Lucky #888 — My Tour of Designing Luck in China, Japan, and Korea

Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I answer your personal question? Now we're just seeing a perfect time. Alrighty. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is a special one. It is number eight eight eight. That's triple eight. Sangaba. We're gonna talk about it. This is going to be a rabbit hole of epic proportions, and it's gonna get nerdy. It's gonna get very bizarre, and that's the point of this show is I can kinda do whatever I wanna do. So I wanted to do something special for eight eight eight, and I thought about doing some live casting of the I Ching, the oldest of the Chinese classics. It's a long story. Maybe we'll come back to that, but let's talk about luck. If you know anything about the Chinese ideas around luck, there's one number that stands out, and I couldn't resist. So we're going to talk about a very expensive phone number, disappearing hotel floors, a casino room designed around one person's birthday, a car company whose name was chosen, or I should say changed, partly for good fortune, and it spans across East Asia. We're gonna dig in. Underneath all of it is one question. How do you design luck? Can you build it into a skyscraper, a brand name, a license plate? Well, a lot of people would seem to think so. And what happens when a casino and the customer both want the room to make the money? Well, let's dig in. So it starts with a sound. In Mandarin, the sound is ba. That is eight, the number eight. And I'll say right up front that of the languages we're gonna touch upon, my strongest is gonna be Japanese, then Mandarin, then Korean, which is gonna be very weak. Studied I it for one year in college, like, thirty plus years ago. And then my Cantonese is nonexistent. So basically ignore everything I say about Cantonese. In theory, it'll make sense, but my pronunciation's gonna suck. But back to Mandarin. So eight is ba, now the word fa shows up all over the place, and you'll find it in, for instance, a common New Year's greeting, which is is like, congratulations. May you prosper. It's... The is like to emerge or come out, so departure is like, and then the the second tone is riches, wealth, prosperity, all that good stuff. So in a sense, the to find riches, prosperity, to have all of this emerge into your life gets represented by the which then corresponds to. So there you have it. That's where eight becomes lucky. It's the resemblance. Now in Cantonese, the match is even closer. I'm not going to try to say it because Cantonese is hard AF even if you speak Mandarin. But you will recognize some …