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If the spirit moves you.
Optimal minimal.
I think this helps a dude.
I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris.
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show.
Where does my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease
out the routines habits and so on that you can apply to your own life.
This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the
last month.
Features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can jump around, get a
feel for both the episode and the guest and then you can always dig deeper by going to
one of those episodes.
View this episode as a buffet to weight your appetite.
It's a lot of fun.
We had fun putting it together and for the full list of the guests featured today, see
the episodes description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app.
Or as usual, you can head to Tim.log, slash podcast and find all the details there.
Please enjoy.
First up, legendary actor Scott Glenn, whose acting career spends nearly 60 years and includes
performances in Apocalypse Now, the right stuff, the silence of the lambs and the born
ultimatum, as well as a return to HBO this year for season three of The White Lotus.
What advice, let's just say 10 years from now your grandkids are listening to this and
they're wondering what life advice?
I would give them both the lessons I learned from Sir Lawrence and from my dad, which is
if you love it, make it your life right along with that beatin' a-tious.
Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up.
If you can put yourself in the spot where you say, I don't care how many times I get
knocked down, I'm getting back up every single time and going after what I want.
That's the answer.
I mean, again, I'm going to bar with Lawrence Olivier, who created the National Theater
of England, who was the biggest movie star in the world, was the most creative stage actor
in the world and director.
He'd done everything.
My question to him was, what is it that you need to make it in this business?
Is it timing?
Right place at the right time?
Is it contacts knowing the right people?
Or is it just working on your skills and becoming better and better at what you do?
He said, my dear boy, none of the above.
Develop very strong jaw muscles, learn how to bite on and not let go.
I said, your telling me it's just pure tenacity.
His answer was yes.
If you're a monk outside the gates with a beggar's bowl and you stay out there long enough,
they'll finally get sick of seeing you open the gates and let you in.
Next up, Barbara Corcoran, an investor shark for the past 15 seasons on ABC's Emmy Award
winning Shark Tank and host of the top business channel on Patreon, Barbara in your pocket.
I would add another superpower in so much that I've seen of you and heard and watched.
The one thing I have never seen and maybe I've just missed it, but I have never heard
you take a victim perspective.
And I have heard, you say, for instance, that the difference between successful people
and others is how long they spend feeling sorry for themselves.
So true.
I've also heard you say, and I'm paraphrasing here, so if I get it wrong, please crack
me.
So far you're right, Jim.
You are at your best when you're being talked down to by a man or something like that.
Definitely.
And I would love for you to perhaps tell the story of your 51% partner in the founding
of the company, but also I'm so curious where that resilience and ability to reframe
them, what other people could take as victimization and turn it into something to your advantage.
Because I've seen that over and over again in your story.
It's such an important part.
I mean, recovering from failure in my book is 95% of life.
If you're going to have a good life, you better be really good at getting back up like
a jack in the box.
Boom, boom, boom, just get back up, get back up.
I think I got that, honestly, by being dyslexic.
Because when you're the kid in class that's dumb, you're a failure by anybody's standard.
And you constantly put down or look down on.
And I was embarrassed.
I learned shame in the classroom terrible thing for a child to feel like a nobody just because
they don't have a certain skill set.
But that definitely taught me about I had to go to school every day.
I had to go back and sit there and hope they didn't call on me for reading whatever.
And I got used to being a loser like that.
And getting back up and just said, I just had to go to school.
So I got early training in that area.
And I also learned from running sales for you in my whole life, that really was the only
difference between the superstars that I had making two, three million dollars a year
and people made an average of 45,000, which was the norm.
How does a superstar do it?
You know, I became a student of that.
I used to think it was connections.
I would hire for that.
Work ethic.
I would hire for that.
Who did they know?
In real estate, high price real estate, I would hire for that.
And then I realized that's just a starting gate.
It gets you any easy.
But when it comes down to how well you get back up and how long you take to feel sorry
for yourself, they drove me crazy too.
But I admired my superstars so much because of that ability.
I could see them like, you could punch them around.
They go, ah, that's a back up.
And so I learn from them too, you see.
Next up, Seth Godin, author of 21 international bestsellers, including Purple Cow, Lynchpin,
The Dip.
This is marketing and his new book, The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto for Teams.
How do you choose or think about kind of next chapters or what advice might you give
me as I contemplate?
But what's next type of question?
You know, I think it's very kind of you to say I'm very good at it.
I don't think I'm good at it, but because I'm sort of in public and I do it in a certain
way.
It's noted.
You know, I did five years of a Kimbo.
It was in the top 1% of all podcasts.
And then I just stopped.
And I stopped.
Not because I didn't love it.
I did love it.
I stopped because if I kept doing it, there's something else I wouldn't do instead.
And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum.
But if I just keep doing the thing, then there is no vacuum.
And sometimes the technology changes.
That's why Spinnaker went away.
That's why you couldn't keep making VCR games.
That's why my head start in the CD-ROM business was worthless because CD-ROMs went away.
I'd liked in every time I did this being a pioneer in a new media space because that's
for me the funest spot.
And then when the technology changes, I got to move on.
But podcast technology is never going to change.
I mean, you're noting there's a change in the production format and that is a change.
So in my case, what I am trying to do is not maximize my income per hour spent.
Nor am I trying to maximize the size of my audience.
What I'm trying to maximize is, are the people I'm serving glad that I did, that I showed
up to solve an interesting problem.
And two, as I build the stack of things on the bookshelf behind me, can I point to them
and say, that was interesting and generous and I'm glad I did it.
And that's part of a limited attention span theater.
So it's not for everybody.
But my whole point of view is that life is projects.
It is not a job.
And when you stopped the podcast and created that vacuum, did you already have something
kind of warming up in the batting cage that was pending that you need to create that vacuum
for or did you create the vacuum and then wait for something to get pulled in?
Not to strain the metaphor, but the idea.
No, you're not straining it.
If there is something pending, it's not a vacuum.
There have been times when something so good came along, I did it and then had to remove
things so I could do it.
You know, when a few of us started to do, which was one of the first social networks,
I had a completely reorganized my life because we built the 40th biggest website in the US
with only eight employees.
So we were busy.
This is not what I'm talking about.
I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you're never going
to work again, where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up.
And that's hard to do.
Yeah, it is hard to do.
Just to put a microscope on that, I have as means of backstory done this for periods
of time and have found it deeply, deeply uncomfortable, sometimes fruitful, oftentimes
not terribly fruitful.
In part, I think because when I create that vacuum, I don't know if the best way to embrace
the vacuum is to just stare at the wall and watch a paint dryer to do something else
and my mind just kind of folds in on itself.
You create the vacuum and then what do the next few weeks look like in terms of how you
spend your time day to day or week to week?
I think a fundamental difference between you and me.
There are so many of them, but one of them, as I am here, talking to what the World Tango
Champion, former World Record holder, L.A.
Long time ago, yes.
Is the only thing I have a World Record in is being part of the largest co-author book
signing in history in which me and 400 other people all signed our book at the same time.
Because I am not a high performer.
I am interesting.
And being interesting is really important to me, but I am not holding myself to the standard
you hold yourself in so many ways.
And so I could imagine that the thing that gives me comfort might not make you happy.
Right.
For sure.
I agree with all of that.
And how does that difference translate to what you would do in the weeks following creating
the vacuum after say, stopping the podcast?
Because I guess you have activities that you're still carrying forward.
It's not like you're completely idle.
You're writing so presumably.
If someone looked at me from the outside, I think that they would see that my days aren't
that different.
I am not shipping public work because I don't ship junk.
But I am internally creating lots of mediocre work.
And basically creating straw people and saying, what would this be like?
And then what would that be like?
And here's this thing.
I sat with my 60 or 80 watt laser cutter and I cut this thing out.
What do I think of that?
And that invention cycle is joyful.
But I can't do it forever because I also need the satisfaction of shipping the work and
not giving into resistance.
So what I'm doing when I was a book packageer, we sold 120 books in 10 years, a book a
month.
I had more than 800 books on my hard drive ready to go.
Not finished, but two page five page proposals.
Because the only way to have a finished proposal for me is to have an unfinished one that
you didn't ship.
What is it?
This is probably a fundamental question I should have asked earlier.
But what do you get from writing and having written this consistently as you have been
due?
What is the pay off?
Like why do that?
Okay, so the biggest payoff is simple, not in terms of equity, it's stock value, but
in terms of the noise in my head, the biggest benefit is I will be writing tomorrow because
it's Friday, not because I've written the perfect blog post that every single day something
gets published by me because I decided that 24 years ago, not because I have reconsidered
each day, whether this one is good enough.
And even if no one read my blog, I would still do it.
And I'm very fortunate that people give me the benefit of the doubt knowing that I am
not guaranteeing this is the best thing I ever wrote.
And there's still a link to look at it.
So that's lovely.
In terms of my professional practice, again, back to genre, having a sinecure, a platform
where for a long time, if you type blog into Google, I was the first match because I just
showed up more than just about anybody.
There's a lot of value to saying, this is my lane and you can count on me in this lane.
And for someone who is as parapetetic as I in their creative pursuits, having one of those
turned out to be a really useful thing.
But not least, Hugh Howey, the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Beacon 23,
Sand, Machine Learning, Halfway Home, and more than a dozen other novels.
I read in the process of doing research, which is always fun for me to do with friends
when I have them on the podcast because otherwise it'd be really creepy to do like a bunch of
Google sleuthing on my friends.
And I was wondering, I think you gave the advice and I'm wondering if it still applies
that writers not take days off.
That's one that could be one of those don't play everything you read on the internet.
The second is related to writing for I think it was a book review website and becoming
accustomed to working on deadline.
And I just love you to speak to the importance of that because I know for me, I think of
myself occasionally as a writer.
If I don't have a deadline, man, I am not terribly productive.
Yeah.
There's the deadline piece if you could speak to that and then just how you would suggest
people train themselves to write.
Is it daily?
Is it a few days a week?
Is it something else?
So I can only speak to what works for me, but I will say that I found that I have way
more in common with other writers than we are dissimilar.
Like I hear the same laments, like you were just mentioning.
I know you and I have a lot of the same hangups about writing and the famous quote about writing
is I hate writing, but I love having written.
Yeah.
Everyone loves to like gotten some pages behind them.
And I tried for 20 years to be a writer from age 12 to 32.
But number one bucket list thing in life is to write a book and no one was stopping me
by myself, but for 20 years I couldn't do it.
And honestly, like all I had to do was write a little bit every day and I would write a
book that's all I ever wanted.
And so how can you get in the way of yourself that consistently and we all do it as writers?
And once I unlocked the ability to write, my fear was ever turning that switch back off.
And that's where I think the daily habit is critical.
Like I wrote today before I came here and it's Saturday.
And I'll write on the plane and I'll write in the back of an Uber.
I'll do whatever it takes to get some words in that day.
Is there a certain amount or is it just something?
It used to be.
I used to try to do like 2000 words a day.
Wow.
I know.
It's a lot of work.
So if I do a thousand words a day and what I find helpful in my word document, whatever
I'm working on, there's the word count written in the document at the end wherever I'm writing.
And when I start my daily session as I'm writing, I can see at the bottom of the word document
what the current word count is and I can just see the comparison.
And that gives me my like you need to do a little more.
And then once I'm done for the day, I update that number to the days number.
And so I'm always just trying to march that forward.
It sounds calculated and cold, but if you just sit around waiting for inspiration and
try to write a few sentences here and there, you'll never stay with the story enough to
know what it's even about.
And you said effectively when you turned on the spigot, you're afraid of turning it off.
So you kept up the daily practice.
But how did you, after so many years, turn it on the first place?
Like what was the catalyst?
You mentioned the review website I was writing for.
So I was trying to help a friend get this crime mystery thriller website up and running.
And he was doing the film movie side of it and I was doing the books.
And I just put a call out to publishers.
It was a beautiful website that he had made.
So I was sharing the URL of saying this is what we're doing.
And I started getting a flood of books in the mail.
And for a reader like me, this was like Christmas every day.
I was getting more books than I could review.
So I was having to go through and see which ones it feel to me.
And I was building bookshelves all over my house.
To house these things.
For one genre.
Yeah.
For one genre.
And it was the biggest genre.
The one that publishers make a lot of their money on.
And in order to keep up with it, I started reading and reviewing a book a day.
And this is all I was doing.
That done us in college too.
I'd gone through a period of like two years where I was reading a book a day as a challenge.
And some of these are 400 page books.
So you're not doing much else.
Yeah.
Just that.
I didn't know how good this was going to be for my writing.
But absorbing that much prose just made it so easy for me to tap into.
Not only the ability to string words together, but all the plot elements that I was absorbing
from weeks and weeks and weeks of absorbing this many books.
And then I was also writing that review every day.
And so I was getting a daily writing habit.
And that wasn't even a job.
Wasn't getting paid to do this.
I was doing it for a friend to try to get a website going because I love reading.
But that experience is what made it possible for me to write.
Is there any Mount Rushmore of fiction books?
Well, they come to mind, right?
This is not a fixed list, but whatever comes to mind, if you were to say, like, and I'll
make this personal.
So I've been experimenting with short fiction for the last year or so.
I think I will do quite a bit more.
Possibly in screenplay format, which I definitely want to talk to you about at some point.
But what are some books people should consume or that I might want to consume to
know?
Provide myself with really good nutrition for absorbing some way you're describing.
I think reading beautiful prose is almost like striking a tuning for it before your writing
session.
I think it's really awesome to pick up.
There's several things you can do.
You can read stuff that's nonsense, but beautiful, like some proofs.
And you can just turn to any part of proofs.
It's all the same.
The beginning of a story reads just like the middle of the stories.
But the way a good translation of proofs flows that I have been tamer, the run on
sentences.
It's like it's you start to hear the tonal quality of good music in words.
And then you can start to sing in that key yourself.
Some of the books I've read recently that have I think up to my writing.
One was, this is how you lose the time war.
Which is so good.
Yeah, so good.
That is an incredible book.
And it's short.
And it's one of those that you can just pick up and read again to like remind yourself
what writing can sound like.
Also fast name because it was written by two authors.
Yeah, who alternated back and forth, which is structural to the story, which works.
Cersei, have you read that?
I haven't yet read it.
I have seen so many people reading it.
I have seen friends reading it.
Took me forever to read that.
The prose in that book is so special and will make you a better writer.
Just recently is another one that someone recommended it was tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
I haven't heard it.
I tried to read that like five times and it was the hottest thing.
And I never gave it enough of a chance.
But when I finally finished it, I was like, that's what I'm aiming for with my writing.
No kidding.
Why did it take you five times?
I've heard this from a lot of people.
So if you're here, this recommendation and you want to read the book, get through the
first like 70 or 80 pages.
And I know it's like, I'd rather read something that's kept for me from the first page.
This book pays off.
So those are recent books that have recommended Lincoln Highway to me.
Lincoln Highway.
It's spectacular.
Anything by Amor.
Amor Tolls is one of the, it's just a book full of literary and narrative magic tricks.
It's wild.
He upsets me because he wasn't even a writer as his primary career.
I thought no, one of those.
Yeah, super successful investment banker.
You know, it's like a Michael Lewis kind of story, like super successful other ways.
But it turns out the quality of reading that he does and he's just one of the smartest
human beings I've ever met.
But his writing, there's a short story collection coming out by him this year called Table
for Two.
Get it on day one because there's one short story in particular in there that is the clearest
thing I've ever read.
So he's another one that I read his works in order to remind myself like, well, we're
aiming for.
And his wordsmithing is beautiful.
Yeah.
But it's not first, right?
It doesn't strive to be that clear.
And his is so clear and the story arcs and character development and the weaving, right?
He's like sitting at a loom of prose and just like weaving these carpets and you don't
see the finished pattern until after he's saying an hour and you're like, oh my God.
Yeah, I didn't see that coming at all.
He's a genius and he works hard at it.
You know, it spins that the years and time it takes.
That's a level of writing that it's fun to aspire to, but I know I'll never reach.
Would you have to have like loftier goals than you expected outcome?
And now here are the bios for all the guests.
My guest today is someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for years.
We did the interview at his house in Idaho.
He has no social media, no website.
And his name is Scott Glenn.
He is a legend.
Scott Glenn's acting career spans nearly 60 years.
His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now or Urban Cowboy, the right stuff.
Silverado, the hunt for red October, the science of the lamps, backdrop, the version suicides
and the born ultimatum.
I would venture that every single one of you would recognize his face.
More recently, Scott has appeared on the small screen as Kevin Garvey senior in the leftovers.
The blinds sense a stick in Marvel's daredevil and the defenders.
And as the retired sheriff Alan Pangborn and Castle Rock this year, Scott will return
to HBO to join season three of the White Lotus.
And there is so much more to his story.
He has, I would consider it, the gold medal trifecta in terms of mastery across life.
My guest today is not only incredibly successful in her various endeavors, she is absolutely
hilarious.
And I burst out laughing a lot in this conversation.
I had a blast, I think you will enjoy it as well.
Barbara Corcoran.
Barbara Corcoran has been an investor slash shark for the past 15 season on ABC's four
time Emmy award winning show Shark Tank, investing in more than 100 businesses to date.
Even more impressive to me, she is also the founder of an eponymous real estate company,
the Corcoran Group, which she started with a $1,000 loan after leaving her job as a waitress
in New York City.
You've seen this name everywhere.
It's on signs, buildings all over the place.
Over the next 25 years, she would parlay that $1,000 into a $5 billion real estate business.
And we get really deep into the weeds about early decisions, critical inflection points,
and oh my God, some of her stories are just incredible.
Barbara is the author of the National Best Seller, Shark Tales, how I turned $1,000 into
a billion dollar business, and host of the top business channel on Patreon, Barbara in
New York Pocket, which provides exclusive content created for entrepreneurs at every level.
On Patreon, Barbara will dive deep into the topics most important in business today, given
an inside look at how she runs her business and works with her shark tank companies and
join members live to answer their toughest questions.
You can find Barbara on TikTok, on Instagram, LinkedIn, all Barbara Corcoran, and you can
find Barbara in your pocket at patreon.com slash Barbara Corcoran.
One of my favorite people to ask for advice is Seth Goedan.
And this is a walk-in talk, which means Seth and I were walking and talking while we recorded
this.
And I had many burning questions I wanted to ask.
He did not fail to deliver a lot of sage advice, tactical, practical wisdom.
And what Morgan I say, the guy is a gem, he delivers every time.
Who is Seth Goedan, you might ask?
Seth Goedan is the author of 21 International Best Sellers that have changed the way people
think about work.
His books have been translated into 38 languages, and Seth's books include tribes, purple
cow, lynchpin, the dip, and this is marketing.
That's right, one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, 8500, 8500 plus daily
blog posts, just to put that into perspective.
And two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time.
He is the founder of the Alt MBA, the social media pioneer, Squidoo, and Yoyodine, one of
the first internet companies.
His latest book is The Song of Significance, a new manifesto for teams.
You can find him at SethGoedan.com and you can find Seth's blog at Seth's blog.
So you can go to both of those for a lot of resources.
And I'm going to just reiterate why we did this format the way we did it, because there's
too much sitting in the world.
It's not good for you.
We weren't evolved to do it.
And I am trying to counteract the trend, the impulse, all the incentives to do podcasts
in a fixed location.
This isn't good for my health, and it's certainly not good for your health to force you to
consume it that way.
So I'm at least experimenting with being out and about doing something that we are designed
to do, and that is walk.
My guest today is my friend Hugh Howey.
And man, oh man, do I love having conversations with Hugh.
I always learn so much.
I laugh so much.
But who is Hugh?
Hugh is the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Beacon 23, Sand Machine Learning,
Halfway Home, and more than a dozen other novels.
His silo trilogy was recently adapted by Apple TV, becoming their number one drama of
all time.
A series based on his novel Beacon 23, starring Lena Headey, also released last year with
season two, Do in March.
Hugh's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of
copies around the world.
He lives in New York City with his wife, Shay.
On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as Hugh Howey, we talk about all sorts of things.
Creative process.
We talk about his publishing journey from a small press to self publishing, hitting the
New York Times list with a self-published book to a first of its kind, Print Only Deal
with a Big Five publisher.
He breaks all the rules and he is a very original thinker and also a prolific producer of all
things.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off.
And that is Five Bullet Friday.
Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
before the weekend?
Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter,
called Five Bullet Friday.
To sign up, easy to cancel, it is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday
to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over
that week.
Kind of like my diary of cool things.
It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
all sorts of tech tricks and so on.
They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I
share them with you.
So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you
head off for the weekend, something to think about.
If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blogslashfriday.
Type that into your browser, Tim.blogslashfriday.
Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.
