Timothy Ferriss's Blog, page 60

Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons (#370)

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Photo by Norman Chan

“A true creator knows that you follow the thing to where it’s going, not to where you think it ought to go.”

— Adam Savage

Adam Savage (TW: @donttrythis IG: @therealadamsavage FB: therealadamsavage) has spent his life gathering skills that allow him to take what’s in his brain and make it real. He’s built everything from ancient Buddhas and futuristic weapons to fine-art sculptures and dancing vegetables.

The son of a filmmaker/painter and a psychotherapist, Adam’s previous positions include projectionist, animator, graphic designer, carpenter, interior and stage designer, toy designer, welder, and scenic painter. And he’s worked with every material and in every medium he could fathom—metal, paper, glass, plastic, rubber, foam, plaster, pneumatics, hydraulics, animatronics, neon, glassblowing, mold making, and injection molding, to name just a few.

In 1993, Adam began concentrating his career on the special-effects industry, honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Galaxy Quest, and the Matrix sequels.

A decade later, Adam was chosen, along with Jamie Hyneman, to host MythBusters, which premiered on Discovery Channel in January 2003. 14 years; 1,015 myths; 2,950 experiments; eight Emmy nominations; and 83 miles of duct tape later, that version of the series ended in March 2016.

Today, Adam hosts and executive produces MythBusters Jr., as well as a brand-new series, Savage Builds, which premieres on Science Channel in June 2019. He also stars in and produces content for Tested.com, including behind-the-scenes dives into multiple blockbuster films (including Alien Covenant, Mortal Combat, and Blade Runner).

In addition, after a lifetime of hunting for the perfect bag, Adam launched Savage Industries and began manufacturing his own, along with MAFIA BAGS. Made in the United States and constructed primarily from recycled sailcloth, every bag is not only durable and lightweight but unique, as well. The current line (available at AdamSavage.com) includes two sizes of the EDC (“Everyday Carry”) and pouches, with more product both available on the site and on the way.

Finally, in 2019 Adam wrote his first book, Every Tool’s a Hammer, which is, in Adam’s words, “…a chronicle of my life as a maker. It’s an exploration of making and of my own productive obsessions, but it’s also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you.”

More information about the book is available at AdamSavageBook.com.

Watch the interview on YouTube.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/2bce09f9-eb95-4ac3-94ca-4fe1dfedae50.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”
Watch the interview on YouTube.

Want to hear another episode with someone who’s not afraid to let their geek flag fly? — Listen to my conversation with Aisha Tyler in which we discuss optimism, free-range parenting, aggressive failure, heckler stories, and much more. (Stream below or right-click here to download.):

#327: Aisha Tyler — How to Use Pain, Comedy, and Practice for Creativityhttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/1d8dd853-973a-4874-b452-3f6b68cead2d.mp3Download

This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Theo Chocolate, which is the first organic and fair-trade chocolate company in North America. The folks there reached out to me because they spotted some neatly stacked bars of their dark chocolate coconut in a recent Instagram photo of my fridge (see it here).

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As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you’ll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at AthleticGreens.com/tim.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Adam Savage:

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It by Adam Savage
Tested.com
Spirited Away
Inside Adam Savage’s Cave: Spirited Away No-Face Cosplay, Tested
15 Fascinating Facts About Spirited Away by Rebecca O’Connell, Mental Floss
Adam Savage’s Alien Spacesuit, Tested
San Diego Comic-Con
Excalibur
Adam Savage’s Knightly Comic-Con Cosplay Revealed: His Most Personal Yet by Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly
Murphy Brown
ICM Partners
Adam’s Charmin Debut
You’re Only Human (Second Wind) by Billy Joel (See Adam around 2:04)
NYU Tisch School for the Arts
The US Only Has Three Truly Global Cities: NYC, LA, and SF by Bradley Tusk, Observer
The Usual Suspects
The Sixth Sense
Eureka Theater
Berkeley Repertory Theater
Beach Blanket Babylon
Colossal Pictures
Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin
MythBusters
EG Conference
TED
My Obsession with Objects and the Stories They Tell by Adam Savage, EG 2008
Porchlight
Cafe du Nord
The Flying Karamazov Brothers
Maker Faire Bay Area
My Love Letter to Cosplay by Adam Savage, TED 2016
Failure Is Always An Option by Adam Singer, The Future Buzz
The Scientific Method, Khan Academy
Calling All Angels by K.D. Lang with Jane Siberry
Until The End Of The World
The New York Times
The Dharma: The Teachings of the Buddha, Harvard Divinity School
Unboxing Adam Savage’s Maker Box! Tested
Adam Savage’s Zorg ZF-1 Prop Replica! Tested
The Fifth Element
Weta Workshop
The Lord of the Rings
Adam with Boromir’s Sword
David Hockney: The Art of Seeing, A Culture Show Special
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy of Arts
In Television, What Are the Upfronts? The Working Director
Gordon Ramsay’s Scrambled Eggs, Watch The Daily
Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin
The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss
McEvoy Ranch Olive Oil
Industrial Light & Magic
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
Space Cowboys
Atria Publishing Group
Pixar Animation Studios
John Carter
Finding Dory
Monsters, Inc.
Ghibli Museum, Mitaka
The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
Former ‘MythBusters’ Host Adam Savage Returning to Science Channel in New Series by Kimberly Nordyke, The Hollywood Reporter
Colorado School of Mines
Iron Man

SHOW NOTES

Adam and I discuss our shared love of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and how Adam designed his disturbingly wonderful No-Face cosplay for Comic-Con. [07:18]
Adam’s inspiration for building not just one, but two suits of armor as a sophomore in high school. [12:09]
In high school, what did Adam think he was going to be when he grew up? [14:15]
How did a lack of specialization in his 20s lead Adam from New York to San Francisco, and why does Adam see San Francisco as a more ideal place for finding one’s ambition than New York? [16:32]
Did Adam find his focus in one cathartic moment, or was it something discovered slowly over time? [20:31]
How has theater been a force multiplier for Adam’s very particular set of skills, and what necessary family ethos kept him grounded? [23:16]
What would have made Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up a better audio book. [27:40]
We share recollections about Adam’s quirky Maltese Falcon presentation at the 2008 Entertainment Gathering where we first crossed paths, and he explains its evolution from a 10-minute throwaway talk encouraged by Kevin Kelly. [28:36]
The highest possible achievement Adam feels can be attained on stage. [36:43]
The origin of “Failure is always an option.” [37:29]
Favorite failures that led to later successes. [40:24]
Authors, thinkers, and philosophers who have had an impact on Adam — particularly Noam Chomsky in the current poltical climate. [44:19]
How Adam used the perspective of a screenwriter to de-escalate an argument. [47:41]
Where did Adam’s “watching the watcher” habit originate? [49:22]
What projects would Adam suggest for aspiring but inexperienced makers to get a taste of building something? [51:35]
The point when a maker goes from gear-switching mode to entirely mental mode. [55:04]
The practical side of obsession: find something you have to have and try your hand at making it. [57:28]
The last notable object Adam had to make. [58:21]
The materials one might use to build their own miniature scale home. [1:00:16]
A documentary about the artist David Hockney I highly recommend, and how it relates to practically scaled art. [1:01:39]
How a movie set Adam recently visited bridges between art, construction, and narrative like a big, complex puzzle that has to move just so in order to tell the story properly. [1:03:33]
What’s the story behind Adam’s rumored egg-making prowess? [1:04:55]
A few of my own egg secrets. [1:09:25]
Is Jacques Pepin a Jedi master? [1:10:27]
The Jacques Pepin and Julia Child way of finishing scrambled eggs. [1:11:20]
Musings on universal suffering and coping with defeating self-talk. [1:12:24]
The one thing Adam would tell his younger self if he could go back in time. [1:20:40]
How Adam’s book may be more of a stegosaurus he found than the tyrannosaurus rex he was in search of (and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing). [1:23:58]
What Adam and his wife can expect from the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo. [1:26:34]
“Take no cure for your dignity.” [1:27:35]
Parting thoughts. [1:29:20]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

No-Face
Hayao Miyazaki
Chihiro Ogino
Thomas Kane
Satoshi Ohno
John Boorman
Gabriel Byrne
Patrick Stewart
Liam Neeson
Nigel Terry
King Arthur
Whitney Lee Savage
Charlie Kimbrough
George Whipple
Billy Joel
George Lucas
Jamie Hyneman
Warren Buffett
Michael Jordan
Steve Martin
Richard Saul Wurman
Adele
George Michael
Kevin Kelly
Forrest Gump
Stewart Brand
Jon Ennis
Arline Klatte
Beth Lisick
Michael Hawley
David Mamet
Jane Siberry
K.D. Lang
Noam Chomsky
Harlan Ellison
Kurt Vonnegut
Richard Feynman
Donald Trump
Carlos Castaneda
Ram Dass
Peter Jackson
Richard Taylor
Boromir
Peter Lyon
David Hockney
Gordon Ramsay
Julia Child
Jacques Pepin
Charles Bukowski
Ryan Nagata
Wil Wheaton
Laura Kampf
Simone Giertz
Andrew Stanton
Mary Karr
Tobias Wolff

Kevin Systrom — Tactics, Books, and the Path to a Billion Users (#369)

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“I think a big part of knowing that you’re right is working as hard as you can to prove that you’re wrong. And if you can’t, well, there’s only one option left, which is: you’re probably right.”

— Kevin Systrom

Kevin Systrom (@kevin) is an entrepreneur and the co-founder (with Mike Krieger) of Instagram. While at Instagram, Kevin served as the CEO, where he oversaw the company’s vision and strategy and daily operations. Under his leadership, Instagram grew to over one billion users and launched dozens of products including video, live, direct messaging, creative tools, Stories, and IGTV.

The company also grew to over 800 employees with a campus in Menlo Park, new offices in New York City, and a new headquarters in San Francisco.

Prior to founding Instagram, Kevin graduated from Stanford University with a BS in management science and engineering. Kevin currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Watch the interview on YouTube.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #369: Kevin Systrom — Tactics, Books, and the Path to a Billion Users
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/6c7b3008-cf08-4aae-93f8-d3fde8fca727.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”
Watch the interview on YouTube.

Want to hear an episode with someone else who lives by strong principles? — Listen to my conversation with Ray Dalio. We discuss how Ray thinks about investment decisions, the three books he would give to every graduating high school or college senior, how he might assess cryptocurrency, and much, much more (stream below or right-click here to download):

#264: Ray Dalio, The Steve Jobs of Investinghttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/12871ab9-f085-4f1e-83db-7b088c4a2d92.mp3Download

This podcast is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients.

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Kevin Systrom:

Instagram

Instagram
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Bridgewater
Ray Dalio, The Steve Jobs of Investing, The Tim Ferriss Show #264
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
Memento
South by Southwest
Gowalla
Foursquare
Instagram Was First Called ‘Burbn’ by Megan Garber, The Atlantic
What is a Greenfield? by Vangie Beal, Webopedia
The 10 Most Used Instagram Filters (According to Iconosquare Study) by Olga Rabo, Iconosquare
OpenGL
Mayfield Fellows Program
Harvard Business School
Craigslist
The Golden Personality Profiler
Myers-Briggs Personality Test
What is an API? (Application Programming Interface) by Vangie Beal, Webopedia
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
The Mathematics of Politics by E. Arthur Robinson and Daniel H. Ullman
Odeo
Twitter
JavaScript
Blogger
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
YouTube (Circa 2005)
Everything to Know about Facemash, the Site Zuckerberg Created in College to Rank ‘hot’ Women by Sam Brodsky, Metro.us
Post-it Notes Were Invented by Accident by Daven Hiskey, Today I Found Out
Viagra Turns 20: The History of the “Little Blue Pill” by Lisa Beebe, Roman Health
Modern Family
Blade Runner
The Sunk Cost Fallacy by David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart
King Midas and the Golden Touch by Amy Friedman and Meredith Johnson, uexpress
How Did Mario Mendoza Become a Shorthand for Batting Futility? by Chris Landers, MLB.com
The Science of the Resting Bitch Face and How to Prevent It by Vanessa Van Edwards, Science of People
What Is a 360 Review in the Workplace? by Susan M. Heathfield, The Balance Careers
How to Tell Someone They Have Something in Their Teeth by Susan Sherwood, How Stuff Works
Kyle Maynard: How to Live Without Limits, The Tim Ferriss Show #251
Why Small Biz Owners Should Hope for 4-star Reviews over 5 on Yelp and Google by Michael Grothaus, Fast Company
Shaun White and the Magic of “Who Cares?” The Tim Ferriss Show #140
Instagram: Here’s Why We Just Sold For $1 Billion by Alyson Shontell, Business Insider
Why Instagram Is Becoming Facebook’s Next Facebook by Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Where is Your Herbie? by Wayne Chaneski, Modern Machine Shop
The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Investopedia
The Complete Story of Civilization by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
Cliffs Notes
The New York Times Best Sellers
How to Write a Bestselling Book This Year — The Definitive Resource List and How-To Guide by Tim Ferriss
How to Tell When Someone Is Talking BS about AI by Lisa Lacy, The Drum
“Blockchain Technology” Is a Buzzword With Little Meaning. Here’s What Matters. by Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center

SHOW NOTES

The book Kevin has been gifting most frequently. [04:34]
Another book that helped Kevin in his early days of entrepreneurship that drove home the importance of doing the simple thing first. [06:31]
How has Kevin implemented the idea of doing the simple thing first in his own operations, and why is it so important? [08:03]
Instagram’s origin story as a check-in app called Burbn, and how Kevin and his co-founder Mike kept things simple even when it became clear they’d have to pivot their business model into something else. [11:56]
In the transition from Burbn to what would become Instagram, how did Kevin and Mike decide which features to keep and which ones to eliminate? [15:41]
How filters became part of Instagram’s big picture. [17:19]
What is Stanford’s Mayfield Fellows Program, what was the deciding factor that granted Kevin access to this exclusive curriculum, and what were the most important lessons he learned from the experience? [19:28]
What Kevin confirmed about his learning style from the Golden Personality Test that Ray Dalio has people take at Bridgewater. [22:07]
How Mortimer Adler recommends reading nonfiction books most effectively. [24:29]
A sampling of the kind of books currently occupying Kevin’s nightstand. [26:38]
What was Odeo, and what did Kevin learn during his internship there? [27:27]
From the time they worked together at Odeo, what does Kevin see as Evan Williams’ superpowers? [29:31]
An examination of some of the most successful pivots in recent history and why some entrepreneurs handle the process better than others. [32:44]
Is the ability to make the right call between pivoting or stopping a project altogether intrinsic, or something that can be trained? [36:50]
Someone needs to write a 10-volume set about the bad ideas of amazing people. It could be called There Is No Midas Touch. [38:10]
Approaches for getting honest feedback when it’s time to stress test — especially when people are wired to avoid conflict and might not want to hurt your feelings. [40:21]
Some honest — but difficult to acquire — feedback Kevin was grateful to get during his early days of stage presentation that helped him improve. [42:56]
Learning how to take honest feedback non-defensively may be the key to giving honest feedback without fear. [44:37]
What is a 360 interview, and what can it teach us? [45:12]
Disallowing seven on a one-to-10 scale when soliciting feedback is a good way to prompt honesty. [47:59]
Tough times Kevin has experienced on his entrepreneurial journey and how he’s bounced back. [49:16]
Selling Instagram for a billion dollars should have felt like winning, but Kevin explains why it was bittersweet at the time and how he responded to it all. [53:48]
The power of understanding your own motivators and what gets you out of bed in the morning, and how Kevin discovered he’s not actually as competitive as he’d always assumed. [57:42]
How did Kevin learn to manage, and why does he strongly support the idea of hiring up? [58:44]
Mr. Systrom elaborates on the meetings he and Mike would have specifically to get through decision-making bottlenecks and how this was inspired by Herbie from The Goal. [1:02:17]
How does Kevin choose the books he’s going to read? [1:07:42]
What Kevin gets most out of reading history books. [1:09:46]
Some of my recommended biographies and histories. [1:12:12]
Advice Kevin gives to entrepreneurs (and I give to aspiring authors) — that very few actually take. [1:13:41]
Other mistakes Kevin sees entrepreneurs and creators making often. [1:18:01]
What would Kevin’s billboard say? [1:20:29]
Parting thoughts. [1:22:43]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Mike Krieger
Nicole Systrom
Freya Systrom
Ray Dalio
Eric Ries
Diane Systrom
Douglas Systrom
Mortimer Adler
Evan Williams
Noah Glass
Jack Dorsey
David Allen
Steve Jobs
Mario Mendoza
Joe Gebbia
Kyle Maynard
Shaun White
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
David McCullough
Naval Ravikant

Amanda Palmer on Creativity, Pain, and Art (#368)

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“I’m just so fundamentally optimistic, and I barrel forth in life with this attitude that everything is going to be absolutely fine and go my way.”

— Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) is a singer, songwriter, playwright, pianist, author, director, blogger, and ukulele enthusiast who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, and art. She first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their inventive songcraft and wide-ranging theatricality.

Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, featuring such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded Theatre Is Evil, which made a top 10 debut on the SoundScan/Billboard 200 upon its release in 2012 and remains the top-funded original music project on Kickstarter. In 2013 she presented The Art of Asking at the annual TED conference, which has since been viewed over 20 million times worldwide. The following year saw Palmer expand her philosophy into the New York Times best-selling memoir and manual, The Art of Asking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Let People Help.

Since 2015 Palmer has used the patronage subscription crowdfunding platform Patreon to fund the creation of her artwork. This has enabled her to collaborate with artists all over the world with over 14,000 patrons supporting her creations each month. Palmer released her new solo piano album and accompanying book of photographs and essays, There Will Be No Intermission, on March 8, 2019, followed by a global tour. Recorded in late 2018 with grammy-winning Theatre Is Evil producer/engineer John Congleton at the helm, the album is a masterwork that includes life, death, abortion, and miscarriage among its tentpole themes.

Watch the interview on YouTube.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #368: Amanda Palmer on Creativity, Pain, and Art
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/b5a6cb4c-7c17-4f73-bb33-66518d39ccb2.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”
Watch the interview on YouTube.

Want to hear an episode with Amanda’s husband? — Listen to my conversation with author and world treasure Neil Gaiman, in which we discuss the writing process, first drafts, artistic collaboration, daily routines, and the merits of fountain pens. Stream below or right-click here to download.

#366: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years To Dohttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/c23f9079-1e14-4b4c-93cc-5dbe8684d06f.mp3Download

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Amanda Palmer:

Website | Patreon | Twitter | Instagram

There Will Be No Intermission by Amanda Palmer: Vinyl | CD | Patreon | Bandcamp
Amanda Palmer on How to Fight, Meditate, and Make Good Art, The Tim Ferriss Show #67
The Dresden Dolls
1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
Theatre Is Evil by Amanda Palmer
The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer, TED 2013
The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help by Amanda Palmer
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss
Dropping Ashes on the Buddha by Zen Master Seung Sahn
Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Rare Footage of The Eight-Foot Bride by Amanda Palmer, YouTube
Woolworths
Star Wars
Black, White, and Jedi Over: Zen Themes in Star Wars by Lee Neikirk, Medium
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD
Adam Gazzaley: The Maverick of Brain Optimization, The Tim Ferriss Show #67
FKK: Freikˆrperkultur by Rubab Paracha, Study in Germany
Steroids and Cancer — What You Need to Know by Karen Raymaakers, Verywell Health
The Day after the Longest Day of the Year by Amanda Palmer, Patreon
Peet’s Coffee
What Is a Miscarriage? Planned Parenthood
Kripalu
Beloved Demons by C. Anthony Martignetti
Tara Brach on Meditation and Overcoming FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), The Tim Ferriss Show #94
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
The Sandman: A Beginner’s Guide by Scott Meslow, GQ
Profligation, Oxford Living Dictionary
The Cure
The Legendary Pink Dots
History of Muzak: Where Did All The Elevator Music Go? by Jennifer Gersten, WQXR
Knock-on Effect, Merriam-Webster
Men vs. Women on Pain: Who Hurts More? by Alice Park, Time
Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide by Tim Ferriss
Doc Parsley’s Sleep Remedy
Amanda Palmer Is Crowdfunding Again, but This Time on Patreon by Stuart Dredge, The Guardian
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by David Delamare
Death by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
Amanda Palmer at SXSW 2019

SHOW NOTES

Books are heavy. Amanda shares one of her favorites that she lifts and gifts most often, and explains how it got her through that one time she was arrested outside an Adelaide Woolworths. [08:02]
Amanda’s current book obsession and musings about humanity’s uneven relationship with knowledge, understanding, compassion, and sleep. [15:41]
Reflecting on profound interviews and the nature of Amanda’s most recent project — what she considers to be her most personal to date. [21:10]
The metric Amanda is using to gauge the success of this record. [23:10]
How baring one’s pain and vulnerability can be a generous act. [23:47]
“Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. This performance will last seven years.” [28:01]
How Amanda met her mentor Anthony, the difference he made in her life, and how she coped with the pain of losing him to a rare form of leukemia, sitting at his deathbed, and the mourning process. [30:33]
Amanda takes us through her heartbreaking — and empowering — Christmas miscarriage. [41:46]
Why people — women, especially — should be encouraged to talk more openly about trauma, loss, and grief. [52:48]
“What are you unwilling to feel?” Amanda talks about an early fear she’s mostly overcome and what she considers to be her current Achilles’ heel. [55:50]
The first time Amanda remembers feeling not okay — which likely contributed to her deep-seated fear of feeling unbelieved. [1:01:37]
Amanda addresses the “tyrannical and destructive” myth of everlasting pain being a necessary component of the creative process. [1:06:03]
On understanding and harnessing one’s pain to make it useful to others, the difference between the pain of childbirth and the pain of imminent danger, and pain as a metaphor for our society. [1:12:46]
What we risk when pain becomes our primary motivator. [1:18:22]
What we risk as a society when we marginalize the pain of others or monopolize it as a proving ground, and why recognizing that we’re all suffering from some kind of pain — whether it’s physiological or psychological — should be a shame-free part of the cultural conversation. [1:20:33]
What is the knock-on effect? [1:29:30]
How has moving to a fan-supported model changed Amanda and her art? [1:31:09]
What was the boiling point that proved crowdfunding to be an ideal business model for the way Amanda creates? [1:36:04]
An example of how crowdfunding helped an artist get his book out to the world when the traditional publishing model failed — and its community offered unconditional support when the worst imaginable thing happened to the creator. [1:37:32]
What Amanda especially likes about her community at Patreon. [1:39:53]
Crowdfunding platforms may change and evolve, but the current iterations prove that people can come together to ensure their favorite artists don’t have to starve for their art (or deal with a marketing department’s tampering to make said art more appealing to the masses). [1:41:12]
Parting thoughts and how you can seek out and support Amanda’s efforts and offerings in the Palmerverse. [1:44:10]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Seung Sahn
Anthony Martignetti
Yoda
Matthew Walker
Adam Gazzaley
Neil Gaiman
Little Ash
Nicolas Despo
Terry Pratchett
Tara Brach
Leonard Cohen
Kirk Parsley
Wendy Ice
David Delamare
The Medici Family
David Eagleman

Eric Schmidt — Lessons from a Trillion-Dollar Coach (#367)

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“You can systematize innovation even if you can’t completely predict it.”

— Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) is Technical Advisor and Board Member to Alphabet Inc., where he advises its leaders on technology, business and policy issues. Eric joined Google in 2001 and helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology. He served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer from 2001-2011, and Executive Chairman 2011-2018, alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Eric serves on the boards of The Mayo Clinic and The Broad Institute, among others. His philanthropic efforts through The Schmidt Family Foundation focus on climate change, including support of ocean and marine life studies at sea, as well as education, specifically cutting-edge research and technology in the natural sciences and engineering. He is the founder of Schmidt Futures, which works to improve societal outcomes through the development of emerging science and technology.

He is the co-author of The New Digital Age, How Google Works, and the new book, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell, which he co-authored with fellow Google leaders Jonathan Rosenberg (@jjrosenberg) and Alan Eagle (@aeaglejr).

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #367: Eric Schmidt — Lessons from a Trillion-Dollar Coach
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/d26d7aad-bb59-4032-93d5-2c0c57544da5.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”

Want to hear an episode with Silicon Valley’s most feared and well-liked journalist? — Listen to my conversation with Kara Swisher, in which we discuss war stories, missed opportunities, optimistic pessimism, and the art and craft of good questions. (Stream below or right-click here to download.)

#218: The Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist in Silicon Valley - Kara Swisherhttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/c56aa13c-13b2-4a55-89d6-433240f3ee73.mp3Download

This episode is brought to you by Inktel. Ever since I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, I’ve been frequently asked about how I choose to delegate tasks. At the root of many of my decisions is a simple question: “How can I invest money to improve my quality of life?” Or “how can I spend moderate money to save significant time?”

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Eric Schmidt:

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
How Google Works by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Sun Microsystems’ Rise And Fall by Lee Gomes, Forbes
Novell
Xerox Alto, Computer History Museum
Xerox PARC
The History of the Apple Lisa by Christoph Dembach, Mac History
The History of the Apple Macintosh by Christoph Dembach, Mac History
Digital Equipment Corporation
Hewlett-Packard
Oracle
Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, Stanford GSB
Alphabet Chief Sees AI Helping Spur Scientific Discovery by Jon Nalick, Caltech
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Pair Programming in the Workplace by Sam Harris, freeCodeCamp.org via Medium
The Go Programming Language
Eric Schmidt: “Change Happens when Things are Hard” by Dave Murphy, Stanford Business
Compaq
Kleiner Perkins
National Semiconductor
Fairchild Corporation
The Traitorous 8 and Birth of Silicon Valley by Wade Slome, Investing Caffeine
Intel
Lockheed Martin
Microsoft
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff
Could Boston Be the Next Silicon Valley? by Richard Taylor, BBC News
Why the Next Silicon Valley Will Probably Be Outside the US by Richard Florida, CityLab
Cisco
What is Proxy Caching? by Robert Gibb, MaxCDN
YouTube
Netflix
What Is a CDN? How Does a CDN Work?, Cloudflare
Sequoia
Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google with Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners
70-20-10: Vital Statistics That Helped, The Independent
Walmart’s New Ceo Has Made Its Iconic Saturday Morning Meeting Optional by Max Nisen, Quartz
Former CEO Eric Schmidt Says Google Had to Revamp Its Whole Hiring Process Because They Were Interviewing Candidates 16 Times by Nick Bastone, Business Insider
Silicon Valley’s Legendary ‘Coach’ Bill Campbell Has Died by Kara Swisher, Recode
Chegg
Real Life Extension: Caloric Restriction or Intermittent Fasting? (Part 1) by Tim Ferriss, Tim’s Blog
Why Is Too Much Sugar Bad for You? by Lauren Cox, Live Science
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

SHOW NOTES

Why did Eric begin his undergrad in architecture and shift to electrical engineering? [08:17]
Eric talks about working at Sun Microsystems in 1983 and contrasts the world of electronics then with today. [10:06]
How did Eric wind up at Sun and who does he consider his mentors from those days? [12:22]
Has Eric always been known as a clear communicator, or is it something he developed over time? [14:28]
What did Eric learn about the executive arts at this point in his career, and how did they differ from the way things are done today? [15:23]
When you’re teaching, learning, and doing business in uncharted territory, sometimes you’ve got to write the reference material. [18:19]
On the seemingly everywhere venture capitalist John Doerr and how small Silicon Valley is — and was, especially in its early days — despite how vast it might appear to outsiders. [20:26]
Eric’s 30-second history of Silicon Valley. [24:07]
Does Eric believe Silicon Valley is a unique, non-recurring phenomenon? What would it take to replicate its positive characteristics for entrepreneurship elsewhere? [26:35]
John Doerr’s role in introducing Eric to Google. [28:36]
Eric sets the scene of his interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin. [29:57]
How time proved all sides right in an argument between Eric, Larry, and Sergey about proxy caches. [31:07]
During his Google interview/argument, what clued Eric in to the fact that he was dealing with atypical founders? [32:36]
How did Larry and Sergey assess Eric as a potential leader, and what qualities in Eric did John Doerr see as a complement to those of the Google founders? [33:23]
In what ways did Eric lend his “adult supervision” to manage the brilliant chaos of early Google and spur its growth? [35:13]
Eric explains Sergey’s 70-20-10 model and how it’s been applied at Google. [37:24]
What Eric believes a company should focus on to keep growing pains from becoming an equally scalable distraction. [39:29]
What Eric considers his most important job as a CEO. [41:08]
What did Google’s weekly meeting schedule look like initially, and how has it adapted over time? Is it what Eric would consider ideal? [42:37]
Who was Bill Campbell, and why did Eric, together with Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle, write Trillion Dollar Coach about him? [46:13]
Why does coaching matter in the business world, and what made Bill such an exceptionally gifted coach? [47:34]
What were Bill’s opinions about starting and running meetings? [49:27]
The key difference between a coach and a manager. [50:44]
The importance of regularly articulating motivating principles over falling back on feelgood cliches. [52:00]
How would Bill facilitate solutions when decision makers didn’t see eye-to-eye? [53:37]
When Google went public in 2004, Bill recommended that Eric step aside as chairman, but made sure he would be reinstated as chairman later. What was his thinking behind this, and how did he pitch it to Eric? [54:57]
Though Eric was initially resistant to the idea of having a coach, here’s what happened during his first meeting with Bill to convince him otherwise. [56:33]
An example of how Bill moved when charged to execute a task. [58:23]
How does one person successfully lead 100? Ask Bill Coughran. [59:23]
What types of words would Bill Campbell write behind his whiteboard to prompt conversation in a meeting, and how would he structure the results? [1:01:23]
How did Bill Campbell walk the delicate line between simultaneously helping Google and Apple — and being so trusted by both? [1:03:10]
What was Bill Campbell’s secret for accurately sniffing out BS when people weren’t being honest with him, and what were the consequences of such dishonesty if discovered? [1:06:21]
As Bill reportedly told Chegg’s Dan Rosensweig, “I don’t take cash, I don’t take stock, and I don’t take shit.” So how was he compensated? What were his primary motivations? [1:08:01]
As someone who was always trying to find the right people for the right problems, how did he handle firing the wrong people when things didn’t work out? [1:10:53]
How Bill became part of “the fabric” at Google — and Apple — and facilitated conversations between the two in a way no one else could. [1:11:24]
As a coach, how did Bill course correct Eric when he saw him violating his own rules? [1:13:10]
What were some of Bill’s workplace and weekday rituals? [1:14:22]
What Eric tries to incorporate into his own life from Bill’s Saturday morning routine. [1:15:27]
What does a typical morning look like for Eric? [1:16:36]
How would Eric recommend that someone in need of a coach vet potential candidates? [1:17:50]
What does Eric hope to gain (or lose) by intermittent fasting? [1:18:46]
What book does Eric gift the most, and why? [1:21:04]
Does Eric have any favorite failures or challenges that set the stage for later successes? [1:24:00]
Eric’s co-pilot was instructed to be unhelpful during jet training as a way to prompt leadership-level decisions. When did Eric first notice something amiss, and how did he deal with it? [1:26:33]
Has Eric’s exposure to the arts developed his intuition in a way that’s been useful toward making hyper analytical business decisions? [1:27:48]
What would Bill Campbell have considered “success?” [1:30:20]
What would Eric’s billboard say? [1:31:34]
Parting thoughts. [1:34:40]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Bill Campbell
Jonathan Rosenberg
Alan Eagle
Bill Joy
Butler Lampson
Bernard Lacroute
Peter Wendell
John Doerr
Vinod Khosla
Terry Semel
Arthur Rock
Steve Jobs
John Chambers
Larry Page
Sergey Brin
Bill Gates
Salar Kamangar
Susan Wojcicki
Marissa Mayer
Jack Dorsey
Jeff Bezos
Sheryl Sandberg
Bill Coughran
Kara Swisher
Dan Rosensweig
Peter Attia
Dominic D’Agostino
Steven Pinker

Neil Gaiman — The Interview I’ve Waited 20 Years To Do (#366)

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“The biggest problem we run into is going, ‘This is who I am, this is what I’m like, this is how I function’ while failing to notice that you don’t do that anymore.”

— Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) is the bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories, film and television for all ages, including Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The View from the Cheap Seats and the Sandman series of graphic novels. His fiction has received Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Will Eisner Awards, among many other awards and honours.

His novelistic retelling of Norse myths, Norse Mythology, has been a phenomenon, and an international bestseller, and won Gaiman his ninth Audie Award (for Best Narration by the Author).

Recently Gaiman wrote all six episodes of, and has been the full-time showrunner, for the forthcoming BBC/Amazon Prime mini-series adaptation of Good Omens, based on the beloved 1990 book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.

Many of Gaiman’s books and comics have been adapted for film and television including Stardust (starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), Coraline (an Academy Award nominee and the BAFTA winner for Best Animated Film), and How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a movie based on Gaiman’s short story. The television series Lucifer is based on characters created by Gaiman in Sandman. His 2001 novel, American Gods, is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated TV series, now entering its second season.

In 2017, Neil Gaiman became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he lives in the United States, where he is Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #366: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years To Do
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/c23f9079-1e14-4b4c-93cc-5dbe8684d06f.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”
Watch the interview on YouTube.

Want to hear an episode with another world-building dreamer? — Listen to my conversation with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky in which we discuss nomadic writing, how to navigate tough conversations over creativity and control, dealing with critics, and much more. Stream below or right-click here to download.

#263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Arthttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/d1969bd1-650c-448e-b4a2-273e3d81619b.mp3Download

This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.

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This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is also brought to you by Hello Monday, a new podcast from LinkedIn’s Editorial Team filled with the kind of advice that stays with you — the kind you can actually use.

Each week, host Jessi Hempel sits down with featured guests, such as Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, to uncover lessons you can apply to your career.

For example, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about relieving creative pressure to get more done: As Liz was approaching her follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love, she tried to write for six million people and felt overwhelmed. Instead, she focused on writing for her 10 closest friends. She didn’t know how to please millions of strangers, but did know how to reach those 10 friends.

Find Elizabeth Gilbert’s episode and other episodes from Hello Monday on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Neil Gaiman:

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Tim Ferriss
Roger Dean: How I Designed the Yes Classic Close to the Edge by Sid Smith, Louder
Views by Roger Dean
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Irregular Lives of Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl by 009, Artistic License Renewed
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
Parson’s Pleasure by Roald Dahl, Esquire
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Marriott World Trade Center
Neil Gaiman’s Writing Shed, The Well-Appointed Desk
This Is What A Handwritten Novel By Neil Gaiman Looks Like by Hayley Campbell, BuzzFeed
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Moleskine Notebooks
Leuchtturm Notebooks (and on Twitter: @leuchtturm1917)
Legatoria Rivoaltus, Venice
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
The Fountain Pen Hospital
Lamy Safari Fountain Pen
Namiki-Pilot Falcon Collection Fountain Pen
Visconti Fountain Pens
The Pilot 823 “Workhorse”
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman Ices His Hand via Imgur
Neil Gaiman: ‘The Book I Wish I’d Never Written’ by Rebecca Hawkes, The Telegraph
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
The Addams Family
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
Groundhog Day
Plant Engineering
The Power of the Dog. Cabal (2003-2013) by Neil Gaiman
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Johnny and the Dead (The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy) by Terry Pratchett
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
A Beginner’s Guide to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld by David G. Lloyd, The Conversation
The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Bertorelli’s Italian Restaurant, Yelp
The Necrotelicomnicon, The Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki
Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman
The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe
The Omen
The Sandman: A Beginner’s Guide by Scott Meslow, GQ
The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman, John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
The Teaser and Official Trailers for Good Omens with Michael Sheen and David Tennant
Terry Pratchett: Living with Alzheimer’s
Terry Pratchett Defends Choosing to Die Documentary from Critics by Haroon Siddique, The Guardian
Good Omens’ Garden of Earthly Delights Descends Upon SXSW 2019, Austin American-Statesman
Queen

SHOW NOTES

How long has this interview been in the making? [09:37]
An early interview failure that Neil resolved to never repeat. [10:47]
On separating home life from work life and the writing habits of Maya Angelou and Ian Fleming. [15:55]
Neil’s biggest rule for writing. [20:16]
Neil’s process for writing first drafts. [23:35]
What Neil aims to accomplish with his second drafts. [25:49]
Something Neil noticed when he first started writing and editing with the use of computers. [26:28]
What notebooks does Neil prefer for writing first drafts? [29:13]
Fountain pens Neil has known and loved. [35:21]
How many book signings does it take to get to the bottom of a Pilot 823’s structural capacity? How about Neil’s signing hand? How many such pens given in sacrifice by Neil’s three-year-old will appease his house gods? [39:39]
Neil’s journey from manual typewriter to electric typewriter to computer to notebook, and the power of trivializing weighty endeavors — whether they’re writing novels or going for gold medals. [41:49]
How Coraline went from being an unpublishable labor of love for Neil’s children to an award-winning novella. [47:48]
Does Neil tend to work on multiple projects at once? [53:22]
Why does Neil take particular delight in writing introductions to other people’s work? [55:24]
At what time of day does Neil prefer to work, and has this changed over the years? [56:50]
Advice to aspiring novelists about finding a routine: The more you can be like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, the better. [59:35]
The importance of understanding that just because we do something one way today doesn’t mean we’ll be doing it that way tomorrow. [1:01:28]
How a touching post on Neil’s blog (which I recommend everyone read) inspired me to adopt my own dog, Molly. [1:03:16]
What’s the genesis story of The Graveyard Book? [1:04:10]
Neil makes the case for giving the ensemble version of The Graveyard Book a listen. [1:15:29]
Who was Terry Pratchett, and how did he and Neil strike up a friendship? [1:16:24]
On working with Douglas Adams and the germ of the idea that became Neil and Terry’s collaboration, Good Omens. [1:20:12]
Neil shares his preposterous writing schedule from simultaneously working on Good Omens, Sandman, and The Books of Magic — something only someone very insane (or very young) could possibly handle. [1:23:08]
Why, after so many misfires trying to get Good Omens on the screen, we’ll finally see an uncompromising television adaptation soon. [1:24:30]
Where to find out more about Good Omens — the book and the series. [1:30:58]
What does Neil feel he learned most from his “apprenticeship” with Terry? [1:32:40]
How did Terry approach his own mortality when he learned he had Alzheimer’s disease? [1:34:45]
Before he passed away, Terry opened up a controversial dialogue around the right to die for people with terminal diseases like Alzheimer’s. What is Neil’s view? [1:38:14]
What would Terry think of the Good Omens series and its related fanfare? How might things have gone differently if he’d been directly involved in production? [1:39:50]
Time flies when you’re interviewing Neil Gaiman. (For the record, I hope to fly again sooner than later.) [1:45:09]
Parting thoughts. [1:46:03]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Michael Moorcock
Dave Dickson
Roger Dean
Maya Angelou
Ian Fleming
James Bond
Roald Dahl
Ash Gaiman
John McPhee
Joe Hill
Charles Dickens
Kim Newman
Shaun White
Coraline
Holly Gaiman
Jane Yolen
Maddy Gaiman
Jennifer Hershey
Shadow Moon
Lurch
James Thurber
Tori Amos
Gene Wolfe
Cabal
Molly
David Gaiman
Michael Gaiman
Rudyard Kipling
Terry Pratchett
Lenny Henry
Derek Jacobi
Miriam Margolyes
Reece Shearsmith
Douglas Adams
Christopher Marlowe
Michelangelo
K. Rowling
Terry Gilliam
Agnes Nutter
Hugh Jackman
Wolverine
George R.R. Martin
Michael Sheen
David Tennant
Jon Hamm
Jeff Bezos

Michael Pollan — Exploring the Frontiers of Psychedelics (#365)

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“An overactive ego is a tyrant.” – Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

His newest book is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which will be available as a paperback in May.

And if you haven’t yet, check out “Trip of Compassion”, which is the most compelling movie I’ve seen in the last year. It documents one unusual approach to healing trauma that might astonish you, an innovative treatment involving the psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known as “ecstasy”). As you will see firsthand, if the therapy is well designed, true rebirth and transformation can happen in a matter of weeks and not years. Find out more by clicking here.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #365: Michael Pollan — Exploring the Frontiers of Psychedelics
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/54edeb9a-7665-4522-9ecf-91219d757dbb.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”
Watch the interview on YouTube.

Want to hear another episode that explores science and psychedelics? — Listen to my conversation with Paul Stamets, an intellectual and industry leader in the habitat, medicinal use, and production of fungi. Stream below or right-click here to download.

#340: Paul Stamets — How Mushrooms Can Save You and (Perhaps) the Worldhttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/a347d207-3697-4540-a7fd-5f5344067421.mp3Download

This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.

As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you’ll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.

This podcast is also brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs.

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Michael Pollan:

Website | Twitter | Facebook

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Psychotomimetic Effects of PCP, LSD, and Ecstasy: Pharmacological Models of Schizophrenia? by Vibeke Sorensen Catts and Stanley V. Catts
Psycholytic and Psychedelic Therapy Research 1931-1995: A Complete International Bibliography compiled by Torsten Passie
Bogus Science: LSD and Chromosome Damage, The Vaults of Erowid
LSD Users Stare at Sun, Snopes
The Time and Life Acid Trip: How Henry R. Luce and Clare Boothe Luce Helped Turn America On to LSD by Jack Shafer, Slate
The Blood Feud That Launched the War on Drugs by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, Politico Magazine
How Ken Kesey’s LSD-Fuelled Bus Trip Created the Psychedelic ’60s by Edward Helmore, The Guardian
Thirty Years of Psychedelic Research:The Spring Grove Experiment and Its Sequels by Richard Yensen, Ph.D. and Donna Dryer, M.D., M.P.H.
Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit
Rapid and Sustained Symptom Reduction Following Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety and Depression in Patients with Life-Threatening Cancer: A Randomized Controlled Trial by Stephen Ross et al., Journal of Psychopharmacology
I Took a Psychedelic Drug for My Cancer Anxiety. It Changed My Life by Dinah Bazer, Time
Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance by R.R. Griffiths et al., Psychopharmacology
Long-Term Follow-Up of Psilocybin-Facilitated Smoking Cessation by Matthew W. Johnson et al., The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse
The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan, The Wall Street Journal
Psilocybin with Psychological Support for Treatment-Resistant Depression: Six-Month Follow-Up by R.L. Carhart-Harris et al., Psychopharmacology
A Double-Blind Trial of Psilocybin-Assisted Treatment of Alcohol Dependence, New York University School of Medicine
The FDA Approved a New Ketamine Depression Drug — Here’s What’s Next by Angela Chen, The Verge
A Dose of Anesthesia Could Blunt Traumatic Memories by Stephanie Pappas, Live Science
Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI) by Matthew M. Nour, Lisa Evans, David Nutt, and Robin L. Carhart-Harris, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
What Is the Difference between 5-MeO DMT and DMT? Choosing a DMT Therapy by Roger R., Psychedelic Times
Ibogaine Therapy for Drug Addiction, MAPS
The Brutal Mirror: What the Psychedelic Drug Ayahuasca Showed Me about My Life by Sean Illing, Vox
Basic Cocktails: How To Make An Old Fashioned, Cocktail Chemistry
The Psychedelic Toad, Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia S2 EP1
The Rotating Mask Illusion, eChalk
Maria Sabina and the Psychedelic Revolution by Robert Bitto, Mexico Unexplained
Bach Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor by Yo-Yo Ma
Depression as a Disease of Modernity: Explanations for Increasing Prevalence by Brandon H. Hidaka, Journal of Affective Disorders
Psychedelics Panel Invited to Mainstream Healthcare Conference by Adam Snider, Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), The Mayo Clinic
Discovering a New Form of Communication in the Brain, Case Western Reserve University
Marcus Raichle on the Default Mode Network, VPRO Labyrint TV
fMRI Brain Imaging: Classic Hallucinogens vs. Mindfulness Meditation by Gary Weber, Science and Nonduality Conference 2012
The Science of Psilocybin and Its Use to Relieve Suffering by Roland Griffiths, TEDMED
The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs by Robin L. Carhart-Harris et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD Set for FDA Approval by 2021 by Rich Haridy, New Atlas
FDA Approves Psychedelic Magic Mushrooms Ingredient Psilocybin for Depression Trial by Kashmira Gander, Newsweek
After Dropping Bannon, The Mercers Are Looking Into Dropping Ecstasy by Cale Guthrie Weissman, Fast Company
Molly at the Marriott: Inside America’s Premier Psychedelics Conference by Casey Schwartz, The New York Times
LD50: 50% Lethal Dose, The MSDS HyperGlossary
Tusko: The Elephant who Died on LSD, Audible484
The Grateful Dead Dosed Everyone with LSD, RockTalk TV
Could Psychedelics Become an Accepted Treatment for Mental Health Problems? by Guy Kelly, The Telegraph
Powerful Hallucinogen Eyed as Treatment for Alzheimer’s, Chronic Pain, MAPS
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5): The Latest Edition of the DSM Makes Some Controversial Changes by Marcia Purse, Verywell Mind
Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond, The Tim Ferriss Show #347
Like Cannabis, Investors Are Shoving Millions into a Growing Psychedelic Industry by Reilly Capps, Rooster
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
What Do Babies Think? by Alison Gopnik, TEDGlobal 2011
Two Kinds of Consciousness by Alan Watts, AMP3083
Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity? by Adam Halberstadt and Mark Geyer, Scientific American
Shortcuts to an Infant-Like View on the World by Shaoni Bhattacharya, New Scientist
Magic Mushrooms As Therapy for Long-Term HIV Survivors? by Emily Land, BETA
Have More Died from Opioids in Two Years than in Vietnam War? by Douglas Soule, Politifact
“Trip of Compassion” — The Most Compelling Movie I’ve Seen In The Last Year by Tim Ferriss
Fantastic Fungi
The Heffter Research Institute
Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal by Tom Shroder
The Secret Chief Revealed by Myron J. Stolaroff
The Healing Journey: Pioneering Approaches to Psychedelic Therapy by Claudio Naranjo
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys by James Fadiman
American Society of Ketamine Physicians Directory
Michael Pollan’s Psychedelic Resources Page

SHOW NOTES

What are psychedelics? [08:05]
Why are so many declaring a renaissance in the field of psychedelic research, and what caused the dark age preceding it? [10:46]
Psychedelic applications Michael finds most promising. [16:30]
How do the effects of these substances linger long after their physical presence in the body? [22:33]
What compounds have most captured Michael’s curiosity, and why? [28:41]
Have any of Michael’s psychedelic excursions had a lasting effect? [33:37]
Michael describes his guided high-dose psilocybin experience and brush with ego death. [36:00]
What is the opposite of spiritual? [46:25]
What kind of pushback — and support — has Michael received since How to Change Your Mind was published? [47:34]
While some medical professionals decry psychedelic therapies as unquantifiable by science, Michael points out a lot of currently accepted treatments are equally mysterious. [52:25]
What is the default mode network (DMN), and what are the pros and cons of having an ego? [55:45]
A look at the path forward for therapeutic access to psychedelics: from federal approval to financing. [59:50]
While current press seems positive about the merits of psychedelic therapies, what can we do to avoid a ’60s-style public backlash and subsequent dark age? [1:05:28]
Are psychedelics physiologically safer than Tylenol? What are the psychological risks? [1:07:49]
What progress has been made in the acceptance of psychedelics as a topic of mainstream discussion since How to Change Your Mind was published? [1:11:32]
Psychedelics are not a panacea: a look at what they’re good — and probably not so good — at treating. [1:14:12]
In this field of study that’s so woefully underfunded, where might a potential investor best allocate their funds? [1:18:11]
Two recent documentaries anyone interested in this field should see. [1:25:27]
Worthwhile resources Michael recommends. [1:27:03]
How to find a guide for whatever journeys you may decide to take. [1:29:24]
Parting thoughts. [1:34:06]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Humphry Osmond
Aldous Huxley
Timothy Leary
Henry Luce
Clare Boothe Luce
Richard Nixon
Galileo Galilei
Roland Griffiths
William James
Andrew Weil
Thierry David
Maria Sabina
Johann Sebastian Bach
Yo-Yo Ma
Marcus Raichle
Robin Carhart-Harris
Rebekah Mercer
Steve Ross
Tom Insel
Stanislav Grof
Joshua Woolley
Alison Gopnik
Brian Anderson
Rick Doblin
Tom Shroder
Leo Zeff
Claudio Naranjo
James Fadiman

Ten Lessons I Learned While Teaching Myself to Code

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Note from the editor: The following is a guest post by Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99), a journalist who’s written about technology and science for two decades. Clive is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.

In his guest post, Clive outlines the most important lessons he learned teaching himself to code after interviewing 200+ programmers for his new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

Enter Clive…

So, you want to learn to code.

Join the club! We live in a time when, as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously put it, “…software is eating the world.” So the people who know how to program are in a catalytic spot; they can make things happen. Maybe you’ve watched this from the sidelines and thought: Huh. Could I learn to do that? Perhaps you’re out of school; maybe you can’t afford either the money or the time to go back and do a four-year degree in computer science. You’ve seen a zillion of these online tutorials in coding. Could you just sort of, well, teach yourself?

The short answer is: Sure you can.

The longer answer is… the rest of this essay.

The reason why I think you can do it is that I’ve met tons of people who did. I’m a science journalist who spent three years interviewing about 200 programmers for my upcoming book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. The bulk of them had studied computer science, but a surprisingly significant minority were self-taught. They were artists or accountants or speechwriters or marketers or musicians or carpenters or stay-at-home parents or people from just about any walk of life, but they’d gotten interested in coding, buckled down, and learned.

They inspired me, frankly, to dive in and teach myself. I’d gone my whole adult career doing essentially no coding. As a teen, back in the ’80s (I’m old, people), I’d learned some BASIC on those computers you plugged into your TV. It was a blast—I made little (terrible) video games and insult generators and bits of computer music, but I didn’t get very far because my mother refused to let our family own a computer. (“He’ll just sit around playing games all day long,” she told my dad.) So I never studied coding and, instead, did degrees in English and political science. As an adult, I’d really only tinkered with a bit of HTML and some web pages. When I started thinking about learning to code a few years ago, I had a day job and couldn’t study full time.

So I decided to teach myself in my spare hours. I wasn’t looking to become a full-time coder, mind you. I had no visions of creating some app and scoring boatloads of VC money. I was just curious to find out: how learnable was this, as a skill? Could I do it well enough to make software that was, at a minimum, useful for me?

The answer was, on all fronts, yes.

I learned a ton, and now I very frequently write code to help me in my job as a journalist and book author. I’ve written little scripts and programs that make my work and personal life easier. I’ve also discovered I enjoy it—it can be an absolute blast, intellectually and creatively.

Along the way, I gathered some hopefully-useful lessons for you.  Some of them from my own experience and some from talking to experts—those who teach programming and some full-time coders who taught themselves.

So the advice I gleaned, in order, is:

#1) The online world is your friend. Start there.

It’s never been easier to get started learning to code because there are dozens of free-or-cheap courses online. If you’d tried to do this even a decade ago, the pickings were slim. Now, it’s a cornucopia. Within five minutes of reading my list, you could be starting an online course.

Me, I decided to learn some JavaScript, since it’s a language that powers the web. After reading reviews and canvassing some recommendations, I started with the JavaScript lessons at Codeacademy, which begin very much at zero, assuming a newbie knows essentially nothing about programming concepts. Each lesson gives you a bit-by-bit primer on some part of coding—like assigning data to variables and using if-then statements—then challenges you to do something simple with it. After a few weeks using it, I read some blog posts touting freeCodeCamp, a different site for newbies, which integrates JavaScript alongside learning HTML and CSS, the languages for making web pages. I bounced back between the two tutorials, finding that their different approaches to teaching the same thing helped to cement the basics in my mind.

I didn’t stick to one language, though. I’d also heard that Python was a good language for neophytes, easier to pick even than JavaScript; and it’s used a lot in data analysis, something I was intrigued by. This time, instead of doing an online tutorial only, though, I used a book—Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way, which many coders highly praised online. Indeed, while doing these online courses, I also amassed a small collection of paper books, like Crash Course in Python, Automate the Boring Stuff With Python, and Eloquent JavaScript, all of which were really useful: They were fast to flip through and refresh a concept in my memory. There are a ton of resources online—the instant you forget how to reverse-sort a list in Python, you can Google it—but it turns out paper books are still very useful. A good book like Shaw’s has been organized specifically to structure info about a coding language so it makes sense.

A word of warning as you dive into online courses? Buyer beware: “Most of the stuff that says it’s ‘Great for a beginner’ is not,” as my friend Katrina Owen—a self-taught coder who works as an engineer for GitHub and founded Exercism, an open-source project that offers coding challenges to help sharpen your chops—says. She’s right. I’ve seen a ton of “tutorials” that are supposed to be for newbies but are written erratically. Half the time they’re great, patiently walking you through material, then half the time they assume you already know what an object or an IDE is. If you try these, you’ll wind up feeling frustrated and thinking that it’s your fault you don’t understand things, but it isn’t. So find recommendations: Read online reviews of a course, use my suggestions here, ask friends.

#2) Don’t stress over what language to pick.

Don’t get bogged down picking the “perfect” language to learn. Your goal in the early days is just to become familiar with the basic concepts of coding, which are similar across all languages.

“If you can learn one programming language, you can learn the other ones, and where you start doesn’t matter nearly as much as you might think,” as Quincy Larson, the founder of freeCodeCamp, told me. So pick one—the common ones for newbies are things like Python, JavaScript, Ruby, or, say, Microsoft’s C#—and dive in. You can switch around later or even, as I did, try a few and see which ones “take” better with your style of thinking. (Me, I prefer writing Python—it’s prettier, to my eyes—but JavaScript is more useful for building the web tools I use in my work, so I’ve stuck with both.) “Stop looking for the perfect coding course,” advises Madison Kanna, who taught herself programming at age 23. “Just pick a curriculum and stick with it.”

Actually, you may want to avoid Googling “What coding language should I learn?” because you’ll immediately find yourself deep in the sprawling flames wars that coders engage in over Which Language Sucks/Rocks. These arguments are a) frequently nuts and b) to the extent that they have any meaning, nothing you need to worry about right now.

Now, there’s one big exception to my rule here. If you’re learning to program specifically because you’re sick of your job and want to retain for full-time coding work, as fast as possible? Then your choice of language does matter. You want to match it up to market needs—specifically, your local market, notes my friend Saron Yitbarek, a developer and the founder of CodeNewbie, a podcast about programmers. So research your local job scene: What types of entry-level coding jobs exist, and what languages and skills do they ask for? Then find tutorials and books that will lead to those skills. “Find the jobs that you want, and then reverse engineer your curriculum,” she tells me.“ Too many people go, ‘Oh, I heard about JavaScript. Now I’m going to learn JavaScript.’ And they realize there are no JavaScript positions anywhere where they live. Then they’re stuck in a community that really wants them to learn .NET,” a Microsoft framework, “and they didn’t take the time to learn .NET.”   

#3) Code every day.

This is a big one. You should try to do some coding every day—at least, say, a half hour.

Why? Because this is just like learning Spanish or French: Fluency comes from constant use. To code is to speak to a computer, so you should be speaking often. Newbies often try to do big, deep dives on the weekends, but that’s too infrequent. “Programming languages are still languages, so attempting to learn them only on weekends doesn’t train your ability to use them naturally. It requires daily practice and study,” as Zed Shaw told me. But you’re busy, so how are you going to find time to code every day? Well, Shaw argues, take the time you normally allocate for something fun—watching TV, going out with friends, video games, watching sports—and use it instead to code daily. “It’s better to do one hour a day then ten hours on Saturday,” argues Avi Flombaum, who runs the Flatiron School, one of the first coding bootcamps, and now a WeWork company.

They’re right—this was precisely my experience. When I was doing a bit of coding every day, I found I could much more quickly grasp key concepts. But if I stopped for a few days or, every so often, a few weeks, when a crush of work in my day-job and a load of personal-life responsibilities arrived, it was like wiping the slate clean. I’d come back to work on a coding project and I’d have forgotten a shocking amount of basic stuff.

Related to this advice, it’s worth noting that learning to code—to the point where you can build something useful for yourself or others—isn’t going to happen quickly. A while ago there was a vogue for books with titles like Learn Java in 10 Hours, which is frankly insane. It’s more like, “Learn to code in ten months,” (or, as the longtime Google programmer Peter Norvig once wrote, “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”.) It was a few months before I was beginning to make little scripts and web tools that actually accomplished a useful task for myself.

And while getting a half-hour a day is useful, if you can do more, do more. Programming typically requires immersion: When you’re trying to understand a new concept, you’ll do a lot of staring at the screen, trying to grasp or visualize or apprehend the flow of logic or data through a snippet of code. Very often I’d find I would sit down to learn something in an evening, thinking I’d spent 30 minutes, then get stuck—and two hours would go by before I’d get unstuck. It isn’t always easy when you’ve got a busy life, but free up as much time as you can.

For sheer density of learning, one option to consider—if you have the money and time—is a bootcamp. These are crash courses, typically several months long, where you study programming all day (and often into the evening) in a formal schooling environment with instructors and classmates. (A good community college can offer similar courses.) Bootcamps aren’t cheap, averaging over $11,000 in tuition, though some defer tuition until you get your first coding job. Their great upside is that they give you a curriculum: “…it takes away ‘decision fatigue,’” notes Flatiron’s Flombaum. Teaching yourself to code on your own, requires endless decisions: Should I keep learning this language? Which JavaScript front-end framework should I try? “Whereas here you have someone making those decisions for you, so you can just focus on learning,” he notes.

The trick here is finding a good bootcamp. It’s an unregulated field, in which high-quality ones with solid track records of grads finding jobs exist cheek-by-jowl with dodgy, fly-by-night ones. In NYC where I live, some well-regarded ones are Flatiron (which also operates in eight other locations, including Houston, Washington and Atlanta), Grace Hopper (which also operates in Chicago), and General Assembly (which also operates in 19 other locations around the US, such as Austin, San Francisco and Boston). In San Francisco, it includes Hack Reactor and App Academy. It’s very much a city-by-city scene, though, so do your local research if you go this route; SwitchUp is a useful resource here.

#4) Automate your life.

When people think, “I’m going to learn to code,” they often assume it needs to end in making a product—some app like Facebook or Grubhub or Uber.

Sure, that could happen. But honestly, the more practical reason to learn to code is much simpler, more mundane, but much more personally powerful. You can very quickly learn to automate boring things in you life.

That’s because computers are amazing at doing dull, repetitive tasks. They’re also great at being precise. Since we humans are terrible at doing dull tasks and quite bad at being precise, this makes us a match made in heaven. So one enormous pleasure in learning to code is that you begin to see how you can automate many difficult, onerous tasks.

For example, when I’m reporting I often find a great speech on YouTube, and I want to copy and save the automatic transcription of it. The problem is, the transcriptions that YouTube generates are messy—every other line is a piece of timecode. So when I’d cut and paste them into a research file, the file would be long and hard to skim. I could go through and delete every other line, but yikes, what a hassle!

So instead, one evening I quickly wrote a dead-simple little web tool that lets me paste in a YouTube transcript, and, with a button-push, clean up the transcript, removing the timecode lines and rendering it into a single paragraph. It’s much easier to read that way.

I’ve written tons of other scripts to automate boring things. My youngest son once ran into a problem: He wanted to get his homework done quickly after getting home from school, and his teacher would post it to the school’s web site, but sometimes she’d delay. So he’d sit there, refreshing the page every so often, waiting for the homework to post. To automate that, I wrote a little web-scraper that would check the page every five minutes, and once it detected the homework was posted, it’d shoot a text message to me and my son—so he could now do whatever he wanted, knowing he’d get an automated alert. These days, I’m working on a little script that registers where I’ve parked the car on the streets of Brooklyn (where I live) and sends me an automated reminder when I need to move it before I get a ticket.

This is the secret value of coding, for me. I’m not going to quit my job to build a software company or get hired as a coder. But coding makes me more efficient, more empowered, at my job and in everyday life, often in weird and delightful ways. Odds are this will be true of you, too.

“Don’t learn to code, learn to automate,” writes the coder Erik Dietrich. This is bang on. Nearly every white-collar job on the planet involves tons of work that can be done more efficiently if you know a bit of coding. Maybe you can automate collecting info for reports; maybe you can automate dull, routine emails. (I’ve done that. Gmail makes it easy with built-in JavaScript.) Before Katrina Owen became a coder, she was working as a secretary in Paris and would build bits of software that automated parts of the office workflow: She made it so employees could upload their spreadsheets to a form, and it’d pick apart the spreadsheet and input the info into a database. It was insanely valuable—though, as she notes, “I had no idea what I was doing was coding.”

But it is. And, indeed, this sort of coding—tucked into the corner of your existing work—is insanely powerful. Rather than quit your job to become “a programmer,” learn some coding so you can become much more valuable at your existing career and maybe move up in pay. There are people who do that all the time, as Zach Sims, the founder of Codecademy, tells me.

“Coding,” he jokes, “is marketed poorly.”

#5) Prepare for constant, grinding frustration.

Coding is brutally, punishingly frustrating.

Why? Because the computer will do whatever you say—but only if you are perfectly, utterly precise in your instructions. One small mistake, one misplaced bracket, and odds are high the whole shebang stops working.

“Programming is a constant stream of failures thrown at you by a computer that does not care how you feel,” Shaw notes.

This is the fulcrum around which all coder experience, and all coder psychology, pivots. After interviewing scores of developers for Coders, I’ve come to an interesting conclusion: Being logical and systematic is not, at heart, what makes someone good at programming. Sure, you obviously need to be able to think logically, to break big tasks down into tiny steps. That’s a prerequisite. But if you asked me what’s the one psychological nuance that unifies all the coders I’ve interviewed?

They’re all able to handle total, crushing, incessant failure and roadblocks (at least, at the keyboard.) People think that programmers code all day long; you look at Hollywood movies, and the hackers’ fingers are flying, pouring out code onto the screen. Looks fun, right?

Nope. Most coding goes like this: You write a few lines of code, something intended to do something fairly simple, then you run a test on it, and… it doesn’t work. So you try to figure out what’s wrong, isolating sub-parts of the code and testing them, or Googling the error messages the computer spits up, in desperate hopes that someone else online has written about this particular problem. And quite often I’d discover, after long periods—minutes, certainly; often hours, sometimes days—that the problem was my own error, and an aggravatingly “how obvious” one: A tiny typo, a missing colon. Nothing has ever made me feel like an idiot so regularly, so routinely, than computer programming.

And this psychological storm doesn’t really let up, no matter how good you get or how long you code. I’ve spoken to top coders for places like Facebook or Google or Baidu, and they’ll tell you the same thing: They spend a lot of their time trying to figure out what’s wrong, why things aren’t working. They don’t make the stupid newbie mistakes I make, clearly, but since they now work on very complex systems, they run into very complex problems. Either way, they face grinding frustration, too.

Now, why would anyone endure such a grind? Because of the flip side. When you finally figure out the problem—when you fix the bug, and things start working—there’s a sudden, narcotic rush of pleasure that’s almost unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. It’s delightful, people. There are few things in life that give you that absolute sense of mastery and joy. My wife got used to hearing me give a sudden whoop when some busted piece of crappy code I’d been tinkering finally twitched its Frankensteinian eyes open and came to life.

It’s almost cheesy now to talk about the “growth mindset,” the idea that you should approach a new skill assuming it’s going to be hard, but it can be learned. But this is crucial with coding. The frustration will never let up; the better you get, the farther you’ll reach, and the more fiendish will become your bugs. But coding isn’t some mystical act. It’s just sheer persistence and work ethic. “It’s hard, but it’s not impossible,” as Owen says.

This is why, also, try not to get intimidated by other people’s code—or by programmers who breezily boast online, when you read a thread on Stack Overflow about how obvious some concept is. Ignore them. Everything in coding is hard the first time you do it. “Never compare yourself to others and don’t take online criticism personally,” says Lydia Hallie, a 21-year-old woman in Stockholm, who taught herself to code as a teenager. “The fact that you’re struggling when you’re teaching yourself how to code is completely normal and doesn’t say anything about how good of a programmer you’ll be later.”

#6) Build things. Build lots of things.

When you’re learning to code, you need to start trying to build things—real pieces of code you can use.

Certainly, the online tutorials and books are good for giving you the basics. But what really teaches you how code works is when you try to make a piece of software that does something. That’s when you finally grapple with what you do and don’t know. It’s the difference between learning French phrases from a book or in class, then going into a restaurant and ordering a meal.

Now, when I say “build things,” I don’t mean: Build the next Facebook or Snapchat—heh, no. It can be something tiny, something weird, something small—but it’s something you can use, or show to someone else. For example, early on while learning JavaScript and HTML, I started building little web apps that would do funny things like autogenerate surrealist Pokemon names (to amuse my kids); the night of the 2016 election, I was so stressed out I wrote a little script that just flashed a variety of zomg messages on the screen, so I could externalize my nervousness and have the computer freak out for me. These were all small and silly, but they had to at least function, and when you have to make something function, that’s when you learn.

One extreme example of this “build stuff” approach is Jen Dewalt. Back in 2013, she was a designer with a background in fine art but no real experience coding, when, at age 30, she decided to teach herself programming. To make it serious, she decided to make a website a day… for 180 days. At first they were incredibly simple pages, like a button you could click to change the background color. But within a few weeks, she’d learned enough to make little interactive games or a clock that displayed the time in words. And by the last few days, she was doing complex stuff, like a mood analyzer that would count how often hashtags like “#awkward” were being used on Twitter, in real time.

“I highly recommend starting with small, tangible projects,” she told me. If she wanted to make something, she’d use snippets of code she found at coder sites like Stack Overflow, not worrying if she didn’t understand them very well, so long as they worked. (Though she’d always type in the code, herself, to work it into her muscle memory. Zed Shaw suggests this, too. Don’t cut-and-paste code if you’re borrowing it from someone else. Type it in yourself; it forces you to ponder it a bit more deeply.)

Dewalt’s main advice? “Just Fucking Do It (#JFDI)!” The sooner you start trying to make things, the quicker you learn. You certainly may not have the ability to do what Dewalt did; she saved enough to not work for months, so she could learn coding all day long. (Not an option for me.) But the general idea—do little, tangible things—is key.

#7) “View Source”: Take other people’s code, pick it apart, and reuse it.

If you wanted to learn how a clock works, you’d disassemble it and try to reassemble it, right? That’s how the pioneering programmer Grace Hopper’s mind worked. As a curious kid, she took apart so many clocks, her parents bought her one just to disassemble and reassemble.

So it is with code. When you’re building stuff, you don’t need to start from scratch. You can grab things that already exist, rip them apart, and see how they work. It’s a superb way to learn. For example, very early on in my coding tutorials, I wanted to make a little web page to decode and encode secret messages for my kids, but I honestly hadn’t yet done enough HTML or JavaScript to figure this out. So I went to Codepen.io—a site where people post little web doodads and where you can inspect and reuse any of their code. I found a couple of text boxes that worked more or less the way I wanted and added in some secret-code decryption scripts. Presto: I had my project done. And by poking around in someone else’s project, I learned a bunch of useful new things about using JavaScript and HTML.

Later on, when I was looking to learn how to set up Node, a type of JavaScript used to run web servers, I started using Glitch. It’s like a server version of Codepen: There are tons of projects you can grab, remix and tinker with. I wanted to make a Twitterbot that auto-generates haikus, so I grabbed an existing Twitterbot on Glitch and started poking around in the code. By now, I understood enough JavaScript to be able to figure out what part of the Twitterbot I needed to rewrite, injecting my own function that takes 1,000 lines of haiku, randomly picks three, and squirts that out to Twitter as an insta-poem. It was a terrific way to get started. If I’d had to start from scratch, I’d never have done it.

“That’s how open source works,” as Chris Coyier, Codepen’s founder, tells me. You see something great, and you reuse it. “You’re in the clear, not just legally but morally.” Indeed, the vast majority of software you use all day long relies heavily on reused, open-source code—something someone grabbed and modified for their own purposes.

Also, starting with an existing app and making it do something new, something you uniquely want, can help prime your pump and make it less intimidating to begin a piece of code that stretches your boundaries. “It’s good when you’re not starting from a blank page because whenever I’m getting into learning a new language or a design pattern, when I started from a blank page I was overwhelmed and paralyzed,” as Jenn Schiffer, the director of community engineering for Glitch, tells me.

#8) Build things for you—code you need and want.

As I learned more coding, I realized I could make a lot of little pieces of software that were useful for me.

Here’s a funny one: I made my own Pomodoro timer. You may have heard of the “Pomodoro” technique, where you set a timer for 25 or 15 minutes and work in a focused way—not checking email or distracting yourself—until the dinger goes off, at which point you take a short break. It’s a great concept, and I used to use various Pomodoro timers online. But they all had one problem: They generally forced me to pick a quantum of time that was 15 or 25 minutes.

And, well, my procrastination problems were worse than that. I wanted a Pomodoro timer that would let me work for… five minutes. Or three. Or one minute. When I was truly avoiding work, hell, working for one damn minute would be a victory, people! But none of the Pomodoro software was designed for someone as horrifically work-avoidant as me.

So I thought, to hell with it, I’ll code my own. I used Python to make a simple “command line” timer that lets me pick precisely how many minutes I could work. (I can even pick increments: 10% of a minute! Six seconds!) And to make it funny and witty to use, I wrote a ton of cheery, you-go messages for when I finish each work session and coded it so the robotic voice of my computer speaks it aloud. (“Rock and roll,” the computer intones. “Boo ya.”) It is a weird, crazy piece of software, utterly specific to my needs. That’s precisely why no one else on the planet was going to make something like this! And why I made it for myself. It’s a customized app for an audience of one: Me. And wow, was it useful! I started using it on a daily basis; I still use it a few times a week, when I feel myself starting to slack off.

The more I coded, the more I found things I could build to make my work easier. I made web scrapers that would auto-grab material I needed off websites for journalistic research. I made Twitter scripts that would archive any links I posted to Twitter every day and email me a summary. When I got worried that I was too frequently using italics while writing my book (it is a bad habit, stylistically) I wrote a Python script to analyze the text, pull out every italicized word, and deliver me a long and humiliating list.

The point is, one of the best ways to motivate yourself to learn coding is to build little apps that actually do something you need done. It’s deeply motivating. If you’re coding in an abstract way, doing tutorials, it’s easy—when you get stuck—to think, ah, screw it, and stop. But if you’re actually building a tool you’re going to use? It pushes you to go further, to work past the frustration and the blockages.

By the way, this isn’t just about utilitarian tools. I also discovered I loved using P5.js (a “library” of JavaScript) to make little bits of interactive art, merely for the pleasure of making something pretty or playful. This is as good a motivation as any for learning to code, says Daniel Shiffman, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who makes fantastic learn-to-code videos (including some for P5.js that I learned from). Shiffman tells me that one great way in to coding is to take something artistic you like—music, drawing, games, wordplay and text—and learn programming that works within your field.

“It’s useful to learn programming in the context of applying it to something that you’re already passionate about,” he says. If you make music, try learning Sonic Pi, which lets you program tunes. If you dig art, learn P5.js or Processing. If you like games, make one with Phaser, also based on JavaScript. Approaching coding as a fun, creative hobby demystifies it. “It’s like the way you take up knitting or join a band. You find your local community of people who are hanging out in a coffee shop learning to code, just to have fun, and an experience where you don’t know where it’s leading—as opposed to, hey, I need to memorize the top five sorting algorithms so I can pass my Google interview.”

#9) Learn how to learn.

While researching my book, I visited with the programmer who’d created a Y Combinator company that had just landed its first series of funding. “What’s the secret to being a good coder,” I asked him? He laughed.

“It’s having good Google-fu,” he said. Sure, he’s a programmer, so he writes code. But what many programmers do much of the day is sit around Googling things, reading up, trying to figure out how to do something—how to solve a problem, how to kill a bug that has stopped them in their tracks.

And frankly, given how much there is to know, a lot of programmers tell me they’re constantly Googling even pretty basic stuff—like different ways to sort or chunk a list. They might have done it hundreds of times before, but there are so many little fiddly aspects of the languages they use that it feels weirdly inefficient to use their brains for rote memorization because they can just Google whatever rote knowledge they need to quickly recall. “I’d call myself a JavaScript expert,” as Glitch’s Schiffer tells me, “and I would say I can’t remember any string-manipulation function because I can just look it up.”

(I was so deeply relieved when she said that! Me, when I’m writing JavaScript and need to find the length of a string—i.e., how many characters in “Clive Thompson”?—I look it up. Every. Single. Time.)

So when you learn to code, your core skill is going to be constantly learning and constantly relearning. That’s true in the short term and the long term. Over the years, new languages and frameworks always emerge, and old ones evolve. “Being a programmer basically means you’ll be an eternal student,” as Lydia Hallie told me.

#10) Reach out to other coders.

Learning to code can be pretty isolating—it’s hours of just wrestling with the computer. And while it’s good to try to figure things out, yourself, sometimes the fastest way to get unstuck is to ask someone else, How the heck does this work?

So nearly everyone I know who taught themselves to code built some sort of social network around coding. freeCodeCamp’s Larson urges it: “Hang out with other developers. Go to tech talks and hackathons, and hang out at startups and hackerspaces. This will help you make valuable connections and stay motivated during the long process of learning to code,” he told me. If you live in a really remote region or don’t have the mobility to find people face-to-face, try them online; freeCodeCamp and Glitch both have active forums, and sites like CodeNewbie have everything from a Slack forum to regular Twitter chats, where neophytes talk and connect.

Frankly, I wish I’d done more of this socializing. I too often spent time grinding away at a problem, myself, instead of asking for help. When I did talk to other coders about problems I was having, inevitably they’d suggest an approach that helped.

###

Clive’s new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World will be available on March 26th. 

Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries (#364)

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“All these things you’re sure are true — what if they weren’t?”

— Safi Bahcall

Safi Bahcall (@SafiBahcall) is the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. Loonshots describes what an idea from physics tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. It has been selected for The Washington Post‘s 10 Leadership Books to Watch for in 2019, Inc.‘s 10 Business Books You Need to Read in 2019, and Business Insider‘s 14 Books Everyone Will Be Reading in 2019.

Safi received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, Safi was named Ernst and Young’s . In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on the future of national research.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/41329492-2cee-4976-b910-7a1c9b2d64b9.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”

Want to hear an episode with someone else who likes to ask big questions? — Listen to my conversation with Nick Kokonas, subversive entrepreneur, angel investor, and restaurateur extraordinaire (stream below or right-click here to download):

#341: Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Lifehttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/c23d1aee-571f-4e87-ae41-4026a5a5e92d.mp3Download

This podcast is brought to you by Uber. Uber makes getting around town easier than ever before, and now Uber is introducing Uber Rewards, a new rewards program that helps keep modern life going. With Uber Rewards, you can earn points on Rides and Uber Eats and unlock rewards such as Uber Cash for your next Uber ride or your next Uber Eats order. You can unlock new benefits at every membership level, such as flexible cancellations with Gold, price protection with Platinum, complimentary surprise upgrades with Diamond, and more. For terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber Rewards, go to Uber.com/Rewards.

This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.

New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.

Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Safi Bahcall:

Website | Twitter

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall
Sundance Film Festival
Total Immersion Swimming
Rational Choice Theory, Investopedia
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What Is the Formula for Calculating Net Present Value (NPV)?, Investopedia
A Crash Course on Derivatives by Rhett Allain, Wired
McKinsey & Company
Men’s Wearhouse
Marlon Brando and Popcorn; Lessons on Leadership; And the Idea That Changed the Course of History by Safi Bahcall, LinkedIn
Active vs. Passive Voice, Grammar Lessons
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall
How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom by Garry Kasparov
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
Dana Farber Cancer Center
Longwood Medical Galleria
Why Director Robert Rodriguez Chose to Make Another $7,000 Movie by Cat Cardenas, Texas Monthly
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton
Dutch Goose, Menlo Park
Pan Am
The Battle of the Atlantic: The U-boat Peril, BBC
American Airlines
Steve Jobs Discovers the Macintosh Project, Mac History
Robert Hooke and the Wrath of Isaac Newton by Daryl Worthington, New Historian
Meet The PayPal Mafia, The Richest Group Of Men In Silicon Valley by Charlie Parrish, The Telegraph
Founders Fund
The History of Social Networking by Saqib Shah, Digital Trends
Statins: A Success Story Involving FDA, Academia, and Industry by Suzanne White Junod, PhD, FDA
The Incredible Story Of Walmart’s Expansion From Five & Dime To Global Megacorp by Leah Goldman, Business Insider
JFK Moon Speech
The New York Times’ 1920 Editorial Mocking Space Travel Remains a Classic by Michael Byrne, Vice
The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack
Art or Eyesore? The Eiffel Tower History You Probably Didn’t Know by Lindsay Shapka, The Anthrotorian
AgassiñSampras Rivalry, Wikipedia
May 8th, 1963: Sean Connery Stars in His First Bond Movie, Dr. No, History
Starkiller: The Jedi Bendu Script Site
Star Wars
E.T.
History of Transistors, ROHM Semiconductor

SHOW NOTES

How Safi and I first met. [07:17]
How the atypical lessons we learned in our respective Total Immersion Swimming experiences can be applied to other aspects of life. [09:36]
How psychologist Daniel Kahneman changed economics by approaching it from a human perspective. [13:15]
My own experience as a lab rat for Kahneman at Princeton. [15:12]
What circuitous path led Safi from particle physics toward his work with cancer? [16:04]
A digression: Safi’s Men’s Wearhouse story. [19:30]
Back on track to cancer. [22:22]
Some of the why: Nobody writes 15,000 page essays (except for Safi). [26:15]
A lesson in the difference between active and passive voice — and why a Pulitzer winner’s advice regarding their use might differ from a schoolmarm’s. [29:32]
How Safi began training himself to become a better writer by slowly dissecting paragraphs instead of succumbing to the more popular inclination of speed reading. [30:52]
Two books that resonated for Safi during this period. [33:28]
Have you heard the music of Nabokov? Safi has. [36:34]
How did chess champion Garry Kasparov’s post-game analysis shift Safi’s mindset about the decision-making process? [37:51]
How Safi has implemented this system versus outcome mindset to other areas of his life. [43:14]
What other questions might someone ask in a business setting to decipher how they came to a certain decision — whether or not the outcome was ideal? [45:56]
How might this process be applied to decision-making in a personal setting? [49:20]
An aside about single life in Manhattan, SWAE and no BLC gatherings. [51:34]
How Safi fell into an unfulfilling junk dating pattern during this time. [54:34]
Upon prompting, Safi shares a little more personal detail about this pattern. [57:08]
Two criteria for finding the right life partner from one of Safi’s well-practiced friends, and the one that became his system versus outcome litmus test for breaking out of the junk dating funk. [59:50]
When he came to the decision to do so, how did Safi go about paring down his peer group? [1:01:47]
How Safi met his wife and gleefully exited the dating world entirely. [1:04:09]
Safi often uses acronyms as memory tools. So what does “Write FBR” stand for, and how might it help liberate you if you’re a writer with perfectionistic tendencies? [1:10:26]
With creativity as with riding a bike, task switching is really expensive — from the perspective of effort as well as physics. [1:15:21]
The two hats Safi wears for reading: RICLS and REAS. [1:11:22]
Why a physicist biotech entrepreneur and I are having a conversation about writing, and what Safi has tried to convey with his first book. [1:21:14]
The three hats Safi wears for writing: hunting, drafting, and editing, and how it’s a bit like the way director Robert Rodriguez makes a movie. [1:24:30]
Possibly the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to Safi about his book. [1:27:50]
How did Safi come up with the wacky stories that wound up in Loonshots? [1:28:42]
Safi’s three rules of creativity: speed, attention, and courage. [1:29:46]
Why the sequence of these hats and heuristics matter for giving purpose clarity, with a Tony Robbins exercise for the sake of illustration. [1:34:12]
False failure and the difference between a loonshot and a moonshot with a case study of Friendster vs. MySpace vs. Facebook. [1:35:36]
Who was Sir James Black, and how does his story connect with Safi’s? [1:41:34]
The three deaths of the loonshot: how great ideas get killed easily and often — in spite of what revisionist historians will tell you decades after the fact. [1:44:45]
The problem with Silicon Valley’s “Fail fast and pivot!” slogan. [1:46:19]
The two types of loonshots: P (product) and S (strategy). [1:47:22]
Robert Goddard’s universally ridiculed notion that a rocket could make it to the moon in 1920, and the Eiffel Tower’s initial opposition. [1:51:08]
Mental reminders for ushering an aspiring loonshooter through the three deaths and the so many nevers. [1:55:29]
Why does Safi have a Post-it note on his wall that says “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller,” and how does it tie in with a spy-fighting limey truck driver? [1:58:59]
Why entrepreneurs and small teams should nurture loonshots and eschew the idea of “disruptive” innovation. [2:05:00]
The differences in nurturing loonshots between larger and smaller teams. [2:08:19]
A summary and parting thoughts. [2:14:00]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Barack Obama
Daniel Kahneman
Peter Thiel
Auren Hoffman
Chris Sacca
Chris Ashenden
Terry Laughlin
Richard Feynman
Vladimir Nabokov
Donald Hall
Garry Kasparov
Josh Waitzkin
Magda Bahcall
Robert Rodriguez
Bob Sutton
Albert Einstein
Johannes Kepler
Steve Jobs
Juan Trippe
Bob Crandall
Jef Raskin
Isaac Newton
Robert Hooke
Tony Robbins
Ken Howery
Mark Zuckerberg
Sir James Black
Sam Walton
Robert Goddard
John F. Kennedy
Michelle Wie
Olivia Fox Cabane
Pete Sampras
Andre Agassi

James Bond
Ian Fleming
Sean Connery
Mace Windy

Tea Time with Tim — How to Find Mentors, Decrease Anxiety Through Training, and Much More (#363)

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Welcome to a special episode called “Tea Time with Tim,” for which I solicited phone numbers and then called a handful of you to field any questions you might have.

Among other topics, we discuss:

How to go about finding a mentor.
The meaning of life.
How to extinguish anxiety.
Cocktails.
Relationship advice.
Training into confidence.

Without further ado, please enjoy this tea-fueled Q&A!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.

[image error] [image error] [image error] #363: Tea Time with Tim — How to Find Mentors, Decrease Anxiety Through Training, and Much More
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/fb7b7920-bf19-4982-86ca-2a61b065418d.mp3Download

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”

Want to hear another episode that had me calling up listeners and answering their questions? — Listen to this one, in which I tackled how to reassess existing projects, how to learn to care less about what other people think, how to ask better questions, and much more. (Stream below or right-click here to download):

#330: The Return of Drunk Dialing Q&A: How to Ask Better Questions, Take Better Risks, and More!https://rss.art19.com/episodes/89218eff-aa5b-4a42-8373-d945d53bec9e.mp3Download

This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.

New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.

Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.

This podcast is also brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites — everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times.

Whether for personal use or business, you’re in good company with WordPress — used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, Beyoncé, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress offers “the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable,” which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today!

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World’s Most Successful People Launched Their Careers by Alex Banayan
Entrepreneurs Organization
Young Presidents Organization
The Indus Entrepreneurs
Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs
Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield
5 Reasons Why Creatine Monohydrate Is the Best by Grant Tinsley, PhD, Healthline
The Pet Rock Captured a Moment and Made Its Creator a Millionaire by Dan Good, ABC News
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time, The Tim Ferriss Show
South by Southwest
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Treatment-Resistant Depression, The Mayo Clinic
Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello
My TED Talks
Broadhead vs. Elk, Montana Wild
Black Belt Karate Test, Tom Leeman
Toastmasters
Kodokan Judo Institute
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month by Tim Ferriss
Old-Fashioned Cocktail Recipe: The Whiskey Classic by Colleen Graham, The Spruce Eats
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch
Living the 80/20 Way: Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More by Richard Koch
Acquisition of Japanese Kanji: Conventional Practice and Mnemonic Supplementation by Timothy Ferriss
The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman
Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor
Nonviolent Communication, Wikipedia
Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values by Marshall Rosenberg
Death Star Assault, Star Wars
The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

SHOW NOTES

The right and wrong questions to ask when you’re in search of a mentor. [06:26]
What’s my opinion on sending the often advised handwritten follow-up letter? [18:51]
I may not have the answer to the meaning of life, but here’s how I pursue purpose. [19:57]
What’s my method for staying calm and focused during potentially stressful times? [33:23]
Should you spend the time leading up to a physical evaluation (like a black belt test) training more rigorously, or resting? [52:29]
If I had to identify as a cocktail, what would it be and why? [55:19]
Why identifying a lack of purpose at some point in your life shouldn’t be seen as a character flaw, but an opportunity to reassess your options. Here’s how I proceed when this happens to me. [58:36]
Ways to identify, understand, and learn from what seem to be relationship incompatibilities. [1:12:13]
The basics of nonviolent communication for coping with sources of friction in a relationship. [1:28:59]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Viktor Frankl
Alex Banayan
Jack Canfield
Gary Dahl
Anthony de Mello
Dale Carnegie
Archilochus
James Cameron
Richard Koch
Karen Pryor
Richard Dawkins
Neil Strauss
Marshall Rosenberg
Luke Skywalker

“Trip of Compassion” — The Most Compelling Movie I’ve Seen In The Last Year

“I felt like I went through 15 years of psychological therapy in one night.” 

— Actual patient featured in “Trip of Compassion”

This post is about the most compelling movie I’ve seen in the last year.

I first watched “Trip of Compassion” about six months ago, when I was sent a link to a private video. The film had been broadcast once on Israeli television, but it wasn’t distributed or available anywhere else. This documentary affected me so deeply (and immediately) that I flew to Tel Aviv, met the filmmakers, and offered to help launch the film digitally worldwide for free. Everything I am doing for this film is 100% pro bono, and all proceeds go to the filmmakers.

Why am I doing this, and why is this film so exciting to me?

Tens of millions of people worldwide suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Millions more have suffered from emotional and physical abuse but never get diagnosed. I would put myself in the latter category for reasons I’ll explain another time.

“Trip of Compassion” documents one unusual approach to healing trauma that might astonish you, an innovative treatment involving the psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known as “ecstasy”). As you will see firsthand, if the therapy is well designed, true rebirth and transformation can happen in a matter of weeks and not years.

If you’ve ever felt held back, felt defective in some way, or felt that you’re not living up to your full potential, this film will give you hope.

This is also the first feature documentary to show actual therapy session footage (to our knowledge), to which the patients consented because of the incredible results they experienced.

Filmed at the Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center in Israel, “Trip of Compassion” provides a rare glimpse into a treatment process that can restore optimism and even the will to live.

Thank you for watching this film (just click here to stream) and, if you find it as powerful as I did, thank you for sharing it or this post.

***

In addition to helping launch this movie, I am supporting broader access to MDMA-assisted therapy in the USA and elsewhere by donating to MAPS.org, a non-profit dedicated to making this treatment available to those who need it (e.g., phase 3 trials, regulatory work, scholarships for low-income patients).

If you also decide that this work is important, please consider visiting MAPS.org to donate. NOTE: Be sure to specify the following in the donation form (there is a field for this, as they have many initiatives): “Funds are restricted to MDMA phase 3 trials.”

***

Thank you so much for reading this far. I couldn’t be more excited to share this film.

And remember as you watch: this is possible now. To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Let’s help make this treatment more evenly distributed.

More to come,

Tim