say you do two percent more of it, or you do it with two percent more intensity every week or month over time, three years from now, what does that look like?” Be very aware of the trend line and the way it compounds. So in the case of say, YouTube titles, if you’re exaggerating two percent and people accept that and you get better results, you think you’re going to stop at two percent? Of course you’re not going to stop at two percent. Now it’s going to be four percent. And eventually you’re going to cross a line without realizing that you’ve crossed that line.
Ben Patrick: Yeah, that explains a lot. And that’s how my wife and I run our business together. She’s really much more of a business genius and thank God. But even on the integrity stuff, it’s hard to explain in a way. Okay, if I was in any country, I would want, just based on all my observations of being in business, I would want to be supporting local businesses and stuff. So we’ve got this passion for making stuff in America that really, from observing everything in this last year, and now she’s just off to the races. Just crushing it in terms of it takes calls and networking and finding people and continuing because you’re told, “No, no, can’t make this, can’t make this.”
And then you find the person who can make it. You find the factory, you find the technology that you can — if I was in Canada or if I was in China, I would feel the same way. It’s something that’s important to us. But I like your two percent thing. If we keep putting two percent more energy on that. Because when you were describing this, I was thinking, because this is something that’s on our minds a lot, and I’m thinking three years. Wow. I’m like, “Three years from now, life is going to be amazing.” I don’t know what the exact numbers will be but the amount —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it applies to the good stuff as well.
Ben Patrick: We’re breaking through all kinds of stuff that people aren’t able to make here that now we’re actually getting. And it’s so cool. You can go to the factory, see the people, see the person. Like when you blew up our wrist bar sales, for us, it makes us happier. We like it. And I like your rule. What does it look like a few years from now if we keep putting a little more? And I’m like, “That’s a life I really like.” The numbers won’t be gigantic, but they’ll be good and we’ll be super happy about it.
Tim Ferriss: And also it’s like enough is enough at some point. And what enough means will differ from person to person. But generally speaking, money’s not going to solve all the problems you think it will. And what you need to live an amazing life is much less than most people realize. And then if you cross the finish line, so to speak, with annual income or savings or some combination invested capital and low cost index funds, whatever it might be, whatever gives you the sense of sort of psychological safety, once you get close to that or you get there, which can be a lot less than you might realize. And there’s an exercise called dreamlining that if you search my name and that, you can find it, it’s costing all this stuff out. You’ll realize that the other pieces of the puzzle that are so important are not in any way addressed by money.
And you have to work on those separately. And part of the way you work on those separately is doing things that you feel good about that make you feel good about yourself. And so for instance, if part of that is making things in the US, that in and of itself can more than offset the additional cost that’s incurred compared to doing it overseas. The actual benefit, and particularly since you’re doing it with your wife, the benefit to your family collectively. And if you’re proud of that, the way you radiate that to your kids, that’s a lot, right? That’s valuable.
Ben, so nice to spend time together. Really nice to spend time together.
Ben Patrick: As you can see, I could grill you on this whole side of things, but I appreciate it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, definitely. Where can people find you online?
Ben Patrick: Kneesovertoesguy on YouTube and Instagram are the best places where you can just go and learn everything that I know.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect. All right. We’ll link to those in the show notes. People will be able to find that. You’ll pin the video that gives people an overview of what we recorded earlier. We’ll also link to the video we did together so people can check that out because that was a lot of fun. And thanks for taking the time.
Ben Patrick: Dude. Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, as always, we will link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Ben Patrick, or if you want to type out Kneesovertoesguy, probably pipe — I’ll try that again. It will probably pop right up. But you can search Ben Patrick and you’ll find everything we’ve spoken about. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to you, yourself.
Ben Patrick: Nice.Tim Ferriss: Thanks for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy) — 20-Minute Workouts That Produce Wild Results, From Chronic Knee Pain to Dunking Basketballs, Lessons from Charles Poliquin, Bulletproofing the Lower Body, and More (#835) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-12 09:09:02
Ben Patrick, better known as “Kneesovertoesguy” (@kneesovertoesguy), is the founder of Athletic Truth Group (ATG), an online and brick-and-mortar training system rooted in rehabilitative strength and joint health. After years of debilitating knee and shin pain (including multiple surgeries), he rebuilt his body and performance, going from a sub-20″ vertical to a documented 42″ leap. Over the past 15 years, Ben has coached thousands of clients (from weekend warriors to pro athletes) across 50+ countries, sharing his stepwise method via social media and ATG’s coaching system. He is the author of Knee Ability Zero and other books on fitness and recovery. His mission now: democratize pain-free movement by making tools, systems, and education accessible to everyone, especially high-school students.
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“I had a high school basketball coach who started calling me Old Man. I was so stiff it would take me so long to warm up compared to other players.”
— Ben Patrick
“[In the] 1970s, exercise science was becoming a thing in school and they found that when the knee goes over the toe, then there’s more pressure on the knee. So what went into textbooks was showing when you exercise, don’t let your knee over your toes. [But] think about stepping down the stairs and stop. You take a step downstairs, stop. You’re loading your knee over your toes, every single step you take downstairs.”
— Ben Patrick
“So the first thing that I could tell that allowed me to get off the painkillers was dragging a sled backwards.”
— Ben Patrick
“I try to be really careful to never lie in a YouTube title.”
— Ben Patrick
“My whole philosophy is just to have balance stability in the body, forward, backward, high positions, low positions, lower legs, upper legs.”
— Ben Patrick
“Elevating your heels a bit can help people get lower on a squat and holding a weight out in front of you reduces the pressure on the knee.”
— Ben Patrick
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Want to hear another episode with the coach who inspired Ben’s breakthrough? Listen to my second conversation with Charles Poliquin, whose radical knees-over-toes philosophy helped Ben overcome chronic knee pain and get off painkillers. We discuss his favorite mass-building program, nighttime routines for better sleep, how to differentiate terrible trainers from the best, and much more.
The post Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy) — 20-Minute Workouts That Produce Wild Results, From Chronic Knee Pain to Dunking Basketballs, Lessons from Charles Poliquin, Bulletproofing the Lower Body, and More (#835) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-06 15:16:51
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with David Baszucki (@DavidBaszucki), the founder and CEO of Roblox. TIME named Roblox one of the “100 Most Influential Companies,” and it has been recognized by Fast Company for innovation on their “Most Innovative Companies” and “Most Innovative Companies in Gaming” lists.
Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution, where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leader in educational physics and mechanical-design-simulation software.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube.
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Tim Ferriss: David, so nice to see you. Thank you for taking the time. I’m excited to have this chat with you.
David Baszucki: Hey, Tim, it’s great to be on the show, and when we started chatting before I came on, I had read one of your books literally 10 or 15 years ago and it got me inspired to do kettlebells and I did some this morning.
Tim Ferriss: And I saw photos of your beautiful kettlebell collection. Could you, just because now I can’t not take the bait, how did you jazz up your kettlebells that you ended up sending me a photograph of?
David Baszucki: So just to frame it, I’m pretty sure in your book you made your own travel portable kettlebell with some pipes that you could screw together, which I think —
Tim Ferriss: From a plumbing shop or a hardware store, that’s right.
David Baszucki: Yeah. So I have five kettlebells and we use them a lot at my gym and have fun. They’re all made of iron and so we took them over to an auto place where they make low riders and do custom paint jobs of sparkle cherry red, sparkle orange, sparkle green. And so there are all these really beautiful automotive sparkle colors and it just makes them a lot more fun.
Tim Ferriss: And a lot of folks perhaps who are coming into this podcast will assume that we connected because of the amazing business and innovation story of Roblox, but that’s not actually how we connected.
David Baszucki: No.
Tim Ferriss: We connected because we have a friend in common, Dominic D’Agostino, some listeners may recognize as, effectively, Mr. Ketone, master of all things exogenous ketone related and an amazing scientist in his own right on a number of different levels.
And I had also had Chris Palmer of Harvard on the show a while back related to something called metabolic psychiatry, and your name and your Baszucki group kept coming up over and over again. And that is the thread that I pulled on, which ultimately connected the two of us. And I think I had mentioned your name, I’d invoked your name several times on the show including on The Random Show, and that’s how we got connected. So maybe as a way of just setting the table for a little bit of the metabolic health discussion, and everybody listening, we will get to Roblox and all of that of course. But this I think is something that will probably strike a chord with a lot of people listening on a lot of dimensions.
So as a way of setting the table, perhaps you could describe early in your son’s freshman year at college, what happened?
David Baszucki: Yeah, thanks Tim. And I’m going to share that my son and my family are comfortable sharing this story and so I feel I have some flexibility. But you could imagine as a parent of a high school student who had just started at UC Berkeley, all of the hopes and dreams of a parent of a student going off to school and a student that’s been very successful in math and science and academics and athletics and how much hope a parent has for that student going off to school. And like any other student, my son Matthew at his freshman year at Berkeley, it brought back memories of when I had started school. He hit it pretty hard. He was in computer science, he was rushing a fraternity, and there was a lot of demands I could see from afar it just seemed on him. The studies, the creativity, what a rush would be at a college like Berkeley and all of that.
And that was a time when he entered what I would call his first manic episode. We got some cryptic texts from him that were very alarming. We got some texts from some of his friends in his fraternity and dorm. I went to get him and he had entered what you would call a manic episode.
And for us, a manic episode is something that no parent has ever seen before, and is really something very surprising and weird and different. And he had entered this and what he had started on was really an eight or a nine-year journey with us over eight or nine years that involved some of the wildest stuff you could ever imagine. It involved him going to the hospital several times. It involved us not quite knowing how to really care for him. It involved trying to navigate the medical system. It involved going to Stanford and having him being locked up on the psych ward, and really started this journey that if we rounded out was only solved through ultimately getting him on a ketogenic diet.
Coincidentally, we ran into another CEO founder who said they got progress on their bipolar with a metabolic diet and a ketogenic diet, and that seemed like the craziest thing I had ever heard about. How is it possible after eight years and hospitalizations and very difficult times and complete disruption and I would say possibly concerned, would our son ever go back to school? Would he ever work? Would he ever integrate? We worked with Dr. Palmer and others and he tried a ketogenic diet, and literally within three weeks or four weeks, we saw progress that we had never seen with any drug or medication. Mind blown, really, and a miracle. And that was really the catalyst of starting our whole adventure down the ketogenic route.
Tim Ferriss: And if we flash forward then a bit to December of 2017, why was December so significant?
David Baszucki: We were now into a bit of a situation where our son had run away, had flushed all his meds, literally streaming on social media, streaming as he had run away. Had subsequently caught a bus, had made his way down to San Diego, had lived in, I think a lifeguard shack in San Diego. We had some monitoring of him. I knew he was full-blown manic at that time, and I tried my first try to come down and pluck him off the street with the help of some police and get him into a hospital.
Given the laws of our situation, I got to San Diego near some of our relatives, called in the cops, but he was pretty convincing. He said, “Hey, I’m free. I don’t want to go to the hospital.” I knew he was completely out of his mind and he ran away, and the police wouldn’t grab him, he just went running away from his dad. And so that was pretty scary.
Following that, we got a report that he had then hitchhiked to Los Angeles from San Diego. He had a phone and a laptop and that was it. And the communication started getting more sparse with him. In retrospect, it’s really scary because I think in retrospect, what I know now, I would’ve flown down there and hired 200 people, rented a hotel room and started searching all of Los Angeles, just go to every Starbucks in Los Angeles. Let’s find this guy. In the moment that I would say for one or two days, didn’t quite figure out what to do except we have a son who’s gone AWOL in Los Angeles.
This was a terrifying thing, a powerless kind of thing, here we were family with all of the resources in the world. And then by some miracle, he texted me from a Starbucks once again full-blown manic episode. And I was just able to work with him and to say, “Hey man, it’d be fun to buy us a latte together. You want to just chill out there for a couple hours? I’ll come down, we’ll buy a latte, it’ll be fun.”
And surprisingly. He said, “Sure, I’ll just chill out here.”
I’m like, “Oh, shit, he’s going to chill out there.” So flight, rental car, like SWAT team stuff.
I’m on the airplane, I’m sitting next to someone and they’re saying, “Hey, why are you going to L.A.?”
I said, “Oh, my son is AWOL with bipolar. I think I have an hour to get to him and to pick him up.”
So I pop into the rental car, just drive flying over there. I get to this Starbucks and there is my son, just a street person of your son. Nothing except a plastic Safeway bag with his laptop and a cell phone and a charger that he’s sleeping in a Starbucks with. And I’m just like, “Oh my gosh.”
And so now I’m thinking, okay, I can’t call the cops because I’ve been through this before. I cannot lose this guy. So my son and I got into this, I’m saying, “Hey, we should go see your relatives in San Diego. That’d be fun.”
He’s like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s go see the relatives. You don’t mind if I get some smokes, man, do you?”
I said, “No, man, we need some smokes. Let’s get some smokes.” So we buy cigs, we buy Diet Cokes, we get in the rental car, he’s just smoking, completely manic and we’re going to see a relative.
Now I’m driving to San Diego texting 30 people at the same time, texting my wife, texting his uncle who’s a psychiatrist in Carlsbad. And during this 60-minute drive, I’ve got his uncle lined up as a hot stop so, “Yo, hey, we should go see Uncle Alex.”
“Oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s go see Uncle Alex.”
So I’m able to get Uncle Alex warmed up, and so we come in hot to Uncle Alex who’s a psychiatrist, and yeah, let’s just grab a dinner with Uncle Al. Good, so we’re rolling. So then we’re hanging out, and then we got to figure out how do we get my son into a hospital without the cops coming and having him run away? If he runs away, what are we going to do? So he had had a lot of adventures on the street and his hands were really beat up. I don’t know if he was punching a concrete wall or what he was doing, but his hands were really beat up.
So Uncle Alex, who’s pretty savvy, says, “Matt, man, we should go out, get a good steak dinner, what do you think?”
And Matt, thank goodness said, “Oh yeah, I’m really hungry. Let’s get a big steak dinner.”
And then I look at his hands, I say, “Hey, Matt, man, your hands are pretty beat up. We should just stop and get those checked out on the way to the steak dinner. Just, we’ll pull into the hospital, check out your hands.”
And Matt’s like, “Cool, let’s go do it.”
Oh my gosh. We’re texting, we got the hospital lined up and we pull in and just go into the hospital. They know we’re coming, go into this waiting room, but now we’ve got 30 minutes to keep Matt together in this waiting room so he doesn’t run away. “Let’s go have a smoke outside. Let’s do all of this stuff.”
Finally, after what seems like a lifetime, the doctor comes in, “Yeah, we’re ready.” The doctor’s preflighted just like, “Oh yeah, let me see your hands.” And this doctor, I forget their name, but she was a genius. She’s just like, “Matt, it just seems like maybe you want to take a rest for a day or two, just get off the street.” And wow, that was huge.
Tim Ferriss: And he was open to it.
David Baszucki: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, man. Yeah.
David Baszucki: And he could have ran out of there. I think that started the journey of some, what is called insight in some level of insight where a bipolar person has a small inkling that things are not quite right and they want to participate in treatment. And this thing called insight is this very valuable thing that when someone does not have a sliver of it, they will run, they will sleep outside, they will not participate in the journey. That’s what led to ultimately many drugs, many interventions, and finally us finding ketogenic therapy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thank you for the context and the story. I actually read something that your wife wrote or shared on metabolicmind.org and did not know this particular episode, this chapter in your family’s history. And it struck me for a couple of different reasons and I won’t read it all, but if you’d indulge me for a second, I mean, I’ll just read a little portion of this, which complements what you already described, but this is from your wife.
“At 4 a.m. the Friday before Christmas, I lay curled up and crying on my bedroom floor, convinced my son was no longer alive.
“Matt, then 21, had been a star in elementary and high school, but he began experiencing insomnia and panic attacks. After a manic episode led to a hospitalization at age 19, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Two further hospitalizations and 10 different medications failed to provide stability.
“That December of 2017, escalating into mania, Matt had left home, cut off contact, and wandered the streets, eventually taking a bus from the Bay Area to Southern California. From his increasingly alarming Snapchat and Instagram posts, we knew he had no money, and that he’d slept one night behind a dumpster and another in a lifeguard tower. As dawn broke that Friday morning, his social media channels had gone silent and his three sisters hadn’t heard from him in 18 hours.”
This makes me quite emotional as well because I’ve had two or three friends basically follow this exact same pattern with bipolar, and I can only imagine the effect that would have on a family. And for people who also hear you mention metabolic psychiatry or ketogenic therapy or diet, and it might sound like some type of hand wavy panacea because they don’t understand perhaps some of the plausible mechanisms, what is actually happening? Why did this intervention help your son when so many other things had failed, or at least what is your best understanding of that?
David Baszucki: I want to take a step back, and your audience may be familiar with what a ketogenic diet is, but in the big picture, almost all of us live our lives day-to-day burning glucose, and we have monitors. Too much glucose can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. And society I think is just learning about glucose and how it brings energy to the body.
Now, interestingly enough, the body has a second way of generating energy called ketones, and most people never touch their ketones. It’s a more primitive way of generating energy. It’s a way of generating energy that we all go into if we don’t eat for a day or two because there’s no more glucose, we go into ketosis. But it’s also a way of generating energy that people who live far up in the north and eat seal blubber all day long aren’t getting any glucose, they’re not getting any carbs. And so they eat that seal blubber and they go into this thing called ketosis.
It’s arguably something that is closer to the way we lived as primitive people than the way we live today. We arguably live today with more carbohydrates in our diet because about 10,000 years ago, we had this thing called the agricultural revolution and the agricultural revolution in this amazing thing. Humans figured out they could generate a lot of food that was support a lot of people. It was an amazing invention, but it was more carbs than what the traditional diet has. Being in ketosis comes from fasting or eating very low carbs and more fat than we would be used to. What happens when someone is in ketosis is you run on ketones, this alternate energy pathway, and you get very consistent energy and very clear energy, especially to your brain.
The thesis would be, I guess my thesis would be, there are a lot of people around, arguably interestingly enough, with bipolar people who have pretty big brains, people who are trying to process a lot, and if they’re not getting consistent energy to their brain, which could happen from glucose spike, glucose crash, glucose spike, glucose crash, one might argue that what people see in bipolar is actually just a little bit of a symptom of not having enough brain energy to their brain. So keto, what we did with Matt and people have been exploring with keto diets for a long time for epilepsy. Also, I like to think when those Aboriginal people would run 300 miles in America a thousand years ago with a bag of pemmican, that was pretty keto food. That was high fat, low-carb food and allows people to go pretty far without crashing.
We put Matt on a keto diet and we worked with a dietician and Dr. Palmer, and this is a diet less than 20 grams of carbs per day, which is almost unfathomable for modern people, right? Because a quarter of a Coke probably has 20 grams of carbs. And also a diet that probably had more fat than protein, which is also something that we’re not used to because I think the last 50 to 100 years, we’ve migrated to less fats in our diet as well, somewhat. So we migrated Matt to what is called a ketogenic diet. And after 20 plus meds and treatments and all of it, we started and he started to see results from this diet, which was an absolute miracle.
Tim Ferriss: How do you make it as easy as possible to follow a ketogenic diet? And I say that as someone who’s spent probably upwards of a year in nutritional ketosis, and I always see the benefits, but I typically come off of it at some point because I find it difficult for compliance depending on travel and various things. But still, for instance, over the next month, I’ll probably spend two to three weeks in nutritional ketosis, and there are a lot of reasons to do that. People should also listen to Dominic D’Agostino or Chris Palmer, but activates anti-cancer pathways. It directly, quite aside from the anti-inflammatory effects and just the ability to starve certain types of cancerous cells of glucose, there’s so many upstream benefits. You develop this mitochondrial and metabolic machinery that has some durability if you’re in ketosis even for say four to six weeks, something like that. How do you make it as easy as possible?
David Baszucki: So this is, it’s hard, right? And another Matt story that we shared publicly is as we learned about ketosis and how you monitor your diet, and at this point Matt had been on eating primarily food that had been measured made by a cook. We know all of the ingredients so we could measure the carbs, the fat, and the protein. We went on a trip to Mexico as a family for a week, and we thought we had it right in the restaurant, but where we were wrong is possibly me, somewhere in the family, we forgot that avocados, even though they have a lot of fat in them, carry some carbs more than we expected. And so we were a couple of days into the Mexico trip, everything was cool. Matt was eating fish, olive oil, butter and some avocados. Those avocados had more carbs than we expected and nudged him out of this, for him, very strict ketone zone.
I think he arguably is good at a ketone level of two or 2.5. We weren’t measuring at the time, we didn’t have a ketone measuring device, and we can talk about that. And so all of a sudden here we are, day three or day four, and Matt’s starting to get some manic symptoms, more trouble sleeping, which is an early warning sign, a little more agitation and things are starting to get a bit edgy and we didn’t know what’s going on. And then we identified, oh my gosh, we’re a little off on the diet.
The next two days, Matt went to just literally small amounts of fish and butter, asking the chef, “Get more butter, more butter for my fish and more olive oil,” and he popped right back in and I just saw the correlation and how tight it was. So you’re exactly right. It’s very hard, especially if we’re going to restaurants or things like that. I am not as strict as Matt. I feel my life doesn’t quite depend on it, but I am also a huge advocate of some of the things you mentioned, sharpness of focus, just body weight control, consistency, energy in the afternoon, all of these good things that come from it. So when I go into a restaurant, the first thing that comes out in a restaurant is the big thing of bread. You have to push that aside, just get that out of my face.
You have to know how to order specifically. Yeah, I’ll take the burger without a bun and some extra mayo and maybe some extra butter and eat the burger with the mayo and the butter and maybe the lettuce and the tomato and all of that. But the bun and the fries are not fully keto aligned as well. Matt is even more strict. He’s gone pretty keto to the point of carnivore as well, which is very heavily animal type products. So I’d say it does take some practice, but I think once you get used to it and you can figure out how to maneuver in a restaurant, I think you’re in pretty good shape. The hardest thing for me would be, say we were to go to a wedding or something and you’re not fully controlling the menu and you’ve got all these friends around you and it’s all of this special food. Sometime in that case it’s kind of hard to do that unless you just don’t eat anything and sometimes you have to figure that out.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just speak personally for people who might be curious. I mean, what I’ve ultimately found easiest and Dominic, Dom has some good recommendations related to this because he’s spent a hell of a lot of time in nutritional ketosis, but basically two huge salads a day, intermittent fasting, so I just have two meals somewhere between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. I have two huge salads, lots of olive oil, with a sliced ribeye on top of it, and it does the trick. You have to be a little careful, like you mentioned, in terms of protein fat ratios. If you consume a ton of protein at one sitting, you can knock yourself out because the liver, through gluconeogenesis, converts all those lovely amino acids or some of them right back into glucose.
David Baszucki: My son knows that and I figured that out as well. Protein is not a complete free lunch. You will pick up that glucose effect.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Where have you landed in terms of measuring ketone levels? So for people who are wondering, I’ve used the Precision Xtra device, but then you end up having to do a million finger pricks, which is fine. Eventually you start to feel the level. I’m sure Matt, at this point, can tell when he’s at two millimolars or 2.5 millimolars, which is pretty high for people who are wondering, it’s actually pretty challenging for me to get there unless I’m fasting, so he must be very tight on the controls to get to two to 2.5. But once I hit, I know what it feels like on a Precision Xtra for me to get to 1.2, 1.3 millimolars. In terms of mental sharpness, I can feel the click over to that mode. What do you use for measurement now, or what would you recommend people use?
David Baszucki: Yeah, and we should come back to knowing what it feels like because I do feel, and this might sound a little wacky, I can either do an optimism simulation or a very minor, obviously with all due respect to people who are clinically depressed, a minor depression simulator by how far I go into ketosis or how far I glucose crash and I feel I can set both of those moods a little with my diet. Once again, not obviously the level of depression of people who truly suffer it, but touch on the edges of that.
So I, like you, initially tried some of the finger prick stuff and what’s interesting with fingerprint stuff is best practice would be twice a day check your ketones, kind of stuff. For many of your audience, they’ve probably tried CGM, which are continuous glucose monitors now, which are a complement to ketosis, and those are things where you just slap it on the back of your arm, hook it up to your mobile phone, and you get a graph of your glucose level for two weeks that you can look at. That’s a gentle early sign of ketosis if your glucose is just not spiking, but it’s not the full picture.
What has started coming out now, and it’s surprisingly not available in the United States, are continuous ketone monitors, CKMs, they’re available for sale in Canada. They’ll probably be approved in the next year in the US and, I’ve got to be honest, I’m in a smuggling ring bringing CKMs —
Tim Ferriss: “It fell off the back of a truck.”
David Baszucki: — into the United States.
Tim Ferriss: I might need to join that WhatsApp group.
David Baszucki: Yeah, I’ll send you a CKM and, just like a CGM, you can watch your ketones 24/7 throughout the day and then really see where they’re at. They’re very close to probably what you would assume, right? You’re probably one, 1.5. Matt’s two, 2.5.
I also find it hard to really pop up over in that one to 1.5 zone. I’ve got to really push it to get there, but there’s definitely a feeling, there is a feeling. For me the feeling is one of not irrational optimism, but a little bit of a calm optimism that we can do this and things are going to be okay. And I’m excited about challenges that, I would say when I’m glucose crashing, may seem completely untenable and challenges that seem completely untenable, this is impossible to solve. In a moderate level of ketosis, it’s like, “Hey man, it’s chill. You’ve got food, you’ve got shelter, you’re not going to die. You can solve this thing. Let’s go do it. It’s going to be exciting to solve this challenge.” And so I can feel that feeling.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ll just mention a couple of other things that people might find interesting. Having done a lot of ketosis since 1998 or so, that’s when I first started. I was actually doing a weird, for some people weird, approach to it, a variant called the cyclical ketogenic diet because I was training in athletics, so I would do about 18 hours of, after a glycogen depletion workout, of carbohydrate loading so that you could take advantage of insulin and so on for packing on a little muscle while you’re doing the ketogenic diet.
But the point of that is a few things that I’ve seen repeatedly and it’s N of one, but you do see some of this reported in the literature as well. Number one, I need less sleep. I, actually on average, I would say spend two to three hours less time in bed and I wake up feeling fully refreshed. I wake up and I am awake versus waking up and needing 60 minutes to get up to speed. That is a clear benefit. A weird one that people shouldn’t screw around with too much, but my breath hold times double at least.
David Baszucki: Can I ask, because this scares the crap out of me? What’s your breath hold time?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my breath hold time. If I did it right now, my breath hold time would probably be 45 seconds. I have a really compromised left lung from being born prematurely. I have something analogous to emphysema in my left lung, but when I did, I’ll give you two examples of breath holds. So one was after doing 10, and these are not breathing exercises that put me at risk of a shallow water blackout, but breathing exercises for 10 to 15 breaths along the lines of Wim Hof and then doing a breath hold on the exhale when at about three millimolars in terms of ketone or BHB concentration. That was like two minutes, 50 seconds. So I went from basically 45 seconds to two minutes 50 and had a friend right next to me who is a witness to this, and I’ve done it many times since.
I don’t think extended breath holds are great for your brain. I did another experiment when I was on day nine of a 10-day water fast and I was probably around five, I want to say four to five millimolars. I was really deep and there’s a point at which you could argue the really high concentrations are perhaps not great for you, but I was on day nine of a 10-day water fast and I did a hard shell hypobaric oxygen treatment where you can get up to 2.4 atmospheres, 2.5 atmospheres of pressure. And I was doing that for other reasons, but I thought to myself, well, let’s see what we could do in this type of environment. So I did a bunch of, let’s just call it Wim Hof breathing, breath hold on an exhale and I stopped at nine minutes because I was just terrified myself. I thought I was going to cause an aneurysm or something. Felt totally fine.
David Baszucki: So heavy ketosis, arguably a little lower metabolic rate. If you’ve just gone nine or 10 days without food, you’re probably a little skinnier, like less stuffed.
Tim Ferriss: A little bit.
David Baszucki: And then you’re saying in that hyperbaric chamber you pushed two or two and a half times as much oxygen into your body? Damn.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, nine minutes. And that was without feeling any impulse to breathe. I stopped because I was like, you know what? I’ve never gone anywhere close to this long without breathing and I’m not getting paid for this, so let me just stop and call nine minutes a good breath hold. Yeah.
David Baszucki: Can I ask what you think your average sleep is per night?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my sleep is terrible. It’s really fractured. Sleep for my entire life has been a problem. So I would say that generally I’m spending probably nine hours in bed. I have a latency, so the onset to sleep I would say, and I wear an Oura ring, so I’m able to track some of this. You could debate maybe the accuracy of the algorithms and so on, but around, yeah — there you go. Showing me an aura rig. So I would say 47 minutes to an hour plus for me to get to sleep, that would be an average night. It could be much longer. I probably wake up two to three times per night. And overall, if you look at my sleep score, like the absolute maximum would be around 90. It’s much more frequently. This is on the kind of aura rating scale, but 90 would be an absolutely best night of sleep for me.
It is more typically in this 60 to 70 range. So sleep is a real problem more than almost anything else. I mean there are a few things that contribute to dramatically improved sleep quality. One is zero caffeine, not a little caffeine, zero caffeine, even at very small quantities, I find that my sleep is interrupted. That is a pretty tough pill to swallow or not swallow for me, to be frank. But in addition to exercise and all the levers you would expect, sun exposure, a huge one for me for improving sleep quality, if I get at least 45 minutes of sun exposure. But ketosis just does a lot of heavy lifting on the sleep side of things. And it’s not possible for me to isolate variables here, but I have clinically diagnosed OCD and a lot of ruminative looping. When I am in ketosis, the volume on that goes from a 10 to a two.
So although I haven’t tracked it with an Oura ring, I would suspect my sleep latency is dramatically improved, right? I’m falling asleep a lot faster because my brain isn’t basically saying, oh, finally I have been waiting all day to tell you so much. It’s not that kind of situation quite as much. And then there’s a lot of other things going on, and I would say to folks, not to devalue therapy because I have therapists, I engage with therapy, but if you have some of these fundamental physiological issues, let’s just say with fuel utilization, talk therapy in and of itself is probably not going to fix those things.
And whether that’s looking at, for instance, I have three relatives with Alzheimer’s disease right now, and I’ve done some experiments with providing them with exogenous ketones, so supplemental liquid ketones in this case that they can drink. And if I give them 25 to 30 milliliters of BHB bonded to 1,3-butanediol, there are some real concerns around 1,3-butanediol. Just to make it clear, I think there could be some real liver toxicity from extended use, but putting that aside for the moment, give this to a relative with Alzheimer’s and within 20 to 30 minutes, longer sentences, verbal acuity, noticeably, very noticeably improved. They’re telling stories instead of giving one answer, one word answers.
David Baszucki: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: It’s incredibly noticeable. And for instance, I slept like dog shit last night. Not to get too technical. But I just had a ketone salt mix prior to this conversation and it’s like I can feel it now. I can tell when the light switches come on. And there’s a reason Alzheimer’s is sometimes referred to as type three diabetes. And furthermore, I mean I don’t want to dox this scientist, you might know who I’m talking to, but I don’t think he’s been public about this, where there’s also — there might be some explanatory power in various types of infections as catalysts for certain types of what we would term psychiatric disorders.
And if your glucose metabolism is compromised in some way— And people listening, we’re not going to talk about ketosis the whole time, but honestly, if this is the only thing you take from this conversation, I think for a lot of you it will be well worth it — I’ve had Lyme disease twice and there’s a bunch of ridiculous woo-woo nonsense around Lyme disease and quite a few infectious diseases. Not everyone has Lyme disease. You might just be depressed. There’s a lot of overlap with symptoms for various syndromes. But growing up on Long Island, I had two absolutely verified cases of Lyme disease and other coinfections. Then you take a bunch of antibiotics and you do kill that infection despite what people might say. Nonetheless, you might experience what people call long Lyme disease, like long and what, in retrospect, I’ve realized that a lot of my longer duration symptoms, I think were probably neuro-inflammation, probably microglia, but who knows?
There could be other aspects to it. What solved my symptoms, that came after Lyme disease, was three weeks of strict ketosis, very strict ketosis. And I formed a bunch of pet theories or hypotheses as to why that might be the case because this was 10 years ago, but only recently — well, let me back up. Had at least four, maybe five friends or their wives who had actual proper documented cases of Lyme, a hundred percent success rate of getting rid of their cognitive symptoms and joint pain with strict ketosis. I’m not saying it’s a cure all, but it’s four for four or five for five at this point.
David Baszucki: That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, long-winded way of saying, it’s such an accessible intervention, obviously do it with doctor supervision and neither you or I play a doctor on the internet. But man, it’s right there. It’s right there in front of you and accessible.
David Baszucki: I feel the same thing about sleep. And I feel 10 years ago I used to fear insomnia because that could mean a bad day, but I’ve never correlated this with ketosis. But I now know I can have three nights of what might be considered bad sleep, but I’m not as afraid of it. And now if I wake up at 2:00 a.m. I just listen to some interesting thing I want to listen to, a book or a podcast or something, and I fall back to sleep and I actually feel it’s just like a free learning period rather than something to be afraid of. And I no longer have those days, maybe 10 or 15 years ago where I’d just wake up and just go, it’s going to be a terrible day. I’m exhausted.
And then on the talk therapy thing, the way I sometimes think about this is, it’s kind of interesting that we first go to talk therapy rather than what I would call mechanical therapy. Mechanical therapy is what’s up with the machinery in your brain? Your brain is a machine. And talk therapy, with all due respect, in many cases, very, very valuable. But in many cases, if the machinery is not functioning, not getting enough energy, has a core at the molecular level thing going on, talk therapy is not going to do anything. And so I think that the physiological mechanical should always be the first place to go and in many cases, boom, that can take care of quite a bit.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would actually go further because there have been many periods in my life where I’ve, I don’t want to say ignored, but for periods of time, developed a blind spot related to the mechanical therapy. Looking at examining the engine and oil levels and so on, instead of just trying to improve my driving technique.
And I would go further and say that there are times when, and keeping in mind people, please, I do talk therapy regularly, so I’m not knocking it. I view it as necessary but not sufficient. It can actually put you into a precarious position because if you’re doing a lot of talk therapy but making no progress, you can develop almost a learned helplessness and the self-flagellating can get worse where you’re like, well, wait a second, I’m working with this great therapist. They’re giving me all the tools. Why am I of such a fucking failure? I thought I was so smart. Why can’t I figure this out?
And you can end up in this very dangerous, in some cases, situation where you feel like you cannot fix things because you’re unable to use the talk therapy to fix whatever the underlying issue is. Whereas in reality, it could be a purely physiological issue. Or you at least need that base level of physiological support before you can begin to do some of the higher level functioning and reorienting.
Let’s shift gears. You mentioned listening. This is going to sound like it’s out of left field, but it’s sitting right in front of me. So I might as well ask, this is actually from Lifehacker back in the day. Lifehacker.com. And I want you to tell me if this is still true. “I tend to work well,” this is quoting you, “whenever I’m listening to pure ambient noise, like those you’d find on the Atmospheric Calm playlist on Spotify. It’s my go-to playlist if I need a quick boost in creativity or productivity.” Do you still have any playlists that you listen to of that type?
David Baszucki: I still listen to Atmospheric Calm on Spotify. I am unable to function with anything other than ambient noise in the background. And so ambient means no lyrics, no words, no people saying stuff. For me, if I want some chill music, it’s got to be spa music, ambient music. I can’t get distracted by that.
Tim Ferriss: All right, I’m going to try that playlist because you and I are the same in that way. If there are lyrics, forget about it. It’s just generally not going to work for me.
Let’s talk about Roblox. So there are a million different entry points here. The most obvious one would be to say, David, tell me the genesis story of Roblox. And I do want to hear the genesis story, but I might want to start with one that’s also sitting right in front of me. And maybe we could just start with this. This is under the heading of the future. Why don’t you give people an overview of what Roblox is for those people who have no idea whatsoever? And then the future I have here procedurally generated real-time worlds, aka dreaming in real time, that’s just too attractive for me not to leap into. So what is Roblox? And you could give some stats and figures if that helps give people an idea of the scale and scope of this. And then could you elaborate on the future as I teed it up?
David Baszucki: So hey, the out of the box big picture thing here is humans are just compelled to try to figure out ways to connect and communicate. And we didn’t used to have language and then we figured out language and we could sit around the campfire and communicate and tell stories. And then we tried to communicate at a distance and we had smoke signals or semaphores, and then we figured out writing and the mail system and we had the Pony Express and all of that, but we still wanted to communicate more at a distance. And then we had the telegraph system and then we had the telephone system and we use that a lot. And then we have text. And then in the midst of COVID, all of a sudden video, what we’re doing right now got to be more. And it’s just this core human thing of wanting to connect with people both real time and whatever.
And technically we’re not quite done. Technically, there’s going to be more. And it’s not necessarily dystopian. It could arguably very positive, whether it’s the holodeck we’ve seen on Star Trek or some of those things where maybe instead of a video call, I’m hanging out with my dad and we’re walking around ancient Rome together even though he’s in Carmel and I’m here. Or maybe he feels like he’s right in my office together. And so behind all of Roblox is what I feel is this unstoppable wave of technology that is going to happen. And we have graciously landed in this opportunity to usher it in, initially coming from what seems like a gaming platform, like people playing together, but arguably a platform that, if it’s done well and if it’s done safely and with civility and with scale, can be a very important, not just play, but working platform, communication platform, lonely kid with cancer in the hospital connection platform, lonely kid who’s having a hard time finding their people and finding them digitally platform and maybe even a way to experience music or political rallies even.
So the good news is, it’s good to be in a company with just a big thing happening behind it. The way Roblox presents today is you could think of it as a 3D gaming play platform with about 120 million people on it every day where all of the games, all of the creations, are made by people on the platform, whether it’s a 12-year-old hobbyist, whether it’s a team of 50 people making 10 million dollars a year, where it’s everything in between.
And where, through these user created experiences, about three percent of all the gaming in the world is now starting to happen on Roblox. And gaming is a pretty big market. What’s really beautiful about it is that we see emergent games like you would expect with user generated things where maybe we have a traditional view of what games are. But on Roblox, a top game is Dress to Impress, like a fashion game where you pick clothes out for five minutes and you compete in a fashion show or, what was recently hot, Grow a Garden, where your garden is always growing in the background and you’re tuning it and you’re trying to make it better.
So it’s really a fascinating, interesting journey. I think it started with a combination of great people and just a big vision. It’s an enormous responsibility because there’s probably nine billion hours of people on our platform every month. And at peak times there’s over 40 million people.
And from day one, we’ve built this as a platform for all ages. So we have nine-year olds on the platform. All of their communication is filtered. They’re not able to share images, but they are able to go play hide and go seek. And we put enormous effort on safety and civility with all these things. And we actually, I think have done something very lucky, is unlike almost every other social platform, you name it, it’s 13 and up. We’ve accepted that we have young people on the platform from day one and really built the infrastructure around that rather than denying that. So it’s a really fun company to run, it’s in a really big interesting market. I think we’re going to see people doing virtual 3D work on the platform.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by 3D work? What would be an example of that?
David Baszucki: I just think as, over time, Roblox gets more and more photorealistic and more real-time rather than having a video call. What’s interesting about a video call with 20 people is we see 20 windows and only one or two people can talk at the same time because it gets all confusing. But in a 3D Roblox world, we’re all in the same space and we kind of hear us all at the same time, just like the real world. So I think over time some types of video calls will get replaced with 3D calls. We’ll see music concerts. If you’re not live, you’ll be there in a 3D holodeck type version with your friends dancing and seeing everything around you.
And I do think we’ll ultimately see political rallies where, in addition to the stadium of a hundred thousand people within the rules and the laws of the state where that political rally may be occurring, we may see both a video version, a physical version, and a 3D version where you can be there with your friends and go to that. So I really do think we’re at the start of just used to be the phone and now video is pretty big. And someday 3D is going to be pretty big too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
I can’t remember. Alan Key? I might be getting the attribution wrong.
David Baszucki: Alan Kay?
Tim Ferriss: Kay. Alan Kay. Is that “The best way to predict the future is to create it”?
David Baszucki: I think the future, in many ways, we sometimes don’t have the hubris to feel many things are inevitable. And so, one other way to predict the future I think is many things are just inevitable. There are enough smart people around that the wheel was inevitable and one could take credit. I invented the wheel, but that wheel was probably going to get invented by thousands of different people anyways. And I think we have a little bit of the same vision at Roblox. We are working on something that is inevitable. We are participating in building it, but I don’t think we would lay claim to being the inventors of it.
Tim Ferriss: Although I’m fascinated by the Incan Empire, it seems like they never landed on the wheel idea. It’s like what they were able to accomplish without the wheels is totally bananas. But that’s — go figure.
David Baszucki: Yeah, that is bananas. That is. But then again, if they would’ve survived, they might’ve come across it.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. Maybe they just ran out of runway. So let me ask you, since a lot of entrepreneurs are listening to this, and I’m sure even if they have not played Roblox, they have heard of Roblox and the numbers you’re providing our mind-boggling numbers in terms of the breadth and size of Roblox and where it’s going. You mentioned the creator community, and I’ve got some numbers in front of me, like Roblox creators earned more than one billion dollars in the past year, and this, in a sense, open development community seems to be key to growth. How early on did you figure that out? Did you try to do things internally for a while and then prototype it and then pour gasoline on it? Or was that just from the very first sort of nascent stages of this product of the company, part of the plan?
David Baszucki: I believe one has to always be innovating in a company like this. And part of building a company like Roblox is those innovations have to be happening year after year. One almost needs a system for innovation. We, along the way, with the way this economic system called the developer system, Roblox was always what is called a user-generated content platform, which means creators are making stuff, people are learning STEM, people are getting excited. Even the ego burst of having three friends play a game can really motivate a young person to get into computer science. And so, initially, you could say Roblox ran on the excitement of having friends see what you’re working on.
We initially had a much more primitive economic system, a club membership thing, like some much older virtual worlds from young people. And we had one of these moments that we’ve had so many in the company where one number is going great and one number is not going so great. And, at this point, we had one number going great, which is user growth and hours growth, but we had this other number going not great, which is revenue. And that was really —
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain what the membership — what that looked like at the time just so I have an understanding?
David Baszucki: The membership, the early membership model was, if you subscribe for $5 a month, you get some cool stuff, you get some skins for your website, you get more places to build stuff so you could build more. But that was actually a very dangerous revenue model because there should never be any impediment to building and creating. That should just be unlimited and free. So we had arguably a primitive revenue model. We weren’t making building free. And it was like selling a little extra cool thing like extra chrome on your car or something. And that was getting stale and tired.
And what we learned in that is, sometimes, your intuitive, big picture, very difficult thing is the right solution, but we did what many other entrepreneurs would do, which is, like, “Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a revenue problem. We need to forensically diagnose this. Let’s look at the 50 things. What did we change? What did we break? Oh, we can’t find anything we broke. Okay, let’s spend three more months making a list of all the small little tweaks we can do to improve revenue. Oh, let’s stack rank them. Okay, there’s 50 things. Well, okay, let’s do the top 10 of those. Oh, my gosh, those aren’t working.” And then, in the back of our heads, we had been saying there’s one thing that’s really difficult, which is we need a digital economy, virtual currency. We need players to be able to buy Robux. We need them to be able to go into any game and use their Robux. We need the creators to sell things for Robux.
Whatever they could think of, we have to trust that these creators, in a pizza delivery game, they’re going to sell us a scooter for anyone who wants to deliver pizzas faster. We’re going to have to trust that, in Bird Simulator, they’re going to sell the ability to turn into an eagle faster than if you just play. And so, all of a sudden, okay, let’s go do the big strategic thing. This is going to take a while. Let’s just go, go, go, go.
Tim Ferriss: Were there any sources of inspiration who led you to consider the digital economy Robux route? Were there any antecedents or influences?
David Baszucki: You could say Adam Smith. Like, literally, the way our economy works, people have some currency. They buy things. When artists or creators make stuff, people decide what they want to buy. People are very creative in making that. We are literally inspired by the real-world economy, and so we said we have to have kind of a microcosm of the real-world economy. What was exciting is, even though we knew this was going to take two or three months to build, the second we committed, like, “Forget all these fixes, forget all of these little things, we’re going all in at what we think is the big strategic fix to this problem.” It was very relaxing and fun. It was just like we’re —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can see you getting visibly excited. I’m just wondering, with such a seemingly dramatic move, number one, am I over dramatizing the risks involved in doing it? Is it more like, hey, it seems big, and it is big, but it’s actually not that risky, number one? Number two is how did you decide internally to hit go on that decision?
David Baszucki: I think we were smaller. We had 20 people. We had spent three months trying to find what we broke. We’d spent three months trying the top 10 of the 50 stack rank things and we were like okay. But I think we had hope and conviction that, if we built this right, we would build essentially a system that, if Roblox grows, our economy will grow. And we’re not going to be day in day out trying to fix the economy. If we build this system, we can get back to making Roblox fun. We are always working on safety. We continue to focus on that, focus on those things, because we’re going to build a system that’s going to scale with the system. And, by the way, that did turn out to be true. If we typically double the number of users or the number of hours, we’ll generally double the revenue. The system just —
Tim Ferriss: Got it. So, in this case, the numbers that were looking good, that you mentioned before, hours played, is now directly correlated with another number which looks good —
David Baszucki: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — which is the revenue —
David Baszucki: Revenue —
Tim Ferriss: — as opposed to diverging because one is subscription per month or whatever the interval was. Got it. Okay.
David Baszucki: We wanted to get to a point where revenue equals K times hours. And that was the hope.
Tim Ferriss: What’s K?
David Baszucki: Just a constant. Pick a number.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay. Got it.
David Baszucki: Revenue equals some multiple times hours. So then, psychologically, what was exciting is, a few days into this, it’s like pretty relaxed. Right? We’re obviously risking wasting three months on this, and we’re risking that this won’t work. But the opposite side of it is, “Oh, my gosh, we really can imagine this thing working. And if this thing works, it’s really going to work. And this one thing is going to work really, really well.” And it’s a pretty complex feature. We needed digital currency. We needed users to be able to buy digital currency. We needed anyone’s game. In your hide-and-go-seek game, you needed a facility to be able to sell a flashlight for five Roblox. We needed the facility for you to take all of your Roblox and turn them into cash to support your living as creator. We needed a discovery component to see what are the interesting games that you can spend Robux in.
We needed developers to do all of this stuff, so we had to build all of this in parallel. But what was interesting is we had kind of some secret rocket engine behind it and that for the first time ever, as a complement to this feature, you or I could imagine making a living on Roblox because, before, we were hobbyists and, all of a sudden, whoa, if I could make five grand a month with my Roblox game, I might just work on that full time rather than an hour a day. So we felt there would be a secret afterburner here that people would work harder on their Roblox game. So, fast-forward, and we got within a day of shipping and we were, like, “Okay, it’s like we’re kind of hoping this works. I hope this works.” And then like, now, the dev community had heard about it. Everyone’s really excited about it. And the day we shipped it, I would say, within four hours, we knew it’s going to work just like boom.
Tim Ferriss: Was that a revenue metric? Was it just an adoption metric? How did you know it was going to work?
David Baszucki: It’s, oh, my gosh, of the top a hundred creators on Roblox, 22 of them already have Robux features. Oh, my gosh.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it, like integrated that quickly.
David Baszucki: Yeah. Oh, my gosh, a bunch of users have already bought Robux in the first four hours. Oh, my gosh, people are spending Roblox in these places. Oh, my gosh. And so, yeah, it was a little example of what we would call doing the hard thing and taking the long view. It’s a little bit like, when the strategic thing is right, everything else follows. And, metaphorically, it’s a little bit like, first and foremost, if you’re having a mental health crisis, work on your body and your machinery maybe before you work on the talk therapy. Like get the strategic things right first.
Tim Ferriss: And when you were about to ship to make this virtual economy a reality, this digital economy, prior to shipping, did you have a framework for how you would decide whether it was pass, fail? In other words, was it time-bound, like, “We’re going to follow X, Y, and Z metrics for four weeks. And if it’s not working, we’re going to roll back to the prior version?” What was the plan B. Or was there nothing like that?
David Baszucki: I feel, this one, we’ve got conviction. I think what actually happened is, in the back of our minds, we all really knew this was the right big way to go. It was just so much work that we constantly kicked the can down the road, tried to fix things, tried to do the small things, and then, finally, when we accepted reality, we got to do the right, big-picture thing, all of a sudden, it’s like, “Okay, we accept the reality. We got to do the strategic thing,” and then it was all good. And then I think we started believing this is going to work.
Tim Ferriss: All right, let me ask a question about this digital economy. So you talked about different creators making a living and many of them are doing much more than making a living on Roblox. Some of them are fantastically successful. And one of my employees sent me his two kids’ favorite games and then Dad’s favorites. One of them is a game you mentioned, Grow a Garden. And you also mentioned Dress to Impress, which shows up for one of them. There are a bunch of other ones.
Well, you know what, just for fun, there are a couple that show up a bunch. The Mimic, 99 Nights in the Forest, and there are many more. But I wanted to talk about Grow a Garden specifically, because Grow a Garden was also the game that came up when I was in a text thread with my friend Kevin Rose. And Kevin’s an amazing entrepreneur, a fantastically successful investor, and he kept sending me these videos, these screen captures or iPhone videos, I don’t know which, of playing Grow a Garden with his little girls. And he just loves the game. He’s got to be one of your biggest spenders, I would have to imagine, based on some of the conversations I’ve had with him.
And he had a question, and I would love to know how you think about this as sort of the Fed and the president and everything involved at the top of the pyramid for this digital economy. His observation was that, when something like Grow a Garden comes out, and I apologize that I haven’t participated in the ecosystem quite so I can’t speak to this, but, once something is really successful, a lot of copycats come out, a lot of clones sort of come out. How do you think about handling that type of situation where people might go to an imitator believing it to be the original, they spend money, et cetera, all of these possible complications, or maybe ensuring that creators are incentivized to put the time into developing their games. If they fear they might be cloned, how do you think of handling a lot of these issues which get handled offline as well, of course, with the USPTO. And you have drug development and certain types of rules and regulations around IP. How do you think about handling that in your digital economy?
David Baszucki: Yeah, so I would say, first, more and more, from an IP copyright standpoint, things that are typically IP and copyrighted like the name Grow a Garden and things like that, or avatars or things like that, the same protections exist on our platform that would exist in any other platform. What is trickier is barring a name or a trademark or a copyright, a form of game play that’s traditionally not been protected. I’m not a lawyer, so I might not be giving the exact right thing, but if I made an experience on Roblox called Water Your Plants a Lot and Create an Amazing Garden, and it kind of works like Grow a Garden, that’s a little hard to protect.
What we do find, and we work a lot on it, is people who make similar type experiences do try to draft on the main experience. They get very creative. We have the ability because, when people search for Grow a Garden or when they look for it and they type that in, we can see a lot about all of the games, the game that matches exactly like Grow a Garden. Or even if someone types in the word “garden”, we know pretty well that there’s one game on Roblox with the name “garden” in it that has 25 million people playing at the same time. And there’s a bunch of other games with the word “garden” in it that have 10 people playing, and so we can be pretty intelligent in really showing, like, “This is Grow a Garden even if you type ‘garden’, and here’s a few small other ones.” But we would not block Dave’s Try to Create a Garden game even if Grow a Garden were there.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the other best decisions? I’m also going to ask biggest mistakes after this. I’m just going to plant that seed, because I often ask people what are their favorite failures or mistakes. In addition to the implementation of the digital economy, what have been some of the best decisions? Those could be design features. Those could be related to business model. They could be related to org chart of the company and how you thought about that. It could be really anything, but some of the best decisions that, since made, have contributed to the success of Roblox.
David Baszucki: I think one of the best decisions we’ve made is trying to optimize creator revenue over profits actually. And so, when I’m running Roblox and we have our CFO and our board and we have a lot of options and we’re making billions and billions of things flowing through the company, we end up with this really interesting decision where we’re trying to keep our employment cost as efficient as we can. We’re trying to keep the cost of running Roblox as efficient as we can. We’re trying to have really many interesting ways to efficiently purchase Roblox without that costing a lot. And we end up with two final places the cash can go. One is it can go back to the developers or the other is, quote, we can make profit.
And, time and time again, I think we’ve leaned a bit on the direction of “Let’s move back more to the creator community” rather than being a ridiculously profitable company. We do generate cash, and we put some cash in the bank. But, generally, we’re trying to create that creator community. And I think that goes hand in hand with, when we think about designing the product, we have groups that work on our simulation engine, and the user experience, and the economy, and trust and safety. Our economy team’s been pretty gracious in that their goal is to generate revenue. But the real primary goal is to make Roblox engaging and interesting and fun, not at the expense of revenue. And so our economy team has been very gracious in a sense saying, “Yeah, the primary goal is still user engagement, not making money.” So I think that’s been a good decision. We have —
Tim Ferriss: Now, could you say more about that because people might have —
David Baszucki: Well, you could imagine if you were —
Tim Ferriss: — questions about that?
David Baszucki: If you were the head of Roblox economy and you said, “Hey, Dave, for my job, all I want to do is make the most money.” That seems like a logical thing for that economy team. What I would say is, “Well, we want to be careful. We like you, for every feature you build, to make sure that it’s neutral-to-positive on fun as well, and that, if you come up with a wacky feature that people get confused and just spend a lot of money and they’re not quite as happy, but we make more money, that would fail all of our metrics. And so, in a sense, we can make more money, but we really want to move all of the things. We want to move fun. We want to move how much people enjoy Roblox at the same time.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it also seems, tell me if I’m misreading this, like playing the long game in the sense that, if you want to build the largest company possible, if you want to have 10 percent of all gaming content on Roblox, if you want to go beyond that.
David Baszucki: I would say, subject to constraints, actually, because what our mission is is connect a billion users with optimism and civility. And so there’s some pretty big guardrails around that in that we would not just take the billion daily users. We would take the billion daily users if the average user on our platform might come away with a higher level of civility than if they hadn’t even played. We are actually trying to teach civility at the same time we’re growing the company.
Tim Ferriss: And what I was going to say is not mutually exclusive with that. I was just going to say that you need the game developers to be happy for the long-term interest of everyone involved, including Roblox, right? So you don’t want to kill the golden goose by pulling out as much profit as possible.
David Baszucki: No. We think the more efficiently we run the company, the more of the money flowing through that flows to the developers. It’s a much better long game than just trying to be a hyper-profitable company.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the missteps or mistakes along the way that have stood out for you?
David Baszucki: Generally, missteps happen either not taking the long view and sometimes trying to do too much rather than doing less better. I’ll share a classic mistake that’s really hard to get one’s head around. Maybe five to eight years ago, there’s a whole category of gaming that was around being in a clan and making points and having rankings and all of that. And those are features that are beautiful within a single game or beautiful within certain games. But, arguably, those are features that aren’t necessarily something we should have been building as a platform. We should have trusted the developers to, like, “You go build your game with that stuff,” rather than us saying, “We want to be in the gaming business rather than the platform business.” And so we spent a lot of time building out some of that kind of clan ranking functionality, clan point stuff, and we threw it all away because it was trying to do too much on the platform.
We’ve done many, many things well. One thing we did really well was Roblox was initially a PC/Macintosh company. And there was a time when people did not believe that 3D stuff should happen on a phone. Phone games were two-dimensional, more puzzle-type thing. And there was a technological leap that, just like with the iPhone, all of a sudden, websites that were used to being these big PC websites, with a pinch and a Zoom, would work on an iPhone, the exact same website. There’s no more of this separate mobile-web stuff. It was a huge innovation. And I think we did it right, thinking that this 3D immersive, metaverse, holodeck stuff will ultimately work on a phone as well. And most Roblox games run on a phone or a big screen at the same time. And that has really, I’d say, turned to pass and worked out really well for us.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you have confidence in that when others didn’t?
David Baszucki: It just seemed inevitable. I think the reason we felt it was inevitable is people were watching movies on their phone at that time. And movies are kind of three-dimensional. And games are starting to approach movies. It just seemed inevitable. But, you are right, that was a little bit of me and a couple other people in the company believed it. But that was a pivotal time when probably 90 percent of the company said, “No way is this one going to work,” but we took the risk on it.
Tim Ferriss: What was the risk?
David Baszucki: Distraction.
Tim Ferriss: Distraction?
David Baszucki: Yeah, like we’re going to spend all this time on this iPhone version of Roblox. But that same kind of stuff taking that big, long leap, the very — there was a really fun, very simple game called Survive the Natural Disaster on Roblox. And early on in the prototyping phase, I had a version running on a very old iPhone. And it was that same feeling as the virtual economy. It’s just, “This is going to work.” Boom. Now, iPhones and Androids are the biggest platforms for Roblox.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The inevitability part is worth underscoring. I’ll just share a quick story, which was in 2008 or 2009 when I first met Tobi, CEO of Shopify. This was when they had nine or 12 employees, something like that, and Harley as well. And I ended up becoming an advisor to the company, which was pretty good timing. But the point of the story is that the way I decided to look at that really seriously was, number one, I asked my fans how I should update my first book related to e-commerce specifically. And they mentioned Shopify over and over again, but I took a look at it.
And, to borrow from this wild man, hacker/investor named Pablos Holman, he often will look out and he says, “Okay. Well, what’s going to happen next year is pretty hard, maybe, to predict with any precision. But what might happen in 10 or 20 years can be a little bit easier.” If you ask yourself, “Will there be more or less e-commerce?” I think it’s pretty obvious, right? At that point, more. Will there be more phones? Will there be more broadband connectivity? Yes, and yes, like if you had to choose a yes or no. And pretty soon, when you start to add up a few of those, you come to the conclusion that this seems like an inevitability. It also seems inevitable that someone’s going to win in this space, so why not bet on the horse that my readers have recommended over and over again? And that was the decision process. There was more to it, of course. I mean, Tobi is a genius, and Harley is amazing, but —
David Baszucki: But if it was Tobi from Shopify, you probably also had some intuition that this is the type of person that can make that happen.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean, it can’t just be a good idea. I mean, the team was critically important. And Tobi is one of the best first principles thinkers and systems thinkers —
David Baszucki: Tobi is a —
Tim Ferriss: — I’ve ever met in my life.
David Baszucki: — very systems thinker, absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. But the inevitability part, I sometimes just like to point out to folks, like, yeah, I’ve done a lot of angel investing in this and that, and I’ve had some luck, but you can train yourself to ask some of these questions to narrow down the list of players you might consider just based on these inevitabilities. And if you can’t find an inevitability, it’s like, okay, maybe you just opt out of that particular playing field, whatever that might be.
Let me ask a couple of questions from one of my employees. This is, again, the father who plays with his kids. We can do just a couple of these. Are there any games that maybe aren’t super popular, but you particularly like? Are there any games that are not sort of the greatest hits that a lot of people listening would know where you’re, like, “Yeah, I am actually a fan of this game or that game?” Any come to mind?
David Baszucki: Yeah. I think what I’m a fan of, and I’m hoping that happens more on Roblox, is more nichey content that super fans would have. So there’s a couple simulations. One is, and I forget the name, but it’s a simulation of a full airline company. And it’s a simulation, it seems unbelievable, but a simulation where you go to the airport, you buy tickets, you wait in the lounge, you get on the plane with everyone else, you take your seat, you go on a flight for an hour, you get served with a flight attendant, and everyone plays a role. You’re either a passenger. You’re a flight attendant. You’re a pilot. You’re an executive in the airline.
That kind of thing really blows my mind just because of the potential for amazing role playing. And, yeah, I think the potential for individuals to, “Hey, there’s a role for everyone.” There’s the first-class passengers. That’s a role. There’s also the baggage handler or whatever. I think that’s really fun. I also like model railroading. And I think I like all the railroad games on Roblox because that — there’s this hobby 30, 40, 50 years ago before we had computers that people would make all these model railroad sets in their Midwestern basements. And they don’t do that anymore. But I like the idea that that hobby can go digital on a platform like Roblox.
Tim Ferriss: How many games are there, roughly, on Roblox?
David Baszucki: The number is almost meaningless because it’s millions and millions and millions, and so what it turns into is more these crazy numbers. Like how many people make more than a million dollars? I think that’s pretty big. How many people can make a living. And that’s thousands and thousands that can make a living. How many make any money at all? We will validate that I’m giving you the right number, but that’s tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. And then how many are making cool stuff to show off with their friends? That’s in the millions. So there’s a lot.
Tim Ferriss: All right, this is another one, again, from my employee. What are things kids can do to be extra safe on Roblox or I guess, by extension that parents could do to ensure their kids are extra safe on Roblox?
David Baszucki: So this is a big one, and I think we are really working to keep kids on Roblox actually. And this might sound counterintuitive, but we’re really working to keep people in a place where text is filtered and we can monitor critical harms and where there’s no image sharing or video sharing. I would say, the backstory of the industry right now is there are a lot of 10-year-olds who have phones. And there’s a lot of 10-year-olds who can install software that is for 13-year-olds. And a lot of that software allows more open communication, unfiltered communication, and sharing pictures. We’ve all heard there’s a lot of things that go on on the internet that are really terrible. When people start sharing images, they can get blackmailed, they can start trying to meet someone in the real world.
So we’re working really hard to just stay on Roblox. And I would say, there are controls for parents as far as if you only want your kid to communicate with the people you pick, we will offer that for you. But I would say, we accept the responsibility and the challenge that not all kids are talking with their parents. And there are so many kids out there who when they’re 10, they get handed an iPhone and they go try a bunch of stuff, and we have to build Roblox in a way that is as safe as possible for those kids.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. What does the future hold, do you think, just for safety precautions or other technological innovations that might just help you to manage the entire system in that way to mitigate risk?
David Baszucki: I think we’re rapidly approaching a position where what is going on is in addition to all of our investigators, and in addition to all of that, the advancements in AI that we’re bringing forward on our platform. And some of the things we’ve committed to make this essentially not just a very, very, very, very, very good system, but a system that we almost take for granted. One thing that we have in the works right now, by the end of this year, using AI, using age estimation, using the camera on everyone’s phone, we’re going to know pretty well the age of everyone on our platform.
And in addition to filtering all text on our platform, and in addition to monitoring for critical harms, we’re going to start clustering people by ages just so unless you happen to know that person who’s a farther age away, we’re not going to let you communicate at all. So I think we’re going to zero in on that. So I do think, over time, both on the communication and the content side as well, we’re going to get to that well beyond very, very, very, very, very, very good type system.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, how long have you been embracing, how long have you been an AI shop, I suppose is one way to put it? Roblox. How long have you had elements behind the scenes, exactly?
David Baszucki: Behind the scenes, Roblox is a hundreds of different AI model shop. We build them ourselves. We have built all of our own texts, safety models, all of our own voice safety models. A lot of the models we use for figuring out what is a cool game to play. We’ve built our own translation system that is starting to translate from one language to another. We have started to debut some of the more, I wouldn’t say more exciting, but more futuristic stuff, which is 3D creation by AI, so that even if you or I aren’t used to using 3D tools, we can talk about things and have those be created. And we have more coming.
As you said earlier, I think you use something like procedurally generated, real-time dreaming. We have our eyes on that. And I think beyond, I would say, oh, can I use AI to make a game? It’s interesting to think if someday, will AI literally create an evolving game as we’re walking around, almost as if you and I are in a dream world or the Holodeck talking about the Holodeck and just have that fill in around us?
Tim Ferriss: And that’s another thing that seems kind of inevitable, right? Why wouldn’t that happen? It seems like, I don’t know, you’re holding a finger up, so what do you think?
David Baszucki: I think you’re exactly right. I think a long time ago, if we read a comic book, we would see Dick Tracy with a TV set on his watch. And we would just say, that’s completely crazy. We’ll never see a TV set. And now we have a smart watch. And a long time ago we had HAL in 2001, and no one’s ever going to be like that. And arguably, the AI systems today are better than HAL in 2001. So yeah, I think the average consumer, you, or me, or other people, if we have a crazy vision of some future technology, there’s a good chance we’re going to figure out how to build it someday.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. The Impossibles are worth questioning, particularly within the realm of AI. I was listening to a professor, well, Fei-Fei Li, I believe her name is.
David Baszucki: Absolutely. I know they’re working on a beautiful, wonderful idea of a company.
Tim Ferriss: They are, and she’s incredible. We were actually at Princeton at the same time. And she had Andrej Karpathy as a student at one point. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that. But the point is they were generating descriptions from images, and Fei-Fei I think at one point, she talked about this in her TED Talk, was saying, “What if we could generate an image from the description? So go the other direction.” And even at that time, which was not that long ago, if you think about it, Andre was like, “Yeah, no, that’s impossible. That’s not going to happen.” And yet here we are, really just in the blink of an eye.
So a lot of these things, like the holodeck you’re talking about, it’s like, sure you guys are working on this. There are other people working on some version of this. The ability to walk around Rome or something with a friend or to be in their living room with very, very lightweight hardware, it’s like, man, this stuff feels like it’s just around the corner. Who knows? People have said that about fusion for a long time, but I think in this particular case, it’s just so technologically-enabled and the development is so rapid that it’s hard for me to imagine a future without these things. I mean, how far away do you think these things are? The holodeck has come up a couple of times, how far away, if you were a betting man?
David Baszucki: There’s some various things to think about, right? How long till a Hollywood movie is maybe AI generated? Three to five years maybe, crazy. How long before there’s a product where instead of whatever you like, TikTok, Shorts, Reel, Spotlight, whatever short form video product you like, how long before some of that activity rather than you thumb scrolling, you’re watching a continuous video of your dream rather than all of those, who knows? That’s going to be kind of crazy.
I think one of the things we have our eyes on that is technically very difficult. How long could we support a photo realistic music concert with 100,000 people in the same stadium? Where if you and I were on the other side of the stadium and I waved a flag, you could see me and we could have a full simulation of how that concert. We’ve got our eyes on that. I’m not going to make a prediction, but that’s a really big technical lift to build that kind of technology out. But I think that’s going to happen as well. How long before my glasses have full AR overlay and I’m getting a lot of feedback? We’re starting to see early signs of that. So there’s a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe.
Tim Ferriss: I know a lot of friends who have gone from private to public, and it’s not to say it’s a bad thing. In a lot of ways, it can be an incredible thing, but you have more voices at the table in some respects. And I’m wondering how you think about preserving some of the, or ensuring that some of the constraints and values you put in place early continue even with those additional voices at the table.
So for instance, you mentioned TikTok, question from another friend was around Roblox Moments. And then they said, “Context, Moments has recently released beta short-form video format similar to TikTok.” And then I think back to when you were talking about STEM and some of the games that my friends use with their kids, which relate to critical thinking and so on. And I know nothing about Moments, so you could describe it. But when I hear similar to TikTok, I think, man, well if kids are able to use that instead of something that is STEM-focused, that’s quite a battle for attention. And I’m not sure who wins there, maybe the TikTok analog wins. How do you think about product development moving forward?
David Baszucki: Yeah, so one thing, I think that there’s a separation on intention in that historically side-by-side, the big thing I shared with you about this desire to connect, I think there is also a desire to tell stories and consume stories. And a lot of consuming stories is a bit of a different emotional head space, chilling out, watching a movie, watching a TV show, scrolling through short-form video, things like that. What I think is exciting is people have different mental models of I want to go hang out with people and do stuff together, or I want to be by myself and consume stuff by myself. And that gives me some positivity on building a connection platform because that desire, I think, for people to be with friends and meet and hang out with friends is always going to be there.
On the Moments thing, the reason we created Roblox Moments behind the scenes is there’s a couple things going on. People are looking for ways to find cool Roblox content. And one of the ways to find content is see what your friends are doing or see what other people are doing and jump into that. And so we think it is a gentle way to help people find more interesting stuff. You mentioned STEM on that side. I do feel once again, behind the scenes of everything that’s happened on Roblox from then to now, if we were to tabulate the number of new entrants into computer science, or graphic arts, or economics that had been inspired by Roblox, it probably is in the millions given just that experience that people have had on our platform.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the challenges of being a public company CEO?
David Baszucki: If your machinery is functioning, you can keep making those, I would say, bigger, more optimistic decisions. I think when we talked earlier about you’re feeling you’re in ketosis or you’re feeling you’re not in it, I think there’s a little bit of a connection to if the machinery is running properly, the decisions tend to drift a little bit more long-term and strategic because you’re not in fight or flight. Whereas if you’re in a glucose crash and you’re a little more fight or flighty, those decisions can tend to lean more tactical and that long-term thing’s going to be —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a good point.
David Baszucki: The long-term thing’s going to be impossible. Everything’s an emergency, let’s just do, do, do, do, do. And so I think trying to stay in the right balance of long-term decision making is a big thing.
Tim Ferriss: So for people who may not be watching the video and perhaps they’ve seen photos of you, but when we had our conversation a while back, this was our first conversation discussing the possibility of doing this podcast together. Biohacking came up as one topic we could explore. Maybe you could speak to some aspects or elements of your self-care routine. Because you obviously take good care of yourself, clearly exercise. What does the regimen look like, what does a week in the life look like in terms of when you are performing at your best, supporting the machinery?
David Baszucki: A lot of it is just trying to have some form of movement every day. As you said, get some sun every day. On the diet side, definitely pretty much two nights ago I had a glass of wine. I could definitely feel it. So try to keep very, very low on the alcohol. I would say, try to stay in moderate ketosis, have the workouts fun and set up, and a balance of those things. It’s not that complicated though. Like you I’m trying to eat in that say, 1:00 to 6:00 window and trying to know generally what pieces I would eat. Trying to more get to bed at 9:00 rather than 11:00 type thing. Pretty simple.
Tim Ferriss: What do your meals look like? I imagine maybe you have some commonalities in meals from day to day.
David Baszucki: Mine are very similar to yours. I would say, low carb everywhere, fair amount of meat, fair amount of eggs, fair amount of butter, coupled with lettuce, veggies, stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss: And what about non-negotiable exercise? Do you have a weight training three times a week? Do you have something else that is sort of non-negotiable?
David Baszucki: CrossFit three times a week, hiking with a weighted vest three or four times a week, pretty simple.
Tim Ferriss: And you’ve got your Oura Ring on. What kind of stuff do you track for yourself? Are you recording these workouts? Are you just doing the workout of the day as prescribed by the Crossfit Gym? What type of stuff are you doing?
David Baszucki: Yeah, I’ve got a trainer that I’ve got a dialogue and my whole thing set up in my garage. So we have a fun little thing going on there. On my Oura Ring, somewhat similar to when you were talking about your sleep score. I don’t look at my Oura thing maybe more than once a month because I actually don’t want to get freaked out by how bad my sleep scores are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good idea. Good idea.
David Baszucki: So I’m like you. I’m in the 60 to 80, 60 to 90 zone on the sleep, and I try on the sleep just not to worry about it.
Tim Ferriss: So when you say you don’t look at it more than once a month, what are you doing once a month? Are you crunching that yourself, just scrolling through the Oura Ring or are you exporting the data and doing something with it?
David Baszucki: I’m just looking at the Oura Ring. What I’m mostly looking for once a month, is that the Oura projected stress score, the Oura projected cardio age. I’m looking for what’s my lowest heart rate while I’m sleeping. I’m looking at HRV, just do a scan of those things, maybe temperature. But nothing too much more than that. I would say, I’ve spent quite a long time wearing a CGM or a CKM to dial in my diet and watching those type things. That would be my biggest recommendation for people is to wear a CGM if you can. I think you can buy them on Amazon right now because it’s pretty interesting.
At Roblox, we give everyone a CGM. And —
Tim Ferriss: Which CGM do you give them?
David Baszucki: I think it’s FreeStyle or whatever. I don’t know. Or I think they can buy either one. The other thing we do at Roblox is we have pretty good snacks, but we label all of the snacks at Roblox on two axes. One is the whole food axis, and not all whole foods is necessarily metabolically what I would call metabolically good. Like fresh-squeezed orange juice might be whole foods. We also —
Tim Ferriss: Hemlock’s a whole food too.
David Baszucki: And then we also put it on another axis, which we just picked up the Good Energy axis. It’s not a strict keto axis, but it’s pretty close to that. And we’ve got the Casey Means book from that and all of that. So every snack at Roblox is either, is it whole energy or not? Is it whole food or not? And what’s surprising is with that, with talking about it at company meetings, with giving out the CGMs, I get all kinds of Slacks from engineers saying, “Oh my gosh, my life’s been changed. I’ve been wearing the CGM. And we used to eat just white giant plates of white rice every dinner. And we’ve read a few books and I’m not eating that. I lost 30 pounds and I feel so sharp. And that’s amazing.” And then I’m like, so actually we’re getting a lot of that from employees in the company.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is remarkable how much stabilizing your glucose metabolism and just how far that goes, touches every aspect of your life. David, just a few more questions then we’ll wrap right up. This is just kind of a couple of rapid fire before we land the plane. Favorite books or books that you’ve gifted or recommended a lot to other people? Are there any books that come to mind?
David Baszucki: One of our board members gave me this book called The Infinite Game, and it’s the original infinite game book. There’s some follow ons from it about how to implement the infinite game, so I forget the original author.
Tim Ferriss: So there’s a book by Simon Sinek, which is The Infinite Game. The original Finite and Infinite Games, I believe, is Carse.
David Baszucki: Yeah, that’s the one, the original. And so that one really got me into thinking fun, play, Roblox is a long game. It’s not a short game. That one I think really got me thinking, so I’m a big fan of that.
Tim Ferriss: Were there any books that had an outsized influence on you as an entrepreneur or a company builder?
David Baszucki: What’s interesting is I’ve never really ever liked any business books ever.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I feel you. I feel you.
David Baszucki: The books I was obsessed with in my youth were the books about Magellan, and Captain Cook, and Mutiny on the Bounty, and Joshua Slocum, and just all of these crazy explorers, Amundsen, and Scott, and all of that stuff. For some reason, that was my go-to category.
Tim Ferriss: Probably in some ways a more helpful set of reading than the typical business books where you have complete information in retrospect, whereas these people just forging off into the unknown, are dealing with catastrophe, and challenges, and curveballs at every turn.
David Baszucki: Amundsen versus Scott is such a balance of knowing how to play the long game and being prepared versus not, and it’s a great comparison.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, two last questions. This one is the billboard question. If you could put, metaphorically speaking, a message, a question, a quote, anything on a billboard to get the message to millions or billions of people, anything non-commercial, could be a mantra, something you live by, anything at all, what might you put on that billboard?
David Baszucki: You know what, I’m thinking metaphorically right now, just off our whole conversation and then popping back to Surrealistic Pillow. I don’t know if everyone would get it, but how about feed your head?
Tim Ferriss: Feed your head, yeah. Yeah. Feed your head.
David Baszucki: That’s what ketosis does.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. God, I was kind of on the fence about whether or not to do ketosis before my next trip to Mexico. And I’m thinking it’s time to get into ketosis. David, is there anything else that you’d like to say or point people to? Anything at all? Anything you’d like to ask my audience? Of course, people can find Roblox, R-O-B-L-O-X.com, Roblox. They can find you on X @DavidBaszucki. We’ll link to all of these things as well as YouTube and Baszucki Group. Is there anything else you’d like to say or mention before we wind to a close here?
David Baszucki: No. I want to thank you for having me on, and I think going back to your earlier book, I just want to also think, one other thing I really remember is your mixing of, I forget what kind of oil you were mixing with your coffee really early on.
Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah. Could have been MCT oil, could have been any number of things that I was experimenting with.
David Baszucki: Yeah. And I think you were onto something there because I have my coffee with whole cream, which is zero carb, which I think has some overlap with your MCT oil. So my takeaway would be, if you want to dabble in ketosis, go buy some whole cream for your coffee rather than half and half.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, heavy cream, just to be clear, it’s not half and half. Heavy cream, which sometimes coffee shops will have in the back. It is effectively pure fat and man, is that stuff delicious, also. But back in the day, with kids with epilepsy when it was hard to get them to maybe choke down the butter and this, that, and the other thing, heavy cream, that was the key to the kingdom of feeding your head. David, thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate it. And for folks listening, we’ll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And feed the machine, feed your head. It doesn’t always have to be something you think your way out of, sometimes you have to fix the physiology. Thanks for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: David Baszucki, Co-Founder of Roblox — The Path to 150M+ Daily Users, Critical Business Decisions, Ketogenic Therapy for Brain Health, Daily Routines, The Roblox Economy, and More (#834) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-11-05 08:07:04
David Baszucki (@DavidBaszucki) is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox. TIME named Roblox one of the “100 Most Influential Companies,” and it has been recognized by Fast Company for innovation on their “Most Innovative Companies” and “Most Innovative Companies in Gaming” lists.
Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution, where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leader in educational physics and mechanical-design-simulation software.
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Roblox Profile | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube
“[Our son with bipolar] tried a ketogenic diet, and literally within three weeks or four weeks, we saw progress that we had never seen with any drug or medication. Mind blown, really, and a miracle.”
— David Baszucki
“One other way to predict the future, I think, is many things are just inevitable. There are enough smart people around that the wheel was inevitable.”
— David Baszucki
“Roblox was always what is called a user-generated content platform, which means creators are making stuff, people are learning STEM, people are getting excited. Even the ego burst of having three friends play a game can really motivate a young person to get into computer science.”
— David Baszucki
“If you’re having a mental health crisis, work on your body and your machinery, maybe, before you work on the talk therapy. Get the strategic things right first.”
— David Baszucki
“If we were to tabulate the number of new entrants into computer science or graphic arts or economics that had been inspired by Roblox, it probably is in the millions, given just that experience that people have had on our platform.”
— David Baszucki
“What’s interesting is I’ve never really ever liked any business books ever. … The books I was obsessed with in my youth were the books about Magellan and Captain Cook and Mutiny on the Bounty and Joshua Slocum and just all of these crazy explorers, Amundsen and Scott and all of that stuff.”
— David Baszucki
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Want to hear another episode exploring the groundbreaking power of metabolic psychiatry? Listen to my conversation with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer, in which we discussed his pioneering work using ketogenic diets to treat psychiatric disorders, the brain energy theory of mental illness, extraordinary case studies of recovery from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, how mitochondrial function affects mental health, and much more.
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2025-10-31 01:17:39
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Jack Canfield (@JackCanfield), known as America’s #1 Success Coach. Jack is a bestselling author, professional speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Canfield Training Group, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, sales professionals, educators, and motivated individuals how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals.
He has conducted live trainings for more than a million people in more than 50 countries around the world. He holds two Guinness World Record titles and is a member of the National Speakers Association’s Speaker Hall of Fame.
Jack is the coauthor of more than two hundred books, including, The Success Principles
: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, The Success Principles Workbook, Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction, The Aladdin Factor, Dare to Win, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers and has sold more than 600 million copies in 51 languages around the world.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Jack, Jack, Jack, it is so good to see you.
Jack Canfield: Glad to see you, my friend.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m so thrilled that you’re here, and we’re seeing each other again.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, this is fun.
Tim Ferriss: It has been a long time, and as I warned you before we started recording, I said, “I really doubt people in my audience have the full context or even partial context.” So I wanted to give them some of the backstory, because one could make a compelling argument that I owe my career as such to you, because you made the introduction to Stephen Hanselman, who became my book agent. At the time, he was a, I suppose, former superstar editor on his way to becoming an agent. So we were both starting out in a sense, and you made that introduction.
But there’s even more backstory that I have to share with folks. That would have been 2005, 2006. I was around 27, 28 at the time. Much earlier, this would have been when I just moved to Silicon Valley, I was riding around in my mom’s hand-me-down POS minivan, which was broken in every way imaginable, listening to Personal Power II on cassette tape, to and from my job as I commuted on 101.
I was eating at Jack in the Box, in the parking lot of a Safeway a couple nights a week, because that’s what I could afford. And I was volunteering for a group called the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, which is a mouthful, but SVASE, and I had volunteered, which I still recommend to folks, because I knew nobody, nobody knew me, and I always tried to do extra jobs as a volunteer. And eventually they said, “Wow, this kid really likes working for free. Let’s give him more responsibility. Hey, would you like to organize some speakers for a main event?” And I thought to myself, “Absolutely. This is a great way for me to meet some of my heroes.”
And I invited Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts. I invited you, because of the phenom, of course, we’ll talk about it, but Chicken Soup for the Soul, I invited all sorts of folks, and that was the first time that we met. You graciously agreed to come to that. And here we are, God knows how many, to almost 20 years, more than 20 years later, and I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. So thank you for all of that.
It’s just, it’s — these are these Sliding Door moments, where there’s no way I could play the alternative, but the what if certainly looms large. What if you hadn’t said yes to come to that event? What if I hadn’t reached out and said, “Jack, all these notes I have from this lecture I’ve been giving to this high-tech entrepreneurship class, is there anything here?” And frankly, I hoped you would say no, because I didn’t want to write a book. And you were like, “Actually, I think there’s something here.” And before I could say anything, you started making introductions, and here we are. So thank you for everything, Jack. I really appreciate it.
Jack Canfield: Well, let me just say —
Tim Ferriss: More than I can say.
Jack Canfield: Let me just say you’re someone who knows how to take advantage of an opportunity. You’ve done really well.
Tim Ferriss: You know, you’ve got to take your shot when you can take your shots.
Jack Canfield: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s been one hell of a ride. So I’m thrilled to have you on. And I was looking through some of the materials beforehand. We’re going to run out of time before we run out of topics, but ultimately, we will rewind the clock, and go back to some of the beginning chapters. But I have to ask, because there is a bullet here. The story behind more than 300 million copies sold in China. How does that happen?
Jack Canfield: Well —
Tim Ferriss: Because I’m imagining chicken soup does not have the same connotation over there. So I don’t even know if the title’s the same.
Jack Canfield: Well, what happened is a company called Anhui Publishing and they decided to publish the book. And what’s interesting is we had a contract that they would pay us 10 cents for every book sold in China. But Anhui was half owned by the government, and half owned by private equity. So they decided to make it a textbook to teach English to kids in high school with —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Jack Canfield: — Chinese on one side, English on the other, and they printed millions and millions of books. Because it was in the schools, which was the government side, we didn’t see one penny of millions of books sold. So I learned how to write better contracts in the future. But the fact is, a lot of Chinese people have had major transformations because of the books have taken off, and they have sold them in the general public as a result of kids learning a lot in school, showing it to their parents, so on and so forth. So it all works out, it all paid off. But that was a major lesson for us. You know, you’ve got to be really, really careful when you’re in — when you’re interacting with the Chinese and making deals, they’re very, very clever.
Tim Ferriss: You’ve got to be, you’ve got to be careful.
Jack Canfield: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There is an expression, I’m not going to say that everyone uses this, but in Chinese, which is “Néng piàn jiù piàn,” which is “If you can trick them, then you should trick them.” And not saying everyone subscribes to that, but you’ve got to have your wits about you.
Jack Canfield: Right. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Jack Canfield: That’s true.
Tim Ferriss: So part of the reason I love doing this podcast is it gives me a pretext for doing a bunch of internet sleuthing on my friends without seeming like a stalker or a crazy person. And I really had no understanding or grasp of your childhood, your upbringing, anything like that. Could you speak to — a bit for folks, just the basics —
Jack Canfield: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — of where you grew up, what you learned or didn’t learn from parents, or household, things of that type?
Jack Canfield: Sure. Well, I was born in 1944. My father was in the Air Force. World War II was going on. He trained bomber pilots, actually. And so from the time I was born until the time I was six, we lived in three different states with — on military bases. I don’t remember much of it at all. But when I was six, we moved to West Virginia, which is where I mostly grew up, in Wheeling, West Virginia, a steel town, coal mining, all that kind of stuff. And my father was an alcoholic, and he got violent when he was drunk, and my mother decided to divorce him when I was six, and we went to live with my grandmother. And I actually lived in the attic of her house for years, and then eventually she met my stepfather, who had just come out of the Navy.
And I grew up poor. We were not wealthy at all. And so, my father was one of these people, when I went off to college, my stepfather, he said to me — he gave me $20. He looked over me in the eye and he said, “Now, there’s that.” He says, “If you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm. There’ll be no more gifts coming from me.” So, okay. So I learned early on, I worked my way through high school. I was a lifeguard of the country club pool. So I was always — I had this thing I was in, but not of. I was in the country club, meeting girls whose parents were, but I wasn’t of that.
And I went to a private military school from the fifth grade, so I graduate high school. My rich aunt had a son named Jack who died. If I was — talk about kismet and fate, if my name was Bob, we’d not be talking right now. But because I was Jack, she adopted me after his death, and sent me to a private school in town. So I got a much better education than my brother, or anyone else. And, but I — again, I was in, but I wasn’t of — I wasn’t a doctor’s son. I didn’t — the president of the guy who owned the Cadillac dealership, that was not my crowd. Yet I got to hang out with those kids, and eventually got into Harvard on a scholarship to play football. I was a football player. I was an honorable mention all state. I was an end, all that kind of stuff.
And I grew up thinking, you know, you’ve got to work really, really hard, which I did. I worked my way through Harvard. I cut grass. I cleaned the dorms. I did all — got up and served food at 6:00 in the morning and then fell asleep immediately in French class, because I was so tired, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jack Canfield: I remember one day, I’m like this, falling — I’m totally asleep in this class at 9:00 in the morning, and this professor comes over and he shakes me awake and he says, “You can leave now. The class is over.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s a very understanding comment from the teacher.
Jack Canfield: I know, I know. Well, whatever. And then I majored — this is interesting, I majored in Chinese history, which is interesting why. Later I learned that I had past lives in China and Tibet, and so it made sense to me. But at that time, it was this — my freshman year, I got all Cs in everything. Here I was, A student, high school, get to Harvard. I always say I graduated in the half of the class that made the top half possible. So there were a lot of smart, smart kids there, valedictorians from their school.
And I said to my counselor, “I need an easy A for my sophomore year.” He says, “Well, this guy, he used to be the ambassador to China, he gives everyone an A, why don’t you take his class?” And he knew Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, he had slides of everything, and I got the A. But I fell in love with Chinese history for some weird reason. So that was my major, and so I always tell people, it prepared me really well to do the work I do. It had nothing to do with it, you know?
My senior year, I took an elective class, I said, “I need another easy A.” And someone said, “Take Soc Rel 10.” Soc Rel, Social Relations 10. It’s an encounter group. You just sit in there and talk about your feelings and everybody gets an A.” So I went over there and I took the class, and I fell in love with human potential. Oh, my God. There’s this thing called psychology, and people, and human behavior, and feelings, and motivation.
So I said, “Well, how do I get into that?” And they said, “Well, it’s a little late to get into psychology,” you had to study as an undergraduate and I hadn’t. And they said, “Well, you could sneak into psychology through education.”
So I went to the University of Chicago, got a master’s degree in education, taught in an all Black inner city high school for two years, and I got Teacher of the Year my first year, and became — I went to Jesse Jackson’s church. I became friends with people in the jazz community. Really got deeply — I would say probably for a year, I almost wished I was Black, because I thought white people are milquetoast. And these Black guys, they’ve got — they’ve got energy, and the poetry, and the songs, and the music, and the dancing, and the anger, and the fear, and all that.
And so then, basically I started realizing my students were not motivated. They didn’t believe they could learn, because they were Black in the inner city, and they didn’t have role models. And that became my passion. How do I motivate them to achieve? And I met W. Clement Stone, my mentor, he was a self-made — he was worth $600 million in 1968, which is when I was there.
Tim Ferriss: Wild.
Jack Canfield: Yeah. His best friend was Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich. And together, they wrote a book together. And then also he wrote a book called The Success System That Never Failed. And that’s where I learned about motivation, and setting goals, and having vision, and values, and working hard, and using affirmations, and visualization, and all of that.
Tim Ferriss: So let me — Jack, could I pause you for a second?
Jack Canfield: Oh, please do. Do.
Tim Ferriss: Because there’s so many different avenues we can go down here.
Jack Canfield: Sure. Sure.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to W. Clement Stone. $600 million. Just — we’ll come back to that, because that’s a mind-boggling number, especially at — for that point in time, but any time, even now. But if we back up for a second, Teacher of the Year, first year in Chicago. What made that possible? What do you think contributed to that?
Jack Canfield: I think what happened was it was, this school, probably five years earlier, was all white and Jewish, and then it was this Black invasion, they would call it, into the community, and there was this flight flight out to the suburbs. So what happened was a lot of the teachers didn’t really want to be there. They wanted to go with the kids who went. So there was a certain kind of malaise, and almost an upset that they had. And I think a lot of them didn’t treat the kids very well.
And the other thing is nobody was teaching African American history. I was teaching history, and American history, and world history. And I found a book called Before the Mayflower, and it was by a guy named Lerone Bennett, and it was a book about African American history. It’s just a paperback. I think it was like $3.95. I bought one for every one of my students, and I would teach Black history along with white history. You know, history’s always written by the victors, so basically white history is our history, and they didn’t know any of this stuff. And the fact that I would do this, and the fact that I was loving, and kind, and motivational, and believed they could do everything, it made them, I think, just like me, because I was on their side.
And then they started an African American Club, African American Studies Club. They asked me if I’d be a sponsor. I said yes. So that was another thing. I ended up coaching the swimming team, because the guy who was supposed to do it had majored in basketball. He was a phys ed teacher. He didn’t know that much about swimming. I had swum competitively in high school, and was a waterfront instructor in summer camps in Maine, and teach kids to swim and all that kind of stuff.
And I think the last part of that was that I was starting to do these human potential activities in my classes. You know, I’d get them into pairs and have them do — go back and forth, say, “I can’t.” And then I’d have them go replace that sentence with, “I won’t.” And which feels stronger? Which feels more true? Which is — and they go, “Yeah, can’t is really a victim word.” So I was doing maybe 10 minutes of that every day, along with teaching my history, and I think that’s kind of why.
And the big moment for me, this is so cool, you know you have these little moments in life where you get affirmation from outside. So Sammy Davis Jr. was at school, he was going to do a talk to the kids. He’d written a book called I Can. And he was there when I got the award. They gave me the award the same day. And I’m walking offstage, and he looked at me and said, “You must be really cool to have gotten that award from those kids.” And I think I lived on that for days.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, that’s a hell of a compliment, from a hell of a —
Jack Canfield: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — hell of a person, and a hell of an entertainer.
Jack Canfield: Yeah. And you’re like 22 years old or something, you know, it’s a big deal.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the right words at the right time. I mean, just like you were probably offering the right words at the right time to a lot of those students.
Jack Canfield: Right.
Tim Ferriss: So if we flash forward to W. Clement Stone, how did he make $600 million? That’s just, again, not to fixate on that, but I mean, that’s —
Jack Canfield: Yeah. I think —
Tim Ferriss: — a non-trivial sum of money.
Jack Canfield: Three ways. Number one, he started an insurance company called Combined Insurance, and it was really low premiums. In other words, the price you paid for it. And he believed everybody could afford something, and he wanted to insure the people that often wouldn’t be insured by the big companies. And because of that, and then he also hired people that were not college graduates to be salespeople, and then he had them — he had a training system. This is so cool. Think about this. So he’d go in, here’s his training system. He’d tell him what to do, you know, maybe a Monday class. He said, “Now we’re going to go tomorrow and I’m going to go in.” And he’s teaching these kids who never graduated college to sell to CEOs of banks, and companies. It was intimidating for them. He said, “We’re going to go in, I’m going to make a sale, at least a presentation. You watch what I did.”
And so, goes in, they do the presentation, either sold or didn’t, they go out for coffee afterwards. “What did you notice I did?” “You did this, you did this, you did this.” “Okay, but you missed that. Next time, watch that.” They go in, they do it again. Did it about three or four times in the morning, and a fourth time they’re going in, and he just turns to the kid and he goes, “This one’s yours.” So he just stepped back. And a kid, maybe he made it, maybe he blew it. But afterwards he’d go out and say, “Okay, you missed two things. We’re going to go to the next one and watch me do those two things.” Next one, he’d go, “This is yours.” By the end of the day, they knew how to sell. It was a —
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.
Jack Canfield: It was amazing. So he had salespeople all over the country selling these low price insurance things. Second thing he did, he was a genius when it came to real estate. He invested in a lot of real estate. The coolest thing he ever did, if you go into Chicago on rails, that’s a big area where they, you know, bring beef in, and they were processing beef all those days, and it’s also a big central distribution point for everything. There’s a place, it’s just huge, wide, like six rails wide going into the main station. And there was no more real estate to buy, and so he said to the guys who own the railroad land, he said, “Can I buy the air rights over the railroad tracks?” And they said, “Sure.”
So if you go to that part of Chicago, there are all these buildings over the tracks, which he got a 100-year lease on the air rights and they built these huge skyscrapers, which he then got the royalties for, or the commissions for, or the rents for, whatever. So he was just very creative. And the third thing he did, he invested well in everything else, as well. So a lot of it was investment. And then he also produced Success magazine, started by W. Clement Stone. And he was a speaker, he had books he sold, and the magazine, Og Mandino, who wrote The Greatest Salesman was the — so I’m working in the Stone Foundation at one point. So I quit teaching. I worked for Stone and I —
Tim Ferriss: Why did you quit teaching?
Jack Canfield: Because Stone offered me a job.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Jack Canfield: So Stone said, “We have this achievement motivation program. We’re teaching teachers to do it, to go into the schools. We don’t have anyone that’s had inner city experience. You do. Would you come work for me?” And it was like more than I was making as a teacher, and I went, “Yeah, okay.” And it’s him, right? Working for him was amazing, and he just took everybody under his wing, loved them. Imagine you’re young, you’re 23, maybe, and he says to you, “Work in my foundation, go teach this stuff. If there’s any training you ever want to take anywhere, it’s on me. Go for it.” I took 37 weekend workshops that year.
Tim Ferriss: You’re the edge case he has to budget for.
Jack Canfield: Yeah. It was like a grant from the government or something. So I took all these workshops, everything from Dale Carnegie to Gestalt therapy, and body work, and meditation, and so he funded all that, which was great. But he really was an amazing being that just — I learned so much by being in his presence, you know?
I’ll tell you a story. So I got an intake interview first day, and he says to me, “Do you take 100 percent responsibility for your life?” And I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “It’s a yes or no answer, son. Think.” I said, “Well, based on I don’t even understand it, probably no.” He says, “Do you ever blame anybody for anything?” “Yeah.” “Do you complain about anything?” “Yeah.” “Do you ever make excuses why you didn’t achieve something?” “Yeah.” “You don’t take 100 percent responsibility.”
So he introduced me to the whole concept of 100 percent responsibility, and then he said to me, “Do you watch television?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How many hours a day?” I said, “I don’t know. Good Morning America, the news, maybe a movie at night, 11:00 or something like that.” He said, “That’s three hours a day.” He says, “Cut out an hour a day.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because that’ll give you 365 additional hours a year to be productive. Divide that by a 40-hour work week, that’s nine and a half weeks. I’ll give you a 14-month year. You’ll be much more competitive than all the people in your field if you do that.” So I did that. He was teaching me in the fricking in interview, like, you know.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Jack Canfield: So it was cool.
Tim Ferriss: What were some of the things that really stuck with you after you got the job? Whether it was through osmosis, whether it was through direct teaching, like why did that job, and that mentorship have the impact that it did? Were there any other examples or stories that come to mind?
Jack Canfield: Yeah. He challenged me, because I mean, as an educator, I was probably making, back then, $30,000 a year if I was lucky. That was like — now people make a lot more, inflation. But what happens is, he said, “I want to challenge you to make $100,000 a year. And if you do it, it’s only because of what I taught you.” And he taught me to set goals, to believe in them, to visualize it, like as if it’s already happening, have an affirmation, “I’m so happy and grateful I’m now whatever.” And I started doing that, and I took the goal of $100,000 seriously, and every morning I’d wake up, and I’d put — oh, I put a $100,000 bill on the ceiling, that — I didn’t even know one existed at the time. Banks actually trade them back and forth. But I took a $100 bill, I projected it with a — remember overhead projectors?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Jack Canfield: I projected onto a piece of like flip chart paper, traced it, added some extra zeros, and then I put that on the ceiling. Every morning I wake up, I see that, say my affirmation, which went, at that time, “God is my infinite supply and large sums of money come to me quickly and easily as I earn $100,000 a year.” And about, I’d say maybe a month or two into it, I’m in the shower, and I had $100,000 idea, because I’d written a book called 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom, and I used to get a quarter, 25 cents, for every book that got sold.
And, I said, “Wow, sell 400,000 books, I get $100,000.” That was my first $100,000 idea. And so, to make a long story short, because I could do a half hour in that story, I literally started to sell more books. I started a bookstore, literally a mail order bookstore, where you could buy my book, had one product, and then, my wife at the time said, “You know, we’re selling that book.” I know what happened. She had ordered something in the mail, and have you ever ordered something in the mail and it comes, and then there’s like five flyers for other products they have in the box?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure.
Jack Canfield: So she had done that. Said, “Why don’t we sell other people’s stuff?” So we’d added other products, and I hired a high school kid to come in after school and to sell the books, ship them out, and so forth. So long story short, I did not make $100,000. I made $92,328, but I went like, “Okay, this is a success.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jack Canfield: And then my wife says, “Do you think it’ll work for a million?” I said, “Only one way to find out.” So literally we set a million dollar goal, and that happened with Chicken Soup for the Soul, the second year, I got four checks, Tim, you know this because of your success with the books. The first time you get a check for a million dollars for three months’ royalties, you go, like, “Are you kidding me?” It’s, like, it changed my life, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, that’s — I mean, that’s a juggernaut of a success. But people probably don’t realize quite how much rejection went into that, but maybe we could start at the beginning, in at least the Genesis story. Where did Chicken Soup for the Soul come from? I mean, people have seen — everyone listening has seen this book at some point, chances are, unless they’re 18, perhaps, and have like never been into a dentist’s office, or a physician’s office, or an airport, or fill in the blank, right? I mean, it’s ubiquitous.
Jack Canfield: Right.
Tim Ferriss: How did it start?
Jack Canfield: So I was going around doing workshops for teachers on self-esteem, motivation, that kind of thing, and I was always telling stories, just because I noticed when I was a high school teacher, if I was talking historical facts, kids were looking out the window. If I was telling a story about an escaped slave who became an ambassador, or my own story, or something from Jet magazine or Ebony magazine, the kids would pay attention.
So stories capture us. And all the great teachers, Buddha, Jesus, we know they told stories, and parables, and so forth. So one day, somebody said, “That story you told about the Girl Scout who sold 3,328 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in one year, is that in a book anywhere? My daughter needs to hear that story.” And I went, “No.” And over a course of two months, I must have had four people a day say, “Is that story in a book? Is that story in a book? Is that story in a book?” So I’m coming home on a plane from Boston to L.A. where I was living at the time, and I said, “How many stories do I really know?” So I wrote down every story, the dog story, the Girl Scout story, the puppy story, the Mount Everest story, whatever it was 70 stories. So I said, okay, that’s a book. So I made the commitment that every night I would work on a story, and at the end of the week I would have two stories. And if I did that for a year, I’d have 101 stories, 108, whatever. So I did that.
And when I was about, I don’t know, five-sixths through, I had breakfast with Mark Victor Hansen, who became my co-author. And we were having breakfast in Beverly Hills at this place. All these human potential leaders would come to this breakfast. And the Inside Edge it was called. And so Mark said, “What are you working on?” I said, “I’m writing this book.” And he said, “You should let me finish it with you.” I went, “That’s like telling Stephen King, you should be his co-author because he’s five-sixths of the way through the book. How do you justify that?” He says, “Well, some of the stories you tell you stole from me.”
I said, “Maybe three, Mark. Come on.” And he said, “But I’m a much better salesperson than you. I’ll be the upfront voice person.” I said, “Well, give me 30 more stories and we’ll talk.” Because I had 70 at that time. So he said, “Okay.” Came back. He did it. So basically it was a made in Heaven. He really was good at getting the word up. We were in a mall once, believe this Tim, we were in a mall where he is, I think it was B. Dalton bookstores. They were in a lot of the malls.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I remembered B. Dalton.
Jack Canfield: Yeah. And so we’re doing a book signing and there’s nobody there. So Mark goes out into the mall and he just starts walking up and down the mall yelling, “Are you guys crazy? There’s a book signing in B. Dalton right now with these two amazing authors about the best book in the world. You all should be in there.” And so he’s doing that. And about 40 people came into B. Dalton. And then Mark walks up to the front of the room where I am ready to do the little talk before the signing. And they all gasped, like “You’re the guy who was in the hall.” But he would do that. I was too shy to do that. It worked out really well.
But you talked about rejection. We were turned down by 144 publishers once we had a manuscript. Then it took us over a year to sell the book.
Tim Ferriss: When I think about that story, and I think about The 4-Hour Workweek, which was also turned down, Steve and I got front row seats, obviously to this by 37, 39 publishers, something like that, imprints within the publishers. And maybe tell me if this resonates or not, but you can have a bad idea that gets rejected, just because something gets rejected a lot doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. But in this case, I had tested everything in the classes, so I knew what worked. I knew that the material stuck, so to speak. And you had been testing stories also in front of audiences. And people had been asking you, “Where can I read this in a book?” But was there anything else that contributed to the perseverance to go through that many rejections?
Jack Canfield: I think it’s what you just said for us too. We had tested these stories over and over and told them we got standing ovations. Many of the stories in there, the first book were what often are called in the speaking business, your signature story that other people had let us use with their signature stories. So we knew they were tearjerkers, they were inspirational, they made you laugh. They made you feel like you want to call up and tell your mother, “I’ve got to read you this story.” So basically we knew that, like you said, you knew that from your experience. What I find in the book world, especially in the New York publishing world, is everybody wants something that’s a copy of something that already worked.
So basically when you come along with something radically new, like your idea was, and our idea was, up until then, no collections of short stories had ever worked. Because they were all fictional. And they were too short to get engaged with the characters and really go get involved. Whereas all these stories were in categories like on love, on overcoming obstacles, grief and so forth that are the human things that everybody lives with, which is why they’re so touched by it. And we just knew to stick with it. And we would’ve self-published eventually, and I would’ve made a lot more money, but I didn’t really want to be a publisher. I wanted to be a speaker and a writer.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to read something here. You can tell me if this needs some fact-checking, but this is from Thrive Global. This is a Q&A with you. So here we go. It’s just a paragraph.
“Eventually, we went to ABA, the American Booksellers Association, and went booth to booth for two or three days and on the final day, this one new publisher employee said: ‘We’ll read the manuscript.’ Some people wouldn’t even take it, and they read it and loved it, and they said they’d publish it. We said, ‘How many books do you think you’ll sell?'” And this is their response. “Oh, 20,000 if you’re lucky.” And then your response, I think this is you.
“‘Well, we want to sell a million and a half in a year and a half,’ I said.” This employee “laughed, and then a year and a half later we’d sold 1.3 million copies.”
To sell 1.3 or 1.5 million copies is so hard. I mean, it is so hard to do unless you happen to be very, very lucky somehow in capturing lightning in a bottle. But usually there’s a lot of elbow grease behind it. So two things. Well actually it’s just really one thing. What went into selling that many copies over a year and a half? And were you still using affirmations? Was that still one of the ingredients in the cocktail?
Jack Canfield: Yeah, we were doing the mindset work. But it’s a combination. I always say it’s mindset, skill set and ready, set, go. The set go. I wanted another set. Action. It’s action. So someone had told us that the book, The Road Less Traveled, the author of that book had done five interviews a day for the first year. Five interviews a day. And Scott Peck. And that book was on the New York Times list for 12 years — 512 weeks, something like that.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so long.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, I think it’s a record. I mean, you were really close, I think. Maybe you still are. I don’t know. But the reality was I thought, “Well, if that’s what works, let’s do it.” So Mark and I actually had gone to five bestselling authors and then read about Scott Peck and we talked to John Gray, who wrote Men Are from Mars.
We talked to Ken Blanchard, who wrote The One Minute Manager, we talked to Barbara De Angelis, who wrote a book on love and then another book on TM that someone had written that was successful. And we said, “What should we do?” And they all said, “Do as many interviews as possible. Get in front of everybody.” I know you did the blogger thing, which was brilliant. We did the radio thing. Now I think podcasts are better than radio. I always tell new authors because the people listening to them, they’re your audience. There’s a focus, whereas radio may have a bigger reach, but not everybody’s your audience. But anyway, five a day every day for a year.
So we created what we call the rule of five. It’s a book by John Kremer called How to Sell a Million Books, something like that. And it’s a great book. We bought the book and we took every idea that was in that book and we made a Post-It, little two-by-three Post-It, put it on a wall. And if you went down the wall of our company at that time, Self-Esteem Seminars, it was just covered with Post-Its. And every day we’d take something off and either do it five times or take five Post-Its off and do each one time call it church, can we talk in your church? Can we call five PXs in the military?
And we’d say, “Are you carrying our book? Can I send you one? If you like it, will you carry it?” Call bookstores. “Are you stocking it? Can we send you one? If you like it, will you carry it?” Call them back two weeks later. “Did you get it?” It was nonstop. We were giving talks at churches on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, whatever. The ones that have bookstores, we’d do signings. We signed in the parking lot. I spoke at every damn conference there was.
I didn’t care where it was or how long it took to get there. If it was there, we did radio shows that were at two in the morning. Maybe a trucker driving through Montana will hear it, but maybe he’ll like it. Maybe he’ll buy it. Maybe he’ll tell his daughter and the daughter will tell her friends. So literally it was that level of nonstop activity. And it was interesting because we were pretty amped up in the beginning. And we talked to the psychic guy and, he was in trance, he’d go, “It would be as if you would go to a tree with a very sharp ax. And you would take five swipes at that tree every single day. Eventually, even a redwood would have to come down.” And we went, okay, rule of five. That’s what we’re going to do.
Tim Ferriss: What prompted the trip to the psychic? Do you remember?
Jack Canfield: Yeah, I do. We knew his wife and she was a friend of ours. And then he turned psychic, if you will, and he was doing these readings. And they were awesome. So we just thought, well, why not? Let’s ask him what we should do.
Tim Ferriss: And how old were you, or what date was this? Either one? Roughly? When the first Chicken Soup for the Soul came out.
Jack Canfield: ’93, and I was born at ’44. So what is that, 49 years old, something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. And when it hit, when you sold the 1.3 million copies in a year and a half or whatever it added up to be, how did that change your life?
Jack Canfield: Dramatic.
Tim Ferriss: In what ways did that affect your life?
Jack Canfield: Well, it allowed me to move out of a very small house. It allowed me to get a better car, all that kind of stuff. I think more so, it was an affirmation from the world that the work I was passionate about was needed. And so it wasn’t just the money, it was the confirmation that my intuition, that my passion was correct. You’re probably familiar with the concept of Ikigai, which comes from the Japanese. Whereas if you love to do something, that’s one thing. Are you good at it? Does the world need it? And are they willing to pay for it? So all four of those have to come together for this thing that you’re passionate about to actually work. In this case it did. So I thought, okay, my purpose is needed. It’s going to work. I can make a living at it. So it was a big confirmation of that, I think more than anything. And yeah, I bought three sweaters in different colors and all that kind of stuff. I went through my nouveau riche stage for sure.
Tim Ferriss: If the sweaters were the extent of the nouveau riche, then I feel like you have very good restraint. The title itself, Chicken Soup for the Soul, because that ended up to be such an incredible format also for extending that into a million different verticals, right? Chicken Soup for the Fill-in-the-Blank Soul. And this I suppose is a nod to the intuition or unorthodox approaches, but how did that title come to be?
Jack Canfield: Well, we had an agent who was going to take us to New York and meet with publishers. And we didn’t have a title. So Mark and we are both meditators. So we said, “Well, let’s just meditate and ask the universe source, God, whatever you want to call that energy, for a title.” So would go to bed mark’s really hyper. He’d go to bed chanting, “Make a best-selling title, make a best-selling title, make a best-selling title.” I would just go and I would, every morning I’d sit for an hour and I’d say, “Okay, God, give a title.” And on Wednesday, so two days, nothing happened. Third day, I’m sitting there and all of a sudden this chalkboard appears, green chalkboard like in school, and the hand comes out and writes “chicken soup” in script on it. And I said to the hand, “What the hell does chicken soup have to do with this book?”
And the voice said back, “When you were a kid, your grandmother gave you a chicken soup when you were sick.” And I thought, “But this is not a book of sick people.” And the voice answer back, “People’s spirits are sick. They’re in resignation, hopelessness, and fear.” We were in the first big recession, 1993. The Gulf War was going on. Downside. A lot of things that are happening now, were happening then the economy was tanking and people were losing jobs. So timing was good in terms of people needing inspiration. That played out well. So I went Chicken Soup for the Spirit, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I got goosebumps. Told my wife, she got goosebumps. Called Mark, “What do you think of this?” He got goosebumps, called her agent, he got goosebumps, went to New York, met with 21 publishers, seven a day for three days. Nobody got goosebumps.
So basically that led to the 144 rejections. And you’re right, we went to the American Booksellers Association, booth to booth. We were both wearing backpacks full of these spiral bound, 20 stories from the book, the best stories. “Would you publish this book? Would you be interested in this book?” And most people wouldn’t even take one, let alone — and then Peter Vegzo, who’s the guy who did publish it, you’re right, he said, “20,000,” and we said, “No.” And he laughed. He laughed out loud at us. And later he said, “Yeah.”
Tim Ferriss: He may have just laughed. Was it laugh as in “I don’t believe her,” or was he like, “That’s some chutzpah.”
Jack Canfield: He laughed, because he thought we were freaking crazy, he thought we were —
Tim Ferriss: Insane.
Jack Canfield: “You guys are nuts.” And what happened was the first shipment he made was 800 books to, I think it was Barnes and Noble, might’ve been Borders. And they sold 80 books the first week. He said, “When you sell one 10th of your inventory the first week, that’s a phenomenon.” Next week, 92.” The next week 150, he said something was happening. It shocked him. And they reached a point where literally they started with those presses that do this kind of thing. And now then they had to go to a rotary press like you see in the movies when the newspaper’s getting printed. And they had three shifts just doing nothing but printing Chicken Soup for the Soul. And I remember one December, the guy who was in charge of the money, the CFO of that company, told his staff, I never knew this until later, he said, “Don’t take any more orders for delivery in December. I don’t want any more revenue for tax purposes this year.”
Tim Ferriss: And meanwhile, you’re following the rule of five. You’re calling the churches, you’re speaking in on Sundays, you’re calling the PXs, you’re doing all of the things. Were there any particular breakthrough moments or interviews looking back at these hundreds of things that you tried? Were there any that really seemed to help the book break through?
Jack Canfield: I think as far as interviews go, being on Good Morning America definitely made a big difference, being on Fox and Friends. In other words, major national TV shows, which didn’t happen immediately. You start out local and you basically create some reels of someone that can talk and they’ll consider you if they’re a producer on the big shows. But those big shows, we’d be on them and then sales would just boom. But the word of mouth more than anything, I think, Tim, what we noticed was we’d have these big sales and then nothing would happen for a week or two. And then there’d be big sales, and it would take people a week or two to read the book. They’d tell everybody the word of mouth was crazy, and it was like a chain letter.
It just kept going and going and going and going. Geometric progressions. I think the other thing that was really big for us, it was a company called SkillPath, sometimes you get these marketing things and say, “We’re going to be doing a workshop on AI, and we’re going to do it in Davenport, Iowa on Monday. And it’ll be in the middle of Iowa and Tuesday. It’ll be there.” So there have these people running around doing seminars everywhere in little towns that we would never,
Tim Ferriss: Is it like Learning Annex back in the day, similar or different?
Jack Canfield: Well, Learning Annex, and I spoke at those places as well, it’s similar, but here’s the value of this. What happened is, let’s say you’re a trainer for this company. You’re going to five cities in Iowa in a day a week, and you’re going to teach the same course, and there’s someone else teaching how to communicate with your boss, someone else teaching you how to use Excel, whatever. Now what happens is that those are places we never would’ve gone. And in the back of the room, they were selling our books. So we got a lot of book sales and places, and then that word of mouth thing would take over and it would just keep exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding. And what’s fascinating is I had sent the book to the guy who runs that company and said, “Would you sell this book as part of your backroom?”
Because I knew they did backroom, mostly audio programs back then. They were like $60 for six cassettes. And so he said, “Well, I know there’s no money in a book or whatever.” So then he was a Christian and he always led the Wednesday night men’s group or something. And he always liked to start with a Bible story. And he gets to the group and he doesn’t have a Bible story in his mind. He opens up his briefcase. There’s a Chicken Soup book. He reads the story, it makes him cry. He goes in, he reads the story to his Bible group. They go, “Can you read any more stories?” That night, he read seven stories from the book to his Bible group. “Maybe I should reconsider.” So they did.
Tim Ferriss: I want to emphasize something for folks, and this is through my own lens and bias of course, but what part of how you can improve the likelihood of word of mouth with a book like that, or any book really, if you’re dealing with, especially, I think non-fiction stories, is practice it in front of live audiences. You just get such valuable feedback. It is not the same. Speaking of someone who’s done 800 plus podcast episodes, it’s not the same as virtual feedback. Being able to see faces, see when people are getting distracted, see when they’re taking notes.
To hear what they ask you after you’re done teaching or presenting, it allows you to refine your materials so well. I have thought, actually, I’m sitting here in Austin, Texas right now, and I have an idea for a short book, which of course, I’ve been trying to write a short book for 20 years. I haven’t yet succeeded. But I have this idea for a short book, and I’ve thought about maybe reaching out to UT Austin here to teach a class just to work on the material and try to present it, because it worked so well for particularly the first book. And for people listening who might think, “Well, times have changed. Now it’s all about TikTok and this and this and this.” Yes, certain things have changed, but a lot is still the same. So I just wanted to speak to the live audience piece of it. Because I think it’s so powerful.
Jack Canfield: Well, I never write what I haven’t spoken about a lot first for the exact same reason you’re talking about, because I get real feedback about what lands, what doesn’t land, where did I confuse, where did I give them enough information, where was I redundant, et cetera. And people now, they get a book and they instantly go to create an online course, which they haven’t taught live. At least teach it online live before you just record it and put it online. So yeah, it’s crazy what people don’t do what they should.
Tim Ferriss: So to maybe just put a bow on the chapter of Chicken Soup for the Soul, you’ve got some crazy accolades related to this, right? The Guinness Book World Record with seven Chicken Soup books on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously. That was in 1999. There are so many bullet points that I could list off that are just completely nuts. When you think back to somebody saying, “Hey, if you sell 20,000 copies, you’d be lucky.” And then flashing forward to some of these. You ended up selling the name, the backlist, so 220 plus title titles, all future royalties, the trademarks, et cetera. How did that happen? How did that come to pass and why did that happen?
Jack Canfield: I think two things. We got burned out on the process. When we first started it we were doing a book or two a year, and by the end we were doing eight or nine books a year because the publisher wanted more because everything has an arc. And so what happened was the success was starting to dwindle. There was a little saturation in the market, perhaps. We’re niching books now. Where the first books had universal appeal across the board. When you start doing Sports Fan Soul or Golfer Soul, you start to limit the size of the audience. And so we’re doing all these books and we got tired, and I got burned out at the level of not another one-arm guy climbing Mount Everest story or one-legged. I should have been inspired. It was like, “Ah, not another.”
My mother died and she loved bluebirds, and a bluebird landed on our windowsill. So I knew it was my mom, and it probably was. But after a while, I’m tired of hearing that. I knew I was getting a bit jaded. This is not the thing. And also I think I was tired. So the guy who was the CEO of our company at the time noticed all that and said, “Would you like to sell it?” And I said, “Well, for the right price.” So we sold it for tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. So yeah, it was a good offer. It happened at the right time. So that’s how it happened.
Tim Ferriss: As you’re noticing the saturation and the niching down, and when you’re checking in with yourself, you don’t have a full-body yes. You’re like, “Oh, my God, another — don’t know if I can do it.” Were you doing things in parallel that you then kept doing after you sold things off? Because for a lot of people that could become their identity, and once they sell it, they’re like, “Oh, my God, what do I do now?” And they have this void that could be really terrifying. And I’m just wondering how you thought about what you did after that and if you already had something in the hopper or if there was another plan.
Jack Canfield: During that whole time, I was running seminars and three, four, five, 600 people seminar, sometimes 700, 800 people in a room. I did one seminar in India that had 7,000 Herbalife people in it for three days, and they only spoke Tamil. The whole thing was translated. And so I had that going. That was always happening. And the Chicken Soup was kind of like, it was a parallel track to my workshops and my seminars. So basically, yeah, that was always there.
I knew I could go back to that, and not go back to that, but just shift my energy over to that. And I did. And that’s when Patty, my business partner, said, “You really should consider putting all these success ideas into a book.” And that’s what led to The Success Principles, which is the second chapter of my life, if you will, in terms of that being. But I was always teaching success ever since W. Clement Stone. And so yeah, it wasn’t like I was like, “Oh, I’m going to quit being a corporate person, and I have no other idea what I’m going to do, which is I can’t see how. It’d be scary.”
Tim Ferriss: And I have a first edition copy of The Success Principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Because before The 4 — when was the pub date on The Success Principles?
Jack Canfield: 2005.
Tim Ferriss: 2005. Right. So it came out two years before The 4-Hour Workweek. And I think I have a brief cameo in there, probably because of the kickboxing stuff or something else.
Jack Canfield: I tell that story. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so I have a signed copy at home. At my parents’ house, actually. I keep it right where I can see it, so I’ve had that ever since. And what was it like stepping into The Success Principles? Were you nervous about that because the bar had been set so high with Chicken Soup for the Soul? Were you able to let go of that? What was that experience like?
Jack Canfield: Well, there is a little bit of an identity thing. I became known as the Chicken Soup guy and I had to let go of that. Some people still see me that way, which is fine. But no, I think for me it was a very natural transition. It was a book. I knew how to sell books. People would say, “How long did it take you to write that book?” I’d say 20 years because I was collecting all that data about what works in terms of success. And the actual writing took about a year and a half. I would write from 7:00 at night. Sometimes all of a sudden I’d hear birds singing and it would be getting gray. “Oh, my God, I’ve been up all night typing.” I had the regular —
Tim Ferriss: It’s that bluebird again. I’m kidding.
Jack Canfield: Well, I had a regular job, which was to run my seminars. Unfortunately, most of them were on weekends and evenings, but basically I would go to bed at 7:00 in the morning and sleep until noon, one o’clock, then get up and do my business again and then write. So thank God my wife could put up with all that, but she did and it worked out really well. But yeah, it was not that hard. And I like writing. I like wordsmithing. I’ll give you an example, so I have a chapter in there about the guy who wrote Sleepless in Seattle, the movie. And the next chapter is about a guy who’s a coffee roaster. It’s all about perseverance, not giving up. And he’s up in Seattle and he’s sleeping on these coffee beanbags because he couldn’t afford an apartment. Now he’s uber rich, but what happened was one of his major clients was a coffee shop down in Long Beach, California.
And he would ship the beans through UPS and UPS had a strike. And I was able to go, “Wow, blah, blah, blah. I was writing Sleepless in Seattle. In Seattle, this guy was also sleepless.” I love that, being able to make those kind of takeaways and stuff. And then his chapter is called “Going the Extra Mile.” When the strike happened, he said, “I can’t let this guy flounder and not have the beans he needs.” And he drove them himself 1,250 miles from Seattle to Long Beach. I said, “He was willing to go more than one extra mile. He went 1,250.” Playing with words like that is really fun for me.
Tim Ferriss: What was the reason for continuing to do the seminars? Because presumably you’d done very well financially from, as you mentioned, some of the royalties from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Was there something you got personally from doing the seminars? Was it kind of an insurance policy of sorts to have an additional revenue stream? Why did you keep doing so many in-person events?
Jack Canfield: I love doing it. I know you participated in a lot of sports and you get really good at them fast because the way you play, but whatever your favorite sport is, you play it because you love it when you’re playing it. For me, nothing turns me on more than being up in front of a group, sharing ideas and stories and experiential exercises where people are interacting and watching their lights come on, their eyes get bright, their awarenesses happen, the breakthroughs happen. All of a sudden they’re coming up and they think, “Oh, my God.” And then watching them name their children after me and write their first book and leave shitty marriages and stop letting their husbands abuse them. And I love it.
I’m kind of retiring right now and literally that was the hardest part of that decision was so I had to get my wife to agree that I could do X number of workshops a year. And now it’s other people are doing all the work. I’m not renting hotels and filling them and doing all that kind of crap I used to do. I used to have 12 staff. Now I have two.
Tim Ferriss: And what is your age now, Jack?
Jack Canfield: 81.
Tim Ferriss: All right. You are sharp as a razor’s edge. And I have to ask two questions. Number one, what do you think contributes to that? Maybe you also have some fantastic genetics. I don’t know, but you’re very, very sharp. You have a lot of energy. And then the related question is, I’m not questioning the decision, but why retire? Why change what you’re doing?
Jack Canfield: Well, I realized there were things I want to do that I haven’t done. I want to become a really good chef cook. I want to learn how to oil paint. I play guitar mediocrely. I want to learn to play the piano. All these kind of hobby things that most people do as they go along in life, I’ve kind of piled him up at the end. I have a 12-year-old grandson who I absolutely adore, who’s the coolest kid. He’s an old soul kind of kid and amazingly talented. I want to spend more time with him. I want to spend more time with my wife. I think I owe her that after all the time she’s put up with me being on the road and I enjoy being with her. And I want to just explore things because they’re fun, not because I need to. And so I want to read a book because it interests me, not because I’m getting ready to write something or I’m getting ready to whatever.
And it’s funny, I never thought I would retire. I told everyone for years I would never retire and then I was doing an ayahuasca experience down in Costa Rica and I literally — I’ll tell the story real quick.
Tim Ferriss: Please.
Jack Canfield: The intention that we were to hold that night was forgive the unforgivable. And I thought, “I’ve forgiven my parents. I’ve forgiven people who embezzled from me. I’ve forgiven people who stole from me. I’ve forgiven the guy who bullied me in school, forgiven both my ex-wives, their lawyers.” I forgiven everybody. What’s left to forgive, but I’ll do it. So I take the medicine and I’m lying there on my mattress and all of a sudden Vladimir Putin’s face comes up. I thought, “God, I’ve got to forgive Vladimir Putin?” Who I think is one of the more evil guys on the planet.
So I literally started to see his childhood. I saw what motivated him. He wants to be seen as majorly significant, that he did something outrageously huge, put the Soviet Union back together. How does he do that? You start bringing all these countries back that they gave away, like Ukraine and Poland and all those places. And so I finally forgave him and I felt this energy just leave my body. I didn’t know I had such animosity toward him. And then the next thing I see is my door to my office and the office opens and the first three feet of my office is a shrine to how significant I am. It was like the Guinness Book World Record, magazine covers, awards, honorary doctorates, people that made me honorary sheriff of this town.
I’ve got more damn stuff. And I realized part of my motivation has been to feel like I was worthy of being here. I made a difference. I’m significant. Now, it’s a huge philanthropic, loving, service-oriented heart in my body, but I realized how many honorary doctorates do you need. I’m Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Canfield. It’s like I would go away for four days on a trip to give a commencement speech to get another doctorate and I’d leave my wife and my kids. It was crazy. And so I had that awareness and I thought I really need to slow down and take a look at all that motivation. And part of it, being 81, my 80th birthday last summer, 81st birthday in August, I just realized there’s a lot I want to do that I’m not doing. And I’m going to just shove all this work stuff to decide. Not totally. I’ve got four books I’m still writing, so I’m not retired retired, but the road warrior, the three weeks in Asia —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the road warrior. The travel.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, all that and I’m not doing that anymore.
Tim Ferriss: I love how four books is the retirement plan.
Jack Canfield: I know.
Tim Ferriss: That’s Jack’s version of lazy. So I’m going to come back to the ayahuasca in a second, but before we get to that. What do you think has contributed to you being as vibrant, full of energy, and as sharp as you are?
Jack Canfield: I think several things. I’m passionate about what I do. I follow my joy, follow my passion. So there’s not a lot of resistance between what’s coming through and what I want to do. I can’t say I’m fearless totally, but very few fears in my life anymore. Just if I want to do it, we’ll do it. And so that inner struggle is mostly gone. That uses up a lot of energy and creates disease in the body. I don’t have a lot of limiting beliefs anymore. One of the books I’m writing is a belief change process that I developed with somebody that literally works, so I’ve cleared just tons of that stuff. I’m a big fan of Byron Katie. Do you know her work?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Her work is amazing. People can find PDFs online also of her work, which are super helpful, the turnarounds and so on.
Jack Canfield: I did that work for years. I’ve not ever been with her, but I did her work. And I don’t get upset about anything. It just is what it is. That whole idea, it is what it is. My desire to change it can also be what it is, but it’s not out of anger or out of upset or it shouldn’t be that way. It’s all just called whatever. So that is a big piece of it. I meditate regularly. I cleanse. I told you before we came on that I’m in the eighth day of a 10-day cleanse. So all this stuff coming out of my body, detoxing. I do saunas regularly. I won’t say I exercise every single day. That’d be a lie, but I exercise enough to keep things moving. I only listen to comedy channels on my XM radio. I laugh a lot. I think laughter is very healing. I love your digital detox concept, which I actually put in the 10th anniversary edition of The Success Principles.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. I didn’t even know that.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, I’ll have to send you a copy. I can’t believe I didn’t do that. But anyway, so I think that, organic food. When I was in graduate school at UMass in Amherst, I was 23, [24], something like that. My best friend, we played racquetball every night. He was the owner of a health food store, so I got into the organic thing, the supplement thing, the cleansing thing, all of that really, really early on. And then doing the ayahuasca, the plant medicine, anything that’s not clear comes up and out. So that’s all good. And I’m very loving. I get massages regularly. All the things people tell you to do, I’m mostly doing for longevity.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good list. I’m taking some notes for myself. I’m going to add a few more in the rotation. So you mentioned the ayahuasca, so let’s talk about that. I was surprised not because I would expect anything otherwise, but I wasn’t aware that you had these experiences. Is that something that goes back many decades or is there something that prompted you to engage with plant medicine?
Jack Canfield: No, it doesn’t go back many decades. I mean, I did not smoke pot in high school and college. It made me fall asleep, so my drug of choice on weekends was a couple beers or a vodka tonic or whatever. And that’s another thing, I stopped drinking quite a bit ago, but the reality was I think in graduate school — this is so funny because the guy who eventually became the head of drug education for New Hampshire is a person who introduced me to mescaline and peyote and things like that, but I only did a few journeys. I did LSD once, I think. I never did cocaine. I was afraid of all that. I didn’t want to get addicted and I’d seen people who had, so none of that for years and years and years and years.
And then Lynne Twist, who runs the Pachamama Alliance, was taking people down to the rainforest in Ecuador to help raise consciousness about let’s save the rainforest. And I went on one of those trips and one night, one of the journeys, one of the things you do is take ayahuasca in the jungle with a real shaman that’s there. And I did that and I had amazing breakthrough experiences. And so I became interested in it.
Tim Ferriss: How old were you when you had that first experience, you’d say?
Jack Canfield: I’m thinking 20 years ago maybe with —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, something like that. And then when I learned about Rythmia and I thought, “Well, I want to do that.” And the thing I liked about Rythmia, for those who don’t know, it’s a center in Costa Rica. And it was founded by a guy who was, in his own words, a total asshole. He was a womanizer, a drug addict, a drinker, got in fights in bars all the time. And so eventually he was going to commit suicide because he couldn’t get his life together. He’d been in and out of rehab so many times. And he was worth about $60 million, I think, but he was miserable. So he said he was going to commit suicide, and somebody told him and said, “Don’t commit suicide until you go to the rainforest and work with this guy named Maganda.” So he looks him up and looks like a resort and he signs up to go there and gets down there. I mean, the resort images were bullshit. It was an old house, dirty mattresses, cockroaches, all this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Hotel paradise. Yeah.
Jack Canfield: And it was funny because when he got there, he tells this story. He got there and he flies down in a private jet, that whole thing. He gets there and Maganda meets him at the airport. He says, “Get my bags, man.” Maganda is this African guy. And he says, “Get your own, man. I don’t carry your bags.” He’s used to being treated like a king. So they get to this place that doesn’t look anything like the brochure and he’s about to leave and he says, “Come on, lie down.” And he gets in there, about eight people lying head to head in the middle of a circle in the garage on mattresses. And they do ibogaine, which is an African —
Tim Ferriss: Hell of an introduction.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, but it totally rocked his world because what happened was he ended up going back to his grandfather and he realized his grandfather had been sexually violating him his whole youth and he totally repressed all that. That’s why he was so angry, was he was repressing. And then finally, I love this last line. He’s lying there and Maganda just taps him on the head and goes, “Happy birthday, man. You’re reborn.” And he was. And so he decided what he wanted to do is help people have his experience. And the second time he did ibogaine, he said, “You’re supposed to open a center, but don’t do it with ibogaine. Do it with ayahuasca.” So we started that center. So I’ve been down there five times, do four journeys every time you’re there, so 20 journeys. And they’ve been life-changing for me, just literally life-changing. And I think that’s another reason I’m so light and it’s all good.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the pharmacology of ayahuasca in and of itself, super, super fascinating for people who might be interested. Also outside of the DMT, which is found in the chacruna. The leaves of the shrub actually related to the coffee plant, but the actual vine itself contains a lot of interesting properties. And I think it’s ESPD50, this ethnobotanical search for psychoactive drugs. There’s a presentation from that that goes into some of the potential properties around neurogenesis and so on from the beta-carbolines and so on themselves in the vine. So even the vine has some very, very interesting properties.
What have you observed as someone who’s been a practitioner, a student, a teacher in the, for lack of a better term, self-development space for many decades now? What do you think is often missed or under-taught? You’ve seen lots of different waves of different things that have become popular, fallen out of popularity. Is there anything you wish folks paid more attention to?
Jack Canfield: Well, I think several things come to mind. I don’t think about that very often, but several things come to mind as you ask the question. Number one, I think most people don’t understand the impact of unconscious limiting beliefs. That they watch The Secret, they visualize, they affirm, and then somehow it’s not working and they don’t know why. And so it’s always either fear or limiting beliefs or just lack of willingness to take action that basically corrupts the process. And I think for me, why I’m writing a book about this limiting belief process is I’ve just worked with literally thousands of people. Twice a year I’ve been doing these free sessions where I’ll get 700 people sign up and I’ll do this belief process with them. And I’d say 99 percent of the people have a major breakthrough. I had a woman got rid of arthritis in 20 minutes.
I mean, ridiculous stuff. And so these beliefs we’re holding onto that usually got formed between the age of three and eight, somewhere in that range because of some experience we had, usually a traumatic experience. You make a decision, that’s never going to happen again. It’s not safe to say what I want. It’s not safe to ask for things. It’s not safe to be sexy, make noise, whatever. What happens is that we don’t realize we have that belief. And so we do all the things we’re supposed to do and it doesn’t happen. And it’s very frustrating and sometimes people give up on the whole human potential movement because they’re doing all these things that the gurus are teaching them, but they’re not dealing with this block. I’ll tell people it’s like calling up Domino’s Pizza to order a pizza and then having this other voice call them and say, “Forget the order.” And you wonder, “Why isn’t this showing up?”
And so all this work that so many of us taught in The Secret and so forth, that seems to be a missing piece for a lot of people, I would say. And fear, which is based on limiting beliefs is my experience, which we imagine bad things happening in the future, it’s a visualization process usually or a thought process which we can intervene on as well. But I think those are the two big things that people don’t understand very well. And then I think what we’re seeing today that I’m a bit more aware is the power of community, the power of support, the power of not being alone. That there are people there to hold you back and lying when you go off.
My sister just called a couple hours ago and was having a really tough time and just spending 10 minutes with her she was back where she needed to be. But she didn’t have anyone to call, which is increasingly true for her as she gets older and doesn’t have a lot of friends who’ve died and so forth. I think that’s really critical. And I think more and more people are becoming aware of that. That’s why you’re seeing all these communities evolving. And I think one of the reasons that plant medicine’s taken off is because it deals with all those limiting beliefs. They come up. And as we say at Rythmia, “What’s coming up is coming out, so don’t resist it.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good one.
Jack Canfield: And you get to clear it.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to something that we spoke about or you spoke about early on with W. Clement Stone in his intake interview when he asked you do you take a hundred percent responsibility for your life? And the reason I want to revisit that is that I grew up in a family where there was a lot of complaining. There was a lot of finger pointing, a lot of blaming, and the villain would change depending on the context. And I’ve worked very hard to try to correct that training for myself. And most of the time I would say I do pretty well, but there are certainly times when I seem to revert back to that early experience and find myself complaining about — maybe I don’t complain, but I blame. Right? Maybe it’s just internally. Maybe I don’t give voice to it, but there could be some blaming. How do you encourage people to take more or 100 percent responsibility? What are the steps for people who recognize that’s what they want to do, but perhaps have the habits of blaming, pointing fingers, complaining?
Jack Canfield: Well, I’ll start with a story. A couples therapist told me once she was working with a couple and they were arguing about whose fault it was that something had happened. And a therapist said, “Well, I’m glad to see you agree on something.” And they said, “What?” “Well, you obviously agree that if you could figure out whose fault it is, somehow that’s going to make your life better.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s outstanding. Yeah.
Jack Canfield: So basically I teach a little formula equation, if you call it. E + R = O, event plus response equals outcome. So when there’s an event and you blame somebody or something, the government, the bank, the economy, your mother, your sister, your neighbor, the boss, whatever you’re blaming for this experience you’ve just had, that event plus your blaming does not produce a better outcome. So we all want a better outcome. We want to experience joy, freedom, peace, love, success, abundance, whatever the outcome that we want, health, longevity, whatever. And certain behaviors do not do that, so I’ve never found a place where blaming produced a better result. You don’t feel better and you don’t solve the problem in a way that really gets you anywhere because you’ve just blamed somebody.
And it’s amazing how much our culture supports blaming and complaining. I used to call bars “Ain’t it awful?” clubs. Every profession has their own bar. They go to the firemen go here, the police go there, the lawyers go there, the doctors go there and they bitch and moan about everything that happened that day. The economy, the president, the minister of the hospital, whatever. So the reality is it lets off steam and you get agreement, but you don’t get resolution, you don’t get breakthrough, you don’t get better results. So if you look at E + R = O, there’s only three responses you have any control over. Your thoughts, your images, and your behavior. That’s it. You can’t manage time. You can manage your thoughts in relation to time.
You can manage your visualizations in relation to time and your behavior, but we think we can control things outside of us. We can only control our response to things outside of us and notice what kind of outcome that produces. And what you’ve done magnificently and what I’ve done a lot as well is look at who are the people that are succeeding. What are their responses to certain events? How do they relate to this situation? Which ones produced the better results? I mean, your book, the Titans book, is just amazing. All these people telling you what worked.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Jack Canfield: If you haven’t read that, by the way, guys, please do. It’s incredible. So what happens is blaming, we just discovered, we talked about it. And it’s incredible what people blame. I mean, look at our president right now. He’s blaming everybody for everything. It’s unfortunate, but he does. But it’s not producing particularly great results as a result of it. Complaining, in order to complain, you have to have a reference point of something better you prefer. So I can’t complain about my girlfriend if I don’t have an image of some woman who’s better than my girlfriend, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Jack Canfield: Now, the reality is that nobody ever complains about gravity. You’ve never seen an old person walking through the mall, all bent over going, “Gravity, I hate gravity. If it wasn’t for gravity, I wouldn’t be all bent over. Gravity sucks.” Never said that. Why not? Because you can’t change gravity. Everyone knows gravity just is, so we don’t complain about it. So anything you’re complaining about, you have to have a reference point in your mind of something better. Better job, better country, better president, better whatever.
And what happens then is we — when we become aware of that, we have this better option that we’re not willing to risk creating. So therefore we complain about it, and it lets off steam. It gets people to go together. Yeah, I know. My wife is the same way, whatever it is, but we don’t get a better result. So I always say, imagine a situation where every woman in the world dies except my wife. Big thing comes down from outer space, zaps yours with some energy field. My wife happens to be in a lead mine that day. She’s the only one to survive. Would I come to work and complain about my wife? No. Why not? She’s the only one. There is no option, right? So we wouldn’t complain about it.
So basically, if you’re complaining, my response to that is what would you prefer? What would you have to do to create that? One of my friends runs a workshop he does over in Europe. He’s a European, corporate consultant, and one of the questions he asks people, even when they’re pissed off at the company they work for, he says, “On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your quality of life working here?” And they go, “Three.” He’ll go, “Why so high? It’s not a zero. Something is going on there, right? So why so high?” Which floors them. It kind of breaks the chain of their thought. And then he goes, “So what would be an eight for you?”
Never goes to 10. That’s too big a leap for people. He goes, “What would be an eight for you?” “Well, this would be happening. This would be happening. What could you do to help generate that result? What could you do to help make that happen in your company?” Because that’s really what you have to do. You can’t just sit there and bitch, and moan. Nothing is going to change.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you mentioned Tools of Titans, and I wanted to just, not to push the book, but it brought to mind because I put together these books mostly as reference books for myself and Tools of Titans, in particular, was an example of not wanting to let learnings from these interviews fall through my fingers, like sand through an hourglass.
And one of the essays in that book is taken from Jocko Willink, who’s a famous Navy commander. He has done a million things since. His first public interview ever was on this podcast ages ago. People can find videos of this too, but it’s just called “Good.” And so if you’ll indulge me for a second, I just want to read a second —
Jack Canfield: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — just a minute or two of this. So this “Good,” this is the title and Jocko has a great video of this for people who want, but it’s also in the book. So “Good.” “This is something that one of my direct subordinates, one of the guys who worked for me, a guy who became one of my best friends pointed out, he would pull me aside with some major problem or issue.” This was when Jocko was in the military. “That was going on and he’d say, ‘Boss, we’ve got this thing, this situation. It’s going terribly wrong.’ I would look at him and say, ‘Good.’ And finally one day he was telling me about something that was going off the rails. And as soon as he finished explaining to me, he said, ‘I already know what you’re going to say.’ And I asked, ‘What am I going to say?’ He said, ‘You’re going to say good.’ He continued. ‘That’s what you always say when something is going wrong or going bad, you look at me and say, good.'”
“And I said, ‘Well, I mean it because that’s how I operate.’ So I explained to him that when things are going badly, there’s going to be some good that will comfort. Oh, the mission got canceled? Good. We can focus on another one. Didn’t get the new high-speed gear we wanted? Good. We can keep it simple. Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better. Didn’t get funded? Good. We own more of the company. Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good. Go out, gain more experience and build a better resume. Got injured? Good. Need a break from training.” It just goes on and on, and on.
And then he says, just to maybe put a pin in it, he says, “Now, I don’t mean to say something trite. I’m not trying to sound like Mr. Smiley positive guy. That guy ignores the hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems. It won’t, but neither will dwelling on the problem. No, except reality. But focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem and turn it into something good. Go forward. And if you’re part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout.”
And I feel like you reflect that. And certainly Jocko is an archetype of many types. And it’s also, for me at least, makes it clear that it’s something you train yourself to do, right? If it doesn’t come naturally all the time, just like an exercise habit or anything else, this is something that you have to condition yourself to do with reminders and practices. Are there any reminders or practices that you have for yourself to stay on the rails, so to speak, with the 100 percent responsibility?
Jack Canfield: Yeah, I guess so. I think, well, I’ve always got something I’m working on and you have to have something that keeps it in your focus. So if I’m engaging in some kind of negative self-talk then I take and I create an opposite affirmation and I’ll put that on some Post-Its and put on the refrigerator door and on my bathroom mirror, and stuff like that. Because we know that normally you probably have other data than I do on this, but neuroscience tends to tell us that it takes about 66 days to change a belief. And it can take longer depending on who it is and how badly that belief is ground into you through the trauma of it. That’s creation.
But generally, it requires repetition. There’s a guy, I forget his name right now. He’s the head of peak performance at West Point. He wrote a book about it. And one of the things when I read the book that he does is when the students are wanting a behavioral change, they create an affirmation and he teaches them every time you walk through a door, reach up and touch the door jamb and then say your affirmation. Now, I have a repetitive system that’s built in that tells me to do that. And you think about how many doors you go in and out of every day into the bathroom, into the kitchen, out of the kitchen, into your car, back out, whatever.
And so it’s that level of repetition until it becomes ground in. They don’t have to repeat it. I mean, I know my phone number. I don’t have to repeat it. Well, I did when I first got it. And you want to get your new ideas like that. I always say if you can build in four new behavioral shifts a year, think about in 10 years you got 40 new shifts. That’s a lot. So for me, for example, when we read the — what’s the book? Shaman from Mexico. Boy.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s Carlos Castaneda?
Jack Canfield: A different one.
Tim Ferriss: Different shaman from Mexico.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, this is me being sharp at anyone. Anyway, he had The Four Agreements. That’s the guy, the book.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, this is Don Miguel.
Jack Canfield: Miguel Ruiz. Don Miguel Ruiz.
Tim Ferriss: There we go.
Jack Canfield: Yeah. So my wife and I decided we’ll take The Four Agreements and we’ll work on each agreement for three months. And so for three months, that was the agreement of not making other people wrong, thinking positive, etc. And we had to reinforce that and we had little signs that told us what to focus on and so forth. So I think it’s important to do that because as you know, we are so distracted today now with AI and scrolling through Instagram. I mean, I even get caught in that occasionally. I’ll go looking for something on YouTube and the next thing I know I’m watching old reruns of Jay Leno. But I think that reminders are important.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m going to use the doorway. That is a great cue. It’s actually something. If people want to read, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Doorways are also really helpful for some of that. People can check out Stephen LaBerge if you want to go into a really weird town. And also for people who might be wagging a finger at me, I know that Carlos Castaneda was not a shaman, but it was The Teachings of Don Juan, I think, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. That was the book that I was thinking of.
Jack Canfield: Yeah. That was one of the first books I read. It was a great book.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a compelling book. I mean, whether it’s real or not, it’s a fun read. So I’m looking at a blog post or some — I think, yeah, this is from jackcanfield.com productivity tips. And you, like me, I’m sure have quite a few blog posts. I’ll just read the headlines here for a second. There’s “Clean up Your Messes,” two, “Focus,” three, “Just Say No,” four, “Practice the Rule of Five,” which we’ve talked about a bit. Five, “Meditate.” And this is going to seem so mundane, but I’m very curious if you could expand a bit on “Clean up Your Messes” and how you go about doing it. Because I have a few Achilles heels, as I suppose we all do.
And one of them is I collect so much goddamn paper. I’m a hypographic note-taking maniac, and I just have paper. It metastasizes to cover every flat surface that I have. I try to take photos here and there and digitize, but it’s messy and it really agitates me. I’m not saying that that’s ideal. Maybe it shouldn’t bother me, but how do you think about — why is number one of five on productivity tips “Clean up Your Messes,” and how do you do it?
Jack Canfield: Well, you’re talking to a fellow person that needs the same rehab, just so you know. I take more notes at a conference than almost anybody and I’ve got literally books full of notes and taking notes when I’m listening to stuff and podcast, things. I think the problem is that every time you look at all that, it’s taking your attention. And so the research that I’ve read says we have the ability to hold about seven attention units at a time.
And so what happens is that you’ll notice the research also. If you haven’t paid the bill yet, any good waiter or waitress could tell you what you had. As soon as you pay the bill, you ask them 10 minutes later, they don’t remember anymore. They don’t need to. So what happens is all those attention units are being taken up by things that are incomplete. So messes in my world are incompletions. So anything that’s incomplete. Now that can be that thing you started, you didn’t finish. It could be that letter you were writing the book you’ve not finished up the notes you have over here.
But what I’ve learned to do is find a place for those things. I have lots of filing systems. I have filing systems in my computer. I have filing systems. I bought 10 drawers in my office that are file drawers. And so things go in those places. And if I need to remember something to do it, I have what’s called a comp file. So let’s say I need to do something March 28th, I have a folder called March. So in the 1st of March, I go through that folder of everything I put in there, and then I put it into my counter for those days. Or I can put it in now called Steve on March 28th.
But if there’s papers related to that, things we’re going to talk about, whatever, it goes in my March file. So it’s there. It’s not in my visual cue. What happens is whether it’s a relationship we’ve all had that experience of walking through a grocery store and seeing someone down the aisle we don’t want to talk to. So we go down the aisle and hope we evade them because it’s incomplete. So all that energy is taken up because it’s not complete. All the things you’ve never said, the upsets, the thank you’s, the acknowledgements, the wanting acknowledgements, and not having got them are taking up space in your head.
So everything you can close up, it’s almost like you’re taking a piece of paper off the desk and pretty soon you have a clean desk. Do you know Dan Sullivan’s work? The Strategic Coach?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. He’s got some great stuff. He’s got some great stuff.
Jack Canfield: Well, one of things I learned from him, he doesn’t have a desk. He’s got three or four offices with conference tables and he’ll go into one and say, “Bring over that stuff.” And he’ll work with one of his people. They do all the things they need to do. They walk out with all the papers, he’s done. Doesn’t have that pile up shit that I deal with and you deal with. But the reality is that everything that’s incomplete, you walking through the hall of your house, you see a little crack in the wall and you go, “Oh, it needs to get fixed.”
Pretty soon you won’t see that crack because you have to block it out of your awareness to pay attention to other things. So now things are not getting handled that need to get handled. And also if you do keep paying attention to it, that’s time you could have spent writing your book or thinking about your project or loving your mother or giving good feedback to your girlfriend or whatever. So the reality is it’s really important to clean that up. And there’s financial messes, there’s garage messes, there’s the attic, the tool drawer, the door that has the leashes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. I can feel my cortisol piling up as I’m listening. Sounds like you’re in my house on my nanny cam.
Jack Canfield: I’m going to send you — I have a sheet of 21 things you need to clean up. I used to work for a company called insight training seminars, and if you were a trainer, you had to clean all that up because you had to be living that you were complete and you couldn’t teach it if you weren’t living it. So basically think about it, financial records, your checkbook, now balance, stuff in your car, clothes that don’t fit anymore. I mean people go — you could go down a list of all that stuff. I literally had to go through my clothes at one point. I’m a shirt whore. I love shorts.
Tim Ferriss: It’s another thing we have in common. No, I have so many t-shirts. It’s just unacceptable. It’s indefensible.
Jack Canfield: I know, I know. But I had to go through and clean it out because it got to a point where I couldn’t even put anything in the closet. And so the rule is if I haven’t worn it in the last 60 days and it’s not a tuxedo or something like that, it’s gone. So there’s a lot of the — I love all the decluttering books that are out there and all that kind of stuff. One person said, “Go through your house, take everything you haven’t used in the last 30 days. Put it in a box, label the box what’s in it.” And if another 120 days go by and you haven’t used it, just throw it out because you’re never going to use it again.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret, which is I moved eight years ago from San Francisco to Austin and I moved all my stuff from California into storage because there was a gap where I was shopping for a place and I didn’t have anywhere to put all this stuff. It has been sitting in storage, all that stuff for eight years, and I get a bill for it every month. And I’m like, “I should go down and take a look at that.” And I’m like, “I cannot allow myself to look at that stuff because I’m going to want to keep all this junk that I haven’t needed in eight years.” So it’s my ignorance is bliss approach. It’s a small tax to pay at this point. Oh, yeah, stuff.
Jack Canfield: George Carlin does a really good routine on stuff if you can find it. It’s really amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I will find it. George Carlin, what a genius. Also, his late night bit on Heaven and Hell, people can look that up. In Heaven, the French are the cooks, the Japanese the lovers, and this and this. And then in Hell, X, Y, and Z. It’s also worth checking out. But decluttering, the 21 things that I need to clean up, please do send that to me.
Jack Canfield: Yeah, I will. I will.
Tim Ferriss: Is that something we could share in the show notes for this episode for other people?
Jack Canfield: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. Perfect.
Jack Canfield: I think it’s even a page in my book. If not, I’ll get it for you.
Tim Ferriss: All right, perfect. Jack, we’ve covered a ton of ground. I don’t want to take up your entire afternoon on a Friday, but is there anything else that — I’m not in any rush whatsoever, but is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered? Anything you’d like to say? Request of my audience? Anything at all that you’d like to bring up that I haven’t already prompted?
Jack Canfield: Yeah, I would just say self-servingly that if you would like to know more about my work, the book that Tim talked about, it was found in his 20th anniversary edition, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. It’s really the basis of everything I do. If you haven’t read the Chicken Soup book, start with the first one. It’s really brilliant. One thing I did, Tim, I haven’t done it for all my books, but I did with that book, I literally after we probably edited every story five or six times, went out to Colorado to a ski resort in the summer, took three days, read every story out loud. Because what I know is when most people read, they’re sub vocalizing in their brain. They’re not speed reading.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Jack Canfield: And if it didn’t sound as one of my actors says coming trippingly off the tongue, I would rewrite it. And that book went on to sell 105 million copies. So basically, I think that was a good thing to do. So I always tell people, like you said, get feedback, but also read it out loud. How does it sound to you? And then make sure you get — I always say get feedback from at least 20 people. First Teenage Soul book, we had an entire high school suspend classes for a day. Over 1,000 kids read all the stories. So we had an Excel spreadsheet. They all graded every story on a scale of one to 10. And that book went on to sell, I think, six million copies or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Jack Canfield: So feedback. I love what Ken Blanchard says, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
Tim Ferriss: Feedback is the breakfast of champions.
Jack Canfield: Most people avoid feedback because they’re afraid of what they’re going to hear. And you’ve got to know that — we call it constructive feedback. But anyway, so I would read that book, go to my website, jackcanfield.com. There’s all kinds of things there you might be interested. And it’s interesting, I normally say this, but last night for some reason I was looking up something and I couldn’t remember it. I thought it was. There’s a guy named Nick Nanton. He did a documentary of my life called The Soul of Success.
I went in there to find one little thing and, I don’t know, call it egotistic or whatever, I watched the whole hour on YouTube. It’s free. Just go to The Soul of Success on YouTube and you’ll see one of the most amazing documentaries ever made, I think, because he’s an Emmy-winning documentarian, really good thing. So that’ll give you some information about some of the stuff Tim and I talked about that maybe we didn’t go deep enough on. And that’s about it, I would say.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ll link to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes. Jack Canfield also, just to reiterate the spelling, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D, jackcanfield.com. You can find all that. We’ll of course link to everything as per usual in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for everybody including the 21 things to clean up. It’s going to ride hard on my OCD, which is properly diagnosed. I’m not just making that up as a swipe against OCD folks. Big shocker to anyone who actually knows me. I’m kidding.
But what I will say as we wind to a close, Jack, is that you’ve had a huge impact on my life. Your work has had an impact. You personally have had an impact. You’ve been so gracious, so patient. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember when I was volunteering at that event, S phase. I had all the speakers. I had some type of waiver because I wanted to record everything. And the waiver was, I’m sure all sweeping and full encompassing of everything because I’d probably gotten it online somehow. I remember you had your glasses on and you pulled down the glasses like a very patient parent, and you’re like, “Timothy, I have some questions about this release.” And then you scratched everything out. You scratched a bunch of nonsense out and you signed it.
You’ve had an incredible impact on my career, and I just want to thank you for all of that and for what you offer to the world as an eternal student and as a teacher.
Jack Canfield: Well, thank you.
Tim Ferriss: I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jack Canfield: Well, I’ve enjoyed this. One of the best podcasts I’ve ever been on, so thank you.Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my pleasure. Least I can do. And I’ll say it one more time, everybody who’s listening, we will link to everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Just search Canfield, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D and it will pop right up. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen (#833) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-10-30 02:19:25
Jack Canfield (@JackCanfield), known as America’s #1 Success Coach, is a bestselling author, professional speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Canfield Training Group, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, sales professionals, educators, and motivated individuals how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals.
He has conducted live trainings for more than a million people in more than 50 countries around the world. He holds two Guinness World Record titles and is a member of the National Speakers Association’s Speaker Hall of Fame.
Jack is the coauthor of more than two hundred books, including, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, The Success Principles Workbook, Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction, The Aladdin Factor, Dare to Win, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers and has sold more than 600 million copies in 51 languages around the world.
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From Jack:
How many things do you need to complete, dump, or delegate before you can move on and bring new activity, abundance, relationships, and excitement into your life? Use the checklist below to jog your thinking, make a list, and then write down how you’ll complete each task.
Once you’ve made your list, choose four items and start completing them. Choose those that would immediately free up the most time, energy, or space for you—whether it’s mental space or physical space.
At minimum, I encourage you to clean up one major incomplete every three months. If you want to really get the ball rolling, schedule a “completion weekend,” and devote two full days to handling as many things on the following list as possible.
Excerpt from The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, ©2005, 2015 Self-Esteem Seminars, L.P. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
“When you were a kid, your grandmother gave you chicken soup when you were sick. … People’s spirits are sick. They’re in resignation, hopelessness, and fear.”
— Jack Canfield
“When I went off to college, my stepfather, he gave me $20. He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘If you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm. There’ll be no more gifts coming from me.'”
— Jack Canfield
“Nobody ever complains about gravity. You’ve never seen an old person walking through the mall, all bent over going, ‘Gravity, I hate gravity. If it wasn’t for gravity, I wouldn’t be all bent over. Gravity sucks.’ Never said that. Why not? Because you can’t change gravity. Everyone knows gravity just is, so we don’t complain about it. So anything you’re complaining about, you have to have a reference point in your mind of something better.”
— Jack Canfield
“[W. Clement Stone] said to me, ‘Do you watch television?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘How many hours a day?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Good Morning America, the news, maybe a movie at night.’ He said, ‘That’s three hours a day. Cut out an hour a day, because that’ll give you 365 additional hours a year to be productive. Divide that by a 40-hour work week, that’s nine-and-a-half weeks. It’ll give you a 14-month year. You’ll be much more competitive than all the people in your field if you do that.”
— Jack Canfield
“E + R = O — event plus response equals outcome.”
— Jack Canfield
On retirement: “I realized there were things I want to do that I haven’t done. I want to become a really good chef cook. I want to learn how to oil paint. I play guitar mediocrely. I want to learn to play the piano.”
— Jack Canfield
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Want to hear another episode with someone who built a publishing juggernaut through consistent principles and daily discipline? Listen to my conversation with bestselling author James Clear, in which we discussed launching a mega-bestseller that’s sold 10+ million copies, building an email list to two million+ people, the power of identity-based habits, strategies for consistent creative work, finding leverage in your life and career, and much more.
The post Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen (#833) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
