Tim Ferriss and Rolf Potts On Vagabonding, World Travel, And The Writing Process: Part Two
This is part two of the written transcription of the audio version of The Tim Ferriss Show. It is not endorsed by Tim Ferriss or his affiliates, but has been created to help fans and readers to absorb the material at their own pace. You can find part one here.
This episode with Rolf Potts, the author of Vagabonding, originally aired on The Tim Ferriss Show here.
Tim Ferriss
Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to The Tim Ferriss Show. What you’re about to hear is Part 2 of a multi-part conversation with Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding, world traveler extraordinaire, one of my favourite people. If you didn’t catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in, but if you don’t mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, by all means keep on listening. We bounce around a lot, it’s a very eclectic conversation, so you can certainly listen to these episodes out of order. This episode is brought to you by 99 Designs, you can check out a bunch of my competitions that I’ve run at 99designs.com/tim and Exofficio, and if you want to see my favourite pieces of travel gear, as well as a video on rapid ultra-light packing then you can visit exofficio.com/tim. And I almost forgot, of course, there are a ton of websites, resources, links and books mentioned in this episode – all of it can be found in one place in the show notes. So you just have to go to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. You can find the show notes, resources and links for this episode, as well as every other episode, such as those for Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Mike Shinoda, you name it, so you don’t need to scribble furiously, unless you want to, but fourhourworkweek.com/podcast is where you want to go. So, without further ado and further Porky Pig imitations, please enjoy Part 2 of The Tim Ferriss Show with Rolf Potts.
Tim Ferriss
What are some of your favorite books or commentaries on writing?
Rolf Potts
Well this is funny, because I teach writing and various concepts, and I teach a summer writing class in Paris and I teach a course at Yale for the past few years, so I’ve been reading a lot of craft books lately and I realize that I had crossed my carrying capacity, that I needed to stop reading books about writing craft, that like I had learned all the metaphors there were. And so there are some journalistically-minded books like Roy Peter Clark has The Writer’s Toolkit I think it’s called [Editor’s Note: It’s actually called Writing Strategies], and Phillip Lopate has a series of essays about the writer’s craft called To Show and To Tell I think. The old adage goes, Show don’t tell, but he’s a believer in strategic telling, and he’s a brilliant essayist himself.
Tim Ferriss
How do you spell his last name?
Rolf Potts
L-O-P-A-T-E. He’s sort of the modern father of belletristic essays, the personal essay, and he actually came up from New York to talk to my Yale students in person this year, and his kind of writing is very different from what you and I do, and he might frown on it from a certain extent, he’s about that going back to Montaigne, high art of the essay, but he really has some good advice on writing, and jumping back to screenplays – the breakthrough for me in my writing, when I took my first vagabonding trip and thought I was going to be Jack Kerouac and try to write about it, I realized that one chronological retelling of what I did was not going to work regardless of how beautiful the sentences were, was stumbling into screenwriting 20 years ago and learning the importance of structure. And so those classic screenwriting tomes like Syd Field’s Screenplay book or Robert McKee’s Story, which is actually ridiculed in the movie Adaptation, right, where Brian Cox actually plays Robert McKee in that movie. I think that those are useful because they go back to the very core of how we communicate as humans, how we tell stories. And you can get tired of the 3-act, the screenplay structure, or the needs of the audience but the audience is damn important, and I’m a big believer, well, I’m not a believer in cultural hierarchy, I think that high literature is important and good, but I just wrote a pulpy B movie, but I think that it’s good to know how Raymond Chandler structures his narratives in the same sense that it’s good to know how Montaigne structures his narratives as well. I would say if people are looking for writing craft books, don’t be afraid of any kind of book that just talks about how to tell a story. And I think that movies are great metaphors for how to tell a story. And there’s crappy movies out there, and Adaptation is sort of a lampoon for how we invariably tell stories in movies, but just because you learn a very basic and formulaic way of telling a cinematic story doesn’t mean that you have to use that every time, it just means that you understand the rules, and then within the structure of those rules you can shine as a writer.
Tim Ferriss
I very much concur. I have an embarrassing confession which is I’ve been agonizing over a screenplay for several months now and I think partially because I’ve loaded the expectations and the burdens so large on my shoulders that it’s roughly an adaptation of The 4-Hour Workweek and a lot of the backstory, and it’s intended to be comedic but still convey a lot of philosophical takeaways that will spur viewers to do interesting things in their lives and make big changes, blah blah blah. But I’ve been agonizing over it. The one thing that did help me to at least get started, and I have quite a lot on paper, was Save The Cat. I found it so helpful because, I took McKee’s story seminar actually, which was quite an experience in and of itself, I mean the portrayal in Adaptation is not far off the mark [laughs].
Rolf Potts
Interesting.
Tim Ferriss
But a fun experience nonetheless. I really found Save The Cat to hold your hand and walk you through at least getting things down on paper by saying, “Alright. By this page and this minute, you should have this type of element.” And really allowing you at least to get, I wouldn’t consider what I have a first draft, but a skeleton structure down that I can use to fill in the blanks with all these random ideas that I have. Totally agree. I think that, and I’ve become recently interested in Joseph Campbell, I have a passing familiarity with Joseph Campbell, watched a few documentaries, but The Hero’s Journey, the monomyth, I find very interesting, just as a way of getting started, if you can sort of lay out these markers for different stories that you’re considering telling. But another thought that I had, which we don’t have to go too deep into, unless you have thoughts on it, which is that that beginner’s mind that you mentioned, which is achievable through travel or vagabonding, is also one of the primary benefits of what you might consider therapeutic use of psychedelics. And that’s part of the reason that people often describe, with the right setting, a psychedelic experience as one of the best experiences of their lives, and it is the same reason that many people would describe their first vagabonding experience as one of the best experiences of their lives, and that is the present state of awareness and the beginner’s mind and the appreciation that both of those experiences tend to catalyze.
Rolf Potts
I touch on that a little bit in Vagabonding, I sort of gently dissuade readers of the necessity to, say, smoke marijuana when they travel, because reality is giving you this present state of awareness. If you allow yourself to be bored, or you allow yourself to be lonely, or you allow yourself to have experiences by accident, then suddenly you’re discovering things in a vivid way, that don’t need artificial enhancement.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely. One of the pieces of advice that you gave was the benefit of getting lost. And heading out of your housing and just walking off in one direction, maybe with a map and and maybe without a map, and just walking and taking random turns for a few hours. And I have found that so invaluable, not only while traveling, quite frankly, but even in San Francisco or places where I’ve lived or live, exploring by foot a terrain that you might otherwise, for the sake of convenience, use taxis for, for instance. And it’s been a major priority for me when I travel, not for business, but for this type of experiential reflection and exploration to try to catalyze discomfort whenever possible. And that doesn’t mean a pebble in the shoe, but, for instance, to purposefully go out of my way to encounter language difficulties. And one of my favorite ways to do this is, I’m typically a night owl like I mentioned, but when I travel I try to switch it up. So I try to wake up, in some cases, very early. And I did this in Greece, on my first trip to Greece when I was traveling with a close friend, and I started waking up really early. I’d just leave the blinds open and just wake up as early as possible. And my habit was to go for a walk and just hand-wave and try to ask the locals, these are on some very small islands, where I could find a cafe or a bakery. And inevitably I would go to these bakeries or coffee shops, and there would be a small group of really old Greek guys sitting outside debating whatever old Greek men typically debate, I would imagine it’s probably complaining about politicians and so on and so forth, much like any other sort of gaggle of old men early in the morning everywhere else in the world. And then I would just proceed to sit down and try to have a conversation with these guys, and it was always hilarious and extremely fun, and I ended up being basically the court jester for these guys for a period in the morning, and they always got a kick out of it, so I think that that seeking out of mild discomfort or uncomfortable situations is really one of the main values and benefits that I’ve taken away from travel, certainly in the last 10 years or so.
Rolf Potts
Ya, this ties into a lot of ideas that are really close to my heart and that I’ve sort of embraced even since I’ve discovered vagabonding, and it’s funny that you talk about the old Greek guys because as a travel writer, one of my biggest strengths, and it could be an accidental strength, as a person who wanders out with the purpose of getting lost is that whatever town I’m in, inevitably the town weirdo finds me, like the most eccentric guy, and if you read my second book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, one-third of the stories are about me with a really strange dude in Lebanon or Burma or some place, and it sort of connects to the idea of the old Greek guys sitting there, because they see each other every morning, but the chance for an American to stumble in and have a semi-comical exchange with them is the most exciting thing that’s happened to them all week. It’s like their wives have stopped listening ot them, their children have stopped listening to them, and so they can take you under their wing and just the things that you learn from these guys is amazing. And so that’s funny, that’s very relatable because I feel like, for whatever reason, I don’t know if it’s my mid-western tendency to talk a little bit less and listen a little bit more or something, but I always meet these guys who just have the weirdest view of the world. But you were talking about walking out and getting lost – in Vagabonding I talk about how, if in doubt, just walk until your day becomes interesting. And this is sort of tied into a concept that I’ve discovered since then, and it’s a concept that I teach in my Paris classes, because we’re in the city where it was invented, and it’s the idea of the flâneur. Are you familiar with the flâneur?
Tim Ferriss
The only reason I recognize that word is because a friend of mine named Nassim Taleb, who’s very famous for having written The Black Swan and a number of other books, describes himself that way. So maybe you could expand on that, because I would love to hear more, and quite frankly I don’t know much about the term.
Rolf Potts
Ya, it’s a wonderful idea that in a sense, when I was walking until my day became interesting, I was being a flâneur before I knew what it was. But it goes back to Baudelaire, over a hundred years ago in Paris, and it’s connected through French ideas, through the Situationists of the 1960s, and the idea is that – and flâneuring is somethign that I use in travel, but it was really invented as a concept in your own hometown, and the idea is that you become so used to your hometown that you’re not seeing it anymore. That it’s become a purely utilitarian space, and between Point A and Point B, you cease living. That in your routine, you’re not really living your routine, and this is sort of paraphrasing, but you’re sort of zombie-walking through your day. And so being a flâneur, a flâneur is not someone who walks through his own city in a utilitarian or pragmatic way, a flâneur is someone who goes out in search of experience. And it’s also tied into the idea of psychogeography, so instead of walking through a city with the idea that you’re going to see tourist attractions, or that you’re going to go visit your friend on the other side of town, but instead that you’re going to walk through a town psychogeographically and you’re going to collect the color red, and you’re just going to see how many forms the color red can take. Or you’re going to look for every parking meter in town. Or you’re going to look for license plates with the letter Q on them.
Tim Ferriss
Cool.
Rolf Potts
Or you’re going to look for immigrant restaurants. And that’s going to organize your day. That’s psychogeography. Being a flâneur is even less than structured in that you’re just wandering. And it was invented to be done in your hometown to break out of your habits, and it’s a great way to break out of your tourist habits, where you go to a city and there’s 100,000 things you can do at any given moment, and you do the obvious thing which is go to the tourist attraction, and I’m not going to knock that, there’s a reason why they’re tourist attractions, but people talk about how there’s the beaten path, everything has already been discovered, everything has already been done, but actually that’s not true. Paris is the most touristed city in the world, but you wander for 10 minutes and pretty soon you’re going to be finding something that’s pretty unique to itself. Even along the Champs-Élysées. Even along the Champ de Mars where the Eiffel Tower is. If you just embrace the idea of the flâneur and walk until something catches your eye and stay open to experience instead of your plans, then you’re going to be living in a way where you previously had only been consuming those moments.
Tim Ferriss
And flâneur is F-L-A-N-E-U-R, is that right?
Rolf Potts
That’s right, with a little hat over the A [flâneur].
Tim Ferriss
Got it. God, of all the languages I’ve attempted, although this one very half-heartedly, I just cannot seem to get a grasp on French, because I panic when it starts to erase any of my Spanish or anything else that I’ve studied, but Paris. What is it like to teach in Paris, and what type of students are you teaching?
Rolf Potts
Well I teach at the American Academy, and I’m actually the course director, and it’s sort of become my baby. I’ve been running this writing workshop for the last 10 years on Rue St. Jacques in Paris. And my students are age 18-70, and it’s a large number of people, and some people are there because they know Vagabonding or my other writing, or they know some of the other writers who teach there, I have one other non-fiction teacher and two fiction teachers, so it’s not just travel writing, they can study poetry or screenwriting or short stories. And so for a lot of people it’s sort of a bucket list thing for them, they want to come to Paris and be a writer for a month. And it’s one of the exciting parts of the program is that it delivers, you’re there on the Left Bank, you’re there in the University District of Paris, and you’re firing on all cylinders, you’re writing all the time, you’re interacting with writers, you’re reading a lot, and you’re being a flâneur, and it’s funny that I discovered the flâneur in the context of Paris, even though I’d already been doing it. And even when I’m not teaching travel writing, the flâneur is such a great creative exercise for my students who might be writing a poem rather than a travel story. And Evelyn Roy talked about how a city like Paris is sort of like a house that’s been wallpapered over so much that the only thing holding it up is the wallpaper. Everybody’s written about Paris, so you have to find a way that’s against expectations, and the only way to find that is to get out and wander and find your own interests. And I’ve had students who have brought their skateboard, and through skateboarding in Paris have discovered sides of it that nobody else is seeing, and they’ve discovered the French skateboarding culture. And so my students are just there for the romance of Paris, and the great thing is that Paris is a romantic place to be, but it’s a great place to deliver. You can walk outside of a classroom and in 90 seconds you’re where Victor Hugo lived when he was 11 years old. And in 3 minutes you can go to a place where Hemingway got shit-faced. We’re literally on the street that he describes in A Moveable Feast. And so, we could teach the same thing in North Dakota and it would still be very professional and I’m very proud of what our teachers are doing, but it’s almost like a catalyst. Paris puts people in a mental state, almost like an athletic performance thing. People are in Paris, and they’re not going to blow it. They don’t live in Paris, so they’re going to come to Paris and they’re going to do something special. And it creates this energy that amazes me every year of people just uncorking some really good stuff, and just an experience that is very specific and very Parisian but very unique to themselves. So, I’ve really loved my association with that city.
Tim Ferriss
That sounds amazing. How many students are in the course?
Rolf Potts
It varies from year to year. We’ve been averaging about 24, it’s capped at 32, and so anywhere from 18 to 32 students.
Tim Ferriss
Gosh, I feel like I should take the course, it sounds amazing. I’ve fantasized fairly frequently about going to graduate school or attempting something like an MFA for creative writing, because I really haven’t explored fiction, outside of doing some exercises in elementary school. Of the students who take this course, what are the shared characteristics of the people who get the most out of it? I’m going to leave that open-ended on purpose.
Rolf Potts
I think it’s an earnest desire to do their best, combined with a beginner’s mind sort of humility towards writing. And sometimes I can get a very young and brilliant college student a leg above a mid-career professional, but because the college student has not quite cultivated – it’s a strange thing to think – but there’s a sort of confidence and self-assuredness that College students have that mid-career professionals don’t have, And that can get in the way of the beginner’s mind, and so that – know-it-all is the wrong word -but that overconfidence of a brilliant college student might impede his/her advancement whereas someone who’s 35 or 45 and is just there to soak in everything and work as hard as they can, going back to the beginner’s mind, it’s the person who is willing to embrace the beginner’s mind and work hard and synthesize the creative aspect with the parts of Paris that you can’t overlook. You can’t just come to Paris and sit in your room and write all the time, any more than J.P. Morgan should’ve been reading teletexes the whole time he was in Egypt. Going out and having fun and having a bottle of wine by the Seine and flâneuring the city and discovering things by accident is what’s going to feed what’s happening when you’re alone in your room. And so I think it’s the students who can find that balance, and I think to a big extent it’s almost like Vagabonding, it’s the students who have been saving their money, and this means something, that they’re not just gathering from their limitless pool of resources to pay for their month in Paris, but they have earned this with their sweat. It’s like a chapter in Vagabonding, I talk about how the work you do makes your travels meaningful. I think it’s the people who come in and know the value of what they have in Paris, that this one month is a special time that can catalyze them into a new creative state, those are the people who are going to get things delivered for them. And you mention MFAs: I got a mid-career MFA and there are some advantages to that sort of thing, but I think there’s an extent to which that creatively a 1-month program like this can cover a lot of those MFA bases without compromising 2 years of your life.
Tim Ferriss
Right. Agreed. I’d love to hear your thoughts. My basic fueling is that the benefits would be, and maybe it sounds ridiculous that I feel very isolated writing a lot of the time, and it’s sort of odd that I have access to more people than I’ve ever had access to in my life, yet I spend a lot of my time feeling quite isolated and lonely. And I don’t know many writers in San Francisco, that’s not in my social sphere, which maybe is a good thing and maybe is a bad thing, but the idea of being in a group of people going through the same experience, having that shared study experience, I’m sure with some degree of commiseration once in a while, with a structure that actually facilitates experimenting with new types of writing is very appealing to me, so maybe the month is a great solution as opposed to 2 years like you said. I think that will remain a fantasy in my head.
Rolf Potts
They’re both good for that social community of writers situation, just like this friend that I’m swapping houses with in Brooklyn is a grad school friend, and in my late 30s I was able to make very, very dear friends through my time at grad school, but there’s an extent to which MFA programs aren’t really designed for 38-year-olds who are already successful as writers, and that a 1-month program – I mean, obviously I have a vested interest in my own 1-month program – but a 1-month program can deliver both the community and a more concentrated spark of inspiration without having to go through a 2-year cycle that isn’t necessarily tailored to someone in your situation. One thing that a 2-year program can give you is structure, like monthly deadlines, but if you’ve already written a book, I think there’s an extent to which an exposure to poetry or fiction or screenwriting and 30 other people who are going gung ho and locked in on that similar created openness than that 1-month catalyst can be more youthful, I mean useful, in both senses than a more extended certificate program that lasts 2 years.
Tim Ferriss
You know, I am happy that you misspoke for a second and said youthful, because in a way it’s almost appropriate, because as you said, the charge of a group in Paris, recognizing that for most of them it’s a very unique opportunity that required a lot of sacrifices to make happen would charge it with a certain youthful energy which I’m trying to re-infuse into a lot of what I do because, and I don’t think this is purely a function of age, maybe it’s exposure to the doom and gloom of general Internet bullshit, but I’m trying to beat back my own cynicism with a club, and really try to prevent myself from becoming apathetic – that’s a very strong word – but there’s a lot of instability and crazy in the world if you go looking for it, or if you’re spending a lot of time on social media, for instance. And I want to combat that with a positive and charged youthful energy, so it’s very interesting.
Rolf Potts
Well, I think that goes back to the idea of success vs. lack of success. And a certain kind of success is more meaningful when you’re 30 than when you’re 40, because you have a different relationship to that success after you’ve been steeped in it for a while. So finding the screenplay that you can bang your head up against or embracing poetry or samba dancing or anything else with that vulnerability, that beginner’s mind, that youthfulness, I think that that is so useful, to use the right word this time, in rejuvenating your relationship with yourself. When I started out as a travel writer, there were certain bylines that were really important to me that aren’t now.
Tim Ferriss
And by bylines, you mean publications and credits and stuff?
Rolf Potts
Yeah. I’m going to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, I’m going to write for National Geographic Traveler, good publications that do good work. But I realized that once you took away the thrill of that initial success of having a major publication acknowledge the quality of your work, then what I was doing with the content transformed a little bit. And so now I’m writing a screenplay with zombies in it, not that I’m going to become a B movie screenwriter now, but it brings me joy, that childlike joy, in the creative process, that doesn’t exist anymore in what I’ve already become professionally successful at.
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Rolf Potts
And so I think you get into that pattern, and it sounds like you’re experimenting with this already, that you become successful in a certain manner of creative expression, and a certain manner of expertise, and then I think a way to keep yourself fresh is to try activities that you might fail at. And I think that if you aren’t failing at something fairly substantial once a year, then you’re not pushing yourself enough. And of course travel is a great venue for inviting failure and mild humiliation. But sure, I think it’s great that you’re bashing your head against a screenplay that might not work out. 10 years ago, or maybe 8 years ago, I had my Vagabonding screenplay, where I was expressing the philosophical ideas of Vagabonding through a coming-of-age story. And it didn’t quite work, maybe I’ll go back to it. But it was a good thing to have tried and not quite succeeded at. And I’m not saying that that’s where your screenplay is going, but that process is important for keeping yourself sharp and keeping a perspective amid certain jadedness to other kinds of success.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely. The adjective successful has come up a couple of times. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why?
Rolf Potts
Oh man, I don’t know if a person comes to mind. I think when I was 28 I may have been able to name a travel writer who I wanted to be, like Pico Iyer or Tim Cahill, and I think that when you ask that question a person doesn’t pop into my head because I have that different relationship to success. The hunger to be like Pico or Tim played itself out in a great way, it became part of the energy that made me a travel writer. And so now, it’s funny, I feel like our backgrounds are fairly similar. I’m from Wichita, Kansas, you’re from Springs, right, Long Island?
Tim Ferriss
That’s right.
Rolf Potts
Bulls-eye middle class families, right?
Tim Ferriss
That’s right.
Rolf Potts
And you had your Ivy League experience right out of high school and I didn’t, I taught at Penn and then Yale for a few years really recently, and a part of me felt like I needed to measure myself against that standard, and it was a great experience. But now that has also been folded into my idea of success. And so I think this might be a little bit tied into talking about the creative process and sometimes it can be difficult, that my notions of success are slightly different, it has a different energy. So I’m not thinking about someone I want to be necessarily, but I think it’s more about appreciation. My role models, and I’m still blanking on who I might point out, are not achievement people but appreciation people. People who have found the same success and are synthesizing it in a good life kind of way.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely. This is just somebody who comes to mind, and I’ve asked this question of a lot of folks and more than a few times Steve Jobs comes up, but he’s actually not, in many ways, exemplary, based on what you just described, and I think Steve Wozniak, his co-founder, very much is. I’ve met Woz on a number of occasions and even gave him a little tango class prior to his Dancing With the Stars experiment, and he really savors and loves life and has built a life for himself where he is able to experience the joy of discovery and is a genuinely happy human being. And this is going to sound funny, but despite all of his material success. I think that the material success, not to say that it’s a bad thing – I think it enables more than it disables – but it can make people very defensive, where they spend the vast majority of their time managing the protection and growth of their assets instead of the growth of other areas of their lives, and I don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars or anything like that, but I’ve been very fortunate to have enough success with publishing or elsewhere that I don’t have to worry about where the next month’s rent’s coming from, but I’ve witnessed that in myself. And I think that there’s a possibility that, and maybe this isn’t true, but I’d be curious based on your observations if you’ve noticed this. If you’re coming from a very middle class background where there were many, many times where money was tight within the family and we weren’t able to take certain trips or get certain birthday presents or go out to certain restaurants, that my inclination is to focus on the defense and protection of assets more than those people I met at Princeton who grew up as blue bloods where money is a known quantity, it’s an element that for multiple generations the family has become comfortable with, so not sure if that’s worth exploring, but it’s something that I try to be very cautious or aware of, because I think it’s a terrible inclination that I have.
Rolf Potts
Well you’ve touched on a couple of things, a couple of new concepts I’ve wrestled with very recently, and it actually made me realize who my role models are going to be, to your earlier question. But ya, teaching at Yale, for example, which is such a good institution, I came into Yale in my early 40s, and my excitement at being at this institution after all these years, after being a person when I was 17 at the college fair in Wichita, Kansas, I remember looking at the Yale table and feeling sorry for the guy who had to come to Kansas, and I’m not even going there, just because I came from a family that you don’t spend money on an Ivy League education, there are more practical ways to get an education, it wasn’t an expectation. But me sitting as a teacher in a class at Yale, and this is very recently, who’s excited about being at this institution in a way that the 18-year-old student isn’t. The 18-year-old student is just relieved to be there because they’ve been expected to be there for years, and it’s a part of their socioeconomic status, and they didn’t have to go to their safety school, that sort of situation. And so in a way that’s sort of a gift of middle classness, you don’t have those expectations, nobody’s going to be disappointed if you don’t end up at Yale. And you can actually have this beginner’s mind sort of experience as being a 42-year-old who’s over the moon about being a Yale professor all of a sudden. And actually, the other thing you asked about, when you think of success, who do you think about, actually I’ve been really just in the last couple of months in the stories of Dave Chappelle and John Hughes. Dave Chappelle being the comedian who turned away $50 million and society sort of said, “Oh, what’s wrong with him?” and John Hughes, who in the 1980s made all the best teen movies ever, and then just sort of disappeared to become a quiet person.
Tim Ferriss
Did he make Home Alone, or am I making that up?
Rolf Potts
He made Home Alone, he made all of those Brat Pack teen movies.
Tim Ferriss
Right. Mrs. Doubtfire? Did he also make that one?
Rolf Potts
He might’ve been involved as a screenwriter…
Tim Ferriss
I might be making that up.
Rolf Potts
He had involvement with movies through the ‘90s, and then just stopped doing that altogether in the 2000s. And I’m still in the process of researching this personality type, because I’m really interested in the relationship that these guys have to success and they were both judged harshly, and I think these are guys who were really trying to wrestle with the idea of who they were versus who their success dictated they were supposed to be, right? And so Dave Chappelle – we live in a society where you have to be insane to turn down $50 million. People were questioning Dave Chappelle’s mental health.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, literally. That was a very prominent feature of the whole discussion, whether or not he had gone literally insane.
Rolf Potts
When in fact it could’ve been, and again I’m strill researching these guys, that could’ve been a radically sane thing to do. A friend of mine, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, who’s a great up-and-coming journalist, wrote a profile of him for The Believer where she went to his hometown in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and talked to his Mom who’s a college professor, and actually ran into him in a coffee shop but just wanted to respect his privacy.
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Rolf Potts
And Dave Chappelle is a fit, happy guy living on a farm in Ohio, hanging out with his friends, and it feels – again, I need to do some more research – but it feels like he’s a guy who decided what would make him happy and he realized that $50 million and getting locked into a show wouldn’t. And similarly, John Hughes is a beloved guy – and these are just two examples, there are other examples that one could throw in – but he was beloved for his teen movies, especially by people of my generation, but I think there came a point at which he didn’t want to be beholden to The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles anymore. He’s a family man, and a guy who was passionate about his creativity, and I think he chose being happy in a city that he loved, Chicago, with family members that he loved, over making The Breakfast Club 3 and making another $10 million. And so, while these guys didn’t pop into my head as success, they’re guys who have captured my attention because I think the public perception of, “Oh, here are these two guys that have disappeared,” with these two examples, they’re not people who disappeared but they realized that they have the structure in place to live the lives they want to live, and they’ve quietly been doing it.
Tim Ferriss
I love it, it makes me want to immediately start researching both of them, but if you’re on the job, and given that I enjoy your writing so much, I’ll probably just wait.
Rolf Potts
Well, actually it’s funny that I’m not researching it from a writing point of view, so go ahead and take it, it’s just from an intellectual point of view, at all points. The Heracleidae said, “You never step into the same river twice. It’s a different river and you’re a different man.” You’re always trying to make sense of how you’re living an dhow other people are living, and suddenly this is just a random intellectual thing that I probably wouldn’t’ve thought of in the context of success until you brought it up, and here’s 2 guys that I think were crazy like foxes. They said, “No thanks, American idea of success, we’re going to take real success, we’re going to take time wealth, and live in ways that make us happy,” instead of trying to live up to artificial ideas of success. So you can have it Tim, and I want to read this book or article on success management. It feels like an important topic.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I agree. Especially because it’s such a nebulous term that I think there’s a lot of insidious potential for such a heralded, pressured, nebulous term in particular. Interesting. Alright, I’m sure that seed will just sit in my head and not go away, so I might need to scratch that itch.
Rolf Potts
Well, there are so many ways of looking at success, but in dental terms, we’re all more successful than the kings of Europe 500 years ago.
Tim Ferriss
Right. [laughs]
Rolf Potts
So the keeping up with the Joneses idea of success, that comparing yourself to other people idea of success, is useful to an extent, but it’s also toxic, and so it’s part of this idea of success management, which is a phrase that I only just now said, but it feels like it’s the other half. There’s a million books about how to become successful, but perhaps the idea of how to manage one’s success in an enriching and life-enhancing way is something that more thought needs to address.
Tim Ferriss
This has been a fantastic conversation, I have just a few more questions I want to ask and I want to be respectful of your time.
Rolf Potts
Sure, go for it.
Tim Ferriss
I’m very hopeful that people will enjoy this, and they should definitely let us know if they want a round 2 at some point if you’re up for it, because this has been a blast.
Rolf Potts
Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss
So the questions that I have. There are a couple of rapid-fire questions. You walk into a bar, what do you order from the bartender? What are your drinks of choice or drink of choice?
Rolf Potts
I have turned into a whiskey guy, and I’m actually giving myself a little vacation from whiskey, because almost like with Internet connectivity, it became too easy to have a nightcap that compromised my productivity, and being the middle class guy I am, I love Woodford Reserve – and I’m talking about the bourboney types of whiskey – but Evan Williams Black Label makes me happy, but I’m taking a little vacation from it because it became my booze version of the Internet where it just became unnecessary for me to be having another Evan Williams. And you know, I like the Single Malt and stuff like that too, but I needed a Freedom App for my bottle of Evan Williams.
Tim Ferriss
[laughs] Just duct-tape over the bottle mouth, right?
Rolf Potts
Exactly, exactly.
Tim Ferriss
Or an anti-booze pacifier? I should sell one of those.
Rolf Potts
Exactly. And it’s not alcoholism, because I’ve been on my whiskey fast for about 2 weeks now and I never think about it, I just needed to get my monkey brain off of my whiskey nightcap, because it was delightful and unnecessary and totally counter to my own creative life. It was a very lazy, it was like checking my Facebook feed for the third time in 20 minutes. Anyway, eventually I will return to whiskey with pleasure, but I’m on a little mini-retirement, as it were, from whiskey.
Tim Ferriss
I understand. I recently just took a month off of booze entirely for similar reasons. Do you have a favorite documentary or documentaries?
Rolf Potts
What popped into my head was Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Have you seen this?
Tim Ferriss
Oh boy, yeah. I’ve heard of this, but I think part of the reason I’ve avoided it is it has the horrific epilogue if I’m not mistaken. Is this the same movie that I’m thinking of? Or, let me rephrase that: are people eaten by bears?
Rolf Potts
Yes. It’s about this eccentric guy named Timothy Treadwell who spends 13 summers in Alaska with grizzly bears, and the 13th summer he’s actually eaten by a grizzly bear. And this is not a spoiler because you know that from the beginning of the movie, and one reason I like it is that it’s such an interesting experiment in storytelling. And I use it as an example with my students, and I tell them about how you infuse narratives with mystery, with the idea that you’re going to get certain information later on in the narrative, and Herzog gives us the answer to the mystery almost immediately, which is the What. What happens? Timothy Treadwell gets eaten by a bear. But then it’s the How that gets answered, but then it’s the Who. It turns into this, “Who the hell is this guy who would hang out with grizzlies for 13 summers?” And it’s not one of my favorite documentaries from the standpoint of life-changing model for how I want to live or even how I want to make a documentary, but it’s such a brilliant use of narrative. Werner Herzog is just so good. Literally yesterday I was looking at these spoofs of Werner Herzog reading Curious George, which just killed me, it was so funny. If you’ve seen Grizzly Man with his Germanic voiceover and you hear this spoof of him reading, “Curious George was a curious monkey…” it’s so uncanny. Anyway, that’s a little bit of an aside. He’s another one of these role models, of someone who is almost irreplicably brilliant in the way he uses narrative, and it’s such a subtle, simple, brillian tway of telling the story of Timothy Treadwell mostly thorugh Tim Treadwell’s own video, but it’s just a fantastic documentary. And it doesn’t really tie into lifestyle design, but as far as using it as a model for using found footage and existing resources for telling a really, really profound story about human nature and the people who go against human nature and nature itself and the assumptions of nature, it’s just fantastic. And yeah, a guy gets eaten by a bear, but it’s less macabre than you might think.
Tim Ferriss
This is a random one, but we mentioned Adaptation earlier. If Nic Cage came to your house for dinner, what would you cook him?
Rolf Potts
Oh God. Well, I’d probably go to Aldie’s and find some cheese bratwursts just because that’s sort of how I roll. It’d be the same if you showed up at my doorstep or any number of friends or celebrities. That’s an interesting guy, and this is another complete aside, but I’m a little bit obsessed with the movie Con Air.
Tim Ferriss
[laughs] Okay, that requires some elaboration.
Rolf Potts
Because I saw it on a bus in Syria, and if a computer took every action movie cliche and turned it into an algorithm and spit out a movie, it would be Con Air. It’s a cast full of indie actors. I mean, Steve Buscemi’s in that movie, John Malkovich is in that movie. But I watched it on a bus full of Syrians, and they didn’t have any of the snarky, self-aware, judgmental, hipper-than-thou attitude towards it, and they cheered at the end. And they cheered in the middle. And that became a part of my emotional experience in Syria, and this was 14 years ago, which is that it’s an amazing place, and it’s become a heartbreaking place because I know that the people I met there who were so wonderful are living hard lives now. And so I want to write an essay about this at some point, about my emotional relationship to Con Air that is somehow tied into the experience of travel along with the helplessness of seeing what’s going on in Syria. And sorry for this to take a serious turn, but it’s one of those limitations of travel, for all of the beauty of humanity I experienced in Syria, which was such a wonderful place years and years ago, that I have this dumb Nic Cage movie tied in to my emotional experience of the Syrian people.
Tim Ferriss
You should absolutely write that, I think it’d be a fascinating piece. Roger that. So, cheese bratwurst.
Rolf Potts
[chuckles] You got it. Come on over, Tim, come on up to Kansas.
Tim Ferriss
Sign me up. What is the most gifted, or the few most gifted books in your life? Meaning, aside from the books that you’ve written, and of course people who’ve followed me for a while know that I’ve given away hundreds if not thousands of copies of Vagabonding…
Rolf Potts
Thank you for that.
Tim Ferriss
Of course, of course. I view it as a must-read, of course. Aside from your own books, what books have you gifted to other people the most?
Rolf Potts
Well you could probably guess Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely.
Rolf Potts
And this is especially a young adult to mid-30s gift, and this is going to sound funny, but I probably gave it to every woman I dated for like 6-10 years, not because I was some sort of jaded pickup artist but because I felt it was so true to my own joyous attitude towards how I wanted life to be, and just the openness this 19th-Century gay dude capturing these Rolf straight guy emotions towards the joy of life, and so I apologize if I sound jaded to my ex-girlfriends, but there’s a point at which I felt so connected to that book that I would give it to people I was falling in love with. And so that continues to be a book that, especially for young people who are just coming in to resting with what’s in store for them for life, Leaves of Grass is this great reminder that joy and openness to experience and inclusivity is something that is going to be that catalyst that makes every experience more exciting.
Tim Ferriss
I love it. Any others? What have you been gifting to your girlfriends for the last while?
Rolf Potts
Let me think. I have so many writer friends now, like I have really good friends from my grad school program who are poets, and you have a poetry bestseller if you sell 150 books of poetry, right?
Tim Ferriss
[chuckles] Right.
Rolf Potts
So I’ve been buying a lot of poetry by my friends or even just by poets I respect simply because that one purchase and handoff is meaningful to them in a way that for other people it might not be, and this is something we haven’t touched on, but poetry is useful for non-poets in the way that it uses language. There’s nothing more pure and distilled in the way that every single word operates in poetry. My friend Eli Burrell just came out with a book, I’ve been buying that for friends, my friend Heather Dobbins-Combs had a book that came out with poetry, and I think that poetry is a good – and hopefully my friends who are receiving these books are reading them – is just a good reminder of how important language is, and how much you can do on a single page with language. I guess Leaves of Grass is poetry too, so somehow I’m this prose writer who’s besotted with poetry for the last 20 years. That’s a big thing too.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely, I need to read more poetry. I’ve never been much of a consumer of poetry, partially I think because I dealt with a lot of holier-than-thou liberal arts majors at Princeton who seemed to imply that if I insisted on understanding the poetry that it was above me, that I was lacking the intellect or somehow if I couldn’t appreciate what I considered to be nonsensical prose that I just didn’t get it. And that I think give me a bit of an allergy to poetry that I should probably revisit. Besides Walt Whitman, any other poets that you would recommend to the intrepid reader of poetry?
Rolf Potts
Well, actually a guy who speaks almost every summer in Paris is a guy named Stuart Dischell.
Tim Ferriss
Can you spell his last name?
Rolf Potts
D-I-S-C-H-E-L-L. It’s very dude-like poetry.
Tim Ferriss
[laughs] Is it like a country song with the pickup and the dog, or what are we talking about?
Rolf Potts
He’s from Jersey, he’s from Atlantic City, and it’s not dude-like in bro-like poetry, but if you’re a straight male who’s encountered greater questions in life, there’s something very relatable about it.
Tim Ferriss
Got it.
Rolf Potts
Penguin publishes him. Also a guy who was born in Kansas and is sort of out there, his poetry is really infused with a lot op pop culture is Michael Robbins who wrote a book called Alien vs. Predator. It’s just sort of a trip to read. In fact, it’s a fun book to buy and read out loud to your friends because he’s using these strange meters and rhymes with poems about Axl Rose, and rhyming Axl Rose with something else. Really interesting guy who’s also published by Penguin. So those are a couple of dude poets that I think would be accessible or at least appealing to people who aren’t usually vested in poetry. Billy Collins would be another example, these are all men. Actually there’s a woman named Aimee Nezhukumatathil, great woman, I’ve spoken with her at a writing and environment conference, and very accessible and beautiful poetry. I also have a recommendation for people who are interested in poetry, which I would imagine, for your or my audience both, is maybe not a huge priority for people who read our books.
Tim Ferriss
Right.
Rolf Potts
Get an edition of Best American Poetry any time in the last 20 years, and read through the poems, and the ones that you don’t like, forget about them, and the ones that are appealing, find other poems by those authors. And that’s how I found some of my favorite poets.
Tim Ferriss
That’s great advice, and I just wanted to raise also one other poet. And this is one of the rare poets who broke thorugh my unfounded bias against poetry. Naomi Shihab Nye. Her father is a Palestinian refugee, and I have just really enjoyed her poetry and kept it quiet, which is so stupid, but it just goes to show how early bruising can affect how you behave as a supposedly-mature adult.
Rolf Potts
Right?
Tim Ferriss
I enjoy her poetry because I understand it. It’s beautifully written but I get it, there’s sort of a message being conveyed, or a point, or a description of something concrete, and based on the condescending lectures I would get from people at Princeton who were probably very similar to the guy in the bar in Good Will Hunting who’s reciting plagiarized classics, so just imagine that dickhead and multiply it by a couple hundred people. I guess I’ve never really talked about it. But Naomi is a poet that I’ve come to really appreciate, so I’m glad that you’re lighting a fire for that.
Rolf Potts
And those poets are out there. Major Jackson is another guy that occurs to me, an African-American guy from Philly, who actually taught at the MFA program, I didn’t study poetry but he was there, great guy. And for every completely abstract poem that’s playing with language in a way that is almost meant to be pretentious, you have poetry that’s very soulful and accessible and great. And people deeply invested in poetry might bag on some of this stuff, but there’s a lot of it out there, and again the Best American series and other anthologies might be a good way to find it. Or even just going to Poetry Daily and ignoring the poems that seem completely inaccessible and following up on poems that really seem to be delivering something relatable. Don Hall is another great one, he’s pushing 90 now, but he’s a wonderful, wonderful poet based out of New England.
Tim Ferriss
Well, Rolf, I want people to continue exploring your thoughts, what is the best way for them to learn more about you, find you online, etc.?
Rolf Potts
My author website is rolfpotts.com, that links to all aspects of my travel writing career and also my career as a journalist and an essayist. If they want to know more about Vagabonding, they can buy the book or they can also go to vagabonding.net, which I should probably remind them has resources that go in tandem with the Vagabonding audiobook that you published, and are also more updated than the print book that came out 11 years ago. So vagabonding.net/resources will allow you to follow up on a lot of the stuff we talked about today, a lot of these websites like Bootsnall.com. And then finally, anyone interested in my Paris course, which takes place in the month of July every summer, it’s pariswritingworkshop.com, which is also linked from my other websites, but pariswritingworkshop.com will give you all the basics about that. And Twitter is @RolfPotts, so there’s many ways to find me.
Tim Ferriss
And that is Rolf with an F, for those people who might be wondering what the spelling is.
Rolf Potts
With an O and an F.
Tim Ferriss
With an O and an F and an R and a couple of Ts as well. So Rolf Potts. And for folks who are interested in the Book Club, I do have a book club, and Vagabonding was the very first book used to launch that book club, and you can hear a sample of the audiobook and check it out at audible.com/timsbooks. So you can get the scope on some of the books that have had a huge impact on my life and I’ll thank you once again, Rolf, because Vagabonding certainly hit me at a very important time in my life where I could’ve gone, and I feel like it steered me in a very positive direction and if