#710: Super Combo: Jamie Foxx and Maria Popova

Brought to you by LinkedIn Ads http://linkedin.com/tfs marketing platform with 1B+ users; Cometeer https://cometeer.com/timtim delicious hyper-fresh, flash-frozen coffee; and Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business. Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This time around, we have a very special edition with two hit interviews from the podcast’s back catalog. It features two incredible guests: Jamie Foxx and Maria Popova. My goal is to introduce people to interviews they might have missed over the years and encourage them to enjoy household names but also sample lesser-known people I consider stars. You can think of this format as my personal, curated selection of the best of the last 10 years, or at least some of my favorites. Jamie Foxx (@iamjamiefoxx https://twitter.com/iamjamiefoxx) is an Academy Award-winning actor, a Grammy Award-winning musician, and a standup and improv comedian. He is one of the most consummate performers and entertainers that I have ever met. This conversation was voted Podcast of the Year in 2015. Maria Popova (@brainpicker https://twitter.com/brainpicker) is the creator of The Marginalian https://www.themarginalian.org/ (long ago named Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress’ permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. The Marginalian is Maria’s one-woman labor of love—an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. From Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde and everyone in between, Maria finds the hidden gems. She is prolific and consistent—The Marginalian was created on October 23, 2006, and it has been running strong for 17+ years. What do you think of this format? Please let me know on Twitter—or X, as the cool kids say—by tagging @tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Cometeer https://cometeer.com/timtim! Cometeer https://cometeer.com/timtim is hyper-fresh, expertly brewed, flash-frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup. Cometeer https://cometeer.com/timtim lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, and no bitterness. Cometeer sources high-quality beans from the country’s top roasters. The coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor compounds and antioxidants. It’s then flash-frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in that incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty brew. Simply add hot water and you’ve got a game-changing cup of coffee. It’s easily customizable in seconds for iced coffees, lattes, espresso martinis, and more. Order today at Cometeer.com/TimTim https://cometeer.com/timtim. Listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show will receive $25 off their first order. * This episode is also brought to you by Shopify http://shopify.com/tim! Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required. Go to shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions https://linkedin.com/TFS, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers https://linkedin.com/TFS who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. With a community of more than one billion professionals, LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/TFS is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a diverse group of people all searching for things they need to grow professionally. 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Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies, and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. I tell that story in The 4-Hour Work Week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious, and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in-person POS system, or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the e-commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  This is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim.

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Cometeer. That's spelled C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R. Cometeer is hyper fresh, expertly brewed, flash-frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup. Now, I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of flash-frozen coffee and I thought, at face value, this is probably just a gimmick, yada, yada, yada. But, as you know, I am an avid coffee drinker. I talk about caffeine and coffee a lot on this show. And when it landed on my doorstep, when I first started testing it, I thought to myself, this is actually incredible. It is locked in at peak freshness and you can sample coffee from some of the top roasters, not just in the US, but around the world.

• 2:36Tim Ferriss?

  And I went in with one eyebrow raised, and I'm sure some of you have one raised right now, but the coffee is absolutely delicious. It's pretty incredible. And I'm able to avoid bitterness completely. Cometeer lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, no bitterness whatsoever. It's a fast and foolproof way to a truly delicious cup of specialty coffee. They source high-quality beans from the country's top roasters and some outside of the country. That includes Counterculture, Bird Rock, George Hell, Equator Coffees, which I used to have. I used to drive 45 minutes from my house in San Francisco to have Equator Coffee, just to give you an idea, and you can get it through Cometeer. Birch, Joe Coffee, Red Bay, Go Get Em Tiger, Klatch, Onyx, Square Mile, Black and White,

• 3:21Tim Ferriss?

  Intelligentsia, which was in The 4-Hour Chef, as an example, in Chicago, and on and on. So, you can get all sorts of coffee you wouldn't otherwise be able to get because it is frozen using their process. Their coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor compounds and antioxidants, then it's flash-frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in the incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty brew. I already mentioned this, but it's worth reiterating. Cometeer ships to you in 100% recyclable capsules that you store in the freezer. And if you were to walk into my kitchen right now and look in the freezer, it is chock-full of Cometeer coffee. Simply add hot water and you've got a game changing cup of coffee lickety split. It's very fast.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's easily customizable in seconds for iced coffees, lattes, espresso martinis and more. If you've never had an espresso martini, I recommend it. It's pretty game changing. We'll cover that another time. Cometier is also great to travel with when you need a cup and don't want to sacrifice quality. Their capsules are TSA approved. So order today at cometeer.com/timtim and listeners of this podcast will receive $25 off of their first order. So, visit cometeer.com/timtim to learn more and get $25 off of your first order when you join the future of coffee with Cometier. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:50Maria Popova?

  No, I would have seen my perfect time. I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, 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 from all different disciplines to tease out their routines, habits, favorite books, lessons learned, mental frameworks, et cetera, and so on, and so on and so forth, that you can apply to your own lives. This time around, we have a very special edition with two hit interviews from the podcast's back catalog. We're coming up very soon on the 10th anniversary of the podcast and I wanted to experiment

• 5:40Tim Ferriss?

  with a new format and that is taking someone who is very much a household name, a superstar who is known to the masses, in this case Jamie Foxx, and pairing that person with someone who is lesser known, but who I consider to be a superstar and who I would love to have a little more visibility. So it's a two for one and in this case, the names are Jamie Foxx and Maria Popova. Jamie Foxx, for those who may not know, you can find him on Twitter at IM. Jamie Foxx is an Academy Award winning actor, a Grammy Award winning musician, and a stand-up and improv comedian. He is one of the most consummate performers and entertainers

• 6:19Tim Ferriss?

  that I have ever met. Honestly, I would say that the two top are Jamie Foxx and Hugh Jackman, who've both been on the podcast. But Jamie blew my mind in this conversation. It was so much fun. It ended up being voted Podcast of the Year in 2015, back in the Pleiocene era of podcasting, when celebrities appearing on podcasts were really few and far between. And we did this in his recording studio at his house. There's music, there's comedy, there's everything. The stories are amazing. And then we have Maria Popova, who you can find on Twitter at Brain Picker, who is the creator of The Marginalian. Long ago, this was named Brain Pickings, and it is included in the Library of Congress's

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. It started off as a newsletter to a handful of friends, I think maybe six people, and now millions and millions and millions of people read her work constantly. The Marginalian is Maria's one-woman labor of love, an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. She is unbelievably prolific. She reads so continuously. She writes so beautifully. She speaks multiple languages, and English is not her first language, which is always incredibly impressive to me, because her writing is better than mine, which is not to say that I'm the best in the world, but her English is far more elegant, far more eloquent than mine. She is incredibly

• 7:48Tim Ferriss?

  consistent. The Marginalian was created on October 26, 2006, and it has been running strong for 17-plus years. So I hope you enjoy this format. You can dip in, dip out. You have two people to choose from. My hope is that you will begin with the entertainment, the no-name, and that will pull you in, in this case with Jamie Foxx, who better? And then you will continue and listen to someone you may not come across otherwise, and that is Maria Popova. I love both of these interviews and I would love to know what you think of this format. So let me know on Twitter. It's gonna be a while before I can bring myself

• 8:28Tim Ferriss?

  to say X, as the cool kids might be saying, by tagging at T Ferris, at T F E R R I S S. Let me know what you think of this format. My goal, again, is to introduce people to interviews they might have missed over the years. They might miss forever if they weren't surfaced and brought to your attention. And you can think of this as my personal curated selection of, if not the best of the last 10 years of the podcast, at the very least, some of my own personal favorites. So I really hope you enjoy this and please do let me know what you think. Jamie, welcome to the show.

• 9:05Jamie Foxx?

  Man, thanks, buddy.

• 9:07Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so excited to be here. I'm admiring your setup here.

• 9:11Jamie Foxx?

  Crazy, right?

• 9:12Tim Ferriss?

  This is where the magic happens.

• 9:13Jamie Foxx?

  To be honest with you, a lot of magic happens here. For the people that are listening, we are actually in my studio, my home studio. Now, you know, studios, we're talking about tech world, studios because of the tech world, a lot of them dissipate in closed doors. Because if you think about when LMFAO came around, they didn't need studios. They did all of their music on a laptop.

• 9:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 9:38Jamie Foxx?

  Flying from here to Germany or whatever like that and just dumped it on to, and just pressed up the CD or the iTunes. So studios have almost become obsolete. But there's something very interesting about this studio. First, just for people that are listening, this studio, and I'll describe it, it's, you know, it's sort of plush, the carpet is gray, we're gonna sit next to a grand piano. You hear the grand piano, which a lot of places.

• 10:12Jamie Foxx?

  So we keep a grand piano around just to make sure that we don't lose, you know, we don't get too techie, but what's interesting about it is it's actually electric. But it's an electric grand piano, so we still have the wood to give you that warm sound. Uh, which, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense because as music starts to progress, uh, because of the way we record now, sometimes you lose a little bit of the heart of it. So I think within the next twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, it'll be, you know, this type of music, the real sound will, you know, remain.

• 10:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 10:45Jamie Foxx?

  If that makes sense. Now, the studio, when I first got the house, looked like a, a old porn set. It had a, it had like an old basement carpet and a couch and like a Metallica, uh, Metallica poster. And I was like, what would I do with this because I needed a place to, to work and, and do music. What's interesting now, I, I got a guy to change the whole place over and as you can see, we'll take pictures and show it for, for you, for you guys that are listening. But they did a very good job in it. But if you look over here, this is where we do the recording. There's, there's a booth, which is normal, but also the recording on both sides, we're able to do animation. We're able to do, uh, if we want to do ADR for movies.

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  What is ADR?

• 11:27Jamie Foxx?

  ADR is like when you, um, like when we're doing a movie, but we're recording up the, the movie outside, it's a lot of noise.

• 11:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you're doing pickup audio?

• 11:34Jamie Foxx?

  So we'll do pickup audio. Uh, so, uh, and so, and, and most, any actor or actress would tell you ADR is the worst thing in the world to do. So to be able to have here, have it here, I could do my ADR here, I could do my animation here and things like that. And so just the, now the, the studio itself, the actual brains of the studio, it's an old hard drive. And the reason I kept that old hard drive, I used to have a smaller studio in a smaller house, but when I had that small studio, I wasn't in music. I built the studio in my smaller house because I wanted to get in music, but I was from comedy and from acting and things like that. But what I would do is I would throw parties and I would invite musical people over, uh,

• 12:18Jamie Foxx?

  at the party, like, but, and when they would come over, like if I had Puff or, or Snoop or back at that time, John B. or, or Brian McKnight, I would say, hey, man, you know, I'm trying to get into music, would you leave me some music in my studio? So the people would leave me like sixteen bars, twenty-four bars.

• 12:33Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning they would, they would record something while they're in the studio?

• 12:36Jamie Foxx?

  They would record, we'd have the party going, I'd say, hey, man, let's go in the back. You know, while we're drinking or whatever like that and go and I say, hey, man, just leave me a little something because I was trying to get into uh to music. And then I met this kid uh uh named Brian Prescott. Basketball, you know, we played basketball and all this kind of stuff, pick up basketball games. And he said, hey, man, why don't you ever do music? I said, man, I'm trying to get into that shit, man. I just, you know, I don't know how to get into it. And then one day he, I throw this big party. And uh it was a uh uh the party was was crazy because as I dig digress a little bit. I would follow Puffy Combs around back in the day when it was just like Puff and J Lo and that. And back at that time, no one could get into his parties.

• 13:20Jamie Foxx?

  But the reason he would let me in because I would carry a camera with me everywhere I go. But it was back in the day day, like, you know, the big Canon cameras.

• 13:27Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, he would let you in because you carried a camera?

• 13:28Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, because at that time I wasn't Jamie Foxx, I was just Jamie Foxx. And uh uh so I couldn't get into all the parties because Puff was so big. Like, he come to L A, we couldn't even get in our own clubs.

• 13:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:39Jamie Foxx?

  But I pop, I I I took a town car everywhere he went, jumped out of the town car one day and said, yo, Puff, can I record?

• 13:45Tim Ferriss?

  Now, at that point, he didn't know you at all.

• 13:46Jamie Foxx?

  He knew me, he knew me, the kid that was on Living Color or whatever like that, but it wasn't elevated.

• 13:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:52Jamie Foxx?

  And plus, he was having parties that were like huge, like nobody's getting it. And so there was, he saw me with the camera, he's like, yo, let him through. And it was back in the day, it was like the big Canon camera with the light and I had to change the battery. It wasn't like how today you just got your, you know, your phone in your pocket. No, I had, I had production. But uh I would follow him around. And then one day we had this this party in Philly that I I recorded for him. And he said, yo, yo, money, you know how much this party costs? I said, what? He said, it costs a million dollars for this party. I said, you paid a million dollars for a party? He was like, yeah, that's how we. I told Puff, I challenged him, I said, I'll throw you a party at my house in L A, which is way smaller than this situation, but I'll spend maybe four hundred dollars and it will rival this party, not in the scale of it, but in the type of people that are there.

• 14:35Jamie Foxx?

  And he was, he was a little upset, you know, Puff is a, you know, he he always likes to win.

• 14:40Tim Ferriss?

  He's a competitive guy.

• 14:40Jamie Foxx?

  He's a competitive guy. I said, yo, you must be out your motherfucking mind, playboy, you don't understand the essence of this party. And I was like, all right, I I get it. And he actually came to LA a few weeks later. And it was a Saturday, he said, yo, playboy, make that shit happen. So he calls me like nine in the morning, right?

• 14:57Tim Ferriss?

  For that night?

• 14:57Jamie Foxx?

  For, in the morning.

• 14:59Tim Ferriss?

  For the same day?

• 15:00Jamie Foxx?

  For the day. I said, no problem. So I go into my cell phones. Call, I have a, I have a list of people. Uh, that since I first came to LA. The way I got into, uh, um, knowing everybody. I was the first, I was the first social media guy without social media. I would go do a stand-up comedy routine at a club. If they liked the routine, I had cue cards back in the day. And would have people sign cue cards, sign their name, did you like the set? Give me your pager number, I will text you and let you know where I would be.

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  You were ahead of the curve.

• 15:39Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Tim Ferriss?

  So they were like index cards?

• 15:40Jamie Foxx?

  Index cards, so a box, and I had these, get rid of this fly, man. Stop before I say.

• 15:47Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so we're picking back up, I just have to, we took a fly break.

• 15:50Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, so it was a fly assaulting my man.

• 15:52Tim Ferriss?

  I just have to admire this, because the studio is, what would you say, maybe like thirty, thirty by fifteen feet on the floor, and then another fifteen feet tall. And you said, I'm gonna stop and get this fly.

• 16:04Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, I saw the fly assaulting my man.

• 16:06Tim Ferriss?

  This is a lot of space, and it took you about seven seconds to track this fly down and kill it, I was very impressed.

• 16:11Jamie Foxx?

  We gotta get shit done in here, we don't have time.

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  So the cue cards.

• 16:15Jamie Foxx?

  So, so what, so I would get cue cards, and, and like I said, I would send it, you know, I, I had a list of about eight hundred people. I had six hundred women, because women at that time, this is like around ninety, ninety-one, women at that time loved to go to comedy clubs. So it was all the pretty girls, because pretty girls like to laugh, you know, and, and about eight, nine girls together, and Jamie, you're so crazy, whatever. And so, uh, I had eight hundred singers, just two hundred guys, because they wanted to be where the girls were, so I would take that list. And also, say, okay, well now I'm having a party here, here, here, whatever, whatever, if you want to come by. So that same list, along with the other people that I met as I. As I started to grow in the business, I text and said, I'm throwing a party for Puff. And this one Puff had, uh,

• 17:02Jamie Foxx?

  We Ain't Going Nowhere was out. And it was bl- it was popping. I mean, even the LA dudes was like, man, we don't wanna fuck with this New York dude, but this shit is so- the song is so hot. So, I text, I said, listen, um, um, Puff is coming. And the people that I text were only cool people. Like, no guys that'd be hatin'. You know, uh, girls are pretty, uh, uh, not slutty, but not, not too tight. Right. You know what I mean? The Goldilocks. It was just, it was just really, it was, um, it was, um, it was, um, um. And so, I hit him at 12 noon, I said, yo, where you at? We're at a Fever Pitch. It's going off over here in my little house. And when he gets there, his mind is blown. And, you know, he shows up with the entourage, then, you know, he, Puff was, he was like, Gatsby.

• 17:47Jamie Foxx?

  Okay. And he walked in, he says, oh, that's the girl from that show, and that's the girl on this, and I said, yeah, Puff, we, we all live out here. You know, so all the people you see in Hollywood, I, I know they're my friends. And so he's like, oh shit, so the party's incredible. We're playing his music through my little sound speakers. Everybody's really toasting him. And I said, Puff, the people that are here are different in this. Oh, what the fuck? It's another fly. Hold on, stay right there.

• 18:19Jamie Foxx?

  Good night. Two for two. Two for two.

• 18:24Jamie Foxx?

  So, so, so, so he's, he's admiring that, that, it's, it's crazy. And, um, and, and everybody's in tune with him, and I explained to him, I said, Puff, let me explain to you who you are. I said, these are the people who not only live in LA, but I think I've found the right set of people who appreciate the art as well. Because what you do musically and what you're doing on the artistic side is blowing our minds as well. And I said, Therefore, look at the table. I only spent four hundred dollars on the table. There's Kentucky Fried Chicken. I just put it in a nice bowl. Uh, there's cola. I just put them in pitchers. I said, so no more than four hundred dollars, but people are here. I said, because here's the thing. A fitted baseball cap, New York, fitted, is fifty-eight dollars maybe retail.

• 19:07Jamie Foxx?

  I said, but Puff on your hat, on your head is priceless. We just wanna be around this fly shit, right? So we partying, Puff is partying, and there's a dude standing, uh, next, uh, uh, like on the wall. No one's talking to him. He got a little green jump jacket on. Guess who it was? It was Jay-Z. Nobody knew who he was. Jay-Z, kid, I said, yeah, I know that dude. Uh, Missy Elliott has one room, Puff has the other room. Then I go to my garage to grab some other drinks, and I see this tall dude and this little dude, and, uh, and, and they're like, the little guy goes, yo, B, it's like this all the time. I said, yeah, what you mean? You know, the girls and karaoke. And I said, yeah, yeah, man, who are you? Oh, we're the Neptunes. My name is Pharrell. I said, yeah, man, I heard of you. Yeah, man, I like your shit. So that's how long ago this was.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 19:51Jamie Foxx?

  So here's how I make the music play, though. So as Puff is there, I get people to leave me different bits of music or whatever, like, cause I'm trying to get into the music thing. So I turn that into a show, in a sense, to where I would just have different people I would toast, and try to, you know, get my music on. So one day, my boy Brian brings in this kid. He has a backpack on. His jaw's a little busted. His name is Kanye West. And I say, yo, yo, who's, who's that? They said, yo, that's a new kid, Kanye West, he coming on. I said, really? What he do? He said, he rap. I said, well, shit, he gotta perform that shit, cause everybody comes to this, to my house, they gotta perform. So I said, yo, man, they say you the shit. And he was really quiet, you know? I said, man, let me hear you rap.

• 20:36Jamie Foxx?

  You need your beats or whatever? He said, I don't need no beat. Freestyle. Blew every, I mean, chopped everybody's heads, just amazing. I said, dude, I don't know where you come from. But you are going to be one of the biggest stars ever. And he says, I actually have a song for you. I said, moi? Me, a song? Like, what you mean? He said, I got this song. He says, I wanna record it. I said, well, you happen to be in luck because I got a studio in the back. So we go in the back. And my studio at that time, I called it the Porsche. It was a lot smaller than this. It was really like nifty. It was like a, uh, it was like a Learjet. It was compact. It was compact. The sound was toasty.

• 21:15Jamie Foxx?

  I had engineers from all over the, the, the city dial it in so that when real artists come, they don't think that, oh, this is just comedian fucking around. Some real shit. So we go in and, and, and, and Kanye, you know, quiet. But, but at the same time, he knew what he wanted. He says, okay, the song goes like this. She say she wants some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross, a little. I said, I got it. And I started going, she say she wants some Marvin Gaye. And he said, what the fuck are you doing? I said, well, see, young man, you don't know nothing about R and B. See, I'm a R and B motherfucker. See, I, I got to give him the shit, you know, I gotta put the shit on it. And he goes really politely, he says, hits the, the button, he says, uh, don't do that. I said, but you don't know what you're talking about, brother.

• 21:58Jamie Foxx?

  Uh, that ain't how the song go. You gotta sing it this way. So in my mind, I'm thinking, you know what, I'm gonna sing this shit. The song is whack. It's not gonna make it. Cause I'm thinking old school R and B. But he was teaching me the simplicity of hip hop, which I didn't know. I was like, what? Cool guy, great rapper. I don't think it's gonna happen for him. So I go off and do a bad movie. And when I come back, my boy says, remember that song you said was whack? I said, yes, number one in the country. You, Kanye and Twista, Kanye's first record. And it was actually Twista's record. I said, oh shit. So I'm at a club. He says, you don't believe me? I said, no, I'm, we're in Miami. He, they played it. Everybody ran to the dance floor.

• 22:41Jamie Foxx?

  I grabbed the mic, said, that's me? That's, that's, that's my song? I'm, I'm on that, you know? And so the music, that's how I got into the music. Now, the reason the story is significant is because the same brains that we use, that same hard drive that we use, I brought it to this studio. Oh, no. So that hard drive is, is magical because we also did, just to give you a history on the, on the music. Brian found that song, Slow Jams. It went number one. And then as we started getting into music, there was a song that Brian brought in. And he would play these, Brian would call me, like he said, you wanna be in the music business? It's like, you know, two or three in the morning, he called me, says, you wanna be in the music business? I said, yeah. He said, then wake your ass up. I said, what? He said, I got this song you gotta hear.

• 23:24Jamie Foxx?

  So I drove all the way from my house in the valley to this, to this, uh, to this, to this little studio. He says, so you ready, motherfucker? Are you ready? And Brian always says everything three times. Are you ready, motherfucker? Are you ready? Are you ready? I said, yeah, yeah, man, play the shit. So he plays it. And the song was, blame it on the goose, got your feeling loose, blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. I stopped it. I said, listen, first of all, please tell me that's my song. He said, yeah, it's your song, but you gotta record it right now. Because a lot of people are listening to this song and they don't know if it's a hit or not. He said, but I know it's a hit. We did Blame It on the Alcohol. That night, I sung it exactly like the record, which goes way in contrast to my R and B roots. Cause it was auto-tuned and everything like that, but we wanted to sing it exactly like the demo.

• 24:07Jamie Foxx?

  So we wouldn't lose the essence of it. I don't wanna be like, blame it on the alcohol, you know, some corny shit. So we did that. And then we went from every, the way we broke that record is that we went from every club. We went to the strip clubs first. Went to the strip clubs? Strip club. We went, we went, we did an east coast run. So we were going to break the record in the east coast. So we went to the strip, went to New York. Uh, my man Pekus took us around. Uh, and I would go into the club and use my comedic, you know, vernacular to get the song off. I said, fellas, you ever been, uh, at the club, you meet a girl, you been drinking? You think she look like Halle Berry, you get her back home, she looks like Halle Scary, you know what you gotta do?

• 24:48Jamie Foxx?

  Blame it on the goose, got your feeling loose, blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Stop the record. Ladies, you ever meet a guy, you get back to the house with him and you been drinking too much? And you say, I usually don't do this, but you do it anyway? You gotta blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah. So we took that and we went all the way down from New York, all the way down to Miami. This is like two thousand eight. And then the song took off. And so. Long story longer, blaming on alcohol is done here, slow jams is done here. So this studio has that, that essence to it that you just, you don't throw that away. And just the building itself, Natasha Beddingfield's been here, she's cut. Kelly Rowland's been here, she's cut. The game has been here, he's cut.

• 25:31Jamie Foxx?

  Right here on this floor, and I'm showing, uh, for you guys listening, I'm pointing to the floor, to the carpet. A young man by the name of Ed Shering slept on this carpet for like six weeks, uh, trying to get his music career going. Uh, he came from over from London, he heard about a, a live show that I do in LA. Said, really wanna, uh, do your live show if it's possible? Uh, you know, because I have some music that I live, I hear this kid with this red hair, I'm like, hey, you do my live show? And it's all, it's mostly black, you know what I'm saying? But it's really like music people, like really hardcore music people, they're very finicky. You know, people that have played for Stevie Wonder, people will come there to, I mean, I had Miranda Lambert one night.

• 26:13Jamie Foxx?

  I had Stevie Wonder on stage, I had Babyface, I said, so this is the real shit you talking about? You know, you come here, I don't care about the London and the accent, you gotta really come with it. He said, I, I think I'll be okay. I said, alright. So I take it to my live night, eight hundred people there. People's playing, black folks sweating and just getting it, you know what I'm saying? I mean, people singing and, you know, they would, they would tear American Idol up, you know, so these people don't necessar- hasn't, haven't necessarily made it. So all of a sudden Ed Shering gets up with a ukulele, walks out onto the stage, and the brother that was next to me was like, yo Foxman, who the fuck is this dude right here, man? With the red hair and shit and the fucking ukulele? I said, man, his name is Ed Shering, let's see what he does. But then twelve minutes, he got a standing ovation.

• 26:58Jamie Foxx?

  Wow. From that crowd. And I said, bro, you on your way. So this studio has a, like I said, a lot of history and it has that magic to it as well. The mojo. Yeah.

• 27:12Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you, uh, you mentioned getting into music. But it seems like, from what I've read of you, that music in some ways came first.

• 27:21Jamie Foxx?

  Music did. Music did. My, when I was a kid, my grandmother, uh, made sure that I took piano lessons. And you know, that's tough for a little boy in Texas. You know, playing furry leaves and Chopin and Mozart.

• 27:35Tim Ferriss?

  And we're not talking about Houston or...

• 27:38Jamie Foxx?

  No, we're talking Terrell, Texas. And I love my city. My city was dope because it was only 12,000 people. So it was like, literally like 12 or 15 families. So we all knew each other. But you know, for a little boy playing at that time, you know, the kids didn't understand, yo, man, why you doing that? My grandma want me to do this, you know? And so I would, sometimes I would be belligerent, be like, why you want me to do this? She says, "The reason I want you to learn classical piano is because I want you to be able to go across the tracks and play your music." For people listening, across the tracks or on the other side of the tracks for a southern city was, the tracks in a southern city separates the city. One side is black, the other side is white. So in our city, the south side, the south side of town was where all the black folk live.

• 28:24Jamie Foxx?

  The north side of town was where the white folks live. So she says, "I want you to be able to go on the white side of town and play classical music." So she taught me how to play classical piano, um, a lady by the name of Lenita Hodge taught me how to play classical piano. And I literally would go on the other side of the tracks and, you know, and, and start playing for like wine and cheese parties and things like that. But my grandmother took it a step further too, because she was able to see the future. Uh, here's a lady with an eighth grade education. She had her own business for 30 years. She had her own, uh, nursery school business. She says, "When I say across the tracks, I don't just mean in Terrell and those people over there. I mean the metaphor, like across the track, like meaning everywhere in the world."

• 29:05Jamie Foxx?

  So you, she said, "Because music connects you to the, to, to the whole world." So in doing... That I would connect with people on the other side of tracks who, you know, in a southern city, Ontario, you know, we were a little, we were a little behind the curve when it came to race relations. Let's just say it that way without, you know, I don't want to demonize my, my hometown, but there was, there was that, who's a little black kid? And my grandmother be like, don't, you know, play. Do your thing. And when I would play, you know, a lot of that broke up, broke up, you know, broke up. I remember even like being armed with just my music in sort of that racial setting and some, sometimes. Like there was a, a time when there was a Christmas party. Were these paid gigs?

• 29:50Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, I make like, man, I get like ten, fifteen dollars. You know what I'm saying? At that time was a lot of money and I played for the church. So playing for the church, I would make like, uh, seventy-five dollars a week. So if you count that up, that's like three hundred a month, you know? Real money. That's real money at thirteen, fourteen. My grandmother would take the money though, said, put it, you know, and give me this money. So, "Grandma, what you doing with my money? Shit, you ain't paying, you ain't paying no rent. You gonna give me this money." So, but I remember at that time being armed with just my music and, uh, there was a Christmas party that I was supposed to play for. Myself and my best friend who was seventeen, I was sixteen at the time. And so here's a little bit of the, the racial misunderstanding, shall we say. I went to play for the guys, Christmas time, maybe it's like December seventeenth. And we show up, it's two little black kids on the white side of town.

• 30:36Jamie Foxx?

  And, uh, when he opens his door and he sees these two little black kids, he says, "What's going on here?" I said, "Well, I'm, I'm here to play, uh, for your Christmas party." "Sure, then why are two of you here at the same time?" I said, "Well, I don't have a license. He, you know, he drove me." Uh, "Is there a problem?" "Yeah, there's a problem. I can't have two niggers in my house at the same time." And I was like, "Oh, well, you know, I've been sort of used to the racial misunderstandings." And I said, "Well, i- is there any way he could wait outside or wait?" And he can't wait on the street. Starts at six thirty. Now you gotta make your, make your mind up now. So I, I said, I told my boy, I said, "Let's just come get me at eight thirty," which was pretty late, you know, for kids at that time, you know? Uh, so I go in. He says, "Where's your tuxedo?" I said, "Well, he didn't tell me to have a tuxedo."

• 31:22Jamie Foxx?

  So we go into this room, which looks like a bedroom, and I'm looking like, why the fuck does he have clothes hanging up in his bedroom? But it was a walk-in closet. I've never seen no shit like that. I'm like, I don't know. We can make a split-level condo out of this shit. So he gives me a Brooks Brothers jacket that had the patches on the elbows. I'm like, oh shit, high for loop. So now I'm really playing, you know, I'm getting. But as I'm playing, uh, they were doing, uh, the grownups there were doing, uh, racially misunderstanding jokes. I'll say it like that. And my grandmother taught me something at that time. She said, uh, when you're in a setting like that, uh, there's a word I want you to remember. It's called furniture. I said, what's that? She said, you're part of the furniture.

• 32:06Jamie Foxx?

  So you don't comment on what's being said. You play, that's what you're there for. You let these people enjoy their. And the lady at the house felt bad. She said, I just want to apologize to you for what they're saying. I said, no, no problem. She said, can you sing something for us? And I was like, sure. I could sing something for us. And this was a song that I saw.

• 32:30Jamie Foxx?

  Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

• 32:37Jamie Foxx?

  Jack Frost nipping at your nose.

• 32:44Jamie Foxx?

  You'll take hell being sung by a choir and folks dressed up like Eskimos. Everybody, anyway. So as I'm singing, I remember watching those white guys, older men, some of them faculty at my school, that had just said something, you know, probably not, I don't think it was that they meant harm, harm, but it was.

• 33:15Tim Ferriss?

  They'd have to, they'd have to resign today.

• 33:17Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah. And they look and they go, they, they immediately changed. It's wow, man, that's good. You know any other songs? And I sat and I did about maybe like a six-song set. And I saw what my grandmother talked about. That music cracked them in half. They saw a different me. And then afterwards, he gave me a hundred bucks. And I'm like, shit, call me nigga every day. I got a hundred dollars. I'm rich.

• 33:42Jamie Foxx?

  And what was interesting was I went to give him the jacket back. He's like, no, I don't, I can't wear the jacket. So it was still a little bit of residue left over. But I saw what the music did and I remember when my, when my boy showed back up, I said, listen, it was a cool gig. We got paid. I said, but I gotta get out of here. I said, because I'm too smart for this, uh, I need to go elsewhere. And I did. I changed my major. Well, I changed the college that I was gonna go to. I was gonna go to another college in Texas and study music instead. I came to California, San Diego to study music, uh, at International University. And what was interesting about that was is that being in Texas, it was black, whites and Mexicans.

• 34:23Jamie Foxx?

  When I got to International University, it was eighty-one different countries represented at that school, all connected by music and other things, music or sports. Uh, in the music, the music arena at that time was high-end, strict. Child prodigies from Japan, child prodigies from China. I had a Russian, uh, uh, music teacher and I had a Yugoslavian music theory teacher. So it was, it was really across the tracks. But, uh, because of that, because of Estelle Tally and Mark Tally, you know, picking me up every, uh, weekend to go play music, um, man, I, it, it set me on a, like I said, a, a crazy, wonderful journey.

• 35:07Jamie Foxx?

  And, uh, uh, so the music was first, you know, and, um, my college was interesting. I didn't know anything about Jewish, Palestinian. I had no idea. I was at the student center and there was this argument going on, you know? So what, what are you arguing about? Oh, my brother, my brother, my friend, they're talking about the Gaza Strip. I said, what the fuck is that? And they said, no, the Jewish. The occupation, the this, the that, and I had a, I got a quick, I got a quick, uh, history lesson on, on that. I got a quick history lesson on people from Argentina. Or I would see a person who looked black and I'd be like, "Hey, what's up, brother?" "Bonjour." "That's what's up with you?" And I'd be like, "Oh shit, where you from, man?" "I'm from

• 35:51Jamie Foxx?

  Paris." I was like, "What the fuck? They got black people?" So, that music gave me not only an opportunity to share, but an opportunity to be educated by other people, because we studied Texas history. And in studying Texas history is interesting. Like, if you study Texas history, if it didn't happen in Texas, it didn't happen. So, when you look at, like, like, this is just a sidebar, but when you think about politics and what people know and don't know in politics, and what they know about across the sea, or what they know about even on the next block, or what they know about what's different in Texas from New York, the reason that politics is so interesting is because the people don't necessarily

• 36:28Jamie Foxx?

  have educations of other people, which is why I think that once we start opening up a little more and traveling a little more, because, what is it, less than how many percent? Less, well, less than 5% of Americans have passports and things like that? That's a small number, yeah. So, so anyway, that music, like I said, took me, took me everywhere.

• 36:54Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. If you are a business-to-business marketer, your needs are unique and your solutions should be unique as well. B2B buying cycles are long and your customers face incredibly complex decisions. It's time that you had a marketing platform built specifically for you. LinkedIn Ads empowers marketers with solutions for both you and your customers. LinkedIn Ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers exactly where they are already. You'll have direct access to and can build relationships with decision-makers, 1 billion members, 180 million senior-level executives, and 10 million C-level executives.

• 37:37Tim Ferriss?

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• 38:14Tim Ferriss?

  What other... Your grandmother seems like a very wise woman. And I've heard you describe her, and I might be, I'm sure I'm paraphrasing this, but that she was the bow or had the arrow, and you were the arrow. And she pointed you in different directions. I'm wondering what other... Like, you are the furniture, right? I mean, when to speak, when not to speak. What other lessons did you learn from your grandmother?

• 38:37Jamie Foxx?

  My grandmother taught me confidence as well. My grandmother was a very confident person and very smart. Just, how would you say? Just naturally intelligent. She was a Taurus. You know what I'm saying? Natural is like, it wasn't something that was super educated or anything like that. But you just had a... I'll give you a hint of my grandmother. I'm 10 years old, maybe. I think I'm in the fifth grade, '76. President Carter. The preacher started preaching about homosexuality. I don't know what it is. 10 or 8 or whatever. So he's saying, "God made Adam and Eve. God didn't make Adam and Steve."

• 39:20Jamie Foxx?

  So people's like, you know, it's southern, it's Texas. Amen. My grandmother stood up and said, "You stop that." And the whole church stopped. What's that, Ms. Taylor? "You stop that." Now, her words, what she said next was very interesting. Let me tell you something. I've had this nursery school for 30 years. And I want to let all y'all know that God makes sissies too. And the whole place went, "What?" She said, "These little boys that I've watched since they could walk."

• 39:53Jamie Foxx?

  They they play by they play by different music. And you stop that because you're making it hard for them to navigate. Sits down, he goes to another subject. Eventually, he leaves the church. But I found that very interesting. But at that time, I didn't know what that meant. Until I got to be about eighteen, I was like, what was you talking about? She says, yeah, it's true. She says, you know, I've had this nursery school. I I see the difference in the kids. And so therefore, I would have these kids come to me. After they graduated from high school, gone to college, or tried to have a family. Although they had, they were living with this. So she was the type of woman who had natural intelligence. I said, well, Granny, well, what does it say about religion? Doesn't it say that it's that it's wrong?

• 40:38Jamie Foxx?

  You know, being a, you know, kid from Texas, it's a natural question. She says, you know, when I think about it? She said, you have to open up the umbrella of religion. I said, what do you mean? She said, if you only open up the umbrella halfway, only a few people can stand under it. She said, you have to open the umbrella all the way through. So God's children can stand on it. Because no one here did not get made by anybody else or anything else but God. So that was my grandmother, you know?

• 41:07Tim Ferriss?

  It seems very, uh, the move in church, man, that's a very bold move, very courageous move.

• 41:12Jamie Foxx?

  Very bold, very bold. But my grandmother raised those people in church. See, I was adopted, you know, at seven months, so she was much older. So all of the kids that were there, whether, and it was like I said, it was only a few families that lived in Terrell. So all of the kids that grew up, or all of the grownups that were there, she.

• 41:29Tim Ferriss?

  She was the matriarch.

• 41:30Jamie Foxx?

  Because during during the year, it was a it was a it was a it was a school. You know what I'm saying? But then during the summer, you drop your kids off at my at my grandmother's house and just let them keep them. So she was very, uh, powerful in that sense. And then, when I did finally make it. It was wonderful to tell my grandmother, come live with me. So my grandmother was living with me. So we go to the clubs. You know, my grandmother was like. She had to be eighty-three at the time. She would go to the clubs, we'd hang out, you know what I'm saying? This is in L.A. This is in L.A. I had a little apartment, split-level condo, remember when that was hype? The split-level condo. So I had a loft, oh yeah, Ricardo, he's only nineteen, he doesn't know what I'm talking about.

• 42:11Jamie Foxx?

  But I had a loft, and we were living in that loft, and then we eventually rented a house. Me and my grandma, and I didn't know I was a mama's boy. Like, we'd go to the parties, come back, we'd have an after-party at the crib, and then one of my homies came and said, yo, uh, "Yo, Fox, uh, there's an older lady out here, uh, in the, in the front room." I said, "Yeah, that's my grandmother, what's up?" "Uh, yeah, it's cool," I said, "yeah," and then he hears a bottle of champagne pop. "What we doing? We getting into what?" You know, so, uh, she was, uh, she was amazing, man. So, you know, my grandmother, you know, we'd party, hang, have a good time, she was eighty-three years old. And then the big thing was, is like, Granny, you know, it's Christmas time, why don't we do something we ain't never done? You know, you, you, you saw her making a little money.

• 42:53Jamie Foxx?

  Why don't we go to Hawaii for Christmas, 'cause I got some friends from Hawaii. "Well, what, yeah, well, let's get it going, gas up the plane," right? So we, uh, fly to Hawaii one year, and I, it was just amazing to be able to show my grandmother another side of the world, it even made the papers in Terrell, Texas. Estelle Tally, uh, on her way to Hawaii, you know? And I remember, and you know, just a fun, just a fun time. I remember, um, we're having a good time, we're going everywhere, and she had a boyfriend at the same time, who was eighty-three, too. And he was on the, you know, he was on the land side, and so, so it was like December twenty-third, and we, uh, we called her boyfriend, just so they could talk. So she's on the phone, "Mm-hmm.

• 43:37Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, having a good time. Mm-hmm, oh yeah, yeah, weather's nice, mm-hmm, sunny. Our food is good, I got my own seasonings, though. Mm-hmm. Real nice." Well, I tell you what, look, I'm gonna go, but let me tell you something. Don't let me come back there and, uh, catch you with no young girls. You understand? 'Cause I don't play that. Let me catch you with no young girls, you hear me? So she hangs up, you know, it's like three or four families there, we're having like a little Christmas party, and we all go, Granny, what? When you said the young girls, what are you talking about? You know sixty, sixty-five, I don't wanna mess with no sixty-five. She says, "Shit, I'm eighty-three, you know, so I can't handle sixty-five-year-old woman all in my shit." So she was just a- Great person, tough girl.

• 44:21Jamie Foxx?

  Uh, I remember there was some situations where I did make it and some people in my family felt like I should give them all of the, all of my money. This lady walks in and we're in my apartment, she comes and says, "My rich cousin." I didn't even recognize, cause I, you know, I hadn't, I only seen him maybe once or twice growing up. So anyway, he gets around to it, she says, "I need ten thousand dollars for a kidney." I'm like, "Who's kidney?" "Well, I need kidney surgery," or something like that.

• 44:51Jamie Foxx?

  "So if you give me the cash, I could take it and get the..." I said, "Well, why don't you, if it's a situation of medical, I, I know some doctors, maybe they can help you." "Oh, I would prefer the ten thousand dollars." "That's funny, okay, I'll hit you." And I didn't call back, I was like... So that became a problem for her. And she called me one day and left on the answer machine. "Young fella, last time you seen the answer machine?" So I'm checking my answer machine and she leaves this scathing message. "Well, you know what, I didn't get the money from you." "And that's fine, cause you're not part of his family anyway, he was adopted. Nobody wanted you anyway." This is what this lady is saying to me. Brutal. I said, "What the hell?" So I left my grandmother here, "Let me run that back."

• 45:35Jamie Foxx?

  Played it, "Mm-hmm, what's that number?" And she called and I, I remember listening, now I'm grown, you know, I'm, I'm twenty-two. So I'm grown and I hear how she stuck up for me. She says, "Let me explain something to you, boy," and I could hear, I got the bow when he was seven months old. I said, "And everybody wanted him, I wanted him, uh, everybody, you know." I said, "And he may not be blood, but he's our family." And it just, it was just incredible, incredible thing. My grandmother was absolutely amazing, I think you need people like that. And when you talk about that bow, that's what, that's my reference to, to raising kids, and I got my own kids now. Is that when you raise your kids, you are the bow and arrow, you're the bow, they're the arrow.

• 46:16Jamie Foxx?

  And you just try to aim them in the best direction that you can and hopefully, uh, your aim isn't too off. And, uh, that's what she did for me and then, uh, you know, she watched my whole career, uh, all the way up until getting nominated for an Oscar. Where all of the things that she taught me came into play. When we did, uh, Ray Charles, that was an opportunity to play the piano.

• 46:43Jamie Foxx?

  To be funny, to do an impersonation. And all these things was what my grandmother championed. So when we embarked upon that film, I was like, oh, man. Granny was right. This is taking me on the other side of the tracks. And when we got in, even when I got a chance to meet Ray Charles, which, you know, that's my grandmother's era, you know? And she didn't get a chance to meet him because at the time she was, you know, she couldn't move bedridden a little bit. But being around older people, you know, I understood that muscle too. Because I was always the young kid with the old parents. So, meeting Ray Charles was like seeing my grandfather, seeing one of my uncles.

• 47:25Jamie Foxx?

  And when I met Ray, and we were trying to do Ray Charles a movie. And Taylor Hackford, who was the director, and he said, you know, I've been wanting to do this movie for 25 years. I'm glad you came along because it's the right time. And I remember meeting Ray Charles, walking down his studio, you know, clean, you know? Looked like, almost like you could see, you know? And I said, Mr. Charles, you know, I'm just trying to do the best I can to, you know, to do your movie, your biopic. He said, you know what? Look, if you could play the blues, man, shit, you could do anything, man. I said, what do you mean? He said, just can you play the blues? Shit, that's what I'm asking. I said, I guess so, then come on. And we go and we sit down.

• 48:05Jamie Foxx?

  And all of the hard work that my grandmother put in, all of the days my grandfather drove me to, piano lessons. Here I am, sitting with a legend. And we were like,

• 48:23Jamie Foxx?

  and I was like, playing the blues with Ray Charles. And as we're playing, I'm like, I'm on cloud nine. Then he moved into some intricate stuff, like the Lonnie's Monk. And I was like, oh shit, I gotta catch up. And I hit the wrong note. And he stopped because his ears are very sensitive. And you know, now why the hell would you do that? I said, what was that? Why you hit the note like that? That's a wrong note, man, shit. I said, well, I'm sorry, Mr. Charles. I just, he said, let me tell you something, buddy. The notes are right underneath your fingers, baby. You just gotta take the time out to play the right notes. That's life. So that was a lesson.

• 49:04Jamie Foxx?

  That the notes are right underneath your fingers. So metaphorically, so now you got across the tracks. There's someone like Estelle Tally teaches you. Then you got Ray Charles explaining now that you're across the tracks. What notes are you gonna play? And so now we go on and we, we, we, we do that movie. Which we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know that it was gonna be like that. It wasn't a studio film. Uh, it was independent. And, uh, you know, during the, during the process of the movie was interesting. Of my, you know, background being from Terrell, knowing how to mimic. But I needed to know how to do Rach, do Ray Charles like the young Ray Charles. So I got in touch with Quincy Jones.

• 49:49Jamie Foxx?

  And for all of you young ones out there, uh, listening. Make sure you Google Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. And the reason why you should do that is because they were the building blocks of our music today. Which started in Seattle, Washington, which was interesting. Seattle at that time was, was a big hub for jazz music, jazz musicians. And that's where Ray Charles migrated to running into a young Quincy Jones. Ray Charles actually taught Quincy Jones everything he knows about music. Who was Quincy Jones for the you young ones listening? Quincy Jones was the one who did, I mean, he played, he was the band director for Frank Sinatra. All of those guys, the Rat Pack, all of those guys. He was the bandleader.

• 50:32Jamie Foxx?

  Uh, if you, and when I met Quincy Jones, he talks about that. Yeah, man, shit, man, music, man, these young cats don't know music anymore, man. Shit, they wouldn't, they'd play in the Kia Q if they would, man, shit. Man, when I played baby Frankie, baby, I said, Mr. Jones, who's Frankie? Man, shit, Frank Sinatra, man. Shit, I was young, man, the band, we were playing in Monaco, man. We didn't even have time to rehearse, baby. We're just there playing, waiting on fucking Frank to come in. I said, what do you mean? He says, we, we had to play this show in Monaco. Frank had never met me, knew that I was this young kid who was great with the music. I become the bandleader, we don't get a chance to rehearse.

• 51:13Jamie Foxx?

  Monaco where his billionaires and millionaires in the audience waiting on this incredible show. And he says, we're just vamping, man, shit. And Frank doesn't even come out on the stage, he comes through the audience, man. Shit, talking and shit. I'm like, man, I'm nervous as hell. And then Frank got up, he said he sung.

• 51:32Jamie Foxx?

  The band was tight. And Frank Sinatra knighted him, like, gave him a ring that was like, you know, pretty significant, if you know what I mean. And if you guys, uh, Google Frank Sinatra, you'll understand what I mean about the Loco So Nostro. And, uh, so here I am now talking to Quincy Jones. And he's telling me about Ray Charles. He says, "Yeah, man, Ray taught me everything, man. Shit, man, he taught me how to dress. We were wearing suit suits, zoot suits and shit, man. He had nice suits, tailor-made." And I said, "Why did he have nice suits?" Shit, man, he was always around women, man. And women would tell him, "Man, those zoot suits are ugly." Because he couldn't see. So the women was telling him how to dress.

• 52:14Jamie Foxx?

  And I said, "Well, Mr. Jones, I'm trying to figure out how to do Ray Charles, but I need the young Ray Charles, right?" And he says, "Well, man, shit, let me look." And he gives me a cassette tape. To you young ones out there, a cassette tape back in the day was a way for us to, I'm just messing with her, to, uh, to share music. And I said, "Okay, I got the cassette tape." I had to go rent a truck from, rent a, from Hertz Rent A Car, because there was no cassette players in the cars. So I popped the cassette tape in. And, uh, on the tape was, "Hi, this is Donna Shore from the Donna Shore Show. We have two very wonderful musicians here today, and Mr. Kenny Rogers and Mr. Ray Charles." And you hear the young Ray, "You know what, God, I'm just so happy to be here, so happy

• 52:59Jamie Foxx?

  to hear that you know my music. I mean, this is just great." And it was the young Ray, like, you know, uh, because when I was talking to the older Ray, I didn't want to grab those bad old habits I want to play in young. So I hear Ray talking young on the tape. And then all of a sudden, he's in charge of the, of the interview, and this is, you know, he was just doing his thing. And then all of a sudden, she says, "Talk about the drugs, Ray." And then he started to stutter. "Well, you know what?" So I used that as DNA to play the iconic character Ray Charles, that when he's talking about his music, he's fully in control. When he's confronted with real-life things, "Why are you doing drugs? Why don't you take care of your family? Why are you cheating on your wife?" He would

• 53:41Jamie Foxx?

  stutter. And I say this long story to say this. After the success of Ray Charles, after being nominated for, uh, an Oscar, uh, my grandmother got a chance to witness all of that. She got a chance to see...

• 53:58Jamie Foxx?

  The bearing of the fruits of, you know, of her labor for her young kid coming from that racially misunderstood town, which I love and wouldn't change anything in the world when it comes to Terrell, Texas. Her saying, get across the tracks. We've now gone across the tracks. We've gone all over the world and then here we are. And think about, think about what's the, what's the odds of a kid who lives in a town, population 12,240 people from Terrell to go all the way to Los Angeles, California, meet Puff, meet all these different people and then actually have an opportunity to

• 54:42Jamie Foxx?

  win an Oscar and your grandmother gets a chance to see that. Now, October 23rd, 2004, she passed away, which if you know, the actual awards was 2005 in February, but she got a chance to hang in there and, and you know, and feel it, you know? So it's, you know, my grandmother was just like, you know, the blueprint.

• 55:07Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids? Because you're, you're clearly a very confident guy.

• 55:14Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Tim Ferriss?

  Grandmother was very bold, very strong woman. How do you try to teach that to your kids?

• 55:20Jamie Foxx?

  Well, what you do with your kids is like, when, when my daughter is that, there's the phrase that when you see Annalise, my, my, my daughter and my oldest daughter, Corinne, I would always ask them, what's on the other side of fear? And they'd be like, huh? I said, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like if I stood in the middle of this floor right there and just yelled, ah, what's on the other side of that? Or if I stood on the, in the middle of the floor and went, huh, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like either you do or you don't, but there's no penalty, there's no reward. It's just, you just be yourself. So I taught them, what's on the other side of fear? Nothing. People are nervous for no reason because there's nothing, no one's going to come out and slap you or beat you up and then you're just nervous. So why even have that?

• 56:05Jamie Foxx?

  And so that's a building block that they can use, not just about the entertainment business, because that's the other thing. You don't have to be an entertainer, but whatever you go into, whether you be a lawyer or a school teacher or tech guy or whatever, or girl, whatever it is, there's nothing on the other side of it.

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  What's on the other side of fear?

• 56:25Jamie Foxx?

  Nothing.

• 56:26Tim Ferriss?

  I like it.

• 56:26Jamie Foxx?

  So it's like, so why are you, why, when people say, oh, I'm so nervous, what are you nervous about?

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  Reminds me of this quote that I, I sort of recite to myself, and I'm gonna paraphrase it because I have it written down, but it's from Mark Twain, it says, "I'm an old man who's known of great many troubles, most of which never happened."

• 56:42Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, exactly, because all of it is in our head. When we talk about fear, or lack of being aggressive, or whatever, it's, it's, it's, it's in your head. So, not everybody's gonna be super aggressive, but the one thing that you can deal with is a person's fears. So if you start early, if they are a shy person, they just won't be as shy if you keep instilling those things, so.

• 57:06Tim Ferriss?

  The mimicry, the impersonation.

• 57:08Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Tim Ferriss?

  How early did that start? Because I read, and, and maybe you can tell me if this is off or not, because you never know with the internet, that your second grade teacher used to reward the class if they behaved by letting you tell jokes?

• 57:23Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, they would, they would let me tell jokes, because I would get in trouble. Ms. Reeves, my, I think it was my third grade teacher, Ms. Reeves. Because I would like talk, but I was very smart. My grandmother had a school, I was, I lived in a school, so I, I'd already knew the, the, the, the, from like first to eighth grade, I already knew all of the lesson plan. So, you know, a kid like me sitting there with nothing to do, I'm gonna get in trouble. So she would, uh, let me do stand-up comedy on Fridays for the kids. And all I would do is my grandmother would watch Johnny Carson, and the only room that had the television was my room. So I had to watch Johnny Carson too as a kid. So, nine years old, seven, eight, nine years old, I would just take the jokes that were being told by,

• 58:06Jamie Foxx?

  David Brenner, and Steve Allen, and a young David Letterman, uh, uh, who else would be on there? Franklin Ajay. You guys, when you, when you're hearing this, you go Google these guys. Uh, a young Jay Leno.

• 58:23Jamie Foxx?

  These were like sort of like, uh, you know, Richard Pryor. So I would take those jokes and tell them at school, because those kids wouldn't want it.

• 58:30Tim Ferriss?

  Please tell me you used Richard Pryor on Fridays. Well, I guess it was on primetime, so it wasn't Richard Pryor.

• 58:35Jamie Foxx?

  On primetime, you couldn't, you couldn't, he couldn't really say anything on primetime, he was clean. But like, uh, uh, uh, Rich Little.

• 58:43Jamie Foxx?

  And Google Rich Little because Rich Little was the first person that I saw do impersonations. So there was a, there was, this was, this had to be, this had to be like seventy six, nineteen seventy six. So like fifth grade for me. The joke was, uh, Jimmy Carter, which was the president at the time, singing You Light Up My Life. And at that time, his brother was getting caught drunk all the time, like Billy. Uh, so it was Jimmy Carter goes, uh, so many nights, uh, me and my brother Billy, uh, would sit by the window, waiting for somebody to bring some peanuts and beer. And so that was my first attempt at an impersonation.

• 59:26Jamie Foxx?

  And then it went on from there to do, "Richard Nixon, I am not a crook." So, you know, uh, who else would I do?

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Reagan. That came later.

• 59:33Jamie Foxx?

  But, but here's it, Reagan came later, but Reagan came like in the eighties when I was actually like twenty one. And I was the first black guy, uh, doing the Reagan impersonation, probably the only one. So I would be on stage doing my impersonations and going to Ronald Reagan, people are like, no, it ain't no way. Well, well, as a matter of fact, I, uh, well, uh, oh, no, there you go again. And so that, that being, being young and, and, and that teacher, Ms. Reeves and Ms., Ms. Douthat and all those teachers allowed, Ms. Cole allowed me to be myself. Um, you know, helped me hone in on what I was gonna be doing for the rest of my life. Like, like, literally, my friends from Tarrell go like, how the fuck did you do that?

• 1:00:19Jamie Foxx?

  This is the shit you used to do?

• 1:00:21Tim Ferriss?

  You turned your third grade act.

• 1:00:24Jamie Foxx?

  It was literally the same shit. I'd be like, wow, millions of people are watching this shit and it's the same, it's the same thing. And then, then, you know, as people came.

• 1:00:34Jamie Foxx?

  Uh, came up, you know, the, the impersonation, you know, like, now Cosby is back in. To do the Cosby impersonation is back in. Don't know how I'm gonna do it, but there's definitely a Cosby joke somewhere. I don't know where it, but I, I, I used to do Cosby. Because of the people and the jello pudding and the, and the filth and the flying and the farm, which Eddie Murphy did, but people didn't know, like Cosby's real speaking voice is not like that. What's the speaking voice like? His speaking voice was different, cuz I remember I got in trouble with Mr. Cosby. Because, uh, he felt that the, the, the movie Booty Call was not cool. And he said some things in the press about us, and I was like a young comedian, like, damn, man, I'm just trying to work, you know?

• 1:01:18Jamie Foxx?

  But, but his speaking voice, when he was on the phone, well, see, the thing is, is that when you do something like Booty Call, what is a booty call? See, why are you calling the boo-, you know, whatever, but it was so, it wasn't the, it was because, and then you find out that that was his stick. Yeah, yeah. Because and kid and the child and people and the farm, but, you know? So I know that that will, that will come up. I, I'll, I'll find a joke for, for Cosby that, of course, is gonna be a little, uh, people gonna be like, uh, but it's gonna be funny and shit. Uh, and now, who, who's now, uh, Doc Rivers from, uh, the Clippers.

• 1:01:58Jamie Foxx?

  Hey, you know, we're gonna try, you know, it's not Blake's fault, you know, next year we gotta, we gotta do better, you know, it's. So I'm working on like the new impersonations now. Uh, and so that's, and the way you do an impersonation is usually about, it's, it's, it's musical. Like, um, say Kermit the Frog, right? So Kermit the Frog is. So it's sort of like the way you do your.

• 1:02:24Jamie Foxx?

  You know what I'm saying, it's, it's finding.

• 1:02:27Jamie Foxx?

  Right, so.

• 1:02:31Jamie Foxx?

  So the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit the Frog. Eh eh Kermit

• 1:02:41Jamie Foxx?

  Kermit the Frog here here with the Sesame Street. So that's and then, once you get the voice tone, it's how you make, it's how you manipulate your, your, your mouth to get the sound. Cause you know it's eh eh eh eh eh. So it's, it's sort of constricting. And then, and then, and then it's, and then it's asking the character to come sit with you. Eh Kermit the Frog here, here with the uh, three little pig. So, you know, it's, but the key is this. And at the same time, Kermit the Frog, who else sounds like that? Sammy Davis Jr. A little bit. Eh because you know, man. So now Kermit the Frog is, is one way, but if you just twist your voice or twist your mouth to the right and grab some swag, now you're Sammy Davis Jr.

• 1:03:24Jamie Foxx?

  Eh Kermit the Frog because man, you know, it's the same voice. You know, so that's, that's sort of like the mechanical way of, of getting to the impression.

• 1:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  So you would start with not the visual, because obviously those people who are listening can't see this, but the mannerisms are also very much on point.

• 1:03:42Jamie Foxx?

  Mannerisms are, are important because like, uh, uh, like I, I, I do a LeBron James impersonation, which is really not a, a, a, a, a, a voice. It's more of his mannerism. It's the jaw, you know, it's the look.

• 1:03:59Jamie Foxx?

  Let's go, bro. You know, and the scuro, you know, the game of basketball, you know, we just try to, you know, you know, it's that, you know? You know, it's right, it's right after, it's right after playing, you know, when it comes off the, off the court, they catching me still tight. You know, uh, you know, the game of basketball, we just try to, you know, do the best, you know, so it's the, the mannerism. So people will appreciate the mannerisms first.

• 1:04:17Tim Ferriss?

  Physicality.

• 1:04:17Jamie Foxx?

  The physicality of, of someone like, uh, uh, LeBron or, you know, different, you know, like I said, different, different personalities bring rap, bring about different things.

• 1:04:28Tim Ferriss?

  When you look back on what, uh, what Ray said to you, if you can play the blues, you can do anything. If you had to translate that for your own kids, let's just say, if you can do X, fill in the blank, you can do anything? What would you put in that blank?

• 1:04:44Jamie Foxx?

  I, I would say this. It's, it's a couple of things when you have kids who grow up around Hollywood. If you can stay motivated.

• 1:04:56Jamie Foxx?

  And if you can not do some things, not be jaded, not be entitled, not be spoiled, not do drugs, not get into all the bad stuff, because it's, you know, our kids live in an elevated space. So what I try to do, and Ricardo sees this all, Ricardo sees this all the time, so does Justine, we don't play around when it comes to discipline as well. Like, when the kids are here and all of our friends, the size of the house means nothing to, if you don't do the right thing, you're gonna get in major trouble, and you're gonna get in Texas trouble. You know what I'm saying? Like, how my grandmother disciplined.

• 1:05:38Jamie Foxx?

  So, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a different thing when it comes to kids that are, live in a privileged situation. Luckily, my daughters are very, very, especially my oldest daughter. My oldest daughter never even asked me for money. Never asked for the new car, never asked for a plane, to ride coach, I mean, you know, so, I think she really, really has, uh, a great head on her shoulders. I remember I got this Rolls Royce, and I went to go pick my daughter up in the Rolls Royce, thinking that's gonna be, you know, I'll pick her up in the Rolls Royce, drop the top. Drop it! What up, doc? So I'm riding, go to pick her up at school, she won't get in the car. I said, "Baby, what, what, what you doing? Look at the top, it comes up." She says that, "I'm not getting in the car."

• 1:06:22Jamie Foxx?

  Calls her mom, says, "Could you come pick me up?" I said, "What you doing?" She said, "I'm not getting, you, you goofy. You make me, you make me look stupid in front of my friends." I was like, "Oh." You know, she's really, and that's something she has on her side. My youngest daughter is a little different. She wants to ride in the, in the Rolls Royce all the time. Daddy, let's take this car. We riding down Sunset Boulevard, she playing Rihanna, you know what I'm saying, with her shades on. So she's a little different in, in, in that sense. And I remember telling her, I said, "Well, well, well, Annalise, we can't ride around in L.A. in, in the limo, in the, in the Rolls Royce with the top down, you know, we're on our way to the Soho House, and it's sort of finicky up there." So I gotta, Annalise, put the top up. She's like, "Why?"

• 1:07:04Jamie Foxx?

  I said, "I just, I said, "Listen, let me ride until I get to Soho House, and then I'll put the top up as we get there." "Okay." So we ride up in the Soho House. We're in the valet, and all of these, you know, celebs and people are coming out. And she yells out, Jamie Foxx in the house. And I'm like, hell no. So I'm trying to pull the top down. All of the other celebrities like, look at this motherfucker being arrogant and shit. He's so gaudy, this motherfucker. And he's got this kid announcing him. So, so you know, it's a lot of things you could tell your kids, man. And then you just have to hope for the best and be there.

• 1:07:40Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, what is your birth name?

• 1:07:43Jamie Foxx?

  Eric Marlon Bishop.

• 1:07:45Tim Ferriss?

  And how did Eric Marlon Bishop become Jamie Foxx?

• 1:07:49Jamie Foxx?

  Man, I was Eric Marlon Bishop. Graduated high school, eighty-six. I get out to California and I started doing, you know, I'm in college and, and, um, doing the music. But I would go up on these open mic nights for comedy. So I go, I do really well. Did, I get like standing ovation. And then I came to LA, got a standing ovation. And then when I came back every week, I wouldn't get called up. I was like, man, what, why can't, what's going on? But what I noticed was-

• 1:08:22Tim Ferriss?

  And is the, how does the open mic work?

• 1:08:24Jamie Foxx?

  Well, here's the deal. What you do is you put your name on a list, put your name on the list and they pick from the list and they say, okay, these are people that are going up. So I went up, had a great set then for the next three, four weeks. I didn't, they never called my name. I said, yo, money, did you see my name? Yeah, yeah, you weren't on the list. You were on the list, but we, we got other people. But I found out that the comedians were actually running the list. So the comedians that had been here for a while, I was like, we don't want him on here because he's showing us up. So I was like, fuck. So I ended up going to this evening at the improv, the improv like in Santa Monica. And so I had never been there. So I would notice that a hundred guys would show up, five girls would show up. The five girls would always get on the, on the show because they needed to break up the monotony.

• 1:09:10Jamie Foxx?

  So I said, hmm, I got some. So I wrote down on the list, all of these unisex names. Stacy Green, Tracy Brown, Jamie Foxx. And now the guy chooses from the list. He says, uh, is Jamie Foxx, is she here? She'll be first. I was like, no, money, that's, that's me. Ah, okay, all right, well, you're gonna, you're the fresh meat. I said, what's that? They were shooting Evening at the Improv, this old, old comedy show back in the day. Said, you'll be the guy that will just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two. You know, it's gonna be a tough crowd.

• 1:09:45Tim Ferriss?

  Fresh meat.

• 1:09:46Jamie Foxx?

  Fresh meat. I said, cool. So I go up in between two of the guys, get a standing ovation. People like, who's the kid? Is he on the show? I said, no, he's, fresh meat's amateur. So then they started yelling my name. Yo, Jamie. Yo, Jamie. Hey, Jamie. But I'm not used to the name. So now they think I'm arrogant. This motherfucker thinks he's, she's not even listening to us. So I, I, I took that name and it stuck. And then I started building everything out, off of it. Uh, back in the day, people used to wear jackets and put names on the jacket. So I had Sly Azay, dot, dot, dot. Uh, coming to the Foxhole, Foxhole, you know, things like that. I'm gonna grab a little something to eat.

• 1:10:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sure thing. Okay, we are back after a little food break.

• 1:10:31Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, we talked about some of your comedy, starting in third grade, maybe earlier. We talked about, uh, grandmother. And what I like to talk about a little bit more is fear. So you mentioned on the other side of fear. By the time you got to doing the open mics, getting up on stage, were you nervous? Were you afraid or were you over it?

• 1:10:54Jamie Foxx?

  Nah, because first I looked at it first. Like I, I went to an open mic night and saw the guys, I was like, man, these dudes is terrible.

• 1:11:04Jamie Foxx?

  And uh, so when you go on stage and your whole life is not, I wanna be a comedian. I went on stage like, yo, I'm just fuck around. So if I hit, cool. If I miss, I wasn't trying to be that anyway. You know, I wanted to do more music, but, but when I went on stage, it was just like, it was, it was just natural. It was uh, uh, you know, I belong here. So I think that's the thing too, when it comes to entertainment. Uh, there's a certain like, oh, I belong here. This is what I'm supposed to do. How successful I will be or won't be, that's something out of my hands, but I do know that this is where I belong. And that's with anything and anybody, like when you can, when you can sort of listen to that

• 1:11:48Jamie Foxx?

  voice in your head or what's in your heart and you get a chance to do something that you really feel like you're supposed to do. That alleviates a lot of the fear. Now, if it was a surgeon or a lawyer or something, you know, so like, you know, if something that I'm not, you know, versed in or something like that, then maybe there would be more fear, but with this, you don't have, or I don't have those types of fears. And, and as I've gotten older in the business, I've sort of simplified things. Like now, I just execute. I have to ask people like Ricardo, Justin, Justin, what should I execute? So the fear of a celebrity or, or, or an artist now is how do I get my art off?

• 1:12:34Jamie Foxx?

  In a world where it's uh, uh, the, the, the social media driven sort of uh,

• 1:12:43Jamie Foxx?

  uh ridicule and criticism. Like I always say like this, like a person like Prince or a person like Michael Jackson could have never survived in today's world. Because in the, in the day of the internet and where everybody has a voice, most of the voices are hateful voices or not understanding. Like, like if you saw Prince with uh, um, a guitar and a bandana and the way he dressed, you know, people would meme the shit out of it, you know? So now it's a, uh, it's, it's not a fear, but it's just a. A question that I have to always ask them like, yo, is this, is this the cool shit to do or not the cool shit to do? And so what I learned is when it's just executing something,

• 1:13:28Jamie Foxx?

  when it's either executing a song or executing a joke or executing things within, within entertainment, it's cool. But then you have to wonder like, how do you get it off? Like, how do you, like even now, when you talk about the Bill Cosby joke, back in the day, we just tell the joke. Now you gotta be like, okay, I gotta tell the joke in a way that is still funny, it still keeps the bite on it, but you know, so those are the different like, for me as a entertainer, where there's not fear, it's just like, you know, questions. Does that make sense?

• 1:14:03Tim Ferriss?

  Makes sense. No, this makes sense. The considerations. When you, when you, uh, have you bombed on stage before?

• 1:14:10Jamie Foxx?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, which, what's, two things. What do you, when you are bombing,

• 1:14:15Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  what is your internal dialogue or response? And then secondly-

• 1:14:19Jamie Foxx?

  Internal dialogue is, boy, you stink. Boy, you bombing. Uh, I bombed and it wasn't a lot of, I only bombed like twice.

• 1:14:30Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember your first?

• 1:14:31Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I did this, this show for this guy named Lattimore. Old blues singer. I'm 21.

• 1:14:38Tim Ferriss?

  What was his name?

• 1:14:38Jamie Foxx?

  Lattimore.

• 1:14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Lattimore. Sounds like Voldemort. Yeah, Lattimore.

• 1:14:41Jamie Foxx?

  Lattimore. So this guy saw me at this other club and said, hey, man, you know, Lattimore is performing around the corner, man, would you come and open? I said, whatever. I said, how much you pay? He said, pay fifty dollars. I said, I'm there. Fifty bucks? I need it. So this is like, not, eighty-nine, ninety. So I get there and I don't know who Lattimore is. I just know it was a lot of older people. Like, I mean, like, oh, oh, I'm like, oh, shit. Where the people at? And these are the people. So I go up and the setting was different. It was like the chairs and stuff were way in the, it was like a banquet setting. And it's in the middle of the hood, you know, Crenshaw. And like the tables are like from here to where like twenty feet away, thirty feet away from me. So I don't have it.

• 1:15:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you didn't have that proximity?

• 1:15:27Jamie Foxx?

  And I hadn't been doing stand-up comedy that long. I'd only been doing it for like a year. So I had, if I'm funny, I got an hour. If I'm not funny, it's about ten minutes worth of shit. Cause I would just take a joke and just keep spinning it and spinning it. So my first joke, they didn't get. Second joke, they didn't get. I said, shit, I'm daring now all the jokes.

• 1:15:47Jamie Foxx?

  So I said, well, let me do this before I do anything. Let me just talk about people in the audience. So I looked and I saw this guy with this sort of suit on with a butterfly collar. Like, oh shit, I'm gonna talk about him with the butterfly collar. But before I could say that, I looked around. Everybody has a butterfly collar. This is what they really wanna look like. And so, uh, I just said, hey, man, I, you know, I don't know what else y'all want. And, uh, pretty soon Lattimore is gonna come up. You guys ready for Lattimore? And I just started doing, I said, I'm gonna take a break. So I get offstage and the dude that was washing the dishes takes his apron off and goes, man, I got it. Grab the mic. How y'all feel?

• 1:16:32Jamie Foxx?

  And he started doing these old stock jokes. Kills. And so I said, okay, now I know what it is. You gotta have jokes that are appropriate for your audience. So I learned on how to tell jokes for everybody. Because at first, my jokes was geared towards women, it was singing and this, that. So what I started doing from that, from that day on, I would go to like Des Moines, Iowa, Davenport, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, where it's all white. Gunnison, Colorado, all white. And I would go do like forty minutes of all black material to see what they understood, what they didn't understand. So if I go to these all white places and if they understood fifteen minutes, I logged that fifteen minutes.

• 1:17:16Jamie Foxx?

  I can go to any place where it's just all white.

• 1:17:19Tim Ferriss?

  And, and you would determine if they understood it by the laughs?

• 1:17:21Jamie Foxx?

  Huh?

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  You would, if, you would determine if they understood it by the laughs?

• 1:17:25Jamie Foxx?

  By, by, and I would ask, y'all know who this is? Uh, and so I would tell the joke. If fifteen minutes, they understood it, I can go to any place in the world that's all white and they get it. Then I would go to my chocolate cities, Chicago, DC, uh, Florida, and do all of my, uh, political highbrow stuff and see what the, see, see what the black folks understood. Man, what the fuck you doubt my doubt? Now they understood fifteen minutes. Now I got fifteen to thirty minutes or forty-five minutes that wherever I go, no matter what age, they'll understand. No matter what gender, no matter what race, they'll understand this forty-five minutes. So I had to learn how to use the formula in order for you to be funny. And then once you got your comedy license, once you've been seen by enough people.

• 1:18:12Jamie Foxx?

  In the highest way, like in the, like if you look at a,

• 1:18:17Jamie Foxx?

  like if you look at an arc of a Kevin Hart, like Kevin Hart, takes that arc, takes the same formula. I'm not for sure how he put it in his, in his, in his mind, but he's doing the same thing to where he's going to all of these places, all over the world, implementing his comedy. And if they get it, he's, he's gathering all of that so that now when people see Kevin Hart, no matter where in the world, they're gonna laugh. You know, so it's the, the, you know, becoming a great comedian is also having that formula going on in your head because if you, if you paint yourself into a corner, like you're only the black comedian, or you're only the Hispanic comedian, or whatever that is, then it's hard for you to become universal. I mean Eddie was,

• 1:19:01Jamie Foxx?

  Eddie Murphy was great. He had an opportunity through Saturday Night Live to get it to everybody. But uh, uh, it's definitely a, a formula to not bomb it.

• 1:19:10Tim Ferriss?

  So what would you say to yourself? So that was the first bomb. You mentioned two.

• 1:19:15Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Tim Ferriss?

  What was the second?

• 1:19:17Jamie Foxx?

  Second one?

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  And if, if it's too, if it's hard to recall, the, the, the follow up question is going to be, what is the post-game analysis when you step off the stage after bombing, so the second time?

• 1:19:28Jamie Foxx?

  Well, you gotta, when I bombed the second time was way later in my career when I'm working out jokes. But I don't like to work out jokes and tell people I'm working out. I like to actually do a show, come and do the show.

• 1:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:19:41Jamie Foxx?

  So we're in, uh, I think it was Irvine.

• 1:19:43Tim Ferriss?

  So you don't tell people you're working on it?

• 1:19:44Jamie Foxx?

  No, no, no. I think, I think that's cheating and I think you, you get bad habits. So I, I do a show in Irvine, California. First show I killed. They was just ready for him. I'm like, oh man, everything worked. Second show,

• 1:19:58Jamie Foxx?

  bombed. Because I didn't take time to dig out the jokes and that. So, but when you bomb, you go like, okay, all right, let's go, let's check it out. So I got a team of my, my guys. I said, let's go. Okay, that didn't work. No, you gotta put this in front of that. You gotta put that behind this because that's gonna kick this off. People didn't know what that was, so maybe we don't say that. So you know, you have to. You, when you take the bomb, when we take the L, it's not like you're not funny. What's the L? Like you take the loss. Oh, God. When you take the loss, it's not like you're not funny. It's just like, okay, you just didn't put the shit together. So that's the other thing, too. When you do become funny, it's gonna be harder now to make people laugh because you set the bar. High water. Yeah, so now, so watch this.

• 1:20:42Jamie Foxx?

  The hardest part for Chris Rock was after he had done something great in stand-up. Because now, you gotta top that. The hardest part for Eddie Murphy, because Eddie wants to come out and do stand-up, is how do I top that in your head? The hardest part is coming for Kevin Hart in the fact that you sma- you smashed him. Now, you gotta, you gotta, you know what I'm saying? You gotta know how to, you gotta know how to refresh. Yeah. Because when you do something like, like I, I would look at my stuff and go like, I gotta quit doing that. Because that shtick that I'm doing, people are catching on.

• 1:21:27Jamie Foxx?

  And they're like, okay, motherfucker, we've already seen that shit. So that, that's the other thing. You gotta have great material and you gotta have, you gotta know, you gotta know how to move. Because like, right now, is the perfect time for Eddie Murphy to come out and do stand-up. Because it's been so long, it's nostalgic, it was thirty years ago. So now, you can catch a new, young, uh, you can still excite the older, you know what I'm saying? So being a stand-up comedian is tough. And you've seen a lot of funny guys not be funny anymore. Why? Because you can't top what you did. You look at a Jim Carrey, you go like, okay, man, where you at? Where you at? You know what I'm saying? You know, don't, don't give up the funny. Or, or you look at Chris, I always look at Chris Tuck and be like, motherfucker, where you at? Don't, don't lea- don't leave us. Because.

• 1:22:11Jamie Foxx?

  Being a stand-up comedian is an interesting thing. Most stand-up comedians wanna look good. In what way? We just wanna look good. Think about this, when Eddie Murphy started doing stand-up, he was funny, but then he started doing, you know, to wear the leather suits and it was the fly shit and the rings and they didn't wanna look good. Joe Piscopo started working out with the muscles, you know what I'm saying? So, as a stand-up comedian, we gotta be careful not to look too good because people start going, "What the fuck are you doing? You ain't cute, nigga, we just wanna laugh," you know what I'm saying? But when we started, you know, we started getting into our shit, that's when we lose, because I did that, like, like, I got to, uh, my thing was that, uh, after In Living Color,

• 1:22:56Jamie Foxx?

  the show called In Living Color that I did, I, I felt like I had made it. So, I wasn't necessarily on the good-looking shit, but I was on the, "I've made it" jokes. I went on stage and was doing rich jokes. Just got that Range Rover. Anybody else? It's crazy out here, you know, they're so finicky, right? Motherfuckers are looking at me like, "What the fuck is you talking about?" And then, uh, uh, I'll tell them, "You know, the square footage of the house, man, when they get a certain square feet, man, that shit is crazy and maintaining, you know?" Motherfuckers are like, "Motherfucker, if you don't get off the goddamn stage," I'd lost it. Right. I lost it, and I walked offstage and all of a sudden, I, I walk offstage, they're giving up a Jamie Foxx, and I'm thinking, "That's going crazy, yeah, yeah, oh, thank you, thank you so much." And I'm standing outside the club and I hear the crowd going crazy.

• 1:23:40Jamie Foxx?

  I'm like, "What the fuck they doing? I just went on stage, what the fuck are they laughing at?" And I opened the door and there was a kid, skinny, little tank top on, barely fit. His name was Chris Tucker. He was smashing, he was... No one has been that funny within fifteen minutes. I've never seen, I've never seen, and I watch them all, I've never seen a stand-up where people were laughing so hard, like, I said, "He's gonna kill somebody, somebody's gonna..." Like, when he says, "Last night, how was your...?" "Oh, I killed, it's gonna be true, somebody gonna have a fucking heart attack." And I sat down and said, and I went, "I can't do that." I lost that.

• 1:24:20Jamie Foxx?

  So I left, went to another club, that night bombed, like it wasn't, you know. So finally, I went over to Okinawa where the troops were. I started doing stand-up over there for the troops to sort of get back. It was my Rocky moment. Like, you know, I started running up the steps, chasing chickens and shit. Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam. Trying to get back. And, uh, for a stand-up comedian, that's the one thing you can never let go. You can never stop being, excuse me, a certain goofiness to you. And so, and like when you talk about fear, or when you talk about bombing, it's, uh, it's different when you, when you, when you've done it for a long time. You know, and when you do bomb, you just gotta get right back up and you gotta acknowledge it. Okay, I stunk, nigga. Cause they're gonna let you know.

• 1:25:02Jamie Foxx?

  Like today's world, you can't do nothing in today's world without somebody letting you know, like, oh nigga, you fucked that up.

• 1:25:10Tim Ferriss?

  What are the sources or where do most of your best bits come from? When you look back at the stuff that just killed. Is it the shower, the thing that bugs you three times, so you write it down? I mean, how do you develop your material?

• 1:25:24Jamie Foxx?

  It was observation, and like, you know, I do jokes with them, you know, it's just sort of like observation.

• 1:25:31Jamie Foxx?

  You know, early on, it was the black and white thing, you know, black folks do it this way, white folks do it. Which was the way we were doing comedy in, in, in the eight, late eighties and nineties. Oh, the average white man's heart, it has, no, it has to do with the heart. The average white man's heart beats like this.

• 1:25:47Jamie Foxx?

  Or the average black man's heart beats like this.

• 1:25:54Jamie Foxx?

  You know, ladies, that's why you have a choice. Would you rather make love to somebody like this?

• 1:25:59Jamie Foxx?

  Or would you rather make love to somebody like this?

• 1:26:03Jamie Foxx?

  I mean, that was the jokes, you know, at the time. So it was observational. And then it was personal, like you do your observation first and then it was personal. My grandmother, who was, uh, you know, we lived together, you know? And when she first heard like on television what AIDS was, being old, she didn't know what it exactly meant. She just knew that it was bad, but she thought that since she's always on me anyway, that I'm gonna catch AIDS. But it was for the wrong reasons. Like she would say, boy, you gon', it's six in the morning. You gonna wake up? Shit, half the day done gone. I said, Granny, what you mean? Is it six? Shit, I'm there sleeping. Anybody sleep that long got to have AIDS. I said, Granny, I don't think that's how. No, I saw it on TV.

• 1:26:48Jamie Foxx?

  You sleep it too long, you got AIDS. I said, Granny, I don't think that's how they exactly.

• 1:26:53Jamie Foxx?

  And then like I would use her towels, like, you know, you know, you know, old southern women had them. There was a towel used and it was a nice towel, so I used a nice towel. Boy, I know you ain't use my towels. I said, you gonna put the AIDS on the towels. You don't use everybody's towels. Anybody use a towel like that, got to have AIDS. I said, Granny, I don't think that's how, you know, so. It was opposite, now this is what she was actually saying. So when I did that joke on stage, people was just, you know, would die. So it's observational, then it's personal. And then some of the comedians are great politically. I'm not necessarily a political guy. My thing was the impersonation of the politician, like Bill Clinton. You know, I did not have sex with anyone.

• 1:27:37Jamie Foxx?

  You know, it was, you know, things like that. But, uh, it's so many different ways and so many different guys out there that you, that, that you look at and go, ooh. Like when I would look at a young Chris Rock, the way he was a technician, just me. Or you look at Jay Leno, or you look at, uh, even Arsenio Hall when he would work out. Or you see Eddie working out a joke.

• 1:28:00Jamie Foxx?

  You know, it's, they are, or, or watching George Lopez, who knows how to tap into the bass and just really bring you into his world and stuff. So it's some, it's some, uh, some guys that Sarah Silverman.

• 1:28:15Jamie Foxx?

  Just, I mean, a technician. Amy Schumer, watching her on just a Saturday Night Live when she's, you know, working her shit out. Uh, a young Whoopi Goldberg at the Met. There's so many people that you can watch and see how to, how to, you know, tap into your own skill set, you know. But, uh, I try to look at all of them and try to just, you know, not steal from it, but just get inspired by it all.

• 1:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  Who are some of the most underrated comedians who come to mind? Or people who you'd think haven't had their due, haven't been appreciated?

• 1:28:48Jamie Foxx?

  I wouldn't say underrated, but I, I, I think there were just, there were just like warriors that never got that shine. Uh, there was a guy named TK Kirkland, who was a warrior. But he never got to shine and TK had a colorful past, you know? And he'll let you know, he said, you know, he was a crazy motherfucker, but TK had jokes like, "And why does Kermit the Frog always say, 'Hi-ho, hi-ho'? Is he a pimp? And why? And why do fat people wearing leather pants, do they think that shit is cute? And why do people in wheelchairs tie they motherfucking shoes? Do they think they gonna trip? Oh, man, it was just... He was just amazing. And his delivery, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:29:32Jamie Foxx?

  He say, uh, uh, he says, "'Cause I'm T to the motherfucking K. That's the type of motherfucker I am. Don't play me, play Lotto. You got a better chance." And he's, he, he played, he, he made, he made, he made himself a character onstage. That was just... You know, you guys are too young to, to, to know this joke, but Bugle Boy Jeans? Bugle Boy Jeans used to have a commercial where a girl would pull up in a car and says, "Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy..." She would say this to a guy, like he's walking on the street with his jeans, he says, "Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing?" "Why, yes, they are." And she'd get in the car, right?

• 1:30:13Jamie Foxx?

  TK had a joke, man, that was so funny, he said, "Man, let, man, let that motherfucker be a motherfucking black girl in the motherfucking car." "Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing?" "Yeah." Get in the car, motherf-" I mean, people would just go... The dude had so many, like, levels. And, uh, he just, you know, he, he's, he's an underground guy.

• 1:30:40Jamie Foxx?

  Who else? There was a lot, I mean, a lot of people. Earthquake, amazing. Uh, uh, Earthquake is amazing. Uh, what's my other dude's name? Uh, Tony Roberts, amazing. Tony Roberts, man, I've never laughed. So, he says, uh, he said, uh, "Oh, man, I, I had to dig out some of his jokes." But he talks about, uh, it's very physical, but he talks about being on a plane and the plane is going down. And he says, he said, he was on a plane and he thought the plane was going down. So he says, "So I wanted to fuck everybody before, you know, I wanted to fuck before." He says, "So while the plane's going down, he's fucking everybody, you know, he fucked, he fucked, uh, he fucked a nun, he was fucking everybody, and then the plane leveled off." "Oh, I'm sorry, y'all, I..."

• 1:31:26Jamie Foxx?

  "I'm sorry, my bad."

• 1:31:29Jamie Foxx?

  Just hilarious, man. And there's a, there's so many, man, so many. Not a lot of new comedians now that are actually, uh, it's funny, right? That are actually dangerous now. We don't have dangerous comedians.

• 1:31:43Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by dangerous?

• 1:31:44Jamie Foxx?

  The dangerous comedian that we have right now is Amy Schumer. She's dangerous.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  In what way?

• 1:31:49Jamie Foxx?

  Like, like she'll, she'll say it, like, it'll be hot button, you know what I mean?

• 1:31:53Tim Ferriss?

  Have you, uh, have you ever heard, uh, I saw this guy on a, I actually heard of him through a guy named Evan Goldberg, who's Seth Rogen's writing partner. And, uh, and so Gerard, exactly, that was good. So Gerard Carmichael?

• 1:32:09Jamie Foxx?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:10Tim Ferriss?

  His special, oh my God. He's like, I would never make a rape joke. This is more of a rape question. And it's like, oh my God.

• 1:32:17Jamie Foxx?

  He's dangerous.

• 1:32:18Tim Ferriss?

  That, that struck me as dangerous.

• 1:32:19Jamie Foxx?

  Well, he's da, and it's not a lot of that anymore. It's not a lot of dangerous comedians. And I think that's where we sort of go like, you know, where's that danger? Like you, when you, when you, when you see Amy Schumer, you see like, I saw her in a room talking about catching a dick in front of Robert De Niro. Like we're at the American, uh, Film Awards, whatever like that. And she's just, I mean, hardcore dick, which is what Sarah Silverman started out as, you know, so. But Amy looks like she's rounded the corner and is now, you know, really making it, you know, making it dope for herself.

• 1:32:55Tim Ferriss?

  If you look back at, uh, In Living Color, and I, I watched the show, and it just, if in retrospect, it seems like such, uh, such a magical combination of people. So how did that group get assembled? And, uh, I mean, what made that team so special? Because I mean, you look at the list, right? I mean, you've got Chris Rock, you've got Jim Carrey, you've got the Wayans, you've got, it just goes, Jennifer Lopez, you got, you go down the line. It's just, it's an all-star roster.

• 1:33:27Jamie Foxx?

  Well, at that time, Keenan Ivory Wayans was the, he, he put it all together. And he was able to grab all of these incredibly talented people.

• 1:33:38Jamie Foxx?

  And make them get along. And figure out how to squeeze all of this talent into twenty-two minutes of programming. Sure. Cause it was only, it was a thirty-minute show, so it was twenty-two minutes. But he was very disciplined in how we make jokes. You were not allowed to come in and be half-assed. He pulled you to the side and say, as a black comedian, you cannot be half-assed. You're either great, or you don't exist. So, and he says, don't take the racial part of that any kind of way, that's just the way it is. Because he wrote for Eddie Murphy. He was around the greatest. He says, I'm around the greatest all the time, so that's what we gonna do.

• 1:34:22Jamie Foxx?

  So when you see Damon Wayans come in, and I just got hired, like they had already been doing the show for like a year or two years. So when I saw Damon walk in and Jim walk in, it was like, it was like fucking Jurassic Park. Fucking, ah. It was like fucking T-Rex and fuck, you know what I'm saying? And the way I got on the show was, was crazy too, because it went from the auditioning process, it was a hundred comedians, down to fifty, down to twenty-five, down to ten, down to five. I was part of the five, but I was losing. I wasn't doing well within the improv of it. Because I just wasn't catching, catching the right shit.

• 1:35:03Jamie Foxx?

  And then Keenan says something incredible. He says, well, I dig this, but I wanna see y'all on stage doing stand-up, cause I wanna have stand-up comedians. I was like, oh shit, that's my shit, that's my shit. And the other four people didn't do stand-up. There was only one other girl that did stand-up, God bless her, Yvette Wilson. But the other three didn't do stand-up. So I was like, oh man. So that night, everybody's going to the Laugh Factory, which was just starting. Cause at, at that time, the Comedy Store was dominating, Laugh Factory was just, and, and they begged, can we please have the audition in the Laugh Factory? So I show up late on purpose, because I wanted to be last. Ah, smart. So I show up late and Tamara Robert, uh, who was the producer, and they're, what are you doing? You're late? Oh my god.

• 1:35:44Jamie Foxx?

  Why aren't you here? We're supposed to go on up early. You're supposed to be first, Jamie. Oh my god, you're gonna kill me. I said, oh damn, well, we're gonna, can I, can I just go up last? Yes, you have to, cause we've already started getting here, you, whatever.

• 1:36:00Jamie Foxx?

  So go ahead. Now, this was interesting for me because I was in white world. I was like on the mainstream. I did all my jokes in the hood at that time. You know what I'm saying? I was the hood guy. So I was like, oh shit, you know. We uptown, you know what I'm saying? It's like everything is clean and shit, you know? Ain't no weed in the air and nothing, you know what I'm saying? Ain't nobody snuck no drinks in and shit. And it's an audition thing. So I'm watching the guys, and you know, God bless them. They just had never done standup before. So I had my cassette tape and I knew what I was coming up to. I'm coming up to Heavy Dezen Effect with more bounce to the ounce. So I get a dude my tape. He's like, what's this? That's my tape. Uh, you know, going with music. You know, up there, they didn't go on with music. They just went with a hand clap.

• 1:36:42Jamie Foxx?

  I said, no, man, I gotta, I gotta come in with Heavy Dezen Effect with more bounce to the pumps. I need the crowd going. So, okay, sure. So he's standing there with the tape. And then Sean Wayans gave me a great tip. He, he walked up, he said, yo, Jamie, just go up and do your act, man. Just stop worrying about, don't, don't worry about the characters. Just do your act. Yo, Marlon, Marlon, come here, tell Jamie, just do your act. I said, oh, really? Just do my act? Do my act like I do in the hood? Yeah, do your act like you do in the hood. I said, straight? Cool. So I go up. They don't play the music.

• 1:37:13Jamie Foxx?

  I'm waiting on them, like, yo, you got my music? The dude's over there like.

• 1:37:18Jamie Foxx?

  I said, well, I'm supposed to have some music. And I said, if, if this shit goes wrong, you will actually see me working across the street at the gas station. And I went into a character. Man, I was in there with Keenan and all them, dawg. And it just, so I did this little character and then I went into my act.

• 1:37:34Jamie Foxx?

  And, uh, I got a stand ovation that night. And I remember seeing Jim Carrey and Keenan, Fly Girl was like on their feet. Like, I said, oh, man, this is great. And that's how I got on the show. And during that show, I did this character called Wanda. Where I said, all the good looking ladies clap your hands. And everybody said. I said, now, all the ugly ladies, let me see you make some noise. It was quiet. I said, ain't that a bitch? And then all the ugly ladies, I thought, hey, for real, though, he ain't talking about me. So, we did this character. Keenan was like, I want you to do that character on the show. Cause I think that's where you'll, you'll, you'll really flourish. And when we did that, when I did that character, that's when everything sort of changed.

• 1:38:17Jamie Foxx?

  Because I was trying to find my bearings on the show, because we got on the show.

• 1:38:23Jamie Foxx?

  But we were there for a trial basis. But when I did that character, it was like, it was like, it was like playing football and I was like, the punt returner, and I was the rookie, and I ran it all the way back the first day. Uh, so, nobody really knew who I was, but they knew that this character was, was, was slamming. And so, that sort of gave me like, my stripes, because, uh, these guys were jugging us. I watched, I watched Keenan. I said, Keenan, these jokes ain't funny, just the rights, that the writers wrote. He says, get on your feet. Everybody get up. Let's do this. So, he was like, there's never a joke that's not funny, you just gotta work and find it. So, he taught us the formula of finding the jokes, and he was right every single time. And so, uh, like I said, to be there watching Jim Carrey, like, create Pet Detective on set.

• 1:39:08Jamie Foxx?

  He's writing Pet Detective, as a way. I said, what's that you're writing on? Hey, man, just, uh, you know, working on some stuff, you know, just got some stuff I'm working on. So, what is that? Man, it's a little thing called Pet Detective. I said, okay, sound funny.

• 1:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  And was he developing it for the show at that time?

• 1:39:21Jamie Foxx?

  No, he was developing for, he was developing for.

• 1:39:22Tim Ferriss?

  For much later?

• 1:39:23Jamie Foxx?

  For his own shit. I gotta make one for him.

• 1:39:26Tim Ferriss?

  No problem. All right, so, we're, we're back, we took a little, took a little breather. But, uh, what were we, catch us up, what were we just talking about?

• 1:39:33Jamie Foxx?

  We were talking about how nowadays is that you don't get a chance to control your own narrative. Like, we were talking about is, there's two different people. Some people think that the tech world and the, and social media and things on the internet is taking us to a great place. And then there's people who think that it's a horrible place. I had, I spoke with, uh, um, a young lady who had been burned bad. Bad by the press. Bad to where she lost her job. And what was interesting about her job was that what they were scolding her about was? Like me knowing her, I was like, you're not like that at all. She says, I can't, there's nothing I can do. Everybody thinks so.

• 1:40:12Jamie Foxx?

  And they took something like, they went through emails and through her personal emails and all of a sudden, what it was. But it was just like, you're not like that at all. So when I was on the phone talking with her, she was like, they're saying this and ah, don't worry about it, you're cool. Like, you're not like that, I don't give a fuck. But I hadn't, I'm bowling, I'm like, I don't, I don't even need to read it, what could they possibly say? And when I looked, it was a national story. I went, what the fuck? She lost her job.

• 1:40:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Jamie Foxx?

  And so like even, like, you'll do something where you think that it's, either you're making fun or you're having fun, you know? But they'll take whatever it is that you say, and make it what they wanted to say.

• 1:40:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Jamie Foxx?

  Or crafted where, like, if you do a joke, it's not about doing a joke anymore. Jamie Foxx slams Caitlyn Jenner. Jamie Foxx trounces, like, nah, I'm a comedian, we do, do. But everything is something that they control. And, and it, it's tough because, when I say Justin Bieber, what do you think? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Be honest.

• 1:41:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hair that I'm jealous of.

• 1:41:21Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, but what do you think? But what do you think? Something about a kid who can't get it together. When I say Chris Brown, what do you think? It's something negative. When I say Jennifer Aniston, what do you think?

• 1:41:30Tim Ferriss?

  I think of cover of Rolling Stone photograph, black and white.

• 1:41:34Jamie Foxx?

  You say what?

• 1:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  Cover of Rolling Stone magazine, black and white, naked, laying on a bed.

• 1:41:38Jamie Foxx?

  Oh, that's hilarious. Well, the average person would think of not what they do.

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right, but the impression.

• 1:41:45Jamie Foxx?

  The headline.

• 1:41:45Tim Ferriss?

  The subliminal image they got at the checkout counter.

• 1:41:48Jamie Foxx?

  Yes, it's, it's the headline. If I say, if I say Jennifer Aniston, you automatically think, because nowadays, they control, we don't control our own narrative to where it's like, They talked about this thing with Quentin Tarantino, which I thought was sad because usually when you see a, a, a, a, a story about Black Lives Matter or anything black, it's usually the, the same black folks with the kufi who's trying to be heard. And they're absolutely right. They're absolutely, it's so much wrong going on in black world. There's black on black crime. Then there's the, the, the divide that is because of social media

• 1:42:32Jamie Foxx?

  is, uh, that is going on between the police officers and black folk. Police officers are, on the whole, are great folk. I know them. I, I, shit, I know a gang of police officers. But the one or two that have been caught on social media makes it look, paint the picture that it's all of them. Now granted, we've known for a long time that blacks and police officers have always had a divide. We've done musi, we've done movies about it. We've done books about it. It's just, it is the way it is. Now, my take on it is because I call it residue. It's slave residue, meaning that slavery for 300 years, you saw a person of, of color a certain way for 300 years.

• 1:43:17Jamie Foxx?

  You've always saw him as a slave or the criminal or what, something that you didn't value. So therefore, coming out of that, of course, there's gonna be a divide when it comes to police and when it comes to blacks and when it comes, that's always been that way. So take that off the table.

• 1:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:43:32Jamie Foxx?

  But in today's world of how do we bridge that gap? I've gone to Quantico in Virginia, saw what it, what a police officer sees. I've talked to police officers that, how can we bridge the gap? I've suggested that you go get a white police officer who you think might not like black folk. You know what I'm saying? Get that person to go into the hood and throw a picnic for a kid that's eight, nine, 10 years old who's African American so that he can see another.

• 1:44:03Tim Ferriss?

  Another side.

• 1:44:03Jamie Foxx?

  Another side. Of a police officer because right now in social media or in media period, the stories that are the most salacious where it's the the the black person, the the black cop being ki- the black guy being killed by a cop. It's hard to erase those images. I'm a black man. When I see that, I have to react to that. Because I'm like, wow, you know, I that that troubles me. But then I have to sit down and think, okay, let me not think of the worst thing to say. But let me think because I know how media tries to make things or heighten it.

• 1:44:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:44:39Jamie Foxx?

  How do I bring people together in spite of the headline? Because what people don't understand is that when you keep showing the images of the black guy being killed by the by the cop, that does something to you.

• 1:44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:55Jamie Foxx?

  That's like whatever you believe in, if it if it was a Jewish person, if it was a gay person, but you cannot sit and not be bothered by that. At the same time, that cop, when he sees the other side of it, when they're saying, all of you guys ain't shit, which that's not what's really being said. Most of the time it's with the individual cop. Now, the cop sees the story. In his mind now, well, fuck it. Well, it's a problem now. So now imagine that cop who's watching the story, driving on the street, that young black kid who's watching the story, walking on the street. What happens?

• 1:45:32Tim Ferriss?

  Dynamite.

• 1:45:33Jamie Foxx?

  Dynamite. Because we can't get it, we can't, we can't get anybody responsible on the media side to say, let's stop interviewing people and putting labels on them. Let's interview this man and this woman, but don't say that they're Democrat. Don't say that they're Republican. Don't say that they're a cop. Just have them talk. Because when you see, when you're watching TV and you see something that you agree with, you agree with them only and you can't hear the other person. That's the first thing. Two, like when I look at Quentin Tarantino, to demonize this guy.

• 1:46:08Tim Ferriss?

  Can, and just because people might be listening to this for years, could you catch people up on?

• 1:46:12Jamie Foxx?

  Well, let me catch, catch.

• 1:46:13Tim Ferriss?

  The confusion.

• 1:46:13Jamie Foxx?

  Quentin Tarantino.

• 1:46:16Jamie Foxx?

  Who is a purist when it comes to his opinions and his emotions? Even if, even if you could go, I could go to Quentin Tarantino and say something, man, I think, you know, as a black person and so on, so on, so on. He'd say, well, stop doing that. Stop hanging it just on black. Hanging on things that are substance first and then let it be. I mean, so I've, I've heard this guy speak when there's no cameras. I said, wow, you know what? You make a lot of sense. So Quentin Tarantino sees the Black Lives Matter campaign, sees the individual stories, forty different people of individual stories where a police officer had killed the person who was unarmed.

• 1:47:01Jamie Foxx?

  It touched him. The reason I thought that was impactful because you seldom see the white superstar go and stand with the black folk who just trying to be heard. Even high end black guys don't go stand with the black folks that's trying to be heard. When it comes to like, especially Hollywood, because you know, people in Hollywood are so scared, oh, oh, they won't see my movie, or they won't go see my song if I stand, if I stand up for anything of substance. They so fucking scared. So when I saw this dude do that, I was like, wow, that's great. But then the misinterpretation of his words where he says, I'm standing here with the murdered.

• 1:47:46Jamie Foxx?

  Quentin Tarantino speaks that way. He speaks, if you've read any of his movie, or saw any of his movies, he speaks in those terms. He says, I stand with the murdered. When I see someone being murdered, I call it what it is. It's a murder. That's a murderer that killed this, this person. However, the story got spun was that Quentin Tarantino is a cop hater. He hates all cops and they're all cops of murderers. And I was just like, oh, here we go again, man. Here's a person who's willing, and I'm gonna speak like, willing to put aside his white cushy Hollywood-ness.

• 1:48:28Jamie Foxx?

  He could live on, in his, on his mountain and never give a shit about anything. He came, I said, man, I felt something.

• 1:48:37Jamie Foxx?

  And now, they painted so bad. And now you got, you got the New York cop, so we got something for his ass. Now it's a beef. Now it's, that's not what we, we trying to do, but you can't do anything right now. Because the media story, if it's not salacious, we don't want to report it. We, we have to.

• 1:49:00Tim Ferriss?

  It just bleeds.

• 1:49:01Jamie Foxx?

  You, you feel what I'm saying?

• 1:49:02Tim Ferriss?

  No, I do. And it's, it's, I mean, they, if it bleeds, it leads, right? So they put the salacious, the visually, viscerally impactful stuff up front because it gets the clicks or the purchases, the advertising. The, the, uh, the only, I suppose, flip side to that, and I have a very specific question for you that, uh, from a fan, I'd love to ask, related to, um, some, some of these race questions, but the good news is, if you can look at it in these terms, is that the necessity for new is so high, that if you starve a story of oxygen, it'll often die on its own.

• 1:49:35Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Tim Ferriss?

  Because they can't regurgitate the same thing if there's no response.

• 1:49:39Jamie Foxx?

  Exactly.

• 1:49:40Tim Ferriss?

  And so you, you can let it kind of die on the vine. Uh, but, uh, we were talking about this before, I mean, I've had instances, and I won't bitch and moan too long, because I think the question is more interesting than my bitching, but I've had instances where these, these formerly, I would say, outlets of record, you know, very prestigious outlets, uh, magazines, I'm not going to mention them by name, because it's.

• 1:50:00Jamie Foxx?

  I know what you're talking about.

• 1:50:01Tim Ferriss?

  But, but I was interviewed and profiled by a magazine at one point, very, very highbrow magazine. Uh, there were six or seven misquotes or, uh, erroneous facts in the piece, and I corrected those with the fact checker and went to press with no corrections. What do you do in that situation? When those things then end up in Wikipedia? So you have to develop a sort of, uh, strategy, and I mean, this will get even more interesting once we have, you know, smart stadiums, once we have, uh, facial recognition like you see on Facebook, once that's implemented across the board, it'll get very interesting. But I'm going to go down that rabbit hole, and instead, I'm going to, uh, bring up a question that I'd love to get.

• 1:50:40Jamie Foxx?

  But before you go into that.

• 1:50:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:50:41Jamie Foxx?

  Here, here's the problem.

• 1:50:44Jamie Foxx?

  Back in the day, if there was a misquote, and you went to that entity and said, hey, you quoted me wrong, oh, we'll release a statement saying that we misquoted you, and it erases. The problem with today's world, once it's out there, you can't get it back.

• 1:51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Jamie Foxx?

  You cannot change, you cannot change.

• 1:51:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:05Jamie Foxx?

  Because it's gonna stay there.

• 1:51:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:06Jamie Foxx?

  When you, when I punch up your name, that's the first thing that's gonna come up, or the second thing that's coming, you can't get rid of it.

• 1:51:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Jamie Foxx?

  And when you talk about the regurgitating, or the, or, or, or, or just letting it die, you could let it die, but the problem is, you have to at least, once it starts, give another, hopefully that you can give another side of it that people may see a little bit.

• 1:51:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:51:31Jamie Foxx?

  They don't wanna see, what's crazy about our society right now, no one wants to see anybody reconcile. No one wants to see anybody come, come together, or say that, like, when I, when I think about Quentin Tarantino, I spoke and said, I back you as a friend, and keep, keep speaking the truth, and don't worry about the haters. Meaning, speak the truth from you. Not whatever the comment was.

• 1:51:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:51:57Jamie Foxx?

  But whatever you're saying in your truth.

• 1:52:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:52:00Jamie Foxx?

  You say that because you ain't out there, you could be promoting your movie. You could be trying to make money. You actually trying to see how you could get, how you could go, I know the way he thinks. I'm gonna go talk to them, if they are wrong in what they're saying, I'm gonna tell them. But if they are right, he says, I, I'll be the one that can go to the cops and say that. And now, look, look at how it is, it's, it's so crazy, go ahead, ask a question.

• 1:52:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I mean, it's, I, I think you're right, I think that people want gladiatorial games, and we don't have gladiatorial games, so they use the front page.

• 1:52:32Jamie Foxx?

  Oh.

• 1:52:33Tim Ferriss?

  Gladiatorial games, but, but speaking of conflict resolution, so this is, this is a question from a fan, TJ, my wife is pregnant, we're moving to a very non-diverse neighborhood, we are kind of worried on how it will go, she is black and I am white. What is some advice he can give to a young couple raising a child of color in today's world?

• 1:52:50Jamie Foxx?

  I'll say this, I'll say, I'll, I'll say this about America. Let's use America as an example. To me, America is the most incredible civilization that has ever been created. Hundreds of years from now, people will look on this, look at this place and marvel. There's the bitch in the complain aisle where everybody bitches complains about every single thing. But the one thing about America that is incredible is the evolution of freedom. The change. When I talk about slavery that happened, it was 300 years of it, look at the evolution. We come out of it, we have a black president.

• 1:53:33Jamie Foxx?

  People are more welcoming now. We used to live in a world not too long ago where it was frowned upon, it was tough, it was this. What I would say to people like that, just live your life. Like, I lived my life in places where at times it was definitely racial misunderstanding, but I would talk to that person. I would make sure that person understood who I was as a person. I'm not gonna compromise who I am as far as a black man, but I'm also gonna give you another, another version of it. Not the version that you necessarily see on television, the version that you see on the internet. I'm gonna give you me.

• 1:54:14Jamie Foxx?

  And most of the time, we are alike in so many different, in so many instances. So when he's saying move into that non-diverse place, it's different, man. Look at the, look at the, I hate to say this, but listen to the kids, bro. But when you talk about the kids, the kids today, I, I, I'm, I'm at the gym last night, 24 Hour Fitness. The kid is playing future, white kid. Wayo ass is that when I, white kid. When I first moved into my neighborhood years ago, and I felt like I made it. I'm in the white neighborhood now, I'm here. Oh, I'm so, I've made it. And I hear NWA blasting. Look out there with these kids, it was 16 years old. So times are changing, man. And-

• 1:54:58Jamie Foxx?

  You have to start giving people the benefit of the doubt that they'll get it right. And for all those people that were here back in the old days and that are now fifty and sixty and seventy years old, that's dying out. The way of thinking is dying out. You may be looking in a situation where you may have the first female president. It's the evolution of, it's the evolution of freedom. Think about how we treated women at one point. No voice, no rights, no nothing. I've heard people say, "I'd rather have a black person tell me something to do than a woman any day." But now, it's, it's so, we are on the right path, man. Love who you want to love, be where you want to be, because we are evolving. Look at, look at, look at the steps that, that, that gay rights took in the past few years.

• 1:55:41Jamie Foxx?

  Man, that was, that's huge when you, when you're talking about people in the Bible Belt and you know how they felt. So if, if those things are now... Like, my, my daughter taught me, like, when she was thirteen, she's twenty-one now, she was thirteen, and it was, this, this was nine years ago, and it was talking about gay rights and things like that, and, and, and I asked her friends, I said, "What do you think about it?" She said, "Dad, we don't think about it." I said, "That's, that's you guys." That's a good answer. She said, "That's you guys." She said, "That's old people." She said, "That's why we're turned off from religion sometimes. That's why we're turned off from all of these different things, because old people argue about where you're from, what you do, what you look like. We don't give a shit."

• 1:56:23Jamie Foxx?

  And so, thank God for the youth, thank God for that couple, because what they're doing is they're showing a new world. And she said, "Dad, if someone was doing something somewhere that was straight, gay, black, white, or brown somewhere else, does it affect you at all? Does your air change? Does anything around you change because the people are living the way they want to live, as long as they're not breaking the laws?" I said, "You know what? You made great points." She went on to my radio show and talked about it. So, uh, we are in a new day. What we gotta do, though, is, we gotta stop, I said, like, like I was telling Justine, I said, "We gotta make sure to say, let's put, let's put media out of business." We gotta quit allowing them to control the narrative.

• 1:57:05Jamie Foxx?

  Those people, like with, with Quentin Tarantino, or the Black Lives Matter, or, or people that speak up on something that is broken or that is wrong. You don't give them a chance by painting them in a, in a bad situation.

• 1:57:20Tim Ferriss?

  Are you gonna do another comedy tour?

• 1:57:21Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, I'm gonna do another comedy tour, but my, I'm gonna start it organically, like, uh, maybe a hundred people, two hundred people, start it organically and just sort of grow it. Uh, I got some great jokes. And that's the thing, like, when you're, when you're, when you're a comedian, it's like you have to pray that the jokes will open up. So I got some great, like, jokes that people will get and understand. And then just the stuff that's been going on with me, you know, uh, you know, getting older, you know, uh, not realizing you the OG, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know, the young, like, the young hip-hop guy, "What's up, OG?" "Damn, that's right," you know? I mean, just, just, just, it's just some funny stuff.

• 1:58:02Jamie Foxx?

  It's, it's some funny stuff that's, and, and that's what any comedian would tell you, that it's hard to be funny when there's nothing funny happening. But there's been so much funny shit happening. Uh, for like my mom, who, you know, adopted, and who, who gave me up for adoption in seven months, and she comes back to live with me. And as she's living with me, she walks down, the first day she's here, she walks down, uh, the steps and says, "I want a Phantom." I'm like, "Uh, bitch, of the opera? What are you talking about?" She's talking about a Phantom, uh, Rolls Royce, right? And it was just funny, just certain things that, the fact that everybody lives in my house. The fact that my mom, my dad lives here, my two sisters, my dad still dates. You know, and my mom is going on his side of the house when she, when he has a date.

• 1:58:47Jamie Foxx?

  You know, just assessing, like, just being in a way like, "Mm, oh, hey, hi, I didn't know you had company, George." I mean, just, and then they've turned, they've turned into kids. So, you know, my dad would come to my room, but, "Uh, uh, uh, uh, could you tell her not to come on my side of the house when I got a date?" And I'm like, "Now, parents." So, you know, it's, funny things are happening.

• 1:59:05Tim Ferriss?

  Lots of organic material.

• 1:59:07Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, so it was organic then, so we got funny shit.

• 1:59:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:59:15Jamie Foxx?

  On the bigger picture, because I witnessed this in 2008.

• 1:59:22Jamie Foxx?

  To see President Obama become president to me, 2008, not talking about after he became president, because everyone will have their views on that. I know what it meant to me. To see him stand up there, put his hand on that Bible and say, you know, become the president of the United States. That is success in so many different ways. And it also, it jars you for every person that says, oh, man, just because I'm black, I'm... Maybe you can't use that all the time, because this man now showed you. And whatever side you end up on,

• 2:00:06Jamie Foxx?

  because it's not a political thing, to see that. And the reason that it means so much to me, to see an African-American man like do that, like, and literally when, uh, when, when, when he was... This was interesting. This is how we connected. When he was 30 points down for the nomination, 30 points down, no one knew who he was. I get a call from Oprah Winfrey. Hi, Jamie Foxx. It's Oprah. Hi, Jamie. I was like, what's going on? There's this guy named Senator Obama. I think he's going to be the next president. Then I got a call from Norman Lear. Jamie, it's Norman Lear. The senator's on fire. So who is he? Senator Obama. But he's 30 points down, so nobody knows. The reason they're calling me is because we have a radio show that was reaching everybody,

• 2:00:49Jamie Foxx?

  especially the huge urban market. So I go on my show and I say, uh, I'm voting for this guy named Senator Obama because he's black. And I go to commercial. When I go to commercial, my phone lines light up with all black people saying that we will not vote for this guy just because he's black. Don't treat us that way. So we ended up educating everybody about him. He's the nomination and he goes on and he wins. And to me, it was all odds against him. And I thought that, that, that type of success, regardless of where you come from, like I said, whatever side you stand on, to me, that was something monumental. When we talk about where this country has come from,

• 2:01:32Jamie Foxx?

  when you talk about the greatness of America evolving, and evolving to that type of freedom, and him taking advantage of being in America and becoming um, a president, to me, that's just success that, that uh, he redefined what it is.

• 2:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  What historical figure do you most identify with?

• 2:01:53Jamie Foxx?

  Who do I identify with historically? Uh, when it comes to entertainment, Sammy Davis Jr. is a person that I look at all the time, who I go on the internet and watch him play the drums, or watch him sing, or watch him dance, or watch him uh, do jokes, or watch him do a movie, or watch him spin guns. To me, he was just the ultimate uh, entertainer.

• 2:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  He was a, yeah, full stack entertainer, as one engineer said. That's what he, that's what he called you.

• 2:02:18Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning you kinda, you had all the tools in the toolkit.

• 2:02:21Jamie Foxx?

  Oh, man, that's great. And then, there's, there's other sides of me too, so, like the, the sports side, like I was a Magic Johnson, like, you know, the person who was, who loved being competitive, but also wanted to get everybody else involved, and, you know, the way he played basketball. When it comes to social consciousness.

• 2:02:41Tim Ferriss?

  May I interject for a second?

• 2:02:43Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Tim Ferriss?

  So, this might seem like a funny question, but do you feel like you identify more with Magic Johnson than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

• 2:02:50Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah. The reason I feel more than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is because Magic smiled and it was fun, he was happy, you know, not to say that Kareem wasn't, but Kareem was more a serious guy.

• 2:03:00Tim Ferriss?

  Very serious.

• 2:03:01Jamie Foxx?

  If you ever met him, he's completely serious, you know. I'm more the fun dude, let's have a good time, and, you know. When it comes to social consciousness, and social issues, that's where I, I, I draw from a lot of different people. I think going, I, I think watching Martin Luther King, and going to Atlanta and seeing what he did and how he did, when he did it. When I look at the bravery of him, it's beyond, because I, I, I look at social issues today, how we're so afraid to step out on anything, like, oh. My cars and my, my wealth and my money.

• 2:03:41Jamie Foxx?

  And, and not to say that I've thought this way all my life, like literally, like it just happened not too long ago where I was like, we gotta, we gotta step up more, more socially, we gotta be on social con. Even if, even if some of the people say, ah, fuck it, I ain't gonna go to your movie. It's okay, fine, you weren't gonna go anyway. But we had to step up a little bit more, social, social wise. And when I went to see where Martin Luther King came from, what he did and how his house was, he actually came from middle class, big nice house, but it's right across the street from po- from poverty. And it sort of taught him how to deal with other cultures, taught him how to deal with other, uh, uh, financial groups. He says, I don't wanna see people hurting. He says, I want everybody, you know, so I, I, I think like that.

• 2:04:22Jamie Foxx?

  I've always thought like, uh, even when we talked about earlier, the Jews and the Palestinians in the, uh, in the student center. You know, the rest of the story was, I befriended both of them. And we all became friends because I call myself Spackle, which is the stuff that goes in between the bricks. Between the cracks. Yeah, I'm, I'm Spackle. I get along with all religions, get along with all people and try to bring them all together. So that was the, so when I think about it socially, it is the Martin Luther King thing. Because I think sometimes we overlook that the world is big enough for all of us to live on. It's big enough for all of us to, to, to get along. And, uh, sometimes I, I, I question, why is it so tough to get along? You know, which is what Martin Luther King questions, I just don't, I don't get it.

• 2:05:07Jamie Foxx?

  And I, and I won't stand by, so. A little, and like I said, I've only thought about like that, you know, here in the past few years, after watching Harry Belafonte go on stage, before I was supposed to get a lifetime achievement award. And he goes on and says something so prolific, he says, uh, they were talking about violence and he said, the, the violence that's happening in America is mostly black violence. And you black entertainers, sit here mute. And we laid all of this groundwork down for you guys and you guys are disrespected and not picking up. So, you know, uh, that's the one reason I said I think more socially.

• 2:05:44Tim Ferriss?

  I mentioned Kareem Abdul-Jabbar because I saw just by chance a fantastic documentary called Minority of One.

• 2:05:50Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and it's so good. And it detailed in particular, and I'm not, I'm not at all well versed with basketball. So it was also a glimpse into that world for me. But his relationship with Magic Johnson, which was fascinating.

• 2:06:02Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any particular favorite documentaries or movies that you just feel are must watches for human beings? That's a big question. That's, that's why.

• 2:06:13Jamie Foxx?

  I think documentaries on cultures are important. If you get a chance to see a doc, any documentary about Jews and what they went through, watch it. Any documentary, documentary about Palestinians and what they've gone through, watch it. Blacks and what they've gone through, watch it. Women and what they've gone through, watch it. The reason that I say it is because if we're talking about the human aspect of it, like I didn't get it until I watched, it was actually The Pianist.

• 2:06:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:06:47Jamie Foxx?

  And I just went shit. I didn't know it was like that. You know what I'm saying? Like I, I didn't know that. And so, you know, and then when I listened to some of my friends who like, you know, live in the Middle East and they're going through those things. I said, shit, I didn't know it was like that. So I think anytime you get to watch, get a chance to watch people and where they come from or culture and what they went through. Uh, you can even look at, at, at, uh, whites breaking away from the, I mean, the 13 colonies breaking away from, from England. You go, oh shit, I didn't know you went through that. So it's like, when you do that, you, you, you come away with a sense of, okay, I get you now.

• 2:07:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Helps build your compassion.

• 2:07:27Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah. It helps build your compassion because you, you, you only live in your own world. You know what I'm saying? And unless you get a chance to see what it is, uh, a lot of times your views will be, will be narrow. And just watching documentaries like that to, to open up your views are just amazing. When you look at. When you look at the story of, of, uh, like I said, the story of slavery, there was a book that I just showed these young guys called Without Sanctuary.

• 2:07:55Tim Ferriss?

  Without Sanctuary.

• 2:07:56Jamie Foxx?

  Where it's a book where a guy, a photographer, went around the South during the times of slavery and documented lynchings.

• 2:08:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oof.

• 2:08:06Jamie Foxx?

  And he would document the lynching and take and make postcards. Because at that time, see, we go oof, but at that time, it was commonplace.

• 2:08:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Jamie Foxx?

  It was a party. So people would get their food, this is where you got picnic from, they would get their food, drinks or whatever, and they would go down and watch the lynching. And so there was a postcard that said, here's the lynching of Nigga Charlie. Uh, I hope you like it, I hope everything is well. So that was something that was mind blowing because it was commonplace. You know, so, um, when you get it, like I said, when you get a chance to see cultures and history, you understand what, what's going on today. And this is the last little factoid. If you get a chance, pull up the Harrison Act. The Harrison Act was an act about taking drugs off the street and making them illegal. Because it, uh, at, at, at the time in our culture, we were able to, you know, use whatever drugs that was out there, was available.

• 2:09:00Jamie Foxx?

  But the government sort of didn't know how to get it off the streets. So they ran a story, black man gets high on cocaine and fights cops. And people was like, so we gotta get rid of drugs. People were like, fuck that, I'm getting rid of our drugs. Get bigger guns. Give cops more jurisdiction. Finally, they run a story, black man gets high on cocaine, rapes and kills Caucasian woman. That's when the Harrison Act, because well, we don't want that. But because of that Harrison Act with the jurisdiction of a cop, that plays into a little bit of what we're dealing with today.

• 2:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:35Jamie Foxx?

  Because it was sort of set that way at a time where it was commonplace to see slaves. It was commonplace to see blacks as second or third class citizens. So, and it's not to incite anything, it's not to make you feel anything angry. It's just a, it's just a peering into someone's genesis to see where we are today so that you can understand to, or try to have the compassion for all, all of us who live here in this country. Because like I said, it's, it's the best in the world.

• 2:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  And beyond, I remember a friend mentioned to me, I was watching Planet Earth, and he said there's a companion of some type, which I really want to see called, I think it's Humans of Earth, and it actually profiles different civilizations, different cultures around the world, and it shows you how humans have adapted. You know, Mongolians using falcons for hunting, all of this and whatnot. But the, um, yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that, you know, if a culture is a set of beliefs and behaviors, you have to, in a way, be taken on that sensory experience to develop the compassion. You don't get it through text alone, necessarily. If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say?

• 2:10:52Jamie Foxx?

  Man, it would constantly change. It would be those new billboards.

• 2:10:57Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh, that's a sneaky answer, I like it.

• 2:10:58Jamie Foxx?

  It would be the billboard change. Ball out, dog. Have a great time. Go to church. Love somebody. Teach somebody. Get angry a little bit. It would just change, you know, because, you know, these guys know me. I'm all about having, and at the end of the last one, be have as much fun as you can. Because in a blink of an eye, we'll all be gone. A hundred years compared to infinity is nothing. I talk to my sister all the time. Why you? She be like, what's wrong? I said, girl, you better get, you better start having some fun. We gonna be gone in a minute. You gonna look back and say, like, shit, I should have been laughing. And now I'm dead.

• 2:11:40Jamie Foxx?

  So, yeah, my billboard would change constantly, because I think we all change.

• 2:11:45Tim Ferriss?

  You said get angry a little bit. And it's, and I remember I was given this advice by a guy named Poe Bronson, a writer, many, many years ago. I asked him at an event, I was sitting in the crowd, and I said, what do you do when you get writer's block? And he said, I write about what makes me angry. And if you, if you were teaching a ninth grade class, mixed race, mixed gender, what would you, what would you teach that class about? Like, what would, what would you teach? What do you think the most important things, skills, or otherwise, that you could teach ninth graders might be?

• 2:12:15Jamie Foxx?

  Well, like I said, it would have to be different tiered.

• 2:12:19Jamie Foxx?

  If it's a ninth grader of today.

• 2:12:22Jamie Foxx?

  I would teach him as much as you can interact with actual humans. Uh, you know, the toughest thing in the world is like looking at my daughter and we're in Paris and. They're generating thumbs. Yeah, they're on their, they're on their, they're on their cell phones. So I said, as much as you can interact with people, cause people,

• 2:12:42Jamie Foxx?

  it's the best interaction because there's all types. And there's discretion when it comes to people. Like, there's no discretion when it comes to thumbs and what you can say on the internet. And that's why you get drugged down by it. Because it doesn't take anything. If they're, if it's an anonymous person and they say you're ugly and you're this and you're that and you're this. There's no discretion there. So they can sort of get the venom off. I said, when you're,

• 2:13:10Jamie Foxx?

  if we're, if we're in a surrounding, I may feel something about something, but I want to say because I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. I don't want to have it hurt my feelings. So that's the one thing, interact with people. The second thing is, interact with people from all over the world. Because you become narrow when you're just all about my block. And just being about your block in today's world is going to hurt us. Because people don't understand global. We don't understand global market. We don't understand global things that, how does something in the Middle East affect me in North Dakota? Because of the way we're set up like this. So it's like you have to

• 2:13:54Jamie Foxx?

  get the education. I would bypass. Well, I, no, I wouldn't bypass it. Get the education of people all over the world. And then the last, well, last couple of things would be history. Know your history. Know why we're, why we're here, why this, especially when it comes to, to, to rules and legislation and things like that. Know why, uh, why we vote, why we don't vote. Uh, if you think about it, this wonderful country runs on just like a human brain. We only use a little bit of it when it comes to the voting market. You gotta vote, get out there and be active in that. A lot of times we just, hey, man, whoever's the president is the president, whoever's this, that. So, so that. And then, uh, um, the last part that I would teach is.

• 2:14:40Jamie Foxx?

  Last two things, hustle, teach your hustle. Your hustle muscle is, but hustle muscle is the most important thing.

• 2:14:49Jamie Foxx?

  When you hustle and you go get it, a lot of times that alleviates your problems. When you don't hustle or you leave it to chance, when you leave things to chance and you didn't give it all that day, now you start to argue or wonder about things, bills, fuck, I gotta get that done. Oh, my relationship is, how did it? But if you hustle, for one, it's gonna take up a lot more of your time. So you don't have time to concentrate on just.

• 2:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  The worrying.

• 2:15:16Jamie Foxx?

  The worrying. If I put the work in, I got my check, I put it over there. And your check can be, doesn't have to be monetary, it could be anything. It could be, I put the work in at the charity and this happened because of the charity. But whatever it is, put that hard work in. And now, you could see things coming to fruition and that takes not, seventy percent of your worrying away. Because you did give it your all. And then, uh, the last part of it is, re- reflect, sit still for a minute. Cause when you're working, working, working, working, I gotta this, I gotta that. That will strain you as well. So you gotta be able to decompress. You just gotta be able to chill.

• 2:15:57Jamie Foxx?

  Whatever it is that you chill with, if it's your homies, your friends, whatever, like, take time out to be like, you know what? I, I, if, if, if it's out of my hands, it's out of my hands. I'll get a better crack at it tomorrow. Colin Powell says something incredible. He said, I always feel like in the morning, I got a brand new chance. And I'm paraphrasing, in the morning, he said, I, I love getting in the mo- to the morning. Because it's a new opportunity. But really take that time for yourself, you know, relax, chill, whatever it is that you believe in. If it's God, Buddha, Allah, Hindu, all of them. Whatever it is to get you on, on that, on that, okay. You know, I did what I'm supposed to do, let me relax now and then tomorrow, the next day, get another, another start.

• 2:16:43Tim Ferriss?

  What is, uh, what does the first sixty minutes of your day look like? Or what, do you have any morning routines that are important to you?

• 2:16:47Jamie Foxx?

  Morning routines? I, I wake up, I, uh, I text the people that I dig and love.

• 2:16:57Tim Ferriss?

  What do you say?

• 2:16:59Jamie Foxx?

  I just send them encouraging, like, you know, there's a few, you know.

• 2:17:05Jamie Foxx?

  People that just, you know, really mean a lot to me. Want to let them know I'm thinking about them, the whole nine. And then, uh, uh, it varies, man. Sometimes I'll be like, okay, I, I put some work in, so I put in eight days. So maybe these two days I could chill. Uh, get a little, I do the, uh, just on the physical part. I get my, uh, I get my fifty pull-ups in, hundred sit-ups. You know, maybe a hundred, uh, maybe a hundred crunches. And it's easy. I used to not be able to do it. My, my boy Tyron.

• 2:17:36Tim Ferriss?

  How many sets for the fifty pull-ups?

• 2:17:38Jamie Foxx?

  For the fifty, so I do fifteen first, fifteen pull-ups. This is what it is. I do fifteen pull-ups, fifty push-ups, hundred sit-ups. Then I go back and I do fifteen different.

• 2:17:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, chin.

• 2:17:51Jamie Foxx?

  Grip.

• 2:17:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:53Jamie Foxx?

  So that'll get me to thirty. Another fifty push-ups, that gets me to a hundred push-ups. I'm done with the push-ups. And then I do ten and ten, back to the, to the first grip. And you don't have to do it every single day. You can do it every other day. Uh, and then what you notice is the pull-up bar. And Tyron kept telling me this. Well, we, I got a homie, Tyron, he played Kane in Minnesota Society. And he, I kept wondering, how is he always in shape? He says, man, I'm trying to tell you, the pull-up bar is the everything. So, uh, so that, and then, um, and then just, you know, make the calls and what I need to get done. And make sure I'm, you know, in the right, you know, position and.

• 2:18:34Tim Ferriss?

  Do you drink coffee?

• 2:18:34Jamie Foxx?

  Get the kid. I don't drink coffee. I don't drink coffee.

• 2:18:38Tim Ferriss?

  Is, have you, have you never, oh, you stopped?

• 2:18:41Jamie Foxx?

  I had to stop having stimulants.

• 2:18:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's, you and me.

• 2:18:45Jamie Foxx?

  Earlier in my career, I was, I was all about the stimulants. So at a certain point I had to.

• 2:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Ex-nay on the caffeine, K. Yeah, I've been, I've been cutting that out as well. It's not good for me. People are like, aren't you worried about depressants, alcohol? I'm like, no, no, no, no. Stimulants, that's what I need to.

• 2:19:03Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, because, because what I tell people all the time to drink coffee, after a while, you, you, you keep, you keep hitting that same muscle, you know, in, in your brain to where you, I, I know people right now who could drink four cups of coffee and go to sleep.

• 2:19:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I used to be that person.

• 2:19:17Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, and so it's like my, my, and one of my boys loves, uh, uh, uh, what is it? Red Bull.

• 2:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  Red Bull.

• 2:19:22Jamie Foxx?

  And then he won't understand why some days he'll just be like this.

• 2:19:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25Jamie Foxx?

  So I had to stop, and it was tough because I had to have coffee every day and I drank. Like double expressos, you know, I was like, I had to have the up.

• 2:19:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:36Jamie Foxx?

  But now I know how to go get it inside of my, you know, I know how to go get it inside.

• 2:19:40Tim Ferriss?

  Last, last question here is, um, I'm gonna ask what advice you would give to yourself? Three different ages, twenty, thirty and forty. Um, so what advice would you give to your twenty year old self?

• 2:19:49Jamie Foxx?

  Man, put the condom on.

• 2:19:52Jamie Foxx?

  Shit. Stop playing around.

• 2:19:56Tim Ferriss?

  Important advice.

• 2:19:59Jamie Foxx?

  Twenty, man, put that on, buddy. And not the fishnet one either, put the riddle one on.

• 2:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  Anything else for twenty or should we move to thirty?

• 2:20:10Jamie Foxx?

  Twenty twenties. I had my daughter at twenty six. So the advice I would give me was like, calm down. You know, it was like calm down and, and just, you know, make sure you're paying attention to your daughter and to the daughter's mom. Twenties was tough because I just got to LA. I was just, you know, man, the whole world was opening up. So I'm like, man, I'm, you know, I'm trying to do all of it. And while I was like calm down and, and luckily, it was twenty six, so moving into thirty, I was, uh, on my way to calming. If that makes sense.

• 2:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  Does make sense. So then you had thirty.

• 2:20:56Jamie Foxx?

  Thirty.

• 2:20:57Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give your thirty year old self?

• 2:21:00Jamie Foxx?

  Uh, it's gonna go fast.

• 2:21:03Tim Ferriss?

  In what way?

• 2:21:04Jamie Foxx?

  It's gonna go fast. The time is gonna go fast. So just make sure that you, uh, you start now planning for your future. And not only is it gonna go fast, but don't spend all your money. Don't buy the, the jacket that's twelve thousand dollars. You know, relax, you know, just, just you relax it because it's good. And forty is gonna come so fast. And you don't think that it is, but it's gonna come so fast.

• 2:21:33Tim Ferriss?

  And would you say that because you would want your thirty year old self to pay attention to the present moment? Or do long term thinking or both?

• 2:21:40Jamie Foxx?

  Long term. When you're thirty, you got a kid and you're in my business and in any business. All businesses are gonna, especially when, when you, when, when you make, my business is about me though. So I have to be careful in my decisions socially, uh, and, and plan for the future. It's not gonna be, I remember, uh, uh, doing my television show. And it went, five years went fast and I would tell the people on my television show, it's gonna go fast, man. And if you finish at thirty five, but you live till seventy. You know, so you have to really think about the future.

• 2:22:17Tim Ferriss?

  The long game.

• 2:22:18Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  And then forty, big four zero.

• 2:22:23Jamie Foxx?

  Wow. Forty. There, there're gonna be tough decisions that you have to make when it comes to business. Cause in your forty, when you're forty, in my business, the window is closing on certain things. So you have to be able to open those windows to other things. And some of the people that you've gone to, to battle with till you're forty, may not be the ones that you will battle and do business with towards fifty. And take a little bit of your, uh, personal feelings out of it. Because I'm very personal, uh, meaning like I would stay with someone, even if I feel that they're not up to par business wise, but you know, we have history.

• 2:23:07Jamie Foxx?

  Take a little bit of the personal out of it, still remain friends if you can with that person. Because now it's really pending, like fifty about to be here. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, you know, and, uh, I would tell my forty year old self, grow up in your mind, but not in your body necessarily. Meaning stay young in your body, but certain parts of your life, you have to grow up and be, be grown about things because now you got another kid, your other child is, you know, twenty, yeah, she's twenty one now, which is just, you know, it's past year, so, but she was, you know. Thirteen, fourteen, when I was forty. But now you gotta start living.

• 2:23:53Jamie Foxx?

  You would always live your life a hundred percent for you. But now that you have your kids and they're a certain age, it's gotta be thirty to forty percent you, sixty to seven percent what you're gonna leave for them and how you're gonna leave them. Because like I said, it's flying. And that's it.

• 2:24:12Tim Ferriss?

  Jamie, so much fun. I really appreciate you taking the time. And where can people find what you're up to? Find you online?

• 2:24:20Jamie Foxx?

  Where can they find me? I am Jamie Foxx on my Periscope. Am I right? Am I saying this right? You know, I got these young cats telling me what to do.

• 2:24:29Tim Ferriss?

  And then I am Jamie Foxx on Twitter also.

• 2:24:30Jamie Foxx?

  I am Jamie Foxx on Twitter. And I'm doing better on Twitter. I'm trying to do better.

• 2:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  And?

• 2:24:36Jamie Foxx?

  Twitter, you know.

• 2:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  And?

• 2:24:37Jamie Foxx?

  The old fella trying to.

• 2:24:39Tim Ferriss?

  The latest album?

• 2:24:40Jamie Foxx?

  The latest album's called Hollywood Story of a Dozen Roses. It's out, I don't care how you get it. You can download it, bootleg it, steal it from a friend. I don't care. I just want you to, I just want you to hear the music. The song that's out right now is "I'm Supposed to Be in Love by Now."

• 2:24:55Jamie Foxx?

  I'm supposed to be in love by now.

• 2:25:02Jamie Foxx?

  It's been so long for me. I don't know how.

• 2:25:10Jamie Foxx?

  Been drowning in the sea of broken vows.

• 2:25:18Jamie Foxx?

  But I'm supposed to be in love by now.

• 2:25:25Jamie Foxx?

  I've been chasing my dream. Now I'm chasing you. Running hard, but my legs feel weak. I done played every part. I done played a fool. Write the movie, I'd be your lead. I'm supposed to be in love by now.

• 2:25:47Jamie Foxx?

  Well, girl, you stole my heart. I take a vow. In love by now.

• 2:26:00Jamie Foxx?

  So make sure you get that.

• 2:26:03Jamie Foxx?

  In Love By Now is out. It's a song that my daughter made me.

• 2:26:08Jamie Foxx?

  She sort of made me do. She's like, listen, stop with the club stuff. Stop with, and that's my, my oldest daughter's like funny. She said, stop with the club joints. Stop. You're trying to be too young. Like even, she'd even like, I had on some shoes one day that she thought was just, I had too young of a shoe. She's like, Dad, what is that on your feet? I said, what you, they, they the new style, baby. They's the Giuseppe's. You know, it's this new style. I had a zipper on and a buckle and my name engraved and she was like, stop it. She said, Dad, you have old feet. I said, what does that mean? You have old feet, like you have, you have feet for marching, like a civil rights. You have a civil rights feet. So, uh, but she said, do a song that we know that is from you.

• 2:26:52Jamie Foxx?

  And, and it's true, says I'm supposed to be in love by now. And so, uh, so that and, uh, jumping out of the window.

• 2:27:01Jamie Foxx?

  And, uh, we just shot the In Love By Now video with George Lopez is the priest. I get stood up at the altar. George Lopez is the priest, Nicole Scherzinger, uh, and we all know her from the Pussycat Dolls, but also her solo career and, and everything. She plays my love interest, which is great because she's a good friend. And so we were able to like really get into some like, uh, you know, they don't do old school videos anymore. Like this actually has a bit of a story. My man Tank is in it and then all of my friends, my daughter's in it, my little daughter's in it. And, uh, my mom and dad is in it and, you know, so it's, uh, it's kind of cool.

• 2:27:35Tim Ferriss?

  I was, um, jamming to Baby's in Love.

• 2:27:38Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:39Tim Ferriss?

  That's the type of music I listen to before I'm, when I'm headed somewhere to, to write, sit down, do some creative work.

• 2:27:44Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, man. Baby's in love.

• 2:27:46Tim Ferriss?

  Solid.

• 2:27:47Jamie Foxx?

  Baby's on top. I think Justin Bieber was supposed to do that song for us. And we were lucky enough to get it, but, uh, Baby's in Love, Kid Inc. is on there. So, you know, got some good stuff going. And then, uh, later on, uh, Sleepless Nights will be out at some point. And then, uh, we'll start work on the, uh, Mike Tyson, uh, bio and, uh, and that's it. And then the, the stand-up comedy is coming because like I said, I got a lot of stuff that, you know, I gotta get off, uh, get off my chest.

• 2:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Since you brought up Mike, what, what would Mike say if you were here right now?

• 2:28:16Jamie Foxx?

  Well. I'm gonna say it like this, because now that I'm about to do the movie, to do the Mike Tyson impersonation would be a little disservice. What I would say is, is that I met Mike when I was 21 years old. I went onstage and I was doing my joke and I was getting to my Mike Tyson joke and I went into it and no one laughed. Because Mike was in the audience. A guy was in the audience with Mike and said, "Yo, Mike is in here, motherfucker." I was like, "Oh, man." The black girl in the front was like, "What you gonna do, Jamie? You gonna tell your jokes? You scared of Mike Tyson?" This is when Mike Tyson was knocking people out for nothing. And then the guy yells out, "Mike said do the joke and that shit better be funny." I was like, "Oh, shit." So I do the joke, it's a standing ovation.

• 2:29:01Jamie Foxx?

  I come offstage and Mike goes, "There he is, I wanna talk to you, you're so funny. Come, come hang out with me, you're funny, motherfucker. Grab the, come on, get in the car with me." And we take off and I started hanging out with Mike Tyson at 21 years old. It was the most incredible thing in the world. Mike was bigger than Michael Jackson at that time. He was just, he was the biggest person, biggest star in the world. Mike would be in a club, see a girl and say, "Hi, how are you? You like BMWs?" They're like, "Huh? Do you like BMWs? You like cars?" I'd say, "Yeah." He would go open up the BMW dealership, they buy, he'll buy a car for a girl. That's how dope he was. And then all of his boys would go to all the different cities and pick up the cars that he bought for girls and say, "Yo, come on, get the keys back, you know he's playing." So it was great to see, it was great to see him during that time, then it was tough to see him when he went through what he went through.

• 2:29:42Jamie Foxx?

  And then when we finally decided to do this movie, This is the Mike Tyson, and I think people really be able to grasp, is that when we show Mike Tyson older and I called Mike and I said, "Mike, how are you? I'll pray this to Allah, my brother, I'm happy, how are you?" I said, "I'm good, Mike, you know, what's up? What's going on?" I'm just happy, I'm happy because I don't have any money anymore, so I'm happy. It's like, "Mike, what does that mean?" "No, it's just all the vultures that were around me the whole time. It was always after my money, so I don't have any money, so nobody wants anything from me, so I'm just so happy." And if you notice, his speaking voice, like what I told you with Bill Cosby, is completely different from when he's onstage, when he's getting ready to fight. So he was like, "I'm just so happy." And-

• 2:30:25Jamie Foxx?

  I could tell, I said, Mike, that's the person we need to tell. That's the story. We always see the person who rises to the mountaintop, but we don't see the other side of the mountain and all the jagged edges and all the things and you're about to slip off of that mountain. So Terry Winter, who wrote, you know, Wolf of Wall Street, Boardwalk Empire, and Martin Scorsese, who's gonna direct it, who hasn't directed a film about boxing since Rage and Bull. So fingers crossed if it all goes together, we'll be able to see Mike Tyson in a different way and we'll be able to transform to where I wanna be so good that it's Mike Tyson, that I look so much like him that when I walk into his house,

• 2:31:07Jamie Foxx?

  his kids would acknowledge me as a father. And then I wanna be able to sit back and reflect. And here's what I'm trying to do with a career, is establish characters. In Living Color, it was Wanda. Hey, for real, I'll rock your world. Then it was Willie Beaman, Any Given Sunday. My name is Willie. Willie Beaman, I keep the ladies screaming. Then it's Ray Char- oh, no, it's Bundini Brown from Ali. Muhammad Ali is a prophet. How you gonna be God's son? Soon as you come out the garage, you be number two. So Bundini Brown. And then it's, eh, yeah.

• 2:31:49Jamie Foxx?

  Well, I got a woman way up a town that's good to me. Then it's Ray Charles. And then it's Django. You know they love you very well, Django. So the Django experience, you know, working with Quentin Tarantino, which was mind blowing to be able to go in and read for that. And I didn't know about that part. I thought Will Smith was gonna do it. I was like, woo, Will Smith and Quentin Tarantino, this is incredible, incredible. It didn't work out that way. I meet with Quentin Tarantino. I told him I understand the script. I said, not only that, I have my own horse. And so I ended up riding my own horse in Django.

• 2:32:30Jamie Foxx?

  And I knew that that was gonna be another character that's gonna change the game. And so they'll look at that. So they'll say Django. And then hopefully, if everything goes right, Mike Tyson will sit with those characters. So that you'll be able to, after a while, look at a career where...

• 2:32:51Jamie Foxx?

  You transformed into a character. People know it and were moved by it. And, and hopefully, uh, um, if it all works out, it'll, it'll be a great, it'll be a great opportunity to look back and see like, wow, man, look at the things that you were able to do, uh, in America.

• 2:33:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's an incredible canon already. And, um, my brother gave me Mike Tyson's autobiography for Christmas last year. And I sat down, I read it because when I was a kid, I would watch on the grainy VHS, Mike Tyson's Greatest Hits over and over and over. And you'd see his reception in Japan. He was the biggest star on the face of the planet. But you read the autobiography and there are layers upon layers.

• 2:33:33Jamie Foxx?

  A lot, a lot. A guy who just wanted to be in love, just wanted to, this is, you know, it was more simple than we thought it was.

• 2:33:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And, uh, I can't wait to see it. I hope it comes together.

• 2:33:44Jamie Foxx?

  I hope so.

• 2:33:45Tim Ferriss?

  Jamie, you are the consummate performer and entertainer. So please keep creating.

• 2:33:50Jamie Foxx?

  Oh, man, thank you.

• 2:33:51Tim Ferriss?

  This has been such a, such a gift. Uh, thank you for your time.

• 2:33:55Jamie Foxx?

  Thank you, buddy.

• 2:33:56Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, for everybody listening, you can find all the show notes, links to everything at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Uh, you can search my name and Jamie's and it'll probably pop right up. And as always, thank you so much for listening.

• 2:34:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am extremely excited to have a fellow geek in arms, Maria Popova, on the line with me. Maria, how are you today?

• 2:34:26Maria Popova?

  Very well. Thank you, uh, thank you for having me.

• 2:34:28Tim Ferriss?

  And I appreciate your coaching on the last name. I wasn't sure if it was Popova or Popova. I have friends who, for instance, Naval Ravikant is a friend. It's actually novel, but Americans can't really pull that off. So he goes for Naval. So I appreciate the, the coaching and I.

• 2:34:46Maria Popova?

  Yeah, as a, as a country of immigrants, we have a surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right, right?

• 2:34:53Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. It's, uh, you know, just the sort of anglicizing of, of such a, uh, Crissola, like a, a melting pot of different cultures. And, you know, at, at the same time, I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time, uh, which is reading and. There are so many words, I've embarrassed myself on many occasions, that I've read dozens or even hundreds of times, especially in scientific literature, that I've never heard pronounced.

• 2:35:22Maria Popova?

  Oh yeah, I call this reader syndrome. As somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading, you run into that a lot, especially with sort of cultural icons, last names, first names, that are spelled differently than, very differently than they're pronounced. It's kind of tragicomic when you actually find out how they're pronounced.

• 2:35:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, exactly. Or it can be a real revelation. I remember when I was a young kid, I couldn't hit, let's say, democracy or aristocracy. I could only say, and I'd also read it, "democracy", "aristocracy", for whatever reason, I couldn't get the emphasis right. But coming back to the reading, and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading, if someone asks you, and I'm sure occasionally it happens, you know, "What do you do?", for those people listening who may not be familiar with you, but we'll start with a cocktail question. When someone asks you, "What do you do?", how do you answer that?

• 2:36:23Maria Popova?

  Well, I've answered it differently over the years, in part because I think inhabiting our own identity is kind of a perpetual process, but right now, I would say, I read, and I write, in that order, and in between, I do some thinking, and I think about how to live a meaningful life, basically.

• 2:36:43Tim Ferriss?

  And if someone then were to go online, find your work, end up at brain pickings, and they're like, "Oh, this is quite interesting", and they kind of looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party, and they're like, "What is brain pickings?", how would you describe, how do you typically describe that?

• 2:37:01Maria Popova?

  It's just the record of that thinking, my personal, subjective, private thinking that takes place between my reading and takes, and the writing, and takes form in writing.

• 2:37:13Tim Ferriss?

  A collection of very interesting things, and sometimes, you know, how I've got to sort of simply put it to folks, and Brain Pickings, for those people wondering, is one of the very few sites that I end up on constantly. And when people ask me, "What blogs do you read?" I'm embarrassed, in some cases, kind of humiliated, to answer that I don't go really to many blogs consistently. And I think part of the reason is, so many of them are, feel compelled to put out very, very timely, of-the-moment material that expires within a few hours. And I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses

• 2:37:58Tim Ferriss?

  are just sort of churning out content. And I remember Kathy Sierra, at one point, told me that you should focus on just-in-time information, not just-in-case information, which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound. But there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot. Brain Pickings is one, and Sam Harris' blog is another. And I saw your review of his latest book, Waking Up.

• 2:38:28Maria Popova?

  Well, not a review.

• 2:38:29Tim Ferriss?

  Not a review.

• 2:38:30Maria Popova?

  I don't review books, ever.

• 2:38:32Tim Ferriss?

  I apologize. Okay, no, this is, no, so this is, this is...

• 2:38:34Maria Popova?

  An annotated reading, if you will.

• 2:38:36Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so an annotated reading of, and I definitely want to dig into that, annotated reading of Waking Up, which I found really impactful for me in a lot of ways. It put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I had for a very long time. Talking about reviews, so I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you. And a close friend of mine, Chris Sacca, he came back with, "What percentage of New York Times bestsellers can be attributed to your coverage?" And I'd be curious to hear you answer that, and then there's sort

• 2:39:17Tim Ferriss?

  of a follow-up. But you've built this incredible powerhouse of an outlet for your, whether it's creative musings or observations, and it has a huge influence on what people read. So if you were to sort of think of that, how would you answer that question?

• 2:39:35Maria Popova?

  Well, first of all, you're very kind to put it that way, as is Chris. But I think... One big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about are very old, out of print, things that are not competing for New York Times Bestseller. In fact, I don't even know if I ever really, I mean, perhaps, I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things with the New York Times Bestsellers, but I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question is actually that I met him through his wife, who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love, and I love Wendy, on a book about wine.

• 2:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 2:40:17Maria Popova?

  And that book ended up, and I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensor experience. And I like things that that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it. But in any case, so I wrote about that book, and that particular piece on green pickings seemed to do pretty well. And I think perhaps that warped Chris's idea of how much contemporary books I really sort of am interested in.

• 2:40:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:40:53Maria Popova?

  But but I would say that's a minority.

• 2:40:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And for those people wondering, it's the essential scratch and sniff guide to becoming a wine expert, which was written along with, and the illustrations are wonderful. The Richard Betts was the sommelier who was part of that. And at one point, I met with him because I wanted to try to deconstruct the master sommelier test. And he said, I can show you how to do it. And it was just the pared down, sort of hacked, if you will, version still of passing the master sommelier test was so intimidating that I put it on ice indefinitely. But at some point, Richard, we will talk again and and form a game plan. So the the opposite, of course, of sort of putting out this material that expires as

• 2:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  soon as it's out on the vine is putting out what I think you do very often, and that is timeless.

• 2:41:47Tim Ferriss?

  Timely and timeless, I've heard you call it, material where you're sort of pulling from old sources or older sources, doing pattern recognition to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a theme or something that still affects people. And I was doing research for this interview, and we met briefly in New York at an event, and I've been a longtime fan of your work. And so I thought to myself, like, you know, how much digging do I really need to do? And good God, you have such an absolute canon of work out there. It is astonishing. I mean, it is really...

• 2:42:30Maria Popova?

  You're very kind. It's just the volume of time, really. It's been, you know, I've been doing this for eight years. Coming up, actually, exactly a month from today, it'll be eight years.

• 2:42:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really?

• 2:42:40Maria Popova?

  So it's just the accumulation, you know?

• 2:42:42Tim Ferriss?

  And so I was, I was, I'm fascinated by routine and schedule and, you know, reading from, of course, not the always accurate, but generally a good place to start, Wikipedia. And it says that brain picking takes, you know, 400-plus hours of work per month, hundreds of pieces of content per day, 12 to 15 books per week that you're reading. How do you, and I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before, but sometimes the answer is change and evolve.

• 2:43:15Maria Popova?

  They always do, and which is why I actually don't do interviews very frequently, because I find that they sort of tend to kind of cast this as the static thing that just stays there, some sort of reference point, while we're really just a fluid process and we're constantly evolving. But in any case...

• 2:43:37Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely.

• 2:43:38Maria Popova?

  The answer is to change.

• 2:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  So the question that you've, I'm sure, been asked many times, but I'll ask again, is how do you choose the books? How do you find slash choose the books that you read? This is a huge problem for me, because my appetite for reading outstrips the time that I have. And so I end up actually, unfortunately, sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books I've taken on at any given point in time. So I'd be curious how you sort of vet the books that you read.

• 2:44:14Maria Popova?

  Well, I guess it goes back to that question of, well, let me backtrack and just say that I write about a very wide array of disciplines and eras and sensibilities because that's what I think about. So anything from art and science to philosophy, psychology, history, design, poetry, you name it. But the common denominator for me is just this very simple question of, does this illuminate some aspect, big or small, of that grand question that I think we all tussle at every day, which is how to live well, how to live a good, meaningful,

• 2:44:54Maria Popova?

  fulfilling life. Whether that's, you know, Aristotle's views on happiness and government, or beautiful art from 12th century Japan, or Sam Harris's new book, anything.

• 2:45:09Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And the, I've read you citing Kurt Vonnegut before. Kurt Vonnegut's one of my favorite writers of all time.

• 2:45:19Maria Popova?

  I know. I heard your semicolon quote with the, I think it was either the interview you did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have a counterpoint to the semicolon.

• 2:45:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, no, no.

• 2:45:31Maria Popova?

  But go on.

• 2:45:32Tim Ferriss?

  So I actually, I actually, I brought up the semicolon, quote, partially, as a sort of wink wink nod, ribbing to a friend of mine named John Romanella, who has a tattoo of a semicolon on his, I think it's his forearm.

• 2:45:51Maria Popova?

  Gotta love type nerd.

• 2:45:52Tim Ferriss?

  He loves semicolons. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other arm. He's a fascinating guy. But the, the quote that I heard you cite, that I wanted to dig into a bit, was Kurt Vonnegut saying, "Write to please just one person." And so my question to you is, when you write, Uh, is that still the case? And if so, who are, who you, who is that person that you are writing for?

• 2:46:22Maria Popova?

  Hmm. It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one, and that's myself. It's, like I said, it's just the record of my thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of create a pattern of, of meaning out of seemingly unrelated, meaningless information. And the sort of intersection of, or transmutation of information into, into wisdom, really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom.

• 2:47:02Maria Popova?

  Um, so I, and, and it's interesting too, because I, when I started Brain Pickings, uh, like I said, almost eight years ago, it started very much as a private record of my own curiosity, and I shared it with seven coworkers that I had at the time, just as a little sort of email newsletter thing. Um, and now to think that there are about seven million people, strangers, reading it every month.

• 2:47:26Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 2:47:27Maria Popova?

  It's kind of surreal.

• 2:47:28Tim Ferriss?

  Congratulations, by the way.

• 2:47:28Maria Popova?

  Thank you. But, and I'm not sort of number dropping for, for sale or anything like that, but just to, to try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing for one person, one very sort of, you know, inward person. But there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and, and just relating to this pretty private act. And it, it's a strange thing to live with, and in no way a, a bad thing. I'm not complaining about it, obviously, but it's just interesting to observe how, how one relates to oneself when being looked on by a few million people, you know?

• 2:48:12Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And, uh, oh, there's so many, so many questions I want to ask you. We might have to do a part two at some point because I know we have some time constraints, but the, uh...

• 2:48:24Tim Ferriss?

  Where to even begin? This is where I start fraying at the ends as an interviewer. So, the first question would be related to that. There's so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after kind of the tried and true BuzzFeed-type headlines. Do you ever contend with that temptation? And if so, how do you resist it? And this is part of the, how do you respond to the expectations of the crowd or the 7 million people looking on? And I feel this personally sometimes because I have a blog.

• 2:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  It has certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have. I'm somewhere between 1 and 2 million uniques a month usually.

• 2:49:14Maria Popova?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 2:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. But even at that scale, there are times when I put out something that I feel is very important but on the dense side. And then it will, sometimes it takes off, but sometimes it doesn't. And there's a lot of temptation when, for instance, I know you use social media quite a bit, and we'll get to that, where I look at, say, the retweets or the favorites on something that's kind of dense, and then I'm like, "Oh, God, I should just do like the 7 tricks you can actually teach your cat and get 500,000 retweets." Is that something that ever sort of crosses your mind? And do you ever feel that temptation?

• 2:50:02Maria Popova?

  Well, you know, it's interesting because I think anybody who thinks in public, which is what writing is, which is even what art is, it's some sort of putting a piece of oneself out into the world. Anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug-of-war between wanting...

• 2:50:24Maria Popova?

  To really stay true to one's experience, you know, and being aware that as soon as it's out in the world, there is this notion of the other audience. And, you know, Oscar Wilde, he very memorably said that a true artist takes no notice whatever of the public and that the public are to him nonexistent. And it's very easy to say, especially for somebody as Wilde, who was very prolific, very public, almost performative in his public presence, it's very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say, well, you can't possibly not care about the audience, given you make your living through it and sort of perform to it, right? But I, I think that's a pretty cynical interpretation. I, I think rather than hypocrisy,

• 2:51:09Maria Popova?

  it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood, which is why all art comes to be, because one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what here she stands for and who here she is. And so with that lens, I do think it's hard to say, well, you know, I don't care about what happens to it out there, even though I write for myself and think for myself. The awareness of the, the other really does change things. But I think perhaps Werner Herzog put it best. I, I just finished reading this kind of 600-page interview with him essentially.

• 2:51:53Maria Popova?

  It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Cronin had with him over the course of 30 years. And in one passage, Herzog says something like, you know, it's always been important for me to have my films reach an audience. I don't necessarily need to hear what those audience reactions are, just as long as they're out there, that they're touching, that the films are touching people in some way. And I feel very similarly. So with that in mind, I guess to answer your question rather circuitously, I, I don't feel, quote unquote, tempted to make listicles or to make Anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for.

• 2:52:37Maria Popova?

  And in part, I think the beauty of the web is that it's a self-perfecting organism. But for as long as it's an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest. So perfect the art of the BuzzFeed listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit

• 2:52:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:59Maria Popova?

  of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm interested in.

• 2:53:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, it's, uh, I think it's a very virtuous goal. Um, I, um, I, you know, I, I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it, uh, for a lot of reasons. Uh, one of them is, uh, well, I, I feel a very sort of kindred spirit with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made. So for instance, I mean, not doing the, the slideshows to rack up page views for some type of CPM advertising. That stuff drives me insane. So if it drives me insane, and I assume it drives my readers insane, so I'm not going to do it. Or like you said-

• 2:53:44Maria Popova?

  That's so wonderful that you do that because I think so much of the cultural crap that is out there, not just on the internet, just in general, comes from people who fail to understand that they should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist. So if you're a writer, write the things you want to read. If you're an artist, paint the things you want to paint, you want to see painted. And I, I think the commercial aspect is really warping that. And I really, one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations, from your books to, you know, this podcast, the site, everything, is that there's just this sort of sense that you just want this to exist. It doesn't exist for any other reason than you want it to exist. And I think that's wonderful.

• 2:54:25Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I, uh, that means a lot to me. And I, uh, you know, coming back to the, the right to please just one person, it's, uh, you know, I, I, I think that it's, it's related to that. So in a way, it's, you know, put the things out into the world that you would want to.

• 2:54:44Tim Ferriss?

  Consume yourself or experience yourself, number one. Secondly, just for those people who haven't heard this anecdote, when I was writing The Four Hour Work Week, it was my first book, I still to this day find writing very challenging. And I wish I could say it's gotten easier over time, but for whatever reason, it seems not to have. In the case of The Four Hour Work Week, I came out of undergrad at Princeton and many years have passed, obviously, but when I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kind of Ivy League, you know, where I was trying to use $10 words, where a $0.10 word would suffice and be a lot cleaner. So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted, and this was a major panic attack moment.

• 2:55:28Tim Ferriss?

  I was on deadline, and I remember I was in Argentina at the time. And then I went the other way, and I said, "No, no, no, I have to be loose, I have to be funny." And so I wrote a few chapters that were completely slapstick ridiculous. I mean, it sounded like three studios put on paper. And so I had to throw out those few chapters. And of course, I'm doubling down on my anxiety at this point, and decided at one point that I was just going to have a little bit of yerba mate tea, two glasses of wine, and no more than two glasses of Malbec, and sit down and start to write.

• 2:56:01Maria Popova?

  What is that?

• 2:56:02Tim Ferriss?

  Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America, best known in Argentina, but there are actually some really nice Malbec wines in Chile. They were, as I understand it, it was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe, but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires and has developed this worldwide fame because of its cultivation in Argentina. So there's a lot of, sort of, there's a lot of metaphor there that I also like, but... Drank two glasses of wine, sat down and literally opened up an email client and started typing the four hour work week as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends.

• 2:56:46Tim Ferriss?

  One was an investment banker trapped in his own job and he felt like he couldn't leave because his lifestyle was swelling to meet his income. And then the other was an entrepreneur trapped in a company of his own making. And so these two very specific guys of mine, I started to write with just enough alcohol to sort of take the edge off. And that's how, you know, I was writing in that case to please just two people. But that's, that's the only way I could make it work. Your schedule, so I've, I've read of your schedule, but I'd love to hear the current iteration of that. It seems like you've had a fairly, you have a fairly regimented schedule, which would

• 2:57:30Tim Ferriss?

  make sense if you were putting the number of hours into reading and writing that you do. So what is, what does your current day look like?

• 2:57:37Maria Popova?

  Well, I'll answer this with a caveat. The one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last few years, couple of years maybe is this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and presence and especially in a culture that seems to measure our worth or merit or our value through our efficiency and our earnings and our ability to perform certain tasks as opposed to just the fulfillment we feel in our own lives and the presence that we take in, in the day to day. And that's something that's become more and more apparent to me.

• 2:58:19Maria Popova?

  So I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss routine as some sort of holy grail of creative process because it's just really, it's a crutch. I mean, routines and rituals help us. Not feel like this overwhelming messiness of just day to day life would consume us. It's a control mechanism, but that's not all there is. And if anything, it should be in the service of something greater, which is being present with one's own life. So with that in mind, my day is very predictable. I get up in the morning, I meditate for between fifteen to twenty-five minutes before I do anything else.

• 2:58:59Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up typically?

• 2:59:01Maria Popova?

  Exactly eight hours after I have gone to bed, so it varies.

• 2:59:05Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:59:06Maria Popova?

  I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think, um, I, when I write, because what, or when I, I guess, try to think, what I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts. And in order for that to happen, you know, those associative chains need to be firing. And when I am sleep deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain, um, which is certainly, I'm not unique in that in any way. There's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep. We're almost as drunk if, if we sleep less than half the amount of time we normally need to function. And I think ours is a culture where we, where we, um,

• 2:59:52Maria Popova?

  wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge honor, badge of honor, that speaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is. But really, it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. And I try to sort of enact that in my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep, at least as disciplined as about, as I am about my work, because the latter is a product of the capacities, you know, cultivated by the former. Um, so in any case, so I get up eight hours after I, um, have gone to bed. I meditate, um, I go to the gym where I do most of my, um, longer form reading.

• 3:00:35Maria Popova?

  I get back home, I have breakfast and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles a day and one of them tends to be longer and when I write, I need uninterrupted time. So I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert. Um, so I don't look at email or any, anything really external to the, the material I'm, I'm dealing with, which does require quite a bit of research usually. So it's not like I can cut myself off from the internet or from other books, but uh, I don't have people disruptions, I guess. So anything social. Um, and then I take a, a short break.

• 3:01:18Maria Popova?

  I'm a believer in sort of pacing, um, creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and then you take a short break and then cycle back, you know? Um, and then I, I deal with any sort of admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot. And I resume writing and I write my other article or articles through the evening. I try to have, um, some private time, um, just later in the day, either with friends or with my partner or just, you know, time that is unburdened by deliberate thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought

• 3:01:59Maria Popova?

  in general. And then usually later at night, I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two.

• 3:02:08Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And so a number of follow-up questions. What type of meditation do you practice currently?

• 3:02:16Maria Popova?

  Just guided Vipassana, very, very basic. Um, there's a woman named Tara Brach who, um, she's a mindfulness practitioner.

• 3:02:25Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell her last name?

• 3:02:27Maria Popova?

  B R A C H.

• 3:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 3:02:30Maria Popova?

  And she's based out of DC and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist, then did decades of Buddhist training and lived in an ashram and now she teaches mindfulness, but with a very secular lens. So she records her classes and she has a podcast, which is how I came to know her and every week she does a one-hour lecture and sort of the philosophies and cognitive behavioral, you know, wisdom of the ages. And then she does a guided meditation. So I use her meditations and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life. So I highly recommend her.

• 3:03:14Tim Ferriss?

  Tara Brock.

• 3:03:16Maria Popova?

  Brock, yes. And all her podcast is free. She has two books out too. She's really wonderful. Very generous person.

• 3:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  I will have to check that out. And so you're listening then you have earbuds in when you are or you're listening to audio while you meditate?

• 3:03:33Maria Popova?

  Yes. And it's interestingly, I mean, she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of 2010. It's just one that I like and feel familiar with and it sort of helps me get into the rhythm. So every day I listen to the exact.

• 3:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  Summer 2010. How does that start? How would people recognize it? How does the audio?

• 3:03:53Maria Popova?

  I think the title is, it sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called Smile Meditation. And I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years in other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I, you know, have on and on my broken 3G iPhone without any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod and that's on it.

• 3:04:17Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. That's a great answer. God, I love digging into the specifics. When you go to the gym then? To work out, are you still using an elliptical for that?

• 3:04:28Maria Popova?

  Yes.

• 3:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  You are?

• 3:04:30Maria Popova?

  I do sprints, high intensity intervals on the elliptical.

• 3:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  And are you?

• 3:04:35Maria Popova?

  For cardio and I do a lot of weights and body weights to have too.

• 3:04:39Tim Ferriss?

  You do, alright, but when you're reading, is that on the elliptical?

• 3:04:43Maria Popova?

  Yes.

• 3:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  And what type of device, if any, are you using for that reading?

• 3:04:51Maria Popova?

  Well, I prefer electronic, so I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any PDM viewer because I read a lot of archival stuff. But the challenge, of course, is that because I read so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in cases, rarely possible unless I'm writing about something fairly new. And so in that case, I just go there with my big tome and my sticky notes and pens and Sharpies and various annotation analog devices and I just do that.

• 3:05:26Tim Ferriss?

  Cool, alright, so that leads perfectly into the next question, which is what does your note-taking system look like? And how do you take notes? So for instance, you're really good at using excerpts or quotations, pull quotes, and I found myself asking as I was reading this, like, how are you gathering all of this so that you can use it later? So what does your note-taking system look like when you, in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy?

• 3:05:59Maria Popova?

  So with digital, it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that are, that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. But reading is really, or understanding really, which is what reading should be a conduit to, is a form of pattern recognition. So when you read a whole book, you kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked and they don't usually occur sequentially. So it's not like you walk away with one insight from the first chapter, one insight from the second chapter. It's just sort of this... Pattern of the writer's thoughts that permeate the entire narrative of the book.

• 3:06:45Maria Popova?

  And so especially if you read as a writer, so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that, but ideally wants to record what those patterns and themes are, that sort of reading is very different. And so what I end up doing with analog books in particular, and I've sort of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect, is on the very last page of each book, which is blank usually, right before the end cover, I create an alternate index. So I basically list out, as I'm reading, the topics and ideas that seem to be important and recurring in that volume.

• 3:07:28Maria Popova?

  And then next to each of them, I start listing out the page numbers where they occur. And on those pages, I have obviously highlighted the respective passage and have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it. But it's basically an index based not on keywords, which is what a standard book index is based on, but based on key ideas. And I use that then to sort of synthesize what those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book.

• 3:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I have to geek out on this because I'm so excited now. So as it turns out, with analog books, I do exactly, literally exactly the same thing. I usually start with the front inside cover, but I create my own index. And of course, they don't have to be in order. So you can sort of list them in any, in my particular case, in any order. I also will have sort of two, a couple of lines dedicated to PH. And PH just refers to phrasing. So if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find really...

• 3:08:30Maria Popova?

  Oh, I do that too!

• 3:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really?

• 3:08:32Maria Popova?

  But I call it BL for beautiful language.

• 3:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's so cool. Okay. So there's that, and then I have...

• 3:08:41Tim Ferriss?

  You know, like Q or Q, if they're quotes, so for instance, many books will have quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases. And so I'll have, you know, quotes, I'll just write that out and then colon and then I'll list all the page numbers for that particular sort of category that I'm collecting in the case of quotes. So for when you're gathering this, you mentioned acronyms and shorthand. So besides beautiful language, what are some of the other acronyms that you use?

• 3:09:13Maria Popova?

  Oh, they wouldn't make sense. They're just very private. It's like too long to get into what they stand for. They're just completely my own system.

• 3:09:20Tim Ferriss?

  Is there one other example that you just, just if you could indulge me?

• 3:09:25Maria Popova?

  One that is, I guess, not so much about the contents of that passage as about its purpose is LJ, which is, I have a little sort of labor of love side project called literary jukebox, right?

• 3:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. I've seen it. It's, yeah, it's awesome.

• 3:09:42Maria Popova?

  Oh, thank you. But yeah, so I do these pairings of passages from literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes when, as I'm reading a book, I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that. And maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put LJ next to it. But I want to go back to what you said about the external quotes, I guess, the author quoting another work. I think those are actually really important. And that goes back to your question about how I find what to read. And I mark those types of things. So for the, for the annotations that are specific to that particular book, all of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the, of the pages. But when there's an

• 3:10:27Maria Popova?

  external quote, something referencing another work, I put a tab at the very top with the letter F, which stands for find, if I am not familiar with the word, the work, or just no letter, if I just want to flag a quote from something else that I know of. And I think that's actually very important because

• 3:10:45Maria Popova?

  The phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it, because literature is really, and I say this all the time, it is the original internet. So all of those references and citations and allusions even, they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work. And that way, if you follow those, you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something that you're already enjoying and liking, but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way, I mean directly. And in a way, it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental

• 3:11:30Maria Popova?

  way. And I've often found amazing older books that were, you know, five or six hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which led me to something else, which led me to something else, which led me to this great other thing. So I think that's, that's kind of a beautiful practice.

• 3:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, the serendipity of it is so beautiful when it works out. And I'll, I'll, I'll give a confession, this is really embarrassing, but, you know, since Noah's listening. I came across Seneca, so Seneca the Younger, who's had probably more impact on my life than any other writer. Originally because there, I, I was perusing a number of anthologies on minimalism and simplicity, and Seneca kept on popping up, quote, Seneca, quote, Seneca.

• 3:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  And because it was always one word, like Madonna, or, and this is going to be really embarrassing, or like Sitting Bull, I assumed that Seneca was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good-

• 3:12:41Maria Popova?

  That's too lovely, actually.

• 3:12:43Tim Ferriss?

  I, I assumed he was a Native American elder for probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman. I was like, man, Ferris, you gotta do your homework, pal. You gotta dig in. And then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off the cliff into a lot of his writings. Which I've, I still to this day revisit on an almost

• 3:13:05Maria Popova?

  I, I just revisited um his um The Shortness of Life.

• 3:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so good, so good.

• 3:13:12Maria Popova?

  Which is perhaps the best manifesto, and I had, hate this modern word, um sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally, so the best manifesto for our current struggle with this very notion of, you know, productivity versus presence and how much are we really mistaking the doing for the being, you know, and, and, and it's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago, before there was internet, before there was the things we call distractions today, and, and yet he writes about the exact same things, just in a different form. Yeah.

• 3:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  The exact same things, and the way that, uh, if I'm trying to use Seneca as a gateway drug into philosophy, I, I, I won't use the P word, first of all, with most people, because philosophy smacks of, I think it calls to mind for a lot of people, the sort of haughty pompous, uh, college student in, um, uh, Goodwill Hunting in the bar scene, who's like reciting, you know, Shakespeare without giving, uh, any type of, of credit.

• 3:14:16Maria Popova?

  See, I completely disagree. I actually, I, I agree with the notion that, that those are its connotations today and people have a resistance, but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it and to get people to understand that philosophy, whatever form it takes, is the only way to figure out how to live. Everything else that we take away from anything is a set of philosophies, essentially.

• 3:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  I agree. No, I totally agree. So, but I usually, if I'm gonna lead people there, I try to, to, to

• 3:14:48Maria Popova?

  Lure them.

• 3:14:49Tim Ferriss?

  Lure them in with, with Seneca, because I think he's, he's very easy to read compared to a lot of, say, at least the Stoics, uh, or, or, or that's actually not even fair, compared to a lot of philosophers who, who have been translated from Greek, uh, uh, most of his writing, I believe, was translated from Latin, which tends to be just an easier jump from English. So, um, it's very easy to read, and I, what I tell people is, Start off with some of his letters and you'll find that you could just as easily replace these Roman names like Lucilius and so on with like Bob and Jane or you know pick your contemporary name if of choice and they're all as relevant now as they were then.

• 3:15:33Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to come back to the sort of performance versus presence, which I think of oftentimes as the achievement versus appreciation.

• 3:15:44Tim Ferriss?

  Split or balance or maybe neither, but before we get there, I want to put a put a bow on the note taking with your electronic note taking. So you're using the Kindle app, you're taking highlights. Where do you go from there? Are there any other, what is, what is the sort of workflow look like from there? And are there any, any particular types of software or apps or anything like that that you use often?

• 3:16:11Maria Popova?

  I mean, honestly, I feel like that problem has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way. So the way that I do it is basically a bunch of hacks using existing technologies, but I don't think, or perhaps I'm just unaware, but I don't think there's anybody designing tools today for people who do serious, heavy reading. There just isn't anything that I know. And so what I do is I highlight in the, in the Kindle app on the iPad. And then Amazon has a function that you can basically see your Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page and I paste them into an Evernote file.

• 3:16:57Maria Popova?

  To sort of just have all of, all of my notes in a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific.

• 3:17:07Maria Popova?

  iPad Kindle app Kindle page with my highlighted passage and then email that screen grab into my Evernote email because Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So when I search within it, it's also going to search the text in that image. I don't have to wait until I finish the book and explore all my notes. And, and also, the formatting is kind of shitty on the, on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes. So if you copy them, they paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. So it tabulates each next note indented to the right. So it's sort of this cascading, long cascading

• 3:17:50Maria Popova?

  thing that shifts more and more to the right of the page.

• 3:17:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's horrible. It's like an email thread.

• 3:17:56Maria Popova?

  It's like an email thread, except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all, you know, and so if you want to go fix that, you have to do it manually within Evernote. And, you know, I read, you know, on, on the Werner Herzog book, for example, which is 600 pages, I have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just, there is no viable solution that I know.

• 3:18:24Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay, so let me just, because I, this may or may not help. For me, it was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote. Because I mean, I'm, I'm looking at this list of questions, and I'm not reading entirely off, you know, on script, but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now. And one, one of the things I realized about formatting and transposing things from, say, the, you know, my Kindle page, if you, if you log into your, your Amazon account through Kindle dot Amazon dot com, or

• 3:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  Copying and pasting from many different places is going to, I don't know if you've tried this, but edit and either paste and match style or paste as plain text and it tends to remove all of that headache. I'd say nine times out of 10.

• 3:19:13Maria Popova?

  Yeah, the problem with that, I did try that once, but when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So on every highlighted passage, I also have my own notes.

• 3:19:25Tim Ferriss?

  I see, got it.

• 3:19:26Maria Popova?

  Plus, you know, Amazon's own thing that says, "Add note, read, read at this location, delete note." And so it all merges it and becomes just hideous to just impossible to read.

• 3:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  God, you know, I wonder, I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into TextWrangler, which is used for coding a lot, just to remove the formatting, and then put it into Evernote.

• 3:19:47Maria Popova?

  Yeah, I do that with Coda.

• 3:19:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's true, though.

• 3:19:51Maria Popova?

  But there's gotta be a solution. And the thing is, Evernote, I love Evernote. I've been using it for many years and I could probably not get through my day without it. But it has an API, which means somebody can build this, you know?

• 3:20:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 3:20:04Maria Popova?

  Is there a way to like, I even thought, I mean, I was at one point so desperate and so frustrated, which I think is the, the duo that causes all innovation, you know, desperation and frustration. I, I thought maybe I should just save up some money and offer like a scholarship or like a grant for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me, you know?

• 3:20:25Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great idea.

• 3:20:26Maria Popova?

  I'm still not, I mean, I, I'm still sort of contemplating that.

• 3:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, well, we'll talk about that separately. I think that's something that we, we could absolutely explore. And for all of you programmers, coders out there, please take a look. This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights, I've run into this. You mentioned the Werner Herzog book and having, you know, thousands of, of highlights. Have you run into instances where you'll read an entire book, you're super impressed, or not, but regardless, you have hundreds of highlights, and you go to look at those highlights, and you're restricted to only see-

• 3:21:07Maria Popova?

  Oh yeah, it says like 200 highlights, 81 available, or something like that.

• 3:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so how often does that happen to you? Because that's happened to me, where I've taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff, and then I'm only able to see 25%, and it's so infuriating, and I think it's a limitation that is determined by the publisher.

• 3:21:26Maria Popova?

  Yes, it is, and so I'll tell you why it hasn't happened to me much. It happens to me occasionally, but that's a DRM thing, Digital, for listeners who don't like acronyms, Digital Rights Management, thing that is fairly new, so that is the case with more recently published books. But if you read, you know, the digitized version of, say, you know, Alan Watts, that was published originally 40 years ago, there's no such problem, unless the publisher now is like reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But because I read so much less out of sort of newly published material, I don't run into it often. But you

• 3:22:07Maria Popova?

  know, there is a way to very laboriously, you know, deal with it, which is, you can still open that passage in your Kindle app on desktop, so Kindle for Mac for me, and it will let you highlight and copy those passages, paste them into your Evernote in between the missing parts, but it's obviously completely not conducive.

• 3:22:30Tim Ferriss?

  I have done that, and it's so horrible, because you also get the like excerpted from, da-da-da, like three lines for everyone. So just publishers, if you're listening to this, you are making it harder for people like Maria, who have 7 million uniques per month, to share your stuff. So please, up your threshold. Do you have anybody helping you with brain pickings, or is it just you?

• 3:22:58Maria Popova?

  The actual reading and writing, obviously, is just me, but as of about 10 months ago, I have an assistant, Lisa, who's absolutely wonderful, and she just helps me with admin stuff that has to do with my travel, or email, or scheduling things, that- I feel is weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down. And as you know, I'm sure when you get to a point where the demands are just incomparable with what you can even look at, then you kind of need to have help in order not to either go insane or or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. So.

• 3:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  And was there a particular?

• 3:23:46Maria Popova?

  Oh, and I also have a copy editor, this wonderful older lady I hired to do my proofreading. Um, she's great. I am, that's all I can say. I think proofreading is really, really important and I'm constantly embarrassed if I have a typo, which, you know, as you know, as a writer, you cannot prove your own work. It just, your brain just does not see the errors that were made in the first place. Uh, for the majority of them. And so, and people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or I don't even know. Uh, there's no kind of compassion for the humanity that produces something as human as a typo, right?

• 3:24:27Maria Popova?

  Despite how mechanical the term itself seems, which is sort of ironic. But in any case, so yes, I have my assistant for admin and my copy editor for just proofing.

• 3:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  And what what platform is is, uh, BrainPicking's, uh, on at the moment? What is it? What's the the technology behind it? And I know that, uh, I've heard you mention WordPress before. Is it on? Is it still on WordPress?

• 3:24:49Maria Popova?

  Uh, it is on WordPress. I was gonna make a joke on how about how the technology is called corpus callosum, but, uh,

• 3:24:57Maria Popova?

  the actual technology is, uh, yeah.

• 3:25:01Tim Ferriss?

  That was a very Sam Harris, uh, friendly joke. Um, the, uh, the, so when you're working with, say, uh, your copy editor, uh, do you give your copy editor admin access to WordPress and she'll go in, proofread it, and then schedule or publish? What's the process?

• 3:25:25Maria Popova?

  No, it's it's a very, again, super sort of hacked together process, which is every night I email her the articles from the preview page on WordPress. I just copy that and paste it into a body email. And I send it to her and then she sends me the corrections via email.

• 3:25:43Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 3:25:44Maria Popova?

  I mean, like I said, she's not very, I would say, tech savvy. I mean, I'm sure she's a wonderful learner, so I'm sure she would totally learn how to do it if I gave her admin access. But between that and the fact that I write in HTML, so I really don't like the WYSIWYG. I hate it, actually. I think it's just easier to do it via email, because then she can like, highlight the word and sometimes she would make suggestions that are more stylistic. And I would like to have the final say in those, because very often I want to keep it the way that I have it, because that's just my voice. So I find email works just fine.

• 3:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay, no, I'm always fascinated, because I will use, well, when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also on WordPress, I would use the Share a Draft plugin to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP, which has a, it has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool.

• 3:26:51Maria Popova?

  Oh, that's cool. I should, I should look into that. I think that's what I have too, the WordPress VIP, the WordPress host for WordPress. I don't even know what that function is. I'm kind of, I mean, for somebody who writes on the web, I'm, I don't really, yeah, I sometimes only learn about things through friends.

• 3:27:10Tim Ferriss?

  I think, yeah, that's, that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff. And the, the other option that I've used quite a lot is, and as much as I hate Word, and I really do, I love the track changes feature, and I just find it more user-friendly for a lot of folks than having them use something that's cloud-based, like Google Docs, just because I operate so much offline to try to get anything done.

• 3:27:37Maria Popova?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of people suggest, and what Kai, my producer, actually asked originally, but I do not own Microsoft products on principle, and I just am not gonna just go and deal with it.

• 3:27:49Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay, no, that makes sense. And your assistant, what was, what was the, the sort of...

• 3:27:57Tim Ferriss?

  Defining moment, the straw that broke the camel's back, when you were like, you know what? Like, what was the day where you're just like, fucking enough of this? Like, I need to get somebody stat. I mean, what, when did you actually make the decision?

• 3:28:10Maria Popova?

  It wasn't so much that I made the decision, as the decision was very, um, strongly, lovingly but strongly, sort of pushed on me by my partner, who one day said, "You, you're using so much time on things that are just so mean ill, and you should not..." And, because I was really stressing to a point of just driving myself crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm, I always have been very independent. I, you know, moved away from my parents' house when I was 18, paid my way through school, lived always by myself. And I just had this Emerson-like, you know, sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance that, to a point of pathology, where it was to my own detriment.

• 3:28:54Maria Popova?

  And the notion of outsourcing felt, to me, on some level, um, almost like an admission of weakness.

• 3:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah.

• 3:29:03Maria Popova?

  It's ridiculous.

• 3:29:04Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's true for a lot of people, though, yeah.

• 3:29:06Maria Popova?

  I know, and, and it's the strange thing, the disorienting thing, is that I think we intellectually know that's not the case. That it's actually a lot of strength to be able to delegate and to sort of divvy up control according to a hierarchy of priorities. But on some sort of psychoemotional level, it is just death to, to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, I mean, it's interesting, in terms of how brain picking's evolved, which has always been very organic. So, the, the sort of, you know, eight-year thing that has happened, it went from being a little newsletter that contained five links, no text, like, five links to five things that I found very interesting.

• 3:29:52Maria Popova?

  Um, and then it went to sort of... Five links with a little paragraph about each, about why this thing is interesting and important. And then it was, you know, not, not a little paragraph, but a little like one-page piece. And then it became not one, not five things every Friday, but three things every day of the week. Pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know. And I foolishly and naively thought that I could just have the same sort of operational framework despite the enormous swelling of, of just the volume of the writing. And that's unreasonable. It's completely unreasonable. Um, so at one point last fall, as the sort of seventh birthday of Brain Pickings was approaching,

• 3:30:37Maria Popova?

  my partner was just like, please, like, consider. And, uh, yeah.

• 3:30:43Tim Ferriss?

  How, how, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just, I'm always curious to ask, how did you, how did you find this, the assistant that you ended up with?

• 3:30:53Maria Popova?

  Uh, well, she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant that's had this type of job for about 20 years.

• 3:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, she's just a wonderfully warm and, and just generous person,

• 3:31:06Maria Popova?

  but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic. It's unbelievable. And you always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interests in, in the most magnanimous kind of way towards you, but also the most warmly non, no bullshit way outwardly towards the world demanding things from you. And having this buffer, it's really, really great. Yeah.

• 3:31:32Tim Ferriss?

  And did, uh, was she, how did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected?

• 3:31:38Maria Popova?

  Uh, just a recommendation. She's been working for, um, somebody who's a very trusted, dear person, um, for a long time. So now she works for both of us.

• 3:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the specifics because the way that I found one of my first assistants, and we worked together for many years, was anytime I had a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant, I would say, "Hey, I know this is off-topic, but you've been awesome to deal with. Do you have, you know, twin brother, twin sister, somebody who does what you do as well as you do it that you could recommend to me? Because I need some help." And I just did that over and over again, and eventually one of them said, "Well, actually, I work for multiple clients, so we could talk about it." And that's how we ended up working together. But what was the...

• 3:32:26Maria Popova?

  Oh, the introduction was made by the person. So, I had met her, Lisa, my assistant, I'd met her just socially many times before. And so eventually, when the time came for me to consider, like, she just, like, we set up a meeting, we talked, and she was really into it, and she'd been reading Brain Pickings. And I asked, made sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate, because she's also, I mean, she's a superwoman. Lisa's a superwoman. She is the mother of two kids, one of whom is now her first year in high school, and the other one his first year in college. So, she has that on her plate, too. And, but she's very, like I said, very dogged, very sort of dedicated.

• 3:33:10Maria Popova?

  And she was like, "I can do it, and I'd like to do it." And I was like, "Great, let's roll."

• 3:33:15Tim Ferriss?

  Onward. So, with your assistant, if you were to do an 80/20 analysis of the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time, what are the types, what would those look like? What is the vast majority of her time spent on?

• 3:33:36Maria Popova?

  So...

• 3:33:41Maria Popova?

  A lot of it is, I guess, coordinating travel and things, but I'm trying to really, I mean, I have this new-ish commitment to really not do any speaking at commercial conferences anymore, but to speak to students because I think it's important. And what it takes out of me, which is a lot, speaking takes out a lot of me because I'm a writer and I also don't really recycle talks. I like to write something original. And when it's a commercial conference, it just doesn't add up for me what I get out of it because I usually donate my commissions to the local public library and whatnot. But with students, it is worth my time. If I dissuade even one journalism student from going into buzz-worthy land,

• 3:34:26Maria Popova?

  you know, after graduation, that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking, speaking, I now am getting like all these college requests. And so that takes so much time, especially coordinating, because a lot of them are organized by sort of student volunteers and they're kind of still learning what it means to, you know, schedules and deadlines and advance notice. And so Lisa is sort of wrangling that. And another big part, and I should also mention that the evolution of what I've been able to delegate has been, has sort of organically happened. Originally, I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it because I didn't know how to explain it to her to do.

• 3:35:09Maria Popova?

  But she's a great learner and I'm learning to delegate more. But another thing, because my site runs on donations, I wanna, I sort of make an effort to send handwritten thank you cards to just, at this point, randomly picked donors every month.

• 3:35:30Maria Popova?

  And so I have her sort of export those names and emails from me and just give me like just prepare envelopes and all those types of things so that I could not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing.

• 3:35:42Tim Ferriss?

  And do you operate, do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use soft, other types of software?

• 3:35:49Maria Popova?

  Oh, email, email and text.

• 3:35:51Tim Ferriss?

  Email and text. So no project management software at this point, no sort of Basecamp or Asana or anything like that?

• 3:35:58Maria Popova?

  No, I don't, that would make me feel like some sort of commercial organization, you know, I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things.

• 3:36:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 3:36:09Maria Popova?

  Back to the Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience or the humanity, I guess, of the tension.

• 3:36:15Tim Ferriss?

  What, a couple of, a couple of quick ones. So the first is when you, when you lift, do you tend to have the same workout? What is your, what does your weightlifting look like?

• 3:36:25Maria Popova?

  It's changed a lot. In the last year and a half, I've prioritized body weight stuff heavily, no pun intended. That was actually total inadvertent, this how language, how we think in language. That's so funny. But I prioritize body weight stuff and so I do pull-ups, push-ups and that sort of thing. It also depends on where I do my workout. My gym has, my building has a sort of gym, like a, you know, one of those residential gyms, but I also have a membership at a larger, probably I think the best gym in New York. I love it. But I'm only there a few days a week, so it just depends on where I do it and what I do.

• 3:37:07Tim Ferriss?

  And if you had to pick one, besides the elliptical, if you had to pick one body weight exercise to hold you over, let's say you're traveling for a few months, you can only pick one body weight exercise, what would it be?

• 3:37:18Maria Popova?

  Well, it would be pull-up, but you can't always find a place to do it. So I just do usually elevated push-ups, so my feet on a bench or bed or some, like a step or something and just push-ups.

• 3:37:32Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. A great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted. Bent rose. You know what's actually very helpful for traveling is

• 3:37:47Maria Popova?

  plyometrics.

• 3:37:48Tim Ferriss?

  plyometrics and TRX is actually quite handy. There's a system.

• 3:37:53Maria Popova?

  For some reason, it's just not my thing.

• 3:37:55Tim Ferriss?

  Can't get into it. Yeah.

• 3:37:57Maria Popova?

  It doesn't. The thing is, here's the thing. So if I am forced by circumstances to do a workout that is not my preference, I very much like to be able to do something else while doing it, such as listening to podcasts, which is what I do while I do weights at the gym anyway. And there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just like not great.

• 3:38:21Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 3:38:21Maria Popova?

  So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me when I travel in case there's nowhere to do sprints, which is my plan B for cardio. And then plan C is just jumping, skipping rope.

• 3:38:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You're intense. I love it. The, I remember, the, you know, I wanted to, every time I meet, and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for a very long time, that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who at any point have lived in Bulgaria, I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's not.

• 3:38:55Maria Popova?

  I know nothing about them. I didn't do weight stuff when I was living in Bulgaria.

• 3:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  No, exactly. It's kind of like, you know, like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Ricolet commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff.

• 3:39:08Maria Popova?

  Or else yet, is that guy your cousin?

• 3:39:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. Right. You must know. Like, no, I actually don't. Like, I know I went to X, Y, and Z college, but there are 5,000 people per year. You know, it doesn't, doesn't always work out. You mentioned the donations. I want to talk about the site. So it appears, and I dug around a bit, but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts. Is that accurate?

• 3:39:34Maria Popova?

  I don't have comments. I do have dates. They're in the URL. So the dates.

• 3:39:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they're in the URL, but they're not in the post, they're in the URL structure, but they're not in the displayed post itself.

• 3:39:45Maria Popova?

  Yeah. So the reason for that is because I do think we live in an enormously news fetishistic culture and

• 3:39:56Maria Popova?

  The reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that because we think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed, because all feeds are reverse chronology, and you know, there's an implicit hierarchy of importance to that, we think if it's not at the top, it's not important. And you know, you would understand, you know, writing about Seneca, it really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is, but I think because culture conditions us so much. People, when they see a date stamp, they sort of think, oh, this was like two years old. Oh, and it's really, you know, 2,000 years old. But because a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference, so I constantly get things, this is another thing that Lisa deals

• 3:40:41Maria Popova?

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

• 3:41:02Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years. And if you, if you go to any perma links, if you go, if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog, the date is there in the URL, but also at the very bottom of the post after the related links. So for the same reason, because there's so much bias against older material. And I think some of my older stuff is, I mean, it depends on the person, obviously, in the context, but it's, it's an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate is to timestamp. The comments, did you ever have comments or have you never had comments?

• 3:41:41Maria Popova?

  I did originally. And then I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like her dog does. I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched. Uh, but the comments I was getting, I, I was, I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know, trolling or anything like that, but they were kind of vacant or people trying to plug their own thing or spam and it was taking more of my time that was worth. And so instead I've made my contact information very easily accessible. So if someone has something of substance and urgency to say, which is I think the two things that compel people to reach out, uh, they'll do it via email

• 3:42:22Maria Popova?

  behind their own name and not anonymously. And then, I mean, I do get a lot of, a lot of emails from readers. Um, and those are valuable, you know, but I don't really care for comments. Now the flip side of that is that now that I have the Facebook page having, uh, something mysterious happened with the Bring Pickings Facebook page last fall where it just started growing so fast. I have no idea why.

• 3:42:47Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was gonna ask you about that because if you, if you look at say that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kinda took off.

• 3:42:55Maria Popova?

  Yeah, it was in about October of last year and it went from 250,000 to now, I think, I don't know.

• 3:43:01Tim Ferriss?

  Two point something million.

• 3:43:02Maria Popova?

  Close to three maybe. So more than tenfold in less than a year. I have no idea why. I've done nothing differently. I'm very, I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I know, I get a lot of emails from readers um, elsewhere in the world who actually use Facebook as their primary thing and they're such sweet notes. You know, people who just are stimulated and inspired and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn't be if they hadn't read that piece about some random thing that I read and wrote about. And I think it would be selfish of me to just sort of disable Facebook because I hate it. But the, the point of it is that you can't, you have comments on there. And Lisa, my assistant, actually, that's something I delegated her a few months ago, uh, just to completely

• 3:43:47Maria Popova?

  deal with them. I can't, I can't deal with them. I can't, and, and not for any other reason that I have complete allergy to people.

• 3:43:58Maria Popova?

  Pronouncing their so-called opinions without having actually digested or even engaged with the thing. So people would comment on the basis of like a thumbnail image or the title, make really outrageously inaccurate comments, clearly not having read the piece. And this kind of snap reaction thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I can't deal with it. It's like a psychic drain. Like, I can't even explain. I can't. So, anyway.

• 3:44:29Tim Ferriss?

  So that would explain, that would answer one of my questions, which is in your header picture on Facebook, you have, "This should be a cardinal rule of the internet: end of being human. If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubris to comment on it."

• 3:44:43Maria Popova?

  Yeah. I don't care if it sounds bitchy or anything. The point, I mean, you know, it's interesting, because I think a lot about criticism and the notion of criticism and why it's so hard for anybody. And I don't think that people have a hard time with criticism because another person disagrees with or dislikes what they're saying. They really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood, like the other person does not understand who they are or what they stand for in the world. And 99% of the time, and you actually touch on this in your conversation with Sam Harris, where you say that his ideas are not as controversial as people think when they don't actually understand what they

• 3:45:28Maria Popova?

  are.

• 3:45:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 3:45:29Maria Popova?

  But the main source of anguish is not being seen for who you are, not being understood. And this kind of reactive culture where people comment without taking the care to understand what you're expressing, who you are, and what you stand for, it is so toxic. It is so toxic to readers, to writers, to us as a culture. And I just don't know how to get around it, other than just having instructed Lisa to be just merciless about banning people and deleting comments that are just not... There's no humanity, there's no patience, there's no thinking in them.

• 3:46:08Maria Popova?

  So, I mean, you know, anybody who writes online, I think, feels similarly that this is kind of my home.

• 3:46:15Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 3:46:16Maria Popova?

  And if people come and be idiots in it, then they're not welcome there, so.

• 3:46:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, I actually use the exact same analogy. I say, look, I view my, especially on my blog, I view the comments as my living room. And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like, take your, you know, put your feet up on my table with your shoes on, you're not gonna be invited back, you're gone, you know. So, is your assistant's job, as it relates to Facebook, then primarily calling the herd and just removing the idiots? Or, does she have, what are other instructions, if any? Are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that she responds to?

• 3:46:54Maria Popova?

  No. I don't, I don't really care what people say, again, to the point that if people have something of substance and urgency, they will reach out. And I'm then very happy to hear from actual humans and engage in a human dialogue, which I do. But I really care about, you know, the comments on Facebook. I just don't want them depressing me when I go on the page, because I put my own things on there. You know, Lisa doesn't put the actual postings. And I also don't want them creating a culture that is antithetical to the very reason why I do what I do, which is a kind of faith in the human spirit. I mean, that's where I come from. I am a cautious one sometimes, but an optimist about the so-called human condition.

• 3:47:38Maria Popova?

  And anybody who craps on that without having even given a chance to the thoughts that speak to those ideals, which is what my articles are a record of, then I will want them gone, you know. And so her instructions are just, you know, ban people who are offensive to others, sort of in a vicious way, as opposed to just having rational discourse of disagreement. Ban people who are ignorant and have not read the thing and have some very scandalous, or not even scandalous, sort of contrarian, sensationalist take on it, clearly not understanding the nuance. Because, I mean, a culture of news is, I say often, a culture without nuance.

• 3:48:25Maria Popova?

  Yeah, so that's basically it. Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her task. Just not make me lose my mind over just exasperation and people's impatience.

• 3:48:37Tim Ferriss?

  No, and I really respect that because another reason that I read

• 3:48:43Tim Ferriss?

  brain pickings as opposed to other sites, and I feel comfortable going there, is that I feel it is a stronghold of positivity and optimism in a lot of respects. So, kudos. The email. Actually, before we get to email, I've read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook, which would make sense because you're prolific. If that's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media?

• 3:49:13Maria Popova?

  I use Buffer for Twitter and I use just my hands for Facebook.

• 3:49:21Maria Popova?

  But again, I mean, this goes back to the same inner struggle of I do want to be reading and writing for myself, so why do I have the compulsion to put so much of it out there? And I self-flagellate over that because on some level it does seem like a form of hypocrisy, but then I do think about the people that email me from India and Pakistan and South Africa and Korea and wherever, that actually that's how they connect. And I think if I'm putting in the amount of time that I do into what I do, even if I do it for myself, I might as well just harness that time anyway if it benefits somebody else's journey, you know? And so I do it because of that mostly.

• 3:50:07Tim Ferriss?

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

• 3:50:36Maria Popova?

  Well, I would argue that the benefit, the value... Is not even, I mean, what I do is kind of the antithesis of search. It's a discovery of things that ideally one would not have come across within the usual parameters of one's filter bubble, right? So sort of, a lot of the people that I hear from, for example, you know, just this week, to use the Seneca example, actually, just this week, I heard from this guy who was an IT person, trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and said, "The Seneca, the shortness of life piece, really, really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy, never been interested in it, never looked for it, but it's just cut in the middle

• 3:51:19Maria Popova?

  of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life." You know, and it's kind of, it gives you pause to hear that from people.

• 3:51:26Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, agreed.

• 3:51:30Tim Ferriss?

  On email, the, if you go to your contact page, you recommend emailcharter.org. And I'm very curious to hear if people actually follow the email charter.

• 3:51:49Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of the email that you receive, do people actually pay attention to that and follow the rules?

• 3:51:56Maria Popova?

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

• 3:52:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right, well, I mean, I suppose if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template, "Dear blogger, dear blogger."

• 3:52:35Maria Popova?

  Oh, yeah, I love those, "The dear blogger."

• 3:52:39Maria Popova?

  You know what I get very often, which I think is actually hilarious?

• 3:52:44Maria Popova?

  People who don't even bother to read the name of the site. So they address me, "Dear Brian." Somehow comes Brian and this, and, and, and this, the pinnacle of this was when last year, at one point, I opened my physical mailbox in my building, my home, and I found this bundle from the USPS, but like with an elastic band around it of, of mail for somebody named Brian Pickens, who lives in Long Beach, CA, or used to, I guess. And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me because I guess the guy either moved and the USPS like somehow looked things up. And I don't even know, it was such a, a sort

• 3:53:28Maria Popova?

  of mystery and metaphor for what I deal with online. I was like, well, if USPS does that, how can you ask a publicist not to?

• 3:53:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I used to have a company ages ago called Brainquicken. And I had, I got a telemarketing call one evening, I remember. And this guy goes, hi, sorry if you're, if I'm interrupting, is this Brian? And I go, excuse me? And he goes, Brian? Brian Chicken? And I'm like, Brian Chicken?

• 3:53:55Maria Popova?

  Brian Chicken?

• 3:53:56Tim Ferriss?

  I was like, ah, no, and take me off your list. Goodbye. The, oh God. So on the, on the, on the email and pitching side of things, or just on the pitching side of things, how on earth do you deal with not just cold inquiries, but how do you deal with writer friends or acquaintances who are writers that you don't want to be rude to, who want you to read their books? How do you polite decline that stuff? And maybe, maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is, like, not everyone is, is able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably, if I get 10 books

• 3:54:39Tim Ferriss?

  from decent or good friends, some of them are going to be terrible. And I don't have the time necessarily, or the inclination to read them all. How do you deal with that type of situation?

• 3:54:50Maria Popova?

  Well, I guess you deal first and foremost by controlling not the outcome, but the, the cause, which is your circle of friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround myself with and I'm, I like to think friendly to pretty much everybody that I meet. But my circle of actual friends is really close and really tight and people who are just, you know, when the sky crumbles are gonna be there and we're there for each other. And so with that in mind, I think there is a certain boundary that you have to put up beforehand to, to, to, I guess, manage social expectations in a way.

• 3:55:31Maria Popova?

  Um, and so for those people, my friend friends, in large part, I mean, I should mention that the majority of my close friends, including my, my partner too, are people that I have met just through what I do. So there's already the self-selection of sensibility and ideals and, you know, I, I think we've become a centripetal force for the kinds of people we wanna be and surround ourselves with those types of people. William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal microculture. Uh, and even when you said early on, the kinship of spirit, I think that's so important. So which is a long-winded way to say that when and if those inner circle people put a book out,

• 3:56:11Maria Popova?

  it's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are. And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean, the, the book that we started with, the Scratch and Snip Guide to Wine, Wendy, the illustrator, is precisely that type of person. Somebody who I met through what each of us does and she's now one of my closest human beings, you know? And so of course I'm gonna support her work, but not because I'm being, um, nepotistic about it, but because that's the prerequisite that I am moved by her work and respect it and, and love it. And that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle,

• 3:56:47Maria Popova?

  I don't, I think acquaintances know that there's no such expectation. And when I do get such requests, it's a matter of, well, did the person do their homework in knowing what I actually think and write about? Because very often, I'm sure you get that too, you get pitched things that are just so outside of what you do, in which case I don't even feel compelled to respond. Because if they didn't put in the time to understand what I'm interested in, why should I put in the time to explain to them why this is not a fit?

• 3:57:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I need to embrace that more. I think that's an area where I carry a lot of guilt.

• 3:57:23Maria Popova?

  Guilt, yeah. You know, but guilt, it's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige, and they're both horrible reasons to do things. So often, we would agree as humans, not just you and me, just anybody would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some way, you know? And equally, avoid things because of the guilt thing, or do things because of the guilt thing. But sort of this whole Buddhist thing about aversion, you know, avoidance and aversion, and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is, it's the fear of disappointing somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself, or out of sort of grasping for,

• 3:58:07Maria Popova?

  you know, approval or acclaim, which is what doing things for prestige is. I think either of those are really bad reasons to do things, and yet they motivate us a lot, or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the mind constantly. And it is a real practice to try to decondition that.

• 3:58:24Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. No, I like, I like, I like what you said about why put in the effort to explain why it's not a fit if they haven't done the homework to determine if it is a fit. I think that's a great way to put it. I want to ask, and I know we don't have too much time left, so hopefully sometime, someday, we can do a follow-up part two. I think that'd be a blast.

• 3:58:46Maria Popova?

  Absolutely.

• 3:58:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'll bring some Maul back if you actually drink wine, so I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the donations, I'm very fascinated by the ad-free donation approach. And just to keep it simple, if you had to choose, say, 20% of the options you're currently offering, which would you choose and why? In other words, you have people who...

• 3:59:15Maria Popova?

  What do you mean by the options?

• 3:59:16Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, so I'll explain. Or two or three. So people can make one-time offer, they can make a one-time, single contribution. They can, let me simplify that question, or they can become a member and donate, you know, seven, three, 10, or $25 a month. What I'm trying to ask, without being impropriate or making you feel uncomfortable, is what is working best? When you're asking people for donations, assuming that it's working, if someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month? Or the single contribution versus the membership, or the membership versus the single contribution?

• 3:59:59Tim Ferriss?

  What would your advice be to people?

• 4:00:02Maria Popova?

  Well, I will preface this with a caveat that I use PayPal for donations, and I can, for the life of me, figure out how to actually, like, look at the data and get any sort of real reason. All of it is so antiquated, their export tools and such, and I'm not that interested. I would siphon, you know, days into looking into it. So I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation of it.

• 4:00:23Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah, great.

• 4:00:24Maria Popova?

  And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are also, is also the reason why I don't have an ad-supported site, which is, I just ask myself, what would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad-free site. And how would I like to support that? Well, I'd like to have a few options, you know, just because I don't want to, you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just pulled it out of the hat, basically, with these tiers. And I've just left them on. Since I put them on, they seem to work, you know, whatever. And originally, my sense was that the one-time donations accounted for much more, but I'd never actually analyzed it, because I think...

• 4:01:06Maria Popova?

  I I see the alerts that come from PayPal and sometimes people would send really large one-time donations, like things that are totally humbling and enormously generous. And I think those kind of, you you kind of weigh them somehow as more um than the cumulative sum of the smaller donations. So I thought the one-timers were much more, but then, and I'm pretty sure that must have been the case earlier on.

• 4:01:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:01:34Maria Popova?

  Uh, but, and I've had the recurring ones, I've had the one-time donations for as long as I can remember, for as long as I basically needed to start making money for the site, because by the way, running the site cost me several times my rent. Like, all the costs associated with it, it's like crazy. So at one point, I got to a point where I had to make money. I said, I don't want to do ads, I don't believe in that, I'll have just donations. And I didn't even think of recurring ones at the time, that was years ago. And then, um, my friend Max Linsky, who runs Longform.org, we were having tea, and he said, well, why don't you like push the recurring ones more, because it's working really great for us? And at that point, I had the option, but it was buried somewhere on my, like, donation about page or something.

• 4:02:19Maria Popova?

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

• 4:02:53Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 4:02:54Maria Popova?

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

• 4:03:26Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, no, that makes sense. The, if you had to choose, and of course, this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the dropdown, so you have seven dollars a month, three dollars, ten dollars, twenty-five, if you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose?

• 4:03:42Maria Popova?

  Oh, I have no idea. Probably just the mathematical logical choice, the two middle ones, the three and ten.

• 4:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Cool. No, just very curious about this kind of thing. I think, I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content, and I can't emphasize strongly enough what you just said, which is you, you base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader. In the case of, you know, something with, with text, it doesn't have to be super complicated, it doesn't have to be doing tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself, would this annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it. Would I love this? If so, try it out. And-

• 4:04:29Maria Popova?

  Every decision too has been that way. And actually, in the last couple of years, I've been getting really annoyed, I mean, BrainPicking is a pretty sort of low-fi site, as you can see, it's just very super simple, basic, but I've been getting annoyed that it doesn't load very well on my iPhone when I want to look at something or pull something up to reference, or iPad. And my friend Scott Belski, who runs Behance, he's a great guy, and he's been sort of a very generous donor, just supporting and, you know, and one time, he pulls me aside, that was like, I think in February or March, and he's like, "You know how much I love BrainPicking, but like, the site sucks." He didn't say it in that way, but he was super sweet about it, and then he offered to connect me with this guy

• 4:05:12Maria Popova?

  that he knew that I could hire to do responsive design. And I always have this resistance to making these sort of technological improvements, because then I feel like- I don't want to be a media company, like, I don't want to be a buzzfeed. But at the end of the day, I, as a reader, and as a sort of engager with that experience, was being annoyed by it myself. So now I'm in the middle of releasing like a simple responsive site that is actually easy to read on your phone. And so, yeah.

• 4:05:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's so worth it.

• 4:05:44Maria Popova?

  Despair and frustration prevail again in innovation.

• 4:05:47Tim Ferriss?

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

• 4:06:22Maria Popova?

  Well, since we talked about it so much, the Seneca piece about the shortness of life, it's a fairly short piece. There's a piece I did a couple of years ago, which was less about, it was not about a specific book, just sort of things that I've been thinking about for a long time. This disconnect between purpose and prestige and why we do things. And I forget what it's called. I think it's called "How to Do What You Love", or some other, "How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love", and it was sort of an assemblage of thoughts on that from various sources, as well as my own. And perhaps most of all, a piece that I wrote last fall as, on the seventh birthday, really, of the site,

• 4:07:04Maria Popova?

  which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of reading, writing, and living.

• 4:07:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a great article, and I didn't want to replicate everything in here, so I sort of bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit. But just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone, and I just want to quote Paul Graham here, which you included, which is "Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like", which I think is so astute, and...

• 4:07:40Tim Ferriss?

  In closing, is there any-

• 4:07:41Maria Popova?

  And also, I should just interject and say, any Alan Watts piece, not because my writing about it is so great, or it's not coming from a place of "check me out," it's coming from a place of "check him out." Alan Watts has changed my life. I have written about him quite a bit, so I highly recommend any of those articles.

• 4:07:59Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. Alright, brainpickings.org is the site, guys. Check it out. Maria, any parting advice for this episode, this portion of our conversation, before we check out? Any advice to the people listening out there? Thoughts, parting comments?

• 4:08:18Maria Popova?

  No advice per se, just I guess a comment and a hope, which is that, you know, thank you so much, not just for having me, but for having this show and for doing everything that you do. And I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just, I guess, for lack of a better word, idealism and conviction. And, yeah, thank you for setting an example that way.

• 4:08:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that means a lot, coming from you. And I think you're a tremendous force for good out there in the world, so I hope people check out your work. I hope you continue to do what you're doing. I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull-ups. And we will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show.

• 4:09:05Maria Popova?

  Thank you, Tim.

• 4:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.

• 4:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Cometeer, that's spelled C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R. Cometeer is hyper fresh, expertly brewed flash frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup. Now, I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of flash frozen coffee and I thought,

• 4:10:35Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:12:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:12:43Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:13:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:14:11Tim Ferriss?

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