【進(jìn)階推薦】更好，更快，更強(qiáng)—人人都是紐約客

A few months ago, Timothy Ferriss, a self-help author, threw himself a party in San Francisco, where he lives. Officially, it was not a celebration for his most recent book, “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” which came out in December and is already in its eleventh printing. In the book, Ferriss tells his readers, “Hack yourself,” and presents them with hundreds of “scientific rules for redesigning the human body”: bathing in ice to lose weight, eating organic almond butter on celery sticks to treat insomnia. Nor was the party meant to mark the enduring success of his first book, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” which is still on the Times’ business best-seller list after four years. That book counsels readers to limit their newspaper reading to the headlines visible from vending machines and to outsource the management of their calendars and finances to a remote personal assistant in Bangalore.

As Ferriss took the stage at the Broadway Studios, a club on a seedy strip in North Beach, he explained that the party was intended to encourage cross-pollination among members of the many social and business spheres he inhabits. “Everyone here is extremely awesome in their own way, but we all have our own echo chambers,” Ferriss announced over a microphone, as his guests milled around the dance floor, drinking cocktails with names like Sex Machine and übermensch. Ferriss went on, “Everyone here rocks, and I want you to go out of your comfort zone and talk to someone you don’t know.”

I didn’t know anyone, so I went out of my comfort zone to talk to a young man named Courtney Reum, who told me that he had left a job at Goldman Sachs to start a company that makes and sells Veev—an organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral a?ai（非英文） liquor, bottled in recycled glass, with labels printed with soy inks. I also met Tracy Reifkind, a fitness instructor, who is featured in “The 4-Hour Body”; she recounted losing more than a hundred pounds by swinging kettlebells, a technique endorsed by Ferriss, and told me, “I’m the Jazzercise of kettlebells.” There was Mike Geary, who has a Web site called , which mints money; he lives in Vail, Colorado, and begins every day by checking the ski report. I discovered that Reid Mihalko, who runs a sex-advice Web site called What Tim Ferriss does for stuff, I do for sex”—has incredibly warm hands.