Rick Rubin and Mary Karr — The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss celebrates the show's 10th anniversary and 1 billion downloads with a paired 'super combo' episode. In the first half, recorded in a hot barrel sauna, Rick Rubin describes how a doctor-turned-songwriter and a high-protein low-calorie diet helped him lose 130-140 pounds, and shares his philosophy on inspiration, self-doubt, perfectionism, and making art that divides audiences. In the second half, Mary Karr recounts her harrowing East Texas childhood, her path from drug-dealer houses into college, getting sober in 1989, and how prayer and Ignatian spirituality reshaped her life. She also breaks down her teaching, revision, and memoir-writing process, and discusses the cost of dredging up traumatic memories.

• Rick Rubin lost between 135 and 140 pounds at peak, after reaching 318 pounds despite being a strict organic vegan for over 20 years.
  00:08:47
• A nutritionist's high-protein low-calorie diet finally worked, dropping 130-135 pounds over 14 months after groundwork with Dr. Phil Maffetone turned on his metabolism.
  00:15:30
• Rubin argues the best art divides the audience: if half love it and half hate it, you've done well, while universally 'pretty good' work means little.
  00:22:21
• Mary Karr describes a chaotic childhood with a mother married seven times (twice to her father), both parents drinking hard, and a house where bullet holes ended up in the kitchen tile.
  00:36:36
• Karr reveals she tried to kill herself in grade school by taking aspirin, and entered therapy at 19 after a kind professor and his wife urged her to.
  00:37:09
• Karr, a lifelong atheist, got sober in 1989 and began praying on her knees at a sponsor's urging, told to do it for herself rather than for God.
  01:04:47
• After praying for money for weeks, Karr received an unsolicited $35,000 foundation grant she never applied for, an award decided before she started praying.
  01:16:11
• Karr's editor estimated she threw out roughly 1,200 finished pages while writing her memoir Lit, after being about seven years late on her contract.
  01:35:24

• Dr. Maffetone told Rubin to go outside naked in the sun for 20 minutes immediately on waking to reset a circadian rhythm he never knew he had.
  00:11:19
• Rubin's prescribed daily 20 minutes of low-heart-rate aerobic exercise was so hard that walking up a flight of stairs pushed him anaerobic.
  00:12:52
• Rubin's name first appeared to Tim on the cassette of Slayer's Reign in Blood, the first heavy metal album Tim ever bought.
  00:20:46
• Rubin frequently gifts the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching and Jon Kabat-Zinn's meditation book Wherever You Go, There You Are.
  00:23:24
• Karr literally used the giant Riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat as a child and memorized speeches from Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Richard III.
  00:40:48
• Karr's Syracuse MFA program receives about 1,200 applications for only 12 positions and selects solely on the writing.
  00:54:55
• On day one Karr stages a fake fight with colleague George Saunders to show students that memory is filtered by who they are, not a perfect recording.
  00:55:25
• Karr keeps a 'commonplace book' of beautiful overheard or read language and has 40 years of index cards with quotes from her lectures.
  01:01:11
• Asked for a billboard message, Karr chose: '90% of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath.'
  02:07:31
• Tim took up hunting in 2012 after his first deer hunt with conservationist Steven Rinella while researching The 4-Hour Chef.
  01:25:31

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