The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 52: Ed Cooke, Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief

Episode Date: December 30, 2014

Ed Cooke is a dear friend and a Grandmaster of Memory. In 2010, he was interviewed by a journalist named Joshua Foer. Under Ed's Yoda-like training, Joshua became the very next American Memory Champion in 2011. It took less than a year for Ed to transform a novice from unknown to world-class.But how?!? Aha... This interview explores Ed Cooke's brilliant techniques (many of which I use), strategies, and practical philosophies. To boot, he's also a wicked funny bastard! If you enjoyed the epic interviews with Kevin Kelly, Josh Waitzkin, or Maria Popova, you'll love Ed. He's one of a kind.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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as well as every other episode by going to fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, spell it all out, or you can go to fourhourworkweek.com and just click on podcast feedback. If you have feedback, I would love your thoughts, anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show. Ping me on Twitter at T Ferris, that's twitter.com forward slash T F E R R I S S or on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash Tim Ferris with two R's and two S's. This episode is a conversation between yours truly, Tim Ferriss and Ed Cook. Ed Cook is a grandmaster of memory based in Britain, great Britain, a good friend. He's made a number of appearances in the four hour chef.

He helped improve my ability to memorize anything and everything. He's also very well known for coaching a writer named Joshua Foer from nothing, i.e. ground zero, to becoming U.S. National Memory Champion in, I believe, a year or so of time. A really astonishing feat. And we'll get into what Grandmaster of Memory means. This is a two-part episode. So you have two separate parts. They are very, very dense. They are hilarious. If you liked the Kevin Kelly episodes, the Josh Waitzkin episodes, or any episodes that are similar to those, very in-depth, wide-ranging, you are going to love this episode. I hope you enjoy it. So without further ado, here is Ed Cook. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to a special episode of The Tim

Ferriss Show. I have my dear friend Ed Cook on the line. I grabbed him last minute for reasons I shall explain. And he is a grandmaster of memory among many many other things at the at the ripe old age of 23 is when he turned that corner but ed where are you at the moment and and what are you up to so i am currently sitting in the uh in the office um where i work which is a converted methodist chapel in bethnal green london um and And it's Friday night at 10.15pm. Well, people with adequate social lives are currently running around town and falling in love. Yeah, I'm here and I'm chatting with you Tim and I'm delighted to be here. I wanted to actually share with people what we just talked about doing an audio check before

we began recording, where you gave the best answer I've ever heard to a very mundane question, which is, tell me what you had for breakfast, or what did you have for breakfast? And you feel free to improvise, but what was your answer, roughly? Well, it was a sound check, so I was allowing myself a certain embellishment. But yeah, I was just relating how I had a couple of potteries, a few sausages, some salmon. Seven kippers, I think they were.

They were kippers. They were peach-smoked kippers. Four boiled eggs and two poached eggs. That kind of thing. I actually don't know the English king, but I had a friend who is an amazing friend, sort of friend, who occasionally at breakfast used to sort of chuckle at a canterby. And I'd be like, well, what are you talking about?

And he'd be like, I'm just thinking about what Henry VI had for breakfast every day. And I should give some background for folks who may not realize that you and I first connected several years ago, and you were tremendously helpful with The 4-Hour Chef, since that was a book about accelerated learning disguised as a cookbook, which, surprise, surprise, ended up being very, very confusing to almost everybody in the universe who came across it. But there were aspects of it, including chapters focused on mnemonic devices and other types of memory techniques where you were incredibly helpful. So first of all, thank you very much for that. My pleasure. And I was having trouble piecing together how we first came in contact.

How did we first meet and i should also just as context for folks point out that ed is in the uk i am drinking highly caffeinated tea he is drinking wine and this is intended to be like a pub conversation so so yeah so please filter any interpretation of any remarks in the context of a ripe old English pub. We came into contact through my dear friend Greg, with whom I co-founded the company. And Greg was then a PhD student at Princeton. And I think you came to do a couple of talks. He got chatting with you.

And it was through that that we met. That's right. And so for those who are not familiar, Ed is co-founder, and the office that he referred to is related to his company Memrise, Memrise.com, which we'll come back to. And the concept of being a grandmaster of memory, it's not really a concept, the qualification, what is entailed in becoming a grandmaster of Memory. It's not really a concept, the qualification. What is entailed in becoming a Grandmaster of Memory?

So, I'll explain that first and then we can discuss a little bit just how stupid a term it is and what a marvelous device for kind of, you know, either ending a conversation or beginning one at a bus stop. But, yeah, so

Grandmaster of Memory, it's a kind of title given out by the World Memory Sports Foundation. And basically you have to be able to remember a 1,000-digit number in an hour, a pack of cards in under a couple of minutes, and then 10 packs of shuffled cards in an hour. So it's three parts of the World Memory Championships which determine whether you can get this title. And, yeah, I mean, it's a great title. I mean, I can't really.

It's a very compelling title. You know, the number of times, you know, I've been in the kind of losing situation in nightclub, you know, out danced. You know, I'm not a symmetrical person, Tim. And, you know, sometimes my visual allure kind of understates the value of conversation with me. Anyhow, so this is sort of like, you know, so what's your problem? It's like, sorry, I'm a grandmaster of memory. It's like, okay. You know, let me buy you some champagne and then we can talk further about this important qualification.

But, yeah, it's a very silly concept. But the cultural context, if you want, from which it emerges, namely people doing competitive memory competitions, I think is awesome and fascinating. Because in 1990, the world record for memorizing a shuffle deck of cards was 149 seconds, which, you know, if you could memorize a pack of cards in under three minutes and show that to somebody, they'd be fairly astounded and would think you were cheating. And, you know, it's not obvious to anybody that the human mind would be capable of that. And I remember I was very proud 10 years ago when I first broke a minute.

I was like, oh my goodness, this is extraordinary. Anyway, the world record now is 21 seconds for the memorization of a shuffle deck of 52 cards. And you sort of think, well, obviously people presumably haven't got four times faster brains than they did

only 24 years ago. But the reason for it is that there's been this competitive culture in which there's an objective measure of mnemonic speed, if you like. And over the last 20 years, people have, on each year, done their best to outgun their rivals in the memory scene and then very openly and freely shared the techniques and hacks they've used to be able to optimize these fairly arbitrary, but nonetheless kind of interesting processes of memorization.

And the result has been an absolutely continuous linear increase in the amount of stuff people can remember across a very wide range of disciplines in a particular amount of time so this is true of like names and faces random strings of words crazy like abstractly generated images all the stuff people have been able to think up to test people's memories with as a result of this community of competition and sharing um you know people have got almost 10 times faster now in the course of 24 years at memorizing things when it was already very impressive in the first place so i think that's why it's an interesting thing yeah is that a function of prize money

prestige social media i'm very curious about the dynamic that has produced that progress because if you look at mixed martial arts, for instance, UFC, and you look at the first 10 UFCs, compare that to, compare the competitors to the competitors, say 30 UFCs later, compare those competitors with those of today, as the prize money has increased, among other things, I think it's primarily the prize money, you see a very quick evolution in terms of whether it's selection bias, or just a larger pool of competitors that has gone from, say, top 20% of athletes in the United States to top 10 to top two. And you're just looking at mutants in many cases now, not to detract from their technique. Not to diminish their fine manners and general affable.

Yeah, right. Not to diminish their gentlemanly demeanor and technique and training, but what are the contributing factors to the increases in speed and capability? Of the options you offered up there,

you can choose other ones. It's certainly not social media. The total Twitter followers of competitors in the world memory championships is 20, 25 or something but yeah the and it's not money there's no real money on it

I think it's you know I would suppose that you know perhaps in a hundred years time if people did still care the current state of memory sports would be considered still extraordinarily immature. And so I think what's the kind of, it's like cricket in the 19th century in England where

people were kind of working out the basics of technique. In that case, historically, I believe it was the invention of the steam train which allowed cricket to get good because teams from further apart in the country could visit each other. The information and press was delivered quicker, and so there was a sort of general increase in the talent pool who were competing with each other, and it was just possible to even travel and sort of compete.

And it's the same thing there. So people from all over the world can do it. It's easy to hop on a plane. So that's a contributing factor. But I think fundamentally the motivation is that it's just so cool winning or doing well in the World Memory Championships that it's purely a kind of slightly comic form of status, I think, which drives it, as well as the fact that, of course, it's phenomenally interesting

to take something which every single person there would never imagine they were capable of doing and push it and push it and push it to see how well it can be done. And it probably helps that it's quite precisely quantifiable, like the 100 meters or whatever else. And I wanted to grab something you mentioned and come back to it, which is what the average person is capable of doing or what most people are capable of doing. And perhaps you could recount for folks the outcome of one of the experiments that you and I did also involving your team, which was related to the four-hour chef. So we wanted to incentivize people to try to memorize a shuffle deck of cards.

And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and the outcome because a lot of people listening will probably assume like a thousand digits. I could never even remember a phone number. I couldn't remember 20 numbers. And they underestimate what they're capable of doing. So I would love if you could just perhaps recount the results of the experiment that we did related to the book launch. Yes, that was, that was a fun,

um, fun thing we did. So yeah, we, we all memorize. We, um, we launched a competition,

uh, with you, Tim. Uh, yeah. At the same time as we launched the book. It was a $10,000 prize, I believe, munificently supplied by you, Tim. Yep, that's right.

I spent it on... So we did this thing, and we had this great engineer in the office called Tank, who built this amazing system, which was basically a standard memorized course where you would learn to associate with each card in the deck a person. And I'd actually propose a group of 52 people, but there were ways of changing them to be people that you wanted to have in your set of images. And the basic technique underlying this is that, you know, cards are boring and unmemorable. Sequences are boring and unmemorable. How do you remember them?

Well, you turn the cards into images which are more memorable. And so, for instance, Tim, you are slightly more memorable than the three of hearts, say, because you have characteristics. You have a personality. I can imagine you in detail. I can imagine you interacting in situations. So you're inherently more interesting to my brain than a mere card or figure or anything like that. And so this is kind of an incredibly incoherent explanation, but I'll keep going.

I think you're doing great. The assumption that I have personality is a bit of a stretch but besides that you're doing fine i didn't say that it was an adequate or admirable one i just said there was one um anyway so um so you know the basics of memory techniques is that our minds love certain kinds of things so we're very very good at remembering spaces we're very very good at remembering spaces. We're very, very good at remembering things which attract our interest. And so a rule of thumb I like to use is that anything which should grab your attention if you're wandering down the street is the kind of thing which will grab your attention. If you're walking down the street, no. But will kind of a small elephant being attacked by lemurs attract your attention? Yes. Will a spectacular Lissom naked woman attract your attention? Perhaps.

Will a bollard do so? Probably not. And so it's the same thing when we kind of perceive within ourselves, which is to say when we remember, the vivid vivid interesting emotion grabbing things uh again tim i'd like to clarify that you don't evoke vivid emotions particularly i mean i'm just taking this example anyway uh but anyway these things these things grab my attention so the art of memory is basically transforming information which is not interesting into forms of information which are interesting.

And for a pack of cards, the technique which I use myself and which is very popular in the memory community is to take each card and then rote associate a person with it. And, you know, if you go with personal association, you do this very quickly. It takes like an afternoon for a normal person to associate with 52 cards, 52 people. And then having got that code, which is a bit like a language, really. You think of it as a language. So if I say hola to you, you'll say, oh, hi, Ed. And you've just learned an arbitrary association between some letters, hola, and a meaning, hi there, sort of thing. And it's just like that with the cards.

It's like a very, very small language, 52 words. And so when you're going through the cards, you imagine the people you've associated with the cards instead of the cards, and already it's massively more interesting. And the second thing you do to tackle the sequence, which is difficult to remember because it's just a bland sequence,

is that you string these people who are standing in the cards into an amusing story. So you might be getting your doorstep and, you know, there's Tim Ferriss and he's desperately, you know, trying to impress the queen. She's not impressed. And then slightly down the road, we've got like the Pope and he's chatting with Ed Stoughton. And, you know, these people are standing in for cards.

And because Tim's trying to impress the queen, it's kind of funny. There's a kind of colonial, perverse humor vibe or whatever. It's just more interesting than Three of Hearts, Seven of Spades, kind of thing. Anyhow, so that's the basic technique. So going back to your original question, we put together a course on memoirs which helped people make these associations

and so people would play on that for an hour and they build up this vocabulary of ways of thinking about cards so they're just more interesting, more vivid, so they attract more emotion, and so they're just generally more memorable. And then we proposed a technique very famous in the memory kind of community, which is to sort of imagine going around a space. And actually, for your blog, Tim, I remember embarrassing myself on my local street in a snowstorm trying to wander around demonstrating how to place images in space. I was like, oh, look up there.

I remember that. I remember that very closely. Yeah, so people can search for Ed Cook Cook with an E on the blog to find that video. Yeah. Anyhow, so we did the competition so people learn the technique and they could practice with this cool um system on the on the website and um what was astonishing

was that you know a few thousand people entered you know most people um like basically couldn't be bothered and gave up quite quickly but but but basically anyone who did persevere and actually just learn the images and then start practicing, many of them got really good really, really fast. And the girl who ended up winning it, whose name is Irina Zayat, she's a fabulous young lady,

a programmer who lives in the Ukraine. I tried to recruit her for Memrise, actually. She was sort of only dimly interested. But anyway, she did it in about four days. So she just sat on her computer and practiced the thing, and then within four days, she basically nailed it and could do it under a second. And then at the Memrise Christmas party that year,

we piped her in live on Skype to prove that she could actually do it and wasn't cheating. And so there's a party of about 200 people cramming into the church. You know, scenes of unbelievable debauchery, Tim. I shake as I pull the... Eyes wide shut.

One of the... Yeah, well, yeah, it was that, but we better chat, you know. Better lighting. Anyhow, yeah, so she just nailed it again, live on Skype, under the pressure. We told her, I think, that that was how she could actually win the prize. And that's kind of just a nice example. You know, like, it is very doable.

And I had kind of another interesting experience where I met a – I went to the U.S. Memory Championships, I think in 2005, with my friend. So this is a bit of a sort of diversion, but I'll tell the anecdote. So I got this friend called Lucas who's from Austria and from Vienna who is an absolutely hilarious and wonderful fellow who, before we'd done this, we'd been contacted by Channel 4. And they were like, we're just interested to hear how memory athletes train. And I've always been a bit suspicious, to be honest, of the concept of sort of self-hacking. I've never been quite clear whether that's something I really want to do in my life. But anyway, so I said, well, you know, we like to go to high altitude and go to complete seclusion.

And I was kind of channeling an image of ricky hatton the boxer you know going into the mountains and sort of going through some anyway they were like awesome so anyway lucas and i we headed up into the mountains we um we we put on as a sort of comedy show uh and this can be found on youtube actually but a um a kind of image of what a mental athlete's training program would look like lots of sort of press-ups involving claps and competitive boxing style, mutual recitation of binary numbers and stuff. Anyhow, so it's a kind of, it's a minor, for the sort of 12 or 13 people who, in your listenership,

who think that... Actually, well, fuck it. I'm going to an anecdote within an anecdote. I'm not going to bother. Okay, so we went to America, and we went to the U.S. Memory Championships, and it was quite hilarious. So both of us, at that point,

non-American competitors were not really allowed to compete, but we were allowed to compete. And anyway, we came first and second by a margin of about times three because at that point the sport was not very well developed in the US and um anyway there was a journalist there and he was like oh my god you're a geek you're a uh savant the rest of it and I was like uh no mate you know we were uh two young lads who've got an enthusiasm for memory tennings and so he was like well then this is impossible. So I was like, no, no, no, no, I'll train you.

So I trained him for a year, and he wound up the next year. And by the way, I'm a pretty brutal coach. It's a kind of a way of – it's a way for me to transcend my own insufficiencies is to criticize others. And so I trained him up for a year. And, yeah, he wound up winning the American Memory Championships. It was pretty cool. He read a book about it. That was Joshua 4.

Correct. Yeah, that's Joshua 4. He's super cool. Moonwalking with Einstein. Booked it very, very well. Had a great piece in Wired that introduced me to that as well. But, sorry to interrupt.

Not my intention. No worries. Brought everything to a standstill. I'm actually quite drunk now, by the way, Tim. Oh, perfect, perfect. Well, I was taken aback by your sudden silence,

which I mistook for shyness, but I think it's just drunkenness. I was just sort of taking another slug on the tank. Oh, nice, nice, nice, nice. I'll have to get you a camel for our next podcast. So just to put things in perspective for folks, it was Irina, right? The Ukrainian woman? Yeah. So she learned to memorize a shuffled or randomized deck of cards in less than a minute in four or five days. And the previous U.S. record, I guess a few years ago had been what, 147 seconds or

something along those lines. Um, so she beat the us record with four to five days of training. I mean, granted it was an older record, but I think that that just highlights what is possible for people. And, uh, the, the, the question I'd love to ask you is, I mean, what are some, some, uh, some perhaps if people have an afternoon and, uh, they are not going to necessarily focus on the pack of cards, is there something else that they can do to prove to themselves that they have greater, uh, mental athleticism or memorization potential than they've ever thought possible? Is there something else that they can do? They can make love to a beautiful woman in their imaginations without moving a muscle.

Okay. Why would you recommend that? Well, that was a joke, Tim. Okay, you got me me you're so dry it's just dry british humor we're we're still dragging our knuckles over here that was actually just that was a straight straight out not that funny uh but i suppose the tinkle of a thought which underlies every joke there uh the tinkle of a thought which underlies the joke there is just that imagination is, and you possibly form an image in a second, which you then end up remembering five minutes later? The example I like to give is that that's what happens in conversation the entire time.

If I say to you, I might just describe my office to you, Tim, and we'll actually test your memory. I know that you're sort of getting on a bit. I'm getting a little long in the you, Tim. We'll actually test your memory. I know that you're sort of getting on a bit and getting a little long in the tooth. A little bit sort of doddery. But yeah, so if I describe the office, we've got quite a colourful office.

So I'm going to begin where I am and in about 15 seconds I'm going to describe to you the sequence of objects I'm going to see and I'm going to make it a bit more vivid by imagining myself as an amusing character kind of leaping around. So let's say that I am...

Why don't you name the amusing character, Tim? Amusing Mortimer. Mortimer. Okay, so I'm Mortimer, and I'm yattering into a laptop, and then I take the bottle of wine right by me, and I fling it into the wall where there's a picture of 25, I don't know what they are. Let's just say Yakuza in sort of jockstraps and tattoos, Japanese men.

A picture of them on the wall. And then I jump around and there's a hammock. And in the hammock there are two lambs. This is not true, by the way. But anyway, two lambs eating cheese. And then you jump over the hammock. And then suddenly there's a grand piano. And there's a young man playing Chopin. And he's chopping, by the way. But anyway, two lambs eating cheese. And then you jump over the hammock, and then suddenly there's a grand piano, and there's a young man playing Chopin, and he's chopping away at the piano.

And then move over, and there's a swing. So he goes from the piano to the swing, there's Mortimer. And the swing is covered in pink roses. And if you kind of trace up the swing up the rope, you'll see that at the very top, there is a model of a rhesus monkey just dangling from the top of the rope. Jumping back down, you land on the kitchen table where four people, four unfortunate Memrise employees, are just trying to sort of have a quiet evening in,

reflecting on the vicissitudes of life. But they're by the big agar, the big metal oven, and the metal oven is emitting heat. And on the agar there is a pot full of spoons. Okay, so that was an incoherent narrative lasting about 45 seconds, I'm guessing, in which I mentioned Mortimer's little adventure. And the first thing I'd say to your listenership is that just merely by listening to that, you've followed it.

You've formed images at the speed of talk, which is, you know, one or two images a second. And you've strung that into a coherent mental concept or incoherent one. You know, I'm drunk. Come on, calm down, guys. But anyway, you start getting into a coherent mental concept in a spectacularly small number of seconds. I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal if you think that it's even possible to follow that. But anyhow, Tim, we're now going to test you. So I'm on my laptop.

Mortimer's there, and he's looking at the laptop. What happens next? He grabs a bottle of wine, which is right next to him, throws it into a picture on the wall, which has 25 Yakuza in jockstraps with tattoos. That's superb, yep. And then I'm having a bit of recency primacy here, and then

after that, I want to say there are two lambs in a hammock. That's correct, yep. And I don't recall what they're eating. Yeah, that's what they are. They're eating cheese, if I remember correctly. And then,

jumping out of the hammock to a I believe it's piano after that. There's a gentleman playing Chopin and chopping away at the keyboard, which was a very clever review to use the CH twice. That helped. And then

from there we get to a swing, which is covered in pink roses and oddly enough has a model of a rhesus monkey hanging at the very top of it yeah and when mortimer jumps off the swing he lands on a kitchen table where there are four memorized employees just trying to go about their business and it's very disruptive quite obviously obviously. And there is next to them a... This is where I got tripped up a little bit. The auger on the stovetop.

I don't know what an auger is. So this is fantastic. But there's a pot on top of whatever an auger is with spoons in it. And then the curtain falls and that's the end of the mortimer show as i remember it that's so it's so well done tim so yeah i just to sort of articulate what you've done there so you've gone laptop bottle of wine yakuza 25 of them jock straps so up to about six

items hammock lambs cheese piano shop and chopping swing pink roses recess jumping off landing kitchen table memorize employees arga even though you didn't know what an arga was it is by the way um this mother marvelous kind of european oven which is basically a um a one ton block of iron permanently heated which acts as central heating and as a cooking mechanism um which is what i mean on top of that there was a pot with spoons it says you know it's 20 things you've correctly remembered in sequence there just really by dint of understanding human language which you have successfully uh recounted in order um and for that the uh the narrative helps but it just kind of gives gives one an insight into how these aren't um in the same way that say for instance firing an arrow through a um a blackbird you know which is flying through

the sky is like a skill you almost have to learn you know on the on the top of basic motor skills but you have to learn it very very specifically these sort of memory techniques draw from quite fundamental cognitive capacities they're quite you know it's quite um it's quite basic and you know i do this other thing where i kind of i do these things called memory walks where you just get a bunch of random pedestrians gather them together and say okay we're gonna learn whatever you know the u.s president's the first pharaohs of egypt or what have you and you just wander around a town for about an hour and you're like oh imagine you know george washington there i don't know who george washington is i'm english You just wander around a town for about an hour, and you're like, oh, imagine George Washington there.

I don't know who George Washington is. I'm English. Okay, but imagine George the shark washing himself tons. Okay, very good. They imagine that in the window over there. And you can wander around, and with no prior training whatsoever, you can sort of unlock is too strong a word. You can just make use of the fairly phenomenal underlying kind of cognitive capacities that you have at your disposal all the time. So it's not a kind of elusive geek skill fundamentally.

It's basically just a kind of cunning use of what the human brain does best, namely process real meaning, imagine interesting things happening in space, and kind of integrate narratives. I know, it's something that I feel like, and this actually touches on sort of a deeper, I wouldn't say insecurity, but a conflict that I have, an inner conflict that I'm hoping you can help me resolve. I'm very indecisive about my sexuality. No, that's not it. I wanted to sexually ambiguous. It's caused me a lot of strife. No, that's also not it. The question is related to utility of highly refining certain memory capabilities. So when I was in college, I read a number of books, including I think it's just called Your Memory and How to Improve It. It's like the most generic. I think that's it, Higby.

Most generic title imaginable for something that talks about vivid imagery. Yeah. But I remember becoming very fascinated by memorizing numbers. And I might be getting the terminology wrong, please correct me if I am. But the sort of number consonant system where you're converting the numbers and the consonants, you convert those into words, into images, and that allows you to memorize long strings of digits. And I would place these images around typically my surroundings. And I think that might've been a weakness in my method. I would always use wherever I happen to be as opposed to a predetermined route.

The only benefit to that method is that when I would play this game with people and I would typically have them pull out a five, a single, and a $20 bill. So I'd have them pull out bills of different denominations, and I'd memorize the serial numbers on those different bills. And then – I'll show you the center of the party, Tim. Oh, yeah. I wasn't fast enough to make it really exciting. I was like, okay, cool.

Give me five minutes. And they're like, what? Okay, this it really exciting. I was like, okay, cool. Give me five minutes. And they're like, what? Okay. This is really boring. Um, but what was really fun about it is I would memorize these numbers. They would, they'd be like, oh wow, that's amazing. And then I'd do them backwards. Oh my God, that's amazing. And then, uh, but it only took a really a week or two of practice to get to that point. And I'm, and I'm so confident that almost anyone can do that. The, what was fun about having the, the loci, I mean, the locations dependent on where I was sitting at the time is that very often I could bump into that person a week later and say, Hey, you still have that five or that single or

that 20. I can, I can give you the serial number and I could remember it because I had so many distinct locations, which was kind of a fun trick. Um, but the, it took a decent amount of effort to get good at that. And what I'm wondering is, uh, do you find that there are any particular mental exercises that have a high degree of carry over to other areas or that have more utility than others? Because there's, there's so many different kind of party tricks that you could develop or competitive capabilities is if you had to pick one that you think people would get the most out of is, is that even a possible,

is that a good question? But I think about this because it does take time to sort of main for me to maintain a high degree of proficiency with these things. Right. I think that, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily recommend to, you know, anybody with a rounded social life to get too deep into the number memorization stuff. But, I mean, for me, the interest in memory techniques kind of is,

I guess, you know, emerges out of a much more general, interesting consciousness and the curios that one can draw out of the theory and history of memory techniques, I think I'd give two answers and the first is um you remember things which ignite your imagination um and we all know this in our hearts you know you know if you're really into soccer or football as we call it here you know you might be a a pathetic kid at school but you might be able to remember something like you know if you actually added it up 12 000 distinct football results the equivalent of a kind of medical degree uh in terms of scale of information it's because you're interested and so um i think a lot of people um are kind of embarrassed about uh the characteristics of their mind that you know about the things that they have a greater tendency to remember uh the things which they feel they need to do to really wrap their mind around a topic and so the first

thing would just be like the most um the things which um you find stimulating and interesting other things you'll remember and don't censor yourself in finding what those things are and allowing yourself to kind of uh experience information in that way um and so i'll try and make that concrete you know um i think that um a lot of people will be reading some nonfiction book about economics, and it will sort of ignite in the back of their mind the idea that this is actually a bit like their friend Al and how he behaves with their mate Dan. But it's actually officially about, you know, U.S.-China relations. And, you know, that metaphor that that way of

comprehending things that very kind of personal perhaps trivial um manner of comprehending things through the filter of one's own experience gets suppressed leading to kind of boredom and um a lack of emotional engagement with the subject matter and so, you know, just to say it succinctly, like just back wherever your mind needs to go and endorse it and ignite interest through kind of imagination would be one thing. God, that's a very unsuccinct piece of advice. Second thing is more succinct, which is just that when two things are in the same place, either in your mind or on a diagram or in a semantic space,

they will get confused with each other. And I think the genius of the spatial techniques is the genius of having different contexts for different thoughts. And you touched upon this, actually, with your own adventures with $5 and $10 bills, which is that where thoughts, where experiences and thoughts are separated, they stand alone, they don't interfere, and they can persist through time. But where they are sort of spatially connected in actual experience

or spatially connected kind of within the mind, so where two um where where two concepts just feel very very similar and you kind of when you're thinking about them you're kind of thinking about them the same way they will tend to fuse with each other and then fail to be distinct entities in their own right so just literally separating stuff out in space is incredible as a general cognitive tip for brainstorming, for resolving arguments, for clarifying emotions in a relationship to anything. And because of this, I discovered some quite interesting thing about how to design house parties.

So I used to have these moments where you have an incredible house party. You talk to 25 really interesting people. It would be, you know, super thing. At the time, you're just flush with happiness. And then the next day, the whole thing would be in your mind, it would just be a kind of a blur. You'd just be like, yeah, I recall being in the kitchen and there were some people there and we chatted about stuff.

But because all those kind of memories are on top of each other because of the spatial constraints of a house party, you don't really remember all the things which happened and if you can sort of take a house party and this is true of any kind of experience it could be true of um an evening out with friends it could be true with it's obviously true of road trips um it could be true even of um of a friendship or a romance or anything else if things are kind of spread out through space if if each kind of context or experience has its own place then they can all live by themselves and you just get a much richer level of kind of autobiographic memory um and so with house parties specifically i kind of recommend um always having three or four phases to a house party, preferably with a different style, a different kind of music, a different fundamental

focus spatially, and narrativize the transitions between them. So rather than just being like, there's a splurge of a house party and everyone's just getting drunk and trying to chat each other up. Instead, you have a kind of a phase where you're being quite posh and drinking champagne and listening to French music. And then a bunch of people arrive and you're like, okay, we're not going to eat. And what's more, we're going to eat on one leg. And so you have a bunch of time hopping around, chewing on reindeer or whatever it is. And then up onto the roof, it's a rave. And you've got a different thing.

And so by creating a kind of artificial structure, you end up with much richer experience. And, yeah, so that would be my little summary, Tim. Two pieces of advice are, like, make stuff vivid and personally interesting and don't sense yourself and then if you are relating to anything it could be learning or even just personal experience um find individual spaces for each thing um because then they'll survive by themselves and not just kind of merge into the um into the kind of fog of similarity. Right, blending together into indistinguishability.

So that has, it's funny when you start to think of just the basic programming that we have, that of course has a lot of applications to dating as well. And you did mention something in passing I wanted to come back to, which was clarifying your feelings about a relationship. And I wanted to know how you think about that, because this is a pain point for a lot of people at different points in their lives, or at least a source of anxiety. How do you try to, if this is even the objective, find objectivity when clarifying your feelings about a relationship?

Or maybe it's just getting a better understanding of your own subjectivity. But I wanted to kind of dissect that. It's a minor challenge. Yeah, I wanted to just unpack that a little bit. So how do you think about clarifying feelings in a relationship? It's actually quite funny because my girlfriend's called Clara, and your accent does sound clarifying i was like i think about clarifying my relationship my relationship with you

clara i i'm not sure there's much more i can do but um but anyway so um i mean i i'm definitely not in a uh relationship group but i mean i i'm happy to freestyle on this subject because i think it is fascinating it is a lot of it's a big source of pain and you know and it's also it's and it's not just romantic relationships it's also um you know creative and personal relationships relationships with friends and um and uh you know i've uh i've suddenly sort of um thought about this a bunch because one of the surprising features of adult life alongside like not being competent as you always assume you're going to become competent or whatever and the fact that sort of that you are actually going to become an adult which is kind of you

know obviously when you're 18 you know it's a pretty abstract thing and you kind of you know aging is a kind of comic um encounter with something you can conceptually deny with certain futility but anyhow so relationships be the other thing where you kind of um where when you're looking at a person you're in some sense you're experiencing the entire or at least um that person is the focus of and the undifferentiated focus of a whole like incredibly complex um tissue of fundamentally distinct you know emotions and judgments and attitudes um and so you know you find yourself in a relationship, you know, in an argument, say, and you're like, well, then you basically you come from an emotion, you come from emotion, which is like, you probably don't perceive yourself and you're thinking like, I don't feel very happy about what's going on sort of thing. And the tendency is to map that against

basically whatever springs into your mind or whatever the person is telling you or what the situation is. And so, you know, this is why like someone's late to a restaurant and someone can go absolutely mental about it. And of course, it's got nothing to do with being late to a restaurant. It's part of a whole load of other stuff, which not not directly the same thing um and so yeah so for instance i've an argument that that i have had which turned out to be um amazingly stupid um actually i'm not sure now i actually think about what this argument was about i'm not sure your timorous readers really what uh listeners sorry uh i don I really want to hear about it. This is good. I want to hear about it.

So I had a... You're going to have to cut this out of the final recording because I'm just going to have to pause and just sort of... Jumping to another topic, one of the fascinating things about language is that when you begin a sentence, even if you sort of have an intimation of how the sentence is going to end up you've actually got no knowledge of where what the sentence particular formulation is going to be so as you initiate a sentence you have kind of

like oh something interesting to be said with a particular kind of internal mental urge and the words begin to come out and you kind of shepherd it in a slightly chaotic fashion to the end of the piece of meaning you had implicitly wanted to emit at the beginning of the sentence, but which is not like consciously before your eyes at the beginning. It just kind of,

it's like a seed which becomes a tree. The seed contains the tree, but the seed doesn't look like the tree or whatever. Well, a similar thing with anecdotes. You know, I think, oh, this is a really good anecdote best best tell tim about this anecdote and then um actually the anecdote is not actually before your eyes and so i have to take a quick time out just to see where this

anecdote is actually going to end up no problem i can give you if you'd like a, a respite or a pause, I can ask a few other on this and I might forget to come back to it so we can also do that. But I would like to come back to it, but I'm cute. I could hit you with a couple of rapid fire questions if that would take the pressure off. Okay. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why um so i think of the german who um and so but actually this is this is a good this is a good topic and i'm by the way very happy

to return to the previous one because um they're interesting. But I'm quite suspicious of the concept of merit. So it seems to be one of the guiding, if you like, philosophical assumptions of, you know, and I think actually especially Western American Californian culture, that merit is the correct thing to drive outcomes in humans' lives. So if you try hard and work your balls off and you're inherently really talented and you're not benefiting from, say, inherited wealth or whatever, then the success and happiness and whatever else, which might supposedly emerge from that is justified. Um, and, um, and in fact, Tim, you know, you, um, you know, you write books in some sense and, you know, and you're, you're interested in, you develop the concept of improving as a person of, um, of finding kind of powers and talents and possibilities within yourself. And this is kind of an inherently attractive idea, right?

And it's very difficult on the face of it to say, well, actually, you know, there's a problem with this. But I'm not saying there is. But, you know, merit is kind of a fundamental assumption of goodness in our culture. And the merit is associated with effort? I guess I just want to define merit. Well, so I think the noble concept of merit is associated with effort. So it's like if you do something really incredible

and you've tried really hard, that success is something you deserve. We think of that as morally justifiable, which is kind of problematic for sociological reasons, but also problematic for kind of, and the sociological reasons being some people have, you know, the opportunity and situation to express their talents kind of thing. But it's also problematic because, you know, you just don't choose your merits. And so you might say, okay, I don't choose my merits. But actually I do choose them because i trained really hard and i learned about how to improve myself and i expressed discipline but again the underlying capacities which allowed you to find the time to train hard and control

your discipline these aren't things you choose and you know and so so so almost all of our kind of um our culture of admiration for people who do really well is based on this kind of implicit moral idea that people determine their own outcomes. But once you kind of begin digging into that, it's not really clear they do. And the second part of that is, you know, what are the kind of categories and concepts with which we use to determine merit? So I'm always really struck by the fact that, for instance, in our society, there are people who have a level of genius for artistic expression and other things

which aren't commercially valued and therefore aren't really culturally valued except in extreme cases who are you know are earning like seven pounds an hour working in a cafe they have a mental world and range of learning and sophistication of perspective you know which is enormously rich and like comparable with, and in many cases superior to, according to a different perspective, someone who's really good at coding and commands $200,000 a year and has high status and so on and so forth. And in that case, there's a kind of capitalistic, I guess, reason for ascribing merit to one person over another.

But, you know, you change the perspective even slightly and the merit flips completely. And so the whole kind of concept of merit does depend on these kind of background thoughts about what is valuable, which is kind of often problematic. How would you flip the perspective with the artistic barista versus the coder? Well, so one, one example, one different paradigm would be like, um, towards richness of experience. So, um, which, um, you know, which people's mental lives would make for a better novel.

And so, you know, I'm not sure if that's whatever, or you could say like, you know, effect on the environment, you know, someone who's super dynamic and successful, the rest of it will tend to fly around and create capital and spend the capital and generally heat up the world economy, which will generally heat up the world and so on. And so, you know, know we we have no way of tracking the kind of externalities of human action either um in terms of karma i.e the emotions of the people who surround and come into contact with them or in terms of say environmental impact because we can't track them and even if we could we, we might not, um, we don't, so these aren't, these aren't metrics which we could

can tune into. Right. Um, and because they're metrics, we're not, we can't tune into, we just kind of assume they don't really exist. Um, and they, they have no real influence on, you know, um, a changes in behavior, but B, you know, what as a society or culture we find easy to admire. So how did Goethe make you think of merit? Just like, Jesus, man. I'm just asking a simple question. You've got a yattering on the side of like half-baked left-wing nonsense.

Okay, well, Goethe was just like... I know you hate Ayn Rand. It's fine. What do you think of Goethe? No, no. So Goethe? No, no. So Goethe is really cool. So he's like at the age of 25, he – as a teenager, he's sort of falling in love the entire time and writing poetry to his friends and so on. At the age of 25, he writes a novel which kind of of extraordinary brilliance, called The Troubles of Young Werther. It's this wonderful story of a young man who falls in love and it doesn't really work out so well. wrote this book by locking himself in a hotel room for three months imagining his five best friends on different chairs and then discussing with his imaginary friends different possibilities

of plot and so on and so forth which is an example by the way of that spatial separation i was talking about which is to say that in one's own mind with this one is somehow kind of inherently boxed in and constricted and by like imagining in different spatial locations different perspectives and then kind of iterating an idea or or um or novel in this case through those perspectives he was able to kind of give himself five perspectives separated out and uh and give himself a kind of multi-dimensional playground for creating the work of art, which by the way is an awesome creative technique.

Anyhow, so he does that and then he starts writing the best poetry. He's already the best prose stylist in the history of the German language. And then there's this like, Germany at that time was kind of brick-heated, lots of little kingdoms. He got appointed at the Weimar Republic as a kind of poet in residence, but then just got really interested in loads of other stuff. So he started like redirecting the construction of the canal system and doing various other stuff and doing lots of kind of inventive things.

And so then he gets into basically administering human affairs, and he becomes incredibly good at that. And then at the age of 39, he basically falls in love for the first time truly uh or maybe that was something before but anyhow he just disappears one day he's like he's at this very prestigious sort of important position he's kind of like the mayor of weimar effectively uh and then he just pisses off to italy just leaving a small note and then um basically runs around you, falls in love with lots of beautiful people, writes some of the best sort of sexual erotic poetry ever written. Meanwhile, he's becoming, you know, comes back, becomes incredibly interested in Newton's theory of physics, which he thinks is appalling and doesn't capture the mystery and beauty of color at all. So he writes a theory of color, which is still like an amazing fount of incredible goodness for philosophers and stuff about the phenomenology of color perception

and how shade and context and meaning influenced the character of color. And then meanwhile, he's writing Faust, a famous play. It's the, his greatest work he completes that in his 50s but hasn't lost energy at all and goes through three or four totally different styles of poetry and by the time he dies

the age of 82-ish he has become really interested in Eastern culture and did I forget to mention that he's got this deep aesthetic vision of um of science and our relationship to nature and it comes up with basically was a theory of evolution um and and like studies plants and human and there's this particular thing there which at the time a justification for humans differences from from the animals, which I think was called the intermaximillary bone,

some random bone in your jaw. And it's amazing how we try and distinguish ourselves, opposable thumbs, language, humor, there's consciousness, intelligence. And at that point, it was the intermaximillary bone. And he actually did some dissections of animals and young humans to show that this bone was present in both. It fuses later in life and therefore is not the basis.

You know, and so therefore it can be missed. But humans and animals are fundamentally the same. And he talks about plants and the similarity of plants, the efflorescence of a flower with the way the human cranium kind of bends around and links up with itself. And so he's kind of, he's just cool. He's like expressive. He's incredibly independent. When Napoleon invades, I think he was living in Frankfurt at the time. When Napoleon invades Frankfurt, everyone else is like sheltering in their houses.

And he was wandering the fields looking for evidence about the color pink for his theory of colors it's totally kind of transcending the local context um and anyway so he's interested in all this stuff he's um passionate and intuitive um he is a genius which helps um but he produces a kind of a body of work and a set of perspectives which um which are just fundamentally life-affirming and in a way which kind of carries through the ages and so like i actually got into girth i went on my get yeah i was traveling around at the age of 18 the world which is what people in england do and between school high school and university and um in my coat i just had goethe's aphorisms his short little thoughts in my pocket and so i read and reread and reread

this book it's actually had quite a fundamental perspective on my life because these are his like little snippets of wisdom on almost any imaginable topic um and all of them are brilliant you know it's things like the company of women is schooling in good manners, or boldness has genius, power, and magic, or, you know. And then there are ones you don't remember in their precise form, but which nonetheless act as little microfilters

for interpreting reality. And anyway, so he's had kind of a big influence on me i mean one of his quotes actually is like uh something along the lines of there is nothing so depressing as um someone who is heroic um being praised by somebody who isn't because when we praise people we put ourselves on a level with them. And so I was actually just trying to think of like a quote which related to this situation. And so here I am praising Goethe. And actually, as I'm describing Goethe,

I'm kind of channeling a bit of his general awesomeness. I'm feeling a bit better about myself. And yeah, anyways. And by the way, just as a general concept, that phenomenon of how a memory can influence perception is the fundamental reason why I think it's by having you know it's by being able to recognize the difference between 20 different birds that you don't just perceive a bird you perceive ah you know a particular variety of bird and what on earth is it doing around here at this time of year it must be lost perhaps the migration pattern's being fucked up by global warming whatever it turns like pure data

into connection with a meaningful world that's kind of what memory does and um and so and that will be kind of my general justification for for and not the tool of the master that is technology. You mentioned two things about Goethe that I wanted to dig into a little bit. You mentioned passion and intuition. And you can revise that, but those are two of the characteristics of Goethe that you pulled out. And one of the reasons that I reached out to you very much at the 11th hour yesterday to see if you wanted to chat and catch up and just record it because I thought it'd be fun for people to listen to is that I've been having a bit of a tough time with medical issues related to Lyme disease and other things

and have felt a little down, in a bit of a slump. And I find that you always strike me as very, and this could be an illusion, so feel free to disabuse me of this notion, but in a very excited, very passionate, very, uh, energized. And I'm, I'm wondering if that is something that you feel you've, you've, you've always had intrinsically, or if it's something you've developed and if, if the latter, and maybe it's a combination, you know, how do you strive to, to encourage that type of state? Um, you know how do you strive to to encourage that type of state um you know what are the things that contribute to your better moments those are a lot of fucking questions in one but uh and i don't know i don't know i don't have alcohol as an excuse but yeah i know i i do for for my slowing nonsense at this end of the skeptical but um well first of all sorry to hear about the the medical stuff and the dip of um dip of enthusiasm that's um undoubtedly tough and um second thing um no

i'm not always really happy about so i mean i it's funny like doing a company has been um an amazing journey full of just like the highest highs and the most like execrable, horrifying lows, you know, you know, because it's sort of a, it's,

you know, I guess it's just life really, but, um, everything, you know, you start a company, everything turns,

starts out, you know, like, Oh, this is going to be absolutely incredible. You know, do something amazing. Everyone's going to love it.

And it's all going to be beautiful. So thing. And then, um, and then it turns out to be just like a much more complex human process than that. And you have, um, you know, you have breakdowns in relationships with people you love and you have, um, decisions you make where you subsequently realize that they were the wrong decision and it caused a lot of people some pain. And you have successes which are wonderful,

but which are compromised by the fact that they weren't what they should have been. Anyway, so of course, like anybody else, I have access to the full range of goodness and badness in human experience, obviously. I am quite keen on life, though, Tim. Like I do. And you can sense that. Yeah. So I'm curious.

I don't know where that, I mean, because I mean, I guess I am, I suppose it's also that I get my energy from the world and other people rather than internally. Like I'm very kind of uninterested generally in supposedly scientific assessments of, you know, personality and so on and so forth. I think that the reductive impulse is um demeaning to humans i'm also probably quite worried about what i discovered if i really looked into it but um but um but i am extrovert and i did read one thing uh in my studies of cognitive science which struck me as fascinating piece of self-knowledge which is that you know introverted people tend to have a much higher

internal level of energy so that proactive interaction with their environment isn't so necessary to keep them rewarded and interested and for the richest. And I am undoubtedly extroverted, so I absolutely love and gain huge energy from interacting with people and so on and so forth. So that's kind of a personality thing. Regarding, like, passion, I guess it's – this kind of might connect with a few interesting issues,

but I think that – I suppose I'm a dick, and so I hate doing things which bore me. Wait, did you say you'm a dick and so I hate doing things which bore me did you say you're a dick? yeah I mean as in like almost everyone in life has to like you know slop it up and just get on with

things because things are great but like I have a kind of quite visceral emotional reaction against being bored and that does And that does influence things. The other thing you touched upon there, which I think is such a good subject, is intuition. Because the process of rationally justifying to yourself your action is incredibly slow, full of like grayness and complexity.

And generally, like, it's like it's sort of a 5% efficient process of moving forward in one's ideas and beliefs. Um, because, you know, you're like, oh, you know, we should really do this in the, you know, on memorize or, you know, we should, or, um, I think I, I think this girl is like the person I want to marry, but, and then you, if you allow rationality into this, you end up with like a situation where all the energy is going in the wrong place. It's like, but on the other hand, you know, is she really going to get along with me in old age?

And like, what kind of person am I really looking to like connect with? And so, you And so you could sort of double question yourself to death on most things. And when life is really, really good, one isn't like pissing around, like going,

oh, I really, you know, should I turn left or right out of the door today? You end up as kind of existential Borden's ass, stuck between a million possibilities and never really doing anything. Whereas when things are going really well, you're just like, this feels right, might be wrong, don't give a shit, let's go.

And that is so energetic. And this is actually something, I mean, I've really had a journey in this within Memrise because my intention with it actually isn't at all with um with helping people remember more effectively which is the kind of thing you might do to a computer chip or you know you know that is a an element in something much more interesting which is like helping people feel like a genius or helping people love the world they're learning about or helping people just get pleasure out of their minds and the richness of their consciousness and learning.

And one of the things about, as I think is probably true in almost any profession, with a startup you've got this thing where you're like, you've got the push and shove between what happens in one month's time and what happens in 12 months' time. And so a lot of the time you're like, well, yeah, this idea we've had would be absolutely incredible and would make people feel like geniuses. But on the other hand, it's not going to move any metrics for two months. And it sounds a bit irresponsible. And so in the early days, for instance,

I had this idea that what we should, cause you know, we're fundamentally like a language learning site. And I had this idea that we should all get on a bus, like a converted double decker bus and just go around Europe, you know, a lot of coders, designers,

the whole team, and just go on a fucking road trip around Europe. And it would just be incredible. It'd just be incredible it just be the best idea ever so i think um and you know we'd have learned so much about language and it would have been an incredibly fun diverse interesting experience um and it would have been a wonderful way of getting pr and the rest of it but on the other hand and this is where rationality came in you know what the hell are you doing you're supposed to be doing a startup

you're in a bus you're driving around europe the hell are you doing? You're supposed to be doing a startup. You're in a bus. You're driving around Europe. Where are you going to sleep? Exactly what function does this have for the product? And so there's a million other things come in. And so that was an example of where intuition was thwarted by a kind of banal kind of self-recriminating rationality resulting in I'm almost certain like a less interesting product and less fun. Now you bring up a really interesting, uh, you bring up a really interesting set of questions. And this is, this is something that, uh, at times I do better with at times I do more poorly with, but I've tried to, at various points in my life, increase the speed with which I make

decisions. So if a decision is reversible and non-fatal, then I find my life is generally much better when I just do exactly what you mentioned, which is like left, right, who gives a fuck? I'm going right, it'll be fine. And if it's not, I'll figure it out later. And making these types of reversible decisions as quickly as possible so that you don't have a lot of cognitive burden and you're not sort of stuck up your own ass all the time. But in the case of the bus and the business, let's just say, or how do you balance the in the intuition which at some at at times can be an irrational exuberance with the sort of prefrontal cortex calculation yeah yeah well that's that's the question that that is that is the question