The Tim Ferriss Show - #201: The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour: Meditation, Mindset, and Mastery

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Starting point is 00:02:46 FourSigmatic.com forward slash Tim. Hello, boys and girls. Tim Ferriss here, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is always my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the habits, routines, tactics, breakfasts, or lack thereof, that you can then then emulate apply to your own life test yourself favorite books whatever it might be this particular episode i am going to try to do one better i'm excited to bring you a little sample taste test of a new show format that i'm working on and this isn't going to displace the other it would just complement it and i'm calling it for lack of a better name,

Starting point is 00:03:25 for the time being, the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. And you'll see where this is going. After nearly 200 conversations with world-class performers all over the map, including people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Tony Robbins, Maria Popova, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, Amanda Palmer, Malcolm Gladwell, Rick Rubin, Reid Hoffman, and so many more. You start to spot patterns, or at least when I'm reviewing all of the transcripts, I spot patterns. Sometimes they're months apart, but these are the shared habits, philosophies, tools, and more that are the common thread or the common threads. And this is the premise, of course, of my new book, Tools of Titans, which is a compilation of all of my favorite patterns, all of my favorite routines.

Starting point is 00:04:08 You can check that out everywhere. But that's also where the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour comes in. In each episode, we'll take a deep dive into one specific topic or tactic, bringing together the collective genius of past guests to help you, hopefully, become world-class in your own right if you aren't already. At the very least, it will give you a common thread, as I mentioned, with slight tweaks here and there that you can customize and affect to your idiosyncrasies, to your own personality, or you can blend them together. And today in this sneak peek episode, we will be exploring meditation. Meditation or practicing mindfulness is by far the most common pattern across them all. In this episode, I ask, for instance, Chase Jarvis to explain his top priorities for feeling fulfilled.

Starting point is 00:04:57 I've found sort of a new passion for sleep. I can't ever, not never, but I rarely get the 8, 9, 10. I talk TM, that's Transcendental Meditation, with the Terminator, the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I would say within 14 days, 3 weeks, I got to the point where I really could disconnect my mind and also learn how to focus more and to calm down. I cover a wide spectrum with Sam Harris and talk about everything, or ask him about everything, from hallucinogens to meditation techniques. The unique power of psychedelics is that they are guaranteed to work in some way. And then I wrap up with Rainn Wilson discussing how to handle life when you feel overwhelmed. And we all end up at points feeling overwhelmed or at the very least unclear. It was the key for me as an

Starting point is 00:05:46 actor that kind of broke me open and got me out of my head and just got me in my body and in that place of kind of pure imagination and spontaneity that you really want as an actor. We start our deep dive on meditation with Chase Jarvis, CEO of Creative Live, which is an online learning platform that broadcasts live, of course, high definition classes to more than 10 million students in 200 plus countries. Chase was also the youngest person ever to be named a Hustleblood Master, Nikon Master, and ASMP Master. He has photographed for Nike, Apple, Columbia Sportswear, REA, Honda, Subaru, Polaroid, Lady Gaga, Red Bull, and many more.

Starting point is 00:06:27 He's one of the most successful commercial photographers on the planet. So without further ado, let's jump into the first episode of the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. Enjoy. What do you feel have become your top priorities in feeling happy or fulfilled? Like what are the things as you become wiser that you've learned to prize more or prize less? Health. Yeah. One's health and being active is incredibly valuable. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:01 And these are, I feel like an old person saying this next one, which is sleep. I have lived on four to six hours sleep for the last 10 years. Yeah. So just prioritizing sleep. Yeah. The third one is meditation. Meditation. Oh, yes.

Starting point is 00:07:15 We haven't talked about this in a while. You were on it for a good bit. You said you fell off the wagon a little bit. I was. I fell off the wagon. But yeah, you're one of two people that I credit with finally kind of kicking me in the ass to take it seriously. It has really been a game changer. Yeah, specifically TM, so Transcendental Meditation, for those who don't know.

Starting point is 00:07:33 Or Trademark. Yeah. But I have my issues with almost every form of meditation. There are pros and cons. We talked about them before. But tell me about your meditation practice. My meditation practice is not perfect, and none are. I just sit down between 15 and 20 minutes twice a day.

Starting point is 00:07:55 Sometimes I only get one time a day. Sometimes those are a little compressed, or shit happens, or you're on an airplane, and the captain comes on and pulls you out of it or whatever like but i make a conscious effort to just observe my thoughts and practice tm in the morning in the evening before dinner and it has made it's it's sort of the analogy that i can you know most simply put here on on your show is it's when you're in the zone, say playing sports or playing music, and things just seem effortless. It's called The Flow State, Stephen Kotler's new book, which is a good book, The Rise of Superman.

Starting point is 00:08:33 Check that out, a little plug for his book about creativity and flow states. But that sense of flow, it's when things sort of happen in slow motion. Now you're not literally talking in slow motion, but you have the same clarity as if you're going through life and everything's happening in slow motion

Starting point is 00:08:50 instead of that I'm hyper caffeinated my boss is I'm agitated, I'm reactive, dodging bullets instead you're just like I'm driving the bus here and we're going to go here and then I'm going to do this and there's just certain clarity that

Starting point is 00:09:04 it's like magic. It's really weird. And it's, there's another thing. I don't know if you felt this Tim, but it's sort of aggregates. So you get good benefit from one, two, three, four. And then when you're on a good, on a roll, there's this sort of exponential, there's a little overdrive that it's like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm just floating. Yeah. I can't explain it either, but for me, and just for those people who might be thinking like I did for my entire life, like. Bullshit. Bullshit. No, just like I don't want people oming me and freaking, you know, all this, yeah, yeah, yeah, chakra, whatever.

Starting point is 00:09:36 Like I'm not into it. Yeah. Especially living in San Francisco, I've developed sort of an allergy to like sanctimonious. And I've been to Burning Man, but like sanctimonious burner types who like want to lecture me about chakras. I'm just like, honestly, please, I can't handle another minute of this. So I've had this aversion to meditation, but when it's very sort of non-dogmatic,

Starting point is 00:09:57 where it's just like, look, you're not trying to control anything. You're not trying to think of a candle flame. Like just observe your thoughts and be okay with them and sit with good posture for this period of time. That's it. And even if you think it's a shitty job and you're like just observe your thoughts and be okay with them and sit with good posture for this period of time. That's it. And even if you think

Starting point is 00:10:07 it's a shitty job and you're like running through your to-do list or thinking of the stock market, that's okay. Just make it part of your routine. And what I found was, and some people who,

Starting point is 00:10:16 well-known people who do TM, I mean, it's like Paul McCartney, Ariana Huffington. David Lynch. David Lynch. I'm blanking on his name for some reason, but Bridgewater Capital, largest hedge fund in, if not the world, the United States, 100 billion plus.

Starting point is 00:10:33 Ray Dalio, that's it. Russell Simmons. The list is, I think, like Howard Stern. Yeah, the list is pretty amazing. Seinf Yeah. And the physiological or psychological effects are so fascinating, like you said, because you'll do it for a couple days and you're like, man, like, yeah, okay, whatever. And then you hit this. Like, you hit this sort of inflection point where suddenly you just drop from like 200 RPMs to 150. And you're like, whoa, okay, this is different. And then the whole week you're kind of zenned out. Yep. 50 and you're like, whoa, okay, this is different. And then the whole week you're kind of zenned out. And then after say a four week period, and I did my first retreat a few months ago before I volunteered for the masochism that is television production. I can just hit you with a stick.

Starting point is 00:11:15 Yeah. If you could just like, yeah, if you could put a nail through it first, that'd be great. But really had this tremendous effect on me that, oddly enough, and maybe this is getting too out there for some people, but very similar to my experiences post relatively high-dose hallucinogens. Yeah. This extended period of calm and ease in decision-making. Like uncluttered. Like you closed every browser on your computer and turned off the antivirus and rebooted the whole thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:48 That type of feeling. Yep. So I did fall off the train. Question for you, because I find the morning session, I usually find pretty easy. Yep. Afternoon is hard. Afternoon.

Starting point is 00:11:58 What do you do? I'm right now thinking of, okay, I got to go from here to the thing to the thing, and when am I going to get my thing in? Like, oh, shit. Yeah. Sometimes I'll try to do it in a car, like Uber or whatever. But when do you typically do it in the afternoon? I'm curious.

Starting point is 00:12:12 I try and do it before dinner sometime. Okay. Between work and dinner, we're entrepreneurs. We work crazy long hours. So I'll take it whenever I can get it. And it's usually a little bit more, a little bit less gracious than my morning one. Like you said, it's sort of like morning is like it's your time. You cry about 20 minutes. So my afternoon one is often a little bit more piecemeal.

Starting point is 00:12:36 But again, it's the act. I try not to judge the practice. The practice is the practice. Are you, when you meditate, are you sitting cross-legged? Are you sitting with your feet? I try and sit in a comfortable chair, flat on the floor, hands on my lap. And there's a mantra that if you learn TM,

Starting point is 00:12:57 you're given a mantra and say that word over and over. And if some thoughts come in, they're like, oh, there's those thoughts, bye. And they go away and you just keep doing it over again and then sometimes like oh my god that was 25 minutes and sometimes it's like oh my god that was one minute it felt like a week like a week and again but just not not judging that and it's without you know continue to talk about it because now it's getting weird because we're talking about it so much but it's just a power it's a powerful tool that is so simple i'm just mind-building while you because now it's getting weird because we're talking about it so much. But it's just a powerful tool that is so simple.

Starting point is 00:13:26 I'm just mind-melting while you're talking right now. It's great. You're meditating. You're staring up. I haven't been listening to you for 20 minutes. For the listening people out there,

Starting point is 00:13:31 Tim is staring into space right now. He's not paying attention to us. Okay, so let's... That is, I think, a huge takeaway for people. It doesn't have to be TM. It could be Vipassana. It could be just about anything.

Starting point is 00:13:44 Building in a pause, which is like a warm bath for your brain, even if it's 10 minutes a day, so that you're not in a reactive mode. It's really a game changer. And physiologically, it had a lot of effects for me as well. So when my cortisol level dropped, I was able to lose body fat more easily in my abdomen, for instance. Really, I became very sensitive to alcohol and caffeine, so I dropped it. They dropped them both significantly, not because I was getting judgmental about it,

Starting point is 00:14:12 because I was oversensitized to it. I'd grown immune to the effect, so I could have six cups of coffee a day and be like, eh. And then I met TM for four or five weeks, and I had one cup, and I'm like, wow. I didn't realize what my baseline was. So just maybe to wrap up. Makes you a cheap date, too, by the way.

Starting point is 00:14:30 I've always been a cheap date. So with that, I thought you might like to know about some of my current meditation routines or how I'm incorporating mindfulness into my day. First and foremost, upon waking, there are a few things that I do. I get up, generally take a cold shower, do some Wim Hof breathing, which is a whole separate podcast, and make my bed, etc. I have my five things that I do in the morning. There's a separate episode on this. But the meditation comes in right after I've set the kettle to boil some water or get it to 185 for tea.

Starting point is 00:15:08 I sit down, I do 21 minutes of transcendental meditation, although I should say 21 minutes of meditation. The first minute is really just to allow myself to fidget and get settled. I'm sitting on the couch in a effectively half lotus position. I don't think that's necessary at all. You could sit with your feet on the floor. I just happen to be comfortable that way. And for the first few minutes, I'm actually mimicking the format of Headspace, the app in many ways. I'm really focusing on what is happening already, the sensations of, say, my legs against the couch, the feeling of my breathing.

Starting point is 00:15:42 And you could look at it as a form in some sense of Vipassana meditation. Then I segue into the mantra-based TM. That is simply what I've found to work well for me. And oddly enough, it seems that a high percentage of men gravitate ultimately towards TM, high percentage of women gravitate towards Vipassana. That is not true across the board at all. Sam Harris, for instance, practices a number of types of meditation, none of which are TM. Now, another guest who I asked about meditation was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 30th governor of California, seven-time Mr. Olympia, and something perhaps a lot of people don't know, he was a Golden Globe winner in 1976 for his role in Stay Hungry with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field.

Starting point is 00:16:28 He has done everything. He's reinvented himself over and over again. And the other place that you might find mindfulness in my life is where Arnold also has it, and that is in the gym. If we're trying to cultivate present state awareness and less reactivity, you don't have to sit down and think of a mantra to do it. There are multiple ways. So that all having been said, here we go. Delving into meditation with none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. I've heard you mentioned transcendental meditation in passing briefly do you meditate um i don't meditate now but i uh got heavily into it in the 70s and i remember there was a time in my life where i felt like everything is just kind of

Starting point is 00:17:14 coming together and i did not find a way or couldn't find a way of keeping the things separate so it was always when i was thinking about i was thinking about at the same time my bodybuilding career I was thinking about my movie career I was thinking about the documentary pumping out that we're shooting right now and the movie stay hungry that we just finished shooting and the my investment in the apartment building and is this gonna do I get the financing from the bank and all of this kind of stuff was always coming together and at the same time I was training for the Mr. Olympia competition in South Africa. And I was training right here at Gold's Gym.

Starting point is 00:17:50 And I remember there was all the camera equipment around five hours a day in my face. And then someone in the middle of squatting was trying to change the battery pack on my lifting belt and all this stuff. So it was like, you know, eventually I felt like I got to do something about it because I have such great opportunities here and everything this stuff. So it was like, you know, eventually I felt like I got to do something about it because I have such great opportunities here

Starting point is 00:18:08 and everything is happening and everything is going my way, but I'm just clustering everything into one big problem rather than separating it out and having calm and peace and being happy. And so I, but total, you know, coincidence, I ran into this guy that i've run into many times on the beach very very pleasant man who uh told me that he is a teacher in transcendental meditation

Starting point is 00:18:34 and i said well it's interesting you mentioned it is it because i feel like i should do something because i feel like you know i'm just overly worried and anxieties and all this stuff. And I feel like certain pressures that I've never felt before. And he says, oh, says, Arnold, it's not uncommon. It's very common. A lot of people go through this. This is why people use meditation, transcendental meditation, as one way of dealing with the problem. And he was very good in selling it

Starting point is 00:19:05 because he didn't say it's the only answer. He just is one of many. And he says, why don't you try it? He says, I'm a teacher there up in Westwood. I would not be able to teach you since we have friends and we have many years. There will be another teacher there that will give you a mantra and blah, blah, blah

Starting point is 00:19:25 and teach you how to do it and then I can help you after that. He says, because I will be teaching up there. So why don't you come up on Thursday and I will be there. I will introduce you to the folks up there. And so I went up there, took a class

Starting point is 00:19:37 and I went home after that and then tried it. I said to myself, I've got to give it a shot. And I did 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night. And I would say within 14 days, three weeks, I got to the point where I really

Starting point is 00:19:52 could disconnect my mind. And as they say, to find this few seconds of disconnection and rejuvenate the mind. And also learn how to focus more and to calm down. And I did that for, and I saw the effect right away,

Starting point is 00:20:14 that I was much more calm about all of the challenges that were facing me. And I continued doing that then for a year. And by that time, I felt like, I think that I've mastered mastered this i think that now i don't feel overwhelmed anymore uh and i really felt kind of it was one of the things where uh you know transcendental meditation was kind of anxiety and pressure meeting around the corner tranquility you know this is kind of what it felt and um and so i was happy from that point on. Even today, I still benefit from that because I don't merge and bring things together

Starting point is 00:20:53 and see everything as one big problem. I take on one challenge at a time. And when I go and I study my script for a movie, then that day when I study my script for a movie, I that day when I study my script for a movie, I don't let anything else interfere in that and I just concentrate on that. The other thing that I've learned is

Starting point is 00:21:13 that there's many forms of meditation in a way because when I study and I work really hard where it takes the ultimate amount of concentration, I can only do it for 45 minutes, maybe. Maybe an hour.

Starting point is 00:21:30 But then I have to kind of run off and maybe play chess. And I play chess for 15 minutes, and then I can go back and have all the energy in the world again, and jump right back, and then continue on with my work, as if I've not done it at all today, right? It's like I'm fresh. And so that's another way I think of meditation. And then I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle and

Starting point is 00:22:01 I have my mind inside the bicep when I do my curls. I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. So I'm really inside. And it's like, again, a form of meditation because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time, but just that training that you do. And so there's many ways of meditation, and I benefit from all of those, and I'm today much calmer because of that and much more organized and much more tranquil because of that. This whole conversation makes me want to go tackle the world.

Starting point is 00:22:38 I love it. Next, I want to reintroduce one of my most popular and controversial guests, Sam Harris. He is brilliant. Sam is a PhD in neuroscience and the author of many bestselling books, including The End of Faith, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Our first conversation on this podcast explored science, different types of meditation, and the uses and risks of psychedelics, among many other things. And that conversation included segments such as this. There's a quote here that is, quote,

Starting point is 00:23:14 There's nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have. End quote. Assuming that's true, and you and I have, of course, talked about altered states and you've written about altered states, I'd love to just dig into that expression or that quote, rather, and look at the alternate approaches that you've perhaps explored or researched related to achieving some of these valuable states. Yeah, yeah. So in the beginning of my career, as you point out, I spent a lot of time criticizing religion and criticizing it for its obvious harms. But one of its harms that's not so obvious is that it keeps us talking about this positive end of human experience,

Starting point is 00:24:07 the self-transcendence and highly normative states of consciousness in first century or seventh century terms. And most people most of the time think that the only way to capture, quote, spiritual experience and one's interest in it and the ways in which one would explore it is to, to some degree, indulge the mis-intoxicated language of the Iron Age. There's just no way to talk about it otherwise. Science hasn't given us the tools to talk about it. Secular culture doesn't give us the tools to talk about it otherwise. Science hasn't given us the tools to talk about it. Secular culture doesn't give us the tools to talk about it. And so we're left talking about being Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and organize our

Starting point is 00:24:53 lives around those really incompatible, the incompatible truth claims and doctrines that you find in those religions. And people, very smart people who are secular in every other way, think there's no alternative to that. And so one of my main interests now is in articulating an alternative, because clearly there are extraordinary experiences that people have, and many of these experiences do lie at the core of many of our religions. And so to take Jesus as an obvious example, and who knows who Jesus actually was and what is historically true in the New Testament. But let's just say,

Starting point is 00:25:32 for argument's sake, that there really was a guy who loved his neighbor as himself and had this extraordinarily charismatic effect on the people around him and bore witness to this possibility of a kind of radical self-transcendence. Well, clearly, whatever's true there is deeper than Christianity, and it's not reducible to Christianity. In fact, Christianity has to be a distortion of that truth, and we know this because Jesus isn't the only person who's had that experience. The Buddha and the countless contemplatives through the ages can attest to this experience of, for lack of a better phrase, unconditional love. And that has some relationship to what I

Starting point is 00:26:16 would call self-transcendence, which I think is even more important. And so there's this phenomenon that's clearly deeper than any of our provincial ways of talking about it in the context of religion. And so it's a deeper truth to our children about the nature of reality and that we don't indulge this divisive language of picking teams in the religious, in the contest among religions. So yeah, my next book that's coming out in the fall is called Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. And it's about the phenomenon of self-transcendence

Starting point is 00:27:05 and the ways in which people can explore it without believing anything on insufficient evidence. And one of the principal ways is through various techniques of meditation, mindfulness being the, I think, the most useful one to adopt first. There's also the use of psychedelic drugs, which is not quite the same as meditation, but it does, if nothing else, reveals that the human nervous system is plastic

Starting point is 00:27:42 in a very important way, which means your experience of the world can be radically transformed. You are tending to be who you were yesterday by virtue of various habit patterns and physiological homeostasis and other things that are keeping you very recognizable to yourself. But it's possible to have a very different experience. And it's possible to do that through pharmacology. It's possible to do that through some kind of crisis. Or it's possible to do it through a deliberate form of training like meditation.

Starting point is 00:28:18 And I think it's crucial to do because we all want to be as happy and as fulfilled and as free of pointless suffering as we can possibly be. And all of our suffering and all of our unhappiness is a product of how our minds are in every moment. And so if there's a way to use the mind itself to improve one's capacity for moment-to-moment well-being, which I'm convinced there is, then this should be potentially of interest to everybody. So a couple of quick questions on all of those subjects. So the first I'd like to touch on, meditation, I think we can probably touch on this briefly, is something we've discussed before, you along with many other people who are high performers in their respective fields have recommended meditation. So I have been meditating, partially in thanks to your influence for some time now. Is it safe to say

Starting point is 00:29:23 that the meditation that you most frequently recommend to novices is vipassana meditation or is that just okay got it why is that i mean i've i've experimented with a number of different types of transcendental meditation uh vipassana of course and have taken a number of courses um why that selection why that? Yeah, it has a few obvious strengths that are actually not shared by any other technique I know of. The first is that it doesn't, it needn't presuppose any belief about anything. I mean, you don't have to develop a fondness for the iconography of Buddhism. You don't have to care about the Buddha. You don't have to believe in rebirth or karma.

Starting point is 00:30:13 I mean, none of the doctrine of Buddhism need be adopted in order to get the practice off the ground and never need be adopted if it never makes any sense, which much of it doesn't. You don't have to become a Buddhist to do this, and you don't have to add anything strategically to your experience as a mechanism by which to meditate. So you're not adding a mantra. You're not visualizing something that isn't there. You don't have to look at a candle flame or do anything to your environment by way of artifice to create the circumstance of meditation. All you're doing is paying exquisitely close and nonjudgmental attention

Starting point is 00:30:56 to whatever you're experiencing anyway. And the first technique you use to be able to train that capacity is to focus on your breath, which you always have with you and is just an easy object to focus on. But it doesn't even have to be the breath. I mean, mindfulness is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations and even thoughts themselves without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away. So just being wide open to the next sensory or emotional experience that comes careening into consciousness, that is mindfulness.

Starting point is 00:31:38 And so in some sense, it's not even a practice. It's just the state of not being distracted and being aware. And you have to, it feels like a practice in the beginning because it's hard to do. We're so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to be having this conversation with ourselves from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep, where we're just, there's just chatter in the mind, and it's so captivating that we're not even aware of it. We are essentially in a dream state, and it's through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environments, but we're just talking to ourselves nonstop.

Starting point is 00:32:23 And until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness just arising and passing away, you can't even pay attention to your breath or to anything else with any kind of clarity. And so initially you have to develop some concentration and get mindfulness tuned up so that you can pay attention. But once you can pay attention, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to. There's nothing in principle that is outside the meditation practice. There's nothing that's in principle a distraction. You don't need a quiet environment.

Starting point is 00:32:55 You can have loud construction noises going across the street and that's just as good a circumstance for meditation as anything else. And so those are the main reasons why I think it's the, in terms of being designed for export outside of Buddhist culture or religious culture generally, and becoming a tool for our intellectual lives

Starting point is 00:33:19 in a secular scientific context, I think there's nothing like it. What resources would you suggest for someone who wants to try to educate themselves or dive in as a novice in terms of books, resources, websites for mindfulness and meditation? Yeah, well, I give a few on my blog. I wrote an article a couple of years ago entitled How to Meditate, and if people Google that, they'll see I link to a few books, and I tell people where they can go on retreats,

Starting point is 00:33:48 and I briefly describe the practice. I also have given a couple of guided mindfulness meditations I've put on SoundCloud, which are on my website as well. And there are other guided meditations out there that people can use. In the beginning, people find that very helpful to have somebody's voice essentially reminding them to not be lost in thought every few seconds. Because what happens in the beginning for people, and this happened to me in my practice for at least a year.

Starting point is 00:34:25 I think it was a year before I went on intensive silent retreat. I was just sitting for an hour a day or so just on my own. I was 20 or so. And essentially I was just sitting cross-legged and thinking. It's so hard to notice that you're lost in thought that by tendency you're just not going to notice it. And so in the to notice that you're lost in thought that by tendency, you're just not going to notice it. And so in the beginning, people think they're meditating and they're really just lost in thought. And it wasn't until I did my first 10-day Vipassana retreat where I broke

Starting point is 00:34:58 through and connected with the practice in a way that where I realized, wow, that was all of that that has preceded this was really my thinking I was meditating and not meditating. And there are other landmarks along my journey that are like that, where there was a shift where I realized, wow, this, what I thought was happening really was not happening as I thought it was. And that's a very common experience. And so in the beginning, using a guided meditation can help cut through the chatter in a way that many people can't summon on their own.

Starting point is 00:35:35 Related to cutting through the chatter, people ask me, well, let me take a sidestep, which is people ask me, what blogs do you read? And there really aren't many blogs that I read consistently, aside from a handful. And blogs that I read consistently aside from a handful. Uh, and partially I read your blog, uh, and the posts you put up because they're like feature magazine articles in many cases. And there's one you wrote in 2011 called drugs in the meaning of life. Um, and you've, you've written about this subject before I have found

Starting point is 00:36:00 certain hallucinations in particular to be very therapeutically valuable for cutting through the chatter and sort of turning that off and bringing present state awareness to you in a very high definition way when used responsibly. And of course, as you point out in this piece, it's not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. But I'd be curious to know that you know, one of the lines here that needs to be read in context, of course, but, you know, I have a daughter who will one day take drugs. Of course, I'll do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. And then you obviously go through sort of the how you might guide her to view these different subjects. And one of the closing lines in this paragraph is, but if she does not try psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD,

Starting point is 00:36:52 at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. And I agree with this. I'd be curious to hear sort of what particular drugs or psychedelic substances you found most therapeutically valuable in your own life and how you suggest people think about this obviously there are uh i mean putting you have to put the legal potential legal ramifications in perspective also but what have you personally found most valuable and how so yeah um well, you found another paragraph where I was happy to court controversy, saying that I'll be disappointed if my daughter doesn't drop acid. But the caveat here, and the caveat comes out several times in that piece. Which everybody should read in full. I'm not trying to pull anything out of context. I just don't want to read the whole thing to them now.

Starting point is 00:37:47 I stand by every word, but there are a lot of words in there. And the caveat really is that I have an increasingly healthy respect for what can go wrong on psychedelics and wrong in a way that I think has lasting consequences for people. And so there's a lot that can go right with psychedelics.

Starting point is 00:38:11 And to some degree, I think they're still indispensable for a lot of people. They certainly seem to be indispensable for me. I don't think I ever would have discovered meditation without having taken, in particular, MDMA. But MDMA and mushrooms and LSD all played a role for me in unveiling an inner landscape that was worth exploring. But for that pharmacological advantage, I think I was just, my consciousness was such that, you know, I looked inside, I saw nothing of interest, and that's sort of the end of the conversation. You tell me that there's something profound to witness about the nature of my own mind, I don't see it. You know, I just want to, you know, get on with the next thing in the world that seems fun to do or seems likely to lead to my success. I just was a skin-encapsulated ego who was just trying to get on with life and succeed and thought he was very clever and didn't have the contemplative tools to see much of

Starting point is 00:39:20 anything when he paid attention. And so that's the situation that many people are in, and many smart people are in that position. So I'm constantly meeting scientists and philosophers and highly articulate people who spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the human mind. And when I talk to them about meditation or really any of these philosophical issues for which an ability to pay attention to the nature of your own consciousness is an advantage, so something like free will or the nature of the self or the possibility of self-transcendence, I'm meeting people who have, as far as I can tell, no ability to notice their inner lives. Some of them seem simply not to have inner lives, but these are people who are very much the way I was when I was 18

Starting point is 00:40:15 and before I had any experience with any of this. There's just, you're lost in thought, and you don't know it, and that phrase, lost in thought, means nothing to you, and you don't have the tools by which to do anything with it, even if it meant something to you, and there to be found. The most important point of which is the self you think you are is an illusion. This sense of being a self riding around in your head, this feeling of I, this feeling that everyone calls I, is an illusion that can be disconfirmed in a variety of ways. It can be, its boundaries can be transformed in ways, or it can be completely cut through and vanish for a moment or a minute or potentially for the rest of one's life. And so it's vulnerable to inquiry, and that inquiry can take many forms, but the unique power of psychedelics is that whether or not they, there's a unique power and there's a unique liability.

Starting point is 00:41:29 The unique power and liability is that they are guaranteed to work in some way. And this is a point that Terence McKenna always made. Terence McKenna was a huge booster of psychedelics and a very articulate one. And he pooh-poohed any other spiritual methodology, meditation and chanting and yoga, anything else that people brought to him saying, well, can't you kind of get the same benefit without drugs? And his point was, well, you teach someone to meditate, you teach them yoga,

Starting point is 00:42:01 there's no guarantee whatsoever that something's going to happen. They could spend a week doing it. They could spend a year doing it. Who knows what's going to happen? They may just get bored and they're going to wander away from this thing not knowing that there was a there there. If I give you five grams of mushrooms or 300 micrograms of LSD and tell you to sit on that couch for an hour, you are guaranteed to have a radical transformation

Starting point is 00:42:25 in your experience. It doesn't matter who you are, this freight train of significance is going to come bearing down on you. And we just have to watch the clock and know it's going to happen. And that's a fact. So that's the advantage because you're guaranteed to realize at the end of that episode that it is possible to have a radically different experience than you tend to have. And if you have a good experience, you're going to realize that human life can be just unutterably sublime, that it's possible to feel at home in the universe in a way that you couldn't have previously imagined. But if you have a bad experience, and the bad experiences are every bit as bad as the good experiences are good, you will have just this harrowing encounter with madness. and it's as pathological as any lunatic who's wandering the streets, raving to himself and completely cut off from others. You can have that experience and hopefully it goes away.

Starting point is 00:43:35 And in virtually every case, it does go away. But it's still rough and it still has consequences for people. Some of the consequences are good. I happen to think that it gives you a basis for compassion, in particular for people who are suffering mental illness that you couldn't otherwise have. But it's not an experience that I'm eager to have again. And so my healthy respect for the power of psychedelics has led me

Starting point is 00:44:06 to not take many for many years. And it's been years since I've taken anything. And my use tapered off in my 20s when I got into meditation and was spending more time on retreat and beginning to feel that I was getting, kind of hitting the center of the bullseye with meditation in a way that I was certainly not guaranteed to with psychedelics that I basically stopped using everything and just practice meditation. But there's no question that I wouldn't have become sufficiently interested in meditation, but for the experiences I had on LSD and MDMA in particular. To round out this deep dive into meditation,

Starting point is 00:44:51 I wanted to relive a conversation that I had with Rainn Wilson, who is perhaps best known as Dwight on NBC's Emmy award-winning The Office. He shared an incredible insight to a very simple question we all face from time to time. When you feel overwhelmed, what do you do to improve the situation? Well, you know, I have a spiritual faith that I rely on, that I use. So I use prayer and meditation as tools to center me and bring me back kind of into reality. I also find that for me, like acting is a wonderful escape because you get out of your own head and you get to go into someone else's head. And, you know, it was like that on The Office too and doing comedy, you know, and life was good and life was bad.

Starting point is 00:45:44 There was something wonderful about coming to Dwight and I could just put Rainn Wilson aside and just all of that bullshit and, and clear it out of my head and out of my heart and just be Dwight Schrute. And sometimes it was just, just super, super fun, uh, to do that. So those are some of the tools, acting as a tool, prayer and meditation is a tool I use to kind of bring myself into the, into the world. And your, your faith, I know I'm going to massacre this because I've only read it and not heard it said, but is it Baha'i? Is that correct? Yeah. Baha'i. Baha'i. There we go. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:46:21 Baha'i. How are you doing? Yeah. And I want to come back to that. But what does your, when you meditate, what does that look like? And do you do it on a daily basis? What's the format of that? Yeah, I try and meditate every day. There's no format in the Baha'i faith. It's just greatly encouraged to meditate.

Starting point is 00:46:42 When you pray, you're communing with the creator. You're communing with the universe, you're putting stuff out there. And when you're meditating, you're listening to the universe. But it's really pretty simple. I get a great deal of benefit if I even do a 10 minute meditation. And out of that 10 minutes, if four of the minutes, my mind can be very still and very silent. There's great guided meditations. Now there's apps, there's all kinds of things that you can do for meditation. But for me, it's just about, um, I won't say silencing the mind cause that's impossible. So the mind is, those thoughts are always going to pop up, but those thoughts pop up. You just notice them,

Starting point is 00:47:19 you identify them, you let them float in front of your eyes, almost like, you know, one of those old fashioned Wall Street ticker machines. And, and, and, and you find a tremendous, I find a tremendous amount of peace, serenity and bliss in just being in consciousness. And consciousness is not thought. Consciousness is just being. I am this being. I am not separate from the giant being of Earth and the cosmos and the universe. And just being in that stillness is incredibly rewarding. I get really a ton of clarity and I get a ton of energy from it. And these have been proven in scientific studies, by the way, in all kinds of things from healing trauma to giving you more energy to giving you more focus in your work. It's meditation is a pretty incredible tool. And lowering cortisol. spending time interacting with some, some researchers at Johns Hopkins, a gentleman named Roland Griffiths, and, uh, also a gent named Adam Gazalia runs a neuroimaging lab at UCSF. And what's, what's been very interesting and we don't have to go down the rabbit hole with this, but it appears that when you, if you look at experienced meditators and brain activity, and I'm blanking on the particular area. I think it might be somewhere in the parietal lobe, but I could be off. In any case, there's a portion of the brain

Starting point is 00:48:51 that is thought to contribute to the separation of self and other. So it's associated with, let's just call it the ego. And that is inhibited both in the use of say psilocybin, which was found in magic mushrooms, but also you experience a similar type of pattern in experienced meditators, which is kind of cool. And, uh, well, I know that they, Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, no. Go ahead. I know. I heard a fascinating thing on the radio once where they did a study and they found the happiest man in the world. So they did a brain scan and they found the happiest man in the world. So they did a brain scan and they found the happiest person they could possibly find. And this guy was, I think he was an American,

Starting point is 00:49:34 but he was living in Wisconsin, but he was a, he was a student of Tibetan Buddhism. And at the time when they did the brain scan, which charted out as the very happiest, he was in the process of meditating. And it was a meditation of kind of universal compassion. So it's a meditation where you are feeling at one with everyone and great compassion for everyone on planet Earth and all beings on planet Earth, not human, animal, plant, what they're going through. And in so doing, that achieved like the greatest happiness. That kind of goes along with what you're saying. No, definitely. And it's, I mean, there is a sort of, even if you are self-interested,

Starting point is 00:50:18 there's a biological benefit to empathy and compassion in meditation. And just to reiterate something you said, because I think it's so important, uh, is that, you know, I try to meditate 20 minutes each morning. And like you mentioned, there are apps like calm and headspace that are very helpful for this. But even if I'm just violently, violently, excuse me, let me try English again, violently getting punched in the psyche by like my to-do list and worries and anxieties and thoughts for 15 or even 18 minutes out of 20. If I have two minutes where the mud kind of settles and the mind is clear, it has an incredible impact on the entire day for me. And I feel exactly the same way. That's exactly my experience. Even out of a 10 minute meditation, if I can just get two or three minutes in there where I have almost achieved thoughtlessness

Starting point is 00:51:10 and just, um, kind of a serene bliss, it's, it's like getting, it's like taking a power nap, you know, and it helps you through your whole day. Definitely. And I had, I think it was Tara Brock who said this to me, but it might've been someone else, but they said the, the, if, if you just come back to your breath or a mantra or whatever it is that you're focusing on, if you're doing concentrated meditation, it's the coming back that is the practice. So if you're just distracted and you're basically just bouncing off the walls mentally with your monkey mind for those 19 minutes, if you come back even once you can consider it a successful session. I think for type a personalities, that's really important to keep in mind. You mentioned something I'd love to explore a little bit, which is that acting can be a

Starting point is 00:51:53 wonderful escape. And I'm paraphrasing here, but from your own head, I was actually watching Amy yesterday, which is a documentary about Amy Winehouse and very, very sad story and tragic on many levels, but she produced some beautiful music from bad experiences. And so she was able to escape her own head by putting these poems, which became songs on paper. Uh, are there any particular exercises, uh, from whether it's acting school or improv or otherwise that you think could benefit non-actors who just want to help create new avenues of thinking or, um, embrace some type of therapeutic effect of getting outside of their own head. Yeah. You know, um, specific ones,

Starting point is 00:52:42 I suppose I could go into, but I studied with a great teacher in NYU named Paul Walker. He died of AIDS, but he was an exquisite teacher and he taught theater games. And for me, that was a real revelation because I had when I had tried acting early on, I was very stiff and very in my head and cerebral and kind of stuck and kind of like it was very conscious like how am I going to say this line and how do I best look when I'm turning this way it's just a very self-conscious style of acting that was bad it was sucky so what Paul got us doing in acting school at NYU was just playing. And there's something incredibly freeing about playing like a kid and that your impulses as an actor and your impulses as a kid at play are really the same thing. Like I said before, it's deeply pretending. So, you know, are there specific exercises? I mean, I suppose I could think of some, but, you know, how much fun is it to play red light, green light and for 20 minutes or duck, duck, goose, and then to move from those exercises into more and more imaginative kind of improvisations.

Starting point is 00:53:58 But where you allow yourself to just play like a child and sometimes children play and they're competitive. Sometimes they play and they're very serious. It's not all kind of this general like we kind of stuff. And I found that so freeing. And it was the, it was the key for me as an actor that kind of broke me open and got me out of my head and just got me in my body and in that place of kind of pure imagination and spontaneity that you really want as an actor. And I think it seems to me also when you put yourself in that place, much like meditation, you have to be present state aware. You can't be worrying about something that you have scheduled two weeks in the future or resenting something like somebody had to cut you off in traffic that morning. You

Starting point is 00:54:52 have to be in that moment and be effective and to have fun. You just can't be distracted by those things. Yeah. Like we'll do a thing where you, I just remembered cause I did it recently at soul pancake. I did some sessions with the employees at SoulPancake. I do kind of games and improv stuff where everyone has a number from one to 10. There's two teams of 10 on each side of the room. There's a stool in the center of the room with a shoe on it. The goal is you've got to get the shoe and then get back to your place in line, right? It's a pretty simple game. But then you also do this game called Sexy Nostril, where you write down adjectives and you write down body parts. So it could be angry, sad, lonely, energetic. Those are the adjectives. And then body parts, you know, earlobe, testicle,

Starting point is 00:55:39 anus, shoulder, blade, you know, fingernail, whatever. And you draw one of each and then you try and play a game manifesting those characteristics so if you have sex nostril and then you have to play that same game of getting the shoe and getting back the line but you're a person where their center of their energy is in their nostril and it's a very sensual sexual energy and you're just kind of it helps you create a character and play as that character and it's it takes you out of your head and it just gets you in your body and gets you kind of feeling and responding and i love teaching that stuff uh it's it's uh it's super fun and for me tim i'm in my head a lot and it's kind of sucks. So there's certain tools that I have to use to get by. So I've learned, uh, in my life, I don't remember every day, but there's certain things

Starting point is 00:56:32 I have to do to just be out of my head and just to get to normal. I'm not talking about like being like really super effective, uh, just to get to normal. I have to do meditation. I have to do some exercise. If I can get into nature, great. If I could play some tennis, better. And acting is that same way. Acting, rehearsing, playing characters. These are the things that get me out of my head and out of just analyzing every goddamn thing that comes down the pike and leaves me miserable and making really bad choices. Well, there you have it, folks. My first episode of the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour

Starting point is 00:57:14 with some of the superstars, some of the experts that I've spoken to over the past few years. And this is an experiment. As I said at the top of the show, I want to know what did you like? What did you not like? How could it be improved? Do you want more of these or should we just skip it? That's totally fair as well. What topics would you like me to most explore or consolidate? What types of patterns? In other words, I just want your feedback. So please let me know what did you like? What didn't you like? What should I do more of less of? And you can ping me on Twitter at T Ferris, T F E R R I S S, or on the blog at four hour workweek.com forward slash blog. If you're a Facebooker, you love the Facebooks. You could go to facebook.com forward slash Tim Ferris with two

Starting point is 00:58:01 R's and two S's. But generally speaking, Twitter is going to be the best means of communication for now at T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. So please let me know your thoughts. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.

Starting point is 00:58:43 That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind in the best

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Starting point is 01:00:20 People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now. This is the answer. So it is legal. It will not give you visuals. That's something else. And you can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com forward slash Tim. That is foursigmatic, S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C, foursigmatic.com forward slash Tim and use the code Tim to get 20% off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset,

Starting point is 01:00:47 I do not think you'll be disappointed. Four Sigmatic.com forward slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I use 99designs to get book cover prototypes for the 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #201: The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour: Meditation, Mindset, and Mastery

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