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I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to attempt to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types. And my guest today doesn't really need an introduction, but I'll lead into it this way. And I'm going to keep my preamble short. The world's greatest bodybuilder, the world's highest paid movie star, the leader of the world's sixth largest economy. These are all the same person. Sounds like the setup to a joke, but this is no joke.
This is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And for those who don't know, he is an Austrian-born bodybuilder, actor, businessman, philanthropist, bestselling author, and politician. He served as the 38th governor of California. His new book, Be Useful — 7 Tools for Life, is out October 10th. And his daily newsletter — that's email newsletter — Pump Club recently passed 500,000 subscribers and is growing quickly as a positive corner of the internet.
Schwarzenegger has made it his mission to give back since his time in the governor's house. He's been working heavily to combat climate change, anti-Semitism, ensure fair voting practices, help youth work with veterans, and inspire healthy living, among other things.
Now if you want, in addition to all of that, some footage of his incredible accuracy with killing flies, his shepherding of various animals around the property, including pigs and dogs, you can go to my YouTube channel. That's youtube.com slash Tim Ferriss. You can find him on social at Schwarzenegger. That's on Twitter, Instagram. TikTok is at Arnold Schnitzel on YouTube, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The website for the book is BeUsefulBook.com and the newsletter is ArnoldPumpClub.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We've talked about a lot the last few times that we've spoken, but I'd love to chat maybe about the heart surgery and your recovery from the heart surgery, which I think might be perhaps an inspiring place to start for a lot of people. Would you mind just describing the heart surgery and what the recovery has looked like for yourself?
Well, I think that you're referring to the most recent one, which was 2018. That was when I just went into a routine, non-invasive aortic valve replacement, where it goes through your arteries, and your arm, neck, and then your groans into your heart, and then they replace your valve. And it's a standard procedure that they have now in the last 10 years, and you don't have to perform open
heart surgeries anymore because of it. It just happens to be that in my case, they had a difficult time somehow, and they poked through the hard wall with the cable, and so I got internal bleeding, and they now had to perform an emergency open heart surgery. Of course, it was not a way of
any of that, because I was out. The next thing I know is I wake up, and I'm really happy, and this is over, only to find out that I was having a breathing tube in my throat, and I couldn't talk, and I saw three doctors in front of me, not smiling, but kind of having a concerned look in their face. One said, don't try to talk because you can't. You still have a breathing tube in your mouth, and we're going to pull that out right away now, so just stay with us. Okay, one, two, three.
And then I was like, so I was breathing heavy, and someone ripped the breathing tube out of my mouth, and then the second doctor said, we are so sorry, Arnold, but something went wrong with the valve replacement, and we had to perform open heart surgery. So I adjusted all that, and also the breathing tube was just ripped out of my throat and lungs, so I'm still kind of not
saying anything, just staring at them. And the next doctor says, yeah, it's like 16 hours later now since you were first put down, so now we are keeping you awake, and everything hopefully will be fine. The most important thing is now for you to make it through the first night, because that's usually when you can have pneumonia and where things go south. I've just gotten out of open heart surgery where it could have cost my life, and now they're telling me that this next night
or two is very crucial, so I don't lose my life. So I said, what the hell is that? What kind of a deal did I get into here? I had to kind of connect quickly, shift gears, and realize what has happened, which takes you a while because you're on drugs and you're on medication, and you're still under anesthesia somewhat, and you're not with the program. So as I slowly started getting with the program, I had to kind of shift gears and realize that the simplest things were impossible
to do. I couldn't go to the bathroom, I couldn't get up, I couldn't do this, this and that. And then slowly I started getting with the program, started pulling out the tubes during the night, and started adjusting this and adjusting that. And then eventually I was able to go and get up a little bit. So now the doctor said, the key thing is to walk, because if you walk, then you exercise your lungs, and when you exercise your lungs, the danger of having pneumonia starts really
slipping away, and you don't have to worry about that. But the key thing that kills you always is the least amount of lung activities that you have can create this problem and you die with pneumonia. And so I was right away setting goals for myself. Okay, I'm going to go and walk around the bed, right away I'm going to get up, have someone pull along the machines. Then after I walked around the bed, I sat down again and relaxed a little bit. Then I went outside to do this, and I said,
I got to make it outside the room. And I started going outside the room, back in again, and outside the room, again, again, and doing exercises like that. Eventually, I was walking around the nurses station. And then eventually, two days later, I was walking down the long hallways, over to another building and back, which was like hundreds of yards. So I could really build
up strength and get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. And so after six days, rather than what they thought seven days, after six days, I got out of the hospital, and I was exercising, and I was walking. And I asked friends of mine that were working out with me to put the pressure on me and my family, the kids, put the pressure on me to make me walk and to not let me get away with not walking. And so that's exactly what we did.
So you've always seemingly been very good at setting goals, having a vision, and then setting these intermediate goals. I'd like to rewind the clock. So I was trying to find some aspects of your life that we haven't explored already, and this is going to go back to age 10. So age 10, roughly, is it true that you were selling ice cream at the time? I think there were ice cream pops or some type of ice cream.
You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but I did find that, and I'm wondering if that was one of your first experiences with entrepreneurship or at least trying to make money by selling something.
You're absolutely correct. And it was not that I wanted to become an entrepreneur or anything like this at that point. What it was was just really a necessity. You know, I felt like I needed a training suit. Friends of mine had training suits in the winter and, you know, tennis shoes, and my parents refused to buy it. You know, they just would give me my leather hose and, you know, the pants that they wore day and night and in the winter and in the summer, and then some high shoes, boots, just clothes that would work all the time.
But nothing fancy. And so I wanted to have a good soccer field. I wanted to have a training suit. So they said, Well, you go out and make your own money. That's fine. You can buy your own stuff. But you're definitely not going to get it for us, because that's not the kind of money that we have. That's exactly what I did. So I went downstairs to the lake where I grew up, where I learned how to swim. And they asked, there was an ice cream and dessert kiosk in front of the big restaurant, right near the lake. So I asked them, I said, Do you
have anything that I can go and put ice in it and then carry it back there where the people are lying around in the middle of the grass and the bushes and all around the lake that they're too lazy, maybe to come to the front here and buy the ice cream here and, you know, have it melt on the way back there. And it's gone already. So there's some people I think this was maybe the entrepreneurial kind of mentality because I felt kind of there is maybe a need for someone like to deliver the ice cream to the lake.
So I found a place where they would have those bushes, there's different locations around the lake rather than have them to go. Those people go all the way to the front to get the ice cream. And so I did not know, but I thought that maybe it would be interesting if you let's try it. So I would just take a little box that the guy gave me was like some kind of a container where you would normally put water in it, some round kind of container, and with a handle on it. And he put in ice from the winter that they when they've cut the ice, there was a little bit of ice that was falling away from the ice cream.
And they put ice in the winter on that lake. They used it in the restaurant below for keeping because there was no refrigeration yet, keeping the drinks, the beer and the vegetables and everything cold. So they had broken ice, huge amounts of broken ice in the bottom of the restaurant. And so the guy had in his trunk, the ice cream was this ice in it. So he gave me a little bit for my container. And then he put in 20 ice creams. They were like, you know, just icicles. So that there's bars, and he put those in there. They had a little
bit of cell phone, this little kind of paper with and so I ran with those around the lake. And I said, ice cream, ice cream, fresh ice cream, ice cream, then it was often someone would pop up and say, yeah, I want some ice cream. And then I will go with the bush and there will be three guys like there with a girl. So this is give me four ice cream, we'll get four. So the next four. So by the time I was like 100 yards gone, I already was out of ice cream from my pocket. So I had to run back to the front again, get more ice cream.
And go back out again. Then eventually I just took 100 with me, you know, and there was enough ice underneath to keep it cold in that hot day, was on 30-35 degrees. And so I sold this ice cream. And then the end of the day, I ended up what this guy gave me one shilling for each ice cream. So I sold like 145, 150, 180 ice creams and somebody's 180 shilling. So that got me enough money to buy myself a training suit. Then the next weekend, they will go back out again.
And I will go back and I will buy myself with the money and some tennis shoes and stuff like that. And so this is kind of how I started to realize that if you work your ass off, you can really accomplish a lot of things. That's why my book, you know, be useful. I put in there, this is a main job, just work your ass off.
Work Your Ass Off. We're definitely directly going to segue to Be Useful, 7 Tools for Life. This title, Be Useful, could you explain — and that probably ties into similar chapters around the story, around earning money and working your ass off in your younger years — where did this title come from, Be Useful?
It comes from my father, you know, he would always say that. And his whole attitude always was, whatever you do, try to serve the people, try to do something good for your community or for your family. Don't just think about yourself. That's why my father was so heavily kind of against body building, because he felt like that there was, he was called this is seps phronom, which means you're kind of glorifying and you're treating yourself rather than worrying about others. And so he just
felt like he says, instead of lifting for yourself, why don't you go out and chop some wood? Why don't you go and suffer some coal? And this way you help some older person that has coal delivered, shovel coal into their basement so they have coal in the winter and they have wood in the winter, and you help an older person that doesn't, that is not able to do those things anymore. That's what you should do. Then you get also muscles and you also get strong. And you also
can kind of look good. Look at this guy's like Laszlo Pop. Laszlo Pop is a boxer from Hungary. He was the European champion in boxing. How does he train? He does pictures all over the place where he's chopping wood in the forest. I said, that's how he trained. That's how he becomes a world boxing champion. He doesn't just think about his boxing, he thinks about other people too. So that was his rap. And so he says, you got to be useful. You know, you got to go and use your talent to
help people. And so that's where it kind of came from. And it's something that was really interesting because I think you and I, we talked about that in the past, that sometimes things come to you as a kid, but then later on in life, it kind of comes back. It's like kind of you're like that six o'clock in the morning and you want to stay in bed and you say, wait a minute, I heard his voice from my father screaming, be useful. You know, people have never accomplished anything.
No country ever was built by people sleeping in, you know, Austria was not built by people sleeping in, America was not built by people sleeping in, people struggled, people suffered, people worked their asses off to build this country. So you want to go now and sleep in. So then you start feeling guilty and you just jump out of bed right away because you hear those sounds. They come back and it's kind of motivational because it really has driven me my whole life and has pushed
me. So this just, you know, that's why I called the book Be Useful because it's kind of a no-ball title. And then within that book, I put all the chapters in there, Never Think Small or Work Your Ass Off or Sell, Sell, Sell, and all of those kinds of things, Shift Years, or whatever it is, you know, I've put this kind of lessons together, which were very crucial lessons that I've learned throughout my life and throughout the various different careers, but especially in the gym.
Most of my lessons are learned in the gym because there's no better place than to learn in the gym, because this is where, you know, the rubber hits the road, right? I mean, this is where if you don't do the forced reps, if you don't work until it burns and until it hurts, and then you go beyond that and do the forced reps, you're not going to grow. So now you get this message that only through pain, you can actually grow. Only through pain, you can go and discomfort and
misery. You can kind of grow also as a person, not just physically, not just muscle-wise, but as a person. Through comfort, no one ever grows. You know, you only grow through comfort and going through things where you have to have discipline and where you struggle. If it's in the military, if it is in a real good job, or if it's studying in the university, then why do kids struggle and study all night and go through hardship the further they're going to go? Look
at the students that go to medical college, how many sleepless nights they have in order. So this is what it takes.
What did your father say, be useful, in German? What is the way to say that properly? Or how would he say it to you?
Why he would have different versions of it, he would just say, A heart arbeiten. Right. You know, work hard. Hel für andere. Help others. You know, it was always like, you know, help others. You know, don't just interested in yourself. So it was kind of like a combination of all of those things that he was through to gather, and he would just always, you know, kind of like be very critical of people that didn't do that. My father's job was a police officer.
He was with the Chander-Marie, which was the country police. It was all about protecting people. And keeping law and order. So that's serving the people. And the same is when you talk about music. Music is to entertain people. So his whole thing about learning to play music and to play six instruments, the trumpet, the flute one, the saxophone, the clarinet, all of these different, you know, instruments, it made him a great performer. He wrote music. He conducted music.
So it was all about what can you do for other people. So he would go to the city park out there, and he would have concerts, he would play concerts. He would play in funerals. A police officer died. He would always play at the funerals and direct the music, conduct the music, and all of that stuff. So he was always interested in serving the people. So he was really into that.
I was asking myself this question earlier today that the adjective that comes to mind for me is resilient and Many people have seen the Netflix miniseries Arnold and one of the lines that I'm not going to get this perfectly right that stuck out to me was
That your upbringing made you but broke your brother and I'm probably getting the phrasing off a little bit but I'm wondering if you could just elaborate on that and speak to What the upbringing was like and then also what made you different from your brother in that respect
My brother was a nature more fragile, and I never really realized that when I kind of grew up, but it is the very fact that certain things that kind of unfolded made me then realize that. And there was two things. One of them was that he was more fragile, and the other one was that he appeared to be more fragile, and that I appeared to be stronger.
And the reason I'm saying that is because, for instance, when he was like 11 years old and he was going to school in Graz outside the village, and he had to go with the bus there, then they had to be picked up at the bus station a half an hour away from our house, and then it was night in the window in the fall, and then he was afraid to go home. He would say, I'm afraid to go home by myself. And so my father would turn to me and say,
well, Arnold, can you pick him up? I give you a shilling every night that you pick him up. So I'm going to end up with a week five shilling. Because on Saturday, it was only half day school, so he would go home at a time when he was still alive. So I said to him, oh, yeah, yeah, I pick him up. No problem. He says, you're not afraid? I said, you're kidding me now. But in the meantime, I was also scared shitless. So I appeared tougher
than my brother, but I was also afraid. But I was not afraid enough not to go. So I did go even though I was afraid. My brother refused to go because he was afraid. So there was both that I was a little tougher than him, but that I also pretended to be tougher than him. So that kind of unfolded as time went on. So as we were punished and beaten and all of this kind of things that was going on, it was clear that my brother couldn't
quite handle the thing because he ran away more often from home. Well, not only more often ran away because I never ran away. He ran away and he would not appear sometimes for a week. My father would have to look for him all over the place. He was scared that he got lost. Is he gone? Or what is going on? So it freaked him out. And he treated him for a while when he came back home. He treated him for a while nicer and then started
getting to be again too much for him. So what happened was really, when I look back was that each time my father punished us, it made my brother more and more vulnerable and weaker. And it made me stronger. So I thrived. My mind started gearing up to, I'm going to get back at him. I'm going to leave this house as soon as I can. I'm going to be out of here with the age of 18. I'm going to go to the military. And then I'm going to
go get my passport. And then I'm going to go to Germany. And then I'm going to go to America. And I'm going to be out of here. This is it. I'm not going to take this any longer. And it will make me stronger and really set a program and set a goal and a vision of what I'm going to do in life. Whereas my brother crumbled. He got weaker. He started drinking. He started getting involved in alcohol. And I could see in his behavior that he didn't behave well. He was abusive.
And eventually he died because of a car accident, drunk driving. With the age of, he was, I think, 24. And I was 23 when it happened. I was already in America at that time. But it was like, it was really sad because I could see that he just could not handle any more the punishment. And I could. I was thriving on it. And I used it to my big plus and as a support system. And it was like, gave me the motivation. It created the fire in the
belly. It made me create a vision, a necessary vision. This is what I want to do. I want to get to America. I have to become a bodybuilding champion. I have to get away from home. I had to find my new father figure. My father was great to be the father, the official father. But there were others, the trainer in the weightlifting club Kurt Manol and Mui. There was a guy that could now, that we also knew there was in his 40s and 50s, that became
a father figure, very smart guy that spoke English and was very worldly. And then there was a Jewish fellow there that became our kind of mentor and helped us with the weightlifting club. So this all became kind of my new father figures in the way. And then eventually Joe Weider when I came to America and all of these people I looked up right I was an idol because they would treat me in a better way. And they will educate me and they will really usher
me along and nurture me along. But they never really resented my father because of it. I always kind of felt that he served a really extraordinary purpose for me, not for my brother, but for me, which means to get me to America, become a great champion, to have that will, be able to work no matter how many hours it takes, to do no matter what it takes, and to not shy away from misery or from pain or from obstacles or from falling down and having
to get up again and crawl on all four for nothing. That was the power and the strength my father gave me. And so I always kind of appreciated that. And nothing comes in the perfect package, because I knew that if he would have given me all the love, and if he would have not done none of that, and if I would have had all the money in the world,
I would have not grown up as tough. And I would not have been able to accomplish what I did coming to America and becoming this world bodybuilding champion and do all the things that I was doing. It was all because of that upbringing. And so when I look at, for instance, my in-laws, when I see those kids, they're very smart kids in the Kennedy family.
But I always felt kind of like they couldn't have grown up, like Maria or Maria's brothers or anyone around them, they couldn't have grown up, or my children couldn't grow up with the same desire and the same hunger. But they can get other qualities. So that's the key thing to focus on that. But I mean, you could never have that quality of hunger and desire and deep inside, kind of like being able to reach inside, no matter what it takes.
So let's talk about one of the rules. Never think small. You seem like the walking archetype of not thinking small. You've lived multiple lifetimes compared to most people. How would you suggest people think of never think small, or what stories come to mind that from your life exemplify that?
There was a moment, just the very beginning, for me to go and say I want to compete in the Junior Mr Europe competition rather than just in the Mr Austria competition. I trained just as hard as everyone else in the gym. Their goal was just smaller. They said, I want to be Mr Austria. And I said, I want to be Mr Europe. So I'm going to start with Mr Junior, Junior Mr Europe, the best built men of Europe. I'm going to go to this competition. And I was thinking bigger.
And I was training as hard as they were. Everything was the same. But then when I won that competition, because I had a very clear vision, that's what I want to win, that immediately launched me into getting a job, become a trainer in Munich in a bodybuilding gymnasium. Now imagine how in heaven is that? You're a young bodybuilder, you're 18 years old, you just won your first international competition.
You win some local competitions in Austria, you win some powerlifting competitions, some weightlifting competitions. But now you're Junior Mr Europe, and you have this trophy. And now you're getting a job to train in the second biggest gym in Munich. So that was like absolute heaven. So with 19, I started training, become the trainer in the gym. So now I had the opportunity to train day and night. When I wake up, because I was sleeping in the gym, I was waking up and I was training.
I was taking a nap in the afternoon, I was training before going to sleep at night after dinner. I was training day and night. This is a dream. But it was all because I felt big. They were still stuck working for some bathhouse in Austria or for the government or being a trash collector or being a teacher or something like that. They were still stuck in the same job.
I was already moving on to Munich, and I was already a trainer in a bodybuilding gymnasium, taking this launch pad to America, which was my ultimate dream. So this is what I'm saying. So it didn't take more work to think big. It just thinking big makes you bigger. And my point is, it takes just as much effort. And I learned again from bodybuilding. From that kind of thing, I learned that don't hold back. So when I went within the age of 19, I was the youngest Mr Universe competitor.
I competed in the Mr Universe contest. I placed second, I placed runner up, so that a year later I went back with the age of 20 and won Mr Universe, the youngest Mr Universe ever. But it's just all because I was thinking big. I was not saying, oh, maybe in a few years from now I'll go there or I shouldn't go there right now or something. Oh, it's too early. Oh, it is. And then that's just the other thing. Right away, I'm going to go for the second Mr Universe next year.
I'm going to go to America. I'm going to go and make Joe Weider aware of me and make sure that I win another competition. So I was driven bigger and bigger and bigger. And even when I got into acting, I didn't look at it as kind of like I'm going to get some character roles. I wasn't interested in character roles. I wanted to be another Steve Reeves or Reg Park. They were the stars of the Hercules movies. Clint Eastwood was the star. We always Clint Eastwood in a fistful of dollars.
Clint Eastwood in a dollar, a few dollars more. Clint Eastwood in this movie. Whatever it was, it was like, that's what I wanted. Charles Bronson, I want to be like Charles Bronson. I want to be like Warren Beatty. I want to be like these guys. They were the top stars. And that's what I saw myself. And they said, well, this ladder is very hard to build or to climb up to. I said, well, then I built my own ladder. I built my own ladder. And then I know exactly how to get up there.
That's exactly what I did. I created my own way of getting up there. I took five hours that I learned in bodybuilding. I took five hours every day of working my ass off to train and to train and to train and to pose and to pose. And to do all the stuff that I needed to do, I said, I'm going to do the same five hours. But I'm going to go and learn English. I'm going to learn acting, speech lessons, voice lessons, accent remove lessons. Well, I should get my money back for those.
But in any case, I took all of those lessons one hour every day. And I was grinding it out. And then I remember eventually it happened. People started hiring me. And the great thing was that I felt that I should not be financially vulnerable. So I first got into real estate. And I worked my ass off in real estate. My first million actually made in real estate before I really got into acting.
And that helped me because now when they came to me with stupid parts, they said, do you want to play a bouncer? I said, fuck no. Why would I play a bouncer? They said, well, what about a Nazi officer? You have a great, if the German accent is, no, I don't want to be a Nazi officer. I say, I want to be a star. I want to be a leading man. I want to get rich and famous. Just like King D's with Klaus Bronson. And they said, you're crazy. It would never happen.
Well, I applied the other rule, which is don't listen to the naysayers. So I worked my ass off. I did exactly what I did in the bodybuilding. I did in the movies. Eventually it happened. I started doing the Jane Mansfield story. I started doing it with Kirk Douglas and Ann Margaret, the villain. I was doing Streets of San Francisco. I was doing Stay Hungry and Pumping Iron, or in the 70s. And even with Lucille Ball, doing Happy Anniversary and Goodbye. So I did all of those kind of things.
And then that led to the big role. And now I've arrived. Starring role in Conan the Barbarian. You know, when John Milius saw me, he says, if we wouldn't have Schwarzenegger, we would have had to build one. So all of a sudden, the body that everyone said would ever, ever become famous in the movies, because the movies, no one is seeing Muslim movies anymore. All of the opposite came true. The accent became very welcome. When they did Terminator, they loved the German accent.
They were Jim Cameron called. Schwarzenegger is talking like a machine. That's why it worked, the Terminator. So things like that. So all of a sudden, the things that they said would never make it in Hollywood. The accent, the name, the body, all of those things became big bluses. And it made it. So that's my own ladder that I built. That's why it's important. Don't just worry about climbing a ladder that someone else has built. No, build your own ladder.
You know, just don't wait for anyone else. So that's what I did.
I want to underscore a few things for folks. Number one, the building of the ladder was not — many ladders — was not haphazard. It was systematic. So you had the real estate as a financial buffer, which gave you then the ability to pick your shots. And you've been very good at doubling down on betting on yourself in many different areas. But could you speak to twins and what that looked like with that particular film to bet on yourself?
Well, Twins was a little bit out of nowhere because I had certain goals, but comedy was not one of my goals when I got into movies. And I felt like I could be funny in the movies, in an encounter, and there were funny moments and all that stuff. But only when I started doing one action movie after the next, you know, my hunger, you know, the whole philosophy of staying hungry, kind of came out a little bit.
I wonder if we ever could sell the idea of me doing a comedy. And then all of a sudden I started getting obsessed with the idea. And I started talking to everyone. I said, have you ever thought about me doing a comedy? And of course, every studio executive said, Are you crazy? I don't. I mean, what do you think? I'm making millions of dollars if you're being an action hero. You finally build the up to be this international action hero, not only in America, but all over the world. Why would I go and start spending money on something else that is not sure? I love the actual movies. We're going to give you all the script.
So I said, Yeah, but I understand. But what about me doing an action movie for you? And then the next one we do is a comedy. Why would I do that? You tell me. I mean, would you do it? I said, Yeah. I said, but here's the thing what we need to do. So then when we finally formed the partnership, Danny DeVito, Ivan Reitman, and myself, we got together and said, you know, I can sympathize with the studio. Why would they take the risk? For what? Why don't we all take a risk? Why don't we go and do it?
Why don't we go to them and say, instead of us getting the big salaries, why don't we just say we did the movie for nothing? Just give us a back end. You don't have to pay us any salary whatsoever. If the production costs $16.5 million, that's all you use. Not one penny more for us. Fuck us. Don't worry about us at all. We have plenty of money. And if the movie goes in the toilet, we all go in the toilet. Everyone takes risks. Not just you, the studio. Wouldn't be a problem.
It wouldn't be fair. They said, Hey, this is my thinking. So what do you want in return? We said, all we want is just you give us three, 37.5% of ownership of the movie. And then we all go to the bank together. If the movie goes to the roof, we all make money. The movie goes in the toilet. None of us make money. They said, we are in. That's exactly what we did. And it happened to be with Ivan Reitman's genius directing. And with Danny DeVito, kind of great
acting and everyone else around us, Kelly Preston and everyone else and me being involved, we made the movie a huge hit. As a matter of fact, that movie made more money than any action movie made up until that point for me. So my action movies went always to like $70, $80 million. And that movie made $128 million domestically and worldwide $250 million. So now imagine the budget being $60 million.
$16.5 million. And your box office is $250 million. So now we own 37.5, almost 40% of that chunk. So we all cleaned house. It was so fucking funny to go around. As a matter of fact, Tom Pollard, who was a fantastic studio leader, great producer and lawyer. He, after the deal, he's just basically said he went around the desk in his office. And he bent over and
pulled out his pockets and says, you guys fucked me and dropped me blind. And so it was like, we all were laughing because we all were very good friends. He was right. I mean, it's like, it really because they were so worried about the risk taking. They said, we take the risk. And sure enough, we did. And the risk paid off. And so we just really cleaned house. So I made like, I think $70 million on twins or something like that. And Danny made a forge that he bought
two houses, build two houses. So we all got kind of a lot of money. And I've been right. And it's a, this was deals that we did then in the future with kindergarten cop. We did it with junior. We did it. So it became a model that no one is going to do today anymore. The studios got smarter than that. But anyways, it was like historic kind of a deal. But I had the confidence that I could pull it off. And Ivan had the confidence and Danny had the confidence. And so together, we all did it. And universal student then had the confidence.
And they promoted it really well. We hired Annie Leibovitz to do the photo shoot. And she took us on top of a bus against the blue sky, and just photograph Danny and me leaning against each other. And that became the poster. And it was like really genius. So everyone kind of worked together to make this a brilliant movie, the successful movie.
He was right. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Why that's the annual percentage yield with the Wealthfront Cash account. That's more than 11 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. So why wait? Earn 4.8% on your cash today. Plus it's up to $5 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks.
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they think of selling as a dirty thing. I don't happen to think of it that way. But why is this so critical that sell, sell, sell would be one of the primary sections in the book?
You can imagine the reason why I called it Sell, Sell, Sell is because it does raise eyebrows. Right? It does make people say, wait a minute, selling normally is a no-no. I mean, if you think about it, most of the actors in the 70s and 80s refused to sell their movies. They said, this is not my job. I'm an artist. I don't sell. I'm not a salesman out there and all this stuff. And I, this was my strength, because I studied selling, you know, when I was in
career education, I started to be a salesman. And so I realized then the importance of selling that no matter what you have, if you have a podcast, if you have a movie, if you have a painting, if you have a car, a technology, a medicine, whatever it is, if people don't know about it, you have nothing. The more people that know about your product or about your talent, the more you can go and be successful. So therefore, this idea of selling, publicizing, marketing, communicating,
convincing, all of those kinds of things is an art. And there's art agencies that make millions and millions of dollars to just figure out what the language should be in order to really sell to the right people and if the right customers and sell a product the right way. So it's an art to do that. And I've learned that way back when I was 15 years old, and I learned how to sell. I remember when my boss said to me, says, now look at, watch me carefully. When I sell,
there's this couple coming in. So this couple comes in, I work in a store that had wood products, and it was like a lumber yard, that kind of hardware store. It was kind of like a hardware store type of thing. So this couple comes in, they wanted to have tiles. And so immediately, the guys started talking, my boss started talking to the guy and said, what kind of tiles do you want? Do you want the black tiles or pink tiles or white tiles? And the guy said, this is, well,
I don't know. So the woman said, we want white tiles. And for the bathroom, we want to have pink tiles. And so the guy looked at her and says, okay, fine, let me take you over there. He said, how much tiles do you need? Again, the man didn't answer, the woman answered. And she said, so I need some to me, I've written down the measurements here. And it's two meters by a meter 80 tall, and blah, blah, blah. And so the guy then all of a sudden realized that she's the
customer. So he started really paying attention to her, and asking all the questions and thinking around, but included him also. And then on the end, when they were satisfied, and we wrote up the order, and we then told him that they will be all delivered on Thursday. He came to me after they left this. So what did you learn? I said, Well, I said, did you really sold the tiles well, and the colors and the difference between real tiles and fake tiles and orders? He says, no,
but there was one other thing. I switched who I thought was the customer. He says she was the customer, not him. He paid for it. But she was the customer. So I had to talk and address her, because that was the important thing. She needed to be convinced. So I had to sell to her. And so I realized then that selling is an art that you have to improvise and adjust all the time. That if you go in front of a children audience, for instance, you have to speak a totally different
language. When you're talking to class in the school, in after school programs, then I talk in Washington, when I talk to legislators, I have to talk to differently when I talk to a crowd of fans at the movie theater, then I talk to a bunch of lobbyists. So it's always different. So you have
to learn the art of selling. And this is why selling is so important. And I remember that when Andy Warhol, when I was being painted in his warehouse down in Soho, and Jamie Wise was there, and Andy Warhol was there, and he always talked about that the most important thing is that you don't just sell the art, but you sell yourself. You have to sell yourself, you have to become
an interesting person. With both parties you go to, who you hang out with, the photos that you take, the recordings that you make, the magazine that you publish, and all of this together, he says, makes me a character and makes people fascinated to write about me. And therefore they write about my art. And sure enough, it worked. Because in no time, Andy Warhol's art became worth millions and millions of dollars. I used to buy it for $50,000, $30,000. I have the big
Indian that is hanging in my office that is now $10, $15 million. I bought for $30,000. So imagine the value that Andy Warhol gained by being just a character, a different character, and being just strange with a wig on it, and the glasses, and all of these different things. He ran around with a tape recorder. And he, by the way, was a great promoter of mine.
What is the significance of shifting gears? I mean, people can think of it, of course, in an automotive capacity. But shift gears, what does that mean to you, and are there any particular stories that stand out?
I talked about it earlier. You wake up from a surgery that you think is two hours, they replace your heart valve, and then someone tells you, we poked through your heart wall, and you now have been out for 16 hours, and now you have to stay here seven days. You're not out of the woods yet. You know, we have to do everything we can to keep you alive. And, you know, you almost died on the operating table. And it could still happen next night, if you don't really get going with the walking and forget pneumonia. So that you have to shift your mind.
You have to shift gears very quickly. I usually call it the art of improvisation. You know that you have to be very good in improvising because there's a lot of things that come up to you in life where you have to be really good in improvising. And this happened to me all the time when I was governor, I had to quickly shift gears. It happened also in show business where you have to shift gears. But it is the unexpected is happening. And you have to be kind of like ready for that and confront that. I mean, that's the most important thing.
It's just so many people get stuck on certain things on the track, and they then cannot get off the track. I just always felt like I was very good in shifting gears, like going from bodybuilding to show business. I mean, you really had to shift gears, because all of a sudden certain other things became important. I mean, think about it. You go and you do bodybuilding.
Every athlete always tells you that you got to go and keep the motions out of the way, because it's the emotions that are going to kill you. You cannot go train and compete and train for a competition for a world championship or the Olympic Games or whatever it is, and be emotionally involved in whatever it is, because you can derail you. So you do that, and I've become a master in that.
I became like a cornerstone. But then all of a sudden, you go and you start taking acting classes. And you start hearing from the acting teacher, Arnold, you talk like a fucking cold fish. I mean, there's no emotions there. I got to go and find the emotions. So think about that for a second. All your life long, you hear now that this is like bad. And now all of a sudden, you hear you have to be more emotional. You have to be in touch with your emotions.
Have you thought about lately, the smell of a rose? I said to myself, what? A rose. A rose smells a certain way, a beautiful smell. What does this have to do with acting? This is ah, this is if you sit down the scene, and you start thinking about that smell of a rose, you have a totally different facial expression.
You close your eyes, you know, let's assume that you want to compliment the woman the perfume she wears. You can't go and say, I like your perfume. Stupid. But if you go and say, what are you wearing?
It smells wonderful. I mean, you have good taste. It's just that's a totally different talent. It would change your voice. If you smell the rose, it would change your voice. But you only can do that if you really smell it and be in touch with that. So that's what I'm talking about shifting gears very quickly. So from one year to the next, I had to kind of all of a sudden have all the emotions kick in and make everything work that didn't really work in the past.
I'm curious to ask you about how that re-accessing of emotion maybe has informed how you experience grief yourself. Since we last spoke, you lost Franco, Franco Colombo, and I'm just wondering what that grief was like for you to experience.
I have to say I react a little bit differently to those kind of things than everyone else, because to me it's not so much the shock as it is the ongoing missing a person. Because there's certain friends that have become part of you. And so if they pass away, and they die, something dies in you. And so when I imagine every day when I walk into my living room, and I
see this chess board, where Frank and I played chess in the last 10 years, two, three times a week, and drank wine, smoked a stogie, and just talked in the talk, like 65 and 70 year olds talk, rather than the way 20 years old talk, you know, like in the old days. And because Frank, I've known since I was 18 years old. So then our conversations were different than they were, as of the last 10 years.
We talk about family, we talk about that we grew up in the past, and in what kind of like people conversations, and more emotional conversations. And now we're sitting here every day, when you walk into your living room, you see this chess table down the corner, and Franco is not sitting there anymore. And that, to me, you know, is heartbreaking. And when I go to the gym, and I drive down the bicycle, and Franco came on a bicycle ride, he was not good at bicycle riding.
He was all over the place. That was funny. And I had people sometimes videotape him, you know, just to show how goofy he looks on a bicycle. I think the bike seat was maybe too high up, but we couldn't know. But the problem was, it was just hilarious, because he was in a 5'3", according to him, I think he was 5'1", 5'2", the most. But then he always said 5'3". And then working out with him, the fun of working out with him. Then I had him in so many movies. I remember when I threw up,
I had him in the, I had him in the, I had him in all those movies in there. So he was just, he became, you know, kind of part of me. So to me, it's not just the initial shock. When someone tells you, oh, Franco just passed away on the beach in Sardinia. It is also then a daily thing, a weekly thing. Every time I go to the Arnold Classic,
and we hand out, I have a trophy. That is the Franco Colombo posing trophy, or most muscular man trophy. And we hand those out. And we Franko's body on it that I got made by a really great Italian sculptor, the double bicep pose. And the double bicep pose intentionally, because Franco was really not never known for his biceps, because he was known, he had such overpowering back, his lats.
His chest is dealt with. It was so overpowering that people sometimes didn't even see the arms. So I on purpose wanted to do a double bicep pose. So in the future, people also remember him for his biceps. But it's just a great, great sculpture. So to me, Franco will live on forever. So it's Joe Weider, you know, and Ben Weider, and Dave Draper and Sergio Liver and Bill Pearl, and Reg Park. To me, I see them all sitting in front of me.
When there's the Arnold Classic, and they see them all sitting there laughing and having a great time. And watching the Arnold Classic, and watching how bodybuilding is progressing, how the cash prices are going up, how we have bigger and bigger sponsors, how we have a bigger and bigger convention, and Expo, and all of this, how they enjoy all that. So that's what I see out there now. But it's kind of like, you know, it's in between kind of like, should I have tears in my eyes, when I'm out there and looking at Arnold Classic,
all those faces of those bodybuilding champions and promoters of bodybuilding, or should I smile? You know, it's this combination.
I would love to get your thoughts on aging and relating to aging because a lot of people struggle with relating or thinking about aging. I, for the first time in the last nine months, have had chronic pain for the first time due to a spinal issue, which is the first time in my life I've ever experienced that. And I'm wondering if you could share anything about what you've learned or decided with respect to aging, just getting older, as we all do.
You know, the first time at all I experienced something similar to that is when I had my open heart surgery. I was not even 50 years old. It was in April and in July I'm 50. So it was just a few months before I was 50. And it was the first time where I woke up after two heart surgeries. The first one didn't work. So they did the second one within 48 hours. And after that, I felt like I was damaged goods. I didn't feel any more
like invincible. And I didn't feel like I can handle anything. All of a sudden, there were limits put on me where the doctor said don't train as heavy. Every time you force your reps, you put pressure on your valve unnecessarily. We have to replace those valves again in maybe 10-15 years from now. So the more you put pressure on it, the faster we will have to, it's like a tire.
You can use it up in one year, you can use it up in 20 years. So it's up to you. You know, it's that kind of a thing. So it was the first time where I started thinking about when I did stunts. I remember that right after that was a stunt in End of Days, where the woman that was possessed by the devil takes the piano and runs it against my chest, wanted to kill me. So normally, you can run the piano into my chest. Doesn't make any fucking sense.
I don't care. But because of the heart surgery, and having been now cut open in the chest, I did not know how vulnerable that rib cage is. So I told them to measure out the distance with a rope, and then the rope comes to an end, and it stops an eighth or quarter of an inch before my chest.
So it looks still like it's smashing for him, and I still sell it. But it's like, you start planning on your vulnerability. And this then continues on. Because all of a sudden, you know, you used to kind of hop upstairs, and hop downstairs in a squatting position to just get out of breath. So that when you start a scene, you're exhausted, you know, like you're cutting in in the middle of a fight scene, so that you're
We can be the biggest fucking celebrity in the world, but you still get your back pain, you still get your hip pain, you still get your shoulder pain, you still get your elbow pain, you still get numb fingers, you still have to watch your heart, you still have to watch the diet, you still get fat if you don't watch the diet, you eat three times a day a full meal, you get fat, you have to cut one meal out, all of this kind of stuff you have to start doing. So it's just that simple. And this is all kind of so that we stay alive longer. And that we kind of
like this, we all are, the time you've won, your time clock is set. It's set. The only thing that changes it is you, right? So let's assume I'm set for 85. So I can decide, do I want to go to 90? Yeah, I can do that. But then you have to live really healthy. Someone else is set for 90, you can live to 100. But you can stretch it a little bit. And you can also fuck it up big time.
You can be set for 85 and you wipe up with 70. You know, my dad wiped out with 66. He was in a pension for one year, and then he wiped out. He died because of too much smoking and alcohol and all of those things. So he cut himself short. He maybe was meant to be 80. But he definitely wiped out with 66. So my mother, you know, she died with 76. Well, she did it herself because I mean, she had a congenital heart attack.
She had a heart disease, which is what I have, which is the valve. But she has the choice to get surgery or not. She says, No, if God wants me, he should have me. And so she resisted any surgery. There's some people when you watch the shows in Sardinia, they live to 100 because they have no problems. What they sleep in the afternoon, they take their naps, they eat well, they walk around for miles and miles every day. They still walk.
And work. The women are still in the kitchen with the age of 90, making food for the whole family and all this stuff. So they push it. They push the envelope beyond of what they were meant for. So this is the way we can do it. But I mean, I think there is a reason when you get to a certain age to be concerned about it. I don't know if it's the age that you're in now. You're still a young punk. I can hope. For your whole life, you could be my grandson.
So, you've been an athlete, as it was laid out in the three chapters in the miniseries, athlete, actor, American, right? You've had this arc. How do you think of yourself now? What is your identity now, and how do you hope to use the time that you have left? Because of course, you have this book, Be Useful, 7 Tools for Life. You have the newsletter, which has done very well. You have more than half a million people for Pump Club. You have the Pump app.
How do you think of yourself now, and what do you want to focus on in the next 10 years, if you have, let's say, 10 years left, something like that?
Well, I don't really think of myself now any different than I thought of myself when I was governor, when I thought of myself as an actor, as a bodybuilder. You know, I'm very rarely in the moment of where I just appreciate what I'm doing right now, because I always think about the future. You know, I don't like the past. I appreciate the present, but I really live for the future. I always just live about where I want to go. There's a lot of things I want to accomplish environmentally.
There's a lot of things that I want to accomplish when it comes to public policy. There's a lot of things I want to accomplish in show business. There's a lot of things that I want to accomplish in the promotion of health and fitness and bodybuilding. So all of those different worlds, I hopefully can manage to combine them and create a certain synergy. So in one, so that one can help from the other, so the bodybuilding can help from the show business, my success in show business, that the show business can get help with the success of the fitness movement.
Then my newsletter that I have, which is going through the roof right now, the Pump Club, all of that is kind of like playing into this whole thing. I'm very happy that all of a sudden now it's kind of like an unexpected new era for me, which is the era of motivational speeches, the era of motivational books, the era of motivational newsletters. I mean, not in my wildest dreams to ever think about that. I want to create a positive corner in the internet.
And it was only because there was so much negativity out there. I started thinking about, well, maybe I should say some nice things and some positive things. And it became a huge hit beyond my expectation. And so I now I do speeches every so often if it's the Ukrainian war, the Russian war in Ukraine, or the insurrection, or if it is prejudice, or whatever the issues are, I tackle those. So as I said to you earlier, I'm the guy that climbs up Mount Everest and sees a
bunch of peaks. And therefore I say, Oh my god, I didn't even know they were there. And I climbed them. And so that's what I do. This is a continuous climb. Nothing changes. I would climb to 20. I'm climbing now. What
What do you hope the impact of Be Useful will be? What would you hope people to gain from it or use it for?
I think that the whole thing is about helping people live a better life and be able to fulfill their dreams, whatever those dreams are. You know, it's just simple things like don't listen to the naysayers or create a vision. And I know that because I asked my kids when they were like 18, 19 years old, what do you want to do? Why do you want to go to college? They couldn't answer me. Well, I could answer that question when I was 18, 19.
And so I'm concerned about that because they're looking too much in the computer, too much on the iPhone and on the iPad, and they get ideas from someone else. But this is their ideas, but not their ideas, not my kids' ideas. They need to be by themselves and sit in the jacuzzi or sit somewhere on the mountain or out there by themselves instead of thinking. Let the dreams come into your mind. Let your deep inside come out and give yourself time. Don't always look at the machine.
And so I'm trying to tell people, there's a simple rules that I talk about in the book where you kind of learn, you know, that here's how I create a goal. Because without a goal, without a vision, you have nothing. Where are you going to go? You know, it's like you have an airplane pilot that doesn't know where to fly and he has the best airplane. He can fly around, around, around, and he'll eventually crash. That's what happens to you in your life. You crash. You're not going to go anywhere.
So you need to have a direction. You need to have a goal. Why you get up in the morning? What do you struggle towards? What it is? Why are you happy to go to bed at night? Did you need some rest to get up in the next morning and have that energy again? All of this has to have purpose. It has to be purpose. So this is what I try to do is kindle a little bit of this light in my book and say to people in a casual way, you know, have a goal. Here's how you can do it. This is how I did it.
You know, and then big goals. Don't be afraid of big goals. You know, big goals are just as easy as little goals. And by the way, I know that every human being is afraid of failure, but you can overcome that, you know, by accepting failure. In a wind bodybuilding, we go and do a failure with our reps. So every single day when we train, we experience failure. We're not afraid of it. We go, it's like Ben Muhammad Ali said, he said, hey, how many reps do you do in sit-ups?
He says, I don't start counting until it starts hurting, I start failing. That's when I start counting. So I mean, in lifting, you can only know how much you lift if you're willing to fail. So Mikey Jordan, when he talked about his 5,000 shots that he missed in basketball and how many 280 some games he missed in basketball and all of this stuff, that's what made me great. That's an eye-opener, you know, when you hear that. That's really powerful.
The greatest basketball player talks about failure that made him great. So people should look at that. They should start thinking about that. Don't start approaching everything with, oh, I'm afraid. What is if I fail? What is if he doesn't like it? What if I make a fool of myself? Well, you know, it's people afraid of speaking, public speaking is the biggest fear that people have because they're worried that they may fail or sound stupid and stuff like that. Forget all that.
Better get rid of all of this in a worry about failure and he will be then free. And I'm not saying he will be able to get rid of it completely. We can never change 100%, but you can change somewhat so that you're not as afraid anymore of failure and that you're actually looking forward to that and that you're saying, okay, I'm going to go out and do a fail. You know, that you approach it differently the way you look at failure. And look, I've always pushed myself.
What do you think when you run for governor? I mean, it would be the highest embarrassment if he would have lost, right? But I took the chance. I was not afraid of failure. I could see my vision very clearly. This is how I'm going to sell to the California people what I'm going to do for Californians. And that's how I'm going to approach the governorship and blah, blah, blah. And you know, if they buy in, great. If they don't, then they're lost. And then move on with something else.
But I'm not going to freeze now and say, oh my God, if I lose, but then I would have never run in the first place if I will be afraid to run. So you never know how far it's going to take you. So I think simple rules like that, I wanted to have those people take away those rules. And all, for instance, giving back.
As soon as you realize that you're not a self-made man, and you realize that we all were created by your parents, and that you were created by mentors, teachers, coaches, and many other people that none of us know, but you yourself know. I mean, those are the people that have created me. I mean, just alone, if I wouldn't have had Joe Wheeler to bring me over to America, how could I have come to America? So how can I say I was self-made?
How could I have become governor if not 8.5, 5.8 million people voted for me? I mean, I'm not a dictator. I was voted in through the democratic process. So did I make myself governor? No. So I'm not a self-made man. So I have to recognize that my training, my money, everything comes from a lot of different people. And therefore, that means when you recognize that, that you now have the responsibility of going out and help others. So many people out there did need help.
And like my father-in-law said, Sergeant Shriver, who created the Peace Corps, Head Start, Job Corps, and all these great programs in the 60s, he said to a bunch of Yale students at a graduation class, he said, tear down this mirror that you always look at yourself. Tear down this mirror and you will be able to look beyond that mirror and you will see the millions of people that need your help. That's exactly right.
As soon as we start a minute looking at ourselves, then you will be able to look beyond yourself and you see that there are people out there that need help. There are poor people out there that need help. There are fire victims right now out there that need your help. There are earthquake victims out there. There are homeless people out there. There are war veterans out there.
There are kids that come from poor backgrounds that need to learn how to speak English, how to write English, how to do math, and all of the stuff that says immigrants that don't even speak English. So there's so many areas where you can be helpful that takes money or takes no money, just effort. So never ever think it's all just about you. Someone helped you where you are today, so now you go out and help someone else.
So this is another one of my lessons is just, you know, break that mirror in front of you. So these are the different lessons that I teach people that really had a profound impact on me and made me successful. And the no bullshit rules and anyone can follow it.
So people can find the new book, Be Useful, 7 Tools for Life, anywhere fine books are sold. They can go to BeUsefulBook.com. The newsletter can be found at Arnoldspumpclub.com, and we'll link to all this in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. Arnold, is there anything else that you would like to say, any closing comments or other requests of the audience, suggestions, anything at all that you'd like to add before we come to a close?
No, no, I just want to say to the people, I want to thank them for having been such great supporters of mine. You know, without them, as I said earlier, I would be nothing. I mean, if it wouldn't have been for the bodybuilding fans as I grew up, they were cheering there and screaming, Arnold, Arnold motivated me. I would be nothing. If it wouldn't have been for the movie fans that went to run to see Conan the Barbarian and made it the number one box office, they then gave me all the headlines.
I would have been nothing. All the Jim Camerons and the Ivan Reipman's and all of these people and the people that are now following my newsletter, the Pump Club and all of these people that are even interested in a book like Be Useful, and to go to my seminars and listen to my speeches, my motivational speeches. I just really love that I have had such an extraordinary following and that some of my speeches have reached like 35 and a half, six billion people.
That's really extraordinary. So I want to say thank you without them, I will be nothing. And thank you to America for giving me everything.
Thanks for watching, and please subscribe to the channel.
Thank you, Tim. You did a great job.
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday.
Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. I also have my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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