The Tim Ferriss Show - #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova

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Starting point is 00:04:47 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

Starting point is 00:05:16 This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for

Starting point is 00:05:56 many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, writer, and producer, and co-creator of the Emmy, Golden Globe, and People's Choice Award-winning Seinfeld, named the greatest television show of all time by TV Guide. His latest book is Is This Anything? You can find Jerry on Twitter and Instagram at Jerry Seinfeld.

Starting point is 00:06:46 My writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful, pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with like a wheelbarrow full of bricks. You either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. And I learned that really fast and really young. And that saved my life and made my career, that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy really young. And that principle is you learn to be a writer. It's really the profession of writing. That's what stand-up comedy is. However you do it, you can do it any way you want. But if you don't learn to do it in some form, you will not survive. And when you sit down, is it an empty page? Is it bits and pieces that you've noted through the week as observations that you then flesh out? What is actually in front of you

Starting point is 00:07:51 when you start? What's in front of me is usually about 15 or 20 pages of stuff that's in various states of development. And then there's a smaller book of just really, really random things, like when you're on a cell phone call and the call drops, and then you reconnect with the person, they'll go, I don't know what happened there. As if anyone is expecting them to know anything about the incredibly complex technology of a cell phone, they offer this little, I don't know, it's an excuse or an apology.

Starting point is 00:08:36 They go, I don't know what happened there. So anyway, so I don't know. So that's an example of something in that, my little, little tiny notebook that I don't know what to do with that. But it's just so stupid to me and funny. So that to me is like it's like an archery target 50 yards away. And then I take out my bow and my arrow and I go, let me see if I can create something that I could say to a room full of humans in a nightclub that will make them see what I see in that.

Starting point is 00:09:14 There's something stupid and funny about that to me. That's the very, very beginning. So then I'll write something about it. It'll be if I'm lucky, it'll be a half a page or a page on a yellow legal pad. And I'll write that. And then in the session the next day, if I get around to it, I will see it again and I will see what I have and what I like and I don't like. And as any writer can tell you, it's 95% rewrite. So I have two phases. There is the free play creative phase, and then there is the polish and construction phase.

Starting point is 00:09:56 And I love to spend inordinate, I mean, it's not wasteful to me because that's just what I like to do. Amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear. And then it becomes something that I can't wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it. And then from the stage, the audience will then, I imagine, you know, it's a very scientific thing to me. It's like, okay, here's my experiment. And you run the experiment. And then it's back through the rewrite process. And then new ideas will come. And it's just millions of different kinds of development. So you're just going to that place of creating, fixing, jettisoning. It's extremely occupying. It's never boring. It's the frustration

Starting point is 00:11:08 I'm so used to at this point, I don't even notice it. And it's just work time. It's just work time. I like the way athletes talk about, I got to get my work in. Did you get your work in? I like that phrase. One of the reasons i was looking forward to doing this show with you is i know that it's something you are very interested in the craft yeah the systemization of the brain and creative endeavor you know i really think when i'm working it's very much like when you're watching a picture working on stage. Then now we're going. So that's different.

Starting point is 00:11:49 So basically, it's on stage and off stage. It's the desk and then the stage and then back to the desk and then back to the stage. And that's endless. My guiding rule is systemize. What's the problem? The problem is like my daughter. My daughter is very creative. She's extremely bright. She's got an incredible head on her shoulders. And I see myself in her at that age.

Starting point is 00:12:14 She's way further advanced than I was at that age. She has a creative gift. So I say to her, when you have a creative gift, it's like someone just gave you a horse. You have to learn how to ride it. You've got to learn how to ride this horse. And I've seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens. I've seen people that were given black stallions. And if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you're born and they just put you on it. And that's what happens. They just put you on it and you either learn to ride this thing or it's going to kill you. Then we have many, many examples of that. So she's trying to write this thing. She's struggling.

Starting point is 00:12:57 I can't write. I keep putting it off. So I explained to her my basic system, which you already talked about at the top of the show which is if you're going to write make yourself a writing session what's the writing session I'm going to work on this problem well how long are you going to work on it don't just sit down with an open-ended I'm going to work on this problem that that's a ridiculous torture to put on a human being's head it's like you're going to hire a trainer to get in shape and he comes over and you go, how long is the session? And he goes, it's open-ended. Forget it. I'm not doing it. It's over right there. You've got to control

Starting point is 00:13:37 what your brain can take. Okay. So if you're going to exercise, God bless you. And that's the best thing in the world you can do, but you got to know when's it going to end. When's the workout over? It's going to be an hour. Okay. Or you can't take that? Let's do 30 minutes. Okay, great. Now we're getting somewhere. I can do 30. I'm trying to teach my son, who knows how to do transcendental meditation, how to do it. i assume you know about that i do yeah yeah i practiced this morning because i can't do it 15 minutes like okay let's do 10 let's do 10 let's come up with something you can do that's where you start everything that's how you start to build a system so my daughter so i said to her you have to have an

Starting point is 00:14:22 end time to your writing session. If you're going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you got to get a reward for that. And the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You're done. If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is stop. Now, pencils down. So that's the beginning of a system that, to me, will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something I kind of wanted to teach in a way. I think it's so simple.

Starting point is 00:15:03 I think exercise is pretty simple too, but people don't, they don't come up with good, simple little systems. They just try and do it. And that's, to me, that's, you're going to fail. The simple doesn't mean easy. And the point you made is so important. The incentives, right? Having a reward, having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration or how long have you chosen? I told her, just do an hour. That's a lot. She says, I'm going to write all day. No, you're not. Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can't write all day. It's torture. Yeah. If you taught a class on writing, what other lessons

Starting point is 00:15:46 might you have or resources or anything, exercises? Because I'm imagining that your daughter could sit down, she says, all right, I have an hour. And then you ask her how her writing session went. She said, well, I didn't have any idea what to write. So you'd have, I don't know what age the students would be in your course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing? Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. You know, no one's really that great. You know who's great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it.

Starting point is 00:16:15 It's a game of tonnage. You know, how many hours are you going to work per week, per month, per year? You might even want to chart that or with your exercise if you want to get in shape. I couldn't get in shape. I was like, I started as a jogger, you know, like in the seventies and I would run three miles a day. And then I got older and I got married late and I had young kids and I really had to get in shape. And I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called Body for Life. Body for Life, yeah. And it's really, really such a system for a primitive brain.

Starting point is 00:16:54 I do it to this day. I think it's a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape because he broke it down to here's what we're going to do in minute one. Here's what you're going to do to minute five, minute 12. And this is going to end in 45 minutes or whatever it is. And every minute I know exactly what I'm doing. And that like turned the key for me. And all of a sudden I was getting in shape. I never had to ask, what am I doing now? Or what are we doing next? It's like, you got to treat your brain like a dog that you just got. You got it. It's stupid. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained. You got to confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to

Starting point is 00:17:48 confine it. You confine it. And it's done through repetition and systemization. So let's talk about feedback in the experimental loop that you mentioned earlier, which was desk stage, desk stage, desk stage. One form of feedback would be audience feedback. And I'm curious what other forms of feedback you have. No, there is no other feedback that means anything. Okay, got it. Well, I'll tell you, here's a little fine point of writing technique that I'll pass along to your writers out there. Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day, that day. You have to wait

Starting point is 00:18:30 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone about what you did because you never want to take away that wonderful, happy feeling that you did that very difficult thing that you tried to do, that you accomplished it. You wrote, you sat down and wrote. So if you say anything, it's like the same reason I ever heard the thing like you never tell people the name you're going to give the baby until it's born because they're going to react and the reaction is going to have a color. And if you've decided that that's going to be the baby's name, you don't want to know what anybody else thinks. So I will always wait 24 hours before I say anything to anyone about what I wrote.

Starting point is 00:19:19 So you want to preserve that good feeling because if you if let's say you write something and you love it and then later on that day, you're talking to someone and you thought, hey, what do you think of this idea? Blah, blah, blah. And they don't love it. Now that day feels like, oh, I guess that that was a wasted effort. So you always want to reward yourself. The key to writing, to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in Officer and a Gentleman.

Starting point is 00:19:55 And just be a harsh prick, ball-busting son of a bitch about that is just not good enough. That's got to come out or it's got to be redone or thrown away. So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you're writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. It's just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard ass and you switch back and forth. There's a quote from you in the New York Times. And the quote is, I'm not OCD, but I love routine. I get less depressed with routine. Aside from the writing sessions, are there any other routines for you that are particularly important as scaffolding or automatic behaviors?

Starting point is 00:20:52 Yeah. Exercise, weight training, and transcendental meditation. I think I could solve just about anyone's life, and I don't care what you do, with weight training and transcendental meditation. I think your body needs that stress, that stressor, and I think it builds your resilience of the nervous system. And I think transcendental meditation is the absolutely ultimate work tool. I think the stress reduction is great, but it's more the energy recovery and the concentration fatigue solution, which is, of course, as a stand-up comic, I can tell you my entire life is concentration fatigue. Whether it's writing or performing, my brain and my body, which is the same thing, are constantly hitting the wall.

Starting point is 00:21:46 And if you have that in your hip pocket, you're Columbus with a compass. You're chatting with Hugh Jackman on the podcast, and he's also a devout, seems like an odd word to use since it can be used quite secularly, but proponent of TM. How many times, what does your weekly schedule look like for weight training? When do you do it? And do you do TM twice a day? I do it at least twice a day, but I will do it anytime I feel like I'm dipping. Energetically? Yeah. If I sit down and the pen doesn't move for like 20 minutes, I know I'm at a guess. Why isn't the pen moving? My weight training routine is three times a week for an hour a session, but I'm into

Starting point is 00:22:35 that. I've been into that. You know, I mentioned the Bill Phillips Body for Life program, the HIIT training. So it's three times a week of weights and three times a week, the interval cardio training. There are a lot of days where I want to cry instead of do it because it really physically hurts. But I just think it's balancing. It's very balancing to the forces inside humanity that I think are just, they overwhelm us. We're overwhelmed by our own power. And you got to put that ox in the plow, make it do this stuff that it doesn't want to do. It just keeps it.

Starting point is 00:23:14 What the hell do oxes do in the wild? I can't imagine they were happy. Checking Twitter, just developing neuroses. No, you know, put it in the harness. I mean, I don't know. A lot of my life is I don't like getting depressed. I get depressed a lot. I hate the feeling. And these routines, these very difficult routines, whether it's exercise or writing, and both of them are things where it's like, it's brutal. That's another thing I was explaining to my daughter. She's frustrated that writing is so difficult because no one told her that it's the most difficult thing in the world. It's the most difficult thing in the world is to write. People tell you to write like you can do it, like you're supposed to be able to do it.

Starting point is 00:24:05 Nobody can do it. It's impossible. The greatest people in the world can't do it. So if you're going to do it, you should first be told what you are attempting to do is incredibly difficult. One of the most difficult things there is, way harder than weight training, way harder. What you're summoning, trying to summon within your brain and your spirit to create something onto a blank page. That's another part of my systemization technique. Learn how to encourage yourself. That's why you don't tell someone what you wrote. Be proud of yourself. Treat yourself well for having done that horrible, horribly impossible thing. I would have to imagine, and maybe this is

Starting point is 00:24:52 just a projection because I hope that when I have kids, which I don't have yet, that this will be true for me, but that being kind to your creative self and offering positive reinforcement for yourself through the process would affect how you parent, I would have to imagine. Yes, yes. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost the Lugacit side of parenting. Pesky Child Protective Services. Yeah. What do they know? But yeah, it is similar. You want to be very

Starting point is 00:25:27 encouraging, but you also want to explain there are laws in life that you need to know about, or it's going to hurt. I think one of the better lines I've come up with over my life is that pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void with great speed. Can you say that one more time, please? Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void. You don't know that that post of your bed was not where you thought it was, but when your foot hits it, that knowledge is going to come rushing in really fast. It's going to really hurt when your foot hits that post. Because that was a piece of knowledge that you didn't have, that you're going to get, you're about to get.

Starting point is 00:26:17 You were talking about Black Stallion and learning to ride Black Stallion, lest you be broken yourself by your superpowers slash potential murderers i've struggled with depression for decades and have found some respite in the last five or six years for a whole host of reasons but aside from the writing and weight training is there anything else that has contributed to your ability to either stave off or mitigate depressive episodes or manage. No, I still get them. Still get them. The best thing I ever heard about it was that it's part of a kit that comes with a creative aspect to the brain, that a tendency to depression seems to always accompany that.

Starting point is 00:27:01 And I read that like 20 years ago and that really made me happy. So I realized, well, I wouldn't have all this other good stuff that that just comes in the kit, that you have a tendency to depression. But I think it's fair to say that I don't know a human that doesn't have the tendency. You gave me a quote.

Starting point is 00:27:20 I'll ask you one more question and then we close. We can go a little more. I'm enjoying this so much. Let's go a little more. Let's do it. So I'd love to ask about following up on depression. I'd love to ask about failure just to keep this bright and shiny. Can you think of how a particular failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? In other words, do you have a favorite failure of any type? Something that seemed catastrophic at the time that in fact set you up for great things later?

Starting point is 00:27:51 Yeah, yeah. I have a couple really good ones. And this is another thing I try and teach the kids, you know, when something horrible happens. And I think of all the things I would trade, if you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures. Those are the most valuable ones. When I moved to L.A., I was only doing comedy four years, but I had built up a pretty good reputation in New York.

Starting point is 00:28:22 And New York was really in those days still very much the minors to LA, which was the majors. So I went out to LA and people talked that I was coming and that I was one of the hot guys coming out of New York. And I was only doing it four years. I was 25 years old, really still just starting. And the Comedy Store was the club in LA that you had to break into. That was the club. And the guys that worked there and the women were killers. I mean, these people made the room just shake with laughter. It was very intimidating to go on there. And I went on there and I did very well. In those days you would call and they would give you spots if you were good. And I would never get spots. I would get like one spot a week. And

Starting point is 00:29:11 one spot a week, it's like one pushup a week. It's like, you get it. Well, don't even bother. And so I asked to meet with Mitzi Shore, who was the owner of the club and person who ran the whole thing there. And she said to me, she said, I'm the kind of person that needs to get stepped on. And that's what you need. You need someone to step on you and I'm going to be that person. She said, if you called and said, if I had four spots available and you called in, I would give all four spots to this other guy. She mentions this other guy. And I sat there in her office and I nodded. I nodded and I said, well, I won't mention the name of the guy she said she was going to give the four spots to. I said, well, if maybe

Starting point is 00:29:59 he can't do all four, I'd be happy to take any of the ones he can't do and i walked out of there and i never worked at the comedy store again and saying you're not working at the comedy store in la it's like saying i want to be a baseball player but not the majors not the majors in the united states i'm gonna apply my trade someplace else. Lithuania. And so from there, I went from, I hope it doesn't sound immodest, from being absolutely at the top of the heap in New York City to playing at discos in the basement in LA to like eight people. But my resentment and hostility to her,

Starting point is 00:30:48 I was a guy who I would say I was a three-day-a-week guy in terms of my writing discipline in those days. And I went from three days a week to seven right there. And I was like, okay, we're not... I was angry. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was resentful, but I used that. It was just fuel for me. She wasn't stopping me. Nobody was going to stop me. But when someone is that hostile to you, that can be a very good thing. If you're tough, if you're tough enough to eat that shit and say i'm she's not stopping me that's a great story makes me think one of my friends alexis ohanian co-founded reddit and at one point early on they were super excited about of course their company their baby they'd

Starting point is 00:31:40 put all of their waking hours into it and they met with some yahoo executive who was basically just fishing for inside information and at some point in the meeting, this exec said, oh, there's your traffic. Oh, that's a rounding error for us. And so Alexis and his guys took a huge, they made a poster that said, you are a rounding error and put it on the wall in their office. It worked. It worked. We were talking about systemizing gamifying is another thing i'm very big on let's make this into a game you know whatever the problem is let's make it a game to me it's a fun game i i honestly i wouldn't say this around my family but i i don't care if i drop dead tomorrow it's like i just wanted to I still feel like I played the game well,

Starting point is 00:32:26 you know? That's all I want to feel. I just want to feel like I played the game well. What would be an example of gamifying? I mean, I've read, of course, about the, you know, Seinfeld's productivity secret, marking the crosses on the calendar, which I guess some people get. Yeah, that's not really a game. That's more based that I think stats are good if you want to improve anything. My trainer, Adam Wright, and I always like to play this game. Well, this was the maximum amount of weight you did three months ago for this many seconds or whatever. And then it's like, so it's a game now. Let's see if I can keep the reps going for 30 seconds. Last time was 25. So it's a little game. It's just, again, this just

Starting point is 00:33:11 goes back to my, the human brain is a schnauzer. It's just a stupid little contraption that you can easily trick. As soon as you tell me I did it 25 seconds last time, okay, let's see if I can do 30. That's not wisdom. That's not intelligence. It's a stupid little machine. It's going to do that every single time. Every time you tell someone your last best was 25 seconds, you're going to try for 30. When you hear the word successful, who comes to mind for you and why could be parents could be outside of parents could be anybody but for you when you hear that word is there anyone who is

Starting point is 00:33:54 really a sort of paragon of what you would consider success or someone you have looked up to as someone who's successful well that's a pretty broad term. Hyper broad. It comes down to kind of how you define it also. You know, I think, I don't know if I mean it as a joke, but I say a lot these days, survival is the new success. And I'm a big, look, Tim, what do you want me to tell you? In my business, if you're 60 plus, or I 60 plus or if you're 55 and you're getting paid to work, paid well, you have crushed it. So stand up comedy, I would move this piece of our conversation next to the toxic ecosystem of this world. When you have seen the attrition that I

Starting point is 00:34:46 have seen, it's like in the heart of the sea. You know that book? Ron Howard made the movie. When they're dropping like flies and the handful, the small handful. Somebody asked me the other day, how many people whose careers were made on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson are still working? I didn't want to answer the question because you had it. You know what I mean? You had it. You had it. So once you have it, you can only lose it. You can only fail to take care of it. And that's when we get to health and work ethic and managing yourself so that you don't break. Because they're trying to break you. I always tease my friend Jimmy Fallon that this is like a sick experiment, these talk show gigs. Let's take a human being,

Starting point is 00:35:55 put him in a studio for decades, doing an hour of television a day, and let's see what breaks. It's sick. It's a sick human experiment. It's like a Pope job. It's like they just do it till you're dead. The forever Skinner box. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, that's brutal. Brutal. You've already given a bunch of possible answers to this, but if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, that could get a message, a quote, an image, question, anything out to billions of people, what might you put on that billboard? Back in the 80s, I had a friend who was teaching a comedy course at the Improv on Melrose in LA. And he asked me if I would come in and talk to the class. And I said, sure. I went in and it was like, I don't know, maybe 20 people in the class in the afternoon. And I went up on stage and I said, the fact that you have even signed up for this class is a very bad sign for what you're trying to do.

Starting point is 00:36:56 The fact that you think anyone can help you or there's anything that you need to learn, you have gone off on a bad track because nobody knows anything about any of this. And if you want to do it, what I really should do is I should have a giant flag behind me that I would pull a string and it would roll down and on it, the flag would just say two words, just work. Just work. Just work. Yeah. I love it. 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 Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet. So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key

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Starting point is 00:39:01 Tim. And now, Maria Popova, essayist, author, poet, and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism at The Marginalian, part of the Library of Congress's permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. You can find Maria on Instagram at Maria Popova. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am extremely excited to have a fellow geek in arms, Maria Popova, on the line with me. Maria, how are you today? Very well. Thank you for having me.

Starting point is 00:39:46 And I appreciate your coaching on the last name. I wasn't sure if it was Popova or Popova. I have friends who, for instance, Naval Ravikant, who's a friend. It's actually novel, but Americans can't really pull that off, so he goes for Naval. So I appreciate the coaching. And as a country of immigrants, we have a surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right, right? Absolutely. It's just the sort of anglicizing of such a crisol, like a melting pot of different cultures. And at the same time, I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time, which is reading. And there are so many words,

Starting point is 00:40:26 I've embarrassed myself on many occasions, that I've read dozens or even hundreds of times, especially in scientific literature, that I've never heard pronounced. Oh, yeah. I call this reader syndrome. As somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading, you run into that a lot, especially with sort of cultural icons, last names, first names that are spelled differently than very differently than they're pronounced. It's kind of tragicomic when you actually find out how they're pronounced. No, exactly. Or it can be a real revelation. I remember when I was a young kid, I couldn't hit, let's say, democracy or aristocracy. I could only say,

Starting point is 00:41:07 because I'd also read it, democracy, aristocracy. For whatever reason, I couldn't get the emphasis right. But coming back to the reading and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading, if someone asks you, and I'm sure occasionally it happens, what do you do? For those people listening who may not be familiar with you? But we'll start with the cocktail question. When someone asks you, what do you do? How do you answer that? Well, I've answered it differently over the years, in part because I think inhabiting our own identity is kind of a perpetual process. But right now, I would say I read and I write in that order. And in between, I do some thinking and I think about

Starting point is 00:41:46 how to live a meaningful life, basically. And if someone then were to go online, find your work, end up at brain pickings, and they're like, oh, this is quite interesting. And they kind of looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party. And they're like, what is brain pickings? How do you typically describe that? It's just the record of that thinking, my personal subjective private thinking that takes place between my reading and the writing and takes form in writing. Collection of very interesting things. And sometimes, you know, how I've sort of simply put it to folks. And brainpickings, for those people wondering, is one of the very few sites that I end up on constantly. And when people ask me,

Starting point is 00:42:32 what blogs do you read? I'm embarrassed, in some cases kind of humiliated, to answer that I don't go really to many blogs consistently. And I think part of the reason is so many of them feel compelled to put out very, very timely of the moment material that expires within a few hours. And I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Jones focus on just-in-time information, not just-in-case information, which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound. But there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot. Brain Pickings is one, and Sam Harris's blog is another. And I saw your review of his latest book, Waking Up. Well, not a review. Not a review. I don't review books. Okay. No, so this is… An annotated book, Waking Up. Well, not a review. Not a review. I don't review books.

Starting point is 00:43:25 Okay. No, this is, no, so this is, this is an annotated reading. Okay. So an annotated reading, and I definitely want to dig into that annotated reading of Waking Up, which I found really impactful for me in a lot of ways. It put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I had for a very long time. Talking about reviews, I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you. And a close friend of mine, Chris Saka, he came back with what percentage of New York Times bestsellers can be attributed to your coverage? And I'd be curious to hear you answer that. And then there's sort of a follow-up, but you've built this incredible powerhouse of an outlet for your, whether it's creative musings or observations,

Starting point is 00:44:10 and it has a huge influence on what people read. So if you were to sort of think of that, how would you answer that question? Well, first of all, you're very kind to put it that way as is Chris. But I think one big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about are very old, out of print, things that are not competing for New York Times bestseller. In fact, I don't even know if I ever really, I mean, perhaps, I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things with the New York Times bestsellers. But I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question is actually that I met him through his wife, who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love, and I love Wendy, on a book about wine. Definitely.

Starting point is 00:44:59 And I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensory experience. And I like things that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it. But in any case, I wrote about that book and that particular piece on brain pickings seemed to do pretty well. And I think perhaps that warped Chris's idea of how much contemporary books I really sort of am interested in. Right. But I would say that's a minority. Right. And for those people wondering, it's the essential scratch and sniff guide to becoming a

Starting point is 00:45:35 wine expert, which was written along with, and the illustrations are wonderful. Richard Betts was the sommelier who was part of that. And at one point I met with him because I wanted to try to deconstruct the master sommelier test. And he said, I can show you how to do it. And it was just the pared down sort of hacked, if you will, version still of passing the master sommelier test was so intimidating that I put it on ice indefinitely. But at some point, Richard, we will talk again and form a game plan. So the opposite, of course, of sort of putting out this material that expires as soon as it's out on the vine is putting out what I think you do very often. And that is timely and timeless. I've heard you call it material where you're pulling from old sources or older sources, doing pattern

Starting point is 00:46:22 recognition to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a theme or something that still affects people. And I was doing research for this interview, and we met briefly in New York at an event, and I've been a longtime fan of your work. And so I thought to myself, like, you know, how much digging do I really need to do? And good God, you have such an absolute canon of work out there. It is astonishing. I mean, it is really... You're very kind. It's just the volume of time, really. It's been, you know, I've been doing this for eight years coming up. Actually, exactly a month from today, it'll be eight years. Oh, really? So it's just the accumulation you know and i'm fascinated by routine and schedule and you know i'm reading from of course

Starting point is 00:47:12 not the always accurate but generally a good place to start wikipedia and it says that brain pickings takes you know 400 plus hours of work per month, hundreds of pieces of content per day, 12 to 15 books per week that you're reading. I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before, but sometimes the answers change and evolve. They always do. And which is why I actually don't do interviews very frequently because I find that they sort of tend to kind of cast us as the static thing that just stays there as some sort of reference point while we're really just a fluid process and we're constantly evolving. But in any case. No, definitely.

Starting point is 00:47:53 So the question that you've, I'm sure, been asked many times, but I'll ask again, is how do you find slash choose the books that you read? This is a huge problem for me because my appetite for reading outstrips the time that I have. And so I end up actually, unfortunately, sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books I've taken on at any given point in time. So I'd be curious how you sort of vet the books that you read.

Starting point is 00:48:22 Well, I guess it goes back to that question of, well, let me backtrack and just say that I write about a very wide array of disciplines and eras and sensibilities because that's what I think about. So anything from art and science to philosophy, psychology, history, design, poetry, you name it. But the common denominator for me is just this very simple question of, does this illuminate some aspect, big or small, of that grand question that I think we all tussle with every day, which is how to live well, how to live a good, meaningful, fulfilling life. Whether that's Aristotle's views on happiness in government or beautiful art from 12th century Japan

Starting point is 00:49:10 or Sam Harris's new book, anything. Got it. And I've read you citing Kurt Vonnegut before. Kurt Vonnegut's one of my favorite writers of all time. I know, I heard your semi-cololon quote. I think it was either the interview I did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have a counterpoint to the semicolon question, but go on. So I actually brought up the semicolon quote partially as a sort of wink, wink, nod, ribbing to a friend of mine named John Romanello

Starting point is 00:49:46 who has a tattoo of a semicolon on his, I think it's his forearm. He loves semicolons. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other arm. He's a fascinating guy. But the quote that I heard you cite that I wanted to dig into a bit was Kurt Vonnegut saying, write to please just one person.

Starting point is 00:50:08 So my question to you is, when you write, is that still the case? And if so, who is that person that you are writing for? It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one, and that's myself. Like I said, it's just selective. My thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated, meaningless information and this sort

Starting point is 00:50:46 of transmutation of information into wisdom, really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom. And that's interesting, too, because when I started Brain Clicking, like I said, almost eight years ago, it started very much as a private record of my own curiosity. And I shared it with seven co-workers that I had at the time, just as a little sort of email newsletter thing. And now to think that there are about 7 million people, strangers, reading it every month. That's amazing. It's kind of surreal. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. And I'm not sort of number dropping for fail or anything like that, but just to try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing for one person one very sort of inward person but there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and just relating to this pretty private act and it's a

Starting point is 00:51:39 strange thing to live with and in no way a bad thing i'm not complaining about it obviously but it's just interesting to observe how one relates to oneself when being looked on by a few million people you know definitely and there's so many so many questions i want to ask you we might have to do part two at some point because i know we have some time constraints. But the first question would be related to that. There's so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after kind of the tried and true BuzzFeed type headlines. Do you ever contend with that temptation? And if so, how do you resist it? And this is part of the, you know, how do you resist it and this is part of the you know how do you respond to the expectations of the crowd or the seven million people looking on and i feel this personally sometimes because i have a blog it has certainly by no means the number of

Starting point is 00:52:36 monthly readers that you have i'm somewhere between one and two million uniques a month usually but thank you but even at that scale, there are times when I put out something that I feel is very important, but on the dense side. And then it will, sometimes it takes off, but sometimes it doesn't. And there's a lot of temptation

Starting point is 00:52:57 when, for instance, I know you use social media quite a bit, and we'll get to that, where I look at, say, the retweets of the favorites on something that's kind of dense, and then I'm I'm like oh god I should just do like the seven tricks you can actually teach your cat you know and get 500,000 retweets is that something that ever sort of crosses your mind and do you ever feel that temptation well you know it's interesting

Starting point is 00:53:21 because I think anybody who thinks in public which which is what writing is, which is even what art is, it's some sort of putting a piece of oneself out into the world. Anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting to really stay true to one's experience, you know, and being aware that as soon as it's out in the world, there's this notion of the other audience. And, you know, Oscar Wilde, he very memorably said that a true artist takes no notice, whatever, of the public and that the public are to him non-existent. And it's very easy to say, especially for somebody as Wilde, who was very prolific, very public, almost performative in his public presence. It's very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say, well, you can't possibly not care it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood, which is why all art comes to be, because one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for and who he or she is.

Starting point is 00:54:38 And so with that lens, I do think it's hard to say, well, you know, I don't care about what happens to it out there, even though I write for myself and think for myself. The awareness of the other really does change things. But I think perhaps Werner Herzog put it best. I just finished reading this kind of 600-page interview with him, essentially. It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Cronin had with him over the course of 30 years. And in one passage, Herzog says something like, you know, it's always been important for me to have my films reach an audience. I don't necessarily need to hear what those audience reactions are just as long as they're out there, that they're touching, that the films are touching people in some way. And I feel very similarly. So with that in mind, I guess to answer your question rather circuitously, I don't feel, quote unquote,

Starting point is 00:55:37 tempted to make listicles or to make anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for. In part, I think the beauty of the web is that it's a self-perfecting organism. But for as long as it's an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest. So perfect the art of the BuzzFeed listicle, the endless slideshow,

Starting point is 00:56:00 the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm interested in. I think it's a very virtuous goal. I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons. One of them is I feel a very kindred spirit with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made so for instance i mean not doing the slideshows to rack up page views for some type of cpm advertising that stuff drives me insane so if it drives me insane i assume it drives my readers insane so i'm not going to do it or like you said that's so wonderful that you do

Starting point is 00:56:41 that because i think so much of the cultural crap that is out there, not just on the internet, just in general, comes from people who fail to understand that they should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist. So if you're a writer, write the things you want to read. If you're an artist, paint the bowls you want to see painted. And I think the commercial aspect is really warping that. And one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations from your books to, you know, this podcast, the site, everything is that there's just this sort of sense that you just want this to exist. It doesn't exist for any other reason

Starting point is 00:57:16 than you want it to exist. And I think that's wonderful. Thank you. That means a lot to me. And I, you know, coming back to the right to please just one person, I think that it's related to that. So in a way, it's put the things out into the world that you would want to consume yourself or experience yourself, number one. Secondly, just for those people who haven't heard this anecdote, when I was writing The 4-Hour Workweek as my first book, I still to this day find writing very challenging. And I wish I could say it's gotten easier over time, but for whatever reason, it seems not to have. In the case of the four-hour work week,

Starting point is 00:57:50 I came out of undergrad at Princeton, and many years have passed, obviously. But when I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kind of Ivy League, you know, where I was trying to use $10 words where a $0.10 word would suffice and be a lot cleaner. So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted, and this was a major panic attack moment. I was on deadline. And I remember I was in Argentina at the time. And then I went the

Starting point is 00:58:16 other way and I said, no, no, no, I have to be loose. I have to be funny. And so I wrote a few chapters that were completely slapstick ridiculous. I mean, they sounded like three stooges put on paper. And so I had to throw out those few chapters. And of course, I'm doubling down on my anxiety at this point and decided at one point that I was just going to have a little bit of yerba mate tea, two glasses of wine, and no more than two glasses of Malbec, and sit down and start to write.

Starting point is 00:58:42 What is that? Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America, best known in Argentina, but there are actually some really nice Malbec wines in Chile. As I understand it, it was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe, but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires and has developed this worldwide fame because of its cultivation in Argentina. So there's a lot of metaphor there that I also like, but drank two glasses of wine, sat down and literally opened up an email client and started typing the four hour work week as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends. One was an investment banker trapped in his own job and

Starting point is 00:59:23 he felt like he couldn't leave because his lifestyle was swelling to meet his income. And then the other was an entrepreneur trapped in a company of his own making. And so these two very specific guys in mind, I started to write with just enough alcohol to sort of take the edge off. And that's how I was writing in that case to please just two people. But that's the only way I could make it work. Your schedule, I've read of your schedule, but I'd love to hear the current iteration of that. It seems like you have a fairly regimented schedule, which would make sense if you're

Starting point is 00:59:57 putting the number of hours into reading and writing that you do. So what does your current day look like? Well, I'll answer this with a caveat. The one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last few years, couple of years maybe, is this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and prejudice. And especially in a culture that seems to measure our worth or our merit or our value through our efficiency and our earnings and our ability to perform certain tasks as opposed to just the fulfillment we feel in our own lives and the presence that we take in the day-to-day. And that's something that's become more and more apparent to me.

Starting point is 01:00:42 So I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss a routine of some sort of holy grail creative process because it's just really, it's a crutch. I mean, routines and rituals help us not feel like this overwhelming mesh and mesh of just day-to-day life with consumers. It's a control mechanism, but that's not all there is. And if anything, it should be in the service of something greater, which is being present with one's own life. So with that in mind, my day is very predictable. I get up in the morning. I meditate for between 15 to 25 minutes before I do anything else.

Starting point is 01:01:19 What time do you wake up, typically? Exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed. So it varies. Okay. I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think when I write, or when I, I guess, try to think, what I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts. And in order for that to happen, those associative chains need to be firing. And when I am sleep deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain, which is certainly I'm not uniting that in any way. There's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep. We're almost as drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time we normally need to function. And I think ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that speaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is, but really it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. And I

Starting point is 01:02:19 try to sort of enact that in my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep, at least as disciplined as I am about my work, because the latter is a product of the capacities cultivated by the former. So in any case, so I get up eight hours after I have gone to bed, I meditate, I go to the gym where I do most of my longer form reading. I get back home, I have breakfast and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles a day and one of them tends to be longer and when I write, I need uninterrupted time. So I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert. So I don't look at email or anything really external to the material I'm dealing with, which does require quite a bit of research usually. So it's not like I can cut

Starting point is 01:03:12 myself off from the internet or from other books, but I don't have people disruptions, I guess. So anything social. And then I take a short break. I'm a believer in sort of pacing, creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and you take a short break and then cycle back, you know. And then I deal with any sort of other article or articles. Through the evening, I try to have some private time just later in the day, either with friends or with my partner or just time that is unburdened by deliberate thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general. And then usually later at night, I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two. Got it. So a number of follow-up questions. What type of meditation do you practice currently? Just guided Vipassana, very, very basic. There's a woman named Tara Brock,

Starting point is 01:04:23 who she's a mindfulness practitioner. How do you spell her last name? B-R-A-C-H. Got it. And she's based out of DC and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist, then did decades of Buddhist training and lived in an ashram. And now she teaches mindfulness, but with a very secular lens. So she records her classes and she has a podcast, which is how I came to know her.

Starting point is 01:04:48 And every week she does a one-hour lecture on sort of the philosophies and cognitive behavioral wisdom of the ages. And then she does a guided meditation. I use her meditation years and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life. So I highly recommend her.

Starting point is 01:05:09 Tara Brock. Brock, yes. And all her podcasts is free. She has two books out too. She's really wonderful. Very diverse person. I will have to check that out. And so you're listening, then you have earbuds in.

Starting point is 01:05:23 You're listening to audio while you meditate. Yes. And it's interestingly, I mean, she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of 2010. It's just one that I like and feel familiar with. And it sort of helps me get into the rhythm. So every day I listen to the exact summer 2010. How would people recognize it? How does the audio? I think the title is, it sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called Smile Meditation. And I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years and other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I have on and on my broken 3G iPhone without any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod. That's on it. Awesome. That's a great answer. I love digging into the specifics. So when you go to the gym, then, to work out, are you still using an elliptical for that? Or are you? You are. I do sprints, high intensity intervals on the elliptical.

Starting point is 01:06:21 And are you? For cardio. And I do a lot of weight and body weight stuff too. You do? All right. But when you're reading, is that on the elliptical and are you for cardio and i do a lot of weight and body weight stuff too you do all right but when you're reading is that on the elliptical yes and what type of device if any are you using for that reading well i prefer electronic so i use the kindle app on the ipad or any pdm viewer because i read a lot of archival stuff. But the challenge, of course, is that because I read so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in case it's rarely possible. And like I'm writing about something fairly new. And so in that case, I just go there with my big tome and my sticky notes and pens and sharpies and various annotation

Starting point is 01:07:07 analog devices. And I just do that. Cool. All right. So that leads perfectly into the next question, which is what is your note taking system look like and how do you take notes? So for instance, you're really good at using excerpts or quotations, pull quotes. And I found myself asking as I was reading this, like, how are you gathering all of this so that you can use it later? So what does your note-taking system look like in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy? So with digital, it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. Understanding, really, which is what reading should be a conduit to, is a form of pattern recognition. you kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked, and they don't usually occur sequentially. So it's not like you walk away with one insight from the first chapter,

Starting point is 01:08:09 one insight from the second chapter. It's just sort of this pattern of the writer's thoughts that permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so, especially if you read as a writer, so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that, but ideally wants to record what those patterns and themes are, that sort of reading is very different. So what I end up doing with analog books in particular, and I've sort of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect, is on the very last page of each book, which is blank usually, right before the end cover, I create an alternate index. So I basically list out, as I'm reading, the topics and ideas that seem to be important and recurring in that volume. And then next to each of them, I start listing out the page numbers where

Starting point is 01:08:59 they occur. And on those pages, I have obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it. But it's an index based not on keywords, which is what a standard book index is based on, but based on key ideas. And I use that then to sort of synthesize what those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book. Okay, I have to geek out on this because I'm so excited now. As it turns out, with analog books, I do exactly, literally exactly the same thing. I usually start with the front inside cover, but I create my own index.

Starting point is 01:09:34 And of course, they don't have to be in order. So you can sort of list them in any, in my particular case, in any order. I also will have sort of a couple of lines dedicated to pH. And pH just refers to phrasing. So if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find really... Oh, I do that too. Oh, really?

Starting point is 01:09:53 But I put BL for beautiful language. Oh, that's so cool. Okay. So there's that. And then I have Q or if they're quotes. So for instance, many books will have quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases. And so I'll have quotes, I'll just write that out and then colon, and then I'll list all the page numbers for that particular sort of category that I'm collecting in the case of quotes. When you're gathering this, you mentioned acronyms and shorthand. So besides beautiful language, what are some of the other acronyms and shorthand so besides beautiful language what are some of the other acronyms that you use oh they wouldn't make sense they're just very private it's like

Starting point is 01:10:30 too long to get into what they stand for there's a completely my own system is there one other example that you just if you can indulge me one that is i guess not so much about the contents of that passage is about its purpose is LJ, which is, I have a little sort of labor of love side project called littering jukebox, right? Sure. I've seen it. It's yeah, it's, it's awesome. Oh, thank you. But yeah, so I do these pairings of passages from literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes as I'm reading a book, I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that. And maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put LJ next to it. But I

Starting point is 01:11:12 want to go back to what you said about the external quotes, I guess, the author quoting another work. I think those are actually really important. And that goes back to your question about how I find what to read. And I mark those types of things. So for the annotations that are specific to that particular book, all of my sticky cab notes are on the side of the pages. But when there's an external quote, something referencing another work, I put a tab at the very top with the letter F, which stands for find, if I am not familiar with the work, or just no letter, if I just want to flag a quote from something else that I know of. And I think that's actually very important because the phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it, because literature is really, and I say this all the time,

Starting point is 01:12:00 it is the original internet. So all of those references and citations and allusions even, they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work. And that way, if you follow those, you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something that you're already enjoying and liking, but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way. I mean, directly. And in a way, it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way. found amazing older books that were five or six hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which led me to something else, which led me to something else, which led me to this great other thing. So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice. The serendipity of it is so

Starting point is 01:12:56 beautiful when it works out. And I'll give a confession. This is really embarrassing, but since no one's listening, I came across Seneca. So Seneca, the younger who's had probably more impact on my life than any other writer. Uh, originally because I was perusing a number of anthologies on minimalism and simplicity and Seneca kept on popping up quote Seneca quote Seneca. And because it was always one word like Madonna or and this is going to be really embarrassing or like Sitting Bull. I assumed that Seneca was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good. Lovely, actually. I assumed he was a Native American elder for probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman.

Starting point is 01:13:46 I was like, man, Ferris, you got to do your homework, pal. You got to dig in. And then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off the cliff into a lot of his writings, which I still to this day revisit on an almost monthly basis. I just revisited The Shortness of Light. Oh, so good. Which is perhaps the best manifesto, and I hate this modern word, sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally. So the best manifesto for our current struggle with this very notion of productivity versus presence and how much are we really mistaking the doing for for the being it's amazing that somebody wrote this

Starting point is 01:14:26 millennia ago before there was internet before there was the things we call distractions today and and yet he writes about the exact same things just in a different form yeah the exact same things and the way that uh if i'm trying to use seneca as a gateway drug into philosophy i won't use the p word, first of all, with most people because philosophy, I think it calls to mind for a lot of people, the haughty, pompous college student in Goodwill Hunting in the bar scene who's like reciting, you know, Shakespeare without giving any type of credit. I completely disagree. I agree with the notion that those are connotations today and people have a resistance,

Starting point is 01:15:05 but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it and to get people to understand that philosophy, whatever form it takes, is the only way to figure out how to live. Everything else that we take away from anything is a set of philosophies, essentially. I agree. No, I totally agree. But I usually, if I'm going to lead people there, I try to lure them in with Seneca because I think he's very easy to read compared to a lot of, say, at least the Stoics, or that's actually not even fair, compared to a lot of philosophers who have been translated from Greek. Most of his writing, I believe, is translated from Latin, which tends to be just an easier jump from English.

Starting point is 01:15:48 So it's very easy to read. And what I tell people is, you know, start off with some of his letters and you'll find that you could just as easily replace these Roman names like Lucilius and so on with like Bob and Jane or, you know, pick your contemporary name of choice. And they're all as relevant now as they were then. I'm going to come back to the performance versus presence, which I think of oftentimes as the achievement versus appreciation split or balance or maybe neither. But before we get there, I want to put a bow on the note-taking with your electronic note-taking. So you're using the Kindle app, you're taking highlights.

Starting point is 01:16:29 Where do you go from there? What does the sort of workflow look like from there? And are there any particular types of software or apps or anything like that that you use often? Honestly, I feel like that problem has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way. So the way that I do it is basically a bunch of hacks using existing technologies. But I don't think, or perhaps I'm just unaware, but I don't think there's anybody designing tools today for people who do serious heavy reading. There just isn't anything that I know. And so what I do is I highlight in the Kindle app on the iPad.

Starting point is 01:17:14 And then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page, and I paste them into an Evernote file to sort of just have all of my notes in a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific iPad, Kindle app, Kindle page with my highlighted passage, and then email that screen grab into my Evernote email, because Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So when I search within it, it's also going to search the text in that image. I don't have to wait until I finish the book and export all my notes. And also the formatting is kind of shitty

Starting point is 01:17:53 on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes. So if you copy them, they paste them to Evernote with this really weird formatting. So it tabulates each next note indented to the right. So it's sort of this long cascading thing that shifts more and more to the right. It's horrible. It's like an email thread.

Starting point is 01:18:13 It's like an email thread, except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all, you know, and so if you want to go fix it, you have to do it manually within Evernote. And, you know, on the Werner Herzog book, for example, which is 600 pages, I have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know. Got it. Okay, so let me, this may or may not help. For me, it was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote. Because I mean, I'm looking at this list of questions, and I'm not reading entirely on script, if you log into your Amazon account through kindle.amazon.com or copying and pasting from many different places,

Starting point is 01:19:11 is going to, I don't know if you've tried this, but edit and either paste and match style or paste as plain text, and it tends to remove all of that headache. Let's see, nine times out of ten. The problem with that, I did try that once, but when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So on every highlighted passage, I also have my own note. I see. Got it. Plus, you know, Amazon's own thing that says, add note, read, read in this location, delete note. And so it all merges it

Starting point is 01:19:42 and becomes just hideous. Interesting. God, you know, I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into Text Wrangler, which is used for coding a lot, just to remove the formatting, and then put it into Evernote. Yeah, I do that with Coda. Yeah, it's true, though. But there's got to be a solution. And the thing is, Evernote, I love Evernote. I've been using it for many years and I could probably not get through my day without it but it has an API which means somebody can build this

Starting point is 01:20:10 you know there's a way to like I even thought I mean I was at one point so desperate and so frustrated which I think is the duo that causes all innovation you know desperation and frustration I thought maybe I should just save up some money and offer like a scholarship or like a grant for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me. That's a great idea. I mean, I'm still sort of contemplating that. Okay, well, we'll talk about that separately. I think that's something that we could absolutely explore. And for all of you programmers, coders out there, please take a look. This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights. I've run into this. You mentioned the Werner Herzog book and having thousands of highlights.

Starting point is 01:20:56 Have you run into instances where you'll read an entire book, you're super impressed or not, but regardless, you have hundreds of highlights and you go to look at those highlights and you're restricted to only see oh yeah it's like 200 highlights 81 available or something like that right so how often does that happen to you because that's happened to me where i've taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff and then i'm only able to see 25%, and it's so infuriating. And I think it's a limitation that is determined by the publisher.

Starting point is 01:21:29 Yes, it is. And so I'll tell you why it hasn't happened to me much. It happens to me occasionally, but that's a DRM thing, digital, for listeners who don't like acronyms, digital rights management thing that is fairly new. So that is the case with more recently published books. But if you read the digitized version of, say, Alan Watts, it was published originally 40 years ago. There's no such problem unless the publisher now is reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But because I read so much less out of sort of newly published material i don't run into it

Starting point is 01:22:08 often but you know there is a way to very laboriously deal with it which is you can still open that passage in your kindle app on desktop so kindle for mac for me and it will let you highlight and copy those passages paste them into your evernote in between the missing ports but it's obviously i've done i have done that and it's so horrible because you also get the like excerpted from like three lines everyone so just publishers if you're listening to this you are making it harder for people like Maria who have 7 million uniques per month to share your stuff. So please up your threshold. Do you have anybody helping you with brain pickings or is it just you? The actual reading and writing obviously is just me. But as

Starting point is 01:23:00 of about 10 months ago, I have an assistant, Lisa, who's absolutely wonderful. And she just helps me with admin stuff that has to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel is weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down. And as you know, I'm sure when you get to a point where the demands are just incomparable with what you can even look at, then you kind of need to have help in order not to either go insane or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. Oh, and I also have a copy editor, this wonderful older lady I hired to do my proofreading. She's great. That's all I can say. I think proofreading is really, really important. And I'm constantly embarrassed if I have a typo, which, you know, as you know, as a writer, you cannot

Starting point is 01:23:57 prove your own work. It just, your brain just does not see the errors that we made in the first place for the majority of them. And people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or I don't even know. There's no kind of compassion for the humanity that produces something as human as

Starting point is 01:24:18 a typo, right? Despite how mechanical the term itself seems, which is sort of ironic. But in any case, yes, I have my assistant Bradman and my copy editor for just proofing. What platform is BrainPicking on at the moment? What's the technology behind it? I know that I've heard you mention WordPress before. Is it still on WordPress? It is on WordPress. I was going to make a joke on how the technology is called Corpus Colossum, but the actual technology is right yeah very sam harris friendly joke so when you're working

Starting point is 01:24:53 with say your copy editor do you give your copy editor admin access to wordpress and she'll go in proofread it and then schedule or publish? What's the process? No, it's a very, again, super sort of hacked together process, which is every night I email her the articles from the preview page on WordPress. I just copy that and paste it into a body email and I send it to her and then she sends me the corrections for your email. Got it. I mean, like I said, she sends me the corrections for your email. Got it. I mean, like I said, she's not very, I would say tech savvy.

Starting point is 01:25:29 I mean, I'm sure she's a wonderful learner. So I'm sure she would totally learn how to do it if I gave her admin access. But between that and the fact that I write in HTML, so I really don't like the WYSIWYG. I hate it actually. I think it's just easier to do it via email, because then she can highlight the word. And sometimes she would make suggestions that are

Starting point is 01:25:49 more stylistic. And I would like to have the final say in those, because very often I want to keep it the way that I have it, because that's my voice. So I find email works just fine. Got it. Okay, no, I'm always fascinated fascinated because I will use, well, when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also in WordPress, I would use the share a draft plugin to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP. It has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool. Oh, that's cool. I should look into that. I think that's what I have runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool. Oh, that's cool. I should look into that.

Starting point is 01:26:26 I think that's what I have too, the WordPress VIP, the WordPress host with WordPress. I don't even know what that function is. I'm kind of, I mean, for somebody who writes on the web, I don't really, yeah, I sometimes only learn about things through friends. Well, I think, yeah, that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff.

Starting point is 01:26:46 And the other option that I've used quite a lot is, and as much as I hate Word, and I really do, I love the track changes feature, and I just find it more user-friendly for a lot of folks than having them use something that's cloud-based, like Google Docs, just because I operate so much offline to try to get anything done. Yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of people suggest and what Kai, my proofreader, actually asked originally. But I do not own Microsoft products on principle, and I just said I'm not going to deal with it.

Starting point is 01:27:19 Got it. Okay, no, that makes sense. And your assistant, what was the defining moment, the straw that broke the camel's back when you were like, you know what, like what was the day where you're just like, fucking enough of this. Like I need to get somebody stat. I mean, when did you actually make the decision? It wasn't so much that I made the decision and the decision was very strongly, lovingly,

Starting point is 01:27:42 but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner who one day said you're using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not and because I was really stressing to a point of just driving myself crazy and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm always have been very independent I moved away from my parents house when I was 18 paid my way through school, lived always by myself. And I just had this Emerson-like setting of self-sufficiency and self-reliance to a point of pathology where it was to my own detriment. And the notion of outsourcing felt to me on some level, almost like an admission of weakness. It's ridiculous.

Starting point is 01:28:24 I think that's true for a lot of people though. Yeah. I know. And it's the strange thing, the disorienting thing is that I think we intellectually know that's not the case, that it's actually a lot of strength to be able to delegate and to sort of divvy up control according to a hierarchy of priorities. But on some sort of psycho-emotional level, it is just death to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, it's interesting in terms of how brain pickings evolved,

Starting point is 01:28:53 which has always been very organic. So the sort of eight-year thing that has happened, it went from being a little newsletter that contained five links, no text, like five links to five things that I found very interesting. And then it went to sort of five links with a little paragraph about each, about why this thing is interesting and important. And then it was not a little paragraph, but a little like one page piece. And then it became not five things every Friday, but three things every day of the week

Starting point is 01:29:26 pretty long form in the thousands of words you know and I foolishly and naively thought that I could just have the same sort of operational framework despite the enormous swelling of just the volume of the writing and that's's unreasonable. It's completely unreasonable. So at one point last fall, as the sort of seventh birthday of Brain Biggins was approaching, my partner was just like, please consider.

Starting point is 01:29:55 I'm always curious to ask, how did you find the assistant that you ended up with? Well, she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant that's had this type of personal assistant that's had this type of job for about 20 years she's just a wonderfully warm and just generous person but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic it's unbelievable and you always have

Starting point is 01:30:18 the sense that she's looking out for your best interest in the most magnanimous kind of way towards you, but also the most warmly, no bullshit way outwardly towards the world demanding things from you. And having this buffer, it's really, really great. How did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected? Just a recommendation. She's been working for somebody who's a very trusted, dear person for a long time. So now she worships both of us. a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant. I would say, hey, I know this is off topic, but you've been awesome to deal with. Do you have a twin brother, twin sister, somebody who does what you do as well as you do it that you could recommend to me because I need some help?

Starting point is 01:31:15 And I just did that over and over again. And eventually one of them said, well, actually, I work for multiple clients so we could talk about it. And that's how we ended up working together. But what was the... The introduction was made by the person. So I had met her, at least my assistant, I'd met her just socially many times before. And so eventually when the time came for me to consider, we set up a meeting, we talked and she was really into it and she'd been reading brain pickles. And I asked, made sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate because she's also, I mean, she's superwoman, at least a superwoman. She is the mother of two kids, one of whom is now her first year in high school and the other one, his first year in college. So she has that on her plate too. But she's very, like I said, very dogged, very sort of dedicated.

Starting point is 01:31:59 And she was like, I can do it. I'd like to do it. And I was like, great. Let's roll. Onward. So with your assistant, if you were to do an 80-20 analysis of, you know, the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time, what would those look like? things, but I'm trying to really, I mean, I have this new ish commitment to really not do any speaking at commercial conferences anymore, but to speak to students because I think it's important and what it takes out of me, which is a lot of speaking takes out a lot of me because I'm a writer and I also don't really recycle talks. I like to write something original. And when it's a commercial conference, it just doesn't add up for me what I get out of it because I usually donate my commission students to the local public library and whatnot.

Starting point is 01:32:52 But with students, it is worth my time. If I disassociate even one journalism student from going into buzzworthy land after graduation, that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking, speaking, I now I'm getting like all these college requests. And so that takes so much time, especially coordinating, because a lot of them are organized by sort of student volunteers, and they're kind of still learning what it means to schedule the deadlines and advance notice. And so Lisa is sort of railing that.

Starting point is 01:33:27 And another big part, I should also mention that the evolution of what I've been able to delegate has sort of organically happened. Originally, I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it because I didn't know how to explain it to her to do. But she's a great learner, and I'm learning to delegate more. But another thing, because my site runs on donations, I sort of make an effort to send handwritten thank you cards to just at this point, randomly picked donors every month. And so I have her sort of export those names and emails for me and just prepare envelopes and all those types of things so that I could not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing.

Starting point is 01:34:09 Do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use other types of software? Oh, email. Email and text. Email and text. So no project management software at this point, no sort of Basecamp or Asana or anything like that? That would make me feel like I have some sort of commercial organization. You know, I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things. Back to the Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience or the humanity, I guess, of the tension.

Starting point is 01:34:36 A couple of quick ones. So the first is when you lift, do you tend to have the same workout? What does your weightlifting look like? It's changed a lot. In the last year and a half i've prioritized body weight stuff heavily not unintended that was actually total inadvertence this how language how we think in language that's so funny i prioritize body weight stuff and so i do pull-ups push-ups and that sort of thing it also depends on where i do my workout my building

Starting point is 01:35:04 has a sort of gym like a you like one of those residential gyms. But I also have a membership at a larger, probably, I think, the best gym in New York. I love it. But I'm only there a few days a week. So it just depends on where I do it and what I do. If you had to pick one, besides the elliptical, if you had to pick one bodyweight exercise to hold you over, let's say you're traveling for a few months, you can to pick one body weight exercise to hold you over let's say you're traveling for a few months you can only pick one body weight exercise what would

Starting point is 01:35:29 it be well it would be pull-up but you can't always find a place to do it so i just do usually elevated push-ups so my feet on a bench or bed or some like a step or something and just push-ups cool a great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted bent rows you know what's actually very helpful for traveling is uh plyometrics plyometrics and trx is actually quite handy there There's a system. For some reason, it's just not my thing. Can't get into it? Yeah. The thing is, if I am forced by circumstances to do a workout that is not my preference,

Starting point is 01:36:14 I very much like to be able to do something else while doing it, such as listening to podcasts, which is what I do while I do weights in the gym anyway. And there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just like not great. So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me when I travel in case there's nowhere to do sprints, which is my plan B for cardio. And then plan C is just jumping, skipping rope. You're intense. I love it. Every time I meet, and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who at any point have lived in Bulgaria, I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's not. I know nothing about them. I didn't do weights up when

Starting point is 01:37:00 I was living in Bulgaria. No, exactly. It's kind of like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Ricola commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff. There was yet. Is that guy your cousin? Yeah, right. Right. You must know.

Starting point is 01:37:14 Like, no, I actually don't. Like, I know I went to X, Y, and Z college, but there are 5,000 people per year. Yeah, it doesn't always work out. You mentioned the donations. I want to talk about the site so it appears and i dug around a bit but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts is that accurate i don't have comments i do have dates they're in the url that's what the date oh they're in the url but they're not in the post they're in the url structure but they're not in the displayed post itself yeah so the reason for that is because I do think we

Starting point is 01:37:46 live in an enormously news fetishistic culture. And the reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that because we think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed, because all feeds are reverse chronology, then, you know, there's an implicit hierarchy of importance to that. We think if it's not at the top, it's not important. And, you know, you would understand, you know, writing about Seneca, it really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is. But I think because culture conditions us so much, people, when they see a date stamp, they sort of think, oh, this was like two years old.

Starting point is 01:38:25 And it's really, you know, 2000 years old. But a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference. So I constantly get things. This is another thing that Lisa deals with, like requests from textbooks for citations or whatnot. And those people actually need the date. So I've made it so that if you actually look, it's kind of easy to see, or I can just tell them when they write and ask me what the date is, look in the URL. But it's just not one of those immediate things that slaps you over the head like a newspaper front page, you know?

Starting point is 01:38:56 Definitely. I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years. And if you go to any permalink,, if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog, the date is there in the URL, but also at the very bottom of the post after the related links. So for the same reason, because there's so much bias against older material. And I think some of my older stuff is, I mean, it depends on the person, obviously in the context, but it's an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate is to timestamp the comments. Did you ever have comments or have you never had comments? I did originally. And then I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like

Starting point is 01:39:36 Herzog does. I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched. But the comments I was getting, I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know, trolling or anything like that. But they were kind of vacant or people trying to plug their own thing or spam. And it was taking more of my time than it was worth. And so instead, I've made my contact information very easily accessible. So if someone has something of substance and urgency to say, which is, I think, the two things that compel people to reach out, they'll do it via email behind their own name and not anonymously. And then, I mean, I did get a lot of emails from

Starting point is 01:40:17 readers and those are valuable, you know, but I don't really care for comments. Now, the flip side of that is that now that I have the Facebook page having something mysterious happened with the Brain Pickings Facebook page last fall work, it just started growing so fast. I have no idea why. I was going to ask you about that, because if you look at, say, that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kind of took off. Yeah, it was in about October of last year and it went from 250,000

Starting point is 01:40:45 to now, I think, I don't know. Two point something million. Close to three, maybe. So more than tenfold in less than a year. I have no idea why. I've done nothing differently. I'm very, I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I get a lot of emails from readers elsewhere in the world who actually use Facebook as their primary thing. And they're such sweet notes, you know, people who just are stimulated and inspired and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn't be if they hadn't read that piece about some random thing that I read and wrote about. And I think it would be selfish of me to just sort of disable Facebook because I hate it. But the points of it is that you have comment on there. And Lisa, my assistant,

Starting point is 01:41:25 actually, that's something I delegated her a few months ago just to completely deal with them. I can't deal with them. And not for any other reason that I have complete allergy to people pronouncing their so-called opinions without having actually digested or even engaged with the thing. So people would comment on the basis of like a thumbnail image or the title, make really outrageously inaccurate comments, clearly not having read the piece. And this kind of snap reaction thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I can't deal with it. It's like a psychic drain, like I can't even explain. I can't deal with it. It just, it's like a psychic drain. Like I can't even explain it.

Starting point is 01:42:06 Just, I can't. So that would explain, that would answer one of my questions, which is in your header picture on Facebook, you have, this should be a cardinal rule of the internet, end of being human. If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubris to comment on it. I was going to, I was going to, I don't care if it sounds like bitsy or anything. You know, it's interesting because I think a lot about criticism and the notion of criticism and why it's so hard for anybody. And I don't think that people have a hard time with criticism because another person disagrees with or dislikes what they're saying. They really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood. The other person does not understand who they are or what they

Starting point is 01:42:52 stand for in the world. And 99% of the time, and you actually touch on this in your conversation with Sam Harris, where you say that his ideas are not as controversial as people think when they don't actually understand what they are. But the main source of anguish is not being seen for who you are, not being understood. And this kind of reactive culture where people comment without taking the care to understand what you're expressing, who you are and what you stand for, it is so toxic. It is so toxic to leaders, to writers, to us as a culture. And I just don't know how to get around it other than just having instructed Lisa to be just merciless about banning people and deleting comments that are just not, there's no humanity, there's no patience, there's no thinking in them. anybody who writes online, I think, feel similarly that this is kind of my home and if people come and be idiots in it, then they're not welcome there. Yeah. No, I actually use the exact same

Starting point is 01:43:53 analogy. I say, look, I view my, especially on my blog, I view the comments as my living room. And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like put your feet up on my table with your shoes on, you're not going to be invited back. You're gone, you know. So is your assistant's job as it relates to Facebook then primarily calling the herd and just removing the idiots? Or what are other instructions, if any? Are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that she responds to? No, I don't really care what people say again to the point that if people have something of substance and urgency, they will reach out. And I'm then very happy to hear from actual humans and engage in a human dialogue, which I do. But I really care about the comments on Facebook. I just don't want them

Starting point is 01:44:34 depressing me when I go on the page because I put my own things on there. Alicia doesn't put the actual postings. And I also don't want them creating a culture that is antithetical to the very reason why I do what I do, which is a kind of faith in the human spirit. I mean, that's where I come from. I am a cautious one sometimes, but an optimist about the so-called human condition. And anybody who craps on that without having even given a chance to the thoughts that speak to those ideals, which is what my articles are a record of, then I will want them gone, you know? And so her instructions are just, you know, ban people who are offensive to others sort of in a vicious way, as opposed to just having rational discourse of disagreement. Ban people who are ignorant and

Starting point is 01:45:23 have not read the thing and have some very scandalous or, I think I have a scandalous sort of contrarian, sensationalist take on it, clearly not understanding the nuance because, I mean, a culture of news is, I say often, a culture without nuance. Yeah. So that's basically it. Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her task. Not say you lose my mind over exasperation when people's impatient. No. And I really respect that because another reason that I read brain pickings as opposed to other sites and I feel comfortable going there is that I feel it is sort of a stronghold of positivity and optimism in a lot of respects. So kudos. The email. Actually, before we get to email, I've read that you schedule

Starting point is 01:46:14 your Twitter and Facebook, which would make sense because you're prolific. If it's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media i use buffer for um twitter and i use just my hands for facebook yeah but again i mean this goes back to the same inner struggle of i do want to be reading and writing for myself so why do i have the compulsion to put so much of it out there and i i self-flagellate over that because on some level, it does seem like a form of hypocrisy. But then I do think about the people

Starting point is 01:46:51 that email me from India and Pakistan and South Africa and Korea and wherever, that actually that's how they connect. And I think if I'm putting in the amount of time that I do into what I do, even if I do it for myself, I might as well just harness that time anyway if it benefits somebody else's journey, you know? And so I do it because of that mostly. Definitely.

Starting point is 01:47:14 And I think that while it's fine to write for yourself, if you keep the value of what you write to yourself when it could benefit a lot of other people then i think that's actually it could be viewed as a selfish act so the i think that there's particularly when you're curating in the way that you do and you're saving people thousands of hours of searching by distilling a lot of these concepts well i would argue that the benefit, the value, I mean, what I do is kind of the ant an IT person, trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and said, the Seneca, the shortness of life piece, really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy, never been interested in it, never looked for it, but it just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life. It gives you pause to hear that from people. Definitely. Agreed. On email, if you go to your contact page, you recommend emailcharter.org. And I'm very curious

Starting point is 01:48:33 to hear if people actually follow the email charter in terms of the email that you receive. Do people actually pay attention to that and follow the rules? Yeah, they do. And I'm so grateful. And I mean, but the majority of them do, you know, some people who reach out with the intention of self-promoting, there's usually, you know, laziness to people who self-promote for the sake thereof, you know, so they don't, they don't usually follow. But people who actually care to have a conversation and to engage are very courteous and very sort of mindful of what I've asked, except for publicists who are never. Yeah, right. Well, I suppose if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template, dear blogger.

Starting point is 01:49:18 Oh, yeah, I love that. But dear blogger. Yeah. Or you know what I get very often, which I think is actually hilarious, people who don't even bother to read the name of the site. So they address me, Dear Brian. The pinnacle of this was when last year, at one point, I opened my physical mailbox in my building, my home. And I found this bundle from the USPS, but like with an elastic band around it of mail for somebody named Brian Pickens, who lives in Long Beach, CA, or used to, I guess. And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me because I guess the guy either moved and the USPS like somehow looked things up. And I don't even know, it was such a sort of mystery and metaphor for what I deal with online. So I used to have a company ages ago called Brain Quicken. And I got a telemarketing call one evening.

Starting point is 01:50:16 And this guy goes, hi, sorry if I'm interrupting. Is this Brian? And I go, excuse me? And he goes, Brian? Brian Chicken? And I'm like, and he goes Brian Brian chicken and I'm like Brian chicken I was like no and take me off your list goodbye so on the email and pitching side of things or just on the pitching side of things how on earth do you deal with not just cold inquiries but how do you deal

Starting point is 01:50:42 with writer friends or acquaintances who are writers that you don't want to be rude to who want you to read their books? How do you polite decline that stuff? And maybe, maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is like, not everyone is able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably, if I get 10 books from decent or good friends, some of them are going to be terrible. And I don't have the time necessarily or the inclination to read them all. How do you deal with that type of situation? Well, I guess you deal first and foremost by controlling not the outcome, but the cause, which is your circle of friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround

Starting point is 01:51:27 myself with. And I like to think friendly to pretty much everybody that I meet. But my circle of actual friends is really close and really tight. And people who are just when the sky crumbles, they're going to be there and we're there for each other. And so with that in mind, I think there is a certain boundary they have to put up beforehand to, I guess, manage social expectations in a way. And so for those people, my friend friends in large part, I mean, I should mention that the majority of my close friends, including my partner too, are people that I have met just through what I do. So there's already the self-selection of sensibility and ideals. And I think we've become

Starting point is 01:52:07 a centripetal force for the kinds of people we want to be and surround ourselves with those types of people. William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal microculture. And even when you said early on the kinship of spirits, I think that's so important. So which is the long-winded way I can say that when and if those inner circle people put a book out, it's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are. And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean, the book that we started with, The Scratch and Sniff Guide to Wine, Wendy, the illustrator, is precisely that type of person. Somebody who I met through what each of us does, and she's now one of my closest human beings, you know? And so of course I'm going to support her work,

Starting point is 01:52:48 but not because I'm being nepotistic about it, but because that's the prerequirement that I am moved by her work and respect it and love it. And that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle, I think acquaintances know that there's no such expectation. And when I do get such requests, it's a matter of, well, did the person do their homework in knowing what I actually think and write about? Because very often, I'm sure you get that too, you get pitched

Starting point is 01:53:17 things that are just so outside of what you do, in which case I don't even feel compelled to respond because if they didn't put in the time to understand what I'm interested in, why should I put in the time to explain to them why this is not a fit? Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I need to embrace that more. I think that's an area where I carry a lot of guilt. Guilt, yeah. But guilt, it's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige and they're both horrible reasons to do things. So often we would agree as humans, not just you and me or just anybody, would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some way, you know. And equally avoid things because of the guilt thing or do things because of the guilt thing. this whole Buddhist thing about aversion of, you know, avoidance and aversion and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is, the fear of disappointing

Starting point is 01:54:10 somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself, or out of sort of grasping for approval or acclaim, which is what doing things for prestige is. I think either of those are really bad reasons to do things. And yet they motivate us a lot, or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the mind constantly. And it is a real practice I think that's a great way to put it. I want to ask, and I know we don't have too much time left, so hopefully sometime, someday, we can do a follow-up part two. I think that'd be a blast. I'll bring some more back if you actually want to take one, so I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the donations, I'm very fascinated by the ad-free donation approach.

Starting point is 01:55:01 And just to keep it simple, if you had to choose, say, 20% of the options you're currently offering, which would you choose and why? In other words, you have, so people can make a one-time single contribution, or they can become a member and donate, you know, $7, $3, $10, or $25 a month. What I'm trying to ask without being improprietous or making you feel uncomfortable is, what is working best? When you're asking people for donations, you know, assuming that it's working, if someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month, or the single contribution versus the membership, or the membership versus

Starting point is 01:55:42 the single contribution, what would your advice be to people? Well, I will preface this with the caveat that I use PayPal for donations and I can, for the life of me, figure out how to actually look at the data and get any sort of real reason. All of it is so antiquated, their export tool and such, and I'm not that interested. I would spy for days into looking into it. So I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation. Sure. Yeah, great. And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are is also the reason why I don't have an ad-supported site, which is I just asked myself,

Starting point is 01:56:16 what would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad-free site. And how would I like to support that? Well, I'd like to have a few options, you know, just because I don't want to, you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just pulled it out of the hat basically with these tiers and I've just left them on since I put them on. They seem to work, you know, whatever. And originally my sense was that the one-time donations accounted for much more, but I'd never actually analyzed it because I think

Starting point is 01:56:46 I see the alerts that come from PayPal and sometimes people would send really large one-time donations, like things that are totally humbling and enormously generous. And I think those kind of, you kind of weigh them somehow as more than the cumulative sum of the smaller donations. So I thought the one-timers were much more. And I'm pretty sure that must have been the case earlier on. And I've had the recurring ones, I've had the one-time donationers for as long as I can remember, for as long as I basically needed to start making money for the site. Because by the way, running the site cost me several times my rent, like all the costs associated with it. It's like crazy. So at one point I got to a point where I had to make

Starting point is 01:57:31 money. I said, I don't want to do ads. I don't believe in that. I'll have just donations. And I didn't even think of recurring ones at the time. That was years ago. And then my friend, Max Linsky, who runs longform.org, we were having tea and he said, well, why didn't you like push the recurring ones more? Because it's working really great for us. And at that point I had the option, but it was buried somewhere on my donation about page or something. And so like, okay. So I put it in the sidebar and that was, I want to say maybe 2011 and it started accruing

Starting point is 01:58:01 slowly. And so this past year, when I did my taxes, I very reluctantly went to deal with all the PayPal tools to get the data out, basically. And I actually had Lisa pull all the Excel and whatnot. And then I did the tally to see, and to my surprise, the recurring ones, which are very small individual amount, actually were two to one ratio to the one-time donation wow and i don't

Starting point is 01:58:27 know at what point it tipped over but i think because of the scale and just how many people have these tiny tiny donations that they contribute every month i mean that's such an active commitment and it's so generous you know that they add up and my guess is that as time goes on, because the recurring ones have only been available for the last two and a half, three years, whatever, they would become by far the larger financial support compared to those single ones. Sure. No, that makes sense. If you had to choose, and of course this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the dropdown, so you have $7 a month, $3, $10, $25. If you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose? Oh, I have no idea. Probably just the mathematical logical choice, the two middle ones, the three and 10. Okay. No, I'm just very curious about this kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:59:22 I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content. And I can't emphasize strongly enough what you just said, which is you base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader. In the case of something with text, it doesn't have to be super complicated. It doesn't have to be doing tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself, would this annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it. Would I love this? If so, try it out. Every decision too has been that way. And actually, in the last couple of years, I've been getting really annoyed. I mean, brain picking is a pretty sort of lo-fi site.

Starting point is 02:00:01 You can see it. It's very super simple, basic. But I've been getting annoyed that it doesn't load very well on my iphone when i want to look at something or pull something up to reference or ipad and my friend scott belsky who runs behance he's a great guy and he's been sort of a very generous donor just supporting and and one time he pulls me aside that was like i think in february march and he's, you know how much I love brain thinking, but like the site sucks. We didn't say it in that way, but he was super sweet about it.

Starting point is 02:00:31 And like he offered to connect me with this guy that he knew that I could hire to do a responsive design. And I always have this resistance to making these sort of technological improvements because then I feel like I don't want to be a media company. Like I don't want to be a media company. Like I don't want to be a Buzzfeed. But at the end of the day, I, as a reader and as a sort of engager with that experience was being annoyed by it myself. So now I'm in the middle of releasing like a simple responsive site that is actually easy to read on your phone. And so, yeah, despair and frustration prevail again in innovation. It's so, so worth it. It took me, let's see, it only took me three,

Starting point is 02:01:13 oh God, seven years to get a mobile version of the site ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago. So better late than never, I suppose. Well, Maria, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you taking the time. If someone were to want to explore brain pickings, what are a few articles you might suggest that they start with or a few posts? Well, since we talk about it so much, the Seneca piece about the shortness of life, fairly short. There's a piece I did a couple of years ago, which was less about, it was not about a specific book, just sort of things that I've been thinking about for a long time, this disconnect between purpose and prestige and why we do things, right?

Starting point is 02:01:56 I forget what it's called. I think it's called How to Do What You Love or some other, How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love. and it was sort of an assemblage of thoughts on that from various sources as well as my own and perhaps most of all a piece that i wrote last fall on the seventh birthday really at the site which was about seven things that i learned in those seven years of reading writing and living which is a great article and i didn't want to replicate everything in here so i sort of uh bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit. But just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I just want to quote Paul Graham here, which you included, which is prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like, which I think is so astute. And in closing, is there any... And also, I should just interject and say, any Alan Watts piece, not because my writing about it is so great or it's not coming from a place of check me out. It's coming from a place of check him out.

Starting point is 02:02:59 Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit, so I highly recommend any of those articles. All right. Brainpickings.org is the site, guys. Check it out. Maria, any parting advice for this episode, this portion of our conversation before we check out? Any advice to the people listening out there? Thoughts, parting comments? No advice per se, just I guess a comment and a hope, which is that thank you so much, not just for having me, but for having this show and for doing everything that you do. And I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just, I guess, for lack of a better word,

Starting point is 02:03:37 idealism and conviction. And thank you for setting an example that way. Well, that means a lot coming from you. And I think you're a tremendous force for good out there in the world. So I hope people check out your work. I hope you continue to do what you're doing. I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull-ups. We will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Starting point is 02:04:01 Thank you, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech

Starting point is 02:04:41 tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova

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