#603: In Case You Missed It: May 2022 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap. of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place. So you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together, and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we

Press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to Tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up? Edward O. Thorpe

Edward was one of the world's best blackjack players and investors. And his hedge funds were profitable every year. For twenty nine years. He is the author of Beat the dealer.

Beat the market. And A man for all markets. From Las Vegas to Wall Street. How I beat the dealer.

And the market. Yeah, I wanna take a step back just for for people who are listening. And say that. There are many reasons that I wanted to have this conversation with you and It is not specifically related to

to Gambling in the sense that what most There there are many things that interest me about your life and your thinking. And my hope is that for people listening They get a window into at least two things. One would be Your methods of thinking frames more.

works for thinking, how you think about thinking, and then also Your personal approach to health. and fitness and because as people may have picked up with some of the references. Could you tell everyone listening what your age is as we speak today?

I'm uh eighty nine. And for those people who can't see video You look like you're in your sixties. And I am just beyond excited to to hop right into that. So we're gonna jump around quite a bit. We won't do this exactly chronologically, but

Could you Perhaps describe Your approach. Two Health and fitness and you could tackle that.

starting wherever you like. Is it just that you you were given the right parents and out of the box have tremendous genetics? Is there more to it? How would you Begin to unpack this. I kind of wandered into health and saidn't spy. accident initially. Just like I wandered into Blackjack and Roulette. I'm curious and always looking for things to understand.

I like the idea of self improvement too. So I was walking. behind the student co op one night when I was about twenty. I heard a bunch of clanking. I look down in the basement.

And there were some uh fairly burly guys down there. Pumping iron. And I walked in and I said, You know, this is This is a waste of time. This is ridiculous.

I'll bet you a milkshake. That if you work out With us for a year. Just One hour.

An evening. Three evenings a week. You'll double your strengths. Yeah. A set of exercise that they uh

Describe. So I said, I don't believe it. Let's try it. So I went down and uh the four exercises were The squad. With a barbell on a rack.

The military overhead press. The bench press. And uh Deadlift. Wasn't that left, it was something else. I forgot the fourth one at the moment, but I'll think of it.

Yeah, clean and jerk, maybe, who knows? Or Bent Row. It was nothing wrong those lines. But a compound exercise like like the others. Yeah. So there was a fourth exercise. So anyhow. What happened was

I was a uh I wouldn't say ninety eight pound weekly. But maybe uh A hundred and fifty pound weekly. And at the end of a year I could uh military press one hundred and eighty five.

Which uh was At least double what I started with. I could bench press. Three seventy five. I could do fifteen at uh

three twenty five. Um I could Yeah, I could squat with three seventy five.

I could do so. Forget what the other one was. Wish I could remember it. In any case. I was astounded that all this uh came to pass.

So maybe pay attention to uh Strength at least. And some time went by. And I a little swimming'cause I got interested in scuba diving. Then uh

One day in my Thirties I was jogging along the beach with my uh Brother in law. Yeah. He said, Let's go for a little jog. I went for about a quarter mile and I was gasping.

I was thirty five then I remember. I said, This is awful. I'm I'm in terrible shape. I have to do something about this. So they had uh book. On aerobics by somebody named Ken Cooper. Who has a had a lab down in Texas and started

In large part the aerobics a revolution that uh swept the country. So I started keeping track of his points. He gave you points for uh various degrees of aerobic effort. I think if you did a mile in Between twelve and fifteen minutes you got one point and

You did between. Why ten and a half and twelve you got two points. And so forth. So I started trying to run a mile a day and I did that. Well, I ran a mile every Saturday to start with.

And then One Saturday I decided to try a little further, so I ran two. And then three. And then I said I'll tr I'll try a ten mile race. I got under a ten mile race, which was uh kinda foolish.

Well I finished and I did I did reasonably well. So then I said I'll try a marathon. So then I got into marathon running. And I really like that. I did that for about uh twenty years until I uh hurt my back weightlifting. All my uh bad events have been from pushing myself athletically. So hurting my back was uh probably the worst thing.

It needed a disc, so I had to stop. Had to stop heavy pounding, heavy running. But twenty years of uh road running. Well, more than that, maybe twenty five years and marathon. Gave me I think a very good

Bass. For going forward. And so now I Do things like uh walk about. Three miles.

Three or four times a week. And I spent about Two days in the gym. Doing stretching and uh Strength exercising.

core strengthening and so on. Lot of emphasis on core because of my back, which is just fine now. I was just gonna ask how your approach seems like it has evolved and changed over time. Say After fifty years of age or In the last.

Say forty years or so, are there any particular changes that you made in addition to the core? strengthening to support the back that you think have Contributed to your Longevity. I've evolved. I try to listen to my body.

So I do what I enjoy. And The rule I started to follow was some is better than none. And more up to a point is better than less.

So there's there's no excuse. I mean If you tell yourself, gee, I'm not gonna do this because I can't do the whole program. That's a big mistake. Just start doing it. Now I find that If you start doing it.

And you get used to it. You find more and more things that you kinda like that you can build on? And then you just keep getting better at it. I was probably in my best shape at around uh Fifty five to sixty five because of all this.

That is inspiring. I am uh just about to turn forty five and even Amongst my It's just a age cohort. It's very common for me to see people giving up even in their 40s and blaming it on age. But with you sitting in front of me,

describing your trajectory and uh sort of adaptive habits. I feel like those those excuses don't hold a whole lot of weight. One thing that's pretty neat is uh Racewalking. I did that for a while.

And that's something that is uh lower impact than running. But you can get the same kind of aerobic work out. So that's something I uh direct people towards. What does your strength training look like? Now.

Or over the last few decades. Well it's as I get older, it's Declines. I get weaker. And it gets a little harder to do things.

Yeah. I feel a little tired where I can't do as many uh Reps or sets of things. So I have a mix of things that I do now. I will do

Squats. Usually now just body weight. And I try to I'll do dumbbell squats. Or

Lunges with a lot of emphasis on One leg and then shift and do a lot a lot of uh Weight on the other leg. Do pull ups. I think the best I've done recently was not very much is uh four underhand pull ups.

I'm too overhandful of Ten years ago I could do a dozen of each. Well I do A lot of back exercises regularly. On the map.

And That's very helpful for keeping my back in shape and keeping my core. In pretty good condition. Next up Morgan Fallon

A nine time Emmy nominated executive producer. Director. and cinematographer. Morgan shot, directed, and produced Throughout the one hundred and three episode run of the series.

Anthony Bourdain Parts unknown So let's talk about different types of high standards. Could you elaborate on

Tony's particular species of high standards. And if you have any funny stories, that's always great. But you know, any any stories that come to mind are also super helpful. And just so you know where this is going, I'm wondering like how it contrasts with say A Michael Mann. Or I don't think you've had experience with like James Cameron, but like James Cameron, another person is really famous for having extremely high standards.

And uh You know, where the line is between being like brutally direct And turning into something else. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'd love to explore that'cause this is something I struggle with also.

So speaking at the very high end, you were speaking about the Michael Mann's the James Cameron so the level of expectation is Never achievable. It's never good enough. They do not have a level where it's good enough. It can always be better. You have to be that way.

Yes, they are assholes. I will say it straight up. Michael Mann is an asshole. And he's known that way in the industry. But he has to be. That is the only way that you get that caliber of project done. You want to get through a Titanic. You are going to have to be an asshole. A hundred percent. And the same is true in high caliber kitchens. You wanna run a high caliber kitchen?

There is only one way to do it and you are not friends with your crew. You are in charge and it's your responsibility. And and I think that Tony Tony approached it from that perspective, at least initially. He had Extremely high expectations that I think were based on his history of knowing how to run an effective kitchen.

And at the same time. He had all kinds of his own neuroses and stuff that bled into that. And you see it in Roadrunner. I actually one of the parts I really liked was when he talks about Hey, I'm not gonna stop for the cameras. You guys learn how to get fast. You get fast, I do what I do.

And that was I love that. Because I could do it. I was fast and I loved working fast like that. So yeah, super high standards. With Tony though, different than like Michael and James Cameron. And I and I have not worked with James Cameron. I know a number of people who have though. I don't think you're ever gonna get that moment with Michael or with someone like Michael Mann or someone like James Cameron where you're like Sitting down and drinking beers with them out in the desert and talking about like life and things that really mean something. And like with Tony, you did. And that was the difference. He was actually he was a friend. And a very, very important friend who I miss every single day.

He was not Those guys. He wasn't an asshole. He could be an asshole. You could be an asshole all the time. It could be incredibly frustrating to work with. But there was something under it. There was something very loving. there. There was something very caring. And once you were kind of

In his sphere, he really did care about people. So from that perspective, it was different. From the work perspective, though, he wasn't gonna mince words in the same way that he wasn't gonna mince words when a dish isn't right in the kitchen. Like you can't Yeah, it doesn't work that way. Unless you want twenty fucking risotto sent back. You better get the first one right. And when someone fucks it up, you better let them know that they fucked it up big time right now. immediately and correct the problem.

And that was a lot of the process with Tony in post for sure. In the field, it was more like things that were cumbersome or inconvenience Tony, he didn't like messiness, he didn't like sitting around and like you know that When shit goes south on a crew, I mean, my God, we just look like a bunch of chickens with our heads cut off running around trying to make shit happen or trying to make shit work. And there's a lot of reasons that that can happen, you know. He didn't like any of that. And we'd you'd hear about unfucking yourself quite a bit in those moments. But when it came to posts, like That's a much more calculated thing. And like I would send him rough cuts, and everyone has been through this. I would send him rough cuts where

From the very beginning, he's like What Possible. reason do you have for presenting me with

This piece of garbage I didn't work so hard. Dot dot dot. In full caps, you didn't work so hard. To have your work flush down the toilet. By this. Asshole editor.

And you're like oh Okay. Are we gonna like are we gonna go in a constructive direction? Like what do you you know But he would. And that's the th that was the thing about him is that The good ones

Are right. You know Michael Mann as much of an asshole as he was to people, like You'd have to kinda be like, Well, he's right though. You know? He's right. He knows. And he's right. He's not wrong.

Ninety percent of the time he was he was right. And it wasn't up to the standards. What was cool about Tony is that then he would go on and work the material. You would start reforming it, you'd start working with him, he'd give constructive notes. And that's something that I tell people or try to explain to people. And I think that people should know about him. And something I do uh, you know, kind of wish they had said in Roadrunner Two. Tony was a you know, he's like you go on his Wikipedia and it's like celebrity chef and it's like Yeah, that's not how I think of him. And he wasn't that great of a chef.

Also just that label doesn't I and I didn't know him at all, but the the label doesn't make any sense. Sounds so hollow to me given the breadth of what he did. Yeah, totally. Right. A hundred percent. To me, what he was more than anything else within my sphere of working with him was he was a Absolutely.

Incredible television producer. And he understood story. He understood story structure. He understood Cinematography. He understood using the tools of film to make something. that was cinematic. Even though we were on you know making our little show on T V it was like It always wanted to be a feature film. And so we were using our limited resources to get as close to that benchmark as possible.

It should look beautiful. The framing should be great. The lighting should be great. The music needs to be great. The editing, the pace, the build up, the way that you present subjects, you know, all of that stuff needs to be like at the highest level. And that's what people are seeing. I I think when they respond to the show and the kind of response that the show has gotten, which is really incredible. They're seeing a couple things. Authenticity. 'Cause we never did shit twice. We never faked anything. That's all real. Everything you see is real. We didn't set up shots.

We didn't call cut. We didn't call action. We got fast. We did what he told us to do. We got fast. So you see authenticity and you see just a very, very high level of production value. Given

our resources and I think it's something that constantly want to point out to people is like, look at the weight classes that we were punching in. We were way out of our group. We're going out on shows where we're shooting for seven days in the field. We had a

Three thousand dollar External equipment rental budget. And we're getting cinematography nominations. My last cinematography nomination was up against Free Solo. It was up against free soul. We're punching way out of our class. And that was because of the very high standards. And that can only come from the top.

We were down with it because over the time He was powerful enough and the the show was magnetic enough to pull in people. Who were very talented. Who were gifted, who really wanted to do like good work and push the genre as far as they could.

But that comes from the top. And that was Tony. That's what you get from that impeccable nature of like, no, everything needs to be good. Yeah. And also you just Tony was so fucking cool that you like you you really wanted to please him. On my wall I have framed The best email I ever got from him.

That was when I sent him the first act of the Nigeria show. That we shot Legos. And it just says out fucking standing. With two exclamation points. And then under it it says couldn't be happier.

And I framed it and I put it on my wall. So Maybe that's a little bit I mean, that's like the highest moment of my career, so Next up. Richard Wiseman

Author of The luck factor. The scientific study of the lucky mind. And Fifty nine seconds.

Think a little. Change a lot. You mentioned dreams earlier. You're fascinated by dreaming.

Why are you fascinated? By dreaming. Because I can't believe How much goes on. In my head. When I mean about it.

Oh well, all of our heads. We fall asleep. And then you wake up. Eight hours later. And you don't remember

Thing. You think oh I've been out of action for that time. And what we know is that people are going through a very predictable sleep cycle. There's all sorts of repair going on to the brain and the body. And then about four or five times.

You go into Dream sleep. And you have these really weird Dreams. And what's phenomenal is the research is now showing us that these dreams are not random.

They are our minds working through anxieties and our worries and trying to either knock the edge off of some of those anxieties Or problem solve. And what I find incredible is the number of times I have woken up with a solution to an experiment or an idea or a book. Fully formed in my head.

First thing in the morning. It's happened to me again and again. And o often with magic. Actually, so a friend of mine was doing a television show here. And I wasn't really thinking about it.

When I woke up in the morning, boom, I've got the entire item. in my head, even to down well the camera angles were and everything. And I just find that incredible. There's so much going on. offline, as it were. I share this

interest. I'm reading a book right now by Matt Walker, Why We Sleep. And for those who are curious, Matt is a very credible scientist. He really he really knows uh his neuroscience. Fantastic book. It goes more into the the why and how and specifics of of sleep without a specific focus on dreaming, but Uh, I read a book when I was in college. So the very beginning, undergrad, I was in neuroscience for a period of time then couldn't do the animal testing necessary to work in the lab I wanted to be part of, which was with Barry Jacobs. Not saying I oppose it completely, I just couldn't be hands-on with it at the time.

And I read a book. Named Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Steven Leberg. which I found to be very practical. And I don't know if you have any thoughts on on lucid dreaming, but it does seem like you can experimentally demonstrate that it exists. Just through IQing and and tracking. And you can improve it as a trainable skill through journaling and waking up at odd hours and doing various things. Like I think mnemonic induced lucid dreaming, mild is one acronym. Do you have any experience with or thoughts on lucid dreaming? Unfortunately no. I mean I did a book called Sleep School uh Night School. Sorry, can it be good if I remembered the title of my own uh book, Night School.

Uh and uh sleep deprivation. I haven't slept well for years. No. Uh night school. And so I contacted uh Steven uh in in that and he was very gracious talking about lucid dreaming. I really wish I could do it. It sound phenomenal. I've only had one lucid dream in my life. Which I woke up and I was in a shopping mall. I mean in the lucid dream. And

I was only partially in control. I mean good lucid dreamers can do whatever they want, but I wasn't. I was only partially in control. And I saw myself, felt myself. Going to a shop. To buy a shirt. And that was it.

I was So annoy with my brain because I could have gone flying I c I could have met a celebrity I've never met. I could have done all these amazing things and instead my Brilliantly creative brain did a thing that I've done many times in real life, and actually really isn't very interesting. That is my only experience with lucid dreaming. I love dreaming and I found that very helpful. I just can't get the lucid thing. I used to um I know it's it's terrible. I used to have night terrors.

I used to suffer from night terrors a lot. Which if people don't know It's where you sit up, you've got your eyes open, normally it's about ninety minutes into the the night, and you scream out and you think there's a demonic Entity. There or something like that.

And if you're sleeping next to somebody else. This wakes them up. And th they're properly awake at that point. You yourself are still in deep sleep, and so you go straight back to sleep. And they're sitting up shaking, going, Oh my goodness, what's the problem? And they can't get back to sleep at all. So it's worse for them than it is for you.

Yeah, I d I did um had a lot of those for a while. And that's what got really me interested in sleep. I was thinking what is going on in my little head? That should see these demonic Entities. Well that's what's quite good about having those.

Is that If you ninety minutes in you can't sleep and you're a bit bored. And you think well, you know. Let's make the life a bit more interesting from a partner. You can sit up and scream. They wake up and then you go back to sleep. Pretend you're you had a night terror.

The Upside of Night Terrors by Richard Wiseman. No, that's that's a great book title. The upside of Night Terrors is a great book title. So I Do not frequently have nightmares, but I had a nighttime a few nights ago and I like woke up

screaming and scared the shit out of my girlfriend, who then stiff armed me like a reverse clothesline to try to keep me down because she's afraid of me lashing out and Kicking her or punching her,'cause this happens every Six months or so. Yeah. Uh it was a very, very exciting evening. I will say on the lucid dreaming side. In my senior year of high school, I got to the point where I could actually

practice my sport at the time, which was uh let's call it Olympic style wrestling in the US would be collegiate style wrestling. with a coach I'd never met at the time, who was John Smith out of Oklahoma, who's very, very famous, but I was actually able to consistently Practice a skill That transferred

It seemed to have some transference to the real world, which I I found Almost unbelievable. Uh I'm sorry that Yeah, you were you were buying shirt and uh it would be a bummer if if I were to only end up doing my taxes when I uh induce lucidity. But hold a second. This this means that you can lucid dream. I can, yeah, but I I can lucid dream, but I will say that it is a very perishable skill.

So it got to the point end of high school and then transferring over to say sophomore year in college. Where I could If I were journaling on a daily basis immediately upon waking and If you don't have any dream recall trying to induce lucidity is pointless, largely. So those two seem to be closely correlated, or the development of one seems to be closely. correlated to the other.

Where I could induce lucidity pretty consistently at least once a night. Uh it becomes easier during longer extended REM periods, so Let's just say or very early morning, which is why some of the techniques have you wake up around four AM and then do a few things and go back to bed. But if I don't do the journaling. Forget about it. Then it's effectively non existent. So uh my non creative m mind sent me shirt shopping. I suspect you do far more interesting things in your lucid dreams. Uh other than practicing sport, what do you do? Oh, you can fly around and have sex with everybody. Those are kind of the two most common uh people are developing this. Those are where they usually self indulge the most in the beginning. And my experience was

In the very early stages, it was very similar to your shirt buying experience, right? You would have like a glimpse of lucidity doing something really mundane and then You would wake up or you would slip back into non lucid sleep. So it does seem to accrue and there are Hopefully this doesn't make me sound like a lunatic. I think it's a very For me, at least through direct experience, like a very developable skill, you can begin to extend your periods of lucidity.

Using different techniques. That seem to have some Reliable effect. It is a skill that is of great interest to me, but it takes so much work. On the

journaling training side. that it's it's just generally not a super high priority. Also waking up at like four in the morning to to increase the frequency is not very appealing given that I already have insomnia. What else have you learned about sleep? And improving sleep. And why did you stop having night terrors if you stopped?

Yeah, I did. Uh they are related a little bit to anxiety and also related to being a w a warm room. So actually if you sleep in an icebox essentially, they pretty much go away. In terms of night Terrorists because you mentioned your girlfriend there sort of worried about you lashing out. I think receive wisdom is not to touch the person who's having the night terror, because often they can interpret that as being the demonic entity attacking them and they will lash out. Uh so keep keep your distance. Uh but often just saying the person's name gently.

uh will will be sober enough to bring them uh kinda back. I'll buy my girlfriend some headgear and a mouthpiece. She'll be fine. Ha. Um sleep stuff There's all sorts of things you can do to improve your quality of sleep.

One of the biggest ones that came out of night school, which I didn't know about, was that if you've got kids who have recurrent nightmares, and this goes for adults as well, but particularly with kids. Where it's the same nightmare every night. During the day you get them to visualize the nightmare But with a more positive ending. So if they're being chased by a dragon

They visualize that. And then you go, Well, maybe it's a lonely dragon, it's a friendly dragon, he just wants to be your friend. And actually that's got about a ninety percent hit rate within a very short period of time. For reducing those recurring nightmares. So there's all this kind of simple stuff that's out there. I think All the stuff about that night of two halves and then actually taking a break in the middle is what we used to do before electric light and and and and so on. The paradoxical if you're trying to fall asleep.

The paradoxical approach. Which is you try and keep yourself awake. So you're allowed to blink. But otherwise you have to keep your eyes open and you have to actively not fall asleep. It's quite exhausting. And you end up falling asleep quicker.

Again faced with all sorts of research. So yeah, night school was a a fun book to to do. So then speaking to onset insomnia. Which is something that I've suffered from for decades. And I go through periods of not having it be as acute an issue, but the the initial falling asleep portion for people who don't understand the terminology. So there's the paradoxical approach of

I've never tried the keeping my eyes open part. That I haven't tried. So I may try that. Yeah. Ice box, I feel like I've got that pretty well dialed. Use various devices to keep the bed cool. Any other suggestions? busying the mind if it's based on anxiety. So so just writing down those anxieties and worries often clears it before you you go to bed.

Uh counting back was from a hundred and threes. feels working memory, basically, uh and that means those anxieties can't get in. Engaging in f fantasy world so that when the dreams and and sleep comes along it's a little bit more pleasant. And if you are laying there for more than this is particularly waking up during the night.

More than say ten minutes weighing laying awake from on ten minutes. Get out. A bad. And do something non stimulating but physical, like one of those kind of adult colouring in books, something like that. Do that for about ten minutes, go back to bed.

If you're still laying there awake ten minutes later. Get out and do it again. And after a couple of those You start to fall asleep because What happens is you're what you're not doing is associating the bed

With the anxiety of being awake. Otherwise that becomes a stimulus response. The other the the bed is a place where I'm anxious. So moving yourself out and occupying the mind and going back. Again is a is another very effective technique.

Next up Dennis McKenna An ethnopharmacologist who has spent more than forty years researching The interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology

And plant hallucinogens. So let me ask you a question about a comment that you made in uh the Brotherhood of the screaming abyss about LSD is a potential treatment for dyslexia. Now I don't have all the context, but I pulled this out.

And This is gonna lead to a broader question about perhaps unusual or unexpected applications uh or indications for psychedelics, but this section here reads it did lead me to speculate about the use of LSD as a potential treatment for dyslexia. We have a limited understanding of neuroplasticity, to say nothing of how psychedelics might affect it. That man's anecdote So of course I've omitted an anecdote hints at the curious link between psychedelics and language, as do the more prevalent accounts of synesthesia I've discussed earlier.

And then I'll actually read one more sentence. Psychedelics have some fundamental relationship. To the way our brains create meaning and understanding out of sounds and images. Convinced that further investigations into this phenomenon would yield new insights. Could you expand on that? Because I would agree certainly with the assertion of this fundamental relationship. Any thoughts on

LSD specifically is perhaps a tool for addressing dyslexia or psychedelics for any other indications that people might not guess. The connection to LSD and language and I think even more so with mushrooms. Because uh you're probably familiar with an essay, I think, by uh Henry Munn. That was published in a book called I think it was by Peter First called Hallucinogens and Culture. This was around nineteen seventy. There's a wonderful chapter in there called The Mushrooms of Language. It's by Henry Munn.

And it makes the point. And again, like I talk about this in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, it makes the point that in this be mushroom state the poetry, the language becomes much more fluid. It just sort of flows of you and that's why These people can chant for hours and they're actually instantiating

The mushroom is speaking through them. You know, this gnosis literally this The logos is the word, the true The pure logos actually flows through them. And then there's the f phenomenon of synesthesia.

Which psychedelics, especially mushrooms, can reliably do, and you know I've the association with meaningful images with with sound. Some people are naturally genetically synesthetic. It's very interesting how their synesthetic experiences Often have to do with words and numbers.

And Things like that. And they'll say things like, Well The number thirteen is chrome shaped and spiky. Shiny and spiky. What?

But for them that's a reality. And I think You know, I've argued that mushrooms well I have, terraps have, lots of people have. that mushrooms were important in the origin of consciousness, so I think that Із конечно іно конціснес

What we understand as true consciousness depends on this Construction of this worldview essentially. And that's built on language. This artificial reality that we construct for ours for ourselves that's a combination of Sentry input. that is filtered and processed in a certain way and linked to associations, memories

All of that kind of thing, so we build this What. The neuroscientists now call the default boat network. Which is kind of ordinary consciousness or ordinary state of consciousness. Long before I heard of the default mode network, I was calling it the reality hallucination.

Effectively we live in a hallucination. We live in an artificial world. reality that our brains construct. And It must reflect whatever's out there, because we're not wandering around stepping in front of buses and things like that. So it does map to reality in some ways. But it's

a it's actually an impoverished version of reality. What the a lot of what the brain does is filter things out. You know and Huxley had this insight. He talked about the reducing valve. that you know, to make the world comprehensible you have to selectively filter

What gets in. You inhabit this filtered almost used the word curated version of reality. Otherwise it would just be a blooming buzzing confusion. You wouldn't

Be able to navigate. And then you can take a psychedelic, you can disable those mechanisms. You could disable this default mode. mechanism. Open the gates of the reducing valve.

And That can be very beneficial. in terms of helping you get outside of your reference frame. And that's very useful. I think that that's what psychedelics I think that's where the therapeutic effect really for many of the things it's indicated for, it's this ability to step outside your reference frame temporarily.

and look at your situation from a different perspective. But you wouldn't want to be there all the time. Right, because you wouldn't be functional. That's again why You have to be very selective about your set and setting. It's a complex topic because I think it does relate to the way

That we link images essentially internal images to Sounds and Meaning. Because I'm here rapping to you.

And I'm making effectively small mouth noises. Which are inherently meaningless. Except that we happen to share language. And so when I make these small mouth noises Chances are your brain is reflecting it in terms of Images. I say chair, you see a chair. I say star, you see a star. I mean it's more complex than that, but I think

That's the basis of cognition. Really. And and if you look at Culture if you look at if if you look at consciousness, it's all based on This relationship between

Sound. image and and meaning or what they sometimes call portentousness. Yeah, an ascribed meaning, right? It's a learned Association

That is not automatic, right? I think about this a lot with Yeah. say infants and language, and I'm sure there's someone who could comment on this much more intelligently than I can, but When

an infant, let's say before they develop full depth perception and so on, if they were to look at what's in front of me, they wouldn't see laptop, webcam. Microphone. wood table, et cetera. pile of papers as discrete objects until they have Likely, uh at least not to that level of fidelity until they have labels for those things. It might just be

A flattened sort of two dimensional sheet of colours and shapes and shadows. I think about that quite a bit also as You mentioned the last episode that you've Done.

Who knows how many sessions with ayahuasca, you know, five hundred plus and It does seem that people develop Or some people develop an ability to discern and see in those spaces in the same way that an infinite

Sort of. develops the ability to these discrete things that we have labels for as adults.

Last but not least. Cal Newport Best selling author of Deep work. Digital minimalism.

And A world without email Revisits The four-hour work week.

Why in the interest that I'm curious about it. In the interim between When it first hits, work is unsustainable, you should try radical new things. In the interim the over time the book in pop culture beyond people who were directly engaged with the book got associated with something different. And and I mentioned this to you via email, but

I think about two thousand eleven. The office. brings up the book. Daryl brings up the book. The character Dale. in the office. And by that point in 2011, when he's bringing up this book, it has nothing to do with work being unsustainable and radically rethinking work. It is all just how do I be more hyper productive.

Which is almost the opposite. Of what the book is about. And I bet that for a lot of people who The book was on their radar, but they didn't engage with the book. That's for a lot of people became associated with like being hyper productive by using you sort of

radically inventive in the systems you use for the purpose of getting more done. Which is not what the book was about. And so this is sort of this mystery to me is that this big warning shot was happening. We feel it today, huge. Yeah, work's not sustainable. We need to rechange it.

But in between somehow that warning shot for a lot of people got changed to um How can we use tech and innovative systems to get even more done. Yeah, it's a damn fine question. You know, the four hour work week became and you know, I didn't mind. I thought it was kinda funny. This

Yeah, sort of pop culture productivity. Novelty that word again. Novelty novelty, yeah, in a way, right? So you so it shows up on the office or The cast from well supposedly the cast. I mean it's probably a bunch of ghostwriters, but from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia wrote a book called The Seven Secrets of Awakening, the highly effective four hour giant today. So you can see what that is. And

I would love to hear your theory for why this is, but I think it's deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And it can be deeply, deeply challenging to really question the assumptions and plans that Are

the underpinning for much of your existence. your waking existence. I think it's very uncomfortable. And it's not as cleanly Measurable, perhaps?

As Installing a new Chrome plugin that helps you do A, B, and C and I I cleared seventeen percent more email in the last hour. That type of trackability And that type of Accountability.

is really alluring. So the Productivity porn, like real porn, is highly addictive and highly distracting. And As new Technics and

applications and approaches surfaced, even if they're old. approaches that are being reinvented, right? Using note cards or index cards for various things. It's a very graspable appealing novelty that I think. Almost everyone gravitates towards.

Yeah, it's not surprising to me. That The four hour work week became A representation of a collection of productivity.

Tricks or techniques or technologies because it it did include that in fairness. But I think that What

Is unfortunate. But not surprising is that The four work we sort of treated like a tool kit and a bunch of construction materials. But used without the blueprint. and the approach and the guiding design principles that are explored in the first

Say two sections especially. Those two things are divorced, where in my mind the blueprints and the design principles Those are the most valuable and most important piece. And then the tools, those are all going to change over time. And I expect them to change over time.

That's what I've Observed. Did you observe people Doing that? You know, just looking at the hacks and not or was it the

The perception of the people who weren't reading the book but just This is what I think it is. Because you y of course you're around this crow a lot more. Yeah, I think it's more the latter. The book is written in a way. If you start at page one.

You cannot get around. the sort of philosophical resets and questioning of assumptions and design principles. You can't get around. Yeah. But If you

You are reading a blog post that is supposedly a summary of the four hour work week. Or you are reading any number of books that followed the four hour work week, which were intended to kind of capitalize on

that wave of popularity. They focused on Almost without exception on The tools. And the tricks.

And the latest websites. and the best virtual assistant services and so on. Again, not to say those don't have value. They do have value. But without the underlying frameworks and principles.

I don't think you end up solving many problems. And in fact I think you can end up creating a lot of new problems. Yeah. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today. Is Edward O. Thorpe. He is the author of the bestseller Beat the Dealer, which transformed the game of Blackjack. His subsequent book, Beat the Market, co-authored with Sheen T. Kasouf, influenced securities markets around the globe. He's also the author of A Man for All Markets, subtitle From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market. Thorpe was one of the world's best blackjack players.

investors and his hedge funds were profitable every year for twenty nine years. He lives in Newport Beach, California, and his website is Edwardothorpe.com. Mm. Morgan Fallon. on Twitter at DiamondMofallon is a nine time ME nominated executive producer. director and cinematographer who's born and raised in New England and studied film at Emerson College in Boston.

First question's probably gonna be what you learned and did not learn. in your film courses at Emerson. After graduating, he spent three years working for his mentor, director Michael Mann, and in two thousand seven he began a long term working relationship with producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tanalia and their New York based production company Zero Point Zero Productions. Through his tenure at ZPZ, Fallon focused primarily on work with ZPZ Creative partner Anthony Bourdain on several episodic series and documentaries produced by Bourdain. Including the Emmy winning mind of a chef. The theatrically distributed documentary The Last Magnificent, and the ME Peabody, PGA, T C A and A C E award winning series, Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown.

Fallon shot directed and produced. throughout the series one hundred and three episode run. Currently he's a director and executive producer for the EMI. Winning series. United Shades of America with W Camal Bell.

He lives in California with his wife and production partner, Jillian Brown, and his two children. You can find him like I mentioned on Twitter at Diamond Mo Fallon. Instagram at Fallon dot Morgan and I'll include the Facebook and everything else in the show notes. And the website for zero point zero is zero point zero. Dot com.

My guest today I've been looking forward to for some time, although he may not know that. This is Richard Wiseman, who holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Maybe getting that right. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles examining the psychology of magic and illusion, the paranormal, luck, and self-help. His books on psychology, which include The Luck Factor, The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, and Fifty Nine Seconds, Think A Little Change A Lot, have sold more than three million copies worldwide, and his psychology based YouTube videos, which I highly recommend, have garnered more than five hundred million views.

Elizabeth Loftus, I hope I'm getting that right, we'll find out which corrections I need to make, former president of the Association of Psychological Science described Richard as quote, one of the world's most creative psychologists, end quote, and the independent on Sunday chose him as one of the top one hundred people who make Britain a better place to live. In addition to his work in the field of psychology, Richard served as director of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for eight years. You can find him on Twitter at Richard. Wiseman W I S E M A N My guest today is a fan favorite, Dennis McKenna. You can find him on Twitter at Dennis McKennafor. Dennis has spent more than 40 years researching the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical field work in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.

His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and Ukuhe, two tryptamine based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Hefter Research Institute, which has helped fund and directly funded a lot of very good science, and was a key organizer and participant in the Huasca Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by the UDV, a Brazilian religious group. He is the younger brother of Terrence McKenna. From 2000 to 2017, he taught courses on ethnopharmacology as well as plants and human affairs at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. In 2019, in collaboration with colleagues, he incorporated a nonprofit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy. Currently, the Academy has several projects underway. With the most immediate being preparations for an upcoming conference in the UK, May twenty-third to twenty-sixth. That's twenty twenty-two. ESPD fifty five, we're gonna talk a lot about this, which will cover a wide range of topic related to psychoethnopharmacology.

Dennis emigrated to Canada in the spring of 2019 with his wife Sheila and now resides in Abbotsford, British Columbia. The website for the event that I just mentioned at ESPD fifty five dot com. In this episode, past podcast guest and excellent writer, Cal Newport, interviews me for an article he ended up writing for the New Yorker titled Revisiting the Four Hour Work Week. how Tim Ferris's two thousand seven manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval. So the call itself was

for material. We were having a conversation for this print piece. that ended up coming out. And I really enjoyed the conversation and thought you might as well. So who is Cal? Cal Newport. You can find him at Cal. newport.com, C A L N E W P O R T dot com, is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Cal is the author of seven books, including most recently Deep Work.

Digital minimalism and a world without email. He is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. You can find my interview with Cal, me interviewing him, that is, at Tim Dotblog. slash Cal Newport and you can find the two thousand seven talk at South by Southwest. It launched everything. So my talk at that festival, my first ever keynote. on the content and the concepts. in the four hour work week at tim.blog slash sxsw

Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash.

Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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