The Tim Ferriss Show - #183: Cal Fussman: The Master Storyteller Returns

Episode Date: August 31, 2016

Cal (@calfussman) is a New York Times bestselling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the "What I Learned" feature. The Austin Chronicle has described Cal's interviewing skills as "peerless." He has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with the icons who've shaped the last 50 years of world history: Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert DeNiro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pelé, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others. When I asked listeners for questions to present to Cal during this return appearance, about 70 percent of you replied with some version of: "He is my favorite storyteller of all time. Please just let him talk for another four hours!" I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I never get tired of talking to Cal. He's so good at what he does. He's such a nice guy. And he's such an incredible storyteller. Here you have it -- enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement -- right now, this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code "Tim" to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, dear Mogwai and internet friends. Just a note before we get started. This is a public service announcement. There are a few minor audio glitches that were due to a bad cable. 99.999% of this episode with Cal, which turned out amazing. He brought the thunder in every way possible. 99.999% of it is totally fine. So please enjoy that. And I am telling you all this so that I don't get endless shit on the web about these tiny, tiny little things. I am aware of them and I wanted to get

this out to you as opposed to postponing it indefinitely to try to fix it, which we spent many, many hours trying to do. And it is easiest just to ship it out. And listen to the stories. If you don't get my question, listen to the story for 30 seconds, and it'll make perfect sense after that. So there you have it. And thank you for listening. Hello, boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers

or attempt to do something lofty like that, but to drill into the specifics. And that is where this podcast is different. I will ask them all of the nitty- gritty details so that you can tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, et cetera, to apply to your own life. But this episode involves Cal Fussman. And for those of you who know Cal, well, he is a master storyteller. So sometimes the best policy is just to let him go. And Cal appeared on this podcast. Pretty much no one had heard him interviewed at that point, and he's become quite the internet favorite. Cal, at Cal Fussman, F-U-S-S-M-A-N, on Twitter, is a New York Times bestselling author,

and was the writer at large, or is the writer at large, for Esquire Magazine, where he's best known for being the primary writer of the What I Learned feature. Austin Chronicle has described Cal's interviewing skills as peerless, and he's really transformed oral history into an art form in many ways. He's interviewed icons who've shaped

the last 50 years of world history, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Bezos, Branson, Jack Welch, De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino. It just goes on. Woody Allen, Muhammad Ali, John Wooden, Serene Williams, everybody. On top of that, Cal spent 10 straight years, ages ago, traveling the world, swimming over 18-foot tiger sharks, rolling around with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and searching for

gold in the Amazon. This is the second episode with Cal. It's completely self-sufficient. You can listen to it without having heard the first one. The first one includes all sorts of stories about him trying to box Julio Cesar Chavez, about Mikhail Gorbachev, etc. In this episode, we talk about Muhammad Ali, what he learned from Muhammad Ali, his entire experience with Muhammad, and so much more. I asked many of you via Facebook and Twitter, what should I ask Cal in this round two? And probably 70% of you just said, he is my favorite storyteller of all time. Please just let him talk for another four hours. So that's, that's effectively what I did, but it's not four hours long. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I never get tired of

talking to Cal. He's so good at what he does. He's such a nice guy and he's such an incredible storyteller. Here you have it. Cal Fussman at Cal Fussman on Twitter. Enjoy. Cal, my good friend, welcome back to the show. Oh, thanks so much. I'm ready to walk the tightrope with you. Speaking of walking the tightrope, someone who's not ready to walk any tightropes is my poor pup, Molly, who got sedated for x-rays earlier today, who's been entertaining us and gaining our sympathy by wandering around and staring off into space. She looks as high as a kite. And you mentioned to me that she should be

listening to? Tom Waits. Tom Waits. And a name I did not recognize, I'm embarrassed to say. Well, if Molly was to hear Tom Waits sing, the piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep. That's pretty well the way she's looking right now. Thematically appropriate. I thought we would start, and of course we've been chatting over the last two days, spending time together, about Muhammad Ali. And I just want to pass it over to you because I know it hit you quite tremendously hard, it would seem. And unlike most people listening, you had direct interaction with Muhammad Ali.

So I'll just pass it over to you for your thoughts. For me, it was almost like having your childhood end when you're in your 50s on the day that he died. It's very hard to describe the feeling. I hadn't ever really felt anything like it. And in fact, at a time where everybody was like sitting down in front of the television looking for reports, I just like curled up in bed. I kind of knew the story. I knew everything. So there was nothing more for me to learn. And I was just terrifically saddened because he was my childhood hero. And there really

are no longer many like him. What made him unique? And how did you grow to or get to know him? I didn't meet him until 2003. And at that point, the world knew that he had Parkinson's disease. We had seen him at the Olympics with the torch. So let me back up to when I was a kid, seeing him for the first time. And it's very hard for a lot of people to understand like what the sixties were like if you didn't live through them, because every day you woke up and something else happened that made you go, what, what, what, you know, whether it was sadly the shootings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Bobby Kennedy,

or could have been Woodstock, or landing on the moon. Every day seemed to bring something that you didn't expect. And Ali was in the middle of it. That's when he came of age. He won the heavyweight championship in 1964. So he kind of embodied, for me, the spirit of asking questions. Because at the time, he had won the Olympic gold medal in 1960. And the story goes, we don't really know if it's true, that when he came back to Louisville with his medal, he wasn't allowed into a restaurant and able to sit with white people. And so he took his gold medal and he threw it in the Ohio River. Whether the story is true or not, it makes a point. And he was, in my mind, the voice of reason amidst what at the time was just crazy behavior. It's like hard to imagine that there were places where black people couldn't walk into and sit next to white people. I'm walking around now and I'm just seeing in these days of Black Lives Matter just how integrated we are.

You go to an airport and there's no longer a thought about this. But back then, that was the order of the day. And Muhammad Ali was somebody who stood up to that and let people know, hey, this is wrong. And he did it in a way that made people laugh at times, through poetry. He's like the first rapper. And you could not take your eyes off and the other thing that's kind of interesting about it was there were only three networks that you could really watch in those days right we were talking about this is like kind of bbc one two three and four yeah and and if you were you have the camera on him, one of the most charismatic figures in the world, nobody else is going to compete with that. So everybody was watching him. And it's not like

now in the days of the internet and TMZ where he would have been followed relentlessly in every detail of his life would have been on the internet. You only knew so much, but he was everywhere, probably the most popular or the most well-known person in the world. And when the Vietnam War really started to kick in and Ali was inducted into the draft, the way he stood up to it and his famous line, I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong. It's just white people sending black people to kill yellow people. At the time, this is like slice the country in half. Either you loved him for it or you hated him for it. Either you were with the kids out on the street who were protesting against the war or with the people who were beating them over the head. Very hard for somebody who's young now to understand that time. We talk about the conventions that were happening this year, I mean, people should go back and look at the 1968

Democratic Convention. I mean, it was a free-for-all. There was all kinds of violence outside of it. And Ali lived amidst this, and he was always, in my mind, asking the right questions. Why are we in Vietnam? Why can't I sit next to somebody who has white skin in a restaurant? And it was very simple. And then there were so many people who hated him for asking those questions and for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, that he was really reviled by a huge number of people in this country. And for him to constantly stand up and risk going to jail for what he believed in, the faith that he had,

and then it was backed up by his bravery in the ring when he fought with Joe Frazier, and he fought with George Foreman. People thought that he was going to get killed when he fought George Foreman, who was undefeated and had knocked out just about everybody. Looked like the Incredible Hulk. I remember I think it was uh in these warm-ups leading up to by getting this right was in zaire uh might be getting my locations mixed up i sometimes conflate the fraser fights and foreman but uh ollie didn't and others didn't

want to watch foreman warming up on the heavy bag yeah it's just such a spectacle of force and impact yeah you didn't want to believe that was coming in at you and yet when they got into the ring to fight ollie basically laid back on the ropes and let foreman throw that at him all the while saying that all you got george that all you got and a funny line by foreman was after four rounds, yeah, that's about it. And then by the eighth, Ali hit him with a few straight punches and down he went. He was just exhausted. But over again, we saw him take tremendous punishment and come back as he aged. And you just had a tremendous sense of belief when you followed him. And so for me, the idea that he was always asking these questions that were important to ask,

that were the most important issues of the day. And then when he stood up to everything that was in front of him with full faith in himself, in my mind, that was the definition of a hero. And so in 2003, Esquire magazine was celebrating its 70th anniversary, and it had always been my dream to do a magazine story about Muhammad Ali from the time I was a kid. And so they sent me out to write this cover story based on reportage in Dublin, Ireland, where Muhammad was in town for the Special Olympics. He was going to help inaugurate the games. And so I went out there, and it was one series of experiences after another that were completely surprising to me.

Because, you know, when you have a hero, you often don't want to meet them because they're your hero before you know who they really are right and you might you might encounter the hero with clay feet exactly and suffer the disillusionment disappointment yeah and you don't want to walk away from your hero disappointed so i didn't know what was going to to happen. But keep in mind, this is, we should, we should cite this. This is seven years after 1996, the Atlanta Olympics, when he did something else that I thought was very brave, because that point everyone knew he had Parkinson's disease. And he stood with the

Olympic torch in front of the world, the torches in his shaking hand, and he had to put it into the Olympic cauldron to get it to light. And for what seemed like an endless amount of time, he couldn't get it in the right place, and his hand is shaken. And it was like the world was holding its collective breath. And all of a sudden, he got in the right place. It erupted and the flame erupted and so did everybody's heart. And from that point on, 96 to 2003, we hadn't really seen that much about him. So the editors basically said, go tell us, how's he doing? So I go to these Olympics, the Special Olympics to meet him. And he's in a hotel and he knows in advance that he's my childhood hero. And he comes through the just threw out his arms and hugged me with a big embrace. And after that, he's moving on really slow, tender steps.

And then he kind of slumps down in this cushy leather chair. I take the sofa on the side. And I say to him, champ, I came here to find out all the wisdom that you've accumulated in the world. But he doesn't seem to be paying attention. He seems to be paying attention to his right arm, which is like trembling back and forth.

And now both of his arms are really starting to tremble. And I'm starting to think, what should I do? Should I call his wife? And now not only his arms are trembling, but his torso, his legs are shaking, his breaths are coming almost in gasps. And now I'm really starting to get nervous. I said, champ, champ, are you okay? And then slowly his head rises to the point where he's at eye level with me. And he looks me in the eye and he says, scared you, huh?

And it only got more confusing. It only got more confusing. It only got more confusing. So the Olympics get started, Special Olympics. And there was one moment that, like, when it really hit me, like you asked, like, why was he your hero? All right. So Muhammad is going to meet with Nelson Mandela and Muhammad's best friend and photographer, Howard Bingham is with us and Muhammad's wife, and I'm

coming along and we meet Mandela and we're walking to a hotel suite to sit down and talk. And on the way, Mandela is saying how when he was imprisoned in his younger days and he would hear news of Muhammad Ali, how much it inspired him. And I'm standing there like looking at Nelson Mandela thinking, hold it, like my hero is Nelson Mandela's hero. And that's when it really hit me what Muhammad Ali meant to the world. And we went, had this nice meeting and then the Olympics get started. And Ali was there to go around the track in a golf cart and kind of wave to the crowd and let everybody just get everything started off on a really high note. And so I'm down at the base of the stadium with him and the golf cart comes out and Muhammad gets slowly gets on. He gets into his seat and Howard, his best friend and photographer gets on the back and he waves me, come on, get on, get on, get on. So I like run,

hop on the golf cart. And it was, wherever Ali went, it was that same chant. Ali, Ali. And it was almost like this energy is coming from the top of the stadium, like down on us. And then Ali would put up his hand, and then the energy would get pushed back all the way to the top. And then it would come down again, and back and forth and back and forth. And I was always the one like at the top of the stadium screaming.

So it was like an amazing experience to see the power that he still had. And yet when we had to leave that day, he needed a wheelchair. And so my head was, it was like a mystery to me because he had all this power and yet he was very vulnerable and his body was breaking down. And I was just trying to figure this out, to write the story, to explain, like, how's Muhammad Ali doing? And it was confounding to me, because one day, we would go out to dinner. And after dinner, we're coming out of the restaurant, and like a huge strong of people is coming. It's time to get in the car and go. We just can't be avalanched like that.

And he needs to move fast. And he does. And then the day after that, he can't speak much above a whisper at that time. But he's doing magic tricks for people. And then when we got back to his home in Michigan, I remember he had just taken his medicine for Parkinson's disease. We're sitting on the couch and his tongue, the medicine turned his tongue orange and we're talking. And all of a sudden, he just like falls asleep and his left leg is jangling into mine. And I'm thinking,

how can I possibly make sense of this? I can't really describe these contradictions. And there's no question I can really ask that's going to unlock this mystery. So I'm getting down to like the last day that I'm scheduled to be with him. And Muhammad's wife, Lonnie says, you know, you're, you don't work out much anymore, Muhammad. Why don't you just go with Cal to the gym and just do a little workout? And Muhammad kind of rolls his eyes. Oh, okay. Come on. So he takes me over to the gym on the property. And it's not really a gym. It's more like a museum. We walk in and the ring looks like nobody's ever stepped foot in it.

There's no smell of sweat. There's exercise equipment all around the ring. And it looks like it's just out of boxes. All four walls have mirrors on them. And above the mirrors are photos, great photos of Ali fighting his arch rival, Joe Frazier. There were other photos too, but those were the ones that really stood out to me because the trilogy that they fought was like the thrill of my childhood. It's what I lived for. And I knew like everything about Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier down to like the childhood stories that define their styles in the ring. Like for instance, Muhammad, when he was a kid, he would have his younger brother, Rudy, pick up rocks in the street and throw the rocks at

Muhammad's head. Back then he was Cassius. And as the rock would be approaching his head, just about to hit, he would just throw his head back, lean away from it and let the rock slide by. And that was exactly the style he adopted in the ring. He would dance like no heavyweight ever before him danced. If you got close enough to throw a punch, he's just going to lean back, make you miss. And then he'd hit you like 20 times faster than a shoe shine guy could buff a pair of shoes. Joe Frazier, on the other hand, very different story, short, stocky. And here's where that left hook came from. When he was a kid, he grew up on a farm in Beaufort, South Carolina, and his dad had only one arm. Nobody knows the real story, but apparently there had been trouble with some other woman and some shooting.

And so Joe's dad only had one arm. And they would work this cross saw back and forth, Joe and his dad. And Joe's dad would use the right arm and Joe would be using his left. So he's just sawing back and forth for years with that left hand. He had the muscles that are developing as he's going back and back and forth, back and forth. And the power that he developed in this left hand turned into this phenomenal left hook that came out of the side out of nowhere. And it was the only punch that a kid who could move away from rocks in the middle of the street was vulnerable to because you didn't see it coming all the times, except at the very end of his career, that Muhammad Ali got knocked down always with a left hook.

He just, it was his kryptonite. And here you've got a guy who is like five foot 10, 205 pounds of relentless kryptonite coming at him. And when Ali fought Frazier, like it was like thunder versus lightning. The thing about it was when they fought, Ali had already refused to go into the army. He was stripped of his heavyweight championship. The government wouldn't let him fight. The state commissions wouldn't let him fight for three and a half years that he lost the prime of his career. And then when he was finally able to come back in 1970, he wasn't as fast. He couldn't dance the way he danced when he was 22 and 23. At this point, he's 28, 29. And he he never had anybody like Joe Frazier coming at him before. So you had on March the 8th, 1971, Thunder versus Lightning, two never before seen, two undefeated, legitimate heavyweight champions confronting each other. And Frank Sinatra was holding,

was a photographer in the front row. Everybody had to be ringside for this. The whole world was watching. It was like the sporting event of the century. And so what would happen, or what happened the first fight anyway, is Ali started to get in trouble because Joe Frazier just would not stop. And the left hooks kept coming. And Ali was able to get into the minds of a lot of his opponents. And he tried to get into the mind of Joe Frazier. Frazier would be hitting him with shots, and Ali would be saying to him,

you can't beat me. I'm God. And that would have worked on some other people. And Joe Frazier just looked at him and said, well, God's going to get his ass whooped tonight. Kept throwing punches. And so when Ali would get into trouble, and Frazier got him into trouble,

he had this corner man named Drew Bundini Brown, who was the guy who, when you hear the phrase, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, that came from both Muhammad and Bundini. They would kind of sing it. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, rumble, young man, rumble. And so when Ali got in trouble, Bundini would, in the most poetic ways, say things to help lift him up. He'd think, the world needs you, champ. Go to the well once more. Go to the well, and use it to lift him over the bar. So I'm looking at these pictures above the mirrors

on the wall, and I'm almost hearing Bundini's voice in my head. go to the well once more. And I realized that's what I got to do. That is my question here. In order to write this piece, I got to find out what's still in the well. So I look around the gym and there is a rack of boxing gloves. And I'm saying to myself, you think you should take the risk? I don't know. And then I said, what the hell? Let me try it. Because one of the things that I've learned as an interviewer is when you get to the end of an interview, that's when you can always ask the toughest question. And so I take four gloves off this rack and I put two on Muhammad's hands and two on mine. Now I should actually, if, if, if people heard the first installation of our conversation,

then they know about the story of me fighting against Julio Cesar Chavez. And so it begins just as the side note with you sitting on like the couch eating potato chips, berating Julio Cesar Chavez on TV, and your wife saying something along the lines of, oh yeah, okay, you're going to fight Julio Cesar Chavez. And you're like, damn right I'm going to fight Julio Cesar Chavez. And long story short, because you should listen to the long version, you ended up traveling by hook and crook and donkey and everything else. Yeah, so we did. But you that and that's the whole point here when i train i trained for like six months to get in the ring

for one round with julio cesar chavez and i trained in the exact style of Joe Frazier. So I could do Joe Frazier so well. I could even sound like Joe Frazier. So I got these gloves on. He's got the gloves on. But I don't come at him. I don't ask to go to the ring. I just start to move toward the heavy bag. And Smoke and Joe

had this style where he's like bobbing back and forth, his head moving left to right. And his left hand would be doing like a figure eight in front of his head and his right hand would be figure eighting in front of his jaw. And he's going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And he's low and he's in a crouch and he's just relentlessly pursuing. And then he'd get close to the left hand and say, hum-da, hum, hum, hum-da. And he'd be throwing that left hook. And so I'm in that crouch.

I'm bobbing and weaving. And I'm looking at Ali out of the corner of my eyes to see what kind of reaction I'm gonna get and it was like watching his eyebrows arched it was like watching a sleeping lion awakened by an old familiar scent and he looks over and he says you good so now I'm like I hear that now I'm like, I hear that. Now I'm starting to hit into the bat. I'm throwing my left hooks, right hand. And Ali steps up.

And now he's like, and he's throwing left, right, left, right, left, right. I said, you think that's going to keep me off? Now I'm really in a crowd. He steps up. Lefts and rights, lefts and rights. Jab, jab, jab, lefts and rights. I come back. And all of a sudden, he looks at me in a way that says,

Okay, so that's your question. And slowly with his left hand, he waves me away from the bag and he waits till I'm away from the bag. And then I saw something I never thought I would ever see again. Muhammad Ali started dancing and he's dancing around the bag. He's moving, not like when he was 20, but he still had the rhythm. He still had the grace and he's moving around the bag and he's looking at himself in the mirror. And as he's looking at himself, you could see his chest come up and then his head come up and he's dancing and he's dancing. And then all of a sudden he like stop pivots and those like 40 straight shots right into the bag. Really rapid fire. And I I'm in disbelief.

And his last shot, if the bag had been like a heavyweight fighter he might have knocked him down i'm standing there just staring don't know what to say it's like hard to process what i've just seen you're thinking no one is going to believe me yeah what and as he's going away from the bag his legs cross and he starts to go down and i'm saying no no no this is not happening no no please and now he's going down down down and there are mats on the ground, and he falls on the mats. And now I'm thinking, what did you do, Cal? Oh, like, you're an idiot. Why did you do that?

And I go, I'm paralyzed for a second, but then I start to move over to, like, help him get up. Before I can reach him, he flips over, and he starts doing stomach crunches and then he's doing sit-ups and then he's on his back legs bicycling in the air then he gets up and he goes over to super leg press it's on like 250 pounds he grips it pushing it back and forth. I said, champ, you don't have to do this. Like, you know, I seen you, champ. I seen you. Don't worry about it.

I know what's in the well. And he just looked at me and he said, feels good. And I thought I had pushed him as far as I could, but he had more to give. And so after this, we go back to the house and he knew that I wanted his wisdom. And he tells me to sit down on a table outside the kitchen. I'm sitting down and he comes to me with a piece of paper. And on this paper paper it's just filled with wisdom. And I'm going down the lines one after another and he points to one in the middle. And it says,

God will not place a burden on a man's shoulder knowing that he cannot handle it. And that kind of summed everything up. But for me, the story went a little further because he went into the kitchen and he came out with two bowls in his left hand and a quart of ice cream in his right. And you know how much I love ice cream, Tim. So I got a chance to sit at the table and have ice cream with my childhood hero. And that is my enduring memory. And it was just sad to in one minute know that this man who had been with me like all my life

was not with us anymore but the thing that really pushed me because i i was called by the editor of s square because the magazine was shipping out on the exact day that Muhammad died. And so he wanted to hold off the issue and make sure that we represented. Esquire had followed Ali's career like just about no other magazine. Maybe Sports Illustrated, you can make the same claim. And so I'm sitting there charged with writing this essay of what he meant to me.

And what really hit me is when I started to think forward, I started to think of all of the kids now, and I'm wondering, like, what kind of heroes do they have? Do they have a Muhammad Ali? And I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so is because we don't have a Nelson Mandela who saw Muhammad Ali as a hero. It's just a completely different time. And I wondered what this absence might mean for this next generation going forward. are their heroes? What are they going to get out of it? And it really, it really has pushed me to think and, and to think a lot about the, this millennial generation, which we were laughing

about yesterday because everybody says the word millennial. I tried to look it up on, I was like, we need to sort this out. We're at dinner, having some, having some wine. And the first article that pops up say, everyone can agree that millennials having some wine. And the first article that pops up say, everyone can agree that millennials are the worst. And the next line is something along the lines of, but no one can seem to define what exactly a millennial is. Well, there you go. And the amazing thing to me, for some reason,

I don't know what it is. And I think you have the same characteristic where certainly you do. I'm just starting to see little vibrations of it where there's an attraction among the Millenniums to you. I know that because they all come over to me and say, oh, I heard the podcast that you did with Tim Ferriss. So there's like this whole arc of millennials out there

that I know are listening to you. And they're also starting to come up to me. And I really, I feel for this generation. I feel for them because I don't think they have a Muhammad Ali. You know, a lot of them were behind Bernie Sanders. And to me, I love seeing Bernie out there pounding on the podium. You know, he's in his mid-70s and he's throwing himself into it. And like, what could be better than that? You're that age and you're throwing your entire passion into your everyday. You can't beat that.

But to me, there's a difference between having Muhammad Ali as a hero and to having Bernie Sanders as a hero. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people... Well, I know there's a difference in stakes, right? And I think that... Who was it? Customato. I want to say it was Customato, famous trainer of Mike Tyson, starting in the Catskill days, who said, you know, the hero and the coward feel the same thing. The difference is how the hero responds. And I'm sure some people would disagree on some level, but the stakes of engaging in the theater of politics for an election are very different from going up

against the norms and laws of your country. The stakes are just different. So you have someone who has put their livelihood where their mouth is and reputation where their mouth is to make sacrifices. And I think that engenders a certain type of loyalty and respect that is very hard to mimic in the sort of charade of politics as we see a lot of it play out. But I would say that I don't think it's, if there is a problem of heroes, related to heroes among, say, younger generations right now, I don't think that it's because there is a lack of heroes. I think it's because

there is so much noise that one needs to sift through to find the signal that is a hero they can believe in, if that makes any sense. Instead of having four channels, you have an infinite number of channels in the form of websites and feeds and apps and push notifications and so on. So it becomes more of a sort of cognitive burden and time-consuming task to find someone that one can sort of dedicate their admiration to does that make any sense there are a few exceptions though i would say that as you said we we didn't have all of the details when he was the greatest much like although this certainly came up at the time, for the nature of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the adultery. I mean, these people are flawed

human beings, right? They make mistakes. They make bad decisions. But in today's environment, that gets showcased and put into a permanent record that comes up as a top five Google result for your name. And so it's, I think it's more challenging to have heroes now because they are more clearly human as a result of the, the abundance of information available. But I do think there are some Elon Musk, I think is very inspiring, inspiring, has made great decisions, has all of the flaws that human beings do, of course. But I'm cautiously optimistic. I think that there are very few Muhammad Alis, period, in the world well yeah what i realized i mean a lot of this is the time as you're saying because like when you look at what elon musk is doing and the grandiosity of his vision

and then also to have like failed failed and then put the craft in the air. So you see, yeah, this is a big timer. And yet, if you were in South Dakota at a movie theater, and Elon Musk was 10 people in front of you online to get in, how many people would know who he was? I see where you're going. I mean, he is sort of unassuming compared to a heavyweight champion of the world, right? Yeah, but to my mind, when you think of a hero, this is what I'm trying to grapple with, this question. Like, has the hero changed now so that Elon Musk is the hero now,

but to think of him in the way I think of Ali is it's foolish because everything's changed. Yeah. It's entirely possible. I want to actually ask a couple of questions that were sitting on my mind during your story. So the first is, do you remember the flavor of ice cream that you had?

Vanilla. Vanilla, just straight vanilla. Straight vanilla. No decoration on the vanilla? Just vanilla ice cream. And how did you end up opening and or closing the piece that you wrote, if you remember. Yeah, it's interesting because one of the difficulties that you have when, and this always happens, like you're a writer and they say, okay, you got 1500 words. And then you start writing and then there are like twenty five hundred words on your

page and you know that only fifteen hundred are going to fit in the magazine they've basically pulled this thing away from the presses and there's a certain amount of pages and so there's no extra room for you they said the editor said this is what I can give you. And it is giving you an opportunity to make the most out of it. And of course, you want to make it even better than that somehow. And so you go overboard and you write a thousand extra words. And then you have to look at it, have an editor look at it and say, okay, what's the 1500 words that we really want here? And the interesting thing about this piece was exactly what I was just talking about. There was everything that I had seen in the past. And then there were these

questions of where does this put the future? But at the time, it really was an obituary. And so it really was a look back. And so the thousand words that got cut were the thousand words that were looking ahead. And it basically ended with this point that you're just never, we're never going to see this again, ever. It's past. We don't know where it's going. Maybe it is going to the Elon Musks of the world and people will just have a different definition than I did. It's possible. Or if you look at just a broader timescale, right? I mean, how many Genghis Khans are running around? Not that many, right? And if you look at it in a broader thousand-year increment, maybe we're just in a lull period between heroes. That's an interesting point. I guess we're so, we're

accustomed to, we want these, we want heroes. We need heroes. I think human beings need heroes. I think we're hardwired to search for heroes and we find them in real life we find them in mythology we find them in religion or we find them somewhere else i think that we are by nature very hierarchical animals and um there's a there's a very interesting book called chimpanzee politics for people who are very interested in looking at the sort of reality of our evolutionary biology, I think we look for rulers and heroes. And it's an important signpost for the mammals we've evolved to be. But do you recall any of the other pieces of wisdom on that paper? There were a lot that ran in this what i've learned that i really like my favorite was the best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up that's a good one

silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer the sun is always shining someplace someplace. I remember asking him about his definition of evil and he said, unfriendliness. I thought that was a really good answer. The more we help others, the more we help ourselves. What you're thinking about, you are becoming. Oh, how about this for a kicker? When you're right, nobody remembers. When you're wrong, nobody forgets. Dot, dot, dot, especially with the internet. Looking back, I think it captured the experience that I spent with him. So there were two stories. One was the cover story that came out on the 70th anniversary of Esquire in 2003. And then in January of 2004, the What I've Learned came out on the 70th anniversary of Esquire in 2003.

And then in January of 2004, the What I've Learned came out. And I think both stories captured the essence of what I wanted to bring out, which on top of that, I should point out for me, the best part of the experience was spending a week with my childhood hero. And at the end of it, liking him even more than I did before I met him. He was even more heroic to me for that reason. Once I knew him, Just seeing the kindness. I saw there was this great obit in Time Magazine written by a guy named Bob Lipsight, who was the New York Times columnist for many years and spent 50 years with Ali. And they did a book in Time magazine that was filled with Lipsight's story and photos. And the story starts in an interesting way.

He and Ali are going through an airport. They're late for the plane and Lipsight doesn't think they're going to make it. And as they're moving through the airport, a woman appears and notices Ali and pulls out her camera to get a picture, and Ali stops and goes over to the woman and makes sure that she has the picture that she wants,

and Lipside is thinking, look, the plane's going to leave. And Ali said to him, that was the only time that woman was going to have a chance to have her picture taken with me. I wanted to make sure she got the best picture. I don't know that there are many people who are thinking that way. And obviously part of it gave him internal satisfaction, but he really was thinking a lot about everyone around him. Who are other people, heroes, or just well-known folks who have exceeded your expectations?

Well, I have breakfast every morning with Larry King. And so, I mean, I see him when we're in town together at the same time, probably 300 days a year. And so he was, if you're an interviewer, it's very likely you're going to really look up to him. And I've been, I've formed a very close friendship with him. And so that's something I never could have anticipated. And it's like be beyond, you know, what he accomplished in a career. It's now it's, it's about friendship. And so it has gone way way beyond that sense of a hero from afar. And in fact, I helped him write a book, and he inscribed it to me saying, like to Cal,

my friend, my writer, my hero. So when your hero calls you, he was joking, but still he wrote it on the page. Still on the page. It still counts. But that's emblematic that he would write that to me. Tells you about him, tells you about the kindness and the friendship underneath it. So that's probably my best answer to the question. I have some requests from fans, or I should say listeners, who had a lot of follow-up questions for you. And of course, we'll have to pick and choose. But this is from Osro Hepworth. Ask him if he'll talk about the time brazil used a camera under his shirt as a fake gun to scare off some guys is that a real thing how did he know he said i heard the story from someone who knows him pretty well would love to

hear about it via cal fussman's storytelling style oh man wow so let's see my fans are everywhere man eyes and ears in all corners you know what that's pretty impressive okay now this is uh early i believe 1994 february carnival Rio de Janeiro. Carnival. And my wife is Brazilian. I met her headed to a beach near the equator eight years before this carnival. The bus story that we talked about in part one. Right. And so we get a chance to go back to carnival where we're going to dance in the Samba Parade

in spangles and feathers at three in the morning in front of the huge crowds. And it's like a fantasy. Custom thong for yourself, I'm assuming. Well, everybody, when you join a Samba school, they call them Samba schools, like various neighborhoods all like band together and they compete against each other so when an outsider comes in that you go to one of the samba schools and you wear their regalia so but it's all spangles and feathers no matter what and you know when it comes to the beautiful women there's not too many spangles and feathers to be

seen it's just the beautiful women yeah so as it's this is a this is a wonderful experience now and my wife couldn't resist She always wanted to dance in the Samba school. She was five months pregnant at the time. So it's probably not the best of times for her to be flying halfway around the world and dancing at three in the morning. Up on some float potentially, who knows? Yeah, we weren't on the float. We were following the floats and had a great time. It was a blast.

And the thing about the way I traveled was I always liked to live with the people and so the people that we that brought us into this summer school lived in a favela which is in the mountains overlooking the city very poor typically cobbled together electricity oftentimes if you haven't seen city uh city of god right see what the deuce i think it is, check it out. That'll give you a pretty good glimpse. And some of them, some of the favelas aren't, actually, they're decent places to live. It's not all like that you're living on a dirt floor.

And then people figure out how to cobble electricity. And this area wasn't an a like an intensely poor area but like it's dangerous to to be moving around on the streets but look we were in a group of people from this area and so i like i felt com completely safe because when you're with the people, you're with the people. Safety in numbers with the locals. The locals, exactly. And so we go through the dance. It's a really great time.

The music, the crowd, and the sheer pageantry of the whole thing. And we're starting to walk back home. It's like three or four in the morning. Now, right around that time, we had heard of, I hope I'm pronouncing it right, but it's been a while now. The word was Ahastown, which was, what would happen is there are a lot of bridges in Rio that people can walk over. And what young toughs and thugs would do was they would line both sides of the bridge

and just be looking over the water casually and waiting for appropriate moment where everybody would just like attack somebody or a group of people to either like steal something or you can get beat up like not stuff that wasn't so good is going to happen to you. And so we, like we heard about this, we, we knew it was kind of a dangerous time and we were staying in a place that while it was not dangerous on that street, we were still walking through dangerous places to get there. And so it's really early in the morning and we're walking across this bridge and, and my wife is Brazilian and she looks Brazilian and I do not look Brazilian. I'm like a gringo,

you know, it's the middle, it's the middle of February. And I've been at that point, I'm back in New York. It's winter. I'm like, I'm looking really white ghostly

i wouldn't say ghost man come on tim give me a break just trying to expand my adjective like i know i know that okay if they're going to be looking to get somebody they're coming after me. Right. Okay. So we're all walking, and now I'm, like, seeing these lines of people on the side, and I could see that they're, like, looking over at us. And I immediately know this is not good because we're in the middle of, like, a fairly long bridge, and we've got, like, a half a mile to get to the other side where at least you could run or do something. There's nowhere for us to go except over the side and take a long tumble into the water. So it's... It's like an Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom situation.

It was really scary uh because and it it's interesting because when i think back on it like i have some measure of pride because there are just some certain moments where you know okay bad shit's gonna happen what am i gonna do and and you have no time to think. So I immediately say to my wife, who's really understands what's going to happen even far better than me. I say, you stay like toward the middle, but get away from me because I know they're coming after me. And I mean, I don't know what's going to happen. I may get thrown off. I may get thrown off the side. I may get pummeled. Who is to know?

But I'm just thinking if I can like have them all turn on me, then my wife and my kid are going to be able to get away. And so I move away and she is like really nervous. And I just said, walk as fast as you can to get to the other side. I'm going to slow it down and have that focus on me. In the meantime, one of the guys that was in our neighborhood, Toko, God bless him. He has stopped to take a piss under the bridge. This piss saved my life. Because what happened was after he was done, he came back up to the bridge and then he saw from behind what was going to happen. And he just came running, like shouted to a few people and went running. And like literally as everybody was about to turn on me, I'm sitting there thinking.

And the other thing about it, I should point out, this is right after I fought Julio Cesar Chavez. So I'm also like in the back of my mind saying, well, the first guy, like I can hit him. Maybe if he goes down, maybe it'll stop things for a second. Or maybe the Rolando's going to move me down. But there's a lot of men like looking and they're coming after me no shortage of firearms in brazil either well you know what i don't even think it was a matter it was a matter of that because the setup was you did like you didn't need it right you all you had to do is just get 50 people to line up the side of a bridge and then wait for a moment of attack and then attack.

What could people, like, you know, a gringo tourist dressed in spangles and feathers, what's he going to do? But I'm just, sorry, just the sheer shock of some gringo in spangles and Feathers knocking out the first guy would have been quite something. But please continue. Okay. So at this point, there's two thoughts. First thought is, like, this could be it for me. But at least my wife and my son can get out of here. So now I've slowed it down.

I'm seeing she's moving really fast away. Okay. Now I'm waiting for the onslaught. In the meantime, Toko sees what's going on, calls a few of his friends, and he just sprints with his hand inside his shirt. And he and his buddies, they literally surround me, and they just stop the group. And it like, he's a guy who's like looking like he's Al Capone. Like,

Hey, I got some serious five power here. Like, I'm going to mow you all down. If you don't leave him alone, he's with us. And then there's this like fear among the crowd because we don't know what toko's got under there but he's got something and toko says you just like back off let us get to the other side of the bridge we're

not gonna have any problems otherwise there's gonna be a lot of problems and these these guys, everybody's staring at what's inside Toko's shirt. And so the others just remain still while I get to the other side. And I'm walking straight, but Toko and the others are walking backward, making sure nobody's with with his hand his shirt the whole time and we get to the other side and i said oh my man i didn't know you took a gun and he pulled out a camera oh man what a bluff yeah and uh i i owe my life to him and that quick bathroom stop and the camera. How did people hear this story? I have no idea.

You can ask Osro. At Osro Hepworth can tell you more. You might be listening, Osro, so let Cal know. One more, and then perhaps we'll have it to be continued. It's from a friend of mine, actually, a chef. Ask about his acceptance speech for the JBF. The James Beard Foundation. Yeah.

Well, that was something that I didn't expect. Man, it's amazing. It's like the Oscars for food. Yeah, it's like the Oscars for food. And it was in a beautiful setting with thousands of people in New York. Man, it's amazing. It's like the Oscars for food. Yeah, it's like the Oscars for food. And it was in a beautiful setting with thousands of people in New York. And the thing about the James Beard Award is there are a lot of awards given out during these ceremonies. And so in the beginning, people are paying attention.

But then you get everybody coming up and you're warned. You got three minutes, you win an award, like no more than 180 seconds up behind the mic. Cause, and everybody knows there are a lot of awards. And if people talk for 20 minutes, you're not going to get out of here to four, four in the morning. So you're, you're not going to get out of here until four in the morning so you're told three minutes that's it and as the evening is going more and more awards and people are going up and I don't want to make fun of it

but when you get people getting up and saying you know I'd really like to thank Aunt Penelope for showing me how to skin a cucumber and like it's over and over and over and over and over again a thousand variations of aunt penelope yeah there's exactly and so naturally the crowd's attention is going to start to drift away and then once it starts to drift it it just it's not coming back. Unless like Ted Allen gets an award,

like well-known TV food personality, people will, oh, there's Ted Allen. And there'll be a silence. But if you're going through categories where only a few people know the person who's just won, it thing is just going on and on and on. And now the whole crowd is having a good time at their table. And everybody's talking, having a great time, but nobody's paying attention to Anne Penelope no more.

So here it is. I've just written this story that took me 10 years to write about being the sommelier at Windows in the World so I've got, and I, I win the award for like best essay. So the award is called, I hear my name and I go up to the stage to give my speech. And I look out and there's like, nobody is paying attention. It must be like three or 4,000 people there in this grand setting. Nobody having a thousand conversations. That's right. And like this, I cannot describe all of the pain that I had to go through to get this piece out of me. And here I am like, you get your medal and then you're going up to speak. And I'm looking out at this crowd and I can't speak into that crowd. Because I feel like I've got something important to say. It goes back to 9-1-1 and there's nobody out there listening that I can see. So I just get behind the podium

and I don't say anything. And like 15 seconds pass, 30 seconds pass. There's a woman over on the side, the one who's saying, three minutes, three minutes, three minutes. I've just gone like 30 seconds. I haven't said a word. 45 seconds minute now you start to see some people are saying like

what's going on why why is he talking about his aunt penelope and then after it must have been a minute maybe a minute and a half ted allen like, like, stands up and, like, throws his arm in the crowd, throws his arm up and is like, no, Cal must speak. He didn't say that, but something like that. And a hush, like, comes over the crowd. And then I still, I said, I am not going to say a word until there is, like, complete silence in this place. And I just wait, and I wait, and I wait.

And, like, my three minutes is all up, you know. Now it's, like, people all around, their arms up. Let him speak. Let him speak. And then I spoke and the beauty of the experience because I I I'm only now understanding that speaking was something that I was born to do like it's I look back on those moments, like that moment tells me, yeah, you were born to do this because afterward, like a chef like Paul Bartolotta, who has a great Italian restaurant, had it at the Wynn for many years, has won James Beard awards for himself,

came over to me and he just said, you took back the crowd. And at the time it didn't, it made no, I didn't understand it. But now that I'm starting to give speeches, now it makes sense. Yeah, I do have this and I have to use it. It would be terrible for me not to use it. I'm supposed to use it. And that was only like a flicker. And it's still, it was about five years after that before I started talking. But it was there. Some more questions when we get back from festivities? A hundred percent. You know, we could spend all tomorrow talking if you want.

I got this guy who's like managing me now. Kevin, the manager. And he says, Cal, you go, you go on, you do these three and a half hour podcast, like three and a half hours.

Do you realize how long that is? And then I said to him, Kevin, it was fun. Why wouldn't I? So we can talk all tomorrow. All right, fantastic. And we have more barrel sauna use,

which I'll fill people in on perhaps. One of my newest distractions slash saviors, but to be continued. So this is great fun and we will continue. All right, this is round two, picking up in the a.m. We have two mugs full of Yarmouth tea. And I thought we could tackle some questions from listeners. And one that we can start with is Nick Simon.

Which interview in his career went worst and discuss the aftermath? Okay, there's a good story to that one. I don't know if many people remember a guy named William Buckley. He was an incredible intellect who was at the foundation of the conservative party, but he had a TV show back in the 60s that was just fantastic. And this guy had an amazing intellect and a vocabulary that you'd only dream of. And I don't know why, but he was the only person I have ever been frightened to interview just because, well, I'll tell you why. Back in the 60s, he challenged Robert Kennedy to a debate on TV on a show and Robert Kennedy wouldn't go. And so Buckley comes on the next show, and he spoke in this kind of a feet way. And he basically says, well, you know, I invited Robert Kennedy to come and debate me.

He has refused. This is clearly a case of the baloney rejecting the grinder. What a line. Wow. And he was like that all the time. I mean, he could take you apart if he wanted to, just with the magnificence of his language. And I don't know what it was, but I was really scared.

Look, the guy, he was way older than me he had seen much more than me how old were you at the time oh let's see just roughly uh probably oh silent late 30s early 40s okay okay got it so not totally green no no that's that's the point yeah that's the point i had no reason to fear him i know i've already done like many what i've learned interviews i'd already met a lot of famous people people who've done big things but i was just scared and so i said to myself you you really got to be prepared for this interview like no other interview before. And so I did all my research. I read and read and read and I watched what I could of him.

And for two days before the interview, I stopped eating. Now, was this part of your performance enhancement plan or is that just nerves i just wanted to be laser focused when i walked in there like a hawk that's right or a hunting like a pellegrin falcon that they'll starve to make them their senses more acute okay that's that's exactly it i wanted my senses to be laser focused when i walked in there there was no way that this guy was going to throw you off. So I'm outside of his apartment in New York, like a half an hour early. I'm just pacing back and forth. Like there's no, no way he's going to take you apart. You're going to

stay with him, Cal. You're going to, you, This guy is amazing, but you're going to stay with him. Finally, that point in hour arrives. It's like 11 in the morning. Go and knock on his door. The door swings open, and he throws his arms out wide. And he says, Welcome to my home. And then he starts rubbing his hands together, and he says,

with a big smile on his face, A little scotch? Now I'm screwed. Now I'm screwed. Now I'm screwed. Because when I traveled around the world, if you offered me something to eat or something to drink, I drank it or I ate it. I mean, like I did some crazy stuff. I remember going to the Nile for the first time and just walking up and drinking out of it just to say, okay, I'm at one with you here. And, you know, the next three days I couldn't leave my hotel room. I was over the toilet, but that was my mentality. I, if you serve it, I have ultimate respect. I will, I will eat it or drink it. And so now he's saying, have this scotch.

And I know if I put this scotch to my lips within 20 minutes, I'm going to be like slurring my words out of it because I'm just too clean for it. Right. And so I looked at him and I said, God, I regret it. It gives me shivers just to repeat it. I said, how about a little water? And he looks at me and his nose goes up in the air. And he says oh and in that oh was it's going to be that kind of interview is it and the interview was done it was just i had not respected him and look my whole way of interviewing is i'm gonna make you feel like you're at home.

So here is a guy who opened the door to his home, threw out his arms to embrace me, offered me, who knows, probably, you know, 50 year old single malt. And I just said, no, I couldn't even make him feel at home in his home. And we sit down and in fairness to myself, when I went back and listened to the interview, it wasn't that bad, but it could have been great. Right. You know how much better it could have been. Yeah. Because I just set the thing, I just set it off on such a wrong note and it ended way earlier than it should have ended. And I walked away as saying, you will never, ever do that again. Like that, that is a mistake you never should have made. And I hope you learn your lesson.

So what happens, the aftermath is a good part of that question because, okay, I'm getting ready to hand the piece in and I'm just making it work. It's like, it's one of those, if you're a pole vault and you're just getting over the bar. Barely clearing it. Yeah, and it's like shaking. Like you've nicked it and it's shaking but but i feel as i'm about to hand it in that it's still it's still there and i'm coming down

and i'm gonna have soft landing here so and i get a phone call and it's uh bad news's bad news, Cal, bad news from the editor. What's going on? Well, William Buckley had written a piece for Esquire like 30 or 40 years ago, and there was some problems with it, and a legal agreement was made between William Buckley and Esquire that that piece would never again run. It would never be republished.

And Esquire had just put out a huge book of great stories. Oh, including his piece. Because what happened is there have been maybe eight editors in between the time that happened. Too many regime changes. Yeah, and nobody knew about this. Only Buckley and his lawyers knew. And they basically said, hey, get that book off the racks. You can't do this.

And so they said, there's just no way we can run the interview. Oh, man. I got to reprieve. You got to. Oh man. I got to reprieve. You got to reprieve. I got to reprieve. You got a pardon at the last minute. That's right. I got a last minute pardon. And the lesson was the truly important thing because I will never ever go into an interview like nervous because it serves no purpose it only hurts you so were there points in the future when you felt the involuntary nerves kicking in and if so what would you say to yourself no because the experience like scarred me remember the scotch And, you know, like now, like I'll take ice cream into interviews. Yeah.

So you skipped the Pellegrin Falcon prep after that? Never. Look, do the prep. Not the prep, but I mean the fasting approach. Yeah. I mean, that's just, it's just ridiculous because if you're, if you're going intense, you're going to transmit that tenseness into the interview and to the person, to the subject.

Now, look, there's a lot of interviewers who do things different ways. I just did a piece with Jorge Ramos, the Univision anchor who Donald Trump pitched out of the interview in Iowa a while back. And his, he has like completely different approach. He, he goes into the interview as if it's a war because a lot of the people that

he's interviewing could have been dictators or people who, uh, like presidents who took power in unscrupulous ways and he knows he's he may only have like a few minutes he may be getting thrown out so he's going to come at them with like the toughest questions right at the start. Right, the bell of the first round. That's right, yeah. And he's had a great career out of it. But look, his background was completely different from mine because he grew up in Mexico

where basically the media was censored. So he was a reaction to that. And everything he does is a reaction to censorship. It's a reaction to people having power and taking advantage of those who don't have it. And he sees journalism as more than just asking a question. He sees it as defending people. Right. And I really don't go into an interview to defend anybody.

And in fact, it's kind of interesting because like some people say, well, what happens when you get people who lie to you? And I said, the way I write, it's impossible for somebody to lie to me because I write in other people's words. So if they lie to me, their lie is going to be printed on the page exactly the way they told it. And so basically the truth is they're a liar because anybody who knows the truth is going to know that they lied. So very, very different styles. Very different styles. So we were talking yesterday about some prep that I was doing for an interview where I wanted to watch a movie and we ended up watching a good part of it together.

But I was nervous that I wouldn't have the chance to see it beforehand due to some technological issues. And so you mentioned that, for instance, Larry King doesn't want to know anything about, and feel free to add to this, say a given movie that's coming out that a guest is a part of because he wants to, I suppose, see it with fresh eyes and ask the questions that a, a beginner might ask or someone who's unfamiliar with it. How does your style differ from say Larry's? Cause of course you spend a lot of time with Larry. Yeah. And Larry's basic idea is I am thinking like the person who's listening. They haven't seen the movie. They haven't gotten a chance to get a preview. So why should I, Larry King, be in the position to tell them what happens?

Better for him to put, oh, there's Molly. There's Molly. Molly's awake now, guys. She was sedated yesterday but she's she's full of beans today i will close that door if she continues her home defense against squirrels and butterflies sorry so so larry's basic feeling is hey i am i am gonna talk to this person who made the movie or was in the movie or who wrote the book as if I just sat next to him on an airplane seat. Oh, you wrote that book? What's it about?

And then let the conversation go from there. And that's a great strategy because it's very natural and it allows the person to be just as natural. I've gone both ways. In fact, I don't really follow pop culture that much. And certainly when I moved out to Los Angeles in a way, rarely followed it before then. Once you're in LA, it's hard to not be part of the pop culture because it's all around you. And so what Esquire, as soon as I moved out there, they came up with a pretty funny idea, knowing that I didn't know much about current movies. And they hatched a plan to send me out to do a cover story.

But the only thing they told me was, we just want you to go out and do a story about a guy. His name is Jerry. And I said, well, what else? That's it. It's just, his name is Jerry. And they gave me his address. Such a setup. And not only that, but they told me, look, it's just a short interview. Don't, don't sweat it.. His name's Jerry. Just go out and talk to him for a few minutes and come back and write something up. So it didn't seem like a big trick to me. In the meantime, Gerard Butler, the actor, is waiting in his house.

And he's appeared in a few movies at this point, one of which was 300. Another one was Phantom of the Opera. I hadn't seen either of those movies. And I had no idea who he was. And he is sitting at home getting his first cover story for Esquire. He's consented to a three-hour interview. A few minutes. Yeah, I'm going in a few minutes for Jerry,

and he's thinking, okay, cover story, Esquire. And so I knock on the door, and I say, hey, is Jerry here? And then I said, well, you know, to be honest, I have no idea who you are. But the magazine has sent me to interview you for a few minutes. And he's looking at me and he's like, his eyes are like squinting. Like, this guy's putting me on. This guy's putting me on.

And I said, no, no, no, no. Really, I have no idea who you are and then like he's caught between the squinting of the eyes and then like there's a smile on his face because he like he's an actor who can go with it and so he he wants to go with it, but he's wary. Understandably. Yeah, this is the setup. This is the setup. And he keeps looking for that little string to pull that's going to take the garment and just unravel it and prove that I'm an imposter. But there's nothing he can do because I have no idea who this guy is. And so instead of saying, what do you do?

I just acted like I had met him. And I said to him, you know, the good thing about this is for 10 years, I traveled around the world and I would just get on trains and sit next to people. And we just go and get a chance to meet each other so why don't we just approach it like that and so he's okay okay and so it's like where you're from just that question like i don't believe you i don't believe it i don't believe this and then he starts telling me he's from paisley in scotland and i and i think i at first i couldn't tell if it was like is it australia is it england is it scotland yeah

yeah and then i said scotland and he yeah yeah yeah and then he started giving me his background and it's only about 20 minutes into the interview where it comes out. And then like I started to act and I said, oh, you're an actor. And he says, oh, this is just the biggest bunch of malarkey. Like, I know you're a film buff. This whole thing is being recorded to put me on. No, I have no idea who you are. And now the rest of this this interview he's like trying to prove to me that he is like a world-class actor i'm poor guy and the amazing thing about it was like we're talking we're talking i still it hasn't occurred to me that this is a cover story. I still think this is... A little interview, a few minutes with Jerry. Yeah.

And so at a certain point, we take a little break and he says, you need to use the bathroom. Like, use the one off my bedroom. Here, I'll show you. And we start walking into his room, to the bedroom, and there is an Esquire on a nightstand. And it's got Megan Fox, the actress, on the cover. And he makes this offhanded comment like, geez,

why would they want to put me on the cover of Esquire when you can have Megan Fox? And then it hits like, oh, my God, I've got to write a cover story about this. Oh, no. So we step back down, and I say, all right, Jerry, like. Let's shift gears here. What movies were you in? And he's like, really?

Really? And he brings up, he says, well, this was the topper. He says, I was in 300. And I haven't seen it. And I said, 300, 300. You know, I saw, I remember seeing, I think I saw a poster of that movie. It was like, it was like these like kind of gladiator guys. And it was this, I remember a beard.

And Jerry says, that was me. That was me. And we're talking about 300. And he said, in this issue with Megan Fox on the cover, it also had a story, the 75 movies that every man must see. And so he says, I'll show you. And he picks up this issue and he says, I guarantee you 300 is one of the 75 movies

that every man must see. I'll show you. He opens up to the story. He goes on page one. He's looking at these movies. These movies are pretty good. Gets to page two. Yeah, it is really good.

He's not saying 300. Turns the page and he's, fuckers. Turns the next page. Fuck. Fuck. And he gets to the last page. It's not there. And it's like, fuck, how can they not put 300 in here? And I'm, I'm saying, okay, okay. Like what else we in? He said, Phantom of the, come on, Jerry, you can't sing like that. Like I saw that Broadway show.

I got roped into it. I don't like musicals, but my wife does. And so we went like, you can't sing like that. I was the phantom. And so the whole interview is going on where he's trying to prove to me that he's an actor and belongs on the cover of Esquire. And we have a great time. And true to the actual beginning of the interview

where I said to him, look, I sit down on trains next to people and like they take me home. At the end of the interview he's saying, hey, you wanna use my big screen? Come back anytime. Like we're tight. It's been a great time and i'm getting ready to leave and he disappears and and right before i leave

the house fills with music from phantom of the armor and he comes down and he starts singing note for note to the music and i said okay jerry i know who you are wow so there was a case where i had no not a clue not a clue who i was interviewing and it and it works just being natural yeah well that would work for you also not for all interviewers right given your background in the same way that perhaps if you went into a war conflict interview format where you had three minutes to hit someone with a left hook you might not be as adaptable as the Univision interviewer, right? I mean, like the, the, that format, the stranger on the train scenario is something you've, you're, you're very well adapted to take advantage of. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Jorge Ramos was telling me a story. The only time that he

actually like got thrown out of an interview or pushed away before Donald Trump was with Fidel Castro. And it was a very tricky situation he was in. And Castro knew it. Castro knew who he was. And so they're at a conference and Jorge manages to get next to Castro and he's got his mic and he starts asking him questions. And what Castro did was put his arm around Jorge. Ah, for photos and whatnot. Because the camera's in on this. And so the look now is that they're pals, which if you're Jorge, you do not want to be seen as pals with that's clever though on the part of fidel right and so jorge has got to come back at him and

manage to like wriggle away wriggle away like a toddler wriggle away and then hit him with a tough question and at which point one of castro's bodyguards like elbowed him away and like, out, this is over. I'm like, I never have to think like that because my feeling is if somebody is going to feel comfortable with me, then I'll get to the deep eternal truths. And I don't, I don't want to push them back or off guard or make them nervous or make them think about what they have to say.

So it's completely different, different styles. Hence the Scotch rule. Hence the Scotch rule. Now there are, for people who are wondering in a lot, there are many questions that popped up about questions. Hence the Scotch rule. Larry's approach, your approach, and Jorge Ramos's approach, such as James Lipton inside the actor's studio. He, and I've spent time with some of his researchers who I've paid to look at past transcripts of my podcast to try to help me improve. But the format's completely different because in the case of say, James Lipton, he, I believe knows the answer to every question he's

going to ask. So there's a tremendous amount of in-depth research and prep that goes into it. And for me personally, it really kind of depends on the guest and the circumstances. Some are really, really deeply researched, particularly if I'm nervous. And then others I'm coming in relatively blind because I feel like it's a complex enough subject that I want to have myself in the shoes of the majority of the people listening, if that makes sense, like physics or mathematics or something like that. Who are some interviewers that I don't admire. But this conversation is kind of explaining it all.

They were all completely different. So that when I look at them, I see what they're doing. I see how they're doing it. I admire Barbara Walters. And I know that she has scripted her interviews a little different from Lipton because she doesn't know what's coming. But she's got question number one, question number two, question number three. She's storyboarded. There's a progression. There's a progression.

There's an arc. Her interviews from start to finish and meticulously. And I can see how she makes it work for her. Charlie Rose, the research that he does is absolutely fantastic. And the interesting thing about Charlie Rose is when he's interviewing somebody, you think like he's on almost an equal level of, of intelligence or material as a person that he's interviewing.

And like that works, that was great for him. Matt Lauer is a master at getting people to feel comfortable. And I know where this comes from because I interviewed him. And when he was a kid, he worked in a men's shop. And he said, when you're a salesman, you have to observe the person coming in through the door and see what they're looking at. What's the right time to approach? When is it time to back off? And all that translated into his interviews. And you can see why it makes people feel so comfortable.

Came from that clothing store and so same story and uh different background with barbara walters right and you were mentioning this to me yesterday if you could if you'd elaborate on that for a second also just as the the as another example of how the background forms the interviewer. Yeah. The, with Barbara Walters, her dad owned a famous nightclub in New York called the Latin quarter. And so all the famous celebrities were in this place night after night, and she was just accustomed to sitting next to them and casually talking to them. experience, you might be put off. You might be a little nervous. And that might be something you have to overcome by repeatedly doing it. But probably in her case, the first time she sat in on a celebrity interview, it was not much different from being at her dad's nightclub.

And for someone who doesn't have, because I don't want people to get the impression that you have to have this extensive childhood experience with something or another to become a good interviewer, because I don't, I don't think that's the case necessarily. Maybe I'm missing something in my own background, but are there any, there are a number of questions to this effect. And we've, we've chatted about this a little bit, but for instance, here's a question from David Drone or Drone net. What are the, what are the top three specific questions he asks most often during interviews that he finds are the most revealing. Now we've, I've, I suspect I know what, what part of your answer will be to this, but the two that I would offer for people who are

opening an interview and are really nervous, right? So one was what do you ask? Where are you from? Like just like very simple. The other one that seems to buy a lot of time for me and my experience, if I just don't know where to go, where to start, I'll say, tell me the story of how you became X, right? An actor or whatever. And you've immediately bought yourself probably five minutes of time to figure out what your next move is. And you'll get something in the answer that will help you figure out your next move. But how would you answer this question? Because I'm sure you get some variation of this question all the time. Well, the, the, the big thing that I'm noticing from the people who ask this question, because

once I started to speak, this question kept coming up again and again. It's like, what's the holy grail of questions here so that I could use them? And I always say it's not like there's a holy grail questions. Look, I come prepared. I've got like 200 questions in my mind when I show up for an interview, because I've thought about them. I've written them down and then I've ripped them up. The,

the thing is, it's not that first question that I'm really dependent on. That first question, just opening the door. And then the answer is going to spark my second question. And that's going to take me down a flight of steps, like deeper into the person's soul. And then when they answer the second question, that's going to bring up a third question. And by the sixth answer, maybe that's where I wanted to go with my first question. So it's a process.

It's not a, use this and you will be successful too. It's not an incantation yeah it's it's it's also filled with curiosity because you what you what you're doing and what you're doing is you're just listening to see where the answers take you it's the answers that are going to take you where you want to go. The questions are there just to like open the doors for the answers. And so relying on one question to get you to the bottom of something is something I wouldn't do. But you know what? It might be something that Jorge Ramos, that's a good question for Jorge Ramos, because he's had to think really carefully.

If he knows I've only got five minutes with this president of a Latin American country, and he's got to ask something that's going to get a response that everybody talks about, he might ask a question like, how much did your house cost? Yeah. And then if the person, well, I don't know, like, you don't know how much your house cost. Yeah, well, like any answer is an answer, right? In that case. Yeah.

I won't answer that. It tells answer is an answer, right? In that case. Yeah. And I won't answer that as tell, it tells you quite a lot, right? I mean, the mask tells you more than what's underneath the mask. That's, that's what he's working in. He's, he's like really thinking hard about what he's going to ask, knowing that he doesn't have much time and also knowing that he's there for the people. Right. This is a, this is a point that I think about quite a lot, but in the, in the converse way, meaning some of my fans I'll have, I'll have guests on who are known or have been known at some point for some type of scandal, or if you're in the public eye long enough, eventually something's going to come up. I mean, you're going to make

a misstep. You're going to say something stupid. And there are some fans, not a lot, but we're like, why didn't you ask him about this? Why didn't you ask her about that? Well, in my case, I do have a lot of time. I have two to three hours to uncover in my particular format, tactics and tools and so on. So if I ask, how much did your house cost? That's the equivalent of not accepting the scotch times a hundred, right? They're just going to, they'll go, Oh, Oh, it's one of these. And the doors get shut. Yeah. And that's effectively the end of the interview. Even if it lasts another two hours, they will not, they will not give me

anything. They wouldn't give a stranger who's potentially hostile. And so it's a completely different, uh, different set of, it's a, it's a different style of interviewing. Um, but you know what, there, the way, the way I would approach that is like, not with a direct question, but just by allowing the conversation to circle around that area and invite him or her to explain the scandal through that. And then you can be into it. Best example I could give you about that is when Larry King was just getting started in Miami on radio. He was sitting at a table with a friend of his at the time, Jackie Gleason, Honeymooners. Yeah, for sure. So they had become friends. And Jackie had asked this question around the table, like, what's impossible?

I guess it was a doctor at the table that said, like, we'll never have artificial blood. And he gets to Larry and Larry says, what's impossible? I have a three hour radio show. Getting Frank Sinatra to appear on my radio show, that's impossible. And Jackie Gleason pointed to him and said, you got it. And as it turned out, Frank had been doing a concert and, or a series of concerts and lost his voice and needed to be replaced one night. And he called Jackie, and he said, hey, Jackie, can you go on, do like a comedy bit for me

so that nobody's upset? And Frank says, I owe you one. And so after that conversation with Larry and the others, Jackie calls up Frank and says, hey, Frank, this is the one. There's this kid, Larry King. He's just starting out in radio, Miami Beach. He's got a three-hour show.

I need you to go on for three hours. Frank says, you want it? You got it. Now, nobody can believe. This is like a little radio station. And at the time, I mean, imagining that Sinatra is the biggest of the big. Yeah. Not only that, but Frank, as his PR guy points out, the public relations guy is basically employed to say no to all these requests like this.

I'm very familiar and so they call up the people at the radio station can't believe it because larry says i got frank sinatra coming in like friday night or whatever night it was and the radio wants to do all this publicity and so that they say like are you sure he's going to show this is a little station it's not a larry king is not big time this is what made larry king big time and like the radio station is calling over to where frank is staying asking just to get a confirmation no response no response no response finally whatever the show was on at nine o'clock, like at two minutes to nine. Frank comes through the door with his publicist and the publicist pulls Larry aside and says,

I don't know how you got this because my job is to not let this happen. But he said he wants to do it. Okay. I'm just telling you one thing. You do not ask about the kidnapping of his son just don't and larry is young and so grateful after whatever you say whatever you say and the interview starts and larry's like dumbfounded So he says to Frank to talk about starting an interview. He says to Frank, even better. He says, why are you here?

And Frank explained and Larry didn't even know the backstory. Oh, wow. And so Frank is having to explain to him, well, Gleason substituted for me and I owed him one. And then he said, Frank, this is the one. And so I'm here. And the interview starts going and starts going, an hour passes or whatever. And midway into the interview, Frank is feeling very comfortable. And Larry says to him, do you feel, Frank, you've ever gotten a bum rap? And Frank says, absolutely. Like in the case of my son getting kidnapped. And then just goes into

the whole story. And so Larry didn't ask the question directly. He just made Frank feel at home so that is more like where i line up as as as opposed to the style of going in there and say we got sinatra let's let's see corner of the wild beast yeah he's the camera's in front of him if we ask him about it and he doesn't want to answer, we're still going to get his reaction. I don't go that way. It's also very, from my perspective, a very mercenary way of doing things and very transactional way. Contrasted with if you take the approach that Larry did, he's developing friendships, not just good tape, right? Over time. I mean, he's... Yeah, and exactly. And I mean, at least I would say a third of the guests that I've had on the podcast came

as recommendations from other guests and introductions. And that wouldn't happen if I had a transactional gotcha type of approach. And just to reiterate what you said, the exact same experience is something that I've had on at least two dozen of my interviews in the sense that I always ask guests beforehand, because the show is not about making people look bad. It's about tactics and routines and habits and all the stuff that people can use. I'll ask, is there anything you really don't want to talk about or prefer not to talk about? And, uh, not, uh, not often, but every once in a while, someone will say, yeah, I really don't want to talk about X. And if I make them feel comfortable, and if I do one thing, which, uh, Neil Strauss is a very, uh, very good writer and very accomplished

interviewer for Rolling Stone and New York times. He said to me, if you want them to be vulnerable, be vulnerable yourself, like give up some details of your life that are very vulnerable. So I made that a habit. And in, I'd say half of the cases, they end up talking about exactly the thing they said they didn't want to

talk about. They bring it up themselves. It only makes sense because when people feel comfortable, then they're going to speak normally. Yeah. They're going to forget they're being interviewed. And later on in life, Frank actually wrote Larry a note that in it said, you know, you make the cameras disappear. And I think that's what you, as an interviewer, want to do. You want to make people forget they're being interviewed and just speak with you naturally. Now, that's just my style. Other people, they want it to be known it's an interview. If you show up with a pad in front of you and cameras, then it's an interview. The pad is going to tell the person that is across from you, there are questions written down.

This is an interview. Be advised. And so that's just something i would like never never do but that's just me that's just my style so you mentioned that you think about the questions write down the questions then tear them up i'm curious about this so do you review a list of questions and then the day before or before you walk into someone's house just tear it up into little shreds and throw it in a wastebasket? Or what does your process look like for adding the ammo to your brain? Yeah, it's a matter of you do your research.

And then there's a period of curiosity where you're just, you've taken in all this information. And now what are you curious about? And so you just start writing down questions and that comes, for me, it comes very easy. And I'll just start writing, writing, writing, writing, and then pages will be filled up. The way I look at it is it's almost like I'm putting songs in a jukebox and the questions are my songs. And I'm just going to have these songs in there. They're in my head. I know the words to the songs. I can sing the songs. And then I rip them up. It's more of like a ceremonial act. The questions are no longer on paper. They're in my head. And so then I go, when I go into the interview, like interesting things start happening because number one, because all these questions are in my head, I'm never like at a loss for a question. I've

talked to some writers who say like, what happens when you run out of questions? Well, I don't because my jukebox is filled. But more than that, what will happen is I'll ask a question and then I'll get a response and then I'll get a response. And then I'm working off the responses. But oftentimes a response will lead to a question I've already thought of. So it's like they're hitting the jukebox and they're playing the music. They're getting the question that they want because that's where they were going. Right. They used the proper cue.

Right. In a sense. And so my mind was prepared to ask them the question that they wanted to hear to make them more, more comfortable. So it's, it's, it's a very, it's my style and other people can try it and see if it works for them but there's something relaxing about it to me and i i can recall like i've interviewed people who like have shows on tv where they have to interview people and i come in without any questions or a pad,

and you could see this shocked look on their face. You don't write down your questions? Because they might feel like, what will I do on camera if I can't think of a question? It might look bad. Having that pad there is a safety net. But once you do it this way a few times, you're, you're free. Neil does the same thing. Neil Strauss. I don't know if you,

I don't think he tears them up, but if he folds it up, folds it up and put it in his, puts it in his pocket and doesn't look at it at all. And I think that if, if I were to underscore something that you both have in common, you're very good at getting people open up about things they would be disinclined to open up about normally in an interview. And I think that's a big part of it,

right? It's like if you have a camera with a flashing red light, people put on their body armor. It's just in the, the more you can make it a conversation as opposed to an interview, like you said, with is if you can remove the symptoms of an interview, so to speak, right? The pad of paper, the flashing lights, the more naturally people will engage with you and the more they will share. Well, now you're getting into like Oprah territory where, I mean, imagine this, you've got like the flashing lights, you've got an audience

that's reacting, and then you've got a subject on the couch and she is getting them to speak about things that are very intimate in front of a crowd and the flashing lights. I mean, that's, that's a high, high level of jujitsu. Yeah. Yeah. She's amazing. Uh, if you were to ask me what is impossible, my answer currently would be getting Oprah on the podcast, but on my three hour podcast. So we'll see, we'll see if that manifests something. I wish I can say, you got it. You got it. Oprah owes me a solid. Oprah owes me one. Don't worry about this.

This may have a good amount of overlap with things we've already talked about, but this is from Devin Hedgepeth. Best strategies to get to the heart while interviewing. Find out what they love. I mean, it's that simple, especially if you're able to do the research before. They just hone in on something they're passionate about and they love talking about and just ask them about it. And they're going to be happy to talk about it.

It's very simple. And it's the exact opposite of going in, feeling like a journalist who is determined to get a question answered. I've got to get this. I mean, you talked about gotcha, but there's like a level underneath that with, that's not so much gotcha. It's a legitimate, okay, we need, we need to know this. And if you go in trying to grab, if you go in trying to grab something from anyone they're gonna protect it so just make people relax by finding out what they like and then have them talk about it and uh this this is really good advice uh took me a long time to figure out that for myself at least and I'm still very much a novice, but sometimes the best place to start is really far off of any topic that they've covered in interviews related to their profession. I mean, I remember interviewing Edward Norton, and I'd spent a good amount of time with Edward. But the way that he interacts in interviews can be very different than the way he interacts, say, over coffee having normal conversations. So I wanted to make him feel as relaxed as possible. So we just talked about

surfing for the first five to 10 minutes of the interview. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And, you know, we were sitting out on, I think it was the Malibu pier, overlooking the water, we could see the surf lineup. And I was like, okay okay let's talk about surfing that's just a clear example of doing something that's very natural and getting somebody to to feel like at one with you and the place and to me that's making the person the subject feel safe and comfortable, that's where it all starts. It's obviously there's research before and there's the preparation of questions, but if you can't make a person feel safe, forget it. Yeah. Although look, that's just me.

Jorge Ramos is going in there. He is not making them feel safe and he, he makes it work for him. Yeah. He's, he's doing the, uh, the John Snow charging into battle approach. Yeah. And, and, and from where he comes from, that's what's necessary. I mean, he can't go in warm and fuzzy. It won't work. I wouldn't think. Yeah. And, and his audience is his audience because they know he's going in to fight for them. Yeah. So, I mean, a big part of this is realizing who you are, where do you come from?

How do you want to get your own message across? Like just the way you were speaking, you're helping to uplift people. Trying, yeah. And so your style is based on that. I don't know that I ever looked at an interview as a way of uplifting somebody, but it's a very interesting way for me

to look at it because interestingly, I don't do it in the interviews, but when I give speeches or workshops, that's, that's what I do. I'm uplifting people. That's the intention. Yeah. And it, you know, we've been talking about this over the last couple of days and you just lit the light bulb in my head because I've been saying to myself, what's going on? I'm kind of moving into a place but I'm finding that I really like enjoy this in a way that I didn't get out of writing a story in a magazine. And I just understood why in this conversation, because it allows me to do what you do in an interview. It allows me to help uplift people. So if people are working in a company and the company is not hiring the right people because they're not interviewing them in the right way, I can give them information that

is going to help them hire better and have a better company. And that makes me feel great. I don't. And at the end of it, they're saying thank you and hugging me. Generally, at the end of an interview, I may I hug people sometimes at the end of interviews and people say thanks, but it's a different kind of thanks. It's when somebody walks out of an interview and says thanks it's hey that was a really good time when somebody walks out of a workshop and says thank you it's a very different thing it's like there was this one woman man this is just like hitting me as we're talking, who at the end of this workshop says, you know, I spend more time on my job than I do at home. And I hire the people that are around me on my job. And I didn't know

any of this about interviewing until you told us. And this is going to affect all the people that I put around me going forward. Like, thank you. And that was like, that was an experience that I'd never had before. So this, this is why I, I'm just understanding this now, why I'm compelled to go in this other direction. Well, I'm excited to see the new direction. And we also have some barbecue to eat in the not too distant future. So I think this has been great fun. We have so much more we could talk about how to approach second time interviews. We're going to talk about George Clooney. Maybe that'll be in the part, part three. There's so much, so much that we could cover and so many great stories, but where can people find you online and where can they say hi? Uh, we've got calfussman.com and, uh, I just got

Kevin, the manager to, uh, make sure that you send an email in. He'll get it to me. Kevin, the manager, Kevin, the manager, he'll get it to me and, uh, we'll get it to me kevin the manager kevin the manager he'll get it to me and uh we'll get back to you and then on twitter i think you're just is it at cal fussman yeah i gotta do a better job on on twitter i'll have you uh see if i can get jocko willing to sit you down and give you a tutorial you know it's got plenty to do but he's doing a great job on Twitter. I'd love to meet Jocko. He's incredible. Yeah. He's an incredible human being. Tough, tough young man, that Jocko. Well, Cal, this is always so much fun. Thank you for taking the time. And I think I need to feed you more yerba mate, man. That was a hell of a tear. That was good.

Well, you know, what people don't realize is we don't know if the last installment was affected by the last tea, this caramel tea that I didn't realize puts you away. That's right. That's right. So last night we, uh, we've been having tea and I was like, Cal, you want some tea? He's like, sure. And there's a big collection of tea. And so after we did the evening, the PM session interview yesterday, I said, Cal's like, yeah, I really, I like this tea. And, uh,

he pointed to the caramel bedtime tea, which literally in the past when i've taken it has made me feel like leonardo dicaprio at the payphone in wolf of wall street and i was like holy god i can't believe you're even standing right now very impressed you powered through that so yeah we'll, we'll focus on the South American stimulants, meaning Yerba Mate in the future, perhaps. But guys listening, yeah, we will have links to everything we can track down in the show notes.

Of course, Cal's site and social and so on. Please say hi to him. And anything else to add before we sign off? Well, the whole weekend has been an absolute delight. I come out of here almost a changed man. I mean, it sounds out. We've had about 36 hours of conversation. And that part of you, that uplifting part of you has taken me to

places i'm i'm just starting light bulbs are just starting to go off in my mind and so i can't wait to come back for the third because I don't know where you're going to take me. Well, it's, uh, it's just a joy to hang out with you, man. And, uh, if, if, if I can, in my own meandering way, uh, offer a few things from the path that I've already traveled, then that makes my whole weekend. So, uh, and I always learn so much from you. So I feel like very selfishly, I'm learning a lot more than I'm giving out. But I don't know about that. But I am fixing your shoulder with the sauna. We have this barrel sauna,

which came from specs developed by Laird Hamilton. And then I think either duplicated or refined by Rick Rubin when we actually recorded the interview in there and burned our hands on the mics. But so many adventures to have. And we're just getting started. Rubin when we actually recorded the interview in there and burned our hands on the mics. But so many adventures to have, and we're just getting started. So everybody listening, you can find the show notes at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast as always for this episode and every other. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do.

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