Ep 42: Rolf Potts (Part 2) on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking

Part 2 of 2 "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." - Rolf Potts Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812992180/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0812992180&linkCode=as2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=MHUU7GZHBMFJPMDF (hear the audio book sample here http://audible.com/timsbooks), one of my favorite books of all-time. It was one of just two books (the other was Walden http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619493918/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1619493918&linkCode=as2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=JW6O3XN7VN2E623B) that I carried with me around the world from 2004-2005. Those adventures led directly to The 4-Hour Workweek http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307465357/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307465357&linkCode=as2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20. In this often hilarious conversation, Rolf and I dig deep into travel tactics, creating time wealth, "managing success," and much more. It's a fun romp through every imaginable topic, from business to poetry, and from Wall Street to psychedelics. Show notes, including all links and resources: www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast

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 ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I would have seen an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to The Tim Ferriss Show. What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part conversation with Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding, world traveler extraordinaire, one of my favorite people. If you didn't catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in. But if you don't mind, your story is more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. We bounce around a lot. It's a very eclectic conversation, so you could certainly listen to these things out of order. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. You can check out a bunch of my competitions that I've run at 99designs.com/tim and Xoficio.

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  And if you want to see some of my favorite pieces of travel gear, as well as a video on rapid ultra-light packing, then you can visit Xoficio... X-A-F-R-I-C-O, Xoficio.com/tim. And I almost forgot, of course, there are a ton of resources and links and websites and books mentioned in this episode. All of it can be found in one place, in the show notes. So you just have to go to 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, forward slash podcast. 4hourworkweek.com/podcast. You can find the show notes and resources and links for this episode, as well as every

• 1:45Tim Ferriss?

  other episode, like those for Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Mike Shinoda, you name it. So you don't need to scribble furiously unless you want to, but 4hourworkweek.com/podcast is where you want to go. Without further ado and further Porky Pig imitations, please enjoy part two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Rolf Potts.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of your favorite books or commentaries on writing?

• 2:15Rolf Potts?

  Well, this is funny because I teach writing in various contexts. I teach at a summer writing program in Paris and then I've been doing a class at Yale the last couple of years. And so I've been reading a lot of craft books recently and I realized that I had crossed my carrying capacity, that I needed to stop freaking reading books about writing craft, that like I had learned all the metaphors there were. And so, I mean, there's some journalistically minded books, like Roy Peters Clark has The Writer's Toolkit, I think it's called. And Philip Lopate has a book called A Collection of Essays About the Writer's Craft Called To

• 2:59Rolf Potts?

  Show and to Tell, I think. Because, you know, the old adage goes, show don't tell, but he's a believer in the idea of strategic telling and he's a brilliant essayist himself.

• 3:09Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell his last name?

• 3:12Rolf Potts?

  L-O-P-A-T-E.

• 3:13Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 3:14Rolf Potts?

  He's sort of the modern father of the bellatristic essay, the personal essay. And he actually came up from New York to talk to my Yale students in person earlier this year. And his kind of writing is very different from what you and I do and he might sort of frown on it to a certain extent, that he's really about that old going back to Montaigne, high art of the essay, but he really has some good advice on writing. And jumping back to screenplays, the breakthrough for me in my writing, when I took my first vagabonding trip and thought I was going to be the new Jack Kerouac and tried to write about it and realized that one chronological retelling of what I did was not going to work regardless of how beautiful the sentences were, was stumbling into screenwriting 20

• 3:57Rolf Potts?

  years ago and learning the importance of structure. And so those classic screenwriting tomes, like, you know, the Sid Field screenplay book or Robert McKee's story, which is actually ridiculed in the movie adaptation.

• 4:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right, yes it is.

• 4:10Rolf Potts?

  Brian Cox actually plays Robert McKee in that movie.

• 4:17Rolf Potts?

  I think that those are useful because they go back to the very core of how we communicate as humans, how we tell stories. And you can get tired of the three-act screenplay structure or the needs of the audience, but the audience is damn important. And I'm a big believer, and you know, I'm not a believer in cultural hierarchy. I think that high literature is important and good, but, I mean, I just wrote a Pulp B movie. I think that it's good to know how Raymond Chandler structures his narratives in the same sense that it's good to know how Montaigne structures his narratives as well. So, I would say if people are looking for writing craft books, don't be afraid of any

• 5:01Rolf Potts?

  kind of book that just talks about how to tell a story. And I think that movies are great metaphors for how to tell a story. And there's crappy movies out there, and you know, adaptation is sort of a lampoon of how we invariably tell stories in movies. But just because you learn a very basic and formulaic way of, say, telling a cinematic story doesn't mean that you have to use that every time. It just means that you understand the rules, and then within the structure of those rules, then you can shine as a writer.

• 5:34Tim Ferriss?

  I very much concur. I have an embarrassing confession, which is I have been agonizing over a screenplay for several months now. And I think partially because I've loaded, I've loaded the expectations and the burden so large on my shoulders. It's roughly an adaptation of The Four Hour Workweek and a lot of the backstory, and it's intended to be comedic, but instill or at least convey a lot of sort of philosophical takeaways that hopefully will spur viewers to do. Interesting things in their lives and make big changes, blah, blah, blah. But I've been agonizing over it.

• 6:15Tim Ferriss?

  The one thing that did help me to at least get started, and I have quite a lot on paper, was Save the Cat. I thought that was, I don't know if you've seen this book, but I found it so helpful because I also read, I took McKee's Story Seminar, actually, which was quite an experience in and of itself. I mean, the portrayal and adaptation's not far off the mark.

• 6:39Rolf Potts?

  Interesting.

• 6:41Tim Ferriss?

  But a fun experience nonetheless. I really found Save the Cat to hold your hand and walk you through at least getting things down on paper by saying, all right, by this page in this minute, you should have this type of element and really allowing you at least to get, I wouldn't consider what I have a first draft, but a skeleton structure down that I can use to fill in the blanks with all these random ideas that I have. Totally agree. I think that I've become recently interested in Joseph Campbell, had a passing familiarity

• 7:20Tim Ferriss?

  with Joseph Campbell, watched a few documentaries, but the hero's journey and the monomyth, I find very interesting, just as a way of getting started, if you can sort of lay out these markers for different stories that you're considering telling. But another thought that I had, which we don't have to go too deep into unless you have thoughts on it, but is that that beginner's mind that you mentioned, which is achievable through travel or vagabonding, is also, I think, one of the primary benefits of what you might consider therapeutic use of psychedelics.

• 7:59Tim Ferriss?

  And that's maybe part of the reason that people often describe with the right set and setting, a psychedelic experience is one of the best experiences of their lives, is I think the same reason that many people would describe their first vagabonding experience as one of the best experiences of their lives, and that's the present state awareness and the beginner's mind and the appreciation that both of those experiences tend to catalyze.

• 8:28Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah. Yeah.

• 8:30Rolf Potts?

  Well, I touched on that a little bit in vagabonding. I sort of gently dissuade readers of the necessity to, say, smoke marijuana when they travel because reality is giving you this present state awareness. You know, if you allow yourself to be bored, or if you allow yourself to be lonely, or just if you allow yourself to have experiences by accident, then suddenly you're having, you're discovering things in a vivid way that don't need artificial enhancement.

• 9:00Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. I, the, one of the pieces of advice that you gave, I'm pretty sure that you gave this advice, feel free to, to, to correct me, but was getting lost, the benefit of getting lost and heading out of your, your housing, whatever that might be, and just walking off in one direction, maybe with a map, maybe without a map, and just walking and taking random turns for a few hours. And I have found that so invaluable, not only while traveling, quite frankly, but even in San Francisco and places where I've lived or live, exploring by foot a terrain that you might otherwise, for the sake of convenience,

• 9:42Tim Ferriss?

  use taxis for, for instance. And it's, it's been, I think, a, a major priority for me when I travel, not for business, but for this type of experiential reflection and exploration, to, to try to catalyze discomfort whenever possible. And that doesn't mean a pebble in the shoe, but to, for instance, to purposefully go out of my way to encounter language difficulties. And one of my favorite ways to do this, I'm typically a night owl, like I mentioned, but when I travel, I try to switch it up. So I like to try to wake up in some cases very

• 10:25Tim Ferriss?

  early. And I did this in Greece, my first trip to Greece, I was traveling with a close friend, and I started waking up really early. I would just leave the blinds open and I'll wake up as early as possible. And my habit was to, to go for a walk and just hand wave and try to ask the locals, these were on some very small islands, where I could find a cafe or a bakery. And inevitably, I would go to these bakeries or coffee shops and there would be a small group of really old Greek guys sitting outside debating whatever old Greek men debate. I would imagine it's probably complaining about politicians and so on and so forth, much like every other gaggle of old men early in the morning everywhere else in the world.

• 11:08Tim Ferriss?

  And then I would just proceed to sit down and try to have a conversation with these guys. And it was always hilarious and extremely fun. And I ended up being basically the court jester for these guys for a period of time in the morning, and they always got a kick out of it. So I think that, I mean, I've said it, that seeking out of mild discomfort or uncomfortable situations, I think, is really one of the main values and benefits that I've taken away from travel in the last, certainly in the last 10 years or so.

• 11:50Rolf Potts?

  Yeah, this ties into a lot of ideas that are really close to my heart and that I've embraced even since I discovered vagabonding. And it's funny that you talk about the old Greek guys because as a travel writer, one of my biggest strengths, and it could be an accidental strength, as a person who wanders out with the purpose of getting lost, is that whatever town I'm in, inevitably, the town weirdo finds me, like the most eccentric guy. And if you read my second book, Marco Polo Didn't Go There, like, one-third of the stories are about me with a really strange dude in Lebanon or Burma or someplace. And it's sort of connected to the idea of the old Greek guy sitting there,

• 12:34Rolf Potts?

  is that they see each other every morning. But the chance for an American to stumble in and have a semi-comical exchange with them is the most exciting thing that's happened to them all week. It's like their wives have stopped listening to them, their children have stopped listening to them. And so they can take you under their wing and just, the things that you learn from these guys is amazing. And so that's funny, that's very relatable because I feel like, for whatever reason, I don't know if it's my Midwestern tendency to talk a little bit less and maybe listen a little bit more or something, that I always meet these guys who just have the weirdest view of the world. But you were talking about walking out and getting lost. In vagabonding, I talk about

• 13:19Rolf Potts?

  how if in doubt, just walk until your day becomes interesting.

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Rolf Potts?

  And this is sort of tied into a concept that I've discovered since then. And it's a concept that I teach in my Paris classes because we're in the city where it was invented. And it's the idea of the flaneur. Are you familiar with the flaneur?

• 13:37Tim Ferriss?

  The only reason I'm, in passing, I want you to expand on, the only reason I recognize that word is because a friend of mine named Nassim Taleb, who's very famous for having written The Black Swan.

• 13:52Rolf Potts?

  Sure.

• 13:52Tim Ferriss?

  And a number of other books, describes himself that way.

• 13:57Rolf Potts?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Tim Ferriss?

  And so maybe you could expand on that because I would love to hear more. Quite frankly, I don't know much about the term.

• 14:05Rolf Potts?

  Yeah, it's a wonderful idea that, in a sense, when I was walking until my day became interesting, I was being a flaneur before I knew what it was. But it goes back to Baudelaire in, you know, over 100 years ago in Paris. And it's connected through French ideas through the situationists of the 1960s. And the idea is that, and flaneuring is something that I use in travel, but was really invented as a concept in your own hometown. And the idea is that you become so used to and inured to your hometown that you're not seeing it anymore. That it's become a purely utilitarian space. And between point A and point B, you've

• 14:48Rolf Potts?

  ceased living. That in your routine, you're not really living your routine. You're just sort of, and this is a paraphrase, but you're sort of zombie walking through your day. And so being a flaneur, a flaneur is not someone who walks through his own city in a utilitarian or pragmatic way. A flaneur is someone who goes out in search of experience. And there's someone, it's also tied into the idea of psychogeography, that instead of walking through a city with the idea that you're going to say, see tourist attractions, or that you're going to go to visit your friend on the other side of town, is that you're going to walk through the town. Psycho geographically and you're gonna can collect the color red and you're just gonna see how many forms the color red can can take. Or you're gonna look for every parking meter in town.

• 15:33Rolf Potts?

  Or you're gonna look for license plates with the letter Q on them.

• 15:36Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 15:37Rolf Potts?

  Or you're gonna look for every immigrant restaurant and that that is gonna organize your day. That's psycho geography. The being a flaneur is even less structured in that you're just you're just wandering. And it's a wonderful. It was invented to be done in your hometown to break out of your own habits. It's a great thing. It's a great way to break out of your tourist habits where you go to a city and there's a hundred thousand things you can do at any given moment and you do the obvious thing, which is go to the tourist attractions. And I'm not gonna knock that. There's a reason why they're tourist attractions. But people talk about how, oh, there's the beaten path. Everything's been discovered. Everything has already been done. And it's like, actually, that's not true. You know, Paris is the most tourist city in the world, but you wander for 10 minutes

• 16:21Rolf Potts?

  and pretty soon you're gonna be finding something that's unique to itself, even along the Champs-Élysées, even near the Champs-Dumas where the Eiffel Tower is. If you just embrace the idea of the flaneur and walk until something catches your eye and stay open to experience instead of your plans, then you're going to you're gonna be living in a way where you previously had only been consuming those moments.

• 16:43Tim Ferriss?

  And flaneur is F L A N E U R, is that right?

• 16:47Rolf Potts?

  That's right, with a little hat over the A.

• 16:50Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. God, my I've of all the languages I've attempted, although this one very half-heartedly, I just cannot seem to get a grasp on French because I panic when it starts to erase any of my Spanish or confuse anything else that I've studied. But Paris, what is it like to teach in Paris and what type of students are you teaching?

• 17:13Rolf Potts?

  Well, I teach at the American Academy. I'm actually the the course director and it's sort of become my baby. I've been running this writing workshop for the last 10 years on Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. And my students are like age 18 to age 70. And it's just, it's a large number of people. I mean, some people are there because of they know vagabonding or my writing, or they know some of the other writers who teach there. I have two, one other nonfiction teacher and two fiction teachers. So they can, it's not just travel writing. They can study poetry or screenwriting or short stories. And so a lot of people have just, it's sort of a bucket list thing for them is that they want to come to Paris and be a writer for a month. And it's, and it's, one of the exciting parts of the program is that it delivers.

• 17:55Rolf Potts?

  You're there on the left bank, you're in the university district of Paris, and you're, you know, you're, you're firing on all cylinders, that you're, you're writing all the time, you're interacting with writers, you're reading a lot, and you're being a flanour. And this is, it's funny that I discovered the flanour in the context of Paris, even though I'd already been doing it. And even when I'm not teaching travel writing, the flanour is such a great creative exercise for my students who might be writing a poem rather than a travel story. And Evelyn Waugh talked about how a city like Paris is sort of like a house that's been wallpapered over so much that the only thing holding it up is the wallpaper, is that there's no, everybody's written about Paris. And so you have to find a way that is against expectations.

• 18:37Rolf Potts?

  And the only way to find that is to get out and wander and find your own interests, you know. And I've had students who have brought their skateboard and through skateboarding in Paris have discovered sides of it that nobody else is seeing. And they've discovered, you know, the French skateboarding culture. And so, yeah, my, my students are just there for the romance of Paris. And the great thing is that it's a great, you know, July in Paris is a romantic place to be, but it's a great place to deliver. You know, you can walk outside of a classroom and in 90 seconds, you're where Victor Hugo lived when he was 11 years old. And, and so there's this huge, and, and in three minutes, you can go to a place where Hemingway got shitfaced, you know.

• 19:17Rolf Potts?

  We're literally, we're on the street, you know, that he describes, you know, in Movable Feast. And so I think that energy, I mean, it's like, we could teach the same thing in North Dakota, and it would still be very professional. I'm very proud of what our teachers are doing. But there's, it's almost like a catalyst. Paris puts people in a mental state, almost like an athletic performance thing, is that people are in Paris and they're not going to blow it, you know? Right. That they don't live in Paris, they're going to come to Paris, and they're going to do something special. And it creates this energy that, that amazes me every year of people just uncorking some really, some really good stuff and, and just having some...

• 20:00Rolf Potts?

  Going back to Time Wealth, just an experience that is very specific and very Parisian, but very unique to themselves. So I've really loved my association with that city.

• 20:11Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds amazing. How many students are in the course?

• 20:14Rolf Potts?

  It varies from year to year. We've been averaging about 24. It's capped at 32. And so probably anywhere from 18 to 32 students.

• 20:26Tim Ferriss?

  God, I feel like I should take the course. It sounds amazing. I fantasized fairly frequently about going to graduate school or attempting something like an MFA for creative writing, because I really haven't ever explored fiction outside of elementary, doing some exercises in elementary school. What do you find of the students who take this course? What are the shared characteristics of the people who get the most out of it? And I'm going to leave that open-ended on purpose.

• 20:57Rolf Potts?

  I think it's an earnest desire to do their best, combined with sort of a humility, almost a beginner's mind-type humility towards writing. And sometimes I can get a very young and brilliant college student who will come in sort of a leg above, maybe sort of a mid-career professional. But because the college student has not quite cultivated, it's a strange thing to think, but there's a sort of confidence and self-assuredness that college students have that like a mid-career professional doesn't have. And that can get in the way of the beginner's mind.

• 21:39Rolf Potts?

  And so that sort of, know-it-all is a wrong word, but like the overconfidence of a brilliant college student might impede his or her advancement where like someone who's 35 or 45 and is just there to soak in everything and work as hard as they can. I think it's the person, going back to the beginner's mind, it's the person who's willing to embrace the beginner's mind and work hard and synthesize the creative aspect with the parts of Paris that you can't overlook. You can't just come to Paris and sit in your room and write all the time, any more than J.P. Morgan should have been reading teletextes the whole time he was in Egypt. That that interactive going on, having fun and having a bottle of wine by the Seine and floundering through the city and discovering things by accident is going to feed what's

• 22:24Rolf Potts?

  happening when you're alone in your room. And so I think it's the students who can find that balance. And the students, I think to a big extent, it's the students who have been, almost like vagabonding, who've been saving their money, and this means something, you know, that they're not just gathering from their limitless pool of resources to pay for their month in Paris, but they have earned this with their sweat. It's like a chapter in vagabonding, I talk about how the work you do makes your travels meaningful. I think it's the people who come in and know the value of what they have in Paris, that this one month is a special time that can catalyze them into a new creative state. Those are the people who are gonna, who are gonna get things delivered for them. And you mentioned MFAs.

• 23:06Rolf Potts?

  I got a mid-career MFA. And, I don't know, there's some advantages of that sort of thing, but I think there's an extent to which that creatively, a one-month program like this can cover a lot of those MFA bases without compromising two years of your life.

• 23:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, agreed. I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I mean, my basic feeling is that the benefits would be, and I mean, it's maybe sounds ridiculous that, I feel very isolated writing a lot of the time. And it's sort of odd that I'm, you know, have access to more people than I've ever had access to in my life, yet I spend a lot of my time feeling quite isolated and lonely. And there's, and I don't know many writers in San Francisco, I just, that's not in my social sphere, which maybe is a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing, but the idea of being in a group of people, going through the same experience.

• 24:11Tim Ferriss?

  Having that sort of shared study experience, I'm sure with some degree of commiseration every once in a while, with a structure that actually facilitates experimenting with new types of writing is very appealing to me. So maybe the month, maybe that's, maybe that's a great solution as opposed to two years, like you said, which I don't, I don't think I could. I think that will remain a fantasy in my head.

• 24:34Rolf Potts?

  Yeah. I, I, I think they both, they're both good for that social, that community of writers situation. Just like this, the friend that I'm swapping houses with, who lives in Brooklyn is a grad school friend. And I just, you know, in my late 30s, I was able to make very, very dear friends through my two years of grad school. But there's an extent to which that, that like MFA programs aren't really designed for 38 year olds who are already successful as writers.

• 25:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Rolf Potts?

  And that, and then that, that a month program, I mean, obviously I have a vested interest in my own one month program, but a one month program can deliver both the community and a more concentrated spark of, of inspiration without having to go through a two-year cycle that isn't necessarily tailored to someone in your situation. One thing a, a two-year program can give you is, is structure, like monthly deadlines. But if you've already written a book, I think there's an extension to which like that exposure to poetry or fiction or screenwriting and just 30 other people who are gung ho and

• 25:47Rolf Potts?

  are locked in on that similar creative openness, that that one month catalyst can be more youthful, useful in both senses than, than a more extended certificate program that lasts two years.

• 26:00Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it's, I, I. I am happy that you misspoke for a second and said youthful because in a way, I think it's almost appropriate because like you said, the charge of a group in Paris recognizing for most of them that it's a very unique opportunity that required a lot of sacrifices to make happen would charge it with a certain youthful energy which I'm trying to re-infuse into a lot of what I do because and I don't think this is purely a function of age. Maybe it's exposure to just the doom and gloom of just general internet bullshit.

• 26:40Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm trying to beat back my own cynicism with a club and really try to prevent myself from becoming apathetic. That's a very strong word, but there's just, there's a lot of instability and craziness in the world if you go looking for it or if you're spending a lot of time on social media, for instance, and I want to combat that with a positive and charged youthful energy. So this is very interesting.

• 27:16Rolf Potts?

  Well, I think that that goes back to the idea of success versus lack of success and that a certain kind of success is more meaningful when you're 30 than when you're 40 because you have a different relationship to that success after you've been steeped in it for a while. So finding the screenplay that you can bang your head up against or embracing poetry or any or, you know, samba dancing or anything else with that that vulnerability, that beginner's mind, that youthfulness, I think that that that is so useful, to use the right word this time, in rejuvenating your relationship with yourself. Just like

• 27:58Rolf Potts?

  when I started as a travel writer, there were certain bylines that were really important to me that aren't now, you know?

• 28:04Tim Ferriss?

  And by bylines, you mean publications and credits and?

• 28:07Rolf Potts?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna write for the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm gonna write for National Geographic Traveler. Good publications, they do good work, but I realized that once you took away the thrill of that initial success of having a major publication acknowledge the quality of your work, then it shifted, you know, what I was doing with the content.

• 28:30Rolf Potts?

  I guess transformed a little bit. And so, um, so now I'm writing a screenplay with zombies in it. Not that I'm going to become a B-movie screenwriter now, but it brings me joy, you know, sort of that childlike joy in the creative process that doesn't exist anymore with what I've already become professionally successful at.

• 28:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 28:53Rolf Potts?

  And so I think you get into that pattern, and it sounds like you're experimenting with this already, that you become successful in a certain manner of creative expression and a certain manner of expertise. And then I think a way to keep yourself fresh is to try activities that you might fail at.

• 29:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 29:14Rolf Potts?

  And I think if you aren't failing at something fairly substantial once a year, then you're not pushing yourself enough. And of course, travel is a great venue for inviting failure and, you know, mild humiliation. But sure, you know, I think it's great that you're bashing your head against a screenplay that might not have worked out. Ten years ago, or maybe eight years ago, I sort of had my vagabonding screenplay where I was sort of expressing the philosophical ideas of vagabonding through a coming-of-age story. And it didn't quite work, you know? Maybe I'll go back to it, but it was a good thing to have tried and not quite succeeded at. And I'm not saying that that's where your screenplay is going, but that process, I

• 29:58Rolf Potts?

  think, is important for keeping yourself sharp and keeping a perspective amid certain jadedness to other kinds of success.

• 30:06Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. The adjective, well, the adjective "successful" has come up a couple of times. When you think of the word "successful," who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 30:21Rolf Potts?

  Oh, man, I don't know if, I don't know if a person comes to mind. I, you know, I think when I was 28, I may have, I may have been able to name like a travel writer that I wanted to be, like Pico Iyer or Tim Cahill. Um, and I think the reason that a person, when you ask that question, a person didn't pop into my head because I have that different relationship to success, you know, that, that the hunger to be like Pico or Tim, um, played itself out in a very, in a great way. It became a part of the energy that made me a travel writer. Uh, and so now I don't think, you know, it's funny, I, um, I feel like our backgrounds are fairly similar. I'm from Wichita, Kansas. You're from Springs, right?

• 31:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 31:06Rolf Potts?

  Bullseye, middle-class families, it feels like.

• 31:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 31:09Rolf Potts?

  Um, and you had your Ivy League experience right out of high school and I didn't. And like I did my, I taught at Penn and Yale for a couple of years really recently. Um, and that became, a part of me felt like I needed to measure myself against that standard and it was a great experience. Um, but now that has also been folded into my idea of success. And so I think this might be a little bit tied into talking about the creative process and, and sometimes it can be difficult, that my notions of success are slightly different. It has a different energy. So I'm not thinking about someone I want to be necessarily, but it's back into that, I think it's more about appreciation. Like my role models,

• 31:54Rolf Potts?

  and I'm, I'm still blanking on who I might point out, are not achievement people, but appreciation people, you know, people who have found the success and are synthesizing it in sort of a good life kind of way.

• 32:07Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. I think, um, this is just somebody who can't, who comes to mind. Uh, I've, I've asked this question of a lot of folks and, uh, more, uh, more than a few times, Steve Jobs comes up, but he's, he's actually not, uh, in many ways, um, exemplary, uh, based on what you just described. And I think Steve Wozniak's co-founder very much is. Uh, I've, I've met Woz on a number of occasions and I even gave him a little tango class, uh, prior to his Dancing with the Stars experiment. And

• 32:42Rolf Potts?

  Interesting.

• 32:42Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, he really savors and loves life and has built

• 32:50Tim Ferriss?

  Has built a life for himself where he is able to enjoy or experience the joy of discovery and is a genuinely happy human being. And this is gonna sound funny, but despite all of his material success, because I think that the material success, not to say that that's a bad thing, I think that it enables more than it disables, but it can become a, it can make people very defensive, where they spend the vast majority of their time managing the protection and growth of their assets as opposed to the growth in other areas of their lives. And I've certainly, I mean, I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars or anything

• 33:32Tim Ferriss?

  like that, but been very fortunate to have enough success with publishing and elsewhere that I don't have to worry about where the next month's rent's coming from. But I've witnessed that in myself, and I think that there's a possibility, and maybe this isn't true, but I'd be curious, based on your observations, if you've noticed this, you're coming from a very middle-class background where there were many, many times when money was tight in the family and we weren't able to take certain trips or get certain birthday presents or whatever it might be, go out to certain restaurants, that my inclination

• 34:11Tim Ferriss?

  is to be very, to focus on the defense and protection of assets more than perhaps those people I met, for instance, at Princeton who grew up as blue bloods, where money is a known quantity, it's a, it's an element that for multiple generations, the family is, has become comfortable with. So, I'm not sure if that's worth exploring, but that's something that I try to be very cautious or aware of, because I think it's a terrible inclination that I have.

• 34:48Rolf Potts?

  Well, you touched on a couple of things, a couple of new concepts I've come, I've sort of wrestled with very recently, and it actually made me realize who my, who my role models are gonna be, to your earlier question. But yeah, like, teaching at Yale, for example, which is such a good institution, you know, I came into Yale in my early 40s, and my excitement...

• 35:11Rolf Potts?

  At being at this institution, after all these years, you know, after being a person, when I was seventeen at the, at the college fair in Wichita, Kansas, I remember looking at the Yale table and feeling sorry for the guy who had to come to Kansas and not even going there, you know, just because I came from a family that, that, um, that you don't spend money on an Ivy League education. There's, there's more practical ways to get your education. It wasn't an expectation. But me sitting as a teacher in a class at Yale, this is very recently, who's excited about being at this institution in a way that the eighteen-year-old student isn't. You know, the eighteen-year-old student is just relieved to be there because they've been expected to be there for years and it's a part of their socioeconomic status. Um, and they, they didn't have to go to their

• 35:56Rolf Potts?

  safety school, sort of situation.

• 35:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 35:59Rolf Potts?

  And, and so, in a way, that's sort of a, a gift of middle-classness is that you're not, you don't have those expectations. Nobody's gonna be disappointed if you don't end up at Yale. And then you can actually have this, this beginner's-minded experience of being a forty-two-year-old who's over the moon about being a Yale professor all of a sudden. And actually, the other thing you, you asked about, when, when I, when you think of success, who do you think about? Actually, I've been really fascinated, just like in the last couple of months, of the stories of Dave Chappelle and John Hughes. Dave Chappelle being the comedian who had turned away fifteen, fifty million dollars and society sort of said, oh, what's wrong with him? And then John Hughes, who in the nineteen eighties made all of the best teen movies ever, and then just sort of disappeared to become a quiet person.

• 36:44Tim Ferriss?

  And did he make Home Alone, or am I making that up?

• 36:47Rolf Potts?

  He made Home Alone. He made all of those brat-packed teen movies. He made Home Alone.

• 36:51Tim Ferriss?

  Mrs. Doubtfire, did he also make that one?

• 36:53Rolf Potts?

  He may have been involved as a screen.

• 36:55Tim Ferriss?

  I might, I might be making that up, uh, but, yeah.

• 36:58Rolf Potts?

  He, he had involvement with movies through the nineties and then just sort of stopped doing that altogether, um, in the two thousands. And we...

• 37:09Rolf Potts?

  And I'm still in the process of researching this personality type because I'm really interested in the relationship that these guys have to success and they were both judged sort of harshly. And I think that these are guys who are really trying to wrestle with the idea of who they were versus who their success dictated they were supposed to be, right? And so Dave Chappelle, we live in a society where you have to be insane to turn down $50 million. People were questioning Dave Chappelle's mental health.

• 37:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that was a very prominent feature of the whole discussion, yeah. Whether or not he had gone literally insane.

• 37:46Rolf Potts?

  When in fact, it could have been, and again, I'm still researching these guys, that could have been a radically sane thing to do. A friend of mine, Rachel Kadzi-Gonza, who's a great up and coming journalist, wrote a piece, profiled him for The Believer, where she went to his hometown in Yellow Springs and talked to his, Yellow Springs, Ohio, talked to his mom, who's a professor, and actually ran into him in a coffee shop, but sort of wanted to respect his, you know, privacy sort of thing.

• 38:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 38:14Rolf Potts?

  And Dave Chappelle is a fit, happy guy, living on a farm in Ohio, hanging out with his friends, and it feels, again, I need to do some more research, but it feels like he's a guy who decided what would make him happy and he realized that $50 million and getting locked into a show wouldn't. And similarly, John Hughes is a beloved guy, and these are two examples. There's other examples that one could throw in, but he was beloved for his teen movies. But I think there came a point at which, especially by people of my generation, there came a point at which that he didn't want to be beholden to The Breakfast Club and 16 Candles anymore, that he, he's a family man and a guy who was passionate about his creativity.

• 38:55Rolf Potts?

  And I think he chose being happy in a city that he loved, Chicago, with family members that he loved, over making, you know, The Breakfast Club 3 and making another $10 million. And so while I wouldn't say, while these guys didn't pop into my head as examples of success, they're guys that have sort of captured my attention because I think the... The sort of public perception of, oh, here are these guys who have disappeared. With these two examples, these guys aren't disappeared, they're not people who disappeared, but they returned, they realized that they had, they had the, the structure in place to live the lives they wanted to live, and they quietly have been doing that.

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. It makes me want to immediately start researching both of them. But if you're, if you're on the, if you're on the job, then, and I, given that I enjoy your writing so much, I'll probably just wait.

• 39:52Rolf Potts?

  Well, actually, you know, it's funny that I'm not researching it from a writing point of view, so go ahead and take it. It's just like from an intellectual point of view. You know, there were, at all points, Heraclitus said, "You never step into the river, same river twice, because it's a different river and you're a different man." And that's probably not a direct quote, but you're always trying to make sense of, of how you're living and how other people are living. And suddenly, this is just a random intellectual thing that I probably wouldn't have thought about in the context of success until you brought it up. And here's two guys that I think, you know, were crazy like foxes, you know, that, that said, "No, thanks, American idea of success. We're going to take real success, we're going to take time wealth, and live in ways that make us happy," instead

• 40:32Rolf Potts?

  of trying to, to live up to artificial ideas of success. So I would, actually, you can have it, Tim, and I want to read this. I want to read this Booker article on the, on success management, you know?

• 40:46Tim Ferriss?

  Success management, I like it.

• 40:48Rolf Potts?

  It, it feels like an important topic.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I agree. Especially because it's such a, it's such a nebulous term that I think there's a, there's a lot of insidious potential for such a heralded, pressured, nebulous term in particular. Interesting. All right. I'm, I'm going, I'm sure that seed will, will just sit in my head and not go away, so I might have to scratch that itch.

• 41:18Rolf Potts?

  Well, I mean, if you, I mean, there's so many ways of looking at pers- at perspective in success, but in dental terms, we're all more successful than the kings of Europe 500 years ago, you know?

• 41:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 41:29Rolf Potts?

  So there's that, the keeping up with the Joneses idea of success, you know, that comparing yourself to other people idea of success is useful to an extent, but it's also toxic. And so it's part of this idea of success management, which is a phrase I only just now said, but it feels like it's the other half. There's a million books about how to become successful, but perhaps there's not, perhaps the idea of how to manage one's success in a, in an enriching and life-enhancing way is something that more thought needs to be, you know, addressed.

• 42:05Tim Ferriss?

  I think so. Definitely. Well, this, this is, uh, this has been a fantastic conversation. I have just a few more questions I'd love to ask. I want to be respectful of your time. But I think I'm, I'm, I am very hopeful that people will enjoy this and they should definitely let us know if they, if they want a round two at some point, if you're up for it, because this has been a blast. But the, the questions I have, so there are a couple of rapid fire questions. You walk into a bar, what do you order from the bartender? What's, what are your, your drinks of choice or drink of choice?

• 42:43Rolf Potts?

  I have turned into a, into a whiskey guy and I'm actually giving myself a little vacation from whiskey. Just because almost like with internet connectivity, it became too easy to like have a nightcap that compromised my morning productivity. And, you know, being the middle-class guy I am, you know, I love Woodford Reserve and I'm talking about the Burberry types of whiskey, but Evan Williams Black Label makes me happy. But I'm taking a little vacation from it because it became my, you know, my booze version of the internet where it just became unnecessary for me to be having, you know, another Evan Williams. And, you know, I like, I like the single malts and stuff like that too. But as far

• 43:28Rolf Potts?

  as something like I needed a freedom app for my bottle of Evan Williams.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  Just duct tape over the mouth, right?

• 43:36Rolf Potts?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 43:38Tim Ferriss?

  Like an anti booze pacifier. I should sell one of those.

• 43:41Rolf Potts?

  Exactly, and it's not alcoholism, because I've been on my whiskey fast for about two weeks now, and I never think about it. I just need to get my monkey brain off of my whiskey nightcap. Because it was delightful and unnecessary and completely, you know, counter to my own creative life, you know? It was a very lazy... It was like checking my Facebook feed for the third time in 20 minutes, you know? Anyway, eventually I will return to whiskey with pleasure, but I'm on a little mini-retirement, as it were, from whiskey.

• 44:19Tim Ferriss?

  I understand. I just recently took a month off of booze entirely for similar reasons. Do you have a favorite documentary or documentaries?

• 44:30Rolf Potts?

  What popped into my head is Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man.

• 44:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, boy.

• 44:35Rolf Potts?

  Have you seen this?

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  I've now, I've heard of this. This is the one with the, I think part of the reason I may have avoided it with a horrific epilogue, if I'm not mistaken. Is this the same movie?

• 44:51Rolf Potts?

  Um, the epilogue?

• 44:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let me rephrase that. Are people eaten by bears?

• 44:57Rolf Potts?

  Yes, yeah, it's about, it's about this guy, this eccentric fellow named Timothy Treadwell, who spends 13 summers, I believe it's 13 summers, in Alaska with grizzly bears, and the 13th summer, he's actually eaten by a grizzly bear. And it's something, this is not a spoiler, because you know that from the beginning of the movie. And one reason I like it is that it's such an interesting experiment in storytelling. And I use this as an example with my students about how you infuse narratives with mystery, with the idea that you're going to get certain information later on in the narrative. And Herzog gives us the answer to the mystery almost immediately, which is the what? What happens? Timothy Treadwell gets eaten by a bear. But then it's like, the how, it gets answered, but then it's the who.

• 45:41Rolf Potts?

  It turns into this, who the hell is this guy who would hang out for grizzlies for 13 summers? And I'm not saying, it's not my favorite, or it's not one of my favorite documentaries from the standpoint of like sort of life-changing model for how I want to live, or even how I want to make a documentary. But it's such a brilliant use of narrative. Werner Herzog is just so good. Literally yesterday, I was looking at like these spoofs of like Werner Herzog reading Curious George, which is just, it just killed me. It was so funny. If you've seen, if you've seen Grizzly Man with his sort of Germanic voiceover, and then you

• 46:20Rolf Potts?

  hear the spoof of him leading Curious George was a Curious Monkey. It's so uncanny. Anyway, that's sort of an aside, is that he's another one of these role models of someone who is so brilliant, he's sort of unreplicably brilliant in the way he uses narrative. And it's such a subtle and simple and brilliant way of telling the story of Timothy Treadwell, mostly through Tim Treadwell's own video, that it's just, it's just a fantastic documentary. And it doesn't really tie into lifestyle design, but as far as using it as a model

• 46:58Rolf Potts?

  for using found footage and existing resources for telling a really, really profound story about human nature and the people who sort of go against human nature and nature itself and the assumptions of nature, it's just fantastic. And yeah, a guy gets eaten by a bear, but it's less macabre than you might think.

• 47:22Tim Ferriss?

  This is a random one, but we mentioned adaptation earlier. If Nick Cage came to your house for dinner, what would you cook him?

• 47:30Rolf Potts?

  Oh, God. Well, I'd probably, I'd probably go to Aldi's and find some cheese bratwursts, just because that's sort of how I roll, you know. It would be the same if you showed up at my doorstep, or any number of friends or celebrities. That's an interesting guy. And this is another complete aside, but I'm a little bit obsessed with the movie Con Air.

• 47:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, that requires some elaboration. Okay.

• 47:57Rolf Potts?

  Because I saw it on a bus in Syria, and...

• 48:02Rolf Potts?

  That movie, like if you took every, if a computer took every action movie cliche and turned it into an algorithm and spit out a movie, it would be Con Air. You know, with a cast full of indie actors. I mean, Steve Buscemi is in that movie and John Malkovich is in that movie. But I watched it on a bus full of Syrians and they didn't have any of the snarky, self-aware, judgmental, hipper-than-now attitude towards it. And they cheered at the end. And then they cheered in the middle. And that became a part of my emotional experience of Syria, which, and this has been 14 years ago, which is this amazing place. And it's become this heartbreaking place because I know that the

• 48:45Rolf Potts?

  people I met there and who were so wonderful are living hard lives now. And so I want to write an essay about this at some point, about my emotional relationship to Con Air that is somehow tied into the experience of travel along with, like, the helplessness of seeing what's going on in Syria. And sorry for this to take a serious turn, but it's one of those limitations of travel, you know, for all of the beauty of humanity that I experienced in Syria, which was such a wonderful place years and years ago, that I have this dumb Nick Cage movie tied in to my emotional experience of the Syrian people. So.

• 49:22Tim Ferriss?

  You should absolutely write that. I think that'd be, I think that'd be a fascinating piece. Roger that. So cheese bratwurst.

• 49:33Rolf Potts?

  That's it. Come on over. Sign me up.

• 49:38Tim Ferriss?

  What is the most gifted or the few most gifted books in your life? Meaning, aside from the books that you've written, and of course, people who've followed me for a while know that I've given away hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of Agvoning, but.

• 49:55Rolf Potts?

  And thank you for that.

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, yeah, of course. I think it's, I view it as a must read, of course, you know that. Aside from your own books, what books have you gifted to other people the most?

• 50:08Rolf Potts?

  Well, you could probably guess Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

• 50:12Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 50:14Rolf Potts?

  And this is, this is especially a young adult to mid 30s gift. And this is gonna sound funny, but I, I probably gave it to every woman I dated for like six to 10 years, not because I was some sort of jaded pick-up artist, but because I felt it was so true to my own, you know, you know, joyous attitude towards how I wanted life to be and just sort of the openness, like this 19th century gay dude, you know, capturing these rolff, straight guy emotions towards, you know, the joy of life. And so I apologize if I sound jaded to my ex-girlfriends, but there's a point at which that I felt so connected

• 50:57Rolf Potts?

  to that book, you know, that I would give it to people I was falling in love with, you know? And so that continues to be a book that, especially for, for young people who are just sort of coming into wrestling with what's in store with them for life, Leaves of Grass is this, this great reminder that joy and, and openness to experience and inclusivity is something that is going to, is gonna be that catalyst that makes every, every experience more exciting.

• 51:29Tim Ferriss?

  Great, I love it. Any, any others? What have you been gifting to your, your girlfriends for the last while?

• 51:38Rolf Potts?

  Let me think. You know, I've, I have so many writer friends now that I, like, we, I have really good friends from my grad school program who are poets. And like, you're, you have a poetry bestseller if you sell 150 books of poetry, right?

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 51:56Rolf Potts?

  And so I've been buying a lot of poetry by my friends, or even just by poets I respect, simply because that one purchase and handoff is meaningful to them in a way that other people might not be. And this is something we haven't touched on, but poetry... Is useful for non-poets in the way that it uses language. You know, there's nothing more pure and distilled in the way that every single word operates in poetry. And so my friend Eli Burrell just came out with a book. I've been buying that for friends. My friend Heather Dobbin Combs had a book that came out with poetry. And I think poetry is a good, and hopefully my friends who are receiving these books are reading them.

• 52:36Rolf Potts?

  It's just a good reminder about how important language is and how much you can do on a single page with language. And so that would be, I guess, leaves the grass as poetry too. So somehow I'm this prose writer who's besotted with poetry for the last 20 years. That's a big thing, too.

• 52:55Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, I need to, I need to read more poetry. I've never been much of a consumer of poetry, partially, I think, because I dealt with a lot of holier-than-thou liberal arts majors at Princeton, who seemed to imply that if I understood, if I insisted on understanding the poetry, that it was above me, that I was lacking the intellect, or somehow if I couldn't appreciate what I considered to be nonsensical

• 53:28Rolf Potts?

  Right, yeah.

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  prose, that I just didn't get it. And that, I think, gave me a bit of an allergy to poetry that I should probably revisit. Besides Walt Whitman, any other poets that you would recommend to the intrepid reader of poetry?

• 53:47Rolf Potts?

  Well, actually, a guy who speaks most every summer in Paris is a guy named Stuart Deschell.

• 53:52Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell his last name?

• 53:54Rolf Potts?

  D I S S, D I S C H E L L. It's very dude-like poetry.

• 54:04Tim Ferriss?

  Is it like a country song about the pickup and the dog? Or what are we talking about?

• 54:07Rolf Potts?

  I mean, he's from Jersey. He's from Atlantic City.

• 54:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 54:11Rolf Potts?

  And it's not dude like in bro like poetry. But it's just like if, if you're a, you know, like a, a straight male who's encountered bigger questions in life, there's something very relatable about it.

• 54:21Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 54:22Rolf Potts?

  Penguin publishes him. Also a guy who was born in Kansas and who was sort of out there and his poetry is really infused with a lot of pop culture is, is Michael Robbins, who wrote a, a poetry book called Alien Versus Predator. That's just sort of a trip to read. In fact, yeah, um, it's a fun book to just read, buy and read out loud to your friends because there's so much, he's like using this, these strange, um, meters and rhymes with poems about Axl Rose, you know? You know, rhyming Axl Rose with something else. Really interesting guy, um, who's also published by Penguin. So those are a couple of dude poets that I think would be accessible or at least appealing to people who aren't usually vested in poetry.

• 55:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 55:03Rolf Potts?

  Billy Collins being another example. These are all men. Actually, there's a woman named Amy Natzukumatil.

• 55:10Rolf Potts?

  N-E-Z-H-U-K-U-M-A-T-I-T-I-L. Great woman. I've spoken with her at a, at a writing and environment conference and very accessible and beautiful poetry. One recommendation I might have people, for people who are interested in poetry, which I would imagine for you and my audience both is maybe not a huge priority of people who will read our books. Just get an, get an edition of Best American Poetry, any, any time in the last 20 years, and read through the poems and the ones that you don't like, forget about them. And the ones that are appealing, find other poems by those authors. And that's how I found some of, some of my favorite poets.

• 55:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's great advice. And I, I just wanted to raise also one other poet. And I've, and this is, this is one of the rare. Poets who broke through my probably unfounded bias against poetry. Naomi Shihab-Nye, S H I H A B N Y E, two words. Her father is a Palestinian refugee and just really enjoyed, have enjoyed her poetry and kept it quiet. This is so stupid, but it just goes to show how early bruising can affect how you behave as a supposedly mature adult.

• 56:29Rolf Potts?

  Right, right.

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  I enjoy her poetry because I understand it. It's beautifully written, but I get it. There's sort of a message being conveyed, or a point, or a description of something concrete. And I suppose I was based on the condescending lectures that I would get from people at Princeton who were probably very similar to the guy in the bar in Good Will Hunting who's reciting plagiarized classics. Just like imagine that, dickhead, and multiply it by a couple hundred people up. I guess I've never really talked about it, but Naomi

• 57:11Tim Ferriss?

  Shihab-Nye is a poet that I've come to really appreciate. So I need to read more poetry. I'm glad that you're sort of lighting a fire for that.

• 57:20Rolf Potts?

  And those poets are out there. Major Jackson is another guy that occurs to me, African-American guy from Philly, who actually taught at the MFA program. I didn't study poetry, but he was there, great guy. And for every completely abstract poem that's playing with language in a way that is almost meant to be pretentious, you have poetry that's very soulful and accessible and great. And people might bag, well, people deeply vested in poetry might bag on the accessible stuff, but there's a lot of it out there. And again, the best American series or other anthologies might be a good way to find it. Or even just going to Poetry Daily and ignoring the poems that seem completely inaccessible

• 58:01Rolf Potts?

  and following up on poems that seem to really be delivering something relatable. Donald Hall is another great one. He's pushing 90 now, but he's a wonderful, wonderful poet based up in New England.

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Rolf, I want people to continue exploring your thoughts. How can they, what is the best way for them to learn more about you, find you online, etc.?

• 58:27Rolf Potts?

  My author website is rolfpotts.com. That links to all aspects of my travel writing career and also my career as a journalist and an essayist. If they want to know more about Vagabonding, hey, they can buy the book. They can also go to vagabonding.net, which I should probably remind them, has resources that go in tandem with the Vagabonding audiobook that you published and are also more updated than the print book that came out 11 years ago. So vagabonding.net/resources will allow you to follow up on a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today, a lot of these websites like Boots and All. And then finally, anyone interested in my Paris course, which takes place in the month

• 59:07Rolf Potts?

  of July every summer, is pariswritingworkshop.com, which is also linked from my author website. The pariswritingworkshop.com will give you all the basics about that. And Twitter is @RolfPotts, so there's many ways to find me.

• 59:22Tim Ferriss?

  And that is Rolf with an F, for those people who might be wondering what the spelling is.

• 59:30Rolf Potts?

  With an O and an F.

• 59:31Tim Ferriss?

  With an O and an F and an R and a couple of Ts as well, yes. Rolf Potts. And for you folks who are interested in the book club, so I do have a book club, and Vagabonding was the very first book used to launch that book club. And you can hear a sample of the audiobook and check it out at audible.com/timsbooks. So you can get a scope on some of the books that have had a huge impact on my life. And I'll thank you once again, Rolf, because Vagabonding certainly hit me at a very important time in my life where I could have gone many different directions. And I feel like it steered me in a very positive direction. And if I hadn't read Vagabonding, quite frankly, I don't know if The Four Hour Workweek ever

• 1:00:16Tim Ferriss?

  would have been written. So thank you once again for having that impact on me and many, many thousands of other people as well.

• 1:00:25Rolf Potts?

  Well, I appreciate that, and I appreciate you championing the book, too, that it's really gotten to people who may not have found me otherwise. So it's a great synergy happening there.

• 1:00:35Tim Ferriss?

  For sure, and I will continue to champion it. So Raul, thank you so much for the time, and I would love to continue this sometime when you're available and not taking a sabbatical from electronics. And until next time, thanks so much for taking the time.

• 1:00:52Rolf Potts?

  All right, thanks for having me, Tim. Talk soon.

• 1:00:54Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, Raul. Bye.

• 1:00:55Rolf Potts?

  Bye.

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  and resources from this episode, as well as every other episode, by going to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Spell it all out. Or you can go to fourhourworkweek.com and just click on Podcast. Feedback? If you have feedback, I would love your thoughts, anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show. Ping me on Twitter, @tferriss. That's twitter.com/tferriss. Or on Facebook, at facebook.com/timferriss, with two R's and two S's. And until next time, thank you for listening.