Terry Crews and Richard Koch | The Tim Ferriss Show

This anniversary 'super combo' episode pairs two of Tim Ferriss's favorite guests. Terry Crews discusses growing up in Flint during the crack epidemic, discovering his talent as an artist, and the high-school basketball failure that taught him to always take his shot and reframe setbacks on his own terms. He shares a dark story of confronting his abusive father and how real healing came through vulnerability rather than revenge. Richard Koch then explains how he discovered Pareto's 80/20 principle in an Oxford library and used it to ace exams, built an investing career on the 'star business' principle (including a 1.5 million pound all-in bet on Betfair), and lays out the nine landmarks of 'unreasonable success' drawn from studying 20 world-changers from Bezos to Mandela.

• Terry Crews recounts winning a blind art competition at Interlochen where the judge picked both of his anonymous drawings as the two best in the room, cementing his belief he could compete with artists from around the world.
  00:10:35
• Crews describes missing a last-second layup that lost the district championship at age 16, then days later realizing 'I took the shot' became the lesson that still guides him: win or fail, it's on your own terms.
  00:17:27
• Crews shares the darkest period of his life: beating his abusive father after he hit Crews's mother, feeling completely empty afterward, and years later achieving real healing by thanking and forgiving him instead.
  00:25:24
• Richard Koch reveals he discovered the 80/20 principle in a French 1896 Pareto book in the Bodleian Library and used it to 'cheat without cheating' on his Oxford finals by studying only six likely-repeated topics per paper.
  00:43:09
• Koch explains he invested 1.5 million pounds in Betfair, his entire liquid net worth, after just one hour of due diligence, solely because it was a 'star business' with no competition, eventually making about 100 million pounds.
  00:55:41
• Koch describes Bill Bain promoting him to partner nine months in advance and asking him to behave as a partner without the title, which transformed his loyalty, diplomacy, and assertiveness.
  01:33:41
• Koch names Paul of Tarsus the most successful of his 20 'unreasonable success' subjects for stripping Jewish customs from early Christianity so it could convert the whole Roman world rather than remain a small sect.
  02:17:30
• Koch credits Nelson Mandela's 'unique intuition' formed during 17 years on Robben Island with sensing the apartheid government secretly wanted a deal, enabling a peaceful one-person-one-vote transition no one else thought possible.
  02:51:59

• In college Crews ran a 'scam' where he pre-made paintings over summer, brought in deliberately bad ones first for teacher critiques, then revealed the masterpieces to show fake improvement and earn A grades.
  00:13:45
• On the set of The 6th Day, facing Arnold Schwarzenegger for his first big movie line, Crews froze with impostor thoughts but talked himself back in, and Arnold said 'I like his energy.'
  00:34:20
• Crews's favorite quote, on his dressing room wall, is Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.'
  00:31:44
• Koch researched 20 years of Oxford history exam papers and found recurring questions on the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and causes of WWI.
  00:45:14
• Betfair was growing at 40 to 60 percent per month when Koch invested; no venture capitalist would back it because none of its managers had run anything before.
  00:57:15
• Of the 20 world-changers in Koch's book, he later classified 14 as 'adventurers' and only 6 as 'controllers,' with controllers like Lenin having far less fun.
  02:08:37
• Koch takes a two-hour countryside bike ride nearly every day on the same route as his unsystematic system for thinking and planning his day.
  02:00:14
• Koch wrote Unreasonable Success partly to refute Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hours thesis, finding it didn't explain most of his 20 subjects.
  02:12:49
• Amazon's relentless.com still redirects to amazon.com, a relic of one of the company's first domain names.
  02:49:21
• Churchill was nearly bankrupt after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, got hit by a car on Fifth Avenue during a US lecture tour, yet got up and kept going.
  02:46:42