#727: In Case You Missed It: February 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

0:00Hey folks, Tim here. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. My new card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing people at Exploding Kittens is now a national bestseller. Things are going completely bananas. It just launched everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8 ,000 plus retail locations, anywhere you can buy games. So check it out. See some videos of gameplay at coyotegame.com. 300 million social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind-blowing. It takes just minutes to learn. I guarantee you'll have a lot of laughs. This has been in the works for two years. Please enjoy it. Check it out.

0:34Coyotegame.com. Now back to the episode. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday. my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time because after all the podcast the books they can be quite long and that's why I created five bullet friday it's become one of my favorite things I do every week it's free it's always going to be free and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash friday that's tim.blog forward slash friday I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with.

1:35And little known fact, I've met probably 25 % of them because they first subscribed to 5 Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. 5 Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with 5 Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out. tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe any time.

2:12So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.

2:32cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

2:44Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-betweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite.

3:13It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together, and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description, probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

3:34First up, legendary actor Scott Glenn, whose acting career spans nearly 60 years and includes performances in Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as a return to HBO this year for season three of The White Lotus.

3:57what advice let's just say 10 years from now your grandkids are listening to this and they're wondering what life advice i would give them both the lessons i learned from sir lawrence and from my dad which is if you love it make it your life right along with that be tenacious learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, I don't care how many times I get knocked down, I'm getting back up every single time and going after what I want, that's the answer. I mean, again, I'm in a bar with Laurence Olivier, who created the National Theater of England, who was the biggest movie star in the world, was the most creative stage actor in the world, and director.

4:45He'd done everything. thing. My question to him was, what is it that you need to make it in this business? Is it timing, right place at the right time? Is it contacts, knowing the right people? Or is it just working on your skills and becoming better and better at what you do? He said, my dear boy, none of the above. Develop very strong jaw muscles. Learn how to bite on and not let go. I said, you're telling of me is just pure tenacity? His answer was yes. If you're a monk outside the gates with a beggar's bowl and you stay out there long enough, they'll finally get sick of seeing you open the gates and let you in.

5:30Next up, Barbara Corcoran, an investor shark for the past 15 seasons on ABC's Emmy Award winning Shark Tank and host of the top business channel on Patreon, Barbara in your pocket.

5:46I would add another superpower. And so much that I've seen of you and heard and watched, the one thing I have never seen, and maybe I've just missed it, but I have never heard you take a victim perspective. And I have heard you say, for instance, that the difference between successful people and others is how long they spend feeling sorry for themselves. So true. I've also heard you say, and I'm paraphrasing here, so if I get it wrong, please correct me, So far, you're right, Jim. You are at your best when you're being talked down to by a man or something like that. Definitely. And I would love for you to perhaps tell the story of your 51 % partner and the founding of the company.

6:28But also, I'm so curious where that resilience and ability to reframe what other people could take as victimization and turn it into something to your advantage. Because I've seen that over and over again in your story. It's such an important part. I mean, recovering from failure in my book is 95 % of life. If you're going to have a good life, you better be really good at getting back up like a jack-in-the-box. Boom, boom, boom. Just get back up, get back up. I think I got that, honestly, by being dyslexic. Because when you're the kid in class that's dumb, you're a failure by anybody's standard.

7:07And you're constantly put down or look down on. And I was embarrassed. I learned shame in the classroom, terrible thing for a child to feel like a nobody just because they don't have a certain skill set. But that definitely taught me about I had to go to school every day. I had to go back and sit there and hope they didn't call on me for reading, whatever. And I got used to being a loser like that and getting back up and just I just had to go to school. So I got early training in that area. And I also learned from running salespeople my whole life, that really was the only difference between the superstars that I had making two,$3 million a year and people made an average of 45 ,000, which was the norm.

7:47How does a superstar do it? You know, I became a student of that. I used to think it was connections I would hire for that. Work ethic, I would hire for that. Who did they know in real estate, high-priced real estate, I would hire for that? And then I realized that's just a starting gate. It gets you any easy. But when it comes down to it, it's how well you get back up and how long you take to feel sorry for yourself. They drove me crazy, too. But I admired my superstars so much because of that ability. I could see them like you could punch them around. They go, ha ha, to back up. And so I learned from them, too.

8:24You see?

8:28next up seth godin author of 21 international bestsellers including purple cow lynchpin the dip this is marketing and his new book the song of significance a new manifesto for teams

8:47how do you choose or think about kind of next chapters or how what advice might you give me as I contemplate, but what's next type of question. You know, I think it's very kind of you to say I'm very good at it. I don't think I'm good at it, but because I'm sort of in public and I do it in a certain way, it's noted. You know, I did five years of Akimbo. It was in the top 1 % of all podcasts. And then I just stopped. And I stopped not because I didn't love it. I did love it. I stopped because if I kept doing it, there's something else I wouldn't do instead. And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum.

9:33But if I just keep doing the thing, then there is no vacuum. And sometimes the technology changes. That's why Spinnaker went away. That's why you couldn't keep making VCR games. It's why my head start in the CD-ROM business was worthless because CD-ROMs one away. I'd liked in every time I did this being a pioneer in a new media space because that's for me the funnest spot. And then when the technology changes, I got to move on. But podcast technology is never going to change. I mean, you're noting there's a change in the production format and that is a change. So in my case, what I'm trying to do is not maximize my income per hour spent, nor am I trying to maximize the size of my audience.

10:20What I'm trying to maximize is, are the people I'm serving glad that I did, that I showed up to solve an interesting problem? And two, as I build the stack of things on the bookshelf behind me, can I point to them and say, that was interesting and generous, and I'm glad I did it. and you know that's part of a limited attention span theater so it's not for everybody but my whole point of view is that life is projects it is not a job and when you stopped the podcast and created that vacuum did you already have something kind of warming up in the batting cage that was pending that you need to create that vacuum for or did you create the vacuum and then wait for something to get pulled into it not to strain the metaphor but you get the idea no you're not straining it.

11:07If there's something pending, it's not a vacuum. There have been times when something so good came along, I did it and then had to remove things so I could do it. You know, when a few of us started Squidoo, which was one of the first social networks, I had to completely reorganize my life because we built the 40th biggest website in the US with only eight employees. So we were busy. This is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you're never going to work again, where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up. And that's hard to do.

11:43Yeah, it is hard to do. So just to put a microscope on that, I have as means of backstory done this for periods of time and have found it deeply, deeply uncomfortable, sometimes fruitful, oftentimes not terribly fruitful. In part, I think, because when I create that vacuum, I don't know if the best way to embrace the vacuum is to basically just stare at the wall and watch paint dry or to do something else. And my mind just kind of folds in on itself. You create the vacuum. And then what are the next few weeks look like in terms of how you spend your time day to day or week to week? I think a fundamental difference between you and me, there are so many of them, but one of them, as I am here talking to what, the world tango champion?

12:28Former world record holder, long time ago. Yes. is the only thing I have a world record in is being part of the largest co-author book signing in history in which me and 400 other people all signed our book at the same time. Because I am not a high performer. I am interesting. And being interesting is really important to me, but I am not holding myself to the standard you hold yourself in so many ways. And so I could imagine that the thing that gives me comfort might not make you happy. Right. For sure. I agree with all of that. And how does that difference translate to what you would do in the weeks following creating the vacuum after, say, stopping the podcast?

13:17Because I guess you have activities that you're still carrying forward. It's not like you're completely idle. You're writing still, presumably. If someone looked at me from the outside, I think that they would see that my days aren't that different. I'm not shipping public work because I don't ship junk, but I am internally creating lots of mediocre work and basically creating straw people and saying, what would this be like? And then what would that be like? And here's this thing. and I sat with my 60 or 80 watt laser cutter and I cut this thing out. What do I think of that? And that invention cycle is joyful, but I can't do it forever because I also need the satisfaction of shipping the work and not giving into resistance.

14:10So what I'm doing, when I was a book packager, we sold 120 books in 10 years, a book a month, But I had more than 800 books on my hard drive ready to go. Not finished, but two-page, five-page proposals. Because the only way to have a finished proposal for me is to have an unfinished one that you didn't ship. What is it, and this is probably a fundamental question I should have asked earlier, but what do you get from writing and having written as consistently as you have been due? What is the payoff? Why do that? Okay, so the biggest payoff is simple. not in terms of equity stock value, but in terms of the noise in my head, the biggest benefit is I will be writing tomorrow because it's Friday, not because I've written the perfect blog post.

14:59That every single day something gets published by me because I decided that 24 years ago, not because I have reconsidered each day whether this one is good enough. And even if no one read my blog, I would still do it. And I'm very fortunate that people give me the benefit of the doubt, knowing that I am not guaranteeing this is the best thing I ever wrote, and they're still willing to look at it. So that's lovely. In terms of my professional practice, again, back to genre, having a sinecure, a platform, where for a long time, if you type blog into Google, I was the first match. Because I just showed up more than just about anybody.

15:45there's a lot of value to saying this is my lane and you can count on me in this lane and for someone who is as peripatetic as i in their creative pursuits having one of those turned out to be a really useful thing

16:05last but not least hugh howey the new york times best-selling author of wool beacon 23 sand machine learning, halfway home, and more than a dozen other novels.

16:21I read in the process of doing research, which is always fun for me to do with friends when I have them on the podcast, because otherwise it'd be really creepy to do like a bunch of Google sleuthing on my friends. And I was wondering, I think you gave the advice, and I'm wondering if it still applies, that writers not take days off. That's one. That could be one of those don't believe everything you read on the internet. The second is related to writing for, I think it was a book review website and becoming accustomed to working on deadline. And I'd just love you to speak to the importance of that because I know for me, I think of myself occasionally as a writer, if I don't have a deadline, man, I am not terribly productive.

17:05There's the deadline piece if you could speak to that and then just how you would suggest people train themselves to write? Is it daily? Is it a few days a week? Is it something else? So I can only speak to what works for me, but I will say that I found that I have way more in common with other writers than we are dissimilar. Like I hear the same laments, like you were just mentioning. I know you and I have a lot of the same hangups about writing. And the famous quote about writing is, I hate writing, but I love having written. And everyone loves to have gotten some pages behind them. And I tried for 20 years to be a writer from age 12 to 32.

17:41My number one bucket list thing in life is to write a book. And no one was stopping me but myself. But for 20 years, I couldn't do it. And honestly, all I had to do was write a little bit every day, and I would write a book. That's all I ever wanted. And so how can you get in the way of yourself that consistently? And we all do it as writers. and once I unlocked the ability to write, my fear was ever turning that switch back off and that's where I think the daily habit is critical. Like I wrote today before I came here and it's Saturday and I'll write on the plane and I'll write in the back of an Uber.

18:15I'll do whatever it takes to get some words in that day. Is there a certain amount or is it just something? It used to be. I used to try to do like 2 ,000 words a day. Wow, that's a lot of words. Yeah. Now, if I do a thousand words a day and what I find helpful in my Word document, whatever I'm working on, there's the word count written in the document at the end, wherever I'm writing. And when I start my daily session, as I'm writing, I can see at the bottom of the Word document what the current word count is. And I can just see the comparison. And that gives me my, like, you need to do a little more.

18:48And then once I'm done for the day, I update that number to the day's number. And so I'm always just trying to march that forward. It sounds calculated and cold, but if you just sit around waiting for inspiration and try to write a few sentences here and there, you'll never stay with the story enough to know what it's even about. When you said, effectively, when you turned on the spigot, you were afraid of turning it off, so you kept up this daily practice, but how did you, after so many years, turn it on in the first place? What was the catalyst? You mentioned the review website I was writing for.

19:19So I was trying to help a friend get this crime mystery thriller website up and running, and he was doing the film movie side of it and I was doing the books. And I just put a call out to publishers. It was a beautiful website that he had made. So I was sharing the URL of saying, this is what we're doing. And I started getting a flood of books in the mail. And for a reader like me, this was like Christmas every day. I was getting more books than I could review. So I was having to go through and see which ones appealed to me. And I was building bookshelves all over my house to house these things.

19:47For one genre? Yeah, for one genre. But it was the biggest genre. It was like the one that publishers make a lot of their money on. And in order to keep up with it, I started reading and reviewing a book a day. And this is all I was doing. And I'd done this in college too. I'd gone through a period of like two years where I was reading a book a day as a challenge. And some of these are 400-page books. So you're not doing much else, just that. I didn't know how good this was going to be for my writing. but absorbing that much prose just made it so easy for me to tap into not only the ability to string words together but all the plot elements that i was absorbing from weeks and weeks and weeks of absorbing this many books and then i was also writing that review every day and so i was getting a daily writing habit and that wasn't even a job wasn't getting paid to do this i was doing it for a friend to try to get a website going because I love reading.

20:43But that experience is what made it possible for me to write. Is there any Mount Rushmore of fiction books that come to mind, right? This is not a fixed list, but whatever comes to mind, if you were to say, look, and I'll make this personal. So I've been experimenting with short fiction for the last year or so. I think I will do quite a bit more, possibly in screenplay format, which I definitely want to talk to you about at some point. But what are some books people should consume or that I might want to consume to provide myself with really good nutrition for absorbing some of what you're describing?

21:23I think reading beautiful prose is almost like striking a tuning fork before your writing session. I think it's really awesome to pick up. There's several things you can do. You can read stuff that's nonsense, but beautiful, like some Proust. And you can just turn to any part of Proust, it's all the same. The beginning of a story reads just like the middle of a story. But the way a good translation of Proust flows, that iambic pentameter, the run-on sentences, it's like it's you start to hear the tonal quality of good music in words, and then you can start to sing in that key yourself. Some of the books I've read recently that have, I think, upped my writing.

22:02One was This Is How You Lose the Time War, which is so good. Yeah, it's so good. That is an incredible book. And it's short. And it's one of those that you can just pick up and read again to remind yourself what writing can sound like. Also fascinating because it was written by two authors. Yeah. Who alternated back and forth. Alternated back and forth, which is structural to the story, which works. Searcy, have you read that? I haven't yet read it. I have seen so many people reading it. I've seen friends reading it. Took me forever to read that. The prose in that book is so special and will make you a better writer.

22:36just recently another one that someone recommended was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow I tried to read that like five times and it was the hottest thing and I never gave it enough of a chance but when I finally finished it I was like that's what I'm aiming for with my writing why did it take you five times? I've heard this from a lot of people so if you hear this recommendation and you want to read the book get through the first like 70 or 80 pages and I know it's like I'd rather read something that's captured me from the first page this book pays off So those are recent books that have - You recommended Lincoln Highway to me.

23:09Lincoln Highway. Which I thought was spectacular. Anything by Amor. Amor Tolles is one of the - It's just a book full of literary and narrative magic tricks. It's wild. He upsets me because he wasn't even a writer as his primary career. Oh, no, one of those. Yeah, yeah. Super successful investment banker. It's like a Michael Lewis kind of story. Like super successful in a lot of ways. but it turns out the quality of reading that he does and he's just one of the smartest human beings i've ever met but his writing there's a short story collection coming out by him this year called a table for two get it on day one because there's one short story particular in there that is the cleverest thing i've ever read so he's another one that i'll read his works in order to remind myself like what we're aiming for and his wordsmithing is beautiful yeah but it's not Proust, right?