2026-08-21 14:48:08
Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode devoted to one deceptively simple question: How do you stay close to your partner over time through the inevitable exhaustion, misunderstanding, conflict, disappointment, and change?
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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ESTHER PEREL
Esther Perel: So, this is a question from Gregoire Frifri via Facebook. “I would love to ask her how to foster marriage longevity. Any exercises, routines, or habits would be great, especially around fostering deeper emotional relationships.”
That is the first basic – appreciation. Simply saying a lot of nice things, not taking things for granted, not forgetting to say please and thank you just because it’s the person that you live with, making compliments, holding hands, kissing, stroking, sending sweet notes, buying flowers, preparing breakfast, bringing the coffee to bed – all those sweet things that people do that basically let you know that they live inside of you, that you’re thinking of them even when they’re not there.
These daily appreciations go a long way, and sometimes, it’s a real diligent effort to keep doing them. And then, I am a strong fan of letter writing. I think that when you fly away, when you’re away, sitting in a café when you just have a moment, drop a note that’s not just on the birthdays and on the anniversaries, but your own musings about you, your lives together, your dreams, where you’re going, how you met, what you remember, what you fancy – that is very much the telling of the story of the couple. There’s a lot of intimacy in there.
Touch is a major experience of intimacy. I think when you do that, humor, and things that encourage the other person in which you recognize them at their most authentic – go do this thing. This is similar to something you really like. Take a few more days. “You always wanted to take this class – go take this class.” These are ways in which you encourage the other person to be the best version of themselves, and vice versa. Be your best version of yourself with them. The things that are really basic are what makes a relationship sustain itself and be more nurturing.
Next, Alicia Kinea Eidelberger asks via Facebook, “How do you lessen arguments in your marriage?” Look: I think it’s all about the art of speaking and listening. Now, there was a sculpture a few years back by Bruce Nauman, and it was a World Peace product. He had 23-inch monitors with faces of the most diverse group of people – diverse races, ethnicities, genders, ages, all of it – and every single person – every face was saying, “I’ll talk, and you listen. You’ll talk, and I’ll listen. They’ll talk, and we listen. You’ll talk, and we listen.” And, it just showed you the robustness of this most difficult art, which is often harder than speaking, I would say. But, to some people, speaking may be the hardest thing.
In a relationship, you can often get the daily hassles in which you are grinding at each other, and in which there’s a friction going on. Don’t sweat the small things. That’s probably really important in terms of how people deal with arguments in a relationship. I would say don’t complain, ask. Behind every criticism, there’s often a wish. If you believe that your partner has done something wrong – that they didn’t pay a bill on time or anything – and you wish that they had done it right, instead of acting them to correct it, you basically tell them they can never do it well, that they’re doing this on purpose – just ask them to do it better next time.
Rather than “Would it kill you?”, something as simple as, “Do you think that next time, you could set a monthly alert so that you don’t forget?” It’s a very different tone. It’s a very different way of relating to the person. There’s no contempt in that one. We know from the research of John Gottman that contempt is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Actually, I’m going to give you the four horses because they’re really important. They are criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness. Those four are pretty much the killers in the land of arguments and relationship decline.
Try not to talk with categoricals of always and never, all or nothing. That is probably one of the most important changes in vocabulary. Banish them. “I always have to ask you.” “You never do this.” The moment you say, “You never,” the other person is going to come up with the one time that they know and that they’ve done it, so that they can defeat your argument rather than understand that you’re asking them to do it more often, which is exactly why I say, “Ask, don’t complain.”
Add some humor. There’s nothing that’s going to defuse your arguments more than just putting some perspective into it and not taking yourself so seriously. Show empathy. At the end of the day, assume that your partner has the same interests as you – to solve the stresses in your relationship. For that to happen, it’s important that both of you understand and appreciate the other person’s point of view. Do you really think the other person wants you to purposefully be annoyed, hurt you, or let you down? Probably not.
It’s all of that shift that takes you out of relationships that are mired in bickering, chronic low-intensity warfare, or high conflict. There’s a range there. Imagine I ask you, “Has your arguing turned toxic?” Does your partner keep telling you that you can never do it right, or that they can never do it right by you, that every little conversation about who should set the table will end up in a blowout about how dysfunctional your relationship is, or that two minutes into a fight, one of you is saying you should get a divorce or break up? That’s what I’m calling a high-conflict couple.
The opposite of the argument is coming in and saying, “I want to listen to what you have to say. I want to apologize. What can I do to make this better?” Not “What can you do to make this better?” Shift it around, and you’ll have magic happening.
BRENÉ BROWN
Brené Brown: The other two hacks that I think have saved our marriage besides just showing up and using some of these things, like what’s working, what was hard is the 80/20. So everyone says marriage should be 50/50. It’s the biggest crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s never 50/50. Ever. And so what we do is we quantify where we are. So if Steve comes home and he’ll be like, “I got 20.”
Tim Ferriss: Just in terms of energy.
Brené Brown: Just energy, investment, kindness, patience, “I’m at 20.” And I’ll be like, “I’ll cover you. I got you, brother. I’ll pull the 80.” Sometimes we come home, which we have done a lot, and my mom has been sick, and I’ll say, “I’ve got 10,” and like, Steve two days ago said, “I’m riding a solid 25.” So we know that we have to sit down at the table any time we have less than a hundred combined and figure out a plan of kindness toward each other.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I love that.
Brené Brown: Yeah, because the thing is, marriage is not something that’s 50/50. A partnership works when you can carry their 20 or they can carry your 20. And that when you both just have 20, you have a plan where you don’t hurt each other.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re threadbare, right?
Brené Brown: Yeah. And so what we’ll say is I’m like, “I’ve got 10,” and he’ll be like, “I got maybe 25.” We’re like, “Put all the groceries that are supposed to be great and healthy in the freezer; we’re ordering out. Get the housekeeper here an extra day, and we’re canceling anything with people that we really actually don’t like.”
Tim Ferriss: So how can we create some buffer in the system?
Brené Brown: We do that. So like, and then we’ll like a day or two later I’m like, he’ll be like, “I’m riding to 60,” I’m like, “Oh, my God, work is kicking my ass. I’m still at 20.” He’s like, “I got you, but we’re a spare of 20. So let’s ask Charlie if he wants to skip water polo practice today and let’s all turn in at 8:00.” Like, huge. The other thing I would say too, that now I’m thinking about that, is we made a determination very early there’s kid-focused families, parent-focused families, and family-focused families. We’re a family-focused family.
So that means that if you want to do water polo, Eagle Scouts, tennis, and skeet shooting, and then that comes to the family, and the family agrees what will keep the family healthy. Like we can, you know, I’ve got a book launch, I’ve got this, Steve’s got patients, he’s taking on others, you know, he’s a pediatrician, he’s doing this. So what works for our family right now is you can do two extracurriculars and I’m going to have a two-week tour, not a four-week tour, but we put the family as the system that we serve. It’s not the kids at the parents’ cost or the parents at the kids’ cost. It’s the family and it is remarkable.
Tim Ferriss: How do you weigh, if you do it all the voting system, so to speak, right? So if you all come to the table, does everyone have equal vote in the decision-making process with respect?
Brené Brown: No. This is a dictatorship! Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. No. Like, we don’t even bullshit around that. It’s like when my kids, like if I say like, “Oh shit,” my kids are like, “Ooh, you can’t say that.” I’m like, “I say anything I want. You can’t say that. And when you’re old enough, you can do whatever you want.”
Tim Ferriss: “You get your cursing license!”
Brené Brown: Yeah, right now I can totally do that. Watch me.
BRAD FELD
Tim Ferriss: So if we’re talking about links and breaking these artificial causal links, let’s talk about another, what seems like a pattern interrupt, and that is your life dinners. Can you describe what these are?
Brad Feld: Yeah. This was another thing that came out of me and Amy’s weekend in Rhode Island. So she said to me, as we’re walking, “I want to have dinner with you once a month. Not a date night, but let’s do dinner once a month. Let’s do it on the first night of every month. And I just want a commitment for that.” And I hem and haw, “Oh, gee, I don’t know whether I’ll be in Boulder or Boston or New York or the Bay Area or whatever.” And she looked at me and she said, “Do you have a calendar, an online calendar?” Knowing full well I did, of course. And I said, “Yeah, I have an online calendar.” She says, “Does it have the ability for you to make a recurring calendar appointment?” I said, “Yeah, the online calendar lets me do that.” She says, “How about if you make an online recurring calendar appointment from 6:00 p.m. Colorado time to 10:00 p.m. Colorado time on the first day of a month and have it repeat forever?” I said, “Okay, I guess I can do that.”
So we did that. And so every month on the first day of the month, we have what we call life dinner. Now, 20 years of life dinners later, so what is that, 1,000-something life dinners, which is awesome, by the way, we have a little flexibility. There are definitely nights where we will have it on the second or the third because something’s going on. But we really commit to it. We used to go out to dinner. Now, a lot of times we just do it at home. Time of COVID, we for sure do at home. We often, not always, but often start with a gift exchange, and the gifts could be trivial little things. Once she gave me a remote control fart machine. She’s picked up a lot of jewelry and art from it over the years and books. One dinner she gave me a Range Rover. So it’s a full spectrum of little to big.
Tim Ferriss: I really hope it was the same dinner that you gave her the — oh, no, you didn’t give her the fart machine. That would have been less popular. Right.
Brad Feld: I think the Range Rover was to make up for the fart machine, but the fart machine was years earlier. And we sit down, and if you’re a fan of software development, and you know what Agile is, we essentially do — the first half is a retrospective of the previous month, and the second half is sprint planning for the next month. So again, very deliberately not a date night. We have plenty of those. This is let’s talk, each of us, you go first, or I go first, doesn’t matter, about the last month, and what happened, and what was good, and what was bad, and what we were unhappy about, and what we wish we’d done differently, and what we regret, and what we’re really satisfied with, anything. Just retrospective.
This powerfully interesting — because we started to learn that if Amy did something that really annoyed me on the 21st of the month, in the moment, I didn’t have to react and cause us to have a three-hour personal meltdown on the 21st of the month. I could wait nine more days or 10 more days, and it could be — 11 more days. It could be part of our life dinner. And it gave us a marker for being able to resolve the conflicts that we would have with each other or express things, positive and negative, that we hadn’t said in the moment.
The forward sprint planning part of it is not go through the calendar for the next month, but talk about goals, aspirations, what we might want to do differently, what we’re feeling in the moment that’s making us uncomfortable about the future, what we’re not afraid of, what we’re worried about happening in the future, what’s causing us, in the moment, real anxiety about the future. And anybody out there has had any therapy or done meditation, literally just naming the thing oftentimes gets rid of a lot of the anxiety. Just labeling it, just calling it out, and saying it out loud.
And so these dinners, sometimes the conversation, the life dinner part of the conversation might go five or 10 minutes, and sometimes it might go three hours. And sometimes there was laughter and sometimes there were tears and sometimes there were both. And it’s just such now, 20 some odd years later, a comfortable way to reground ourselves as a couple, roughly every 30 days, in what is a very, very challenging and complicated world.
JIM DETHMER
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the candid or uncomfortable conversations that are the most important to have, if any come to mind, aside from what we’ve been discussing?
Jim Dethmer: So as you look at your close relationships, whether it be with your parents or with your siblings or children, this idea of, are we willing to be candid? Now I want to say something here, Tim, because people misunderstand this. They think that if I’m below the line, if we keep using that language, then people will say, “I don’t have a problem being candid. God, you ask anybody in my world, they’ll tell you I’m candid. I tell it like it is.” But what they’re really saying is they’re kind of living a scorched earth policy where they tell the truth all the time, but they’re rigid and righteous about being attached to their truth. So we don’t call that candor. What we call candor begins with the ability to differentiate facts from stories, facts from data, facts of what is totally unarguable. Facts are that which all reasonable people would agree to. Facts, the facts of life, stories are judgments, opinions, beliefs, interpretations that we make up about the facts. So for example, or that typical thing would be, I walk in the house, Debbie’s standing there.
Fact, a video camera would record that the corners of her mouth are turned down slightly in what one could call a frown. That’s a fact. Video camera would record it. Now my mind starts making up stories. Debbie’s upset with me. I did something wrong. She’s going to criticize me. And now I start reacting to the stories, defending, justifying, explaining, reacting to the stories, even though the stories are all made up in my mind. So candor, practicing conscious candor, first you differentiate fact from story, and then you reveal your stories, holding them lightly. So from below the line, I want to be right about my stories and prove that I’m right because my ego identification believes it can only survive if it’s right. So what that would look like is from below line, I’d say, “What are you upset about? I’m only 10 minutes late and I know I forgot the milk, but God, I was very busy.”
So now I’m revealing my story that she’s upset in a reactive modality while holding tightly to my story that A, she is upset at me and B, she shouldn’t be. That’s truth-telling. That’s not what we’re talking about at all. Candor, I differentiate fact from story, and here’s what this might look like. I walk in the house and let’s say I’m above the line and present, which I might not be. I might say something like this, “Hey, when I look over, it looks like you’re upset. I’m making up the story that you’re upset and rather than get all scared and reactive to that, first thing I do is just want to tell you I’m making up that story and I want to check it out with you. Are you upset? And by the way, when I make up the story that you’re upset, I noticed I get defensive.
Furthermore, probably what I really get scared because I don’t want you to be pissed off at me, but I’m going to reveal myself to you, Debbie, not from being right. This act of candor is an act of incredible vulnerability. I’m going to let you know me. I say all the time. I’m going to let you know what’s going on on Planet Jim. My thoughts, beliefs, interpretations, wants, desires, so you can know me. Not so that I can prove I’m right.” And by the way, this kind of candor goes hand in hand with conscious listening.
People always want to say, “I want a more candid relationship with my partner.” I say, “Great. Before you start revealing, start listening. Start becoming a person to whom others will reveal themselves candidly because you see them and you hear them and you get them. Then as they feel safe to reveal themselves, you’ll find that the relationship becomes more safe for you to reveal yourself.” So candor and conscious listening go hand in glove. But again, it’s a cocommitment, right? Debbie and I said we want to remove all barriers to closeness. One of the barriers to closeness is not revealing ourselves to each other. It’s so easy to hide out for fear of being rejected, for fear of being criticized, the risk. And Debbie and I had been practicing candor for decades, Tim, and there’s almost always some edge of candor where I could reveal a thought or I could reveal a judgment.
In our case, specifically about our children, because it’s our second relationship. Debbie has four boys. I have two girls. Well, sometimes I have judgments about her boys. It’s always risky to say to her, “Hey, I just want to tell you. I’ve got a judgment coming up in me about so-and-so,” because she cares about her boys and she’s irrationally involved with them just like I am with my girls. Every time I practice vulnerability in candor in my intimate relationship, there’s a modicum of fear that comes up because who knows how she’s going to react. We do have decades now of practicing, so pretty good chance that we’ll work it through. So that’s what candor is. Differentiate fact from story, hold your story likely, and reveal to the other for the sake of being known, not for proving you’re right, and practice deeply listening so the other person trusts you enough to reveal themselves. That’s a short primer on candor.
SHEILA HEEN
Sheila Heen: My guess is that you’re familiar with research by John Gottman up in Seattle?
Tim Ferriss: I have some familiarity, but please provide an overview.
Sheila Heen: An overview and just a connection to the question that you just asked. He invites married couples into his lab, and he invites them to talk about an issue that’s stressful between them, to have a difficult conversation, essentially. Hooks them up to heart monitors and videotapes and all of that. Then he says that he can watch for five minutes and predict with their different numbers based on his different studies, but 90-ish, 90, 92 percent accuracy, whether they’ll divorce within three or five years.
Part of the reason I name this is that, for me, it really says it’s not just that we have difficult conversations in our most important relationships. Those conversations are the relationship. That if we find a way to have them productively or constructively, then the relationship will thrive, whether it’s a personal or professional relationship, and/or is where we start to disengage because you just don’t get it and you won’t listen, and the relationship starts to fray.
What Gottman is listening for are what are the indicators that he’s listening for that tell him which direction it’s going to go. One of them is that as a conversation gets heated and starts to escalate, one of the spouses will often make a joke, but the purpose of the joke is that it’s an invitation to step outside this argument and to see it for what it is, to see what’s happening, which is that this is the conversation we usually have and how it usually goes. So often it’s a little bit of an inside joke, but humor — by the way, I listened to your conversation with Anne Lamott, who I absolutely adore.
Tim Ferriss: She’s a treasure.
Sheila Heen: She is a treasure. And what does she call it? Laughter is carbonated —
Tim Ferriss: Holiness.
Sheila Heen: Holiness, yeah. So laughter also in the brain just gives us a little bit of instant perspective that we suddenly see the absurdity of our own behavior in many cases. So it’s an invitation to just name what’s happening. It’s like a meta move. For instance, with my husband, who also teaches negotiation, by the way —
Tim Ferriss: I’d love it to be a fly on the wall for some of those.
Sheila Heen: Yeah, you can imagine. So we fight about how we fight. That’s the fight we usually have.
Tim Ferriss: This is like my friends’ kids. My friends are therapists, and their kids are like, “Stop therapizing me.”
Sheila Heen: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: “Stop therapizing me.”
Sheila Heen: Exactly. So we’re like, “Yeah, you’re not listening. Oh, well, those difficult conversations, huh?” Yeah. So that’s the fight we have.
Tim Ferriss: “Stop putting your BATNA in my face!”
Sheila Heen: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, folks. Inside joke.
Sheila Heen: Exactly. That was very nice inside baseball joke. Yeah. Waving your BATNA around in a romantic relationship is not usually a successful strategy. You know, there are a lot of people who’d find me very appealing.
One of the jokes that he and I make when we have the wherewithal to do it is like, “Why will you not just admit I am good and you are bad? That is what this is about, right? It’s about who needs to apologize, whose fault this is, et cetera.” So as things escalate, your ability to just name that underlying dynamic sometimes makes the other person laugh, and you can step out of it for a moment. Then that gives you the opportunity to say, “Look, obviously we’ve had this conversation several times. I’m not understanding why,” fill in the blank. “I’m not understanding why what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense. Help me, genuinely, help me understand that.” Or “I’m not understanding what you’re most worried about here.” That often helps.
It needs to be a genuine ask. You can’t say like, “What are you worried about?” Because that’s really a hot question. It’s like, you shouldn’t be worried about anything. Why are you being so stupid as to be worrying about something? As long as you can step outside, see, oh, I’m not being curious right now. And I don’t have to pretend that I agree to do it. I think that’s really the key. And I don’t have to say there’s no truth, but from where I sit, I can only see some of the pieces of the puzzle. You have the other pieces of the puzzle. Putting those pieces on the table for discussion is how we figure out what we have to work with. Then at the end of the day, we still might not agree about this, but it might open up new options for how we handle it.
DR. SUE JOHNSON
Tim Ferriss: Could you walk us through what a hold me tight conversation is?
Dr. Sue Johnson: A hold me tight conversation, very briefly, is a bonding conversation. The tricky part is that, as adults, some of us have never seen this conversation. So it’s a dance that is foreign to us. We’ve never had it with our own parents. We’ve never had it with siblings. We’ve never had it with previous lovers. And we get married, or we get committed to a partner, and it’s reasonable that we don’t know how to go there because many of us, it’s just not a drama that we’ve ever seen enacted.
A hold me tight conversation is where one person is able to open up and reach for the other person and share vulnerabilities; talk about their needs and fears in a way that pulls the other person close. It helps the other person reach back and respond.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give any examples of phrasing, or questions —
Dr. Sue Johnson: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: — or guidelines you provide?
Dr. Sue Johnson: Of course.
Tim Ferriss: I know I would love to know, and I suspect others would too.
Dr. Sue Johnson: Well, when you don’t trust, you don’t feel safe, and you’ve never seen a hold me tight conversation, the way it usually goes just naturally as human beings, I catch myself doing this with my husband, if I’m upset about something, like he’s been going to bed very early, and that means that we don’t have our snuggle time, we don’t have our little chat time, okay, and it doesn’t seem to bother him at all. It doesn’t seem to bother him this isn’t happening. So this will go on for a couple of weeks. And even though I’m doing this work, there’s a certain point where I start to get self-protective and I start to blame him in my head. And I say, “He’s always too busy. He’s got his lists. He’s got lists, and he’s a man and he’s got lists. And all he cares about is his list of tasks. And he’s just into problem-solving. And he doesn’t think about me at all.”
And this dialogue would go in my head. So I turn to him and I say, “You’re going to bed very early these days.” Listen to my voice. It’s the emotional music. He says, “No, I’m not,” because he hears the threat in my tone, I say, “Yes, you are. And you’ve been going to bed for weeks. And I guess it doesn’t matter to you that we’re not having those close moments.” And listen to me, I’m on the attack and we are acutely sensitive as human beings to signs of rejection, or abandonment by the people we love, acutely sensitive. That’s how we’re wired. So he hears that he’s blown it. He hears it that I’m rejecting him. I’m telling him he’s done something wrong. So he says, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.” I say, “Oh, let me guess, you have to go to bed because you’re so tired.” Right. So we’re off. Right? Okay.
That is the typical demand-withdraw, demand-defend dialogue that you’ll see in a distressed couple. And it’s totally predictable. You can also have it with your kids. I can remember a glorious argument I had in Starbucks with my adolescent son that was just a perfect example of the way distressed couples talk to each other. So I’m blaming and pointing fingers and he’s rolling his eyeballs and basically telling me what a dreadful mother I am. So you can have it with anyone, but with partners it’s very predictable, and it has everyone feeling completely threatened and unsafe and unable to dance together. If you shift that into a hold me tight conversation, the way it would go is that I would be more able to tune into my own needs, more aware of my own needs, accepting of my own needs. And I would realize, oh, I’m really missing those conversations with John. We’ve been married for 32 years. We’re both very strong people, so it’s been quite an adventure.
So, I think, oh, I’m missing those relationships with John and maybe he doesn’t miss them. And oh, that makes me feel really somehow anxious and uncomfortable if he doesn’t miss them, because the big question in love relationships is, are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Can I count on you? Maybe those conversations don’t matter to him, but they really matter to me. So I am aware, on a different level, of me and I’m specifying, that scares me a bit that maybe these conversations don’t matter to him. I can tune into my own emotions. And then I take the risk and reach for him and say to him, “I’m open.” I say to him, “You know what? We haven’t been having our usual talks late at night and somehow, it doesn’t look like you miss them. And somehow that makes me feel really uncomfortable. It almost feels like I’m not sure that that closeness matters to you.”
And so I could get angry about it, but actually what’s happening is it scares me a bit because I need those conversations. Now I’ve talked about my fears and my needs. I can only do that if I have some model that it’s okay to do that, that doesn’t mean I’m a wimp, or mentally ill, or weak, or pathetic. From my point of view, it’s strength to do that. And that’s what we teach: I need strength to do that. And that’s what securely attached people can do. They can reach from a position of vulnerability. So I say that to him, and that pulls him; he says, “Oh, you’re right. Yeah. Yeah. I do want those conversations. I’ve just been so exhausted and I’ve been doing this and I haven’t wanted to tell you how stressed out I am.”
So then it becomes reciprocal. I say, “Oh, I didn’t know that you were so stressed out about this decision we’ve made and that it’s taking up all your energy and you’re worried about it.” So then we start to have an open, responsive, engaged conversation where we can share vulnerabilities, comfort each other, and you’re literally better at tuning in to each other. And I think that’s because when I feel safe, I can tune into you. When I think about the people I can dance with in tango really well, it’s the people I feel emotionally safe with. And I know that there’s no mistakes, because mistakes don’t matter, we’re just playing. Then I relax. I’m in my body. I tune into their cues and we move together naturally. So, that’s what happens. And it’s a hold me tight conversation.
And it cascades. Each time you have this conversation, your nervous system goes, “Ah, this is comfort. This is home. This is safety. This is what I need.” And you see your partner as a resource. You see your partner as somebody who can provide this safety, comfort, caring, reassurance, social support, if you want to use a psychological formal term for it. You see your partner as this person and your partner connects, and you know how to do this dance. This dance is innately rewarding. It creates joy in people.
You don’t have to persuade people to keep doing it, like going to the gym, or meditation, or their communication skills. People will do this. Once they know how to do it, they’ll keep doing it. And that’s why I think we get good follow-up results, because once you start having these conversations and it’s very moving sometimes to see people’s response, like people will start to cry and say things like, when they discover these hold me tight conversations, people will say, I’m thinking of one man who said, “I never knew that you could talk to somebody like this. I never knew that you could ask for these things and that she wants me to be vulnerable to her. I never knew that. I never saw that growing up. I didn’t know people did that.”
And then he wept and he turned to the therapist and said, “I’ve been alone all my life, haven’t I?” And that — what attachment science tells us is that emotional isolation is toxic for human beings. We found out that in the pandemic, but we still don’t get it. I wish we would get it on a different level. It’s toxic for human beings. It’s not who we are. And when people start to have these hold me tight conversations, all kinds of amazing things happen. They don’t just understand how relationships can be and how you can shape relationships, don’t have to just have them happen to you, you can shape love, they understand something very deep about themselves. Couples grow each other. In safe relationships, couples grow each other. I watch severely traumatized people learn to trust another human being by having these hold me tight conversations with their partner, and it changes everything. Because they have a secure place in life for the first time. They feel seen, they feel accepted, they feel held.
And once you feel seen, accepted, and held, there’s a natural human growth process that happens. Attachment science is all about development of the personality. There’s a natural growth process. So we tune into that natural process in the hold me tight conversation. And those conversations predict over study, after study, after study, after study, those conversations predict success in EFT, they predict more secure bonding, they predict better sex, more sexual satisfaction in couples, they predict any measure of good, positive functioning you can imagine. Those bonding conversations predict all the good results we get in EFT and they predict results at follow up.
TERRY REAL
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, I imagine that’ll give you a lot of payoff over a lot of miles. What is, another term that I’d never heard before, being exposed to your work, normal marital hatred?
Terry Real: I got this from Ed Tronick, infant observational researcher. Ed, along with Berry Brazelton, was the first generation — you know, since Freud, what we said about child development all came from listening to adults. We didn’t watch any kids. And he was one of the first people to actually plunk a video camera in front of mothers and infants and then fathers and infants and actually look at what happens. And when he came up with, I borrowed and it’s central to RLT, which is the essential rhythm of all relationships is harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness. That’s where the skills come in, how to move from disruption to repair.
Our culture doesn’t teach it. Our culture doesn’t even acknowledge that this rhythm, a good relationship is all harmony. Just like a good body is pure or a good body is like a 20-year-old body. A good sex life is like what you had when you were two weeks into the relationship. No, all harmony is bullshit. Bullshit.
One of the things I like about you, Tim, is you tell the truth. You know what? You go to a cocktail party and you go, “Oh, there’s Harry and Shirley. They’re in their 80s. They still have sex, they love each other.” Makes me — one of these days I’d let you go to a cocktail party in here, “There’s Harry and Shirley. They actually split up for a year. He fell in love with another woman. He couldn’t take it because she was such a drunk. But then she got into AA and got sober and the two of them are really doing reasonably well. Aren’t they cute?” Just once, I’d like to hear that.
So we don’t deal with reality. The father of couple’s therapy back in the ’50s said, “The day you turn to the person who’s next to you,” it was assumed it was your marriage, “and you say, ‘This is a mistake. I’ve been had. This is not the person I fell in love with.’ That,” said Framo, “is the first day of your real marriage.”
So here’s what I want to say about disharmony. You ready? It hurts. It’s dark. You can really, really feel like, “What the hell did I get myself into? This is such a disappointment. And guess what? Your partner’s probably feeling that about you, too. So I talk about normal marital hatred. When you’re in that dark phase, you hate your partner. That’s okay. Don’t kill yourself or her. That’s okay. I’ll teach you how to get through it, but it’s part of the deal for many of them. And here’s what I like to say, I’ve been going around the world talking about normal marital hatred for, oh, my God, what? 30 years. This is true. Not one person has ever come backstage and said, “Terry, what do you mean by that?” It’s okay, kids. Don’t sweat it. You can get through it. It’s normal. Relax.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the first steps or tools that you would recommend to someone listening who agrees with what you’re saying, but has had no models for repair, has never learned how to use any type of approach for repair? And this is something that your help, well, your direct help, and then also your books have really helped me with because I did not grow up in a household with repair, right? It was basically, one person screams, then the other person goes to fix, which they don’t really want to do, but it’s their attempt to basically quell the disaster and fury, and that’s it. Then everybody’s kind of upset, and it never gets addressed. That was the model growing up. So what do you suggest to people who want to start with repair?
Terry Real: Of course, I’m tempted to say, “So are you a screamer or a fixer?” But I won’t. Leave that alone.
Tim Ferriss: I’m a fixer. I’m not a screamer.
Terry Real: Oh, wow. Okay. Lucky for your partner, but —
Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah.
Terry Real: The problem is the resentment that builds up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Terry Real: Yeah. Okay. So, repair. First of all, I like to say I have a number of bitter pills to swallow, but if you swallow them, things will be a lot better in your life. And here’s one of them. Repair is a one-way street. Everybody gets that wrong. It’s not a dialogue. It’s not, well, these are your issues with me. Well, these are my issues with you. No. You have your turn, but not then. Take turns. So if you have a disgruntled partner, you are at their service — that’s the first thing to master. I like to say, Tim, you’re at the customer service window. Somebody comes to the customer service window and says, “My microwave doesn’t work.” They don’t want to hear you say, “Well, my toaster doesn’t work.” They don’t want your excuses. Fix the goddamn microwave. Tend to your partner and bring them back into repair with you, then hours later or maybe, or the next, then they might have some interest in what you’re — but tend to them. Put yourself aside and tend to them.
What does that look like? Two things. First, do I get it? Listen. Don’t argue. Don’t rebut. Listen. Empty the well. “I’m sorry you feel bad.” That’s beautiful. Compassion. “I’m sorry you feel bad. I love you. I don’t want you to feel bad. Help me understand. What feels bad? What’s it like for you?” Okay, and then you reflect, “This is what I hear you say. Did I get it?” Yeah, good enough. Good. Two, “Is there something I could say or do right now that would be helpful? What would you like?” Who says that? And then if anything short of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, give it to them. Be generous. So those are the basics. I could be more specific, but —
DIANA CHAPMAN
Tim Ferriss: I would like to, if you’re open to it, shift a little bit to relationships. And I want to ask you specifically about your partnership with Matt. So here’s one of your superpowers, as listed from Mr. Jim. “Creating and sustaining a wonderful, intimate partnership with Matt, her husband and lover, since they were teenagers. Have her talk about the risks she and they were willing to take to keep the relationship alive and vital, growing, and intimate.” If you are game to talk about that, I would be very interested to hear more.
Diana Chapman: Yeah. Well, it’s a challenge. It’s both a great gift to be with a partner since you were young and get to grow up together. There’s a lot of shared memories and shared friends, and there’s a sweetness that it started out with you get to keep. And there’s also a great challenge of the fact that we are different people who evolve and change. And so several times, at least three key times in our relationship, we’ve been willing to let it all go, and we’ve basically killed it off. Just said, “The relationship as it was is done. Now let’s just check and see, is there a relationship? What is the relationship that wants to happen moving forward? Maybe it’s just friends, co-parents. Maybe it’s lovers, staying married. What is it?” And so we have a lot of courage, both of us, to be willing to let go of what’s not working and trust that the right form of the relationship will reveal itself. And it just so happens that it continues to be us married.
And we play around often. Sometimes we’ll get up in the morning and I’ll say something like, “Hey, you want to be married today?” And he’ll say, “Oh, well, what would that mean? What kind of a husband do I need to be?” And we’ll giggle and play around with, “Well, how about this and this?” And then we choose.
And we are always choosing over and over again, and we always are willing, kind of to the point of using the work with Byron Katie of, I’m willing to open to the possibility that not being married is just as okay as being married.
And what that has created is an incredibly vital, creative, ever evolving, passionate marriage, in which we’re freed up to keep exploring new ways of being together.
And I am really proud of my relationship. I think it’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done, is the marriage that I have. We get a lot of feedback that it’s an inspiring marriage to a lot of people who look to it. And I do think it comes with the courage to say no.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned at least — I think you said three times that you’ve had this type of conversation. I would like to zoom in on the first conversation. Were you both already prepared and trained to initiate that type of conversation? Did one side initiate the, “Hey, let’s decide if we want to remain as is, or if we want to take one of these other forms?”
I’m just wondering for people who are listening, who have never had one of these conversations — maybe they’ve been at the breaking point, but they’ve never had this conversation.
Diana Chapman: I initiated it. It wasn’t Matt’s idea. I said, “Hey, this isn’t working for me, the way we’re in a relationship. And there’s a different kind of a man I want to be with than how you are. And I want another possibility.”
And so I didn’t know how to do all this. I was just toddling around, trying to figure this out. And I said, “I don’t want to do it this way anymore.” And so I thought that might mean that we needed to be separated and that we needed to end the marriage.
And I was willing to. We actually got some support from counselors about telling our kids that we were going to divorce. Because that’s the only direction it seemed like we were going to go.
And then I had this great advice from a friend who said, “Okay, Diana, I love you both. If you think divorce is what needs to happen, that’s great. But I hear you complaining that there’s a certain man you want him to be that he’s not.” And she said, “Who is the woman you would need to be to call forward that man?”
And my stomach dropped, and I though “I don’t know about that. What?” And I realized, “Oh, I would need to be a different woman.” So we said, “Let’s kill off this old marriage and let’s see if we can create a new one. And I’m going to keep asking myself, who do I need to be to call forward the man I want to be with?”
And about six months later, I was with the man I wanted to be with. And I remember saying to him, “You really changed.” And he said, “No, you really changed.” And the truth is we both really changed.
But I was really grateful for that first conversation of being willing to let it go, and then getting the feedback of, “Hey, if you’re the creator of who’s showing up over there, who do you need to be?”
And for many months I felt like I was going to throw up 24/7, learning to be a much more vulnerable, needy woman, who called forward the man who could protect and lead, in a way that I hadn’t been willing to be in the past.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you for sharing all this, by the way. Very courageous and vulnerable. And how did you figure out who you needed to be? Who that woman was, to call forth the version of your husband or the man who you wanted to be with?
Did you have help? Was it obvious once you sat with it, in terms of the changes that needed to be made on your side or the things you needed to cultivate or drop? How did you arrive at the answers?
Diana Chapman: At first I didn’t know. I just knew I was really scared when I asked the question. And so I knew that my fear — I believe that fear, when we’re present, is an intelligence that says, “Something needs to get learned. Something needs to get learned.”
So when I had that fear, I thought, “Oh, wow, something needs to get learned. I don’t know something here.” And so that was my first clue that her question was powerful, is the fear that arose in me. And then I just kept asking the fear, “What needs to be learned?”
I just kept being really broad in that curiosity. I got into a state of wonder. “I wonder who I would need to be to call forward the man I most want to be with.” I just kept asking that. “I wonder.”
And I let it be okay that I didn’t have to know, because I didn’t know. I’d been with him for a long time and I didn’t know. So I had to be willing to listen and learn from something greater than my own experience so far.
And so it was in that level of curiosity that I just found my way. And it was just baby steps. A little bit here, a little bit there, and we’ve had several versions of that often. Or not often, but the three versions were all some version of me — something needs to get learned for the next evolution here of this relationship.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have recommended resources or practices that couples can seek out or embrace so that they are better prepared, if they get to these decision points? Or just overall in with respect to nurturing a healthy co-created relationship? Are there any books, any particular practices that you would highlight for folks?
Diana Chapman: Well, Matt and I studied with Gay and Katie Hendricks for years at the Hendricks Institute. They did a lot of relationship work. They still do a bit of it. But I learned so many tools there on how to get off the Drama Triangle.
I learned about personas and about how I get caught in these personas that then unconsciously require the persona of my partner to show up in a certain way, that then I complain about. And I learned about how to unwind those or shift them when I wanted to.
I learned about the importance of feeling my feelings. I learned about really questioning my stories. I learned about polarity and how important it is to honor polarity that shows up in couples, and making sure that I honored both sides of the polarity equally.
For example, a lot of couples argue about money. And almost always there’s one that we call the gas and one who’s the brake, and somebody who’s more free-flowing with money, and somebody who’s more controlling about money. And can we honor these polarities and can we see the value in both of them?
Because usually I was the one who wanted to spend the money and my husband wanted to hold onto the money. And we would get into a battle about, “You’re keeping me from having joy in my life because you’re so stingy about money.” And he’d say, “You’re going to make us all broke because you’re just so unconscious about spending it.”
And so honoring that those two sides of the polarity are actually allies that are here to create just the right balance to take care of ourselves and have fun. And so those are all different skill sets. There’s so many different tools.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Relationship Tools That Work — Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Dr. Sue Johnson, Terry Real, and More on Conflict, Repair, and Lasting Love (#880) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-08-20 04:57:24
This special episode is devoted to one deceptively simple question: How do you stay close to your partner over time through the inevitable exhaustion, misunderstanding, conflict, disappointment, and change?
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Connect with Diana Chapman:
“Don’t complain, ask. Behind every criticism there’s often a wish.”
— Esther Perel
“Everyone says marriage should be 50/50. It’s the biggest crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s never 50/50. Ever. … A partnership works when you can carry their 20 or they can carry your 20. And that when you both just have 20, you have a plan where you don’t hurt each other.”
— Brené Brown
“Just naming the thing oftentimes gets rid of a lot of the anxiety. Just labeling it, just calling it out and saying it out loud.”
— Brad Feld
“Before you start revealing, start listening.”
— Jim Dethmer
“We fight about how we fight. That’s the fight we usually have.”
— Sheila Heen
“What attachment science tells us is that emotional isolation is toxic for human beings. … In safe relationships, couples grow each other.”
— Dr. Sue Johnson
“The essential rhythm of all relationships is harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness.”
— Terry Real
“I believe that fear, when we’re present, is an intelligence that says, ‘Something needs to get learned.”
— Diana Chapman
Want to hear another episode with someone who thinks deeply about how we understand and relate to one another? Listen to my conversation with philosopher Alain de Botton, in which we discussed real-world versus academic philosophy, emotional intelligence, the underrated skill of listening, why “mean” is often simply “anxious,” status anxiety, practical pessimism, the value of rituals and tribes, “ordinary genius,” and much more.
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 5. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, the Pod 5 ensures you and your partner stay cool in the heat and cozy warm in the cold. And now, listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can get $250 off the Pod 5 plus an additional $200 off Pod 5 accessories for a limited time! Click here to claim this deal and unlock your full potential through optimal sleep.
The post Relationship Tools That Work — Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Dr. Sue Johnson, Terry Real, and More on Conflict, Repair, and Lasting Love (#880) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-08-14 15:42:00
Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode devoted to reinvention: how to shed an identity that no longer fits, decide on a new chapter, navigate uncertainty, and commit to what’s next.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
STEVE YOUNG
Steve Young: Well, let’s back up because what you’re alluding to, I think, is that what we’ve been talking about really for the whole time is transition.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.
Steve Young: And the difficulties because I love football and I was very successful at it, I run into a lot of people who played in high school and loved it. The dream, like they would give their arm to be able to, or leg to be able to play in college and keep the dream going. And I always think about how when I left the game, it wasn’t necessarily forced, but you do age out. It just sooner later, even Tom Brady aged out at 45. It’s a young man’s game. And I remember the day before, the day I retired, I was known for this thing that I had been able to do worldwide even. The next day I remember waking up and now that that’s gone.
Tim Ferriss: Now what?
Steve Young: Yeah. Yeah. And what I’ve learned about transition that leads to Rich Lawson, how I describe it, that everyone, and even the high schooler, the last day they play and it has to be put away, needs to recognize and treat it like a death, to mourn it and go through all the steps of mourning it and burying it and actually having it as a place that you can keep referring to as almost like a grave site. Because otherwise you carry it around and it never gets — you never transition. Transitioning is about actually moving from to, right? And so I’m really grateful, Roger Staubach, the poster on my wall, I got to know him. He became a friend. Like it’s insane.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. How cool is that?
Steve Young: And he famously transitioned, probably the most successful transition in the history of the NFL.
Tim Ferriss: What did he transition to?
Steve Young: The Staubach Company was a real estate business that he was hugely, hugely successful. And I remember asking him towards the end of my career, “Roger, give me some tips.” And he goes, “Run.” I’m like, “Run? Run where?” He goes, “Just run away.” That was his tip. Because he said, “The game will never leave you, but you need to leave it. You need to move on.” And I thought that was just simple, but really important.
And I tell people today, and I really want to write a book about transition because everybody is constantly transitioning, whether they like it or not. Most of it forced, right? But if there’s an authentic, vulnerable way to transition and bury and mourn, you can wake up the next day, realize I was great at something and now I’m not even good at anything else, but you know what? I’m going to —
Tim Ferriss: Learn and grow.
Steve Young: We’re going to learn and grow.
SULEIKA JAOUAD
Tim Ferriss: Just based on some of the reading that I’ve done, and also in your TED Talk, you had four hour naps in the middle of some days. You still had to make visits, or you did make visits at least to the ER at points. I’m curious to hear how you related to expectations of you perhaps. So outside of the physical aspect, did you feel there were certain expectations of you after, let’s just call it beating cancer, and then a dissonance between the reality of your experience and what was expected of you? If that question makes any sense.
Suleika Jaouad: Absolutely. I remember the day I was discharged from the hospital and was finally done with these four years of treatment, getting a slew of text messages, congratulating me on being done. And that seemed to imply an end point that I very much wanted but didn’t feel necessarily true or accurate because there were so many unanswered questions that I realized I suddenly needed to figure out, like the ones you just named. How do I hold down a job if I need to nap for four hours in the day? How do you begin to date when you’re coming out of an experience like this, and you still have a port in your chest? Where do you even — or do you bring up a cancer diagnosis without potentially scaring somebody away? Is it responsible for me to consider long-term commitments like marriage or children given my high likelihood of relapse?
Those were the questions I was swimming around in. But the other piece of it that I began to grapple with are the ways in which the hero’s journey arc is projected onto survivors. There’s this notion that when you emerge from a trial or a big trauma, you are better, braver, stronger for what you’ve been through, but I didn’t feel brave. I didn’t feel strong. I felt wrecked by this experience and had no idea who I was or how to find my way forward and what I had expected to be the final act of this illness experience, which was being cured, was actually the beginning of a very different kind of healing.
Tim Ferriss: Please say more. I would like to encourage you to continue. What do you mean by that?
Suleika Jaouad: So, in that first year after treatment, I was hell bent on moving on from this experience. I wanted to be a quote unquote normal young person. And I remember looking to my friends almost with an anthropological I, thinking to myself what does a normal 27 year old do, and trying to do those things almost as if I was play acting. And I’d go out dancing with friends and then pay for it with three days in bed. I would try to force myself to write about something other than illness, to come up with something new, and I just couldn’t. And what I came to understand is that moving on is a myth. You don’t get to compartmentalize your most difficult passages and stow them in the past. You don’t get to skip over the hard work of healing and grieving and recovering, and really uncovering who you are in the wake of that, and that instead, I was going to have to learn to move forward with this experience, with these imprints on my body and my mind, and to learn how to integrate them in my present.
So I started thinking about the language of ritual and the rules of rites of passage in these transitional moments. We have birthdays and funerals and weddings and bar mitzvahs, these —
Tim Ferriss: Mourning periods.
Suleika Jaouad: Yeah. And mourning periods. These ritualized ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings that help us cross the distance between no longer and not yet. And what I realized was that there is no 12-step program. There is no rite of passage for when you survive a trauma like illness, and that I was going to have to create one for my own. And so that’s what I did.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. As Tim takes a long inhale, because there’s so many questions I want to ask. I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, but you mentioned no one gets to skip the hard work of grieving, recovering, and or in some senses uncovering the trauma or the difficulty through which they have passed. I would love to hear what type of work, whether it ended up being hard or otherwise, ended up in retrospect being really valuable. Were there any particular things you did, types of therapy you experimented with, anything at all that really seemed to help with those checkboxes? These are the things that must be done before you can pass go. You don’t get to skip these seven steps. Was there anything that really stood out as valuable or helpful in terms of that work?
Suleika Jaouad: So the truth is I didn’t do much of that work that first year. I had done therapy while I was sick. I had gone to support groups for young adults with cancer, but in the aftermath of that experience, because of that projection that this was supposed to be done, I didn’t have in place those same kinds of support systems and structures. I think when someone gets diagnosed or when someone loses a loved one, if you’re lucky to have friends and family, everyone rallies around you in that moment of acute distress, but in my experience and the experiences of so many other people that I’ve befriended or interviewed, it’s the quieter weeks and months after that are the hardest, because you don’t have the cavalry running after you and you’re left to your own devices. And so all those sources of support that I had created for myself or sought out in treatment, I no longer had in the wake of treatment. And so I really had to invent my own. But this notion of recovery is something that I spent a lot of time reflecting on. The word recovery implies a return to something. And I think that in that first year, I was really trying to return to the person I’d been pre-diagnosis and very quickly realized that person no longer existed. And that though the word maybe implied otherwise, recovering wasn’t about a return to the old, it was a brute, terrifying act of discovery.
And what was helpful was I met a doctor who I was actually interviewing for a story and we got to talking and I explained to him some of the things I’ve been struggling with, and he said to me, “It sounds like you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you have PTSD.” And that was a revelation to me because I thought of PTSD as something that’s reserved for veterans returning from war or someone who has experienced a kind of violence. It hadn’t occurred to me that it also applied to emerging from a long period of life-threatening illness. And once I actually understood what it was that I was feeling, once I removed any expectations of what this post cancer experience is going to be like, and I actually was able to confront the facts of what was happening face forward, then I actually began to create a plan for myself.
Tim Ferriss: What did that plan look like and was it mostly focused then at that point on the present state awareness of this possible diagnosis of PTSD? So rather than being trapped in the past, trying to revert to this pre-illness version of yourself that no longer existed, did the plan focus then on this diagnosis or possible diagnosis of PTSD? What did it look like?
Suleika Jaouad: The simplest way for me to say it is that I understood I needed time to heal, which wasn’t something that I had allowed myself. I’d been pushing myself to figure out what I was going to do next and to get back into the motions of living immediately. But more than that, what I understood was that I needed to learn how to feel safe again in my own body. I write in the book that when the ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. You have to learn to live along fault lines. And so that really became my work. I wanted to feel safe in my body. I wanted to learn to become my own caregiver after years of being dependent on other caregivers. And more than anything, I wanted to carve out the time and space to figure out who I was and what that path forward was going to look like for me. So what I did was I started by confronting a smaller fear, but still a pretty significant fear for me, which was learning how to drive.
And so that’s what I did. I learned how to drive. And as I began learning how to drive, I started dreaming of going on a long road trip. And as I began dreaming of that, I began to imagine a solo cross country road trip. And I didn’t just want to go on some touristy boondoggle, but I was really seeking out people who could offer guidance in this strange limbo in-between place that I found myself in. And so I ended up making a list of about 22 strangers. All of whom had written to me in response to my calm about all kinds of reckonings and interruptions in their own life. And that’s what I set out to do. I had this newly minted driver’s license, which I’d had for about a month. I rented out my apartment and used the funds from that to pay for my road trip. And I reached out to all of these different people to let them know I’d love to meet face to face and I left home.
Tim Ferriss: Into the unknown.
SAMIN NOSRAT
Tim Ferriss: … Why was the food market so quickly popular? Were there any particular reasons that come to mind?
Samin Nosrat: I think part of it was timing of it. What it was, I was really good at making pasta. I lived in Italy for two years. I made pasta every day for 10 years. I really love making pasta. When the restaurant closed, I would sort of bump into people in town and they’d be like, “Well, we really miss your pasta.” I really enjoy the beautiful manual labor of making it and the folding, and the cutting and the whole thing. I thought, “Well, what if I cut out all of the parts of having a restaurant that I hate, and I just make the pasta and sell it to people?”
I had these friends who had a commercial kitchen that was empty a lot of evenings; they let me use it, and I was like, “Okay, well, how do I sell this pasta to people?” I think it was 2009, so I think it was before Instagram or it was certainly before Instagram was really big, and I maybe had a Twitter with five followers, but really, Facebook was the main thing that I used, and so I think I put on Facebook, “I’m going to sell some pasta, does anyone buy it?” And I made a Google Doc and people started buying it.
I opened a little Shopify storefront where people would order the stuff online, so I would know exactly how much to make because a big thing in food is, it’s already so hard to make money, and really, if you’re not efficient in terms of every decision of how much labor and ingredient, you’ll really lose money. By sort of taking my orders in advance, I knew exactly how much to make, and nothing was going to go to waste and then people would come pick up their stuff.
Then, very quickly, it grew from just pasta to pasta and sausages, to pasta and sausages and cookies because everyone else that I knew who is an unemployed cook who maybe wanted to start their own food business also wanted to do these things. We started doing this, and all of a sudden, it became this online marketplace where you could preorder and prepay for your food and then come and pick up your stuff a week later. It was sort of this way to get beautiful restaurant quality stuff at home, but it was certainly before Caviar, it was certainly before a lot of these internet food things and it was also before Good Eggs, which is a food tech startup that was sort of born out of this thing.
It was definitely one of the first online, I don’t know, order your food thing. I don’t know, it was just a weird time. Then, we had a mailing list from the restaurant and I started sending it out to that, and then, very quickly, because the press was very interested in this weird way that I was operating this thing, the mailing list grew to many, many tens of thousands of people, way more than I could support.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, yeah, that’s a lot.
Samin Nosrat: It was a whole thing that grew out of control beyond the resources I had very quickly, and I was always struggling to keep up and that became such a source of stress. All I had wanted to do was to make some pasta.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, funny how things –
Samin Nosrat: All of a sudden, I’m managing 9,000 business licenses and permits and health department and taxes and sales tax and vendors, and vendor inviting, and people wanting their beans vegan or whatever. It was so much more than I ever wanted to do, and it took so much energy and I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore.
Tim Ferriss: You have this feeling, “I can’t do this anymore,” which I think a lot of people have, and yet, they keep doing it for a long time and maybe forever to a certain extent. Now, while this is happening, you have these maternal instincts kicking in which make you feel obligated on some level to help these people who, at least in your head at some point and in their heads, depend on this income. Do you remember the meal, the drinks you had with a friend, the walk you took where you’re just like, “You know what? Fuck it, I have to close this down.” When you went to thinking about winding it down to, “Okay, tomorrow morning, that’s it. I’m doing it.”
Samin Nosrat: I’m pretty sure it was therapy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay, all right.
Samin Nosrat: I’m pretty sure it was therapy and I’m pretty sure, I think the thought that really hit my body, that I realized it was that I had, by that point, spent 10 years cooking. I had been wanting to be a writer since I was 15 years old. I finally had a chance to make the time to be a writer. I even had an office that I had that I shared. I had everything in place.
Because this thing was ruining my life and making me miserable, I couldn’t do the thing that I always had wanted to do and was basically ready to do, and not that it was some easy thing to just go be a writer, because, what? I ended up writing blog posts for yogajournal.com for $25. It wasn’t so much income or anything, it was just, I knew that this thing was making me emotionally and almost physically ill. I just had to stop, and I think now I’m just so much more attuned to that moment, to the feeling of knowing this thing is bad for me.
No matter how many other people it’s good for, it’s making me sick, and it’s making me feel really bad. I think I try to be a lot more aware of that and sometimes now I get into situations or projects or jobs where that feeling comes up again, but I’m already in it and often now a lot of the work that I do is temporary. I do one project, I do one article, I do one story, I do one whatever.
Now, for me, it’s more about learning and being really attuned to what’s happening, even just, for example, in the process of making the show. I had never made a show before. This was this incredible opportunity that came to me. I was so excited and felt so lucky to go make it and go do it, and I still feel so lucky and so excited, but a lot of things happened throughout the making of the show that I was like, “Oh, this doesn’t feel very good,” or, “This doesn’t feel very fair,” or, “I don’t ever want to be in a situation like this again.”
Now that I know what’s possible, I know that negatively and also positively, I know what to ask for and I know how to articulate that. I will forever insist, to me, I’m going to insist on working with a lot more people of color in the future. I’m going to insist on making sure that I have a lot more power creatively in anything that I do, because I realized I became very frustrated when I didn’t have as much power as I needed or wanted. There are just things, it’s a constant learning thing, nothing’s perfect. We figure things out as we go, and we try to do our best, and what is failure? I don’t know.
It’s not that big of a deal, especially if there’s some sort of positive take away that you have, and maybe my therapist would be really proud of me. Maybe it’s really bad for me to even say that my therapist would be proud of me, but I do feel like all of these stories and all of these experiences really always come back to me sort of paying attention to my feelings.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, hear, hear. That’s something that I’ve also personally been working on because I think I muted my feelings or viewed them as a liability for so long and I’ve –
Samin Nosrat: Me too.
Tim Ferriss: – realized, holy shit, you cannot spreadsheet your way out of everything, nor onto everything.
Samin Nosrat: No, me too.
Tim Ferriss: You really have to pay attention to that, the feelings.
Samin Nosrat: I think about that all the time. I came from a culture that’s very much about appearances and not very touchy feely in a lot of ways. I came from a family that wasn’t super touchy feely. What did I learn to do? I learned to shut down all of my own feelings and then I made my way into a profession who literally tells you to shut down your feelings. When you’re a cook in a restaurant, you don’t have time or room or space for feelings and not only emotional feelings, but if you actually burn or cut yourself, there’s not time or space to address that. You just sort of wrap your hand up and keep going.
LORI GOTTLIEB
Tim Ferriss: When you look back at your chapter changes, say, from entertainment to med school or med school to journalism, which decision or transition was the hardest? In other words, I’d love to hear more about some of the detail of one of the harder jumps. Were any of these decisions that you agonized over for days or weeks or months or was it just a flash of insight and decisive action? Which of these was difficult for you, if any?
Lori Gottlieb: Leaving the entertainment business wasn’t difficult for me because I was so clear that there was something deeper that I wanted to pursue, not that movies and television can’t be incredibly profound, but I think there was something that was more personally resonant for me about working with actual people out there which foreshadows, of course, what I do as a therapist. What was hard about that change was everybody thought I was crazy, that everybody said, “How do you leave this place that you’re in in your career? How do you leave that and just go to medical school?”
I think what was harder was leaving medical school because I had already made this switch. I was up at medical school. It takes a lot, by the way. You have to take all the classes to take the MCAT, you’d take the MCAT and then you have to meet all the requirements. I was, again, not a science major, although I was very math-y and science-y as a person. I was on the math team, those kinds of things, but I was very much taking humanities courses in college and literature. I think that doing everything that it took to get to medical school, getting into a medical school, being at a medical school and then saying, “You know what, I’m going to go be a freelance journalist.”
Tim Ferriss: Not just any medical school either, right? You’re on Palm Drive or nearby with beautiful Stanford, so I can imagine that also has a decent bit of waiting in some people’s minds.
Lori Gottlieb: Well, also financially, I think that we’re so worried about talking about money in our culture, but I think it’s a very real thing. I think people need to talk more about it because there I was, I already paid for two years of medical school and I had loans and all of that. Now I’m going to go be a freelance journalist. Who does that? I think what it was is what I was talking about earlier is that voice, that quiet voice where everybody else is saying, “Just finish medical school. Just get the degree and then figure out what you want to do. Just tough it out for two more years.” I was like, “Life is short.” I was very aware of that even back then.
This is a theme that you see all over my work, which is this theme of why thinking about death makes us happier, which is I don’t mean dwelling. Just acknowledging it. Just acknowledging that life has a 100 percent mortality rate and most of us don’t know how or when we’re going to die. I think that even though I was in my 30s then, which sounds young, it’s not. It’s like, why should I spend those next two years in medical school when I know that I want to go? Right? When that’s what I want to do is I want to go tell other people’s stories, I want to go do this work, that’s where the fire in my belly was.
I just followed the fire in my belly, and I said, “I’m going to have to make sacrifices, I’m going to have to make a lot of financial sacrifices and I’m going to have to write a lot to make enough money to support myself and to pay off my medical school loans, etcetera.” Now, I had some money saved up from Hollywood, but not enough to sustain me. These are the choices that that people make. It was again a choice where people said, “I really suggest you do this, that, or the other thing,” and I really listened to myself and what I wanted to do and becoming a therapist was the easy choice in the last of the changes, but I feel like every single thing that I did was really just looking at story in the human condition from a different perspective.
I don’t feel like I had four different careers. I feel like I had one career and I’m just experiencing them from different ways of getting in.
MARTINE ROTHBLATT
Tim Ferriss: You seem to be good at many things, of course, just based on the bio alone. But what strikes me is how quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields. And I’d like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio, and that is: “United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company she started to save the life of one of her daughters.” I’d love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story just because people will want to hear it. And then the follow-up just to plant the seed for it is how you learned biology. Because my understanding is you didn’t have much in terms of background in biology. So that’s a huge mouthful of a question, but if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful, and we can use that as a jumping-off point.
Martine Rothblatt: Sure. So it’s kind of funny that you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course, but that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school and here suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running SiriusXM, that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness. She can’t even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door and there are no medicines approved for it. I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the Head of Pediatric Cardiology at Children’s National Medical Center in the middle of Washington DC. And the doctor said, “This is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises. All the patients die within two to three years.” He had only seen two or three other kids with it and they both died. “And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant.”
So Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I mean, I didn’t know what to do. And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward night after night and myself, and Bina would tag team, staying there with her was once she fell asleep to go down into the library and to just begin learning about what was this illness she had, which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension. And why were there no treatments available for it? So I just began reading and reading and reading.
Most of the time I read things, I didn’t understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words that I never learned in law school, or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering. But of course, there were dictionaries, and I looked up the words in the dictionary and they had college-level anatomy textbooks. So what I didn’t know, I just kept going backwards in academia, I guess you would say, backwards in learning or pedagogia, until I would even get to like a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, “Okay, I get that.” And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.
Tim Ferriss: How did you — and I know this is a story you’ve told before, but ultimately in searching for possible solutions. And as we were chatting about before recording, there’s a lot of luck involved. And it doesn’t mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation, similar to what you experienced, but nonetheless, you were able to ultimately track down, I suppose, it’s fair to say a molecule, a drug of some type. Would you mind describing for listeners the process then of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion, this drug or to license it? If you could describe that, I have a number of questions that will stem off of it.
Martine Rothblatt: Sure, Tim. So there are a good zillion articles published on every type of medical research you could imagine. I mean, it’s just a bottomless well. There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals. And each of those journals have every year thousands of articles published across them. So it’s difficult to find the information that you need, but in law school, we learn a very useful skill. And this skill goes by the name of Shepardizing after this type of index they have in law school called Shepard’s. So what Shepardizing involves is when a judge writes a decision like the Supreme Court issues a decision, they drop a lot of footnotes. And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is make footnotes and references. And then what you’re supposed to do as a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to. And then the Shepardizing process is after you get all of those references to then look up all of the references in those other articles. And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down, the references are all circling back around on themselves.
So I applied that Shepardizing process to these medical articles, and somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article, they make footnotes and citations to other people’s research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those. And then I would follow up on all of the references in those. Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher at Glaxo Wellcome had written in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure. And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work, but in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did. And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart, which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures and all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well, that’s exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension, the people who have this disease — oh, I’ll make a quick footnote.
Now, when my daughter was diagnosed, 2,000 people in the US had the disease. Because medicines have become so much better, and because we’ve been able to have, like you mentioned in the introduction, get all of these approvals, there are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it. So it’s likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension. And I read this article and I said, “Wow, just what I need. This tiny stretch of artery chest between the heart and the lungs, this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone.” That was the holy grail that I was looking for. So I looked at where the author of the article was from, he was from Glaxo Wellcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And I made a beeline down to him and asked him if he could develop this molecule that he’d found for my daughter’s disease.
Tim Ferriss: Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom, a big, all-caps YES?
Martine Rothblatt: No. It was actually a big, all-caps NO, unfortunately. The individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier. And the person that I ended up meeting with, who was in charge of research and development, said that this was just one article. It was an incidental finding. In any event, this disease afflicted so few people, it was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo Wellcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease. And I asked him, his name’s Bob Bell, he’s now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I asked Dr. Bell, I said, “What would it take for you to develop this medicine?” He said, “Well, it probably would take — you couldn’t do it. We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in revenue potential.” He said, “But it’s possible you could buy it from us. If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise, I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo Wellcome.”
So over the course of the next several months, I created a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel Laureate who was formerly associated with Glaxo Wellcome become head of a scientific advisory board. And I reapproached Glaxo Wellcome. And I said, “I have all the things that you asked for. Can you sell me this drug and we’ll develop it ourselves?” Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody I asked said, “Well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree.” And that’s how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper to agree to license this drug to me.
Finally, it happened. And all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10 percent of any money that I would ever get from this molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time. And also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell’s sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time I first met him toward the end of this process. And he became a product champion for me within Glaxo Wellcome. I mean, that was just purest luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say. And then they really didn’t think this molecule had any chance at all. And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think, but still, all 15 people had to sign it.
And after we successfully developed this molecule, Tim, we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to Glaxo Wellcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people’s lives. It has produced a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us and Bob Bell, when I invited them to our 15th anniversary and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine, and he said this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo Wellcome had ever done.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about, perhaps an uphill, perhaps a pause, perhaps something else, which I’d love for you to comment on what you did come later. And that was a decision which I’d love to explore, to say no to quite a lot of opportunities for a period of time. It seems like at one point, you were very successful, you became very famous, like you said, practically overnight. You’re being offered opportunities you couldn’t have imagined a week prior, and you have a string of successes and then you realize, “Well, wait a minute, here, I might be getting painted into a corner,” and you start to say no.
You start to turn down, say, action film opportunities with big paychecks, things like that. Was that hard to do? Did other people say that you were doing the right thing and encourage you? Could you walk us through and just tell a story about that experience?
Matthew McConaughey: Yeah, love to. So this is around—I don’t remember the year, I’m guessing it’s around 12, 13 years ago. I was rolling with romantic comedies. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant and was the male lead rom-com go-to guy.
Rom-coms are mid-level budgets, 30, 35 million. They offer a good front-end paycheck to me. They go make 60 million. I mean, the studios don’t have to overspend and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make them.
You get a good female and a male lead that have good chemistry. People love to go escape to them. My rom-coms are doing well. They were my bank. They were what Hollywood banked on me to be in. At the same time, I’m living in Malibu, learning to surf, got my shirt off, and the paparazzi are Discovery Channels like almost documenting this, and I’m like, “You damn right document it. This is the life I’m living. I love it. I worked and earned to get this life. And those romantic comedies that I get paid so handsomely for, actually pay the rent at the house on the beach that I live in, in front of this water that I’m surfing in.”
So I was full on shaking hands with—I was going, “Yes.” At the same time, I did notice that any other dramas I wanted to do, or even the way people sort of—when I said, “Don’t meet strangers anymore.” Even when the way these sort of people thought of me or approached me or would talk to me or about me, there was no consideration.
It was like, “McConaughey is the shirtless rom-com guy.” And I was like, “Yeah, I am, and I’m—” But only I could answer that second question of, “And I’m—” like only I could continue that sentence. No one else could. And really Hollywood, for sure was like, “No, nothing else,” and so any dramas I wanted to do or other pictures, no one wanted to make them with me.
And I remember we had just had Levi. Camila and I just had our first son, and my life was so vital. Man, I had just had a newborn, I’ve met the woman that I love and want to spend the rest of my life with. I’m laughing harder. I’m crying harder. I’m happier than ever. Life is very vital and I’m in it. My real life is, but my work feels like, “Yeah, I can do that tomorrow morning. Just give me the script tonight, let me look at it. I can do it tomorrow morning.”
It wasn’t really challenging me, and the rom-coms weren’t challenging me, and my lifestyle was one big green light. And to me, if it’s all green lights, if it’s all sugar and candy, well, that’ll make tyrants out of anybody.
So I was saying, “Oh, I wish my work could—” I remember saying this. I remember looking in the mirror actually, and going, “Okay, McConaughey, so if your life is more vital and true to who you are than your work, well, if it’s got to be one or the other, that’s a good thing, because I know a lot of people that their work is more vital than their life.”
So I said, “That’s a good thing.” I said, “But jeez, could I just get some work that might challenge the vitality of my life and the man I am in it? Where I can get some work, where I can be more me in it?” Well, those roles were not being offered to me. Nothing, nope, not a chance.
No studio will bank you in this drama role, or this other role you want. I had control of Dallas Buyers Club at that time, but no one wanted to make it for me, nor would anyone finance it. So I decided that if I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was not being offered to me, it would be prudent for me to just stop doing what I had been doing and what was in the pipeline continually coming to me, which were the romantic comedies.
I called my money manager, I said, “All right, look, I’m going to stop doing the only work I’m getting offered. And I don’t know how long it’s going to be till I work again. How am I doing with my money?” He says, “You’ve invested well, conservatively. You’re fine. You can take time off.”
I remember calling my agent, Jim Toth. I would say, “Hey, Jim, I don’t want to do romantic comedies anymore.” I remember this conversation, he goes, “Great.” And I go, “Wait, woah, woah, woah. What do you mean, great?” He goes, “Great.” And I go, “How do you say that so quick? What are you going to say Monday morning when you go into your superiors in the office and say, ‘McConaughey’s not doing romantic comedies,’ and McConaughey has been bringing a nice chunk of 10 percent commission into you guys with these romantic comedies for years now. And he said the coolest thing to me, he goes, “I don’t work for them; I work for you.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good line.
Matthew McConaughey: And he meant the line, right? And then it was I went to Camila, my wife. And I’d shed quite a few tears with her going through this. Am I feeling fraudulent in my work? Do I feel a lack of significance in my work? Do I feel like—is it okay to be feeling this? I mean, remember as we said earlier, I’m tired of going running downhill. Why would you sabotage not doing the work you’re getting offered when you can get paid so handsomely to do it? But she understood that my soul was shaken and needed some recalibration and that the work I was doing wasn’t the true expression of who I was in my life. I told her, I said, “I want to hold out for some work that can challenge the vitality of the life that I’m living with you and our son Levi.”
And she repeated the lines to me. She goes, “Okay. You’re going to get wobbly. I’ve been around you, you’ve got to work, Matthew, and you love to accomplish. You’re going to get wobbly. You might start reaching for a little sip of something to drink earlier in the day too.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She’s like, “Me, too.” She goes, “Days are going to be longer. We don’t know how long this will last, how long we’ll be in this”—she called it a desert—”how long this will be a desert?”
She goes, “But if we’re going to do this, if you’re going to do this, we’re not going to half-ass it.” She repeated my dad’s line to me. And I went, “Yes, ma’am.” Gave her a hug, put some tears on her shoulder, and we said, “Starting today, no more rom-coms.” Well, rom-com offers came in to my agent for about the next six months, but nothing but rom-com offers.
Unless it was a major offer, I just said no. And they just stopped at my agent’s desk, Jim Toth. No. And then one of them came through that was a gargantuan offer for it. And my agent said, “It’s a pretty damn good script, too.” And so I said, “Well, send it out, let me read it.” I remember reading it, and I remember the offer was for $8 million, and the script was pretty good, but it was still kind of a rom-com.
And I remember reading it and going, “No, thank you.” I remember feeling sort of emboldened and strengthened by saying, “No, thank you. Great. Sticking to my guns. No rom-coms. Six months into this drought. No, I’m not caving in now. Don’t half-ass it, McConaughey.” So they come back with a $10 million offer. “No, thank you.” They come back with a $12.5 million offer. Now I go, dot, dot, dot ellipsis, ellipsis, “No, thank you.” Now they come back with a $15 million offer.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Matthew McConaughey: And I said, “You know what? Let me have another reread of that script.” And I reread that script. And you know what? At $15 million, the same script that I’d been offered for $8 million, the $15 million offer script, which was the same exact words as the $8 million offer script, the $15 million offer script was better, it was funnier. It had possibilities, it had angles, I had ideas, I could make this work. I mean, this could work.
Tim Ferriss: Now I’m imagining at this point, Jim is like, “Man, this saying no thing is really working out!”
Matthew McConaughey: He’s in and he’s over there teetering like, “I know what we said, but $15 million and it’s not like—it’s a pretty good script. I know it’s rom-com. It’s a pretty good script.” But I said, “No, thank you.” Well that got the signal across Hollywood that McConaughey was taking a serious sabbatical. And so don’t even send him a rom-com. It got around.
Tim Ferriss: So that was the crucible, then. I mean, that was the crux move, in a sense.
Matthew McConaughey: In a way, that was—I called an audible six months in and I had them thinking I might cave, I might just be posturing and, “Come on back, McConaughey. Hey, we love you.” And I said, “No.” And when they had pumped the money offer up so much, and people knew in the industry what that offer was, it became very clear, “Oh, shit, okay. McConaughey, I don’t know what he’s doing, but he ain’t doing this stuff. He’s not doing any more rom-coms.”
And it became clear. So for the next 12, 14 months, nothing came in, nada, zilch, not an offer for anything. I mean, I’d talk to my agent every couple of weeks. It’d just be like, “Nothing came in, nothing.” So now we’re 20 months into this desert period. I do have my son to raise, which being a father has always been the most important thing to me.
So that’s got my compass at least directed in a place that I go, “Just trust in this, if it has something to do with raising your son and being here on the land with your family, even if you start to wander, just trust that that’s always going to be in the asset section, McConaughey, you can’t go wrong with that.”
So I stuck to that. And I was now fine with not doing any work. I didn’t know what I was going to be, I didn’t know if I was going to change my career, if I was going to become a teacher, or a coach or go back to being a lawyer, I didn’t know, I didn’t think so, but I was writing more.
Talking about forced winters, I had put a forced winter on myself and I was pretty content. I wasn’t waking up every morning, going, “Did an offer come in? Did something new come in?” I was past that. And then all of a sudden, 21 months into this desert, I start getting some offers that are interesting things, William Friedkin, Killer Joe. Lee Daniels, The Paperboy.
Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me, Steven Soderbergh called, Magic Mike. Richard Linklater and I go do Bernie together. True Detective comes around, all of a sudden, Dallas Buyers Club. No one still wants to put a bunch of money up for a 1980s period drama about AIDS, but all of a sudden, McConaughey, all the directors or no directors would do Dallas Buyers Club with me, they wanted the script, they loved the script, they didn’t want to do it with McConaughey.
All of a sudden we find Jean-Marc Vallée who says, “No, I’d like to do it with McConaughey.” So what happened was that 22 months or whatever, that drought, that desert, I unbranded. I didn’t rebrand, I unbranded. Me being away, me being in Texas, not being on a beach getting pictures of being shirtless on a beach, not being in rom-coms, I was out of the world’s view.
I was out of the industry’s view, I was not in your living room, I was not in your theater, I was not in any of the places that the world had become expectant to see me and how to see me. Where was I? I was gone. Where is McConaughey? When you’re gone long enough, all of a sudden, I became a new, good idea. Which I was not a new, good idea earlier at the end of that 20-month period, and then all of a sudden things came to me that I wanted to do and I remember saying, “You know what? Fuck the bucks, I’m going for the experience. If I read a role that shakes me in my boots, and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life, and challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that’s what I’m going after.”
And man they came in. Camila and I looked at each other, shed some more tears, and we said, “Let’s get after it.” And I just started hammering them. The family came with me everywhere I went, and just started laying down work that really, really turned me on.
DEBBIE MILLMAN
Debbie Millman: So, the exercise that I do now with my students, because they are quite a bit younger than I was when I was doing this five-year plan, I ask them to do a ten-year plan.
And so, this gives them a chance to really mature into who they are in their 20s and into their early ‘30s. And it’s this ten-year plan for what I call a remarkable life. It’s about imagining what your life could be if you could do anything you wanted without any fear of failure. And they are the most life affirming essays. They are so, full of hope and optimism and well being and goodness, that it gives me a sense that humanity can be saved. So, I borrowed that exercise from Milton and now use that both in my graduate program and the undergraduate classes that I teach.
Tim Ferriss: This is going to seem nerdy, but I’m a nerd and I’ll run with it. Do you have any parameters for people at home who might want to try this, or recommendations, ways to start? Is it bullets or is it in prose in full paragraphs? How does it end? Any recommendations for people who would like to give this a stab?
Debbie Millman: So, let’s say it is winter, 2027. What does your life look like? What are you doing? Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house are you in? Is it an apartment? Are you in the city? Are you in the country? What does your furniture look like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets. Tell me about your significant other.
Do you have children? Do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Talk about your career. What do you want? What are you reading? What are you making?
What excites you? What is your health like? And write this day, this one day ten years from now. So, one day in the winter of 2027; what does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until when you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big. Dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it and write like there’s no tomorrow. Write like your life depends on it because it does. And then, read it once a year and see what happens. It’s magic. It’s magic, Tim.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Reinvent Yourself and Make Bold Moves — Decisive Stories from Matthew McConaughey, Steve Young, Samin Nosrat, and More (#879) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-08-12 21:38:00
This is a special compilation devoted to reinvention: how to shed an identity that no longer fits, decide on a new chapter, navigate uncertainty, and commit to what’s next.
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“Fuck the bucks, I’m going for the experience. If I read a role that shakes me in my boots, and challenges the vitality that I feel in my own real life, and challenges me, the man I am in my own real life, that’s what I’m going after.”
— Matthew McConaughey
“What I’ve learned about transition [is] that everyone … needs to recognize and treat it like a death, to mourn it and go through all the steps of mourning it and burying it and actually having it as a place that you can keep referring to as almost like a grave site. Because otherwise you carry it around and you never transition.”
— Steve Young
“Thinking about death makes us happier. I don’t mean dwelling — just acknowledging it. Just acknowledging that life has a 100 percent mortality rate and most of us don’t know how or when we’re going to die.”
— Lori Gottlieb
“Recovering wasn’t about a return to the old. It was a brute, terrifying act of discovery.”
— Suleika Jaouad
“Now that I know what’s possible — negatively and also positively — I know what to ask for and I know how to articulate that.”
— Samin Nosrat
“What I didn’t know, I just kept going backwards in academia, backwards in learning or pedagogia, until I would even get to a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, ‘Okay, I get that.’ And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.”
— Martine Rothblatt
“Write this day, this one day, 10 years from now. What does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until when you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big. Dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it and write like there’s no tomorrow. Write like your life depends on it because it does. And then, read it once a year and see what happens. It’s magic.”
— Debbie Millman
Want to hear another episode with someone who walked away at the top to reinvent himself? Listen to my conversation with author, entrepreneur, and one-time circus clown Derek Sivers, in which we discussed selling CD Baby and giving the proceeds to charity, the joys of an un-optimized life, finding paths less traveled, taking giant leaps, the wisdom of quitting when you’re ahead, picking the right game of life, why saying “good enough” can be a superpower, and much more.
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2026-08-08 13:36:59
Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I’ve asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in as some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions as we explore the craft of writing.
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Tim Ferriss: This makes me wonder how you choose, and I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while, and I don’t think we got into it in our prior conversation, which is how do you choose projects, how to spend your time, where to allocate your limited life force? Because there’s, “what do you want” which is where a lot of people would start. Although that’s a pretty — it can be nebulous in a handicapping way because that could take you in all sorts of different directions. But how do you choose your projects, things to spend time on?
Elizabeth Gilbert: I’m kind of a hard-ass about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, great.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Part of the thing I’ve noticed that people tend to get stuck on sometimes is that they get this inspiration. Inspiration comes first. Inspiration is the breathing in of God. So something, even the most empirical, scientific, atheist people in the world, when they talk about where an idea came from, they say, “An idea came to me.” They say that. They don’t even know they’re saying that, but that’s they’re reporting accurately what the feeling is because that’s what everyone I’ve ever met who’s had an idea. It’s the eureka moment. It’s like, “Oh, I just heard, saw, and felt an inspiration.” I know the difference between something that comes from me and something that comes to me talking about prepositions again, and I think most creative people do as well. Like, “Oh, this came to me.” And then it can feel like an assignment or it can feel like a challenge. It’s like, “Now, I want to make this thing.” But a place where I think people get sidetracked and distracted, it’s very, very, very similar to meditation. Meditation, spirituality, and art have so much in common.
This may sound familiar to people who — maybe you’ve had this experience. You start working on this thing that was this inspiration, and a couple weeks, couple months into it, couple days, another idea comes. And that idea seems more interesting than the one that you’ve already invested some time into. And then you’re like, “But I want to do this thing. This thing is fresh and exciting. This is the really, really cool thing.” And then you go and do that one, and then another idea comes, and then it’s like you’re dealing with this melee. And so oftentimes people will say to me, “I’m working on a book and I’m halfway through it, but I’ve got this other idea that I think is way better. This book feels really stale and it doesn’t have any life in it.” I always say like, “Okay. Well, I give you permission to quit working on that first project, but only if you have a proven track record of ever being able to finish a thing.”
Tim Ferriss: That is so smart.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Because then it’s legit. It’s like, “No, I’ve got this better idea.” But do you have 30 unfinished things? Because if you have 30 unfinished things, now, we have a problem. I have those same things happen to me. Like I’m a third of the way, a quarter of the way, a fifth of the way in a project, and then something so much more interesting comes along. I’m like, “But I know enough to know.” I’m like, it comes dancing. It’s like a dancing girl. It just comes across the stage.
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say the hottest girl at the dance —
Elizabeth Gilbert: The hottest girl at the dance —
Tim Ferriss: — just showed up.
Elizabeth Gilbert: — just showed up, and you’ve been married for two months. And you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been married for two months, and the hot…” But what I know is that if I abandon my, let’s call it wife, this project that I’ve been working on for a few months to go off with the hot girl, in a few months, she’s going to be just as boring and stale. And then, a new hot girl is going to come along, and I’m never going to complete anything. So stick with the one you came to the dance with. If I’ve got multiple ideas and I’m not sure which one I’m beginning, I actually have a team meeting and I make the ideas make proposals to me about what do you actually want me to do?
Tim Ferriss: This is like project-based IFS.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Totally. It’s like I’m the angel investor and these ideas are like, “We want your time and money for this.” I’m like, “Well, what are you?” Like, “What are you? What do you have for me? Why should I invest my money and time in you?” A lot of ideas when I challenge them, they disappear into the ether. Because they’re like, “I don’t know. Something about birds.” I’m like, “You haven’t thought it out.” And then, some other ideas like, “No. I want to write about this very specific thing and it’s going to take…” I’m like, “Okay, so this one’s got their act together. So when the bird idea is more formed, come back. Come back when you’re ready. Come back when you’re ready to be real and not just to be tantalizing me with…” So I’m a real hard-ass about it. I don’t mess around. I don’t let these ideas push me around.
ANNE LAMOTT
Tim Ferriss … And I’m going to ask a question that no doubt you’ve been asked before, but I have to ask, what do you think it is about Bird by Bird that affected so many people so deeply? And certainly that’s true of many of your other works, but in this particular case, what do you think it is that has that type of effect on people?
Anne Lamott: I think it’s because I didn’t try to con people into thinking that if they just got a book finished, that my agent would want to take a look at it by the end of the week and that it would almost certainly be published. And that then all the Swiss cheese holes inside of them would be healed and they’d be well, and they’d get that FDA stamp of approval and be validated. And then their parents would start to respect them. I said, “None of that’s going to happen all of that as an inside job.” But I’ll tell you a funny story. When Sam’s little boy, who’s 12 now was five, I was teaching his kindergarten class a writing workshop. And instead of saying “shitty first drafts,” I said, “really poopy first drafts.” And the kids loved me. And after I was done, my little grandchild came up to me and he leaned in and he sounded like Tony Soprano.
He said, “Oh, Nana. That was terrible.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “You told people you would teach them how to write a book, but you only taught us how to write one page.” And that’s really what I can help you do is the one chapter on shitty first drafts. So I don’t try to teach kids or grownups how to write really, really well. I just teach them to stop not writing. I teach to keep their butt in the chair and to write badly. And that all first drafts of any book you’ve ever read by the authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts. And I teach people to take it really small, Bird by Bird. Is it okay if I tell the story?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, please. I would love for you to tell the story just so people know the genesis.
Anne Lamott: Well, my older brother — I was like a super superstar achiever in school and my older brother hated school. And he was kind of a rebel. And in California, in the ’50s and early ’60s, in fourth grade, you wrote two term papers. One was the Sacramento paper, that’s our state capital. And the other was on birds. And you had to write all year, all semester, a paper on birds. And my brother hadn’t started. It was due on a Monday, and on a Saturday, he admitted to my dad that he hadn’t started. And my brother was a tough guy and he was in tears. And my dad sat down with him and put his arm around him and he said, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy. First you read about chickadees and then you write a paragraph in your own words about chickadees and then you draw a picture. And then you take pelicans and you study up on pelicans, and then you write a paragraph or a passage on pelicans.”
And I never ever forgot that. And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so in my forties, I heard E.L. Doctorow say that writing was like driving at night with the headlights on. You could only see a little ways in front of you, but you could make the whole journey that way. And I think that is the most profound advice I can offer anyone on any topic. That you can only see a little ways in front of you and you can make the whole journey that way. And another thing that I think helped people when they read Bird by Bird was the chapter on perfectionism and how perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. It’s the voice of the enemy. And if you listen to it, it keeps you crazy for your entire life because we all fall short. You’ve written books and you think you’re creating this golden and crystal palace that people can walk inside of and see all of truth and beauty and reality.
And you kind of end up — your books and my books, all of them are kind of shantytowns and like in the [inaudible] the peace marches where people set up tents and thought it made sense to bring their dogs during the rainstorm. And that’s a miracle to have written a shantytown. And so I think these ideas of not knowing what you’re doing and letting yourself do it really badly and to try to help grind down that critical voice. I’ll just mention my husband’s work here. He’s Neal Allen. He wrote Shapes of Truth. And the work he does with people in these Shapes of Truth is taming the inner critic. And what his position is: “You’re never going to get rid of it. We don’t get over very much here.” What he does with people is he has them bring forth the inner critic and actually just put it on the table in front of him.
And he thanks them for keeping him alive when he was six and seven, because that critic kept him small and controllable. So he didn’t run out into the street. He didn’t swim out past his ability to stay afloat, but that at the age of 60 or whatever, we probably don’t need it anymore. And so he has his clients give the inner critic a great new job, which might be ethical consultant for the project so that the inner critic can go off to the library where there’s an incredibly comfortable chair and a good reading light and 2,000 books. And he will sit there and read, which he loves to do, and when we need an ethical consultation, we’ll come get him. But we don’t need that constant — is it okay to say the F word on this show?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Yes please.
Anne Lamott: Okay. So in Bird by Bird, there’s a whole chapter on K-Fucked Radio, KFKD. And without a lot of help and a lot of transformation and healing, K-Fucked Radio’s on 24/7. It’s telling you how far short you’re falling. It’s telling you how great you started out and what a disappointment you’ve turned out to be. It’s telling you that what you’re in the middle of is beating a dead horse, on and on and on. And so the Shapes of Truth work and the inner critic work and Bird by Bird is 90 percent about turning down K-Fucked Radio. Anyway, out of the left-hand speaker is all this stuff about that you can’t do it perfectly, and why bother, and that this has been blah, blah, blah. But out of the right-hand speaker, is like the voice of the people who love you most. The voice of like, for me, Sam or my husband or my two best girlfriends. And they’re saying, “I love your stories. I love how you write. I can’t wait to read more.” But you can turn down the left-hand speaker and it’ll always be there to some degree.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Tim Ferriss: I read a beautiful line from you describing a certain aspect of your creative process. This is from the Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, Number 72. “One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood.” And you continue to say, later in that same paragraph, “I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes … and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.” Could you expand on any of this? I mean, I think it’s pretty well put. But I know that there are a lot of people who feel they need to get themselves into the mood to write. Is there anything else you could add to this?
Joyce Carol Oates: No. I definitely feel that you create your mood by working. And I have a work ethic. I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it. And so if you feel that you just can’t write, or you’re too tired, or this, that, and the other, just stop thinking about it, and go and work. Life doesn’t have to be so overthought. You don’t have to wait to be inspired. Just start working. Particularly, I think, first go for a long run and a nice walk, and think about what you’re going to do, come home, and start working. But try not to be interrupted. That’s the problem. Most people are living in families, or they’re living with a partner, and the other person has a schedule and expectations. And while you may love your family, they can be the ones who drain you of energy.
For women, that’s always been a problem. Women are nurturing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But women find it very hard to say no. Women writers are always being asked to do things pro bono, to volunteer their time, to do different things, to read manuscripts, to be on committees, and so forth. And the instinct is really to say yes. I say yes on lots of these things. If you’re a careful custodian of your own time, like Philip Roth, for instance, or Flaubert, you would never give away a whole lot of your time. Philip Roth would never — he wouldn’t do one 100th of the things that I do. He was too smart. He knew how to guard his own privacy.
JERRY SEINFELD
Jerry Seinfeld: Well, my guiding rule is systemize. What’s the problem? The problem is — like my daughter. My daughter is very creative. She’s extremely bright. She’s got an incredible head on her shoulders, and I’ve seen myself in her at that age. She’s way further advanced than I was at that age, but she doesn’t know —
She has a creative gift. Okay? So I say to her, “When you have a creative gift, it’s like someone just gave you a horse.” Now, you have to learn how to ride it. You got to learn how to ride this horse. I’ve seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens, I’ve seen people that were given black stallions, and it usually — if you have a black stallion, like from that movie, and you’re born, and they just put you on it — and that’s what happens. They just put you on it. And you either learn to ride this thing, or it’s going to kill you.
And we have many, many examples of that. So she’s trying to write this thing. She’s struggling, “I can’t write. I keep putting it off.” So I explain to her my basic system, which is, if you’re going to write, make yourself a writing session. What’s the writing session? I’m going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don’t just sit down with an open-ended, “I’m going to work on this problem.” That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head.
It’s like you’re going to hire a trainer to get in shape, and he comes over, and you go, “How long is the session?” And he goes, “It’s open-ended.” Forget it. I’m not doing it. It’s over right there. You’ve got to control what your brain can take. Okay? So if you’re going to exercise, God bless you, and that’s the best thing in the world you can do, but you got to know when is it going to end. “When is the workout over?” “It’s going to be an hour.” “Okay.” Or “You can’t take that? Let’s do 30 minutes.” “Okay, great.” Now we’re getting somewhere. “I can do 30.”
I’m trying to teach my son, who knows how to do Transcendental Meditation, how to do it. You know? I assume you know about that.
Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah, I practiced this morning.
Jerry Seinfeld: Okay, so — “I can’t do it 15 minutes.” “Okay, let’s do 10. Let’s do 10. Let’s come up with something you can do. That’s where you start everything. That’s how you start to build a system.” So my daughter — so I said to her, “You have to have an end-time to your writing session. If you’re going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you’ve got to get a reward for that. And the reward is, the alarm goes off, and you’re done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You’re done.”
If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is “Stop now. Pencils down.” So that’s the beginning of a system that to me will help almost anybody learn to write, which is something I’ve kind of wanted to teach in a way, because I think it’s so simple.
I think exercise is pretty simple too, but people don’t — they don’t come up with good, simple little systems. They just try and do it, and to me, that’s — you’re going to fail.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The simple doesn’t mean easy, and the point you made —
Jerry Seinfeld: No, no, no. Not easy —
Tim Ferriss: — is to —
Jerry Seinfeld: — but simple.
Tim Ferriss: — so important. The incentives. Right? Having a reward. Having a defined format. How long did your daughter end up choosing for her writing duration, or how long —
Jerry Seinfeld: I told her —
Tim Ferriss: — have you chosen?
Jerry Seinfeld: I told her, “Just do an hour.” That’s a lot. She says, “I’m going to write all day.” “No, you’re not. Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you taught a class on writing, what other lessons might you have, or resources, or anything, exercises? Because I’m imagining that your daughter could sit down, she says, “All right, I have an hour.” And then you ask her how her writing session went, and she said, “Well, I didn’t have any idea what to write.” So you’d have — I don’t know what age the students would be in your course, but what else would be a component of your class on writing?
Jerry Seinfeld: Well, I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. No one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage. You know?
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Jerry Seinfeld: How many hours are you going to work per week, per month, per year? You might even want to chart that. Or with your exercise, if you want to get in shape. I couldn’t get in shape. I started out as a jogger in the ’70s, and I would run three miles a day. And then I got older, and I got married late, and I had young kids. And I really had to get in shape, and I picked up this book by Bill Phillips called Body for Life.
Tim Ferriss: Body for Life, yeah.
Jerry Seinfeld: And it’s really, really — it’s such a system for a primitive brain, and I do it to this day. I think it’s a work of genius, this book. And it really got me in shape, because he broke it down to, “Here’s what we’re going to do. In minute one, here’s what you’re going to do, to minute five, minute 12. And this is going to end in 45 minutes.” Or whatever it is. And every minute, I know exactly what I’m doing, and that turned the key for me. And all of a sudden, I was getting in shape, because I never had to ask, “What am I doing now?” Or, “What are we doing next?”
It’s like you’ve got to treat your brain like a dog you just got. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid, little dog that is easily trained. Do not confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. And it’s done through repetition and systematization.
MARY KARR
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about revision.
Mary Karr: Okay, revision.
Tim Ferriss: Revision. This doesn’t have to be serious.
Mary Karr: I’m a big revisor. I’m a big revisor.
Tim Ferriss: You are a big revisor. But, so you have said, “Anyone who has read a rough draft of anything I write is just shocked at how bad it is.”
Mary Karr: It’s terrible.
Tim Ferriss: What does the process look like? I mean, I know this is a very—hopefully it doesn’t sound like a really naive question, because I know that there are many, many aspects to revision. So, I’ll lead with just a bit. This is from writermag.com, but Karr says she takes a hard look at every sentence she writes: “Can I make this sentence less boring? More interesting? Prettier? More colorful? More true?” So that’s a teaser. What does your revision process look like? Because I’ve read that you threw out something like 1,200 pages.
Mary Karr: Threw out 1,200 pages of Lit. Yeah. Finished pages too, that’s not draft. And that was written over about, I want to say, five or six years. And I remember when I threw it out, Tim, I was so upset. I had been—well, first off, they were about to hang me. I was so late. I was like seven years late on a contract. I mean they—and so I finally my agent called me and said, “You’re going to have to…” I said, “You know what? I will sell my apartment and give the damn money back if they don’t shut up and leave me alone. It’s just going to take me a minute.” So anyway, so I’d sent them, I don’t know, I’d sent them like 130, 140 pages. And my editor at the time estimated that I’d thrown out 1,200 pages.
And let me tell you, when she said that they sucked as bad as I thought they sucked, I mean, I knew they sucked when they sent them, which is why I didn’t want to send them. I wanted to keep working on them. So I just, I went to bed for like two days and I watched Dr. Phil reruns and a lot of cooking shows. And I ordered a lot of curry. I think I had a whole pizza at one point and slopped around in my bathrobe. And then I called Don DeLillo, who’s one of the people I call, it’s like the nuclear button, who’s just one of the great novelists, and who also happens to be a friend of mine. And I said, “Don, I think I’m writing a…” He’s like, “What are you crying about?” I said, “I think I’m writing a bad book.”
And he said, “Well, who doesn’t?” And I thought about that. And I thought, “God, he’s right. Tolstoy’s written bad,” but I mean, people I read, every writer I know has written a bad book. So, okay. So, okay. So maybe it’s just going to be a bad book, but it’s the book that’s standing in line to be written. And I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened. So basically what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a time.
I think one example I give in The Art of Memoir is that when my mother is driving me to college, and I think the sentence I started with was something like, “Mother drove me to college in her yellow station wagon. We stopped every night at the Holiday Inn and got drunk on screwdrivers.” I can’t remember. Might’ve said puking drunk on screwdrivers. And so I somehow was able to remember being in that car. The thing about my mother’s yellow station wagon was that it didn’t have an air conditioner. So at that time you could buy an air conditioner that strapped under the dashboard. Well, it would build up condensation. And when she turned right, and I was sitting in the shotgun, the water in the air conditioner would spill out onto my bare feet. And it was icy, icy cold water.
And I remembered that we had stopped and gotten a bushel of peaches in Arkansas, and she was drinking vodka. Driving, drinking vodka and orange juice, and eating these—watching her eat a peach. When you’re 17 years old, to watch your mother eat and show any desire for anything is just so horrifying. You just want to die. There’s just nothing uglier than watching your mother eat a peach when you’re 17. You just think, “My God, woman. Shut your mouth. Take a smaller bite. Jesus, it’s not going anywhere.” But the smell of the peaches and being in the—and suddenly I remembered that I had a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I had got, it was her book, but I had started reading, and she said, “Read it aloud to me.”
And I remembered reading that book and driving, and I remembered the—you grow up around these Texas dirt farms. I mean, there’s plenty of corporate farming in the state of Texas, but then you get to the Midwest and it’s just so organized. It’s just there aren’t the rusted cars in the yard and the refrigerator on the porch. It’s these rows and rows of corn and these big, cinnamon-colored silos. And I remember driving into that landscape up to that college and reading that book and thinking I could be a writer. I somehow was able to remember those details and occupy that body in space and time and remember how disgusted I was by my mother and how terrified I was that I wouldn’t do well at school, that I would fail.
I’d been such a screw up. I’d been arrested the year before with a bunch of kids and there was a bunch of dope and some of them went to jail and I didn’t because the judge was a guy who had known my mother when she was a reporter for the local newspaper. And I still remember sitting in—she came to pick me up wearing a leopard—she had leopard skin pajamas. It was July 4th. And she had on a beaver coat with a mink collar and those leopard skin pajamas on this hot night and Kountze County, Texas, and here sits this judge behind this—this liver-spotted judge with these palsied hands and every meal he’s ever eaten on his tie when she came to pick me up. And he said, “I remember your mother. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” And she said, “Oh, you old fool.” I mean, I was just like, “Oh, my God, Mother, get me out of here. Sucking up is underrated.”
So anyway, yeah, I think it’s memory. I do an exercise with my—I just did it the other day for a colleague of mine, Dana Spiotta, wonderful young novelist I teach with. And she’s teaching an undergraduate class, there are 90 kids in the class. I said, “I want to do this writing exercise.” She said, “Well, the writing, it’s been uneven.” But I said, “Trust me, everyone will write well.” And you have them focus on a room they grew up in and to try to occupy the smell, to try to remember a room you were in where your mother’s cooking, your grandmother, wherever you had a good meal when you were little and try to close your eyes and smell that, because smell is the most primordial memory and the most emotional memory and it’s stored way back in that snake brain hypothalamus we have that is where all the trouble starts.
And you try to get in that memory and interrogate your body about what you can smell, taste, touch, and then finally what you want, what are you yearning for and what’s keeping you from getting it? Maybe it’s a bite of the brisket or some of the barbecue or daddy’s oysters coming up out of the fryer, or what’s going to keep you from getting it? It’s my big-footed sister, who, as Daddy said, “Nothing ever got between her and a bag of groceries. She’s going to get all the oysters and I won’t get any.” And so it’s really more about trying to occupy a former self, because I think as you know, just as in trauma, the body remembers. The body also remembers beauty. It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things, too.
BRANDON SANDERSON
Tim: Are you still teaching the creative writing class at BYU?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, I am.
Tim Ferriss: Brigham Young University. What is the first class?
Brandon Sanderson: First class, so first class is some things I just told you. I get up and I say to them — actually, the very first thing is I say to them, “During this class, we’re going to pretend you want to be a professional writing writer, earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years. That we’re going to pretend, because most of you…” that’s probably not why they’re there. Most of them, they’re just curious. They may have a book of them, and we have this curious relationship with art in our society. It is, as soon as you say, “I’m going to write something,” people are like, “Oh, when will you monetize it? When will you earn money from it?” And that can be kind of destructive.
Like you mentioned you’re writing a book or you wrote one just because it was an itch. You enjoyed it. I think writing is legitimately just good for people in the same way that working out is good for people, learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head on a page, it’s just innately good. Most people, when they go play basketball, if they look like me, people aren’t going to be like, “So when are you going into the NBA?” But if you write a book, people will say, “So when are you going to publish it?” And I say to the students, “It’s okay if that’s not your goal. If you want to write just for you — if you want to be on the, I spend 20 years and then produce one book route, totally fine. However, I want you to know everything you would need to shoot for the highest level, which is earning a full-time living as a writer. And everything else falls underneath that.”
So during the class, we pretend that that’s your goal. Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are. But while we’re there, we pretend that. And then the second thing I say is, “You’re going to have to learn when to ignore me.” And that is really hard to do because I’m an authority. I’m up there. Survivorship bias says who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant? Some of it hopefully, but I can’t really determine what really played a part in me being successful and what didn’t.
And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory. Self-contradictory. I can give you examples of that if you want, but you can’t use them all. So you’re going to have to ignore some of the advice of major authors. Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong — some of the things for you. Some of the things that I tell you will be wrong for you. You have to find your own way. And so I kind of start off with, “I’m going to pretend you want to be a professional writer.” And then follow it up with, “But learn when to ignore me.”
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit?
Brandon Sanderson: The one I generally use as my prime example is when I was studying this before I broke in, two authors that I admired, I read their books. I read On Writing by Stephen King and How to Write Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. And I read these books, and I honestly can’t tell you 100 percent if it was in those exact books or other writings of theirs on their websites and things. But Stephen King at one point said, “Do not make an outline. Do not use a writing group. These will destroy your writing.” And Scott Card is like, “I need an outline. It is fundamentally vital for me in order to build my book.” Now, Stephen King is what we generally call — these are George R.R. Martin’s terms. He’s wonderful the way he speaks about fiction. If you’re really interested, anything George says is golden. He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener. For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited. He wants to take a seed. He’ll often say, “I take two really interesting characters and I put them in conflict and have something go wrong, and I see where the story goes, and I just write.” And he says if he has an outline, he feels like he’s already done that process in the outline. So when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation. He’s not exploring and discovering anymore.
The other group we call architects. Architects like to build a structure and then kind of go and take this little piece and then polish that little piece and see where it goes, and then take the next piece that they’ve already built as part of their structure and build a story around that. And most people are somewhere in between these two extremes. But those were two extremes where I realized I can’t do both of these. I can’t both not have an outline and have an outline. I can have a hybrid approach. But if you try to take both of their advice equally weighted, then you’re going to get nowhere. You can try both methods in different ways, you can try some hybrids. But a lot of things you’ll learn in writing you kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students or you think best served them even though they might not recognize it?
Brandon Sanderson: So what I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach. Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, if someone comes up to me and says, “I’m having trouble with X,” I’ll give them a writing exercise to work with that. If someone comes up to me and says, “I am having a lot of trouble going back and revising my chapters over and over again, instead of writing the next one,” I’ll say, “Okay, try writing longhand.” This works for some people. You go, you take a page of paper, you write it longhand, and you tell yourself, it doesn’t have to be perfect until I put it into the computer. You start each day taking what you wrote before and putting it to the computer and then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand, and then use that process to kind of get yourself back into the writing, but then forcing yourself to do something new. That works for some people.
If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, “All right, go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus and you just write down exactly what they say exactly as it’s said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue.” If you’re writing like Soderbergh, how would you do it? Pick some of your favorite people, go watch their movies, write down the dialogue, and compare that to their real life, and just kind of figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do. Those are exercises.
But in general, I’m only doing that when I’m diagnosing a problem. For the class I’m saying your job, if you want to try to be a professional writer, you’re going to have to write consistently.
Brandon Sanderson … Nine out of 10 writers that I’ve found do better with consistency. One out of 10 is a binge writer. I don’t understand binge writers as well, but I can talk about that. Those are the people who go rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book, and then they don’t write for 10 months. Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently, or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits. And I focus on that.
I’m like, break it down, set a goal, have a spreadsheet and try to hit your word counts, or at least your hour counts. If you’re having trouble doing this, go to a specific place every day that you do this, that you don’t do a lot of other things. Go to the coffee shop, go to a certain room in the house, turn on certain music that you only turn on when you’re writing. Build that habit so that you are very consistent. Batch your writing time. If there’s something you already do every day, if you already have built a habit to go to the gym, then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have an hour to write. Think about what you’re going to write at the gym, sit and write for an hour so that you are adding onto a habit that you’ve already built.
And that’s my focus in the class is to really be consistent. See if you can write, the goal is in the class to write 35,000 words. Class is around a third of the year, if you do that all year, you will end up with 100,000 words, which is your average novel.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s hit some top line habits from Brandon. How many words per year on average would you say you put down?
Brandon Sanderson: My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day. So whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages is what I’m looking at. Depends, I mean, I write in the old school manuscript format where everything’s 12 point and in Courier and it’s a holdover from the days when certain typesetting things are done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here. But I think in words, so I do 2,000, 2,500.
Tim Ferriss: Those are new words?
Brandon Sanderson: Those are new words. Now when I’m doing revisions, I’m not writing new words. And I would say around a third of my time is spent on revisions depending on the year. And this is the thing, some years I’ll do a lot of words. Some years I do a lot more revisions. And so it really depends. But if we’re looking at 2,000 words a day times 50 weeks, that can produce quite a lot of words. So 10,000 words a week is what that would turn into. That’s 500,000 words a year is what I could theoretically produce. Now, a third of my time’s done to revisions. So really I’m looking at around 300,000 words. A Stormlight Archive book is 18 months of work for that reason and things like that.
SETH GODIN
Tim Ferriss: All right, so I’m going to personalize this selfishly because that is my nature, right? To flash back, now I’m going to create a montage of dinners with Seth. This is just a portion of our exchange in the last dinner, same dinner where I misattributed this book to you as a recommendation, where I asked you for advice because I was feeling stuck with writing. You very, very observantly replied, “Didn’t we talk about that eight months ago, the last time we had dinner?”
I said, “Yes indeed, we did. It shows you how little progress I’ve made.” Whether this is just an opportunity to showcase my insecurities, I don’t know, but I would love to hear what you think it is that I torture myself with, or that tortures me that leads me to ask you these types of repeated questions on different occasions because you are as much as anyone I know, you seem from the outside looking in. Maybe it’s like the calm duck on the surface kicking like hell underwater, I don’t know. You seem to be a relatively unconflicted person. You’re not like biting your nails, fretting about doing A or B. You seem to pretty calmly do your thing, and I wouldn’t describe myself that way.
In what you’ve seen, is there any outside perspective where you’re like, “I think that these are some of the reasons Tim gets tied up and nuts?” Is there anything that you have to —
Seth Godin: Okay. Well, first of all, if I’m making you miserable at dinner, I apologize. That’s certainly not —
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no, no, you’re not. No, I love our dinners.
Seth Godin: I think that you left —
Tim Ferriss: This is just a segue into conversation.
Seth Godin: You left out the thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which is “Where is your bad writing?” And there’s no such thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block is real, but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed. “I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing,” and the way through is to do your bad writing. You don’t have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing and bad writing over time, if you do enough of it, can’t persist. Good writing will slip through, and I learned this from Isaac Asimov. He and I worked together on a project years ago.
He published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book, 400 books, and he told me that every morning — sorry, that’s the volunteer fire department. Every morning for six hours, he would sit and type. It didn’t matter if it was good or not, he had to do six hours of typing. Now obviously, he didn’t have a typing problem. Just about anybody can do six hours of typing and then at the end of the shift, he would look throughout the bad writing, whatever was left, what was left and the subconscious understood that if he’s going to type anyway, you might as well type something good.
He got through the bad writing thing and in your case, you have so much skill and such a benefit of the doubt from people you’ve earned it from, that it’s really likely that you’re saying, “Why do I need to get back into that? There’s nothing but downside for me,” because you know how to make one of the world’s best podcasts, you do it on the regular, people really like it. When you write a book, they roll their eyes, they read the whole thing. “Aren’t you proud of me?” What a pain in the neck. It takes a year; just do the other thing. I totally get that feeling, and this is where we lead to the second part about being conflicted, and it’s a small Nike riff, which is “Just do it.”
We’re not going to go into the origin of that phrase coming from a mass murderer, but just do it implies —
Tim Ferriss: Hold on! Is this like a Manson family reference, or?
Seth Godin: Gary Gilmore.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, I have no idea. All right, that’ll be for people to have research on their own.
Seth Godin: That was the last thing he said before they killed him.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Seth Godin: “Just do it.” Now you’ll never be able to unsee that image, sorry. Just do it implies “What the Hell? It doesn’t matter.” That’s not a good way forward, because it pushes you to be a hack who’s not responsible for your own work. The alternative is to replace the word “just” with the word “merely.” Merely do the work that the time you are spending narrating yourself doing the work, the time you’re spending catastrophizing the work is not helping anything. I was a really insecure flailing, failing entrepreneur for at least eight years in a row, just consistently failing, barely breaking, even getting close to bankruptcy on a regular basis.
I was willing things to work out, and I was spending a lot of time dramatizing all of the perfect problems that I was confronting. Then I was able to shift to merely doing the work without the narrative and without the drama. As soon as we can merely do the work, then there’s room to see what needs to be seen. I don’t believe in the muse at all. I don’t think there’s any outside force. I don’t think talent really matters. I think what matters is choosing to find your smallest viable audience, understand your genre, and explore what it means to make magic in the small, so you can do it again.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Two things, the first is you are a delightful dinner host, and I love our dinners so not to cherry pick and make this look like a —
Seth Godin: Okay, you’re invited back.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is not a video collage of like NASCAR accidents that I want to paint as the experience at your house, that’s not the case at all. Number two, I would love to ask about the decision, the point at which you decide you have something that you would like to publish or share, and that quality cut off or how you think about it because in my head, the helpful and self-defeating depending on how you want to look at it perfectionist side of things will, for instance, look at something I wrote in 2010 and say, “I can’t do that anymore and if I practice, I could still practice for weeks and publish something on the blog, and it would not be that good. Therefore, I’m not going to publish because I feel like people will be disappointed, or I will be letting them down and that the attention they’ll spend on it will not derive or return as much value to them,” right?
That’s the voice that is the deliberation that I have in my own head, and I do actually have hundreds of drafts. I have shitty stuff, but it’s never quite crossed the chasm into good enough to publish. I’ve been stymieing myself in that respect, and there is part of me that’s like, “You know what, the podcast is easier, it’s fun. I feel like it’s a craft I’m still improving on. Why don’t I just do that?” There is part of me that says that, then there’s another part that says that’s a cop-out.
In fact, the writing helps you to learn to think as Kevin Kelly, to invoke that name again, right? He writes to think, he doesn’t think and then write, and that I’m shortchanging myself by using perfectionism as an out.
Seth Godin: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If hearing all that, what comes to mind for you?
Seth Godin: Well, I’ll share my personal experience, but first, I want to challenge something you stated as fact, which is —
Tim Ferriss: Yes, please.
Seth Godin: — that the writing isn’t good enough to publish says who?
Tim Ferriss: Says me, right.
Seth Godin: Right.
Tim Ferriss: That’s me.
Seth Godin: Right. It’s not that the writing isn’t good enough to publish. It’s that when you look at the writing, your analysis of where you are in the marketplace and the promise you’d like to make and keep doesn’t match the writing that’s in front of you, but I dare say as talented as you are at so many things, this might not be your best skill knowing when it’s ready to publish —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, true.
Seth Godin: — and it may make sense in this world where it is ever easier to hire somebody to do the thing they are good at, to say to this person, “Here’s 5,000 words aimed at this kind of reader. Tell me where I’m got light and tell me where I should take stuff out,” because the way you get — my friend who I went to business school, Evan, climbed Mount Everest back when that was a very big deal. I mean there was no YouTube or anything, and I was quizzing him, “What’s that like?” Well, he said that the first weeks are just spent walking up this trail, that’s not that hard a trail to walk up, with tea houses along the way and stuff like that. It’s only toward the end, once you’ve committed to climbing Mount Everest, that Mount Everest actually gets really hard to climb.
It’s a fortunate coincidence for the climbers that it happens in that order because your sunk costs have increased so much by the time that it gets serious that you’re too embarrassed to turn to your peers and say, “I can’t put in the work.” What you’re doing before you get to the hard part is you’re inventing a reason to stop, and you said something was really poignant, which is you look at stuff you wrote in 2010 and you say I can’t do that anymore. Well, two things happened to me. First, 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Permission Marketing. It became a New York Times bestseller and I said, “I’m done. What could I do the first time out of the gate because I’d been a book packager before? This is my first ‘real’ book. How can I beat that?”
So I stopped. I just stopped and I sat in the dark for a year. I just didn’t do much of anything because I said, “I can’t hit lightning like that again,” and thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, he was unknown. He sent me this new book called The Tipping Point, and he asked me to write a blurb for it. I read it in one night and realized that without knowing it, I had been writing a book about how ideas spread. In the next 12 days, I wrote a 225-page book and I sent it to Malcolm. I said, “Look, if you want me to not publish this because it seems like you unlocked the key, and I don’t want to take away anything from The Tipping Point, I will stop and just throw it out, but I needed to get this out of my system.”
He was such a mensch. He gave me his blessing and wrote the forward, and I realized in that moment I couldn’t write Permission Marketing again. That day was gone, but I could write this book and someone would benefit from it. Then 10 years later, same 2010 you’re saying, “I wrote a book called Linchpin, and I will never be able to write a book that good again. I will never write a book that goes that deep close to my bones, that makes me feel the way that book made me feel.” After that book came out, I felt the same way again, which is “Well, if this is the journey, I found the end of the journey.” I realized six, nine months later, that that was selfish and that leads to the other key thing I want to talk about, which is generosity. Because generosity doesn’t mean free.
People pay for a surgeon who’s going to save their life. Generosity means that you’re expending emotional energy, emotional labor to help somebody else and as soon as I could shift it around in my head to say there’s somebody over there who could use a hand, then it wasn’t about me anymore, and I wasn’t parading anything. It got way easier to merely do the work without commentary because there’s somebody over there I’m doing it for, here we go.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Start When You’re Stuck, Finish What You Begin, and Stop Waiting for Inspiration — Creative Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamott, and More (#878) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-08-07 22:53:05
This is a special compilation devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I’ve asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in as some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions. Please enjoy this special compilation on the craft of writing.
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Connect with Elizabeth Gilbert:
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Elizabeth’s appearances on the podcast: 770, 430
Connect with Anne Lamott:
X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram
Anne’s appearance on the podcast: 522
Connect with Joyce Carol Oates:
X | Bluesky | Facebook | Newsletter
Joyce’s appearance on the podcast: 497
Connect with Jerry Seinfeld:
Website | X | Facebook | Instagram
Jerry’s appearance on the podcast: 485
Connect with Mary Karr:
Website | X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram
Mary’s appearance on the podcast: 479
Connect with Brandon Sanderson:
Website | X | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Brandon’s appearance on the podcast: 794
Connect with Seth Godin:
Website | Seth’s Blog | X | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram
Seth’s appearances on the podcast: 792, 476, 402, 343, 177, 138
“Meditation, spirituality, and art have so much in common.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
“All first drafts of any book you’ve ever read by the authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts.”
— Anne Lamott
“Life doesn’t have to be so overthought. You don’t have to wait to be inspired. Just start working.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
“Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture.”
— Jerry Seinfeld
“Every writer I know has written a bad book. So maybe it’s just going to be a bad book, but it’s the book that’s standing in line to be written.”
— Mary Karr
“Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently, or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits.”
— Brandon Sanderson
“Bad writing over time, if you do enough of it, can’t persist. Good writing will slip through. I learned this from Isaac Asimov … [who] published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book.”
— Seth Godin
Want to hear another episode with someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling the demon of the blank page? Listen to my conversation with novelist and The War of Art author Steven Pressfield, in which we discussed overcoming “Resistance with a capital R,” the many faces of self-sabotage, his journey from blue-collar truck driver to bestselling novelist, the hero’s journey versus the artist’s journey, morning routines and a “little successes” approach, shadow careers, why the process that works for Joyce Carol Oates might be all wrong for you, fear-setting, and much more.
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The post How to Start When You’re Stuck, Finish What You Begin, and Stop Waiting for Inspiration — Creative Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamott, and More (#878) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
