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Writing is like a doctor's checkup for your thinking.
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So many of the questions that I ask myself when I get stuck are just questions that you've come up with.
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If you know where to look or what questions to ask, you could find gaps.
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They're just invisible until you sit down and think about it.
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If you could have a billboard for writers, what do you tell the city of aspiring writers?
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Do something interesting first where you can take A-plus material with B-minus writing and come out with something that people really want to pay attention to.
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And my books are not short in case you haven't noticed. They're big.
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I lift weights with your books. Yeah, they're huge.
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I do Tribe of Mentors and 4-Hour Body.
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I'm working on a book right now.
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It's the first book I've worked on in six years.
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Can you share about that?
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Well, it's actually, I can't share specifics, but I can share ...
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Tell me about hypergraphia, like what is it? I hadn't heard of it.
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So you could have, I guess, hypo like hypothermia and then you get have hyper, hypermania, hyperthermia.
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Hypergraphia, in my case, is not anything I've been diagnosed with, but it's a convenient term to use because I have notebook upon notebook upon notebook.
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I have effectively walls of notebooks going back to when I was probably 16 or 17.
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I mean, I have almost every workout I've ever done recorded as an example. Oh wow.
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And that's just one category.
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So graphia would refer to writing just like you have, let's say, dyslexia.
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And I have a lot of friends who take a lot of notes.
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I think I take more than most, hence the hyper.
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And that's been I think a foundational aspect of a lot of what I've done, certainly in the writing capacity when I ended up trying the shoe on to see if it fit for actual long-form writing. It's all research.
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If the writing's not working, if you don't know what to do next, for me, the first question is, have you done enough research?
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Do you have enough raw material? If not, get more.
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Don't have something interesting to write about, you haven't done something interesting, go do something interesting.
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When was that moment that you put on that shoe?
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Was it at Princeton with John McPhee before or after?
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I would say that I had dabbled in writing in the same way that any elementary school kid or high schooler is forced to with school papers and so on.
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But I never studied the craft of writing per se.
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I'm ashamed to admit it until my, I guess, it was my senior year in college, Literature Effect with John McPhee and I'm sure I had English classes and guidelines and so on.
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But in terms of getting good instruction from a very legitimate practitioner of the craft, it would have to be that class with Professor McPhee, which was a game changer for me on a whole lot of levels and had side effects I couldn't have predicted.
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For instance, it was a small class, I want to say maybe 12 kids and begged and pleaded and negotiated to make my case to be in this seminar.
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And the class consisted of two pieces.
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The first was a lecture, so every week, we'd sit down and for three hours or whatever it was, McPhee would get up and he'd sketch out structures and he would explain pieces and teach us the lessons that he had learned.
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The other piece was once a week, I want to say it was once a week, we had independent writing assignments and then you would get one-on-one time with McPhee.
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And he would come in with, let's just say it's five pages and there'd be more red ink than your original black ink- Oh my goodness. ... of his notes.
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And then you'd sit down and you'd look at his notes and he'd walk you through and he'd explain his notes.
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I knew it then, but even now I would say I appreciate it more.
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I think draft number four does a pretty good job of running people through a lot of the content from that course.
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I think that there was also, I want to say in the Parish review, a number of interviews, the art of non-fiction, there's at least one long form piece which was a conversation with McPhee, which also covered a lot of the feedback he would give if something was amorphous and ill-defined, it might be, and I'm pulling this from a piece, I didn't actually get this in class with him, but pea soup.
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So you might just write in the margin pea soup and that would be shorthand for McPheeism of something. Yeah. What does that mean? That it's just unclear.
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What you're trying to do is unclear.
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One of the repeat offenders on my side, and I suspect on the part of a lot of these students, was trying to sound fancy or dress up your writing in some way that was patently absurd to someone with the keen eye of a McPhee.
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He would be like, "What is this word mean?"
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And then you would not be able to defend it.
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And he'd be like, "What does this sentence mean?
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What are you trying to say here? Remove."
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And as he excised these things from my writing, my thinking became much crisper and my grades in all my other classes that I can remember went up.
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So it wasn't just writing, it was revising writing, which is revising thinking, which then transferred to a lot of my other classes that at face value would never expect to be affected by such a thing like language learning, Chinese.
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Why would the literature affect my grades and something like Chinese?
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At least immediately even now, it's kind of hard for me to explain, but that was the effect.
5:57
What do you feel like made him a great teacher?
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So I think of my favorite teacher in high school.
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His name was Miles Chen and he had this way of teaching astrophysics in a way that was fun and it made me laugh and he would have these competitions and these prizes, so it actually wasn't even about the information delivery all the time.
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And then think of another teacher who more virtually I've gained a lot from, Jordan Peterson, took a lot of concepts around psychology and the Bible that I thought were really dry and sterile and he just ignited them, brought them to life.
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What was it about McPhee that was so compelling for you?
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First and foremost, he is an A-plus practitioner, so anyone who's in that class as a student knows that they are learning from an operator who has spent decades honing his craft in this case, Pulitzer prize, maybe two at that point, I can't even remember.
6:57
And you had the bona fides, you also had ...
6:57
there's McPhee as a teacher, so what makes McPhee a good teacher?
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There's also what makes a good class.
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Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
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So I think any teacher is beholden to the format they choose or that is chosen for them.
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So you could take a great teacher and let's just say they're not allowed to have any class participation or interaction and that might completely handicap them.
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So the fact that we had a small class size, the fact that he had been doing this for a very long time, revising it, revising it, revising it, refining it, refining it.
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It's kind of like a comedian who at a very high level takes a year to workshop material.
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You see the finished product and you're like, "Oh wow, this guy must be funny all the time."
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And lo and behold, you meet them in person, you go to a dinner and they're not immediately funny all the time.
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There are exceptions, but it's often because they start with something very rough and polish it to a fine sheen.
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So there was the fact that we were not the first monkey shot in the space on Spaceship McPhee.
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He had had a lot of repetitions.
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He's also a compelling charismatic teacher in the sense that he knows where to inject humor?.
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And I haven't thought about this in decades, but you're like, "What do you remember from the class?"
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I'm like, "This is what I remember," which is kind of embarrassing example, but at one point he was talking about quotations in written pieces, in other words, using dialogue.
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So said so-and-so, blah, blah, blah.
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And he's like, "Don't get too cute with it."
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He's like, "You don't need to be like, da, da, da, da, da, Robert ejaculated."
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He's like, "Don't say ejaculated.
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You don't need to do that. It's distracting."
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And I'm paraphrasing, of course, so he knew when to add in humor.
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For me, it was a good class. I'm not sure ...
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I actually should say, I am sure that my experience would differ from a lot of other people in the class, every student in the class.
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I mean, I was intimidated by other students in the class.
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They were good writers and a lot of good writers have come out of his class.
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I think David Remnick also was a student of his way back in the day, and as one of many examples.
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His roster is pretty illustrious.
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I would say another aspect is his class was hard, and if you are going to rise to the occasion, you need someone who's going to set the bar quite high.
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And so a lot of the hard work I think that he did was also in selecting the cohort. The team matters, right? The team matters a lot.
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The fact that I was intimidated by the students was a good thing for me.
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I didn't want to look foolish.
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I was able to see good examples and therefore I gained a lot in the seminar.
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And then the one-on-one is a complete game changer, and that's affected how I also work, for instance, with some employees of mine in the sense that if I want to try to train them to be better communicators, clearer communicators, I will take, say, an email draft that they put into a Google Doc.
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I'll switch the mode to suggesting as opposed to editing and I'll redline and then either do, say, a Zoom screen share or so we do almost everything remotely, use something like Loom and walk through and explain my redlines.
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It's not enough to just give someone a redline.
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The rationale behind the redlines is what matters.
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And in that way, you can over time, email draft by email draft, refine thinking and writing surprisingly quickly.
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And so there have been longstanding results.
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I actually still have all of my notes from McPhee's class in a box.
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I have not reviewed them in a very, very long time, but the fact that my notes and resources and papers also that I wrote from that class have traveled with me since 2000 says something. No kidding. Yeah.
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You were talking about with McPhee and the word ejaculate.
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It is funny how later on ...
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It's going to make a great clip for you.
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Later on- Ferriss ejaculates on camera.
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Later on when you were writing The 4-Hour Workweek, you said your first draft, you're trying to sound smart and you're like, "Okay, this isn't going to work."
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And that's sort of like that.
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And then the second draft you're like, "Okay, I'm going to be funny."
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And then that one doesn't work, and I guess it was the third draft.
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Explain it to friends after a few glasses of wine and you're like, "That's my flow to be in for writing." Yeah, so exactly right.
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So you've done your homework, write it as if I'm two glasses in with friends and I wrote it in an email composition box. That's key.
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In terms of setting the conditions such that the tone would be right.
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Sitting in a Word document felt formal, but actually composing it at least parts of it in email helped me to build a little bit of momentum and then I could transfer it into an actual Word editor.
12:27
Whether that's word or generally with most of my book projects has been Scrivener as a tool.
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I think very visually, and it's just an easier format, at least thus far, it's been the easiest tool for me to use for the job of writing long nonfiction.
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I think it was Churchill who said, "First we shape our buildings or tools, then our tools shape us."
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How does Scrivener as a tool shape your writing?
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It lessens attachment to a set table of contents.
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So the way that I set up Scrivener.
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Scrivener, for those who don't know, I believe was initially designed for ...
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it was either screenwriting or playwriting. Oh, really?
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And what makes it interesting to me, and there may be better tools out there, but I'm working for instance on a book right now, which I can't say too much about.
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It's the first book I've worked on in six years, and I would plan personally on using mostly Scrivener.
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And the reason for that is that you can, for instance, on the left-hand side of the window, have a vertical list basically of all of the documents that you're working on.
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And for me, I break those into, say, three or four folders.
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Those are sections in the book, and then I have these documents within these folders, and if you want to move those around, whether it's the folders or the documents, you just click and drag.
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Furthermore, below that table of contents, which is constantly changing, constantly moving around, I have research below that, so I have research that I can reference.
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So rather than clicking through multiple windows, you could have multiple screens for this too, but I have this left-right, so on the left you have this overview of what I'm working.
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On on the right-hand side then imagine that ...
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it's getting a little easier for me to visualize than to explain maybe.
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But you have the right three quarters of the screen split into a top half and a bottom half.
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On the top is what I'm working on.
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That's the chapter I'm writing, and then below that is the research that I'm referencing. Oh, interesting.
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So the amount of flow that I can achieve without interruption, without losing tabs or windows, without crashing Word or just completely destroying most Word processing software is pretty remarkable.
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So the text files themselves were very lightweight.
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You can add footnotes and stuff.
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I usually don't get too fancy.
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I have done that for some of my books, but those are a few of the reasons that I like to use Scrivener. How does it shape me?
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It emboldens me to experiment more with structure than I otherwise would because it's low friction.
15:16
Very, very, very, very easy to move stuff around.
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I could switch two sections and read it and see how the flow goes.
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Don't like it, no problem. Boom.
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Two seconds later it's reverted.
15:25
Hey, so when you're talking about research, what is the percentage of research these are personal experiments that I've done, observations that I've collected versus I was reading this book and I collected this fact and now it's in there?
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So it's hard for me to say.
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I mean, historically and the toolkit is going to change because the tools evolve, but I would use Evernote.
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Let's just say I have an idea percolating for a book, whether that's for 4-Hour Chef, including, say, a lot on accelerated learning for our body, whatever.
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I would use the web clipper for Evernote.
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So if I came across anything that was sent to me, anything that I found a scientific study, an interview that I thought might be relevant, I would web clip that and take it into Evernote.
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I would also take Evernote notes and I use more tools now, but Evernote was the default for a very long time.
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Then, and I'm going to come to your question, but I would go back and pretty much immediately since research can be a means of procrastinating also. It's not always upside.
16:31
It can be a very fancy way of not doing your homework.
16:34
To avoid that and to avoid the overwhelm of looking back at say two weeks of collecting random web clips and thinking, "Holy shit, now I have to read 600 pages."
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I would go through immediately in Evernote and put three asterisks and bold anything that I thought was most important in that piece.
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This allows me to control F or command F later and just search for that and find the relevant pieces in each of these notes.
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So then the review process becomes very fast.
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I would say that in my, what I would consider my best work, which doesn't mean it's great work, it's just the best that I can do.
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It's mostly personal experimentation or interviews with people who have done firsthand experimentation.
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If it's, let's just call it, secondhand or book-based research, there are a number of issues with that for me.
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The first is that I think the reader's attention is more likely to wander because it's depersonalized, just a speculation, but I think that would probably hold.
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The second is I have no competitive advantage.
17:48
If it's digesting books and pulling anecdotes and stories and facts and figures from books, anybody can do that, and increasingly so anyone can do that. Yeah, no kidding.
18:02
Not to derail this whole conversation with AI, but the process of doing that type of thing through research or honestly just getting very good at spell casting with good queries in chatGPT or other tools, you will not have a competitive advantage.
18:18
My competitive advantage is for at least the foreseeable next few years, no iRobot is going to be going out and doing the hair brand experiments that I do to myself and then writing about them in a personalized way.
18:29
That's harder to imitate.
18:30
It's harder for anyone to imitate because it is higher labor, and there are more barriers to entry.
18:39
If I want to write compelling writing and if I want to write something that is highly differentiated, I would say most of it's going to lean towards experimentation or reporting on someone else's experimentation that has not been captured.
18:59
One of the things that struck me as I was reading the 4-Hour Workweek was there is a section towards the end of the book where you have basically a set of principles and parameters for an assistant that you work with, and I think it's point number seven, nine, something like that is how important your brand and respectability is.
19:21
And you basically say, if anyone who's a CEO of a well-known company saw this and they sort of scratched their head or something, I'm probably not going to be interested.
19:33
And I then just started looking over and over and over, that seems to have been the north star that you have used for your brand for years, and you talk about it with advertising deals that you work with for the podcast is one of the places where I think that you've really gone for the maximum where a lot of people are much more about just satisficing is around brand credibility, respectability. Yeah. For a bunch of reasons.
20:03
One is I think if you want to be the fullest expression of yourself, which for a lot of people will, and this can become a weaselly word, so we can dive into this if you want, but being creative on some level.
20:20
You need good constraints to be creative.
20:23
You need really strong constraints, and people might think, "Well, I want to be outside the box, or at least I want a really huge box," and I would argue a lot of the time, you actually want the smallest box possible so that your options are constrained so you can make faster better decisions.
20:40
What that means is I have policies for all sorts of things in my life, and a lot of them are around this scarce resource, which is very easily destroyed, called reputation, credibility.
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This is going to become increasingly scarce and increasingly valuable.
21:08
I think reputation and credibility is the new gold, and there is a certain finite supply, at least a finite amount of trust that any consumer or any person can put into other people, and so they're going to choose the people with the highest signal of credibility for them.
21:28
And from a competitive perspective, I really try not to compete, I mean, in the sense that I think being a category of one is much more interesting as an artistic challenge, and it's much more defensible and sustainable.
21:47
Nonetheless, if you have to compete for attention, which you do, having impeccable ...
21:47
and you slip up and you make mistakes and maybe you recommend something, you're like, "Ah, man, it had all five stars and now it's three stars because there was some defect.
22:03
Or maybe I gave them the hug of death by sending too many people through the newsletter.
22:07
So I set two million people to this hot sauce maker, and then they tried to scale to boost production, and the quality dropped." I'm like, "Ah fuck."
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And then people get upset.
22:17
Understandably, things like this happen, but I really try to think very carefully, often very slowly about decisions so that I can play the long game of credibility, which doesn't mean trying to be a expert.
22:35
It just means if you ask someone, do you trust Tim's recommendations, that their answer is going to be yes as often as possible, and you have to turn down a lot for that, in my experience anyway.
22:52
Now you need to turn that a lot.
22:55
80% of the sponsors who come through, including people who are willing to spend millions of dollars and saying no, that has a cost, very measurable cost.
23:03
Then there are all these other intangibles that are harder to measure.
23:06
But when I look at the ability to do something I love doing for 10 years and to feel good about it, I don't feel conflicted about it at all.
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I never second guess those decisions.
23:22
You're talking about distinctiveness and being a category of one.
23:25
How intentionally did you think about cultivating your voice?
23:29
I know that you learned a lot from Kurt Vonnegut, and maybe we can start there, but how did you think about that?
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So there are ways to develop voice, but I think it's a preoccupation that is premature for a lot of folks, and I think it is the top of mind for a lot of people who are ambitious or eager to get started.
23:48
It was top of mind for me.
23:50
I would say content is king.
23:53
Worry about the what before you worry about the how.
23:59
If you look at, for instance, 50 Shades of Grey, funny example to bring up, maybe I know so many people who have tried to read that and have been unable to because of the writing quality, but how many copies did that sell?
24:15
10 million, 20 million, 30, a hundred million, I don't know. Hollywood movies. Why? Great premise.
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It struck a chord in a very off menu way that captured the imagination of a country, and then an entire world.
24:35
Started off as fan fiction too.
24:36
That's all separate thing.
24:39
Worry about the what first.
24:40
If your subject matter is like a B minus and you're going to rely on A plus writing to make it super compelling, if you're John McPhee, it's fine.
24:50
If you're David Foster Wallace, fine.
24:53
But maybe you shouldn't assume that you're going to have the superpowers to pull that off.
24:59
And I think in the beginning, the cheat is do something more interesting, interview someone more interesting, which by the way, doesn't mean they need to be a superstar.
25:10
One of the writing assignments we had in McPhee's class, I remember, was effectively ...
25:10
and I may have adapted this from the letter of the law of the assignment, but effectively interviewing invisible people, people who are largely ignored, service staff, whatever the case might be, and it's your job to make it interesting, and you can do that.
25:33
Have you heard the McCullough Look at Your Fish story? No. Okay.
25:37
So McCullough had a teacher when he was in school and basically on the first day the teacher plopped a fish on the table and goes, "I'm going to leave the room. Write about the fish."
25:49
So he leaves for 20 minutes and he goes, "Okay, students, what did you write?"
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And the students are like, "What are you talking about?
25:58
You put a fish on the table, there's nothing to write about."
26:01
He's like, "No, keep looking."
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And it goes again and again and again.
26:06
And the whole point is that by the end of the semester, they have to write 10 pages or something about the fish and they can, because the whole lesson is that the things are always there.
26:16
You just have to look and look and look.
26:18
Yeah, it's a great exercise.
26:21
So another short form exercise, which were always kind of like three to five pages, I want to say, in the literature of fact class, was to look at this somewhat bizarre abstract figure.
26:36
This large statue, which was in a courtyard at Princeton. Write about it. That was it.
26:43
And I want to emphasize again the conditions, right?
26:48
Small class seminar plus one-on-one, you're getting to hear other students writing, and you realize how much of a Rashomon game this ends up being.
26:57
If you haven't seen Rashomon, go watch it.
26:59
Akira Kurosawa, amazing film, also has inspired a lot of movies that are more recent that people will be able to ...
27:04
The Last Duel, for instance.
27:08
Also a great movie, but look at the shifting of perspectives and you realize, okay, at first glance you might think there's very little to write about, but how many different perspectives could you take?
27:20
You could take the historical, you could take the aesthetic, you could take the environmental, you could talk about everything around the statue, which is what some people do for profile pieces.
27:30
If they can't get a hold of subject, they take this sort of 360 interview approach to paint a picture of the person they can't get a hold of.
27:37
There's so many different approaches, but the principle I'm trying to underscore is when in doubt, do something more interesting.
27:49
The what instead of the how.
27:51
But if we're talking about the how and voice, I do think you get there over time by embracing your weird self as my [inaudible 00:28:02] would be, and not necessarily exaggerating, but not hiding your idiosyncrasies. Leaning into it.
28:08
Yeah, I have all sorts of jokes in most of my books to make them amusing for me.
28:13
They make no sense to anybody, and editors and copy editors are like, "This makes no sense.
28:19
We need to take this out."
28:20
And I'm like, "No, you can leave it in."
28:21
It's just like an inside joke with me and a researcher, and they're stupid, but they're highly, highly, highly functional in the sense that if you do not have some degree of fun or excitement around what you're writing, at some point, and I still find writing incredibly difficult.
28:42
Somebody asked me recently, they were like, "I imagine each book got subsequently easier than the one proceeding." And I was like, "Oh, no.
28:51
My writing I think has just gotten harder for me actually."
28:53
But it doesn't get easier and therefore the need to make it interesting on some level, which can be in the writing, the pre-writing experiential phase, doing cool things, interesting things, or it can be in the writing phase, but it's a lot easier to do something interesting while you're still honing your craft.
29:18
So you can take A plus material with B minus writing and come out with something that people really want to pay attention to.
29:25
Then I think to do the opposite.
29:27
Tell me about how you have used your newsletter to reboot your writing.
29:32
You hadn't been writing a lot and you're like, "Hey, I'm going to use this newsletter."
29:35
What have you been doing?
29:37
If you are connecting with your audience predominantly through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it might be, you are renting your audience.
29:45
You do not own a direct means of communication.
29:49
There might be exceptions where you can export and perhaps there are workarounds, but fundamentally, there are a couple of things that are proclaimed dead every year.
30:00
Okay, blogs are dead, email's dead, this is dead, and yet, they're still here.
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All the kids now, they're never going to use email.
30:10
I'm like, "Yeah, until they get a job, and then guess what?
30:12
They're going to use email."
30:15
So I recognize the importance of having that direct means of communication.
30:21
I wanted to do something novel, wanted to experiment with a new format.
30:25
I also wanted to try to resurrect my writing, which I had backed off of in a really significant way because the podcast was easier. The podcast was fun.
30:37
The podcast had my full attention.
30:38
It was far more lucrative than any writing I could do.
30:43
And yet, I wanted to continue to sharpen the ax.
30:50
And that was important why?
30:53
It was important to me, because I think you become a slower duller thinker if you don't write regularly. You will get worse.
31:08
And writing is like an annual checkup or a doctor's checkup for your thinking. Nice.
31:16
So I feel compelled to write, at the very least, just check how sloppy or tight my thinking is.
31:27
And with the newsletter, which has whatever it is, two million plus subscribers now, the Five Bullet Friday, which is the name of it, was important because it's set the [inaudible 00:31:43] mark at a really low bar. Does that make sense? Five Bullets, that's it.
31:47
I have no excuse not to write this newsletter, but then occasionally, and most people who have done a fair amount of writing, will see where this is going, for instance, when I went to Korea recently, first trip to Seoul, had an amazing time and wanted to do a Korea-focused Five Bullet Friday.
32:05
There's plenty to talk about.
32:08
And I put together five bullets that became eight bullets, and then once I started fleshing out, these various bullets turned into five or six pages.
32:19
So in a sense, it violated the basic parameters of the newsletter, ended up being pretty long, but I felt very good about it because it got the wheels moving and I spent a good amount of time on it.
32:32
So it was effectively a blog post and it probably will end up being a blog post, but do less than you think you can do is the takeaway.
32:42
If you want to forge a new behavior, do less than you think you can do.
32:46
The most important thing is building positive momentum of "success."
32:52
If you don't have an exercise habit and your New Year's resolution is to work out six days a week and you've, for the last year, have not worked out even twice a week, don't do that. Hour of workout, no.
33:05
10 minutes of workout, do less than you think you can do.
33:08
Two things I've taken from you is complexity fails and two crappy pages per day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who did I get that from?
33:17
It might've been Po Bronson.
33:19
I got it from somebody else.
33:20
I think it was Po Bronson. Two crappy pages a day. Yeah. That tracks in my prep.
33:26
I think it was two crappy pages per day.
33:28
I guess this was inspired by the IBM sales team.
33:31
Yeah, with the sales quotas. What's the story there?
33:34
The story there, and I might be getting some of the facts wrong, but as I remember it is that at one point in time, IBM had an incredibly dominant sales force, and I want to say a journalist was asking, might've been a writer, investigating why this was the case.
33:53
And counter-intuitively, one of the answers that was provided by an insider was that the quotas were quite low.
34:03
So the compensation, contingent commission-based compensation was very high.
34:08
So you had that incentive, but the quotas were set quite low so that people were not intimidated to pick up the phone.
34:17
There was less of a fear factor, and so they were able to take that first step.
34:20
In my case, putting together five links in Five Bullet Friday, that's enough.
34:26
I could mail that out and some weeks, I do. I'm busy.
34:28
I know what I want to include, you know what?
34:30
People can figure it out on their own, still going to be valuable.
34:33
That's all that goes out, but it gets the wheels moving so that if I do feel the muse knocking at the door or I've had too much caffeine, who knows?
34:42
Then I can sit down and I can write five pages, six pages and feel really good about them.
34:48
And I think that returns back to something I was mentioning, which just set the bar low.
34:54
Now, there are times when I'm very perfectionist and when I'm very meticulous, but that's later. Right. That's later. That comes later.
35:03
It's like, okay, when the car is done, when you've got it in mint condition, you've taken it around the track, it works, and then you want to buff the hood, fine, then you can be a perfectionist.
35:14
But when you are doing the initial ...
35:14
when you're brainstorming possible designs for the car, that's not the time to do it. Yeah.
35:22
There's a nice bit from your interview with Jerry Seinfeld where he says, "Early in the process, you want to treat yourself like a baby and whatever goes, oh, do whatever, play around, and then later on you're like a sergeant.
35:35
You are a sergeant, you're super strict, and that these two modes of being have to be separate in the creative process." Yeah, I feel that way.
35:47
My inclination is to be the sergeant, so the one that I have to do is more on the foreword, and then some people are very easygoing, go with the flow, and they probably need ...
35:52
just like the yoga people need to do more weights and the weight, people need to do more yoga.
36:04
It's always a matter of trade-offs.
36:05
If you have any superpowers, you're going to have super weaknesses.
36:08
So it's not a question of fixing the super weaknesses, it's just like, "All right, how can you leverage your strengths while addressing the weaknesses enough if need be such that you can continue to play whatever long game you've committed to."
36:21
What do you feel like you're working on in your writing?
36:26
What is the thing that you would maybe even say is a weakness and you're like, "I want to address that.
36:32
I want to get better at that."
36:34
Playing with different formats.
36:36
So I mean, after five successful books, I have a formula that works.
36:45
I know how to do it just like there's certain people out there, I'll leave them unnamed, but it's like their tweets are always formatted the same way. They have three parts.
36:52
If you look at it closely, you can be like, "Aha, I see the recipe."
36:56
And they never deviate and people love these tweets, but at some point I find that personally very unfulfilling.
37:05
It's like, "Okay, I get it.
37:08
I can do this and I can take a certain type of subject matter copy and paste that into these various structures that I know work."
37:20
But after five [inaudible 00:37:23] and I have experimented within books also, I would like to toy around with more unusual ways of structuring the narratives and explorations.
37:33
When you going to give us some fiction?
37:37
I've actually written quite a bit of fiction and I've shared some of it as a podcast actually with voice actors.
37:46
Bizarrely, we can get into this if you want, but it's called the Legend of Cockpunch. I kid you not.
37:52
So if people can look that up and they can unpack that on their own, but I love fantasy and I love Sci-Fi.
38:00
I read a lot of fiction actually.
38:05
I wanted to actually publish, not just write, because I'd done small tiny fiction experiments on my own and never shared it with anybody.
38:14
I wanted to actually force myself to publish, to face that discomfort for a number of reasons and to experiment with world building. This is ongoing.
38:25
So I ended up writing 13, I want to say, chapters about describing the histories of various greater houses and mythologies and intertwining political alliances and old enemies and all this stuff about this fantasy realm.
38:40
And that was part of experimenting with format, because what works for me in nonfiction, there are certain tools and certain tricks and literary devices that you can transplant, but it's also a very different thing.
39:02
And I wanted to play with a completely different mode of expression, not just expression, but also writing in the sense that generally I'm amassing vast cement research, picking the most interesting bits, and then flushing it out.
39:19
I know exactly where things are going, so I have the blueprint, I execute the plan and it's bricklaying. Hold that thought.
39:28
One of the things that I thought was interesting in terms of your process for The 4-hour Chef was you looked at all the books with a four and a half star review, you read the reviews, you said, "What's missing?"
39:40
And then you started there and then you said, "Okay, I am going to begin there, do a bunch of research and then compile that."
39:45
And I think that's a good example of how you're thinking about writing a nonfiction book that's the third in a series, and then what you end up getting is like a supreme density of insight. I could not believe it.
39:57
The most highlighted books in Kindle history at some point were the ESV Bible, The 4-Hour Body, The One-Year Bible, and then The 4-Hour Workweek.
40:06
And that density is so core to how you write. It is.
40:11
So I wanted to try doing something completely different in the world of fiction, what that meant was since I'm not wedded to research, I'm not wedded to facts I should be able to defend, I was able to set conditions.
40:27
I was able to say, "All right, here are two characters in a weird situation."
40:29
Until the chapters done no research.
40:34
There was a lot of research that went into certain aspects of these worlds if I'm studying architecture or certain types of mythology, but I felt free to use TKs, things I would come back to and fix later and just make shit up.
40:51
And that is a very uncomfortable, and I would say nourishing approach to writing that will ultimately make me a better nonfiction writer not because you can just make ...
41:02
I don't think you should make shit up if it's nonfiction, kind of defeats the purpose.
41:12
People do it, but I feel strongly against it.
41:16
But that type of embracing of flow and not interrupting your writing to fill in gaps in research that you can fill in later is a practice I would like to cultivate.
41:26
So I was cultivating that in fiction, but I think that will apply.
41:30
And actually it is applying to some nonfiction that I'll be working on.
41:35
So I wouldn't view these as totally distinct disciplines.
41:38
I view it as cross-training for me, and if you're stuck on one, go do something else, right?
41:44
In the sense that I like to give myself a way to cross-train and switch if I am at an impasse for whatever reason.
41:52
And I do that with my writing also, maybe this will be helpful to people, but one of the best pieces of advice that I received very early on was actually from an agent.
42:03
I don't know if she's still agent, Jillian Manus, M-A-N-U-S.
42:05
And I'll paraphrase it because I don't remember exactly what she said, but she read my original proposal for The 4-Hour Workweek, and she was very encouraging.
42:15
She's like, "I can't take you out as a client, but let's meet up."
42:18
And she gave me some feedback and she recommended that each chapter be entirely self-sufficient, standalone, strong, like a long-form magazine piece.
42:30
And I thought about that for a long time, and I ended up by and large, approaching The 4-Hour Workweek that way.
42:38
What advantage does that have?
42:40
Well, first advantage is for the reader.
42:42
The reader can jump around.
42:44
Even though The 4-Hour Workweek is intended to be a logical linear read, so I would suggest that to most people, but the reader can jump around and it'll be coherent.
42:55
Just as important, but not as explicitly obvious, it makes it easier to write.
43:00
If everything is contingent on all the pieces that come before it's very hard to write in a nonlinear way.
43:08
But if each chapter is effectively a self-sufficient module, if I get stuck on chapter three, I can hop to chapter eight and I can work on that so I can keep momentum and avoid getting demoralized by an impasse.
43:21
Tell me about this advice that you got from Michael Gerber before writing The 4-Hour Workweek.
43:28
You may need to remind me.
43:29
If you're going to write a book, write a fucking book. Write a fucking book. That's so good. It is good. It is good.
43:36
I am often asked by friends, acquaintances, strangers who I bump into for book advice and/or they will say, "I've got a great idea for a book.
43:50
I'm definitely going to write a book sometime, or I'm planning on writing a book."
43:56
And there are people who are very serious about it and they say, "I would like to write a book."
44:01
They've given it some dedicated thought.
44:03
They have a plan, they have a premise, et cetera, et cetera.
44:07
And generally what I will say to people, and there are mutants out there who can violate this and produce a great book, but there are very few, and that relates to my answer, which is if this cannot be your top priority, your top priority, so you're going to have to beg for forgiveness with your family or they're going to have to give it freely.
44:30
You're going to have to compromise your work.
44:33
Whatever your company is, so to speak, that's going to have to play second fiddle.
44:37
If this cannot be your top priority for the next year, minimum, don't do a book.
44:43
There is a glut of mediocrity in the world. No kidding.
44:48
Please don't contribute to it.
44:51
Furthermore, there may be a hundred thousand plus books published in the US alone, which I'm sure is the case, probably much higher now, and books for a reader come and go. For you, Mr.
45:05
Author, if you put out a book that is a C minus, you're going to have to live with that C minus for the rest of your life.
45:12
So if you're going to do a book, do a fucking book. Take it seriously.
45:19
And very few people will follow that advice. A lot will do a book.
45:26
It'll be priority number six.
45:28
It'll have a very short life.
45:32
It will not do what they hoped it would do, and then they have to live with that mediocrity forever because it is attached to their names.
45:39
And if they went through a traditional publisher and it's not out of print, they're going to have to be reminded of that on a pretty regular basis.
45:46
And a fair number of friends who are close to me say, "If that's true, then I shouldn't do a book." I'm like, "Great.
45:55
That may be one of the best decisions you've ever made."
45:59
Not everyone needs to write a book at all ever. Writing a book is hard. It should be hard.
46:05
If it's easy, then either you are a freak of nature and God bless you, and there are those people, but chances are you're not that person.
46:14
I couldn't believe how many of the bestsellers Colleen Hoover has. I was blown away, man.
46:19
Yeah, some people are just built for it.
46:24
And just like there are people who are super sleepers with a genetic predisposition, and I know some of these people, they only need four hours.
46:33
They cannot sleep more than four or five hours a night, and they're fully rested, some of them after three or four hours.
46:39
And that is an advantage that most people do not have.
46:44
One of the things that I love doing with every book I pick up is I start right at the end with the acknowledgement section, and it is striking to see how many people go into a book.
46:57
There's obviously the agent and the publisher, but you always finish, at least in your first two books, finish with a thank you to your parents.
47:04
One of the things that I found to be an interesting tactic is first of all, talking to friends and asking for what is the 10% that you would cut?
47:14
And also, I'm going to instantly implement this.
47:16
I need a lawyer friend who can look at my arguments and say ...
47:16
do a little John McPhee redlining and say, "You missed these things." I don't have that.
47:27
I think that's a good piece of advice. It works really well.
47:30
Lawyers are allergic to, unless it's to their advantage in a negotiation, there are times, ambiguous language, and if something has the possibility of being litigated, the terms need to be super clear and the more extra words there are that should not exist in an agreement, the more liability there is frequently.
47:50
So lawyers, good lawyers can read something and identify unclear thinking very quickly, and there are exceptional proofreaders.
48:01
So that's a cheat, right?
48:04
And they don't need to be a senior partner at a law firm.
48:08
I mean, chances are if someone is a top student at law school in a given class, go ask a professor, I've never tried this, but I'm sure it would work, "Who's your best and brightest?
48:19
Who has the best attention to detail?"
48:23
Great, I would bet a sizable amount of money.
48:26
That person's going to be better than your average proofreader, at least a copy editing to look for ambiguous language or unnecessary language.
48:36
And then there are the questions, including the one that you mentioned, which 10 or 20% would you cut if you had to cut, what would you cut?
48:43
And you got to force them to do it because unless you do, if I was editing in your work, I'd feel like, "I don't know."
48:50
But if you're like, "David, I need 20% from you," then I got to give it back.
48:54
And now you've just given me permission to do something that if I don't want to offend you or anything like that, I'm not going to say anything. Yeah.
49:03
You have total protective air cover from my request.
49:07
Similarly, if you could only keep 20%, and if 20% sounds too abstract, you can just say one out of every five pages can stay. That's it. Which stay?
49:22
I'm giving you a chapter that's 20 pages. So there you go.
49:26
Well, Jason Fried at Basecamp, he has a little blog post called Writing Class I'd Like to Tach.
49:33
And he goes, "Write a thousand words, cut it down to 200 words, cut it down to one paragraph, cut it down to one sentence, and you just force people to just do that distillation and compression, both to find the essence of what they're trying to say, but also to make them distill and narrow."
49:51
And one of the things that you find is once you get to that super compression, often you begin to find things.
49:59
It's almost as if there's a phase transition.
50:02
And an example of that in your work is you started with Lifestyle Hustling as the name of your first book, and then you get into The 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef, and that's a good example of a transition that occurs that makes the packaging of whatever it is that you're saying, so much more compelling.
50:19
And then I retired the jersey, the 4-Hour Jersey, right? Yeah.
50:23
I wanted to retire that and then move to Tools of Titan. Why'd you do that?
50:26
I think it's easy to end up imitating yourself, and that's a dangerous place to be.
50:33
So I could have kept milking the four-hour thing forever, and I could have franchised it out or licensed it and done all sorts of things that I chose not to do for reasons that I think we already touched on in terms of playing the long game and not commoditizing what you're doing.
50:56
But I didn't want that to become a crutch or to feel at some point if I did enough of that that I could not do something else because it was too speculative and felt very confident in the content of Tools of Titans, which came out whenever it came out, 2014, '15, '16, can't even remember.
51:23
But I felt very confident that that book was going to do well and I was enjoying writing it.
51:30
I was having a really good time with that book, which was probably the first time that I could say that. Really?
51:38
Oh, yeah, first three books were very difficult, and for Tools of Titans, I wanted to set the circumstances, environments, and people in my life as such that it would be, not just my writing, but my existence would be as nourishing as possible.
51:59
Exercise, sauna, the people around, the food.
52:03
I thought about all of those elements, and also working with someone who had been my researcher who had then brought on full-time to help with many different aspects of the book.
52:17
Even though I am always writing in my own voice.
52:18
In the sense that if you read something in my voice, there may be a few tiny exceptions with social posts that I direct via phone or something, but by and large, if it has my name on it, I've written it.
52:32
At the very least, I have gone through it and revised.
52:37
Very rare that that's not the case.
52:39
And book was a blast to write, so I felt like I had lightning in a bottle with that, and that gave me all the confidence that I needed.
52:50
I was already committed to moving on from the four-hour thing, so I wanted to test what was possible in the same way that with The 4-Hour Workweek, every external pressure and expectation was that I would do some extension in business as my next book, 4-Hour Workweek,
53:05
3-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Workweek Extreme, 4-Hour Workweek, whatever, Revisited, that I would end up using the business applications of Pareto, et cetera, within the branding of The 4-Hour Workweek and beat that drum until I could no longer be the drill. I knew that was a dead end and there would be diminishing returns, but I had permission
53:26
I knew that was a dead end and there would be diminishing returns, but I had permission through the success of the first book to kind of do whatever I wanted.
53:37
And I was like, "Okay, I may not get this opportunity again.
53:39
I can always go back to The 4-Hour Workweek.
53:42
I don't think that's going anywhere.
53:44
So let me do something in an entirely different section of the bookstore.
53:48
If that works and my audience follows me, now I have permission to do anything, to write about any subject matter," right?
53:55
A la Gladwell or Michael Lewis, right? Or John McPhee.
54:01
John McPhee, especially John McPhee, entire book on oranges, entire book on canoes, an entire book on one tennis match.
54:10
The guy really has an incredible spectrum of subject matter, and I wanted that freedom.
54:18
So I tested it and it worked. Doesn't always work.
54:21
I tried Amazon Publishing with 4-Hour Chef, and that was a huge catastrophe on a lot of levels because it was boycotted by all the big box retailers, not just Barnes and Noble, but Target and Costco.
54:35
None of these people carried that book. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
54:40
According to Nielsen book scan, I sold 120,000 copies, I want to say, that first week.
54:46
And I ended up number four on the New York Times under people who had sold like 12,000 copies because it didn't come from the right reporting sources, or most of them came from Amazon because it wasn't available in other places.
54:59
So that was a wake-up call. Burned me out.
55:02
In a sense the silver lining, which is a major silver lining, is that I started the podcast to break from the writing, but to come back to Tools of Titans, I knew I could always go back to the four-hour thing.
55:15
I felt very confident in that, so I was like, "Why not do something very different?
55:19
Because if it works, I've now bought/provided myself permission to play with a much larger canvas." It worked great.
55:31
As you think about learning from experts and being a better writer, how does the interview style show that you have ...
55:39
how does that factor into the kind of writing that you're going to do in the future?
55:44
And a nice place to begin might be what you've learned from Cal Fussman. Yeah, Cal's great.
55:51
So for people who don't know the name Cal Fussman, cal wrote the What I Learned column, I believe it was called, in Esquire for a very long time.
56:02
So he interviewed Muhammad Ali, interviewed Gorbachev, he interviewed everyone and anyone you can imagine, I'm sure De Niro and all the stars at the time.
56:13
And it was quite a time, quite a span of time.
56:16
Cal, from an interview standpoint, has taught me a lot.
56:20
I'd say the principle takeaway that I have from Cal is let the silence do the work.
56:25
So sometimes what you don't say in the space you provide does heavier lifting than any clever follow-up you could possibly bring to bear on the situation.
56:35
And the tendency of a novice or a seasoned but nervous interviewer is to fill space.
56:44
And I did that in the beginning, and there's a time and a place for that. But it is one tool.
56:52
Silence goes a long way because the interviewee will often feel a little uncomfortable and eventually they'll break and they'll say something else, which often ends up being quite interesting, not always. So that was part of it.
57:07
I would say that interviewing is for me very similar to writing in so much as I think about sequencing a lot, what is the right order in which to present this information or to interrogate this subject matter, this person, the order matters a lot.
57:32
So how do you grab the attention in the beginning, if I'm writing a chapter, say, you can look at this in the 4-Hour Body in [inaudible 00:57:38], right?
57:39
I'm starting in the action almost always. There's not a preamble.
57:43
I'm not starting with dry facts and figures.
57:47
It's like I'm at Shoreline Amphitheater and I just finished my third pizza and I was reaching my hands into the bowl of chocolate coverage almonds, and two friends of mine were staring at me in a slack jawed in disgust. That's the opener.
58:00
I mean, that's paraphrase, but that's the beginning of one of the chapters in The 4-Hour Body.
58:04
To pull people in, you also have to do that in interviews.
58:07
If you are, just as you would be, if you're an author competing for attention, you do not have a ...
58:12
in most cases, unless you're very famous.
58:16
There are very few authors I will wait a hundred pages for.
58:21
There are some, like John Crowley who wrote Little Big, he's a poet.
58:24
His stuff takes a long time to warm up.
58:27
There's a lot of foreplay involved.
58:29
It's like Tarantino with Hateful Eight. Yeah. And it can be very slow.
58:34
But generally I would say that it's asking too much of your readers, it's asking too much of your listener.
58:39
You need to provide something juicy that they can sink their curiosity into early.
58:46
So the sequencing is very interesting to me, and I spend a good amount of time thinking about sequencing when I am preparing for an interview.
59:00
I would say that fundamentally thinking and also writing is asking and answering questions.
59:09
So if you are trying to identify a possible subject matter theme for a book, maybe that's a statement, but I think it's more interesting to approach it from what question am I trying to answer?
59:20
What are the questions for your books?
59:25
I would say that for The 4-Hour Body, for instance, it'd be like, "What is the minimal effective dose for the 10 most important dimensions of physical fitness?" That's it.
59:39
And for The 4-Hour Chef, it would be like, "In eight weeks, how can I take someone from ground zero to super accelerated learner with any subject matter?" That's basically it.
59:56
Can I develop a curriculum that would take eight weeks or so that would enable someone to go from average learner to hyper accelerated learner with any subject matter?
1:00:08
And you can apply those questions to your book.
1:00:13
You can apply those questions to your chapter.
1:00:15
If you are stuck on a chapter, which happens to me, happened to me with, especially with The 4-Hour Workweek, hire someone to interview you about that chapter and record the conversation.
1:00:28
And I beat myself up and suffered through weeks of being stuck on this one particular chapter, and I danced around it.
1:00:39
I went to other chapters, but you can only dance around it for so long.
1:00:42
Eventually you have to do it.
1:00:43
And I really got to a point where I thought the book was not going to be finished.
1:00:48
I was like, "This might be the end.
1:00:50
I can't seem to solve this riddle."
1:00:52
And I spoke to, I want to say it was Jack Canfield who generously provided a quote for the book.
1:01:00
He's the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and a very sweet guy, very smart guy.
1:01:06
And I believe he introduced me to a woman he had used as a researcher, and she interviewed me on this chapter.
1:01:16
And I kid you not within 60 minutes, I thought I was going to have to go back and listen really carefully to the interview.
1:01:22
By the end of 60 minutes, I was like, "Oh yeah, I know exactly what to do."
1:01:26
Forcing me to speak it out loud and if something was unclear, having her make it clear that it was unclear and asking good follow-up questions helped me to solve that chapter, which was probably the first or second chapter in the automation section, which gets a little technical compared to the other chapters.
1:01:46
So there was a question of how to make something that is very potentially dense, potentially boring, interesting enough that people will actually make it through and enjoy these chapters because those are important principles.
1:02:05
You can't just remove the automation section for the book and have things work.
1:02:10
So that was one of the bigger challenges and that was solved by being interviewed. Yep.
1:02:17
It's not just that you can clarify existing ideas.
1:02:22
One of the things that I find with a good question is I think of my brain like a maze, and they're these walls and a good question will just have one of the walls go ...
1:02:29
And it'll fall and all of a sudden I'll just jump and I'll make a connection between ideas that then gives me this flow and this momentum where I can just go ...
1:02:39
And then the other thing is bending constraints.
1:02:46
And I think that this is what a lot of your questions do, which is how do I achieve a goal that I have for 10 years and six months?
1:02:53
What would it look like if it was easy?
1:02:56
I just had this moment of epiphany listening to you share your last point about questions.
1:03:01
I'm like, "Oh my goodness.
1:03:02
So many of the questions that I ask myself when I get stuck are just questions that you've come up with."
1:03:07
And the defining thread of those questions is that what you're doing is you're taking some constraint that's like a 10 and you're bringing it to a zero and you're like, Now that we've bent the shape of reality, now it's contoured differently, what can we achieve now?"
1:03:22
And it's not like you have to do this, but it opens up oxygen where there was none. Totally agree. Yeah.
1:03:30
In a sense, the more outrageous the question, the more helpful it.
1:03:33
It's because if it's an off-the-shelf question, you would've perhaps asked yourself already that would be operating within whatever assumptions and constraints you already have.
1:03:45
And if you were going to solve that problem, you would've solved it already.
1:03:49
So it's not just more thinking, it's looking at the problem from a different perspective or oftentimes completely looking away from the thing that you have defined as the problem.
1:04:03
And so for instance, maybe instead of how do we hire, I'm making this up, a head of paid acquisition.
1:04:14
Maybe the question is, if you had to run your business without any paid acquisition, where would you put 50K?
1:04:18
Where would you put that salary that you were planning on paying?
1:04:21
Where would you allocate that money?
1:04:23
That's a more interesting question.
1:04:25
Even if you end up not pursuing the outcome of that question, it will inform how you think about this director of paid acquisition you thought you were going to hire. Right.
1:04:39
So I do that a lot with my business.
1:04:40
I'm thinking about it a lot right now, frankly, with what my next zig or zag might be from a professional standpoint, because I think the podcast world is going to become 10X hyper-competitive than it is already within the next few years.
1:05:01
They're like, "Okay, started in blue ocean.
1:05:04
It's turning into a red ocean.
1:05:05
There's still plenty of space for excellence, but the game's getting a little bit tougher and it's going to get a lot tougher."
1:05:14
And AI tools are going to make it incredibly difficult to compete for attention if you are mimicking the format and the, let's just call it, kind of algo driven types of content that are being produced by almost everyone now. Okay.
1:05:32
So what if I couldn't do the podcast? What would I do?
1:05:37
What if I could never do any video? Could I make that work?
1:05:42
Could I make that financially viable?
1:05:44
Could I make it a behind the paywall only podcast?
1:05:47
I'm not planning on that.
1:05:49
But these questions that you might shy away from because the initial response is the answer's no, it's probably good to take that thing that's an immediate no or an immediate yes and say, "All right, what if I had to do the opposite of whatever my answer was?"
1:06:07
In what way does your level of fame make creative work easier, and in what way does it make it harder?
1:06:13
I would say it hypothetically makes it easier.
1:06:17
I'll explain why I have that flourish on my answer.
1:06:23
Hypothetically makes it easier because I have access to a lot of people.
1:06:27
So if the rate limiter is access to amazing experts, I have access or I can create access pretty easily.
1:06:39
I would say that is offset, hence the hypothetical, by a degree of inbound that is hard to fathom unless you have a large public platform.
1:06:52
And what you have put out that has created that large platform is very personal, very long form.
1:07:00
So the people who are reaching out to you, not just think they know you, but actually do know you pretty well, and the dynamics at play with that type of information management can get reasonably complicated.
1:07:23
On some level it's very simple.
1:07:25
The more inbound you have, the more you are reactive, even if the opportunities are great.
1:07:34
Occasionally I see amazing opportunities that come in, but if, let's just say, my inbox and I have employees who help with inbox and management and so on.
1:07:42
But if I am suddenly responding to things that are coming in as opposed to sitting down with no distractions and deciding what my plan is and executing to plan, the former, this reactive business existence makes it very difficult or has made it very difficult for me and I own it because all these things are consequences of decisions I've made, to block out extended periods of time for deep creative work. I can change that.
1:08:18
I can pull a few levers and move a few things and change it, but there's a seduction to the inbound. Great word choice. Yeah.
1:08:28
It's not necessarily a fear of missing out, but it's variable reward.
1:08:32
It's like a slot machine.
1:08:33
Or if you want to train a dog really well, you use variable reward.
1:08:37
Every once in a while, you give a jackpot, especially in the beginning, you give 10 treats instead of one and they turn into crack heads.
1:08:43
I mean, they're basically gambling addicts, but you can harness that for operant conditioning and actually being very effective with dog training and clickers and so on.
1:08:53
But I think you mentioned earlier, first we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
1:08:58
Being shaped by inbound and becoming reactive, I think is antithetical to fully expressed creativity and writing.
1:09:10
And I say fully expressed because if your goal is to be most yourself, if you are inundated by the requests and projections of other people, you will lose sight, maybe very hard to decipher what is yourself, what your goals are versus what the rest of the world's goals are.
1:09:29
So I think that's a challenge.
1:09:31
I would say that overall it has made it harder for me.
1:09:37
There are people out there who have the exact opposite experience.
1:09:41
They're like, "I've reached escape velocity, I've just enough fame, I've got money. Great."
1:09:47
And then they can buckle down and go into a cave in monk mode and just spend all their time writing.
1:09:52
I have friends who do that, so they've made it work.
1:09:54
I think my blessing and my curse without the business side, without my study of PR, without my many experiments and paid acquisition and negotiation and so on, though I do not think The 4-Hour Workweek would have gone parabolic in the way that it did.
1:10:15
So having the operator ability was critical to that success, but that operator ability, and we tend to like the things we're good at, means that I'm very susceptible to sexy, shiny business things that come in over the transom or through friends who are very trusted, who send me things that are very interesting, but they are not fundamentally creative projects.
1:10:39
So I take the bait more than I should.
1:10:42
Is there a creative project that you feel is some sort of magnum opus that you've been thinking about or something that you almost don't feel like you're ready for that challenge, but it will excavate a depth of who Tim Ferriss is that someday you'll be able to do that? Yeah, I do. Really?
1:11:04
Actually, I can tell you a bit.
1:11:08
I'll tell you by way of a story because why not?
1:11:12
Stories are fun and it's the easiest way for me to get my point across in a way.
1:11:17
I remember having dinner, this is many years ago now. Was it a dinner?
1:11:21
It was a dinner with Michael Pollan and a handful of other folks, and he had just given the people at the dinner galleys of what would later be How to Change Your Mind. Oh, cool.
1:11:36
Which is about the history of psychedelics and the potential of psychedelics therapeutics.
1:11:40
How to Change Your Mind, that book ended up catalyzing worldwide a huge resurgence of interest in psychedelics.
1:11:52
Michael has been incredibly instrumental in publicly, but even more so behind the scenes with a lot of things that have happened in the last, let's call it, five to 10 years with respect to psychedelic therapies.
1:12:05
I have a lot of respect for Michael.
1:12:08
He's very good at what he does, and he takes writing very, very seriously.
1:12:13
When I first read that book in galley form, I had been gathering notes, meticulous notes on all of my experiences related to psychedelics or I'm guessing here maybe five years, a wall of notebooks to a level of detail that I haven't seen shared anywhere in terms of not just the higher concept stuff, but frontline practices, innovations, dosages, what are people doing at the frontier, at the edges.
1:12:56
And the edges could be very modern, the edges could be thousands of years old, but just like at the edges, what are the most interesting things that are happening and what have my personal experiences been?
1:13:06
So at that point, I had hundreds of pages of notes, and then I saw and read Michael's book, which is outstanding.
1:13:16
I mean, I have an entire shelf full of this book so that if guests ever stay with me, I can just give them a copy.
1:13:23
It's a very powerful book, very user-friendly.
1:13:28
I think he does a brilliant job of weaving that book into a tapestry that can really pull in people from many different worlds with many different viewpoints, many different prejudices. We all have biases.
1:13:41
And when I saw the galley, I thought to myself, my first thought was, "Thank fucking God.
1:13:51
That saves me so much trouble that Michael has put together this book."
1:13:55
Because a lot of my motivation behind potentially writing the book that I alluded to was to catalyze new conversations, policy change, hopefully reclassification of some of these compounds out of schedule one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
1:14:13
And I knew as soon as I read Michael's book to the extent that I can know anything, I was like, "This book's going to do it."
1:14:23
He's already done it before like The Omnivore's Dilemma, et cetera.
1:14:26
I've seen him do this before. The book is great.
1:14:29
And I was like, "Thank God. Books are so hard.
1:14:33
That just saved me so many years of grinding."
1:14:36
But I still think about it because it's a story not just about psychedelics, which have become very much a mainstream conversation, and I've been very involved in that world since 2015 or so officially, let's just say publicly facing, but it would be a story also about mental health, a story about healing from childhood abuse, a story about very specific, very, very specific tactics and protocols and so on that I've not seen anywhere else. So we'll see.
1:15:18
It would be a tremendous amount of work if I were to write it myself. There are alternatives.
1:15:24
I could have somebody interview me, I could have somebody ghostwrite it, but it's not the type of thing.
1:15:29
It's so close to me, it's so personal.
1:15:32
I really don't think I would be comfortable having somebody else write it.
1:15:38
That may mean it just doesn't get written.
1:15:41
But that's the one that I do think about. Because I've got it.
1:15:45
I've got the notes and it's ongoing.
1:15:47
I'm still gathering things and experimenting with other technologies, by the way, outside of psychedelics.
1:15:55
The interest is in unorthodox, high leverage uncrowded areas that are also under-reported, and that includes quite a bit.
1:16:05
And that book would also talk about some very, very, very, very bizarre experiences that raise a lot of questions about what this human experience is or is not, or what the gaps in our knowledge may be.
1:16:24
So I do think that book, it would be very interesting, but I haven't been able to bring myself to think about the amount of time that it would necessitate.
1:16:40
Now that's where I'm making assumptions that I should test.
1:16:43
What would this look like if it were easy?
1:16:46
Okay, is it better for me to not publish this?
1:16:51
I want to write it myself, or is it better for it to come out and be half as good as I think it should be? Maybe the latter, maybe.
1:17:01
Maybe I'll get there, but for the time being, I'm just sitting on it. Yeah.
1:17:05
Well, to weave some of these ideas that we've been talking about together, there's also also a way that teaming up with somebody on a book like this might actually be better, and I'll make the argument for why.
1:17:16
As I was hearing you say that, if I was writing a book like that, it's so intimate and close and personal that sometimes it's just hard to touch those ideas and what'll come out when you're writing those and how vulnerable you need to be, it might actually be easier with a co-writer who could pull that out of you. I agree. I agree.
1:17:40
I think it would definitely be easier. Definitely be easier. We'll see. TBD.
1:17:45
I have another thing to write first.
1:17:48
Can you share about that?
1:17:49
Well, it's actually, I can't share specifics, but I can share why it's important to me.
1:18:02
I am working on a writing project for the first time ever with a collaborator. Nice.
1:18:08
Not a ghostwriter, not somebody who is going to going to be behind the scenes.
1:18:12
I'm not going to claim to write a book I didn't write.
1:18:15
That shit drives me bananas.
1:18:16
If you want to call yourself a best-selling interviewee, that's fine, but if you didn't write your book, please don't call yourself a best-selling author. Please. Anyway, pet peeve.
1:18:30
I mean, you just think about where that would be unacceptable, which is pretty much everywhere else. It's just so bizarre.
1:18:39
It's like if someone's manager, they're like, "Yes, I've won the Academy Award for best actor."
1:18:48
I'm like, "No, I know you're kind of involved, but ..."
1:18:48
It's very strange to me that in the writing world, that is perfectly acceptable. It's very odd. In any case, it's okay.
1:19:01
There's some great ghostwriters.
1:19:02
I'm not faulting ghostwriters, by the way.
1:19:04
It's the other side that I sometimes find a little strange.
1:19:08
So I'm working with a collaborator who would be very credited, and this is another major experiment for me, and I'm holding it lightly, and we're both very open at any point if it's not working to just dropping it.
1:19:30
But I have always had people helping.
1:19:34
You mentioned the acknowledgement.
1:19:35
There are always a lot of people who go into a book, but as far as hands on the keyboard writing, it's always been me and my books are not short, in case you haven't noticed. They're big.
1:19:47
I lift weights with your books.
1:19:48
Yeah, they're huge books.
1:19:49
I do Tribe of Mentors and 4-Hour Body.
1:19:53
You can just superset with the different books. Exactly.
1:19:56
My books tend to be very long, and if this works even partially, this collaboration, that opens up a whole new universe of things that I can do, which does not mean watering things down.
1:20:11
The quality level has to be incredibly high, which is a constraint I'm happy to always embrace. Of course. Right.
1:20:20
Volume, I don't care about volume.
1:20:22
I just do not care because there's no competitive advantage there.
1:20:29
You are going to lose to the robots, you're going to lose to the people using robots.
1:20:32
If you think you're going to win on a volume game longterm, you're not going to win.
1:20:38
At the very least, if you're doing it manually, you're going to burn out.
1:20:41
So for me, at least, the quality, by my standards, needs to be incredibly high to the extent that I can make it high.
1:20:52
And I recognize I'm not Leo Tolstoy, right?
1:20:53
I'm not saying that my books are amazing works of art that are going to be in the Smithsonian.
1:20:59
I'm not saying that, but to the extent that I can make something as good as humanly possible.
1:21:05
I want to ensure that which also saves me from over committing to projects like the question I posed to my friends, can you make this your top priority for the next year?
1:21:15
If not, my suggestion is you don't do it. So TBD, we'll see. We shall see.
1:21:26
But very excited about that and should have more to say about that hopefully the not too distant future, but if things work out, the book should be done certainly in 2024.
1:21:42
So people might hear more about it.
1:21:44
That's my first write project in six years.
1:21:48
I'm long form, really long form.
1:21:50
It's not going to be going to be scratching stuff.
1:21:54
I think it's going to be another tone.
1:21:57
It will not be as long as my previous books, although every time I write a new book I say that, so we shall see.
1:22:06
But it'll be highly, highly tactical.
1:22:09
There's not anything, and maybe it's going to be very nuts and bolts as soon as you open this book, you can use something kind of book, which I'm excited about. Last question.
1:22:19
It's a very Tim Ferris question.
1:22:21
If you could have a billboard for writers and you just had the billboards only for writers, what do you tell the city of aspiring writers?
1:22:31
The first is do something interesting first.
1:22:39
Even if you're writing fiction, by the way, writing is already hard.
1:22:41
Don't make it harder than it needs to be.
1:22:43
Do something interesting first.
1:22:45
Or if people are like, "Ah, so intimidating."
1:22:48
Do something fucking weird first. Great.
1:22:53
Because you're probably going to choose something fucking weird that you are personally interested in, which your friends would claim makes you kind of fucking weird. That's perfect.
1:23:01
All right, so that's the first that came to mind.
1:23:05
The second that came to mind would be a category of one. Figure out what that is. Figure out what that is.
1:23:13
There's still plenty left.
1:23:14
They're just invisible until you sit down and think about it.
1:23:17
Kind of like my looking at those, say, four-star most constructive reviews, three-star most constructive reviews on Amazon.
1:23:25
If you know where to look or what questions to ask, you can find gaps.
1:23:30
Oftentimes the gaps are really simple.
1:23:31
What book are you trying to find that you haven't been able to find? Okay.
1:23:37
Maybe that's your category of one.
1:23:38
Maybe let's say do less than you think you can. Yes. Why that?
1:23:44
If you're writing to become famous, stop. Do something else.
1:23:48
If you're writing to make money, generally stop. Do something else.
1:23:53
If you're writing because it does something for you, maybe it's therapy.
1:23:57
Maybe you have these things gnawing at you, these things upsetting you or things just bouncing around your head that you need to get out, great.
1:24:04
Maybe it's because you love writing.
1:24:07
I know many friends who just love writing. Great.
1:24:12
Maybe there's another reason.
1:24:16
But if the reason leads you to want to write long-term, trying to bleed the stone every day is a great way to make that impossible.
1:24:28
I have more than most tried to really over deliver every day, and that is a recipe for burnout.
1:24:41
That is a recipe for beginning to drag your feet and not look forward to the thing that you really used to look forward to.
1:24:46
So whether that's two crappy pages a day or some of Neil Gaiman's advice from my interview that I did with him ...
1:24:55
There are many writers I've interviewed certainly, and they all have slightly different approaches.
1:25:01
But you mentioned some of the anecdotes from Jerry Seinfeld.
1:25:05
I mean, you see that one of the patterns is on some level at the very highest levels, a lot of these people are more like chaperones at daycare to themselves than they are like a drill sergeant in the military.
1:25:28
This is very fragile in the beginning.
1:25:32
I believe it was Jerry who said, "For 24 hours or 48 hours, don't show people anything that you've written.
1:25:40
Bask in the glory or having done one of the hardest things that a human can possibly do."
1:25:44
I think that positive reinforcement is very important and to set the conditions so that the positive reinforcement is possible, you need to leave some gas in the tank, is my feeling.
1:26:00
It's much better to do two crappy pages five days a week than it is to do 10 pages one day, but then you went to bed at four in the morning, so now you're worthless for the next two days, and then you freak out because you haven't written for the last two days.
1:26:15
So then you churn out some garbage or rush into something that's formulaic, and then you have toss that, and then you're building panic on panic.
1:26:22
That's not a good existence, and I've done that.
1:26:26
I've lived that for years at a time.
1:26:28
So if you haven't, take my word for it.
1:26:31
It doesn't produce good writing, and there will be days where you capture lightning in a bottle and those two pages turn into four or five, six, 10, who knows?
1:26:43
But it's tempting, I think, to try to model mutants, and that's a risky business.
1:26:51
I've read interviews and there are people who are like, "My minimum, I stop when I've put out 1,500 great words."
1:26:57
And I'm like, "1,500 great words? Really?" Okay.
1:27:04
If I set that bar, I'd want to throw myself face first through a window by day three.
1:27:09
Maybe that makes me weak.
1:27:10
Maybe that makes me an under performer. I don't know.
1:27:13
But I know that I cannot do that.
1:27:16
And there are other people that are like, "I chained myself to my desk eight hours a day and I don't move.
1:27:20
If I have to stare at a blank screen for eight hours, then so be it." Same result.
1:27:23
Tim face first out a window. Can't do it.
1:27:28
And then you have alternatives.
1:27:30
I've interviewed a lot of them, like BJ Novak, who talks about really setting the conditions in the morning.
1:27:35
It's like if you need to have a cappuccino and read the newspaper and bullshit and talk to the barista and do this and that to get in the mood, great.
1:27:44
The common thread though, that makes these people by and large hyperproductive, it's just consistency.
1:27:53
And I know that a lot of people deliver this message, but the key to consistency is coming back to the billboard, which is stop before you're exhausted, would be a better way to put it.
1:28:04
Stop before you're exhausted. Beautiful answer. Thanks, man.
1:28:07
I've been a fan for a long time and you had a big influence on me.
1:28:11
I remember in 2016 going to your event at the 92nd Street Y, and I mean, it's really thanks to you that ideas became so captivating to me.
1:28:21
I didn't have that until I started listening to your stuff and listen to your podcast, and I was just thinking of how many interviews I had listened to of yours throughout the years, and thank you. Oh, thanks, man. Really appreciate that. Yeah.
1:28:37
This is a tight ship you got here, so nice work. Thanks, man. Keep it up.
1:28:41
Yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah.