#220: Soman Chainani — The School for Good and Evil

Soman Chainani (@SomanChainani https://twitter.com/somanchainani) is a detailed planner, filmmaker, and New York Times best selling author. Soman's debut fiction series, The School for Good and Evil http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062434977/offsitoftimfe-20, has sold more than a million copies, has been translated into more than twenty languages across six continents, and will soon be a film from Universal Pictures. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University's MFA Film Program, Soman began his career as a screenwriter and director, with his films playing at over 150 film festivals around the world. He was recently named to the Out100 http://www.out.com/out100-2016/2016/11/11/out100-2016-arrivals#slide-34 and has received the $100,000 Shasha Grant and the Sun Valley Writer's Fellowship, both for debut writers. Special thanks to mutual friend Brian Koppelman http://tim.blog/2014/06/04/brian-koppelman-screenwriter/ for making the introduction! Grab a notebook, pay attention, and please enjoy my conversation with Soman Chainani! 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 TrunkClub http://trunkclub.com/tim. I hate shopping with a passion. And honestly, I'm not good at it, which means I end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless. Enter TrunkClub http://trunkclub.com/tim, which provides you with your own personal stylist and makes it easier than ever to shop for clothes that look great on your body. Just go to trunkclub.com/tim http://trunkclub.com/tim and answer a few questions, and then you'll be sent a trunk full of awesome clothes. They base this on your sizes, preferences, etc. To get started, check it out at trunkclub.com/tim http://trunkclub.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Soman Chainani?

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Trunk Club. There are two types of men out there, you know who you are. Guys who love shopping for clothes, but are short on time, category A. And those of you who hate it, category B. I am in the latter category. My fashion sense is also probably somewhere between homeless and confused with a dash of lazy added in. Either way, you can take heart. And I've used Trunk Club now and have found some of my favorite pieces of clothing that make me look a lot better than I would be able to handle on my own. And there are many reasons for that. But you can get clothing that fits perfectly and looks amazing without ever stepping into a store again, thanks to Trunk Club. And they make it very, very easy.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  And the clothing is handpicked by a personal stylist, your own personal stylist. All you have to do is go to trunkclub.com/tim, type in your measurements, share your likes and dislikes. They'll pick your clothes from more than 80 top brands and ship them right to your door. You keep what you like, you send back what you don't. If you don't like any of it, send it all back. Doesn't matter. And Trunk Club is not a subscription service. This is what appealed to me, among many other things. I didn't want to constantly be getting dinged by things or have to deal with the headache of constantly getting boxes. It's not a subscription service. Shipping is always free and you have five days to try on the clothes. So, a couple of points here. Number one, get started today.

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  Go to trunkclub.com/tim, try it out. You get premium clothes, expert advice, no work, no risk. That is a winning combo. And I have found some of my favorite Espadrilles shoes from them, bright green. I do like the color green and they actually work. I've had so many compliments on these shoes and more people ask me where I got them than any other pair of shoes I've ever had. And more shirts, I kept, ended up keeping about, I would say, three quarters of my box, which I did not expect to do. So go to trunkclub.com/tim and check it out.

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for many, many years. I absolutely love audiobooks and they are one of my favorite ways to pass the time when I travel. I'm on the road all the time and Audible allows me to consume many more books than I possibly could otherwise. I have two audiobooks to recommend right off the bat. The first is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time and it's the only audiobook I've wanted to listen to twice in a row. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's amazing and you will thank me. There are a few different versions. I like the version that Neil narrates himself. One of the most soothing voices of all time. The second book is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, P-O-T-T-S, which had a huge impact on my

• 3:10Tim Ferriss?

  life and formed the basis for a lot of what would later become The Four Hour Work Week. So, go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of these two books or any of many, many other options. That could be books, magazines and much more. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can also access a free 30-day trial. Just go to audible.com/tim. You can't make more time, but you can make the most of it. So, turn your travel or your commute into something more with a free trial at Audible. Go to audible.com/tim to start now and get your free 30-day trial.

• 3:50Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all types, whether they are military strategists, super athletes, business icons, or anything in between, really, to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, tips and tricks you can test and apply in your own life. And this episode was a real treat. If you enjoyed my episodes with Seth Godin, Noah Kagan, any episode that really gets into the nitty-gritty details, then you are gonna love this one. It is a conversation with Somen Chainani, and I'll spell that for you. S-O-M-A-N-C-H-A-I-N-A-N-I. Trying the English today.

• 4:34Tim Ferriss?

  And you can find him on Twitter, on social, @tim Soman Chainani in all places. He was introduced to me by Brian Koppelman, very, very accomplished artist, screenwriter, producer, co-creator of the hit show Billions, and a very, very long filmography. And when I asked Brian what I should dig into with Soman, he said many things, but among others, his, quote, "His discipline and rigor, carefulness of his approach in all aspects of life. He's in incredible physical condition. He's super careful by financial security. He kept tutoring after getting a three-book deal. He's a detailed planner and an artist of high order, more disciplined and organized and businesslike than almost any artist I've met."

• 5:16Tim Ferriss?

  So who is Soman? Well, his debut fiction series, The School for Good and Evil, has sold more than a million copies, well over a million copies, been translated into 25 languages across six continents, been a New York Times bestseller for more than 30 weeks, and will soon be a film from Universal Pictures with Soman co-writing the screenplay. He's a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University's MFA Film Program, after which he began his career as a screenwriter for film and TV. He was recently named to the Out 100 and has received the $100,000 Circle Grant and the Sun Valley Writers Fellowship, both for debut writers. He's also an incredible tennis player, which we will dig into. And there are a lot of parallels and a lot of transfers between what we talk about is obsession with Disney, and we cover so much

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  ground. I think you guys will really enjoy this episode, so pay attention, get a notebook ready, and please enjoy my conversation with Soman Chainani.

• 6:12Tim Ferriss?

  Soman, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I am sitting here with a set of questions and exploratory bullets, and each one of these could be explored for, I would say, an hour or two, I would guess. So we may need a round two at some point, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the mutual connection that we have. How do you know the incredible Brian Koppelman? And for you people who don't know that name, he is a polymath, he is a writer, he co-wrote Rounders, The Illusionist, I think The Illusionist he co-produced, and is co-creator of Billions,

• 6:54Tim Ferriss?

  this new hit show which I'm absolutely in love with. But how do you know Brian?

• 6:59Soman Chainani?

  Well, it started, I think, because in my twenties, I'd come out of film school at Columbia, and I'd gone straight to London and had been working on a movie over there for a couple of years. And that was supposed to be my sort of hotshot debut and all that stuff. And it ultimately fell apart. And so I came back to New York when I was like, you know, 25 or 26, broke a quarter million dollars in debt from college and film school. And I didn't know how to make money. So, you know, I didn't know what to do. And luckily, a friend saved me and introduced me to a couple clients and told me to become an SAT tutor. And so I sort of learned overnight how to tutor and got into that whole business. And

• 7:42Soman Chainani?

  it just happened that Brian's son needed a tutor. And so that's how it started. And so, you know, I was working with his son and a bunch of his son's friends as I was starting to write the first School for Good and Evil book. And so he sort of watched the entire evolution from hotshot filmmaker to broke and penniless tutor to then, you know, rising from the ashes into a new career. So he knows me better than anyone. My God.

• 8:13Tim Ferriss?

  Well, he is one of your biggest fans. And the enthusiasm, he's an enthusiastic guy to begin with. But if we were to spinal tap that and take it to 11, the enthusiasm with which he wanted to make the introduction was, of course, an immediate yes then on my part. And one thing he mentioned to me, and I wanted to dig into this, is that, well, first, let's back up. And this is going to be a very, a non chronological interview. We're going to jump all over the place because that's what conversations tend to do. But the School for Good and Evil, how many books are there in that series right now?

• 8:51Soman Chainani?

  So there's three books in the series right now. And then there's a full color kind of graphic handbook. That's a companion guide that we offer to like reluctant readers, to kids who hate to read and will never read novels ever. But if they want to be part of the universe, they get this sort of graphic version of the world. So there's either the three novels or there's the handbook. And then I'm in the process of writing the fourth one as we speak. And I think there'll probably be in the end, six in the series total. Just also because the movies are going to start to come out from Universal. And so I wanted to have enough books to stretch out to match the movies.

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't want to end up in a, in a Game of Thrones situation?

• 9:36Soman Chainani?

  You know, that, at least once a week, I think of that situation and cannot imagine that just because, you know, I get so involved in my work and like, I take it almost too seriously at times. And the idea that you have to share your secrets of what's going to happen to somebody who then is going to put it on TV before you, oh my God, I'd kill myself. I couldn't do it.

• 10:01Tim Ferriss?

  So you are one of the most, according to Brian, this is our first conversation, you and I, one of the most disciplined and rigorous people he knows in all things. And one of the adjectives he used was careful. And I wanted to explore that because I thought it might lead us to some backstory. So he said, correct me if I'm wrong, that you kept tutoring, you kept doing your tutoring after you got a three book deal. Is that true?

• 10:27Soman Chainani?

  I kept tutoring after we made the movie deal. And the movie deal like was enough for me to not have to work for like 15 years.

• 10:35Tim Ferriss?

  So, you know, so. Why keep tutoring?

• 10:38Soman Chainani?

  I just couldn't get out of my head, the idea that art is something that you should not depend on. I don't like depending on my art for income because then I start to think in a mercenary way. And so, you know, I had to get through my head that it's okay, you know, you're, you're making enough now from, from the books and the movies that. You don't have to confuse them. You don't have to confuse money and art. Because the great thing about tutoring was it took all the pressure off the book. Even though I was broke at the time, even though I had nothing going for me, it meant that I could write freely because at the end of the day, my money wasn't going to come from that book.

• 11:22Soman Chainani?

  You know, and so I couldn't let go of tutoring. I tutored up until last year. It, you know, I went like three or four years longer than I should have. Because it just meant that I had that absolute freedom in the back of my head that if, you know, it all went to pot, I still had tutoring, you know?

• 11:39Tim Ferriss?

  Should have is a tricky word, right? Or it's a tricky contraction because it's, I'd like the separation of church and state that you described in so much as you not feeling as though you have to find rent money through your art, even if your art is compensating you well psychologically, allowing you to compartmentalize that you don't think about what will sell best as the primary directive of your art. Perhaps. Where did you grow up?

• 12:11Soman Chainani?

  I grew up in a little island off Miami called Key Biscayne. That is now quite popular as a resort town. It has a Ritz Carlton. It has a Starbucks now. It had neither of those things when I was growing up. It was, it was basically just, you know, beaches and trees when I grew up and it was very, very small. But the one thing it was famous for was tennis. Like if you didn't play tennis on Key Biscayne, like, you know, you weren't part of the cool crowd. And so that's, it's a lot of, it's a, it's a lot of where players train these days. And still, so, you know, that's sort of where I grew up.

• 12:49Tim Ferriss?

  And how would you describe your, I don't know what age to pick here. Hmm, it's a 10 year old self. Were you, were you a popular kid?

• 13:02Soman Chainani?

  Let me think. No, not until high school. And I think it was because I just was a little confused, I think, at that age. You know, I was the only Indian kid on the island I grew up on. I was one of three people of color at my high school, right? And so you grow up not looking like anyone else. And then, once I turned 12 and 13 and I start liking guys instead of girls, that adds another dimension to the whole thing, right?

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:35Soman Chainani?

  Also, at the same time, I'm basically six foot. And at that time, I was like 110 pounds.

• 13:41Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 13:42Soman Chainani?

  I could not put weight on to save my life, right? So, all those things, it just felt like I just didn't fit in in any shape, way or form. You know, and I didn't, I didn't know what to do. And I think it led me to basically retreat into work. And so, you know, I became the kid who, who won everything, right? Like, they used to give out subject awards at school every year. They gave out 11 on the last day of school. And from seventh grade, you know, through like 11th grade, I won all 11 every single year. So, it was basically me just walking back and forth, picking up trophies. Because that's sort of what I did. You know, I just sort of threw myself into work.

• 14:25Soman Chainani?

  And it was only once I got to the later years of high school, 11th and 12th grade, that I think I started to let my real self come out a little bit. You know, I just think it broke through on its own. And I think people started to realize that I actually did have a sense of humor for all my workaholic tendencies, you know?

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. When did you become openly gay?

• 14:48Soman Chainani?

  I think it was my senior year of college. And it wasn't something that, it's so funny, because now I watch kids come out and it's done with such empowerment and like this kind of beautiful freedom. And if there's only one thing I'm sort of envious of in the entire world, it's the way that, that kids come out now. Because when- You know, we did it in like the early to mid 2000s. There just wasn't anything out there to help you, you know? And so it was just traumatic having to come out to people, to your parents, to your friends. Every time you did it, it was just trauma, you know?

• 15:27Soman Chainani?

  And so I think once I actually came out is when everything sort of broke open. And that's when, you know, like, I think the path I was on up until then, I thought I was going to be in business. I thought I was gonna, you know, be a consultant or a banker or any of these things. And it was only after I came out that I think my creative self came back. It was almost like that had gone in the closet, too. And it, and it took time for, for both to come out.

• 15:54Tim Ferriss?

  I was talking to a dear friend of mine, Adam Robinson, who's been on the podcast as a guest before, but alongside several other people. And we just did a solo episode. And he battled with depression for a long time. And I've had my own bouts with depression. I'm not saying these are the same thing, but we had a long discussion about one of the ingredients being inauthenticity, meaning not following who you are or opening up to who you are fully as one of the ingredients in, in, in that particular breed of, of depression. So I've, I've thought a lot about that. Were you able to be yourself with your parents at a young age?

• 16:39Tim Ferriss?

  Or did they know you were gay? It was that, was that a, an open secret? Could you describe your, could you describe your, your sort of dynamic with your family?

• 16:49Soman Chainani?

  You know, my parents are, are amazing. Like, they're just both brilliant people and both, you know, at, at the end of the day, so open minded. I, I don't know if it was so much about worrying about disappointing them as much as at that time in the world, it was just, there were no models of, of how to do it in a, in a real way, especially in, in the sort of like world of Indian families, you know? There was nothing. So I don't know if it was them specifically that scared me as much as the idea. I didn't even know what it would look like. I thought if you come out of the closet, you're going to live this very small, lonely life, you know? That's what I thought at the time.

• 17:31Soman Chainani?

  And you know, what's funny is, once I came out, once I became a writer, all these things, I look back at that time and think, thank God, my life sort of unfolded the way it did. Because like, if you look at the School for Geneva books, there's, there's 120 characters, right? Each has their own story. Each, it's, it's an entire labyrinth world that I don't keep track of with notes. Like, I just, I know it in my head. Everything's in my head. And I think, all of that energy, this entire universe of creativity was trapped, right? And so, no wonder I was a complete basket case for so much of my young life. Because if you can't, like, you know, forget the gay thing, if you're not actually, like,

• 18:16Soman Chainani?

  letting out this absolute volcano of sort of creative energy inside of you, it's gonna be rough. And so I think, that's sort of one of the missions I have in life, just myself, is, is whenever I sense another creative soul who's, who's bottled themselves up, I gravitate towards them and try to find a way to let them out. And that's what the books are too. Sort of the, the message of the books in there too, is, for kids, is, you know, find your tribe, right? Like, don't, don't buy into the matrix of, of what the society is telling you, a successful person or a hero has to be. Find your tribe.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  What did you major in undergrad?

• 18:56Soman Chainani?

  English. Just because, you know, when you go to a school like Harvard, you don't know, there's nothing practical, right? Like, a lot of the, the finance guys will major in economics or government, but only out of just sort of default. Because there isn't anything applicable at, at a school like Harvard, really. So, you know, in my head, I knew I was gonna go into consulting or banking, but it didn't matter what ma, what you majored in. So I figured, might as well major in something that I actually like, which was, you know, English.

• 19:28Tim Ferriss?

  I remember having an open Q and A not too long ago where we were talking about where the question was related to entrepreneurship and I gave a response and then they interrupted and they said, well, it's easy for you to say because you you're a male who went to an Ivy League school and I know, no, but I remember thinking to myself, the last thing an Ivy League school does is prepare you to be an entrepreneur.

• 19:56Soman Chainani?

  Oh, you're so right.

• 19:57Tim Ferriss?

  It prepares you, it molds you to be a very well polished cog in a fancy machine like consulting or eye banging, but it does not in any way, probably if, if, if anything inhibits in many respects entrepreneurship, but that's, that could be a whole separate podcast, I suppose.

• 20:18Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, we have, we have to at some point do our dump on Ivies. I have so much to say, I almost want to tell, like, put on my forehead that like, if you went to an Ivy, I probably won't date you, which is like the ultimate form of self loathing.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  Where, where did, where did film or the fiction come into the picture?

• 20:41Soman Chainani?

  You know, I think growing up, film was my love. Like, I always wanted to be in, in film in some capacity. I thought that's what I was going to end up doing. The big problem I thought was that I was not one of these people craving to direct just for directing sake, right? I, I didn't have this burning desire to, you know, be a Spielberg or something like that. I wanted to control a vision of a world, right? So I already had like a fantasy streak inside of me. I gravitated towards, you know, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, all the, all the Grimm's fairy tales, things like that. And so.

• 21:20Soman Chainani?

  I think ultimately, what I wanted to be able to do only sort of came into to existence once J K Rowling wrote Potter. Because once I saw Potter, I thought, oh, wait, this is like exactly sort of the the kind of brain I have, which is create your own universe, control how this universe is going to to be presented in media, whether it's it's books, it's film, it's whatever. And I think that's where School for Good Evil came from at some level was this,

• 21:53Soman Chainani?

  you know, desire to somehow bring a universe in my head into the world in the most fully realized way possible, combining my interests in both film and literature, you know?

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. So I have something I can't get out of my head, so I'm gonna jump back to tennis.

• 22:09Soman Chainani?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Tim Ferriss?

  The first thing I was thinking was at six foot, whatever you were, 110 pounds, you must have had a really mean serve. That was the first thing I was thinking. And the second is really a selfish or self interested question, because I have been considering learning tennis this year. And you've spent an incredible amount of time tutoring, granted, doesn't sound like you were tutoring in tennis, but how would you recommend? I learned to play tennis if I were going to take it seriously and what what should I focus on and what should I spend less time on, maybe things that novices waste a lot of time on? Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 22:48Soman Chainani?

  That's such a good question. It's funny, I'll tell you, I'll tell you how I play to this day, and it might help, which is that, you know, all year long in New York, I play four or five times a week, you know, with different people, and it's usually, you know, we play matches or we hit or whatever. And then every two months, I go down to Miami to the condo complex I've lived in since I was a kid. And I play with the coach I've had since I was a kid. I've been playing with him for 25 years.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  And for context for people listening, and you did not lose a first round match for 10 years?

• 23:22Soman Chainani?

  You know what happened was I I went 10 years. Playing tournaments all the time, you know, after this from high school up until probably my late twenties and never lost the first match because I always felt like I had paid the entry fee. I had done so much work to get there because often the tournament was in another state or another country. I would not lose. It didn't matter who you put me against. I had this sort of like killer iron will that would get me through that match. And as soon as I started writing good and evil, as soon as I was putting all my creative energy elsewhere, I think I lost six in a row.

• 23:59Tim Ferriss?

  We have to pick and choose where you put your energy, right? So I interrupted you telling me how you how you play though.

• 24:04Soman Chainani?

  So I go down to Miami and I play with the same coach I've been, you know, playing with 25 years. He's basically 70 years old. He cannot move. So what he does is he takes a basket of balls and feeds me to them, feeds me them quite slowly and analyzes my swing on every single one. So it's 100% about technique, 100% about timing. It's, it's as basic as it gets, but it's like three or four times a year. He's just training technique. And if I had a kid or had to, you know, teach somebody tennis, it's get your technique perfect because the thing about tennis is it's so unconscious. If you try to consciously think your way through the

• 24:46Soman Chainani?

  strokes or anything like that, you're going to end up in trouble just because of how fast it ultimately goes. It's like ping pong. So it has to become automatic. It has to become conscious. So your technique has to be impeccable. And so one of the things he taught me from an early age is, you know, don't rush to the baseline. Start at the service line and get your technique right, you know, and then things will flow. So I became sort of a technique obsessive, which of course flows into all the other aspects of my life because I'm big on technique and process.

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  Service line is where you serve from?

• 25:20Soman Chainani?

  No, no, no. Service line is the middle. Is that like the line in the middle of the court?

• 25:26Tim Ferriss?

  Here we go. All right. Now we're at my level. Thanks.

• 25:29Soman Chainani?

  Well, the funny thing about tennis is.

• 25:32Soman Chainani?

  It rewards, it reminds me of like gymnastics and figure skating where it rewards attention to detail and it rewards sort of individualistic obsession. And so it's sort of, you're talking sweet spot of my personality. It's just the one sport I love. And I also think it's a great sport where, you know, you can put me up against somebody who is enormously big and, you know, powerful and it won't help them. You know, it's a sport where power is not gonna do all that much for you ultimately against somebody who's, who's fast. And we can see that, you know, in, in the men's game now with Djokovic and Murray and all those guys.

• 26:11Tim Ferriss?

  So I have next to me, literally five inches from my, my left thigh, I have the book I'm finishing, which is Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chang. It's a science fiction compilation of short stories. And then right next to that is the, the next book I was planning on reading, The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallway, W. Timothy Gallway. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his last name, but where do novices waste a lot of time? We're gonna get into what makes a good coach. And this is, I think, gonna take us a few different places. But where should I, where should I not spend a lot of time in the beginning? And, and that relates to how should I choose a tennis coach?

• 26:48Soman Chainani?

  You know, I think one of the things is when coaches put you against other kids very early and you're playing matches very early because they want to develop your competitive instincts. Again, I think it's super dunder headed because what they don't realize is your competitive instincts are far stronger than your technique, right? So what you'll end up doing is coming up with this hatchet job way of playing tennis that somehow will do the job to win you some matches, but it isn't gonna serve you well in the long run, right?

• 27:18Tim Ferriss?

  And it's like memorizing openings in chess versus learning first principles.

• 27:23Soman Chainani?

  Yes, and like, that's how you get to the club. And when you go to the club and you see all these people with hacking back, backhands or like they slice both the forehand and the back and they, they play in a way that doesn't make any sense. It's because as a kid, they were put against too many of their compatriots in competitive matches and were never taught actually how to play. And so I think it's more about finding a teacher who is technique and obsessive with technique. I mean, the coach I played with invented the two handed backhand on tour. He was the first person to ever use it. It's a guy named Mike Belkin, you know, he played Connors at Wimbledon. So like, All he cares about is are you hitting the ball in the sort of like micrometer sweet

• 28:05Soman Chainani?

  spot? You know, I can hit the the perfect shot. He doesn't care. He's he's just looking at where I hit it like, you know, and ultimately, I think tennis is about knowing your weaknesses. And I think my weaknesses, for instance, are weaknesses that show up in other aspects of my life, you know, so having someone call me out on them a few times a year actually helps me not just on the tennis court, but everywhere else.

• 28:29Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of your weaknesses that manifest elsewhere?

• 28:32Soman Chainani?

  Oh, boy, I would say.

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  We could just trade weaknesses for two hours, but don't worry, this will this I won't do this the entire interview.

• 28:39Soman Chainani?

  He doesn't understand why my margins are so small. He thinks that like, the comfortable way to play tennis is to give yourself two inches of net clearance.

• 28:48Tim Ferriss?

  What is that? Uh, I see margins, you mean the space over the net with which you clear it? Got it.

• 28:53Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, and I mine is like two millimeters because I just I hit the ball very hard and very flat for the lines. And he doesn't understand why everything has to be so dangerous, you know, which is the same note I get when I submit my books to my editor. Why does everything have to be so provocative? Why does everything have to be so aggressively on the edge of what's appropriate? You know what I mean? So it shows up, you know, all the time. I think the other two things are when I get tense, I tend not to finish my swing, which I think shows up in life also, which is when you're nervous or when you're tense or when you go in with, you know, feeling on your heels, you don't let the full expression of

• 29:36Soman Chainani?

  yourself through, you know, so that's something that that I think shows up. And maybe also, and this I think is a common one, whenever I'm going through a string of unforced errors or anything like that in tennis, it's because I'm hitting the ball too early. I'm reaching for it. I'm not waiting for it. Like, it's not coming into my strike zone. I'm lurching forward for it.

• 29:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 29:58Soman Chainani?

  Holding on a little bit.

• 30:00Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do that with deal making or negotiating, things like that? Or where does that, where does, where else does that show up?

• 30:06Soman Chainani?

  I think, yeah, I think sometimes it's, it's a tendency to wanna jump at something and say yes to everything. And what, I'm lucky to have sort of the, the greatest agent ever, who weirdly enough is a lot younger than me, who basically doesn't let me say yes to anything. You know, he's just like, wait, hang on, like, you know, and it's, it's sort of.

• 30:28Tim Ferriss?

  Start with no and then just.

• 30:30Soman Chainani?

  Start with no.

• 30:30Tim Ferriss?

  And then build from there.

• 30:31Soman Chainani?

  Yeah. And also just, he's like, it's not just saying yes. It's like, you have to wait until something actually excites you, you know? So, yeah.

• 30:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, as another friend of mine, Derek Sivers, entrepreneur, would say, it's either a hell yes, or it's a no, nothing in between. And that's how he makes his binary decisions. But you brought up something that I really want to underscore for people who haven't experienced it perhaps, or who, who haven't utilized it enough. And this is a lesson that I revisit quite a lot and sometimes forget. And that is, we, we talk a lot about of, or say, in general, US culture talks a lot about mind over body and, and so on. But you can use body over mind in so much as the sports arena, the gym, the tennis court can be used, like you said, as a way of surfacing and working on weaknesses that then transfer to other areas.

• 31:24Soman Chainani?

  Hundred percent.

• 31:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I have found that to, to be the case, which is one of the many reasons that when my exercise regimen is consistently on point, everything else improves or is easier. So that is, that's something that I'm focusing a lot on right now. All right, let's, let's, let's dig into some of this other stuff.

• 31:48Tim Ferriss?

  Where do you even begin? I have so many notes in front of me. I will start with, we, we talked about tennis. I want to talk about. Walt Disney and Disney. So you are apparently obsessed with Disney, Disney World. Let's talk about it. Why don't you just, I'll just let the door, let the door open and we can go from there.

• 32:10Soman Chainani?

  Well, I don't know if it was by choice. I think what happened was we didn't have TV growing up. We didn't have cable, internet, any of these things that kids grow up with now.

• 32:19Tim Ferriss?

  What did your parents do growing up?

• 32:20Soman Chainani?

  My dad was in real estate and my mom, you know, was a very young mom, you know, she had three kids by 23. So, you know, it was a, it was a lot going on. So she, she was trying to figure out how to like raise three kids, you know, and back then, you know, you had your VCR and your TV that played a couple of channels and that was it. So we used to complain a lot to them that we had nothing to watch. We didn't have a Nintendo. We didn't have anything. And so my grandparents finally relented and came home with the entire Disney animated collection on VHS, which was like, I think 27 movies or something like

• 32:59Soman Chainani?

  that. And that is all I watched from what, from age, maybe six or seven until 15. That was all that was in the house. So like, that was our only source of entertainment. And so I think Disney at some level infected every cell of my brain and it became for good or for good or bad, sort of an essential part of how I thought about the world. And it was only later on, you know, once I got to college, I took a class on, sort of a famous class at Harvard on fairy tales taught by a professor named Maria Tatar, who has become sort of like, you know, the, the most famous expert on fairy tales in the world.

• 33:40Soman Chainani?

  And she exposed me to the original Grimm stories, which are horrific and dark and insane. And half the time, the evil character wins and half the time, the good character wins. And I think that gap between the Disney stories I grew up with and I took so seriously and the real fairy tales is where the skull for good evil started. Because the question that kept sticking in my head is why did kids 200 years ago grow up with stories where the hero didn't always win? Where the hero died a horrible death if they made a mistake? And we got these very sanitized versions of the story where the hero always wins, even if the hero is not particularly smart. You know, you look at The Little Mermaid, you look at The Lion King.

• 34:23Soman Chainani?

  Ariel should die brutally in that movie because she's an idiot.

• 34:28Soman Chainani?

  A complete idiot. I mean, the number of mistakes she makes in that movie doesn't make any sense. So then to read The Little Mermaid, the original, where she dies at the end, suddenly made sense, right? And I think that's where I started thinking, okay, how do we get kids in our world to get the real stories? How do you get them to start reading something where good and evil are in balance? Where it actually means something again, you know? And I think all of that stuff, and then the arrival of Potter, you know, my knowledge of Disney, that all sort of played into what the School for Good and Evil ultimately became, which is sort of a mix of all of that with an attempt to give fairy tales back to children and sort of make them really think about what good and evil is.

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  So I remember reading the original Hansel and Gretel stories, a few variations. And there's an illustrated version people can check out if they want. They should read it before their kids read it.

• 35:25Soman Chainani?

  Yes.

• 35:26Tim Ferriss?

  Which I think Neil Gaiman played a part in, which really underscores how brutal

• 35:34Soman Chainani?

  brutal.

• 35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Some of these stories were. And have you, I have thought a lot about Disney in the last few years, but I've thought about Disney more so in the capacity of Walt Disney. And there's a, there's a fantastic Walt Disney Museum here in San Francisco.

• 35:52Soman Chainani?

  Which I'm dying to come.

• 35:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's so good. It's so good. And it looks at Walt Disney, the thinker Walt Disney, the imagineer, et cetera, but also Walt Disney, the technology innovator.

• 36:04Soman Chainani?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Tim Ferriss?

  But Glenn Beck, of all people, has a book and he carried it with him for some period of time. And my understanding is that it inspired Disney World. It's The Garden Cities of Tomorrow.

• 36:17Soman Chainani?

  Oh, I've read that book.

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  You have, by Sir Ebenezer George Howard. Have you, have you been to Disney World?

• 36:22Soman Chainani?

  Forty times.

• 36:25Soman Chainani?

  Forty times. I, you know, like I said, Disney was somebody that I admired so much that I came to a point where, once you started admiring someone and studying them, you start to see their flaws. And that's where you start to see the seeds of your own career. Because I think, once you have an idol, and you study them long enough, and you realize their weaknesses, you think, oh, wait, I can, I can come in here with my own voice and do something totally different, that's going to ultimately, you know, be, be its own thing. And so, I studied all that stuff, because I was fascinated, the most important thing that I was fascinated about with Disney is his desire to create his own city. He was obsessed with this idea of creating his own, not just, you know,

• 37:10Soman Chainani?

  Walt Disney World amusement park, he wanted his own model community, that the rest of the world would then adopt. That's what Epcot was supposed to be. You know, it never ended up happening, and then, you know, for whatever reason, they abandoned it after his death. But I think, you know, once I'm done with School for Ghanival, I'm dying to do another series about, that's sort of analogous to this idea of what the perfect city of the future looks like.

• 37:35Tim Ferriss?

  You bring up something that I'd like to add to, which is the, the benefit, in a way, of heroes with clay feet. And so, there's, people have probably heard the recommendation, never meet your heroes. And that is said because of the fear and the reality that oftentimes, when you meet the people you most admire, they disappoint you in some way. There is some type of flaw, there's some type of weakness. And it's the, the frame to have, I think, that is more enabling, is the one that you just described. And that is, you shouldn't be, well, actually, I shouldn't, you're allowed to be disappointed, you can be disappointed, but even if you feel

• 38:17Tim Ferriss?

  disappointed in some way, everyone is flawed, and that should just... Encourage you because it humanizes them. You realize, okay, they're not some infallible, metaphorically, some entrepreneur or fill in the blank who is hitting every foul shot 100 times out of 100. It's like, no, they have real weaknesses. And that then, like you said, opens the door to the possibility that you could do something of that magnitude. So I find it really encouraging in a way when I explore the weaknesses of people that I really, really admire. So in any case, I appreciate you making that point, you know, the paradox

• 39:01Tim Ferriss?

  of heroes. What is one of your, if you have one, favorite failures? Because I think a lot of people listening will think to themselves, good God. All right. So this guy just seems to be a savant in everything. I can't, I don't have those attributes. So let's talk about some failure.

• 39:22Soman Chainani?

  Oh, God, there's been so many.

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a favorite failure? Meaning, a failure that in retrospect, really planted the seeds of later success?

• 39:35Soman Chainani?

  You know, I think the one small one and one big one, which was, I had sort of tested School for Geneva at Film School in a three-page treatment of the story. And the professor was this ultra jockey, you're talking patriarchal culture, you know, entrenching kind of guy. And I submitted it. And I went in to talk to him at office hours. And he goes, so let's talk about this story you wrote about an Indian family. And I said, I didn't write the Indian, anything about the Indian family. And he's like, he's like, well, which one, he didn't have names on them, or he hadn't looked at the names. He's

• 40:18Soman Chainani?

  like, well, which one was yours? And then like, he got distracted and was talking about how his favorite one was this one about fairy tales. And he's like, whoever the girl that wrote it was, like, she has a future, da, da, da, da. And I said, that one's mine. And he, his face just totally changed and he couldn't get over the idea that I had written it, that like, you know, that a boy had written that story, that star that had a female lead character was set in the world of fairy tales. And he never sort of, we never went over it because he couldn't get over the shock of it. And there was something in that moment that I think I took badly. I think I got ashamed

• 40:57Soman Chainani?

  of it. And had I, had I reacted with a little more self-confidence at 23 or 24, however old I was, I would have taken the positive comment he had given more than the negative one. Do you know what I mean? But for some reason, I felt embarrassed by it. So that was something that I wish, but it was an important one because I think years later, when I came back to it with a little more self-esteem, I was like, out of all the kids in the class, he liked that one the best. Why didn't I run with it? That was like, it was a serious idea. The, the failure that came, that became sort of the, the cornerstone of my life happened after I graduated film school, which was, I came out sort of the hot graduate. I got picked up by CAA off a script that had won-

• 41:41Tim Ferriss?

  For people who don't know, just sorry, just for context, so CAA is one of the largest talent agencies in the world, if not the largest, but it's CAA, WME, Willie Morris Endeavor. There, there are a handful of these UTA out there, but CAA is one of, one of the big motherships.

• 41:58Soman Chainani?

  And so they had, you know, they had picked me up and this script had won a ton of stuff and, and it had won this, you know, big grant. And so I immediately got a studio deal out of England to, to make the movie for, I think it was a $6 million budget, which is ridiculous for a graduate of-

• 42:17Tim Ferriss?

  For a movie that you wrote?

• 42:19Soman Chainani?

  For a movie I wrote. And so, you know, it was, it was sort of the, almost like an autobiographical story at some level with some fantasy elements to it. And so I moved to London. I spent a year and a half prepping it, doing all the work to get it ready. You know, we had crews set up. We had a great cast. We had everything set. And it was, you know, right at a sort of bad time in the industry financially. And the studio had had three or four flops in a row. And then their, their big movie came out and died and that was it. They went bankrupt six weeks before we were starting shooting. And that was it. That was in a year and a half, I lost everything I had worked on,

• 43:02Soman Chainani?

  you know, worked for all those years. And I just didn't know what to do. And I remember going home. And that's when, you know, I started tutoring and all that stuff. But the biggest thing that came out of there is I remember thinking, never again, that's never going to happen again. I'm never going to work on something for two years and put my life and soul in it and not have it see the light of day. And that's when I realized there has to be a way to control your IP, right? There has to be a way to to control the creative property so that, you know, you can be in charge. And that's when I started thinking, you know, why don't I go back to what I was always meant to do, which was fantasy? And what if I start with it as books first? You know, what can I do?

• 43:43Soman Chainani?

  But even then I thought, all right, say I write a book and it comes out and no one reads it. Then we're back at square one. And so I did a lot of investigation into the kids book industry. And this is where I found sort of the magic secret, which is I watched a lot of authors going on tour who wrote kids and teen books. And if you're a teen author, you tour like an adult author does. You just go to bookstores every night in different cities and you meet your fans, which, you know, is great. But if you don't have any fans, then there's no point, right? If you write for kids eight to 12, you don't go to bookstores. Instead, they send you to schools and you're put in front of captive audiences,

• 44:25Soman Chainani?

  anywhere from 200 to 1,000 kids at a time who, you know, don't know anything about you. And you get an hour to sell your book three times a day to three different schools. And I thought, okay, that I can do that. If you, if I write a book good enough and you put me on tour and I get to see 3,000 kids a day, I can sell. And that's what got me, got me going. I realized I could control the creative and the business side of it. And for someone who lives their life wanting control, it was, I saw a career waiting to happen, you know? So it looks like an accident, I guess, but I had, I had sort of seen how it could be done.

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to talk about the selling and now that the more I hear three, three times a day, a thousand kids at a time, I'm like, why have I not been choosing my genres more intelligently? Because you can show up to a gigantic book signing, even if you've had successful books and have 12 people or two people. I remember going to the UK. I've never, so just as a contrast, I've never done what anyone would consider a, a book tour, because if after, I remember the, the four hour work week came out and I went to the UK and I expected to have this fantastic launch and it did pretty well, but they wanted to rely on everything that had happened in the US. And I remember going

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  to my first book signing that the, the publisher in the UK was handling. And I showed up and it was, I don't remember the exact name of the bookstore, but I'd show up at seven o'clock or eight o'clock at night. It's raining outside and literally over two hours, two people showed up. One person who was just wandering around and wanted to talk to me about things, anything that was unrelated to my book. And then one person who'd already bought the book somewhere else.

• 46:14Soman Chainani?

  You know, nothing, nothing brings you back to earth like the British.

• 46:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God. It was just such a punch in the nuts. And after that, I was like, no more. Much like yourself, different context, but I was like, never again, ever, ever in my life, am I going to have my head stuffed into the toilet this hard from like an ego demolishing standpoint. But I digress. That's my, that is my want.

• 46:38Soman Chainani?

  No, but I think it's important because also I think at some point, you know, all the principles that, that you believe in and that, you know, I've been reading your books for years and, and immediately sensed a fellow soul, um, you know, who is interested in the same things. All that stuff kids need. And the School for Gagneva in a weird, you know, sense is kind of a fictionalized expression of all the stuff we're talking about, right? It's everything, you know, I believe in about the world and, and making your own destiny and planning and, and not fitting in, you know, to, to society's constructs. And so, you know, people who want to raise their kids with those values, I hope would then

• 47:21Soman Chainani?

  find, you know, interest in the books. But at the same time, I think you're due to write a kid's version of yours. Cause I just think teenagers, more than anything, Need it, you know, and parents will buy it because they know you. So, you know, I think it's, it's coming.

• 47:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it might, it might. I've been very intimidated. And then I'm going to come back to the coming out of college and film school, a quarter of a million dollars in debt, because I think that's, that's an important topic to dig into. But I've, I've been very intimidated by, in, in a very, I think, good way, some, what I would call, and the genre names are confusing. So, young adult fiction, like-

• 48:09Soman Chainani?

  It's 13 plus.

• 48:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, 13 plus. When, when I picked up, this was, I don't know, 2005? Actually, I know exactly when it was. It was 2005, because it was when I was doing my walkabout around the world prior to the four hour work week. When I was doing all my experiments, I was in Panama, and I was reading his dark materials, Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass. And I had to look up probably two or three words a page to define them for myself. I mean, nautical terms, all sorts of stuff. And I remember wondering who the audience was.

• 48:47Soman Chainani?

  I'll blow your mind on that one. Golden Compass and Philip Pullman is not young adult. That's middle grade. That's eight to 12.

• 48:55Tim Ferriss?

  What? I, it's, I consider myself a pretty well educated guy.

• 48:59Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, no, he's in, he's intense. And I think, but he's part of the whole specter that, that I aspire to as well, which is if you look at Narnia, if you look at Golden Compass, even if you look at Potter, middle grade is where you find the books that really transcend to adults as well. Because-

• 49:20Tim Ferriss?

  Is Neverending a Story, is, would that be considered middle?

• 49:23Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, Never Ending Story as well. I think the problem is

• 49:26Tim Ferriss?

  That was my favorite, favorite book growing up in, for three or four years in, in elementary school.

• 49:31Soman Chainani?

  It's, it's an amazing book. And I think the, the thing with a lot of young adult is it's there to gratify, you know, specific teenage impulses from 13 to 17. So it's a very, very sort of melodramatic and, and romance based at times, you know? And I think romance becomes sort of a, an essential element of it. Whereas in middle grade, you will often find the more high fantasy, you know, that you would also find in adult fiction, which is why I think often some of the, the best books that cross over, things like, even like, if you look at the best Neil Gaiman, like The Graveyard Book, these are, these are middle grade books, you know?

• 50:10Tim Ferriss?

  My, my favorite audio book of all time, probably, is read by Neil himself. It's so good.

• 50:16Soman Chainani?

  And so, you know, that's, that's also why I love this genre, because, you know, School for Gagneville, for instance, the number of adult fans we have is insane. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's no way we would sell as much as we have sold and, and been able to do what we have done without adult readers. What happens is the kids get obsessed and then they give it to their parents. The parents read it and then they start getting into it. You know, the, the trick with a middle grade series is that the first book has to be a little younger. That's why the first Harry Potter book-

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  So they can grow into the rest of the series?

• 50:48Soman Chainani?

  It's, it has to feel like a kid's book. It has to sort of like, get the kids, you know, into it at some level. And then, then you can start getting deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's, that's sort of how it's done. Which is why even if you look at his dark materials, Golden Compass is, is a little bit easier, but then two and three are intense.

• 51:10Tim Ferriss?

  Tough, tough. Well, you mentioned controlling your IP, your intellectual property, so that you would be the master of your fate more than you had been when this, this, this film evaporated in front of you, that you were going to work on.

• 51:27Tim Ferriss?

  Golden Compass, one of my favorite books in that genre. One of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. And I was so fucking enraged when I came out of that theater. I was like, how could you? How could you? I was so upset that they tried to cram one and a half or two of these gigantic gorgeous books into 90 minutes or whatever it was. It just infuriated me. How, what have you done? Or how do you think about protecting the integrity of your work? How do you go about ensuring that is likely to be the case? Because I'm not going to generalize, but yes, I am. I'm going to. You don't want to take people's word for it in Hollywood or anywhere else. That's just, there are too many players.

• 52:12Tim Ferriss?

  There are too many cooks in the kitchen. So what do you do?

• 52:15Soman Chainani?

  Well, first thing I do is I have this piece of paper. And anytime I get on the phone with anyone from LA, I put it on my wall and it says, they are lying.

• 52:31Soman Chainani?

  So I've been doing that for about three years and it really makes a big difference. Because they are lying. They are saying whatever they need to say. The great thing about Hollywood is once you figure out that it is essentially the same kind of engine as the political system, designed to slow things down, designed to make things move as slowly as possible. And you start to realize that it's essentially like working with Congress. Then for some reason you start to accept it a little more. I think the difference with me is I come from that world, right? So like I'd gone to film school. I'd come out and been involved with not just the movie that had evaporated,

• 53:15Soman Chainani?

  but I was getting offered a lot of projects at that time. And so I had met a lot of people. So when it came to selling the rights to School for Gagneville. I got to pick who it was. I didn't just go with whoever gave the best offer. So I put together the producing team, which was Jane Starks, who did Ella Enchanted and Tuck Everlasting, and is known for putting together the most faithful children's adaptations of all classic books. I mean, that's her reputation. And then put her together with Joe Roth, who is Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, Snow White and the Huntsman, who's the big

• 53:54Soman Chainani?

  blockbuster fairy tale producer. And that combination has been the magic bullet because A, I got to make sure that I wrote the first couple of drafts of the script to make sure that we were in the right direction before I stepped off to keep working on the books. And then I made sure that we got on somebody who, a new screenwriter who would put in the studio's notes, who also loved the books, which turned out to be, right now, it's David McGee, who wrote Finding Neverland: Life of Pi and is doing the new Mary Poppins for Disney. And his daughters loved the book. So I've been reading every single draft of the script. I've been involved every step of the way. And as of now, could not be more

• 54:39Soman Chainani?

  faithful to the books. That is not to say that it will not end up being the worst movie of all time. That has nothing to do with the series. But all you can do as an author is, I would say, the advice would be, hold on to it until you put together the right team yourself. You don't just hand it over.

• 54:56Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, whether it's through social engineering and just managing relationships in a particular way, how do you minimize the likelihood of really stupid studio notes getting forced into your script?

• 55:16Soman Chainani?

  You know, I think that time has helped because of social media. The fanbase of the series is getting bigger and bigger by the day. And I think They have learned from too many things like Golden Compass or Beautiful Creatures or movies where the fans revolted before it ever came out, you know, and you have to have the fans on board because at the end of the day, they're the ones who are going to make all the noise, right? You know, like my biggest goal when I wrote Good and Evil was, you know, like, look, the way to make a success is not necessarily to have the most readers straight off the bat, but to have the most passionate ones, you know? So

• 55:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, they become your marketing force.

• 55:58Soman Chainani?

  That's it. And that's everything. And, you know, to this day, I spend at least half an hour a day doing fan engagement to make sure that the people who love the books most, you know, get as much access as possible.

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  What have you found most effective for that in that half hour?

• 56:15Soman Chainani?

  Well, it's tricky because with eight to 12, our core fan base, I don't think is really eight to 12. It's more like 10 to 15. But I think they are not on social media so much, right? They're not on Twitter. They're not on Instagram. So we built an interactive website that is, I think, the best of any kids series in the world in terms of how complex and how much it offers. There's 18 moderated chat rooms. There's like games. There's contests every week. We have a YouTube channel. Like, there's so much for them to do there. And there's a forum in the chat forums called Questions for Soman, and they can ask me questions, you know, anytime they want. And I go on half an hour a day and answer them all.

• 56:53Tim Ferriss?

  God, it got so centralized. Now, you, all right. Now, each, I'm going to lay this out. So each year, looking at, looking at some specs, your player stats, these aren't really stats, but you write a 500 to 700 page book, you tour 60 to 80 days, film a weekly YouTube show, work on film, manage the business side of the School for Good and Evil.

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Plus parenthetical, you're single at the moment, which is a part-time job in and of itself.

• 57:26Soman Chainani?

  In New York, which is not just a part-time, it's like death of your soul.

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you also have in New York, that it's a whole separate, you have the extra layer of paradox of choice, plan, shopping issue. There's a, there's a, there's an abundance of riches in some respects that makes it challenging. But what does your time management look like? What are the keys to your time management? What do you do differently? I know there's a lot of questions, but I'd love for you just to describe how you keep things in order and prioritized.

• 57:56Soman Chainani?

  Well, I think that there are a few tricks. The big trick is one day a week is where anything not

• 58:06Soman Chainani?

  essential happens. So like if I have to meet my agent or get a haircut or like go, you know, do some press thing or a radio interview or something, all of that happens on one day. So like everything gets shoved into, usually it's Tuesday. Tuesday becomes the like, the funnel day for anything.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Miscellaneous.

• 58:26Soman Chainani?

  Yeah. And so, you know, I think that becomes the, the, the main day. And then I think for me, it's all about segments, you know? So like the, the sort of core anchors of my day are I play tennis in the morning at, usually at seven. And I work out with my trainer at two. And just having those two anchors makes everything go so much smoother because then I have a big block in the morning from like eight 30 to one to like write and, and manage whatever else I have to. And then after I train from like three 30 to six. So I just think that becomes the, the, the way I manage time is,

• 59:10Soman Chainani?

  and also if you're, you're fueled by those two workouts, you come back like ready to go, you know? You're just like in it. And so I always feel like I'm, I'm operating on like pure adrenaline at any given time and I'm operating very single-mindedly on something. And then I try to finish working by seven because I also think if you work too late, it ruins the work the next day.

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular tools that you use to help you manage all this?

• 59:41Soman Chainani?

  Um, no, it's this is, I've had fights with friends over this who do think I should use a calendar, but my, when we were growing up, my dad never used a calendar for his business and he just wasn't into it. He just felt like he could keep everything in his head. And I don't know, it's how he grew up. It's how I grew up. I never kept track of my homework in school. I never wrote stuff down. And so I don't have a calendar, which is so ridiculous to say out loud, but I don't have a calendar.

• 1:00:09Tim Ferriss?

  Do you now, is that a reflection of just having a prodigious memory? Or is it more, is it a reflection of it being more free flowing? Do you wake up in the morning knowing exactly what you're going to do in those two major blocks of time?

• 1:00:23Soman Chainani?

  Or? Yeah, I think that's it. I think it's because I know the anchors. I know what's happening. I, the only thing, I mean, obviously if I have to attend it, like I'm scheduling a trip for April or something, I'll have it written down somewhere.

• 1:00:34Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's, as an exercise, so today's Tuesday, today's your odds and ends day.

• 1:00:39Soman Chainani?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Tim Ferriss?

  What does tomorrow look like for you? And what are your key priorities? If you can talk about them.

• 1:00:43Soman Chainani?

  Yeah. So tomorrow, okay. So I'll get up at, I usually get up about six and then what do I do in the morning? So I'll meditate for about 15 minutes.

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  What type of meditation? How do you meditate?

• 1:00:55Soman Chainani?

  Oh, that's a, that'll take us down a whole rabbit hole.

• 1:00:57Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. We'll come back to that. I'll bookmark that. All right. So 15 minutes of meditation.

• 1:01:02Soman Chainani?

  And then I start my day every day with, um, I boil water and then I put a towel over my head and I inhale steam because for some reason it gets a sweat going and somehow clears out my head. I don't know. It's just something I do, which, which always works. And it just feels like you went to a sauna in your house. Um, and then I'll eat, uh, grab a juice from the place next door and then get to tennis by seven. Um, I'll get home by, you know, eight 30, I'll be writing by nine. And then right now I'm working on revisions to the first 10 chapters of book four. So I'll do that until about one, then I'll eat. Um, then I'll go, uh, meet my trainer and we train for about.

• 1:01:46Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a set lunch that you have?

• 1:01:48Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, so we were talking about this before we came on. I can't cook and I just don't have time to think about food. So I have tried every meal delivery service in New York City. And I use Portable Chef, which is really good, which is basically like a customized personal chef. And they deliver all your meals for the day, the day before.

• 1:02:11Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:02:12Soman Chainani?

  So everything's set for you. So that one's really great. Heart and Belly is really good. And it's not, it's not like Blue Apron or something like that where you have to like have pots.

• 1:02:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's minimal. So you're, you, you heat it up and you're ready to go.

• 1:02:26Soman Chainani?

  Ready to go. So then, um, yeah, then I'll go train with, with Trainer Dave, as I call him, from two to about 3:30. And then from four to, to 6:30 or seven is that second block where right now it'll still be revising. But, you know, inevitably there's business stuff too. So I try to do that in a solid hour as well. So that's you. And then because I work in my, in my apartment, most of the time, after seven, I leave. I never am at home after seven. I always go out or do something, see friends, you know, or go on a bad date.

• 1:03:04Tim Ferriss?

  What are your, what are your favorite ways to wind down after a day?

• 1:03:08Soman Chainani?

  I think it's just talking to people. I think it's just, you know, the good thing about having lived in New York for, for 15 years is, you know, I've met so many cool people. And so, um, you know, I try to, to go see a show, go see a movie. Inevitably, one of my friends, I have a lot of actor friends who are in, in things. So, you know, there's always, there's always

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Something premiering. What, do you have any pre-bed rituals or anything that you do typically before bed?

• 1:03:36Soman Chainani?

  If I really want to sleep well, then I'll stop watching anything by 10, um, even 9:30. Cause I think I'd rather read than watch TV. Cause for some reason, I just have a very sort of like open, spongy brain. And if I watch TV too close to bed, that's what I'm going to dream about, when I'd rather not be dreaming about, you know, The Real Housewives of New York.

• 1:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  What are you, what are you reading at the moment? Or what's the last book that you found memorable?

• 1:04:07Soman Chainani?

  You know, I've read this book three times now and I keep trying to stop rereading it, but I think it's maybe the best book I've ever read. Called A Little Life by Hanya Yanegihara.

• 1:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  The Little Life?

• 1:04:20Soman Chainani?

  A Little Life.

• 1:04:21Tim Ferriss?

  A Little Life.

• 1:04:22Soman Chainani?

  It's big. I mean, it's, it's almost 700 pages. But I think it was nominated for the Pulitzer or something. And it's just incredible. It's, it's about, you know, these four male friends who grew up in New York City together. And it's sort of tracking their life from when they're 20 to 60. And, you know, for Pete, for anybody who, who loves to have a bigger view of what life is and look beyond sort of the, again, the matrix of what life is supposed to look like according to society, that book will just completely sort of ravage your brain. So I just think it's, I give it to so many people and never once has anyone come back to me and not said like, that changed my life, you know?

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  I think that might be the title of, of this podcast episode. Ravage, ravage, ravaging your brain. So many.

• 1:05:15Tim Ferriss?

  So a few things. The first is meditation. What type of meditation?

• 1:05:22Soman Chainani?

  So.

• 1:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  Or describe your meditation.

• 1:05:24Soman Chainani?

  So it's, it's super simple. It's just going to sound a little crazy to everyone because I've been doing this for a long time. Like I, I remember I read the Tao Te Ching when I was 23 or 24 and going through a rough time after the movie had collapsed or maybe it was a little later.

• 1:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  So a copy of it, also six inches from my left thigh.

• 1:05:45Soman Chainani?

  It's, and I remember reading it being like, okay, this makes no sense, you know? But you, you just keep reading it again and again. And slowly I started to get the point of it, which was thank God I played tennis. But it was saying the same thing that I talked to you about tennis earlier, which is there should not be any decisions. It should be automatic. It's not automatic because there is something in the way. And the thing in your way is the I, the ego, your self-consciousness. So every meditation I've done since then, and it's not been 10 years, it's 15 minutes of trying to find the I, that sort of energy that makes up. That conscious will, you know, inside of me and realizing that that's actually the place that you do not want to operate from, that that is actually an illusion,

• 1:06:29Soman Chainani?

  right? That's just residual anger and frustration and your inability to control things in the world, right? So all of my meditation is recognizing the I that you operate from and the world tells you to operate from and realizing that that's what you have to let go of.

• 1:06:45Tim Ferriss?

  So when you sit down, assuming you're sitting, are you then, I'd like you to get as concrete as you can and describe it. Are you imagining the me, so to speak, in parentheses, behind the, sitting behind the eyes and trying to visually or graphically observe it? Are you, are you observing the words in your head as a detached third party? What are you doing exactly?

• 1:07:12Soman Chainani?

  It's more like trying to sense the me, right? Just sort of thinking, okay, where is I? Where, where is I in my body right now, right? And trying to actually imagine, like, your entire perception, your entire consciousness, your, everything that's in your mind, everything that's in your body, everything that's in your thoughts right now, is that I and realizing that all of it is actually wrong, right? All of it is, is energy that you're holding that needs to be let go of. And what you really want is empty space. I think that the line in the Tathacittic that stuck with me the most is, you know, why is there something when there should be nothing, right? And it's that whole idea of, of the true happy human is clear. There shouldn't be anything there.

• 1:07:57Soman Chainani?

  And so that's what the meditation is. It's trying to find the, the I, the, that center of like me, like, you know, can I actually identify what the me is? And then realizing that that's, that needs to be let go.

• 1:08:10Tim Ferriss?

  So you're, you're very self-directed, even lacking calendar. So you are, I hope you have, I hope the studio has good key man insurance with you. It's a great point of leverage, though, having this entire world you've created inside your own head, not without its risks, but. You mentioned having a trainer. Now, in doing some of my review before this, you appear to train exclusively with trainers. I am almost the opposite. So I'd love to hear why that is.

• 1:08:43Soman Chainani?

  Wait, first, tell me why you're the opposite.

• 1:08:46Tim Ferriss?

  I am, no, it's not entirely.

• 1:08:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's changed a bit in the last few years when I've

• 1:08:55Tim Ferriss?

  I've realized that there are certain types of physical movement that I view as recreation, physical recreation, not primarily training. So I'm not doing them to lose body fat or fill in the blank, like acro yoga, acrobatic yoga, partner gymnastics, that type of thing.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  And there are certain instances where you need a technical coach, tennis, gymnastic strength training. In those instances, I will have a coach, whether I'm using video or otherwise. But training for me, exercise has always been my me time, my meditative time, to live in the present moment and very often use some type of cadence. As I never thought of it this way, doing this up until maybe a few years ago, but a mantra of sorts where I'm simply counting, say, the seconds up, seconds down of a particular lift, or the number of repetitions. And that for me is my, my mental palate cleanser for the day. It's, it's for a very long time was my version in a sense of meditation.

• 1:09:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I didn't want to banter with someone else. I didn't want to have any type of sensory input from someone else. And so that's why, that's why I train by myself.

• 1:10:10Soman Chainani?

  That's so interesting.

• 1:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  That's still the case with, say, weightlifting, unless it is a very technical skill and I'm working with someone for, say, an Olympic weightlifting movement where the penalty of doing it incorrectly is so high and you really require a separate set of eyes to correct, because what you think you're doing is probably not what you're doing, at least in the beginning. So that's, that's why I've, I've always trained alone and I like to train late. So I love to train at nine, 10, 11 PM. That, for, for a host of reasons, but.

• 1:10:46Soman Chainani?

  I have a theory, though. I think that you might instinctively be. What I call a somatic person, which is like you, when it comes to anything in the body, you want to push yourself, right? So you won't let yourself get away with incorrect form or, or not pushing yourself to the max.

• 1:11:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's true. That is true.

• 1:11:08Soman Chainani?

  Which is not me, which is like mentally, when I'm working on a book or something, I will die to make sure it's perfect, right? To make sure that it's, it's exactly right. But when I get to a workout, my instinctive thing, just because I grew up, then I grew up like, you know, the kid who never thought he was ever going to be strong, who kids always made fun of for being skinny. So when it came to lifting weights and things like that, I came in scared, right? And I always bailed before it ever got heavy, thinking like, you know, I'm too weak to do this or whatever. I needed, I need trainers to push me. Do you know what I mean? At some level, like I need them to say, this is what you're doing and we're not getting out of it. You know?

• 1:11:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:11:49Soman Chainani?

  And I think, because if it was just me, I don't know, I would, I don't think it would be the same. And I also think like, it, it lets me not have one, it lets me have one moment of the day, when I'm not in charge, which is nice.

• 1:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, right, right, right. This makes a lot of sense. Yeah, this, this could lead into all sorts of relationship discussions.

• 1:12:11Soman Chainani?

  All sorts of interesting things, but um, the, uh.

• 1:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  How many trainers have you worked with? Or is it always the same person or handful of people?

• 1:12:19Soman Chainani?

  So I work with the same trainer in, in New York.

• 1:12:23Tim Ferriss?

  Trainer Dave.

• 1:12:24Soman Chainani?

  Trainer Dave. His name is Dave Stockzil at CrossFit NYC. And I chose him the same way.

• 1:12:29Tim Ferriss?

  He's about to get a lot to his ear.

• 1:12:30Soman Chainani?

  He is an absolute genius. And I chose him the same way I chose my agent, which you're going to laugh at, but I chose them both by their photo. And I think it's because I spent so much time casting movies that I'm very good at, at just when I see a photo, or maybe I spent too much time on Tinder or something, but like, I know when I see a photo that like, that's the person. And so I remember going through all the CrossFit gyms in New York and like looking at photos and I saw his and was like, that's the right guy. And it's funny.

• 1:13:02Tim Ferriss?

  I have to pause here. So what, can you, is this purely subconscious? Or is there some, is, is what you do a teachable skill, do you think?

• 1:13:13Soman Chainani?

  No, I think it's, I think it's instinct. It's, it's, I'm looking for with trainers, I was looking for like a softness, kind of like a

• 1:13:21Tim Ferriss?

  Kind eyes type of thing?

• 1:13:22Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, like a non-bro bro.

• 1:13:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. Yes, I do.

• 1:13:29Soman Chainani?

  And, and that's him. He's, he's the guy you go to if, you know, you aren't like, if you, if you're coming at weight training, not from like the, the bro-iest place, you know?

• 1:13:44Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do when you're on the road?

• 1:13:46Soman Chainani?

  Then I get a trainer every single city, every single day I'm in. It's, it's a bit obsessive, but

• 1:13:52Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you find them? And how do you choose? Are this, are they all photograph based?

• 1:13:57Soman Chainani?

  No, no, no. So that's too much work. So that the assistant does. She, she knows, you know, I don't know. She just, she's pretty good at, at knowing what to look for now because I've been on enough tours that I'll be like, that one was great. That one wasn't that great. So she, she started to get a sense of, of like, you know, what I'm looking for. But I've worked with, you know, so many, so many different trainings, trainers. I think what makes Dave so great is he figured out very early on that it wasn't just going to be CrossFit that I needed, but he's mixed in a ton of GSD stuff, which is gymnastics, strength training, a lot of Z Health stuff, which is like exercises that also complement like brain neurology.

• 1:14:39Soman Chainani?

  Like he's very good at customizing based on your personality, what, what your goal is. Like he knows not to give me intense conditioning pieces because I can out-cardio anyone on the planet. You know what I mean? It's just the way I was born. So he's focusing on, on my weaknesses, you know?

• 1:14:57Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. All right. Well, I'm not going to spend too much time on trainers because there's so many other places I want to dig. Quarter of a million dollars in debt. That's a fuck ton of money after undergrad and the MFA. So how did you?

• 1:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  And your family make the decision to go so far into debt because in the US, there's a very, and I think this is dangerous on a lot of levels, an anti, at least in Silicon Valley, there's a very romanticized anti-college notion.

• 1:15:29Soman Chainani?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Tim Ferriss?

  And I do think that student debt can be a, a paralyzing problem for many people. How did you decide to go, how did you and your family decide to go that far into debt? And I don't know if it was you or you and your family. I don't know how that was arranged.

• 1:15:44Soman Chainani?

  Well, I think, you know, at some level, Indian families are, are a lot like Jewish families and, and other sort of, you know, cultures that put a primacy on education, where there is this expectation that your family will pay for school. You know, and my dad was going through a hard time in, in the eighties, you know, because he was in real estate and that's when, when the market was tanking. And, you know, he took on a lot of debt himself in order to, to pay for Harvard. So I don't think Harvard is where the main source of debt came from. Main source of debt came from film school. And, you know, there was no way he was going to pay for that or I was going to let him.

• 1:16:26Soman Chainani?

  And so it was just my decision really to basically be like, okay. I was so deluded, I guess, into thinking that like somehow I was going to pay it back. And I look at some of the kids who came out of film school and, and are saddled with so much debt now, and I just don't know what you do. Like I, I was lucky enough to discover tutoring, which paid really, really well. And I was lucky to get a ton of clients and do really well at it. So that's what got me through and ultimately the book deal helped me, you know, sort of pay the rest off. But it is a gamble that is not wise, I think.

• 1:17:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. All right. So, so now, now we're getting to. The next question, which is what advice, so much like college has sort of lost its luster for a lot of people, although I do generally think that if you can get into a top tier name recognizable brand, which sounds terrible, but whether it's undergrad or say MBA, then it can be worth it sometimes.

• 1:17:27Soman Chainani?

  I agree with you.

• 1:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  The film, the MFA Film School is also one of those divisive topics where a lot of successful filmmakers will say, ah, wasted time. But then there are many successful filmmakers who come out of film school. Aspiring filmmaker, about to graduate from undergrad or has already graduated from undergrad, did decently well in however we want to think about that. Should I go to film school? They love film. Maybe they've done a few short films in some elective classes in college, but their major was something else. Should I go to film school? What do you say to that person or what do you ask them? What's the conversation?

• 1:18:12Soman Chainani?

  What would I say now? I would have such specific advice now, which is only get, go to film school if you can get into USC. That would be my only, my only advice. And the reason why is the industry has changed so much to basically eliminate independent film so that the only sort of productive education you're going to get in film school that will lead you to, you know, a Hollywood career at some level is to be in Southern California at USC or, you know, maybe UCLA where you have studio connections and are working with studio professors. And if you're good enough, you're going to get, you know, you might get seen. That's what I would say.

• 1:18:53Soman Chainani?

  Cause when I went to Columbia, it was in the, you know, heyday of the, of independent film at some level. And so a lot of the great things that happened to me at Columbia were because I had access to all these successful, you know, independent directors and producers who love my work and therefore introduced me to all these great people who, all those people now are having trouble making films, of course, because there's no outlet for them, you know? So they've all gone to television or whatever. So film at some level, if you want to work in film, we're talking, working, you know, in, in the studio world, which means you gotta be in LA. You have to be at one of those two, two film schools.

• 1:19:35Soman Chainani?

  But otherwise, I would say, I don't think there's a need for it. I don't think, I don't think you need to go to film school. I think you just need to, to make work.

• 1:19:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. This is the, the USC reference, or, or I guess, recommendation with caveats. Makes me think of Stanford also, in my backyard, here in the Bay Area.

• 1:19:58Soman Chainani?

  Yes.

• 1:19:58Tim Ferriss?

  And certainly, as a computer, as a competent computer science major, the, the demand for, for engineers so outstrips supply. It's, it's just ludicrous. But if you want to be part of the Silicon Valley tech scene, and you're debating between different undergrad options, then Silicon Valley, and being based in Palo Alto, where you have all of the venture capitalists literally in the same town, or right next door, gives you, can give you a huge leg up, similarly, depending on which facet of the business you want to be a part of.

• 1:20:32Soman Chainani?

  It was the one school that I didn't let my, uh, because I helped so many kids with their college applications over the years. Stanford was the one school I rarely, rarely kind of let them apply to.

• 1:20:43Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 1:20:43Soman Chainani?

  Because I, I said it was too hard.

• 1:20:45Tim Ferriss?

  Too hard?

• 1:20:46Soman Chainani?

  I said, the problem with Stanford is that you have to, the college application game is very simple. Whichever school you apply to early, you better be fairly sure you have a good shot at getting in. Because, you know, when you apply early, um, your chances of getting in are much better. But you have to at least be in the game to get in. Stanford's acceptance rate is so low, and everybody applying to Stanford is so good and so smart, that to get in takes an act of God. You better be like, you know, a real miracle nature. And so it was the one school I recommended more often than not. I just said, you are throwing away your application, because they don't take anyone.

• 1:21:30Soman Chainani?

  It's harder than Harvard, it's Harvard than, than Yale, it's Harvard than any school. Stanford is, to me, Stanford's the top school in the country right now.

• 1:21:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great school. It's a great school. Their, uh, their business school program is also outstanding. I considered it. I had this, I, I, I always thought I should have gone to Stanford, had I been able to get in. I mean, I, I applied early. To Princeton, got accepted, ended up having a very difficult time at Princeton. Always thought, you know, I would have been much better off having gone to a Brown or a Stanford.

• 1:22:01Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, cuz you're you're not, Princeton is very square.

• 1:22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I ended up, I don't know if I've ever talked about this publicly, I ended up, I don't know if you're familiar with the very weird eating club.

• 1:22:12Soman Chainani?

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  Social structure at Princeton, but in effect, for people who aren't familiar with this, you have the, you have a street, you have, you have a street that is lined with gigantic mansions. And that is where the partying happens generally.

• 1:22:27Soman Chainani?

  Welcome to Princeton.

• 1:22:28Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to Princeton. Yeah, gigantic mansions, they're all stylistically different, which is very odd. So you have kind of old timey, blue blood, New England rich mansion. Then you'll have colonial style, kind of Georgia belle from old money mansion. And then it goes on and on, it's a very odd place. And they're effectively coed fraternities, it's the easiest way to describe it, where you also eat meals. And some of these eating clubs, it's just mind blowing. Like Ivy, for instance, I believe has an endowment, so to speak, that is larger than some name brand universities in the United States. It's just mind blowing.

• 1:23:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I ended up trying to fit in, in some of these eating clubs and getting very disillusioned and unhappy. And then joining an eating club called Terrace. So Terrace, to give you an idea, had a rainbow flag flying out front.

• 1:23:29Soman Chainani?

  I would have loved it.

• 1:23:30Tim Ferriss?

  I am not gay, but it's where all the, it's basically like your Tuesday. It's where the, it's where the odds and ends, the people who didn't fit in anywhere else, ended up going. And it was the one thing, I don't give any money to Princeton for reasons that you guys can look up if you're, if you want to read some practical thoughts on suicide, an essay that I wrote, then that'll give you an idea why I don't give money to Princeton. But I do give money to Terrace because it saved me.

• 1:23:57Tim Ferriss?

  Anyway, I'm not sure how we, how I, how I got onto that, but I didn't, I didn't fit in in any way at Princeton whatsoever.

• 1:24:02Soman Chainani?

  This is important because I think most of your listeners, at some level. Regardless of whether on the outside they fit in or not, I think inside they don't, which is why they're looking for something different. And that's also why I wrote the books, right? I felt like, you know, when I was growing up, there were no books for the odds and ends, right? The hero always won. It was always the good looking guy. Like even if you read Harry Potter, like he's always the good kid. He always does the right thing. You know, he's gonna win at the end because there's no version of Potter where Harry ends up in a pool of blood and Voldemort goes kicking into the sunset, you know? And I wanted to write a book that questioned all those assumptions, you know, at some level and said, okay, what about us? What about us weirdos who root for the villains?

• 1:24:45Soman Chainani?

  Or us weirdos who don't think evil is what evil is made out to be and that good often is not good? And, you know, all those sort of, sort of big questions. So, um, yeah, it's why I think I've always been attracted to your work and people like you at some levels because, um, that sort of questioning reality of what the structure is, is so important. And I think kids are helpless to do that. And, and if we can train them not to through books, because that's our, our number one medium to sort of get to them. Um, I think it's, it's a big deal, which is why I sort of take what I do, like I said, too seriously, probably.

• 1:25:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, I mean, I think that anyone who's really good at what they do, really, really good, tends to have a certain degree of pathological obsession with, with what they do. If you had to recommend books on writing or books that would help someone's writing, um, is there, is there a shortlist? Are there any that come to mind?

• 1:25:49Soman Chainani?

  Let me think. I think-

• 1:25:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make it genre specific on purpose. It could be, it could be anything. For instance, I'm a nonfiction writer at this point, but Bird by Bird, which is written in Lamont for fiction writers, really, I found just the best, the cheapest therapy that money could buy.

• 1:26:06Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that, that one's an amazing book. I think, you know, I'm less interested in books specifically about writing because I think writing to me is like breathing. You write the way you breathe. Everybody has their own way of doing it. Everyone, you know, every true writer has to write to stay alive because that's how we, that's how we live, you know, that's, that's our connection to the sort of cosmos. And so every writer has their, their specific process. I don't get so much out of, writer books. What I do get books, you know, out of are two things. One, books about creativity.

• 1:26:45Soman Chainani?

  And then, you know, sort of like creative spirit and then documentaries about creative process. Those are the two things I sort of look at. And so one of my favorite books is called The Spark. It was, it's written by Cirque du Soleil.

• 1:27:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, very cool. I love Cirque du Soleil.

• 1:27:03Soman Chainani?

  And they have a book called The Spark about where their ideas come from. It's very short. You can read it in like 20 minutes. But it's fantastic. And it gets to this idea that so much of creativity is about the fact that we try to control it, right? That again, it goes back to that idea of the I that I'm trying to get rid of, that if we just let go of this idea of, of the conscious I trying to control when we work creativity creatively, that's when the universe comes rushing through. And it's so, it's about almost making yourself into a clear vessel and accepting that, that, you know, it's going to come. And I think one of the great things about writing a series is that now that I'm on book four and I've settled into a rhythm, I start to trust myself.

• 1:27:47Soman Chainani?

  And when I trust myself is when the great stuff happens because I'm not monitoring, I'm not judging and.

• 1:27:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right. You're not, you're not editing when you're generating.

• 1:27:55Soman Chainani?

  Editing. And you're getting, I'm getting twist after twist where every chapter is ending in a twist that like I never predicted. The character is doing something I'd never had any idea they would do. And it's happening versus, you know, the first couple of books, first three books where it's, you know, every chapter, one twist or whatever. Now it's constantly, constantly, constantly, because I'm allowing myself to take things in new directions. And along with The Spark, they've got a cool documentary called, I think it's called The Fire Within, that follows. Eight people that try out for Cirque du Soleil. And it's sort of a, it's a, it's kind of a wonderful Canadian documentary about just, you know, people passionate about their art. And then the other thing is I'm obsessed with documentaries about creative process,

• 1:28:39Soman Chainani?

  specifically about fashion designers, because if you look at fashion, it's where you get 100% undiluted creativity, because it's on such a short cycle with all the different fashion shows. And so-

• 1:28:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's also, in a sense, I mean, purely subjective, which makes it, which adds to the creativity by necessity in some respects.

• 1:29:00Soman Chainani?

  Yes, and so you get to sort of watch these madcap geniuses who aren't constrained, right? Because again, it's subjective, so they can do whatever they want, because people have already judged them to be geniuses at some level. So you, you get these amazing things. So, you know, things like Dior and I, or Valentino, The Last Emperor, or Lagerfeld Confidential.

• 1:29:21Tim Ferriss?

  If you, if you depict one of those three for a non-fashion, I'm, I'm the most disheveled, unfashionable person you could possibly imagine. Which of those three should I start with?

• 1:29:33Soman Chainani?

  Let me give you another one, man. And I think, let me give you one that I think the best of them all is called Ballet 422.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:29:40Soman Chainani?

  And it's on Netflix. It's, uh, so American Ballet Theater has a choreographic internship. That's, I think, the, the most prestigious choreographic award a young person can win. And people compete, I think, from all over the world for it, I think. And one, the person who won it one year was someone inside their own company, who was just sort of a middling dancer in their company and who was only 24, which I think the youngest they've ever given it to. And it tracks his internship and, and his choreographic, you know, process. And when you meet him, you think he's a complete yahoo, right? You just think this, he doesn't seem smart, he doesn't seem charismatic. The guy's name is Justin Peck. You don't see why they gave it to him.

• 1:30:23Soman Chainani?

  You're just sort of watching this movie, thinking it's dull, you know, watching like paint dry, because there's no narration. It's 100% watching this guy work. And about 15 or 20 minutes into it, you start to see him at work and you start to realize slowly by slowly, you're watching a genius and you're watching like a Mozart who was, who was just gifted with something that is absolutely unrivaled. And it's only like an hour and 10 minutes, but it's the best hour and 10 minutes you ever spend because you'll get to see true genius in process without any editorializing.

• 1:30:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, cool. Ballet 422.

• 1:31:00Soman Chainani?

  Ballet 422. And he's since become the best choreographer in the world.

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:31:04Soman Chainani?

  And he's, he's young, you know, but you, you get to watch it happen.

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  I love it.

• 1:31:09Soman Chainani?

  It's amazing. Yeah.

• 1:31:11Tim Ferriss?

  Have you seen, and it's, it's a bit of a, they use this in a loving way, bumbling documentary. It's, it doesn't take itself too seriously, but there are aspects of it that I found so hilarious that I could, I could, I could, I could trudge through it, but six days to air about.

• 1:31:31Soman Chainani?

  No, tell me about it.

• 1:31:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's about the South Park team putting together an episode from scratch, zero, nothing to shipping finished product for air in six days.

• 1:31:44Soman Chainani?

  Oh, see that? I'd love.

• 1:31:45Tim Ferriss?

  After they went to the, I want to say the, ah, I'm so out, out of La La Land, maybe went to the Emmys, perhaps. I'll just say the Emmys. They went to the Emmys, the Golden Globes or something in women's dresses on acid. And the only, they, they committed to each other that every time they were interviewed on the red carpet, they could talk about anything except for the dresses. They couldn't even make mention of the fact that they were in dresses and they were on acid. And then they get back to the office and they're like, holy fuck, we only have six days to ship a new episode. Better get to work on that. And then it's just crunch time, all nighters insanity.

• 1:32:19Soman Chainani?

  That's being watched tonight. Sounds so good. But that, like, that kind of stuff where you get to see, you know, how the sausage is made is, is really the only type of documentary I want to watch. There's, there's another one that everybody should watch called Theater of War about the making of Mother Courage when they did it in Central Park with Meryl Streep. And it's the only time Meryl Streep has ever let anybody film her rehearsing ever. And she said she didn't want to do it because she goes, rehearsal looks like bad acting. And she goes, I don't want to see me. You know, do bad acting. And then she goes, I thought, then she changed her mind and thought, maybe it would be valuable. And to get to watch Meryl Streep's rehearsal process, you realize how much it is, how much of bad, you know, how much of writing in the beginning,

• 1:33:03Soman Chainani?

  how much of acting in the beginning, all of it is bad. It's just about doing all the bad stuff to get to the good stuff, you know?

• 1:33:10Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:33:10Soman Chainani?

  So, yeah, that's another great one.

• 1:33:12Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I've been, I've been making a list of docs to watch. So now, I was already on this yesterday in my mind. So now we have a bunch of new ones to work on. Let me, let me jump to, I suppose, what I always call these rapid fire questions, but your answers don't need to be short or rapid. What book or books have you given the most as gifts to other people, if you have, besides your own?

• 1:33:37Soman Chainani?

  I would say A Little Life for sure. And then a book called The Velvet Rage.

• 1:33:43Tim Ferriss?

  The Velvet Rage?

• 1:33:45Soman Chainani?

  The Velvet Rage, which is ostensibly about, you know, if, if you grow up a gay man, like how to deal with it, you know, in the world. But I think it's more about modern masculinity and, and about sort of what it means to be a man in America. And...

• 1:34:03Tim Ferriss?

  So even for a hetero normative?

• 1:34:06Soman Chainani?

  I think so. I think so. I think, you know, the, the one thing A Little Life and that book share in common is an attempt to, to deconstruct what, you know, the tenants of being a man are in, in this country, because I think it ultimately restricts emotional health, you know? And so, you know, I think both those books sort of give you a window into alternative. And, and yeah.

• 1:34:32Tim Ferriss?

  Here's a, if you wanted a, a different shade of gray in a book with all your spare time, that, that you might enjoy, that a number of my friends, male and female, have just found extremely powerful is Tribe by Sebastian Younger. And

• 1:34:51Soman Chainani?

  I'm writing it down.

• 1:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  It's, I found it to be just a fantastic, fantastic and thought provoking book that helps to explain a lot of what we see in the world. And it might add just a different lens through which to look at that as well.

• 1:35:13Tim Ferriss?

  What is the, what is the best investment you've ever made? And that could be energy, time, money, or any other resource. And I'll, I'll give you an example. So for instance, Amelia Boone is a three time World's Toughest Mudder Champion. Also power attorney at Apple, just a killer cyborg. And I asked her this question and she said it was the entrance fee for her first World's Toughest Mudder. Or it might've been her first very toughest mudder. In either case, the fee was $450, which for her at the time was actually a stretch. But if she hadn't, if she hadn't done that, this entire other career and life for her wouldn't have opened. Does anything come to mind for you?

• 1:35:56Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't have to be the best, but it could be one of the best investments.

• 1:36:00Soman Chainani?

  This is so small, but it made such a big difference in my life, which was that, you know, I had struggled with just like acne for a lot of my teenage years. And it was something that like, I couldn't get rid of. And as an adult, just having like breakouts and stuff. And I, you know, you, you just, it starts to get in your head a little bit, you know, that you couldn't get rid of it. And so you try everything. That's the problem when, when you're built like, you know, me and a lot of your listeners, you try every effing thing. And so you're going to doctor after doctor, you're trying antibiotics, you're trying creams, you're trying every kind of soap. And I just had had it, like I just, you know, gave up.

• 1:36:41Soman Chainani?

  And so then I read this story in the Times about a company that had started. It was called AO, AO Plus Biome.

• 1:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I, okay, yes, absolutely.

• 1:36:53Soman Chainani?

  So I became one of their early adopters. I was one of the first 10 people to try the product.

• 1:36:57Tim Ferriss?

  Could you describe for people, this, this was my, my year without soap or something like that?

• 1:37:02Soman Chainani?

  Oh yeah. So you've done it.

• 1:37:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I, I actually got a prototype sample of AO Biome way back in the day, which, which is its own story too. But can you describe for people? Well, I mean, you could take stab at it, I could take stab at it. But could you describe for people what this is? It's not antibacterial for sure.

• 1:37:22Soman Chainani?

  No, it's the opposite. Tell me if I'm wrong. As far as I know, it's a probiotic spray. It's a spray that's just pure water and, you know, bacteria that's supposed to naturally reside in your skin. Because their hypothesis was animals don't use soap and, you know, don't really have skin issues as regularly as humans do, because they have a certain kind of bacteria that sort of, you know, oxidizes all the bad bacteria. And so they created this bacterial spray that they said, all you need to do is throw out all your soap, any cream, anything you've ever used in your entire life, and just use this. You don't even have to shower,

• 1:38:06Soman Chainani?

  and you potentially would be fine. And so I was desperate. I was desperate. And so I became one of their first customers, tried it. Within three days, my skin was clear, and I've been using it three and a half years. They are now called Mother Dirt. They've changed their name.

• 1:38:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they did. Okay.

• 1:38:23Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, because AO Plus Biome was not.

• 1:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue.

• 1:38:27Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, marketable. And they have a shaving cream now that you can use. They have a shampoo that you can use that is sort of bacteria friendly. And man, it made a difference. Let me tell you that. Like, it just changed everything because you just, forget the skin thing. I mean, that's just superficial. But to realize that the problems you were chasing for 10 years, or more than that, could be solved by your own body and by something that was natural already, that theoretically, like, you don't even need the mist at some level. Like, if I don't have it for a week, I just don't use soap, and then my skin goes back to, stays completely fine, you know?

• 1:39:07Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:39:08Soman Chainani?

  So that was a big shift.

• 1:39:10Tim Ferriss?

  And it's called Mother Dirt now.

• 1:39:12Soman Chainani?

  Mother Dirt, motherdirt.com.

• 1:39:14Tim Ferriss?

  If people want to read the New York Times piece, the New York Times does what I do, which is confusing sometimes, that they'll use a different headline online versus in the print edition, and then it makes things very confusing for people. But it's the, let's see, "My No Soap, No Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment."

• 1:39:32Soman Chainani?

  Yes.

• 1:39:33Tim Ferriss?

  And I think the author's name is Julia Scott, "Discovers What She Smells Like After 28 Soapless Days." It's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating.

• 1:39:42Soman Chainani?

  Yeah, everyone should be on this product. I feel like it's a market that's going to... Explode soon.

• 1:39:49Tim Ferriss?

  What uh, what other tricks do you have like that? Do you have any other uh, any other expedient solutions to come problems like that?

• 1:40:03Soman Chainani?

  Somebody thinks so, you know, just cause I feel like everyone's stress goes somewhere in their body. Like some people get back pain and that becomes their, their big thing.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:40:13Soman Chainani?

  With me, it's usually, it was always skin until that was solved. Um, and then I guess when I was younger, it was um, uh, stomach.

• 1:40:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, one of my best friends has that. He's, he always gets stomach issues.

• 1:40:24Soman Chainani?

  Stomach issues and also because I was on antibiotics for the skin problems when I was a teenager. So that was something that stuck around. And um, again, I did a lot of research and realized that um, you know,

• 1:40:37Soman Chainani?

  you can take a daily probiotic, but that probably won't be enough. And so I uh, sort of cobbled together my own probiotic therapy where I would buy two or three bottles um, of different brands and take those on tour. When you're sleeping at, you know, basically not sleeping, eating god knows what, you know, and, and completely off rhythm. And just by taking maybe like eight probiotic pills a night from, you know, whatever, a combination of different brands, it solved all my problems. I can travel anywhere in the world and as long as I'm overdosing on probiotics with different, mixing up different brands, no issues whatsoever. It's, it's the mix of the different brands that I think is, is what.

• 1:41:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's key, right?

• 1:41:18Soman Chainani?

  Solves. Um, and then the other, the other thing that helps to sleep, uh, just in terms of insomnia is if you have a, an aromatherapy diffuser, one of those sort of wood diffusers that you can get off Amazon for like $20. Um, and you use lavender oil in it, it'll, it'll zonk you out very, very fast.

• 1:41:37Tim Ferriss?

  Lavender oil, alright, I'll have to play around with this. I started using a diffuser for the first time after.

• 1:41:45Tim Ferriss?

  I had Nicholas McCarthy on the podcast who is a one-armed, or I should say miraculously one-handed concert pianist.

• 1:41:54Soman Chainani?

  Oh my god.

• 1:41:55Tim Ferriss?

  And he uses geranium oil when he's composing. He said it's the perfect mixture of relaxation without sleepiness. It's relaxation plus alertness for him. So I use geranium oil for, for a lot of my editing and writing sessions when I did Tools of Titans. Do you use, do you use the diffuser for anything other than lavender oil?

• 1:42:19Soman Chainani?

  I do. I use, but what's funny is this is such a stupid answer, but at the, the sort of food market I go to, they have this basket of 50% off oils of whatever hasn't sold that week or whatever. So I just buy whatever's in there. So I never really keep track of what's in the diffuser on any day. It's just a different smell. Welcome to my life. I'm willing to cede control over what oils in the diffuser.

• 1:42:47Tim Ferriss?

  When, when you're traveling as much as it sounds like you do, 60, 80 days a year, and I'm sure you have other non-tour related travel, do you have any tips for minimizing onset of cold, flu, et cetera, things like that?

• 1:43:05Soman Chainani?

  You know, I think before I, this, the steam thing before I leave helps a lot because it really does clear your sinuses because that's where you can get sinus infections. And I think I was prone to those, you know, a lot. And I think when I'm on tour, and it's funny, I read a book about Steven Spielberg, who apparently does the same thing.

• 1:43:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:43:29Soman Chainani?

  When he's shooting a movie for him not to get sick, which is he drinks tea incessantly and herbal tea, just, you know, he's just constantly to stay warm because you never know what the weather is, you never know what the situation's going to be, but he's just always downing hot tea of some herbal variety. And I think when I'm on tour, everywhere I go, every time I get in the car, I get a hot tea. Every time I get to a school, I drink a hot tea. So I'm drinking like seven or eight cups a day.

• 1:43:55Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a go-to hot tea or is it like the 50% off?

• 1:43:59Soman Chainani?

  It's, it's, you know, if I, if I can get to a Starbucks, they've got the Mint Majesty, which is really good. I mean, we should preface this all by saying that I can't drink caffeine because it makes me crazy.

• 1:44:13Tim Ferriss?

  Do you drink, do you drink alcohol or no?

• 1:44:14Soman Chainani?

  No, I mean, a glass of wine if it's been a particularly horrific day, but otherwise, not really. I just.

• 1:44:26Tim Ferriss?

  You don't need, you don't need the enhancement or

• 1:44:29Soman Chainani?

  I'll tell you what.

• 1:44:29Tim Ferriss?

  Handicap one way or the other.

• 1:44:30Soman Chainani?

  This is what I would say, and this is, this is sad, but I think there's a happy lining to it, which is that I spent so long in my, my twenties and teens trying to get control of my brain and trying to, to make it a happy place. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:44:44Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:44:44Soman Chainani?

  And when I finally found peace of mind and, and sort of the creative space to be able to work in and now live in a, in a fairly,

• 1:44:53Soman Chainani?

  I don't know, just like constant state of, of goodness. I don't want to mess it up, you know?

• 1:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  I get it. Totally get it.

• 1:45:01Soman Chainani?

  I think that's, uh, that's where, where I am at the moment, you know?

• 1:45:07Soman Chainani?

  But yeah.

• 1:45:08Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, what topic would you speak about if you had to give a TED Talk on something that you're not known for at all? So can't be, can't, can't be tutoring, can't be tennis.

• 1:45:21Soman Chainani?

  Can't be tennis.

• 1:45:22Tim Ferriss?

  Can't, certainly can't be the writing that you're doing.

• 1:45:25Soman Chainani?

  It might be on things that make people laugh because I've done all these studies because when, when, you know, you're writing, you wanna, you wanna get to the sense of what makes kids laugh, right? Because as, as horrific as the School for Good and Evil books are at times, they're, they're quite dark. They're also, they're also quite funny.

• 1:45:43Soman Chainani?

  And a lot of it is trying to find out what, what makes kids laugh. And so I would do a TED Talk, I would, I would hope on this, um, I read this book or this study about, you know, these people who spent like 10 years trying to figure out what makes people of all cultures laugh, no matter what. Like even if you go to the recesses of the Amazon, um, it'll make people laugh. They came up with four things. And the four things were, number, okay, I'm gonna try not to, to die laughing while I say these. Number one, um, is beating someone with a kitchen utensil?

• 1:46:17Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Good. Good to know.

• 1:46:19Soman Chainani?

  Okay, number two is falling down a short flight of stairs, which apparently, no matter where you are, it makes people laugh. Number three is a swift fart delivered in silence.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna say fart has to be in there somewhere. I like a swift fart delivered in silence. That could also be the name of my memoir.

• 1:46:43Soman Chainani?

  And I use that. I use that in chapter three of the first book, and it's always mentioned as one of the kids' favorite moments. And I'm like, of course, because it's one of the four things. And number four is, number four was such a shock, and then it stayed with me, is adults dressed as twins.

• 1:47:01Tim Ferriss?

  What?

• 1:47:02Soman Chainani?

  Adults dressed as twins. If you parade two adults dressed in the same clothes in front of a weird tribe in the middle of the Amazon, everyone will laugh.

• 1:47:15Tim Ferriss?

  All right, that would make good TED Talk.

• 1:47:16Soman Chainani?

  So I just think, I think things like that, like, like, what connects everybody, right? What are, what are the common denominators? I just think those are important. And so I'm trying to get to the bottom of those, because that's what fairy tales are also, right? That's, at the end of the day, School for Evil, at their core are fairy tales. So I'm trying to get to the essentialness of, and maybe this is why I'm so focused on Zen and meditation, and trying to understand the world beyond the matrix, of trying to get to the bottom of like, what connects every kid? What connects every one of us, you know, before our blank slates are filled?

• 1:47:49Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. What is, what is the bad advice that you hear given out often in your world? And I'm deliberately keeping that very, very broad, not going to define your world for you. You can take it any way you want.

• 1:48:07Soman Chainani?

  I think when people say, you know,

• 1:48:12Soman Chainani?

  This whole idea of like following your passion, right? Following what you think you were meant to do or following what you love. I don't always know is going to lead you somewhere productive. Because I think ultimately what you are meant to do isn't necessarily what you love. It's what you're good at. It's what you're divinely meant to do, what you're good at. And I always think that's the better question. What are you better at than anyone else in the whole world? What would you put yourself against anyone else in the whole world against? You know, at?

• 1:48:49Soman Chainani?

  And I think that's what's going to lead you somewhere really good. Following, you know, because what? Everybody wants to be, you know, a professional athlete or movie star at some level. So I don't know. Following what you love or your passion is necessarily going to guide you to the most fulfilling career.

• 1:49:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think it's also easier.

• 1:49:10Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see. Easier in the sense that there are more options for taking something you are good at and molding it into something you can be excited about. Or combining it with other things that you are excited about. Then starting with an undirected passion and then trying to become good at wherever that leads you.

• 1:49:35Soman Chainani?

  Oh, you're right. You're right. You're a hundred percent right. Because if you're just following the passion, you don't have the, whatever it is, the 10,000 hours that is behind mastery to even begin, you know?

• 1:49:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:49:49Soman Chainani?

  Get going. Yeah.

• 1:49:51Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have one gigantic billboard, anywhere with anything on it, you know, short message, no advertising.

• 1:49:59Tim Ferriss?

  What would you put on it? A message to get out to the world?

• 1:50:04Soman Chainani?

  I think one of two things, one is if I'm in New York, it would be death is coming. You know, one of the things I meditate on a lot is just what it would feel like to die. That's the other thing. Oh, besides the looking for the me, some days I just try to imagine what it would feel like for everything to just disappear, for the something of consciousness to become nothing. So actually trying to experience death. And I think that has led me more towards happiness than anything else in my life is so like trying to understand that your life is short and it's going to end and it can end at any minute. So take advantage, right? Really, really try to make of your life, everything you can, you know?

• 1:50:49Soman Chainani?

  So that's the one thing. And then the second one is when I'm in Miami, because my parents have a beach house on this island and it's so clear above that you can see the sort of night sky with the stars. And so if I was anywhere else but New York, I would just say, look at the stars because you can't see stars in in New York, because every time you look up there, you realize the fact that there's life on earth. It's such a weird freak accident that should never have happened. And there is no meaning to life necessarily in the larger cosmic scheme of things. It's just a fluke. It's an accident. So enjoy it because the fact that, you know, you got to have a life in the first place compared to the sort of infinity of the universe is is pretty remarkable.

• 1:51:35Tim Ferriss?

  I like that. And it surprisingly echoes the thoughts of two very disparate people I've had on the podcast also BJ Miller, who's a palliative care physician, helps people to die in hospice care, and Ed Cook, who is a memory champion and entrepreneur from the UK, both talk about the stars in a similar way. So I think that is a profound place to start to wrap up just a few more questions. And I'll certainly ask at the very end where people can find you and so on. But do you have any, any ask or request or suggestion for the audience? Any, any, any parting words or recommendations, suggestions, please?

• 1:52:21Soman Chainani?

  I would just say that I think, you know, if, if these are sort of the principles that you're interested in, not just for yourself, but for, for kids, either your own or somebody else's, I think this, this book series will sort of lead those kids in the right direction because it forces them to question all their assumptions about what good and evil are, about what they usually see in the world and about, you know, what their life is going to look like. And it's about, it's about empowering kids when kids usually don't feel empowered and usually feel, you know, so, so helpless. So it lets

• 1:53:01Soman Chainani?

  them reinterpret what heroes really are. So I would just say, you know, give it to a kid and see what their reaction is.

• 1:53:12Tim Ferriss?

  So, man, thank you so much for the time. This has been a blast.

• 1:53:15Soman Chainani?

  It's been awesome.

• 1:53:16Tim Ferriss?

  And it would be great to grab some mint majesty tea when I'm next in New York or you're next in San Francisco. Where can people find you online, learn more about you, say hello on social, if that's one of the places to find you? Where, where, where should they find you?

• 1:53:32Soman Chainani?

  Besides Tinder?

• 1:53:34Tim Ferriss?

  Besides Tinder. If only there were a search function. Alas.

• 1:53:39Soman Chainani?

  Let's, you know, I think Twitter, I tend to post pretty regularly, Instagram as well. And then we have our YouTube channel, which is called Ever Never TV, but that's, you know, mainly for, for the kids. So Twitter and Instagram for the adults, Ever Never, Ever Never TV for the kids. And also the School for Good and Evil website is a treasure trove for, you know, any kid under the age of 16 of just, even if they haven't read the books, it's just a great place to spend some time because there's so many awesome interactive features on there.

• 1:54:09Tim Ferriss?

  And Twitter, it's at Somen Chinani, right? Chinani, am I getting that right?

• 1:54:14Soman Chainani?

  Chinani, yep. Somen Chinani on Twitter. And then Instagram is Somen C.

• 1:54:18Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. S O M A N C. Well, so thank you so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed this conversation. And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything, the School for Good and Evil, of course, everything else, all the books we mentioned, all the docs we mentioned, in the show notes, which can be found with the show notes for every other episode, at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. 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?

• 1:55:00Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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

• 1:55:42Tim Ferriss?

  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 Audible, which I've used for many, many years. I absolutely love audiobooks and they are one of my favorite ways to pass the time when I travel. I'm on the road all the time and Audible allows me to consume many more books than I possibly could otherwise. I have two audiobooks to recommend right off the bat. The first is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time and it's the only audiobook I've wanted to listen to twice in a row, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's amazing and you will thank me. There are a few different versions. I like the version that Neil narrates himself,

• 1:56:25Tim Ferriss?

  one of the most soothing voices of all time. The second book is Vagabonding by Rolf Pott. POTS, P-O-T-T-S, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what would later become the Four Hour Work Week. So, go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of these two books or any of many, many other options. That could be books, magazines, and much more. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can also access a free 30-day trial. Just go to audible.com/tim. You can't make more time, but you can make the most of it. So turn your travel or your commute into something more with a free trial at Audible.

• 1:57:05Tim Ferriss?

  Go to audible.com/tim to start now and get your free 30-day trial. This episode is brought to you by Trunk Club. There are two types of men out there. You know who you are. Guys who love shopping for clothes but are short on time, category A, and those of you who hate it, category B. I am in the latter category. My fashion sense is also probably somewhere between homeless and confused with a dash of lazy added in. Either way, you can take heart, and I've used Trunk Club now and have found some of my favorite pieces of clothing that make me look a lot better than I would be able to handle on my own, and there are many reasons for that.

• 1:57:46Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:58:30Tim Ferriss?

  Shipping is always free, and you have five days to try on the clothes. So, a couple of points here. Number one, get started today. Go to trunkclub.com/tim, try it out.

• 1:58:43Tim Ferriss?

  You get premium clothes, expert advice, no work, no risk. That is a winning combo. And I have found some of my favorite Espadrilles, shoes from them, bright green. I do like the color green, and they actually work. I've had so many compliments on these shoes, and more people ask me where I got them than any other pair of shoes I've ever had. And more shirts, I ended up keeping about, I would say, 3/4 of my box, which I did not expect to do. So go to trunkclub.com/Tim and check it out.