0:00
When I'm in a flow, being like, "Oh, this is so fun. Oh, my God.
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This is my curiosity is just on the page."
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That's going to be the best writing.
0:03
I think that's an interesting idea of research as chasing of surprise.
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I just learned something new or something just clicks and boom, dopamine hit. You wrote 300 posts.
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And your drawings don't even begin to emerge.
0:17
I wasn't trying to be a writer. I was just having fun. That's gold.
0:20
Once you start to take something seriously, parts of your brain can literally stop working.
0:25
It's easy when you're writing a book, especially, to think that you're writing it for the most snooty critic.
0:29
That person does not matter.
0:38
One of the things that struck me as I was preparing for this interview, I think of you as somebody with a super distinct style, the colors and the stick figure drawings and just the way that you explain things.
0:47
I didn't realize that you had a blog before Wait But Why, that you wrote from ages 23 to 29. You wrote 300 posts.
0:53
And here's what's interesting.
0:53
I went through, went through, went through. Oh, wow. And I was looking at it. Old school.
1:04
And your drawings don't even begin to emerge until the end of that era.
1:04
So your style is something that comes out of that, but it takes 300 posts. Yeah. Yeah, totally.
1:12
That was my procrastination activity before it became the thing I was supposed to be doing.
1:21
When Wait But Why started, it became a full-time job.
1:25
Before that, it was what I was supposed to not be doing.
1:25
It was I was supposed to do other stuff that I'm supposed to be doing, and so I would procrastinate. Oh, I'm just going to...
1:35
Actually, just I have an idea for a blog post quickly and then I'll get back to the work.
1:38
And so I became prolific because procrastinators are great at producing in the areas where they're not supposed to be.
1:46
And yeah, it was just, I think part of what was the reason I did it so much is because it was fun because there was no pressure.
1:53
I wasn't trying to be a writer.
1:58
I wasn't trying to be a good writer.
1:58
I wasn't trying to be any writer. I was just having fun.
2:02
It's almost like if I had a funny day, I would send...
2:02
Back then, email was a little bit more of a social thing than it is now.
2:09
I would send an email to six friends or whatever and I would explain a funny story about my day.
2:15
Basically, it was just that publicly.
2:15
And I don't think people, when they're writing a funny story to their friends, I don't think they're thinking I'm being a writer right now.
2:28
They're just talking to their friends over text.
2:28
So basically, it was just that.
2:32
And then when you start playing in the sandbox, you start to find stuff you didn't know.
2:39
Okay, I'm going to actually start doing lists.
2:39
And this was, by the way, I feel like before the Buzzfeed and all those, they were in listicles and became such a trite format.
2:48
I didn't invent the list article, but it wasn't a huge thing yet.
2:48
And I started doing 19 Things I Don't Understand or 25 Things That Annoy Me.
2:53
And I think it was actually kind of a fresh format then.
2:59
People were like, "Oh, this is fun."
2:59
And then that totally got ruined, so I can't do them anymore.
3:03
But I didn't know, I didn't think when I first started about writing lists, but then I realized that was fun because I did it once and I liked it.
3:09
And then the same thing, towards the very end, I one day was like, what if...
3:15
I didn't even know how do you draw something and then get it onto into the computer?
3:22
How do you get it onto the...
3:22
It was just this was so long ago.
3:22
I was like drawing tablet and then you draw and then you can save the file and you can upload.
3:28
This seems obvious now, but back then, I was like, can I even upload an image into this basic blogger? Turns out you can.
3:38
And so I started doing these cartoons and then the readers really liked them and it was really fun and I was like, "Oh, this is a whole new thing."
3:44
But again, just kind of discovered that by playing in the sandbox.
3:50
Yeah, they're incredible, they're goofy.
3:50
And what I think that I really admire about you is the juxtaposition between goofiness and this is how AI is going to evolve.
4:02
And even in your Elon post, you're like, "Hi, you're Elon Musk."
4:02
And there's an awkwardness that you sort of write into that piece that is really well portrayed through those cartoons.
4:15
And it's what allows anybody who goes on Wait But Why to be like, "Oh, I remember that site."
4:22
Because so many websites look the same.
4:22
Yours looks totally different.
4:27
Even the stick figures move and stuff like that.
4:27
And what I like about that, beyond the fact that it's just cool and distinct and unique is that it's super you and it's very aligned with who you really are as a human being.
4:39
Yeah, because I think it started with the old blog.
4:44
It was basically the activity was just being me online.
4:44
And it's kind of still what I feel like I'm doing.
4:54
It's more real writing now.
4:54
It's more real topics now, for sure.
4:54
But I think that the core is still just me kind of hanging out with readers and talking.
5:02
I think there's a spectrum of how much the writer is a character in the writing.
5:13
So on one end, it's a super academic thing where you will read an entire book, and I read a lot of these, by a scientist or whatever. And they can be great.
5:26
They can be great books, there's nothing wrong with it.
5:26
It's just you finish the book and you don't know anything about the writer.
5:29
You don't know what their personality's like, you don't know if they're funny, you don't know any of their quirks, you don't know what they do in their spare time.
5:37
You know nothing about them because that's not the point.
5:40
A journalist, a lot of journalists, you're reading a front page New York Times article, not an op-ed.
5:43
You're not going to know pretty much anything about the writer.
5:43
An op-ed, you're going to start to know, you're going to know a lot more about the writer because the point of an op-ed is to, first of all, it's just the concept is it is their opinion.
5:51
So you know their opinion, but you also...
5:56
There's a lot of personality in those articles, in an op-ed.
5:56
There's a range there too, though. Some really put...
6:01
William Safire or a certain...
6:01
People with a ton of personality. Hunter S. Thompson. Yeah, exactly.
6:07
I mean, that's the ultimate.
6:09
And so that's just a spectrum that I think any writer should think about.
6:09
And by the way, it could be different for different articles.
6:16
If I'm writing about procrastination, I'm going to be really putting myself into the article.
6:23
And if I'm writing about, I don't know, like AI, less so, but still, what you're going to hear...
6:33
You're going to finish that article and you're going to not just know about AI, but you're going to know about my freakout while researching AI and you're going to know about why my mind is so blown and where I am at the end of this.
6:51
So you're still going to know a lot.
6:51
Again, I don't think that's better or worse. I think there's...
6:56
Some of the best writers don't put themselves in, there's no reason you have to.
7:01
It's almost like Daniel Day Lewis, do we know anything about who he actually is in his spare time from watching his movies? No.
7:06
But he's one of the best actors in the world. Versus Louis C. K. on stage.
7:11
You're getting to know him quite well.
7:11
And so again, it's not one's better or worse, it's just it's interesting to even just think about that as a spectrum.
7:18
I like that you used the word hanging out because when I think of your writing, I don't just think of what ideas are going to be shared.
7:25
When I open up Wait But Why, I feel like I'm stepping into an environment that you've created, and that you are curating a visual experience and then I can laugh and experience your epiphanies.
7:38
And basically, the way that I think about what you're trying to do with your writing is say that you're researching something over six months.
7:48
You have a whole emotional journey that you go through.
7:48
And then basically, when you're writing, you're like, "Okay, I'm going to squash that emotional experience so that you, as the reader, can experience that same arc, at least the highlights, in 45 minutes."
7:56
And that's what makes your writing so emotionally resonant in a way that truly is like nobody else I know on the internet.
8:08
Someone talked about, I think it's Julian Shapiro talked about the dopamine hit density in his writing, something like that.
8:16
And I love that because when I'm researching, a lot of it is dry, a lot of it's boring.
8:23
And then I read something fascinating, something that I just learned something new or something just clicks or it's an incredibly interesting fun fact or just something, a connection gets made and boom, dopamine hit.
8:35
Just like this jolt of a euphoric little jolt of intellectual excitement.
8:46
Or you're watching a stand-up comedian and they say something so hilarious and true and the perfect words, dopamine hit.
8:53
What an enjoyable moment because... Right?
8:59
And so it could be and I'm in a conversation with a friend and we come up with something and it's like, "Oh, that's good."
9:02
Or I'm just thinking, I'm just daydreaming.
9:02
I'm like, "Oh, that's such a funny way to compare that thing to this." Okay.
9:06
Or often, I'm researching and then just like I'll research for three hours and get seven minutes of dopamine hits.
9:21
Okay, so now, my goal when I'm writing is to take all those collected thoughts and insights and research ahas, and now give a much denser version.
9:26
So a lot of my research time is bored or confused or feeling like I already know this.
9:40
And so yeah, it's just trying to filter down to distill the best moments, which I think a lot of writers...
9:51
Of course, that's part of why we like to read is because someone out there has done a lot of work to bring us the best.
10:05
The stand-up comedian is the ultimate example because this is the funniest thoughts they've had that year or maybe in the last decade and the absolute best.
10:10
And then they go out and they test them.
10:17
And the ones that really click, they keep and then they keep coming up with funny ideas.
10:22
And when you're seeing an HBO special on one of these hour specials, is you're seeing the best of the best of the best of the best, aha, funny moments they've had and you get to just watch it for one straight hour and it's just one thing after the other.
10:33
And it's not that they're the most brilliant person.
10:37
It's that their craft is distilling the funniest insights of their decade into this hour for you. It's just it's cool.
10:44
Comment, then a question.
10:44
So Raymond Chandler, the novelist, he used to write on his typewriter and it would have about 250 words per page.
10:49
And his rule was that on every single page that would come out, there had to be one of those moments of insight.
11:01
And if it didn't have it, then it wasn't dense enough, which is sort of like what you're saying.
11:05
My question, about almost a decade ago when I was just getting started in writing, I was doing a summer internship in New York City and I saw you at a coffee shop and I was too scared to say hi.
11:15
So how's this for a decade later?
11:15
I also feel like I met you the first time in Central Park. Is that correct? We did. Uh-huh. We were sitting...
11:20
I went to the Wait But Why meetup. I remember that.
11:23
That was a long time ago. That was like 2016.
11:26
That was a long time ago. That was a fun day. Thanks for coming.
11:30
It was the global media day. Yeah, that was fun.
11:31
Yeah, we should do that again. That was great. Yeah. Internet's cool.
11:34
You can start a blog and people from all over the world who happen to click with your ideas can find you.
11:46
And then it's like anyone publishing a substack, when they publish, their audience, it's not this audience of people in the room sitting with them.
11:54
It's literally like they're scattered around the planet reading this article. It's crazy.
11:58
They're thousands of miles apart, but they're all reading the same thing. It's weird.
12:04
When you were in those early days of writing, how consciously did you cultivate your voice?
12:12
Not very consciously at all because it was literally just like a fun activity for me.
12:21
And so it was the opposite of writing college papers and high school papers, which I hated.
12:30
Which it's the opposite of fun, those papers.
12:30
You have an extremely rigid form, you have to do a topic sentence, a thesis statement, a topic sentence, and you have to cite every sentence, and it just takes...
12:40
Any form of no personality at all is supposed to be in those papers, and it's often based on a lot of dry reading.
12:53
And this first blog, no research, no format, extremely informal.
12:53
And I had a funny idea, I had a funny list.
13:03
I realized it's weird that we all own dogs. That's a weird concept.
13:12
Okay, I'm going to go and just write that for 20 minutes, three paragraphs, and post it.
13:16
So there really wasn't, but I think what happens is you do develop a voice, you start to develop a voice, but for me, it was very not intentional because I really truly wasn't taking it seriously as a craft for almost...
13:26
I wrote for six years on that first blog, and I almost never at any point said, "I'm going to get big as a writer.
13:32
I'm going to go for this."
13:39
There's something to this, how once you start to take something seriously, all of a sudden, parts of your brain can literally stop working.
13:44
So if I'm hanging out at the bar with a friend or I'm on a walk, whatever, I will just come up with ideas and it's just sort of what I do, and it's like, "Ooh, that's cool, that's cool."
13:54
But then the second it's like, okay, now you need to come up with this idea that needs to be good.
13:58
All of a sudden, I feel like I get this block and there's something to the fact that you are writing without being a writer for six years, and I wonder if you would've gotten something so distinctive if you hadn't had that time period of testing and playfulness and experimentation. Yeah, no.
14:16
I mean, and I might not just have had the confidence to write in such a specific me voice because I might not have thought that that's what writers should do, but I knew from 300 posts that at least some people, and it wasn't a huge audience, but I knew that it resonated with some people.
14:31
So I said, "Okay, I know this is appealing to some people, so I can just keep doing it."
14:36
I learned that lesson without having to, just by accident, kind of.
14:44
But I totally agree with you where it's like I'll sometimes be trying to write something and I'll be writing in a certain...
14:50
I'll be trying to explain for a current book I'm working on.
14:58
I'll explain something in the book and then I'll say, "I'm going to go and write a long tweet to subscribers about this concept because it's interesting." Whatever.
15:09
And I go, suddenly, I'm just on Twitter and I'm just writing it out.
15:09
And I'm like, "Okay, but this isn't for the book.
15:13
Let me just explain it."
15:13
And I realize I'm like, "This is better than...
15:19
This is what I should be doing there.
15:19
These are the same people I'm writing for here.
15:24
Just explain it like you're having fun on Twitter."
15:24
And I have to go back and remind myself that.
15:29
And it's like you're not writing for the...
15:29
It's easy when you're writing a book especially to think that you're writing it for the most snooty critic, and, "Okay, I need to..."
15:45
And it's like that person does not matter.
15:45
For me, the people that I'm writing to on Twitter, like my silly readers who I am friends with in my head, we're all friends.
15:56
That's the only people that matter here.
15:56
People who don't like that, that's totally fine, but it's hard.
16:06
It's very hard to remember that, especially with a book.
16:06
You're like, "Oh, the New York Times might review this."
16:11
And then that just makes you think about that.
16:17
Yeah, I want to talk about what I'm calling chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is what you experienced in your book.
16:21
And I guess you wrote the first 10 chapters. Oh, God.
16:26
And then chapter 11, you were just like, "Oh, my goodness." What happened?
16:27
Okay, so this was a series called The Story of Us, and then it turned into a book called What's Our Problem?
16:35
But it was A, it was supposed to be just a blog post, and then it was like, oh, there's so much to say.
16:41
I'm trying to figure out why society is all messed up.
16:44
And then I realized, okay, I'm going to tell them, I'm going to explain this using, first, a bunch of just new frameworks we can use to look at society through this thing we're all looking at, let's look at it through an unfamiliar lens.
16:56
And here's a new pair of glasses.
17:03
Now, let's see if it looks different to us and we can get some insights.
17:03
That's the first few parts of this online series.
17:07
And then I was like, "Okay, let's get into the history.
17:12
Let's talk about how we got to this point."
17:12
And then finally, in the chapter 11 out of 12, the 12th is just a little conclusion.
17:21
So chapter 11 is going to be this meaty chapter about just some examples in the real world.
17:26
So now, let's apply this to the real world, and we'll do a few examples over here and a few examples over here.
17:29
And then that examples chapter, I just got really sucked in and I realized there is so much to say if I really want to explain what's going on with the specific politics now, because it's not history and it's not just theory.
17:39
Now, I'm talking about what is going on in the news last week and why is the reaction?
17:44
I didn't get into policy.
17:50
I'm not talking about why one side's right or the other or what the right policies are. That's not this book.
17:55
This book was why is everyone being so tribal about everything?
17:55
Why are the lies spreading so well?
18:00
Why do people hate their family members right now? What is going on?
18:07
So I started getting into specific movements and I started getting into...
18:07
And then the history of those movements and how it came together and then how does this...
18:12
And that just ended up being longer than the whole other 10 chapters combined.
18:17
And I said, "This is insane.
18:17
I can't publish a 100,000 word chapter."
18:22
So I said, "Okay, I'm just going to make this a book so people can read it."
18:31
Because this is a blatant...
18:31
Now, usually, my other long posts are kind of books, but they're short books or long blog posts. This is just a book.
18:36
So then I turned it into a book and then that raised the standards.
18:40
Now, I said, "Well, now it really has to be airtight and I really want to go and...
18:44
By the way, a lot's changed since I wrote the first 10 chapters.
18:44
So let me go back and rework all those and condense them."
18:48
I've also gotten feedback on those 10.
18:48
That was actually kind of nice because I had posted them, so I had hundreds of comments.
18:53
Some very critical, some very positive, people arguing with each other.
18:59
That was incredibly valuable.
18:59
I mean, you usually don't get that.
19:03
So I had already completely talked about scientific method.
19:03
I had taken these 10 chapters and thrown them through a very kind of gauntlet and they came out tattered with something standing and something's broken. And I said, "Okay, cool.
19:16
Now, let's make a bigger, better, tighter version of those.
19:21
And then let's condense that last chapter 11."
19:21
And that became this book, What's Our Problem?
19:26
Tell me about Bakari Kafele.
19:26
I guess he was writing this blog about Story of Us and- Well, publishing multiple posts about politics, getting pretty spicy, which for the first time, I hadn't really gone in that direction very much.
19:44
And so there's a lot of...
19:44
That's going to bring a lot of critical comments in.
19:44
And also a lot of the comments sections that people are going to be arguing with each other.
19:51
And some of the critical comments were ad hominem attacks or just, "This is so disappointing coming from you."
19:58
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
20:04
I could pretty quickly weight out a lot of the comments.
20:04
These are very tribal political people who seems like I look at the substance of what they're saying, they're mostly just really mad I don't agree with their tribe and they're attacking me. Okay.
20:21
But there's a whole other group of critical comments that were really substantive and we're saying, "You're missing the forest for the trees here because of this, this and this."
20:28
or "There's an inconsistency with your argument here."
20:33
or "Your bias is showing here." Okay.
20:33
And it doesn't feel good.
20:40
You'd rather everyone love it.
20:40
But it's important to read those and to reflect on them, especially if this is a topic you're going to either write about more in the future, or in my case, if you're about to turn this into a book. That's gold.
20:51
It's like you're trying to build a machine you're going to put out in the world and someone kicks the machine and says, "Look, it's broken there." And that's what it is. Maybe they're wrong.
21:01
Maybe you look and you say, "No, it wasn't broken." And that happens a lot.
21:04
Sometimes I look at the criticism and I think, "No, I think that this person's missing the forest for the trees." Fine.
21:08
But sometimes I'm like, "Damn it. You know what?"
21:11
So this was one commenter on the blog, his screen name, his avatar is Jacob Azizas or Jacob Aziza.
21:19
And I was like, "This guy's annoying me because his comments are really like they're on point and they're long and they're thorough."
21:28
So I just reached out to him and I said, "Are you interested in potentially reading the draft of this book for feedback?"
21:32
And he was so down to do that and wrote back with extremely thorough comments.
21:38
And the book is better because of him. I'm extremely grateful.
21:45
If again, I happen to have this opportunity to even find him because I had published this on the blog ahead of time, but I think if someone has a very thoughtful critic who's, in the end, doing you a service by putting all this time into giving these comments, this is a service, take it.
22:03
Talk to me about the feeling in your brain when you get stuck.
22:12
And I want to hear about that negative feeling, that feeling where you're feeling really agitated, maybe you're hating yourself, you're like, "I just can't do this anymore."
22:19
What is that like for you? I know it so well.
22:19
Especially it happens with longer things.
22:28
With shorter things, you can kind of see the end.
22:28
I feel like it's just difficult in a different way to do a good short thing.
22:36
The long things is when you just get tired of writing because especially since I think in some ways, I'm not doing academic writing where it's always the same tone.
22:50
It's always kind of a very straight tone.
22:50
And so you're just trying to...
22:54
You don't have to keep it interesting tone-wise as you go, but I'm trying to.
23:01
I don't want to just be doing chronological.
23:01
And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.
23:05
And I'm also trying to vary the tone a little bit, and I want it to be a fun read.
23:10
There's hitting a snag because the next thing is just really daunting and I don't feel like I understand it that well.
23:18
And I know I have to research more and it's just icky and I don't feel very confident in my ability to write this section.
23:23
Okay, that's going to snag me.
23:28
I'm just going to do anything else.
23:28
Then I was going to icky avoid that.
23:32
Or I'm like, "No, I know my stuff now, but I have to...
23:32
I don't know what order to put it all in.
23:36
There's so much to say about this."
23:36
And it's like, I don't know how I'm going to wrangle this story into a streamlined thing that's not so long.
23:41
Okay, that's icky, I'm going to avoid it now because I haven't...
23:46
Or okay, I know what I'm going to say and I know the order I'm going to say it in, and it's just I'm stuck trying to...
23:54
I'm not writing good writing right now. I'm being boring.
24:01
I'm just trying to plod through this and I can tell, and the reader's going to know that. I should be having fun.
24:05
Every section should have a fun thing going on. I should never be...
24:11
Someone gave me some advice once with when I was preparing for my TED Talk, they said, "If there's a part when you're practicing that you always hate and you're like, 'Oh, I hate this part, I just want to get through it.'
24:22
, that's going to be the worst part of the talk.
24:22
The audience is going to...
24:26
Don't just cut it or change it.
24:26
And then the part that you're like, 'Oh, I love this part. This is so fun.' , great, more of that.
24:30
And that the best talk is when from beginning to end, you're like, 'Every minute of this is fun to do. I love it.'"
24:39
So I feel the same with writing.
24:39
If I'm fighting through a section, it's like, that's not going to be fun writing.
24:43
And it's when I'm in a flow, being like, oh, this is so fun.
24:43
Oh, my God, this is my curiosity is just on the page and I'm just itching to get to the next thing and I'm not thirsty or hungry and I have to go to the bathroom for an hour and I just won't because I'm in this flow.
24:57
That's going to be the best writing.
24:57
So sometimes that's just not coming.
24:57
And sometimes I feel like I'm like, "I hate these sentences as I'm writing them."
25:05
So that's another way to...
25:09
So these are three totally different reasons that I would feel stuck. Yeah.
25:15
And when do you do the drawings?
25:15
Do you do them as you're going? No, no, no. After. After?
25:18
Yeah, the drawings I put in...
25:18
As I'm writing, I'll say, "Okay, there should be a drawing here.
25:23
And I'll put in a description in brackets in bold of what I'm going to do."
25:23
, which is both for me to remember, but also for if I give it for people feedback before drawing.
25:30
So I want them to be able to see what it's going to be.
25:34
And that's the last thing. And that part is a slog.
25:34
And then I'm doing a lot of my hand and I'm not very good at drawing, so it's a lot of the next one comes up and I have another blank page, and I'm like, "How am I going to do this thing on the page?"
25:46
So that's miserable in that way, but it's not like existential like, I don't know how to do...
25:50
I'm like, I just have to...
25:56
This is just like working out.
25:56
It's like going to the gym.
25:56
I'm like, "I just have to power through and do six drawings a day."
26:00
Do you make yourself laugh when you're doing the drawings? No.
26:08
You're just like serious stone-cold face? Yeah.
26:08
Usually, I'll be doing some drawing that's a totally wacky stick figure.
26:11
And I'm just sitting here like this just being like... There's a lot of that.
26:16
What I do a lot of is I make the facial expression inadvertently without...
26:22
Totally subconsciously, I'll make the facial expression that I'm drawing.
26:27
So my wife will see me sitting there and I'll be like... Or I'll just be like...
26:27
And I don't realize I'm doing it.
26:37
It's so embarrassing to get caught.
26:37
But there's something about, I'm trying to channel this very, the facial expressions on stick figures are very subtle, little tiny, extra little curl in the mouth totally changes this face.
26:46
So I'm like, it's very... Yeah. Okay. I got a question.
26:51
You obviously have this thing with procrastination.
26:51
Do you legitimately think that you would be more successful if you didn't procrastinate or does it serve a function in your life?
27:02
And if so, what is the right balance?
27:02
Because you've been talking about wanting there's black focus time and then there's white free time, and I want to delineate between black and white, one or the other.
27:13
But is that advice for you that's directionally true, or do you actually wish that you would follow it?
27:19
And if you did, you would be more successful and prolific as a writer?
27:24
Yeah, I think the alternative to me procrastinating is not I'm rushing through an idea, not thinking it through, just powering it out there, not mulling on anything.
27:42
That's never going to be me.
27:42
That's just a whole different problem.
27:45
And yeah, I don't think that would be good.
27:45
I think that the mulling and some of the tortured kind of like, "This isn't good enough.
27:50
I need to think harder about this.
27:50
I need to come back tomorrow."
27:53
Some of that's very important to do something really good.
27:53
Or another kind of maybe productive procrastination is when I'm researching and I think I kind of know enough to do it, but I'm just going to read through more sources anyway, because it becomes kind of fun at that point to read sources.
28:08
Once you understand it, reading more sources is fun because you get to...
28:11
You're like, "Oh, I get this."
28:11
And it feels so good to read and be like, "Oh, I totally get this now.
28:16
Where if I had read this before, I wouldn't have understood this at all."
28:19
And it's confirming that confidence. It's like, yep.
28:19
And then someone will just go watch a YouTube video on it.
28:25
It's not an actual real source, but I'm like, and of course, if you can also realize that's the way to test, you can realize, I don't know some stuff there too, but the point is sometimes I could start writing and I'll go do extra research, and I do think that does serve me.
28:39
It's like you'd be surprised each of those sources, something new comes up and I'm like, "Glad I read that."
28:44
Because I just had a new insight while reading it either because of the source or just while reading or I learned something.
28:52
So I think there is productive procrastination.
28:52
I think the impulse that creates procrastination can also create other good things, like a really determination to make it an A, an A+.
29:02
If it were easier, if you were just doing a B-, you would procrastinate less.
29:02
That said, there's just a whole...
29:11
Most of procrastination is just self-defeating.
29:11
You are just lacking executive function where it makes so much sense to work right now.
29:19
It's a time when you're fresh.
29:25
A lot of the time, you have stuff to do later today.
29:25
This is the writing time.
29:25
You'll be so much happier later today if you just do your writing right now.
29:30
You're going to move forward with your project, you're going to get to do more of the things you want to do because you're going to move more quickly.
29:38
And you're not going to be rushing at the end.
29:38
You'll have more time to dig deep. So it is just better.
29:42
Now, it's also better to work out crazy and to sleep perfectly well and to eat perfectly well.
29:47
And we don't do a lot of these things.
29:47
It's like, of course it's better to be a perfect grownup about things like this.
29:51
And it's just simply, humans are not...
29:58
Don't tend to be great at being perfect grownups.
29:58
And the ones I talked to, I talked to Ryan Holiday recently on his podcast, and he's kind of the opposite.
30:04
He just writes a book a year or whatever, and he also has kids and he has a farm and he's got a bookstore.
30:09
And it's just like, "How?"
30:15
Adam Grant, these people.
30:15
And what I find is that it's not always the healthiest thing that creates that either.
30:23
There's this feeling of shame if they're not doing it maybe, or there's an anxiety from not producing.
30:27
So I think that it's not like it's easy to be perfectly mentally healthy and also just perfectly productive.
30:38
Humans aren't really good at this.
30:42
So I don't get to, I'm not like, "Why do I do this crazy thing?"
30:42
I'm like, "I do it because I'm a human. We do this."
30:45
But it's the same thing where there's some people that eat pretty well, but they cheat sometimes.
30:50
And then there's some people that have a huge problem with their diet and it's ruining their life or alcohol or one of these things.
30:54
And I think that procrastination's like that too, it can really...
31:01
I wouldn't say it's ruining my life, but I can see how if it were 50% worse, maybe it would legitimately be doing that.
31:09
So yeah, I think less procrastination's good and I think it's a worthy thing to try to work on.
31:14
And I don't think there's this idea that, oh, procrastination's actually good because it's just that rushing isn't good.
31:19
And that doesn't mean procrastination is good. Right.
31:24
How do you think about the relationship between ideas and writing and the relative importance of both of those?
31:28
So would you rather have someone who's a great writer with not so good ideas?
31:32
Great ideas, but not so good at writing?
31:36
What is the relationship between them?
31:36
I don't think it's an obvious answer.
31:36
I think that someone who's a great writer with okay ideas, you can enjoy their writing.
31:42
You can just enjoy their wordplay and the humor in their writing.
31:48
And maybe they're not saying something that original, but it's just a lot of fun to read.
31:53
I don't know, you can watch someone on YouTube just kind of ranting, but they're being interesting about it even though the actual ideas aren't that good, but it's fun to watch them.
32:05
So I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
32:05
I think the more obvious answer's to say the ideas matter more.
32:09
And I think if I had to choose one, I'll choose ideas over great writing.
32:14
But bad writing is not fun to read.
32:14
And I would say honestly, if I have to choose truly bad writing with great ideas, like a really dry, dense academic paper, I will not read that. No way? No. So a balance is good.
32:36
And I think that really bad writing, it's hard for the good ideas to even come through at all. Right.
32:44
Did you write out your TED Talk or how did writing factor into that?
32:51
Well, I had already written a blog post on procrastination, so I kind of had the framework in mind, these three characters that are in my head.
32:55
So yeah, I think I first just wrote bullets and then talked it out and it was way too long, double the length and rambly and okay.
33:06
I started making more involved bullets about specifically what's actually going to be said here, what's not, what's the order?
33:24
To get the rambliness out and the redundancy, and I would speak it again, and then I would just kind of talk it out loud and I have to continue to reframe in my head because if I'm writing a speech, I'm not going to sound like a person.
33:35
So what I would do is I would just out loud, I would just pace around and I would just say things and I would have to continue to envision that I'm just talking to an audience.
33:45
I'm talking to people because when I'm talking...
33:50
If there's a group of people here and I'm just talking to them, how would I actually talk?
33:50
And that's very different sometimes than how I would write.
33:55
So I would do that and then I would capture that and write it down, and then I would maybe work on the writing a little, revise, but then I would say it out loud and realize that sounds weird.
34:02
So it's really, it was a mix back and forth.
34:05
But for most talks, that's not how I do it.
34:05
Most talks, I know what I want to say, I have my slides, I might do some thinking about the general structure, but the slides kind of provides that, and then I go talk it out. Ted Talk is different.
34:16
That's like the Super Bowl of talks.
34:20
And it's also just an exact amount of time, it's going to be online forever, everyone's going to see it, you get one take.
34:28
And if you mess up a sentence, that sentence is now forever...
34:35
That mess up is ingrained in it forever.
34:35
It's like a short film online where you get one take. It's this crazy thing.
34:40
It's a stressful activity.
34:40
And so for that, I think, look, there are some very, very accomplished speakers who have done their talking a million times and they can go up there and just kind of do it.
34:51
I'm much more experienced now, and so I got down to word-for-word and then did the best I could to really memorize it, and I wish I'd memorized it even better.
34:59
There were still a few moments when I was like, "What am I saying now?"
35:05
And then I would say, "So I thought about this."
35:10
And that is not in the talk.
35:10
That's just me furiously trying to remember what's next.
35:16
So I pulled it off, but barely is how I feel.
35:16
So my favorite part of that talk is when you're talking about the procrastination.
35:22
And I think you give three examples.
35:22
And you give example one, example two, and then you go, "And then I'll go on Google Earth and I'll start at the southern part of India, and then I'll scroll all the way to the top of the country for two hours."
35:34
And then you say it so well, you go, "Just to get a better feel for India."
35:39
I remember the first time I heard that, I was laughing my face off. So tell me about that.
35:45
Did you rewrite that section?
35:52
Do you feel like that just came out?
35:52
But those specific words, which for me, are the highlight.
35:56
Every word was written there. Okay. Yeah.
35:58
And naturally, that specific line had been on my blog.
35:58
I had used that example in one of the blog posts about it, and I specifically had written that line, that I did it to get a better feel for India, which is also a true story.
36:09
Every single thing in that talk and in the blog post is true.
36:14
I'm not inventing stories that sound funnier.
36:14
Every example I gave of what my monkey says we should do instead of working is very specific stuff I'd do.
36:22
The India story, I've exactly done that for literally multiple hours where sometimes I'd zoom out and realize, "Oh, I'm still in the southern third here." Zoom right back in.
36:32
And it was 100% a day when I absolutely should have been working.
36:38
And it's just a classic kind of thing I would do because also, then it's this perfectionist part of me is once I start that activity, it becomes really unsatisfying to stop.
36:46
So now, I'm going to keep going.
36:46
Now, once it starts, we're getting all the way to the top of India.
36:50
And probably knowing me, I probably ended up from there into Tibet and other places.
36:55
But the instant gratification monkey is creative.
36:55
If there's a part of you that is really...
37:03
If you have it in your head that this work is really icky, and icky is the best word I can give, because that encompasses...
37:11
It can be icky because it's daunting, it can be icky because it's just a lot.
37:15
It's a hard, there's a lot you have to do.
37:15
It can be icky because you're behind and you're feeling really stressed about that.
37:23
So even just this whole thing is it can be icky because you're feeling not confident.
37:30
Writers in confidence is a whole dance and you can feel great.
37:37
You go through these spells where you just feel like, I don't know why anyone thinks I'm good at this.
37:41
Or I lost it, what I used to have.
37:41
And then you write something good or you get some compliment and you're reminded and suddenly, all this confidence shoots back and you're like, "No, I got this. And this is great. Oh, yeah."
37:51
And then you feel amazing and then you're having fun again.
37:54
So for any reason, it can be icky.
37:54
The monkey is going to suddenly do everything to resist.
38:00
And it will get creative.
38:00
You will be cleaning your apartment or you'll be doing productive stuff that's not this, or you'll be totally wasting time, just whatever it is.
38:17
You have to see, oh, there's this monkey doing this.
38:17
That's why I'm like having an early lunch today. Made no sense.
38:23
Oh, because I didn't want to work and it was something to do.
38:29
How does playing piano as a kid and then playing a lot of music as you got to be a teenager, how does that show up in your writing?
38:35
I think there is a lot of composing music and composing writing.
38:41
There are some parallels there.
38:41
With music, what I would always try to avoid is writing stuff that's derivative that sounds a lot like this artist or this category and is kind of my version of that.
39:02
It's nothing wrong with that, but it's not going to stand out and you're not going to disrupt any kind of thing doing that.
39:06
The film scorers, which is what I was doing a long time ago, who end up doing the big, big movies, they developed a really unique style, kind of like that cook and the chef.
39:19
They kind of discover their own chord patterns and their own sounds versus the ones that are copying those people and using those chords that they're famous for, but doing it in their own way.
39:32
They're not going to be doing the big, big movies.
39:39
They're going to be doing much smaller things or video games or maybe TV shows, smaller TV shows.
39:45
And the same thing goes for bands that get huge.
39:45
Usually, the ones that are really famous is because they're doing something new.
39:50
The Beatles is the ultimate example.
39:50
They started doing derivative, but really excellent versions.
39:54
They were the best of the derivative sound at the time.
40:01
And then somewhere mid to late '60s, they started doing truly original stuff.
40:01
So composing, I would always be torturing myself to not do the obvious chord now.
40:10
It's like it wants to go from this to this, to this to this.
40:15
That's a very common pattern.
40:15
I would say, okay, what's something different I can do here?
40:19
But you don't want to make it sound worse.
40:22
How can I do something that's different and it sounds really good? That's really hard.
40:26
So writing is very similar where I try not to use too many figures of speech.
40:26
I try not to say stuff like, I don't know, however, or because, after all.
40:36
That's not me, that's just how writers write.
40:46
And so of course, I do some of it.
40:46
It's impossible not to, but I try to...
40:46
I'd rather be doing something that is more colloquial and maybe weirder and maybe even less flowing, less beautifully written, but it's me and it's distinct than to write something that sounds like, oh, this is great writing.
41:06
But it sounds a whole lot like a lot of other writers.
41:09
Tell me more about the tricks that you use to get you in the writing.
41:09
Because something I feel is I am the most me if I'm writing an iMessage.
41:15
And then, that's if it's one-on-one, and then I'm a little bit less me if I'm writing in a WhatsApp group chat.
41:21
And then I'm definitely less me if I'm writing in Google Docs.
41:25
What tricks have you cultivated so that you can get more of yourself into your writing?
41:30
Honestly, it's very intangible.
41:30
It's a lot about mood and emotions that are going through you. Again, confidence.
41:37
If there's a lot of me in writing, it means I was pretty confident when I was writing that I was feeling like this is my domain here and I'm having fun and you're welcome to join.
41:49
I don't care if you don't because this is how I...
41:53
I'm here having fun in my own way.
41:53
I'm not trying to impress anyone and I'm just being silly.
41:58
If I'm being silly at all or...
41:58
And of course, that's going to be more original.
42:06
If the writing, if the palette is your play thing and you're just like, "I'm just going to screw around on this thing, and it's like, whatever, I can break all the rules. That's going to be...
42:20
There's a lot of confidence involved in that.
42:20
And when you're not feeling confident, that's when I'm going to be much more writing less interestingly, more kind of matter of fact explaining. And then no.
42:35
Now, sometimes, something calls for an explanation.
42:35
You can't be silly in every paragraph, of course.
42:40
So there's also a matter of choosing when to do it, especially if you're writing something emotional or serious.
42:46
Obviously, you don't want to kill the tone by...
42:50
Sometimes it's not about you.
42:50
So sometimes you're writing something about someone else or about an idea or about something, and no one needs to hear your little personality right now.
42:54
So there's also an element of choosing when, but I think the times when I know I should be doing that, I should be having more fun and I'm not, I'm putting more of me in, I think it's about mood.
43:11
I think having a few drinks can help.
43:11
I think taking a break and coming back to it or forcing myself to pause and be like, "What would this be like if I were just blogging?
43:20
If this were 2006 and now we're just blogging about this, how would I explain this to a friend?"
43:24
And then it'll trigger that kind of groove and I'm like, "Okay, right."
43:29
And then suddenly, I'm having more fun.
43:33
Or you can go read other writers that you think write colloquially that are a lot of fun. Who's that for you? Oh, there's a lot.
43:39
I mean, Bill Bryson is great.
43:41
I love Scott Alexander's blog. He writes really...
43:41
I mean, there's really silly blogs, Hyperbole and a Half, right?
43:46
One of my favorite blogs.
43:46
And she's the silliest and the most...
43:52
She's on the far end of the spectrum, Allie Brosh, of putting herself into it and being silly, but it's amazing. She's incredible.
43:57
And looking at something like that just to remind me or looking at my old writing, looking at a piece of stuff when I was having fun, to be like, this is fun.
44:08
It's almost like I want to remind myself, "This is fun. Have fun. This isn't a chore. You're not in college.
44:13
This isn't a college paper.
44:13
If you're not having fun, then write something different here. Don't do it."
44:19
Now, that's again, for a blog post, that's easier.
44:24
For a book, there is just a slog element to it.
44:24
You can't just have fun on every single page.
44:28
And even if you are, it's just a lot of writing to do.
44:28
So it's not always going to be fun, but you can just...
44:34
Some reminders like this to snap yourself back into that zone.
44:42
Do you still use TextEdit for a lot of your writing? Oh, yeah. Why?
44:46
Because it is- That's so random.
44:47
All I want is literally a white rectangle where I can...
44:47
It's no formatting and no bullshit, no tools.
44:55
I want to be able to make it bold or not bold, change the font size to make it caps or not caps and add color if I want to.
45:00
And then a indent, different indents.
45:00
That's a ton of tools right there.
45:05
Everything I just said, I can have 20 different classifications of stuff and I know everything...
45:10
I know what green means, I know what red means, I know what bold and red means versus not bold, and I know what two indents means versus one, and I know what putting three spaces in between versus just next line. All of that has... It's my own code.
45:24
And I'm sure that if I practice for a while on 10 different pieces of outlining software or whatever, I'm sure that on one of them I'd say, "Okay, you know what? This is better.
45:33
But this is working fine."
45:33
And I know I'm being an old man about this, but I have tried other software.
45:39
I have and it's like I just feel frustrated because I just want to move this there and I have to go in and highlight and do this, and then I have to go in, then I have to expand and I just want it here.
45:48
And then if it's too much in this doc, I want to make another doc.
45:52
And then I want to have the short version doc and then the long doc and then a little doc here, which is just a scratchpad for what I'm doing right now, and that's not my actual writing.
46:01
Then I'll do that in Microsoft Word, which I also have...
46:01
People can't believe I still use Word, but I tried other things and I'm just like, the editing process and the track changes and I don't love Word at all, but it just...
46:12
It's basic and it gets the job done.
46:22
So I'm always open to suggestions, but I will say my assistant has gotten me on to Workflowy for certain outlinings or she'll put her notes, her research notes in Workflowy and that it is a really good piece of software.
46:32
But I just look back at text at it and I'm like, because I just have such a code with myself for that, it's really easy to use.
46:37
It's also, you just close it, it's just all saved, even if something's not, even a doc is still untitled and you open it and they all open to the exact mosaic you had them in, and it never takes a long time to open.
46:57
You don't need any software. I don't know.
46:57
So that's how I feel about it.
47:02
It's funny you were talking about Microsoft Word, and I have this vivid memory of my mom teaching me that when you're writing in Word, you have to press Command + S. And I still do. Me too. I still do it.
47:15
Because they don't autosave because you have to use their stupid OneDrive or whatever it is, which I don't want to use.
47:19
So this happened a couple times with the last book where it would crash. Worst feeling ever.
47:26
Or the power would go out.
47:26
And now, it does do some form of autosave because the doc is recovered.
47:29
But that recovered doc might be up-to-date, it might be one paragraph behind or it might be three pages behind.
47:37
It's very unpredictable, and I have legit...
47:41
And losing writing of even two sentences is excruciating. Horrible.
47:46
Because you worked hard on that writing and maybe you also were really happy with the wording of certain parts and you can't replicate it.
47:52
You can't remember exactly how you did it, and it's just something that's so torturous about doing writing you've already done.
47:56
But the fact I was like, I can't believe whatever it was that year, 2021, and this is still happening.
47:59
Every other software just autosaves now.
48:06
So yes, it's maddening, but it also is just... It's very functional.
48:16
Why are you grateful for David McCullough's book on John Adams? I read that in college.
48:21
And I'm one of many people who loves history, but graduated high school thinking he hated history.
48:30
That's a very common story I find because history in school, unless you were lucky to have a great teacher, great history teachers like this godsend that I never had, sorry to any history teachers of mine that are watching this. I don't think any are. They weren't good.
48:46
They weren't good at all.
48:46
They didn't have passion for the subject.
48:46
First of all, it's not even like, of course the ultimate bad history is like you're just memorizing dates.
48:59
You're memorizing, you're spitting out, okay, that multiple-choice test.
49:05
It's kind of crazy how we teach history.
49:05
It's the most vivid thing of all these amazing things to happen.
49:10
It's better than any fiction story.
49:12
And you're saying passion for the subject.
49:12
It's the best fiction story, and we are characters in it.
49:16
It's literally like, do you want to know about the story that we're inside of? It's so interesting.
49:21
Plus people love gossip.
49:21
History is just drama and gossip, and it's like this crazy thing that happened, these betrayals, and then these surprise attacks, and then there's this giant movement and everyone...
49:33
This big picture, the creation of a new paradigm of all the way we all lived and then that failed because of this. Whatever.
49:45
Listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, for example, he's telling stories like soap opera, you're watching...
49:49
It's not a very highbrow part of me that I'm not like, "Haha, I'm listening to my history."
49:53
I'm sitting there like it's basically I'm addicted to really good soap opera.
50:02
So anyway, David McCullough's book was one of the first experiences I had when I was like, "This is amazing. History is amazing."
50:07
Even just that specific topic.
50:07
It's about John Adams, but it's really of course about the founding of the US.
50:13
You learn a ton about Washington and Jefferson and Madison, all the people at the time.
50:17
I had learned about that topic in really boring ways, many times.
50:23
That was just super boring.
50:23
And so A, it was this incredible story.
50:23
If you're an American, what could be more interesting than these, basically, a group of dudes in their 20s and a couple older ones who got together, who had read a ton of philosophy, knew a lot of law, and were like, "We have the rare chance to start a country from scratch."
50:46
And they invented the US.
50:53
It is striking how literate they were.
50:53
They were incredibly educated and smart.
50:53
They knew ancient philosophy, they knew modern philosophy.
51:01
They were enlightenment people.
51:01
They spent all their time drinking coffee and arguing with each other, as opposed to before that, drinking in the saloons.
51:11
If this had been a different time, those guys would be drinking in the saloons and arguing about their whatever dumb shit and not doing...
51:15
They were products of their time.
51:15
But anyway, it wasn't just that.
51:22
It wasn't just this great story, but it was the details.
51:22
It was that I didn't think I quite understood, because in history class, I never quite understood how much we do know about the details.
51:32
So it was that John Adams letter because he was this mythic figure to me, this painting, this guy in a painting.
51:36
It's his letter to his wife, letters to his wife and his diary about how he needs to stop going out with girls in college and focus on his books.
51:47
And I'm like, "John Adams was a college kid who was hitting on girls? What?"
51:47
And I realized, I'm like in the 1700s.
51:54
I feel like I was in a time machine.
51:54
I'm learning about the quirks and how they wrote.
51:58
And so it was a double whammy of the big story's so good, the details are so interesting.
52:02
And just for me, a birth, and I still, today, I've read a ton of history books and I even more so love history podcasts.
52:06
And the more you learn, the more interesting it becomes because you have a foundation.
52:13
And now, when someone mentions the late stages of the Roman Empire, you've learned about that seven times from seven different sources.
52:17
So you can place that in a place in your brain where it goes, and that makes it even more fun to learn.
52:26
Yeah, I like what you're saying about the big story, super interesting.
52:26
The details are really good.
52:29
How do you think about that when you're editing of building an intuition, a taste for what details are worth including because they add life to the piece, they add vigor and color and a sense of realism and actually an integrity to the writing?
52:40
But then also sometimes you'll be reading an academic paper, or you'll be reading some biography on page 274, and they're still on what this person was wearing when they were six years old going to their first piano recital or something.
52:55
You're like, "Okay, you can spare these details."
52:55
How do you think about that?
52:59
Yeah, it's a really interesting thing to think about, which is just a lot of these things, there's balance, right?
53:04
There's a certain time for details and a certain time for...
53:04
So I'm doing a book now, which is the biggest arc ever.
53:14
It's like the whole big history and future and everything.
53:19
And what you realize when you're writing is that actually, just zooming out, it can be interesting, but it's like you said, it's hard to have credibility.
53:27
If you just zoom out, and it's also, if you're just talking about the biggest picture, it's a little like, why should I listen to you about this?
53:36
Or maybe you're framing this thing interestingly, but I don't know, you're losing a lot of what's interesting, the big zoom out on, I don't know, evolution and reptiles split with mammals and then reptiles went and would develop in this way, and mammals would develop in this way.
53:57
And it's like, that is interesting.
53:57
But first of all, a lot of people know that stuff and a lot of the epiphanies they're going to have, the dopamine hits are going to be in the details.
54:07
But of course, also, like you said, I still want to remind everyone that we're on one big arc here and I want the big arc to blow people's minds as well.
54:18
So a lot of the way I'll choose what to put in is just my own experience.
54:18
I always assume that my readers are like me, my level of intelligence and education and knowledge and curiosity.
54:26
That's just the easiest way.
54:33
And when you write a lot and you're going to attract the people that happen to think like you or be interested in the same things.
54:38
So if I got a dopamine hit from a certain factoid, it's going to probably be in the book.
54:45
And a lot of times, I don't.
54:45
I'll read a factoid and I'm just like, "Okay, I don't know."
54:52
Around the time we split with chimps, the population of the common ancestor was 300,000. I'm like, "Okay."
54:58
I'm just like, "That's information."
55:08
But I'm not like, "300,000? That's so small." or "That's so big."
55:08
or "Oh, now I'm glad I know that." I'm like, "Okay."
55:13
It's like there's a million facts that come my way like that.
55:17
And most of them I'm like, "Okay, fine. That's not..."
55:17
And then something will come across and it'll be like some fact that absolutely blows my mind.
55:22
Or just chimps, I was just reading today, chimps tend to...
55:29
The habitat of a chimp tends to be eight square miles and that habitat of a hunter-gatherer, 500 square miles, which is one of the reasons that we went bipedal because it uses one-quarter of the energy to walk the same distance as it does to walk on all fours. Okay.
55:45
I'm like, that eight versus 500, I was like, that to me was like, "Wow, I didn't realize how small...
55:50
Eight square miles is a two by two.
55:50
Chimps live their whole life in a little space.
55:57
Okay, that was interesting. 500 miles is massive.
55:57
These hunter-gatherers would cover great distances and the differences when we all had a common ancestor, okay, that to me is interesting.
56:08
It's not the most interesting fact.
56:08
I'm not like, "Oh, my God."
56:08
But I'm like, "That one makes the cut at least on round one."
56:13
Maybe I'll cut it in the second round.
56:13
But that to me, plus it seems like it was an important...
56:17
I actually needed to explain that to help explain why we walked long distances.
56:21
So that's just two random examples I was just thinking about with what I'm researching right now.
56:26
But there's a lot of that, using my own taste for if that's interesting or not.
56:31
Yeah, I mean, I think that you're a real, sort of like Bill Bryson, actually, the implicit argument is, okay, there are these very specific parts of the world and if you can get really excited about diving in, exploring that thing, then you can realize that actually, this thing that seems really dry, it's actually incredibly interesting.
56:49
And I guess you went down this rabbit hole of the history of English podcast and you're like, "Oh, history of English. Okay, whatever.
56:54
It's just some language."
56:58
And it sounds like you had another one of these realizations and that's I think what you do for other people when you write.
57:02
Yeah, I mean, I think the history podcast I listen to, History of English, the Fall of Civilizations, Hardcore History, Revolutions, Explorers, these are all great history podcasts.
57:14
What they all have in common is they have great taste for what's interesting.
57:20
And so the amount of filtering they must do, I imagine that these hosts, they learn 10X what they actually put in.
57:31
And so that is the skill.
57:31
Bill Bryson's another perfect example.
57:31
I mean, the amount of research he must do to write a book like The Body. Great book.
57:37
But what the body is is it is like what a stand-up comedian does.
57:42
It is the most interesting things that he came across. I agree with his taste.
57:46
He happens to share my taste on what's interesting.
57:46
So when he is going to go on an extra deep diversion about something, almost every time, I'm happy he digs.
57:57
I'm like, "Oh, that was great."
57:57
And if he's not, I'm assuming I wouldn't have liked it anyway.
57:57
And so that is, I think the goal for, as a reader is to not find...
58:02
It's not about objectively great taste, it's finding people who happen to be interested in exactly the level you are.
58:06
If they're going deeper and they're boring you, that doesn't mean you're stupid or they're, "You shouldn't like this." No, no, no. It's a bad match.
58:17
Find someone that's a little bit less deep, or on the other hand, find someone that explains it more thoroughly if you feel like you're just getting a surface and you're unsatisfied. Right.
58:26
getting a surface and you're unsatisfied. Right. Tell me about this idea that you have around research where you're researching and you're researching, maybe you're playing around, maybe it's after the procrastination monkey that's really taking control of the wheel here,
58:39
and you're looking and you're not actually sure what you're looking for, but maybe you have some sort of sense inside your body where you're like, "Hey, my compass is sort of directing me over there and I'm not really sure why, but I've just done this many times before and I feel like there could be gold over there." I think that's an interesting idea of research as the chasing
58:53
I think that's an interesting idea of research as the chasing of surprise, but you have enough experience that you're like, "Actually, I just know that there could be gold there, but I can't actually put into words or articulate why I know that." Yeah.
59:10
So I'm just thinking about researching the history of humans, which I'm doing right now.
59:10
I want to read about Lucy, the famous skeleton of an Australopithecus from, I think she was from four and a half billion years ago.
59:24
I know Lucy's important to include, but I'm not sure if it's just like, here's a fossil that we have of this stage and this is an Australopithecus and this is some stuff about them and we move on.
59:37
And what happens is as you go, like you said, you realize, oh, okay, that actually, Lucy's really interesting part of this bigger story of this, she was bipedal, but she wasn't smart yet.
59:49
Oh, that's so interesting that we were walking around before we were human level intelligence, whatever it is.
59:53
And your curiosity is the guide.
1:00:01
If your curiosity is just like, "Ooh, this is interesting."
1:00:01
and "Oh, I'm learning stuff."
1:00:01
Okay, good, you're in a good place.
1:00:05
Versus if you're reading and it just seems dry and it seems confusing and not interesting, then maybe you have to learn more or maybe it's not that interesting.
1:00:17
There's a lot of stuff that's also just not that interesting and don't include it just for the sake of being a perfectionist, just cut it out or mention it quickly and move on.
1:00:27
Growing up, we had this giant history book that my mom would always point me to and say, "Go read this.
1:00:34
This is the most interesting way to learn history."
1:00:34
And there were basically no words.
1:00:39
It was all charts and graphs showing the chronology and the lineage of different things that happened. That sounds amazing.
1:00:47
So you could be like- What book is this? I want this.
1:00:49
I remember the color and… This is my dream book.
1:00:52
Yeah, it was great because you would be like, "Okay, the Wright brothers were doing this at the same time that this happened."
1:00:55
For example, Cubism is right around the time of Sigmund Freud, and then Dali comes right after. Okay.
1:01:00
So then, we have Sigmund Freud, which then leads into the Surrealist Art Movement.
1:01:06
Now that these things are overlapped on each other, I can see how there's a relationship there.
1:01:15
There's a story that reveals itself that otherwise you just had isolated things you don't know there's an interesting story there.
1:01:19
And so often, history is very isolated in terms of what it's pointing to.
1:01:23
So you'd be like the history of painting, the history of psychology. Totally.
1:01:28
But this makes them overlapping and you begin to see all of these things and the author doesn't even have to say anything for you to learn a bunch. Yeah.
1:01:34
It's like, I think what's interesting, I actually have a term for this, I call it horizontal history, and that's a little confusing without any explanation, but I think of it as if history is going backwards, these threads that go down in time.
1:01:48
So we're at the present and you're going back to the 19th century and 18th century and whatever, and you can trace, you can say, what's the history of art?
1:01:57
Okay, let's just look back at this and let's trace it up.
1:01:57
So horizontal history is taking a snippet cross section, and then you're actually understanding a time much better.
1:02:07
You can go back to the early 1500s and you had the Protestant Reformation was in a similar time to the Age of Exploration, which was in a similar time to Copernicus discovering his stuff.
1:02:15
And you can kind of get the vibe of the time back then.
1:02:21
Shakespeare, I think, was right around. So yeah, I like that.
1:02:29
Anything that helps orient you a little bit more and make history a little bit more real.
1:02:34
And that's what becomes so interesting is the people in the 1500s didn't know they were in the ancient 1500s.
1:02:38
They thought they were in the cutting edge present like we do, and they were living and they're like, "Wow, my parents grew up in the 1400s, but we're in the new time. We're in the 1500s now."
1:02:48
It is like- The printing press, Gutenberg.
1:02:52
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:02:52
The kids these days, they don't even know.
1:02:52
Because now, there're 1500s kids, nothing will ever be...
1:02:56
And we think of this as old, old school time, but it's so interesting remembering that these were just people.
1:03:01
There were clouds and there were birds chirping and the rain was coming down and people were in a bad mood and then they were constipated and then they had sore throat and then they were jealous of their friend's girlfriend. It was just people.
1:03:12
Just they were 1500 people and they didn't know about galaxies or atoms or a lot of stuff, but they were...
1:03:24
So yeah, I can do this all day.
1:03:24
That's why I like the details of history are so interesting.
1:03:29
So if we all of a sudden had 250 high schoolers in the room and you're like, "This is going to be the Tim Urban seminar to writing."
1:03:36
, and you have one day to teach them, how would you structure and outline how you're going to teach people to write in the way that you've learned to do it? Oh, geez.
1:03:45
Well, I'd want to think about it a lot more than however long I'm going to think about it now, because it's something that there's definitely that...
1:03:49
To do the A+ of this, I would need to think about it for a long time.
1:03:56
And they're like, "Please, please, please, please, please make it fun."
1:03:58
Because they don't like school and you're just this guy.
1:03:58
You're like this old guy who's walking in.
1:04:02
So it's like you got to captivate them.
1:04:02
How do you think about it?
1:04:06
I mean, I think I would just use my own experience, and my own experience was that I thought I hated writing.
1:04:09
I did hate writing in college, just like history.
1:04:09
I learned that this thing is boring because it was boring in school.
1:04:15
And then I started doing this other thing, blogging, that I didn't even think of as writing, and it was super fun, but actually, it is writing.
1:04:25
It's just that writing can be really fun.
1:04:25
I would talk to each of them or I'd want them to spend a few minutes thinking about what is fun for them to talk about?
1:04:30
What do they talk about with their friend? What's interesting?
1:04:34
What do they think is funny?
1:04:41
Does it sound fun to write, to create a little world, to create a little fiction world?
1:04:41
Does it sound fun to explain something you already know?
1:04:45
Does it sound fun to try to make funny observations about life? Does it... Whatever.
1:04:49
And figure out and then just say, "Go and have some fun on the paper.
1:04:56
Just do something and you have to have fun."
1:04:56
I want them to have that experience of my creativity is out and about and I'm tickled by it, and then I want to do more of this maybe.
1:05:09
And then I have all this confidence now that I didn't have before that I can be creative.
1:05:16
And I just think I would want to break them out of a bunch of things that I know I was in back then.
1:05:19
So I would want them to have the experience I had when I started blogging, which is just like, no pressure, the opposite of school. No pressure.
1:05:25
You don't have to be a good writer. Just write how you talk.
1:05:32
Just have fun and write me something like...
1:05:32
Teach me something or make me laugh or bring me into some world, anything you want.
1:05:38
That's what I would, I would want them to have that experience throughout the day.
1:05:43
And then hopefully that's going to trigger hopefully some of them to keep going with it.
1:05:46
Why do you think that there's such a seriousness about writing as a medium and a way to communicate?
1:05:49
It's not like this in speaking? No.
1:05:57
I think that first of all, a lot of the writing that is out there is incredibly...
1:06:02
Academic writing is serious and boring.
1:06:02
And that's, by the way, what we're trained on.
1:06:06
We're trained essentially on the child version of academic writing, which is hard to read, it's hard to write, it's not fun.
1:06:10
It's not that it's just bad.
1:06:10
It is the way it is for a reason, in that it is trying to be a hyper organized way to prove something using very kind of strict set of... Conventions? Yeah.
1:06:30
The same way an architect would do their thing in a very...
1:06:34
They're not going to be having fun in their...
1:06:34
They're trying to create a blueprint that the builder can now use.
1:06:37
There's going to be conventions there.
1:06:43
What's funny that I'm hearing about what you're saying is you're almost saying that there's a trade-off between fun and efficiency, that as a field or whatever continues, it gets more efficient, but it loses its fun.
1:06:56
I actually don't think that's necessarily true.
1:07:01
I think some writing that's not at all dry can be very efficient.
1:07:01
Paul Graham, his articles are, they're not academic at all.
1:07:09
They're extremely plain, small words.
1:07:09
They're easy to read, they're fun to read, but they're extremely efficient.
1:07:14
I think it's more just that it's a discipline.
1:07:20
Academic writing is a specific discipline.
1:07:20
It's almost like a science. It has its own methods.
1:07:26
And that for a reason, and it's predictable for the peer reviewers and whatever else.
1:07:26
And I think in school, we're kind of taught a kid version of that, where you're taught to prove, write a thesis statement and then very organized writing.
1:07:40
Look, I'm sure there's some benefit to it.
1:07:46
You're helping kids learn how to organize their thoughts.
1:07:46
You're helping kids learn how to read something and develop an opinion about it, and then have to go and prove that opinion and then bring a counter argument.
1:07:55
And I think that is valuable.
1:07:55
The downside is that if that's all the writing you're doing, you learn this lesson is that writing is serious.
1:08:00
But I think that anyone who starts reading fun books knows that writing does not have to be serious.
1:08:11
Right alongside you writing these boring papers, you're reading Roald Dahl or whatever and so- Did you ever read Captain Underpants? No. That was a great one. Sounds great.
1:08:20
And also, my cousin used to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
1:08:20
And these books, they were fun and they were goofy and they were sort of cartoonish.
1:08:26
But what I like about them is that they get people into reading.
1:08:33
And then for me, I've gone into the meatier, more serious stuff.
1:08:40
But trying to throw Romeo and Juliet on me in fourth grade, "But soft!
1:08:40
What light through yonder window break?"
1:08:46
It's like, I'm not ready for "It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!"
1:08:52
No, it's really confusing. And you're just like... Yeah, I totally agree.
1:08:52
I just think it can be...
1:09:03
There's no reason that...
1:09:03
Look, there's a few core skills you have to build in kids, and some of those aren't going to be fun.
1:09:08
Some of it's going to be like weightlifting, but I think that that could be 20% of what they're doing. And 80% could be fun.
1:09:12
And some of that fun is building core skills.
1:09:20
20% maybe has to be dry, maybe. Maybe not even.
1:09:20
But right now, I feel like 90% of school is dry and it's kind of geared around a test.
1:09:28
And the big lesson kids get is that learning sucks. Which is crazy.
1:09:40
Yeah, because kids have so much natural curiosity and...
1:09:40
Look how a kid picks up a video game or something and they get fire brains for when they get engaged in something.
1:09:47
So how do you get them into that zone about their education somehow? Last question.
1:09:53
As you are beginning to wrap up a piece and you're doing that final edit, this is the one, you're now the gatekeeper before, this is going to be public, everybody's going to be able to see it and be like, "Tim Urban was totally wrong." "Oh, my goodness. He was totally right." "Hey, that was funny." "That was boring."
1:10:13
How do you think about being that final gatekeeper and doing that last edit?
1:10:18
Do you do it on your phone?
1:10:18
Do you print it out and scribble scrabble? What do you do?
1:10:24
Look, I'm trying to write things that I would like to have someone send me. That's always the goal.
1:10:29
If I'm writing a book or a blog post, I'm trying to think about what would, on this topic, what would I love someone to...
1:10:37
What would I love to read?
1:10:37
And how would it be the most fun way?
1:10:44
So I'm trying to create that, which means that I also should like reading it back, especially since I forget some of this stuff.
1:10:49
So I'm just trying to read it, basically, and enjoy it.
1:10:55
And if there's parts where I'm like, "Oh, wow.
1:10:55
This is not interesting, or this is not clear or this is bad." , I'll change it.
1:11:02
But I am basically trying to...
1:11:02
I'm saying this, I'm having the experience right now that other people are about to have, and I'm just trying to use my taste.
1:11:13
I'm just trying to sit back and almost hopefully enjoy it and be like, "Oh, yeah, this is so fun."
1:11:19
or "This is so interesting."
1:11:19
or, "Oh, yeah, that is funny.
1:11:19
That's such a funny way to..."
1:11:22
And if I'm enjoying my own thing, I know other people are going to also.
1:11:22
So I just kind of trying to put myself, pretend I'm a reader, basically.
1:11:27
But by that point, that read usually happens a little earlier.
1:11:34
The very last read or two is probably going to be very technical.
1:11:41
Very technical things or just a little tiny word change here and there and yeah.
1:11:48
Thanks for coming on the show.
1:11:48
Yeah, thanks for having me.