The Tim Ferriss Show - #779: In Case You Missed It: October 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short and action packed for a very long time because after all the podcasts, the books, they can be quite

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Starting point is 00:01:27 If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss 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.

Starting point is 00:02:18 This is a special in between a soad, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It 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 a lot of fun with fun putting it together and for the full list of the guests featured today see the episodes description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app.

Starting point is 00:02:47 Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, John Battiste, an Academy Award-winning and five-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and composer. His new album, Beethoven Blues, which showcases Batiste's interpretations

Starting point is 00:03:08 of Beethoven's iconic works is out now. You can find John on Instagram and Twitter, at John Batiste. What other mantras can you share? Oh man, this is deep. You going in. I'm going in. I'm going in.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Scoop of gear intact. Tim. Yeah, you know. Because I believe in the power of mantras. Oh, you. I do, in meditation, in repetition, the ability to, in a sense, end up with the mind of no mind to cleanse the pallet.

Starting point is 00:03:46 I mean, there's so many different ways you can use mantras also, which is why this is as deeply interesting to me. It can be a concentration practice. It can be sort of an erasing practice to regain some equilibrium. There's so many different ways to use repetition. Could be drumming too. It doesn't have to be, could be instrumental. There are so many different ways that you can enter unusual, uncommon states using repetition. So I'm very, very interested in this, which is why I'm asking.

Starting point is 00:04:16 Yes, for sure. So two of the ones that I, not for stage, but just more for crisis that I go to is be still and know, which is from the Bible, be still and know that I am God. It is this idea that, I'll give you a practice, so be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am. Be still and know that I. Be still and know that. Be still and know. Be still. Be.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Just this idea, I've sat with that and each phrase has a different meaning. Even be still and then breath or room tone. There's messages in that space. There's messages in the crevice. So I've done that and sat in that. And it's changed my entire perspective on a crisis or something that I felt perhaps I was wronged or perhaps, you know, there's so many opportunities for us in this life to transmutate darkness into light or even darkness into perspective. Another one is thy will be done, which is one of surrender. Now, we believe

Starting point is 00:05:34 there's a divine power. However you name it, whatever your relationship to it is, we've for the most part had an experience. There's something beyond explanation. The universe is carrying us in some way. Thy will be done is trusting that there's a divine logic to it all. When there's nothing that you can do, thy will be done. Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Because the belief of this divine logic allows for you to understand that there's

Starting point is 00:06:07 a path and you are accounted for in that path. You are accounted for. There's so much that is allowed for you to be at the culmination of so many things has led to you and there will never be another you. You're the only one. That specificity alone is something that comes to me when I'm in that, that will be done. It's a revelation of so many other things,

Starting point is 00:06:31 which is also allowing for the right thing to occur and for me to be accepting of it, versus for me to control it without knowledge of what the true right thing is. So there's so much that you have to cleanse yourself of from believing or from holding on to that's not actually connected to the best outcome. But you can't always know that, especially in crisis. It's very hard to know.

Starting point is 00:06:58 Many parables are always like this, this happened. Such good news, maybe. Such and such happened. This is terrible. Maybe. Like this, this happened, such good news, maybe. Such and such happened, this is terrible, maybe. It just depends on so many things outside of our sphere of knowledge that on so many levels can't be known.

Starting point is 00:07:12 When would you be inclined to say to yourself that last mantra? When would you apply that in your life? There's so many things that happened to us with our health. I talk about to like her a lot. I love her as you know. She's great. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Had her on the show. Yes. And I also borrow a lot of phrases from her in particular, this idea of being between two kingdoms, this idea of the kingdom of the well, the kingdom of the sick. And we all exist in this in-between space, and we have a passport for both,

Starting point is 00:07:49 which is something that she created this understanding of that through the way she lives through it, the way she gracefully moves through this time with such grace, with such power, with such clarity. I think about that. I think about how there's a certain surrender that's required of all of us in times when we deal with health challenges,

Starting point is 00:08:16 whether it's us or a loved one. And you find yourself in moments where there's literally nothing that you can do to take away pain or to take away the unknown and the anxiety of waiting. So that's an opportunity for a great amount of growth. That's an opportunity for a lesson to be instilled in a way that almost nothing else that I can think of affords you the chance for, thy will be done. Thy will be done.

Starting point is 00:08:47 Yeah, this coach I worked with for a while, he used to say, this is your pop quiz from the universe, when something unexpected would pop up. You'd be like, all right, all that meditation you've been doing? Let's see it. Let's see it.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Let's see, bro. Come on, bro. You've been rehearsing. This is game time. Let's see how it goes. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Tim bro. You've been rehearsing. This is game time. Let's see how it goes. Yeah. Yeah Oh Tim, you know what I'm saying when you you in that moment? Yeah Yeah, I've had a lot of sympathy for watching you both go through that journey and I can only imagine what it's like

Starting point is 00:09:16 I mean I have been of course and most people listening have been in a position where they feel powerless to help or they don't know how to help a loved one, but I had a lot of sympathy for a challenging road and also really been in awe of how much growth both of you have exhibited through the challenges and pain and so on. In any case, I just wanted to say that. Oh man, it means a lot to hear that and it feels so much of the time as odd as it may sound, it feels like a privilege to go through it together in the way that we have seen it. It's shifted into almost the orientation of blessing. And that's not to say that the difficulties are any easier.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Right? It doesn't change the nature of hard things. They're hard, but there's something about life. There's a truth. There's something about going through the fire that is so required and something about suffering that is so essential. This idea that we're meant to run from pain or run from difficult things and find the most leisurely and completely frictionless existence possible is such a lie.

Starting point is 00:10:50 It's not just a lie because it's not possible, but if it were possible, that would kill you the most. It would rob you in so many ways, which is, of course, easy for me to say sitting in this comfortable chair right now. In the midst of it, it's sometimes hard to see it. At the same time, there was an astrophysicist, Jan 11, who was on the podcast some time ago. And I'm going to butcher this quote, but it's more the concept for me that has really stuck.

Starting point is 00:11:16 She said something along the lines of, I used to look for the underlying path that would help me navigate around obstacles. And then I realized there is no underlying path. Like the obstacles are the path through which you discover yourself, through which you learn, through which you grow. Like that is the path. That's the path. Yeah. Take those away.

Starting point is 00:11:35 That's it. And then you're just, just a free floating essence of comfort. That's just not the human experience. Yeah. And also you're talking about blessings. So I could imagine even an earlier version of me would say like, oh, come on now. I mean, I suppose that's helpful, but maybe it's delusional and it's overly optimistic, but it's deeper than that. And I think that misses the mark because given a longer timeframe,

Starting point is 00:12:03 given all the unknowns, it could be a blessing, it could be a curse, but you can't know which it is over time, and it depends a lot on your perspective, so you might as well choose blessing. That is the more enabling perspective. And since you can't know, it's a coin flip, choose the side of the coin that is most enabling,

Starting point is 00:12:22 it seems to me, at least least in the abstract, it's easy to say. Taxi runs over my foot. We'll see how I do later today. It's that. And it's also, you only will know when you are there. You have to go there to know there. You only know what it can be for you when you're in the fire. Everybody can talk about what they would do when they are there, right? We can all say, man, if that would have happened to me, I would, you know, slay the dragon. I would, you know, whatever you think you would do, most often is not what you would do. And that's not because you're not who you think you are.

Starting point is 00:13:06 It's because there's so many other factors you can't know. And for many things in my life that I think about, the things I've learned the most from are when I've embraced the discomfort and realized what I was made of through it. Let me just sit with that for a second. Yeah. Let me just sit with that for a second. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:47 life and beyond. You can learn more about Dr. Grayson at bruisgrayson.com. So I want to zoom in and out from the clinical skeptical side to the hopefully, and I think we'll get to quite a few of these, but examples that could be corroborated in some fashion. And those may overlap with those that are described as out-of-body experiences they might not and We'll probably come back to that term as well. But could you tell the story of The Tony if this is enough of a cue the red mgb, you know many people in the native experience say that they Encountered deceased loved ones in the experience. And that can easily be explained as wishful thinking, expectation.

Starting point is 00:14:29 You know, you think you're dying and you would love to see your grandmother once more, so she comes to you and there's no way to prove or disprove that. However, in some cases, the person having the near-death experience encounters someone who had died, but nobody yet knew they had died. So that can't be dismissed as expectation and wishful thinking. This is not a new phenomenon. Pliny the Elder wrote about a case like this in the first century, Gaius D. But we're hearing about a lot of them now. About 12 years ago, I wrote a paper that had 30 different cases from recent years. Jack was one of those. He had an experience, actually he was in South

Starting point is 00:15:05 Africa back in the 70s. And he was a young technician at that time and had very serious pneumonia and he was really stopped breathing, had to be resuscitated. So he was admitted to the hospital with a severe pneumonia and he had one nurse who was constantly working with him as his primary nurse, a young pretty girl about his age. He flirted a lot with her when he could. And one day she told him she's going to be taking a long weekend off and there'd be other nurses substituting for her. So he wished her well and she went off. And over the weekend while she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest where he couldn't breathe. He had to be resuscitated. And during that time, he had a near-death experience. And he told me that he was in

Starting point is 00:15:51 this beautiful pastoral scene, and there out of the woods came his nurse, Anita, walking towards him. And he was stunned because he was in this different world. What's she doing there? So he said, you know, what are you doing here? And she said, you know, Jack, you can't stay here with me. I want you to go back and I want you to find my parents and tell them that I love them very much. And I'm sorry, I wrecked the red MGB. He didn't know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods. And then he woke up later in his hospital bed. Now he tells me that back in the 70s there were very few MGBs in South Africa and he had never seen one. When the first nurse came into

Starting point is 00:16:30 his room he started to tell her about his experience and seeing his nurse Anita she got very upset and ran out of the room. It turned out that she had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday and her parents had surprised her with the gift of a red MGB. She got very excited, hopped in the car and took off for a test drive and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly, just a few hours before his near-death experience. I don't see any way he could have known or wanted or expected her to have an accident and die. And surely in a way he could have known how she died.

Starting point is 00:17:07 And yet he did. And we've got lots of other cases like this that called Peakey and Darien cases based on a book that was published in 1800s with cases like these, where people encounter deceased individuals who were not known to be dead. Now, I don't know how to explain those.

Starting point is 00:17:23 Now, just to put my skeptic's hat on, I could say, well, if I were Jack, was it Jack? Let's just say it's Jack. That would make one hell of a story if there wasn't a third party to sort of independently verify it with. Right. But there are other cases and for people listening, we're going to come back to some of the common questions I would say, forms of discussion around these related to possible biological mechanisms or lack thereof. We're gonna come back to that in a second. But there are then cases that are seemingly

Starting point is 00:17:55 characteristically quite different and perhaps can be, and I'd be curious to know if this has been done or not, but verified with third parties. And one that comes to mind that I've heard you discuss is related to the surgeon flapping like a bird. And I was hoping that you could give a description of that particular case study. Before we get to that, how many near-death experiences

Starting point is 00:18:24 have you documented, studied or otherwise read about, put into the archives yourself? How many instances would you say you have encountered in one way or another? I've got slightly more than a thousand in my database at the University of Virginia, where we have validated as much as we can that they were in fact close to death and this is what happened to them. I've talked to many more people about their near-death experience that I haven't included because I wasn't confident that they really fit the criteria for being in the study. But it's really much more common than you might think it was because people don't talk

Starting point is 00:18:57 about these things. You mentioned people wanting the publicity of this. That is actually maybe more true now. But back in the 70s and 80s, nobody wanted to talk about these things. Yeah, you see what I'm saying. If you talk about things, you got ridiculed, you got referred to a psychiatrist, you were called crazy, you were shunned by people you knew, both materialists and religious folks.

Starting point is 00:19:19 They didn't want to hear about these things. So people did not talk about these events. And what of this surgeon flapping like a bird? This was a fellow, Al, in his mid fifties, who was a van driver and he was out on his rounds one day and he had chest pain and he would do enough to stop his rounds and drive to the emergency room. And they did some evaluations and found that he had four arteries to his heart that were blocked. And they rushed him to the emergency room for urgent quadruple bypass surgery.

Starting point is 00:19:55 So he's lying on the table, fully unconscious, the drapes over him, so forth. And he tells me that in the middle of the operation, he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw the surgeons operating on him. And he saw the chief surgeon who he hadn't met before flapping his arms like he was trying to fly. And he demonstrated for me. At that point, I laughed.

Starting point is 00:20:18 So I thought, this is obviously hallucination. Doctors don't do that. But he insisted that I check with the doctor. He said, this really happened. Ask him. So he told me lots of other things about his new death experience, but that's the one that I was able to verify. So I talked to a surgeon who actually had been trained in Japan and he said, well, yes, I did do that. I have a habit of letting my assistants start the procedure while I put on my sterile gown and gloves and wash my hands and so forth. Then I go into the operating room and watch them for a

Starting point is 00:20:51 while because I don't want to risk touching anything with my sterile hands now. I point things out to them with my elbows and point to things out just the way Al was saying he was trying to fly. I don't know any other doctor that's done that. I've been a doctor for more than 50 years and I've never seen anyone do that. So it's kind of an idiosyncratic thing. Is there any way Al could have seen that? Well, he was totally anesthetized. He had his heart was open. I don't think there's any way he could have seen that. And yet he did. didn't. Next up, Andrew Roberts, historian and New York Times bestselling author of 20 books, including Napoleon, a Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, and most recently Conflict,

Starting point is 00:21:40 the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, co-authored with general David Petraeus You can find Andrew on Twitter at a Roberts underscore Andrew Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self-control in crisis it seems that that's something that recurs. And the reason I'm asking about it is, this would be, I suppose, a sub question, how much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also? But feel free to take that in any direction you'd like. RL. Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war. They both went to military colleges. So as their level of command grew,

Starting point is 00:22:28 as they grew older, the sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men essentially that they were controlling increased exponentially. So they had the intellectual background, they had the training as well, and as young men in both cases, they thought a lot about war, about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and so on. They had an egotism to look at it in a negative way, but a self-confidence to look at it in a positive way that gave them the ability to take these shatteringly important decisions. So I think it's much more nurture than nature. In both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire that they both had. There was a not holy in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at all

Starting point is 00:23:18 religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were doing was sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were doing was so good and right and proper and had to be done that they were not kept up awake at night over even the death of friends. The death of friends that they were responsible for. CB They were responsible for. In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names or I suppose using the royal we here, you could bring up other names. Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive, who they leaned on in some sense, that they found solace in, were there particular minds? RL Well, certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive autodidact. He never went to university and so therefore,

Starting point is 00:24:06 when he was a young subaltern in India in his early 20s, he sat down and read the greats, philosophers as well as writers. And he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two greats, 19th century English historians. That affected his writing style and of course later his oratorical style, but also his philosophical outlook on life. With regards to Napoleon, he was even more literary really because he also wrote short stories and books and so on. And so, he was very much affected by what he read again as a young man. And in both cases, they were reading so much that it slightly cut them off from their contemporaries. Napoleon didn't have many friends when he was in his early 20s. And Churchill, when the other people were

Starting point is 00:25:07 off sleeping in the midday heat of India, his colleagues and comrades, he'd be sitting there reading Schopenhauer and Gibbon and Macaulay and so on. CB How did Gibbon and Macaulay inform his philosophical leanings? RL They made him into what was called at the time a wig. We don't have them today, obviously, but they were in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives who believed in noblesse oblige in the importance of- What is that? I'm sorry. Noblesse oblige. It's almost a medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege, is to work for the greater good of the community to protect widows and orphans. It's sort of like the nightly chivalric concept

Starting point is 00:25:54 that you get from the Middle Ages. And they very much believed in that and so did Churchill. AC Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about Napoleon. I'm embarrassed to admit and I do want to ask more about Churchill as well, but you've described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that? There are lots of military leaders who can do a lot of things, but he was the only one that I can think of who could do all of them. Of course, it helps if you're winning. in the last three years of his military career, he was losing. But even then, even when he had far fewer troops when he was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able to win five

Starting point is 00:26:38 victories in seven days in the 1814 campaign. That's two years after the retreat from Moscow. It's quite extraordinary capacity. And he was able to win whether he was advancing or retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the right or left flank or sometimes straight through the center as it ousts. He had that capacity, that mind for military conquest, but also, of course, the greatness that was required completely to revolutionize French society. People think that the French Revolution revolutionized society, you know, the clues in the name as it were. But in fact, the long-lasting things that actually dragged France into the 19th century were things like the Code Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary concept. They were a Napoleonic concept.

Starting point is 00:27:32 This may seem like a lazy question, but since I'm operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon, what do you think it was that allowed him to be a decathlete of war, as it were, being good at all of these different facets? And I think of how we might analyze different athletes and what allows them to exercise the capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe what enabled him to do that where others were unable? Richard Lange It was inspiration, but also perspiration. He really did put in the time, thinking about it and reading about it by it. I mean, warfare. And of course, he'd been educated in it. He read the key books. There's a guy called the Comte de Gervais who in 1772 wrote a book about strategy and tactics, and he, 30 years later, put these into operation.

Starting point is 00:28:29 And so, he was able to spot the best of the best when it came to modern thinking, or in this case, 30-year-old thinking, in fact. That didn't matter because the weapons of war hadn't changed in the intervening period. And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use, the classic example being the core system. What was it called? It's called the core system. It's basically- C-O-R-E.

Starting point is 00:28:58 C-O-R-P-S. And what he did with them was to create mini armies essentially, which were able to march separately but converge and concentrate for the battle. And so one of your corps would engage the enemy and then he would use the other corps to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a brilliant concept. Actually, the Allies didn't start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted the core system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new concepts. And at the same time, he had very old fashioned views about how to excite the men. Victory, obviously, is the best thing when it comes

Starting point is 00:29:47 to exciting men. Exactly. Nothing much works better than that. But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that to appeal to the soul was the way to electrify the men. And so, he was able to do that. And some people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general being the classic example, who won the Battle of Waterloo against him, it wasn't interesting in electrifying the soul of the men at all. He rather despised his ordinary soldiers, but nonetheless- You're talking about Wellington or- The Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice, negative remarks about his about his own soldiers. And he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat, but they loved him because he cared

Starting point is 00:30:33 about how many of them died in battle, you know, and he never lost a battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander, needless to say. But he didn't try, he didn't go out. He would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men. Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hats and his gray coats and his way of taking off his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders of the day, his proclamations before the Battle of the Pyramids in 1799, he said, 40 centuries looked down upon you. And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier in Egypt, far away from home, and he looks up at the pyramids and thinks, yeah, he's placing the events of that day in the long historical parabola. And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. In about 10% of all of the speeches

Starting point is 00:31:25 that Churchill gave in 1940, there's some reference to history or the past. He too would summon up the idea that yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British Commonwealth are on their own, and this of course was in the period before America and Russia were in the war. But we've been in terrible straits before, look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral Nelson, and so on. And we came through those and won. He also brought up the First World War a lot. So yes, he too drew on history. And people knew that because he'd written history books and written biographies, including the biography of his great ancestor, the first Eacon Walbrough. He was with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his

Starting point is 00:32:10 view of history. And now, an excerpt from Tim's solo podcast episode, Productivity Tactics, two approaches I personally use to reset, get unstuck, and focus on the right things. A few years ago a creature died in the walls of my home. It was disgusting. Now to be precise, it gave up the ghost in the heating system so the death fumes were conveniently pushed directly into my bedroom. My ex-girlfriend and I discovered this around 11 p.m. as we tucked into bed hoping for a good night's sleep. We could turn off the heat and freeze, that was one option,

Starting point is 00:32:51 or we could bathe in the stench of what I assumed was a raccoon carcass. And the whole thing made my eyes itch, it was horrible. I imagined it downing its last meal, pig entrails, moldy socks, fermented beans, who knows, before defiantly jamming its bloated body into my HVAC. Don't worry, we are getting to some kind of lesson here.

Starting point is 00:33:11 But the Kamikaze Raccoon was just the first surprise guest. The opening act, in short order, my dog then got horribly sick, unrelated to Raccoon. Overdue paperwork started piling up, popping out of nowhere, and onboarding a bunch of new contractors ran into trouble. Then I pulled out of a parking spot and scraped the entire side of my car and the car next to me. Later that same afternoon,

Starting point is 00:33:33 all these Christmas presents I had ordered somehow had run out of stock and were auto canceled, so I was sent scrambling. And on and on it went, more and more clowns piling into the clown car for a shit show that lasted Three to four weeks. It was just a 15 car pileup of nonsense. There are the rare times when I feel like I'm in the zone. Those are great Those are fantastic. Then there are times when I ask myself

Starting point is 00:33:59 How in holy hell have I become the janitor of a mountain of bullshit that happens more than you might think Put another way sometimes you're the boxer and sometimes you are the punching bag We all get our turn as the punching bag doesn't matter who you are as far as I can tell it doesn't matter how successful you become you've always grabbed a number at the deli counter of Just wait eventually you're going to get your ass kicked by the universe. Now, during these periods of firefighting, let's just call it when stuff is popping up, this whack-a-mole, I get fidgety and frustrated. I feel like I'm treading water and patience wears very thin,

Starting point is 00:34:35 has never been my strong suit. That's true, especially with myself. And my instinct is to try to fix things as quickly as possible. And that's all well and good, but I've realized that from a place of what the fuck, I often rush and create more problems. This is particularly bad, catastrophic sometimes,

Starting point is 00:34:54 when I try to sprint immediately upon waking up. The mantra that has saved me, and saved me during that three to four week period I mentioned was very simple and it's this, make before you manage. make before you manage. That's it. What this means is each morning before plugging holes, fixing things, calling vets, answering text messages, delegating or yanking out dead raccoons, answering

Starting point is 00:35:19 a million text messages. This mantra was a reminder to make something. You should read Paul Graham's essays and listen to Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art Commencement speech for more on all of this. But back to any given day and make before you manage. Even the most time sensitive items can usually wait 60 minutes.

Starting point is 00:35:38 And by make something, I mean anything. It could be anything at all. You just need to feel like you've pushed a millimeter ahead in some creative direction. For me personally, even a 90 second video of calligraphy could set a better emotional tone for the entire day, helping me to be more calm as I handle problems, as I execute all the rest of the stuff later. Or maybe I attempt to jumpstart my writing with an Instagram caption, right? Or an email to a friend to take the pressure off.

Starting point is 00:36:06 It's practically nothing, but it's enough. Even token efforts allow me to reassure myself with, hey pal, don't worry, you did produce something today. And the psychological difference between zero acts of creation and one act of creation, no matter how small, is really impossible to overstate. It's binary, right really impossible to overstate. It's binary, right?

Starting point is 00:36:26 Zero to a little bit, those are two different worlds. If you're lucky, sometimes that one idea, that one sentence, or one shitty first draft can turn into something bigger. And that happens when you catch the wave. But the point is to be able to say to yourself, even for five minutes, Hark, I am a creator, not just a janitor of bullshit. Here's proof that I can and will do more than just manage the minutia of life.

Starting point is 00:36:49 And I think at least personally, I do need that reinforcement. We all spend time on the struggle bus, happens to everybody. At the very least, this mantra has helped me to find a window seat when it's my turn. So as a reminder, when in doubt, try it out. Make before you manage. And now here are the bios for all the guests. This isn't just any episode. This one turned out

Starting point is 00:37:19 really, really special. And I really encourage everybody to listen to this once as audio only if you are listening to this without any video but also go to youtube.com slash tim ferris two r's two s's to see the video we recorded this episode in the recording studio designed by jimmy hendrix where he slept in the recording studio designed by Jimi Hendrix where he slept. The acoustics, the surroundings, everything is gorgeous and my guest was in the flow. We happened to mesh really well together and it's one of those episodes that I will remember for many years. My guest, John Batiste, is a five-time Grammy award-winning and Academy award-winning singer, songwriter, and composer. I met him ages and ages ago, back when he was a mere incredible, incredible musician, composer, etc. But I've been able to watch him become the Marquis lights John Battiste,

Starting point is 00:38:18 and it has been a thrill to watch. We talk about it all. His eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues, is set for a November 15th release release when we're sitting in jimmy hendrix studio there are pianos guitars you name it and we don't just talk we walk around and uses music to answer some of my questions it's phenomenal. Beethoven Blues marks the first installment in his solo piano series showcasing Baptiste's interpretation of Beethoven's iconic works reimagined. And that is an understatement. You're going to hear a lot of it in this episode towards the last 25%. So buckle up and stick around. Beethoven Blues follows Baptiste's studio album, World Music Radio, which received five Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year.

Starting point is 00:39:06 As a composer, he scored Jason Reitman's Saturday Night, Now in Theaters. The film depicts the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live's very first broadcast in 1975, underscored by Batiste's blending of jazz, classical, and contemporary elements. He composed and produced the music live on set, capturing the intensity of the show's debut.

Starting point is 00:39:27 He also appears in the film as Billy Preston, the show's first musical guest, and certainly he has lived that out himself. Additionally, Baptiste composed and performed music for the Disney Pixar film, Soul, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. You can find him at JohnBatiste.com.

Starting point is 00:39:47 That's J-O-N-B-A-T-I-S-T-E.com on Instagram and socials, at JohnBatiste. And boy, oh boy, I love this. I really think you guys are in for a treat. Stick around, listen to the whole thing. Watch it a second time on video at youtube.com slash Tim Ferriss My guest today is Bruce Grayson MD he is the Chester F. Carlson professor emeritus of psychiatry and

Starting point is 00:40:17 Neurobehavioral Sciences and director emeritus of the division of perceptual studies at the University of Virginia where he has practiced and taught Psychiatry and carried out research since 1995. He's also a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and his most recent book is After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. He has studied, documented more than 1,000

Starting point is 00:40:40 near-death experiences, and what made him appealing to me as a guest with this incredibly unusual terrain is that he was raised with a secular what we could call rational materialist worldview. Today's guest Andrew Roberts. Andrew Roberts has written 20 books which have been translated into 28 languages and have won 13 literary prizes. These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, A New History of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, George III, The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch, and most recently conflict, the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus. Lord Roberts is a fellow of the

Starting point is 00:41:32 Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. The Bonnie and Tom McCloskey, distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He's also a member of the House of Lords. You can find all things Andrew at Andrew-Roberts.net online and he's also on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, at X.com slash a Roberts underscore Andrew. Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Andrew. 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 kind of

Starting point is 00:42:30 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 it out, just go to tim.blogslashfriday.

Starting point is 00:43:02 Type that into your browser, tim.blogslashfriday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #779: In Case You Missed It: October 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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