#belabor live audio

[rebeccaheyman]

Time slip, but make it literature

Review: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, aBook narr. Marin Ireland (Penguin Audio, 17 May 2022)

Emma Straub's latest novel is a poignant time-slip saga about a forty-year-old woman having the coming-of-age adventure of a lifetime. Far more than the sum of its parts, This Time Tomorrow is a portrait of love, grief, regret, and friendship, perfect for fans of Margarita Montimore's Oona Out of Order and Josie Silver's The Two Lives of Lydia Bird.

Three-sentence summary: On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice can't shake the feeling that something in her life is amiss — something besides the rapid deterioration of her father's health. The next morning, she wakes up in her 16-year-old body, reliving the landmark birthday that set her life on its original trajectory. Armed with knowledge of what's to come, Alice returns to the past night after night, determined to set a different future in motion and challenge what seems like inevitable fate.

I can't say enough about the perfect marriage of narrative and narration on the audiobook version of This Time Tomorrow. Marin Ireland captures the nuance and emotion of Straub's prose with precision and grace; her bright, alto tones move subtly from teen to adult versions of characters in a way that marks time without belaboring the point. Sheer perfection.

#this time tomorrow #emma straub #fiction #literature #book review #book recommendation #marin ireland #audiobooks #penguin audio

[adultswim2021]

Home Movies #6: “Director's Cut” September 2, 2001 - 10:00 PM | S01E06 Home Movies! The first *OFFICIAL* thing to air on Adult Swim! Home Movies was created by Brendon Small, previously of nothing, and Loren Bouchard, previously of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist. Produced by Tom Snyder Productions (renamed Soup2Nuts by the time this episode aired). This first season of Home Movies utilized Squigglevision, first used in Dr. Katz. The show originally aired on UPN for the first five episodes back in 1999 and was promptly cancelled due to low ratings. I was one of the very few people who caught it during the UPN run, I saw, I think, one and a half episodes. Then, it was gone. I probably would’ve forgotten all about it were it not for Adult Swim’s revival of it. I kind of faintly recall seeing the initial promos for this show and thinking I’d seen it before. Do I explain the premise of the show here now? Okay, I guess I will. Brendon is (googling how old he’s supposed to be) an 8-year-old boy who makes amateur camcorder movies with his friends. Brendon and his friends are smart for their age, owing to the fact that they are voiced by adults leaning on their improv chops. There’s a ton of improv in the show. Brendon lives with his single mother and his dad is largely absent due to freakin’ cancel culture. His father figure is an alcoholic soccer coach named McGurk, voiced by Jon Benjamin, formally Ben Katz on Dr. Katz. In fact, it took me a while before i got used to his voice coming out of McGurk’s mouth, because I so strongly associated it with Ben. The plot of this episode is that Brendon’s crew want to film a script written by Duane, an older kid who performs all the music for Brendon’s movies. He wrote a rock opera about Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which I have never and will never read. Brendon favors his own script and is jealous that Duane’s project is such a hit. The B-story is similar, McGurk is jealous of his assistant coach Drew who is doing a much better job than him. Drew is voiced by Larry Murphy, voice of Teddy from Bob’s Burgers and Assy McGee from Assy McGee. He speaks in what resembles his natural speaking voice, I assume, and you’d never guess it was him. I think this episode is good, but it’s light on laughs compared to episodes that came after it. Also, the literary references don’t thrill me. WE GET IT: YOU WENT TO COLLEGE. Big whoop. Go write for a Lampoon, why don’t you? I did listen to the DVD audio commentary for this (which are really funny! I forgot how funny they were!), which revealed that it was less about trying to find a literary reference and more about needing something public domain to make a rock opera about to avoid legal trouble. In fact, this episode was originally supposed to be a TRON rock opera. The other thing I have a mild distaste for is the aspiring film-maker character. You’d think I would hate this show, being that the whole thing is about an aspiring film-maker. Usually when there’s an aspiring film-maker character in a movie or TV show they are portrayed as a cutesy dreamer, and it usually doesn’t go deeper than that. Even though it’s reflecting a very true-to-life personality type I usually can’t stomach it in fiction. Who among us doesn’t know an obnoxious, borderline-delusional narcissist with stars in their eyes, getting off on acting the part of a bigshot creative type. But I guess all real-life bigshot creative types start out this way, so what the fuck kind of point am I even making right now? Anyway, there’s a scene in this episode where Brendon and his friends are negotiating the business side of their various projects and Jason demands “points” without having a firm grasp of what “points” are. It’s extremely funny, despite the weird hang-ups I described earlier. My favorite bit is the cold open, when McGurk questions why the team never carried him off the field in a celebratory manner after he witnesses Drew getting that treatment. “We tried once, but you were too big” Brendon says. McGurk is offended. “I mean, you were too... drunk” Brendon corrects himself. McGurk happily accepts. Goddamn, that’s a funny joke. Other things of note? This was the start of Adult Swim proper, with the old people swimming bumpers and whatnot. I think I touched on that stuff in one of my preamble posts, so I won’t belabor it here. But yes, this is technically the first Adult Swim show to air ON Adult Swim. What else? I like to complain about internet dorks who leap to wild conclusions about “unaired” episodes of shows, so I’ll do that to close this out. I think Home Movies fans tend to believe that this episode as well as the rest of “season one” as we know it were just laying around on broadcast master tapes spitefully not being aired by UPN until Adult Swim rescued it. I believe that there had to be a break in production which resumed sometime between UPN and Adult Swim, and MAYBE this episode was partially produced, but probably not. But since Brendon’s mom is now voiced by not Paula Poundstone (which she was in the UPN episodes), I’m lead to believe that this could almost be considered the start of a new season. I guess I’ll find out if they ever discuss this in the DVD commentaries (they didn’t in the one I heard).

#adult swim #home movies #adultswim2021

[orchidbreezefc]

okay so!! if you don’t follow me on twitter, i went to the liveshow for the audio drama podcast king falls am this last weekend with my buddies @amarantae​ (whom i had known for 8 years before us meeting for the first time this weekend) and @wendy-comet​ (who is a newer friend but just as cool). this is a longass post to gush about [the fandom-relevant parts of] one of the best weekends of my life.

the liveshow was fantastic, of course, and it’s going to be available to listen to so i won’t belabor the point, other than that trent shumway is one of the major wonders of the modern world and watching him run through half the characters in the show for a simple skit was wild. 

wendy, ama, and i were the last three people to go through the autograph line as the venue was kicking everybody out so we didn’t get to talk much with most of the cast (and also i was so starstruck by noah james that there was a moment of awkward silence lmfao). 

we decided to hit the meet and greet hangout at the park the next morning, and that was a lot of fun! someone (i think emily from the discord?) brought a cards against kfam game and we played a few rounds with noah. kyle asked me to show him my hand of cards at one point as an example of what kind of cards were in the deck and i was like HHHH YEAH.

(me with the blue hair on the right, noah in the silly two wolf tank top in the middle, and wendy with the red hair on the left.)

we also told kyle how much the queer rep in the show meant to us and got a couple great selfies with the cast. kyle and noah gave us the best hugs we’ve ever had in our LIVES.

(left to right: noah james, eric kimelton, me, ama, trent shumway, wendy, and kyle brown)

after the big group picture, ama, wendy, and i took off and walked to the old los angeles zoo, which is long abandoned and super cursed, and messed around LA in general for a bit longer. then later that day we went to fucking??? karaoke??? with the cast?? absolutely wild. kyle went full troy bolton on us because he swore up and down ever since karaoke was planned months ago that he would go but not sing, and he definitely sang twice.

i have some videos of the karaoke that i hope to put on an unlisted youtube playlist once i get wendy’s videos. suffice it to say it was a blast, and the room only fit like 20, 25 people, so it was an incredibly intimate experience with, again, the goddamn cast of king falls am. owen sang freak on a leash in jacob williams’s voice. noah did prince and then got a 100% score on a rage against the machine song. wendy and i went three times and even got ama in on it once. kyle and noah did bohemian rhapsody. cameron chambers and mallori were there.

this is how big the room was. the picture was taken by ama with her back to the wall. this was us singing a song on wendy’s kfam playlist. absolutely nuts.

afterwards we got kicked out of the karaoke room so kyle and noah decided that instead of saying our goodbyes on the sidewalk outside there in a not unsketchy part of town, we should grab midnight denny’s. so we did. with, not to put too fine a point on it, but the goddamn cast of king falls am. wendy played a game of ninja with noah and some others outside the restaurant.it was wild.

i sat directly across from noah and y’all. y’all. i would have been MORE than happy to eat tres leches pancakes and listen to noah james talk about his life for an hour and a half but the man was DETERMINED to hear all about us. i’m never going to forget him leaning across the table and fixing me with these beautiful brown eyes and going ‘tell me about your necklace’ and my starstruck ass, who had two necklaces on, holding up my crochet bat necklace and going “this one?” and him gesturing to my whole getup and saying ‘all of it’

LIKE. he paid RAPT attention and engaged and asked questions as we talked about things like how we met through fandoms and the bad rep slytherin gets in the harry potter books. he made me feel not like a nerd but the most fascinating person on the planet as i told stories about shiny hunting in pokemon and showed off the crochet pokemon i’ve made, both irl and in pictures. apparently he has played all the pokemon games, and was the second person to recognize my pin hat as being from pokemon since i made it for comic con 2018. he’s a slytherin too and so is his girlfriend, and they liked my ‘woomy’ pin because apparently they were inklings for halloween last year.

(clockwise from bottom right: julie, noah, norma, ama, wendy, me, rachel, and meg)

we all followed each other on twitter before leaving. on our way out the door we got another hug each from kyle, who was clear that the cast members were, if possible, even more enthused about the whole weekend than we were. i had wanted to show noah my pokemon tattoo but had forgotten, but he reappeared right as our uber was showing up. i went over to show him and AS OUR UBER PULLED UP noah james, most beautiful man in america, went ‘wait. explain this to me. tell me what it means’. like SIR. you are too perfect.

and now my twitter follows look like this:

(my most recent 5 followers, all of whom are on the king falls am cast)

and there’s also this:

(sage’s tweet: night out with @KingFallsAM cast was fucking incredible beyond words, especially getting to sit and eat with @James_NoahJames. dude just radiated sincerity & genuine interest in our lives & creative efforts. it's probably painful to be so legitimately good & talented all at once.

noah’s response: 

Seriously had such a wonderful time [four heart emojis of different colors])

#sage original post #i was gonna tag this with the main tag but apparently noah goes through that on a regular basis and nah.... nah #if you thought i was cool and collected when we spoke i am not about to disabuse you of that notion sir #on that note pls dont snitch tag aaaaa #sage status update

[doshmanziari]

2019 Mega Drive Explorations [3]

A continuation of parts 1 and 2. Click the link below the first entry to read more.

Fist of the North Star: The New Legend of the Post-Apocalyptic Messiah (1989)

Absolute garbage. Since I couldn’t give less of a shit about Fist of the North Star’s plot, I played it in Japanese; the English localization of the game did not retain the Fist of the North Star license, and was renamed Last Battle. You guide Kenshiro, slowest man in the world, through a bunch of ruinous stages, fending off opponents including: men with jack-knives for arms who live underground, men with scythe-arms who form three-man-towers, men wielding shotguns who do not move at all, and harpoons. A bar runs along the bottom of the HUD, and each time one of its thresholds is passed Kenshiro will destroy his shirt and get strong. You have to face around ten bosses, and there is, barring the last point on the map, never any way to tell if the next stage is a boss or not. This is a problem when you can get destroyed in mere seconds (as far as I could tell, the best strategy for nearly every boss was to keep jump-kicking and hope the sketchy hit detection worked). If you go the wrong way on the map, you must backtrack, and it is never fun to return to any of these places. The worst are the warehouses, each acting like Sword of Sodan’s horrendous Craggamoor gauntlet, except that they are mazes with nothing to do but walk one way, see if it dead-ends, and proceed from there. The music may have, for all I know, been the work of Fatal Labyrinth’s composer, and that’s not a happy comparison. Through it all, New Legend has a kind of graphic appeal that’s tough to put to words besides shrugging and saying that maybe I just have a weak spot for coarse ugly-banal stuff that’s pumped full of shrieking colors (such colors aren’t so present here, but when they are you know it, as the second screenshot demonstrates). My final opinion is that I don’t think that Fist of the North Star deserves to have good videogames, so whatever.

Mega Turrican (1993)

This was my first Turrican game and I thought it was a lot of fun! Exciting stages, surprisingly reasonable bosses, responsive controls and neat subsidiary mechanics, and one of the system’s very best credits themes. Sometimes you can forget how many videogames had enemy placement that was “BOOM! Here’s this thing (or these things) just outta nowhere, get fucked, lmao,” and, well, every one of Mega Turrican’s stages has parts like that. This is mitigated by it being a minor trend, and the unexpected plentifulness of items that fully restore your lifebar. My main concern is one vertical room right near the end that’s structured like an extreme fan-hack for a Metroid game. Its assembly is interesting -- a sequence of platforms and recesses in either wall that come together for a series of precision-based grapple-hook challenges -- but having the likely consequence of one mistake be falling all the way back down is too much (this was also where I wished that you had a line of sight for your grapple-hook; the angle of your arm is not as reliable as it would appear). Anyway: another example of welcome mitigation was entering an enormous organic den with literal xenomorphs and facehuggers prowling about and having arrows indicating the way to the exit -- a blessing when I was expecting to contend with a maze made to make you time-out over and over again. As you can partly see, the game is visually astounding, a dense maximalist masterpiece evoking the look of an Amiga platformer, and the level design -- what’s interactive, what’s background, etc. -- remains remarkably legible, for the most part.

Golden Axe III (1993)

I was hoping to come away from Golden Axe 3 with a better impression than the one I had when cooperatively playing it years ago, but I think beat ‘em ups aren’t a genre I can get into past screenshots and soundtracks. For me, enemies have too much behavioral randomness (if they, e.g., suddenly decide to charge at you, it’s almost impossible to react in time), and the best strategies for someone who’s not mastered the mechanics often feel tedious -- cautious jump-attacks and protracted turf wars with opponents who’ve been knocked offscreen and are edging their way back. Golden Axe 3 offers the unusual opportunity to take alternative paths, which I’m guessing lead to other stages, and it does unquestionably have the series’ best avatar roster, but even the promise of new sights and sounds can’t compel me to be enthusiastic about seeing the game’s five or so endlessly palette swapped barbarians again. With these qualities and a final stage that belabored its point about being the final stage, Golden Axe 3 is another title I won’t be returning to.

X-Men 2: Clone Wars (1995)

Although it might be an unfair association, when I think of Mega Drive action-platformers I think of hellishly large layouts featuring repeating level designs and little to no grounding setpieces. Now, there are numerous western-developed games for the Super Nintendo which fit this description, but as I had little experience with those growing up, aside from the occasional Bubsy or Marvin Missions, and as that was almost exclusively what I found when playing on someone else’s Genesis, it became a stereotype. Clone Wars doesn’t escape that sort of level design -- there’s a lot of impossible-to-anticipate enemy placement, some stretches where the visual homogeneity of your surroundings gives rise to the boring sort of dislocation, a few places that could be trimmed -- but it’s also better than I was expecting. Prior to starting a stage, you can choose from, ultimately, a total of seven characters. Aside from the last few stages, where it seemed practically necessary to choose Beast for his sheer strength, I could keep switching to a different character and not feel like I was inconveniencing myself for variety's sake. Perhaps because it was a late Mega Drive release, but also certainly because of the combined talents of the background artists who included Steven A. Ross (an artist for Chakan: The Forever Man), Clone Wars is hardly ever dull to look at. It harnesses that almost over-detailed, modular aesthetic many superhero comics came to have during the 90s: characters with too many muscles, machines with too many tubes, all of those melodramatic grotesqueries that are an irresistible attractant when you’re an adolescent. And Kurt Harland’s forceful, metalized score is the best audio accompaniment that you could wish for, maybe occupying the pinnacle of EDM/IDM on the system, right next to Bare Knuckle 3. I’d love to see a ROM-hack of this that adjusted the level design, or lessened damage taken.

#hokuto no ken #fist of the north star #turrican #golden axe #x-men #sega genesis #mega drive #clone wars

[younggentlemeneagle-blog]

SEWA SOUND SYSTEM JOGJA

SEWA SOUND SYSTEM JOGJA

BERIKUT INI ADALAH HARGA PRICE LIST UNTUK HARGA TERBAIK SILAHKAN HUBUNGI MARKETING KAMI DI 081904158111 #SEWA SOUND SYSTEM JOGJA #SEWA ALAT MUSIK JOGJA #SEWA ALAT MUSIK MURAH JOGJA #SEWA LIGHTING JOGJA #SEWA ALAT BAND JOGJA #SEWA ALAT BAND MURAH JOGJA #MULTIMEDIA JOGJA #SEWA LED JOGJA #SEWA RIGING JOGA #SEWA PANGGUNG JOGJA #SEWA GUN SMOKEA SOUND SYSTEM JOGJA

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#alat #basic sound system #belabor live audio #belabor live mixing audio #belajar audio dasar #belajar sound system #genset #jogja #jogjakarta #lighting #live mixing audio #musik #rental #rental sound #rental sound system jogja #rental sound sytem yogyakarta #sewa #sewa alat band murah jogja #sewa alat musik jogja #sewa alat musik murah jogja #sewa alat musik yogyakarta #sewa lighting jogja #sewa multimedia jogja #sewa panggung jogja #sewa sound sistem jogja #sewa sound system jogja #sewa sound system yogyakarta #sound #yogyakarta

[gerdfeed]

Join renowned futurist Gerd Leonhard as he explores humanity's uncertain future in the era of exponential technology, addressing questions such as AI and the possibility of a Singularity, what a human-focused future looks like, and why we MUST regulate and control technology to avoid losing our humanity. This 'Best Of' reel encompasses years of Gerd's film making career focused on warning about the potential threats of unencumbered tech advancement, automation, and the dystopian inequality that may/would ensue. As a humanist futurist belaboring big tech's surveillance and manipulation economy, Gerd was one of the earliest to rail against Silicon Valley's rosy promises and share a true glimpse of the future we are all living today. -- FREE BONUSES: Get My 10 Tech Megashifts Rewiring Society @ https://ift.tt/3m0WXpS Watch My Latest Uncut Keynote @ http://gerd.global And be sure to subscribe to this channel, and to share my videos if you like them. Sign up for my 'best reads & finds' newsletter at https://ift.tt/2EY1Fog If you like my vidoes and shows, you can download all episodes via http://www.gerd.cloud (look for the Gerd.Live folder or my keynotes 2020 folder) Gerd Leonhard Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker Zürich / Switzerland https://ift.tt/ZMjdE4 https://ift.tt/23EKyaz (my latest book) https://ift.tt/17rsyc8 Audio-only versions of most of my videos are available via SoundCloud https://ift.tt/2jsLDFC, and Spotify see https://gerd.fm/spotify My key memes and messages can be browsed here: https://ift.tt/2GfczpY For booking inquiries please go here https://ift.tt/3i58P7D If you enjoy my videos and talks, please take a look at my best-selling book “Technology vs Humanity” https://ift.tt/23EKyaz - it's now available in 12 languages! Twitter: @gleonhard Newsletter: www.gerd.digital by Gerd Leonhard

#futuristgerd #keynote speaker #Gerd Leonhard #techvshuman

[vapormaison]

Budget Hi-Fi for Future Funk & Vaporwave: An Introduction

Introduction

I’ve had a couple of readers reach out to me in DMs after the holiday, and both wanted to start consuming vaporwave in reasonably high-fidelity — presumably with some fresh Christmas cash. First off, I want to apologize for converting them to this insane hobby. It will serve as an eternal joy to your ears, but an eternal terror to your finances. With that in mind, they both gave me budgets of around a thousand dollars, American, and I found myself recommending rather identical setups based on their parameters, living space, and general use patterns.

From the outline I gave over those previous DMs, I prepared a three part (potentially five part, if there’s sufficient interest) series of articles serving as a primer to roughly introducing basic principles of hi-fi enjoyment to a novice or neophyte crowd, My hope is that this can double as both a buyer’s guide for the reader, but also as a way to proselytize new fans into these two great hobbies: hi-fi and vaporwave. Here goes:

BASIC PRINCIPLE: Pure Sound, Compression & Loudness

“Pure Sound” is more of a term in vogue with Japanese audiophiles, but I think it’s functional here for what we’re trying to achieve. To understand pure sound, we’ve got to take a look at its antithesis: compressed digital. I want to make a point here of the word compressed because I’m not some boomer or vintage fetishist to the point where I can’t appreciate good sound from a digital source.

But, the way 90% of the world consumes music in the 21st century — in lossy mp3 formats with varyingly low bitrates on mediocre-to-poor head/ear phones is not ideal. Steve Jobs’ decisive victory over physical media with the iPod and iTunes expanded our libraries, but rendered most of that music into poor shadows of its state when originally recorded. The reason why your dad or grandpa are still devoted to their old stereo with a collection of CDs and vinyls is not just because they’re a luddite — primarily, it is because those CDs (up until ’95 or so) and vinyls (since and to forever, essentially) are usually compiled and pressed in the highest resolution possible. 

And before, anyone gets on my case about denigrating about Steve — I love the guy. His taste was excellent, too. Here’s a picture of the man’s Woodville mansion, where his only furnishings are a lamp, his hi-fi and some records. He’s got a handmade-in-Scotland Linn LP12, Acoustat Monitor 3 loudspeaker pair, and a Spectral Statis Amplifier. Absolutely legendary gear. Rest in sonic peace, King.

It was a $30,000 kit in its day, so he spared no expense. While he was selling you poorly compressed music, he was enjoying his audiophile vinyl music (a 1960s recording of Handel is in there, one of the “pure sound” classics in Japan) in the ideal recreative sonic comfort. Be more like Steve. I’ll try to get you there for 1/25th of that price.

What We Need:

To get a good sound system going for your library of vaporwave, there are four things you need at minimum. Today I’m going to just address formats. In the coming weeks I’ll go over the following: playback platforms (turntable, network streamers, etc), amplifiers, and your speakers (in-ear, headphones, or loudspeakers). But what all those are predicated by are a necessity of some kind of musical source — the reason, if you will, that you’re probably intrigued by hi-fi, right? Apart from the aesthetics of most systems, we’re trying to reach a higher echelon of music enjoyment.

Digital Fomats

The short answer here is just .flac files. They are lossless (uncompressed) 16-bit data-hungry kings which pump out much more detail than normal mp3s, which will be extremely important when you get a pair of nice speakers or headphones. I will go into that into more detail in a future article. If you play a crummy mp3 on a pair of nice earphones or loudspeakers, you waste their ability to soundstage — something we will discuss when we get to the speakers article. These lossless lassies also give us the ability to chase after that muse known as “dynamic range”, which is another way we can detect detail in musical compositions.

This kind of stuff matters deeply to both audiophiles and the artists themselves. If you remember the Quincy Jones vs. the Estate of Michael Jackson case, one of the accusations is that the detailed sound-spaces he created were crunched to oblivion in subsequent CD and digital releases of tracks like Thriller and Bad.

Above is a CNET comparison of the vinyl rips of Bad’s original release and a 2017 mp3 release. The top is “good” dynamic range -- you can hear the whole sound arrangement. The bottom is, well, shit.

People will occasionally argue for other digital formats. I don’t consider it a point even worth belaboring, really, as in my own benchmarks and those of many other audiophiles, there’s just no beating FLAC for general purpose listening. Some people will simp for another similar lossless format, ALAC. It’s Apple’s format, and while I’m a huge apple Stan (this is being typed on a 2018 MacBook pro connected to a Apple Thunderbolt display), Apple has effectively abandoned the project since Jobs’s death, primarily because it doesn’t sell, and secondarily because it needs a visionary of Jobs’s caliber to really take it global. Some people will also try to sell you on WAV. Just laugh at them. It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of vaporwave releases offer .flac as a format available for download, and you should be taking that option every single time.

Now, if you’re not a downloader, there are some streaming services that are offering hi-res. Spotify does so, but poorly at the moment. Tidal does a much better service to listeners and creators. I’m a Tidal guy, myself, but just because Tidal was an early adopter of hi-res formats for streamers. The differences in a few years, I think, however, will be negligible, as Spotify has finally started to take audiophiles serious now that its market share has started to stagnate. I’ll be going more into how to optimize your lossless streaming in my article about pre-amplifiers and network streamers, so stay tuned for that.

Analog Formats

I’m going start off by making a controversial statement here: cassettes are not high fidelity.

This is unfortunate, because the vast majority of physical releases for vaporwave are definitely motivated by a sort of 80s nostalgia and I’m sure many of the purchases are also motivated by the false presumption that the cassettes offer better sound quality. While they very well might seem like it in comparison to a youtube upload (although I think Real Love uploads in hi-res audio, not sure about Artzie), they will mostly be wasted on your system unless you’re just looking to pump some bass or annoy your neighbors. Real quality sound will be difficult to extract from these.

Why CDs? Why vinyl? It comes down to the numbers. I’ll explain this in the most lay terms possible, so much so that I’m sure audiophiles will wander onto my socials and demand retractions and corrections.

One of the ways we measure high quality sound is in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). I think this is best expressed as a sustained “pop, & warmth” that you hear when a needle hits a record. With tapes it sounds a little different — I’d liken it to the cracking of unboiled pasta, or the fluttering of plastic in the wind. The lowest quality consumer tapes, the stuff that your parents probably fucked to in the early 90s, are rated at roughly 45-50db of SNR. That’s like 2003-iTunes level of muddy, ugly, sound. CDs are almost double consumer-grade tapes, at around 95db. Vinyls sit at around 70-75db.  

Now, some vinyl-heads will come at me with some takes from the Loudness Wars. Yes, CDs went through a period from roughly 1994-2008 where they were poorly mastered that they bordered on unlistenable. But we’re talking about vaporwave, where the work is contemporary, and the mastering and production lines are boutique. No one at the Aloe Island, DMT FL, or Neoncity is demanding the mastering engineer to compress the sound to make the bass sound punchier for badly designed car audio systems based on bad anecdotal studies from disgraced EMI engineers -- at least that I know of. 

However, I will, just for you, include an obligatory “loudness wars” jpeg that only you will understand. Everyone else, for the purpose of this article, disregard.

Saint Vitus - "Let Them Fall" from "Lillie: F-65" (2012)

Additionally, I know most of you guys like a “little” analog sound in your systems. I do, too. Vinyl’s a warm medium, and I love it for that. It exists in that happy medium between the noisiness of cassette tape and the cold cleanliness of CD. If I ever have to do serious reference listening of classical music or something like that, I have CDs for that. Vinyls are what I listen to for fun.

Concluding Thoughts

My next article — in a few days — will be getting into the weeds with gear, specifically turntables, cassette decks (I know the people want it) and network streamers. I’m hoping that gives interested parties some time to get their records or FLACs on a hard-drive, because that is going to be essential to us even embarking on this journey towards high-fidelity Outer Heaven.

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/macbook-pro-16-first-impressions-return-of-the-mack/

MacBook Pro 16” first impressions: Return of the Mack

In poker, complacency is a quiet killer. It can steal your forward momentum bit by bit, using the warm glow of a winning hand or two to cover the bets you’re not making until it’s too late and you’re out of leverage. 

Over the past few years, Apple’s MacBook game had begun to suffer from a similar malaise. Most of the company’s product lines were booming, including newer entries like the Apple Watch, AirPods and iPad Pro. But as problems with the models started to mount — unreliable keyboards, low RAM ceilings and anemic graphics offerings — the once insurmountable advantage that the MacBook had compared to the rest of the notebook industry started to show signs of dwindling. 

The new 16” MacBook Pro Apple is announcing today is an attempt to rectify most, if not all, of the major complaints of its most loyal, and vocal, users. It’s a machine that offers a massive amount of upsides for what appears to be a handful of easily justifiable tradeoffs. It’s got better graphics, a bigger display for nearly no extra overall size, a bigger battery with longer life claims and yeah, a completely new keyboard.

I’ve only had a day to use the machine so far, but I did all of my research and writing for this first look piece on the machine, carting it around New York City, through the airport and onto a plane where I’m publishing this now. This isn’t a review, but I can take you through some of the new stuff and give you thoughts based on that chunk of time. 

This is a re-think of the larger MacBook Pro in many large ways. This is a brand new model that will completely replace the 15” MacBook Pro in Apple’s lineup, not an additional model. 

Importantly, the team working on this new MacBook started with no design constraints on weight, noise, size or battery. This is not a thinner machine, it is not a smaller machine, it is not a quieter machine. It is, however, better than the current MacBook Pro in all of the ways that actually count.

Let’s run down some of the most important new things. 

Performance and thermals

The 16” MacBook Pro comes configured with either a 2.6GHz 6-core i7 or a 2.3GHz 8-core i9 from Intel. These are the same processors as the 15” MacBook Pro came with. No advancements here is largely a function of Intel’s chip readiness. 

The i7 model of the 16” MacBook Po will run $2,399 for the base model — the same as the old 15” — and it comes with a 512GB SSD drive and 16GB of RAM. 

Both models can be ordered today and will be in stores at the end of the week.

The standard graphics configuration in the i7 is an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of memory and an integrated Intel UHD graphics 630 chip. The system continues to use the dynamic handoff system that trades power for battery life on the fly.  

The i9 model will run $2,699 and comes with a 1TB drive. That’s a nice bump in storage for both models, into the range of very comfortable for most people. It rolls with an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of memory.

You can configure both models with an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. Both models can also now get up to 8TB of SSD storage – which Apple says is the most on a notebook ever – and 64GB of 2666 DDR4 RAM but I’d expect those upgrades to be pricey.

The new power supply delivers an additional 12w of power and there is a new thermal system to compensate for that. The heat pipe that carries air in and out has been redesigned, there are more fan blades on 35% larger fans that move 28% more air compared to the 15” model. 

The fans in the MacBook Pro, when active, put out the same decibel level of sound, but push way more air than before. So, not a reduction in sound, but not an increase either — and the trade is better cooling. Another area where the design process for this MacBook focused on performance gains rather than the obvious sticker copy. 

There’s also a new power brick which is the same physical size as the 15” MacBook Pro’s adapter, but which now supplies 96w up from 87w. The brick is still as chunky as ever and feels a tad heavier, but it’s nice to get some additional power out of it. 

Though I haven’t been able to put the MacBook Pro through any video editing or rendering tests I was able to see live demos of it handling several 8K streams concurrently. With the beefiest internal config Apple says it can usually handle as many as 4, perhaps 5 un-rendered Pro Res streams.

A bigger display, a thicker body

The new MacBook Pro has a larger 16” diagonal Retina display that has a 3072×1920 resolution at 226 ppi. The monitor features the same 500 nit maximum brightness, P3 color gamut and True Tone tech as the current 15”. The bezels of the screen are narrower, which makes it feel even larger when you’re sitting in front of it. This also contributes to the fact that the overall size of the new MacBook Pro is just 2% larger in width and height, with a .7mm increase in thickness. 

The overall increase in screen size far outstrips the increase in overall body size because of those thinner bezels. And this model is still around the same thickness as the 2015 15” MacBook Pro, an extremely popular model among the kinds of people who are the target market for this machine. It also weighs 4.3 lbs, heavier than the 4.02 lb current 15” model.

The display looks great, extremely crisp due to the increase in pixels and even more in your face because of the very thin bezels. This thing feels like it’s all screen in a way that matches the iPad Pro.

This thick boi also features a bigger battery, a full 100Whr, the most allowable under current FAA limits. Apple says this contributes an extra hour of normal operations in its testing regimen in comparison to the current 15” MacBook Pro. I have not been able to effectively test these claims in the time I’ve had with it so far. 

But it is encouraging that Apple has proven willing to make the iPhone 11 Pro and the new MacBook a bit thicker in order to deliver better performance and battery life. Most of these devices are pretty much thin enough. Performance, please.

Speakers and microphone

One other area where the 16” MacBook Pro has made a huge improvement is the speaker and microphone arrays. I’m not sure I ever honestly expected to give a crap about sound coming out of a laptop. Good enough until I put in a pair of headphones accurately describes my expectations for laptop sound over the years. Imagine my surprise when I first heard the sound coming out of this new MacBook and it was, no crap, incredibly good. 

The new array consists of six speakers arranged so that the subwoofers are positioned in pairs, antipodal to one another (back to back). This has the effect of cancelling out a lot of the vibration that normally contributes to that rattle-prone vibrato that has characterized small laptop speakers pretty much forever.

The speaker setup they have here has crisper highs and deeper bass than you’ve likely ever heard from a portable machine. Movies are really lovely to watch with the built-ins, a sentence I have never once felt comfortable writing about a laptop. 

Apple also vents the speakers through their own chambers, rather than letting sound float out through the keyboard holes. This keeps the sound nice and crisp, with a soundstage that’s wide enough to give the impression of a center channel for voice. One byproduct of this though is that blocking one or another speaker with your hand is definitely more noticeable than before.

The quality of sound here is really very, very good. The HomePod team’s work on sound fields apparently keeps paying dividends. 

That’s not the only audio bit that’s better now though, Apple has also put in a 3-mic array for sound recording that it claims has a high enough signal-to-noise ratio that it can rival standalone microphones. I did some testing here comparing it to the iPhone’s mic and it’s absolutely night and day. There is remarkably little hiss present here and artists that use the MacBook as a sketch pad for vocals and other recording are going to get a really nice little surprise here.

I haven’t been able to test it against external mics myself but I was able to listen to rigs that involved a Blue Yeti and other laptop microphones and the MacBook’s new mic array was clearly better than any of the machines and held its own against the Yeti. 

The directional nature of many podcast mics is going to keep them well in advance of the internal mic on the MacBook for the most part, but for truly mobile recording setups the MacBook mic just went from completely not an option to a very viable fallback in one swoop. It really has to be listened to in order to get it. 

I doubt anyone is going to buy a MacBook Pro for the internal mic, but having a ‘pro level’ device finally come with a pro level mic on board is super choice. 

I think that’s most of it, though I feel like I’m forgetting something…

Oh right, the Keyboard

Ah yes. I don’t really need to belabor the point on the MacBook Pro keyboards just not being up to snuff for some time. Whether you weren’t a fan of the short throw on the new butterfly keyboards or you found yourself one of the many people (yours truly included) who ran up against jammed or unresponsive keys on that design — you know that there has been a problem.

The keyboard situation has been written about extensively by Casey Johnston and Joanna Stern and complained about by every writer on Twitter over the past several years. Apple has offered a succession of updates to that keyboard to attempt to make it more reliable and has extended warranty replacements to appease customers. 

But the only real solution was to ditch the design completely and start over. And that’s what this is: a completely new keyboard.

Apple is calling it the Magic Keyboard in homage to the iMac’s Magic Keyboard (but not identically designed). The new keyboard is a scissor mechanism, not butterfly. It has 1mm of key travel (more, a lot more) and an Apple-designed rubber dome under the key that delivers resistance and springback that facilitates a satisfying key action. The new keycaps lock into the keycap at the top of travel to make them more stable when at rest, correcting the MacBook Air-era wobble. 

And yes, the keycaps can be removed individually to gain access to the mechanism underneath. And yes, there is an inverted-T arrangement for the arrow keys. And yes, there is a dedicated escape key.

Apple did extensive physiological research when building out this new keyboard. One test was measuring the effect of a keypress on a human finger. Specifically, they measured the effect of a key on the pacinian corpuscles at the tips of your fingers. These are onion-esque structures in your skin that house nerve endings and they are most sensitive to mechanical and vibratory pressure. 

Apple then created this specialized plastic dome that sends a specific vibration to this receptor making your finger send a signal to your brain that says ‘hey you pressed that key.’ This led to a design that gives off the correct vibration wavelength to return a satisfying ‘stroke completed’ message to the brain.

There is also more space between the keys, allowing for more definitive strokes. This is because the keycaps themselves are slightly smaller. The spacing does take some adjustment, but by this point in the article I am already getting pretty proficient and am having more grief from the autocorrect feature of Catalina than anything else. 

Notably, this keyboard is not in the warranty extension program that Apple is applying to its older keyboard designs. There is a standard 1 year warranty on this model, a statement by the company that they believe in the durability of this new design? Perhaps. It has to get out there and get bashed on by more violent keyboard jockeys than I for a while before we can tell whether it’s truly more resilient. 

But does this all come together to make a more usable keyboard? In short, yes. The best way to describe it in my opinion is a blend between the easy cushion of the old MacBook Air and the low profile stability of the Magic Keyboard for iMac. It’s truly one of the best feeling keyboards they’ve made in years and perhaps ever in the modern era. I reserve the right to be nostalgic about deep throw mechanical keyboards in this regard, but this is the next best thing. 

Pro, or Pro

In my brief and admittedly limited testing so far, the 16” MacBook Pro ends up looking like it really delivers on the Pro premise of this kind of machine in ways that have been lacking for a while in Apple’s laptop lineup. The increased storage caps, bigger screen, bigger battery and redesigned keyboard should make this an insta-buy for anyone upgrading from a 2015 MacBook Pro and a very tempting upgrade for even people on newer models that have just never been happy with the typing experience. 

Many of Apple’s devices with the label Pro lately have fallen into the bucket of ‘the best’ rather than ‘for professionals’. This isn’t strictly a new phenomenon for Apple, but more consumer centric devices like the AirPods Pro and the iPhone Pro get the label now than ever before. 

But the 16” MacBook Pro is going to alleviate a lot of the pressure Apple has been under to provide an unabashedly Pro product for Pro Pros. It’s a real return to form for the real Mack Daddy of the laptop category. As long as this new keyboard design proves resilient and repairable I think this is going to kick off a solid new era for Apple portables.

#Uncategorized

[exilesofembermark]

Game Dev Update | 7.20.17

The Forge... FORGES! We just recently brought that system online, so crafting is afoot at Gunslinger HQ! Welcome back to the Dev Update, wherein we examine everything going on in the production of Exiles of Embermark.

Last Update, we encountered the Narrator and got a little of his background, met the Bandit NPC, showed how battle environments are setup and the progress on loot. This time around, you should strap in. Besides the Forge coming online, we’re covering progression in the game, the evolution of combat mechanics, UI design, animations from THREE different NPCs, the new avatar system and so much moar. 

As always, let’s dig into it together in live Discord chat or on the forums!

GAMEPLAY UPDATES 

We’ve been sharing updates on the gameplay evolution we’ve been experimenting with over time, including the additions of more varied Abilities and gameplay modes to increase the in-battle options that players have to adapt to certain situations. Here’s the story:

In the beginning, we designed a very simple Wego-style combat, where each combatant had 4 Abilities to choose from during battle (if you haven’t already, read the original rant for the game). We knew we wanted deep character development and tried to let the combination of lots of build choices for your character couple with super-simple gameplay to deliver on the game’s promise of 1-minute multiplayer. The problem with that was that there wasn’t enough strategic choice when you were stuck with 4 Abilities that may or may not suit the situation you found yourself in-- particularly in PvP.

So we tinkered with more Abilities, trading out Abilities during battle and a “Deck” mode where you drew in new Abilities as you used others. Each of these creeped toward deliciousness but didn’t quite get us there. And then this last milestone began.

We’ve developed what we hope is going to give you gaming goodness for generations. It’s a more malleable system of combat, summed up as follows:

Each player has 8 Abilities at their fingertips

Each Ability is assigned to a Stance: Martial, Magick* or Mystic

Using an Ability changes the player’s Stance to the Ability’s stance

Martial does increased DAM to Mystic, Mystic does increased DAM to Magick and Magick does increased DAM to Martial

Abilities have various cooldowns to avoid spam-o-rama

What we’ve learned from early testing on this system is that it creates depth without a ton of increased complexity, cat-and-mouse tactics via stance-dancing and most importantly, dramatic fun. We’ll now hold our enthusiasm for those of you who have signed up for closed testing and let you tell us what you think (if you’re interested in testing, PM TheWizard in the forums with your device type-- preferably phone)!

*please note that I am, sadly, the only Gunslinger dev who wants to spell magic “magick.” I believe it is way more fun to write (and read) “magick.” Thus, these Updates are my only outpost of protest. Thank you for your patronage.

PROGRESSION UNLOCKS

The ambition of the world for the game (and the continent of Embermark specifically) is for it to be a living, breathing world. But it’s not a 3D world-- it functions more like a Google Map. To populate that world with Quests, NPCs and events, we’ve been working on our Progression Unlock system during this milestone, and I’m excited to report that it’s coming along as planned-- any trackable piece of data in the game, from your Character’s level, Quests complete, wins, losses, # of dwarves slain, etc can be used as a trigger in the game. 

What this unlocks for us as game masters is the ability to give players agency over the world itself. Naturally, you’ll have several Quest lines that open for everyone, or for your Class, or for your House. But other, more secretive or hidden things will emerge as the game progresses and you (or your House) accomplish things within the game world. One day, the massive port of Sezunan may welcome great half-men from across the sea. The next day, it may be laid waste, with refugees pouring north to escape the devastation brought on by the uprising of the Queviel elves who are simply done with the nonstop raids from-- who else-- the players of House Revenge! 

That’s one example of the power of this system-- we’ll be diving more into detail on this as we get into testing and start seeing what works, is fun and balances out the happenings on Embermark. 

BATTLE UI REDESIGN

While Exiles hasn’t gotten to outside testing just yet, we’ve been doing plenty live, either at the studio, on a show floor or on the fly. And we’ve identified some of the early indicators for redesign needs. As you know, one of the aims of the game is to provide one-hand, one-thumb control for easy access (whether or not you’re a leftie), and we noticed some thumb-placement issues with the old interface (you can see the old one here) as well as some feedback clarity needed for things like Effects Over Time (EOT) and HP and Ability descriptions. 

This led us to the exercise we’re in the middle of, and we’re excited to get feedback on the increase in clarity and control, but also the aesthetic (work-in-progress):

Coupled with the gameplay development mentioned above (which is not represented here), and the avatar system you’ll read about below, there will be much to discuss! 

TONS OF NEW LOOT

The loot train continues to roll down the tracks and shows no signs of stopping. In fact, it’s speeding up. So without belaboring that fact, check out a bit of the mass quantity of tasty items (at varying levels of finish) coming your way:

Axes, warhammers, staves, light & heavy armor, blunts, boots, wizardy whatnots & everything that fits in the 13 slots for your gear is underway. Moar soon!

BANDITS... WITH GUNS

We’re learning quite a bit about how we’ll deal with the Rogue Class design from this cretin, but don’t get excited about what’s in his left hand just yet. All work-in-progress... (but check this out!):

AUDIO FROM THE EXILES BOUND DEBUT

I asked our friends at Bound, the app for episodic fiction, audio and visuals for all sorts of interesting properties, if we could debut a snippet of Episode 1 from Tales of Embermark, the series we’re doing together to reveal a little bit of history before players start directing it themselves. They graciously agreed. 

Thus, here’s an audio snippet from our Narrator (who you met in the last Update), a haggard soul who was there back when the Collapse unfolded. He’s just encountering a farmer on his way to investigate what’s going on with House Resolute. So, without further ado, the debut! EPISODE 1 END.

(and download Bound from the iOS App Store here) 

ASKALA

There’s so much continent to concept, sometimes it gives us pause.

THAT’S A LIE.

We’re rolling through each Zone of Embermark with evil delight, adding towns, ruins and caves to fight things in all over the place. The next one for us to share is Askala-- and here are the notes from our design doc about it:

“Temperate and slightly southern, Askala is one of the richest Zones in terms of natural resources. Farmland is abundant (though it’s not flat), and the fishing trade is huge, given Askala’s largest coastline of any Zone. In the middle of the Zone is a mountain range of steep peaks. There’s a long archipelago along the southern end, with sporadic civilization and ruins along them. House Revenge HQ located along the Eastern part of the Zone.”

Like most of the continent, even the civilized portions are tucked away for protection and under constant threat of decimation, both from Others From Over There (beyond the Breaches) and from neighbors. Here’s a rough of Pactu, a farming village nestled among the conifers below the nearby range:

As you read from the design doc, House Revenge is here, an amalgam of architecture from the once-proud elves and the men and half-men who have come to reside there:

We’re also working on Dokkul, a fishing capital right at the start of the Askalan Archipelago. Its seemingly haphazard and spread-out makeup has allowed it to regroup and restart after countless raids and invasions on its rich resources:

AND NOW, THE FORGE ONLINE

yes, Yes, YES, YES! The Forge works, people! I can’t tell you how happy this makes me (I am, admittedly, an easily delighted wizard, but indulge me)... 

“Craft items of enormous power” is said in many game descriptions, so I will outline:

Forge Recipes - You will find, earn and win Recipes throughout your journeys in Embermark, and these will allow you to forge items needed and some not available in Chests or Quests. A few crafting materials (also available in drops) plus a Unique Material (which can literally be anything) and BOOM - you’ve got a unique item or a banana or what-have-you.

Forge Random - Pick one of the 13 slots available on your character, and as long as you have the crafting materials, you can forge a random piece of loot for that slot. The higher the Forge level, the better the loot!

Salvage - 1-800-GOT-JUNK has nothing on Exiles. Not only does the game take away your junk, it gives you crafting materials (and sometimes, even Ember Essence) in return!

Upgrade - Got a Legendary, except it’s Level 3 and you’ve gotten way beyond that? Throw in your mats and bring that item with you on your journey to Paragon!

(oh and you can of course Level Up your Forge, unlocking treasures untold)

DWARVES FIGHTING

In this Update’s Dwarf section, we have some animations to share, not the least of which is this Shield Slam, which will likely cause you to lose your feet (or some other awful effect-over-time) during battle:

And who says dwarves aren’t spry? Try making this type of leap at home:

WINNERS OF THE PCGC

All hail the mighty SecretOwl, winner of the 1st Player-Created Gear Contest! It was a heated competition, with entries as varied as weapons, to offhands to armor pieces, but a shield won the day!

Jakallen’s Aegis, a singular shield combining epic-level resistances for the bearer with an impressive side effect, won “The Paragon” and will be created, given Lore and made available in the game after launch. In addition, prizes were given for the “Loose Cannon” (craziest) and The Fisherman’s Boot (funniest). Check The Scroll of Exaltation for the winners and details on upcoming contests.

If your entries didn’t make the finals this time, fear not-- there will be many more PCGCs in the future, and your creativity just may see its way into the game along with the Aegis.

RINGS & BELTS!

There are 13 slots on your Character’s person in Exiles, and 8 of those slots for gear are visible. Given that the creation of visible items (like helms and chest pieces and boots) are more work, we did those first. Thus, rings and belts have languished in the dark for a long time, waiting to be introduced into the game.

This milestone, those items made their way in, and the Bard is hard at work on the Ring of Whateversinhishead.

ETHEREALS IN EMBERMARK

Ethereals aren’t supposed to be here. 

Another race from Otherworld, these beings are intelligent and highly sophisticated but non-humanoid. Their physical forms are up to them, both in shape and in solidity. They communicate with each other entirely mind-to-mind, with no sound or vibration emitting from them. To anyone on the outside, they must communicate by the assuming of form. Assuming form and substance makes them vulnerable, but this is also how they must attack a physical foe or charm them or lull them into a stupor. Thus, a battle with an Ethereal is a dance of prepare-and-attack as they tend to buff themselves in prep and then unload on an enemy.

They move in life cycle from Wisp to Shine to Ascended to Superior, and their forms and powers and even limitations progress as well. 

Here we take a look at an Ascended, chosen to form of human and fire:

Despite their ever-increasing power, they can be defeated-- and as you can see, they don’t take their possessions into the next life...

Plan on seeing more on this enemy, as we introduce their multiple forms (and multiple power structures alongside).

THE AVATAR SYSTEM

For a while-- in fact, a great loooong while, you’ve been looking at this guy as a placeholder player avatar in every screenshot ever:

Thus, thank you for your patience and huzzah! You don’t have to look the same as everyone else anymore. In fact, Exiles will only sometimes use faces. Instead, we’re developing an avatar system that gives players some agency over their representation to the world while playing the game. It’s a combination of options, whereby you have default choices for the various parts of your avatar as well as earn or find parts as you go through the game experience. 

First, you’ll choose your avatar frame, beginning with lowly, shameful materials and progressing into fantastic borders that make your opponent go “whoa, that Character won the Hoozitwhatsit Tourney-- I’d better just quit right now...”

Then you’ll combine with a number of backgrounds for the avatar, same story:

And finally, you will add an icon as well the icon’s color for full badassery:

Banana icons, anyone?

NOW REMEMBER

We’ll keep sharing details as we head into testing (remember to PM TheWizard on the Exiles forums with your device type if you want in on closed testing & beta later), and you can count on early impressions from the testers throughout our various channels.

If you haven’t already, follow along with the Exiles development on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And if you haven’t, I’ll find you. And SMITE you.

THERE’S CHAT CHATTER EVERYDAY AS WE READY TO BATTLE

If you want to hear about the game, ask questions or connect with others who are helping the development team think about features, design and narrative, hop into the Discord Channel for live chat and say hi– it’s a friendly lot with plenty of daily shenanigans (there’s even-- still-- a Shenaniganizer).

BONUS: VFX ARE COMING!

We’re just starting to dive into our VFX plan (you may have noticed a lack of them in previous GIFs or screenshots), but rest assured, Exiles shall have them, and our bonus image this month is a WIP concept for the Ability “Armor Up,” which would appear on you or your opponent upon Ability use:

BONUS X2: THE DWARF... SHIMMY

As we prepared the dwarf model for animations, a very strange thing happened, which has turned into a GIF that you can find here. Take a look, then try and look away...

#gamedev #gameart #rpg #indiegame #fantasy #hearthstone

[rebeccaheyman]

The word you're looking for is "atmospheric"

Review: Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert, aBook narr. Emma Galvin and Chloe Cannon (Macmillan Audio, 28 June 2022)

If you, like me, have a major crush on Melissa Albert's writing, get ready to send your heart into non-stop palpitations. Our Crooked Hearts is Albert at her best: lyrical, creepy, vivid, propulsive, powerful. (Does it still count as a review if I just list the first hundred adjectives that come to mind?) 

Three-sentence summary: In a present-day timeline, Ivy's summer begins with a car accident and a mysterious encounter with a young woman in the woods. Twentyish years in the past, Dana is pulled into a world of magic that turns unspeakably dark, altering the course of her life forever. As Ivy and Dana's stories intertwine, transgressions from the past threaten to destroy their lives -- unless the truth can save them.

The narrative portion of Our Crooked Hearts gets an easy 5 stars, so I hope you understand how much it pains me to reveal that the audiobook format has major problems. Emma Galvin does a phenomenal job voicing seventeen-year-old Ivy, but Chloe Cannon as Ivy’s mother is one of the most disastrous performances I’ve heard this year. Her cadence frequently tapers into a low part of her vocal register that’s nearly impossible to hear; I had to crank the volume up way high to catch every word, and even then, I was straining at the end of every sentence. Cannon’s delivery is belabored and overly stylized, which is a real shame, because her mid- to upper register is a pleasure to listen to. I genuinely don't know how much production happens after aBook ARCs go out, but unless the balance on the entire recording is rejiggered, I can't recommend this format.

Star ratings are a vague, deeply flawed metric. While the disastrous audio should bring the score on this down to three-star range, I absolutely can't justify anything lower than a 4 for such a fantastic narrative. But you've been warned, folks! Just read it.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NG for the advance copy.

#our crooked hearts #melissa albert #ya books #book review #book recommendation #audiobooks #macmillan audio #new release #summer reading #ya suspense #ya mystery #witchy books #fiction #netgalley

[thedeadshotnetwork]

The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim Ferriss reveals what he's learned after a difficult year of introspection, and how he built a passionate fanbase of millions . Sarah Jacobs/Business Insider Tim Ferriss first found fame in 2007 with the massive bestseller "The 4-Hour Workweek." His interview podcast, "The Tim Ferriss Show," has been downloaded nearly 200 million times. His newest book, "Tribe of Mentors," is a collection of advice he gathered from some of the world's most successful people. Ferriss explained how this year was a time of introspection and learning. Tim Ferriss first found fame with his 2007 book " The 4-Hour Workweek ." After taking a break from writing, in 2012, he became an accidental podcast star with " The Tim Ferriss Show ," which is approaching 200 million downloads. He's an investor and self-described human guinea pig. He sat down for an interview with Business Insider senior reporter Richard Feloni for our podcast, " Success! How I Did It ." This past year hasn't been typical for him. He celebrated the 10th anniversary of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and then decided to leave his successful "4-Hour" brand behind him. He's out with a new book, " Tribe of Mentors ," in which he collects advice from 140 successful people, a project that was as much for him as it was for his audience. Ferriss has spent the last year thinking a lot about his own life. He lost some friends, he got a lot of attention for talking about his struggle with depression in a viral TED Talk , and he turned 40. On this episode of "Success! How I Did It," Ferriss spoke with Richard Feloni about all of that and more, including how wrestling shaped his childhood, the original title of "The 4-Hour Workweek," and why he hopes no one considers him a role model. Listen to the episode: Subscribe to " Success! How I Did It " on Apple Podcasts , Google Play , RadioPublic , or your favorite app. Check out previous episodes with: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman "Shark Tank" star and real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran Former White House press secretary and Fox News host Dana Perino Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff The following is a transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity. A year of reflection Andrew "Drew" Kelly Tim Ferriss: Turning 40 didn't, as a number, scare me, or throw me off, at all. I'm very comfortable being 40. But as a thought exercise, you know, I asked myself, "If this is the halfway point, if we're just looking at the actuarial tables, it's like, all right, if I'm at 50%, right, I'm halfway through this race called life, and when I hit the finish line, you're dead at 80, how might I want to rethink trajectory? How might I want to rethink over-planning versus under-planning? Even though I'm trying to improve my relationships with others, are they dependent on my relationship with myself? If so, how should I even conceptualize improving that, right? If it's never been part of my repertoire? And all these questions sort of came to the surface, and, rather than try and go at it on my own, which has been my predisposition and my reflex for decades, I figured, why don't I just take these questions and, given the reach of the podcasts and books and everything else at this point, why don't I just reach out to 130 or 140 people and ask them all the same questions? People who are the best at what they do, in many, many dozens of different fields — and then just try to borrow? Why not do this the potentially easier way? Rich Feloni: It seems an extension of what you've done that past 10 years. Even beginning with "The 4-Hour Workweek," which is dabbling in a bunch of different things and seeing what works and then sharing that with an audience. Ferriss: Yeah, it's exactly the same. I mean, really I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques. Then testing them on myself, and if I can replicate results, and then share those with, say, six to 12 friends, and they're able to replicate results, then fantastic, off to thousands or millions of people it goes. Laying the foundation in childhood Courtesy of Tim Ferriss Feloni: And did this constant love of learning anything and everything, did it start as a kid? Ferriss: Yeah. My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents. Did not have a lot of money, and the one exception they made: "We always have a budget for books. So if you want to get a book, we will figure out a way to get the book." So what does that do to a child brain? It makes you excited to figure out ways to get books. And so we became fascinated at a very early age with books. And I remember to this day this book called " Fishes of the World ," I think it was, that I carried with me. This huge hardcover — I mean I was a little runt, I was a really small kid growing up, and it was this gigantic hardcover, beautifully illustrated book on marine biology, and I took it with me to school every day, because the playground was not a safe place for me. I was born premature, I was really small and got my ass kicked mercilessly up until about sixth grade. So I wouldn't go out to the playground. That was a danger zone. I would stay by the classroom and kind of sit on the step leading out to the playground, and I would read this book. Feloni: Was being a small kid and someone picked on for his size — was that an impetus for getting involved in body experiments? As you say, you're a human guinea pig. Is that when it started? Ferriss: It wasn't a deliberate decision to become Captain America or anything. I was really small and had a lot of health issues growing up. I mean, not compared to some people certainly, but I had a number full-body blood transfusions when I was kid. Premature, so I can actually — this is audio, most likely, so people can't see it — if you look here, Rich, on my wrist, it looks like a cigarette burn, and that's actually from being intubated. And then I have another one under my left lung, where my lung collapsed, where my blood was being oxygenated. Nonetheless, so all of these various issues, and to make my parents' lives more difficult, really hyperactive. And some other mothers told my mom, "You should put him into something called 'kiddie wrestling,' because that'll drain his batteries, and then when he gets home he'll just fall asleep." Wrestling is unique among sports because it's weight-class-based. So you could have the puny runt from Class A competing against the puny runt from Class B. So it's a situation which one of the puny runts can actually win at something. And my mom inserted me into kiddie wrestling, and I took to it, and that became my sport, until the very end of high school effectively. But the confidence built on the wrestling mat as a puny, little — God knows, like 40-pound kid — is where a lot of it started. Feloni: I've heard you downplay your time in high school, like your time as a student and all of that. But you ended up at Princeton, which doesn't happen by accident. Ferriss: Yeah. My brother and I were always told, maybe not in these words, but if you get really good grades, you can do whatever you want in life. In effect, that's your ticket. And I transferred from a high school on Long Island to a high school in New Hampshire, which was a much better school called St. Paul's. Very well known — it's one of the older boarding schools in the US. Feloni: "Dead Poets Society" type of thing? Ferris: Very — feels like "Dead Poets Society." So you'd have seated meals, seated dinners a few nights a week, with suit and tie, and classes six days a week, chapel almost every day of the week, mandatory sports. And I was encouraged to go there — or to at least leave high school on Long Island — by teachers who could see me getting complacent. Like "All right, you think you're pretty good because you're a big fish in a small pond, but you should go somewhere else." Number one. And then one of my friends — just one of my classmates, because very few people left where I grew up in Long Island, or relatively few people — and one of my friends had gone to a boarding school and came back and effectively was, like, "I've seen the promised land — you need to get the hell out of here," and so I was able to get support from my grandparents, and kind of extended family, got a few small scholarships, and go to St. Paul's. And St. Paul's really set the stage for everything else and really opened the door, or even the possibility, of even thinking about applying to a place like Princeton. Finding himself in his 20s Tim Ferriss/Flickr Feloni: At Princeton you studied East Asian studies, and you took a break as well. Ferriss: I took a year away from school, which was in the middle of my senior year. It was a very, very, dark, dark, dark time for me, due to a bunch of — just a conflagration of all sorts of heavy things hitting me at the same time. And that is when I came close to sort of the precipice of total self-destruction. I don't want to belabor it here, because I've spoken about it at TED and people can certainly just search "Tim Ferriss suicide TED" and it'll pop right up. During that time, I saw my classmates competing, because that's what they were good at. I mean, you take kids who go to a school like Princeton, they're used to competing, and they're used to being No. 1, so if something seems coveted, they will compete for it, whether or not they really want that thing. And in this case, the thing would be, say, a job at McKinsey or a job at Goldman Sachs. And everyone was competing for these, and I ended realizing very clearly I did not want to do either of those things. And I felt very lost. So during that year I tried all sorts of things. I spent six months in China, mainland China, and then went to Taiwan, and just fell in love with Taiwan. So I had this dream of opening a gym chain in Taiwan and went pretty far down the line of trying to figure out all the details, this that and the other thing, meeting with gym owners throughout Taiwan, and ultimately you had to interact with, like, paying, in some cases, protection money and so on, to Triads, and organized crime, and it just got so involved, it was, like, "You know what, this is just a little bit above my pay grade — don't think I can handle this." So came back, ultimately rejoined school, and graduated a year later. Most of my friends had already graduated. I walked away with an illustrious degree in East Asian studies. Feloni: And the foundation of your career over the past 10 years was "The 4-Hour Workweek." And key to that coming together was your experience with BrainQuicken, the first company that you started. And so, it's a young guy, and he's selling supplements out of his house. That sounds a little sketchy. Ferriss: OK, all right — what's your question? Feloni: I've seen you refer to it as, like, you jokingly refer to yourself as a drug dealer or something. Ferriss: In fairness, I was actually neuroscience before East Asian Studies and had some of the wherewithal to determine what might make a good product, because as someone making 40,000 pretax in Silicon Valley, in those days, with roommates, and a hand-me-down minivan, did not have a whole lot of disposable income, but nonetheless was spending an absurdly high percentage of my take-home income on sports nutrition. I was, like, "All right, I have some ideas of the pain points and needs of this market, and know what I would want to create if I had the budget for myself," and, which would in effect be what we ended up labeling a "neural accelerator." BrainQuicken was a real learning-on-the-job MBA. I mean, it was very, very difficult. Achieving unexpected success and creating a brand TED Feloni: So "The 4-Hour Workweek" comes out in 2007. It seemed like no one really expected that to be success, including yourself, right? Like, a massive success. Ferriss: Nobody expected it. I mean, I had an initial print run of 10,000 copies, which isn't even partial national distribution. So for those who don't know, the premise of "The 4-Hour Workweek" — which, by the way, was initially titled "Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit" — is a collection of tactics and tools and case studies of people who have designed ideal lifestyles for themselves by thinking about this nonrenewable resource of time and how they want to spend their day-to-day, week-to-week, and then reverse-engineering that by building a business, a cash flow, or a career that allows for remote work and so on. So that's "The 4-Hour Workweek" and those are the basics, but nobody expected it to do anything. Feloni: Yeah, and it led to this "4-Hour" brand essentially. Ferriss: Yeah. Feloni: "The 4-Hour Body," "The 4-Hour Chef." Ferriss: Very accidental, but yeah. Feloni: And I've seen you lately kind of be self-deprecating about it, like, "Oh, this makes me sound like an infomercial guy or something." Do you actually regret the title? Ferriss: No, no. Feloni: Would you have changed it? Ferriss: No, no, no. Definitely not. No, I don't regret it at all, but, you know, there comes a point where all good things must come to an end. And in the beginning, you want to be pigeon-holed, in a sense, you want to be clearly defined in the very beginning. But past that point, and I did. You want to diversify your identity so you don't become a parrot who regurgitates the same party lines over and over again. So in the beginning, "4-Hour" this, "4-Hour" that, fantastic. But right after "The 4-Hour Workweek," I was heavily advised by many people that I should do "The 3-Hour Workweek" or "The 4-Hour Workweek Revisited" or something along those lines. I felt, if I didn't do something that was a complete left turn in a different field, I would forever be thought of as "The 4-Hour Workweek" business guy. Which is why I took the same approach and applied it to physical performance and sort of physical manipulation. And then with "Tools of Titans" retired the jersey of "4-Hour." And you know, who knows? Maybe it comes back at some point, but probably not. Living the Silicon Valley investor life Garrett Camp via Tim Ferriss/Flickr Feloni: At what point did investing enter the picture? You had a public post that you essentially retired from it in 2015, but you had deals that — most any one of them — people would kill for. Uber, Facebook, Twitter. Ferriss: Yeah. Feloni: How did those happen? Ferriss: Yeah, I've had a fortunate run. So in the case of angel investing, in 2007, "4-Hour Workweek" pops and suddenly it's a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and so on. I'm not so naive to think that I can just put lightning in a bottle and do that over and over and over and over again. I thought to myself, "Well, if this is really my moment, like the opportunity window, what might I do with this?" And around the same time, I was having lunches with Mike Maples. Feloni: And Mike Maples is? Ferriss: So Mike Maples, at the time, was a very successful angel investor, meaning he invested his own money in generally small-ish checks into very, very early-stage embryonic startups. He's now a founding partner of Floodgate, which is a successful venture-capital firm. And at the time, we would meet up for lunch or brunch at a place called Hobee's in the Bay Area, and we would very frequently talk about launch strategy or PR angles that his startups could use. In return, I would ask him about deal structure, about company selection. "Why did you choose this company instead of A, B, or C companies? What are the most important points in deal negotiation for, say, a seed round of financing?" And over the span of a few months of asking him these questions, I had decided that, rather than go to Stanford Business School, what if I took $120,000 of my money, which I would have spent on Stanford Business School for two years at the time and instead created a real-world MBA for myself where I create the "Tim Ferriss Fund," in quotation marks, and invest $120,000 in startups over two years with the expectation that I'm going to lose all of that money. In other words, every startup will fail, but the relationships developed — that I develop and the skills that I develop, the knowledge that I acquire, will, and so forth and so on, will more than make up for that over time. So I asked Mike if I could co-invest with him in a few deals and that's how it started. Feloni: You had a good run. Ferriss: I had a good run. The first one was not a good run. The first investment I made — I won't mention the name. But I invested — now keep in mind, I'm looking at 120K over two years, right? So the first investment, I want to say I put in — it's so stupid — I put in 50K in the very first investment, because I got so excited. This is one of the risks of being an angel investor who's a former entrepreneur, is you can sometimes get very easily excited. And Mike says — I remember Mike saying to me, "Don't you think 50K might be a little aggressive?" — given that my allocation for the year is supposed to be 60. And I was, like, "Oh man, but no, based on your description, based on this, this, and this, no, I'm so bullish," and it promptly just went sideways and became walking dead. Over time, as I started to learn, "All right, well now that I've overspent my budget, I need to figure out also how to become an adviser." And an adviser, for those who don't know, really just means that I am acting as a consigliere or consultant slash adviser, and instead of getting paid in cash, I get paid in equity. I get paid in a portion of the company over time. And so that — that then led to some very good decisions, and I had very lucky timing also. Because, say, 2008, 2009, there was less capital in the startup game, and that allowed me to invest in some great companies, and, like you mentioned, some of them — I mean, the Facebooks and Twitters and being an early adviser to Uber and then later Ali Baba, and I was the first adviser to Shopify, which had eight employees at the time and now has 2,500 to 3,000, and is a publicly traded company, and so on and so forth. So ultimately, the portfolio ended up being, I want to say, 60 or 70 companies, currently. A new chapter as a podcast star The Tim Ferriss Show Feloni: So, Tim, you've had a few books at this point, but whenever I mention your name to someone now, what typically comes up is the podcast, and this is something that you started a few years ago. The way you put it, it almost seems like it came up as a lark type of thing. Ferriss: Oh, it did. It's not just the way I put it — it totally was, dude. It totally did. Feloni: How did that happen? Ferriss: Well, after "The 4-Hour Chef," which was a very complex book, I was very burned out and wanted to take a break from anything that was writing-focused. And I was interviewed at the time on Joe Rogan's show, Marc Maron's "WTF," "Nerdist" with Chris Hardwick, which has since exploded into its own industry unto itself, and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it because I could be myself. I could curse if it came out, from Long Island and all, and there was very little censuring. A and B, the format was long enough that I could get into the details, I could dig into the nuances, and I didn't have to try to encapsulate everything about a 600-page book into 20 seconds of scripted time when the person I'm talking to is reading a teleprompter over my shoulder. And in those interviews I had so much fun, No. 1, and then, No. 2, they moved a lot of books. I was blown away by how many books these podcasts moved. It just completely made my jaw drop compared to a lot of other media. And I committed to six episodes to start. I felt like that would give me a certain critical mass, where I could develop new skills, maybe remove a few verbal ticks and decide and assess fairly whether I enjoyed it or not. So I committed to six episodes. First one was a softball with my buddy Kevin Rose. Didn't even have a name for the podcast at that point, and we got — or I got, I should say; I'm trying to use the royal "we," but it was me — I got sloppy drunk because I was nervous, I was really nervous to interview one of my best friends, partially because he was busting my balls the whole time, and after six episodes I decided to keep doing it. I was having a lot of fun. And now, 300 episodes or so later, I'm still going and it's become, like you mentioned, what almost anyone who comes up to me in the street mentions. Feloni: I've noticed in your podcasts, it seems to be a common thing that you interview people across all kinds of industries. You even have some maybe experimental episodes where you're talking about things like your morning routine or things like that. When I look at the past 10 years or so of your career, it seems that you — this a common theme — that you jump around among things. Do you get bored with stuff easily? Ferriss: Oh, I would say I get bored with things easily, but the jumping around is also a protective mechanism. So much like, I had mentioned diversifying my identity with content by going from "4-Hour Workweek" to "4-Hour Body," even though I'm still ... I still had interest in business stuff, but I wanted to establish the precedent of me exploring different subject areas with the same framework. The insertion of experimental episodes into the podcast, say, the "drunk dial" episode, would be a good example. So I decide, all right, what would this look like if it were easy? Well, I would put out a note on social. I'd say, "Hey, guys, fill out this Google form, give me your phone number or Skype handle, and I'm just going to sit down with some gin and soda and I'm going to start drinking and then I'm going to call the first 15 people or 20 people and you can ask me anything you want, and that's going to be a podcast episode." So it self-selects for an audience who's up for that type of experimentation. What it means to be Tim Ferriss "The Tim Ferriss Experiment" Feloni: I've heard you call yourself a dilettante before. Someone — Ferriss: Yeah. Feloni: Dabbling in a bunch of different things. And what is it that you specialize in? Ferriss: I specialize in pattern recognition and accelerated learning. So taking a subject that seems very complex or that can be presented in a very complex way, and distilling it down into the fewest number of moving pieces that really matter. So the 20% that gets you 80% of the results that you want. And then imparting that to other people. Feloni: So with that perspective, you've built up a good amount of success over the past 10 years, but something that I find interesting about you is that, more so than a lot of even entrepreneurs in tech, that you're really open about your failures, whether that was being turned down by publishers or your TV show being dropped or just a wide variety of things. Is that deliberate on your part? Is that as much for you as it is for your audience? Ferriss: It's very deliberate. I don't know if it's "for me" because it's painful. Feloni: Well, maybe coming to terms with the pain? Ferriss: No, no, I mean it's not really a cathartic exercise for me — I suppose it has that effect — but I talk about my failures because I think it's dishonest to only talk about your successes. It's so critical that people realize mistakes are part of the game. Unforced errors are part of the game and as soon as that becomes the norm or the expectation, people can persist when they inevitably flub or drop the ball. I've had a bunch of what people would consider failures, in TV, in books, in any domain that I've participated in, I've made huge mistakes, massive errors of judgment. And nonetheless, if you focus on acquiring skills and relationships — acquiring — developing skills and relationships, if that's your focus, over time, you will win. Feloni: Do you see yourself as a role model at this point? Ferriss: I ... no. "Role model" is ... I wouldn't call myself a role model. I would call myself a teacher, certainly. I think there are certain tool kits that I've acquired, or approaches that I've tested that people can emulate, certainly, and use to replicate results. I mean, that's what I do. But I wouldn't anticipate, nor really want anyone to look at me and say, "I want to be Tim Ferriss." No, that shouldn't be the goal, and trust me, I mean, I talk about a lot of my demons. Like, I don't think you want to sign up for that necessarily. I want to be the teacher who makes his students better than he was. I want to give people the tools and say, "OK, look, I made this shitty little birdhouse that people seem to be impressed by, but you can go build a Gothic cathedral if you want with the same set of tools, right?" That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea, and then send people on their way to have their own adventures. Feloni: Well, thank you so much, Tim. I really enjoyed talking to you. Ferriss: Yeah, likewise. NOW WATCH: The 60-minute morning routine that productivity expert Tim Ferriss swears by November 18, 2017 at 02:18PM

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The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim Ferriss reveals what he's learned after a difficult year of introspection, and how he built a passionate fanbase of millions

Tim Ferriss first found fame in 2007 with the massive bestseller "The 4-Hour Workweek."

His interview podcast, "The Tim Ferriss Show," has been downloaded nearly 200 million times.

His newest book, "Tribe of Mentors," is a collection of advice he gathered from some of the world's most successful people.

Ferriss explained how this year was a time of introspection and learning.

Tim Ferriss first found fame with his 2007 book "The 4-Hour Workweek." After taking a break from writing, in 2012, he became an accidental podcast star with "The Tim Ferriss Show," which is approaching 200 million downloads. He's an investor and self-described human guinea pig. He sat down for an interview with Business Insider senior reporter Richard Feloni for our podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

This past year hasn't been typical for him. He celebrated the 10th anniversary of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and then decided to leave his successful "4-Hour" brand behind him. He's out with a new book, "Tribe of Mentors," in which he collects advice from 140 successful people, a project that was as much for him as it was for his audience. Ferriss has spent the last year thinking a lot about his own life. He lost some friends, he got a lot of attention for talking about his struggle with depression in a viral TED Talk, and he turned 40.

On this episode of "Success! How I Did It," Ferriss spoke with Richard Feloni about all of that and more, including how wrestling shaped his childhood, the original title of "The 4-Hour Workweek," and why he hopes no one considers him a role model.

Listen to the episode: 

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, RadioPublic, or your favorite app. Check out previous episodes with:

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman

"Shark Tank" star and real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran

Former White House press secretary and Fox News host Dana Perino

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff

The following is a transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity. 

A year of reflection

Tim Ferriss: Turning 40 didn't, as a number, scare me, or throw me off, at all. I'm very comfortable being 40. But as a thought exercise, you know, I asked myself, "If this is the halfway point, if we're just looking at the actuarial tables, it's like, all right, if I'm at 50%, right, I'm halfway through this race called life, and when I hit the finish line, you're dead at 80, how might I want to rethink trajectory? How might I want to rethink over-planning versus under-planning? Even though I'm trying to improve my relationships with others, are they dependent on my relationship with myself? If so, how should I even conceptualize improving that, right? If it's never been part of my repertoire?

And all these questions sort of came to the surface, and, rather than try and go at it on my own, which has been my predisposition and my reflex for decades, I figured, why don't I just take these questions and, given the reach of the podcasts and books and everything else at this point, why don't I just reach out to 130 or 140 people and ask them all the same questions? People who are the best at what they do, in many, many dozens of different fields — and then just try to borrow? Why not do this the potentially easier way?

Rich Feloni: It seems an extension of what you've done that past 10 years. Even beginning with "The 4-Hour Workweek," which is dabbling in a bunch of different things and seeing what works and then sharing that with an audience. 

Ferriss: Yeah, it's exactly the same. I mean, really I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques. Then testing them on myself, and if I can replicate results, and then share those with, say, six to 12 friends, and they're able to replicate results, then fantastic, off to thousands or millions of people it goes.

Laying the foundation in childhood

Feloni: And did this constant love of learning anything and everything, did it start as a kid?

Ferriss: Yeah. My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents. Did not have a lot of money, and the one exception they made: "We always have a budget for books. So if you want to get a book, we will figure out a way to get the book." So what does that do to a child brain? It makes you excited to figure out ways to get books. And so we became fascinated at a very early age with books.

And I remember to this day this book called "Fishes of the World," I think it was, that I carried with me. This huge hardcover — I mean I was a little runt, I was a really small kid growing up, and it was this gigantic hardcover, beautifully illustrated book on marine biology, and I took it with me to school every day, because the playground was not a safe place for me. I was born premature, I was really small and got my ass kicked mercilessly up until about sixth grade. So I wouldn't go out to the playground. That was a danger zone. I would stay by the classroom and kind of sit on the step leading out to the playground, and I would read this book.

Feloni: Was being a small kid and someone picked on for his size — was that an impetus for getting involved in body experiments? As you say, you're a human guinea pig. Is that when it started?

Ferriss: It wasn't a deliberate decision to become Captain America or anything. I was really small and had a lot of health issues growing up. I mean, not compared to some people certainly, but I had a number full-body blood transfusions when I was kid. Premature, so I can actually — this is audio, most likely, so people can't see it — if you look here, Rich, on my wrist, it looks like a cigarette burn, and that's actually from being intubated. And then I have another one under my left lung, where my lung collapsed, where my blood was being oxygenated.

Nonetheless, so all of these various issues, and to make my parents' lives more difficult, really hyperactive. And some other mothers told my mom, "You should put him into something called 'kiddie wrestling,' because that'll drain his batteries, and then when he gets home he'll just fall asleep."

Wrestling is unique among sports because it's weight-class-based. So you could have the puny runt from Class A competing against the puny runt from Class B. So it's a situation which one of the puny runts can actually win at something. And my mom inserted me into kiddie wrestling, and I took to it, and that became my sport, until the very end of high school effectively. But the confidence built on the wrestling mat as a puny, little — God knows, like 40-pound kid — is where a lot of it started.

Feloni: I've heard you downplay your time in high school, like your time as a student and all of that. But you ended up at Princeton, which doesn't happen by accident.

Ferriss: Yeah. My brother and I were always told, maybe not in these words, but if you get really good grades, you can do whatever you want in life. In effect, that's your ticket.

And I transferred from a high school on Long Island to a high school in New Hampshire, which was a much better school called St. Paul's. Very well known — it's one of the older boarding schools in the US.

Feloni: "Dead Poets Society" type of thing?

Ferris: Very — feels like "Dead Poets Society." So you'd have seated meals, seated dinners a few nights a week, with suit and tie, and classes six days a week, chapel almost every day of the week, mandatory sports. And I was encouraged to go there — or to at least leave high school on Long Island — by teachers who could see me getting complacent. Like "All right, you think you're pretty good because you're a big fish in a small pond, but you should go somewhere else." Number one.

And then one of my friends — just one of my classmates, because very few people left where I grew up in Long Island, or relatively few people — and one of my friends had gone to a boarding school and came back and effectively was, like, "I've seen the promised land — you need to get the hell out of here," and so I was able to get support from my grandparents, and kind of extended family, got a few small scholarships, and go to St. Paul's. And St. Paul's really set the stage for everything else and really opened the door, or even the possibility, of even thinking about applying to a place like Princeton.

Finding himself in his 20s

Feloni: At Princeton you studied East Asian studies, and you took a break as well.

Ferriss: I took a year away from school, which was in the middle of my senior year. It was a very, very, dark, dark, dark time for me, due to a bunch of — just a conflagration of all sorts of heavy things hitting me at the same time.

And that is when I came close to sort of the precipice of total self-destruction. I don't want to belabor it here, because I've spoken about it at TED and people can certainly just search "Tim Ferriss suicide TED" and it'll pop right up.

During that time, I saw my classmates competing, because that's what they were good at. I mean, you take kids who go to a school like Princeton, they're used to competing, and they're used to being No. 1, so if something seems coveted, they will compete for it, whether or not they really want that thing. And in this case, the thing would be, say, a job at McKinsey or a job at Goldman Sachs.

And everyone was competing for these, and I ended realizing very clearly I did not want to do either of those things. And I felt very lost. So during that year I tried all sorts of things. I spent six months in China, mainland China, and then went to Taiwan, and just fell in love with Taiwan. So I had this dream of opening a gym chain in Taiwan and went pretty far down the line of trying to figure out all the details, this that and the other thing, meeting with gym owners throughout Taiwan, and ultimately you had to interact with, like, paying, in some cases, protection money and so on, to Triads, and organized crime, and it just got so involved, it was, like, "You know what, this is just a little bit above my pay grade — don't think I can handle this." So came back, ultimately rejoined school, and graduated a year later. Most of my friends had already graduated. I walked away with an illustrious degree in East Asian studies.

Feloni: And the foundation of your career over the past 10 years was "The 4-Hour Workweek." And key to that coming together was your experience with BrainQuicken, the first company that you started. And so, it's a young guy, and he's selling supplements out of his house. That sounds a little sketchy.

Ferriss: OK, all right — what's your question?

Feloni: I've seen you refer to it as, like, you jokingly refer to yourself as a drug dealer or something.

Ferriss: In fairness, I was actually neuroscience before East Asian Studies and had some of the wherewithal to determine what might make a good product, because as someone making 40,000 pretax in Silicon Valley, in those days, with roommates, and a hand-me-down minivan, did not have a whole lot of disposable income, but nonetheless was spending an absurdly high percentage of my take-home income on sports nutrition.

I was, like, "All right, I have some ideas of the pain points and needs of this market, and know what I would want to create if I had the budget for myself," and, which would in effect be what we ended up labeling a "neural accelerator." BrainQuicken was a real learning-on-the-job MBA. I mean, it was very, very difficult.

Achieving unexpected success and creating a brand

Feloni: So "The 4-Hour Workweek" comes out in 2007. It seemed like no one really expected that to be success, including yourself, right? Like, a massive success.

Ferriss: Nobody expected it. I mean, I had an initial print run of 10,000 copies, which isn't even partial national distribution. So for those who don't know, the premise of "The 4-Hour Workweek" — which, by the way, was initially titled "Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit" — is a collection of tactics and tools and case studies of people who have designed ideal lifestyles for themselves by thinking about this nonrenewable resource of time and how they want to spend their day-to-day, week-to-week, and then reverse-engineering that by building a business, a cash flow, or a career that allows for remote work and so on. So that's "The 4-Hour Workweek" and those are the basics, but nobody expected it to do anything.

Feloni: Yeah, and it led to this "4-Hour" brand essentially.

Ferriss: Yeah.

Feloni: "The 4-Hour Body," "The 4-Hour Chef."

Ferriss: Very accidental, but yeah.

Feloni: And I've seen you lately kind of be self-deprecating about it, like, "Oh, this makes me sound like an infomercial guy or something." Do you actually regret the title?

Ferriss: No, no.

Feloni: Would you have changed it?

Ferriss: No, no, no. Definitely not. No, I don't regret it at all, but, you know, there comes a point where all good things must come to an end. And in the beginning, you want to be pigeon-holed, in a sense, you want to be clearly defined in the very beginning. But past that point, and I did. You want to diversify your identity so you don't become a parrot who regurgitates the same party lines over and over again.

So in the beginning, "4-Hour" this, "4-Hour" that, fantastic. But right after "The 4-Hour Workweek," I was heavily advised by many people that I should do "The 3-Hour Workweek" or "The 4-Hour Workweek Revisited" or something along those lines.

I felt, if I didn't do something that was a complete left turn in a different field, I would forever be thought of as "The 4-Hour Workweek" business guy. Which is why I took the same approach and applied it to physical performance and sort of physical manipulation. And then with "Tools of Titans" retired the jersey of "4-Hour." And you know, who knows? Maybe it comes back at some point, but probably not.

Living the Silicon Valley investor life

Feloni: At what point did investing enter the picture? You had a public post that you essentially retired from it in 2015, but you had deals that — most any one of them — people would kill for. Uber, Facebook, Twitter.

Ferriss: Yeah.

Feloni: How did those happen?

Ferriss: Yeah, I've had a fortunate run. So in the case of angel investing, in 2007, "4-Hour Workweek" pops and suddenly it's a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and so on. I'm not so naive to think that I can just put lightning in a bottle and do that over and over and over and over again. I thought to myself, "Well, if this is really my moment, like the opportunity window, what might I do with this?" And around the same time, I was having lunches with Mike Maples.

Feloni: And Mike Maples is?

Ferriss: So Mike Maples, at the time, was a very successful angel investor, meaning he invested his own money in generally small-ish checks into very, very early-stage embryonic startups. He's now a founding partner of Floodgate, which is a successful venture-capital firm. And at the time, we would meet up for lunch or brunch at a place called Hobee's in the Bay Area, and we would very frequently talk about launch strategy or PR angles that his startups could use. In return, I would ask him about deal structure, about company selection. "Why did you choose this company instead of A, B, or C companies? What are the most important points in deal negotiation for, say, a seed round of financing?"

And over the span of a few months of asking him these questions, I had decided that, rather than go to Stanford Business School, what if I took $120,000 of my money, which I would have spent on Stanford Business School for two years at the time and instead created a real-world MBA for myself where I create the "Tim Ferriss Fund," in quotation marks, and invest $120,000 in startups over two years with the expectation that I'm going to lose all of that money. In other words, every startup will fail, but the relationships developed — that I develop and the skills that I develop, the knowledge that I acquire, will, and so forth and so on, will more than make up for that over time.

So I asked Mike if I could co-invest with him in a few deals and that's how it started.

Feloni: You had a good run.

Ferriss: I had a good run. The first one was not a good run. The first investment I made — I won't mention the name. But I invested — now keep in mind, I'm looking at 120K over two years, right? So the first investment, I want to say I put in — it's so stupid — I put in 50K in the very first investment, because I got so excited. This is one of the risks of being an angel investor who's a former entrepreneur, is you can sometimes get very easily excited. And Mike says — I remember Mike saying to me, "Don't you think 50K might be a little aggressive?" — given that my allocation for the year is supposed to be 60. And I was, like, "Oh man, but no, based on your description, based on this, this, and this, no, I'm so bullish," and it promptly just went sideways and became walking dead.

Over time, as I started to learn, "All right, well now that I've overspent my budget, I need to figure out also how to become an adviser." And an adviser, for those who don't know, really just means that I am acting as a consigliere or consultant slash adviser, and instead of getting paid in cash, I get paid in equity. I get paid in a portion of the company over time. And so that — that then led to some very good decisions, and I had very lucky timing also. Because, say, 2008, 2009, there was less capital in the startup game, and that allowed me to invest in some great companies, and, like you mentioned, some of them — I mean, the Facebooks and Twitters and being an early adviser to Uber and then later Ali Baba, and I was the first adviser to Shopify, which had eight employees at the time and now has 2,500 to 3,000, and is a publicly traded company, and so on and so forth. So ultimately, the portfolio ended up being, I want to say, 60 or 70 companies, currently.

A new chapter as a podcast star

Feloni: So, Tim, you've had a few books at this point, but whenever I mention your name to someone now, what typically comes up is the podcast, and this is something that you started a few years ago. The way you put it, it almost seems like it came up as a lark type of thing.

Ferriss: Oh, it did. It's not just the way I put it — it totally was, dude. It totally did.

Feloni: How did that happen?

Ferriss: Well, after "The 4-Hour Chef," which was a very complex book, I was very burned out and wanted to take a break from anything that was writing-focused. And I was interviewed at the time on Joe Rogan's show, Marc Maron's "WTF," "Nerdist" with Chris Hardwick, which has since exploded into its own industry unto itself, and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it because I could be myself. I could curse if it came out, from Long Island and all, and there was very little censuring. A and B, the format was long enough that I could get into the details, I could dig into the nuances, and I didn't have to try to encapsulate everything about a 600-page book into 20 seconds of scripted time when the person I'm talking to is reading a teleprompter over my shoulder.

And in those interviews I had so much fun, No. 1, and then, No. 2, they moved a lot of books. I was blown away by how many books these podcasts moved. It just completely made my jaw drop compared to a lot of other media.

And I committed to six episodes to start. I felt like that would give me a certain critical mass, where I could develop new skills, maybe remove a few verbal ticks and decide and assess fairly whether I enjoyed it or not. So I committed to six episodes. First one was a softball with my buddy Kevin Rose. Didn't even have a name for the podcast at that point, and we got — or I got, I should say; I'm trying to use the royal "we," but it was me — I got sloppy drunk because I was nervous, I was really nervous to interview one of my best friends, partially because he was busting my balls the whole time, and after six episodes I decided to keep doing it. I was having a lot of fun. And now, 300 episodes or so later, I'm still going and it's become, like you mentioned, what almost anyone who comes up to me in the street mentions.

Feloni: I've noticed in your podcasts, it seems to be a common thing that you interview people across all kinds of industries. You even have some maybe experimental episodes where you're talking about things like your morning routine or things like that. When I look at the past 10 years or so of your career, it seems that you — this a common theme — that you jump around among things. Do you get bored with stuff easily?

Ferriss: Oh, I would say I get bored with things easily, but the jumping around is also a protective mechanism. So much like, I had mentioned diversifying my identity with content by going from "4-Hour Workweek" to "4-Hour Body," even though I'm still ... I still had interest in business stuff, but I wanted to establish the precedent of me exploring different subject areas with the same framework. The insertion of experimental episodes into the podcast, say, the "drunk dial" episode, would be a good example. So I decide, all right, what would this look like if it were easy? Well, I would put out a note on social. I'd say, "Hey, guys, fill out this Google form, give me your phone number or Skype handle, and I'm just going to sit down with some gin and soda and I'm going to start drinking and then I'm going to call the first 15 people or 20 people and you can ask me anything you want, and that's going to be a podcast episode." So it self-selects for an audience who's up for that type of experimentation.

What it means to be Tim Ferriss

Feloni: I've heard you call yourself a dilettante before. Someone —

Ferriss: Yeah.

Feloni: Dabbling in a bunch of different things. And what is it that you specialize in?

Ferriss: I specialize in pattern recognition and accelerated learning. So taking a subject that seems very complex or that can be presented in a very complex way, and distilling it down into the fewest number of moving pieces that really matter. So the 20% that gets you 80% of the results that you want. And then imparting that to other people.

Feloni: So with that perspective, you've built up a good amount of success over the past 10 years, but something that I find interesting about you is that, more so than a lot of even entrepreneurs in tech, that you're really open about your failures, whether that was being turned down by publishers or your TV show being dropped or just a wide variety of things. Is that deliberate on your part? Is that as much for you as it is for your audience?

Ferriss: It's very deliberate. I don't know if it's "for me" because it's painful.

Feloni: Well, maybe coming to terms with the pain?

Ferriss: No, no, I mean it's not really a cathartic exercise for me — I suppose it has that effect — but I talk about my failures because I think it's dishonest to only talk about your successes. It's so critical that people realize mistakes are part of the game. Unforced errors are part of the game and as soon as that becomes the norm or the expectation, people can persist when they inevitably flub or drop the ball. I've had a bunch of what people would consider failures, in TV, in books, in any domain that I've participated in, I've made huge mistakes, massive errors of judgment. And nonetheless, if you focus on acquiring skills and relationships — acquiring — developing skills and relationships, if that's your focus, over time, you will win.

Feloni: Do you see yourself as a role model at this point?

Ferriss: I ... no. "Role model" is ... I wouldn't call myself a role model. I would call myself a teacher, certainly. I think there are certain tool kits that I've acquired, or approaches that I've tested that people can emulate, certainly, and use to replicate results. I mean, that's what I do. But I wouldn't anticipate, nor really want anyone to look at me and say, "I want to be Tim Ferriss." No, that shouldn't be the goal, and trust me, I mean, I talk about a lot of my demons. Like, I don't think you want to sign up for that necessarily.

I want to be the teacher who makes his students better than he was. I want to give people the tools and say, "OK, look, I made this shitty little birdhouse that people seem to be impressed by, but you can go build a Gothic cathedral if you want with the same set of tools, right?" That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea, and then send people on their way to have their own adventures.

Feloni: Well, thank you so much, Tim. I really enjoyed talking to you.

Ferriss: Yeah, likewise.

SEE ALSO: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman reveals what it was like building PayPal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and what it takes to make a $26.2 billion company

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The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim Ferriss reveals what he's learned after a difficult year of introspection, and how he built a passionate fanbase of millions

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Sarah Jacobs/Business Insider

Tim Ferriss first found fame in 2007 with the massive bestseller "The 4-Hour Workweek."

His interview podcast, "The Tim Ferriss Show," has been downloaded nearly 200 million times.

His newest book, "Tribe of Mentors," is a collection of advice he gathered from some of the world's most successful people.

Ferriss explained how this year was a time of introspection and learning.

Tim Ferriss first found fame with his 2007 book "The 4-Hour Workweek." After taking a break from writing, in 2012, he became an accidental podcast star with "The Tim Ferriss Show," which is approaching 200 million downloads. He's an investor and self-described human guinea pig. He sat down for an interview with Business Insider senior reporter Richard Feloni for our podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

This past year hasn't been typical for him. He celebrated the 10th anniversary of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and then decided to leave his successful "4-Hour" brand behind him. He's out with a new book, "Tribe of Mentors," in which he collects advice from 140 successful people, a project that was as much for him as it was for his audience. Ferriss has spent the last year thinking a lot about his own life. He lost some friends, he got a lot of attention for talking about his struggle with depression in a viral TED Talk, and he turned 40.

On this episode of "Success! How I Did It," Ferriss spoke with Richard Feloni about all of that and more, including how wrestling shaped his childhood, the original title of "The 4-Hour Workweek," and why he hopes no one considers him a role model.

Listen to the episode: 

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, RadioPublic, or your favorite app. Check out previous episodes with:

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman

"Shark Tank" star and real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran

Former White House press secretary and Fox News host Dana Perino

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff

The following is a transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity. 

A year of reflection

Andrew "Drew" Kelly

Tim Ferriss: Turning 40 didn't, as a number, scare me, or throw me off, at all. I'm very comfortable being 40. But as a thought exercise, you know, I asked myself, "If this is the halfway point, if we're just looking at the actuarial tables, it's like, all right, if I'm at 50%, right, I'm halfway through this race called life, and when I hit the finish line, you're dead at 80, how might I want to rethink trajectory? How might I want to rethink over-planning versus under-planning? Even though I'm trying to improve my relationships with others, are they dependent on my relationship with myself? If so, how should I even conceptualize improving that, right? If it's never been part of my repertoire?

And all these questions sort of came to the surface, and, rather than try and go at it on my own, which has been my predisposition and my reflex for decades, I figured, why don't I just take these questions and, given the reach of the podcasts and books and everything else at this point, why don't I just reach out to 130 or 140 people and ask them all the same questions? People who are the best at what they do, in many, many dozens of different fields — and then just try to borrow? Why not do this the potentially easier way?

Rich Feloni: It seems an extension of what you've done that past 10 years. Even beginning with "The 4-Hour Workweek," which is dabbling in a bunch of different things and seeing what works and then sharing that with an audience. 

Ferriss: Yeah, it's exactly the same. I mean, really I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques. Then testing them on myself, and if I can replicate results, and then share those with, say, six to 12 friends, and they're able to replicate results, then fantastic, off to thousands or millions of people it goes.

Laying the foundation in childhood

Courtesy of Tim Ferriss

Feloni: And did this constant love of learning anything and everything, did it start as a kid?

Ferriss: Yeah. My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents. Did not have a lot of money, and the one exception they made: "We always have a budget for books. So if you want to get a book, we will figure out a way to get the book." So what does that do to a child brain? It makes you excited to figure out ways to get books. And so we became fascinated at a very early age with books.

And I remember to this day this book called "Fishes of the World," I think it was, that I carried with me. This huge hardcover — I mean I was a little runt, I was a really small kid growing up, and it was this gigantic hardcover, beautifully illustrated book on marine biology, and I took it with me to school every day, because the playground was not a safe place for me. I was born premature, I was really small and got my ass kicked mercilessly up until about sixth grade. So I wouldn't go out to the playground. That was a danger zone. I would stay by the classroom and kind of sit on the step leading out to the playground, and I would read this book.

Feloni: Was being a small kid and someone picked on for his size — was that an impetus for getting involved in body experiments? As you say, you're a human guinea pig. Is that when it started?

Ferriss: It wasn't a deliberate decision to become Captain America or anything. I was really small and had a lot of health issues growing up. I mean, not compared to some people certainly, but I had a number full-body blood transfusions when I was kid. Premature, so I can actually — this is audio, most likely, so people can't see it — if you look here, Rich, on my wrist, it looks like a cigarette burn, and that's actually from being intubated. And then I have another one under my left lung, where my lung collapsed, where my blood was being oxygenated.

Nonetheless, so all of these various issues, and to make my parents' lives more difficult, really hyperactive. And some other mothers told my mom, "You should put him into something called 'kiddie wrestling,' because that'll drain his batteries, and then when he gets home he'll just fall asleep."

Wrestling is unique among sports because it's weight-class-based. So you could have the puny runt from Class A competing against the puny runt from Class B. So it's a situation which one of the puny runts can actually win at something. And my mom inserted me into kiddie wrestling, and I took to it, and that became my sport, until the very end of high school effectively. But the confidence built on the wrestling mat as a puny, little — God knows, like 40-pound kid — is where a lot of it started.

Feloni: I've heard you downplay your time in high school, like your time as a student and all of that. But you ended up at Princeton, which doesn't happen by accident.

Ferriss: Yeah. My brother and I were always told, maybe not in these words, but if you get really good grades, you can do whatever you want in life. In effect, that's your ticket.

And I transferred from a high school on Long Island to a high school in New Hampshire, which was a much better school called St. Paul's. Very well known — it's one of the older boarding schools in the US.

Feloni: "Dead Poets Society" type of thing?

Ferris: Very — feels like "Dead Poets Society." So you'd have seated meals, seated dinners a few nights a week, with suit and tie, and classes six days a week, chapel almost every day of the week, mandatory sports. And I was encouraged to go there — or to at least leave high school on Long Island — by teachers who could see me getting complacent. Like "All right, you think you're pretty good because you're a big fish in a small pond, but you should go somewhere else." Number one.

And then one of my friends — just one of my classmates, because very few people left where I grew up in Long Island, or relatively few people — and one of my friends had gone to a boarding school and came back and effectively was, like, "I've seen the promised land — you need to get the hell out of here," and so I was able to get support from my grandparents, and kind of extended family, got a few small scholarships, and go to St. Paul's. And St. Paul's really set the stage for everything else and really opened the door, or even the possibility, of even thinking about applying to a place like Princeton.

Finding himself in his 20s

Tim Ferriss/Flickr

Feloni: At Princeton you studied East Asian studies, and you took a break as well.

Ferriss: I took a year away from school, which was in the middle of my senior year. It was a very, very, dark, dark, dark time for me, due to a bunch of — just a conflagration of all sorts of heavy things hitting me at the same time.

And that is when I came close to sort of the precipice of total self-destruction. I don't want to belabor it here, because I've spoken about it at TED and people can certainly just search "Tim Ferriss suicide TED" and it'll pop right up.

During that time, I saw my classmates competing, because that's what they were good at. I mean, you take kids who go to a school like Princeton, they're used to competing, and they're used to being No. 1, so if something seems coveted, they will compete for it, whether or not they really want that thing. And in this case, the thing would be, say, a job at McKinsey or a job at Goldman Sachs.

And everyone was competing for these, and I ended realizing very clearly I did not want to do either of those things. And I felt very lost. So during that year I tried all sorts of things. I spent six months in China, mainland China, and then went to Taiwan, and just fell in love with Taiwan. So I had this dream of opening a gym chain in Taiwan and went pretty far down the line of trying to figure out all the details, this that and the other thing, meeting with gym owners throughout Taiwan, and ultimately you had to interact with, like, paying, in some cases, protection money and so on, to Triads, and organized crime, and it just got so involved, it was, like, "You know what, this is just a little bit above my pay grade — don't think I can handle this." So came back, ultimately rejoined school, and graduated a year later. Most of my friends had already graduated. I walked away with an illustrious degree in East Asian studies.

Feloni: And the foundation of your career over the past 10 years was "The 4-Hour Workweek." And key to that coming together was your experience with BrainQuicken, the first company that you started. And so, it's a young guy, and he's selling supplements out of his house. That sounds a little sketchy.

Ferriss: OK, all right — what's your question?

Feloni: I've seen you refer to it as, like, you jokingly refer to yourself as a drug dealer or something.

Ferriss: In fairness, I was actually neuroscience before East Asian Studies and had some of the wherewithal to determine what might make a good product, because as someone making 40,000 pretax in Silicon Valley, in those days, with roommates, and a hand-me-down minivan, did not have a whole lot of disposable income, but nonetheless was spending an absurdly high percentage of my take-home income on sports nutrition.

I was, like, "All right, I have some ideas of the pain points and needs of this market, and know what I would want to create if I had the budget for myself," and, which would in effect be what we ended up labeling a "neural accelerator." BrainQuicken was a real learning-on-the-job MBA. I mean, it was very, very difficult.

Achieving unexpected success and creating a brand

TED

Feloni: So "The 4-Hour Workweek" comes out in 2007. It seemed like no one really expected that to be success, including yourself, right? Like, a massive success.

Ferriss: Nobody expected it. I mean, I had an initial print run of 10,000 copies, which isn't even partial national distribution. So for those who don't know, the premise of "The 4-Hour Workweek" — which, by the way, was initially titled "Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit" — is a collection of tactics and tools and case studies of people who have designed ideal lifestyles for themselves by thinking about this nonrenewable resource of time and how they want to spend their day-to-day, week-to-week, and then reverse-engineering that by building a business, a cash flow, or a career that allows for remote work and so on. So that's "The 4-Hour Workweek" and those are the basics, but nobody expected it to do anything.

Feloni: Yeah, and it led to this "4-Hour" brand essentially.

Ferriss: Yeah.

Feloni: "The 4-Hour Body," "The 4-Hour Chef."

Ferriss: Very accidental, but yeah.

Feloni: And I've seen you lately kind of be self-deprecating about it, like, "Oh, this makes me sound like an infomercial guy or something." Do you actually regret the title?

Ferriss: No, no.

Feloni: Would you have changed it?

Ferriss: No, no, no. Definitely not. No, I don't regret it at all, but, you know, there comes a point where all good things must come to an end. And in the beginning, you want to be pigeon-holed, in a sense, you want to be clearly defined in the very beginning. But past that point, and I did. You want to diversify your identity so you don't become a parrot who regurgitates the same party lines over and over again.

So in the beginning, "4-Hour" this, "4-Hour" that, fantastic. But right after "The 4-Hour Workweek," I was heavily advised by many people that I should do "The 3-Hour Workweek" or "The 4-Hour Workweek Revisited" or something along those lines.

I felt, if I didn't do something that was a complete left turn in a different field, I would forever be thought of as "The 4-Hour Workweek" business guy. Which is why I took the same approach and applied it to physical performance and sort of physical manipulation. And then with "Tools of Titans" retired the jersey of "4-Hour." And you know, who knows? Maybe it comes back at some point, but probably not.

Living the Silicon Valley investor life

Garrett Camp via Tim Ferriss/Flickr

Feloni: At what point did investing enter the picture? You had a public post that you essentially retired from it in 2015, but you had deals that — most any one of them — people would kill for. Uber, Facebook, Twitter.

Ferriss: Yeah.

Feloni: How did those happen?

Ferriss: Yeah, I've had a fortunate run. So in the case of angel investing, in 2007, "4-Hour Workweek" pops and suddenly it's a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and so on. I'm not so naive to think that I can just put lightning in a bottle and do that over and over and over and over again. I thought to myself, "Well, if this is really my moment, like the opportunity window, what might I do with this?" And around the same time, I was having lunches with Mike Maples.

Feloni: And Mike Maples is?

Ferriss: So Mike Maples, at the time, was a very successful angel investor, meaning he invested his own money in generally small-ish checks into very, very early-stage embryonic startups. He's now a founding partner of Floodgate, which is a successful venture-capital firm. And at the time, we would meet up for lunch or brunch at a place called Hobee's in the Bay Area, and we would very frequently talk about launch strategy or PR angles that his startups could use. In return, I would ask him about deal structure, about company selection. "Why did you choose this company instead of A, B, or C companies? What are the most important points in deal negotiation for, say, a seed round of financing?"

And over the span of a few months of asking him these questions, I had decided that, rather than go to Stanford Business School, what if I took $120,000 of my money, which I would have spent on Stanford Business School for two years at the time and instead created a real-world MBA for myself where I create the "Tim Ferriss Fund," in quotation marks, and invest $120,000 in startups over two years with the expectation that I'm going to lose all of that money. In other words, every startup will fail, but the relationships developed — that I develop and the skills that I develop, the knowledge that I acquire, will, and so forth and so on, will more than make up for that over time.

So I asked Mike if I could co-invest with him in a few deals and that's how it started.

Feloni: You had a good run.

Ferriss: I had a good run. The first one was not a good run. The first investment I made — I won't mention the name. But I invested — now keep in mind, I'm looking at 120K over two years, right? So the first investment, I want to say I put in — it's so stupid — I put in 50K in the very first investment, because I got so excited. This is one of the risks of being an angel investor who's a former entrepreneur, is you can sometimes get very easily excited. And Mike says — I remember Mike saying to me, "Don't you think 50K might be a little aggressive?" — given that my allocation for the year is supposed to be 60. And I was, like, "Oh man, but no, based on your description, based on this, this, and this, no, I'm so bullish," and it promptly just went sideways and became walking dead.

Over time, as I started to learn, "All right, well now that I've overspent my budget, I need to figure out also how to become an adviser." And an adviser, for those who don't know, really just means that I am acting as a consigliere or consultant slash adviser, and instead of getting paid in cash, I get paid in equity. I get paid in a portion of the company over time. And so that — that then led to some very good decisions, and I had very lucky timing also. Because, say, 2008, 2009, there was less capital in the startup game, and that allowed me to invest in some great companies, and, like you mentioned, some of them — I mean, the Facebooks and Twitters and being an early adviser to Uber and then later Ali Baba, and I was the first adviser to Shopify, which had eight employees at the time and now has 2,500 to 3,000, and is a publicly traded company, and so on and so forth. So ultimately, the portfolio ended up being, I want to say, 60 or 70 companies, currently.

A new chapter as a podcast star

The Tim Ferriss Show

Feloni: So, Tim, you've had a few books at this point, but whenever I mention your name to someone now, what typically comes up is the podcast, and this is something that you started a few years ago. The way you put it, it almost seems like it came up as a lark type of thing.

Ferriss: Oh, it did. It's not just the way I put it — it totally was, dude. It totally did.

Feloni: How did that happen?

Ferriss: Well, after "The 4-Hour Chef," which was a very complex book, I was very burned out and wanted to take a break from anything that was writing-focused. And I was interviewed at the time on Joe Rogan's show, Marc Maron's "WTF," "Nerdist" with Chris Hardwick, which has since exploded into its own industry unto itself, and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it because I could be myself. I could curse if it came out, from Long Island and all, and there was very little censuring. A and B, the format was long enough that I could get into the details, I could dig into the nuances, and I didn't have to try to encapsulate everything about a 600-page book into 20 seconds of scripted time when the person I'm talking to is reading a teleprompter over my shoulder.

And in those interviews I had so much fun, No. 1, and then, No. 2, they moved a lot of books. I was blown away by how many books these podcasts moved. It just completely made my jaw drop compared to a lot of other media.

And I committed to six episodes to start. I felt like that would give me a certain critical mass, where I could develop new skills, maybe remove a few verbal ticks and decide and assess fairly whether I enjoyed it or not. So I committed to six episodes. First one was a softball with my buddy Kevin Rose. Didn't even have a name for the podcast at that point, and we got — or I got, I should say; I'm trying to use the royal "we," but it was me — I got sloppy drunk because I was nervous, I was really nervous to interview one of my best friends, partially because he was busting my balls the whole time, and after six episodes I decided to keep doing it. I was having a lot of fun. And now, 300 episodes or so later, I'm still going and it's become, like you mentioned, what almost anyone who comes up to me in the street mentions.

Feloni: I've noticed in your podcasts, it seems to be a common thing that you interview people across all kinds of industries. You even have some maybe experimental episodes where you're talking about things like your morning routine or things like that. When I look at the past 10 years or so of your career, it seems that you — this a common theme — that you jump around among things. Do you get bored with stuff easily?

Ferriss: Oh, I would say I get bored with things easily, but the jumping around is also a protective mechanism. So much like, I had mentioned diversifying my identity with content by going from "4-Hour Workweek" to "4-Hour Body," even though I'm still ... I still had interest in business stuff, but I wanted to establish the precedent of me exploring different subject areas with the same framework. The insertion of experimental episodes into the podcast, say, the "drunk dial" episode, would be a good example. So I decide, all right, what would this look like if it were easy? Well, I would put out a note on social. I'd say, "Hey, guys, fill out this Google form, give me your phone number or Skype handle, and I'm just going to sit down with some gin and soda and I'm going to start drinking and then I'm going to call the first 15 people or 20 people and you can ask me anything you want, and that's going to be a podcast episode." So it self-selects for an audience who's up for that type of experimentation.

What it means to be Tim Ferriss

"The Tim Ferriss Experiment"

Feloni: I've heard you call yourself a dilettante before. Someone —

Ferriss: Yeah.

Feloni: Dabbling in a bunch of different things. And what is it that you specialize in?

Ferriss: I specialize in pattern recognition and accelerated learning. So taking a subject that seems very complex or that can be presented in a very complex way, and distilling it down into the fewest number of moving pieces that really matter. So the 20% that gets you 80% of the results that you want. And then imparting that to other people.

Feloni: So with that perspective, you've built up a good amount of success over the past 10 years, but something that I find interesting about you is that, more so than a lot of even entrepreneurs in tech, that you're really open about your failures, whether that was being turned down by publishers or your TV show being dropped or just a wide variety of things. Is that deliberate on your part? Is that as much for you as it is for your audience?

Ferriss: It's very deliberate. I don't know if it's "for me" because it's painful.

Feloni: Well, maybe coming to terms with the pain?

Ferriss: No, no, I mean it's not really a cathartic exercise for me — I suppose it has that effect — but I talk about my failures because I think it's dishonest to only talk about your successes. It's so critical that people realize mistakes are part of the game. Unforced errors are part of the game and as soon as that becomes the norm or the expectation, people can persist when they inevitably flub or drop the ball. I've had a bunch of what people would consider failures, in TV, in books, in any domain that I've participated in, I've made huge mistakes, massive errors of judgment. And nonetheless, if you focus on acquiring skills and relationships — acquiring — developing skills and relationships, if that's your focus, over time, you will win.

Feloni: Do you see yourself as a role model at this point?

Ferriss: I ... no. "Role model" is ... I wouldn't call myself a role model. I would call myself a teacher, certainly. I think there are certain tool kits that I've acquired, or approaches that I've tested that people can emulate, certainly, and use to replicate results. I mean, that's what I do. But I wouldn't anticipate, nor really want anyone to look at me and say, "I want to be Tim Ferriss." No, that shouldn't be the goal, and trust me, I mean, I talk about a lot of my demons. Like, I don't think you want to sign up for that necessarily.

I want to be the teacher who makes his students better than he was. I want to give people the tools and say, "OK, look, I made this shitty little birdhouse that people seem to be impressed by, but you can go build a Gothic cathedral if you want with the same set of tools, right?" That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea, and then send people on their way to have their own adventures.

Feloni: Well, thank you so much, Tim. I really enjoyed talking to you.

Ferriss: Yeah, likewise.

NOW WATCH: The 60-minute morning routine that productivity expert Tim Ferriss swears by

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Quiet and Loud, at -16 LUFS

One of the great tool of cinema is “dynamics.” Some scenes are loud, some are quiet, and the contrast makes the story world feel even bigger.

This is a harder to do in a modern audio drama. After all, audio dramas are very rarely listened to in a quiet room over a nice sounding sound system. The “best” listening experience for your typical audience member is going to be over a pair of headphones while they clean their house, and often people listen while driving in a noisy car.

If you decide “Screw those people who don’t listen in quiet places, I’m gonna mix it so it sounds best!” and create quiet parts and loud parts, I have bad news for you: Your audience is inches away from the volume control. They’ll likely turn it up and down on their own, keeping it at their own personal sweet spot as it plays, getting a little annoyed every time they do.

But, still. Dynamics is a powerful tool. It’s a shame to walk away from it.

Well, luckily, I have a theory.

Sounding Loud and Sounding Quiet

In our everyday lives, we spend time in quiet places, and we spend time in louder places. Unless the sound is outside of a certain range--unless it’s exceptionally quiet, or painfully loud--we don’t notice these volume changes. When we talk in these different places, we naturally raise the volume of our voice to be heard by the people we are talking to, or lower it so we don’t disturb the people we aren’t talking to it. This is done by pure instinct.

So Note #1: In our lives, the volume of the world changes from place to place, and our ears automatically adjust.

Note #2: When we change the volume of our voice, it’s not just the volume that changes, but also the *quality* of our voice.

This is easiest to see at the extreme ends of our voices, with whispering and screaming. You can turn up the volume on a recording of a whisper, and it’ll still sound quiet, and a scream will always sound like a scream, no matter the final output level. This also applies to more normal ranges of speech. We speak differently on busy street corner than we do in our living room.

Which brings us to Note #3: No matter the level of the final piece, the volume your actors use when recording will essentially calibrate the listeners and tell them how loud other sounds are. So if an actor is yelling at the top of their lungs, but the club music is drowning them out, the listener will understand that the club music is fucking loud. If the characters are talking in hushed voices, the scene will feel quiet to the audience, even if you’re hitting -12LUFS.

But we have to be reasonable, here. If the actor is whispering, but is still audible over the loud club music, it’ll sound canned.  The trick to seamlessly adding a noisy background is to make sure the actors raise their volume to the appropriate level when recording. In fact, this is one of the spots where a lot of audio dramas get into trouble...the actors speak at a normal volume in a noisy airplane, and it just doesn’t match. (This is also one of the dangers of recording actors remotely: they each read at a different volume, so their conversation doesn’t match.)

But the big take away here: you can make your piece feel loud and feel quiet, even if the final mix is all at roughly the same level.

Dynamics Are a Story Choice

While the majority of this article is going to be about production techniques, it really begins in the script. A scene that’s set in the middle of the night wants to be quiet. A scene that’s set in a night club wants to be loud. More to the point, if all of your settings are in similar places, your piece is going to want to be at the same volume.

If you’re going to embrace dynamics, you need to write them in. Consider changing the setting of a scene to create more contrast with the previous scene. Design the drama in a way where characters will need to be quiet for some parts, and loud for others.

Recording Loud Scenes

Sorry to belabor the point, but the key to dynamics is in the actors’ performances. To make a scene sound loud, the actors need to speak loudly, and the background ambience needs match in both quality and in the mix.

In my experience, it is very hard for an actor to speak louder than the environment. If you are recording in a quiet room, they tend to trail off to quieter level. Often the actor will be so concerned about their volume, it will hurt their performance. Other times, one actor will maintain and the other drops off, making the conversation feel very unnatural.

So a couple tricks.

Record on location. If it’s a scene on a busy street, go out on a street and record it. The actors will naturally adjust their pitch, and will even interact with the environment (when the traffic gets louder, they’ll talk louder). Use a shotgun mic to reduce the amount of ambience, if needed. And make sure to record room tone/ambience. This only works where the noise is steady and constant, like freeway traffic. It won’t work with music.

Bring a recording of what the intended space will sound like, and play that for the actors before recording. It sounds goofy, but it really helps. At the very least, it’ll help convince the cast that you aren’t insane when you remind them to keep the volume up.

Have the actors sit further apart from each other than they normally would. For instance, if it’s two people sitting at a table in a noisy club, have them move to opposite sides of the room and talk to each other. They’ll naturally raise their voices to make themselves heard.

Yell at the actors. More precisely, raise your voice to the volume you want before beginning a take. “OKAY, THIS IS YOUR VOLUME. SCENE 4, TAKE 2. AND...ACTION!” The talent will usually bend their voice to match yours, at least at first.

Shorten long takes. As we said, people naturally adjust their volume to their environment, and an actor may gradually bring their voice back to the normal range over the course of a scene. Break the scene up into smaller pieces, if you need to, AND KEEP TALKING LIKE THIS.

Give the actors earplugs or earmuffs. I haven’t actually tried this, but I’m 95% sure it would work great.

Most importantly, whoever is directing/producing needs be aware of this choice, and to not give up on it. It can be a struggle, but I think it’s worth it in the end.

Recording Quiet Scenes

It’s a lot easier to “bring your voice down” than it is to talk loudly, and your actors will probably do it easily. But quiet scenes have their own difficulties. Specifically:

Silence is a myth. It doesn’t exist.

If you go into a very quiet space, you’ll still hear something. Maybe the ventilation system. Maybe your breath. Your heartbeat. A slight ringing in your ears from that absurdly loud concert you went to years ago (Too Much Joy at the 9:30 Club and it was totally worth it). If you put pure silence into your audio drama, you aren’t telling the audience that it’s quiet, you’re telling them that you, the storyteller, have taken a break from the story.

So while your actors will have an easier time talking quietly, to make it feel quiet, you actually need to add the sounds you only hear when it’s quiet. Wind blowing. Breath. A clock ticking. Footsteps, which are usually problematic, can actually work better in a very quiet scene.

Recording very quiet sounds can be difficult. Unless you are using very expensive equipment, it’s hard to get levels above the noise of your recorder. Bringing the mic close to, say, the clock you want to record, may give you better levels, but may also bring out the mechanical sounds of the clock that you wouldn’t hear in the room. And the quiet nature of the scene means that imperfections in the recording can stick out more.

Plugins can really help, here. A noise-reducing plugin (such as Izotope’s Dialog De-noiser) can be magic. “Convolution Reverb” is kind of plugin that uses reverb impulses to recreate a physical space (such as Altiverb, or Reaper’s ReaVerb), and these can help more than adding a more traditional reverb effect. Adding a subtle layer of tape-hiss can also help, believe it or not.

Using Dynamics to Create Motion

One of my favorite uses of dynamics is *inside* of a scene. Remember how people generally adjust their speaking volume to be just loud enough to be heard? By having your actors change the volume of their speech, you can create movement in the scene without narration. Consider:

[Andy enters the room] Andy: Bob! How are you? Bob: Andy! It’s been forever. Andy: You look terrible, Bob.

If you have Andy and Bob raise their voices at the beginning, like they are talking across the room, the audience will understand they are far apart. If they lower their voice over the first few lines, the audience will know that have come together. If Andy whispers “You look terrible, Bob,” the audience will know that Andy has moved very, very close to Bob.

And now, you have one of film’s most powerful tools at your disposal: Blocking. As the drama in a scene unfolds, the characters can physically move to reflect the story, or perhaps counterpoint the story. In the example above, if Andy is whispering “You look terrible,” it’s become a character moment--Andy and Bob apparently aren’t close, and Andy is invading Bob’s personal space.

If Andy quietly professes his love for Bob, and Bob is moving to the other side of the room as he responds, we might understand that Bob doesn’t return that love, even if he says he does.

To me, that is the true power of dynamics in audio drama. It’s a way to add subtext to a highly restrictive medium.

One Last Time: It’s Not about Output Levels

If we get philosophical about it, dynamics is not about volume at all. It’s about people interacting with the world, trying to make themselves heard in a noisy environment. People trying to be just loud enough to get what they want.

One of my goals in telling any story is to make the audience feel like the story exists in a larger world, without boring them with exposition. There are a ton of techniques to help this happen. Have things happen “off screen.” Have characters with motivations that aren’t on the nose of the plot. Start scenes in the middle, not at the beginning.

Varying the dynamics is another way to do this.

See, when you start making your character change how they speak, you are forced into paying attention to the things the audience may not consciously notice, but that they will feel. It’s no longer “restaurant ambience,” but “a quiet restaurant where waiters almost whisper,” or “a crowded, noisy sports bar.”

It’s not a particularly complicated concept. It’s not that hard to implement. But the impact it can have on a piece can feel like magic.

#audiodrama #audio drama #podcasting