Ep 39: Maria Popova on Writing, Work Arounds, and Building BrainPickings.org

This episode is sponsored by 99Designs http://www.99designs.com/tim and ExOfficio http://www.exofficio.com/tim. Maria Popova has written for amazing outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, but I find her most amazing project to be BrainPickings.org http://www.brainpickings.org. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends, BrainPickings now get more than 5 million readers per month (!). I read very few blogs regularly, but BrainPickings is one of the few. It is a treasure trove. BrainPickings is Maria's one-woman labor of love — her subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. It's also 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 hidden gems to share. And that's what I hoped to do in this episode. It takes me a few minutes to warm up in this interview, but as soon as we get going, we geek out like crazy, talking about almost every aspect of her life, her site, her business, and her writing. I loved doing this interview, and I hope you love listening to it. There are a lot of valuable nuggets.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  No, we're seeing appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs and Exoficio. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers. And I have used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge hit. And here's how it works, and you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, a car wrap, a web design, an app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt, whatever, you go to 99designs.com, you describe your project, and then, within a week or less,

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  you have tons of designers around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love, or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it, I have mentioned it before, including in The 4-Hour Workweek as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So check it out. Exoficio, boy, where do I begin? I have a long history with Exoficio. Exoficio makes clothing. And as far back as 2007, 2008, I had a hit video that went viral called "How to Travel

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  the World with 10 Pounds or Less," and I talked about Exoficio underwear. Exoficio underwear is lightweight, ultra-lightweight, quick-drying, and antimicrobial. Why is this important? Well, I've gone through 20-plus countries with two pairs of underwear before, both from Exoficio. And I'm not alone in this. This might sound crazy, but a lot of executives, for instance... They'll take this underwear, they'll wash it in the sink or somewhere else, roll it up in a towel like a burrito, step on it, and a few hours later, they are completely dry, completely clean. You don't have to just have two, and yes, they have to be comfortable for all day wear, but check out their clothing, as well as their underwear. You can go to

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  exofficio.com/tim. That's X-E-X-O-F-F-I-C-I-O.com/tim, and you can see this video, which has a bunch of other packing tips. But this underwear, this clothing, is not just for the gents. Ladies, you have choices too. And they really have an incredible collection of high-quality products that I've used for almost 10 years now. So check them out, exofficio.com/tim.

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, yet again, running out the door to a flight. But I have such an exciting episode, I can barely contain myself. I might just wee myself on my way across the country. But I digress. Probably TMI. Let me answer just a couple of questions. What is this podcast about? You long-term listeners might know, long-term, long-time, that it's about dissecting excellence, trying to tease apart what makes world-class performers so good at what they do, finding the tools and tactics that you can apply. And this episode features Maria Popova. I'm about to explain who she is, and if you don't know who she is, or if you are intimately familiar with who she is, you're in for a treat. First, I'll answer a question that a lot of people ask me, and that is, "What

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  are you reading?" Well, what I'm reading right now is two books, comprised of two books. The first is William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Goldman is the screenwriter behind such movies as The Princess Bride, one of my favorites of all time, and Butch Cassidy's The Sundance Kid. The second book is John Muir, Wilderness Essays. So very different, both very, very good and highly recommended. The Adventures in the Screen Trade is a little outdated with some of the contents, because it's related to film and it was written in the 80s. But there are a lot of timeless principles, and Goldman is just hilarious. But moving on, the guest, Maria Popova. Oh my goodness, where to start? She would describe herself as a reader/writer, interestingness hunter/gatherer, and curious

• 4:27Tim Ferriss?

  mind at large. What does that mean? It'll all make sense in just a few seconds. While she's written for all sorts of amazing outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, I find her most amazing project to be BrainPickings.org, and I'm not alone in this. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that she sent out to seven friends, coworkers really, very informal, Brain Pickings was eventually brought online, and now it gets more than 5 million readers per month. It is massive. Many of you ask, what blogs do you read often? What do you do online? Where do you spend most of your time? The answer is that I read very few sites consistently. I don't have that type of loyalty. But Brain Pickings is one of the few. It is a treasure trove.

• 5:09Tim Ferriss?

  It is Maria's one-woman labor of love. Her subjective lens on what matters, it's also an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. This is what hooks me, of course, because she'll pull from excerpts and reading from the Stoics, my favorite Seneca, to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and everyone in between. Maria is good at finding the hidden gems to share, and the amount of information this woman consumes and can parse down to the finest detail of what will help you now, blows my mind. She makes me look like the laziest son of a bitch ever. And of course, immediately, my questions are, how? How does she do that? How on earth does she do that?

• 5:52Tim Ferriss?

  And we dig into this in this interview. Really, I try to unearth the hidden gems in her life, her workflow. It takes me a few minutes to warm up, as it often does, but once we get going, we geek out like crazy, and we talk about almost every aspect of her life, her site, her business, her workouts, her writing, her workflow, her tools, her workarounds, all of it. And I love doing this interview. I hope you love listening to it. And for bonus credit, for those of you who are super curious, might have a little extra time to do some detective work, at one point she mentions that her Facebook fan page went from a few hundred thousand people to over 2 million people, without explanation. So if you are able to figure out why that happened, what contributed to

• 6:37Tim Ferriss?

  that, please let me know on Twitter, @TFerriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. I'm dying of curiosity. And always, or as always, I should say, the show notes, all the links that we mentioned, the tools, etc., all of that can be found on the blog at 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out. So you don't need to scribble away furiously with notes, although you can. I will have pretty much everything that you will need, right there in the show notes. So without further ado, please meet Maria Popova.

• 7:18Tim 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?

• 7:32Maria Popova?

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

• 7:34Tim 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 coaching, and I-

• 7:51Maria Popova?

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

• 7:59Tim Ferriss?

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

• 8:28Maria 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.

• 8:50Tim 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, because and I'd also read it, "democracy", "aristocracy", for whatever reason, I couldn't get the emphasis right. But coming back to the, the reading, and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading,

• 9:14Tim Ferriss?

  if, 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?

• 9:28Maria 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.

• 9:49Tim 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?

• 10:07Maria Popova?

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

• 10:19Tim 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, 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.

• 10:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are just sort of churning out content. And I remember Kathy Sierra at one, at one point told me that you should focus on just in time information, not just in case information. And which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound, but there are, there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot. Brainpickings is one and Sam Harris's blog is another. And I saw your, your review of his latest book, Waking Up.

• 11:34Maria Popova?

  Well, not a review.

• 11:35Tim Ferriss?

  Not a review.

• 11:36Maria Popova?

  I don't review books ever.

• 11:38Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. No, this is, no, so this is, this is.

• 11:40Maria Popova?

  An annotated reading, if you will.

• 11:42Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So an annotated reading of, and I definitely want to dig into that annotated reading of Waking Up, which I found really, 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 Saka, he, 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.

• 12:22Tim Ferriss?

  And then there's sort of a follow up, but you've, 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?

• 12:41Maria 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.

• 13:05Maria Popova?

  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 MacNodden, the illustrator, whose work I love, and I love Wendy, on a book about wine.

• 13:23Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 13:23Maria 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 brain 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.

• 13:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 13:59Maria Popova?

  But but I would say that's a minority.

• 14:02Tim 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

• 14:44Tim Ferriss?

  soon as it's out on the vine is putting out what I think you do very often, and that is timeless, 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 or something that still affects people. And I was 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, how much digging do I really need to do?

• 15:26Tim Ferriss?

  And good God, you have such an absolute canon of work out there. It is astonishing. I mean, it is really-

• 15:36Maria 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.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really?

• 15:45Maria Popova?

  So it's just the accumulation, you know?

• 15:48Tim Ferriss?

  And so I was, I was, I was, I'm fascinated by routine and schedule. And, you know, reading from, of course, not, not the always accurate, but generally a good place to start, Wikipedia. And it says that Brain Pickings 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.

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, and I, I'm, I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before, but sometimes the answer is change and evolve.

• 16:21Maria 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-

• 16:43Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely.

• 16:44Maria Popova?

  Go on. The answer is to change.

• 16:46Tim 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 I, my, 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.

• 17:19Maria 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,

• 18:00Maria 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.

• 18:14Tim Ferriss?

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

• 18:25Maria Popova?

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

• 18:36Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, no, no.

• 18:36Maria Popova?

  But go on.

• 18:38Tim 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.

• 18:56Maria Popova?

  Gotta love type nerd.

• 18:58Tim 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, Is that still the case? And if so, who is that person that you are writing for?

• 19:29Maria Popova?

  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 meaning out of seemingly unrelated, meaningless information. And the sort of intersection of, or transmutation of information into wisdom, really, which is what "Learning to Live" is. It's about wisdom.

• 20:09Maria Popova?

  So, and it's interesting, too, because when I started Brain Pickings, 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. And now, to think that there are about seven million people, strangers, reading it every month.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 20:33Maria Popova?

  It's kind of surreal.

• 20:34Tim Ferriss?

  Congratulations, by the way.

• 20:34Maria Popova?

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

• 21:18Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And 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...

• 21:30Tim 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.

• 22:11Tim 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.

• 22:21Maria Popova?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 22:22Tim 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, 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?

• 23:08Maria 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...

• 23:30Maria 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,

• 24:15Maria Popova?

  it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood, which is why

• 24:23Maria Popova?

  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. 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,

• 25:08Maria Popova?

  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

• 25:37Maria Popova?

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

• 26:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Maria Popova?

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

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, it's, uh, I think it's a very virtuous goal. I, um, I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons. One of them is, well, 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-

• 26:50Maria 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.

• 27:31Tim 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-

• 27:50Tim 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 as 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 $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.

• 28:34Tim 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, they 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.

• 29:07Maria Popova?

  What is that?

• 29:08Tim 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.

• 29:51Tim 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 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

• 30:36Tim 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?

• 30:43Maria 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.

• 31:25Maria 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.

• 31:59Maria Popova?

  I get up in the morning, I meditate for between fifteen to twenty-five minutes before I do anything else.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up typically?

• 32:07Maria Popova?

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

• 32:11Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 32:11Maria 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 is 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.

• 32:52Maria Popova?

  And I think ours is a culture where we, where we, um, wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge honor, badge of honor, that the speaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is, but really, it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. And I 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.

• 33:33Maria Popova?

  I meditate, um, I go to the gym where I do most of my, um, longer form reading.

• 33:41Maria 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.

• 34:23Maria 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

• 35:05Maria 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.

• 35:14Tim Ferriss?

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

• 35:22Maria Popova?

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

• 35:31Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell her last name?

• 35:33Maria Popova?

  B R A C H.

• 35:35Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 35:36Maria 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.

• 36:20Tim Ferriss?

  Tara Brock.

• 36:22Maria Popova?

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

• 36:30Tim Ferriss?

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

• 36:39Maria 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.

• 36:54Tim Ferriss?

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

• 36:59Maria 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.

• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. That's a great answer. God, I love digging into the specifics. When you go to the gym then

• 37:30Tim Ferriss?

  to work out, are you still using an elliptical for that? Or are you?

• 37:36Maria Popova?

  Yes. You are? I do sprints, high intensity intervals on the elliptical.

• 37:40Tim Ferriss?

  And are you?

• 37:41Maria Popova?

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

• 37:45Tim Ferriss?

  You do? All right. But when you're reading, is that on the elliptical?

• 37:49Maria Popova?

  Yes.

• 37:50Tim Ferriss?

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

• 37:57Maria Popova?

  Well, I prefer electronics, so I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any PDF viewer because I read a lot of archival stuff. But the challenge, of course, is that because I read so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in case it's rarely possible 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.

• 38:32Tim Ferriss?

  Cool, all right. 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?

• 39:04Maria Popova?

  Hmm. 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, you know, sequentially. So it's not like you walk away with one insight from the first chapter, one insight from the second chapter.

• 39:43Maria Popova?

  It's just sort of this pattern of the writer's thoughts that permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so... Especially as you, 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

• 40:24Maria Popova?

  index. So I basically list out, as I'm reading, the topics and ideas that seem to be important and recurring in that volume. And then next to each of them, I start 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.

• 41:03Tim 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-

• 41:35Maria Popova?

  Oh, I do that too!

• 41:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really?

• 41:38Maria Popova?

  But I call it BL for beautiful language.

• 41:41Tim Ferriss?

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

• 41:48Tim 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?

• 42:19Maria 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.

• 42:26Tim Ferriss?

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

• 42:31Maria 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?

• 42:45Tim Ferriss?

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

• 42:47Maria Popova?

  Oh, thank you. But yeah, so I do these pairings of passages from literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes as I'm reading a book, I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that. And maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put 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,

• 43:27Maria Popova?

  all of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the, of the pages. But when there's an external quote, something referencing another work, I put a tab at the very top with the letter 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 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.

• 44:11Maria Popova?

  And that way, if you follow those, you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something that you're already enjoying and liking, but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way, I mean directly. And in a way, it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way. And I'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.

• 44:53Tim 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.

• 45:33Tim 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-

• 45:47Maria Popova?

  That's so lovely, actually.

• 45:49Tim Ferriss?

  I, I assumed he was a Native American elder for probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman. And 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

• 46:11Maria Popova?

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

• 46:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so good, so good.

• 46:18Maria 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.

• 46:53Tim 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 Good Will Hunting in the bar scene, who's like reciting, you know, Shakespeare without giving uh any type of, of credit.

• 47:22Maria 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.

• 47:47Tim Ferriss?

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

• 47:54Maria Popova?

  Lure them.

• 47:55Tim 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 that's actually not even fair, compared to a lot of philosophers who, who have been translated from Greek, 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.

• 48:38Tim 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, split or balance, or maybe neither. But before we get there, I want to put a bow on the note taking with your electronic note taking. So you're using the Kindle app, you're taking highlights. Where do you go from there? 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?

• 49:16Maria 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,

• 49:59Maria Popova?

  and I paste them into an Evernote file to sort of just have all of, all of my notes on a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific iPad Kindle app Kindle page with my highlighted passage and then email that screen grab into my 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

• 50:44Maria Popova?

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

• 50:59Tim Ferriss?

  That's horrible. It's like an email thread.

• 51:01Maria 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.

• 51:30Tim 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

• 52:04Tim Ferriss?

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

• 52:19Maria 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.

• 52:31Tim Ferriss?

  I see. Got it.

• 52:32Maria Popova?

  Plus, 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. It's just impossible to read.

• 52:43Tim 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.

• 52:53Maria Popova?

  Yeah, I do that with Coda.

• 52:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's true, though.

• 52:57Maria 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, and 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?

• 53:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great idea.

• 53:33Maria Popova?

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

• 53:36Tim 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-

• 54:13Maria Popova?

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

• 54:18Tim 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.

• 54:32Maria 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

• 55:12Maria 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 non-deductive.

• 55:35Tim 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?

• 56:03Maria 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-

• 56:23Maria Popova?

  I feel is weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down or and as you know, I'm sure when you get to 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.

• 56:50Tim Ferriss?

  And was there a particular?

• 56:52Maria 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 proof 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. There's no kind of compassion for the humanity that produces something as human as a typo, right? Despite how mechanical

• 57:34Maria Popova?

  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.

• 57:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 57:55Maria Popova?

  Uh, it is on WordPress. I was gonna make a joke about how the technology is called Corpus Colossum, but, uh, the actual technology is, uh, yeah.

• 58:07Tim Ferriss?

  That was a very Sam Harris 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?

• 58:31Maria 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.

• 58:49Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 58:50Maria 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 my voice. So I find email works just fine.

• 59:30Tim 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.

• 59:57Maria 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.

• 1:00:16Tim 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.

• 1:00:43Maria 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 going to just go and deal with it.

• 1:00:55Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:01:03Tim 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?

• 1:01:16Maria Popova?

  It wasn't so much that I made the decision as the decision was very strongly, lovingly but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner who one day said, "You're using so much time on things that are just so mean 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.

• 1:02:00Maria Popova?

  And the notion of outsourcing felt to me on some level,

• 1:02:06Maria Popova?

  almost like an admission of weakness.

• 1:02:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:02:09Maria Popova?

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:02:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:02:12Maria Popova?

  I know. 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 consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, I mean, it's interesting in terms of how Brain Pickings 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.

• 1:02:58Maria Popova?

  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,

• 1:03:43Maria Popova?

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

• 1:03:49Tim 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?

• 1:03:59Maria 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. Uh, she's just a wonderfully warm and, and just generous person, but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic. It's unbelievable. And you always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interest and, and 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.

• 1:04:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:04:44Maria 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.

• 1:04:54Tim 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, a 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...

• 1:05:32Maria 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.

• 1:06:16Maria Popova?

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

• 1:06:21Tim 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?

• 1:06:42Maria Popova?

  So...

• 1:06:46Maria 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

• 1:07:30Maria Popova?

  from going into buzz-worthy land, you know, after graduation, that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking, speaking, I now 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

• 1:08:15Maria Popova?

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

• 1:08:36Maria 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.

• 1:08:48Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:08:55Maria Popova?

  Oh, email, email and text.

• 1:08:57Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:09:04Maria 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.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:09:15Maria Popova?

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

• 1:09:21Tim 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?

• 1:09:31Maria 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.

• 1:10:13Tim 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?

• 1:10:24Maria 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.

• 1:10:38Tim 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 rows. You know what's actually very helpful for traveling is?

• 1:10:53Maria Popova?

  Plyometrics.

• 1:10:54Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:10:59Maria Popova?

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

• 1:11:01Tim Ferriss?

  Can't get into it?

• 1:11:02Maria Popova?

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:11:27Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 1:11:27Maria 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. Yeah.

• 1:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:12:01Maria Popova?

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

• 1:12:06Tim 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 Rico Lo commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff.

• 1:12:14Maria Popova?

  Or was yet, is that guy your cousin?

• 1:12:17Tim 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?

• 1:12:40Maria Popova?

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

• 1:12:44Tim 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.

• 1:12:50Maria Popova?

  Yeah. So the reason for that is because I, I do think we live in an enormously

• 1:12:58Maria Popova?

  News fetishistic culture and the reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that because we think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed, because all 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 that this 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

• 1:13:40Maria Popova?

  a lot of academics actually use Brain Pickings to reference, so I constantly get things, this is another thing that Lisa deals 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?

• 1:14:08Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years. And if you, if you go to any permalink, so 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?

• 1:14:47Maria 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 behind their own name and not anonymously.

• 1:15:30Maria Popova?

  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 Brain Pickings Facebook page last fall where it just started growing so fast. I have no idea why.

• 1:15:53Tim 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.

• 1:16:01Maria Popova?

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

• 1:16:07Tim Ferriss?

  Two point something million.

• 1:16:08Maria Popova?

  Close to three maybe. So more than 10 fold in less than a year. I have no idea why. I've done nothing differently. I'm very, I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do 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

• 1:16:53Maria 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.

• 1:17:04Maria 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.

• 1:17:34Tim 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."

• 1:17:49Maria Popova?

  Yeah. I don't care if it sounds bitchy or anything. The point, I mean, 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 are.

• 1:18:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:18:35Maria 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. So, I mean, you know, anybody who writes online, I think, feels similarly that this is kind of

• 1:19:20Maria Popova?

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

• 1:19:26Tim 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 going to 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?

• 1:20:00Maria 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.

• 1:20:43Maria 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.

• 1:21:31Maria 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.

• 1:21:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:22:01Maria Popova?

  Thank you.

• 1:22:02Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:22:18Maria Popova?

  I use Buffer for Twitter and I use just my hands for Facebook. But again, I mean, this goes back to the same inner struggle of I do want to be reading and writing for myself, so why do I have the compulsion to 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

• 1:23:02Maria Popova?

  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.

• 1:23:12Tim 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.

• 1:23:40Maria Popova?

  Well, I would argue that the benefit, the value...

• 1:23:46Maria Popova?

  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 just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life."

• 1:24:28Maria Popova?

  You know, and it's kind of, it gives you pause to hear that from people.

• 1:24:32Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, agreed.

• 1:24:36Tim 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.

• 1:24:55Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:25:00Maria Popova?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:25:33Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:25:41Maria Popova?

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

• 1:25:45Maria Popova?

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

• 1:25:50Maria 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 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 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

• 1:26:30Maria Popova?

  things up. And I don't even know, it was such a sort of mystery and metaphor for what I deal with online. I was like, oh, this USPS stuff, how can you ask a publicist not to?

• 1:26:41Tim 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?

• 1:27:01Maria Popova?

  Brian Chicken?

• 1:27:02Tim 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

• 1:27:43Tim Ferriss?

  inevitably, if I get 10 books from decent or good friends, some of them are going to be terrible. And I don't have the time necessarily, or the inclination to read them all. How do you deal with that type of situation?

• 1:27:56Maria 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, I guess, manage social expectations in a way.

• 1:28:37Maria 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 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, it's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are.

• 1:29:21Maria Popova?

  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 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,

• 1:29:53Maria 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?

• 1:30:23Tim 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.

• 1:30:29Maria 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

• 1:31:11Maria Popova?

  of grasping for, 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.

• 1:31:30Tim 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.

• 1:31:43Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:31:52Maria Popova?

  Absolutely.

• 1:31:53Tim 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...

• 1:32:20Maria Popova?

  What do you mean by the options?

• 1:32:22Tim 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 dollars 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? What would your advice be to people?

• 1:33:06Maria 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.

• 1:33:29Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah, great.

• 1:33:30Maria 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 analyze it, because I think...

• 1:34:11Maria 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.

• 1:34:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:34:40Maria 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.

• 1:35:25Maria 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.

• 1:35:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:35:59Maria 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.

• 1:36:32Tim 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 $7 a month, $3, $10, $25, if you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose?

• 1:36:48Maria Popova?

  Oh, I have no idea. Probably just the mathematical logical choice, the two middle ones, the three and 10.

• 1:36:56Tim 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-

• 1:37:35Maria 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 Belsky, 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

• 1:38:18Maria 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.

• 1:38:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's so worth it.

• 1:38:49Maria Popova?

  Despair and frustration prevail again in innovation.

• 1:38:53Tim 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?

• 1:39:28Maria 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. 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, seventh birthday, really, of the site, which

• 1:40:11Maria Popova?

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

• 1:40:16Tim 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 In closing, is there any-

• 1:40:47Maria 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've written about him quite a bit, so I highly recommend any of those articles.

• 1:41:04Tim 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?

• 1:41:23Maria 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.

• 1:41:50Tim 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.

• 1:42:11Maria Popova?

  Thank you, Tim.

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show, 99designs, which is your one-stop-shop for all things graphic design-related. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see the projects that I've put up, including the mock-ups and drafts of the book cover for The Four-Hour Body. Exoficio, Exoficio and I go way back, exofficio.com/tim. You can see the clothing that I've used for traveling through 20-plus countries, including the underwear. By the way, that's about half of my underwear drawer right now. exofficio.com/tim. You can also see the viral video that I put out, which shows you how to travel the world with 10 pounds or less. As always, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and you can find all of

• 1:43:01Tim Ferriss?

  the links and resources from this episode, as well as every other episode, by going to 4hourworkweek.com/podcast. Spell it all out, or you can go to 4hourworkweek.com and just click on Podcast. Feedback, if you have feedback, I would love your thoughts, anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show, ping me on Twitter @tferriss, that's twitter.com/tferriss, or on Facebook at facebook.com/timferriss with two Rs and two S's. And until next time, thank you for listening.