#760: Robert Rodriguez and Susan Cain

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/4cbcba86d0519869

I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that. Or
creepier still if you're at home and this has happened to me. I search for something or I type in a UL
Incorrect, and then a screen for ATT pops up.
And it says, you might be searching for this. How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't love it. And
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No
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.
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth 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 favourites.
From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.
I could not be more excited.
To give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these
The Super Combo episodes.
Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.
But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider
Stars.
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
Perhaps
They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
And for the bios of all guests.
You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash.
combo.
And now, without further ado.
Please enjoy.
And thank you.
For listening.
First up
Robert Rodriguez.
Screenwriter, producer, and director of Desperado
From dusk till dawn.
The Spy Kids franchise.
Once upon a time in Mexico
Frank Miller's Sin City.
Machete
And we can be heroes.
and founder of L Ray Network.
You can find Robert on Twitter and Instagram at
At Rodriguez.
How do you use journaling? I started
you know, with the word processing way back, you know, when I first started filmmaking the first
When I sold El Mariachi and Columbia hired me.
First thing I asked for was an Apple laptop computer, which was the very first one that came out. They nobody knew what it was.
I was the only one on the plane with one.
I was writing my screenplays and then I would continue my journal, which I'd started
By handwriting it.
It really started.
I think in college my dad gave me a day planner. One of those day planners.
And I started using it and I would write the things you were gonna do on the left side and then you would write what you ended up doing that day on the right.
And even though I was in college, I would try to push myself pretty hard. I would look and I'd go, Wow, I didn't have very much to write about myself.
At the end of that day. I'm gonna have to give myself
More things on the left, so I have more to write stuff on the right.
It really made you reflect on your day and realize I didn't I didn't do much today.
And so those got really full and I became a filmmaker right away. A mariachi got made.
And then during the process of El Mariachi, I remember
Keeping a really dense journal.
Because it was an experiment. It was really a test film. And that was during all parts of the process. Because I thought if I'm gonna go take on this endeavor, I know a lot of things aren't gonna work out. It's my first feature film. No one's intended to see it. It's really a learning experience.
I'm just gonna go make it and I'm gonna be able to look back on my journal and see where I messed up.
It's really gonna be a document.
So I wouldn't make that mistake again. I could go back and track.
Why did the exposure not work? And I'd be able to go back and go, Oh, I didn't do this and I didn't do that.
It was really gonna be a record of failure rather than a
Document of success in any way.
It was really about
recording a methodology for a project, a specific project. And as the process went on, right away as I started editing it, I kept track of that.
I sold it pretty quickly.
And then I was in Hollywood and I was like now I really got something to write about. I was writing down all the weird stuff that was happening. Finally I decided to put out a book on just the making of Mariachi and I kept journaling from then on. Everything which was Rebel Without a Crew. Rebel Without a Crew.
And I would find that you meet the same people over and over again. Like I wrote down very specifics of people that I would meet casually in Hollywood, knowing we would run into each other again and they end up being
Great collaborators ten years later, you know, are showing up in things. And I'd be able to go back and read'em stuff from the early days and I would blow them away. So when you write these down, for instance I'll go in a computer so I can find them and I do it by year. So do you do it by hand and then input it into a computer? No, I do them all on the computer. So I have a little alarm that goes off at midnight to make sure because around midnight's usually a good time.
And I'll write something down.'Cause I found that even when I just wrote some items down, I could go back and fill'em in later'cause you would remember
And what always would shock me, what kept it going, is when I would go back and review the journals at how many life changing things happen like within a weekend.
Or things that you thought were spread out over two years were actually
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and that Monday. I mean so many occur occurrences happen.
In chunks.
That blow you away. Things that kinda define you. And do you use a word? Do you use a different application? How do you catch it? I always just used Word because that was the first thing I had on App my Apple laptop. There are about a thousand
Sometimes a thousand, two thousand pages per year.
Wow. Of journals and trees. A few days uh or I'm sorry, a few pages.
Per night on average. Yeah. Two pages per hour. Sometimes. Some some hardly anything. Some things are bigger. And sometimes it's a cheek. Sometimes I'll clip like reviews or conversations I had that have been written down somewhere else and I'll throw them in there too.
Everything goes the right in the in the right date.
And so I can search by date and I can kinda cross reference stuff.
Which is
I would just say for anyone who's a parent, it's a must. It's a must'cause your children
And you forget everything.
You know, within a few years they'll forget things that you think they should remember for the rest of their lives. They'll only remember it if it's reinforced.
And I'm and I'm a real family man, so I really love every birthday.
I'll go tell my kids again.'Cause they forget by the next year.
What their first years were like.'Cause I'll just read those journal entries.
It blows them away. You know, or they'll say
Hey.
We should go camping again. I go, Camping? Oh yeah, remember that time?
We went camping and I put the tent in the back yard and it had electricity going through. We had fans were watching Johnny Quest and we were playing
I must have.

And it must have video, so I would go
Year by year I just search camping, camping, camping. Oh.
May fourth, nineteen ninety nine.
We went camping.
Oh, it's on tape twenty five of this particular tape. I'd go find the tape and show it to them.
I tried to show him the tape.
They didn't have to go camping again. They just relived it. They relived it and it was better than we even remembered.
So
Capsulating stuff like that was just really important. It reminds me of uh something I don't think I've ever talked about, but my
Mom, when I was fifteen, I spent a year abroad in Japan. It was my first time overseas and I was in a Japanese school.
the only, you know, where's Waldo American kid in the entire yeah, I think it was five thousand student school.
Japanese family and of course I assumed at the time I was gonna remember everything that happened.
But my mom, to her credit.
Every time we had a phone call, we'd get off the phone.
And write down what I had said.
Wow. And so she has this record of my experience in Japan that I have no record of, and of course I don't remember any of it without that kind of cueing. Yeah.
I think part of that came through I read him uh a diary my mom tried to keep.
When we're really little.
And it had
Very few entries, but one of the most defining moments when she pushed me into a pool.
'Cause I wouldn't go s jump in. She knew I just needed to push and I felt totally betrayed.
Angry with it.
It was in there, but it had her side of the story, and of course it was correct. But I wish she had written more. So I thought I'm gonna make sure I write.
And now it's become an addiction and I and it's just so necessary. I mean you ask your girlfriend or your wife.
What did we do last year on your birthday? They won't remember.
A year goes by, you will not remember the details.
You go back and you see the journals.
It's even better the second time you lived it again and you realize the importance of it. And when you meet someone
you think might be a recurring figure in your life, or you meet someone who ends up being a teacher of some type. Mm-hmm.
How often do you go back and review the notes or do you is it really
Just in time information, not just in case. So when you
when you realize, oh my God, I'm gonna be meeting, say, Francis Ford Coppola for the second time, should probably go back and look at what happened in the first meeting, or is it something that you proactively review?
It's only a need to know.
'Cause there's so many things you mean you're you're really
I'd tell myself I want to be the guy looking through the windshield, not the rear view mirror. But sometimes you can see better through the windshield if you look through the rear view mirror.
Look at some of this stuff that's gone on.
And seeing kind of makes sense of where your relationships are going or what you've learned.
And it pulls me away some time. I'll just go ahead and and look somebody up, you know, that I'm about to meet with.
I just met with Jim Cameron when we uh always talk like four hours. We hadn't seen each other in a few years.
And they looked up old stuff and I was like, Oh my God, do you remember when we did this? This'cause I met him twenty years ago.
And we've been friends over the years and he totally forgot when I went and showed him
Desperado.
for the first time before it came out. Just to see what he thought.
He was watched it in his screen room and he gave me two little manuscripts. Here, while while I watch your movie, go read

treatments. One of them was for Spider Man and one of them was for Avatar. This was in nineteen ninety
Four.
Wow. That's how long ago he had that. And how much that was going in his head. And I thought, Wow.

That was that visionary and you had that long waiting for the technology to come.
Those kind of things.
Made you realise.
Some of these projects I've had for ten years, I should go re bring'em back up, I wonder. And I have. I have since then.
Best it off something that I'd had.
Fifteen years.
And
Sold it and uh now I've just finished a screenplay for it. So you mentioned Jim Cameron.
I had
An opportunity.
to I met him very briefly through the X Prize and Peter D Mandis and those guys.
And as part of the experience,'cause it was a fundraiser for the X Prize, we all got
staff or cruise shirts from Avatar.
Right. And the shirt said.
It said something along the lines of hope is not a strategy.
Failure's not an option.
Luck is not a factor. And
Jim is is known for being very demanding, not in a bad way.
But I thought that shirt was just it spoke volumes, I think, in in so many different ways about
sort of his process, his mentality.
How do you keep morale high?
When you're working with a crew.
And maybe like you said, you're doing like an exterior shot in Austin and people are just suffering, sweating, fatigue.
Do you have any
Tricks or
approaches that you use over and over again to keep kind of morale high and get the best out of people? I've worked with the same crew for or some of them for twenty years.
And so they kind of know already.
the philosophy I tend to have. And I've learned this not through filmmaking, but through other disciplines sometimes, working with painters and with sculptors and
Musician friends,'cause uh what I found that's kinda why I do so many different jobs, is because creativity is in job specific. I mean, if you know how to be creative, you can literally jump from job to job with no training.
And do them pretty well.
'Cause the technical part of any job is ten percent.
Ninety percent of that is creativity.
If you already know how to be creative, you've kind of got the battle, you know, half B, which is you don't need to know.
You don't need to know what note specifically you're gonna play when you get on stage and do your solo.
Everybody will go, What did you just play? And you're gonna go, I don't know.
Yes, I mean Vaughn that I know what you're playing just now.
I don't even know what I played.
It's like well it was fantastic. Did anybody tape it? No, that's another one. It goes off into the air.
You know, ask ask any of the greats, you know, painters. I studied under a painter.
Sebastian Kruger went all the way to Germany to to watch him paint.
To figure out his trick. How does he do it? Because I tried to do what he did and it was looked like garbage. He must have a special brush.
Must have special paint and a special technique.
And I go no, you're just doing
Start with a mid tones.
Knocking into my lights.
A little bit on the chin, then he goes to the eye and I'm like, How do you know where to go next? He goes, Oh, I never know. It's different every time.
That drives me bonkers. What do you mean? So how come I can't do that?
And I go sit down and suddenly I could do it.
Blows you away.
So I take those lessons back and I teach my actors that. I teach my crew that. So just to But you don't need to know. Yeah, so since sorry to pause, but this is so fascinating to me.
So what clicked? What was the realization when you sat down and so you get it in your own way, thinking that you needed to know something.
A trick or a
process before it would flow. If you got out of the way, it would just flow.
What gives you permission to let it foe sometimes if you take four years of schooling or you study under somebody then
You've suddenly given your permission to let it flow.
And I know you're a guy who likes to take a shortcut in. Here's the shortcut. Just get out of your own way. Right.
You're just opening it up.
the pipe and that creativity flow through. And as soon as your ego gets in the way and you go, Oh, but I don't know if I know what to do next.
You've already put I in front of it and you've already blocked it a little bit.
I did it once, but I don't know if I can do it again. It was never you.
The best.
You can be it's just to get out of the way so it comes through.
So when an actor comes to me or a crew member goes, I I'm not sure I know how to play this part or I'm not sure I know
That's beautiful.'Cause the other half's gonna show up.
We're there. They say knowing's half the battle. I think the most important part is the other half. Not knowing.
Not knowing what's gonna happen, but you trust that it'll be there.
When you put the brush up to the canvas, it's gonna know where to go.
And the
further you're out of the way of it, it'll just happen. So the trust comes first.
Trust comes first. You have to trust first and then it'll happen. And I always point it out when it does.

Point it out. You'll see it and I'll point it out when it's just gonna fall on your lap, or I'll just call upon you to come up with something and you will.
And I'm gonna point out'cause that's the magic. You're just gonna be open to it. It's all attitude.
There's nothing wrong that could ever happen.
I remember on From Dust till Dawn the film.
The uh special effects guys.
Put too much fire in the explosion. And the actors come running out of the building
And the it's in the movie, you see the building blow up the bar at the end.
And the fireball, if you were to continue, but I cut away, it just kept going and engulfed the whole set.
And that was the first shot. We still needed lots of other stuff to shoot with it.
Everyone else is freaking out. The production designers crying, that was all their work. And uh me and my assistant director came over and he goes.
You think what I'm thinking? Oh yeah, this it looks good the way it is. It's all charred.
Let's just keep shooting.
And we'll do the repair, you know, a little repair that needs to be done for next week and we'll shoot that exterior next week. But let's just shoot. Let's just keep shooting. Sometimes you use those gifts.
'Cause nothing ever goes according to plan. And sometimes when I hear, you know, new filmmakers talk, they talk all down about their film and oh well nothing worked and it was a disappointment. It's like oh they don't realize it. That's the job. The job is that nothing is gonna work at all.
And you go, well, how can I turn that in a way?
to turn it into a positive and I get something much better.
That if I had all the time and money in the world.
Yeah. And I love those experiences so much that I would purposely
And I talked to Michael Mann about this in the Michael Mann director's chair,'cause uh we talked about Manhunter once years ago.
And he retold me the story.
And he didn't have it money to he'd fired the effects crew. It
Some of the
really cool staccato editing was really to cover up the fact that they didn't have effects and I didn't know that. I always thought it was a stylistic choice. He goes No'cause we didn't have any money or time and I had to c I was cut it in myself and I was throwing ketchup on the guy in between and I bit an edit. I was like oh my God, I thought that was brilliant stylistic choice. No
I said, I'm gonna do that for all my movies now. I want all of them to not have enough money, not enough time.
So that we're forced to be more creative.'Cause that's gonna give it something to spark.
That you can't manufacture.
And people will tap in it or they'll go, I don't know why I like this movie. It's kind of a weird movie, but there's something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again because it's got a life to it.
Sometimes art is should be imperfect in a way.
The point you made
Just a minute ago about creativity.
transferring from one area to the next to seemingly unrelated
skills and areas I think is really important. And I
cannot recommend highly enough that people check out the director's chair. And one of the one of the terms that jumped out, which you kind of mentioned
In your last example was the Gremlins, right? And the Gremlins that you kinda turn to how do you embrace the Gremlins and turn them to your advantage and the you know the example of the ending of Back to the Future.
And how like the church tower and all of that was because the studios
just refused to finance this more kind of spectacular ending. Things that you would think that planned for for years were created at the last moment. And you I couldn't believe that myself.
That's why I enjoyed doing those interviews. I truly want to know.
These things'cause they still blow me away. The creative process blow me away.
And it applies to so much that even if you're not a director or a filmmaker, you watch that.
And you see people talking about the create
And you see how it applies to the case.
So anything that you do. How you raise your children, how you cook food.
How you run a business, you know, creativity is so much a part of that.
And when people say, Oh, you do so many things, you you're a musician, you're a painter, you you know, you edit, you're the composer, you're the cinematographer, you're the editor, you're saying you do so many different things go, No, I I only do one thing.
I live a creative life.
When you put creativity in everything.
Everything becomes available to you. Anything that has creative aspect.
is suddenly yours to go and do. And there's no separation between work and play. I mean I I
Work, quote unquote.
In my house. I mean that's why I I write my scripts, come up with my ideas while I'm playing with my kids.
While I'm cooking them a meal, which is a creative exercise art you can eat in itself.
And you go upstairs and do some editing.
Yeah, it has seen you, I can already hear the kind of the music for I'll walk over to this room and I'll do music for it. I mean then you go, Mm and I'm not sure how the character
I'm gonna get into this character said, maybe I'll paint him first.
And to kinda see visually what he looks like, or musically what he sounds like.
And you can work completely nonlinear that way because you realize
I can do anything I want because everything can be creative, even the business call.
Suddenly you go, this is kind of out of my league, but
May add my creativity to it and maybe that'll solve something no one else will be able to solve.
And sure enough, you can always rely on creativity.
to sort of win the day in in a lot of areas.
El Mariachi.
I've heard a couple of different versions of this.
financing, but I'd love to know how you
Financed it because
I've heard experimental medical procedures.
I've heard selling your sort of body to science.
How was that financed?
Yeah, that's one of the strangest things. The legend kept growing around. And it's one of the few times you'll hear a legend where it was all literally true. I mean it was uh
It was as crazy as it sounded, but back then, you know, I mean I was from a family of ten kids. There was no borrowing from mom and dad to go make a movie. That was on me.
I was already paying my way through school and I already had two jobs.
I had a job as a cartoonist, I had a job working at the university and
Barely making rent and tuition.
So to go make a movie
Even though you know people would say, Oh, seven thousand, that's so cheap for a sixteen millimeter movie. Oh, yeah, you got seven thousand dollars sticking out of your pocket.
Who has that?
So uh you had to kinda take down a score. And the only way you could actually go do a big number
was to go to this, uh it was one of the biggest universities in the country at the time.
They had this thing called Pharmaco, which was a medical research facility. And it's only like a fourth stage where it's already been tested many times and this is the final before they get F D replacing getting. They're not like, you know, mixing a couple of things together and giving it to you and saying, Okay, let's see if it works. They're really kinda seeing
But they need healthy young specimens between the ages of eighteen and twenty four.
And so that's college students and they all need money. So you go in for a weekend and make five hundred bucks. But you become a pin cushion.
I would go in there for the longer ones, there were like a month.
Where you would be uh paid for your time rather than your pain.
And I would write scripts while I was in there.
Two thousand.
three thousand dollars real in a month. Real money when you're not having to pay for food and rent and anything.
Now you have to eat. Oh, so you were housed there. You're housed there. Yeah, you're housed there and you can't leave and you gotta eat and shit and pee at a certain thing. Because you're they're covering some of your
What would otherwise be expenses. Mm.
It was a great deal. And so I did a couple of those and
One of them was a drug that's on the market, lipator, the the cholesterol lowering drug. That's the one I was on.
So I got to eat bacon and all kinds of stuff. I got to eat eat a you know high cholesterol diet.
I use that money to go and make the film because I I had an idea we could sell it for at least double of what we made it if we kept the
budget really low. I didn't know. So I I had to just make it for as little as possible. Most of that money went to just
the film stock. And then I really didn't think anyone was gonna see it.
It was really just a test film. That's why I did it in Spanish. I did it for the Spanish market.
I was already had a bunch of award winning short films.
But I needed to practice telling features. So I thought I'd just make a bunch of features for the Spanish market just to get some seasoning, do all the jobs myself.
'Cause I can afford a crew and that way I'll learn them all. If I can sell it for twice of what I put in
That's like the best film school. I'll learn every job. I'll do like two or three of these things, cut'em all together.
Take out the best portions and use it on my demo reel and then use the money that I make to go make a real first
Film.
English language, American and uh independent film.
The first one got released by Columbia Pictures and I was shocked.
How did that happen and
Who took a chance on you or how did you increase the odds of that happening? Because I guess it was Sundance? Is that was that the trigger? No, it was already bought by Sundance. It was already bought by Sundance. So how did that happen?
Crazy idea. I'd made this short film by myself. It was a wind up camera. It was eight minutes long.
It was called Bed Head. It's online.
And I utilized it to use slow motion and
All kinds of things that I couldn't use on a video camera. I really wanted to show off what I could do with that little camera.
I mean a piece of junk.
But it could do stuff it couldn't do with video.
Shot that.
Put it in festivals and won a bunch of festivals.
And I was like, wow, I did that all by myself with eight hundred dollars.
It's eight minutes.
If I did that times ten, I could do an eighty minute movie for eight thousand dollars or less,'cause it would be dialogue scenes. It wouldn't be wall to wall action like that short film.
I could pat it out, I could probably do it for five grand.
I felt like I was getting away with something, coming up with this idea and thinking, how come no one's ever done this before?
Let me go try it this summer. I mean, try it for the Spanish video market,'cause they make them for like thirty grand. But I'll guarantee no one sees it.

A Mariachi, which is basically
If you're going to the action section.
You won't buy a movie call or rent a movie called The Guitar Player.
That promises no action at all. But I just thought, you know, had a sense of humor and it thought let me make it kind of
Don't really want people to see it. I just want to be able to
Test out these ideas and see if it's possible.
Shot, shot, shot. Cut, cut it, cut it.
Went to sell it in LA'cause that's where the distributors were for those US distributed Spanish language movies.
'Cause you would just look at the video box and all the companies were like on Wilshire Boulevard, so I drove up here with my friend Carlos.
And
The in I had was there was gonna be a twenty fifth anniversary of the Texas Film Commission in Austin.
And a bunch of people from Hollywood that Governor Ann Richards was trying to invite in.
And I saw the list of people and one of the agents from I CM called Robert Newman was gonna be there.
And I thought maybe I can try and slip on my short films.
Well, the whole thing got canceled and fell apart.
So when I was in LA, I called I CM up cold. I looked him up in the phone book, called him up.
This was in nineteen ninety two. And asked for Robert Newman's office and they put me right through. He was a new agent there.
He didn't have any directors yet. I called up his uh assistant and I said, Hey, can I talk to Robert Newman? He was gonna
Come down to this twenty fifth anniversary thing. And they said Oh hooked up on the phone.
Said, yeah, what happened with that? I was already to come down. Go, wow, I don't know, but I was gonna show you my film and I'm here in town.
I wanted to drop off my award winning short film and a trailer for a movie I made for seven thousand dollars.
Okay, drop it off. I couldn't believe it. Dropped it off.
Yeah.
Call me back up the next day. Hey, the machine ate my tape. He actually watched it couldn't believe it. I went and made another tape, gave it to him.
Waited over the weekend and uh got the call and he says, I love the short film.
But I love the trailer.
The trailer for this movie.
The Mariachi movie. I mean it's like a world class trailer'cause I cut it
I know people come and watch the whole thing, so I was pr I'm a pretty good editor. I kept this really snazzy.
trailer that just made you want to watch the movie.
And he said, How much did it cost again? I said seven thousand. Well that's pretty good. Most trailers cost twenty or thirty.
No, no, the whole film costs seven thousand. Oh come on. No, okay. I shot it I shot a really little bunch, but I'm gonna
Can I come up and talk to you? So he had me come up and I told him.
I plan on making
Two or three of these, like a trilogy of these.
Guy with a guitar case.
As just a test.
And I'm wondering what else I should put on my demo tape because you know, my award winning short film's been doing well. I think I
It's all kinda like a dollars trilogy.
And I can get you work right now off of this.
Oh really? I send this to the studios.
Just put subtitles on it.
And I'll send it to him. So I subtitle it, send it.
He got me a two year deal right away at Columbia Pictures. Not that they even release Mariachi. Mariachi was just a calling card.
But it happened too so quick. I mean, I was really young. I was what, twenty two, twenty three.
I really thought I was gonna make some test films first and have a chance to come up with what my big idea was. I mean
That was in no rus. I really wanted to be prepared.
I really wanted to learn every job and really know what I was doing.
So this suddenly caught me by surprise.
'Cause now they're asking, Well you're a filmmaker now. And he even wrote me down as a writer director and I guess a writer director. Well, I guess I wrote the script. Never really thought of myself that way.
And I was suddenly this young kid plunged into this world and I suddenly had to come up with a bunch of original ideas because this was my shot. It was too quick. Yeah. I was not prepared. So I thought, Well look, you guys like the mariachi. Why don't we just remake that?
Remake it with like Antonio Benderas in Spain and
We'll just cast it up and just remain they said, Okay, that's a good idea.
But we want to test screen on Mariachi first to make sure people aren't think it's a downer ending when the girl gets killed. So they made a film print, they tested it.
People liked it the way it was. They decided to take it to festivals. And I completely protested.
It's like this is my practice film. No one was ever supposed to see this. Give me two thousand dollars. This is my debut ball. Don't put this out for the world to say it. If I knew people were gonna see, give me two thousand dollars, I'll go reshoot half of it, just knowing people were gonna see it as my first film.
And they said, No, you don't know what you have here. It's very special.
And they took it out and it went to Telly Ride, Toronto, and uh the the head of Sundance came to me at Toronto and said, Don't show it at any more festivals and you can bring it to Sundance and put it in competition'cause you know he knew it would do really well there.
And it once and I so I was already bought by Columbia.
So it's one of the few films usually that that's already had a distributor.
Yeah we took it in um
I had a great
little talk I would do before to set it up because I had to disclaim why it was the way it was. And say, Well when you see the Columbia logo come on in the front.
Logo probably costs more than the whole movie. With everything you watch after that, just know that I how I did it.
I wanted people to know how I did it. I really wanted to deconstruct how it was done. Cause I would have wanted to know that.

Coming from a family of ten kids, living in Texas, people constantly saying
You wanna be a filmmaker or you need to move to LA?
But you could stay where you are and come up with something that could be sold.
I wanted other s I just wanted to get on top of a mountain and tell everybody.
So I'm why I put out a book and that's why even before each screen I would explain.
How it was even possible, because I knew they would be wondering, because nobody had really ever done it.
It wasn't that it was impossible, just nobody had done it before. Nobody ever thought that way. People kind of forgot that that's how movies really started.
There's always like a couple of guys with a wind up camera and Buster Keaton in front.
It wasn't a business yet. When it became a business suddenly everyone had a job and you needed two hundred people.
Because it was now an industry.
That's not what the art form was originally. It was just
the manipulation of moving images. And you can do that with two people.
One person. That was a breakthrough idea. And so being able to tell them
I just took stock in what I had. My friend Carlos he's got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that'll be where the bad guy's at.
His cousin owns a bar.
The bars where it's gonna be the first initial shootouts where it'll be all the bad guys hang out.
His other cousin owns the bus line. Okay, there'll be an action scene with a bus.
At some point. There's a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus.
He's got a pit bull. Okay, he's in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he had found. Okay, the turtle is in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler and that'll suddenly raise production value. So you I wrote everything around what we had.
So you never had to go search and you never had to spend
Anything on the movie. The movie cost really nothing. It was really just the
The fact that I wanted to shoot it on film.
Instead of video so that it would look more expensive.
I try and tell people you don't made it for seventy thousand, try to sell it for like seventy thousand.
Said it ended up going to Columbia and getting released and
That story really
And we won Sundance.
The audience award.
My acceptance speech said.
You're gonna get a lot more entries next year when people find out that this is the one that won.
Movie made with no money, no crew. Everyone's gonna pick up a camera and start making their own movies.
And it's been flooded with entries since then.
It was really a real change in the paradigm.
And it was only out of necessity. It wasn't my big idea that it could be done. I really just thought I I don't want to take anyone with me. Even my best friend wanted to come help.
On my movie shoot from Mariachi.
'Cause I gotta go to Mexico and this camera I borrowed, you know, it's probably gonna break down.
The first day. I don't want to do it. I'll jinx it if I start bringing too many people down. I don't mind failing. I just don't like failing at a bunch of other in front of a bunch of other people. So where they go back and they say, Right to make a movie for no money. Idiot. And then stranded in Mexico. So I really didn't think it would work. And I was surprised. And that's the best I tell people is just be naive. Stay naive.
Throw it away.
Don't overthink it.
I didn't overthink it at all'cause I would have
treated it completely differently had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody.
And I thought I would go to a festival and I would submit it.
I would have spent ten times as much. I would have gone and borrowed money and done all
Instead it was like one take, one take, one take everything was one take, even if it didn't work.'Cause I had the film's so expensive.
So I would go and it was a noisy camera and it was a soundless camera.
I mean it would make so much noise you couldn't record sound.
So I have to record sound the way you're doing right now.
So it's shoot a take.
Put the camera away, get the sound out, put the mic up close. So it's for those people yeah, we we have two mics attached to a little recording device.
I'm gonna put the mic as close as you have it, so I got great sound, but it was out of sync.
But
You kinda talk in your own rhythm. So if you say, Hi, my name is you know Robert
Put the camera away. You okay, now do the audio. Hi, my name is Robert.
It kinds of scene,'cause I don't like
rubber lips. If you look at Mariachi.
It's all in sync except
Where it started to get out of sync, I cut away to the dog or I cut away to a close up. And it created this really snappy editing style. But it was really just to get it back in sync because I couldn't stand that.
But that was the whole idea, you know, it's like let me just try and do all these things myself and and see if we can put it together.
It reminds me of
Jack Ma. I mean it's very consistent among these people who seem to come out of nowhere and build
something very big. Of course, there are exceptions, but Jack Mov Ali Baba, I said, you know, we had a couple of advantages when we started. We had no experience.
No money.
And uh
No plan. And so every dollar we spent we had to consider very, very, very carefully. Well, my plan was I had a really good plan. This was the plan was.
I'm gonna go shoot one take of everything.
'Cause a film is the most expensive item. If I just shoot two takes
You know, one just in case. I've just doubled my budget.
So one take.
I'll cut it together.
The stuff that I need to come reshoot.
We'll only reshoot that.
We'll only get those shots.
He never come back and reshoot.
By the time you get back up there, back to Austin.
You figure out a way to cut around things that were like not done right or a little slow or
And I never came back and reshot anything. You end up just working with what you got. But it left me off it got me off the hook from being too precious.
is by knowing I had that safety net.
Which I never ended up using.
So if you can do that for yourself, you know.
In any area that you're in.
Try to just go free with a band. And sometimes, you know, they say that for writing a book or writing a script. Just write. Don't keep rereading each page and going, Oh, it's not good enough and then tear it up and throw it in the trash can. You'll never get anywhere. You gotta just get momentum and keep going and then come back later with fresh eyes and look at it again.
Now that you have access to so many resources
What are practices you have?
Or principles for maintaining that
Scrappy creative mindset. Right. Because if you
You don't have to have many constraints if you don't want to.
Yeah. At this point.
Are there ways that you try to simulate that or there's a couple of things with that. This is freedom of limitations.
You know, there's almost more freeing to know.
I gotta use only these items.
Turtle.
Bar.
Ranch.
Yo's completely free within that.
You know, you almost can do
Not anything,'cause that would be almost
Too many options.
But you're just put into a box. One of my favorite movies I did with Quentin was called Four Rooms.
Where they said
We're all doing short films, we're all have the same criteria. Has to be set in one room.
Has to be New Year's Eve.
And you have to use the bellhop.
The freedom of limitations was enormous. I mean you watch that short
And it goes all over the room.
By the end we burn it on the room. I mean it's it you almost
It's more exciting to know that you were in a box and you could be creative within that box.
So now that so many things are available to you, you want to limit yourself in a way.
So I try to limit time, I try to limit money.
So that we can really get still keep that essence of creativity.
And deliver on the screen something that just looks much bigger.
So that you can retain your freedom.
Creative freedom because if you start spending more money
suddenly the financiers, rightfully so, the studios or, you know, the executives will
Be over your shoulder constantly questioning every move you make.
Because they want their money back.
But if you keep the budget low, it's a win win situation. The movie does great
It's a great success. If the movie doesn't do great, it's still a success'cause it didn't cost very much and it'll make back its money.
Over time. That's kind of where I've kind of lived and breathed.
How about to jump out of the box a little bit more and do some things that are a little bigger.
Just to learn more, you'cause you just learn more when you go and do other kind of assignments, but where
It's really the most fun.
And that's why you that's how do you keep the morale high? The morale's always high on the set,'cause they know
We're just being creative. That's the name of the game.
It's not looking for a result.
It's like
How can we just keep ourselves jazzed about this?

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And now
Susan Kane
Number one New York Times best selling author of Quiet.
The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking.
Which spent eight years on the New York Times bestsellers list.
And bitter sweet.
How sorrow and longing make us whole.
And award winning speaker.
whose TED Talks have garnered more than forty six million views.
You can find Susan on Instagram.
Uh
Susan Kane Author.
Susan, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time.
And
We have a lot of terrain to possibly cover, so we may end up having a part two and three, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I thought that we could
Look at
public speaking just for a second because
Many people will associate you with
This blockbuster
mega hit of a TED talk.
And
Rumor has it that you
Straight.
in the delivery room from the get go, were a natural born killer on stage. This is true. Were you born?
A spectacular.
Public speaker. Oh my gosh. Okay, well, everybody listening, you can't see Tim right now, but he has a very devilish smile on his face because of course the answer is the
Complete opposite. So
I had a lifelong well dating back to middle school, I knew exactly when it started. I've had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking.
And a lot of people say they're afraid of public speaking and you know, they're telling the truth. But like they didn't have a fear the way I had a fear of it. It was so extreme. What was the triggering of it?
Oh okay, the triggering event was I had recently switched to a new middle school.
And
I was in an English literature class and I probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all because I love English, so I was always participating.
Anyway, she called me up to the front of the room. We were doing Macbeth.
And she called me up with a friend of mine and she said, Okay, you're gonna play Lady Macbeth and your friend Rob is gonna play Macbeth and just improvise this scene.
And for me as a shy person in a new school.
This was like
Total kryptonite.
And
I couldn't say anything. I just completely blanked out and just stood there dumbly at the front of the class.
And finally just had to kind of sit back down red faced.
Not having said a word.
That sounds terrible. Making my pulse sweat. Just listening to it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I and I know this now, now that I've I've studied all this stuff, that if you have an experience like that
It gets encoded into your amygdala, which is the part of your brain that registers all your fears. And then the amygdala for the rest of your life is doing its job by saying, Oh, you know, I'm gonna steer you clear of any situation ever approximating anything like that literature class ever again.
So
After that, any time I had to give a speech and I did it, you know, I used to be a lawyer and on Wall Street and stuff.
Any time I would do it.
I would just sort of suffer my way through and
I would always lose five pounds because I couldn't eat before, like for a week before.
Then I started writing this book, Quiet.
After I had left law.
And I really, really, really cared about it. You know, it was my dream come true to be a writer, and I cared so much about the ideas in the book, and I didn't want my fear to stand in my way.
And I was giving this TED talk.
So I had to overcome it.
How did the opportunity for the TED Talk come about?
So I had a friend who worked at Ted.
told him about the book and he kind of passed on the idea to the curators at the time.
And I think that they understood.
that most of the Ted audience is really introverted.
And so they knew that it would relate with their audience. And I think that that was probably why they invited me in. And I mean, I'll come back to how I overcame my fear in a minute, but I will tell you, they turned out to be so accurate that
After I gave the talk, you know, I came down off the stage.
And I was absolutely mobbed for the whole rest of the week by every single other audience member who are all coming to tell me, you know, that's my story too. And I'm going around pretending to be this very confident, extroverted person, and that's not really who I am.
So amazing. Yeah.
Present company included.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I will steer us back and you will also bring us back to what we were just talking about. But
last night at a group dinner, which I helped organize, keep in mind.
at a wonderful restaurant here in New York City called the Lily. It's a Lebanese place.
I had to take
four or five bathroom breaks, which were not to use the bathroom. It was j I that is what I do at
any dinner of more than one or two people. I have to exit.
Not just the conversations, but the environment.
To just
recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes. And is it and then go back out. It's it's like uh you're feeling a kind of overstimulation in the setting. Over stimulation. Yeah. I mean that's so interesting because I've heard you talk before about moving to Austin and having these group dinners. And I thought, oh that's so interesting that that's what Tim wants to do because
I would never choose to socialise that way. I always love to socialise one on one. Almost the way we're
doing right now. Yeah. Sitting here just talking.
There's a kind of boiling point for me in terms of size.
Like four to six I can handle. It depends for me also.
on the environment, I think more so than the number of people.
So when I do these group dinners, I will generally host them at home.
Or have them at one of my friends' homes. Right. Not in a popular restaurant. Yeah. Like I did last night. So
I'm just gonna say what what's interesting about that is how strategic you are about it. And I've really noticed this with people. So
We were just talking about Ted. I I was just talking to Chris Anderson, who runs Ted about this whole phenomenon and he describes himself as an introvert too. And he said he loves group dinners. If there's a specific topic that everybody has gathered there to discuss and he knows it's gonna be something really substanti, then he's in his comfort zone. You know, but if it's just kind of this amorphous socializing.
He wants to leave. So just on the tactical practical side, I also tend
to very frequently cook the meal for the group so that I have a task. Yeah.
while people are arriving.
And talking.
also deliberate because I'm often inviting people who don't know one another, so I want them to have a chance.
To chat without having me as a
Mutual crutch, if that makes sense. Yep. But
In any case, we could talk about that. Yeah, no, and that's a really common strategy. I hear that from many people. Yeah, but I'm not going to I can play extrovert.
I'm good at playing extra, but up until say sixth grade, I wouldn't even go out to recess. I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I wouldn't even go out to recess. Wow. So a lot of what you talk about and have written about certainly strikes a chord.
Now I feel like I wanna ask you so many questions about this. Like I'm really curious if we talked about if we
Could
Go back and talk to sixth grade U, right this minute. Like would sixth grade U have any idea that
you would have the life path.
Okay.
Yours is taken, that's so public.
Absolutely not.
No.
Definitely not. I mean what happened in sixth grade also just
for people who might be wondering, Well, what happened in sixth grade? If it's up until sixth grade, what happened in sixth grade or I should say more accurately
the summer of fifth grade is that I had a huge growth spurt.
And I had been bullied really badly. I was born premature and very small.
And I was bullied really, really badly up until
the end of fifth grade, then I left to a summer camp.
and gained about thirty pounds of muscle and grew four to five inches over the summer, came back.
And then
Like a Captain America. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then the bullies who had been accustomed to bully me
tried their usual playbook and I just went on this vigilante spree like the Punisher and that changed the dynamic the social dynamics so I was able to actually go outside and do things that I wanted to do at recess from that point on. So I didn't mean that I socialized a lot more, but I had more mobility.
So that is that is what happened.
But like you, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to start with this.
question about overcoming a fear of public speaking is that it's when people see the finished product
It's easy to assume.
that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill. Yes.
And
In fact, a lot of what appears to be
natural appears only to be natural because it started off very, very unnatural.
And someone has worked at shipping away at it over time.
I think that's true. I think so often when you see someone who's really good at almost anything, it's because they actually started out
exactly the opposite, and then they cared so much about fixing that problem. Yeah. But in terms of how I overcame that fear, and I I have this kind of
Evangelical desire to share it because
It was so extreme. I feel like if I could do it, then I know anyway can overcome any fear. Um, so first of all, I spent
years sitting in therapists' offices kind of cosily discussing
Well, what might be the sources of this fear and you know, what do I trace it back to and and that does no good at all.
I'm actually a big believer in therapy, but not for this type of issue.
So
What really does it if you're afraid of something.
You have to expose yourself very slowly to the thing that you fear.
in really manageable doses. So you can't start off by giving the TED talk. So in my case
I signed up for the seminar in
It was a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety here in New York.
And uh
You know, you'd get there and on the very first day
All you had to do was stand up.
Say your name.
Sit back down.
Declare victory.
You're finished.
And that's it. What was the organization?
Oh gosh. No, and I am a big fan of Toastmasters, but this was almost like
More remedial than Toastmasters. Toastmasters Light. Yeah, this is like pre-toastmasters. Yeah. So
The guy's name he's amazing. His name is Charles
Yeah.
And you can find his organization. It's speakeasy.com. And I think it's spelled with three E's. Perfect. And I'll put a link in the show notes for people as well. Yeah, yeah, because I really recommend him. Yeah. And so, you know, you'd come back the next week and maybe you'd stand up
And he would do these things like he'd have people stand on either side of you so you didn't feel all all alone up there on stage. It's brilliant. Yeah, yeah. And then the audience would ask you questions like Where are you from? And where'd you go to college? You know, so really easy stuff.
You answer the questions and you're done.
And it's like if you do that little by little by little
you actually really can overcome it. It's kind of crazy but true.
But I will say, having said all this, still
You know, there's something about a Ted talk.
That's on some whole crazy other realm of
Public speaking nerve.
Yeah, even if the setting is ex exactly the same, there is a
performance anxiety associated with that three letter acronym for sure. Yeah. We were talking about this before we started taping that.
so many of the speakers are really practiced on stage and yet you see them minutes before they go out and they're sweating bullets and they're they're all losing it.
Yeah, we were chatting for a second about and Chris Anderson could certainly correct me I'm blanking the exact term, but there's some space right next to the stage
behind the curtain.
Called the Zen Room or the relaxation cube. There's some very pleasant sounding name for this space, and it's intended to be.
The next up.
batting cage for the two or three speakers to come.
And I remember it's probably fifteen or twenty minutes before I was supposed to go live. Or no, it couldn't have been that. It was probably an hour before. And I really didn't want to be around a lot of people. And in the green room there are all sorts of staff and lots of people milling around.
And working on production.
And I thought to myself, I need to go to the z the Zen room. We'll just call the Zen room and so I walk out to the Zen Room
And I won't mention names, but they're like three.
Just
Killers. These are
consummate professionals who have done this type of thing thousands of times. People I look up to and would love to someday have a coffee with, and they are
Freaking the fuck out. And I was like, not helping, not helping. I need to leave the Zen room right now. So yes, it's a different beast. So then how do you go from
Talking about
Your favorite color on stage with two people next to you to Ted then.
Okay, so I graduated from that to Toastmasters, which I also completely r recommend and
Should I describe what that is? Yes, please. Yeah. Okay. So Toastmasters, it's a worldwide organization. You can absolutely find one near you because they're everywhere. And it's basically this
non for profit thing where you sign up for a a a group that meets near you.
And once every two weeks you get together and you practice public speaking together. And they have this ritualized way of doing it. And some of the time you're practicing
speaking off the top of your head and sometimes it's a prepared speech.
And it's just kind of giving you that exposure therapy of, you know, putting you in the beast of the thing that most frightens you. You have to show up every two weeks and do it.
So I did that. But then the next stage after that, and it was my husband's idea
I hired
A coach for the full week before the TED Talk.
This really amazing guy named Jim Fife, who I also completely r recommend. And and since then he has coached many other TED speakers. So I worked with him.
Morning till night for a full week before the talk.
Good for you. Yeah. And what did the working with him look like?
Okay, so he
He did a really brilliant thing. He was very psychologically attuned.
And I said to him, you know
I'm really comfortable
In general, talking to people one on one and kind of like cozily sitting on a couch and talking about life. I love that. For me at that point, though.
Getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing. So he said, Okay, let's practice your talk.
Sitting on the couch.
I just
Talk to me about it.
Oh, we did that for like two days.
And it was only after that that we then moved to the stage and started getting into kind of the theatrics of it, that kind of transition.
Yeah.

Note that this is
I spend so much time with and I'm so obsessed with.
Good teachers. Yeah.
good coaches, this is very common where they will
effectively say, let's start from where you are right now. Right. They will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to a point of familiarity or comfort. Yeah. And then edge into
sort of the next concentric circle of
That is your limit of comfort. Yeah. And I think they also have to show a lot of nonjudgment because I had some dark moments during that week. You know, for me, this was the abyss. And I was just hanging out in the abyss for a week.
And so he saw me, you know, I had only just met him.
And he saw me not in the most flattering circumstances, and yet I didn't feel embarrassed by that.
Did he do anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview?
That he used like an intake. Do you remember what it wasn't really formal like that. You know, he's such a human guy. It was just like we were just talking. Disguised as intake for a fellow. Yeah. And then
So the amazing thing to me now is
I now.
Super ironically.
Have a career as a public speaker.
Like I traveled the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place.
Like I asked you, well, if we could tell sixth grade Tim
Where he would be, what would he say?
And I say that to myself too. Like if you could have even told me
eight years ago that this would be my life, I would have been so shocked.
And now I've come to like it.
Did you have any particular
pre-game ritual.
Or anything that you did in the hours leading up to your talk.
They helped.
Or that you didn't do.
I have things now. Back then I just suffered. But what do you have now?
I have a few things. I mean, I do deep breathing.
Just like everyone else. I'm sure you've heard that a million times, but it's gotta be real deep breathing, you know, where you really feel your belly and your diaphragm filling up.
But for me what I also do is
I usually think to myself, and I do this especially when I'm speaking to an audience that I find more intimidating, you know, like a

finance people at an investment bank or something.
I will say to myself
There, I am sure is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted.
And
If that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears today.
Then
It's all good.
And that
Pulls me out of myself instantly.
Yeah, it gives you also a hurdle that you can clear.
For winning
The presentation, so to speak.
Yeah, it's a man right, it's a manageable goal. But I think it's it feels deeper than that to me. It it feels also like
I think when people get nervous about speaking
Obviously they're really nervous about being judged, right? But this completely shifts the energy where it's not
Any longer about
How anybody judges me, it's about
Can I help that kid out there?
I wanna say also that
Part of the reason I am
More than happy.
actually excited to spend so much time talking about this is that it is not specific to public speaking. Right.
This just happens to be a very common
fear and perceived weakness of many, many, many people. Also as a side note.
what Warren Buffett says is his greatest ever investment.
But more specifically, a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking. Right. Because it magnified his ability to do almost everything else to communicate effectively.
both in spoken word, but also in the written word in in some respects.
I've never, I don't think I've ever t I've ever spoken about this, but I also did Toastmasters.
And uh if you have trouble finding it, oftentimes there are large companies that will have within
their HQ or any large
location their own Toastmasters group. And that's actually how I found it in San Jose initially. It was at Adobe.
So I would go in and I would do this Toastmasters.
and your description of having this very logical progression of
small wins layered upon small wins, getting up on stage and then getting off stage. Getting up on stage, having two people next to you and answering a few questions and getting off stage.
Is so
Incredibly effective.
And uh I'm laughing right now.
The Kreis.
I remember when I was preparing for my first
So this is a very large
Festival and conference in Austin, Texas. And the timing was 2007. It was about a, I want to say a month, month and a half before my book.
is going to come out my first book, which I'm very nervous about.
There had been no speaking slots, but I had pitched Hugh Forest at the time.
Who I've been introduced to.
that I would take anything available. Corner of a room, hallway, if there are any cancellations.
I would really appreciate the the opportunity.
To speak of the event. And lo and behold, there was a last minute cancellation, not by
Hey keynote speaker.
but by a sponsor who is going to have a stage to pitch their products from in in this makeshift cafe. And I was like, I'm in.
I'm in. But I was so incredibly nervous about this.
that in the beginning in particular I was and this is true today.
Too nervous to
practice my rough, rough draft of the presentation in front of people. Yeah, I got it. And so what I did, I was staying in a guest bedroom at a friend's house.
He had three chihuahuas.
And I went outside I was playing with the Chihuahuas.
And they followed me into the garage. I was I practiced in the garage. I didn't want to practice in the house where my friend's wife was.
And I gave my presentation. I felt reasonably confident about the content, but I wasn't comfortable with any of the performance aspects of trying to keep attention. So I gave
My
draft of this talk over and over again until I could get the dogs to sit and stare at me.
somewhat bewildered, but to hold their attention. That was the litmus test for me.
Wow. To graduate to giving a rough draft in front of humans for those people out there who are wondering whether this all comes naturally to me. It does not at all. Have you talked about that before, or is this the first time? I don't think I've talked about that.
Certainly I don't think I've talked about it on the podcast. And for the TED Talk also, something I did which I did not do for the South Bye talk, which I thought
really made a difference was
I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers.
once I had a reasonably polished version and I asked friends of mine who worked at larger companies who had teams
during lunch hour if there was uh if there happened to be an empty empty conference room.
Could they
invite people to hear a rough draft of a TED talk.
And then I would ask them for feedback. And usually there was enough time that I could give it two or three times. So I could actually incorporate their feedback.
give another version and and
Once I've given the second version.
There are a lot more people in the room who are willing to be critical.
The the first round you get one or two. Yes, that's so true. And uh
This is just something I've thought about a lot because I've s I've been so nervous about public speaking for so long. And it by the way, it doesn't really go away. Like I at least for me, I still have those nerves.
But with Ted very specifically, I assumed
And this came from sports, but I'd never applied it that I was going to be
My heart rate was probably gonna be thirty
beats per minute higher than normal.
And that it was not just important for me to practice the content, but to practice
Under
the physiological stress that I would probably experience.
when trying to deliver the content. So I would do a bunch of pushups in another room and drink two double espresso and wait for it to hit and then go in and give my dress rehearsal to see if I could handle that stimulation.
That was so, so smart. And
You know, listening to that story is reminding me of this crucial step that I left out.
In
a lot of ways of kind of mistake that I made, which is, you know, I told you I worked with that guy, uh Jim, for a week, who was amazing.
And I thought I was pretty well ready at that point.
So
I talked to my friend.
Adam Grant, who's a very dear friend. Very good speaker, too. And a really good speaker, and who also started out as a very nervous and by his description, a terrible public speaker. He says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students and he just worked and worked and worked at it. And now he's the most popular professor at Wharton.
But okay, so I was talking to Adam about all this, and so he said
So I'm leaving for Ted on Sunday morning, right, to fly out to California, which is where it was at that time.
And he says, Oh, I'm gonna pull together a group of friends and you can practice your talk in front of them.
And so this is Friday night and I'm leaving Sunday morning.
And so I show up at this apartment full of Adam and his friends.
And I think that I'm pretty well done with the talk.
And this is the first time that I'm giving it in front of any kind of group, because I didn't have the foresight of what you just described.
And
Not only was I so nervous, but I realized from the feedback
That a lot of the content was all wrong.
And it's Friday night and I'm leaving you know, like the next day, basically. Or the day after the next day. So
I went home and I just spent the whole entire night rewriting the whole final third of the talk. And then I'm like on the plane going out to Ted trying to memorize the new talk.
I don't recommend.

But
You need to get
real people in front of you. This is just like entrepreneurship and people try to get the product perfect before exposing it to any prospective clients. Like you really need
to get into
the messy reality of what a live audience or a real customer looks like.
And the same was true for me.
I made a lot of changes in the last few days, which I thought were just gonna be fine tune. Right. And then you fine tuning. And I was like, Oh, actually, I really need to completely change probably thirty percent of this. Yeah. And I was very, very nervous.
before the TED talk. And I came off stage and I did not think that I I didn't think that I blew it, but I didn't think that I
did a great job. I came off stage thinking that there were definitely
Bits and pieces I could have done better.
But
Seems to have worked out. Okay, wait, but I wanna come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now.
So you said
That you still are really nervous when you give a talk.
Are you really as nervous as you used to be? Because I I I really want people to understand that
You can get to a point, you might still have butterflies. It's not like the nerves completely
Disappear.
But they get to I in in my experience and from all the literature that I've studied on this, they really do get to a point where you can manage them. And the difference between manageable and non manageable is gigantic in terms of its effect on your life and your career and everything. Totally. So I just wanna make sure people know that. I can I can clarify. So uh it depends a lot on the event.
Right.
We're gonna do a QA, and it's a friend of mine interviewing me on stage. That's not from my perspective really public speaking. I mean it is
But at this point.
I could do that with zero preparation. If it's anything resembling
A keynote if it is Tim on stage talking.
to an audience and they expect something that has been well rehearsed.
My physiological response is still very strong.
I get really sweaty hands.
I pace I have very minimal contact with anyone beforehand.
But
Let me mention a few things. Number one
And uh
Both.
Mike Tyson.
And Dean Martin.
used to vomit before.
nearly every performance.
But
the way that they psychologically contended with that.
evolved over time.
And since I mentioned Mike Tyson, Costumado, who was the trainer who really in a lot of respects, I think boxing
scholars or boxing fans would agree.
made Tyson into
Wyson was at his prime.
As an athlete.
used to say something along the following that the hero and the coward feel the same thing.
It's how they respond. Yes. Oh, I so believe that. Yeah. And
I mean there is no courage without the presence of fear.
And
for me, I have come to see those physiological symptoms that used to make me panic.
that used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong, that used to make me feel like I was unprepared.
As
simple precursors to a performance. The way that I frame them for myself.
is completely different.
And I've learned to view it as this
Energetic asset.
That I can use.
And that has made
All the difference.
It has decreased in some circumstances, but certainly before Ted. I mean I'd given hundreds
of different presentations and
It was like I was getting on stage for the first time.
In part also for people who don't know, they are very, as they should be, strict about
Many things at Ted.
including running over. Oh yes. If running over, I mean then I wanna say, and this is exactly what they should say, but in effect they say if you run over
By you should not run over. Number one. Do not run over.
If you run over.
If you get to the point where you're like thirty seconds over, we will come up and remove you from stage. And while I'm preparing and while I'm rehearsing, one of the things that made me most stressed out is that
My finish times were really variable.
And I would say like 30, 40% of the time I ran over. Then other times I would run two minutes under, but miss something really, really important. Yeah. So I was rushing and I was like, good.
God, this is just a crapshoot. Like I am at the craps table with my timing and that
really was a concern.
For me. So that was another element.
That made
Dead unique for me.
was that degree of cutoff. Yeah, I felt that way too. And I did end up going over it by over a minute.
Oh, good for you. And there it is. And they're just like, we cannot stop this performance. I don't know about that, but I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who
is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn't sure whether they can really get past it. Um
Also like what is waiting for you on the other side of it.
Is so
gigantic because there's just there's something weird about public speaking where
It has such disproportionate value to
in a way what you're investing in it. You know, like you're going up on stage for eighteen minutes or forty minutes or whatever. Or or maybe within your own workplace, you know, even giving a two minute talk.
suddenly everybody is regarding you as a leader and as
Someone who they can turn to in a new way.
from if you hadn't been willing to put yourself forward in that way.
Definitely. I mean there's there's public speaking as
The force multiplier.
For the value of your other skills, which is absolutely true.
And then public speaking in a way is also
a wonderful diagnostic tool. And what I mean by that is I was I I remember talking to you
A friend of mine who
He's a wealth manager for a lot of
Buckety mucks who
You would recognize.
And
He said I know them.
generally better than therapists they've been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because
Money brings up everything.
That's talking about money it brings up.
the full spectrum of someone's insecurities, fears, desires, neuroses.
Sex also, true.
And public speaking, I think.
If it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking, like it, at least for me, it kind of brings up all your stuff. So if you're simply interested in
Personal growth.
It brings to the surface
many different pieces of your
personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that transfers to other areas.
So that's
to me was my experience and I find it really interesting. It's like okay, well maybe you don't have to play

with talk therapy for twenty years to find all of the bits and pieces when
if rather than following these different gingerbread trails.
You can use certain
fearful circumstances.
To just bring it all right.
Or a lot of it to the surface. That was my experience. I'm not saying it's true for everybody, but it was one of those things like talking about money, talking about sex, or public speaking. It's like okay, now we just bring everything to the forefront.
So for me that was also uh
even if I had not had any interest in getting on stage and giving presentations, it would have been valuable.
In and of itself. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense.
Are there other things that you're
fearful of or have been afraid of that you've overcome. No, I mean that was really the big one for me.
But yeah, we were talking about this before, I guess. Uh you know, my bugaboo in general is that
I just tend to be a warrior, so
Other than the experiences I had with public speaking, it's not like I have full on panic or anything like that. It's more like it's a
a very familiar companion for me. So I've had to just come up with various hacks around it. What what are some of your hacks?
This is gonna get us into another big topic, but why not?
So, for example, when I stopped practicing corporate law and I decided that I wanted to be a writer.
I told myself that
It's really hard to make a living as a writer. And I said, Okay, the goal is to publish something by the time you're seventy five.
And at the time I was thirty three, at the time that I said that.
And I kind of did that instinctively.
because I was always doing these hacks of like just wanting to completely take the pressure off of something that I otherwise loved so deeply. And like I I just knew that
If I
turned this thing that I deeply loved into
A source of like
This has to be the place where I make my
living this has to be the place where I derive some kind of professional stature.
It was gonna soak a lot of the joy out of it.
And so that's the kind of hack that I just
Naturally do. On a very related note.
Could you
give us a little bit of context around the leaving law.
Like why you left law.
And then uh
You decide you want to be a writer.
And you kind of alluded to it, but does that mean that suddenly
your rent is dependent on writing.
Right, okay. So I had wanted to be a writer from the time I was four.
And then for a whole bunch of reasons and like so many people
I took some creative writing classes in college.
And I decided, you know, I'm not actually that good at this and I need to make a living and
I also kind of had a desire, I think, to show myself that I could be
out there as a kind of alpha.

So
I went to law school and and I practiced law wall street law for almost a decade.
And during that time that I was practicing law, it was so awe consuming that I completely forgot about the fact that I had wanted to be a writer.
It wasn't like, you know, I was walking around conscious of this broken dream or something. Like I I had completely forgotten.
And the first few years of practicing law, I really loved it. It was just this kind of crazy adventure that I was on.
And as the years went by
It started to get really tough for me.
You know, I'm not
a very natural lawyer in a million different ways.
But I was on this partner track and I was committed to it.
And then came the day and I
I think I may have told you about this in an earlier correspondence, but
Then came the day when a senior partner in my firm walked in and said, I was supposed to be up for partner that year. And he said, Well, we're not gonna be putting you up.
And
funny thing is to this day I don't really know if he meant we're not putting you up ever for partner or
Just not any time soon. I I don't really know what it meant. All I knew was like
Number one, I burst into tears.
And number two.
Here was my get out of jail free card.
So three hours later I had left the firm.
Like I was gone. I took a leave of absence.
And I just started
bicycling around Central Park, like I didn't know what I was gonna do next.
But
As soon as that space opened up.
That I now had free time for the first time in like ten years.
I started writing.
And I had no idea that was gonna happen.
It was almost like in a movie. That's cool. Yeah. It's like I've just been waiting for you. Yeah. I mean, literally. I like I remember that night, you know, like kind of curled up on my sofa in my apartment and I just started writing on my laptop and
And then a week later I signed up for a class in creative nonfiction.
At NYU.
And
I just had this complete feeling of certainty that this was what I wanted to be doing.
And zero expectation that I would make a living out of it.
So th and this this is a really important thing, I think. I think if you have that kind of a creative dream and a creative love.
You have to do everything you can not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things or the pressures of needing to derive professional status from it.
So I set up a little side business teaching people negotiation skills and that was how I was paying the rent.
But the thing I was really doing in my heart
was this beloved hobby of writing.
This is super, super, super, super, super important. And
There are
I think it's true in creative fields, which is pretty much every field, but just for the the sake of illustration, writing, music, et cetera, that
Also in entrepreneurship, you hear these stories of desperation where a necessity is the mother of invention.
And
Yeah, but a bing, but a boom.
magic wand and then there's a billion dollar company or there's JK Rowling or whatever it is. But those are in my experience the outliers.
Those they make for great
cover stories and magazines.
But the fact of the matter is that
From what I've seen
Certainly with the guests on this podcast is that for instance Soman Chainani, who has
a number of mega successful novels, but he had a
S A T
Prep counseling.
service that he offered well past the point that his first book was successful because he wanted to always feel like he had a safety net. Yes. So that the writing would not be tainted.
Or even subconsciously influenced.
to match the market or
whatever the the lens might become.
By this pressure.
Yeah.
And that is something that
whenever possible has come up as a really valuable
I suppose on one hand, financial
sort of survival mechanism, but even more so a psychological
Yeah, yeah. And you know, I I think we're so addicted to having a really glamorous narrative for things. And the glamorous narrative is, you know, you you had so much courage, you
took the risk, you know, you you were dependent on this company or this book or whatever, and if it didn't work, it was gonna be a disaster, but you know, you you you were the one who beat the odds. Like we love that narrative.
And for most people, that's a really bankrupt narrative. And there's a kind of deeper glamour, actually, in the kind of story that you just told.
Because the glamour comes from your
You're doing everything that you can to deeply protect the thing that you love most.
Definitely.

Now the book itself.
People may not know backstory. I'm sure a lot of people don't.
How long did it take?
To
Get that book done.
Okay. So I'm laughing'cause it took a really, really long time, especially by Tim Ferriss' standards.
I like I listen to you and like look at your life trajectory and like how does he do that? But

Lots of cheating with format is the short answer. But I won't take us off track.
Yeah, it took from start to finish. It was about
Seven years.
I will say in my defense that during those seven years I also
had two children and was raising them. So
That was part of it.
But I also just think I'm kind of
A slow writer. Like I I like to really, really think about everything super deeply. And
What I think is prob people might not know.
I had a deadline, as all writers do, and I turned in some sort of draft upon
My deadline?
coming to you, you know, after eighteen months or two years. Right.
And my editor basically read it and said, This is terrible.
And she said, you know.
Go back and completely throw that out.
Start from scratch and take all the time that you need.
And you might think that when that happened that I would have been really bummed.
But I was actually elated.
Because I knew that it was terrible and I knew that I needed much more time and I had no idea what I was doing. I had never written anything before.
So yeah, I was just really happy to have that time. And it's actually really unusual. Like usually in publishing, they had given me a big advance for the book, and usually
They want their advance back and they're not willing to delay like that.
So
That was huge. Very understanding editor.
Yeah, she is brilliant. And I'm working with her again in my next book. It's also smart.
In the sense that
A mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all. Yes. Right. Yeah. For everyone involved. For everyone involved. Yeah, and because, you know, I have this philosophy about writing that it's
The deep love that has to be protected at all costs. Because of that.
I don't care how much time it takes.
You know, like I'm just
interested in doing it as well as I can.
writing process at this point.
Look like you had your experience.
With that book.
I and now when you are writing, do you have a daily practice? Does it go through phases of
research period, then organizing
Then
Putting
All of that into
prose through synthesis. What are your writing routines or how do you think about writing?
These days. So for me, I take
whatever thesis I'm working with. And then I spend a year or two just walking around the world looking at everything through the lens of that thesis. You know, so it used to be introverts and now it's onto a new topic.
And I'm taking crazy notes through that period. So every conversation that I have, every book I read, it's all going in. How do you take and organize your notes? Do you do it?
Notebooks do you do it?
Digitally what are the I know this is nerdy, but I like it. No, it's not nerdy at all. I'm into it because
A lot of writers do it differently.
The reason I'm laughing is I'm thinking
when you hear my answer, you're gonna know that I need a consultation with you for the next book because I I don't do it in in a super systemic way.
I uh basically all those conversations, all those ideas and notes and thoughts I'm having, I stick them all into one word document and that document becomes about seven or eight hundred pages by the time I'm done.
And then I go through that document and I'm kind of tagging as I go along. And then I'm separating everything out by topic. So I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic.
But in each of those binders it's just like
One big.
Massive notes. And then I think about where do I want everything.
Whenever I'm emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I'm taking notes on
I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there because
You don't know if that emotion's gonna come back. So you have to capture it when it happens.
I think it's a perfectly fine system. Uh so you I feel like technology must have come up with something better. Like I do it in Microsoft Word.
There are there are probably better tools.

Available.
But I would say also that a lot of people confuse
New tools for better content.
It's very easy.
At least
Let's be for myself for a second.
When I'm writing, I have to disallow myself from thinking about, say, marketing, because marketing is
Fun and exciting and
To you. Easy for me. Yeah.
Because I
But ever had insomnia as a kid and watched too many infomercials or something. In any case, it's a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece, which is
the actual research and digging and pros. That's the hard part for me.
Always has been, but it's the most important part.
Mm-hmm.
I think similarly a lot of folks can become consumed by
Upgrading their tools, multiplying their tools versus just
The words. You gotta put the words in.
And I have some questions about this word doc though. So when you're going through and adding things to the word doc.
And you come in and you're tagging things. So you can separate them. And you mentioned binders. So you're printing this stuff out and then separating them. Does that mean that when you put in a new note?
in the Word doc you go to a new page if it's tagged differently so you can separate them.
More easily later, does that make sense? As opposed to
Each time you add a note, then
hit return twice and then add a new note.
If they're tagged differently, it would seem like you would have to cut up the page into multiple pieces. So do you
Start a new page.
Are there any particular ways that you
Tag for instance, w would it be a chapter name?
Or would it be a theme? What what would a tag look at?
Yeah, so every time I'm adding a new note.
If I know that it relates to something I've already done, then I'll search for the thing I've already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later. That makes sense. But you know, sometimes I don't or I can't think of it and then I'll just add it to the end of the document.
Which control F, right? Word, then good to go. Yeah. Simple simple words.
Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker, keeps a journal I think he does puts it in almost every day at midnight and it's
Word, Word Docs.
Yep. It works. Yeah. Yeah. I actually I will say I tried for this next book.
I spent a few days
Reading the instructions for Scrivener, one of these programs. Scrivener is and I just ended up thinking, you know, this isn't for me. It looks great, but Scrivener, well, some other time we can sit down. That is one tool that if you set it up really simply and you don't use ninety
eight percent of the features I find really useful just because
You can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents.
Or actually I should say rather you see your tentative
Table of contents on the left side.
in a vertical pane and then you can look at what you're on the right hand side, then I would have it set up so that I have
two split windows. So the left hand side you see your table of contents and then there's a research and then you have whatever research you want.
That way you can be working on a document in the upper right hand pane while you have your research that you're writing off of in the bottom right. And if you decide to move docs around to see how it affects flow, it's just drag and drop. It's actually quite wonderful. They did have some issues with footnotes, or maybe I was just too technically incompetent at one point when you then had to export when the publisher
insists on say word. Which maybe that'll change at some point.
getting a little geeked out, but Scrivener I've used Scrivener for
Almost all of my books. There may be one exception, I think, for our chef because of how visually intensive it was was done outside of that.
And in terms of routine or ritual, you spend a year
gathering these notes. So then you have to maybe more. So you have seven hundred to eight hundred pages.
It's a big word doc. Yeah. And
Then what happens? Yeah, so then I spend the time sorting them out. So I get to the point where I've got my eight or nine loose leaf binders that are more or less organized by what the chapters are gonna be. Yeah, and then comes the time to
Right, during which I'm still doing more research, but I'm starting to write.
For me
The writing.
Like the
Sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all. That's like
I wanna say it's my happy place, but that's not really the best description. It feels like it's this

Go.
Deep in my mind.
And I really love being there.
And it's like no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life.
I always have those few hours a day where
I'm going to a cafe or a library or whatever, and I'm sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino.
And
I'm just doing it.
Like I'm stressing the emotional aspect because
That's so huge for me, and I feel like I train myself.
to associate writing with all of these pleasures of, you know, sitting around in cafes and things like that.
Do you have a consistent time?
When you
sit down with your cappuccino and do this. Are you a morning writer or are you a
Catches catch can.
writer, are you an evening writer? I mean you also
have kids. You have other obligations. Yeah. So when do you tend to do your writing?
Or do your best writing. You can answer it however you like. Well I mean
There's what I do and there's what would be ideal, but
As you say, I have kids, so my routine is that I drop my kids off at school, that's at around eight.
Then I go and I either play tennis or do yoga every day.
And then after that
I do my writing.
And that's a pretty good time for me. But what time of day would that typically end up being? Yeah, that probably ends up being around ten or so that I'm starting. Yeah.
But if I had no other obligations
the best times of day would be more like either seven in the morning
And also super late at night.
So two time periods that I have no access to for this stage of life. Right.
And you start writing this is really
I mean interesting to me, hopefully interesting to other people.
So you start let's say round ten.
Do you break for lunch? Do you skip lunch? Do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have?
And the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason
so many writers seem to work between the hours of say
Just make this up, but
Ten PM.
And
seven thirty A. M. And they tend to either be night owls like me or
early risers is that there are fewer distractions and they get an relatively uninterrupted block.
Of three to five hours. Mm-hmm.
But if you're starting at ten.
Then uh
Most people that have lunch scheduled.
shortly thereafter, like two hours later. Right. So do you break for lunch? Do you have something really small? How do you handle that?

Because for me, just speaking personally, it's like if I might have time, of course I have time for a five minute phone call, but if I do a five minute phone call about something very
mechanical or mundane, like
calendaring stuff or whatever and I'm juggling
15 pieces that were on paper in my head. I kind of have to start over a lot of times. Like I drop all those balls that I'm jogging. Right, right.
Because of the task switching. So I'd love to hear
Not that that's true for everybody, but it's true for me. What is your
schedule look like then once you sit down.
I'll just kind of
go until I realize that I'm not concentrating well anymore and
Very often that happens after two or three hours and I just have to take a break. I have a lot of
discipline if my brain would cooperate.
So
I would happily sit there for seven hours until my kids come home from school.
But at a certain point I'll notice that it's just not coming anymore. And so then I'll take a break and I'll eat or something like that.
But you know, I would say
Like you were mentioning well people might
work at night because it's
when you get uninterrupted time.
And I think that that's one factor, but
I also think the reason that
Those hours tend to be so good.
So nighttime is when your cortisol levels are really low, you know, which of course is your stress hormone.
And so I I notice this in myself all the time that
The ideas that I come up with late at night are different from the daytime ideas. Cause they're completely
Unfettered by any stress.
And so I'll just
I don't know, I just make different kinds of associative leaps and there's there's like a softness and an ease in my thinking and my feeling about the ideas. So I think that's one advantage of late night writing. And then in the morning you've got the high cortisol, but you also have the sort of acute
Attention. Yeah.
I can totally see that. I can definitely see that.
I also find that writing late at night
If I'm writing at two in the morning, it's very hard for me. I remember I wanna say it was Ayn Rand who wrote a she had a book about the craft of nonfiction.
And there was some
It wasn't a metaphor. I think it was a real world example. But in effect she's saying writers many writers will do almost anything

And there's this story about the white tennis shoes. Like I have to clean my white tennis shoes before before I'm gonna write because I'm gonna go out and da da da and when it's two or three in the morning, like I have to check email to make sure X is just not a viable excuse. Right. So it it also just removes a lot of bullshit distraction that I would
impose on myself to avoid doing
What it is that I find hard.
I still relate to this. Wait, w so when I was writing Quiet, I suddenly
developed this idea that I had to learn everything in the world about digital photography. And I I was reading all these books about it and the rule of thirds and all this stuff. And I have never had any interest in photography before or since. It was just these two weeks of mania where I
Didn't want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there.
particular I mean you are a student of the craft, right? You've taken creative nonfiction courses. Are there any particular
Books
Or resources or
writers who have had
a significant impact on how you
Viewer practice writing.
Oh gosh, I'm sure the answer is yes.
I can try to buy some time, if helpful. Draft number four by John McFee. I think is is really I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was an undergrad in college because he was teaching a seminar. But the the structure I took my creative writing classes. Yeah. So the structure
Thinking about structure in the way that
A few things about structure saved me because I
thrive with some type of predetermined
blueprint for structure. It's very hard for me to
Just freehand flow of consciousness.
let things take some emergent form. It's very hard. I do know friends who who do that really, really well. That terrifies me.
So I need the scaffolding. Right.
Bird by Bird by Ann Lee Bob. Oh, I love that book. Yeah. Such a good book.
Bird by bird for people who don't know the book, I will say just uh before getting into a short description.
Has
Saved.
At least a half a dozen friends of mine from
The precipice. Meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just
Quitting.
their books and they were all writers in this case. They were at the point where they're like, I'm done, I can't do this, it's too stressful. I don't like this. I don't want to do this. It's going to be terrible. And they were going to, in some cases, return their advances and just walk. And
I wanna say at least half of them.
Read this book.
Went on to finish their books and their books went on to become New York Times bestsellers. So talk about an important
Window.
for making a decision and the gist of the book, the title I should say, comes first
From
I think it was her brother.
Anne's brother and Lamont is a writer, and her brother had this experience where you'd had something like an entire semester in
I'm making this up, but let's just call it fourth grade to prepare for
this end of semester project and he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that. And it was like the night before I hadn't done any preparation.
And this poor kid who granted kinda deserves it because he didn't do any prep, but nonetheless is having this like nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like fifteen books about birds and he just is paralyzed.
And I want to say it was Anne's dad who came over and like put an arm on his shoulder and said, Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird. Something like that.
And it's sort of a psychological
Life raft.
Break glass in case of emergency kit for writers.
Who are just hitting that point. Like
maybe you did with the photography where you're just like
I want to do anything.
other than look at that screen or that page. I just I can't handle it and I don't know what to do.
So for that reason, not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process itself, but for the psychological component. It's like if you had a if you were a a top athletic coach and you had your sport specific technical coach and then you had a mental
toughness coach who also doubles as a shrink. Like the mental toughness coach who doubles as a shrink is the bird by bird. Yeah. I'm remembering she also talks about shitty first drafts. Yes. And it just those three words are incredibly helpful because, you know, when you're looking at your draft and it is always really shitty at the beginning. And so just knowing, okay
That's what it's supposed to be. Yeah.
But yeah, you know, the other thing that's been really helpful to me.
So I told you I started taking that creative nonfiction class at NYU.
And
All of us who took that class got along really well. So we formed a writer's group.
After the class was officially done. And we stayed together for years. And we would meet once every week, every two weeks, and read each other's stuff. And
Especially at that stage, that really, really helped.
You know, getting the feedback, but also having the kind of camaraderie and support system. And in fact, totally isolated, yeah. Not feeling isolated. And I actually met my literary agent from one of the people who was in that group, who was a publishing lawyer. And I I said, You know, I have this idea for this book about introverts, which at the time
to me seemed like the most idiosyncratic project on earth. But she said
When you're ready, I know the right agent for that.
And that's a really serendipitous thing.
When I
put together the proposal for the book that became quiet.
I sent it out.
to that agent who she recommended.
And to four other
Super amazing agents, two of whom I had connections to. And
Every single one of the other ones.
Past.
And some of them said you know
I really like the writing, but I think this topic is not commercial enough and I just don't think it'll sell. So could you come back with a different topic?
And my uh the guy who became my agent.
instantly saw what the potential was gonna be. And we've been together ever since. And I feel like I owe him everything and I love him. And his name is Richard Pine. I've
You were out there looking for an agent.
And I think about this story all the time, not only because of book writing, but because all these people, these other agents
These are experts and these are the culturally anointed gatekeepers and they know what they're doing.
And
Yet they didn't see this one particular thing. And I think that that happens all the time. Totally. So No, I'm glad you shared that. And I had a very similar experience. I reached out to I want to say it was four
agents who were introduced by a very successful author.
who had met something like seven years earlier by volunteering at a nonprofit, which is a great way to meet people above your pay grade as a side note, just like filling water glasses for panelists.
Works really well.
So I had the right introduction.
The writing I didn't think my writing was
Tolstoy or anything, but it was
It was passable.
And um
Complete.
Rejection from three of the four. The four hook week. Two of them were not
Well.
pretty heavy handed about it.
the one of the third I remember her name, Jillian Manis, a very good agent. And she passed, but she gave me a lot of really helpful feedback.
She didn't say this won't work, she just said I don't think
This is the right fit for me. Right.
And that that one fair enough. Which is totally fair. But like here's a bunch of advice. And one of the pieces of advice she gave me actually wow, I haven't thought about this in forever.
was
Think of each I was intimidated by the prospect of writing a book. I'd never written a book before. She said, treat each chapter like a feature magazine article.
Beginning, middle, and end. Self sufficient. Yeah. Each. Yeah.
chapter can live on its own. And I've followed that advice ever since. With with with nonfiction. Yeah. Which makes it easier to write also because if you get stuck somewhere
It's not like you have to cross that bridge to get to a chapter.
That
sequentially should show up three chapters later, you can treat it in a modular way. Right. If you get really bogged down, you can skip.
Which also
in some cases like the rest of my books, it leads to a book that can be read.
Non sequentially, in any case.
It's a three out of four, turn it down.
Finally sign with my current agent, Steven Hanselman.
To
Still work with to this day. Similarly. Yeah.
And
He had just become an agent. Wow.
He had just become an agent, but part of what attracted me to him was that
He had a long career as a very successful editor.
And was also is just an eclectic guy. Went to Divinity School, plays in a jazz band. I mean, really my like my kind of my kind of person. Yeah.
And then we went out to sell it.
And I always forget if it's like twenty six or twenty seven, but nonetheless it was like somewhere between twenty six and twenty eight publishers turn it down. Really? Yes. Wow. And then the
But you only need one.
That's the thing. It's like you it's not about how many people don't get it. Yeah. It's about having the right
person or people who do get it.
And I mean, it was just so clear with your book, right? It's like you don't need
All the people in the world.
to think it's a good idea. You don't need half the people in the world to think it's a good idea. You need the people who
It resonates with
to have it resonate. Yeah. That's it. And it does not need to be
does not need to be millions of people. It could be.
But it doesn't have to be. And I th I had a note down also to just
Yeah, we don't have to necessarily spend a ton of time on this, but just to clarify
The
Talk introversion versus shyness.
I came across this when I was doing

Which is people think of say
Bill Gates, right? As sort of maybe a one example of someone who could be useful in in distinguishing between the two. But could you
Clarify what an introvert.
is how you define introvert. Yeah. And how it might differ from
From somebody who's shy. Right. Yeah.
Introversion is really about
The preference for lower stimulation environments
And you can trace it to our neurobiologies. Like introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli.
And so that means that we're kind of at our most alive and happiest and switched on.
when things are a little more chill around us, which is probably why when you're in those group dinners
You're going to the restroom every so often because your nervous system wants to tone it down. And extroverts have the opposite situation and the opposite liability. And cause
For an extrovert, you've got a nervous system that's reacting less.
to stimulation and that means
when you're in an environment that you find too quiet, you start to get really listless and checked out.
So that's the liability there. Mm-hmm.
Shyness
And I always feel like my work has to do with both introversion and shyness, by the way.
But shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment.
So
You'll know if you're a shy person because
When you encounter someone who has a neutral expression on their face.
You will have a tendency to read disapproval in there.
And to react really strongly to the disapproval. You feel kind of really unhorse by it.
And it can take different forms. So it could be a fear of public speaking, or it could be
a job interview or any kind of situation where you feel you might be evaluated.
So in reality, lots of introverts do tend to be shy and vice versa, but
Not necessarily at all. I don't
No Bill Gates personally, but my guess is that he's an introvert, but not specially shy. And then
Somebody like an Eileen Fisher.
Who
She's got this wonderful and I think it's been decades now, um, super successful fashion brand. She describes herself as a shy extrovert.
So like she really wants to be around people all the time, she wants to be connecting all the time.
You talk to her, she's constantly like setting up this workshop and that program and you know, you look at her life and she's always surrounded

But she's often feeling intense discomfort.
And
Needing to work through that. Wild. Yeah. I would certainly describe myself as an introvert and
I never knew quite how to frame it until
coming across your definition of preferring lower
Stimulation or
environments or environments with fewer stimuli. Because I've I've ever since I was a little kid been very sensitive. I mean my sight is very sensitive. Right.
My hearing is very sensitive. Yeah.
But I'm not shy in the sense that I don't
I want to engage and ask questions and interact, but if the volume is turned up
too much or there are too many speakers, metaphorically or or physically. I I have a lot of difficulty
Parsing it all.
But you don't have like uh shyness would be like
You know, before you go into those group dinners
Are you feeling a kind of social anxiety?
No. Right.
Yeah. That's the difference. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
There's so many questions that I want to explore.
But let's uh because we have
Maybe
Ten or fifteen minutes more.
Let's ask a few of the questions that I
That I always like to ask.
Are there any books that you have given the most to others?
as a gift, or any books you've gifted often to other people.
I think that the book I've probably
for the last few years been giving out the most is Waking Up by Sam Harris.
Which
Yeah, it's fantastic book. It's such a fantastic book. And it was really for me
completely life changing, I think for probably the reasons it is for many people, which is
I hadn't really known much about meditation before.
Reading it.
And because
I think by my uh
My nature, I'm sort of a cross between a sceptic and a mystic or something.
You know, and the skeptical side of me, and it it's a pretty deep skeptical side.
it really needed somebody like Sam, who's such an extreme skeptic. Right. You know, and then who very conveniently spent like what, twenty eight years of his life or something investigating all these different spiritual tools.
And then reporting back on them.
You know, for me that was a narrator I could really
I felt I could really rely on it. Fantastic book.
You know, I just I have to I just'cause I think you'll
We were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because we're going to be able to do
We were both you know sort of fanboying and fangirling about his meditation app and
handful of other things, but I haven't told you and I don't know if I've even mentioned this
publicly. But here we go. So the first time I met Sam.
This relates to Ted.
Went to Ted for the first time as an attendee.
Which by the way was too much stimulation, so it never went back.
Interesting. Yeah, but I went to Ted f the first time as an attendee.
And I was invited to one of these group dinners. Right. And so I go out to this group dinner.
And
We're eating dinner and off to the side on a separate
table there's this tray of brownies and I love brownies it's one of my weaknesses it is a Achilles heel and I have zero portion control
And these brownies are large brownies and I
sneak over kind of in between courses. And I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna skip one of the later courses and just substitute the brownies because I love brownies. And so I eat two of these brownies and
About
Twenty minutes later, the host who I shall not name.
comes up to me and goes, Tim, did you eat?
Any of the brownies? Yeah, I had two of them.
And he goes.
Okay.
Everything's gonna be fine. And I'm like, Wait, what? Everything's gonna be fine. What the hell are you talking about? They were heavily dosed.
Pod Brownies.
Hilarious.
A habitual pot user. And so I suddenly in the middle of dinner

Just get hit by this tsunami of cannabis and
You combine that with my discomfort with high stimulation environments and I'm like, I need to get the hell out of here. So I excuse myself to go to the restroom.
And by this point.
I'm already a huge fan of Sam. Yeah.
But I've never had any contact with them. So I run off to the bathroom to escape.
And
I open the door and literally like at the sink run straight into Sam Harris in the men's room. And I'm like, Sam Harris?
High off my rocker.
And that was my first interact. And he looks at me kind of like he's like hi. At that point, and that was my first meeting with Sam. And did you tell Brownie's. I did. I did. I did tell him, which he appreciated because he does have some history with Yes, he does.
Altered states.
But yeah, no, I I I found that book
And the subsequent meditation app and all of it.
Incredibly helpful and fantastic.
The one piece of it that
I'm kind of trying to explore separately because I feel like
He looks at much less is the whole
tradition of loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that.
So that's really, really of interest to me.
So I'm sort of charting a different course there. And I'll tell you, like even just last night
I was interviewing on stage this guy Heyman Sunum. I don't know if you've heard of him, but
He's a
A really renowned Zen Buddhist monk from Korea.
And his books are all number one bestsellers and
Korea and lots of other countries, but here he's less well known. But anyway
He has a new book out, so I I was doing this interview.
And
We're up on stage, so you can see the audience.
And
It happens to be a pretty formal audience, so before we start.
The audience is kind of sitting there.

And then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation.
And it was so amazing to see the transformation on their faces. And he did this for maybe one or two or three minutes. Like it wasn't long. Yeah and you know, suddenly they're totally smiling and they're open and they're happy.
It's remarkable, yeah. It's remarkable and I think it's so
Weird and dispiriting how
In the mainstream media and in corporate life.
I mean it's great that there's been this
Incredible embrace of mindfulness meditation. But I think there's a kind of allergy
Toward going too much in the loving kindness.
Direction. Um I spoke to Sharon Salzburg about this, who's
One of the great
Teachers.
And she said.
that people have this sense that it must be phony, like that you couldn't possibly
actually have those feelings and so it kind of gives them
a sort of creepy feeling to do it. Totally. But it but I feel like that all needs to get
Completely rethought.
Loving kindness, the label, I think.
Smells of kinda hand wavy
Hippy
Associations and
Therefore people veer away from it. Yeah.
If they have sensitivity to that stuff, which I
do and have for a very long time.
But so had mindfulness for many years. Absolutely. But I mentioned that as a contrast to my
then subsequent experience with loving kindness meditation, also called meta M E T T A meditation.
uh which I was introduced to not first by Jack Cornfield, although I did spend some time with him, who's sort of of the same cohort as Sharon Salzburg. I mean they're they're close friends and Sharon's been on the podcast. But
Meng, Chad Meng Tan of Google actually started this
class within Google called I think it's Search Within Yourself. It was a course that included many tools, including mindfulness.
And he has a book called Joy on Demand, which is fantastic. I thought it was a fantastic title. I was like, I could use Joy on Demand. Let's take a look at this. And there's a very short part in that book, which I ended up excerpting for I wanna say
tools of Titans about loving kindness meditation.
And he tells the story of this woman.
who as an experiment
guided or suggested by Ming.
did a one minute loving kindness meditation on the hour every hour for one work day. And she would pick people who were w walking about the office or so and she came back and she said, That is the
best day I've had at work in seven years. And I think part of that
is at least for me.
That
I am very
historically have been very trapped in my head.
I'm very prefrontal. Yeah. And I come from a family of
Warriors.
People who are Warrior or Warrior.
Warriors. Not the not the battle axe type, but the like Larry David type. Yeah, one of those two. Right. And
when you are consumed with
Worry.
Or anxiety.
This is not my description, but it's been
described to me as being trapped in the future.
Like depression is being trapped in the past, anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future.
And it's also, at least for me, it's a focus on the self.
It's like me, me, me. It's all
Things that might happen to me, things that I should do.
And the loving kindness
Meditation which
can be so short and have an impact.
Gets you unlike most
types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the West, it gets you out of yourself. Yeah.
And
I recall when I was writing Tools of Titans.
I decided to
Take Mang's advice and I did loving kindness for
Literally two or three minutes every night.
I was at this
the hotel and they have a dry sauna and I'd go into the dry sauna really late'cause I was doing my writing really late. Right. And just do
Two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same.
And it was
transformative as regards with regards to my mood. It was really just incredible. Yes.
Low dose. Really, really low dose. And I'm curious, you mentioned that you were thinking about love or meditating on loving kindness to your friend. Did you also start with a traditional
Practice of wishing it to yourself, or is that less comfortable if you're a great question. So I did not
It did not even occur to me.
To do this until years later.
when I
Went to my first
Seven day. Might have been ten day.
silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock. Right. And Jack Cornfield was there. And I went in, they check in with you to make sure you're not having a total psychotic break.
For a few minutes every other day.
And I had this meeting with Jack and one of his
co teachers for the event.
And we were talking about love and kindness, talking about love and kindness, and as I was leaving.
The woman with Jack said.
Just out of curiosity, have you been doing any loving kindness for yourself?
And it struck
I don't know how to describe this in a way that doesn't look make me look like an ass, but it just struck me as such a silly question. I was like, No, of course I haven't been doing it for myself.
And then I realized
How much that
probably explained a lot of my problems. And she goes, Yeah, you might want to try that. Why don't you experiment with that?
And uh remember Jack later saying, you know, if and I'm paraphrasing but you know, if your compassion doesn't include yourself, then it's incomplete. Yeah and that is become you can't really give it to other people in a complete way either. Right. So that is become
Probably I'm so glad you asked that. One of the biggest changes in
My
I could call it a mindfulness practice, but my way of relating to the world and thinking about helping others has been actually taking time to
Show.
or think on self-compassion specifically for myself at a handful of younger ages.
Yeah.
Yeah. Which I do at meal times.
And
Might talk about that more at some point. But yeah, that's that's it's become really it's become a very, very, very, very important ritual for me.
But I don't think you're alone. I mean Sharon Salisburg
mentioned to me that many people have trouble. I mean, the the traditional progression of the practice would be start with yourself and then, you know, move progressively outward to other people in your life. And she said many people have trouble
beginning with themselves.
And so I was really struck because last night this monk Haman Sunim, who I love, began
in this meditation by directing it to ourselves. And I asked him about that.
Afterwards.
And he seemed kind of puzzled by the question, which made me wonder if this is a uniquely American problem. I don't know.
It reminds me of the story I heard of this
I don't know what it was, Nepalese or
I know Bhutanese monk who came to the U S and he
He was in a car on the way to some event. This was in the US and there were these people running, you know, jogging on the side of the street to get in shape, but they're just they looked like they were dying. I mean they looked like they were running from hyenas. And he was just like
Are they okay? What's wrong with them? Just it was so foreign. Oh my goodness. So we have just a few minutes. Let me ask you
the billboard question. Uh so if if you could put
A message on a billboard. This is metaphorically speaking, to get a a message, a quote, a question, anything.
non commercial out to millions or billions of people. What
might you put on that billboard.
I think I'd probably put
This one aphorism that I've loved since high school, I think, which is only connect.
By E. M. Forster.
Only connect. Only connect. Yeah, like that at the end of the day.
That's all that really matters.
What does that mean to you?
It just means connecting on some really
deep level with the people around you. And that might sound like
An ironically.
Aphorism for someone who wrote.
A book.
About introversion, but to me
Those are not contradictory things at all.
You know, and so for me like connection
It can happen in person for sure. But it could also happen just by listening to
music that's really touching you and you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore, you know, or a writer who might not be alive anymore, but they're expressing something
Deep and unchanging about what it's like to be human. So those
I think there's kind of nothing
More important than that. Only connect. Only connect.
Is there anything you've done that has helped you to
more deeply or frequently experience those moments or any
advice you might have for people who
Want
Two
Cultivate that.
So aside from meditation, which I am a huge proponent of, but
I think you really do have to pay attention to what works for you. And it really is so different for everybody. You know, so for me, I love to have
Deep one on one conversations.
It happens through music, it happens through literature.
And there's

Um
It really is a different answer for everyone.
But I'll tell you this is maybe.
A different topic, but the whole
idea for my next book.
came out of one of these kinds of experiences.
Which is
I have always had a love of bittersweet and minor key music.
And
The book's not about music, but I'm gonna tell you this story anyway. Okay. So
When I was in law school, I was listening to music like that in my dorm and a friend came by and he was kind of a funny wise guy.
And he said, Why are you listening to this music to commit suicide to
And
You know, and I I thought it was funny and I laughed, but I thought about it for decades afterwards. Like I was thinking well
Why is it?
First of all, what is it about our culture?
That makes this music so suspect that you would make that kind of joke.
And also
What is it about the music itself that for me is not suicide inducing at all? It's like it's the opposite. I feel when I hear music like that completely.
Connected.
Two
Everything.
Because it's like the composer is expressing some really deep truth about what it is to be human. And so I've I've thought about this for decades and and the place that I'm going with this next book is
I think that
tuning into the sorrows of the world actually is a kind of secret superpower that we're not really allowed
to access very often because of course we live in this culture that tells you don't go there and always wear the smiley face and and so on.
But
If I can say like even look at somebody like you.
Even before you started being really open and upfront about some of the demons that you've struggled with, which by the way
all the honor to you for doing that. It's
Amazingly brave and generous.
But even before you did it, and if you had never done it.
I don't think you would have been
Touching all those people the way you have all these years.
If it weren't for those sorrows.
I agree.
Yeah.
Yeah. So it's all about that.
I'm excited to read your next book. Thank you.
I think that's a really, really, really, really
Important topic.
Yeah. I think.
Well we'll have to do round two in that case. I would love that. That would be awesome. I just have to write a little faster. I w I will happily wait for your best word. So no need to rush. Well this isn't this has been
Such a joy.
And I'm sure people can hear it.
But
Just to
Maybe
underscore the point. I mean you are a very present person when
You're speaking with someone else. And I can feel that in the room.
And uh so you're you're walking the talk, which is always refreshing and not always the case.
So thank you for taking the time today. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, and hang out. And I will link to everything in the show notes for folks, including the uh the name of the Korean monk that I couldn't spell to save my life at the moment. But we will have links to everything at team.blog forward slash podcast. You can just search.
Susan.
Uh and it'll pop right up.
People can find you
Online, presumably. Where are the best places to say hello, learn more about what you're up to?
Well
Best thing is to sign up for my newsletter, which you can get to if you go to QuietRev dot com, which is for Quirevolution. So you'll find it right there on the homepage. There's a a sign up form and there's a newsletter that goes out every week.
So that's the absolute best. And then I'm also super active on LinkedIn and on Facebook.
Great. And is that simply Susan Kane?
Because I think Facebook, correct me if I'm wrong, I think is author Susan Kane. Oh gosh, thank you for saying that. Yeah. So on Facebook, it's author Susan Kane, and on LinkedIn.
I actually don't remember, but it's part of the LinkedIn influencer. Like if you put in LinkedIn influencer and my name
It'll get there right up. Yeah.
And then Twitter may be less active.
Yeah, I am on Twitter a little less active. But at Susan Kane. Yeah.
And
Can't wait to see.
Next book.
And continue to follow your work. Thank you for doing. What is the next book? What is the next book? Well, you know, based on the an episode that came out a few days ago, I think it's gonna be this book that I
have been waiting to give myself permission to write, which is about
It's not that
It'll be
A close cousin to
what you are thinking a lot about right now. It would be
how to pay attention to
The psycho emotional.
Undercurrents and
components of life very closely. And
How to use tools both
On the beaten path and off very, very, very off the beaten path.
For
Finding resolution for
problems or challenges or
Insecurities.
Or trauma that are
At least in current conventional practice.
considered very difficult to treat or untreatable. So that would be
As far as I can tell, and I've been gathering notes for about five years now. That would be the thrust of it.
That's gonna be
Your most important book.
I hope so.
What's your timetable?
What's my timetable?
It's
Well, as who was it? I think this was this is something I heard on a T V set once. They didn't want people to rush, but it was
The gist was people need to rush. And they said but they didn't want to say that and make people panic. So they said, We need everyone to move with purpose.
So I think my answer is move with purpose, but not in haste, because I wanna treat it with
The depth.
and thought that it deserves. So I don't want to rush.
will probably write it without signing before selling anything or
signing any contracts, I'll probably Oh you'll write the whole thing. I'll probably do it on my own time. Oh interesting. Okay. But it is a top, if not the top priority.
Wow. So So are you like working on it every day right now? I am in some fashion working on it every day, but it's gonna be a while before I get to the
composition prose stage. But the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is the experimentation and the traveling for subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note taking and the organizing of said notes. Right. And I'm doing some piece of that almost every day.
Wow.
Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad you're doing this book. Yeah. So if I can help, you know, if you want an early reader or whatever, I would love to.
It's completely up my alley. Well, likewise. Likewise. This has been so much fun.
And
Until next time.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And to everybody listening.
Same.
Until next time, thank you for listening.
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 Bold Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.
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.
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