The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 4-Hour Workweek Success Stories — Charlie Houpert on Building “Charisma on Command” to 10M+ Subscribers, From Charging $10 for Seminars to Making Millions, Living in Brazil, Critical Early Decisions, and The Secret to Freedom (#817)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Charlie Houpert (@charliehoupert), co-founder of Charisma on Command, a company that helps people develop confidence, charisma, and strong social skills. Originally launched as a 4-Hour Workweek-inspired “muse,” it has since grown into one of the largest platforms for social skills and confidence training, with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers worldwide and more than a billion views across its content in six languages. His flagship course, Charisma University, has guided more than 30,000 members through practical steps to become more magnetic.

Charlie was once voted “Most Likely to Break Out of His Shell” and began studying charisma to overcome his own social anxiety. He now explores the deeper roots of confidence through archetypal psychology, embodiment practices, and more.

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: Charlie, welcome to the show. Nice to be spending some time together.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I thought we would start, as you suggested, since I do not have much memory of this — and that is not to say that I am too big for my britches. I think it was quite a while ago, but how did we first meet in person? This is not our first time meeting.

Charlie Houpert: No, it was a much larger moment in my life than in yours, I think. This is 2011, 2012. I'm working as a management consultant in Washington, DC and I have been a 4-Hour Workweek acolyte for probably six months, like evangelical. “Everyone needs to read this book. We're all entrepreneurs.” I've sold nothing at this point. I've got no product, but everybody has to do this.

And I'm out to dinner with my company. We've just completed this contract. And sitting there facing the door and Tim Ferriss walks in, and the blood drains from my body. I go cold. I'm working on being more gregarious. My boss sees. He goes, “What's wrong?” I said, “It's Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is here,” like the boogeyman walked in. I've told him, and he goes, “The 4-Hour guy?” It's like, “It's him. Yeah, it's him.”

So I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, walked over to your table. This is on H Street in DC. And I didn't know what — I just said, “Hey, Tim, Mr. Tim, I read your book, and it's changed my life.” And this is even before it really changed my life. And I love your blog, and it was so great.

And you turned and faced me and were very kind. You gave me far more attention than I had anticipated that I would get and asked some questions about what I was doing. And at the time, I was like, “Fuck, I haven't actually made anything happen.” So I was like, “I'm working on this, that, and the other thing,” and then excuse myself to go to the bathroom where I was like, “Fuck. You fucking ruined it.” And came back out and didn't have an ask. This is an interesting learning for me, and was just like, “Do you want to get coffee tomorrow?” I don't even drink coffee. You're like, “Sorry, I'm in town. I'm just doing The 4-Hour Body. I've got some meetings tomorrow, so I can't do it,” and politely excuse yourself.

But for me, that was — it was a number of things. One, it was like, “Man, I wish that I was able to have that conversation in a way that created more connection between he and I.” And it was also — it's funny to be sitting here now because at the time I had this projected belief that if you would just feature my business in The Muse, if you would just write about it on your blog, everything would be solved. Units would start flying off the shelf and I'd be taken care of forever. So it's really cool to be sitting here on the other side of that projection and get to chat.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay. DC. Yeah, I very rarely go to DC. So, I mean, in the multiverse of other infinite possibilities, it is pretty incredible that we met at all because I so rarely go to DC. And I think you can also probably cut yourself some slack in the sense that in those conditions, it's pretty hard to establish very quick rapport and connection.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I don't know. Was I by myself or in a group?

Charlie Houpert: You were by yourself. It was offered up on a silver platter. No, not to say — I reflect and it's like you're in town for one day, but the idea that maybe there was something that could have been said to create that connection was like — it was the Inception seed that just kept spinning in my internal safe for the next 10 years.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So let's double click on the management consulting and then how you became an ex-management consultant — 

Charlie Houpert: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — or just the path itself. Because I have seen interviews with you, and you talk about, of course, various different things, Charisma on Command, Charisma University. You have this topic area expertise. And we'll probably touch on some of that, but for a lot of my audience, and for my own personal curiosity, I want to hear about your journey, your personal journey, not necessarily focusing on the content that you're best at showcasing. And I suspect we'll probably get to some of that.

But looking back at the early chronology is always fun for me because I remember, for instance — and I want to not make this the Tim Ferriss retrospective show, but that exact experience that you had with me, I have had many times with other people where I'll just like fumble out some accidental pig Latin. And then I go to the bathroom. I'm just like, “You idiot. That could have been the sentence that changed your life, and you fucked it up.” Not to say that's what you said yourself, but certainly I have had those types of experiences.

So let's go back to management consulting. What was that experience like? Just paint a picture. And then I know this might seem like a lazy question, but just take us forward from there.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, every day it felt like a self-betrayal. So I read The 4-Hour Workweek when I was in grad school. And I was in grad school because I was a philosophy major as an undergrad and graduated in 2009 where not only were they not hiring philosophy majors, they weren't hiring anybody.

So hid out in business school for a year, wound up as a consultant because that's what you do when you don't know what you're supposed to do with your life. And every day putting on that suit felt like a betrayal of myself, especially having read The 4-Hour Workweek at that point.

And so there were these minor rebellions that I would stage. I had a faux-hawk, and I wouldn't cut it, and I would put it down. There were these subtle passive-aggressive — I let my shoes fall apart. I had my business shoes, but I wouldn't get new ones. They were ratty and crappy. And it was just these ways of like, “This is not me. This is not right.” And then I would come home from that after sort of sneaking out as early as I could, and I would write in just my own little journal about like, “This is not what I want. I don't want this life. I don't want to be the guy who is my boss or the guy who is his boss.”

And so it was in this period of time that I was noticing and experimenting with coming out of my shell at the same time. So I was able to make friends with not just my boss or his boss, but I got close with the president of the company. And it was through just talking about the bars and clubs I was going to at Saturdays, and he was vicariously — we'd meet Monday morning, be like, “So what'd you get into this weekend?” And we had a little rapport there of I-remember-the-good-old-days type of a thing.

And so had that job, wasn't right, had our fruitful encounter, which didn't wind up selling anything. And at the time, my first business was a parkour training DVD. I think I even used a service that you'd listed in The 4-Hour Workweek to try to do it and was trying to get that off the ground, selling it through Google Adwords, very step by step, 4-Hour Workweek. It could have been a chapter had it worked. And it was starting to go, but it wasn't something I loved. And I was struggling with it because my co-founder and best friend was in New York, I was in Washington, DC.

Tim Ferriss: How did you choose parkour at the time? How did you decide on that? And were there any other candidates where it's like, “Okay, here are the top four. We're going to strike these out. We're going with parkour”?

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, there was. I did the little Venn diagram of what do I want that other people might be interested in. I just wrote all of my interests. I hadn't done parkour, but I liked Casino Royale. That was my level of exposure to parkour.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. One of the best intro sequences of any James Bond.

Charlie Houpert: Yes. So the idea was, “Oh, wow, there's no parkour gyms. If there are, they're expensive. Maybe people would want to learn this. I would want to take a class.” And so went out, hired a guy that had done it. Never shot anything before. I mean, there's so many funny little stories.

He chips his tooth the day before the shoot, so he's got this lisp before the shoot, and he can't remember more than a line. So we're saying lines to him as he's trying to teach parkour, chopped this footage up into 35 or 40 minutes of how to do a wall run, how to do a Kong, how to do all these things, and made a DVD out of it from TrepStar.

The other things, I mean, I can't remember what was on there, but it was very much — I was a little bit outside of myself and thinking, “What do other people want?” I hadn't gotten to the scratch-your-own-itch experience. And what I experienced was that, “Oh, wow. We're actually selling enough DVDs to break even on Adwords and even a little bit of profit.” Which means if we did a follow-up, we'd be totally in the black.

Tim Ferriss: Follow-up meaning you're selling to pre-existing customers?

Charlie Houpert: Correct. If we'd made the advanced course or, “Do you want personal coaching,” or something, and I was completely deflated. I was like, “I can't do this other thing in addition to my job that I don't love in order to get free of the job. So there was this recursive 4-Hour Workweek mentality, which is like, “Stop doing the thing that you don't want to do in order to get to the place that you want to be. Just do the thing that you want to do.”

Tim Ferriss: Although, at the same time, just to play with that for a second, the approach of moonlighting just to dip your toe in the water, get a taste of the blood, whatever metaphor you want to use, I think is actually pretty helpful in the sense that you don't have to act out of desperation. You still have a safety net of some type, but then you can make an informed decision about whether or not you want to burn the ships, so to speak. So just my two cents. 

Charlie Houpert: It was an integral step. I very much agree with you. I needed the experience of disliking consulting and then the experience of disliking my side gig to go, “Okay, the next side gig has to be something that I would do for free or I'm paying to do.” And so then it was, “Okay, what am I spending money on?” It's like, “Well, I go out to these bars, not to drink, to talk to women and try to get them to like me and to make friends.” And I put way more time, effort, attention into studying how our interaction went. I can't tell you how many times I chatted with my best friend about like, “What if I said this?” We were putting far too much energy, relative to others, into understanding people and how to connect better.

So there was a transition of — my best friend and co-founder was in New York. He was an investment banker. I was in DC. I was a consultant. We would talk every day after work for an hour about the interactions we had, and I was just aching. I didn't have other friends in DC.

So I went to this president who I had been close to, and there was this moment where I was trying to get the side gig and trying to get a job in New York, and I — I went to Skillshare, and they didn't want to hire me. And I went to all these companies. They wouldn't hire me. I was taking weekend trips. And eventually my friend was like, “Why don't you just quit and go to New York and figure it out there?”

So having settled with that and done the fear-setting exercises and what's the worst thing that can happen, I came in and I made a pitch to my president, which was, I mean, a lot of 4-Hour Workweek things, which is once it's already done, people get out of your way. Internally, I was like, “This is done. We're not talking about if I'm going to New York.”

So I sat down. I said, “Hey, you guys have been really good to me. I appreciate it. I just cannot be in DC any longer. I feel socially like I'm missing something. I want to be with my friends in New York, but I want to transition in a way that is really good for you to repay the kindness that you guys have showed me,” which was true. And we sat there, and he's like, “You know what? Let's work something out.” So he winds up saying, “Instead of being an analyst, let's make you a contractor. Except if you're a contractor, the base rate that we pay contractors is twice as much as we pay analysts. So we'd have to give you basically a 90 percent raise increase in order to do it, but you'd have no job security and no healthcare. Month to month, you could get fired.”

So I'm like, “Wait a second, I get to go to New York, double my pay, and no healthcare? This is incredible.” So it worked out really well, and I wound up keeping that job working remotely from New York and making one trip every two weeks for a few months as I did this.

Tim Ferriss: That's a pretty sweet bridge. Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: And it was incredible.

Tim Ferriss: At least for a while.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, it was magical. And it was this showing up with, “Hey, I love you, but here's what I have to do. And I'm open to something that works for both of us.” Was really powerful.

Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you this. For people who are listening and they might be thinking to themselves like, “That's a really interesting bridge,” or just improvement quality of life. Also, you got the income increase. How did you plan for that meeting, basically the pitch/delivery that ended up in a remote work agreement?

Charlie Houpert: Step one was to get clear that it was happening, and I wasn't there to make him do anything. I wasn't trying to convince him to force it. So I was able to really come in with the mentality of, “I want to show love to you. I want to support you guys and take care of you, and I'm willing to be flexible. And I can stay another two weeks, but this is happening.”

So it was making sure that, first and foremost, I wasn't asking him to meet in need of mine. It's like, “I'm going to meet my needs. How can we work together?” Then it was literally rehearsing it. I ran through the conversation. This was not an outcome that I had ever planned. I thought it was like, “Yes, I'd be willing to stay on for three more weeks, and then come down and do touch points here and there. And I'm happy to get on the phone and talk to the person you have replacing me.”

But I really think it was the pre-established relationship that we had, plus me taking care of my needs, and then saying, “What is best for you? Genuinely, within these bounds, I want to do what's best for you.” And he came up with that solution. I didn't suggest it, which was powerful. And I've seen that same sort of dynamic play out many, many times in my life

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And I think employees, I know, oftentimes — it's been a few eons, but I've been an employee underestimate their own value or position, and as a result sometimes feel like they need to go hat in hand and expect maybe the outcome to always fall in the boss' favor. But the fact of the matter is, in the boss' favor, if you actually work hard and are a decent, let alone a very good performer, it is a huge pain in the ass to replace someone. It is. And for that reason, I think many people are surprised when they have some of these conversations how often they're like, “Wasn't even going to ask for that, and look what ended up coming my way.”

Charlie Houpert: You had all that money just lying around. Why don't you tell me?

Tim Ferriss: Let me open up this chest full of gold coins.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So then what happens — you move to New York?

Charlie Houpert: So I go to New York, and I am splitting time now between what is this new business, which is called KickAss Academy. And this is my brilliant idea. I think we're going to do — it's an academy, an online academy where you learn how to live a kick-ass life. And it's about going out — and it's heavily Game-influenced at this point. I've read Neil Strauss' The Game.

Tim Ferriss: By Neil Strauss, yeah?

Charlie Houpert: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Great book. I mean, controversial on a number — 

Charlie Houpert: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — of levels, but a really compelling — it's a compelling underdog sort of hero's journey story, and it's well written. Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: And to a 23-year-old guy who has been socially restrained and — I won the award for most likely to break out of the shell in college, which is like, “You're the shyest boy in our 500-person class. Congratulations.” To learn that there was something that I could say or do that would change the receptivity that I got from people, that was so powerful to see in The Game.

So those two books, 4-Hour Workweek, The Game, are really deeply influencing me. I start sharing some of these blog posts. Well, actually, first what happens is the government shuts down, and that sweet contractor gig that I have disappears overnight. So I had four-ish months of gravy and where I've been saving twice as much, and then that happens. So I'm in a 396-square-foot apartment, two bedroom in the Lower East Side, bathroom door hits the toilet when you open.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was going to say. If we do the math on that square footage, it's not a whole lot of space.

Charlie Houpert: No, no. I'm sleeping literally on a blow-up mattress to save money. I'm eating Chipotle and learning how to persuade them to give me more scoops in order to save money. I'm frugal beyond frugal at this point in my life, start Airbnb-ing my own bedroom and then sleeping in, literally — God bless him. My co-founder shares his queen size beds with me so that I can take some nights and make a hundred bucks a night Airbnb-ing my bedroom.

And in the meantime, the beautiful thing is that everything that was taken from me pushes me to the next level of putting myself out there. So I had had all of these writings that I'd been doing in DC about what I believed and what I thought and what I was learning about speaking with women and people, but I was too afraid to really share them.

Tim Ferriss: So were any of those coping strategies that you ended up using, were any of those initially in the fear-setting exercise?

Charlie Houpert: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: Those and others. I mean, I had to play guitar and ask for dollars. That was farther down the list. It was learn how to make a basic drink and bartend, Airbnb the bedroom. I had a list of things.

Tim Ferriss: So for people who have no context on this, just to set the table a little bit, fear-setting, it's named that because it's a play on goal-setting, but it's an exercise. You can find it at tim.blog/ted. I also did a TED Talk on it. So you don't have to buy anything. You can find it.

But the basic gist is that you have something you're considering doing right, quitting your job, moving to New York, getting married, getting divorced, whatever it is. Then you write down all of your fears in as much detail as possible. Because the more detailed, the more actionable and preventable, and it's sort of the nebulous misty fears that we never put on paper, define that tend to be the most problematic. So you make this list in excruciating detail of the worst things that could happen.

Then there's another column, the next column. You write down ways that you could try to prevent those things from happening. And then in the sort of damage control/mitigation column, which is yet another column, you ask yourself, “If each of these things happened, what could I do to limit the damage or get back on my feet, even if it takes me a while?” And there's more to the exercise. There are other things. But in the mitigation/damage control column, you have something like “Airbnb my own bed.”

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, Airbnb my own bed, sign up for a ton of credit cards to get the credit card miles and then convert to cash. But I did a lot of things for 50, 60 bucks. Get a job at Chipotle so that you can eat the food there, and that takes care of food and money. So I had a lot of these, and I ran through quite a few. Zeroed out my 401k and IRA and took the penalty at one point a little bit later down the line. So I was doing all of that.

But as things got more and more dire, and I'm going through my fear-setting mitigation strategies, I am confronted with the fears that I have not written down, which is, “Okay, it's time to put your writing out there.” So, okay.

God, it's so funny. One of the big mistakes that I've made with people that I've loved is I've tried to prevent and hide from them and support them in not having to confront those horrible, harrowing, entrepreneurial moments of, “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. This isn't working.” Because it is in those moments of tension and pressure that something pops and you go, “Fine, I'll be honest and share what's on my heart.” Because up until then, you're not going to do it, or I wasn't going to do it.

Tim Ferriss: So what was the first prototype version of post-parkour entrepreneurship? What was the V1?

Charlie Houpert: It's kickassacademy.com. And we are here to live a kick-ass life, and no one can stop us, and we will not be average. It's a 23-year-old manifesto about how all the people don't know how to do it, and I do. I know the way to do it. It's a regurgitated 4-Hour Workweek, plus my own iteration of The Game thing.

So I write my blog post, and I haven't shared any posts. And I remember being in this tiny apartment with my hand hovering over publish, and I published it on this blog post, and I have to run out of the apartment and go down the street and just get away from the computer that, I don't know, houses the blog post now that it's on the internet. And of course, I come back and nobody's read it. And a month later, nobody's read it. 

Tim Ferriss: What was the first blog post?

Charlie Houpert: Oh, gosh. I wish I knew.

Tim Ferriss: Do you recall?

Charlie Houpert: I do not recall. I should have checked before this.

Tim Ferriss: That's all right. But it's some kind of how-to thing? It's like seven rules for et cetera, or — 

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, it might've been how-to. It might've been a declaration of one of my feelings when I was quitting the job and like, “This isn't what I want.” It was not profound, but it was personal and tender to me, so it was very tough to receive criticism.

Tim Ferriss: And I guess it is maybe — I mean, we'll get there. Maybe not in terms of readership, but in terms of crossing the Rubicon from not publishing to publishing, hitting that button is a big deal.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, my gosh.

Tim Ferriss: Right? Psychologically.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm willing to be seen is the emotional thing that is, I think, for me, has been the challenge endlessly in entrepreneurship the way that I've chosen to do it. So we got that post out, and then nobody, of course, read it.

And then the next step was, “Okay, I'm going to promote this. I'm going to go to Reddit. I'm going to go to the forums that are most related. Every man should know.” There was a seduction subreddit. There was a New York City-related subreddit, and I started posting my own things. And now comments start coming in. And so it's, “Thank you. I like this,” or “Don't promote your own stuff here,” or — now I'm actually dealing with feedback.

But the next stage was posting, posting. I wrote a little, short pamphlet book, but the real thing that actually started, I think, early — I think you probably know him. I hired Neville Medhora for a day of copywriting to help me design the website and wound up with the first actionable real thing that I did was, “Okay, I've got people that read my blog. There's like 30 recurring viewers. And I want to host an in-person class that will talk about how to talk to a woman in the park in New York City,” which is something that I'm doing with my friend, going out. We're breaking it down and, “How did it go?” And all that kind of stuff.

So we rent out a room in one of these office buildings for like 60 bucks for an hour, an hour and a half, or something like that. I go to the New York City subreddit. I give away five tickets. They are sold. Sold. People accept them. They accept the five free seats. And then I sell the remaining five seats for five or 10 bucks. I think I might've sold it for 10 bucks each. And like an hour before the class, we sold the last one. So we had 10 people in this class, made 50, lost 60 plus cab fare, down 15 bucks, whatever. Go in and give an hour-and-a-half presentation with a PowerPoint on, “This is what to wear, say, do, stand. Here's how to deal with the fear that's going to come up. If she rejects you, here's how to address that feeling.” All of that sort of stuff.

It was just thrilling to do it. But afterwards, four of the 10 people stayed after and were like, “Do you do coaching? Do you guys do this?” And the answer was, “Now we do.”

Tim Ferriss: “Funny you should ask.”

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, “Funny you should ask.” So really had no intention of a — there was not a business idea of there to be an upsell, but there was enough asking. So then it evolved into, “Oh, now we're doing traditional,” what was around at the time, “dating coaching in New York City,” and we're finding our rates as we did that. And that was tough. That's a gig where you're going out with a dude who's having the most fearful experience of his life, and he's paid you to encourage him and support him in facing that fear, which is, “I'm going to go speak to that woman that I'm attracted to at the bar, in the park,” wherever.

And it's not fun to push someone to do something that they say they want to do, but they're really grappling with. And then you go out and you show them, “It could look like this. It could look like that.” So we did that for a while and were charging, I don't know, a hundred bucks an hour as we did.

But again, something else that crept in, same thing with the parkour, was this wasn't the dream. When I'd sat down and I'd done the fear-setting, there's another piece of it, which is you write the 10-out-of-10 upside.

Tim Ferriss: You assess the upside. If it works — 

Charlie Houpert: If it works.

Tim Ferriss: — what's the one-to-10 impact? Positively, if it fails, what's the transient, most likely not permanent impact, right?

Charlie Houpert: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: And so as we'd sat there and written in detail the 10-out-of-10 upside, it was never “You have a dating coaching business that is stressful in New York City.” It was “You get to live on the beach with your friends, do work that you like, when you like.” There was this idea which was silly, that you would have a laptop as you sat on the beach. That's ridiculous. It's just like a photo op, but it's not a good way to work. But I had that idea. I would drink Caipirinhas and I'd do it in Rio. That was the romantic vision. And so again, I found myself having this thing that was working that wasn't the 10-out-of-10 upside.

Tim Ferriss: So I just want to pause for a second and just say that's where a lot of people get into trouble, right?

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Because they find something that is maybe not even 30 percent of the way to where they want to be, but it has a seductive traction. And there are certain financial realities. It's like, “Hey, if you need to pay your rent, you need to pay your rent.” But it's very easy for that to then become something that is a monster you feel you need to feed that you can't step away from. And in that case, with coaching, you're still trading time for money, right?

Charlie Houpert: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: At a per-hour rate.

Charlie Houpert: And in person, in a place that isn't the most fun with guys that are having a challenging time. You know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. If people want to get a really good laugh, you can find it on my YouTube channel, but the Tim Ferriss Experiment TV show episodes are all up there for free. And there's one, I think it's just called The Dating Episode, where, a small world, Neil Strauss is sitting in a van with an earpiece trying to give me advice at the farmer's market in San Francisco as I'm doing cold approaches. Horrible, horrible, and horrifying, beyond terrible. If people want to see what that looks like, knock yourselves out.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So you decide that the one-on-one coaching in person, this is not the 10-out-of-10 that you'd hope for.

Charlie Houpert: Yes. Yeah. And I think the experience — it's not a great model. It's really challenging, high intensity, doesn't create the level of transformation with reliability that you might hope, and people walk away feeling sometimes very stressed about it. And so it was, “Okay. I don't know what it is, but I said Brazil, with my friends, et cetera.” So again, I'm evangelical. I'm telling everybody I meet, “Have you read the gospel of Tim? There's this book, The 4-Hour Workweek. You need to do it. Everyone's an entrepreneur.” That was a mistake and learning it's not for everybody. I got that in time. So I'm telling everybody, and what happens is one of the guys that attended that first class becomes a friend. It's probably the most magnetic period of my life where I'm just talking about this ambition. And what happens is not just my co-founder and I, but six people, many of whom I'd met in the last two months, quit their jobs, quit their schools, and agreed they were going to move to Brazil in August of 2013.

Tim Ferriss: How did Brazil specifically become the dream?

Charlie Houpert: So there was one, it's got great PR, right? It had never been, there's just this sense that Rio is this romantic, beautiful beach city vibe. And I had, when my company let me go from that contractor role, I immediately said, “Okay, what's the upside of this?” So I booked a flight to Brazil and met a friend who was traveling. And I spent five weeks in Floripa and one week in Rio. And in that week in Rio, my friend had gone home. I was alone. And it was these experiences of being alone in a hostel, not knowing anybody, that uncomfortable feeling of like, “I want to go home. I want my friends, I want my thus,” whatever. But I stepped outside of myself, went to a co-working space, met a guy, he invited me to stay with him. And I had one of those travel, magical adventures that culminated in meeting a beautiful Brazilian girl and having this fling that lasted few days. And she came and visited and — 

Tim Ferriss: I knew that had to figure in somehow. Yeah, all right.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. So had that romantic experience of I showed up feeling empty, and then I walked away with abundance and feeling wonderful.

Tim Ferriss: Whirlwind transformation of a trip.

Charlie Houpert: Yes. So I was like, “That's where I want to be.”

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So six other people to quit all their stuff, school, job, whatever it might be, okay?

Charlie Houpert: Well there's 10 total, six who lived together and then four who lived in other places in the same city.

Tim Ferriss: And then what happens?

Charlie Houpert: So we get there. Nobody speaks Portuguese. I speak Spanish. And I'm negotiating rent for looking for a four-bedroom where I can take, they have maids quarters in a lot of these places. So I have the tiny room because that's what I can afford. But anyway, we settle into a life in Brazil, and my Spanish is converting to Portuguese as quickly as I can. And we are living it. We're there. It is the thing. We are going to the beach, throwing the American football, making friends.

We've got a whiteboard. Every day there's four questions. Did you do the social stretch that you wanted to do? Whether that's make a friend speak to a woman you're attracted to. Just say, be kinder to the guy who serves you acai, whatever it is. There was a social stretch. Did you do your business stretch? Did you do your health stretch? And there was one more thing, which is like, did you do your own personal thing? For some people it was reach out to a family member. For some people it was learn the guitar. So it was like four things. We had this running whiteboard of who had done their growth thing that they need to do.

Tim Ferriss: That's cool. I like that.

Charlie Houpert: And it was a really encouraging growth, everyone, it was like if you tried and failed, it was high-fives all around for that year was just amazing. “She didn't want to talk to you. So cool. Welcome back into the fold. You are welcome here.” 

So we're doing that and from a business perspective, so now all my income is gone because it was all the thing and it was in-person coaching. One or two people agree to switch to online coaching, but it's not enough. And so for a period, the blog becomes online coaching, which is actually nicer because now instead of just going to a bar and speaking about, did you talk to the girl and what to say, it's people that are calling in with questions about workplace scenarios. And so I'm speaking to guys older than me using Tony Robbins' principles essentially to answer questions about experiences that I've only barely had. But it's helpful because there's this Tony Robbins transformation process that I'm helping with and using. So that becomes a thing. And after months of doing in-person coaching and there's a whole learning the sales process and being able to ask for money, these are all intermediate steps that had to happen. 

I'll tell you a story about Tucker Max in here as well. But I'll tell it now. 

Tim Ferriss: Almost never boring.

Charlie Houpert: — no time like the present.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, never boring.

Charlie Houpert: So at the time, there's this program, I think it was called Clarity or something where you could pay people per minute for advice and they would get on the phone with you. And I don't know what, Tucker was $15 or $22 per minute or something like that. I don't remember exactly. And so said, I had no money. I was like, “Okay, 200 bucks, let's get this done in whatever, eight minutes, 12 minutes.” So call him up, say, “Hey, can you help? We're having trouble getting customers. Can you take a look at our business? What do you recommend?” And he goes, and he goes on to our home page, it's called Kickassacademy.com. It's me and my co-founder. He's got hair down to his shoulders and he's wearing a pink tank top, and I've got a neon green pink top and frizzy hair. And he says, “You guys look like douchebags. No one over the age of 26 is going to want to associate with this.”

And it was so true. It wasn't packaged in a very digestible way, but in time, as I started to get other points of feedback, I was able to integrate that and there was a transition from, “Oh, wow.” What I realized is all the guys who had come with me, they were one of the captains of the Princeton football team when he was at Princeton. These were successful, cool dudes, but they all had this thing where it's like they didn't really want it to be public, that they were learning this kind of a thing.

And so we talked to them, we're like, “You like us, but you don't want anyone to know that you, like what's going on?” We learned that, “Yeah, I do want to get better in my relationships and learn how to talk to women, but I don't want to broadcast it that way essentially. And I also care about work and I also care about friendships.” And so we did a bunch of interviews and I started tracking what word are you comfortable with? What's the 10-out-of-10 word that you're down for? And I had a long list. It was lifestyle design, confidence and charisma came back as like a nine or a 9.5 out of 10. And so I'm going through this marketing course, Eben Pagan's Marketing Step-by-Step, oldie, but a greatie. Excellent.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Eben's a smart fella. For a long time has been a smart fella.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, yeah. And he's got this line that the name of your company is the most important marketing decision you will ever make. And I realize that when I say Kickass Academy to people, they think it's a dojo where you're going to learn how to fight. And so through this process, Eben also says you want an alliteration that sticks in the head.

Tim Ferriss: He loves alliteration.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: David DeAngelo, Double Your Dating.

Charlie Houpert: David DeAngelo, Double Your Dating, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. He loves alliteration.

Charlie Houpert: I've got alliteration, charisma, and the thing that they want is they want to walk into a room and feel like they do with their best friends. They want to feel comfortable, calm, collected. They want to just be able to turn it on. And so we're brainstorming and Charisma on Command comes in. Switch the name of the blog, screw up the redirect, so we lose all of our Google juice, whatever. But very quickly conversions, just nothing has changed. And we start converting way better as a result of this.

Tim Ferriss: And this is converting to online coaching?

Charlie Houpert: This is at this point, I forget exactly where we are, but there's just more interest. People are commenting. Every metric of engagement is up. And the type of person — 

Tim Ferriss: Just with the rebrand.

Charlie Houpert: Just with the rebrand, and we took the long hair down a little bit and made it a little bit just, okay, here we are, but we put on a tee-shirt instead of a tank top.

Tim Ferriss: Got rid of the 1980s Miami Vice — 

Charlie Houpert: Exactly. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — tank tops. So let me sprinkle in just a little context on a few things you've said. So one is Tucker Max, for people who don't know the name, he wrote a number of books. I believe his first mega bestseller was, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. And he was the first person, actually, I would say the only person in early 2007. I approached Tucker Max who was part of a panel at South by Southwest, and I was like, okay, there's this long line of people. I already know Tucker's pretty prickly, can be, and very direct. And I somehow heard through the grapevine that he was interested in jiu-jitsu or something like that. And at the time, I had been doing a lot of training.

So when I got up there, I was like, “Oh, have you ever trained with so-an-so or so-and-so.” And I used that as a wedge in, and he agreed to have coffee or lunch. I can't remember what it was, one of the two. And I gave him an early galley copy of The 4-Hour Workweek. And a day later, or two days later, whenever we actually met up in person, he came in and he had a research assistant who was named Ryan Holiday later went on to become a mega bestselling author. Actually one of his books behind me, somewhere here, Tucker said, “Okay, let me explain what's going to happen.” And he is like, “I can't prepare you for it because nobody can prepare you for it.” And he just went step by step and basically predicted the next year of my life.

Charlie Houpert: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: He's the only one who did that. Now, Tucker at the time also was, I think rightly considered a marketing genius and very good at promotion and positioning. Had at the time a massive community, which I believe was based on vBulletin or something like that. So his vote of confidence, maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy on some level, but that's just a snapshot of Tucker. Then you also mentioned interviewing people, and I want to emphasize that. Interviewing various folks, because the thing that doesn't scale in the beginning often helps you to scale later. And for people interested in how, for instance, like Brian Chesky and the founders of Airbnb applied that one of the very early Masters of Scale podcast episodes has one talking about doing the things that don't scale. And that led to the rebrand, at least on some level, right?

Charlie Houpert: Oh, a hundred percent, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So you change the positioning and the branding, Charisma on Command, and everything improves, all the metrics of the website improve. And in the meantime though, you are still in the servants' quarters in Brazil.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, I'm in the servants' quarters. I am, at this point, I take out, I contact the HR lady at my old company. I go, “Hey, we had a 401k, right?” She's like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Can you drain that for me?” She's like, “That's going to come with a penalty.” I was like, “Don't worry, I have no income. My taxes won't be too much. I'll just pay the penalty.” So I hit zero, and then I get a little infusion of cash and I'm about to hit zero again. I'm going to broke. I am Airbnb-ing my bedroom, sleeping on a horrible couch. I am teaching SAT tutoring to Brazilian high schoolers. I'm still doing the mitigation strategies in order to make things work.

Tim Ferriss: And in your mind at that time, if you remember, what is your goal?

Charlie Houpert: I have it. I'm living it. This is the beautiful thing as I was reflecting, it was really wonderful. Thank you for having me. It was such a cool opportunity to reflect on this. And I was like, I had it. It was it. That was it. I was broke and I was living it. And I got a tattoo right before this, it's a paraphrase. It's right here. I don't need to flash the audience, but there's a paraphrase of Thucydides that is, “The secret to freedom is courage.” And he also says, “The secret to happiness is freedom.” That's a paraphrase, essentially of I think a quote in The Peloponnesian War.

And I was so happy, so broke, so unable to feed myself. And I have tried to remind myself of that is the secret. It's just like when you step into it and you're living it, nothing more needed to happen. I would've liked the business to do well, and it eventually did, but I was there. So at this time, I'm getting everything that I want in a degree, but also I'm running out of money and I'm planning airline points to get back home. 

So what happens is we get this course, it's from Clay Collins, and it's about pre-selling an online course. And at the point I've done so much coaching that I'm actually getting tired of saying the same types of things over and over again now. Now it's just happening via Skype at the time.

Tim Ferriss: At the same time, you got to workshop your material.

Charlie Houpert: Yes, and I start to dial — so each stage is important. So I'm dialing it in until I get bored of like, okay, this is what works. This is what creates transformation. But now my role is just robotic at this point. It's not as dynamic as I'd like it to be. So given that I can do it once and be done, maybe I should just make an online course. Thank God for this pre-selling thing though, because it runs you through this process. At this time, I've been posting on the blog, I think we have 5,000 people on the email list, and I follow this template, which is something like, “Hey guys, I was about to go into a cave and make this online course, and I remembered that that's stupid because I'm making it for you. So before I sit down to record it, I just want to know what is the biggest problem you're facing related to charisma? If you reply to me, I'm going to make the whole course, but I'm going to make a piece of it for free that I'm just going to give everyone who replies.”

So they come in, they give me all their answers. Step two, you take all of those things, you bucket them and categorize them, and you put them into radio buttons ranking things in one of those survey monkeys, whatever you want. Say, “Hey guys, thank you so much for writing in. I think I have the top things. If you would just vote on which one you most want me to actually make the free piece on that would help me to decide which piece to make for you.” So then I get back, and the first thing it was how to make an amazing first impression, how to feel unshakably confident, how to have a conversation that flows effortlessly, how to tell great stories, how to have body language that's magnetic and how to be a good leader. And in that order is what they ranked them like number one, first impression, number two, confidence.

So I get this, and they just gave me the outline of my course in addition to all of the specific phrases, questions, things that well need to be answered. So I say, “Hey guys, I'm making a course. It's going to cover these things. First impressions, how to be unshakably competent, effortless,” all this stuff. “It's going to sell for eventually, I think I started it at $800. We lowered it to $600, but it's going to sell for 800 bucks. You can get it for $500, but here's the catch one. You're going to have to do a one-on-one call with me,” which is exactly what they want to do. “Two, there's going to be group interaction throughout the whole time. And three, I really want your feedback throughout the course so that I'm building it exactly to be what you want.”

And so we offer 25 seats like this, and holy, that's the most money, we make $12,500. We sell out. People are stoked. And for us, “Oh, wow, I was going to make this course.” And what I learned now, each week I get on a call, I talk to several people, and I develop the content that I then send to them, and they give their questions, and it's this iterative, interactive thing over six weeks. And they, with their questions completely reshape the course I thought I was going to make. I thought I was going to make a course about all these advanced tips and tricks. And of course, where if you've done something for a while, you always overlook the beginning phases. You overlook the fear, you overlook all of those things. So we focus way more on getting through that.

And the course as a result is tailored to where my average audience member is, right? The guys that I wanted to work with that I started filtering by calling the company Charisma on Command. And I have all these surveys that have language that then become the sales page on the back end. So do you want to walk into a room and be the guy that people instantly notice and that they're drawn to magnetically? That's phrases that they wrote in their descriptions of what they were asking for and wanted. So on the back end of this, I have my outline, I have my course, I've gone through it.

And so now I can go record this thing and offer it on the website. So all of a sudden, these blog posts, which had nothing to sell to, have something to sell to. So now actual money can start coming into the business while I sleep. So we're selling this course, we're getting one a day or one every other day. 

Tim Ferriss: That's going to pay for your servants' quarters rent at the very least, right?

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. Yes, correct.

Tim Ferriss: For sure. And much more even at that rate, right?

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. So my $450-a-month rent becomes affordable. I don't have to Airbnb my bed. And at this point, we pop back, we go to Las Vegas, we're flipping when summer hits the Northern Hemisphere, we go home. When it hits Brazil, we go back to Brazil. And so we're just chasing summer basically in six-to-eight-month increments. Vegas, Brazil, Vancouver, Brazil, Columbia.

Tim Ferriss: Where are you from originally?

Charlie Houpert: Pennsylvania. Didn't go back there.

Tim Ferriss: Pennsylvania. Okay. So how did you choose Vegas? How was Vegas chosen?

Charlie Houpert: We exit Brazil the first time right before the World Cup. Great opportunity to Airbnb the last month of rent. Gets some money coming in.

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Charlie Houpert: It was great. And so I go back to Pennsylvania because I need a car. That's where I've left my car. And plan to drive out to Los Angeles. Drive across the country in three days, spend one night in Vegas. That was a lot of fun. Avicii played at XS. Let's try it again. Stay two nights, say three nights. Stayed there for 10 months, I don't know, a year. It was good food. It was really fun. We were, at the time, really enjoying going out. We were able to meet and talk to people and do the whole song and dance. And so we wound up getting off campus student housing, which is the only place that had four cheap bedrooms in Vegas for a year outside of UNLV and were in Vegas for that period. So just stayed.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. So I'm curious, what was the durability of that first course or the learnings in that first course? In other words, how much of an annuity has that been, whether it's, or was it, in revenue or just in terms of core pieces of curriculum?

Charlie Houpert: Numbers over 10 million for sure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: So I've rerecorded it and I've gotten a little bit better background. I fixed the sound, and one time I was traveling, and so there was a new place every time. So I've rerecorded it four times and I've tried to change pieces that I didn't like, but that structure remains. The sales page remains with minor tweaks. It's not great, but it has been almost 10 years, if not 10 years at this point.

Tim Ferriss: That's incredible. Yeah. Amazing.

Charlie Houpert: And because the problems are very similar, people have questions about Zoom or texting, but it was built off of core human problems that are durable and addressable. And interestingly, the refund rate has not changed over the time, it doesn't seem to be working less for the people who buy it and apply it. There's still a sizable refund rate because it's a go-at-your-own-pace online course, and we have a very flexible refund policy, but it hasn't increased. So I'd like to rerecord again.

Tim Ferriss: That's amazing.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, I'd love to do one more rerecording, but same thing. Keep it going is how I feel.

Tim Ferriss: This might seem like a small detail, but I'm sure folks will be interested. What platform or software do you use to serve the course?

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How do people, what's the back end? Or maybe it's very explicitly through some type of platform that provides this?

Charlie Houpert: I am sure there's better options now, but we've kind of got on, and so there's inertia. It's just a WordPress with some plugins. There was a WishList Member plugin, which was hot at the time and since sort of been depreciated, and so we're rolling off of that. SamCart is the cart. It was one of the only carts at the time that let you do payment plans. Now it's like everybody will let you do a payment plan, but for our needs, those were the two. So it was a SamCart cart to a WordPress site with a gated content thing that hooked into SamCart.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Makes sense.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So the course starts working, right. Well, at least to the extent that you just described it, which was selling one a day or every other day, you then get to Las Vegas. When do things really start to ramp or when do things start to change?

Charlie Houpert: So I can afford not Main City, US rent at this point. I can live in Vegas. I can't live in New York. I can't live in L.A. That's where we're at at one point. I think it's when I'm in Colombia. I had a list of, “Try LinkedIn?” “Try Twitter?” and the third was “Try YouTube?” And I have that piece of paper somewhere. It has a question mark, YouTube, question mark.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, people would love to see that. Given the size of your YouTube presence. YouTube, question mark.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. And so I had no idea. So I post on LinkedIn. I post on Twitter, and I put a video on YouTube. Now, to be fair, I put several videos on one YouTube channel that was me on the beach in Rio with the wind whipping past the lapel mic, and just that didn't get any views. But I do one video on YouTube that is me analyzing a Bill Clinton debate, and it was one of those community debates where he approaches an audience member. And I talked about the power of his eye contact in that video.

And I didn't look at it for six months, and I was, one day I found that piece of paper. I was like, “I should review to see how these things did.” I go to LinkedIn and nobody's followed me, and I go to Twitter, nobody cares. And on YouTube there's a hundred thousand views and I have 7,000 subscribers or something on this YouTube channel, and I haven't even looked at it. So that was mind-bending, and I had no call to action. So it had no way to hit me other than I had to log into the YouTube platform, which I hadn't done. 

So I think it was 2016. I did a few videos at the end of 2015, but by 2016, I made the commitment that once a week, every week, I would release one YouTube video, and the first ones, this was, I'd read Essentialism, and it was like, “Just do the thing.”

Tim Ferriss: Great book.

Charlie Houpert: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Greg McKeown.

Charlie Houpert: So good. So good. Read it. Read it four times. Need to read it again.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I have a piece of artwork downstairs in this house that Greg McKeown recommended to me called “The Listener.” People can check it out. It's a great reminder. But not to interrupt. So you read Essentialism. Excellent book I recommended as well.

Charlie Houpert: He's got one story about Herbie, which stuck with me so long. I'm setting up to do these YouTube videos once a week, and they're tedious and I don't like doing them and I don't want to. And I read Essentialism, and he tells a story about a Boy Scout troop that was taking a hike. And they're trying to get to their destination, but they've got one, a little bit of a pudgy guy named Herbie, and he's having a hard time with his pack, and they're falling behind schedule, so they don't know what to do.

Tim Ferriss: Herbie's slow. He's holding up the whole line.

Charlie Houpert: He's slow, and so nobody can go. So they realize that if they take Herbie's pack and they redistribute it amongst some of the adults and the kids that can handle it, the whole troop is able to go double time and get to where they need to do and get back on time. So the question is, is there one friction point in your process that makes the thing un-fun or miserable? And can you spend whatever money or do whatever you need to do to stop this? So the breakthrough was, I hated setting up the camera, and so I didn't do it immediately, but the next place that we got, I said, “It must have an extra bedroom. I don't care. I will pay for the extra bedroom. I need to be able to leave this camera up.” And oh, my God, that changed it. It was like being able to walk in, press play and do it was versus 15 minutes of focus. Oh, my God, it was terrible. So that was a breakthrough. 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the Herbie Parable, I believe, originated in manufacturing specifically when you have a serial or a linear production process where if there's a machine in the middle or a lack of inventory at point X that causes that type of slowdown, you need to figure it out, a.k.a. Herbie. But it can be applied to so many different things. And in your case, video production.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. Well, I love watching your work because you so often remind me that there's emotional Herbies of like, “I don't enjoy this, so I don't want to do it.” And so the question of “What if this were 10 times enjoyable? What if I had to have fun doing this?” Those are always the Herbies for me. It's always, “I don't like this thing.” “It's okay, what if you were only allowed to do the thing that you like?” It's like, “Oh, well then I'd do a lot more of it and I could see some results.” 

So we start making these YouTube videos. I do a big one at the beginning that is in January of maybe 2016. I do a video that says, “I think Donald Trump's going to be the President. Here's why.” I'm watching his debates. Scott Adams is before me on this, but I'm watching debates. I see the same thing that starts to pick up. Other videos are going, I'm analyzing Conor McGregor. And I think it was from, was January or February or March of that year, the business tripled, and then I think it tripled again within two months.

Tim Ferriss: Is that due to the success of that video, would you say? 

Charlie Houpert: Of the videos.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. The cumulative videos.

Charlie Houpert: Yes. So I'm doing Donald Trump, Conor McGregor, taking Game of Thrones characters. We can talk about fame-jacking if you want.

Tim Ferriss: Let's talk about it.

Charlie Houpert: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you an intermediate question. Just to interrupt my own train of questioning, which is how did your call to action or flow change? Did the funnel change now that people are finding you on YouTube?

Charlie Houpert: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Was it just a link in a description or how did the actual business funnel function?

Charlie Houpert: So it's evolved, and I'm going to take you up to present day to answer the question. So at first it was, “Hey guys, if you like this, leave a comment, subscribe.” I wasn't thinking about it. So subscribers, which was, okay, fine. Then it was, okay, you need a tripwire. And the idea in online marketing is that there's this low cost product that you want to get people onto your email list, give them a taste of something, and then they can buy your low cost product and then they'll buy your larger product. So we set up this online funnel that was, “By the way, if you like that video and you want to know how to make a great first impression, here's a free piece of content that's like four minutes long on the basics of how to do it.” And you get that content. It's four minutes of how to do it. And then it's one minute of, “Hey, do you want help implementing this? Buy a section of this larger Charisma University course.”

And then when you're in that, at the end of that, “Okay, so now you know how to make a great first impression. Do you want to know all this other stuff?” So it's standard online marketing. Give them a piece, offer them more. Give them another piece, offer them more, solve a problem, offer them help with the next problem.

Tim Ferriss: And for those astute listeners, you may remember that how to make a first impression was straight from the interviews and then the Survey Monkey rankings, right?

Charlie Houpert: Yes, correct.

Tim Ferriss: Which is, for instance, even after writing five books, I have one in my mind that I would like to work on sometime soon. But I think the way I'm going to approach it is actually going back to the origins of The 4-Hour Workweek. And I will maybe, at a place like UT Austin in an entrepreneurship or business class, to workshop it, right?

Charlie Houpert: Hm.

Tim Ferriss: Teach it for a semester.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you learn really quickly what works and what does not work.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: When you have an audience, whether it's the one-on-one interviews or in something that you collate and then rank or having an audience who's unlikely to give you kind of courtesy claps. So TBD. But all right. So I asked you about the funnel, but what else would you like to say about that, if anything? I didn't mean to interrupt before.

Charlie Houpert: No, no. Well, the funnel has evolved. I think it's worth saying that there's so many sacred cows of everything online marketing. This is how you do it. What I've since seen is that these videos, without intending to be, they're mini webinars. They're 10 minutes of content. I don't need to take everybody through this multi-step funnel. Here's a small thing. So what we started doing, a breakthrough a few years later was just, “Do you want to buy our $600 course? Here's some testimonials.”

And so that was a four X in conversions of just being everyone who's watched their videos has at this point watched 10 of them and they don't need to be drip fed this thing, they need to be offered “Jab, jab, jab” that Gary Vaynerchuk calls it, “hook.” Is like, “Dude, we've been jabbing for years at this point.” Offer them the product. Don't offer them the email list. So that was a huge, huge increase to our thing was when I realized, oh, we've been just giving value consistently. We don't need to do the same game that somebody who's doing paid ads would do, who is just totally cold traffic and you don't know them at all.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if they walk into the Ferrari dealership, you're allowed to sell them a Ferrari.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Walk out with a Porsche.

Charlie Houpert: Yes. Yeah. Yes, please. Look, we've got them on our email. These are great leads. Call them back. So that was that. The fame-jacking was something that is worth mentioning, it's since changed. But in order to get traction on some of these social media platforms, you need something that hooks people, and my face in front of a white wall ain't it. That's not going to fly for me.

So what we found was, if I can comment on somebody that is known, Conor McGregor, Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, how does Tyrion Lannister, what sort of principles is he applying? Even though it's a work of fiction. We were able to take a Game of Thrones fan and by the end of it make them a Charisma on Command fan. And so we were able to start fishing in all of these pools that I was interested.

We were doing breakdowns of the Marvel actors and why their interviews were so fun or how come this viral moment where Robert Downey Jr. gets in a tiff with an interviewer as what can you learn about it? So called that fame-jacking, which is basically, look, there's someone else who was famous, you start with them on the thumbnail, you speak to a broad problem, “How to deal with a rude person,” and by the end they've become not just a Robert Jr. fan, but a Charisma on Command fan. That was sort of the goal and that helped a tremendous amount of growth.

Tim Ferriss: You said it's changed. Is that an algorithmic change? Because I see that playbook being used a fair amount still on YouTube, but how has the game changed?

Charlie Houpert: What I see is that in short-form content, there isn't the decision to click. There is only what captures attention. And so there's many things that capture attention. One is Robert Downey Jr. a guy who you know, but another is, can you walk up these sticky stairs on Mr. Beast thing on what it looks like to run with $10,000? So you actually don't have to sell the click on the short-form content in the same way. And just the Meta people have realized. I think this is what's beautiful about YouTube.

There's these incredible titles that are like, “I went to every state's Airbnb,” or “I sat in a circle for 36 hours,” or “I gave a homeless man 10k.” At the time in YouTube there was this sacred cow belief that it had to look like what you titled a blog article, “How to do something in seven steps,” six things, listicle blog titles. And I think YouTube has started to really find its own formatting identity, which is not what had traditionally worked with blogs. And maybe blogs will start picking it up from YouTube, but I see that you don't need to do fame-jacking in order to succeed in the same way. There's many other avenues in order to do it.

Tim Ferriss: I'd love to touch on maybe a few expansions of that just briefly for folks. So you might recall back in the day, this is, let's just say maybe even pre-Eben Pagan and so on. If you were to look at different types of online marketing, a standard operating procedure was long sales letters with lots of yellow highlights. And that was how you did it. Period. That was the scripture of online marketing. But lo and behold, that isn't the only way to do things.

And in fact, you can approach it completely differently. Now, if you go through almost any website that sells software as a service, you'll see somewhere on the product comparison or on the checkout portion when you're selecting features or plans, they'll have three options. The middle will say most popular, there's a very cheap one with half the features you need, there's a super expensive one that only two percent are ever going to consider, and then there's most popular in the middle. And while the presentation changes, I would say there are a few takeaways.

Number one is you can always experiment and break the rules. Number two is there's certain things that don't tend to change that much. So you can still look at Caples on advertising for copy editing. You can look at old print advertisements from Ogilvy. You can read, for instance, Influence. So there are certain things you can study.

And like if drawing is learning how to see, sure, you might have a crayon, a pencil, a paintbrush, a piece of charcoal, but those are tools that can be adapted based on certain base principles. And then you can feel free. Once you have an understanding of some of these core fundamental concepts, then you can experiment to your heart's content and you can start to break stuff. I don't know. I mean, a lot of it because platforms have so much value capture and are so powerful now, I mean, if they do decide they want to promote X, Y, or Z, and they have a template for making you conform to that, then I would imagine there's a decent amount of pressure to be pushed in that direction.

Last year videos or tweets, whatever tweet is called on X, or whatever it might be, doesn't get the distribution that you would like. Now, you mentioned shorts or shorter clips not needing maybe the type of cell to be watched ostensibly because there's shorter duration. 

Do you see much of a conversion from shorter clips to viewing of longer clips or subscribers? I don't know which metric is the one that matters, but I'm curious.

Charlie Houpert: We ran a little experiment. I have not put a lot of energy into shorts because the answer was there's a couple of things. To your first point, I'm going to come to shorts with all of those Ogilvys, whatever what I have found is that if you take the tried and true ways of doing it and you run it through your own value system and you don't allow for things that don't align with yourself, so I'll just give you a for instance. We used to do discounts because that's what you do. You do a discount.

And I got an email from a guy who was like, “Hey, I love your stuff, but last week my friend who didn't buy your thing and was on your email list for 30 days got offered this thing for $400 and I bought it immediately for 600.” And I realized that in a way, we were penalizing our most strident, ardent, willing customers for not sitting on the fence and offering discounts down the line. So I made the decision to chop off discounts. It hurt the business by 20 percent.

But you get an audience of people that has a different degree of trust with you. And so all of these rules, you can win short-term by doing a lot of different things. You can do clickbait titles, you do all sorts of things, but you're establishing a relationship with every business decision. So I find that running all of those things through the center is helpful. So when it comes to shorts, one of them is I don't really like shorts.

I've never really gotten tremendous amount of value from a short, I've gotten value from YouTube videos, blog posts, videos, all sorts of things, but I don't connect with them. So I haven't pushed shorts. We did a few experiments, and what I found for the way that we do things is no, that we didn't see. We got a ton of subscribers, but we didn't see a strong connection between long-form and short-form and purchases. I'm sure that somebody else could make that happen, but even though that was the way the wave was going, that's not the way that my wave breaks. I don't know. That was not a particular trend I was interested in.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think to date I would say, and I'm sure my team would have additional thoughts, but I don't think we've seen any correlation next to no impact whatsoever on short-form success. And by success, I mean some of our shorts have had 100 million views. And then the impact on the long-form interview that it was cut from literally imperceptible. You could not see an impact.

And yet it's like, “Well, is that now a necessary survival/distribution tactic?” I'm not qualified to say, but also do not feel compelled to focus on clips. We do surface clips from longer interviews, but I do sometimes wonder if it's to the detriment of the audience that I most like to cultivate, which is an audience who recognizes you cannot achieve any level of mastery nor can you retain anything effectively if all of your information is consumed in ten second increments.

Charlie Houpert: Totally. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Not evolved to do it. It doesn't work that way.

Charlie Houpert: I totally agree. I'm so curious for you. What do you want from the podcast these days? Because it seems to me, and I'm sure you've had this many times like, “Look, I've done it. I'm safe. I can survive with the money that I have.” What is success for you at this point?

Tim Ferriss: Well, the podcast, I've thought, especially with the 10-year anniversary not too long ago and hitting some major milestones in terms of total downloads and listens and so on, I thought, well, if I were going to pack up my tent and move on, this would be a decent time to do it. However, I suppose for myself I just realized, well, even if I weren't recording conversations, I would still be having these conversations.

And therefore, for the cost of a microphone and using an service to record a podcast with some basic, I mean, it's not fancy lighting as anyone can tell if they're watching me right now, but for the minimal cost of production, especially when you consider that a lot of these conversations I would be having would be via Zoom or FaceTime video. I might be walking around outside having this conversation, but I could also have a headset on where I'm recording. So the lifestyle inconvenience to me of recording the conversations I would have otherwise is close to zero.

And I would say success is having thought-provoking conversations. Ideally, I learn something or feel something from those conversations, maybe both, and then I get to share them. Because the origin of the podcast, I mean, it's easier for me to forget, but I mean, there are a lot of factors that contributed to it in 2014. But one of them was I was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco at the time and I was having the most incredible conversations with brilliant people. At least people I thought were brilliant. The density of intelligence there is so high.

I mean, there are a lot of issues as well, but it just seemed like such a shame, not too dissimilar. I mean, it's slightly different, but it's closer than people might realize where it's like you're doing the one-on-one coaching. It's yeah, it's good to help one person, but then if I want to convey this to a second person, let alone 200 people, I have to repeat it. And for me, these conversations were sand through the fingers, that I could not in any way convey to someone else.

And I was like, “Well, let me just try to record some of these.” Which is why the first 10 to 15 were with friends of mine also, to make the lift as light as possible. And I feel like I probably, it's not a probable, I would definitely miss recording because let's just say I quit the podcast today, next week I would've an amazing conversation with someone. I'd be like, “God dammit.” It's so selfish of me not to just record on an iPhone with a half decent headset to record this thing because fuck, it's a real privilege to have access to the network that I have access to.

Which doesn't mean by the way that, I mean, everyone's going to know every person I talk to, I prefer strongly if they don't. But success to me right now it's honestly scratching my own itch. So for instance, I mean, I'm thinking of potentially compiling a whole lot of 4-Hour Workweek-related case studies because very early, very early in my entrepreneurial journey, and I'm not recommending people go buy this book. I think it's out of print anyway, but Entrepreneur Magazine had this book called Young Millionaires, and it was two to three pages profile of each young millionaire, which meant somewhere between 20 and 35, I suppose.

And it was like, how much cost to start the business? $200. How much they made last year in revenue, next year estimated revenue, type of business. And it ranged from pest control to crime scene clean up to — 

Charlie Houpert: Oh, God.

Tim Ferriss: — yeah, pretty gnarly, to cosmetics, to forestry. It was like the range and scope was so inspiring to me. The magic of that and the impact that it had on my psyche I didn't take it and apply it right away, I was too young, but seeing that it was possible has made me think about assembling effectively a book that would be the [REDACTED]. 

Charlie Houpert: Wow. Oh, I love that. I love that. I got chills. I love that. Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Because with The 4-Hour Workweek it's like in the beginning, and even now, understandably with a title like that, people are like, “Yeah, bullshit. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You work more than four hours a week.” I'm like, “Well, I'm not just going to lay outside staring at at the grass rubbing cocoa butter on my stomach.” I like building things and I like having these kinds of conversations, but there are so many other types of pushback in the early stages, keeping in mind, I've revised The 4-Hour Workweek, but the last time I did it was 2009.

And the principles really apply. The frameworks still all apply. The technology, forget about it, almost all outdated, but that doesn't matter. If you grasp the principles, then you can find the methods. But a lot of the types of pushback that people would say, “Oh, well, it's easy for a single guy than on a single mom.” Or “I have four kids.” Or “I'm in a different country.” Or “I'm in this struggling economy.” Or fill in the blank. For every possible excuse that I have heard, I have received a case study from someone who fits that exact profile who figured it out.

So the idea that I could collect those in some fashion in a compendium just seems A, it would be so much fun and so gratifying for me after almost 20 years of this book being out. And therefore, as always, us having this conversation is a way for me to feel into that and to be like, “Okay, what aspects of this?” Like you said when I mentioned the book, like chills like, “Okay, what pieces of it?” I'm like, “Okay.” I get an extra big smile, so big that my earpiece keeps falling out. Also, I have swimmer's ear, so my canals are fucked  — 

Charlie Houpert: Oh, no.

Tim Ferriss: — on my right ear. So it just keeps falling out. But that's a very long answer to your question. But success for me with the podcast is just recording conversations that I would want to have anyway, which for a successful podcast is maybe harder than people would realize. So hard. Because if you want to protect traction, distribution, and audience size, and ideally grow it, that is more and more every day being dictated by platforms with priorities that are not the same as your priorities.

And if you really double click on that, look at it, study audience capture as well almost every financial incentive would push you to break that rule and choose guests based on the number of Oprah moments or salacious clips you can pull from an interview that you can then use on the platforms to drive some type of growth engine. Although growth for what end is an open question. A lot of people make YouTube work, but in my particular case, I'm just not really video first. So it's never been particularly strong performing compared to audio. It's very difficult or I shouldn't say it's difficult. It requires constant revisitation to instill the habit of me only having conversations with people I would want to have a conversation with, right?

Charlie Houpert: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: Because if I could have on some completely off-the-wall lawmaker or I could have on, who knows? I could step on a bunch of third rails politically speaking. I could pull from current events and light off some audio and video dynamite with talking about the Middle East. There are many things that I could do, which would get a lot more attention than me finding a Japanese sword maker who no one has ever heard of.

But when you start to put on a mask, adopting practices that are not of your own invention, but because you're complying with incentives, the concern is not that it just ends up hollowing you out inside, because that can happen, the risk is that you actually become the mask you're wearing and that those behaviors change how you think and change your own beliefs, which I think is inevitable on some level. So in any case, that's probably more than either of us bargained for.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, goodness. I've wrestled with this endlessly. And I absolutely hit a period where I felt like to a degree I allowed that audience. So at first it was, I wanted to make this video. I think what Bill Clinton does with his eyes is so fascinating. I think it's so interesting that Donald Trump is probably going to be President. And I love Game of Thrones. And then it was, well, you guys want more Game of Thrones videos, let me do another Game of Thrones — well, you guys really like that one. And what you're describing to me is not just a business struggle.

It is a legitimate emotional, spiritual struggle to be like, “Do I choose myself in the face of the world offering me all of this temptation to be something else?” And there were periods where the answer to that is I compromised. And it's like I didn't kill anyone or do any, but I made the video that I didn't really want to make and it did really well and then, okay, well, I've got to make another one. And I burned out. I had to step away for years and didn't make videos for years because I believed that I hated making videos. And what I learned was that no, I hated losing my creative well as I chased approval and views and more.

Tim Ferriss: So let's talk about the timeline on that. Let's see. Let me see if these are lining up. So you're in Vegas, you begin to make these videos, which you enjoyed making, about Bill Clinton. I suppose Bill Clinton came maybe even prior to that, but to use your term fame-jacking, so Jon Snow, real characters or otherwise, Keanu Reeves. Maybe Keanu Reeves came later.

But in any case, those videos start to do very well. You realize that you can offer the higher priced products upfront or reasonably soon with testimonials, and you get conversion. You don't have to lead someone through a 12-step process. And I suppose what I'm wondering is what does the trajectory look like from there? And how long was it before you decided, “I just can't do this. I need to take a break?”

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. It's so funny, this. There's two lines. There's the line of when you've created the value, which is I created the value sleeping on the couch in Brazil, and then there's the line of when the money starts coming in, and so there's a delay. So you're creating the value and then the money comes in later. But there's also a delay on the backside, which is you stop creating the value, but the money keeps going up.

And this is every cash cow business that starts cannibalizing itself and not treating customers well, but is still when Marvel makes the next sequel to Marvel movie and it does well, and they don't realize that they're eating their own future. So I would say the flip for me was 2018 to when it shifted from I personally want to make these videos and I'm excited and I'm learning something in every video to, oh, I've learned what makes them clap, and now I want more claps. I want more clapping. And the money was secondary, but it's like, “Oh, they like it. They love me.” Every video bigger.

Tim Ferriss: So that was a few years after starting the channel at that point?

Charlie Houpert: Yes. And I'd been doing it weekly. And there was an authentic drive to do it weekly that's then slowly shifted and it became, “I don't want to do this.” And then it was, “I definitely can't do this.” And I, at the time, so many other things were going on in my life, we can go into it or not, but there was a moment probably in 2018 where I needed to have a conversation with my co-founder that said, “Hey, I think we're no longer in alignment with this business. I've been driving the growth with these videos. Your projects have not succeeded in the same way, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of honesty, we have to have a talk about our 50/50 split.”

But money was never the drive. The drive was always be with my friends in Brazil. And so I didn't care. But as my own inability to have sincere, authentic conflict crept into the business, it cascaded downwards. So I'm avoiding having a difficult conversation with my co-founder. We hire somebody else to cover that up. Turns out years later that we hire somebody who fabricated a bunch of stuff and stole money from the business and all of it was just from this core pattern of not wanting to face the problem and just wanting to squint at it and say, “Everything's good. The money's coming in. People like it,” et cetera.

And so what happened was, and again, I was so happy, broke in Brazil, sleeping on the ground, unable to afford food, and then I had the experience, the cliched one of I've made more money than I've ever made. Everybody wants more, they think it's all great, and I feel like, I feel awful. 

And then I have a breakup, right before my 30th birthday and I'm going to collapse some things. We can go into anything. I am invited to an ayahuasca retreat, I have been having these issues that have not surfaced. I don't smoke weed, I don't drink.

I am a straight edge, but fuck it I'll give it a try. I go headfirst into this ayahuasca experience with no idea what's coming and that starts what has now been a seven-year process of completely turning my life upside down and having to face everything that I hadn't looked at, which was, of course, these things in the business, but even more importantly, the patterns of avoidance and people pleasing and seeking that had been birthed in my childhood. And so, hey, happy to touch on all of that. I know it's broad spanning.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No, we could spend probably two hours on six different facets of that. Let's start with coming back to the secret of freedom is courage. Was there a catalyzing event? Was there a book you read? How did you go from squinting at the problem? Because this is, I would say shockingly calm, but it's not shocking because I see it so often. Co-founder challenges, co-founder splits, these happen all the time. And it's particularly challenging in a situation where you have some accepted 50/50 division because there's no real tiebreaker. It gets even more complicated when you have governance and board of directors and all that kind of stuff. But I mean, almost no relationship is 50/50.

Charlie Houpert: It would be weird if it was. It'd be so weird.

Tim Ferriss: Actually, that clip I mentioned that got 100 million plus views, it was Brené Brown talking about how marriage is never 50/50. And I would say the question for me that I'm sure people are wondering is how did you go from the conflict avoidant kind of people pleasing, maybe fear-based, who knows, squinting at the problem, hiring people to try to paper it over, et cetera, et cetera, to having whatever come-to-Jesus conversation presumably you guys had? How did that happen?

Charlie Houpert: It took years. And the catalyst was not the business because the sacred center of it for me was never money. It was the friendship. And I was acting out a pattern to try to keep things good with us and he was doing his half of that pattern to keep things good in the way that we thought to do it, which was, let's not address this. And it was on me to address it because I was the one that was beginning to be frustrated, resentful, subtly trying to influence change, encourage, coach everything other than say, “This isn't working for me.”

And how did I do that? It was a multi-year process of facing brick by brick those familial patterns of I'm afraid you won't love me if I say that I'm upset with you. I'm afraid that you won't love me if I take what I think is my fair share. I'm afraid that I'll be alone. And I hear it in my voice. I still carry that in me. And if you look at the business, Charisma on Command, even how to make Tim like you in a conversation, how to make somebody like there was this founding belief that, “If I could just communicate clearly enough, do more, say more, be more, that connection would just happen,” 

Tim Ferriss: How did you decide it was time? What did it look like to go from doing the work with all these modalities to, “All right, game time — “

Charlie Houpert: Oh, God.

Tim Ferriss: — to have the conversation?

Charlie Houpert: Again, it was pieces. First, it was oblique conversations like, “Hey, I'm not feeling — this isn't feeling great,” and then seeing what I got back. And then it was more confrontational. And the essential problem was I did not know how to have a boundary and tried to negotiate boundaries endlessly with people that I loved, instead of saying, “I love you,” but pass this line, “It's not okay with me and I will not comply.” It was, “Well, can you see why that would be fair for me to have this perspective?” So if there was a shift, the big thing that happened was, over these years, I had started to develop a therapeutic relationship with a therapist and a number of friendships where I was being met in ways that I did not think were possible, and to not use therapy language, I felt that people wanted to hear the ways in which I was upset with them or angry and wanted to repair in ways that actually didn't just paper over the problem but felt good.

And when I brought that possibility, I was like, “Holy shit, this can happen? Let me bring myself,” that was not the result of my conversation with my co-founder. It did not go that way. And knowing that it existed now and then not getting it there made it like, “Okay, this is no longer working. We need to separate.” And so what happened was, first, it was with the friendship, but secondarily with the business, it was tough for me to come back to to say, “I don't want you to make videos anymore for the business. I don't feel that they're aligned with what I want to say.” I made videos for, I don't know, the first three-ish years and then got burned out. I was like, “Will you please step in?” and always didn't want to look at the videos.

Whatever, the money's coming in, I don't want to see. I actually had to sit down and literally watch them, and not that there's anything objectively wrong with them, but they're aligned with what felt right for me. And I had completely abdicated that responsibility of saying, “This doesn't feel good.” So confronting that I felt so evil and awful and bad for having that perspective. I was being too cruel or too mean, but I had become more grounded in, “Not saying that you shouldn't make videos ever. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this, but this doesn't work for me.”

So we just paused literally making videos on the channel for one year. Business starts to nosedive, right? Not immediately, but the videos don't get views forever. Business falls off 20 percent, 30 percent, 50 percent. And it was again a question of which — it wasn't a game. It was, “I just don't feel good about that.” 

And so through that process, we were talking about the future of the business and what I buy, what he sells, we couldn't find an agreement on who would do what. And I can talk about the negotiation if you want, but we finally settled on, “I'm going to buy the business all out. I'll pay you for the piece and you'll have no restrictions. You can make any sort of content that you want on any other channel, but this was going to go, I'm going to take this, I'm going to give you cash.”

And honestly, it's what both of us wanted. I think the thing that we didn't acknowledge is that we had fundamentally different drives, whereas mine was more creative expression and his was more financial security. And that split, it's very tough. It just doesn't align well, especially what you said. I did not feel he has a different opinion, that we were equally contributing to the financial success of the business. So yeah, it was harrowing more importantly than the business split was that he was my best friend and we're not that anymore. And so it was going through the wringer. It was Dark Night of the Soul-type challenges. So grateful for it and it was painful as hell to experience.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I'm sorry you guys experienced that. I would say that, in theory, sometimes in practice, if everything's going perfectly, 50/50 informally agreed upon sounds great, right? But in practice, it can be very challenging. And if you were to do this again, right? If you were to partner with someone else, let's just say that it actually made sense, someone came to you with a channel with an equal number of subscribers. They're like, “Hey, let's join forces. I think we can 3x,” and let's just say that conformed with your artistic expression and what you want to do. I would imagine you would have some type of partnership agreement that can function as a prenup in the sense that you would have termination clause, where it spells out what happens in case of a split, which is an area where also conflict avoidant folks get themselves into long-term trouble, not saying you, but in general.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, 100 percent me.

Tim Ferriss: Right? They get themselves into long-term trouble because they want to avoid the short-term discomfort of talking about the ingredients that would go into such an agreement, and man, oh, man, yeah, it can get really, really, really messy. A prenup is always cleaner than a postnup in business and in life. Where do things stand now with the business?

Charlie Houpert: So I'm making monthly payments to him. We agreed on a fixed sum that I would pay over a period of time. I am sole owner and it's great. It's exactly what I want. The business for me always has been the crucible of emotional growth. From the moment where, “Am I going to press publish on this thing?” to, “Am I going to do private coaching or am I going to move to Brazil?” and it's always been the question of, “Can you hold your center in the face of temptation not to?” And there's a long period where with my relationship with him, I lost it. I lost my center and that's not his fault. But God, it's so amazing, I come back and I step into this audience-capture moment where I want to prove myself that I've still got it, that I can do it, except I don't want to make the old bangers that I used to. I don't want to throw fastballs down the middle to the fat part of the bell curve any longer.

And so I'm facing continually the challenges of letting go of my ego of the guy who did it and having the business that is authentic to me. And I have not sorted through it. Even in preparation for this conversation, half of me wants to sit and dial in my story, so that I'm perfect and I nail it and it hit that punchline. And the other half of me is like, “Dude, go in empty. Go in empty.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I like rough draft.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, rough draft, right?

Tim Ferriss: More than finished 60-minute comedy special on Netflix.

Charlie Houpert: Exactly, yeah, TED Talk.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I appreciate the vulnerability and the candor and I am going to ask you at some point, I'm just going to plant the seed because I'll let it germinate a bit, which is other critical decisions that you made in your entrepreneurial journey. Could be anything. Could be a tiny detail that ended up making a big difference. Could be anything at all like other decisions or milestones that were really important. I'll buy some time though.

Charlie Houpert: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: So do you still recommend, I've actually never read book, but Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden?

Charlie Houpert: Amazing. So good. Now I haven't read it in maybe seven or eight years, maybe longer, but if you do read it and you're crunched for time, you can skip to the chapters on the pillars. He's got some preparation on what self-esteem is and the history of it. But if you haven't worked on your self-esteem at all, it's the first stop to go to. If you have more experience, you might be more familiar with it.

Tim Ferriss: And what should people expect to gain from this? How did you find this book in the first place? Do you remember?

Charlie Houpert: Goodness, that Tucker Max message board was a lot of the books — that was where I found The Game and it might've been Six Pillars of Self-Esteem as well. I think it was through something like that, yeah, and I got into, it's like a 1970s psychology personal development book, but it's perennial. What people can expect, there's these exercises that people are discovering the power of, which is sentence completions exercise. So it'll run you through each chapter and talk about how personal responsibility is a critical element of self-esteem or whatever, but then it adds at the end it's got these sentence stems, “If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today,” blank.

And the idea is that you can write or speak, just free like, “If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, I would eat healthy. If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, I would call my parents and tell them that I love them,” whatever it is that is honest for you in that thing. And if you go through these, usually the fifth, sixth one, you're just like, “Oh, damn.” And so some of them were, “I would have talked to that girl at Whole Foods,” and it was, “Oh, crap.” And so there was one, there was a woman who I dated who I had seen her and then I went back and then I did my pillars of self-esteem and I went, “Oh, crap,” and I walked back to Whole Foods and I said, “I had to talk to you. I went home and wrote my sentences and it was, ‘If I had more courage, if I had five percent more courage, I would've asked you on a date,'” and that became a relationship.

Tim Ferriss: It's amazing.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, it's that sort of stuff.

Tim Ferriss: She's a slow shopper.

Charlie Houpert: No, no, she worked at Whole Foods. She was at the counter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I was like, “She wearing leg braces?”

Charlie Houpert: No, she was identifiable. She was easily trackable.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. Okay. Amazing. All right, so we will link to that in the show notes. This is what I was curious about. What was The Last Psychiatrist blog?

Charlie Houpert: Oh, my gosh, you don't know this?

Tim Ferriss: No, never heard of it.

Charlie Houpert: To me, he is the secret godfather of bloggers on the internet. A lot of the people that you might've liked from cracked.com or whatever, he wrote. It was a pseudonym. People think they know who he is. He's likely a psychologist or psychiatrist and he has incredibly thought-provoking stuff. Now if you read it, you're going to go, “Well, that doesn't make sense and that's kind of a leap,” but it is very thought-provoking in reading it. And at the time, he stopped writing in like 2013 or something.

Tim Ferriss: But the old posts are still up?

Charlie Houpert: Somebody's cataloged them because there's an internet fandom around it, but if I could give you some basic things, I'll give you one story that I remember.

Tim Ferriss: I think “The Maintenance of Certification Exam as Fetish,” “Ten Extra Seconds Would Have Saved True Detective‘s Finale.” Okay, he's got all sorts of random stuff.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, he's all over the place.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 2014 looks like the last post.

Charlie Houpert: He discusses how advertising doesn't just condition you [to] what you want, it conditions how you learn what to want. So as an example, people will watch a Lexus commercial and they'll think, “I didn't fall for that. I don't want to buy a Lexus,” and his point is, “Yeah, but you think that that's what a pretty woman looks like, the woman who moves towards the Lexus.” And so he's got a couple of maxims which are interesting, which is, “If you see it, it's for you,” meaning if you're consuming a piece of advertising and you think it's not impacting you, it's been split test to make it to your eyeballs. And yes, technically there's a chance that you're resisting, but it is teaching you that a watch is a status symbol. And maybe you don't think you need a Patek Philippe, but you learned that this is what money looks like because the background has a bookshelf. And now you think that books are what make people want things.

So he talks about how two things have happened. We've, one, lost the ability to self-reference internally our desires, which is exactly in line with what we were talking about. It's all mimetic desire, right? “What do you want that you want that you want that I can't find my own wanting in it?” And he talks about how we have become deeply narcissistic. Just collectively as a society, we see our own reflection and image everywhere and many people do not have the capacity to genuinely love and encounter another, “It's just what my wife says about me, what my kids say about me,” that sort of a thing.

Tim Ferriss: All right, so that is just thelastpsychiatrist.com. All right, let's come back to critical decisions or they don't have to be critical, important decisions. If you were basically teaching a class about your entrepreneurial journey, a seminar, and you were highlighting some of the things that actually really made a difference, maybe they looked small at the time, maybe they looked really big at the time, anything else come to mind that we have not yet discussed?

Charlie Houpert: So a lot of them we have. So allow me to run through the ones because maybe I'll find something new. So if I really go to critical decisions, there were all of the early ones about, “This isn't my 10-out-of-10 and I'm willing to let it go.” That was repeated throughout the business. There was this phase of making videos where I had read Essentialism and it became, “Get everything out of my way so that I can do this thing,” and that was rocket ship growth. It was like, “Let shit go awry. Problems are arising. Do not come to me.” And there's a balance there that I haven't quite figured out because what happens is a lot of little things go wrong, but the net of me making these videos absolutely obliterates and cancels them out.

And there comes a compounding bill when you've just hired that person and just let that culture persist and it becomes — it, at some point, needs to be addressed, which is what eventually did need to happen with the company. But there was a period of just rocket ship growth by letting small problems accrue. There was, getting that extra room was really big, so that I could film the video.

Tim Ferriss: Handling the Herbie.

Charlie Houpert: Handling my Herbies.

Tim Ferriss: That there was the rebranding, of course. 

Charlie Houpert: Rebranding early. Yeah, then building the course. Here's one. There was between V3 and V4, I went to Jay Abraham. He had a private coaching thing. He's one of these old-school business coaches.

Tim Ferriss: He's super old school. He has a great book on joint ventures. I haven't read it in more than a decade, but all the myriad forms that joint partnerships and joint ventures can take. Pretty wild. Some of the negotiating gambits and kind of guerrilla marketing and partnership approaches. Jay Abraham.

Charlie Houpert: So I have private coaching with Jay Abraham. And he asks me, “Who's the person you most want to take your course?” I say, “Tim Ferriss or Tony Robbins.” And he says, “If Tim Ferriss found your course and took it right now, how would you feel?” I went, “I don't want him to,” and he said, “That's a problem.” I said, “Well, it's not good enough.” He said, “Make it good enough.” 

Tim Ferriss: That's a cool exercise.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. So I went back and filmed it and I still have insecurities and this and that, but I did my best effort to make it okay for Tim, for you. And when it was done, the next video that I made, I spoke about it, and at the end of the video I said, “This is the best I can do. This is the greatest thing that I can possibly make for you guys on this topic,” and conversions exploded. And every ad read after that had a significantly higher like 2x or more lift in conversions and we started getting more testimonials. And it was this, “If you don't believe in it fully, you're going to sell it with hesitancy, right?”

So being able to tell the truth and the truth was not, “This is the greatest thing in the world,” is, “This is my absolute best. If you like this blog, this is the best I can offer you.” And at this point, the truth is it's now longer true. I feel like I can do something better now. So I need to go back, do it again and then be able to honestly say, “This is the best I can do and I'm sure that will have the same impact because I subtly shy away from selling, from offering the thing that I don't fully believe in,” so that was a big one. It's tough. 

I don't know how to parse it out, but this plus adding testimonials was a 4x conversion lift when we started adding those at the end.

So we used to have our call to action, it was a 10-minute video and then like, “Hey, if you want to buy Charisma University, it does this, it does this, it does this. It's got all this in it. Here's what's in it.” And then it became, “Hey, do you want to buy Charisma University? Here's what somebody said about it, ‘This helped me get a promotion. It did this.' Here's what somebody else said about it, ‘I got a girlfriend.' Here's what somebody else said about it.” And they were just literally photo comments that people had left in the comment section or emails that they sent in and that combined with the, “I care about this more,” was a 4x total conversion lift, which was huge.

There was — the avoidance was something that I had to pay for on the backend, the avoidance of conflict, and not — I think this is one, I didn't know how to just allow people to know that I was disappointed or upset or hurt or angry. I had to fix everything very, very quickly, a lot of people-please-y tendencies, compounding over time, created a lot of issues.

There was not firing the person who wound up stealing. I knew that I needed to. There was a lot of not firings that were huge.

And then there was the walking away and the returning, which was really, really important and they were both honest. One was like, “I'd rather not have this thing send me money than post videos that I don't feel aligned with,” which made me like, “Oh, my God.”

When you do stuff that isn't aligned for money, it signals such a lack of self-belief and self-love. And this is in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem book. When you start trading your beliefs for cash or approval, you're just sending a signal that, “I can't be relied on to be myself and be safe and earn.” But when you do things that are detrimental to income, not offering a discount, like saying, “I don't want these videos to go up,” not to punish anyone, but just because it doesn't feel aligned, I have felt every time where I've dropped into that this power arises in me. And so that was like, “Oh, holy shit.” I felt like a beggar in a weird way. I'm making all this money, but I'm feeling unsafe that I need to beg for more and ride the coattails of this thing that I built that I can no longer do. And as soon as I said, “I don't want this,” I felt a surge of like, “Oh, fuck, I have more to say. I have more to contribute.” So that was huge.

And then in the negotiation, the big moment was two things. We'd been at deadlock for two years. I made him an offer. It was nowhere near what he wanted. We were just not able to meet. There were two things that happened. One was we're starting to get into these circular spirals of, “Things aren't working,” and I paused and I said, “Hey, it sounds like you're really scared,” and we just talked about our feelings and the fallout of the friendship and the fears that we both had. And acknowledging the emotional intensity of this, that was essential. Pretending that this was a business transaction, that's a lie. That's not what was going on here. We were both really afraid. And speaking to that and bringing it to light moves things tremendously.

And then the second one was honestly going to him and saying, “I'm willing to sell the business. I'm willing to sell it, but I need one thing, which is I need no noncompete. I need the ability to go and make anything that I want anywhere.” And that moved us from “I'm trying to buy from him, he wants more money, I don't want to give him the money,” to, “Make me an offer.” He made me an offer then for that. And I said, “I'll give you 20 percent more than that,” and it was done deal over and it was that.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Was there anything in particular that led to those two, call it breakthroughs?

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I don't think they're, after a two-year impasse, I think that wording is appropriate.

Charlie Houpert: Oh, totally.

Tim Ferriss: What contributed to those two things?

Charlie Houpert: Joe Hudson, I have to give a huge shout-out. Have you spoken to Joe?

Tim Ferriss: I have spoken to Joe. Joe. I actually just featured a tweet storm about emotional intelligence that Sam Altman had retweeted at one point. Just shared that in my newsletter I think one week ago, maybe two weeks ago. Yeah, so Joe Hudson, you should explain, though, to folks who don't know the name, who he is.

Charlie Houpert: Joe's awesome. It's funny, I have to admit this. It was Father's Day last Sunday and I was making the joke. I'm like, “I'm meeting all my dads in one week. It's my dad and Tim Ferriss and Joe Hudson is going to be here in two days.” And for me, it's a significant thing because the truth is, and I told you, I had a ton of projections onto you like, “If Tim helps me, it will save me.” And I had the same thing with Joe because Joe's work was also deeply important to me. And so it's just really cool to drop some of the projections and meet the people.

So all my dads. Joe Hudson is my third dad. He's great. He has a thing called Art of Accomplishment and he acknowledges the emotional aspect of business and not only acknowledges it, but points to the fact that, if you ignore it, you will either not do as well as you could or you will do is exceedingly well and feel that empty burnt-out thing that awaits everybody who trades the inner asset for the external one. So his work was extremely helpful. I'd gone through his courses and he offered me, because we'd been in contact, a private coaching session because I'd helped him with some YouTube stuff. And on that, he literally suggested, he said, “Offer to sell. Are you willing to sell?” And he was like, “Then make the offer. Do a shotgun deal where you guys both write a number on a piece of paper and the person who is willing to spend more will take it.”

So just knowing that I had that, I brought that to my co-founder and said, “Look, I'm willing to make a binding agreement about this where I'm genuinely willing to buy or sell.” But it was that shift of, when I needed to buy, he was like, “Well, give me more.” And when it's like, “Look, I don't need to buy, but let's get our way out of this thing,” his number came down essentially is what happened. And there was one final thing that was — I based on loving advice from people who were supporting me, had wanted to buy the business out of net revenue, which is to say, with safety valves on, “If it doesn't perform, I don't have to pay you.” And that, we couldn't find a number for. It just didn't feel good.

And I had a number come through, a literal number that came to me and I was like, “That's way more than I've been offering him and he said no.” And the next followup was, “Yeah, because you're going to take all the risk,” and I felt a surge of fear and then that self-belief energy come back and like, “Oh, my God, yes, I want the risk. I don't want this. If it works, I want this through rain or shine, good or bad. Let me pay the price for not succeeding.” And I'll take you back to one. It was the burning the boats that finally made the business work at every stage. It was taking the steps that got me to not have the contracting job, to move to Brazil. I'm committed. I care about this enough to suffer and hurt if this doesn't work out, right?” And so that was also huge in that and it was huge at the beginning of the business.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, what a story. I'm consistently amazed, it happens to me all the time in my own life too, but how a single conversation or a dream, literally this has happened to me when I've had a fever and I've just been sick in bed where you're looking at something and then suddenly say a Joe Hudson's like, “Well, why don't you just do the opposite of what you're considering?” and you're just like, “Oh, shit. Yeah, why don't I do that?” It's this revelatory experience of an off menu option suddenly seeming obviously available and viable, right? And it's like when someone offers you A or B, look for C type of situation. And it's so easy to say that and it sounds trite and cliched, and even as I would like to think at least how much practice I have at trying to test assumptions or I am testing assumptions, testing assumptions and always looking for side entrances and these off menu options, still there are these moments where you're blind to what is hiding in plain sight. And it's fun to hear that Joe was one of the unlocks for part of that.

Charlie Houpert: And by the way, I have to say, if you're here watching this, I can't imagine you have it, but if you haven't read The 4-Hour Workweek, that's the entire thing. It's that energy. And I actually think what people are buying from me is that energy in the social realm, “There's a third option, which is connect. The magic is available,” and I think 4-Hour Workweek is like, magic is available in your career.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. I've been asked so many times, as you would imagine, by publishers to go back and kind of fine tune, rewrite that book. And I don't want to touch it. 

Charlie Houpert: It's too good.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I appreciate you saying that. It somehow captured lightning in a bottle, and I'm like, “Look, I'm 47 right now. I wrote that when I was 29.” And sure, if I read it now, there's a little bit of chest puffing, and there's shit in it where I'm like, “Oh, my God.” It makes me facepalm a little bit. But for whatever reason, that book has just stood the test of time, at least over 20 years or close to it, and resonated with people from so many different age brackets. Going from 15 all the way up to retiree. I don't want to touch it.

And to your point though, fundamentally, it's about calling into question all the basic assumptions of career, retirement, slave, save, retire. The deferred life plan. And looking for alternatives that you can effectively prove are, if not realistic, at least possible vis-a-vis these case studies that are already in the book. And the vast majority of those case studies predated the publication of the book. I mean, I think that's a byproduct of enjoying books that do that on some level.

Let My People Go Surfing, I think, is the title of the book by Yvonne Chouinard. I remember reading books by Ricardo Semler, and Branson, Losing My Virginity. Where it's like, “Okay.” Everyone says an airline is suicide. He workshopped it, in a sense, because a flight got canceled. He walked around with a sign at an airport offering charters. And then once he had people booked for a charter, he chartered a flight somewhere. And then figured out how to work with, I think it was a Boeing at the time, to effectively cap his downside so that his losses were contained.

But the upside was attractive. And you look at how he structured some of these deals, and it's like, “Oh, yeah. It wouldn't have occurred to me that that was possible.” But of course, when you have someone like that who's scrappy, and also had the life experience of having to pick himself up by his bootstraps, and work with next to no money. It's like, “Oh, wow.” You just had to ask, and you had to know the right way to ask. And these apparent miracles can happen. It's just wild. So we'll see. Maybe I'll put together that book of case studies. I think it'd be fun.

Charlie Houpert: Can I ask a question about that?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: So I ask because I have a conflicting relationship with my earlier work. This course is 10 years old. This is exactly what you said. That braggadocious ass. He's not caveating it enough. There's this boldness that you can only have in your 20s of, “This is how the world works.” Right?

You haven't been smashed before, but there's something beautiful about that as well. That only a 29-year-old can write this book with this much punch, and pizzazz, and clarity. So I'm curious what your relationship is with that version of yourself. And I'm also curious, what is it like when you are to receive gratitude for that? Do you feel that it's able to land? Does it hit? Does it matter? I struggle with some of this as well.

Tim Ferriss: I have never been particularly skilled or natural at receiving praise, or compliments, or anything like that. And who knows all the reasons? I mean, there are probably many I'm not even aware of. But I think in part, there were certain things that I adopted really early on as core beliefs like, “Look, the good stuff takes care of itself. You just have to fix what's not working.”

Which, by the way, is not true in a lot of cases. It can be true in a limited sense for certain things, but it's a very Faustian bargain of a philosophy to live with. But I believe that for a long time. So in sports, if coach wanted to give me a pat on the back, I would be like, “Yeah, that's great, but that's already working. So help me fix the stuff that's not working.” Which is not to say that I never responded to positive reinforcement. But little Scooby Snacks, tiny bits of positive reinforcement, and say language learning. It was very important.

But I often got that reinforcement through the process itself. Not from anyone else. That being receiving praise. So I would say I'm very grateful. I do practice gratitude, and I journal a lot on things I am grateful for. And I basically have run through some type of gratitude list, and also asking myself, “Is this a good day to die?”

When I take off in planes — take off, and land in planes — just as an exercise, I'm kind of like, “Okay. If this is the last rodeo as far as travel goes, how do I feel about what I'm doing right now?” And then assuming that it's positive, then — and even if not, running through some level of gratitude. So I would like to think of myself as a very grateful person, but I still struggle with receiving compliments and praise.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. What about other people grateful for you?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can be really deeply appreciative. I think there's also a deep-rooted fear of becoming self-absorbed, or arrogant, or over-weighting my importance in the large-scale cosmic order of things. Which is, effectively, zero. I would like to remind myself. Which I don't think is a real risk, but nonetheless, that fear is there. So I think that's also maybe a byproduct. The allowing it to glance off of me, but maybe not fully land is, I think, a consequence of that as well.

Charlie Houpert: I relate. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It's like, God, you don't have to go very far. Open your laptop, and go anywhere online. And 99 percent of people out there, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration, but are just saying things with the utmost confidence and self-importance. And it doesn't seem to help them, and it doesn't seem to help anyone else, ultimately.

It tends to end in tears. So I love to say I don't know.

And that would be another reason why I like having these conversations because there's a lot more that I don't know than what I know. That was a long riff on the gratitude piece. 

In terms of relating to my earlier self, I think it's probably harder for you with video.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You know what I mean?

Charlie Houpert: I know what you mean.

Tim Ferriss: I think it's probably a lot harder for you in video. Video is incredibly unforgiving, and video also has so many different components that feed into the end product. You've got camera, you've got framing, you've got lighting, you've got editing, you've got your stage presence, so to speak, and performance. You have body language. There's so many different elements on top of the scripting, or not scripting. But the actual delivery of whatever the content happens to be. Set design, depending on what you're doing.

I mean, there's so much that goes into it. Whereas, with print on a page, I would say, I still feel very proud of the writing in The 4-Hour Workweek. I mean, I killed myself over that book, and took the writing itself very, very, very seriously. I mean, I hate to say this, but it may even be crisper and tighter than my writing now. So I feel good about the writing, and the presentation.

The teaching of the concepts, which was based largely on many, many, many, many guest lectures at Princeton when I was invited back by one of my professors to speak to an entrepreneurship class. So that's how I workshopped that particular book. There are small pieces where I'm just like, “Oh, God.” Just the kind of chest-beating confidence, and flamboyance, maybe, of some of the examples. And at the same time, I think that some of that irrational, maybe, exuberance is really effectively infectious within the context of that book.

Charlie Houpert: I think so.

Tim Ferriss: Right? Keep in mind that was however many years. Not that many, really. I mean, we're talking five or six years after for my purposes in lifestyle design. Cracking the code, or at least figuring out elimination and automation, and all these various things. To an extent that seemed very unusual at the time. I was still really high on that experience. And you can't be a lukewarm evangelist, or a lukewarm teacher.

I didn't really view myself as an evangelist. The harder the subject is, the more enthusiastic you better be, or at least enthusiastic and effective as a teacher. If the subject matter takes care of itself, then there are lots of ways that you can perhaps compromise, or not be up to snuff. But entrepreneurship is a full-contact sport, as you know. 

And the chapter that I think gets the least attention, if I were to expand something that I would expand, is the “Filling the Void” chapter at the end. People miss that, and it's so important.

It's like, look, if you just create a lot of empty space in terms of time, humans are not really designed just to be idle. And I mean, go spend some time with any reasonably intact hunter-gatherer society that might have some plantains and cassava, or something like that. And you'll see, yes, they do rest quite a bit, but they're also, by and large, very active. It might be just household stuff, it might be chores, it might be any number of duties, church, et cetera. Especially these days. But idle hands are the Devil's workshop applies to the mind as well.

So for mental health, I think that that chapter is particularly important, and maybe could have been positioned a little bit differently to underscore it. But that's the type of chapter, also, that, number one, most readers don't assume they're going to have to deal with. They're like, “Well, that's once you've won the race.” I'll worry about that once I've won the race. Unfortunately, if you build a business, and a machine-to-serve lifestyle, but then it becomes inverted, it's not exactly straightforward, or it's certainly not pain-free to fix it at the 11th hour after the fact. So I relate to the book well. It is funny to me when I look back at some of the tech recommendations, and I'm like, “Oh, my God. This is just going to the Natural History Museum and seeing dinosaur bones. Most of these are completely extinct.”

Charlie Houpert: Yeah, I'm wrestling with that. It's an ability to look back at myself, have all the thoughts that you said, which is, “Ugh. Ugh.” But also, love that part. Like, holy shit, that guy brought me here. You know?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. On the entrepreneurial journey, are there any other books that you would recommend to the mini Charlie, or someone out there? It doesn't have to be YouTube specific. But if you could only recommend a handful of books. They don't need to be business books, per se, but they can be.

Charlie Houpert: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Are there any other books that stick out to you?

Charlie Houpert: Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, is excellent.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: Excellent.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have that. Have that downstairs.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That was easy to read. You can read it in small segments.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Why that book for you?

Charlie Houpert: It's been a minute since I've read it, but I'm in that zone of what moved me. I was like, “Oh, that book brought me to tears many, many times.” There were just deep truths about life. Increasingly, I'm into that archetypal, mythic, pseudo religious stuff. Not because of any doctrine, but because of the way that it moves me. So that's just an example of a 20th century classic tome — not even a tome, it's a pamphlet, essentially. It's not that long.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. It's like a hundred pages, maybe.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: 120 at most.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Charlie Houpert: Running Lean helped a lot with the interviews. It's not the most fun read, but it helped me set up those interviews that I did that identified the stuff in the business.

Tim Ferriss: Running Lean?

Charlie Houpert: Running Lean. You could probably find many books on the topic, but it's a lean startup thing. And it just has two sections. Here's the big takeaway. There's two interviews that you do. You do one interview that is about the customer, and one interview that is about your product. So the first interview is not, “Do you like this? Do you want this?”

It's, “What are you bothered by? What are you trying to make happen? What isn't working for you? Where are you hanging out?” And then the second one is, “Hey, I've got this idea for you. Does that solve the problems that you identified?” And it helps you run through those. So that was really important back in the day. What were the other ones? Back in the day, Influence by Cialdini was huge.

Tim Ferriss: Outstanding book still.

Charlie Houpert: Classic. Still Dale Carnegie. Still classic.

Tim Ferriss: Which Dale Carnegie?

Charlie Houpert: For me, it was How to Win Friends and Influence People was the one. There's ways in which I go to it.

I've got poetry by Hafez, which again, that hits the part of me that is coming more active today. I love Martha Beck. I saw your interview with her. She's got several books. Her interview with you is honestly great though. I think it does a lot of the work that you might want to take from some of her books. So I'd recommend that. Let me see real quick. Brandon Sanderson's in here. I know he was on. That was a great interview as well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he was fun.

Charlie Houpert: So good. Yeah, I'll leave it there. And Essentialism. Yeah, let's not drown people.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. That's plenty to start with. And Essentialism, I'll reiterate. It is a really good read. And if you combine that with Richard Koch's book, The 80/20 Principle. Those two will take you a long way. A really, really long way.

Well, Charlie, we have covered a hell of a lot of ground here.

Charlie Houpert: We did it. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that you would like to mention, or point people to? Where can people find all things Charlie online?

Charlie Houpert: Charisma on Command YouTube channel. If you're interested in the course, it's Charisma University. You should be able to just type it in, and it'll take you to our sales page. I know it didn't hit, but I spent a lot of time and money. I made a D&D show on YouTube. I dressed up. I wore a cape. I got my friend who does a Trump impression to be a character that is named Tumpy. He's great. That's called Improv & Dragons. Don't expect it to explode. But if that's your thing, and you want to have a quick laugh, you could check that out as well.

Tim Ferriss: What is your character?

Charlie Houpert: So my character, I called him Sigmund because I was doing a riff on Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. So Sigmund, and his brother Carl. He was a druid. Was he an elf? I forget exactly what his race was. Oh, no, he was a Kalashtar, which is one of those weird ones.

Tim Ferriss: Kalashtar? That must be a new one.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah. They have these dream lives. And so, for me, I was having dreams, and I was like, “Okay. I want to just infuse this with psychoanalysis, and I'm going to give him a German accent, and I'm going to lean into this.” So we had a good time with that. And one day, I hope to actually get people to watch it.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right, man. Well, I think we can begin to wind to a close here. Any last comments, or remarks, recommendations? Anything at all you'd like share with my audience?

Charlie Houpert: Anything else? If I had a billboard. I have to answer my Tim Ferriss question.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let's do it.

Charlie Houpert: I thought about this. I was like, in the moment I'll find it. What is it? “Don't think, feel.” And I know that's counterintuitive to a lot of people, but lately, that's been my guiding principle is feel my heart, feel my gut, think from my mind, and try to find some union of the three to move forward.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, dig it. I dig it. I'm sure Joe would like that. And I'll give a shameless plug. Diana Chapman interview on The Tim Ferriss Show for people who want — 

Charlie Houpert: Oh, I'll check it out.

Tim Ferriss: — maybe a framework or two to try to calibrate. To learn how to do that. She's a very good teacher, and I suppose we'll cap it there, man.

Charlie Houpert: Beautiful.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks so much for taking the time.

Charlie Houpert: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Really had a lot of fun.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And for everybody listening, as always, we'll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/Podcast. Not too many Charlies on the podcasts. So if you just search Charlie — 

Charlie Houpert: Charlie Hoehn.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Charlie Hoehn.

Charlie Houpert: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Charlie Hoehn might pop up on the blog, but otherwise, Charlie Houpert will be the one and only. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than necessary. Not just to others, but to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.