2026-08-14 15:42:00
Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode devoted to reinvention: how to shed an identity that no longer fits, decide on a new chapter, navigate uncertainty, and commit to what’s next.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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STEVE YOUNG
Steve Young: Well, let’s back up because what you’re alluding to, I think, is that what we’ve been talking about really for the whole time is transition.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.
Steve Young: And the difficulties because I love football and I was very successful at it, I run into a lot of people who played in high school and loved it. The dream, like they would give their arm to be able to, or leg to be able to play in college and keep the dream going. And I always think about how when I left the game, it wasn’t necessarily forced, but you do age out. It just sooner later, even Tom Brady aged out at 45. It’s a young man’s game. And I remember the day before, the day I retired, I was known for this thing that I had been able to do worldwide even. The next day I remember waking up and now that that’s gone.
Tim Ferriss: Now what?
Steve Young: Yeah. Yeah. And what I’ve learned about transition that leads to Rich Lawson, how I describe it, that everyone, and even the high schooler, the last day they play and it has to be put away, needs to recognize and treat it like a death, to mourn it and go through all the steps of mourning it and burying it and actually having it as a place that you can keep referring to as almost like a grave site. Because otherwise you carry it around and it never gets — you never transition. Transitioning is about actually moving from to, right? And so I’m really grateful, Roger Staubach, the poster on my wall, I got to know him. He became a friend. Like it’s insane.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. How cool is that?
Steve Young: And he famously transitioned, probably the most successful transition in the history of the NFL.
Tim Ferriss: What did he transition to?
Steve Young: The Staubach Company was a real estate business that he was hugely, hugely successful. And I remember asking him towards the end of my career, “Roger, give me some tips.” And he goes, “Run.” I’m like, “Run? Run where?” He goes, “Just run away.” That was his tip. Because he said, “The game will never leave you, but you need to leave it. You need to move on.” And I thought that was just simple, but really important.
And I tell people today, and I really want to write a book about transition because everybody is constantly transitioning, whether they like it or not. Most of it forced, right? But if there’s an authentic, vulnerable way to transition and bury and mourn, you can wake up the next day, realize I was great at something and now I’m not even good at anything else, but you know what? I’m going to —
Tim Ferriss: Learn and grow.
Steve Young: We’re going to learn and grow.
SULEIKA JAOUAD
Tim Ferriss: Just based on some of the reading that I’ve done, and also in your TED Talk, you had four hour naps in the middle of some days. You still had to make visits, or you did make visits at least to the ER at points. I’m curious to hear how you related to expectations of you perhaps. So outside of the physical aspect, did you feel there were certain expectations of you after, let’s just call it beating cancer, and then a dissonance between the reality of your experience and what was expected of you? If that question makes any sense.
Suleika Jaouad: Absolutely. I remember the day I was discharged from the hospital and was finally done with these four years of treatment, getting a slew of text messages, congratulating me on being done. And that seemed to imply an end point that I very much wanted but didn’t feel necessarily true or accurate because there were so many unanswered questions that I realized I suddenly needed to figure out, like the ones you just named. How do I hold down a job if I need to nap for four hours in the day? How do you begin to date when you’re coming out of an experience like this, and you still have a port in your chest? Where do you even — or do you bring up a cancer diagnosis without potentially scaring somebody away? Is it responsible for me to consider long-term commitments like marriage or children given my high likelihood of relapse?
Those were the questions I was swimming around in. But the other piece of it that I began to grapple with are the ways in which the hero’s journey arc is projected onto survivors. There’s this notion that when you emerge from a trial or a big trauma, you are better, braver, stronger for what you’ve been through, but I didn’t feel brave. I didn’t feel strong. I felt wrecked by this experience and had no idea who I was or how to find my way forward and what I had expected to be the final act of this illness experience, which was being cured, was actually the beginning of a very different kind of healing.
Tim Ferriss: Please say more. I would like to encourage you to continue. What do you mean by that?
Suleika Jaouad: So, in that first year after treatment, I was hell bent on moving on from this experience. I wanted to be a quote unquote normal young person. And I remember looking to my friends almost with an anthropological I, thinking to myself what does a normal 27 year old do, and trying to do those things almost as if I was play acting. And I’d go out dancing with friends and then pay for it with three days in bed. I would try to force myself to write about something other than illness, to come up with something new, and I just couldn’t. And what I came to understand is that moving on is a myth. You don’t get to compartmentalize your most difficult passages and stow them in the past. You don’t get to skip over the hard work of healing and grieving and recovering, and really uncovering who you are in the wake of that, and that instead, I was going to have to learn to move forward with this experience, with these imprints on my body and my mind, and to learn how to integrate them in my present.
So I started thinking about the language of ritual and the rules of rites of passage in these transitional moments. We have birthdays and funerals and weddings and bar mitzvahs, these —
Tim Ferriss: Mourning periods.
Suleika Jaouad: Yeah. And mourning periods. These ritualized ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings that help us cross the distance between no longer and not yet. And what I realized was that there is no 12-step program. There is no rite of passage for when you survive a trauma like illness, and that I was going to have to create one for my own. And so that’s what I did.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. As Tim takes a long inhale, because there’s so many questions I want to ask. I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, but you mentioned no one gets to skip the hard work of grieving, recovering, and or in some senses uncovering the trauma or the difficulty through which they have passed. I would love to hear what type of work, whether it ended up being hard or otherwise, ended up in retrospect being really valuable. Were there any particular things you did, types of therapy you experimented with, anything at all that really seemed to help with those checkboxes? These are the things that must be done before you can pass go. You don’t get to skip these seven steps. Was there anything that really stood out as valuable or helpful in terms of that work?
Suleika Jaouad: So the truth is I didn’t do much of that work that first year. I had done therapy while I was sick. I had gone to support groups for young adults with cancer, but in the aftermath of that experience, because of that projection that this was supposed to be done, I didn’t have in place those same kinds of support systems and structures. I think when someone gets diagnosed or when someone loses a loved one, if you’re lucky to have friends and family, everyone rallies around you in that moment of acute distress, but in my experience and the experiences of so many other people that I’ve befriended or interviewed, it’s the quieter weeks and months after that are the hardest, because you don’t have the cavalry running after you and you’re left to your own devices. And so all those sources of support that I had created for myself or sought out in treatment, I no longer had in the wake of treatment. And so I really had to invent my own. But this notion of recovery is something that I spent a lot of time reflecting on. The word recovery implies a return to something. And I think that in that first year, I was really trying to return to the person I’d been pre-diagnosis and very quickly realized that person no longer existed. And that though the word maybe implied otherwise, recovering wasn’t about a return to the old, it was a brute, terrifying act of discovery.
And what was helpful was I met a doctor who I was actually interviewing for a story and we got to talking and I explained to him some of the things I’ve been struggling with, and he said to me, “It sounds like you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you have PTSD.” And that was a revelation to me because I thought of PTSD as something that’s reserved for veterans returning from war or someone who has experienced a kind of violence. It hadn’t occurred to me that it also applied to emerging from a long period of life-threatening illness. And once I actually understood what it was that I was feeling, once I removed any expectations of what this post cancer experience is going to be like, and I actually was able to confront the facts of what was happening face forward, then I actually began to create a plan for myself.
Tim Ferriss: What did that plan look like and was it mostly focused then at that point on the present state awareness of this possible diagnosis of PTSD? So rather than being trapped in the past, trying to revert to this pre-illness version of yourself that no longer existed, did the plan focus then on this diagnosis or possible diagnosis of PTSD? What did it look like?
Suleika Jaouad: The simplest way for me to say it is that I understood I needed time to heal, which wasn’t something that I had allowed myself. I’d been pushing myself to figure out what I was going to do next and to get back into the motions of living immediately. But more than that, what I understood was that I needed to learn how to feel safe again in my own body. I write in the book that when the ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. You have to learn to live along fault lines. And so that really became my work. I wanted to feel safe in my body. I wanted to learn to become my own caregiver after years of being dependent on other caregivers. And more than anything, I wanted to carve out the time and space to figure out who I was and what that path forward was going to look like for me. So what I did was I started by confronting a smaller fear, but still a pretty significant fear for me, which was learning how to drive.
And so that’s what I did. I learned how to drive. And as I began learning how to drive, I started dreaming of going on a long road trip. And as I began dreaming of that, I began to imagine a solo cross country road trip. And I didn’t just want to go on some touristy boondoggle, but I was really seeking out people who could offer guidance in this strange limbo in-between place that I found myself in. And so I ended up making a list of about 22 strangers. All of whom had written to me in response to my calm about all kinds of reckonings and interruptions in their own life. And that’s what I set out to do. I had this newly minted driver’s license, which I’d had for about a month. I rented out my apartment and used the funds from that to pay for my road trip. And I reached out to all of these different people to let them know I’d love to meet face to face and I left home.
Tim Ferriss: Into the unknown.
SAMIN NOSRAT
Tim Ferriss: … Why was the food market so quickly popular? Were there any particular reasons that come to mind?
Samin Nosrat: I think part of it was timing of it. What it was, I was really good at making pasta. I lived in Italy for two years. I made pasta every day for 10 years. I really love making pasta. When the restaurant closed, I would sort of bump into people in town and they’d be like, “Well, we really miss your pasta.” I really enjoy the beautiful manual labor of making it and the folding, and the cutting and the whole thing. I thought, “Well, what if I cut out all of the parts of having a restaurant that I hate, and I just make the pasta and sell it to people?”
I had these friends who had a commercial kitchen that was empty a lot of evenings; they let me use it, and I was like, “Okay, well, how do I sell this pasta to people?” I think it was 2009, so I think it was before Instagram or it was certainly before Instagram was really big, and I maybe had a Twitter with five followers, but really, Facebook was the main thing that I used, and so I think I put on Facebook, “I’m going to sell some pasta, does anyone buy it?” And I made a Google Doc and people started buying it.
I opened a little Shopify storefront where people would order the stuff online, so I would know exactly how much to make because a big thing in food is, it’s already so hard to make money, and really, if you’re not efficient in terms of every decision of how much labor and ingredient, you’ll really lose money. By sort of taking my orders in advance, I knew exactly how much to make, and nothing was going to go to waste and then people would come pick up their stuff.
Then, very quickly, it grew from just pasta to pasta and sausages, to pasta and sausages and cookies because everyone else that I knew who is an unemployed cook who maybe wanted to start their own food business also wanted to do these things. We started doing this, and all of a sudden, it became this online marketplace where you could preorder and prepay for your food and then come and pick up your stuff a week later. It was sort of this way to get beautiful restaurant quality stuff at home, but it was certainly before Caviar, it was certainly before a lot of these internet food things and it was also before Good Eggs, which is a food tech startup that was sort of born out of this thing.
It was definitely one of the first online, I don’t know, order your food thing. I don’t know, it was just a weird time. Then, we had a mailing list from the restaurant and I started sending it out to that, and then, very quickly, because the press was very interested in this weird way that I was operating this thing, the mailing list grew to many, many tens of thousands of people, way more than I could support.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, yeah, that’s a lot.
Samin Nosrat: It was a whole thing that grew out of control beyond the resources I had very quickly, and I was always struggling to keep up and that became such a source of stress. All I had wanted to do was to make some pasta.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, funny how things –
Samin Nosrat: All of a sudden, I’m managing 9,000 business licenses and permits and health department and taxes and sales tax and vendors, and vendor inviting, and people wanting their beans vegan or whatever. It was so much more than I ever wanted to do, and it took so much energy and I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore.
Tim Ferriss: You have this feeling, “I can’t do this anymore,” which I think a lot of people have, and yet, they keep doing it for a long time and maybe forever to a certain extent. Now, while this is happening, you have these maternal instincts kicking in which make you feel obligated on some level to help these people who, at least in your head at some point and in their heads, depend on this income. Do you remember the meal, the drinks you had with a friend, the walk you took where you’re just like, “You know what? Fuck it, I have to close this down.” When you went to thinking about winding it down to, “Okay, tomorrow morning, that’s it. I’m doing it.”
Samin Nosrat: I’m pretty sure it was therapy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay, all right.
Samin Nosrat: I’m pretty sure it was therapy and I’m pretty sure, I think the thought that really hit my body, that I realized it was that I had, by that point, spent 10 years cooking. I had been wanting to be a writer since I was 15 years old. I finally had a chance to make the time to be a writer. I even had an office that I had that I shared. I had everything in place.
Because this thing was ruining my life and making me miserable, I couldn’t do the thing that I always had wanted to do and was basically ready to do, and not that it was some easy thing to just go be a writer, because, what? I ended up writing blog posts for yogajournal.com for $25. It wasn’t so much income or anything, it was just, I knew that this thing was making me emotionally and almost physically ill. I just had to stop, and I think now I’m just so much more attuned to that moment, to the feeling of knowing this thing is bad for me.
No matter how many other people it’s good for, it’s making me sick, and it’s making me feel really bad. I think I try to be a lot more aware of that and sometimes now I get into situations or projects or jobs where that feeling comes up again, but I’m already in it and often now a lot of the work that I do is temporary. I do one project, I do one article, I do one story, I do one whatever.
Now, for me, it’s more about learning and being really attuned to what’s happening, even just, for example, in the process of making the show. I had never made a show before. This was this incredible opportunity that came to me. I was so excited and felt so lucky to go make it and go do it, and I still feel so lucky and so excited, but a lot of things happened throughout the making of the show that I was like, “Oh, this doesn’t feel very good,” or, “This doesn’t feel very fair,” or, “I don’t ever want to be in a situation like this again.”
Now that I know what’s possible, I know that negatively and also positively, I know what to ask for and I know how to articulate that. I will forever insist, to me, I’m going to insist on working with a lot more people of color in the future. I’m going to insist on making sure that I have a lot more power creatively in anything that I do, because I realized I became very frustrated when I didn’t have as much power as I needed or wanted. There are just things, it’s a constant learning thing, nothing’s perfect. We figure things out as we go, and we try to do our best, and what is failure? I don’t know.
It’s not that big of a deal, especially if there’s some sort of positive take away that you have, and maybe my therapist would be really proud of me. Maybe it’s really bad for me to even say that my therapist would be proud of me, but I do feel like all of these stories and all of these experiences really always come back to me sort of paying attention to my feelings.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, hear, hear. That’s something that I’ve also personally been working on because I think I muted my feelings or viewed them as a liability for so long and I’ve –
Samin Nosrat: Me too.
Tim Ferriss: – realized, holy shit, you cannot spreadsheet your way out of everything, nor onto everything.
Samin Nosrat: No, me too.
Tim Ferriss: You really have to pay attention to that, the feelings.
Samin Nosrat: I think about that all the time. I came from a culture that’s very much about appearances and not very touchy feely in a lot of ways. I came from a family that wasn’t super touchy feely. What did I learn to do? I learned to shut down all of my own feelings and then I made my way into a profession who literally tells you to shut down your feelings. When you’re a cook in a restaurant, you don’t have time or room or space for feelings and not only emotional feelings, but if you actually burn or cut yourself, there’s not time or space to address that. You just sort of wrap your hand up and keep going.
LORI GOTTLIEB
Tim Ferriss: When you look back at your chapter changes, say, from entertainment to med school or med school to journalism, which decision or transition was the hardest? In other words, I’d love to hear more about some of the detail of one of the harder jumps. Were any of these decisions that you agonized over for days or weeks or months or was it just a flash of insight and decisive action? Which of these was difficult for you, if any?
Lori Gottlieb: Leaving the entertainment business wasn’t difficult for me because I was so clear that there was something deeper that I wanted to pursue, not that movies and television can’t be incredibly profound, but I think there was something that was more personally resonant for me about working with actual people out there which foreshadows, of course, what I do as a therapist. What was hard about that change was everybody thought I was crazy, that everybody said, “How do you leave this place that you’re in in your career? How do you leave that and just go to medical school?”
I think what was harder was leaving medical school because I had already made this switch. I was up at medical school. It takes a lot, by the way. You have to take all the classes to take the MCAT, you’d take the MCAT and then you have to meet all the requirements. I was, again, not a science major, although I was very math-y and science-y as a person. I was on the math team, those kinds of things, but I was very much taking humanities courses in college and literature. I think that doing everything that it took to get to medical school, getting into a medical school, being at a medical school and then saying, “You know what, I’m going to go be a freelance journalist.”
Tim Ferriss: Not just any medical school either, right? You’re on Palm Drive or nearby with beautiful Stanford, so I can imagine that also has a decent bit of waiting in some people’s minds.
Lori Gottlieb: Well, also financially, I think that we’re so worried about talking about money in our culture, but I think it’s a very real thing. I think people need to talk more about it because there I was, I already paid for two years of medical school and I had loans and all of that. Now I’m going to go be a freelance journalist. Who does that? I think what it was is what I was talking about earlier is that voice, that quiet voice where everybody else is saying, “Just finish medical school. Just get the degree and then figure out what you want to do. Just tough it out for two more years.” I was like, “Life is short.” I was very aware of that even back then.
This is a theme that you see all over my work, which is this theme of why thinking about death makes us happier, which is I don’t mean dwelling. Just acknowledging it. Just acknowledging that life has a 100 percent mortality rate and most of us don’t know how or when we’re going to die. I think that even though I was in my 30s then, which sounds young, it’s not. It’s like, why should I spend those next two years in medical school when I know that I want to go? Right? When that’s what I want to do is I want to go tell other people’s stories, I want to go do this work, that’s where the fire in my belly was.
I just followed the fire in my belly, and I said, “I’m going to have to make sacrifices, I’m going to have to make a lot of financial sacrifices and I’m going to have to write a lot to make enough money to support myself and to pay off my medical school loans, etcetera.” Now, I had some money saved up from Hollywood, but not enough to sustain me. These are the choices that that people make. It was again a choice where people said, “I really suggest you do this, that, or the other thing,” and I really listened to myself and what I wanted to do and becoming a therapist was the easy choice in the last of the changes, but I feel like every single thing that I did was really just looking at story in the human condition from a different perspective.
I don’t feel like I had four different careers. I feel like I had one career and I’m just experiencing them from different ways of getting in.
MARTINE ROTHBLATT
Tim Ferriss: You seem to be good at many things, of course, just based on the bio alone. But what strikes me is how quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields. And I’d like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio, and that is: “United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company she started to save the life of one of her daughters.” I’d love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story just because people will want to hear it. And then the follow-up just to plant the seed for it is how you learned biology. Because my understanding is you didn’t have much in terms of background in biology. So that’s a huge mouthful of a question, but if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful, and we can use that as a jumping-off point.
Martine Rothblatt: Sure. So it’s kind of funny that you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course, but that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school and here suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running SiriusXM, that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness. She can’t even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door and there are no medicines approved for it. I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the Head of Pediatric Cardiology at Children’s National Medical Center in the middle of Washington DC. And the doctor said, “This is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises. All the patients die within two to three years.” He had only seen two or three other kids with it and they both died. “And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant.”
So Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I mean, I didn’t know what to do. And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward night after night and myself, and Bina would tag team, staying there with her was once she fell asleep to go down into the library and to just begin learning about what was this illness she had, which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension. And why were there no treatments available for it? So I just began reading and reading and reading.
Most of the time I read things, I didn’t understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words that I never learned in law school, or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering. But of course, there were dictionaries, and I looked up the words in the dictionary and they had college-level anatomy textbooks. So what I didn’t know, I just kept going backwards in academia, I guess you would say, backwards in learning or pedagogia, until I would even get to like a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, “Okay, I get that.” And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.
Tim Ferriss: How did you — and I know this is a story you’ve told before, but ultimately in searching for possible solutions. And as we were chatting about before recording, there’s a lot of luck involved. And it doesn’t mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation, similar to what you experienced, but nonetheless, you were able to ultimately track down, I suppose, it’s fair to say a molecule, a drug of some type. Would you mind describing for listeners the process then of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion, this drug or to license it? If you could describe that, I have a number of questions that will stem off of it.
Martine Rothblatt: Sure, Tim. So there are a good zillion articles published on every type of medical research you could imagine. I mean, it’s just a bottomless well. There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals. And each of those journals have every year thousands of articles published across them. So it’s difficult to find the information that you need, but in law school, we learn a very useful skill. And this skill goes by the name of Shepardizing after this type of index they have in law school called Shepard’s. So what Shepardizing involves is when a judge writes a decision like the Supreme Court issues a decision, they drop a lot of footnotes. And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is make footnotes and references. And then what you’re supposed to do as a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to. And then the Shepardizing process is after you get all of those references to then look up all of the references in those other articles. And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down, the references are all circling back around on themselves.
So I applied that Shepardizing process to these medical articles, and somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article, they make footnotes and citations to other people’s research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those. And then I would follow up on all of the references in those. Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher at Glaxo Wellcome had written in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure. And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work, but in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did. And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart, which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures and all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well, that’s exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension, the people who have this disease — oh, I’ll make a quick footnote.
Now, when my daughter was diagnosed, 2,000 people in the US had the disease. Because medicines have become so much better, and because we’ve been able to have, like you mentioned in the introduction, get all of these approvals, there are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it. So it’s likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension. And I read this article and I said, “Wow, just what I need. This tiny stretch of artery chest between the heart and the lungs, this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone.” That was the holy grail that I was looking for. So I looked at where the author of the article was from, he was from Glaxo Wellcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And I made a beeline down to him and asked him if he could develop this molecule that he’d found for my daughter’s disease.
Tim Ferriss: Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom, a big, all-caps YES?
Martine Rothblatt: No. It was actually a big, all-caps NO, unfortunately. The individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier. And the person that I ended up meeting with, who was in charge of research and development, said that this was just one article. It was an incidental finding. In any event, this disease afflicted so few people, it was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo Wellcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease. And I asked him, his name’s Bob Bell, he’s now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I asked Dr. Bell, I said, “What would it take for you to develop this medicine?” He said, “Well, it probably would take — you couldn’t do it. We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in revenue potential.” He said, “But it’s possible you could buy it from us. If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise, I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo Wellcome.”
So over the course of the next several months, I created a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel Laureate who was formerly associated with Glaxo Wellcome become head of a scientific advisory board. And I reapproached Glaxo Wellcome. And I said, “I have all the things that you asked for. Can you sell me this drug and we’ll develop it ourselves?” Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody I asked said, “Well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree.” And that’s how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper to agree to license this drug to me.
Finally, it happened. And all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10 percent of any money that I would ever get from this molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time. And also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell’s sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time I first met him toward the end of this process. And he became a product champion for me within Glaxo Wellcome. I mean, that was just purest luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say. And then they really didn’t think this molecule had any chance at all. And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think, but still, all 15 people had to sign it.
And after we successfully developed this molecule, Tim, we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to Glaxo Wellcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people’s lives. It has produced a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us and Bob Bell, when I invited them to our 15th anniversary and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine, and he said this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo Wellcome had ever done.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about, perhaps an uphill, perhaps a pause, perhaps something else, which I’d love for you to comment on what you did come later. And that was a decision which I’d love to explore, to say no to quite a lot of opportunities for a period of time. It seems like at one point, you were very successful, you became very famous, like you said, practically overnight. You’re being offered opportunities you couldn’t have imagined a week prior, and you have a string of successes and then you realize, “Well, wait a minute, here, I might be getting painted into a corner,” and you start to say no.
You start to turn down, say, action film opportunities with big paychecks, things like that. Was that hard to do? Did other people say that you were doing the right thing and encourage you? Could you walk us through and just tell a story about that experience?
Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, love to. So this is around—I don’t remember the year, I’m guessing it’s around 12, 13 years ago. I was rolling with romantic comedies. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant and was the male lead rom-com go-to guy.
Rom-coms are mid-level budgets, 30, 35 million. They offer a good front-end paycheck to me. They go make 60 million. I mean, the studios don’t have to overspend and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make them.
You get a good female and a male lead that have good chemistry. People love to go escape to them. My rom-coms are doing well. They were my bank. They were what Hollywood banked on me to be in. At the same time, I’m living in Malibu, learning to surf, got my shirt off, and the paparazzi are Discovery Channels like almost documenting this, and I’m like, “You damn right document it. This is the life I’m living. I love it. I worked and earned to get this life. And those romantic comedies that I get paid so handsomely for, actually pay the rent at the house on the beach that I live in, in front of this water that I’m surfing in.”
So I was full on shaking hands with—I was going, “Yes.” At the same time, I did notice that any other dramas I wanted to do, or even the way people sort of—when I said, “Don’t meet strangers anymore.” Even when the way these sort of people thought of me or approached me or would talk to me or about me, there was no consideration.
It was like, “McConaughey is the shirtless rom-com guy.” And I was like, “Yeah, I am, and I’m—” But only I could answer that second question of, “And I’m—” like only I could continue that sentence. No one else could. And really Hollywood, for sure was like, “No, nothing else,” and so any dramas I wanted to do or other pictures, no one wanted to make them with me.
And I remember we had just had Levi. Camila and I just had our first son, and my life was so vital. Man, I had just had a newborn, I’ve met the woman that I love and want to spend the rest of my life with. I’m laughing harder. I’m crying harder. I’m happier than ever. Life is very vital and I’m in it. My real life is, but my work feels like, “Yeah, I can do that tomorrow morning. Just give me the script tonight, let me look at it. I can do it tomorrow morning.”
It wasn’t really challenging me, and the rom-coms weren’t challenging me, and my lifestyle was one big green light. And to me, if it’s all green lights, if it’s all sugar and candy, well, that’ll make tyrants out of anybody.
So I was saying, “Oh, I wish my work could—” I remember saying this. I remember looking in the mirror actually, and going, “Okay, McConaughey, so if your life is more vital and true to who you are than your work, well, if it’s got to be one or the other, that’s a good thing, because I know a lot of people that their work is more vital than their life.”
So I said, “That’s a good thing.” I said, “But jeez, could I just get some work that might challenge the vitality of my life and the man I am in it? Where I can get some work, where I can be more me in it?” Well, those roles were not being offered to me. Nothing, nope, not a chance.
No studio will bank you in this drama role, or this other role you want. I had control of Dallas Buyers Club at that time, but no one wanted to make it for me, nor would anyone finance it. So I decided that if I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was not being offered to me, it would be prudent for me to just stop doing what I had been doing and what was in the pipeline continually coming to me, which were the romantic comedies.
I called my money manager, I said, “All right, look, I’m going to stop doing the only work I’m getting offered. And I don’t know how long it’s going to be till I work again. How am I doing with my money?” He says, “You’ve invested well, conservatively. You’re fine. You can take time off.”
I remember calling my agent, Jim Toth. I would say, “Hey, Jim, I don’t want to do romantic comedies anymore.” I remember this conversation, he goes, “Great.” And I go, “Wait, woah, woah, woah. What do you mean, great?” He goes, “Great.” And I go, “How do you say that so quick? What are you going to say Monday morning when you go into your superiors in the office and say, ‘McConaughey’s not doing romantic comedies,’ and McConaughey has been bringing a nice chunk of 10 percent commission into you guys with these romantic comedies for years now. And he said the coolest thing to me, he goes, “I don’t work for them; I work for you.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good line.
Matthew McConaughey: And he meant the line, right? And then it was I went to Camila, my wife. And I’d shed quite a few tears with her going through this. Am I feeling fraudulent in my work? Do I feel a lack of significance in my work? Do I feel like—is it okay to be feeling this? I mean, remember as we said earlier, I’m tired of going running downhill. Why would you sabotage not doing the work you’re getting offered when you can get paid so handsomely to do it? But she understood that my soul was shaken and needed some recalibration and that the work I was doing wasn’t the true expression of who I was in my life. I told her, I said, “I want to hold out for some work that can challenge the vitality of the life that I’m living with you and our son Levi.”
And she repeated the lines to me. She goes, “Okay. You’re going to get wobbly. I’ve been around you, you’ve got to work, Matthew, and you love to accomplish. You’re going to get wobbly. You might start reaching for a little sip of something to drink earlier in the day too.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She’s like, “Me, too.” She goes, “Days are going to be longer. We don’t know how long this will last, how long we’ll be in this”—she called it a desert—”how long this will be a desert?”
She goes, “But if we’re going to do this, if you’re going to do this, we’re not going to half-ass it.” She repeated my dad’s line to me. And I went, “Yes, ma’am.” Gave her a hug, put some tears on her shoulder, and we said, “Starting today, no more rom-coms.” Well, rom-com offers came in to my agent for about the next six months, but nothing but rom-com offers.
Unless it was a major offer, I just said no. And they just stopped at my agent’s desk, Jim Toth. No. And then one of them came through that was a gargantuan offer for it. And my agent said, “It’s a pretty damn good script, too.” And so I said, “Well, send it out, let me read it.” I remember reading it, and I remember the offer was for $8 million, and the script was pretty good, but it was still kind of a rom-com.
And I remember reading it and going, “No, thank you.” I remember feeling sort of emboldened and strengthened by saying, “No, thank you. Great. Sticking to my guns. No rom-coms. Six months into this drought. No, I’m not caving in now. Don’t half-ass it, McConaughey.” So they come back with a $10 million offer. “No, thank you.” They come back with a $12.5 million offer. Now I go, dot, dot, dot ellipsis, ellipsis, “No, thank you.” Now they come back with a $15 million offer.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Matthew McConaughey: And I said, “You know what? Let me have another reread of that script.” And I reread that script. And you know what? At $15 million, the same script that I’d been offered for $8 million, the $15 million offer script, which was the same exact words as the $8 million offer script, the $15 million offer script was better, it was funnier. It had possibilities, it had angles, I had ideas, I could make this work. I mean, this could work.
Tim Ferriss: Now I’m imagining at this point, Jim is like, “Man, this saying no thing is really working out!”
Matthew McConaughey: He’s in and he’s over there teetering like, “I know what we said, but $15 million and it’s not like—it’s a pretty good script. I know it’s rom-com. It’s a pretty good script.” But I said, “No, thank you.” Well that got the signal across Hollywood that McConaughey was taking a serious sabbatical. And so don’t even send him a rom-com. It got around.
Tim Ferriss: So that was the crucible, then. I mean, that was the crux move, in a sense.
Matthew McConaughey: In a way, that was—I called an audible six months in and I had them thinking I might cave, I might just be posturing and, “Come on back, McConaughey. Hey, we love you.” And I said, “No.” And when they had pumped the money offer up so much, and people knew in the industry what that offer was, it became very clear, “Oh, shit, okay. McConaughey, I don’t know what he’s doing, but he ain’t doing this stuff. He’s not doing any more rom-coms.”
And it became clear. So for the next 12, 14 months, nothing came in, nada, zilch, not an offer for anything. I mean, I’d talk to my agent every couple of weeks. It’d just be like, “Nothing came in, nothing.” So now we’re 20 months into this desert period. I do have my son to raise, which being a father has always been the most important thing to me.
So that’s got my compass at least directed in a place that I go, “Just trust in this, if it has something to do with raising your son and being here on the land with your family, even if you start to wander, just trust that that’s always going to be in the asset section, McConaughey, you can’t go wrong with that.”
So I stuck to that. And I was now fine with not doing any work. I didn’t know what I was going to be, I didn’t know if I was going to change my career, if I was going to become a teacher, or a coach or go back to being a lawyer, I didn’t know, I didn’t think so, but I was writing more.
Talking about forced winters, I had put a forced winter on myself and I was pretty content. I wasn’t waking up every morning, going, “Did an offer come in? Did something new come in?” I was past that. And then all of a sudden, 21 months into this desert, I start getting some offers that are interesting things, William Friedkin, Killer Joe. Lee Daniels, The Paperboy.
Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me, Steven Soderbergh called, Magic Mike. Richard Linklater and I go do Bernie together. True Detective comes around, all of a sudden, Dallas Buyers Club. No one still wants to put a bunch of money up for a 1980s period drama about AIDS, but all of a sudden, McConaughey, all the directors or no directors would do Dallas Buyers Club with me, they wanted the script, they loved the script, they didn’t want to do it with McConaughey.
All of a sudden we find Jean-Marc Vallée who says, “No, I’d like to do it with McConaughey.” So what happened was that 22 months or whatever, that drought, that desert, I unbranded. I didn’t rebrand, I unbranded. Me being away, me being in Texas, not being on a beach getting pictures of being shirtless on a beach, not being in rom-coms, I was out of the world’s view.
I was out of the industry’s view, I was not in your living room, I was not in your theater, I was not in any of the places that the world had become expectant to see me and how to see me. Where was I? I was gone. Where is McConaughey? When you’re gone long enough, all of a sudden, I became a new, good idea. Which I was not a new, good idea earlier at the end of that 20-month period, and then all of a sudden things came to me that I wanted to do and I remember saying, “You know what? Fuck the bucks, I’m going for the experience. If I read a role that shakes me in my boots, and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life, and challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that’s what I’m going after.”
And man they came in. Camila and I looked at each other, shed some more tears, and we said, “Let’s get after it.” And I just started hammering them. The family came with me everywhere I went, and just started laying down work that really, really turned me on.
DEBBIE MILLMAN
Debbie Millman: So, the exercise that I do now with my students, because they are quite a bit younger than I was when I was doing this five-year plan, I ask them to do a ten-year plan.
And so, this gives them a chance to really mature into who they are in their 20s and into their early ‘30s. And it’s this ten-year plan for what I call a remarkable life. It’s about imagining what your life could be if you could do anything you wanted without any fear of failure. And they are the most life affirming essays. They are so, full of hope and optimism and well being and goodness, that it gives me a sense that humanity can be saved. So, I borrowed that exercise from Milton and now use that both in my graduate program and the undergraduate classes that I teach.
Tim Ferriss: This is going to seem nerdy, but I’m a nerd and I’ll run with it. Do you have any parameters for people at home who might want to try this, or recommendations, ways to start? Is it bullets or is it in prose in full paragraphs? How does it end? Any recommendations for people who would like to give this a stab?
Debbie Millman: So, let’s say it is winter, 2027. What does your life look like? What are you doing? Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house are you in? Is it an apartment? Are you in the city? Are you in the country? What does your furniture look like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets. Tell me about your significant other.
Do you have children? Do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Talk about your career. What do you want? What are you reading? What are you making?
What excites you? What is your health like? And write this day, this one day ten years from now. So, one day in the winter of 2027; what does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until when you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big. Dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it and write like there’s no tomorrow. Write like your life depends on it because it does. And then, read it once a year and see what happens. It’s magic. It’s magic, Tim.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Reinvent Yourself and Make Bold Moves — Decisive Stories from Matthew McConaughey, Steve Young, Samin Nosrat, and More (#879) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-08-12 21:38:00
This is a special compilation devoted to reinvention: how to shed an identity that no longer fits, decide on a new chapter, navigate uncertainty, and commit to what’s next.
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“Fuck the bucks, I’m going for the experience. If I read a role that shakes me in my boots, and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life, and challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that’s what I’m going after.”
— Matthew McConaughey
“What I’ve learned about transition [is] that everyone … needs to recognize and treat it like a death, to mourn it and go through all the steps of mourning it and burying it and actually having it as a place that you can keep referring to as almost like a grave site. Because otherwise you carry it around and you never transition.”
— Steve Young
“Thinking about death makes us happier. I don’t mean dwelling — just acknowledging it. Just acknowledging that life has a 100 percent mortality rate and most of us don’t know how or when we’re going to die.”
— Lori Gottlieb
“Recovering wasn’t about a return to the old. It was a brute, terrifying act of discovery.”
— Suleika Jaouad
“Now that I know what’s possible — negatively and also positively — I know what to ask for and I know how to articulate that.”
— Samin Nosrat
“What I didn’t know, I just kept going backwards in academia, backwards in learning or pedagogia, until I would even get to a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, ‘Okay, I get that.’ And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.”
— Martine Rothblatt
“Write this day, this one day, 10 years from now. What does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until when you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big. Dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it and write like there’s no tomorrow. Write like your life depends on it because it does. And then, read it once a year and see what happens. It’s magic.”
— Debbie Millman
Want to hear another episode with someone who walked away at the top to reinvent himself? Listen to my conversation with author, entrepreneur, and one-time circus clown Derek Sivers, in which we discussed selling CD Baby and giving the proceeds to charity, the joys of an un-optimized life, finding paths less traveled, taking giant leaps, the wisdom of quitting when you’re ahead, picking the right game of life, why saying “good enough” can be a superpower, and much more.
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2026-08-08 13:36:59
Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I’ve asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in as some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions as we explore the craft of writing.
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Tim Ferriss: This makes me wonder how you choose, and I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while, and I don’t think we got into it in our prior conversation, which is how do you choose projects, how to spend your time, where to allocate your limited life force? Because there’s, “what do you want” which is where a lot of people would start. Although that’s a pretty — it can be nebulous in a handicapping way because that could take you in all sorts of different directions. But how do you choose your projects, things to spend time on?
Elizabeth Gilbert: I’m kind of a hard-ass about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, great.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Part of the thing I’ve noticed that people tend to get stuck on sometimes is that they get this inspiration. Inspiration comes first. Inspiration is the breathing in of God. So something, even the most empirical, scientific, atheist people in the world, when they talk about where an idea came from, they say, “An idea came to me.” They say that. They don’t even know they’re saying that, but that’s they’re reporting accurately what the feeling is because that’s what everyone I’ve ever met who’s had an idea. It’s the eureka moment. It’s like, “Oh, I just heard, saw, and felt an inspiration.” I know the difference between something that comes from me and something that comes to me talking about prepositions again, and I think most creative people do as well. Like, “Oh, this came to me.” And then it can feel like an assignment or it can feel like a challenge. It’s like, “Now, I want to make this thing.” But a place where I think people get sidetracked and distracted, it’s very, very, very similar to meditation. Meditation, spirituality, and art have so much in common.
This may sound familiar to people who — maybe you’ve had this experience. You start working on this thing that was this inspiration, and a couple weeks, couple months into it, couple days, another idea comes. And that idea seems more interesting than the one that you’ve already invested some time into. And then you’re like, “But I want to do this thing. This thing is fresh and exciting. This is the really, really cool thing.” And then you go and do that one, and then another idea comes, and then it’s like you’re dealing with this melee. And so oftentimes people will say to me, “I’m working on a book and I’m halfway through it, but I’ve got this other idea that I think is way better. This book feels really stale and it doesn’t have any life in it.” I always say like, “Okay. Well, I give you permission to quit working on that first project, but only if you have a proven track record of ever being able to finish a thing.”
Tim Ferriss: That is so smart.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Because then it’s legit. It’s like, “No, I’ve got this better idea.” But do you have 30 unfinished things? Because if you have 30 unfinished things, now, we have a problem. I have those same things happen to me. Like I’m a third of the way, a quarter of the way, a fifth of the way in a project, and then something so much more interesting comes along. I’m like, “But I know enough to know.” I’m like, it comes dancing. It’s like a dancing girl. It just comes across the stage.
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say the hottest girl at the dance —
Elizabeth Gilbert: The hottest girl at the dance —
Tim Ferriss: — just showed up.
Elizabeth Gilbert: — just showed up, and you’ve been married for two months. And you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been married for two months, and the hot…” But what I know is that if I abandon my, let’s call it wife, this project that I’ve been working on for a few months to go off with the hot girl, in a few months, she’s going to be just as boring and stale. And then, a new hot girl is going to come along, and I’m never going to complete anything. So stick with the one you came to the dance with. If I’ve got multiple ideas and I’m not sure which one I’m beginning, I actually have a team meeting and I make the ideas make proposals to me about what do you actually want me to do?
Tim Ferriss: This is like project-based IFS.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Totally. It’s like I’m the angel investor and these ideas are like, “We want your time and money for this.” I’m like, “Well, what are you?” Like, “What are you? What do you have for me? Why should I invest my money and time in you?” A lot of ideas when I challenge them, they disappear into the ether. Because they’re like, “I don’t know. Something about birds.” I’m like, “You haven’t thought it out.” And then, some other ideas like, “No. I want to write about this very specific thing and it’s going to take…” I’m like, “Okay, so this one’s got their act together. So when the bird idea is more formed, come back. Come back when you’re ready. Come back when you’re ready to be real and not just to be tantalizing me with…” So I’m a real hard-ass about it. I don’t mess around. I don’t let these ideas push me around.
ANNE LAMOTT
Tim Ferriss … And I’m going to ask a question that no doubt you’ve been asked before, but I have to ask, what do you think it is about Bird by Bird that affected so many people so deeply? And certainly that’s true of many of your other works, but in this particular case, what do you think it is that has that type of effect on people?
Anne Lamott: I think it’s because I didn’t try to con people into thinking that if they just got a book finished, that my agent would want to take a look at it by the end of the week and that it would almost certainly be published. And that then all the Swiss cheese holes inside of them would be healed and they’d be well, and they’d get that FDA stamp of approval and be validated. And then their parents would start to respect them. I said, “None of that’s going to happen all of that as an inside job.” But I’ll tell you a funny story. When Sam’s little boy, who’s 12 now was five, I was teaching his kindergarten class a writing workshop. And instead of saying “shitty first drafts,” I said, “really poopy first drafts.” And the kids loved me. And after I was done, my little grandchild came up to me and he leaned in and he sounded like Tony Soprano.
He said, “Oh, Nana. That was terrible.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “You told people you would teach them how to write a book, but you only taught us how to write one page.” And that’s really what I can help you do is the one chapter on shitty first drafts. So I don’t try to teach kids or grownups how to write really, really well. I just teach them to stop not writing. I teach to keep their butt in the chair and to write badly. And that all first drafts of any book you’ve ever read by the authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts. And I teach people to take it really small, Bird by Bird. Is it okay if I tell the story?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, please. I would love for you to tell the story just so people know the genesis.
Anne Lamott: Well, my older brother — I was like a super superstar achiever in school and my older brother hated school. And he was kind of a rebel. And in California, in the ’50s and early ’60s, in fourth grade, you wrote two term papers. One was the Sacramento paper, that’s our state capital. And the other was on birds. And you had to write all year, all semester, a paper on birds. And my brother hadn’t started. It was due on a Monday, and on a Saturday, he admitted to my dad that he hadn’t started. And my brother was a tough guy and he was in tears. And my dad sat down with him and put his arm around him and he said, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy. First you read about chickadees and then you write a paragraph in your own words about chickadees and then you draw a picture. And then you take pelicans and you study up on pelicans, and then you write a paragraph or a passage on pelicans.”
And I never ever forgot that. And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so in my forties, I heard E.L. Doctorow say that writing was like driving at night with the headlights on. You could only see a little ways in front of you, but you could make the whole journey that way. And I think that is the most profound advice I can offer anyone on any topic. That you can only see a little ways in front of you and you can make the whole journey that way. And another thing that I think helped people when they read Bird by Bird was the chapter on perfectionism and how perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. It’s the voice of the enemy. And if you listen to it, it keeps you crazy for your entire life because we all fall short. You’ve written books and you think you’re creating this golden and crystal palace that people can walk inside of and see all of truth and beauty and reality.
And you kind of end up — your books and my books, all of them are kind of shantytowns and like in the [inaudible] the peace marches where people set up tents and thought it made sense to bring their dogs during the rainstorm. And that’s a miracle to have written a shantytown. And so I think these ideas of not knowing what you’re doing and letting yourself do it really badly and to try to help grind down that critical voice. I’ll just mention my husband’s work here. He’s Neal Allen. He wrote Shapes of Truth. And the work he does with people in these Shapes of Truth is taming the inner critic. And what his position is: “You’re never going to get rid of it. We don’t get over very much here.” What he does with people is he has them bring forth the inner critic and actually just put it on the table in front of him.
And he thanks them for keeping him alive when he was six and seven, because that critic kept him small and controllable. So he didn’t run out into the street. He didn’t swim out past his ability to stay afloat, but that at the age of 60 or whatever, we probably don’t need it anymore. And so he has his clients give the inner critic a great new job, which might be ethical consultant for the project so that the inner critic can go off to the library where there’s an incredibly comfortable chair and a good reading light and 2,000 books. And he will sit there and read, which he loves to do, and when we need an ethical consultation, we’ll come get him. But we don’t need that constant — is it okay to say the F word on this show?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Yes please.
Anne Lamott: Okay. So in Bird by Bird, there’s a whole chapter on K-Fucked Radio, KFKD. And without a lot of help and a lot of transformation and healing, K-Fucked Radio’s on 24/7. It’s telling you how far short you’re falling. It’s telling you how great you started out and what a disappointment you’ve turned out to be. It’s telling you that what you’re in the middle of is beating a dead horse, on and on and on. And so the Shapes of Truth work and the inner critic work and Bird by Bird is 90 percent about turning down K-Fucked Radio. Anyway, out of the left-hand speaker is all this stuff about that you can’t do it perfectly, and why bother, and that this has been blah, blah, blah. But out of the right-hand speaker, is like the voice of the people who love you most. The voice of like, for me, Sam or my husband or my two best girlfriends. And they’re saying, “I love your stories. I love how you write. I can’t wait to read more.” But you can turn down the left-hand speaker and it’ll always be there to some degree.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Tim Ferriss: I read a beautiful line from you describing a certain aspect of your creative process. This is from the Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, Number 72. “One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood.” And you continue to say, later in that same paragraph, “I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes … and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.” Could you expand on any of this? I mean, I think it’s pretty well put. But I know that there are a lot of people who feel they need to get themselves into the mood to write. Is there anything else you could add to this?
Joyce Carol Oates: No. I definitely feel that you create your mood by working. And I have a work ethic. I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it. And so if you feel that you just can’t write, or you’re too tired, or this, that, and the other, just stop thinking about it, and go and work. Life doesn’t have to be so overthought. You don’t have to wait to be inspired. Just start working. Particularly, I think, first go for a long run and a nice walk, and think about what you’re going to do, come home, and start working. But try not to be interrupted. That’s the problem. Most people are living in families, or they’re living with a partner, and the other person has a schedule and expectations. And while you may love your family, they can be the ones who drain you of energy.
For women, that’s always been a problem. Women are nurturing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But women find it very hard to say no. Women writers are always being asked to do things pro bono, to volunteer their time, to do different things, to read manuscripts, to be on committees, and so forth. And the instinct is really to say yes. I say yes on lots of these things. If you’re a careful custodian of your own time, like Philip Roth, for instance, or Flaubert, you would never give away a whole lot of your time. Philip Roth would never — he wouldn’t do one 100th of the things that I do. He was too smart. He knew how to guard his own privacy.
JERRY SEINFELD
Jerry Seinfeld: Well, my guiding rule is systemize. What’s the problem? The problem is — like my daughter. My daughter is very creative. She’s extremely bright. She’s got an incredible head on her shoulders, and I’ve seen myself in her at that age. She’s way further advanced than I was at that age, but she doesn’t know —
She has a creative gift. Okay? So I say to her, “When you have a creative gift, it’s like someone just gave you a horse.” Now, you have to learn how to ride it. You got to learn how to ride this horse. I’ve seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens, I’ve seen people that were given black stallions, and it usually — if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you’re born, and they just put you on it — and that’s what happens. They just put you on it. And you either learn to ride this thing, or it’s going to kill you.
And we have many, many examples of that. So she’s trying to write this thing. She’s struggling, “I can’t write. I keep putting it off.” So I explain to her my basic system, which is, if you’re going to write, make yourself a writing session. What’s the writing session? I’m going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don’t just sit down with an open-ended, “I’m going to work on this problem.” That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head.
It’s like you’re going to hire a trainer to get in shape, and he comes over, and you go, “How long is the session?” And he goes, “It’s open-ended.” Forget it. I’m not doing it. It’s over right there. You’ve got to control what your brain can take. Okay? So if you’re going to exercise, God bless you, and that’s the best thing in the world you can do, but you got to know when is it going to end. “When is the workout over?” “It’s going to be an hour.” “Okay.” Or “You can’t take that? Let’s do 30 minutes.” “Okay, great.” Now we’re getting somewhere. “I can do 30.”
I’m trying to teach my son, who knows how to do Transcendental Meditation, how to do it. You know? I assume you know about that.
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah, I practiced this morning.
Jerry Seinfeld: Okay, so — “I can’t do it 15 minutes.” “Okay, let’s do 10. Let’s do 10. Let’s come up with something you can do. That’s where you start everything. That’s how you start to build a system.” So my daughter — so I said to her, “You have to have an end-time to your writing session. If you’re going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you’ve got to get a reward for that. And the reward is, the alarm goes off, and you’re done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You’re done.”
If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is “Stop now. Pencils down.” So that’s the beginning of a system that to me will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something I’ve kind of wanted to teach in a way, because I think it’s so simple.
I think exercise is pretty simple too, but people don’t — they don’t come up with good, simple little systems. They just try and do it, and to me, that’s — you’re going to fail.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The simple doesn’t mean easy, and the point you made —
Jerry Seinfeld: No, no, no. Not easy —
Tim Ferriss: — is to —
Jerry Seinfeld: — but simple.
Tim Ferriss: — so important. The incentives. Right? Having a reward. Having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration, or how long —
Jerry Seinfeld: I told her —
Tim Ferriss: — have you chosen?
Jerry Seinfeld: I told her, “Just do an hour.” That’s a lot. She says, “I’m going to write all day.” “No, you’re not. Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you taught a class on writing, what other lessons might you have, or resources, or anything, exercises? Because I’m imagining that your daughter could sit down, she says, “All right, I have an hour.” And then you ask her how her writing session went, and she said, “Well, I didn’t have any idea what to write.” So you’d have — I don’t know what age the students would be in your course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing?
Jerry Seinfeld: Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. No one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage. You know?
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Jerry Seinfeld: How many hours are you going to work per week, per month, per year? You might even want to chart that. Or with your exercise, if you want to get in shape. I couldn’t get in shape. I started out as a jogger in the ’70s, and I would run three miles a day. And then I got older, and I got married late, and I had young kids. And I really had to get in shape, and I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called Body for Life.
Tim Ferriss: Body for Life, yeah.
Jerry Seinfeld: And it’s really, really — it’s such a system for a primitive brain, and I do it to this day. I think it’s a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape, because he broke it down to, “Here’s what we’re going to do. In minute one, here’s what you’re going to do, to minute five, minute 12. And this is going to end in 45 minutes.” Or whatever it is. And every minute, I know exactly what I’m doing, and that turned the key for me. And all of a sudden, I was getting in shape, because I never had to ask, “What am I doing now?” Or, “What are we doing next?”
It’s like you’ve got to treat your brain like a dog you just got. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid, little dog that is easily trained. Do not confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. And it’s done through repetition and systematization.
MARY KARR
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about revision.
Mary Karr: Okay, revision.
Tim Ferriss: Revision. This doesn’t have to be serious.
Mary Karr: I’m a big revisor. I’m a big revisor.
Tim Ferriss: You are a big revisor. But, so you have said, “Anyone who has read a rough draft of anything I write is just shocked at how bad it is.”
Mary Karr: It’s terrible.
Tim Ferriss: What does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very—hopefully it doesn’t sound like a really naive question, because I know that there are many, many aspects to revision. So, I’ll lead with just a bit. This is from writermag.com, but Karr says she takes a hard look at every sentence she writes: “Can I make this sentence less boring? More interesting? Prettier? More colorful? More true?” So that’s a teaser. What does your revision process look like? Because I’ve read that you threw out something like 1,200 pages.
Mary Karr: Threw out 1,200 pages of Lit. Yeah. Finished pages too, that’s not draft. And that was written over about, I want to say, five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out, Tim, I was so upset. I had been—well, first off, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract. I mean they—and so I finally my agent called me and said, “You’re going to have to…” I said, “You know what? I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don’t shut up and leave me alone. It’s just going to take me a minute.” So anyway, so I’d sent them, I don’t know, I’d sent them like 130, 140 pages. And my editor at the time estimated that I’d thrown out 1,200 pages.
And let me tell you, when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked, I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which is why I didn’t want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like two days and I watched Dr. Phil reruns and a lot of cooking shows. And I ordered a lot of curry. I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathrobe. And then I called Don DeLillo, who’s one of the people I call, it’s like the nuclear button, who’s just one of the great novelists, and who also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, “Don, I think I’m writing a…” He’s like, “What are you crying about?” I said, “I think I’m writing a bad book.”
And he said, “Well, who doesn’t?” And I thought about that. And I thought, “God, he’s right. Tolstoy’s written bad,” but I mean, people I read, every writer I know has written a bad book. So, okay. So, okay. So maybe it’s just going to be a bad book, but it’s the book that’s standing in line to be written. And I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened. So basically what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time.
I think one example I give in The Art of Memoir is that when my mother is driving me to college, and I think the sentence I started with was something like, “Mother drove me to college in her yellow station wagon. We stopped every night at the Holiday Inn and got drunk on screwdrivers.” I can’t remember. Might’ve said puking drunk on screwdrivers. And so I somehow was able to remember being in that car. The thing about my mother’s yellow station wagon was that it didn’t have an air conditioner. So at that time you could buy an air conditioner that strapped under the dashboard. Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right, and I was sitting in the shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet. And it was icy, icy cold water.
And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas, and she was drinking vodka. Driving, drinking vodka and orange juice, and eating these—watching her eat a peach. When you’re 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die. There’s just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you’re 17. You just think, “My God, woman. Shut your mouth. Take a smaller bite. Jesus, it’s not going anywhere.” But the smell of the peaches and being in the—and suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I had got, it was her book, but I had started reading, and she said, “Read it aloud to me.”
And I remembered reading that book and driving, and I remembered the—you grow up around these Texas dirt farms. I mean, there’s plenty of corporate farming in the state of Texas, but then you get to the Midwest and it’s just so organized. It’s just there aren’t the rusted cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch. It’s these rows and rows of corn and these big, cinnamon-colored silos. And I remember driving into that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking I could be a writer. I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn’t do well at school, that I would fail.
I’d been such a screw up. I’d been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope and some of them went to jail and I didn’t because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper. And I still remember sitting in—she came to pick me up wearing a leopard—she had leopard skin pajamas. It was July 4th. And she had on a beaver coat with a mink collar and those leopard skin pajamas on this hot night and Kountze County, Texas, and here sits this judge behind this—this liver-spotted judge with these palsied hands and every meal he’s ever eaten on his tie when she came to pick me up. And he said, “I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” And she said, “Oh, you old fool.” I mean, I was just like, “Oh, my God, Mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated.”
So anyway, yeah, I think it’s memory. I do an exercise with my—I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spiotta, wonderful young novelist I teach with. And she’s teaching an undergraduate class, there are 90 kids in the class. I said, “I want to do this writing exercise.” She said, “Well, the writing, it’s been uneven.” But I said, “Trust me, everyone will write well.” And you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell, to try to remember a room you were in where your mother’s cooking, your grandmother, wherever you had a good meal when you were little and try to close your eyes and smell that, because smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory and it’s stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts.
And you try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want, what are you yearning for and what’s keeping you from getting it? Maybe it’s a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy’s oysters coming up out of the fryer, or what’s going to keep you from getting it? It’s my big-footed sister, who, as Daddy said, “Nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries. She’s going to get all the oysters and I won’t get any.” And so it’s really more about trying to occupy a former self, because I think as you know, just as in trauma, the body remembers. The body also remembers beauty. It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things, too.
BRANDON SANDERSON
Tim: Are you still teaching the creative writing class at BYU?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, I am.
Tim Ferriss: Brigham Young University. What is the first class?
Brandon Sanderson: First class, so first class is some things I just told you. I get up and I say to them — actually, the very first thing is I say to them, “During this class, we’re going to pretend you want to be a professional writing writer, earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years. That we’re going to pretend, because most of you…” that’s probably not why they’re there. Most of them, they’re just curious. They may have a book of them, and we have this curious relationship with art in our society. It is, as soon as you say, “I’m going to write something,” people are like, “Oh, when will you monetize it? When will you earn money from it?” And that can be kind of destructive.
Like you mentioned you’re writing a book or you wrote one just because it was an itch. You enjoyed it. I think writing is legitimately just good for people in the same way that working out is good for people, learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head on a page, it’s just innately good. Most people, when they go play basketball, if they look like me, people aren’t going to be like, “So when are you going into the NBA?” But if you write a book, people will say, “So when are you going to publish it?” And I say to the students, “It’s okay if that’s not your goal. If you want to write just for you — if you want to be on the, I spend 20 years and then produce one book route, totally fine. However, I want you to know everything you would need to shoot for the highest level, which is earning a full-time living as a writer. And everything else falls underneath that.”
So during the class, we pretend that that’s your goal. Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are. But while we’re there, we pretend that. And then the second thing I say is, “You’re going to have to learn when to ignore me.” And that is really hard to do because I’m an authority. I’m up there. Survivorship bias says who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant? Some of it hopefully, but I can’t really determine what really played a part in me being successful and what didn’t.
And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory. Self-contradictory. I can give you examples of that if you want, but you can’t use them all. So you’re going to have to ignore some of the advice of major authors. Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong — some of the things for you. Some of the things that I tell you will be wrong for you. You have to find your own way. And so I kind of start off with, “I’m going to pretend you want to be a professional writer.” And then follow it up with, “But learn when to ignore me.”
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit?
Brandon Sanderson: The one I generally use as my prime example is when I was studying this before I broke in, two authors that I admired, I read their books. I read On Writing by Stephen King and How to Write Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. And I read these books, and I honestly can’t tell you 100 percent if it was in those exact books or other writings of theirs on their websites and things. But Stephen King at one point said, “Do not make an outline. Do not use a writing group. These will destroy your writing.” And Scott Card is like, “I need an outline. It is fundamentally vital for me in order to build my book.” Now, Stephen King is what we generally call — these are George R.R. Martin’s terms. He’s wonderful the way he speaks about fiction. If you’re really interested, anything George says is golden. He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener. For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited. He wants to take a seed. He’ll often say, “I take two really interesting characters and I put them in conflict and have something go wrong, and I see where the story goes, and I just write.” And he says if he has an outline, he feels like he’s already done that process in the outline. So when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation. He’s not exploring and discovering anymore.
The other group we call architects. Architects like to build a structure and then kind of go and take this little piece and then polish that little piece and see where it goes, and then take the next piece that they’ve already built as part of their structure and build a story around that. And most people are somewhere in between these two extremes. But those were two extremes where I realized I can’t do both of these. I can’t both not have an outline and have an outline. I can have a hybrid approach. But if you try to take both of their advice equally weighted, then you’re going to get nowhere. You can try both methods in different ways, you can try some hybrids. But a lot of things you’ll learn in writing you kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students or you think best served them even though they might not recognize it?
Brandon Sanderson: So what I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach. Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, if someone comes up to me and says, “I’m having trouble with X,” I’ll give them a writing exercise to work with that. If someone comes up to me and says, “I am having a lot of trouble going back and revising my chapters over and over again, instead of writing the next one,” I’ll say, “Okay, try writing longhand.” This works for some people. You go, you take a page of paper, you write it longhand, and you tell yourself, it doesn’t have to be perfect until I put it into the computer. You start each day taking what you wrote before and putting it to the computer and then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand, and then use that process to kind of get yourself back into the writing, but then forcing yourself to do something new. That works for some people.
If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, “All right, go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus and you just write down exactly what they say exactly as it’s said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue.” If you’re writing like Soderbergh, how would you do it? Pick some of your favorite people, go watch their movies, write down the dialogue, and compare that to their real life, and just kind of figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do. Those are exercises.
But in general, I’m only doing that when I’m diagnosing a problem. For the class I’m saying your job, if you want to try to be a professional writer, you’re going to have to write consistently.
Brandon Sanderson … Nine out of 10 writers that I’ve found do better with consistency. One out of 10 is a binge writer. I don’t understand binge writers as well, but I can talk about that. Those are the people who go rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book, and then they don’t write for 10 months. Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently, or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits. And I focus on that.
I’m like, break it down, set a goal, have a spreadsheet and try to hit your word counts, or at least your hour counts. If you’re having trouble doing this, go to a specific place every day that you do this, that you don’t do a lot of other things. Go to the coffee shop, go to a certain room in the house, turn on certain music that you only turn on when you’re writing. Build that habit so that you are very consistent. Batch your writing time. If there’s something you already do every day, if you already have built a habit to go to the gym, then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have an hour to write. Think about what you’re going to write at the gym, sit and write for an hour so that you are adding onto a habit that you’ve already built.
And that’s my focus in the class is to really be consistent. See if you can write, the goal is in the class to write 35,000 words. Class is around a third of the year, if you do that all year, you will end up with 100,000 words, which is your average novel.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s hit some top line habits from Brandon. How many words per year on average would you say you put down?
Brandon Sanderson: My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day. So whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages is what I’m looking at. Depends, I mean, I write in the old school manuscript format where everything’s 12 point and in Courier and it’s a holdover from the days when certain typesetting things are done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here. But I think in words, so I do 2,000, 2,500.
Tim Ferriss: Those are new words?
Brandon Sanderson: Those are new words. Now when I’m doing revisions, I’m not writing new words. And I would say around a third of my time is spent on revisions depending on the year. And this is the thing, some years I’ll do a lot of words. Some years I do a lot more revisions. And so it really depends. But if we’re looking at 2,000 words a day times 50 weeks, that can produce quite a lot of words. So 10,000 words a week is what that would turn into. That’s 500,000 words a year is what I could theoretically produce. Now, a third of my time’s done to revisions. So really I’m looking at around 300,000 words. A Stormlight Archive book is 18 months of work for that reason and things like that.
SETH GODIN
Tim Ferriss: All right, so I’m going to personalize this selfishly because that is my nature, right? To flash back, now I’m going to create a montage of dinners with Seth. This is just a portion of our exchange in the last dinner, same dinner where I misattributed this book to you as a recommendation, where I asked you for advice because I was feeling stuck with writing. You very, very observantly replied, “Didn’t we talk about that eight months ago, the last time we had dinner?”
I said, “Yes indeed, we did. It shows you how little progress I’ve made.” Whether this is just an opportunity to showcase my insecurities, I don’t know, but I would love to hear what you think it is that I torture myself with, or that tortures me that leads me to ask you these types of repeated questions on different occasions because you are as much as anyone I know, you seem from the outside looking in. Maybe it’s like the calm duck on the surface kicking like hell underwater, I don’t know. You seem to be a relatively unconflicted person. You’re not like biting your nails, fretting about doing A or B. You seem to pretty calmly do your thing, and I wouldn’t describe myself that way.
In what you’ve seen, is there any outside perspective where you’re like, “I think that these are some of the reasons Tim gets tied up and nuts?” Is there anything that you have to —
Seth Godin: Okay. Well, first of all, if I’m making you miserable at dinner, I apologize. That’s certainly not —
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no, no, you’re not. No, I love our dinners.
Seth Godin: I think that you left —
Tim Ferriss: This is just a segue into conversation.
Seth Godin: You left out the thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which is “Where is your bad writing?” And there’s no such thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block is real, but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed. “I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing,” and the way through is to do your bad writing. You don’t have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing and bad writing over time, if you do enough of it, can’t persist. Good writing will slip through, and I learned this from Isaac Asimov. He and I worked together on a project years ago.
He published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book, 400 books, and he told me that every morning — sorry, that’s the volunteer fire department. Every morning for six hours, he would sit and type. It didn’t matter if it was good or not, he had to do six hours of typing. Now obviously, he didn’t have a typing problem. Just about anybody can do six hours of typing and then at the end of the shift, he would look throughout the bad writing, whatever was left, what was left and the subconscious understood that if he’s going to type anyway, you might as well type something good.
He got through the bad writing thing and in your case, you have so much skill and such a benefit of the doubt from people you’ve earned it from, that it’s really likely that you’re saying, “Why do I need to get back into that? There’s nothing but downside for me,” because you know how to make one of the world’s best podcasts, you do it on the regular, people really like it. When you write a book, they roll their eyes, they read the whole thing. “Aren’t you proud of me?” What a pain in the neck. It takes a year; just do the other thing. I totally get that feeling, and this is where we lead to the second part about being conflicted, and it’s a small Nike riff, which is “Just do it.”
We’re not going to go into the origin of that phrase coming from a mass murderer, but just do it implies —
Tim Ferriss: Hold on! Is this like a Manson family reference, or?
Seth Godin: Gary Gilmore.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, I have no idea. All right, that’ll be for people to have research on their own.
Seth Godin: That was the last thing he said before they killed him.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Seth Godin: “Just do it.” Now you’ll never be able to unsee that image, sorry. Just do it implies “What the Hell? It doesn’t matter.” That’s not a good way forward, because it pushes you to be a hack who’s not responsible for your own work. The alternative is to replace the word “just” with the word “merely.” Merely do the work that the time you are spending narrating yourself doing the work, the time you’re spending catastrophizing the work is not helping anything. I was a really insecure flailing, failing entrepreneur for at least eight years in a row, just consistently failing, barely breaking, even getting close to bankruptcy on a regular basis.
I was willing things to work out, and I was spending a lot of time dramatizing all of the perfect problems that I was confronting. Then I was able to shift to merely doing the work without the narrative and without the drama. As soon as we can merely do the work, then there’s room to see what needs to be seen. I don’t believe in the muse at all. I don’t think there’s any outside force. I don’t think talent really matters. I think what matters is choosing to find your smallest viable audience, understand your genre, and explore what it means to make magic in the small, so you can do it again.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Two things, the first is you are a delightful dinner host, and I love our dinners so not to cherry pick and make this look like a —
Seth Godin: Okay, you’re invited back.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is not a video collage of like NASCAR accidents that I want to paint as the experience at your house, that’s not the case at all. Number two, I would love to ask about the decision, the point at which you decide you have something that you would like to publish or share, and that quality cut off or how you think about it because in my head, the helpful and self-defeating depending on how you want to look at it perfectionist side of things will, for instance, look at something I wrote in 2010 and say, “I can’t do that anymore and if I practice, I could still practice for weeks and publish something on the blog, and it would not be that good. Therefore, I’m not going to publish because I feel like people will be disappointed, or I will be letting them down and that the attention they’ll spend on it will not derive or return as much value to them,” right?
That’s the voice that is the deliberation that I have in my own head, and I do actually have hundreds of drafts. I have shitty stuff, but it’s never quite crossed the chasm into good enough to publish. I’ve been stymieing myself in that respect, and there is part of me that’s like, “You know what, the podcast is easier, it’s fun. I feel like it’s a craft I’m still improving on. Why don’t I just do that?” There is part of me that says that, then there’s another part that says that’s a cop-out.
In fact, the writing helps you to learn to think as Kevin Kelly, to invoke that name again, right? He writes to think, he doesn’t think and then write, and that I’m shortchanging myself by using perfectionism as an out.
Seth Godin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If hearing all that, what comes to mind for you?
Seth Godin: Well, I’ll share my personal experience, but first, I want to challenge something you stated as fact, which is —
Tim Ferriss: Yes, please.
Seth Godin: — that the writing isn’t good enough to publish says who?
Tim Ferriss: Says me, right.
Seth Godin: Right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s me.
Seth Godin: Right. It’s not that the writing isn’t good enough to publish. It’s that when you look at the writing, your analysis of where you are in the marketplace and the promise you’d like to make and keep doesn’t match the writing that’s in front of you, but I dare say as talented as you are at so many things, this might not be your best skill knowing when it’s ready to publish —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, true.
Seth Godin: — and it may make sense in this world where it is ever easier to hire somebody to do the thing they are good at, to say to this person, “Here’s 5,000 words aimed at this kind of reader. Tell me where I’m got light and tell me where I should take stuff out,” because the way you get — my friend who I went to business school, Evan, climbed Mount Everest back when that was a very big deal. I mean there was no YouTube or anything, and I was quizzing him, “What’s that like?” Well, he said that the first weeks are just spent walking up this trail, that’s not that hard a trail to walk up, with tea houses along the way and stuff like that. It’s only toward the end, once you’ve committed to climbing Mount Everest, that Mount Everest actually gets really hard to climb.
It’s a fortunate coincidence for the climbers that it happens in that order because your sunk costs have increased so much by the time that it gets serious that you’re too embarrassed to turn to your peers and say, “I can’t put in the work.” What you’re doing before you get to the hard part is you’re inventing a reason to stop, and you said something was really poignant, which is you look at stuff you wrote in 2010 and you say I can’t do that anymore. Well, two things happened to me. First, 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Permission Marketing. It became a New York Times bestseller and I said, “I’m done. What could I do the first time out of the gate because I’d been a book packager before? This is my first ‘real’ book. How can I beat that?”
So I stopped. I just stopped and I sat in the dark for a year. I just didn’t do much of anything because I said, “I can’t hit lightning like that again,” and thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, he was unknown. He sent me this new book called The Tipping Point, and he asked me to write a blurb for it. I read it in one night and realized that without knowing it, I had been writing a book about how ideas spread. In the next 12 days, I wrote a 225-page book and I sent it to Malcolm. I said, “Look, if you want me to not publish this because it seems like you unlocked the key, and I don’t want to take away anything from The Tipping Point, I will stop and just throw it out, but I needed to get this out of my system.”
He was such a mensch. He gave me his blessing and wrote the forward, and I realized in that moment I couldn’t write Permission Marketing again. That day was gone, but I could write this book and someone would benefit from it. Then 10 years later, same 2010 you’re saying, “I wrote a book called Linchpin, and I will never be able to write a book that good again. I will never write a book that goes that deep close to my bones, that makes me feel the way that book made me feel.” After that book came out, I felt the same way again, which is “Well, if this is the journey, I found the end of the journey.” I realized six, nine months later, that that was selfish and that leads to the other key thing I want to talk about, which is generosity. Because generosity doesn’t mean free.
People pay for a surgeon who’s going to save their life. Generosity means that you’re expending emotional energy, emotional labor to help somebody else and as soon as I could shift it around in my head to say there’s somebody over there who could use a hand, then it wasn’t about me anymore, and I wasn’t parading anything. It got way easier to merely do the work without commentary because there’s somebody over there I’m doing it for, here we go.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Start When You’re Stuck, Finish What You Begin, and Stop Waiting for Inspiration — Creative Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamott, and More (#878) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-08-07 22:53:05
This is a special compilation devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I’ve asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in as some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions. Please enjoy this special compilation on the craft of writing.
This episode is brought to you by:
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Connect with Elizabeth Gilbert:
Website | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | Newsletter
Elizabeth’s appearances on the podcast: 770, 430
Connect with Anne Lamott:
X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram
Anne’s appearance on the podcast: 522
Connect with Joyce Carol Oates:
X | Bluesky | Facebook | Newsletter
Joyce’s appearance on the podcast: 497
Connect with Jerry Seinfeld:
Website | X | Facebook | Instagram
Jerry’s appearance on the podcast: 485
Connect with Mary Karr:
Website | X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram
Mary’s appearance on the podcast: 479
Connect with Brandon Sanderson:
Website | X | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Brandon’s appearance on the podcast: 794
Connect with Seth Godin:
Website | Seth’s Blog | X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram
Seth’s appearances on the podcast: 792, 476, 402, 343, 177, 138
“Meditation, spirituality, and art have so much in common.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
“All first drafts of any book you’ve ever read by the authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts.”
— Anne Lamott
“Life doesn’t have to be so overthought. You don’t have to wait to be inspired. Just start working.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
“Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture.”
— Jerry Seinfeld
“Every writer I know has written a bad book. So maybe it’s just going to be a bad book, but it’s the book that’s standing in line to be written.”
— Mary Karr
“Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently, or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits.”
— Brandon Sanderson
“Bad writing over time, if you do enough of it, can’t persist. Good writing will slip through. I learned this from Isaac Asimov … [who] published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book.”
— Seth Godin
Want to hear another episode with someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling the demon of the blank page? Listen to my conversation with novelist and The War of Art author Steven Pressfield, in which we discussed overcoming “Resistance with a capital R,” the many faces of self-sabotage, his journey from blue-collar truck driver to bestselling novelist, the hero’s journey versus the artist’s journey, morning routines and a “little successes” approach, shadow careers, why the process that works for Joyce Carol Oates might be all wrong for you, fear-setting, and much more.
This episode is brought to you buy ProLon! One name that has come up on this podcast more than once is Dr. Valter Longo, a USC professor with decades of peer-reviewed research on fasting, nutrition, and aging. I regularly fast and have done a lot of experiments with fasting over more than a decade, and it has been one of the most incredible unlocks that I have found for both near- and long-term physical and mental health.
But fasting can be really hard, and that is why Dr. Longo, best known for the Fast Mimicking Diet (FMD), developed ProLon. For 5 days, you’re able to get the benefits of fasting—including autophagy, your body’s cellular, self cleanup process—all while eating real, structured, plant-based meals. In scientific studies, 5-day cycles of the Fast Mimicking Diet improved markers tied to metabolic health and biological aging and helped people drop fat while holding onto lean muscle. And ProLon makes it easy: it comes in one box, everything is clearly laid out, and there’s no guesswork. For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off sitewide, plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-day program. Just visit ProLonLife.com/Tim.
This episode is brought to you by AG1. I’ve taken AG1 for more than a decade. Longtime listeners have heard me call it my nutritional insurance. Here’s the news: they’ve just launched AG1 Pro, designed for people focused on performance and longevity. I’ll be traveling soon, and I’m throwing this in my bag to cover my bases while I travel. Past a certain age, maintaining lean muscle becomes priority number one, and AG1 Pro is formulated to support exactly that. It includes HMB, a clinically studied compound that supports protein synthesis and helps reduce protein breakdown, plus zinc carnosine to support the gut lining. Remember: training is only half the equation. Recovery is where the work compounds, and AG1 Pro is built to support it. It’s NSF Certified for Sport, so what’s on the label is what’s in the pouch. Get your free AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in the Welcome Kit at Drinkag1.com/Tim.
The post How to Start When You’re Stuck, Finish What You Begin, and Stop Waiting for Inspiration — Creative Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamott, and More (#878) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-07-30 14:43:42
Please enjoy this transcript of a wide-ranging Q&A I did with subscribers. We explore reinvention, enduring skills for the age of AI, friendship, mental health, fitness, language-learning, privacy, cognitive longevity, and more.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
Legal conditions/copyright information
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: I am going to just hop into it. Take advantage of everybody being here. Thanks for joining. There were a lot of questions submitted, hundreds upon hundreds. Narrowed that down to a few dozen. And I will answer a handful, and then we’ll hop to the live feed and answer questions there.
So the first question is from Christine, and here it is, “Over the years, we’ve watched you going through quite a transformation from a driven, hyper-optimized logical business investor to a grounded, relationship-focused man talking openly about trauma, mental health struggles, and meditation. What are your comments on the transformation? And for someone who is still stuck in the driven hyper-optimized logical phase and sees that they need to change something, what advice would you give?” So the first observation, or perhaps question I would pose in response to that is, are you stuck? Maybe you’re not stuck. And I say that because my shift certainly eventually, and it took me decades to get there, focusing on addressing childhood sexual abuse and so on, which I’ve written about extensively so I won’t belabor it here and drag people into that.
Was because I recognized over time that the 17 separate problems I thought were separate were in fact all stemming from this unaddressed elephant in the room that required some, I don’t want to say handling, maybe it’s metabolizing, maybe it’s revisiting, maybe it’s re-contextualizing as an adult. So that was a necessary step for me. I couldn’t proceed past go without addressing that. I don’t think everyone requires that. And there are tools I think that almost anyone can benefit from that may steer you towards introspection or more internal validation versus external validation. Some of you will recognize this, the book Awareness by Anthony de Mello. I still read it at least once a year. There are frameworks that I think nearly anyone can benefit from like IFS, Internal Family Systems. And I did a live session on this podcast with the founder of IFS, Richard Schwartz.
I would caution, though, that just as you frame the question as being stuck in a driven, hyper-optimized phase, it is just as easy, if not easier, to get stuck in doing the “work.” And you only have to visit Austin to see what I’m talking about. There are lots of people who can’t seem to get past a hyper-reflective, never-ending cycle of polishing the self. And I think that any obsession with the self, whether that is validated by others through your bank account or achievements, or getting pats on the back for doing the “work” is poisonous in excess, right? The dose makes the poison and I think it applies here. So I would say maybe you’re not stuck, number one, that deserves some examination, that deserves some examination. But I do think Awareness, IFS, there are a handful of things that anyone that I know, certainly, has benefited from or can benefit from. So I would start there. So I’ll leave it there for now.
The next question is from Mike R. “Much of your work focuses on reversible experiments, but the stakes of reinvention rise in your late 40s when career, family, health, plus financial responsibilities make big moves harder to test. How would you distinguish a genuine next chapter from an impulse to escape your current life? Would you use a 30-day experiment or is there a better framework for evaluating a major career/life pivot?” So I’m going to try to keep this short, but I would say read a blog post by Derek Sivers that is titled “There Are Always More Than Two Options.” And you can find that very easily, but it is sive.rs/options. And I’m going to see if I can pull this up for a second. And in effect, he says, “When people say they only have two options, it means they got stuck. Once people get two options, they start comparing pros and cons of those two and forget to think of more. As an example, a friend was trying to decide whether to stick with this frustrating job or quit and start his own company. I suggested some other options.”
This is all reading from his blog post. Bullet number one, “Build your new company outside of work hours. Do this until the income from the new company is 50 percent of your salary, then quit.” Bullet two, “Show up to your job, but secretly just work for your own company all day. Do this until you get fired.” Bullet three, “Bring your new company idea to your boss and propose it as a division of their company so you can stay on salary.” Last bullet, “Do neither and move to New Zealand to be a tour guide. After exploring more options, my friend realized that he didn’t actually want to start a new business. He was just avoiding fixing his current situation.” All right. I’m not saying that’s the case for you, Mike, but I would say that you probably have a lot of options you could list out if you took the time.
And we all fall prey to the A versus B trap. But there’s—you can always come up with C, D, E, F, and G. So that would be step number one for me. And then beyond that, I would say write down all the things that you find might lead you to want to escape your current life. What are those? And I think a lot about something that Chris Bosh shared in a conversation with me on this podcast. He’s an 11-time NBA all star. And he talked about in the context of gratitude, metaphorically, if you were to sit around a table, and he might have been crediting someone else, but if you had five people and they all put all their problems on the table, you would pick your problems right back up. So sometimes your problems seem really bad because you are most intimate with what you experience. But if you were to take all of the insecurities and friction and challenges and relationship woes of your five best friends, put everything on a table, you might rush to pick up your own problems again.
So I would say that, as a thought exercise, that is also valuable. 30-day experiments, I’m always a fan of two- to four-week experiments, but you don’t have to make it binary, right? You could do it after hours, you could do it on the weekends. This is something that I’ve recommended in The 4-Hour Workweek with respect to developing your own businesses or lifestyle muses. And I still think it applies to many, many, many different things. And coming back to dose, there may be something that you really enjoy in small doses. And this also harkens back to a story in The 4-Hour Workweek, which dives into, let’s just say, surfing. If you love surfing, maybe on the weekends, because it is an alternative, a contrast to what you do throughout the week, that does not mean that you would enjoy surfing as your job if you had it as an obligation from Monday to Friday. So you want to expand the volume of something like that to test the hypothesis before you jump from A to B.
So I’m not sure if that answers your question super directly, but that’s how I might try to think through it.
All right. Next question is from Nathan B. And he talks about his father watched electricity reach his community and these various technological changes over time. And then I’ll hop to the crux of the question. “So, in effect, AI feels different, and I would agree with that, not merely another tool, but…five-year predictions now seem almost unserious. So here’s my question. If you are a capable but non-famous, intellectually curious person responsible for protecting and providing for a family, determined to remain useful, healthy, financially resilient, and morally grounded, what concrete practices, skills, relationships, and experiments would you prioritize during the next 12 months to prepare for the coming decade?” So that is a tall order. It’s a very good question.
I don’t know if I can, and I don’t think it would be helpful actually, maximally, for me to try to parse that into each bullet point, but I can tell you how I’ve been thinking about this with respect to teaching children or upskilling yourself or maybe creating a flak jacket of sorts. And I have approached this from dozens of different angles and I keep coming back to learning, asking questions, written and verbal communications, and negotiating. Those are a handful of skills that I think will remain constant. And I could defend each of those, but I will say that with AI and certainly with so many people having their massive bank accounts and net worths tied into this, there is a lot of selling of all of the change that is coming. And there is a lot of change that is already here and it’s going to accelerate.
But the more things change, the more certain things, I think, remain constant. The necessity of, in real life, close human relationships is not going away as a prerequisite for mental and spiritual health—that social component, we could just call it social health, which includes all of that. But I would focus on learning, and this is going to sound like I’m shilling my own bags here, but the meta-learning section of The 4-Hour Chef, I think The 4-Hour Chef as a book tried to do too much, but the very first section, which is something like 80 pages on meta-learning, I do think is worth a revisit if you haven’t in a while. And learning, once you try to break it down into its constituent building blocks, really comes down, in many cases, to asking questions. And the asking of questions is important not just for interviewing other people or asking questions of other people to try to separate fact from fiction. It’s equally important for asking yourself questions.
And this is where all things are interrelated and Awareness by Anthony de Mello and so on will tie into this. 80/20 analysis, it’s really a collection of questions for examining your assumptions and separating signal from noise. So we come down to asking questions, and then we have written communications and verbal communication. And I think in many cases, and Kevin Kelly, for instance, the founding editor of WIRED Magazine, would say that he doesn’t write what he knows. He writes in order to better understand what he thinks, to figure out what he thinks. And I don’t think these are going away. Sure, you could try to just walk and talk into an LLM, and I do that as well. But there’s a lot of bias built into that, not just by the people who design the systems, but by the force of memory function across different chats and threads.
You’re going to get a lot of self-reinforcing feedback. So I do think getting offline, like I did today, I spent 90 percent of my day today with pen and paper. And maybe that just dates me as a boomer, but I don’t think so. It removes distraction. And I’m able to be much more nonlinear off of a keyboard where I have to hit return, return to go down, right? I really like to use arrows and so on. So anything that will improve written comms. There are many books on this, certainly On Writing Well by Zinsser. Verbal comms, it’s going to sound so antiquated, but join a local Toastmasters or something like that. Get used to standing up and talking. And that would be on the group side, and then separately, negotiating. That’s not going anywhere. So learning how to propose and craft deal structure for, in most cases, ideally win-win outcomes, but that’s not reality a hundred percent of the time.
But negotiating, whether that’s, and these are some older callbacks for me, but I think it’s The Secrets of Power Negotiating by Dawson, I remember had a huge impact on me. Getting Past No had a large impact on me. There are other books that provide frameworks and I’ve interviewed a lot of these people. So you can also look at the archive of the podcast for people involved with the Harvard Negotiating Project. And I actually interviewed one of the co-authors of Getting to Yes. I think it’s William Ury. And those are all worth jumping into. But learning, asking questions, written comms, verbal comms, and negotiating is really where I would focus. I think that those are meta skills that can be applied across disciplines to almost everything and anything. So that’s probably where I would focus. In terms of morally grounded, I mean, man, read philosophy.
Philosophy is not for people in academic ivory towers. In my opinion, if you look back, it’s learning how to live. And I think that you can establish consistent moral codes. Religion would be another option, certainly. I’m not averse to that. There are many different paths to the same goal, which is having rules that you follow consistently that allow you to view yourself as a morally grounded person.
All right. Next is from Mason H. “When you returned from your sabbatical in 2024…” So FYI, on the 10th anniversary of the podcast, some of you might remember I took a four-month hiatus where we republished episodes. I didn’t record or publish any new episodes. And part of this was to experiment with killing the golden goose. Does the world end when I bench the goose for a short period of time? And I had a lot of fear around that.
Turns out as with most fears, it was ungrounded and it was fine. But here’s the question: “When you returned from your sabbatical in 2024, you set a new set of rules for the kind of podcast you were going to do moving forward. Which of those rules have made it in the last two years and which do you discard? Any generalizable insights for those of us trying to stay in blue oceans in our own endeavors?” All right. So the last part about generalizing, I would say if you haven’t read it, read The Blue Ocean Strategy. It is going to be increasingly critical and important. And certainly for a lot of businesses, existential in the coming years. This is going to become more and more valuable real estate to figure out how to navigate. All right. So The Blue Ocean Strategy.
The other generalizable insight would be fear-setting. Use that exercise. You can find it for free online. I did a TED talk about it. You don’t have to buy anything. Use that to stress test your fears related to any action. What is holding you back? Right? What are the costs of inaction? It’s all laid out very clearly. So look at that. But to answer your question, I thought, why rely on my recollection? Because sometimes our own assessments and recollection memory is an act of creating or recreating might be self-serving. I might hallucinate to look at things more favorably. So I asked one of my key employees what his answer would be. And the rules that stuck, which ended up being very gratifying, number one, no book-launching episodes. So changing the rules around book launches, that was probably the biggest change. Just did not want to be in the podcast-o-sphere rotation of the same guests being on 20 podcasts at a time.
Number two, living legends. I wanted to interview people who are older, who perhaps had either not been on podcasts or might not be on many podcasts before they could no longer do that and operate at a high level for a few hours. So we had Andrew Weil, 84, Richard Thaler, 80, Tish Rabe, 74, Wade Davis, 72, David Whyte, Frank Miller, Danny Hillis, right? There are many examples. And whether or not these episodes had maximum downloads, I would not expect them to because a lot of these names are relatively unknown compared to celebrities, certainly, and everything is being pushed to short clips with name recognition or sensational stuff. And I try to avoid both of those. I really enjoy doing this. And the only way I’m going to have any endurance in playing any game I choose to play, which includes podcasting, is if I enjoy doing it. Because if I enjoy doing it, I have this prerequisite foundational layer of energy, which allows me, in turn, to have attention, which allows me to take advantage of time and outlast trends.
And that could still be a fatality if everything gets pushed to LLMs or whatever, but you get the idea. Number three, experiments. So co-hosting episodes with, like, Nick Kokonas, Kevin Kelly. I should do more of that. So it was nice to do this review. Thank you for the question. Guided meditations with Henry Shukman. The Meditation Mondays, if you haven’t had a chance to check those out, go check them out. You will feel better if you incorporate them. Tim’s Founder Kitchen, having given up on that one. I’m going to do more of that. That actually had a lot of impact behind the scenes. But again, wasn’t one of the most downloaded episodes of the last year. But in terms of impact and a few very important ways that we were tracking that are not reflected on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, very successful. And then the Simplify Your Life episodes, which I really, really, really enjoyed doing those compilations.
We had a couple of household names, right? We had a handful of household names, Tim McGraw and so on, which were fun. So that 90/10 split, meaning I’m going to interview people in a barbell strategy who are either relatively unknown, like Tish Rabe, who is the heir apparent of Dr. Seuss. Amazing story, you should check it out. Last name is spelled R-A-B-E, or Tim McGraw, right? Almost everybody, let’s just say within certain demographics knows who that is. A lot of fun. And people also who have just not been on podcasts like Steve Young. All right. So that is the answer to that question. And I’m going to do one more, and then I’m going to hop into the live questions and we’ll grab a couple. So I will hop in just a second.
All right. The next one is from Alec B. And my answer will be pretty short to this.
So then we’ll hop into the live chat in a second. “I’m a therapist, so building emotional closeness is literally my job and it’s always come easy with women, but I’ve never cracked male friendship. If you were a 30-something with zero old friend groups to lean on, what’s the actual first move? And how do you get past how weird it feels to initiate with another guy?” All right. Let me tell a story first. So I was in the mountains of Montana with a small group of guys. This has shown up in some of my writing a couple months ago. And we’re sitting around this fire chatting and we’re having these really deep conversations after a full day of activities together. All right. So while we’re doing the activities, we’re hiking, we’re carrying weight, we’re tending llamas, long story. We’re fishing. We’re climbing over rocks and doing stuff that is somewhat dangerous.
All of that is activities together. And then late at night, I think—maybe I’ll admit, there was some tea, there might’ve been some whiskey, who knows? And later on, we were going to grab some really magnified binoculars and look at the full moon standing up on a rock, which ended up being incredible, by the way, if you have something with a stabilizer. But while we were around the fire, we were having this very deep conversation. And one of the guys there said, “You know why this works so well?” And he said, “You know why, also, perhaps men in particular,” and I’m not saying this is limited to men, but “love fires so much, is no eye contact. You’re staring at the fire. It’s not some weird sit-down session where two guys are staring at each other, which I think activates some type of millions-of-year-old machinery that reads as threat.”
We’re just sitting around a fire. No one’s making eye contact. It’s kind of dark. And we’re talking about all of this deep stuff, right? But it was a relatively small percentage of the total day. And this is a long way of saying that I think men and women are pretty different. And women are much more adept at the face-to-face verbal, social element for lots of fantastic evolutionary reasons. And I think men just require, and I’m talking about, I guess, heteronormative whatever, whatever, but maybe not. That’s my reference point, of course, is shared activities. Men just bond in different ways. And I’ve tried both. I’ve tried everything in between. I’ve tried the extremes, and I would just find activities.
There was another question from someone else about moving to a new city. “How would you build relationships?” My answer would be to really have all of it revolve around shared activities.
So take your pick. Is it morning swims? I like to do something active. Is it rock climbing? Is it fill-in-the-blank? Something inherently social where you have a partner or people you’re working with. Maybe it’s a run that is followed by some beers on fill-in-the-blank place, right? There’s a lot of this stuff out there. But those are some of my thoughts. May not be the most research-supported, but I think it’s evolutionarily supported. And certainly when I look at all of my male friends who have the closest male friendships, whether they’re from 20 years ago or from a year or two ago, shared projects or shared activities is the answer. And I have some relatively new male friendships, say with Elan Lee, and have we had a lot of deep conversations? Yeah. But did we spend a year building a card game together? Yes.
You get to see kind of through the cracks and indirectly talk about a lot of deep stuff without actually opening the kimono and talking about it head on. And I think that’s one example that comes to mind.
All right. Long answer, but let’s hop into the live questions. I’m going to see what we have here. Thank you, Hannah, “Love your episodes with women authors like Anne Lamott, Liz Gilbert, Margaret Atwood, Cheryl Strayed.” Yeah, for sure. Mary Karr is also just phenomenal. If you haven’t heard that one, check that one out, please.
All right. Question about the SAINT protocol. This is a TMS protocol that I’ve used for generalized anxiety disorder and OCD. I have actually tested a number of things since.
SAINT can be incredibly effective getting, in some people 70 to, or I should say some groups of people, 70 to 80 percent remission in treatment resistant depression, things like that. So it’s accelerated TMS. You’re applying basically a paddle or a helmet to your head to affect different brain regions. And sometimes it’s not so much a chemical issue. You just have anatomical structures that are firing in the wrong order, right? It’s as if you were trying to, say, drive a manual car, but you were using the clutch and shifting the gears and so on out of order. You have to get those in the right sequence. And I’m simplifying, but this is one way to look at it.
There is a company that I recently got involved with maybe six to 12 months ago called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A. And Jonathan Downar, Dr. Jonathan Downar is involved with this company and they have developed a one-day protocol. So instead of five days, which is SAINT, you’re getting 10 stimulations a day. It’s pretty much all you’re doing for a week. What they’ve done is compress that into a single day. And with what they call the ONE-D protocol, they pre-administer a drug called D-cycloserine, which is actually an antibiotic. They just give you a small amount. That helps induce plasticity. So I was able to get three to four months of complete relief after one day, which is bananas. I mean, it still blows my mind. And I’m focused at this point more on these ultra-condensed, possibly pharmacologically enhanced options because most people can’t take five days off of work. Most people can’t afford what is involved in traveling to five days of treatment. But a single day suddenly really opens up the aperture of who this could help. So I am paying a lot of attention to that area and might have more on that soon.
All right, let’s see. The question from Craig, I’m going to keep trying to answer these. Oh, there’s a lot of questions coming in. So it kind of got bumped. But Craig was asking me keys to building a long-term dedicated fan base. Honestly, the best advice I could give, I think, is just try to be your authentically weird self and follow your own obsessions. And if something, at least in the nonfiction space, if you are contending with a problem, a challenge, a dream, and you’re trying to figure out how to get to that. I think the personal is the most universal.
So don’t try to read the tea leaves to guess what your audience wants. Just do what is interesting to you. Don’t be ashamed of your obsessions, and that’s going to come up in some later answers as well. And if you do that, at least you’re taking care of yourself along the way. There’s a lot more to it, but the tools, the platforms, the formats, all of that changes over time. But this is how I think about it. And also, I’m not aiming to impact a hundred million people. I’m like, “Well, this helped me. Maybe it’ll help somebody else. Let me take good notes. I’ll share it. And if it really helps five people, I will consider that very, very well worth the time.”
All right. Moving down. Okay. Sebio, “Still using kettlebells in your training. What’s an average week of training look like for me recently?” I do still use kettlebells, especially for overhead pressing. I don’t do as much swinging as I used to simply because of some lower spinal issues, but I will do cleans, and then from cleans into shoulder pressing.
My workout routine right now is pretty simple. The backbone, pun intended of that, is lifting two to three times a week. That really is the crux of it. I just think for longevity, weight training, if I had to choose one modality would be the pick. So I’m roughly breaking that into pushing exercises, pulling exercises, and legs. And those are my three weight training workouts per week. Each one’s about an hour. Then yoga, one to two times a week. I really like Iyengar yoga specifically for alignment and use of props and so on. It’s very adaptable in that way. And then some form of movement daily, biking, swimming, walking. And as I get older, I think rule number one is don’t get injured because they accumulate. And then number two, something’s better than nothing. So if for whatever reason life got in the way, you were defeated and you’re not going to be able to make it to the gym for an hour, it’s like, look, do 10 laps in the pool. Do 20 pushups. Do something. There’s no excuse that you can give that would take those types of options away.
So rather than pushing it and pushing it and pushing it to another day, just scaling down to something minimal. And I think if you do that consistently, it’s pretty hard to lose over time.
And that was overlapping a lot with a question from Barbara C., “How are you staying fit these days, physically, mentally and soulfully?” Mentally and soulfully, honestly, it’s being very clear on the one or two things that you are focused on, say professionally, and then being very, very clear on the one or two relationships that you’re focused on most. And then booking stuff with your friend group. And you can identify the most “important friends” for all of those things I just mentioned by doing a past-year review. And people can look up “past-year review” to see how I do that. That’ll pop right up.
Here’s one from Steven, “What workouts from The 4-Hour Body are you still prioritizing in your routines?” There’s a lot from The 4-Hour Body. In the “Reversing Injuries” chapter, you had chop and lift, those types of exercises where you’re basically in a half kneeling position with a cable pulley and you’re rotating from kind of like bottom right to top left or say top right to bottom left or switching to the other side. I think that kettlebells still have a place, right? I’m not doing as many swings, but doing single sided one arm presses, for instance, with kettlebells can I think be incredibly effective for the time invested. I am certainly using some variant of Occam’s Protocol. So typically in my weightlifting workouts, I’m going to be doing very strength focused stuff. So it might be kind of greasing the groove along the lines of Pavel Tsatsouline, where I’m doing 10 sets of two pull-ups with like 30 to 60 seconds in between. Very submaximal, right?
And then at the end of the workout, I’ll do some type of pulling movement with a five second up, five second down cadence to failure, right? So that would be reminiscent of Occam’s Protocol. And by and large, if you look at my body, I mean it is from a body composition perspective, strength perspective, the spine issues have affected axial loading, top down loading somewhat. But I’ve been able to maintain very, very well between say 30 and almost 50 now. So if you look at it, what I’m doing seems to be working. There are always tweaks to be made, but I think simple works where complex fails a lot of the time.
This is from Aaron G., “Imagine that your next podcast guest is a high school senior who will become one of the most successful people of their generation, but today they look completely average. What skills, abilities, qualities would you be listening for that teachers or schools often overlook?” This is pretty simple and this is also how I find a lot of interesting technologies, stuff on the cutting edge before it makes it to the mainstream. And that can inform how you invest, that can inform how you think about life. It’s just a fun way to explore this thing called being human. I would look at what they’re doing on the weekends and evenings, probably. I would look at what these kids are doing related to their obsessions. What are their obsessions? Are they doing any projects? Are they using initiative to create things? Are those approaches unorthodox? Are they self-teaching? If they’re teaching themselves something, what are they teaching themselves, and what are the lessons beneath that?
Because you might be tempted to dismiss something quickly. If it’s like, “Okay, it’s Minecraft. Who cares?” It’s like, “Well, hold on a second. What is that actually teaching? All right. Which elements of that are they best at? Which elements are they most interested in?” Those are the types of things that I would be looking for.
Next one is Neha G. “How do you distinguish between needing a vacation, being burned out, and simply having outgrown the life you’ve built? And once you realize you’ve outgrown it, what would you do to [home] in on what needs to change?” I’m only going to address the first part of that. So how do you distinguish between needing a vacation, being burned out, and simply having outgrown the life you’ve built?
So step number one would be take a vacation. Since that is a temporary intervention and if that fixes the problem, then you know that perhaps was the answer, right? So if you’re asking yourself a question, is it A, B, C, D, E? Or should I do A, B, C, D, or E? If there’s one that is of short duration, try it. Cross it off the list, right? That would be the first thing. And then being burned out might be related to needing a vacation. And then simply having outgrown the life you’ve built. I would say take a mini-retirement. And that is another concept from the The 4-Hour Workweek. I still do it once or twice a year. This is taking, ideally, at least three or four weeks away from your usual routine or business, right? And I frame it in or through the lens of business for, say, entrepreneurs a lot.
This is most applicable to people who are self-employed or most easily applied, although literally thousands of people who have done this who are employed. So there’s flexibility. But the reason three or four weeks is important is that if you take a week off, maybe even two, and you don’t change anything before you leave, you can come back, you can try to triage while you’re gone. So you’d be tempted to hop in and put out small fires before they become big fires. And when you come back, you can end up doing two to three weeks of damage control to reverse all the things that went wrong. When it’s three or four weeks or five, six, seven, eight weeks, all of a sudden before you leave, you have to take a very hard look at your systems, your policies, how well you are eliminating things, automating things.
If you’re doing a lot of things that don’t need to be done in the first place, you might stop those. You might hit pause on a bunch of things for that three-to-four-week period and see what happens, much like I did with my podcast sabbatical, right? And by doing that once or twice a year, you’re effectively doing a controlled burn, which prevents much bigger forest fires. And it gives you also perspective, much like writing a book. Right now I am on a new draft of a book and I let it sit for a few weeks because I cannot look at it with fresh eyes—I’m too close to all the problems in every edit—until I’ve let it marinate for a few weeks. So the benefit of a mini-retirement, and I’m sure people have written about this online so you don’t necessarily have to buy The 4-Hour Workweek, is that you have to set up systems and policies and improve all of that before you leave.
And by the way, leave could mean that you’re in the same place, although I do recommend a change of geography for this. And then when you come back, you will also be able to look at things with fresh eyes and a clearer vision, I would say. So that is probably the approach that I would take. When I am in doubt or a lot of different problems are starting to cohere together and I’m having trouble separating them, in the immediate term, I’ll start doing TM meditation again twice a day, Arnold Schwarzenegger found this, a lot of problems tend to glom onto one another and it seems unresolvable. Meditation twice a day, specifically twice a day, is important. You could also use The Way app by Henry Shukman or someone else. Twice a day is important. And I have theories for why that’s the case, but just do that for like a week or two.
And then if there’s still lots of outstanding questions and it just seems like you’re spinning too many plates, I will try to get a mini-retirement on the calendar. And it doesn’t need to be next week. It could be two months, three months from now. But get it on the calendar, and then defend it. That is how I approach it. May or may not apply to your situation. Hopefully that wasn’t boring as fuck.
Next question is, I’m not sure if this is going to be helpful, but I’ll just throw it out there because the simple response is McKinley W.
And I apologize if this is a dissatisfying answer on my part, but, “I work in public education. I’ve spent years in child and teen mental health and suicide prevention,” thank you for that, first and foremost, super important work. “What advice would you give to practitioners and educators who are caring for our youth through unprecedented times?” I’m going to just hop in for a second. I would look very, very closely at Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T, not only his books, but also what he’s doing with his small group of researchers. They’ve actually changed certain legislation on a state-by-state basis for restricting phone use in schools. And I think it’s very, very interesting. So I would take a look at that.
Getting back to the question, “You’ve had many great guests who have touched on this and you’ve shared boldly about your own experience. What would you say to a 16-year-old in 2026?” I would say that everything on this Black Mirror is designed to hijack your free will and to turn you into a puppet of the machine of some type. One machine or another, whether that’s Meta or fill-in-the-blank, right? And that this could be a digital mini-retirement. I would try to get them off of social media for a period of time. And then talk to them. Be like, “Hey, this is going to be an experiment. You can get back on it and use it 10 times as much, but I’m going to challenge you and we’re going to come up with a plan for other things that you can do. Delete the apps from your phone for three to four weeks. We’re going to do an assessment beforehand to look at how you feel, your anxiety levels, maybe depressive symptoms, how much you’re getting done, what you say you want to do versus how you’re spending time. And then we’re going to look at it afterwards. And no expectations, no pressure on what you do with those results. But let’s start there. And if you want to have a beautiful life that has some element of peace of mind and healthy relationships, I think it’ll benefit you. If you want to be a world beater and you want to build anything or operate at the highest levels in any way, also, this will help you.”
So I would probably pitch it that way. That’s what I would do. All right. Next one is going to be a little inside baseball, but I’m going to jump into it because it’s a topic that I love.
This is from Sebastian. And I’m going to abbreviate this a little bit. All right. So I’ve talked a lot about language learning in the past and have had blog posts and resources from people like Benny Lewis, the Irish Polyglot.
And Seb’s question, or Sebi’s question is, “Has any of this thinking changed with advancements in AI?” And here are some questions. “What’s the purpose of language learning?” “If, in the end, we’re all plugged in with a chip and blah, blah, blah, what does language learning provide for the human experience?” So for me, number one, actually population level, zoom out. There seem to be some crazy longevity and cognitive benefits to language learning. This is relatively new. I put it in the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter, so I can’t recall it from memory, which is ironic. I get it. But there seem to be some really significant benefits to acquiring multiple languages. All right. Secondly, it doesn’t take that long to get conversationally functional in a new language. You probably know this already, but between eight to 12 weeks, and not to beat a dead horse, but again, the meta-learning section of The 4-Hour Chef goes into this at length.
And I’ve written a lot on the blog, tim.blog, I think there’s a section called Language Learning, but if you just search language learning, you’ll be able to find a ton of stuff. So it’s also not as heavy a lift as people expect, right? To get to a point where you have a thousand words, you can go to a country and navigate 80 percent of your transactional conversations in a restaurant, at a hotel, whatever, all in your target language. You could probably actually do that in about two weeks. I know that sounds crazy, but I believe that is entirely achievable. And I’ve taught people to do that. There are plenty of other people out there who teach folks. It’s very, very achievable, right? So it seems like limited downside in terms of time investment and very high, durable upside.
But the purpose of language learning for me also is that I agree with Wittgenstein that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. And whether it’s through grammatical structure or vocabulary or words like saudade in Portuguese, which is actually pretty close to like natsukashii in Japanese or komorebi, this term for dappled light in Japanese. Or the phrases like arigata-meiwaku in Japanese, which is people have heard arigato, right? Arigato. Arigata-meiwaku is like pain in the ass. So arigata-meiwaku is like when somebody does you a favor you don’t want. When someone does you, like, a favor you don’t really want or gives you a gift you don’t want.
And then you feel obliged to do stuff for them and it’s a huge pain in the ass. All of that is compressed into this one expression, arigata-meiwaku, which is just beautiful, hilarious, fun. And we’ve all heard that the Inuit have 30 words for different types of snow. Hawaiians have many, many, many different words for various types of rain. Also, some of them are location dependent, like rain at a specific place. All of these concepts broaden your ability to experience life, right? In the same way that if you’re looking around here where I’m sitting or you’re driving around and walking through the woods, let’s just say. And what you see are trees. That’s what you see. Trees and plants. But you don’t have any specific knowledge that allows you to see anything really more than that. Perhaps somebody could put two different types of leaves in your hand, you’d be able to say, “Yes, they’re different.”
But if you went on a walk as I will do with, say, a botanist or somebody who works at a local plant shop, doesn’t have to cost much money. It’d be 20 bucks. And they start to describe to you, for instance, “Oh, you’re in upstate New York. Here are the six to eight trees that constitute more than 90 percent of all the trees. And here’s how you tell them apart. And by the way, here are the three different leaf structures that matter.” Or with birds, “Here’s how owl feet are different from passerine, which are different from this.” Suddenly, because you have these labels, your experience of reality is much higher resolution. And when it’s higher resolution, when you have also, and these are not exactly the same thing, but a better frame rate, I think you extend your experiential lifespan. So if you want to live in full color HD as opposed to black and white, and if you want to be able to watch super slow-mo, to extend your life without waiting for some magical, biological intervention that all the billionaires are funding to live forever, probably not going to happen any time soon, you can do that right now.
And one of the ways that I find helps is by learning languages. All right. That was a long one. And I didn’t even get to the second part. All right. So have I thought about how to systematically integrate AI into language learning process? There are lots of people who have lots of takes on this. And I was one of their earliest investors, so I’m biased here, but I don’t think so. If anyone’s going to crack AI for language learning, I do think it’s going to be Duolingo. They’re already using it. There may be some AI native companies that approach it, but I do think Duolingo’s probably ahead of the game.
There are lots of other options. So for instance, just in the last few weeks, Instagram auto dubbing has become really good. And my team sent me a clip of me speaking in Japanese, right? So The Random Show. And there was a segment. And it was my voice. It sounds like me. Dubbed into, as far as I can tell, perfect Japanese, idiomatic, perfect Japanese. And I was like, “Holy shit.” Now I don’t want to spend all day listening to myself, but because I knew the content of that conversation, I was able to improve my Japanese, which is already pretty good. It’s not perfect, but it’s advanced. I was able to improve my Japanese in five minutes of watching something, watching content I knew in this target language, right? So you can use AI. I think one of the more interesting uses of AI for language learning for kids specifically, or younger people, older people too, would be personalizing the experience based on your interests, based on what you want to learn.
What native content can I aggregate that will be interesting to you? Right? The Duolingo Spanish podcast was phenomenal. I don’t know what the equivalent is in Mandarin. I’m trying to brush up on my Mandarin Chinese right now. And it’s like, well, I would love to do that. So I’m going to go to—and I just did this earlier today—ChatGPT or Claude and ask them that question. I liked the Duolingo Spanish podcast, which by the way, at one point was like one of the top 10 podcasts or 20 podcasts in the world. Crazy. And I want the equivalent from Mandarin. What might that look like? Now, if it doesn’t exist, I would imagine that within a year, AI will be able to create that for me. And that would be a great use case for me, for AI enhancing language learning. But frankly, old and boring and analog, I think, works fantastic because as soon as you are learning a language on this, you are competing.
Your attention is competing with a thousand other distractions that are more tantalizing than using spaced repetition or SuperMemo or something like that, Anki, to acquire vocabulary, right? So I like printed out flashcards. I like watching, for instance, any time you’re watching Netflix or whatever, Amazon Prime. Okay. Here’s the thing, I don’t actually believe you learn a target language, let’s say Italian. I’ve been watching some Italian movies recently. I love Italian as a language. I can watch, say, Roberto Benigni. Incredible, right? Life is Beautiful. But if I miss something and I’m watching English subtitles, if I miss it, I miss it. I don’t get it. However, if I’ve spent, let’s just say, 72 hours using a Lonely Planet phrase book intended for travelers about Italian, they give you like a 10-page grammar overview, if I have a basic understanding, then I can watch a movie I know in and out, right?
Die Hard, Babe is one of my favorites. The Bourne Identity, whatever, where you know the dialogue, Snatch, whatever it might be. And then just turn on the subtitles in your target language. So now I’m watching, right now I’m watching Parks and Rec. Okay. And we’re going to come back to Parks and Rec. But I’m watching from season one, episode one through Parks and Rec. It’s highly conversational, lots of different characters, right? And you can watch it as you would normally watch it or you can just turn on some subtitles and whatever your target language is and you will acquire a lot of language, a lot of vocab. All right. So not sure that is helpful, but that’s how I’m thinking about it. And I’m definitely going to be learning more languages. So I do think about this.
All right. Let’s hop into—and my laptop battery’s doing so well. I can’t believe I’ve ever recorded podcasts indoors. Ludicrous. Should always do it outside with nice weather like this. All right. I’m going to hop back into the live chat and see if we got anything I can hop into. Also, some of you have heard me talk about this. Michel Thomas, M-I-C-H-E-L T-H-O-M-A-S, Michel Thomas Method. If you want something you can listen to and really acquire the fundamentals of a language in a week or two, the Michel Thomas Method is outstanding. The languages he recorded himself, which I think are French, Spanish, Italian, maybe, certainly German, are world-class. The Korean that I went through, I was very skeptical that anyone other than Michel would be able to use his method to teach well, and it was awesome. So I would take a very close look at Michel Thomas. His background is nuts. All right.
Okay. Michael R., “What’s one of your recent favorite TV shows or movies? All time favorite TV shows or movies?” Well, I just mentioned some of my favorite movies. And when I’m writing a new book, very often I’ll write late at night and I will take one of my favorite movies and I’ll play it on the TV or on a projector and mute it. And then I’ll just listen to music. But I like having the company late at night so it doesn’t feel too isolating. And it’s been different movies for different books, but I mean, I’ve seen Babe like a thousand times. I’ve seen The Bourne Identity like a thousand times. Spirited Away, I’ve probably seen a few hundred times because I’m playing them every night. And there are many others.
Right now, and this comes to a question someone else asked, Len A. “I’ve always enjoyed your ‘What purchase under $100 has made a big impact?’ question. Why have you stopped asking that?” I don’t have a great answer to that. “And do you have any new purchases that would make such a list?” And this ties into favorite TV shows. All right. So like millions of people, I had seen many short clips on social of Parks and Rec, Parks and Recreation. I’d even seen one or two episodes, but I’d never watched it as the good Lord intended, which is from season one, episode one, all the way through. And there are 120 plus episodes and goodness gracious, is that a fantastic show.
It is just wholesome goodness, 90 percent of the time. I think family friendly 99 percent of the time. Not that I care about that right now, but it’s so positive and such a feel good pallet cleanser given the insanity that we get waterboarded with all day through doom scrolling. And even if you don’t want to be subjected to it it’s just everywhere. It really has turned into this nightly ritual with my lady. And we just watch one episode every night, one or two. So good. And that’s literally months and months of payoff because they have seven seasons. So buying the full seven seasons is my best purchase of under $100.
This is from Timothy K. “You said, ‘Walking is my number one daily hack.'” I’m just revisiting the memory banks to try to confirm that I’ve said that, but it doesn’t really matter.
“What actually happens in [my] mind on those walks that doesn’t happen at a desk? Intentional, or does it just unfold?” I will say that it’s not always about what happens in the mind. I just pay, even though I might be known in some circles as an early-stage tech investor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I’m looking at the new, new, new, new, new thing. I pay more attention to the old, old, old thing. And evolutionary drives that have withstood millennia and millions of years to prove durable. And we’re designed to move. We’re designed to walk a lot, right? And most of us don’t do as much of that as we have evolved to be capable of. So I just find the health benefits, the mood elevation, it is across the board beneficial to me. If I’m walking, sometimes it’s going to be just letting my mind wander, trying to let ideas percolate from wherever the muse might yank them if I’m working on a book.
Might be listening to an audiobook, might be doing phone calls, but walking, walking, walking. I mean, you can fix a lot of problems by walking. And when I say walking, I mean walking like two hours plus a day. It’s a lot of walking. But for me, any amount of walking helps, but just meditating twice a day is fundamentally different for me. If you can meditate, for instance, if you could choose 15 minutes twice a day or 30 minutes once a day, I’d do 15 minutes twice a day. And similarly with the walking, any amount helps, but there seems to be something magical that happens after at least an hour, right? Preferably two. So that’s where I’ll leave that.
Scissor Liquor, that’s pretty funny. “My top tip for more restful sleep at the moment when falling asleep is fine, but hitting a full night’s rest is challenging.” I think that’s a question. I mean, number one, look, if you’re waking up to pee a lot, stop drinking water an hour or two before you go to bed. Two hours, right? Just stop drinking so much water. I drink water compulsively, so that is something that I have to tell myself. And putting aside drugs and all that kind of stuff, because I don’t think we want to get into that rabbit hole right now. Falling asleep, for me, so cutting down on primary insomnia or onset insomnia. The TMS, the one day TMS, has just been remarkable for that. So people can look up Ampa Health if they want to try to find a place that might offer a one-day. It’s called the ONE-D protocol. You can also look up literature on that.
But otherwise, sun, lots of exercise. So boring. Isn’t that boring? But if I get plenty of sun exposure, if I’m seeing lots of natural light, especially when the sun is going down, like right now, I mean, in the morning, yes, to wake up, but also plenty of light exposure. And I am exercising so that I feel tired. It sounds so ridiculous for me to say, but it bears repeating because I think in modern environments, in modern life, it’s very easy to do what? To suffer from a deficiency of sunlight, get very little sunlight exposure, and to not be tired because you’re sitting in front of one of these screens at 18 inches for the majority of the day. So those would be a few. That’s another reason why I like to walk, because I can get a lot done if I push this horrible thing called the inbox to phone calls, and then just do a few hours of calls, which I do almost every Tuesday when I’m having one-on-one calls with my direct reports, as an example. Let me know if you have follow-ups on that, but that’s what comes to mind.
This is a question, let’s see if I can answer this, I didn’t have immediate thoughts. This is a question from Oksana, “As someone who naturally values privacy, how did you reconcile that with choosing such a public career and has that changed over time?” Well, the first thing I would say is that I didn’t really think through choosing a public career because the first book was turned down by 25 plus publishers, and then bought for nothing. And my expectation was that it wasn’t going to do very much. And even though I stacked the deck so that it would have a snowball’s chance in Hell, I did not expect it to blow up.
And by the time it did blow up, and then I was saying yes to things and became publicly exposed, the genie was out of the bottle, toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube, however you want to think about it. But if I could hit control Z, there are times when I would be tempted to say, “Yes, I would take that.” And I think the silver lining on it is that the half-life of fame is just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Some of you might remember, let’s just call it 10 years ago, you would get a hilarious meme video. And that video would make the rounds for like a week. How long do the videos make the rounds now? 60 seconds? Three hours? One day? Everything is becoming more ephemeral in the world of sort of digital visibility. And over time, I might shutter the podcast or stop doing video because I have no desire for more facial recognition.
But I think, depending on what you’re trying to do, for better and for worse, if you’re maybe in growth mode, it’s going to get harder and harder to have any durable public profile. Now on the flip side, it’s going to get easier and easier for everyone to find you. So I do think it’s important to think about digital protections, privacy protections, and so on, but that’s a much longer conversation for another time. But yes, I am paranoid and incredibly focused on privacy. I think that privacy, in some ways, even though it was a, let’s call it a God-given right for millennia upon millennia, it is now a luxury of sorts. If you do not take proactive action, if you do not have defenses put up, your whole life is on display or available for the right technical person who can do a deep dive or for the right price.
So you really, in their tools you can use like Incogni and others for scraping stuff off the web. I think that’s just going to become a privacy survival imperative if you want it. Then there’s other stuff that’s interesting. If you want private money, right? Which by the way, for a long time cash was that. Now it’s like, go to your bank and try to take out $9,000. You’re going to get cross-examined. Government doesn’t like private money, even though the default was kind of fiat currency for a long time, which allowed you to live your life and do your thing without having Big Brother breathing on your face at every second. So stuff like Zcash is kind of interesting. Obviously crypto can lead you into dangerous waters and you can lose everything very quickly, but I do find some of the privacy coins and stuff interesting. So we’ll see where all that goes. That does not mean invest, by the way. It is very, very easy to lose all your money in that stuff.
All right. Let me answer a few more and then we’ll hop off and I’ll let everybody get back to their lives. All right, this one is from Josh, “Tim, what are three to five things in your life now that you happily pay top dollar for? In other words, what luxuries do you think are absolutely worth upgrading for?” I’m going to mention a few. The first is massage and manual therapy. And I wanted to mention this first because even when I was very poor, right out of school and driving around in a used, hand-me-down minivan that the rear seats had been stolen out of, I’m not making this up, like really a A+ piece of shit car, and had a bunch of roommates and slept on a futon a lot, I saved my money for manual therapy, meaning massage therapy, once a week. And not for relaxation, for, like, sports massage, fix-the-broken-car type of work. And that is a commitment that I made early because I saw the dividends and I really think it is paid off over time.
And I think that is a core component of my longevity, health span constellation of things. So that’s one. I really try to get massage work done with a good therapist once a week. And again, a little is better than nothing. Can’t afford an hour? Do 30 minutes. Can’t afford 30 minutes? Try to find somebody to do 15 minutes. I guarantee you, you can find somebody who can help you out. Even if they’re only working on your IT bands for five minutes, scale back instead of going to zero. All right. Ease of travel. I think travel can be very stressful the more people you have involved. I’ve got a dog. So anything that makes travel a bit smoother, a bit easier, I was their first advisor, so again, full disclosure, but like CLEAR, TSA pre-check, anything that makes travel a little bit easier, right?
If it’s going to be a hassle to lug your stuff around, if you hurt your elbow and you’ve got heavy luggage, ship your luggage. There’s a lot you can do. When I was spending a lot of time in New York City, I actually stayed at the same hotel most of the time. And what I did at one point is I bought a trunk, a big trunk, and I put a week’s worth of clothing and some of the supplements I always use, and a bunch of the stuff that is in my everyday carry in my primary home, and I just had a trunk of stuff that they stored in the basement at the hotel. What did that mean? I never had to pack, right? I could grab a toothbrush and get on a plane and go to New York and I was totally covered. Had a couple of different pairs of shoes, had workout outfits, everything. Bathing suit. Didn’t need anything. In one trunk, that’s it. So ease of travel would be number two.
And then last, and I’m sure I could think of other stuff, but healthcare for myself and loved ones would be way up there. And that includes in some cases, and I’m fortunate that I have the means to do this, but for some people, like for my parents and other people paying for trainers, paying for doctors, paying for meal prep or meal delivery, this kind of thing. It’s like the man or woman who is well wants a million things; the sick man or woman wants only one thing: not to be sick. The injured man or woman only wants one thing: not to be injured. So just really taking care of that is another place where I’m happy, not just to spend a lot, but to overspend.
So what does that mean? That means that feeling like I have an insurance policy or a safety net available just in case. Having, say, concierge medicine such that, God forbid something happens and I need to get ahold of somebody at 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, a Saturday, whatever, that I can reach a doctor, gives me a peace of mind that helps with everything else, even if I never use it, right? It’s like having a very safe car. Even if you never get into a head-on collision, God forbid, there’s a reassurance that comes with having a very, very well-rated safe car for you and your family. So I feel very similar to that. Just having the ability to do A, B, C, D, or E with respect to health, fitness, medicine, specialists, I find to be a very good investment. And by the way, sometimes you do need that stuff.
And some of you may have seen the announcement in The New York Times, but I’m going to be getting very heavily involved in a startup called Neko Health, which is expanding to the US very soon. It’s already in the UK and Sweden, if you want to check it out. Co-founded by Daniel Ek, the co-founder, longtime CEO of Spotify. Going to be doing some very interesting stuff. So I’m hoping to make world-class preventative healthcare available to millions of people. That is just the basis of everything else. If you don’t have your health, what do you have?
This is a good one from Hannah. All right. “What’s the one most important thing you’re doing to prevent cognitive decline? Both my parents have Alzheimer’s and I’m overwhelmed with all the hacks.” I know how you feel because I have multiple relatives I’m caring for with Alzheimer’s right now. I would say that if I had to pick one thing, it would be the exercise. Okay. So if I had to pick one thing for cognitive health, it is the exercise. And my conversation with Dr. Tommy Wood gets into specifics around this, but I’ll give you one example. Doing something called the Norwegian 4×4, which is a type of interval training. Doing that, I want to say three times per week for six months, provided five years of benefits, something like that. And Zone 2 also counts for mitochondrial health.
Alzheimer’s, frankly, is very poorly understood. And I think we’re still in the dark ages in a lot of respects. I don’t totally believe, actually often don’t believe, and I’m no doctor, I don’t play one on the internet, so this is just my personal experience. But the remove amyloid beta and tau tangles and all will be well hypothesis, which a lot of therapeutics are predicated on, I really don’t buy it. I think a lot of it is vascular dementia and some of it certainly is mitochondrial dysfunction. So I’m looking at things like I am taking Urolithin A myself for checking in some respects a mitochondrial box. Paying a lot of attention to insulin sensitivity and glucose disposal. Again, that comes back to the weight training, but also doing plenty of intermittent fasting and so on.
There is a supplement called Avmacol that I think is pretty interesting. It’s basically a sulforaphane precursor plus a few other ingredients that I think help with enzymatic conversion and things like that. But if I had to pick one, it would be the exercise. And then there’s lots of other stuff I do. I don’t know if you guys can see it, but there’s a barrel sauna over there. Sauna use is very interesting, heat shock proteins, et cetera. So I’m throwing a lot at it because it terrifies the living hell out of me. But I think you can pop all the pills you want and cobble together all sorts of mini interventions. But if you’re not doing the exercise, if you’re not eating good food, if you’re spiking your glucose constantly over and over again, and always eating by the clock and never doing any type of intermittent fasting.
And by intermittent fasting, I’m talking about along the lines of a researcher named Mark Mattson. So at least 16 hours of fasting, preferably more, so that you deplete glycogen in your liver and switch to some ketone production. If you’re only cobbling together lots of pills and potions, I don’t think that’s going to do it. But I’m throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it. So hopefully that is somewhat helpful. If you guys think it would be interesting, at some point I might do a dedicated podcast, just a solo podcast, talking about exactly what I’m doing for preserving cognitive health and function. Again, not that I’m a doctor or an MD, but frankly, a lot of those folks are so siloed and specialized that sometimes it’s hard to assemble a full picture for practical implementation. And there are things coming hopefully down the line. I invested in a company called Jocasta Neuroscience, J-O-C-A-S-T-A, looking at injectable Klotho for humans, hopefully.
I think Klotho, K-L-O-T-H-O, is very interesting, and hopefully that’ll be a therapeutic, but in the meantime, guess what provokes natural Klotho production or release? Exercise of different types. So when in doubt, get to the gym.
All right guys, I think that’s all I have for right now. I’m going to hop off and get a bite to eat since I haven’t had anything since a small breakfast. And I think we’re going to wind down and come to a close in just a few moments. So thank you everybody for the questions. Thank you for tuning in from around the world. And for those people who might be listening to this, if we publish it, we will have show notes linking to all sorts of stuff that I mentioned at tim.blog/podcast. And I’m not sure what the hell you would search to find this particular episode, but you’re smart people. I’ll let you figure it out. But show notes will be at tim.blog/podcast. And once again, everybody, thanks for tuning in and hope to do another one of these soon.
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2026-07-30 03:08:16
In this wide-ranging Q&A, I explore reinvention, enduring skills for the age of AI, friendship, mental health, fitness, language-learning, privacy, cognitive longevity, and more.
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