The One With Best-Selling Author Neil Strauss - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #133

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and.

This is the I love marketing podcast.

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And here we are. This is going to be a very special episode, so an interview. So we'd like everyone to, you know, get. If you're driving, you know, just pay attention and you're going to listen to this. You're probably going to listen this interview and episode several times. We've got our good friend Neil Strauss, who's joining us. He's in LA right now. We're over the phone, so we'll do our best to make sure that this is as good of a recording quality as we can have. And so, Neil, how. How are you, man?

Awesome. Hey, Joe. Hey, Dean. It's good to be talking to you guys.

Yep, yep. So let's give some context here about who this is. If you don't. Could I start with that, Dean, or is there anything you want to jump in and say? Okay, no, you go ahead. So Neil is a writer. He is not just a writer. I think he's one of the greatest writers in the world. Living. His writing is compelling. It's powerful. He's sold millions of books. He's got, I think, seven New York Times bestsellers. He's spoken at the last two 25K Genius Network annual events. The crowd loves him. And at these events, we have billionaires at each group that watch him. Neil asked the group at the most recent 25k meeting, how many of you would like to write a book? And almost every hand went up if you don't recognize his name. Some of the books that he wrote are the Game, which is one of the most famous ones on penetrating the secret society of pickup artists. The Long Hard Road out of Hell that he did with Marilyn Manson. The Dirt with Motley Crue, how to Make Love Like a porn star with Jenna Jamison. Rules of the Game, Everyone loves you when you're dead. And on and on. Book emergency. That will scare the daylights out of you if you read it. So he's written a lot of books, but more importantly, he. He actually knows how to persuade people tremendously. And what I say at 25k ingenious network is it's really a group for industry. Transformers and Neil actually created an industry. And I'll ask you to respond to this in a minute, Neil, when I'm done babbling here. But like with the Game, you kind of went into this underground world of pickup artists. No one knew that you were a writer. You're going to eventually write a book on it. I don't even know if you thought about that. It was literally just trying to figure out how people do this. Is it real? And your book became so huge, you virtually created a industry which branched off a whole bunch of different bizarre businesses and various things for people. And so you're quite an influential guy. And a few years ago, me and you did an interview called the Anatomy of Addictive Writing, where we talked about your methodologies of writing, what you recommend. So today there's so much that we can cover. But I want to talk to you about the power of words, your rituals, things like that, and anything else that, you know, me and Dean, of course, could come up with. So, that being said, you know, who the heck is Neil Strauss from your perspective and some of the misconceptions people may have of you because you've. You've written, you know, you've interviewed more famous rock stars than probably anyone alive right now. You write for Rolling Stone, you know, a bunch of stuff. So, I mean, how would you describe yourself to someone that doesn't know who you are?

I mean, you just did an awesome job. So I probably.

Assuming I wasn't around, you know, to say nice things about you or whatever. What do you really do? I mean, you're a writer. How do you think of yourself, of what you do?

No, it's funny, if someone were to ask me, the way I think about myself is like a storyteller. I love the art of storytelling because it's the art of keeping somebody interested in something for the amount of time that you want them to. And the medium doesn't have to be writing. It could be speaking. It could be, you know, film. It could be in any medium. It could be even just making a meal. It could be. I love the idea of storytelling, and it's the idea of keeping somebody interested from, you know, beginning, middle to end and it. Having a story.

So funny. Neil, as you're saying that I'm going to let you continue, but just those words that you said, storyteller, are exactly what came to my mind. And I've told you, I don't know whether I've told Joe's, but about a year before I met you, I was at the Virgin Megastore in Orlando and I picked up your Dave Navarro book and I started reading it and I sat down on the comfy couch there, and literally three hours later, I looked up and it was, you know, I had not put the book down. I couldn't stop. And that was really like exactly. What I would describe is that it was like being there at a dinner party or something. You telling this incredible story of your experience with Dave Navarro. I mean, that was really. That was my introduction to you before I even met you. Now that I've gotten to know you, it's been. I've read everything and it's absolutely true.

And not only that, but Dean actually has been a proofreader of my last two books before they were done, before they were published. I'll give them to us. A certain select group of people. They don't even have to be that select, actually. But I get that.

I felt really good there for a.

Second and then you let me right back.

I know, I can't.

You neg'd me.

You neg'd me is what you did there.

Yeah, but I've given to people. What I mean by that is because I was thinking of people listening. It's like you don't have to give them to the greatest, smartest people you know, though. You are one of the greatest, smartest people I know. Just giving different kinds of people the book to read is a great litmus test of how it works. So that was the reason I qualified it. Not because you are not selecting. I do give it to a small group of people. Diverse.

That's a great cover too. But I appreciate the fact that you're insulting Dean sort of, because I tend to do that on the I love marketing episodes. And everyone has this perception that he's this really sweet, nice guy and I'm just the sarcastic one and stuff. But it's. I mean, so by all means, even if it's very subtle, anything you want to say about Dean, feel free.

No, no. Yeah. Gene. Dean gets almost people addicted to. To drugs in his spare time and deals with charities as well.

Let me say this also, Dean, because I.

Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to give you a little bit of.

I think it's important too that Neil is an entrepreneur also. I mean, he, you know, beyond writing. He has a group of really great guys, a lot of very successful entrepreneurs that he has a pretty exclusive group called the Society that meets on a regular basis. He brings in big name speakers, really tries to help them with capability in all kinds of areas of their life, from financial to relationships. And a lot of people probably that don't know what he does may peg him based on one of his books. Oh, he's the pickup guy. But you recently got married. I mean, you've totally had these transformations in your life over the years about all the shenanigans that you've gone through and kind of where you're at right now. So there's a lot more to what people really would know about someone other than just a particular book and a subject. But when you go into a. Or a category, I mean, you really immerse yourself and become an expert in it or at least have the ability to really see what the hell's going on and then do a great job of telling the story about it in the form of a quote unquote book. But you do a lot of other stuff, so I just wanted to point that out.

And by the way, you said earlier, what are some misconceptions you want to clear up? And there actually aren't any because I'm not really worried about misconceptions because the misconceptions are misconceived. So it doesn't matter. The only things I worry about are, you know, are if somebody's actually right, conceptions that are negative, you know, so. So I think, you know, I named a book I wrote Everyone Loves yous When youn're Dead, because anyone. I'm sure this is true of every single person listening. As you start to excel in your respective field, a lot of people will start to criticize you and try and bring you down. And that's really part of life that. What they call in Australia the tall, you know, the tall poppy syndrome. You know, the tall poppy gets cut because everybody else feels like, well, your competition, you're doing better. If you're doing better and they're not doing as well, it makes them feel inadequate. So that's why we love to bash on celebrities and talk about their weight and their affairs and these kinds of things to bring them back down to our level. So one thing is, and I learned this early on from interviewing like the most, whether it's Chuck Berry, who invents at Rock and Roll, or Lady Gaga, that they're all just dwelling and stuck in their criticism and not looking at all these amazing things that have happened in their life and then watching when some of the people I interview pass and how all of a sudden every criticism and all those bad things they were worried about, no one says a word about it. They're just talking about how great they were because there's no longer competition once they're gone. So one thing I learned early on just from interviewing other people was, I mean, not to read it, not to read it, not to look at it, even if it's going to bother you. Not to worry about the misconceptions, but to worry about if somebody's actually saying something that is true and it's negative, then that's something you have to look at.

Let me say this, too, because I think you brought up a really important point. I mean, you have a really great perspective and understanding and interaction with many famous people. I mean, world famous. I remember one time we were hanging out in la and you were, like, getting ready to do an interview with Mick Jagger. And you've interviewed David Bowie, like, three times. You did the first interview with Sacha Cohen Baron. That was out of character. The. The Borat guy, you know, several years ago. You've been on Howard Stern. I mean, people can. You know, you've been on Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, people can find you all over the Internet. And, you know, I mean, you've interacted.

Listen, I want to say Howard Stern, because he didn't. He wasn't just on Howard Stern. He took over. Howard Stern is what happened. He was there just as an observer. It turned into one of the greatest segments on the show. It was awesome.

Well, and you wrote the. You know, you wrote the COVID story on Rolling Stone about Howard Stern. Right. I'm sorry that we're talking over each other. I mean, we're all kind of, like.

Talking and interrupting it, really. It is that we're excited. I think that's it.

No, but. But what I wanted to point out, though, because I think before, you know, you start talking about writing and literally probably giving practices and techniques and rituals and how to. And all the stuff that, you know, we could cover in the time we have here is that I think one of the big limiting things for people to, you know, go to another level, do what they want to do is this fear of criticism and attack. And as you made that comment, you know, as you become well known, you know, people take shots at you, and there's a lot of envy and jealousy that exists in the world. And you, because of the. The mere subject matter that you write about, I mean, you open yourself up for massive controversy. And I don't. You know, knowing you, I think you give a shit. I think you really care. I mean, there's a side of you that I've seen you do incredible things to try to be helpful and concerned with people. I mean, when I spoke at one of your groups, you know, I mean, your main concern was like, I want to give these guys the very best. I mean, about, you know, your clients and helping them do stuff. It's not this Radical rock star figure guy that writes about picking up women stuff. How does criticism affect you?

I mean, when you.

Does it bother you? Have you gone through a transitional stage? I mean, because, you know, I think that's so important for people listening because I think it holds back most people.

From that bigger version. For sure. That's the intent of it. The intent of it is to. Is to bring you down to their level and get you stuck there. Like, you know, just the way you see in movies, like, or, you know, an old, you know, people gossiping about someone as they're stepping out. And your challenge, I mean, it's sort of life presents you with many obstacles. Nothing is a journey from A to B. There are obstacles. And what separates the people who excel in this world is if they can surpass the obstacles versus stopping at them. So I think they're one of life's tests. And what I found is as you're pulling away, as you're pulling ahead in whatever your field may be, and it could just be in happiness in life. It doesn't have to be financial success or career, career success. People will try to drag you down a certain degree of people. And can you pull past that resistance and get up high enough that it just sort of snaps and you stay there long enough and they accept that. And then you keep kind of moving on and up and fighting against that sort of criticism. And again, I've watched the way. And the best way to do it is literally to ignore it, to put no energy into it, no energy even in dispelling it. You dispel it by being excellent. I mean, I remember when I was at the. I was writing at the New York Times, I did my very, very first book, which was with Marilyn Manson. And nobody had ever written about me before. Nobody had ever really cared about me. The very first article was like a three page article which accused me of like the worst stuff imaginable, which none of which was true. And the COVID it was in like every weekly newspaper, including a newspaper I used to write for. The picture was like Marilyn Manson holding my severed head.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

And the crazy. And for like, for months, I was just. It was the first time it really, really got to me. It really hurt me. It really disturbed me. Even my mother had a dream that this writer was being buried. And she threw a picture of me in his grave, in his tombstone, in his coffin, so he'd have to live with more of us. Even disturbed my parents sleep. It was so harsh. But the weird. But the weird. Here's where the weird effect of it was if I was worth writing a. Because the stuff wasn't true, it didn't stick. But secondly is if I was worth writing that big article, that three page article, but I really must be worthy of that. You know, they have to build you up to tear you down. So in the end, it actually helped my career. People who hadn't heard of me heard of me then. And it was a name people recognize. And it's so weird. It's hard to explain now, but the first three runs were hell. But after that, like, it really, it actually brought me to a new level. It was weird and unexpected. So I thought it was. Is if you're not getting criticized, you're probably not doing the right thing. You're not daring to step out, you're not daring to be different, you're not daring to, and you're not succeeding at what you're doing. And once that criticism starts and it's not true, you'll know what it's happening because you're complaining to someone about being misunderstood or something. Once you're doing that, you know you're on the right path. You know you're doing the right thing. You know, you're, you're, you're lifting off, off in this life and excelling and making something of yourself.

That's an interesting point where to sit and think about that. I'm writing it down too. I loved what you said. Dispel criticism by being excellent. I mean, I think the first key is truly if what you're producing or being is just crap, of course you're asking if you want to put sloppy stuff out there, don't get annoyed if someone says it's sloppy. The thing is, there is, I remember something Dan Kennedy would always say to me early on, back in the mid-90s, he was like, always talked about, if you're not offending somebody every day, you're not marketing enough, strongly enough. The distinction I made between that is you don't purposely go out of your way to offend people or shock people. I mean, it's just you're going to have, especially in the area of marketing and persuasion, if you're going to shift someone's emotions and engage them in a positive or negative way, they aren't going to be in some vanilla, you know, comfortable state. You're going to make people uncomfortable. And that could be applied to music, it could be applied to entertainment and movies. When someone goes to a horror movie, if it doesn't scare the hell out of them, it's not a very effective horror movie. And so, you know, your whole. Your whole thing about if you're not being criticized, you're not doing the right thing. I think that's something to embrace, which is different than just purposely going out and being a jerk, arrogant and annoying for the sake of offending people and setting yourself criticism. I mean, there's a distinction there.

Yeah, maybe the distinction would be between criticism and feedback. You know, feedback is really important. Feedback is the most useful. I mean, I think that feedback is one of the only ways to really excel and become great, which is you're going to get feedback from people that you really need to listen to. And it's that line between criticism and feedback. And it's funny just, you know, just to think about it. I mean, I think feedback is from, you know, people in your circle who, you know, that you're going to pay attention to that. That is not intent. That is not intended as, you know, as negative. I think the intent to feedback is to actually help somebody. The intent to criticism is to hurt someone. And maybe that. And that's the difference.

I wonder, Neil, how much of that really toughened your skin when you're getting. You dealt with all that when you were writing about other people and how you were already prepared for it. Now when you made that shift and you started writing about your own life, you were probably already tough. You're already toughened up and used to what comes from it.

Yeah, no, I think that's for sure. I mean, I definitely think, like, watching all those other people deal with it and watching how it didn't help them and distracted them and turned them to, you know, turn them to drugs or got them obsessed with it, you know, you'd be surprised at the number of. I remember when the Internet first came out, I was actually at Dave Navarro's house and he was in, like, not the Internet first came out. It was like aol, like, caught on, and it was like a little chat, like, fighting with his fans. And it was like, come on, man. You know, it's like. So, yeah, definitely, definitely watching that help. But also I think how it helped, like, just receiving a lot of it. And you hit a weird place where you hit the weird place where if you listen to enough feedback and you do something enough and you get to a point at it, you know, whether it's good or bad, and you know what's good about it, you know what's bad about it. So you can actually get to the point where the praise doesn't matter either. You know, where you may not even read your reviews, for example, because you know what was good or bad about it, and you start to read it, it's kind of boring, so you just don't finish it. So that you got to get to the point, too, where the praise is as unimportant as the criticism because you know what's good and bad about it. I'll give you a quick little thing for listening to feedback. When I get feedback, and Joe might know about this, but when I get feedback, someone's giving the analogy of a catcher's mitt. And this is anything in life, so I get the feedback. I don't take it in right away, right? And it's hard if you just take it in right away. You take in the catcher's mitt, you look at it, right? If it's true, you put it into your brain and process it, and you try and use it to improve. If it's not true, you throw it away. And if it may be true, you hold onto and you look at it. Maybe you go out and ask your friends, hey, man, is this perception true for you? Are you getting this? And you examine it, and then you decide whether to keep it or not. And then the other kind of feedback, which is my favorite, is the stuff you get. You look at it, you say it's not true, and you throw it away. But then you get it again in your mitt, someone else gives it to you, you're like, nah, it's not true. You throw it away. And the third person does, and you're like, wait, hold on a second. And if you keep getting that same piece of feedback and throwing it away, there's a point where you want to look at it and consider that it might not be true. It might actually be true. And that's where you get, like your biggest epiphany, because it's something that you weren't even. You were oblivious to.

No, you know what? That's actually great. And I think the perfect thing about this as a setup for, you know, going into. I want to talk to you about writing and stuff, is the fact that even doing it and playing the game. Because if you're. I'm going to look up that Theodore Roosevelt quote, which you've all have heard before about the. In the arena, you know, I think.

Where is it? You know what I'm about talking. I don't know this quote, Theodore Roosevelt.

Okay, here, I'll read it real quick. I'm just pulling it up real quick online. The man in the arena which is. It's not the. I've always loved this quote by Theodore Roosevelt. It's called the man in the arena. It's not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again because there's no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually str to do the deeds, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. And you know, the point is you're not going to open yourself up for feedback or criticism or anything if you're not willing to step into the arena. And so, you know, the people that I always respect the most, in spite of what some people. People's perceptions may be or whatever, are people that are out there playing the game. Because there's a hell of a lot more people that like to talk about the players and what they should do, could do, want them to do versus people that are out there actually playing the game.

Exactly. And we just remember people's successes like you don't. The Beatles went to auditions and were famously rejected. Like anyone who does anything great in the culture, they got their ideas rejected and they made all these. I mean anybody. And we think that it just happened overnight and it didn't. What happened was they stuck with it because they believed in and they kept improving and getting better at it. I love that quote, by the way. That's a great quote.

Yeah, thanks. And so let's talk then, Neil, about what you're really true. One of your stupid human tricks, and you have quite a few, is you're just an amazing frickin writer. You're compelling. And like what Dean was saying where he sat down and read your. I mean, it's one of the things even within the first interview I did with you, you're like marketers. They write a letter or website or whatever to get people to read it for several pages. 20 pages, 50 pages in some cases. How do you get someone to read 500 pages? How do you keep them engaged? So I guess starting back from people listening here, there's probably many that are writers. We have quite a few New York Times best sellers that listen to our stuff and we have other people that are startup companies. But most of our listeners are entrepreneurs and people that just want to share for fun and profits, of course, what they know with the world in the form of writing. So let's just talk about the subject of being skilled at that. Were you born this way? You started writing early on. But how does one develop and become excellent at the skill of writing and talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about that you think is most useful?

Yeah, yeah. No, it's funny, you know, it's funny. I mean I have all these discussions all the time. I love talking with people who are very talented about talent and I definitely subscribe to the theory of Robert Greene's mastery and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers that it's just, you know, it's just time. If you look at the first things I ever wrote, they're really not that good, you know, But I think a combination of getting great at something is a spending a lot of time doing it. But here's the theory, here's the corollary to that whole outliers 10,000 hours rule. You're actually not going to get great by doing something for 10,000 hours. And this links back to our earlier thing we were talking about earlier. It's 10,000 hours plus having getting feedback so you can keep getting better at it and being able to listen to appropriate, well intended feedback so you can just learn and get better and better at it. So my first stuff was not very good, but I had really good editors at the first places. I wrote at different magazines and newspapers and I really listened to their. I figured they got there for some reason. I really listened to what they had to say. And really I think the first step of like master getting great at something is learning the way everybody else does it before you go ahead and innovate with your own unique genius. You know, painters tend to start off, most of them doing abstract Expressionism per se. They really learn formally and then they can take it apart and dismantle it and take apart the rules. But I guess good editors was helpful as far as writing Then the other thing you were saying is I think like my. And I said this at your group, Joe, but I think that the number one thing that I when I always sit down to write. So for anyone sitting down, whether you're writing, like Joe said, you know, market materials or you're sitting there to sit down and write Your book. The biggest mistake people make is they assume that my audience loves me and they're gonna be interested in whatever I have to say because they're interested in me. And I always assume. I always sit down and I assume that nobody cares. Nobody cares about me. Nobody cares about anything I've done in my life or the person I'm writing about. Nobody cares about the ideas you think are so great. Nobody cares about your innermost thoughts and feelings. Nobody cares about the stories or characters you're writing about. And if you write from the perspective, that perspective, and you manage to make it interesting to somebody who doesn't care or have any interest in a topic, then whatever you write is more likely to cross that tipping point because it's going to be intrinsically interesting. So the Dave Navarro is probably my least favorite of the books I've written, to be totally honest. Yet can Dean Jackson, who is not. You don't think of as a rock and roller. Can he sit there and read a book about someone they don't care about? My audience. When I'm writing in my mind, it's somebody who just doesn't give whatever swear word you want to insert there.

By the way, since this is going on. I love marketing is one of the places that we're going to share this. Of course we're going to share with all the 25k members because we told them we would do a great interview with you about this stuff. But you're welcome to use profanity if you want. And we'll just blame if anyone's offended with that. They can give the feedback back to Dean and he can deal with it.

Great. My same thing. I like to say that swear words are my generation's exclamation marks.

That's great. Well, let me ask you then for what you just said there. So do you think you have the ability to take any subject and make it interesting? I mean, like, I want to make sure I'm clear on what you said, you know, nobody cares. You know, no one gives a shit about what you're writing about the subject matter. But you taking that, you know, reference point and you're starting to make something as interesting, exciting. Do you think you can take any subject or category and make it interesting, or is that there are just certain things you just, no matter what your skill level is, it's just, you know, it's just boring. It's just not interesting.

I think, I really think you can. I think you can make anything interesting. Absolutely. In fact, I did this. I was Doing this live event, I was trying to think, how can I make writing fun and cool? And I did this live event called these, like one hour memoirs where I would bring up a bunch where I would take somebody and in an hour write their memoir, or at least as much of it as I could. It was like speed memoir writing. And then I'd read it back and then a bunch of actors would turn it into theater, like improv theater. It was really cool. I found that you could take anybody's life and. And if you have two qualities, one is just curiosity. You have to really be interested in what you're writing about. And secondly, or just interested in people or interested in wherever you're exploring. And two is the ability to, I always say, start at the most interesting point. So there's gotta be something interesting about anything. I mean, I think about the book, there was a bestseller called the professor and the Madman that was really about the making of the, I think the Oxford English Dictionary or something like that. And it was a huge bestseller. And people are trying to write about these, you know, salacious, you know, topics. And this guy wrote about the making of the dictionary and it was a great bestseller because he found the interesting thing about it, which was that the person was corresponding with someone in an asylum, in a mental asylum, who was providing a lot of the topics and the entries.

Is that where you, Neil, if you're thinking about, about the, you know, the books that you write now, that does it start with your own curiosity first? Because a lot of these are, you know, I describe your style as full immersion where you take a topic that you maybe don't have knowledge of and you fully immerse yourself in it. And you do. I think you approach things with that curiosity that, that we would approach it with if we were to take that, you know, take on the study of whatever you're writing about. I mean, think about the game, I think about Emergency, and how you just fully immerse yourself in those things.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And it's funny. Like, I really always did want to give myself the challenge, but I just have too many things that I really, really care about to write. It's just trying to find the most boring topic, you know, and writing about it. Like I used to when I was really young. I mean, I always loved writing and I thought, I used to think people always say it's as boring as making widgets. And I thought, oh, I'd love to write about widgets and make them interesting. But I didn't realize Because I was so young that a widget was not an actual thing. But my books always start from one of two places. And the first books that I did with kind of well known people, Marilyn Manson and Motley Crue and these kind of bands, they always came from somebody who was iconic, who. Who meant something more than themselves. And before I wrote about them, I had to give them a certain test. And this helped with my own writing because I had to give myself. Ask myself the same questions. And the questions in that test that I would ask them right away were, are you willing to tell everything and not worry about how you're going to look or come across? And if somebody starts to say, well, you know, I've done all these crazy things, but I'm worried about that my kids are going to read it one day, so I just want to hold some of it back, then it doesn't matter how famous they are. I will not do the book. And so one of it is just ability to tell the truth. Because if you're gonna, like Joe said, if you're gonna. If someone's gonna spend 500 pages with you, that's more longer than they spend in a movie and listen to, you know, podcast, what have you, they're gonna see through. And, you know, if you're holding back, they're gonna see through it. The second thing is not being afraid to make yourself look bad. We're all fallible people, and people are gonna relate to someone if they're also fallible. We have our doubts and we have our insecurities and we have our flaws and. And things we're not proud of. And those are going to be the best parts of the book, not the things you're the most proud of. And there are a few other kind of congenital questions I have, but the main thing is, are you willing to really be transparent, really expose yourself and maybe say things that you've never told anyone before that you've almost been embarrassed by? The book is actually the place to do it because you can properly contextualize it so that someone can really understand why that thing happened. I remember. I remember my first night with Jenna Jamison when she was writing that book or a few nights in. I said, let's start at the most interesting point. And she was starting with, like, you know, when she won her big AVN award and the paparazzi and the flashbulbs and the autographs and that whole thing. And then a couple days in, she talked about. She used to go on Howard Stern and, you know, deny Ever having been sexually abused, because that was such a cliche for porn stars. But it turned out something horrible and violent had happened. And she kind of just said it, and I said, okay, this has to go in. This has to go in there. And, you know, it's kind of where we began it. And that's where you want to begin, which is, you know, you know you're going to get to the. Oh, no, but that's not where it began. We began somewhere else. We actually began the book. That's another thing I like to do is begin a book where no one would expect it. You know, you're going to get to porn. You know, you're going to get to the sex. Can you begin it somewhere interesting? That somewhere they know they're going to get. Get that later. So can you begin somewhere where they wouldn't even expect it and draw them in? Because then they know, wow, this is good. I bought this book to read about a porn star, but now I'm reading about, you know, starting with, like, a friend with a suicide. What the hell is this? And, you know, and they'll keep going into it. So. And so the rest of the book's.

Kind of interesting because do you know, do you arc it all out before you get going that you know where it's all.

Never know.

I can't be. I heard an interview with Quentin Tarantino about his writing process. He was talking about with Django, how he had the story for, you know, not the story, had the idea. And when he lets the idea kind of simmer and percolate until he gets the story. And then once he gets the story, then he has to start writing. But he never knows how it's going to. How it's gonna unfold. And that's part of the. That's kind of what drives them. You can only see, you know, so far into the horizon sort of thing.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting with movies, you know, you need your three acts because you gotta go in and pitch it and say what the ending is. And the great thing about books is you just have to know where you're beginning. And I can't outline because I don't know where it's gonna go. Like, I really have no idea. And I'll usually write myself into it. It might end somewhere where I. I couldn't even imagine or couldn't even expect. And you're kind of open. You're open to that process. You might even have a preconception at one point of how you think it's going to end, but you let the writing sort of take care of it. So I love it. I mean, I really think that's true. I think one word, one paragraph kind of suggests the next one. And again, you may have your overall idea. You may even have a quick structure, and as you get close to the ending, you have a better idea. But for me, the writing, it becomes its own. Becomes its own. Be separate from your preconception of it. I think the biggest challenge for people sitting down to write is that you have an idea in your head and it's really stressful thinking. How can I make that vision? I have that conception of. And again, whether it's like Joe was saying, a sales page that's going to be what your entire year's income may be depending on, or a book, that's the manifestation of the idea you spent your whole life living to get that idea from your head for anything on paper to even. How do I make that? How do I create something that matches that thing in my head? There's a huge gulf there, and that gulf might exist for a long time. So you get that writing down. I think it's scary sitting down to think like, oh, man, it's just intimidating. How do I get this idea in my head into something that other people can then experience? And it's a long journey, whether it's writing or painting or making a movie or writing a scene page or what have you.

That's what always strikes me about the whole process, is how long it takes that really it's part of it is the writing, but a good portion of it seems to be your skill as a project manager in a way.

Really?

Yeah. Like in the sense of explain the.

Project manager thing well, in the thought that nobody's going to. Like, you're not going to sit down and bang a book out in a weekend. I mean, the process of knowing that this is going to take hours and hours, and it's going to take a long, extended period of time and being able to organize yourself around, being able to do the research, have the experiences, reflect on what happened and write it, you know, put it all down. I've always been curious whether we've never talked about it, about whether you're writing it as you go, or are you experiencing, like, if we take emergency as an example, are you writing the book all the way along the way as it's going, or are you going through the whole experience and writing your notes and then do you sit down and write the whole thing.

Once you've had the whole experience.

Usually what I'm doing is taking like copious, copious notes as I'm having experiences and recording things and I'm just getting those notes together and organized and then about like 3/4 to 4/5, probably more like 4/5 through the experience is when I sit down and start writing. Because I think when I'm in it, A, I don't have the perspective and B, I'm just doing so much research that it's kind of so time consuming. And even when I'm doing the research, you still don't know where it's going to go or end up. So anything you write will be thrown away as you kind of get more information and more knowledge and a little bit past it and above it and beyond it. So now. But I'm taking really copious notes. Like for the book I'm writing, I probably have like 2,500 pages of notes. And if I include like transcripts and things, you know, probably like a thousand more pages.

Let me touch on that too before we scare the living daylights out of everyone going, man, I didn't realize it was this much work. Now me, I mean, I still have trouble understanding the difference between a noun, an adjective and a verb. I mean, I'm not kidding. I mean, partially. I'm probably sounding dumber than I actually, but I can be pretty dumb. And I've never had any formal training. I never did all that well in school. I've got no college degree. I mean, I failed owning and operating a small business in a community college, although I built a multimillion dollar business. To what degree does a writer need special training or do they not need any? And so I'd like to talk about that. And do you have to be a perfectionist? Do you need to be this intense or are you really not that way? This is just where you're at right now at your current level. I'd like to talk about some of those things because I want people listening to this to be able to hear this interview. And I don't know if being inspired is the right word. I mean, I'm less concerned about inspiring and motivating someone than I am. I'm more interested in making people to be feeling disturbed if they don't take action. Because we know the power of words. We know what people are capable of doing if they decide to take something seriously enough and do it. And we want to use talking with you as a catalyst for people that aren't writing a book to get off their ass and do it and to start it, and people that are underestimating the value of words and writing to be like, yeah, this is a huge deal. You invented an industry in a really bizarre subject matter. We're not telling people they have to write about any of the stuff you write about. It's just the mere active of doing it. So I want to talk about. You get your insights on some of the shit I just babble.

Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. I wanted two things. I want to give you a note on that question, and then I want to answer the question directly, which was interesting to me, that as I was talking about all the research and 2,500 pages of notes and thousand pages that. That you were like, well, hold on, I better tell people it's not that hard. But. And it makes sense. It makes sense that one would say that. And I think that's probably the most rewarding things that you need to do in your life, if you're listening right now, are the hardest things, the things you're avoiding because they are hard. Every book on time management is pretty much the same thing, whether it's first things first by, I think, Stephen Covey or someone like that. And there's another book called never check your email in the morning. Both titles are the same thing, which is, it's easy to do those little tasks and feel that sense of accomplishment. You know, it's like pressing a button for a pellet, like a little rat in a cage. But, you know, as these humans with this prefrontal cortex and this amazing brain capacity, and there's some amazing things we can do, and it requires doing the hardest thing first. So if something's hard and you need to do it, then that's for sure what you need to be doing asap, right away. So that's one note, and we'll get back to that in a second. Because I love talking about time management. If you guys want to talk about how I manage time and clear that space, especially in this busy world with information coming at you and. And messages and texts and emails from every direction, how I do that, we can get into that. But you made a great point, Joe, which is like, probably a lot of people think, I'll tell you what, I was at your 25k group, and I was sitting next to Tim Paulson, and he was saying. He said, I love writing. My writing sucks. And my answer to that was, everyone's writing sucks, including most professional writers on the first draft. So when I read my first draft, and you can ask my now wife, I Write it. And I'm like, oh, my God, this sucks. This is a fucking piece. I won't read it to anybody, not out of modesty, because it actually does suck. It really sucks. And so I might even love it while I'm writing it. Then I'll read it back and find that I hate it. And most people think, oh, it sucks. I suck as a writer. I gave up.

You know what?

It just struck me that good editing is really like the literary equivalent of auto tune.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I mean, I think if you have another editor, it's auto tune. If you edit yourself, then it's learning, just missing on pitch. Right.

Right.

There you go.

Exactly. And so that the art of writing is actually not in the writing itself, it's in the revising. And I spend far longer proofreading that I do writing. And the way I think about this is like. I think of it like a. It's like a really wrinkled shirt. And each time I go through and revise it, running the iron across it again, it's getting finer and finer wrinkle, finer and finer wrinkles till it's totally, you know. You know, flat and looks perfect. And someone reads it and they're like, oh, my God, you're whatever. Someone says you're a great writer or something. And the truth is that first draft is bad. It is horrible. And. Yeah. And it doesn't really matter. Like, they're. So if you read a. There's a great fiction writer named Hubert Selby. It's very hardcore. But this guy, like, you know, broke all the rules of grammar. He wasn't formally trained yet. His writing was so rich and so compelling. And by the way, there's some writers like Jack Kerouac, who wrote on the road in, like, 30 days, three weeks, I think, on coffee and speed or whatever. And just wrote it nonstop. And you can buy that original draft. It's like all this one paragraph that he just wrote on a typewriter. So it's possible just to sit down and just do it. But for me, it's a little more of a perfectionist. The arts in that revising. And. Yeah, so it doesn't matter if you don't know those rules. That's what editors are for. You can use Autotune, like Dean said, it really doesn't matter. But the question is, can you express yourself purely all those rules? I mean, no one knows how to spell anymore because there's autocorrect spelling. Check on anything. You don't need know how to spell. You don't need to know where words go. All you need to do is can you just express yourself in some pure way? Someone else can always clean it up and fix it, but only you can express yourself.

Yeah, you know, I want to point out a couple things you said too, about going back to the whole thing of being excellent. You know, I mean, I guess on one level I want to get rid of people's psychological barriers that they can't do this, because certainly, you know, I've seen lots of people do it. By doing it, you'll accomplish more through movement than you will through meditation. Not all the time, but much of the time, which is what Gary Halbert always drilled into my head early on when I first learned marketing, the whole thing of hard work. I always love the quote. If I would have known being successful is this much work, I would have stuck with staying a loser. The thing is, what this reminds me of as it relates to marketing and selling, I cannot tell you. You both have seen this a million times where someone will write a book or they'll create a product and they're like, Alright, I got 95% of the work done. I don't want to deal with any of this marketing stuff. So the world that me and Dean deal with all the time is helping people that already have established a business have created something if their product or service is in the form of, let's say, a book. There's a lot of authors that will meet that they will create nothing in terms of a marketing campaign, but they'll put a year or six months or two years in writing a book and they're like, alright, I got it done, now I'm going to be successful. It's like, well, nah, you still got to sell the darn thing. No one's going to show up and discover you unless you're lucky. So you've got to do things to go get yourself discovered. So it's one thing about creating something versus putting together the marketing for it, which is a whole other issue. I want to make sure that, that we touch on that. Because you know, Neil, you haven't just taken this great skill of being a writer and you know, all of a sudden, voila, you know, you're this, you're this New York Times bestseller. I mean, you had to work in order to become who you actually are. I mean, there's plenty of people that are, you know, got great books sitting on computers that aren't New York Times bestsellers because they haven't done all this other shit. So what is the other shit that people need to be aware of.

And I want to put a fine point on that, which is, which is when you're writing, when you're writing, when you're creating the thing, do not think about marketing at all at that point. So I'm going to get into marketing in a second, but I know a lot of people writing books who will be thinking, okay, what's a title that will appeal to most people? And what's my marketing plan? And it becomes a form of procrastination because then you can feel like you're busy working on your book, but you're not actually writing it and all that stuff gets in the way. In fact, all those books that seem like they were great marketing ideas, the marketing part was figured out after the writing and even starting off with an idea to think, hey, what's the idea that people are going to like the most? It's going to be the most popular. You've got to write the thing that you care about the most because it's going to be better than the thing that other people will care about. In this context, if we're really trying to write a book that's not just a best seller, but one that continues to sell after that initial, a lot of people can find ways to juice the list and you know, get their, you know, whatever, give their list some other book that's really good to buy their own crappy book as a freebie or whatever it is, you know. And again, you can get that. I mean, if you're, you know, a lot of people, and I think, you know, it's a valid thing. A lot of people want to write books so they can say, hey, best selling author. If I can just juice it up to Amazon, I can send a best selling author to the top for like, you know, 10 seconds. Or I can, you know, just give this away to my clients and show that I'm, and that's available reason to write a book. But hey man, as long as you're gonna write it, you might as well try and write about and spend that time doing it. You might as well do something you care about. So anyway, in that point, while you're in a gestation creation period, I think it's important to not think about marketing at all because it'll distract you. Just think about writing and making something great. And then when you're all done, when you're done, you got time now when you're done, you think about, okay, what's the title that's gonna catch the Most people, Tim Ferriss did something great for the four hour workweek when he was starting out. He actually sent me his book proposal and I think was calling like it was either called Drug dealing for Fun and profit for a while. Then it was called Lifestyle Hustling and literally wouldn't be talking about Tim Ferriss if he hadn't gone on to. He went to Google AdWords and just tested his different titles and then tested the different subtitles to find out what got the most clicks. And I thought that was very, very smart, you know, very smart way. So first, the first step of the marketing, your book is thinking about what is the package and just what's the package and what's the title and those sorts of things. And the second one is how am I going to get this package into the world? I think it's a great point that you do need that combination. I mean, I just think about all these. I do this radio show on Sirius Radio and I have musicians I really love on there and I love to find out there's a musician I really love who's obscure, who's just as good as a musician, who's really well known and talented. I usually find, kind of like you said, Joe, they don't have, they won't do the marketing. They think that that's just not something for them. They spend a lot of time crafting it to perfection and then they think it's done and the marketing and.

Or they think that that's, that that's the hard part that's done. Remember Joe, we were. Somebody was saying how, yeah, the product's already done. Now it's just the easy part, just the marketing. The hard part's already done by the.

Way you're disguising who the person is. But he owns a very well, I mean a giant company that has done literally over 11 billion in revenue. But he started another business. So this guy already has in some ways the handicap of having access to lots of money. So he put about $3 million into this other business.

That is awesome.

I mean what the delivery is, is awesome. He made this comment one day that, oh yeah, 95% of all the work is done now this thing, none of the marketing had been created. They had no clue on how to sell it, although they had this awesome product and service. But of course, just to protect the innocent, we're going to not mention the name or the company of this individual. But we laughed because we're like, you have no clue. I mean, you have this great thing over here, but until you actually compel people to buy it. It doesn't matter how great you think it is or how useful it is to the world, if you don't have any mechanism to engage people into the usage, the giving you money for it, that sort of stuff. Neil, what you said about finding musicians, those people are lucky to have a guy like you that will seek them out. Because marketing, you have a radio show on Sirius, that's a platform that you have done stuff in order to orchestrate and get. Because it gives you a voice. It gives you another distribution system. And you're inviting people into that world in the same way that we're inviting, inviting you into this world of. I love marketing and we do it for each other. As just one example of hearing this, but I mean, even if me, you and Dean could be talking on the phone about all of this stuff, but if we didn't have any distribution system for people to hear it, how useful would it be if we didn't have a way to get it out? But we have a platform where hundreds of thousands of people are going to hear this because we do.

Marketing.

How do you think of marketing?

It's interesting. I was just thinking as you were speaking, you know, I think marketing simply is that you have something that you. I mean, if I think about it, there's something you believe in and it's. And it's. And how do you just share it or get it to people who don't know you? I just think marketing is how can I reach people who don't know me with something that I care about or believe in. But one thing I want to say is, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, I remember when I first met a lot of kind of big marketers and they said it's, hey, it's. It's like 15% what you do and 85% the marketing and this and that. I think I forget what the ratio number they use is, but they usually say something like that maybe it's 5% the product and 95% the marketing and things like that. But here's what I think, and maybe it just comes from writing for the New York Times, reviewing these bands and really going to discover things that are great. I kind of think of it like this. If it's 5%, 95%, it's like, like you made a brick and you're trying to keep it in the air. So you have to market really hard. Keep tossing it up in the air and as much as you can to get it up in the air. Right. But the tendency of the brick is just to drop to the ground or, you know, or what you do is a helium balloon where you can just let it go and just the right push into, you know, and maybe refill it with helium every now and then. So I do think that the better, the better what you. The better what you do is marketing can just be the push that launches into the world and then just takes off.

I agree with that. Yeah, it's like, but the cream's gonna rise to the top in a way like.

Yeah, exactly. And marketing can get it out.

Yeah, you need that momentum to keep it going.

Hey, Ryan, let me say this, Dean too, because to go on the comment that Neil said, who knows what the right number is? And all of this is contextual. I mean there are certain things that.

Are just set up.

The interest of the marketplace, the power of the copy. There's a lot. The list is critical. You don't need to have brilliant marketing if you have a perfectly matched list. It's like Gary Halbert would say, the most important thing if you're opening up a restaurant is a service starving crowd. So void of that. What people's perception are. Because people see the world the way they are and think it should be. A lot of this just has everything to do. If you're a hammer, everything's a nail. So if you're a marketer, you're like, oh, the solution to successful business is you got to have all your marketing. Right. If you're a management guy, it's like, oh, it's not that marketing, you need to have your management down. And I've listened to a lot of different, different things before. I just try to throw out the marketing hammer because sometimes you can give people. If someone reads Breakthrough DNA on I love marketing and goes through the eight profit activators, those are principle based methodologies and framework that would apply to a Nonprofit for profit 100 years from now, no matter how much technology changes. However, if someone has a piece of crap product or service, they can try to apply our marketing techniques, but they're only going to go so far. And the same thing, what you were saying, Neil, if someone writes a crappy book, I mean, you know, whatever. I mean, so.

Exactly. And here's the thing that I want to say, which is a lot of books and other things seem like they were great marketing ideas that were packaged, but they were packaged that way usually after the person finished writing it. And people will always say always, even on whether it's Writing books or figuring out what your next product is. If you're making products that you know, find out what your audience wants. And I personally think, you know, it's interesting to know that. But I personally think, you know, fuck that. Don't follow your audience. Your goal is, can you get your audience to follow you and where you're going and stay one step ahead of them? Because all your audience knows is what you've done before. They don't know what you're going to do next. So when they say they want something is all they know is what you've done before. They don't know where you're going. And I think someone who is great, including a great marketer, is somebody who can get that audience to follow them where they're going next versus just, you know, following their audience and doing the same thing over and over again, repackaged in different ways. Right.

Like if Steve Jobs would have had to ask everyone, do you guys want an iPad? Do you want an ipod on an iPhone?

I mean, they wouldn't know what the.

Hell he was talking about.

Exactly.

Good.

Good analogy.

Well, let's do this. Because of timing. Here's. I was going to say, Dean, we could talk to Neil about time management and do so. We could totally violate the length of our podcast and go over the time we usually spend by maybe 10 or 15 minutes specifically to talk about time management, which will be kind of hypocritical, but I think it would be funny.

Okay, sure.

What do you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I was going to ask Neil, in the 10 or 15 minutes that we have left, what do you think would be the most valuable thing, Neil, that we could talk about?

Yeah, I'd say let's talk about time management, because whatever you're doing, including writing, but you got to deal with that.

Wait, let's say this. Neil, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's.

Just kind of how I am.

You write a lot of dark stuff and you've written some pretty crazy shit and you've met some really unique characters. If your life was to end 15 or 20 minutes from now and you only wanted to depart any last remaining knowledge, and this was the only platform you could do it on, what would you say that would be most useful for people? Because I think that would be pretty good.

I'd probably say, just listen to. I love marketing.

We've got to take. Now, here's how my marketing brain works. We should just take the clip right there that you just said. That should be the lead in. We use to get people famous. New York Times bestselling author Neil Strauss. Here's what he has to say about I love marketing before his life is.

About to Ed, never be sarcastic and.

Everyone loves you when you're dead.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, you know what I love? My favorite thing probably would be. There's a line of Joseph Campbell's that he says that the insecure way is the secure way. And this is my kind of favorite quote for life. And what he means by that is a lot of people want to do what's secure, which is, hey, if I go for money and even my parents are trying to get me to go into business, you know, hey, then I'll be really secur. And people are fighting for security. But the point is that if you. His point was if you just go for money, right, you can get your money and then you lose the money and you kind of have nothing. However, if you take the insecure way, which is maybe doing what you love, doing what your passion is, doing the stuff you really care about, it might take you longer to get to that point of making money. Maybe it'll take seven years instead of two years or what have you. But the point is it actually won't matter whether you make money or you don't make money because you'll be doing what you love and that's your passion, and no one can take that away. Following your bliss, right? Follow your. Yeah, follow your bliss. And the point about that is that like, again, a lot of people do these product launches, right? And it's a success based on how much money it made. But what if it's success just because you actually love the product? And then if it made a lot of money and success that way, that was a bonus as well, that you could feel good about what you did, whatever you did. Like, if I write a book, it's a success if I really said what I needed to say and said it really well. And the rest is just some validation or some. Or some bonus of that. So I love that quote. And again, I think Joe and Dean, you know, knowing you guys really well, you guys love what you do and you're passionate about what you do and are really into it. Obviously people hear you guys talking about all the time, you have this love and awesome for it. And it doesn't mean that, you know, that marketing is certainly an awesome passion. And I think if we even deep dived into it, we'd find that the universality of your passion. I mean, I know Dean, like just Dean Loved Kind of being a Buddha and giving this awesome advice. So it ties into what you do. And Joe loves networking, connecting, getting people together. And you found a way that your passion ties into marketing and ties into money making as well.

Yeah, that was great. That was really useful. So thank you. And going to the thing with time management at the end of the day before we wrap, as it relates to writing, I really think everyone listening, if they've never read any of your books, they should. We'll ask you towards the end, what do you recommend either that people should read to, obviously get sort of some of your DNA thinking either your own books or other things. But none of this is going to matter if you don't develop rituals and you don't develop ways of handling the onslaught of this. You know, how technology has created the pace of how everyone lives and how you navigate through it. So, yeah, let's talk about how you get shit done, because you do. I mean, you have to. You have to block out a lot of things, because in the process of writing all these books, what most people are not aware is you have thousands of people that are constantly trying to reach you because you have sold millions of books. And so people are constantly trying to track you down and you have a lot of opportunities. So how do you. How do you navigate this world? If you're someone out there doing important stuff or just, you know, trying to.

Get shit done, great. And this really ties into what we're saying before, because the rest of that Joseph Campbell quote, follow up, follow your bliss is follow your bliss. Go where your body and soul want you to go. And when you find it, don't let anyone throw you off. And we live in this culture now, especially now, where it was really, really hard to do something meaningful. And I think the goal of anybody listening is to turn from a reactive person to an active or proactive person, which is. It's a nightmare now because you got your emails coming in, you got your texts coming in, you got the phone calls coming in, you got the Facebook messages coming in, you got the tweets coming in. You're getting attacked from all sides by these things you're supposed to respond to. And a lot of people then spend their being reactive. And like, the Internet has become, you know, the busy person's form of procrastination. Before the Internet, you know, it's like you watch TV and then it's like you wasted your day. But now you can be the Internet, really busy, really working hard, and really have done nothing. And so the goal of the switch is to turn off that reactivity thing and to actually train people to respect your time. And man, I got it. So I got a bunch of. I got, I have a bunch, I have a bunch of thought. But the main, if I had to sum it up in one thing, is that you create what I'll call, what we'll call like a sacred space. This is the space, you know, the space where you, where you work and where you, where you, where you do your thing. And when you're in that sacred space, that your time is inviolateable, inviolable, whatever the word may be. I should know this is since you just talked about what a writer I was. But in that sick.

In other words, you clean that up in editing.

Exactly.

So.

So in other words, if you're somebody who, whatever. I assume that, that, that. So when you're in that space, you have to decide what, what days are, what days are going to be there, what hours are going to be there, and, and not being interrupted. I would say like, if I was to say what is one tool that will change people's life? There's a program called Freedom F R E E D O M. You can get it for the Mac and I'm pretty sure they do it for the PC as well. And what it will do is it will say, how much freedom do you want? How much time? And you can say 60 minutes, 360 minutes, whatever it may be. And it will completely shut off your Internet for that amount of time. There's no way to get on the Internet. And literally without that, you will find that instead of working 15 minutes in an hour, you'll actually get to work a full hour in an hour. So that's really important. I'll also get. There's a program, they just changed the name. It's called Family Protector. Family Protector will actually can block certain websites. So if you find, you put yourself on Facebook or Twitter. And it will also can also allow certain hours of Internet access. If just being on the Internet is a pain. And what I do is it's a password protected. So I have, in this case, my wife, she, she only knows the password. I don't know it. So I can't go in there and change it and get online. So those two programs can keep the Internet out of your head. The other thing I'll do is I'll usually give my phone to somebody else and they'll hide it in that period. So there's no way I can be reactive. The other thing is you have to narrow your avenues of communication. So you have to choose one medium for most of your indirect contact. So whether it's phone calls, text, Facebook, email, just choose one. And what you'll do then is let's just say you only want to be communicated via email or only via text. Create a new phone number, a new email account, and only give that to the people in your inner circle. So the truth is, most of the people you comment, I mean, if you think of the emails you respond to each day or the text you respond to each day, how many should you really be responding to? How many do you have to respond to? So what I did to manage my time was I made a list of the 25 people who I should be in contact with. I gave them the new email address. On the old email address, what it does is it just forwards, just straight to my assistant who will respond to it, or they'll print it out and I'll look over, you know, for 20 minutes each day. At the end of the day, they'll go through the emails and ask me how I want to respond. So the deal is you still have to all these things. As long as someone gets a response, they're happy. That response can be a bounce back saying you're busy for the month working on a project. That response can be an assistant just responding. They can get some sort of response. It doesn't have to be from you and it doesn't have to take up your time. And I would say I can go on, but I would say, man, there's so much I do. Because again, you have to train people. People will take what you train them for. So if you respond to everything right away, they will expect you to respond to everything right away. If you instead respond to emails between 5 and 6pm every day, they'll expect to get a response between 5 and 6pm so you have to train them to what you want to do. A couple quick little tools I use. One is the weekly dinner party. It's my favorite thing, I think. I don't know if you guys do it now, but basically what happens if you have more than seven friends who want to see you once a week, right? And there's so many people and you see them all one at a time. It's just amazing how much of your time can be sucked up. And so what I do is I have a weekly dinner party. Usually it's not on a Friday or Saturday. If I can avoid it because people have other plans, then maybe it'll be on a Thursday or Wednesday, choose your day of the week. And at that point it's a. The people who I want to see, the people who I enjoy, the people who are just kind of acquaintances. That person who kind of wants to meet with me, but I'm not quite sure they can come along. Usually it'll be a group of anything more than say five people becomes a party. So it'll be group of five to 10, five to 12 people, and they'll spend time together. And afterward, if there's people I want to spend maybe more time with, we'll go to back to my house or to, you know, another location. Just a small group of people. But if you. You can get to see everybody and instead of being react to everybody's plans, you can kind of create this dinner party. It really makes my life easier. That's the night when I go out and I do all my social things. And if people want to hang out, I say, sure, come to, you know, come to the dinner on Wednesday. One note for that, just so you don't get stuck with a bill of like 14 people once a week. Depending on what you know, that may not be something you want to take on. There's a restaurant here where I made an arrangement where everybody gets the same kind of meal. It's all the best dishes there. And they all just get a set check that's not too expensive, that's handed individually. And then they can. Then I'll usually just cover the drinks or if you even want them to cover the drinks, they can go to the bar for drinks. But you can arrange that so you're not shafted. So it's not that awkward time every time when you have to split the check. Go ahead. I got.

No, I got to say something to the weekly dinner party thing because I think it's a great strategy and we've talked quite a bit about it. At the last. Not this year's annual event, but the one last year you actually talked about that and how you actually do that. And I know several people have incorporated that and I do it in my own world similar ways. But me and Dean have people all over the world that have started. I love marketing meetup groups and I think a lot of people actually can use that if they don't quite know how to organize and engage conversations, but they just want to talk about a particular area because there are some really introverted people that would love to organize, but they don't even know how to do it. So this is just a real simple plug for. We don't charge for this, people can go to ilovemarketing.com, look at the meetup guide, and they can actually use that to organize get togethers and just the whole act of bundling all of your relationships together once a week or once every two weeks or however you want. I mean, I think it's a great time saving method while simultaneously staying in connection with important relationships and ones where you don't really quite know. So I love that idea.

Here's a fun game you guys can play if you want to, which is cell phone roulette, which is when you start your meeting. If you guys want to do this and you can do it anytime, have everybody put their cell phones in the middle of the table. Whoever touches their cell phone first has to pay for the meal.

I love that. That's a great one.

And by the way, another thing that's really simple that'll save me a lot of time is any task. There's a book, I think it's called Willpower and it talks about how we have a certain amount of decision making capability in a day. And after a while I'm sure you guys find it. We just have decision making fatigue. You just can't make another decision or think any. And we waste a lot of that decision making power, as well as time itself on decisions that could be maintenance tasks. For example, everywhere I've ever worked, when I was working at the Village Voice or the New York Times, there would be like lunchtime or even at home, like, what do you want for lunch? And then you go through the book and the menus, look at the menus, what do you want? And you figure it out. One thing that saved me a lot of decision making time and actual time is. And by the way, I don't believe in doing lunches, doing lunch meetings, unless you really have work to do where it really is your work, just don't do lunches. It's just too much time wasted. It's like three hours out of your day. I mean. But my thing is with lunches is a good example of this is that I realized it was just wasting so much time and all that decision making capability. So I decided, what are my five or seven favorite restaurants and what are my favorite dishes there? And then I just have them delivered each day around the week. So lunch just arrived at a certain time. It's a meal I love and I don't have to think about it.

I combined that concept that you shared, which was great. And Richard Rossi and I have been talking about this Idea of a one click life. And I have gone through the process now of setting up one click lunch so that. Because I told you I had that same thing with Courtney. I had all the menus, my assistant, easy button. And now I've set them up so that there I've picked the things that I already. The things that I like from those restaurants and I just roll that and one click send that to Courtney and that's what I get for lunch.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The more you can turn everything into one click and automate it, I think it's important. Even if choosing your clothes is a big deal in the morning, just find seven or 14 outfits and put them in a. In a rotation. Just be okay, done. Figure out those parts in your life where you're inefficient that waste your time. One thing I'd recommend doing if again, I don't think everybody can improve their time management is keeping a schedule for like three days or a week of how you're spending your time every 15 minutes and then looking and seeing, hey, where is the most time being wasted?

That's great. These are some awesome tips. I mean, the funny thing with Dean is one thing for him is just be a lazy bastard and not do anything. And then he doesn't let other people have to be on his beck and call.

Yeah, you know what? And that's the new thing. I'm in. But by the way, the myth of passive income. Tell me you guys can tell if I'm wrong about this. I think passive income is like the greatest myth in the world. First of all, it's possible, but it's not fun or enjoyable because we love working, we love doing things we love. So this is my new thing and I've never discussed this. So you guys can tell me what you think. And this is my new thought, which is the goal of life and the goal of happiness is not the passive income. You know, hey, sit on the beach while you're making money. It gets boring sitting on the beach. You know, after 720 days, how long can you just sit on a beach and drink coladas? It sounds fun, but trust me. But. So I think that the goal of life is to. Is to. Is kind of like. Well, I guess is to organize everything into doing the things what you love the most. And you know what? I realize this is an original Dan Sullivan talks about your unique ability. Right. So I think the goal of life is finding the thing that you really love and that you really enjoy and the things that you don't enjoy either not doing or having someone else doing them. So the goal of life is really like, you know, Tim Ferriss in the four hour work week to bring it up again, he spends a lot of time doing things that look like work, but it's stuff he really loves and enjoys. He probably spends more time doing it than even 40 hours a week. But it's not. But he's gotten rid of the work and the unenjoyable stuff. So I think the goal is not the passive income, but to be making money while doing the things you love, whether the things you love happen to be work or they happen to be play or whatever they are. So to streamline your life so that the shitty stuff is just one click like you said, Dean, and everything else is where you're focusing your time.

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Well, no, really great suggestion. So let's do this. To wrap up first off, Neil, thank you. Always great to talk with you and there's some really, really good insights here and hopefully all of our listeners will go out and apply it. So recommendations for things that they if someone has never read one of your books, where should start? I mean, maybe that's I don't know if you could even answer that. I guess it depends.

But yeah, I would go only because Dan Kennedy said it was one of the he felt it was like one of the greatest sales books he'd read is the game. And it's a story. It's not a how to, it's not a how to book per se. But between the lines, there's a lot of stuff that a lot of principles that people use in your audience. I think the game is right on for your audience.

And any books that you recommend that people absolutely must read in order for someone to be an amazing writer, do they need to be a reader?

I guess the answer is they don't need to be. For me, I for sure need to be. But what I really recommend is there are a lot of books that people say, hey, you have to read for marketing and people will recommend Cialdini's Influence or Evan Pagan recommended My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins. There are a lot of great books, but I think that you really get great at what you're doing by reading something that is completely outside of your field and then bringing that into it. So in other words, if you're instead of reading kind of marketing books, read like really great, gripping, compelling fiction and you might find an idea or a phrase or an idea about storytelling that you're going to have that Everybody else is all reading the same books are not going to have. So I always believe in finding something really, really good, strong and powerful that's like, you know, outside your. Your discipline.

Awesome. Awesome. So if people want to listen to your radio show or anything, give out any websites or any information you want. If someone wants to track you down and have their life, life permanently polluted with your craziness, what. What should they do?

Yeah, I mean I would say like the main thing and my mailing list, I really at my mailing list, I really do write things I love on it is if you just go to Neil Strauss.com and if you just click on any of the posts like a slider will pop out where you put in your name and email address. I do pride that's not like I really do love writing my emails and pride myself on trying to make them meaningful and matter and engaging and interesting and doing really cool things with my list. So I really love it. In fact, one thing I do want to say for marketing and marketers, I will say that having a mailing list, which I've had for a really long time and I think Frank Kern was the one who literally I did the game. I didn't even have my website on the game. I was so naive. And then I think Frank Kern and this guy named Matt Kadish and Trey, his cousin came along and kind of talked me into doing a product and they put an opt in on my site, forced opt in back then. And I got this mailing list and literally it's one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Because when I write a book, everyone here knows this, but other authors didn't. When I write a book, I don't need the BD anymore. I already can communicate directly with my audience. I'm not dependent on Facebook or Twitter or the press. And a lot of things in my life have come about because of that, including having I have my own publishing imprint at HarperCollins where I publish other people's books. And that was really only because I had access to the audience. So to go back to your argument, what you guys were saying about people who are dismissed marketing, I mean, I think for someone who's not in the marketing world or community that know and understand these things is life changing and makes you independent. Yeah.

So anyway, also Dean is infamously known for inventing the squeeze page. And so without that stuff, how would you have any interaction that you could control with your audience?

It comes full circle. I have my imprint thanks to Dean.

Dean You're a bad person, Dean. I'm sorry. Neil, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. And to all of the listeners, please put your comments lovemarketing.com let us know what you thought of this, what you're going to apply, how you're going to use it, and Neil or Dean, any famous last words?

Thank you so much, Neil. That was awesome.

Yeah, that's fun. I love talking to you guys.

Awesome. Awesome. Thanks guys. And thanks everyone. Have a wonderful day and go kick ass and take names. Bye.

Bye.