Optimal mental this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking and oils you a personal question. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Hello, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss yet again running out the door to a flight, but I have such an exciting episode. I can barely contain myself. I might just we myself on my way across the country, but I digress probably TMI. Let me answer just a couple questions. What is this podcast about you long-term listeners might know long-term long time that it's about dissecting Excellence trying to tease apart what makes world-class performers so
Good at what they do finding the tools and tactics that you can apply in this episode features Maria Popova. I'm about to explain who she is and if you don't know who she is or if you are intimately familiar with who she is you are in for a treat first. I'll answer a question that a lot of people ask me and that is what are you reading? Well, what I'm reading right now is two books comprised of two books. The first is William Goldman adventures in the screen trade Goldman is the screenwriter behind such movies as The Princess Bride one of my favorites of all time.
I'm and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The second book is John Muir Wilderness essays. So very different both very very good and highly recommended the adventures in the screen trade is a little outdated with some of the contents because it's related to film and it was written in the 80s, but there are a lot of Timeless principles and Goldman is just hilarious but moving on the guests Maria Popova. Oh my goodness where to start she would describe herself as a reader writer interestingness hunter-gatherer and cure.
Mind at large. What does that mean? It'll all make sense in just a few seconds while she's written for all sorts of amazing Outlets like the Atlantic and then there are times. I find her most amazing project to be brain pickings dot-org and I'm not alone in this founded in 2006 as a weekly email that she sent out to seven friends co-workers really very informal brain pickings was eventually brought online and now it gets more than 5 million readers per month. It is massive many of you asked. What blogs
do you read often? What do you do online? Where do you spend most of your time? The answer is that I read very few sites consistently. I don't have that type of loyalty but brain pickings is one of the few it is a treasure Trove. It is Maria's one woman labor of love her subjective lens on what matters it's also an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. This is what Hooks me of course because she'll pull from excerpts and reading from the stoics my favorite Seneca.
To Mark Twain Oscar Wilde and everyone in between Maria is good at finding the hidden gems to share and the amount of information this woman consumes and can parse down to the finest detail of what will help you now blows my mind. She makes me look like the laziest son of a bitch ever and of course immediately. My questions are how how does she do that? How on Earth does she do that? And we dig into this in this interview really I try to unearth the
In gems in her life her workflow takes me a few minutes to warm up as it often does but once we get going we geek out like crazy and we talked about almost every aspect of her life her sight her business her workouts her writing her workflow her tools her workarounds all of it. And I love doing this interview. I hope you love listening to it and for bonus credit for those of you who are super curious might have a little bit of extra time to do some detective work at one point. She mentions that her
Fan page went from a few hundred thousand people to over two million people without explanation. So if you are able to figure out why that happened what contributed to that please let me know on Twitter at T Ferris TFE. Riss. I'm dying of curiosity and always or as always I should say the show notes all the links that we mentioned the tools Etc. All of that can be found on the blog at for our work.
Week.com forward slash podcast 4-Hour workweek.com forward slash podcast all spelled out. So you don't need to scribble away furiously with notes. Although you can I will have pretty much everything that you will need right there in the show notes. So without further Ado please meet Maria Popova.
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss. Shell. I am extremely excited to have a fellow geek in arms Maria Popova on the line with me Maria. How are you today?
Very well. Thank you. Thank you for having
me and I appreciate your coaching on the last name. I wasn't sure if it was Pope OVA or Popova. I have friends who for instance Neva or avocado is a friend. It's actually novel but Americans can't really pull that off. So he goes for the
So I appreciate the the coaching and
I as a country of immigrants. We have a surprisingly hard time getting people's original names. Right?
Right. Absolutely. It's into just the sort of angle sizing of such a crystal like a Melting Pot of different cultures and you know at the same time. I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time which is reading and there.
There are so many words. I've embarrassed myself on many occasions that I've read dozens or even hundreds of times especially in scientific literature that I've never heard pronounce.
Oh, yeah. I call this reader syndrome as somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading you run into that a lot. Especially with sort of cultural icons last names first names that are spelled differently than very differently than their pronounced. It's kind of tragic comedy.
When you actually find out how they're
pronounced know exactly or it can be a real Revelation. I remember when I was a young kid, I couldn't hit let's say democracy or aristocracy. I could only say because I didn't had also read it you get a demo cracy aristocracy for whatever reason I couldn't get the emphasis right but coming back to the the reading and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading if someone asks you and I'm sure occasionally it happens.
You'll what do you do for those people listening who may not be familiar with you, but we'll start with the cocktail question when someone asks you what do you do? How do you answer
that?
Well, I've answered a differently over the years in part because I think inhabiting our own identity as kind of a Perpetual process. But right now I would say I read and I write in that order and in between I do some thinking and I think about how to live a meaningful life basically
and if someone then were to go online find your work and up at brain pickings and they're like, oh, this is quite interesting.
When they look kind of looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party and they're like, what is brain pickings? How would you describe how do you typically described
that it's just a record of that thinking my personal subjective private thinking that takes place between my reading and takes and the writing and takes form in writing
collection of very interesting things and sometimes you know how I get resolved simply put it to folks and brain pickings for those people wondering
Is one of the very few sites that I end up on constantly and when people ask me what blogs do you read? I am embarrassed in some cases kind of humiliated to answer that. I don't go really too many blogs consistently and I think part of the reason is so many of them are feel compelled to put out very very timely of the moment material that expires within a few hours.
and I don't like the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are just sort of churning out content and I remember Kathy Sierra at one time at one point told me that you should focus on just-in-time information not just in case information and which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound but there are there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot brain pickings is 1 and
I'm Harris is blog. Yeah is another and I saw your your review of his latest book
waking up. Not a review. I don't review I
don't review books. I bought okay. No, this is no so this is
this is annotated reading if they're well,
okay, so an annotated reading of and I definitely want to dig into that annotated reading of waking up which I found really really impactful for me in a lot of ways it put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I have.
I had for a very long time talking about reviews. So I pulled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions. They would love to ask you and a close friend of mine Chris. Sacca. He came back with what percentage of New York Times Best Sellers can be attributed to your coverage and I'd be curious to hear you answer that and then there's sort of a follow-up, but you've built this incredible power house.
As an outlet for your whether it's creative musings are observations and it has a huge influence on what people read. So if you were to sort of think of that how would you answer that
question? Well, first of all, yeah, you're very kind to put it that way as a script but I think one big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about or very old out-of-print things.
That are not competing for New York Times bestseller. In fact, I don't even know if I ever really I mean perhaps I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things with the New York Times bestsellers, but I suspect that. The reason Kris asked that question is actually that I met him through his wife who collaborated with Wendy macnaughton the illustrator whose work I love and I love Wendy on a book about wine and the feeling that book ended up I and I wrote about it because it's lovely and
profound
challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensor experience and I like things that that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual and it but in any case so I wrote about that book and that particular piece on green pickings seemed to do pretty well and I think perhaps that warped
Chris's idea about how
much contemporary books I really sort of am interested in but I would say that's a minority.
Right. And for those people wondering it's the essential scratch-and-sniff Guide to Becoming a wine expert which was written along with and the illustrations are wonderful. The Richard Betts is the sommelier who is part of that and at one point I met with him because I wanted to try to deconstruct the master sommelier test and he said I can show you how to do it and it was just the pared-down sort of hacked. If you will version still of passing the master sommelier taste was so intimidating.
That I put it on ice indefinitely. But at some point Richard we will talk again and and form a game plan the so the the opposite of course of sort of putting out this material that expires as soon as it's out on the vine is putting out what I think you do very often and that is timeless timely and Timeless. I've heard you call it material where you're sort of pulling from old sources or older sources doing pattern.
Ignition to pull from other areas to talk about say a theme or or something that's still affects people and I was I was doing research for this interview and we met briefly in New York at an event and I've been a longtime fan of your work. And so I thought to myself like how much how much digging do I really need to do and good God you have such an absolute.
In of work out there. It is astonishing. I mean, it is
really kind of just the volume of time really. It's been you know, I've been doing this for eight years coming up actually exactly a month from today. It'll be eight years. So it's just that the accumulation you know,
and so as I was I was I'm fascinated by routine and schedule and you know, I'm reading from of course not not the always accurate, but generally a good place to start Wikipedia and
It says that brain pickings takes 400 plus hours of work per month hundreds of pieces of content per day 12 to 15 books per week that you're reading. How do you achieve and I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before but sometimes the answer is change and
evolve or we always do and which is why I actually don't do interviews very frequently because I find that they sort of
Tend to kind of cast this as the static thing that just stays there some sort of reference point while we're really just a fluid process and we're constantly evolving but in any
case no definitely so yeah, so the question that you've sure been asked many times but I'll ask again is how do you choose the books? How do you find / choose the books that you read? This is a huge problem for me because I like my appetite for reading.
Outstrips the time that I have and so I end up actually unfortunately sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books I've taken on it at any given point in time. So I'd be curious how you sort of vet the books that you
read.
Well, I guess it goes back to that question of well, let me backtrack and just say that I write about a very wide array of disciplines and areas and sensibilities because that's what I think about. So anything from Art and Science to philosophy psychology history designed poetry you name it, but the common denominator for me is just this very simple question of
just this illuminate some aspect big or small of that grand question that I think we all tessalit every day, which is how to live well how to live a good meaningful fulfilling life, whether that's you know, Aristotle's views on happiness and government or beautiful art form 12th century, Japan or Sam Harris has new book anything
got it and
The I've read you citing Kurt Vonnegut before Kurt vonnegut's one of my favorite writers of all time.
I know I heard your semicolon quickest. I think it was either the interview did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have a Counterpoint to the semicolon.
Okay? No, no sir, but show on so I actually I actually I brought up the semicolon quote partially as a sort of wink wink.
Nod ribbing to a friend of mine named John. Romanello who has a tattoo of a semicolon on his I think it's his for are you love some type nerd he loves semicolons. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other armies. He's a fascinating guy, but the quote that I heard you cite that I wanted to dig into a bit was occur vonnegut's saying right to please just one person and
So my question to you is when you write is that still the case and if so who or who you who is that person that you are writing
for? It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one and that's myself that's like I said, it's just a record of my thought process my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it.
How we relate to one another how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated meaningless information and the suit of intersection of or transmutation of information into into wisdom really which is what learning to live is it's about wisdom. So I in and it's interesting too because when I started drink leggings, like I said almost 8 years ago.
It started very much as a private record of my own curiosity and I shared it with seven co-workers that I had at the time just as a little sort of email newsletter thing and now to think that there are about 7 million people strangers reading it every month.
That's amazing. Congratulations.
Thank you, but and I'm not sort of number dropping for sale or anything like that. But just to try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing for one person.
One very sort of you know inward person. But there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and just relating to this pretty private act and it's a strange thing to live with and no way a bad thing. I'm not complaining about it obviously, but it's just interesting to observe how one relates to oneself when being looked on by a few.
Alien people, you know
definitely and there's so many so many questions. I want to ask you we might have to do part 2 at some point because I know we have some time constraints but the where to even begin this is where my start fraying at the ends as an interviewer. So the the first question would be related to that. There's so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after
You're kind of the tried-and-true BuzzFeed type headlines. Do you ever contend with that Temptation? And if so, how do you resist it? And I and this is part of the universe. How do you respond to the expectations of the crowd or the 7 million people looking on and I feel this personally sometimes because I have a Blog it has certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have.
I'm somewhere between one and two million uniques a month usually but witch thank you. But even at that point even if that scale there are times when I put out something that I feel is very very important but on the dense side and and then it will sometimes it takes off but but sometimes it doesn't and and there's a lot of Temptation when for instance. I know you use social media quite a bit and we'll get to that where I
Look at say the retweets the favorites on something that's kind of dance. And then I'm like God I should just do like the seven tricks you can you can actually teach your cat, you know and get 500 thousand retweets. Is that something that you're that ever sort of crosses your mind. And do you ever feel that
temptation?
Well, you know, it's interesting because I think anybody who thinks in public which is what writing is, which is even what art is its some sort of.
Putting a piece of oneself out into the world anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting to really stay true to one's experience, you know and being aware that as soon as it's out of the world there is this notion of the other audience and you know, Oscar Wilde he very memorably said that a true artist takes no notice whatever.
Of the public and the public are to him non-existent and it's very easy to say especially for somebody as wild who was very prolific very public almost performative and his public presence. It's very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say well you can't possibly not care about the audience giving you make your living through it and sort of perform to it. Right but I think that's a pretty cynical interpretation. I think rather than hypocrisy. It's just this very human struggle.
Google to be seen and to be understood which is why.
All art comes to be because one human being wants to put something in it to the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for and who he or she is and so with that lens. I do think it's hard to say. Well, you know, I don't care about what happens to it out there, even though I write for myself and think for myself the awareness of the other really does change things, but I think
perhaps Werner Herzog put it best. I just finished reading this kind of 600-page interview with him. Essentially. It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul croonin had with him over the course of 30 years and one passage hertzog says something like, you know, it's always been important for me to have my films reach an audience. I don't necessarily need to hear what those audience reactions are just as long as they're out there that
Touching the films are catching people in some way and I feel very similarly. So with that in mind, I guess to answer your question rather circuitously. I don't feel clearly quote tempted to make listicles or to make
anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for and import I think the beauty of the web is that it's a self perfecting organism, but for as long as it's an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest So Perfect The Art of the BuzzFeed listicle the endless slideshow the infinitely paginate at article and not the perfect the human spirit.
Yeah of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm interested in
ya know. It's I think it's a very virtuous goal. I eat I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons. One of them is well, I feel a very sort of kindred spirit with
A lot of the decisions it seems you have made. So for instance, I mean not doing the the slideshows to rack up page views for some type of CPM advertising that stuff drives me insane. So if it drives me insane, I assume it drives my readers insane, so I'm not going to do it or like you
said so wonderful that you do that because I think so much of the cultural crap that is out there not just on the internet just in general comes from people who fail to understand that they should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist. So if you're a writer, right?
Things you want to read if you're an artist painting the things you want to paint you want to see painted and I think the commercial aspect is really warping that and I really one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations from your books to you know, this podcast the site everything is that there's just this sort of sense that you just won this to exist. It doesn't exist for any other reason than you wanted to exist. And I think that's wonderful.
Thank you. I love means a lot to me and I
you know coming back to the the right to please just one person. It's a dice. I think that it's related to that. So in a way it's you know, put the things out into the world that you would want to consume yourself or experience yourself. Number one. Secondly just for those people who haven't heard this anecdote when I was writing the 4-Hour workweek as my first book. I've I still to this day find writing very challenging and I wish I could say it's gotten easier.
Over time but for whatever reason it seems not to have the in the case of the four hour work week. I came out of undergrad at Princeton and many many years of past obviously, but when I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kind of Ivy League, you know where music I was trying to use $10 words where a ten-cent word would suffice and be a lot cleaner. So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted and this was a major panic attack moment is on.
Deadline and I remember I was in Argentina the time and then I went the other way and I said no. No, I have to be loose. I have to be funny and so I wrote a few chapters that were completely slapstick ridiculous. I mean, they've it sounded like three stooges put on paper and so I had to throw out those few chapters. And of course, I'm doubling down on my anxiety at this point and decided at one point that I was just going to have a little bit of yerba mate tea two glasses of wine and no more than two glasses.
Them all back and sit down and start to
write. What is that
Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America best known in Argentina, but there's actually some really nice Malbec wines in Chile. They were as I understand it. It was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe, but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires and has developed this worldwide Fame because of its cultivation in Argentina, so,
there's a lot of sort of there's a lot of metaphor there that I also like but drank two glasses of wine, sat down and literally opened up and an email client and started typing the 4-Hour workweek as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends one was an investment banker trapped in his own job and you felt like you couldn't leave because his lifestyle swelling to meet his income and then the other was an entrepreneur trapped in a company of his own making and so these
Very specific guys in mind I started to write with just enough alcohol to dissertate the edge off and that's how you know, I was writing in that case to please just two people but that's that's the only way I could make it work the your schedule. So I've read of your schedule, but I'd love to hear the current iteration of that. It seems like you've had a fairly you have a fairly
Ented schedule which would make sense. If you putting the number of hours into reading and writing that you do. So, what is what is your current day look
like
Well, I'll answer this with a caveat. The one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last few years a couple of years. Maybe is the student really delicate balance between productivity and presence and especially in a culture that seems to measure our Worth or Merit or value through or efficiency and her earnings and our ability to perform certain tasks as opposed to
To just the Fulfillment we feel in our own lives and the presents that we take in the day-to-day and that's something that's become more and more apparent to me. So I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss routine as some sort of Holy Grail of creative process because it's just really it's a crutch. I mean routines and rituals help us not feel like this overwhelming messiness of just day-to-day life.
Consumers it's a control mechanism. But that's not all there is and if anything, it should be in the service of something greater, which is being present with one's own life. So with that in mind, my day is very predictable. I get up in the morning. I meditate for between 15 to 25 minutes before I do anything
else. What time do you wake up? Typically
exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed so it varies. Okay. I'm a huge.
Opponent of sleep, I think.
When I write because what or when I guess try to think what I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and Concepts and in order for that to happen, you know, those associative chains need to be firing and when I am sleep deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain, which is certainly I'm not unique in that in any way there is research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep. We're almost
has drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time when normally need to function and I think ours is a culture where we were we where our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge honor badge of honor the bespeaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is. But really it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect and I tried to start of an act
I did my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep at least as disciplined as about as I am about my work because the latter is a product of the capacities, you know cultivated by the former. So in any case so I get up eight hours after I have gone to bed. I meditate I go to the gym where I do most of my longer perform reading I get back home. I have breakfast and I start writing I usually write between two and three or
Chuckles a day and one of them tends to be longer and when I write I need uninterrupted time, so I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert. So I don't look at email or anything really external to the material. I'm dealing with which does require quite a bit of research usually so it's not like I can cut myself off from the Internet or from other books, but
Don't have people disruptions, I guess so anything social and then I take a short break. I'm a Believer Institute of pacing creating a sort of Rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and then you take a short break and then cycle back, you know, and then I deal with any sort of admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot. And I resume writing and I write my other
article or articles through the evening. I try to have some private time just later in the day either with friends or with my partner or just you know time that as unburdened by deliberate thought although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general and then usually later at night either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two
got it and so on.
Number of follow-up questions what type of meditation do you practice currently
just guided the pasta in a very very basic. There's a woman named Tara Brach who she's a mindfulness practitioner. How do you spell your last name be our ACH got it and she's based out of DC and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist. Then the Decades of Buddhist training and lived in an ashram and now she
teaches mindfulness, but with a very secular lens so she records her classes and she has a podcast which is how I came to know her and every week she does a one-hour lecture and sort of the philosophies and cognitive behavioral, you know wisdom of the ages and then she does a guided meditation. So I used her meditations and she has changed my life. Perhaps more profoundly than anybody.
My life so I highly highly recommend her Tara Brach Rock. Yes, and all her podcast is free. Just two books out to she's really wonderful very generous
person. I'll have to check that out. And so you're listening then you have earbuds in when you are or you're listening you're listening to audio while you
meditate. Yes, and it's interesting Lee. I mean, she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of
Of 2010 that's just one that I like and feel familiar with and it sort of helps me get into the Rhythm. So every day I listen to the exact
summer 2010. How does that start? How would people recognize it? How does the Audio?
I think the title is it sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called smile meditation and I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms Through The Years in other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I you know have on and on my broken 3G iPhone without
Any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod and that's on it.
Awesome. That's great. Answer gotta love. I love digging into the specifics and when you go to the gym then to work out. Are you still using an elliptical for that or are you
are okay do Sprints high intensity intervals on the elliptical and are your cardio and I do a lot of weight and body weight stuff to
you do alright, but
When you're reading is that on the elliptical? Yes, and what type of device if any are you using for that
reading? Well, I prefer electronic. So I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any PDF viewer because I read a lot of archival stuff but the challenge of course is that because I read so many older books that are out of print let alone having digital versions. That's not always possible in case it's
Rarely possible unless I'm writing about something fairly new and so in that case, I just go there with my big toe and my sticky notes and pens and Sharpies and various annotation Analog Devices and I just do that
cool, right so that that leads perfectly into the next question, which is what is your note taking system look like and how do you take notes? So for instance, you're really good at using
Excerpts or quotations pull quotes and I found myself asking as I was reading this like, how are you Gathering all of this so that you can use it later. So what is your note taking system look like when you sit in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy.
Yeah. So with digital it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that are that have acronyms that
Is frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. But reading is really or understanding really which is bloat reading should be a conduit to is a form of pattern recognition. So when you read a whole book you kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked and they don't usually occur, you know, sequentially so it's not like you walk away with one inside from the first chapter one. Is it from the second chapter? It's just sort of this.
Pattern of the writers thoughts that that permeate the entire Narrative of the book and so especially as you if you read as a writer so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that but ideally wants to record what those patterns and themes are that sort of reading is very different. And so what I end up doing would analog books in particular and it's absurd of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect is
On the very last page of each each book, which is blank. Usually right before the end cover. I create an alternate index. So I basically list out as I'm reading the topics and ideas that that seem to be important and recurring in that volume and then next to each of them. I start listing out the page numbers where they occur and on those pages. I have obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it.
But it's basically an index based not on keywords, which is what a standard book index is based on but based on key ideas and I use that then to sort of synthesize with those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book.
Okay. I have two gig out on this because I'm so excited now. So as it turns out with analog books, I do exactly literally exactly the same thing. I usually start with the in front inside cover.
I create my own index and of course, they don't have to be in order so you can sort of list. Yeah them in any when my particular case in any in the order. I also will have sort of two a couple of lines dedicated to pH and pH just refers to phrasing. So if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find
really I do that too
really
I would be out for beautiful
language. Oh, that's so cool. Okay, so there's that and then I
I have you know that Q over Q if I if their quotes so for instance many books will have quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases. And so I'll have you know quotes. I'll just write that out and then colon and then I'll list all the page numbers for that particular sort of category that I'm collecting in the case of quotes So for when you're Gathering as you mentioned acronyms and
And so besides beautiful language, what are some of the other acronyms that you
use? Oh, they wouldn't make sense. They're just very private. It's like too long to get into what they stand for. There's a completely my own
system. Is there one other example that you just just if you could indulge me
one that is I guess not so much about the contents of that passage as as about its purpose is LJ which is have a little sort of Labor of Love side project called literary jukebox, right?
Right. Sure.
I've seen it. It's yeah, it's
awesome. Thank you. But yeah, so I do these pairings of passages from literature with at the matically Matched song and so sometimes went as I'm reading a book I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that and maybe a song comes to mind and so I would put LJ next to it, but I want to go back to what you said about the external quotes. I guess the author quoting another work. I think those are actually really important and that goes back to your
Question about how I find what to read and I Mark those types of things. So for the for the annotations that are specific to that particular book, all of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the of the pages, but when there's an external quote something referencing another work, I put a tab at the very top with the letter F which stands for find if I am not familiar with the word the work or just no letter if I just want to flag.
Lag a quote from something else that I know of and I think that's actually very important because the the phenomenon itself not my annotations of it because literature is really and I say this all the time it is the original internet. So all of those references and citations and Illusions, even they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work and that way if you follow those
Go into this magnificent Rabbit Hole where you start out with something that you're already enjoying and liking but follow these tangential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way. I mean directly and in a way it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very Anchor Mental way and I've often found amazing older books that were, you know, five or six hyperlink reference is
Moved from something. I was reading which led me to something else or selling me something else which led me to this great other thing. So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice
Yeah. It's the the Serendipity of it is so beautiful when it works out and I'll give a confession. This is really embarrassing but you know since no one's listening I came across Seneca. So Seneca the younger
Who's had probably more impact on my life than any other writer originally because there I was perusing a number of anthologies on minimalism and simplicity and Seneca kept on popping up quote Seneca quote Seneca, and because it was always one word like Madonna or and this is going to be really embarrassing or like sitting bolt. I assumed that Seneca was a Native American
an elder of some type for probably a
good we
actually I assumed he was a Native American Elder for a probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman like man first you gotta do your homework pal like you gotta dig in and then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off the cliff into all a lot of his writings, which I've I still to this day revisit on an almost
revisit it
His shortness of life so good. So it is perhaps the best Manifesto and I had had this modern word sort of buzz word but I use it intentionally. So the best Manifesto for Art current struggle with this very notion of you know, productivity versus presence and how much are we really mistaking the doing for the being you know, and and it's amazing that somebody wrote this Millennia ago before there was internet before
for there was the things we call distractions today and and yet he writes about the exact same things just in a different form. Yeah
the exact same things and the way that if I'm trying to use Seneca as a gateway drug into philosophy, I won't use the p-word first of all with most people because philosophy smacks of die think it calls to mind for a lot of people the haughty pompous college student in
Good Will Hunting in the bar scene who's like was reciting, you know Shakespeare without giving any type
of completely disagree. No, actually, I agree with the notion that those are its Communications today and people have a resistance but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it and to get people to understand that philosophy. Whatever form it takes is the only way to figure out how to live everything else that we take away from anything is a
out of philosophy is essentially
I agree. No I totally agree. So but I usually if I'm going to lead people there I try to to lower them lure them in with with Seneca because I think he's very easy to read compared to a lot of say at least the stoics or that's actually not even fair compared to a lot of philosophers who have been translated from Greek. Most of his writing I believe was translated from Latin which tends to be just an easier jump from English. So
It's very easy to read and what I tell people is you start off with some of his letters and you'll find that you could just as easily replace. These Roman names like Luke Ilyas, and it's and so on with like Bob and Jane or you know, pick your contemporary name if of choice and they're all as relevant now as they were then so I'm going to come back to the sort of performance versus presence, which I think of
I've often times as the of achievement versus appreciation split or balance or maybe neither. But before we get there, I want to put a put a bow on the note-taking with your electronic note-taking. So you're using the Kindle app. You're taking highlights. Where do you go from there? Are there any other what is what is the sort of workflow look like from there and are there any any particular types of software or apps or anything like that?
You use often.
I mean, honestly, I feel like that problem has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way. So the way that I do it as basically a bunch of hacks using existing Technologies, but I don't think or perhaps I'm just unaware but I don't think there's anybody designing tools today for people who do serious heavy reading there just isn't anything that I know and so what I do is I highlight in the in the Kindle app on the iPad.
And then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop on your computer. I go to those I copy them from that page and I paid them into evernote file to sort of just have all of my notes and a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific iPad Kindle app.
Indle page with my highlighted passage and then email that screengrab into my Evernote email because Evernote has as you know, optical character recognition. So when I search within it, it's also going to search the text in that image. I don't have to wait until I finish the book and explored all my notes and and also it's the formatting is kind of shitty on the on the Kindle notes on the desktop. We were can see all your notes. So if you copy them they pay
paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. So a tabulates each next note indented to the right. So it's sort of this cascading long cascading thing that shifts more and more to the right of the
horrible. It's like an email
thread. It's like an email thread except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all you know, and so if you want to go fix it, you have to do it manually within Evernote and you know, I read you know on the burner hertzog book for example, which is sick.
The pages have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know
got it. Okay. So let me just because I this may or may not help for me. It was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote because I mean I'm looking at this list of questions, and I'm not really
Being entirely offs on script but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now and one one of the things I realized about formatting and transposing things from say the my Kindle page. If you login to your Amazon account through kindled at Amazon.com or copying pasting from many different places is going to I don't know if you've tried this but edit and either paste and match style or paste as plain text and it tends to
Remove all of that headache. Let's see nine times out of ten. So
if you if a problem with that, I did try that once but when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata. Look the same as the text. So on every highlighted passage. I also have my own notes. I see God bless bless. You know Amazon's own thing that says add note read read this location the least until it all merges it and becomes just hideous to just Impossible 3,
you know, I wonder
I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into textwrangler, which is used for coating a lot just to remove the formatting and then put it into
evernote. Yeah, I do that with Cota.
Yeah, it's true though.
There's gotta be a solution. And the thing is Evernote. I love Evernote. I've been using it for many years and I could probably not get through my day without it. But it has an API which means somebody can build this, you know, the true way to like I even thought I mean I was the one point so desperate and so
Straight at which I think is the duo that causes all Innovation, you know desperation and frustration. I thought maybe I should just save up some money and offer like a Scholars or like a grand for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me. No, that's a great idea. I mean, I'm still sort of contemplating that
okay. Well, we'll talk about that separately. I think that's something that we could absolutely explore and for all of you programmers coders out.
There please take a look. This is actually not as rare in issues. You might expect one question for you on the Kindle highlights. I've run into this you mentioned the Werner hertzog book and having you know thousands of highlights. I've have you run into instances where you'll you'll read an entire book you're super impressed or not. But you regardless you have hundreds of highlights and you go to look at those highlights and you're restricted to only see
ya.
Like 200 highlight 81 available or
something like right. So how often does that happen to you? Because that's happened to me where I've taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff and then I'm only able to see 25% and it's so infuriating and I think it's a limitation that is determined by the publisher.
Yeah it is and so I'll tell you why it hasn't happened to me much. It happens to me occasionally, but that's a DRM thing digital for listeners who don't like acronyms digital Rights Management.
Thing that has that is fairly new. So that is the case with more recently published books. But if you read you know, the digitized version of say, you know, Alan Watts that was published originally 40 years ago. There's no such problem unless the publisher now is like reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But because I read so much less out of sort of newly published material. I don't run into it often, but you know, there is a way to
Very laborious Lee, you know deal with it, which is you can still open that passage in your Kindle app on the desktop. So cable 4 back for me and it will let you highlight and copy those passages and paste them into your Evernote in between the missing parts, but it's obviously not conducive have done that and it's
so horrible because you also get the like excerpted from that are like three lines. Everyone said just publishers.
As if you're listening to this you are making it harder for people like Maria have 7 million uniques per month to share your stuff. So please up your threshold. Do you have anybody helping you with brain pickings or is it just
you the actual reading and writing? Obviously, it's just me a but as of about 10 months ago. I have an assistant Lisa. It was absolutely wonderful.
She just helps me with admin stuff that has to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel is weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down or and as you know, I'm sure when you get to point where the demands are just
Incomparable with what you can even look at then you kind of need to have help in order to not to either go insane or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. So
and was there a particular
when I also have a copy editor this wonderful older lady. I hired to do my proofreading she's great. I am that's all I can say I think proofreading is really really important and I'm constantly embarrassed if I have a typo which you know,
As you know as a writer, you cannot prove your own work. It just your brain just does not see the errors that we made in the first place. What were the majority of them? And so and people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or hadn't even know there's no kind of compassion for the humanity that produces something as human as a typo, right despite how mechanical the term itself seems which is sort of ironic but in any case, oh, yes, I
have my assistant for admin and my copy editor for just proofing
and what platform is is brain pickings on to the moment. What is it? What's the the technology behind is I know that I've heard you mention WordPress before is it aunt. Is it still on WordPress?
It is on WordPress. I was going to make a joke and have about how the technology is called corpus callosum, but the actual technology is
Very Sam Harris friendly joke the the so when you're working with say your copy editor. Do you give your copy editor admin access to Wordpress and she'll go in proofread it and then schedule or publish. What's the
process? It's a very again super sort of hack together process, which is every night.
A'ight, I email her the Articles from the preview page on WordPress. I just copy that and paste it into a body email and I sent it to her and then she sends me the corrections to your email.
God I mean, like I said, she's not very I would say tech savvy. I mean, I'm sure she's a wonderful learner. So I'm sure she would totally learn how to do it if I gave her admin access but between that and the fact that I write in HTML, so I really don't like the wysiwyg. I hate it. Actually I think it's just easier to do it via email because then she can like highlight the word and sometimes she would make suggestions that are more stylistic and I
Like to have the final say in those because very often I want to keep it the way that I have it because that's what a voice so I find email works just fine.
Got it. Okay. No, I'm always fascinated because I will use while when I was when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere. I'm also in WordPress. I would use the share a draft plug-in to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP which has a
it has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty
cool. Oh, that's cool. I should actually look into that. I think that's what I have to there were presbyopia. The WordPress hosted WordPress. I don't even know what the that function is to I'm kind of I mean for somebody who writes on the web. I'm I don't really yeah. I sometimes only learn about things through friends.
I think yeah, that's that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff.
And the the other option that I've used quite a lot is and as much as I hate word, and I really do I love the track changes feature and I just find it more user-friendly for a lot of folks than having them use something that's cloud-based like Google Docs just because I operate so much offline to try to get anything done. And
yeah, I mean that's what a lot of people suggesting what Chi my perforator actually asked originally but
I do not own Microsoft products on principle and I just said I'm not going to deal with it.
Okay? No, that makes sense. And your assistant. What was what was the the sort of defining moment the straw that broke the camel's back when you were like, you know, what like what was the day? We just like fucking enough of this like I need to get somebody stat. I mean what when did you actually make the
decision? It wasn't so much that I made the decision as the
Decision was very strongly lovingly, but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner who one day said you are using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not and because I was really stressing to the point of just driving myself crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm always have been very independent. I you know moved away from my parents house when I was 18 paid my way through school lived on.
Always by myself and just had this Emerson like, you know sense of self sufficiency and self-reliance that to a point of pathology where it was to my own detriment and the notion of Outsourcing felt to me on some level almost like an admission of weakness. Sure. It's
ridiculous. I think that's true for a lot of people though.
Yeah. I know and it's the strange thing. The disorienting thing is that I think we intellectually know that's not the case that it's
Actually a lot of strength to be able to delegate and to sort of divvy up control according to a hierarchy of priorities, but on some sort of cycle emotional level. It is just death to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, I mean it's interesting in terms of how brings the kings of all which has always been very organic. So the the sort of you know eight year
Thing that has happened it went from being a little newsletter that contained five links. No text like five links to five things that I found very interesting and then it went to sort of five links with a little paragraph about each about why this thing is interesting and important and then it was, you know, not not a little paragraph but a little like one page piece and then it became not want not five things every Friday, but three things every day of the week.
Pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know, and I foolishly in the evilly thought that I could just have the same sort of operational framework despite the enormous swelling of just the volume of the writing and that's unreasonable. It's completely unreasonable. So at one point last fall as the sort of 7th birthday of bring pictures is approaching. My partner was just like he pleased like consider
and yeah,
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just I'm always curious to ask. How did you how did you find this particularly assistant that you ended up with?
Well, she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant. That's had this type of job for about 20 years. She's just a wonderfully warm and and just generous person but also has such doggedness about things and just
Work ethic. It's unbelievable. And you always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interest and the most magnanimous kind of way towards you but also the most warmly non no bullshit way outwardly towards the world demanding things from you and having this buffer. It's really really great. Yeah
and did was she how did you track her down? How did the two of you get
connected just a recommendation. She's been working.
Working for somebody who's a very trusted dear person for a long time. So now she works for
business and did that person reach out to you. Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the specifics because of the way that I found one of my first assistance and we worked together for many years was anytime I had a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant. I would say hey, I know this is off topic, but you've been awesome to deal with do you have you know, twin brother twin sister somebody who does
You do as well as you do it that you could recommend to me because I need some help and I just did that over and over again and eventually one of the said well, actually I work for multiple clients so we could talk about it and that's how we ended up working together. But what was the
the introduction was made by the person so we I had met her at least in my assistant. I'd met her just socially many times before and So eventually when the time came for me to consider
like she just like we set up a meeting we talked and she was really into it and she'd been reading bring pickings and I asked made sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate because she's also I mean she's Superwoman least a superwoman. She is the mother of two kids one of whom is now her first year in high school and the other one his first year in college, so she has that on her plate to and but she's very like I said very dogged very sort of dedicated and
Like I can do it and I'd like to do it and I was like great let's roll
onward. So with with your assistant if you were to do an 80/20 analysis of to the eighth the you know, the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time. What are the types? What would those look like?
What is the vast majority of her time spent on
so
hmm a lot of it as I guess coordinating travel and things but I am trying to really I mean I have this new ish commitment to really not do any speaking at commercial conference anymore but to speak to students because I think it's important and
What it takes out of me, which is a lot speaking takes out a lot of me because I'm a writer and I also don't really recycle talks. I like to write something original and when it's a commercial conference, it just doesn't add up for me what I get out of it because I usually donate my commissions due to the local public library whatnot. But with students it is worth my time. If I this shade even one journalism student from going into buzzworthy lands, you know after graduation.
That's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking speaking. I now getting like all these college requests. And so that takes so much time especially coordinating because a lot of them are organized by sort of student volunteers and they're kind of still learning what it means to, you know, schedules and deadlines and advance notice and so releases sort of wrangling that and another big port and I should also mention that the evolution of what I've been able to
Delegate has been has sort of organically happened. Originally. I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it because I didn't know how to explain it to her to do and but it's just a great learner and I'm learning to delegate more. But another thing because my site runs on donations. I want to I sort of make an effort to send handwritten thank-you cards to just at this point randomly picked donors every month.
And so I have her sort of export those names and emails for me and just give me like just prepare envelopes and all those types of things that I could not spend too much time on the actual admin of The
Mailing and do you operate do communicate exclusively via email or do you use soft other types of
software email email and
text email and text. So no project management software at this point. No sort of base camp, Persona or anything like that.
Yeah, I don't
That would make you smile. Like I'm some sort of commercial organization. You know, I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things that no actually that Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience Humanity, I guess of attention
what a couple of a couple of quick ones. So the first is when you when you lift do you tend to have the same work out? What is your what is your weight lifting look like
it's changed a lot in the last.
Year and a half. I have prioritized body weight stuff heavily. No pun intended. That was actually total inadvertent this how language how we think and language. That's so funny. But I heard his body weight stuff. And so I do pull-ups push-ups and that sort of thing. It also depends on where I do my work had my gym has my building has a sort of gym like a, you know, one of those residential gyms, but I also have a membership at a larger probably I
Make the best gym in New York. I love it. But I'm only there a few days a week. So it just depends on where I do it and what I do
and if you had to pick one besides the elliptical if you had to pick one body weight exercise to hold you over. Let's say you're traveling for a few months. You can only pick one bodyweight exercise. What would it
be?
Well, it would be pull up but you can't always find a place to do it. So I just do usually elevated push-ups so my feet on a bench or bed or something like a step or something and just push ups
cool a great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath that able to do basically inverted bent Rosewood. Do you know what's actually very helpful for traveling is Plyometrics Plyometrics and
TRX is actually quite handy. There's
a system for some reason it just not my
thing get into it.
Yeah, it doesn't the thing is here's the thing. So if I am forced by circumstances to do a workout that is not my preference, I very much like to be able to do something else while doing it such as listening to podcasts, which is what I do while I do weights at the gym anyway, and there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones.
And it's just like not great. So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me when I travel in case there's no or to do Sprints, which is my plan B for cardio and then plan C is just jumping skipping rope. Yeah,
you're intense. I love it. The I remember the you know, I wanted to every time I meet in this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for very long time that whenever I meet bulgarians.
People who in at any point of lived in Bulgaria. I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's not I know nothing about them. I don't know
exactly wait except when I was living in Bulgaria
know exactly it's kind of like, you know, like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the wrinkle to a commercial. They're like, no we don't talk about that stuff
yet. Is that guy your cousin?
Yeah, right, right. You must know like no. I actually don't like I know I went to X Y and Z college, but there are 5,000.
People per year, you know, it's doesn't doesn't always work out. You mentioned the donations. I want to talk about the site. So it appears and I dug around a bit but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts is that
accurate? I don't have comments. I do have dates there in the URL so that they
are there in the URL but they're not in the post there in the URL structure, but they're not in the displayed post itself.
Yeah. So the reason for that is because
II do think we're living an enormously news fetishistic culture. And the reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that because we think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed because all feeds our reverse chronology, then you know, there's an implicit hierarchy of importance to that. We think if it's not at the top it's not important and you know, you would understand, you know writing about Seneca.
Really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it as but I think because culture conditions is so much.
People when they see a date stamp, they sort of think. Oh, this was like two years old and it's really, you know, 2,000 years old, but because a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference so I constantly get things this another thing that Lisa deals would like request from textbooks for citations or you know, what not and those people actually need the dates. So I've made it so that if you actually look it's kind of easy to see or I can just tell them it when they write an ass.
With the date is look in the URL, but it's just not one of those immediate things that slaps you over the head like a newspaper front page, you know,
definitely I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years. And if you if you go to any permalinks, if you go if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog the date is there in the URL but also at the very bottom of the post after the related links so for the same reason because there's so
Much bias against older material and I think some of my older stuff is I mean, it depends on the person obviously in the context, but it's an easy way to have a high sort of Abandonment rate is to timestamp the comments. Did you ever have comments or have you never had
comment I did originally and then I was like, you know what I kind of feel like hertzog does I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm very glad and by people who are in any way moved or touched, but the
Once I was getting I was I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know trolling or anything like that, but they were kind of bacon tour people trying to plug their own thing or spam and it was taking more of my time there was worth and so instead of made my contact information very easily accessible. So if someone has something of substance and urgency to say which is I think the two things that compel people to reach out, they'll do it via email behind their own name and not anonymously.
Lee and then I mean I do get a lot of a lot of emails from readers and those are valuable, you know, but I don't really care for comments. Now the flip side of that is that now that I have the Facebook page having something mysterious happened with the bring picking spatial page last follower. It just started growing so fast. I've no idea
why you don't know I was going to ask you about that because if you if you look at say that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth the Facebook just kind of took
Off.
Yeah, it was in about October of last year and it went from 250,000 to now. I think I don't know. I think it's like something million close to three maybe some more than tenfold in less than a year. I have no idea why I've done nothing differently. I'm very I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I know I get a lot of emails from readers elsewhere in the world who actually use Facebook as their primary thing and they're such sweet notes, you know people who just are simulated and
Inspired and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn't be if they hadn't read that piece about some random thing that I read and wrote about it. And I think it would be selfish of me to just sort of disabled Facebook because I hate it. But the point of it is that you can't you have comments on there and Lisa my assistant. Actually that's something I delegated her a few months ago just to completely deal with them I can deal with them. I can't and not for any other reason that I have complete.
allergy to people
Pronouncing their so-called opinions without having actually digested or even engaged with the thing. So people would comment on the basis of like a thumbnail image or the title make really outrageously inaccurate comments clearly not having read the piece and this kind of snap reaction thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate I can deal with it just it's like a psychic drain. Like I can't even explain it. Just I can't so
Anyway,
so that would explain that would answer one of my questions which is in your header picture on Facebook you have this should be a cardinal rule of the internet and of Being Human if you don't have the patience to read something don't have the hubris to comment on it. I was gonna
care if it sounds like bitchy or anything the point. I mean, you know, it's interesting because I think a lot about criticism and the notion of criticism and and why it's so hard for
or anybody and I don't think that people have a hard time with criticism because another person this agrees with or dislikes what they're saying, they really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood like the other person does not understand who they are or what they stand for in the world and 99% of the time and you actually touch on this in your conversation with Sam Harris where we say that his ideas are not as controversial as people think when they don't actually
What they are right but the main source of Anguish is not being seen for who you are not being understood and this kind of reactive culture where people comment without taking the care to understand what you're expressing who you are and what you stand for. It is so toxic it is so toxic to readers to writers to us as a culture and I just don't know how to
get around it other than just having instructed Lisa to be just merciless about banning people and deleting comments that are just not there's no Humanity. There's no patience. There's no thinking in them. So I mean, you know anybody who writes online I think feels similarly that this is kind of my home and if people come and be idiots in it, then they're not welcome there. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I actually use the exact same.
The analogy I say look I view my especially on my blog. I view the comments as my living room and if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like take your you put your feet up on my table with your shoes on you're not going to be invited back you're gone, you know, so is your assistants job as it relates to Facebook then primarily culling the herd and just removing the the idiots or does she have it? What are other instructions if any are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that
It responds
to no, I don't I don't really care what people say again to the point that if people have something of substance and urgency, they will reach out and I'm then very happy to hear from actual humans and engage in the human dialogue which I do but I really care about you know, the comments on Facebook. I just don't want them depressing me when I go on the page because I put my own thing Shonda, you know, Lisa doesn't put the actual postings and I also don't want them creating a
That is antithetical to the very reason why I do what I do, which is a kind of faith in the human spirit. I mean, that's where I come from. I am a cautious one sometimes but an optimist about the so-called Human Condition and anybody who crafts on that without having even given a chance to the thoughts that that speak to the to those ideals which is what my articles are record of then I will want them God, you know, and so her
jeans are just you know band people who are offensive to others sort of in a vicious way as opposed to just having rational discourse of disagreement band people who are ignorant and have not read the thing and have some very scandalous or not even scandalous sort of sensation and sensationalist take on it. Clearly not understanding the Nuance because I mean a culture of news as I say often a culture without nuance and
Yeah, so that's basically it helped me stay sane when I look at them. That's her. That's her task. It's not make me lose my mind over exasperation. When people's impatient
know and I you know, I really respect that because another reason that I read brain pickings is opposed to other sites and I feel comfortable going there is that I feel it is sort of a stronghold of positivity and optimism in a
A lot of respects so Kudos the email actually before we get the email. I've read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook which would make sense because your prolific if that if that's still the case. What do you use to schedule that social media?
I use buffer for Twitter and I use just my hands for Facebook. But again, I mean this goes back.
The same inner struggle of I do want to be reading and writing for myself. So why do I have the compulsion to put so much of it out there and I sell flagellate over that because on some level it does seem like a form of hypocrisy but then I do think about the people that email me from India and Pakistan and South Africa and Korea and wherever that actually that's how they connect.
and I think if I'm putting in the amount of time that I do into into what I do, even if I do it for myself, I might as well just harness that time anyway, if it benefits somebody else's Journey, you know, and so I do it because of that mostly
definitely and I think that while it's fine to write for yourself if you if you keep
The value of what you write to yourself when it could benefit a lot of other people than I think that's actually it could be viewed as a selfish act. Right? So the I think that I think that there's particularly when you're curating in the way that you do and you're saving people thousands of hours of searching by distilling a lot of these Concepts.
Well, I would argue that the benefit the value
Is not even I mean what I do is kind of the antithesis of search. It's a discovery of things that ideally one would not have come across within the usual parameters of one's filter bubble. Right? So sort of a lot of the people that that I hear from for example, you know, just this week to use the Seneca example actually just this week I heard from this guy who was in it person trained as a physicist end up doing it and said,
Seneca the shortness of Life piece really will really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy never been interested in and never looked for it, but it's just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life, you know, and it's kind of it gives you pause to hear that from people
definitely agreed on an email the if you go to your contact page you recommend email Charter dot-org.
Oh and I'm very curious to hear if people actually follow the email Charter it like we would in terms of the the email that you receive do people actually pay attention to that and
forefathers. Yeah, they do and I'm so grateful and I mean but the majority of them. Do you know some people who reach out with the intention of self-promoting there's usually, you know laziness to people who self promote for
Take their of you know, so they don't they don't usually follow but people who actually care to have a conversation and to engage or very courteous and very sort of mindful of what I've asked except for publicist who are
never yeah, right? Well, I mean suppose if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template dear blog dear blogger. Oh, yeah. I love it.
Very often which I think is actually hilarious people who don't even bother to read the name of the site. So they address me dear Brian breaking some outcomes and at this the Pinnacle of this was when last year at one point, I opened my physical mailbox in my building my home and I found this bundle from the USPS, but like with an elastic band around it of mail for some
Named Brian Pickens who lives in Long Beach CA or used to I guess and somehow that stuff got forwarded to me because I guess the guy either moved and the USPS like somehow look things up and I didn't even know it was such a sort of mystery and metaphor for what I deal with online. I was like, how can you ask a publicist not to
so I used to have a company ages ago called brain Quicken.
And I had a I got a telemarketing call one evening. I remember and this guy goes High. Sorry if you're if I'm interrupting is this Brian and I go excuse me, and he goes Brian Brian chicken and I'm like a Brian chicken. I was like no and take me off your list. Goodbye the God. So on the on the on the email and pitching side of things or just on the
Pink side of things. How on Earth do you deal with not just cold inquiries, but how do you deal with writer friends or acquaintances who are writers? They don't want to be rude to who want you to read their books. How do you polite decline that stuff and maybe maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it and the fact the matter is like not everyone is is able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably if I get ten books from
Some decent or good friends. Some of them are going to be terrible and I don't have the time to certainly or the inclination to read them all. How do you deal with that type of situation?
Well, I guess the deal first and foremost by controlling not the outcome, but the the cause which is your circle of friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround myself with and I'm I'd like to thank friendly to pretty much everybody.
Either I meet but my circle of actual friends is really close and really tight and people who are just you know, when the sky crumbles are going to be there and we're there for each other. And so with that in mind, I think there is a certain boundary that you have to put up beforehand to I guess manage social expectations in a way and to for those people my friend friends in large part. I mean, I should mention that the majority of my close friends including my partner.
To our people that I have met just through what I do. So there's already the self selection of sensibility and ideals and you know, I think would become a centripetal force for the kinds of people we want to be in surround ourselves with those types of people William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal Michael culture. And even when you said early on the kinship of spirit, I think that's so important so which is a long-winded way to say that when and if those inner
Circle people put a book out. It's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are. And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean the book that we started with the scratch and sniff guide to Wine Wendy. The illustrator is precisely that type of person somebody who I met through what each of us does and she's now one of my closest human beings, you know, and so of course, I'm going to support her work but not because I'm being nepotistic about it, but because that's the pre requirement that I am.
Moved by her work and respected and loved it. And that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle. I don't I think acquaintance is know that there's no such expectation. And when I do get such requests it's a matter of well did the person do their homework and knowing what I actually think and write about because very often and I'm sure you get that to get pitched things that are just so outside of what you do in which case I don't even feel
Failed to respond because if they didn't put in the time to understand what I'm interested in why should I put in the time to explain to them why this is not a fit.
Yeah. That's a great way to put it. I need to embrace that more. I think that's an area where I carry a lot of
guilt guilt. Yeah, you know, but guilt it's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige and they're both horrible reasons to do things. So often we would agree as humans not just you and me just anybody would agree to do things because they say,
sound prestigious is some in some way, you know and and equally avoid things because of the guilt thing where do things because the guilt thing but sort of the whole Buddhist thing about a version of you know, avoidance and aversion and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is it's the fear of disappointing somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself or out of sort of grasping for you know, approval or a claim which
We're doing things for Prestige is I think either of those.
Are really bad reasons to do things and yet they they motivate us a lot or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the Mind constantly and it is a real practice to try to decondition that
definitely know. I like I like I like what you said about why put in the effort to explain why it's not a fit if they haven't done the homework to determine if it is if it I think that's a great way to put it I want to ask and I know we don't have too much time left. So hopefully sometime someday we
Do a follow-up part 2 I think that'd be a blast. I'll bring I'll bring some Malbec if you actually say I can I can introduce you to it first hand, but the the donations I'm very fascinated by the the ad free donation approach and just T just to to keep it simple. If you had to choose say 20% of the options, you're currently offering. Which would you choose and why?
In other words, you have no no, so I'll explain or two or three so you so people can make one-time offer. They can make a one-time single contribution. They can let me simplify that question or they can become a member and donate it a 7-3 ten or twenty five dollars a month what I'm trying to ask without being in praia Des or making you feel uncomfortable is what
Working best when you're asking people for donations, you know, assuming that it's working. If someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month or the the single contribution versus the membership or the membership versus the single contribution. What would your advice be to
people? Well, I will preface this with the caveat that I use PayPal for donations and I can't for the life of me figure out how to actually like look at the data and get any sort of real reason.
Love it. It's so Antiquated their export tools and such and I'm not that interested. I would siphon, you know days into looking into it so I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation. And yeah, great. And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are also is also the reason why I don't have an ad-supported site, which is I just asked myself. What would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad-free site and how would I like to support that? Well, I'd like to have a few options, you know, just
because I don't want to you know be sort of confined to something and so I just just pulled it out of the Hat basically with these tears and I've just left them on since I put them on they seem to work, you know, whatever and originally my sense was that the one-time donation is accounted for much more, but I'd never actually analyze it because I think I see the alerts that come from PayPal and sometimes people would send really large one-time donations like things that are totally
Lee humbling and enormously generous and I think those kind of you kind of way them somehow it's more than the cumulative some of the smaller donations. So I thought the one-timers were much more but then and I'm pretty sure that must have been the case earlier on right but and I've had the recurring ones I found the one-time donations for as long as I can remember for as long as I basically needed to start making.
Money for the site Because by the way running the site cost me several times my rent like all the costs associated with it. It's like crazy. So at one point, I got to a point where I had to make money I said I don't want to do ads I don't believe in that I'll have just donations and I didn't even think of recurring ones at the time that was years ago. And then my friend Max lynskey who runs long form dot org or having tea and he said well, why don't you like push the recurring ones more because it's working really great for us and
at that point I had the option but it was buried somewhere on my like donation about page or something and I was like, okay, so I put it in the sidebar and that was I want to say maybe 2011 and it started occurring slowly. And so this past year when I did my taxes, I very reluctantly went to deal with all the PayPal tools to get the data out basically and I actually had Lisa pull all the excels and whatnot. And then I did the tally to see
And to my surprise the recurring ones which are very small individual amounts. Actually. We're two to one ratio to the one-time donation. Wow, and I don't know at what point of tipped over but I think because of the scale and just how many people have these tiny tiny donations that they contribute every month. I mean that's such an act of commitment and it's so generous, you know that they add up and my guess is that as time goes on because the recurring
Once have only been available for the last like two and a half three years, whatever they would become by far the larger sort of financial support compared to the single ones
sure know that makes sense the if you had to choose and of course this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the drop-down, so you have seven dollars a month three dollars ten dollars 25 if you had to choose two of those to leave up. Which would you choose?
So I have no idea. I'm probably just the mathematical logical Choice the two middle was it there that three and ten?
Okay cool. No just very curious about this kind of thing. I think I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content and I can't emphasize strong strongly enough what you just said, which is you you base what you do on
What you would like or dislike as a reader in the case of the something with with text? It doesn't have to be super complicated. It doesn't have to be doing tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself. Would this annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it what I love this. If so, try it out and
every decision to has been that way in actually in the last couple of years. I've been getting really annoyed. I mean brain becomes is a pretty sort of Lo-Fi site as you can see it just very super simple base.
Static but I've been getting annoyed that it doesn't load very well on my iPhone when I want to look at something or pull something up to reference or iPad and my friend Scott belsky who runs the hands. He's a great guy and he's been sort of a very generous donor just supporting and you know, and one time he pulls me aside that was like I think in February marking, he's like, you know how much I love brain pickings but like the site sucks. We couldn't say it in that way, but I feel super sweet about it and they key offered to
me with this guy that he knew that I could hire to do a responsive design and I always have this resistance to making these sort of technological improvements because then I feel like I don't want to be a media company like I don't want to be a buzzfeed but at the end of the day, I as a reader and as a sort of engage or with that experience with being annoyed by it myself, so now I'm in the middle of releasing like a simple responsive site that is actually easy to read on your phone and
So yeah, it's a fair and so Wastin Prevail again Innovation.
It's so so worth it it took me. Let's see it only took me three. Oh God seven years to get a mobile version of the site ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago. So I better late than never I suppose. Well Maria, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you taking the time if someone were to
Want to explore brain pickings? What are a few articles you might suggest that they start with?
A few posts.
Well since we talked about it so much. It's the Seneca piece about the shortness of life. It's fairly short piece. There's a piece I did a couple of years ago, which was less about it was not about a specific book just sort of things that I've been thinking about for a long time this disconnect between purpose and Prestige and why would you things and I forget what it's called. I think it's called how to do what you love or some other had a
Your purpose and do what you love and it was sort of an assemblage of thoughts on that from various sources as well as my own and perhaps most of all a piece that I wrote last fall as on the seventh seventh birthday really at the state which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of Reading Writing and living
which is a great article and I didn't want to replicate everything in here. So I sort of bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit, but just to reiterate
Something that you mentioned and that's doing nothing for Prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I just want to quote Paul Graham here which you included which is prestigious like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy it causes you to work not on what you like, but what you would like to like, so I think is so stood and in closing is there an
also I should just interject and say any Alan Watts. Peace not because my writing about it is so great or it's not coming from a place of
Check me out. It's coming from a place of check him out. Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit. So I highly recommend any of those
articles cool. All right, brain pickings dot-org is the site guys. Check it out Maria any parting advice for this episode this portion of our conversation. But before we before we check out and you device to the people listening out there thoughts parting comments.
No advice for say just I guess I commented in a hope, which is that that you know, thank you so much now just for having me but for having this show and for doing everything that you do and I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just I guess for lack of better word idealism and conviction. And yeah, thank you for setting an example that
way well that means a lot coming from you.
I think I think you're a tremendous Force for good out there in the world. So I hope people check out your work. I hope you continue to do what you're doing. I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull-ups. And and we will we will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one. This is five. Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a
A short email from it. Would you enjoy getting a short email for me? Every Friday is that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend and fiber Friday's every short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that have discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that
I shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that check it out. Just go to four hour workweek.com. That's for our week.com all spelled out and just drop in your email. You will get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you enjoy.
