Tim Ferriss on Tim Ferriss (and much much more)

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🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ ? minutes

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Summary

Cold plunges. Exogenous ketones. Pu-erh tea--but hold the breakfast: it's all par for the morning routine, at least if you're entrepreneur, self-experimenter, and king of the lifehacks, Tim Ferriss. From how he manages the challenges of his celebrity to how he manages to stay in great shape; how he does--and when he doesn't--harness the power of AI; and how he preps for a podcast designed to help us live richer, fuller, and healthier lives, the bestselling 4-Hour Workweek author and billion-downloads podcaster speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about what it's really like to be him, and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is July 23rd, 2025, and my guest is author, podcaster, LifeHacker, extraordinaire, Tim Ferriss.
0:44.7	His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has over one billion with a B, billion downloads since he began in 2014.
0:56.1	His books, which include the four-hour work week, tribe of mentors, tools of titans have sold millions of copies. In 2018,
1:02.8	he founded the Sysay Foundation to fund unorthodox research, explore treating conditions that are
1:08.9	widely considered untreatable and challenge existing frameworks
1:12.1	and paradigms within science and medicine. Tim, welcome to e-con talk. Thanks for having me.
1:18.7	Great to see you. Now, in introducing, I called you an author and a podcast or in a life hacker. I'm sure
1:23.9	I could add it some things to that list, and they're all true. But what you really are is a phenomenon. You're an explorer of the world, an explorer of yourself, and you took that exploration, put it in the public eye via the internet, and became really an extraordinary brand, and you're good at every piece of that, the exploration, the marketing. How'd that happen? Was that a plan or did you just sort of stumble onto it?
1:50.0	I think it was a lot of serendipity somewhat engineered in a positive sense, because it conforms with my personality fundamentally.
2:04.3	But a lot of it started, and maybe this is going back too far,
2:07.5	but I had a lot of health problems as a kid,
2:12.3	and some of those were a consequence of being born premature and had a lot of issues with thermoregulation and so on.
2:15.6	But the only sport that I could participate in really
2:20.7	effectively was wrestling. My mom put me into kiddie wrestling because the puny kids could go
2:25.5	against the other puny kids. And I had a lot of constraints. I would overheat quickly
2:31.8	and effectively had to experiment and work around a lot of limitations
	...

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