#746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova

This episode features Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova discussing the intertwining of creativity, personal development, and the disciplined routines that support high-level performance.

1. The importance of disciplined daily routines for maintaining creative and intellectual productivity.
2. How systematic organization and note-taking enhance understanding and creativity.
3. The necessity of rewriting and refining work as a central part of the creative process.
4. The role of intellectual curiosity in driving continuous learning and personal development.
5. Strategies for managing and overcoming creative and personal challenges through disciplined practices.

1. Introduction

Tim Ferriss introduces the episode and discusses the significance of creativity and discipline in achieving excellence. He sets the stage for his conversations with Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova, highlighting their achievements and approaches to work. Tim Ferriss: "Welcome to another episode where we dissect the components of greatness in varied fields."

2. Jerry Seinfeld on Comedy and Creativity

Jerry Seinfeld discusses his approach to comedy, focusing on the necessity of relentless rewriting and the joy found in perfecting a joke. His insights reveal the depth of his commitment to his craft. Jerry Seinfeld: "It's 95% rewrite... The joy is in refining it until it sounds perfect to your ears."

3. Maria Popova on Reading and Writing

Maria Popova shares her detailed system for reading and note-taking, which fuels her ability to write deeply researched articles on culture and philosophy. She emphasizes the importance of making connections between different pieces of information. Maria Popova: "I create an alternate index by themes, not just keywords, which guides my synthesis of the material."

4. Philosophies on Life and Work

Both guests discuss their philosophies on life, work, and the interplay between discipline and creativity. They share personal anecdotes and beliefs about how best to live a fulfilling and intellectually vibrant life. Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova: Discuss the importance of routines and the systematic approach to both creative and personal life.

1. Implement a daily routine: Stick to a structured daily schedule to enhance focus and productivity.
2. Develop a note-taking system: Create a personalized method to capture and organize information efficiently.
3. Embrace rewriting: View the revision of your work as an opportunity to refine and perfect your output.
4. Cultivate intellectual curiosity: Regularly engage with diverse materials that challenge and expand your perspective.
5. Set defined work sessions: Use timers to manage work sessions effectively, ensuring you have breaks to maintain energy and focus.

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #485 "Jerry Seinfeld — A Comedy Legend’s Systems, Routines, and Methods for Success" and episode #39 "Maria Popova on Writing, Workflow, and Workarounds."

People

Jerry Seinfeld, Maria Popova

Companies

None

Books

"Is This Anything?" by Jerry Seinfeld

Guest Name(s):

Jerry Seinfeld, Maria Popova

Content Warnings:

None

This episode showcases the intertwined paths of rigorous discipline and creative flourishing through the practices of two renowned figures in comedy and cultural commentary. Their shared insights underscore the universal relevance of structured creativity and intellectual exploration.

Tim Ferriss
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Maria Popova
At this altitude, I can run flat. Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now we're just in appropriate time. What if I did the opposite?

Unknown
I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

Tim Ferriss
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test. In your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane. Think about and past 1 billion downloads.

To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle.

Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim blog Combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Jerry Seinfeld, american stand up comedian, actor, writer and producer and co creator of the Emmy, Golden Globe and People's Choice award winning seinfeld, named the greatest television show of all time by TV Guide.

Maria Popova
His latest book is, is this anything? You can find Jerry, on Twitter and Instagram.

My writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful. Pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with like a wheelbarrow full of bricks. You either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. And I learned that really fast and really young, and that saved my life and made my career, that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy really young. And that principle is you learn to be a writer.

It's really the profession of writing. That's what stand up comedy is. However you do it, you can do it any way you want. But if you don't learn to do it in some form, you will not survive. And when you sit down, is it an empty page?

Jerry Seinfeld
Is it bits and pieces that you've noted through the week as observations that. You then flesh out what is actually in front of you when you start. What's in front of me is usually about 15 or 20 pages of stuff that's in various states of development. And then there's a smaller book of just really, really random things, like when you're on a cell phone call and the call drops and then you reconnect with the person, they'll go, I don't know what happened there. As if anyone is expecting them to know anything about the incredibly complex technology of a cell phone.

Maria Popova
They offer this little, I don't know, as an excuse or an apology. They go, I don't know what happened there. So anyway, so I don't know. So that's an example of something in that, my little, little tiny notebook that I don't know what to do with that, but it's just so stupid to me and funny. So that, to me, is like an archery target 50 yards away.

And then I take out my bow and my arrow, and I go, let me see if I can hit that. Let me see if I can create something that I could say to a room full of humans in a nightclub that will make them see what I see in that. There's something stupid and funny about that to me. That's the very, very beginning. So then I'll write something about it.

It'll be, if I'm lucky, it'll be a half a page or a page on a yellow legal pad, and I'll write that. And then in the session the next day, if I get around to it, I will see it again, and I will see what I have and what I like and I don't like. And as any writer can tell you, it's 95% rewrite. So I have two phases. There is the free play creative phase, and then there is the polish and construction phase.

And I love to spend inordinate. I mean, it's not wasteful to me, because that's just what I like to do. Amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear, and then it becomes something that I can't wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it, and then from the stage, the audience will. Then I imagine, you know, it's a very scientific thing to me.

It's like, okay, here's my experiment. And you run the experiment, and then the audience just dumps a bunch of data on you, of, this is good. This is. Okay, this is very good. This is terrible.

And that goes into my brain from performing it on stage, and then it's back through the rewrite process, and then new ideas will come, and it's just millions of different kinds of development. It's just that. So you're just trying to get your. You're just going to that place of creating, fixing, jettisoning. It's extremely occupying.

It's never boring. It's the frustration I'm so used to at this point, I don't even notice it. And it's just work time. It's just work time. I like the way athletes talk about, I got to get my work in.

Did you get your work in. I like that phrase. One of the reasons I was looking forward to doing this show with you is I know that it's something you are very interested in. The craft. Yeah.

The systemization of the brain and creative endeavor. You know, I really think when I'm working, it's very much like when you're watching a picture working on stage, and now we're going, so that's different. So basically, it's on stage and off stage. It's the desk and then the stage, and then back to the desk and then back to the stage. And that's endless.

My guiding rule is systemize. What's the problem? The problem is, like, my daughter. My daughter is very creative. She's extremely bright.

She's got a incredible head on her shoulders, and I see myself in her at that age. She's way further advanced than I was at that age. She has a creative gift. So I say to her, when you have a creative gift, it's like someone just gave you a horse. You have to learn how to ride it.

You got to learn how to ride this horse. And I've seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens. I've seen people that were given black stallions, and if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you're born and they just put you on it, and that's what happens. They just put you on it and you either learn to ride this thing or it's going to kill you, then we have many, many examples of that. So she's trying to write this thing.

She's struggling. I can't write. I keep putting it off. So I explained to her my basic system, which you already talked about at the top of the show, which is, if you're going to write, make yourself a writing session. What's the writing session?

I'm going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don't just sit down with an open ended, I'm going to work on this problem. That's a ridiculous torture to put on a human being's head. It's like you're going to hire a trainer to get in shape.

And he comes over and you go, how long is the session? And he goes, it's open ended. Forget it. I'm not doing it. It's over right there.

You've got to control what your brain can take, okay? So if you're going to exercise, God bless you, and that's the best thing in the world you can do. But you got to know when's it going to end? When's the workout over? It's going to be an hour.

Okay. Or you can't take that. Let's do 30 minutes. Okay, great. Now we're getting somewhere.

I can do 30. I'm trying to teach my son, who knows how to do transcendental meditation, how to do it. I assume you know about that. I do, yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss
I practiced this morning. Because I can't do it 15 minutes. Like, okay, let's do ten. Let's do ten. Let's come up with something you can do.

Maria Popova
That's where you start everything. That's how you start to build a system. So my daughter. So I said to her, you have to have an end time to your writing session. If you're going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you got to get a reward for that.

And the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk, you're done. If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is. Stop. Now, pencils down.

So that's the beginning of a system that, to me, will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something I kind of wanted to teach, in a way. I think it's so simple. I think exercise is pretty simple, too. But people don't. They don't come up with good, simple little systems.

They just try and do it. And that's, to me, that's you're going to fail. The simple doesn't mean easy, and it's not easy. It's so important, the incentives, having a. Reward, having a defined format.

Tim Ferriss
How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration or how long have you chosen? I told her, just do an hour. That's a lot. She says, I'm going to write all day. No, you're not.

Maria Popova
Nobody writes all day.

Shakespeare can't write all day. It's torture. Yeah. If you taught a class on writing. What other lessons might you have or resources or anything?

Tim Ferriss
Exercises. Because I'm imagining that your daughter could sit down. She says, all right, have an hour. And then you ask her how her writing session went. And she said, well, I didn't have any idea what to write.

Jerry Seinfeld
So you'd have, I don't know what age the students would be in your. Course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing? Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity you know, no one's really that great. You know who's great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it.

Maria Popova
It's a game of tonnage, you know, how many hours are you going to work per week, per month? Per year. You might even want to chart that or with your exercise, if you want to get in shape. I couldn't get in shape. I was like, I started as a jogger, you know, like in the seventies, and I would run 3 miles a day.

And then I got older and I got married late and I had young kids and I really had to get in shape. And I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called body for life. Body for life, yeah. And it's really, really such a system for a primitive brain. I do it to this day.

I think it's a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape because he broke it down to, here's what we're going to do in minute one. Here's what you're going to do to minute five, minute twelve. And this is going to end in 45 minutes or whatever it is. And every minute I know exactly what I'm doing.

And that, like, turned the key for me. And all of a sudden I was getting in shape. I never had to ask, what am I doing now? Or what are we doing next? It's like you gotta treat your brain like a dog.

You just got. You gotta. Stupid. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained.

You got confused the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. Yeah.

And it's done through repetition and systemization. So let's talk about feedback in the experimental loop that you mentioned earlier, which was desk stage. Desk stage, desk stage. One form of feedback would be audience feedback. And I'm curious what other forms of feedback you have?

No, there is no other feedback that means anything. Okay, got it. Well, I'll tell you, here's a little fine point of writing technique that I'll pass along to you writers out there. Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day. That day.

You have to wait 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone about what you did because you never want to take away that wonderful, happy feeling that you did that very difficult thing that you tried to do, that you accomplished it. You wrote. You sat down and wrote. So if you say anything, it's like the same reason you ever heard the thing, like you never tell people the name you're going to give the baby. Sure.

Until it's born, because they're going to react, and the reaction is going to have a color. And if you've decided that that's going to be the baby's name, you don't want to know what anybody else thinks. So I will always wait 24 hours before I say anything to anyone about what I wrote. So you want to preserve that good feeling, because if you. If, let's say you write something and you love it, and then later on that day, you're talking to someone and you go, hey, what do you think of this idea?

Blah, blah, blah. And they don't love it. Now, that day feels like, ugh, I guess, you know, that that was wasted effort. So you always want to reward yourself. The key to writing, to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, very, extremely nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett, an officer and a gentleman, and just be a harsh, prick, ball busting son of a bitch about that is just not good enough.

That's got to come out, or it's got to be redone or thrown away. So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you're writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. It's just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard ass, and you switch back and forth.

Tim Ferriss
There's a quote from you in the New York Times, and the quote is, I'm not OCD, but I love routine. I get less depressed with routine. Aside from the writing sessions, are there any other routines for you that are particularly important as scaffolding or automatic behaviors? Yeah. Exercise, weight training, and transcendental meditation.

Maria Popova
I think I could solve just about anyone's life. And I don't care what you do with weight training and transcendental meditation. I think your body needs that stress, that stressor, and I think it builds your resilience of the nervous system. And I think transcendental meditation is the absolutely ultimate work tool. I think the stress reduction is great, but it's more the energy recovery and the concentration fatigue solution, which is, of course, you know, as a stand up comic, I can tell you my entire life is concentration fatigue, whether it's writing or performing.

My brain and my body, which is the same thing, are constantly hitting the wall. And if you have that in your hip pocket, you're Columbus with a compass.

Jerry Seinfeld
Yeah. Chatting with Hugh Jackman on the podcast. And he's also a devout. Seems like an odd word to use, since it can be used quite secularly. But proponent of TM.

Tim Ferriss
How many times? What does your weekly schedule look like for weight training? When do you do it? And do you do TM twice a. Day or do you.

Maria Popova
I do it at least twice a day, but I will do it anytime I feel like I'm dipping energetically. Yeah. If I sit down and the pen doesn't move for like 20 minutes. I know. I'm at a guess why the pen moving.

My weight training routine is three times a week for an hour a session. But I'm into that. I've been into that. You know, I mentioned the Bill Phillips body for life, the hit training. So it's three times a week of weights and three times a week, the interval cardio training.

There are a lot of days I want to cry instead of do it because it really physically hurts. But I just think it's balancing. It's very balancing to the forces inside humanity that I think are just. They overwhelm us. We are overwhelmed by our own power.

And you got to put that ox in the plow. Make it do the stuff that it doesn't want to do. It just keeps it. What the hell do oxes do in the wild? I can't imagine.

They were happy.

Tim Ferriss
Checking Twitter, just developing neuroses. Yeah. So, you know, put it in the harness. I mean, I don't know. A lot of my life is.

Maria Popova
I don't like getting depressed. I get depressed a lot. I hate the feeling. And these routines, these very difficult routines, whether it's exercise or writing, and both of them are things where it's like, it's brutal. That's another thing I was explaining to my daughter.

She's frustrated that writing is so difficult because no one told her that it's the most difficult thing in the world. It's the most difficult thing in the world is to write. People tell you to write like you can do it, like you're supposed to be able to do it. Nobody can do it. It's impossible.

The greatest people in the world can't do it. So if you're going to do it, you should first be told what you are attempting to do is incredibly difficult. One of the most difficult things there is. Way harder than weight training. Way harder.

What you're summoning, trying to summon within your brain and your spirit to create something onto a blank page, that's another part of my systemization technique. Learn how to encourage yourself. That's why you don't tell someone what you wrote. Be proud of yourself. Treat yourself well for having done that horrible, horribly impossible thing.

Jerry Seinfeld
I would have to imagine, and maybe this is just a projection because I. Hope that when I have kids, which. I don't have yet, that this will. Be true for me, but that being kind to your creative self and offering. Positive reinforcement for yourself through the process would affect how you parent.

Tim Ferriss
I would have to imagine, yes. Yes. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost the Lou Gossett side of parenting.

Jerry Seinfeld
Pesky Child protective Services, what do they know?

Maria Popova
But yeah, it is similar. You want to be very encouraging, but you also want to explain there are laws in life that you need to know about or it's going to hurt. I think one of the better lines I've come up with over my life is that pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void with great speed. Can you say that one more time, please? Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void.

You don't know that that post of your bed was not where you thought it was, but when your foot hits it, that knowledge is going to come rushing in really fast. It's going to really hurt when your foot hits that post because that was a piece of knowledge that you didn't have that you're going to get. You're about to get. You were talking about black stallion and. Learning to ride black stallion less you.

Tim Ferriss
Be broken yourself by your superpowers, potential murderers. I've struggled with depression for decades and. Have found some respite in the last five or six years for a whole host of reasons. But aside from the writing and weight training, is there anything else that has. Contributed to your ability to either stave.

Off or mitigate depressive episodes or manage. No, I still get them. Still got them. The best thing I ever heard about it was that it's part of a kit that comes with a creative aspect to the brain, that a tendency to depression seems to always accompany that. And I read that like 20 years ago and that really made me happy.

Maria Popova
So I realized, well, I wouldn't have all this other good stuff without that. That just comes in the kit that you have a tendency to depression. But I think it's fair to say that I don't know a human that doesn't have the tendency. You gave me a quote, I'll ask. You one more question and then we close.

We can go a little more. I'm enjoying this so much. Let's go a little more. Let's do it. I'd love to ask about following up on depression.

Jerry Seinfeld
I'd love to ask about failure, just. To keep this bright and shiny. Can you think of how a particular failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? In other words, do you have a favorite failure of any type, something that seemed catastrophic at the time, that, in fact set you up for great things later? Yeah.

Maria Popova
Yeah, I have a couple really good ones. And there's another thing I try and teach the kids when something horrible happens. And I think of all the things I would trade if you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures. Those are the most valuable ones. When I moved to LA, I was only doing comedy four years, but I had built up a pretty good reputation in New York, and New York was really, in those days, still very much the minors to LA, which was the majors.

So I went out to LA and people talked that I was coming and that I was one of the hot guys coming out of New York, and I was only doing it four years. I was 25 years old, really still just starting. And the comedy store was the club in LA that you had to break into. That was the club. And the guys that worked there and the women were killers.

I mean, these people made the room just shake with laughter. It was very intimidating to go on there. And I went on there and I did very well. You know, in those days, you would call and they would give you spots if you were good, and I would never get spots. I would get like one spot a week and, you know, one spot a week.

It's like one push up a week. It's like, you get it. Well, don't even bother. And so I asked to meet with Mitzi Shore, who was the owner of the club and person who ran the whole thing there. And she said to me, she said, I'm the kind of person that needs to get stepped on, and that's what you need.

You need someone to step on you. And I'm going to be that person. She said, if you called and said, if I had four spots available and you called in, I would give all four spots to this other guy. She mentions this other guy. And I sat there in her office and I nodded.

I nodded and I said, well, I won't mention the name of the guy she said she was going to give the four spots to. I said, well, if maybe he can't do all four, I'd be happy to take any of the ones he can't do. And I walked out of there and I never worked at the comedy store again and saying, you're not working at the comedy store in LA. It's like saying, I want to be a baseball player, but not the majors. Not the majors in the United States.

I'm going to ply my trade someplace else. Lithuania. And so from there I went from, I hope it doesn't sound immodest, from being absolutely at the top of the heap in New York City to playing at discos in the basement in LA to like eight people. But my resentment and hostility to her, I was a guy who, I would say I was a three day a week guy in terms of my writing discipline in those days. And I went from three days a week to seven right there.

And I was like, okay, we're not. I was angry. I was angry, I was frustrated, I was resentful, but I used that. It was just fuel for me. She wasn't stopping me.

Nobody was going to stop me. But when someone is that hostile to you, that can be a very good thing.

If you're tough. If you're tough enough to eat that shit and say, she's not stopping me. That's a great story. Makes me think. One of my friends, Alexis Ohanian, co founded Reddit.

Tim Ferriss
And at one point early on, they were super excited about, of course, their company, their baby. They put all of their waking hours into it, and they met with some yahoo executive who was basically just fishing for inside information. And at some point in the meeting. This exec said, oh, there's your traffic. Oh, that's a rounding error for us.

And so Alexis and his guys took. A huge, they made a poster that. Said, you are a rounding error, and. Put it on the wall in their office. Yeah, it worked.

Jerry Seinfeld
It worked. We talked about systemizing. Gamifying is another thing I'm very big on. Let's make this into a game. You know, whatever the problem is, let's make it a game.

Maria Popova
To me, it's a fun game. I honestly, I wouldn't say this around my family, but I don't care if I drop dead tomorrow. It's like, I just wanted to, I still feel like I played the game well, you know? Yeah, that's all I want to feel. I just want to feel like I played the game well.

Tim Ferriss
What would be an example of gamifying? I mean, I've read, of course, the. About the Seinfeld's productivity secret, marking the crosses on the calendar, which I guess some people get. That's not really a game. Yeah, that's more based that I think stats are good.

Maria Popova
If you want to improve anything, my trainer, Adam Wright, and I always like to play this game well. This was the maximum amount of weight you did three months ago for this many seconds or whatever, and then it's like, that's so it's a game. Now let's see if I can keep the reps going for 30 seconds. Last time was 25. So it's a little game.

It's just, again, this just goes back to my. The human brain is a schnauzer. It's just a stupid little contraption that you can easily trick as soon as you tell me I did it 25 seconds last time. Okay, let's see if I can do 30. Yeah.

That's not wisdom. That's not intelligence. It's a stupid little machine. It's gonna do that every single time. Every time you tell someone your last best was 25 seconds, you're going to try for 30.

Tim Ferriss
When you hear the word successful, who comes to mind for you and why? Could be parents, could be outside of. Parents, could be anybody. But for you, when you hear that word, is there anyone who is really. A sort of paragon of what you would consider success or someone you have looked up to as someone who is successful?

Maria Popova
Well, that's a pretty broad. Hyper, hyper broad. It comes down to kind of how you define it also, you know, I. Think, I don't know if I mean it as a joke, but I say a lot these days, survival is the new success, and I'm a big. Look, Tim, what do you want me to tell you?

In my business, if you're 60 plus or I'll even, if you're 55 and you're getting paid to work, paid well, you have crushed it. Yeah. So stand up comedy. I would move this piece of our conversation next to the toxic ecosystem of this world. When you have seen the attrition that I have seen, it's like in the heart of the sea.

You know that book? Yep. Ron Howard made the movie when they're dropping like flies. And the handful, that small handful. Somebody asked me the other day how many people whose careers were made on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson are still working.

I didn't want to answer the question because you had it. You know what I mean? You had it. You had. You had it.

So once you have it, you can only lose it, you know, you can only fail to take care of it. And that's when we get to health and work ethic and managing yourself so that you don't break because they're trying to break you. I always tease my friend Jimmy Fallon that this is like a sick experiment, these talk show gigs. Let's take a human being, put him in a studio for decades doing an hour of television a day, and let's see what breaks. It's sick.

It's a sick human experiment. I go, it's like a pope job. It's like they just do it till you're dead. The forever Skinner box. Oh, God.

Jerry Seinfeld
Yeah, that's brittle. You've already given a bunch of possible answers to this. But if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, that could get a message, a. Quote, an image question, anything out to. Billions of people, what might you put on that billboard?

Maria Popova
Back in the eighties, I had a friend who was teaching a comedy course at the improv on Melrose in LA, and he asked me if I would come in and talk to the class. And I said, sure. I went in, and it was like, I don't know, maybe 20 people in the class in the afternoon. And I went up on stage and I said, the fact that you have even signed up for this class is a very bad sign for what you're trying to do.

The fact that you think anyone can help you or there's anything that you need to learn. You have gone off on a bad track because nobody knows anything about any of this. And if you want to do it, what I really should do is I should have a giant flag behind me that I would pull a string and it would roll down, and on the flag, it would just say two words. Just work.

Jerry Seinfeld
Just work. Just work. Yeah. I love it.

Tim Ferriss
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Tim Ferriss
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Maria Popova
And now Maria Popova, essayist, author, poet and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism at the marginalian part of the Library of Congress permanent Web archive of culturally valuable materials. You can find Maria on Instagram at. Maria Popova hello, 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
Maria, how are you today? Very well. 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 or avakant, who's 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.

Unknown
Right? Right. Absolutely. It's just the sort of anglicizing of such a crysol, 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
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 pronounce. Oh, yeah. I call this reader syndrome. As somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading, you run into that a lot, especially with sort of cultural icons, last names, first names that are spelled differently than, very differently than they're pronounced. It's kind of tragic comic 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 demo crassy 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? How 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.

Unknown
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 happened to be doing it on their iPhone at the party, and they're like, what is brain pickings? How do you typically describe that? It's just the record of that thinking, my personal, subjective, private thinking that takes place between my reading and the writing.

Jerry Seinfeld
And takes form in writing collection of very interesting things. And sometimes how I've 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 Cathy Cyra 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. But there are two sites that come to mind that I end up on quite a lot.

Brain pickings is one, and Sam Harris's 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.

Unknown
I apologize. Okay. No, this. Is this an annotated reading, if you will. Okay.

Jerry Seinfeld
So an annotated reading. And I definitely want to dig into that annotated reading of waking up, which I found 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, I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you. And a close friend of mine, Chris Sacca, he came back with, what percentage of New York Times 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 a script.

Unknown
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. In fact, I don't even know if I ever really. I mean, perhaps I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things with the New York Times bestsellers. But I suspect that the reason 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.

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. But in any case, so I wrote about that book, and that particular piece on grain pickings seemed to do pretty well. And I think perhaps that warped Christian's idea of how much contemporary books I really sort of am interested in. Right.

But I would say that's a minority. Right. And for those people wondering, it's the essential scratch and sniff guide to becoming a wine expert, which was written along with. And the illustrations are wonderful. Richard Betts was the sommelier who was part of that.

Jerry Seinfeld
And at one point, I met with him because I wanted to try to deconstruct the master sommelier test, and he said, I can show you how to do it. And it was just the pared down, sort of hacked, if you will, version, still, of passing the master sommelier. Taste was so intimidating that I put it on ice indefinitely. But at some point, Richard, we will talk again and 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 timely and timeless.

I've heard you call it material where you're 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. And so I thought to myself, like, how much digging do I really need to do? And good God, you have such an absolute cannon 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.

Unknown
Oh, really? It's just the accumulation, you know, and. 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, twelve to 15 books per week that you're reading. I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before, but sometimes the answers change and evolve.

They always do, which is why I actually don't do interviews very frequently because I find that they sort of tend to kind of cast us 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, so the question that you've, I'm sure, been asked many times, but I'll ask again is how do you find slash choose the books that you read? This is a huge problem for me because my appetite for reading outstrips the time that I have. And so I end up actually, unfortunately sometimes finding myself anxious because of the number of books ive taken on at any given point in time.

Jerry Seinfeld
So id 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, whether 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.

Okay, no, no, but show 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. I 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 Kervonnegut saying, write to please just one person. 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?

Unknown
It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one, and that's myself. Like I said, it's just selectorative. My thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in that, 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. And this sort of transmutation of information into wisdom, really, which is what learning to live is.

It's about wisdom. And that's interesting, too, because when I started brain clicking, 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 tale 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. And 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
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 the first question would be related to that. Theres so much temptation to dumb things down or to go after kind of the tried and true Buzzfeed type headlines. Do you ever contend with that temptation? And if so, how do you resist it?

And this is part of the how do you respond to the expectations of the crowd or the 7 million people looking on? I feel this personally sometimes because I have a blog. It has certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have. I'm somewhere between one and 2 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. And there's a lot of temptation when, for instance, I know you use social media quite a bit. And we'll get to that, where I look at, say, the retweets 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. Anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting to really stay true to one's experience, you know, and being aware that as soon as it's out of the world, there's this notion of the other audience.

Unknown
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 wild, who is 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 and sort of perform to it. Right. 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 here 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 Lerner Herzog put it best.

I just finished reading this kind of 600 page interview with him. Essentially, it's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Kronan 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. And 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. So 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. I think it's a very virtuous goal.

Jerry Seinfeld
I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons. One of them is, I feel a very kindred spirit with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made. So, for instance, not doing this slide shows 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 reader's 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.

Unknown
So if you're a writer, write the things you want to read. If you're an artist, paint the things you want to see, paint it. 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, the 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 coming back to the right to please just one person, I think that it's related to that. So in a way it's put the things out into the world that you would want to consume yourself or experience yourself, number one.

Jerry Seinfeld
Secondly, just for those people who haven't heard this anecdote, when I was writing the four 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 four 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 ten dollar words where word would suffice and be a lot cleaner. So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted and this was a major panic attack moment.

It 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, they 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. What is that? Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America, best known in Argentina, but there's actually some really nice Malbec wines in Chile. As I understand it, it was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe, but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires and has developed this worldwide fame because of its cultivation in Argentina. So there's a lot of 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 workweek as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends.

One 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 of mine, I started to write with just enough alcohol to sort of 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.

Your schedule. I've read of your schedule, but I'd love to hear the current iteration of that. It seems like you've had a fairly. You have a fairly 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?

Unknown
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, couple years, maybe, is this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and prejudice. And especially in a culture that seems to measure our worth or our marriage 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. And that's something that's become more and more apparent to me. So I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss routine of some sort of holy grail creative process, because it's just really.

It's a crutch. I mean, routines and rituals help us not feel like this overwhelming messioness 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 Lana's own life. So, with that in mind, my day is very predictable.

I get up in the morning, I meditate for between 15 to 25 minutes before I do anything else. What time do you wake up? Typically exactly 8 hours after I've gone to bed. So it varies. I'm a huge proponent of sleep.

I think when I write, because what or when I 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 change 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.

And 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 this peaks 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 cultivated by the former. So in any case, so I get up 8 hours after I have gone to bed. I meditate, I go to the gym where I do most of my longer form reading.

I get back home, I have breakfast, and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles a day. 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 you take a short break and then cycle back, you know.

And then I deal with any sort of admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot. And I resume writing and I write my other oracle 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 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
So a number of follow up questions. What type of meditation do you practice? Currently? Just guided Vipassana. Very, very basic.

Unknown
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. And she's based out of DC, 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 1 hour lecture on sort of the philosophies and cognitive behavioral wisdom of the ages. And then she does a guided meditation. I used 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, her podcast is free. She has two books out, too.

It's really wonderful. Very generous person. I will have to check that out. And so you're listening then? You have earbuds in, 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. So every day I listen to the. Exact same summer, 2010.

Jerry Seinfeld
How would people recognize it? How does the audio, I think the. Title is, it sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called smile meditation. And I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years in other recordings.

Unknown
It just happens to be the one that I have on and on my broken 3G iPhone without any Internet cell service, which I just use as an iPod. That's on it. Awesome. That's great answer. I love digging into the specifics.

Jerry Seinfeld
When you go to the gym then to work out, are you still using an elliptical for that or you are. I do sprint high intensity intervals on the elliptical. And are you cardio? And I do a lot of weight 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 PDM viewer because I read a lot of archival stuff.

Unknown
But the challenge, of course, is that because I read so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in case, it's rarely possible unless I'm writing about something fairly new. And so in that case, I just go there with my big 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 does your note taking system look like and how do you take notes?

Jerry Seinfeld
So, for instance, you're really good at using excerpts or quotations, poll quotes. And I found myself asking, as I was reading this, how are you gathering all of this so that you can use it later? What does your note taking system look like in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy? So with digital, it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself.

Unknown
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. 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 permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so, especially 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.

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. And on the very last page of each book, which is blank, usually right before the end cover, I create an alternate index. So I basically list out as I'm reading the topics and ideas that 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 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 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, 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
And of course, they don't have to be in order, so you can sort of listen them. In my particular case, in any order, I also will have 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?

Unknown
But I would bl for beautiful language. Oh, that's so cool. Okay, so there's that. And then I have q if they're quotes. So, for instance, many books will have quotes attributed to other people, or just header quotes in some cases.

Jerry Seinfeld
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, 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.

Unknown
They're just very private. It's like too long to get into what they stand for. They're just really my own system. Is there one other example just if you could indulge me one that is. I guess, not so much about the contents of that passage is about its purpose is LJ, which is I have a little sort of labor of love side project called litter and jukebox.

Right. Sure. I've seen it. Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you.

But yeah, so I do these tearings of pathogens from literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes as im reading a book, I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that. And maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put LJ next to it. But I want to go back to what you said about the external quotes.

I guess the author quoting another work, I think those are actually really important. And that goes back to your question about how I find what to read. And I mark those types of things 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 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 phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it, because literature is really, and I see 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. And 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 words 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 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. So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice. 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
Quote seneca. And because it was always one word, like Madonna or. And this is going to be really embarrassing or like sitting bull. I assumed that Seneca was a native american elder of some type for probably a good. I assumed he was a native american elder for probably a good year or two before I realized he was a romantic.

I was like, man, Ferris, you gotta do your homework, pal. You gotta 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. I just revisited 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.

Unknown
So the best place manifesto for our current struggle with this very notion of productivity versus presence. And how much are we really mistaking the doings for the being? 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. Yeah, the exact same things.

Jerry Seinfeld
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, I think it calls to mind for a lot of people, the haughty, pompous college student in good will hunting in the bar scene, who's reciting Shakespeare without giving any type of. They completely disagree. I agree with the notion that those are 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. The only thing 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. 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. Most of his writing, I believe, was translated from Latin, which tends to be just an easier jump from English.

So it's very easy to read. And what I tell people is 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 Bob and Jane, or pick your contemporary name of choice. And they're all as relevant now as they were then. Going to come back to the 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 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? What does the workflow look like from there? And are there any particular types of software or apps or anything like that that you use often? Honestly, I feel like that problem has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way.

Unknown
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.

I 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 explore all my notes. And, and also it's the formatting is kind of shitty on the Kindle notes on the desktop, where you can see all your notes.

So if you copy them, they paste them to evernote with this really weird formatting. So it tabulates each next notes indented to the right. So it's sort of this long cascading thing that shifts more and more to the right. It's horrible. It's like an email thread.

It's like an email thread, except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all. And so if you want to go fix it, you have to do it manually within Evernote. And, 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.

So hence my point about just. There is no viable solution that I know. Got it. Okay, so let me. This may or may not help.

Jerry Seinfeld
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 dot 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, and it tends to remove all of that headache. Let's see, nine times out of ten. The problem with that.

Unknown
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 note. I see. Got it. Plus, you know, Amazon's own thing that says, add note, read, read in this location, delete note until it all merges it and becomes just hideous.

They're just impossible to ring. God, you know, I wonder. I wonder what to do there. Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into text Wrangler, which is used for coding a lot, just to remove the formatting and then put it into evernote. Yeah, I do that with codex.

Jerry Seinfeld
Yeah, it's true, though. 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.

Unknown
But it has an API, which means somebody can build this, you know, 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. You know, that's a great idea. I mean, I'm still sort of contemplating that. Okay, well, we'll talk about that separately.

Jerry Seinfeld
I think that's something that we could absolutely explore. 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 regardless, you have hundreds of highlights, and you go to look at those highlights, and you're restricted to only seeing. It says, like, 200 highlight 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.

Unknown
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. But if you read, you know, the digitized version of, say, you know, Alan Watts that was published originally 40 years ago, there's no such problem, unless the publisher now is, like, reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing. But because I read so much less out of sort of newly published material, I don't run into it often.

But, you know, there is a way to very laboriously 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, paste them into your evernote in between the missing ports. But it's obviously not conducive. I have done that. And it's so horrible because you also get the, like excerpted from da da da.

Jerry Seinfeld
Like, three lines, everyone. 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.

Unknown
But as of about ten months ago, I have an assistant, Lisa, who's absolutely wonderful, and she just helps me with admin depth that has to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel is weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down. 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. 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 confidently embarrassed if I have a typo, which, as you know, as a writer, you cannot proof your own work. It just, your 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 Bradman and my copy editor were just perfect. What platform is brain pickings on at the moment?

Jerry Seinfeld
What's the technology behind it? I know that I've heard you mention WordPress before. Is it still on WordPress? It is on WordPress. I was going to make a joke on her about how the technology is called corpus callosum, but the actual technology.

Is very Sam Harris friendly joke. So when you're working with, say, your copy editor, do you give your copy editor admin access to WordPress and she'll go in, proofread it and then schedule or publish? What's the process? 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. But between that and the fact that I write in HTML, so I really don't like the Wysiwyg.

Unknown
I hate it actually. I think it's just easier to do it via email because then she can highlight the word. 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 voiced. So I find email works just fine. Got it.

Jerry Seinfeld
Okay. No, I'm always fascinated because I will use. Well, when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also in WordPress. I would use the share a draft plugin to share drafts with people. I'm now on WordPress VIP.

It has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool. Oh, that's cool. I should look into that. I think that's what I have to the WordPress VIP, that WordPress, WordPress. I don't even know what that function is.

Unknown
I'm kind of. I mean, for somebody who writes on the web, I don't really. Yeah, 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
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. Yeah, I mean, that's what a lot of people suggest and what Kai, my perfect actually asked originally, I do not own Microsoft products on principle and I just am not going to deal with it. Got it. Okay.

No, that makes sense. And your assistant, what was the 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, when did you actually make the decision?

Unknown
It wasn't so much that I made the decision and the decision was very strongly, lovingly, but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner, who one day said, you are using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not. Because I was really stressing to a point of just driving myself crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I always have been very independent. I 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. Sure, it's ridiculous. I think that's true for a lot of people, though. Yeah, I know. And it's the strange thing, the disorienting thing, is that I think we intellectually know that's not the case, that it's actually a lot of strength to be able to delegate and to sort of divvy up control according to a hierarchy of priorities.

But on some sort of psycho emotional level, it is just death to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course, it's interesting in terms of how brain pickings 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 not a little paragraph, but a little like one page piece.

And then it became not five things every Friday, but three things every day of the week. Pretty long form in the thousands of words. 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 7th birthday of brain fitness was approaching, my partner was just like, please consider, I'm always curious to. Ask, how did you find the assistant that you ended up with? Well, she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant that's had this type of job for about 20 years. She's just a wonderfully warm and just generous person, but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic.

It's unbelievable. You always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interest in the most magnanimous kind of way towards you, but also the most warmly, no bullshit way outwardly towards the world, demanding things from you and having this buffer. It's really, really great. How did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected.

Just a recommendation. She's been working for somebody who's a very trusted, dear person for a long time. So now she worshiped us. And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her?

Jerry Seinfeld
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 anytime I had a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant, I would say, hey, I know this is off topic, but you've been awesome to deal with. Do you have a 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. And 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 was the introduction was made by the person.

Unknown
So I had met her, at least in my existence. I'd met her just socially many times before. And so eventually, when the time came for me to consider, we set up a meeting. We talked, and she was really into it. And she'd been reading brain pickles.

And I asked, made sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate because she's also, I mean, she is superwoman, Lisa. 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. But she's very, like I said, very dogged, very sort of dedicated.

And she was like, I can do it, I'd like to do it. And I was like, great, lets roll onward. So with your assistant, if you were to do an 80 20 analysis of the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time, what would those look like? What is the vast majority of her time spent on? A lot of it is, I guess, coordinating travel and things.

But im trying to really, I mean, I have this new ish commitment to really not do anything 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 commission, student, local public library and whatnot. But with students, it is worth my time.

If I this should even one journalism student from going into buzzworthy land after graduation, that's worth it to me. And so even though I've scaled back on the speaking speaking, I now getting 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 schedule the deadlines and advance notice. And so Lisa is sort of railing that. And another big part I should also mention that the evolution of what I've been able to delegate has sort of organically happened.

Originally, I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it because I didn't know how to explain it to her to do. But she's a great learner and I'm learning to delegate more. But another thing, because my site runs on donations, 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 prepare envelopes and all those types of things so that I could not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing.

Jerry Seinfeld
Do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use 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 that would make up 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 humanity, I guess, of the tension. A couple of quick ones.

So the first is when you lift, do you tend to have the same workout? What does your weightlifting look like? It's changed a lot in the last year and a half. I've prioritized body weight stuff heavily, not pun intended. That was actually total inadvertent.

Unknown
That's how language, how we think in language. That's so funny. I prioritize body weight stuff and so I do pull ups, push ups, that sort of thing. It also depends on where I do my work. Have my building has a sort of gym like, 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 im only there a few days a week so it just depends on where I do it and what I do. If you had to pick one besides the elliptical, if you had to pick one bodyweight exercise to hold you over. Lets say youre traveling for a few months, you can only pick one bodyweight exercise. What would it be? Well, it would be pull up, but you cant always find a place to do it.

So I just do usually elevated push ups. So my feet on a bench or bed or a step or something and just push ups. Cool. A great little hack for pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted bent rows. You know what's actually very helpful for traveling is plyometrics.

Jerry Seinfeld
Plyometrics and TRX is actually quite handy. There's a system. For some reason, it just not my thing. Can't get into it. Yeah, it doesn't.

Unknown
The thing is, 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 wakes at the gym anyway. And there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just not great. 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
You're intense. I love it 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. I know nothing about them. I knew waits up when I was living in Bulgaria too.

No, exactly. It's kind of like, oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Riccolo commercial. They're like, no, we don't talk about that stuff. There was yet.

Unknown
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 5000 people per year. You know, it doesn't always work out.

Jerry Seinfeld
You mentioned the donations. I want to talk about the site. So it appears, and I dug around a bit, but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts. Is that accurate? I don't have comments.

Unknown
I do have date. They're in the URL. They said the date. 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 nude, 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, then there's an implicit hierarchy of importance to that. We think if it's not at the top, it's not important. And you would understand writing about seneca, it really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is.

But I think because culture conditions us so much, people when they see a date stamp, they sort of think, oh, this was like two years old, and it's really, you know, 2000 years old. But a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference. So I constantly get things. This is another thing that Lisa deals with, like requests from textbooks for citations or, you know, whatnot. And those people actually need the date.

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, you. Know, 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, and I think some of my older stuff is, I mean, it depends on the person, obviously, in the context, but it's an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate is to timestamp the comments.

Jerry Seinfeld
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.

Unknown
But the comments I was getting, I've been fortunate enough not to really get any trolling or anything like that, but they were kind of vacant or people trying to plug their own thing or spam, and it was taking more of my time than 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 can help 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. A lot of emails from readers, and those are valuable, you know, but I don't really care for comment.

Now, the flip side of that is that now that I have the Facebook page, having something mysterious happened with the brain pickings Facebook page, last follower, it just started growing so fast. I have no idea why I was. Going to ask you about that, because if you look at, say that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kind of took on 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 don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I get a lot of emails from readers elsewhere in the world who actually use Facebook as their primary thing. And they're such sweet notes, 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 have Tommen 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. So people would comment on the basis of like, a thumbnail image or the title, make really outrageously inaccurate comments. Clearly not having read the piece and this kind of snap reaction thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I can't deal with it. It's like a psychic drain.

Like, I can't even explain it. Just, I can't. 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubris to comment on it. I don't care if it sounds like bitsy or anything. 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.

Unknown
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. But the main source of anguish is not being seen for who you are, not being understood. And this kind of reactive culture where people comment without taking the care to understand what you're expressing, who you are and what you stand for, it is so toxic. It is so toxic to readers, to writers, to us as a culture.

And I just don't know how to get around it, other than just having instructed Lisa to be just merciless about banning people and deleting comments that are just not. There's no humanity, there's no patience, there's no thinking in them. So, you know, anybody who writes online, I think, feels similarly that this is kind of my home, and if people come and be idiots in it, then they're not welcome there. Yeah, 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and, like, put your feet up on my table with your shoes on, you're not going to be invited back. You're gone, you know? So is your assistant's job as it relates to Facebook then, primarily calling the herd and just removing the idiots, or what are other instructions, if any? Are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that she responds to?

Unknown
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 the human dialogue, which I do, but I don't 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. Alicia 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. I mean, that's where I come from.

I am a cautious one sometimes, but an optimist about their 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 a record of, then I will want them. God, you know, and so her instructions are just, you know, ban people who are offensive to others, sort of in a vicious way, as opposed to just having rational discourse of disagreement. Ban people who are ignorant and have not read the thing and have some very scandalous, or not even scandalous sort of contrarian sensationalist take on it, clearly not understanding the nuance. Because, I mean, a culture of news is, I say, often, a culture without nuance.

Yeah. So that's basically it. Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her task. You lose my mind over exasperation when people's impatience.

Jerry Seinfeld
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. 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 it's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media?

Unknown
I use buffer for Twitter and I use just my hands for Facebook. But again, 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.

And so I do it because of that, mostly. Definitely. And I think that while it's fine to write for yourself, 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. So I think that there's. But 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, 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. To sort of a lot of the people that I hear from, for example, 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 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.

It gives you pause to hear that from people. Definitely agreed on email. If you go to your contact page, you recommend emailcharter.org dot. 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?

They do, and I'm so grateful, but the majority of them do. Some people who reach out with the intention of self promoting, there's usually laziness to people who self promote for the sake thereof, so 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. Yeah, right. Well, I suppose if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template. Dear blogger.

Oh, yeah, I love them. The. Dear blogger. Yeah. 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, 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 USP's, 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. And somehow that stuff got forwarded to me because I guess the guy either moved and the USP's 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. So I used to have a company ages ago called brain quickening, and I got a telemarketing call one evening, and this guy goes, hi, sorry if I'm interrupting. Is this Brian? And I go, excuse me.

Jerry Seinfeld
And he goes, Brian. Brian chicken. And I'm like, brian chicken. I was like, no, and take me off your list. Goodbye.

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 ten 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. How 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 when the sky crumbles are going to be there and we're there for each other.

Unknown
And so with that in mind, I think there is a certain boundary that you have to put up beforehand to, I guess, manage social expectations in a way. And 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 I think we 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 spirits, I think that's so important, which is the long winded way to say that. But when and if those inner circle people put a book out, it's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are. And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean, the book that we started with, the Gretchen Sniff guide to wine, Wendy the illustrator, is precisely that type of person, somebody who I met through what each of us does.

And she's now one of my closest human beings, you know, and so of course I'm going to support her work, but not because I'm being nepotistic about it, but because that's the pre requirement that I am moved by her work and respected and 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. And when I do get such requests, it's a matter of, well, did the person do their homework? And knowing what I actually think and write about? Because very often, I'm sure you get that too.

You get pitched things that are just so outside of what you did do, in which case I didn't 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. But guilt. It's interesting because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige. And they're both horrible reasons to do things. So often we would agree as humans, not just you and me or just anybody, would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some way and equally avoid things because of the guilt thing, or do things because of the guilt thing.

But sort of this whole Buddha's thing about aversion, of avoidance and aversion and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is the fear of disappointing somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself, or out of sort of grasping for approval or acclaim, which is what doing things for prestigious. I think either of those are really bad reasons to do things, and yet they motivate us a lot. Or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the mind constantly. And it is a real practice to try to decondition that. Definitely no, I like what you said about why put in the effort to explain why it's not a fit, if they haven't done the homework to determine if it is a fit.

Jerry Seinfeld
I think that's a great way to put it. I want to ask, and I know we don't have too much time left, so hopefully sometime, someday we can do a follow up part too. I think that'd be a blessing. I'll bring some all back if you actually, 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. So people can make a one time single contribution or they can become a member and donate 7310 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. All of it is so antiquated, their export tool and such. And I'm not that interested. I would spy from days into looking into it.

Unknown
So I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation. Sure. Yeah. Great. And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are is also the reason why I.

I don't have an ad supported site, which is I just asked myself, what would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad free site. And how would I like to support that? Well, I'd like to have a few options, you know, just because I don't want to, you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just pulled it out of the hat, basically, with these tears.

And I've just left them on since I put them on. They seem to work, you know, whatever. And originally, my sense was that the one time donations accounted for much more. But I'd never actually analyzed 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. And I'm pretty sure that must have been the case earlier on. Right. 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, comma, we're having tea, and he said, well, why didn't you, like, push the recurring ones more? Because it's working really great for us.

And at that point I had the option, but it was buried somewhere on my donation about page or something. And so I was like, okay. 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 amount, 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, I mean, that's such an act of commitment, and it's so generous 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 the 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. Probably just the mathematical logical choice. The two, middle, three and ten. Okay. No, I'm just very curious about this kind of thing.

Jerry Seinfeld
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? If so, try it out. Every decision, too, has been that way. And actually, in the last couple of years, I've been getting really annoyed. I mean, brain picking is a pretty sort of lo fi site, as you can see it.

Unknown
Just very super simple, basic. But I've been getting annoyed that it doesn't load very well in my iPhone when I want to look at something or pull something up to reference or iPad. And my friend Scott Belsky, who runs Behance, he's a great guy and he's been sort of a very generous donor, just supporting. And one time he pulls me aside, that was like in February or March, and he's like, you know how much I love brainwave ink, but like, the site sucks. We couldn't say it in that way, but he was super sweet about it and he offered to connect me with this guy that he knew that I could hire to do a responsive design.

And I always have this resistance to making these sort of technological improvements because then I feel like I don't want to be a media company, 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 it myself. So now I'm in the middle of releasing like a simple, responsive site that is actually easy to read on your phone. And so, yeah, 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 mobile version of the site ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago.

Jerry Seinfeld
So better late than never, I suppose. Well, Maria, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you taking the time. If someone were to want to explore brain pickings, what are a few articles you might suggest that they start with, or a few posts? Well, since we talk about it so much, the Seneca piece about the shortness of life, fairly short.

Unknown
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. And 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 7th birthday, really of the site, which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of reading, writing. And living, which is a great article. And I didn't want to replicate everything in here, so I sort of bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit. But just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I just want to quote Paul Graham here, which you included, which is prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.

Jerry Seinfeld
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. Alan Watts has changed my life.

Unknown
I've written about in quite a bit. So highly recommend any of those articles. All right, brainpickings.org is the site, guys. Check it out. Maria, any parting advice for this episode?

Jerry Seinfeld
This portion of our conversation 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 a hope, which is that thank you so much not just for having me, but for having this show and for doing everything that you do.

Unknown
And I really hope we have more people who operate out of such a place of just, I guess, for lack of better word, idealism and conviction. And 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.

Jerry Seinfeld
I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull ups. We will talk again soon. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

Tim Ferriss
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 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter. My super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up up, easy to cancel.

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