Ep. 15: Neil Strauss - Author of The Game and 7 New York Times Bestsellers

Neil Strauss has written 7 New York Times bestsellers, including The Game. He's also been an editor at Rolling Stone and a staff writer for The New York Times. In this episode, we discuss life, his creative process, writing, and generally answer the questions: How do you create amazing work? How to you overcome writer's block and other pitfalls? What are Neil's favorite books and movies? How do you edit your work to go from terrible to award-winning? How did Neil become a master interviewer, and how does he do it? What's next? Show notes and links can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Neil is a close friend, and this is one of my favorite conversations we've had together. Enjoy!

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mo kari maka, bochi bochi de na.

• 0:04Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And holy guacamole, do I have a treat for you. I had so much fun with this interview. The guest is none other than Neil Strauss, a close friend of mine, seven-time, I think, New York Times bestselling author. He has written many books, including The Game, for which he's best known, perhaps, Emergency, for which I was a proof reader, and there's a hilarious story behind that that we get into, and many, many others. He has written what many consider sort of the definitive rock memoir or biography, which was The Dirt about Motley Crue. He has written with people, including Marilyn

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  Manson, Jenna Jameson, on and on and on, Rules of the Game. The guy is prolific and he is also, and has been, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, staff writer for The New York Times. Why am I listing off all of these credentials? Because the conversation that I have with Neil is about the creative process. How do you become a creative powerhouse? What are the methods that he uses? What are the tricks that he has up his sleeves when times get tough, when he's on deadline, when he wants to create the next bestselling book, when he wants to write a book that can become a movie, when he wants to create a business? And he's built some very, very profitable businesses, which is something not many people

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  know. So this entire conversation, I hope you enjoy. If you want a part two, if you'd like to hear a part two, please let Neil and I know on Twitter. And two other things. Number one, this episode is brought to you by you guys. I'm not going to browbeat you with advertisers. I want to avoid that, but this thing has to be self-sustaining. The podcast takes time and does take money to put together. So please. Visit the Tim Ferriss Book Club. Go to fourhourworkweek.com/books. I'll give you a second to write that down. It's fourhourworkweek.com/books. This is a book club, kind of like Oprah's Book

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  Club. Every month or two, I put out a book that I think, or I should say I promote, a book that has changed my life, that really never made it into the limelight. A book that never got the attention it deserved. And this ranges from books on investing, to learning, to travel, to philosophy. They're super fun. So check them out. Fourhourworkweek.com/books. And please take a look. That would help the show. Last, for show notes, all of the links, URLs, book recommendations, and so on, from this interview, all you have to do is go to fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, no numbers, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, for all the goodies. And without

• 2:50Tim Ferriss?

  further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Neil. I hope you enjoy the show, and thank you for listening.

• 2:57Neil Strauss?

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

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Now would be a suitable time.

• 3:08Speaker 03

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

• 3:17Tim Ferriss?

  Neil, my good man, welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show. Thanks for making the time.

• 3:21Neil Strauss?

  Cool. Thanks for having me. And congrats on the podcast, by the way.

• 3:25Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks. I am selfishly bringing you into the fold, in part because I want to pick your brain on creative process and interviewing, but we'll get to that. For people who may not be familiar with your work, how many New York Times bestsellers do you have now? Six, seven, 12, 20?

• 3:42Neil Strauss?

  Yes, seven.

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. Lucky number seven. Three have just about killed me. I'm not sure I have more books in me. But you didn't start off writing books, as I understand it. Where did you, what was the path that you took to get to writing your first book?

• 3:59Neil Strauss?

  You know, what's funny is, I recently had my family send everything I'd ever written, just all my old, like, kinda, you know, uh, grade school stuff here. And I thought I just had written my first book later in life than I actually did, but it turned out, when I was in second grade, I wrote a book, and I tried to get it, maybe it's, it might have been a little later than second, maybe fourth grade, however old you are when you're eleven. I actually wrote a book, tried to get it published, sent it out to publishers with a note saying, hey, sent, or, and to agents, and wrote an entire book, which, not only did it get rejected, but I never got a single response back from a single agent or publisher, so it really inured me to rejection. Which is cruel, like, who would not send a letter back to some poor kid?

• 4:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, really. It makes me, it makes me have even less sympathy for the traditional publishing world than I already do, perhaps. But you, you really sort of honed your teeth, or cut your teeth, I guess the expression is, as a journalist, right? New York Times and other places?

• 4:55Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, yeah, I wrote for the New York Times for, like, ten years in Rolling Stone, for, like, ever.

• 5:00Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, speaking of rejection, you have, I remember, a letter, I believe from Phil Collins, framed on your wall?

• 5:06Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, yeah, I have, yeah, I, I was, I had a review of Phil Collins' concert, and it wasn't that good, it was, it's at the New York, it was, and I was really trying to be gentle in the, in the review, but I guess he got upset by it, and I get in the mail this two-page handwritten screed, and the last words are, "Well, Neil, fuck you, Phil Collins."

• 5:24Tim Ferriss?

  Was, wasn't it on, like, Hotel Stationery, if I remember correctly, or something like that?

• 5:28Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, it was from the Peninsula Hotel, so I called his publicist, just to make sure that it wasn't like a fake, and know he was there, staying at the Peninsula Hotel. And I think later on TV, he said that he had, like, someone told me, I don't know if you regretted writing that, writing, writing this letter. And it's funny, because, you know, I did a book, my interview is called "Everyone Loves You When You're Dead," and it just really goes to show you that everybody, everybody out there who's succeeding on a high level in this culture, has this persecution thing going on. No one I've interviewed doesn't feel, if you really get down to it, feel like they're not respected by their peers, they're not respected by the press, nobody understands them, no one understands what they're doing. And, and we're talking not, you know, even beyond Phil Collins' level, like Chuck Berry level, who invented rock and roll, like, and it seems that, that, you know, as long as you're living, and it depends on what you pay attention to, you will, you will always

• 6:13Neil Strauss?

  get criticized as you're doing great things, and the greater they get, the greater the criticism becomes.

• 6:17Tim Ferriss?

  How have you, or rather, how is your approach? Because I'd love to dig into sort of the nuts and bolts of how you approach the creative process. How has your writing changed, if at all, from when you were on deadline, writing pieces for The New York Times, and let's just assume the piece is on the shorter side, and book writing? Because one thing that's always struck me, and it's given me a lot of insecurity, is that I do feel like I get writer's block, and it can last for extended periods of time. But when I talk to my friends who are trained journalists, they have just seemingly eradicated the belief, the concept of writer's block from their minds. They're like, "Look, I don't have a choice. I have to have this in by 5 o'clock. I don't have the luxury of thinking about writer's block."

• 7:02Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, how has your process changed? And what are your recommendations to people who are trying to really write something substantive for the first time?

• 7:10Neil Strauss?

  So, I will say something which is this, which is, writer's block does not actually exist. And I'll tell you how I know. I was speaking to a group, and I thought, hey, I'm doing an exercise. And I had them write something really challenging. I said, "Your first sentence, I can give you guys the first sentence I want you to write, the most interesting first sentence you can possibly write. So interesting someone has to read the second sentence." And then I took them through maybe five sentences, each one challenging. "This sentence, I want you to write something that makes somebody feel something emotionally." "Now, I want you to tie this sentence back." And I made it really challenging, and I gave them just a few minutes for each sentence. Everybody completed the exercise. Everybody in the room. Even people who aren't writers, people who are professional writers, people who are screenwriters, people who, you know, think that they're not writers. And it proved to me that there's no such thing as writer's block.

• 7:53Neil Strauss?

  Writer's block is almost like the equivalent of impotence. It's the performance pressure you put on yourself that keeps you from doing something you naturally should be able to do.

• 8:01Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 8:03Neil Strauss?

  So, writer's block, the reason you don't get writer's block as a writer because you have a deadline and it has to be in and you have no choice. But if you sit there and you think this piece has to be the ultimate article or the ultimate book ever been written, and my entire self-esteem is wrapped up in this, and this is me, and the more, the bigger of a story you make up about what you were doing, the bigger the block will get. Because it's all, it has nothing to do with the talent of writing, the skill of writing. It's all completely a... Performance anxiety.

• 8:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I read a quote recently, which I thought was very applicable to me anyway, because I have a tendency to put like the weight of the world on my shoulders when I'm trying to write things, which doesn't help. And the quote was, "The essence of creativity is fucking around."

• 8:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I think there's, I think there's some truth to that, but when you're writing, to avoid some of that pressure, I know we've talked about this before, but for people who haven't heard this, because it was a long time ago, you do a number of different drafts or revisions, and there are four different people. Could you just expand on that?

• 9:06Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, like I would say that if I can give like one tip that will help anyone get their things done, is when you start writing, just write to the end, just write to the end. The only time, when I start writing something, I try to get a nice first couple pages or a nice couple first paragraphs, because it's just a nice little balance, a nice little sort of weight to drop the rest of my book or project on. So you can spend some time on that, but when you're done, just write to the end, just get it all done, get the story out there, because the truth is, it's not really till you get to the end of what you're writing, that you really sometimes even know what it is, or where it's going, or what it's going to become. So you just write to get to the end, and your first draft is only, this is for you, no one's ever going to see it, so you don't have to worry about it. You're not going to turn it in, you're not going to show it to friends to evaluate, because it's only for you.

• 9:49Neil Strauss?

  And the fun part about that first draft is when you're done, somewhere in that mess of words you just wrote, the entire book, the entire book is in there, and you don't have to deal with anything else. You're done with your notes, because you put them all in there. All your thoughts are in there, somewhere in that mess is your book, and now you just have to carve it and shape it into the actual book. So my first draft is always for me. And, and, and but, and that's the easy part, by the way, the easy part is the first draft. The tough part is the second draft, because the second draft is for the reader. Is this, is this what you wanted me to talk about?

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted you to mention.

• 10:19Neil Strauss?

  So yeah, the second draft, so the second draft is for the reader, so here's the thing, your life may be really fascinating to you, but most of it is really boring to somebody else. You know, or your ideas may be really fascinating to you, and maybe you've come by them, worked really hard to get to those ideas, or you've, you've suffered and agonized, and this thing is going to change everything, but sort of it's just boring to other people. It's interesting to you, but it's boring to other people. And you have to have a filter on that says, this is what's interesting, and this is what's boring, this is what's repetitive, this is what's new. So the second draft is where the real pain comes in. And I literally, the book I'm writing, I just cut out a hundred twenty-five page chunk that took me Months of research and months of writing and it had to go and it's a better book for it.

• 11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the 125 that you cut, what is the total page count now?

• 11:09Neil Strauss?

  The total page count right now is 675 pages.

• 11:12Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit. Okay, so you but you.

• 11:14Neil Strauss?

  By the way, it's less than a book, but that's how much it is on a computer screen.

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. All right. So you cut out, you know, a good, say, fourth or third of the book at this point, which was my experience with The Four Hour Chef. I mean, I cut 250 pages from The Four Hour Chef and it was still a monster.

• 11:31Neil Strauss?

  And that was just a discreet chunk. There are other parts I've cut too, so I've probably cut out five or 600 pages. In this case, it's usually not that brutal. But you know what? And I had to write it there. Here's the crazy thing. And just tell me if I'm getting too esoteric, because I love talking about the creative process in writing. But this is the crazy thing, okay? And I hope that I can say this in a way that people understand will change what they're doing. The book is smarter than you. In other words, I'll sit down to write a book with an intention to write a book about a certain topic. And I'll sit down, I'll start writing it, and I'll read it, and I'll be like, you know what? When I write the truth down on paper and I look at that, I get a kind of clean perspective. And so a book I'll sit down with the intention to write, that book, I have to let that book become something else sometimes. And that's the right book.

• 12:14Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. No, I've been looking at screenwriting a lot recently and I heard a quote, which is not always true, of course, but I found it very insightful as sort of a fortune cookie concept, which was you don't know the first sentence of your book until you've written the last sentence.

• 12:30Neil Strauss?

  That's true.

• 12:31Tim Ferriss?

  Let me drill into one of the things you said, which is the second draft who's for your reader. Are you actually taking the first draft and allowing other people to read it? Or are you putting on your hat of the reader and pretending to be the reader with their eyes as you read what you've done?

• 12:48Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, no one will ever see the first draft. And I hope if someone saw it, I mean, I would think it would be unpublishable and embarrassing. And yeah, this first draft, nobody sees.

• 12:58Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 12:58Neil Strauss?

  And the second draft is, I mean, here's the other thing. I think the art of succeeding in anything in life is the art of empathy. And this is your empathizing with whatever your general idea of a reader is. And my reader is never somebody who is a already a reader. My idea is just, hey, who is, what is somebody? My reader is me as a reader, probably. You know, it's me reading a book and thinking, oh, my God, will this guy just get on with it? Or reading a book and thinking, you know what? This guy is like not even living up to what he's writing and saying he's doing. He's a total hypocrite or whatever I'm thinking when I'm, when I'm reading. So my reader is just kind of almost me, the way I would read a book critically.

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And what's the next revision?

• 13:35Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, so, so, yeah, so that draft, and again, that's, that's a tough draft. That's when those, all those phrases, kill your babies and let go of these. That's, I think, the art of writing is they really get the revisions for me.

• 13:45Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 13:46Neil Strauss?

  And, and then I've done, I've got a book and I feel like it's a great story. The third draft is for the haters. So the idea is with the third draft is, okay, I've written the story. The story's really interesting, but there're gonna be people who have an opposite viewpoint. They're gonna be, you know, press and critics reading it. There's gonna be, they said, I'm never, I'm never gonna cater to them. I'm not gonna change my point of view. I'm not gonna change my ideas. I'm not gonna change what I stand for. I'm not going to censor myself ever. But what I will do is make it, do my best to make it immune to criticism. In the sense of, A, I'm gonna make sure that my facts are, are iron tight. I'll always hire maybe one or two or three fact checkers because if somebody can just find one weakness, you know? That's it. They can just, they can throw out the baby with the bathwater. He was wrong about that. He knows nothing.

• 14:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 14:31Neil Strauss?

  So, but, but the second more important thing is, and I always use Eminem as an example. You can't really criticize Eminem because he's already, in his songs, he already sort of impersonates the critics and then answers them. So I really want, there's nothing that anyone, that many people have said about any of my books that are already really actually answered in a book or accomplished in some hopefully self-aware way. So I really wanna sort of answer their critics, their questions, their, their critiques in there in a way that's still kind of fun and entertaining. So that's sort of the idea of maybe hater-proofing it.

• 15:00Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I-

• 15:01Neil Strauss?

  And it's okay, by the way, you always get haters, but you want your haters to be wrong.

• 15:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right, you have to have a fortified defense against criticism warranted and unwarranted, right, unreasonable and unreasonable criticism. Could you give an example from one of your books? I know how fucking secretive you are, so you're not gonna tell me about, you're probably not gonna dig into the details of the new book, but let's, maybe a historical example.

• 15:25Neil Strauss?

  I'll give you a simple example. Writing The Game, which is the book where I spent two years in this secret subculture of pick-up artists. And obviously, you know, I'm writing it, I'm writing the book for, for the book that I would have needed, you know, in college, in high school, and the book that I, that maybe would have made me feel a little less lonely growing up, and also, you know, trying to make it fun and entertaining and mythological and all that kind of stuff. Mythological in the sense that all my books, I try to have an underpinning that's a, that's a, then we can get back to that later, I try to have an underpinning in the books, it's a great story arc. But then I read it, I wanna, I wanna read it from the point of view of, of somebody who, maybe is not my audience, of, of a woman who's found it in her, you know, husband's

• 16:08Neil Strauss?

  drawer, or boyfriend's closet, or maybe just a, someone I'm writing for Jezebel or one of those blogs, and to think, okay, if they actually read the book, can I write in such a way that they really don't find fault with the book itself? There can be fault with the characters, but not the book itself.

• 16:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:25Neil Strauss?

  And so I went through, and any time a woman was referred to in a way that I thought was objectifying, you know, I would just kind of make it, make sure that there was nothing that felt, you know, that woman, if somebody was not rated by State of Numbers, or every time you described them, you're not describing a certain body part. And it's actually just smart.

• 16:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 16:41Neil Strauss?

  Because nobody wants to read that.

• 16:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right, definitely.

• 16:44Neil Strauss?

  So that was one way of going through, and just saying, hey, you know what, let me read this, so, so you're kind of like, the first book you write from your perspective, the second maybe you write from your perspective as a reader, even more so than an ideal reader, I think, because if it's found interesting to you, it's gonna be interesting to nobody. And the third, you kind of put on different hats, okay, what's a, you know, a feminist reading, reading The Game? Another example is I read through The Game, and I thought, I wish there was a female character in this book, but it's based on my life, and I really wasn't in that community, there wasn't really a strong female character, I had a relationship outside of the woman I ended up dating at the end. So I couldn't do that, so I thought, you know, it needs a female point of view, so, but before each section, I put a, kind of a counterpoint quote from a feminist thinker, to just say, hey, there's another point of view, and this is what it is.

• 17:27Neil Strauss?

  So, in that last draft, you're putting on different hats of, maybe people who are not your audience, and how are they gonna read the book?

• 17:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, that makes that makes perfect sense and I take a similar approach. I often try to address as many of these points as possible in my introductions or prefaces.

• 17:42Neil Strauss?

  Right.

• 17:43Tim Ferriss?

  That is to say, for instance, in The Four Hour Body or The Four Hour Chef, I'll say, many of my conclusions are based on the following assumptions and the following process. Like, and then to, at least for that type of book, to say, it's very likely, almost certain, that not everything in this book is 100% accurate. So this will evolve as the book evolves and reaches more people. Just, again, to deflect the criticism that it hasn't been, let's say, you know, 100% verified. Because in some cases, there is, there are theories, there's speculation, whatever it might be. But addressing that early, because realistically, like, if people start reading the book, where are they gonna start? Typically, in the beginning, right? How do you incorporate readers?

• 18:24Neil Strauss?

  And just to, just to sort of clarify something, which is, when Tim is doing this or I'm doing this, what you're doing is, a book is like a little world, or it's like a software program. You're debugging it. It's not, we're like, we're like, oh no, we don't want to get criticism. Of course, we get a lot of it and, and some it deserves, some it not deserves. But what we're trying to do is create a, create a program that doesn't have bugs in it because, you know, at least in the old book model, you didn't get to do a version two. Now, now you can do that with Kindle and stuff. But we're trying to create a, you know, trying to create a completely self-contained world that has no bugs.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, definitely. And I think, just like software, you know, if you want everyone to be your fan, no one's gonna be your fan, because you'll have to

• 18:59Neil Strauss?

  So true.

• 19:00Tim Ferriss?

  dilute it to the point, like, if no one is going to have a negative response to your book, it's very unlikely that anyone will have a strong positive response. And you have to kind of defend against that and make sure that you're focusing on how many people get it and not how many people don't get it. But, to that point, how do you currently incorporate feedback from other readers? Say, writers, people who are proofreading. And the reason I ask, people might find this amusing, is I remember proofreading parts of Emergency. And the lengths that you went to, with me, now granted, we've known each other for a long time now. And I just remember going to like this hotel, I don't know why you were working out of a hotel, we can talk about that.

• 19:42Tim Ferriss?

  And the only reason that you gave me parts of the book were because I said, you wouldn't tell me what the book was about, and then I, then I just threw out a Hail Mary and I said, what's the book about? Something related to five flags? And I remember that, that freaked you out. And you're like, wait, wait, did somebody tell you? And then you would give me something like forty to fifty printed out pages at a time in a like a FedEx folder. And then I would have to bring those back before I could have the second like set of fifty pages. So how are you currently doing that? Are you doing it in a very? And by the way, I agree, maybe you can expand on this, but like that memes get released accidentally and you have to be very careful about that. Because books take so goddamn long to make, right? You don't want to

• 20:24Neil Strauss?

  Exactly.

• 20:24Tim Ferriss?

  Like prematurely release this idea virus so that you can't harness it later. But how do you have people, other people, if you do, proofread your stuff and provide feedback?

• 20:36Neil Strauss?

  This is a funny thing that I'm doing right now, which is they come over to the house and they read it as much as they can tolerate and then they come over to the house another day. And the second reason for that is the books haven't had a legal, haven't had the legal read yet. So a lot of, you know, a lot of my books are stories, they're true to life stories. And when I'm writing from life, I really use the real names when I'm writing the first draft and the real identifying details and characteristics.

• 20:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 20:56Neil Strauss?

  Before the lawyers get their hands on it. So I don't want it to float around because I'm doing a big thing right now. So hopefully no one in my book listens to this, but of course. So my great cop, I just want to write about somebody. I usually say, oh, don't worry, you were a cop as a character. I use piece of you and piece of someone else so that when they read it, they can say, oh, those good parts must be me and the bad parts are obviously the other person. But you know, I, A, I just, I kind of write it all down with real people's names and identifying details and I don't want that to get out because I either A, I'm respecting their privacy or they're, or don't want them to see me.

• 21:26Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. The people who come over and read as much as they can tolerate. So I remember doing something very similar for one of your books, might have been your last book.

• 21:34Neil Strauss?

  Right.

• 21:34Tim Ferriss?

  How are you choosing the people you have proofread your stuff? Like what, maybe you could just give us, you don't think you have names, obviously, but like what types of people do you ask to read your stuff? Yeah, what's your process?

• 21:43Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, so the truth is. It doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be, say, someone like yourself who's an accomplished author and has been on the bestseller list. I'm just trying to get as many different people to read it as possible, who are willing to, who are willing to read it. So, a lot of people think, you know, I've never hired, let's say, you know, hired, the hardest thing, I think the hardest thing to find than a writer, a good writer, is to find a good editor.

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Neil Strauss?

  So, as you know, so, I really just have as many people read as possible. I have a process, and I'll, I'll share this process with you because I think it's good not just for writing, but for getting any kind of feedback and criticism in life, not just about a project you're doing, but about yourself. Which is, this is the way, this is the best metaphor for it. It's a catcher's mitt, I'm trying to remember who told me, I think it was a guy named Brent, and this is, he kind of had this basic concept, which is, it's a catcher's mitt, so when someone gives you feedback, you catch it in your catcher's mitt, then you look at it, and one of three things are possible. It's true, if it's true, then, then I put it in my head, right? The secret to life is not to take it personally, obviously, so, any criticism is criticism on your technique, not on you. You know, people personalize stuff so easily, so you catch it before you're, you take it and you look at it. If it's true, you insert it. If it's not true, you throw it away.

• 22:50Neil Strauss?

  And if you're, if it's a maybe, if you're not sure, if it's a maybe, you just keep it in the mitt, you show it to a couple other people, you know, hey, Tim, hey, so-and-so, what do you think of this? And then you, then you reevaluate and decide yes or no. But here's the best stuff. The best stuff is, you get a piece of feedback, say you read a book, you tell me something, I'm like, you know what, I don't think that's true. Then, whatever, my wife reads it, nah, you know what, I think that she's wrong, and then I get it from one or two other people, and then I, then instead of throwing it away, I'll look at it again, and that's when you get the real truth is. So, the more people you can have give you feedback, and there's a piece of feedback you reject that keeps coming back to you, it's time to reevaluate that, and then you can get a real, real epiphany that changes you. That's where growth is.

• 23:29Tim Ferriss?

  How many people do you typically have proofread a given chapter in a book before it goes to, say, before you get to kind of pick lock, you know, before you, before you get to the book being locked and done as a manuscript?

• 23:42Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, so, yeah, so there's two faces. It's so fun, because it really is like, people think I've written a book to the end and it's done, you're really only like a quarter done at that point.

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Neil Strauss?

  But it feels good, it feels good, you can have a small celebration, and by the way, when you're done, don't take too much time off of it, you gotta get right back to it right away, because otherwise you're gonna forget, you know, doing a book or a screenplay or a big project, there's a lot of information to hold in your head, it's a tight thread.

• 24:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a lot of connective tissue that you forget that isn't in the book, but that you need as glue to kind of hold it all in your head.

• 24:08Neil Strauss?

  Exactly, and if you go away for, say, three weeks to get back, it'll take you a week or two to get that, get those connections going again. And let's talk about a little time management later because every time you're interrupted when you're doing something creative, it takes you 20 minutes to get back to the state before that phone ring and that person asks you that question. So, but back to the, so there's two stages. One is, in the early stages, maybe when I'm still in the second variation, the reader variation, I'll have a couple of people just read it through so I can just see if it's as kind of test readers, so I can make sure it's engaging and not boring, or maybe there's a part I'm not sure about, man, this feels too long. So I'll have a few people, two or three people come in and read it, but then when I'm, feel like I'm all done and it's being edited at the parpa columns in my case, and it's being edited, then I'll kind of print it out fully and have some people read it from front to

• 24:51Neil Strauss?

  back, and really as many people as will tolerate and get as many, as many feedback and comments and criticisms as I can. And there are a few people, like yourself and a couple of other people, who I will always give it to as sort of like, kind of, people whose opinions I'm gonna take a little, you know, a lot more seriously than my, uh, the cable repairman. If they'll read it, I'll give it to them. And, and you know what? It's more important, if it works for him, it may be more important than if it works for, say, you or another author's readers.

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  Well, definitely, because it's tough for a lot of authors to take off their editor's slash book writing hat. They go into the weeds right from the outset as opposed to just reading the book as a reader, if that makes sense. But one approach that I took with the last two books that seemed to work pretty well, I do think The Four Hour Chef tried to do too much. I think it could have been four or five books very easily and it would have made the positioning of each of them a lot easier, but...

• 25:43Neil Strauss?

  Right. And by the way, that's my thing, I'm still upset you didn't take my feedback on it.

• 25:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Neil Strauss?

  I have one big piece of people, it's too hard, you were too invested in it.

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Neil Strauss?

  I mean, you were too far along in it, but I always think, I really feel, I was, I feel like, yeah.

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  It should have been multiple books, and who knows, maybe they'll get split up at some point in the future, because they could be. But where I was gonna go is, I typically give proofreaders three to five chapters. My chapters tend to be pretty short and they're modular, so that'll usually suffice. And then I'll always ask, you know, what was your favorite chapter? If you had to pick just one to stay in the book, which would it be and why? And then if you had to get rid of one, which would it be and why? And what I've found really helpful personally is, if anyone loves a chapter, it stays in, end of story. Like, if someone over the top loves a chapter, it stays in. If someone dislikes a chapter, I then need a consensus to justify taking it out unless I feel the same way. Does that make sense?

• 26:36Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, it's, I always do that too. It's so good because yeah, you're looking for criticism. I'll also say, Mark, what you thought, what really moved you, you thought was funny, or you wanted to underline. And then I'll be careful about throwing, throwing that out. That's, that's a great point.

• 26:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Neil Strauss?

  And it's true also with, uh, with Everyone Loves You When You're Dead, which was an anthology. It was an anthology of all my favorite moments from my favorite interviews. And with that, I probably, you know, once again, had maybe a thousand interviews I had cut down. And I'd have people come over, I'd have them give them a, do a rating system. And I had a whole tile and I'd see what rated the highest. And here's the thing that people often don't get, and tell me if this is true for you as well. You know, you often talk about testing a title on, on Facebook or Google AdWords back when that made more sense.

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:16Neil Strauss?

  And you talk about testing it, but tell me if I'm wrong here, but this is how I do it, which is that's just one variable. It doesn't mean, oh, this tested the best, I'm gonna do this. It's one input. Okay, there was testing, there was, there's your own intuition. There's your kind of what other experts think, there's what friends think. And you put that all into the, into the mix versus saying, hey, this just tested well, it's the only, and then that must be right. And I'm sticking with that no matter what.

• 27:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, def- definitely. And I think because the testing was maybe unique at the time that started spreading around as, as a story about the four hour work week. I think people miss the context, which is I only tested titles that I could live with from the outset. So you shouldn't test like a cyborg and end up with the title that you hate and then use that. Because that will ultimately affect the success of the book. And secondly, most books fail. You could do everything right and the book could fail. Do you want to, can you live with the title you hate, even if the book might fail? And the answer is you shouldn't have to. So you, you need to first pick, uh, sort of a subset before you test of titles or content or chapters that you can live with, and then you do the testing.

• 28:22Tim Ferriss?

  The other thing that, um, just on the, on the time management for a second, then I want to ask about interviews is, like you said, it's not a question of do you have the time to do something like run to FedEx and mail something off? The question is, can you afford the interruption, right? And there's, there's a great article by Paul Graham, he would call it the essay. I think it's just the makers versus the managers' schedule and how for, for a maker, whether it's a programmer or a writer or a musician, if you're in the flow and you get interrupted, it might take you, like you said, 20 to 60 to 90 minutes just to get back to the place where everything that's spread out around you makes sense again. There's a huge cost interruption and I mean you go pretty much completely off the grid.

• 29:03Neil Strauss?

  Right.

• 29:04Tim Ferriss?

  And have some retreat spots and I mean we actually, I remember when you were working on your last book and I was working on the Four Hour Chef, we had some retreats which were really, really helpful. On the interview stuff, because I'm of course trying to get better at interviewing.

• 29:16Neil Strauss?

  Can I mention a couple of things for time management, because there's a couple of things that are just so good.

• 29:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, yeah, definitely.

• 29:20Neil Strauss?

  And it's okay to add no investment in whatever in this, but there's one computer program that's probably saved my life, it's been the best investment I've ever made, the 10 bucks or whatever it costs.

• 29:27Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 29:28Neil Strauss?

  I don't know if you have it, do you have freedom for the computer?

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  Freedom, I use something called Rescue Time and a few others, but Freedom is a fantastic app, absolutely.

• 29:35Neil Strauss?

  It's so simple and I think the great thing about it, it's my favorite program in the world, which is it says, "How many minutes of freedom do you want?", you put in whatever it is, 120 minutes of freedom, and then you're completely locked off your internet, no matter what for that amount of time. So as soon as I sit down to write, the first thing I do is I put on Freedom, because you're saying you're writing, you're working, you want to research something, right, you research something and then you get stuck in a clickbait, you know, rabbit hole.

• 29:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 29:59Neil Strauss?

  And what you can do is you can save up all the things you want to research and just research them when that time expires and you'll find it's so much more efficient. And now I go a little more hardcore, which is because I'm on a real deadline and I'm in an even bigger, heavier deadline, which is using, I think right now I use Entego Family Protector, but there are plenty of places, you know, there's those children's monitoring things and basically I have my wife put in a password and I can only get online from 5 to 6pm every day and from 11 to midnight, that's the only time I can get online, period. And it is great, you will never answer emails faster and more efficiently and productively when you know you only got an hour to do it.

• 30:33Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing, that's a, what was it, Entego Family Protector?

• 30:37Neil Strauss?

  Entego, yes, Family Protector, and again, I don't know the password, so if there's some other, if an emergency that comes up, like we were going to do this on Skype, I would have to have her go type in the password, I don't know it, yeah.

• 30:47Tim Ferriss?

  I was wondering why you didn't want to do this on Skype, that's hilarious, okay, now it makes a lot more sense.

• 30:52Neil Strauss?

  So the bigger problem is not other people interrupting you, it's you. You are the enemy you're fighting. Because as soon as something gets challenging, the first thing we want to do is go do is go do something else. And if you stay there, you can work through it or pop through it. But as soon as something gets tougher or challenging, the first thing we'll do is find something else we have to do that's not as big or not as important, because we just don't want to, we're trying to conserve our energy. It's the way we are as well.

• 31:13Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I remember I was looking at a book on nonfiction writing, written by Ayn Rand. And I think one of the chapters was called "The White Tennis Shoes." And basically, the point was, writers will do anything to avoid writing. And if, she said, if there are white tennis shoes, like within your visual field, that have one blemish on them, you will find a way to rationalize cleaning those white tennis shoes instead of doing the writing you're supposed to write.

• 31:39Neil Strauss?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Tim Ferriss?

  So you have to sort of build systems to protect against your lesser self.

• 31:44Neil Strauss?

  Right, and you have to find out, so yeah, and it's a great analogy, like you have to find where your weaknesses are. So whatever your white tennis shoes are, you have to make sure they're nowhere in your eyesight, in that space in which you write. You have to have the sacred space, the cave you go to, and this is your sacred space. What at some points, and when I can afford it, I don't even let anyone in that room. I don't want anyone's energy in that room, no one's even allowed in there, whatever it may be. You have to create your sacred space, there are no clocks in your sacred space, because there's no time in your sacred space. No one's allowed in there. If there's something really important, they can flip a note under and you can answer what you want. No one's allowed in the sacred space.

• 32:14Tim Ferriss?

  So, on the subject of productivity.

• 32:18Neil Strauss?

  No one's gonna want to write when we're done.

• 32:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:20Neil Strauss?

  I gotta be mid-jerk to everybody.

• 32:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, I mean, the first piece of advice, I get contacted by a lot of would-be writers, who are actually good writers in shorter form, oftentimes. And they'll ask me, most, this is where I know things are headed for, for problems, is they'll ask me about all the marketing stuff first. And then they'll tell me that they're gonna write a book part-time in three to four months. And I try to discourage everyone from doing a book unless they can allocate at least a year to it, assuming full time, Monday to Friday. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts because I think a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all.

• 33:00Neil Strauss?

  I hundred percent agree. I think that first of all, yeah, the greatest distraction people have, and I'm glad you keyed into that, is when you start thinking about the marketing, why you're still writing, don't even, I never think about the marketing or the promotion or any of that stuff until the books actually create a part of the finish. Don't, that's just a distraction for creativity and it'll hurt your creativity because that's going to start giving you writer's block because you're thinking too much about the audience, the reception, is it going to succeed? But the second thing is, I was always inspired, when I was working with Judith Regan at Harper Collins, there was a writer she had that did a book on like, it was whatever, maybe it's 10 years ago, whatever, the some famous court case, Amber Heard, is that, Amber, no, Amber, I don't know what it, I don't remember the court case, but I'm sure a thousand listeners know what it is, or something, anyway, one of those horrible court cases where somebody was famous

• 33:44Neil Strauss?

  for five minutes and she had to get the book out. Amber Heard, I think, is a model. So, so, so they, she had a writer, he wrote it, he literally wrote it in a week. This this challenged me. So, so he literally wrote the book in a week. He just typed it out as she was talking, he just typed it out, then he edited it, got it in, hit the New York Times Bestseller list. And so it inspired me to think, how fast can I write a memoir? So Joel Stein from Time Magazine was writing about the Sarah Palin book. So he called me up, he's like, I want you to write my memoir in the quickest amount of time possible. And I said, awesome, we're going to do this in half a day, come over for a couple hours, I'll write as you talk, I'm going to send it to my designer, have the cover, the book, the designed book by the end of the day. And so I'll find, I'll get you the link, but he, we put this in time and he put the link on there. I mean, it's a short 25-page book,

• 34:28Neil Strauss?

  but it's actually pretty funny and, and not, and not bad. So, so, so the answer is, it's, it's focused time versus just say, you know, say the amount of time, you can still write something great, but you have to sit down, really focus, and really want to kind of write something great versus saying, I just want a book to, to help my brand or whatever.

• 34:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Neil Strauss?

  It's bad to be writing a book.

• 34:47Tim Ferriss?

  There are so many bad reasons for writing a book. But on the subject of writing, I mean, of course, with most of your books and certainly all of my books, the books start with personal experience and a lot of interviews or interacting with experts of various types. What have you learned as an interviewer? Obviously, you did it for Rolling Stone, your time. First of all, you should mention some of the people you've interviewed. I mean, some of the more, the better-known folks, because the list is super long, but a few examples. And then what have you learned about interviewing that I might be able to use on this podcast and other people might be able to use for all their various projects and whatnot?

• 35:24Neil Strauss?

  Sure, yeah. I mean, I love, I love interviewing. I mean, basically, like, I've done tons of Rolling Stone covers. I've basically kind of any, definitely any musician and most actors, I'd probably interview them at some point. So, yeah, you know, it's interesting. A Rolling Stone or an article or a book interview is different because you have time to play with, right? So that's like the, in a way, that's the waiting game. I can talk about all the details of that. And you can choose which one to talk about. But then, I got a show at Sirius Radio, and I just did the show as an experiment or a challenge to think, can I get the material I get with someone in a Rolling Stone interview? Can I get that in, you know, in just a one-hour amount of time that that interview takes? And so I actually created a bunch of techniques for the live interview that helped me get to that core really quickly. So do you want to talk about the live interview?

• 36:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Let's talk about the live interview, because I think it will translate. I think the principles are probably quite flexible. So why don't you talk about the live interview with some of the techniques you've developed and are using?

• 36:18Neil Strauss?

  We'll start with prep, and this is for any, any interview. It's tough to do an interview or to want to do a really, really great interview. And you and I have an awesome rapport, and we can just kind of talk, riff and talk about anything. But when I'm preparing for an interview with somebody, I will go research everything they've ever done. I'll try to read if there's any books on them, if they're musicians, I'll listen to everything they've ever done. I'll try to watch every interview, because I just want to make myself an expert in them. And then I'll write down as many questions as I can think of. Maybe for some, say, when I did Rolling Stone interviews, I'll write down hundreds of questions, literally, and then I'll study them like I'm studying for an exam. You know, and I'll mark the ones that I really wanna make sure I ask, and then I'll get to meet them, I'll take those questions, I'll fold them up, I'll put them in my back pocket, I'll never look at them again.

• 37:01Tim Ferriss?

  Huh.

• 37:02Neil Strauss?

  And then, and then I'll let it flow, but I'll know, where do I need to go, where do I need to go, here's what they've said, but what have they never said, what about them can I show that's a side of them that's never been seen by anybody else, and I'll know, I'll, the conversation will never hit a dead point, it'll feel completely natural to them, but I'll know where I'm shaping and structuring it, and every now and then if I have a tough one, like I had to do Taylor Lautner for Rolling Stone, who was like that, you know, the werewolf kid in Twilight or something.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 37:26Neil Strauss?

  And like, I actually thought it was a assignment for someone else, so I said yes, I didn't realize who it was till afterward, and then I realized I gotta talk to this guy, and so I actually, my goal always as a writer is just to be interesting, you know, if you bore someone, you've committed to me the cardinal sin of writing, so I would actually walk him into a place where I knew I had a series of five or 10 questions that would lead him somewhere really fun, or funny, or entertaining, or interesting, or somewhere, so there's a part of it where you're actually, like little segments where I'll almost be like a lawyer, where you're walking someone down a chain that's gonna end up with a unique revelation.

• 37:54Tim Ferriss?

  So what would be an example, or examples of some of those questions, or, and you can answer this a couple different ways, that, or, just questions that are not person-specific, like, tell us about this incident, that are just good kinda can-openers for getting people to riff and tell you something interesting.

• 38:12Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, you know what's funny, like, at one point I thought of making a list of that, someone wants, uh, Red or Rolling Stone wants to interview Bob Dylan, and he wants to ask Bob Dylan, who tells you when you're wrong, and Bob Dylan got upset and left the interview, I thought that's a good question, and I use that question a lot, but you know what, I did, I was, I was gonna try and do those kinda canned questions, like, you know, like those cards you get in a game that are fun, always good questions, but what I always think about is, here's what I'm thinking about, is, now, what is, what do I wanna know, or what does the audience wanna know, I'm trying to, it's again, that art of empathy, I really wanted to think about how, from their perspective, is life lived, how can I get inside their head, understand, what are the things that they wrestle with, or they struggle with, like, the conversation we're having as writers is to empathize, because it's used for me to talk about it, and you're hitting kind of a nerve with me, because these are things

• 38:56Neil Strauss?

  I talk about, if you wanted to talk to me about... You know, is the game good or bad? You're gonna get a horrible interview because you're doing two things. One is, you know, maybe I'm interpreting that as judgment.

• 39:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:06Neil Strauss?

  Two is, it's just sort of a stock answer. You know, three is, it's, I'm already on the defensive and that's gonna be boring. But your, the questions you're asking are the things that I wrestle with and things I think about, the things I probably talked about today and yesterday. So even, say I'm interviewing a celebrity and there's a scandal, or they wanna find out they're dating somebody or something. Like, I'm not gonna say, "Are you dating that person?" I'm gonna say, "What's it like for you when everyone's always trying to speculate about who you're dating? And you have your own private life that you wanna keep." So I'm empathizing with how they see the question, how they see their reality, not how, you know, whatever TMZ sees their reality.

• 39:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. And at the same time, you're sort of opening, you're like softballing the topic in if they wanna choose, if they wanna hit it, if they wanna swing for it, they can go for it.

• 39:47Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, the real, the real trick, I've given away too much of the real trick, and this is again, kind of a celebrity interviewing type of stuff. The real trick is, if there's a topic that's like you know that they, that you really want, but they don't wanna give or share, you wait for them to bring it up. Once they've mentioned it, it's like they've opened the door to it. If you wanna get it, it's almost, you know what, it's like anything. It's like the game, it's like getting funding, it's like dating. It's like, if there's something you want from someone, they're not gonna wanna give it to you.

• 40:13Neil Strauss?

  And, and, and so the idea is, so you wait for them to bring up the elephant in the room.

• 40:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right. What, are there any ways to sort of leave the gingerbread trail to get them closer to it? Any particular examples that come to mind? I mean, I know one thing that a lot of journalists do, which sometimes drives me nuts, but I recognize why they do it, is they'll deliberately give false facts to try to get a correction. So they'll say, "So, you know, rumor is that you're dating whatever, Taylor Swift." You know, and then you hope that they'll come back and say, "Actually, that's completely bullshit, you know, I'm dating so and so." And you're like, "Okay, gotcha, now we can go down that trail."

• 40:49Neil Strauss?

  Right.

• 40:49Tim Ferriss?

  But are there-

• 40:50Neil Strauss?

  But that, that's weak because-

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  It is weak.

• 40:52Neil Strauss?

  You showed, because you showed, A, it's kinda a little too tricky, B, you showed you're kind of ignorant about them, and C, you're trying to like kinda capture them. See if I didn't get that one answer, but you'll have a shitty interview.

• 41:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, exactly, but it is a common technique that journalists use, right? I mean, uh, not-

• 41:06Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 41:07Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very common. The other one that makes me kind of crazy, and I've had to learn how to defend against it, because it's so easy to be misquoted in print, is the, "So I guess what you're saying is, fill in the blank," and then all of a sudden you're quoted as saying that. You're like, yeah, whatever. I guess pretty close. And then all of a sudden you're quoted. But what are some of-

• 41:27Neil Strauss?

  And that's kind of equivalent to sitting down to write a book and not letting the book tell a story of you trying to force your story in a book. It's you try to force your story on the, on the, on the subject. So, so yeah, I mean, I'm sure that's a way to get, it's a short-term gain for a long-term loss, which is, you know, untruthful journalism. And then not having a good reputation. Go ahead.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  In the case of Taylor, when you wanted to sort of be interesting and have a series of questions that would lead somewhere interesting for the piece itself, how did you go about doing that?

• 41:54Neil Strauss?

  I mean, yeah, it's basically like, there's a technique of like creating a yes ladder. You know, it's a fun, it's a famous kind of persuasion technique, which is, you know, asking them something safe and it's yes. And then a little bit safer and it's yes. And then would you ever do it with this, you know? You know, like, you know, as I just said, example, and this is not far off, I, I, I'll find it if someone, you know, you know, you don't, you seem like you're a healthy guy, you're not a smoker, right? You know, you don't smoke. He's like, no, no, I don't, I don't smoke. And then so you've never, then you obviously never smoked pot, right? You know, and then you're getting someone very interesting that is sitting on her smoke pot. And then, and then we got down to like traffic tickets. And then we had this fun game of me trying to like, find something he's done like wrong or illegal, like, you know, you've never even double parked or whatever. And it was a kind of a fun, you know, and so it's walking into a natural way that's fun for them versus like,

• 42:35Neil Strauss?

  I want something from you and I'm going to try to get it and I'm going to try to hold it and keep it from you. Another secret for interviews that are, and I'm sure is the idea of fractionation, right? Fractionation and hypnosis is if you are hypnotizing someone and you bring them out of trance, and then you put them back in trance and go in deeper the second time. So whenever I'm interviewing somebody, especially for Long Stone or anything, I always try to break it into a couple of little pieces. We do a little bit of interview, then we maybe go have lunch, go dinner, maybe go somewhere else. And that second interview is always better.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, that's interesting. That's very, very fascinating.

• 43:10Neil Strauss?

  Even with my radio show, and this is, this is, uh, so this is something for people with podcasts or radio shows. And again, I don't know how relevant this is to everybody. I like, again, I love this stuff. I love the art of, it's really the art of trying to get someone to be themselves. Um, it's really the goal because as soon as someone, people go into interview mode and they're, they're trying to show you what, how they want to be perceived, not to not, not who they are.

• 43:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:31Neil Strauss?

  So with, with my radio show, the first, we pre-recorded and the first 10 minutes were actually a complete throwaway. We did the first 10 minutes, go to a break. And that was, we'd recorded, but that's always a throwaway because it allows them to get their promotional message out and they're, you know, feel like they've said their message. And beyond their message, there's a person and I get rid of their message and get to the person.

• 43:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's hilarious. So wait, do they end up being able to plug the the stuff that they that they wanted to plug by coming on the show? Or did you scrap the whole thing?

• 43:59Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, no, I'll always plug for you. I'll always tell somebody, and this is true. When you're going on and you know, you're trying to promote your business, your brand, or your book, your movie, or whatever you're promoting, the more you it's that goes back to that philosophy, the more you want somebody to do something and the more desperate you are, the more they don't want to do it.

• 44:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Neil Strauss?

  You're you're selling yourself. If they like you, they'll like what you have to offer. You're not selling your book, you're representing it by who you are.

• 44:21Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely.

• 44:22Neil Strauss?

  So my thought is it's the it's your job or the host's job to do the promotion for you. Your job is to be the most awesome version of you you can be.

• 44:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, definitely. Getting them to trust the messenger, not the message, first and foremost.

• 44:36Neil Strauss?

  Right, because because I mean, if you're somewhere and they keep mentioning, you know, we listen to those interviews, right? And they keep mentioning their website and have and put in a WWW in front of it or whatever it is. And you're just like, I don't even want to go to your stupid website. Right? If you're interested, if you if someone is interested in me, I don't even need to mention my book. I don't mean to mention where they find them. I need to mention my website because my name's on the podcast and there's there's plenty of search engines that will leave leave them there without me having to say it.

• 44:59Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 45:00Neil Strauss?

  Yeah. And so so that's for anybody, like, don't go on to sell, go on to represent.

• 45:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's excellent advice. Well, I want to be cognizant of your time, obviously. I want to just ask a couple more questions and then obviously we talk all the time so we can keep talking about this for hours. But the the first is, what books, if any, do you gift to other people the most besides your own books? What are there any books, resources, things that you give to people in the written format?

• 45:30Neil Strauss?

  So it's probably one you give away a lot and you've given it away on your blog.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, is this, God, it could be anything. Seneca? It could be.

• 45:38Neil Strauss?

  Yes. So that's it. Yeah, On the Shortest of Life, that's my that I have a stack of those, that Little Penguin edition, I think it is.

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Neil Strauss?

  So that I give away a lot. And the other ones I the other ones I tend to buy a lot for for people. I have a friend right now who I'm encouraging to read fiction. He's a voracious nonfiction reader, and I'm a big fan of reading fiction. Because, you know, especially your Audience and to greet my audience, uh, you know, a lot of people feel like we gotta read self-help books because that's knowledge and we don't want to waste any time, we want to be efficient.

• 46:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:08Neil Strauss?

  People learn through metaphor, that's how the first stories were told, that's what the Bible is, that metaphor and storytelling are how the brain actually learns information. When you just get it as data, that's good for computers, it's not good for, for human learning.

• 46:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:21Neil Strauss?

  And so, so I really encourage people to read great works of, really good works of fiction, the literature, A, because it's art, and B, because I love to learn more about life from, from fiction. So, the two books that I told them, the book I told them to start with was, it's kind of a deeper one because he's a, I guess, an art, he's an artist, and so I thought that, that, you know, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude, I just think is a good book to appreciate, you know, literature and storytelling and the magic world that can be weaved through fiction. So I, I give that away, there's a dark, dark book by Jersey Kozinski called The Painted Bird. It's really, it's really dark, but it's unpatonable.

• 46:55Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 46:56Neil Strauss?

  That I tend to give away a lot.

• 46:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Painted Bird.

• 46:59Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, by Jersey Kozinski, it's, it's disturbing though, so just know that it's a-

• 47:03Tim Ferriss?

  Might be for a plane ride and not before bed.

• 47:05Neil Strauss?

  Yeah, yeah, but it's about, you know what, just, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna-

• 47:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, you know.

• 47:12Neil Strauss?

  But you learn about human nature through that, through, through that book. For, for artists, there's a book by Milan Kundera that I give away a lot called Life is Elsewhere, and it's about, this is my interpretation of it, which is probably completely wrong, it's been a few years, but he's, there's someone who's born and he got to become, and he's born to be a great artist, he's become, gonna become a great poet, but his issues, his, his mother issues, and the sort of politics and peer pressures at the time turn him into a total hack.

• 47:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 47:37Neil Strauss?

  And I think it's an analogy for that choice we all have in life, you know, are you gonna fulfill your potential, are you just gonna give in to the, you know, the peer pressure of the moment and, and become nothing? I was talking to this billionaire friend of mine, and, and I, I was saying I really would like to write a book about the way your mind works, and he was saying that the difference between someone to say a billionaire and billionaire, it's so stupid to even talk about this, but so, but, is that the people who really think they are not, he said, the biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time.

• 48:07Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I love it.

• 48:08Neil Strauss?

  By not accepting norms is where you innovate, whether it's with technology, with books, with anything, so not accepting the norms is the secret to really big success and changing the world.

• 48:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's a fantastic way to wrap up this episode, I think. So Neil, I'm gonna ask, I know that you don't have to say because people can just use Google and other tools, but where can people learn more about your work, find more of your stuff? Where would you like people to find you?

• 48:38Neil Strauss?

  I'm gonna let them choose. After that big speech, it would be completely hypocritical to go. If it goes to anything, they can find me in various ways. On your blog, on theforourworkweek.com.

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  Appreciate you not throwing the WWW in there.

• 48:53Neil Strauss?

  Happy to.

• 48:54Tim Ferriss?

  All right, man. Well, many conversations to be had, to be continued. Thanks for making the time, and I will hope to have some wine with you soon. Thank you, sir.

• 49:03Neil Strauss?

  All right, talk soon. Always enjoyable.

• 49:05Tim Ferriss?

  All right, buddy. Bye-bye.

• 49:07Speaker 05

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• 49:17Speaker 00

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• 49:20Speaker 05

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• 49:33Speaker 00

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• 49:35Speaker 05

  Or on Facebook at facebook.com/TimFerriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.