The Forgotten Ferriss Experiment

Why Tim Ferriss's TV show about rapidly learning to be successful failed so rapidly

“Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.”

-Tim Ferriss

“The people who rise to the top are no longer those who accomplish truly great things, but those who figure out how to most attractively package their shortcuts and fake-outs.”

- Michael Schein

Like many college educated white dudes living in the Bay Area, I spent a chunk of my twenties under the spell of Tim Ferriss. I first heard about this life hacking guru in 2012, after my cousin Ben told me that he was enjoying reading The Four Hour Chef. As a 22 year old aspiring chef, the idea of a secret sauce for rapidly learning to cook sounded almost too good to be true. So I bought the book in the Boston airport to read on my flight home.

Consuming this 600 page doorstop of a tome, I rapidly yo-yo’d between delight and frustration. It was packed with dozens of recipes, some delightful, some copycats, and some so ambitious you’ll undoubtedly never cook them. Yet it also had lot of bonus cooking content including but not limited to: a handy guide to knife work, how to butcher a chicken & kill a lobster, a list of truly essential cooking gear, a “coaching tree” of the chefs who have worked at Chez Panisse, and a recipe from every single country in the world in tweet form. Then there was even more stuff that wasn’t at all related to cooking including how to: shoot a 3 point shot, handle a shotgun, fold a T-shirt, brew a cup of coffee, play “bear ninja cowboy,” field dress a deer, and a nauseating multi-page account of eating an entire Vermonster by yourself because…science?

The book’s self indulgence, tonal dissonance, and (lack of) focus really got to me. While there were legitimate gems in there, they were buried beneath hundreds of pages that jumped around with hyperactive intensity between disparate topics. Ferriss has since claimed that people “didn’t get,” what this behemoth of a book was trying to do. He’s insisted that The Four Hour Chef is not about cooking; but about learning. However, the reality is that the experience of trying to learn from it is as intimidating and disorienting as it is ambitious and inspiring. This book is impossible to read in a conventional sense. Doing so would give you the overwhelming, claustrophobic overstimulation of reading the transcript of someone’s every thought as they pulled an all nighter in the cookbooks section of a Barnes and Noble after shotgunning half a dozen 5 Hour Energy drinks.

I’m not alone in finding Ferriss’s approach a bit all over the place. The NYT described his previous biohacking book, The Four Hour Body as “among the craziest, most breathless things I’ve ever read, and I’ve read Klaus Kinski, Dan Brown, and Snooki” and likened the experience of flipping through it to “reading the sprawling menu in a dubious diner, quite certain the only thing you’d dare order is the turkey club.”

Still, I was intrigued enough to try listening to his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, aka The Joe Rogan Experience for tech bros. The explicit promise is that by listening to his long form interviews with experts he’ll tease out the tactics, best practices, and principles from their successes that you can apply to your life. As an insecure young man longing to be more than he was, these interviews with titans of industry, media, and culture drew me in with the sirens song of self-improvement. For a while I was a cheerleader for Team Ferriss, listening to every new episode and keeping a running Google doc with a list of products, ideas, and books that his guests had recommended. Because of Tim and his guests I read the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, tried a float tank, and sought out kettle bell training. I even briefly looked into buying Athletic Greens after his 20th breathless endorsement of it, that is until I saw how expensive a bag of it was compared to actual vegetables, which I remembered I already knew how to cook & eat for a fraction of the price.

A decade later, I am reassessing everything I once believed about Tim Ferriss. As with my naive intellectual infatuation with Malcolm Gladwell, the once simple appeal of this hyper-confident man now seems much more complicated. The perfect way to understand Ferriss’s quirky and polarizing legacy as well as my ambivalent relationship to his work is to watch an episode of his short-lived TV show: The Tim Ferriss Experiment.

This show is an odd hybrid of Myth Busters meets Jackass. The premise is that Tim has 5 days to learn a new skill, ranging from parkour to poker, dating to drumming, surfing to shooting. To show him the ropes, he recruits a roster of experts. Along the way he’ll deconstruct their methods so you the viewer can learn as Tim does. Each episode culminates in a final challenge or showcase of some sort for Tim to test or show off what he’s learned.

It had a good premise and better timing. Ferriss was riding high after the publication of The Four Hour Chef. He recruited Zero Point Zero Productions, Anthony Bourdain’s production company, to help him bring his vision of a meta-learning show to life. It debuted on HLN and iTunes in 2013 only to be immediately forgotten.

For such a famous author and guru, it’s truly remarkable what a blip on the radar this show was. Even as a die-hard Ferriss fan in my early 20s, I never actually saw a minute of it until 2023. While there were 13 episodes in the 1 season, only a few of them ever played on TV. They’re no longer on Tim’s website, so if you want to watch them today you’ll have to watch them on Youtube, as I did, where each episode has no more than 1,000 views or so. Why couldn’t the proto life hacker hack it as a TV star on his own show? A decade after its brief run and unceremonious cancellation, in an indulgent act of Youtube archeology, I finally watched all 13 episodes of this show in an effort to find out.

What I learned about Tim from Tim’s show about learning like Tim

Here’s how Tim sets up the show in the intro:

I’m Tim Ferriss, best-selling author and human guinea pig. I’ll show you how to make the impossible possible by bending the rules. I’ll find the world’s best teachers and push myself to the edge to deconstruct, decode, and demystify some of the world’s toughest challenges in record time. If I can do it, so can you.

I’ll start by giving Tim some credit. Ferriss’s behavior in this show is to vulnerability practice what Brené Brown’s work is to vulnerability theory. His willingness to take risks and look stupid is truly laudable. In this show as with the better parts of his books, he also does an admirable job at focusing on the most applicable principles instead of obvious tactics. In The Four Hour Chef this looks like getting you to understand the how and why for a technique (like braising) before throwing you into executing a recipe for osso buco. Here it occasionally looks like thoughtfully observing the nuances of surf paddling, parkour leaping, poker strategy, and lock picking.

However, the premise also holds the keys to the downfall of the entire show. To illustrate what I mean, let’s turn Tim’s premise on itself by deconstructing this show into its component parts.

Make the impossible possible by bending the rules

Unlike other parts of the premise and show it sets up, this one isn’t annoying so much as it is just incorrect. He ends up both underselling and overselling what he’s doing by framing his journey as some sort of Promethean quest which it never is. Learning a technical skill like rally car racing or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu quickly isn’t impossible, it’s just inadvisable for reasons each episode makes painfully, abundantly clear.

The bending the rules emphasis implies that he’ll show you a way to cheat without really using that dirty word. While this used to be a focus of Tim’s work, famously becoming a kickboxing champion by abusing a technicality in the rules, in this show he never tries anything like this. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to elite drumming, surfing, parkour, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, there isn’t some kind of rule bending portal to greatness only Tim and his teachers know about. There’s just a lot of practice, repetition, and hard work. Tim can rush, but not avoid all this in his trademark speed run format.

This distorted framing of the show ruffled my feathers a good deal because it epitomizes what Michael Hobbes calls the TED Talkification of intellectual discourse, where everything worth knowing has to be positioned as being counterintuitive. In today’s intellectual landscape, nuggets of knowledge are only considered palatable if they’re covered in the brain puckering sauce of contrarianism: “you thought it was this, but it’s actually THIS!” I have as much patience for this style of content as headache-inducing, overly hoppy double IPAs at this stage of my life.

Contrary to what the intro cheekily implies, what you repeatedly see in the show is that it’s not actually bending or even breaking the rules that gets you ahead; it’s learning them. For example, Ferriss’s surfing teachers don’t teach him some way to break the rules of the waves. That very idea is laughable. A wave will break you but not the other way around. What enables him to get better at catching them is learning to how to observe the energy of the ocean, paddle harder, and distribute his weight more effectively than he used to.

When he tries to quickly master Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, his mentor has him focus on a devastatingly effective finisher called “The Guillotine,” only to have Tim learn that, unsurprisingly, the finisher is a small part of what makes a good grappler. Missing the intuition, transitions, and muscle memory that hours of practice grant you, Tim has to cobble together ways to get his opponent into position to be guillotined with the determination of the cast of Les Mis. It’s interesting to watch but also reveals that when it comes to greatness, there’s nothing really that “hidden” about any of it. You can’t hack hard work.

Tim’s take away in the majority of the episodes is ironically not that the majority of us focus on the wrong stuff; it’s that the fundamentals really do matter. Learning them really quickly doesn’t change the fact that you still have to learn them somehow. You leave most episodes as disillusioned with his “groundbreaking” approach as Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada when someone proposes florals for a spring fashion launch.

Find the world’s best teachers

The teachers are the best and worst part of this show. They’re the best in that they often convey genuine knowledge and insight to Tim and you, the viewer. They’re often a lot more interesting and charismatic than he is. Sometimes, you even catch these wry smiles from them as if they too know just how silly what they’re taking part in is.

They’re the worst in that they are a big part of what makes his pitch that “If I can do it, so can you” immediately collapse under its own self-indulgent pretense. The entire show consists of him having access to elite coaches and working on nothing but this skill for a week straight. While learning how to play a drum kit or surf is certainly something any of us can do in a week if we can set aside the time and get the equipment, almost no one besides Tim gets to learn drumming from Stewart Copeland of the Police and surfing from big wave legend Laird Hamilton. So good luck trying literally any of this at home.

Push myself to the edge

The compressed time frame part of the show is of course necessary for TV but it’s also ridiculous, which he seems to be sort of aware of. In turning the nuanced, multi-layered repetitions of learning into a 5 day sprint, he not only blends the material into a knowledge smoothie, but the artificial pressure usually causes him to buckle mentally, physically, or both. Each episode reliably features a confessional insert shot about a physical or mental breakdown. In the parkour episode he seriously damages his knee, tearing most of the quadriceps muscles on both legs. He crashes his rally car into a ditch because he’s struggling with the cornering at high speed. To try to learn the drums he pulls an all nighter, has a panic attack, and confides to the camera:

“I’m effectively having an anxiety attack. If you’re trying to learn something very very quickly in a compressed time frame you will experience extreme frustration at predictable points and sometimes completely freaking out. The question remains of course: Is 4 or 5 days really enough for me to adapt and learn what I need to learn.”

His stoic narration of his mental breakdown is admirable, but the breakdown itself also seems very avoidable. It’s almost as if you can’t really learn anything worth learning in just 5 days. In forcing this compressed timeline, Ferriss ends up distorting both himself and the subject matter he’s tackling in ways that alternate between frustrating, worrying, and predictable. Like Too Hot to Handle, the absurdity of this show’s premise creates a gravitational field that even the most exceptional TV production from Zero Point Zero can’t fully escape.

Deconstruct, decode, demystify (and some Silicon Valley nonsense)

This show has to overcome some self-indulgent optics before you can learn a thing from it. After viewing just 4 minutes of it, Alexis summed up this show as: “rich man goes on fun vacations to learn new hobbies.” Even if you can look past that and focus on the learning, the reality is that even with expert mentors, the process of watching someone learning to do something in a week just isn’t always great TV. The golf episode, for example, showed me that the only thing more boring that watching golf is watching someone learn to play golf.

The end result of his speed learning is often underwhelming, awkward, or passable. Even after a week of expert tutoring, Tim usually ends up just okay at whatever he’s trying to do. Unless you’re a proud parent, watching someone be just kind of okay at a new hobby isn’t very gripping viewing.

As for the learning “hacks” featured, they range from genuinely insightful, to fairly obvious, to downright silly. In the dating episode, perhaps the cringiest of the series, Tim enlists the help of his hacker buddy who proposes speeding up the app-based dating process by:

1. Scraping the profiles off of an entire dating site onto your computer.

2. Setting up a language filter to detect and filter out profiles with a reading level below your ideal threshold.

3. Theoretically fornicating with any human female that doesn’t find the above tactics offensive, sexist, and creepy.

It’s thinly veiled classism, but with the sheen of superiority that only a tactless technocrat can provide, which incidentally is a halfway decent subtitle for Ferriss’s larger oeuvre. This whole segment feels like a cruel joke from the Silicon Valley writers room. Who on earth actually has the time, skills, and interest in dating this way?

Later in this same episode, Tim tries is working with a fancy Silicon Valley matchmaker, whose business is invite only and will put you back $25,000-$100,000. Again, how is this an applicable form of expertise? One third of Tim’s total dating strategies basically boils down to having a lot of money.

Speaking of having no class consciousness, this particularly awkward episode culminates with a “cocktail party” that Tim is supposed to be hosting. However, when we finally get to this sequence, it turns out to take place at Bourbon and Branch, a fancy speakeasy bar in SF, which Tim has rented out for the night. In this fancy setting, the “challenge” of wooing the three women he invites to this bougey cocktail party runs aground on the aforementioned coral reef of self-indulgence.

There’s also a fair amount of Silicon Valley life-hacking jargon to wade through, of course. By my analysis Tim invokes 80/20 analysis in at least 80% of the episodes, which would make Pareto want to hurl himself off of a 80 foot building onto 20 foot spikes. Additionally the way he applies it, while accurate, is also often thuddingly obvious. In learning to play a Foreigner song on drums his big insight is that instead of forcing himself to learn to read sheet music in 5 days, it might be better to break the song into verse, pre-chorus, and chorus. While this is packaged as a Pareto-esque insight, the reality is any musician could have told you to start this way. It’s almost as if Tim adds complexity into the process just so he has something to slash through with his intellectual machete. This is compounded by the amount of onscreen overlays that give the whole show the over-caffeinated Silicon valley alpha male vibe of the famous hacking scene from the start of The Social Network.

If I can do it, so can you

The idea that any of us can do this stuff is perhaps the most ludicrous and frustrating part of the show. Tim has the money, connections, and free time to set up indulgent deep dives into elite expertise and you do not. He is also perched atop an invisible iceberg of other advantages he only occasionally admits to. In the language learning episode, he stoically proclaims that to learn Tagalog in just 5 days he’ll have to draw on his 10 years of practice rapidly learning languages. Wait, so he’s been practicing this particular skill for 10 years!? How is that a fair comparison for the rest of us then? Tim’s crash course in Tagalog inadvertently reveals the Achilles heel of the entire show, the key to learning things this quickly might not be using his tactics but literally being Tim Ferriss.

Moreover, most of these skills appear not to be things anyone can just pick up quickly, even with expert coaching, as the painful and awkward sections of the dating and parkour episodes make abundantly clear. The one exception is the poker episode, which both imparts useful poker advice and appears to significantly improve his game. Some skills are more quickly transferrable. Learning a card came is understandably simpler than learning Jiu Jitsu or golf.

Yet time and time again, while some of his principles transfer, the process usually does not. As one Youtube commenter poignantly put it, Tim’s secret to success is “essentially, having top mentors and being coached one-on-one for five days...”

Groundbreaking.

Why did this show fail while Ferriss continues to succeed?

The biggest lesson you can learn from the Tim’s TV show is that understanding an expert and becoming one are actually different enterprises entirely. Grasping a concept or principle in an interview is one thing, but applying it via the expression of a skill is a different affair. Tim built his career on packaging the insights of experts, and his endeavor to apply these insights in real time ends up being unintentionally informative about the limits of this kind of life hacking content in the first place. You wouldn’t want to watch Teri Gross try to record a rap album after interviewing Jay Z a few times, but that’s essentially what this show’s premise is in practice.

What works about Tim Ferriss’s podcast is that he provides a platform for true experts to share their secrets. His wealth, fame, and privilege grant him access to elite expertise, which can be thrillingly, seductively intimate to listen to. However, the application of said expertise is entirely up to you. As you listen, you’re free to imagine the training montage of you applying these tactics to your life. What doesn’t work about his TV show is ironically the raw humanity and “Timness” of it. He attempts and usually fails to demonstrate that expertise is as quickly transferrable as he confidently suggests it is. In having to witness the very training montage that would otherwise be left to our imagination, we learn how the sausage of learning works, and it’s just never as pretty or clean as we or Ferriss might have hoped. We see that even TV editing can’t hide how tricky expertise is to truly pin down or bottle up. After watching 13 episodes of this stuff I’m left with the sobering conclusion that cynics suspected all along: maybe there is no shortcut to developing expertise in 5 days. Maybe it’s better that way.

The conundrum of being a rich and famous person with an iconic personal brand like Tim Ferriss or Oprah is that when you try to proselytize about learning your approach it’s hard for the rest of us to separate how much of your success is attributable to your method, your wealth, or other contextual or intangible factors that aren’t actually transferrable or teachable. I left this “extreme learning” show with the same question his books and podcasts left me with: how much of being as successful as Tim Ferriss is even learnable? I now believe a more honest title for this show would have been"I am Tim Ferriss and you are not.”

After this curious and uncharacteristic failure, Tim Ferriss’s career continued to rack up success after success. He went on to release two more books of “trade secrets” you can apply to your life: Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors, which I for the life of me cannot tell apart. Like seemingly everyone else in SF, he decamped from the Bay Area and moved to Austin where I suspect the windfall from all his Uber stock can buy a lot more land. He’s continued to crank out podcast after podcast, even interviewing Andrew Huberman for a breezy 3 hours recently. I feel like listening to these two titans of self-optimization talk to each other would surely result in all of Silicon Valley spontaneously climaxing with a focused efficiency that even Vilfredo Pareto would approve of. However if you don’t have three hours to spare, the 6 secrets to a good life according to Huberman are: sleep, nutrients, exercise, light, relationships, and regularly wrestling a Grizzly bear naked in a glacial pool under the full moon. Okay, I’ll admit I embellished that last one a bit just to see if you were still paying attention.

Wait, did you catch the Ferriss fake-out of this entire essay? I lured you in with the premise of learning something that I didn’t really teach you despite all the energetic asides and passionate tangents. After watching all 13 episodes I’ve thoroughly deconstructed, decoded, and demystified Tim’s formula in depth. While we now understand why this show stumbles, where it’s premise fails, and what about it is frustrating and awkward to watch, we still don’t know why it was a one season wonder beyond my educated guesses. So few traces of it even remain. A decade later, I could find little evidence of this show’s impact, reviews, or reactions online. I suppose when you produce as much content as he does, the occasional dud doesn’t really matter. All I can surmise is that after the experiment of this show proved to be a dead end, Ferriss learned from his failure at his trademark lightning speed, cut bait and moved on. So perhaps it’s time I do the same. To help me slickly parkour out of this essay, I’ll drop an intellectual smoke bomb in the form of a Buckminster Fuller quote. While Tim used it to defend his failure to speedily learn parkour without shredding his cartilage, I suspect he’d approve of it being used as a meta-explanation of this charmingly odd cul-de-sac of a show:

"There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes."

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