The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep. 15: Neil Strauss - Author of The Game and 7 New York Times Bestsellers

Episode Date: June 23, 2014

Neil Strauss has written 7 New York Times bestsellers, including The Game. He's also been an editor at Rolling Stone and a staff writer for The New York Times.In this episode, we discuss life, his creative process, writing, and generally answer the questions: How do you create amazing work? How to you overcome writer's block and other pitfalls? What are Neil's favorite books and movies? How do you edit your work to go from terrible to award-winning? How did Neil become a master interviewer, and how does he do it? What's next? Show notes and links can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Neil is a close friend, and this is one of my favorite conversations we've had together. Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And holy guacamole, do I have a treat for you. I had so much fun with this interview. The guest is none other than Neil Strauss, a close friend of mine, seven time, I think, New York Times bestselling author. He has written many books, including The Game, for which he's best known, perhaps. Emergency, for which I was a proofreader. And there's a hilarious story behind that that we get into. And many, many others.

He has written what many consider sort of the definitive rock memoir or biography, which was The Dirt, about Motley Crue. He has written with people including Marilyn Manson, Jenna Jameson, on and on and on, rules of the game. The guy is prolific. And he is also, and has been, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, staff writer for the New York Times.

Why am I listing off all of these credentials? Because the conversation that I have with Neil is about the creative process. How do you become a creative powerhouse? What are the methods that he uses? What are the tricks that he has up his sleeves when times get tough, when he's on deadline, when he wants to create the next best-selling book, when he wants to write a book that can become a movie, when he wants to create a business? And he's built some very, very profitable businesses, which is something not many people know. So this entire conversation, I hope you enjoy. If you want a part two,

if you'd like to hear a part two, please let Neil and I know on Twitter and two other things. Number one, this episode is brought to you by you guys. I'm not going to browbeat you with advertisers. I want to avoid that. But this thing has to be self-sustaining. The podcast takes time and does take money to put together. So please visit the Tim Ferriss Book Club. Go to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash books. I'll give you a second to write that down.

It's 4hourworkweek.com forward slash books. This is a book club, kind of like Oprah's book club. Every month or two, I put out a book that I think, or I should say I promote a book that has changed my life that really never made it into the limelight. A book that never got the attention it deserved. And this ranges from books on investing, to learning, to travel, to philosophy. They're super fun. So check them out, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash books. And please take a look. That would help the show. Last, for show notes, all of the links, URLs, book recommendations, and so on from this interview, all you have to do is go to 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, no numbers, 4hourworkweek.com

forward slash podcast for all the goodies. And without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Neil. I hope you enjoyed the show and thank you for listening. personal questions. Now would have seen an appropriate time. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Neil, my good man, welcome to the Tim Ferriss Show. Thanks for making the time. Cool. Thanks for having me. And congrats on the podcast, by the way. Thanks. I am selfishly bringing you into the fold in part because I want to pick your brain on creative process and interviewing, but we'll get to that. For people who may not be familiar with your work, how many New York Times bestsellers do you have now?

Six, seven, 12, 20? Yes, seven. That's incredible. Lucky number seven. Three have just about killed me. I'm not sure I have more books in me, but you didn't start off writing books, as I understand it. Where did you, what was the path that you took to get to writing your first book? You know, what's funny is I recently had my family send everything I'd ever written,

just all my old grade school stuff here. And I thought I just had written my first book later in life than I actually did. But it turned out when I was in second grade, I wrote a book and I tried to get it. Maybe it might have been a little later than second, maybe fourth grade, however old you are when you're 11. I actually wrote a book, tried to get it published, sent it out to publishers with a note saying, hey, send it to agents and wrote an entire book, which not only did it get rejected, but I never got a single response back from a single agent or publisher. So it really inured me to rejection, which is

cool. Like who would not send a letter back to some poor kid? It's really, it makes me have even less sympathy for the traditional publishing world than I already do, perhaps. But you really sort of honed your teeth or cut your teeth, I guess the expression is, as a journalist, right? New York Times and other places? Yeah, yeah. I wrote for the New York Times for like 10 years and Rolling Stone for like ever. And speaking of rejection, you have, I remember, a letter, I believe from Phil Collins framed on your wall.

Yeah, I had a review of the Phil Collins concert and it wasn't that good. It was, it's at the New York, it was, and I was really trying to be gentle in the review, but I guess he got upset by it. And I get in the mail, this two page handwritten screed and the last words are, well, Neil, fuck you, Phil Collins. And it was like hotel stationary, if I remember correctly, or something like that? Yeah, it was from the Peninsula Hotel, so I called his publicist just to make sure that it wasn't like a fake and know he was there staying at the Peninsula Hotel.

And I think later on TV, he said that he had like, someone told me, I don't know if you regretted writing this letter. And it's funny because, you know, I did a book in my interviews called Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. And it just really goes to show you that everybody, everybody out there who's succeeding on a high level in this culture has this persecution thing going on. No one I've interviewed doesn't feel if you really get down to it, feel like they're not respected by their peers. They're not respected by the press. Nobody understands them.

No one understands what they're doing. And we're talking that, you know, even beyond Phil Collins' level, like Chuck Berry level, who invented rock and roll. And it seems that, you know, as long as you're living and it depends on what you pay attention to, you will always get criticized as you're doing great things. And the greater they get, the greater the creative process. How has your writing changed, if at all, from when you were on deadline writing pieces for the New York Times, and let's just assume they're the pieces on the shorter side, and book writing? Because one thing that's always struck me, and it's given me a lot of insecurity, is that I do feel like I get writer's block, and it can last for extended periods of time. But when I talk to my friends who are trained journalists, they have just seemingly eradicated the belief, the concept of writer's block from their minds. They're like, look, I don't have a choice. I have to have this in by five o'clock. I don't have the luxury of thinking about writer's block. I mean,

how has your process changed and what are your recommendations to people who are trying to really write something substantive for the first time? So I will say something which is this, which is writer's block does not actually exist. And I'll tell you how I know. I was speaking to a group and I thought, hey, I'm doing an exercise and I had them write something really challenging. I said, your first sentence, I can give you guys the first sentence. I want you to write the most interesting first sentence you can possibly write. So interesting someone has to read the second sentence. And then I took them through maybe five sentences, each one challenging.

This sentence I want you to write something that makes somebody feel something emotionally. Now I want you to tie the sentence back. I made it really challenging, and I gave them just a few minutes for each sentence. Everybody completed the exercise. Everybody in the room, even people who aren't writers, people who are professional writers,

people who are screenwriters, people who think that they're not writers. And it proved to me that there's no such thing as writer's block. Writer's block is almost like the equivalent of impotence. It's the performance pressure you put on yourself that keeps you from doing something you naturally should be able to do. Interesting. Okay. So writer's block, the reason you don't get writer's block as a writer because you have a deadline and it has to be in and you have no choice. But if you sit there and you think this piece has to be the ultimate article or the ultimate book ever been written and my entire self-esteem is wrapped up in this and this is me and the more, the bigger of a story you make up about what you are doing,

the bigger the block will get because it's, uh, it's, it's all, there's nothing to do with the talent of writing, the skill of writing. It's all completely a, uh, performance anxiety. So I read, I read a quote recently, which I thought was very applicable to me anyway, because I have a tendency to put like the weight of the world on my shoulders when I'm trying to write things, which doesn't help. And the quote was the essence of creativity is fucking around. And I think there's, I think there's some truth to that, but when you're writing to avoid some of that pressure, I know we've talked about this before, but for people who haven't heard this because it was a

long time ago, you do a number of different drafts or revisions and they're for different people. Could you just expand on that? Yeah. Like I would that if I can give one tip that will help anyone get their things done is when you start writing, just write to the end. Just write to the end. The only time when I start writing something, I try to get a nice first couple pages or a nice couple of first paragraphs because it's just a nice little balance, a nice little weight to drop the rest of my book or project on. So you can spend some time on that, but when you're done, just write to the end, just get it all done, get the story out there, because the truth is, it's not really until you get the end of what you're writing that you really sometimes even know what it is or where it's going or what it's going to become. So you're

just ready to get to the end. And your first draft is only, this is for you. No one's ever going to see it, so you don't have to worry about it. You're not going to turn it in. You're not going to show it to friends to evaluate because it's only for you. No one's ever going to see it, so you don't have to worry about it. You're not going to turn it in. You're not going to show it to friends to evaluate because it's only for you. And the fun part about that first draft is when you're done, somewhere in that mess of words, you just wrote the entire book. The entire book is in there and you don't have to deal with anything else. You're done with your notes because you put them all in there. All your thoughts are in there. Somewhere in that mess is your book. And now you just have to carve it and shape it into the actual book. So my first draft is always for me.

And that's the easy part, by the way. The easy part is the first draft. The tough part is the second draft because the second draft is for the reader. Is this what you wanted me to talk about? Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted you to mention. So yeah, the second draft is for the reader. So here's the thing. Your life may be really fascinating to you, but most of it is really boring to somebody else.

Or your ideas may be really fascinating to you, and maybe you've come by them, worked really hard to get to those ideas, or you've suffered and agonized, and this thing is going to change everything. But some of it is just boring to other people. It's interesting to you, but it's boring to other people. And you have to have a filter on that says, this is what's interesting, and this is what's boring. This is what's repetitive. This is what's new. So the second's repetitive. This is what's new. So the second draft is where the real pain comes in.

I mean, literally, the book I'm writing, I just cut out a 125-page chunk that took me months of research and months of writing. And I had to go, and it's a better book for it. Now, the 125 that you cut, what is the total page count now? The total page count right now is 675 pages. Holy shit. Okay. Which, by the way, that's less than a book, but that's how much it is on a computer screen. Got it. All right. So you cut out a good, say, fourth or third of the book at this point, which was my experience with The 4-Hour Chef. I mean, I cut 250 pages from The 4-Hour Chef, and it was still a monster. And that was just a discrete chunk.

There are other parts I've cut too, so I've probably cut out 500 or 600 pages. In this case, it's usually not that brutal. But you know what? And I had to write it there. Here's the crazy thing, and just tell me if I'm getting too esoteric, because I love talking about the creative process in writing,

but this is the crazy thing, okay? And I hope that I can say this in a way that people understand will change what they're doing. The book is smarter than you. In other words, I'll sit down to write a book with an intention to write a book about a certain topic. And I'll sit down and I'll start writing it, and I'll read it, and I'll be like, you know what? When I write the truth down on paper and I look at that, I get a kind of clean perspective. And so a book I'll sit down with the intention to write, that book, I have to let that book become something else sometimes. And that's the right book.

Definitely. No, I've been looking at screenwriting a lot recently, and I heard a quote, which is not always true, of course, but I found it very insightful as sort of a fortune cookie concept, which was you don't know the first sentence of your book until you've written the last sentence. Let me drill into one of the things you said, which is the second draft is for your reader. Are you actually taking the first draft

and allowing other people to read it, or are you putting on your hat of the reader and pretending to be the reader with their eyes as you read what you've done? Yeah, no one will ever see the first draft. And I hope if someone saw it, I mean, I would think it would be unpublishable and embarrassing. And yeah, I would never, this first draft, nobody sees. Okay.

And the second draft is, I mean, here's the other thing. I think the art of succeeding in anything in life is the art of empathy. And this is your empathizing with whatever your general idea of a reader is. And my reader is never somebody who is already a reader. My idea is just, hey, who is, what is somebody? My reader is me as a reader, probably. You know, it's me reading a book and thinking, oh, my God, will this guy just get on with it?

Or reading a book and thinking, you know what? This guy is like not even living up to what he's writing and saying he's doing. He's a total hypocrite. Or whatever I'm thinking when I'm reading. So my reader is just kind of almost me the way I would read a book critically. Got it. And what's the next revision? Yeah. So, so yeah, so that draft, and again, that's, that's a tough draft. That's when those, all those phrases, kill your babies and let go of these. That's, I think the art of writing, they really get revisions for me. Definitely. And, I've done it. I've got a book, and I feel like it's a great story.

The third draft is for the haters. So the idea is with the third draft is, okay, I've written a story. The story is really interesting, but there are going to be people who have an opposite viewpoint. There are going to be press and critics reading it. There's going to be – I'm never going to cater to them. I'm not going to change my point of view. I'm not going to change my ideas. I'm not going to change my point of view. I'm not going to change my ideas. I'm not going to change what I stand for.

I'm not going to censor myself ever. What I will do is do my best to make it immune to criticism in the sense of, A, I'm going to make sure that my facts are iron tight. I'll always hire maybe one or two or three fact checkers because if somebody can just find one weakness, that's it. They can just pick another baby with the bathwater. He was wrong about that. He knows nothing. So, but the second more important thing is, and I always use Eminem as an example, you can't really criticize Eminem because he's already in his songs. He already sort of impersonates the critics and then answers them. So I really want, there's nothing that anyone, that many people have said about any of my books that aren't already really actually answered in a book or accomplished in some hopefully self-aware way. So I really want, there's nothing that anyone said, many people have said about any of my books that aren't already really actually answered in a book or accomplished in some hopefully self-aware way.

So I really want to sort of answer their critics, their questions, their critiques, and they're in a way that's still kind of fun and entertaining. So that's sort of the idea of maybe hater-proofing it. And it's okay, by the way, you always get haters, but you want your haters to be wrong. Right. You have to have a fortified defense against criticism warranted and unwarranted, right? Reasonable and unreasonable criticism. Could you give an example from one of your books? I know how fucking secretive you are,

so you're not going to tell me about, you're probably not going to dig into the details of the new book, but let's maybe a historical example. I'll give you a simple example. Writing The Game, which is the book where I spent two years in this secret subculture of pickup artists. And obviously, you know, I'm writing the book for the book that I would have needed, you know, in college, in high school, and the book that maybe would have made me feel a little less lonely growing up. And also, you know, trying to make it fun and entertaining and mythological and all that kind of stuff mythological in the sense that all my books i try to have an

underpinning that's a that's a then we can get back to that later i try to have an underpinning in the books it's a great story arc but then i read it i want to i want to read it from the point of view of of somebody who maybe is not my audience of of a woman who's found it in her husband's drawer or boyfriend's closet or maybe just someone I'm writing for Jezebel or one of those blogs, and to think, okay, if they actually read the book, can I write in such a way that they really don't find fault with the book itself? There can be fault with the characters, but not the book itself. And so I went through, and any time a woman was referred to in a way that I thought was objectifying,

I would just kind of make sure that there was nothing that felt, you know, that woman, if somebody was not rated by state of numbers, or every time you describe them, you're not describing a certain body part. It's actually just smart. Because nobody wants to read that. Right. Definitely. So that was one way of going through and just saying, hey, you know what, let me read this. So you're kind of like, the first book you write from your perspective, Right. Definitely. reading, reading the game. And another example is I read through the game and I thought, I wish there was a female character in this book, but it's based on my life. And I really wasn't in that

community. There wasn't really a strong female character. I had a relationship outside of the woman I ended up dating at the end. So I couldn't do that. So I thought, you know, it needs a female point of view. So, but before each section, I put a kind of a counterpoint quote from a feminist thinker to just say, Hey, there's another point of view and this is what it is. So in that last draft, you're putting on different hats of the people who are not your audience and how are they going to read the book? No, that makes perfect sense. And I take a similar approach. I often try to address as many of these points as possible in my introductions or prefaces. That is to say, for instance, in The 4-Hour Body or The 4-Hour Chef, I'll say,

many of my conclusions are based on the following assumptions and reaches more people, just again, to deflect the criticism that it hasn't been, let's say, you know, 100% verified. Because in some cases, there is, there are theories or speculation, whatever it might be. But addressing that early, because realistically, like if people start reading the book, where are they going to start typically in the beginning, right? How do you incorporate readers? And just to sort of clarify something, which is when Tim is doing this or I'm doing this, what you're doing is a book is like a little world or it's like a software program. You're debugging it. It's not like we're like, oh, no, we don't want to get criticism.

Of course, we get a lot of it and some of it deserves, some of it not deserve. But what we're trying to do is create a program that doesn't have bugs in it because, you know, at least in the old book model, you didn't get to do a version two. Now you can do that with Kindle and stuff, but we're trying to create a, you know, trying to create a completely self-contained world that has no bugs. Yeah, definitely. And I think just like software, you know, if you want everyone to be your fan,

no one's going to be your fan because you'll have to dilute it to the point. Like if no one is going to have a negative response to your book, it's very unlikely that anyone will have a strong positive response. And you have to kind of defend against that and make sure that you're focusing on how many people get it and not how many people don't get it. But to that point, how do you currently incorporate feedback from other readers, say writers, people who are proofreading? And the reason I ask, people might find this amusing, is I remember proofreading parts of Emergency. And the lengths that you went to with me, now granted, we've known each other for a long time now. And I just remember going to this hotel, I don't know why you were working at a hotel, we can talk about that. And the only reason that you

gave me parts of the book were because I said, you wouldn't tell me what the book was about. And then I just threw out a Hail Mary and I said, what's the book about? Something related to five flags? And I remember that freaked you out. And you're like, wait, wait, did somebody tell you? And then you would give me something like 40 to 50 printed out pages at a time in like a FedEx folder. And then I would have to bring those back before I could have the second set of 50 pages. So how are you currently doing that? Are you doing it in a very... And by the

way, I agree, maybe you can expand on this, but that memes get released accidentally, and you have to be very careful about that, because books take so goddamn long to make, right? You don't want to prematurely release this idea virus so that you can't harness it later. But how do you have other people, if you do, proofread your stuff and provide feedback? This is a funny thing because I'm doing it right now, which is they come over to the house and they read it as much as they can tolerate. And then they come over to the house another day. And the second reason for that is the books haven't had the legal read yet. So a lot of my books are stories.

They're true-to-life stories. And when I'm writing for life, I really use the real names when I'm writing the first draft and the real identifying details and characteristics before the lawyers get their hands on it. So I don't want it to float around because I'm doing a big thing right now. So hopefully no one in my book listens to this, but of course. So my great cop, when I'm writing about somebody, I usually say, oh, don't worry, you were a cop as a character. I use pieces of you and pieces of someone else. So when they read it, they can say, oh, those good parts must be me and the bad parts are

obviously the other person. But A, I just kind of write it all down with real people's names and identifying details. I don't want that to get out because I either A, I'm respecting their privacy or don't want them to sue me. Got it. The people who come over and read as much as they can tolerate. So I remember doing something very similar for one of your books might've been your last book, right? How are you choosing the people you have proofread your stuff? Like what, maybe you could just give us, I don't know if you guys names, but like what types of people do you ask to read your stuff?

Yeah. What's your process? Yeah. So the truth is it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be say someone like yourself, who's an accomplished author and has been on the bestseller list. I'm just trying to get as many different people to read it as possible, uh, who, who are willing to, who are willing to read it. So a lot of people think, you know, I've never hired, let's say, you know,

they're hired the hardest thing, I think the hardest thing to find that a writer, a good writer to find a good editor. So as you know,, I really just have as many people read as possible. I have a process, and I'll share this process with you because I think it's good not just for writing but for getting any kind of feedback and criticism in life, not just about a project you're doing but about yourself, which is the best metaphor for it.

It's a catcher's myth. I'm trying to remember who told it to me. I think it was a guy named Brent. He had this basic concept, which is it's a catcher's myth. When someone gives you feedback, you catch it in your catcher's mitt. Then you look at it, and one of three things are possible. It's true. If it's true, then I put it in my head, right? The secret to life is not to take it personally, obviously.

So any criticism is criticism on your technique, not on you. You know, people personalize stuff so easily. So you catch it before you take it in. You look at it. If it's true, you insert it. If it before you're do you take it and you look at if it's true you insert it if it's not true you throw it away and if you're if it's a maybe if you're not sure if it's a maybe you just keep it in the minute you show it to a couple other people you know hey tim hey so and so what do you think of this and then you then you re-evaluate and decide yes or no but here's the best stuff the best stuff is you get a piece of feedback say

you read the book you tell me something i'm like you know what i don't think that's true then whatever my wife reads it now you know? I think that she's wrong. And then I get it from one or two other people. And then instead of throwing it away, I'll look at it again. And that's when you get the real truth. So the more people you can have give you feedback, and there's a piece of feedback you reject that keeps coming back to you, it's time to reevaluate that. And then you can get a real, real epiphany that changes you. That's where growth is. How many people do you typically have proofread a given chapter in a book before it goes to say, before you get to kind of pick lock, you know, before you, before you get to the book being locked and done as a manuscript? Yeah. So yeah, so there's two phases. It's so fun

because it really is like people think I've written a book to the end and it's done. You're really only like a quarter done at that point. But it feels good. You can have a small celebration. And by the way, when you're done, don't take too much time off of it. You've got to get right back to it right away because otherwise you're going to forget. You know, doing a book or a screenplay or a big project, there's a lot of information you're holding in your head.

It's a tight thread. There's a lot of connective tissue that you forget that isn't in the book but that you need as glue to kind of hold it all in your head. Exactly. And if you go away for, say, three weeks to get back, it'll take you a week or two to get those connections going again. And let's talk about a little time management later, because every time you're interrupted when you're doing something creative, it takes you 20 minutes to get back to the state before that phone rang and that person asked you that question. So back to the feet. So there's two stages. One is in the early stages, maybe when I'm still in the second variation,

the reader variation, I'll have a couple people just read it through so I can just see if it's as kind of test readers so I can make sure it's engaging and not boring. Or maybe there's a part I'm not sure about, man, this feels too long. So I'll have a few people, two or three people come in and read it.

But then when I feel like I'm all done and it's being edited at the Harper Collins in my case and it's being edited, then I'll kind of print it out fully and have some people read it from front to back. And really as many people as will tolerate and get as many feedback and comments and criticisms as I can. And there are a few people like yourself and a couple other people who I will always give it to as sort of like kind of people whose opinions I'm going to take a lot more you know, a lot more seriously than my, uh, the cable repair man. I'll give it to him. And you know what? It's more important if it works for him, it may be more important than if it works for say you or another author. Well, definitely because it's tough for a lot of authors to take off their editor slash book writing hat. They go into the weeds right from the outset as opposed to just

reading the book as a reader, if that makes sense. But one approach that I took with the last two books that seemed to work pretty well, I do think the four-hour chef tried to do too much. I think it could have been four or five books very easily and it would have made the positioning of each of them a lot easier. Right. By the way, that's my thing. I'm so upset he didn't take my feedback on it. I have one big piece of it. Too hard, you were too invested in it. Yeah by the way, that's my thing. I'm so upset that you didn't take my feedback on it. I have one big piece of people too hard. You were too invested in it. I mean, you were too far along in it, but I always think I really feel, I feel like, yeah, it should have been multiple books and who knows, maybe they'll get split up at some point in the future because they could be. But where I was going to go is I typically give proofreaders

three to five chapters and my chapters tend to be pretty short and they're modular. So that'll usually suffice. And then I'll always ask, what was your favorite chapter? If you had to pick just one to stay in the book, which would it be and why? And then if you had to get rid of one, which would it be and why? And what I found really helpful personally is if anyone loves a chapter, it stays in, end of story. If someone over the top loves a chapter, it stays in end of story. Like if someone over the top loves a chapter, it stays in. If someone dislikes a chapter, I then need a consensus to justify taking it out. Unless I feel the same way. Does that make sense?

Yeah. I always do that too. It's so good because yeah, you're looking for criticism. I'll also say, Mark, what you thought, what really moved you,

what you thought was funny or you wanted to underline. And then I'll be careful about throwing, throwing that out. That's a, that's a great point. Yeah. And it's true also with a, with everyone that out. That's a, that's a great point. And it's true also with a, with everyone loves you when you're dead, which was an anthology. It was an anthology, all my favorite moments for my favorite interviews. And with that, I probably, you know, once again, had maybe a thousand interviews that had cut down

and I'd have people come over, I'd have them give them a, do a rating system. And I had a whole tile and I'd see what rated the highest. And here's the thing that people often don't get, and tell me if this is true for you as well. You know, you often talk about testing a title on Facebook or Google AdWords back when that made more sense. And you talk about testing it, but tell me if I'm wrong here, but this is how I do it, which is that's just one variable. It doesn't mean, oh, this tested the best, I'm going to do this.

It's one input. Okay, there was testing, there's your own intuition, there's your kind of what other experts think, There's what friends think. And you put that all into the, into the mix versus saying, Hey, this just tested well and see only, and then that must be right. And I'm sticking with that no matter what. Oh, definitely. And I think because the testing was maybe unique at the time that started spreading around as a story about the four-hour work week, I think people miss the context, which is, I only tested titles that I could live with from the outset. So you shouldn't test like a cyborg and end up with a title that you hate and then use that because that will ultimately affect the success of the book. And secondly, most books

fail. You could do everything right and the book could fail. Do you want to, can you live with the title you hate even if the book might fail? And the answer is you shouldn't have to. So you need to first pick a subset before you test of titles or content or chapters that you can live with and then you do the testing. The other thing that, just on the time management for a second, then I want to ask about interviews is, like you said, it's not a question of do you have the time to do something like run to FedEx and mail something off? The question is, can you afford the interruption, right? And there's a great article by Paul Graham. He would call it the essay. I think it's just the makers versus the manager's schedule and how for a maker, whether it's a programmer or a writer or a

musician, if you're in the flow and you get interrupted, it might take you, like you said, 20 to 60 to 90 minutes just to get back to the place where everything that's spread out around you makes sense again. There's a huge cost to interruption. And I mean, you go pretty much completely off the grid and have some retreat spots. And I mean, we actually, I remember when you were working on your last book and I was working on The 4-Hour Chef, we had some retreats which were really, really helpful. On the interview stuff, because I'm, of course, trying to get better at interviewing. Can I mention a couple of things for time management?

Because there's a couple of things that are just so good. Yes. Yeah, definitely. And I have no investment in whatever in this, but there's one computer program that's probably saved my life. It's been the best investment I've ever made, the 10 bucks or whatever it costs. Okay. I don't know if you have it.

Do you have Freedom? Freedom, I use something called Rescue Time and a few others, but Freedom is a fantastic app, absolutely. It's so simple. I think the great thing about it, it's my favorite program in the world, which is it says how many minutes of freedom do you want? You put in whatever it is, 120 minutes of freedom, and then you're completely locked off your internet no matter what

for that amount of time. So as soon as I sit down to write, the first thing I do is I put on freedom because you're saying you're writing, you're working, you want to research something, right? You research something and then you get stuck in a clickbait, you know, rabbit, rabbit hole. And, and what you can do is you can save up all the things you want to research and just research when that, when that time expires and you'll find it so much more efficient. And now I go a little more hardcore, which is because I'm on a real deadline, and I'm in an even bigger, heavier deadline, which is using, I think right now you use Intego Family Protector,

but there's a point in place there that, you know, there's those children's monitoring things. And basically, my wife put in a password, and I can only get online from 5 to 6 p.m. every day, and from 11 to midnight. That's the only time I can get online, period. And it is great. You will never answer email faster and more efficiently and productively when you know you only got

an hour to do it. That's amazing. What was it? Antigo Family Protector? Antigo, yes. Family Protector. And again, I don't know the password, so if there's some other emergency that comes up, like we were going to do this on Skype, I would have to have her go type in the password. I don't know it. I was wondering why you didn't want to do this on Skype

that's hilarious, now it makes a lot more sense so the bigger problem is not other people interrupting you, it's you you are the enemy, you're fighting because as soon as something gets challenging the first thing we want to go to is go do something else and if you stay there you can work through it or pop through it but as soon as something gets tough or challenging

the first thing we'll do is find something else we have to do that's not as big or not as important because we just don't want to, we're trying to conserve our energy. That's the way we are as animals. Well, I remember I was looking at a book on nonfiction writing written by Ayn Rand, and I think one of the chapters was called The White Tennis Shoes. And basically the point was, writers will do anything to avoid writing. And if if she said, if there are white tennis shoes, like within your visual field that have one blemish on them, you will find a way to rationalize cleaning those white tennis shoes instead of doing the writing you're supposed to write.

So you, so you have to sort of build systems to protect against your lesser self. Right. And you have to find out. So yeah, and it's a great analogy. Like you have to find where your weaknesses are. So whatever your white tennis shoes are, you have to make sure

they're nowhere in your eyesight in that space in which you write. You have to have the sacred space, the cave you go to, and this is your sacred space. At some points, and when I can afford it, I don't even let anyone in that room. I don't want anyone's energy in that room. No one's even allowed in there. Whatever it may be, you have to create your sacred space. There are no clocks in your sacred space because there's no time in your sacred space. No one's allowed in there. If there's something really important, they can slip a note under and you can answer when you want. No one's allowed in the sacred space. So on the subject of productivity. No one's going to want to write when we're done. I've got to be a jerk to everybody. Well, you know, I mean, the first

piece of advice I get contacted by a lot of would be writers who are actually good writers in shorter form oftentimes. And they'll ask me most, this is where I know things are headed for, for problems is they'll ask me about all the marketing stuff first. And then they'll tell me that they're going to write a book part time in three to four months. And I try to discourage everyone from doing a book unless they can allocate at least a year to it, assuming full-time, Monday to Friday. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, because I think a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all. I 100% agree. I think that, first of all, yeah, the greatest distraction people have,

and I'm glad you keyed into that, is when you start thinking about the marketing, why you're still writing. I never think about the marketing or the promotion or any of that stuff until the book's actually creative part is finished. That's just a distraction for creativity, and it'll hurt your creativity because that's when I start giving you writer's block because you're thinking too much about the audience, the reception, is it going to succeed? But the second thing is, I was always inspired. When I was working with Judith Regan at Harper Collins, there was a writer she had that did a book on like, there was one of whatever, maybe it's 10 years ago,

whatever the some famous court case, Amber Heard, is that Amber? No, Amber, I don't know what it is. I don't remember the court case, but I'm sure a thousand listeners know what it is. Anyway, one of those horrible court cases where somebody was famous for five minutes and she had to get the book out. Amber Heard, I think, is a model. So she had the writer. He wrote it. He literally wrote it in a week. This challenged me. So he literally wrote the book in a week. He just typed it out as she was talking. He just typed it out, then he edited it, got it in, hit the New York Times bestseller list. And so it inspired me to think, how fast can I write a memoir? So Joel Stein from Time Magazine was writing about the Sarah Palin book.

So he called me up. He's like, I want you to write my memoir in the quickest amount of time possible. And I said, awesome. We're going to do this in half a day. Come over for a couple hours. I'll write as you talk. I'm going to send it to my designer. I'll have the cover, the book, the design book by the end of the day.

And so I'll get you the link. But we put this in Time, and he put the link on there. I mean, it's a short 25-page book, but it's actually pretty funny and not bad. So the answer is it's focused time versus just say the amount of time you can still write something great, but you have to sit down, really focus, and really want to kind of write something great versus saying I just want a book to help my brand or whatever. Yeah. That's bad reasons for writing a book. But on the subject of writing, I mean, of course, with most of your books and certainly all of my books, the books start with personal experience and a lot of interviews or interacting with experts of various types. What have you learned as an interviewer? Obviously you did it for the

Rolling Stone, New York Times. First of all, you should mention some of the people you've interviewed. I mean, some of the more, the better known folks, because the list is super long, but a few examples. And then what have you learned about interviewing that I might be able to use on this podcast that other people might be able to use for all the various projects and whatnot? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I love, I love interviewing. I mean, basically like I've done tons of, you know, Rolling Stone cover store. I've basically kind of any, definitely any musician and most actually I probably interviewed them at some point. So yeah, you know, it's interesting, a Rolling Stone or an article or a book interview is different

because you have time to play with, right? So that's like the, in a way that's the waiting game. I can talk about the details of that And you can choose which one to talk about. But then I got a show at Sirius Radio, and I just did the show as an experiment or a challenge to think, can I get the material I get with someone in a Rolling Stone interview? Can I get that in just a one-hour amount of time that that interview takes? And so I actually created a bunch of techniques for the live interview that helped me get to that core really quickly. So do you want to talk about the live interview?

Let's talk about the live interview because I think it will translate. I think the principles are probably quite flexible. So why don't you talk about the live interview with some of the techniques that you've developed and are using? We'll start with prep, and this is for any interview. It's tough to do an interview or to want to do a really, really great interview. You and I have an awesome rapport, and we can just kind of talk,

riff and talk about anything. But when I'm preparing for an interview with somebody, I will go research everything they've ever done. I'll try to read if there's any books on them, if there are musicians, I'll listen to everything they've ever done. I'll try to watch every interview because I just want to make myself an expert in them. And then I'll write down as many questions that I can think of.

Maybe for some, say, well, when I did Rolling Stone interviews, I'll write down hundreds of questions, literally. And then. Maybe for some, say, when I did Rolling Stone interviews, I'll write down hundreds of questions, literally. And then I'll study them like I'm studying for an exam. And I'll mark the ones that I really want to make sure I ask. And then I'll get to meet them. I'll take those questions. I'll fold them up. I'll put them in my back pocket.

I'll never look at them again. And then I'll let it flow, but I'll know, where do I need to go? Where do I need to go? Here's what they've said, but what have they never said? What about them can I show that's a side of them that's never been seen by anybody else? And I'll know. The conversation will never hit a dead point. It'll feel completely natural to them, but I'll know where I'm shaping and structuring it.

And every now and then, if I have a tough one, like I had to do Taylor Lautner for Rolling Stone, who was like that werewolf kid in Twilight or something. And I actually thought it was an assignment for someone else. So I say, yes, I didn't realize who it was until afterward. And then I realized I got to talk to this guy. And so I actually, my goal always as a writer is just to be interesting. You know, if you bore someone, you've committed to me the cardinal set of writing. So I would actually walk him into a place where I knew I had a series of five or ten questions

that would lead him somewhere really fun or funny or entertaining or interesting or similar. So the part of it where you're actually, like the little segments where I'll almost be like a lawyer where you're walking someone down a chain that's going to end up with a unique revelation. So what would be an example or examples of some of those questions? Or, and so you can answer this a couple different ways, that or just questions that are not person-specific, like tell us about this incident,

that are just good kind of can openers for getting people to riff and tell you something interesting. Yeah. You know, what's funny, like at one point I thought of making a list of that. Someone wants to vote, uh,

right or wrong. Still wants to interview Bob Dylan. And he wants to ask Bob Dylan, who tells you when you're wrong? And Bob Dylan got upset and left the interview. I thought that's a good question. And I use that question a lot, but you know what I did?

I was, I was going to try and do those kinds of canned questions. Like, you know, like those cards you get in a game that are fun, always good questions. But what I always think about is, here's what I'm thinking about is now what is, what do I want to know? Or what does the audience want to know? I'm trying to, it's again, that art of empathy. I really want to think about how, from their perspective is life lived. How can I get inside their head and understand what are the things that they wrestle with or they struggle with? The conversation we're having as writers is to empathize because that's used for me to

talk about it, and you're hitting kind of a nerve with me because these are the things I talk about. If you want to talk to me about, you know, is the game good or bad, you're going to get a horrible interview because you're doing two things. One is, you know, maybe I'm interpreting that as judgment. Two is, it's just sort of a stock answer. You know, three is, I'm already, I'm a defensive and that's going to be boring. But you're at your questions you're asking are the things that I wrestle with and things I think about the things I probably talked about today and yesterday. So even say I'm interviewing a

celebrity and there's a scandal or people want to find out they're dating somebody or something. Like, I'm not going to say, are you dating that person? I'm going to say, what's it like for you when everyone's always trying to speculate about who you're dating and you have your own private life that you want to keep? So I'm empathizing with how they see their reality, not how whatever TMZ sees their reality.

At the same time, you're sort of opening, you're softballing the topic in if they want to hit it. If they want to swing for it, they can go for it. Yeah, the real trick, and I've given too much for the real trick, and this is, again, kind of celebrity interviewing type of stuff. The real trick is if there's a topic that's like you know

that you really want, but they don't want to give or share, you wait for them to bring it up. Once they've mentioned it, it's like they've opened the door to it. If you want to get it, it's almost, you know what, it's like anything. It's like the game, it's like getting funding, it's like dating, it's like if there's something you want from someone, they're not going to want to get it, it's almost, you know what, it's like anything. It's like the game. It's like getting funding. It's like tating. It's like if there's something you want from someone, they're not going to want to give it to you.

And the idea is so you wait for them to bring up the elephant in the room. Right. Are there any ways to sort of leave the gingerbread trail to get them closer to it? Any particular examples that come to mind? I mean, I know one thing that a lot of journalists do, which sometimes drives me nuts, but I recognize why they do it, is they'll deliberately give false facts to try to get a correction. So they'll say, so, you know, the rumor is that you're dating whatever, Taylor Swift, you know, and then you hope that they'll come back and say, actually, that's completely bullshit. You know, I'm dating so and so. And you're like, okay, gotcha. Now we can go down that trail. But are there-

But that's weak because- It is weak. You've showed, because you showed A, it's kind of a little too tricky. B, you've showed you're kind of ignorant about them. And C, you're trying to like kind of capture them. So you might even get that one answer, but you'll have a shitty interview. Yeah, no, exactly. But it is a common technique that journalists use, right? Right. Yeah, I'm not sure. Very, very common. The other one that makes me kind of crazy, and I've had to learn how to defend against it because it's so easy to be misquoted in print, is the, so I guess what you're saying is, fill in the blank, and then all of a sudden you're quoted as saying that.

You're like, yeah, whatever, I guess pretty close, and then all of a sudden you're quoted. But what are some of the— And that's kind of equivalent to sitting down to write a book and not letting the book tell the story of you trying to force your story on the book. It's you trying to force your story on the subject. So, yeah, I'm sure that's a way to get—it's a short-term gain for a long-term loss, which is untruthful journalism. How do you— And not having a good reputation. Go ahead. In the case of Taylor, when you wanted to sort of be interesting and have a series of questions that would lead somewhere interesting for the piece itself, how did you go about doing that? I mean, yeah, it's basically like there's a technique of like creating a yes ladder. You know, it's a fun, it's a famous kind of persuasion technique, which is, you know,

asking them something safe and it's yes. And then a little bit safer and it's yes. And then would you ever do it with this? You know, like, you know, just an example, and this is not far off, I'll find it. You know, you seem like you're a healthy guy, you're not a smoker, right? You know, you don't smoke. He's like, no, no, I don't smoke. And then you obviously never smoke pot, right?

You know, and then you're getting someone very interesting that doesn't smoke pot, and then we got down to, like, traffic tickets, and then we had this fun game with me trying to, like, find something he's done, like, wrong or illegal, like, you know, never even double parked or whatever. And it was kind of a fun, you know, and so it's walking into a natural way that's fun for them versus like I want something from you and I'm going to try to get it and I'm going to try to hold it and keep it from you. Another secret for interviews that are, and I'm sure is the idea of fractionation, right? Fractionation and hypnosis is if you are hypnotizing someone and you bring them out of trance,

and then you put them back in trance, they go in deeper the second time. So whenever I'm interviewing somebody, especially for a long stone or anything, I always try to break it into a couple little pieces. We do a little bit of interview, then we maybe go have lunch, go dinner, maybe go somewhere else,

and that second interview is always better. Ah, that's interesting. That's very, very fascinating. Even with my radio show, and this is, this is a, so this is something for people with podcasts or radio shows. And again, I don't know how relevant this is to everybody. I love, again, I love this stuff. I love the art of, it's really the art of trying to get someone to be themselves. Right. It's really the goal because as soon as someone, people go into interview mode and they're

to try to show you what, how they want to be perceived, not who they are. So with my radio show, the first, we pre-recorded and the first 10 minutes were actually a complete throwaway. We did the first 10 minutes, go to a break and that was, we recorded, but that's always a throwaway because it allows them to get their promotional message out and they feel like they've said their message and beyond their message there's a person and I get rid of their message and get to the person. That's hilarious. So do they end up being able to plug the stuff that they, that they wanted to plug by coming on the show or do you just scrap the whole thing?

Yeah, no, I'll always plug for you. I'll always tell somebody, and this is true when you're going on and you know, you're trying to promote your business, your brand or your book, your movie or whatever you're promoting. The more you, your brand, or your book, your movie, or whatever you're promoting, the more it goes back to that philosophy, the more you want somebody to do something, and the more desperate you are, the more they don't want to do it. You're selling yourself. If they like you, they'll like what you have to offer. You're not selling your book.

You're representing it by who you are. Absolutely. So my thought is it's your job or the host's job to do the promotion for you. Your job is to be the most awesome version of you you can be. Yeah, definitely. Getting them to trust the messenger and not the message first and foremost. Right. Because, I mean, if you're somewhere and they keep mentioning, you know, we listen to those interviews, right?

And they keep mentioning their website and put them at www in front of it or whatever it is. And you're just like, I don't even want to go to your stupid website. Right? If you're interested, if someone is interested in me, I don't need to mention my book. I don't mean to mention where they find them. I didn't mention my website because my name's on the podcast and there's plenty of search engines that will leave them there without me having to say it. Definitely.

Yeah. And so that's where anybody like don't go on to sell, go on to represent. That's excellent advice. Well, I want to be cognizant of your time, obviously. I want to just ask a couple more questions and then obviously we talk all the time so we can keep talking about this for hours. But the first is what books, if any, do you gift to other people the most besides your own books? Are there any books, resources, things that you give to people in the written format? So it's probably when you give away a lot and you've given it away on your blog. Oh, is this a God could be anything Seneca. It could be. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the shortest

of life. That's my, that, that I have a stack of those, that little penguin edition, I think it is. So that I give away a lot. And the other ones I tend to buy a lot for people. I have a friend right now who I'm encouraging to read fiction. He's a voracious non-fiction reader, and I'm a big fan of reading fiction, because especially your audience and to agree with my audience,

a lot of people feel like we've got to read self-help books, because that's knowledge. We don't want to waste any time. We want to be efficient. But people learn through metaphor. That's how the first stories were told. That's what the Bible is. That's metaphor and storytelling are how the brain actually learns information. You just get it as data.

That's good for computers. It's not good for human learning. And so I really encourage people to read great works of, really good works of fiction and literature, A, because it's an art, and B, because I've learned more about life from fiction. So the two books that I told them, the book I told them to start with was, it's kind of a deeper one, because he's a, I guess an artist, and so I thought that, you know, Gabriel Garcia

Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude, I just think it's a good book to appreciate, you know, literature and storytelling in the magic world that can be weaved through fiction. So I'll give that away. There's a dark, dark book by Jersey Kaczynski called The Painted Bird. It's really dark, but it's unpatronable. That I tend to give away a lot. The Painted Bird. Yeah, by Jersey Kaczynski.

It's disturbing, though. So just know that it's a – Might be for a plane ride and not before bed. Yeah, but it's about – you know what, I'm not going to say it. Yeah, no, yeah, no. But you learn about human nature through that book. For artists, there's a book by Milan Kundera that I give away a lot called Life is Elsewhere. And it's about, this is my interpretation of it, which is probably completely wrong.

It's been a few years. But there's someone who's born, and he's born to be a great artist. He's going to be a great artist. He's become, going to become a great poet, but his issues, his, his mother issues and the sort of politics and peer pressures at the time, turn them into a total hack. And I think it's an analogy for that choice we all have in life. You know, are you going to fulfill your potential? Are you just going to give in to the, you know, the peer pressure of the moment and become nothing? I was talking to this billionaire friend of mine, and I was saying, I really would like to write a book about the way your mind works.

And he was saying that the difference between someone who's, say, a billionaire and a billionaire, it's so stupid to even talk about this, but is that the people who really think big are not, as he said, the biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time. I love it. By not accepting norms is where you innovate, whether it's with technology, with books, with anything. So not accepting the norms is the secret to really big success and changing the world. That's a fantastic way to wrap up this episode, I think.

So Neil, I'm going to ask, I know that you don't have to say because people can just use Google and other tools, but where can people learn more about your work, find more of your stuff? Where would you like people to find you? I'm going to let them choose. After that big speech, it would be completely hypocritical to go see anything. They can find me in various ways. On your blog, on theforaworkweek.com. Appreciate you not throwing the www in there. All right, man. Well, many conversations to be had, to be continued.

Thanks for making the time. And I will hope to have some wine with you soon. Thank you, sir. All right, talk soon. Always enjoyable. All right, buddy. Bye-bye if you want more of the tim ferris show you can subscribe to the podcast on itunes or go to fourhourblog.com f-o-u-r-a-t-o-u-r-b-l-o-g.com where you'll find an award-winning blog tons of audio

and video interview stories with people like warrenett and Mike Shinoda from Lincoln Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com slash tferris. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.