#573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More

Brought to you by 80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/tim free career advice for high impact and doing good in the world, Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and LinkedIn Jobs http://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 770M+ users More on all three below. Margaret Atwood (@margaretatwood https://twitter.com/margaretatwood) is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly https://www.amazon.com/Dearly-New-Poems-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B0847NZL76/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments https://www.amazon.com/Testaments-Novel-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B07KVLPYDQ/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale https://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood/dp/1328879941/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, now an award-winning TV series. Her other works of fiction include Cat’s Eye https://www.amazon.com/Cats-Eye-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B00513F9Q6/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace https://www.amazon.com/Alias-Grace-Novel-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B00513F9PM/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Assassin-Novel-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0385720955/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; the MaddAddam Trilogy https://www.amazon.com/MADDADDAM-TRILOGY-BOX-Crake-Maddaddam/dp/0804172315/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; and Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Retold https://www.amazon.com/Hag-Seed-William-Shakespeares-Tempest-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B01AQO0IHY/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Margaret’s work has been published in more than 45 countries, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovator’s Award. Burning Questions https://www.amazon.com/Burning-Questions-Essays-Occasional-Pieces-ebook/dp/B09635CJ9V/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, a collection of essays from 2004–2021 will be published in March of this year. Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible https://studio.disco.co/learn-live-with-margaret-atwood-course, an eight-week live online learning experience, will run later this year. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by 80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/tim! You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That’s 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. They add up and are one of your biggest opportunities, if not the biggest opportunity, to make a positive impact on the world. Some of the best strategies, best research, and best tactical advice I’ve seen and heard come from 80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/tim, a nonprofit co-founded by Will MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher and a popular past guest on this podcast. If you’re looking to make a big change to your direction, address pressing global problems from your current job, or if you’re just starting out or maybe starting a new chapter and not sure which path to pursue, 80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/tim can help. Join their free newsletter http://80000hours.org/tim, and they’ll send you an in-depth guide for free http://80000hours.org/tim that will help you identify which global problems are most pressing and where you can have the biggest impact personally. It will also help you get new ideas for high-impact careers or directions that help tackle these issues. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. * This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 770 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * When jumping into a new writing project, does Margaret know if it’s going to be expressed as poetry or prose? From her perspective, is there a difference in where they originate? How do these two sometimes act in synergy? [07:59] How does Margaret maintain her vital life energy at 82 years young? [16:55] In what way does astrology — particularly Gemini rising — explain Margaret’s tendency to “stick [her] nose into things?” [18:45] The Gift vs. Trickster Makes This World. [24:24] What drives Margaret’s ability to craft engaging speculative fiction? [26:51] What are the downsides of raising a family in the woods, blissfully isolated from the world? Margaret shares a glimpse into her own childhood. [33:07] How crossing a football field in a pink princess line dress nudged Margaret toward writing poetry for the first time. [38:03] How the limited number of career options from which a young woman was expected to choose guided Margaret toward her current profession — and how long it took to start paying off. [44:17] What benefit did Margaret get from writing during the time before being paid to do so? [49:44] As someone who’s often found herself in the teaching profession, what type of teaching has Margaret enjoyed most? [52:59] Why Margaret considers The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson to be required reading for young adults. [55:28] Why Margaret resists the act of labeling that humans tend toward. [58:24] What explains Margaret’s ongoing interest in dystopian — as well as utopian — literature, and what can people expect from “Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible,” her eight-week online learning experience? [1:02:58] Comparing and contrasting major revolutions and political upheavals of recent centuries, and what Margaret learned by visiting Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. [1:08:31] How is the DISCO online learning platform that will host “Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible” different from other such platforms, and what kind of problems will participants be solving? [1:12:01] What readers can expect from Burning Questions. [1:14:42] How has Margaret’s writing process changed over the course of her life? What does it look like these days? [1:19:24] A tangent about shows we binge when our writing quotas for the day are fulfilled, an H. G. Wells story about perspective, and a Twilight Zone episode that (surprise!) doesn’t end well for its protagonist. [1:22:04] Tezos NFTs, illustrated utopias, and inventions fitting unexpected functions. [1:24:22] A spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t yet read The Testaments and doesn’t want to know what happens to a character from The Handmaid’s Tale: skip ahead to the next timestamp! [1:31:48] Does Margaret do research for her characters? [1:33:27] Margaret turns the tables and asks me what prompted my podcasting endeavors. [1:35:36] Dictation apps, the three Henry Jameses, and confessional stenographers. [1:37:48] Undertaking winter adventures at high elevations and other parting thoughts. [1:41:25] * For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Balaji Srinivasan https://tim.blog/2021/11/15/balaji-srinivasan-2/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, Dr. Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/tim, or use coupon code TIM, T-I-M. Eightsleep.com/tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 80,000 Hours. You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. They add up and are one of your biggest opportunities, if not the biggest opportunity, to make a positive impact on the world. In other words, if you want to make the best use of your 80,000 hours, until we wrap up this show called Life, where should you start? Where should you focus? It can be really hard and quite frankly, pretty stressful to try and figure out. Some of the best strategies, best research and best tactical advice I've seen and heard come from 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit co-founded by Will McCaskill,

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  an Oxford philosopher and a popular past guest on this podcast. Will is perhaps best known as being the co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, which has gained a lot of steam and a lot of popular coverage in the last handful of years. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help you find a career or path for tackling one of the world's most pressing problems. If you're looking to make a big change to your direction, mid-career, say, address pressing global problems for your current job, or if you're just starting out or maybe starting a new chapter and not sure which path to pursue, 80,000 Hours can help. Join their free newsletter and they'll send you an in-depth guide that will help you identify which global problems are most pressing,

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  where you can have the biggest impact personally. And it will also help you get new ideas for high-impact careers or directions that help tackle these issues. They also have a job board with 800-plus opportunities to work on these problems and offer one-on-one advice to help you switch paths, if that's what you choose to do. And you can check out their excellent 80,000 Hours podcast, which has in-depth conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems and really try to find that needle in the haystack. There's so many things to choose from. How do you pick the right high-leverage problem for you to focus on helping solve? My team has raved, for instance, about the interview with Ezra Klein. That's number 94. And you can subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. That's the 80,000 Hours Podcast.

• 4:25Tim Ferriss?

  If you join the newsletter now as an extra bonus, they'll mail you, yes, physically mail you, a free book about impactful careers such as Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better. You can sign up at 80000hours.org/tim. That's eight zero zero zero zero hours, H-O-U-R-S.org/tim. Check it out. I really encourage you to check out this site, even if you have no plans to change your career, if you're just curious about picking high leverage targets in life to improve the world. So I will also say it one more time because it's noteworthy. They're nonprofit and everything they provide is free. That takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell

• 5:06Tim Ferriss?

  of a lot of dedication and a lot of people, a lot of hours on their part. The podcast, the newsletter, even their one-on-one advice, all free. So check it out. 80000hours.org/tim. 80000hours.org/tim. Take a look.

• 5:24Speaker 01

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

• 5:31Speaker 02

  No, I would have seen an appropriate time.

• 5:34Speaker 03

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

• 5:47Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers, to try to tease out the habits, mental frameworks, lessons learned, life stories that you can somehow apply to your own lives. And my guest today is a living legend. I have been wanting to interview her for so long, probably more than a decade, Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  Long wait to sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, now an award-winning TV series. I believe in 2017, it was the most read book across all of Amazon, at least so Amazon reports. She has won more prizes than I can possibly list out. Her other works of fiction include Cat's Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, the Matt Adam Trilogy, and Hag Seed, William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold. Margaret's work has been published in more than 45 countries, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, as mentioned, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade,

• 7:12Tim Ferriss?

  the Friends Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, will be published in March of this year, 2022 that is. Practical Utopias, an exploration of the possible and eight-week live online learning experience, will run later this year, and Margaret is heavily involved. You can find her online at [email protected], on Twitter, at Margaret Atwood on Instagram, TheRealMargaretAtwood. And without further ado, please enjoy a conversation that turned out even so much better than

• 7:51Tim Ferriss?

  I possibly could have hoped with Margaret Atwood. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this today, and I've been looking forward to it.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Well, my pleasure.

• 8:05Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to bounce around quite a bit. I will make sure that we touch on Burning Questions and certainly Practical Utopias, but I have so many questions about just your life and life energy, and we can come at it from so many different directions. I want to begin with a few questions, if it's okay with you, from someone on my team, who is a huge fan of yours, and it relates to your writing or to creative process. And in the research that I've done, it seems like you tend not to outline books before you start writing them. At least the quote that I have here is, "Never map it out, just get into it, jump in like going swimming." Is that accurate?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  That's pretty right. Yes, you have to factor in that the going swimming part is about a very cold lake, so we're not talking about Florida here. Or pools. We're talking about screaming. Run and screaming. Right.

• 9:04Tim Ferriss?

  When you sit down to write, and this is her question, one of her questions, do you know at the start whether it will be poetry or prose or a specific project?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  I do know that. Yeah.

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

  You do?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  I actually do know that. And poetry is more likely to be written on the run or on the fly and not necessarily sitting down.

• 9:25Tim Ferriss?

  Could you expand on that, please?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I write, I always write poetry in, in something called cursive. You may have forgotten about that.

• 9:34Tim Ferriss?

  I know cursive.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Apparently, they're not always teaching cursive to young people. So we're gonna have a whole generation who don't know how to sign their names. They'll only know how to print their names. Anyway, yes, cursive, which we were all taught in school with scratching little metal nibs that you dipped in inkwells. You probably didn't do that because they probably had ballpoints by your day.

• 9:59Tim Ferriss?

  I used ballpoints, but my grandfather was an actual, well, he was in part a calligrapher. So I spent a lot of time around inkwells.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Oh, extremely classy.

• 10:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very classy.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I've bought several calligraphy sets intending to use them, but Tim, I haven't used them yet. But I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to do that.

• 10:20Tim Ferriss?

  If we look at the poetry and the prose, do they come from different places within yourself? Do they have a different feeling?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  It's my theory, but you can't ever test it out without great cruelty.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  I guess what? Cats don't write poetry or anything else. So it has to be people that you would practice the great cruelty on. So you would have to wire up their heads. And you can wire up their heads for novels, no problem, because you know novels, it's 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So you actually have to work at writing novels. It's called work. You have to sit down. It's like a job. You have to put in the hours. But with poetry, it's exactly the opposite. You don't know when something may strike you. And that's why poets are so annoying to people who are not poets, because they'll be looking out the window. And you'll say, could you please mow the lawn? And they'll say, shh.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Don't interrupt. No, no, go away. I mean, it can be very annoying. We understand why poets often have quite interesting lives, but I was lucky to be able to do both. So people think I'm moderately sane in the bell curve of poets and novelists with, let's say, well, I don't know. I mean, I guess a lot of novelists drank a lot too, but let us say that poets are often, let's say their life trajectory is frequently more erratic than that of novelists. How can we put this gently? And especially female poets. I mean, it was just assumed in the, in the 50s that they were sort of crazy.

• 11:58Tim Ferriss?

  You don't seem crazy to me.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not, but you know, I'm, I'm living demonstration that this isn't true, but it's my theory that poetry comes from a different part of the brain and the part that's more closely allied to patterning, music, mathematics like that, whereas novels come from the part that is more closely associated with gossip, gossip, telling stories about people, telling stories about just about anything, and narrative. So this happens, that happens, this happens, that happens. And that goes all the way back to, for instance, Homer.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  So you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you can see that there's a narrative approach, very useful. The Iliad starts in the middle of things and so do a lot of novels. So you've got several ways you can start. You can start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end, or you can start in the middle, or you can start at the end and then go back and pick it up. But poetry, lyric poetry is different. Epic poetry is more like novels.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  It's got lots of stories in it. So my thing about The Odyssey is that it's, you know, all those westerns in which they were holding the fort and the cavalry was riding to the rescue.

• 13:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  So the people in the fort didn't know that. And the cavalry didn't know what was happening in the fort. So you've got a lot of tension. So that's The Odyssey. So here comes Odysseus. Nobody knows where he's been all these years. And there's Penelope holding out. And just as she's about to give in, he turns up in disguise. You know, a lot of stories involve in disguise. Then we go on from there with a great finale.

• 13:49Tim Ferriss?

  Do you feel like poetry enables you or enlivens you in a way that fuels the prose work? In other words, is there a synergistic relationship for you between having both of those outlets or vehicles?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so why do I do that? Because nobody told me not to. There weren't any. Once upon a time, Tim, a long, long time ago, and you aren't going to believe this, but there were no creative writing schools.

• 14:18Tim Ferriss?

  I believe it.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  So essentially, it was open season. You could do whatever you, what you wanted. And there weren't people saying you have to do either this or that. There were no people like that. So we just did whatever. And it seems to have been true that I will have written poems about something. And then some years later, that will turn up in some other form. So for instance, I wrote some poetry in which this character called Grace Marks makes an appearance. And then some years later, I wrote a television play about that. Back when television was still black and white. You don't remember that, Tim?

• 15:03Tim Ferriss?

  I don't, it's true.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  There's so many things you don't remember. So it was black and white. And I was using only one source for that because this is an historical person. And the person who had been writing about Grace had got a lot of things wrong. So I did the play for television. And then years passed. A number of years passed, maybe about 12 years. And there I was in Switzerland.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  It would be Switzerland, you know, home of Carl Jung. And I started writing this piece of prose and I thought, so who is this? It's Grace Marx. And she's dissatisfied with the job I did in that play. She wants me to go back and take another look. So this time we went to a lot of sources, not just the one. And we found this extremely interesting story because it was, it was several stories and there was no resolution. You know, we never actually found out through the historical record whether Grace Marx had murdered anybody or not.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  So I, I wrote a novel called Alias Grace and then that gets turned into a Netflix series, mini-series by Sarah Polley. And Sarah Polley is an actress, director, producer, scriptwriter who wrote to me when she was 17 years old and said, I have to do this. She was 17, I said, um, so cute. But she did it finally, she said, it only took me like 20 years and she did a great job of it. So that's, that's that story. So yeah, started as a poem, turned into a television play, turned into a novel and then turned back into a television series, only this time a more accurate one.

• 16:55Tim Ferriss?

  I'm already having so much fun. I have to ask you, I'm going to put all of my questions aside. I have this, I have just pages and pages of notes and plans and research and I'm going to push it all aside for a second just to ask, what are the things that you do? If anything, maybe it's just out of the box genetics, you could speak to that too, to maintain such a vital life energy at 82 years young? Because I'm looking for any playbook and I don't know how much of it is nature versus nurture, but I would just love any, any tips from the field because I've been impressed with watching videos of you, certainly it's entirely more impressive to be having the conversation with you.

• 17:40Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of your other activities or things that you do?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Let's begin with the genetics. My mom lived to 97. My dad, not quite so long, 86. But my mom was very, they were both very curious about things. So there's always something new coming along.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  And you may have noticed that I dabble in those things from time to time. Because I'm interested in them. I want to know how they work. I want to know, there's a good and a bad for every human technology that we make. I want to know what's the upside, what's the downside, cost benefit. But also, what are, what are people using this for? Because it's so frequently that we invent something for one purpose. And then people find a whole different purpose for it. Or lots of purposes. For instance, Velcro. I invented Velcro. I had no idea what it was for. But now we know. It's for putting on your shoes, Tim.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  So curiosity, genetics curiosity. And if you want to go to the astrology, we can do that, too.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. You know, I didn't see that coming, but yes, let's go to the astrology.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Of course you didn't. Yeah, so what do I know about astrology? Because a long, long time ago, I was in English literature. And I was a Victorianist. And one of the things that you had to know for the kind of English literature that I was in at that time, which began with Anglo-Saxon and ended with T.S. Eliot, was people's worldviews. And especially as you get into the Renaissance, that's what people believed. They believed in astrology. They believed in palmistry, which is connected. And therefore, it was interesting to know about things because you could see, you could, for instance, look at a portrait, a Renaissance portrait,

• 19:42Speaker 02

  and look at the rings on the fingers. Because what fingers those rings were on meant something to the people looking at the picture. And the positions of the hands meant something. So like this. You see a lot of saints going like this. Let me see if I can show you.

• 20:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So it's sort of palm facing in.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Well, no, it's the little finger.

• 20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. What are you doing with your?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  The little finger that's separate from the rest of the hand.

• 20:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. I see.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We did that, too, you know.

• 20:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this is the Vulcan?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  We go, "Live, live well and prosper."

• 20:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, exactly.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yes, our hand gestures still mean things, but our hand gestures have changed over the years. Anyway, back into the Renaissance, they believed in astrology, and that's when the tarot cards arise. So if you were studying T S Eliot, you had to know something about the tarot because it turns up in the wasteland. So lucky me, I had somebody called Yetska Sabisma living below me when I was living in a, you know, an apartment. And she was from Holland. And she was studying Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. And it was her thesis

• 21:01Speaker 02

  back in 1969, that these funny little figures in Hieronymus Bosch's weird paintings were not figments of his Freudian subconscious, but they were astrological symbols. So she set about demonstrating that. And during the long cold Edmonton winter nights, when nobody went out, because it was very slippery and cold, and people's car tires froze in squares. Yetska Sabisma taught me astrology and palmistry. So I know those things. So if you want to do the astrology, we can go there, Tim.

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Well, with that type of lead in, I can't say no.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Okay. All I need to tell you is Gemini rising. And you will know what that means.

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  I will not know what that means. I need a footnote.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  You will not know what that means. Okay, very curious, Tim. Very curious and a bit flighty.

• 22:03Tim Ferriss?

  So do you identify then with your Gemini rising assessment? Would you agree with the astrological read of yourself?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Well, it kind of doesn't matter whether I agree or not. It is what it is. I just throw it out there for you because you wanted an explanation as to why I'm always sticking my nose into things and what keeps me going. So what keeps me going is you never know. And the other thing that keeps me going is, don't open that door. Why not? I'm gonna open the door.

• 22:34Tim Ferriss?

  Is the "you never know" a reference to why not trying something new? Is that what that means? Or does it mean something else?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yes, it means that. Exactly. It means that. So just to go a little deeper into the astrology, the governing planet of Gemini is Hermes, okay, otherwise known as Mercury. And what is Hermes, the god of?

• 22:59Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna say handbags, but I don't have my mythology.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Nope. Handbags get, they get into it. They get into it. There's a reason it's called... Okay, thieves, jokes, money, communications, travel. He's the opener and closer of doors, the garter of secrets, also the revealer of secrets, and the only one of the gods that can go down to the underworld and return from it. So he is the conductor of souls to the underworld. And as you'll recall, Tim, from the end of the Odyssey, when, no...

• 23:37Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  When Odysseus shoots all these people, he shoots a lot of them, really. Good shot. It is Hermes who conducts these souls to the underworld. He's what we call a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld. So people in my configuration are very interested in plumbing, the sewer system, underwear, thieves, criminals, secrets, and anything that's buried.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Like that. So that's where the curiosity comes in. Let's dig this up.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Let's dig this up. Well, you mentioned Hermes and, you know, aside from the handbag reference, which was only partially joking.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  That's pretty good. Hermes, Hermes governs money. I mean, it all makes sense.

• 24:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. For those people listening or offended, Hermes, I get it. But the opening and closing of doors, the opener and closer of doors, it made me think of a book that I really enjoyed called Trickster Makes This World.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Great book. I know the author. Yeah.

• 24:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really? Lewis Hyatt. So I loved that book.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Well, have you read The Gift, his first book?

• 24:43Tim Ferriss?

  The Gift didn't grab me in the same way, although I know many, many, many people who would put that up in their top three, five books in terms of influence in their lives. So I should probably give it another shot.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Well, I think Trickster Makes This World is more pertinent to you.

• 25:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, as a trickster.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna let that float in the, in the air. Yes. Well, this is, this is a business that you're in. You're, you're in that, that side of the Hermes constellation. So The Gift, on the other hand, is very useful for people going into the arts because it differentiates quite clearly the world of commerce from the world of the arts. Although if you're in the arts and you may get your inspiration as a gift, but at some point you have to go through the valley of the shadow of commerce to get to the other side where your, your thing, whatever it is, turns back into a gift in the hands of the recipient, say, the ideal reader. So you write the book that's in the world of gift. It then gets

• 25:47Speaker 02

  turned into this thing with pages and everything, and it gets something called sold. So it's in the world of commerce. But somebody who then reads your book, on the other hand, and loves it doesn't say, oh, well, I didn't get $22.95 worth out of this book. I mean, some people do, but usually they don't say that. Whereas they might say that about an automobile that they bought, you know, the, the seat belts don't work. I want you to fix them. You do that with things that you have bought, but things that you have received as a gift, you do not do that too. You do, however, have obligations towards gifts. You need to pass them on. You do not keep them.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  You need to either give somebody else a gift or pass on the gift that you have received in some way. So I do recommend it if you want to understand some of the odd ways of artists.

• 26:42Tim Ferriss?

  I did very much enjoy the sections I did read about gift economies and the circulation of gift.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I, I do want to say though, that I think Trickster makes this world applies to you as well. And the reason I say that is there's a term used in that book that I very much loved and I highlighted. I think the description was related to coyote as one of the archetypes here, but as a boundary walker. And I view you also as a,

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:13Tim Ferriss?

  as a boundary walker between the, the present and the possible. I've, in the course of doing research for this conversation, read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of say, science fiction on some other planet with creatures never before seen versus say speculative fiction where you're taking something that exists or is in the process of becoming and then taking it a few steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master in my mind of boundary walking. And I'm just, I'd love to hear what you think has led you, and this also made me think of how some people describe you as clairvoyant when you were discussing the astrology and the palmistry

• 27:58Tim Ferriss?

  because of your adeptness in this boundary area. What types of questions or what types of structured thinking or observation lend themselves to your ability to write speculative fiction?

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Okay. You might say the lack of the qualities that make it difficult for me to write science fiction.

• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Which I read a lot of, plus dragons, you know, I'm keen on dragons.

• 28:21Tim Ferriss?

  Me too.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  But I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do, that you have the ability to do and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do. So dragons outside my range of capabilities in any way Ursula K. Le Guin has kind of sewed up dragons. She got sort of the dragon franchise. That's dragons. Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas. But her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that are usually attributed to dragons in the English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition,

• 29:04Speaker 02

  etc. We could go on about that, but we won't today. Now, you wanted to know sort of what's behind it.

• 29:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what's behind this speculative fiction? What makes you get at it?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I grew up in the 50s as a teenager and I read a lot of those things at that time. So I read 1984 just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the early 50s. They put classics into these quite, what shall we say about those covers?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  They were, they made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies and negligees lying on beds.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Partly was, but not much really. So my copy of 1984 had this woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and a guy standing behind her looking down her front, which does get in there a bit, but that's not the general import of the book. So I mainlined all of those books. I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits, I think for The Guardian. I went to Comic Con for the first time because we thought we were on our way to see Ray, but unfortunately he died before we got there. So we ended up having a memorial service at

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Comic Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields, really. So read all of those things. John Wyndham, I was reading in the 50s. And I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you are then writing when you're able to, you know, when you have the skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to write a 1984 only with women like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K. And a number of other people that I was following. So really, it's partly

• 31:19Speaker 02

  what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skills to do. As I say, I can't do dragons.

• 31:25Tim Ferriss?

  I can't do dragons or speculative fiction. So you have me beat.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  I can't do podcasts, you know?

• 31:32Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera in the mist. I think that your, your works will have much more permanence. But I can hope, I can hope that someday the audio will have the same, get locked in the amber in the same way that words are.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  I'm sure it will.

• 31:50Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Today, many small business owners like me are busier than ever. Time spent searching for and interviewing candidates can take time away from managing and most importantly, growing your business. That's why LinkedIn Jobs has made it easier to get to the candidates worth interviewing faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach your network and beyond to the world's largest professional network of more than 770 million people. Focus on candidates with the skills and experience you need and use screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people. Then use the simple tools on LinkedIn Jobs to quickly

• 32:33Tim Ferriss?

  filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. My small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires over leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster. Did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? So try to post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Tim. T I M. That's LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 33:07Tim Ferriss?

  I want to go back in time from your teenage years. I've read about your experience of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that. The lack of distractions, giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on. I'm thinking about having kids in the very near future. And I fantasize about living in the woods because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides, would you say?

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Okay, which woods are you thinking of, Tim?

• 33:39Tim Ferriss?

  Any woods.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  What sort of woods?

• 33:40Tim Ferriss?

  I like varied terrain, so I prefer something that isn't flat. So we could think American West, we could think upstate New York, we could think British Columbia in certain locations. I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors. I would like to have lots of trails that I can explore with my dog or dogs or family. And running water of some type and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those or one of those at least. That is my, I grew up, I grew up on Long Island, more or less in the woods. That's my idealized version, but I don't know what it's like to raise kids in the woods. I'm curious if there are any downsides.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Well, you should ask my mom, except she's not here.

• 34:30Tim Ferriss?

  She is not here.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  I can tell you what Jay said. Yeah, she's kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person in that she liked being outdoors most of the time.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  She was very athletic. She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses. She rode them hither and thither. And she was also a speed skater and of course, a skier and this kind of thing. So I think she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy. And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late 50s. I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much the way it would have done.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  So I think she, who didn't like hats, little white gloves, tea parties, any of that. She really didn't like it, didn't fancy it. She liked dancing, like Fast and Furious waltzing and things like that, square dancing. But she didn't like the frilly part. And up in the woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much housework. You just swept the dirt out the door and you didn't have to worry about, you know, all of the stuff that people have in their houses usually, like bric-a-brac and china and things like that. You don't have to worry about those. So she didn't.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  And she doesn't seem to have had a problem in the woods, except my brother almost drowned once because he got out and fell off the dock. But apart from that and a few other somewhat hairy moments, it was probably safer on the whole than being in a city. Anyway, she seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends, because they were in cities during the winter. My dad was a forest entomologist at Mint. He was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost 100%. They don't do much in the winter, insects.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Pretty quiet insect wise in the winter. So they would go up and say April or so. And they would go back in, for instance, November, but this is, I think, quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods, Tim. I think you're thinking of a more southerly location. Yeah.

• 37:11Tim Ferriss?

  I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  No, they weren't up there.

• 37:17Tim Ferriss?

  I know. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  These were, yeah. Insects that live in trees. He was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest.

• 37:27Tim Ferriss?

  There had to be the forest.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had running water, but it was out of a pump and they didn't have electricity. And they, the transportation was by boat. So no roads there. You could get to, I think by 1939, there was this horrible road, which I remember very well. You'd always get carsick going over it. And then you get to a place where you left the car and then you would get in a boat. So then it was during the war. So there, there weren't even a lot of motorboats because gasoline was rationed. So canoes.

• 38:03Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to hear you describe an experience that came up in my reading in preparation for this. And it relates to a day you found yourself walking across a football field. I don't know if that's enough of a cue, but I would love to hear you expand on this because I did read about it, but I, I feel like there's probably more to the story. So could you please just provide some color and tell the story?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway. So I'll tell you what I made up, but it is kind of true.

• 38:45Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like my life.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. It's like that.

• 38:49Tim Ferriss?

  It's mostly kinda true.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer? There wasn't anything to do except when it was raining, except reading, writing and drawing. So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no, what else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore I fixated on writing pretty early. And it was a narrative family. People told stories. And my older brother was a gung ho writer. He wrote lots of things at that age. He turned into a scientist, but he was very narrative when he was, say, ten, nine.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Anyway, back to the football field. There I am, having written my first novel at the age of seven. It was about an ant. Some structural difficulties there, Tim, because ants don't do anything until the fourth stage of their life. So they don't do anything when they're an egg. They don't do anything when they're a larva. They do nothing when they're a pupa. And it's only when you get to, you know, the last part of the story that they actually have any legs. So I don't start books that way anymore, Tim, but I did then. So then I stopped writing. I took to drawing. I drew a lot. Then I ended up in high school at slightly too early an age.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  They skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So I was 12 and some of the people in my classroom was 16 because they failed people then, Tim.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  So it was a slightly daunting experience, but

• 40:33Tim Ferriss?

  I can imagine.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Things evened out after that. Yes, I was quite short.

• 40:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'm still quite short.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  In fact, I'm still quite short.

• 40:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  People got bigger. For a while I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these, you know, enormous kids who drank a lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade 11 teacher. That would be one, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that?

• 41:02Tim Ferriss?

  I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call it? Fifth form? I don't know if you use British system. I have no idea.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  No, that's English.

• 41:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What do you guys call it in Canada?

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Well, we called it different grades, like nine, 10, 11, 12, and in those days 13, but they've done away with that.

• 41:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we would call it 11th or junior year.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Junior. Yeah. So my great English teacher who I put in a book, because she was a peculiar, people go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, oh, yes, I could see instantly great, brilliant Sean right out of her head. And I can tell she was, you know, slated for greatness, but she told the truth. She said she showed no particular ability in my class, which was true. I didn't show any particular ability

• 41:50Speaker 02

  and I had no idea then that I was going to be a writer. Didn't strike me until the next year. When I had a different English teacher who I've also put into a story because she was a legend in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum. No matter what, no matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings. And she made the immortal comment, because I showed her one of my poems. She said, I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  So wonderful. I love it.

• 42:31Tim Ferriss?

  That is great. That is great.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I started writing poetry in, in grade 12. And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field in a pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself. A work of art, Tim. You don't know what that is, do you?

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Princess line. It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great. Loved it. And it had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences, which I should have done. Had I known, I would have done that. And then I would know how to touch type, which I don't. And it's too late now, Tim. So there I was in my pink princess line dress crossing the football field and a poem occurred to me. It wasn't a very good poem, but it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start. You write

• 43:36Speaker 02

  some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about. And luckily, there's nobody there to tell you, this is really terrible poetry. And then you go on from there.

• 43:47Tim Ferriss?

  What did it feel like when this poem came to you? I mean, the lie. Now, you can tell me how much of this is revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your experience, but quote, "A large invisible thumb descended from the sky."

• 44:01Speaker 02

  It's the eureka moment, Tim. Yeah, a big thumb came out of the sky. You believe that? What else would you like me to tell you that you will also believe?

• 44:10Tim Ferriss?

  I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Yeah, you can tell me anything.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  It was very interesting to me. And I had been trying out these potential careers, like I was going to be a painter. And then I revised that. I was going to be a fashion designer. And then I revised that. And I went into home economics, because in the textbook, it was called Guidance. In grade nine, you were supposed to decide what your career was going to be. Can you imagine? Who knows anything when they're that old?

• 44:44Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  So the Guidance textbook had had five things that that girls could do. And they did not include astrophysicist. Let's see if you can guess what they were in 1952.

• 44:58Tim Ferriss?

  I think I can, but I'm cheating. Nurse secretary, schoolteacher, airline stewardess, as they were known, and home economist.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  You've read what I wrote. Bad cheater.

• 45:10Tim Ferriss?

  I have. I'm a bad cheater. I am a very good cheater. I don't know.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Well, you didn't get away with it.

• 45:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  That's what was on offer. And being a mercenary child, I looked up what they made.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Because I did grow up in a family in which it was expected that you would support yourself. So the home economists made the most, believe it or not. So I went into that. But then I decided, no, this is not for me. I'm going to be a biologist. I was going to be a botanist because I was actually quite good at it. But then along came this writing, much to my parents dismay, but being the bite your tongue kind of parents, I think they just hoped it would be a phase. Grow out of it.

• 45:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's been a long phase. It would seem.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  A phase. Yeah. Well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, well, how are you going to support yourself? I said, you know, I'll get a job, which I did. I got lots of jobs. And then my mother said rather caustically,

• 46:15Speaker 02

  if you're going to be a writer, you better learn to spell. And I said, others will do that for me. And you know, they have. Now we have spell check.

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

  You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were right. You were right.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  I had to wait a while.

• 46:32Tim Ferriss?

  It panned out. So you wrote, if I'm getting the chronology right, you wrote for 16 years before you could make a living out of it. You had all these different jobs, as you mentioned, as a cashier and a coffee shop and many others.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  I was bad at that.

• 46:48Tim Ferriss?

  Over those 16 years, were you maintaining the belief that someday it would pay the bills? And you would be able to make a living out of it? Or was it just a labor of love while you did these other things?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Oh, the writing?

• 47:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  You mean, did I ever think I would make a living out of it? No. People in my age group in my country at that time didn't think that way. They might have thought that way in the 30s. And even in the 40s, where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country. But right after the war during the 50s, a couple of things had happened. And one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off. I think it started with Penguin in the UK and then it was pocketbooks. And Canada didn't have, it had some nascent book publishers,

• 47:45Speaker 02

  but paperbacks were not included in them. So the glossy magazine market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the twenties and thirties, made a living out of selling to glossies. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that they had. So we weren't really thinking in those terms. And there were no agents in Canada at that time. We didn't even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, well, we have to get a partner, you know, either in London or in New York. And that was easier said than done. So the book publishing that had been going on in the thirties of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be a little more certain about that. It was gone, having had paperbacks take its place. So it was hardbacks. And I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact, I was associated with a small publishing company in the late sixties and early seventies. And a lot of it was about money.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Like, how many can we sell? What can we publish to support these works of cutting-edge experimental fiction that nobody's going to buy? What can we publish? So we did. We published the first book on venereal disease. It was called VD. You know Idiot's Guides? These were sort of Idiot's Guides before there were Idiot's Guides. We got as far as warts, but we didn't get to AIDS because nobody knew about it yet. It's like that.

• 49:45Tim Ferriss?

  So let me let me hop in for just a second. When you're writing for 16 years, not thinking you can make a living from it, what did you get from the writing? And did you share your writing with anyone?

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. We were all sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were all of the the poets were connected through this kind of spider web network of little magazines.

• 50:15Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I got it.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines that published poetry and people knew each other through them. So the poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. The poets were more peripatetic. They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door and sleep on your rug. And you, in your turn, might get on the Greyhound bus and and turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a rug exchange of poets. They would turn up here and there and give readings in out of the way places. And some of them, do you remember? No, you don't, sorry.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Coffee shops, coffee shop readings.

• 51:03Tim Ferriss?

  No, I know coffee shops. No, I do. I do. I have been to a coffee shop reading.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops. That's it should be houses. So they didn't have liquor licenses. So basically, people brought flasks in their handbags, pockets and things like that. And you had the usually condemned warehouse or something. And the little tables with the checkered tablecloths, the little wine bottles with the candles stuck in them and the open mic. So poetry night usually on a Tuesday.

• 51:43Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds great. That sounds like a lot of fun.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Down part of the week. Well, the folk singing and jazz went on on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday and Saturday. That's how they, you know, supported the poetry meetings. So we did that in the early 60s. And then the poetry readings spread to universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that, too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the mid 70s, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around, or you did see it before COVID, they didn't exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffeehouses.

• 52:31Tim Ferriss?

  This is neither here nor there, but I am fascinated actually by the history of coffeehouses, especially in the UK where you have Lloyds of London coming out of one coffee shop. And all of this incredible history that I had really.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  You mean back in the 18th century?

• 52:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, way back, which I also don't remember, to be clear, but I have read about it. And that interchange of ideas and this sort of interstitial tissue in the societal fabric of the time. But what I'd like to ask you about next is teaching. And it's clear, reading about your life, that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching did you most enjoy, if any of it?

• 53:12Speaker 02

  I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal. I taught at a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams. And it was a downtown city establishment. You taught your subject to 19-year-olds in the day. And then in the evening, you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me. The 19-year-olds weren't too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to. And really, they would rather be drinking beer

• 53:52Speaker 02

  or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Couple of reasons they wanted to be there, they wanted to up their credentials, but also they were very engaged and they would argue with you, object to things and really, really give you the old run through and that was pretty stimulating. So I taught 19th century novels to those people and I also taught American Romanticism. And it was they who gave me a button that said, "Moby Dick is not a social disease." So they had a sense of humor. I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things that the 19-year-old liked, frequently

• 54:42Speaker 02

  the grown-ups would not like, and the things that the 19-year-olds really didn't like, the grown-ups thought were terrific. So "Middle March" by George Eliot, the 19-year-old said, "We don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers and they marry the wrong people and we're not going to do that." And the adult said, "This is a great book. They make the wrong decisions in their careers, they marry the wrong people, it's just like life." So a big difference in experience. And what's the lesson? The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are, the age that you are

• 55:23Speaker 02

  and the experience that you've had, and it's the same for everyone.

• 55:28Tim Ferriss?

  So we're talking about books, of course. I'll segue to a book that I've not read and I'd love to ask you about because you've recommended that young adults should read "The Future of Life" by Edmund Osborne Wilson, if the internet is to be believed.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yes, unfortunately he's just died.

• 55:44Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry to hear that. As did, uh, yes, exactly right. Yes, that's right. I've actually put a quote of E.O. Wilson, I guess as I better know him, in my newsletter, in fact, I guess two weeks ago. And why do you recommend "The Future of Life," that book in particular?

• 56:05Speaker 02

  He's a biologist. Yeah, he's a biologist. I was familiar with his work from an early period because of course he was an entomologist. He was, he was an ant guy. And my dad started out as a bee guy. And as you will know from your deep study of entomology. Those are both hymenoptera. So my dad was, was very interested in his work on ants and I read it pretty early on. I followed him along and I was in fact the reviewer for his only novel. And you can probably find that review in the New York Review of Books. And I was

• 56:47Speaker 02

  well equipped to do it because I knew about ants. And the, the central section of that book, which is the life and death of an ant colony is the most gripping one. You think, wow, this is so epic. Uh, what is going on here? It's like the sack of Troy. I actually knew him a bit. I'd met him. I thought he was very interesting. And he was a huge advocate for the future of life on earth. And an early, an early advocate and a lot of the early advocates for the kinds of things that we are now very concerned about now. Uh, they came from the world of biology. So my parents, for instance, were early Sierra Club and early environmentalists

• 57:31Speaker 02

  and very clear from any study of biology, life is interconnected. So you contain multitudes, Tim. Just telling you.

• 57:45Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I'm still, I'm still investigating. But yes, I tend to, I tend to agree with you.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Maybe not in the way you think.

• 57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Almost certainly not in the way I think.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  I'm thinking more of your microbes, but never mind. You could not exist without them.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  Now, that is actually something that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about, the microbiome and the, the exobiome.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Do you?

• 58:10Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Yes. It's.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Well, so the knowledge has percolated out from the biologists into the podcasts.

• 58:18Tim Ferriss?

  Somehow. Yes. I do. I'm not going to be writing any books about it, but somehow these things do happen. I would love to chat with you about something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very interested in, and certainly I'll be interested in exploring a bit. And that is the, what seems like a predilection to resist labels or being labeled, being claimed for causes. And you wrote an essay titled "On Being a Woman Writer," which got a lot of attention. Is it fair to say that you resist labels, being labeled? And if so, why is that? How would you explain that?

• 58:58Speaker 02

  I resist closed boxes.

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Okay. The reason I resist closed boxes is that nature does not deal in closed boxes.

• 59:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't have been any evolution. If it did, you and

• 59:18Speaker 02

  I would not exist. So, everything in nature is on a bell curve. There are a lot of liminal beings, or let's say, forms that cannot be put into closed boxes, such as, for instance, the platypus. So, I just don't like closed boxes. And labels are a way of filing people. "Oh, you're a this. We're gonna file you there, under this letter. Your box is gonna go there. And that's who you are, and that's all you are." And I don't think that's true of anyone. And I do think we all contain multitudes. So, that's probably why. You can say, "Sure, I'm a woman writer. I'm a woman, I'm a writer." But that's not the

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  end of the story. There have been a lot of women writers, and not all of them are exactly like me. So, we don't, you can put a general heading over something, just as you can put a general heading over science fiction, speculative fiction, stories about werewolves, Dracula, Frankenstein, ghost stories. They're all wonder tales. You can call them all wonder tales. So, you can call all women writers, women writers. But that's not the end of the story. There's a lot of other things that can be added to that. So, Dracula is not the same as War of the Worlds. They're both wonder tales, but they're very different like that.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  So sure, let's say, woman writer, eighty-two, generational, okay? Country, city, height, hair, curly? That's important, Tim.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  So like that, so you can, you can build out the picture. You can, you can start with a few labels, but it's not the whole story for anybody. And if you're a novelist, of course, you deal in individuals. So you're not just doing types. Does that make any sense to you?

• 1:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  It makes perfect sense, makes perfect sense. You know, I think that labels are also dangerous because if you assume them for yourself, you're more inclined, if you get attached to them, to want to defend those labels as a facet or as the sole entirety of your identity. And that's, I think, how we end up in a lot of the places where we find ourselves collectively now.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, people attach labels to other people and then they attack the label. And that has been going on for at least, you know, five thousand years, as far as we know.

• 1:01:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, a few years.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, quite a few years. So that's, that's a thing that if we wish to live in a multiple democracy, we should attempt to go beyond labels. And of course, what people then go is, well, you're a feminist. And then I always have to say, what kind of feminist are you talking about? Because there's at least seventy-five different kinds. So am I the kind that thinks all men should be rounded up and shoved off a cliff, except for ten percent kept for breeding? No, I am not that kind. You will be happy to know, Tim.

• 1:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, yes, thank you.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  I think you're happy to know. You don't want to be kept for breeding, do you?

• 1:02:39Tim Ferriss?

  I want to be kept for breeding, yes. Please keep me for breeding.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  No, you don't.

• 1:02:44Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe not, maybe not. It depends on the, it really depends on how that's all organized.

• 1:02:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I should probably think more before I answer these types of things. But you strike me as a very joyful person. Before we started recording, I said, I didn't want to bore you, and you said, I'm never bored. One might say, and again, this is applying a label, but that you've long been interested in what people might consider dystopian literature. You seem to be a connoisseur of possibly dystopian speculative fiction.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Utopian, too.

• 1:03:21Tim Ferriss?

  Utopian. Do you consider yourself, and I am asking you to use a label, so pardon me, but generally speaking, an optimistic or hopeful person?

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  I think hope is built in on a very fundamental level to human beings because we get up in the morning and if we thought it was going to be a horrible day every day, we probably wouldn't bother doing that. So some people are afflicted, you know, they are, they've got depression and it's just a horrible thing to live with. So there is a difference between sad and being depressed. So of course I'm sad about various things, but I'm also, I'm hopeful about our species in that although we have lots of downsides, which we know about through history and looking around you and reading dystopian fiction, we know we're capable of really awful things.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  We're also capable of really pretty wonderful things and we're smart and inventive. So yes, we're facing a climate crisis. It's real. We're also inventing a lot of things having to do with that. We are looking at the problem and we are coming up with the solutions. And that's very interesting to me and it's why I'm doing this program called Practical Utopias.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  So the 19th century was a big century of utopias. They wrote a lot of them because they had made so many improvements already in the 19th century that they thought, well, this is just going to go on and it's going to get better and better and better. But then along comes the First World War, bloodshed, slaughter, mustard gas and all kinds of awful things. And then along come various totalitarianisms and the Second World War. So people aren't writing utopias much in the 20th century. They're writing a lot of dystopias. Things could get much worse instead of things could be a lot better.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  So I'm doing practical utopias to bring together a lot of this thinking that's been going on about not how to make a utopia in which everything is perfect. We don't get to have that. Human beings are different, fallible, and they don't always agree on what is better. But we're going to have to think of different ways to live if we are going to overcome the crisis that is facing us. And short form is the oceans die, we're gone. Sorry. We're going to have to deal with that, Tim.

• 1:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  Let's expand on practical utopias. So practical utopias, and then the subheading or description, an exploration of the possible. This is an eight-week, if I understand correctly, live online learning experience. How did you choose this project of all of the things that you could spend time on? Why is this important to you?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  I think it's important to us. I think it's important in the general scheme of things and at the point at which we are now finding ourselves. And we know what the problems are because we carp about them endlessly. It's important to turn people's minds to what can be done apart from blanket statements like we all have to not use gasoline anymore. So there is going to have to be a transitional period about that, Tim.

• 1:06:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  So getting people together, gathering people who know something about these fields, putting them together with people who are knowledgeable in other fields and constructing, you know, Lego. Making a Lego village, you know Minecraft. So world building in a practical way. What are we going to eat? What sort of clothes are we going to wear? What are they going to be made out of? What sort of houses will we live in? What about vertical farms? I'm really interested in vertical farms right now. How about mushrooms? Did you know you can make bricks out of mushrooms? Would you like to have a mushroom coffin?

• 1:07:30Tim Ferriss?

  I did not.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Bricks, yes, bricks. Yeah, yeah, you better join up. You know, you can 3D print houses out of compressed earth in two days. Do you know that there are now prefab houses that you can erect? That create more energy than they consume. So all of these ideas brought together and for the practical utopia is going to have to be. The solutions will have to be green. They'll have to be cheap enough and they'll have to be scalable. This is a problem solving enterprise. And we can look at some of the things that went pear shaped about previous attempts to make Utopias.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  And we're going to have to build in the social component to try to keep that from happening. How do you take something with great idealism attached? Like the early stages of the Russian Revolution? And keep it from turning into Stalin's show trials? Like that.

• 1:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  You know, a lot about the Russian Revolution. What might be some of your observations with respect to the example you just gave?

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Well, it's not just the Russian, it's the French. The American one is a bit of an anomaly. Because it was, it was not conducted in a confined space, as it were. And it was a particular kind of revolution that was not so much overthrowing a ruling class from within. As ejecting a ruling class that was coming in from without. So that's a different kind of thing. So with the French and the, the Russian, they were toppling a ruling class from within.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  And the way that both of those things went is is very interesting to me. And then you find them, you reach a point where it all falls apart. I mean, the other example, of course, is Hitler and Mussolini on on the right. The French and the Russian, I guess you would say, were from the left. So how do you keep those things from sort of falling apart and turning into the terror and the show trials and the Cultural Revolution and things like that? In fact, one of these books, no, it's not under there anymore. It's around here somewhere. It's over here. Great book on the Chinese Cultural Revolution by a guy who was there.

• 1:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  What's the title?

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  The World Turned Upside Down. The World Turned Upside Down. It's by Yang Jisheng.

• 1:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  The most interesting part for me is is how they went about toppling the Gang of Four. They actually did meet in houses and write things on little pieces of paper, which they then burned because they were convinced their houses were bugged, which they were. So high drama, high drama, sort of George Smiley territory.

• 1:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  You know what? There have been multiple times when you have said, do you remember that? And then you said, of course, you don't, because I was not alive. Who is George Smiley? I'm going to admit ignorance on this one.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  George Smiley is John le Carré's tinker tailor soldier spy.

• 1:10:46Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, got it.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  M I six guy who sets out to catch a mole, a mole from within the intelligence service.

• 1:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  What was the the film?

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  It's a it's a TV series starring Alec Guinness, who is very good at it, too. From about the seventies, early seventies. You can find it with a cursory search of web streamers.

• 1:11:14Tim Ferriss?

  There's a there's a fantastic film.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Depths of the Cold War.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  That's the Cold War. There's another film that might sort of tie into that example. One of my favorite films, actually, certainly for a long period of time, called The Lives of Others, which was about

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Fantastic film.

• 1:11:28Tim Ferriss?

  The monitoring of East Berlin residents by the Stasi. Incredible film.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  You bet. So I lived in West Berlin in 1984 and went across to East Berlin and also Czechoslovakia and also Poland. Very instructive.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  You had to be quite careful how you talked to people if they would talk to you. And those three countries were very different. So the one that was sewed up the tightest was East Germany. The one that was quite loosey goosey was Poland.

• 1:12:02Tim Ferriss?

  So you're going to be bringing your life experience, your study of history to bear on practical utopias. How many other people are involved? What does the structure look like? Are there?

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  So we're doing it with a platform called Disco, which is an interactive live learning platform. It's structured so that they give you the tools. So you know what Substack is?

• 1:12:29Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  So Substack gives you the tools to basically publish your own newspaper and Disco gives you the tools to do your own live learning experience. There are other kinds of learning experience, which are like TED Talks and things and Master Class, which I did one of. And they're more like films. In fact, the background of the Master Class people was in film production and they do a beautiful job of film producing your class. The Disco one is interactive in that people join you and there's a to and fro. So the idea is that people will bring their ideas to add to the building of their version

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  of a better way to live that will be green, scalable and affordable. And they're going to have to make practical decisions. They're going to have to say, okay, which is better? Is it better to get your corpse disposed of by cremation? Very carbon producing. Is it better to put it in a mushroom coffin? Is it better to do this new thing that has started up in Seattle called recompose, in which you get turned quite quickly into compost? And they're going to have to do the cost in money and the cost in carbon and figure out which choice they're going to make because there's ups and downs to all of these choices.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  So what you're going to eat? Are you going to eat the 100 mile diet? Are you going to grow things in vertical gardens quite close to you? Is it going to be nothing but brown rice? It wasn't about 1973. That was very bad for people.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  You're going to have to do the nutrition plus where are you getting these things? And we are so used to going into the supermarket and everything is just there.

• 1:14:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  You know? So how long can that continue? And all of these things, what are you going to do with old people? Yeah, what are you going to do with the old people? Are you going to sort of shove them out the window at some point or what?

• 1:14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'll make you a deal. If I am kept as one of the 10 or 20% of males for breeding, I will prevent them from throwing you out the window. So I will, we can strike a bargain.

• 1:14:57Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you have a lot going on. You also have Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, which will be published in March of 2022. Could you tell us more about Burning Questions?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  So it's the third in the series. There's been two other collections of essays. The first one was called Second Words because it was mostly book reviews. Did a lot of book reviews at that time. The second one was called Moving Targets. And that took us up to 2004. And then we have Burning Questions. And to do these collections, we have to weed through an awful lot of stuff. Because it turns out that I write about, on an average, of 35 short pieces a year. So you can see that adds up.

• 1:15:50Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you say short pieces, what do you consider short? What is the range on short?

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Well, anywhere from four pages to 25 pages.

• 1:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Well, some of them are speeches, you know, they can dribble on for a while. But some of them are, and you have to condense them, you have to take out the repetitions. Increasingly, of course, there are obituaries of people that I have known. I didn't write any of those in the first part of my life because nobody died that I knew. So there are some of those I did, well, we won't go into all the people that have died, but I have written some of their obits. I wrote actually two for Ursula K. Le Guin. I wrote one for The Guardian, I wrote one for The Washington Post, and they both had to be different. But these things are very sudden, you know, somebody is suddenly dead and they want you to write it right now.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  So I wrote one of those on a plane. So that's what it is. And quite a lot about conservation issues, which have come increasingly to the fore. As usual, gender issues and other things that you might not expect.

• 1:17:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  Nor did I. I didn't expect them either, but suddenly there I was, writing about them.

• 1:17:10Tim Ferriss?

  Is Burning Questions taken from one of the pieces that was included in the collection? Otherwise, where did the title come from?

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it just came out of the air like, like a lot of titles.

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  Like that big thumb in the sky?

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  Like that, exactly like that. It's suddenly just there. I think the issues that we are facing, although we have been in these very tight spots before. I can remember sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, thinking that we were all going to get atom bombs dropped on us at any minute. That didn't happen, but I think it came pretty close. So like that, things that, that almost happened, but, but didn't. And I'm hoping that the climate crisis. Although it's already underway, I'm hoping that it can be at least stalled enough

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  for people to get a grip on it.

• 1:18:10Tim Ferriss?

  It is certainly a subject area and a research area that I'm spending a lot of my time on as well right now.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  I bet you are. Well, you should join Practical Utopias. Come and join us. You probably by this time have gathered a lot of things. Every day, there's something new that comes into view. For instance, I hadn't been thinking at all about vertical farms, and now I am. I'm suddenly doing a lot of thinking about how. And there's a number of companies putting this together for you. There's a bunch of kits out there.

• 1:18:40Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Things like that. Did you know you can make fabric out of algae?

• 1:18:44Tim Ferriss?

  I did not know about the fabric example, but...

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  No, neither did I, but now I do.

• 1:18:49Tim Ferriss?

  But it's so funny that you mentioned algae. I was just going to say, as one of my examples in the last six months is aquaculture, so vertical sea farming, and specifically algae. I didn't know about the application of clothing, so no, I did not know that. It's the hemp of the sea, I guess.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Yes, well, clothing and growing cotton, growing stuff that you make fabrics out of is pretty consumptive of energy and materials and water. So how do we deal with these things?

• 1:19:24Tim Ferriss?

  I want to push back on a quote that I read from you at some point when prepping for this, and it was related to, I believe, an interviewer or someone profiling you, saying that you were prolific, and you said, I believe, and this could be a misquote, but Joyce Carol Oates is prolific, I'm just old. Now, you have a great sense of humor, so I can see now, especially having spent some time together, how you would say something like that. I would say that you are most certainly prolific, but...

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  But it mounts up. You see, it just accumulates. So, you know, John Keats was probably more prolific, but he died young. So there's two things. There's the accumulation, which makes you look prolific. But then there's the speed, the rate, which can actually be quite slow. But if you're this old, it all sort of adds up.

• 1:20:18Tim Ferriss?

  Has your writing cadence or your writing habits changed much over the last few decades? Or have they remained fairly constant?

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  Of course. No, no, of course they change. So when you have a job,

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  you write at night.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when you have a job, when you're a student, those kinds of things, you're going to be a night writer. When you have a child, when the child is small, if you still have a brain at that point, and it does come back,

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  you are going to write when the child is asleep. When the child goes to school, you're going to write when the child is at school. When the child sniffle, sniffle, sniffle, goes off on its own, grows up and goes off on its own, then you're probably, and you're getting quite, dare I say, middle aged. Yes, I'm going to say middle aged, Tim.

• 1:21:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'm there. I'm there already.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  You're probably going to be writing in the daytime. Then there's another thing that happens when you pass a certain moment, which you seem to need less sleep. So right now, I'm a procrastinating nighttime writer. In other words, I'm back to doing what I used to do in about 1964.

• 1:21:45Tim Ferriss?

  What does it look like when you write at night? Is it a set block of time, a set number of pages? I know that you, as I understand it, don't have any sort of magical talismans. You don't have a particular writing setup that you require. But what is it in the last, just say, handful of years? What does your night writing look like?

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  So many pages is usually how I do it. So not so much time. That's motivating. Because if you write the number of pages that you think you should be writing that day, you can then goof off and watch really silly murder mysteries, Tim.

• 1:22:25Tim Ferriss?

  Sign me up. I was just doing it on Netflix the other day.

• 1:22:32Tim Ferriss?

  Although

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  What were you watching?

• 1:22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I was watching In the Dark, which is a series about a very attractive blind woman who is attempting to solve a murder mystery. And it's very funny.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  Oh, that's the Audrey Hepburn plot from, uh, long ago. What is that movie that she was in?

• 1:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, boy. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Wait until dark.

• 1:22:55Tim Ferriss?

  There we go.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  That's what it is. Wait until dark. She's blind. A guy comes in, the house is going to murder her and she shuts off all the lighting.

• 1:23:04Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  So that she can get around better than he can.

• 1:23:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  And, uh, that goes back to, I think, an H. G. Wells story called In the Valley of the Blind, The One-Eyed Man is King, which is a sci-fi story in which he, this guy thinks he's pretty. You want to hear the plot?

• 1:23:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do. I do want to hear the plot.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Yes, he, he strays into a valley in which everybody is blind. In fact, they don't even have any eyes. They, they just have sort of blank spaces there and not even any sticky out things. And he, he decides that he can be king of this because he can see. And he falls in love with a woman who says, uh, yes, yes, we can get married, but first we have to get rid of those ugly bumps on your face.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Wait a minute. I'm gone.

• 1:23:56Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me think of that, uh, Twilight Zone episode. I can't recall the name of the episode, but the, it's very sort of antisocial. I guess this is sort of a redundant way to put it, but misanthrope. This man who wears glasses, who survives the end of the world, and now he can be alone and read all of his books and he steps on his own glasses at the end of the episode.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  Oh, no. Oh, no.

• 1:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Sad Christmas. Yes. Margaret, this has been so much fun. People should certainly check out Practical Utopias, An Exploration of the Possible. We'll link to that in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. So people will be able to find that very easily.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  We had to move along to, to launching in September because we got too much. There's too much input, so we just needed a bit more time. And we also decided to add a low-cost NFT. You know what an NFT is?

• 1:24:53Tim Ferriss?

  I do. I do know what an NFT is.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  You do? Well, we're doing them. At first, they said, let's do one of those. And I said, we can't do that because they consume too much energy. Like, a lot. So they went out and they found one that doesn't. It consumes the same amount of energy as a tweet. And it is called a T E Z O S.

• 1:25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Tezos. S.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Tezos.

• 1:25:19Tim Ferriss?

  I know Tezos.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  Yes. You do. What do you know about it, Tim?

• 1:25:24Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I know that many creatives, artists of different types, decide to use Tezos. And by extension, some of them use a marketplace called Hen. There are different tools and platforms related to this. But it is an alternative for those who are seeking a less energy-intensive way of engaging with the NFT, non-fungible token, space.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  So what we are doing, we're hiring graphic illustrators to draw the utopias. So each of our interactive groups is going to make choices about how their utopia is going to be. And these illustrators are going to illustrate them. And I'm going to do some illustrating of them, too, because one of my background things is graphic design and comic book writing, pretty elementary kind. So we're going to get some wonderful illustrators. And they're going to make five illustrations for each of our utopias. And we're going to put them into these NFTs. And this is a whole new world for me. But one of our team members knows quite a lot about it.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  In fact, he is an NFT artist himself. So he just gave us a crash course last week on how this works, what it could look like, and how it's all going to come together. So I think that part is pretty exciting. And I have worked with graphic artists before. They live in a wild and wonderful world. You probably know that I did what is essentially a bird conservation project called Angel Cat Bird.

• 1:27:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  With a wonderful graphic artist called Johnny Christmas.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  And that was so much fun. And we exchanged ideas through drawing them and sending them over the internet. So he would send me one and I would say, make the ears bigger. Then I send him a cat skeleton. You know, this is a cat skeleton. You have to look at the skull. It's very narrow at the bottom. So he did a wonderful job. And I'm looking forward to seeing which graphic artists our team member, Rick, manages to talk into doing this. And they will all be in these NIF, NFTs, NFTs at low energy cost. That's the idea.

• 1:27:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's a fascinating space. I think it's also wonderful that you're experimenting with some of these alternative platforms and drawing some attention to different options that people have in the space.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I'm keen on Disco because it allows people who aren't in a physical space to participate in an experience that usually people only had in physical spaces. And that goes way back to the beginning of the 21st century, when I was trying to think of a way to make book signings and author appearances available to places that normally wouldn't have them. We did succeed in doing that. The enterprise was called Longpen, but the publishing industry couldn't get their heads around it. So now it's segwayed into

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  a business tool with a different name. It's called SYNGRAFII. It is biometric digital signing within a video signing room. But because we started it so early, we've got all these patents, Tim, because nobody else was doing it. And people thought we were nuts. You've heard this story before. Sort of the Velcro story, like, what is this good for?

• 1:29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's how, that's how a lot of things start. You know, Post-it notes would be another example.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Was it?

• 1:29:16Tim Ferriss?

  They thought it was a flawed, doomed, failed adhesive because it didn't work. Didn't keep things stuck in one place. And then somebody said, well, wait a second here. Maybe we can actually change the positioning. And there is an application. It's just not the application that we're used to. It's actually the opposite of what we would normally look for.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  I use them a lot in novel writing, Post-it notes with words on them.

• 1:29:41Tim Ferriss?

  How do you use them in novel writing?

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  Well, you know, there's my thing that I'm writing and then I have an idea. So I stick it on the table.

• 1:29:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes. The idea on the table. Well, I have been taking notes as we've been talking. I have so many things that I'm going to be following up on, ranging from The World Turned Upside Down to, of course, Practical Utopia's Burning Questions. This collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, coming out March 2022. I feel like we could talk for many, many hours. And for those people who didn't catch it, not only have you produced work and written in every possible format or genre imaginable, because why not? Right?

• 1:30:25Tim Ferriss?

  Why be constrained?

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  You understand.

• 1:30:27Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Because why not? You also are an inventor, because I think people may have not, just in case they didn't get the underscoring on that, with patents with this long pen, originally long pen technology allowing, I guess it would be remote robotic writing?

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  The physical long pen, of course, we have an entirely digital service now, but the physical long pen still exists and people still want to have them. Because you write on your end and the pen holder on the other end duplicates that exactly with real ink. So yes, it's bizarre, but it came out of the requirements of the book signing industry because book collectors would not accept anything that wasn't perfectly your signature. And we did these events, you know, from Australia to North America, from, you know, back and forth from, from England. We were able to do it. People didn't know how to

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  scale it. But as it is now, that has all been solved. So you can, you can do the digital version, but if you need the physical one with ink, that can be produced. But it's not like an auto pen. An auto pen is a, is like a sewing machine designed. This is every, remember cursive?

• 1:31:42Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Your signature. Every, every time you sign your name, it's, it's different from the last time you signed it.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  So I have just two more questions for you. One, I'm going to warn people ahead of time. This has a bit of a spoiler. So fast forward 30 seconds if you don't want a spoiler of sorts. This is on behalf of my employee I mentioned who loves your work. And here's her question. When you wrote The Handmaid's Tale decades ago, did you plan Aunt Lydia's role as a double agent, which the rest of us didn't find out until the Testaments? Or did she evolve as a character in the space between the two books?

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  She evolved, for sure. She's a secondary character in The Handmaid's Tale, and she becomes a primary character in the Testaments. The thing about characters who speak for themselves, you're always a lot closer to them and, and they're always more complex than somebody that you're just seeing, you know, that's sort of across the room. And as you know, from what I've already said, everybody is more complex than, than just a sort of cardboard cutout. So, once we get inside Aunt Lydia's head, she turns out to have quite a few more dimensions. And also, it's further along in the plot. So,

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  the Testaments is approx 15, 16 years after The Handmaid's Tale. Things have happened to Aunt Lydia since that time. I always base things on stuff that's happened. And one of my go-tos for Aunt Lydia was, was people who had been believers within a system and then changed their minds. And there are a number of those in history. They're pretty interesting.

• 1:33:27Tim Ferriss?

  And how do you go about doing research for characters like those in history? Or were those already examples you had in mind and therefore you didn't have to go digging for them? Were they already references in your head or did you do research?

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so remember what I said about being old?

• 1:33:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  And stuff accumulating?

• 1:33:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  So, did you have a granny who had an attic?

• 1:33:52Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  Okay, what was in it?

• 1:33:56Tim Ferriss?

  I wasn't allowed up there, so I don't know.

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  Oh darn, you weren't allowed up there. Well, that's very bad. Everybody should be allowed up into their granny's attic once because it's basically like a collection of stuff that just, it's there. You put it up there because you can't think of what else to do with it, but you don't want to throw it out. So the inside of my head is like that, Tim. So there's just a lot of stuff in there. And there's also a lot of books in this house and, and one of the sections is devoted to wars and totalitarianisms. And spies and really interesting things like programs of deception in wars.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  I mean, I find those fascinating. The British hired a lot of theatrical set designers to design illusions in the desert. Make it look as if there were people where there weren't people, hide their oil drums, disguise trucks as tanks and tanks as trucks. And then they switch them at night. So theatrical illusions. Yeah, so I had a lot of it already in the junk shop of my brain. Some of it in the, some of it in the war spies totalitarianisms section of my library. And some of it, of course, in Shakespeare. You always go to Shakespeare.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  So Richard III, a villain, a villain who tells us right off that he's really bad and now we can watch him being bad.

• 1:35:37Tim Ferriss?

  Margaret, I don't even know how to, how to begin to close up this conversation and you contain multitudes. Is there anything else that you-

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  Tim, have I confused you?

• 1:35:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you've impressed me. I think you haven't confused me. You have, I think you've just outranked me. There's, I need to do a lot more reading.

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's have a little bit about you. How did you get into this? What, what put it into your head to do a podcast?

• 1:36:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the truth is, I wrote books before the podcast, nonfiction books. So I wrote three of those and I found the third book to be particularly difficult and it really took a lot out of me. And in the process of launching that third book, I ended up on a number of podcasts and I really enjoyed the long form conversation and I decided that I would take a break from writing to do six to 10 episodes of a podcast with my friends to get better at asking questions. Because with the nonfiction books I was writing, it all came down to asking questions of experts at the end of the day. So it seemed like something that would transfer.

• 1:36:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I decided to have fun, long conversations with friends to hopefully get rid of some lazy verbal tics and some lazy mental habits as a consequence. And I just fell in love with doing it. It was for me, the fun part of the research process without the writing. And I know that sounds terrible, but-

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:37:13Tim Ferriss?

  At the time, I was just so battered and bruised from my experience with this third book. And that's how the podcast started. And now we're almost 600 episodes in and it's something that gives me incredible nourishment and energizes me. I was having such a, if I'm being honest, terrible day before we had this conversation. I was, I was just having a brutal day and the last week has been very difficult. And I feel great right now.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  Well, that's wonderful.

• 1:37:43Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that's why I do the podcast.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's a really good reason.

• 1:37:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  So have you ever, this is completely off topic.

• 1:37:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's okay.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  Do you know anything about dictation apps in which you talk into the-

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Microphone and then it turns into text.

• 1:38:03Tim Ferriss?

  I would like to start using such a program because a friend of mine, a new friend named Noah Feldman, who's a professor at Harvard Law School, is a, he's just a prodigious talent and an incredible writer. And he uses, I want to say Dragon, which might have been previously known as Dragon, naturally speaking, to draft everything that he writes, articles, books, and so on. Why do you ask?

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Well, you know, typing is hard.

• 1:38:31Tim Ferriss?

  Typing is hard.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  Especially if you can't touch type, especially if you can't touch type, which I can't, I have to look.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  So you know that they said, instead of Henry James, there are three. Henry James is James the first, James the second, and the old pretender. But late Henry James dictated.

• 1:38:52Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Did you know that?

• 1:38:54Tim Ferriss?

  I did not know that.

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So people used to dictate to stenographers, but I don't think those people exist anymore. But, and also it would be a bit inhibiting because there'd be another person in the room.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Don't you think?

• 1:39:09Tim Ferriss?

  It would be inhibiting, yes.

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we knew a person a long time ago who, who wrote romance novels and also drank. And, and she used to sit behind a screen and dictate her romance novels to a stenographer.

• 1:39:21Tim Ferriss?

  Like a confessional?

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  And she would be dictating away and she would say, you know, no, no, she was dictating romance novels. Oh yeah, I like the confessional. The voice would come from behind the screen and she would say, and, and Letitia with her flashing green eyes and the stenographer would say, um, a couple of pages ago, her eyes were blue. Well, change them.

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  So maybe I need a person like that.

• 1:39:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So you're saying I should drink and use some dictation software? Is that, if I'm hearing?

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  No, not you. No, no, no, no, you're not writing flashing eyed romance novels. No, no, you don't need to do that. But I think if you have an iPad, I think you can do this, right?

• 1:40:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, oh, for sure. I've been meaning to test this software. Do you use dictation software or anything like that?

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  Not yet. That's why I'm asking.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  I'll test it out for you. I'll test it. Noah Noah is a true believer and he is extremely smart. He says it takes a little while. We were just texting about this the other week, in fact, to work out the kinks and get comfortable. But he has, I believe it's carpal tunnel or some type of issue with his hands and his lower arms whereby he really can't sit and type for long periods of time. But he's a true believer with the dictation software. So I give you my word, I will test it out and I will let you know how the experiment goes and what my what my pro and con evaluation is.

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I do write a lot in in longhand and I can just read the longhand rather than having to transcribe it.

• 1:40:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. I think that's a brilliant idea. I'll test the software and let you know because I need someone to hold me accountable. So I will, I will do that. I'll make that commitment.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  It's gonna be me holding you accountable?

• 1:41:08Tim Ferriss?

  I know that I've made a promise. And now, even if you forget who I am tomorrow, I will still feel badly if I don't do it. So I will download some form of transcription software and I will test it out and let you know how that goes. And is there anything else you would like to to say, share, questions you'd like to ask, requests of my audience, complaints about the podcast you'd like to lodge publicly?

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Can you come over and shovel the snow off my roof?

• 1:41:37Tim Ferriss?

  You know, if I would love to, but I don't think I'm terribly close by.

• 1:41:44Tim Ferriss?

  If I were closer by, I would be happy to do that.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Where are you, Tim?

• 1:41:48Tim Ferriss?

  I am actually in the mountains and there is quite a bit of snow. It's gonna start snowing again very soon. And I just love it here.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  Are you there to go skiing?

• 1:42:00Tim Ferriss?

  I'm absolutely skiing. I'm going on a backcountry trip tomorrow for my first time to learn how to skin, which I have never done before, which is putting on almost like a shark skin condom on your skis so you can go uphill and then you take them off and you have Alpine skiing. I'll be doing that for a few days. And I find the geography and the ecology here to be just stunning. It is unlike any place I've ever spent an extended period of time. My girlfriend's family is here. She grew up here. So that's another reason that I'm here.

• 1:42:36Tim Ferriss?

  And it's spectacular just being immersed in the enormity of nature here is calming for me. I'm reading a book right now called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  He was a friend.

• 1:42:52Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, he was.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one of my little, one of my little write ups and burning questions is, is Barry.

• 1:42:59Tim Ferriss?

  Um, he passed away so recently and I was so sad.

• 1:43:02Speaker 02

  Imagine that.

• 1:43:02Tim Ferriss?

  I was so sad to hear that I had been gifted of wolves and men. And it absolutely blew my mind. It was such a beautifully written meticulously researched book. And Arctic Dreams, of course, was, was recommended and recommended and recommended. And I'd never spent time near the poles, but recently had my first trip. I was invited by a friend to go to Antarctica and became fascinated by these polar regions. And so only in the last few weeks have I started Arctic Dreams. And the permanence that he writes about in, and the vastness of some of those spaces

• 1:43:43Tim Ferriss?

  reminds me in a sense of the, the Western United States at altitude. And they're very different, very, very, very different. But you can get a taste of what he's referring to in places like Montana, certainly in Alaska. You can get that feeling. So I'm, I'm happy to be here. I'm very, very happy to be here. And where are you at the moment?

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  I'm sitting in my study, which you can see in the background in Toronto. But I, I made it down from the woods just in time for this interview. We had a blizzard yesterday, so I was supposed to come down yesterday, but we did not take that chance and made it down, passing 12 stuck buses on the way.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  And uh

• 1:44:28Tim Ferriss?

  You made it.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  Made the interview, hooray.

• 1:44:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you for, thank you, thank you for putting in such an incredible effort. And this was, uh, this was wonderful. I encourage people to really do a deep dive on everything that you're up to, including Practical Utopias and Burning Questions. People can find you online at margaretatwood.ca, on Twitter at @margaretatwood, Instagram, the real Margaret Atwood. And this has just been such a joy to spend time with you this afternoon. So thank you very much, Margaret, for, for carving out the space to have this conversation.

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  And thank you. It was a real pleasure and enjoy your skiing.

• 1:45:06Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I will. And to everybody listening, you contain multitudes. Do not be contained by closed boxes that do not conform to the greater beauty of nature. And be just a little bit kinder than you have to be. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the

• 1:45:49Tim Ferriss?

  coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:46:33Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 80,000 Hours. You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. They add up and are one of your biggest opportunities, if not the biggest opportunity, to make a positive impact on the world. In other words, you want to make the best use of your 80,000 hours. Until we wrap up this show called Life, where should you start? Where should you focus? It can be really hard and quite frankly, pretty stressful to try and figure out. Some of the best strategies, best research and best tactical advice I've seen and heard come from 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit co-founded by Will McCaskill,

• 1:47:17Tim Ferriss?

  an Oxford philosopher and a popular past guest on this podcast. Will is perhaps best known as being the co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, which has gained a lot of steam and a lot of popular coverage in the last handful of years. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help you find a career or path for tackling one of the world's most pressing problems. If you're looking to make a big change to your direction, mid-career, say, address pressing global problems for your current job, or if you're just starting out or maybe starting a new chapter and not sure which path to pursue, 80,000 Hours can help. Join their free newsletter and they'll send you an in-depth guide that will help you identify which global problems are most pressing,

• 1:48:01Tim Ferriss?

  where you can have the biggest impact personally. And it will also help you get new ideas for high-impact careers or directions that help tackle these issues. They also have a job board with 800-plus opportunities to work on these problems and offer one-on-one advice to help you switch paths if that's what you choose to do. And you can check out their excellent 80,000 Hours podcast, which has in-depth conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems. And really try to find that needle in the haystack. There's so many things to choose from. How do you pick the right, high-leverage problem for you to focus on helping solve? My team has raved, for instance, about the interview with Ezra Klein. That's number 94. And you can subscribe wherever you

• 1:48:43Tim Ferriss?

  Find your podcasts. That's the 80,000 Hours Podcast. If you join the newsletter now as an extra bonus, they'll mail you, yes, physically mail you, a free book about impactful careers such as Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better. You can sign up at 80000hours.org/tim. That's eight zero zero zero zero hours, H-O-U-R-S dot org slash tim. Check it out. I really encourage you to check out this site, even if you have no plans to change your career, if you're just curious about picking high leverage targets in life to improve the world. So I will also say it one more time because noteworthy, they're nonprofit and everything they provide is free. That takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell

• 1:49:28Tim Ferriss?

  of a lot of dedication and a lot of people, a lot of hours on their part. Podcast, the newsletter, even their one-on-one advice, all free. So check it out. 80000hours.org/tim. 80000hours.org/tim. Take a look. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in

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• 1:51:38Tim Ferriss?

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