#745: Rick Rubin and Mary Karr

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #76 "Rick Rubin on Cultivating World-Class Artists (Jay Z, Johnny Cash, etc.), Losing 100+ Pounds, and Breaking Down the Complex https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/" and episode #479 "Mary Karr — The Master of Memoir on Creative Process and Finding Gifts in the Suffering https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/." Please enjoy! Sponsors: AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra) LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 1B+ users: https://linkedin.com/tim (post your job for free) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [05:11] Notes about this supercombo format. [06:15] Enter Rick Rubin. [07:58] How Rick lost over 135 pounds in his late 30s. [16:03] How artists can hurdle the obstacles that hinder their best work. [19:31] Where to find world-class contemporary music. [20:24] Approaching music production with a fan’s-eye view. [22:53] Recommended reading. [24:22] Helping artists break their creative blocks. [26:54] Rick’s advice for his younger selves. [29:06] Why practicing self-kindness isn’t just nice — it’s a necessity. [32:01] Enter Mary Karr. [32:25] Growing up in “The Ringworm Belt.” [34:44] The catalyst for Mary expressing herself and publishing to the world. [37:47] The role reading played for young Mary. [40:31] The feeling that inspired Mary’s desire to become a poet at a young age. [44:27] “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” [45:17] How Mary, a high school dropout, got into college and became an A student. [49:13] Mary’s struggle with bringing darkness with her even after leaving her traumatic past. [53:23] The highly selective process for getting into Mary’s graduate seminar at Syracuse University. [54:33] The first day of Mary’s class and what it illustrates about processing memoir-building memories. [1:00:20] The value of a commonplace book and helping others find alternative perspectives. [1:04:19] The importance and utility of prayer in Mary’s life and sobriety. [1:17:09] The significance of Ignatian exercises in Mary’s Catholic faith and gratitude practice. [1:23:10] Obligatory Texas talk about weaponry and hunting. [1:26:41] The origins of Mary’s unique wordsmithing. [1:34:24] Mary’s process of rough drafts, revision, and using past memories for storytelling. [1:42:34] How Mary copes with the pain of dredging up memories through writing. [1:46:09] Why Mary feels the happiest at 65 and her advice to her younger self about therapy. [1:49:26] The most and least effective types of therapy for Mary. [1:53:25] Mary’s solution to fear and getting through uncomfortable times. [1:58:14] Recognizing the gifts from suffering through difficult times in retrospect. [2:06:28] Mary’s billboard. [2:07:35] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/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/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And 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.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe.

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the market. Label does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. 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. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep.

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  I have been using Eight Sleep Pod Cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod, and I'm excited to test it out, Pod4Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod4Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

  Pod4Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore-heavy nights, the Pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus, with the Pod4Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod4Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night's sleep. Head to eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM to get $350 off of the Pod4Ultra.

• 4:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's Eight Sleep, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim and code TIM, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod4Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

• 4:32Speaker 01

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

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Now we're seeing an appropriate time.

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on, that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th-year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to,

• 5:39Tim Ferriss?

  yes, enjoy the household names, the super-famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  First up, Rick Rubin, nine-time Grammy-winning producer, one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, number-one New York Times bestselling author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and host of the Tetragrammaton Podcast. You can find Rick at tetragrammaton.com.

• 6:39Tim Ferriss?

  Where are we right now?

• 6:40Rick Rubin?

  We are sitting in the sauna.

• 6:42Tim Ferriss?

  We are sitting in a very hot barrel sauna and I was told that was one of the conditions for having this conversation. And it's such an impressive barrel sauna, it's indoors, that I wanted to get the specs for it when I first saw it. And you have a heater that has to be, what, four times the size of the off the shelf heater that would go into such a heater?

• 7:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's a much bigger heater than for the size of the room.

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sitting on the floor because I have such little confidence in my ability to withstand heat compared to you. But we do have the alternate, which is the bath just outside of this door. And you and I have gone back and forth, of course, quite a few times with this type of cycling. But what is right outside of this door?

• 7:24Rick Rubin?

  A metal tub filled with ice.

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  It is a metal tub about four feet, three and a half feet off the ground, full of ice. Looks like, if you were to say, what, a horse trough times two, something like that.

• 7:36Rick Rubin?

  Something like that.

• 7:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's gotta be maximum low 50s, something like that.

• 7:42Rick Rubin?

  I think it's about, today it's probably about 38 degrees.

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God. All right. So we have two mics on the floor. I'm hoping won't explode or melt down. We have the H4 and the H6. And we have water, ice, heat. Nothing could go wrong. I'm looking forward to it. So Rick, I was hoping perhaps we could start with a discussion of your physical transformation. And I'd love for you to perhaps just describe to people in your, in my mind, the picture of fitness in a lot of ways now. And we've been paddle boarding before and you summarily whoop my ass every time we go out. I'm always impressed. There are a lot of things contributing to my, my lack of competency and fear there. But where were you and how did you end up undergoing this physical transformation? Because you've lost how much weight at this point? How much fat are you saying?

• 8:30Rick Rubin?

  I lost, at the peak moment, I lost between 135 and 140 pounds. And I always thought I was eating a healthy diet.

• 8:41Rick Rubin?

  I was vegan for twenty something years, all organic vegan, really, you know, very strict with what I ate. And doing that, I got up to three hundred and eighteen pounds. And I read a book by a guy named Stu Mittelman, who ran a thousand miles in eleven days. And I remember reading that and just thinking, wow, it's like I can barely walk down the block. This guy ran a thousand miles in eleven days, and it just seemed so inspiring. So I read his book, and in the book, he talked about a guy named Phil Maffetone, who I'd never heard of before. And he said, in Stu's book, he gets to the part where he said, well, I met this doctor, Phil Maffetone, and he changed the way I trained, and he changed the way I ate,

• 9:23Rick Rubin?

  and he changed all these things. And then, all of a sudden, I was able to do all these things. It's like, okay, I want to find Phil Maffetone. I found him online. I sent him an email. And he was living in Florida. And I asked if, you know, I could become his patient. And he said that he had just stopped treating patients and retired from being a doctor. It's like, that's terrible news. But the reason he decided to stop being a doctor was he decided to become a songwriter. I said, oh, it's interesting. I'm Funny you should mention that. Yeah, it's like, I'm involved in songwriting and the music world. Maybe we can trade. Maybe I can help you with your songwriting, and you can help me with my health and fitness.

• 10:07Rick Rubin?

  And he liked the idea, and we ended up meeting a few months later, met several times, and became friends. And then he eventually ended up moving into my house and lived in my house for about two years. I did everything he said, and I got much healthier. My metabolism got turned on. The hours that I was sleeping shifted. For most of my life, I stayed up all night and slept most of the day. When I was in college, I never took a class before three P. M. Because I knew I wouldn't, I wouldn't go. And this was at NYU? At NYU. So I'm used to living a night lifestyle. I remember even in high school, I missed the first three classes of school so many times that,

• 10:49Rick Rubin?

  you know, it was really an issue. But it was just, I had learned to be a late night person. And it kind of suited the music life, like it worked well with my life. And one of the first things that Phil suggested when we got together was, I slept with blackout blinds. And I usually didn't leave the house until the sun was setting. And he said, from now on, when you wake up, I want you to go outside. As soon as you wake up, open the blinds and go outside, negative possible, and be in the sun for 20 minutes. And when he said it, I remember thinking it'd be the same as him saying, I want you to jump off this ledge. You know, like, it sounded like the most terrifying, based on the way I lived my life, that just sounded terrible.

• 11:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right. What time was he recommending that you wake up?

• 11:36Rick Rubin?

  Well, by the time we started, it kept moving down. It went from three o'clock to probably noon to 11 to nine. And it just sort of happened naturally. And he knew that if I immediately went in the sun, that naturally my body would want to start waking up earlier and going to sleep earlier. It was the first time ever that my circadian rhythm was kicking in. I never knew that there was such a thing or knew what that was. So he got me to connect to that. And I did everything he said, changed my diet, started eating some animal protein. I was, as I said, a devout vegan, so eggs and fish were the first things that I would eat.

• 12:19Rick Rubin?

  And even then, I never liked eggs and I never liked fish, so I ate them more like medicine. And slowly, I got healthier and healthier and healthier and more and more fit. But I was still very heavy and I was heavy for a long time.

• 12:35Tim Ferriss?

  What age were you when you brought him into your house? Or how long ago was this?

• 12:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I'm gonna guess it was probably late 30s.

• 12:46Tim Ferriss?

  And how, if you don't mind me asking?

• 12:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, like 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago, something like that.

• 12:52Tim Ferriss?

  So you're changing your diet. What were some of the other things that he had you change?

• 12:56Rick Rubin?

  He had me do 20 minutes of low heart rate exercise, aerobic activity every day. He had me start wearing a heart rate monitor and My heart rate, I would get into, you know, for me, walking up a flight of stairs would be an aerobic activity.

• 13:15Tim Ferriss?

  An aerobic.

• 13:16Rick Rubin?

  An aerobic activity, yeah. So I had to work hard to stay in the anaerobic space.

• 13:22Tim Ferriss?

  Or the aerobic space, you mean?

• 13:23Rick Rubin?

  In the aerobic space.

• 13:25Tim Ferriss?

  Below that.

• 13:26Rick Rubin?

  It's getting hot in here.

• 13:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's getting hot in here. Let me take off all your clothes.

• 13:30Rick Rubin?

  My hands, my hands burning holding the mic.

• 13:33Tim Ferriss?

  I tried to wrap them in napkins. I did mention those might get hot, but sorry, I digress. So to stay within the aerobic threshold, you had to work very hard.

• 13:44Rick Rubin?

  Yes. And again, my health changed, but I still stayed very heavy. And after two years of time, I had probably lost a little bit of weight, but not much. But I was much healthier and much more alive and much better than I was before. And after that period of time, Phil said to me, you know, anyone else who made the changes you made, out of everyone he's ever dealt with, 99% out of 100 people, you know, 99 out of 100 people would have dropped all their weight. For some reason, there's something else going on with you that's holding on to the weight. So I just accepted that that's how it was, but at least I felt a lot better. My life was a lot better. I was a lot happier.

• 14:27Rick Rubin?

  And then a mentor of mine, his name is Mo Austin, he's a guy who ran Warner Brothers Records for 35 years. He worked for Frank Sinatra, real inspiring guy in music business. He suggested, I went up to lunch with him one day and he said, you know, Rick, I'm really worried about you. I know you watch what you eat and I know that you walk on the beach every day and exercise, but you're really getting big and I'm worried. So he said, I'm going to get the name of a nutritionist and I want you to go to my guy and I want you to do whatever he says. And I said, okay, fine. Like, and I knew it wouldn't work because I knew that my whole life I had a weight problem. My whole life I've tried every diet and nothing ever worked. But I, you know, I would do anything for Mo.

• 15:11Rick Rubin?

  So I went again, open minded, but not believing it would work. Willing to try, but not believing it would work. The nutritionist put me on a high protein, low calorie diet and I'd never done a low calorie diet before. And over.

• 15:31Rick Rubin?

  Fourteen months, I lost one hundred and thirty pounds, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. That changed everything. And I will say, if I didn't do the work with Phil first, I don't believe that the diet would have worked. It was sort of a combination of things in order. It was like the metabolism got turned on. I started being in tune with circadian rhythm. I was stimulating my aerobic system every day. I built a base and then with the right diet was able to drop the weight quickly.

• 16:03Tim Ferriss?

  What are things that get in the way of artists producing their best work?

• 16:08Rick Rubin?

  Concern about what other people think, competition, wanting to do better than someone else, self doubt, ego.

• 16:17Tim Ferriss?

  What manifestation of ego?

• 16:19Rick Rubin?

  If someone thinks that everything they do is great, they might not be willing to edit themselves enough or work hard enough at, if I could write ten great songs in five minutes each, those are the best songs and I'm just gonna record it and put them out. And those might not be as good as the ones that you develop over a long period of time. For example, that might be any autistical artist who thinks everything I do is just great.

• 16:45Tim Ferriss?

  When you have the opposite, when you have an artist who is doubting themselves, how do you help them through that? What do you recommend? Just speaking personally, I have continuous self doubt as a writer.

• 16:57Rick Rubin?

  I think most artists do. That's more of a, more typically self doubt is the case. I think if your goal is to be better than you were, you know, if you're competing only with yourself, it's a more realistic, it's a more realistic place to be. You know, if you say, I don't want to write songs unless I could write songs better than The Beatles, it's a hard road. But if you say, I want to write a better song tomorrow than the song I wrote yesterday, that's something that can be done. And if you write a better song than you wrote yesterday every day, then you continue to get better and better and better. And it really is small steps.

• 17:40Rick Rubin?

  And trying not to think too much, because so much of it is more of a. The job is, it's more emotion and heart work than it is head work. Like, the head comes in after to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place, and it's not the head, and it's not an intellectual activity. It's more inspiration. So the key first is to really do whatever activities you can to tune into inspiration. Things like meditating help and diving into art in general. It doesn't have to be even your modality.

• 18:25Rick Rubin?

  I mean, going to museums and looking at beautiful art can help you write better songs. Reading great novels, reading great, great works of art. Seeing a great movie could inspire a great song. Reading poetry. So I would say being in, submerging yourself in great art. And the more you can do to get out of the mode of competition, where you're looking at what other people are doing, if you're wanting to be better than them or be inspired by them. The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time, which is a great thing to do. You know, like, if you listen to the greatest music ever made,

• 19:09Rick Rubin?

  that would be a better way to

• 19:15Rick Rubin?

  work through to find your own voice to matter today than listening to what's on the radio now and thinking, I want to, you know, compete with this.

• 19:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 19:24Rick Rubin?

  So it's more like a stepping back and looking at a bigger picture than what's going on at the moment.

• 19:32Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking as someone who is not very well versed with music, I don't feel highly literate when it comes to music. I enjoy music, but hanging out with you and Neil Strauss, certainly, I feel like I'm lacking perhaps vocabulary and a lot of references. Are there any, for people who feel like they're in my shoes, are there any particular albums you could offer as a, as a starting point? Not the end all be all, but just as a, as a starting point for appreciating good. World-class contemporary music, meaning not necessarily, could be classical music, but are there any recommendations?

• 20:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I would, I would just start by listening to the greats, which you can look at like, if you look at, search online for Mojo's Top 100 Albums Vol. 10, or Rolling Stones Top 100 Albums, or any trusted sources' Top 100 Albums, and start listening to what are considered the greats. It's a good place to start.

• 20:24Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm not sure I ever told you, the first time I ever saw the name Rick Rubin was actually on the inside of an audio cassette. It was the first heavy metal album I ever bought, which was Rain and Blood.

• 20:33Rick Rubin?

  Oh, it's a good one.

• 20:35Tim Ferriss?

  And I just remember

• 20:36Rick Rubin?

  That's a really good one.

• 20:37Tim Ferriss?

  Not having, this is pre-internet, of course, and I was just told by my friends, you have to, you will love heavy metal, you should listen to heavy metal. And I asked what the hardest heavy metal was that could possibly be found, and Rain and Blood came to the lips of those I asked. And I just remember listening to, I think it's Angel of Death, the first track on that, and going, oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? And just fell in love with that band. But how did you go from hip-hop to, say, Slayer? It's stylistically so different, it would seem, but how did Slayer come about?

• 21:11Rick Rubin?

  Because I was coming about it with no technical skill. It's not like I knew about hip-hop, or I knew about heavy metal. I was a fan of music, and I loved heavy metal, I loved hip-hop. So it was more that, coming at it from this appreciation, and as a fan, knowing what I wanted to hear, knowing that, especially in the case of Slayer, Slayer were an underground metal band who had two albums out on an independent label, and were kind of considered, you know, the heaviest band in the world. And when we signed them, there was this terrible fear that Slayer, now doing their first album for a major label, you know, they were going to sell out.

• 21:49Tim Ferriss?

  Get watered down.

• 21:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, which happens all the time. And then the album that we made, Rain and Blood, was much harder and worse than anything that anyone ever heard before. And it really did come from that, you know, I liked extreme things, and they were extreme, and I wanted to maximize it. I didn't want to water down. The idea of watering things down for a mainstream audience, I don't think it applies. I think people want things that are really Passionate and the best version of that they could be and often the best version they could be is not for everybody. The best art divides the audience where, you know, if you put out a record and half the people who hear it absolutely love it and half the people who hear it absolutely

• 22:32Rick Rubin?

  hate it, you've done well because it's pushing that boundary. If everyone thinks, oh, that's pretty good. Why bother making it? It doesn't mean much.

• 22:40Tim Ferriss?

  Lost in this slipstream of time almost as soon as it comes out.

• 22:44Rick Rubin?

  I'm gonna do a round of ice if that's all right.

• 22:46Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely, all right. Let's do some more ice and we'll be back. Okay, we are, we are back. Do you have a book or books that you've gifted often to other people?

• 22:57Rick Rubin?

  The first one that comes to mind is the Tao Te Ching. It's this Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching. What's great about it is it's 81 short pieces that could be, look at them as poems, that if you were to read the book today, you would get one thing from it. And if you pick it up in two years and read it again, it would mean something entirely different. And always on the money, you know, always what you need to read at that period of time. So it's a magic book in that way that it always fits.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  I actually took, God, this is bringing back a memory. I took an entire class on the Tao Te Ching at Princeton when I was an undergrad in East Asian Studies. And it seems on some level that that book does what you do for musicians, meaning it sort of reflects back truths that they were not aware of themselves or they could not verbalize themselves. Any other books come to mind?

• 23:59Rick Rubin?

  Another one that's really nice is a book about meditation called Wherever You Go, There You Are, which is by John Kabat-Zinn. It's a great book if you've never meditated and if you've been meditating for 50 years, if you read this book either way, you'll care more about meditation, become a better meditator and just give insight into why we do it and what the benefits are.

• 24:23Tim Ferriss?

  When you are working with an artist who believes they can't do something, or it's just hitting that wall, what are some of the ways that you help them get past that?

• 24:34Rick Rubin?

  Usually I'll give them the homework, like a small doable task. I'll give you an example. There was an artist I was working with recently, who hadn't made an album in a long time and was struggling with, struggling with finishing anything. And just had this, it was a version of a writer's block, but it was a, I don't know, hard to explain what it was. But I would give him very doable homework assignments. It almost seemed like a joke, you know, like tonight I want you to write one word in this song that needs five lines that you can't finish. I just want one word that you like by tomorrow. Do you think you'd come up with one word?

• 25:17Rick Rubin?

  And usually he'd be like, yeah, I think I can do one word. And then just very quickly by breaking it down into pieces, like I learned from Laird and chipping away one step at a time, you can, can really get through anything.

• 25:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Breaking it down into

• 25:33Rick Rubin?

  I remember on the beach, we had a, a zip line. Not a zip line, a, you know, the, the beam that you balance on.

• 25:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, a slack line.

• 25:42Rick Rubin?

  A slack line. And Laird was pretty good at it in the beginning, but had never done it before. And he would work for hours. He would just be there hour after hour after hour falling off and getting back on, falling off, getting back on. And then of all of the group of people, he was by far the first one who was able to do it. And it wasn't because he just naturally was gifted at it. He knows that anything he sets his mind to learn to do, if he focuses and just continues to not mind falling off and not thinking he's supposed to be good out of the box, learning to be able to do it. That's how you learn things. I also will say that after having the weight problem that I had for so long,

• 26:23Rick Rubin?

  and then finally finding the solution and making the change, it really makes me believe that anything's possible. You know, we can learn, we can train ourselves to do absolutely anything. It's really just getting the right information. If we get, get the right information, we can learn anything, whatever it is. Now, it doesn't mean we can necessarily be the best in the world at something. But we can be our best at that thing.

• 26:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the best version of ourselves.

• 26:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And do things that we never dreamed of as possible for us.

• 26:54Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give? And I'll ask this for a couple of different ages, but I'll start with your 20 year old self. What advice would you give your 20 year old self, if any?

• 27:04Rick Rubin?

  Try to have more fun.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you think you weren't having as much fun as you could have at that point?

• 27:10Rick Rubin?

  I think I was more driven and I don't know, I want to say almost like I felt I had something to prove. I don't know if I did have something to prove, but it felt like doing the work was the most important thing in the world as opposed to doing the work and enjoying the process and being able to step back and see what it was. You know, not just be so deeply into it that, you know, I feel like I missed a lot of years of my life because I was just in a dark room working on music, you know, seven days a week for probably 20 years.

• 27:44Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, I recall that makes me think of a story from Neil Gaiman, the writer, when he, I think he was with the success of Sandman. And he was in a huge line of readers who wanted signatures and fans who wanted to tell him stories. And Stephen King pulled him aside and just said, enjoy it.

• 28:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Tim Ferriss?

  And he didn't, he was too caught up in the, in the flow. What about your 30 year old self? What advice would you give to your 30 year old self?

• 28:12Rick Rubin?

  I would probably tell myself something that I still might apply to me today. I wouldn't have known it at all then I know it now, I just still, it's not sick in nature. But um, to be kinder to myself, because I beat myself up a lot because I expect a lot from myself. I'll be hard on myself. I don't know that I'm doing anyone any good by doing.

• 28:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's advice that I need to, to give myself as well. When do you tend to beat yourself up? I've made somewhat of a sport of it, it would seem.

• 28:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it can happen, you know, anytime I can come up with anything that I could be doing.

• 28:55Rick Rubin?

  Further something and didn't already think of it and didn't already do it. I might beat myself up about why, you know, why have I not done that?

• 29:06Tim Ferriss?

  Something I struggle with that I'd love to get your two cents on and is related to this, which is on one hand, I don't want to beat myself up. On the other hand, I feel like the perfectionism that I have has enabled me to achieve whatever modicum of success I've been able to achieve. And I've heard stories and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but about for instance, ZZ Top and La Futura and how they worked on it with you from I guess, I want to say what? 2008 to 2012, something like that. But how they realized the value of you wanting the art to be as perfect as it could be, or the best that it could be, and taking whatever time and pains necessary to make that possible.

• 29:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because it's something that I continually struggle with. I want to be easier on myself, but I worry that if I do that, I will lose whatever magic, if there is such a thing that enables me to do what I do.

• 30:01Rick Rubin?

  I think that's a myth and I think that your take on things is specific to you and it's not because of your, it's almost like you've won the war. And to accept the fact that you've won the war, you have broken through to now you have an audience, people are open to hear what you are interested in, what you learn, what you're interested in learning about and what you want to share. You can do that without killing yourself and that killing yourself won't be of service either to you or to your audience.

• 30:34Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals for your team faster and for free. LinkedIn isn't just a job board. LinkedIn helps you hire professionals you can't find anywhere else, even those who aren't actively searching for a new job, but who might be open. To the perfect role. In any given month, more than 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, if you're not using LinkedIn,

• 31:14Tim Ferriss?

  you are in the wrong place. More than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring with 86% getting a qualified candidate within 24 hours. LinkedIn knows that small business owners, leaders, execs are wearing so many hats, they're stretched then. They might not have the time or resources to hire in any drawn out way. So LinkedIn is constantly finding ways to make the process easier. In fact, they just launched a feature that helps you write job descriptions, making the entire thing A to Z faster and much simpler. So hire professionals like a professional on LinkedIn. And now you can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/Tim. That's LinkedIn.com/Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Next up, Mary Carr, author of three award-winning bestselling memoirs, The Liar's Club, Cherry, and Lit, and author of The Art of Memoir, which breaks down her process, and Tropic of Squalor, her latest volume of poetry. You can find Mary on Twitter, at Mary Carr Lit.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  Mary, welcome to the show.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me.

• 32:29Tim Ferriss?

  And I appreciate you putting me at ease when I mentioned that I have copious notes in front of me. And that's usually an indication that I am nervous and

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Not you. You do this all the time. You're gonna kill it. It's gonna go great. I'm convinced.

• 32:44Tim Ferriss?

  And thank you. And you reassured me by saying, I make really good waffles.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  That's what I do.

• 32:49Tim Ferriss?

  I'm like a Nona.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  I'm like a Nona. You gotta think of me as a Nona out here in Podcastville.

• 32:55Tim Ferriss?

  Let's rewind the clock as a first step in Podcastville and maybe we can talk about known as in the family lineage of sorts. And I want to talk about, or have you speak to, a guy redoing your mother's kitchen and holding up a tile. Could you perhaps elaborate on that, please?

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Right after my first memoir was published, we were having my mother's kitchen re-tiled. My sister and I were there and that, yeah, and the tile dude pries off a tile and he holds it up and it has a little round toilet and he looks at my little fluffy haired, gray haired mother and says, Ms. Carr, this looks like a bullet hole. And my sister says, Mom, isn't that where you shot at daddy? And she says, No, that's where I shot at Larry. Over there is where I shot at your daddy. So people ask me why I wanted to be a memoirist. I'm like, why would you make stuff up when that's who your mother is?

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

  So for those who have no context, like to provide a bit more context, where was this kitchen? Or where is this kitchen for that matter?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  This kitchen is in southeast Texas. It's a town that I write about to protect the mayor and the school principal and the people who didn't sign off on what I said about them. I call it Leach Field, but it's really east of Port Arthur, Texas, a small town in east Texas. I call it the ringworm belt.

• 34:17Tim Ferriss?

  Which I've also heard you describe as a swampy town. So moisture, humidity, ringworm. As a former wrestler, I can say those things combined to produce ringworm.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yes. No, that's it. And industrial, like a lot of oil refineries all around. So not Paris in the twenties, I guess is the way I would put it.

• 34:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm gonna hop around like Memento the movie if I must, and I must because that is my way. And you've written extensively about your childhood. You had in many respects, an extremely difficult, painful childhood and will probably unwind some of that. Now, you've written extensively about it and you've also mentioned about writing memoirs.

• 35:03Tim Ferriss?

  And if this is a misquote, please call me out. Quote, "I've said it's hard. Here's how hard. Everybody I know who wades deep enough into memories waters drowns a little." And certainly in your book, you paint a high resolution picture of just how painful that can be. And certainly, an element might be catharsis, but it is painful. And I would love for you to speak to the catalyst for beginning to publish this type of work, write and then publish this type of work.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  The publishing is nothing compared to the writing, I think. Publishing for me was great because they gave me money and I didn't have any. So that was, that was good. But yeah, I think I had a flamethrower on my ass. Can I say ass on your show?

• 35:46Tim Ferriss?

  You can say ass. Not only are three letter words allowed, four letter are allowed as well.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Oh, there we go. You know, I was a weird little kid and I was just, my mother was capital N- nervous and married seven times and twice to my daddy. And both my parents drank hard. It was Texas. Everybody was armed. And we were a loud, combative house. So I loved my parents. I mean, that's what I should say. It's, I don't think anybody who's read anything I've written about them would challenge that. But it was not a safe childhood. And yes, it had its fair share of blows. I mean, I always, you know, look, I was born in the richest country in the world. My skin color is something the whole country privileges. I'm, you know, I'm a college professor.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  I grew up skinny and my teeth came in relatively straight and I have a lot of advantages. So whatever I went through, a lot of people, and people I grew up with and loved, had it way worse and didn't make it. So I think I was haunted. I was a haunted little girl. I tried to kill myself when I was a kid, when I was still in grade school. I took a bunch of aspirin. It said pain relief. And I thought, okay, this is what I want. So I didn't have a choice. I was, in some ways, not having a choice was a lucky thing because I went into therapy very early. I managed to get, after leaving school without a diploma, I managed to weasel my way into college and had a really kind professor.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  And his wife kind of took me under their wing and urged me to go into therapy when I was nineteen. And so I was sitting in rooms, talking to, you know, codependent social workers, starting when I was a kid. And all of that helped. But I guess I've been really blessed with a lot of outside help. I'm a big, big fan of the mental health professional and the librarians and English teachers and those kind souls you meet along the way.

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  So you have kind souls that you meet in person. You mentioned a few, and I want to talk more about weaseling into college in a few minutes. But I've read a lot about your reading, if that makes sense.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I read a lot. Yeah.

• 38:01Tim Ferriss?

  Some might envision in their minds, I, the childhood you described as a family of illiterates, nobody picked up anything other than People Magazine, but that was not the case.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  No, the huge advantage. Yeah.

• 38:14Tim Ferriss?

  Describe that a little bit. And also, if I could tag on an additional piece of that question, I've heard you describe finding and reading poetry as Eucharistic. And I would love for you to just speak to that as well.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I started reading poetry when I was a little girl. And I, you know, reading is socially sanctioned disassociation. You know, if you can't, they won't let you drink or, you know, geez heroin when you're a little kid. But, but you can disappear down a valley of Winnie the Pooh, or Charlotte's Web, or, and in some ways, the poets I read, I think a lot of time, I think poetry really captured me early. And my, my mother had, who was a painter, had gone to art school in New York and was enormously well-read. There were books all over my house in a place for the nearest bookstore. The bookstores in my town sold, you know, Bibles as big as station wagons and, you know, little dashboard

• 39:14Speaker 02

  icons. But there wasn't a lot of literature to buy. But I found a home in the, the little library was a three block walk from my house and I could disappear down the snowy valley of a book and I was somewhere else. And so poetry saved my life. I mean, my best friends were poets. I, I think the way people worship saints and, you know, have crosses blessed, I felt that way. And if you think about the idea of the Eucharist, we weren't Catholic, we were atheists. My father was a union organizer and said, you know, church is a trick on poor people to, to get their money away from them. And my mother was a kind of Marxist lady who was very smart

• 39:55Speaker 02

  and, you know, just a loose, a little bit of a loose cannon. So we were not churchy in the Bible Belt. And yeah, you take some, when you read a poem, you know, you put it in the meat of your body. I mean, you're a body person. I'm a body person. I feel like you take somebody else's suffering into you and it changes you. It transforms you. I had this idea of being a poet, starting when I was five or six years old, that I wanted to be a poet. It was the strangest thing because there were no poets around. No one had ever, no one I knew had ever met a poet.

• 40:31Tim Ferriss?

  What was the feeling that elicited that desire? Was it just the tangible brilliance in some type of wordplay? Was it a kinesthetic reaction to the aesthetics of certain poets? What was it that produced that desire?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Wow. You said it better than I could, Tim. You win. I mean, it's not a joke that I used the Riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat. That's literally what happened. I sat, when I had to reach the table, I sat on this giant edition of Shakespeare my mother had that was very water stained. And it was a, a book that I read very early and I started memorizing not Shakespeare poems, but the speeches from

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, and Richard III. And I would memorize these speeches and say them to my hungover mother. And she liked it, you know? It was something she, I got her attention that way. She was a very, to say she was not nurturing. I mean, Lady Macbeth is probably not nurturing the way my mother was not nurturing. I mean, she, her disinterest in being a mother was profound. Let's just put it that way. She once said to me, when I was, early on, when I was getting sober, I, she was supposed to watch my little boy, who was then a toddler, when I went to an AA meeting. I came back one day and she was like, "I can't keep him, he's just too..."

• 42:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I was gone for an hour and a half. She said, "I just don't do kids." And I was so mad. I said, "Mother, you had four children. What do you mean, you don't do kids? You don't cook? You don't clean? You haven't had a job in 40 years? What exactly do you bring to the party?" And she thought for a minute, and she said, "Uh, I'm a lot of fun to be with." You know, like, "Yeah, I forgot to do anything for any other living human being, but I am fun to be with," which was not untrue. So, I guess I had an aesthetic sense. She played music, she played opera, she played blues. Janis Joplin grew up in my hometown, or rather, I grew up in her hometown since she was older. Her brother would be in my high school carpool. So, there was a lot of music I listened to.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  And I think poetry was part of that, the form, the shape. You know what it felt like, Tim? I felt less lonely. I was a lonely person. And I would read these poems, and I felt like someone understands me. Someone knows what it feels like to occupy this body. And I remember trying to tell other little kids in my neighborhood about it. About poems that I liked, there's a E. E. Cummings poem I once tried to tell some girls about in my school. You know, it's just spring and the world is mud luscious and the little lame balloon man whistles far and we and Eddie and Bill came, come running and it's spring and the world is a puddle wonderful and the goat footed balloon

• 43:33Speaker 02

  man whistles far and we, something like that. I can't even remember it, but it's so long ago.

• 43:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's pretty good for not remembering.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  I can remember little bits of it, but I remember these girls in my school just going, what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, what about it doesn't make any sense? You know, it's about it's being spring. And she's like, well, what is the mud luscious? Like, that's not even a word. I mean, no, it's like muddy and luscious and delicious. And it's like, how is mud delicious? You know, it's like, like, no, like, y'all aren't getting it. And I thought they were messing with me. It seemed so obvious to me how great this was. So I learned to shut up about it very early. You know, by like, third, fourth grade, I learned, just don't, you like this stuff,

• 44:21Speaker 02

  nobody else. Your mother likes it, your sister likes it, your daddy likes it, nobody else is gonna like it. You shut up.

• 44:27Tim Ferriss?

  One expression that I think was in The Art of Memoir, I've read it in other interviews, and again, I'm probably gonna paraphrase here, but that poetry should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yes, I wish that were my line. Isn't that a great line?

• 44:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's so good. Where's that from? Or do you recall where you learned it?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I know, I know vaguely where it's from, but I can't remember the guy's name. You can Google it. It's

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  We'll find it.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Early 20th century, maybe 1920s to 1950 journalist guy. So I'm sorry, I don't cite him. I wish I could take credit for it. But yeah, all art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, and all therapy should, and most foods. You know, it's not a bad goal to shoot port at the beginning of a day.

• 45:16Tim Ferriss?

  How did you weasel into college?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  How did I weasel into college?

• 45:21Tim Ferriss?

  Flashback, because I would imagine that there's some listeners like me who are just in their mind's eye, seeing this little girl sitting on Shakespeare and out of focus behind her head in the same kitchen are bullet holes in the tile.

• 45:40Tim Ferriss?

  Imagining the experience and the experiences, although truly you endured some horrific horrific things, but wondering how does someone in that position get into college? Especially when they're missing, at least based on some of my homework, for instance, eighty seven days of school in the sixth grade, things like this. How on earth does someone get into college? Was it your wielding of words and an essay that just unlocked it? Was it something else?

• 46:09Speaker 02

  I won an essay contest when I was in high school. I remember. I think it was from the National Council of Teachers of English. And I had some professors, actually, my, my mother had gone back to graduate school and got me a recommendation from this teacher of Chinese history who felt me up, sexually assaulted me in his office and then wrote me a recommendation. So maybe that helped. Actually, what I think helped, when I look back on it, was I opposed the Vietnam War and I wore black armbands on Moratorium Day. And that's the kind of thing that where I grew up, you know, I remember my coach, the football coach, pinning me up, physically, like pinning me up against the lockers by

• 46:54Speaker 02

  the front of my shirt and holding me against the lockers and threatening me essentially to take my black armband off. So I did things like I didn't stand up for the American flag. I mean, I don't know, I thought I was Colin Kaepernick or something. It didn't win me any friends, let me just say that. But I later found out, when I got to my school, and I had a, had to have a lot of jobs to go there, because it was a private school, it was McAllister College, it's a very good school. And I later found out that the assistant principal of my high school, who had thrown me out a lot for things like my skirt was too short, one time he threw me out for not having a bra on, and I said, what makes you think I don't have a bra on?

• 47:37Speaker 02

  And then he called in, the gym teacher, to look under my shirt and confirm, in fact, I didn't have a bra on. So I was just, I was a pain in his ass. And I later found out that he called McAllister and told these people in the admissions office that I was a bad citizen, that I wouldn't stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance and stuff. Well, they hear this old redneck assistant principal, and they hear about this little girl who's doing this, and they think, she sounds great!

• 48:02Tim Ferriss?

  She's perfect!

• 48:03Speaker 02

  She's perfect!

• 48:06Speaker 02

  So I actually think my misbehavior that got me in so much trouble and made him hate me so much, I once had an algebra teacher reveal to me, he really is after you, like you're not paranoid, like he's, he's really, he wants you out of here. And so I actually think, I don't know how I got in, I don't know how I got in, it was clearly a mistake. I made a D in art, you know, my senior year, and my mother was a painter. So, I mean, all I had to do was slap art on something and I would get, have gotten, you know, a B. And I couldn't handle the pressure, it was too hard. So I don't know how I got to college.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  But once I got to college, I've got to say, I really, well, everybody else was complaining about their parents and the, I don't know, that you, that you couldn't, weren't supposed to smoke pot in your, or whatever they were mad about. I was like, this is great. This is, all these people read books and they'll talk to you about them. And I made straight A's and I got a scholarship and it was just shocking to me that I might succeed at something, you know?

• 49:13Tim Ferriss?

  What about the environment? Aside from people who read books and are willing to listen, if it was the environment, maybe there are other variables led to the straight A's? Was it being outside of your home environment? Like, what was the recipe that contributed to that sort of conversion of sorts from D for defiant to straight A? Maybe you were still defiant, but you got straight A's?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  I wasn't defiant. I wanted to please people. I mean, I think I had a lot of jobs, like I had one of those hair net wearing jobs at the food service where I had to go in at like four in the morning and like cook scrambled eggs and wash dishes and stuff. And so I think in some ways I had to organize my time, but I had been living with a bunch of drug dealers before I went to college out in Southern California. We moved out there. Initially, we lived in cars and stuff. And then we got some, a couple of us were slinging dope, mostly pot and psychedelics, although one guy had robbed a drugstore. And it was, I hitch, was hitchhiking one day from Laguna Beach to San Clemente where my friends were

• 50:20Speaker 02

  surfing. And I got picked up by a guy who really scared me. I thought he was gonna rape me. And had to jump out.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  On the side of the road, and it's interesting because there were six of us who lived in that house when I left home, and of the six, four went to jail. And two of those were dead before they were 20. And only me and one other guy, who's still my best friend, Dooney, wound up getting sober. And we both kind of made it, quote unquote, him in construction in Southern California, and me doing whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing. So I was scared. I was scared by how dark things that I brought to darkness with me. You know, you get to Southern California from where I grew up, and you're like, where has all this been? You know, everybody's orthodontured, and, you know, people's teeth are great, and nobody's

• 51:13Speaker 02

  missing any digits or anything. Everybody looks so amazing, and everything's so beautiful, and you're like, God, I've never seen anything like this. Golly. And so you would think everything would have been great, but, you know, as you know, when you have a lot of trauma growing up, you bring the darkness with you. So I had this idea after I was hitchhiking, and I got scared. I went to jump out of this guy's car. It was a Volkswagen that had no backseat, and it had a bunch of garbage in it. And I pulled up on the handle of the door, and it just went floppy round and round and round, like it was locked and I couldn't get out.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  And so the window was open, stuck open, wouldn't go up, wouldn't go down. And I stuck my arm out the side of the window and opened it from the outside and jumped out and went down this embankment on the side of the road. I was really scared. I was, you know how those moments of trauma are. I was scared like I had been when I was a little kid, and there were bullets flying around my house. And I thought, I know, you know, I'll go to college in Minnesota, and I mean, it's just, that was the other thing. Everybody in Minnesota is so damn nice. Have you ever been there?

• 52:28Tim Ferriss?

  I have. I have spent time there.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  I couldn't. I used to make a joke about, an unkind joke, I'd say, if you're not a virgin when you get here, you will be when you leave. It was just, everybody was so damn nice. Oh, my God, I'd never seen such nice people in my life. And still, I got there, and I did extremely well for two years, and I won all these prizes, and then I dropped out. I couldn't handle the prosperity, you know, I couldn't handle the success. It took me a while to finally start getting sober, I guess. I guess that was a lot of my problem.

• 53:04Tim Ferriss?

  Which we will definitely talk about. I want to dig into that. And I also am going to ask you, just to plant a seed, about how those mentors initially convinced you to go to therapy. But first, I want to bounce around chronologically.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:20Tim Ferriss?

  Because from these origins, I've, in the process of doing my homework, read about your graduate seminar at Syracuse described as hyper selective. And you're certainly a writer and poet of great note at this point. Lots of people know who you are. Lots of people love your work. Lots of people love you describing the craft and process that goes into your work. How do you select the students who make it into your graduate seminar? Or how did you?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  I mean, I do it. It's, I wish they would just give me a wand and I got to pick all my people. But interestingly, I've been teaching there, gosh, 30 years? Something like that. I only teach in the fall and I go and I commute from New York City. So, we do it based on the work. We do it solely based on the writing. And George Saunders, my colleague George Saunders, had gotten so, has gotten so famous that, you know, he attracts a lot of people and have a lot of people who teach there are through Flowers. Juno Diaz has taught there. We just have gotten up to, you know, 1,200 applications for 12 positions.

• 54:33Tim Ferriss?

  You end up with these 12 gems of assorted colors and kinds.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  What is day one, class one? What does that look like?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Oh, you're thinking my, when I teach my memoir class. Yeah, well, I used to do, I used to do this thing. Yeah, that's so funny. I used to do this thing where I would stage a fight in my class with someone who was opposite from me. So, let's say, you know, like my colleague, George Saunders, who is just the sweetest guy. I can't even tell you. I, I was in the car with him once and there was a bug on his shirt and I was like, George, there's a big beetle on your shirt. And he'd be like, well, he has to be somewhere.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  You know, I'd be like, "Kill it." And he's like this Tibetan Buddhist with this amazing practice, you know, just the sweetest guy. So George comes in and starts arguing with me that my classroom is in fact his classroom.

• 55:32Tim Ferriss?

  This is in front of all the students?

• 55:34Speaker 02

  In front of all the students. And it's for them, it's the first day of school, and it's like having their parents fight. And I script it so that I say only nice conciliatory things. I back up, he walks forward, he's bigger than I am. And then it ends with him like throwing the papers up and, you know, telling me to go fuck myself or something. Or telling me to go hang, maybe, I don't know if you can say the F word. Can you say the F word?

• 55:59Tim Ferriss?

  F word is not only allowed, but endorsed.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Okay, good.

• 56:03Tim Ferriss?

  I grew up on Long Island, you're in good company.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  I feel so much better. Just telling me to go fuck myself. And then we ask the students to write. So let's say there are seventeen, eighteen students in this class, twenty, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-two. And they're all smart, and they're all young, they were all incredibly juiced on adrenaline and cortisol because they were scared and it's a public scene and they don't really know each other that well, and they don't know us that well. So they're all extremely alert, they're hypervigilant. And we ask them to write down what happens, and everybody writes something just a little different. Interestingly, people will describe me in very aggressive terms.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Like, even though I'm the one backing up and I'm saying, "Well, I can clear out during the break, George, but like, I don't understand why you're so upset." And he'll say, "You don't understand why I'm so..." I mean, and he walks forwards and I'm backing up and my head is down and I'm doing every conciliatory gesture I can think of.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  And people will say, you know, she stood her ground like a bulldog, or she had military strength facing off against him. And one year I did it with my student assistant, who was a, an undergraduate, just a beautiful young track star, Betsy. And, you know, Betsy just threw her papers up in the air and was screeching at me. Well, you know, she's this kid, and here I am, this professor with, you know, fancy clothes in a position of power. So people would, in that class of undergraduates, assume that I had done horrible things to Betsy that had... In one class, there was a young woman, one of the ruses

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I set up is that I leave my cellphone on so I can start to argue with George before he comes in, and then ask the students, you know, how often did he call? How long between each call? And ask them to guess things or remember things about time. And some people, he calls three times, some people will say he called once, some people four times. So all those details are very influenced by who they are. The young woman with sickle cell anemia will have this enormous compassion for me because I'll say, I have to leave my phone on, I'm waiting for medical results. And she'll assume I'm waiting to hear if

• 58:28Speaker 02

  I have some awful ailment. And she sees George as a complete beast, and me as this woman, perhaps ill, who dragged herself to class, while everybody else in the class thinks, what a diva. She's answering her phone in the middle of class? She can't wait an hour to get medical results? I mean, come on. So there are always people in class who have, you know, have those perfect memories. I remember one kid, often they're musicians. This kid was a jazz saxophone player who was very famous in Brooklyn for giving these amazing house parties. I think he made a living giving house parties for like, I don't

• 59:07Speaker 02

  know, years. So this kid had this amazing memory. He got, we had a script, and he remembered the script exactly. He remembered what George had on, he remembered where we stood, he remembered that I backed up every step. And then when he wrote it, he wrote it exactly as it happened. He didn't miss anything. And he said, George was the aggressor, but I wonder what she'd done to make him act that way. I guess the purpose of the exercise is for you to realize that you remember through a filter of who you are. Memory is not a computer. It's not a perfect storage system. Obviously, we, even these fine minds of these young people, very alert and paying

• 59:52Speaker 02

  attention in their first class and wanting to get everything right and do well, misremember. And what's more, what I want them to think about is how they are not just perceiving things, but beaming the world, the landscape into being with whoever they are inside. It's important as a writer of anything to realize what kind of filters you're strapping on that prevents you from seeing what's going on.

• 1:00:20Tim Ferriss?

  I would imagine that is an opening exercise that a lot of your students remember, speaking of memory, for a very, very long time. What other exercises or aspects of your teaching, it could be in any setting, do many of your students remember or have stick out for them, would you imagine?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  I think a lot of practice things, a lot of, I think it's important as a writer or as in anything, to develop habits. I mean, you talk about this in For Our Body, For Our Work Week. You've developed a lot of practices in your life to shape your life so that you're kind of operating, you know, to constantly be growing and developing. And so, things like keeping a commonplace book, just keeping a notebook where you write down beautiful pieces of language.

• 1:01:15Tim Ferriss?

  What is a commonplace book? That is where you capture the sort of beautiful turns of phrase that you encounter?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, things you read. So you might copy poems, you might copy something you ever heard on the street. There was a guy standing on my street, this is like a couple of years ago when I first moved into this apartment, screaming murder or suicide at the top of his lungs. And everybody was walking around the street, walking around him. And it was early in the morning and I walked up to him and I said, excuse me, sir. He was screaming murder or suicide, murder or suicide. And I went up to him and said, sir, isn't there like a third alternative? Like, isn't there a door number three? And

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  that little encounter I wrote down, but things I overheard.

• 1:02:10Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on, hold on, that's too much of a cliffhanger. So what happened when you said that?

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Well, you know what was beautiful? I went into, I was going in to get a pastry for a friend of mine who was visiting from London. I got him one. I thought I'd bring him a pastry when I came out. But when I walked into the bakery, he was looking at the sky, you know, with a curious look. You know, he was thinking like, isn't there a door? Isn't there a door number? Isn't there another? Gosh, what might just be a door number three? But mostly what I write down are pieces of language or things, poems that I read, paragraphs, anything, so that you're just constantly copying. In longhand, you can't type it.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  You're constantly copying things that are beautiful. You're constantly guzzling beauty. You're guzzling the beautiful language so that you're kind of steeped in it, you know, like a fruitcake and good, and good brandy.

• 1:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  Is the value of the commonplace book and using it this way in the writing down? Or do you have some approach to review or using that later?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  I mean, the great thing about them is that if you get on an airplane or you're going along, you sort of know what you're reading. But I've also been doing this. A poet named Stanley Cunets, who was a poet laureate in like 1978 or something, told me to do this. So I've been doing this since 1978. Also, every time I give a lecture, I put the quotes I use in the lecture on index cards. And so I have like, You know, I've been teaching for 40 years. I mean, I have 40 years of index cards with quotes on them. It's oddly satisfying. I don't know what it is. It's like a sit up you do. It's like a push up you do. It's something you don't really, I often don't look back. I think

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  it's in the writing down. I think it's in the practice. And it's kind of, it's like an altar. You're making an altar for yourself every day.

• 1:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I wanted to, might as well use this as a segue. Alter. Could you speak to the importance or utility of prayer in your life?

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a prayer. I was an atheist my whole life and I got sober in 1989. And believe me, I drank my share. I did my part. I remember some guy I went to high school with telling me, I was, when my mother was still alive, I was home and he says, "You don't even drink anymore. You don't even smoke pot." I was like, "No, Jack Lander and I, I don't do that stuff anymore." He's like, "Why?" I was like, "Well, it just didn't agree with me." You know, it made me do things that I didn't want to do. And he says, "I just think you're a quitter. I just think you're a quitter. I just think you gave up." I mean, what is smoking pot gonna do? You're never gonna like rob anybody's television or anything. He

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  said, "Well, that's true. That's true enough, Jack Lander. But you have had this job pumping gas since the 11th grade."

• 1:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  Please tell me this guy's name was actually Jack Lander.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  His name was Jack. We called him Jack Lander because of a sad tooth thing he had gone on. And because we were not ones to stand on ceremony. And he said, "I said, "You have had this job since the 11th grade and you're 50 years old and you have an ambition deficit disorder."

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  By my yardstick. So, no, but he would say, Jack Larranaga, he'd say, "Don't call me that no more." I'm like, "What do you want me to call you?" Like, "That's your name, dude." "That's been your name since you were 15. That's your name."

• 1:05:59Tim Ferriss?

  What does prayer look like for you? What is praying?

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Well, I think it started off, I think poems were my first prayers, the ones that I read. Like I said, I felt less lonely. So I started praying not out of any virtue, not, I didn't believe in God. I had no religious training whatsoever. When I was a little girl, you know, people would say, would talk about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I thought they were kidding. I thought, "They don't really believe this horseshit." I mean, I figured out pretty early on, you know, by the time I was like six or seven, people were serious. They prayed when people weren't looking at them. I couldn't believe it. It was shocking to me. And Daddy would say, "Well, you know, folks ignorant, you know, what you gonna do?" So I had not a religious bone in my body, but I did notice when I tried to stop drinking,

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  that I couldn't, like, that I tried to stop drinking for two or three years. And I tried by myself, and I tried drinking only beer, and I tried drinking only alone. I tried drinking only with other people, and I tried drinking only wine. I tried drinking with food. I tried drinking, you know, weekends, not, I mean, I just, somehow I had crossed some line where I just couldn't stop drinking. And I went to get help, and I went to sat in church basements, and I hated everybody I saw who was sober. I just hated them. They just seemed like, you know, the guys selling incense at the airport. I just didn't like them. They just didn't look fun, and I just, they were so nice, too. It was like getting to Minnesota. They're, "Hi, you know, welcome."

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  I'd be like, "Oh, God, I hate these people." And finally, the last time I drank, the last night I drank, I had gotten together for like, it was the longest amount of time sober I'd had since I was 15, and I'd gotten together 90 days sober by going and, you know, sitting in church basements and talking to people who were sober. And I got a 90-day chip, and then I had to give this talk. I had to give a poetry reading at Harvard.

• 1:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry to interrupt, just since I don't have much familiarity, when you say 90-day chip, is that some like literal token that you were given?

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  It looks like a poker chip. And so like you get one, the first day you go and then you get one at 30 days and, and 60 days and 90 days. So this was for me, an epic accomplishment. I mean, there was no time that I ever ran the 100 yard dash in that was as important to me as that 90 day chip. And I was happy that I was sober. I felt better. I was sleeping better. My kid was better. Everything was better. And I had to give this poetry reading at Harvard College and I, I was nervous. I'd never given a reading without drinking. The reading went okay. I was teaching at a bunch of places, including one class there and I went out with some of my students and the next thing I know, it's three o'clock in the morning

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  and I'm, my car's spinning out on Star Drive in Boston and I'm going towards this concrete and I somehow didn't crash the car and I somehow got home. And, and so at that point, everybody had been saying, you know, got to get on your knees and pray. And there was this great heroin addict, recovering heroin addict, Janice at this halfway house where I did volunteer work. I drove people to meetings, basically, and we'd pick people up and drive them to meetings. A lot of disabled people and Janice said, just get on your knees. And I'm like, Janice, you know, what kind of God wants me to grovel and go, oh God, you're so great. Ooh. And she said, you don't do it for God, you asshole. In that Boston accent,

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  you don't do it for God, you asshole. I'm like, well, who am I doing it for? She's like, you're doing it for yourself. Just get on your knees. Just say, help me stay sober in the morning. Get on your knees. And I say, thank you for helping me stay sober. And so I'd be like, okay. So I'd get on my knees. Help me stay sober. And at night I'd say, thank you for helping me stay sober. Well, some weird thing started to happen. I mean, sometimes I would literally shoot the finger at the light fixture because I just thought, I hate this. You know what's terrifying about praying is the loneliness of it. I always tell people, young women I sponsor, you show more face praying when you have never prayed before than any nun.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  To sit in that silence with all your fears and all your self doubt is so scary and hard. If you have a big loud head like I do, and like I have a big inner life and mine never has anything good to say, it thinks it can kill me and go on living without me. Something started to happen. I would have these moments of quiet. And the only way I can describe it is it was south of my neck. It was like in the middle of my chest. If I was living my life with my head like yammering at me like a chihuahua all day. Do this, don't that stupid bitch, put that down, pick that up, go over there.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  I mean, it was just, eat this, don't eat that, call him, I hate him. You know, like just these moments, like in the middle of my chest would be like this broad expanse of quiet. And I remember one particular day, our little shitty car broke down. My kid was a toddler and he was, I had to pee, we were on the road. I didn't break down, I had a flat and didn't have a spare, a working spare. It was rush hour, we were on Memorial Drive, we were trying to get home. And I just, in that moment, what I normally would have done, you know, I would have been there, you know, like throwing the jack around and trying to get the car jacked up and in

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  a state of indignant fury that, I didn't believe in God, but I believed that there was fate that had doomed me to misery and that the guy with the Jaguar would always get my parking place right before I pulled in. And I believed, I had a head that had memorized the bad news and spewed it out all day. And I remember that day, it was, the sun was setting. I just got out on the side of the road, I got Deb out of his car seat and the sun was going down and he was looking at me afraid that I was gonna be like angry. And I just sat there and he said, he was hungry. And I didn't have anything to eat in the car and I'm sitting there and I said, let's just look at the sunset a minute and then we'll, we'll go, we'll walk and we'll get

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  some help. And we were just sitting there looking at the sunset and this truck pulls up with these Goomba guys from this 12-step meeting.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  And they have ginger ale, they have a jack, they have a way to tow my car, they give Deb potato chips. And it was just like, you know, all I have to do is just find some space in my body and just wait for a minute. And so I started to notice things happening when I wasn't bent over the day like a dog over like a bone that was about to be stolen. You know, like that when I could just, I could just like, sit there for a moment. And so I

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  began to get a space in my body and I began to get, I began to hear not the voice of God, I would call it, I would have some leanings, like I would be thinking, I should have just killed myself. Like literally, this is what I'd be, I should have killed myself. My husband would marry some nice girl who wore berets and my son would have this great mother and his life would be better if I weren't there. And I would hear this voice in my head that was like, you need a sandwich. Why don't you get a sandwich? Why don't you make yourself like the biggest sandwich you can make? And I'd be like, oh, great idea. Like I just started to have these small, good ideas that were not like anything I'd ever heard when

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  I was afraid before. Yeah, then I had all these crazy spiritual experiences and like one of the things I had this great sponsor, Joan the Bone. God, I loved her. She was so great. She was the kind of girl who lived in Alaska and would go to the bar when it was like 50 below in a tutu. She was just like a badass. Like she was just, and she was a Harvard social theorist too, I've got to tell you. She was just all that.

• 1:14:25Tim Ferriss?

  Joan the Bone.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  Joan the Bone, all that and a bowl of biscuits. Yeah.

• 1:14:29Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a mobster. What's the origin of the name? Do you have any idea?

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  I just called her that. That was my nickname for her, Joan the Bone.

• 1:14:35Tim Ferriss?

  I see, I see.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Joan the Bone. And Joan would tell me things like, I was such an ingrate, she'd say, you have to make a gratitude list. And so she'd call me and say, what's on your gratitude list? I would say, I have all my limbs. She'd say, no. Okay. Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna make a gratitude list every day this month for every letter of the alphabet, and you're gonna call me and read it to me. I said, "Shut the fuck up. I'm not gonna do that." She's like, "Yes, you are, or else, you know, like, I won't talk to you anymore." I'd be like, "Okay." So I just started trying. I just started trying, instead of sitting there with my arms crossed and my lower lip stuck out and my baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I just started trying shit that people who were happier than me suggested I should try. It was so simple.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  And so, one of the things I said to her, she said, "You've gotta pray for what you want." "What are you praying for?" I said, "I pray to stand it." Yeah, not to kill myself, not to- To stand it. To stand it, just to get through the fucking day. That's what I'm praying for. And she said, "Okay, well, you gotta pray for what you want." "What do you want?" I said, "I made $9,000 this year. I would like some money, please." She said, "Well, why don't you pray for money?" I'm like, "You can't pray for that." She's like, "Well, why not?" I said, "Okay." So I would literally get on my knees in the morning and say, "Keep me sober. I would like some money." I'm not even making this up. And I would get on my knees and say, "Thank you for keeping me sober. I would still like some money."

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Three weeks later, after I started, this is a true story and you can look it up, I get a phone call from a guy who says he's from this foundation. He's giving me $35,000 that I'd never applied for or asked for, that somebody just put me up for. And I so thought it was, I thought it was my friend George playing a trick on me and says, "You know, fuck you, George." And I hang the phone up. And the guy calls back and he has me on, you know, the speakerphone. You can hear people laughing maniacally. So, I've never gotten money from prayer again. And then Joan of the Vine says, "Well, you must believe that there's some sort of God." I was like, "No, because they were meeting to give me that prize before I had stopped drinking and started praying."

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  And she said, "Jesus Christ." And I would also talk to her all the time. She would say, "How can there be a God? Because look at the Holocaust." She's like, "God didn't do the Holocaust. People did the Holocaust." Like, "What are you mad at God for? People did that. God didn't do it. That has nothing to do with God." So, that's how my prayer life started. It's a bizarre story.

• 1:17:07Tim Ferriss?

  I like bizarre. So Ignatian exercises. Does that mean anything to you?

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes. I became a Catholic. I became a Catholic and I do something, I practice a kind of spirituality called Ignatian spirituality, which when you become a Jesuit, you go away to the Jesuit place, or the Jesuit making place. So you do a, you go to Jesuit school and then they give you these 30 day exercises. And the purpose of the exercises is to find God in all things. So like this election, which is just turned around to look at my screen to see if we had a new president. So this election, for instance.

• 1:17:49Tim Ferriss?

  Just a side note, somebody just sent me a text before we started recording and said the entire country has electile dysfunction, which I thought was pretty clever.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  Why didn't I think of that? Oh my God, that's so great.

• 1:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  That was a clever turn of phrase. Yes.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Oh my God. No, it really is.

• 1:18:10Tim Ferriss?

  So finding God in all things.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Finding God in all things. So that means, you know, like when the car breaks down, instead of thinking, you know, your cruel fate, you know, has come to hurt you. So what you do actually, Tim, is in the morning, I do a prayer and meditation thing for 20 minutes where I do, like centering prayer for maybe, I don't know, five, six, seven minutes. And then I read a scripture and I meditate on the scripture. And then I have a bunch of people I pray for. I have a list of people I pray for and things I pray for. Then at night, I do something called the examine of conscience where you, it's not like going over your day, making a list of good things that happened or whatever, and then repenting for the bad things. It sounds like that, but

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  it's not that. What it is, is you kind of press play on the recorder of your day. So you think, I woke up and so what did I do? Where was I? What mindset was I in? And you close your eyes and you try to review your day, literally like you're watching a movie. And where you see moments of grace, or luck, or even something, you know, a good sandwich, something yummy to eat, you're supposed to savor.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Those moments and occupy those moments. And it's a very body oriented exercise. You're supposed to smell. What do you smell? What do you hear? What do you taste? How do your clothes feel? You're supposed to really recreate that moment in a sensory way. And thank God for the grace or the gift of that. And then you kind of press play again and you see moments where you turned away from God or you, your best self didn't act. And you say, I want to do better next time. Instead of snapping at the robo call voice, snapping at Siri because she doesn't understand

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  me, I love me for myself alone, you know, to just, ah, you know, tomorrow I'd like to be more patient, help me to be more patient. So what it does is it made those moments of gratitude. And I also keep kind of a list or journal of those things and a prayer journal, a daily. I don't keep a journal journal, but I keep a daily prayer journal and, and I just will kind of highlight some of those things. Like for me today, right now, Steve Kornacki's haircut, which I know he does himself. I don't know. The guy who delivers the big map thing on MSNBC. I just like the guy. I just like him.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Every time I see him, I feel like I'm spending the night at my girlfriend's house and he's her nerdy brother who's like secretly hot.

• 1:20:58Tim Ferriss?

  I had this flash of panic. So I was like, oh, fuck, here's somebody important. I'm not saying he's unimportant, but I'm just saying, oh, God, here's another name that I have to pretend I know because I'm on the podcast.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  He's the guy who delivers the darn, you know, what the electoral map says on MSNBC. So if you're a liberal, you're like a nut and you watch this way. Other people watch other things. So he's this really nerdy kind of math scoop guy who wears like khakis and a really like a clip on tie and has this really bad haircut. And I just have a complete crush on him. I just crush on him. I don't even like young men. I don't, I really don't. You have to have some. You know, you have to have a, some hair coming out of yours for me to want to date you, but this guy just does it for me. I just like him. I just like.

• 1:21:47Tim Ferriss?

  So wait a second. Tie that together for me. Is that, does that have anything to do with the prayer journal?

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:53Tim Ferriss?

  Or are you just confessing that?

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  No, no. It's, it's, I have a crush on a ton of this guy who's on TV every day. And it tickles me to see him. It's kind of a little thrill. It's a little thrill to see him. It really is. It's so stupid. But it's also, it makes me feel like a child. It makes me feel like, like I'm in junior high school. And so there's something innocent and sweet about it. Also, the fact that he's so dorky, I like. I just like that.

• 1:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  So you have a prayer journal?

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:22:21Tim Ferriss?

  You have the commonplace journal?

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:23Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any other journals?

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  No, that's it.

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  Those need to.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  The prayer journal, I don't really, I only write, like actually write, and I, it's mostly, kind of looks like a list. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:22:35Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  It's mostly like a list of things, like the lady at my drugstore, who, my pharmacist, who, they were all out of, you know, the pneumonia vaccine. I get pneumonia a lot. And she went out of her way to call me and say, you know, I got you the pneumonia. If you can come in right now, that we had a cancellation, I, you know, I can do the, just kindnesses, moments of kindness, but also moments of presence and awareness of God. A lot of people feel it in nature. I feel it a little bit in Central Park, which is all the nature I have.

• 1:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  I am currently in Austin, Texas, which is home base for me.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  Shut the front door.

• 1:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've been here for three years. I live in the Republic of Austin.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 1:23:21Tim Ferriss?

  Slash the Republic of Texas. One of my favorite T-shirts, not everyone's going to get this, but is a shirt with the Texas flag, which says, "Most Likely to Succeed" on it.

• 1:23:34Tim Ferriss?

  Jack quite like. Yes. So I'm in Texas.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  How did you wind up down there?

• 1:23:40Tim Ferriss?

  Would argue that I'm not in Texas.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  Of course. Yeah, I know. Right. Listen, do you have a weapon? If you have a weapon, you belong.

• 1:23:47Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  I'll get good for you. What do you have? Can I ask? Can we talk weapons?

• 1:23:51Tim Ferriss?

  As far as weapons? Yeah, sure. I have a seven millimeter wind mag hunting rifle. I have a Glock 34, which is a nine millimeter handgun.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  I know what a nine milli-

• 1:24:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you know.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  I don't know what a nine millimeter gun is.

• 1:24:05Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not explaining it for you. I'm explaining it just like getting on your knees. Not for, not for God, it's for you. I'm explaining to the listeners. So nine millimeter Glock 34, I have an M and P 45. And a few other.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  Do you hunt?

• 1:24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Firearms that I don't use much. I hunt, but infrequently. And that started in 2012. I always had a very negative association with hunting. I just given my exposure to it.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Kind of a great thing.

• 1:24:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I had a very negative association because I saw very irresponsible hunting on Long Island. Yep. And then in the process of working on The Four Hour Chef and learning to forage, I felt it was incumbent upon me to hunt. And if I were to consume animal protein, so I had my first deer hunt with an incredible hunter and conservationist named Steve Rinella. And that really completely shifted my lens on how ethical and responsible hunting could be. Now, in Texas, you have the whole spectrum from responsible to, you know, machine gunning hogs from helicopters,

• 1:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  which I do not partake in, although people could argue it's an invasive species, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, so I do hunt infrequently. Probably, you know, let's just call it once every year or two.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  You know, those javelina hogs are fun to shoot. I'm sorry to say it. I'm embarrassed to say it, but I have shot a javelina hog. So I'm anti-gun but pro-hunting.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  So does that make sense?

• 1:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  It does. I mean, I'm just imagining these kind of backwood kiwis in New Zealand hunting hogs with knives, walking into the woods barefoot, which is a real thing. I know there's no one guy who did that. So you can be pro hunting while being anti-gun. I think that's possible.

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  No, but I mean, if I were to hunt, I would hunt with a gun. But I'm, it's funny. One of my best friends is a young writer named Phil Lamarche, who's in a, is one of those guys who stocks his freezer with bow and arrow kill venison. And he called me this week and said of very interest, he'd just killed his, a deer. And he said, you know, the longer I hunt, you know, the only thing I hate about it is the killing.

• 1:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  I think there's a lot of shared sentiment to that.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Tim Ferriss?

  By a lot of hunters. Yeah.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  I mean, the most reverent people I know about the natural world are, are practicing, many of them are practicing hunters.

• 1:26:40Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. True fact. Well, I want to use this to tie a bunch of things together in the most awkward fashion possible.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  That's okay.

• 1:26:49Tim Ferriss?

  As I've been, been trying to force fit a segue somewhere. So I might as well do it here.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, do it.

• 1:26:54Tim Ferriss?

  And that is to hear your description or explanation of how some of your wordsmithing came to be. Part of what I enjoy so much about your writing is that you have this, let me get this right. Time critic Lev Grossman said in his review of Lit, "Car seems to have been born with the inability to write a dishonest or boring sentence." That's high praise. Now.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Love him.

• 1:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  The, the least, the least boring sentence is for me. And God, I wish I could remember it. But you take this, what seems like this sensitivity to language and poetry to create sentences using cat shit sandwich metaphors.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:38Tim Ferriss?

  And so on, which also seems to me, and maybe this is, you tell me if this is warranted or not, but to be a very kind of Texan thing also, it kind of makes me think of like a trial lawyer in God knows where in Texas, right? Who gets up and just demolishes some slick trial attorney from Los Angeles in a complete mismatch, right? I mean, just dismantles someone with these really clever.

• 1:28:04Tim Ferriss?

  Turns of phrase, where does that come from? Or how did that develop in you? Because I do think it is one of your superpowers.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  Well, I think growing up in Texas is it's a storytelling culture. You know, I Texas idiom is poetry as far as I'm concerned. And I had two great practitioners. I'm a seventh generation Texan on my mother's side and fifth generation of my daddy. So my daddy was a great barroom storyteller. I mean, he was he was a labor union organizer for the oil chemical and atomic workers local 1242. And he was just funny as a crutch and told these amazing kind of tall tales like Adam Mark Twain. But he also spoke in poetry like he would say, like a woman with an ample behind, he'd say, she has butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  And for him, that was a compliment. There was nothing insulting about that, that he used to call me, I'm a little skinny thing. He used to call me a gimlet ass. Okay, you need you need some taller on that ass. You need you need you got you a gimlet ass. I don't even know what that is, but I knew it wasn't good. A little flat butt. Or he would say, it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock. You can scan that, by the way. It's raining like a cow pissing on flat rock.

• 1:29:26Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, what do you mean by scan? Real quick.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, like, like Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. Or my first love poem that was ever written to me, I saw you on your horse today, your eyes like eggs, your hair like hay. That's like, it's iambic pentameter. It's da da da da da da. That's it doesn't matter what it is, but you can hear it when I say it, right? That it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock. And that you hit that flat rock. It creates, for one thing, it creates a whole landscape in which cows piss on flat rocks and people stand around and marvel. You go, my goodness, looky at that. And then you attribute that to the rain. It's a metaphor.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  It operates way beyond the bounds of propriety. It's not how you talk in church. You're not supposed to talk like this. So the minute you say this and somebody laughs at it. You have them. They're in your boat. They have transgressed by laughing at your joke. Well, Daddy was just the master of a story, but he was also a poetic imagery. I mean, to me, that poetry, I grew up, I was steeped in it. My mother, who was an enormous reader, who read everything, Chinese history and Russian novels and philosophy and just read everything, was just the master of, you know, I remember

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  when she was dying, she had all these old men who were always trying to marry her, which, why? But she's dying, she's actively dying, and one of these old boyfriends has come to see her at the hospital in Houston, and the nurse, Ben Soper, says, "Miss Carr, your husband's here to see you." And she says, "Well, he must look like shit. He's been dead 20 years." And, you know, I mean, she just can't stop herself from saying like the most horrible thing you've ever thought. And so I think between the two of them and just growing up in Texas, the idiom, the language I grew up with is epically beautiful.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  And the need to not be boring when you speak, you know, people will, "I'm gonna stomp a mud hole in your ass." That is so much better than "I'm gonna whip your ass."

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  It's just like, "Yeah, right." Or, my friend Duni got in a fight once with a guy in a bar, and the guy said, and he told the greatest story about it. It was actually the guy he decided to stab. He went out in his truck and got a knife and came back with like a Swiss Army knife. And he starts chasing this guy who was a state congressman, by the way, I won't tell you his name, but he starts chasing him around this bar. Well, to brandish a weapon in a place where alcohol is served is a mandatory, I think, 10-year sentence, 10, some big, you know, it's frowned upon. And he's chasing this guy around, and one time, somebody says to Duni at one point, "That's a little bitty old knife you got there." He said, "Well, notice he don't wanna get stabbed by it."

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  And then he runs out and then we hear the sirens. So here comes the say, here comes all the woo, woo. Then he runs out, he gets in his truck and one of those mall cops, security guys runs out and Dooney says, he stands in front of my truck, in front of my headlights. He's got a belt buckle that will pick up HBO. And he, he holds his hands up and goes, halt, halt. And Dooney just puts it in first gear and hits the guy. I mean, he doesn't hit him hard, but he knocks him down and then leaves and gets pulled over and is convinced he's going to prison for brandishing this weapon for trying to

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  hit this guy. But anyway, it turns out he had to call the guy to apologize. The guy's daddy knew Dooney's daddy. And he said, all he wants you to do is apologize. And Dooney's like, apologize? You know, I'll blow the guy. Like, are you kidding? I don't want to go to jail. Of course I'll apologize. But here's the punchline of the story. And this is what makes Dooney my, still my best friend since I was 50. So he calls the guy up and the guy answers the phone and goes, and Dooney goes, I am so sorry, man, about last night. I am so sorry. And the guy says, you almost killed me. And Dooney says, man, I'm so sorry. I didn't know it was you.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Don't you want to say that though? The next time somebody hap- I didn't know it was you. The next time you do some horrible thing.

• 1:34:06Tim Ferriss?

  Next time I get in a really stupid argument with my girlfriend, that's what I'm gonna use.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Don't you want to say, I didn't know it was you, honey? I don't know. Only in the state of Texas do you have that story. It's just got all the elements of a Texas story. How could I not love it down there? I mean, oh my God.

• 1:34:25Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about revision.

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  Okay, revision. I'm a big reviser. I'm a big reviser.

• 1:34:32Tim Ferriss?

  But so you have said, you know, anyone who's read a rough draft of anything I write is just shocked at how bad it is.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  It's terrible.

• 1:34:38Tim Ferriss?

  And what does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very, hopefully it doesn't sound like a really naive question because I know that there's a, there are many, many aspects to revision. I'll lead with just a bit. This is from writer mag.com, but Car says she takes a hard look at every sentence she writes. Can I make this sentence less boring, more interesting, prettier, more colorful, more true? So that's a teaser. What does your revision process look like? Because I've read that you threw out something like 1,200 pages.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Threw out 1,200 pages of lit, yeah. Finished pages too. That's not draft. And that was written over about, I want to say five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out, Tim, I was so upset. I had been, well, first off, they were about, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract. I mean, they, and so I finally, my agent called me and said, you know, you're going to have to, I said, you know what? I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don't shut up and leave me alone. It's just going to take me a minute. So anyway, so I'd sent them, I don't know, I'd sent them like 130, 140 pages. And my editor at the time estimated that I had thrown out 1,200 pages.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  And let me tell you, when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked. I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which is why I didn't want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like two days and I watched, you know, Dr. Phil reruns and a lot of cooking shows and I ordered a lot of curry. I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathrobe. And then I called Don DeLillo, who's one of the people I call. It's like, you know, the nuclear button, you know, who's like, just one of the great novelists who's also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, Don, I, I think I'm writing a, he's like, what are you crying about? I said, I think I'm writing a bad book.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  And he said, well, who doesn't? And I thought about that and I thought, God, he's right. Tolstoy's written bad, but I mean, people I read, you know, every writer I know has written a bad book. Okay, so maybe it's just supposed to be a bad book, but it's the book that's standing in line to be written. And I think I became willing to fail, to just say what happened. Basically, what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time. I think one example I give in The Art of Memoirs is that when I'm, my mother is driving me to college, and I think the sentence I started with was something like, "Mother

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  drove me to college in her yellow station wagon. We stopped every night at the Holiday Inn and got drunk on screwdrivers." I can't remember. Might have said puke and drunk on screwdrivers. I somehow was able to remember being in that car. The thing about my mother's yellow station wagon was that it didn't have an air conditioner. So that at that time, you could buy an air conditioner that's strapped under the dashboard. Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right, and I was sitting in the, you know, shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  And it was icy, icy cold water. And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas. And she was drinking vodka, driving, drinking vodka and orange juice and eating these, watching her eat a peach. You know, when you're 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die. There's just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you're 17. You just think, my God, woman, shut your mouth, take a smaller bite. Jesus, it's not going anywhere, you know? But I, the smell of the peaches and being in, and suddenly I remembered that I had

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  a copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude. It was her book that I had started reading, and she said, read it aloud to me. And I remembered reading that book and driving and I remembered, you know, you grew up around these kind of Texas dirt farms. I mean, there's plenty of corporate farming in the state of Texas, but then you get to the Midwest and it's just so organized. It's just, there aren't the rusted cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch, you know, it's these rows and rows of corn in these big cinnamon colored silos. And I remembered driving into that landscape, up to that college and reading that book and thinking, I could

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  be a writer. I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn't do well at school, that I would fail. I'd been such a screw up. You know, I'd been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope and some of them went to jail and I didn't because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper. And I still remember sitting in, she came to pick me up wearing a leopard, she had leopard skin pajamas. It was July

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  4th and she had on a beaver coat with a mink collar and those leopard skin pajamas in this hot night in Coons County, Texas. And here sits this judge behind us, this liver spotted judge with these palsy hands and every meal he's ever eaten on his tie. When she came to pick me up and he said, I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. And she said, oh, you old fool. I mean, it was just like, oh my God, mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated. So anyway, yeah, I think it's memory. It's, I do an exercise. I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine,

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  Dana Spioto, wonderful young novelist I teach with. And she's teaching an undergraduate class and I said, you know, I want to do this right. There are 90 kids in the class. I said, I want to do this writing exercise. She said, well, the writing, you know, it's been uneven. And I said, trust me, everyone will write well.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  And you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell, to try to remember a room you were in where your mother's cooking, your grandmother, wherever you had a good meal when you were little and try to close your eyes and smell that because, you know, smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory and it's stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts. You try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want, what are you yearning

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  for and what's keeping you from getting it? Maybe it's a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy's oysters coming up out of the fryer or what's going to keep you from getting it. It's my big footed sister who, as daddy said, nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries. You know, she's going to get all the oysters and I won't get any. And so it's really more about trying to occupy a former self because I think, as you know, just as in trauma, the body remembers, the body also remembers beauty. It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things too, so.

• 1:42:34Tim Ferriss?

  So the body keeps the score and if you go excavating for these memories, sometimes there are costs associated with that.

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Tom's Horror Show.

• 1:42:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've read that while you were working on The Liar's Club, that you'd suddenly fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon as if you'd driven all night and you would sob, you'd really suffer. What did you do to cope with that pain? And I should just say, you and I were chatting before the recording about... Trauma a bit, and I've recently described some of my childhood sexual abuse. And the podcast that I did related to it didn't seem to exact a horrifying toll. But the process years before of trying to write about it and getting a very, very rough draft brutalized me.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  Of course it did.

• 1:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  And just left me paralytic for, God, more than six months in some ways.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  I'm so sorry.

• 1:43:38Tim Ferriss?

  And I just love to... Yeah, thank you for saying that. And I'm horrified by the experience and also fascinated by it in a way because I don't know why those two things should be so different. And I'd just love to hear you expand a bit on the price that you've paid or your experience with dredging up a lot of these memories or recalling them, putting them down, and why writing seems, at least in my experience, to be so different from some other forms of expressing these things?

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, because you're alone. I mean, that's for me where the prayer and the God comes in. I do have a sense now that I didn't have back in the day. I mean, when I... By the time I started writing Liar's Club, how old was I? I don't know, 35? I'd been in therapy for 16 years. And I'd also had a prayer practice for, you know, a meditation and prayer practice for some years. I hadn't converted. I wasn't a Christian. I didn't... I was a Catholic, but I was about to become Catholic. And I was very active in recovery programs and I had a sponsor.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  And I also had, based on all of those efforts, I had done a lot of the processing and recovery. I had flown down to Texas when I was 23 years old and got my mother drunk on margaritas and told her, you know, "You tried to kill me with a butcher knife, and it's not because I was a bad kid and it ruined my life. And what the hell was wrong with you? What was going on with you?" You know, I had done a lot of that work before. And I tell people, when they tell me they want to write a memoir about some horrible stretch of childhood or some awful period of trauma, maybe they don't. Maybe they don't right now.

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  So I think I had a sense of... You know, when I was drinking, my idea of medicating myself or anesthetizing myself, that was all I knew how to do. That was what my parents told me to do. That was all they knew how to do, was try to drink it away. You know, my daddy was in the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, he went in at Normandy and he came out at Buchanwall. I mean, that's plenty of trauma. Plus, being married to my mother would have been simple. There was only one person with a weapon, as opposed to the Nazis. So, yeah, I think I'm a big fan of a hot bath.

• 1:46:14Speaker 02

  I'm a big fan of nutritious food. I'm a big fan of cardio. Even now, I mean, I'm 65. I don't do five dance classes a week, but I get up in the morning and I walk four miles. And then I do Pilates three or four times a week. And I take a dance class a couple of times a week. And all those things keep me in my body. And when I'm in a lot of pain, I take care of myself. When I was drinking, I felt like I had this screaming baby that I was holding, and I was screaming at it all the time to shut up. So, yeah, I think I still have, even writing anything now, I find very... I'm not dealing with anything like that. I'm so much...

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  But I'm also, I'm so much happier now than I've ever been in my life. I mean, I'm 65 years old. I've never been so happy in my life. I've never been less good-looking, had less social power, had, you know, any of the things that you would think would make me happy, joyous, and free. And I'm just, I wake up every day really feeling lucky to be alive and feeling loved and feeling like... Not every day. I mean, I wake up plenty of days and I'm, you know, mad as an old stompessant, but most of my days are pretty lit up.

• 1:47:41Speaker 02

  And it's a lifetime of practice. So I tell a lot of my students, my young students, you know, want to write about sexual assault or trauma of various kinds. Well, maybe, why don't you get some treatment for this first? Why don't you treat your heart first? Treat your body, treat yourself with a lot of care and see if this is what you want to write about right now. Something you can write about maybe five years from now or something, you know?

• 1:48:09Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give yourself about therapy if you were talking to your 19 or 20 year old self? And how were you first convinced to go to therapy? I remember you mentioning that long ago.

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  You know, I didn't have to be convinced. I mean, here's the other thing.

• 1:48:26Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't?

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no. And there weren't a lot of people saying, gee, I wish you'd stop drinking. I mean, I led a pretty isolated existence, the way a lot of people who grew up the way I grew up do. I mean, my idea of telling somebody how I felt, I remember right before I stopped drinking, I remember I was teaching sort of all over the academic ghetto around Boston. But I remember specifically one day at Tufts, I was copying something for a class and I was, I had dropped my kid off like vomiting out the side of the car before I dropped him off at daycare. I mean, and then I drove to Tufts and I was Xeroxing something and somebody said, how you doing, Mary? And I was like, you know, I want to blow my

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  fucking brains out. And that was my idea of telling somebody how I felt, making a glib, sort of awkward, socially awkward statement to somebody I hardly knew. And I'd been in therapy then for a while, but I was also drinking every day, everything I could get my mitts on. So.

• 1:49:26Tim Ferriss?

  What is good therapy to you? Because therapy is a term that's extremely broad. It's kind of like saying medicine, right?

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:49:34Tim Ferriss?

  There are so many different specialties. What has proven to be good therapy for you?

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  You know, I think it totally depends on the, on the person. I mean, the best there, the best therapist I ever had, I think, I mean, for me, the difference in therapy and recovery, I think, in therapy, I'm the baby and they're the mommy.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  And that model, sort of, especially when I first started, I just felt like I needed a lot of nurturing. And I had great therapists. You know, my first therapist, when I look back on things he said and did was insane. He would have been fired. He told me to go down, after he'd been seeing me nine months, and confront my homicidal, suicidal mother about all this horrible stuff she'd done to me. And I did it. And he said, "I won't see you until you do it."

• 1:50:23Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  I mean, nobody's ever done it.

• 1:50:28Tim Ferriss?

  In for a penny, in for a pound, yeah.

• 1:50:29Speaker 02

  I know. I mean, I look back on it, I was like, "He was crazy." Nobody's ever... I had a great therapist when my son was a baby, who was a psychologist, PhD psychologist, and who really helped me try to learn how to be a mother when I hadn't had one. And all the feelings that come up around what you didn't get when you were a child, when you have a child, the protection and stuff. It's funny, my son watches me with his daughter now and just says, "I don't know." Sort of gives me nothing but a stroke. And I said, "Let me just tell you, I was not this good with you." Like, "I was crazy about you and I loved you, but I didn't have what I have now, that

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  I have with her, that's just, I don't even break a sweat going in there. I can do this stuff." It's funny, I was in, I babysit one or two days a week. I was in Prospect Park this week, and I had taken her across the park in a stroller, and a thunderstorm broke out, I mean, pouring rain. And I've never shared DNA with somebody this good-natured as this baby. This baby coo, smiles, laughs, never cries. I mean, sleeps, eats, is just the best-natured kid. I used to babysit in high school and college, so I've taken care of a lot of babies, and she's just the easiest kid. I get across the thing, it's pouring rain, and she starts screaming, crying, like she's being beaten.

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  And I take her out of the stroller and I hold her and she calms down. I go to put her back in the stroller. She just starts screaming, crying again. Well, it's two miles across a muddy field in the pouring rain and I've got a stroller and a bunch of crap. And I've got this, you know, 27 pound unit, screaming unit. And I just had no problem doing it. And when I was 40 years old, 35 years old, it would have been like being beaten with a hose. I just thought, you know what, daddy was in the battle of the bulge. This is not that hard. You know, I just had the physical energy, even at my age, that I didn't know I had to do it.

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  And I got back to the house and I went to fold up the stroller. There was four inches of freezing water in the bottom of the stroller that I've been putting her in. And she was soaked through to her skin. Yeah, there was, she was perfectly reasonable to be, you know, now I understand. I could have just emptied it out and put her in the stroller and wrapped her up in a blanket. But I, I didn't know what it was, but I just thought, well, I'll get her home and it'll be fine. You know, I didn't feel like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm a terrible mother and I'm going to wind up trying to stab her with a butcher knife, which is how I felt when my kid was that age. You know, I didn't know that I wasn't going to be my mother. I wasn't, I didn't know that. So scary.

• 1:53:21Tim Ferriss?

  That is scary. Yeah. Super scary. And, you know, it sounds like, please correct me if I'm wrong, but you've learned in some form or fashion, or maybe many forms and fashions, to wear the world like a loose garment. I'd love to know if you agree or disagree because based on my reading.

• 1:53:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, okay. So at your first confession.

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. No.

• 1:53:44Tim Ferriss?

  Priest said to you, wear the world like a loose garment. What does that mean to you?

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think it's not, you know, the problem isn't whatever your mind is telling you. The problem is, the problem is the fear.

• 1:53:57Speaker 02

  And for me, the solution to fear is curiosity and presence. And I can't be terrified and curious at the same time. And so when I was walking the baby across the field, just all I was was physically uncomfortable. I mean, I was thinking, gee, can I shove this thing and hold her moose, you know, and get everything and get all this stuff? How am I gonna do, you know? And so I went crossways across mud fields. So I'm shoving the stroller and carrying her. I didn't know physically if I could do it. I was sort of dubious. I was thought, maybe I can't do this. But all I had to do was do it. I thought, well, if I get tired, I'll sit down.

• 1:54:40Speaker 02

  It'll rain on me a minute, then I'll get up and go again. Like, that's what we'll do. But I don't know. Here's the way I put it. I tell people it's like I have a trichony. It's like, most of the time, I walk fine. I run fine. I can, you know, squat more than my body weight and do advanced Pilates for an hour and 10 minutes. And I'm tough as a boot. But there are days that I don't feel that way, or there are moments where I get my kneecaps out and I fall on the ground. All I have to do is honor those moments. All I have to do is... I have a heating pad. I have a weighted blanket. My kids have a pit bull I'll bring to stay with me. Well, an idiot is my little comfort animal.

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  You know, I call people. I still have a sponsor. I still have a therapist I don't talk to all the time. But I didn't have to be convinced to go into therapy. I knew I needed it. But when I first started it, as you know, it was just so damn painful. And I just, for those of your listeners out there, if you're having a hard time, I just want to say, it's like you lance a boil and the infection's draining off. And if you can just get by that. It's gonna tell you that it's endless, but it's not endless. There's a bottom to it. So, did you ever smoke? You never did.

• 1:56:00Tim Ferriss?

  I was never a smoker, no.

• 1:56:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're just such a jock. You're such a specimen. You're such a specimen, Tim.

• 1:56:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we're all specimens. It depends on how we look on the autopsy table. But the, the, I was born premature, so I have respiratory issues in my left lung. And that was part of it. So I had a lot of breathing issues growing up to begin with. And secondly, I was, sports saved me. So, sports kept me out of a lot of trouble.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, I was good at sports and then I quit when I was like, I quit. I'm much more of a jock now than I was then. You know, I would ask you-

• 1:56:37Tim Ferriss?

  Why, did you ask about smoking?

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  I was gonna ask you about smoking because when you quit smoking, there's a phenomenon that happens. It's also when you quit drinking, but somehow it's more intense when you smoke. You'll have a craving for a cigarette. And the craving is as intense as it was the first day you quit. It's as overpowering. But if you just keep note of how long the craving lasts and how many of them there are, they're as intense, but they're not as long and as frequent. So it's the same thing about suffering when you first start therapy or you first lance that boil and you're unearthing some of the painful things you grew up with.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  It's as intense the first day. And you just feel like, oh my God, I'm in the burn ward and I just got snatched out of the fire. And every ounce of me hurts and I wanna run screaming down the street like my hair's on fire. And it just won't last as long as it did the first time. And so-

• 1:57:41Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent advice.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  For your listeners, if, you know, if you're just, you know, looking at hard things that you grew up with or you're trying to quit smoking, trying to quit drinking, trying to recover from trauma, I promise you, I will send you money if this is not true, that it will get easier. It's not linear and there will be those days when it's as painful as the first day and you'll think, but I'm no better than I was, but you are. You just, it doesn't feel that way.

• 1:58:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, excellent advice. Just a few more questions. I'm having so much fun. I could go forever, but I

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  You've got a lot to do, dude.

• 1:58:20Tim Ferriss?

  Do I? Do I though? I don't know. I mean,

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  Where in Austin do you live?

• 1:58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I spend most of my time downtown for recording and then live in the burbs outside of that. I love it in Austin and expect to be here for quite some time. I wanted to move here right after college. I didn't get the job and there was

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  Those morons. They screwed up.

• 1:58:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, you know, possibly. I also think that that could have been in everyone's best interest.

• 1:58:49Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:58:49Tim Ferriss?

  I think I make a quite terrible employee in most circumstances.

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 1:58:56Tim Ferriss?

  But at the time, and you know, I didn't expect this to lead here, but at the time that I was not given the green light to get an offer from Trilogy Software way back in the day, it seemed like a death blow, right? This seemed like the end of the world because I had put a lot of eggs in that basket. I didn't want to do anything that was recruiting on campus really otherwise. And I listened to and watched your Syracuse University commencement speech and

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  That's so nice of you.

• 1:59:30Tim Ferriss?

  And then I read the transcript and I think this is from the speech unless it was sort of mistranscribed, but here's the paragraph. "Almost every time I was super afraid it was of the wrong thing and stuff that first looked like the worst, most humiliating thing that could ever happen almost always led me to something extraordinary and very fine." So my question is, could you give us an example of that that comes to mind? Could be something humiliating. It could be a favorite failure, but anything that

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  Oh, I'll tell you.

• 1:59:57Tim Ferriss?

  As it turns out.

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

  When I first did a kind of moral inventory and recovery that they encourage you to do, I had a lot of resentments against God.

• 2:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  When you say they, this is in a 12-step program?

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Joan LeBong, you know,

• 2:00:12Tim Ferriss?

  Joan LeBong, right?

• 2:00:14Speaker 02

  Like, one of the things I really resented God for, my son, who was just this little beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed, and a tank of a boy, a natural kind of athlete, when he was little, he was sick. All the time. I mean, he would get a cold and he would get these sinus infections. His fever would go to like 105. We'd rush him to Children's Hospital in Boston. It was terrifying. We're always rushing to emergency rooms because his fever was so bleeding high and just so terrifying. And so I never slept. I never slept and I was

• 2:00:54Speaker 02

  depressed. I was probably postpartumally depressed and I was drinking. By then I had started, I'd decided drinking would help me take care of a sick child. Great idea, Mere. It's like the bad mom in the after-school special. And so what? And I remember, so when it came time to do Ignatian spiritual exercises, you're trying to find God in all things. Where is God in that? Where is God in a sick baby? I'll tell you a secret. When I actually looked at my life and the decisions I was making, I would have kept drinking. If I'd had one of those Playboy babies, you know, that like sleeps 12 hours a night and never is sick

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  and just, you know, coos and cuddles and like, and, and I had been able to, I would have kept drinking. If I'd had my granddaughter, who's like the easiest, like 12-hour night sleeper, eats everything you give her, laughs at everything you do, I would have kept drinking. I could not physically drink the way a real alcoholic needs to drink and take care of a kid who was sick all the time. Couldn't do it. And work and make a living. I couldn't do all those things. It's too hard. And so I don't think God sent pathogens into my infant son's body. I don't know how any of this works, but when I ask where God is in this, my own physical discomfort forced me to get sober.

• 2:02:26Speaker 02

  So my sister died this summer, very suddenly, of pancreatic cancer in less than a week.

• 2:02:32Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sorry too. You know, we were not in touch. We had a terrible childhood and we had not been really in touch for seven years. And that was my choice. And I remember saying to my therapist, isn't it going to be terrible when she dies? She said, yeah, it's going to be terrible anyway. And although it's horrible that she's dead, there's nothing. I feel my love for her. I don't have to defend myself against my love for her. The way I did when we were estranged.

• 2:03:14Speaker 02

  I can cherish and remember all the times we were there for each other. All the ages we were in each other's lives. And I would give anything for her to be alive, but I still think our not being in touch was the best thing for both of us. You know? I don't regret that. And there's this amazing gift to me of being in touch now with her son and her husband and her stepchildren. And I would give anything if she were alive. But there are gifts in this suffering that are real spiritual gifts. I practice when things happen that I find very disappointing.

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  My son had a film coming out, his first feature film coming out at Tribeca Film Festival. And it's a global pandemic, and so there is no Tribeca Film Festival. And he's raised somehow all this money and put years' worth of work in and moved heaven and earth. And you know what? The film's being released. He's got a great distribution deal. He just won Best Director at Fright Fest. And, you know, it's unfolding just the way it needs to unfold. It's getting curious about where the light is, you know? Just being curious about where the light is.

• 2:04:31Tim Ferriss?

  Getting curious about where the light is and the all-powerful reframe. And it is really incredible what can happen, as you said, when you...

• 2:04:43Tim Ferriss?

  Really get curious.

• 2:04:45Speaker 02

  I have to say this on

• 2:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  In the face of fear.

• 2:04:47Speaker 02

  On air, Tim, because I have to say it. I just, I have so many young people who come to me about sexual assault. So many young men who have come to me, my students, young writers, young poets. And your being open about this on this podcast has just been such a gift to all these young men.

• 2:05:08Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  So good for you. So good for you. So a horrible thing that happened to you that's being used to help a lot of, give a lot of people hope and it's going to prompt a lot of healing.

• 2:05:21Tim Ferriss?

  I hope so. And I've seen, seen a lot come out of the woodwork and it's been simultaneously, and I know you've experienced this certainly, it's been simultaneously appalling, rewarding, and brutal in a way. I mean, it's all of those things. I mean, there's a lot of pain and beauty in it. And, you know, I'll just mention that of my closest male friends, and there really aren't that many. I don't collect friends like little porcelain teacups or whatever people collect. I have a fairly small-ish circle and I would say 30% of my closest male friends

• 2:06:02Tim Ferriss?

  reached out to me after that podcast to describe their own experiences with sexual abuse that I knew nothing about. And these are people I've known for a very long time. So I hope there's healing.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  Of course there is. We're living, look, we're not curled up on the backwards of mental institutions and we both could be.

• 2:06:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. Very true. Well, Mary, we're going to talk again and I want to ask one more, one more question.

• 2:06:29Speaker 02

  Okie doke.

• 2:06:30Tim Ferriss?

  Which sometimes is a dead end. I'll own that if it is.

• 2:06:33Speaker 02

  Okay, then.

• 2:06:34Tim Ferriss?

  But we'll see where it goes. The question is, if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach billions of people, however many you want, a word, a phrase, a question, a quote, a poem, anything, what might you put on that billboard?

• 2:06:51Speaker 02

  That's so hardcore. Jesus. Oh my God. That is really, God, that's a little, if you could...

• 2:07:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's aggressive. It's aggressive.

• 2:07:01Speaker 02

  It's hardcore. It really is. It's a little javelina hogs. It's a pack of javelina hogs running out of the bushes at me.

• 2:07:10Tim Ferriss?

  And it doesn't have to be the one and only. This could just be the first billboard.

• 2:07:14Speaker 02

  The first billboard. You know, put down that gun. You need a sandwich.

• 2:07:23Speaker 02

  You need a sandwich and a hot bath. No, I know what I would put. I would put 90% of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath. That's what I'd put.

• 2:07:33Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. I love that. Well, Mary, this has been so much fun.

• 2:07:37Speaker 02

  Been a hoot.

• 2:07:38Tim Ferriss?

  I've really, really enjoyed this. People can find you at your website, marykarr.com. That's mary k a r r dot com. Twitter at marykarrlitt. Is there anything else you'd like to say, suggest, ask?

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  No, just like, let's, let's all heal. Let's all heal as a country. No matter how different we think we are, we're all suffering souls and we all want to heal this ribbon country of ours. So that's what I'm wishing for all of us and wishing everybody a lot of love and light today and a big, nice cigar.

• 2:08:17Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here.

• 2:08:18Speaker 02

  We're here.

• 2:08:19Tim Ferriss?

  Get curious. Look for, look for the light. Thank you, Mary.

• 2:08:22Speaker 02

  All right. Well, you take care. You go do you.

• 2:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  I will. And to everybody listening, we'll link to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, thanks for listening.

• 2:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange.

• 2:09:19Tim Ferriss?

  Esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep Pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod and I'm excited to test it out,

• 2:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  Pod4Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod4Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that. Pod4Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring.

• 2:10:46Tim Ferriss?

  Plus with Pod4Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod4Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking is just one example, is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night's sleep. Head to eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM to get $350 off of the Pod4Ultra. That's EIGHT-SLEEP, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim and code TIM, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod4Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. This episode is brought to you by AG1,

• 2:11:28Tim Ferriss?

  the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And 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.

• 2:12:14Tim Ferriss?

  So what is AG1? What is this stuff? 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. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible, using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral, superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals.

• 2:12:59Tim Ferriss?

  That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy, knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what Is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances.

• 2:13:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. 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. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.