The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 39: Maria Popova on Writing, Work Arounds, and Building BrainPickings.org

Episode Date: October 21, 2014

This episode is sponsored by 99Designs and ExOfficio.Maria Popova has written for amazing outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, but I find her most amazing project to be BrainPickings.org.Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends, BrainPickings now get more than 5 million readers per month (!). I read very few blogs regularly, but BrainPickings is one of the few. It is a treasure trove.BrainPickings is Maria's one-woman labor of love — her subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. It's also an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. From Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde and everyone in between, Maria finds hidden gems to share.And that's what I hoped to do in this episode. It takes me a few minutes to warm up in this interview, but as soon as we get going, we geek out like crazy, talking about almost every aspect of her life, her site, her business, and her writing. I loved doing this interview, and I hope you love listening to it. There are a lot of valuable nuggets.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. But I digress. Probably TMI. Let me answer just a couple questions. What is this podcast about? You long-term listeners might know, long-term, long-time, that it's about dissecting excellence, trying to tease apart what makes world-class performers so good at what they do, finding the tools and tactics that you can apply. And this episode features Maria Popova. I'm about to explain who she is. And if you don't know who she is, or if you are intimately familiar with who she is, you're in for a treat. First, I'll

answer a question that a lot of people ask me, and that is, what are you reading? Well, what I'm reading right now is two books, comprised of two books. The first is William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Goldman is the screenwriter behind such movies as The Princess Bride, one of my favorites of all time, and Butch Cassidy's The Sundance Kid. The second book is John Muir, Wilderness Essays. So very different, both very, very good and highly recommended. The Adventures in the Screen Trade is a little outdated with some of the contents because it's related to film and it was written in the 80s. But there are a lot of timeless principles and Goldman is just hilarious. But moving on the guest Maria Popova. Oh my goodness, where to start? She would describe herself as a reader writer, interestingness hunter gatherer

and curious mind at large. What does that mean? It'll all make sense in just a few seconds. While she's written for all sorts of amazing outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, I find her most amazing project to be brainpickings.org. And I'm not alone in this. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that she sent out to seven friends, co-workers really, very informal, Brain Pickings was eventually brought online and now it gets more than 5 million readers per month. It is massive. Many of you ask, what blogs do you read often? What do you do online? Where do you spend most of your time? The answer is that I read very few sites consistently. I don't have that type of loyalty. But Brain Pickings is one of the few. It is a treasure trove. It is Maria's one-woman labor of love, her subjective lens on what

matters. It's also an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. This is what hooks me, of course, because she'll pull from excerpts and reading from the Stoics, my favorite Seneca, to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and everyone in between. Maria is good at finding the hidden gems to share. And the amount of information this woman consumes and can parse down to the finest detail of what will help you now blows my mind. She makes me look like the laziest son of a bitch ever. And of course, immediately, my questions are,

how? How does she do that? How on earth does she do that? And we dig into this in this interview. Really, I try to unearth the hidden gems in her life, her workflow. It takes me a few minutes to warm up as it often does. But once we get going, we geek out like crazy. And we talk about almost every aspect of her life, her site, her business, her workouts, her writing, her workflow, her tools, her workarounds, all of it. And I love doing this interview. I hope you love listening to it.

And for bonus credit, for those of you who are super curious, might have a little of extra time to do some detective work. At one point, she mentions that her Facebook fan page went from a few hundred thousand people to over 2 million people without explanation. So if you are able to figure out why that happened, what contributed to that, please let me know on Twitter at T Ferris, T F E R R I S S. I'm dying of curiosity and always, or as always, I should say the show notes, all the links that we mentioned, the tools, et cetera, all of that can be found on the blog at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. So you don't need to scribble

away furiously with notes, although you can. I will have pretty much everything that you will need right there in the show notes. So without further ado, please meet Maria Popova. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. I am extremely excited to have a fellow geek in arms, Maria Popova on the line with me. Maria, how are you today? Very well. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I appreciate your coaching on the last name. I wasn't sure if it was Popova or Popova. I have friends who, for instance, Naval Ravikant is a friend.

It's actually novel, but Americans can't really pull that off. So he goes for Naval. So I appreciate the coaching. And as a country of immigrants, we have a surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right. Right. Absolutely. It's just the sort of anglicizing of of such a crystal, like a melting pot of different cultures. And, you know, at the same time, I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time, which is reading. And there are so many words, I've embarrassed myself on many occasions, that I've read dozens or even hundreds of times, especially in scientific literature that I've never heard pronounced. Oh, yeah,

I call this reader syndrome as somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading, you run into that a lot, especially with sort of cultural icons, last names, first names that are spelled differently than very differently than they're pronounced. It's kind of tragicomic when you actually find out how they're pronounced. No, exactly. Or it can be a real revelation. I remember when I was a young kid, I couldn't hit, let's say, democracy or aristocracy. If someone asks you, and I'm sure occasionally it happens, you know, what do you do for those people listening who may not be familiar with you? But we'll start with the cocktail question. When someone asks you, what do you do? How do you answer that? Well, I've answered it differently over the years, in part because I

think inhabiting our own identity is kind of a perpetual process but right now I would say I read and I write in that order and in between I do some thinking and I think about how to live a meaningful life basically and if someone then were to go online find your work end up at brain pickings, and they're like, oh, this is quite interesting. And they kind of looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party. And they're like, what is brain pickings? How would you describe, how do you typically describe that? It's just the record of that thinking, my personal subjective private thinking that

takes place between my reading and the writing and takes form in writing. A collection of very interesting things. And sometimes, you know, how I've got to sort of simply put it to folks. And brain pickings, for those people wondering, is one of the very few sites that I end up on constantly. And when people ask me, what blogs do you read? I'm embarrassed, in some cases kind of humiliated, to answer that I don't go really to many blogs consistently. And I think part of the reason is

so many of them feel compelled to put out very, very timely, of-the-moment material that expires within a few hours. And I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are just churning out content. And I remember Kathy Sierra at one point told me that you should focus on just in time information, not just in case information. And which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound. But there are there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot. Brain Pickings is one. And Sam Harris's blog

is another. And I saw your your review of his latest book, Waking Up. Well, not a review. Not a review. I don your review of his latest book, Waking Up. Well, not a review. Not a review. I don't review books. I apologize. Okay. No, so this is... An annotated reading, if you will.

Okay. So an annotated reading of... And I definitely want to dig into that. An annotated reading of Waking Up, which I found really impactful for me in a lot of ways. It put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I had for a very long time. Talking about reviews. So I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you. And

a close friend of mine, Chris Saka, he came back with what percentage of New York Times bestsellers can be attributed to your coverage. And I'd be curious to hear you answer that. And then there's sort of a follow-up, but you've built this incredible powerhouse of an outlet for your, whether it's creative musings or observations, and it has a huge influence on what people read. So if you were to sort of think of that, how would you answer that question? Well, first of all, you're very kind to put it that way, as is Chris. But I think one big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about are very old, out of print, things that are not competing for New York Times bestseller. In fact, I don't even know if I ever really, I mean, perhaps, I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in him through his wife who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love and I love Wendy, on a book about wine.

And that book ended up and I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensory experience. And I like things that that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it. But in any case, I wrote about that book and that particular piece on brain pickings seemed to do pretty well. And I think perhaps that warped Chris's idea of how much contemporary books I really sort of am interested in. Right. But I would say that's a minority. Right. And for those people wondering, it's the Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine

Expert, which was written along with. And the illustrations are wonderful. Richard Betts was the sommelier who was part of that. And at one point I met with him because I wanted to try to, uh, deconstruct the master sommelier test. And he said, I can show you how to do it. And it was just the pared down sort of hacked, if you will, version still of passing the master sommelier test was so intimidating that I put it on ice indefinitely. But at some point, Richard, we will talk again and form a game plan. So the opposite, of course, of sort of putting out this material that expires as soon as it's out on the vine is putting out what I think you do very often, and that is sort of timeless, timely and timeless,

I've heard you call it, material where you're sort of pulling from old sources or older sources, doing pattern recognition to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a theme or something that still affects people. And I was doing research for this interview. And we met briefly in New York at an event. And I've been a longtime fan of your work. And so I thought to myself, how much digging do I really need to do? And good God, you have such an absolute canon of work out there. It is astonishing.

I mean, it is really... You're very kind. It's just the volume of time out there. It is astonishing. I mean, it is really... You're very kind. It's just the volume of time, really. It's been, you know, I've been doing this for eight years coming up. Actually, exactly a month from today, it'll be eight years. So it's just the accumulation, you know? And so I was, I was, I'm fascinated by routine and schedule. And, you know, reading from, of course, not the always accurate, but generally a good place to start, Wikipedia. And it says that Brain Pickings takes 400 plus hours of work per month, hundreds of pieces of content per day, 12 to 15 books per week that you're reading. How do you, and I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before but sometimes the answer is change and evolve they always do and which is

why i i actually don't do interviews very frequently because i find that they sort of tend to kind of cast this as the static thing that just stays there as some sort of reference point while we're really just a fluid process and we're constantly evolving. But in any case. No, definitely. So the question that you've, I'm sure been asked many times, but I'll ask again, is how do you choose the books? How do you find slash choose the books that you read? This is a huge problem for me because my appetite for reading outstrips the time that I have. And so I end up actually, unfortunately,

sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books I've taken on at any given point in time. So I'd be curious how you sort of vet the books that you read. Well, I guess it goes back to that question of, well, let me backtrack and just say that I write about a very wide array of disciplines and eras and sensibilities, because that's what I think about. So anything from art and science to philosophy, psychology, history, design, poetry, you name it. But the common denominator for me is

just this very simple question of does this illuminate some aspect, big or small, of that grand question that I think we all tussle with every day, which is how to live well, how to live a good, meaningful, fulfilling life. Whether that's, you know, Aristotle's views on happiness and government, or beautiful art from 12th century Japan, or Sam Harris's new book, anything. Got it. And I've read you citing Kurt Vonnegut before. Kurt Vonnegut's one of my favorite writers of all time. I know. I heard your semicolon quote.

I think it was either the interview I did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have a counterpoint to the semicolon. Okay, no, no. So I actually, I actually, I brought up the semicolon, quote, partially, as a sort of wink, wink, nod, ribbing to a friend of mine, named John Romanello, who has a tattoo of a semicolon on his, I think it's his forearm. He loves semicolons. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other arm. He's a fascinating guy. But the quote that I heard you cite that I wanted to dig into a bit was Kurt Vonnegut saying, write to please just one person. And so my question to you is, when you write, is that still the case? And if so, who is that person that you are writing for?

It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one, and that's myself. Like I said, it's just the record of my thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated, meaningless information and the sort of intersection of or transmutation of information into wisdom, really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom. So I and it's interesting, too, because when I started brain pickings, like I said, almost eight years ago it started very much as a private record of my own curiosity and I shared it with seven co-workers that I had at the time just as a little sort of email newsletter thing um and now to think that

there are about seven million people strangers reading it every month that's amazing it's kind of surreal thank you but and I'm not sort of number dropping for scale or anything like that, but just to try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing for one person, one very sort of, you know, inward person. But there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and just relating to this pretty private act. And it's a strange thing to live with and in no way a bad thing. I'm not complaining about it, obviously, but it's just interesting to observe how one relates to oneself when being looked on by a few million people, you know?

Definitely. And, uh, there's so many, so many questions I want to ask you. We might have to do a part two at some point because I know we have some time constraints, but the, uh, where to even begin, this is where I start fraying at the ends as an interviewer. So the first question would be related to that. There's so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after kind of the tried and true BuzzFeed type headlines. Do you ever contend with that temptation? And if so, how do you resist it? And this is part of the, how do you respond to the expectations of the crowd

or the 7 million people looking on? And I feel this personally sometimes because I have a blog. It has certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have. I'm somewhere between one and two million uniques a month usually. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. But even at that scale, there are times when I put out something that I feel is

very important, but on the dense side. And then it will, sometimes it takes off, but sometimes it doesn't. And there's a lot of temptation when, for instance, I know you use social media quite a bit, and we'll get to that, where I look at, say, the retweets of the favorites on something that's kind of dense, and then I'm like, oh, God, I should just do like the seven tricks you can actually teach your cat, you know, and get 500,000 retweets. Is that something that ever sort of crosses your mind? And do you ever feel that temptation? Well, you know, it's interesting because I think anybody who thinks in public, which is what writing is, which is even what art is.

It's some sort of putting a piece of oneself out into the world. Anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting to really stay true to one's experience, you know, and being aware that as soon as it's out in the world, there is this notion of the other audience. And, you know, Oscar Wilde, he very memorably said that a true artist takes no notice, whatever of the public and that the public are to him non-existent. And it's very easy to say, especially for somebody as wild, who was very prolific, very public, almost performative in his public presence. It's very easy to call this out as a

kind of hypocrisy and say, well, you can't possibly not care about the audience given you make your living through it and sort of perform to it. Right. But I think that's a pretty cynical interpretation. I think rather than hypocrisy, it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood, which is why all art comes to be, because one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for and who he here she is. And so with that lens, I do think it's hard to say, well, you know, I don't care about what happens to it out there, even though I write for myself and think for myself, the awareness of the other really does change things. But I think perhaps Werner Herzog put it best. I just finished reading this kind of 600 page interview with him, essentially. It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Cronin had with him over the course of 30 years. have my films reach an audience, I don't necessarily need to hear what those audience reactions are, just as long as they're out there, that they're touching, that the films are touching people in some way. And I feel very similarly. So with that in mind, I guess, to answer your

question rather circuitously, I don't feel, quote unquote, tempted to make listicles or to make anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for. And in part, I think the beauty of the web is that it's a self-perfecting organism. But for as long as it's an ad supported medium, the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest, to perfect the art of the BuzzFeed listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm I think it's a very virtuous goal. I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons. One of them is, well, I feel a very sort of kindred spirit

with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made. So, for instance, I mean, not doing the slideshows to rack up page views for some type of CPM advertising. That stuff drives me insane. So if it drives me insane, I assume it drives my readers insane. So I'm not going to do it. Or like you said. That's so wonderful that you do that because I think so much of the cultural crap that is out there, not just on the internet, just in general, comes from people who fail to understand that they

should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist. So if you're a writer, write the things you want to read. If you're an artist, paint the things you want to paint, you want to see painted. And I think the commercial aspect is really warping that. And I really, one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations from your books to, you know, this podcast, the site, everything is that there's just this sort of sense that you just want this to exist. It doesn't exist for any other reason than you want it to exist. And I think that's wonderful. Thank you. I, uh, that means a lot to me and I And I, you know, coming back to the right to please just one person, it's, you know, I think that it's related to that. So in a way, it's, you know, put the things out into the world that you would want to consume yourself or experience yourself, number one. Secondly, just for those people who haven't

heard this anecdote, when I was writing The 4-Hour Workweek as my first book, I still to this day find writing very challenging. And I wish I could say it's gotten easier over time, but for whatever reason, it seems not to have. In the case of The 4-Hour Workweek, I came out of undergrad at Princeton and many years have passed, obviously. But when I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kind of Ivy League, where I was trying to use $10 words where a $0.10 word would suffice and be a lot cleaner. So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted, and this was a major panic attack moment. I was on deadline, And I remember I was in Argentina at the time. And then I went the other way. And I said, No, no, I have to be loose. I

have to be funny. And so I wrote a few chapters that were completely slapstick ridiculous. I mean, they sounded like three stooges put on paper. And so I had to throw out those few chapters. And of course, I'm doubling down on my anxiety at this point and decided at one point that I was just going to have a little bit of yerba mate tea, two glasses of wine and no more than two glasses of Malbec and sit down and start to write. What is that? Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America, best known in Argentina, but there are actually some really nice Malbec

wines in Chile. They were, as I understand it, it was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe, but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires and has developed this worldwide fame because of its cultivation in Argentina. So there's a lot of metaphor there that I also like. But drank two glasses of wine, sat down, and literally opened up an email client and started typing the four-hour workweek as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends. One was an investment banker trapped in his own job, and he felt like he couldn't leave because

his lifestyle was swelling to meet his income and then the other was an entrepreneur sort of trapped in a company of his own making and so these two very specific guys of mine i started to write with just enough alcohol to to sort of take the edge off and that's how uh you know i was writing in that case to please just two people uh but that's the only way I could make it work. that. It seems like you have a fairly regimented schedule, which would make sense if you're putting the number of hours into reading and writing that you do. So what does your current day look like? Well, I'll answer this with a caveat. The one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last few years, couple years maybe, is this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and presence,

and especially in a culture that seems to measure our worth or merit or our value through our efficiency and our earnings and our ability to perform certain tasks as opposed to just the fulfillment we feel in our own lives and the presence that we take in the day to day. And that's something that's become more and more apparent to me. So I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss routine as some sort of holy grail of creative process because it's just really, it a crutch I mean routines and rituals help us

not feel like this overwhelming messiness of just day-to-day life would consume us it's a control mechanism but that's not all there is and if anything it should be in the service of something greater which is being present with one's own life. So with that in mind, my day is very predictable. I get up in the morning, I meditate for between 15 to 25 minutes before I do anything else. What time do you wake up? Typically? Exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed. So it varies. I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think I when I write because what or when I don't have full access to my own brain, which is certainly I'm not unique in that in any way. There's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep. We're almost as drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time we normally

need to function. And I think ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that bespeaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is. But really, it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. And I try to sort of enact that in my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep, at least as disciplined as about, as I am about my work, because the latter is a product of the capacities, you know, cultivated by the former. So in any case, so I get up eight hours after I have gone to bed, I meditate, I go to the gym where I do most of my longer form reading. I get back home, I have breakfast and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles a day and one of them tends to be longer. And when I write, I need uninterrupted time. So

I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert. So I don't look at email or anything really external to the material I'm dealing with, which does require quite a bit of research usually. So it's not like I can cut myself off from the internet or from other books, but, uh, I don't have people disruptions, I guess. So anything social. Um, and then I take a short break. I'm a believer in sort of pacing, um, creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and then you take a short break and then cycle back, you know. And then I deal with any sort of admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot. And I resume writing and I write my other article or articles through the evening. I try to have some private time just later in the day, either with friends or with my partner or just, you know, time that is unburdened by deliberate thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general. And then usually later at night, I either do some more reading or some

more writing or a combination of the two. Got it. And so a number of follow-up questions. What type of meditation do you practice currently? Just guided Vipassana, very, very basic. There's a woman named Tara Brock, who she's a mindfulness practitioner. How do you spell her last name? B-R-A-C-H. Got it. And she's based out of DC and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist, then did decades of Buddhist training and lived in an ashram. And now she teaches mindfulness, but with a very secular lens. So she records her classes and she has a podcast, which is how I, um, came to know her. And every week she does a one hour lecture and sort of the philosophies and cognitive

behavioral, you know, wisdom of the ages. And then she does a guided meditation. Um, so I, I use her meditations and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life. So I highly, highly recommend her. Tara Brock. Brock, yes. And all her podcasts is free.

She has two books out too. She's really wonderful. Very generous person. I will have to check that out. And so you're listening then. You have earbuds in when you're listening to audio while you meditate. Yes. And it's interestingly, I mean, she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of 2010. It's just one that I like and feel familiar with. And it sort of helps me get into the rhythm. So every day I listen to the exact same one. Summer 2010. How does that start?

How would people recognize it? How does the audio start off? I think the title is, it sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called Smile Meditation. And I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years in other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I have on. And on my broken 3G iPhone without any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod and that's on it. Awesome. That's a great answer. Um,

God, I love, I love digging into the specifics. So when you go to the gym then, uh, to work out, are you still using an elliptical for that? Or are you are? I do sprints, high intensity intervals on the elliptical and cardio. And I do a lot of weights and body weight stuff too. You do. All right. But when you're reading, is that on the elliptical? Yes. And what type of device, if any, are you using for that reading? Well, I prefer electronic. So I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any PDF viewer because I read a lot of archival stuff.

But the challenge, of course, is that because I read so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in case it's rarely possible unless I'm writing about something fairly new. And so in that case, I just go there with my big tome and my sticky notes and pens and sharpies and various annotation analog devices. And I just do that. Cool. All right. So that leads perfectly into the next question, which is, what does your note-taking system look like? And how do you take notes? So for instance, you're really good at using excerpts or quotations, pull quotes. And I found myself asking as I was reading this, how are you gathering all of this so that you can use it later? So what does your note-taking system look like when you,

in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy? So with digital, it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. But reading is really, or understanding really, which is what reading should be a conduit to, is a form of pattern recognition. So when you read a whole book, you kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked, and they don't usually occur, you know, sequentially. So it's not like you walk away with one insight from the first chapter, one insight from the second chapter, it's just sort of this pattern of the writer's

thoughts that that that permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so, especially as you if you read as a writer, so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that, but ideally're imperfect, is on the very last page of each book, which is blank usually, right before the end cover, I create an alternate index. So I basically list out, as I'm reading, the topics and ideas that seem to be important and recurring in that volume. And then next to each of them, I start listing out the page numbers where they occur. And on those pages, I've obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it. But it's basically an index based not on keywords, which is what a standard book index is based on, but based on key ideas. And I use that then to sort

of synthesize what those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book. Okay, I have to geek out on this because I'm so excited now. So as it turns out, with analog books, I do exactly, literally exactly the same thing. I usually start with the front inside cover, but I create my own index. And of course they don't have to be in order. So you can sort of list them in any, in my particular case, in any,

in the order. I also will have sort of a two, a couple of, of lines dedicated to pH and pH just refers to phrasing. So if I find a turn of phrase or wording that i find really i do that too oh really but i call it bl for beautiful language oh that's so cool okay so there's that and then i have um uh you know like q or q if i if they're quotes so for instance many books will have uh quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases.

And so I'll have quotes. I'll just write that out and then colon. And then I'll list all the page numbers for that particular sort of category that I'm collecting in the case of quotes. So when you're gathering this, you mentioned acronyms and shorthand. So besides beautiful language, what are some of the other acronyms and uh shorthand so besides beautiful language what are some of the other acronyms that you use oh they wouldn't make sense they're just very private it's like too long to get into what they stand for they're just completely my own system is there one other example that you just just if you could indulge me one that is i guess not so

much about the contents of that passage as about its purpose is LJ, which is I have a little sort of labor of love side project called Literary Jukebox, right? Sure. I've seen it. It's yeah, it's it's awesome. passages from literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes as I'm reading a book, I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that. And maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put LJ next to it. But I want to go back to what you said about the external quotes, I guess, the author quoting another work. I think those are actually really important. And that goes back to your question about how I find what to read. And I mark those types of things. So for the annotations that are specific to that particular book, all of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the pages. But when there's an external quote, something referencing another work, I put a tab

at the very top with the letter F, which stands for find, if I am not familiar with the work, or just no letter, if I just want to flag a quote from something else that I know of. And I think that's actually very important because the phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it, because literature is really, and I say this all the time, it is the original internet. So all of those references and citations and allusions, they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work. And that way, if you follow those, you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something that you're already enjoying and liking, but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way. I mean, directly. And in a way, it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way. And I've often

found amazing older books that were, you know, five or six hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which led me to something else, which led me to something else, which led me to this great other thing. So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice. Yeah, the serendipity of it is so beautiful when it works out. And I'll give a confession. This is really embarrassing, but since no one's listening. I came across Seneca, so Seneca the Younger, who's had probably more impact on my life than any other writer. Originally, because I was perusing a number of anthologies on minimalism and simplicity, and Seneca kept on popping up, quote, Seneca, quote, Seneca. And because it was always one word like Madonna, or, and this is going to be really embarrassing, or like Sitting Bull, I assumed that Seneca

was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good... That's so lovely, actually. I assumed he was a Native American elder for probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman. I was like, man, Ferris, you got to do your homework, pal. You got to dig in. And then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off the cliff into a lot of his writings, which I still to this day revisit on an almost monthly basis. I just revisited The shortness of life. Oh, so good.

Which is perhaps the best manifesto, and I hate this modern word, sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally. So the best manifesto for our current struggle with this very notion of productivity versus presence and how much are we really mistaking the doing for the being. And it's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago before there was internet, before there was the things we call distractions today. And yet he writes about the exact same things, just in a different form. Yeah. The exact same things. And the way that if I'm trying to use Seneca as a gateway drug into philosophy, I won't use the P word first of all, with most people because philosophy smacks of, I think it calls to mind for a lot of people,

the sort of haughty pompous college student in Goodwill hunting in the bar scene. who's like reciting, you know, Shakespeare without giving any type of credit. See, I completely disagree. I agree with the notion that those are its connotations today and people have a resistance, but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it and to get people to understand that philosophy, whatever form it takes, is the only way to figure out how to live. Everything else that we take away from anything is a set of philosophies, essentially. I agree.

No, I totally agree. But I usually, if I'm going to lead people there, I try to lure them in with Seneca, because I think he's very easy to read compared to a lot of, say, at least the Stoics, or that's actually not even fair, compared to a lot of philosophers who have been translated from Greek. Most of his writing, I believe, was translated from Latin, which tends to be just an easier jump from English. So it's very easy to read. And what I tell people is, you know, start off with some of his letters, and you'll find that you could just as easily replace these Roman names, like Lucilius, and so on with like Bob and Jane, or, you know,

pick your contemporary name of choice. And they're all as relevant now as they were then. So I'm going to come back to the sort of performance versus presence, which I think of oftentimes as the achievement versus appreciation split or balance, or maybe neither. But before we get there, I want to put a bow on the note-taking with your electronic note-taking. So you're using the Kindle app, you're taking highlights. Where do you go from there? Are there any other,

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

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

on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes. So if you copy them, they paste them to Evernote with this really weird formatting. So it tabulates each next note indented to the right. So it's sort of this cascading, long cascading thing that shifts more and more to the right of the sheet. That's horrible. It's like an email thread. It's like an email thread, except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all, you know,

and so if you want to go fix it, you have to do it manually within Evernote. And, you know, I read, you know, on the Werner Herzog book, for example, which is 600 pages, I have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know. Got it. Okay, so let me just because I, this may or may not help for me. It was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote.

Cause I mean, I'm, I'm looking at this list of questions, uh, and I'm not reading entirely off, you know, on script, but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now. And one, one of the things I realized about formatting and transposing things from say the, you know, my Kindle page. If you, if you log into your Amazon account through kindle.amazon.com or, um, copying and pasting from many different places is going to, I don't know if you've tried this, but edit and either paste and match style or paste as plain text. And it tends to remove all of that headache.

Let's see, nine times out of 10. So if you... Yeah, the problem with that, I did try that once. But when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So on every highlighted passage, I also have my own notes. I see. Got it. Plus, you know, Amazon's own thing that says, add note, read, read at this location, delete note. And so it all merges it and becomes just hideous. Interesting. God, you know, I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into Text Wrangler, which is used for coding a lot, just to remove the formatting and then put it into Evernote. Yeah, I do that with Coda.

Yeah, it's true though. But there's got to be a solution. And the thing is, Evernote, I love Evernote. I've been using it for many years and I could probably not get through my day without it. But it has an API, which means somebody can build this, you know, and there's no way to like, I even thought, I mean, I was at one point so desperate and so frustrated, which I think is the duo that causes all innovation, you know, desperation and frustration. I thought maybe I should just save up some money and offer like a scholarship or like a grant for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me. That's a great idea. I'm still not, I mean, I'm still sort of contemplating that. Okay, well, we'll

talk about that separately. I think that's something that we could absolutely explore. And for all of you, programmers, coders out there, please take a look. This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights, because I've run into this. You mentioned the Werner Herzog book and having thousands of highlights. Have you run into instances where you'll read an entire book, you're super impressed or not, but regardless, you have hundreds of highlights

and you go to look at those highlights and you're restricted to only seeing the first- Oh yeah, it says like 200 highlights, 81 available or something like that. Right, so how often does that happen to you? Because that's happened to me where I've taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff

and then I'm only able to see 25% and it's so infuriating. And I think it's a limitation that is determined by the publisher. Yes, it is. And so I'll tell you why it hasn't happened to me much. It happens to me occasionally, but that's a DRM thing,

digital for listeners who don't like acronyms, digital rights management thing that is fairly new. So that is the case with more recently published books. But if you read the digitized version of, say, Alan Watts that was published originally 40 years ago, there's no such problem unless the publisher now is like reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But because I read so much less out of sort of newly published material, I don't run into it often. But there is a way to very laboriously deal with it, which is you can still open that passage in your Kindle app on desktop, so Kindle for Mac for me,

and it will let you highlight and copy those passages and paste them into your Evernote in between the missing parts. But it's obviously completely non-produceable. I have done that, but it's obviously not conducive. I have done that. And it's so horrible because you also get the like excerpted from, like three lines for everyone. So just publishers, if you're listening to this,

you are making it harder for people like Maria who have 7 million uniques per month to share your stuff. So please up your threshold. Do you have anybody helping you with brain pickings? Or is it just you? The actual reading and writing, obviously, it's just me. But as of about 10 months ago, I have an assistant, Lisa, who's absolutely wonderful. And she just helps me with admin stuff that has to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel is weighing me down so much I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down or and as know, I'm sure when you get to a point where the demands are just

incomparable with what you can even look at, then you kind of need to have help in order to not to either go insane or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. So. And was there a particular. Oh, and I also have a copy editor editor this wonderful older lady i hired to do my proofreading um she's great i am that's all i can say i think proofreading is really really important and i'm constantly embarrassed if i have a typo which you know as you know as a writer you cannot prove your own work it just your brain just does not see the errors that were made in the first place for the majority of them. And people are kind of merciless.

They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or I don't even know. There's no kind of compassion for the humanity that produces something as human as a typo, right? Despite how mechanical the term itself seems, which is sort of ironic. But in any case, so yes, I have my assistant for admin and my copy editor for just proofing. And what platform is BrainPicking on at the moment? What's the technology behind it? I know that I've heard you mention WordPress before.

Is it still on WordPress? It is on WordPress. I was going to make a joke about how the technology is called Corpus Colossum, but the actual technology is WordPress. That was a very Sam Harris-friendly joke. So when you're working with, say, your copy editor, do you give your copy editor admin access to WordPress and she'll go in, proofread it, and then schedule or publish? What's the process?

No, it's a very, again, super sort of hacked together process, which is every night I email her the articles from the preview page on WordPress. I just copy that and paste it into a body email. And I send it to her and then she sends me the corrections via email. Got it. I mean, like I said, she's not very, I would say, tech savvy. I mean, I'm sure she's a wonderful learner, so I'm sure she would totally learn how to do it if I gave her admin access. But between that and the fact that I write in HTML, so I really don't like the WYSIWYG.

I hate it, actually. I think it's just easier to do it via email because then she can highlight the word. And sometimes she would make suggestions that are more stylistic and i i would like to have the final say in those because very often i want to keep it the way that i have it because that's my voice um so i find email works just fine got it okay no i'm always fascinated because i will use, well, when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also in WordPress, I would use the share a draft plugin to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP, which has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool.

Oh, that's cool. I should look into that. I think that's what I have too, the WordPress VIP, the WordPress host, the WordPress. I don't even know what that function is. I'm kind of, I mean, for somebody who writes on the web, I don't really, yeah, I sometimes only learn about things through friends. I think, yeah, that's how i learned about a lot of this stuff and the the other option that i've used quite a lot is and as much as i hate word and i really do i love the track changes feature and i just find it more user friendly for

a lot of folks than having them use something that's cloud-based, like Google Docs, just because I operate so much offline to try to get anything done. Yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of people suggest and what Kai, my proofreader, actually asked originally, but I do not own Microsoft products on principle, and I'm not going to, just don't deal with it.

Got it. Okay, no, that makes sense and your assistant what was what was the the the sort of defining moment the straw that broke the camel's back when you were like you know what like what was the day where you're just like fucking enough of this like I need to get somebody stat I mean what when did you actually make the decision? It wasn't so much that I made the decision as the decision was very, um, strongly lovingly, but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner who one day said, you, you are using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not, because I was really stressing to a point of just driving myself crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I always have been very independent.

I moved away from my parents' house when I was 18, paid my way through school, lived always by myself, and I just had this Emerson-like sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance to a point of pathology where it was to my own detriment. And the notion of outsourcing felt to me on some level almost like an admission of weakness. It's ridiculous. I think that's true for a lot of people though. I know. And it's the strange thing, the disorienting thing is that I think we intellectually know that's not the case, that it's actually a lot of strength to be able to delegate and

to sort of divvy up control according to a hierarchy of priorities. But on some sort of psychoemotional level, it is just death to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, I mean, it's interesting in terms of how brain cookings evolved, which has always been very organic. So the sort of, you know, eight year thing that has happened, it went from being a little newsletter that contained five links, no text, like five links to five things that I found very interesting. And then it went to sort of five links with a little paragraph about each, about why this thing is interesting and important. And then it was, you know, not a little paragraph,

but a little like one page piece. And then it became not one, not five things every Friday, but three things every day of the week, pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know. And I foolishly and naively thought that I could just have the same sort of operational framework, despite the enormous swelling of just the volume of the writing. And that's unreasonable. It's completely unreasonable. So at one point last fall, as the sort of seventh birthday of brain pickings is approaching, my partner was just like, please like consider.

And yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just, I'm always curious to ask, how did you, how did you find this particular, the assistant that you ended up with?

Well, she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant that's had this type of job for about 20 years. She's just a wonderfully warm and just generous person, but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic. It's unbelievable. And you always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interest and in the most magnanimous kind of way towards you, but also the most warmly, no bullshit way outwardly towards the world demanding things from you. And having this buffer, it's really,

really great. Yeah. And did, was she, how did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected? Just a recommendation. She's been working for somebody who's a very trusted, dear person for a long time. So now she works for both of us. And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the specifics because the way that I found one of my first assistants and we worked together for many years was anytime I had a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant, I would say, Hey, I know this is off topic, but you've been awesome to deal with. Do you have, you know, twin brother, twin sister, somebody who does what you do as well as you do it that you could recommend to me because I need some help. And I just did that over and over again. And eventually one of them said, well,

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

And she was like, I can do it. And, uh, I'd like to do it. And I was like, great, let's roll. Onward. So with, uh, with your assistant, if you were to do an 80, 20 analysis of to the eight, the, you know, the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time. What, what are the types? What would those look like? What is the vast majority of her time spent on?

So. Hmm. A lot of it is, I guess, coordinating travel and things, but I'm, I'm trying to really, I mean,

I have this new ish commitment to really not do any speaking at commercial conferences anymore, but to speak to students because I think it's important. And what it takes out of me, which is a lot, speaking takes out a lot of me because I'm a writer and I also don't really recycle talks. I like to write something original. And when it's a commercial conference, it just doesn't add up for me what I get out of it, because I usually donate my commissions due to the local public library and whatnot. But with students, it is worth my time. If I dissuade even one journalism student from going into buzzworthy land, you know, after graduation,

that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking, speaking, I now am getting like all these college requests. And so that takes so much time, especially coordinating, because a lot of them are organized by sort of student volunteers and they're kind of still learning what it means to, you know, schedules and deadlines and advance notice. And so Lisa is sort of wrangling that. And another big part, and I should also mention that the

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

on the actual admin of the mailing. And do you operate, do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use other types of software? Oh, email. Email and text. Email and text. So no project management software at this point? No sort of Basecamp or Asana or anything like that? No, I don't. That would make me feel like I'm some sort of commercial organization. I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things. Back to the Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience or the humanity, I guess, of the tension.

What, a couple of quick ones. So the first is when you lift, do you tend to have the same workout? What does your weightlifting look like? It's changed a lot. In the last year and a half, I've prioritized body weight stuff heavily, no pun intended. That was actually total inadvertence, this how language, how we think in language. That's so funny. But I prioritize body weight stuff. And so I do pull-ups, push-ups, and that sort of thing. It also depends on where I do my work at my gym has my building has a sort of gym like a you know one of those residential gyms but I also have a membership at a larger probably I think the best gym in New York I love it but I'm only there a few days a week so it just depends on where I do it and what I do and if you had to pick one besides the do. And if you had to pick one, besides the elliptical,

if you had to pick one body weight exercise to hold you over, let's say you're traveling for a few months, you can only pick one body weight exercise, what would it be? Well, it would be pull up, but you can't always find a place to do it. So I just do usually elevated pushups. So my feet on a bench or bed or some, like a step or something and just push-ups. Cool. A great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted bent rows. You know,

it's actually very helpful for traveling is plyometrics. Plyometrics and trx is actually quite handy there's a system for some reason it's just not my thing can't get into it yeah it doesn't the thing is here's the thing so if i am forced by circumstances to do a workout that is not my preference i very much like to be able to do something else while doing it, such as listening to podcasts, which is what I do while I do weights at the gym anyway. And there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just like not great. So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me when I travel in case there's nowhere to do sprints, which is my plan B for cardio.

And then plan C is just jumping, skipping rope. Yeah. You're intense. I love it. I remember, you know, I wanted to, every time I meet, and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who at any point have lived in Bulgaria, I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's not. I know nothing about them. I didn't do the weight stuff when I was living in Bulgaria. No, exactly. It's kind of like, you know, like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Ricola commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff. Or worse yet, is that guy your cousin?

Yeah, right. Right. You must know. Like, no, I actually don't. Like, I know I went to X, Y, and Z college, but there are 5,000 people per year. You know, it doesn't always work out. You mentioned the donations. I want to talk about the site.

So it appears, and I dug around a bit, but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts. Is that accurate? I don't have comments. I do have dates. They're in the URL. Oh, they're in the URL, but they're not in the post. They're in the URL structure, but they're not in the displayed post itself. Yeah. So the reason for that is because I do think we live in an enormously news fetishistic culture. And the reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that because we think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed, because all feeds are reverse chronology. And, you know, there's an implicit hierarchy of importance to that. We think if it's not at the top, it's not important. And you know, you would understand, you know, writing about Seneca, it really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is. But I think that this culture conditions us so much. People, when they see a

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

thing for quite a few years. And if you go to any permalinks, if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog, the date is there in the URL, but also at the very bottom of the post after the related links. So for the same reason, because there's so much bias against older material. And I think some of my older stuff is, I mean, it depends on the person,

obviously, and the context, but it's an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate is to timestamp. The comments, did you ever have comments or have you never had comments? I did originally. And then I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like Herzog does.

I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched. But the comments I was getting, I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know, trolling or anything like that. But they were kind of vacant or people trying to plug their own thing or spam. And it was taking more of my time than it was worth. And so instead, I've made my contact information very easily accessible. So if someone has something of substance and urgency to say, which is, I think, the two things that compel people to reach out, they'll do it lot of emails from readers, and those are valuable, you know, but I don't really care for comments. Now, the flip side of that is that now that I have the Facebook page having – something mysterious happened with the Brain Pickings Facebook page last fall.

It just started growing so fast. I have no idea why. I was going to ask you about that because if you look at, say, your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kind of took off. Yeah, it was in about October of last year and it went from 250,000 to now, I think, I don't know. Two point something million. Close to three maybe. So more than tenfold in less than a year. I have no idea why. I've done nothing differently. I'm very, I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I know I get a lot of emails from readers elsewhere in the world who actually use Facebook as their primary thing. And they're such sweet notes,

you know, people who just are stimulated and inspired and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn't be if they hadn't read that piece about some random thing that I read and wrote about. And I think it would be selfish of me to just sort of disable Facebook because I hate it. But the point of it is that you can't, you have comments on there. And Lisa, my assistant, actually, that's something I delegated her a few months ago, just to completely deal with them. I can't deal with them. And not for any other reason that I have complete allergy to people pronouncing their so-called opinions without having actually digested or even engaged with the thing. So people would comment on the basis of like a thumbnail image or the title title make really outrageously inaccurate comments, clearly

not having read the piece. And this kind of snap reaction thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I can't deal with it. It just, it's like a psychic drain. Like I can't even explain it. Just, I can't. So anyway. So, so that would explain, that would answer one of my questions, which is in your header

picture on Facebook, you have, this should be a cardinal rule of the internet, end of being human. If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubris to comment on it. I was going to, I was going to. I don't care if it sounds like bitchy or anything. The point, I mean, you know, it's interesting because I think a lot about criticism and the notion of criticism and why it's so hard for anybody. And I don't think that people have a hard time with criticism because another person disagrees with or dislikes what they're saying. They really have a hard time

when they feel misunderstood, like the other person does not understand who they are or what they stand for in the world. And 99% of the time, and you actually touch on this in your conversation with Sam Harris, where you say that his ideas are not as controversial as people think when they don't actually understand what they are. But the main source of anguish is not being seen for who you are, not being understood. And this kind of reactive culture where people comment without taking the care to understand what you're expressing, who you are and what you stand for, it is so toxic. It so toxic to readers to writers to us as a culture and i just don't know how to get around it other than just having instructed lisa to be just merciless about banning people and deleting comments that are just not there's no humanity there's no patience

there's no thinking in them so i mean I mean, you know, anybody who writes online, I think, feels similarly that this is kind of my home. And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like, take your, you know, put your feet up on my table with your shoes on, you're not going to be invited back. You're gone, you know? So is your assistant's job as it relates to Facebook then primarily calling the herd and just removing the idiots? Or does she have, what are other are other instructions if any are there things that she passes to you are there things that she responds to no I don't I don't really care what people say again to the point that if people have something of substance and urgency they will reach out and I'm then very happy to hear from actual humans and engage in a human dialogue which I do but I really care about you know comments on Facebook. I just don't want them depressing me when I go on the

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

as opposed to just having rational discourse of disagreement. Ban people who are ignorant and have not read the thing and have some very scandalous or not even scandalous sort of sensation, sensationalist take on it, clearly not understanding the nuance, because I mean, a culture of news is, I say often a culture without nuance. And yeah, so that that's basically it. Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her, that's her task. Just not make me lose my mind over just exasperation when people's impatient. No. And I, you know, I really respect that because, uh, another reason that I read, uh, brain pickings as opposed to other sites, and I feel comfortable going there is that I feel it is sort of a stronghold of positivity and optimism, uh, in, in a lot of respects. So kudos, uh, the email, uh, actually

before we get to email, I've read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook, which would make sense because you're prolific. Uh, if, if that, if that's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media? I use buffer for Twitter, and I use just my hands for Facebook. But again, I mean, this goes back to the same inner struggle of, I do want to be reading and writing for myself. So why do I have the compulsion to put so much of it out there? And I self-flagellate over that because on some level it does seem like a form of hypocrisy. But then I do think about the people that email me from India and Pakistan and South Africa and Korea and wherever. That actually that's how they connect.

And I think if I'm putting in the amount of time that I do into what I do, even if I do it for myself, I might as well just harness that time anyway, if it benefits somebody else's journey, you know, and so I do it because of that mostly. Definitely. And I think that while it's fine to write for yourself, if you, if you keep the value of what you write to yourself, when it could benefit a lot of other people, then I think that's actually, it could be viewed as a selfish act,

right? So the, I think that there's particularly when you're curating in the way that you do and you're saving people thousands of hours of searching by distilling a lot of these concepts um well i would argue that the benefit the value is not even i mean what i do is kind of the antithesis of search it's a discovery of things that ideally one would not have come across within the usual parameters of one's filter bubble, right? So sort of a lot of the people that I hear from, for example, you know, just this week to use the Seneca example, actually just this week, I heard from this guy who was an

IT person, trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and said, the Seneca, the shortness of life piece really, really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy, never been interested in it, never looked for it, but it just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life. And it's kind of, it gives you pause to hear that from people. Definitely. Agreed. On email, if you go to your contact page, you recommend emailcharter.org. And I'm very curious to hear if people actually follow the email charter.

In terms of the email that you receive, do people actually pay attention to that? Yeah, they do. And I'm so grateful. But the majority of them do. Some people who reach out with the intention of self-promoting, there's usually laziness to people

who self-promote for the sake thereof you know so they don't they don't usually um follow but people who actually care to have a conversation and to engage are very um courteous and very sort of mindful of what i've asked except for publicists who are never yeah right well i mean i suppose uh if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template dear blogger dear blogger oh yeah i love those but dear blogger yeah or you know what i get very often which i think is actually hilarious uh people who don't even bother to read the name of the site so they addressed me dear Brian and the pinnacle of this was when last year at one point I opened my physical mailbox

in my building my home and I found this bundle from the USPS but like with an elastic band around it of mail for somebody named Brian Pickens, who lives in Long Beach, CA, or used to, I guess. And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me, because I guess the guy either moved and the USPS like somehow looked things up. And I don't even know, it was such a sort of mystery and metaphor for what i deal with online how can you ask a publicist not to so i used to have a company ages ago called brain quicken and uh i had i got a telemarketing call one evening i remember and uh this guy goes hi uh sorry if you're if i'm interrupting is this brian and i go excuse

me and he goes brian brian chicken and i'm like brian chicken i was like uh no and take me off your list goodbye uh the um oh god so on the on the uh on the email and pitching side of things, or just on the pitching side of things, how on earth do you deal with not just cold inquiries, but how do you deal with writer friends or acquaintances who are writers that you don't want to be rude to who want you to read their books? How do you polite decline that stuff? And maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is, not everyone is able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably, if I get 10 books from decent or good friends, some of them are going to be terrible. And I don't have the time necessarily or the inclination to read them all. How do you deal with that type of situation? Well, I guess you deal first and foremost by controlling not the outcome, but the

cause, which is your circle of friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround myself with. And I like to think friendly to pretty much everybody that I meet But my circle of actual friends is really close and really tight and people who are just you know When the sky crumbles are gonna be there and we're there for each other and so with that in mind I think there is a certain boundary that you have to put up beforehand to I guess manage social expectations in a way. And so for those people, my friend friends, in large part, I mean, I should mention that the majority of my close friends,

including my partner, too, are people that I have met just through what I do. So there's already the self-selection of sensibility and ideals. And, you know, I think think would become a centripetal force for the kinds of people we want to be and surround ourselves with those types of people. William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal microculture. And even when you said early on the kinship of spirit, I think that's so important. is a long-winded way to say that when and if those inner circle people put a book out it's a guarantee that i will like it because of who they are and so then i'm more than happy to support it i mean the the book that we started with the scratch and sniff guide to wine wendy the illustrator is precisely that type of person somebody who i met through what each of us does and she's now one of

my closest human beings you know and so of course i'm going to support her work, but not because I'm being, um, nepotistic about it, but because that's the prerequirement that I am moved by her work and respect it and love it. And that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle, I don't, I think acquaintances know that there's no such expectation. And when I do get such requests, it's a matter of, well, did the person do their homework and knowing what I actually think and write about? Because very often, I'm sure you get that too, you get pitched things that are just so outside of what you do, in which case I don't even feel compelled to respond because if they didn't put in the time to understand what I'm interested in, why should I

put in the time to explain to them why this is not a fit? Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I need to embrace that more. I think that's an area where I carry a lot of guilt. Guilt, yeah. But guilt, it's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige and they're both horrible reasons to do things. So often we would agree as humans, not just you and me, just anybody would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some way, you know, and and equally avoid things because of the guilt thing or do things because of the guilt thing, but sort of this whole Buddhist thing about aversion of, you know, avoidance and aversion and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is. It's the fear of disappointing somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself or out of sort of grasping for, you know, approval or acclaim, which is what doing things for prestige

is. I think either of those are really bad reasons to do things. And yet they motivate us a lot, or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the mind constantly. And it is a real practice to try to decondition that. Definitely. No, I like, I like, I like what you said about why put in the effort to explain why it's not a fit if they haven't done the homework to determine if it is a fit. I think that's a great way to put it. I want to ask, and I know we don't have too much time left, so hopefully sometime, someday we can do a follow-up part two. I think that'd be a blast. I'll bring some more back if you actually drink wine. So I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the donations, I'm very fascinated by the ad-free donation approach. And just to keep it simple, if you had to choose,

say, 20% of the options you're currently offering, which would you choose and why? In other words, you have... What do you mean by the options? No, no. So I'll explain. Or two or three. So people can make a one-time single contribution. Let me simplify that question. Or they can become a member and donate $7, $3, $10, or $25 a month. What I'm trying to ask without being improprietous or making you feel uncomfortable is, what is working best? When you're asking people for donations, assuming that it's working, if someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month, or the single contribution versus the membership, or the membership versus the single contribution, what would your advice be to people? for donations and I can for the life of me figure out how to actually like look at the data and get any sort of real reason all of it is so antiquated their export tools and such and I'm not that

interested I would siphon you know days into looking into it so I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation of it yeah great and by the way the only reason these options are as they are also is also the reason why I don't have an ad supported site, which is, I just asked myself, what would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad free site. And how would I like to support that? Well, I'd like to have a few options, you know, just because I don't want to, you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just, just pulled it out of the hat basically with these tears and i've just left them on since i put them on they seem to work you know whatever and

um originally my sense was that the one-time donations accounted for much more but i'd never actually analyze it because i think i i see the alerts that come from paypal and sometimes people would send really large one-time donations, like things that are totally humbling and enormously generous. And I think those kind of, you, you kind of weigh them somehow as more, um, than the cumulative sum of the smaller donations. So I thought the one-timers were much more, but then, and I'm pretty sure that must have been the case earlier on. Right.

But, and I've had the recurring ones, I've had the one-time donations for as long as I can remember. For as long as I basically needed to start making money for the site. Because, by the way, running the site cost me several times my rent. Like all the costs associated with it. It's like crazy. So at one point, I got to a point where I had to make money. I said, I don't want to do ads. I don't believe in that. I'll have just donations. And I didn't even think of recurring ones at the time. That was years ago. And then my friend Max Linsky, who runs longform.org, we're having tea. And tea and he said well why didn't you like push the

recurring ones more because it's working really great for us and at that point I had the option but it was buried somewhere on my like donation about page or something and so I was like okay so I put it in the sidebar and that was I want to say maybe 2011 um and it started accruing slowly. And so this past year, when I did my taxes, I very reluctantly went to deal with all the PayPal tools to get the data out, basically. And I actually had Lisa pull all the Excels and whatnot. And then I did the tally to see. And to my surprise, the recurring ones, which are very small individual amounts, actually were a two-to-one ratio to the one-time donations. Wow. And I don't know at what point it tipped over,

but I think because of the scale and just how many people have these tiny, tiny donations that they contribute every month. I mean, that's such an active commitment, and it's so generous that they add up. And my guess is that as time goes on, that's such an active commitment and it's so generous, you know, that they add up. And I, my guess is that as time goes on, because the recurring ones have only been available for the last like two and a half, three years, whatever, they would become by far the larger sort of,

uh, financial support compared to the single ones. Sure. No, that makes sense. Uh, the, if you had to choose, and of course this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the drop-down, so you have $7 a month, $3, $10, $25. If you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose? Oh, I have no idea. Probably just the mathematical, logical choice, the two middle ones, the three and 10.

Okay, cool. No, just very curious about this kind of thing. I think, uh, I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content. And I can't emphasize strong, strongly enough what you just said, which is you, you base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader. In the case of, you know, something with, with text, it doesn't have to be super complicated. It doesn't have to be doing tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself, would this annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it. Would I love this? If so, try it out. And every decision too has been that way. And actually, in the last couple years, I've been getting really annoyed. I mean,

brain picking is a pretty sort of lo-fi site, as you can see it just very super simple basics. But I've been getting annoyed that it doesn't load very well on my iPhone when I want to look at something or pull something up to reference or iPad. And my friend, Scott Belsky, who runs Behance, he's a great guy. And he's been sort of a very generous donor, just supporting. And, you know, and one time he pulls me aside. That was like, I think in February, March. And he's like, you know how much I love brain thinking.

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

it only took me three, oh God, seven years to get a mobile version of the site ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago. So better late than never, I suppose. Well, Maria, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you taking the time. If someone were to

want to explore brain pickings, uh, what, what are a few articles you might suggest that they start with, uh, or a few posts? Well, since we talked about it so much, the Seneca piece about the shortness of life, it's a fairly short piece. There's a piece I did a couple of years ago, which was less about, it was not about a specific book, just sort of things that I've been thinking about for a long time, this disconnect between purpose and prestige

and why we do things. And I forget what it's called. I think it's called How to Do What You Love or some other, How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love. And it was sort of an assemblage of thoughts on that from various sources as well as my own. And perhaps most of all,

a piece that I wrote last fall on the seventh birthday really at the site, which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of reading, writing, and living. Which is a great article. And I didn't want to replicate everything in here. So I sort of bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit. But just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone.

And I just want to quote Paul Graham here, which you included, which is, Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like, which I think is so astute. And in closing, is there any-

And also I should just interject and say, any Alan Watts piece, not because my writing about it is so great or it's not coming from a place of check me out. It's coming from a place of check him out. Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit. So I highly recommend any of those articles. Cool. All right. Brainpickings.org is the site, guys. Check it out. Maria, any parting advice for this episode, this portion of our conversation

before we check out? Any advice to the people listening out there? Thoughts? Parting comments? No advice per se. Just, I guess, a comment and a hope, which is that thank you so much, not just for having me, but for having this

show and for doing everything that you do. I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just, I guess, for lack of a better word, idealism and conviction. And yeah, thank you for setting an example that way. Well, that means a lot coming from you. And I think you're a tremendous force for good out there in the world. So I hope people check out your work. I hope you continue to do what you're doing. I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull-ups. And we will talk again soon.

Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Tim. Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show. Thank you, Tim. Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show, 99designs, which is your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. Go to 99designs.com forward slash Tim to see the projects that I've put up, including the mock-ups and drafts of the book cover for The 4-Hour Body. Exofficio. Exofficio and I go way back. Exofficio.com forward slash Tim. You can see the clothing that I've used for traveling through 20-plus countries, including the underwear.

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