#151: How to Overcome Fear - Lessons from Firefighter and Luger, Caroline Paul

Caroline Paul (@carowriter https://twitter.com/carowriter) is a blast and can also probably kick my ass... seriously. Caroline is the author of four published books. Her latest is the New York Times best seller The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. http://www.amazon.com/The-Gutsy-Girl-Escapades-Adventure/dp/1632861232/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 Once a young scaredy-cat, Caroline decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted--of excitement, confidence, and self-reliance. She has since flown planes, rafted big rivers, climbed tall mountains, and fought fires as one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco. In this episode, we discuss various types of fear and how to overcome them, using stories, habits, and tactics. Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you—for free–exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years and I love audio books. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose between more than 180,000 audio programs. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy!

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, we're just seeing appropriate timing.

• 0:12Speaker 00

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc.,

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest $830,000. ...account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 2:32Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for years.

• 3:15Tim Ferriss?

  I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing, you will thank me, The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than 180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could

• 4:00Tim Ferriss?

  be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  Hello Druids and Dro Elves. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct people who are exceptionally good at what they do, whether they are chess prodigies, performers, athletes, politicians, military strategists, or otherwise. And this episode, we have a very fun guest, Caroline Paul, @CaroRiter on the Twitters, C-A-R-O-W-R-I-T-E-R. She is a blast, and she was recommended to me by two close friends who have both been on the podcast, Chris Sacca, and we'll get to his introduction in the interview itself, and Maria Popova. And Maria, I hope to God that I'm getting your last name correct this time around.

• 4:56Tim Ferriss?

  And Maria said that Caroline is "all about living courageously and embracing adventure in our culture of safe achievement." And that is music to my ears, because I feel like we have grown soft, we've grown weak, and it is time to remedy that with habits, practices, and stories that impart lessons. On top of that, Caroline can probably kick my ass, and I'm actually not kidding whatsoever about that. She's the author of four published books. The latest is the New York Times bestseller, The Gutsy Girl, subtitle Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. And that does not mean this podcast is only for girls, or women, or females. It is about overcoming fear.

• 5:39Tim Ferriss?

  Once a scaredy cat herself, Caroline decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted, including a life of excitement, confidence, self-reliance, etc. She has since fought fires as one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco, flown planes, rafted big rivers, climbed tall mountains like Denali, and much, much more. In this episode, we discuss various types of fear, and how she has overcome them, or minimized them, and how you can do the same. So please enjoy my conversation with Caroline Paul.

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  Caroline, welcome to the show.

• 6:14Caroline Paul?

  Thanks, Tim. I'm really happy to be here.

• 6:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's nice to see you again. And I thought we could start with an email that you haven't seen, which was an introduction from Chris Sacca, who's been on the podcast. And I hate to use the B word, but he's a very, very esteemed startup investor, billionaire, and all-around good guy, and famous for his introductions, I would say. He's very good at writing mutual intros, or in this case, a one-sided intro. And this was his email to me about two weeks ago. "Hey, man. Remember Caroline Paul from Italy? You guys hit it off big time. She's a fucking badass. One of the only ever San Francisco female firefighters, a pilot who walked away from a crash, a surfer, adventurer, etc. Her twin sister was actually one of

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  the star lifeguards on Baywatch, too. Did I mention she can probably lift as much as you? I don't know exactly what her supplement regime is, but she looks like she's teetering on the edge of not entirely natural. Can I re-intro you, Chris?" Now, the last part, for those of you who don't know Chris-

• 7:15Caroline Paul?

  That's a lot of Bs. Billionaire badass Baywatch.

• 7:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's a lot. It's a lot. And I remember meeting you in Italy very briefly, and just wanting to ask so many questions. And so this is now my opportunity. And it also gave me an opportunity to dig into your background and do a lot more reading. And I feel like there's so many different pieces of the puzzle, I don't know where to start. So I will begin with the one that just jumped out at me when I was reading an op-ed of yours in the New York Times. And that is pulling a bloated body from the bay. Can you provide some context for pulling a dead body from the bay?

• 8:03Caroline Paul?

  Yes. Well, I was a San Francisco firefighter from 1989 to 2003. And I worked on a rig called Rescue Two. And we were trained not only to rescue in fires, but to do all sorts of technical rescues. And one of them was to be a dive rescuer, mostly not a rescuer, a recovers. We did body recoveries. And so I must have been talking about one of my attempted body recoveries.

• 8:34Tim Ferriss?

  What does that-

• 8:37Tim Ferriss?

  Feel like and specifically the first time you went to potentially recover a body or did recover a body, what was that experience like?

• 8:48Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, there's lots of mixed emotions because first of all, it's really exciting and I love adventure. So it's adventurous, but I've never been great with dead bodies. I know that's weird. Who's great with dead bodies? I don't love them. I mean, I don't love coming upon them. I always get a little bit of the heebie jeebies right before I walk up to someone who I know is dead. I have to gird myself just a little. And so when you're looking for a body in the bay, it's kind of like searching for a monster because bodies in the water decompose very fast. They bloat, fish, crabs eat the eyes. Yeah, I know.

• 9:30Tim Ferriss?

  And the visibility is generally next to nothing in the bay? Or am I making that up?

• 9:37Caroline Paul?

  It's nothing.

• 9:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's nothing, right?

• 9:38Caroline Paul?

  It's literally nothing. I mean, the first couple of feet, it's sort of, you can see a little, then it gets murky brown. And then the bay, the bottom of the bay is actually a couple of feet, I think, of silt.

• 9:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 9:51Caroline Paul?

  And so when you drop down to search, you drop down and you can feel mud, even though you're wearing like a super thick suit, you can still kind of feel the mud. And then you have to sink even lower to hit the actual bottom. So you're actually swimming very slowly through silt. So you can't see anything.

• 10:12Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds terrifying without the dead body. And in that case, I mean, the bay is certainly larger than a swimming pool by many orders of magnitude. If you have such low visibility, how do you search for a dead body?

• 10:27Caroline Paul?

  The worst way you feel for a dead body? So you swim very slowly, one hand, one hand, holding a rope because you're guided from the top because you want to do a certain pattern. And the other hand, just reaching out very slowly and feeling. And if you do the search pattern right, you pretty much cover a pretty wide area. But you don't see anything, and I'll tell you, the things at the bottom of the bay are amazing. I mean, shopping carts, tires, I don't even, you know, pipes, cans.

• 11:01Tim Ferriss?

  I had this experience, just since I've had enough caffeine to feel like I need to chime in, that scared me tremendously in the bay. I was at Aquatic Park, and for those people who don't know Aquatic Park, it's like this somewhat safeguarded portion of the bay where you can swim laps. And there are a number of swimming clubs. So I put on my swimming cap, went in without a wetsuit at some ungodly point in the season, not realizing that I would kind of freeze my extremities, and went for a swim. And about 15 minutes into it, I had a gigantic mammal or animal of some type come up and brush my side.

• 11:40Caroline Paul?

  No.

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  And it wasn't sandpaper-y, so I figured it wasn't a shark, but it was like a gigantic sea lion. I was just doing freestyle stroke, and it just went boom, and bumped me like five feet off of my lap. And I was like, okay, I think I'm done.

• 11:56Caroline Paul?

  There was no fin?

• 11:57Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, no fin that I saw. Uh, but I was like, you know, I'm not sure what that was, but I'm going to get out of the water now. So if we, if we, if we then backtrack and rewind. So we, we start the movie, and you're coming out of a burning building. And then suddenly, there's like a fragmented, kind of a memento-type movie cut to you in the bay, pulling out a dead body. But then, we have this flashback, and there are milk cartons involved. Can you tell us the story of the milk cartons, please?

• 12:32Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, when I was a kid, I, I was obsessed with adventure pretty young.

• 12:37Tim Ferriss?

  How did that, how did it start?

• 12:40Caroline Paul?

  I don't know, I mean, maybe one is born with this, I really love the outdoors and we grew up in the country, so we-

• 12:47Tim Ferriss?

  Where did you grow up?

• 12:47Caroline Paul?

  Uh, Cornwall, Connecticut. So it's a rural part of Connecticut, northwest corner. And we basically spent our days biking all over the place. We had to, we were not adult supervised, just come home by dark. We skateboarded, we went cross-country skiing, we rode horses. We basically had an outdoors life. We built forts. We didn't, we weren't allowed to watch TV. We had no TV, uh, then. And, uh, so I guess that sort of fed that or gave me the idea that adventure was possible?

• 13:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the default activities seemed to be also pretty adventurous, being forced out into the, into the wilderness.

• 13:29Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, adults paid no attention to us, which was awesome. Like, I didn't even know that you were supposed to actually interact socially with adults until as an adult, I saw kids doing that. It was a different time.

• 13:41Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, how did the, how did the milk cartons come into the picture?

• 13:45Caroline Paul?

  Well, I was a big reader. I read a lot of books and also my parents had the proverbial National Geographics all lined up on-

• 13:52Tim Ferriss?

  My parents too.

• 13:53Caroline Paul?

  Right?

• 13:53Tim Ferriss?

  The Yellow Binding?

• 13:54Caroline Paul?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  Stack over there.

• 13:55Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, right. It was sort of decorative and also practical. So I would read those voraciously and in one of them was this article about a milk carton boat race. And I thought, I want to do that. I want to build a milk carton boat. So I had this grand plan of a pirate ship. Because these boats in these pictures were amazing. What I forgot was I don't, I don't know how to build anything. My dad doesn't know how to build anything, but that didn't matter. We, I collected milk cartons for months. And failed to wash them out because I was a kid and I didn't, and so they started to really reek. They were all under my bed. So I had to wash them out. That was a revelation.

• 14:37Caroline Paul?

  And then I asked my dad to help me and so we built a milk carton boat.

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  What happened to the boat?

• 14:47Caroline Paul?

  Well, let me just, it wasn't really a boat. It was more like a raft. Because like I said, my dad didn't know anything. So we ended up downgrading the pirate ship idea to basically, you know, a bunch of milk cartons wrapped in garbage bags taped and then put between plywood and nailed together. And we made a flag. And then I made a flag. I picked my crew. And my crew basically was my twin sister. And my friend Charlie and then this poor exchange student from France. I think she just didn't understand what I was saying. She was like, so anyway, we, and we set sail on this river in our town called the Husatonic, which of course is where they hold these really high, have you heard of it?

• 15:32Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't.

• 15:33Caroline Paul?

  They, they hold big whitewater kayak races on that river.

• 15:36Tim Ferriss?

  What could go wrong?

• 15:38Caroline Paul?

  My, I mean, my parents were good parents, but they knew nothing about rivers. They didn't, they didn't care. It's just like, I think they helped us like ferry this big square to the river and then we set sail.

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  And so I, you know, I don't usually bring this up until much later in interviews, but I want to compliment you. So this story, the reason I knew this story for those people wondering why I knew this story wasn't from our conversations. It was from a book that you've published called The Gutsy Girl and the subtitle is Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. And I wanted to compliment you. I get sent a lot of books and I always have a high degree of trepidation because I get sent books by a lot of friends or friends of friends. You are a really, really good storyteller. I just wanted to compliment you on that.

• 16:24Caroline Paul?

  Thank you.

• 16:25Tim Ferriss?

  It is a really compelling read and I sat down with a glass of wine at a Japanese restaurant yesterday and just tore through half of it. It was great.

• 16:34Caroline Paul?

  It's totally up your alley though, Tim.

• 16:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it is.

• 16:36Caroline Paul?

  It's like crazy, not even as crazy as things you would do. Not even close.

• 16:41Tim Ferriss?

  It gave me, it gave me a

• 16:45Tim Ferriss?

  It gave me a shot of excitement, number one, and it also gave me a shot of half nostalgia, half regret, because I remember trying to become, at one point, a Boy Scout. I wanted to be an Eagle Scout, and there weren't enough adult volunteers at the time to do the program. So after two meetings, it got shut down. And it was just so sad to me. But it also brought back memories of my mother, who would always take me, my brother, and a few friends camping and hiking every summer. And it was very similar to the, I'm not going to say lack of adult supervision, but let's call it minimalist adult intervention style of parenting in the

• 17:29Caroline Paul?

  They call it free-range parenting.

• 17:31Tim Ferriss?

  Free-range parenting.

• 17:32Caroline Paul?

  Yeah.

• 17:33Tim Ferriss?

  And I really recall these experiences with my mom. Now, you talk about, at least in the first half of your book, your dad quite a lot. And in one of your op-ed pieces, which, could you remind me of the title again? I want to say it has two titles. I'm looking at one, "Why Do We Teach Girls That It's Cute to Be Scared?" And I think the alternative in print was "It's Not Cute to Be Scared," or something along those lines. You mentioned in this piece, and this is going somewhere, I know this is meandering a bit, that your mom encouraged you to be more adventurous, in part because her mother was so timid and protective. Were you closer to your father, though, in that kind of hands-on activity

• 18:17Tim Ferriss?

  sense of thinking about it?

• 18:21Caroline Paul?

  Actually, neither of my parents were very hands-on activity. Again, it was parenting, you know, by sort of pushing you out the door and telling you to come back before dark. This was one of the few times, actually, that my dad and I sort of built something or made something. And

• 18:41Caroline Paul?

  So I was definitely closer to my dad, though, than my mom until later in life. And then, of course, you know, it's the mother-daughter sort of relationship, which is much more complicated, just like the father-son, I think. So, um, but it's funny because my mom, I didn't give her really any credit for my sort of ability to run off and have adventures, or develop that spirit of adventure. And in fact, I showed her the op-ed before it was done, and she read it, and that's when she turned to me and she said, "You know, um, my mom was a real scaredy cat, and she never let us do anything, her and her sister. And when I was 21, I went on a ski trip, and it was a revelation.

• 19:25Caroline Paul?

  It was so fun." And she realized everything she'd been missing, and so when she became a mom, she didn't want that for us. So in fact, it turns out, and I didn't know this, and of course, as kids, we never give our parents their due. And so now I get to, and I'm glad. But I think it was actually more my mom, who really wanted us to go experience a lot of things. And while neither of my parents were outdoorsy, they definitely wanted us to try everything, just a little bit. Like, so we had to, we had to play an instrument, and we're so not musical. That was fine, they let us, we had to play it for a certain amount of time, and then we could drop it. They taught us to ski, they took us sledding, that kind of thing. So they opened up our life.

• 20:10Caroline Paul?

  They weren't outdoorsy, and they didn't participate, but they allowed it and encouraged it.

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  How would you describe your childhood?

• 20:18Caroline Paul?

  Can I have multiple choice?

• 20:21Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, can you have multiple choice? Sombre, A. Ecstatic, B. No, I, in general terms, I'm really curious. I mean, uh, because you have, you have a very eclectic life, live in San Francisco, from Connecticut. I just don't know much about the, the, the background, the childhood. I'd just be very curious to hear you sort of describe the family dynamic and what it was like growing up.

• 20:50Caroline Paul?

  We had, we had a varied life for sure. I have an identical twin and a younger brother. And we grew up in New York City until about third grade. And in fact, my mom, she's a bit embarrassed about this now, but when I was eight, I took two public buses to school on my own, which is unheard of now. And this was the seventies. New York was not, I mean, it was a dangerous place then. So my mom feels a bit bad about this, but I think it was great. So we lived in New York City and then moved to the country. Moved to actually to Paris for two years for, with my father's work. And then

• 21:33Tim Ferriss?

  What was the work?

• 21:34Caroline Paul?

  He was a banker with Morgan Stanley, so he was transferred there for two years. Actually, he had been transferred there two years earlier, so we spent four years total in my childhood and then moved to Connecticut and lived in the country. And I sort of think of myself as a country girl, but when I really parse it out, I've probably not spent most of my time in the country. But I definitely think of myself as somebody who grew up in a rural setting.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  When did you decide or even begin to think about firefighting? How did that happen?

• 22:07Caroline Paul?

  Oh, I mean, that was, I never thought about firefighting. I didn't grow up thinking about firefighting. I wasn't one of those kids who wanted to be a firefighter. It wasn't an option when I was a kid. No, there were no female firefighters. And the only firefighters I knew were the volunteer firefighters in our small town, and they were all men. And so firefighting, I fell into literally, not literally, but I tripped into it. I graduated from Stanford and I

• 22:40Tim Ferriss?

  What was your major?

• 22:41Caroline Paul?

  Communications, an easy major. By the way, I wouldn't get into Stanford these days. It's crazy.

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  I wouldn't either.

• 22:48Caroline Paul?

  No. So I graduated from Stanford and really was sort of on the trajectory to lead a sort of, you know, briefcase carrying life of sorts, which I didn't want. Didn't want to be in an office, couldn't imagine it. But I was, I wanted to be maybe a documentary filmmaker or journalist, somewhere where I could be outside in the field somehow. And so I was volunteering at the time at KPFA in Berkeley.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know what that is, that radio station?

• 23:17Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, it's a part of the Pacifica chain of radio, sort of public radio-esque, more radical though. And they have a great internship program where basically, most of the station is run by volunteers and you don't come in and push papers, you actually throw you right into making, to doing stories.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's awesome.

• 23:36Caroline Paul?

  Yeah. So I was the news reporter for quite a few years there at KPFA in the 80s. And at the time, all these stories were coming across my desk about the San Francisco Fire Department and how racist and sexist it was. This was 86, 87. And I thought, oh, well, maybe I'll do an undercover story. So I'll sign up to take this test to become a firefighter, which is, I mean, as far as my, as my life as you can imagine, because I had grown up going to boarding school, going to Stanford. And it just wasn't in my purview. It's funny, you think the whole world's open to you, but in, in every situation, really, I think, we're

• 24:20Caroline Paul?

  sort of acculturated to certain things, never occurred to me. But I did go through this test process. And of course, you know, racism and sexism isn't, doesn't show up in the obvious ways we expect it to or think it does. It's, it's so pervasive, I think, because it's more insidious than that. You can't just encapsulize it in like a two-day test-taking situation. So I had no story, but I went through the process and I, every segment I passed, which surprised me because I'm not that great a test taker. I'm not that interested in academics, really. I mean, I know I'm-

• 24:58Tim Ferriss?

  This is the written portion of the test?

• 24:59Caroline Paul?

  The written portion, which was the big gatekeeper. I came in really high. And I think, you know, obviously, I knew how to take tests is really what the, what it was about. And then the physical portion was easy for me because I had been a rower and, at Stanford, and I was very, always been very physically fit. And, and all of a sudden, they said, you're in.

• 25:24Tim Ferriss?

  What was, okay, so I'm gonna come right back to that, but what was the physical, what did the physical test look like, do you recall? What were some of the components?

• 25:33Caroline Paul?

  Uh, I can't quite remember now, it's been a long, long time, but it was, they were at the time struggling to make it relevant. It's one test for really coming under scrutiny, so it's not, you didn't just do a bunch of pushups, because pushups aren't relevant.

• 25:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right, they don't translate directly.

• 25:50Caroline Paul?

  Right, so I think they were still struggling and, um, you know, the test at the time was, uh, definitely if you were not fit, you couldn't pass it. But I think that it should have been more stringent, I'm a big believer that, I mean, same, being a firefighter is a really, really tough job.

• 26:08Caroline Paul?

  And, uh, physically it's tough, you're wearing a hundred pounds of equipment on you. You need to be fit, yes, you need to be strong, you need to be fit.

• 26:18Tim Ferriss?

  You're wearing a hundred pounds of equipment, that's minus anything or anyone else that you need to carry.

• 26:23Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, or drag, or, you know, or, yeah.

• 26:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for anyone who's wondering how heavy that is, just as someone who I'll admit has a tough time carrying, like there's, we're looking at the wall here, there's a, there's a caribou skull, uh, that I, this is not a hunting story, but anyway, had to pack out close to a hundred pounds of caribou meat in Alaska, and that is extremely, extremely heavy.

• 26:53Tim Ferriss?

  If, if, uh, if you haven't conditioned, like your glute knees and your hips and everything else. So, for those people wondering, like, get a weight vest and try that with like twenty or thirty or forty pounds.

• 27:02Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, our packs, our air packs, mine was heavier because we had to be in there for longer. The rescue squads were in there, you know, for longer without hose to protect us. So our packs were heavier than most people's, I weighed them, I think they were thirty pounds. So just the air pack was thirty pounds and then you're wearing.

• 27:22Tim Ferriss?

  So within the fire department, uh, and then I'll rewind back to where you passed the test, you said rescue squad, so how is, how is it divided up? What are the different squads?

• 27:33Caroline Paul?

  This is funny because it's when I grew up like it seemed like the boys just automatically knew the difference between an engine and a truck and so an engine carries the water and a truck carries the ladders and do you mind if I give you this primer?

• 27:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I would love you to. I don't I couldn't find my ass with both hands when it comes to fire department.

• 27:51Caroline Paul?

  So fire engine, fire truck, they're actually different things. So the fire truck is responsible mostly for ventilation in a fire and rescue. So they'll throw the ladders, go up to the roof, start destroying the building. The fire is destroying the building and also the truck people are destroying it by putting holes in the roof to ventilate so that when the engine crew gets there, they have the water. They're going in that the conditions aren't as terrible. They're trying to ventilate that smoke and that heat. The truck so letting the hot air and smoke rise and leave. So it's a sort of semi-coordinated effort. I mean, ideally, it's very coordinated, but it's just a chaotic situation, obviously.

• 28:33Caroline Paul?

  So the engine crew will crawl in with a hose and the truck helps them make entry if necessary. And the truck is also responsible for search and rescue. But in San Francisco, we have two specialized units called the rescue squads, Rescue One and Rescue Two. And I was a member of Rescue Two for probably most, most of my career, 10 years. I was in for 14. So and our responsibility was just to search and rescue. Every so often, they'd say, hey, squad, grab a hose. And and we'd do that. But mostly, that was our job. Get in there. So we carried an axe and an entry tool and.

• 29:17Tim Ferriss?

  Do you still have your axe?

• 29:18Caroline Paul?

  No, I don't. I do not, unfortunately.

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have to relinquish it like the sort of 1980s cop movie like Badger Weapon?

• 29:26Caroline Paul?

  I can't, I cannot, I cannot confirm or deny what I relinquished and what I did not.

• 29:33Tim Ferriss?

  So you pass the test. Then what? Then what goes through your head? What happens then?

• 29:38Caroline Paul?

  Well, then, then I was like, wow, this, I did not expect this. My father will be so bummed. And my whole circle of friends will be shocked.

• 29:48Tim Ferriss?

  If you, if you were to accept, you mean?

• 29:49Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, I mean, this was, uh, this was a completely different strata of life.

• 29:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Caroline Paul?

  And, uh, for me, by the time that I had gone through the test, I was completely enamored with the job and really realized that it was full of incredibly smart people. Well, maybe I didn't quite realize this yet, but I was on the verge of realizing that it was smart and brave people leading really an extraordinary life. And, uh, but I said, no. I said, I didn't actually say no, I deferred. I was so, I didn't know, I was so confused, you know, to say, but I was also in my, I was 25 at the time. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I was really adrift. So instead of making a decision, I said, I said, maybe, I said deferred, which really kinda meant no.

• 30:40Caroline Paul?

  And then I went on this expedition with a friend of mine to Bolivia, where we just rode mountain bikes through the Andes there. It's just he and I, mountain biking. And I thought a lot about, you know, leading a life where I could do this sort of thing. And when I came back, so that was 88, 89. I guess I took the test in 88, went to Bolivia, came back, was working odd jobs, and then the earthquake hit. And when the 89 earthquake hit, I read a lot about what the firefighters were doing. And they, there were some amazing stories about the bravery of these men.

• 31:21Caroline Paul?

  And so I thought, okay, I mean, this is an institution that has, uh, issues with racism and sexism for sure, but there are some amazing people in this institution and it's really an amazing job. And so I called and said, I'd like to, um, take that position. And they said, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, okay. And then, uh, they had to, I had to wait a while. And then in, uh, December of 89, I got in.

• 31:50Tim Ferriss?

  What was, what was your first day or week or month on the job like?

• 31:54Caroline Paul?

  My first day was really scary frankly. I, you know, I walked in and I remember one of the first things I did was I put on the medical gloves to check the equipment that I was supposed to do. I was called a probie, probationer. And then I went to the bathroom and didn't take my gloves off and forgot that there's like powder all over. So I walk out and there's powder all over my crotch.

• 32:28Tim Ferriss?

  I've been zipping up your pants.

• 32:31Caroline Paul?

  I was so mortified. It was, they were so nice to me. I mean, they were not, they were, gave me a hard time like in a, but in a really nice way.

• 32:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 32:41Caroline Paul?

  Uh, those guys were, you know, they, they basically, I came in, that Stanford grad, that vegetarian, my twin sister at the time was on Baywatch, which was the most watched show in the world. So if I wanted to be a little bit under the radar, it just wasn't gonna happen.

• 33:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hard to blend in.

• 33:04Caroline Paul?

  Right.

• 33:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God, the powdered crotch. That's, that's ready for film adaptation. Uh, what in your mind makes a good firefighter?

• 33:20Caroline Paul?

  That's a great question. It's funny. I noticed that in the fire department, the guys that I really respected as firefighters were often not the strongest ones. They were of course fit, but they were often smaller and they were, had a lot of street smarts. And what I, at first just confused me because supposedly firefighting, you have to be this huge brute because such a physical job, and it is a physical job, but it's a combination of physicalness and smarts. And when that, at that intersection, you get a really amazing

• 34:04Caroline Paul?

  firefighter. So you need to understand your physical limitations because everybody has them, even the strongest guy. And you understand your physical limitations, which often the smaller guys did and they used their smarts and their grace. There was an elegance to the way they figured things out. And I remember very clearly being on a stairwell once, super smoky, and I was like third down on the stairwell, lying there waiting for the guy up top to make entry. And he was wailing on the door with an axe. He was a big guy and the door just wasn't giving way. And I had a door opener, a Chicago door opener, which is a pry bar, basically. And you usually you never give up your equipment because if you give up your equipment, you're

• 34:48Caroline Paul?

  useless. And I would never give up my equipment. But he was up there and I also had an axe. So I said, take my pry bar, take my pry bar. And he's like, no. And he kept wailing at that door. And I'm telling you, it took so long for that door to come open because he thought as a big guy, he could get that door open. Whereas for me, I knew I had a pry bar, I would have just stuck it in there. Someone would give it one hit on the head and that door would have popped open. That's the kind of thing you need as a firefighter as well. So.

• 35:17Tim Ferriss?

  Seeing the, seeing the second option or the third option.

• 35:20Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, knowing that there's, you know, you got to work within your sort of human limitations. And I think those of us who have to, like women and the smaller guys, we know right away where our limitations are. So we're going to just compensate with other things.

• 35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you see that, you see that in a lot of places. For instance, when I, years ago, this is, I've had elbow surgery, which took me out of this sport for a long time, but would train at say Planet Granite or Mission Cliffs in rock climbing. I always wanted to take lessons with the best female climbers because they were more, generally speaking, self-aware when it came to the physics of proper technique. They couldn't just like muscle with dynos or compensate for bad technique with a lot of upper body strength, generally speaking. So you would, you would just get these elegant lines and decisions and you'd be like, oh, wow, I never would have thought to solve that part of the wall

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  in the way that she did. It was just so elegant. And it, what you're, what you're describing. Sounds a lot like the dynamic that I've observed in the Special Forces, for instance, Navy SEALs as well. Like you have literally these guys called the door kickers, or like these big brutes, who aren't necessarily elegant, but the guys who often impress me the most, not always, are very unassuming. I mean, they're like 170, like to run long distances, and just happen to be able to close a number three captains of crush gripper and do all this other crazy stuff. What is the... So when you describe the situation

• 37:00Tim Ferriss?

  with the door kicker, or the person trying to get entry with wailing on the door with an axe, it seems like pride can get you into a lot of trouble in firefighting. I mean, is that... How do... Do you get to choose the people that you have on your team, or is that a dynamic that you just have to try to manage to the best of your ability? Because it seems like that person, not to make an example of this person, I'm sure it was a very good firefighter, but could have gotten you guys all in a lot of trouble. If this building's collapsing, and it takes five minutes to open a door instead of two minutes, how do you contend with something like that?

• 37:38Caroline Paul?

  Well, I can't. I mean, I had a lot of pride when I was a firefighter. I think as I get older, I'm able to sort of put that in its place, but especially as being one of the few women in the fire department. When I got in, I was the 15th woman, and there were 1,500 men. And so if I made a mistake, it wouldn't be, "Oh, Caroline made a mistake." It would be, "All women just made a mistake." And so, for me, pride worked a little, because my fear of failure was way more than my fear of fire. I didn't often feel fear of fire, to be totally frank. I'm not trying to pretend I'm so brave. It's just that I had a bigger fear, which was humiliation, failure, letting down, you know,

• 38:20Caroline Paul?

  women. So pride, pride can be a really great motivator, I think, too.

• 38:25Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. I agree.

• 38:29Caroline Paul?

  I didn't get... You don't get to pick your crew, but... Everybody puts stuff aside when you're in a fire. And if you're not getting along with your crew, which I had a great crew for many, many years. And I had a great station. I was at Station Seven here in the mission. The biggest station in the city.

• 38:52Caroline Paul?

  And it's like a village, the fire department. So there's always people that are, you know, the drunks, the mean person, the like gossip. You have, you have all that. It's, it's a small town. But in general, I think crews learn to work together. And the truth is, in a fire, it's pitch dark. And so you often don't know who is to your left or your right from another crew. So it's, squabbles aren't gonna, they're not relevant in a fire.

• 39:26Tim Ferriss?

  What lessons did you take to other areas of your life from firefighting?

• 39:37Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, I was really comfortable fighting fires. For me, that really, I loved fighting fires. And I, not in a weird way, being a fire bug.

• 39:47Tim Ferriss?

  Fifty Shades of Fire.

• 39:49Caroline Paul?

  I just love, I mean, I love the excitement of a fire. It's hot and smoking, pitch dark. And you're either, if you're on the hose, you're trying to find the seat of the fire. And it's, your heart's going. And you have this goal. Everything else just falls away. So I really, a big fire, or really, as we call it, a good fire, was what I loved. What, what I learned more about myself in was the medical calls.

• 40:25Caroline Paul?

  The fire department does a lot of medical calls, especially these days as fire goes down with better building inspections and people smoke less, they drink less. Real estate in San Francisco is so expensive, people aren't burning stuff down like they were when I was a firefighter. We do way, way more medical calls. And medical calls, I think, are really where I myself called upon really my human attributes, like compassion and patience. So I learned a lot in that. I know that sounds like, oh, the women should be really good at that.

• 41:06Tim Ferriss?

  No, I mean, that's not, that's not what came to my mind. What are some of the, are there any particular memories or experiences that come to mind when you think of your medical calls?

• 41:19Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, I mean, I had, I remember doing CPR on a baby, which was very, I'm not a parent myself, but I was surprised how absolutely overwhelming that is. And, you know, we knew the baby had died, but we're transporting the parents too. And to be in that hospital where the mother and the father are waiting in the waiting room, I just wept after.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  What happened to the baby?

• 41:54Caroline Paul?

  SIDS.

• 41:55Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 41:56Caroline Paul?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Tim Ferriss?

  What is that, sudden infant death syndrome?

• 41:59Caroline Paul?

  Yeah. And they were, it was really sad. They were running their baby to the hospital along the street, so we had to try to find them. Because we went to the address and they said, they've already gone, they're running their baby to the hospital. So we had to find them, do CPR in the street, take the baby into the ambulance and go with them. And then it was really interesting, two weeks later, I got a call, happened to be working for a woman who, I don't know what the call came in as, but we got to this church and this woman was completely catatonic, would not respond to anything, just lay on the ground and stared straight up. And it turned out it was the baby's mother, and I recognized her.

• 42:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, how does that, how does an experience like that impact you subsequently? If it does, I mean, does that, does that have a lasting impact? Aside from the imprint of such a strong memory, of course, but does?

• 43:01Caroline Paul?

  I think the best firefighters and also, I mean, this extends to maybe emergency room doctors and soldiers, police officers, anyone who works in a profession where it's highly traumatic emotionally, you have to learn to walk this line between efficiency and being able to do the job practically, like administer that CPR and maintain your emotions about it because it's very easy just to block it out. And I think that's why a lot of, there was a lot of drinking in the fire department. It was part of, a part of the culture all up until the 90s.

• 43:44Caroline Paul?

  And because that's the way one handles emotions.

• 43:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's like doctors and prescription medications.

• 43:51Caroline Paul?

  Exactly, yeah. So that, walking that line is really difficult. I'm not sure I did a great job of it and I know I used to come home and I often used to sort of cry in my car and then I'd get out and go home. And there was, it's hard to talk to someone who's not a firefighter about what you're seeing. And I think later in life, I think it gave me a depth, but there's also a wall, I think, as well. So I keep trying to climb that wall or maybe put that wall up, depending.

• 44:26Tim Ferriss?

  This is a conversation, or this, this particular type of choosing to be compassionate versus choosing to compartmentalizing or trying to balance the two. I talked quite a bit with a number of friends of mine who've worked in ER shifts. And I remember this one story from a friend of mine, I'll leave nameless for now, who is, he was describing to me the experience of looking into someone's eyes as they go from alive to dead, eyes open, not an experience I've had, but, and he was telling me this story with a burn victim, actually, who was...

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  Getting, of course, Matt covered with, I think, second or third degree burns. Throat was starting to inflame. But the guy was able to talk and he said to him, "I need to give you an emergency tracheotomy." Like, "I need to put this into your throat, or you are probably going to die." And in his head, he knew, with 99% certainty, the guy was gonna die anyway. And he, but he made the decision to break protocol that time. And he said, "Do you want to make any phone calls on my phone?" And the guy made, he was able to make two phone calls, his throat's closing, to his loved ones. And he's like, "I want to make one more phone call." And the doctor had to make the decision then. He's like, "I'm sorry, you can't make one more phone call. I have to give you the tracheotomy." Gave him the tracheotomy and the guy died anyway. And it's just like, "Holy shit."

• 45:48Tim Ferriss?

  You hear these stories and it's like, "Fuck. How could you do that?" I'm like, week in, week out. It's hard for someone like me, as a civilian, to just even fathom that. So, to shift gears just a little bit, although it's very closely related. So, there's a trainer, now passed, named Cust D'Amato. He was Mike Tyson's trainer, who sort of rescued him, brought him to the Catskills, and got him to, I guess at the time, youngest heavyweight champion of the world ever. And Cust D'Amato, I'm sure it's not his quote originally, and I'm gonna paraphrase this, would say, "The coward and the hero feel the same thing. It's what the hero does that makes him different, or her different."

• 46:32Tim Ferriss?

  So, we're talking a lot about fear, contending with fear, and this is gonna come back to the op-ed, but when you think of the moments you've been most terrified, what are those moments that come to mind? They don't have to be physical danger, they could be, but what are the moments that first come to mind for you?

• 46:56Caroline Paul?

  Well, I think the time that I was probably the most physically scared, and it was a bit of an unusual feeling for me, and I'm not trying to say that I'm super brave, I just had this ability to really take fear and put it way, way back in line of all my other emotions when I was a firefighter. But I was in a, I talk about this in the book, actually, I was in a fire building and I was with my crew and I was, we're in teams of two, so the, the, the team who was ahead of me, Frank and Andy, and then I had my crewmate was behind me, Victor, he and I were together, but we were all crawling down the same hallway and we had a hose line, which was unusual, but they couldn't find the fire.

• 47:39Caroline Paul?

  So, the chief goes, "Hey, guys, you guys grab a hose line." So, we're psyched to do that, it's awesome to go find the heat, the seat of the fire, and it's super smoky, hot, and kind of quiet in this weird way, and then all of a sudden, a huge explosion, which pushed us all out of the hallway. And we're, what we realized later was that there had been a flashover, not in the hallway, which would have killed us, but somewhere close enough by to just blow us off.

• 48:10Tim Ferriss?

  What is a flashover?

• 48:11Caroline Paul?

  A flashover is when the room gets so hot that even the particles in the air simultaneously ignite.

• 48:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 48:22Caroline Paul?

  So, it's basically this just huge...

• 48:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a gas blast.

• 48:24Caroline Paul?

  Basically, yeah. I've been in those too, and those are not, those are, will knock your mask off and throw you backwards. And I remember being sort of discombobulated and in the garage, and my friend Frank goes, "Where's Victor?" Victor was my, my crewmate, and I look around and there was just three of us instead of four, and I remember thinking, "I have to go back into that hallway?" And the, the fear was paralyzing. This all took milliseconds, and I see Frank, who's super brave, really great firefighter, just turn and start to... Just catapulted himself towards that door to find Victor. And for me, it was only a millisecond.

• 49:09Caroline Paul?

  But I was scared and I recognized that fear and that fear scared me more than the fear itself. Because when you're paralyzed as a firefighter and your friend is missing, that's the worst. And so, of course, I was right on his heels. But that feeling of overwhelming fear was really sobering for me. But what I learned, of course, is that you can be scared. That's okay, but you still have to take action if it's necessary. And my friend was fine. He had actually been blown out too, but he took shelter on the other side. We found ourselves in the garage. So it all ended up fine, but it was a moment I'll never forget.

• 49:52Tim Ferriss?

  So you've mentioned in your writing, for instance, your ability to put fear behind your other emotions. And the story that comes to mind for me is the, and we don't necessarily have to go into the details of this right now, but the climbing of the Golden Gate Bridge. Which, by the way, folks listening, illegal. I wouldn't recommend doing it.

• 50:16Caroline Paul?

  Especially now after 2001.

• 50:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Caroline Paul?

  They will shoot you.

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they will shoot you, so not advised.

• 50:21Caroline Paul?

  It was all a lark in the 90s, but not anymore.

• 50:26Tim Ferriss?

  760 some odd feet or something along those lines. Maybe 720, I don't know. You probably have a better memory of the Olivision than I. But where did you develop that ability? Or how did you develop that ability? Like for someone listening who's like, God, you know, I'm so fearful. How can I develop that same ability to take, say, courage or desire or whatever it might be, enthusiasm, and try to put it in front of this dominant emotion that I have and default emotion, which is fear? What would you say to them? And I guess that's two questions. How did you develop it and what would you say to them? But you can tackle it any way you'd like.

• 51:05Caroline Paul?

  Well, I am not against fear. Let me just say right up front. I think fear is definitely important. It's there to keep us safe. But I do feel like some people give it too much priority. It's one of the many. Things that we use to assess a situation. Um, so I'm not against fear, but I am pro bravery. So that's my paradigm. So once I know that fear is just one of many things that are going on. So for instance, when we climbed the bridge, which was five of us deciding we wanted to walk up

• 51:44Caroline Paul?

  that cable in the middle of the night, please don't do that, but uh, we did. And it was a really, I mean, talk about fear. I mean, you're walking on a cable. You have to put one foot in front of the other and you get higher and higher until you're basically uh, on as high as a 70 story building and with nothing below you and holding on to these two thin wires on either side. It's just a walk technically. Really nothing's going to happen unless some earthquake or sudden catastrophic gust of wind, which was really not going to happen. You're going to be fine as long as you keep your mental state intact. Don't panic.

• 52:30Caroline Paul?

  It's just a walk. And so what I do in those situations is I look and look at all the emotions I'm feeling, which is anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun and fear. And then I take fear and say, well, how, how much priority am I going to give this? I really want to do this. And then I put it where it belongs. And it's, it's kind of like bricklaying. I don't know. You just look at all the bricks and you, or making a stone wall, you fit the pieces together.

• 53:05Tim Ferriss?

  So do you, or have you literally, I should use that word more carefully in my life in general, but visualized the bricks or like to someone who hasn't had this practice?

• 53:19Tim Ferriss?

  And you're you're gonna give them sort of a meditation exercise, right? The next time you're feeling fear, do this. How, what would you advise them to do?

• 53:28Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, I actually want someone to partition each emotion as if it's a little separate block, and then put it in a line. Because once you not only look at your emotions, but also assess your own skill and the situation, often things change. I mean, we're scared supposedly. I hear people say, I'm so scared of, fill in the blank, picking up an insect. Really, what is really so scary about an insect? Seriously, is it gonna eat you? No. So as long as you stop and really look, I think people's lives will change. Kind of radically, especially for women. Because women are very, very quick to say they're scared.

• 54:13Caroline Paul?

  And that's something I really want to change.

• 54:15Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about that. I mean, I have a million more questions for you, but actually, you know what? I'm gonna ask you, and you can feel free to decline. But I'd like to ask about being gay. When did you come out of the closet to your family and/or friends about that?

• 54:40Caroline Paul?

  Not until I was 21.

• 54:43Tim Ferriss?

  21.

• 54:43Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, though I knew when I was two.

• 54:46Tim Ferriss?

  Was it intimidating to you to come out? I mean, was that?

• 54:48Caroline Paul?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, this was a totally different time. So I'm 52 now, so that was, I can't do the math, was the 80s, right? So it was the 80s. Yeah, I mean, it was just different. It was, it was a bizarre thing to be.

• 55:05Tim Ferriss?

  How did that?

• 55:05Caroline Paul?

  I didn't know anybody growing up who was gay. Nobody.

• 55:09Tim Ferriss?

  In Connecticut?

• 55:09Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, nobody.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  How did, how did you break the news? What was the conversation like? Or how did you deliver that? Or did your parents already know, but they didn't explicitly?

• 55:23Caroline Paul?

  They didn't know.

• 55:24Tim Ferriss?

  They didn't know.

• 55:24Caroline Paul?

  Uh-uh. No.

• 55:26Tim Ferriss?

  So what, what, what, how did you, how did you go about having that conversation? And why?

• 55:31Caroline Paul?

  Well, my twin sister guessed. I mean, my, I have an identical twin. I can't keep anything from her, who is, by the way, like, so straight. So it's kind of interesting. I mean, I guess we're a little, we're a bit of a science lab experiment. Though they, they, they've done studies and in fact, there's no correlation or little correlation between sexuality and

• 56:00Caroline Paul?

  genes. And yet, it feels very biological.

• 56:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Caroline Paul?

  So I think it's epigenetics, I think is probably, or hormonal.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Yeah, hormones are environment that are triggering different genes to flip on or off?

• 56:13Caroline Paul?

  I guess, but I was, I feel like I was born this way. So I think it happened in the womb. Like, my sister got that hormone and I got this and, you know, so, I mean, really, as gay as I am, she's straight. It's kind of funny. And yet, we're so alike in so many ways.

• 56:29Tim Ferriss?

  And so the, the, the, so your, your sister guessed early on, you knew early on.

• 56:36Caroline Paul?

  She, no, she guessed, no, around 20.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

  Around 20.

• 56:39Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, because basically she was calling my, you know, my dorm room at Stanford and this woman was answering. And it was like, what? It's seven in the morning.

• 56:48Caroline Paul?

  My sister's not dumb.

• 56:49Tim Ferriss?

  Really early, really early study session.

• 56:52Caroline Paul?

  At Stanford, we really are into studying.

• 56:59Tim Ferriss?

  How'd the conversation with your parents go? Or did you talk to one before the other? And if this is uncomfortable, I'm happy not to talk about it. I'm just so curious because.

• 57:08Caroline Paul?

  I remember my dad, talking to my dad. I know, my sister told me to do, this is actually really great because I was a big secret keeper. And I think you just learn that if you're not sort of part of the mainstream, you learn to keep those secrets because it's just easier, you think. And my sister said, my dad was the last of my fam, my brother's like, oh, that's cool. I love women too.

• 57:35Caroline Paul?

  He was so, he was the catchest about it. My sister, it took my sister a while because being an identical twin, it made her think all about her own identities. And, you know, neither of us are, my sister is an amazingly beautiful, very well-known actress who was in Baywatch. So you would think her femininity would not be questioned, but she's definitely not like a girly girl. Neither of us are. Both of us kind of walk like a truck driver, you know? So she had to question her own identity, I think. Not just, it just brings up a lot of

• 58:14Caroline Paul?

  things. So that, I think it was more difficult for her than my brother. And now she's just psyched, basically. I know that sounds weird, but she's like, God, I'm so glad there's just that you're not straight because it's so much more interesting. And maybe that's fetishizing it too, but at any rate, she's just awesome. And my dad, though, super conservative, voted for Nixon, still believed that Nixon was a great president, up until his death, you know, definitely like

• 58:53Caroline Paul?

  a true blue Republican. That he, I didn't tell for a long time until my sister said, why are you keeping secrets? Secrets are a buffer to intimacy. And I said, no, he doesn't, he doesn't need to know. She said, it's a part of your life that he's not hearing about and you're keeping from him. And even though he might not realize it, that is keeping a distance. So you need to tell him. And in fact, she was so right. And so I told him and I was petrified. And he sort of was really sweet about it. He was shocked. And then he sort of struggled and he said, well, I know some gay people. And then he started listing like the gay people he knew. It was really cute.

• 59:41Tim Ferriss?

  Your mom?

• 59:43Caroline Paul?

  Uh, my mom, she also, like, it wasn't that she thought that being gay was bad. It was just that she had to then rework her whole.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  Paradigm or lens through which she viewed the world.

• 59:58Caroline Paul?

  And she became immediately defensive for me. So she would, she said that the way she worked it out, she would tell everybody immediately, almost in the first sentence, that she had a gay daughter. And then she'd wait. It was almost a litmus test. And if they had any sort of flicker of.

• 1:00:12Tim Ferriss?

  Look for the micro expression.

• 1:00:14Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, then she'd like cut them off. So she was sort of testing the world as well as testing herself. And again, it's just a, it's a, it's a readjustment for people. And it was, I understood. Now it's no big deal, but back then it was pretty huge. And also I think it really shaped me to carry that, to be, I'm actually grateful for it because I always knew I was different. And I think that gave me an empathy that I probably wouldn't have had if I had just been easily part of the norm.

• 1:00:45Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. Well, it forces you to, I would imagine, question assumptions about other people when there's something about you that is different that people might assume is otherwise, if that makes any sense.

• 1:01:03Tim Ferriss?

  So lots to unpack there, but I want to talk about, in a good way, the op ed. So I really enjoyed the, and you have multiple op eds, but this particular one, "Why Do We Teach Girls That It's Cute to Be Scared?" And I was hoping to have you elaborate on a particular passage here. And this is, this is about three quarters of the way through. "So when girls become women, this fear manifests as deference and timid decision making. We try to counter this conditioning by urging ourselves to, quote, 'lean in,' end quote. Books on female empowerment proliferate on our shelves. I admire what these writers are trying to do, but they come far too late."

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  Can you provide the background to that comment? And what catalyzed the writing of this op ed? Why do we teach girls that it's cute to be scared?

• 1:02:02Caroline Paul?

  Well, I wrote The Gutsy Girl as sort of an antidote for what I see is happening, and it maybe has happened for a long time, but certainly still keeps happening today in that we acculturate our girls to be fearful. And I see it in my peers now. So I was really curious about that and where that started after I wrote the book. So I went and looked at some studies. It had been bothering me for a long time. And it actually, one of the incidents that really probably was part of the that catalyzed

• 1:02:43Caroline Paul?

  this whole thing was years ago, a friend of mine lamented to me that her daughter was a scaredy cat. And I was a firefighter and she looked up to me. Could I hang out with her? And yes, she was sort of a scaredy cat. But what I really noticed was that her parents were anxious on her behalf, always telling her to be careful, no, watch out. And when I did some research, it turns out that yes, parents, both moms and dads caution their daughters way more than their sons. And when I say caution, it's basically tell them, watch out, that's dangerous, you're

• 1:03:24Caroline Paul?

  going to get hurt, and discourage them from trying something. Whereas with boys, there's an act of encouragement despite the possibilities that you'll get hurt and guiding the son to do it often on his own. And when a daughter decides to do something that might have some risk involved, the parents after cautioning her will then much more likely to assist her doing it. So what is this telling girls, except for that they're fragile and that they need our help? And that is acculturated so early. So of course, by the time we're women and we're in the workplace or in relationships

• 1:04:07Caroline Paul?

  or that is going to be a predominant paradigm for us, fear.

• 1:04:17Tim Ferriss?

  And this is, and I'm going, uh, not off the rails, but maybe going on a tangent here. So for, for women who are listening and say to themselves, my God, she's totally right. I was raised in a bubble of sorts.

• 1:04:37Tim Ferriss?

  I don't want to have this default anymore. I want to condition myself to be able to contend with fear, to put it in line like you described. What would you say to them?

• 1:04:48Caroline Paul?

  Well, I would say that it's time to adopt a paradigm of bravery instead of a paradigm of fear. I think that's what, I mean, weren't you acculturated much more to bravery? Like fear wasn't really part of the conversation. It's the flip side, which is bravery. So when you have a boy and a girl, or a man and a woman facing the exact same situation, they will take two, there'll be two emotional reactions to it that are sort of opposite, but it's the same situation. The man will be trying to access his bravery and the woman will be accessing her fear.

• 1:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, so this is something, and just, just, I think this, I'm going to underscore something that I think is important, which is that courage takes practice. It's a skill that you have to develop. And, you know, I feel like a coward sometimes and I don't, so this is, we're, we're sitting here in my house, we're doing this interview and on my coffee table, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher this name, you might be able to get this right, but the quote, which is on a piece of driftwood, says, "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." And I literally have this on my coffee table, so I see it every single day. Now, I don't know how to pronounce that name properly, do you?

• 1:06:02Caroline Paul?

  Oh, Anaya, Anaya Sin.

• 1:06:03Tim Ferriss?

  There we go. Thank you. Thank you, Stanford.

• 1:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, the, if I were to look back at my upbringing, and you talk about this in your, your Sunday op ed piece also, I think that...

• 1:06:21Tim Ferriss?

  Being outdoors and playing sports had a huge role in inoculating me against, inoculating me with small doses of constant fear and realizing that the worst case scenario just was not that bad. And so I think it was also a process of just, I don't know if it would be operant or classical conditioning, but just like, or more of like a hormetic response, kind of like iocaine powder in The Princess Bride. Maybe that's too arcane a reference, but the, so the Dread Pirate Roberts makes himself immune to iocaine powder and he kills the Sicilian when death is on the line in The Princess Bride. The point being that if you constantly expose yourself, and this was Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, every day,

• 1:07:03Tim Ferriss?

  do something that scares you. If you just give yourself these small doses of fear, you begin to expand your sort of comfortable sphere of action, if that makes any sense.

• 1:07:17Tim Ferriss?

  So how did you choose the activities then in The Gutsy Girl?

• 1:07:24Caroline Paul?

  The activities?

• 1:07:26Tim Ferriss?

  So you have all the things that I wanted to do as an Eagle Scout and many more in the book, but how did you think about putting the book together?

• 1:07:35Caroline Paul?

  Oh, I see. Yes. The activities, meaning the daring do's.

• 1:07:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:07:39Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, we have a bunch. I have a bunch of sort of fun exercises that girls can do, and they range, like, some of them are survival tips, like how to get water from a tree, which is that you put a clear plastic bag over it and the tree will sort of perspire actual water through photosynthesis, which I think is cool. I love those kind of MacIver like tips. How to Find the North Star, which is not only practical, beautiful to look at the night sky. And then I have a lot of confidence building exercises, like standing in the Wonder Woman pose, based on Amy Cuddy's talk, TED Talk.

• 1:08:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, great TED Talk.

• 1:08:19Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, which talks about how if you stand in, with your posture straight, taking up space, you'll actually trigger.

• 1:08:30Caroline Paul?

  Confidence chemicals. And if you stand in what she calls a low power pose, which is slouched, you're actually triggering cortisol, which makes you feel worse. So the key is not to be brave in that moment or confident, is to actually stand like you're brave and then the confidence will come. Uh, so there's exercises like that. So I wanted a full range because, you know, this book takes place in the outdoors because I think it's a great training ground for bravery and learning bravery, because yes, bravery is learned. But obviously it's not the only place where gutsiness comes into play. I mean, we need it in all parts of our life. So that's why the exercises range.

• 1:09:12Caroline Paul?

  But again, it's in the outdoors because that's fun and it's great to read about adventures in the outdoors.

• 1:09:18Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, let's talk about, there's so much we could talk about. Uh, I mean, we're not going to have time for all of this, but I mean, you have an incredible story about getting, uh, cloud sucked, is that the expression? Into not a cumulus, but a cumulonimbus? Am I getting this right? That's terrifying. Uh, we might not have time to get into that. Uh, but you mentioned the outdoors, you mentioned books and one thing that you've written about is reading, correct me if I'm wrong, Harriet the Spy as a kid? Am I getting that right?

• 1:09:55Caroline Paul?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:56Tim Ferriss?

  So what, what books have you gifted most to other people besides your own?

• 1:10:02Caroline Paul?

  I don't gift my own, just so you know.

• 1:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I, I never do that either.

• 1:10:09Caroline Paul?

  Everything that I, I.

• 1:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:11Caroline Paul?

  I can't.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  I wouldn't hold it against you if you gifted your own books, by the way.

• 1:10:15Caroline Paul?

  No, I don't, but I, I'm trying to remember books that I pass on. I'm kind of blanking, to be honest. I'm so sorry.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's okay. We can, we can always, we can always come back.

• 1:10:29Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's talk about, because I was actually astonished when you said, you said you're 52? So I'm not hitting on you. You do not look 52. You look a lot younger. But what does your current training regimen look like?

• 1:10:48Caroline Paul?

  So I have become a much more efficient worker outer. I used to be a complete gym rat. And obviously when I was a firefighter, I was working out all the time. I ran six miles a day and I lifted a lot. But now I enjoy being outside much more. So my workout consists of surfing. Hopefully if the waves are right. And if not, I'll swim in the out, an outdoor pool. And I do a very quick lifting workout. I unfortunately have a replaced knee. My knees are shot. So I, there's a lot I can't do anymore, like run, which makes me sad. But I've just become way more efficient with my workouts.

• 1:11:32Tim Ferriss?

  What does the lifting workout look like?

• 1:11:35Caroline Paul?

  Oh, I'm so old school and I'm embarrassed about it because I realized that everybody these days are into, you know, functional workouts that, that mean like swinging kettlebells. And it's funny because I actually worked with Charles Poliquin, like 20 years ago?

• 1:11:50Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding?

• 1:11:51Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, because one of my really close friends is a trainer with him. I met my friend Andre when I was a loser. I was actually a-

• 1:11:58Tim Ferriss?

  Not to be con-

• 1:12:01Tim Ferriss?

  L U G E R. I thought that was a very, very strong Connecticut accent on loser for a second.

• 1:12:07Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, that too. I was a loser as a loser. But I had determination as most people know, who know me know, and maybe who've read this book. I had an Olympic dream. And so my theory was, well, I'm not really good at anything, but I'm super dogged and determined. So let me find a sport where there's hardly any people. And lo and behold, it's losing. At least back in 1984, it was losing. Basically, the only people on the Olympic team for luge in the United States all lived in Lake Placid. That was the only place there was a track. So I went and I did luge and I was terrible. I crashed all the time.

• 1:12:50Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds dangerous.

• 1:12:51Caroline Paul?

  Yes. Yeah, it's, it is. You go at high speeds and if you're me.

• 1:12:58Tim Ferriss?

  Now, lugeing, just for people who aren't familiar, that's effectively you're laying on your back with your kind of feet internally rotated, going feet first, like inches off the ice.

• 1:13:08Caroline Paul?

  Yes. And then, in fact, I was terrible. I had a nickname.

• 1:13:12Tim Ferriss?

  What was your nickname?

• 1:13:13Caroline Paul?

  Crash.

• 1:13:16Caroline Paul?

  This is so bad, and I talk about this in the book. It was, I had such spectacular crashes that people would gather at this turn. I can't remember, I think it was 14, that's the one I remember, and they would just watch me just take these incredibly flippy, turny, topsy-turvy.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Just yard sales.

• 1:13:34Caroline Paul?

  Oh, yeah. And I even was taken to the hospital once. And it was, but I just wanted to be an Olympian. And I wasn't, I was determined, but when I found out about the sport of skeleton.

• 1:13:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's the one, this is, all right, you flip it around, you're going head first, right?

• 1:13:55Caroline Paul?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's insanity. It seems.

• 1:13:57Caroline Paul?

  It is, actually. And at the time, there was really a ragtag team. They didn't have any uniforms. They wore jeans and like work boots and motorcycle helmets. And I, I looked at it, I was like, that's the sport for me. And when they said there are absolutely no women doing it, I was like.

• 1:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, double, doubling down on black here.

• 1:14:17Caroline Paul?

  I figured that, oh, there's no women doing it, then I'll for sure make the Olympics in this sport. And they said, well, we're not in the Olympics yet, but we, we plan to be. I was like, that's good enough for me. And that, that's an amazing sport. I actually think, because you're literally, your eyes are like three inches from the ice. When I first went, the guy said, yeah, come here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you, uh, someone, there was no learning. They just basically put you on a sled. But he did take me to the side of the track. And this, he said, watch Mike, or whoever it was. And I remember standing at the corner, and this guy goes around the corner around us, and I hear this scream. And I looked, I said, was that a screen? He said, oh yeah, Mike, his chin almost hits

• 1:15:02Caroline Paul?

  the ice on this turn. Don't worry about it.

• 1:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  Now, were you in Lake Placid or were you somewhere else?

• 1:15:09Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, in Lake Placid. It was the only, that was the only, now they have a couple tracks, but at the time.

• 1:15:13Tim Ferriss?

  Now, were you in Lake Placid, then you decided to do the lugeing in skeleton? Or were you like, saw it, you were like having a beer at a bar and you're like, what the hell is that? Luge? Fuck it. I'm moving to Lake Placid.

• 1:15:25Caroline Paul?

  No, actually, I was super lucky. It just so happened that the number, the highest placing American lugeur at the time was a woman named Bonnie Warner, and she went to Stanford.

• 1:15:36Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 1:15:36Caroline Paul?

  And she was determined to break this Lake Placid kid only team. So she held these tryouts out here, which basically consisted of putting wheels on sleds and pushing us down Alpine Road near Stanford. And like, I don't know why, and she, and I got, and I was, I was like, this is for me, for sure. And I got picked along with my really good friend Blaze. He and I were pals and-

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Blaze?

• 1:16:03Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, good name, right?

• 1:16:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good name.

• 1:16:04Caroline Paul?

  That's a good nickname. Uh, he and I were really good friends and we were both pilots, so we flew together a lot. And so then we went to Lake Placid and then he left to go back to Stanford and I'm like, I'm, I'm staying. And I took a semester off or a quarter at Stanford.

• 1:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  So you, you started the luge story by mentioning Charles Poliquin and saying that you're old school.

• 1:16:29Caroline Paul?

  Oh, right, sorry. So then when I was at Lake Placid, all these athletes from around the world trained there. It was an amazing experience. And I met my friend Andre, who was a, turned, he turned into a Canadian Olympian. His nickname was Not Crash. He was really good at what he did. And he became a trainer under Charles Poliquin and trained many Olympic teams. And, um, so that's how I met Charles and- When he came to San Francisco to do a class with Andre, I was there.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  And so how has that informed your current, as you put it, old school training?

• 1:17:06Caroline Paul?

  Well, I was doing training in unstable environments, which is what Poliquin pretty much pioneered here in the United States. I think he took it from Russia, but.

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  Using Swiss balls or.

• 1:17:18Caroline Paul?

  Swiss balls, medicine.

• 1:17:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Caroline Paul?

  Swiss balls was his big thing. I mean, he can do squats on a Swiss ball. I know that's, you can probably do that too.

• 1:17:25Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I, I think I would end up in a YouTube blooper reel of people hitting walls on Swiss balls if I tried it, but it doesn't surprise me that Charles would be able to do that.

• 1:17:34Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, it was amazing.

• 1:17:34Tim Ferriss?

  He's been on the podcast.

• 1:17:35Caroline Paul?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's, he's, he's a very smart and very hilarious guy for people who are interested in physical training.

• 1:17:41Caroline Paul?

  And his, he's just super interesting, his technique. And his techniques were really new at the time. This idea of training in an unstable environment was completely new. And so I do incorporate that in my workouts still. But in general, I'm old school, free weights.

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  Just compound movements like squat, deadlift, whatever it might be.

• 1:18:03Caroline Paul?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Tim Ferriss?

  Nothing wrong with that.

• 1:18:04Caroline Paul?

  Sorry.

• 1:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, there's no sorry. Uh, now are you still a vegetarian?

• 1:18:09Caroline Paul?

  Uh, I am a lapsed vegan who is pretty much a vegetarian now.

• 1:18:18Tim Ferriss?

  When you were a firefighter, you were also vegan?

• 1:18:21Caroline Paul?

  No, I was vegan right before and then I, the thing about the fire department is part of the biggest social times are the meals. And so I, V being a vegan was not going to really help me at all. So I, I, I became a vegetarian and there were a couple of other vegetarians in the fire department, some old timer guys who were vegetarians. But in general, we were an anomaly and people hated it when I cooked. I, I hated it when I cooked. I hated cooking. Cooking completely terrified me way more than any big fire could.

• 1:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  So what now? All right. So I, I take it then there was some type of rotation where you would end up with cooking duty? So, all right.

• 1:19:02Caroline Paul?

  And I, people would try to, they would like, I would trade out of it or they would come up to me and say, well, you want to like trade this? And you take my night watch next time. I was like, yes. They didn't want me to cook either.

• 1:19:15Tim Ferriss?

  What was your, did you ever, when you had to cook, did you have a go to meal?

• 1:19:19Caroline Paul?

  Oh, yes, I had probably, that was actually the trick. Well, there were two, three tricks. And once I remember a guy coming up to me and he said, you just don't put any love into this meal. And I was so shocked, this big burly firefighter wanted love in his meal. And he was right, actually. I was so sullen about cooking that I didn't. And he actually was a little indignant about that.

• 1:19:48Caroline Paul?

  And now I try to put love in my meals when I cook. The other thing was make it colorful. That was another advice that I got and I thought was great advice. Very hard for me to do. Everything was kind of gray.

• 1:20:02Caroline Paul?

  Oh, and then the third was have three to set meals that you do.

• 1:20:06Tim Ferriss?

  What were they?

• 1:20:07Caroline Paul?

  I can't remember. I've blocked it out. I remember doing vegetarian chili and someone threw it against the wall.

• 1:20:14Tim Ferriss?

  Was there protest?

• 1:20:16Caroline Paul?

  Basically, I mean, they're very funny. I mean, firefighters are hilarious. And I really, you learn to have a thicker skin when someone throws your meal against the wall.

• 1:20:26Tim Ferriss?

  So, so speaking of thicker skin, I, it strikes me, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. It's a very broad subject and question, but I get the impression, at least in the US, and I know this is true in many other English speaking countries, Australia, it's true.

• 1:20:46Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, the UK also true. It seems that people are getting thinner and thinner skin, not thicker and thicker skin, when it comes to discussing important or unimportant topics that might be uncomfortable. Would you, to people who are easily offended or hurt, do you have any?

• 1:21:12Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say to them? Because you strike me as very tough, very resilient, very capable of like exacting your sort of philosophies and goals in life. And it strikes me that people who are very easily offended are just poor resource allocators. They waste a lot of energy and time with sort of getting upset by small things they shouldn't get upset by. In the same way that some people are afraid of things they shouldn't be afraid of necessarily, or get dominated by that.

• 1:21:44Tim Ferriss?

  That is one hell of a diatribe that has went on, but do you have any, you know what strikes me as someone who's easily offended? And do you have any thoughts for people who are?

• 1:21:58Caroline Paul?

  I'm actually not easily offended, mostly because I think in general, like for instance, being in the firehouse, I learned one really interesting thing. At first, I thought a lot of the men were ignoring me. I'd literally say hello to them or ask them something and they would not speak to me. It turned out a lot of them are deaf. I kid you not.

• 1:22:23Tim Ferriss?

  I totally believe it.

• 1:22:24Caroline Paul?

  And then I suddenly realized they're not ignoring me because they wouldn't do that. I mean, of course, a couple, there were a couple of bad apples for sure who would do that, but in general, they were super respectful. And there were a lot of amazingly kind and open-minded men who were really struggling. I mean, it's hard when you have your homogenous club, which we all do. If you look at your friends, they all look like you. And then suddenly it's forcibly opened and it's just difficult. It's right. It's, it's, you shouldn't have your club necessarily. You don't have a right to it, but still it's going to be hard. And I really did empathize with that, especially when I looked around and saw that my own life was as homogenous as the fire department had been.

• 1:23:07Caroline Paul?

  And in fact, my life opened up a lot with the fire department, met a lot of people I would not have met who were very different from me. So just understanding that the motivation is obviously is often not malice.

• 1:23:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Caroline Paul?

  And they might be deaf.

• 1:23:27Tim Ferriss?

  They might be deaf on top of it. When you think of the word success, who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 1:23:39Caroline Paul?

  Probably Wendy.

• 1:23:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so for people who don't know Wendy, please, please describe Wendy and why.

• 1:23:47Caroline Paul?

  Wendy's my partner of eight years and she's a very successful illustrator. And she's illustrated, she illustrated Gutsy Girl and she illustrated our, the book that I wrote before called Lost Cat, A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. And she's done, illustrated many books and been in the New York Times.

• 1:24:08Tim Ferriss?

  She's a rock star.

• 1:24:08Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, total rock star. But, so she's very successful because she's doing exactly what she wants to do. She's an artist who has her own business. The great thing about Wendy too is she can, she's so great at laughing at herself. She really, something that I really want to embrace more in my own life is just to laugh at myself. And she's also great about pointing out her own flaws all the time, whereas I try very much to hide my flaws. And it's just so endearing when someone bears their flaws, because the truth is, you know, our flaws are usually fine. They're usually what makes us so lovable.

• 1:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  What, for people who want to look up Wendy, what is her last name?

• 1:24:54Caroline Paul?

  MacNaughton, M-A-C-N-A-U-G-H-T-O-N. Wendy MacNaughton.

• 1:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Wendy's, Wendy has the career that I wanted for about 10 years when I was growing up. I wanted to be an illustrator.

• 1:25:08Caroline Paul?

  Really?

• 1:25:09Tim Ferriss?

  I was actually an illustrator in college. I was the graphics editor of the, I guess it was the Princeton Tiger? Or I might be getting the name of the magazine wrong. But in any case, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator, a penciler. Jim Lee, I'm gonna get you on the podcast eventually.

• 1:25:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna, I'm gonna step up to bat and try this book question again. But it doesn't have to be most gifted book, although that usually, sometimes triggers a book or two. Do you have any favorite books? You know, I'll give you three options. Third option, you are giving a commencement speech at Stanford, and you can give every graduating senior undergrad one to three books. Which books would you give them?

• 1:26:02Caroline Paul?

  I would say that the books, first of all, the book, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

• 1:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  I've never heard of it. I'm embarrassed to say.

• 1:26:10Caroline Paul?

  Oh, it's a beautiful book by a writer who went to, who fought in Vietnam, and when he came back, he became a writer. And a lot of his writing, at least initially, was about Vietnam, either in sort of thinly veiled autobiographical form, but fiction. The Things They Carried is a beautiful book. It actually got me back to reading, because I think when you go to college, reading gets kicked out of you a little bit. It's just, you know, you have to read all these things. And I didn't read until, from my friend Eric, who was a whitewater rafter with me, handed me this book and said, this is great. And I started

• 1:26:47Caroline Paul?

  reading again after that. I really love the book by Peter Heller. Is it Peter Heller? Gosh, I can't... And that book is called The Dog Stars, which I picked up because I love the stars, basically. I was like, oh, it's gonna, he's gonna be talking about, the main character will be an astronomer, and I'll learn something about the stars. It turns out, it's an, it's an apocalyptic book. It's beautifully written. That main character is a pilot, and since I fly a lot of different things, with varying degrees of success, obviously, I love that book. But these are books I'd give, just to say

• 1:27:30Caroline Paul?

  these are amazing stories, and you'll probably learn something from them.

• 1:27:35Tim Ferriss?

  If you had to pick a historical figure that you identify with, who would you pick?

• 1:27:41Caroline Paul?

  I, two people, I don't identify with Rosa Parks, but I would love to have her sort of courage, her ability to overcome like what was then the social norm, sit in the back of the bus. And the other person would be Beryl Markham, who's a pilot.

• 1:28:02Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 1:28:03Caroline Paul?

  Markham is M A R K H A M, Beryl Markham. She wrote a biography, autobiography called West with a Night. It's about flying.

• 1:28:13Tim Ferriss?

  I think she's also one of the highlighted women in your book, is she not?

• 1:28:22Caroline Paul?

  I don't actually mention her because I think she's probably too well-known.

• 1:28:25Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that makes me feel like a total idiot.

• 1:28:28Caroline Paul?

  No, well, she's actually not in the book, but I try to, I have little sidebars of women throughout history and also around the world who have done adventurous, super badass, kick-ass things. And she certainly could be.

• 1:28:43Tim Ferriss?

  A quick side note, I was pleased to see the first one, and I might be, if I'm getting the name wrong, tell me, but Laura Decker, was it? The Dutch girl, 14, was it, that she circumnavigated the globe? There's a documentary about her, it's just incredible.

• 1:28:58Caroline Paul?

  Great documentary. Yeah, she actually wanted to go around the world and her parents said, "Fine," on her own, and the Dutch courts and the court of public opinion freaked out. It was a really interesting question, I think, but she was clearly a very talented sailor.

• 1:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, incredibly gifted.

• 1:29:18Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, I mean, I have a quote where she's like, "Yeah," because I have some, a lot of quotes in the book, too, and her quote, I'm not going to do it quite right, but it's something like, "Yeah, we had sort of a boring day to..." She wrote, writing in her journal, "I had sort of a boring day today. Hurricane Lucy came by, but that's about it."

• 1:29:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, just the, some of the footage and the stories going around the Cape, South Africa, and these experienced sailors saying, yeah, like, almost anyone would have been killed on that route. Like, this girl is beyond, beyond talented.

• 1:29:54Caroline Paul?

  I mean, there's something psychological about doing something alone. Like, so when I, I was a paraglider for many years, and I remember always when I would launch, feeling, okay, now I'm really alone. No matter what happens, it's just me. I mean, at the time, we didn't even carry radios. Now, I think probably paragliders carry all sorts of, you know, paraphernalia, but, so when you fly in the air, you feel alone, and she's in the middle of the ocean, in a storm, very different.

• 1:30:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Really good doc. If you could have a billboard, anywhere that said anything, what would you put on the billboard? I know, these questions.

• 1:30:38Caroline Paul?

  Are you?

• 1:30:39Tim Ferriss?

  I know.

• 1:30:44Caroline Paul?

  Be brave? I don't know. I'm not good. I write books, not sentences.

• 1:30:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're comprised of sentences.

• 1:30:52Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, you're right. What would you put on a billboard, Tim?

• 1:30:56Tim Ferriss?

  You know, the first one that comes to mind, which I've been, it's just really burned into my memory, is actually from someone else's answer, so I'm gonna cheat here a little bit, but Amelia Boone.

• 1:31:09Caroline Paul?

  Cheating.

• 1:31:10Tim Ferriss?

  I know. Amelia Boone, sitting right where you're sitting, and I interviewed her for the podcast, and I asked her this question, and her aunt, she's the world's most successful female obstacle course racer. So, Spartan Race, top, world's toughest mudder. To get, to put it in perspective, too, because I feel like... The modifying it, even though it's true, modifying it with female doesn't do her quite enough justice at all because she competed, I might be getting, I don't, I think I'm getting this perfectly right, actually, in the 2012 World's Toughest Mudder, where there are more than a thousand competitors, you have to qualify to compete, it's like the World Series.

• 1:31:53Tim Ferriss?

  And predominantly men, as far as I understand, competing, it's a 24-hour race where you have to do as many cycles or reps as possible of an obstacle course, no sleeping, and she finished second out of everyone, and the man who won beat her by a total of eight minutes, 24-hour race. She's a huge, just an incredible athlete, really funny, very smart, is an attorney at Apple, I mean, she's, but she's effectively a full-time professional athlete, she's just winning at life. And her answer was, no one owes you anything. That was her answer. I was like, I like that. I really like it. It's just, you have to go out and get amongst

• 1:32:38Tim Ferriss?

  it. And so I might steal that. If I had to choose a second-

• 1:32:41Caroline Paul?

  That's mine. I want to put that. That's mine. That's my answer.

• 1:32:45Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:32:46Caroline Paul?

  We'll change it. Nobody knows you anything at all.

• 1:32:50Tim Ferriss?

  At all. Yes. Underscore, underscore. Do you have any morning routines? We were talking earlier, I asked you what you had for breakfast, and you said, coffee and two Balance bars. I'm a creature of habit. So let's talk about habits. Do you have any particular morning routines or daily routines that you absolutely must do, or feel better if you have done them?

• 1:33:16Caroline Paul?

  I am such a creature of habit, which often surprises people, because they think someone who loves adventure would be incredibly spontaneous. And I can see why, because when you're outside, let's say, I don't know, I was a, I did first descents with a whitewater team, you do not know what's gonna happen next on a river that's never been done before, even if you've scouted it along the banks. Yet I need a routine in my daily life. I guess that makes sense because it balances that out. It's like Obama who wants to wear the same tie because he makes way too many decisions in other areas. So, yes, I love, I get up early, even if

• 1:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  What time?

• 1:34:02Caroline Paul?

  Six. Even if it's a vacation, I set my alarm and get up. I feel if I sleep in that I've sort of wasted the day. And then I immediately, I eat within an hour, just because that's important for my metabolism. And it's Pete's coffee, French roast, really strong, two balance bars. And I feel set for the day, kind of thing.

• 1:34:28Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do, uh, do you have any evening routines?

• 1:34:32Caroline Paul?

  Go to sleep.

• 1:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  Go to sleep.

• 1:34:34Caroline Paul?

  I, I cannot stay up late. I, it's, I wish I could, I wish I hardly, could hardly sleep at all. Because I don't, I'm not one of those people who loves sleep. But I need to go to bed about 10, I'm, it drives Wendy crazy, but about 10, I'm checked out.

• 1:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  Powered off.

• 1:34:53Caroline Paul?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any trouble sleeping, getting to sleep?

• 1:34:55Caroline Paul?

  I do, I have a lot of trouble sleeping. Now I have my medical marijuana card, actually. It's, I don't, I've never liked pot, ever. And, but my mom recently had lung cancer and she's, she's fine. But she was really nauseous from the drugs and she had a friend, uh, giving her pot, some pot paste, which, which we said, just take that pot paste, it'll probably help your extreme nausea. And she's English, she was like, and she's almost 80, she's like, oh no, I'm not going to submit pot, or I'm not going to take pot. And then she did, and it was miraculous for her. And she said she slept well, and I said, you slept well? And I don't smoke pot either, and so, but I said, oh, I need to, I sleep terribly.

• 1:35:38Caroline Paul?

  And I've been, I took it and I slept like a log, so now I, I, I take pot before I go to sleep.

• 1:35:46Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, do you smoke it or a small amount of paste, or how do you consume it?

• 1:35:50Caroline Paul?

  I actually use an e-cigarette, because I don't like the effect when I, I wouldn't, I don't smoke anything in general, like I don't smoke cigarettes, never have. But I do use the vape, I guess.

• 1:36:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:36:04Caroline Paul?

  I'm so uncool. I don't know any of the.

• 1:36:06Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was about to out one of our close mutual friends who's an expert in this field, but I won't.

• 1:36:11Caroline Paul?

  Oh, I have many close mutual friends.

• 1:36:14Tim Ferriss?

  Throw stone and hit a pot professional.

• 1:36:18Tim Ferriss?

  The, have you always had trouble sleeping? Or is that something that cropped up recently?

• 1:36:23Caroline Paul?

  I think I don't remember having trouble sleeping like the last 10 years. I don't know if it's an age thing, but it's a drag when you can't sleep because well, part of it is I used to get injured a lot. And then I couldn't sleep because of my injuries. You know, I basically had my knee replaced. That was a very from because I fell in a firefight, a fire while firefighting. And eventually that knee had to be replaced. And once it was, it took years for, for me to feel, to be able to sleep. And then, so that kind of thing, I think probably threw me off track.

• 1:37:03Tim Ferriss?

  So you, do you wish people, this is gonna sound funny maybe, do you wish people would break more bones when they were kids?

• 1:37:13Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason I bring that up is just going back to the op ed and maybe the way we've been acculturated and socialized. When I meet a guy who's never broken a bone, I always get very suspicious. I'm just, uh, but it's just, it's perfectly accepted if you meet, say, a girl who's never broken a bone. It's like, oh, yeah, no, it's not, it's not a, it's a non-topic, right? Do you think kids should get injured more in the process of growing up?

• 1:37:43Caroline Paul?

  That's, that's interesting. I mean, I think the parents will hate me if I say they should. I had my first stitches when I was five, when I, my parents put me on a sled and I immediately sledded right into the tree at the bottom of the hill. Thus, thus my illusion career was foretold.

• 1:38:01Caroline Paul?

  But.

• 1:38:03Caroline Paul?

  It was not treated as if it was something catastrophic. It just was part of childhood and I had a couple of stitches and it broke my thumb and blah, blah, blah. So I guess what I think is that, I hope no one gets injured, but I think injury is not as bad as people think. And to not do something because you might get injured is a terrible reason not to do something. Because we're gonna get, we could get injured in anything. I mean, just getting into your car is very dangerous. And so I think we should just put that in its place where it should be. And so, girls are often told, "Oh, you could get hurt." And this specter of getting hurt takes on these huge proportions.

• 1:38:48Caroline Paul?

  Whereas for boys, that's not emphasized. And they've done studies with this. And yet, the interesting thing is that girls and boys, before puberty, are physically the same. They break the same and they're as able as each other, if not, girls being more able at that time. So the fact that girls are told and treated as if they're more fragile, doesn't make sense at all. And it primes them to be very sort of over cautious about this idea of being hurt.

• 1:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just on that point, being in some cases more capable. I remember getting my ass kicked in 5th grade, because I was playing Shinobi, this ninja video game. I was a little boy at the time. And this gigantic towering girl came over and just restarted the game to just terrorize me. And I just started bubbling and I was on the verge of tears and I called her Squid Face and she proceeded to just mop the floor with me. Ah, the trauma.

• 1:39:51Caroline Paul?

  Never call women Squid Face.

• 1:39:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was, I'm trying to think.

• 1:39:58Caroline Paul?

  Lesson learned.

• 1:39:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you've ever seen Bloodsport, like Frank Tuk's, put up your tuk's, right? And the huge, kind of like redneck American who just like hammer fists the first opponent in the face, it was kind of like that. It was, it was a very short fight.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  We could talk for hours and hours and hours. I think this is a good round one, and people can certainly let us know if they'd like a round two. But do you have any requests before we wrap up and we'll talk about where people can find you and social and so on, but any requests of the audience, suggestions for them to anyone listening?

• 1:40:36Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, if you're a parent, I really want you to look at the way you are guiding your girls versus guiding your boys. Because I hear a lot of parents say, "Oh, no, no, no. I treat my boy and my girl the same." And then the more we talk about it, the more it becomes clear that maybe they don't. So for instance, I was talking, and I referenced this in my op-ed, I was talking to this woman and she said, "No, I don't really treat my boy and my girl differently." "Oh, but my girl's actually more klutzy. So I do caution

• 1:41:18Caroline Paul?

  her more because she's more klutzy." And so in fact, she was actually already treating her girl differently without realizing it. I think if we look, because I'm guilty of this too, of this bias of thinking that girls and women are more fragile, are more in need of help. And that is just so not true and so detrimental.

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  And just on the klutzy point, because I thought this was really good, and Bob just pulled it up on the piece here. "But she's very klutzy, the mom explained. I wondered, wasn't there a way even a klutzy child could take risks?" Such a good question. And my friend agreed there might be, but only half-heartedly. And I could see on her face that maternal instinct was sparring with feminism and feminism was losing.

• 1:42:07Tim Ferriss?

  I love this book, and I very rarely say that because I get sent a shit ton of books. And I don't want to get 10x the number of books sent to me because I would do nothing more than read books. But I am really a fan of the message and the writing. It is, I was expecting it to read like a kid book in a derogatory, no offense intended, but it's like to be kind of pandering to kids. And it's a hilarious book to read, even as an adult, I really enjoyed it. So where can people find more about the book, more about you on the web, on social?

• 1:42:47Caroline Paul?

  I have a website, carolinepaul.com, and my book is there. And we actually have an Instagram called The Gutsy Girl Club that's doing very well, where we highlight girl heroes or girls that are great role models for gutsiness and bravery. And we also have a website for the book, thegutsygirl.org.

• 1:43:10Tim Ferriss?

  And if people wanted to say hello, wave a digital hand at you on social media, @CaroWriter, is that right?

• 1:43:20Caroline Paul?

  Yes, I'm terrible on social media, I have to say.

• 1:43:23Tim Ferriss?

  Probably makes you better in every area of your life.

• 1:43:25Caroline Paul?

  Better to send me an email, which is on my website.

• 1:43:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's the best way to put it. That'll give you some time to potentially modify that to a contact form. Just as a point of reference, Derek Sivers, who I've had on the podcast, after two and a half hours or something like that, and he was like, ah, nobody's going to be listening anyway, gave out his email address, and got 4,000 emails. So we'll figure that out. Everybody listening, of course, links to everything we discussed, the book references, of course, Caroline's books and so on, will be in the show notes. So if you're wondering what we said, and you don't want to have to go back and listen two or three times to the podcast, you can go to fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, forward slash podcast. And Caroline, this was so much fun. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:44:12Caroline Paul?

  So fun. Thank you, Tim. I'm a fan.

• 1:44:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the feeling is very mutual. I'm super inspired to go out and do something daring. I need more injuries in my life. And to everyone listening, as always, until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:44:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:45:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for years. I love audiobooks and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. The only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing, you will thank me, The Graveyard Book.

• 1:46:00Tim Ferriss?

  The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than 180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class, it's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim, that's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:46:38Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:47:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:48:05Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 1:48:47Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.