#485: Jerry Seinfeld — A Comedy Legend’s Systems, Routines, and Methods for Success

Entertainment icon Jerry Seinfeld’s (@jerryseinfeld https://twitter.com/jerryseinfeld) comedy career took off after his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1981. Eight years later, he teamed up with fellow comedian Larry David to create what was to become the most successful comedy series in the history of television: Seinfeld https://www.sonypictures.com/tv/seinfeld. The show ran on NBC for nine seasons, winning numerous Emmy, Golden Globe, and People’s Choice awards, and was named the greatest television show of all time in 2009 by TV Guide and in 2012 was identified as the best sitcom ever in a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll. Seinfeld made his Netflix debut with the original stand-up special Jerry Before Seinfeld https://www.netflix.com/title/80163156 along with his Emmy-nominated and critically acclaimed web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee https://www.netflix.com/title/80171362, which has garnered over 100 million views, and which the New York Times describes as “impressively complex and artful” and Variety calls “a game-changer.” His latest stand-up special, 23 Hours to Kill https://www.netflix.com/title/80170847, was released by Netflix earlier this year. He is also the author of Is This Anything? https://www.amazon.com/This-Anything-Jerry-Seinfeld/dp/1982112697/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 which features his best work across five decades in comedy. Please enjoy! * This episode is also brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim! Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as ‘robo-advising,’ and they currently oversee $20 billion of assets for their clients. It takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite http://wealthfront.com/Tim and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. Smart investing should not feel like a rollercoaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/Tim and open a Wealthfront account today, and you’ll get your first $5,000 managed for free, for life http://wealthfront.com/Tim. Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim will automate your investments for the long term. Get started today at Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/Tim. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode was just a blast and part of me still doesn't believe that it happened. Of course, my job is to interview and deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, of all different stripes, from all different fields. And my guest for this episode is none other than the icon Jerry Seinfeld. So, who is Jerry Seinfeld? Entertainer icon Jerry Seinfeld's comedy career took off after his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1981. Eight years later, he teamed up with fellow comedian Larry David to create what was to become the most successful comedy series in the history of television.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  Seinfeld, a lot of you have heard of it. The show ran on NBC for nine seasons, winning numerous Emmy, Golden Globe, and People's Choice Awards, and was named the greatest television show of all time in 2009 by TV Guide, and in 2012 was identified as the best sitcom ever in a 60-minute Vanity Fair poll. Seinfeld made his Netflix debut with the original stand-up special Jerry Before Seinfeld, along with his Emmy-nominated and critically acclaimed web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which has garnered more than 100 million views, and which The New York Times describes as "impressively complex and artful," and Variety calls "a game changer." His latest stand-up special, 23 Hours to Kill, was released by Netflix earlier this year. He is also the author of Is This Anything?

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  Or, Is This Anything? It's a question with a question mark at the end, which is a brand-new book and features his best work across five decades in comedy. It is a collection of his notes, his journaling, and certainly his process. You can find him on Twitter @JerrySeinfeld, Instagram @JerrySeinfeld, Facebook @JerrySeinfeld. And if you have interest in creative process, gamifying life, mastering the mind, comedy, habits and systems of someone who can operate at the top of their field for decades, this conversation touches all of those things. Please enjoy a wide-ranging conversation with none other than Jerry Seinfeld.

• 2:15Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  No, I would assume an appropriate time.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 3:35Tim Ferriss?

  Jerry, welcome to the show.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Thanks, Tim. Great to be here.

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you making the time. And I thought we would start with the beginning of, is this anything? And in the, I suppose you could call it the introduction or the preface, another book pops up, which is The Last Laugh by Phil Berger. And I would love to just know how that book entered your life.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  How did I find that? I really don't know, but I still have it. I have the copy that I bought wherever I found it. I mean, I was in high school and I did the absolute minimum you could do to survive in high school. I never read anything outside of high school, except magazines, car magazines, comic books, and Esquire. I don't know, in those years, you know, early, early seventies, Esquire was really full of character and about encouraging male boldness and inventiveness in lifestyle

• 4:44Speaker 01

  and just life in general, you know, they were very sophisticated and it was everything I wanted to be. I wanted to be urban and I wanted to be smart and smarter than I was and I wanted to have like this cool adventurous life and they were very encouraging to that. I don't, I don't think there's anything like that around today. That was essential. And the same with that book, The Last Laugh. It was, it was just like whatever made men in centuries past become explorers, you know? I don't know how they became that. I guess, I, I remember reading about explorers' clubs like in 17th, 18th century London, you know?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  I have two sons and a daughter and that's, that's the thing I really wanted. If I could pass along, the two things I would want to pass along would be ethics and boldness in life. But that doesn't answer your question of where I got the book. I don't know.

• 5:48Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's okay, though. The genesis story is, is secondary. It's really the, the context that you're providing. And just as a quick side note, a friend of mine, Cal Fussman, used to write the What I've Learned interview series in Esquire back when it had that, back when, you know, when it had, and maybe still does on some level, that character that you're describing, that boldness. What was it inside The Last Laugh that grabbed you so much?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if I look back at my whole life, starting, you know, about like second or third grade, it was all this inexorable march towards this pursuit of the comedy arts. And there was nothing else about comedy. Albert Brooks did a album.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Who did an article in Esquire called "School for Comedians", and it was a parody. And I had no idea it was a parody. He grew up in LA and he was making fun of what comedians might need to learn to be comedians. And it was an early 70s Esquire article, and I had no idea it was a parody. I mean, I just, "Oh, there's a school." I just wanted to learn about this world. And the last laugh really took you deeply into the world. And it is a completely hermetically sealed world that is frankly unrelated to the rest of the entertainment industry.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And it's really unrelated to almost all other creative arts. It is a very sealed ecosystem, the world of comedy, particularly stand-up comedy. And I was desperately thirsty for any scrap of data about it.

• 7:41Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you have, much like an Olympic athlete of sorts, with training logs and workouts and so on. You have 45 years of hacking away, as it's put in the book's description, on yellow notepads. You've preserved all of this. And I'd love to speak, or to hear you speak more accurately, a bit about your writing process and the preparation that I did for this. I read in the New York Times, and I'm just gonna read this short bit. You can fact correct this if need be, but here's how it reads. "I still have a writing session every day. It's another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here, the pad goes here, the notes go here. My writing technique is just, you can't do anything else. You don't have to write, but you can't do anything else."

• 8:25Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to hear you elaborate on that, because it actually sounds very similar to what the fiction writer Neil Gaiman has as his first book of writing as well. But what does that look like for you? And what do your writing sessions tend to look like if we look back over the last, I don't know, 10 years? Because I'm sure it's changed over time.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  No, it hasn't changed. It hasn't. It changes the coffee, which I didn't know about coffee in my younger years. I think I discovered coffee after I had kids and I didn't have time. To have long meals with my friends anymore, but we could meet for coffee. And then I realized, boy, this coffee really gets you talking. And I thought, maybe I'll do a show where you just talk with coffee. And that's kind of where that came from, that comedians and cars show. But my writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful,

• 9:24Speaker 01

  pushing against the wind in, in soft, muddy ground with like a wheelbarrow full of bricks. And I had to do it because there's just, as I mentioned in the book, you either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. And I learned that really fast and really young. And that saved my life and made my career, that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy really young. And that principle is you learn to be a writer. It's really the profession of writing. That's, that's what standup comedy is.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  However, you do it, you, you, anybody, you can do it any way you want. But if you don't learn to do it in some form, you will not survive.

• 10:19Tim Ferriss?

  And when you sit down, is it an empty page? Is it bits and pieces that you've noted through the week as observations that you then flesh out? What, what is actually in front of you when you start?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  What's in front of me is usually about 15 or 20 pages of stuff that's in various states of development. And then there's a smaller book of just really, really random things like when you're on a cell phone call and the call drops and then you reconnect with the person. They'll go, I don't know what happened there.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  As if anyone is expecting them to know anything about the incredibly complex technology of a cellphone. They they offer this little, I don't know, is is an excuse or an apology. They go, I don't know what happened there. So anyway, so I don't know. So that that's an example of something in that my little, little tiny notebook, that I don't know what to do with that. But it's just so stupid to me and funny. So that to me is like a, it's like an archery target 50 yards away. And then I take out my bow and my arrow and I go, let me see if I can hit that. Let me see if I can create

• 11:42Speaker 01

  something that I could say to a room full of humans in a nightclub that will make them see what I see in that. There's something stupid and funny about that to me. That's the very, very beginning. So then I'll write something about it. It'll be, if I'm lucky, it'll be a half a page or a page on a yellow legal pad. And I'll write that. And then in the session the next day, if I get around to it, I will see it again. And I will see what I have and what I like and I don't like. And as any writer can tell you, it's 95%

• 12:24Speaker 01

  rewrite. So I have two phases. There is the free play creative phase. And then there is the polish and construction phase of, and I I love to spend inordinate, I mean, it's not wasteful to me because that's just what I like to do, amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear. And then it becomes something that I can't wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it. And then from the stage, the audience will then, I imagine, you know, it's a very

• 13:05Speaker 01

  scientific thing to me. It's like, okay, here's my experiment and you run the experiment and then the audience just dumps a bunch of data on you of this is good, this is okay, this is very good, this is terrible. And that goes into my brain from performing it on stage and then it's back through the rewrite process and then new ideas will come and it's, you know, it's just millions of different kinds of development. It's just that, so you're just trying to get your, you're just going to that place of creating, fixing, jettisoning. It's extremely occupying. It's never boring. It's the frustration I'm so

• 13:50Speaker 01

  used to at this point, I don't even notice it. And it's just work time. It's just work time, which, and that's my, I like the way athletes talk about, I gotta get my work in, that you get your work in. I like that phrase. One of the reasons I was looking forward to doing this show with you is I know that it's something you are very interested in.

• 14:15Tim Ferriss?

  The craft.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  The, yeah, the systemization of the brain and creative endeavor or, you know, I really think when I'm working, it's very much like when you're watching a pitcher working onstage than that we're going.

• 14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  So that's a different, so basically it's onstage and offstage. It's, it's the desk and then the stage and then back to the desk and then back to the stage and that's endless.

• 14:43Tim Ferriss?

  The process and the repeatable process, the experimentation, like you phrased it, is extremely interesting to me. And if we took or take that cellphone example, the dropping of reception, that's an observation. It seems to me that you are a real connoisseur of questions, whether those questions are being used as part of a bit or possibly as prompts. And you mentioned the coffee in part, leading to comedians in cars. In a Harvard Business Review interview, you also mentioned that it's important to know what you don't like. A big part of innovation is saying. You know what I'm really sick of? Question mark, right? And for you, that was talk shows where the music plays. Somebody walks out to a desk, shakes hands with the host, sits down.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:28Tim Ferriss?

  And what am I really sick of being a departure point for innovation? I would love to hear about any questions, if there are questions, that you use as prompts to help elicit observation or materials for yourself.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  No, no, that's, that part is somewhat having a very cranky nature and being a sensitive kind of, I don't know if it's percept, perception, but you're just provoked by a lot of things, you know?

• 16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  And that, if you're lucky enough to have that, the next thing you must do is nurture and protect it and never lose it. And the enemy of it is success. Success is the enemy of irritability and crankiness because now you have money and you can remove the difficulties from your life and that's not good.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  How do you contend with that? Because you've had, certainly you've, I would imagine, have had to do things to offset, in that case, the creature comforts and so on, that come along with the amount of success that you've had.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yes. The thing I did that really solved almost all of that issue is I got married.

• 16:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Please elaborate.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  That will, you'll never run out. If you get married and if you have kids, then, then, then you've got a gold mine.

• 17:05Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned just a few minutes ago about wordsmithing until you get everything pleasing to the ear and really obsessing over the, the prose. I've read that one of your explanations for the success of all of your television was that, quote, "The show was successful because I micromanaged it. Every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting." And then later on, if you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. There are a lot of questions I could ask about this, but I suppose one is if you are, for such a period of time, I understand the logic of it, but for such a long period of time obsessing over

• 17:47Tim Ferriss?

  the details like that, did you not find yourself at risk of burnout? Or just hitting a point of overwhelm? Or did that not happen to you?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Are we talking about the series now? Or just?

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we're talking about the series.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  The series, well, the series is a, you know, if you want to look at the comedy arts is the only thing that interests me creatively, I think, or the only thing I'm any good at. But if I look at the different comedy arts, if, you know, if I was to break it down, let's just say into like basics of standup comedy, a television series, or a movie. I would analogize those to different vessels on the water. So a TV series is like a pretty big boat that you can run with a couple of people. A movie is a yacht. There are so many people. It's a beautiful thing. There's a lot of money involved. Everybody wants it.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Everybody thinks it's the ultimate way to go across the water. And standup for me is a surfboard. It's just you, you paddle out and you try and catch the energy and you're all on your own. And you can do it and go home and nobody but you really even knows what happened. I think the more people you add to the vessel, the faster you're going to struggle to maintain its progress through the water. For sure, the TV series got to a point, we did it nine years, and the way I was doing

• 19:23Speaker 01

  it, that was as far as it could go before it was really going to stop cutting through the water in that beautiful way that it was doing. That's why I pulled out of it. Before I had to, before anyone wanted me to, because I didn't want to be on a boat that was starting to struggle. I didn't want to have that experience. And I, even more than that, I didn't want the audience to have that experience. I wanted to complete this gift to them in a way that they would always go, oh, I was given a lovely thing one time

• 20:04Speaker 01

  in the nineties and it was just lovely. I wanted them to have it like that. No excuses, no if only's, no, it did go on a bit, maybe longer than it should have. I didn't want to, I just wanted them to have this lovely gift. That's why I stopped the TV series. I could also describe the TV series to you as a weather event that has an energy that gathers and becomes cyclonic, but every storm blows itself out and that, that storm was about to run out of energy. And so was I. It's the same thing because I, I'm, I was

• 20:44Speaker 01

  at the center of the storm and I could feel the slowing of the cyclonic curve, the funnel.

• 20:51Tim Ferriss?

  Is that something that you had a role model for? Is that something you simply perceived? Because it's very rare for someone to step out like Rocky Marciano. Usually they go a bit too far, they get slapped around a bit, or they end up signing, you know, baseball mitts at Caesar's Palace or whatever it is. Did you have any model for that? Was that something you decided entirely on your own?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  The closest I had, and I would never compare myself in any way, shape or form, was The Beatles. The timeframe of The Beatles was nine years. They broke up for different reasons. We had no discord on my show, like they struggled with. But the portion size of The Beatles just felt so right to me. And I thought, and they were together about nine years and we were together about nine years. And there was something about adding that other digit to go to 10. You know, like if people said to me, how long did you do that series for? And if I said 10 years, I could just hear people go, wow, 10 years. It just, just the portion size just felt too big to me.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Is the, you mentioned, I guess, irritation as a wellspring of comedic material. Is it irritation or is it sensitivity in the connotation of a very sensitive scale where you're just perceiving more? Is it a dissatisfaction or a irritability or is there?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I think your five senses have been made a little too good and it's not quite comfortable. I have a friend, actually two friends, it's really weird and they're married. This is a really weird story. And they both suffered from this breakdown in their hearing. There's a bone in the hearing canal that's, I guess, it's like, I think it looks like a little wishbone or something, you know, there's all these little fine bones in there.

• 22:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this stirrup, all these tiny bones.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So both of them, the husband and the wife, first the wife and then the husband, like six months later. It's a very rare condition. So anyway, they both had to get this very delicate surgery on their inner ear and they replaced that bone with a piece of titanium that's made to do the same thing. And it's actually this fantastic cure for this problem. And so they both have these titanium ears now. And when they first got it, their hearing was like too good and it was a little uncomfortable for them.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  And I think now they've adjusted to it fine, but it reminded me of how I feel like my senses are. My eyes and my ears and my skin and I just feel everything just a little more than I think I would even like to.

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  And so that's, yeah, I think that's just kind of a genetic thing, but I don't know another comedian that isn't the same and just has this hair trigger reaction to anything that irritates them.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  And a lot of it is visual, I think. I think I mentioned that in my introduction, that I think jokes come from a kind of intense visual acuity.

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  You did.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that's part of where it comes from.

• 24:24Tim Ferriss?

  If we imagine, we, meaning lay audience, imagine comics in our minds' eyes, you have these sort of hypersensitive, cat-like creatures.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:36Tim Ferriss?

  Who might be very difficult to put into any type of group.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:40Tim Ferriss?

  But yet, you mentioned a lack of discord on the show, which I'm not a Hollywood wonk, but I have a little bit of mileage, and that seems to be not altogether common. To what would you attribute that lack of discord?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  I don't like discord. And I don't like it, and I am fearless in rooting it out and solving it. And if anyone's having a problem, I'm gonna walk right up to them and go, "Is there a problem? Let's talk about this." Because I cannot stand that kind of turmoil.

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  That approach to conflict resolution is very proactive. It's not like you're being passive aggressive. It's not like you're conflict avoidant. Is that something you got from your parents? Is that something that you just came out of the womb having? That direct addressing of discord or problems?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I don't know where I got that. I feel like if you break the human struggle down to one word, it's confront. And so I kind of approached everything that way. And just the act of the confront is like, you know, what do people always say? Admitting you have a problem, all that nonsense. I did read some pop psychology books. I was very much a searcher in my younger years. Yoga and Zen and a little Scientology, transcendental meditation, Buddhism. You know, I read a lot of stuff looking... I don't know what I was looking for.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  I think I was looking for a working philosophy, I think is what I was looking for in life to apply. And I kind of formed my own little, I don't know if religion is the right word, but I've definitely created my own belief or operating system. I think operating system would be the best term for what I've created because it's very pragmatic. It's not faith based in any way, but that's my, one of my biggest principles is confront.

• 26:48Tim Ferriss?

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• 27:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other examples that you could give from your operating system? Any other guiding rules or principles? Or anything that's stuck from that seeking period?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Well, my guiding rule is systemize. What's the problem? The problem is, like my daughter, my daughter is very creative. She's extremely bright. She's got an incredible head on her shoulders. And I see myself in her at that age. She's way further advanced than I was at that age. But she doesn't know, I said to her, she has a creative gift. Okay. So I say to her, when you have a creative gift, it's like someone just gave you a horse. Now you have to learn how to ride it. You've got to learn how to ride this horse. And I've seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  I've seen people that were given black stallions. And it usually kill, if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you're born and they just put you on it. And that's what happens. They just put you on it. And you either learn to ride this thing, or it's going to kill you. And we have many, many examples of that. So she's trying to write this thing. She's struggling. I can't write. I keep putting it off. So I explained to her my basic system, which you already talked about at the top of the show, which is if you're going to write, make yourself a writing session. What's the writing session? I'm going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don't just sit down with an open-ended, I'm going to work on this problem.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  That's a ridiculous torture to put on a human being's head. It's like you're going to hire a trainer to get in shape and he comes over and you go, how long is the session? And he goes, it's open-ended. Forget it. I'm not doing it.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  It's over right there. You've got to control what your brain can take. Okay, so if you're gonna exercise, God bless you, and that's the best thing in the world you can do, but you gotta know when's it gonna end? When's the workout over? It's gonna be an hour. Okay. Or you can't take that? Let's do 30 minutes. Okay, great. Now we're getting somewhere. I can do 30. I'm trying to teach my son, who knows how to do transcendental meditation, how to do it. I assume you know about that?

• 30:42Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I practiced this morning.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Because I can't do it 15 minutes. I go, okay, let's do 10. Let's do 10. Let's come up with something you can do. That's where you start everything. That's how you start to build a system. So my daughter, so I said to her, you have to have an end time to your writing session. If you're gonna sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you gotta get a reward for that. And the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You're done. If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is stop now, pencils down. So that's the beginning of a system

• 31:29Speaker 01

  that, to me, will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something, you know, I kinda wanted to teach in a way. Because I find it, I think it's so simple. I think exercise is pretty simple, too. And, but people don't, they don't come up with good, simple little systems. They just try and do it. And that's, to me, that's, you're gonna fail.

• 31:53Tim Ferriss?

  The simple doesn't mean easy, and the point you made is so important. The incentives, right? Having a reward, having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration? Or how long have you chosen?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  I told her, just do an hour. That's a lot. She says, I'm gonna write all day. No, you're not. Nobody writes all day.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Shakespeare can't write all day. It's torture.

• 32:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If you taught a class on writing, what other lessons might you have or resources or anything, exercises? Cause I'm imagining that your daughter could sit down, she says, all right, I have an hour. And then you ask her how her writing session went. She said, well, I didn't have any idea what to write. So you'd have, I don't know what age the students would be in your course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  You know, no one's really that great. You know who's great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It's a game of tonnage, you know? How many hours are you gonna work? Per week, per month, per year? You might even wanna chart that. Or with your exercise, if you wanna get in shape. I couldn't get in shape. I was like, I started as a jogger, you know, like in the seventies and I would run three miles a day. And then I got older and I got married late and I had young kids and I really had to get in shape. And I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called Body for Life.

• 33:28Tim Ferriss?

  Body for Life, yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  And it's really, really, so it's such a system for a primitive, you know, brain. I do it to this day. I think it's a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape. Because he broke it down to here's what we're gonna do in minute one, here's what you're gonna do to minute five, minute 12, and this is gonna end in the 45 minutes or whatever it is. And every minute, I know exactly what I'm doing.

• 33:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  And that like turned the key for me. And all of a sudden, I was getting in shape. I never had to ask, what am I doing now? Or what are we doing next? It was very, it's like, you gotta treat your brain like a dog you just got. You've gotta, it's stupid. The brain, the mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  You've got to confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it.

• 34:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  And it's done through repetition and systemization.

• 34:43Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about feedback in the experimental loop that you mentioned earlier, which was desk stage, desk stage, desk stage. One form of feedback would be audience feedback. And I'm curious what other forms of feedback you have.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  No, there is no other feedback that means anything.

• 35:02Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you, here's a, here's a little, a fine point of writing technique that I'll pass along to you writers out there. Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day, that day. You have to wait 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone about what you did. Because you never want to take away that wonderful, happy feeling that you did that very difficult thing that you tried to do, that you accomplished it. You wrote, you sat down and wrote. So if you say anything, it's like the same reason I don't

• 35:48Speaker 01

  ever heard the thing like you never tell people the name you're going to give the baby.

• 35:53Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Until it's born, because they're going to react. And the reaction is going to have a color. And if you've decided that that's going to be the baby's name, you don't want to know what anybody else thinks. So I will always wait 24 hours before I say anything to anyone about what I wrote. So you want to preserve that good feeling. Because if you, if, let's say you write something and you love it. And then later on that day, you're talking to someone and you thought, hey, what do you think of this idea? Blah, blah, blah. And they don't love it. Now that day feels like, ah, I guess, you know, that that was a wasted effort. So you always want to reward yourself. The key to writing, to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing

• 36:38Speaker 01

  and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in Officer and a Gentleman. And just be a harsh prick, ball busting, son of a bitch about that is just not good enough. That's got to come out, or it's got to be redone or thrown away. So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you're writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. It's just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard ass. And you switch back and forth.

• 37:23Tim Ferriss?

  When you would come off stage and feel like you had really nailed the set, you just killed.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:32Tim Ferriss?

  Would you ask for feedback from other comics who you might respect, who are there? Would you do something to celebrate instead?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Well, you just got feedback. You don't need to.

• 37:43Tim Ferriss?

  You don't need to ask the professionals.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  That's the paradise of standup comedy. You don't have to ask anyone anything. Standup comics receive a score on what they're doing more often and more critically than any other human on earth. You know, even a pitcher, he's not on the mound for an hour and 20 minutes straight, you know, having his pitches judged by the umpire. And by the way, some of those calls are opinions of the umpire that may or may not be true. Every opinion the audience gives you is 100% accurate.

• 38:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right. How they feel is fact.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Suffer that pain or have that advantage.

• 38:29Tim Ferriss?

  When you did well, much like after checking the box of doing an hour long writing session, would you reward yourself? Or was that not part of the? Process for you?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  I've rewarded myself constantly. I mean, but there's no greater reward than that state of mind that you're in. When that is working, if you can extricate yourself from your self, which is the goal in all sports and performance arts, if you get out of your mind and are able to just function, you know, your sense technique that you have, there is no greater reward. But you know, if you want to have an ice cream sundae, go ahead. It's gonna, it's gonna pale in comparison.

• 39:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Did you have a long-term plan? Let's just, if we go back to the, the early days, did you have any type of long-term career plan for yourself? Or was it really the ball in front of you and executing on that one next step? And then the career emerged from that approach or something else?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Are you asking me if I had a backup plan if stand-up didn't work out? Is that what you're?

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm asking you if you had a long-term career plan within the world of comedy.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I didn't even know if you could make a living as a stand-up comedian unless, you know, you were George Carlin. So I didn't, I didn't know anything about it. I didn't. And the, the truth was, there really wasn't, there really wasn't a, a world, like an infrastructure that, that exists today. We didn't know if there was any jobs out there, even if we were able to learn how to do it. We had no idea what we were doing. We, it was completely blind leap of faith out of the plane with the parachute, hoping there wasn't laundry in there.

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  What is the feeling? I mean, you mentioned it. I would love, as someone who is hypersensitive, for you to describe that feeling that would make an ice cream sundae superfluous, right? That feeling of getting that feedback. What is it in the body? What is it or in the mind? However, you want to answer that. What does it feel like to you?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  I, I sometimes will describe it as math and music, which is kind of the same thing. Music is so mathematical.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  As is stand up is extremely mathematical. So, you know, I mean, I certainly don't have to tell you of what that you're just looking for a state of mind. You're trying to maneuver yourself into a state of mind that you know is your highest function level. But there are many levels below that that are good enough to get the job done so that you can call yourself a professional. So that's all there is, you know, is it's musical. It's very rhythmic and musical. It is for me. I'm looking for the to get myself in a rhythm and then to get the audience in in a rhythm, very much like a conductor, I think, would feel. You know, a conductor has a piece of music. I have a piece of music in front of me.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And now I have to get the symphony to be doing it the way we know it can be. And then the audience comes along and supports that. And it's this absurd struggle. And I really think being a conductor or a surfer is the best analogy because the forces that you're attempting to corral are so much greater than you. The wave has so much more strength than you have. All you can hope to do is navigate it within it. That's the goal, to just get to that very brief, very transitory perception of mastery.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  It seems in this moment that I am completely mastering this audience, but it's only a moment. It's only a moment. I couldn't stay up there very long. Even an hour is not a long time. Totally. You know, it's not a long time. And it takes years and years and years of work and study and practice to be able to do that, to do the hour. The hour is really the standard in my business. A lot of people can do 20. Some can do 35. There are a lot of really good guys at 45. An hour, hour 15. I think, again, I might, I'll go to my favorite, which is baseball for analogies.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  It's the complete game. Can you finish the game? And that's, that's the hour 10, hour 20.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  That's nine innings of mastery.

• 43:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you need to have not just a lot of material, but a lot of practice and tonnage, as you put it, to perform at a high level for that period of time.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And manage their energy and yours. It has to ebb and flow.

• 43:28Tim Ferriss?

  And that's, just to piggyback on the analogy you used, a very much similar sports. And I've had a lot of athletes on the show and even some surfing legends like Laird Hamilton, they'll say they should call surfing paddling because that's what you're actually doing most of the time. What you get to show at the end of the day is the cover shot surfing the big wave, but that's really the output of a lot of tonnage.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I know you've been quoted as thinking of yourself more as a sportsman than an artist. And for a lot of athletes, routine is, is super key to managing energy and putting in the reps and producing good results. There's a quote from you in the New York Times, and the quote is, "I'm not OCD, but I love routine. I get less depressed with routine." Aside from the writing sessions, are there any other routines for you that are particularly important as scaffolding or automatic behaviors?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exercise, weight training, and transcendental meditation. I think I could solve just about anyone's life, and I don't care what you do, with weight training and transcendental meditation. I think your body needs that stress, that stressor, and I think it builds your, the resilience of the nervous system. And I think transcendental meditation is the absolutely ultimate work tool. I think the stress reduction is great, but it's more the energy recovery and the concentration fatigue solution, which is of course, you know, as a stand-up comic, I can tell you my entire life is concentration fatigue.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Whether it's writing or performing, my brain and my body, which is the same thing, are constantly hitting the wall. And if you have that in your hip pocket, you're Columbus with a compass.

• 45:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, chatting with Hugh Jackman on the podcast and he's also a devout seems like an odd word to use since it's it can be used quite secularly, but proponent of TM. How many times, what does your weekly schedule look like for weight training? When do you do it? And do you do TM twice a day? Or do you?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  I do it at least twice a day, but I will do it anytime I feel like I'm dipping.

• 45:51Tim Ferriss?

  Energetically.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And yeah, if I sit down and the pen doesn't move for like 20 minutes, I know I'm out of gas. Why isn't the pen moving? My weight training routine is three times a week for an hour a session, but I'm into that. I've been into that, you know, I mentioned the Bill Phillips Body for Life program, the HIIT training. So it's three times a week of weights and three times a week, the interval cardio training. There are a lot of days where I want to cry instead of do it because it really, it really physically hurts. But I just think it's balancing, it's very balancing to the forces inside humanity that

• 46:36Speaker 01

  I think are just, they overwhelm us. We are overwhelmed by our own power and you gotta put that ox in the plow. Make it do the stuff that it doesn't want to do. It just keeps it, what the hell do oxes do in the wild? I can't imagine they were happy.

• 46:56Tim Ferriss?

  Checking Twitter, just developing neuroses.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, put it in the harness, keep, I mean, I don't know. A lot of my life is I don't like getting depressed. I get depressed a lot. I hate the feeling and these routines, the, these very difficult routines, whether it's exercise or writing, and both of them are things where it's like, it's brutal. That's another thing I was explaining to my daughter. She's frustrated that writing is so difficult because no one told her that it's the most difficult thing in the world. It's the most difficult thing in the world is to write. People tell you to write like you can do it, like you're supposed to be able to do it. Nobody can do it.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  It's impossible. The greatest people in the world can't do it. So if you're gonna do it, you should first be told what you are attempting to do is incredibly difficult. One of the most difficult things there is. Way harder than weight training. Way harder. What you're summoning, trying to summon within your brain and your spirit to create something onto a blank page. So that's another part of my systemization technique. Learn how to encourage yourself. That's why you don't tell someone what you wrote. Be proud of yourself. Encourage, you know, treat yourself well for having done that horrible, horribly impossible thing.

• 48:28Tim Ferriss?

  I would have to imagine, and maybe this is just a projection, because I, I hope that when I have kids, which I don't have yet, that this will be true for me, but that being kind to your creative self and offering positive reinforcement for yourself through the process would affect how you parent, I would have to imagine.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost the Lou Gossett side of parenting.

• 48:57Tim Ferriss?

  Pesky Child Protective Services. What do they know?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  But yeah, it is similar. You want to be very encouraging, but you also want to explain there are laws in life that you need to know about, or it's gonna hurt. I think one of the better lines I've come up with over my life is that pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void with great speed.

• 49:26Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say that one more time, please?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void. You don't know that that post of your bed was not where you thought it was, but when your foot hits it, that knowledge is gonna come rushing in really fast.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  It's gonna really hurt when your foot hits that post because that was a piece of knowledge that you didn't have that you're gonna get, you're about to get.

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  You were talking about Black Stallion and learning to ride Black Stallion lest you be broken yourself by your superpowers slash potential murderers. I've struggled with depression for decades and have found some respite in the last five or six years for a whole host of reasons. But aside from the writing and weight training, is there anything else that has contributed to your ability to either stave off or mitigate depressive episodes or manage?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  No, I still get them, still get them. The best thing I ever heard about it was that it's part of a kit that comes with a creative aspect to the brain, that a tendency to depression seems to always accompany that. And I read that like 20 years ago and that really made me happy. So I realized, well, I wouldn't have all this other good stuff without that that's just comes in the kit, that you have a tendency to depression. But I think it's fair to say that I don't know a human that doesn't have the tendency. I'm sure it varies.

• 51:00Tim Ferriss?

  I have a number of friends who are in comedy and a lot of them are afraid of getting any type of treatment or taking antidepressants because they worry that it would rob them of their comedic insight. I don't know if that's something you've run into yourself or is it more that you accept it as a natural byproduct or companion to the sensitivity?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  I would agree with a chemical intervention into stabilize your mood. I would be nervous about that also. And besides which, as you know, as we all know, there are many other better remedies that, you know, basically a pair of running shoes is probably better than any of the drugs they have on the market, depending on the severity, of course.

• 51:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or at least make sure that you're adding those elements into your life since I think we all know people who take antidepressants and are still depressed. So it's worthwhile to kind of tick off the bigger boxes.

• 52:04Tim Ferriss?

  Behavior, at least.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  I don't think depression is really a creative source. I think irritability and crankiness is.

• 52:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  But not depression. Depression is just an annoying thing we have to deal with.

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  You gave me a quote. I'll ask you one more question and then we can.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  We can go a little more. I'm enjoying this so much. Let's go.

• 52:23Tim Ferriss?

  All right, let's do it. So I'd love to ask about, following up on depression. I'd love to ask about failure, just to keep this bright and shiny. Can you think of how a particular failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? In other words, do you have a favorite failure of any type? Something that seemed catastrophic at the time that in fact, set you up for great things later?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I have a couple really good ones. And this is another thing I try and teach the kids, you know, when something horrible happens. And I think of all the things I would trade. If you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures. Those are the most valuable ones. When I moved to LA, I was only doing comedy four years, but I had built up a pretty good reputation in New York. And New York was really in those days, still very much the minors to LA, which was the majors. And so I went out to LA and people talked that I was coming and that I was,

• 53:34Speaker 01

  you know, one of the hot guys coming out of New York. And I was only doing it four years. I was, you know, 25 years old. I mean, I really still just starting. And the Comedy Store was the club in LA that you had to break into. That was the club. And the guys that worked there and the women were killers. I mean, these people made the room just shake with laughter. It was very intimidating to go on there. And I went on there and I did very well. You know, in those days you would, you would call and they would give you spots if you were good. And I would never get spots. I would get like one spot a week and, you know, one spot a week is like one push up a week. It's like, forget it.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Well, don't even bother. And so I asked to meet with Mitzi Shore, who's the owner of the club and person who ran the whole thing there. And she said to me, she said, I'm the kind of person that needs to get stepped on. And that's what you need. You need someone to step on you and I'm going to be that person. And she said, if you called and said, if I had four spots available and you called in, I would give all four spots to this other guy. She mentions this other guy. And I sat there in her office and I nodded. I nodded and I said, well, I won't mention the name of the guy she said she was going to give the four spots to.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  I said, well, if maybe he can't do all four, I'd be happy to take any of the ones he can't do. And I walked out of there and I never worked at the Comedy Store again. And saying you're not working at the Comedy Store in LA, it's like saying, I want to be a baseball player, but not the majors, not the majors of the United States. I'm going to apply my trade someplace else.

• 55:29Tim Ferriss?

  Lithuania.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so from there, I, I went from, I hope it doesn't sound immodest, from being absolutely at the top of the heap in New York City to playing at discos in the basement in LA, you know, to like eight people. But my resentment and hostility to her, I was a guy who I would say I was a, a three day a week guy in terms of my writing discipline in those days. And I went from three days a week to seven, right there. And I was like, okay, we're not, this is, this is, I was angry. I was angry. I was frustrated.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  I was resentful, but I used that. It was just fuel for me. She wasn't stopping me. Nobody was going to stop me. But when someone is that hostile to you, that can be a very good thing.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  If you're tough, if you're tough enough to eat that shit and say, I'm, I'm, she's not stopping me.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great story. I, it makes me think one of my friends, Alexis Ohanian, co-founded Reddit. And at one point early on, they were super excited about, of course, their company, their baby. They'd put all of their waking hours into it and they met with some Yahoo executive who was basically just fishing for inside information. And at some point in the meeting, this exec said, oh, there's your traffic. Oh, that's a rounding error for us. And so Alexis and his guys took a huge, they made a poster that said, you are a rounding error and put it on the wall in their office.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:13Tim Ferriss?

  It worked. It worked. So what then transpired after you went from three days a week to seven days a week? When did you get a glimmer of hope or vindication?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  The Tonight Show saw me and every comedian in the world wanted to get on The Tonight Show in the seventies and eighties. It was the only way out of the clubs to real gigs was to be on The Tonight Show. The clubs was, you're working for free.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Free, zero. You know, that's not really the object. The object is to get paid. The object is to be a professional. So, and you're, when you're on The Tonight Show, you're going from the service road to lane one.

• 58:07Tim Ferriss?

  No more, no more Applebee's. Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  In five minutes. And I, and I told that story in the book too, what that felt like. You know, my favorite sporting thing, I mean, I'm a baseball maniac, but the 100 meters in the Olympics is a, is a thing I love. I love the 100 meters. And that's what happened when you did The Tonight Show in those days. You, I, when I see Lindsey Vonn at the top of a mountain, or I see those guys kicking their legs when they're in the blocks, you know, I know what that feels like.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  And I'm very grateful that I know that. You know, if you're an adrenaline junkie, which I am, there's no good comedian that isn't. That's a big treat in life to know how that feels. That I'm gonna change my whole life in the next three minutes.

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  How many times did you rehearse that three minute segment of material? I mean, I would imagine you must have done it a thousand times before you.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Thousand.

• 59:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Thousand times.

• 59:14Tim Ferriss?

  Did you ever have another conversation with Mitzi Shore? Or did any, did you ever convey any message to her or have any communication?

• 59:23Speaker 01

  I did. When I got my TV series in the nineties, I moved up to this fantastic house in the Hollywood Hills that overlooked all of LA. Every day I would drive down the hill to go to the studio to work on the show. I would see Mitzi taking her walk on a nearby street that we happened to have in common. And I would always give her a nice look.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  I wouldn't wave or honk, but our eyes met.

• 59:56Tim Ferriss?

  Newman.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Mitya.

• 59:57Tim Ferriss?

  Newman.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Mitya.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  And you know what? Maybe she was right. Maybe I did need someone to step on me.

• 1:00:05Tim Ferriss?

  Why did she respond that way? That just seems so aggressive. Did you do anything?

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Because I would never be the broken, the type of broken winged bird that she wanted to have in her little chicken coop of dysfunction that was the comedy store in those days. I was not built like that. All I really wanted to be a stand up comic is because I wanted to say to myself and to the world, I don't need you. I can do this myself. And the comedy store was filled with people that needed her. The comedy world in those days was a druggie. You know, it's a very dysfunctional world, the comedy world, because you're taking these people that, that, that can't fit in, they can't, you know, they have this one skill.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  And then you put them in a situation where they can get anything they want. So whatever dysfunctional, chemical, sexual, you're lazy, you're broken, you're messed up, you know, now you got, you have no structure around you to fix it.

• 1:01:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? You're, you're out in the world. You're completely on your own.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  It's designed to break human beings, stand-up comedy. It's a perfect way to break a person psychologically.

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I've only been to the Comedy Store once. I was brought there by a friend and I went into one of the back rooms. I'm sure you would know the name of this room, but they listed off a whole lot of old names. I want to say Sam Kinison and a bunch of others. And they said, this is where they used, this was the green room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there was this huge table with a mirror top with thousands of scratches on it and not from fingernails, right? And you just think, my God, if you don't have rails to stay on, I mean, pun intended, I guess. The environment is just designed to destroy and.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Yes, but that's part of the fun also.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  The moguls.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Of this, if you, it's like you're a fish in the Hudson. It's, it's, it's a toxic environment.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  It's just, the attrition is brutal. You never have to say, I don't get why people like this comedian. Don't worry. Don't worry. You don't have to comment on it. The, the environment itself will correct, it is a self-correcting ecosystem of pure toxic water.

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  The self-sufficiency or desire for self-sufficiency that you gave voice to, the proving to others that you don't need, that you can do it on your own, seems to be a very sharp contrast to a lot of entertainers I know, including comics, who seem to have a lot of codependency, right? Like they need the audience to validate, like they need life support if they had respiratory collapse. And was that perspective and that character or constitution rare?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  I have to say, the constitution is, is, is kind of rare, but I also have to say, I don't know anyone who made it over a long period of time that didn't have it.

• 1:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  And that's another thing that kind of led me to, that leads me to the weight training aspect. I think it builds your constitution.

• 1:03:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. The weight training, you know, and I just want to give credit where credit is due with Bill Phillips. I read that book a long time ago. This is before my second book, which was on physical performance. And I was really impressed because it is, to me, first and foremost, a book about behavioral modification and behavioral psychology. And it really nails those elements really, really well. And, you know, if I think back across the hundreds of interviews on this podcast, whether it's Bob Iger in the world of business and heading Disney, or an athlete, or otherwise, if you look at the people who have really performed at a high level for decades,

• 1:04:15Tim Ferriss?

  weight training seems to be one of the constants, or one of the near constants.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you're deteriorating. You're just trying to bend that curve a little bit. You know, I'm 66. I shouldn't be performing at this level at 66. I should be over. So you have to cheat the biology.

• 1:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. 66. I never, I mean, I suppose I could have tried to do the math. I never would have guessed. Do you just wake up some days and find that number to be unbelievable to you? Or is it a foregone conclusion, I guess, because you're in your own body and go year by year?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I find it funny and I find it very, it really makes the game fun. Cause I know this should not be happening. I am getting away with murder. So I love, it really makes it, that's another thing I believe, we talked about systemizing. Gamifying is another thing I'm very big on. Let's make this into a game. You know, whatever the problem is, let's make it a game. To me, it's a fun game. I honestly, you know, I wouldn't say this around my family, but I don't care if I drop dead tomorrow. It's like, I just wanted to, I still feel like I played the game well, you know?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  That's all I want to feel. I just want to feel like I played the game well.

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of gamifying? I mean, I've read, of course, the about the, you know, Seinfeld's productivity secret, marking the crosses on the calendar, which I guess some people

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's not really a game.

• 1:05:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  That's more based that I think stats are good. If you want to improve anything, my trainer, Adam Wright, and I always like to play this game. Well, this was the maximum amount of weight you did three months ago for this many seconds or whatever. And then it's like, that's, so it's a game now. Let's see if I can keep the reps going for 30 seconds. Last time was 25. So it's a little game. It's just, again, this is goes back to my, the human brain is a schnauzer. It's just a stupid little contraption that you can easily trick. As soon as you tell me I did it 25 seconds last time. Okay, let's see if I can do 30.

• 1:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  That's not wisdom. That's not intelligence. It's a stupid little machine. It's gonna do that every single time. Every time you tell someone your last best was 25 seconds, you're gonna try for 30.

• 1:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thinking back to the, what ox do when they're not in a yoke, and how disquieted they would be if they were checking Twitter all day.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, oxen in the wild.

• 1:06:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. In the world of dog training, I know a couple of really high level dog trainers, and one of the expressions you hear, it's kind of this mantra, like you'd find in the military or something, which is a tired dog is a happy dog. And just ensuring that your dog is properly exerted, right? And I

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Uh huh, yes.

• 1:07:10Tim Ferriss?

  Think there's a lot to that as a human also.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Tim Ferriss?

  So if, if you're looking at gamification in the, let's just say, the fitness realm, are there other ways that you've applied that to your creative or professional work? I guess you have these logs. So in a way, I mean, you have.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't believe, I don't score myself creatively. I don't believe in that. This kind of gets into my thoughts on material. I don't know if this will illuminate this for you, but one time. I love to go onstage at Gotham and hearing about the vaccine today got me very excited that maybe I'll be going back there soon on the 23rd Street in the city. And that's why I like to play with material. So I always, I'll go there and I'll, and I'll go onstage, I'll do 20 or 30 minutes of just working on material. And then I like to take questions from the audience, you know, and I'm, when I perform

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  for gigs, the audiences are too big to really take questions. It's too difficult, but in a room of a couple hundred people, you can take questions. So one night, this guy says to me, um, he says, "When you go back to the same city twice, do you ever worry that they're gonna see the same show you did last time? Or how do you know what you did? And how do you know when it's time to take a piece of material out of your act that you've been doing it too long? And it needs to be retired and you should do something else?" And, you know, and these are kind of reasonable questions from a regular person. And I said, "So these pieces I was doing tonight," I said, "Do you think that you could

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  think of things similar to this?" And the guy says, "Oh, God, no, not in a million years." And I went, "Yeah, that's what I was thinking." So what the, the, the point of that story is, if I'm going onstage and I'm doing these bits, however long it took me to figure this stupid bit out, you know, and however many years I've been doing it, which I don't even know, just be glad I'm doing that, you know? It's, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. So this goes to my nurturing side of the equation. If you're getting onstage and standing in front of a group of strangers and trying to

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  make them laugh, God bless you. I don't give a shit what you do. I don't care if it's old stuff, new stuff. I don't care if you're dirty, if you're clean. If you're gonna stand up there by yourself and try and make me laugh, I love you. And I'm not gonna criticize anything you do beyond that. I'm not gonna criticize it. And you shouldn't criticize yourself either. So in other words, there's no, to go back to, do I gamify it? No. It's always I win. If I got up there and tried to do it, I win. Even if I didn't reach what I'm trying to reach. Even if I, to me, it's like a four out of 10 show, I still pat myself on the back for it.

• 1:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Still a win. Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Still a win.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  When you hear the word successful, who comes to mind for you and why? Could be parents, could be outside of parents, could be anybody. But for you, when you hear that word, is there anyone who is really a sort of paragon of what you would consider success or someone you have looked up to as someone who is successful?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Well, that's a pretty broad.

• 1:10:46Tim Ferriss?

  Hyper, hyper broad. It comes down to kind of how you define it also.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  You know, I, I think, I don't know if I mean it as a joke, but I, I say a lot these days, survival is the new success.

• 1:11:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  And I'm a big, uh, look, Tim, what do you want me to tell you? In my business, if you're 60 plus, or I'll even, if you're 55 and you're getting paid to work, paid well, you have crushed it.

• 1:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  So stand-up comedy, you know, this, I would, I would move this piece of our conversation next to the toxic ecosystem of, of this world.

• 1:11:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  When you have seen the attrition that I have seen,

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  it's like in the heart of the sea. You know that book?

• 1:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Ron Howard made the movie, when, when they're dropping like flies and, and the, the handful, the small handful. Somebody asked me the other day, how many people who, whose careers were made on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson are still working? I didn't want to answer the question. So longevity is what I, cause, cause you had it. You know what I mean? You had it. You had, you, you had it. So, once you have it, you can only lose it.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  You know, you can only fail to take care of it. And that's when we get to health and work ethic and managing yourself so that you don't break. Because they're trying to break you. I always tease my friend Jimmy Fallon that this is like a sick experiment, these talk show gigs.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Let's, let's take a human being, put him in a studio for decades. Doing an hour of television a day and let's see what breaks.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  It's, it's sick. It's a sick human experiment. Like it's like a Pope job. Who, it's like they just do it till you're dead.

• 1:13:06Tim Ferriss?

  The forever Skinner box.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's brutal, brutal.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Now, I mean, there's a fantastic book about standup that I read during the virus called Seriously Funny. And the guy, he writes only about comedians of the 50s and 60s. And the introduction of that book, which is like 20 pages long. And he goes through Woody and Lenny and Joan Rivers and all these great people. And how it broke one after the other. One after the other was broken by it, that they either were worn out or their brains cracked or their psychology cracked. Or, you know, it just took them apart. It's a very, very difficult profession to sustain in.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  So just to survive to me is the game. That's my concept of success. Did you beat them at their game? They're, they're, they're just, they designed this thing to kill you.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  The travel. You realize what it takes to travel, to go to the airport? You know, in your 50s, in your 60s, to fly on planes, to go to strange cities, to go to hotels, to put on a suit, to go out on stage at eight o'clock at night and run around and yell, you know, and project your physical energy for an hour in front of thousands of people. They're trying to kill you.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  So I have made it into a game like it's it's like Mitzi. I'm gonna step on you. And I went, no, no, I'm gonna step on you.

• 1:14:48Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  That's the game we're playing. That's life. Life is they're trying to kill you. You get this free ride till you're, let's be generous, forty three. And then God goes, you know what? I'm gonna move on to the people in their sixteen to twenty three, and I'm gonna give them my best. If you wanna hang around, you can hang around, but I'm not giving you anything anymore. It's on you now. If you wanna stick around, but I got nothing for you.

• 1:15:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  You you you figure it out.

• 1:15:20Tim Ferriss?

  So this this caught my attention because I'm exactly forty three.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Oh, perfect.

• 1:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  So perfect.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Oh, we gotta end on.

• 1:15:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. So.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna I'm not gonna ask you to leave, but I I I got nothing for you.

• 1:15:37Tim Ferriss?

  Seriously funny.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  I'm gonna start giving these fifteen year old girls amazing stuff. And the boys, I'm gonna give them crazy buys. That that's my focus. My focus is fifteen year olds, turning them into superhumans. You, I'm with you.

• 1:15:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm the eight foot sturgeon in the Hudson, barely.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  Limping along.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. No one's gonna ask you to leave, but we're not giving you anything. No food.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  No help. There was no help.

• 1:16:11Tim Ferriss?

  Survival is the new success. I'll. If if you have time for one or two questions, then we'll we'll I can bring this to a close. I need to go do some interval training, eat some lentils. This is a question that sometimes hits a dead end, and I'll take the blame for that if it does. You've already given a bunch of possible answers to this, but if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, that could get a message, a quote, an image, question, anything, out to billions of people, what might you put on that billboard?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Back in the eighties, I had a friend who was teaching a comedy course at the improv on Melrose in LA. And he asked me if I would come in and talk to the class. And I said, sure. I went in and there was like, I don't know, maybe twenty people in the class in the it was in the afternoon. And I went up on stage and I said, the fact that you have even signed up for this class is a very bad sign for what you're trying to do. The fact that you think anyone can help you, or there's anything that you need to learn, you have gone off on a bad track.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Because nobody knows anything about any of this. And if you want to do it, what I really should do is I should have a giant flag behind me that I would pull a string and it would roll down and on it, the flag would just say two words, just work.

• 1:17:47Tim Ferriss?

  Just work.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Just work.

• 1:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I love it. Well, that is, I think, an excellent place to wrap up. Jerry, people can find you on all the socials, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, at Jerry Seinfeld. The new book is, Is This Anything?, which features your best work across five decades. That's nuts in comedy and it's a fascinating book and a hell of a ride. I highly recommend people check it out. For anyone who's a student of creative process, doesn't have to be comedy, but craft, whatever that craft happens to be, I think you're a real exemplar of just doing the work, but doing it is also a systematic way, which is a particular species of working that I think makes a beautiful case study. And this has been so much fun for me.

• 1:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you taking the time, Jerry.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Thanks. It was, I love talking with you, Tim, and your podcast is the best.

• 1:18:42Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, thanks so much. It really makes my day to have the chance to have a conversation with you. I've had the bass riff from Seinfeld going through my head all day in prep for this. And it's a real gift that you're showcasing and sharing your notes with the world over such a period of time. I mean, it is, I think, something that will really provide, like you said, just work, but nonetheless will provide so much, so much help to and inspiration to people who are just setting out, unlike the 43-year-old eight-foot sturgeons, those 15-year-olds and...

• 1:19:23Tim Ferriss?

  15 to 20 year olds. And I will let you get back to your day, but this has been great. And please do let me know if I can help in any way or with anything else.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been a great pleasure, Tim. Great pleasure. And thank you for the kind words. It's much appreciated.

• 1:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And to everybody listening, we'll have links to everything, including is this anything in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.

• 1:19:55Tim 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,

• 1:20:35Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. 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 Rockform. That's without a C, R-O-K-F-O-R-M. Rockform is the active lifestyle iPhone and Galaxy protective case company. I've been using their stuff for a few months now. And good God, they can survive anything. First off, Rockform protection is beyond great. You can find thousands of five star reviews and customer

• 1:21:18Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:22:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:22:40Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:23:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:24:15Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:25:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:25:42Tim Ferriss?

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