#168: Dissecting the Success of Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell (@gladwell https://twitter.com/Gladwell) is the author of five New York Times bestsellers -- The Tipping Point http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316346624/offsitoftimfe-20, Blink http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316010669/offsitoftimfe-20, Outliers http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316017930/offsitoftimfe-20, What the Dog Saw http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316076201/offsitoftimfe-20, and David and Goliath http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316204374/offsitoftimfe-20. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1972656_1972712_1973774,00.html and one of the Foreign Policy's Top Global Thinkers. He has explored how ideas spread in the Tipping Point, decision making in Blink, the roots of success in Outliers, and the advantages of disadvantages in his latest book David and Goliath. In his latest podcast project, Revisionist History http://revisionisthistory.com/, Gladwell examines the way the passage of time changes and enlightens our understanding of the world around us. In this in-depth, in-person conversation, we cover a ton, including: His research and writing process How he learned to ask good (and "dumb") questions Favorite books Routines, habits, and tools How he pulls together seemingly unrelated stories into a cohesive theme (and eventually a book) Philosophies related to public speaking His obsession with running Why he eats as little as possible in the mornings And much more... Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com http://wealthfront.com/tim This podcast is brought to you Gymnastic Bodies https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment. Coach Sommer http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/09/the-secrets-of-gymnastic-strength-training/ appeared on a previous episode of the podcast http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/09/the-secrets-of-gymnastic-strength-training/, which turned into a sleeper hit. He is the former USA national team coach for men's gymnastics and creator of this bodyweight-based training system. I'm not easily impressed, and I have been completely blown away by the sophistication and the elegance of his programming. I have been using Gymnastic Bodies https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/ for just a few months now, and I already feel more flexible and stronger than I have in years. Check it out GymnasticBodies.com/tim https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/, where you'll find the Fundamentals course for diagnosing your weakest areas and those you can tweak for fast improvements. It is incredible. Take a look at GymnasticBodies.com/tim https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/ for more details and a large discount.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Quick sound check. Malcolm, can you tell me what you had for breakfast, please?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I had a cappuccino and a third of a croissant.

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Third of a croissant?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:09Tim Ferriss?

  Do you divvy it up over three days or is that just, was it a bad croissant?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  No, I love croissants, but I feel like one, I don't, I think one should eat a minimum, the absolute minimum in the morning. I don't think you should eat a lot in the morning.

• 0:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, we will.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  One of my rules.

• 0:22Tim Ferriss?

  We will explore that further. Thank you.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:48Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, et cetera. And I'll come back to that

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to

• 2:53Tim Ferriss?

  use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 3:28Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by GymnasticBodies.com. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment, and I don't get paid any commissions or anything like that. You may have heard Coach Sommer on the podcast, who designed the program, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am not easily impressed, and I've just been completely blown away by the sophistication of his programming and the elegance of his programming. I've been using Gymnastic Bodies for just a few months now, and I feel more flexible, stronger, and younger than I have in years. And it sounds cheesy to hear myself say that, but it's true. That's the hardest part to believe. And you can check it out,

• 4:08Tim Ferriss?

  gymnasticbodies.com/tim. If you go to that landing page, gymnasticbodies.com/tim, you can take a look at the fundamentals course, which will help you diagnose your weakest points, areas to improve, et cetera. And I highly encourage you, take a look at this body weight training system. It is incredible. gymnasticbodies.com/tim.

• 4:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and squirrels. It is a late night in New York City, and the echo is from within the walls of a fine establishment, otherwise known as a hotel, that I am calling my abode for this evening. Molly is curled up, all the children are snug in their beds with visions of sugar plums. No, that's not why we're here. This is The Tim Ferriss Show, and welcome to another episode where it is my job to deconstruct world-class experts and world-class performers so that we can borrow their habits, routines, tools, test them ourselves, improve how we perform in our personal and professional lives. And this episode features Malcolm Gladwell.

• 5:17Tim Ferriss?

  I've wanted to interview Malcolm quite a long time, and it finally happened. We had a proper sit-down. We've bumped into each other before a few times, but this was the first in-depth conversation, and we cover a lot. Malcolm Gladwell, @Gladwell on Twitter, say hi, is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, mega bestsellers, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He's been named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine. He has explored how ideas spread, decision-making, the roots of success, the advantages of disadvantages. And in his latest podcast project, Revisionist History, which I highly recommend, Gladwell examines the way the

• 5:59Tim Ferriss?

  passage of time changes and enlightens our understanding of the world around us. He also revisits certain aspects of history that perhaps we should take another look at. And in this wide-ranging, in-depth, in-person conversation, we cover a ton, including his research and writing process, how he learned to ask good questions, favorite books, routines, habits, tools, how he puts together, or pulls together, rather, seemingly unrelated stories into a cohesive theme and eventually a book, his obsession with running, why he eats as little as possible in the mornings, and much more. It is highly tactical. There are some hilarious and great stories, some very surprising stuff that I am sure you have not heard anywhere

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  else. And that is all I have to say about that. So please say hi to him on Twitter, @Gladwell, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Thanks for listening.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  Malcolm, welcome to the show.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you making the time. And I know we've bumped into each other a few times over the years. I remember, I want to say the first time was at a salon that Peter Thiel put together about like religion, ethics and morality, or something like that.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 7:13Tim Ferriss?

  It was ages ago.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Years ago.

• 7:15Tim Ferriss?

  Years ago. And I remember showing up and Aron Hoffman, who had co-hosted the event, is a friend of mine, was like, hey, would you mind just like improv-ing and speaking at this event for a few minutes about X, Y, or Z? We haven't decided on the topics yet. And I said, sure. Then I showed up and I see Malcolm Gladwell. I see some award-winning, you know, voted favorite teacher of the decade, Harvard professor. And that's when I started drinking really heavily. So I suspect it was a poor performance on my part. In preparation for this, because I've been looking forward to it, I pinged Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics mutual friend. And his response was short. It was fun exclamation point. He's a great talker. He likes to talk about writing, running, fast cars, not golf, being Canadian. Sorry, I got to run. Something along those lines. And he took off.

• 7:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I was planning to speak with you about at least one or two of those. And I thought we could start with writing.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:05Tim Ferriss?

  What have been the easiest and hardest books for you to write?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting question. I don't find writing, or to the extent that I find writing, I link hard and fun. So if it's not hard, it's not fun. So I never think about writing in terms of hard and easy. I think about it in terms of fun and not fun. So which one was the most fun? Probably the last two, mostly because I wrote the first book while I was still working pretty much full-time at The New Yorker. So I just was, didn't have a lot of time. And that makes it less fun. You can't really kind of savor it and appreciate it. But the last two, I took. As much time as I needed and deliberately dragged it out because I was enjoying myself

• 8:55Speaker 01

  so much. So I think that's probably the last two books were the, were the, so that, does that mean the last two were the hardest?

• 9:02Tim Ferriss?

  The hardest slash most fun.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I think they were because I was trying to do, tell better stories. I became convinced about 15 years ago or so that I, if I was to develop as a writer, I had to be a better storyteller. And so those, the outliers in What the Dog Saw were books where I was really, really trying to do a better job. And I'm sorry, and David and Glaive, where I was really trying to be a, do a better job of telling good stories.

• 9:30Tim Ferriss?

  Who do you, are there any people who come to mind, fictional or otherwise, who are good storytellers?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Michael Lewis is the gold standard.

• 9:39Tim Ferriss?

  Michael Lewis.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And that's, I was actually in reading Michael Lewis that I realized that I wanted to be, you can't be him any more than you can, you know, you can't say, I watched Steph Curry play basketball and I decided that's the kind of basketball player I want to be. Like you, you know, you can try and, you can be inspired by him, you could pattern your play after him, but you can't be him. That only, you know, that's impossible. So I have tried to, I was inspired by Michael Lewis to get better, but I am not on his level.

• 10:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think both of you are very, very good at taking what could be dense, impenetrable material or overwhelming material and making it a story that is easy to consume. I mean, as storytelling and consuming machines.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Well, he tells, I tell a million stories in one book. He tells one story. That's so much harder.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  What makes that harder?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Because you have to go to a level and complexity and have confidence. What happens is That I lose confidence in, the reason I tell lots of stories is that I don't have the confidence to keep going with the same one. I think, oh, everyone must be losing interest. I gotta switch and do something else now. Michael doesn't have that problem. I mean, he, he has the kind of panache to say, I'm gonna tell you a story about a guy basically trying to do, take on the high-speed traders, and I will, we're gonna do this for 200 pages, and you're gonna love it. Like, I can't start with that.

• 11:11Tim Ferriss?

  That's part of the reason I also write my books in, and I'm not in any way comparing myself to you or...

• 11:19Speaker 01

  You have every right to, Tim.

• 11:21Tim Ferriss?

  Why? I'm a writer who, or I'm a teacher who dabbles in writing and sometimes puts stuff down that's intelligible. But the way that I tend to non-linearly write my books and encourage people to consume it in a nonlinear way is precisely for that reason, because I worry that if, in some cases, I can keep something interesting for 15, 20 pages, but I lack the confidence that I can do it for 200 or 300.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It takes that, you gotta be, you gotta be good to pull off that feat, particularly with the sorts of topics that he chooses, which are, you know, esoteric. He wrote, he wrote a gripping thriller about credit swaps and derivatives. I mean, that's not easy.

• 12:00Tim Ferriss?

  Not easy at all. I mean, then you have sabermetrics, and he's so consistent. The next question I wanted to ask was related to, it's a perennial topic, of course, but writer's block, and, or anything that you might consider, something like that. And it's related to the kind of module, choose your own adventure-like way in which I write myself, which is one way that I can put something on the shelf if I'm having trouble with it and move on to something else. It doesn't have to be sequential. Do you run into writer's block? If so, how does that manifest, and what do you, what do you do? Or do you get stuck?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, you know, I worked for 10 years at a newspaper, and if that experience teaches you anything, it's that you can't have writer's block. I mean, you quite literally... Can't. I mean, the story will be, you'll start the story at 10:30 and it's due at 4:00 or 4:30 or whatever. Back in those days, there was hard deadlines. So you can't have, I mean, it's unthinkable.

• 12:59Tim Ferriss?

  You don't have the luxury.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And if you went to your bosses and you said, "I'm blocked on this story," they would look at you like you were insane.

• 13:07Tim Ferriss?

  Take off your beret, put down your poetry. You have a job to do.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So it's like, there's not even an issue. So, I mean, I did, used to have these issues. And then I went to the Washington Post and you get cured in a hurry of any pretensions you have about your writing. You just, you just keep typing. I mean, it's not, there's no kind of alternative. And luckily that I have those habits that I caused, that I learned over tho- that 10 years at the Washington Post, have stayed with me. And so I, I, I never, and also, you know, writing to me is only, writing a book is maybe 20% writing and 80% organization logistics. So I will think about something, for every hour I spend writing, I spend three hours thinking about writing. So usually when I'm writing, it's,

• 13:57Speaker 01

  first of all, it's a tiny period. And secondly, it's all worked out already. I mean, I'm just putting down on the page what has already been kind of figured out in my head.

• 14:06Tim Ferriss?

  Where does, where do you, now, is that true also for a shorter piece in, say, The New Yorker?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will have, not all of it, but I know what I'm doing before I start, or I know what the pieces are.

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example of any piece or any book, where it started and what the process was for you, in getting to the point that you're then putting words down on paper? And the reason I ask is that I am fascinated by structure. I don't think I'm particularly gifted at it, but I did, long ago, took a class with John McPhee, one of your

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:41Tim Ferriss?

  colleagues, staff writer at The New Yorker. And his, his grasp and approach to structure is just incredible. At least the way that he visualizes his structure. But he has a very particular process. I can't follow his, say, day-to-day schedule, which is basically sitting in front of a blank piece of paper from like 8:00 in the morning to 6:00 PM.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 15:01Tim Ferriss?

  Whether anything's written or not, which would lead me to just want to throw my head through a window.

• 15:07Tim Ferriss?

  What, can you give us any origin story of any book?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's somewhere easy. I did a story for The New Yorker last fall about a school shooter in Minnesota. And there I, that was super easy because I wanted to write about school shootings, I start rooting around on the internet and I find this criminal complaint and transcript, transcript of a interrogation of a kid who was caught basically in the act, a would be school shooter caught in the act. And he gives this, it's like 60 pages. And it's this absolutely extraordinary account of what he was thinking and what he was planning

• 15:52Speaker 01

  to do and why he was planning to do it. And when you find something like that, I mean, your job's done, right? So you're like, oh, I'm going to tell this story. And then I'm going to step away only to kind of put that story in broader context. So those are rare. That wrote itself, that's rare. What's harder are things that are, have a less of a, a less obvious structure. So my book, Outliers began with, there was a chapter in that book about Jewish lawyers, about this curious fact that the group, the kind of core group of Jewish lawyers in New York City who rose to prominence in the 60s and 70s and basically kind of take

• 16:31Speaker 01

  over corporate law in the city, all had strikingly similar backgrounds. And so that's the first chapter I wrote in Outliers. And that sort of is where I began that book, because I met one of the, one of those lawyers was the father of a friend of mine. I met him and I talked to him. I was like, oh, wait a minute. They're all of his buddies, they're all from the same part of the Bronx. They all were born in practically the same year. They all went to City College. They all went to NYU Law School. They all started in the same kind of firms. I mean, it's the same story again and again and again. And out of, if you think about, I mean, if, if one were, I don't know why one would, but if one were to study that book,

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Outliers, you would discover that almost all of the themes that I explore in that book are present in the story of the Jewish lawyers. So everything is there. So I, I reported that story. I wrote that chapter. I thought about it. I was like, oh, okay, it's all the strands I'm interested in are there. I'm going to pull out strand after strand and write chapters about them.

• 17:35Tim Ferriss?

  Did it start off in your head as the, as a chapter in a perspective book? Or was it a standalone?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  No, it was, I wanted to write a book about successful people. And so it was always going to be a chapter in the book. But it was, it was just a great, I don't know, it was just a lucky place to start. Because when you could start with, with one of those, I don't know if that's the best chapter in the book, but it is, it is functionally the most important chapter in the book.

• 18:05Tim Ferriss?

  Because it had all the macro elements in the micro.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  And that, that's the gold standard, when you can have that kind of, you can begin on that kind of note. Other ones have been much more difficult because they haven't had that.

• 18:17Tim Ferriss?

  Now, let's say you have that story, you have that chapter. How do you go out, or go about rather, collecting? And let me take a step backwards. How did you, what tools were you using to query and find this 60-page transcript of the would-be school shooter?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  I honestly don't remember. I was, I was screwing around on the internet. I was interested in school shootings. And I don't even know how, I mean, this was, there was zero coverage of this case. It was in the local Minnesota press, that's it.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I'd never heard of it. He didn't, the kid was caught before he did anything. So it never made national headlines. And the transcript is just on the website of the local DA. So it's like, and I don't know how I found it. I can't remember. I just found it.

• 19:12Tim Ferriss?

  I'd be so curious to, I'd be so curious to know.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I would love to know now too. I just, it was one of those. But other cases, like in my podcast, for example, one of the episodes I liked the most, two episodes actually.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Touching this question. So one is an episode, I think it's the eighth or ninth episode. It's called Generous Orthodoxy. And it's the story of a 98-year-old Mennonite pastor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who takes on his church. And I come from a very Mennonite area in Ontario. Many of my friends and brothers' friends are Mennonites. My brothers are Mennonite. My parents grew up in Mennonite. You know, I know that world really well. I go home at Christmas and everyone's talking about this guy. And when I say everyone, there's only, the number of Mennonites in North America is very small. It's a very small evangelical Protestant sect, denomination. But they're talking about this letter this guy wrote.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  It's got a lot of Facebook likes for them, you know, and he's 98. And so I read the letter, I'm like, oh, my goodness. What an extraordinary letter. So I tracked down the guy. I interview him. Like, a week later, go out to, drive out to Lancaster. And then I look at the transcript and I say, well, what's this about? And I realized that what it's about is how to protest. He's a guy who is so wise and, uh, it's an extraordinary interview. It's like, again, I did nothing. It's one of those cases where he's just amazing. And I stumbled into this. It's 10 o'clock at night on a cold Saturday night in January. I'm in this little, tiny

• 20:54Speaker 01

  house on the Turnpike in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, talking to a 98-year-old guy. And it's one of these amazing interviews where it's just all, it's all there. I don't have to do anything. And he's, I'm crying by the end. I mean, it's just insane. So I go home and I look and I think, well, I want to make a show, a podcast about this. And what's amazing now is, I'm not writing this up in print. I'm using this man's own words, which because he's so insanely moving, powerful.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  You know, it's just like so much better that I can hear his voice. And so the question is, what does this story need to be finished? Not a lot, right? Just a little bit to put it in context. So there's a case where you stumble across something and your role, your only role is not to screw it up, right? Don't screw it up, don't bury it. Just put him out there, tell the story, and then just find some other little element that makes it clear what to the listener, what it's about. That's actually, it's my favorite revisionist history episode for that reason. It's just so pure and simple.

• 22:09Tim Ferriss?

  When you have, let's say in the case of the outlier chapters, or chapter, rather, on the Jewish lawyers, how do you capture your notes and organize your notes on something like that?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  What tools do you use?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I just, I mean, it's gonna sound so old school. I transcribe the interview, print out the transcript, and underline the parts I like, and then move them into a file.

• 22:39Tim Ferriss?

  And do you move, what, is it a Word file? How do you, what type of file is it? I know this is getting very...

• 22:44Speaker 01

  It's a Word file, yeah. Just like move from one Word file to the next Word file. I don't even use Google Docs. I mean, I vaguely recently got into Google Docs, but I sort of feel like it doesn't really matter. I mean...

• 22:57Tim Ferriss?

  No, the tools, I would agree. I mean, it's, whether it's a pen, or a paintbrush, or crayons, you still have to know how to use the writing implement. But the process is interesting to me. So if you take these quotes, what qualifies? And this may seem like a sort of infantile question, but how do you, what qualifies as interesting?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's not an infantile question. That is, in fact, the core question. The whole, to the extent that a writer deserves his or her paycheck, it comes down to how good are they at looking through, something like looking through a transcript and understanding what's interesting, right? If you can't do that... You can't kind of, you have to sort of visualize what the story is going to become before it has become anything. So you might be dealing with a document that is 20,000 words, right? Which is, or even longer, could be 30,000 words, which is enormous. I mean, a book, my books are 75,000 words. I mean, so you're dealing with a single interview that might be, you know, a third of a book in length.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  And you have to distill out of that, I don't know, a couple thousand words. So, you know, that process can take days. And I initially go through and I simply delete all of the stuff that's clearly, that clearly doesn't belong, just that dead space. And then I just take repeated passes, pruning, pruning, pruning, until what I'm left with is what, until I know the interview almost by heart. And then when I'm, what I'm left with is the stuff that matters. If you don't transcribe it yourself, it's so much harder. Right? You really, there's enormous benefits to taking the huge amount of time necessary to transcribe it yourself.

• 24:41Tim Ferriss?

  To transcribe yourself. And once you have these nuggets, these various highlights, how do you determine what starts a chapter?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Well-

• 24:52Tim Ferriss?

  Or a book, for that matter.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's the other thing. That's another thing that kind of qualifies you as a writer. The truth is that there are so many ways you can do it. There's so many answers to the problem that I don't get too hung up on it. I sort of think that it's not a math question where there's only one answer. So as long as you understand there's not just one good answer, it takes the pressure off. But typically, you know, I might try out several openings. I don't get, it's, it's made easier by the fact that I don't start at the beginning. So, once you don't start at the beginning, your life just gets so much simpler.

• 25:33Tim Ferriss?

  So, on that point, so I have a tendency to always try the, and I think this has become a bit of a crutch for me, because it seems to work well. But it's become a bit of a trope, if that's the right word, for me, where I'm always doing in media rest, right? So I'm always taking some exciting moment right in the middle of X, that then requires explanation. And I get into that later in the piece. But I found myself doing that effectively all the time, not to turn this into like a writer doctor consultation, but do you ever find yourself doing that and you're like, you know what? This recipe works, but I want to play with other recipes?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I wanted to do a podcast like this so much, which was that with a podcast, you're still storytelling, but suddenly the list of considerations is different. It really matters how good your tape is, how powerful the voices are, how meaningful the interaction you have with the person you're interviewing is. So all those things, do you have archival tape that is incredibly powerful? So, you know, there's a, one of the shows is about, one of my favorites, I have two favorites. This is the other one. It's about giving, uh, sounds boring when I say that. It's about university philanthropy.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  And so I contrast two very wealthy men, one who may reach very different conclusions about where they're going to give their money. And one of them, man is my hero and one is my villain. And the hero, I'm not gonna, I don't want to spoil it, but there was a little bit of tape, the hero had just died and the school that he had given his money to had a memorial service for him. And at the memorial service, a local a cappella group sang a kind of semi-cheesy boy band song, and I've forgotten the title of it, in memoriam of him, but in such a way that it wasn't cheesy anymore.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  It was actually really touching. And so you, you hear this tape and you hear this boy, this a cappella group singing the song and your initial thought is, oh my God. And then you're like, oh, right? And you get it, the emotion hits you. Now, if you're writing about that, it's meaningless, right? All that nuance is lost. In a podcast, suddenly you're like, oh, wow, that's my beginning, right? No question, that's how like, that's the way in, because you want that movement from, oh, this is cheesy to, oh my God, no. It's incredibly meaningful, right? That's that little thing. So that's what's lovely. It's suddenly I'm

• 28:17Speaker 01

  After 20 years of doing the pure print thing, I'm shaking and I have to break out of that and think in a different way about what's powerful.

• 28:24Tim Ferriss?

  You are a very good public speaker. I think you're a tremendous speaker. How do you plan your keynotes? Because this is yet a different format.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  If you think of your most, let's say, your most successful and then perhaps a less successful presentation.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:45Tim Ferriss?

  How have they differed?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  They differ. Well, there's, first of all, I, the breakthrough for me in speaking came when I realized that it required about 10x more work than I was giving to it. And that was a huge moment. So I decided.

• 29:02Tim Ferriss?

  When did you realize that? Sorry to interrupt.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I would say.

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  Was there a particular incident or conversation?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  No, it was about 10 years ago when I asked myself the question, do I want to continue doing this? Because it has its pluses and its minuses. And I realized, I only want to continue doing it if I get much better at it and if I change it in a way that it's much more meaningful to me. So then I decided I needed way more material. I have to give very, very different speeches. I can't just give the same one all the time. I have to spend a lot more time thinking about who I'm speaking to and I have to spend a lot more time thinking about my performance and realizing, by the way, that it is a performance, that it's not, I'm not giving a speech, I'm giving a performance. And all of those things, I thought a lot about all of those things and it took a long

• 29:50Speaker 01

  time to kind of fully kind of implement them. But it has made it much more interesting to me and now I enjoy it in a way I didn't enjoy it when I was, it didn't feel like I was doing it in a kind of halfway manner. But I realized in retrospect I was, just because I hadn't. Understood. I thought that what giving a speech was, was reading an article. And if you think that's what it is, then you just get up and you read your article, right? And it's very... Once you... Actually, no, it's a world that has its own rules and principles. You're really acting. Then it... You're like, "Oh, wow. That's totally different." That is... I gotta throw myself into that in a significant way.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And so that's what I tried to do.

• 30:36Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anyone in the world of speaking, alive or dead, who is the Michael Lewis for you?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  I once went to a wedding... Not a wedding, I'm sorry, a birthday party for an old, old friend of mine, and it was in England. I can say it's my friend Anne Applebaum. And she has all of these... She's been in England for years, and she has all these sort of kind of fancy English friends. When I say fancy, you know, not posh, but like, you know, historians and just kind of like English intellectuals. So she had this birthday party in this little country house in the middle of England. And the English, of course, A, way better at giving speeches than we are, first of all. But secondly, we were talking about the creme de la creme of English speech givers, like, serious kind of, you know,

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Cambridge and Oxford debating society kind of people. So Neil Ferguson, the historian, gave a wedding toast that is... A birthday toast, which is just the best toast I've ever heard in my life. I mean, it was like so much better than anything I had ever heard. It's like on another level. I was like, "Oh, my God, that's good." And part of what made it genius was he really gave you the impression he was making it up on the spot. Now, he might actually have done that. He may be so good he could do that, but he got up and you just like... That was the... The conceit was, it... I'm just...

• 32:05Tim Ferriss?

  This is off the cuff?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I'm just... Yeah, this is totally spontaneous. And it was so cleverly done and so hilarious. And yet, the thing I realized was that... It was so charming that it, and what was charming about it was the ways in which he was wrong. Like that, the kind of part of the joke was, he was gonna make this elaborate hilarious argument about Anne, who was turning 50, and half the stuff that he was gonna say was not right. It was like, I mean, that was sort of like-

• 32:34Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, did he start off saying that?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  No, no, he sort of spun a theory about, about the weekend and about her birthday and about her friends. That was like hilarious because it was not accurate. You know, but it was like, he did it with such panache and kind of, and I was just like, first of all, that would never have occurred to me to like make stuff up in such a dramatic way. But also, I can't do the thing, I can do conversational, but I don't think I ever get to the level where people think I'm off the cuff. Like, I'm not. It's clear that there's been some effort here, but with him, there's just no, it was just like, so ever since I like worship the guy, I mean, I just think, I think he walks on water.

• 33:17Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are the elements of a good performance for you? What are some of the ingredients that make a good performance in your case?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  The thing that I strive for in speaking is authenticity, which sounds corny, but it's really hard to do when you're giving a prepared talk to a group of people who belong to a world that you don't belong to. So if I'm speaking to a group of IT specialists, I don't know anything about IT, right? Nothing. So I'm an outsider, and yet I'm trying to say something that will engage them and be intelligent and make them think. So in the context of doing something that is artificial, by artificial, I don't mean phony, I mean, in a sense that I am, I have to make an effort to connect with them. It's not, I can't just stand up and talk the way I would talk to my friends, right?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  These guys belong to a world I don't know or belong to. So I'm doing something that requires an effort, but at the same time, it has to feel like me, right? They have to feel like they are connecting with me and that I'm not, I can't feel like I'm faking it, right? It's gotta, so that's, that's hard, and that's in really, but it's hard in a good way, it's really, that's what makes it interesting. So the question I have, I ask myself is, I would like to say something intelligent about IT while still-

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Remaining true to myself, someone who knows very little about IT, right? So this, that, and if you pull that off, that's interesting to the audience. So they get that. They don't, they're not bringing me in because I'm an IT specialist. But they do, they want what would bring, what makes them, what satisfies them is my attempt to speak to them while being true to myself, right? My attempt to bridge the, can I bridge the gap is the question really that they're asking themselves in the back of their mind. And when you can bridge the gap, that's really satisfying to someone. It's like, oh, right, that's, you know, that I think you, you know, you've succeeded.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  When you have, and just a few more questions about writing, because I'm most likely about to go into, as we discussed briefly, crunch writing deadline myself.

• 35:33Tim Ferriss?

  When you have, for instance, one or two stories for a book and you, you understand what the theme is going to be, or some of the, the structural components. How do you find the others? Or is it a case where you've gathered these stories over the span of a time with the inkling of an idea and then you have half of it locked and loaded already?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Well, there's a good actual example of this from Revisionist History, from this podcast. I started out by wanting, I wanted to tell a story about this kid who I had met, who was a teenager and lived in LA, came from a poor family and had, I don't know what his IQ is, 150, I mean, he's a one in a million kid.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And I thought his story of, how does that, what happens to you if you're, you have an IQ of 150 and you grew up in South Central, right? That, that's sort of interesting. So I was going to tell that story. And so I talked to the kid and I was particularly interested in, how does he get to college? Is it easy? Do you get recognized? Is it like, you're a great 15-year-old basketball player and they, they find, they always find you. If you, if you can dunk a basketball and hit a three-point shot and you're, you can dominate your, you know, middle school basketball team and you live in Nebraska, they find you, right? So my question was, is that what it's like if you've got an IQ of 150 and you live in South Central?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Do they just find you and like adopt you and blah? So I was, I went out, I- Had this long conversation with this kid. It's incredibly powerful, totally interesting. And then, as I tell the story, I realize, oh, so my episodes are 45 minutes. And I realized, this story is all I need. I mean, he's the whole thing. I mean, I can do little contextual things, but there's no room for anything else here. Not just room, logistically or physically. There's no emotional room for anything else. Right, this kid is, you're in tears by the end. I mean, and what happened to him and his story is crazy. And then this is another kid we talk about. It's like, you can't.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  So then I said, oh, so there's other things I wanted to say. So I'll do another show, also on the same topic of what happens. How good are we at finding, at fulfilling the American dream? The American promise, which is if you work hard and you have some ability, you can make your way up the ladder. That's really what, so this part of revisionist history is revisiting that promise that we make. How good are we at fulfilling it? So I do a second show, which is all about, do colleges actually, how do they find these kids? Do they do a good job of finding them? How do they find them? What do they, do they spend a lot of time and money on it? Do they? And the answer is, the colleges do a terrible job of finding them. So the answer is, well, why? So I do this show on why, why do they do a terrible job? And the answer is, a lot of the time, they're distracted.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  But more than that, they're spending their money somewhere else. It takes money to find these kids. Not just to find them. If the cost of educating a kid is 50 grand, and you want to bring in a kid from South Central, he doesn't have 50 grand. So you've got to pay 50 grand. You've got to, you're out 50 grand if you want to bring them to your school. So if you're going to spend 50 grand on him, it's 50 grand you can't spend on something else. Right? That starts to get really interesting. All right, so what's the thing you can't spend on? And if you can't spend on that other thing, how do you compete with other colleges that do spend on the other thing? Right? So that's what the whole episode's about. So then I do that one, and I'm like, I do that one, and I'm like, wait a minute, I'm not done. This gets more interesting. Right?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  So if you have to spend, you've got to find the 50 grand. Then where do you get the 50 grand? So now we get into philanthropy. That's where I did this whole thing on philanthropy. So that was the third one. So then, so these are all stories that grow out of, do you mean, you find, it all starts with one kid. I find the kid. And all of a sudden, I end up with three very different stories, all of which look at the problem of the kid from a different angle. And that's very typical of the way books work for me, which is you start with the nugget, and then you just start walking around it. And parts of it just kind of, you're like, oh, that deserves its own,

• 40:01Speaker 01

  you know, that's, that's a, you know, it's like when you, the thing I find myself doing when I interview someone most often is stopping them, saying, wait, wait, wait. When I transcribe tapes, I hear that so many times. Wait, wait, stop. And then I make them go back and elaborate on that point, which was like, that kind of weird point. Wait, is that, you know, they, they skip over it because it's old hat to them. And you were like, no, no, no, no, no. I could spend hours on that point, you know? So it's that.

• 40:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I do. I know exactly how that feels. And it strikes me that you ask questions as part of that walking around the first story, right? And you ask a question that then redirects you or focuses you in, into another topic. You find a story and then you ask another question, which then leads to, in this case, another episode, but it could have been another chapter of a book. If you were to credit someone or some people or resources with helping you to get better at asking questions, who or what would that be?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  My dad is a great question asker. And my father has this, I've spoken about it many times. He has, of his many gifts, one in particular, as a kid, always had the biggest impact on, on me, which is my father is, has zero intellectual insecurities. So this is the only thing he has in common with Obama. He and Obama are the same way. My dad has no. It has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he's an idiot. Just doesn't, he's not in that game, right? So if he doesn't understand something, he just asks you. He doesn't care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question, like, you know, and it was without any sort of concern about it.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And maybe it's because he's, my dad's a mathematician. So he has his thing that he knows he's really good at. And so he's like, he's home free. I think if you have a PhD in math, you're home free.

• 42:02Tim Ferriss?

  You're home free. Well, it's something to the true or it's false, or it's clear, it's not.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's like, you're not, if you look like an idiot because you don't know anything about basketball, who cares, right? So he, he asks lots and lots and lots of dumb questions. I mean dumb in the best sense of that word, dumb questions. Wait, like he'll say to someone, I don't understand. Explain that to me. Or he'll, and he'll just keep asking questions until he gets it right. And I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. You know, my father made friends, so my father, here's this guy with his PhD in math. He made friends with all of these farmers who were our neighbors, who were all dropouts.

• 42:44Tim Ferriss?

  This was in Canada?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  In Canada, they were all, they all went, they basically maybe seventh grade. And he first of all treated them with like equals. And secondly, was intensely interested in what they knew that he didn't know. And would ask them tons and tons of questions about why they did what they did. So that's what I grew up around, right? That, and that's what I do. I mean, it's, there's no, it's straight from my dad. I don't think there's any, I just do, and I, you know, when I'm hanging out with my father and someone interesting, we do the same thing. We just start asking questions. It's our sort of thing.

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it strikes me also that the dumb questions or the obvious questions are precisely the questions oftentimes that we should be asking because half of the people in the room, if it's in a group setting, are probably thinking of those questions anyway, but are embarrassed for whatever reason to bring them up.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  You know, it's a good example of this. I often imagine. My dad, meeting Bernie Madoff. My father would say, he would look at the returns and he would say, wow, that's really good. Because as a mathematician, he would know that, you know, the steady, whatever it was, 9% a year, year in, year out, you know, that's really... And then he would say, how did you do that? And then Madoff had that, remember that stock explanation that didn't, that was bullshit. And my father would just simply continue to ask really, really dumb, obvious questions. And until Madoff would either have had to leave, or because he would have tried his patience and been at risk of, but he would never have invested money with him, because he would have said, I don't understand, 100 times, right?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I don't understand how that works. I don't understand. Like, in this kind of dumb, kind of, you know, slow voice, I don't understand, sir. You know, what is going on?

• 44:28Tim Ferriss?

  So, let me ask a, and you feel free to not answer this if you don't want, but, so I ask a lot of questions. I enjoy asking a lot of questions. It can drive some people crazy.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:40Tim Ferriss?

  Did your mom get the 20 questions about a lot of things, or was the relationship different?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Oh, she asks lots of questions, too. They are, neither of them, she's not intellectually insecure either. They're not, um, it wasn't directed at my mother. It was directed at the outside world. They had a, they have an exceedingly harmonious relationship. They don't, yeah, they don't, they don't do that. That's, it's all, it's reserved for outsiders, really.

• 45:08Tim Ferriss?

  What, to what would you attribute the harmony? Because there are a lot of non-harmonious, unharmonious relationships in the world.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  They're, I mean, they were lucky to be well-suited. They're also both incredibly, they're very calm people. So, there's very, very few, they have very little conflict, because it doesn't, they diffuse conflict really well, I think. I think it probably would be a good way of saying it.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  So they can speak rationally instead of...

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not interested in, they, you know, I've never seen them pick a fight with each other, for example. That doesn't interest them.

• 45:46Tim Ferriss?

  So, I have so many questions that I want to ask you. I'm just going to jump into a rather uncohesive list of miscellanea. I'm going to try some new ones this time around. What is the best or most worthwhile investment you've ever made? Could be money, time, energy, or otherwise.

• 46:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or just a very good investment.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  It's a really interesting question. All of the investments that the most worthwhile investments are investments about time. They have to do with time. And they're all about persevering past the point that I would normally have quit. So I can think, for example, of books where there's no, the payoff didn't come until page 1,000. And yet it was very, getting to that page was incredibly important in some future endeavor. Or when I was describing how I ran across that transcript of that school shooter, which that was about an investment of time where, I mean, I was sort of screwing around, not

• 46:48Speaker 01

  screwing around is the wrong word, I was looking for much longer than I would normally look. I kind of, for reasons I don't really understand, put my impatience aside and committed a much longer period of time to that hunt. So those are, I would say those are probably the, it's a very broad category, but those were the best investments.

• 47:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you said page 1,000, you're talking about reading.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I mean, in any kind of, generally speaking, hunting, so many of the really wonderful things that I've uncovered in my life, not just from my writing, but also personally, have come after elongated hunts. So you never find the thing that is moving, moving and powerful in the first five minutes. It just doesn't happen.

• 47:37Tim Ferriss?

  I remember a friend of mine, who I didn't really feel very friendly towards when he said this, said to me, when I was 90% done with my second book, For Our Body, and I said, wow, well, you know, I'm pretty close to the finish line, 90% done. He goes, oh, congratulations, you only have 50% left.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  So true.

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard that from a lot of long-distance runners also. You know, like kind of the race starts at mile 20 or whatever it might be.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:06Tim Ferriss?

  Going back to the sort of investments and these...

• 48:12Tim Ferriss?

  Not postponed, but like delayed gratification wins like this page a thousand. Can you think of any failures that set you up for later success? Or a favorite failure of yours?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's all kinds. I, when I was a kid, I was in, this is one of many, but I was a runner, very serious runner. And I-

• 48:38Tim Ferriss?

  What distance?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  1500 meters and 800 meters. And I-

• 48:43Tim Ferriss?

  The puking distances?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yes. And I, I, in my third year of running seriously, lost races I thought I was gonna win. I mean, it kind of, what for me at that age was a quite, quite a dramatic fashion. And I quit running. And it was the first, I would regard that as the, of that, the first real failure of my life. Something I really wanted to do well at, I didn't. And I feel like it was hugely important, both because it made me think hard about what my priorities were. What, that I had placed running too high in that list.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  But more than that, it, it, I then later in life went back and thought a lot about why I quit and was dissatisfied with my reasons. So anything you can, this whole notion of circling back, I think is so important. I mean, it's, this shows God revisionist history, so explicitly about that. But, you know, I, I would almost obsessively revisit my reasons for quitting running and scrutinize them and say, is it right? What did I learn in the intervening five, 10, 15, 20 years about who I am, what I want, what it takes to be good at something? So that was a very valuable- A really valuable experience.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  At exactly the right time, because that's the age where, you know, where decisions, not decisions matter, but where I think you reflect on things in your adolescence in a way that you don't reflect on things later in your life.

• 50:22Tim Ferriss?

  What age was this, or what grade?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  I was 15.

• 50:25Tim Ferriss?

  15. I always thought I was going to go back at some point and be a ninth grade teacher. So, right around that like 14 to 16 range. Seems like there are a lot of very important forks in the road.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there is. I think you are, because so much is, everything is plastic at that age, right? So, you can mold it whatever way you want. And so, it's just a kind of like, I think about what, how confusing and complicated those years are in retrospect.

• 50:54Tim Ferriss?

  What is, do you have any morning routines? What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like? Could be any day of the week. Let's just say it's a work day.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  I, well, I was just saying earlier, I try, I think one should eat very little in the morning, so.

• 51:08Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  You know, 8. I have a big thing of tea.

• 51:13Tim Ferriss?

  What type of tea? Sorry, I'm going to keep.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Lapsang Souchon.

• 51:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's great stuff.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Great stuff.

• 51:19Tim Ferriss?

  If you like, what is it? I remember a friend who was getting off of, he loved whiskey, and he felt like the smell reminded him of some type of peaty alcoholic beverage, so.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has an amazing smell. It's a very controversial tea. And then I might.

• 51:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I'm going to pull a Malcolm here. Wait, wait, wait, why is it a controversial tea?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Some people smell it and they just run in the opposite direction. They think it, they're, they don't even think it's tea. I mean, I've never seen people have such a kind of, and there's a, there's a little coffee shop where I go often in the morning to have my tea, and they have it. I think I'm one of the only people who order it. I think they get it because of me. And it's like, I walk in, they're like, you know, like a beeline for it. But it's clear that, you know, I'm in a distinct minority. It smells. I mean, you can smell it from quite a ways off. I might eat a little bit of. Oatmeal, that's pretty much all I'll eat in the morning.

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's your go to, one of your go tos?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but not a lot. And then I look at three websites.

• 52:23Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we're gonna come back to three websites. So not a lot means like a cupful? A couple of spoons?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Like a, a cupful, half a cup, something like that. Just enough that I'm, you know, have a reasonable something in my stomach. And then I will look at three websites. The first one is let'srun.com. The nerdy runners, all serious runners read let's run. Then I read marginal revolution, Tyler Cohen's column. And then I read ESPN.com, just to make sure nothing major happened in the world of sports. And then I start my work.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, and what time is that then, when you're starting your work?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  So we're talking, we're now, we're still before nine. And then if I have writing to do, it's best to do it in the next, in the two hours that follow.

• 53:11Tim Ferriss?

  So before lunch?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:12Tim Ferriss?

  And what is your routine look like, is there, in those few hours when you start your work? What does that look like? Is there particular music you listen to?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Sitting in a coffee shop.

• 53:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sitting in a coffee shop.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  I'm, or you know, some restaurant, I'm not at home. And I'm, or not in an office. And I'm working pretty steadily. I'm not really easily distractible. Been around 11:30 or so, I kind of have to do other things. I mean, I don't stop working, but I stop writing.

• 53:40Tim Ferriss?

  Do you listen to music when you write? Do you just take it in the ambient?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Music on in the, I write almost entirely in public places. So whatever, I don't listen to music myself.

• 53:51Tim Ferriss?

  No headphones.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  But I like the noise. Cause I, I came of age in a newsroom, so I need that. I mean, I, you know, I learned how to write in the middle of, when newsrooms are not noisy now, they used to be incredibly loud. So that's what I need to kind of get going.

• 54:06Tim Ferriss?

  And then do you, is that when the bulk of your writing is done? Is that pre lunch period? Or do you write in the afternoons?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  No, I rarely write in the afternoon.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  If I find, yeah, journalists seem to be very adaptable, or former journalists, people who've worked at newspapers or had those types of daily deadlines.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're faster and also remember, writing is not the time consuming part. It's knowing what to write. It's the thinking and the arranging and the interviewing and the researching and the organizing. And that's what takes time. You know, writing is blissful. I wish I could do it more. I mean, it's a break from all of the hassle of.

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  So let's just say end of work day to bed. What do your wind down routines look like?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Well, I'll go running then probably. After the end of the afternoon. And although I'm injured now, but that's really the highlight of the day of the kind of work day. Some days I'll go to my train with my track club. Sometimes I go for a long run or I'll go biking or I'll go do a CrossFit workout or something physical.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  What is your favorite movement in CrossFit or exercise and least?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Well, I kind of runners secretly disdain any activity that's not running. So I.

• 55:22Tim Ferriss?

  I know enough runners to do that.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  So I don't, I don't, I don't even want to think about favorite in that context. It's something I suffer through because it's necessary to ward off injury. And when it's over, I'm very happy. But, uh, you know, I'm much happier if I can go and, you know, run eight miles with some friends.

• 55:45Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Pre bed, anything in particular?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  No, I'll eat dinner, might read in the evening or watch sports or TV.

• 55:52Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have trouble getting to sleep or do you generally sleep easily?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  I'm a, I come from a family of, we are champion sleepers. Gladwells are some of our.

• 56:01Tim Ferriss?

  Some of the best sleepers out there.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  They, we are some of the best. It is our, it is our defining characteristic that we're at our definition of a bad night of sleep is so hilarious because it's like, you know, my father will say he had trouble sleeping. And what that means is he was up for 20 minutes between, you know, four and 4:20. I mean, that's a bad night of sleep.

• 56:22Tim Ferriss?

  So, so if, if the Gladwells are heading up the leaderboard in sleep.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  We're really good.

• 56:29Tim Ferriss?

  What are you guys not good at?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  We are.

• 56:32Tim Ferriss?

  Or are you personally?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  What are we not good at? We're.

• 56:34Tim Ferriss?

  What do you find challenging?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Well, we're not great talkers. We're all pretty introverted, with the exception of my brother, who makes up for it. We're not terribly adventurous. I mean, we're adventurous in certain, very, very specific ways, but we don't. I didn't grow up going. We would go on family vacations to either England or Jamaica, where both my parents are from. My father would travel a lot to interesting places, but we never went out to eat, or went to the movies, or went to concerts, or the sort of going out thing was not something we did. We would, I would go entire summers when I basically never left the house, you know?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  So, we were not, we didn't sort of, we didn't explore the, our immediate surroundings in a way that we might have.

• 57:27Tim Ferriss?

  What is some of the, or an example of the worst advice that you hear being dispensed or given? Could be, could be related to anything. Writing, running, doesn't matter.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. The worst advice that in general we give in America is that we terrify high school kids about their college choices. I mean, all, all things related to college fall under the category of bad advice. As you will find out when you listen to my rants about college on this podcast, I think the American college system needs to be blown up and they just start over. I mean, it's, to my mind, you could not have conceived of a worse system. So, you know, anything, any advice that has to do with you need to work hard and get into the best college you can is just, I'm sorry, it's just bullshit. I mean, it is just terrible. You should not try to go to the best college you can, because particularly if best is

• 58:23Speaker 01

  defined by US News and World Report, you should go to a place that, what a college should, the sole test of what a good college is, is, is it a place where I find myself late at night having deeply interesting conversations with people that I like and find interesting? If you go where you can do that, right? That's all that matters. So am I so inspired by what I learned during the day that I want to be talking about it at 1:00 in the morning? And do I have someone who will have that conversation with me and will challenge me? That's it. That's it. Everything else is nonsense, right? So you tell me what that place is. Now, is... So that place could be any number of a thousand places in the world.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Maybe even that place is unpredictable. Maybe it is that what matters is not that some schools can provide that experience and some can't. What matters is what happens when I go to that school? Do I create that experience for myself? And I think that experience could be created at almost any institution in the country, right? There are interesting kids everywhere. And it's only in our snobbery that we have decided that interestingness is defined by your test scores. This is just such... It's so... It's just an outrageous lie, right? Test scores, sure, they matter in some day, but I'm talking about college now. What makes for a powerful college experience is

• 59:50Speaker 01

  can I find someone interesting to have an interesting discussion with? And that you can do... You can do that if you're curious and you're interesting. That's it. Or you're... By the way, not that you're interesting. You're interested.

• 1:00:02Tim Ferriss?

  Interested.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Right? That's all that matters.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  She comes back to the questions, right? Having the ability and the ammo to ask good questions and follow-up questions.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  And by the way, some of the people that you learn most from in those settings are some of the most flawed people, right? People... It's not true that you learn the most from the smartest, most put-together people. You've... I think about my college experience. It's... The people who had a lasting impact on me were deeply, deeply flawed people. And their flaws were what almost drew them to me, drew me to them and what I kind of fixated on and found fascinating. I had a friend, still one of my very best friends, ended up being very, very successful. In college, he was a basket case, complete basket case, to the point where...

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  He literally said this to me once. I said, "Why do you have a library book that's three months overdue? Your fine is going up every day." He said, "Well, I'm afraid to take it back because I can't afford the fine." He said this to me. This is a guy, that fascinating, you know, that kind of... And simultaneously, he was, I actually turned out to be a brilliant student, or a brilliant professional. And just the squaring those two sides to his personality, the idea that he was hapless in some really crucial respects, and yet made an incredibly successful place for himself in the world. Figuring that contradiction out took years. And when I did kind of figure it out,

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  it so enhanced my understanding of people in the world, and just of understanding the ways in which he compensated for his haplessness brilliantly. Right? And also realizing that it doesn't... If you're hapless in that kind of logistical sense, common sense, sense, he has no common sense. If you can, if you're thoughtful about it, it won't matter one iota.

• 1:02:07Tim Ferriss?

  What flaws or weaknesses do you have that have turned out to be strengths in some capacity?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  This is like a job interview question, isn't it?

• 1:02:15Tim Ferriss?

  I was going to offer you a position to Ferris Enterprises, but I think you're too busy.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Well, probably, God, my...

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  It's only a job interview if you say, "Sometimes I just work too hard."

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, in dealing with my own impatience and my sloppiness into attending to those flaws, I think I have done, that's been a really crucial thing in helping me achieve what I've achieved. So it's just...

• 1:02:55Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that?

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sloppy.

• 1:02:58Tim Ferriss?

  How are you, in what sense?

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  You know, I don't...

• 1:03:01Tim Ferriss?

  Sloppy like clothes all over the floor?

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  No, no, no, sloppy about, I'm in a hurry. I, you know, I don't always double check. Something I know, or I'll interview someone for 45 minutes when I should interview them for two hours, or, you know, I'm just kind of like, I'm a good enough person, I'm not a perfectionist, like, fine, it's fine, let's do, and so I've become so aware of that now that I've compensated, and I have taught myself to be a lot more of a perfectionist, or I've forced myself to keep asking questions much longer than I would have. When I said earlier that it was these investments of time that had been so, that's what I'm talking

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  about, that I forced myself to invest more time in a lot of activities, knowing that if I did it my normal way, I'd be out the door, right? You know, I'd be thinking about what I want for dinner as opposed to, so that's sort of a very, it's why I, by the way, I so object to, so when you, when you observe or measure someone's natural inclinations, you haven't got a picture of them, because you don't know what they do with those natural inclinations, right? So it turns out that one of the most important things about me is how obsessed I am with those two flaws of mine, right? So identifying those as my natural inclinations tells you exactly the opposite about me.

• 1:04:31Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're compensating by developing the opposite.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  I am massively compensating for them all day long, right? I'm obsessed with compensating for them.

• 1:04:39Tim Ferriss?

  Have you received a lot of bad advice along the way as to what you might do professionally, or has that not been the case?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I don't, I'm not an advice seeker about those kinds of things, nor much of an advice giver, so I haven't really gotten a lot of, and also, my position is, you can't know, I've kind of stumbled into most of the things I've been doing. I much prefer somebody to be open to opportunity than to plan my path, I think that's a better, for me, anyway, I don't know, I mean, people are different, so some people need to plan, but I'm not a, I don't think ahead, really, at all.

• 1:05:17Tim Ferriss?

  Your comment about the compensation and just that last mile, so to speak, with the interviews and so on reminds me of Laird Hamilton, the surfer. He was trying to teach me, he had a lot of patients, had a surf at one point a few years ago, and he said, "When you think you've caught a wave, paddle again." Because if you don't, it's like that last paddle and you think you're there, you're just not going to catch the wave.

• 1:05:43Tim Ferriss?

  When you think of the word "successful," who is the first person who comes to mind? And why?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'm so deeply obsessed with running these days that I immediately think of runners.

• 1:05:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's fine.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  There's an American runner, Galen Rupp, who's maybe our silver medalist in the London Games in the 10,000. And I really admire him for many reasons. He's, first of all, a very, he's a system runner. That's to say, he was sort of identified in high school as being someone of promise. He's been with the same coach ever since, and he had a very thoughtful training path and career path.

• 1:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  What was his name again?

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Galen Rupp. And he's also a very beautiful runner. Both those things matter to me.

• 1:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  What makes a beautiful runner?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  If you look him up on the internet, and you looked at the way he moved, you would say he's like a ballet dancer. He just has grace. There are ugly runners and there are beautiful runners. He's a beautiful runner. Those two things in combination, the idea that he, on an aesthetic level, is deeply pleasing. So he does the thing that he wants to do, not just successfully by the standard metric. He runs very quickly, he wins races. But also by a purely irrelevant aesthetic metric. He creates beauty as he's doing it. That matters to me. And it matters to me that he's so thoughtful.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Purposeful in his, to use that overused phrase, in his preparation. You know, that it's not happenstance, or that he's sort of thought about, what does it mean for me, Galen Robb, to be, to bring out the best in myself? And you know, running is tricky because you, running is all about restraint, even, especially at the elite level. You can't be obsessive or a perfectionist and succeed as a runner. You'll get injured. Running is all about good enough.

• 1:07:38Tim Ferriss?

  Because you will have too much training volume?

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't, the minute you, you're walking this fine line between adequately preparing yourself for racing and overtraining, which leads to injury and burnout and all these kinds of things. And the whole struggle in running is to not get injured, to not cross that line. And so in order to not cross that line, you have to rein in all of these tendencies. Your obsessiveness, you want to do the 10th, you know, repetition, you know, you're doing 10 times a whatever, half miles. And you know logically that after nine, that that's enough. You've pushed your body as far as it can go, but your, you know, your kind of anal discipline self says, no, do 10, because 10 was the workout, right? You can't do 10.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  You have to be tough enough to say, no, no, no, I've done enough for the day and walk away, right? Do you know how hard that is? Particularly for the kinds of personalities who are attracted to elite running. I mean, it's insane, right? So that kind of, that notion of how hard it is to say, it's good enough and walk away. It's like, he does that.

• 1:08:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so a couple of things. It makes me think about a story I heard related to Charlie Francis, very controversial sprint coach, Ben Johnson and so on. The reality is, he was, he was a brilliant coach.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Brilliant coach.

• 1:09:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I hate to say it, but I'm not going to point fingers at any specific people, but very likely that all of the top sprinters at that level are using something besides spirulina.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it's still true, but go on. In that era, in Charlie Francis's era, absolutely.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the golden age of doping in a sense, but the athletes always have more resources than the WADA crew in terms of testing and that cat and mouse game, but. Some really interesting things that have come out. I mean, just recently, I'll give you an example. So there was a period of time where the vast majority of world championship or Olympic sprinters had prescriptions due to their narcolepsy because they wanted to take modafinil as a stimulant pre-race. But I digress. But what Charlie said was, in the case of an elite sprinter, someone said, how do you push your athletes? And he said, no, no, no. The last thing I need to do is push my athletes. It's my job to rein them in. I always have to rein them in. And he would have to say, no, Charlie, you can't

• 1:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  do two sets of squats with 600 pounds on your back at 160, or whatever it was. You have to do one set. And so on. But I wanted to come back to plans. So you said, you're not much for plans, but you are one for systems. Right? So it made me think of, it seems, at least in the case of running, made me think of, and I'm going to paraphrase here, there's a quote from, I want to say Jeff Bezos, something along the lines of, we're uncompromising on the vision and flexible on the details.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Tim Ferriss?

  Where do you have systems in your life that you rely on?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I wish I had more systems sometimes. I don't really have a lot of, I mean, I've sort of, because now I'm essentially self-employed and don't go, I mean, I have discipline, personal discipline, but it's not, is it that rigid? I don't know if I have. Part of the reason I said I think Gail and Rupp is successful is because I'm a little bit envious of the system and structure that he has in place. And it's clear to me that how much can be achieved when you're that kind of thoughtful about what you're doing. I mean, nothing, as someone, you know, as obsessed with sports as I am, the thing that always breaks your

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  heart is that someone who leaves potential on the table, right? And I don't think Gail and Rupp has. And that is an extraordinary achievement, right? To be able to say, when he retires, I ran as fast as I could possibly have run. That is more important than to say, "I won a gold medal," or "I set a world record." Or, and I don't mean that in a kind of cheesy, I mean that really, I really mean that. To say, "I got it 99% of my ability."

• 1:11:45Tim Ferriss?

  And I think folks would be surprised, and you've probably interacted with many more elite runners than I have, but I've met people, a few of them, and I've also interacted with coaches and, for instance, physical therapists who've worked with people like Jackie Joyner-Kersey. And it's very common that they would say about that level of athlete, "I just can't get them," they've never let it all go and really given 100% because of whether it's fear of a hamstring tear, fear of X, fear of Y, Z, whatever it might be. So the fact that this runner is leaving it all on the track.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's interesting, you know, we've been talking, there's two necessarily contradictory things here with runners, which is, training is about restraint, but racing is not, right? So that's why we're sort of getting at why the psychology of these elite athletes is so complex. Restrain, restrain, restrain in preparation. Get on the track and all of a sudden, "No, no more restraint. Go."

• 1:12:45Tim Ferriss?

  All that behavior you've been conditioning, no, ignore all that.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Really hard to kind of, and you know, as I returned to running quite recently and running in a serious way, and that's the piece of it that is proving really hard for me to grasp, is that idea of turning it on on race day. So I train very well, and I race less well, and for that very reason. Whereas I look around me, you know, really elite runners, the difference between their training and racing is astounding. Like, they're just different animals. I mean, it's fascinating to see that.

• 1:13:17Tim Ferriss?

  What books, besides your own, have you gifted to other people the most?

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  There's one book I've given the most in my life, which is a book called, well, there's several now I think about it. There's a book by... Timothy Wilson called Strangers to Ourselves, which is one of the loveliest, most insightful books about social psychology that I've ever read, and I give that a lot to people. And I give, every time I meet, and weirdly, I'm always meeting people who work in retail, particularly, I always send them, particularly if they're Jewish, I send them a book called The Merchant Princes. The Merchant Princes. It's a book about the great Jewish retail families of America.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  So, in the 19th century, all these people come over from Europe who have, have experience in the garment trader retailing, and all of the, not all of them, but an extraordinary number of the early 20th century, late 19th century department stores that pop up around America are founded by Jewish immigrants from Europe, right? You know, from, you know, I mean, literally, you go to any town in America, the traditional department store is one of those families. Well, a guy, and I've forgotten his name, wrote a book about those families, and it's called The Merchant Princes, and it's fantastic. Oh, princes, princes, plural, okay. Yes.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  It's fantastic, as a kind of, it's about everything I'm interested in. It's about immigrants, it's about people figuring out and then conquering an unfamiliar marketplace, right? It's about all of the brilliant ideas that were, that came to these guys in, as they, as they invented the department store, right? The ideas, by the way, were still, you know, all these internet retailers, they're, they're just grandchildren of these guys. I mean, there's nothing, nothing dramatically new has happened. They worked it all out 100 years ago. I mean, it really humbles you about the so-called retail revolution of the last 10 years. And they're such extraordinary characters, and I love the way their personality is

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Kind of imprinted on their, on their business. So there's a fantastic chapter about Fyleens, Fyleen Brothers, who start Fyleens in Boston.

• 1:15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Which, and then Fyleen's basement and so on.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least, and they invent these, they have incredibly interesting ideas about how to hold a sale, how to generate, how to use people's kind of psychological impulses to generate the desire to buy. These guys are so far ahead of everybody else. It's nine, you know, it's like 100 years ago and they are on another level, right? Just like, it's this, that, it's one story like that after another. It's a brilliant book.

• 1:16:11Tim Ferriss?

  Do you read any fiction?

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Oh, huge amounts. I read, I read spy, spy novels.

• 1:16:17Tim Ferriss?

  Spy novels?

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it has the word spy in it, I've read it.

• 1:16:24Tim Ferriss?

  Any, so for someone who's unfamiliar with the genre, but excited to get started, where should they start?

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, do we have, how many hours do we have? But we should, if you know nothing about it, you should start with John Le Carre, of course, and read his first five books. So I would read through, at least through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And you can keep going. Actually, no, no, read, you should read Little Drummers, Little Drummers Girl, or even Russia House. I like his later stuff less so, but it's still fantastic. But you must read Spy, Coming from the Cold. I mean, that's just kind of like gold standard.

• 1:17:02Tim Ferriss?

  A given.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, I mean, I read all of Lee Chau's books. They're not spy thrillers per se, but they're thrillers. Those are fantastic. I mean, I have hundreds, I have literally hundreds of spy novels in my, in my house.

• 1:17:24Tim Ferriss?

  What $100 or less purchase, I mean, this is ballpark, right? Meaning just not a Bugatti or something?

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Tim Ferriss?

  That has most positively impacted your life that comes to mind?

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Probably a

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Piece of music. I think it was probably an album by Brian Eno called Another Green World, which is one of his earlier, early seventies, I think. It's ambient music, but not, not the kind of really weird ambient music. There's an adage that says the music you discover when you are 18. I think it's 18 is the magic here, is the music that stays with you for the rest of your life. Well, I discovered that when I was 18. And I, I sing the songs on that album in my head all the time. And I worship Brian Eno.

• 1:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  He's a fascinating guy.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Have you interviewed him?

• 1:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't. I would enjoy it, though. I have, I have a collection of cards that he also put out called Oblique Strategies.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I know of all about those.

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I have it right on top of, there's another one called The Whack Pack, which is like a series of odd questions just intended to help you.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  He's genius. He's also the most articulate person I've ever met.

• 1:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. You, I should, I should try to get Mr. Eno on the podcast.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  You should. Oh, you should, because just to listen to him talk, it's distracting how perfectly he talks. So you're

• 1:18:45Tim Ferriss?

  He's one of those.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  You just want to listen because it's perfectly done paragraphs. And

• 1:18:52Tim Ferriss?

  It's ready for publication.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  It's just, yeah, you just, I mean, it's, I can't explain the experience. It's just kind of awe inspiring.

• 1:19:00Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like, I've had that experience when watching Neil Gaiman speak, or listening to him speak, also perform, just incredible. What is something you believe that other people think is crazy? Or something that a lot of people believe that you think is crazy, aside from the college piece? Either one. But I'm most interested in things that you believe that other people would raise an eyebrow to.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  I think I believe in ghosts.

• 1:19:23Tim Ferriss?

  I like this. All right. Tell me more.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  I just do. I don't understand. My aunt, who lives in Jamaica, used to live in this house called Hilton Hill, which was said to be haunted. It was a particular room that was said to be haunted. And so I slept in a room. I was a kid, like 13, 14. It was haunted. There's ghosts in there. Played the guitar in the middle of the night. I don't know. And I, at that age, I was like, in Jamaica, everyone believes in ghosts. Not everyone, but it's a, you know, you, people believe in ghosts. So do I think the house is haunted? I actually do think it's haunted. And I also don't understand, if you believe in God, as I do, It's not that hard to believe in ghosts.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  I mean, so I believe in the existence of things outside my own direct physical experience. Right? So, and also, I don't believe that why that's controversial. Like, why people think that you can only believe in things that you have, we have conventional explanations for, and that you can see and touch. Well, that strikes me as being, why would you limit yourself like that? I mean, I'm not crazy. I don't believe in UFOs, although I don't rule them out. I mean, I don't, I'm not a kind of spiritualist, but in a kind of purely rational way, I believe there's stuff out there that can't be properly explained. Why? Because why would we have explanations for everything?

• 1:20:48Tim Ferriss?

  Or not yet, right? I mean, there are, it's just because-

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  There's a ways to go.

• 1:20:52Tim Ferriss?

  There are phenomena that we can't currently explain or examine using the scientific method, right? Which is sometimes poorly, sometimes properly implemented. Doesn't mean we won't. And there's, I mean, you just have to sort of look back in the history books to see many, many, many examples of this.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you're, my mother's an identical twin, and if you know an identical twin, you witness that they live thousands, one lives in Jamaica, one lives in Canada, you know, and they do that thing that twins do, which is they call each other and say, "I was so worried about you," and then the other one will say, "I just had some kind of accident," or one will say, "I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible pain in my stomach," and my mother's like, "That's because I just had an operation for to get," you know, like that kind of stuff, which is like that weird thing you read about, and it happens. I don't know.

• 1:21:42Tim Ferriss?

  This is the second time this has come up on this podcast. I had an identical twin on my podcast, and we talked about this.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, so do I have a rational explanation for that? Does my mother? No. Does it, is it maybe a coincidence? I don't know. Maybe. I mean, I don't know. It just needs an explanation. I don't have one. But I'm open to things that don't need an explanation.

• 1:22:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, I, the question, the, what is something you believe that other people think is insane is actually modified, kind of paraphrased wording of a question that Peter Thiel likes to ask, I suppose, when he's interviewing founders. What is your, what are your, what is your opinion of Peter Thiel? If you have one.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Well, all I know about him is- What I know from this whole Gawker thing, I know that he's been bad odor among some people. And I never read his book, but I think, I think he said, he might have taken a shot at me. I don't remember this.

• 1:22:33Tim Ferriss?

  So the zero to one, he, he takes issue with what he, how he interprets your position as it relates to success and circumstantial factors or luck.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Oh. Does he think there's more, he's more up to the individual?

• 1:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  That would be his position.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. That's a reasonable position.

• 1:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, the, the irony in part, and one of my fans pointed this out, is that he talks in the very beginning of the book, how failing to get a sort of, by a string of events outside of his control, failing to get a clerkship led to all these other things that wouldn't have happened had he received the clerkship, but.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any, I'm going to word this broadly, innovators, and that's sort of jumping. I live in Silicon Valley, so there are a lot of real innovators and even more people who like to fashion themselves innovators. Are there, any people do you think are engaged in very interesting innovation at the moment?

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. I mean, so many, obviously so many people and most of the people doing the interesting stuff, we wouldn't even know about, would we? I mean, they wouldn't have told us.

• 1:23:43Tim Ferriss?

  Don't have publicists?

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, I don't know if I have a good answer to that. I mean, I'm sort of continually.

• 1:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  We could also take a retrospective, I mean, because like everything that was old is once new again, right?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of the retail. So are there other examples of innovators that have had a, that you've become fascinated by? For instance, I interviewed Marc Andreessen recently, incredible tech icon, fascinating guy, and he looks to people like Walt Disney and Edison to apply lessons that they learned and habits they developed, rules they developed for themselves to.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I guess I would say my New Yorker colleague, Tul Gandy, has done all this work with checklists.

• 1:24:29Tim Ferriss?

  So, such great stuff.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Fantastic stuff. And I, I really admire him because it's deeply unpopular work within his own profession, but it's work that has. I mean, extraordinary potential for saving lives. And particularly, it's one of those things that ultimately, I think, has far more usefulness in the developing world and the developed world.

• 1:24:52Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, the Lyme infection example in The Checklist Manifesto is just staggering. I mean, the...

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  But he took an extraordinary risk to his own reputation domestically in America and the medical profession by doing that. Doctors do not like checklists, and they think of him as simplifying, dumbing down. They have all these kind of epithets they use against him unfairly, I think, because he's not saying all medicine can be reduced to a checklist. He's saying, let's find the parts that can be and do it that way, right? So I admire the idea, but almost more I admire the kind of guts that made the idea possible.

• 1:25:35Tim Ferriss?

  I have, so there are a number of books, about 20 or 30 that I have in my living room, because I spend a lot of time there writing oftentimes, although I do like to get out to a third location of some sense. I'll go stir crazy. But I have, it's about 10 books that are face out to remind me of certain things or to elicit certain emotions, and The Checklist Manifesto is one of them.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I'd be pleased to hear that. The other thing, by the way, tons and tons of people write interesting things. Atoole then went and put his ideas into action on a grand scale throughout the world. I mean, follow through. So he's not this kind of intellectual holding forth. He has the idea, he takes the heat, and then he makes it happen in a real way around the world. I mean, it's extraordinary.

• 1:26:21Tim Ferriss?

  Very commendable. What advice would you give to your... Actually, before we get to that one, we talked about books. Do you have any favorite movies or documentaries? That you've seen multiple times.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  No, I'm not really a movie or a documentary guy.

• 1:26:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, then that's an easy, easy pass to the advice you would give your 30-year-old self.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  I would have left North America, leave North America. Get out of there.

• 1:26:45Tim Ferriss?

  Get out, why?

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Because you'll wake up when you're 50 and realize that you spent your entire working career in North America, which is, despite the fact that it pretends to be the only place that matters, it's not the only place that matters. I just would have been, I would have been so much more interesting and thoughtful and insightful and whatever if I had experienced, particularly in the developing world. I had an idea when I was in my 20s that I wanted to go and study in Jamaica, you know, a place where I have family and I have some familiarity with it. I should have done it, or some similar kind of thing. I just think, and it's always my advice to young people, which is, particularly young people are privileged, is just leave. I mean, go away.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  You can come back, but you have to, you can't stay in the cocoon your whole life. Right? You're, it will limit you in ways you cannot even begin to understand at this point.

• 1:27:42Tim Ferriss?

  Totally agree. I was chatting with Sebastian Junger about...

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Oh, he got out of the bubble.

• 1:27:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Tim Ferriss?

  About the system and also any potential remedies. And he felt a mandatory year of, in his case, national service, but it could be volunteering with the Peace Corps after, I think it was, high school. And spending a year exposing yourself to those types of environments before going into the, quote, "real world" somewhere, in this case, North America.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Two, two of the religious groups who take a lot of heat, but for which I, for whom I have enormous respect, the Manonites and the Mormons, have an institutionalized practice of sending people to other cultures.

• 1:28:22Tim Ferriss?

  Their mission.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Their mission. And that's, I just, you know... People who go on those missions come back transformed, not just spiritually, but you know, they have seen a side of them. And by the way, they're not going as American college students do when they do the year abroad to Florence. Florence does not, going to Florence does not expand your horizons. Don't do a year abroad in Paris. Like this is that notion that, oh, I, you know, my school, I'm going to break out of the box and go and spend the, you know, six months in this, in the seventh arrondissement, you know, that bullshit. Go somewhere real, right? That's the, that's what the, that's the upside of that kind of experience.

• 1:29:03Tim Ferriss?

  When, when people have the means, I mean, I spent a year in Japan as an exchange student at 15. It's my first real time outside of the United States and completely rocked my world. It's just called everything into question. And so when, when people have the chance of like, well, I'm thinking about going here, here, here. And if Japan's on this, I go, I always respond with, go to Japan because it will make no sense. You won't be able to read anything and the English that you do read won't make any sense. People do not speak English well and you should just walk until you get lost and then try to find your way back because it's safe. You won't get hurt. And

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  Amazing. But I went there for the first time two months ago.

• 1:29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Blew my mind. I mean, it's like, oh my God, it's so interesting.

• 1:29:45Tim Ferriss?

  Any, any favorite moments or frames?

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  I was there so briefly. I had to come back sadly because I was working on this podcast, but I was there for like four days. I just walked around.

• 1:29:54Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, I did what I had to do and then I just like went for

• 1:29:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  And I went for this, I remember once I was, I was walking down some perfectly ordinary, random residential street. I see a little, I was thirsty. I saw a little sign, tiny sign called coffee. So I look, is there a coffee shop? Can't find it. Search, finding it to go down some stairs, through doors, up some stairs, through another door and there's like a room and there's like a woman, young woman behind a counter. And she makes a cup of coffee that is so far and away the greatest cup of coffee I've ever had, like, nothing else is even close, right? And then I tried to tip her, as one would, and she got offended. I think, you know, threw the money back. It was just like this kind of, an impossible to find, in the middle of nowhere, coffee

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  shop that just kills any other. But that's, that's Japan.

• 1:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like walking through a fever dream. I mean, Japan is, ah, it's so much fun. So the podcast, how did you decide? No doubt you have had people propose that you do a podcast before.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I still, I still think we're at the very early stages of adoption. People, I think something like 15 or 17% of the people in the US have listened to podcasts. It's a very relatively, yeah, early days minority group at this point. Why, why, why now? I mean, what did you, what, what led to the decision?

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Well, my friend Jacob, who runs the Slate Group, an old, old friend of mine, has, they have to, Panoply is theirs, big podcasting company. And he said, do you want to do a podcast? I said, no. He said, come on, do a podcast. So I said, all right. It was really that. And then I got really into it and realized how fun it was. And for all the reasons I talked about earlier, just how it was a different way to tell a story.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  What about it has been the most fun for you? I mean, maybe we covered it already. I mean, it is certainly.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's a group, one is that I've never done a group experience, group thing before. So creating in a group was super novel. I mean, I just, I don't even go to meetings to my, there are no meetings in my life. And suddenly I went to meetings and I didn't realize everyone hates meetings, but I was like, whoa, this is, this is exciting. So everything was just kind of like, and then the idea of just the, the ability to generate emotion in a way you can't do on the page is, was just more than a revelation. It was a kind of, I mean, I was entranced by that possibility.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  It's transformative. I mean, for me. This podcast started as a lark, something to do in between extremely exhausting book projects. And when people, if any fans come up to me now, when I'm on the street, at least nine times out of 10, probably even a higher percentage, talk about the podcast and not the books. And hopefully, that's not because my books are terrible. That could mean that relatively speaking, that is the case. But I think the emotional bond, the emotional response you're able to create and the emotional bond that is forged through the audio medium is just, I have to imagine it's reflective of some hardwiring that we have as storytelling machines.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  It's kind of an amazingly powerful thing.

• 1:33:14Tim Ferriss?

  Where would you, and maybe this is to be kept a secret, but where would you, in an ideal world, let's say, two years from now, what are you doing in audio or not? What does the podcast look like? What is your?

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Well, I imagine I'll do another season. And I had played with the idea of inviting someone to join the Revisionist History rubric and have someone else do some episodes that try something similar. I mean, there's a reason why it can't be a kind of, if I'm doing a collective project, let's make it, just really make it collective, like not just me dreaming up the. So I thought about that. If I could find someone who, you know, took it seriously and was, shared my, but I don't know. And then, you know, can I make a living doing it? That's another question.

• 1:34:02Tim Ferriss?

  So you could certainly talk more about the last piece offline, but I would say the answer should be yes. There's no reason why it shouldn't be. And that on the second to last piece, I would absolutely encourage you to experiment with the format because it's such a lightweight, relatively speaking.

• 1:34:24Tim Ferriss?

  Medium and format for doing that. I mean, I've, I've tried four or five different formats. Some were complete strikeouts.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Tim Ferriss?

  And some, in terms of the cost of creation, in terms of energy, time, money, et cetera, to the output and impact on listeners was so disproportionately favorable. I was like, wow, I'm really glad I tried those five.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Tim Ferriss?

  Because these didn't work. But like the solo Q and A's that I do sometimes as round twos with guests started off because, if you want to talk about kind of a, I was sick at the time I did the Peter Thiel interview. And so it ended up being this solo read of sorts, which was profound and hilarious and great in a bunch of different ways. And I realized, oh, wait a second, I don't actually have to be there for this to be useful to listeners. And so I hope you experiment with that. Last, last real question, and then we'll wrap up here. If you had a billboard and could put anything on it, what would you put on that billboard?

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Probably a picture of one of my favorite runners. On my phone. I'm sure it's on my phone.

• 1:35:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  He's obscured by all the.

• 1:35:32Tim Ferriss?

  All the icons. But who is that?

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Ashbel Kiprop, world's greatest miler.

• 1:35:36Tim Ferriss?

  From Kenya.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  He's my screensaver on my, my picture on my phone. I don't know. I'm obsessed with the idea that track and field ought to be one of our most popular sports and in fact is our least popular sport. So I would love to, I want, I want, I want a day when America's, you know, when the American record holder in the 5K can walk down the street and everyone will come up to her and say, you know, wow, can I have your autograph? And she'll be mobbed. And, you know, that's what I want to happen one day. So.

• 1:36:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any, do you have any, this, this could seem like a silly question, but do you have any quotes that you live your life by or mantras in a non woo woo kind of sense that are meaningful to you? They might just be like heuristics, rules of thumb, anything like that?

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, kind of in a playful way, I used to love, I really like the, I keep myself coming back to that, the legal adage, difficult cases make bad law.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Which I think is an incredibly insightful comment about how because we're we're drawn to the difficult case. And one but you shouldn't generalize from it and that we can't. That's this problem we run into in the political realm over and over again, not just the political, many realms.

• 1:36:52Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example of that? I'm not sure I'm.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so nine 11. It's a difficult case, right? An incredibly rare catastrophic event catches us by surprise. Should you try to generate policy exclusively from the nine 11 experience? That's what we did. And what did we do? I think we made a bunch of really terrible mistakes. Right? We spent two trillion on a war that went nowhere and made the world burst off. We subverted our own civil liberties. We created these monolithic government agencies that God knows what they're doing. Are we actually safer than we were? I'm not sure. That's a case where you, if if we had exercised some restraint and said, you know what?

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  You can't use a single incident, which was this bizarre outlier, and base the whole national security policy of your country on it. You have to look at the at the long view, take the long view, right? Obama is a very natural. That kind of thinking is very natural to him. And he's that difficult cases, bad law kind of guy. He's like, let's not overreact. Let's wait and see that kind of thing, which people find very frustrating with him. But I like that notion. Similarly, you know, it's it's about not overreacting to to black swans, you know, to to outlying events.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  And also not choosing your your case studies wisely. That's, I think, what it's really about.

• 1:38:27Tim Ferriss?

  And I suppose you could also generalize it to your personal life in many ways, too. And I mean, just because you're mugged once doesn't mean you should have a fundamental distrust of every human being as you go throughout life.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly right. And yeah, the and we, I think we can go further that just because you have been traumatized in some way, doesn't mean you are permanently scarred. Right? Human beings are resilient. They recover.

• 1:38:53Tim Ferriss?

  And that's something that Sebastian also brought up, and not everyone shares this opinion, but given his extensive experience with vets and soldiers, he felt like they should not be treated like victims when they come back if they suffer from PTSD for a whole host of reasons that I won't get into. But this has been so much fun. I really think we could continue talking for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time. Malcolm, where can people find the podcast? Where can they find you on social media or elsewhere? Where would you like them to check things out?

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Podcast is revisionisthistory.com. But anywhere there are podcasts, you can find Revisionist History. And my Twitter handle is just @gladwell. I'm the only gladwell out there. But I'm an indifferent tweeter, but I get into little moments when I go off.

• 1:39:42Tim Ferriss?

  Especially if someone brings up the myths and policies of current higher education than the United States.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  Oh, that gets me going.

• 1:39:51Tim Ferriss?

  I remember Poe Bronson told me once, I asked at a Q and A, this is before I had written any books, and I asked him what he does when he has writer's block. And he said, "I write about what makes me angry." Occasionally, I use that. It seems to work pretty well, at least to get me started. Malcolm, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim. That was really fun.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  I can't wait to jump into the episodes you mentioned of the podcast. And I'll probably just go from start to finish. I can be pretty linear that way.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, you can find links to Revisionist History, to everything we discussed, the books mentioned, et cetera, in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And until next time, and as always, thank you for listening.

• 1:40:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:41:22Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by GymnasticBodies.com. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment and I don't get paid any commissions or anything like that. You may have heard Coach Summer on the podcast who designed the program, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am not easily impressed and I've just been completely blown away by the sophistication of his programming and the elegance of his programming.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:42:46Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:43:30Tim Ferriss?

  and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint. And little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees.

• 1:44:15Tim Ferriss?

  For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself.

• 1:44:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.