The Tim Ferriss Show - #211: A.J. Jacobs: Self-Experimenter Extraordinaire

Episode Date: December 24, 2016

A.J. Jacobs (@ajjacobs) is a kindred guinea pig of self-experimentation who chronicles his shenanigans in books that seem to keep winding up as New York Times best sellers. The Know-It-All was about his quest to learn everything in the world. In The Year of Living Biblically, he tried to follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. Drop Dead Healthy followed his well- (and ill-) advised experiments to become the healthiest person alive. My Life as an Experiment is about exactly what it sounds like, and It's All Relative -- which will be out in 2017 -- will aim to connect all of humanity in one family tree. A.J. is also the host of the new podcast Twice Removed, which takes a celebrity guest and introduces them to a surprise cousin they didn't know they had. It could be one of their heroes, an old friend, a teacher, etc. In this episode, we talk about: What A.J.'s learned from his experiments His creative process His writing process Tipping points in his life How he learned to love marketing And much, much more. I think you'll have a blast with this one -- I know I did. Please enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is 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 and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. 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. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. ***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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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. Oh, it's been a while, my friends. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they be from the world of chess, entertainment, sports, military, or, in this case, generalized human guinea pig-ness. And that means my guest is a comrade in arms of sorts in this wacky world of self-experimentation. A.J. Jacobs, one of my favorite people out there,

at A.J. Jacobs on Twitter and elsewhere, is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, and he chronicles all sorts of shenanigans. His books include The Know-It-All, which is about his quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and learn everything in the world. And in case you haven't picked this up yet, he is a hilarious, hilarious human being. The Year of Living Biblically, about his quest to follow all of the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. Fantastic, fantastic book. Drop Dead Healthy, about his quest to become the healthiest person alive, in which with many ill-advised and sometimes well-advised experiments, I was involved as one of said advisors. The Guinea Pig Diaries,

collection of various mishaps, but also insightful quests like outsourcing his entire life and radical honesty. It's All Relative, which is coming out in 2017. So that is to be read about a quest to connect all of humanity in one family tree. He is also the host of the new podcast, Twice Removed by Gimlet Media. Of course, they are the blockbuster factory. The podcast that is Twice Removed is about finding connections. AJ takes a celebrity guest and at the end of each episode introduces them to a surprise cousin they didn't know they had. So it could be one of their heroes, an old friend, a teacher, et cetera, et cetera. AJ and I talk about a lot in this episode. We talk about some of his habits, what he's learned

from many of these experiments. We talk about his creative process, his writing process, certain tipping points in his life, how he learned to love marketing as an author who disdained it for a very, very, very long time, and a lot more. We cover a lot of ground, and I think you will have a blast. That's my hope. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed chatting with AJ. So without further ado, as I always say, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with AJ. So without further ado, as I was saying, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with AJ Jacobs. AJ, good sir. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Tim. Delighted to be here. And I thought we could start maybe at the beginning. How did we meet? I remember specifically where I was sitting when we had our first conversation, but how did I reach out to you? Was it through the website? It was great. Yes. It was either an email, but then we talked on the phone soon after, and you said, I'm a first-time writer. I'm writing a book. At that point, it was called Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit. And you said you had read an article i had written where i outsourced my life to india so hired a team of people in bangalore to do everything for

me like answer my email and argue with my wife and you're you said that you were writing a book about a similar uh topic of trying to find ways to hack work and And could you talk to me about it? And could you reprint that in your book? And I was like, well, this guy, he's writing a book about drug dealing. I don't know, should I trust him? And I'm like, you know, what the hell? So it came out. And then the best part was a year later, I had forgotten about it. And I got a call from you and you're like, my book's coming out in case you want to check it out. And it's number one on Amazon. And I'm like, you mean number one in like 20-something career advice?

You're like, no, number one on Amazon. I'm like, you are a genius. How the hell did you do that? A first-time writer. So now I'm like, yeah, now you are my mentor in publishing. Like you called me for advice. And now I need to, a year later, I needed to call you for advice. Well, this is my chance to ask for more advice because I realized that we talked about your writing at the time and we're going to get into all sorts of experiments. But since, since we're talking about writing a number of people in my

fan base asked about your writing process. And so we've talked about your writing, the subject matter of your writing, but I don't know if we've ever talked about your writing process. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. I think we actually did because when you were researching how to write a book, you really came up. That's true. I asked you a little bit about structure.

Yeah. But I don't know. At the time, I remember I was in Argentina. I was in Buenos Aires. I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking a cappuccino, which was a double espresso. This must have been around late 2005

or early 2006 near this place. Well, it's a large cemetery near Plaza Francia. I remember exactly where I was sitting when we had the conversation. Could you describe for folks, I guess there's two questions about writing process. One is micro on say a daily basis, when you are writing a book, what that day looks like. Right. And then there's the, how do you decide what to write about? Which do you want to tackle first? Whichever you would like to tackle first. Well, let me tackle the micro really quickly, which would be one thing I like to do first, a little mental calisthenics before I start writing.

So just to warm up my brain. So I'll brainstorm. Maybe it's about the book itself or an article, but it could just be random stuff. Like it could be like, you know, I saw a snowman. What can we do with that? Maybe we could do a snow transgender person or a snow Neanderthal. And 99% of the ideas suck, as you can tell. But the idea is just to get your creative juices flowing. And you're writing those down or you're just doing them inside? Yes, I'm typing them down. And, you know, as I say, none of them, very few of them are ever see the light of day,

but that's just to get my fingers typing is another thing. I feel just the movement of my fingers on the key gets me revved up and gets me, uh, so that, uh, I'm, I'm more comfortable typing. The other thing I like to think about is I know that the first half hour of actual writing my book, that is probably going to suck. And so I just have to accept that and be okay with throwing it out. But you got to do that half hour before your brain clicks in. So that's what I do. I do need like three solid hours. I'm not one, some people can do it where they can write in spurts of 20 minutes. I am not one of those people. I can't do it either. Yeah.

And I remember I got some very good advice a few years ago because I was getting very frustrated by the, in my mind, wasted half hour that you mentioned. And someone said, well, you have to realize that if you write 10 pages and you only get one really good page at the very end, those nine pages are not a waste of time. You needed those nine pages to get to the 10th page. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I prefer to have a better ratio, but I'll take it. I know. Yeah. There is some warmup. Yeah. I wish it could be more like high intensity interval training. You're in and you're out, but it is more like stretching.

Do you tend to do it first thing in the morning or when do you write? I do. Well, I have kids, so that makes my life a pain in the ass. So I have had to train myself to write at all hours. So sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night. And do you drink coffee? I do drink coffee. I also, I have to say, I enjoy my white wine. That's mostly mornings. I am a day drinker. i actually prefer drinking during the day um but

yeah you know there are studies that show that you're slightly more creative after like i think after one glass like after two or three glasses then it all goes to hell but one glass it sort of loosens up the uh the frontal, allows you to make more connections. Or it convinces you that you should be more loosened up and you have the placebo effect benefit. There you go. And you sent me over a quote, and I don't know if this is a quote of yours or if it's attributed to someone else, but I really enjoyed this. And I think it applies to a lot of what you do, not just your writing. But here's the quote, quote, it's easier to

act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. Can you elaborate on that or provide us some more context for that? Yeah, I love that quote. And I think it applies to both of us. It definitely applies to both of us. Yeah. I think a lot of what your work is. And i wish i could say i made it up it was the founder of habitat for humanity whose name escapes me right now but it was a wonderful and the idea is just you know uh when you is it's basic cognitive behavioral psychology when you act in a certain way uh then your brain will catch up. But that's a lot of, in terms of change, I find that much easier. Like, I wrote a book about the Bible and living by the Bible, and one of the things was

you had to be more compassionate. And so, I had a friend in the hospital. I hate hospital, hate them. So, I was like, I'm not going to visit that guy. But then I thought, what would a compassionate person do? And I acted as if I were a compassionate person. I forced myself to go to the hospital to visit him. And then in my brain, I'm like, oh, you know what? I am kind of compassionate. You sort of trick your brain. Your brain catches up. And I've done that. And especially with optimism and confidence. You know, I don't think I'm a naturally confident person, but I act as if I'm confident, and eventually you become more confident. So what, in the realm of confidence, what embodies confidence for you? Like, what are the ways in which you act?

Well, for instance, when I wrote a book about health, it was sort of my attempt at the four-hour body. And I was so overwhelmed because it's such a huge topic. And I was trying to be the healthiest person alive, aside from Tim Ferriss. And so it's such an undertaking because there's sleep and there's sex and there's food and exercise. So I was all stressed out. But then I acted. Every morning I would wake up full of despair. But then I would act as if I was confident.

So I would call my publisher and say, okay, when we have the release party, let's have kale martinis. What do you think of that? So I was acting all cocky as if, you know, this is going to come out and be a big hit. And after two or three hours, your brain catches up and I actually felt more confident and I really find it so helpful. So I've, I've been thinking about this a lot recently, uh, because there's so much talk of mind over body. And so this is, I guess, a corollary to this quote, but I've been thinking a lot about body over mind.

And this is something Tony Robbins talks a lot about if you want to change your psychology, changing your physiology first. And it's a lot easier also in the sense that if you haven't reasoned yourself into a position of say lack of confidence or at least you haven't done it consciously it's very hard to reason your way out of it so you just have to act as if oh yeah i absolutely i agree and it's in every part of my life like i did one experiment where i i tried to be the best husband ever. And I forced myself to buy a present for my wife every day, like just

a little trinket, even if I was totally pissed at her and like you wanted nothing to do with her. But just that act of giving it to her, it was like, oh, I'm giving her a present. I must love her. And it really changed my view. So I am a big fan. And we're not the only ones. I read about Teddy Roosevelt. For a while, he was trying to be a cowboy, like he was actually in, I think it was Montana. And someone asked him, aren't you terrified? And he's like, of course I'm terrified when the bull is coming at me, but I just act as if I'm courageous and I become a little more courageous. So it sounds like, and I read this comparison on I think 99U,

one piece maybe method acting, although I know nothing about it, I'm just using the label. And then there's the second component, which is something that I didn't, I like this phrase, and it's capital D, capital O, delusional optimism. Can you elaborate on that? Because it seems like they go together.

Yes, I am a fan of delusional optimism, which is very similar to what we've been talking about. I think it's nothing would get done without delusional optimism, which is very similar to what we've been talking about. I think it's nothing would get done without delusional optimism. And I actually, one example was I interviewed George Clooney once for Esquire, who, by the way, is as charming as you expect George Clooney to be. He gave me a unsolicited shoulder rub, shoulder massage. So that, like, I'll always have that. But anyway, so I asked him about his, what are his secrets to success? And he said one philosophy he has is he used to be a baseball player in high school.

And when he got up to the plate, he would, he wouldn't just say to himself, am I going to hit a home run? He would say, not only am I going to hit a home run, but the only question is, am I going to hit it over the left wall or the right wall? And I loved that. And of course, most of the time he didn't. Most of the time he struck out. But it raised the percentage of times that he did hit a home run because he had that delusional optimism. And I love that. And you have to be careful. I mean, you don't want, it can lead to terrible things. So you have to have some, especially if you're in an organization, you want the CEO to be delusionally optimistic, and then you want someone else to be sort of the bean counter and be like, I don't know about this, a balance. But you really

do, I think, need that delusional optimism to get things done. And if we're then rewinding a little bit and going from the micro book process, book writing process, actually before we leave the daily writing process, I've talked to a lot of my friends who are typically journalists out of newspapers and they drive me crazy and they make me very envious because they talk about how writing or writer's block doesn't exist and they can kick out 1500 beautiful words every few hours. And they seem to be able to do it. A lot of my friends have worked at different papers. Do you have, do you experience blocks or extended periods where you're just stuck on projects? And if so, what do you do to help get yourself out of those? Oh yeah. I get blocked all the time. I actually wrote an article once on, uh,

on writer's block and the way that great writers have overcome it. I remember, I think Ben Franklin wrote In the Nude. A lot of writers wrote Standing Up, like Nabokov wrote Standing Up. There's a philosopher, a German philosopher named Schiller, who he needed rotten apples to inspire him. So I tried them. I went like Tim Ferriss. I tried them all at the same time,

like Standing Up, Naked, with Rotten Apples. So I tried them. I went like Tim Ferriss. I tried them all like at the same time, like standing up naked with rotten apples. I don't know if that was successful. But I will say one of them is similar to what I said before, where you just start writing. And it doesn't have to be as long as you accept that it's going to suck. It lowers the pressure. So I'll, a lot of times if I, if I'm stuck, I'll just start writing, you know, about the, the, the coffee cup or the pigeons on the windowsill or, you know, how my elbow itches and just, just the fact of moving your fingers, like we talked about how much your body affects your mind, moving the fingers gets you going, uh, and helps. But yeah, it's a problem. It is a certainly, uh, people who

say they don't have writer's block. They, they drive me crazy too. And, uh, you mentioned this is going to jump around cause it's, it's the style of my memento like brain, but you mentioned, this is going to jump around because it's the style of my memento-like brain, but you mentioned, and this is a question that came up from quite a few Trojan horse for me through the entertainment value and the humor of the book to actually learn a lot about a number of different religious traditions. Well, bless you. Bless you, Tim. And so, well, that bless you leads me to the question, which is, what are the things that have stuck with you? Because there's one that stuck with me. Really? Well, you talked about wearing white. Oh, yeah.

And so maybe you could explain what that means. But it's actually something that I've ended up doing on a fairly regular basis since I read the book. Me too. Although you're wearing dark blue now. I'm wearing dark blue right now because all my white stuff is filthy. All right. Imagine how much better this interview would be if you were wearing, and I was the book. Me too, although you're wearing dark blue. I'm wearing dark blue right now because all my white stuff is filthy. All right. Imagine how much better this interview would be if you were wearing, and I was wearing white, I'm wearing white socks. Yeah, well, this book, just to give very quick background for those who don't know, it was, I grew up with no

religion at all. As I say in the book, I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. So not very, no offense. But I thought one way to learn about religion would be to dive in and actually follow every rule in the Bible. So the famous ones, like the Ten Commandments, but also the less famous ones, like it says you can't shave the corners of your beard. I didn't know where the corners were, so I just let the whole thing grow,

and I had this huge topiary, and I got stopped at airport security. So it was a crazy year. But one of the rules— The robes probably didn't help at airport security. Yeah, the robes. And the sandals and the walking stick, yeah. As you say, you know, getting into it physically really makes a difference.

And one of the rules in the Bible, and I think it's Ecclesiastes, says that your garments should always be white. So I took that literally, and I only wore white pants, white shirts, and white robes. And it was weird how it affected my mind. As you know, it made me feel lighter, more energetic. I felt like, you know, it made me feel lighter, more energetic. I felt like there's just something about wearing white. Like, oh, I'm going to P. Diddy's Hamptons party or I'm going to play Wimbledon. It's got positive associations. And here in New York, people wear dark clothes all the time. Very noir.

Yeah. It affects your mind. So have you, has that continued to be a piece or what have continued to play a part in your life from that book? Yeah. From that experience? I do like the brighter clothes more than I used to. I would say, you know, a lot of it I gave, I did shave the beard because my wife would not, she wouldn't touch me with that thing. Even though I kept it very clean. I like moisturized, conditioned it, shampooed. But in terms of

stuff that I have actually kept, I would say one thing that really has stuck with me is that the Bible talks about that you should be grateful all the time. It says you should be thankful, say prayers of thanksgiving. So when I was doing the book, I took that literally. So I would be thankful for everything. So I would press the elevator button. I'd get in the elevator. I'd be thankful it didn't plummet to the basement. I'd press the elevator button, and I'd be thankful the doors opened,

and I got to my floor. So it was like hundreds of little tiny things a day. And it was a weird way to live, very time consuming. But it was also, there was something wonderful about it because it made you realize very concretely, there are hundreds of things that go right every day that you totally take for granted. And at least I used to focus on the three or four that went wrong and just stew on them. So I've tried to keep that radical shift in perspective of being thankful for all the tiny little things that go right. And it has made me happier. It's definitely had an impact.

So I want you to, if you wouldn't mind, describe for people one of my favorite stories in the book, stoning adulterers. Well, yes, I was doing a lot with the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, and it says over and over again, you have to stone adulterers. So I thought, all right, let me try to get this, check this off the list. So I was, one day I was in Central Park and I was wearing my whole, I had my robe, I had the getup, the sandals, and a man came up to me and he said, why are you dressed like that? And I said, well, I'm trying to follow all the rules of the Bible from the Ten Commandments to stoning

adulterers. And he said, well, I'm an adulterer. Are you going to stone me? And I said, well, that would be fantastic. Thank you for the offer. So I took a handful of stones out of my robe pocket because I had been carrying them around for weeks. Because there was no specification in terms of the size of the stones. Yes, exactly. That was the key. I showed it to him and I'm like, you know, they're small stones. You know, I can check it off the list even if they're small stones.

And he was a very aggressive adulterer. He grabbed the stones out of my hand and threw them at my face. So I thought, an eye for an eye, I can chuck one back at him. So that's how I checked it off the list. Yeah, I didn't continue that. There were quite a few I did not continue, including if you follow Leviticus really strictly, you can't touch a woman when she's menstruating because she's impure. But if you take it really literally, a woman, if she's menstruating,

if she sits on something, a chair, that chair becomes impure. And my wife found that offensive, so she sat in every chair in our apartment. And I had to stand for most of the year, which as you know, is probably good for you. Probably good for your health. Yeah.

Well, you had a travel stool, right? You had one of those sporting event. Yeah, those were great. Yeah, they were, you know, they're usually used by people who are, you know, either 83 or 600 pounds, but I found it very useful. So a number of folks, and we're not going to get too deep into the audience questions right now, but we had quite a few questions about your wife and how you manage your relationship with your wife, given all of these odd experiments and do you did you did you in some indirect or subconscious way select someone who'd have a high tolerance for all this that's a great question or

how do you how do you repair damage when damage is done it is it is interesting i mean there are first of all she has veto power. So there are like, I'm sure you get this all the time, readers suggesting ideas. One suggested, become the greatest lover in the world and do all the positions in the Kama Sutra, which you kind of did in the four hour body. But you know, I've been married for 12 years, so that was not going to happen. I did pitch it to her, and she's like, no. And I have to say, I was a little relieved, because I don't think I can bend my back like that anymore. So she has veto power.

That's rule number one. And two, I think she gets a lot of reader feedback about how she's so patient. That helps. So please keep sending those in. Positive reinforcement. I will say probably the worst one for our marriage was the life-logging movement where you keep track. Record everything. Yeah, record everything. It's like the self like the self tracking quantified self taken to the

extreme so you I wore I had a little tiny camera like smaller than a GoPro on my ear and I recorded every moment of my life for about three months and it was fascinating it really you know and I think it's a glimpse of the future I think we are all going towards that for better or worse. But one of the things was I was like, you know, 70% of my arguments with my wife are about where she says, you didn't tell me that. And I'm like, yeah, I did. I did tell you that. So now I'm like, you know what?

Now we can rewind and we can see what we actually said. So we had a huge argument about something, whether she had asked me to order Mexican food, something ridiculously small and trivial, but it blew up. And I was able to, I was like, the next day I'm like, okay, let's rewind and watch the argument. And it was so terrible for our marriage because it was like, I can't remember. I think I might've been 60% right, but the net was that I was 0% right

because she was so upset and you don't want to show someone yelling or angry. It just is not. So I don't recommend that as a way to navigate a marriage. In fact, there was a black, you ever see Black Mirror? I was going to say, there's a great episode. I think it was in the first or second season, the UK edition of Black Mirror. Fantastic episode. It was the same exact premise. Very similar premise, but you record through your eye effectively. Yeah, it was great. I love that show. And in the episode, things go horribly awry with his marriage.

Which I think is probably also likely to happen. Exactly. That becomes ubiquitous technology. What did you learn from that experience? Aside from not to replay the Mexican takeout debate? I think, well, one thing I learned is to, of course, I have hundreds of hours of material, so I'll never be able to watch it

because, you know, it's just an infinite loop. But I think one is to enjoy the small moments. You know, if you do watch it, you just realize that 90% of your day is, you know, when I'm getting my kids ready for school. If you are annoyed during those half hour because it's a pain in the ass, that's a half hour of your life wasted. Like you have to realize this is it. Like this is what most of life is. So try to enjoy that as well as when, you know, you're playing laser tag or whatever, because that's very rare. Serving kale martinis at your lunch break. Exactly. That never happened. So that was one. I mean, also the implications for the future are fascinating. You know, how is for future adulterers.

My heart goes out to them because I can't imagine how you're going to get away with sneaking around when everything is fully recorded. Well, I mean, it'll also, on the flip side, it'll clarify a lot of crimes that are not committed where people are wrongly accused. So you have the flip side also. That's true, yeah. And I think it'll also, it might make us more tolerant of people's mistakes because we all do something. You know, the YouTube video of people melting down and acting like idiots, everyone will have one of those. So

we're all going to have, no one's perfect. We're all going to have our flaws right out there on display. So we have to accept those in ourselves and, and be a little more tolerant of others. So it'll be, it's going to be a weird future. I really believe fascinating, but weird. Yeah. It's a, I mean, the question for me is who, for in all these cases, you know, who, who are going to be the dominant owners of this information and controllers of the bits and bytes that represent all of these videos. Uh, but I want to come back to tolerance and I'm not, I'm not sure this is a perfect segue, but I'm going to force it.

Radical honesty. So you wrote a piece, believe it was titled, I think you're fat. Yes, that is about radical honesty. Could you describe for people, and then I want to come back and I'm going to ask you about your thoughts on marriage and parenting but i want to talk this this ties in i think on some level so radical honesty could you describe absolutely the the origins of this experiment and what you did and where you ended up which i don't think we've really talked about no well and to be radically honest thank you you tweeted about it a few weeks ago. And as per usual, like your endorsement gets me more readers in one tweet than I get like, you know, from months of trying to do publicity. I love the piece. Well, thank you.

Yeah, this piece came about because I was, I read about this guy in Virginia, a psychologist named Brad Blanton, fantastic character, one of the greatest interviews of my life. And he believes that you should never lie, but he goes further. He says, whatever's on your brain should come out of your mouth. No filter, like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar. So it is insane. And I was like, well, let me try this and see what happens. How maybe he's right. Maybe it will make my life better despite the challenges. So I did it and oh my God, it was the worst month of my life in many ways. In some ways, it was wonderful, liberating, terrific. In other other ways it was just dreadful and to give you one of the dreadful ones there was like we would go to a restaurant and we would see my wife friends

of my wife's that she hadn't seen since since college and they'd be like they said uh oh we should all get together and have a play date with our kids and And I had to say what was on my brain, which was, you guys seem nice, but I have no interest in ever seeing you again because I don't have time to see my own friend. And they were just looked at me aghast. And my wife, of course, was furious. And I mean, the one thing is we never did see them again. So in that way, it was effective.

But I felt terrible and I still feel, you know, it was a totally terrible thing to say. So there was that. Um, uh, but it did affect me in that I still, I'm not radically honest, like, cause he's crazy. He's like, also, you know, if you see a beautiful woman on the street, you say, hello, I'm very attracted to you. I would like to sleep with you. Which I got weirdly, a lot of people, you know, 20 something guys saying they were using that as a, as like. As their masterful pickup line. Exactly. And they said, you know, the rejection rate was like 95%. But if you're okay with that, then 5% of the women were like, hmm, interesting.

Interesting proposition. I like the confidence. Slash Asperger's. But so what I have kept from that is I try to do what I call radical sustainable honesty or positive radical honesty. Because I don't need to tell people, you know, I'm staring at your mole. Like that just doesn't help the world, I think. But for instance, one of the things I did was when I was doing that, I would be thinking, you know what? I really liked that boss of mine when I was 22 at the small newspaper. He had a very nice influence on me. Let me call him up and thank him.

So I would call him out of the blue. And it was very awkward because men are not supposed to express emotions like that. But I would tell him how much he meant to me. And it made me feel so much better. And I hope, I think it made him feel better. And so I feel that that's something I've tried to keep. If I have a positive thought, then even if it's embarrassing or weird, then I will, I will say like, I love you, man, that kind of thing. Uh, and I think that has made my life

better. So I was given a similar assignment by an ex-girlfriend a number of years ago. I was having trouble, and this is no secret to people who've read certainly a few of the chapters in Tools of Titans or in other places that I've had my ups and downs and my managing of depressive periods and whatnot. And she said, well, if you're having trouble making yourself happy, maybe you should identify one person every day you can send a short thank you to, or call to give a thank you. And specifically people from long ago or people you used to be close to, or who had a huge influence on you that you were no longer close to. And so I started doing this and calling teachers I had in high school or childhood

friends. And it was, it had a hugely uplifting impact on me. I love that. Did it ever go wrong? No, it never went wrong. And sometimes it wasn't even about speaking in person. So if I got a voicemail, I would just leave a heartfelt voicemail. It never went sideways for me.

And in fact, it reinvigorated, I guess, or resurrected a few childhood friendships. And now I'm back in close contact with a number of these, uh, guys I went to grade school with and used to play with on a daily basis on BMX bikes or whatever the hell throwing, throwing dirt clods into each other's eyes in the middle of the forest or whatever we were doing at the time. So it's been great. It's been really, really great. I love that. Uh, how do you, if, if you're, if you've dismissed the option of being able to say to someone, you seem very lovely, but I don't

want to ever see you again, which in a sense is, is fantastic because you're able to cut down on all of this, all these social expectations and commitments. I think a lot of people are just drowning in coffee invitations, cocktail invitations. Let's do this. Let's do that. If you're, if you're trying to practice this more moderate honesty, uh, how do you think of handling in a place like New York city in particular, where you have endless options? I don't know. I need your advice on that. I am, I am terrible at it. I mean, I will tell people the truth, which is right now, I am so overwhelmed that I don't have time for basic hygiene and that they wouldn't want to hang out with me anyway, because I smell and I've got yellow teeth. And that is the truth.

So maybe that's my best answer. but yeah, it's a tough one. The best I've been able to figure out, this was actually something I borrowed from, I'm not going to mention him by name because I don't know if you'd want this to be public, but a very well-known tech investor, billionaire tech investor in Silicon Valley, who's always been very generous with his time. And we'd met up a number of times and I asked him if he'd be open to grabbing dinner. And I wasn't vague about it because I think at this point in my life, I've learned like, let's hang out isn't good enough for someone who has that. So many demands on their time.

So it was like, I'd love to meet up to chat about this, this and this, only if you have time. But we'd had dinner a number of times in the past. And he said, I would love to, but I'm taking a meeting vacation. And so I started applying this to everything. I was like, oh, that's brilliant because it's not personalized. It's not, I can't do it, Tim Ferriss, because I don't like you. It's no, I'm not doing any meetings. He said, I'm not doing any meetings. I'm actually doing no phone calls. I'm just responding to things via email because that's the only way I can manage my schedule right now. And it was so generalized

that I felt totally fine with it. So I started applying that to anything I didn't want to do. I'm taking a conference call vacation. I'm taking a meeting vacation. I'm taking a fill in the blank vacation and also began putting that in my autoresponders so that I didn't feel obligated. A couple of those. You've most certainly got, everyone gets a lot of those from me. I love that. You can be angry when you're taking a vacation. Everyone needs a vacation. Everyone needs a vacation.

Well, and it is interesting. Yeah, another thing that I do is, and some people don't approve of this. You may not. But if I'm totally swamped and someone asks me out to lunch, then I say, what would you think about a Skype lunch where we both order in food and we have lunch and we get to talk to each other, we get to see each other, but we don't have to schlep. We don't have to like waste time. We don't have to get the waiter for the check.

And I'd say 30% of people are offended, but 70% are willing to try. And I found it very useful. Skype lunch. Skype lunch. I've never tried that. Skype dinner, Skype breakfast, whatever you want. And I did it once where this guy was tech savvy and he had a background of us in a cafe like in paris so it was very nice i see you had your own uh lady and the tramp moment virtually that's that sounds very i don't know whether i was lady or the tramp or both you could be both uh there were a couple of bullets

we in preparation for this because i've so i'm very familiar with a lot of your work. I've read, I think, all of your books up to this point. I gotcha. about a few and I feel like some of these we have maybe touched on briefly but I wanted to revisit being kind to your older self can you explain what this means yeah this was I learned this while doing the health book yeah and the idea was I think it was it was a Yale professor. I forget his name, but Egonomics, I think is what he called it. And the idea was when they do experiments and they remind people that they are going to be around in 20 years, people make more responsible decisions. Financially, they invest more in their 401k.

And also health-wise, they act more responsibly. So, I thought this was fascinating. So, I took it, and I took just a selfie, and I digitally aged it on one of those apps. And so, I now look, I've got this weird, I look like I have a skin disease, but it's me at like 82. And I printed it out and put it over my desk. And that older AJ is always looking down and saying, you know, treat me well, treat, remember, treat me like you would treat a friend and, you know, just don't eat that fourth oatmeal cookie, you know, just, and get on that treadmill. So I find that, I find it very inspiring and motivating. And is it something that you're able to continually notice or do you tune it out

after a while? This is a challenge that I've had with certain reminders. So I have a quote, for instance, from Marcus Aurelius on my refrigerator in San Francisco. And it's about not being, trying to regain the harmony as quickly as possible, et cetera, et cetera. It's one of these very Marcus Aurelius type quotes. And there are a number of them around my house, but I will occasionally schedule rotating of the quote or even location because otherwise it just becomes part of the scenery and I don't notice it. So I love that. And I was, I have the exact same thing. Like if you leave it in the same place, you're going to forget about what I do is I make it part of my rotating screensaver. So that, okay, this makes sense. So that it pops up every, you know, couple of days and then,

oh yeah, I should. But you're totally right. We are so good at tuning things out that have been there. Necessarily, right? I mean, it's evolutionarily, it's like, all right, if there's a piece of furniture, I don't need to have some type of acute fight or flight intensity level observation of it because it's clearly not having a direct impact on my survival. And I had that same experience with photos. I had a screensaver that was a photo of my family, totally tuned it out after three days. So I started rotating photos to remind myself, Oh yeah, we did do a fun thing there. And you know, it's not all, uh, tantrums and tantrums and debates over Mexican food. Exactly. What else have you

continued to do from Drop Dead Healthy? I still do love the treadmill desks. I made my own. I didn't buy the fancy one, but I do find it energizing. And I only walk like one and a half two miles per hour when I'm writing or answering emails but I find if I'm sitting in front of a computer I am tempted to just like rest my head on the space bar and fall asleep so you can't do that when you're on a treadmill. So I do like that. And I also still like the competition. Some people are not motivated by this, but I am like getting friends, making sure that I get to 10,000 steps or my friends can mock me,

that they can see there's like a leaderboard and that they can... What do you use for that right now in terms of sharing that with them? I have been, uh, use, I like hooked up my Fitbit to my Apple health. It was complicated.

It took, it took a while to figure it out. So I'm, how do you encourage your friends to mock you if you don't get 10,000? Are they the type of friends who don't need much instruction in the mocking department? Yeah. I'm trying to think I used to, it's been a while, but this great writer who wrote the Henrietta Lacks book, do you remember? Oh, right. Sure, sure, sure.

Anyway, she is great and also very, so I think you just got to find the people who- Are most adept at mockery. I am motivated by mockery. Some people are not. So there's a story that I've told quite a bit because I think that it's very practical in a lot of ways and that there are variations of this but I'd like you to tell probably the more accurate version because I feel like I get details of this wrong when I retell it. Blackmailing yourself. Yeah, I would so honor.

Let's talk about the KKK. All right, let's talk about the KKK, which I do not support, just to get that out there right up front. But I've watched many of your talks and in a couple of them you mentioned that. Very flattering, thank you. This of them you mentioned that. Very flattering. Thank you.

This is an idea by that same Yale professor, and his idea was if you want to quit something or you want to stop doing a terrible behavior, then you can blackmail yourself. Is this the same Yale professor who ended up later or currently being involved with stick.com? Yes. I believe that's right s-t-i-c-k-k.com where this is built into sort of the mechanics of how the site works exactly okay it's the this is where you choose the anti-charity it's the anti-charity it's sort of yeah in this case

you took it to a different you took it to the next level well i was excuse me i was uh doing the health book and i was eating all of these dried mangoes because they sort of have the veneer of health because they're fruit, but really they're just sugar. They're just so much sugar. So I knew I had to quit. So I arranged it. I said to my wife, if I eat another dried mango, then I'm instructing you now, you have to do this, you have to send a $100 check to the KKK. And it was so effective, it was crazy. Because just the thought of that check going out made me physically ill. And I was able to quit cold turkey. So, and he talks about people smoking use this, uh, strategy and yeah. Have you ever tried it? I have tried the anti-charity and it's incredible.

I've also done this with betting because I think that for instance, if you have a betting pool with five people who have a certain goal, Let's just say that's body recomposition. So they're each getting, this is actually a real example from a friend of mine who recently lost 40 or 50 pounds. They're each getting DEXA scans. So these scans that'll indicate body fat percentage and muscle mass and so on every, let's just call it two weeks or something like that, which is actually surprisingly inexpensive. It's like 30, 40 bucks. And whoever has the most successful recomposition of their body by the end would get the pot. And each person I think was putting in a hundred dollars. And so it was $500 total, but people will, I don't think it's the $500 that gets people to lose the weight in this case, lose fat. I think

that it is the two things, the, the social mockery and a grab assing and ball busting in this case, lose fat. I think that it is the two things, the, the social mockery and, uh, a grab assing and ball busting in this case is five guys. And it is the losing of a hundred dollars. It's the loss aversion, I think more than the prospect of gaining. So I, I've, this is one of the many issues that I suppose I take with the 43rd place gets a gold star. Every everyone's a winner. We should only focus on positive reinforcement, uh,

sort of fetishizing of the padding on the head in the U S at least where I think the, the, the stick instead of the carrot and like the shame and humiliation and all of these, all of these things that are thought of as, as negative are actually really, really useful tools.

If you recognize how, uh, how ingrained they are as incentives in human beings. It's just, I find it very useful. I mean, you've got to be careful not to crush someone's ego. So they curl up in a fetal position.

Right. So it's a fine line, but, uh, but good natured, uh, sticks, I's a fine line, but, uh, but good natured, uh, sticks, I think,

you know, like, uh, soft, maybe, uh, you know, nerf sticks,

I think are, are incredibly helpful. Uh, so this is one that I may have read about before. It didn't ring a bell. Uh, the, a trip to Jerry Falwell's church.

Oh, yes. Well, this is when I was writing the Bible. And I send you this in the context of just the joy of being a mentor. And I can say that because this guy, my mentee, my protege, has far surpassed me in success. His name is Kevin Roos, and he was a writer for the New York Times and New York Magazine. Now he's at Fusion, and he's written a couple of great books. But I met him because I was writing my book on the Bible. He was a freshman at my alma mater, Brown University,

and he wrote me a very funny letter saying he wanted to be a writer. So immediately that's a good lesson. Like just the chutzpah, I call it a strategic chutzpah. Just writing out of the blue. Instead of going through alumni relations, he just wrote me out of the blue. I want to be a writer. I'll work for you for free while I'm a writer. I do remember this part.

So that I was like, you know, I was already impressed. And at the time I was trying to follow all the rules of the Bible and the Bible actually in the old Testament, slavery is, is fine. So I was really struggling with how do I deal with that in my life? Because obviously slavery, not so fine, not so legal, thank God. So, I said, the closest thing to slavery in my life is an internship. So, if you can come and be my intern and let me call you my biblical slave, then let's do it. So, he's like, I'm in. And he was great, so proactive. And then as a thank you, I took him on one of the trips I made for that book where I was going around trying to see

how different people interpreted the Bible literally. And I took him to Jerry Falwell's church and he was fascinated. He was like, this is amazing. This is like an alternate universe. I live in a bubble. I wanna, what if I transferred from Brown, the most liberal college in the United States, to Liberty College, which is one of the most conservative, where you can't watch an R-rated movie. You get in trouble for, you can't, like, holding hands with someone of the opposite sex is like, you know, that's for voting. So I was like, that's an interesting idea. And I said,

encouraged him to write a proposal and I helped him a bit and hooked him up with an agent and he did it. And he went and got the book contract, wrote a great book, which is great, not just because it's interesting, but because it's very nuanced. And he shows that these are people and that there are benefits to this way of life. And so it's not, he didn't villainize them. And anyway, I thought that that was fantastic. So just this idea of being a mentor gives gives so much pleasure i think it's uh you know in one way it's a waste of time but in another way it's just and it's also from a very practical point of view it's paid off like now he's so much smarter than me and more connected with the internet that he

can help me what if we look at, uh, your toolkit and set of rules, you have done a lot of experiments for many, many different things. If, if you were trying to give someone who is say about to get married recommendations for marriage and parenting, If you had to be as not somber, but as serious as possible, what would the real advice be? Well, a couple of things come to mind. One is, you know, the cliche, don't go to bed angry. I fully disagree with that. I go to bed angry all the time. And I find it so helpful because my wife gets cranky at night. If I tried to argue it out with her, she would be furious. Neither of us would get sleep. It would be a disaster. You go to sleep, you wake up in

the morning, you have a fresh perspective, you can talk about it rationally. And I do that with my kids too. Like we start to get an argument, I say, you know what, let's cool down. Let's think about this. I'm not forgetting about this argument, but let's reconvene in a few hours. So I actually, I do like that. So don't go, do go to bed angry is my first suggestion. Another one is from my wife's stepdad who died recently, but he said when we were getting married, I thought he gave very good advice. He said, you both think, you're both going to think that you're doing like 70% of the work in the marriage and you're both wrong, you know? So just be aware of how much the other person is doing and you're taking for granted. And for one of my experiments, the one I said where I tried to be the best husband,

one of the things we did was we wrote a list of everything she does in our lives around the house and everything I do. I honestly thought it was going to be about 50-50. And it was like 80 her and 20 me. So it was a very humbling experience. It was in one sense terrible because now she realizes too how little I did. So it's made my life worse in one sense, but it's also, it was very revelatory. And I got to see, you know, like the, the little, um, liquid soap thing. I, I just figured they refilled themselves. It was like a self-cleaning oven or something, but I was like, oh yeah, someone has to do that. So, so be aware of how much the other person is doing,

even if you, you don't see it, you know, it's the, you're, it's the comfort, you know it's the you're it's the comfort you know what the uh whatever bias is you're not seeing it so you're not aware of it what can i just pop that back at you and ask you what what you would suggest to someone going into a relationship uh i i think this is probably above my pay grade given that uh i've not yet decided how I feel about marriage or gained much clarity related to marriage. But, you know, I think I would give the advice that Amanda Palmer, the musician, received from a mentor of hers.

And for any type of conflict resolution, say less. I think that would be the starting point. Just say less. I like that. Because my inclination, and I think that my entire family is, much of my family is this way. Certainly my brother is this way.

The desire to be right sometimes overrides the pragmatic road to being effective. Yeah. At least with, uh, my brother and I can both get kind of righteously indignant and that does not help with conflict resolution. It turns out.

So I would say say less. I've become better at that. I love, and that there are a couple of things that come to mind, phrases like I've heard, you can be right or you can be married, but not both, which I think is a good one. And then I asked some 80 year old guy who would have been married for 50 years,

what his secret is. And he said, tooth marks on the tongue. That's the secret to a happy marriage. Just bite your tongue, bite it, bite it, bite it. Oh, that's funny. There's some funny bits of advice that I've heard thrown around. I'm not saying this is the advice I would give. I also talked to a friend, his soon to be, who was it? It was not his father-in-law. It was not his direct father-in-law, but he was about to get married literally the day of the wedding. And I think it was the grandfather from the old

country, like Poland or somewhere grabbed him. And he's like, let's take a walk. I took him for a walk and he said, this is all you need to know. He goes, only professionals, only on the road. So I'll let people figure that out for themselves. But yeah, some, some great relationship advice out there. Uh, other advice I would give would be know what you need to work on and ideally find someone who's really good at what you need to work on. Um, because I do think at least for me, the, the, there's a complimentary polarity that needs to exist for a relationship to have any longevity. And, uh, it's a, it's a complimentary polarity that needs to exist for a relationship to have any longevity. And,

uh, it's a, it's a, it's a complimentary set of skills, but those could overlap very much with attributes, just God given or nature given predispositions. Uh, and then the,

you know, something that I don't know if I've ever written about, but I've noticed for a lot of relationships, and this goes for heteronormative or homosexual, it goes for anything sexual as far as I can tell, at least in many cases, that if you were to imagine a sliding scale and you have 100%, and this is going to get people up in a tizzy no matter how I phrase it, so I'm going to try to state it simply. 100% what we would consider feminine attributes on one end of the scale, and then 100% masculine attributes at the other end of the scale. And in the middle, you have perfect androgyny. Just a complete, perfect 50-50 androgyny in all respects. Right. Physical, mental, emotional, and otherwise, that wherever

you are on the slider, you will be most attracted to and have the most longevity. Well, actually, I should not say longevity. You'll be most attracted to and perhaps most compatible with someone who is the opposite. So if you are, say, 70% male attributes or masculine attributes, 30% feminine attributes, then you will be most attracted to someone who is 70% feminine attributes, 30% masculine attributes. And that, that sort of equal polarity from the center 50, 50 perfect androgyny seems to work pretty well. And that when you find someone who generally, and this is just very abstract speculation on my part, but it seems to be the case when you see people who are,

say overlap too much in, on one side of that spectrum, very rarely works. And from what I've observed, very, very rarely. So that's not so much advice, but maybe a conceptual framework for thinking about. Yeah, that's interesting. I was trying to apply it to my own marriage to see if I lined up. And I think actually 70-30 is about where I am. Maybe 65, 35. I don't know.

Different people would say lower. So those are some of my passing thoughts. Excellent ones. Working on it. Yeah, this is something I'm working on a lot. I'm hoping to have a number of people on the podcast to discuss these types of questions as their parallel would be one,

their handful of others. Have you had Dan Savage on the pod? I haven't, you know, he would be another, he would be, he would be another mind to pick on this. And he's been recommended to,

to quite a few, uh, by quite a few, uh, listeners of mine as well. Um, so it's, it's,

uh, so I was chatting with a friend of mine. I don't know if you've spent any time with Neil Strauss before. I have. All right. So, so Neilil eight time new york times best-selling author he's one of those guys who never gets writer's block who makes me crazy but he wrote a piece recently i think it was for rolling stone and it's something like the age of fear but the point i might be getting the headline wrong but it the basic premise was that we've never lived in safer times and yet everyone is more afraid than they've, more fearful than they've ever been. So for a while,

you wrote a column for, I guess it was Mental Floss. Yes. Can I just say one thing about Neil Strauss that I love? Is that he is so generous with his ideas. And this is something I've come around to. Like, you know, he gave me two or three book ideas. I never pursued them, but they're good book ideas. Like he had one where he said, you should just, you know what? It's kind of similar to your podcast. You should find the best, the Michael Jordan of everything

and learn their secrets and then write a book. It's kind of tool for tightening. That's kind of exactly what I did. Yeah. That's hilarious. I didn't realize that. But I love the idea of being generous with your ideas. Because when I first started my career, I was so paranoid. I wouldn't, people say, what are you working on? Oh, I can't tell you. Even though it was like, you know, it was probably some lame thing that no one's going to steal. And if they did steal it, so what? It's all about execution. So, this is a crazy story. This is, I'm much older than you. So, when I very first started, I got out of college, there were still libraries and that's where you would go to research things. And I was doing a book on,

it was like a joke book on the eerie similarities between Jesus and Elvis because Elvis had said that he was, he believed he was the second coming. And I was so paranoid that I went to the two different libraries. So I went to one to get books about Elvis and one to get books about him. You don't want anybody to put two and two together. Yeah, is that insane, the level of delusion there?

Like, who cares? And now I feel telling people my ideas, the positives outweigh the negatives, that you meet people who are interesting, who can help you or expand the idea. I don't know if you know Adam Monsbach, who wrote, go the, I don't know, are you loud? Do you want the E on this or no?

Go the F to sleep. Oh, no. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, you loud? Do you want the E on this or no? Go the F to sleep. Oh, no. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, no, we have lots of cursing on this show. It's deliberately not Falwell compliant. So, yes, go the fuck to sleep. Brilliant. Yeah.

Brilliant, brilliant, which became a huge bestseller because it got leaked, as far as I can tell, as a PDF among people in the publishing world. Oh, that's so interesting. That's part of how it became a huge bestseller because it got leaked as far as I can tell as a PDF among people in the publishing world. Oh, that's so interesting. That's part of, part of how it became a huge bestseller. Well, that's similar to, because he had put it up as a Facebook, uh, update, like as a joke, he said, I'm going to write a book called go after sleep. And, and people are like, you should do that. So the idea of sharing and being out there with your ideas, um, uh, that's, I've been a big change in my career.

So just to touch on that, because I think it's really important ideas. Neil Strauss does this, although when he is working on something, he is tremendously paranoid about it. Interesting. When he's already committed to writing something, I've known Neil forever and he still will not,

he's afraid of letting out the meme. But I do think these are two different things. Once you've fully committed to doing something, and when you're testing the waters, I think are two distinct phases. But I remember when I was proofreading his book, Emergency, number one, the only reason he let me write about it, or rather read it,

was because he wouldn't tell me what he was writing about. He wouldn't tell me, he wouldn't tell me. And I just threw out this Hail Mary. And I said, what is this? Some five flag stuff, which is very sort of insider terminology for all sorts of kind of prepper survivalist, multiple passport communities.

And his eyes got about the size of a dinner plate. And he said, what have you heard? What have you heard? And then he would give me printed out like 15 to 20 pages at a time to proofread. And then I would have to give those back before I could have the next set. I love it.

Were they color-coded? They were not color-coded. Although I'm sure knowing Neil, there's probably some type of identification, like serial numbers on them. But he is very generous with his ideas until he decides where he's going to go all in. And Kevin Rose, very close friend of mine, serial entrepreneur, extremely successful investor, does the same thing. And Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, one of my favorite people out there. I think he's probably the real world most interesting man in the world. You know, a technology futurist who spends time with the Amish almost every year

to determine how they accept and vet technology. I mean, fascinating guy. He also tries to give away or kill as many of his own ideas as possible. And if he can't give them away, he can't kill them, and they stick with him, and he alone, then those are the ideas he considers pursuing. So in a way, giving ideas away is one of his filters for determining what he should work on. Because he is a man of a lot of ideas.

He might have 20 different project ideas. The ones he can't give away, when that group overlaps with, or I should say rather, when you combine the ones he can't give away with the ones that he can't kill because he can't find flaws in them, some fatal flaw,

those are the projects he ends up pursuing. That's so interesting. I love that. Yeah. So we were talking about earlier on being grateful for the little things. Right. And then Neil came up because he wrote this Rolling Stone piece on the, the age of fear and how everyone's terrified and thinks that the world is

going to hell in a handbasket and every possible respect. But objectively things seem pretty good. Oh yeah. And I totally believe that. And, and there's that great Steven Pinker book, the better angels of our nature, which traces the history of violence and how we are in the safest time ever, even with the horrors of the 20th century wars. And, yeah, and I, there was a great magazine called Mental Floss that just folded a month ago, but they still have a web presence. And I wrote a monthly column. I can't remember. I wanted to call it The Good Old Days Sucked,

but I don't think it ended up being called that. But the premise was we have this nostalgia. Wait, Modern Problems? Oh, yeah, exactly, Modern Problems. There we go. You are, see, you're better than me. I just happened to read your Wikipedia more recently, I think, than you did. Yeah. So the idea was every month I would take a different topic and show how horrible life used

to be and how grateful we should be. You know, not all of us, there are still people in other countries and even in our country living in horrible conditions. But if you're lucky enough, we live in by far the best times. And there's so many examples. The first one I think was on medicine. And the one that came, the one I talked about in the first paragraph, I believe, was the smoke enema, the tobacco enema, which is, you know the phrase, blow smoke up your ass? Yeah. Like that was a literal thing. It came because they would have a hose and a pump and they would shoot tobacco up your butt because they believed that it was good for your stomach and good for your health. Okay, this might explain something that I've been trying to figure out for a few years now.

So a friend of mine sent me a photograph of the menu of a whorehouse in like the early 1800s. And it was like, blowjob, $2, you know, whatever. This type of sex, $3. This type of sex, $1. And then it had smoke up the ass, $30. And I was like, wait a second. I want to know what the smoke up the ass is about. I was very curious because it's like, what was the, but maybe this was actually like the medicinal option on the venue. Exactly. It was like, that is fascinating. How did something so highly prized come to be

associated with deceitful flattery, blowing smoke up your face? Yeah, it is. It's a weird segue. I don't know what to make of that. All right, so the tobacco enema back in the day. So, yeah, I'm sure you can still find it. I'm sure there's someone out there if you Google it. Oh, you know what else to be thankful? If you ever for feeling down, I would Google the words surgery without anesthesia and read the first person accounts of people who had surgery. And it is just, oh my God, it is just. Does not sound appealing or pleasant in the least.

No, it was great. Yeah. This one woman wrote one and it was just, you know, I couldn't sleep for days. So even when I'm going to the hospital for a procedure, I'm like, all right, at least we got anesthesia. So it has made my life better, this idea. And, uh, yeah, people out there, you can definitely find Neil's piece on this as well, which I think is a good, it's a good recalibration. Yeah. I remember something was really bothering me. Uh,

I was, maybe I ran across something about ISIS drowning people in cages or, or burning people alive. Both of which are of course, horrible, horrible, horrible things. And I was having a conversation with someone I won't mention,

but very, very famous, uh, and successful technologist. And he said, horrible, horrible things. And I was having a conversation with someone I won't mention, but very, very famous and successful technologist. And he said, well, he's like all terrible, but thank God we're not in the middle ages. He's like, broadly speaking, humanity would be much worse off than we are right now with, with these edge cases. Absolutely. And, and on that theme, you can also Google Louis C.K. on Conan. I think it's something like, everything is great and everyone's miserable. Yes. All right, so as long as we're doing stand-up, I was not going to mention this, but I will because I think it's so hilarious.

Living in San Francisco, I get overdosed on San Francisco sometimes. And there may be a place for this. So people out there who are aficionados try not to freak out and just laugh at yourselves or laugh at this because I think it's pretty funny. Patton Oswalt, it's one of my favorite comedians, has this piece where he opens in effect saying, you know, if one of my Whole Foods friends lectures me one more time on home births, I'm going to punch all the soy on the planet. And he goes on to talk about, and I'm not going to do it justice, but he's like, you know what women were dreaming about on the frontier when they were like squatting

on the mud in a shack giving birth? Hospitals, these amazing sterile environments where you didn't have to worry about the Wolverine sneaking in and stealing the afterbirth. And I want people to listen to it because I think it's so good i love that uh yeah it's easy to romanticize it is so and the good old days when in fact the good old days were very frequently terrible terrible the terrible old days and actually that brings to mind when i was researching the bible uh there is a line in the Bible where God says, because of Eve eating the apple, women shall have pain in childbirth. And when anesthesia for childbirth was first introduced, there were some super religious people who were like, oh no, we can't have that. Women have to suffer. And so thank God I, my wife, she was like, give me that drug. Give it to me now. There was no chance she was going to do it naturally.

How did you choose your projects? I mean, these, these are big projects, book projects, very time consuming. What are, what are some of the, and maybe this is a way to edge into it, what are some of the ideas you came close to doing that you ended up not doing? Yeah, well, there was the Kama Sutra, which my wife put the kibosh on. I think the answer, maybe not the most surprising, but I have to be totally passionate about it because it can't just be something that I think will be popular. It has to be something that I am super excited about because like you, you know, I commit to these things and maybe not to the level of Tim Ferriss, but I do. I go in. I go in hard.

You do. I try. I try to of Tim Ferriss, but I do, I go in, I go in hard. Oh no, you do, you do. I try, I try to be Tim Ferriss. You're my, I am the less successful, less famous. Oh,

stop it already. But, How many bestsellers you've had? Four. You're ahead of me, Val. Not in terms of quantity. But yeah,

I would say there's that. And if it makes me laugh, I once talked to a Daily Show writer about his writing process. And he said one of the most important things to him was that he could surprise himself while he was writing. And I love that idea, just being able to surprise yourself. And I feel that same way about big ideas. You have to be like, when you come up with the idea, you'd be like, oh man, I love that idea. Like you amuse yourself.

Or just going, huh, like, hmm. When that happens, I've tried to become better at that because I've noticed that BJ Novak, who's a fantastic writer and excellent, of course, actor and everything else, producer, well-known for The Office and many other things. But he, Scott Adams as well, creator of Dilbert, really pay a lot of attention to the kinesthetic sort of body response to what they're writing. And so I've tried to really, really hone in on paying more attention to that as I'm writing or drafting or brainstorming or anything. That's so interesting you say that, because I've never

talked about this, but when I'm writing and I write something that I think might be funny, I can tell there's sort of a little ping in the back of my head, like a little dopamine rush. And yeah, I do try to pay attention to that. That's so interesting. I never, never verbalized it. Um, and then just the idea I do love, like I think you do is taking, uh, an idea and just pushing it to its logical extreme, just reductio ad absurdum. So like, you know, when I first read about outsourcing and I was like, well, this is cool. How can I push this to the extreme? How can I outsource every single thing in the world? And that's how I came up's power and it's humor. Uh, why? So you were saying, I have to be really excited about it. I have to, on some level, maybe find it funny. Why genealogy? Not something that people generally think of as knee slapping.

It's true. Well, genealogy is a thing. Yeah. I try not to use that word. I say family history. That sounds, there we go. we go or connections or uh but this came about because a couple of years ago i was uh at my desk i got an email from a guy and he said you don't know me but i'm your 12th cousin and i thought okay next comes he's going to say please wire ten thousand dollars to my near nigerian bank account but he didn't. And I looked into it more and he's one of this group of people, they're researchers and scientists and geneticists who are building a family tree, the biggest family tree ever, the biggest possible family tree ever of every human on earth, connecting everyone on earth in one family tree. And I was like, that is a bold, crazy idea. I love it. So that's how I dove into it. And it's crazy, you know, as I say, there are two ways you do it with DNA,

but one way is on the internet where you, almost a Wikipedia-like model, where thousands, millions of people are working on the same big family tree. So I'm on this tree, which now has a hundred million people. And one of the fun things that will take up like a week of your life is you can figure out how you're related to almost anyone else. Like Barack Obama, for instance, this is true, is my fifth great aunt's husband's brother's wife's seventh great nephew. So we're pretty close. I'm sure when he's out of office soon he'll be hanging with me so i loved this idea it's like six degrees of of kevin bacon but everyone is kevin bacon uh and and i became entranced and i decided this is my next book uh and for your listeners actually it has

very practical implications because we like practical here on the Tim Ferriss show. Yeah, this is a, this is a, this is a tool I believe for Titans or, or non Titans, but it is, it's like the greatest social network ever. It's like LinkedIn on steroids because I was trying, I threw an event of trying to hold the biggest family reunion ever and I needed publicity. So I would find a reporter or a TV producer. I would figure out how I was related to them.

I would send them an email and say, listen, this may sound weird, but you are my seventh cousin, three times removed husband's son. So we're family. Would you do a favor for a cousin and write about my project? And I'd say 20% of the time, they were freaked out and stopped stalking me. But 80% of the time, they were intrigued. They were like, really?

We're cousins? Oh, that's so interesting. And I got more publicity that way than anything. What was the subject line? Do you remember what the subject line might've been? I think it was... From AJ, your relative? Yeah, from AJ, your distant cousin. For my book about it, I wanted to interview George H.W. Bush, because he's got this huge family. So I emailed his chief of staff and

I was like, you know, uh, and she said, Oh, we're, he's not doing interviews. And I said, well, but I am a cousin. She's like, Oh, well, you're a cousin. I guess we can make an exception. And I was able to go down and interview him. So until for, for another like three years, this will work. And then everyone will realize, Oh wait, everyone's cousins. So until for, for another like three years, this will work and then everyone will realize, Oh wait, everyone's cousins. So, uh, but I highly recommend it as a strategy for now. Gotta make it, gotta make it count while you can. Right. Uh, why did you decide to do a podcast? Yes, I am. Now, and have you, so a number of fans of yours and mine said they loved your audiobooks. Oh, that's nice.

And have you, I, God, you know, this, we might not need to edit this out if this is not the right anecdote, but I could swear that you told me at some point that you went in to record your audio book and the people at the studio, God, I want to say this was you. They said, well, you seem to have a cold, so why don't you come back when you don't have a cold? Is this the right story? No, that's hilarious. But you know what? It might well have been. I don't trust my memory, so I have... Well, one of my friends, at least, who has gone on, you or somebody else, and he went in to record his audio book, and he was so excited. And they went on to be hugely successful.

And he recorded for 10 minutes, and the producer in the studio was like, you know what? Let's take a break, and why don't we have you come in in a few days when your cold is over?, let's take a break and why don't we have you come in a few days when your cold is over? And he's like, no, I don't have a cold. This is just what I sound like. I love it. I know. I have an odd voice. I have an odd voice. It hasn't hindered me too much. No, I'm not saying you have an odd voice. I was bringing it up because I thought that it was from you. But I love that. Well, I will tell you when I recorded my audio book, I apparently had a very active stomach. And so it was growling a lot.

So I had to do a lot of retakes and I was apologizing to the producers. And they said, no, no, to everyone that happened to everyone. And they, in fact, had a file of all these famous authors, like body sounds, like Susan Sontag's farts or whatever. And I was like, you got to put that out. Like that would be the most awesome album, famous people's bodily functions. But I don't think they did. So anyway.

So the podcast, I took us off the rails. Yeah, the podcast I'm very excited about. It's called Twice Removed. And it's sort of an interview show mixed with hardcore history, mixed with a game show. So it's an odd mix. And the idea is we take a notable person, and then we go through their family history

and find the most interesting, inspirational stories, and then talk about those. And then at the end, we introduced them to a cousin they didn't know they had. So it's sort of this like surprise ending. And it could be someone like that, their hero, maybe their mentor. It could be, you know, an ex-girlfriend. It could be, it could be anyone. We haven't done that yet, but. Current wife. Yeah, exactly. You are wives.

You are cousins with your spouse. But yeah, no, I, and it's being produced by Gimlet, who did Startup, which I'm sure, because you're friends with Chris Saka. And so, yeah, Startup, which I'm sure, because you're friends with Chris Saka. And so, yeah, Startup, which is, as you might know, your listeners might know, it's like it was a podcast about starting a podcast company.

Very meta. So they are doing it and they are amazing because they are, they're all like This American life, uh, alums. And so they are just so good at editing and crafting the story and music. And I, I know nothing about it. So it's been a fascinating learning experience and learning also how to tell stories in an audio way, which is, which is different. And, uh, so I've, I've found it, uh, it's fascinating. It's been, uh, uh, we'll see, we'll see how it does, but I'm, I'm excited. Yeah. They have a really good team. I mean, Alex, uh, Bloomberg, he's actually,

he's also in tools of Titans, really, really good at asking questions because he's, he's, he records really long tape and is good at eliciting emotion and the stories specifically like you said from interview subjects and he he gives me i'm sure since you interviewed him like yeah the silence he's like brilliant at using the silence just like waiting letting the silence do the work oh yeah yeah he's really really good and uh they've had a whole string of really successful shows i mean reply all mystery, they've had a whole string of really successful shows. I mean, reply all mystery show. They've had a very, very consistent hit rate. So, uh, I will be, I will be certainly checking that out. And, uh, and we actually had one that's sort of related to some of the stuff you do. We had, um, Abby Jacobson who's on broad city, she's a hilarious comedian. But one of her ancestors was this entrepreneur, a woman entrepreneur.

So we did like a whole segment on female entrepreneurs through history, including Betsy Ross. Like we all think of her just like sewing the flag. But apparently she was like a, she had like a team. She was a titan. Yeah. And same with JFK's great-grandma came over and opened a button shop. And the Kennedys would not have existed if she hadn't been an entrepreneur and funded her kids' education. And then they, whatever, got into liquor. And then that spawned the political dynasty.

The gateway to all good things so you are of course going to be promoting the podcast you've promoted books in the past done various types of pr and marketing uh one of the bullets that I wanted to talk about was, and this is in your voice, but how I learned to love marketing. Because a lot of, a lot of authors, a lot of artists certainly think of marketing as a sullying their hands with the, the dirty work of commercialism or, uh, a, an evil to be avoided. avoided. So how did you learn to? I did, well, you know, partly inspired by Tim Ferriss, but partly it was, I reframed marketing and tried to think of it not as the sullying my art, but as something that could be creative in its own right. And part of this was I interviewed the artist Christo, you know, the guy who wraps islands and the gates in Central Park, a really interesting guy. And he was working on this one project for 24 years. He was trying to

put up these gates in Central Park, these Central Park, these curtains and arches in Central Park, like 10,000 orange arches. And he had to deal with city bureaucracy for 24 years. So I asked him, you know, God, that must have been so frustrating. And he said, well, yes and no. He said, I actually see dealing with the bureaucracy and as part of my art is like all part of one big art project. So I don't separate it from the actual designing of the pieces. And I was like, that's an interesting way to look at it. So I tried to apply that to marketing. And instead of seeing it as this horrible pain in the ass, like, what can I do that's creative with it? And one of the things when I was doing the year of living biblically, for instance, I was like, how can I section this off so I can appeal to like 50 different audiences. So I wrote a piece for a

music magazine about music in the Bible. I did for Glamour magazine, I wrote sex advice in the Bible because there's a good amount of sex in the Bible. And it was actually, it was very interesting. I became a fan of this way of thinking as opposed to being, and the same thing with speeches. I used to hate giving speeches, but like we said before, the whole fake it till you make it, I forced myself to do every speech I could. And now I just, you know, I love, I actually, I'm not a fan of sitting down in front of the keyboard, but I'd much rather be on stage talking. Well, that's part of the dangerous siren song of marketing.

So when I was working on Tools of Titans, I used a program called Scrivener to put together my books. And I've done that for the last three books. And there's a, I had a working file, which was marketing ideas. And I found it was very dangerous to have that within a stone's throw of my writing because it was always easier to, or more enjoyable for me to work on the marketing ideas and put off the actual work of writing. So it had marketing ideas and I modified the file name. So it was marketing ideas dash focus on writing in all caps, exclamation points. That's it. Now, if you had to rank the different parts of your job

in terms of enjoyment that they give you, what would you say? Well, it's funny enough, this last book was the first one that I've enjoyed writing. I enjoy, I love doing what I'm doing right now, which is my favorite part of writing without the writing, the interviewing. I love the interviewing and the researching. I do doing right now, which is my favorite part of writing without the writing, the interviewing. I love the interviewing and the researching.

I do, I do enjoy the experimentation, but those sometimes go sideways as you and I both know. So those don't always turn out as intended or hoped. Uh, and then the probably historically would have been marketing and then the writing. Uh,

but the, the writing was right there. I would say if not at par with the marketing, maybe even ahead of it this time around. And what do you think that was? Was it the topic or did you discover some half to enjoying writing? There were a few things. enjoyment, and assimilation of, this is kind of meta, but absorbing the lessons and recommendations of the people I interviewed as I was editing and reviewing and taking multiple passes on these chapters.

Interesting. So I was actually incorporating a lot of the... What's an example? Do you remember one? Sure. Oh, yeah. I was, I ended up having a routine where for instance, I did, I used a barrel sauna with the exact same specs as Rick Rubin, who recommended it to me and alternated that with cold exposure at specific times of the day, just like Wim Hof would. And in the mornings I would listen to say a guided meditation from Tara Brock,

specifically the 2010 summer smile meditation, which Maria Popova recommended to me. So I started incorporating and then I would take say exogenous ketones, which are these powdered synthetic ketones, which Dominic D'Agostino had recommended to me. So all of these bits and pieces from the actual chapters became part of my daily routine for working on the chapters, which is kind of wild. And then there's the deeper kind of philosophical stuff. I was writing this mostly over the summer and early fall. And there were

a few people in the book, like BJ Miller, who's a palliative care physician, who's helped more than a thousand people die. Ed Cook, a cook memory champion who taught you might remember a book called moonwalking with einstein yeah so ed cook is who is the the memory champion slash coach who taught in this case i think it was joshua for yeah those four brothers both amazing writers uh three of you know they're three that's right so to become national membrane champion in the U S in one year. So Ed cook and BJ Miller both use stargazing as a way to reduce anxiety. And they both have particular ways that they go about it. So, so I did that every night, uh, before going to bed and it just went on and on and on. So I think that the subject matter itself had a huge

impact on the writing of the book, which was unexpected in a way. Yeah. That's helpful. Yeah. And the marketing at this point for me is fun because I try to make it fun in the sense that I very often ask myself, how can I make the launch itself PR worthy? If that makes sense. Right. And that forces me to do sometimes absurd things. And even if some of the absurd things are, uh, what, what I might consider or people might consider a waste of money like doing billboards in New York city right now, I have 80 plus billboards in New York city with the answers from guests to the question, what would you put on a billboard? If you could put anything on a billboard to get a message out to millions of people? So I got all these answers and took some of my favorites.

And now they're on actual physical billboards all throughout New York City. That probably doesn't sell a lot of books, but it gives me such childlike joy like joy to do something that absurd and to make guests happy themselves that even if it is a waste of money, it's probably not a waste of money. Meaning in isolation, maybe it's a waste of money, but because of the infusion of enthusiasm that it's given me and the excitement it's created in, uh, among many of the, of the guests and people who ended up in the book, it's created in among many of the of the guests and people who ended up in the book it's acted as fuel for a lot of other things that actually do have a good financial return or at least a clear financial return i love that that's funny yeah and i i had a similar experience i actually have i'm finishing my book on the family now but as as part of it, last summer, I threw, uh, the biggest worldwide family

reunion, uh, ever. And that was like financially not a great idea, but it was, uh, it was so fun and so interesting. Uh, and, and I hope raised the profile enough that it will pay off in the end but uh yeah because it was like 4 000 people in new york but then there were 40 simultaneous reunions around the world and sister sledge came and saying we are family one thing this was a this was a revelation you know i was with sister sl are family. I'm like, this is the perfect song. The anthem. This is, but it turns out

like one of the sisters like is not talking to the other. Some sort of lawsuit. So they're family in the sense that every family is dysfunctional. Let's grab a couple

of fan questions and then we'll jump into some rapid fire questions. Yeah. This is a question you probably get a lot. I certainly get it a lot, but I'm curious how you would answer this. This is from Constantine Inozemtsev. I can't pronounce it, but it's I-N-O-Z-E-M-T-S-E-V, which experiment or approach turned out to be a total dud? Something that you had extremely high hopes for that completely flopped. I did start,

and you probably will remember this guy's name, but the man who invented the idea of microexpressions, where you... Right. Paul... Ackman? Yes. There we go.

And his idea was, he was like the show about the lie catcher, you know, the people you can tell who's lying based on their facial expressions. So I interviewed him, great interview. And I tried it and I just couldn't do it. I don't know.

I don't know whether it's because it's a pseudoscience or whether, uh, because it's my failure, probably the latter. But it just, and it's fun to write about failures, but not when there's just nothing but failure. When there's no lesson learned, just couldn't do it. Exactly. All right. This is from Miguel Fliguer, I think it is. Book outtakes from your year of living biblically.

Was there anything that didn't make it in? Ah, interesting. I did, yes, there was. In Orlando, there's a theme park called the Holy Land Experience, which is the Disney version of ancient Jerusalem. And so, you've got, and, you know, instead of mascots like Disney World, you've got, you know, Jesus. You've got this guy with robes and a beard, and he's got a little Madonna Ted face mic, and he's, you know, talking. And you've got these guys like lepers. That was my favorite, like a blind leper begging on the street with his little microphone.

So, and then they read. But anyway, I went there and it could have been a funny chapter in that it was, I found it very ridiculous. But it was also like shooting fish in a barrel. It was like, or I think PJ O'Rourke said, uh, you know, shooting cows with a sawed off shotgun. It was just too easy. And, um, and there, and there are people I'm sure that it was meaningful too. So like, why, why ruin their lives just for a cheap laugh? So that didn't make it. So I, this is, is, I mean, these are all related, I suppose. This is from Anna Lamont.

And I'll try to simplify this a little bit, or I might rephrase it after I read it. Would be great to hear your take on whether it's possible to completely rewire our subconscious to ignore the norms and expectations instilled by society, family, environment, et cetera. Or is it a never-ending work in progress, something that you need to become aware of and focus on every single day? So I think part,

if I could read into this, maybe what is being asked is, or implied is that we both do all these crazy experiments. How have you trained yourself to ignore the norms and conventions? But, and this was directed at both of us. For me, I would say the writing is just the ultimate excuse. It's the perfect alibi to do any absurd thing you could possibly conceive of and then just say, I'm doing it and writing it and people are like, oh, okay. I mean, but if you're doing it seriously, right? If you didn't have the pretext of writing about it for the year of living biblically, like I'm sure plenty of people thought you were crazy anyway, but there are people who would have assumed

you were completely insane who otherwise were like, oh, that's so genius. Oh, what a great idea. Absolutely. I think that's it. I mean, I think if you almost see yourself as a method writer or instead of a method actor and just get into character,

I often do that. I'm like, I'm going to get into character now. And, you know, this is not me. This is me. And I think that you don't have to be a writer to do that, actually. I think the idea of experimenting on your own life, even if you're not writing a book, is I think it's great to just, you know, try eight different toothpastes and see which works. But there is a sense where you have to commit and you're like, you know what? I'm going to force myself to do this. I'm going to take on a character and I'm going to do it. So that I find very helpful. And I think also, I'd say this to Anne or anyone, is that if you frame something, even if you're not writing about it as an experiment,

like I'm doing X for Y number of months, you also can kind of get away with murder in the sense that if you're worried about trying something unusual or uncommon and you can get to what should I test by the extension to reductio ad absurdum, right? Like, okay, if people are outsourcing like you did, what is the most absurd, exaggerated place? Where's the most absurd, exaggerated place I can

take this? Like, all right, passive aggressive bickering with my wife. Like I'm going to have someone do that on my behalf or having, you know, I actually, you know, this might be another misattribution, but no, it's not. It's not. This one, I think I'm getting right. Where you hired someone to be worried on your behalf. Oh, yeah. I found that extremely helpful. So I thought that was, and you found it really helpful. And that sounded so absurd.

But I remember, I think it was the four-hour body. I was really stressed out about the deadline. And so I paid a virtual assistant to worry about my deadline for me. And it was just, it was such a weird form of not necessarily self-deception, but like taking advantage of a quirk of human psychology to know that someone else was on the job. So then I, then I. Who was your virtual assistant? Was it like an Indian or? I think from the Philippines.

The Philippines. Yeah. They're good warriors. Yeah. Yeah. And. That is awesome. And I also think calling it an experiment gives you permission to fail because it's an experiment. Sometimes experiments fail.

So if you do a change in your life and say, I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I think it was a French writer named Montaigne who came up with the word essay, which means to try. So that's what I find that so freeing. Like when you write something, you're just trying. You're just trying. It may work, it may not. And the more, at least this has been true for me, the more experiments you attempt and the more you try to push the absurd in certain respects, the easier it gets

because you realize the penalties are generally not that severe. Right. With some of the stupid stuff that I do, they end up physically being pretty severe and you can get very injured. Like don't try to learn parkour in a week. It turns out to be a bad idea for your knees. I saw you recently after you'd done that

and you were brutal. I was not in good, I was not in good shape. Uh, still have injuries from that. But generally if, if you're doing these, these experiments that you think you're going to be judged very harshly for, if you're presenting them in, in the right way, if you feel compelled to explain them, generally there are very few repercussions and people are actually more supportive and interested than you would expect. And also if you get something good out of it for your own life,

then it's probably worth it unless you inflict massive pain on others like with radical honesty. Yes, radical honesty. That's another one I want to explore a bit there's a great book called lying by sam harris oh yeah i read that i think it's a great book very complimentary to the i think you're fat essay uh okay so here's this is from charlotte chapman most embarrassing failure at an experiment so aside from the micro expressions right uh most embarrassing failure at an experiment. So aside from the microexpressions,

right. Uh, most embarrassing failure at an experiment. Did he give up or refine his approach? Interesting. Yeah. Well, I, I mean, I think my life has been a series of embarrassments and humiliations. So, you know, in a way you engineer your, that's true. Experiments to be embarrassing. Yes, exactly. Because I'd also think that makes me a better copy. And that is actually one thing I was thinking about that I learned doing this podcast is that being humiliated on radio is actually sometimes makes for better radio.

So when I'm doing interviews and I ask a question and the person is like, God, that's a dumb question. That is beautiful. Always makes the cut. That's gold, yeah. So I may not sound that good on the podcast, but I think it's entertaining. But yeah, I would say many humiliations. I don't know if this counts,

but this is the first one that comes to mind. I was working at Esquire magazine and we asked the actress Mary Louise Parker to pose nude. And I was tasked with asking her and she said, well, I will pose nude, but only if the editor of the piece also poses nude. And I was the editor. So, uh, I went to my editor in chief and he was like, all right, we'll do it. Take off your pants. That's your job. Uh, so I had to pose nude for a very well-known celebrity photographer. And it was, it was quite humiliating and, and, uh, vulnerable and, and also highly insulting because I was, you know, he's a big photographer, so he had like 10 assistants, like gorgeous 20-something female assistants.

And I was like, oh my God, this is so embarrassing. But they could not care less. They were like, no interest in my nude form. So that was like, that was tough for my ego. And then they came out and they actually published the picture and we got some subscription cancellations, I believe. So it was, uh, overall, it was a, it was a dark time. All right. Let's, let's do some, some rapid fire questions, which may in fact be misnamed. Uh, but they're, they're short questions. The answers don't need to be short. When you hear the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind or who comes to mind? Well, this is a little schmaltzy of an answer, but I would say my dad. He is a lawyer who loves his job. He literally has no hobbies because all he loves is spending time

with his family and his job. So if you can derive that much pleasure from your job, uh, I think that's a success. I mean, to me, there are two criterion for success. One is that you're happy and the other is that you're making the world a better place. So, um, and I think he does both. And he's also like, he is definitely in, in our genre of like taking things to the ridiculous extreme. He, he writes law books and he holds the world record for the most number of footnotes in a law article, 4,280. So yeah, so he finds something and he just goes with it. Wow, the apple does not fall too far from the tree on that one. What is, I don't ask this with everyone,

but I'll ask you, what is something you believe that other people think is insane or that very few people would agree with you on? Yeah, I love this question. And there are many, many things. So let me just go over a couple of them quickly without trying to alienate too many of your listeners. Oh no, alienate away.

Yeah. They're tough. All right, one is cannibalism. Wait, what about it? You're a proponent? I am a proponent of ethical cannibalism. I'm very interested and excited about in vitro meat, lab grown meat. Like you take a little cell from a chicken and grow a chicken breast.

So I'm very excited that, and I think in 10 or 20 years, it's going to be reality. And it's going to open up. You don't have to just eat cows or chickens. You can have a human burger. Yeah, a human burger. Well, I was thinking like, yeah, giraffe or endangered animals, but yeah, take it to the extreme. You get, what is the harm in eating another human, a human burger? And this is my idea for a startup. I know, I think you've pulled back on angel investing. So, but, um, and maybe there are plenty, plenty of them listening listening. All right. This may have already someone may already be doing this.

But my idea is celebrity meat. So like you can eat a Brad Pitt burger. Yeah. Either eat a Clooney burger or eat, you know, a J-Lo burger or and it could even be specific body parts like that. A little creepy. But I wonder what will end up being the Kobe beef of humans. So it's like if you can if you can choose gender,, race and so on, like where do we end up? Right. Yeah. That's interesting. I don't know. I don't know.

So that is questions just begging to be answered. So cannibalism. Okay. That's one. Um, another one, I, I like Sam Harris. I don't believe in free will, which I think is, some people see that as depressing, but I actually find it liberating. And when, because it's so much easier to forgive yourself for doing stupid things if you realize that you really didn't have, there was no other option. The die has been cast. The die has been cast. And I think you're more forgiving of other people and the stupid things they do. No,

no. Conversely though, wouldn't, couldn't you also be more, um, forgiving or accepting of things that should not be condoned or is that, does that just come back to lack of free will and you're, you're sort of, well, Or does that just come back to lack of free will? Well, my feeling is there's a difference between fatalism and determinism.

So you can believe that you don't have free will, but of course our decisions make a difference. Like if I just for the rest of the month lay here on this couch, you know, my life would fall apart. I realize that. So I'm not saying our decisions make a difference. It's just those decisions are predetermined. That's a big subject. Oh, and I did have, wait, what was the other one that I wanted to bring up?

Shoot, it'll come back to me. We can come back to it. Oh, the last one, which is multiverses. I know a lot of physicists believe in multiverses. But it really hit me with this election cycle because it is so, like, I can see at the convention of universes, all of the multiverses, and our universe is going to be, like, getting just a ton of crap.

Like, guys, this is the universe where Donald Trump is president. Like, can you believe that? We'd be like. So if the multiverse is actually a collection of kids in school, you're saying that we're going to be taunted. I think so. I do believe that.

So yeah, that's what I've been thinking about recently. What books, what book or books have you gifted the most to other people besides your own? I would say, I can't remember whether you had him on as a guest, but Jonathan Haidt. I have not had him on as a guest. He's a great writer. How do you spell his last name? H-A-I-D-T.

And I may be- He's come up a few times in conversation with friends recently. Yeah, he did a great TED talk. He wrote a book called The Righteous Mind. And it's all about trying to figure out the gap between the red and blue states, Republican and Democrat. And it's really interesting. And he likensist about a year ago, a PhD in neuroscience. So the righteous mind. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory? Uh, well, one thing I do love the, my elastic shoelaces, my, uh, do you use those? No, I like this idea though. I was just fussing with shoelaces yesterday and got so fed up that I went and found a different pair of shoes that I had packed, uh, which do not have shoelaces.

So elastic shoelaces. Yeah. So you just replace the, the cloth shoelaces with these al I think it's called Lace Lock is the brand I use. And yeah, shoelaces seem like such like 19th, 18th century technology. It's so crazy we still use them. And these ones, you just slip them on and they, for me at least, they're just as tight and secure. They're also not as sort of mental institution as like velcro shoes you don't have to make the jump to velcro you can go in

between with the right yeah velcro if you're under seven or like over 80 you can get away with velcro but in between it's hard. Do you have any particular morning rituals? Anything that is particularly important to you that is not obvious? Like, yes, you want to keep your kids alive and I'm imagining feed them in some form and fashion, but are there any other morning routines or rituals that are important for you?

Well, one we talked about is sort of the mental calisthenics. I find that helpful. Another you talk about in your books, which is the sort of restricting information, information diets. And I have tried sometimes successfully to stop reading the newspaper or any news in the morning because, you know, then i just get depressed and spiral uh i find it good to read news right before i go to bed because then i get depressed and i'm able to fall asleep so uh that for me keeping your mind clear away from news in the morning is is crucial

uh if you were to give a ted talk on something you are not known for, so you've given a lot of talks, but something that you are not associated with or known for whatsoever, what would it be on? Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Um, let me think. Uh, I don't know, this might be repetitive, but just talking about all of the horrible, the ways that the past is horrible. I think I could go on for like, I know you only have 20 minutes of her TED talk but I could go on for like four hours do you have any anything is there anything that you obsess on or over on the evenings or weekends so something I got a pet obsession of yours that is that that you've not talked about?

Let's see. I mean, yes, I'm sure I'm, I'm a slightly obsessive person as are you. So, um, yeah, slightly, slightly is very generous in my case, at least. Uh, I, uh, I'm trying to think, I would say, I guess, uh, that i'm i i do have the fear of missing out not on parties but on ideas like i'm i'm always nervous like that i haven't read enough and that there's great ideas and i'm just woefully ignorant uh so so that's i guess something and then you read the newspaper before you go to bed. Exactly. You get depressed and voila.

That's it. Uh, if you think about bad advice, what is, what is some bad advice that you hear given out often in your world? And you can define that any way you want. Could be writing, could be. I do have one. I have one that's like a pet peeve of mine, which is be yourself. Because, you know, what if yourself is an asshole?

Like Stalin, he was being himself. Just let Stalin be Stalin. That guy was really being himself. So I think if you think about this a little more, a little less flippantly, I think there are things that are very deep in us. If you're gay, you're gay. Don't try to change that. But there are aspects of our personality that we think are ingrained, but that can be changed. I don't think I'm a very outgoing person naturally. I think I would spend most days just indoors reading. But I force myself to be social. I sort of force myself to be a,

to get out there. And it's made my life better because you interact with people, you're happier. So, don't just be yourself. Try to, you know, be the best parts of yourself, but then take the worst parts of yourself and try to change those, which I think you do, right? No, no, I agree with that. I agree with that advice. And I think there's also be yourself implies that you're a finished product in a sense too, right? Which is where i take issue with the the obsession with discover yourself where maybe as a compliment to that at least uh maybe even an alternative the create yourself maybe in some ways more accurate even though we think of this

persistent i this persistent tim this persistent aj uh I mean, from the cells in our body to just about every other aspect of our being, we were constantly in flux. Yeah, I love that. Works in progress. So, I may not have time to put this up in the next few weeks, but if you could have one gigantic billboard anywhere to get a message out to millions of people, they could not be an advertisement. Any short message?

I was thinking about this because I know you asked it. I mean, one thought that occurred to me is something like, you know, life is too complicated and subtle and filled with grays to be summed up on a billboard. So don't pay attention to billboards. Something meta like that. Um, I did a piece on, on effective altruism. I know you introduced, interviewed Will McCaskill. Yeah. And I am a fan of that way of thinking just, you know, how lucky we are and trying to give that. So maybe like, you know, uh, is that, but that would be an advertisement. No, not necessarily. I mean, you could have, uh, you know, if you make more than 68K per year, you're in the global 1%.

Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. It was interesting because like you, you got to use guilt. Very, guilt will only get you so far. Like that, that might get you in the door. But then this feeling of empowerment, of helping others, I think is a better motivator for altruism. Yeah. Well, I think it's more if you're looking to optimize the lifetime value of a donor as opposed to a single transaction that they then resent, then yeah, guilt is not the primary tool.

Right. At least it seems that way just working with a number of non-profits um myself mostly in educational stuff so i sometimes ask people what advice they would give their younger self i'm going to pose it a different way because you have this this aged photo of yourself your your 82 year old self in your house what what advice do you think your 82-year-old self would give your current self? That is a good one.

I like that twist. I think, and I try to do this, I think my 82-year-old self hopefully will be wiser and happier. I do think overall my level of happiness has risen, which is nice. So hopefully... Trending in the right direction. here. I do think overall my level of happiness has risen, which is nice. So hopefully... Trending in the right direction. Yeah.

Hopefully. Fingers crossed that continues. And I guess I battle this even today is don't be so opinionated. Don't have such strongly held beliefs that they can't be changed with evidence. You know, I think that

this society has a weird fetish with strongly held beliefs and like, you know, these are my deep-seated beliefs and if you change them, you're a flip-flopper. And I, you know, I think we've got to rebrand. Flip-flopping is great as long as you're doing it based on evidence and not on whims. You have the ability to, the courage to change your convictions. Not just the courage of your convictions, but the courage to change them. So maybe I would tell myself, work on that part of your personality. That's what makes a good scientist as well, right? Exactly. Right. What is one of your favorite personal failures? What I mean by that is specifically a failure that led in some way to a later success. Right. or set the stage for a later success?

Well, I have had many, many failures as we've discussed, and I am a big fan of them. And rejection, that's one of the things I try to teach my kids all the time. You're going to get rejected 98% of the time. You just got to keep going. One, I don't know if this falls into the right category, but NBC a couple of years ago optioned my life, one of my books. And it was going to be a comedy where every week it was this writer did another wacky experiment and chaos ensued. And it was a total failure. It didn't get picked up. But the lesson I learned was I actually made a conscious effort. I was like, you know what, this may or may not get picked up, but I am going to consciously enjoy this experience and get everything I can out of it. You know, I got to meet Donald Sutherland, played my father-in-law. My wife was

played by this woman who had much bigger boobs than she did. So she loved it. And it was just a blast. And I would go into meetings and I would see, be like, you know, what if, what if the main character who was named AJ, what if he did this? And they're like, oh, AJ would never do that. I'd be like, huh, well, I don't know, maybe he would. But it was just so much fun. And there's one producer who I read a book of hers and she's like, yeah, if you cannot enjoy the process, then you're screwed because the chances of getting a movie actually made are so infinitesimal. So enjoy the process, enjoy the walk up the mountain, not just the summit. That was a big lesson. If you think back, can you think of the best or one of the best investments you've ever made?

And that could be time, energy, money. I'll give you an example. So Amelia Boone, three-time world's toughest mudder champion, most decorated obstacle course racer in the world, full-time attorney also at Apple, but it was her first entrance fee for one of these races, which was, I think at the time, $400, $450, which was a stretch. I mean, it was a, a real expenditure for her, but it opened up this entirely new career. Right.

She not taken that. Who knows? Uh, can you, can you, it doesn't have to be analogous to that, but, uh,

well, can I go the other way? I have two ideas. One is about a month ago, I wrote an article for Esquire where I got the most expensive haircut in the world, in New York city, an $800 haircut.

And it was crazy because, you know, it was this guy, it was on Park Avenue. His name was Julian Farrell and he was very French. He said, haircut. And I was like, and it was a fascinating learning experience because of course it's not worth $800. It's like, that's insane. It's like, you know, 20% better than my super cuts, which costs 20 bucks. But just learning, he gets clients, he is booked all the time. Like, how does he do this? And, you know, he's got Goldman Sachs guys who come in every week for an $800 haircut. And it's, it's all about the experience because the actual cutting, it's not that different, right? But the experience, you know, the cappuccino and the music, and he'll talk to you, stare you deep in the eyes

and talk to you about what your hair means to you and how it can change your life. I'm going to have a tough task ahead of him with me if I go there. Maybe you've got to discount that. Although the small remaining parts I have do mean a lot to me.. Although there are small remaining parts. I have, do you mean a lot? There you go. So yeah,

it was fascinating. I mean, that's how he does it. It's, and he'll look at your skull for like five minutes, like an artist, like a phrenologist. So,

but, so he's able to get clients by making the experience, even though the price is just so ridiculous. Maybe it's because the price is so ridiculous. That's a good part of it, exactly. He is just jacked. So anyway, I thought that was in it. I did not pay for it, luckily.

Esquire paid for it. So I guess one of my first books was about reading the Encyclopedia Britannica when they still actually printed that. So there were like 40, 33 volumes and I read them all. And that costs, that costs $1,500 to buy that set, which is an absurd amount for a book, but it turned out it paid off. So would you say, was that book one of the biggest inflection points for you as a writer I mean did that would if something put you on the map as a writer was it that book or was

it an earlier piece or no that was definitely that took it to a different level and I had written a couple of other books before but they were sort of novelty short books like you know one was called America Offline about this wonderful world outside of the internet where you could actually meet people face to face. And it's all like four copies. It came out, I think it was, it probably sucked, but it was also ahead of its time. So that probably both play. But that, I think the key was that that was the first one with real emotion and sort of an emotional arc. And I talked about my father. I talked about the meaning of life in a lame way.

I tried. And that connected with people. I think emotion really does that. And that's one of the big lessons of this podcast that I'm doing with Gimlet is like getting those emotional moments really makes a difference. So let's, let's wrap up on a question directed at you, but for the audience.

So for people listening and I'll certainly tell them, uh, we'll have two questions, but the first one is, is not related to where they can find you and so on, which is going to be the last question. This one is really, do you have any suggestions,

recommendations, parting thoughts for people listening, something they could try or something that they can just carry with them that might be helpful or useful in some, uh, aside from all the brilliant stuff we talked about for the last two hours. It could be one that you want to underscore. Well, I definitely, I think we both talk about this.

The idea of experimenting with your life is so important. Because I think if you do the same, routines are good in some ways because they automate things. So some parts of your life should be automated. But sometimes the routines cause you to get in a rut like the neurons actually get in a neural rut. So doing simple tricks to just shake up your life. I found it incredibly enriching. I think you have.

For sure. And it can be, as I said, it could be just trying a different toothpaste every month. You know, there's millions. I used Crest for like 28 years because some kid at my camp used Crest and I thought he was cool. So I kept buying it and like, you know,

I actually don't like it. I don't like it. But it took me 28 years to be like, you know what, let me try some other stuff. And as you said, also, I think this is worth repeating and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's often easier to act your way into thinking differently as opposed to thinking your way into acting differently. Totally. Yeah. And the, yeah, the quote is, which is not mine, but yeah, it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. And I do love that. AJ, always fun to hang out. We've had, we've seen each other a little bit this trip in New York

City, which has been fun. Great. And where can people find you, learn more about you on the internet, podcast, et cetera? Where can people check you out and say hi? The podcast is called twice removed and it is on iTunes, Gimlet media. And my website is AJ Jacobs.com at AJ Jacobs on Twitter. And, and, and my book about family,

not genealogy is coming out in the fall of 2017. Very, very cool. AJ, thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks. I loved it. And to everybody listening, as always, you can find the show notes, links to everything that we discussed at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. 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

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