#746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova

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Stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

First up, Jerry Seinfeld, American standup comedian, actor, writer and producer and co-creator of the Emmy Golden Globe and People's Choice Award winning Seinfeld. Name the greatest television show of all time by TV Guide. His latest book is, is this anything you can find Jerry on Twitter and Instagram at Jerry Seinfeld. My writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful, pushing against the wind in soft muddy ground, like a wheelbarrow full of bricks.

You either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. And I learned that really fast and really young. And that saved my life and made my career that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy. And that principle is you learn to be a writer. It's really the profession of writing. That's a standup comedy is. However, you do it, you can do it any way you want. But if you don't learn to do it in some form, you will not survive.

And when you sit down, is it an empty page? Is it bits and pieces that you've noted through the week as observations that you then flesh out? What is actually in front of you when you start? What's in front of me is usually about 15 or 20 pages of stuff that's in various states of development. And then there's a smaller book of just really, really random things.

When you're on a cell phone call and the call drops and then you reconnect with the person, they'll go, I don't know what happened there. Is this anyone is expecting them to know anything about the incredibly complex technology of a cell phone. They offer this little, I don't know if it's an excuse or an apology, they go, I don't know what happened there. So anyway, so I don't know. So that's an example of something in that my little little tiny notebook.

That I don't know what to do with that, but it's just so stupid to me and funny. So that to me is like a, it's like an archery target 50 yards away. And then I take out my bow and my arrow and I go, let me see if I can hit that. Let me see if I can create something that I could say to a room full of humans in an eye club that will make them see what I see in that. There's something stupid and funny about that to me. That's a very, very beginning.

So then I'll write something about it. It'll be if I'm lucky, it'll be a half a page or a page on a yellow legal pad. And I'll write that. And then in the session the next day, if I get around to it, I will see it again. And I will see what I have. And what I like and I don't like and as any writer can tell you, it's 9% to 5% rewrite. So I have two phases. There is the free play, creative phase.

And then there is the polish and construction phase. And I love to spend an ordinate. I mean, it's not wasteful to me because that's just what I like to do. Amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear. And then it becomes something that I can't wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it. And then from the stage, the audience will then I imagine, you know, it's a very scientific thing to me.

It's like, OK, here's my experiment. And you run the experiment. And then the audience just dumps a bunch of data on you. Of this is good. This is OK. This is very good. This is terrible. And that goes into my brain from performing it on stage. And then it's back through the rewrite process. And then new ideas will come. And it's just millions of different kinds of development. It's just that.

So you're just trying to get your you're just going to that place of creating fixing, jettisoning. It's extremely occupying. It's never boring. The frustration I'm so used to at this point, I don't even notice it. And it's just work time. It's just work time. I like the way athletes talk about I got to get my work in that you get your work in.

I like that phrase. One of the reasons I was looking forward to doing this show with you is I know that it's something you are very interested in the craft. Yeah, the systemization of the brain and creative endeavor, you know, I really think when I'm working, it's very much like when you're watching a picture working on stage than now we're going.

So that's different. So basically it's on stage and off stage. It's the desk and then the stage and then back to the desk and then back to the stage. And that's endless. My guiding rule is systemize. What's the problem? 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 see myself in her at that age. She's way farther advanced than I was at that age. She has a creative gift.

So I say, when you have a creative gift, it's like someone just gave you a horse. You have to learn how to ride it. You got to learn how to ride this horse. And I've seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens. I've seen people that were given black stallions. And if you have a black stallion like from that movie and you're born and they just put you on it. And that's what happens.

They just put you on it. And you either learn to ride this thing or it's going to kill you. Then we have many, many examples of that. So she's trying to write this thing. She's struggling. I can't write. I keep putting it off. So I explained to her my basic system, which you already talked about at the top of the show, 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 you going to work on it? Don't just sit down with an open ended. I'm going to work on this problem. That 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 all 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's it going to end? When's it work out over? It's going to be an hour. Okay. Or you can 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 trans and dental meditation. How to do it? I assume you know about that. I do. Yeah. I practice the story. 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 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 you know I kind of want it to teach in a way. I think it's so simple. I think exercise is pretty simple too, but people don't they don't come up with baked good simple little systems. They just try and do it. And that's to me that's you're going to fail.

The simple doesn't mean easy and no, no, no, not easy. So important. The incentives right having a reward, having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration or how long have you chosen? She's 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.

It's a torture. Yeah. If you taught a class on writing, what other lessons might you have or resources or anything exercises some imagining that your daughter gets to down she says, all right, I have an hour. And then you ask her how a writing session went. She said, well, I didn't have any idea what to write. So you'd have, I don't know what age students would be in your course. But what else would be a component of your class on writing.

Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. You know, no one's really that great. You know, who's great. The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It's a game of tonnage. You know, how many 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 guess I could start as a jogger, you know, like 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. Body for Life, yeah.

And it's really, really such a system for a primitive, you know, brain. I do it to this day. I think it's a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape because he broke it down to here's what we're going to do in minute one. Here's what you're going to do the minute five minute 12. And this is going to end in the 45 minutes or whatever it is. And every minute I know exactly what I'm doing.

And that like turned the key for me and all of a sudden I was getting in shape. I never had to ask, what am I doing now? Or what are we doing next? It's like you got to treat your brain like a dog you just got. You got it. It's stupid. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained. The got them to use the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You can find it. Yeah. And stun through repetition and systemization.

So let's talk about feedback in the experimental loop that you mentioned earlier, which was desk stage, desk stage, desk stage, one for a feedback would be audience feedback. And I'm curious what other forms of feedback you have. Now there is no other feedback. That means anything. Okay. Got it. Well, I'll tell you. Here's a little fine point of writing technique that I'll pass along to your writers out there.

Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day, that day. You have to wait 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone about what you did. Because you never want to take away that wonderful happy feeling that you did that very difficult thing that you tried to do that you accomplished it. You wrote you sat down and wrote. So if you say anything, it's like the same reason I've ever heard the thing like you never tell people the name you're going to give the baby.

Sure. Until it's born because they're going to react. And the reaction is going to have a color. And if you've decided that that's going to be the baby's name, you don't want to know what anybody else thinks. So I will always wait 24 hours before I say anything to anyone about what I wrote. So you want to preserve that good feeling.

Because if you, if let's say you write something and you love it. And then later on that day, you're talking to someone and you thought, Hey, what do you think of this idea? blah, blah, blah. And they don't love it. Now that day feels like, I guess, you know, that that was a wasted effort.

So you always want to reward yourself. The key to writing to being a good writer is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving and then switch over to Lou Gossett and officer in a gentleman. And then just be a harsh prick ball busting son of a bitch about that is just not good enough. That's got to come out or it's got to be redone or thrown away.

So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you're writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. It's just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard ass and you switch back and forth.

There's a quote from you in the New York Times and the quote is, I'm not OCD, but I love routine. I get less depressed with routine. Aside from the writing sessions, are there any other routines for you that are particularly important as scaffolding or automatic behaviors? Yeah, exercise, weight training and transcendental meditation. I think I could solve just about anyone's life and I don't care what you do with weight training and transcendental meditation.

I think your body needs that stress that stressor and I think it builds your resilience of the nervous system. And I think transcendental meditation is the absolutely ultimate work tool.

I think the stress reduction is great, but there's more the energy recovery and the concentration fatigue solution, which is of course, you know, as a standup comic, I can tell you my entire life is concentration fatigue, whether it's writing or performing my brain and my body, which is the same thing, are constantly hitting the wall. And if you have that in your hip pocket, your Columbus with a compass.

And you're chatting with Hugh Jackman on the podcast and he's also a devout seems like an odd word to use since it can be used quite secondarily, but yeah, proponent of TM how many times what is your weekly schedule look like for weight training when do you do it and do you do TM twice a day or do you do it at least twice a day, but I will do it anytime I feel like I'm dipping energetically.

If I sit down and the pen doesn't move for like 20 minutes, I know I'm out of guess why the pen moving my weight training routine is three times a week for an hour. A session, but I'm into that I've been into that you know, I mentioned the bill Phillips body for life for the hit training.

So it's three times a week of weights and three times a week the interval cardio training there are a lot of days I want to cry instead of do it because it really physically hurts, but I just think it's balancing it's very balancing to the forces inside humanity that I think are just they overwhelm us.

We are overwhelmed by our own power and you got to put that ox in the plow make it do the stuff that it doesn't want to do it just keeps it what the hell the oxes do in the wild I can't imagine they were happy. Checking Twitter just developing the roses. You know, put it in the harness. I mean, I don't know a lot of my life is I don't like getting depressed I get depressed a lot.

I hate the feeling and these routines that these very difficult routines, whether it's exercise or writing and both of them are things where it's like it's brutal. I was explaining to my daughter she's frustrated that writing is so difficult because no one told her that it's the most difficult thing in the world. It's the most difficult thing in the world is to write people tell you to write like you can do it like you're supposed to be able to do it nobody can do it.

It's impossible the greatest people in the world can't do it. So if you're going to do what you should first be called what you are attempting to do is incredibly difficult one of the most difficult things there is way harder than weight training way harder what you're summoning trying to summon within your brain and your spirit to create something onto a blank page.

That's another part of my systemization technique learn how to encourage yourself. That's why you don't tell someone what you wrote be proud of yourself encourage you know treat yourself well for having done that horrible, horribly impossible thing.

I would have to imagine and maybe this is just a projection because I hope that when I have kids which I don't have yet that this will be true for me but that being kind to your creative self and offering positive reinforcement for yourself through the process would affect how you parent I would have to imagine yes. Yes, yes, unfortunately we seem to have lost the lugas at side of parenting. pesky child protective services. Yeah, what do they know.

But yeah, it is similar you want to be very encouraging but you also want to explain there are laws in life that you need to know about or you it's going to hurt. I think one of the better lines I've come up with over my life is that pain is knowledge rushing into filivoy with great speed.

Can you say that one more time please pain is knowledge rushing in to filivoy you don't know that that post of your bed was not where you thought it was but when your foot hits it that knowledge is going to come rushing in really fast had going to really hurt.

When your foot hits that post because that was a piece of knowledge that you didn't have that you're going to get you're about to get here to talk about black stallion and learning to ride black stallion less you be broken yourself by your superpowers slash potential murderers I've struggled with depression for decades and have found some respite in the last five or six years for a whole host of reasons but aside from the writing and weight training is there anything else that has.

Contributed your ability to either stave off or mitigate depressive episodes or manage no I still got him still got him the best thing I ever heard about it was that it's part of a kit that comes with a creative aspect to the brain.

The tendency to depression seems to always accompany that and I read that like 20 years ago and that really made me happy so I realized well I wouldn't have all this other good stuff without that that's just comes in the kit that you have an tendency to depression but I think it's fair to say that I don't know a human that doesn't have the tendency.

You give me a quote I'll ask you one more question and then we can go a little more and I'm enjoying so much let's go let's do it so I'd love to ask about following up on depression I'd love to ask about failure just to keep this bright and shiny can you think of how a particular failure or apparent failure set you up for later success in other words do you have a favorite failure of any type something that seemed catastrophic at the time that in fact.

Set you up for great things later yeah yeah I have a couple really good ones and there's nothing I try to teach the kids you know and something horrible happens and I think of all the things I would trade if you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in the last ones I would trade would be the failures those are the most valuable ones.

When I moved to LA I was only doing comedy four years but I had built up a pretty good reputation in New York and New York was really in those days still very much the miners to LA which was the majors so I went out to LA and people talk that I was coming and that I was one of the hot guys coming out of New York and I was only doing it four years I was 25 years old really still just starting.

And the comedy store was the club in LA that you had a break into that was the club and the guys that work there and the women were killers and these people made the room just shake with laughter it was very intimidating to go on there and I went on there and I did very well you know in those days you would call and they would give you spots if you were good and I would never get spots I would get like one spot a week and.

You know one spot a week is like one push up a week it's like you get it why don't you bother so I asked to meet with Mitzi shore who's the owner of the club and person who ran the whole thing there and she said to me she said I'm the kind of person that needs to get stepped on and that's what you need you need someone to step on you and I'm going to be that person.

She said if you called and said if I had four spots available and you called in I would give all four spots to this other guy she mentions this other guy and I sat there in her office and I nodded. I nodded and I said well I won't mention the name of the guy she said she was going to give the four spots to I said well if maybe he can't do all four I'd be happy to take any of the ones he can't do.

And I walked out of there and I never worked at the comedy story again and saying you're you're not working at the comedy store in LA it's like saying I want to be a baseball player but not the majors not the majors in the United States. I'm going to apply my traits on place out.

Lithuania. And so from there I went from I hope it doesn't sound amon is from being absolutely at the top of the heat in New York City to playing at discos in the basement in LA you know to like eight people but my resentment and hostility to her. I was a guy who I would say I was a three day a week guy in terms of my writing discipline in those days and I went from three days a week to seven right there.

And I was like okay we're not I was angry I was angry I was frustrated I was resentful but I use that it was just fuel for me she wasn't stopping me nobody was going to stop me but when someone is that hostile to you. That can be a very good thing. It's your top if you're tough enough to eat that shit and say I'm she's not stopping me. That's a great story.

I actually think one of my friends Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit and at one point early on they were super excited about of course their company their baby they put all of their waking hours into it and they met with some Yahoo executive who was basically just fishing for inside information. And it's some point in the meeting this exact said oh there's your traffic oh that's a rounding error for us and so Alexis.

And this guy's took a huge they made a poster that said you are a rounding error and put it on the wall in their office. Yeah. It works. We were talking about systemizing game of fine is another thing I'm very big on. And let's make it into a game you know whatever the problem is let's make it a game to me it's a fun game I honestly I wouldn't say this around my family but I don't care if I drop dead tomorrow. It's like I just wanted to I still feel like I played the game well.

Yeah. That's all I want to feel I just want to feel like I played the game well. I've seen an example of game of fine I mean I've read of course the about the you know sign felt productivity secret marking the crosses on the calendar which I guess some people. Yeah that's not really a game. Yeah that's more based that I think stats are good. If you want to improve anything my trainer Adam right and I always like to play this game well this was the maximum amount of weight.

I did three months ago for this many seconds or whatever and then it's like that's so it's a game now let's see if I can keep the reps going for 30 seconds last time was 25. So it's a little game it's just again this is goes back to my the human brain is a schnauser it's just a stupid little contraption that you can easily trick as soon as you tell me I did it 25 seconds last time.

Let's say if I can do 30 yeah it's not with them that's not intelligence it's a stupid little machine it's going to do that every single time every time you tell someone your last best was 25 seconds you're going to try for 30.

When you hear the word successful who comes to mind for you and why could be parents could be outside of parents could be anybody but for you when you hear that word is there anyone who is really a to the paragon of what you would consider success or someone you have looked up to as someone who's successful. Well that's a pretty broad hyper hyper broad it comes down to kind of how you define it also you know I think I don't know if I mean it as a joke but I say.

I say a lot these days survival is the new success and and I'm a big look to what do you want me to tell you in my business if you're 60 plus or I'll even if you're 55 and you're getting paid to work paid well you have crushed it yeah. So stand up comedy I would move this piece of our conversation next to the toxic ecosystem of this world when you have seen the attrition that I have seen it's like in the heart of the sea you know that book yeah.

So I think I'm going to make a video about how I made the movie when they're dropping like flies and the handful the small handful somebody asked me the other day how many people whose careers were made on the tonight show with Johnny Carson are still working. I didn't want to answer the question because you had it you know what I mean you had it you had you had it so once you have it you can only lose it.

You can only fail to take care of it and that's when we get to health and work ethic and managing yourself so that you don't break because they're trying to break you I always tease my friend Jimmy Fallon that this is like a sick experiment these talk show gigs. Let's take a human being put him in a studio for decades. You're in an hour of television a day and let's see what breaks. It's sick it's a sick human experiment. It's like a Pope job who it's like they just do it till you're dead.

The forever Skinner box yeah that's brutal you've already given a bunch of possible answers to this but if you had a billboard metaphorically speaking that could get a message quote an image question anything out to billions of people what might you put on that billboard. Back in the 80s I had a friend who was teaching a comedy course at the improv a Melrose in LA and he asked me if I would come in and talk to the class and I said sure I went in and there was like I don't know.

Maybe 20 people in the class in the afternoons and I went up on stage and I said the fact that you have even signed up for this class is a very bad sign for what you're trying to do.

The fact that you think anyone can help you or there's anything that you need to learn you have gone off on a bad track because nobody knows anything about any of this and if you want to do it what I really should do is I should have a giant flag behind me that I would pull a string and it would roll down and on it the flag would be a lot of people. The flag would just say two words just work just work just work just work yeah I love it.

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And now Maria popova essayist author poet and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism at the margin alien part of the library of congresses permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials you can find Maria on Instagram at Maria popova.

Hello ladies and gentlemen this is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show I am extremely excited to have a fellow geek in arms Maria popova on the line with me Maria how are you today very well thank you for having me and I appreciate your coaching on the last name I wasn't sure if it was popova or popova I have friends who for instance novel or Avacan is a friend it's actually novel but Americans can't really pull that off so it goes for an evolve.

So I appreciate the coaching and as a country of immigrants we haven't surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right right absolutely it's just the sort of angle sizing of such a crystal like a melting pot of different cultures and at the same time I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time which is reading and there are so many words I've embarrassed myself on many occasions

that I've read dozens or even hundreds of times especially in scientific literature that I've never heard pronounced. Oh yeah I've called this reader syndrome as somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading you run into that a lot especially with sort of cultural icons last names first means that are still differently than very differently than their pronounced it's kind of tragic comic when you actually find out how their pronounced.

No exactly or it can be a real revelation I remember when I was a young kid I couldn't hit let's say democracy or aristocracy I could only say because I'd also read it demo crashy aristocracy for whatever reason I couldn't get the emphasis right but coming back to the reading and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading if someone asks you and I'm sure occasionally it happens what do you do for those people

listening who may not be familiar with you but we'll start with the cocktail question what's I'm going to ask you what do you do how do you answer that well I've answered it differently over the years and part because I think inhabiting our own identity as kind of a perpetual process but right now I would say I read and I write in that order and in between I do some thinking and I think about how to live a meaningful life basically.

And if someone then were to go online find your work end up at brain pickings and they're like oh this is quite interesting and they kind of looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party and they're like what is brain

pickings how do you typically describe that it's just the record of that thinking my personal subjective private thinking that takes place between my reading and the writing and takes form in writing collection of very interesting things sometimes

you know how I've just sort of simply put it to folks and brain pickings for those people wondering is one of the very few sites that I end up on constantly and when people ask me what blogs do you read I'm embarrassed in some cases kind of humiliated to answer that I don't go really too many blogs consistently

and I think part of the reason is so many of them feel compelled to put out very very timely of the moment material that expires within a few hours and I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Jones is when the Jones is just sort of churning out content

and I remember Kathy Sierra at one point told me that you should focus on just in time information not just in case information which I thought was very stupid and really sort of profound but there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot brain pickings is one and Sam Harris's blog yeah is another and I saw your your review of his latest book waking up well not a review I don't review books I know this is no so this is this is an annotated reading

there well OK so annotated reading and I definitely want to dig into that annotated reading of waking up which I found really impactful for me in a lot of ways it put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I had for a long time talking about reviews I pulled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you and a close friend of mine Chris Saka

he came back with what percentage of New York Times best sellers can be attributed to your coverage and I'd be curious to hear you answer that and then there's sort of a follow up but you've built this incredible powerhouse of an outlet for your whether it's creative musings or observations

and it has a huge influence on what people read so if you just think of that how do you answer that question well first of all you're very pine to put it that way as a stress but I think one big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about are very old out of print I think that are not competing for New York Times best seller in fact I don't even know if I ever really I mean perhaps I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap and the

Venn diagram of things with the New York Times best sellers but I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question is actually that I met him through his wife who collaborated with when they would not be illustrator whose work I love and I love Wendy on a book about wine and and I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges are

existing ideas about sort of sensor experience and I like things that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it but in any case so I wrote about that book in that particular piece on grand picking seemed to do pretty well and I think perhaps that war can't with the Chris's idea of how much contemporary books I really sort of

interested in right but I would say that's a minority right and for those people wondering it's the essential scratch and sniff guide to becoming a wine expert which was written along with and the illustrations are wonderful Richard Betts is the Somalia who is part of that and at one point I met with him because I wanted to try to

deconstruct the master Somalia test and he said I can show you how to do it and it was just the paired down sort of hacked if you will version still of passing master Somalia test was so intimidating that I put it on ice indefinitely but at some point Richard we will talk again and form a game plan so the opposite of course of sort of putting out this material that expires as soon as it's out on the vine is putting out what I think you do very often and that is

timely in time as I've heard you call it material where you're pulling from old sources or older sources doing pattern recognition to pull from other areas to talk about say a theme or something that still affects people and I was doing research for this interview and we met

briefly New York at an event and I've been a long time fan of your work and so I thought to myself like how much digging do I really need to do and good God you have such an absolute pen and of work out there it is astonishing I mean it is really very kind it's just the volume of time really it's been you know I've been doing this for eight years coming up actually exactly a month from today it'll be eight years so it's just the accumulation you know and I'm fascinated by routine and

schedule and you know reading from of course not the always accurate but generally good place to start with the idea and it says that brain picking takes you know 400 plus hours of work per month hundreds of pieces of content per day 12 to 15 books per week that you're reading I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before but sometimes the answer is change and all they always do and which is why I actually don't

do interviews very frequently because I find that they sort of tend to kind of cast us as the static thing to just stay there some sort of reference point while we're really just the fluid process and we're constantly evolving but in any case no definitely so the question that you've I'm sure been asked many times but I'll ask again is how do you find slash choose the books that you read this is a huge problem for me because I might

appetite for reading outstrips the time that I have and so I end up actually unfortunately sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books I've taken on it at any given point in time so I'd be curious how you sort of vet the books that you read well I guess it goes back to that question of well let me back track and just say that I write about a very wide array of disciplines and errors and sensibilities because that's what I think about

to have anything from art and science to philosophy psychology history design poetry you name it but the common denominator for me is just this very simple question of just this illuminate dumb aspect they were small of that grand question that I think we all tussle lit every day which is how to live well how to live a good meaningful fulfilling life whether that's Aristotle's views on happiness and government or beautiful art from 12th

century Japan or Sam Harris did new book anything got it and I've read you citing curve on a good before curve on against one of my favorite writers of all time I know I heard your semicolon quote is the I think it was

either the interview with Kevin Kelly or with Sam but I actually have a counterpoint the semicolon okay no no but so on so I actually brought up the semicolon quote partially as a sort of wink wink nod to a friend of mine named John Romano who has a tattoo of a semicolon on his four

he loves type nerds he loves semicolon he also has a molecule of testosterone on the other armies he's a fascinating guy but the quote that I heard you cite that I wanted to dig into a bit was the curve on against saying right to please just one person so my question to you is when you write

is that still the case and if so who is that person that you are writing for it this very much the case I still write for an audience of mine and that myself that's like I said it's just a like my thought process my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understands

my place in that understand how we relate to one another how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated meaningless information and the sort of transmutation of information into wisdom really which is what learning to live is

it's about wisdom and that's interesting too because when I started brand clickings like I said I will say years ago it started very much as a private record of my curiosity and I shared it with seven co-workers that I had at the time just as a little sort of email newsletter thing

and now to think that there are about seven million people strangers reading it every month that's amazing congratulations but I'm not sort of number dropping first fail or anything like that but just to try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing to a

one person one very sort of inward person but there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and just relating to this pretty private act and it's a strange thing to live with and in no way a bad thing I'm not complaining about it obviously but it's just

interesting to observe how one relates to oneself when being looked on by a few million people you know definitely and there's so many so many questions I want to ask you we might have to do part two at some point because I know we have some time constraints but the first question

would be related to that there's so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after kind of the tried and true Buzzfeed type headlines do you ever contend with that temptation and if so how do you resist it and this is part of the you know how do you respond

to the expectations of the crowd or the seven million people looking on and I feel this personally sometimes because I have a blog it has certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have I'm somewhere between one and two million in each

a month usually but thank you but even at that scale there are times when I put out something that I feel is very important but on the dense side and then it will sometimes it takes off but but sometimes it doesn't and there's a lot of temptation when for instance

I know you use social media quite a bit and we'll get to that where I look at say the retweets the favorites on something that's kind of dense and then I'm like oh God I should just do like the seven tricks you can actually teach your cat you know and get 500,000

retweets is that something that ever sort of crosses your mind and do you ever feel that temptation well you know it's interesting because I think anybody who thinks in public which is what writing is which is even what art is it's some sort of

putting a piece of oneself out into the world anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting to really stay true to one's experience you know and being aware that as soon as it's out in the world there's this notion

of the other audience and you know Oscar Wilde he very memorably said that a true artist takes note notice whatever of the public and that the public are to him non-existent and it's very easy to say especially for somebody as wild who is very prolific, very public

almost performative in his public present it's very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say well you can't possibly not care about the audience given you make her living through it and sort of perform to it right I think that's a pretty cynical interpretation

I think rather than hypocrisy it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood which is why all art comes to be because one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for who here she is and so with that lens I do think it's hard to say well you know I don't care about what happens to it out there even though I write for myself and think for myself the awareness of the other really does change things but I think perhaps

Werner Herzog put in best I just finished reading this kind of 600 page interview with him essentially it's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Krunin had with him over the course of 30 years and one passage Herzog says something like you know

it's always been important for me to have my films reach an audience I don't necessarily need to hear what those audience reactions are just as long as they're out there they're touching that the films are touching people in some ways and I feel very similarly so with that in mind I guess to answer your question rather circuitously I don't feel quite tempted to make listicles or to make anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for and in part I think the beauty

of the web is that it's a self-perfecting organism but for as long as it's an ad-supported medium the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest so perfect the art of the Buzzfeed listicle the endless light share the intimately paginated article and not to perfect the human spirit

yeah of the reader or the writer which is really what I'm interested in I think it's a very virtuous goal I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons one of them is I feel a very kindred spirit with a lot of the decisions it seems

you have made so for instance I mean not doing the slideshows to rack up page views for some type of CPM advertising that stuff drives me insane so if it drives me insane and I assume it drives my readers insane so I'm not

going to do it or like you said that's so wonderful that you do that because I think so much of the cultural crap that is out there not just in the internet just in general comes from people who fail to understand that they should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist so if you're a

writer write the things you want to read if you're an artist paying the bulls who want to see painted and I think the commercial aspect is really working that and one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations from your books to you know this podcast the site

there's just this sort of sense that you just want this to exist it doesn't exist for any other reason than you wanted to exist and I think that's wonderful thank you that means a lot to me and I you know coming back to the right to please just one person I think that it's related to that so in a way it's put the things out into the world that you would want to consume yourself or experience yourself number one secondly just for those people who haven't heard this anecdote when I was

in the four hour work week is my first book I still to this day find writing very challenging and I wish I could say it's gotten easier over time but for whatever reason it seems not to have in the case of the four hour work week I

came out of undergrad at Princeton and many years past obviously but when I wrote the first few chapters it was really stilted in pompous and kind of Ivy League you know where you know trying to use ten dollar words were a ten cent word would suffice and be a lot cleaner so I threw out the first few

chapters that I drafted and this was a major panic attack moment on deadline and I remember I was in Argentina at the time and then I went the other way and I said no no I have to be loose I have to be funny and so I wrote a few chapters that were completely slapstick ridiculous I mean they've they sounded like three stooches put on paper and so I had to throw out those few chapters and of course I'm doubling down on my anxiety at this point and decided at one point that

I had to have a little bit of your but my T T two glasses of wine and no more than two glasses of mall back and sit down and start to write what is that mall back is just this wonderful variety in South America best known in Argentina

but they're actually some really nice mall back wines in Chile as I understand it it was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires and has developed this worldwide fame because of its cultivation in Argentina so there's a lot of metaphor there that

I also like but drank two of us as a wine sat down and literally opened up an email client and started typing the four hour work week as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends one was an investment banker trapped in his own job and he felt like he couldn't leave because his lifestyle was swelling to meet his income and then the other was an entrepreneur sort of trapped in a company of his own making and so these two very specific guys in mind I started to

write with just enough alcohol to sort of take the edge off and that's how you know I was writing in that case to please just two people but that's the only way I could make it work your schedule I've read of your schedule but I'd love to hear the current iteration of that it seems like you've had a fairly you have a fairly regimented schedule which would make sense if you putting the number of hours into reading and writing that you do so what does your current

day look like well I'll answer this with the caveat the one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last years couple years maybe is this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and presence and especially in a culture that seems to measure or

worst or marriage or our value through our efficiency and our earnings and our ability to perform certain tasks as opposed to just the fulfillment we feel in our lives and the presence that we take in the day to day and that's something that's like a more and more apparent to me so I'm a

little bit reluctant to discuss routine as some sort of holy grail creative process because it's just really it's a crutch I mean routines and rituals help us not feel like this overwhelming mission that should have just day to day life with consumers it's a control mechanism but that's not

all there is an if anything it should be in the service of something greater which is being present with one is in light so without a mind my day is very predictable I get it in the morning I meditate through the train 15 to 25 minutes before I do anything else what time do you wake up typically I

can I exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed so in varies I'm a huge proponent of sleep I think when I write because what or when I guess try to think what I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts and in order to

have to happen you know those associative change need to be firing and when I am sleep deprived I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain which is certainly I'm not unique in that in any way there's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep we're

almost as drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time we normally need to function and I think ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by and very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that the speaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is but really it's a total profound

failure of priorities and of self respect and I fried to in sort of enact that in the light by being very disciplined about my sleep at least at the supplement as I am about my work is the latter is a product of the capacities cultivated by the former so in any case so I get

up eight hours after I have gone to bed I meditate I go to the gym where I rest of my longer form reading I get back home I had breakfast and I start writing I usually write between two and three articles a day and one of them tends to be longer and when I write I need uninterrupted

time so I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert so I don't look at email or anything really external the material I'm dealing with which does require quite a bit of research usually so it's not like I can cut myself off from the internet or from other

books but I don't have people disruptions I guess so anything social and then I take a short break I'm a believer in sort of pacing creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and you take a short break and then cycle back you know and then I

deal with any sort of admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot and I resume writing and I write my other article or articles through the evening I try to have some private time just later in the day either with friends or with my partner or

just time that is unburdened by deliver it thought although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general and then usually later at night I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two got it so a number of follow up questions what type of

meditation do you practice currently just guided the pasta and very very basic there's a woman named Tara Brock who she's a mindfulness practitioner how do you call her last name B or A C H got it and she's based out of DC and she was trained as a cognitive

psychologist then the decades of Buddhist screening and living in Osher and now she teaches mindful lesbian with a very secular lens so she records her classes and she has a podcast which is how I came to know her and every week she does a one hour lecture and sort of

the philosophies and cognitive behavioral wisdom of the age of the man she never guided meditation I use her meditation years and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life so I highly recommend her Tara Brock Brock yes and all her her podcast is free just two books out

to him it's really a wonderful very diverse person I will have to check that out and see you're listening then you have earbuds you're listening to audio while you meditate yes and it's interestingly I mean she puts one out every week but I've been using

the exact same one from the summer of 2010 it's just one that I like and feel familiar with and it sort of helps me get into the rhythm every day I listen to the exact summer 2010 how would people recognize it how does the audio I think the title is it sounds chavie but it is not chavie I think it's called smile meditation and I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years and other recordings it just happens to be the one that I have on and on my broken 3g iPhone without any

internet or cell service which I just use as an iPod that's on it awesome that's great answer I love digging into the specifics when you go to the gym then to work out are you still using an elliptical for that or are you are I do sprints high intensity of all sound the elliptical and are you

recording and I do a lot of weight and body weight step to you do all right but when you're reading is that on the elliptical yes and what type of device if any are you using for that reading well I prefer electronic so I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any pdm viewer because I read a

lot of archival stuff but the challenge of course is that because I read so many older books that are out of print let alone having digital versions that's not always possible in case it's rarely possible and I'm writing about something fairly new and so in that case I just go there

with my big tone and nice sticky notes and pens and sharp keys and various annotation and a long devices and I just do that cool all right so that lead perfectly into the next question which is what is your note taking system look like and how do you take notes for instance you're

really good at using excerpts or quotations poll quotes and I found myself asking as I was reading this like how are you gathering all this so that you can use it later so what is your note taking system look like in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy so with digital

it's very simple I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or a short hand that I have developed for myself understanding really which is below reading should be a conduit to

is a form of pattern recognition so when you read a whole book you kind of walk away with certain take away that are thematically linked and it won't usually occur sequentially so it's not like you walk away with one inside from the first chapter one inside from the chapter it's just

sort of this pattern of the writers thoughts that permeate the entire narrative book and so especially if you read as a writer so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that but I gilly wants to record what those patterns and things are that sort of reading is very different so

what I end up doing with analog books in particular and that sort of hapsim systems of doing it electronically with their imperfect and on the very last page of each book which is blank usually right before the end cover I create an alternate index so I basically list

out as I'm reading the topics and ideas that seem to be important and recurring in that volume and then next to each of them I start listening out the page numbers where they occur and on those pages I had obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little

sort of stick tab on the side so I can find it but it's an index based not on keywords which is what a standard book index is based on but based on key ideas and I use that then to sort of synthesize what those ideas are once I'm ready to write it at the book

okay I have to geek out on this because I'm so excited now as it turns out with analog books I do exactly literally exactly the same thing I usually start with the in front inside cover but I create my own index and of course they don't have to be in order so you can

sort of list them in any in my particular case in any order I also will have sort of a couple of lines dedicated to pH and pH just refers to phrasing so if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find really oh I do that too really but I would be out for beautiful language oh that's so cool okay

so there's that and then I have q or if they're quotes so for instance many books will have quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases and so I'll have quotes I'll just write that out and then colon and then I'll list all the page

numbers for that particular sort of category that I'm collecting in the case of quotes when you're gathering as you mentioned acronyms and shorthand so besides beautiful language what are some of the other acronyms that you use oh they wouldn't make

that they're just very private it's like too long to get into what they stand for is there is there is there one other example that you just if you could indulge me one that is I guess not so much about the contents of that passage is about its purpose is L.J. which is a little sort of labor

of love side project called littering jude box right sure I've seen it it's yeah it's awesome thank you but yeah so I do these tearing the pathogen literature with a thematically matched song and so sometimes as I'm reading a book I would come across a passage that I think would be great

for that and maybe a song comes to mind and so I would put L.J. next to it but I want to go back to what you said about the external quotes I guess the author quoting another work I think those are actually really important and that goes back to your question

find what to read and I mark those types of things so for the annotations that are specific to that's particular book all of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the pages but when there's an external quote something referencing another work I put a tab at the very top with the

letter at which stands for find if I am not with the work or just no letter if I just want to flag a quote from something else that I know of and I think that's actually very important because the phenomenon itself not my annotations of it because literature is really and I see this all the time

it is the original internet so all of those references and citations and illusions even they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work and that way if you follow those you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something that you're

already enjoying and liking but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way I mean directly and in a way it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way and I often found amazing

older books that were five or six hyperlinks references removed for something I was reading which led me to something else which is something else which led me to this great other thing so I think that's kind of a beautiful practice the serendipity of it is so beautiful when it

works out and I'll give a confession this is really embarrassing but you know since you know as a listening I came across senica so senica the younger who's had probably more impact on my life than any other writer originally because I was perusing it a number of anthologies on minimalism

and simplicity and senica kept on popping up quote senica quote senica because it was always one word like Madonna or and this is going to be really embarrassing or like sitting ball I assumed that senica was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good I assumed he was a Native American

elder for a probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman and I was like man first you got to do your homework valic you got to dig in and then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off the cliff into a lot of his writings which I've I still to this day revisit

on an almost I just revisited the shortness of light so good so we just perhaps the best manifesto and I had hate this modern word sort of buzzword but I use it intentionally so the best manifesto for our current struggle with this very notion of productivity versus presence and how much are we

really mistaking the doings for the being it's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago before there was internet before there was the things we call distractions today and yet he writes about the exact same things just in a different form yeah the exact same

things and the way that if I'm trying to use senica as a gateway drug into philosophy I won't use the p word first of all with most people because philosophy I think it calls to mind for a lot of people the haughty pompous college student in goodwill hunting in the bar scene who's like reciting

you know she experienced that giving any type of they are completely disagree I agree with the notion that those are connotations today and people have a resistance but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and use it intelligently and to reclaim

it and to get people to understand that philosophy whatever form it takes is the only way to figure out how to live everything else that we take away from anything is a set of philosophy essentially I agree no I totally agree so but I usually if I'm going to lead people there I try to lure them

lure them in with with senica because I think he's very easy to read compared to a lot of say at least the stoics or that's actually not even fair compared to a lot of philosophers who who have been translated from Greek most of his writing I believe is translated from Latin which

tends to be just an easier jump from English so it's very easy to read and I what I tell people is you know start off with some of his letters and you'll find that you could just as easily replace these Roman names like Lucillus and so on with like Bob and Jane or you know pick your

contemporary name of choice and they're all as relevant now as they were then I'm going to come back to the performance versus presence which I think of oftentimes as the achievement versus appreciation split or balance or maybe neither but before we get there

I want to put a bow on the note taking with your electronic note taking so you're using the Kindle app you're taking highlights where do you go from there what is the sort of workflow look like from there and are there any particular types of software or apps or anything like that that you use

often honestly I feel like that problem has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way so the way that I do it is basically a bunch of hacks using existing technologies but I don't think or perhaps I'm just unaware but I don't think there's anybody designing tools today

for people could do serious heavy reading there just isn't anything that I know and so what I do is I highlight in the Kindle app and the iPad and then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop on your computer I go to those I copy them

from that page and I paste them into an ever-node file to sort of just have all of my notes in a specific book in one place but sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific iPad Kindle app Kindle page with my highlighted passage and then email that screen

grab into my ever-node email because ever-node has as you know optical character recognition so when I search within it it's also going to search the text in that image I don't have to wait until I finish the book and explore all my notes and and also it's the formatting is kind of shitty on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes so if you copy them they'd paste into theogle, you can trigger all of your notes on the seconds so you can see a bunch of triggers on the 긁�

sea gate. But I didn't sort of check them out on this channel with the sitting down the bottom right right. So until the end So it won't inform me for sure if I get required. And if you go think of that time of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know.

Got it. Okay, so let me, this may or may not help. For me, it was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote, because I mean, I'm looking at this list of questions and I'm not reading

entirely on script, but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now. And one of the things I realized about formatting and transposing things from say, you know, my Kindle page, if you log into your Amazon account through Kindle.Amazon.com or copying pasting from many different places is going to, I don't know if you've tried this, but edit and either paste and match style or paste is plain text and it tends to remove all of that headache. Let's see nine times out of 10.

The problem with that I did try that once, but when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So on every highlight of Gauzege also have my own note. I see. Got it. Plus, you know, Amazon's own thing that says add note read read in this location. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it all merges it and becomes just hideous. It's just a awful thing.

God, you know, I wonder, I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into text Wrangler, which is used for coding a lot just to remove the formatting and then put it into Evernote. Yeah, I do that with code. Yeah, it's true though. There's got to be a solution. And the thing is Evernote, I love Evernote. I've been using it for many years and I could probably not get

through my day without it, but it has an API, which means so, but he can build this. You know, in a way to like, I even thought, I mean, I was at one point so desperate and so frustrated, which I think is the duo that causes all innovation, you know, death, race and frustration. I thought maybe I should just save up some money and offer like a scholarship or like a grant for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me, you know. That's a great idea.

I mean, I'm still sort of contemplating that. Okay, well, we'll talk about that separately. I think that's something that we could absolutely explore. And for all of you, programmers, coders out there, please take a look. This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights. I've run into this. You mentioned

the Werner Herzog book and having thousands of highlights. Have you run into instances where you'll read an entire book, you're super impressed or not, but regardless, you have hundreds of highlights and you go to look at those highlights and you're restricted to only see it. Yeah, it's like 200 highlight 81 available. Right. So how often does that happen to you? Because that's happened to me where I've taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff.

And then I'm only able to see 25% and it's so infuriating. And I think it's a limitation that is determined by the publisher. Yes, it is. And so I'll tell you why it hasn't happened to mean much. It happens to me occasionally, but that's a DRM thing. Digital for listeners who don't like acronyms, digital rights management thing that has that is fairly new. So that is the case that we're recently published books. But if you read the digitized version of, say, Alan

Watts, it was published originally 40 years ago. There's no such problem unless the publisher now is reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But because I rate so much less out of sort of newly published material, I don't run into it often. But you know, there is a way to very laboriously deal with it, which is you can still open that passage in your Kindle app on desktop. So Kindle for Mac for me. And it will let you highlight and copy those passages

to paste them into your ever noted between the missing courts. But it's obviously I've done that. I have done that. And it's so horrible because you also get the like excerpted from that I like three lines. Everyone. So just publishers, if you're listening to this, you are making it harder for people like Maria have seven million unique per month to share your stuff. So please up your threshold. Do you have anybody helping you with brain

pickings? Or is it just you? The actual reading and writing obviously is just me. But as of about 10 months ago, I have an assistant Lisa who's actually wonderful and she just helps me with admin depth that has to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel

is weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down or and as you know, I'm sure when you get to point where the demands are just incomparable with what you can even look at, then you kind of need to have help in order not to either go insane or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. Oh, and I also have a copyator. This wonderful older lady I hired to do my true

reading. She's great. That's all I can say. I think proofreading is really, really important. And I'm constantly embarrassed if I have a typo which, you know, as you know, as a writer, you cannot prove your own work. And just your brain just does not see the errors that we made in the first place. More the majority of them. And people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or I don't even know. There's no kind of compassion for the humanity that

produces something as human as a typo, right? Despite how mechanical the term itself seems, which is sort of ironic. But in any case, so yes, I have my assistant Bradman and my copy editor, if you're just perfect. What platform is brain picking is on at the moment? What's the technology behind it? I know that I've heard you mentioned WordPress before. Is it on, is it still on WordPress? It is on WordPress. I was going to make a joke in here about how the technology is called Corpus

Colossum. But the actual technology is very. Very Sam Harris friendly joke. So when you're working with say your copy editor, do you give your copy editor admin access to WordPress and she'll go in, proofread it and then schedule or publish? What's the process? No, it's a very against a version of hack together process, which is every night I email her the articles from the preview page on WordPress. I just copy that and paste it into a body email. And I send it to her and

she sends me the corrections via email. Got it. I mean, like I said, she's not very, I would say tech savvy. I mean, I'm sure she's a wonderful learner. So I'm sure she would totally learn how to do it if I gave her admin access. But between that and the fact that I write an HTML, so I really don't like the wigs away. I hate it actually. I think it's just easier to do it the email because then she can like highlight the word. And sometimes she would make suggestions that are more stylistic.

And I would like to have the final say in those because very often I want to keep it the way that I have it because I voiced. So I find email works just fine. Got it. Okay, no, I'm always fascinating because I will use while what I was hosting WordPress elsewhere. I'm also in WordPress. I would use the share draft plugin to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP. It has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself,

which is pretty cool. Oh, that's cool. I should look into that. I think that's what I have to. The WordPress VIP that's where fresh. That's the first. I don't even know what that function is. I'm kind of, I mean, for somebody who writes on the web, I don't really, yeah, I sometimes only learn about things through friends. I think, yeah, that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff. And the other option that I've used quite a lot is, and as much as I hate word, and I really do,

I love the track changes feature. And I just find it more user-friendly for a lot of folks than having them use something that's cloud-based like Google Docs, just because I operate so much offline to try to get anything done. Yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of people suggest in what Kai, my favorite, are actually asked originally, but I do not own Microsoft products

on principle. And I just am not going to deal with it. Got it. Okay. No, that makes sense. And you're assistant, what was the defining moment, the straw that broke the camel's back when you were like, you know what, like what was the day where you're just like, fucking enough of this? Like, I need to get somebody stat. I mean, when did you actually make the decision?

It wasn't so much that I made the decision and the decision was very strongly, lovingly, but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner, who one day said, you're using so much time on things that are just so mean-y-al and you should not. And because I was really stressing to a point of just driving myself crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm always having been very independent. I moved away from my parents' house when I was 18,

couldn't wait to her school, lived always by myself. And you just have to immerse in like, you know, setting the self-sufficient, the self-reliance that to a point of pathology, where it was to my own detriment. And the notion of outsourcing felt to me on some level, almost like in the admission of weakness. Sure. It's ridiculous. I think that's true for a lot of

people, though, yeah. I know. And the strange thing, the disorienting thing is that I think we intellectually know that's not the case, that it's actually a lot of strength to be able to delegate and to sort of divvy up control according to a higher-care priority. But on some sort of cycle-emotional level, it is just death to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, it's interesting in terms of how bringpickings of all, which has always been

very organic. So the sort of eight-year thing that has happened, it went from being a little newsletter that contained five links, no text, like five links to five things that I found very interesting. And then it went to sort of five links with a little paragraph about each. Of a widest thing is interesting and important. And then it was not a little paragraph, but a little like one-page piece. And then it became not five things every Friday, but three things every day

of the week, pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know. And I foolishly and the ebony thought that I could just have the same sort of operational framework despite the enormous swelling of just the volume of the writing. And that's unreasonable, it's completely unreasonable. So at one point last fall, add the sort of seven birthday of bringpickings as approaching. My partner was just like, please consider. I'm always curious to ask, how did you find

the assistant that you ended up with? Well, she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant that's had this type of job for about 20 years. She's just a wonderfully warm and just generous person, but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic. It's unbelievable. And you always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interest in the most magnanimous kind of way towards you, but also the most warmly non-no bullshit way outwardly

towards the world demanding things from you. And having this buffer, it's really, really great. How did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected? Just a recommendation. She's been working for somebody who's a very trusted dear person for a long time to now shoot or she's

worth aness. And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the specifics because the way that I found one of my first assistants and we worked together for many years was anytime I had a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant, I would say, hey, I know this is off topic, but you've been awesome to deal with. Do you have twin brother, twin sister, somebody who does what you do as well as you do it that you could recommend to me,

because I need some help. And I just did that over and over again and eventually one of the said, well, actually, I work for multiple clients. So we could talk about it. And that's how we ended up working together. But what was the introduction was made by the person? So I had met her, at least

in my assistant, I'd met her just socially many times before. And so eventually when the time came for me to consider we set up a meeting, we talked and she was really into it and she'd been reading brain pickingles and I asked, make sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate because she's also, I mean, she's super womanly, she's super womanly, she is the mother of two kids, one of whom is now her

first year in high school and the other one, his first year in college. So she had that on her plate too, but she's very like I said, very dog-ed, very sort of dedicated and she was like, I can do it. I'd like to do it. And I was like, great. Let's roll. Onward. So with your assistant, if you were to do an 80-20 analysis of, you know, the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time, what would those

look like? What is the vast majority of her time spent on? A lot of it as I guess coordinating travel and things, but I'm trying to really, I mean, I have this new-ish commitment to really not do any speaking at commercial conferences anymore, but to speak to students because I think it's important and what it takes out of me, which is a lot, speaking takes out a lot of me because I'm

a writer and I also don't really recycle talks. I like to write something original. And when it's a commercial conference, it just doesn't add up to me what I get out of it because I usually donate my commission's due to the local public library and whatnot. But with students, it is work my time. If I disheve even one journalism student friend going into buzzworthy land, you know, after graduation, that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking speaking, I now getting

like all these college requests. And so that takes so much time, especially coordinating because a lot of them are organized by sort of student volunteers and they're kind of still earning what it means to schedule deadlines and advanced notice. And some Lisa is sort of reiling that. And another big part, I should also mention the evolution of what I've been able to delegate has sort of organically happened originally. I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it

because I didn't know how to explain it to her to do. But it's just a great learner and I'm learning to delegate more. But another thing because my site runs on donations, I sort of make an effort to send handwritten thank you cards to just at this point randomly picked donors every month. And so I have her sort of export those names and emails for me and just prepare envelopes and all those types of things that I could not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing.

Do you communicate exclusively the email or do you use other types of software? Oh email email and text email and text. So no project management software at this point, no sort of base camp or a sauna or anything like that. That would make me like some sort of commercial organization. You know, I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things. No. After the Oxford Wild hypocrisy about the audience, there's an

entity I guess of the tension. A couple of quick ones. So the first is when you lift, do you tend to have the same workout? What does your weight lifting look like? It's changed a lot. In the last year and a half, I've prioritized body weight stuff heavily now by the intended. That was actually total inadvertent to this how language, how we think in language. That's so funny. I prioritize body weight stuff. And so I do pull-ups for ships and that sort of thing. It also depends on

where I do my work at. My building has a sort of gym like a, you know, one of those residential gyms, but I also have a membership at a larger probably I think the best gym in New York. I love it. But I'm only there a few days a week. So it just depends on where I do it and what I do. If you had to pick one, besides the elliptical, if you had to pick one bodyweight exercise to hold you over, let's say you're traveling for a few months, you can only pick one bodyweight

exercise. What would it be? Well, it would be pull-up, but you can't always find a place to do it. So I just do usually elevated pushups in my feet on a bench or a bench or some like a step or something and just pushups. Cool. A great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath the table to do basically inverted. You know, it's actually very helpful for traveling is. Biometrics. Biometrics and TRX is actually quite handy. There's a system.

For some reason, it just not my thing. Can't get into it. Yeah. It doesn't, the thing is if I am forced by circumstance to do a work at that is not my preference, I very much like to be able to do something else while doing it such as listening to podcasts, which is what I do while I do wakes at the gym anyway. There are certain types of movements that

it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just like not great. So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me when I travel in case there's nowhere to do sprints, which is my plan B for cardio and then plan C is just jumping, skipping rope.

You're intense. I love it. Every time I meet and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weight lifters for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who at any point have lived in Bulgaria, I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's not. I know nothing about them. I don't exactly wait. When I was living in Bulgaria, I was so obsessed. No, exactly. It's kind of like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in

the Rikolo commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff. There was yet, is that guy your cousin? Yeah, right. Right. You must know. Like, no, I actually don't. I know I went to X, Y, and Z college, but there are 5,000 people per year. You know, it doesn't always. We got you mentioned the donations. I want to talk about the site. So it appears, and I dug around a bit, but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts. Is that accurate?

I do have comments. I do have date. They're in the URL. They're in the URL, but they're not in the post. They're in the URL structure, but they're not in the displayed post itself. Yeah. So the reason for that is because I do think we live in an enormously

news fetishistic culture. And the reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that, because we think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed, because all feed, the reverse chronology, and you know, there's an implicit hierarchy of importance to that. We think if it's not at the top, it's not important. And you know, you would understand, you know, writing about Sena Ka, it really doesn't matter what the

date stamp on it is. But I think because culture, condition of this so much, people when they see a date stamp, they sort of think, oh, this was like two years old. And it's really, you know, 2000 years old. But big, the thought of academics actually used brain picking to reference. So I constantly get things. This is another thing that Lisa Deals would like, requests from textbooks

for citations or, you know, whatnot. And those people actually need the date. So I've made it so that if you actually look, it's kind of easy to see where I can just tell them when they write and ask me what the date is, look at the URL. But it's just not one of those immediate things that slaps you over the head like a newspaper front page, you know. Definitely. I actually have done

the same thing for quite a few years. And if you go to any permalink, so if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog, the date is there in the URL, but also at the very bottom of the post after the related links. So for the same reason, because there's so much bias against older material. And I think some of my older stuff is, I mean, it depends on the person obviously in the context, but it's an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate is to timestamp.

The comments, did you ever have comments or have you never had comments? I did originally. And then I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like Herzog does. I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched. But the comments that was getting, I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know, trolley or anything like that. But they were kind of vacant or people trying to plug their own thing or spam. And it

was taking more of my time that was worth. And so instead of made my contacts, information very easily accessible. So if someone has something up substance and urgency to say, which is I think the two things that can help people to reach out, they'll do it via email behind their own name and not anonymously. And then, I mean, I did get a lot of a lot of emails from readers. And those

are valuable, you know, but I don't really care for comments. Now the flip side of that is that now that I have the Facebook page having something mysterious happened with the Brinkley Consul page last fall work, it just started growing so fast. I have no idea why you know, I was going to ask you about that because if you look at say that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kind of took off. Yeah, it was in about October of last

year and it went from 250,000 to now, I think I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. Two point something million close to three, maybe. So more than 10 fold in less than a year,

I have no idea why I've done nothing differently. I'm very, I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do reluctantly because I get a lot of emails from readers elsewhere in the world who actually use Facebook as their primary thing and they're such sweet notes, you know, people who just are stimulated and inspired and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn't be if they hadn't read that piece about some random thing that I read in good about. And I think it would be selfish of

me to just sort of disable Facebook because I hate it. But the points of it is that you have comment on there. And Lisa, my assistant actually, that's something I delegated her a few months ago, just to completely deal with them. I can't deal with them. And not for any other reason that I have complete allergy to people pronouncing their so-called opinions without having actually digested, or even engaged with the thing. So people would comment on the basis of like a thumbnail image or

the title, make really outrageously inaccurate comments clearly not having read the piece. And this kind of mapped reaction thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I can't deal with it. It's like a psychic drain, like I can't even explain it, just I can't. So that would explain, that would answer one of my questions, which is in your header picture on Facebook, you have, this should be a cardinal role of the internet end of being human. If you don't

have the patience to read something, don't have the hubris to comment on it. I was gonna, I was gonna, I don't care if it sounds like Bixie or anything. You know, it's interesting because I think a lot about criticism and the notion of criticism and why it's so hard for anybody. And I don't think that people have a hard time with criticism because another person just agrees with or dislikes what they're saying. They really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood. The other person

does not understand who they are or what they stand for in the world. And 99% of the time, and you actually touch on this in your conversation with Sam Harris, where he said, his ideas are not as controversial as people think when they don't actually understand what they are. Right. But the main source of anguish is not being seen for who you are, not being understood. And this kind of reactive culture where people comment without taking the care to understand

what you're expressing clearly or what you stand for, it is so toxic. It is so toxic. It's leaders to writers to us as a culture. And I just don't know how to get around it other than just having and struck at least that to be just merciless about banning people and deleting comments that are just not there's no humanity. There's no patience. There's no thinking in them. So, you know, anybody who writes online, I think, feels similarly that this is kind of my home and if

definitely people comment be idiots and it's then they're not welcome there. Yeah. Yeah. No, I actually use the exact same analogy. I say, look, I view my especially on my blog. I view the comments as my living room. And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like put your feet up on my table with your shoes on, you're not going to be invited back. You're gone. So, is your assistance job as it relates to Facebook then primarily calling the

herd and just removing the idiots or what are other instructions if any? Are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that she responds to? No, I don't really care what people say again to the point that if people have something of substance and urgency, they will reach out. And I'm then very happy to hear actual humans and engage in the human dialogue which I do. But I really care about the comments on Facebook. I just don't want them depressing me when I go

on the page because I put my own thing. And I also don't want them creating a culture that is antithetical to the very reason why I do what I do which is a kind of faith in the human spirit. I mean, that's where I come from. I am a cautious one sometimes with an optimist about their so-called human condition and anybody who craps on that without having even given a chance to the thoughts that speak to those ideals, which is what my articles are record of, then I will want them gone.

You know, and so her instructions are just, you know, ban people who are offensive to others sort of in a vicious way as opposed to just having rational discourse of disagreements. Ban people who are ignorant and have not read the thing and have some very scandalous or I think I have a scandalous sort of culture in sensationless take on it clearly not understanding the nuance because I mean, a culture of news is I say often a culture without nuance.

Yeah, so that that's basically it. Help me say saying when I look at them, that's her task. If you thought they could lose my mind over exasperation when people are impatient. No, and I really respect that because another reason that I read brainpickings is opposed to other sites and I feel comfortable going there is that I feel it is sort of a stronghold of positivity and optimism in a lot of respects. So kudos.

Thank you. The email. Actually, before we get the email, I've read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook, which would make sense because you're prolific. If it's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media? I use buffer for Twitter and I use just my hands for Facebook. But again, I mean, this goes back to the same inner struggle of I do want to be reading and writing for myself. So why do I have the compulsion to pursue

much of it out there? And I self-glagely over that because on some level, it does seem like a form of hypocrisy. But then I do think about the people that email me from India and Pakistan and South Africa and Korea and wherever. That actually that's how they connect. And I think if I'm putting in the amount of time that I do into into what I do, even if I do it for myself, I might as well just harness that time anyway. It could benefit somebody else's journey. And so I do it because of that

mostly. Definitely. And I think that while it's fine to write for yourself, if you keep the value of what you write to yourself when it could benefit a lot of other people, then I think that's actually, it could be viewed as a selfish act. So I think that there's particularly when you're curating in the way that you do and you're saving people thousands of hours of searching by distilling a lot of these concepts. Well, I would argue that the benefit, the value, I mean,

what I do is kind of the entitusious of search. It's a discovery of things that ideally one would not have come across within the usual parameters of one's filter bubble, right? To sort of a lot of the people that that I hear from, for example, you know, just the sweet tunes, the centric eighth. Well, actually just this week, I heard from this guy who was an IT person trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and said, the centric of the shortness of life, these really put everything

in perspective. I've never really read philosophy. Never been interested in it. Never looked for it, but it just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life. It gives you pause to hear that from people. Definitely. Agreed. On email. If you go to your contact page, you recommend email charter dot org. And I'm very curious to hear if people actually follow the email charter in terms of the email that you receive. Do people actually pay attention to

that and follow the way they do? And I'm so grateful. And I mean, but the majority of them do, you know, some people who reach out with the intention of self-promoting, there's usually, you know, lasing us to people who self-promote for the sake they're of, you know? So they don't, they don't usually follow. But people who actually care to have a conversation and to engage are very courteous and very sort of mindful of what I've asked, except for publicists who are never.

Yeah, right. Well, I suppose if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template, do your blogger. Oh, yeah, I love that. But do your blogger. Yeah. Or, you know, what I get very often, which I think is actually hilarious. People who don't even bother to read the name of the site. So they address me. Beer Brian. The pinnacle of this was when last year, at one point,

I opened my physical mailbox in my building, my home. And I found this bundle from the USPS, but like with an elastic band around it, of mail, for somebody named Brian Pickens, who lives in Long Beach, CA, or used to, I guess. And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me, because I guess the guy that moved in the USPS, like somehow looked things up. And I don't know if it was sex, sort of mystery and metaphor for what I deal with online. So I used to have a company

ages ago called Brain Quicken. And I got a telemarketing call one evening. And a guy goes, hi, sorry, if I'm interrupting, is this Brian? And I go, excuse me? And he goes, Brian, Brian chicken, and I'm like, Brian chicken. But I was like, no, and take me off your list. Goodbye. So on the email and pitching side of things, or just on the pitching side of things, how on earth do you deal with not just cold inquiries, but how do you deal with writer friends or acquaintances who are

writers that you don't want to be rude to, who want you to read their books? How do you polite decline that stuff? And maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is like, not everyone is able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably, if I get 10 books from decent or good friends, some of them are going to be terrible. And I don't have the time to certainly, or the inclination to read them all, how do you deal with

that type of situation? Well, I guess you deal first and foremost by controlling not the outcome, but the cause, which is your circle of friends and acquaintances. I'm very selected about the people I surround myself with. And I'd like to thank friend Lee to pretty much everybody that I need. But my circle of actual friends is really close and really tight. And people who are just

when the skycrumbles are going to be there and we're there for each other. And so with that in mind, I think there is a certain boundary they have to put up beforehand to, I guess, manage social expectations in a way. And so for those people, my friend friends, in large port, I mean, I should mention that the majority of my close friends, including my partner too, are people that I have met just through what I do. So there's already the self-selection of sensibility and ideals.

I think would become a centripetal force for the kinds of people we want to be in surround ourselves with those types of people. William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal micro culture. And even when you said early on, the kinship of spirits, I think that's so important. So which is the long one that we can say that when and if those inner circle people put a book out, it's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are. And so then I'm

more than happy to support it. I mean, the book that we started with, the Crachan-Sniv guide to wine, Wendy, the illustrator is precisely that type of person, somebody who I met through what each of us does. And she's now one of my closest human beings, you know. And so of course I'm going to support her work, but not because I'm being nepotistic about it, but because that's the prerequisement that I am moved by her work and respected and love it. And that's how we

became friends. But outside of that inner circle, I think a queen says no, that there's no such expectation. And when I do get such requests, it's a matter of, well, did the person do their homework in knowing what I actually think and write about? Because very often, I'm sure you get

that too, you get pitched things that are just so outside of what you do. And which case, I don't remember if you'll compelled to respond because if they didn't put into time to understand what I'm interested in, why should I put into time to explain to them why this is not a fit? Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I need to embrace that more. I think that's an area where I carry a lot of guilt. Guilt? Yeah. But guilt, it's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip

side of prestige and there are both horrible reasons to do things. So often we would agree as humans, not just you and me or just anybody would agree to do things because they sound prestigious and so and so away, you know, and equally avoid things because of the guilt thing or do things

because guilt thing. But sort of this whole Buddha's thing about a version of, you know, avoidance and aversion and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is, the fear of disappointing somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself or out of sort of grasping for approval

or acclaim, which is what doing things for prestigious. I think either of those are really bad reasons to do things and yet they motivate us a lot or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the mind constantly and it is a real practice to try to decondition that. Definitely. No, I like what you said about why I put in the effort to explain why it's not a fit if they haven't done the homework to determine if it is a fit. I think that's a great way to put it.

I want to ask and I know we don't have too much time left so hopefully sometime some day we can do a follow-up part two. I think that'd be a blast. I'll bring some mall back if you actually I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the donations, I'm very fascinated by the ad-free donation approach and just to keep it simple, if you had to choose, say, 20% of the options

you're currently offering, which would you choose and why? In other words, you have, so people can make a one-time single contribution or they can become a member and donate, you know, seven, three,

ten, or twenty-five dollars a month. What I'm trying to ask without being improprietous or making you feel uncomfortable is what is working best when you're asking people for donations, you know, assuming that it's working, if someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month or the single contribution versus the membership or the membership versus the

single contribution, what would your advice be to people? Well, I will preface this with a caveat that I use PayPal for donations and I can for the life of me figure out how to actually look at the data and get any sort of real reason. All of it is so antiquated, their export tool and such. And I'm not that interested. I would spife think, you know, days into looking into it. So I can

tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation. Sure. Yeah, great. And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are is also the reason why I don't have an ad-supported site, which is I just asked myself, what would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad-free site. And how would I like to support that? Well, I'd like to have a few options, you know, just because I don't want to, you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just pulled it out of the hat

basically with these tears. And I've just left them on. Since I put them on, they seem to work, you know, whatever. And originally, my sense was that the one-time donations accounted for much more, but I'd never actually analyzed it because I think I exceed the alerts that come from PayPal. And sometimes people would send really large one-time donations, like things that are totally humbling and enormously generous. And I think those kind of, you kind of weigh them somehow as more than

the cumulative sum of the smaller donations. So I thought the one-timers work much more. And pretty sure that must have been the case earlier on. Right. And I've had the recurring ones, I've had the one-time donations for as long as I can remember. For as long as I basically needed to start making money for the site, because by the way, running the site costs me several times my rent, like all the costs associated with it, it's like crazy. So at one point, I got to a point

where I had to make money. I said, I don't want to do ads, I don't believe in that. I'll have just donations. And I didn't even think of recurring ones at the time that was years ago. And then my friend Max Linsky, who runs longsform.org, who are having tea, and he said, well, why didn't she push the recurring ones more? Because it's working really great for us. And at that point, I had the option, but it was buried somewhere on my donation about paying or something.

And so I was like, okay, so I put it in the sidebar. And that was the one I said, maybe 2011. And it started accruing slowly. And so this past year, when I did my taxes, I very reluctantly went to deal with all the PayPal tools to get the data out, basically. And I actually had Lisa pull all the Excel and whatnot. And then I did the tally to see. And to my surprise, the recurring ones, which are very small individual amount, actually were two to one ratio to the one time donation.

Wow. And I don't know at what point it tipped over. But I think because of the scale, and just how many people have these tiny, tiny donations that they contribute every month. I mean, that's such an active commitment. And it's so generous, you know, that they add up. And my guess is that as time goes on, because the recurring ones have only been available to the last, two and a half, three years, whatever, they would become by far the larger, sort of,

financial support compared to the single ones. Sure. And that makes sense. If you had to choose, and of course, this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the drop down, so you have seven dollars a month, three dollars, ten dollars, twenty five, if you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose? So I have no idea. I'm probably just the mathematical logical choice to, to middle, it's a three and ten.

Okay. No, I'm just very curious about this kind of thing. I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content. And I can't emphasize strongly enough what you just said, which is you base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader. In the case of something with tax, it doesn't have to be super complicated. It doesn't have to be doing tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself, would this

annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it. Would I love this? If so, try it out. Every decision, too, has been that way. And actually, in the last couple of years, I've been getting really annoyed. I mean, brain picking is a pretty sort of low-fly site, you can see it. It's very super simple, basic. But I've been getting annoyed that it doesn't load very well in my iPhone when I want to look at something or pull something up to reference

or iPad. And my friend, Scott Belzky, who runs Behan, she's a great guy. And he's been sort of a very generous donor just supporting. And one time, he pulls me aside, that was like, thinking February and March. And he's like, you know how much I love braiding. But like, the site sucks. We can't say it in that way. But he was super sweet about it. And he offered to connect me with this guy that he knew that I could hire to do a responsive design. And I always have this

resistance to making these sort of technological improvements. Because then I feel like, I don't want to be a media company. Like, I don't want to be a BuzzFeed. But at the end of the day, I as a reader and as a sort of, engage with that experience with being annoyed by it myself. So now I'm in the middle of releasing like a simple responsive site that is actually easy to read on your phone. And so, yeah. It's despair and frustration prevail again in

innovation. It's so, so worth it. It took me, let's see, it only took me three. Oh, God, seven years to get a mobile version of the site ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago. So I better late than never. I suppose, well, Maria, this has been a blast. I really appreciate taking the time. If someone were to want to explore brain pickings, what are a few articles you might suggest that they start with or a few posts?

Well, since we talked about it, so my, it's the Svanica piece about the shortness of light, but fairly short. There's a piece I did a couple of years ago, which was less about, it was not about a specific book, just sort of things that I've been thinking about the long time, this disconnect between purpose and prestige and why we do things, right? Forget what it's called. I think it's cold. How to do what you love or some other, how to find your purpose and

do what you love. And it was sort of an assemblage of thoughts on that from various sources as well as my own. And perhaps most of all, a piece that I wrote last fall on the 7th birthday, really, at the site, which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of reading, writing, and living, which is a great article. And I didn't want to replicate everything in here.

So I sort of bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit, but just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I just want to quote Paul Graham here, which you included, which is prestigious, like a powerful bandit that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work

not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. I think it's so astute. And in closing, is there an also I should just interject and say any Alan walks peace, not because my writing about it is so great or it's not coming from a place of check me out. It's coming from a place of check him out. Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him. I'd have fed so highly

recommend any of those articles. All right. BrainPickings.org is the site guys. Check it out. Maria, any parting advice for this episode, this portion of our conversation before we check out? Any advice to the people listening out there, thoughts, parting comments? No advice for say just a guess a comment and a hope, which is that thank you so much.

Not just for having me, but for having this show and for doing everything that you do. And I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just I guess for lack of bit of word idealism and conviction. And thank you for setting fun example that way. Oh, well, that means a lot coming from you. And I think you're a tremendous force for good out there in the world. So I hope people check out your work. I hope you continue to do what you're

doing. I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull ups. We will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, term. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me? Every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

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