#746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova

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4:47 cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and doscelling. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers. From every field imaginable to tease out the habits. routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply. And test in your own lives.

5:16 This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about. And past one billion downloads. To celebrate. I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites. From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.

5:34 I could not be more excited. To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these. The Super Combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks. But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider

5:51 Stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.

6:07 And for the bios of all guests. You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado. Please enjoy. And thank you.

6:17 For listening. First up Jerry Seinfeld American stand up comedian. Actor.

6:25 Writer and producer. And co-creator of the Emmy. Golden Globe and People's Choice Award winning Seinfeld. Name the greatest television show of all time.

6:36 By TV Guide. His latest book is Is this anything? You can find Jerry on Twitter and Instagram. At Jerry Seinfeld.

6:46 My writing sessions used to be Very arduous. Very Painful Pushing against the wind in soft Muddy ground.

6:58 With like a wheelbarrow full of bricks. You either learn to do that or you will die. In the ecosystem. And I learned that really fast and really young. And that saved my life and made my career.

7:12 That I grasped. The Essential principle of survival. In comedy.

7:21 Really young. And that principle is You Learn to Be a writer.

7:28 It's really the profession of writing. That's that's what stand up comedy is. However you do it, you can do it any way you want. But if you don't learn to Do it.

7:38 And some Form. You will not survive. And when you sit down, is it an empty page? Is it s bits and pieces that you've noted through the week as observations that you then flesh out? What is actually in front of you when you start? What's in front of me is

7:54 Usually about Fifteen or twenty pages. of stuff that's in various states of development. And then there's a smaller book. of just really, really

8:08 Random. Things like When you're on a cell phone call And the call drops. And then you

8:16 reconnect with the person They'll go I don't know what happened there. Yeah.

8:24 Anyone is expecting Them to know anything. about the incredibly complex technology of a cell phone. They offer this little I don't know, is it is an excuse or an apology. They go, I don't know what happened there.

8:38 So anyway, so I don't know. So that that's an example of something in that my little little tiny notebook. But I don't know what to do with that. But it's just so stupid to me and funny. So that to me is like a it's like an archery target. Fifty yards away.

8:54 And then I take out my bow and my arrow and I go Let me see if I can hit that. Let me see if I can Create something. But I could say

9:06 To a room full of Humans in a nightclub. That will make them see what I see in that. There's something stupid and funny about that to me. That's a very, very

9:19 Beginning. So then I'll write something about it. It'll be if I'm lucky, it'll be a h a half a page or a page. On a yellow legal pad. And I'll write that and then

9:32 And then session the next day. If I get around to it, I will see it again and I'll see what I have. And what I like and I don't like and As any writer can tell you, it's ninety five percent rewrite. So I have two phases. There is the free play

9:49 Creative phase. And then there is the polish and Construction phase. And I I love to spend inordinate I mean, it's not wasteful to me'cause that's just what I like to do.

10:03 Amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it. Until it has this pleasing flow to my ear. And then it becomes something that I can't wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it.

10:20 And then from the stage the audience will then I imagine, you know, it's a very scientific thing to me. It's like okay, here's my experiment And you run the experiment. And then the audience just Dumps a bunch of data on you.

10:35 Of This is good, this is okay, this is very good, this is terrible. And that Goes into my brain. From performing it on stage.

10:45 And then it's back through the rewrite. Process and then New ideas will come and it's just millions of different kinds of development. It's just that So you're just trying to get your you're just going to that place of Creating

11:01 Fixing Jettisoning. It's extremely occupying. It's never boring. It's The frustration I'm so used to at this point I don't even notice it. And It's just uh work time.

11:15 It's just work time. I like the way athletes Talk about I gotta get my work in. That you get your work in. I like that phrase.

11:24 One of the reasons I was looking forward to doing this show with you is I know that it's something you are very interested in. The craft. Yeah, the systemization of the brain and Creative Endeavour. You know, I really think

11:40 When I'm working, it's very much like when you're watching a picture working. On stage. And now we're going. So that's different. So basically it's on stage and off stage. It's I it's the desk and then

11:52 The stage and then back to the desk and then back to the stage. And that's Endless. My guiding rule is systemize. What's the problem?

12:02 The problem is, like my daughter. My daughter is very creative. She's extremely bright. She's got a Incredible head on her shoulders. And I see myself. In her at that age. She's way further advanced than I was at that age.

12:18 She has a Creative gift. So I say to her, When you have a creative gift It's like someone just gave you a horse. You have to learn how to ride it.

12:27 You gotta learn how to ride this horse. And I've seen people that are born By the Dozens and dozens. I've seen people that were given

12:36 Black stallions. And If you have a black stallion like from that movie And you're born and they just put you on it. And that's what happens. They just put you on it.

12:48 And you either learn to ride this thing or it's gonna kill you. Then we have many, many examples of that. So she's trying to write this thing. She's struggling. I can't write. I keep Putting it off.

13:00 So I explained to her my basic system, which you already talked about at the top of the show. Which is if you're gonna write Make yourself a writing session. What's the writing session? I'm gonna work on this problem.

13:14 Well, how long are you gonna work on it? Don't just sit down with an open ended I'm gonna work on this problem. That that's a ridiculous Torture. Two. Put on a human being's head.

13:24 It's like you're gonna hire a trainer to get in shape and he comes over And you go, How long is the session? And he goes, It's open ended. Forget it. I'm not doing it. It's overright there.

13:36 You've got to control What your brain can take. Okay, so if you're gonna exercise, God bless you, and that's the best thing in the world you can do. But you gotta know when's it gonna end. When's the work out over?

13:50 It's gonna be an hour. Okay. Or you can't take that? Let's do thirty minutes. Okay, great. Now we're getting somewhere. I can do thirty. I'm trying to teach my son who knows how to do transcendental meditation.

14:04 How to do it. I assume you know about that. I do. Yeah. Yeah, practice. I can't do it fifteen minutes. Like, okay, let's do ten. Let's do ten. Let's come up with something you can do. That's where you start everything.

14:16 That's how you start To build a system. So my daughter, so I said to her, You have to have an end time. To your writing session. If you're gonna sit down at a desk with a problem

14:28 And do nothing else. You gotta get a reward for that, and the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up and walk away and go have some Cookies and milk. You're done.

14:40 If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write You need a reward at the other end of that session, which is stop. Now pencils down. So that's the beginning of a system. Yeah.

14:53 To me Well Help almost anybody learn to write. Which is something you know, I Kinda wanted to teach in a way.

15:03 I think it's so simple. I think exercise is pretty simple too. But people don't They don't come up with bak good simple little systems. They just try and do it. And that's to me, that's you're gonna fail. The simple doesn't mean easy and

15:16 No, no, not easy. It's so important. The incentives, right? Having a reward, having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration? Or how long have you chosen it? I told her, just do an hour. That's a lot. She says I'm gonna write all day. No you're not. Nobody writes all day. Ha ha

15:39 Shakespeare can't write all day. It's it's it's torture. Yeah. If you taught a class on writing What other lessons might you have or resources or anything? Exercises. I'm imagining that your daughter could sit down, she says, All right, I have an hour. And then you ask her how her writing session went, she said, Well, I didn't have any idea what to write.

15:56 So you'd have I don't know what age the students would be in your course, but What else would be a component of your Class on writing. Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. You know? No one's really that great. You know who's great?

16:11 The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It's a game of tonnage. You know? How many Are you gonna work? Huh?

16:22 Week per month per year. You might even want to chart that. Or with your exercise if you want to get in shape. I couldn't get in shape. I was like a start as a jogger, you know, like in the seventies and I would run three miles a day and then I got older and I got married late and I had young kids and

16:40 I really had to get in shape and I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called Body for Life. Buy it for life, yeah. And it's really, really Such a System. For a primitive

16:53 You know, brain. I do it to this day. I think it's a work of genius. This book. And it really got me in shape. Because he broke it down.

17:03 So here's what we're gonna do. In minute one. Here's what you're gonna do. The minute five, minute twelve. And this is gonna end in uh forty five minutes or whatever it is. And every minute I know exactly what I'm doing.

17:16 Yeah. Like turn the key for me and all of a sudden I was getting in shape. I never had it asked what am I doing now? Or what are we doing next? It's like you gotta

17:26 Treat your brain Like a dog you just got. You got it. Stupid. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog. That is easily trained.

17:40 Uh You got to confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to Confine it.

17:49 You can find it. Yeah. And it's done through repetition and systemization. So let's talk about feedback in the experimental loop that you mentioned. earlier, which was desk stage, desk stage, desk stage. One form of feedback would be audience feedback.

18:07 And I'm curious what other forms of feedback you have. No, there is no other feedback. That means anything. Okay, got it. Fine point of

18:17 writing technique that I'll pass along to you writers out there. Never talk to anyone. About What you wrote that day. That day.

18:29 You have to wait twenty four hours. To ever Say anything to anyone. About what you did. Because

18:38 You never wanna Take away. That wonderful Happy Feeling that you did

18:46 That very difficult thing. That you Try to do That you accomplished it. You wrote. You sat down and wrote. So

18:55 If you say anything It's like the same reason I don't you ever heard the thing like you never tell people the name you're gonna give the baby? Sure. Until it's born because they're gonna react. And the reactor is gonna have a color. And

19:09 If you've decided that that that's gonna be the baby's name, you don't want to Not what anybody else thinks. So I will always wait twenty four hours before I say anything to anyone about what I wrote. So you wanna preserve that good feeling. Cause if you if let's say you write something and you love it. And then later on that day you're talking to someone and you thought, Hey, what do you think of this idea?

19:29 Blah blah blah. And they don't love it. Now that day feels like oh I guess You know, that that was uh wasted effort.

19:37 So you always want to reward yourself. The key to writing But being a good writer is to treat yourself Like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving.

19:50 And then switch over to Lou Gossett, an officer and a gentleman. And just be a harsh Correct. Ball busting son of a bitch. About that is just not good enough.

20:03 That's gotta come out. Or it's gotta be redone or thrown away. So Flipping back and forth between those two Brain quadrants.

20:14 Is the To writing. When you're writing You wanna treat your brain like a toddler.

20:22 It's just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard ass. And you switch back and forth. There's a quote from you in the New York Times.

20:36 And the quote is, I'm not O C D, but I love routine. I get less depressed with routine. Aside from the writing sessions Are there any other routines for you that are particularly important as scaffolding or automatic behaviors? Yeah, exercise, weight training.

20:54 And transcendental meditation. I think I could Solve just about anyone's life. And I don't care what you do. With weight training and transcendental meditation.

21:06 I think your body needs that stress. That stressor? And I think it builds your Resilience of the nervous system. And I think transcendental meditation is the

21:19 Absolutely. Ultimate Work. tool. I think the stress reduction is great, but it it's more the energy recovery and the

21:27 Concentration, fatigue. Solution. Which is of course, you know As a stand up comic, I can tell you my entire life is concentration fatigue. Whether it's writing or performing.

21:40 My brain And my body, which is the same thing. Are constantly hitting the wall. And if you have that In your hip pocket.

21:49 You're Columbus with a compass. Yeah. A yeah. Devout seems like an odd word to use since it's it can be used quite secularly, but uh proponent of T M, how many times what does your weekly schedule look like for weight training?

22:09 When do you do it? And do you do T M twice a day or do you I do it at least twice a day, but I will do it any time I feel like I'm dipping. Energetically. Yeah, if my if I sit down and The pen doesn't move.

22:23 For like Twenty minutes. I know. I'm out of gas. Why the pen moving? My weight training routine is three times a week for an hour. a session, but I'm into that. I've been into that. You know, I I mentioned the Bill Phillips

22:38 Body for life. The hit training. So it's three times a week of uh weights and three times a week the uh Interval cardio training. There are a lot of days where I I wanna cry instead of do it. Because it really physically hurts, but I just think it's balancing it's very balancing to the

22:58 Forces inside humanity that I think are Just they overwhelm us. We are overwhelmed by our own power. And You gotta put that ox in the plow.

23:10 Make it do the stuff that it doesn't want to do. It just keeps it What the hell do oxes do in the wild? I I can't imagine they were happy. Checking Twitter. Just developing neuroses. Well you know, put it in the harness.

23:28 I mean I I don't know. A lot of my life is I I don't like getting depressed. I get depressed a lot. I hate the feeling. And These routines the These very difficult routines, whether it's exercise or writing.

23:41 And both of them are things where it's like it's brutal. That's another thing I was explaining to my daughter. She's frustrated. That writing is so difficult because no one told her. That it's the most difficult thing in the world.

23:57 It's the most difficult thing in the world is to write People tell you to write like you can do it, like you're supposed to be able to do it. Nobody can do it. It's impossible. The greatest people in the world can't do it. So if you're gonna do it, you should first be told what you are attempting to do. Is

24:16 Incredibly difficult. One of the most difficult things there is. Way harder than weight training. Way harder. What you're summoning Trying to summon.

24:26 within your brain and your spirit. To create. Something onto a blank page. That's another Part of my

24:34 systemization technique. Learn how to encourage yourself. That's why you don't tell someone what you wrote. Be proud of yourself. Encourage, you know, treat yourself well for having done that. Horrible.

24:48 Horribly impossible thing. I would have to imagine, and maybe this is just a projection, because I I hope that when I have kids, which I don't have yet, that this will be true for me, but that Being kind to your creative self and offering positive reinforcement for yourself through the process would affect how you parent, I would have to imagine. Yes. Yes. Unfortunately

25:11 We seem to have lost the Lugoset side of parenting. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's it is similar. You want to be very encouraging, but you also want to

25:30 Explain there are Laws In life. that you need to know about or you it's gonna hurt. I think one of the

25:38 Better lines I've come up with over my life is that Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void. With great speed. Yeah. Can you say that one more time, please? Pain is knowledge.

25:51 Rushing in to fill a void. You don't know that that Post of your bed. Was Not where you thought it was.

26:00 But when your foot hits it. That knowledge. Is gonna come rushing in. Really fast. Mm.

26:07 It's gonna really hurt. When your foot hits that post. Because that was a piece of knowledge that you didn't have that That you're gonna get, you're about to get. You were talking about Black Stallion and learning to ride Black Stallion less

26:21 Y you be broken yourself by your Superpowers slash potential murderers. I've struggled with depression for decades. And have found some respite in the last five or six years for a whole host of reasons. But aside from the writing and weight training, is there anything else that has contributed to your ability to either stave off or mitigate depressive episodes? Or manage.

26:45 No. I still get him. Mm-hmm. Still got him. The best thing I ever heard about it

26:51 Was that it's part of a kit that comes with a Creative. Aspect. To the brain. Mm-hmm. The a tendency to depression seems to always accompany that.

27:01 And I read that. Like twenty years ago, and that really made me happy. So I realized well I wouldn't have all this Other good stuff. Without that that's just comes in the kit.

27:12 That you have an a tendency to depression. But I I think it's fair to say that I don't know a human that doesn't have the tendency. You gave me a quote. I'll ask you one more question and then uh we close. We can go a little more. Let's go a little more. Let's do it. So I'd I'd love to ask about following up on depression, I'd love to ask about failure just to keep this bright and shiny. Can you think of how a particular failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? In other words, do you have a favorite

27:42 failure of any type, something that seemed catastrophic at the time that in fact set you up for Great things later. Yeah. Yeah.

27:52 I have a couple. Really good ones. And this is another thing I try and Teach the kids, you know, and something horrible happens and I I think Of all the things

28:02 I would trade. If you could take Your experiences and Asked to trade'em in. The last ones I would trade.

28:10 Would be the failures. Those are the most valuable ones. When I moved to LA I was only doing comedy four years, but I I had built up a pretty good reputation in New York. And New York was really in those days still very much the miners.

28:27 to LA, which was the majors. So I went out to LA and uh people Talk that I was coming and that I was One of the hot guys coming out of New York. And I was only doing it four years. I was Twenty five years old.

28:40 Really still just starting. And The comedy store was the club in LA that you had a break into that was the club. And

28:50 The guys that Work there and the women were killers. I mean these people made the room just shake with laughter. It was Very intimidating. To go on there.

29:01 And I went on there and I did very well. You know, in those days you would call and they would give you spots if you were good. And I would never get spots. I would get like one spot a week and You know, one spot a week it's like one push up a week.

29:15 It's like it. Well, don't even bother. So I asked to meet with Mitzi Shore, who's the owner of the club and person who ran the whole thing there. And she said to me She said, I'm the kind of person that needs to get stepped on.

29:29 And that's what you need. You need someone to step on you. And I'm gonna be that person. She said if you called and said If I had four spots available and you called in

29:42 I would give all four spots to this other guy. She mentions this other guy. And I sat there in her office and I nodded. I nodded and I said, Well Uh, I won't mention the name of the guy she said she was gonna give the four spots to. I said, Well

29:58 If Maybe He can't do all four. I'd be happy to take any of the ones he can't do. And I walked out of there and I never worked at the comedy store again. And saying you're you're not working at the comedy store in LA.

30:12 It's like saying I wanna be a baseball player, but not the majors. Not the majors in the United States. I'm gonna apply my trade someplace else. Yeah. Lith Lithuania. Yeah.

30:27 And so from there I went from I hope it doesn't sound immodest from being absolutely at the top of the heap. In New York City To playing

30:38 At discos in the basement. In LA. You know, to like eight people. But my resentment and hostility to her.

30:49 I was a guy who I would say I was a A three day a week guy. In terms of my writing discipline in those days. And I went from three days a week to seven. Right there.

31:01 Yeah. And I was like okay, we're not I was angry. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was resentful, but I used that.

31:10 It was just Fuel from it. She wasn't stopping me, nobody was gonna stop me. But when someone is that hostile to you That can be a very good thing.

31:19 Yeah. If you're tough, if you're tough enough to eat that. Shit and say I'm She's not stopping me. That's a great story. Makes me think I one of my friends, uh Alexis O'Hanian, co founded Reddit. And at one point early on, they were super excited about, of course, their company, their baby, they put all of their waking hours into it, and they met with some Yahoo executive who was basically just fishing for inside information.

31:46 And at some point in the meeting This exec said Oh. There's your traffic. Oh, that's a rounding error for us. And so Alexis and his guy and his guys took a huge They made a poster that said you are a rounding error and put it on the wall in their office. Yeah.

32:02 It works. It works. We've talked about systemizing Gamifying is another thing I'm very big on. Mm-hmm. Let's make this into a game. You know, whatever the problem is, let's make it a game.

32:14 To me, it's a fun game. I I honestly I wouldn't say this a around my family, but I I don't care if I drop dead tomorrow. It's like I just wanted to I still feel like I played the game well. You know. Yeah.

32:27 That's all I wanna feel. I just wanna feel like I I played the game well. What would be an example of gamifying? I mean, I've read of course the uh about the you know Seinfeld's productivity secret the marking the crosses on the calendar, which I guess yeah some people get. That's not really a game. Yeah. That's more Base that I think stats are good.

32:47 If you want to improve anything. My trainer, Adam Wright and I Always like to play this game well, this was the maximum amount of weight. You did. Three months ago.

32:59 For this many seconds or whatever. And then it's like that's so it's a game now. Let's see if I can keep the reps going for thirty seconds. Last time was twenty five. So it's a little game. It's just again, this just goes back to my The human brain is a schnauzer.

33:15 It's just a stupid little Contraption that you can Easily tricked. As soon as you tell me I did it twenty five seconds last time, okay, let's say if I can do thirty. Yeah. It's not wisdom.

33:27 That's not intelligence. It's a stupid little machine. It's gonna do that every single time. Every time you tell someone Your last best was twenty five seconds. You're gonna try for thirty.

33:40 When you hear the word Successful. Who comes to mind for you and why? Could be parents, could be outside of parents, could be anybody, but for you, when you hear that word, is there anyone who is really a sort of paragon of what you would consider success or someone you have looked up to. As someone who is successful.

34:02 Well that's a pretty broad Hyper hyper broad. It comes down to kinda how you define it also. You know, I think I don't know if I mean it as a joke, but I I say a lot These days survival is the new success.

34:15 And And I'm a big uh Look. Tim, what do you want me to tell you? In my business If you're

34:24 Sixty Plus, or I'll even if you're fifty five. And you're getting paid? To work? Paid well.

34:33 You have crushed it. Yeah. So Stand up comedy I would move this piece of our conversation next to the

34:42 toxic ecosystem of this world. Yep. When you have seen the attrition that I have seen. It's like in the heart of the sea. You know that book? Yeah. Uh Ron Howard made the movie.

34:53 When they're dropping like flies. And the handful that's small Handful? Somebody asked me the other day How many people whose careers

35:03 were made on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Are still working. I didn't want to answer the question. 'Cause you had it. You know what I mean? You had it. You had

35:13 Yeah. So Once you have it. You can only lose it. Mm.

35:20 You know, uh you can only fail to take care of it. Mm-hmm. And that's when we get To Health.

35:28 And Work ethic. And Managing yourself so that you don't break. Because they're trying to break you.

35:38 I always tease my friend Jimmy Fallon. Yeah. This is like a sick experiment, these talk show gigs. Let's take a human being.

35:47 Put him in a studio. For decades. Doing an hour of television a day and let's see what breaks.

35:57 It's sick. It's a sick human experiment. Like it's like a poke job. Who It's like they just do it till you're dead. The forever skinner box.

36:09 Oh god. Yeah, that's brittle. Brutal. You've already given a bunch of possible answers to this, but if you had a Billboard, metaphorically speaking. that could get a message, a quote, an image, question, anything. out to billions of people, what might you put on that billboard?

36:27 Back in the eighties I had a friend Who was teaching a Comedy course. At the improv on Melrose in LA. And he asked me if I would come in and talk to the class.

36:37 And I said sure. I went in and there was like uh I don't know. Maybe twenty people in the class in the in the afternoon. And I went up on stage and I said, The fact that you have even signed up for this class is a very bad sign.

36:53 For what you're trying to do. The fact that you think Anyone can help you. Or there's anything that you need to learn. You have

37:03 Gone. Off on a bad track. Because nobody Knows anything about

37:11 Any of this. And if you want to do it. What I really should do. Is I should have a giant

37:19 Flag behind me. That I would pull a string and it would roll down And on it the flag. Would just say two words. Just

37:28 Yeah. Just work. Just

37:35 Work. Yeah. I love it. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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39:07 And now. Maria Popova Essayist. Author, poet. And writer of literary and arts commentary.

39:15 And cultural criticism at The Margin Alien Permanent web archive.

39:25 You can find Maria on Instagram at 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

39:40 Geek in arms. Maria Popova. On the line with me, Maria, how are you today? Very well. Thank you for having me. And I appreciate your coaching on the last name. I wasn't sure if it was Popova or Popova.

39:52 I have friends who For instance, Naval or Avocant is a friend. It's actually novel, but Americans can't really pull it off, so he goes for Naval. So I appreciate The coaching and

40:03 As a country of immigrants, we have an surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right, right? Oh absolutely. It's uh you know just the sort of anglicising of such a Chris all like a melting pot of different cultures and at the same time I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time, which is reading. And

40:25 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 Tragic comic when you actually find out how they're pronounced.

40:57 No, exactly. Or it can be a real revelation. I remember when I was uh a young kid, I couldn't hit let's say democracy or aristocracy. I could only say because and I'd also read it democracy, aristocrats. For whatever reason I couldn't get the emphasis right. But coming back to the reading and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading If someone asks you and I'm sure occasionally it happens.

41:20 What do you do for those people listening who may not be familiar With you. We'll start with the cocktail question. When someone asks you, What do you do? How do you answer that? Well

41:30 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.

41:42 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.

41:59 And they l kinda looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party and they're like, What is brain pickings? How do you typically describe that? It's just the record of that thinking, my personal subjective private thinking that takes place between my reading. And the writing. And takes form in writing.

42:16 collection of very interesting things. Sometimes you know how I've s 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 I'm embarrassed and some cases kind of humiliated.

42:36 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.

42:51 And I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are just sort of churning out content. And I remember Kathy Sear at one point told me that that you should focus on just in time information, not just in case information. Which I thought was very astute and really

43:09 Sort of profound. 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. Yeah. Is another. And I saw your your review of his latest book, Waking Up. Well not a review, I not a review. I don't review books. Okay. No, this is no so this is this An annotated reading, if you

43:29 Okay, so an annotated reading. And I definitely want to dig into that. Annotated reading of waking up, which I found really impactful for me in a lot of ways. It put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I had for a very long time. Talking about reviews, I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you and A close friend of mine, Chris Saka.

43:52 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 f a follow up, but you've built this incredible Powerhouse.

44:06 Uh an outlet for your whether it's creative musings or observations. And it has a 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 a squis, but I think

44:24 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. uh things that are not competing for New York Times bestseller. In fact I don't even know if I

44:38 Ever really I mean perhaps. I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things with the New York Times bestsellers. But I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question is actually that I met him Through his wife, who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love and I love Wendy, on a book about wine and

44:59 And I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensor experience. And I like things that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it. But in any case, so I wrote about that book and that particular piece on grain picking s 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.

45:28 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. Yeah. Which was written along with and the illustrations are are wonderful. Richard Betts is the sommelier who was part of that. And at one point I met with him because I wanted to try to

45:46 deconstruct the master somelier 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 Samelier taste was so intimidating that I sort of 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

46:12 putting out what I think you do very often and that is Timely and timeless, I've heard you call it. Material where you're Pulling from old sources or older sources. doing pattern recognition to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a theme or Something that still affects people.

46:30 And I was doing research for this interview. And We met briefly in New York at an event and I've I've been a long time fan of your work. And so I thought to myself, like, you know, how much digging do I really need to do? And good God, you have such

46:48 An absolute canon of work out there. It is Astonishing. I mean, it is really You're very kind. It's just the volume of time really. It's been, you know, I've been doing it for eight years coming up. Actually exactly a month from today, it'll be eight years. It's just the the accumulation, you know. And I'm fascinated by routine and schedule. And you know, I'm reading from, of course, not the always accurate, but generally a good place to start Wikipedia.

47:17 And It says that brain pickings takes, you know, four hundred plus hours. hundreds of pieces of content per day, twelve to fifteen books per week. That you're reading.

47:28 I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before, but sometimes the answers change and evolve or and which is why I I actually don't do interviews very frequently because I find they they sort of tend to kind of cast this as the static thing that just stage there or some sort of reference point while we're really just the fluid process and we're constantly evolving. But in any case. No, definitely so on. Yeah. So the question that you've I'm sure been asked many times, but

47:58 I'll ask again is how do you find Slash choose the books that you read. This is a huge problem for me because I my appetite for reading Outstrips. the time that I have. And so I end up actually, unfortunately, sometimes finding myself

48:13 anxious because of the number of books I've taken on it 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

48:30 a very wide array of disciplines and eras and sensibilities because that's What I think about too and I think 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

48:51 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

49:04 Aristotle's views on happiness in government. Or Beautiful art from twelfth century Japan. Or Sam Harris's new book. Anything.

49:15 Got it. And I've read You citing. Kurt Vonnegut.

49:20 before Kurvanages one of my favorite writers of all time. I know. I heard your uh semicolon quote just The I think it was either the interview did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have A counterpoint the semicolon Okay. No no So I actually brought up the semicolon quote partially as a sort of wink wink.

49:42 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. Uh he loves type nerd. He loves semicolons. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other arm. He's he's a fascinating guy. But the quote that I heard you cite that I wanted to dig into a bit was the curve on a get saying

50:05 right to please just one person. 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?

50:17 It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one and that's myself. That's Like I said, it's just a lecker down. My thought process my wave. Just trying to navigate my way through The world and understand

50:33 My place and that 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 transmutation of information into wisdom really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom. And it's interesting too, because when I started drinking

50:57 Like I said, almost eight years ago. It started Very much as a private record of my own curiosity and I shared it with seven co workers that I had at the time, just as a little sort of email newsletter thing. And now to think that there are about seven million people strangers reading it every month. That's amazing. It's kind of thank you. But and I'm not sort of number dropping for s fail or anything like that, but just to Try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing to one person, one very sort of

51:27 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.

51:39 And it it's a strange thing to live with and in no way a a bad thing. I'm not complaining about it obviously, but it's just Interesting to observe. How one relates to oneself. When being

51:52 looked on by a few million people, you know? Definitely. And There's so many so many questions I wanna ask you. We might have to do a part two at some point because I know uh we have some time constraints, but The first question would be Related to that.

52:07 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

52:21 If so, how do you resist it? And this is part of the you know, w how do you respond to the expectations of the crowd or the seven million people looking on. And I feel this personally sometimes'cause 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

52:40 Uniques a month usually. Oh, 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 but sometimes it doesn't. And

52:56 There's a lot of temptation when, for instance, I know you use social media quite a bit and we'll we'll get to that. where I look at, say, the retweets of the favorites on something that's kinda 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 five hundred thousand retweets. Is that something that ever sort of crosses your mind and do you ever feel that temptation?

53:20 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 And really

53:36 irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting To really stay true to one's Experience. Yeah. And being aware that as soon as it's out of the world, there is this notion of the other.

53:49 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 is very prolific, very public. Almost performative in his public presence. It's very

54:08 Is it to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say, Well, you can't possibly not care about the audience given you Make her living through it and sort of perform to it, right? 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

54:31 one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for who he or 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.

54:49 the awareness of the other really does change things. But I think Perhaps Lerner Herzog put in best. I I just finished reading this kind of six hundred page. interview with him, essentially. It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Croonan had with him over the course of thirty years. And in one passage, Hertzar says Something like You know, it's always been important for me to

55:13 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.

55:29 I guess to answer your question rather circuitously. I don't feel quote unquote tempted to make lysticals 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.

55:49 But For as long as it's an ad supported medium. The motive will be to perfect the commercial interest. So perfect the art of the Buzzvie Lystical, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article. And not to perfect the human spirit. Yeah. Of the reader or the writer. Which is really what I'm interested in.

56:10 I think it's a a a very virtuous goal. I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it. For a lot of reasons. One of them is I feel a very kindred

56:24 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 reader's insane, so I'm not going to do it. Or like you said. So much of the The cultural crap.

56:46 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 see painted and I think the commercial aspect is really warping that. And one thing I really admire about your work in

57:05 All of its permutation 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. That means a lot to me and I You know, coming back to the the right to please just one person, I think that it's related to that. So in a way it's

57:28 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 four hour work week as my first book, I've 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.

57:49 In the case of the four hour work week, I came out of undergrad at Princeton and uh many years have passed, obviously, but When I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kinda Ivy League, you know, where I was trying to use ten dollar words where a ten cent 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. on deadline and uh I remember I was in Argentina at the time.

58:14 And then I went the other way and I said, No, no, no, I have to be loose, I have to be funny, and so I wrote a few chapters that were completely slapstick ridiculous. I mean they 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.

58:41 And sit down and start to write. Uh, Malbec is just this wonderful varietal In South America best known in Argentina, but there're actually some really nice Malbec wines in Chile.

58:53 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.

59:14 And started typing. the four hour work week as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends. One was an investment banker trapped in his own job and 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 sort of take the edge off.

59:38 And that's how I was writing in that case to please just two people. But that's the only way I could make it work. Your schedule. I've read Of your schedule. I'd love to hear

59:50 the current iteration of that. It seems like you've had a fairly 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 of years. Maybe is

1:00:13 This sort of really delicate balance between Productivity and pressures and Especially in a culture that seems to measure Or worse, your marriage.

1:00:25 Or 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 and the Present.

1:00:37 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 of some sort of holy grail, uh creative process because it's just really

1:00:51 It's a crutch. I mean routines and rituals help us overwhelming mesh and just day to day life would consume us. It 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

1:01:06 Being Present when Why is it on white? So with that in mind, my day Very predictable.

1:01:13 I get up in the morning, I meditate for between fifteen to twenty five minutes before I do anything else. What time do you wake up? Typically. Exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed. So in very I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think When I write because what

1:01:32 Or when I I guess try to think. What I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated Ideas and concepts and In order for that to happen, you know, those associative chains need to be firing. And when I am sleep deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain. Which is certainly I'm not unique in that in any way. There's research showing that

1:01:53 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 and very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that the speaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is, but really

1:02:13 It's a total profound failure of priorities and and of self Respect and I Right, and Students.

1:02:21 enact that in my own light by being very disciplined about my sleep, at least as disciplined as I am about my work,'cause the latter is a product of The capacities. cultivated by the former. So in any case, so I get up eight hours after I have gone to bed. I meditate.

1:02:37 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

1:02:52 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.

1:03:04 Or any anything really external to 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. And then I

1:03:21 Take a b a a short break. I'm a believer in sort of pacing creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and then you take a short break and then cycle back, you know. And then I I deal with any sort of admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot and I resume

1:03:42 Writing and I Right, 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

1:03:55 Time that is. Unburdened by deliver at thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general. And then usually later at night I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two. Got it. So

1:04:11 A number of follow up questions. What type of meditation Do you practice currently? Just guided Vapossana very Very basic. There's a woman named Tara Brock who she's a mindfulness correct shirk.

1:04:25 How do you spell her last name? B R A C H. Got it. And she's based out of D C and she Was trained as a cognitive psychologist. Then the decades of

1:04:37 Live in an ashram, and now she teaches. Mindfulness but with a very secular lens, so She records her classes and she has a podcast, which is how I came to know her and every week she does a one hour lecture on sort of the philosophers and Cognitive behavioral

1:04:55 wisdom of the agers and then she did her guided meditation. 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.

1:05:10 Brock. Rock. Yes. And all her podcast is free. She has two books out too um It's really wonderful.

1:05:17 Very I will have to check that out. And uh see you're listening then, you have earbuds in You're listening to audio while you meditate. Yes. And it's interestingly, I mean sh she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of twenty ten. It's just one that I like

1:05:35 And feel familiar with and it sort of helps me get into the rhythm. So every day I listen to the exact summer two thousand ten. How would people recognize it? How does the audio I think the title is it sounds cheesy, but it it is not cheavy. I think it's called Smile Meditation. And I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years and other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I have on and on my broken three G iphone without any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod. That's on it. Awesome. That's a great answer.

1:06:07 I love digging into the specifics. So when you go to the gym then to work out are you still using an elliptical? For that or are you You are. I do sprints, time tens intervals on the elliptical. And I go for cardio and I do.

1:06:23 a lot of weight and body weight stuff too. You do, all right. But when you're reading, is that on the elliptical? Yes. And what type of Are you using

1:06:35 For that reading. Well, I prefer electronic, so I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any PM viewer'cause 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.

1:06:59 And so in that case I just go there with my big tomb and my sticky notes and pens and sharp and There is annotation. Analog devices and I just Do that.

1:07:11 Cool. All right. So I've 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, poll quotes.

1:07:25 And I found myself asking as I was reading this, like How are you gathering all of this so that you can Use it later. So what does your note taking system look like? In the case of digital and in the case of Hard copy.

1:07:38 So with digital it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each. that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. Understanding really, which is what reading should be a conduit to. is a form of pattern recognition. So when you read a whole book

1:08:00 You kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked and they don't usually occur Sequentially. So it's not like You walk away with one instance from the first chapter, one instance from the second chapter. It's just sort of this pattern of the writer's thoughts that permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so

1:08:18 Especially If you read as a writer, so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that, but ideally wants to record what those patterns and things are. That sort of reading is very different. So what I end up doing with analog books In particular, and it's I've sort of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect.

1:08:37 And 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.

1:08:52 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 had obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it. But it's An index based not on

1:09:09 Keywords, which is what a standard book index is based on. But based on key ideas. And I use that then to sort of synthesise what those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book. Okay, I have to geek out on this because I'm so excited now. As it turns out

1:09:27 With analog books, I do exactly literally exactly the same thing. I usually start with the in 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 Yeah. them in any in my particular case in any order I also will have sort of a A couple of lines dedicated to PH and PH just refers to phrasing, so if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find really Oh, I do that too. Oh, really?

1:09:53 But I would BL for beautiful language. Oh, that's so cool. Okay. So there's that. And then I have Q or if they're quotes. So for instance many books will have quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases. And so I'll have quotes, I'll just write that out and then colon and then I'll I'll list all the page numbers for that particular sort of Category.

1:10:17 That I'm collecting. In the case of quotes. When you're gathering this, you mentioned acronyms. And Shorthand. So besides beautiful language, what are some of the other acronyms 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. Is there one other example that you just if you could indulge me.

1:10:39 One that is I guess not so much about the content of that passage is About its purpose is L J, which is I have a little sort of waver of love. Side project called littering Jigbox, right? Sure. I've seen it. It's yeah, it's it's awesome.

1:10:55 Thank you. But yeah, so I I do these tearing the pathogens from literature with a thematically matched song, and so Sometimes As I'm reading a book I will come across a passage that I think would be great for that and maybe a song comes to mind.

1:11:09 And so I would put L J next J. But I wanna 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

1:11:21 Question about how I find What to read and I mark those types of things. So for the annotations that are specific to that particular book. All of my sticky cab notes are on the side of the pages. But when it there's an external quote, something referencing another work.

1:11:41 I put a tab at the very top with the letter et, which stands for find if I am not from a 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.

1:12:02 So all of those references and citations and allusions, even they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed. To another work. And That

1:12:15 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 congential references to other works that Perhaps it would not have come across that way. I mean directly. And in a way

1:12:33 It's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble. In a very incremental way. And I've often Fozing older books that were Five or six. hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which led me to something else, which led me to something else, which led me to this great other thing.

1:12:50 So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice. The serendipity of it. Is So beautiful when it works out and I'll give a confession. This is really embarrassing, but you know, since no one's listening.

1:13:03 I came across Seneca. So Seneca the Younger. who's had probably more impact on my life than any other writer. Uh originally because

1:13:15 I was perusing a 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 gonna be really embarrassing. Or like sitting bowl. I assumed that Seneca was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good Probably actually I I assumed he was a Native American elder for a probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman. I was like, man, first, you gotta do your homework, pal. Gotta dig in. And then at that point is when I really

1:13:53 sort of jumped off the cliff into a lot of his writings. Which I've I still to this day revisit on an almost uh revisited the shortness of light. Which is perhaps the best Manifesto and I had hate this modern word sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally. So the best Manifesto for our

1:14:15 curring struggle with this very notion of productivity versus presence and How much are we really mistaking the doing for the being? It's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago. Before there was internet, before there was the things we call distractions today and and yet he writes about the exact same things just in a different form.

1:14:37 Yeah. The exact same things. And w the way that uh if I'm trying to use Seneca as a gateway drug into philosophy, I I won't use the P word first of all with most people because philosophy I think it calls to mind for a lot of people the Haughty pompous. college student in

1:14:53 Goodwill hunting in the bar scene, who's like r reciting, you know, Shakespeare without giving Any type of completely disagree. No I actually I I agree with the notion that those are 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.

1:15:18 The other thing else that we take away from anything Is a set of Philosophies, essentially. I agree. No, I totally agree. So but I usually if I'm gonna lead people there.

1:15:29 I try to Lure them. Lure them in with with Seneca because I think he's 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 who have been translated from Greek Most of his writing, I believe, is translated from Latin, which tends to be just an easier jump from English, so it's very easy to read and I 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

1:15:56 These Roman names like Lucilius and so on with like Bob and Jane or you know, pick your contemporary name. of choice and they're all as relevant now as they were then. I'm gonna come back to the performance versus presence, which I think of

1:16:13 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

1:16:25 No taking. So you're using the Kindle app, you're taking highlights. Where do you go from there? What does the sort of workflow look like from there and are there any particular types of software or apps or anything like that that you use Often.

1:16:39 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

1:16:56 Tools today per people could do serious heavy reading. There just isn't anything that I know. And so what I do is I highlight in the Kindle app and the iPad. And then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your kindle notes and highlights.

1:17:12 On the desktop, on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page. And I pay them into an Evernote file. to sort of just have all of all of my notes in a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also Take a screen grab of a specific

1:17:29 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

1:17:42 when I search within it, it's also gonna search the text in that image. I don't have to wait until I finish the book and explore all my notes and And also it's 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.

1:17:59 They paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting, so it tabulates each next note indented. to the right. So it's sort of this long cascading thing that shifts more and more to the right. It's horrible. It's like an email thread. It's like an email thread except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all, you know, and so if you wanna go fix it, you have to do it manually. within Evernote and you know, I on the Berner Hertzog book, for example, which is six hundred pages. I have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that that it's just like unreadable. So Hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know.

1:18:41 Got it. Okay, so let me this may or may not help. For me it was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote because I I mean I'm I'm looking at this list of questions and I'm not reading entirely on script, but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now, and one of the things I realized about formatting And transposing things from say you know, my Kindle page if you log into your Amazon account through Kindle.amazon.com or

1:19:08 copying 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 ten. The problem with that, I did try that once, but When you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So On every highlighted passage I also have my own note. I see. Got it. Plus, you know, Amazon's own

1:19:36 Add note. Read. Read in this location. Delete note. Until it all merges it and becomes just hideous. God, you know, I wonder 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 codec. Yeah, it's true though there's There's gotta 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

1:20:12 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 scholarshi or like a grand for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me. That's a great idea. I mean I I'm still sort of Contemplating that. Okay. Well we'll we'll talk about that separately. I think that's something that we could absolutely explore, and for all of you.

1:20:42 programmers, coders out there, please take a look. This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights. I've run into this. You mentioned the Werner Herzog book and having, you know, thousands of of highlights. Have you run into instances where You'll read an entire book, you're super impressed.

1:21:02 Or not, but you regardless, you have hundreds of highlights. And you go to look at those highlights and you're restricted to only seeing the Like Two hundred highlights, eighty one available or something like that. Right. So how often does that happen to you? Because that's happened to me

1:21:19 where I've taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff and then I'm only able to see twenty five percent. 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 uh digital for listeners who Don't like acronyms. Digital rights management. That is fairly new, so

1:21:44 That is the case with more recently published books. But if you read, you know, the digitized version of, say, you know, Alan Watts, it was published. originally forty eight years ago. There's no such problem unless the publisher now is like reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But Because I rate so Much.

1:22:04 Less out of sort of newly published material, I don't run into it often. But you know, there is a way to very laboriously deal with it, which is You can still open that passage in your Kindle app. Um

1:22:18 Desktop so Kindle for Mac for me. And it will let you highlight and copy Those passages. Paste them into your Evernote in between the mything ports, but it's obviously completely not conducive. I have done that and it's so horrible because you you also get the like excerpt it from like three lines for everyone. So just publishers, if you're listening to this You are making it harder for people

1:22:44 Like Maria, who have seven million unique Per month. Two I share your stuff. So please up your threshold. Do you have

1:22:53 Anybody helping you with brain pickings or is it just you? The actual reading and writing obviously is just me, uh but as of About Ten months ago, I have an assistant, Lisa, who's absolutely wonderful, and she just helps me with Admin.

1:23:09 stuff that have to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel Yeah. weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down or And as you know, I'm sure

1:23:25 When you get to a point where the demands are just And comparable with what you can even look at. Then you kinda need to have help. in order not to either go insane or or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. Oh, and I also have a copy editor.

1:23:43 This wonderful older lady I hired to do my proofreading. She's great. I am That's all I can say. I think proof reading 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 we made in the first place. Uh the majority of them. And people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you

1:24:10 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 Bradman and my copy editor for just proofing. What platform is On at the moment? What is it?

1:24:31 What's the the technology behind it? Is it I I know that uh I've heard you mention WordPress before. Is it on is it still on WordPress? It is on WordPress. I was gonna make a joke on her about how the technology is called Corpus Colossum, but uh the actual technology is Yeah. Very Sam Harris.

1:24:51 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 Proof read it. And then schedule or publish? What's the process? No, it's it's a very, again, subversive hacked together process, which is

1:25:13 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. Not very

1:25:28 I would say tech savvy. I mean I'm sure she's a wonderful learners who 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 ha I hate it actually.

1:25:43 I think it's just easier to do it via email because then she can like highlight the word and sometimes she would make suggestions that are more stylistic and I would like to have the final say in those'cause very often I wanna keep it the way that I have it because A boist? So I find email works just fine. Got it.

1:26:02 Okay, no, I'm I'm always fascinated because I I will use while when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also in WordPress, I would use the share a draft. Plugin. to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP. It has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool. Oh that's cool. I should look into that. I think that's what I have too, the Workpress VIP the press. I don't even know what the that function is. I I'm kind of I mean for somebody who writes On the web, I'm I don't really

1:26:39 Yeah, I sometimes only learn about things through friends. Well, I think yeah, that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff. And the Other option that I've used quite a lot. is and as much as I hate Word, and I really do I love the track changes feature and I just find it more user friendly for a lot of folks than having them use something that's

1:27:01 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 in what Kai my appropriator actually asked originally, but I do not own Microsoft products on principle and I just am not gonna don't deal with it.

1:27:19 Got it. Okay, I know that makes sense. And your assistant, what was the defining moment, the straw that broke the camel's back, when you were like, you know what? Like what was the day where you're just like Fucking enough. of this. Like I need to get somebody Stat. I mean when did you actually make the decision?

1:27:36 It wasn't so much that I made the decision and the decision was very strongly, lovingly but strongly sort of pushed on me. By my partner who one day said, You are using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not and'cause I was really Stressing to a point of

1:27:54 just driving myself crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm always have been very independent. I moved away from my parents' house when I was eighteen, paid my way through school, lived always by myself and I just had to Emerson like you know, sense of self sufficiency and self reliance that to a point of pathology where it was to my own detriment. And the notion of outsourcing

1:28:19 Felt to me on some level. Almost like an admission of weakness? Sure. It's ridiculous to think that's true for you. I know. And 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 just sort of

1:28:38 Divvy up control according to a hierarchy of priority. But on some sort of psycho emotional level it is just Da. to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course.

1:28:50 It's interesting. In terms of how brain pickings evolve, which has always been very organic So the sort of Eight year Thing that has happened.

1:29:01 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 sh to sort of Five lengths with a little paragraph about each about why this thing is interesting and important. And then it was not a little paragraph, but a little like one page piece. And then

1:29:21 It became Not five things every Friday but three things. Every day of the week. Pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know. And

1:29:30 I foolishly and naively sort of operational framework. Despite the enormous swelling of of just the volume of the writing.

1:29:43 And that's unreasonable. It's completely unreasonable. So At one point last fall, as the sort of seven Birthday and bringing it is approaching. My partner was just like please like consider I'm always curious to ask how did you find

1:29:59 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 twenty years. She's just a wonderfully warm and just generous person, but also has

1:30:13 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 interests in the most magnanimous kind of way. Towards you but also the most warmly non no bullshit way outwardly towards the world demanding things from you. And having this buffer, it it's really, really

1:30:35 Great. How did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected? Uh, 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.

1:30:48 And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the the specifics because the way that I found one of my first assistants and we worked together for many years was any time 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

1:31:11 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. But what what was the The introduction was made by the person. So I had met her, I at least in my assistant, I'd met her just socially many times before. And so eventually when the time came for me to consider

1:31:36 We set up a meeting, we talked and she was really into it and she'd been reading brain pickings and I asked. Make sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate because she's also I mean, she is superwoman. Lisa's superwoman, she is The mother of two kids, one of whom is now her first year in high school and the other one his first year in college.

1:31:56 But she's very, like I said, very dogged, very sort of dedicated and she was like, I can do it. I'd like to do it, you know. Right. Let's roll. Onward.

1:32:05 So with Your assistant, if you were to do an eighty twenty analysis of You know, the twenty percent of tasks that take up eighty percent of her time What would those look like?

1:32:16 What is the vast majority of her time spent on? A lot of it is I guess coordinating travel and things, but I'm trying to really I mean I have this new ish commitment to really not do any Speaking it

1:32:30 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. Cause I usually donate my commission student in the local public library and whatnot, but With students, it is worth my time if I this should even

1:32:57 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

1:33:10 College. Request. 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 schedules and deadlines and advanced notice. And so Melissa is sort of mailing that. And another big port I should also mention that the

1:33:30 Evolution of what I've been able to delegate has sort of organically happened originally. I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it'cause I didn't know how to explain it to her to do and but it's 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.

1:33:58 And so I have her sort of export those names and emails for me and just Prepare envelopes and all those types of things that I could Not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing. Do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use other types of software? Oh, email. Email and text. Email and text.

1:34:16 So no project management software at this point, no sort of base camp or sauna or anything like that. That would make into like a some sort of commercial organization, you know, I'm I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things. No wild hypocrisy about audience. 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

1:34:45 A year and a half I Prioritize body weight stuff. Heavily, not pun intended. That was actually total inadvertent. This how language how we think in language. That's so funny. I prioritized body weight deaf, and so I do pull ups, push ups, and that sort of thing. It also depends on Where I

1:35:02 Do my work have 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.

1:35:14 I love it. But I'm only there a few days a week, so it just depends on where I do it and what I do. If you had to pick one Besides the elliptical, if you had to pick one bodyweight exercise to hold you over. Let's say you're traveling for a few months, you can only pick one body weight exercise. What would it be?

1:35:31 Well, it would be pull up, but you can't always find a place to do it. So I just do Usually elevated push ups. So my feet on a bench or bed or some like a step or something and just push ups. Cool. A great little hack for Pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted

1:35:53 Bent rose. You know what's actually very helpful for traveling is uh Plyometrics. Plyometrics and uh TRX is actually quite handy. There's a system. Not my thing. Yeah. It doesn't the thing is If I am forced by circumstances to do a work that is not my preference.

1:36:14 I very much like to be able to do something else while doing it, such as listening to podcasts, which is what I do while I do weeks at the gym anyway. And there are certain types of movements that it just a hassle to have the headphones and and it's just like not great. So I actually carry a weight and jump rope with me when I travel. In case there's nowhere to do sprints, which is my Plan B for a cardio.

1:36:39 And then plan C is just Jumping, skipping rope. You're intense. I love it. Every time I meet and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who At any point have lived in Bulgaria I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's nothing about them. I couldn't weights up when I was living in Bulgaria. No, exactly. It's kind of like uh

1:37:05 Oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Ricolo commercial. They're like, No, we don't talk about that stuff. There was yet is that guy your cousin? Yeah, right. Right. You must know. Like no, I actually don't. Like I know I went to the X, Y, and Z There are five thousand people.

1:37:20 Per year. Yeah, it's 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 date. They're in the UL. 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

1:37:44 Is became I do think we'll 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,'cause all feeds are reverse chronology, then you know, there's an implicit

1:38:06 hierarchy of importance to that. We think if it's not at the top, it's not important. And you know You would understand, you know, writing about Seneca It really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is, but I think because culture conditions us so much. People when they see a date stamp

1:38:22 They sort of think, Oh, this was like two years old. Oh and it's really, you know, two thousand years old. But a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference. So it I constantly get things, this is another thing that Lisa deals with, like requests from textbooks for citations or, you know, whatnot. And those people actually need the date. So I've made it so that If you actually look, it's kind of easy to to see, or I can just tell them when they write and ask me what the date is, look in the URL.

1:38:50 But it's just not one of those immediate things that slaps you over the head like a newspaper front page. Yeah. Definitely. I I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years. And if you go to any permalink, so 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

1:39:17 older material and I think some of my older stuff is I mean it depends on the person, obviously in the context, but it's an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate is to time stamp. 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 kinda feel Like her dog does. I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm 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.

1:39:49 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.

1:40:09 They'll do it via email. Behind their own name and not anonymously. And then I mean I did get a lot of a lot of Emails from readers. And those are valuable, you know.

1:40:20 But I don't really care for comments. Flip side of that is that Now that I have the Facebook page having something mysterious happened with the Brain Pickens Facebook page last fall work. It just started growing so fast. I've no idea why. You don't I was gonna ask you about that, because if you look at say that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kinda took off. Yeah, it was in about October of last year and it went from two hundred and fifty thousand to now

1:40:46 I think I don't know I think two point something million. Close to three, maybe. So more than tenfold in less than a year. I have no idea why. I've done nothing differently. I'm very I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I get a lot of emails from readers elsewhere in the world. Cool. actually use Facebook as their primary thing and they're such sweet notes, you know, people who just

1:41:07 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 it and I think it would be selfish of me to just Sort of disable Facebook because I hate it. But the the point of it is that you have comment on there.

1:41:24 And Lisa, my assistant, actually That's something I delegated her a few months ago. Just a completely Deal with them. I can't deal with them. And not for any other reason that I have complete

1:41:35 Allergy 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.

1:41:49 make really outrageously inaccurate comments, clearly not having read the piece. And This kind of Napped reaction. thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I can't deal with it. It just

1:42:03 It's like a psychic drain, like I can't even explain. It just I can't. So that would explain. That would answer one of my questions, which is in your header picture on Facebook. You have this should be a cardinal rule of the internet, end of being human. If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubers to comment on it. I was gonna I don't care if it sounds like Bipsy or anything You know, it's interesting because I think a lot about

1:42:29 criticism and the notion of criticism and why it's so hard for anybody. And I I don't think That people have a hard time with criticism. Because Another person

1:42:42 This agrees with or dislikes what they're saying. They really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood. The other person does not understand Who they are. Or what they stand for in the world? And ninety nine percent of the time

1:42:55 And you actually touch on this in your conversation with Sam Harris, where you say that his ideas are not as controversial Uh People think when they don't actually understand what they are. Right. But The mean source of anguish is not being seen for who you are, not being understood.

1:43:11 And this kind of reactive culture where people comment Without taking the care to understand what you're expressing, Clear and what you stand for. It is so toxic. It is 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

1:43:35 There's no humanity, there's no patience, there's no thinking in them. So you know, an anybody who Right online. I think feel similarly that this is kind of My home and it's

1:43:46 Then they're not welcome there, sir. Yeah. No, I I actually use the exact same analogy. I say, look, I view my especially th on my blog, I view the comments as my living room. And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like put your feet up on my table with your shoes on, you're not gonna be invited back. You're gone, you know. So is your assistant's job as it relates to Facebook then primarily calling the herd and just removing the idiots or What are other instructions, if any? Are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that she responds to? No. I don't really

1:44:19 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 the human dialogue, which I do. But I don't really care about, you know, the comments on Facebook. I just don't want them depressing me when I go on the page'cause I put my own things on there. At least she doesn't put the actual postings.

1:44:41 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 I am A cautious one sometimes, but an optimist about their so called human condition and Anybody who craps on that

1:45:01 Without having even given a chance to the thoughts that speak to those ideals, which is what my articles are recorded. I will want them gone, you know, and So her instructions are just, you know, ban people who are

1:45:14 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 vario scandalists or not even scandalists, sort of Contrary and sensationalist take on it. clearly not understanding the nuance because I mean a culture of news is

1:45:37 I say off in a culture without nuance. Yeah. So that that's basically it. Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her Taps. Exasperation when people was impatient. No, and I you know, I really respect that because

1:45:54 Another reason that I read brain pickings as opposed to other sites, and I feel comfortable going there is that I feel it is sort of a stronghold of Positivity and optimism. In a lot of respects. So Kudos. Uh the

1:46:10 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. If that's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media? I use buffer for um Twitter and I use just

1:46:28 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 I sell

1:46:44 'Cause 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 into what I do

1:47:04 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 I think that While it's fine to write for yourself.

1:47:18 If you keep the value of what you write. to yourself when it could benefit a lot of other people, then I think that's actually It could be viewed as a selfish act. So the I think 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

1:47:39 A lot of these concepts. Well, I would argue that the benefit, the value 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

1:47:55 filter bubble, right? So sort of A lot of the people that 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 Then the Seneca, the shortness of life piece.

1:48:11 really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy, never been interested in it, never looked for it, but it just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life. It gives you pause to hear that from people. Definitely. Agreed.

1:48:26 On email. If you go to your contact page, you recommend email charter. And I'm very curious to hear If people actually follow

1:48:37 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 and I mean, but the majority of them do, you know. Some people who reach out with the intention of self promoting. There's usually, you know, laziness to people who self promote

1:48:56 For the sake thereof. Yeah. So they don't they don't usually Follow but people who actually care to have a conversation and to engage are very courteous and very sort of mindful of

1:49:09 what I've asked, except for publicists who are never Yeah, right. Well I suppose uh if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template. Dear blogger. Oh yeah, I love that the dear blogger. Yeah. Or you know what I get very often, which I think is actually hilarious. People who don't even bother to read the name of the site, so they address me dear Brian. The pinnacle of this was when last year at one point

1:49:35 I open my physical mailbox in my building, my home. And I found this bundle from the USB S. But like with an elastic band around it of of male. For somebody named Brian Pick him.

1:49:50 Who lives in Long Beach CA or used to, I guess. Yeah. And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me because I guess the guy either moved and the USPS like somehow Look things up. I don't know if you know it was such Uh a sort of mystery and and metaphor for what I deal with online. So I used to have a company ages ago called Brain Quicken and I got a

1:50:14 telemarketing call one evening 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. Chicken. Uh I was like, Uh, no and take me off your list. Goodbye. So on the email and pitching side of things or just on the pitching side of things.

1:50:36 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 maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is, like not everyone is

1:50:57 able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably if I get ten 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 the deal

1:51:15 First and foremost. By Controlling not the outcome but the Cause which is your Circle of

1:51:22 Friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround myself with and I'm I'd 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

1:51:37 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 to

1:51:51 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. Or 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 I think we've become a centripetal force for

1:52:09 the kinds of people we want to be and surround ourselves with those types of people. William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal microculture. And even when you said early on the kinship of spirits, I think that's so important So which is a long winded way to say that When and if Those Inner circle people put a book out.

1:52:28 It's a guarantee that I will like it because it's who they are. And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean the book that we started with the Gratch 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 gonna support her work, but not because I'm being

1:52:50 nepotistic about it, but because That's the pre requirement that I and moved by her work and respect it and and love it and that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle I think acquaintances no

1:53:03 That There's no such expectation and When I do get such requests, it's a matter of well Did the person do their homework in knowing what I actually think and write about? 'Cause very often and I'm sure you get that too. You get pitched tank that are just so

1:53:18 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. Yeah. But guilt, it's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige and they're both

1:53:43 horrible reasons to do things. So often we would agree as humans, not just you and me or just anybody, would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some in some way, you know? And Equally avoid things because of the guilt thing, or do things because of the guilt thing, but Sort of the s whole Buddha thing about Aversion of you know avoidance and aversion and

1:54:05 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 approval or a claim which is what doing things for prestige is. I think either of those

1:54:23 Or really bad reasons to do things and yet they motivate us a lot, or 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 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 wanna ask and I know we don't have too much time left, so hopefully sometime someday we can do a a follow up part two. I think that'd be a blast. I'll bring some all back if you actually drink wine. So I can I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the donations, I'm very fascinated by

1:54:58 the ad free donation approach. And Just to keep it simple. If you had to choose say twenty percent of the options you're currently offering.

1:55:10 Which would you choose and why? In other words, you have So people can make a a one time single contribution. Or they can become A member. And donate.

1:55:20 You know, seven, three, ten, or twenty five dollars a month. what I'm trying to ask without being improprietyus or making you feel uncomfortable is What is working best? When you're asking people for donations, you know, assuming that it's working.

1:55:35 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? Well, I will preface this with a caveat that I use PayPal for donations. And I can for the life of me figure out how to actually look at the data and get any sort of real reason all that it's so anticlated, their export tools and such and I'm not

1:56:01 that interested, I would spy for you 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 is also the reason why I don't have an ad suppled 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.

1:56:25 Just I don't want to you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just Pull 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

1:56:37 Originally My sense was that the one time donation Accounted for much more. But I'd never actually analyze it. I see the alerts that

1:56:48 come from PayPal, and sometimes people would send really large one time donations, like things that are totally humbling and enormously generous. And I think those kind of You kind of weigh them. Somehow it's more than the cumulative sum of the smaller donations.

1:57:04 So I thought the one timers were much more. And And Pretty sure that Must have been the case earlier on. Right.

1:57:12 And I've had the recurring ones. I've had the one time donationers. For as long as I can remember. For as long as I basically needed to start making money for the site because by the way, running the site cost me Several times my rent, like all the costs associated.

1:57:27 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, or having tea and he said, Well, why don't you like push the recurring ones more?'Cause it's working really great for us And at that point I had the option, but it was buried somewhere on my

1:57:52 donation about page or something. And so like okay. So I put it in the sidebar. And that was I wanna say maybe twenty eleven. 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.

1:58:11 And I actually had Lisa pull all the excel and whatnot, and then I did the tally to see And to my surprise, the recurring ones, which are very small individual amounts. Actually we're two to one ratio to the one time donation. Wow. And I don't know at what point it tip over. But I think because of the scale?

1:58:32 And just how many people have these tiny, tiny donations that they contribute every month. I mean, that's such an act of commitment and it's so generous, you know, that They add up and My guess is that as time goes on,'cause the recurring ones have only been available for the last like Two and a half three years, whatever.

1:58:50 They would become by far the larger Shooter. Financial support. compared to those string of ones.

1:58:57 Sure, no, that makes sense. If you had to choose And of course this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the drop down, so you have seven Dollars a month, three dollars, ten dollars, twenty five. If you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose? Oh, I have no idea. I'm probably

1:59:14 just the mathematical logical choice, the two middle is it the three and ten. Okay. No, just very curious about this kind of thing. I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content and I can't emphasize strongly enough what you just said, which is

1:59:32 You base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader in the case of something with text. It doesn't have to be super complicated. It doesn't have to be doing Tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself, would this annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it. Would I love this? If so, try it out. Every decision too has been that way. And actually in the last couple of years I've been Getting really annoyed. I mean, rain picking is a pretty sort of low-fly site, as you can see it. Just very super simple, basic. But I've been getting annoyed that.

2:00:05 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 Belski, who runs Behan, she's a great guy and he's been sort of a very generous donor, just supporting and And one time. He pulls me aside. That was like I think in February or March and she's like You know how much I love brain thinking, but like

2:00:27 The site sucks. Like he didn't say it in that way, but he was super sweet about it and like he offered to connect me with this guy that he knew. that I could hire to do a responsive design. And I always have this resistance to making these sort of technological improvements. Because then I feel like I don't wanna be a media company, like I don't wanna be a Buzz feed. But

2:00:47 At the end of the day, I as a reader uh and as a sort of engager with that experience with being annoyed by myself. So now I'm in the middle of releasing like a sinful responsive site that is actually Easy to read on your phone. And so Yeah. It's it's Despair and frustration prevail again in innovation. Yeah, it's it's so so worth it. It took me let's see, it only took me three

2:01:13 Oh God, seven years to get a uh a mobile version of the site ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago. So a better late than never, I suppose. Well Maria, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you taking the time. If someone were to

2:01:29 Want to explore Brain pickings. What are a few articles you might suggest that they start with? Or a few posts. Well, since we

2:01:37 Talk about it so much. The Seneca piece about the shortness of light. Fairly short. There's a piece I did a couple of years ago which was less about it was not about a specific book, just sort of things that I've been thinking back a long time. This disconnect between purpose and prestige and why we do things, right?

2:01:56 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 and living.

2:02:18 Which is a great article and I didn't want to replicate everything in here, so I sort of uh bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit, but Just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I just want to quote Paul Graham here. Which you included, which is prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. In closing, is there any interject and say

2:02:50 Any Alan Watts piece. Not because my writing about it is So greater 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 highly recommend any of those articles. All right, brainpickings dot org is the site, guys. Check it out.

2:03:08 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.

2:03:21 Just I guess a comment and then and a hope, which is that Thank you so much. Not just for having me, but for having this show and for doing everything that you do. And I really hope we have more people who operate out of such A place of just I guess for lack of better word, idealism and and conviction and

2:03:40 Thank you for setting an example that way. Ah, 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

2:03:55 Add repetitions to your pull ups. We will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

2:04:22 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. Albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmas, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

2:05:13 This episode is brought to you by Mementis. Mementus offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing the products for months now. And I have a few That I use. constantly. One of the things I love about Mementos is that they offer many single ingredient and third party testing formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Mementus Mag38 L theanine and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Mementus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. I've also been using Mementus Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as

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