The Tim Ferriss Show - #720: Life Lessons from Taylor Swift, Conquering Anxiety, Coaching Teens, Career Reinvention, Supposedly Gay Bulls, Your Shadow Side, and More — Soman Chainani

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Soman Chainani is the bestselling author of The School for Good & Evil book series, which has sold more than 4 million copies, been translated into 35 languages across six continents, and been adapted into a major motion picture from Netflix that debuted at #1 in more than 80 countries. Visit SomanChainani.com to learn more and follow Soman on Instagram (@somanc).Please enjoy!Timestamps for this episode are available below.Sponsors:Wealthfront high-yield savings account: https://wealthfront.com/tim (Start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/Tim (Save $250 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep this winter.)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[04:54] Who is Soman Chainani?[06:01] Follow the flow.[14:52] Give stories away.[23:34] Your bull might be gay.[30:13] Indispensable assistance.[36:36] Art appreciation: Christopher Marley.[40:35] Coach Alpha.[50:05] Mike Regula's Course of Action.[52:31] The catharsis of being an intermittent pop star.[59:20] How ketamine changed Soman's life.[1:08:09] The Shadow Self vs. The Double (refereed by Kelly Clarkson).[1:13:47] Thoughts on Netflix's Quarterback.[1:17:34] Career lessons from Taylor Swift.[1:24:07] Recommended reading.[1:29:55] Cross-collar dating.[1:35:12] The language of couples.[1:36:59] Hookups.[1:38:28] St. Louis vs. everywhere else.[1:42:48] Dodgy allergies.[1:48:41] Babysitting the fully formed.[1:52:07] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/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, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, 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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Last time, DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

The Tim Ferriss Show. Selman, good sir. Thanks for having me here. This is going to be fun. So nice to see you. And it's hard to believe this is, I think, our first episode in person. Yeah, which I think makes it more real somehow. Makes it more real. Definitely makes it more colorful.

But before we get to the colorful, Soman Chinani, for those who don't know, who are you? I think of myself as a specialist in the teenage mind, and I access that by being an author of young adult fantasy, using everything I can about connecting to young people and lovers of fantasy through novels. So that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years. And for people who might want to dig into that further, any works you might suggest they start with or check out, website, anything like that? I wrote a series called The School for Good and Evil for 10 years. So there's six books in the series and a Netflix made a movie out of it that came out last year. And then another book a little bit for older audiences called Be Some Beauty, which is going to be a TV show sometime soon. So those are kind of my two main things.

We'll link to everything in the show notes, of course, and people should explore your writing. I've explored your writing. And we're looking at some of your writing, your handwriting on cards of various colors. We have orange neatly lined up in one row, yellow, and then purple. And this alludes to, in a sense, your beautiful pursuit of symmetry and color and also the format of the show. So I had sent you a note about this fun experimental format, which is five things you're excited about, five things you've changed your mind about, and then five things that are absurd that you still do or do. And tweak that a little bit, and we'll see if we get to all of them the point is really just to provide a launch pad for conversation but i was thinking in terms of naming five of three is not terribly catchy but four by four like the piece of wood is kind of catchy so we could do four of each of these and

then add four people you're interested in works for following or who people should know more about. And you so delightfully put out these cards and offered me dealer's choice. And there are many things we could go to here, give people some foreshadowing. There's intermittent pop star, cross-collar dating, your bull might be gay, NYC, LA. But we're not going to start there. We're going to start with follow the flow. Speaking of catchy. So what does follow the flow mean? It's interesting because every time I've decided to write a novel, like what my next book is going to be,

and I telegraphed this to my agent and my publisher for a couple years. When it comes time to write that book, I'll start it, but it never ends up being the book I write next, ever. And what I realized is that your conscious mind can't actually solve problems. It can execute. It can deliver on the promise of something. But what actually is going to be

the next creative force in your life, the next big decision has to come to you naturally. So it's this idea of the decision coming to you rather than you making it. And I think especially in creative work where obviously I'm going to be working two or three years on a novel, my brain will not let me work on something unless it decides it. So I realized more and more as time goes on that I am just the manager. I'm the manager of the creativity. I'm not the actual creator.

The elves are the creator. They're going to tell me what to do. They're going to be the ones who tell you what the next book's going to be. They're the ones who are going to come up with the chapter titles. They're going to do everything. I just have to show up.

I have so many follow-ups. May I dive in? Please. All right. So I aspire to embrace this yeah i am like a over caffeinated swiss manufacturing plant manager with ocd and various other monkish tendencies right so i think the manager is kind of running the asylum so to speak, on my side. And that doesn't mean I don't have moments of inspiration, but I justify this by having a schedule in the halls and I kick out a certain amount over a certain period of time, whatever it might be. That is a superpower that is also a super weakness, right? In excess.

Now, on the opposite side of the spectrum i saw this post on social media be careful folks it's a jungle out there but i did see a post i thought was kind of funny and we're sitting here in austin there's a lot of conspirituality here a lot of aspiring shamaness earth goddesses running amok and their male equivalents yeah and this post on social said woman who lives in the moment finds out that moment is connected to all other moments. And it was like this sad, fake Onion article about not being able to plan a life. You clearly ship in the sense that you publish books. You are very engaged with the world. You're not just a ship without a sail, without a rudder getting blown everywhere to and fro. So how do you precipitate or think about inviting the muse?

Because you could just be waiting for 10, 20 years. I think what ends up happening is that I know what my conscious mind can do. So for instance, every publisher wants me to write a fairy tale fantasy next. Because School for the Evilable was my first. It was abnormally successful. Therefore, I will get paid infinite amount of money, have infinite amount of resources to write a fairy tale fantasy. I had a fairy tale fantasy that I wanted to do.

I wanted to reinvent Neverland, sort of do a Game of Thrones version of Neverland. I had the whole thing planned out. My conscious brain mapped out over the course of a year and a half an entire world while I was writing School for the Unable. I would doodle it in notebooks, I had everything. And then when it came time to write it, I wrote the first two chapters, went to sleep. And the next day was like, this is not my next book. And it came from just this feeling of which the only way I can describe it is there was part of me that is like, we are not going to spend two years following the wrong impulse, which the wrong impulse was money, easy route, right? The easy route. And instead, this other idea that I'd been noodling around

and been trying to give away to people for the last five years, I had told everyone this idea of being like, someone told everyone this idea of being like, someone should do this idea. This idea is super important. Someone should do this. It's not me. I can't do this. This is too hard. I just woke up and was like, okay, you know what? That idea, let's try writing it as a short story instead. That idea is so important and no one's done it. Everyone says it can't be done or whatever. So I start working on it, give it to my agent. Can you mention the idea or is it still under wraps wraps yeah okay all right soon because we're about to take it out meanwhile my poor agent he knows that whatever i say the next thing is going to be

and it's not going to be the next thing so i tell him i just could try this idea as a short story because you know we've sold short stories before he's like okay while he comes up with his next fairy tale he will do his short story do the short must appease the talent fine i'll get you your green m&ms just waiting for me to come back with neverland wonderland he doesn't care what it is happily ever after princes princesses you know so i start working on this short story and i start getting into it and then i feel that feeling it's that feeling that I felt with School for Good and Evil, which is, I don't care who reads this. I don't care what happens to this. This is mine. No one's taking it away from me. I am doing this at the expense of all other things.

I don't care. What are the symptoms of that? Is it you wake up earlier than normal and that's the first thing you want to do? Is it that, I'm making things up of course, is it like a giddy feeling that just doesn't occur normally in other circumstances? Like what is the signature of that feeling? It's more like you feel like a cult leader. You're like, this is the thing. Like this is the true way. Yeah, like I am, this is now my church, People are going to join. I just need to write the thing. It becomes your whole personality. Is it fair to say it's a degree of conviction and confidence

that you just couldn't analytically justify? No, you can't. In fact, it's funny. We took it to my current publisher, like 10 pages of it and just the general thing of the ideas. And I've been with them for 10 years writing fairy tales. And they were like, the idea of me moving into kind of a different age bracket. And this is not fairy tales at all.

I mean, this is as far from it as possible. They wouldn't even entertain the idea. Like, wouldn't even go there. And it still did nothing to shake me whatsoever. You know, like, I was just like, well. And it's funny because my parents, my agent, everyone's like, clearly your second thing should be to capitalize on that. And nothing in my body will let me do it. So I have been happy as a clam working on this other

thing. And I realized that it comes down to what you want your life to be. And mine is not getting diminishing returns on the ghost of a past work, even for a lot of money. I remember, I believe it was BJ Novak, who's written a million things, very talented, very funny comedian also, said, whenever he says to himself, but the money is so good, that's a flag. And I'm paraphrasing here.

But in this particular case so i'm going to prod a little bit you can you can refuse yeah is it fiction non-fiction it's fiction okay it's fiction it's a fiction that i would like to happen so it's a predictive fiction and it's so funny because when we announce it which will be soon enough all these things that we're going to talk about today it's all there so it's like it's like the usual suspects with kobayashi on the cup wait a minute everything it's all gonna make sense when we're when we're done i cannot wait to see how your bowl might be gay fits into this all right so it seems like follow the flow has been checked now that seems to this is fun i might people do this, although I'm sure a lot will not be as enthused as you.

Very nice handwriting, too. So we've pulled one of the orange cards. Does this purple give stories away, tie back to what you're saying? It's the idea of I get a lot of big ideas, and I will not write a book until I've had the idea for at least three years. Like it has to stay with me for three years. Because it's going to take me that long to write, promote, take it out. And I need to be sure that it's not going to suddenly be a short-term relationship. And it feels also like it's timeless then. If it lasts three years, it's made it through most of a presidential administration.

It's made it through all the ups and downs. I feel like it's going then. If it lasts three years, it's made it through most of a presidential administration. It's made it through all the ups and downs. I feel like it's going to last. And so first thing I do when I get a big idea that I'm really excited about is I start to tell everybody. I just am like, someone should do this. I tell all my writer friends. I tell anybody.

Sometimes I'll just have meetings with Hollywood companies about adapting other work or stuff like that. I'm doing it really to be like, someone should do this idea. And sometimes it gets picked up and they'll give it to someone else or you know there's many times where i've had ideas for something and someone has kind of done that version of it but if no one takes it then after a few years sometimes it's so strong that that's what i do it i do know of one other person in my life, a friend named Kevin Kelly. I don't know if you know this name.

He's older yet, has an amazing Amish-style beard, despite the fact that he is an incredibly accurate futurist predicting. He's more than that, but he's very good at predicting trends and upcoming developments. He tries to give away all of his ideas. And I don't want to speak for him, but in a sense, it's in the hopes that other people will do the work. Yes, it's selfish. Of implementing those ideas.

It's totally selfish. It's not a generous thing at all. It's, this would be great. Do it for my entertainment. So I can see it, realize, you know. Because there's only so many things I'm going to be able to do. But I'm jealous of songwriters who, if they have a great idea,

they make their one song. You know what I mean? Like this is every time I have a big idea, it's a couple of years, you know, this might seem like a silly question, but how do you distinguish between ideas that people won't pick up because they're bad ideas versus ideas people won't pick up because for whatever

reason, you are uniquely suited to looking through the prism and seeing something they don't see. You get what I mean, right? If you were like, I'm going to start a waste management company in Tuscaloosa, and people are like, no, I'm not going to do that. That is fundamentally different from what you're describing. I always say the test is, can someone else do it? So that's when I have the idea. I'm always like, sure, someone else do it so that's when i have the idea i'm always like sure someone else can do this

but then if they don't and time goes on and i start to see this is what happened with this idea because when i first had it a few years ago i thought i don't know how to do that it's too hard it's just not in my wheelhouse and as the years went by little by little i started to be like well what if i could do this and this plays to my strengths and move this around then all of a sudden you realize you're ready you know i mean I mean? So I think it's about, like School for the Unable came out at a time where that year there were eight other books about magic schools because it had been 10 years since Harry Potter. And it felt like 10 years later, the floodgates opened and everyone was like, now all the narcissists

who think they can compete with JK Rowling are ready to show their wares. And so an agent was frantic. The publisher was nervous. Everyone was nervous because there were much bigger books. I think Chris Colfer, who was on Glee, had one. And Mattel was putting one out called Ever After High, which Ever After High is cool for an evil. They were so similar. And I was never worried because I'm like, mine is so weird. It's so strange. It's just so uniquely me. Like I just knew there wasn't going to be, I'm like, maybe mine will be a total flop,

but whoever reads it will never compare it to any of those others, you know? And that I was confident in. I just have a very strange way of storytelling because it's just mine. I don't know how to follow other people's things. So number one, we'll catch up over dinner about this but i am actually in a very similar position right now i have a writing project my first book in six to seven years i can't talk about it right now and i tried to fucking give it away forever and it didn't work it didn't work it didn't work and then a few close

friends who knew about it kept asking me for it who i thought were going to help me do it and i was like fuck okay let me take another look at it and then i took another look at it and i was like oh i think i'm ready yeah i wasn't ready that's it you weren't i wasn't ready but now i looked down i was like oh i think i'm ready and that's uncanny first of all yeah and i'm god i want to i can't wait until dinner yeah anyway so there's that second thing that what you said reminded me of is there's a very famous brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor named marcelo garcia and last i checked he's nine time maybe, maybe 10-time world champion. And for at least, I would say, the better part of a decade. And the sport has evolved a lot.

So things may have changed. But he was considered the greatest of all time. And that was uncontroversial. He was so successful. He was so uniquely himself. Some techniques he pioneered, and he would record a lot of his training footage and practice footage, sparring footage, even when he was six months away from the world championships, and he would make it available online. And people found this mystifying because that is very rarely done. And the most common response was,

why would you do that? It allows your competitors to prepare for you. And his response, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty close because my friend co-founded a jujitsu school with him, so I got to spend some time around him, was, this is my game. If someone wants to step into my game,

then I am the best suited to win my game. If someone wants to step into my game, then I am the best suited to win my game. Now, there are a million different ways that could be confusing, but I found it odd enough that I sat with it. And in a sense, it's like by giving away your ideas, you're using it selfishly, number one, to get more ideas than you could shoulder into the world, hopefully, if people pick it up. And then secondly, you're filtering to what is

uniquely your own, where you have this differentiator, which is also, not to view anything zero-sum, but a huge competitive advantage. Well, the other thing that was interesting that helped me the most, and I wish this on every young writer, anytime I did something for money or something that wasn't 100% like me, that someone hired me to do, they all fell apart. Like, without fail, none of it ever came out. So there's not a single thing out there in the world by me that was a mercenary job. I mean, I took them in my 20s and 30s it just they never made it there so i think that was kind of the the world kind of telling because it happened so many times at least 10 times so after that i just learned like we're not doing this like even to the point

of i'll get in trouble for talking about this story but who cares yeah um dc comics hired me to do a short story for them and everyone everyone in my life, every male thought, forget what you've done before. This 20-page thing you're doing for DC Comics means you've arrived. And I'm like, okay, thanks. And so I go through the process with them. It's a nightmare because they're making changes to the characters. They're just moving things around because it's the DC machine or whatever.

And I spend six months on it, obviously doing my own work at the same time, but going through it the whole time, I'm thinking this is getting further and further away from me, you know, to the point of, okay, I'll take the check and whatever. And then at the last second, like it all fizzled, like the editorial didn't approve of this and move this. And the whole thing just went poof, right as it was about to print. The art was already done. Everything. I remember poor beleaguered agent was like, what? And I was like, thank God, you know, like it kept the theme,

that narrative in my life complete. Cause had that been published, it would have been the first time. And the fact that it went up completely in smoke on its own accord was, I think the universe being like you are on a frequency and we will help you when you get off it so as long as back to follow the flow as long as i follow that flow everything's gonna be okay so follow the flow give stories away right at first glance it might seem like some kind of poetic artist affect but it's intensely practical, right? Like intensely practical. And so what I'm going to do, just because this is a new game that we're playing,

and I want to take a photograph from the top when we're done with this of these cards, I'm going to turn this over. All right. So I feel like we should go to a different category, just for the fun of it. You know what? I feel like I'm burying the lead. So your bull might be gay. What's the story here? And it's in in quotation marks which is uh i told you when we started stand out i told you that none of these are euphemisms right none of these are types so this is the story so i lived in new york for 22 years i now live in st louis i moved there for love for my partner who is a farmer and lives on a goat and cattle farm of his own. And I go there every weekend and spend three or four days there.

And so I'm that annoying person who drops in every weekend and has thoughts about what he's been working on all week. So anyway, he's got, I think- The helicopter partner. Helicopter farmer from the city who has never been anywhere near a farm who has thoughts all the time. You know what you should really do. That's, yeah, which he finds very amusing.

So he's got over 100 cattle, and he's got these 60 heifers every year that get impregnated by one bull, right? There's one bull that does all the work. And he keeps a bull for, in this work and he keeps a bull for in this case he had a bull for four years and this bull when i saw it i was like oh man where he walks like the ground like shakes the females part they like bow their head it's like the lion king right like his balls are the size of coconuts like like what men in austin the patriarchy they aspire to here like that religion that i see men here go for is that bull they need to spend time with that ball and everything will be fine they need bronze statues yeah and so when i you know was with he was like the problem is

this bull has been here for four years meaning he's now impregnated not just the heifers but their daughters their sisters their grandda, like the cows don't care. They just, you know, so at some point you need to get a new bull. So he goes and gets this new bull that he's very excited about. He comes and brings the bull. And the first thing the bull does when it comes to the farm is it like nuzzles up to me and is really nice to me. And it's just this very like sweet bull and over the next like few weeks every time i see the bull he's off like picking flowers or like hanging out with this little orphan male calf and like

licking him the females are literally just staring at him you know because they're all in heat and nothing's happening and i said your bull might be gay and he gay. And this is where it gets interesting. This is where it gets interesting. He's like, that's impossible. We tested it. It's sperm. It's very healthy. It's a good bull. And the chance of a bull being gay and not impregnating these 60 females, it's maybe like 0.05%.

In my head, all I'm thinking about is worst case scenario. Because if that bull is gay, that means he not only doesn't get these 60 females pregnant, he loses the season, he loses all the money from the cabs that's coming. And it's literally like a catastrophic thing that can happen to. And I realized that people entertain worst case scenarios differently. His is statistically, this isn't happening, so therefore I'm not going to prepare for it. I'm not going to spend a dollar preparing for that worst case scenario,

because statistically it doesn't make sense. All I care about in life is the worst case scenario. So to me, the moment I'm like, that bull is gay, all I'm doing is finding all the evidence that it's gay and being like, here's the action plan for the gay bull. We are getting every female pregnancy tested. You're having the vet come out. You're checking the sperm again. You're doing this.

You're bringing out that fancy machine that triggers that. I'm spending, in my head, I'm getting them to spend thousands of dollars on this gay bull to make sure it still gets them pregnant. Like artificial insemination, everything. And I realized it's just a different way that we operate. My entire life, I told my assistant this on day one. I said, your job is to always think of the worst case scenario and ensure against it.

That's your only job, every day. What's the worst thing that can happen and make sure it doesn't happen? And doesn't think that way because he says that costs money. It just does. You spend too much money on things that statistically shouldn't happen. And I thought, there's something profound in that.

So your bull might be gay has become the kind of like flag-waving motto on the farm. Because it turns out the bull was not gay. It secretly got them all private when we weren't watching. That's the funny part. So he was right. and therefore it validates, he thinks it validates him. But to me, I think I get calmer and more at peace when that worst case scenario is protected against.

If this is a shorthand where your partner, when you're catastrophizing, can say, Soman, this may be a your bull might be gay scenario. Are you finding that you can use that experience to recalibrate a little bit? Do you need an external source like your partner to be like, pat you on the side like a sort of overexcited horse

and be like, everything's gonna be okay? You and I are very similar in this way. I haven't had the gay bull experience or the thought to be gay bull experience, but you and I have bonded over this worst case scenario catastrophizing, which clearly if it had no utility, we wouldn't use it, but in excess sort of becomes its opposite, right?

It's a helpful tool and then it becomes a hindrance at a certain point. But see, I cheat. I offload it to my assistant. That's his job. Like, I literally am like, you're the worst case scenario person. So he's in charge of insuring against those things.

And now that he's been with me a while, in a way, that's become his thing. And he's even more kind of obsessive about predicting all those things. And it's what makes him so amazing, you know, as he's risen in the ranks. So in a way way i'm a little lucky that i'm not the one saying we're gonna outsource some of your worrying i think having

a partner who has the opposite viewpoint if i was with someone who also had the worst case scenario dangerous because then you're just who's gonna screw in the light bulb when you know you're too busy worrying sure he gets all the other things that are never going to happen you know at some point you know someone has to take care of the basics so counterbalance yeah i think i think counterbalance you know the the outsourcing your worry to your assistant your ea makes me think of this chapter which is an excerpt that i had my very first book from aj jaco. Jacobs. I think it was literally called Outsourcing Your Life from originally Esquire, I want to say. And at one

point, he was trying to see how much he could give his virtual assistant at that point in India. And at one point, he realized, A.J.'s amazing. He's written a lot of great books. My favorite's probably The Year of Living Biblically, but he's written a lot of great books. And he, at one point, was really worried about something. And he just decided as an experiment to see if he could ask his assistant to worry on his behalf, if that would make him feel better. No real solution, no fixing anything. He's just like, would you mind worrying about this on my behalf? And I mean, he's a humorist, right?

So he does a lot of funny stuff. But he actually found it therapeutically valuable. Just the broad strokes instruction, could you worry about this? So I know someone's worrying about it. Like I realize it's not productive, but could you worry about it on my behalf? This will come back up.

Well, it's also funny because I think it's uniquely suited to the young to be able to have that mindset. And I told him, I said, if you can master this thing of thinking about the worst case scenarios and everything, that's what I did when I was young and working as an assistant. You're going to be like a mega mogul one day. You just will.

Because that's part of your thinking in a way that it isn't for other people. Well, the Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. Only the paranoid stay up at night staring at the ceiling too. But there is that question about the assistant what other instructions have you found or principles make for training an excellent assistant and i'm asking because i'm in the process right now of actually training some

new folks on my team so this is very top of mind for me i think to me the most important thing especially when you find someone who just has so much talent and capability like june has is that i don't give tasks i give massive projects that are extraordinarily difficult what would be an example an example would be like in the case of dc i was like i don't know anything about dc comics what am i writing about what am i gonna do what am i writing about yeah what am i doing because in this case it's a general world that i'm just i don't know anything oh you had to work with their characters their characters it's not original it's working with their characters okay so that's where it all went

oh yeah you got you were i was headed already you were already in trouble so in that case i was like it's not that i'm looking for a storyline i'm just looking for all right you knowing what i'm interested in give me some characters from there that are interesting give me a world that's interesting and so rather than it being like make me a list of this or something very task-oriented. Procedural. It'll just be like, show me something. And that's kind of the bigger thing.

And then giving freedom for him to structure it, him to figure out how he's going to present it, him to have investment in it. So the same thing when we did Be Some Beauty, we were presenting it to the studios to get a buyer for the TV series. I said, how do we present this? How do we present the book? Be Some Beauty, we were presenting it to the studios to get a buyer for the TV series. I said, how do we present this? How do we present the book? Come up with whatever you think is the best way. And ultimately, he designed this amazing presentation. And therefore, when we sell it, it's easy for me to go to the studio and say, June has to be a producer on it, because he was the one who had the whole presentation. So it's that sort of thing. It's like, I give very, once in a while,

give very few task-oriented things and more like, worry about this for me. You know what I mean? All right, I'm going to ask very, maybe boring, maybe interesting, we'll see. But certainly kind of mundane, practical question. Do you do all your own inbox management? Or do you have...

Yeah, I do all that stuff. You do all your inbox stuff. Now, is that a manageable inbound volume? You've just figured out policies and maybe how to hide yourself effectively so that you don't get an inordinate amount of stuff? Yeah, I think it's if it's scheduling. I'll pass all that stuff on to him. So he will do.

Yes, he says. He's keeping the trains running on time. 100%, 100%, 100%. But I still manage my own email inbox. I just am sorting stuff over there. What kind of stuff, would you say buckets-wise, what kind of stuff does he handle? Scheduling?

Scheduling, school visits, anything that involves a calendar date. And also negotiating. I get asked to speak constantly, whether it's adults looking for a creative spark at a corporation, or whether it's schools, or whether it's a book festival it's just you've been through this many many speaking you are a far better speaker and presenter than i am i don't know yeah you know what if they're teenagers i feel completely at home adults sometimes i'm like are your minds

frozen like is there anything i can do to chip away at the calcification on your brains. Sometimes I feel that way. So his job is to figure out somehow subliminally without making a mess of it is, do they have a budget? Like, what's the... It's all that stuff. And you have rules or at least guidelines in place

where you're like, hey, this is the lowest hurdle, etc. Okay. Your bull might be gay. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your

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No. He is an artist, but his canvas only works with preserved animals from strange parts of the earth. Tell me more. So he's almost like Indiana Jones. He works with remote tribes in the Amazon. He'll just go all over the earth to find animals we've never seen before and then makes art out of them. Christopher Marley? Christopher Marley.

I have all of his books, and I saw an exhibition of his in person, and it was the most inspiring, beautiful thing I have ever seen. That's a strong statement. It is. And that's coming from someone who's exposed to art like you're exposed to my life yeah but this is because they're real animals and so the idea of i spend my life creating fantasies and then to see that the real world has more fantastical things than you'll ever see and he has just so many great ones where you'll see like he'll just make art out of maybe a

thousand butterflies that he's collected but the colors of the butterflies are you've never seen stuff like this before it's almost like you know when you think of the deep sea fish that you've never seen before he's finding this up on land so the beetles the snakes so this but then he has this additional talent of making the most spectacular art out of it so that it almost looks if they were fake, it would still be equally impressive. So that the fact that he's going there, making these relationships, getting animals that, convincing these tribes to hold on to animals that they find, the whole thing's insane. And the fact that this guy isn't the most famous person in the

world to me is shocking. How did you come across Christopher Marley? North Carolina. We were on a family reunion trip, and we went to the museum with my niece and nephew, who were teenagers. And that was the little fun thing. Then I bought all his books. I follow him on Instagram, and I just think it's the most amazing thing. As soon as you start looking at his art, you're going to be like... And also, he has a crazy story, which is they had a photo of him

up on the wall. And I was like, that's him? He was a supermodel. He was a supermodel, this rugged supermodel, who then, I don't know, used his wealth to then do what he really wanted to do,

which was be Indiana Jones. That's incredible. But the talent is like insane like the way he places everything i almost want to like pause for a second and show you the art let's do it yeah sure let me take a look oh you have to see it because once you see it you're gonna be like you're gonna want to like make him your best friend oh wow okay all right Oh, wow. Okay. All right. That's wild. That's just one. That is wild. And I realize that we might be able to splice some stuff in from Instagram with credit and

everything shown, obviously. And if you go back to the grid, you'll just see tons of them. Oh, yeah. Okay. So this is at Christopher Marley Studio, spelled like Bob Marley. Christopher Marley Studio. Spelled like Bob Marley. Christopher Marley Studio. Almost 60,000 followers. It should be 60 million.

All vertebrates are reclaimed specimens. None are killed for art. That was going to be one of my questions. Okay. Yes. All right. This is going to be a thing. And you're right.

If there were a game of match, match the face to this other profession on the other side in column B, this is not to detract from his work, but I'll be like, yeah, no. No. No way. Maybe he's doing jeans commercials.

Maybe he's doing car commercials. But his artwork is incredible. Okay, we will definitely link to that. Check it out, folks, at Christopher Marley Studio. Check, check my next follow on Instagram. Now, I'm going to go to one here that I can't read, which is now pulling my... I see. I thought it was Conch, and then I was like, oh, wait a second. That's an A.

Oh, that's an A. Coach Alpha. What or who is Coach Alpha? Okay, I realized that I can only do two jobs in my life. There's only two things I'm good at. And there's only one thing I would like to do as much as I like writing. And that is, and it's a job that should exist, and it doesn't. Generation Alpha, which is teenagers of today. Oh, I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah. So after-

We've gone back to A. Yes. So after Gen Z is Generation Alpha. And that's like who are teenagers now. They're growing up in an impossible situation with everything that's happening with the world and the phones getting more, it's just impossible. And when I was a tutor, I was a tutor for 10 years. And what I loved the most was when, because I could tutor every subject. That was one of my, I was such a nerd in school that I just really could tutor any subject. And I loved it when a parent just sort of outsourced their entire child's home life to me. But I loved it because I could get to the bottom of what made them tick and what was important and starting to really not just

help them with school, but get them on a better track out of their phone and stop worrying about what everybody else wanted them to be, including their parents, and more focusing on who they actually were. The mental health crisis that's affecting almost all teenagers is this sort of existential dread. I would have loved to if I hadn't become a writer, and I still feel like this is going to be part of my life somehow, is I would love to kind of be the like Mary Poppins who can go into a house and just be like, let's get this on track. Like, I'll give you an example. In a way that parents can't. So the one kid was getting off track because he was drinking a lot

and getting in trouble and all that sort of stuff. And I noticed that every time I saw him, he was talking about going out partying and at the end of the night, you know, having wrestling matches with all his friends and getting into these sort of physical fights with people. And he was always beating up on his younger brother. They were just always physical with this thing.

And one day, like, we're trying to solve all the other stuff. The academic stuff. Yeah, just, you know, everything else. And I thought to myself, I just said to him, I said, and his whole goal in life was to be popular and party and all that stuff. And I said, I don't know if partying is your goal in reality. I feel like your real goal is that you want to fight. That's what you actually want to do

what you really want to do is not drink and like hang out with your friends it's you want to drink so you can beat them up at the end of the night every night ended in aggro and so i said i research i said there's a ufc gym like four minutes from your house go take a class 16 year old go take a class. 16 year old. Go take a class. Takes a class. Loves it. Is now there like three, four times a week. Having the time of his life. Drinking went way down.

Everything got back on track. Got a job to fund the UFC thing. Everything's fine. No more beating up the brothers. I didn't need to. He's getting, you can beat up anyone. Just need to know it.

But what parents going to say, go fight after school. It's just, they're not going to do it. But what parent's going to say, go fight after school? It's just, they're not going to do it. And so it's stuff like that where I just feel like sometimes kids need to be seen for who they are. And in order for us to get out of this crisis, I think people are like, oh, mental health crisis. I feel like there needs to be a third party, whether it's even as much as like teen groups. Like I was just thinking about the fact that on any given night, if you're an alcoholic or you have a drug addiction or whatever, you can just go to an AA meeting and you can have that group experience.

And I felt like, why isn't there that for teenagers? Like this idea that you can just go to a space and meet other teenagers on a given night and have that kind of place to talk to or experience. And yes, you can do it online, but I just think the more you get into your phone, the further you often get away from actually who you are and real connection. So I don't know. I have no formal thoughts on how this should happen. I just do miss that part of my old job, which was going into the house and helping kids.

Footnote for people who may have missed our earlier conversations. Well into your writing career, correct me if I'm wrong, fact check, please. You held on to your tutoring because it gave you a safety net, but also, I guess, the psychological reassurance of knowing that you didn't have to white knuckle desperately make the first buck that came your way through the writing. I mean, is that a fair description? We don't have to spend too much time on it, but it's important as an example to me because a lot of creatives who do really well

do not burn the ships behind them. They do not block all the exits. They actually have some type of backup in the form that you did. 100%, because also it meant that I could take all the risks in my writing, right? So even now, I know I can do other jobs. I could go back to tutoring.

I could teach at a university. I could work with kids and teenagers in some way. So I'm happy to take the risk on this book instead of chasing the money because there's no pressure on it. So I think that's the important thing. I feel like if you're writing with that desperate white knuckle mercenary for money, it increases the chance that what you're writing, you're trying to fit a mold. So Coach Alpha, is this a public attempt to give away an idea? Let's just say you

can't get a taker. Let's just say you don't see it. Would you ever think of doing, I know this isn't in person, but would you ever think of doing a series of talks and then pulling from that and putting together a course making lectures available for free maybe they're targeted at parents maybe they're targeted at kids i mean if this for whatever reason doesn't get takers right this coach alpha because it also requires it's not just an idea that can be executed by anyone, but to underscore something you said, the third party piece is really important. I can get, not anyone, but almost anyone to change behaviors sometimesness around the people you're closest to. So then when you have a third party who's credible, there's a lot of leverage there. Well, even I was thinking about teenagers, right? Let's say you have, and this I had told parents this many times, most of the time they didn't listen, but it was, I gave them the secret, which was when your kid takes initiative and

does something on their own, like they start making their bed, or they start working out after school, do not mention it. Don't say, it was great you made the bed, or that's so cool that you're working out. Do not. Then it's your thing. That means every time they're going to go make the bed, they're now thinking of your approval, and little by little, it's going to stop them doing it because it's now become your thing. Leave it. It's their thing. How many kids have you tutored over the years? What do you say? Oh, God. At least a few hundred. Few hundred. Yeah, probably a few hundred. I miss it, but also I got the connection through the books. And also,

what's funny is I started doing writing camps where I got hosted by writing camps. And there was always a curriculum that they wanted us to teach or whatever. And I would just go in there and do my own thing. And the first thing I would work on with each kid is when you write, you need to know what your characters want. And you need to know at the deepest basis level. Let's say a character wants to play lacrosse. He wants to be a champion lacrosse player. That's where most people will stop. But you need to ask, well,rosse he wants to be a champion lacrosse player that's where most people will stop but you need to ask well why does he want to be a champion lacrosse player in order to why does he want to drink that's not enough yeah exactly because he wants to fight at the end of the night and why does he want to fight at the end of the day you have to keep going down

until you hit a base level like is he trying to save his self-esteem is he trying to prove something to his family like you know whatever it is and then on the second, after we work on that with characters, I do that for themselves. So the teenager, I'm like, what do you want? In front of the class. So there's usually 12 people. And that's when you start to get somewhere. Man, I feel like I could use that exercise now. But that's how for college essays.

So my specialty when I was tutoring was college essays. I used to go in there and help them come up with the perfect essay topic. All I needed was three days with them, and I would spend three days asking that question over and over and looking at pieces of their life and us talking about it until we came up with what do you want and why do you want it, and then making the essay from there. All right, I'll bite. So what's the next step? Once you go through that exercise, how do you craft the narrative? How do you put it into essay form?

Is it describing really what you want? I mean, is that the topic of the essay or do you use that as grist for the mill? It becomes the heart of it. And then from there, you can start to build everything out. Did you start doing this before you were working on fiction

or did it happen simultaneously? Simultaneously. Because as I was working on School for Good and Evil, the on school for evil the thing i had to think about it and also because i'd come from film school where they drill into you what does your character want why do they want it and i did that every page of that book which is why i think it reads quickly because you just know what everybody wants at any given moment and i realized that i'm working with these kids and no one knows what they want they follow the flow in the wrong direction because the flow is taking them towards anxiety and comparison. If I spend my life on Instagram and TikTok, I would die because it's just the wrong inputs to make me find what I want to do. Coach Alpha. I love it all right this is needed i was very fortunate when i was 15 16 to

have a few mentors male mentors figures who by a hook or crook were able to help me correct course in a number of ways if i had not had that input i think things could have ended and i do mean ended in a very sort of terminal way, very differently. We should talk about another person on my list then. Let's do it. He just moved to Austin. His name is Mike Regula, R-E-G-U-L-A. He's an ex-Navy SEAL.

And he is here starting a company called Course of Action, which what I want to do for teenagers, he's doing for men. And it's using basic Navy SEAL kind of concepts and training to basically get men to both individually and in groups, look at their lives and make proactive change to become more connected to what they want. So basically, it's every man who feels like they haven't quite found their way back onto a path or they've lost their tribe or anything like that. He's just trying to find a kind of safe space for men to work on, whether it's the psychological part, the nutrition part, the fitness part, the emotional part, and in groups. And I think it's just so needed, especially in this world. So I just think he's someone to look out for.

And I think the website is 1 COA, one COA for course of action. We'll find it and we'll link to as well. How did you find Mike or course of action? He was introduced to me through the best story. The boy I was in love with in high school was this kid named Noah, who I was obsessed with. And of course, you know, he's now married with children, everything like that. Everyone knew this story except him. And of course, you know, he's now married with children, everything like that. Everyone knew this story except him. And then one day someone finally told him, you do realize that someone spent like most of his high school career trying to get your attention.

And he just was like, what? And so then we reconnected, became friends. And he's like, you have to meet Mike because, you know, I don't know what it was.

Mike was in New York and he just felt like we would bond and we met. And that was, that was that. He's just a special person. And so I just feel like we were talking about this, like the same way I feel about resuscitating the teenage mind and soul. He feels about men because I think he's seen it all having been an ex-seal for sure. Check it out. He's right here, right here in my hometown.

Mike Regula. And this is actually not the first time I've heard his name. This rings a bell and I can't place the context. Oh, he's friends with all your friends. Oh, there we go. There you go. That's probably why I've heard his name. All right.

Does anything catch your eye that might make for a good next Scooby Snack, conversationally speaking? We could go to... You know what, here. How about this? Oh, that's a good one. All right. Intermittent Pop Star. This is in the absurd category. It's in the absurd category, because I should not still be doing this. But in 2017, I went to this book festival for the first time in Charleston called Y'all Fest. That is like the biggest book festival for teenagers in the country. No kidding.

Yeah, about 20,000 kids descend on this thing. Everybody comes there. It's where new projects are. It's just a big festival that takes over Charleston. And to get invited, it means you've officially made it. And all I ever wanted in my career was to get invited. Because your publisher can't pitch you. It's like one of these Sun Valley. Yeah, you must be invited.

Must be invited. So I finally get invited. I'm so excited. And I go and it's the best two days of my life. I'm having the most amazing time. And I go to the final show called The Smackdown, which they charge like $12 to get into. It's 3,000 people in Charleston Music Hall. It's the most beautiful theater. And the authors participate in this kind of variety show. And I sit there and watch the worst show I've ever seen on that. It is an abomination to make 3,000 people sit through that. The fact that I had to participate in some little part of it. And I remember having this thing, secretly thinking, I'm going to take over this show and turn it into my own private pop concert. And it's going to be amazing. And it's going to be awesome. And it's going to be like the greatest show on earth. I

just remember having this thought, like, it was just like, this is my fantasy, and it's going to happen. I grew up idolizing, you know, this, everyone who knows me knows this, but I should probably say it. I grew up a huge Madonna fan. Like that was my pop star growing up. I grew up idolizing, you know this, everyone who knows me knows this, but I should probably say it. I grew up a huge Madonna fan. That was my pop star growing up. I'm obsessed with Taylor Swift. I'm obsessed with anyone who can translate whatever their talent is into some kind of cool showmanship. Cut to two years later, they were like, no one wants to host this show. Do you want to host it? And I was like, dude, I'd earned enough credit to be like, okay. I said, sure, as long as I can completely redo it 100% my way. How did they think to come to you?

Had you planted the seed somehow? Were you like, not a bad show, I could do better on the way out? I didn't say I. With a tear in the eye? I think I said, this could be better. So, we'd love your feedback. Yeah. words this could be better got it so they came to you came to me and then i was like you know we're gonna do the variety show it's gonna be all new games and it's gonna start with an eight song six costume change dance number dedicated to whatever

the themes are in ya almost like a version of like like Billy Crystal's old Oscar thing, but even more extreme. And so I don't know what made me do it. But what was interesting is while we started working on it, and we got a choreographer, and I don't know how to dance, and I started learning these dance steps. It was that process of training for it, learning how to dance, learning how to do choreography, that was so awesome because it got me out of my head. And I started to fall in love with this process of designing a show, designing things, designing themes. It was a new way of telling a story from beginning to end. How do you entertain an audience of 3,000 people for 10 minutes? I fell in love with it and had the best time. But then I think I did it the next

year. I've done it three times. And what I've realized is if I do it every two years, because it's so much work, it's so much money of my own, it's so much work, so much time. Right, in the red column. Throwing money on fire. But if I do it every two years, that means the year in between some poor soul has to come

and it's inevitably a disaster. So then when I come back, I get to herald the Harold, the hero returns. Every two years. It's a Julia Roberts strategy when she was an actress. The reason she had such longevity is she always did one movie where she had her hair red and curly and did a rom-com. And then she would do one when she hacked it off and played like Frankenstein's maid. You know, some crazy indie weird thing but because she did it every other movie whenever she came back it was like

oh thank god she's back to back to doing you know pretty woman so what's been important for me is it's less about I get more than enough attention for the books and everything I don't need it's not a sure it is a narcissistic thing. What am I saying? This is such a lie. What a lie. Terrible. But I think what I enjoy more than the actual performance is the run-up. It's the day before rehearsals start.

I'm always nauseous. I don't want to do it. I don't want to go through that whole experience because it's everything I'm bad at. There's a Japanese word. Have you heard misogi? Misogi. There's a book about this. I'd have to look it up.

To find happiness. I think Mike was telling me about this. The Japanese concept that once a year or once every two years, you have to do something completely out of your comfort zone that is an extended journey. And in doing that, you find like new reinvigoration for life. And I think that's mine. Like every two years to go into this thing where I don't know how it's going to end. I don't know if it's going to work. Because always it's more ambitious and more interesting.

So it's funny because this one was bigger and crazier. I just did it a couple months ago than anything we'd ever done before. the party i was like there's no way i know myself i can't top that skit what we did and someone goes well what are you gonna do now are you gonna are you gonna sing and i was like haha and then i thought huh well so you know you don't know i mean i doubt that's what's gonna be but it's always like when you think you can't find what the next thing is it's like what's the next zone of discomfort so that's the silly thing i still do but i think it's important for me somehow i can't really let go of it you know at this point yeah Definitely. How would your life be different if it were taken away?

If it were just subtracted? How would your experience the rest of the year be different? If there's an answer to that. Wouldn't be as fun. There's something so energizing about the high stakes nature of a show. And also, my assistant is this amazing dancer and musician, so he's part of it. I have backup dancers, and he's one of them. So it's like, we're all

in this ride together where it can end in super embarrassment, because you've got thousands of people with their phones out. Yeah. There's no you had to be there. There's, let me show you what happened. It feels very high stakes

and in the moment so you know where writing is never in the moment really because you are constantly revising this is immediate and i just think it's awesome it's also out of your head like you mentioned yes yeah the dancing that i always feel in incredible shape mentally and physically after six weeks of this stuff i'm gonna force a segue we'll see if it's a natural segue but drugs yeah this is in the this is now this is in the yellow i believe change your mind about yeah category so i never did drugs growing up i maybe did pot once or twice and found it slowed me down to the point of i never wanted to do it again and just sort of walled that whole thing off as stuff that other people do. And then during COVID,

I read The Body Keeps the Score. And I had struggled with some things for my entire life in terms of anxiety and just getting stuck in kind of ruts of feeling. And it was 2021, January, where I just remember talking about follow the flow. I stood up, went to my computer. I remember being in Miami at my parents' house, Googling ketamine treatment, New York City. I knew nothing about ketamine, like nothing. How was it even in your field? I don't know. Just popped into the head. I don't know. I just remember going, ketamine there in New York City, calling up, scheduling the consultation. And a week later, I'm back in New York going to meet the doctor.

And I was like, I don't know if I'm right for this. I don't want anything that will mess with my creativity. I said, the only reason I'm entertaining this idea is because it's in a doctor's office. I said, I would never do drugs on my own because the fear surrounding that of what could happen and where it's procured from and all that stuff would end up infecting the whole experience and with a doctor's office you know i'm entertaining it i said but i don't want it to affect my creativity i don't want it to he's like it's only going to make you more yourself and more creative but he goes these are the three things that i think make for a good candidate he's like number one have you felt emotionally numb for most of your life and at that point in

my life absolutely i think i was in a just cycles of numbness number two was did you have a volatile childhood where emotions were not particularly welcome. And I was like, check, check. Number three, because this one's the most important. He's like, do you know how to have fun? And I said, no. And I cried. I remember crying in the office.

He's like, do you know how to have fun? And that was the first time anyone had asked the question in the right way. Because I knew the idea of fun. I knew that I should be having fun. I knew how to act like I was the first time anyone had asked the question in the right way. Because I knew the idea of fun. I knew that I should be having fun. I knew how to act like I was having fun, but I never felt like I was having fun. And he goes, you don't drink? I said, no.

And he goes, and I meditate. I was at that point four or five years into meditation. He's like, you're going to have a very good response to this. He just like instantly. And so I started ketamine treatments. At that time, I think you do six in 12 days. And then you go back for a booster. In my case, it's every 10 weeks. And I still go and it changed my life. I mean, it was like, I feel like a totally different person. Because what it did is it woke up parts of my brain that I didn't know existed because they'd shut off so early that I didn't know they were there.

And then all of a sudden, I started to get glimpses of what I could be like. And then it became a question of could I hold on to that? And little by little, some people I think get their benefits much quicker, or they don't get any benefits at all. I mean, it's so individual. In my case, it was almost like a practice. It was like every 10 weeks, I'd go learn a million things, work on those things in between, go back. And it almost became like my version of like the deepest therapy, you know, it's become a huge reason for everything. And I think it's also allowed me to follow the flow more than ever because the whole thing of a ketamine treatment is it's a, it's a sedative, right?

So it puts your brain in such a relaxed state that you have no choice but to follow the flow where it goes and the flow usually leads you closer to the truth so i don't know i think it's for someone who was so anti-drugs it was the biggest thing that changed my mind yeah in those just to establish some basics with the whatever it was let's call it six sessions in 12 days so that loading phase let's call it like induction phase those were iv or iv i've never done the microdosing and the nasal spray and all that sort of stuff because again i don't want to do anything that is me alone i've always a great policy yeah i just want to emphasize how good a decision that is a lot of friends i know who have embraced more recreational use to become addicted to ketamine oh

i'm sure it has that potential and you're also in a sense a great candidate slash profile because you don't have any history of alcohol use. Some people who have a history of alcohol abuse or just use, like extensive use, which certainly if you go to New York City, and I've spent a lot of time in New York City, a lot of social life revolves around alcohol. And many people there have switched to ketamine, but it's still a dissociative anesthetic. So in those uncontrolled environments, people can find themselves in a slide that can become very precarious. But in the clinical setting, I also find ketamine to be incredibly interesting. There's a lot of research people can find on PubMed and elsewhere looking at the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine and their different types. For people who might be

interested in the potential benefits and risks and science related to this, I did an episode with Dr. John Crystal of Yale, who was the primary investigator on a lot of the seminal work investigating ketamine as antidepressant in humans and developed some of the early protocols with his fellow researchers and scientists. Which is tricky because I think anytime anybody I talk to people close to me, they're like, do you recommend it? I'm like, no. And I never recommend it to people. I don't think I've ever recommended it to anyone because I found it difficult. It's a journey into the deepest core of yourself. It's a lot. It's a lot of work. And the meditation background also serves you, I would imagine imagine in a very big way in terms of navigating some of these recesses what do your boosters look like is that a single session session and in those

single sessions what does the format look like music no music visuals no nothing and it's alone there's no therapist after it's just i do it in silence and i just follow the flow wherever it takes me and it usually takes me on a ride to the uncomfortable things that i'm not dealing with then you know it's almost like the way i describe it is sometimes i feel like what the ketamine is doing is relaxing your brain like pathway by pathway and whenever it gets somewhere sticky that's like shut off where there's a jam that's where you're going to have a little moment you know that's when the traffic helicopters circle the traffic jam and then you have to you know but i just think it's over time because i've been willing to do the work and sort of be in there with it it's been a huge thing and

it meant that i never had to take antidepressants. I never had to take anti-anxiety medication, things that someone on my profile probably would have needed. But instead to go three, four times a year and do these sessions, I think. And it's also, the great thing about it is it's a short half-life. It's over so fast. So I think that's what makes it, has been such a huge contributor for me. How long would you say your active session lasts? One hour. One hour. Exactly one hour.

And then just the process of getting out of your system, you coming back up, all that stuff is probably another hour and a half. So by the time you're in your Uber home, then you're good to go. Some interesting applications to treatment-resistant depression and chronic pain also. I did six infusions several years ago, and I came in without any particular acute state of anxiety or depression. So the people working there, the staff and technicians and MDs and so on, were a little mystified.

And I therefore didn't have much in terms of measurable reductions because I wasn't coming in with something to reduce at that point. But I left and a few weeks later I realized, oh my God, that mid-back thoracic pain that I have felt every day for several years, I have not felt in probably a month. It's amazing because anything that's coming from a place of stress but the thing is it could return if you haven't if you don't deal with that psychological stress it might return but yeah yeah yeah for sure i felt that too like if i go in with a lot of muscle soreness i'll come back out and it's almost like it never happened so for people who want to learn

more certainly john crystal with a k crystal and andrew huberman also recently had an episode related to all things ketamine which i'm sure involved a lot of due diligence so you can check that out the double this is in the excited about category what is the double super excited about i've been thinking about this one a lot which is there's so much work on your shadow self in psychology right it's always like oh get control of your shadow self your shadow self is you know and the more i i think about it and the more i've gone through my journeys and and all my kind of evolutions i'm realizing that most of the time you're the shadow self you it's the primary

actor you're the problem the better version of yourself is actually out there you're double right and so i think you have to flip it and at any given moment and it's a good exercise to do all day long like just a mental thought experiment what if i'm the shadow and there's a better version of myself completely independent human outside that door that could take over this life and completely handle it with no issues. So it's been something that if you look at all my fiction, all my fiction is about some version of twins, one good, one evil, one this, one that. And it's always, I think it's that. It's that I'm always trying to figure out like, am I who I'm supposed to be? And I think

often psychology will say, well, you have to get control of that shadow. And sometimes I'm like, well, no, maybe I just need to not be here and let the devil be in charge. And so I think it's something I'll be exploring in everything I do, because I think it's such an important concept that we've reversed it

and that we shouldn't be afraid of the shadow because the shadow is actually staring back at us. So when does this thought, this concept come up for you? I have a friend who's calm in almost all circumstances, certainly compared to me, Matt Mullenweg. And there have been times when I have thought to myself,

you know, what would Matt Mullenweg do? Almost like a reminder bracelet some people have for JC and so on. And that has been very helpful. When I'm in a situation, I feel myself on the verge of becoming dysregulated, not like Hulk Smash, but just having some type of rumination or tantrum internally that is not helpful. I'm like, pause. What would Matt Mullenweg do? And then'm like you know what he how he would handle this is he would do and then sometimes i just do that thing and i'm like well that wasn't so hard so i'm curious if there are times when you feel your lesser self doing something or i guess in this case your

shadow right yeah doing something where you're like, what would my double do? How does it come up? It came up first because I was going to be on the Kelly Clarkson show two years ago. And I had never been on kind of like a TV show like that. And it was live student audience. It was straight out of COVID. And I was like, I'm just, I'm not ready for it. Like, I just don't know how to do this.

Did you decide to do that? Or that been suggested to you? Yeah. Yeah. So the publicist was like, we booked you on Kelly. And I was like, I don't know,

especially after lockdown. And I was just like, not ready for, it was the first, I think one of the first shows that she had people back. I remember in the dressing rooms trying to freak out and panic. And I could feel that panic rising. Then all of a sudden I felt this counterforce where I was stressing on my phone.

I felt myself put the phone down. And I just felt some other presence be like, it's fine. We got this. And I almost remember in that moment being like, OK. I just felt it. And that was the first time I'd ever felt something like that. Because I went, I remember sitting on the couch and feeling totally chill. David Duchovny was next to me. it like and that was the first time i'd ever felt something like that because i went i remember sitting on the couch and feeling totally chill david ducoveny was next to me i had grown up

watching x-files i made a sex joke with him in the first like two seconds of the thing like i was just like totally chill and i just was like what i'm literally watching myself being like what is happening and that was the first time i got a sense of oh wait the possibility that there's a better version that can handle every situation you know and i remember the other thing that gave me a clue was tiger woods there was a documentary about tiger woods on hbo and they talked about how his dad taught him kind of techniques to almost hypnotize himself when he played so that his conscious mind wasn't working. And that's how he dominated all those years. And I thought, that's it. It's almost like you have

to get your conscious brain out of the way because the double, the real version of yourself that knows how to do everything is there somewhere. And the question is, over time, can you make it so they start to integrate? And a useful thing that also helped me start to explore it was I started doing IFS. Do you know this? Internal Family Systems. Yeah, I've had the founder, Dick Schwartz, on the podcast. So I started doing IFS therapy, exploring those parts.

And that's when you really start to be able to see them in practice and work with them and start to feel more comfortable letting go. And I think the ketamine treatments plus IFS. Plus Kelly Clarkson. Plus that Kelly Clarkson moment was sort of the secret. I think about a few years ago where everything sort of came together. Personally, do you have thoughts for how you're going to explore that or implement it? I think it comes, really it's in therapy and it's in those treatments where I think sometimes what I'll do now is if I go in for a booster or if I go in for IFS, I just think, okay, I'm taking myself out of this. Let's see what comes from the other part of myself.

You know what I mean? Like the part that is the creative force, is the one that has the vision of where I should be going next, the one who knows what next book I should be writing. Oh, light unbidden. Yeah, like I would like to have a better connection to the thing that is running my life, which is why we should talk about QBs next. QBs, QBs, is this quarterbacks? It is.

And this is so funny. The most spiritual revelations I've ever had watching a TV show have come watching that Netflix series, Quarterbacks. Oh, I haven't seen it. I've only heard watching a TV show have come watching that Netflix series Quarterbacks. Oh, I haven't seen it. I've only heard of it. It's amazing. It follows Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota for the 2022 season. I feel like I know you pretty well. How did you end up watching Quarterbacks? Taylor started dating Travis. Then I felt like, okay. T-Swift is another card. Yeah, we'll get there. So I felt like, okay. T-Swift is another card. Yeah, we'll get there.

So I felt like, okay. I grew up watching a lot of Dolphins games, and I actually love football. I could watch football all day long. I just never really got into it because I didn't have a reason. You know what I mean? There was no team I was rooting for, and the Dolphins always sucked for a long time.

So Taylor gave me more reason. And so I just watched it because I'd also been hearing good things and I love sports talks. I just feel like it's the closest thing I can feel to like high performance. You've played a lot of tennis also for people who don't have the background. So I start watching it and I realized that this position of being a quarterback is the greatest metaphor for what life should be. Because we all think we're the decision makers. This is what we're talking about with Follow the Flow.

We think we're the ones in charge of everything like that. That's not what a quarterback is. Quarterback knows all the possible plays. The other forces are calling it into his helmet. He's not even able to talk to the coach. He can't talk back to the coach. It's a one-way system. So literally, it's universe telling him what the play is.

So he's hearing like white squall, Madonna six wing, whatever. He's like, okay, execute, right? So that's it. And I feel like that's what life should be. You're in the flow so much that the orders are coming from outside. Orders are coming from outside, telling you what the play is. You get the play, you go into the huddle, you communicate the play to your whole team. Now everybody's on the same page as you, but you've got everyone with you, right? Now you go into the huddle, the ball is snapped to you, and now you have to adjust

because the world's going to react to your play. And that's where it gets interesting because you have to be so present and in the moment that you can react to what's going to happen. Everyone's focused so much on deciding the play. Don't focus on deciding the play. Once you feel a play, execute it. Just go, follow it. And if it busts, whatever, you've got a new play coming. And so each film is so different. Mahomes is just sort of a physical freak of nature and so smart and able to on the fly improvise. And so he's

very kind of, I think of him as almost pliable he's very spongy he can sort of like move and adjust at the last minute and he's so sort of confident in that ability current cousins is more like me where he's not particularly physically adept but he's brainy and nerdy and so where the other quarterbacks are in the gym like doing all their physical training he's at biofeedback sessions because he feels like if he can get his brain to just be calm, like the calmest in the most stressful situations, it'll tell him what to do. Roger Federer was similar. He said that every tennis player tenses up right as they're about to hit the ball because the pressure of hitting the right shot gets them at the last nanosecond. And his job is to stay relaxed, so he has an extra millisecond of options.

And so I was just thinking about that show where I was like, these guys are learning. They don't call the play, but they're the executing guys. And I just think like, that's life. Let the plays come to you. Let them come through your invisible headset. Don't question it. You can't talk back to it. Just take the play and then execute. So there's something about that show.

I don't know. I got to check it out. It did something to me at a deep level. All right, we're going to jump straight to T-Swift because knowing very little about Taylor Swift, but watching what was called Americana, I want to say, the documentary, I have a fascination in the phenomenon of Taylor Swift.

And the re-recording and the masters. Some of these fascinating decisions with incredible outcomes. I'm very interested, but I know very little. But I do recall when the whole football cameo came into Taylor's life, somebody who is more attuned to all of these pop phenomena said millions of people, Swifties, are about to become very interested in football.

And that's going to be a curious development. Like, where does that lead? Okay, so T-Swift. It's funny, because i grew up idolizing madonna and i think one of the reasons i was so interested in madonna was some part of me was kind of pre-adapting her central question of existence to what was going to be my life which is which is as an artist how do you sustain a career for a long period of time without it just being a downward diminishing returns you know and what

i loved about madonna was that reinventioning the ability to completely reinvent herself and really brilliant at doing it and she did it for, you know, and then now she's in her close to 70 and in her like legacy celebration era, you know, she's done in terms of that part. It's funny because Taylor in a lot of ways follows the same script, which is each album is a reinvention to the point of now when she's on tour, it's the Eros tour. It's this idea that like, you're going to embrace all the different parts of me but they're all very different and they go in different directions and that's part of my identity now so do not expect me to stay in the box for the next thing because that's not what is happening and that's not what you want so i think it's why when

i went to write fairy tales i think the fact that i am such a also the reason it's why when I went to write fairy tales, I think the fact that I am such a, also the reason it's in the absurd column is because I've liked it for so long. And now I'm so used to comparing myself to her when she wasn't even comparing, not myself, but like, like her moves and things that now that she's so popular,

it's almost more ridiculous when I tell people like, well, we did both move to Missouri for for six foot five aggressively masculine athletic men so i do feel like a special kinship maybe you're light maybe you're a double as taylor i wondered about that i had a one of the ketamine treatments i got you babe for the kelly clarkson she's like we've done this a million times that would be pretty awesome can she deposit some of the funds instead of hoarding but it is this idea of like how do you make it so not staying in the box is your thing because that was my daughter's thing and that's what i want mine to be and that's

why aggressively i can't be afraid of this next thing when I'm going out with something so different. I'm so excited for you. This was not comparing myself to Taylor Swift, nor to you, different circumstances, different time in life. But after the four-hour work week, every pressure, including a lot of internal pressure,

but every expectation and pressure was that I was going to do something in the same category, something with the same category, something with the same brand, which I did obliquely, but the four-hour workweek for fill in the blank, right? Kind of franchise the whole thing, fine splice it, milk it for all it's worth, do the three-hour workweek, whatever it might be. But at that point, and you certainly have this optionality, I paused because the inclination was to rush. And whenever that is the pressure, I tend to hit the brakes. And I'm like, wait a second, this has bought me permission to write another book. This is the time when people are going to be willing to take a gamble

because this first one went so bananas. I can always go back to the four-hour workweek. That door does not close, or it doesn't get locked at least similarly if you try this new thing you will be welcomed back with open arms it's julia roberts with her long red hair and i'm here to write more fairy tales for you exactly and that's that's when i went to the four-hour body totally different category a lot of people assumed within publishing, totally different readership. But I was like, if this works, if this works, it's not guaranteed to work, but if it works, then I buy myself permission to do things that are not within this category. And I can always go back.

I have the optionality of hitting control Z in a sense, hitting undo and going back to what I was doing. But I also think that what was interesting about the four-hour body is it just seems so, it's so funny because that anyone would question that. It just seems so obvious. Because you had presented a hack of the work life. So then for you to be like, I'm now presenting a hack of your physical existence. Of course. Did you feel like this is obvious i did you did that's the important thing yeah i did including some of my close friends like matt mullin like who i mentioned he was like yeah of course of course because he knew that for all the notes and analysis and

so on that i'd put together interviews i conducted for business i had knew, there's no reason why my publishers would know this, although I did tell them. And to their credit, they bit. They were willing to go with For Our Body, which then took off and became very successful. But he knew that I had basically all of my workouts recorded since age 16. He knew the extent to which

I had captured data and experimented on myself and to him he's very productive and in silicon valley he's like yeah like the productivity stuff that's great he's like but for his peer group he's like they're all incredibly good at that right they're all incredibly good at maximizing per hour output he said what we're not good at and what we want from you is actually more of the physical stuff. So all of them personally were asking me questions about the exercise side. And I was like, okay, the same lens, the same framework, the same principles, they can be applied here. That's so interesting because that's what's so obvious, right? What are people asking you?

What do people ask me? How do I fix my teenager? Yeah. Okay, so that's what I'm going to write about. What's staring you in the face? What are people asking you? What do people ask me? How do I fix my teenager? Yeah. Okay, so that's what I'm going to write about. What's staring you in the face? What's staring you in the face? Yeah, what is just staring you in the face? All right.

Should we go to another person? Sure. I'm really interested in these two authors who, I just feel like we're in the age of hyper productivity, the rush of content. So you have to put out a book every year. You have to put out content on Instagram all the time, like this ubiquity of. And I find that the people that, especially the authors that we most hold on to and the

ones that we start to get obsessed over and in a weird, ironic way are the most popular on TikTok are the ones who release a book like every eight years. So I'm thinking of Donna Tartt as one author and the other one that sort of goes together with her. Her name is Hania and the last name is Yana Gihara. And Donna Tartt wrote Goldfinch, Secret History. She's only written three books. She writes one every 10 years and she's due for exactly 10 years. So she did one at 29, 39, 49, and her 59th birthday just passed. So we should be seeing one any moment. And then Hanya wrote A Little Life, which- A Little Life.

Yes, which I read- Yanagihara. Yeah. She's the editor of the Tea Magazine for New York Times. And she wrote this book that is the most immersive, committed, that's what her and Donna do. They spend years and years writing their books, and they become these immersive, complete experiences to the point of they just consume you because they're so real. And what I find so interesting is Donna Tartt, there's a whole section of TikTok dedicated to her. Little Life, 10 years later, it's like number 20 on Amazon. TikTok's obsessed with it. And it's because of the level

of commitment of the work. And that's, I think, what I aspire to deep down is to be able to just be so committed to something that you're able to have the time and freedom to spend a very long time on it so that you can really create this alternate thing that is undeniable. It will exist forever because it's that committed. And so those two authors, I think, are a sign that no matter how addled or stupid or short-term thinking or monkey meme we get, it doesn't matter. That stuff still holds because they're the two most popular authors on TikTok. Why do you think they are, and I know that you just explained part of picture in your mind, why they are so popular on TikTok? Because there are many dedicated authors, let's just take as a category of profession, who release books infrequently, who are supremely good at the craft,

who are not popular on TikTok. So what do you think it is about these two even if you had to just make stuff up speculating what do you think it is about these two in particular what else adds to that it goes with this one so this is okay which is a feeling together with sally rooney who's another author who i'm obsessed with these three authors are able to access a certain kind of primal nerve of feeling because they're so immersed in it. They're just there that it's the intensity of reading it just feels higher than anything else. Yes, you can have someone who spent 10 years crafting this like meticulous world and all that sort of stuff. I've read plenty of books like that.

But there's something about the 10 years that is spent doing that work we talked about. What does a character want? Why do they want it? Why do they want that? Why do they want that? And they do it for every character so that when you're reading it, you're just in this emotional soup that is undeniable. It's just so affecting to everybody who reads it.

So there's this category of book that I can recommend to anybody who comes to me and says, what book should I can recommend to anybody who comes to me and says, what book should I read? I always tell them Secret History by Donna Tartt, Little Life by Hania, Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. Those are my first three recommendations. And it doesn't matter, man, woman, young, old, it always works out. I have not read any of those three. Which one should you start with? That's the question. Which one should you start with that's the question which one should i start with and why oh boy they're all so different depends on their mood a little life well you can interrogate my mood then little life is if you are in the mood to be kind of torn apart not right now yeah so then i would wait for that one that one that one will take it takes so it's

almost like a hijack i'm open to that yeah it's an emotional hijack you will disappear i'm open to that just not right now conversations with friends is the most accurate depiction of what it's like to be i don't know this for sure but i just mean like what I think of what it means to sort of be in a feminine state of mind in your 20s. It is just crystal clear and brilliant writing of the emotions of what it's like to be young. And so I just think for anyone who has ever been young, when you read it, it takes you back there and takes over everything. So I think that one, and you'll tear through it in a day and a half because you won't be able to stop. Secret history is if you just want great writing

and feel like you're in a different world because Donna takes her 10 years to meticulously create a world that the characters feel so real that you're there. So if you're just ready to go somewhere else and disappear for a while, but without the emotional hijacking, you go to Donna Tartt. If you want to be emotionally thrown into a well, Hanya.

And if you want to just have like the equivalent of a Taylor Swift album in prose that is much more articulate, you go to Sally Rooney. Conversation event. Perfect. All right. Where should we go next? Now I'm enjoying this game because as we flip these over we get to get to fewer and fewer options these three interrelated aren't gonna all go together

okay so i'll just we've got two yellows which aren't changed mind about cross-collar dating not sure what that is hookups suspect i know what that is couples language maybe we should start with cross-collar dating then because that's sort of the unlocking key have you never heard this term i've never heard this term i know what a cross-collar throw is in judo but i'm guessing this is unrelated cross-collar dating is that like white collar blue color yes okay i'm just guessing yes yes yes it. And it's been popular now. I've just seen it. There are a lot of columns about this and things like that, which is also why when I thought when Taylor started dating Travis, I'm like, they're going to last forever because they just will. And I'll watch. I'll have to eat

my words. But it's similar to what happened to me, which was I lived in New York for 22 years. I dated every lawyer, accountant, investment banker. I went through it all. And it always felt like two clouds in the sky and no one on earth. Like we were doing jobs that a monkey would not understand. Like, could you explain your job to a monkey? Neither of us. Like, oh, I write.

It wasn't going to work. Yeah. You know? So then when I met S***, who is just in the earth, he can tell you when it's going to rain. It felt like it was just such a match of someone who has earth energy and someone who has sky energy. Because in Hinduism, that's the balance. It's not masculine, feminine. It's not male, female. It's sky energy and earth energy. I'm ashamed and astonished I've never heard this before. Yeah. So that's the balance you're looking for. And I'm all sky. I'm all what they call shakti,

which is thunder and lightning. That's me. So I need somebody who's like the guy on the ground holding the kite before it flies off. And so I just think of like, what was I doing? I should have known from the start. And I think I started to sense it as time went on that I needed to be with someone ultra grounded. And so that's why I think cross-collar dating works because also you're not in each other's space. There's no competition. You're not competing for the same thing you're not measuring each other against maybe you also have different neuroses that's it just probably good

yeah he's thinking about every one of the nurses is about does he have enough money to sell this group of calves for that you know like i'm sure it's that's my reaction to everything it's fine but i can't relate other than be supportive and that's you know when he comes to watch me do the dance in charleston he's just like this is a lot not sure what this is but you do 100 he calls it the dance of the red shoes as a metaphor in general he's like he's off doing his dance of the red shoes we a metaphor in general he's like he's off doing his dance of the red shoes we'll see him when he's done and that could be anything you know so i think that's what it is you know and whenever i see like two lawyers together i'm like i don't know who's gonna

i don't know so yeah worth looking at today i learned yeah cross-collar dating well actually look i'll ask a self-serving question so i'm back on on the singles field as you know we've talked about this privately so what would that potentially mean for me is it more a set of characteristics is it profession i mean i have definitely this is not exactly the same but i have had enough perhaps tiptoeing around this to realize like probably not a good idea for me to be with another writer you know i mean like i've taken that parking spot yeah i think that one is enough i think it's as simple as it's not so much the color it's about the intensity of the commitment to what it is so for instance i'm so committed to my writing career and the entrepreneurship of my life

that it is such a huge part of what I do that you want to find somebody who has that same commitment to what they do that is in a completely different space. So that's why I look at Taylor and Travis Kelsey because she is the most famous pop star in the world. She's always in the number one position. What man is ever going to be able to have that same level intensity? But football player playing in the same stadium in front of the same amount of people, and she has to be there rooting for them. It's like,

you're each doing your thing. It's yours. It's not the other person's, but the other person is there to cheerlead. And I think that to me is the perfect recipe of where i think sometimes when you have like even if it's an investment banker and a lawyer they're similar there's something similar about it but if you can find something that's really different so that you can just relax and be a cheerleader and feel almost humble like coaches basketball and when i go watch the games it's just fun to watch him coach basketball because it has nothing to do with my existence. I have nothing to do with it.

I didn't know that part. You must love that. I'm just thinking of you with the tutoring and all the tennis background. I love it. I always love it. And he comes to me with all his, you know, this kid, this. What do I say to this kid, this? And I'm just like always asking him questions.

I love it. It's my favorite thing. I'm always asking him more questions about what's happening with the drama behind the scenes. I'm still thinking of the dance of the red shoes. I may use that with you. That's great. All right, where should we go?

Hookups or couples language? Well, couples language is a really quick one, but I think it's really interesting that with couples, I feel like every couple... Oh, this is in the absurd category. Yeah. Just so people know. Because I thought it was just us. We have our own language at times like words we make up and things that we have

that no one else would understand and it's almost like animals like we just came up with our own little like barks and like repeated phrases and repeated thoughts that are just ours and then i talked to other couples and they have it too and i was talking to a friend about this where he's like you know him and his partner used to make instead of saying the word program they used to use like a british accent for it and say program or something you know and that was how they always said it and then you know they broke up and then the new partner heard about this somehow and started using it. And he felt this irrational sense of anger. Like aversion to it.

Yeah, because it's somebody else's language. And I thought, oh no, this is a real thing. This is somehow in our DNA to create this private language with our other person. And I have a million of them but like we use the word malinky a lot malinky malinky to refer to something that is on its way to being totally fucked but it's not gotten there it's it's circling the drain is this an adjective or a noun like it it is a malinky or it is it is malinky it's adjective adjective so we use we use that a lot a person could be malinky a dish that we're trying to cook could be like it just comes up and so like we have maybe a hundred of these kind of words

you know nicknames and things and so it's just our own little private language hookups this is a pretty simple one but you know in new york hookup culture was big and I never really got into it. I always was more interested in connections and things like that. And people are like, but it's fun like, okay, you know, you could go hook up with that guy, whatever. I used to think to myself, well, what's the reason? And I realized that it was because I was trying to extract something from them. They had this hotness or this thing or this thing that I felt that by hooking up with them, I would get. And that's when I started thinking about the term hookup.

What is it? Hook. It's like you're trying to like, literally like a fish, like hook them and like get this thing. There's no connection needed. You're going to dispose of them at some point. You know it's going to last. It's like a succubus. You're just going to lean over, breathe in their soul. That's it. And I thought to myself, and in my case, it was obvious because it felt like I was going after certain kind of guys that had things that I wanted. And I realized, it was obvious because it felt like I was going after certain kind of guys that had things that I wanted. And I realized that it was never because I liked them. It was because

I wanted to be them or I wanted this thing that they had physically or something. And it was always like, you just want to extract. And I thought, that can't be good for your soul. I just thought that can't be good. Because what's going to happen if you mentally go through with it? Yes, you're going to go, you're going to extract this thing or try to extract it. You're going to fail to extract it and they're going to leave and you're still not going to have it. I mean, New York, as you described it, is just such a hyperkinetic environment that I feel like whether it's related to hookups or alcohol or other, like you need to have some guardrails where i feel like that environment will sort of eat you alive i think it's funny because we can move to oh yeah another one here i lived there for 22 years and i you know would go to florida and go to places that were much slower to relax

but i think with new york and la what i realized is until you're out of there for an extended period of time, that's when you finally get to be yourself. Because New York and LA and even Chicago and the biggest city, San Francisco, everything's so reactive. It's too much stimulus to ever process in a way where you're just alone with your thoughts in a consistent way. So it's not just vacation, but on a permanent basis. And when I moved to St. Louis, I didn't have any friends there. I was new to the city. I knew no one is still getting used to it, but it's quiet. Not much is happening. And it's for the first time in my life, it was just me. And I felt like in those 10 months, I had to grow.

I got it. So you had a 10-month period where you were there full-time. Yeah. I moved to St. Louis in end of January of this year. And then I go to New York maybe three or four days a month. And in those three or four days, when I first started going, I felt like I'm home. Like, thank God. And each time I went, I started to dread it. I was still seeing all my friends. I was getting to do all the fun stuff that I get to do in New York whenever I go there, the restaurants, the this. But I was just like, I could feel myself be like, we're going to war. Like, that's what it feels like when you go into the city again, you know? And I just realized, especially for me, where I am at my stage, where I want to commit to my art and the things I want to do and connection and relationships, especially with this new set of tools that I have post-ketamine,

where I feel like I'm finally getting to connect and be in the moment and have fun and be present and slow in terms of my experiences in New York, it never would have happened. Do you think you'll have an ebb and flow in that way you'll have a seasonal relationship to that stuff do you think there's a chance that you do st louis for a period and then you have sort of a city period and then a rural period or do you think i think what i'm realizing is i'm in the creative zone now where i'm done with school for evil and fairy tales for a while i'm making new work so for the next two years that's really a while. I'm making new work. So for the next two years, that's really where I am, is the making new work, which involves also making new life,

new partner, new city. It's a new chapter. It's a second act. It looks nothing like my first act. First act was New York, Fairy Tales. I'm now doing something totally different in St. Louis, and I don't want to go for them. It's like a new album.

So I don't know what will happen when I'm done writing, and it's time to promote. Will it be Dance of the Red Shoes again? Let's go to New York and dress up. Of course it will be. Of course it will be. I think it'll be great. I think it'll be great. You have Goat Farm. Goat Farm, St. Louis. What is St. Louis like as a city? I haven't spent any time there. It's quiet. It's manageable. It's a very family-oriented city. Whenever people are like, oh, I just moved to St. Louis, it's manageable it's a very like family oriented city people whenever people are like oh i just moved to st louis it's to be in our family usually most of the time but you're not in the outer reaches of the brooks range in alaska like a flight from people you have access to oh

yeah everything's there yeah yeah everything's there restaurants are there i just think it's a city that has a lot of potential. It reminds me a little bit of when I first started to come to Austin eight or nine years ago, I was like, oh, this place is going to go crazy one day when people find out what's here. St. Louis isn't quite at that level. I feel like it's evolving, but there's a lot there where people are going to be like, weather's good, people are great, food's good, easy to get around no traffic it just feels like it's a sleepy little city that people kind of gave up on but i wouldn't be surprised if it has a has a boom at some point it's the opposite of a malinky it's often or it is the opposite of

malinky excuse me i just did it correctly it's opposite there's a lot to be said about st louis and also i just haven't met that many people so I'm excited to start you know making friends speaking of Britishisms when you're mentioning the shared language of program program I have no idea dodgy dodgy allergies this is in the absurd category on the purple cards a good one to end on I tell everyone I'm allergic to cranberries and eggplant am I allergic to cranberries and eggplant. Am I allergic to cranberries and eggplant? Are you? I don't know.

I don't know, but I've been saying it for so long that I'm like, is it true? So the question is, when we are allergic to things, and I think this gets to a bigger, more profound question, where did that start? I know that once upon a time i thought cranberries caused hives or something and then i ate cranberries this was probably when i was like a teenager and got like a bad case of hives and therefore have told people ever since i can't eat cranberries but it was it could be something else could be something else right and

so this happens i think a lot with you know when we were young i remember first having like peanut butter and things like that and having weird reactions to it i mean like this makes me feel weird but there was no option to stop eating it there was no don't eat the peanut butter it was like we'll just keep giving you peanut butter until one day your system gets used to it. So I was just thinking about the fact that the way that it's easy to, in your mind, create these little zones of, I can't touch eggplant. No fly zones. Once upon a time, this thing happened.

And it makes you start to question, I don't know, deeper no fly zones. So anyway, that was something that crossed my mind. At some point, we need to test the no-fly zones. Basically eat cranberry sauce. For the record, if you're working in a restaurant, I tell you I have an eggplant allergy. It's because I ate eggplant my whole life. And then one day, boom, anaphylaxis, full-blown, like almost died in a restaurant in San Francisco. It's true.

And I went in. That wasn't step one. Step one was, had this dish, had some whatever it was, swordfish, fine. Vegetables, fine. Outside of eggplant. Then I had the eggplant and my tongue got really itchy and I was like, huh, that's weird. Feels like an allergic reaction. I've never had an allergic reaction to eggplant. So being the genius that I am, and I'm saying that sarcastically, I was like, like well i'm going to approach this like an engineer i want to figure out can i replicate the bug yeah so i went back the next day pro tip

do not do this if you have a mild allergic reaction don't do what i'm about to describe so i'm back and i was like well i'll try it again and if my tongue gets itchy i'll go have a slew of testing but that's not how allergic reactions work if you have one allergic reaction that is minor it can suddenly step function up to something very serious and that's exactly what happened so i ate the exact same dish i had the allergic reaction but this time my throat closed down to like the size of a coffee straw and it was rush hour it was in the mission certain part of the mission san franc Francisco where there was absolutely no possibility that an ambulance was going to get to me within 30 minutes.

No bodega or anything nearby because I asked the staff, I was like, do you have any Benadryl? They were like, no. Do you have an EpiPen? No. And I was like, fuck. Of all the dumb things that I've done in my life, this is what's going to kill me?

Yeah. Really? Yeah. And I just sat there. That was all I could do. And I was like, well, freaking out isn's going to kill me yeah really yeah and i just sat there that was all i could do and i was like well freaking out isn't going to do anything and i was like i guess i'm just going to have to try to breathe very calmly and i passed through it therefore i've not had much eggplant now i will say i went and had extensive extensive allergy testing done at stanford with all these top docs.

And at least with the species of eggplant that they used for their various sampling and testing, no demonstrable allergy to eggplant, which raises a bunch of questions. Now, one option is it's a different species of eggplant. Okay, possibly, who knows? The other, which is scarier, which a very well-known friend and tech founder who people would recognize brought up was maybe it is a pesticide that you are unable to identify but that is so psychologically terrifying yes yes yes it says for me to contemplate that i've doubled down on the eggplant and this is why dodgy allergies came into my mind because it's like the fungibility i can avoid eggplant right it to me when i say dodgy what i mean is mental allergies in the sense of the allergy is compounded sometimes by this

extra force like when i was on a plane and they called out okay someone has a peanut allergy therefore we're not serving peanuts or cashews or whatever it was everyone's like okay a little grumbling but whatever next plane they like, someone has an alcohol allergy. We are not serving alcohol. It was like Saigon. Like everyone. Me and me. Everyone's racing for the last helicopter. You know what I mean?

Like to get off that plane. So it was a sudden thing of, okay, we have to take allergy seriously, but then this one we're not taking seriously. It just comes to me sometimes when I think it's worth looking at sort of the mental stress around the allergy. Also, just asking the 30,000 foot question, which I'm sure very competent, qualified people have examined,

but what is going on with all of these allergies? That's what I was thinking to myself. Like when I was young, I definitely think I had a peanut allergy. And it just, I think, got used to the discomfort and to the point where the body was finally like, all right, I guess we're doing this. And just, I guess, got used to it. And I don't think that was necessarily the right way to handle it.

But that's what happened before. And now it's different. It is interesting to see on the farm, none of kids all the nephews nobody has allergies the farm just has so much going on that interesting first thing i do the baby put her in the cow pen into the farm you go all right there's one more thing i can see over there which is one remaining name i think there's one remaining maybe more than one no there's one that thing I can see over there, which is one remaining name. I think there's one remaining, maybe more than one. No, there's one that is worth talking about, which is the daughter of a friend who introduced us, how I first met you.

I met you through Brian Koppelman, the creator of Billions. And I haven't completely independent of the fact that obviously I know her and I've seen her grow up. I have my eye on his daughter, Anna, who is 23 and stand-up comedian and writer, because she is so good. He is a very talented, skilled kid. I tutored both of them. All right. All right.

But no, I did no work with either. Someone will take his customer 15%. In terms of working with either of them, there was nothing to be done. These kids came fully formed. Babysitting mutants. 100% just sat there and talked to the family and had family dinners and somehow got paid for it. I felt like they were the most incredible kids. Sam is the older one and will probably be president someday.

And Anna is just, she reminds me of Dino Miranda, July. I do not. Great name though. Yeah. She is in the early 2000s, late 90s, which is just very prolific and still writes and great comedy, great, just versatile at everything involving writing and performing. And that's Anna. I feel like she can write, she can do standup, she can write novels. It's just the voice is so sharp and interesting and mature. At 23 that I just am like, what's going to happen? So I feel like she's one to keep an eye on. I feel like when I was growing up, people were like, okay, we don't know what he's going to do,

but he'll do something interesting because I was just kind of off doing my dance with the red shoes. And I feel like Anna, I feel like the same. Like something interesting is going to happen. Something interesting is going to happen. So I have my eye on her. So it's good to end on somebody young. Up and comer. That's where I think my brain always is.

I'm looking at youth for talent, ambition, and most of all, commitment. What do you think Brian and his wife have done to foster some of that? This could be nature versus nurture. Who knows? Maybe they're just thoroughbreds. Came from good stock. But I suspect there's more to it. Probably a little bit, certainly, at the very least. What do you think? I think they encouraged their ideas. I just feel like when they had ideas, it almost felt like an improv house, where if one was like, I think I should do this, it would be like, yes, and. Everything was, yes, no shooting down ideas. It was just, go with it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about how, to me, the ideal parent sees a kid reaching for an egg on the table, like a toddler. And he's like, you stop that kid from dropping the egg because you're afraid of the mess and wasting 40 cents on an egg. You're going to lose that toddler seeing this thing explode and leak three different substances and a yolk and a thing. How did that thing turn into that? And all of a sudden you have a scientist and a three-year-old. What else can I drop and see what's going to happen? So he's like, that's it. It's just saying yes and not giving too much direction. That's what I said about the kid making the bed, the kid coming to things on his own terms. Don't comment.

Let them evolve. Just look at the photo. No need to add your two cents underneath. You know what I mean? I do. So what fun. This has been so much fun. Is there anything else you would like to mention? Anything you'd like to point people to? Any closing comments? Anything at all? I think it's just so fun to get to have a conversation with such a deep thinker and

to be able to play around. You know what I mean? Like I would never get to do this in real life so i feel like getting to do this is an honor and i'm just very thankful that you had me oh what a pleasure so fun i'm looking forward to continuing at dinner where can people find you online best place to find me is my website somanchainani.com s-o-m-a-n-N-C-H-A-N-A-N-I.com. And then I don't use Twitter anymore. So Instagram is probably where I see messages and things like that. Soman C on Instagram.

Soman C on Instagram. We'll link to everything in the show notes, folks, so you can find that at tim.blog.com slash podcast and just search Soman. There will not be an overwhelming number of entries, S-O-M-A-N. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to other people, but to yourself. And thanks for tuning in, everybody. Talk to you soon.

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