Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics

Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio and TV personality. He is best-known for writing, along with the economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics (2005), SuperFreakonomics (2009), and Think Like a Freak (2014), which have sold more than 5 million copies in 35 languages. In this podcast, we discuss dozens of topics, including: his writing process, religion, how to "think like freak," parenting, favorite documentaries, and much, much more. Show notes and more at http://www.fourhourblog.com Just search "Dubner" Enjoy!

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Hace mucho que no te veo. Happy to have you guys. This episode is an experiment. The guest is Stephen J. Dubner. You may recognize his name. He's an award-winning author, journalist, radio and TV personality, best known probably for writing along with economist Stephen Levitt Freakonomics, which was a massive global bestseller along with Super Freakonomics. They've sold more than 5 million copies in 35, probably plus, languages at this point. This is the first episode where I attempt to interview someone I've never met before, never spoken with before.

• 0:40Tim Ferriss?

  And it's amusing and perhaps instructive for some of you and maybe entertaining because you'll notice it takes me a good 5 to 10 minutes to find my footing. I'm very nervous. I've never done this before. And Stephen is very gracious, but there's a clear difference in the beginning of the interview, the middle of the interview, and the end of the interview. We delve into some very deep stuff and my goal, because Stephen's been interviewed dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of times, was to ask questions perhaps he had not been asked before and to take him places perhaps he had not been before in interviews like this. I think it was a success. I'm very happy with this.

• 1:25Tim Ferriss?

  I had a blast doing it and I hope you enjoy listening to it. Without further ado, here's Stephen. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  No, with a seat in a broken tire.

• 1:43Speaker 02

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

• 1:54Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, Stephen, thank you for joining everybody on The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an interview I've been looking forward to for some time now, so thank you for making the time, first of all.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks for having me. This is, uh, I'm delighted to talk to you.

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, this is, uh, there's this connection to Freakonomics, at least, that most people are probably not aware of, which was I looked at the storytelling, the combination of storytelling and facts in Freakonomics, uh, multiple times when I was putting together The Four Hour Body, which is my second book, to try to figure out how to deliver something that has historically been very intimidating for people. Uh, often, there's a mathematical component in a way that is really easily digested. And I thought Freakonomics just knocked that out of the park, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree, and certainly that's spoken to by the number of copies sold, what is it, five million plus in 35 languages? Uh, but I just wanted to thank you for that. It served as a really useful model.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  You're welcome. I, I think it worked out pretty well for you, so whatever small, small part we played in it, I'm glad, uh, I'm glad it worked, yeah.

• 2:59Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, I've, I've consumed a ton of your material, and, uh, the, the first question, just as a writer, or someone who would like to think of themselves as a writer, uh, that I'd love to hear a little bit about, and I think the, at least in my particular case, the way that I've approached the books has changed a little bit over time as I've had more success and more resources and things like that. So, so the, the, the question I wanted to ask is, how do you collaborate with your, your co-author on many of these books, Stephen? I mean, what is the process for getting the material together and then threading it into the narrative?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  All right, so you asked, I'll answer, but I'll warn you, it's a, uh, probably not very interesting or useful answer. I don't know, maybe, maybe it is, but, um, so, yeah, the way this works is I have this great, phenomenal co-author named Steve Levitt, who's an economist at the University of Chicago. And what Levitt does mostly is empirical research. Find, uh, a scenario where he can find some data, or maybe you find some data first, or you come up with a question, you go hunting for data, and he writes academic papers. At least, this was what we did pretty much for the first two books, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics. And- And in some cases, it's pretty simple. He would have written an academic paper that I would then

• 4:20Speaker 01

  take and essentially translate into, you know, common English. And then, you know, we would talk it through certainly a lot and, you know, sometimes I'd ask him to explain parts of the paper, especially the theory parts. But then in addition to just, you know, translating it, one thing that I always try to do in writing is tell a story. So you can have a conclusion, a set of data that reaches a conclusion. Uh, we talked about, um, the economics of selling crack cocaine, for instance, or, you know, the data seeming to show that sumo wrestlers, for instance, collude with one another to manipulate the rankings.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  So the data in and of themselves are a good story, but most people don't really assimilate data or theory or rational argument the same way that they do a story. And I think that the power of a story is just unbelievably strong. And I, I, I don't think I'm saying anything that people don't know, but I think that a lot of really smart people, when they're trying to get a point across or when they're trying to persuade someone of their point of view, they forget why stories work so well. They work so well, I think for a number of reasons. One of which is that we're all narcissists to some degree. And so when we're hearing a story, we maybe even subconsciously insert ourselves into the narrative

• 5:42Speaker 01

  to kind of see, you know, how we'd play, like, man, I wouldn't have gone for that deal selling drugs for only, you know, eight bucks an hour, whatever. So the collaboration honestly takes many, many, many forms because not all, all of our work is so neat as having an academic paper. So I would say that for every single story, every single page really in any of our books, there's kind of a different iteration or version of how the collaboration takes place. Sometimes Levitt will have done a lot of heavy lifting and produced a, a story in data that I then translate. Sometimes it's something that I go out and do a lot of reporting on and then write a narrative, then I'll throw it to him and see what he has to say with it. Um, you know, he lives in Chicago, I'm in New York. We don't work together physically all that often.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And honestly, there's only one kind of work together that is practical at all, which is... Uh, basically brainstorming where it's nice to have the tight in-person feedback loop um for all other forms of collaboration, reading, editing, uh, you know, critiquing, saying this sucks. You know, we threw away hundreds of pages on Think Like a Freak. However, long this book is, we definitely threw away many more pages than we ended up with. Um, so you know, there's a lot of that back and forth. And honestly, I think it's great. I mean, I think one of the hardest things about being a writer is uh, critiquing your own work. And that's why any writer who's had a good editor knows how valuable

• 7:08Speaker 01

  that is. So if you have a collaborator who thinks like you do, but with a different angle, he's the economist, I'm the journalist, I think it helps make it stronger. So that's the collaboration.

• 7:18Tim Ferriss?

  No, I love digging into the process and I have a few related questions. The first is, and I want to get to your background in a little bit, but having come out of music, I'm really fascinated about how that came to be. But let's, let's start with something very granular, which is, how do you make a good story? What are the elements of a good story for you? And secondly, when you're brainstorming with Stephen, what, what, what types of things are you brainstorming? And what's the format for that?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  All right. So uh, I'll start with uh, what types of brainstorming. So for this book, it was really different. For Think Like a Freak, we had this idea, you know, we weren't sure we were going to do a third book. We didn't want to do a book if we thought it would be redundant or bad. And so we struggled with ideas for a while. We came up with one idea that we thought was great. For about a week, we thought this is the best idea ever. Then it turned out to suck also.

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  What was that?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  And then we

• 8:17Tim Ferriss?

  Just so curious.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  That was a book that was basically, in a way, a kind of big professional version of the idea that became Think Like a Freak. In other words, Think Like a Freak is meant to be a sort of a guide for people who want to solve problems, whether it's minor life hacks. You know, or major global reforms, right? But before we got to that, we were like diluted and wildly over ambitious. Where we thought we would actually describe and try to solve some of the world's biggest problems. We had this whole research agenda that we thought we could really make some headway. And then we realized we were just out of our minds and that wasn't gonna work.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  So, once we came up with this idea, the brainstorming was what are the kind of concepts that are, that go into Thinking Like a Freak? And we ended up with a book that has, I think, nine chapters. And within each chapter, sometimes there's two or three ideas. So, let's say there are roughly, you know, fifteen principles, right? Of Thinking Like a Freak. In the brainstorming, uh, periods, which went on, I would say for months, uh, not constantly for months, but whenever we'd see each other, I think we probably came up with like a hundred twenty. Um, and some of them turned out to just be, uh, not so interesting. Some of them turned out that we didn't really believe in them.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Some of them turned out to be maybe interesting and true, but they didn't have any data or stories that really illustrated them. And some of them, we collapsed into others. So, that was a really, you know, it, it, I, I, it's a really involved process. It's like, you know, the other things I've done in my life before I became a writer all the way, writing music and like even doing some carpentry. And I think at any, anytime you're making something, whether it's building with your hands and wood, or writing music, or writing words, you learn different ways of, you know, how do I know if this is a good idea or not? And it takes a lot of experimentation. And so, that, that even became kind of part of the message in this book is how to experiment,

• 10:22Speaker 01

  how to fail, how to quit things that aren't going well. And so, our brainstorming was about, you know, let's, let's, um, come up with as many ideas as possible and then put them under scrutiny and, and basically try to kill them off. And if they, they were, if they were unkillable, then we'd keep going with them. Um, in terms of what makes a good story, so this is really, so I, you know, I've always loved storytelling. I would argue that most people love storytelling, even if they don't really think about it. Mm-hmm. And, uh- The way I got in interested in economics, actually, originally was because of the work of Danny Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman.

• 10:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Amos Tversky, right? And, um.

• 11:00Tim Ferriss?

  I was one of, I was one of Danny's test subjects way back in the day at Princeton, in fact.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Oh, you were? Uh, what, what?

• 11:06Tim Ferriss?

  Not that he would, not that he would remember me. It was some excruciatingly boring, uh, I think it might've been called the, um, blanking, a T-test. It was a cognitive test where you had to click a button every time a certain square or circle appeared in the corner of a black screen.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah. What was, what was he looking for?

• 11:27Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I don't recall because at the time, I didn't think of him as, you know, Danny Kahneman in the way that he's thought of now. Uh, this was.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:38Tim Ferriss?

  Prior to a lot of the, the, the fame and attention and, and awards and whatnot. Uh, but, uh, oftentimes also as a subject, I mean, I've been a subject and an experimenter or really an assistant to an experimenter at UCSF in their Sandler Neuroscience Lab with Adam Gazali. And in many, many cases, more often than not, perhaps, you're not actually telling the subjects the, the true purpose of the test. So I don't recall.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 12:02Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  No, no, that's interesting because, you know, Will Kahneman, I mean, look, he, he's a good, Danny's a, he was a very good scientist for a number of reasons. The reason that I was so attracted to his work, and look, I was hardly alone. He did go on to, as you say, become very well-known, rightfully so. And his, his partner, Amos Tversky, uh, who died young, you know, Amos would've won a Nobel with Danny. Danny went on to win the Nobel in economics, even though he's a psychologist. And what made their work so fascinating to me was it was trying to explore how people make decisions, right? Incredibly basic, but incredibly important. But the way that they explained the ideas were in the version of stories.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  And so you'd say, you know, there's a military commander and he's got 500 men and if he goes route A. Uh, there's a ni- a hundred percent chance that eighty of them will be killed.

• 13:02Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And then you take the same story and you flip the numbers so that it sounds like a lower probability, but in fact, it's the same exact outcome. And you ask people, which would you prefer? And this is how you learn about risk aversion and loss aversion and, uh, you know, all, all kinds of great valuable ideas. So, like I said, what appealed to me is that they weren't just recitations of theory and data. They were stories. So I followed that work. It got me into economics generally. I found Steve Levitt. We started to do this Freakonomics work and so on. And then years later, I got to know Danny Kahneman a little bit. And once I said to him, um, you know, that the reason I got into his work so much

• 13:45Speaker 01

  was because of what I thought was the power of stories in, uh, in, in his research. And Danny said, oh, stories are terrible. You should never tell stories. Storytelling is the worst. I said, oh, great. Uh, why? What do you mean by that? And he said, well, stories don't contain any data and they don't have any time. They don't, they don't have a time series attached to them. And I realized that Danny kind of, uh, Danny thought I was talking about was not so much as what I think of as a story, but what I think of as an anecdote. An anecdote would be like, let's say we're talking, let's say, Ken, let's say we're talking about like drunk driving

• 14:29Speaker 01

  and the actual data and the numbers and so on. And I can tell you that, you know, the data seemed to show that if I'm a drunk driver versus a sober driver, I'm thirteen times more likely to get involved in a fatal crash, right? So that's what I tell you, the data say. And then you say, well, you know what? I've got an uncle, or my uncle's accountant, drinks every night at the tavern and drives home and he's never even had a fender bender.

• 14:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  That's an anecdote. That's like the anecdote, which is often the story that kind of disproves the rule.

• 15:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  But to me, what a story is, is it's got the narrative, but it does include the things that Danny Kahneman said you need to include, which is data, right? And time series. So data, because you need to know the magnitude of the story. Is it really important?

• 15:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  And time series, because you need to know if it was a kind of blip, or if it really, you know, persisted. And that, to me, are the elements of a good story, is data, a time element, a time series, and a narrative with characters that people can identify with. Oh, and by the way, it needs to all be true. So, you know, I'm a journalist by training. I'm a nonfiction writer, and I believe that, you know, the best kind of storytelling is where you've got real reporting, real numbers, and you can make an argument that acknowledges, you know, my argument is not perfect, it's not meant to be, but it's compelling because it is true.

• 15:51Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely. And the, I'm sure a lot of listeners have heard the expression, the plural of anecdote isn't data. The, now, the, in the self-experimentation world we're on, you know, N equals one a lot of the time. It's been very fascinating just to watch the quantified self movement, for instance, where I was one of the first attendees, I was at the very first quantified self meetup at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica. And it's been very interesting to see how much, how much good science has come of that, if people are able to actually rationally look at the amplitude of the delta and the changes in various things, but also how many, how many correlations are thought to be causation?

• 16:35Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, how many spurious connections there are, and how it's so easy to manufacture those if you want to find them. But I want to come back to stories for a second, because your background is, and I don't want to, we don't have to go line through line, line by line, rather, through your entire upbringing, but one thing that struck me is very fascinating, thinking of you as, in many ways, a sort of hyper rational person, I would love to hear how you chose your own religion, and to give people a little bit of background, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were raised sort of devout Roman Catholic. After your parents had, it appears, converted to Catholicism, but then chose to,

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  as yourself, as an adult, practice Judaism. So I'd love to hear how you made that decision and why you made that decision.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Great, yeah. So first of all, I appreciate your thinking of me as hyper rational, but I'm probably not, really. I mean, even though, you know, a lot of the Freakonomics stuff has been about trying to, you know, apply rational theory to things, a lot of it is also about understanding that we've all got these biases that, you know, kind of make us human and make us different, which I, you know, which I think is good. So the idea is not, I would say the idea is not for all of us to strive to be purely rational. The idea is to strive to, you know, achieve the greatest collective and individual good we can while acknowledging that many people often do things that don't seem rational.

• 18:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  So I would just add that caveat. So, yeah, so my, so I came from a really weird and wonderful family. So my parents were this pair of Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of typical first-generation American Jews here, who before they met each other, they were both, my mom was, I guess, they were both early twenties, early to mid twenties. Before they met each other, this was in New York during the Second World War, they both ended up converting to Catholicism. For very different reasons and under very different circumstances. My dad had been, was a soldier in the Second World War, so he'd been overseas and had

• 18:41Speaker 01

  a kind of realization that he needed a big change in his life. My mother was a ballerina, very serious, kind of becoming successful at that here in New York, and she fell under the tutelage of a mentor, a dance mistress, who was a Roman Catholic. And so the two of them, like I said, before they met each other, both converted. And this was, as you can probably imagine, a pretty big deal in their families at that time.

• 19:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Especially, but that caused major, major, major trauma within their families. Then they met at a Catholic church as these two former Jews who had this huge thing in common. They happened to fall in love. They both became and remained very, very devout as Catholics, and they really started a life over. You know, we talk- A lot in Freakonomics about quitting and the upside of quitting. My parents, I mean, I sometimes think I've been a little brave in the stuff that I've quit. My parents quit everything. They quit their religion, which meant quitting their families. They left the city, the only city they ever knew. And they were city people and they moved to

• 19:51Speaker 01

  the boondocks of upstate New York on this little, kind of broken down farm where my mom, I mean, my dad was a wonderful human who had a lot of health issues and died quite young when I was a little kid. My mom was just this incredibly strong, forward-thinking, productive person who just picked up the whole family on her back and carried us on. So there were eight kids. I was the youngest and, you know, dead father, kind of middle of nowhere, no money, and very, very, very, very Catholic family. And that, all that said, all that said, which might sound like bad stuff or tough stuff, was, you know, I was very happy. It was, you know, it was a, it was a great experience. You know, my

• 20:33Speaker 01

  family was great and I felt loved and I felt encouraged to do stuff that was, that made me happy. So years later, went to college, started a rock band. The rock band was my life for five years. We took it very seriously. Got a record contract with Arista Records in New York, which led me to move to New York. And at that point, I kind of decided, having gotten some exposure to some people who'd been really successful in rock and roll, you know, just getting to meet, you know, often for really short time to talk to like someone like Bruce Springsteen about what life was like and R E M, who we knew a little bit more because we were from the South and they were from the South. And I

• 21:14Speaker 01

  realized that that dream was awesome, but it wasn't the dream that I really wanted for my life, to live that kind of life on stage and traveling. So I quit the band and then here I was in New York and I decided to pursue writing full time. And living in New York, I started to Um, you know, I was exposed to a whole world of Jewishness and Jewish thought that I

• 21:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Never really encountered. And I knew my parents had been this thing called Jewish, but I knew so little about it, Tim. It's like comical and embarrassing now. Like, most of what I knew about being Jewish came from Woody Allen movies, which is, you know, not, not necessarily, you know, normative. So, anyway, I began to study and explore and to make a very long story relatively short, um, I decided that I, you know, as gradual and slow, I decided that I was going to return to Judaism. And even though I'd been brought up in a very devout setting, or maybe because I'd been brought up in a very devout setting, I didn't have a lot of appetite for being very observant. So, I did what I think of as return to being Jewish. Uh, return because, you know, my parents had been, my entire

• 22:25Speaker 01

  extended family, most of whom I didn't even know about. I'd never met until I started to seek them out. Um, so I returned to that and became, you know, now I'm just another typical Upper West Side Jewish New Yorker, uh, not particularly observant, but very, very, very appreciative of a lot of the traditions in Judaism, as well as a lot of the traditions in Catholicism and in other faiths and so on. And, you know, to me, a religious way of looking at the world is not that dissimilar from, you know, whatever, an economic way of looking at the world, a psychological way of looking at the world. In, in all the, you know, religion, I always think of the word comes from a, a Latin version, uh, I

• 23:07Speaker 01

  think relegare, I want to say, and it means to bring order from chaos. And I think no matter what, you know, and you and me and people like us, people listening to this, no matter what your avenue or your, your actual mode of doing this is, we're all trying to figure out, you know, how to make sense of stuff, how to be productive, how to get what we want while treating other people with the right kind of, uh, balance of respect and, and all that. And so I don't see religion and science as being anywhere near as, you know, contradictory as some people do. I think, I think there's just a lot of value in, in a lot of systems for looking at the world, seeing how people get to where they get, how they make decisions. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's the story.

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Was there, was there something, what, what drove you to explore? Re-embracing or embracing Judaism, was it, for instance, the, simply the, the social environment, and I think that's, that's not a bad reason, certainly in New York.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:07Tim Ferriss?

  That, that opens up a lot of conversations you wouldn't otherwise have, a lot of relationships you might not otherwise have, uh, or was there some type of longing for something that you didn't have, or hadn't experienced that led you to that, or something else entirely?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I would say definitely those two things, um, and probably another, you know, four or five things, like, um, you know, it's funny, my co-author Steve Levitt sometimes talks about when he realized that he was born to be an economist, or at least a certain kind of economist.

• 24:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  And it was, um, and it was in college, and, uh, you know, he was a very smart kid, super, super smart kid, um, and he ended up going to Harvard, and he got to Harvard, and as Levitt tells the story, he was really bad at math, and had always been pretty bad at math, and, um, and so he didn't thrive in a math setting at Harvard, but when he took, uh, you know, Econ 101 or 10 or whatever it's called, he said, you know, he would come out of class feeling that, feeling as if everything that had been said in the class was the most obvious thing in the world. It wasn't the math that clicked with him, it was a certain way of looking at the world and feeling like you intuitively got it, identified

• 25:26Speaker 01

  with it, appreciated it, and it got you excited. And that's when he decided that, you know, Econ was the way, the, the kind of lens that fit his eye. And for me, when I started, when I moved to New York after quitting my band, um, I just accidentally, you know, fell in with a bunch of people. I had a girlfriend at the time who was studying to be an actress, and she had this acting teacher, a guy named Ivan Cronenfeld, who became and remained for many years, and still to some degree, one of the most important people in my life. And, you know, I, I'm 50, I'm guessing many of your listeners, if not most, are, are quite a bit younger. You know, I can't stress enough the, the value in finding

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Physical, real people to be mentors, you know, I just think there's um, you know, as a kid who grew up kind of without a father, I never wanted to find like a substitute father, that just seemed cliched, but yeah, I did have a series of men in my life who were incredibly generous and wise and teaching me and sometimes, you know, some of what they said didn't resonate at all, you have to, you have to be your own editor, but Ivan Croninfeld was this guy who was not religious really at all, but had a deep, deep, deep uh well of uh learning and wisdom uh that had been informed by Judaism and that extended to culture, you know, he was an acting teacher, this wasn't about religion per se, it extended to culture, it

• 26:49Speaker 01

  extended to sports, it extended to politics, and it resonated with me the same way that for Steve Levitt studying econ at Harvard resonated with him, and I just thought, man, this feels substantial to me, feels interesting, feels productive, it feels worthwhile, and by the way, this is the tradition in which I was meant to be born, but wasn't, and so that's kind of, it was a very accidental, I was not looking to make any kind of, you know, I was a very happily lapsed Catholic and planning to stay lapsed, I wasn't looking to reinvigorate my religious life, um but I fell into, like I say, a kind of a tradition and a set of, you know, ideas that really resonated for me.

• 27:34Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's, it's been, it's been, um, I love that story and it's, it's been fascinating for me to, to witness some of my close friends who have re-embraced religion, most often uh Judaism, uh one who comes to mind, you may, you may have bumped into him at some point, is A.J. Jacobs who-

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Oh sure, yeah, yeah, I, yeah, I love his stuff, yeah, he's great.

• 27:56Tim Ferriss?

  So he described his relationship to Judaism up to having children as, uh, I think he said, I am to Judaism as the Olive Garden is to Italian, was the way he put it, and, and it was the children, uh, having his first child that, that really brought about the question, how do I raise this being, and I wanted to sort of segue- In a way to think like a freak. Obviously, there are all these these principles, and I've really enjoyed reading the books that help one to test assumptions, uncover biases, become a better thinker, ideally get better results. And those include learning to say, I don't know, putting away your moral compass, thinking small. Well, I want to revisit a

• 28:40Tim Ferriss?

  few of these, certainly, but what are the, if you could choose one or two of these to, from the book, to instill in your children, you have two children, is that right?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:52Tim Ferriss?

  Which would they be and why? If you had to kind of choose the one or two what you would view as force multipliers, or otherwise, for your kids, what would they be?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's interesting you ask that question, because my kids, it's, you know, look, I think parenting is the most awesome science experiment ever. So you've got an, you've got an N of one or two, or maybe three or four these days. And what's so interesting, among many things, is how, how different two kids from the same gene pool can be. So I will say this, my, so in answer to your question, I would have a really different answer for the two kids. So

• 29:34Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  My boy is 13, his name is Solomon, which is my dad's name, before my dad became Catholic and became Paul. So Solomon Dubner is my son and was my original Jewish father. And Solomon is, God, I mean, you know, I love my kids to death, but my, my feeling for him is like very, very deep in a way that is unusual, that in, from an angle that is just really different from my love for my daughter. And it's because he is attracted to things and thinks about things, just in a very different way from my daughter. And so I, you know,

• 30:19Speaker 01

  I think a great virtue in a human is when you are yourself in all circumstances, right? I love the idea that you meet someone who's, let's say, well-known, or at least, you know, you really admire their work, and then you meet them, and they turn out to be as substantial as you thought. Meanwhile, it really depresses me when, you know, you meet someone who you think is like this really great, whatever, public servant or whatever, and then you see them tearing into somebody and being a real shit, you know?

• 30:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  That bums me out.

• 30:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the hero with clay feet experience is pretty horrible.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, I, I, I very much value the idea of a hu- a human being who's consistent across circumstances. That said, I realize that to be a good parent, I feel like I need to be really different with the two of my kids, because they're just a total- they've got a totally different set of likes and dislikes, talents and flaws, and, and curiosities and so on. So, with my son, he really wants to be, uh, like a, a soccer journalist. That's, that's his dream. And, um, so with him, I try to be, um, I, I try to teach him a lot of the kind of rules of Freakonomics, which is, uh, a- a- and he's

• 31:38Speaker 01

  real- I have to say, he really picks on it, picks up on it really quickly. So, like, uh, today, this morning, at like six o'clock, we both get up early, and he came in and he said, you know, um, ever since I bought that Juan Mata, uh, jersey, Mata's been on a tear, and he scored in like almost every game. And then he looks at me with a smile and says, "I'm sure it was my buying the jersey that caused him to score all those goals." And then he says to me, "Correlation does not equal causality, right, Dad?" So, I love that. I love that he finds, you know, obviously it's a simplistic version of a mistake that we all make, but I like that he's kind of thinking that way. So that's the kind of thinking I talk about with him. With my daughter, which really interesting

• 32:19Speaker 01

  is, in, in our world, at least, living in New York City, girls, I find, once they get, um, and I didn't know this, having not been a girl, but my wife, having been a girl, knew this, that girls, the social, uh, circle pole thing is so intense, like in middle school. And- What I see that doing on young women and girls is that um it puts a lot of pre- they they they seem to care a lot more about what other girls and occasionally boys think of what they're doing than getting just organically excited about what they're doing.

• 32:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  In other words, the boys seem to just charge off and say, I wanna do this, you know, I'm gonna do this, I may be good, I may be bad, I'm doing this, this is what I like to do, whether it's, you know, karate or writing or whatever. And with girls, from what I've seen, and this is not scientific at all in this circle, is that um, you know, there there's a lot of uh social comparison and stuff like that. So with my daughter, uh I'm just always talking to her about uh thinking on your own and what it means to really figure out what your preferences actually are and whether you're choosing a preference because it's what everybody does and it's kind of conventional and convenient

• 33:38Speaker 01

  or whether it really turns you on, um because, you know, I just think that if something doesn't turn you on, you're not gonna wanna do it very much, if you don't do it very much, you're not gonna get very good at it, then in the end you'll be you'll be unhappy for it.

• 33:50Tim Ferriss?

  No, that that makes perfect sense. How how old is your daughter?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Twelve.

• 33:54Tim Ferriss?

  Twelve. Oh, got it. All right. So they're uh, are they close? Are your are your kids close to to each other?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're they're very, very close. I mean, you know, they they they fight um

• 34:05Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  sometimes, like all siblings do, but yeah, they're they're kinda weirdly like this little old married cu- I I I when when they're out of sight and they don't know where around, you see them, they they look exactly like a married couple, like, and, you know, he'll do things for her, she'll do things for him, she'll complain about the food a little bit, but in in many ways, they're total, total opposites. He would be very happy eating nothing ever, ever, ever, except for meat.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  And she became a vegetarian at age nine. So that's just, you know, that's the, do you have, do you have kids?

• 34:39Tim Ferriss?

  I do not, I do not. I think about, I think about kids a lot. I do want a family ultimately. I've, I've got to figure out the sort of girlfriend, wife component first.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that can help.

• 34:50Tim Ferriss?

  That can help, although I live in San Francisco where all formats are possible, so who knows?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:56Tim Ferriss?

  But I don't, I don't have kids. I think about, I'm trying to do, I'm trying to dig my wells before I'm dry in the sense that I'm trying to do as much research and talk to people who appear to be good parents. You know, the anecdote that you brought up about your, your son in the jersey and saying, you know, causation doesn't, or I'm sorry, correlation doesn't equal causality, right? That reminded me of a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett, he's one of the top athletic coaches in the country, works with Olympic athletes, top CrossFit Games athletes, et cetera. And his kids really know all of his principles. They've embodied them all. So for posture and whatnot, and he was having, it was 60 minutes or somebody was over at his house.

• 35:37Tim Ferriss?

  And the woman who's interviewing him was having a lot of trouble doing a, performing a deadlift with, with no weight, just picking up a box off the floor. And he goes, well, let me show you some good technique. We, we, we can, we can pull in a professional athlete and he pulls in his five, I think it was like a five or six year old daughter. Who can explain exactly, you know, how not to pronate your feet and everything.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Awesome, awesome.

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  But I don't yet have kids, but I am thinking about it a lot. And, you know, the question of how much you can form someone versus how, how much of it is nurture? Versus nature. And what's been so fascinating to me, as many of my friends have kids, is that

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  as one example, this isn't always the case, but I, you know, I went to, grew up on Long Island, then went to, transferred to a boarding school, went to Princeton. You know, the, the women that I've spent and the, the girls, the women, I've spent a lot of time around tend to be very well educated and, and sort of power women in a lot of senses. And a good portion of them, up until the point they have two kids, boy and a girl. Uh, tend to have very uh sort of nurture focused views of gender stereotypes. If that makes sense like, well, you know, like, like men and women, maybe they're different on some levels. But a lot of it is socialized and then they have a boy and a girl and they're like, oh, my God, these two could not be more than different.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:00Tim Ferriss?

  And uh, I'm curious to know, uh, you know, if you were try, if, if you were trying to form someone who's uh, help form someone who's a little bit older. Let's just say that you're the mentor in this case, and I was very fortunate like you to have uh, as I traveled around and was away from home, you know, a wrestling coach. I can, I can point to very specific people who had tremendous impact on me and other boys around me. So if you, if you're the mentor, uh, and you have, uh, let's say a boy to keep it simple, uh, or just, I mean, in context for me, who's in say 10th, 11th grade and you're trying to improve their thinking, all right?

• 37:40Tim Ferriss?

  And this um, relates to, you know, a lot of what you've written about, uh, what, what are some of the, the sort of key? If you were gonna lay out a curriculum for them to try to train their brain, train their behavior, uh, what would, what would some of the first steps look like?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a really, really good and really hard question.

• 38:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's a tough question. It's a tough one. It's easier for me to ask it than for you to answer it.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I like it a lot. That's the kind of question that I would like to have thought to ask someone much smarter than me to see what they said. Um, so I'll tell you, um, I think, I think I'm gonna have a hard time coming up with the actual, actual curriculum. But here's one thing I've noticed that I think is really valuable. So, um, I think one, I don't quite wanna call it a mistake, um, but one bias or blind spot that I think a lot of people have is they try to pattern their success after people who have been really successful.

• 38:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  And the problem is that most of the people that have been really successful are anomalous for one reason or another. Um, or maybe for 10 reasons. So like, If, you know, if there's a kid out there who says, you know, I like design and I like technology, I would like to be Steve Jobs, so let me read everything I can about him and try to do everything he did. That should work, right? And I think that's, um, a prima facie, uh, uh, uh, a spurious idea. Um, but beyond that, when you, uh, whenever you're dealing with anomalies, people who have been super, super, super successful, um, you have to appreciate how rare that

• 39:29Speaker 01

  is. And, and there's a counterpoint to that, which is this. Um, and I learned this when I was studying writing. So after I quit my, uh, after I quit playing music, I, uh, I wanted to, you know, I didn't know exactly what kind of writing I wanted to do, whether it was academic, be a professor, write in journalism and so on. So I went to graduate school and I got an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia, which was a great experience for me. And, um, and I learned there that, uh, um, among many other things is that it was a lot harder, at least for me, to learn writing from great writing than it was to learn from really shitty writing. Oh, that's fascinating. Okay.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Because when things are really good, you know, if you read a great book or listen to a great piece of music, or even look at a great athlete, um, you know, there's a kind of natural inclination to want to copy it or mimic it. And like I said a few minutes ago, all the forces and inputs that went into producing that, you know, there are A, a lot of inputs and B, some of them you're not going to have and C, there are these elements of randomness and luck. Right. Um, so if I read, you know, a novel that I think is a great novel, it's Dostoevsky or Philip Roth or whatever, you know, Donna Tartt, whatever I think is this great book I've read, and then say, oh, this is my model, this is what I should pattern myself on, there's just all kinds of reasons why that can't or won't work, including the fact that

• 40:58Speaker 01

  it's going to take you away from being your natural, your best natural version of yourself. On the other hand, if you read really bad stuff and you look at failures, I think there's a tremendous amount to be learned by failures. So first of all, we do try to celebrate failure to some degree in, uh, in this new book. Not failure, quah failure, but because, you know, it's a, it's an experiment. You need to fail and move on to know what's gonna work. But with something like writing, or with sports, or with just patterning your life on somebody else's, um, I think if you can look at the mistakes, the things that don't work, I think it's a lot easier to not do the terrible things than it is to try to do the amazing things.

• 41:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  So that's, that's what I would, that's one kinda very, very narrow part of the gospel I would preach if someone was foolish enough to come to me as a mentor.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  No, that makes perfect sense. I mean, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes because, uh, you have, for instance, these, these savant-like performances on the soccer field, just to bring up soccer again. And it's, it's very difficult to dissect that excellence, uh, like you said, because of all the inputs. Whereas if, if, if you're even a mediocre writer starting out and read something terrible, there's a good chance you could pinpoint a handful of the things that make it terrible, at least for you, subjectively. And, and, uh, no, that makes, that makes a lot of sense to me.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  And never, and never do them again.

• 42:29Tim Ferriss?

  And never do them again. One of the things that popped up in, in this new book, and I underlined it and, and starred it for myself, was, uh, the, the origins of the word sophisticated. Uh, I thought this was so fascinating. So the footnote, I'm just gonna read this, and it says, uh, let's see here. Uh, the, the, the sentence leading to the footnote is da-da-da, because they don't, they don't pass the smell test or have never been tried because they don't seem sophisticated enough. And then it goes down to the footnote, which is, it's not even clear that sophistication is such a worthy goal. The word is derived from the Greek sophists, or sophists, uh, you could probably tell me. Uh, itinerant teachers of philosophy and rhetoric who didn't enjoy a good reputation, which is hilarious, uh, that, that's in quotation marks.

• 43:13Tim Ferriss?

  One scholar writes, "They were, quote, 'more concerned with winning arguments than arriving at truth,' end quote." And I, I have just encountered, and I'm sure I'm guilty of this as well, so many people who seem to... Waste their intellectual horsepower on winning arguments as opposed to arriving at truth or getting results.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, how would you suggest that someone try to cure this? I think it's, I think it's a huge problem and there's just this cognitive surplus of smart people who waste their innate horsepower on just nonsense, kind of mental masturbation. Uh, so I'd be curious to know how you, if it's possible, and if so, how to just help someone overcome that tendency. Let's just assume that they kind of want to fix that. Uh, do you have any thoughts?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Well, you know, what we advise, I mean, what you just read from is a section where I guess we're talking about the advantages of thinking like a child.

• 44:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  That's it. That's the section, right? Yeah, so, I mean, you're right. It's both very, very, very hard, but really simple. But the simple and the hard are not the same category of, of, uh, option here. Because what I mean is, it's hard because you understand why people want to appear sophisticated, right? We have reputations, we have egos, depending on what circle you're in, if you're in an academic or a high-end, um, you know, business or tech circle, there's a hu- or finance, there's a hu- the coin of the realm is appearing to know a lot, it's appearing to know more than other people, it's appearing to know the kind of thing that other people may not

• 45:00Speaker 01

  know, and it's appearing to have a clever quote take on something, right? And all of that is good. All of that can be great. I don't mean to downgrade any of that. The problem is, if, if that is your, you know, MO constantly, then you'll often miss a lot of the lower hanging fruit, which are simple, clever, uh, more obvious points that can be just as fruitful, if not more so.

• 45:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the Occam's razor type of stuff, yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  E- exactly. So, a- and, and I very much agree with you that it's a drag to see these people with huge mental CPU, you know, either doing, you know, thinking about something or working on something that's just not very, whatever, fruitful or productive for a lot of people, or just as often, especially in the-

• 45:55Speaker 01

  In the realm of public intellectualism and media and stuff, just people totally preaching to the choir. So that's, I mean, look, pick a media outlet, any media outlet, just about, that features, you know, some kind of public intellectual, whether it's an op-ed page in a newspaper, or a cable news channel with the talking heads and so on. And what you basically find is people on either side of the aisle who present themselves as extraordinarily sophisticated, making arguments that are absolutely never going to actually persuade anyone. They're totally, they sound super, super, super, super smart and sophisticated, but they're doing nothing more than preaching to the choir. You can say, "Well, okay, that's a way to make a living." And that's fine, you know, who am I to judge that? But if

• 46:38Speaker 01

  your goal is to actually persuade anyone of anything, or to actually enlarge in society in any way, I think it can be a real detriment to act as if sophistication is a goal in and of itself. And so, that's why it's hard. There's a lot of incentives to appear that way. The reason it's easy, though, or why it can be easy, is all you have to really do is stop faking it, and stop BSing, and stop pretending you know everything, and, you know, think a little bit more like a child, follow natural curiosities. If you acknowledge what you don't know, you can start to, like you've done, you know, "I want to do X better," whether it's cooking, or working, whatever, "How do I do it? I

• 47:19Speaker 01

  have my, a head full of preconceptions and old ideas and conventional wisdom. Are they true? Maybe some of them are, but if I want to find out what's most true for me, I can experiment, I can get a lot of feedback, and I can figure out what's actually true." And, so, look, I think the problem is for someone like you, Tim Ferriss, per se, you know, these tendencies aren't so foreign. For a lot of people, for a lot of us, and I'm sure for you in some circumstances, too, it's just so much easier to kind of get in the, to stay in the main flow of the conventional wisdom, where, you know, you want to look like the smart guy who has all the answers, even if the answers are not true.

• 48:01Tim Ferriss?

  No, it is. I mean, it is the easier path, right? Yeah. And I was looking at the, you know, at the new book and at some of the, the principles. And what struck me, living in Silicon Valley and being very heavily involved in tech, is that if I, if I try to dissect the failures and the successes within my portfolio of startups, right? And you look at, Yeah. say the, uh, you know, Uber, the, the app, Yeah. for instance, which has just exploded. And I was one of the first three advisors, three to five advisors pre-seed money to Uber. Well done. And, uh, thank you. I mean, a lottery ticket, to be sure. Uh, but on the other hand, I, people think of Uber as this ubiquitous service.

• 48:44Tim Ferriss?

  And you start to, I can draw these examples from my own experience. Be willing to think small, right? I mean, Uber started with two or three, well, certainly one, cars. I remember proto, uh, testing the prototype, you know, driving around San Francisco, when nothing had really been figured out, aside from the market opportunity and a basic, minimally viable product. And then you have, you know, appreciating the upset of quitting. I can point to serial entrepreneurs who have been successful, I think, in large part because they've known which project, projects to quit, which to put to bid. Right. And, uh, perhaps the, the one that really jumps out at me, um, even more so than those, is, you know, make sure you're asking the right questions, solving the right problems.

• 49:28Tim Ferriss?

  So this solving the right problem, it doesn't matter if you get the right answer if you're solving the wrong problem or a problem that is not worthy of your talents, right? And this is, this is a continual question, uh, among venture capitalists is, you know, are you guys solving the right problem? Like, I will back you guys, but not for this company because you're choosing the wrong opportunity. And, uh, what I'd love to do, to know, uh, is, like you said earlier, you'd come up with a hundred and twenty or so, principles, uh, which, which were the last to go? Where you're like, oh, these are my babies. I don't want to kill them. I love these. I really want to put these in. What were some of the, the principles that didn't make it in the final cut that?

• 50:09Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, you know, ah, in an alternate universe where there were version B, these would be in.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the single most prominent example by a long shot is one that didn't quite not make the cut, but went from being about thirty pages to maybe half a page.

• 50:28Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  And, um, and that was this idea, this is, this, uh, like I said, this was, this book was a real struggle to get started right. Because it was, it needed to be a fairly sequential thing, which might sound like, of course, books are sequential, but ours are usually not.

• 50:47Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, it made a perfect sense because my books are modular in the same way as your first, as your first book.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  But this one, we wanted it to be sequential. And moreover, the most, the biggest thing we wanted it to be that like the tone and pace and weight and all that stuff had to be right. Because we didn't want it to feel preachy, right? We didn't want it to be like, hey, hey, you should wanna be like us and be like us like this. And we also didn't wanna be, hey, you should think like a freak because, uh, you know, you can fix the world and, you know, this and that are wrong and you better get out there and do. We didn't, we didn't wanna be that. So the, the, this one idea that we had that we felt was, um, really, really, really important, but we couldn't pull it off in the original form, was this concept that we called first put away your moral compass.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  And so it did survive in literally like maybe, maybe a page in the book. But this was like, like maybe a thirty page chapter that began the book. And the whole idea was that, um, if you wanna solve a problem, you almost cer- any problem that you care enough about to wanna solve, you almost certainly come to it with a whole lot of ideas about it. Ideas about why it's an important problem, uh, what is it that bothers you exactly? Who are the villains in the problem? All, all these kinds of things. So like, if you're an environmentalist, if, if, if you're an environmentalist.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And you believe that really one of the biggest tragedies of the last hundred years is the people despoiling the environment. The minute you hear about an issue that kind of abuts the environment, whether it's honeybee collapse, or something having to do with air quality, your immediate kind of moral position is, well, I know exactly what the cause of that is. It's caused by people, human beings, being stupid and careless and greedy and so on. Now, that may be true, but it also may not be true. Our point is, if you operate, if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, you know, first and foremost, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  You're going to assume you know a lot of things you don't. You're going to assume you know a lot of things when in fact you don't. And you're not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don't happen to see the world the way you do. Right. And so, we wrote, you know, reams and reams and reams and reams and reams about this with all these kind of examples, and it was just terrible. It was some of the worst writing I'd ever done. And I think in retrospect, it was just because, you know, that's not the kind of writer, you know, we try to be kind of the opposite of preachy, and we couldn't help it get out of being preachy. And then, I have a friend, a dear friend named Jonathan Rosen, who's a wonderful writer and editor, and Jonathan I brought in toward the end of this book, and I asked him to

• 53:44Speaker 01

  read some chapters and just give me some feedback. And I gave him this unwieldy version of this moral compass chapter, and he's very sweet, so he didn't say like, you know, Dubner, this is terrible. He just said, yeah, it's kind of meanders, and it's a little da-da-da. And then, so I killed it. I totally, totally, totally, totally killed it, threw it in the trash. And then, like, three days later, he calls up, and he says, you know, I was thinking about your moral compass idea, and it reminded me of how sailors, you know, hundreds of years ago, when sailing ships first started to become really reliant on a ship's compass... Um, it worked out pretty well most of the time, but then they found that sometimes

• 54:26Speaker 01

  they would get thrown really, really, really off course by following the compass and they couldn't figure out what it was. And it turns out that they were using more and more metal in their, you know, they were carrying around swords and tools and even metal buckles on their clothes and those, the metal was throwing off the compass and they didn't know it. And he said, so as a, as a, as a way to fight that, they had to like isolate the compass. Like sometimes they would build a big lead box for the compass or something, or just have like a no metal zone. And he said, that is actually really what you're talking about is don't, you know, throw away the moral compass and don't be preachy about it, but learn to protect it so that you can whip out your moral compass when you need to, but that it doesn't get thrown off course.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  And once he gave me this unbelievably beautiful metaphor that, um, I think I used, uh, you know, I wrote maybe two sentences about that to kind of place the moral compass idea in the book. Then it felt like we could sort of rescue it. So that was a long, unwieldy explanation for your much better question about, you know, what it was that bit the dust. It didn't quite bite the dust, but it was resurrected only by the intervention of a friend who had a better way to help frame the argument.

• 55:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man, I, I, I would love to chat with you another time just about writing, honestly. I, I.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Any, anytime. Honestly, it's my favorite subject and no, you know, most normal people couldn't care less about writing, you know, but, uh.

• 55:52Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. I love talking about it because it's talking about crystallized thought. It's talking about refining thought and what, what is, what could be more interesting to me anyway? I just find it so fascinating. What I'd love to do, just in the last few minutes, because I want to be respectful of your time and I know you're, you're, you've got a lot on your plate right now, is to just ask a couple of rapid fire questions.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  And of course I'll have, uh, links to, to your books and, and so on, uh, the podcast and everything else that, that you're up to in the show notes for everybody. So that will be very easy, but I'm just going to knock out a couple of rapid fire questions and, uh, we'll see where they go. So the, the first is, uh, what is your favorite movie or documentary or, you know, two to three that come to mind and why?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Uh, so, uh, I would say the Seven Up series of documentaries, um, by, is it Mike Apted? I think is his name. So, um, you know, this is a series of documentaries of a whole bunch of British kids from different socioeconomic classes. And, uh, every seven years, they updated it.

• 56:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I love that.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  And checked in with the kids. And it is an unbelievable, it's incredibly, it was like, you know, reality TV before there was reality TV. It was done incredibly well, incredibly sensitively, uh, incredible candor. But it is, uh, if you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology or human decision-making or nurture versus nature, it is, you know, the best thing ever.

• 57:23Tim Ferriss?

  I love that. Okay. Fantastic. I need to go out and watch that immediately. It's, it's reality TV that is reality with the quotation marks removed.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, even just the way it was produced and created and culled will be, you know, it's really great, interesting.

• 57:40Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. All right. That's a, that, that is a keeper. I will be checking that out. What does the first, uh, hour of your day look like? What is your, your routine, if you have one, for the first

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  hour of your day?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Uh, so that's pretty, so I like to get up, uh, early in part because I like, uh, the energy of the body and the mind in the morning. So I'm, you know, it takes me a while to get going, but I like, I really love that first hour and a half.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  And, um, because I have young kids who get up relatively early too, uh, it's kind of an arms race, so I've had to get earlier and earlier. So now I usually get up, um, usually around 5:00 AM and, um, you know, need some coffee and, um, I bring the, you know, I sit down with coffee and the computer. And on the computer, what I will do is usually start to read a little bit, start to write a little bit, uh, and try to do the kind of writing, however, that doesn't require the full brain. So it's dealing with emails and stuff and, and really planning the day. And I'm a little bit, um, Spatially and uh organizationally challenged in certain ways, uh I really need to

• 58:49Speaker 01

  understand the shape of my whole day uh to to have a successful day.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  So I I kinda use this as a uh a kinda throat clearing hour and a half to get a little bit of stuff done, but mostly it's almost like a a mental, physical warm-up so that then whenever I do whatever I do next, which is maybe go for a run or if I can get in a little um golf practice, which is my new addiction and obsession, then when those hours come, I usually try to keep a a a nice, big, big, big block of totally unbroken time. I have no obligations or commitments, so maybe it's gonna be from like eight thirty to four P M. Or maybe it's from ten to five, where then I know that I'm gonna have that those many hours to sit and think and read and mostly write. Uh so it's about as boring

• 59:37Speaker 01

  as it gets, but it I I love it actually, that that early morning, you know, sit with the coffee, computer, then the kids come in and the stuff starts to happen.

• 59:45Tim Ferriss?

  I I've uh I've found if I just provide a buffer of that type of throat clearing space for an hour to an hour and a half by waking up early or otherwise for each day, my my sort of, to use a boring sort of like Seligman term, my self-reported well-being, my happiness is so much higher consistently, just to have, instead of dodging bullets when you first wake up.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  As opposed to jumping right into the heavy stuff, you mean?

• 1:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or just jumping into anything hugely reactive, I I guess, is the way I'd put it.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, you know, if you get up as early as I do, you know, you never wanna send like the angry email to somebody that's that's postmarked five fifteen A M. Cause now, not only are you the jerk who's writing the angry email, but you're doing it at five A M.

• 1:00:31Tim Ferriss?

  You're a lunatic, right?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:33Tim Ferriss?

  Or on this, with email, which doesn't make any sense. So uh does uh? Random question, do you, do the, does the clothing you wear affect your mood or attitude? Uh, why or why not?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, definitely. Oh yeah, hugely. So this is one of the ways in which, yeah, I'm, I'm over sensitive to my like environment and surroundings. So I'm not like Howard Hughes-ish quite, but I need

• 1:00:55Tim Ferriss?

  No urine bottles.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Things lined up. What's that?

• 1:00:58Tim Ferriss?

  I said no bottles of urine lining the walls or anything.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Not, not, not yet, at least. But um, so you know, this is one reason I became a writer. I like to control my environment. Like, I'm talking to you today now from an empty office in my publisher's building where the temperature isn't quite right, the light is definitely not right. There's these hums coming from the wall. I don't know what they are and I don't like them. And uh, and so one reason I became a writer is so I can control my environment. So like when I watch golf now, like Bubba Watson, I'm transfixed by Bubba because plainly he's really, really affected by the circumstances. You know, by people, the crowd, everything, you know, will say, man, this course does not fit my eye at all, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  And I really identify with that. I, I, I need to um, so, so yeah, absolutely. Something as simple as clothing, I notice this when I play golf. If I'm wearing a, a particular set of shoes or pants and I, and when I'm looking down in my setup and if I look to my eye like a quote golfer, then I play better. I'm gonna swing better. So I think that people who think that, you know, you don't derive uh, feeling or confidence or whatever from something as quote silly as dress or whatnot, I think they're really underestimating how, how uh, you know, I wouldn't say how fragile our, our brains are, but how complex they are. So yeah, I, I think all that matters a lot.

• 1:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I have a, as a side note, I have a friend, um, this is part of, part of why I became fascinated by, by clothing when I never really was before. I just kind of threw on whatever I had.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  Is I've, I have a friend who's a little bit older than I am, a massively successful real estate guy. And he somewhat like men in black, he has the same, he has about thirty pairs of the same khaki shorts and thirty pairs of the same black shirt. And you know, twenty of the same hat and literally that is his, that is his uniform that he wears every single day. And he's one of the most, I mean, I'm not going to go that far, but he's one of the most effective, uh, calmest people I've ever met.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  I just remember though, just remember my son's Juan Mata jersey lesson.

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, no, understood, understood.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  The uniform is not necessarily responsible, but as you say, it may in some part be, absolutely.

• 1:03:17Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, what are, what are your favorites, uh, what are some of your favorite sources of information? Or just guilty pleasures with reading? So you mentioned waking up and reading. What are your go-to sources if you have any, or how do you curate that?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Um, so I probably have a pretty typical, uh, media diet in a lot of ways. Uh, you know, I read a lot of New York Times, read a lot of Wall Street Journal, I read a lot of other, you know, papers and blah, blah, blah. Um, I read Marginal Revolution, economics blog by, um, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabrock, which is great.

• 1:03:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a great.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  I love the browser, um, the, the guy who puts together the browser, I can't recall his name at the moment, but, um, it's just a great daily, I think, or maybe a couple of times a week compilation of good stuff from around the web. Uh, I love, uh, Jason Kotke, if you know Kotke.org.

• 1:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Um, again, I'm not naturally a great visual person. My wife's a photographer. Uh, so she is, but I love people who do astonishing things with, whether it's design or whatnot, and even, partly it's because when I look at it, I, I'm just astonished that someone could even think of that, much less execute. So Kotke.org I look for, I find it really inspiring and, uh, and I love sports, so I read a lot about sports. Um, and like I said, my son has gotten really into, uh, soccer in the last couple of years, European, MLS, you know, of course, upcoming World Cup and so, uh, Partly out of my devotion to him, but also because, you know, I've always liked soccer.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Okay, but now because of him, I that's been the new uh uh reading passion, both with books and and um and journalism and and whatnot.

• 1:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  Have you ever read uh Levels of the Game?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, God. Levels of the Game is one of my very, very, very favorite books ever.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  It's so amazing. Uh for those who are not familiar, this is uh John McPhee's book about a single tennis match, ostensibly. Uh but I actually was was very lucky and I I I don't.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Oh, did you have McPhee?

• 1:05:21Tim Ferriss?

  I had McPhee for my my the Literature Fact Seminar in school, which was just a mind blowing experience. Uh so the uh the I'll ask you just one one last question and then I'll let you let you run. Hopefully, we can have a round two sometime. This was really fun.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  To. Yeah, this is a blast.

• 1:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  Uh so the actually, I lied. There are two two questions. One is a one is a one is a sort of substance question. And then the the next is a where do we find you question? But uh if if you could provide your younger self, and I know this is just one of those questions, but I'll ask it anyway. Uh with with one or two pieces of advice, let's just say yourself in in in college or high school. What what would those what would those pieces of advice be?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Um, I would say it would it's pretty simple. Don't be scared. Um, I was just, you know, I there are a lot of things I did not do, a lot of experiences I never tried. A lot of people I never met or hung out with because I was on some in some form intimidated or scared. And uh look, I I I still deal with that all the time. Um, and so that would be it. And like I said, I haven't, you know, uh it's not like I solved that problem. But that would be what I'd go back and say to my younger self is that almost always the thing that you fear is ridiculous. And it also plays into what psychologists call the spotlight effect, like everybody must be caring about what I do.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  And in fact, is nobody gives a crap what I do. Uh so that's what I would say. Don't be scared, you know?

• 1:06:56Tim Ferriss?

  That is excellent advice. Uh well, I'm going to.

• 1:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  Give some advice to everybody listening, that is, check out everything that Stephen has written. I've really been a fan for a long time and have

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:07:10Tim Ferriss?

  I have looked to you as a virtual mentor in many respects with the storytelling and so on. It's informed my own writing and therefore my own thinking. For those who haven't seen the new book, Think Like a Freak is very much a fantastic companion. If you've read, for instance, a lot of you are already readers of The Four Hour Body, Four Hour Workweek, Four Hour Chef, it's a guide to better thinking. And what better tool could you possibly want or have? So I'll recommend that. Stephen, where can, where would you like people to find you more value? Obviously, they can find everything related to the books on Amazon or elsewhere, but what are the main, where do you spend your time online? Where can people find more of what you do?

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Yes, so, you know, Freakonomics.com is, I guess, the best single compilation. I don't really do a lot of personal writing or tweeting or anything, but Freakonomics.com and Freakonomics on Twitter is where we kind of write what we've got going on in our work life. And so that'll lead you, and you know, it's one of those websites that'll lead you into 10 levels in if you really want to go. And you can find a lot of, a lot of stuff about related projects, et cetera, et cetera, most of which are not very good, but that's okay. We try, we keep trying. Throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall for some of it to stick.

• 1:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  Wonderful. Well, this has been a blast. I will let you get on with your day and hope to, hope to chat with you soon, maybe see you on the East Coast.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Me too. Me too. It was really fun and I would love to talk again in any circumstances and I really appreciate you having me on, Tim.

• 1:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. All right.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:41Tim Ferriss?

  Good luck with everything.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Bye bye.

• 1:08:42Tim Ferriss?

  Bye bye.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter at twitter.com/TFerriss. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at facebook.com/TimFerriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.