#460: Maria Popova on Writing, Workflow, and Workarounds (Repost)

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Hello, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris yet again running out the door. To a flight. But I have such an exciting episode. I can barely contain myself. I might just wee myself. But

I digress. Probably T M I. Let me answer just a couple of questions. What is this podcast about? you long term listeners might know. Long term, long time, that it's about dissecting excellence, trying to tease apart What makes world class performers so good at what they do? Finding the tools and tactics that you can apply. And this episode features Maria Popova. I'm about to explain who she is. And if you don't know who she is, or if you are intimately familiar with who she is, you are in for a treat. First I'll answer a question that a lot of people ask me and that is what are you reading? Well, what I'm reading right now Is

Two books comprised of two books. The first is William Goldman Adventures in the Screen Trade Goldman is the screenwriter behind such movies as The Princess Bride, one of my favorites of all time, and Butch Cassidy is a Sundance Kid. The second book is John Muir, Wilderness Essays. So very different, both very, very good and highly recommended. The Adventures in the Screen Trade is a little outdated with some of the contents. because it's related to film and it was written in the eighties, but there are a lot of timeless principles and Goldman is just hilarious. But moving on, the guest, Maria Popova. Oh my goodness, where to start? She would describe herself as a reader writer Interestingness hunter gatherer and curious mind at large. What does that mean? It'll all make sense in just a few seconds.

While she's written for all sorts of amazing outlets like The Atlantic and the New York Times, I find her most amazing project to be brainpickings. org. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that she sent out to seven friends, co-workers really, very informal. Brainpickings was eventually brought online and now it gets more than five million readers per month. It is massive. Many of you ask, what blogs do you read often? What do you do online? Where do you spend most of your time? The answer is that I read very few sites consistently. I don't have that type of loyalty. But brain pickings is one of the few. It is a treasure trove. It is Maria's one woman labor of love. Her subjective lens on what matters is

It's also an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. This is what hooks me, of course, because she'll pull from excerpts and reading From the Stoics, my favorite Seneca. Uh, Maria is good at finding the hidden gems to share, and the amount of information this woman consumes and can can parse down to the finest detail of what will help you now blows my mind. She makes me look like the laziest Son of a bitch ever.

Ан о кур. immediately my questions are how how does she do that how on earth does she do that and we dig into this in this interview. really I try to unearth the hidden gems in her life, her workflow. It takes me a few minutes to warm up, as it often does, but once we get going, we geek out like crazy and we talk about almost every aspect of her life, her site, her business, her workouts, her writing, her workflow, her tools, her workarounds. All of it. And I love doing this interview. I hope you love listening to it.

And for bonus credit, for those of you who are super curious might have a little ex of extra time to do some detective work. At one point she mentions that her Facebook Fan page went from a few hundred thousand people to to over two million people without explanation. So if you are able to figure out why that happened, what contributed to that, please let me know on Twitter at TFerris, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. I'm dying of curiosity. And always

Or as always, I should say, the show notes, all the links that we mentioned, the tools, et cetera, all of that can be found On uh the blog at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. Four hour workweek.com forward slash podcast all spelled out so you don't need to scribble away furiously with notes. uh although you can I will have pretty much everything that you will need right there in the show notes. So without further ado

Please meet. Maria Popova. Hello ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. I am extremely excited. to have a fellow

Geek in arms. Maria Popova. On the line with me, Maria, how are you today? Very well. Thank you, uh, 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 has a friend. It's actually novel, but Americans can't really pull it off, so he goes for Naval. So I appreciate the the coaching and

I've as a country of immigrants, we have a surprisingly hard time getting people's original names right, right? Uh absolutely. It's um you know just the sort of anglicising of of such a uh criso like a a melting pot of different cultures and, you know, at i at the same time I think it's a reflection of where I spend a lot of time, uh, which is reading. And

There are so many words I've embarrassed myself on many occasions that I've read dozens or even hundreds of times, especially in scientific literature, that I've never heard pronounced. Oh yeah. I call this reader syndrome as somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading. You run into that a lot, especially with um 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 uh uh a young kid, I couldn't hit

let's say democracy or aristocracy. I could only say because and I'd also read it uh you know democracy, aristocracy. For whatever reason I couldn't get the emphasis right. Uh But coming back to the the reading and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading Mm. Uh If if someone asks you, and I'm sure occasionally it happens,

You know, what do you do? For those people listening who may not be familiar Uh 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 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. w and they l kinda looked over their shoulder because they happen to be doing it on their iPhone at the party and they're like, What is brain pickings?

W how would you describe 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 takes And and the writing. and takes form in writing. collection of very interesting things. Sometimes you know how I've c 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 uh when people ask me what blogs do you read, I I f I'm embarrassed, in some cases kind of humiliated to answer that I don't go really to many blogs consistently. Um and I think part of the reason is so many of them Or

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 Um

keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are just sort of p churning out content. And I remember Kathy Sear at one t at one point told me that that you should focus on just in time information, not just in case information. Uh and which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound. But There are there are two sites that come to mind. that I end up on quite a lot. Brain Pickings is one, uh and Sam Harris's blog is another. Uh and I saw your your review of his latest book, waking up. Well not a review, I review I don't review books. I apologize. Okay. No, this is no so this is this is An annotated reading, if you will. Okay, so an annotated reading of uh and I I definitely want to dig into that. Annotated reading of

waking up, which I found really pro uh really um impactful for me in a lot of ways. It it put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings or observations that I had for a very long time. Uh Talking about reviews, so I've I I polled a number of my friends and my readers about different questions they would love to ask you. And a a close friend of mine, Chris Saka Uh he 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 f a follow up, but you've you've built this incredible Powerhouse. Uh

uh an an outlet for your whether it's creative musings or observations. And it has a a huge influence on what people read. So if if you were to sort of think of that, how would you answer that question? Well, first of all, you you're very kind to put it that way as a scris, but I 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. Uh things that are not competing for New York Times bestseller. In fact, I don't even know if I Ever really I mean perhaps um 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. Uh, but I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question is actually that I

Met him through his wife, who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love and I love Wendy, on a book about wine and That book ended up I and I wrote about it uh because it's lovely and sort of profound and Um challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensor experience and I like things that that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it. Uh but in any case, so I wrote about that book and that particular piece on green picking s uh seemed to do pretty well and I think

Perhaps that mm Warped. Chris's idea of how much Contemporary books. I really sort of am interested in the

But but I would say that's a a minority. Right, and for those people wondering, it's the essential scratch and sniff guide to becoming a wine expert. Which was written along with and the illustrations are are wonderful. Uh the Richard Betts was the Somelier who was part of that. And at one point I met with him because I wanted to try to uh deconstruct the Master Sommelier test and he said, I can show you how to do it. And it was just the pared down, sort of hacked, if you will, version still of passing the Master Sommelier test was so intimidating that I sort of put it on ice indefinitely. But at some point, Richard, we will talk again and uh and and and form a game plan. The So the the opposite, of course, of sort of putting out this material that expires as soon as it's out on the vine Is

Uh putting out what I think you do very often and that is Sort of timeless. Timely and timeless, I've heard you call it. Material where you're sort of Pulling from old sources or older sources.

uh doing pattern recognition to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a a a theme or Or or something that still affects people. And Uh I was I was doing research for this interview.

And uh you know, we've we met briefly in New York at an event and I've I've been a long time fan of your work. And so I thought to myself, like, you know, how much how much digging do I really need to do? And good God, you have such An absolute canon of work out there. It is Astonishing. I mean it is really You're very fine. 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. It's just the accumulation, you know. And I

So I was I was I was I'm fascinated by routine and schedule. And uh you know reading from of course not not the always accurate, but generally a good place to start Wikipedia. And Uh It says that brain pickings takes, you know, four hundred plus hours.

of work per month, hundreds of pieces of content per day, twelve to fifteen books per week Uh How do you ch and I I'm I know I'm asking a handful of questions that you've been asked before, but uh sometimes the answers and evolve or which is why I I actually Mm.

don't do interviews very frequently because I find they they sort of Yeah. tend to kind of cast this as the static thing that just stays there some sort of reference point while we're really just the fluid process and we're constantly evolving. But in any case, No, definitely so

Yeah. So so the question that you've I'm sure been asked many times, but I'll ask again is how do you choose The books how do you find Slash choose the books that you read. This is a huge problem for me because I my my appetite for reading outstrips.

the time that I have. And so I end up actually uh g s unfortunately sometimes finding myself Uh anxious because of the number of books I've taken on it at any given point in time. So I'd be curious how you Sort of vet the books that you read.

Well I guess it goes back to That question of well, let me back track 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, you know, Aristotle's views on happiness in government

Or beautiful art from twelfth century Japan. Or or Sam Harris's new book. Anything. Got it.

And The I I've I've read Use the Kurt Vonnegut.

uh before uh curvonegates one of my favorite writers of all time. I know. I heard your uh semicolon quote with the I think it was either the interview I did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have a counterpoint to the semi colon. Okay. No no it's a but go on. So I actually uh I actually I I brought up the semicolon quote partially t as a sort of wink wink. Nod. ribbing to a friend of mine, uh named John Romanello, who has a a

tattoo of a semicolon on his I think it's his forearm. Uh he loves pipe nerd. He loves semicolon. He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other arm. He's he's a fascinating guy. But uh the The quote that I heard you cite that I uh I wanted to dig into a bit was a curve vonegate saying right to please just one person. And So

My question to you is when you write Uh is that still the case? And if so Who are who are you who is that person that you are writing for? Mm. It is very much the case. I still write to an audience of one and that's myself. It's

Like I said, it's just the record of my thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of

create a pattern of of meaning out of seemingly unrelated meaningless information and the sort of intersection of or transmutation of information into into wisdom really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom. Um so I and and it's interesting too because

I when I started brain cooking's uh 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 co workers that I had at the time just as a little sort of email newsletter thing. Um And now to think that there are about seven million people strangers reading it every month. It's kind of surreal. Thank you. But and I'm not sort of number dropping for for sale or anything like that, but just to

to t try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing for one person, one very sort of, you know, inward person. But there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and and just relating to this Pretty private act. And it it's a strange thing to live with and in no way a a a bad thing. I'm not

complaining about it obviously, but it's just Interesting to observe. how how one relates to oneself When being looked on by a few million people, you know?

Definitely. And uh Oh there's so many so many questions I wanna ask you. We might have to do a part two at some point because I know uh we have some time constraints, but The Uh Oh where to even begin. This is where my I start fraying at the ends as an interviewer. So the

The The the first question would be Related to that. There's so much temptation to dumb things down. Or to

go after kind of the tried and true Buzzfeed type headlines. Uh Do you ever contend with that temptation? And if if so, how do you resist it? And I and this is part of the you know s how do you respond to The

the expectations of the crowd or the seven million people looking on. And I I feel this personally sometimes'cause I have a blog it has uh certainly by no means the number of monthly readers that you have. I'm you know I'm somewhere between one and two million Uh Uniques a month usually. Uh but thank you, but even at that p even at that scale.

There are times when I I put out something that I feel is Very Mm. Very important, but on on the dense side. And and then it will sometimes it takes off, but but sometimes it doesn't. And

And there's a lot of temptation when, for instance, I know you use social media quite a bit and we'll we'll get to that, where I look at, say, the the retweets of the favorites on something that's kinda dense. And then I'm like, oh God, I should just do like the the seven tricks you can you can actually teach your cat, you know, and get five hundred thousand retweets. Um is that something that that you're that ever sort of crosses your mind and do you ever feel that temptation? Well, you know, it's interesting because I think anybody who

Thin 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 in the world, there is this notion of the other. Audience. And you know, Oscar Wilde he

uh very memorably said that um a true artist takes no no notice whatever of the public and that the public are to him non existent. And it's very easy to say, especially for somebody as Wilde who was very prolific, very public. almost performative in his public presence. It's very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say, Well, you can't possibly not care about the audience given you

make her living through it and sort of perform to it, right? But I I think that's a pretty cynical interpretation. I I think rather than hypocrisy, it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood, which is why Yeah. All art comes to be because one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for and who he or she is.

And so with that lens I do think it's hard to say well you know, I don't care about what happens to it out there. even though I write for myself and think for myself. the awareness of the the other really does change things. But I think

Perhaps Brunner Hurzog put it best. I I just finished reading this kind of six hundred page Um interview with him essentially. It's a conversation that um a journalist named Paul Cronen had with him over the course of thirty years. And in one passage, um Herzog says Something like You know, it's always been important for me to

Um 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 I don't feel quote unquote tempted to make lysticals 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 Buzzview listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article. And not to perfect the human spirit. Yeah. Of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm interested in. Yeah, no, it's uh

I think it's a a a very virtuous goal. Um I um You know, I I I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter and all these other aspects of it. Uh for a lot of reasons.

Uh one of them is uh well I I feel a very sort of kindred spirit with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made. So for instance, I mean not doing the the slideshows to rack up page views for some type of CPM advertising. That stuff drives me insane. So if it drives me insane, I assume it drives my 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. So if you're a writer, write the things you wanna read. If you're an artist, paint the things you wanna paint you wanna see painted and I I think the commercial aspect is

really warping that and I really one thing I really admire about your work in all of its permutations from your books to, you know, this podcast, the site, everything is that There's just this sort of sense that you just 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. I um

That means a lot to me and I Uh You know, coming back to the the right to please just one person, it's uh it I s I I I think that it's it's related to that. So y i in a way, it's you know, put the things out into the world that you would want to consume yourself or experience yourself, number one.

Um secondly, just for those people who who haven't uh heard this anecdote. When I was writing the four hour work week as my first book, I've I still to this day find writing very challenging. And I wish I could say it's gotten easier over time, but for whatever reason it is. Seems not to have. Uh the

In the case of the four hour work week, I you know came out of undergrad at Princeton and uh many you know many years have passed, obviously, but when I wrote the first few chapters, it was really stilted and pompous and kinda Ivy League, you know, where you I was trying to use ten dollar words where a ten cent word would suffice and be a lot cleaner. So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted and this was a major panic attack moment. I was on deadline and uh I remember I was in Argentina at the time. Uh and then I went the other way and I said, No, no, I have to be loose, I have to be funny and so I wrote a few chapters were completely slapstick ridiculous. I mean they've 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 uh 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? Uh Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America. Uh best known in Argentina, but there's actually some really nice uh Malbec wines in Chile. they were br uh 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 uh fame because of its cultivation in Argentina. So there's there's a lot of sort of there's a lot of metaphor there that I also like, but drank two glasses of wine, sat down, and literally opened up an e uh an email client and started typing the four hour work week as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends. W uh one was uh 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 sort of trapped in a company of his own making. And so th these two very specific guys of mine I started to write with just enough alcohol to to sort of take the edge off. And that's how

Uh Yeah, I was writing in that case to please just two people. Uh but that's that's the only way I could make it work. Uh the Uh Your schedule. So I've I I've read of your schedule, uh, but

I'd I'd love to hear. the the current iteration of that. It it seems like you you've had a fairly you have a fairly regimented schedule, which would make sense if you were putting the number of of hours into reading and writing that you do. So what is what is your current day look like? Well I'll answer this with a caveat. The one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last few years, couple of years.

Maybe as the sort of really delicate balance between productivity and presence and Especially in a culture that seems to measure or worth or marriage.

Or 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 and the the presence that we take in in the day to day and that's something that's become more and more apparent to me. So

I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss routine as some sort of holy grail of creative process because it's just really It's a crutch. I mean routines and rituals help us Not feel like this

overwhelming messiness of just day to day life would consume us. It it's a control mechanism But that's not all there is, and if anything It should be in the service of something greater, which is being present with One is their own life. So with that in mind, my day is

very predictable, um I get up in the morning, I meditate for between fifteen to twenty five minutes before I do anything else. What time do you wake up? Typically. Exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed. So it varies. Okay. Um, I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think um

I When I write because what Or when I I guess try to think. What I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts and

in order for that to happen, you know, those associative chains need to be firing. And when I am sleep deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain. Um, 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 wear our ability to get by and very little sleep as a kind of badge honor badge of honor that bespeaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is, but really It's a total profound failure of priorities and 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 about as I am about my work,'cause the latter is a product of The capacities you know, cultivated by the former. Um so in any case, so I get up eight hours after I um have gone to bed.

I meditate. Um I go to the gym where I do most of my um longer form reading uh I

get back home, I have breakfast and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles a day and one of them tends to be longer and when I write I need uninterrupted time. So I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert.

Um, so I don't look at email or any anything really external to I'm um 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 uh I don't have people disruptions, I guess. So anything social.

Um and then I Take a b a short break. I'm a believer in sort of pacing um creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and then you take a short break and then cycle back, you know. Um, and then I I deal with any sort of

admin stuff like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot and I resume Writing and I write my other article or articles. All right. through the evening I try to have um some private time

um just later in the day, either with friends or with my partner, or just You know. Time that is Unburdened by deliberate thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general. And then usually later at night I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two.

Got it. And So a a number of follow up questions. What type of meditation Do you practice currently? Just guided Vapassana very Very basic. Um, there's a woman named Tara Brock.

who um she's a mindfulness practitioner How do you spell her last name? B R A C H Got it. Mm, she's based out of D C and she Um was trained as a cognitive psychologist.

mm than the decades of Buddhist training and and Live in an ashram and now she teaches. Mindfulness but with a very secular lens. So Um, she records her classes and she has a podcast, which is how I um came to know her and every week she does a one hour lecture on sort of the philosophies and

cognitive behavioral, you know, wisdom of the ages, and then she does a guided meditation. Um, so I I use her meditations and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than Anybody In my life. So I highly, highly recommend her. Um Tara.

Brock. Frack. Yeah. And all her her podcast is free. Um she has two books out to um She's really wonderful.

Very generous person. I will have to check that out. And uh see you're listening then, you have earbuds in. uh when you're d or you're listening you're listening to audio while you meditate. Yes. And it's interestingly, I mean she she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of twenty ten. 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 Summer two thousand ten. How does that start? How would people recognize it? How does the audio I think the title is it sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called smile meditation. Uh, and I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years in other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I you know, have on and on my broken three G iPhone without any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod and that's on it. Awesome. That's a great answer. Um Gotta love I love digging into the specifics.

uh to work out are you still using an elliptical For that or or are you You are. I do sprints, time tense intervals on the elliptical for cardio and I do a lot of um weights and body weights to have too. You do, all right. But y when you're reading, is that on the elliptical? Yes.

And what type of Uh device if any Are you using for that reading? Well I prefer electronics, so I use the Kindle app on the iPad or a any PDM viewer'cause I read a lot of archival stuff, but The challenge of course is that because I read

so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in case it's m 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 sharpe's and various annotation analog devices and I just

Do that. Cool. All right. So that that leads perfectly into The next question, which is what does your note-taking system look like? And how do you take notes? So for instance, Uh you're really good at using Um

Excerpts or quotations, poll quotes. And I found myself asking as I was reading this, like how how are you gathering all of this so that you can Use it later. Um so what does your note taking system look like when you s i i in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy? Yeah. So with digital, um it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath

Mm. um that are that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. Uh but reading is really or understanding really, which is what reading should be a conduit to.

is a form of pattern recognition. So when you read a whole book you kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked and they don't usually occur, you know, sequentially. So it's not like You walk away with one insect from the first chapter, one insect from the second chapter. It's just sort of this pattern of the writer's thoughts that that that permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so Especially

As you if you read as a writer, so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that, but ideally wants to record what those patterns and themes are. that sort of reading is very different. And so what I end up doing with analog books in particular and it's I've sort of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect. is at on the very last page of each each book, which is blank usually.

Uh right before the end cover. I create a a an alternate index. So I basically list out As I'm reading the topics and ideas. that that seem to be important and recurring in that volume. And then next to each of them I start listing out the page numbers where they occur. And on those pages I've obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it. Um but it's basically uh

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'cause I'm so excited now. Um so as it as it turns out with analog books I do exactly literally exactly the same thing. Uh I usually start with the in front inside cover, but I create my own index and of course they don't have to be in order, so you can sort of list them in any in my particular case in any any order uh

I also will have sort of uh two A couple of of lines dedicated to PH. And PH just refers to phrasing. So if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find really Oh, I do that too. Oh really? But I call it BL for beautiful language. Oh that's so cool. Okay. So there's that. And then I have um Like Q or Q if I if they're quotes. So for instance, many books will have uh quotes attributed to other people or just uh header quotes uh in some cases and so I'll have uh

you know, quotes I'll just write that out and then colon and then I'll I'll list all the page numbers for that particular sort of Category. That I'm collecting in the case of quotes. Uh So for when you're gathering this, you mentioned acronyms. And uh shorthand. So besides beautiful language, what are some of the other acronyms that you use?

Oh, they wouldn't make sen they're just very private. It's like too long to get into what they stand for just really my own system. Is there one other example that you just just if you could indulge me. One that is I guess not so much about the About its purpose is L J, which is I have a little sort of labor of love.

side project called litter and jukebox, right? Sure. I've seen it. It's yeah, it's it's awesome. Thank you. But yeah, so I I do these pairings of passages from literature with a thematically matched song, and so Sometimes w as I'm reading a book, I would

come across a passage that I think would be great for that and maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put L J next to it. But I wanna go back to what you said about the external quotes. I guess the author quoting another work. I think those are actually really important and that goes back to your

Question about how I find What to read and I mark those types of things. So for the for the annotations that are specific to that particular book. All of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the of the pages.

But when it there's an external quote, something referencing another work. I put a tab at the very top with the letter F, which stands for find, if I am not familiar with the word, the work, or just no letter, if I just want to flag a quote from something else that I know of. And I think that's actually very important because W the the the phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it, because literature is really and I say this all the time, it is the original internet.

So all of those references and citations and allusions, even they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed To another work. Um 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 works that Perhaps you would not have come across that way. Uh I mean directly. And and in a way

It's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble. in a very incremental way. And I've often found amazing older books that were, you know Five or six hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which led me to something else, which led me to something else, which led me to this great other thing. Um so I think that's that's kind of a a beautiful practice.

Yeah, it's uh the the serendipity of it. Is uh So beautiful when it works out and I'll I'll I'll uh give a confession. This is really embarrassing, but uh you know, since no one's listening. Uh I came across Seneca.

So Seneca the Younger. who's had uh probably more impact on my life than any other writer. Uh originally because There I I I was perusing a a a number of anthologies on minimalism and simplicity, and Seneca kept on popping up, quote Seneca, quote Seneca. And because it was always one word like Madonna.

Or and this is gonna be really embarrassing, or like sitting bowl. I assumed that Seneca was a Native American elder of some type for probably a good lovely actually. I I assumed he was a Native American elder for a probably a good year or two before I realized he was a Roman I was like, Man first, 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 all uh a lot of his writings. Which I've I still to this day revisit on an almost month monthly. Um

His um the shortness of life. So good. Manifesto and I had hate this modern word, um sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally. So the best Manifesto for art. current struggle with this very notion of, you know, productivity versus presence and

how much are we really mistaking the doing for the being, you know, and and and It's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago, before there was internet, before there was the things we call distractions today and and yet he writes about the exact same things, just in a different form. Yeah. uh if I'm trying to use Seneca as a gateway drug into philosophy, I I I won't use the P word first of all with most people'cause philosophy smacks of

I think it calls to mind for a lot of people the sort of haughty, pompous, uh college student in um Uh

Goodwill hunting in the bar scene who's like reciting you know Shakespeare without giving uh any type of offense. I completely disagree. No, I actually I I agree with the notion that th those are its connotations today and people have a resistance, but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it and to get people to understand that philosophy Whatever form it takes. is the only way to figure out how to live. Everything else that we take away from anything

Is a set of Philosophies, essentially. I agree. No, I totally agree. So but I usually if I'm gonna lead people there, I try to to to uh lure them lure them in with with Seneca because I think he's he's very easy to read compared to a lot of, say, at least the Stoics, uh or or or or that's actually not even fair, compared to a lot of philosoph who who have been translated from Greek

uh uh most of his writing I believe is translated from Latin, which tends to be just an easier jump from English. So Um it's very easy to read. And I what I tell people is, you know, start off with some of his letters and you'll find that you could just as easily replace These Roman names like Lucilius and and s and uh so on with like Bob and Jane, or you know, pick your contemporary name if uh of choice and it they're all as relevant now as they were then.

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So I I'm gonna come back to the sort of performance versus presence, which I think of oftentimes as the sort of achievement versus appreciation. Uh

Split or balance. Um Or maybe neither, but before we get there, I I want to put a bow on the note taking with your electronic No taking. So you're using the Kindle app, you're taking highlights.

Where do you go from there? Are there any other what is what is the sort of workflow look like from there and are there any any uh particular types of software or apps or anything like that that you use Often. I mean honestly I feel like that problem has not been solved. at all in any kind of practical way. So the way that I do it is basically a bunch of hacks using existing technologies, but

I don't think Or perhaps I'm just unaware, but I don't think there's anybody designing tools today for people who do serious heavy reading. Mm.

There just isn't anything that I know. And so what I do is I highlight in the In the Kindle app on the iPad. Um And then Um, Amazon has this function that you can basically see your Kindle notes and highlights.

On the desktop. Um on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page. And I paste them into an Evernote file. Um

to sort of just have all of all of my notes in a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also Um 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 gonna 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 The formatting is kind of shitty on the on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes. So if you copy them They paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. Uh so it tabulates each next note indented. to the right. So it's sort of this cascading

It's like an email thread. It's like an email thread except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all you know, and so if you wanna go fix it, you have to do it manually. Within Evernote and you know, I I read you know, on on the Werner Herzog book, for example, which is six hundred pages. have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations until the last one is so narrow and long that that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know.

Got it. Okay, so let me just because I I uh uh this may or may not help. For me it was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote,'cause I mean I'm I'm looking at this list of questions, uh and I'm not reading entirely off sc on script, but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now and one one of the things I realized about formatting and transposing things from, say, the you know, my Kindle page if you if you log into your k your Amazon account through Kindle.amazon.com or

Um copying pasting from many different places is going to I don't know if you've tried this, but edit and either paste and match style or paste as plain text, and it tends to remove all of that Headache. Um I see nine times out of ten. So if you if the problem with that I did try that once, but But when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So on every highlighted passage I also have my own notes. I see. Got it. Plus plus, you know, Amazon's own Thing that says

Add note. Read. Read at this location. Delete and so it all merges it and becomes just hideous. Interesting. 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 coda. Yeah, it's true though. There's gotta be a solution. And the thing is, Evernote I love Evernote. I've been using it for many years and I could probably not get through my day without it. But it has an API, which means somebody can build this, you know, and is there a way to like I even thought I mean I was at one point so desperate and so frustrated, which I think is the

the duo that causes all innovation, you know, desperation and frustration. Um I I thought maybe I should just Save up some money and offer a like a scholarshi or like a grand for a hackathon for somebody to solve this for me. That's a great idea. contemplating that. Okay, well we we'll talk about that separately. I think that's something that we we could absolutely explore and for all of you. programmers, coders out there, please take a look. This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect. One question for you on the Kindle highlights, uh I've run into this. You mentioned the Werner Herzog book and having, you know, thousands of of highlights

I've r have you run into instances where You'll you'll read an entire book, you're super impressed. Or not, but you regardless, you have hundreds of highlights. And you go to look at those highlights and You're restricted to only seeing the first.

Like Two hundred highlight, eighty one 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 twenty five percent, and it's so infuriating. And I think it's a limitation that is determined by the publisher. Yes. It is. And so I'll tell you why it hasn't happened to me much. It happens to me occasionally, but that's a DRM thing, uh digital for listeners who don't like acronyms, digital rights management.

Uh 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 forty 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 Left out of sort of newly published material. I don't run into it often. But you know, there is a way to

A very laboriously, you know, deal with it, which is you can still open that passage in your Kindle app Um 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 parts, but it's obviously completely not conducive. I have done that and it's so horrible because you you also get the like excerpt it from like three lines for everyone. So just publishers, if you're listening to this You are making it harder for people Like Maria, who have seven million unique Per month to share your stuff. So please up your threshold. Uh

Do you have uh Anybody helping you with brain pickings or is it just you? Um, the actual reading and writing obviously is just me, uh but as of About ten months ago, I have an assistant, Lisa, who's absolutely wonderful and she just helps me with

admin stuff that has to do with my travel or email or scheduling things that I feel Yeah. weighing me down so much. I operate so much out of a sense of guilt for sort of letting people down or And as you know, I'm sure

when you get to a point where the demands are just and comparable with what you can even look at, then you kinda need to have help. in order not to either go insane or or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things. So And was there a particular Oh, and I also have uh a copy editor.

This wonderful older lady I hired to do my proofreading Um She's great. I am That's all I can say. I think proofreading is really, really important and I'm constantly embarrassed if I have A typo which, you know, as you know as a writer, you cannot

proof your own work. It just your brain just does not see the errors that we made in the first place. Uh the majority of them. And so and people are kind of merciless. They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy or I don't even know. There's no kind of compassion for the humanity that produces something as human as a typo, right? Despite how mechanical the term itself seems, which is sort of ironic. But in any case so yes, I have my Assistant for admin and my copy editor for just proofing. And what what platform is is uh

Brain pickings. Uh on at the moment. What is it? What's the the technology behind it? I've heard you mention WordPress before. Is it on is it still on WordPress? Uh it is on WordPress. I was gonna make a joke on how about how the technology is called corpus colossum, but uh the actual technology is yeah. That was a very very Sam Harris uh friendly joke. Um the uh

The So when you're working with say uh your copy editor. Uh Do you give your copy editor

admin access to WordPress and she'll go in Proof read it. And then schedule or publish? What's the process? No, it's 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 correction to your email.

I mean like I said, she's Not very I would say tech savvy. I mean I'm sure she's a wonderful learner, so I'm sure she would totally learn how to do it if I gave her admin access. But

Between that and the fact that I write in HTML so I really don't like the WYSIWYG. I h I hate it actually. I think it's just easier to do it via email because then she can like highlight the word and sometimes she would make suggestions that are more stylistic and I I would like to have the final say in those'cause very often I want to keep it the way that I have it because that's just my voice. Um so i I find email works just fine. Got it. Okay, no, I'm I'm always fascinated because I I will use well when I was when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere, I'm also in WordPress, I would use the share a draft Plug in?

to share drafts with people. Uh I'm I'm now on WordPress VIP, which has a It has a sharing function where people can leave feedback in a sidebar that runs alongside the article itself, which is pretty cool. Oh, that's cool. I should I should look into that. I think that's what I have too, the WordPress VIP, the WordPress WordPress. I don't even know what the that function is. So I I'm kind of I mean for somebody who writes on the web. I'm I don't really Yeah, I sometimes only learn things through friends. Well I think yeah, that's that's how I learned about a lot of this stuff. And the

The other option that I've used quite a lot is And as much as I hate Word, and I really do, I love the track changes feature and I just find it more user friendly for a lot of folks than having them use something that's Cloud based like uh Google Docs just because I operate so much offline to try to get Anything done. And uh yeah, I mean that's what a lot of people suggest and what Kai my appropriator actually asked originally, but

I do not own Microsoft products on principle and I just I'm not gonna just don't deal with it. Got it. Okay, I know, that makes sense. And your assistant. What was what was the The de the sort of defining moment, the straw that broke the camel's back when you were like, you know what? Like what was the day where you're just like, fucking enough of this? Like I need to get somebody stat. I mean what when did you actually make the decision?

It wasn't so much that I made the decision as the decision was v very Um strongly, lovingly but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner who one day said, You you are using so much time on things that are just so menial and you should not and'cause 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'm

uh always have been very independent. I you know moved away from my parents' house when I was eighteen, paid my way through school, lived always by myself, and I just had this Emerson like in a sense of self sufficiency and self reliance that to a point of pathology where it was to my own detriment. And the notion about sourcing

felt to me on some level Um Almost like an admission of weakness. Sure. It's ridiculous to I think that's true for a lot of people though, yeah. I know. And 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 to consider that you cannot do something on your own anymore. And of course

I mean It's interesting In terms of how brain cooking's evolved, which has always been very organic So The the sort of

You know, eight year thing that has happened It went from being A little newsletter that contained five links, no text, like five links to five things that I found. Very interesting.

Um And then it went to sort of Five links with a little paragraph about each about why this thing is interesting and important. And then it was you know, not a not a little paragraph, but a little like one page piece and then It became

Not one not five things every Friday, but three things every day of the week. Pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know. And I foolishly and naively thought that I could just have the same

sort of operational framework. Despite the enormous swelling of of just the volume of the writing. And that's unreasonable. It's completely unreasonable. Um so

At one point last fall, as the sort of seventh birthday of brain pickings is approaching. My partner was just like please like consider and uh Uh yeah. H

Oh I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just I'm always curious to ask how did you how did you find This parti the assistant that you ended up with. Uh well she's wonderful. She's a professional sort of personal assistant that's had this type of job for about twenty years. Uh she's just a wonderfully warm and and

just generous person, but also has such doggedness about things and just work ethic. It's Unbelievable. And You always have the sense that she's looking out for your best interest in in the most magnanimous kind of way.

warmly non no bullshit way outwardly towards the world demanding things from you. And having this buffer it it's really, really Great. Yeah. And did uh was she How did you track her down? How did the two of you get connected? Uh, just a recommendation. She's been working for

Um, somebody who's a very trusted dear person, um, for a long time. So now she works for both of us. And did that person reach out to you? Did you reach out to her? I'm always curious about the the specifics because the way that I found one of my first assistants and we worked together for many years was any time I had a really fantastic interaction with someone's assistant, I would say Hey, I know this is off topic, but you've been awesome to deal with. Do you have, you know, twin brother, twin sister Somebody who does what you do.

as well as you do it that you could recommend to me because I need some help. 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. Uh but what what was the Oh, the introduction was made by the person. So we I I I had met her I at least in my assistant had met her just socially many times before And so eventually when the time came for me to consider um Like

She just like we set up a meeting, we talked and she was really into it and she had been reading brain pickings and uh Um I asked made sure it wouldn't be too much on her plate'cause she's also I mean, she's superwoman, Lisa's superwoman, she is the mother of two kids, one of whom um is now her first year in high school and the other one his first year in college.

So she has that on her plate too and uh Uh, but she's very, like I said, very dogged, very sort of dedicated and she was like, I can do it. And uh I'd like to do it. And I was like Great. Let's roll.

Onward. With your assistant w if you were to do an eighty twenty analysis of to the eight the you know the twenty percent of tasks that take up eighty percent of her time. What what are the types What would those look like?

What is the vast majority of her time spent on? So Hm. A lot of it is I guess coordinating travel and things, but I'm I'm trying to really I mean I have this new ish

commitment to really not do any Speaking it commercial conferences anymore. But to speak to students because I think it's important and Um

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. Um 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.'Cause I usually donate my commissions due to the 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, you know, after graduation. Um That's worth it to me. And so Even though I've scaled back on the speaking speaking, I now am getting like all these College.

Request. And so that takes so much time, especially coordinating because a lot of them are organized by sort of student volunteers and they're kind of still learning what it means to, you know, schedules and deadlines and advanced notice. And so Lisa is sort of rangling that. And another big part and

I should also mention that the evolution of what I've been able to delegate has been has sort of organically happened. Originally I just really didn't know what to give her. I felt like I had to do all of it'cause I didn't know how to explain it to her to do and but it's she's a great learner and I'm learning to delegate more. But another thing because my site runs on donations I

wanna I I I sort of make an effort to send handwritten thank you cards to just at this point randomly picked Donors every month. Um And so I have her sort of export those names and emails from me and just Give me like just prepare envelopes and all those types of things. So that could

not spend too much time on the actual admin of the mailing. And do you operate do you communicate exclusively via email or do you use uh soft other types of software oh email email and text. Email and text.

Uh so no project management software at this point, no sort of base camp or sauna or anything like that. Yeah. I don't I that would make it feel like of some sort of commercial organization, you know, I'm I still have so much resistance to the fact that I even have to deal with these things. No, to the Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience or the humanity, I guess, of attention. I a couple of a couple of quick ones. So the first is when you when you lift, do you tend to have the same workout? What do what is your what is your weightlifting look like?

It's changed a lot in the last A year and a half I've prioritize body weight stuff. heavily, no pun intended. That was actually total inadvertent. This how language how we think in language. That's so funny. Uh but uh I I prioritize body weight stuff and so I do pull ups, push ups and that sort of thing. Um

It also depends on Where I do my work had my gym has my building has a sort of gym, like a you know, one of those residential gym. But I also have a membership at a larger um Probably I think the best

Gym in New York. I love it. Uh, but I'm only there a few days a week. So it just depends on where I do it and what I do. And if if you had to pick one Besides the elliptical, if you had to pick one bodyweight exercise to hold you over. Let's say you're traveling for a few months, you can only pick one bodyweight exercise. What would it be?

Well, it would be pull up, but you can't always find a place to do it. Uh so I just do usually elevated push ups, so my feet on a bench or bed or some like a step or something and just push ups. Cool. A great uh little hack for Pulling motions while traveling is putting your feet on a chair and going underneath a table to do basically inverted Bent rose. Uh you know what's actually very helpful for traveling is uh Pliometrics. Plyometrics and uh T R X is actually quite handy. There's a system. Not my thing. Can't get into it. Yeah. It doesn't the thing is

Here's the thing. So if I am forced by circumstances to do a work out that is not my preference. I 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 while I do waves at the gym anyway. Um and there are certain types of movements that it's just a hassle to have the headphones and it's just like not great. So I actually carry a

Um, wait a jump rope with me when I travel. In case there's nowhere to do sprints, which is my Plan B for cardio. And then plan C is just jumping, skipping rope. Yeah.

You're intense. I love it. The uh I remember the the uh you know, I wanted to every time I meet and this is so silly, but I was so obsessed with uh Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians or people who in a at any point have lived in Bulgaria I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting, but it's nothing about them. I don't know exactly waked up when I was living in Bulgaria. No, exactly. It's kind of like uh Uh, you know, like, Oh, you're from Switzerland. Let me talk to you about the guys in the Ricolo commercial. They're like, No, we don't talk about that stuff. Um, is that guy your cousin? Yeah, right. You must know. Like no, I actually don't. Like I know I went to X, Y, and Z college, but There are five thousand people per year. Yeah, it's a it doesn't doesn't always work out. You mentioned the donations. I wanna talk about the site. So

Mm-hmm. It appears and I and I dug around a bit, but it appears that you have no comments or dates on your posts. Is that accurate? I don't have comments. I do have dates. They're in the URL. Oh they're in the URL but they're not in the post they're in the URL structure, but they're not in the displayed post itself. Yeah, so the reason for that Is because

I I do think we'll live in an enormously news fetishistic culture and The reason I do what I do is precisely to decondition that because We think that if something is not news and it's not at the top of the search results or the top of the feed,'cause all feeds are reverse chronology and you know, there's an implicit Hierarchy of importance to that.

With thing if it's not at the top, it's not important. And you know, you would understand, you know, writing about Seneca Mm-hmm. It really doesn't matter what the date stamp on it is, but I think that this culture conditions us so much. People when they see a date stamp They sort of

think oh this was like two years old. Oh and it's really, you know, two thousand years old. Uh but because a lot of academics actually use brain pickings to reference. So it I constantly get things, this another thing that Lisa deals with, like requests from textbooks for citations or, you know, whatnot. And those people actually need the dates. So I've made it so that If you actually look, it's kind of easy to 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 d I actually have done the same thing for um quite a few years and if you if you go to any permalinks, if you go if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog, the date is there um in the URL, but also uh 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 I mean it depends on the person, obviously in the context, but um it's it's an easy way to have a high

sort of abandonment rate is to to timestamp. The comments did you ever have comments or have you never had comments? I did originally and then I was like, you know what, I kinda feel like her dog does. I don't really care to hear I mean I do write for me. I'm I'm very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched. Uh but the comments I was getting I I was I've been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know, trolling or anything like that. But they were kind of vacant, or people trying to plug their own thing or spam.

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 compel people to reach out. Uh 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 Email from readers. Um And those are valuable, you know.

But I don't really care for comments. Flip side of that is that Now that I have the Facebook page having uh something mysterious happened with the Brain Chickens Facebook page last fall or it just started growing so fast, I've no idea why. You don't I was gonna ask you about that, because if you if you look at say that your Twitter follower growth versus your Facebook growth, the Facebook just kinda took off Yeah, it was in about October of last year and it went from two hundred fifty thousand to now I think I don't know I think something million. Close to three maybe. So more than tenfold in less than a year.

I have no idea why. I've done nothing differently. I'm very I don't really enjoy Facebook. I do it reluctantly because I know I get a lot of emails from readers um elsewhere in the world. who actually use Facebook as their primary thing and they're such sweet notes, you know, people who just are stimulated and inspired and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn't be if they hadn't read that

piece about some random thing that I read and wrote about and I think it would be selfish of me to just Sort of disable Facebook because I hate it. But the the point of it is that you can't you have comments on there. And Lisa, my assistant, actually

That's something I delegated her a few months ago. uh just a completely deal with them. I can't I can't deal with them. I can't and 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 inaccura. comments clearly not having read the piece.

And This kind of s snap reaction. thing that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate, I I can't deal with it. Just It it's like a psychic drain, like I can't even explain. It just I I can't. So anyway. So so that would explain, that would answer one of my questions, which is in your header picture on uh Facebook.

You have this should be a cardinal rule of the internet, end of being human. If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubers to comment on it. I don't care if it sounds like bitchy or anything. The point I mean You know, it's interesting because I think a lot about criticism and the notion of criticism and and why it's so hard for anybody. And I I don't think

That people have a hard time with criticism. Because Another person This agrees with or dislikes what they're saying. They really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood. Like the other person does not understand

Who they are. or what they stand for in the world. And ninety nine percent 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. Right. But the the 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 Mm. There's no humanity, there's no patience, there's no thinking in them. So I mean the you know, anybody who Right online.

I think feel similarly that this is kind of my home and if People come and be idiots in it. then they're not welcome there. So Yeah. No, I I actually use the exact same analogy. I say, look, I view my especially the on my blog, I view the comments as my living room. And if you come into my house for the first time and get raging drunk and like st take your sh you know, put your feet up on my table with your shoes on. You're not gonna be invited back. You're gone, you know. Um so is is your assistant's job as it relates to Facebook then primarily calling the herd and just removing the The idiots or

Uh, does she have a what are what are other instructions, if any? Are there things that she passes to you? Are there things that she responds to? No. I don't I don't really Yeah. Care What people say again to the point that if people have something of substance and urgency, they will reach out. And I'm then very happy to hear from actual humans and engage in a human dialogue, which I do. But I 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'cause I put my own things on it. You know, at least it 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 I am a cautious one sometimes, but an optimist about the so called human condition and

Anybody who craps on that Without having him even given A chance to the thoughts that that speak to the to to those ideals, which is what my Articles are recorded.

then I I will want them gone, 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. Uh ban people who are ignorant and and have not read the thing and have some very scandalous or not even scandalous, sort of Contrary sensationalist take on it.

clearly not understanding the nuance because I mean a culture of news is I say off in a culture without nuance and Um Yeah. So that that's basically it. Help me stay sane when I look at them. That's her

That's her task. Does not make me lose my mind over just exasperation when people's impatient. No, and I you know, I really respect that because uh another reason that I read Uh 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. Uh in in a lot of respects. So

Kudos. Uh the Email. Uh, actually before we get to email, I've read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook, which would make sense because you're Prolific. Uh if if that if that's still the case, what do you use to schedule that social media? I use buffer for um

uh Twitter and I use just My hands. Facebook. Yeah. Um But again, I mean, this goes back to the same inner struggle of I do wanna be reading and writing for myself, so why do I have the compulsion to put so much of it

out there. And I I J Self gladiate over that 'Cause 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 where wherever That actually that's how they connect. And I I think if I'm putting in the amount of time that I do into into what I do Even if I do it for myself, I might as well just harness that time anyway if it benefits somebody else's journey, you know. And so I do it Because of that mostly.

Definitely. And I I think that While it's fine to write for yourself. If you If you keep the value of what you write.

to yourself when it could benefit a lot of other people, then I think that's actually It could be viewed as a selfish act. Right. So the I think I think that there's Particularly when you're curating in the way that you do and you're saving people thousands of hours Of search by distilling. Uh

Well, I would argue that the benefit the value Is not even I mean what I do is kind of the antithesis of search. It's a discovery of things that Ideally one would not have come across within the usual parameters of one's

filter bubble, right? So sort of A lot of the people that that I hear from, for example, you know, just this week to to use the Seneca example, actually just this week, um I heard from This guy who was an IT person uh trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and

Said The Seneca, the shortness of life piece. really l really put everything in perspective. I've never really read philosophy, never been interested in it, never looked for it, but it just cut in the middle of what I'm struggling with right now in my own life. You know, and it's kind of it gives you pause to hear that from people.

Definitely. Agreed. Uh On uh on email. The

Uh. If you go to your contact page, you recommend email charter dot org. And I'm very curious to hear If people actually follow

The email charter. In terms of the the email that you receive Um do people actually pay attention to that? And fall through. Yeah, they do, and I'm so grateful and I mean, but the majority of them do, you know. А сам people who

reach out with the intention of self promoting. There there's usually, you know, laziness to people who self promote For the sake thereof, you know. So they don't they don't usually um follow. But people who actually

care to have a conversation and to engage are very um courteous and very sort of mindful of what I've asked. Except for publicists who are never Yeah, right. Well, I mean I I suppose uh if they're flying on autopilot and just blasting out a template.

Dear blog dear blogger. Oh yeah, I love those. The dear blogger. Yeah. Or you know what I get very often, which I think it's Actually hilarious. Uh People who don't even bother to read the name of the site, so they address me, dear Brian. Maybe somehow from Brian and they

And and and this the pinnacle of this was when last year at one point I open my physical mailbox in my building, my home. And I found this bundle from the US PS. But like with an elastic band around it of of male 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 USPS like somehow look things up and I don't even know it was such

A a sort of mystery and and metaphor for what I deal with online. I was like, yes, yes. How can you ask a publicist not to? So I used to have a company ages ago called Brain Quicken. And uh I had a I got a telemarketing call one evening, I remember. And uh This guy goes, Hi, uh sorry if you're if I'm interrupting, is this Brian? And I go, Excuse me and he goes, Brian? Brian Chicken? And I'm like, Brian Chicken. Uh I was like uh no and take me off your list. Goodbye. Uh the um Oh God. On the

On the uh on the email and pitching side of things or just on the pitching side of things. How on earth do you deal with Uh not just Hold on.

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 maybe you don't get a lot of it. I get a ton of it. And the fact of the matter is like not everyone is Is

able to put the time or effort into writing a good book. So inevitably if I get ten books from decent or good friends, some of them are gonna be terrible. Uh 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 the deal

First and foremost. By controlling not the outcome but the the Cause which is your

friends and acquaintances. I'm very selective about the people I surround myself with and um I I'd like to think friendly to Pretty much everybody that I meet But my circle of actual friends is really close and really tight and people who are just

You know. when the sky crumbles are gonna be there and we're there for each other and So with that in mind, I think There is a certain boundary that you have to put up. Beforehand

to To to I guess manage social expectations in a way. Um and so for those people, my friend friends in large part, I mean I should mention that the majority of my close friends, including m my partner too, Or people that I have met just through what I do, so there's already the self selection of

Sensibility and ideals and you know, I 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. Uh and even when you said early on the kinship of spirit, I think that's so important. So which is a long winded way to say that When and if Those

Inner circle people put a book out. It's a guarantee that I will like it because of who they are. And so then I'm more than happy to support it. I mean the The Book that we started with the

scratch a snip 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 gonna support her work, but not because I'm being Um nepotistic about it, but because That's the pre requirement that I

and moved by her work and respect it and and love it and that's how we became friends. But outside of that inner circle I don't 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 do, in which case I don't even feel compelled to respond because if they didn't put in the time to understand what I'm interested in, why should I put in the time to explain to them why this is not a fit. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I need to embrace that more. I 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 are just anybody would agree to do things because they sound prestigious in some in some way, you know? And And equally avoid things because of the guilt thing, or do things because of the guilt thing, but

sort of the whole Buddha thing about Aversion of you know avoidance and aversion and making decisions based out of either fear, which is what guilt is, it's the fear of disappointing somebody and then feeling disappointed in yourself or out of

Um sort of grasping for, you know, approval or a claim which is what doing things for prestige is, I think either of those or really bad reasons to do things and yet they they motivate us a lot, or or at least they sort of lurk in the back of the mind constantly. And it it is a real practice to try to decondition that. Definitely. No, I like I like

I like what you said about uh 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. I think that's a great way to put it. Um I wanna ask, uh, and I I know we don't have too much time left, so hopefully sometime someday we can do a a a follow up part two. I think that'd be a blast. I can I'll br I'll bring some all back if you actually drink mine. So yeah, can I can introduce you to it firsthand. But the the donations, I'm very fascinated by Uh the the ad free donation approach and Uh just to just to to keep it simple, if you had to choose

Um say twenty percent of the options you're currently offering. which would you choose and why. In other words, you have No, no, so I'll I'll explain. Or two or three. So you so people can make one time offer, they can make a one time single contribution. Uh they can

Uh, let me simplify that question. Or they can become A member and donate. You know, seven, three, ten, or twenty five dollars a month. Um what I'm trying to ask without being improprietyus or

uh making you feel uncomfortable is W what is working best? uh when you're asking people for donations, you know, assuming that it's working uh if if someone were to offer one or two options instead of four options per month, or the the single contribution versus the membership, or the membership versus the single contribution, what would your advice be to people? Mm.

Well I will preface this with a caveat that I use PayPal for donations And I can for the life of me figure out how to actually like look at the data and get any sort of real reason. All of it is so antiquated. They're export tools and such and I'm not that interested, I would siphon, you know, days into looking into it. So I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation of it. Yeah, great. Um And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are also

It is also the reason why I don't have an ad supported site, which is I just asked myself, what would I like to read as a reader? Well, I would like an ad free site and how would I like to support that, well I'd like to have a few options, you know. Just I don't want to

you know, be sort of confined to something. And so I just Just pulled it out of the hat basically with these tears and I've just left them on since I put them on. They seem to work, you know, whatever and Um Originally

My sense was that the one time donations Accounted for much more. But I'd never actually analyze it because I think I 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 you kind of weigh them Somehow is more um than the cumulative sum of the smaller donations. So I thought the one timers were much more. But then and

And Pretty sure that Must have been the case earlier on. Right. Uh But

And I've had the recurring ones I've had the one time donations for as long as I can remember. For as long as I basically need it to start making money for the site because by the way, running the site cost me several times my rent, like all the costs associated

Whether 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 Um my friend Max Linsky, who runs longform.org, we're having tea and he said, Well why don't you like push the recurring ones more?'Cause it's working really great for us And at that point I had the option but it was buried somewhere on my like

donation about page or something. And so I was like, okay. So I put it in the sidebar. And that was I wanna say maybe twenty eleven. Um And it started accruing slowly. And so this past year When I did my taxes, I very reluctantly went to deal with all the

PayPal tools to get the data out, basically. And I actually had Lisa pull all the excels and whatnot, and then I did the tally to see And to my surprise, the recurring ones, which are very small Individual amounts. Actually were two to one ratio to the one time donation.

Wow. And I don't know at what point it tipped over. Mm-hmm. But I think because of the scale. And just how many people have these tiny, tiny donations that they contribute every month. I mean, that's such an act of commitment and it's so generous, you know, that they add up and

I my guess is that as time goes on,'cause the recurring ones have only been available for the last like Two and a half, three years, whatever. they would become by far the larger sort of uh financial support. Compared to the single ones.

Sure, no, that makes sense. Uh The if you had to choose and of course this is hypothetical, but if you had to choose two of the amounts to leave in the drop down, so you have seven dollars a month, three dollars, ten dollars, twenty five, if you had to choose two of those to leave up, which would you choose? Oh, I have no idea. Probably Oh just the mathematical logical choice, the two middle is it the three and ten.

Okay. Yeah. Cool. No, just very curious about this kind of thing. I think uh I think you've approached the blog in a very authentic way with the content and I I can't emphasize strong strongly enough Mm.

what you just said, which is you You base what you do on what you would like or dislike as a reader in the case of you know something with with text. It doesn't have to be super complicated. It doesn't have to be doing tons of analytics for months before you make a decision. Just ask yourself, would this annoy the shit out of me? If so, don't do it. Would I love this? If so, try it out. And 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 low fly site, as you can see. It's just very super simple, basic. But I've been getting annoyed that

It doesn't load very well on my iPhone when I want to look at something or pull something up to reference or iPad. And my friend Scott Belski who runs Bihance, he's a great guy and he's been sort of a very generous donor, just supporting and you know And one time uh He pulls me aside, that was like I think in February or March and she's like

You know how much I love brain pickings, but like The site sucks. We couldn't say it in that way, but he was super sweet about it. And then he offered to connect me with this guy that he knew. uh that I could hire to do a responsive design. And I always have this resistance to making these sort of technological improvements because then I feel like I don't wanna be a media company, like I don't wanna be a buzz feed. But

At the end of the day, I as a reader uh and as a sort of engager with that experience was being annoyed by myself. So now I'm in the middle of releasing like a simple responsive site that is actually Easy to read on your phone and so Yeah. Despair and frustration prevail again in innovation. It's it's so so worth it. It took me let's see, it only took me three Oh God. Seven years to get a uh a mobile.

version of the site ready to go. Which I just launched a month or two ago. So better late than never, I suppose. Uh well Maria, this has been a blast. I uh I really appreciate you taking the time. Uh if if someone were to Want to explore Brain pickings, uh What what are a few articles you might suggest that they start with? Um

Or a few posts. Well since we talked about it so much. The Seneca piece about the shortness of life. It's a fairly short piece. Um, 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 Um 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 thought on that from various sources as well as my own. And perhaps most of all

A piece that I wrote last fall as on the seventh seventh birthday really at the site. Uh w which was about seven things that I learned in those seven years of reading, writing, and and living. Which is a great article. And I didn't want to replicate everything in here, so I I sort of uh bobbed and weaved around some of these subjects a little bit, but Just to reiterate something that you mentioned, and that's doing nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I just want to quote Paul Graham here, which you included, which is prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. I think is so astute and um

In closing, is there anything else? Any Alan Watts piece. Uh not because my writing about it is So great or it's not coming from a place of check me out, it's coming from a place of check him out. Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit, um, so highly recommend any of those articles. Cool.

Um Maria, any Parting advice for for this uh episode this portion of our conversation uh before we before we check out. Any advice to the people listening out there, thoughts, parting comments?

No advice per se just I guess a comment and then and then and a hope, which is that that you know thank you so much. Not just for having me, but for having the show and for doing everything that you do and I really hope we have. more people who operate out of such

a place of just I guess for lack of better word idealism and and conviction and Um Yeah. Thank you for setting an example that way. Uh well that means

a lot coming from you and I think I think you're a tremendous force for good out there in the world. So I hope people check out Your work I hope you continue to do what you're doing. I hope you continue to Add repetition to your pull ups. And and uh we will uh we will talk again soon. Sank thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you, Tim. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Fybullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Blood Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite.

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