#710: Super Combo: Jamie Foxx and Maria Popova

27:09You know what I'm saying? I mean, people singing and, you know, they would tear American Idol up. You know, and these people haven't necessarily made it. So all of a sudden, Ed Sheeran gets up with a ukulele, walks out onto the stage. And the brother that was next to me was like, yo, Fox, man, who the fuck is this dude right here, man, with the red hair and shit and the fucking ukulele? I said, man, his name is Ed Sharon. Let's see what he does. Within 12 minutes, he got a standing ovation. Wow. From that crowd. And I said, bro, you're on your way. So this studio has, like I said, a lot of history, and it has that magic to it as well.

27:47The mojo. Yeah. Now, you mentioned getting into music, but it seems like from what I've read of you that music in some ways came first. Music did. Music did. When I was a kid, my grandmother made sure that I took piano lessons. And you know, that's tough for a little boy in Texas, you know, playing Fur Elise and Chopin and Mozart. And we're not talking about Houston there. No, we're talking Terrell, Texas. And I love my city. My city was dope because it was only 12 ,000 people. So it was like literally like 12 or 15 families. So we all knew each other. But, you know, for a little boy playing at that time, you know, the kids didn't understand.

28:28Yo, man, why are you doing that? My grandma want me to do this, you know. And so I would sometimes I would be belligerent and be like, why do you want me to do this? She says, the reason I want you to learn classical piano is because I want you to be able to go across the tracks and play your music. for people listening across the tracks or on the other side of the tracks for a southern city was the tracks in a southern city separates the city. One side is black, the other side is white. So in our city, the south side, the south side of town was where all the black folk live. The north side of town was where the white folks live.

29:04So she says, I want you to be able to go on the white side of town and play classical music. So she taught me how to play classical piano, a lady by the name of Lenita Hodge taught me how to play classical piano. And I literally would go on the other side of the tracks and, you know, and start playing for like wine and cheese parties and things like that. But my grandmother took it a step further too, because she was able to see the future. Here's a lady with an eighth grade education. She had her own business for 30 years. She had her own nursery school business. She says, when I say across the tracks, I don't just mean in Terrell and those people over there.

29:38I mean the metaphoric, like across the track, like meaning everywhere in the world. So music connects you to the whole world. So in doing that, I would connect with people on the other side of tracks, you know, in a southern city. And, Terrell, you know, we were a little behind the curve when it came to race relations. Let's just say it that way without, you know, I don't want to demonize my hometown. but there was that, who's a little black kid? And my grandmother would be like, don't, you know, play. Do your thing. And when I would play, you know, a lot of that broke up. I remember even, like, being armed with just my music in sort of that racial setting sometimes.

30:24Like, there was a time when there was a Christmas party. Were these paid gigs? Yeah, I'd get like$10,$15, you know what I'm saying? At that time, and I played for the church. So playing for the church, I would make like$75 a week. So if you count that up, that's like$300 a month. That's real money. That's real money at 13, 14. My grandmother would take the money, though, and give me this money. So grandma, what are you doing with my money? Shit, you ain't paying no rent. You ain't going to give me this money. But I remember at that time being armed with just my music, and there was a Christmas party that I was supposed to play for, myself and my best friend who was 17.

30:58I was 16 at the time. And so here's a little bit of the racial misunderstanding, shall we say. I went to play for the guys Christmas time. Maybe it's like December 17th. And we show up. It's two little black kids on the white side of town. And when he opens his door and he sees these two little black kids, he says, what's going on here? I said, well, I'm here to play for your Christmas party. Then why are two of you here at the same time? I said, well, I don't have a license. He drove me. Is there a problem? Yeah, it's a problem. I can't have two niggers in my house at the same time. And I was like, well, you know, I've been sort of used to the racial misunderstandings.

31:37And I said, well, is there any way he can wait outside or wait? And he can't wait on the street. Starts at 630. Now you got to make your mind up now. So I said, I told my boy, I said, let's just come get me at 830, which was pretty late, you know, for kids at that time, you know. So I go in. He says, where's your tuxedo? I said, well, he didn't tell me to have a tuxedo. so we go into this room which looks like a bedroom and i'm looking like why the fuck does he have clothes hanging up in his bedroom but it was a walk-in closet i've never seen no shit like that we make a split level condo out of this shit so he gives me a brooks brother's jacket that had the patches on the elbows i'm like oh shit half a looting so now i'm really playing you know i'm But as I'm playing, they were doing, the grownups there were doing racially misunderstanding jokes.

32:30I'll say it like that. And my grandmother taught me something at that time. She said, when you're in a setting like that, there's a word I want you to remember. It's called furniture. I said, what's that? She said, you're part of the furniture. So you don't comment on what's being said. You play. That's what you're there for. You let these people enjoy their... And the lady at the house felt bad. She said, I just want to apologize to you for what they're saying. I said, no problem. She said, can you sing something for us? And I was like, sure. I could sing something for us. And this was the song that I sung.

33:08Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose.

33:22Yuletide caps Being sung By a choir And folks Dressed up like Eskimo Everybody Anyway, so as I'm singing I remember watching those White guys Old men, some of them faculty At my school, that had just said Something, you know, probably not I don't think it was that they meant harm, harm, but it was. They'd have to resign today. Yeah. And they look and they go, they immediately change. I said, wow, man, that's good. You know any other songs? And I sat and I did about maybe like a six song set. And I saw what my grandmother talked about. That music cracked them in half. They saw a different me. And then afterwards, he gave me a hundred bucks.

34:12And I'm like, shit, call me nigga every day. I got a hundred dollars. I'm rich. And what was interesting was I went to give him the jacket back. He's like, no, I can't wear the jacket. So it was still a little bit of residue left over. But I saw what the music did. And I remember when my boy showed back up, I said, listen, it was a cool gig. We got paid. I said, but I got to get out of here. I said, because I'm too smart for this, I need to go elsewhere. And I did. I changed my major. Well, I changed the college that I was going to go to. I was going to go to another college in Texas and study music.

34:49Instead, I came to California and San Diego to study music at International University. And what was interesting about that was that being in Texas, it was black, whites, and Mexicans. When I got to International University, it was 81 different countries represented at that school, all connected by music and other things, music and sports. in the music the music arena at that time was high-end strict child prodigies from japan child prodigies from china i had a russian uh music teacher and i has a yugoslavian music theory teacher so it was it was really across the tracks but uh because of that because of estelle tally and Mark Talley, you know, picking me up every weekend to go play music.

35:39Man, it set me on, like I said, a crazy, wonderful journey. And so the music was first, you know, and my college was interesting. I didn't know anything about Jewish, Palestinian. I had no idea. I was at the student center and there was this argument going on so what are you arguing about oh my brother they're talking about the Gaza Strip I said fuck is that and they said no the Jewish the occupation the this the that I got a quick I got a quick history lesson on that I got a quick history lesson on people from Argentina or I would see a person who looked black and I'd be like hey what's up brother and I'd be like oh shit where you from I was like, I'm from Paris.

36:28I was like, what the fuck? They got black people. So that music gave me not only an opportunity to share, but opportunity to be educated by other people. Because we studied Texas history. And studying Texas history is interesting. Like if you study Texas history, if it didn't happen in Texas, it didn't happen. So when you look at, like, this is just a sidebar. But when you think about politics and what people know and don't know in politics and what they know about across the sea or what they know about even on the next block or what they know about what's different in Texas from New York, the reason that politics is so interesting is because the people don't necessarily have educations of other people.

37:08which is why I think that once we start opening up a little more and traveling a little more because what is it less than how many percent less or less than five percent of Americans have passports and things it's a small number so so anyway that music like I said took me took me everywhere just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. If you are a business-to-business marketer, your needs are unique and your solutions should be unique as well. B2B buying cycles are long and your customers face incredibly complex decisions.

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38:50What other, your grandmother seems like a very wise woman, and I've heard you describe her, and I might be, I'm sure I'm paraphrasing this, but that she she was the bow or had the o and you were the arrow and she pointed you in different directions i'm wondering what other like you are the furniture right i mean when to speak when not to speak what other lessons did you learn from your grandmother my grandmother taught me confidence as well my grandma was a very confident person and uh very smart just how would you say just naturally intelligent she was a a a taurus you know saying natural is like it wasn't something and it was super educated or anything like that.

39:34I'll give you a hint of my grandmother. I'm 10 years old maybe. I think I'm in the fifth grade, 76, President Carter. The preacher started preaching about homosexuality. I don't know what it is. I'm 10 or 8 or whatever. So he's saying, God made Adam and Eve. God didn't make Adam and Steve. Some people are like, you know, it's Southern, it's Texas. Amen. My grandmother stood up and said, you stop that. And the whole church stopped. What's that, Ms. Taylor? You stop that. Now, her words, what she said next was very interesting. Let me tell you something. I've had this nursery school for 30 years.

40:17And I want to let all y 'all know that God makes sissies too. And the whole place went, what? She said, these little boys that I've watched since they could walk. They play by different music. And you stop that because you're making it hard for them to navigate. Sits down. He goes to another subject. Eventually, he leaves the church. But I found that very interesting. At that time, I didn't know what that meant until I got to be about 18. I was like, what was you talking about? She says, yeah, it's true. She says, you know, I've had this nursery school. I see the difference in the kids. And so, therefore, I would have these kids come to me after they graduated from high school, gone to college, or tried to have a family, although they were living with this.

41:06So she was the type of woman who had natural intelligence. I said, well, Granny, well, what does it say about religion? Doesn't it say that it's wrong? You know, being a kid from Texas, it's a natural question. She says, you know, when I think about it, she said you have to open up the umbrella of religion. I said, what do you mean? She said, if you only open up the umbrella halfway, only a few people can stand under it. She said, you have to open the umbrella all the way through so God's children can stand on it. Because no one here did not get made by anybody else or anything else but God. So that was my grandmother, you know.

41:44It seems very, the move in church, that's a very bold move, very courageous move. Very bold, very bold. But my grandmother raised those people in church. See, I was adopted at seven months, so she was much older. So all of the kids that were there, and like I said, it was only a few families that lived in Terrell. So all of the kids that grew up, or all of the grown-ups that were there, she— She was the matriarch. Because during the year, it was a school. You know what I'm saying? But then during the summer, you drop your kids off at my grandmother's house and just let them keep them. So she was very powerful in that sense.

42:21and then when I did finally make it, it was wonderful to tell my grandmother to come live with me. So my grandma was living with me. So we'd go to the clubs. You know, my grandma was like, she had to be 83 at the time. She would go to the clubs, we'd hang out, you know what I'm saying? This is in LA. This is in LA. I had a little apartment, split level condo. Remember when that was hype? The split level condo. So I had a loft. Oh yeah, Ricardo, he's only 19, he doesn't know what I'm talking about. But I had a loft and we were living in that loft and then we eventually rented a house and me and my grandma, and I didn't know I was a mama's boy.

42:56Like, we go to the parties, come back, we have an after party at the crib and then one of my homies came and said, yo, Fox, there's an older lady out here in the front room. I said, yeah, that's my grandma. What's up? Yeah, it's cool. I said, yeah, and then you used a bottle of champagne pop. What we doing? We getting it or what? You know, so she was amazing, man. So, you know, my grandmother, you know, We party, hang, have a good time. She was 83 years old. And then the big thing was, it's like, Granny, you know, it's Christmas time. Why don't we do something we ain't never done? You know, you saw them making a little money.

43:30Why don't we go to Hawaii for Christmas? Because I got some friends from Hawaii. Well, yeah, well, let's get it going. Gas up the plane, right? So we fly to Hawaii one year. And it was just amazing to be able to show my grandmother another side of the world. It even made the papers in Terrell, Texas. Estelle Talley. on her way to Hawaii, you know. And I remember, you know, just a fun, just a fun time. I remember we're having a good time. We're going everywhere. And she had a boyfriend at the same time. It was 83 too. And he was on the, you know, he was on the land side. And so, so it was like December 23rd.

44:09We called her boyfriend just so they could talk. So she's on the phone. Yeah, having a good time. Oh yeah. Yeah. The weather's nice. Mm-hmm. Sunny. Oh, food is good. I got my own seasonings, though. Mm-hmm. Real nice. Well, I tell you what. Look, I'm going to go, but let me tell you something. Don't let me come back there and catch you with no young girls. You understand? Because I don't play that. Let me catch you with no young girls. You hear me? So she hangs up. You know, there's like three or four families there. We're having like a little Christmas party. We all go, Granny, what? When you said the young girls, what are you talking about?

44:44You know, 60, 65. I don't want to mess with no 65. She says, shit, I'm 83. You know, I can't handle a 65-year-old woman all in my shit. So she was just a great person, tough girl. I remember there was some situations where I did make it, and some people in my family felt like I should give them all of my money. This lady walks in, and we're in my apartment. She comes in and says, my rich cousin. I didn't even recognize because I had only seen him maybe once or twice growing up. So anyway, he gets around to it. She says, I need$10 ,000 for a kidney. I'm like, who's kidney? Well, I need kidney surgery or something like that.

45:28So if you give me the cash, I could take it and get the. I said, well, why don't you, if it's a situation of medical, I know some doctors, maybe they can help you. Oh, I would prefer the$10 ,000. That's okay. Okay. I'll hit you. I didn't call. But I was like, so that became a problem for her. And she called me one day and left on the answer machine. Young fella. Last time you seen the answer machine. So I'm checking my answer machine and she leaves a scathing message. Well, you know what? I didn't get the money from you. And that's fine because you're not part of this family anyway. You was adopted.

46:01Nobody wanted you anyway. This is what this lady is saying to me. Brittle. I was like, what the hell? So I let my grandmother hear. Let me run that back. Played it. What's that number? And she called, and I remember listening. Now, I'm grown. You know, I'm 22, so I'm grown, and I hear how she stuck up for me. She said, let me explain something to you, boy. And I could hear her. I got that boy when he was seven months old. I said, and everybody wanted him. I wanted him. Everybody, you know. I said, and he may not be blood, but he's our family. It was just an incredible, incredible thing. My grandmother was absolutely amazing.

46:42I think you need people like that. And when you talk about that bow, that's my reference to raising kids. And I got my own kids now, is that when you raise your kids, you are the bow and arrow. You're the bow. They're the arrow. And you just try to aim them in the best direction that you can. And hopefully your aim isn't too off. And that's what she did for me. And then, you know, she watched my whole career all the way up until getting nominated for an Oscar, where all of the things that she taught me came into play. when we did Ray Charles, that was an opportunity to play the piano, to be funny, to do an impersonation, and all these things is what my grandmother championed.

47:26So when we embarked upon that film, I was like, oh, man, granny was right. This is taking me on the other side of the tracks. And when we got in, even when I got a chance to meet Ray Charles, which, you know, that's my grandmother's era, you know? and she didn't get a chance to meet him because at the time she was you know she couldn't move bedridden a little bit but uh being around older people you know i understood that muscle too because i was always the young kid with the old parents so meeting ray charles was like seeing my grandfather seeing one of my uncles and when i met ray and we were trying to do ray charles the movie and taylor hackford who was the director and he says you know i've been wanting to do this movie for 25 years.

48:11I'm glad you came along because it's the right time. And I remember meeting Ray Charles walking down his studio, you know, clean, you know. Looked like, almost like he could see, you know. And I said, Mr. Charles, you know, I'm just trying to do the best I can to, you know, to do, to do your, move your biopies. You know what? Look, if you could play the blues, man, shit, you could do anything, man. I said, what do you mean? He said, can you play the blues? Shit, that's what I'm asking. I said, I guess so. Then come on. And we go and we sit down. And all of the hard work that my grandmother put in, all of the days my grandfather drove me to, piano lessons.

48:49Here I am sitting with a legend. And we were like...

49:00And I was like playing the blues with Ray Charles. And as we're playing, I'm like, I'm on cloud nine. Then he moved into some intricate stuff, like Thelonious Monk. And I was like, oh, shit, I got to catch up. And I hit a wrong note. And he stopped because his ears are very sensitive. Now, why the hell would you do that? I said, why is that? Why you hit the note like that? That's a wrong note, man. Shit. I said, well, I'm sorry, Mr. Charles. I just said, let me tell you something, buddy. The notes are right underneath your fingers, baby. You just got to take the time out to play the right notes.

49:37That's life. So that was a lesson that the notes are right underneath your fingers. So metaphorically, so now you got across the tracks. There's someone like Estelle Talley teaches you. Then you got Ray Charles explaining now that you're across the tracks, what notes are you going to play? And so now we go on and we do that movie, which we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know that it was going to be like that. It wasn't a studio film. It was independent. and uh you know doing the doing the process of the movie was interesting of my you know background being from tarot knowing how to mimic but i needed to know how to do rich do ray charles like the young ray charles so i got in touch with uh quincy jones and for all of you young ones out there uh listening make sure you google quincy jones and ray charles and the reason why you should do that is because they were the building blocks of our music today, which started in Seattle, Washington, which was interesting.

50:41Seattle at that time was a big hub for jazz music, jazz musicians. And that's where Ray Charles migrated to running into a young Quincy Jones. Ray Charles actually taught Quincy Jones everything he knows about music. Who was Quincy Jones for you young ones listening? Quincy Jones was the one who did, I mean, he played, he was a band director for Frank Sinatra. All of those guys, the Rat Pack, all of those guys, he was the band leader. And when I met Quincy Jones, he talks about that. Yeah, man, shit, man, music, man. These young cats don't know music anymore, man. Shit, they wouldn't, they'd play in the key or cue if they would, man.

51:21Shit, man, when I played baby Frankie, baby, I said, Mr. Jones, who's Frankie? Man, shit, Frank Sinatra, man. Shit, I was young, man, the band leader, we were playing in Monaco, man. We didn't even have time to rehearse, baby. We're just there playing, waiting on fucking Frank to come in. I said, what do you mean? He says, we had to play this show in Monaco. Frank had never met me, knew that I was this young kid who was great with the music. I become the band leader. We don't get a chance to rehearse. Monaco was billionaires and millionaires in the audience waiting on this incredible show. And he says, we're just vamping, man.

51:58Shit. And Frank doesn't even come out on the stage. He comes through the audience, man. shit talking and shit i'm like man i'm nervous as hell and then frank got up he said he sung the band was tight and frank sinatra knighted him like gave him a ring that was like you know pretty significant if you know what i mean and if you guys uh google frank sinatra you'll understand what i mean about the lucoso nostrum and uh uh so here i am now talking to quincy Jones. And he's telling me about Ray Charles. He says, man, Ray taught me everything, man. Shit, man. He taught me how to dress. We were wearing suits, suits, zoot suits and shit, man.

52:39He had nice suits, tailor-made. And I said, why did he have nice suits? Shit, man. He was always around women, man. And women would tell him, man, those zoot suits are ugly because he couldn't see. So the women was telling him how to dress. And I said, well, Mr. Jones, I'm trying to figure out how to do Ray Charles, but I need the young Ray Charles, right? And he says, well, man, shit, let me look. And he gives me a cassette tape to you young ones out there. A cassette tape back in the day was a way for us to, I'm just messing with it, to share music. And I said, okay, I got the cassette tape.

53:12I had to go rent a truck from a Hertz rent a car because there was no cassette players in the cars. So I popped the cassette tape in and on the tape was hi this is Donna Shore from the Donna Shore show we have two very wonderful musicians here today and Mr. Kenny Rogers and Mr. Ray Charles and you hear the young Ray I'm just so happy to be here that you know my music and it was the young Ray because when I was talking to the older Ray I didn't want to grab those bad old habits I wanted to play in Young so I hear Ray talking young on the tape and then all of a sudden he's in charge of the of the interview and this is you know he was doing his thing and then all of a sudden she says talk about the drugs ray and then he started to stutter well you know what so i use that as dna to play the iconic character ray charles that when he's talking about his music he's fully in control when he's confronted with real life things why are you doing drugs why don't you take care of your family while you're cheating on your wife, he would stutter.

54:18And I say this long story to say this. After the success of Ray Charles, after being nominated for an Oscar, my grandmother got a chance to witness all of that. She got a chance to see the bearing of the fruits of her labor for her young kid coming from that racially misunderstood town, which I love and wouldn't change anything in the world when it comes to Terrell, Texas. Her saying, get across the tracks. We've now gone across the tracks. We've gone all over the world and now here we are. And think about, think about what's the odds of a kid who lives in a town, population 12 ,240 people from Terrell to go all the way to Los Angeles, California.

55:15meet Puff, meet all these different people and then actually have an opportunity to win an Oscar. And your grandmother gets a chance to see that. Now, October 23rd, 2004, she passed away, which if you know, the actual awards was 2005 in February. But she got a chance to hang in there and feel it. So my grandmother was just like the blueprint. How do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids? Because you're clearly a very confident guy. Grandmother was very bold, very strong woman. How do you try to teach that to your kids? Well, what you do with your kids is, like when my daughter is, there's the phrase that when you see Annalise, my daughter and my oldest daughter, Corrine, I would always ask them, what's on the other side of fear?

56:09And they'd be like, huh? I said, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like if I stood in the middle of this floor right now and just yelled, what's on the other side of that? Or if I stood in the middle of the floor and went, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like either you do or you don't, but there's no penalty. There's no reward. It's just you just be yourself. So I taught them what's on the other side of fear? Nothing. People are nervous for no reason because there's nothing. No one's going to come out and slap you or beat you up or anything. You're just nervous. So why even have that?

56:43And so that's a building block that they can use, not just about the entertainment business, because that's the other thing. You don't have to be an entertainer. But whatever you go into, whether you be a lawyer or a school teacher or tech guy or whatever, or girl, whatever it is, there's nothing on the other side of it. What's on the other side of fear? Nothing. I like it. So it's like, so why are you, when people say, oh, I'm so nervous, what are you nervous about? It reminds me of this quote that I, I sort of recite to myself and I'm going to paraphrase it because I have it written down, but it's from Mark Twain.

57:15It says, I'm an old man who's known a great many troubles, most of which never happened. Yeah, exactly. Because all of it is in our head. When we talk about fear or lack of being aggressive or it's in your head. So not everybody's going to be super aggressive, but the one thing that you can deal with is a person's fears. So if you start early, if they are a shy person, they just won't be as shy if you keep instilling those things. The mimicry, the impersonation, how early did that start? Because I read, and maybe you can tell me if this is off or not because you never know with the internet, that your second grade teacher used to reward the class if they behaved by letting you tell jokes?

58:00Yeah, they would let me tell jokes because I would get in trouble. Miss Reeves, I think it was my third grade teacher, Mr. Reeves, because I would like talk, but I was very smart. My grandmother had a school. I lived in a school. So I already knew from first to eighth grade, I already knew all of the lesson plan. So, you know, a kid like me sitting there with nothing to do, I'm going to get in trouble. So she would let me do stand-up comedy on Fridays for the kids. And all I would do is my grandmother would watch Johnny Carson, and the only room that had the television was my room. So I had to watch Johnny Carson, too, as a kid.

58:35So nine years old, seven, eight, nine years old, I would just take the jokes that were being told by David Brenner and Steve Allen and a young David Letterman. Who else would be on there? Franklin Ajay. You guys, when you're hearing this, go Google these guys. A young Jay Leno. These were like sort of like, you know, Richard Pryor. So I would take those jokes and tell him at school because those kids wouldn't watch it. Please tell me he used Richard Pryor on Fridays. Well, I guess it was on primetime, so it wasn't Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor on primetime, he couldn't really say anything on primetime.

59:15He was clean. But like Rich Little, and Google Rich Little because Rich Little was the first person that I saw do impersonations. So this had to be like 76, 1976. 26. So like fifth grade for me, the joke was Jimmy Carter, which was the president at the time, singing, you light up my life. And at that time, his brother was getting caught drunk all the time, like Billy. So it was a Jimmy Carter goes, so many nights, me and my brother, Billy, would sit by the window waiting for somebody to bring some peanuts and beer. and so that was my first attempt at an impersonation and then it went on from there to do Richard Nixon I am not a crook so you know uh who else would I do Reagan uh that came later but but here's it Reagan came later but Reagan came like in the 80s when I was actually like 21 and I was the first black guy uh doing the Reagan impersonation probably the only one so I would be on stage doing my impersonations and going to Ronald Reagan people are like no it ain't no way And, well, as a matter of fact, I, well, oh, no, there you go again.

1:00:34And so that being young and that teacher, Miss Reeves, and Miss Douthit and all those teachers, Miss Cole allowing me to be myself, you know, helped me hone in on what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. Like, literally, my friends from Tarot go like, how the fuck did you do that? This is the shit you used to do. you turned your third girl back. It was literally the same shit. I'd be like, wow, millions of people are watching this shit. It's the same, it's the same thing. And then, then, you know, as people came, uh, came up, you know, the, the impersonation, you know, that Cosby is back in to do the Cosby impersonation is back in.

1:01:19Don't know how I'm going to do it, but there's definitely a Cosby joke somewhere. I don't know where, but I, I used to do Cosby because of the people in the Jell-O, putting in the filth and the flying and the flying, which Eddie Murphy did. But people didn't know, like, Cosby's real speaking voice is not like that. What's his speaking voice like? His speaking voice was different because I remember I got in trouble with Mr. Cosby because he felt that the movie Booty Call was not cool. And he said some things in the press about us. And I was like a young comedian, like, damn, man, I'm just trying to work, you know.

1:01:55But his speaking voice, when he was on the phone, Well, see, the thing is, when you do something like booty call, what is a booty call? See, why are you calling the booty? You know, whatever. But it was so, it wasn't the, and then you find out that that was your stick. Yeah, yeah. Because the kid and the child and people and the farm, you know. So I know that that will come up. I'll find a joke for Cosby that, of course, is going to be a little, uh, people are going to be like, uh, but it's going to be funny as shit. And now, who's now Doc Rivers from the Clippers? Hey, you know, we're going to try.

1:02:37You know, it's not Blake's fault. You know, next year we got to do better. You know, so I'm working on, like, the new impersonations now. And so that's, and the way you do an impersonation is usually about, it's musical. like say Kermit the Frog right so Kermit the Frog is so it's sort of like the way you do your you know what I'm saying it's fine right so so the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit the Frog Kermit the Frog here with the sesame tree. So that's, and then once you get the voice tone, it's how you make, it's how you manipulate your, your, your mouth to get the sound. Cause you know, it's, so it's, it's sort of constricting.

1:03:35And then, and then, and then it's, and then it's asking the character to come sit with you. Hey, Kermit the Frog here, here with the, uh, three little pigs. So, you know, but the key is this. And at the same time, Kermit the Frog, who else sounds like that? Sammy Davis Jr. a little bit. Because, you know, man. So now Kermit the Frog is one way. But if you just twist your voice or twist your mouth to the right and grab some swag, now you're Sammy Davis Jr. Kermit the Frog because, man, you know, it's the same voice. So that's sort of like the mechanical way of getting to the impression. So you would start with not the visual, because obviously those people who are listening can't see this.

1:04:16but the mannerisms are also very much on point. Mannerisms are important because like, like I do a LeBron James impersonation, which is really not a voice. It's more of his mannerisms. It's the jaw, you know, it's the look. Let's go, bro. You know, let's go, bro. You know, the game of basketball, you know, we just try to, you know, it's that, you know. It's right after playing. You know, when he comes off the court, they're catching me still tired you know uh you know the game of basketball we just try to you know do the best you know so it's the the mannerisms so people will appreciate the mannerisms first physicality the physicality of of someone like uh uh lebron or you know different you know like i said different different personalities bring about bring about different things when you look back on what uh what ray said to you if you can play the blues you can do anything.

1:05:11If you had to translate that for your own kids, let's just say, if you can do X, fill in the blank, you can do anything. What would you put in that blank? I would say this. It's a couple of things when you have kids who grow up around Hollywood. If you can stay motivated and if you can not do some things, not be jaded, not be entitled, not be spoiled, not do drugs, not get into all the bad stuff because our kids live in an elevated space. So what I try to do, and Ricardo sees this all the time, and so does Justine, we don't play around when it comes to discipline as well. Like when the kids are here and all of our friends, the size of the house means nothing to if you don't do the right thing, you're going to get in major trouble and you're going to get in Texas trouble.

1:06:12You know what I'm saying? Like how my grandmother disciplined. So it's a different thing when it comes to kids that are living in a privileged situation. Luckily, my daughters are very, very, especially my oldest daughter. My oldest daughter never even asked me for money. Never asked for the new car. Never asked for a plane to ride coach. I mean, you know, so I think she really, really has a great head on her shoulders. I remember I got this Rolls Royce, and I went to go pick my daughter up in the Rolls Royce, thinking that's going to be, you know, pick her up in the Rolls Royce. Drop the top.

1:06:49Drop it. What up, dog? So I'm riding. Go to pick her up at school. She won't get in the car. I said, baby, what are you doing? Look at the top. It comes up. she says dad I'm not getting a car calls her mom I said could you come pick me up I said what you doing she said I'm not getting you goofy you make me look stupid in front of my friends I was like oh you know she's really and that's something she has on the inside my youngest daughter is a little different she wants to ride in the Rolls Royce all the time daddy let's take this car we riding down Sunset Boulevard she playing Rihanna you know what I'm saying with her shades on so she's a little different in that sense and I remember telling her, I said, well, Annalise, we can't ride around in LA in the limo, in the Rolls Royce with the top down.

1:07:35You know, we're on our way to the Soho house and it's sort of finicky up there. So I got to at least put the top up. She's like, why? I said, I just, I said, listen, let me ride until I get to Soho house and then I'll put the top up as we get there. Okay. So we ride up in the Soho house. We're in the valet and all of these, you know, celebs and people are coming out and she yells out Jamie Foxx in the house and I'm like hell no so I'm trying to pull the top down all the celebrities like look at this motherfucker being arrogant and shit he's so gaudy and he's got a kid announcing him so you know it's a lot of things you can tell your kids man and then you just have to hope for the best and be there what what is your birth name?

1:08:20Eric Marlon Bishop and how did Eric Marlon Bishop become Jamie Foxx man I was Eric Marlon Bishop graduated high school 86 I get out to California and I started doing you know I'm in college and doing the music but I will go up on these open mic nights for comedy so I go I do really well I get like standing ovation. And then I came to L.A., got a standing ovation. And then when I came back every week, I wouldn't get called up. I was like, man, what's going on? But what I noticed was— And how does the open mic work? Well, yes it is. What you do is you put your name on the list. Put your name on the list, and they pick from the list, and they say, okay, these are people that are going up.

1:09:08So I went up and had a great set. Then for the next three, four weeks, I didn't—they never called my name. I said, yo, money, did you see my name? Yeah, yeah, you weren't on the list. you were on the list but we got other people but i found out that the comedians were actually running the list so the comedians they had been here for a while i was like we don't want him on here because he's showing us up so i was like fuck so i ended up going to this evening at the improv the improv like in santa monica and so i had never been there so i would notice that a hundred guys would show up five girls would show up the five girls will always get on the on the show because they needed to break up the monotony.

1:09:47So I said, hmm, I got some. So I wrote down on the list all of these unisex names, Stacey Green, Tracy Brown, Jamie Foxx. And now the guy chooses from the list. He says, is Jamie Foxx, is she here? She'll be first. I was like, no, money, that's me. Ah, okay. All right, well, you're going to, you're the fresh meat. I said, what was that? They were shooting Evening at the Improv, this old comedy show back in the day. Said, you'll be the guy that will just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two. You know, it's going to be a tough crowd. Freshman. Freshman. I said, cool. So I go up in between two of the guys, get a standing ovation.

1:10:28People are like, who's the kid? Is he on the show? I said, no, he's a freshman. So then they started yelling my name. Yo, Jamie. Yo, Jamie. Hey, Jamie. But I'm not used to the name. so now they think I'm arrogant. This motherfucker thinks she's not even listening to us. So I took that name and it stuck. And then I started building everything off of it. Back in the day, people used to wear jackets and put names on the jacket. So I had Sly as a dot, dot, dot, uh, coming to the foxhole, foxhole, you know, things like that. I'm gonna grab a little something to eat. Yeah, sure thing. Okay. We are back after a little food break.

1:11:08Yeah. and uh we talked about some of your comedy starting third grade maybe earlier we talked about uh grandmother and what i like to talk about a little bit more is fear so you mentioned on the other side of fear by the time you got to doing the open mics getting up on stage were you nervous were you afraid or were you over it because you because first i looked at it first like i i went to an open mic night and saw the guys, I was like, man, these dudes are terrible. And so when you go on stage and your whole life is not I want to be a comedian, I went on stage like, yo, I'm going to just fuck around.

1:11:52So if I hit, cool. If I miss, I wasn't trying to be that anyway. I wanted to do more music. But when I went on stage, it was just natural. I belong here. So I think that's the thing, too, when it comes to entertainment. There's a certain like, oh, I belong here. This is what I'm supposed to do. How successful I will be or won't be, that's something out of my hands. But I do know that this is where I belong. And that's with anything and anybody. Like when you can sort of listen to that voice in your head or what's in your heart and you get a chance to do something that you really feel like you're supposed to do, that alleviates a lot of the fear.

1:12:35Now, if it was a surgeon or a lawyer or something, you know, if it's something that I'm not, you know, versed in or something like that, then maybe there will be more fear. But with this, you don't have, well, I don't have those types of fears. And as I've gotten older in the business, I've sort of simplified things. Like now I just execute. I have to ask people like Ricardo, Justin, Justin, What should I execute? So the fear of a celebrity or an artist now is how do I get my art off in a world where it's the social media driven sort of ridicule and criticism? criticism like i always say like this like a person like prince or person like michael jackson could have never survived in today's world because in the in the day of the internet and where everybody has a voice most of the voices are hateful voices or not understanding like like if you saw prince with uh um a guitar and a bandana and the way he dressed you know people would meme the shit out of it you know so now it's a uh it's it's not a fear but it's just a a question that i have to always ask them like yo is this is this the cool shit to do or not the cool shit to do and so what i learned is when it's just executing something when it's either executing a song or executing a joke or executing things within within uh entertainment it's cool but then you have to wonder like how do you get it off like how do you like even now when you talk about the bill cosby joke back in the day we just tell the joke now you gotta be like okay i gotta tell the joke in a way that is still funny it still keeps the bite on it but you know so those are the different like for me as a entertainer where there's not fear it's just like you know questions.

1:14:40Does that make sense? Makes sense. No, this makes sense. The considerations. When you, when you, uh, have you bombed on stage before? Oh, yeah. Two things. What do you, when you are bombing, what is your internal dialogue or response? And then secondly... Internal dialogue is, boy, you stink. Boy, you bombing. I bombed, and it wasn't a lot of, I only bombed, like, twice. Do you remember your first? Yeah, yeah. I did this show for this guy named Lattimore. Old blues singer. I'm 21. What was his name? Lattimore. Lattimore. Sounds like Voldemort. Yeah, Lattimore. Lattimore. So this guy saw me at this other club and said, hey, man, you know, Lattimore's performing around the corner.

1:15:24Man, would you come and open them? I said, whatever. I said, how much you paid? He said, pay$50. I said, I'm there. 50 bucks. I need it. So this is like 89, 90. So I get there, and I don't know who Lattimore is. I just know it was a lot of older people. Like, I mean, like, oh, oh. I'm like, oh, shit. Where are the people at? These are the people. So I go up, and the setting was different. It was like the chairs and stuff were way in the back. It was like a banquet setting. And it's in the middle of the hood, you know, Crenshaw. And, like, the tables were, like, from here to where, like, 20 feet away, 30 feet away from me.

1:16:01So I don't have that. Oh, you didn't have that proximity? Yeah, and I hadn't been doing stand-up comedy that long. I'd only been doing it for like a year. So I had if I'm funny, I got an hour. If I'm not funny is about 10 minutes worth of shit because I would just take a joke and just keep spinning it and spinning it. So my first joke they didn't get second joke. They didn't get I said shit. I'm damn near all the jokes. So I said, well, let me do this before I do anything. Let me just talk about people in the audience. So I looked and I saw this guy with this sort of suit on with a butterfly collar.

1:16:33like oh shit I'm gonna talk about him with the butterfly collar but before I could say that I looked around everybody has a butterfly collar this is what they really want to look like and so uh I just said hey man I you know I don't know what else y 'all want and uh pretty soon Lattimore's gonna come up you guys ready for Lattimore and I just started doing that I said I'm gonna take a break so I get off stage and the dude that was washing the dishes takes his apron off and goes man i got it how y 'all feel and he started doing these old stock jokes kills and so i said okay now i know what it is you got to have jokes that are appropriate for your audience so i learned on how to tell jokes for everybody because at first my jokes was geared towards women it was singing and do that.

1:17:27So what I started doing from that, from that day on, I would go to like Des Moines, Iowa, Davenport, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, where it's all white, Gunnison, Colorado, all white. And I would go do like 40 minutes of all black material to see what they understood, what they didn't understand. So if I go to these all white places, if they understood 15 minutes, I logged that 15 minutes. I can go to any place where it's just all white. And you would determine if they understood it by the laughs. Huh? You would determine if they understood it by the laughs. I would ask, y 'all know who this is? And so I would tell the joke, if 15 minutes, they understood it, I can go to any place in the world that's all white and they get it.

1:18:11Then I would go to my chocolate city, Chicago, D.C., Florida, and do all of my political highbrow stuff and see what the black folks understood. man what the fuck you talking about now they understood 15 minutes now i got 15 to 30 minutes to 45 minutes that wherever i go no matter what age they'll understand no matter what gender no matter what race they'll understand this 45 minutes so i had to learn how to use the formula in order for you to be funny and then once you got your comedy license once you've been seen by enough people in the highest way like in the like if you look at uh like if you look at an arc of a kevin hart like kevin hart takes that arc takes the same formula i'm not for sure how he put it in his in his in his mind but he's doing the same thing to where he's going to all of these places all over the world implementing his comedy and if they get it he's he's gathering all that so that But now when people see Kevin Hart, no matter where in the world, they're going to laugh.

1:19:20You know, so it's the, you know, becoming a great comedian is also having that formula going on in your head. Because if you if you paint yourself into a corner, like you're only the black comedian or you're only the Hispanic comedian, whatever that is, then it's hard for you to become universal. I mean, Eddie was Eddie Murphy was great. He had an opportunity to Saturday Night Live to get it to everybody. but it's definitely a formula to not bombing. So what would you say to yourself? So that was the first bomb. You mentioned two. Yeah. What was the second? The second one? And if it's hard to recall, the follow-up question is going to be, what is the post-game analysis when you step off the stage after bombing, say the second time?

1:20:05Well, you got to, when I bombed the second time was way later in my career when I'm working out jokes. But I don't like to work out jokes and tell people I'm working out. I like to actually do a show, come and do the show. So we're in, I think it was Irvine. So you don't tell people you're working on the show? No, no, no. I think that's cheating. And I think you get bad habits. So I do a show in Irvine, California. First show, I kill. They was just ready for them. I'm like, oh, man, everything works. Second show, bombed. Because I didn't take time to dig out the jokes and that. So but when you bomb you go like okay, all right, let's go.

1:20:44Let's check it out So I got a team of my guys I said let's go. Okay, that didn't work No, you got to put this in front of that You're gonna put that behind this because that's gonna kick this off People didn't know what that was. So maybe we don't say that. So, you know, you have to you When you take the bomb when we take the L It's not like you're not funny. What's the L? Like you take the loss. Oh, okay When you take the loss, it's not like you're not funny. It's just like, okay You just didn't put the shit together. So that's the other thing too. When you do become funny it's going to be harder now to make people laugh because you set the bar so now you're high water yeah so now so watch this the hardest part for chris rock was after he had done something great in stand-up because now you got to top that the hardest part for eddie murphy because eddie wants to come out and do stand-up is how do I top that in your head?

1:21:40The hardest part is coming for Kevin Hart in the fact that you smashed him. Now you got to, you know what I'm saying, you got to know how to refresh. Because when you do something like, I would look at my stuff and go like, I got to quit doing that because that shtick that I'm doing, people are catching on. and they're like, okay, motherfucker, we done already seen that shit. So that's the other thing. You got to have great material and you got to have, you got to know, you got to know how to move because like right now is the perfect time for Eddie Murphy to come out and do stand-up because it's been so long.

1:22:19It's nostalgic. It was 30 years ago. So now you can catch a new young, you can still excite the older, you know what I'm saying? So being a stand-up comedian is tough and you've seen a lot of funny guys not be funny anymore. Why? because you can't top what you did. You look at a Jim Carrey, you go like, okay, man, where you at? Where you at? You know what I'm saying? You know, don't give up the funny. Or you look at Chris, I always look at Chris Tucker and be like, motherfucker, where you at? Don't leave us because being a stand-up comedian is an interesting thing. Most stand-up comedians want to look good.

1:22:54In what way? They just want to look good. Think about this. When Eddie Murphy started doing stand-up, he was funny, but then he started doing you know the weather leather suits and it was a fly shit and the rings and they don't want to look good joe piscopo started working out with the muscles you know i'm saying so as a stand-up comedian we got to be careful not to look too good because people start going what the fuck are you doing you ain't cute nigga we just want to laugh you know i'm saying but when we started you know we started getting into our shit that's when we look because I did that.

1:23:28Like, I got to, my thing was after In Living Color, the show called In Living Color that I did, I felt like I had made it. So I wasn't necessarily on the good-looking shit, but I was on the I've made it jokes. I went on stage and was doing rich jokes. Just got that Range Rover. Anybody else? It's crazy out here. You know, they're so finicky, right? Motherfuckers are looking at me like, what the fuck is you talking about? And then I was talking about, you know, the square footage of the house, man. when they get a certain square feet, man, that shit is crazy and maintaining, you know? Motherfuckers are like, motherfucker, if you don't get off the goddamn stage, I'd lost it.

1:24:05I lost it, and I walked off stage, and all of a sudden, I walk off stage, I give it up for Jamie Foxx, and I'm thinking, they're going crazy. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. And I'm standing outside the club, and I hear the crowd going crazy. I'm like, what the fuck they doing? I just went off stage. What the fuck are they laughing at? And I opened the door, and there was a kid, skinny, little tank top on, barely fit, His name was Chris Tucker. He was smashing. He was, no one has been that funny within 15 minutes. I've never seen, I've never seen, and I watch them all. I've never seen a stand-up where people were laughing so hard.

1:24:44Like, I said, he's going to kill somebody. Like, when he says last night, how was yo? I killed. It's going to be true. Somebody's going to have a fucking heart attack. And I sat down and I went, I can't do that. I lost that. so I left went to another club that night bomb like it wasn't you know so finally I went over to Okinawa where the troops were and started doing stand-up over there for the troops to sort of get back it was my rocky moment like you know I started running up the steps chasing chickens and shit trying to get back and uh for a stand-up comedian that's the one thing you can never let go you can never stop being excuse me a certain goofiness to you and so and like when you talk about fear or when you talk about bombing, it's, uh, uh, it's different when you, when you, when you've done it for a long time, you know?

1:25:32And when you do bomb, you just got to get right back up and you got to acknowledge it. Okay. I stunk, nigga. Cause they're going to let you know, like today's world. You can't do nothing in today's world without somebody letting you know, like, Oh nigga, you fucked that up. Like, you know, what are the sources or where do most of your best bits come from? When you look back at the stuff that just killed. Is it the shower, the thing that bugs you three times, so you write it down? I mean, how do you develop your material? It was observation. And like, you know, I do jokes with them. You know, it's just sort of like observation.

1:26:08You know, early on, it was the black and white thing. You know, black folks do it this way, white folks do it, which was the way we were doing comedy in the late 80s and 90s. Oh, the average white man's heart. No, it has to do with the heart. the average white man's heart beats like this. Or the average black man's heart beats like this.

1:26:31You know, ladies, that's why you have a choice. Would you rather make love to somebody like this? Or would you rather make love to somebody like this? I mean, that was the jokes, you know, at the time. So it was observational. And then it was personal. Like, you do your observation first, and then it was personal. My grandmother, who was, you know, we lived together, you know, and when she first heard like on television what AIDS was, being old, she didn't know what it exactly meant. She just knew it was bad. But she thought that since she's always on me anyway, that I'm going to catch AIDS. But it was for the wrong reasons.

1:27:07Like she would say, boy, you know, it's six in the morning. You're going to wake up. Shit. Half the day done gone. I said, granny, what you mean? It's six. shit, I'm in there sleeping. Anybody sleep that long got to have AIDS. I said, granted, I don't think that's that. No, I saw it on TV. You're sleeping too long. You got AIDS. I said, granted, I don't think that's how they exactly what... And then, like, I would use her towels. Like, you know, old Southern women had them, there was a towel used and it was a nice towel. So I used a nice towel. Well, I know you ain't use my towels. I said, you don't put the AIDS on the towel.

1:27:43You don't use everybody's towels. Anybody use a towel like that got to have AIDS. I said, Granny, I don't think that's how, you know, so it was opposite. And this is what she was actually saying. So when I did that joke on stage, people would just, you know, would die. So it's observational. Then it's personal. And then some of the comedians are great politically. I'm not necessarily a political guy. My thing was the impersonation of the politician, like Bill Clinton. You know, I did not have sex with that woman. You know, it was, you know, things like that. But it's so many different ways and so many different guys out there that you look at and go, ooh.

1:28:23Like when I would look at a young Chris Rock, the way he was a technician, just me. Or you look at Jay Leno. Or you look at even Arsenio Hall when he would work out. Or you see Eddie working out a joke.

1:28:39Or watching George Lopez who knows how to tap into the bass and just really bring you into his world and stuff. So it's some guys that Sarah Silverman, just, I mean, a technician, Amy Schumer, watching her on just a Saturday night live when she's, you know, working her shit out. A young Whoopi Goldberg at the Met. There's so many people that you can watch and see how to, you know, tap into your own skill set, you know. But I try to look at all of them and try to just, you know, not steal from it, but just get inspired by it all. Who are some of the most underrated comedians who come to mind or people who you think haven't had their due, haven't been appreciated?

1:29:26Oh, I wouldn't say underrated, but I think there were just there were just like warriors that never got that shine. There was a guy named T.K. Kirkland, who was a warrior, but he never got to shine. and TK had a colorful past, you know, and he'll let you know. He said, you know, he was a crazy motherfucker. But TK had jokes like, and why does Kermit the Frog always say, hi-ho, hi-ho. Is he a pimp? And why do fat people wear leather pants? Do they think that shit is cute? And why do people in wheelchairs tie their motherfucking shoes? Do they think they're going to trip? Oh, man, it was just, he was just amazing.

1:30:05and his delivery you know what I'm saying he say he says cause I'm T to the motherfucking K that's what type of motherfucker I am don't play me play Lotto you got a better chance and he's he he played he he made he made himself a character on stage that was just you know you guys are too young to know this joke but Bugle Boy Jeans Bugle Boy Jeans used to have a commercial where a girl would pull up in a car and says, excuse me, are those Bugle Boy, she would say this to a guy, like he's walking on the street with his jeans, she says, excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing? Why, yes they are.

1:30:49And she'd get in the car. TK had a joke, man, that was so funny. He said, man, let that motherfucker be a motherfucking black girl in the motherfucking car. Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing? Yeah. Get in the car, motherfucker. I mean, people would just go, the dude has so many, like, levels. And he just, you know, he's an underground guy. Who else? There was a lot. I mean, a lot of people. Earthquake, amazing. Earthquake is amazing. What's my other dude's name? Tony Roberts, amazing. Tony Roberts, man, I've never laughed. So he says, he said, oh, man, I had to dig out some of his jokes.

1:31:38But he talks about, it's very physical, but he talks about being on a plane and the plane is going down. And he says, he said he was on a plane and he thought the plane was going down. So he says, so I wanted to fuck everybody before, you know, I wanted to fuck before. He says, oh, while the plane's going down, he's fucking everybody. You know, he fucked the nun, he was fucking everybody. And then the plane leveled off. Oh, I'm sorry, y 'all. Sorry, my bad. Just hilarious, man. And there's so many, man. So many. Not a lot of new comedians now that are actually, it's funny, right? That are actually dangerous now.

1:32:18We don't have dangerous comedians. The only dangerous comedian that we have right now is Amy Schumer. She's dangerous. In what way? Like, she'll say it. Like, it'll be hot button. You know what I mean? Have you ever heard, I saw this guy on a, I actually heard of him through a guy named Evan Goldberg, who's Seth Rogen's writing partner. And so Gerard, exactly, that was good. So Gerard Carmichael, his special, oh my God. He's like, I would never make a rape joke. This is more of a rape question. And it's like, oh my God. He's dangerous. That struck me as dangerous. And it's not a lot of that anymore.

1:32:59It's not a lot of dangerous comedians. And I think that's where we sort of go like, you know, where's that danger? Like you when you when you when you see Amy Schumer, you see like I saw her in the room talking about catching a dick in front of Robert De Niro. Like we're at the American Film Awards, whatever like that. And she's just, I mean, hardcore dance, which is what Sarah Silverman started out as, you know. But Amy looks like she's rounded the corner and is now, you know, really making it, you know, making it dope for herself. if you look back at uh in living color and i i watched the show and it just if in retrospect it seems like such a such a magical combination of people so how did that group get assembled and uh i mean what made that team so special because i mean you look at the list right i mean you've got chris rock you've got jim carrey you've got the wayans you've got it just goes Jennifer Lopez, you go down the line.

1:34:03It's an all-star roster. Well, at that time, Keenan Ivey Wayans, he put it all together. And he was able to grab all of these incredibly talented people and make them get along and figure out how to squeeze all of this talent into 22 minutes of programming. Because it was a 30-minute show, so it was 22 minutes. but he was very disciplined in how we make jokes you were not allowed to come in and be half-assed he pulled you to the side and say as a black comedian you cannot be half-assed you're either great or you don't exist so and he says don't take the racial part of that any kind of way that's just the way it is because he wrote for Eddie Murphy he was around the greatest he says I'm around the greatest all the time so that's what we gonna do so when you see Damon Wayans come in and I just got hired like they had already been doing the show for like a year or two years so when I saw Damon walk in and Jim walk in it was like it was like fucking Jurassic Park it was like fucking T-Rex and you know what I'm saying And the way I got on the show was Was crazy too because it went From the auditioning process It was 100 comedians down to 50 Down to 25 Down to 10 down to 5 I was part of the 5 but I was losing I wasn't doing well within the Improv of it Because I just wasn't catching Catching the right shit And then Kenan says something incredible He says well I dig this but I want to see y 'all on stage Doing stand up because I want to have stand up comedians I was like oh shit that's my shit that's my shit and the other four people didn't do stand up it was only one other girl that did stand up god bless her Yvette Wilson but the other three didn't do stand up so I was like oh man so that night everybody's going to the Laugh Factory which was just starting because at that time the comedy store was dominating Laugh Factory was just and they begged can we please have the audition in the Laugh Factory so I show up late on purpose because I wanted to be last Smart.

1:36:15So I show up late, and Tamara Rawit, who was the producer, and I, what are you doing? You're late. Oh, my God. Why aren't you here? We're supposed to go on early. You're supposed to be first, Jamie. Oh, my God. You're going to kill me. I said, oh, damn. Can I just go up last? Yes, you have to, because we've already started getting here. Whatever. So go ahead. Now, this was interesting for me because I was in White World. I was, like, on the mainstream. I did all my jokes in the hood at that time. You know what I'm saying? I was the hood guy. So I was like, oh, shit, you know, we uptown. You know what I'm saying?

1:36:52It's like everything is clean and shit. You know, ain't no weed in the air or nothing. You know what I'm saying? Ain't nobody snuck no drinks in and shit. And it's an audition thing. So I'm watching the guys, you know, God bless them. They just had never done stand-up before. So I had my cassette tape, and I knew what I was coming up to. I'm coming up to Heavy D's in effect with more bounce to the ounce. So I get a dude with my tape. He's like, what's this? That's my tape. You know, I go on with music. You know, up there, they didn't go on with music. They just went up and hand claps. I said, no, man, I got to come in with heavy, decent effect.

1:37:23With more bounce to the pumps. I need the crowd going. I said, okay, sure. So he's standing there with the tape. And then Sean Wayans gave me a great tip. He walked up. He said, yo, Jamie, just go up and do your act, man. Just stop worrying about it. Don't worry about the characters. Just do your act. Yo, Marlon, Marlon, come here. Tell Jamie. Just do your act. I said, oh, really? Do my act like I do in the hood? I said, straight? Cool. So I go up. They don't play the music. I'm waiting on that. I'm like, yo, you got my music? The dude's over there like this. I said, well, I'm supposed to have some music.

1:37:57And I said, if this shit goes wrong, you will actually see me working across the street at the gas station. And I went into a character. Man, I was in there with Kenan and all of them, dog. And it just didn't. And so I did this little character. And I went into my act. And I got to stand an ovation that night. and I remember seeing Jim Carrey and Keenan Flygirls like on their feet like oh man this is great and that's how I got on the show and during that show I did this character called Wanda where I said all the good looking ladies clap your hands I said now all the ugly ladies let me see you make some noise it was quiet I said ain't that a bitch and all the ugly ladies I thought hey for real though he ain't talking about me so we did this character Kenan was like I want you to do that character on the show because I think that's where you'll you'll really flourish and when we did that when I did that character that's when everything sort of changed because I was trying to find my bearings on the show because we got on the show but we were there for a trial basis but when I did that character it was like it was like playing football and I was like the punt returner and I was the rookie and I ran it all the way back the first day so nobody really knew who I was but they knew that this character was slamming.

1:39:15And so they sort of gave me my stripes because these guys were juggling us. I watched Keenan. I said, Keenan, these jokes ain't funny that the writers wrote. He says, get on your feet. Everybody get up. Let's do this. So he was like, there's never a joke that's not funny. You just got to work and find it. So he taught us the formula of finding the jokes, and he was right every single time. And so, like I said, to be there watching Jim Carrey, like create Pet Detective on set. He's writing Pet Detective as a word. I said, what's that you're writing on? Hey, man, just, you know, working on some stuff.

1:39:51You know, just got some stuff I'm working on. So what is that? Man, it's a little thing called Pet Detective. I said, sound funny. And was he developing it for the show at that time? No, he was developing it for much later. For his own shit. I got to make one phone call. No problem. All right, so we're back. We took a little breather. But catch us up. What were we just talking about? We're talking about how nowadays is that you don't get a chance to control your own narrative. Like we were talking about is there's two different people. Some people think that the tech world and social media and things on the Internet is taking us to a great place.

1:40:23And then there's people who think that it's a horrible place. I had I spoke with a young lady who had been burned bad, bad by the press, bad to where she lost her job. and what was interesting about her job was that what they were scolding her about was like me knowing her i was like you're not like that at all she says i can't there's nothing i can do everybody thinks so and they took something like they went through emails and through our personal emails and all of a sudden whatever it was but it was just like you're not like that at all so when i was on the phone talking with her she was like they're saying this and i don't worry about it you're cool like you're not like that i don't give a fuck but i hadn't i'm bowling i'm like i don't i don't even i don't even need to read it what could they possibly say and when i look it was a national story i went what the fuck she lost her job yeah and so like even like you'll do something where you think that it's either you're making fun or you're having fun yeah but they'll take whatever it is that you say and make it what they wanted to say yeah or craft to where, like, if you do a joke, it's not about doing a joke anymore.

1:41:36Jamie Foxx slams Caitlyn Jenner. Jamie Foxx trounces, like, nah, I'm a comedian. But everything is something that they control, and it's tough because when I say Justin Bieber, what do you think? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Be honest. Hair that I'm jealous of. But what do you think? Something about a kid who can't get it together. When I say Chris Brown, what do you think? It's something negative. When I say Jennifer Aniston, what do you think? What do you think? I think of cover of Rolling Stone photograph, black and white. You think Brad Pitt? You think what? Cover of Rolling Stone magazine, black and white, naked, laying on a bed.

1:42:15Oh, that's hilarious. The average person would think of not what they do, but what the headline is. The subliminal image they got at the checkout counter. Yeah, it's the headline. If I say Jennifer Aniston, you automatically, because nowadays they control, we don't control our own narrative to where it's like they talked about this thing with Quentin Tarantino, which I thought was sad. Because usually when you see a story about Black Lives Matter or anything black, it's usually the same black folks with the kufi who's trying to be heard. And they're absolutely right. They're absolutely. It's so much wrong going on in black world.

1:43:01There's black on black crime. Then there's the the divide that is because of social media is that is going on between the police officers and black folk. Look, police officers on the whole are great folk. I know them. Shit, I know a gang of police officers. But the one or two that have been caught on social media makes it look, paint the picture, that it's all of them. Now, granted, we've known for a long time that blacks and police officers have always had a divide. We've done movies about it. We've done books about it. It just is the way it is. Now, my take on it is because I call it residue.

1:43:45It's slave residue, meaning that slavery for 300 years, you saw a person of color a certain way for 300 years. You've always saw him as a slave or the criminal or something that you didn't value. So therefore, coming out of that, of course, there's going to be a divide when it comes to police and when it comes to blacks. That's always been that way. So take that off the table. Right. But in today's world of how do we bridge that gap? I've gone to Quantico in Virginia, saw what a police officer sees. I've talked to police officers. How can we bridge the gap? I've suggested that you go get a white police officer who you think might not like black folk.

1:44:29You know what I'm saying? Get that person to go into the hood and throw a picnic for a kid that's 8, 9, 10 years old who's African-American so that he can see another side of a police officer. Because right now in social media or in media period, the stories that are the most salacious, where it's the black person, the black cop being the black guy being killed by a cop. It's hard to erase those images. I'm a black man. When I see that, I have to react to that because I'm like, wow, you know, that troubles me. But then I have to sit down and think, OK, let me not think of the worst thing to say, but let me think because I know how media tries to make things or heighten it.

1:45:16Right. How do I bring people together in spite of the headline? Because what people don't understand is that when you keep showing the images of the black guy being killed by the by the cop, that does something to you. Oh, yeah. That's like whatever you believe in. If it was a Jewish person, if it was a gay person, you cannot sit and not be bothered by that. At the same time, that cop, when he sees the other side of it, when they're saying all you guys ain't shit, which that's not what's really being said. most of the time it's with the individual cop. Now the cop sees the story. In his mind now, well, fuck, well, it's a problem now.

1:45:59So now imagine that cop who's watching the story, driving on the street, that young black kid who's watching the story, walking on the street. What happens? Dynamite. Dynamite. Because we can't get it. We can't, we can't get anybody responsible on the media side to say, Let's stop interviewing people and putting labels on them. Let's interview this man and this woman, but don't say that they're Democrat. Don't say that they're Republican. Don't say that they're a cop. Just have them talk. Because when you see, when you're watching TV and you see something that you agree with, you agree with them only.

1:46:37And you can't hear the other person. That's the first thing. Two, like when I look at Quentin Tarantino, to demonize this guy. And just because people might be listening to this for years, could you catch people up on it? Well, let me catch you. The confusion. Quentin Tarantino, who is a purist when it comes to his opinions and his emotions. Even if you could go, I could go to Quentin Tarantino and say something, man, I think, you know, as a black person and so on and so on and so on. He'd say, well, stop doing that. Stop hanging it just on black. Hanging on things that are substance first and then let it be.

1:47:16I mean, so I've heard this guy speak when there's no cameras. I said, wow, you know what? You make a lot of sense. So Quentin Tarantino sees the Black Lives Matter campaign, sees the individual stories, 40 different people of individual stories where a police officer had killed the person who was unarmed. it touched him the reason i thought that was impactful because you seldom see the white superstar go and stand with the black folk who just trying to be heard even high-end black guys don't go stand with the black folks that's trying to be heard when it comes to like especially hollywood because you know people in hollywood are so scared oh oh they won't see my movie they won't go see my song if I stand if I stand up for anything of substance they're so fucking scared so when I saw this dude do that I was like wow that's great but then the misinterpretation of his words where he says I'm standing here with the murdered Quentin Tarantino speaks that way he speaks if you've read any of his uh movie or saw any of his movies he speaks in those terms he says I stand with the murder.

1:48:35When I see someone being murdered, I call it what it is. It's a murder. That's a murderer that killed this person. However, the story got spun was that Quentin Tarantino is a cop hater. He hates all cops and all cops are murderers. And I was just like, here we go again, man. Here's a person who's willing. and i'm gonna speak like willing to put aside his white cushy hollywoodness he could live on in his on his mountain and never give a shit about anything he came and said man i felt something and now they painted so bad and now you got you got the new york cop so we got some for his that Now it's a beef.

1:49:23Now it's, that's not what we're trying to do. But you can't do anything right now because the media story, if it's not salacious, we don't want to report it. We have to. You feel what I'm saying? No, I do. And it's, I mean, if it bleeds, it leads, right? So they put the salacious, the visually, viscerally impactful stuff up front because it gets the clicks or the purchases, the advertising. the the uh the only i suppose flip side to that and i have a very specific question for you that from a fan i'd love to ask related to um some some of these race questions but the good news is if you can look at it in these terms is that the necessity for new is so high that if you starve a story of oxygen it'll often die on its own yeah because they can't regurgitate the same thing if there's no response.

1:50:17And so you can let it kind of die on the vine. But we were talking about this before. I mean, I've had instances, and I won't bitch and moan too long because I think the question is more interesting than my bitching, but I've had instances where these formerly, I would say, outlets of record, very prestigious outlets, magazines, I'm not going to mention them by name because it's - I know what you're talking about. But I was interviewed and profiled by a magazine at one point, very, very highbrow magazine. there were six or seven misquotes or erroneous facts in the piece and i corrected those with the fact checker and went to press with no corrections what do you do in that situation when those things then end up in wikipedia so you have to develop a sort of strategy and i mean this will get even more interesting once we have you know smart stadiums once we have uh facial recognition like you see on facebook once that's implemented across the board it'll get very interesting, but I'm going to go down that rabbit hole.

1:51:12And instead I'm going to, uh, bring up a question that I'd love to get before you go into that. Yes. Here's the problem. Back in the day, if there was a misquote and you went to that entity and say, Hey, you quoted me wrong. Oh, we'll release a statement saying that we misquoted you and it erases the problem with today's world, once it's out there, you can't get it back. You cannot change because it's going to stay there. When I punch up your name, that's the first thing that's going to come up. Or the second thing that's coming, you can't get rid of it. And when you talk about the regurgitating or just letting it die, you can let it die.

1:51:57But the problem is you have to at least, once it starts, give another, hopefully that you can give another side of it that people may see a little bit. They don't want to see it. What's crazy about our society right now? No one wants to see anybody reconcile. No one wants to see anybody come together or say that, like when I, when I think about Quentin Tarantino, I spoke and said, I back you as a friend and keep, keep speaking the truth and don't worry about the haters, meaning speak the truth from you. Not whatever the comment was, but whatever you're saying in your truth, you say that because you ain't out there.

1:52:40You could be promoting your movie. You could be trying to make money. You actually trying to see how you could go. I know the way he thinks. I'm going to go talk to them. If they are wrong in what they're saying, I'm going to tell them. But if they are right, he says, I'll be the one that can go to the cops and say that. And now, look at how it is. It's so great. Go ahead. Ask the question. Oh, no. I mean, I think you're right. I think that people want gladiatorial games. And we don't have gladiatorial games, so they use the front page. Oh. Gladiatorial games. But speaking of conflict resolution, so this is a question from a fan, TJ.

1:53:17My wife is pregnant. We're moving to a very non-diverse neighborhood. We are kind of worried on how it will go. She is black and I am white. What is some advice he can give to a young couple raising a child of color in today's world? I'll say this. I'll say this about America. Let's use America as an example. To me, America is the most incredible civilization that has ever been created. Hundreds of years from now, people will look at this place and marvel. there's the bitch in the complain aisle where everybody bitches complains about every single thing but the one thing about america that is incredible is the evolution of freedom the change when i talk about slavery that happened it was 300 years of it look at the evolution we come out of it we have a black president people are more welcoming now oh we used to live in a world not too long ago where it was frowned upon it was tough it was this what i would say to people like that just live your life like i live my life in places where at times it was definitely racial misunderstanding but i would talk to that person i would make sure that person understood who I was as a person.

1:54:38I'm not going to compromise who I am as far as a black man, but I'm also going to give you another version of it, not the version that you necessarily see on television, the version that you see on the internet. I'm going to give you me. And most of the time, we are alike in so many instances. So when he's saying move into that non-diverse place, it's different, man. Look at the, I hate to say this, but listen to the kids, bro. But when you talk about the kids, the kids today, I'm at the gym last night, 24 Hour Fitness. The kid is playing Future. White kid. White kid. When I first moved into my neighborhood years ago, and I felt like I made it.

1:55:22I'm in the white neighborhood now. I'm here. Oh, I'm so, I've made it. And I hear NWA blasting. Look out there with these kids. I was 16 years old. So times are changing, man. and you have to start giving people the benefit of the doubt that they'll get it right. And for all those people that were here back in the old days and that are now 50 and 60 and 70 years old, that's dying out. The way of thinking is dying out. You may be looking in a situation where you may have the first female president. It's the evolution of freedom. Think about how we treated women at one point. No voice, no rights, no nothing.

1:55:59I've heard people say, I'd rather have a black person tell me something to do than a woman. But now it's so we are on the right path, man. Love who you want to love. Be where you want to be because we are evolving. Look at the steps that gay rights took in the past few years. Man, that's huge when you're talking about people in the Bible Belt and, you know, how they felt. So if those things are now, like my daughter taught me when she was 13. She's 21 now. She was 13. And this was nine years ago. And it was talking about gay rights and things like that. And I asked her friends. I said, what do you think about it?

1:56:43She said, Dad, we don't think about it. I said, that's you guys. That's a good answer. She said, that's you guys. She said, that's old people. She said, that's why we're turned off from religion sometimes. Sometimes that's why we're turned off from all of these different things because old people argue about where you from, what you do, what you look like. We don't give a shit. And so thank God for the youth. Thank God for that couple, because what they're doing is they're showing a new world. And she said, Dad, if someone was doing something somewhere that was straight, gay, black, white or brown somewhere else, does it affect you at all?

1:57:15Does your air change? does anything around you change because the people are living the way they want to live as long as they're not breaking the laws you know what you make great points she went on my radio show and talked about it so uh we are in a new day what we got to do though is we got to stop i said like i was telling justine i said we got to make sure to say let's put let's put media out of business we got to quit allowing them to control the narrative those people like with with Quentin Tarantino or the Black Lives Matter or people that speak up on something that is broken or that is wrong, you don't give them a chance by painting them in a bad situation.

1:57:57Are you going to do another comedy tour? Yeah, I'm going to do another comedy tour. I'm going to start it organically, like maybe 100 people, 200 people started organically and just sort of grow it. I got some great jokes. and that's the thing like when you're when you're a comedian it's like you have to pray that the jokes will open up so I got some great like jokes that people will get and understand and then just the stuff that's been going on with me you know you know getting older you know not realizing you the OG you know what I'm saying like you know the young like the young hip hop guy what's up OG?

1:58:35Damn that's right you know I mean just it's just some funny stuff It's some funny stuff. And that's what any comedian would tell you, that it's hard to be funny when there's nothing funny happening. But there's been so much funny shit happening. For like my mom, who, you know, adopted, who gave me up for adoption in seven months, and she comes back to live with me. And as she's living with me, she walks down. The first day she's here, she walks down the steps and says, I want a phantom. I'm like, bitch, of the opera? What are you talking about? She's talking about a phantom of Rolls Royce, right?

1:59:08And it was just funny, just certain things that, the fact that everybody lives in my house, the fact that my mom, my dad lives here, my two sisters, my dad still dates, you know, and my mom is going on his side of the house when he has a date, you know, just assessing, like, just being in a way like, oh, hey, I didn't know you had company, Joy. I mean, just, and they've turned into kids. So, you know, my dad would come to my room, could you tell her not to come on my side of the house when I got a date? And I'm like, now parents. So, you know, it's funny things are happening. Lots of organic material.

1:59:44Yeah, so it's organic now. So we got funny shit. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why? On the bigger picture, because I witnessed this in 2008, to see President Obama become president to me 2008 not talking about after he became president because everyone will have their views on that I know what it meant to me to see him stand up there put his hand on that Bible and say become the president of the United States that is success in so many different ways And it also, it jars you. for every person that says, oh man just because I'm black I'm sorry maybe you can't use that all the time because this man now shows you and whatever side you end up on because it's not a political thing to see that and the reason that it means so much to me to see an African-American man like do that like and literally when uh when when when he was this was interesting this is how we connected when he was 30 points down for the nomination 30 points down no one knew who he was I get a call from Oprah Winfrey.

2:01:03Hi, Jamie Foxx. It's Oprah. Hi, Jamie. I was like, what's going on? There's this guy named Senator Obama. I think he's going to be the next president. Then I got a call from Norman Lear. Jamie, it's Norman Lear. The senator's on fire. So who is he? It's Senator Obama. But he's 30 points down, so no one knows. The reason they're calling me is because we have a radio show that was reaching everybody, especially the huge urban market. So I go on my show and I say, I'm voting for this guy named Senator Obama because he's black. And I go to commercial. When I go to commercial, my phone lines light up with all black people saying that we will not vote for this guy just because he's black.

2:01:44Don't treat us that way. So we ended up educating everybody about him. He's the nomination and he goes on and he wins. And to me, it was all odds against him. and I thought that type of success, regardless of where you come from, like I said, whatever side you stand on, to me, that was something monumental. When we talk about where this country has come from, when you talk about the greatness of America evolving and evolving to that type of freedom and him taking advantage of being in America and becoming a president, to me, that's just success that he redefined what it is. What historical figure do you most identify with?

2:02:30Who do I identify with historically? When it comes to entertainment, Sammy Davis Jr. is a person that I look at all the time who I go on the internet and watch him play the drums or watch him sing or watch him dance or watch him do jokes or watch him do a movie or watch him spin guns. To me, he was just the ultimate entertainer. He was a full stack entertainer, as one engineer said. That's what he called you. You had all the tools in the toolkit. Oh, man, that's great. And then there's other sides of me, too. So, like the sports side, like I was a Magic Johnson. Like, you know, the person who loved being competitive but also wanted to get everybody else involved.

2:03:13You know, the way he played basketball. When it comes to social consciousness. May I interject for a second? Yeah. So this might seem like a funny question, but do you feel like you identify more with Magic Johnson than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Yeah. The reason I feel more than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is because Magic smiled and it was fun. He was happy. You know, not to say that Kareem wasn't, but Kareem was more serious guy. Very serious. If you ever met him, he's completely serious. Serious. You know, I'm more the fun dude. Let's have a good time. You know, when it comes to social consciousness and social issues, That's where I draw from a lot of different people.

2:03:52I think watching Martin Luther King and going to Atlanta and seeing what he did and how he did it, when he did it, when I look at the bravery of him, it's beyond. Because I look at social issues today, how we're so afraid to step out on anything. Oh, my cars and my wealth and my money. And not to say that I've thought this way all my life. Literally, it just happened not too long ago where I was like, we got to step up more socially. We got to be on social. Even if some of the people say, oh, fuck it, I ain't going to your movie. Okay, fine, you weren't going to go anyway. But we had to step up a little bit more social-wise.

2:04:38And when I went to see where Martin Luther King came from and what he did and how his house was, he actually came from middle class, big, nice house, But it's right across the street from poverty. And it sort of taught him how to deal with other cultures, taught him how to deal with other financial groups. He says, I don't want to see people hurting. He says, I want everybody. You know, so I think like that. I've always thought like even when we talked about earlier, the Jews and the Palestinians in the in the student center, you know, the rest of the story was I befriended both of them. and we all became friends because I call myself spackle, which is the stuff that goes in between the bricks.

2:05:15Between the cracks. Yeah, I'm spackle. I get along with all religions, get along with all people and try to bring them all together. And so that was the, so when I think about it socially, it is the Martin Luther King thing because I think sometimes we overlook that the world is big enough for all of us to live on it. It's big enough for all of us to get along. and sometimes I question why is it so tough to get along, which is what Martin Luther King questions. I just don't get it, and I won't stand by. Like I said, I've only thought about like that here in the past few years after watching Harry Belafonte go on stage before I was supposed to get a Lifetime Achievement Award, and he goes on and says something so prolific.

2:06:00He says they were talking about violence, And he said the violence that's happening in America is mostly black violence. And you black entertainers sit here mute. And we laid all of this groundwork down for you guys. And you guys are disrespected and not picking up. So, you know, that's the one reason I said I think more socially. I mentioned Karina Abdul-Jabbar because I saw just by chance a fantastic documentary called Minority of One. And it's so good. and it detailed in particular, and I'm not at all well-versed with basketball, so it was also a glimpse into that world for me, but his relationship with Magic Johnson, which was fascinating.

2:06:39Do you have any particular favorite documentaries or movies that you just feel are must-watches for human beings? I know it's a big question. That's why. I think documentaries on cultures are important. If you get a chance to see any documentary about Jews and what they went through. Watch it. Any documentary about Palestinians and what they've gone through, watch it. Blacks, what they've gone through, watch it. Women and what they've gone through, watch it. The reason that I say it is because if we're talking about the human aspect of it, like I didn't get it until I watched, it was actually The Pianist.

2:07:23Yeah. And I just went, shit. I didn't know it was like that. You know what I'm saying? I'm like, I didn't know that. And so, you know, and then when I listen to some of my friends who like, you know, live in the Middle East and they're going through those things, I said, shit, I didn't know it was like that. So I think anytime you get a watch, get a chance to watch people and where they come from or culture and what they went through, you can even look at whites breaking away from, I mean, the 13 colonies breaking away from England. You go, oh, shit. I didn't know you went through that. So it's like when you do that, you come away with a sense of, okay, I get you now.

2:08:03Right. It helps build your compassion. Yeah, it helps build your compassion because you only live in your own world, you know what I'm saying? And unless you get a chance to see what it is, a lot of times your views will be narrow. And just watching documentaries like that to open up your views are just amazing. When you look at the story of, like I said, the story of slavery, there was a book that I just showed these young guys called Without Sanctuary. Without Sanctuary. Where it's a book where a guy, a photographer, went around the South during the times of slavery and documented lynchings.

2:08:43And he would document the lynching and make postcards. Because at that time, see, we go oof. But at that time, it was commonplace. Yeah. It was a party. So people would get their food. That's where they got a picnic from. They would get their food, drinks or whatever, and they would go down and watch the lynching. And so there was a postcard that said, here's the lynching of nigga Charlie. Hope you like it. Hope everything is well. So that was something that was mind-blowing because it was commonplace. So like I said, when you get a chance to see cultures and history, you understand what's going on today.

2:09:21and this is the last little factoid if you get a chance pull up the Harrison Act the Harrison Act was an act about taking drugs off the street and making them illegal because at the time in our culture we were able to you know use whatever drugs that was out there was available but the government sort of didn't know how to get it off the street so they ran a story black man gets high on cocaine and fights cops and people's like so we gotta get rid of drugs people's like fuck that I'm getting rid of our drugs get bigger guns give cops more jurisdiction. Finally, they run a story. Black man gets high on cocaine, rapes and kills Caucasian women.

2:09:59That's when the Harrison Act, because, well, we don't want that. But because of that Harrison Act with the jurisdiction of a cop, that plays into a little bit of what we're dealing with today. Because it was sort of set that way at a time where it was commonplace to see slaves. It was commonplace to see blacks as second or third class citizens. So, and it's not to incite anything. It's not to make you feel anything angry. It's just a peering into someone's genesis to see where we are today so that you can understand to, or try to have the compassion for all of us who live here in this country.

2:10:44Because like I said, it's the best in the world. and beyond i remember friend mentioned to me i was watching planet earth and he said there's a companion of some type which uh i really want to see called i think it's humans of earth and it actually profiles different civilizations different cultures around the world it shows you have humans have adapted you know mongolians using falcons for hunting all of this and whatnot but the um yeah i totally agree with you i think that you know if a culture is a set of beliefs and behaviors, you have to in a way be taken on that sensory experience to develop the compassion.

2:11:19You don't get it through text alone necessarily. If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say? Man. It would constantly change. It would be those new billboards. That's a sneaky answer. I like it. It would be the billboard channel. Ball out, dog. Have a great time. Go to church. love somebody, teach somebody, get angry a little bit. It would just change, you know, because, you know, these guys know me. I'm all about having, and at the end of the last one, have as much fun as you can because in a blink of an eye, we'll all be gone. A hundred years compared to infinity is nothing. I talk to my sister all the time.

2:12:06Why? She'd be like, amazing. What's wrong? I said, girl, you better start having some fun. We're gonna be gone in a minute. You're gonna look back and say like shit. I should have been laughing and now I'm dead So yeah, my billboard would change constantly cuz I think we all change So you said get angry a little bit and it's it and I remember I was given this advice by a guy named Poe Bronson a writer Many many years ago. I asked him at an event. I was sitting in the crowd I said what do you do when you get writer's block and he said I write about what makes me angry yeah, and if you if you were teaching a ninth grade class mixed race, mixed gender.

2:12:42What would you teach that class about? What would you teach? What do you think the most important things, skills, or otherwise that you could teach ninth graders might be? Well, like I said, it would have to be different tiered. If it's a ninth grader of today, I would teach him as much as you can interact with actual humans. You know, the toughest thing in the world is like looking at my daughter and we're in Paris. Generating thumbs. Yeah, they're on their cell phones. So I said, as much as you can, interact with people. Because people, it's the best interaction because there's all types. And there's discretion when it comes to people.

2:13:26Like, there's no discretion when it comes to thumbs and what you can say on the internet. And that's why you get drugged down by it. Because it doesn't take anything. if it's an anonymous person and they say you're ugly and you're this and you're that and you're this, there's no discretion there. So they can sort of get the venom off. I said, if we're in a surrounding, I may feel something about something, but I won't say it because I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. I don't want to have it hurt my feelings. So that's the one thing, interact with people. The second thing is, interact with people from all over the world because you become narrow when you're just all about my block.

2:14:09And just being about your block in today's world is going to hurt us because people don't understand global. We don't understand global market. We don't understand global things that how does something in the Middle East affect me in North Dakota because of the way we're set up like this. So it's like you have to get the education. I would bypass. Well, no, I wouldn't bypass it. Get the education of people all over the world. And then the last last couple of things would be history. Know history. Know why we're why we're here. Why this especially when it comes to to to rules and legislation and things that know why why we vote, why we don't vote.

2:14:55So if you think about it, this wonderful country runs on just like a human brain. We only use a little bit of it when it comes to the voting market. You got to vote. Get out there and be active in that. A lot of times we just, hey, man, whoever's the president is the president, whoever's this way. So that. And then the last part that I would teach is the last two things. Hustle. Teach your hustle. Your hustle muscle is the most important thing. when you hustle and you go get it, a lot of times that alleviates your problems. When you don't hustle or you leave it to chance, when you leave things to chance and you didn't give it all that day, now you start to argue or wonder about things.

2:15:42Bills, fuck, I gotta get that done. Oh, my relationship is out of that. But if you hustle, for one, it's gonna take up a lot more of your time. So you don't have time to concentrate on just... The worrying. The worrying. if I put the work in and I got my check and your check doesn't have to be monetary it could be anything I put the work in at the charity and this happened because of the charity but whatever it is put that hard work in and now you can see things coming to fruition and that takes 70 % of your worrying away because you did give it your all and then the last part of it is reflect Like sit still for a minute because when you're working, working, working, working, working, I got this, I got this, that, that will strain you as well.

2:16:31So you got to be able to decompress. You just got to be able to chill whatever it is that you chill with. If it's your homies, your friends, whatever. Take time out to be like, you know what?

2:16:44If it's out of my hands, it's out of my hands. I'll get a better crack at it tomorrow. Colin Powell said something incredible. He said, I always feel like in the morning I got a brand new chance. And I'm paraphrasing. In the morning, he said, I love getting to the morning because it's a new opportunity. But really take that time for yourself, you know, relax, chill, whatever it is that you believe in. If it's God, Buddha, Allah, Hindu, all of them, whatever it is to get you on that, okay, you know, I did what I'm supposed to do. Let me relax now. And then tomorrow or the next day, get another start.

2:17:20What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like? Do you have any morning routines that are important to you? Morning routines? I wake up. I text the people that I dig and love. What do you say? I just send them encouraging. There's a few people that just really mean a lot to me. Want to let them know I'm thinking about them the whole time. And then it varies, man. Sometimes I'll be like, okay, I put some work in. So I put in eight days. So maybe these two days I could chill. Get a little, I do the, just on the physical part, I get my 50 pull-ups in, 100 sit-ups, you know, maybe 100 crunches.

2:18:09And it's easy. I used to not be able to do it. My boy Tyron Turner. How many sets for the 50 pull-ups? For the 50? So I do 15 first, 15 pull-ups. This is what it is. I do 15 pull-ups, 50 push-ups, 100 sit-ups. Then I go back and I do 15 different grip. Oh, chin. Yeah. So that'll get me to 30. Another 50 push-ups. That gets me to 100 push-ups. I'm done with the push-ups. And then I do 10 and 10 back to the first grip. And you don't have to do it every single day. You can do it every other day. and then what you notice is the pull-up bar and tyron kept telling me this well we i got a homie tyron he played cane in minister society and he i kept wondering how is he always in shape he says man i'm trying to tell you the pull-up bar is everything so uh so that and then um and then just you know make the calls and what i need to get done and make sure i'm you know in the right you know position and you drink coffee get the kid i don't drink coffee i don't drink coffee I had to stop having stimulants.

2:19:21That's you and me. Earlier in my career, I was all about the stimulants. So at a certain point, I had to... Ixnay on the caffeine. I've been cutting that out as well. It's not good for me. People are like, aren't you worried about depressants, alcohol? I'm like, no, no, no, no. Stimulants, that's what I need to be worried about. Yeah, because when I tell people all the time to drink coffee, after a while, you keep hitting that same muscle in your brain to where you, I know people right now who can drink four cups of coffee and go to sleep. Yeah, I used to be that person. Yeah, and so it's like, and one of my boys loves, what is the Red Bull?

2:19:59Red Bull. And then he won't understand why some days he'll just be like this. Yeah. So I had to stop, and it was tough because I had to have coffee every day, and I drank like double espressos, you know. So I was like, I had to have the up. But now I know how to go get it inside of my, you know, I know how to go get it inside. Last question here is, I'm going to ask what advice you would give to yourself. Three different ages, 20, 30, and 40. So what advice would you give to your 20-year-old self? Man, put the condom on. Shit. Stop playing around. Important advice. 20, man. Put that on, buddy.

2:20:38And not the fishnet one either. They put the real one on. Okay. Anything else for 20 or should we move to 30? 20, 20s. I had my daughter at 26. So the advice I would give me was like, calm down. You know, it was like calm down and just, you know, make sure you're paying attention to your daughter and to the daughter's mom. 20s was tough because I just got to LA. I was just, you know, man, the whole world was opening up. So I'm like, man, I'm trying to do all of it. And while I was like, calm down. And luckily, it was 26, so moving into 30, I was on my way to calming, if that makes sense. It does make sense.

2:21:32So then you hit 30. 30. What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? It's going to go fast. In what way? It's going to go fast. The time is going to go fast. So just make sure that you start now planning for your future. And not only is it going to go fast, but don't spend all your money. Don't buy the jacket that's$12 ,000. You know, relax. You know, just relax it because it's good. And 40 is going to come so fast. and you don't think that it is, but it's going to come so fast. And would you say that because you would want your 30-year-old self to pay attention to the present moment or do long-term thinking?

2:22:17No, you got to do long-term. When you're 30, you got a kid and you're in my business and in any business, all businesses are going to, especially when you make, my business is about me, so I have to be careful in my decisions socially and plan for the future. It's not going to be, I remember doing my television show and it went five years went fast. And I would tell the people on my television show, it's going to go fast, man. And if you finish at 35, but you live till 70, you know, so you have to really think about the future. The long game. Yeah. And then 40 before zero. Wow. 40. there are going to be tough decisions that you have to make when it comes to business.

2:23:09Because in your 40, when you're 40, in my business, the window is closing on certain things. So you have to be able to open those windows to other things. And some of the people that you've gone to battle with till you're 40 may not be the ones that you will battle and do business with towards 50 and take a little bit of your personal feelings out of it because I'm very personal meaning like I would stay with someone even if I feel that they're not up to par business wise but you know we have history take a little bit of the personal out of it still remain friends if you can with that person because now it's really pending like 50 about to be here you know I'm saying so So it's like, you know, and I would tell my 40 year old self, grow up in your mind, but not in your body necessarily.

2:24:03Meaning stay young in your body, but certain parts of your life, you have to grow up and be grown about things. Because now you got another kid, your other child is, you know, 20, she's 21 now, which is just, you know, this past year. But she was, you know, 13, 14 when I was 40. But now you got to start living. You would always live your life 100 % for you. But now that you have your kids and they're a certain age, it's got to be 30 to 40 % you, 60 to 7 % what you're going to leave for them and how you're going to leave them. Because, like I said, it's flying. And that's it. Jamie so much fun I really appreciate taking the time and where can people find what you're up to find you online learn find me at I am Jamie Foxx on my periscope am I right am I saying this right yeah I got these young cats telling me what to do and then I am Jamie Foxx on Twitter also I am Jamie Foxx on Twitter and I'm doing better on Twitter I'm trying to do better and on Twitter and the old fella trying to the latest album The latest album is called Hollywood Story of a Dozen Roses.

2:25:20It's out. I don't care how you get it. You can download it, bootleg it, steal it from a friend. I don't care. I just want you to hear the music. The song that's out right now is I'm Supposed to Be in Love by Now. I'm supposed to be in love by now.

2:25:39It's been so long for me. I don't know how. Been drowning in the sea of broken vows. But I'm supposed to be in love by now. I've been chasing my dream, now I'm chasing you. Running hard, but my legs feel weak. I done played every part, I done played a fool. Write the movie, I'll be your lead. I'm supposed to be in love by now. Well, girl, you stole my heart to take a bow. In love by now.

2:26:37So make sure you get that. In love by now is out. It's a song that my daughter made me. She sort of made me do. She's like, listen, stop with the club stuff. And that's my oldest daughter. It's like funny. She said, stop with the club joints. Stop. You're trying to be too young. Like, I had on some shoes one day that she thought was just, I had too young of a shoe. She's like, Dad, what is that on your feet? I said, they the new style, baby. They the Giuseppe's. You know, it's the new style. I had a zipper on it and a buckle and my name engraved. And she was like, stop it. She said, Dad, you have old feet.

2:27:16I said, what does that mean? You have old feet. Like you have feet for marching, like a civil rights. You have a civil rights thing. So, but she said, do a song that we know that is from you. And it's true. She said, I'm supposed to be in love by now. And so that and jumping out of the window. And we just shot the in love by now video with George Lopez is the priest. I get stood up at the altar. George Lopez is a priest. Nicole Scherzinger. And we all know her from the Pussycat Dolls, but also her solo career and everything. She plays my love interest, which is great because she's a good friend.

2:27:56And so we were able to really get into some... They don't do old school videos anymore. This actually has a bit of a story. My man Tank is in it. And then all of my friends, my daughter's in it. My little daughter's in it. And my mom and dad is in it. So it's kind of cool. I was jamming to Babies in Love. Yeah. That's the type of music I listen to before when I'm headed somewhere to write, sit down, do some creative work. Yeah, man. Babies in love. Solid. Babies on top. I think Justin Bieber was supposed to do that song first. And we were lucky enough to get it. But Babies in Love, Kid Ink is on there.

2:28:31So, you know, got some good stuff going. And then later on, Sleepless Nights will be out at some point. And then we'll start work on the Mike Tyson bio. And that's it. And then the stand-up comedy is coming because, like I said, I got a lot of stuff that I got to get off my chest. Since you brought up Mike, what would Mike say if you were here right now? Well, I'm going to say it like this because now that I'm about to do the movie, to do the Mike Tyson impersonation would be a little disservice. What I would say is that I met Mike when I was 21 years old. I went on stage and I was doing my joke and I was getting my Mike Tyson joke and I went into it and no one laughed because Mike was in the audience.

2:29:19A guy was in the audience with Mike and said, yo, Mike is in here, motherfucker. I was like, oh, man. The black girls in the front was like, what you going to do, Jamie? You going to tell your jokes? You scared of Mike Tyson? This is when Mike Tyson was knocking people out for nothing. And then the guy yells out, Mike said, do the joke. And that shit better be funny. I was like, oh, shit. So I do the joke. It's a standing ovation. I come off stage and Mike goes, there he is. I want to talk to you. You're so funny. Come hang out with me. You're a funny motherfucker. Come and get in the car with me.

2:29:45And we take off. And I started hanging out with Mike Tyson at 21 years old. It was the most incredible thing in the world. Mike was bigger than Michael Jackson at that time. He was the biggest person, biggest star in the world. Mike would be in a club, see a girl and say, hi, how are you? Like BMWs? They're like, huh? Do you like cars? Yeah. He would go open up the BMW dealership. He'll buy a car for a girl. That's how dope he was. And then all of his boys would go to all the different cities and pick up the cars that about for girls say yo come on get the keys back you know he's playing so it was great to see it was great to see him during the times and it was tough to see him when he went through what he went through and then when we finally decided to do this movie this is the mike tyson and i think people really be able to grasp is that when we show mike tyson older and i called mike and i said mike how are you i'll pray this to allah my brother i'm happy how are you i said i'm good mike you know what's up what's going on i'm just happy i'm happy because i don't have any money anymore so I'm happy.

2:30:41I was like, Mike, what does that mean? He said, no, it's just all the vultures that were around me the whole time. It was always after my money so I don't have any money so nobody wants anything from me so I'm just so happy. And if you notice, his speaking voice, like what I told you with Bill Cosby, is completely different from when he's on stage, when he's getting ready to fight. So he was like, I'm just so happy. And I could tell, I said, Mike, that's the person we need to tell that's the story we always see the person who rises to the mountaintop but we don't see the other side of the mountain and all the jagged edges and all the things and and and you're about to slip off of that mountain so uh terry winter who wrote you know a wolf of wall street boardwalk empire and martin scorsese who's going to direct it who hasn't directed a film about boxing since raging bull so fingers crossed if it all goes together we'll be able to see Mike Tyson in a different way and we'll be able to transform to where I want to be so good that it's Mike Tyson that I look so much like him and when I walk into his house his kids would acknowledge me as a father and then I want to be able to sit back and reflect and here's what I'm trying to do with the career is establish characters in Living Color it was Wanda, hey for real I'll rock your world.

2:32:07Then it was Willie Beeman, any given Sunday. My name is Willie. Willie Beeman. I keep the ladies screaming. Then it's Ray Charles. No, it's Bundini Brown from Ali. Muhammad Ali is a prophet. How you going to be God, son? As soon as you come out the garage, you'll be number two. So Bundini Brown. And then it's, well, I got a woman way over town. That's good to me. Then it's Ray Charles. And then it's Django, you know they love you very well. Django. So the Django experience, you know, working with Quentin Tarantino, which was mind-blowing to be able to go in and read for that. And I didn't know about that part.

2:32:51I thought Will Smith was going to do it. I was like, ooh, Will Smith and Quentin Tarantino. It was going to be incredible. It didn't work out that way. I meet with Quentin Tarantino. I told him I understand the script. And I said, not only that, I have my own horse. And so I ended up riding my own horse in Django. And I knew that that was going to be another character that's going to change the game. And so they'll look at that. So they'll say Django. And then hopefully if everything goes right, Mike Tyson will sit with those characters so that you'll be able to, after a while, look at a career where you transformed into a character.

2:33:29people know it and we're moved by it and and hopefully uh um if it all works out it'll it'll be a great it'll be a great opportunity to look back and see like wow man look at the things that you were able to do uh in america it's an incredible canon already and um my brother gave me mike tyson's autobiography for christmas last year and i sat down i read it because when i was kid, I would watch on the grainy VHS, Mike Tyson's greatest hits, over and over and over. And you'd see his reception in Japan. He was the biggest star on the face of the planet. But you read the autobiography and there are layers upon layers.

2:34:10A lot. A lot. A guy who just wanted to be in love, just wanted to just, you know, it was more simple than we thought it would. Yeah. And I can't wait to see it. I hope it comes together. I hope so. Jamie, you are the consummate performer. and entertainer. So please keep creating. This has been such a gift. Thank you for your time. Thank you, buddy. And for everybody listening, you can find all the show notes, links to everything at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. You can search my name and Jamie's, it'll probably pop right up. And as always, thank you so much for listening.

2:34:49Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. 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 Popova or Popova. I have friends who, for instance, Naval Ravikant is a friend. It's actually novel, but Americans can't really pull that off. So he goes for Naval. So I appreciate the coaching. And as a country of immigrants, we have a surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right, right?

2:35:31Absolutely. It's just the sort of anglicizing of such a crisol, like a melting pot of different cultures. And at the same time, I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time, which is reading. And 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 pronounced. 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 they're pronounced.

2:36:16It's kind of tragicomic when you actually find out how they're pronounced. No, 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, and I'd also read it, democracy, aristocracy. For whatever reason, I couldn't get the emphasis right. But coming back to the reading and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading, if someone asks you, and I'm sure occasionally it happens, 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?

2:36:57How do you answer that? Well, I've answered it differently over the years, in part because I think inhabiting our own identity is 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, end up at Brain Pickings, and they're like, oh, this is quite interesting, and they 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 describe that?

2:37:38It's just the record of that thinking, my personal, subjective, private thinking that takes place between my reading and the writing, and takes form in writing. A collection of very interesting things, and sometimes how I've got to sort of 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'm embarrassed, in some cases kind of humiliated, to answer that I don't go really to many blogs consistently. and I think part of the reason is so many of them 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 point told me you should focus on just-in-time information, not just-in-case information, which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound.

2:38:51But there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot. Brain Pickings is one, and Sam Harris' blog is another. And I saw your review of his latest book, Waking Up. Well, not a review. Not a review. I don't review books ever. Okay, no, so this is… An annotated reading. 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 had for a very long time. Talking about reviews. So I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you.

2:39:39And a close friend of mine, Chris Saka, he came back with what percentage of New York Times bestsellers 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 powerhouse of an outlet for your, whether it's creative musings or 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, you're very kind to put it that way, as is Chris. But I think one big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about are very old, out of print, things that are not competing for New York Times bestseller.

2:40:31In 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 Chris asked that question is actually that I met him through his wife who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love, and I love Wendy, on a book about wine. And that book ended up, and I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensory experience. And I like things that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it.

2:41:12But in any case, I wrote about that book, and that particular piece on brain pickings seemed to do pretty well. And I think perhaps that warped Chris's idea of 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 are wonderful uh the richard betts was the sommelier who was part of that and at one point i met with him because i wanted to try to uh 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.

2:42:06But at some point, Richard, we will talk again and form a game plan. So 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 sort of 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 recognition to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a theme or something that still affects people. And 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.

2:42:52And so I thought to myself, like, you know, how much digging do I really need to do. And good God, you have such an absolute canon of work out there. It is astonishing. I mean, it is really... You're very kind. It's 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 the accumulation, you know. And so I was, I was, I'm fascinated by routine and schedule. And I'm reading from, of course, 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.

2:43:45how do you and I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before but sometimes the answer is change and evolve they 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 the question that you've, I'm sure, been asked many times, but I'll ask again, is how do you choose the books? How do you find slash choose the books that you read?

2:44:28This is a huge problem for me because my appetite for reading outstrips the time that I have. And fortunately, sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books I've taken on 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 eras and sensibilities, because that's what I think about, so anything from art and science to philosophy, psychology, history, design, poetry, you name it. But the common denominator for me is just this very simple question of does this illuminate some aspect, big or small, of that grand question that I think we all tussle with every day, which is how to live well, how to live a good, meaningful, fulfilling life.

2:45:32Whether that's Aristotle's views on happiness in government or beautiful art from 12th century Japan or Sam Harris's new book, anything. Got it. And 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 quote. I think it was either the interview I did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam. But I actually have a counterpoint to the semicolon question. Okay, no, no. Question, but go on. So I actually 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 forearm.

2:46:28You gotta love type nerds. He loves semicolons. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other arm. He's a fascinating guy. But the quote that I heard you cite that I wanted to dig into a bit was Kurt Vonnegut saying, write to please just one person. And so my question to you is, when you write, is that still the case? And if so, 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. Like I said, it's just the record of my thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand 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.

2:47:29and the sort of intersection of or transmutation of information into wisdom, really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom. So I and it's interesting, too, because when I started Brain Pickings, like I said, almost eight years ago, it started very much as a private record of my own curiosity. And I shared it with seven coworkers 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, by the way. Thank you. And I'm not sort of number dropping for scale 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 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.

2:48:32And it's a strange thing to live with and in 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 million people, you know? Definitely. And there's so many questions I want to ask you. We might have to do a part two at some point because I know we have some time constraints. But where to even begin? This is where I start fraying at the ends as an interviewer. So the first question would be related to that. There's so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after kind of the tried and true BuzzFeed type headlines.

2:49:23uh do you ever contend with that temptation and if if so how do you resist it and i and this is part of the you know how do you respond to the the expectations of the crowd or the seven million people looking on and i feel this personally sometimes because i have a blog it has uh you know certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have you know i'm somewhere between one and two million uniques a month usually. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. But even at that scale, there are times when I put out something that I feel is very important, but on the dense side. And then it will, sometimes it takes off, but sometimes it doesn't.

2:50:10And 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 of the favorites on something that's kind of dense, and then I'm like, oh, God, I should just do the seven tricks you can actually teach your cat and get 500 ,000 retweets. Is that something 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. It's some sort of putting a piece of oneself out into the world.

2:50:52Anybody 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 in 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 that the public are to him non-existent. And it's very easy to say, especially for somebody as Wilde, who was very prolific, very public, almost performative in 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 given you make your living through it.

2:51:39and 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 to be seen and to be understood, which is why all art comes to be, because one human being wants to put something into 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.

2:52:24I just finished reading this kind of 600 page interview with him, essentially. It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Cronin had with him over the course of 30 years. And in one passage, Herzog 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 they're touching, that the films are touching 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, quote unquote, tempted to make listicles or to make anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for.

2:53:14And in part, 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. to perfect the art of the BuzzFeed listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm interested in. Yeah, no, I think it's a very virtuous goal.

2:53:51I 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 kindred spirit with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made. So for instance, I mean, not doing 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, That's 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.

2:54:35So if you're a writer, write the things you want to read. If you're an artist, paint the things you want to see painted. And I think the commercial aspect is really warping that. And one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations, from your books to this podcast, this site, everything, is that there's just this sort of sense that you just want this to exist. It doesn't exist for any other reason than you want it to exist. And I think that's wonderful. Thank you. That means a lot to me. And I, you know, coming back to the right to please just one person, it's, you know, I think that it's related to that.

2:55:15So 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, it was my first book, 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. In the case of the 4-Hour Workweek, I came out of undergrad at Princeton and many years have passed, obviously, but when I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kind of Ivy League, where I was trying to use$10 words where a 10-cent word would suffice and be a lot cleaner.

2:55:59So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted. And this was a major panic attack moment. I was on deadline. And I remember I was in Argentina at the time. And then I went the other way. And I said, No, 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, 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 of Malbec and sit down and start to write.

2:56:39What is that? Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America, best known in Argentina, but there are 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 aides and has developed this worldwide uh fame because of its cultivation in argentina so there's 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 an email client and started typing the four-hour work week as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends.

2:57:23One was an investment banker trapped in his own job, and he felt like he couldn't leave because his lifestyle was swelling to meet his income. And then the other was an entrepreneur trapped in a company of his own making. And so these two very specific guys in mind, I started to write with just enough alcohol to take the edge off. And that's how I was writing in that case to please just two people. But that's the only way I could make it work.

2:57:53Your schedule. So I've read of your schedule, but I'd love to hear the current iteration of that. It seems like you have a fairly regimented schedule, which would make sense if you're putting the number of hours into reading and writing that you do. So what does 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 this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and presence. And especially in a culture that seems to measure our worth or merit or our value through our efficiency and our earnings and our ability to perform certain tasks as opposed to just the fulfillment we feel in our own lives and the presence that we take in the day to day.

2:58:53And 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 would consume us. 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.

2:59:36What time do you wake up typically? Exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed. So it varies. I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think when I write, or when I, 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, 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's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep. We're almost as drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time we normally need to function.

3:00:23And I think ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by and very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that 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 try to sort of enact that in my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep, at least as disciplined 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 form reading.

3:01:12I get back home, I have breakfast and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles 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 I don't have people disruptions, I guess. So anything social. And then I take a short break. I'm a believer in sort 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.

3:02:05And 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 is unburdened by deliberate thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general. And then usually later at night, I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two. Got it. And so a number of follow up questions. What type of meditation do you practice currently?

3:02:53Just guided Vipassana, very, very basic. There's a woman named Tara Brock, who she's a mindfulness practitioner. How do you spell her last name? B-R-A-C-H. Got it. She's based out of D.C. and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist, then did 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 on sort of the philosophies and cognitive behavioral, you know, wisdom of the ages. And then she does a guided meditation.

3:03:40so I use her meditations and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life so I highly recommend her Tara Brock Brock, yes and all her podcast is free she has two books out too she's really wonderful very generous person I will have to check that out so you're listening then, you have earbuds in when you're or you're listening to audio while you meditate. Yes. And it's interestingly, I mean, she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of 2010. It's just one that I like and feel familiar with, and it sort of helps me get into the rhythm.

3:04:23So every day I listen to the exact same. Summer 2010. How does that start? How would people recognize it? How does the audio start off? 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 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 a great answer. God, I love digging into the specifics. When you go to the gym then, uh, to work out, are you still using an elliptical for that or are you, you are?

3:05:07I do sprints, high intensity intervals on the elliptical for cardio. And I do a lot of, um, weights and body weight stuff too. You do. All right. 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.

3:05:51And so in that case, I just go there with my big tome and my sticky notes and pens and sharpies and various annotation analog devices. And I just do that. Cool. All right. So 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 does your note-taking system look like in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy?

3:06:37So with digital, it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that are that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. But reading is really or understanding, really, which is what 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 sequentially. know sequentially so it's not like you walk away with one insight from the first chapter one insight from the second chapter it's just sort of this pattern of the writer's thoughts that 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 with analog books in particular, and I've sort of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect, is on the very last page of each book, which is blank usually, right before the end cover, I create an alternate index.

3:07:56So I basically list out, as I'm reading, the topics and ideas 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've 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 what those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book. Okay, I have to geek out on this because I'm so excited now.

3:08:37So as it turns out, with analog books, I do exactly, literally exactly the same thing. I usually start with the front inside cover, but I create my own index. And of course, they don't have to be in order. So you can sort of list them in any, in my particular case, in any 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... Oh, I do that too. Oh, really? But I call it BL for beautiful language. Oh, that's so cool. Okay. So there's that. And then I have, you know, like Q or Q, if they're quotes.

3:09:22So for instance, many books will have quotes attributed to other people or just header quotes in some cases. And so I'll have 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 when you're gathering this, you mentioned acronyms and shorthand. 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. They're just completely my own system. Is there one other example?

3:09:59Just if you could indulge me. One that is, I guess, not so much about the contents of that passage as about its purpose is LJ, which is, I have a little sort of labor of love side project called Literary Jukebox, right? Sure. I've seen it. Yeah, it's awesome. Oh, thank you. But yeah, so I do these pairings of passages in literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes 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.

3:10:42I 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 annotations that are specific to that particular book, all of my sticky tab notes are on the side 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 a quote from something else that i know of and i think that's actually very important because the 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 allusions even, they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work.

3:11:42And that way, if you follow those, you 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 incremental way. And I've often found amazing older books that were, you know, five or six hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which led me to something else, which led me to something else, which led me to this great other thing.

3:12:21So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice. Yeah, it's 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 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 bowl, I assumed that Seneca was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good...

3:13:19Lovely, actually. I assumed he was a Native American elder for probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman. I was like, man, Ferris, you got to do your homework, pal. You got to dig in. And then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off the cliff into a lot of his writings, which I still to this day revisit on an almost month. I just revisited his The Shortness of Life. Oh, so good. Which is perhaps the best manifesto. And I hate this modern word, sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally. So the best manifesto for our 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.

3:14:10And it's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago, before there was internet, before there was the things we call distractions today. And yet he writes about the exact same things, just in a different form. 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, I think it calls to mind for a lot of people, the sort of haughty, pompous college student in Good Will Hunting in the bar scene who's like reciting, you know, Shakespeare without giving any type of credit.

3:14:53See, I completely disagree. I agree with the notion that those are its connotations 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 set of philosophies, essentially. I agree. No, I totally agree. But I usually, if I'm going to lead people there, I try to lure them in 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.

3:15:40most of his writing I believe is 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 start off with some of his letters and you'll find that you could just as easily replace these Roman names like Lucilius and so on with like Bob and Jane or pick your contemporary name 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 oftentimes as the 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 the sort of workflow look like from there?

3:16:41And are there any particular types of software or apps or anything like that 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 is 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 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.

3:17:27I go to those, I copy them from that page and I paste them into an Evernote file to sort of just have all of my notes in a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific iPad, Kindle app, Kindle page with my highlighted passage and then email that screen grab 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 export all my notes. And also, the formatting is kind of shitty on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes.

3:18:13So if you copy them, they paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. So it 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 page. That's 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 Werner Herzog book, for example, which is 600 pages, I have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable.

3:18:55So 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'm looking at this list of questions, and I'm not reading entirely on script, but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now. And one of the things I realized about formatting and transposing things from, say, my Kindle page, if you log into your Amazon account through kindle.amazon.com or copying and 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.

3:19:45And it tends to remove all of that headache. Let's say nine times out of 10. So if you, if the 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. Got it. Plus, plus, you know, Amazon's own thing that says add note, read, read at this location, delete notes. And so it all merges it and becomes just hideous. It's just impossible to read. God, you know, I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into TextWrangler, which is used for coding a lot just to remove the formatting and then put it into Evernote.

3:20:25Yeah, I do that with Coda. Yeah, it's true, though. But there's got to 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? Is there a way to like, I even thought, I mean, I was at one point so desperate and so frustrated, 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 scholarship or like a grant for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me.

3:21:03That's a great idea. I'm still not, 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 an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights, I've run into this. You mentioned the Werner Herzog book and having thousands of highlights. Have you run into instances where 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 seeing.

3:21:45Oh yeah. It says like 200 highlights, 81 available or something like that. 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? Yes, 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 is fairly new. So that is the case with more recently published books.

3:22:22But 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 laboriously, you know, deal with it, which is you can still open that passage in your Kindle app on desktop. So Kindle for Mac for me. And it will let you highlight and copy those passages and paste them into your Evernote in between the missing parts.

3:23:04But it's obviously completely non-conducible. I have done that. And it's so horrible because you also get the excerpted from three lines for every one. So just publishers, if you're listening to this, you are making it harder for people like Maria who 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 is just me but as of about 10 months ago I have an assistant Lisa who's absolutely wonderful and 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.

3:23:59I 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 a point where the demands are just incomparable with what you can even look at, then you kind of need to have help in order not to either go insane or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. And was there a particular... Oh, and I also have a copy editor, this wonderful older lady I hired to do my proofreading. She's great. That's all I can say. I think proofreading is really, really important. And I'm constantly embarrassed if I have a typo, which, as you know, as a writer, you cannot proof your own work.

3:24:42Your brain just does not see the errors that were made in the first place, or the majority of them. And people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or I don'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, so yes, I have my assistant for admin and my copy editor for just proofing. And what platform is Brain Pickings on at the moment? What's the technology behind it? I know that I've heard you mention WordPress before.

3:25:24Is it still on WordPress? It is on WordPress. I was going to make a joke about how the technology is called Corpus Colossum, but the actual technology is. That was a very Sam Harris friendly joke.

3:25:45So 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? No, it's a very, again, super sort of hacked together process, which is every night I email her the articles from the preview page on WordPress. I just copy that and paste it into a body email and I send it to her and then she sends me the corrections via email. Got it. 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.

3:26:33But 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 would 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 just my voice. So I find email works just fine. Got it. Okay, no, I'm always fascinated because I will use, well, when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also on WordPress, I would use the share a draft plugin to share drafts with people.

3:27:15I'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 I should look into that I think that's what I have too the WordPress VIP I don't even know what that function is I'm kind of for somebody who writes on the web I don't really I sometimes only learn about things through friends. I think, yeah, that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff. And 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.

3:28:14yeah I mean that's what a lot of people suggest and what Kai my proofreader actually asked originally but I do not own Microsoft products on principle and I'm not gonna 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 where you're 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 um strongly lovingly but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner who one day said you you are using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not and because I was really stressing to a point of just driving myself crazy.

3:29:10And 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 always by myself. And I 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. 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.

3:29:58But on some sort of psych-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 brain cooking has evolved, which has always been very organic. So the sort of 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.

3:30:41And then it became not one, 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 and naively 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 seventh birthday of brain pickings is approaching, my partner was just like, please consider. And yeah. Oh, 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, the assistant that you ended up with?

3:31:31Well, 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 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 in 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?

3:32:15Just a recommendation. She's been working for somebody who's a very trusted, dear person for a long time. So now she works for both of us. And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the specifics because the way that I found one of my first assistants, and we worked together for many years, was any time 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 what you do as well as you do it that you could recommend to me because I need some help?

3:32:52And I just did that over and over again. And eventually one of them 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 what was the. Oh, 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 had been reading brain pickings. And I asked, made sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate because she's also I mean, she's superwoman.

3:33:31Lisa is 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 too and uh but she's very like i said very dogged very sort of dedicated and she was like i can do it and uh i'd like to do it and i was like great let's roll onward so with uh with your assistant if you were to do an 80 20 analysis of to the eight the you know the 20 of tasks that take up 80 of her time what what are the types what would those look like? What is the vast majority of her time spent on? So

3:34:18a lot of it is I guess coordinating travel and things but I'm trying to really I mean I have this new-ish commitment to really not do any speaking at commercial conferences 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 and whatnot. But with students, it is worth my time.

3:34:57If I disfraged even one journalism student from going into buzzworthy land, you know, after graduation, that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking, speaking, I now I'm 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 Lisa is sort of wrangling that. And another big part, and I should also mention that the evolution of what I've been able to delegate has been, has sort of organically happened.

3:35:39Originally, 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. So that could not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing.

3:36:20And do you operate, do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use soft other types of software? Oh, email. Email and text. Email and text. So no project management software at this point? No sort of Basecamp or Asana or anything like that? No, I don't. That would make me feel 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. Back to the Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience or the humanity, I guess, of attention. uh what um a couple of a couple of quick ones so the first is when you when you lift do you tend to have the same workout what what is your what does your weight lifting look like it's changed a lot in the last year and a half i've prioritized body weight stuff heavily no pun intended that was actually total inadvertent this how language how we think in language that's so funny uh but uh i prioritize body weight stuff.

3:37:19And so I do pull-ups, push-ups and that sort of thing. It also depends on where I do my workout. 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 think 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 body weight 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 some like a step or something and just push-ups.

3:38:09Cool. A great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted bent rows. 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's just not my thing. I can't 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.

3:38:52And there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just like not great. That's true. So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me when I travel in case there's nowhere 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. I remember, you know, I wanted to, every time I meet, and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who, at any point have lived in Bulgaria, I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's not.

3:39:32I know nothing about them. I didn't even do the weight stuff when I was living in Bulgaria. No, exactly. It's kind of like, you know, like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Ricolo commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff. But for once 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. It 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.

3:40:10Is that accurate? I don't have comments. I do have dates. They're in the URL. Oh, they're in the URL, but they're not in the post. They're in the URL structure, but they're not in the displayed post itself. Yeah. So the reason for that is because I do think we live in 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 are reverse chronology, and 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 it really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is but i think that this culture conditions is so much people when they see a date stamp they sort of think oh this was like two years old oh and it's really you know two thousand years old but because a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference so i constantly get things this is another thing that lisa deals with requests from textbooks for citations or whatnot.

3:41:22And 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 when they write and ask me what 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. Definitely. I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years. and if you go to any permalinks, 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.

3:42:04And 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 comments? I did originally. And then I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like Herzog does. I don't really care to hear. I mean, I do write for me. I'm very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched. But the comments I was getting, I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know, trolling or anything like that. But they were kind of vacant or people trying to plug their own thing or spam.

3:42:41and it was taking more of my time than it was worth. And so instead I've 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. And then, I mean, I do get 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 Brain Pickens Facebook page last fall, or it just started growing so fast.

3:43:23I have no idea why. I was going to ask you about that because if you look at, say, 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. Two point something million. Close to three, maybe. So 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.

3:43:57And they're such sweet notes, you know, people who just are stimulated 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. And I think it would be selfish of me to just sort of disable 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't deal with them. 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.

3:44:40So 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't deal with it. It's like a psychic drain. I can't even explain. 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, end of being human. If you don't have the patience to read something don't have the hubris to comment on it.

3:45:21I don't 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 why it's so hard for anybody. And I don't think that people have a hard time with criticism because another person disagrees 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 you say that his ideas are not as controversial as people think when they don't actually understand what they are.

3:46:06But 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.

3:46:53And if people come and be idiots in it, then they're not welcome there. Yeah. No, I actually use the exact same 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 know, 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, is your assistant's job as it relates to Facebook then primarily calling the herd and just removing the, the idiots or does she have, what are, what are other instructions? If any, are Are there things that she passes to you?

3:47:29Are there things that she responds to? No, 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 a 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 things on there. You know, Lisa doesn't put the actual postings. And I also don't want them creating a culture that is antithetical to the very reason why I do what I do, which is a kind of faith in the human spirit.

3:48:07I 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 craps on that without having even given a chance to the thoughts that speak to those ideals, which is what my articles are record of, then I will want them gone. And so her instructions are just ban 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 sensationalist take on it clearly not understanding the nuance because I mean a culture of news is I say often a culture without nuance and And yeah, so that's basically it.

3:49:04Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her task. Does not make me lose my mind over exasperation when people is impatient. No, and I really respect that because another reason that I read brain pickings as 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 lot of respects. So kudos. Thank you. The email. Actually, before we get to email, I've read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook, which would make sense because you're prolific. If that's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media?

3:49:49I use Buffer for Twitter, and I use just my hands for Facebook. but again I mean this goes back to 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 self-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 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.

3:50:40And 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 then i think that's actually it could be viewed as a selfish act right so the i think 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?

3:51:30So sort of a lot of the people 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 an IT person, trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and said, the Seneca, the shortness of life piece, really, really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy, never been interested in it, never looked for it, but it 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 email, if you go to your contact page, you recommend emailcharter.org.

3:52:16And I'm very curious to hear if people actually follow the email charter. In terms of the email that you receive, do people actually pay attention to that and follow the rules? 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 the sake thereof, you know, so they don't, they don't usually follow. But people who actually care to have a conversation and to engage are very courteous and very sort of mindful of what I've asked, except for publicists who are never.

3:53:04Yeah, right. Well, I mean, I suppose if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template, dear blogger. Oh, yeah, I love those. The dear blogger. Or, you know, what I get 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. rain somehow comes dry in and 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 somebody named brian pickens who lives in long beach ca or used to, I guess.

3:53:53And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me because I guess the guy either moved and the USPS like somehow looked things up. And I don't even know, it was such a sort of mystery and metaphor for what I deal with online. I was like, well, how can you ask a publicist not to? So I used to have a company ages ago called Brain Quicken. And I had, I got a telemarketing call one evening, I remember. And this guy goes, hi, sorry, if I'm interrupting, is this Brian? And I go, excuse me? And he goes, Brian? Brian Chicken? And I'm like, Brian Chicken. Brian Chicken. I was like, no, and take me off your list.

3:54:37Goodbye. Oh, God. So on the email and pitching side of things, or just on the pitching 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 that you don't want to be rude to who want you to read their books? How do you polite decline that stuff? And maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is not everyone is able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably, if I get 10 books from decent or good friends, some of them are going to be terrible. And I don't have the time necessarily or the inclination to read them all.

3:55:24How do you deal with that type of situation? Well, I guess you deal first and foremost by controlling not the outcome, but the cause, which is your circle of friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround myself with. And I like to think friendly to pretty much everybody that 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, they're 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.

3:56:08And so for those people, my friend friends, in large part, I mean, I should mention that the majority of my close friends, including my partner, too, are 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 we've become a centripetal force for the kinds of people we want to be and surround ourselves with those types of people. William Gibson has a wonderful word for it. He calls it personal microculture. 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.

3:56:52And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean, the 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 respect it and love it. And that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle, I think acquaintances know that there's no such expectation.

3:57:30And when I do get such requests, it's a matter of, well, did the person do their homework in knowing what I actually think and write about? Because very often, I'm sure you get that too, you get pitched things that are just so outside of what you do, in which case I don't even feel compelled 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. 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.

3:58:11So often we would agree as humans, not just you and me, just anybody would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some way, you know, and equally avoid things because of the guilt thing or do things because of the guilt thing. But sort of this whole Buddhist thing about aversion 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 is what doing things for prestige is. I think either of those

3:59:18are really bad reasons to do things. Someday we can do a follow-up part two. I think that'd be a blast. I'll bring some Malbec if you actually drink wine. So I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the donations, I'm very fascinated by the ad-free donation approach. And just 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 people who... What do you mean by the option? No, no. So I'll explain. Or two or three. So people can make one-time offer. They can make a one-time single contribution. They can...

4:00:03Let me simplify that question. Or they can become a member and donate$7,$3,$10, or$25 a month. What I'm trying to ask without being improprietous or making you feel uncomfortable is what is working best? When you're asking people for donations, assuming that it's working, if someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month or 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, for the life of me, figure out how to actually look at the data and get any sort of real reason.

4:00:50All of it is so antiquated, they're export tools and such, and I'm not that interested. I would siphon days into looking into it, so I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation of it. Sure, yeah, great. And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are is also the reason why I don't have an ad-supported site, which is I just ask 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 be sort of confined to something. And so I just pulled it out of the hat, basically, with these tiers.

4:01:28And 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 donations 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 humbling and enormously generous. And I think those kind of you kind of weigh them somehow as more than the cumulative sum 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.

4:02:10Right. But and I've had the recurring ones. I've had 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 this 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 Linsky, who runs longform.org, who are having tea, and he said, well, why didn't you, like, push the recurring ones more because it's working really great for us.

4:02:50And at that point, I had the option, but it was buried somewhere on my donation about page or something. And so I was like, OK. So I put it in the sidebar. And that was, I want to say, maybe 2011. And it started accruing 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 were two to one ratio to the one time donation. Wow. And I don't know at what point it tipped over, but I think because of the scale and just how many people have these tiny, tiny donations that they contribute every month.

4:03:42I mean, that's such an active commitment and it's so generous, you know, that they add up. And my guess is that as time goes on, because the recurring ones have only been available for the last two and a half, three years, whatever, they would become by far the larger sort of financial support compared to those single ones. Sure. No, that makes sense. 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 dropdown, so you have$7 a month,$3,$10,$25. If you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose? Oh, I have no idea.

4:04:20Probably just the mathematical, logical choice, the two middle, the three and ten. Okay, cool. No, just very curious about this kind of thing. I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content. And I can't emphasize strongly enough what you just said, which is you base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader in the case of something 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. Would I love this?

4:05:04If so, try it out. and every decision too has been that way and actually in the last couple years i've been getting really annoyed i mean brain picking is a pretty sort of lo-fi site as you can see it just very super simple basic 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 belski who runs behance he's a great guy and he's been sort of a very generous donor just supporting and you know and one time uh he pulls me aside that was like i think in february or march and she's like you know how much i love brain pickings but like the site sucks like he didn't say it in that way but he was super sweet about it and then he offered to connect me with this guy that he knew uh 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.

4:06:01Like I don't want to be a BuzzFeed. But at the end of the day, I as a reader, and as a sort of engager with that experience was being annoyed by 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, despair and frustration 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 uh a mobile version of the site ready to go which i just launched a month or two ago so better late than never i suppose uh well maria this has been a blast i uh i really appreciate you taking the time uh if if someone were to want to explore brain pickings what are a few articles you might suggest that they start with or a few posts?

4:06:59Well, since we talked about it so much, the Seneca piece about the shortness of life, it's a 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 we do things. I forget what it's called. I think it's called How to Do What You Love or some other, How to Find 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 on the seventh birthday, really, at the site, which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of reading, writing, and living.

4:07:48which is a great article and i didn't want to replicate everything in here so i i sort of uh 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 prestige is 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'd like to like, which I think is so astute. And in closing, is there any? And also, I should just interject and say any Alan Watts piece, 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.

4:08:30Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit. So I highly recommend any of those articles. Cool. All right. Brainpickings.org is the site, guys. Check it out. Maria any parting advice for for this episode this portion of our conversation but before we before we check out any advice to the people listening out there thoughts parting comments no advice per se just I guess a comment and then and a hope which is that you know thank you so much not just for having me but for having this show and for doing everything that you do and And I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just, I guess, for lack of a better word, idealism and conviction.

4:09:16And, yeah, thank you for setting an example that way. Well, that means a lot coming from you. And 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 we will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Tim. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

4:10:03Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

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