Famous and successful people are “deconstructed” every week in The Tim Ferriss Show (iTunes). Kevin Costner, Alain de Botton and Rick Rubin are all very well, but if you’re looking for a podcast about how to be cool, call Jamie Foxx.
Ferriss is a fan of the wordy preamble, but Foxx is from the wind-him-up-and-watch-him-go school of interviewees. Tinkling at his grand piano, Foxx talks about one of his famous visitors. “A young man called Ed Sheeran slept on this carpet for six weeks,” he says, before launching into a pretty accurate impersonation of him.
Foxx is the consummate namedropper, but you would be if you once threw a party to rival P Diddy’s million-pound megablasts by spending just $400. He served KFC “in a nice bowl”, an unassuming rapper called Kanye freestyled and Pharrell looked on wide-eyed at the party that contained “only cool people”.
“Girls were pretty,” says Foxx, generously. “Not slutty, not too tight.” Sadly, Ferriss doesn’t pick him up on his jarring comment.
At two and a half hours, this podcast cuts into more than half of Ferriss’s fabled four-hour work week, but it’s worth slacking off for. It has a touch of the variety show, with Foxx bursting into song on his piano and doing impressions of Ray Charles and Oprah Winfrey.
Ferriss rarely needs to interrupt, which is just as well because Foxx is reluctant to let him get a word in edgeways. “What historical figure do you most identify with?” asks Ferriss. For a man with a ridiculous amount of talent, modesty doesn’t come easily to Foxx, so the answer is Sammy Davis Jr, Magic Johnson and Martin Luther King.
It’s a wide-ranging chat, from race and politics to how Foxx is bringing up his children to be grateful and disciplined, like his grandmother would have wanted. “Your hustle muscle is the most important thing,” Foxx insists. He’s a fan of making things happen rather than leaving them to chance. “What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like?” asks Ferriss. Foxx texts the people he digs and bangs out his 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups, and that’s before he even gets started on the pull-ups and crunches. No coffee, because he avoids stimulants. When you’re this much of a powerhouse, who needs them?
