Introducing The Founder Mindset: Tim Ferriss on Experiments, Risk, and Freedom

Summary

---

HBR IdeaCast: Introducing The Founder Mindset

Episode Title: Tim Ferriss on Experiments, Risk, and Freedom
Date: July 30, 2026
Host: Reza Satchu (Founder Mindset)
Guest: Tim Ferriss (Entrepreneur, Author, Podcaster, Investor)

---

Episode Overview

This episode features a lively conversation between Reza Satchu and Tim Ferriss, delving deeply into Ferriss’s philosophy of risk, experimentation, decision-making, and learning. The discussion breaks down how Ferriss approaches building companies, making investments, and designing a life of freedom and continual growth. Throughout, Ferriss challenges common misconceptions about entrepreneurial “risk” and emphasizes the power of curiosity, commitment, and the discipline of learning from failure.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Myth of the “Risk-Taking” Founder

• Risk-Minimization as Core Philosophy:
  • Ferriss consistently tries to minimize downside risk in both business and life, driven by his upbringing without financial security.
    • “I, from the very beginning, have been hyper vigilant about minimizing losses. I really don’t view myself as a risk taker.” (Ferriss, 03:25)
• Calculated, Not Reckless, Decisions:
  • Ferriss and Satchu agree: being a founder is not about jumping into shark-infested waters, but about constantly calculating risk and not being paralyzed by it.
    • “It is actually someone who is calculating risk at all times and who isn’t paralyzed by that risk.” (Satchu, 03:53)

2. Experimentation as a Competitive Advantage

• Angel Investing as Learning Platform:
  • Ferriss describes investing as allowing him to run more experiments, focusing on recoverable rather than irreversible bets.
    • “Angel investing has made me more bold in running more experiments because I just realized most things aren’t going to work out… you don’t need to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life and build an amazing business.” (Ferriss, 04:19)
• Maximizing Learning:
  • The goal in projects or startups should be to maximize learning and relationships, not just financial return.
    • “As long as you have engineered for yourself a timeline… and you don’t keep it open ended, I think it’s very hard to fail in the long term.” (Ferriss, 07:14)

3. Fear-Setting and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

• Defining Fears, Not Just Goals:
  • Ferriss offers the concept of “fear-setting,” inspired by Stoic philosophy, to bring clarity to nebulous anxieties and reduce inaction.
    • “It’s applying the same thing [as goal-setting] to what could be like a nebulous cloud of concerns and anxiety.” (Ferriss, 06:15)
• Active Decision-Making:
  • Both agree that many people passively let circumstances dictate their path. Explicitly choosing to “stay the course,” even as an experiment, helps develop judgment.
    • “What most people do is when they’re in doubt, they just stay the course. But they don’t make an active decision to stay the course.” (Satchu, 08:44)
• Default Rules and the Value of Fast Decisions:
  • Ferriss prefers rules or policies that reduce cognitive load. Making decisions quickly (unless they’re truly “one-way doors”) is better than agonizing endlessly.
    • “The cognitive load of having lots of pending decisions is worse than making some mistakes.” (Ferriss, 09:21)
    • “The more you can make default and automatic, the better.” (Ferriss, 10:55)
    • Memorable Quote: “Complexity is the enemy of execution.” (Tony Robbins, quoted by Ferriss, 11:27)

4. Optionality vs. Commitment

• The “Curse of Optionality”:
  • Satchu warns that people, especially elite students, often preserve too many options and undervalue the power of deep commitment. Ferriss agrees, adding that optionality brings peace of mind, but only when bounded by clear parameters.
    • “Commitment’s actually a superpower, not a sacrifice… you never actually see what you’re capable of when you commit.” (Satchu, 12:54)
    • “For me, optionality does not mean anything and everything for undefined periods of time.” (Ferriss, 12:54)
• Running Parallel Experiments:
  • Commitment and experimentation can coexist; parallel efforts are possible as long as there’s a throughline—usually learning or relationship-building.
    • “If you have true north… maximizing learning and developing relationships… it’s a lot harder to lose long term than people realize.” (Ferriss, 07:14; 13:51)

5. The Power of Combining Skills: Multidisciplinary Advantage

• Combining Skills for Edge:
  • Ferriss argues it’s more advantageous (and safer) to be in the top 25% of multiple domains than to try to be world-class in one.
    • “If you’re in the top 25% of two things that are rarely combined… you can be the one person who is the go to source.” (Ferriss, 16:22)
    • “I think it’s a safer and more competitively advantageous approach for most people.” (Ferriss, 16:50)
• Learning from Mentors:
  • Ferriss attributes his own multidisciplinary approach to Ed Schau, a mentor who exemplified combining multiple careers and areas of expertise.

6. Finding “Blue Oceans” and Future Opportunities

• Don’t Chase Fads—Excavate the Old:
  • Ferriss prefers to look for opportunities in areas that are overlooked or considered unsexy, like building an email list when everyone else moves on to new tech.
    • “I look for things that once were sexy that are no longer sexy… you can excavate and reinvigorate the old in addition to looking for the new.” (Ferriss, 18:22–19:05)
• Leaning Against Consensus:
  • He’s suspicious of consensus thinking and encourages students to do “weird things” and actively seek adventure and curiosity.

7. Impact and Societal Contribution

• Practical Impact Over Immortality:
  • Ferriss doesn’t aspire to be remembered by the masses, but to genuinely help those he reaches.
    • “If I can lead the world, hopefully maybe a handful of people better off than they were beforehand. Great.” (Ferriss, 23:58)
• Start Small, Act Now:
  • Citing Seth Godin, Ferriss highlights that it’s easy to hide behind big goals, but real impact comes from doing small, concrete things now.
    • “Feel free to think big, but act small next week.” (Ferriss, 25:17)

8. Advice for Students and Aspiring Founders

• No Entitlement, Do the Work:
  • Ferriss cautions that pedigree and credentials don't matter in building companies; willingness to do menial work and unexpected things draws positive attention.
    • “Nobody cares about your business degree. And if you behave… as if you are entitled to something, you’re going to have a very hard slog of things.” (Ferriss, 27:44)
    • “If you just do what people would not expect in a positive sense, you can really squeeze a lot out of what you learned at a place like HBS.” (Ferriss, 29:52)
• Train the “Weirdness Muscle”:
  • Ferriss encourages cultivating curiosity and a tolerance for “weirdness” early, before conformity sets in.
    • “There’s certain types of weirdness that if you embrace early—develop, cultivate the habit of exploring those strange corners…” (Ferriss, 30:39)
• Judgment as a Muscle and Exponential Learning:
  • Satchu frames judgment as a non-linear, exponential process built through repeated action and adventure.
    • “Seek adventure… trust your curiosity, trust your judgment. Learn as much as you can… exponential learning.” (Satchu, 31:55)

---

Notable Quotes and Moments (with Timestamps)

• On balancing luck, risk, and hard work (03:25):

  • “There’s certainly a luck component… but I get a bit frustrated with anyone who attributes all of their outcomes to hard work or 100% to luck.”

• On the psychological trap of overestimating downside (05:29):

  • “People tend to overestimate their downside… you talk about, we need to define our fears, as opposed to… defining their goals.”

• On why experiments beat perfectionism (07:14):

  • “As long as you have engineered for yourself a timeline… I think it’s very hard to fail in the long term.”

• On rapid decision-making (09:21):

  • “For me, the cognitive load of having lots of pending decisions is worse than making some mistakes.”

• On the enemy of execution (11:27):

  • “Complexity is the enemy of execution.” (Tony Robbins, quoted)

• On learning from failure (15:05, 25:17):

  • “Even when you fail, you learn a fair amount… If you are able to prove something out on a smaller scale, you can very often push that into some type of scale.”

• On the “curse of optionality” (12:54):

  • “Commitment’s actually a superpower, not a sacrifice… you never actually see what you’re capable of when you commit.” (Satchu)

• Advice to elite students (27:44):

  • “Nobody cares about your business degree… if you are willing to do menial stuff, and yet you still have this fancy degree, people are going to pay attention to that.”

• On cultivating curiosity and ‘weirdness’ (31:08):

  • “If you embrace early… the habit of exploring those strange corners… be curious.” (Ferriss)

---

Important Segments and Timestamps

• [03:06] – Misconceptions about Ferriss and risk
• [05:29] – The importance of “fear-setting” over goal-setting
• [09:21] – Decision-making rules and the value of defaults
• [12:54] – Optionality vs. Commitment debate
• [16:22] – Multidisciplinary advantage and combining skills
• [18:22] – How Ferriss thinks about blue ocean opportunities
• [20:31] – Using audience/community for distributed experiments
• [23:58] – Making measurable, immediate impact
• [27:44] – Ferriss’s real-world advice for MBAs and founders
• [31:08] – Why founders should train the weirdness/curiosity muscle

---

Takeaways

• Calculated risk, not recklessness, is the founder’s true mindset.
• Curiosity and learning are more powerful than credentials or perfect plans.
• Commitment—in the face of optionality—creates a foundation for real impact.
• Combining diverse skills opens rare and defensible opportunities.
• Action, even if small, should start immediately; waiting for the “big moment” is often a trap.
• Founders must cultivate resilience, humility, and willingness to do unexpected, menial work.
• Question consensus, embrace weirdness, and don’t be afraid to act differently.

---

For Further Listening

• Recommended by Adi Ignatius and HBR:
  • Follow The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu for more candid conversations with world-class entrepreneurs.

---

Transcript

[Adi Ignatius]

Your next VP is already on your payroll, recognized by peers overlooked by leadership, Future Leaders by Workhuman identifies your highest potential talent four years before traditional methods catch up. Develop smarter with future leaders from workhuman. Hi everyone, it's Adi Ignatius, editor at large at Harvard Business Review and co host of IdeaCast. I'm dropping into your feed today to let you know about a show from our friends at Harvard Business School. It's called the Founder Mindset and it's hosted by Serial founder and Harvard Business School senior lecturer Reza Satchew. The show is a masterclass in what it really takes to be a successful founder. In each episode, Reza sits down with some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, including Reese Witherspoon, Kevin o', Leary, Galen Weston, and more than, and pushes them to break down exactly how they commit, decide, and build for impact. Today we're sharing Raise's recent conversation with Tim Ferriss, the entrepreneur investor, bestselling author of the Four Hour Workweek, and host of one of the world's most influential podcasts. You'll hear Tim reflect on experimentation, his approach to calibrated risk taking, and how he makes decisions under uncertainty. Plus, he'll explain why curiosity and learning have shaped nearly every chapter of his career. Before you give it a listen, make sure to follow the Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tim Ferriss]

I, from the very beginning, have been hyper vigilant about minimizing losses.

[Reza Satchu]

It is actually someone who is calculating risk at all the times and who isn't paralyzed by that risk.

[Tim Ferriss]

Most things aren't going to work out in the world of building companies. Nobody cares.

[Podcast Narrator]

This is the Founder Mindset with Reza Sachew.

[Reza Satchu]

Every year at Harvard Business School, hundreds of students compete to gain entrance into my class, one of the most popular courses on campus, the Founder Mindset. For those who make the cut, I take them on a journey, challenging them to take risks, make commitments, and most importantly, learn judgment. One of the most popular aspects of the course are the guests. We bring in outstanding entrepreneurs who've had a truly profound impact on the world. Now I'm sharing my conversations with some of these founders on our show. I'm Reza Sachew and this is the Founder Mindset.

[Podcast Narrator]

What does it take to be a Founder? Tim Ferriss turned experimentation into a competitive advantage, authoring multiple number one New York Times bestsellers, launching one of the world's most influential podcasts, and investing early in companies like Uber, Facebook, Shopify, and Duolingo. His playbook isn't about reckless bets it's about calibrated risk, smart experiments and learning faster than the competition.

[Reza Satchu]

Tim Ferriss, welcome to the founder mindset.

[Tim Ferriss]

Thanks for having me.

[Reza Satchu]

So most people, they look at you and they think, wow, what a remarkable story. How many things you've done. You must take so much risk and therefore there's some combination of risk management or luck that has allowed you to do all of these things very well. What's your reaction to that?

[Tim Ferriss]

There's certainly a luck component, but I get a bit frustrated with anyone who attributes all of their outcomes to hard work or 100% to luck. I mean, I think it's rarely 100%, one or the other. There's a luck factor. I would say on the risk side, I, from the very beginning, coming from family, without a ton of money, where money was always an issue, have been hyper vigilant about minimizing losses. I really don't view myself as a risk taker.

[Reza Satchu]

It's such a remarkable thing because most people would look at your life and they'd say, this fellow has done so many things that are different that he must have sought a tremendous amount of risk. And so this concept that this is not you jumping off a cliff into shark infested waters in the middle of a hurricane, it is not that. It is actually someone who is calculating risk at all times and who isn't paralyzed by that risk. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

And I think I've, by luck, certainly by the grace of timing, in some cases benefited from the angel investing. When you are trying to think systematically about investing, you have to interrogate your own thinking and be willing to change your own thinking, recognize what type of bets are recoverable versus irrecoverable. So I think the, if anything, and maybe this would be unexpected, but the angel investing has made me more bold in running more experiments because I just realized most things aren't going to work out. But you don't need to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life and build an amazing business.

[Reza Satchu]

One of the things around risk calibration is ultimately what you're trying to figure out is, okay, what's my downside and what's my upside? Now human psychology is such that people tend to overestimate their downside. And so one of the things you talk about is we need to define our fears. Okay. As opposed to what we, you know, what everyone here at Harvard Business School is doing is which is defining their goals. Okay, tell me why the concept of defining your fears is so important to actually calibrating risk. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

So the fear Setting exercise which you're describing, people can find it for free online. It was important to me personally because I grew up in a family with all sorts of mental health challenges, addiction, overdoses, depression, you name it, and struggled with a lot of that myself. And I would get into these ruminative. Ruminative loops that catastrophized. So to try to turn down the volume on that came to fear setting through stoic philosophy and found it incredibly helpful. Just for peace of mind was the

[Reza Satchu]

concept that once you define your fear, you were able to realize that you could manage through it.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, yeah. It's a lot like goal setting.

[Adi Ignatius]

Right.

[Tim Ferriss]

You want like specific, measurable, realistic timeline, blah, blah, blah. It's applying the same thing to what could be like a nebulous cloud of concerns and anxiety. And I would imagine if you were to ask a lot of the students in your sections, you know, what are your fears? Do this exercise. They might come up blank. But if I were to say, what's the thing that you would do if you knew you could not fail? Right. What would that be? And it doesn't have to be from the menu of options that's coming straight out of the class. It could be anything. Maybe it's being a screenwriter. Who the hell knows? What is that thing? And then since you're not already committed to that, you've told yourself, I can't do that for some set of reasons. So let's interrogate those reasons.

[Reza Satchu]

So is that the assumption? So when you explore these new things, is that how you're approaching it?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, it is.

[Reza Satchu]

You deciding you want to be a tango dancer, there's obviously risk that that's not gonna happen. Yeah, sure. Okay. But your definition is something different.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I mean, the risk for me is largely. I mean, I could expand on this, but the probability of an irreversible negative outcome and most of the risk, I think that students at a place like HBS would fear is some type of reputational hit being judged by others.

[Reza Satchu]

Well, they're looking left and right.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right. And the fact of the matter is, most people aren't thinking about. Think about themselves in a way. Understanding that theoretically is very different from screwing around with tango and doing that for six months and then doing this, that, and the other thing and realizing very few things matter. And if they don't work out, that's fine. You just keep experimenting. And as long as you have a. Have engineered for yourself a timeline so that you know when you will decide if this is pass fail and if it's failed, Move on to the next thing. As long as you've done that and you don't keep it open ended. I think it's very hard to fail in the long term if you are choosing your projects for maximizing learning and developing relationships that transcend that given project or startup or whatever. I just think it's really, it's a lot harder to lose long term than people realize.

[Reza Satchu]

So it must be true that you have confidence in your ability to see things that others don't see.

[Tim Ferriss]

I have confidence in my ability to wade into waters that I think are plausibly interesting without worrying too much about it.

[Reza Satchu]

Now I have a phrase which is sort of served me well in my founder journey, which is if in doubt, act now. What people think that means, they sort of say, well that's nonsense. I mean, you don't know what to do and you're just going to make an action. No, no, no. What most people do is when they're in doubt, they just stay the course. But they don't make an active decision to stay the course. Right. They're sort of like deer in headlights. So my point is you may want to stay the course, but you're making an active decision in your mind. I'm staying the course so I can test my judgment. Okay, what are the frameworks that you have in place to enable you to make rapid decisions under uncertainty that are risk calibrated but that need to be done timely?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I would say it's, it's more a rule, a policy than a framework. But for me the cognitive load of having lots of pending decisions is worse than making some mistakes. Unless this is a clear one way door, meaning irreversible, that's very, very, it's going to be very expensive, slash punishing. If it's a problem, just make a decision.

[Reza Satchu]

Right.

[Tim Ferriss]

I don't need to think about where I'm going to sit on flight for very long.

[Reza Satchu]

Right.

[Tim Ferriss]

I don't need to think about hotel. Worst case, it's a crabby hotel and I can't sleep. That's fine, I'll get over it.

[Reza Satchu]

It saves time for the things that matter.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, I mean this is true with. It applies, I keep bringing up the angel investing because I think it's a microcosm of the macro in the sense of how you make decisions around bet sizing.

[Adi Ignatius]

Right.

[Tim Ferriss]

So if I'm making very big bets for me, then I'm almost certainly going to take longer to make those decisions. But if I've made a decision in advance Like a meta decision that in a certain area, there's no way that I can predict who's going to be the winner. So I'm just going to spray and pray and it's going to be 25k, 50k. It's not worth me doing four calls with that founder. It's like, unless there are clear disqualifiers, I should just get some chips on the table. And you can do that with a lot of categories of decisions.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because what you're arguing for some set of decisions, you just make them because you're trying to save time. But also it strikes me that what you're also saying is there's value to making decisions.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, there's value to making decisions. Where I would take a step further is for as much as possible in my life, and I do see this across hundreds of people I've interviewed, the more you can make default and automatic, the better. So that could be intermittent fasting. Right. And I were both doing that.

[Reza Satchu]

The health around it is so positive. But two, it's just a set of rules that are very easy to follow. So I don't have to think about it that much.

[Tim Ferriss]

It's the simplicity of that that works. And Tony Robbins has said that complexity is the enemy of execution. I think that's really, really true. Because if you look at what I try to do, at least with the books, and I do this with the podcast too, but I'm thinking about practical behavioral change.

[Reza Satchu]

One thing you talked about where I think we have a disconnect, is you talk about how valuable options are to you. Okay. Now, of course, every option has a value, no question. Okay, I'll take the other side of it and say that we live in a society where, generally speaking, people overvalue options and undervalue commitment. Yeah, Okay, I would agree with that. And so what you see is a decline in marriage, a decline in home ownership, a decline in people going to church. And certainly at hbs, where I see it most acutely is in them making decisions around their career paths that are completely inconsistent with the impact that they want to have and the learning that they want to have. But it enables them to preserve all options. And so I call it the curse of optionality. And so, effectively, you never actually see what you're capable of when you commit. Okay, so my argument is commitment's actually a superpower, not a sacrifice. And yes, by definition, commitment means you are cutting off some options. Okay. But I'm curious whether that resonates with you. And how do you think about that in terms of, you know, maximizing options?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I think they're, I think they're totally compatible. There is definitely. And I do think this is a. Partially a product of my childhood and feeling trapped in certain ways and dealing with a bunch of horrible stuff that I was, I was like, I don't like the feeling of being trapped. So having optionality is something that gives me peace of mind. But for me, optionality does not mean anything and everything for undefined periods of time. And even if I am, for instance, looking for feedback with split testing on, say, the title and subtitle of the four hour workweek, I tested it through Google AdWords, did all this stuff in bookstores with like a clicker to determine what cover I picked up more than others. But here's the, here's the takeaway from that is I, I had already decided on 6 to 10 titles and subtitles that I felt good about. And then it was choosing among those six to 10. I was not going into the ether and asking what should I do?

[Reza Satchu]

So you had a frame of reference. You were like, yeah, yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

And then also you can actually run a lot of experiments in parallel so you don't have to have any superimposed mutual exclusivity where it's like, okay, I'm only going to do this startup for X period of time, and then if it doesn't work, then I'm going to try my hand at writing. Like, one of your students came to me with this dilemma and I was like, well, based on what you're telling me about the scope of the writing, it sounds like something you could do in the evenings and on the weekend. So you can do both. I mean, you're going to really have to figure out self care because you'll be burning the candle at both ends. But if you're signing up for this entrepreneurial journey, I mean, you're kind of signing up for bread and the candle at both ends, no matter what. So you can run those things in parallel. But if there's no through line, I think you have a problem. Right? So if you have true north, which for me would be learning skills, developing relationships with the assumption that even if something fails per se, like the Four Hour Chef, my third book was boycotted by just about everybody because it came out through Amazon Publishing and it scared the out of everybody in the publishing world. A team I worked with on that Houghton Mifflin, Hmh. I ended up working with for my next two books and ended up working

[Reza Satchu]

with, well this is your point around the cost of it's not irreversible failure. Meaning what happens in these situations is even when you fail, you learn a fair amount. You have a commitment to a mindset. How do you think you're able to not just see things differently, but to trust the process or the mindset? And is it really around the experimentation?

[Tim Ferriss]

I mean, that's part of it, but I can try to flesh it out. So I would say also I need to give credit to a teacher of mine actually taught at HBS for a long time named Ed Schau, who then

[Reza Satchu]

he was a Princeton.

[Tim Ferriss]

He was a Princeton for high tech entrepreneurship. 11491 I still have all my notes, Ed.

[Reza Satchu]

It's good to see that a teacher can still have long term impact.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I'm still in touch with Ed and he I think modeled for me. He was the first person I came across in real life who on some level was an exemplar of what I wanted to do. So former congressman for Silicon Valley, former competitive figure skating athlete, ended up teaching computer science at Stanford because no one else. I think somebody had bailed last minute and he's like, sure, I'll try to teach this thing or computer science way back in the day, has taken a number of companies public, focused on teaching and continues to do all these different things.

[Reza Satchu]

So tons of learning.

[Tim Ferriss]

He wasn't a specialist looking to be top 1%, 1 domain. If you're in the top 25% of two things that are rarely combined and you put those together could be computer science plus law degree, it could be, who knows? Suddenly you can be the one person who is the go to source for a very, very narrow specialty.

[Reza Satchu]

So for you, the idea that you could be good at multiple things felt like a life better lived than being excellent at one thing.

[Tim Ferriss]

I think it's a safer and more competitively advantageous approach for most people. If you want to try to be in the NBA and go up against LeBron James, good luck. I mean it's very few people who are going to be able to do that. If you want to be the top 1% in concert cello players or the top 1% and fill in the blank, any one thing, it's incredibly difficult to I think have the company building potential or the impact possibility that you can have by combining say being in the top 25% of two things that are

[Reza Satchu]

rarely combined by putting those together, I guess what you're arguing is effectively you're in the top 1% of whatever those two things are.

[Tim Ferriss]

And also for me, if you look at my chronology, this is a way of getting to your question. It might look like I'm hopping around a lot, and I suppose I am, but it's not because I just get bored and then look for the next thing. It's often because I feel like I started in the blue ocean where maybe I could count cards with a single deck blackjack table. And then suddenly it gets really crowded and all of a sudden that strategy doesn't work. Right. The, the deck is stacked against me. And that at that point I'm like, I don't, I don't fetishize hard games. I like, I like easy games.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah, sure, why not? So, so if you think about blue, I mean, you have found blue oceans in the past. What are the next set of. Where do we see blue oceans going forward?

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh boy, it's. It's really personal. I think there are blue oceans everywhere. Like for instance, I think that

[Adi Ignatius]

a

[Tim Ferriss]

few years ago everything had Web three in its deck if it was a startup. And then for a while it was VR, then it was ar, now it's AI. Like everybody sprinkles a little pixie dust of AI in their deck and valuations go immediately up. Yeah. And things are completely bananas. So I would say it's not chasing that for me. I mean, I placed a few bets in the sector, but I look for things that once were sexy that are no longer sexy. Which is why I started building my email list 10 years ago or whatever it was when everyone's like, email's dead.

[Reza Satchu]

Right.

[Tim Ferriss]

I'm like, I don't think so. Like email's dead until people have to get a job and then email is alive and well. So I think you can excavate and reinvigorate the old in addition to looking for the new. I think there's going to be a lot of pushback to digital overwhelm and I'm curious what forms that'll take. Like, how might you bet on that?

[Reza Satchu]

If I think about, for you what the next 10 years looks like.

[Adi Ignatius]

Okay.

[Reza Satchu]

Sort of. What would be fun, impactful, where are you going to lean into your. Whatever, you know, your, your set of superpowers that you have and what are we solving for? What is that? Like, what does that look like?

[Tim Ferriss]

I'm not totally sure. I'm in part, and maybe this is a cop out, but like whenever I feel like I have a reliable five year plan, I feel like to, to

[Reza Satchu]

have or immediately want to change it.

[Tim Ferriss]

Well, I feel like to have something that I feel I could execute perfectly. I'm operating so well within my sphere of comfort.

[Adi Ignatius]

Yes.

[Tim Ferriss]

That I'm just not aiming.

[Reza Satchu]

Correct.

[Tim Ferriss]

But I would say because what you're

[Reza Satchu]

minimizing is what you might learn in that five year journey which might actually change. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

And things, I mean the conditions change very quickly too. So I would say something that I've been thinking a lot about and that's part of the reason I came in yesterday and had a dinner with a bunch of biotech folks is how I might use my audience now that the technology is available for this to do distributed scientific studies.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah, that's very interesting.

[Tim Ferriss]

So how could I do that? I would need to obviously figure out how to shield myself in the hyper litigious world of the United States.

[Reza Satchu]

And is this sort of around the longevity trend or just broadly speaking?

[Tim Ferriss]

Could be just about anything. So I mean for instance, if I wanted to take a plausible vagus nerve stimulator that could ostensibly have these various effects. Okay. Well including say boosting HRV heart rate variability. Well, could I give people instructions for how to assemble this thing? This is where I have to cover my ass in the US Then ship them an OURA ring or a whoop band, something like that and have a. Potentially this is available now but like an at home self blood draw kit. I just did this the other week. I'd never seen it. It's remarkable. You just stick it on your shoulder and.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Drown it into a vial and then you've got your sample and held people accountable. So it wasn't, it's. We're using quantifiable metrics instead of self reporting. Right.

[Reza Satchu]

And it's highly customized potentially.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, you could, you could really with enough. With a, with an N that is large enough if you have enough people participating like you could, you could potentially parse some really, really interesting signals from that. And that's the kind of thing that it's like if I went to go through academic channels for that, which I've done for 10 plus years, 15 years, it takes forever.

[Reza Satchu]

So you're leveraging potentially your listeners.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. And there are good reasons why it takes a long time to do certain things like IRB and human ethics and all of that. I get it. But I'm not giving anyone the next thalidomide. We'd be dealing with something that has pretty side effect profile. And one of the biggest challenges for any scientific study is subject recruitment. They might recruit 20 people and honestly it'll take them a year and a half to do it. But I can do that in minutes. I also recognize the limitations of something like I'm describing, very hard to placebo control, blah blah, blah. But correlations, if they're strong enough still, like smoking and cancer as an example, can be informing.

[Reza Satchu]

In some ways you're trying to simplify your life, but you're also trying to do hard things.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, this one I would like to do because if I can do provides and this is where I get the most payoff, maybe is doing something that then other, that inspires other people to try different things. So if I could do that and maybe leads to publication, where it's pretty nice to be the co author of a study. I've never done that. And I would want other people with audiences to start to think about. It's like, okay, let's read about cystic fibrosis, let's read about this, let's read about genzyme. Let's study a couple of case studies so you understand what you could do with your audience besides shilling the latest tchotchke.

[Reza Satchu]

Like you could actually have a meaningful impact, have a huge impact.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right. Because you could recruit very specific demographics, psychographics profiles. And to do that through normal academic channels is very, very difficult.

[Reza Satchu]

Okay, so this is a pretty exciting initiative. I mean if this is something where I could imagine, you know, I have a thesis that most people want to live a life of impact where they're having a positive impact on the people they care about. And that can be as broad as the world. Does that resonate with you?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, it resonates. It definitely resonates. I mean I would say that if I can lead the world, hopefully maybe a handful of people better off than they were beforehand. Great. I just like how many people at all of Harvard can tell me Alexander the Great's full name? Probably two or three. So the greatest conqueror the world has ever known. So I don't have any, I don't harbor any illusions or delusions of having people remember my name.

[Reza Satchu]

Well, I think this also speaks to your point where it probably frees you from the shackles of thinking about what everyone just thinking about you.

[Tim Ferriss]

It does that. And also to give credit where credit is due, I think about this a lot. You know, Seth Godin, I have tremendous respect for. He said it's in effect, it's easy to hide behind the big, like solve world hunger, have an impact a billion people, whatever it might be. But he said you can't hide behind the small. So if it's like, okay, you want to impact a Billion people go out next week and impact 10 people and tell me exactly what you did. So I tend to maybe assume is not the right word, but in my experience, like if you start small and that allows you to go from, to bias towards action as opposed to just patting yourself on the back for these big grand dreams, then it's like Jane Goodall didn't start out as Jane Goodall in Marky Lights.

[Reza Satchu]

She spent decades.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Like in the field doing stuff that nobody gave a shit about. If you are able to prove something out on a smaller scale, I feel like you can very often push that into some type of scale. Feel free to think big, but act small next week.

[Reza Satchu]

Well, look, I think there's no question that schools like Harvard, everyone has big dreams. And to your point, there's often a disconnect between their actions and the problem with life. What happens is a lot of people see it as sort of a series of building blocks. They're like, okay, well if I make this amount of money or if I achieve this set of career, if I do this, then I'll get to that phase where I'll impact tons of people. And it's frankly, to your point, it's much easier to do that along the way. And the probability of success that you'll do it with more is much greater if you do it along the way. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

I also think that it's easy to imagine that you yourself making a decision right now will be the same you yourself in five years. And that's rarely the case. So for instance, I also think there's safety masquerading as preserving optionality. And I mean, I know this will be right in your wheelhouse, but if people are going to management consulting or Ibang and they're like, I'm going to get this breadth of experience around multiple

[Reza Satchu]

sectors, they definitely convince themselves.

[Tim Ferriss]

And after four or five years, then I'm going to start my startup. I have seen that happen exactly zero times.

[Reza Satchu]

Yes. Well, so I've heard that a thousand times and I've seen it about the same number.

[Tim Ferriss]

Because the you five years later is going to have like a Porsche gathering dust. You're going to be keeping up with the Joneses or vacationing in Ibiza or whatever nonsense, second home, whatever it is. And suddenly just to feed this monster that you've created and stay in the esteem of your colleagues.

[Reza Satchu]

No.

[Tim Ferriss]

Are you a trap? Are you just.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Are you going to start your like bakery then? I don't think so.

[Reza Satchu]

It's just. So what advice would you give the students you met today, they are here at Harvard, and suddenly what they're seeing is the world is changing pretty dramatically. The jobs that they thought were available to them are declining, even, you know, the consulting jobs. Private equity is a far more institutionalized, less interesting business than it was 20 years ago. The number of people going into banking is going down. And of course, you've got this sort of AI that is apparently going to change everything. And we're trying to solve for this one trait called judgment, which hopefully is a differentiator for human beings. So given these sort of seismic shifts, which both may create opportunity and turmoil, what would be the advice that you would give to these students?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, and look, I hope I don't come off as, like, a cantankerous ass, because I guess I'm pretty salty. But I would say a few things, and this is speaking as someone who has a lot of friends who went to very good business schools and so on, that in the world of building companies, nobody cares about your business degree. And if you behave and interact with people as if you are entitled to something, you're going to have a very hard slog of things. So, on the other hand, if you take what you've learned here and you use that as the payoff, and then are willing, I think, to do what a lot of people are not willing to do, and this extends outside of hbs, too. I think that if you are willing to really have hat in hand and do menial stuff, and yet you still have this fancy degree, people are going to pay attention to that. If you fit the.

[Reza Satchu]

Well, they'll pay attention precisely because it's so differentiated.

[Tim Ferriss]

Exactly. Whereas if you fit the image that most people have, no offense, of like an HBS grad, you're done.

[Reza Satchu]

But what you're precisely saying is that at the core, a founder has to think differently, has to be different. In order to go operate in the extraordinary world, you need to be different. And so the idea here is what you've got to present and do things that are different.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, totally. And also, I would say it's like you can read all the books on boxing or soccer that you want. You could be a PhD in soccer, but, like, until you get out on the field, you're going to realize it's a different thing. And so you gotta get out there and take your lumps. And it doesn't have to be just this march of misery. I mean, like, there's a lot that you can enjoy along the way. But I feel like if you do the Unexpected. Which could be. Right. Starting a podcast in 2014 or whatever. By the way, a lot of people told me, it's too late, that ship was sailed.

[Reza Satchu]

Is that right? Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

A lot of people who had podcasts were like, oh, it's too crowded. I was in 2014. But it could be doing something like that. It could also just be doing what people do not expect, which might be. They're like, oh, this guy's gonna be a pompous. Know it all. And you're just like, hey, I'll get the coffee. I'll do this. Like, clean the shoes, whatever.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

What I've seen amongst founders at least, is like, intelligence is table sticks. It's like reliability, rolling up your sleeves. No. No job too big or too small. And if. If you just do what people would not expect in a positive sense, you can really squeeze a lot out of what you learned at a place like hbs, because, like, the lessons are good.

[Reza Satchu]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

But you still got to get on the field.

[Reza Satchu]

Correct. You know? Exactly. It's the opposite of what you think, which is you're nowhere. You've got to go back to the bottom and actually do the work.

[Tim Ferriss]

Another piece of advice I would give to students, and this is advice that I give to myself. I don't give other people advice that I wouldn't or haven't given myself. And advice, it's like, take it or leave it. Right. Everybody's different. But I'm just suspicious whenever there's too much of a consensus about anything.

[Reza Satchu]

Hence your point. Go do weird things.

[Tim Ferriss]

Go do weird things.

[Adi Ignatius]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Like, especially now, it's not going to get easier unless you train the muscle of doing that and realize. And you realize that if you fall through the ice or one leg goes through the ice, you can get back out. You'll figure it out. But, you know, after four years at McKinsey, are you going to be more or less inclined to take some hairbrained risk? Less, by far. So there's certain types of weirdness that if you embrace early develop, cultivate the habit of exploring those strange corners, which is like.

[Reza Satchu]

I mean, I. Define weird. It's interesting when I hear you say weirdness, it's almost like, be curious. Right. Just be curious about the things that seem unusual to others. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Be curious. And also, like, it's okay to have high conviction in yourself. You got to test that. But it's like if you can beat your head against a wall trying to push forward a bad or mediocre idea because you view yourself as a contrarian. And everyone tells you it's not going to work. And you've read all the amazing stories of these founders who built multi billion dollar companies after everyone said no. Just because people are saying no does not mean your idea is good. Right? So if you label yourself a contrarian, that's very dangerous. Because actually what you're saying is I'm a conformist, but I'm just going to do the opposite.

[Reza Satchu]

Y. You know what, Tim? So what I'd say to you, I'm very grateful for you to come, for you coming here. And I think that part of that gratitude comes from. If I define your life, it's something I try to inspire my students, which is seek adventure. Like, go seek some adventure. Trust your curiosity, trust your judgment. Learn as much as you can. You know, in many ways, you've benefited from what I call exponential learning. Right. And precisely because you took those first steps of trusting your judgment. And I sort of view judgment as a muscle, but it's not linear. And so you've got the benefit of this exponential learning. And at the end of the day, the good of that is that it enables you to hopefully impact a few people a little bit better. And I think today you impacted a lot of people.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, thanks.

[Reza Satchu]

So thank you for being here.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Podcast Narrator]

You've been listening to the Founder Mindset with Reza Sachu

[Adi Ignatius]

Adi here again. I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu. You can follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. We'll be back with a regular IdeaCast episode on Tuesday. Thanks for listening.