Transcript
Forests are more important than ever. Quilter manages its forests sustainably to help combat climate change, to supply wood for building homes, to protect habitats for nature, and to provide beautiful places for people to enjoy. That's why Quilja is developing outstanding visitor destinations like Beyond the Trees Avindale and creating more recreational forests in communities all over Ireland. Quilja, forests for climate, nature, wood, and people for a greener future for all. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. So I'm really happy to have Maria Popova. Is that how you say your last name, Maria? Yep. I'm really happy to have Maria on the show. Maria, I have to tell you, this is totally just a selfish podcast for me because the old people always ask me what blogs I read. And I'm always happy to tell people what books I read, but I'm always hesitant to say what blogs I read because, a, I don't wanna insult anybody, and B, I don't want people to stop reading my blog. But the only blog I read is your blog, which is brainpickings.org. Thank you. But you don't think that the, book authors would be insulted by not being, included in your selection? You know, people are insulted for all sorts of reasons, but really, like, for instance, I write every morning, and I know you write every day, all day. And some I often look to what I'm reading for inspiration. So usually I'm reading books, but I sometimes I need to read other stuff to get inspiration, and on that list is brainpickings.org, because you always have inspiring articles to to draw from. They're either about creativity or life or whatever. And so just the work you do is phenomenal, and I selfishly wanted to do this podcast so I could learn more about the work you do. Well, I I very much believe that any good creative work is a selfish act primarily, so, I think everything we read, all the books we admire came out of that. So ain't nothing wrong with that. Well, let me let me ask you about that because so you don't you don't write personal stories about yourself, but you write, in in-depth analysis, and it's almost like your website is a museum of the world but on the Internet. So you write all about great literature, great art, great design, all of these things that have inspired you through the years. And do you find that to be in any way, you know, like like you say, art is or writing is to some degree almost narcissistic. Like, you think you're writing because other people are going to be interested in what you have to say. So do you find that a little bit Yeah. That's not that's not really why I write. I mean, for me, personally, I can only obviously speak for myself, but, I do think I guess a selfish act is not, perhaps not the right language, but a very personal act, even if I don't write personal stories. And I I like the idea of of a museum of the world, as you say, but it's really kind of a museum of my inner world, and the only common thread between all the things that I write about, whether it's art or philosophy or science, is that there's some element in there that helps me, the person, figure out how to live and how how to live a a meaningful life. And that's the impulse. And and the fact that or the the possibility that it might be helpful to others or interesting to others, that's wonderful. And I'm very grateful for it, but that's not the the the motive. And I think that's really interesting because I would contrast that with almost all other, like, 99.99% of writing on the Internet, which is all this kind of, 10 ways to do have a better interview at work or 10 ways to get a promotion or here's, you know, 10 photos of Kim Kardashian you missed last week. And none of this has kind of, you know, you know, everybody's putting sort of themselves on a pedestal. Like, if I write 10 ways to, get a promotion at work, I hardly ever tell my own personal like, the writers of those articles hardly ever tell their own personal stories or give kind of, interesting examples. They just sort of give, sort of blurred out advice from a pedestal. And I don't really see that in your writing. Like, you're really kind of, even though you're not writing personal stories, you're really writing, your personal views of these works that you personally find either beautiful or meaningful or whatever. Well, thank you. First of all, that's very very generous. But I also I I think those words, beauty and meaning, they're so important and also so lacking in in a lot of the commercial commercial media. And and it's interesting too that I didn't hear you say the word content once, which is one of my big, big pet peeves because I do think there's a difference between content, which is the kind of stuff you see in those listicles and whatnot, and substantive writing, which is what what people who write for their own benefit and and by extension for the public benefit do. And I actually think, you know, language really matters and how we think about those things matters, and that explains why there are all these sort of qualitative differences. And I don't think what I do is any is better or special or different from what anybody else could do. It's more of partly a function of well, a function of the fact that I you know, I've been doing this for now more than 8 years, and I made very early on a decision not to to have an commercial ad supported site. And I think ad supported media do produce content and not substantive writing because that word is something primarily used by sort of people in marketing and native advertising who treat, quote, unquote, content as this filler material that transmits the true currency of their trade, which is advertising. And then, you know, we would hear this cliche, content is king, and it's mostly a cliche, you know, used by those people. But in that context, content is not king, content is currency. And substantive writing is king in the sense of that's what really nourishes us and inspires us and and just makes us feel a little more alive, you know, and and I think it's very hard to conceive of any self respecting journalist or scholar or writer of integrity who would stand to call his or her work content. And I think as long as we continue to kind of falsely crown currency and to insult substantive writing by calling it content, we'll continue to have these listicles and these sort of vacant things, and we'll continue to have a problem. Well, I I think I think there's 2 aspects there. 1 is, the listicles, for better or for worse, are attractive to people. Because let's say you are at work in a cubicle, and you want a promotion, and someone's writing 10 ways you can get a promotion. You're probably gonna click on that. Not because you're fooled by the listicle aspect of it, but because you don't you're you're you're miserable in your life and you want a promotion and this person, whether he's correct or not, has at least held out the bait. Hey, if you click on this, I might be able to help you get a promotion. So that might not be meaningful, you know, writing or whatever, and it might be used by some other organization's purposes as advertising, you know, to get advertising, but it holds out debate that it might help the reader. Whether it does or not, I don't know. Well, yeah. I mean, I I think lists in general, listicles and lists are different things. Just the list is a sort of, form of rhetoric is a powerful thing. And even Humberto Eco, 20 years ago, wrote that the list is the origin of culture, and he's famously a big list maker. Susan Sontag, too, all her diaries, and she used to say that lists are how we sort of confer meaning on existence, and I get that, they appeal to us because they make chaos or an overwhelming amount of of material or information feels somewhat containable and digestible. There's nothing wrong with that, but again, I think it's a qualitative difference that goes back to, as you say, is it really gonna help the reader? Is there some sort of merit of substance behind the form? Even if it takes the form of a listicle, is there some deeper function or is it really a vehicle for, like you said, clickbait? You know, it's funny. One time I was, backstage at a on a news show, and, the producer of the new show come came up to me and basically said, we're just trying to fill the space between advertisements here. And that was a new she was honest or she was honest. That that was a news show at a major network, like, and it was a major news show. It was on, like, I believe, from 7 to 8 PM, so the time when people are watching news on that network. So and that's how that's how quote unquote content is delivered to the masses. So what I like about, Brain Pickings is you've sort of kind of curated what and I can almost imagine what you must be feeling. Like, you see a book, and it might be anywhere from a 100 200 years old to 1 year old. You see a book or you see some design or you see something that's kind of lighted your fancy a little bit, and you decided, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna absorb this and focus on it and write about it in a way that is, in fact, entertaining to to my readers. And I know you say you don't focus on the readers that much, but your writing is good enough that the readers are gonna be entertained no matter what. So so and then what you pick, the choices you pick, you could see your your joy in them, you know, every single day. And and there's no common theme, really, among them, I don't think. Would you say there's a common theme among what you write about? Theme in terms of subject, no, but theme in terms of, as I said, sort of motive or common thread, yeah. It's sort of this question of of of meaning and and living a somewhat aspirational, ennobled life in in our age of cynicism, which, you know, cynicism is a very, I feel, very kind of lazy response to life in the sense that it's it's it's almost like, like a hedge against disappointment, you know. Because when we're cynical and something bad happens, we're like, oh, okay. Well, I knew that was gonna happen. Well, obviously, or, you know, this person's an idiot or whatever the case may be. But it's a it's a self protection mechanism that we have that is very much reinforced by the culture in which we live. But I don't think that it is a useful one in the end, in the grand scheme of things. And I guess that is the common thread that I I very much believe in in just, you know, earnestness. We have no tolerance for earnestness. We mock it and divide it in in ourselves. We're so embarrassed about it and ashamed of it, but Or or or or we could be using it as an excuse. So the reason why we wanna be cynical is we could say, well, look, I'm not gonna try to quote unquote or get that promotion or get or start that business or write that book because, everybody the government's against me or Wall Street's against me or some mysterious they are against me, so there's no point in me trying to step outside myself and be better be the best person I can be. Exactly. No. That's part of the laziness of it, the sense of resignation. And I I think the the other side of the same coin is also our sort of very conflicted relationship with our most earnest aspirations because I think, and and I would say pretty much any every philosopher in the history of humanity believes that, that every human being on some level just wants to be happy, seeks happiness. But the ironic thing, my god, is that, like, you cannot be you cannot pursue happiness without acknowledging that this in and of itself is in very earnest, very deep aspiration. And And people are scared of pursuing it. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, so I wanna so I wanna get I wanna reel it back a little bit and get to your origin story. Because every every superhero has a secret origin story. And so so you started Brain Pickings in in 2,006. Where were you working then? Like, what was happening? I was a sophomore in college. I had come to college to a pretty fancy school. So I'd come from Bulgaria, from the 99% of Bulgaria, which are, you know, not quite the 99% of America. Is there a 1% in Bulgaria? Well, the thing is, I mean, I grew up when while Bulgaria was still under communism, and communism should have fell in 91 ish. And in a communist society, there is no 1%. And so even though by the time I graduated high school and was about to come to college, it was allegedly democracy, it was decades of that sort of social structure trying to be rebuilt. And I wouldn't say I think one thing that happened was that there was a very rapid rift between the sort of the haves and the have nots. And what did emerge in Bulgaria at the time I was teenager and in high school was a 1% class that was mostly the mafia, the product of extreme corruption. Bulgaria, unfortunately, is still one of the most corrupt countries in in if not the most corrupt country in the European Union. And so, yeah. Basically, yes. There was a 1%, but my family was, like, as removed from it as as they come. So in any case So how did how did you how were you able to afford to kind of get over from Bulgaria to a a nice school here in the US? Well, I didn't afford it. I mean, I applied and I I got in, but I did work 4 jobs during college to pay my way through. And I had some sort of I I guess it was some sort of like a name scholarship, which means that it was from an individual person that was, like, donating money to international students. So it was a small scholarship. And then the rest of it, I just, you know, had some loans and did 4 jobs, 2 work study jobs, 2 other jobs, just to pay through. And the interesting thing that happened was I didn't anticipate I mean, you know, we think American culture is so pervasive in the world and that somehow because we watch all the movies and just it's in the culture that we're prepared for it. But I did feel very kind of disconnected, I guess. And I didn't at the time realize it was because the school I was in, which was, you know, an Ivy League school with a lot of rich kids, was not representative of what we will call America by and large, you know. And I just didn't I was very I was very unhappy. And so I had 2 kind of 2 impulses to really start brain pickings. 1 was that the smaller one, I would say, was that I one of the jobs that I had was at this little agency that, was 7 guys who were very young, idealistic. They only wanted to work with brands that sort of had an element of kindness and did something good in the world. And I wanted to sort of participate in that and and help them. And and I wanted to start something that countered this approach to creativity as something that only takes from within its own field. So in their case, they would sort of circulate all that, stuff from the communication arts industry, their industry, and and for inspiration, you know, around the offer, the sort of forwards. And I intuitive and at the time, I didn't have the language word or the sort of formal foundation for it, but I had a deep sense that, no, actually, the most creative work comes when we take all these very disparate ideas from different fields and different areas and, you know, sensibilities, and we we combine them in unusual ways. And so that was part of it, that I wanted to start a little packet of inspiration that was of this ethos. But the more important thing, I think, for me was that I was not, satisfied with my actual education in school, and I didn't feel that the 400 person lecture hall with the professor reading off a PowerPoint slide in the front without knowing a single person's name in her cla*s. No. I don't I didn't feel stimulated by that. And mostly, I wanted to be taught how to live. I mean, that's was was perhaps my naive expectation that college would teach me, but instead I was being taught how to memorize and how to take standardized tests. And at the same time, even when I was able to wiggle my room, my way into the occasional sort of philosophy seminar or something in the humanities, even there, I would say higher education is very much based on this notion of learning and cultivating intelligence by learning how to tear things down. You know, how to how to rip this argument to shreds and even the the whole paradigm of the college critical essay is criticism, but not criticism in the sense of critical thinking that comes from science, which has an element of humility to it, almost acknowledging that we don't know everything and there's the sort of fruitful ignorance. But the the kind of criticism that is about tearing arguments down has almost an arrogance and a self righteousness to it. I just thought, what's the point of that? Why not build things in the world, as opposed to tear them down? And so I started basically just doing my own reading and seeking out things and ways of thinking and ideas that I felt were were not that, were not the sort of seed of cynicism, which I do think higher education very much plants in people. There were there were generous and noble and and meaningful, but not kind of foolish optimism, you know? And so Why do why do you think higher education has that kind of, almost DNA in it to implant cynicism in people? Well, I do think that that notion of the critical, training intelligence to be a way of showing off how well you can pare something down. Like, that's very much part of what we're taught to do in writing papers and essays and and critiquing even each other in in cla*s. That's what college does. And you can very easily see the sort of repercussions in the so called real life, and people coming out of school becoming whatever they become, and you look today even at the Internet, and everything's a takedown, everything is the sort of undertone of snarky and sarcastic. That's part of it, and which is why also, I I write a lot about books, but I get very antsy when people call it reviews because I I don't write reviews. I write very much sort of wholehearted recommendations. The the critical aspect of the review, the negative, better review, you know, presumes that you point out the positive, but the negative also, and most literature reviews are actually an exercise in how well and how intelligently one writer can eviscerate another, you know. And so, I I Yeah. I I totally agree with your approach because I think you take any book, someone has spent a year, 2 years, 5 years of their lives, writing that book, and then somebody can easily write a review, in 20 minutes trashing that book completely. And it's just it's almost like a a murder that has taken place. Like, it's just a a horrible thing. Violence to it. Yeah. And and I've I've, you know, I've gotten so many, so many of the books that I've read over the past several years have been because of your, I don't want to say recommendations, but your analysis of these books. It's been really you've been, the curator for for many of the books I've read over the past few years. Oh, thank you. You're probably you're probably the one person I know who's who reads more than me because I feel like I have to read a lot to write a little. Like, if I'm gonna if I'm gonna write 2 hours worth of stuff, I have to it's almost like I have to read 10 hours worth of books, so I always need good sources of good, things to read. Yeah. No. I I think reading learning to read well and to write well is really learning to think well, and that's what we we all sort of try to do. Right? Well, so okay. So now you're you're you're at this agency. You've been did you did you finish school? Did you drop out? Like, what happened? Oh, no. I finished very reluctantly. I didn't but, you know, it's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine recently about this, who a new friend who is, his name is Parker Palmer. He's my grandmother's age, and he's just absolutely wonderful. One of those people just, you know, emanating goodness. And he went to school at Berkeley in the fifties and sort of became disillusioned. And we were just taught for the same reason, basically, the sort of cynical tearing down aspect. And we were talking about it, and I just had this appointment. I said to him, you know, I I I didn't it didn't occur to me that dropping out was an option. I just I mean, honestly, I didn't even consider that that was, possible. I mean, the in Bulgarian, there isn't even a word for a dropout. Like, in in English, there's a word dropout. There's no such word in Bulgarian, at least that I know of. And it just I I guess I'm I'm just the chronic finisher of things, and I didn't I mean, had I even thought of it, I probably may have dropped out because I did see that a lot of the the back track, that that life path, you know, college spitting people out into this conveyor belt of, you know, high end corporate jobs. And that never appealed to me, so that was certainly not the reason why I graduated. And and meanwhile, I amassed all those student loans, and I was working so hard just to sort of stay in school that I just, I mean, this was literally this week that I was talking to Parker, and I was like, you know, I should've thought of it. Yeah, you should've dropped out. Because, but still it's amazing. I mean, you know, it's clear, you know, one way or the other, you figured out how to make a living doing what you love. So which many people don't because they're so scared of how are they gonna pay their student loans. They don't take that chance and maybe, you know, so let's figure out how you did that. So you're at the agency, they're all sending around emails, and you took a bigger picture view of that, so you started, I guess, sending around your own emails of what inspired you and what happened. So I went originally, it started as just a 8 way, 7 way email to the 7 people at work and me that I would send every Friday, and it was literally just 3 links. There was no text. There was no nothing. It was 3 links to really interesting things that I thought were in some way, well, yeah, interesting and enriching and had nothing to do with their industry, the things from, you know, neuroscience and philosophy, and there was no YouTube at the time, or it had just started maybe. I don't remember. But like web videos maybe later on. And, eventually it became, you know, 3 links and a sentence about each, about why this is interesting, and then a link in a little paragraph, and then that became like a little article. And What were some of the first things you were showing people that were inspiring to you? I mean, I obviously, I was in my early twenties. I've changed a lot as a person, but you know, there's a there's a kind of excitedness that we that that comes with beginner's mind. So I think we all would discover something that we didn't know about, and for a while was sort of super into it and really obsessed. And and then it fades, and then there's something else. And at the time, I was really interested in neuroscience and all the things coming out of, especially how new studies with fMRI were attempting to eliminate how we think, but also showing or or suggesting that we'll never quite be able to use pure biology to explain things that are of a more humanistic nature, things about emotions and motives. And I was just very interested in that. So I was sending a lot of neuroscience, behavioral economics, occasionally interesting art, sort of unusual art that I saw. It was very present based, I guess, early on, which is ironic because right now, the majority of what I write about is very, very old. And I've gravitated more and more toward history, I guess. But really this notion of things that are timeless, but also very timely. And I think that that can only happen as you, grow up. And I don't mean in age, but in in sensibility. And you learn more and more and eventually come to realize that, well, actually, this brand new idea, Bertrand Russell had it a century ago or, you know, whatever the case may be. Well, it's funny because, I would say there's a common theme between that and and even though what you write about now is totally different, you don't you don't write like, let's say, yesterday, yesterday's news is what happened. But then, there's this whole that's the tip of the iceberg, and there's this whole body of things on how it happened. And you often write about how something happened. So how not just about a great work of art, but how did this great work of art happen? And, you know, that's why it seems like, you know, you have so many articles about, you know, all these great writers, talking about the writing process. As opposed to just talking about what they wrote, you you write a lot about process and how, one, any of your readers, or you, have become better writers by looking at all these different pieces of advice from these great writers. So so thinking about how things happen seems to be a common thing in in your work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I very much think that the process is a much greater reflection of personhood than than the product. And and Austin Kleon, who I know is is, you you feature quite a lot in your blog, he often writes about how documenting the process is often as artistic as the outcome of the process. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, actually, this morning, I was reading, so John Steinbeck, while he was writing Grapes of Wrath, he actually wrote another equally important book, which was the journal of the writing of the book. And so he kept literally a daily diary of of the process of it. Oh my god. That's such a great idea. I've gotta steal it. Yeah, yeah. It's fantastic. And even in the first century, he says something like, oh, I've never had much luck with keeping a diary because I just, the the pressure of it was too much, but now I feel that it's essential to the work. And he saw it as a kind of self discipline. But what struck me about that is about that book, the journal's book, which is that he so Grace of Wrath came out of he was originally so he witnessed this lettuce growers strike in California that became really violent, and there was people were literally murdered in the streets of his hometown, and he was very moved by it. He was in his mid thirties and very idealistic, and his wife Carol had these very sort of leftist views and they were both interested in social justice and all that. And so he, after the lettuce strike, he was commissioned to write this book called The Lettuce Affair or something like that. And he What a horrible name, actually. It was in French, actually. I don't remember exactly the name of it, but it was, oh, Lefaire Lettuceberg, I think it was called. But when he finished so this is to me the most extraordinary thing, and that's what shows so much about personhood, is that when he finished that manuscript, he wrote a letter to his editor and he said, this is going to be a very hard letter to write. And he basically said, the book is finished and it's a bad book and I have to destroy it. Because and it was supposed to be this sort of satire, basically eviscerating the people, the workers, the people involved in the government, and just sort of very much based on sort of negative reinforcement to express any sort of social justice views, but through the negative side. And he said, I can't do it. I'm not gonna turn it in and please understand. And he said, If I can do better, I have slipped badly. I remember he said that term. Like, I have slipped badly if I can do better than this. And so he destroyed it, and and that was, a few I think 3 weeks later, he had started writing Grace of Wrath, which had the the sort of opposite approach to the same topic. It was very much about, just giving people the dignity of their experience, you know? It's almost like The Grapes of Wrath was a was a rewrite of his first It was a rewrite, but it was a rewrite. It was a mirror world rewrite, where he he it was the same subject, but but it was a different, I guess, quality of intention to it. And I admire that so much, that the ability to say, not only I'm gonna kill my darlings, but also I was wrong and I can do better. I can do better. I can put something into the world that's not just informative and and sort of entertaining in its very intelligent cynicism, but something that is good and that is kind and that it still makes a point, a very important political and social point, but it doesn't do it in a way that tears people down and leaves readers hopeless, because that was another thing that he wrote, in that letter to his editor saying that I can put a book out that will basically depress people so much and not give them a sense of of of an alternative and of of of what there is to do, but only of what is wrong. Well, what strikes me also as interesting is the patience in that. So everybody says you know, I get tons of emails, that say something to the effect of, I'm 27 years old. I feel like a failure because I haven't found my passion in life. And it always strikes me that, you know, life is not about having 1 or 2 or 50 passions. Life's not really about passion at all, but it's about kind of taking these experiences and just being patient with it, being present with it, and and doing the best you can with it. And it sounds like that's what he did by saying, okay, I'm gonna take my time on this and do it right. Yeah. Yeah. And I I think you're absolutely right about the present aspect, because it's not just about being patient and sitting back and sort of waiting for your life to manifest. But, you know, I was I was listening to your, conversation with Jimmy Wales, whom I love. I just love what he stands for in the world, you know, and Yes. He said something about, about why Wikipedia, you know, picked up. He said something like, oh, you know, it allows people to do something useful with their time. And yes, I agree. People do hunger to do something useful with their time in our age of uselessness. You know, there's so much distraction and just crap. But I would also say there's something more, which is that people also hunger to do something ennobling with their time. And this is something that can't be quantified, you know. There's no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with what we call usefulness. But I do deeply believe that people people wanna be good. Like, we wanna be good. We wanna do better, which requires that we grow and that we enrich and ennoble ourselves, and our our souls. And by the way, it's interesting that this word soul has become one of the greatest targets of cynicism, and eye rolling, and, oh, you know. But very few things, you know, very few things today elicit more cynicism than that word upon being uttered, yet are imbued with deeper longing upon being privately beheld when we think about our souls. That is the the 27 year old's writing to you saying, I wanna find my purpose. That's somebody basically saying, I wanna do work that gratifies and fulfills my soul. But we're so afraid to even acknowledge that, that that we just don't go after it. I think that's very true. I think often often with my own writing, I try to skirt that word. I go around that word while still, trying to help people figure out how to find or how at least I found that part of myself. Because when you use words like soul or God or spiritual, then everybody's gonna bring their own baggage to the table. And then suddenly, there's so much baggage, it just fills up the room and and and you lose track of of of what's really there. Well, it's a semantic problem too though, because I I think I mean, I I personally don't don't think soul is a spiritual term. I am not religious. Don't bring any of that baggage, you know, myself. But I don't mean it in the sense of, you know, eternal soul in the sort of Christian and other traditions, but more of this little, just our participation, I guess, in the mystery of life that is inside each of us. It's a very secular thing in terms of just our sense of who we are and who we want to be and the gap between those and just the presence that we bring to everyday of our lives. I guess that is what a soul is. Well, and it's interesting. I think with Google, you know, or or basically with the Internet, you have all the world's information at your fingertips. But at the same time, you don't it's harder it becomes harder in some sense to find those things that, you know, really light you up and and excite you. And I think and and, again, getting back to the the origin of of brain pickings, I think that's what you were finding in these 3, 4, 5 things a day you were sending out. These were the things that were exciting to you, that were that, you know, were lighting up the the mystery of your soul to some extent so that you could share it with others. And so so so again, getting back to that story, what happened? Like, how what happened next? So eventually, I realized that the the tiny little email that I was sending to my friends at work, they were forwarding to friends of theirs and people would say, oh, you know, my girlfriend or my college roommate, like, really liked this. And I thought, alright. Well, if it sounds like it's helpful to other people that this record of my own journey, of my own sort of becoming a person is marginally useful to other people. Why not just make it public? And that was before, at least to my completely incompetent mind, I think that was before blogs were very pervasive and, you know, at the time, I just didn't know. I didn't think to put it on a blog, and I think the only real platform WordPress had just launched, Blogger existed, but it wasn't it didn't have features that were appealing enough to to bother with, I guess. And so I thought, alright, I'm gonna take a night class, which was in addition to my, you know, college course load and the 4 jobs and whatever. I'm gonna just teach myself a little bit of code so I could make my own site and, just start putting those little bulletins, you know, on on that site. And I did that and eventually but it was literally hard coding an HTML page every Friday, stripping off the old one, replacing with the new one. No CMS, no archive, no nothing. So I did that for a while and then I think it was in the summer of 7. I eventually learned about WordPress, like, watch a whole bunch of tutorials, taught myself how to do it, migrated it. My friend Chuck helped me. He was an IT guy. And that was that that was really kind of how it ended up on on the web, and I just kept doing it from that point on. Now one important thing, which I think we're all so much the product of, our time and place and the curveballs that we have no control over is that so I'm not an American citizen and at the time, the after I graduated college, I very reluctantly went through the whole sort of recruiting thing just to see what would happen, and I got a bunch of offers from very, you know, standard, 10 kid jobs and, you know, consulting and marketing and yada yada. And I just just did not didn't And I decided to stay with the agency in Philly and just build brain picking and just do my own thing. And I had the sense of, like, I don't need that much. What's the I'm I'm I'm okay with whatever I have. Like, I don't need to go burn these, like, giant salaries and go to cubicles all day. You know? And so the agency filed for a visa for me to to be able to stay because after graduating, you get 1 year in what is called OPT, which means optical practical, optional practical training, which means you're allowed to legally work in the country for 1 year in your field of study. So you get a job and and then after that, the your employer applies for a visa for a real visa for you to stay for a longer period. So we did that, but that was unfortunately in the very unfortunate 07, Visa gate period, which was a giant government glitch that affected 2 thirds of people who were in in the US working with just totally legal visas and such. And it ended up that that we applied, but within the application got turned away, not even opened because the government the the the way that the VisaGate thing happened is it basically, and it's so boring, but not so much. I don't even know about VisaGate. I never heard of this. Well, that's what they nicknamed it, but I think on Wikipedia now, you can find it under that, I'm pretty sure, but or at some point you could. Every year at the time, the situation was such that the government gave 65,000 h one b work visas to people applying to work for employers. H one b is the kind of visa that a company gets for you if you're a foreigner. And usually, the application period would run from April 1st to October 1st, but in the 1st 2 weeks of April, the quota would get filled up. So basically, you have to apply on the 1st day if you want a shot at it. Now, 2,007 was it's some sort of complete anomaly that on the very first day that applications were being accepted, which was April 2nd, because the first was this Sunday. The government got a 180,000. So three times the quota on the 1st day, and they panicked, because there is no fair system to do it. So they turned it into a lot. So if you applied after the 1st day, you're automatically rejected. If you applied on the 1st day, it was turned into a lottery where 1 out of 3 got even opened to be reviewed. Oh my gosh. And ours got mailed back. It just was not in that lot even to be reviewed. And so I had to leave the country, like pack up the entire life that I had and all my books and things and just leave. And I went on this sort of forced sabbatical, almost like an exile for a little over a year. I went, to Bulgaria where I was from and sort of split my time between there and London, because I was doing a little bit of writing for Wire UK at the time. And I I was just so unhappy and I felt so uprooted and disappointed and but the the only reason I'm mentioning this is that actually and I think there is very often a silver lining in these, less than ideal circumstances that are forced upon us. That sabbatical because living in Bulgaria was so much cheaper, you know, that was really really cheap to rent and live there, that I was and I was doing my a bit of freelance work with the agency still remotely, and also writing for Wired and a little bit for Business Week and whatnot, that I was actually able to have a pretty relaxed life for a few months, where I really wanted to think about Brain Pickings and just do that. And I had more time to read, even though I had no access to books because that was before Kindle and all of that and nobody would ship the actual books to Bulgaria. So it was kind of a comical situation. That's when I started reading a lot of the public domain texts like Aristotle and older things that I could get for free, you know, on the Internet just as an electronic text. But in any case, so those few months were actually very, while very unhappy, they were very fruitful. And I guess that's a common thread in in the origin story that I I started Brain Pickings out of being very unhappy as a sophomore in college for many reasons. And then I really, really built it out when I was in this state of just helpless dejection, you know. If anything, this was like the one consistent thing happening in your life. Was that every I don't know if you were doing every day at that point, but every certain amount of times, you were you were updating brainpickings.org. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I actually when I moved to Bulgaria, is when I started doing it every day. So originally, it was just the Friday email newsletter put on the web, so it would be just just on Fridays. But when I moved, I spread it out over the week, so instead of, like, 3 or 5 short things all on Friday, I would do them one day one per day, you know. And yeah. So so so at this point, how many users per per month were you getting? Oh, I had no idea. I wasn't even or maybe I think I learned about Google Analytics that you know, when I was in Bulgaria, when I was very I guess, I was very interested in how the web works. So I was reading all these sort of sites about the technical stuff, which was never my forte or my interest really, but I had all this time and I was just learning about the web. And, I don't let me see. Let me think. I mean, I do remember one day when I so Bravely because at that point was on WordPress, and WordPress had its own stats that just when you log in to write, it would show you, like, the stats. I I do remember one day when I had something like, a 1000 readers a day, or maybe it was even a 100 readers in in one day. A big milestone for any vlogger. I know. And I was like, oh my god. It's not just the guys anymore, you know, my 7 the 7 guys at work. It was so funny. And I also remember in 2008 maybe or 9, when I got my 100 Twitter follower and I started in my Gmail, because I was at the time still getting the notifications in my email, like some random person that I didn't know. And I just remember thinking, you know, there are people out there. There are people that just share in this this sensibility and this sort of hope, the the hope that I feel when I when I that I come out of when I read and when I write. So so that's exciting, and I think that's when it becomes more than just writing for yourself. When there's a realization that there there's other people out there who are not only grateful and thankful for what you're writing, but they're also maybe dependent on it. That's why they're following you. Yeah. I mean, it's it's an interesting line and it's a fine line. And I think any writer fine. Yeah. I think any writer who says, oh, I don't write for an audience is either delusional or just deliberately, you know, in in denial or lying to ourselves. But as soon as you have an awareness of an audience, of course, that's a thing, that's a presence. There's some form of an other, you know, somebody other than you just present, looking on. And where it gets kind of hairy is that at what point do you tip over from this kind of, I guess, shared solitude, which is what it can be and which I try to have it be for me, into a form of people pleasing, which the awareness of the audience, so called, you know, the sort of aggregate, and what they might want or what they might like, that can be very addictive. Because I think as humans, we're very, we're very Pavlovian creatures. We thrive on constant positive reinforcement, and we, especially now, when I do know how to use stats now, and I do and I have a Facebook page, I have a Twitter page. We can get statistics very easily on how we're doing because that's really what we wanna know. You know? When When you post something on Facebook and you're sort of looking at how many people liked it, it's like that little insecure little child in you saying, am I okay? Am I doing okay? Like, how am I doing? You know, and it's Totally, like, if if I post something on Facebook and it doesn't get the engagement that I want it to get, I am personally crushed. So even though but, like you say, it's a line. Like, I also don't want to write to just please others. I want to write something that I feel is good. And so there is a a fine line. So so, okay, so so you went from a 100, then a 1000, then 10,000 users. How many user how many unique visitors did you have last month? I have not actually logged into Google Analytics in a long time, but WordPress tells you, I think, page views is the stat that it gives you, and it's around which are it's different from uniques, right? It's like just the hits, I guess. That's around 8,000,000 a month, I would say. So so so basically so from a 100 to 8,000,000 and I I I But I would say it's fewer uniques. I would imagine it's like Yeah. No more than a third of that or a half or who knows? I mean, I can easily look it up. Well well, I would say it's less than that because your site is totally it's like Alice I'm gonna look it up as we speak. It's like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole because once you get into one article, you have like 5 links to other articles and I could spend an hour going from like article to article on your site because now you have such a wide body of of work in there. Well, that interface looks so different than last time I looked. Okay. So here's what Google Analytics says. Yeah. The page reads are the page reads, and then it says users 3,000,598,880. I mean, that's so you're you're basically living the American dream. So you're living the Bulgarian dream. Oh, I'm gonna turn that phone on. That sounded like Bulgarian folk music, actually. It was very timely. I yes. I have specifically a a library of Bulgarian folk music for my cell phone signals. But, it's amazing. Basic it's like Craigslist. Like, Craig sent out you know, Craig Newmark sent out a list of his favorite places in San Francisco every week, and the next thing you know, we have Craigslist. And and this is how he, you know, will spend his life and and make his living. So you you have basically achieved the American dream of, you totally did exactly what you wanted to do, and you had some strife and and hardship along the way, but you came out the other side and now it's just amazing. You you have these 3,000,000 unique visitors, they they they look to what you write and you get to, you know, one way or other, you get to make a living off of it. So so I assume you make a living in part through donations, in part through affiliate fees, and it's just great. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I've been very, very grateful just to see that unfold and just take off, which is not something I ever, ever, like, planned on. I found out about the Amazon Affiliates when I was actually I think it was the last month in Bulgaria, and I was reading Jason Kotke's site. And I clicked on some link to a book, and it opened in the browser. In the URL, it had, like, question mark Kotke20. And I was like, how did his name get in the Amazon URL? That's, like, so weird. And so, of course, I Googled it. I forgot about it. So but interestingly, the Amazon stuff for a while was comparable to the donations, and now it's so many times smaller. I mean, the donations are really it's wonderful. People are very, very generous, and, it's been very interesting to observe it. And and, so I so last year you wrote an article, 7 7 Lessons from 7 Years of Doing Brain Pickings. And I kinda wanted to to go through some of the lessons that you've learned. Like, you list the first one as allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Mhmm. And what what did you mean by that? In part, I meant, I guess, what Steinbeck did with his novel. Right? So this notion of stepping back and saying, okay, well, it's more important for me to understand and reflect and and recalibrate what I wanna stand for than to be right and to feel right. Which is such a such a different that's such a different view than so for instance, I used to write a lot in the financial space, and nobody is allowed to change their mind. Or or no if you go on, like, CNBC, for instance, and you say the words I don't know, then you're never going on CNBC again. Well, yeah. No, I that that's very much part of the culture that we're in. But I also should say that that piece, that is the seven learnings, that as I think I wrote that in the introduction, is that it's not a sort of holier than thou, just how you should live your life, but more of these are the things that I still struggle with, but they're the ones that I identify as the most important daily practice to come back to and remind yourself of, you know? And so it's not like I've mastered that. I hate being wrong. I really hate being wrong, you know? But but I welcome it, and I just sort of grumbled through it, and which is why one of the journalists that I admire most, and he's become a good friend and I feel enormous kinship was stirred with him in a number of different ways, is Andrew Sullivan, who very famously changed his mind about the Iraq war many years ago. And and I think he is one of the very few consistently sort of committed journalist who who I mean, he has been doing this. He's been one of the world's first bloggers and an amazing editor at The Nation and then The Atlantic and The Daily Beast and now Independent for for more than a decade. And he is just very dedicated to doing that and and to to just showing up for for what he does and and constantly reassessing, and and and he publishes dissents. So readers who sort of disagree with his comments, he publishes that on the site without sort of commenting to tear them down or just sort of saying, hey, this is the alter alternative opinion, alternative view, and I have so much respect for that. Yeah. That that is interesting. I haven't I have to check out his his site more. As I said, I don't look at any site but your site. So I Well, I recommend the dish. Yeah. It is he is, he now has a staff, a small small staff, and they're also ad free. So he left the Daily Beast was the last gig he had, and 2 years ago, I think he just started doing it independently and supported solely through memberships. That's great. And then, you say something your your next thing that you say on this list is something that so many of my guests on the podcast have said and and also meet so much resistance from people who have a hard time with this. But it's do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. And I'll tell you the last person to say that to me was Coolio, the rapper. Oh, I have not listened to that episode yet. I have to hunt that down. So you and Coolio have that in common. He would write every day for 17 years before he had his first hit. So that takes a lot of he he said he wasn't doing it for anything other than that he loved doing it, and the proof is in the fact that it took 17 years to have a hit from it. Yeah. I mean, I I very much believe that, and even the notion of a hit, that's almost it's not the goal that you work towards, it's the silver lining of having gone through the experience that generated. And then actually, this week, Princeton Princeton University released a very big archive of, Einstein's papers, and I was sort of poking through and digging, and I found a letter that he wrote to a colleague, and he sort of talks about the buffoonery. He says the whole buffoonery of the scientific establishment and all the awards and all the sort of pompous crap. And he says to the the other man who's a friend of his, a Swiss professor at the University of Zurich, he says, you still have the rewards of doing the work he loves. You know, then that's that's sort of that's enough. That's that's the real that's the real honor. Well, this is like a thread through a lot of Einstein's letters, which, of course, I've read, which I I only know because I read them on your side. So I I recently sent to my 2 daughters, a part of the letter that Einstein sent to his son, which I read on your site, and the part was Beautiful letter. Yeah. I'm he says specifically, I'm very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are, in my opinion, for your age, the best pursuits, better even than school. And I like that because do if you if you do what you find joy in, that's how you're gonna truly succeed, that's how you're gonna make money, that's how you're gonna find success, however you whatever metric you use to judge that. And that's better than even than school because there's all this research that even shows if you go to a lecture that you're bored with, 45 minutes later, you're gonna totally forget it. You won't be able to answer one question about it. Mhmm. And it's so true. I went on one podcast where the podcaster had majored, I think, at the same school that that you went to. He had majored in European history. And so I asked him, well, okay, let me ask you one question. When was Charlemagne born? And, you know, the most important, probably figure in European history. And Well, I would argue that's Voltaire, but okay, go on. Okay, fair enough. But, you know, he kind of united Europe for a brief period, Charlemagne. So so anyway, he was he was 700 years off in his guess. And this is someone who majored in in college, which and this doesn't say anything bad about him. It's about kind of the the institution of higher education is not really where people go to to learn, what's important to them. But we're still talking here about information and facts, which are very different from wisdom. And I personally can't recall the date that he was born, nor do I really care to, because I think if that person that you spoke with was actually able to, in addition to that or instead of that, tell you what was important about that period in history, and how different people related to one another, and how all of that sort of percolated through, the world and world history, and how it explains this or that and that. And I I do think that one thing that's happening with the web is that it's lowering and or completely displacing the need for absolute knowledge of facts and and making us better at or encouraging a kind of relational knowledge, which is how facts relate to one another and explain one another because you can very easily retrieve the fact. You know, we now don't remember the facts. We remember the retrieval pathways to them. So, you know, I know to go to Wikipedia or biography.com or whatever and look that up. But wisdom to me is the more important thing, which is how do bits of information fit together to create a framework of knowledge, which then we assess and reflect on and contemplate to extract some sort of moral wisdom about not just what is true in the world, not just how the world works, but also how it should work and how it could work. And to me, that's the more interesting thing. Right. And I think I think many forms of education don't teach don't teach that. They they test you on the facts. They don't test you on Mhmm. The wisdom. Yeah. But but then, that's why, again, I like a site like yours because look at number 3 of your 7 lessons, which is be generous. So this is this is after you've read 100 or thousands of books and and written all of these articles. This is the 3rd lesson from your 7 years. And that, of course, is, you know, what sits on top of, you know, all these things that you've read and all these things that you've written. The lesson is be generous with your time, with your resources, you know, with yourself, with your words. Yeah. I mean, I I I think And then you say, I just wanna say, and then you say it's so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. And I think that's a key word, particularly in today's day and age of outrage porn that happens on the Internet. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And that that is foundational to what I believe, and what we talked about earlier in terms of cynicism and earnestness, and what kinds of emotions we think are permissible, and what kinds are embarrassing to have. You know, Austin, Austin Cleon, he has this really great line, in his first book, I think, which is still like an artist, where he says, be kind. The world is a small village. You know? And it's true, and it's not I don't mean that or I don't know how he means it, but I don't read that as a transactional thing of, oh, I'm gonna be nice to you so you can be nice to me. And I think being nice and being kind are very different things. I think the world is a small town in the sense that we we touch people all the time with our interactions with them, and it's always a choice in what way to do it. And it takes so little to make somebody's day, you know, it takes so little to to I mean, I'm very fortunate I get really lovely notes from readers, and somebody, you know, took time out of their day to brighten mine. And and it's such a gift, but it also takes so little to crap on somebody's day. And the unfortunate thing about human psychology or perhaps my psychology, but I think it's true of a lot of people, is that one snarky comment from somebody on a stranger on Facebook who has not even read the article can really, really bring you down to a point where 10 earnest, generous emails from people who thought about something and paused and reached out just don't don't count as much. You know? And it's it's very unfortunate, and I think that too is a constant practice internally to to be a not a self critic, but to some degree, a self celebrator, just for the preservation of sanity. I don't mean in terms of, being arrogant, but just sort of keeping yourself somewhat sane. Yeah. So so, it's difficult because, you know, so I have a bunch of books out there. I could get 10 good reviews in a row and then one one star review. And of course, that's probably the right ratio, 10 to 1. The 1 star review would totally you know, no matter what. It's a it's a psychological thing. Like, I could, I could, you know, do all sorts of self work and and meditate and think about things. But still, when someone presses the right button, it's going to affect me. Now it'll affect me less and less, but then there's another button that I wasn't aware of, and another person will stumble upon that button by accident and press it. And there's almost no way to to avoid that other than to realize, okay, other to acknowledge that that's happened, and I can't let it I I have to learn how to better and better react to it. Yeah. And and and I think the other thing too is that the criticism that burns the most is not the people who disagree and dissent after having reflected and just have a different opinion, but the people who misunderstand. Yes. Who misunderstand your view, and your motive misunderstand what you're saying. Because then you feel a sense of helplessness, almost, because there's nothing really to counter that with. You already made your point clear. They just were not didn't didn't take the time to even see that. They just had a reaction as opposed to response. You know, have you ever thought of doing like a quarterly box? You know, one of those things where I did a quarterly box the very first. I was one of the I was I think the second or third contributor. I did it for a year. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Okay. What, why did you stop? It was too much time and I because I am not a believer in sort of half assery, you know, and I think if I can full a*s it, I I would rather not do it at all. And the very first the very, yeah, very non non alphabet. But but but the first package that I sent was a book that I really liked, called sounds for letters shapes for sounds, which is a visual history of the alphabet. And the mistake that I made, of course, was that I hand annotated it with sticky notes, like dozens of them, and and wrote essentially analog hyperlinks on onto the book to why this part is important and what else it relates to. And I it took exactly as much time as you would imagine. And after I did that first one, I thought, I don't wanna do anything less than that. I don't wanna settle for some sort of mediocre trinket thing. And so after the 1st year, I just realized that if I were to do it to the standards that I I I like to to basically if I were to receive to be the recipient of that, the kind of stuff that I would like to receive is the kind of stuff that I would like to give, which is also how I approach my my writing, then that would take so much time that it would just not be sustainable. So So so so and and, you know, I I can relate to that because you, you write so much every day, and I'm sure you want every article to be as best as possible. And sometimes it's hard to kind of do more than one it's hard to do more than one activity where but you want all of those activities to be as best as they can possibly be. And I I dealt with this a little with podcasting because I enjoy my writing very much, but also now I enjoy this podcasting very much, and I try to make I try to deliver the highest amount of value in both. But Which you do. Mhmm. And I don't mean this in a sort of a suck up y way, but I get as much stimulation out of the show as out of the books, and in a very different way, which I think is also important. I think for me, I've kind of combined them, which is that, first off, the reading, the the podcasting encourages me to read a lot. So so let's say it's either you or whoever I'm having on. Like, I just had on, Adam Grant I interviewed earlier this morning. Mhmm. So it means I have I I read his his book, give and take, but then I also go through his TEDx Talks. And it gives me exposure to a lot of things that maybe I would have or wouldn't have read. So so but but I chose to interview him because I was interested in the topic. And so it gives me kind of crash courses in lots of different ideas. But I'll do the same thing with my writing as well, because I'll make I always have to read, like, several hours before I could start writing. Do do you do the same? I think you do do the same or similar. Yeah. I mean, the writing is just sort of the reading is the real work. And it's not just sort of reading, but reading and thinking, and reading and having some sort of discriminating, sense of what matters and why. Right. It's sort of like something has to, you read and you read and you read. It's like sort of rubbing sticks together until something catches fire. Oh, that's such a wonderful metaphor. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. And on that note, I should get back to lighting the fire for the day sometime soon. Absolutely. And I don't wanna keep you from it. Tell me tell me just what some of your favorite books are because that's what I really wanna get out of this entire hour. Oh, wait a minute. That is an ambush question. You know, I feature like 10 books a week for 8 years. Do the math. So that's why I didn't ask what's your one favorite book. I can tell you what what some favorites at the moment are because, again, we're Perfect. Constantly evolving. There's a book by a cognitive scientist named Alexandra Horowitz who studies dogs and dog behavior, but she wrote a book last year called 11 Walks with Expert Eyes, where she takes a walk along a single city block with 11 different so called experts, from an artist to a blind woman, a physician, her dog, and and sort of records, compares and contrast their individual perception of reality to how that expert on one walk sees the world differently from the way she does. And, of course, they see it in profoundly different ways. And the whole point of the book is that we are so limited by our experience and our knowledge, and what we call reality is really this very narrow slice of interpretation of the world. And she's also a phenomenal writer, so it's both very pleasurable to read and very, very pause giving. And I think you wrote about this, right? I remember you. You. I have come back to this book so many times, and I've actually subsequently gotten to know Alexandra through, strangely, I met her at a our mutual friend, Susan Orlean, had a house party, and it turned out that Alexandra was her neighbor, and it was this, like, weird, you know, confluence of, sort of circles, you know, intersecting, but, yeah. But the book is fantastic. And and then another one would be, I mean, pretty much anything by Rebecca Solnit, really, but The Faraway Nearby is really good. My favorite one of hers actually is A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is a collection of essays about, I guess, how we orient ourselves to the world and to ourselves and to others. And she's she's a really great great essayist. And just thinker. I'm gonna get that. And an older one that that is always a standby, and I literally reread it all the time, is Seneca's on the Shortness of Life, which is, coincidentally, a short book. It's great. Henry David Thoreau's diaries, the journal. I think it's called the journal, because you know, back in the day, men journaled, and women kept diaries. But that that's always rewarding, and the same with Anne Truitt's day book. The artist Anne Truitt, which is her journal or diary. She calls it daybook, I guess. Neither journal nor diary. How many how many are we going for here, really? You can keep going because I'm writing them all down. I'll I'll tell I'll tell you what what I've read going down your book shelf. Sure. A little bit of a of a selfish pod. Well, I'll tell you what I've read on, that that I found through your site, actually. So, one is prob probably most of Anne Lamott's books you've you've written about, like Bird by Bird and the more recent one, Small Victories. Amanda Palmer's Art Art of Asking, I really enjoyed. The Art of Stillness, I really enjoyed. Anything by Joan Didion, I like. I I was reading, I don't know how to say her name, Anais Nin's Diaries on your recommendation. I've read a lot of books on your recommendation, actually. Sam Harris, who I've had on my podcast, is Waking Up. Oh, that was a really good show. That was one of my favorites of of your entire archive that I've listened to. Sam is just so just articulate and, you know, perceptive in in many different Very smart guy. Yeah. And, I don't know. I I highly recommend people go down your whole list. You know, I had read this earlier, and then you recommended it later, but Paul Graham's book, Hackers and Painters, I thought it's a very good, beautiful book, Still Writing by Danny Shapiro. Oh, yeah. That's and I would highly that'll be at least in my top five in in recent years. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, it's weird. I like these books, the, This is Dali and This is Warhol. They're like easy books to read about art, and I I really enjoy that that whole series. They they just came out with Jackson Pollock. I I I bought that one and read it. Yeah. So, but you Another one that I would recommend, again, that's sort of a standby packet of of wisdom on many different things is that well, there are 2 of them. Georgia O'Keeffe's letters, and one is the volume of her letters to her best friend, Anita Pulitzer, and the other one is it was a companion book published in the nineties, to a to a Georgia O'Keeffe retrospective, and it's called Art and Letters. Georgia O'Keeffe Art and Letters. Oh, I'll check those out. Quite the philosopher in terms of being a phenomenal artist. So I really appreciate you coming on. I know you're really busy, so I'll I'll I'll let you get back to work. You write 3 or 4 articles a day, so I know what that's like. It's it's hard. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. This was just such a great conversation, and thank you for putting things into the world that are hope giving, I guess. And you too. Well, thanks very much, Maria. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. For more from James, check out the James Altucher Show on the Stansbury Radio Network at stansburyradio.com and get yourself on the free insider's list today.
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