The Tim Ferriss Show - #760: Robert Rodriguez and Susan Cain

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one 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.The episode features segments from episode #98 "The 'Wizard' of Hollywood, Robert Rodriguez" and #358 "Susan Cain — How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Creativity."Please enjoy!Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)ExpressVPN high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[06:08] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:12] Enter Robert Rodriguez.[07:39] Journaling as a crucial component of personal and professional life.[15:01] Keeping crew morale high during a project.[16:16] The magic that happens when creativity truly clicks.[20:47] How applied creativity dissolves the separation between work and play.[23:01] The legendary financing of El Mariachi.[25:56] From Bedhead to an unexpected big break.[30:57] Overcoming budgetary and technological constraints.[34:54] Maintaining momentum when lack of resources is no longer a creative driver.[39:33] Enter Susan Cain.[40:04] What initiated Susan’s lifelong fear of public speaking?[43:09] How Susan's TED Talk opportunity arose, and its initial reception.[44:06] Introvert strategies for group dinners.[46:45] Reflecting on my sixth-grade self.[47:58] How Susan overcame her fear of public speaking.[50:35] Even seasoned speakers get nervous before TED Talks.[52:15] Susan's progression to becoming a global public speaker.[54:08] Common traits of effective teachers and coaches.[55:45] Susan's pre-speaking engagement rituals.[57:16] Public speaking as a skill multiplier.[57:57] How Toastmasters and chihuahuas helped me overcome speaking fears.[1:00:50] Preparation for my own TED Talk.[1:02:21] Adam Grant's crucial pre-TED assistance.[1:04:00] The importance of rehearsing before live audiences.[1:04:49] My current level of nervousness before public speaking.[1:07:36] Time pressure in TED Talks.[1:08:51] Public speaking as a force multiplier and therapy.[1:11:32] Susan's techniques for relieving worry.[1:12:57] Susan's transition from law to writing.[1:16:07] Necessity vs. creativity in making a living.[1:18:10] Susan's timeline and process for writing her first book.[1:20:20] Susan's current writing process.[1:21:05] Susan's note-taking and organization.[1:24:16] Preferences for writing software.[1:26:19] Susan's enjoyment of the writing process.[1:27:05] Susan's preferred writing time.[1:28:07] Susan's writing schedule and break routine.[1:29:49] Night vs. morning writing and procrastination tactics.[1:31:51] Recommended books and resources on writing.[1:35:26] Serendipitous meetings that enabled first books.[1:40:16] Distinguishing introversion from shyness.[1:44:02] Books Susan frequently gifts.[1:45:09] My first meeting with Sam Harris.[1:47:37] Experiences with loving-kindness meditation.[1:49:24] Comparative effects of different meditation types.[1:55:35] Susan's billboard.[1:56:45] Advice for deep connection with others.[1:57:33] Susan's love for bittersweet music.[1:59:44] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still, if you're at home and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says, you might be searching for this. How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I've been using today's episode

sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now. And I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc. And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also with the example that I gave of you can't access this kind of that content wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal

Amazon account as opposed to being routed to.uk or whatever, and everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it. ExpressVPN is so fast, also it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high quality video with no lag or buffering even on servers thousands of miles away. Gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be technologically savvy.

You don't need to know anything about how it works. It's just one click and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs. ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet and I can't recommend it highly enough. So check it out. Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com slash Tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up. Just go to expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressvpn.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that

supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff?

AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress.

Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is

on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Optimal minimum.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a 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. 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 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 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, please enjoy, and thank you for listening. First up, Robert Rodriguez, screenwriter, producer, and director of Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, the Spy Kids franchise, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Frank Miller's Sin City, Machete,

and We Can Be Heroes, and founder of El Rey Network. You can find Robert on Twitter and Instagram at Rodriguez. How do you use journaling? I started, you know, with the word processing way back, you know, when I first started filmmaking the first, when I sold El Mariachi and Columbia hired me, the first thing I asked for was an Apple laptop computer, which was the very first one that came out. They had no idea what it was. I was the only one on the plane with one. I was writing my screenplays and I would continue my journal, which I'd started by handwriting it. It really started, I think in college, my dad gave me a day planner, one of those day planners.

And I started using it and I would write the things you're going to do on the left side, and then you would write what you ended up doing that day on the right. And even though I was in college, I would try to push myself pretty hard. I would look and I'd go, wow, I didn't have very much to write about myself at the end of that day. I'm going to have to give myself more things on the left so I have more to write stuff on the right. It really made you reflect on your day and realize I didn't do much today. And so those got really full and I became a filmmaker right away. El Mariachi got made. And then during the process of El Mariachi, I remember keeping a really dense journal because it was an experiment. It was really a test film.

And that was during all parts of the process? All parts of the process. Because I thought, if I'm going to go take on this endeavor, I know a lot of things aren't going to work out. It's my first feature film. No one's intended to see it. It's really a learning experience. I'm just going to go make it and I'm going to be able to look back on my journal and see where I messed up. It was really going to be a document. So I wouldn't make that mistake again. I could go back and track why did the exposure not work? And I'd be able to go back and go, oh, I kept track of that. I sold it pretty quickly. And then I was in Hollywood and I was like, now I really got something to write about. I was writing

down all the weird stuff that was happening. Finally, I decided to put out a book on just the making of El Mariachi and I kept journaling from then on everything. Which was Rebel Without a Crew? Rebel Without a Crew. And I would find that you meet the same people over and over again. Like I wrote down very specifics of people that I would meet casually in Hollywood, knowing we would run into each other again. And they ended up being great collaborators 10 years later, you know, or showing up in things. And I'd be able to go back and read them stuff from the early days and I would blow them away. So when you write these down, for instance, I'll go into computer so I can find them and I do it my year. So do you do it by hand and then input it into a computer? No, I do them all on the computer. So I have a little alarm that

goes off at midnight to make sure, because around midnight is usually a good time, and I'll write something down. Because I found that even when I just wrote some items down, I could go back and fill them in later because you would remember. And what always would shock me,

what kept it going, is when I would go back and review the journals at how many life-changing things happened like within a weekend. Or things that you thought were spread out over two years were actually Friday Saturday Sunday and that Monday I mean so many occurrences happen in chunks that blow you away things that kind of define you and do you use some word do you use a different application how do

you can always just used word because I was the first thing I had on my Apple laptop there about a thousand sometimes thousand, two thousand pages per year. Wow. Of journals, entries. A few days, or I'm sorry, a few pages per night on average. Yeah. A few pages per hour. Sometimes, some, some, hardly anything, some things are bigger. And sometimes it's a cheat. Sometimes I'll clip like reviews or conversations I had that have been written down somewhere else and I'll throw them in there too. Everything goes right in the, in the right date. And so I can search by date and I can kind of cross reference stuff, which is, I would just say for anyone who's a parent, it's a must. It's a must

because your children and you forget everything. Within a few years, they'll forget things that you think they should remember for the rest of their lives. They'll only remember it if it's reinforced. And I'm a real family man. So I really love every birthday, I'll go tell my kids again because they forget by the next year what their first years were like, because I'll just read those journal entries. And it blows them away. Or they'll say, hey, we should go camping again. I go, camping? Oh, yeah. Remember that time we went camping and I put the tent in the backyard and I had electricity going through? We had fans. We're watching Johnny Quest and we were playing. I must have journal on that. And I must have video. So I would go year by year. I just searched camping, camping,

camping. Oh, May 4th, 1999. We went camping. Oh, it's on tape 25 of this particular tape. I'd go find the tape and show it to them.

I tried to show them the tape. They didn't have to go camping again. They just relived it, relived it, relived it. And there was better than we even remembered. So capsulating stuff like that was just really important. It reminds me of something I don't think I've ever talked about, but my mom, when I was 15, I spent a year abroad in Japan. It was my first time overseas. And I was in a Japanese school. It's the only, you know, where's Waldo American kid in the entire, you know, I think it was 5,000 students school,

Japanese family. And of course I assumed at the time I was going to remember everything that happened. But my mom, to her credit, every time we had a phone call, would get off the phone and write down what I had said. Wow. And so she has this record of my experience in Japan that I have no record of. And of course, I don't remember any of it without that kind of cueing. Yeah. I think part of that came from, I read a diary my mom tried to keep when we were

really little and it had very few entries, but one of the most defining moments when she pushed me into a pool because I wouldn't go jump in. She knew I just needed to push and I felt totally betrayed and totally angry with it. It was in there, but it had her side of the story. And of course it was correct, but I wish she had written more. So I thought I'm going to to make sure I write. And now it's become an addiction and it's just so necessary. I mean, you ask your girlfriend or your wife, what did we do last year on your birthday? They won't remember. A year goes by, you will not remember the details. You go back and you see the journals. It's even better the second time you lived it again and you realize the importance of it. And when you meet someone you think might be a recurring figure in your life, or you meet someone who ends up being a teacher of some type, how often do you go back and review the notes? Or is it really just in time information, not just in case? So when you realize, oh my God, I'm going to be meeting, say, Francis Ford Coppola for the second time, you should probably go back and look at what happened in the first meeting or is it something that you proactively review? It's something that I need to know because there's so many things.

I tell myself I want to be the guy looking through the windshield, not the rearview mirror, but sometimes you can see better through the windshield if you look through the rearview mirror and look at some of this stuff that's gone on and make sense of where your relationships are going or what you've learned. And it blows me away. Sometimes I'll just go ahead and look somebody up, you know, that I'm about to meet with. I just met with Jim Cameron. We had, I always talked like four hours. We hadn't seen each other in a few years and I looked up old stuff and I was like, Oh my God, do you remember when we did this? This, I met him 20 years ago and we'd been friends over the years and he totally forgot that when I went and showed him Desperado for the first time before it came

out, just to see what he thought, he was watching it in his screening room and he gave me two little manuscripts here. While I watch your movie, you go read a couple of my treatments. One of them was for Spider-Man and one of them was for Avatar. This was in 1994. Wow. That's how long ago he had that and how much that was going in his head. And I thought, wow, to keep something that was that visionary in your head, that long waiting for the technology to come, those kinds of things made you realize some of these projects I've had for 10 years, I should go re bring them back up. I wonder, and I have, I have since then dusted off something that I'd had 15 years and sold it. And now I've just finished

a screenplay for it. So you mentioned Jim Cameron. I had an opportunity to, I met him very briefly through the X Prize and Peter D. Mandis and those guys. And as part of the experience, because it was a fundraiser for the X Prize, we all got staff or crew shirts from Avatar. Right. And the shirt said,

it said something along the lines of, hope is not a strategy, failure is not an option, luck is not a factor. Andure is not an option. Luck is not a factor. And Jim is known for being very demanding, not in a bad way. But I thought that shirt was just, it spoke volumes, I think, in so many different ways

about sort of his process, his mentality. How do you keep morale high when you're working with a crew? And maybe, like you said, you're doing like an exterior shot in Austin and people are just suffering and sweating and fatigued. Do you have any tricks or approaches that you use over and over again to keep kind of morale high and get the best out of people? I've worked with the same crew for some of them for 20 years. And so they kind of know already the philosophy I tend to have. And I've learned

this not through filmmaking, but through other disciplines, sometimes working with painters and with sculptors and musician friends. Because what I found is kind of why I do so many different jobs is because creativity is in job specific. I mean, if you know how to be creative, you can literally jump from job to job with no training and do them pretty well because the technical part of any job is 10%. 90% of that is creativity. If you already know how to be creative you've kind of got the battle you know half b which is you don't need to know you don't need to know what note specifically you're going to play when you get on stage and do your solo everybody will go what did you just play and you're gonna go i don't know yes i asked jimmy vann that how do you know what you're playing

just now i don't even know what i played i said well it was fantastic did anybody tape it no that's another one that goes off into the air you know ask any of the greats you know painters i studied under a painter sebastian kruger i went all the way to germany to watch him paint to figure out his trick how does he do it because i tried to do what he did and it just looked like garbage he must have a special brush he must have special paint and a special technique and i'm going no he's just, he starts with a mid-tone, starts knocking in some highlights, a little bit on the chin, then he goes to the eye. And I'm like, how do you know where to go next? He goes, oh, I never know.

It's different every time. That drives me bonkers. What do you mean? So how come I can't do that? And I go sit down and suddenly I could do it. It blows you away. So I take those lessons back and I teach my actors that. I teach my crew that.

So just to- That you don't need to know. Yeah. So sorry to pause, don't need to know. Yeah. So since it's hard to pause, but this is so fascinating to me. So what clicked, what was the realization when you sat down and said, you get it in your own way,

thinking that you needed to know something, a trick or a process before it would flow. If you got out of the way, it would just flow. What gives you permission to let it flow? Sometimes if you take four years of schooling or you study under somebody, then you've suddenly given your permission to let it flow. And I know you're a guy who likes to take a shortcut in.

Here's the shortcut. Just get out of your own way. Right. You're just opening up the pipe and that creativity flows through. And as soon as your ego gets in the way and you go, oh, but I don't know if I know what to do next. You've already put I in front of it and you've already blocked it a little bit. I did it once, but I don't know if I can do it again.

It was never you. The best you can be is to get out of the way so it comes through. So when an actor comes to me or a crew member, he goes, I'm not sure I know how to play this part or I'm not sure I know. Go, that's beautiful because the other half is going to show up over there. They say knowing is half the battle. I think the most important part is the other half, not knowing, not knowing what's going to happen, but you trust that it'll be there when you put the brush up to the canvas.

It's going to know where to go. And the further you're out of the way of it, it'll just happen. So the trust comes first. The trust comes first. You have to trust first and then it'll happen. And I always point it out when it does. I point it out. You'll see it and I'll point it out when it's going to fall on your lap or I'll just call

upon you to come up with something and you will. And I'm going to point out because that's the magic. You're just going to be open to it. It's all attitude. There's your lap or I'll just call upon you to come up with something and you will. And I'm going to point out, because that's the magic. You're just going to be open to it. It's all attitude. There's nothing wrong that could ever happen. I remember from Dust Till Dawn, the film, the special effects guys put too much fire in the explosion. And the actors come running out of the building. And it's in the movie.

You see the building blow up, the bar at the end. And the fireball, if you were to continue, but I cut away, it just kept going and engulfed the whole set and that was the first shot we still needed lots of other stuff to shoot with it and we're like okay everyone else is freaking out the production designers cry that was all their work and uh me and my assistant director he came over and he goes you think what i'm thinking oh yeah this it looks good the way it is it's all charred let's just keep shooting and we'll do the repair, a little repair that needs to be done for next week. And we'll shoot that exterior next week.

But let's just shoot. Let's just keep shooting. Sometimes you use those gifts because nothing ever goes according to plan. And sometimes when I hear new filmmakers talk, they talk all down about their film. Oh, well, nothing worked. And it was a disappointment.

It's like, oh, they don't realize it. That's the job. The job is that nothing is going to work at all. And you go, well, how can I turn that in a way to turn it into a positive and I get something much better than if I had all the time and money in the world? Yeah.

And I love those experiences so much that I would purposely, and I talked to Michael Mann about this and the Michael Mann director's chair, because we talked about Manhunter once years ago and he retelled me the story and he didn't have any money he fired the effects crew it's some of the really cool staccato editing was really to

cover up the fact that they didn't have effects and i didn't know that i always thought it was a stylistic choice he goes no because we didn't have any money or time and i had to cut it in myself and i was throwing ketchup on the guy in between and i did it edit i was like oh my god i thought that was brilliant stylistic choice no i said i'm to do that for all my movies now. I want all of them to not have enough money, not enough time so that we're forced to be more creative because that's going to give it something to spark that you can't manufacture. And people will tap in or they'll go, I don't know why I like this movie. It's kind of a weird movie, but there's something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again, because it's got a life to it. Sometimes art is, should be imperfect in a way. The point you made just a minute ago about

creativity transferring from one area to the next, to seemingly unrelated skills and areas, I think is really important. And I cannot recommend highly enough that people check out the director's chair. And one of the terms that jumped out, which you kind of mentioned in your last example was the gremlins right and the gremlins that you kind of turned to you how do you embrace the gremlins right and turn them to your advantage and the you know the example of the ending of back to the future and how like the church tower and all of that was because the studios just refused to finance this more kind of spectacular ending things that you would think that planned for years were created at the last moment.

And I couldn't believe that myself. That's why I enjoy doing those interviews. I truly want to know these things because they still blow me away. The creative process blows me away. And it applies to so much that even if you're not a director or a filmmaker, you watch that and you see people talking

about the creativity and creative process. And you see how it applies to anything that you do, how you your children how you cook food how you run a business you know creativity is so much a part of that and when people say oh you do so many things you're a musician you're a painter you you know you edit you're the composer you're the cinematographer you're the editor you do so many different things go no i only do one thing i live a creative. I live a creative life. When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you. Anything that has creative aspect is suddenly yours to go and do. And there's no separation between work and play. I mean, I work, quote unquote, in my house. I mean, that's why I write my scripts, come up with my ideas while I'm playing with my kids, while I'm cooking them a meal, which is a creative exercise

art you can eat in itself. Then you go upstairs and do some editing. You edit a scene you can already hear the kind of music for. I'll go over to this room and I'll do music for it. And then you go, I'm not sure how this character, I'm going to get into this character. Maybe I'll paint him first and kind of see visually what he looks like or musically what he sounds like.

And you can work completely nonlinear that way because you realize I can do anything I want because everything can be creative. Even a business call, suddenly you go, this is kind of out of my league, but let me add my creativity to it and maybe that'll solve something no one else will be able to solve.

And sure enough, you can always rely on creativity to sort of win the day in a lot of areas. And with, say, El Mariachi, I've heard a couple of different versions of this financing, but I'd love to know how you financed it. Because I've heard experimental medical procedures. I've heard selling your sort of body to science. How was that financed? Yeah, that's one of the strangest things. The legend kept growing around El Mariachi. And it's one of the few times you'll hear a legend where it was all literally true.

I mean, it was as crazy as it sounded. But back then, you know, I mean, I was from a family of 10 kids. There was no borrowing from mom and dad to go make a movie. That was on me. I was already paying my way through school and I already had two jobs. I had a job as a cartoonist. I had a job working at the university and barely making rent and tuition. So to go make a movie, even though people would say, oh, $7,000, that's so cheap for a 16mm movie.

Oh yeah, you got $7,000 sticking out of your pocket? Who has that? So you had to kind of take down a score. And the only way you could actually go do a big number was to go to this, it was one of the biggest universities in the country at the time. They had this thing called Pharmaco, which was a medical research facility. And it's only like a fourth stage where it's already been tested many times. And this is the final before they get FDA approval. You're not replacing the giddy bits.

They're not like, you know, mixing a couple of things together and giving it to you and saying, okay, let's see if it works. They're really kind of seen, but they need healthy young specimens between the ages of 18 and 24. And so that's college students and they all need money. So you go in for a weekend and make 500 bucks, but you become a pig in cushion. I would go in there for the longer ones that were like a month where you would

be paid for your time rather than your pain. And I would write scripts while I was in there and you make 2000, $3,000 in a month, real money when you're not having to pay for food and rent or anything. Now you have to eat. Oh, so you were housed there. You're housed there. Yeah. You're housed and you can't. Now you have to eat. Oh, so you were housed there. You're housed there. Yeah, you're housed there and you can't leave.

And you got to eat and shit and pee at a certain time. Well, I guess that's another benefit though, right? Because they're covering some of your, what would otherwise be expensive. It was a great deal. And so I did a couple of those. And one of them was a drug that's on the market, Lipitor, the cholesterol lowering drug. That's the one I was on. So I got to eat bacon and all kinds of stuff.

I got to eat a high cholesterol diet. I used that money to go and make the film because I had an idea we could sell it for at least double of what we made it if we kept the budget really low. I didn't know. So I had to just make it for as little as possible. Most of that money went to just the film stock. And I really didn't think anyone was going to see it. It was really just a test film. That's why I did it in Spanish. I did it for the Spanish market. I was already had a bunch of award-winning short films, but I needed to practice telling features.

So I thought, let me just make a bunch of features for the Spanish market just to get some seasoning, do all the jobs myself, because I couldn't afford a crew and that way I'll learn them all. If I can sell it for twice of what I put in, that's like the best film school. I'll learn every job.

I'll do like two or three of these things, cut them all together, take out the best portions and use it on my demo reel and then use the money that I make to go make a real first film, English language, American and independent film. And the first one got released by Columbia pictures and I was shocked. How did that happen?

And who took a chance on you or how did you increase the odds of that happening? Because I guess it was Sundance. Is that, was that the trigger? No, it was already bought by Sundance. It was already bought by Sundance. So how did you increase the odds of that happening because i guess it was sundance is that was that the trigger no it was already bought by sundance it was already bought by sundance so how did that happen i had this crazy idea i'd made this short film by myself it was a wind-up camera was eight minutes long it was called bedhead it's online and i utilized it to use slow motion and all kinds of things that i couldn't use on a video camera i really wanted

to show off what i could do with that little camera. It was a World War II camera, the little wind-up ones. I mean, a piece of junk. But it could do stuff it couldn't do with video. Shot that, put it in festivals, and won a bunch of festivals. And I was like, wow, I did that all by myself with $800.

It's eight minutes. If I did that times 10, I could do an 80-minute movie for $8,000 or less because it would be dialogue scenes. It wouldn't be wall-to-wall action like that short film. I could pad it out. I could probably do it for five grand. I felt like I was getting away with something and coming up with this idea and thinking, how come no one's ever done this before? Let me go try it this summer. Let me try it for the Spanish video market because they make them for like 30 grand, but I'll guarantee no one sees

it. I'll call it a mariachi, which is basically if you're going to the action section, you won't buy a movie call or rent a movie called The guitar player that promises no action at all but i just thought you know i had a sense of humor and i thought let me make it kind of don't really want people to see it i just want to be able to test out these ideas and see if it's possible shot shot shot cut it cut it cut it went to sell it in la because that's where the distributors were for those u.s distributed spanish language movies because you would just look at the video box and all the companies were like on Wilshire Boulevard. So I drove up here with my friend Carlos. And the in I had was there was going to be a 25th anniversary of the Texas Film Commission in Austin. And a bunch of people from Hollywood that Governor Ann Richards was trying to invite in.

And I saw the list of people. And one of the agents from ICM called Robert Newman was going to be there. And I thought, maybe I can try and slip in my short films. Well, the whole thing got canceled and fell apart. So when I was in LA, I called ICM up cold. I looked them up in the phone book, called them up. This was in 1992. I had asked for Robert Newman's office and they put me right through. He was a new agent there. He didn't have any directors yet. I called up his assistant and said, hey, can I talk to Robert Newman? He was going to come down to this 25th anniversary thing. And they said, oh, he hooked up on the phone with him. He said, yeah, what happened with Newman? He was going to come down to this 25th anniversary thing. And they said, oh, he hooked up on the phone. And I said, yeah, what happened with that?

I was all ready to come down. I go, well, I don't know, but I was going to show you my film. And I'm here in town. I wanted to drop off my award-winning short film and a trailer for a movie I made for $7,000. Okay, drop it off. I couldn't believe it. Dropped it off. He called me back up the next day.

Hey, the machine ate my tape. He actually watched it. I couldn't believe it. Went and made another tape, gave it to him. Waited over the weekend weekend and I got the call and he says I love the short film but I love the trailer

the trailer for this movie the mariachi movie I mean it's like a world class trailer because I kind of I knew people could watch the whole thing so I'm a pretty good editor

I cut this really snazzy trailer that just made you want to watch the movie and he said how much did it cost again I said 7,000 well that's pretty good most trailers much did it cost again? I said, $7,000. Well, that's pretty good.

Most trailers cost $20,000 or $30,000. No, no, the whole film cost $7,000. I said, oh, come on. He said, no, the whole thing. I shot it really low budget, but I'm going to, can I come up and talk to you? So he had me come up and I told him, I plan on making two or three of these, like a trilogy of these, guy with a guitar case, as just a test. And I'm wondering what else I should put on my demo tape

because, you know, my award-winning short film has been doing well. I think it was kind of like a dollars trilogy and I can get you work right now off of this. I said, really? He goes, yeah, I'd send this to the studios. Just put subtitles on it and I'll send it to him. So I subtitled it, sent it. He got me a two-year deal right away at Columbia Pictures, not to even release Mariachi. Mariachi was just a calling card. But it happened to so quick. I mean, I was really young. I was, what, 22, 23.

I really thought I was going to make some test films first and have a chance to come up with what my big idea was. I mean, I was in no rush. I really wanted to be prepared. I really wanted to learn every job and really know what I was doing. So this suddenly caught me by surprise because now they're asking, well, you're a filmmaker now. And he even wrote me down as a writer director.

And I guess a writer director. I guess I wrote the script. So I guess I'm a writer director. I really thought of myself that way. And I was suddenly this young kid plunged into this world. And I suddenly had to come up with a bunch of original ideas because this was my shot. It was too quick. Yeah.

I was not prepared. So I thought, well, look, you guys like the mariachi. Why don't we just remake that? Remake it with like Antonio Banderas in Spain and we'll just cast it up and just read me. And they said, okay, that's not prepared. So I thought, well, look, you guys liked El Mariachi. Why don't we just remake that? Remake it with Antonio Banderas in Spain, and we'll just cast it up and just remake it. And they said, okay, that's a good idea. But we want to test screen El Mariachi first to make sure people don't think it's a downer

when the girl gets killed. So they made a film print. They tested it. People liked it the way it was. They decided to take it to festivals. And I completely protested. I was like, this is my practice film. No one was ever supposed to see this. Give me $2,000. This is my debut baton ball. Don't put this out for the world to festivals. And I completely protested. I was like, this is my practice film. No one was ever supposed to see this.

Give me $2,000. This is my debut baton ball. Don't put this out for the world to see. Don't put this out. If I knew people were going to see it, give me $2,000.

I'll go reshoot half of it just knowing people were going to see it as my first film. And they said, no, you don't know what you have here. It's very special.

And they took it out and they went to Telluride, Toronto, and the head of Sundance came to me at Toronto and said, don't show it at any more festivals and you can bring it to Sundance and put it in competition. Because he knew it would do really well there.

And it won. So I was already bought by Columbia. So I was one of the few films usually that's already had a distributor. And we took it and I had a great little talk I would do before to set it up because I had to disclaim why it was the way it was. And I said, well, when you see the Columbia logo come on in the front, the logo probably costs more than the whole movie. Everything you watch after that, just know how I did it. I wanted people to know how I did it. I really wanted to deconstruct how I was done because I would have wanted to know that. As a film student who felt coming from a family of 10 kids living in Texas, people constantly saying,

you want to be a filmmaker? Oh, you need to move to LA. That you could stay where you are and come up with something that could be sold. I just wanted to get on top of a mountain and tell everybody. So that's why I put out a book. And that's why even before each screening, I would explain how it was even possible because I knew they would be wondering because nobody had really ever done it. It wasn't that it was impossible. Just nobody had done it before. No one ever thought that way. People kind of forgot that that's how movies really started. It was always like a couple of guys with a windup camera and Buster Keaton in front. It wasn't a business yet. When it became a business, suddenly everyone had a job and you needed 200 people because it was now an industry.

That's not what the art form was originally. It was just the manipulation of moving images. And you can do that with two people, one person. That was a breakthrough idea. And so Bami would tell them, I just took stock in what I had. My friend Carlos, he's got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that'll be where the bad guy's at. His cousin owns a bar. The bar's where it's going to be the first initial shootouts where it'll be all the bad guys hang out.

His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there'll be an action scene with a bus at some point. There's a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He's got a pit bull. Okay, he's in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the he's in the movie his other friend had a turtle he found the turtle's in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler and that'll

suddenly raise production value so I wrote everything around what we had so you never had to go search and you never had to spend anything on the movie, the movie cost really nothing, it was really just the fact that I wanted to shoot it on film instead of video so that it would look more expensive and try and tell people I made it for $70,000.

Try to sell it for like $70,000. Said it ended up going to Columbia and getting released. And that story really, when we won Sundance, the audience award, my acceptance speech said, you're going to get a lot more entries next year. When people find out that this is the one that won, a movie made with no money, no crew, everyone's going to pick up a camera and start making their own movies. And it's been flooded with entries since then. It was really a real change in the paradigm.

And it was only out of necessity. It wasn't my big idea that it could be done. I really just thought, I don't want to take anyone with me. Even my best friend wanted to come help on my movie shoot for Amariachi. I said, no, because I got to go to Mexico and this camera I bought,

it's probably going to break down the first day. I don't want to do it. I'll jinx it if I start bringing too many people down. And I don't mind failing. I just don't like failing in front of a bunch of other people. So when they go back and they say, Robert tried to make a movie for no money. Yeah, idiot. He got stranded in Mexico. I really didn't think it would work. And I was surprised. And that's the best I tell people is just be naive stay naive throw it away don't overthink it I didn't overthink it at all because I would have treated it completely differently had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody had I thought it would go to a festival and I would have submitted I would have spent 10 times as much I would have gone and borrowed money and done all instead it was like one take one take one to

everything was one take even if it didn't work. Because the film's so expensive. So I would go, and it was a noisy camera, and it was a soundless camera. I mean, it would make so much noise, you couldn't record sound. So I had to record sound the way you're doing right now. So I would shoot a take, put the camera away, get the sound out, put the mic up close. So for those people, yeah, we have two mics attached to a little recording device. I would put the mic as close as you have it. So I got great sound, but it was out of sync,

but you kind of talk in your own rhythm. So if you say, hi, my name is Robert, put the camera away. Okay. Now do the audio. Hi,

my name is Robert. It kind of comes, you can pretty much get it to sync. Cause I don't like rubbery lips. If you look at mariachi, it's all in sync, except where it started to get out of sync. I cut away to the dog or I cut away to a closeup and it created this really

snappy editing style, but it was really just to get it back in, I cut away to the dog or I cut away to a close-up and it created this really snappy editing style. But it was really just to get it back in sync because I couldn't stand that. But that was the whole idea. You know, it's like, let me just try and do all these things myself and see if we can put it together. It reminds me of Jack Ma.

I mean, it's very consistent among these people who seem to come out of nowhere and build something very big. Of course, there are exceptions, but Jack Ma of Alibaba, he said, you know, we had a couple of advantages when we started. We had no experience, no money, and no plan. And so every dollar we spent, we had to consider very, very, very carefully.

My plan was, I had a really good plan. This was the plan was, I'm going to go shoot one take of everything because a film is the most expensive item. If I just shoot two takes, you know, one just in case, I've just doubled my budget. So one take, I'll cut it together. The stuff that I need to come reshoot, we'll only reshoot that. We'll only get those shots. You never come back and reshoot. By the time you get back up there, back to Austin, you figure out a way to cut around things that were like not done right, or a little slow, or, and I never came back and reshot anything. You end up just working with what you got, but it left me off. It got me off the hook from being too precious is by knowing I had that safety net, which I never ended up using. So if you can do that for yourself, you know,

in any area that you're in, try to just go free with abandoned. And sometimes, you know, they say that for writing a book or writing a script, just write, don't keep rereading each page and going, Oh, it's not good enough. And then tear it up and throw it in the trash can you'll never get anywhere you got to just get momentum get it down and keep going and come back later with fresh eyes and look at it again now that you have access to so many resources what are practices you have or principles for maintaining that scrappy creative mindset right because if you you don't have to have many constraints if you don't want to yeah at this point are there ways that you try to simulate that or there's a couple things with that this is freedom of limitations you know there's almost more freeing to know i gotta use only these

items turtle bar ranch you're almost completely free within that you know you almost can do not anything because that would be almost too many options, but you're just put into a box. One of my favorite movies I did with Quentin was called Four Rooms, where they said, we're all doing short films. We all have the same criteria. It has to be set in one room. It has to be New Year's Eve, and you have to use the bellhop. The freedom of limitations was enormous.

I mean, you watch that short, and it goes all over the room. By the end, we burn down the room. I mean, it almost almost more exciting to know that you were in a box and you could be creative within that box. So now that so many things are available to you, you want to limit yourself in a way. So I try to limit time.

I try to limit money so that we can really get still, keep that essence of creativity and deliver on the screen something that just looks much bigger so that you can retain your freedom, creative freedom. Because if you start spending more money, suddenly the financiers, rightfully so, the studios or the executives

will be over your shoulder constantly questioning every move you make because they want their money back. But if you keep the budget low, it's a win-win situation. If the movie does great, it's a great success. If the movie doesn't do great, it's still a success because it didn't cost very much and it'll make back its money over time. That's kind of where I've kind of lived and breathed.

I'm about to jump out of the box a little bit more and do some things that are a little bigger just to learn more because you just learn more when you go and do other kinds of assignments, but where it's really the most fun. And that's why you asked, how do you keep the morale high? The morale is always high on the set because they know we're just being creative.

That's the name of the game. It's not looking for a result. It's like, how can we just keep ourselves jazzed about this? 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 role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their master

chief, marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting, and on and on. Get your free sample pack with any element purchase at drinklmnt.com slash Tim. Be sure to also try the new element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out, drinklm.com slash Tim, drinkelement.com slash Tim. And now, Susan Cain, number one New York Times bestselling author of Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which spent eight years on the New York Times bestsellers list, and Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, and award

winning speaker whose TED Talks have garnered more than 46 million views. You can find Susan on Instagram at Susan Cain Author. Susan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time, and we have a lot of terrain to possibly cover, so we may end up having a part two and three, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I thought that we could look at public speaking just for a second

because many people will associate you with this blockbuster mega hit of a TED Talk. And rumor has it that you straight in the delivery room from the get-go were a natural born killer on stage. This is true. Were you born a spectacular public speaker? Oh my gosh. Okay, well, everybody listening, you can't see Tim right now, but he has a very devilish smile on his face because, of course, the answer is the complete opposite. So I had a lifelong, well, dating back to middle school, I know exactly when it started. I had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking. And a lot of people say they're afraid of public speaking and they're telling the truth, but they didn't have a fear the way I had a fear of it. It was so extreme. What was the triggering event? switched to a new middle school and I was in an English literature class and I probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all because I love English so I was

always participating. Anyway she called me up to the front of the room we were doing Macbeth and she called me up with a friend of mine and she said okay you're gonna play Lady Macbeth and your friend Rob is gonna play Macbeth and just improvise this scene. And for me as a shy person in a new school, this was like total kryptonite and I couldn't say anything. I just completely blanked out and just stood there dumbly at the front of the class and finally just had to kind of sit back down, red-faced, not having said a word. That sounds terrible. Oh my God. It's making my palms sweat just listening to it.

Yeah, yeah. And I know this now, now that I've studied all this stuff, that if you have an experience like that, it gets encoded into your amygdala, which is the part of your brain that registers all your fears. And then the amygdala for the rest of your life is doing its job by saying, oh, you know, I'm going to steer you clear of any situation ever approximating anything like that literature class ever again. So after that, anytime I had to give a speech, and I did it, you know, I used to be a lawyer on Wall Street and stuff. Anytime I would do it, I would just sort of suffer my way through and I would always lose five pounds

because I couldn't eat before, like for a week before. Then I started writing this book, Quiet, after I had left law. And I really, really, really cared about it. You know, it was my dream come true to be a writer. And I cared so much about the ideas in the book. And I didn't want my fear to stand in my way. And I was giving this TED Talk, so I had to overcome it. How did the opportunity for the TED Talk come about? So I had a friend who worked at TED, told him about the book, and he kind of passed on the idea to the curators at the time. And I think that they understood that most of the TED audience is really introverted.

And so they knew that it would relate with their audience. And I think that that was probably why they invited me in. And I mean, I'll come back to how I overcame my fear in a minute, but I will tell you, they turned out to be so accurate that after I gave the talk, you know, I came down off the stage and I was absolutely mobbed for the whole rest of the week by every single other audience member who were all coming to tell me, that's my story too. And I'm going around pretending to be this very confident extroverted person and that's not really who I am. Amazing.

Yeah. Present company included. Is that right? Oh yeah, absolutely. I will steer us back and you will also bring us back to what we were just talking about. But last night at a group dinner, which I helped organize, keep in mind, at a wonderful restaurant here in New York City called The Lily. It's a Lebanese place. I had to take four or five bathroom breaks, which were not to use the bathroom. That is what I do at any dinner of more than one or two people. I have to exit not just the conversations,

but the environment to just recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes and then go back out. It's like you're feeling a kind of overstimulation in the setting. Overstimulation. That's so interesting because I've heard you talk before about moving to Austin and having these group dinners. And I thought, oh, that's so interesting that that's what Tim wants to do because I would never choose to socialize that way. I always love to socialize one-on-one, almost the way we're doing right now, you know, sitting here just talking.

There's a kind of boiling point for me in terms of size. Like four to six I can handle. It depends for me also on the environment, I think more so than the number of people. So when I do these group dinners, I will generally host them at home or have them at one of my friend's homes, not in a popular restaurant like I did last night. I'm just going to say what's interesting about that is how strategic you are about it. And I really noticed this with people. So we were just talking about Ted. I was just talking to Chris Anderson who runs Ted about this whole phenomenon. And he describes himself as an

introvert too. And he said he loves group dinners. If there's a specific topic that everybody has gathered there to discuss and he knows it's going to be something really substantive, then he's in his comfort zone. But if it's just kind of this amorphous socializing, he wants to leave. So just on the tactical practical side, I also tend to very frequently cook the meal for the group so that I have a task while people are arriving and talking. Also deliberate because I'm often inviting people who don't know one another. So I want them to have a chance to chat without having me as a mutual crutch, if that makes sense. But in any case, we could talk about that for a long time. No, and that's a really common strategy. I hear that from many people wanting to have the task. I can play extrovert.

I'm good at playing extrovert. But up until, say, sixth grade, I wouldn't even go out to recess. I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist. But I wouldn't even go out to recess. Wow. So a lot of what you talk about and have written about certainly strikes a chord. Now I feel like I want to ask you so many questions about this.

I'm really curious if we talked about, if we could go back and talk to sixth grade you right this minute, would sixth grade you have any idea that you would have the life path that yours has taken that's so public? Absolutely not. No, definitely not. I mean, what happened in sixth grade also, just for people who might be wondering,

well, what happened in sixth grade? If it's up until sixth grade, what happened in sixth grade, or I should say more accurately, the summer of fifth grade is that I had a huge growth spurt and I had been bullied really badly. I was born premature and very small and I was bullied really, really badly up until the end of fifth grade. Then I left to a summer camp and gained about 30 pounds of muscle and grew four to five inches over the summer, came back. And then- It's like a Captain America narrative. Yeah, exactly. And then the bullies who had been accustomed to bullying me tried their usual playbook and I just went on this vigilante spree like the Punisher. And that changed the social dynamics. So I was able to actually go outside and do things

that I wanted to do at recess from that point on. So it didn't mean that I socialized a lot more, but I had more mobility. So that is what happened. But like you, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to start with this question about overcoming a fear of public speaking is that it's when people see the finished product, it's easy to assume that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill. And in fact, a lot of what appears to be natural appears only to be natural because it started off very, very unnatural. And someone has worked at chipping away at it over time. I think that's true. I think so often when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out exactly the opposite,

and then they cared so much about fixing that problem. But in terms of how I overcame that fear, and I have this kind of evangelical desire to share it because it was so extreme. I feel like if I could do it, then I know anyone can overcome any fear. So first of all, I spent years sitting in therapist's offices kind of cozily discussing, well, what might be the sources of this fear? And what do I trace it back to? And that does no good at all. I'm actually a big believer in therapy, but not for this type of issue. So what really does it if you're afraid of something, you have to expose yourself very slowly to the thing that you fear in really manageable doses. So you can't start off by giving the TED Talk. So in my case, I signed up for the seminar and it was a seminar

for people with public speaking anxiety here in New York. And you'd get there and on the very first day, all you had to do was stand up, say your name, sit back down, declare victory, you're finished. And that's it. What was the organization? Oh gosh. Was it Toastmasters or something else? No. And I'm a big fan of Toastmasters, but this was almost more remedial than Toastmasters. Toastmasters Lite. Yeah, this was pre-Toastmasters. So the guy's name, he's amazing.

His name is Charles DiCagno, and you can find his organization. It's speakeasy.com, and I think it's spelled with three E's. Perfect, and I'll put a link in the show notes for people as well yeah yeah because I really recommend him yeah and so you know you'd come back the next week and maybe you'd stand up and he would do these things like he'd have people stand

on either side of you so you didn't feel all alone up there on stage it's brilliant yeah yeah and then the audience would ask you questions like where are you from and where did you go to college you know so really easy stuff you answer the questions and you're done. And it's like, if you do that little by little by little, you actually really can overcome it. It's kind of crazy, but true. But I will say, having said all this, still, you know, there's something about a TED Talk

that's on some whole crazy other realm of public speaking nerves. Even if the setting is exactly the same, there is a performance anxiety associated with that three-letter acronym, for sure. Yeah, we were talking about this before we started taping, that so many of the speakers are really practiced on stage, and yet you see them minutes before they go out and they're sweating bullets and they're all losing it. Yeah, we were chatting for a second about, and Chris Anderson could certainly correct me,

I'm blanking on the exact term, but there's some space right next to the stage behind the curtain called the Zen Room or the Relaxation Cube. There's some very pleasant sounding name for this space, and it's intended to be the next up batting cage for the two or three speakers to come. And I remember it was probably 15 or 20 minutes before I was supposed to go live. Or no, it couldn't have been that. It was probably an hour before. And I really didn't want to be around

a lot of people. And in the green room, there are all sorts of staff and lots of people milling around and working on production. And I thought to myself, I need to go to the Zen room. We'll just call it the Zen room. And so I walk out to the Zen room and I won't mention names, but there are like three just killers. These are consummate professionals who have done this type of thing thousands of times. People I look up to and would love to someday have a coffee with, and they are freaking the fuck out. And I was like, not helping, not helping. I need to leave the Zen room right now. So yes, it's a different beast. So how do you go from talking about your favorite color on stage with two people next to you to Ted then? Okay. So I graduated from that to Toastmasters,

which I also completely recommend. And should I describe what that is? Yes, please. Yeah. Okay. So Toastmasters, it's a worldwide organization. You can absolutely find one near you because they're everywhere. And it's basically this non-for-profit thing where you sign up for a group that meets near you. And once every two weeks you get together and you practice public speaking together and they have this ritualized way of doing it. And some of the time you're practicing speaking off the top of your head and sometimes it's a prepared speech and it's just kind of giving you that exposure therapy of, you know, putting you in the beast of the thing that

most frightens you. You have to show up every two weeks and do it. So I did that. But then the next stage after that, and it was my husband's idea, I hired a coach for the full week before the TED Talk. It was a really amazing guy named Jim Fife, who I also completely recommend. And since then, he has coached many other TED speakers. So I worked with him morning till night for a full week before the talk. Good for you. Yeah. And he... What did the working with him morning till night for a full week before the talk. Good for you. Yeah. What did the working with him look like?

Okay. So he did a really brilliant thing. He was very psychologically attuned. And I said to him, you know, I'm really comfortable in general talking to people one-on-one and kind of like cozily sitting on a couch and talking about life I love that for me at that point though getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing so he said okay let's practice your talk sitting on the couch and just talk to me about it and we did that for like two days and it was only after that that we then moved to the stage and started getting into kind of the theatrics of it. That kind of transition was so helpful.

I just want to note that this is, I spend so much time with and I'm so obsessed with good teachers, good coaches. This is very common where they will effectively say, let's start from where you are right now. Right. they will effectively say, let's start from where you are right now. They will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to a point of familiarity or comfort, and then edge into sort of the next concentric circle of what is your limit of comfort. Yeah. And I think they also have to show a lot of non-judgment because I had some dark moments during that week. For me, this was the abyss and I was just hanging out in the abyss for a week. And so he saw me, you know, I had only just

met him and he saw me not in the most flattering circumstances. And yet I didn't feel embarrassed by that. Did he do anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview that he used like an intake do you remember what it wasn't really formal like that you know he's such a human guy it was just like we were just talking you know we were just yeah disguised as intakes yeah and then so the amazing thing to me now is I now super ironically have a career as a public speaker. Like I travel the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place. Like I asked you, well, if we could tell sixth grade Tim

where he would be, what would he say? And I say that to myself too. Like if you could have even told me eight years ago that this would be my life, I would have been so shocked by it. And now I've come to like it. Did you have any particular pregame ritual or anything that you did in the hours leading up to your talk that helped or that you didn't do? I have things now. Back then, I just suffered.

What do you have now? Now, I have a few things. I mean, I do deep breathing just like everyone else. I'm sure you've heard that a million times, but it's got to be real deep breathing, you know, where you really feel your belly and your diaphragm filling up. But for me, what I also do is I usually think to myself, and I do this especially when I'm speaking to an audience that I find more intimidating, like a group of finance people at an investment bank or something. I will say to myself, there, I am sure, is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted. And if that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears today, then it's all good.

And that pulls me out of myself instantly. Yeah, it gives you also a hurdle that you can clear for winning the presentation, so to speak. Yeah, right. It's a manageable goal. But I think it feels deeper than that to me. It feels also like, I think when people get nervous about speaking, obviously they're really nervous about being judged, right? But this completely shifts the energy where it's not any longer about how anybody judges me. It's about, can I help that kid out there? I want to say also that part of the reason I am more than happy, actually excited to spend so much time talking about this, is that it is not specific to public speaking. This just happens to be a very common fear and pursuit weakness of

many, many, many people. Also, as a side note, what Warren Buffett says is his greatest ever investment, put more specifically, a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking because it magnified his ability to do almost everything else, to communicate effectively both in spoken word but also in the written word in some respects. I don't think I've ever spoken about this, but I also did Toastmasters. And if you have trouble finding it, oftentimes there are large companies that will have within their HQ or any large location their own Toastmasters group. And that's actually how I found it in San Jose initially. It was at Adobe. So I would go in

and I would do this Toastmasters. And your description of having this very logical progression of small wins layered upon small wins, getting up on stage and then getting off stage, getting up on stage, having two people next to you and answering a few questions and getting off stage is so incredibly effective. And I'm laughing right now because I remember when I was preparing for my first presentation at South by Southwest.

This is a very large festival and conference in Austin, Texas. The timing was 2007. It's about, I want to say, a month, month and a half before my book is going to come out, my first book, which I'm very nervous about. There had been no speaking slots, but I had pitched Hugh Forrest at the time, who I had been introduced to, that I would take anything available. Corner of a room, hallway, if there were any cancellations, I would really appreciate the opportunity to speak at the event.

And lo and behold, there was a last minute cancellation, not by a keynote speaker, but by a sponsor who was going to have a stage to pitch their products from in this makeshift cafe. And I was like, I'm in, I'm in. But I was so incredibly nervous about this, that in the beginning in particular, I was, and this is true today, too nervous to practice my rough, rough draft of the presentation in particular, I was, and this is true today, too nervous to practice my rough, rough draft of the presentation in front of people. And so what I did, I was staying in a guest bedroom at a friend's house. He had three chihuahuas. And I went outside, I was playing with the chihuahuas, and they followed me into the garage. I practiced in the garage. I didn't want to practice in the house where my friend's wife was. And I gave my presentation. I felt reasonably confident about the content,

but I wasn't comfortable with any of the performance aspects of trying to keep attention. So I gave my draft of this talk over and over again until I could get the dogs to sit and stare at me, somewhat bewildered, but to hold their attention. That was the litmus test for me. Wow. To graduate to giving a rough draft in front of humans for those people out there who are wondering whether this all comes naturally to me. It does not at all. Have you talked about that before or is this the first time you're doing that?

I don't think I've talked about that. Certainly, I don't think I've talked about it on the podcast. And for the TED Talk also, something I did which I did not do for the South by Talk, which I thought really made a difference was I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers once I had a reasonably polished version. And I asked friends of mine who worked at larger companies who had teams during lunch hour, if there happened to be an empty conference room, could they invite people to hear a rough draft of a TED Talk? And then I would ask them for feedback. And usually there was enough time that I could give it two or three times so I could actually incorporate their feedback, give another version.

And once I'd given the second version, there were a lot more people in the room who were willing to be critical. The first round, you get one or two. Yes, that's so true. And this is just something I've thought about a lot because I've been so nervous about public speaking for so long. And by the way, it doesn't really go away. At least for me, I still have those nerves. But with TED very specifically, I assumed, and this came from sports, but I'd never applied it, that I was going to be, my heart rate was probably going to be 30 beats per minute higher than normal. And that it was not just important for me to practice the

content, but to practice under the physiological stress that I would probably experience when trying to deliver the content. So I would do a bunch of pushups in another room and drink two double espressos and wait for it to hit and then go in and give my dress rehearsal to see if I could handle that stimulation. That was so, so smart. And listening to that story is reminding me of this crucial step that I left out in a lot of ways, a kind of mistake that I made, which is, I told you I worked with that guy, Jim, for a week, who was amazing. And I thought I was pretty well ready at that point. So I talked to my friend, Adam Grant, who's a very dear friend. Very good speaker too.

And a really good speaker and who also started out as a very nervous and by his description, a terrible public speaker. He says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students and he just worked and worked and worked at it. And now he's the most popular professor at Wharton. But okay. So I was talking to Adam about all this. And so he said, so I'm leaving for TED on Sunday morning, right, to fly out to California, which is where it was at that time. And he says, oh, I'm going to pull together a group of friends and you can practice your talk in front of them. And so this is Friday night and I'm leaving Sunday morning. And so I show up at this apartment full of Adam and his friends. And I think that I'm pretty well

done with the talk. And this is the first think that I'm pretty well done with the talk. And this is the first time that I'm giving it in front of any kind of group because I didn't have the foresight of what you just described. And not only was I so nervous, but I realized from the feedback that a lot of the content was all wrong. And it's Friday night and I'm leaving, you know, like the next day, basically, or the day after the next day. So I went home and I just spent the whole entire night rewriting the whole final third of the talk. And then I'm on the plane going out to TED trying to memorize the new talk. I don't recommend that kind of approach. You need to get real people in front of you. This is just like entrepreneurship and people try to get the product perfect before exposing it to any prospective clients.

You really need to get into the messy reality of what a live audience or a real customer looks like. And the same was true for me. I made a lot of changes in the last few days which I thought were just going to be fine-tuned. Right, and then you end up... Fine-tuning. And I was like, oh, actually,

I really need to completely change by 30% of this. Yeah. And I was very, very nervous before the TED Talk. And I came off stage and I did not think that I... I didn't think that I blew it, but I didn't think that I did a great job. I came off stage thinking that there were definitely bits and pieces I could have done better, but it seems to have worked out.

Okay, wait, but I want to come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now. So you said that you still are really nervous when you give a talk, but are you really as nervous as you used to be? Because I really want people to understand that you can get to a point, you might still have butterflies. It's not like the nerves completely disappear, but they get to, in my experience and from all the literature that I've studied on this, they really do get to a point where you can manage them. And the difference between manageable and non-manageable is gigantic in terms of its effect on your life and your career and everything. So I just want to make sure that people know that.

I can clarify. It depends a lot on the event. We're going to do a Q&A and it's a friend of mine interviewing me on stage. That's not, from my perspective, really public speaking. It is, but at this point I could do that with zero preparation. If it's anything resembling a keynote, if it is Tim on stage talking to an audience and they expect something that has been well rehearsed, my physiological response is still very strong.

I get really sweaty hands. I pace. I have very minimal contact with anyone beforehand. But let me mention a few things. Number one, both Mike Tyson and Dean Martin used to vomit before nearly every performance. But the way that they psychologically contended with that evolved over time. And since I mentioned Mike Tyson, Customato, who was the trainer who really, in a lot of respects, I think boxing scholars or boxing fans would agree,

made Tyson into what Tyson was at his prime as an athlete, used to say something along the following, that the hero and the coward feel the same thing. It's how they respond. Yes. Oh, I so believe that. Yeah. And I mean, there is no courage without the presence of fear. And for me, I have come to see those physiological symptoms that used to make me panic, that used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, that used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, that used to make me feel like I was unprepared as simple precursors to a performance. The way that I frame them for myself

is completely different. And I've learned to view it as this energetic asset that I can use. And that has made all the difference. It has decreased in some circumstances, but certainly before TED, I mean, I'd given hundreds of different presentations and it was like I was getting on stage for the first time. In part also, for people who don't know, they are very, as they should be, strict about many things at TED, including running over. Oh, yes. If running over, and I want to say, and this is exactly what they should say, but in effect, they say, if you run over by, you should not run over, number one, do not run over. If you run over,

if you get to the point where you're like 30 seconds over, we will come up and remove you from stage. And while I'm preparing and while I'm rehearsing, one of the things that made me most stressed out is that my finish times were really variable. And I would say like 30, 40% of the time I ran over. Then other times I would run two minutes under, but miss something really, really important because I was rushing and I was like, good God, this is just a crapshoot. I am at the craps table with my timing. And that really was a concern for me. So that was another element that made Ted unique for me, was that degree of cutoff. Yeah, I felt that way too.

And I did end up going over it by over a minute. Oh, good for you. And there it is. And they were just like, we cannot stop this performance. And I did end up going over it by over a minute. Oh, good for you. And there it is. And they were just like, we cannot stop this performance. I don't know about that. But I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn't sure whether they can really get past it. Also, like what is waiting for you on the other side of it is so gigantic because there's just, there's something weird about public speaking where it has such disproportionate value to, in a way, what you're investing in it. You know, like you're going up on stage for 18 minutes or

40 minutes or whatever, or maybe within your own workplace, you know, even giving a two-minute talk, suddenly everybody is regarding you as a leader and as someone who they can turn to in a new way from if you hadn't been willing to put yourself forward in that way. Definitely. I mean, there's public speaking as the force multiplier for the value of your other skills, which is absolutely true. And then public speaking in a way is also a wonderful diagnostic tool. And what I mean by that is I remember talking to

a friend of mine who, he's a wealth manager for a lot of muckety mucks who you would recognize. And he said, I know them generally better than therapists they've been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because money brings up everything. That's interesting. Talking about money brings up the full spectrum of someone's insecurities, fears, desires, neuroses. Sex also, true.

And public speaking, I think, if it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking, at least for me, it kind of brings up all your stuff. So if you were simply interested in personal growth, it brings to the surface many different pieces of your personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that

transfers to other areas. So that, to me, was my experience, and I find it really interesting. It's like, okay, well, maybe you don't have to play hide-and-go-seek with talk therapy for 20 years to find all of the bits and pieces when, rather than following these different gingerbread trails, you can use certain fearful circumstances to just bring it all right. Or a lot of it to the surface. That was my experience. I'm not saying it's true for everybody, but it was one of those things like talking about money, talking about sex or public speaking. It's like, okay, now we just bring everything to the forefront. So for me, that was also, even if I had not had any interest in getting on stage and giving presentations, it would have been valuable in and of itself.

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. Are there other things that you're fearful of or have been afraid of that you've overcome? No, I mean, that was really the big one for me. But yeah, we were talking about this before, I guess. My bugaboo in general is that I just tend to be a worrier. So other than the experiences I had with public speaking, it's not like I have full-on panic or anything like that. It's more like it's a very familiar companion for me.

So I've had to just come up with various hacks around it. What are some of your hacks? This is going to get us into another big topic, but why not? Why not? So for example, when I stopped practicing corporate law and I decided that I wanted to be a writer, I told myself that it's really hard to make a living as a writer. And I said, okay, the goal is to publish something by the time you're 75. And at the time I was 33, at the time that I said that. And I kind of did that instinctively because I was always doing these hacks of like just wanting to completely take the pressure off of something that I otherwise loved so deeply. And like, I just knew

that if I turned this thing that I deeply loved into a source of like, this has to be the place where I make my living. This has to be the place where I derive some kind of professional stature. It was going to soak a lot of the joy out of it. And so that's the kind of hack that I just naturally do. On a very related note, could you give us a little bit of context around the leaving law? Like why you left law? And then you decide you want to be a writer and you kind of alluded to it, but does that mean that suddenly your rent is dependent on writing? Right. Okay.

So I had wanted to be a writer from the time I was four. And then for a whole bunch of reasons and like so many people, I took some creative writing classes in college and I decided, you know, I'm not actually that good at this and I need to make a living. And I also kind of had a desire, I think, to show myself that I could be out there as a kind of alpha person out in the world of finance or something. So I went to law school and I practiced law, Wall Street law for almost a decade. And during that time that I was practicing law, it was so all-consuming that I completely forgot about the fact that I had wanted to be a writer. It wasn't like, you know, I was walking around

conscious of this broken dream or something. I'd completely forgotten. And the first few years of practicing law, I really loved it. It was just this kind of crazy adventure that I was on. And as the years went by, it started to get really tough for me. You know, I'm not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways. But I was on this partner track and I was committed to it. And then came the day, and I think I may have told you about this in an earlier correspondence, but then came the day when a senior partner in my firm walked in and said, I was supposed to be up for partner that year.

And he said, well, we're not going to be putting you up. And the funny thing is to this day, I don't really know if he meant we're not putting you up ever for partner or just not anytime soon. I don't really know what it meant. All I knew was like, number one, I burst into tears. And number two, here was my get out of jail free card. So three hours later, I had left the firm. Like I was gone. I took a leave of absence and I just started bicycling around Central Park. Like I didn't know what I was going to do next. But as soon as that space opened up that I now had free time for the first time in like 10 years, I started writing and I had no idea that was going to happen. It was almost like in a movie. That's cool. Yeah. It's like,

I've just been waiting for you. Yeah. I mean, literally, like I remember that night, you know, like kind of curled up on my sofa in my apartment and I just started writing on my laptop. And then a week later, I signed up for a class in creative nonfiction at NYU. And I just had this complete feeling of certainty that this was what I wanted to be doing. And zero expectation that I would make a living out of it. And this is a really important thing, I think. I think if you have that kind of a creative dream and a creative love, you have to do everything you can not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things or the pressures of needing to derive professional status from it. So I set up a little side business teaching people negotiation skills, and that was how I was paying the rent. But the thing I was really doing in my heart was this beloved hobby of writing. This is super, super, super, super, super important.

And there are, I think it's true in creative fields, which is pretty much every field, but just for the sake of illustration, writing, music, et cetera, that also in entrepreneurship, you hear these stories of desperation where a necessity is the mother of invention and you know bada bing bada boom magic wand and then there's a billion dollar company or there's jk rowling or whatever it is but those are in my experience the outliers at those they make for great cover stories and. But the fact of the matter is that from what I've seen, certainly with guests on this podcast, is that for instance, Soman Chainani, who has a number of mega successful novels, but he had a SAT prep counseling service that he offered

well past the point that his first book was successful, because he wanted to always feel like he had a safety net so that the writing would not be tainted or even subconsciously influenced to match the market or whatever the lens might become by this pressure. And that is something that whenever possible has come up as a really valuable, I suppose on one hand, you took the risk, you know, you were dependent on this company or this book or whatever. And if it didn't work, it was going to be a disaster. But you know, you were the one who beat the odds. Like we love that narrative. And for most people, that's a really bankrupt narrative. And there's a kind of deeper glamour, actually, in the kind of story that you just told. Because the glamour comes from you're doing everything

that you can to deeply protect the thing that you love most. Definitely. Now, the book itself, people may not know backstory. I'm sure a lot of people don't. How long did it take to get that book done? Okay. So I'm laughing because it took a really, really long time, especially by Tim Ferriss standards. I listen to you and look at your life trajectory. I'm like, how does he do that? Lots of cheating with format is the short answer.

But I don't want to take us off track. So, yeah, it took from start to finish. It was about seven years. I will say in my defense that during those seven years i also had two children and was raising them so that was part of it but i also just think i'm kind of a slow writer like i like to really really think about everything super deeply and what i think is probably people might not know, I had a deadline as all writers do. And I turned in some sort of draft upon my deadline coming to, you know, after 18 months or two years. And my editor basically read it and said, this is terrible. And she said, you

know, go back and completely throw that out, start from scratch and take all the time that you need. And you might think that when that happened, that I would have been really bummed, but I was actually elated because I knew that it was terrible and I knew that I needed much more time and I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never written anything before. So yeah, I was just really happy to have that time. And it's actually really unusual. Like usually in publishing, they had given me a big advance for the book and usually they want their advance back and they're not willing to delay like that. So that was huge. Very understanding editor. Yeah. She's brilliant. And I'm working with her again on my next book.

It's also smart in the sense that a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all. Yes. Right. Yeah. For everyone involved no book at all. Yes. Right? Yeah. For everyone involved. For everyone involved. Yeah. And because I have this philosophy about writing that it's the deep love that has to be protected at all costs. Because of that, I don't care how much time it takes.

I'm just interested in doing it as well as I can. What does your writing process at this point look like? You had your experience with that book and now when you are writing, do you have a daily practice? Does it go through phases of research period, then organizing, then putting all of that into prose through synthesis? What are your writing routines or how do you think about writing these days? So for me, I take whatever thesis I'm working with. And then I spend a year or two just walking around the world, looking at everything through the lens of that thesis, you know, so it used to be introverts and now it's onto a new topic and I'm taking crazy notes through

that period. So every conversation that I have, every book I read, it's all going in. How do you take and organize your notes? Do you do it in notebooks? Do you do it digitally? I know this is nerdy, but I'm into it because a lot of writers do it differently. The reason I'm laughing is I'm thinking when you hear my answer, you're going to know that I need a consultation with you for the next book because I don't do it in a super systemic way. Basically, all those conversations, all those ideas and notes and thoughts I'm having, I stick them all into one Word document. And that document becomes about 700 or 800 pages by the time I'm done. And then I go through that document. And I'm kind of tagging as I go along. And then I'm separating everything out by topic.

So I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic. But in each of those binders, it's just like one big mass of notes. And then I think about where do I want everything. Whenever I'm emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I'm taking notes on, I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there, because you don't know if that emotion's going to come back. So you have to capture it when it happens. I think it's a perfectly fine system.

I feel like technology must have come up with something better. I do it in Microsoft Word. There are probably better tools available, but I would say also that a lot of people confuse new tools for better content. It's very easy, at least let's speak for myself for a second. When I'm writing, I have to disallow myself from thinking about, say, marketing. Because marketing is fun and exciting and easy for me. Because I've had insomnia as a kid and watched many infomercials or something. In any case, it's a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece, which is

the actual research and digging and prose. That's the hard part for me. Always has been, but it's the most important part. And I think similarly, a lot of folks can become consumed by upgrading their tools, multiplying their tools versus just the words. You got to put the words in. And I have some questions about this Word doc though. So when you're going through and adding things to the Word doc and you come in and you're tagging things so you can separate them and you mentioned binders, so you're printing the stuff out and then separating them. Does that mean that when you put in a new note in the Word doc, you go to a new page if it's tagged differently so you can separate them more easily later?

Does that make sense? As opposed to each time you add a note, then hit return twice and then add a new note. If they're tagged differently, it would seem like you'd have to cut up the page into multiple pieces. So do you start a new page? Are there any particular ways that you tag? For instance, would it be a chapter name?

Or would it be a theme? What would a tag look like? A lot of questions. Yeah, it would just be a topic or a theme. And yeah, so every time I'm adding a new note, if I know that it relates to something I've already done, then I'll search for the thing I've already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later. That makes sense. But sometimes I don't or I can't think of it,

and then I'll just add it to the end of the document. Which, control F, right? Word. Yeah. Good to go. Yeah. Simple works. Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker, keeps a journal. I think he puts it in almost every day at midnight, and it's Word doc, word docs. It works. Yeah. I actually, I will say I tried for this next book, I spent a few days reading the instructions for Scrivener, one of these programs. And I just ended up thinking, you know, this isn't for me. It looks great, but... Scrivener, well, some other time we can sit down. That is one tool that if you set it up really simply and you don't use 98% of the features, I find really useful just because you can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents.

Or actually, I should say rather, you see your tentative table of contents on the left side in a vertical pane, and then you can look at what you're on the right-hand side, then I would have it set up so that I have two split windows. So the left-hand side, you see your table of contents, and then there's research, and then you have whatever research you want. That way you can be working on a document in the upper right-hand pane

while you have your research that you're working off of in the bottom right. And if you decide to move docs around to see how it affects flow, it's just drag and drop. It's actually quite wonderful. They did have some issues with footnotes, or maybe I was just too technically incompetent at one point when you then had to export when the publisher insists on, say, Word, which maybe that'll change at some point. But getting a little geeked out. But Scrivener, I've used Scrivener for almost all of my books. There may be one exception, I think, for Our Chef because of how visually intensive it was, was done outside of that. And in terms of routine or ritual, you spend a year gathering these notes. So then you have-

Yeah, maybe more. Yeah, or more. So you have 700 to 800 pages. It's a big word, doc. Yeah. And then what happens? Yeah, so then I spend the time sorting them out. So I get to the point where I've got my eight or nine loose leaf binders that are more or less organized by what the chapters are going to be. Yeah, and then comes the time to write,

during which I'm still doing more research, but I'm starting to write. For me, the writing, like the sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all, that's like, I want to say it's my happy place, but that's not really the best description. It feels like it's this place that I go deep in my mind and I really love being there. And it's like, no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life, I always have those few hours a day where I'm going to a cafe or a library or whatever, and I'm sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino and I'm just doing it. Like I'm stressing the emotional aspect because that's so huge for me. And I feel like I train

myself to associate writing with all of these pleasures of, you know, sitting around in cafes and things like that. Do you have a consistent time when you sit down with your cappuccino and do this? Are you a morning writer or are you a catch-as-catch-can writer? Are you an evening writer? I mean, you also have kids. You have other obligations. So when do you tend to do your writing or do your best writing? You can answer it however you like. Well, I mean, there's what I do and there's what would be ideal. But as you say, I have kids. So my routine is that I drop my kids off at school. That's at around eight. Then I go and I either play tennis or do yoga every day. And then after that, I do my writing. And that's a pretty good

time for me. What time of day would that typically end up being? Yeah, that probably ends up being around 10 or so that I'm starting. Yeah. But if I had no other obligations, the best times of day would be more like either 7 in the morning and also super late at night. So two time periods that I have no access to for this stage of life. Right. And you start writing. This is really interesting to me, hopefully interesting to other people.

So you start, let's say, around 10. Do you break for lunch? Do you skip lunch? Do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have? And the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason so many writers seem to work between the hours of, say, let's make this up, but 10 p.m. and 7.30 a.m., and they tend to either be night owls like me or early risers, is that there are fewer distractions, and they get a relatively uninterrupted block of three to five hours.

But if you're starting at 10, then most people would have lunch scheduled shortly thereafter, like two hours later. So do you break for lunch? Do you have something really small? How do you handle that? Because for me, just speaking personally, it's like, I might have time. Of course I have time for a five minute phone call. But if I do a five minute phone call about something very mechanical or mundane, like calendaring stuff or whatever, and I'm juggling 15 pieces that were on paper in my head, I kind of have to start over a lot of times.

Like I drop all those balls that I'm juggling because of the task switching. So I'd love to hear, not that that's true for everybody, but it's true for me. What does your schedule look like then once you sit down? I'll just kind of go until I realize that I'm not concentrating well anymore. And very often that happens after two or three hours and I just have to take a break. I have a lot of discipline if my brain would cooperate. So I would happily sit there for seven hours until my kids come home from school. But at a certain point, I'll notice that it's just not coming anymore. And so then I'll take a break and I'll

eat or something like that. But I would say, like you were mentioning, well, people might work at night because it's when you get uninterrupted time. And I think that that's one factor. But I also think the reason that those hours tend to be so good. So nighttime is when your cortisol levels are really low, which of course is your stress hormone. And so I noticed this in myself all the time that the ideas that I come up with late at night are different from the daytime ideas because they're completely unfettered by any stress. And so I'll just, I don't know, I just make different kinds of associative leaps and there's like a softness and an ease in my thinking and my feeling about the ideas.

So I think that's one advantage of late night writing. And then in the morning, you've got the high cortisol, but you also have this sort of acute attention. Yeah, I can totally see that. I can definitely see that. I also find that writing late at night, if I'm writing at two in the morning, it's very hard for me. I remember, I want to say it was Ayn Rand who wrote, she had a book about the craft of nonfiction. And there was some, it wasn't a metaphor, I think it was a real world example. But in effect, she's saying writers, many writers will do almost anything to not write. And there's this story about the white tennis shoes. I have to clean

my white tennis shoes before I'm going to write because I'm going to go out. And when it's two or three in the morning, I have to check email to make sure X is just not a viable excuse. So it also just removes a lot of bullshit distraction that I would impose on myself to avoid doing what it is that I find hard. I so relate to this. So when I was writing Quiet, I suddenly developed this idea that I had to learn everything in the world about digital photography. And I was reading all these books about it and the rule of thirds and all this stuff.

And I have never had any interest in photography before or since. It was just these two weeks of mania where I didn't want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there. Are there any particular, I mean, you are a student of the craft, right? You've taken creative nonfiction courses. Are there any particular books or resources

or writers who have had a significant impact on how you view or practice writing? Oh gosh, I'm sure the answer is yes. I can try to buy some time, if helpful. Draft number four by John McPhee, I think is really, I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was an undergrad in college because he was teaching a seminar.

Yeah, Princeton. That's where I took my creative writing classes. Yeah, so the structure, thinking about structure in the way that McPhee thinks about structure saved me because I thrive with some type of predetermined blueprint for structure. It's very hard for me to just freehand flow of consciousness, let things take some emergent form. It's very hard. I do know friends who do that really, really well. That terrifies me.

So I need the scaffolding. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Oh, I love that book. Such a good book. Bird by Bird, for people who don't know the book, I will say just before getting into a short description, has saved at least a half a dozen friends of mine from the precipice. Meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just quitting their books. And they were all writers in this case. They were at the point where they're like, I'm done. I can't do this. It's too stressful. I don't like this. I don't want to do this. It's going to be terrible. And they were going to, in some cases, return their advances and just walk. And I want to say at least half of them read this book,

went on to finish their books, and their books went on to become New York Times bestsellers. So talk about an important window for making a decision. And the gist of the book, the title, I should say, comes first from, I think it was her brother, Anne's brother. Anne Lamott is a writer and her brother had this experience where he'd had something like an entire semester in, I'm making this up, but let's just call it fourth grade to prepare for this end of semester project. And he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that. And it was like the night before, he hadn't done any preparation.

And this poor kid, who granted kind of deserves it because he didn't do any prep, but nonetheless is having this nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like 15 books about birds and he just is paralyzed. And I want to say it was Anne's dad who came over and put an arm on his shoulder and said, just take it bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird. Something like that.

And it's sort of a psychological life raft, break glass in case of emergency kit for writers who are just hitting that point. Maybe you you did with the photography, where you're just like, I want to do anything other than look at that screen or that page. I just, I can't handle it, and I don't know what to do. So for that reason, not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process itself,

but for the psychological component, it's like if you were a top athletic coach and you had your sport-specific technical coach, and then you had a mental toughness coach who also doubled as a shrink like the mental toughness coach who doubles as a shrink is the bird by bird yeah i'm remembering she also talks about shitty first drafts yes and just those three words are incredibly helpful because you know when you're looking at your draft and it is always really shitty at the beginning and so just knowing okay that's what it's supposed to be yeah but yeah you know the other thing that's been really helpful to me so i told you i started taking that creative non-fiction class at nyu and all of us who took

that class got along really well so we formed a writer's group after the class was officially done and we stayed together for years. And we would meet once every week, every two weeks and read each other's stuff. And especially at that stage, that really, really helped, you know, getting the feedback, but also having the kind of camaraderie and support system. Not feeling totally isolated. Not feeling isolated. And I actually met my literary agent from one of the people who was in that group, who was a publishing lawyer. And I said, you know, I have this idea for this book about introverts, which at the time, to me, seemed like the most idiosyncratic project on earth. But she said, when you're ready,

I know the right agent for that. And that's a really serendipitous thing. When I put together the proposal for the book that became Quiet, I sent it out to that agent who she recommended and to four other super amazing agents, two of whom I had connections to. And every single one of the other ones passed. And some of them said, you know, I really like the writing, but I think this topic is not commercial enough and I just don't think it'll sell. So could you come back with a different topic? And the guy who became my agent instantly saw what the potential was going to be. And we've been together ever since.

And I feel like I owe him everything and I love him. And his name is Richard Pine, if you're out there looking for an agent. And I think about this story all the time, not only because of book writing, but because all these people, these other agents, these are experts and these are the culturally anointed gatekeepers and they know what they're doing. And yet they didn't see this one particular thing. And I think that that happens all the time. Totally. Now I'm glad you shared that. And I had a very similar experience. I reached out to, I want to say it was four agents who were introduced by a very successful author who I'd met something like seven years earlier by volunteering at a non-profit,

which is a great way to meet people above your pay grade. As a side note, just like filling water glasses for panelists. Works really well. So I had the right introduction, the writing. I didn't think my writing was Tolstoy or anything, but it was passable. And complete rejection from three of the four. This was the four-hour work week?

The four-hour work week. Two of them were pretty heavy-handed about it. One of the third, I remember her name, Jillian Maness, a very good agent. And she passed, but she gave me a lot of really helpful feedback. She didn't say this won't work. She just said, I don't think this is the right fit for me. Right.

And that wasn't fair enough. Which is totally fair. But here's a bunch of advice. And one of the pieces of advice she gave me actually, wow, I haven't thought about this in forever, was think of each. I was intimidated by the prospect of writing a book. I'd never written a book before. She said, treat each chapter like a feature magazine article, beginning, middle, and end. Self-sufficient. Each chapter can live on its own. And I've

followed that advice ever since with nonfiction, which makes it easier to write also because if you get stuck somewhere, it's not like you have to cross that bridge to get to a chapter that sequentially should show up three chapters later. You can treat it in a modular way. If you get really bogged down, you can skip, which also in some cases, like the rest of my books, leads to a book that can be read non-sequentially. In any case, so three out of four, turn it down, finally sign with my current

agent, Steven Hanselman, who I still work with to this day, very similarly. And he had just become an agent. He had just become an agent, but part of what attracted me to him was that he had a long career as a very successful editor and was also is just an eclectic guy went to divinity school plays in a jazz band and really like my kind of my kind of person yeah and then we went out to sell it and i always forget if it's like 26 or 27 but nonetheless it was something like somewhere between 26 and 28 publishers turned it down. Really? Yes. Wow. And then the, but you only need one.

That's the thing. It's not about how many people don't get it. Yeah. It's about having the right person or people who do get it. And I mean, which is so clear with your book, right? And it's like, you don't need all the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You don't need half the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You don't need half the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You need the people who it resonates with to have it resonate.

That's it. And it does not need to be millions of people. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. And I had a note down also to just, and we don't have to necessarily spend a ton of time on this, but just to clarify the talk about introversion versus shyness. I came across this when I was doing a bit of homework, which is people think of, say, Bill Gates, right? As sort of maybe a one example of someone who could be useful in distinguishing

between the two. But could you clarify what an introvert is or how you define introvert? Yeah, absolutely. And how it might differ from? From somebody who's shy. Yeah. Introversion is really about the preference for lower stimulation environments. And you can trace it to our neurobiologies. Introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli. And so that means that we're kind of at our most alive and happiest and switched on when things are a little more chill around us, which is probably why when you're in those group dinners, you're going to the restroom every so often because your nervous

system wants to tone it down. And extroverts have the opposite situation and the opposite liability because for an extrovert, you've got a nervous system that's reacting less to stimulation. And that means when you're in an environment that you find too quiet, you start to get really listless and social judgment. So you'll know if you're a shy person because when you encounter someone who has a neutral expression on their face, you will have a tendency to read disapproval in there and to react really strongly to the disapproval. You feel kind of really unhorsed by it. And it can take different forms. So it could be a fear of public speaking or it could be a job interview or any kind of situation where you feel you might be evaluated. So in reality, lots of introverts do tend to be shy and vice versa, but not necessarily at all. I don't know Bill Gates personally, but my guess is that he's an introvert, but not

especially shy. And then somebody like an Eileen Fisher, who she's got this wonderful, and I think it's been decades now, super successful fashion brand. She describes herself as a shy extrovert. So she really wants to be around people all the time. She wants to be connecting all the time. You talk to her, she's constantly setting up this workshop and that program. And you look at her life and she's always surrounded by lots of people and things going on. But she's often feeling intense discomfort and needing to work through that. I would certainly describe myself as an introvert.

And I never knew quite how to frame it until coming across your definition of preferring lower stimulation or environments or environments with fewer stimuli. Ever since I was a little kid, I've been very sensitive. My sight is very sensitive. My hearing is very sensitive. But I'm not shy in the sense that I want to engage and ask questions and interact. But if the volume is turned up too much or there are too many speakers, metaphorically

or physically, I have a lot of difficulty parsing it all. But you don't have like, shyness would be like, you know, before you go into those group dinners, are you feeling a kind of social anxiety? No. Right? That's the difference? Yeah. Yeah.

There are so many questions that I want to explore. But let's, because we have maybe 10 or 15 minutes more, let's ask a few of the questions that I always like to ask. Sure. Are there any books that you have given the most to others as a gift or any books you've gifted often to other people? I think that the book I've probably, for the last few years, been giving out the most

is Waking Up by Sam Harris, which... Yeah, it's a fantastic book. It's such a fantastic book. And it was really, for me, completely life-changing. I think for probably the reasons it is for many people which is i hadn't really known much about meditation before reading it and because i think by my uh my nature i'm sort of a cross between a skeptic and a mystic or something yeah um you know in the skeptical side of me and it's a pretty deep skeptical side

it really needed somebody like sam who's such an extreme skeptic right you know and then who very conveniently spent like what 28 years of his life or something investigating all these different spiritual tools and then reporting back on them you know for me that was a narrator i could really i felt i could really rely on. Fantastic book. We were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because we were both sort of fanboying and fangirling about his meditation app and a handful of other things. But I haven't told you, and I don't know if I've even mentioned this publicly, but here we go. So the first time I met Sam, this relates to Ted, went to Ted for the first time as an attendee, which by the way, it was too much stimulation, so I never went back.

Interesting. And so I go out to this group dinner and we're eating dinner and off to the side on a separate table, there's this tray of brownies and I love brownies. It's one of my weaknesses. It is an Achilles heel and I have zero portion control. And these brownies are large brownies and I sneak over kind of in between courses and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to skip one of the later courses and just substitute the brownies because I love brownies. And so I eat two of these brownies. And about 20 minutes later, the host who I shall not name comes up to me and goes, Tim, did you eat any of the brownies? I go, yeah, I had two of them. And he goes, okay, everything's going to be fine. And I'm like, wait, what? Everything's going to be fine? What the hell are you talking about? They were heavily dosed pot brownies.

That's hilarious. And I am not a habitual pot user. And so I suddenly, in the middle of dinner, just get hit by this tsunami of cannabis. And you combine that with my discomfort with high stimulation environments, and I'm like, I need to get the hell out of here. So I excuse myself to go to the restroom. And by this point, I'm already a huge fan of Sam. But I've never had any contact with him. So I run off to the bathroom to escape. And I open the door and literally at the sink,

run straight into Sam Harris in the men's room. And I'm like, Sam Harris? High off my rocker. And that was my first interview. And he looks at me kind of like, he's like, hi. I was kind of sideways because I'm just beyond reality at that point. And that was my first meeting with Sam. That's hilarious.

And did you tell him your brownie story? I did. I did. I did tell him, which he appreciated because he does have some history with altered states. But yeah, no, I found that book and the subsequent meditation app and all of it incredibly helpful and fantastic. The one piece of it that I'm kind of trying to explore separately because I feel like he looks at much less is the whole tradition of loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that.

So that's really, really of interest to me. So I'm sort of charting a different course there. And I'll tell you, like even just last night, I was interviewing on stage, this guy, Heyman Sunim. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's a really renowned Zen Buddhist monk from Korea. And his books are all number one bestsellers in Korea and lots of other countries, but here he's less well-known. But anyway, he has a new book out. So I was doing this interview and we're up on stage so you can see the audience. And it happens to be a pretty formal audience. So before we start, the audience is kind of sitting there, kind of

still in their seats. And then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation. And it was so amazing to see the transformation on their faces. And he did this for maybe one or two or three minutes, like it wasn't long. And suddenly they're totally smiling and they're open and they're happy. It's remarkable. It's remarkable. And I think it's so weird and dispiriting how in the mainstream media and in corporate life, I mean, it's great that there's been this incredible embrace of mindfulness meditation. But I think there's a kind of allergy towards going too much in the loving kindness direction. And I spoke to Sharon Salzberg about this, who's one of the great teachers.

And she said that people have this sense that it must be phony, like that you couldn't possibly actually have those feelings. And so it kind of gives them a sort of creepy feeling to do it. But I feel like that all needs to get completely rethought. Loving kindness, the label, I think, smells of kind of hand-wavy, hippie associations,

and therefore people veer away from it. Or if they have sensitivity to that stuff, which I do and have for a very long time. But so did mindfulness for many years. Absolutely. And that's been recast successfully. But I mentioned that as a contrast to my then subsequent experience with loving kindness meditation also called meta m-e-t-t-a

meditation which i was introduced to not first by jack cornfield though i did spend some time with him who's sort of of the same cohort as sh Salzberg. They're close friends and Sharon's been on the podcast. But Meng, Chad Meng Tan of Google, actually, who started this class within Google called, I think it's Search Within Yourself. It was a course that included many tools, including mindfulness. And he has a book called Joy on Demand, which is fantastic. I thought it was a fantastic title. I was like, I could use Joy on Demand. Let's take a look at this. And there's a very short part in that book, which I ended up excerpting for, I want to say, Tools of Titans about loving kindness meditation. And he tells the story

of this woman who, as an experiment guided or suggested by Meng, did a one minute loving kindness meditation on the hour, every hour, for one workday. And she would pick people who were walking out of the office. And she came back and she said, that is the best day I've had at work in seven years. And I think part of that is, at least for me, that I am very, historically I've been very trapped in my head. I'm very prefrontal. Yeah. And I come from a family of

warriors. Warrior or worrier? Warriors. Not the battle axe type, but the Larry David type. Yeah, I come from one of those too. And when you are consumed with

worry or anxiety, and this is not my description, but it's been described to me as being trapped in the future. Like depression is being trapped in the past, anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future. And it's also, at least for me, it's a focus on the self. It's like me, me, me. It's all things that might happen to me, things that I should do. And the loving kindness meditation, which can be so short and have an impact, gets you, unlike most types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the West, it gets you out of yourself. And I recall when I was writing Tools of Titans, I decided to take Meng's advice and Iving Kindness for literally two or three minutes every night.

I was at this hotel and they had a dry sauna and I'd go into the dry sauna really late because I was doing my writing really late and just do two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same. And it was transformative with regards to my mood. It was really just incredible. Low dose, really, really low dose. And I'm curious, you mentioned that you were thinking about love or meditating on loving kindness to your friend. Did you also start with a traditional practice of wishing it to yourself, or is that less comfortable for you this is a great question so i did not it did not even occur to me to do this until years later when i went to my

first seven day might have been 10 day silent meditation retreat at spirit rock right and jack cornfield was there and i went in they check in with you to make sure you're not having a total psychotic break for a few minutes every other day. And I had this meeting with Jack and one of his co-teachers for the event. And we were talking about loving kindness, talking about loving kindness. And as I was leaving, the woman with Jack said, just out of curiosity, have you been doing any loving kindness for yourself? And it struck, I don't know how to describe this in a way that doesn't make me look like an ass,

but it just struck me as such a silly question. I was like, no, of course I haven't been doing it for myself. And then I realized how much that probably explained a lot of my problems. And she goes, yeah, you might want to try that. Why don't you experiment with that? And I remember Jack later saying, and I'm paraphrasing, but if your compassion doesn't include yourself, then it's incomplete. And that has become- And you can't really give it to other people in a complete way either. Right. So that has become, I'm so glad you asked that. One of the biggest changes in my, I could call it a mindfulness practice, but my way of relating to the world

and thinking about helping others has been actually taking time to show or think on self-compassion, specifically for myself at a handful of younger ages. Yeah, yeah. Which I do at mealtimes. And we might talk about that more at some point. But yeah, that's-

Oh, I think you should. It's become a very, very, very, very important ritual for me. But I don't think you're alone. I mean, Sharon Salzberg mentioned to me that many people have trouble. I mean, the traditional progression of the practice would be start with yourself and then move progressively outward to other people in your life. And she said many people have trouble beginning with themselves. And so I was really struck because last night, this monk, Haman Sunim, who I love, began in this meditation by directing it to ourselves. And I asked him about that afterwards. And he seemed

kind of puzzled by the question, which made me wonder if this is a uniquely American problem. I don't know. It reminds me of this story I heard of this, I don't know what it was, Nepalese or I don't know, Bhutanese monk who came to the US and he was in a car on the way to some event. It was in the US and there were these people running, jogging on the side of the street to get in shape, but they looked like they were dying. They looked like they were running from hyenas. And he was just like, are they okay? What's wrong with them? It was so foreign.

My goodness. So we have just a few minutes. Let me ask you the billboard question. If you could put a message on a billboard, this is metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a question, anything non-commercial out to millions or billions of people, what might you put on that billboard? I think I'd probably put this one aphorism that I've loved since high school, I think, which is only connect by E.M. Forster.

Only connect. Only connect. Yeah. Like that at the end of the day, that's all that really matters. What does that mean to you? It just means connecting on some really deep level with the people around you. And that might sound like an ironic aphorism for someone who wrote a book about introversion but to me those are not contradictory things at all you know and so for me like connection it can happen in person for sure but it could also happen just by listening to music that's really touching you and you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore you know or a writer who

might not be alive anymore but they're expressing something deep and unchanging about what it's like to be human. So those, I think there's kind of nothing more important than that. Only connect. Only connect. Is there anything you've done that has helped you to more deeply or frequently experience those moments or any advice you might have for people who want to cultivate that? So aside from meditation, which I am a huge proponent of, but I think you really do have to pay attention to what works for you. And it really is so different for everybody. So for me, I love to have deep one-on-one conversations. It happens through music, it happens through literature,

and that's how it happens. But I think it really is a different answer for everyone. For each person. But I'll tell you, and this is maybe a different topic, but the whole idea for my next book came out of one of these kinds of experiences, which is I have always had a love of bittersweet and minor key music. And the book's not about music, but I'm going to tell you this story anyway. Okay. So when I was in law school, I was listening to music like that in my dorm and a friend came by and he was kind of a funny, wise guy.

And he said, why are you listening to this music to commit suicide too? And, you know, and I thought it was funny and I laughed, but I thought about it for decades afterwards. Like I was thinking, well, why is it, first of all, what is it about our culture that makes this music so suspect that you would make that kind of joke? And also what is it about the music itself that for me is not suicide inducing at all? It's like, it's the opposite. I feel when I hear music like that, completely connected to everything because it's like the composer is expressing some really deep truth about what it is to be human. And so I've thought about this for decades and the place that I'm going with this next book is I think that tuning into the sorrows of the world actually is a kind of secret superpower that we're not

really allowed to access very often because of course we live in this culture that tells you don't go there and always wear the smiley face and so on but if i can say like even look at somebody like you even before you started being really open and upfront about some of the demons that you've struggled with, which by the way, all the honor to you for doing that. It's amazingly brave and generous, but even before you did it and if you had never done it, I don't think you would have been touching all those people the way you have all these years if it weren't for those sorrows. I agree. Yeah. So it's all about that.

I'm excited to read your next book. Thank you. I think that's a really, really, really, really important topic. Yeah. I think it's really important. I think we'll have to do round two in that case. I would love that. That would be awesome. I just have to write a little faster. I will happily wait for your best work. Thank you. No need to rush. Well, Susan, this has been such a joy. And I'm sure people can hear it. But just to maybe underscore the point, I mean, you are a very present person when you're speaking with someone else. Oh, thank you.

So are you. And I can feel that in the room. And so you're walking the talk, which is always refreshing and not always the case. So thank you for taking the time today. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. And I will link to everything in the show notes for folks, including the name of the Korean monk that I couldn't spell to save my life at the moment. But we will have links to everything at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. You can just search Susan and it'll pop right up. People can find you online, presumably.

Where are the best places to say hello, learn more about what you're up to? Well, best thing is to sign up for my newsletter, which you can get to if you go to QuietRev.com which is for Quiet Revolution. So you'll find it right there on the homepage. There's a signup form and there's a newsletter that goes out every week. So that's the absolute best. And then I'm also super active on LinkedIn and on Facebook. Great. And is that simply Susan Cain? Because I think Facebook, correct me if I'm wrong, I think is author Susan Cain.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah. So on Facebook, it's Author Susan Cain. And on LinkedIn, I actually don't remember, but it's part of the LinkedIn Influencer. If you put in LinkedIn Influencer and my name, you'll get there. It'll pop right up. Yeah. And then Twitter may be less active. Yeah, I am on Twitter, but a little less active.

But at Susan Cain. At Susan Cain. Yep. And can't wait to see the next book and continue to follow your work. Thank you for doing it. Thank you so much. I will say the same can't wait to see the next book and continue to follow your work. Thank you for doing it. Thank you so much. I will say the same to you.

What is the next book? What is the next book? Well, you know, based on an episode that came out a few days ago, I think it's going to be this book that I have been waiting to give myself permission to write, which is about, it's not that, it'll be a close cousin to what you are thinking a lot about right now. It would be how to pay attention to the psycho-emotional undercurrents and components of life very closely, and how to use tools both on the beaten path

and very, very, very off the beaten path for finding a resolution for problems or challenges or insecurities or trauma that are at least in current conventional practice considered very difficult to treat or untreatable. So that would be, as far as I can tell, and I've been gathering notes for about five years now, that would be the thrust of it.

That's going to be your most important book. I hope so. What's your timetable? What's my timetable? It's, well, as, who was it? I think this is something I heard on a TV set once. They didn't want people to rush, but it, but the gist was people need to rush. But they didn't want to say that and make people panic, so they said,

we need everyone to move with purpose. So I think my answer is move with purpose, but not in haste. Because I want to treat it with the depth and thought that it deserves, so I don't want to treat it with the depth and thought that it deserves. I don't want to rush. I will probably write it without signing before selling anything or signing any contracts. I'll probably do it on my own time.

But it is a top, if not the top priority. Wow. So are you working on it every day right now? I am in some fashion working on it every day, but it's going to be a while before I get to the composition prose stage. But the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is the experimentation and the traveling for subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note-taking and the organizing of said notes. And I'm doing some

piece of that almost every day. Wow. Oh, I'm so glad you're doing this book. So if I can help, you know, if you want an early reader or whatever, I would love to. It's completely up my alley. Well, likewise, likewise. This has been so much fun. And until next time, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And to everybody listening, same. Until next time. Thank you for listening. 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 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 AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports

whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff?

AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress.

Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe.

And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one,

drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still, if you're at home and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says, you might be searching for this. How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't like it. And a lot of you know,

I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now. And I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc. And no, you're not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also, with the example that I gave of you can't access this kind or that content, wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all

of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to.uk or whatever. And everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it. ExpressVPN is so fast, also, it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high-quality video with no lag or buffering, even on servers thousands of miles away. It gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world, which is very helpful as I am constantly

traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be technologically savvy. You don't need to know anything about how it works. It's just one click and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs. ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet and I can't recommend it highly enough, so check it out. Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com slash Tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up. Just go to expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Tim

for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressvpn.com slash Tim.