Tim Ferriss: Self-help guru and serial experimenter

Global Business

Angel investor, body hacker and self-help guru, Tim Ferriss holds all of these titles and many more.

His books – “The Four Hour Workweek” and “The Four Hour Body” – were both number one on the New York Times best seller list.

CCTV America’s Mark Niu has more on the entrepreneur who can’t stop tinkering with life. Appearing at the Xtech Conference in San Francisco, Tim Ferriss tells us how it all began.

Born premature, which led to respiratory problems, his counter-intuitive idea was to become a competitive wrestler.

“I realized early on one of the few competitive advantages that I had with that thermoregulatory screw up is that I could sweat really easily, so I decided to get really good at cutting weight,” Ferris said. “ I was sometimes cutting 20-25 pounds within 18 hours, twice a week. I don’t recommend this by the way. I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on the internet.”

What he plays on the internet is hard to describe: he gives advice on rapid fat loss, working with minimum input and maximum output, and accelerated learning – the basis for his show, “The Tim Ferriss Experiment.”

His podcast on iTunes is regularly at the top of the business charts – with more than 70 million downloads.

Ferriss says he’s been the guinea pig in hundreds of experiments both in academic settings and just on his own. He says most of those tests have been perfectly legal, while others fall into a gray area.

Why does he do it? Ferriss says he just wanted to capture the data – something he’s been committed to most of his life — evident by the fact that he’s kept a written log of every one of his workouts since he was 15 years old.


Tim Ferriss talks about technology and neuroscience

CCTV America’s Mark Niu sat down with Tim Ferriss to discuss XTech conference, neuroscience and the future of startups in the U.S.


Tim Ferriss answers One More Question: Has any experiment he’s done caused irreversible damage?