The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief

Episode Date: December 30, 2014

Part 2 of 2... 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.

What you're about to hear is part two of a two-part conversation with Ed Cook, grandmaster of memory, and much more than that. He is a hilarious dude. You will love him. If you didn't catch the first part, however, you might want to do that before venturing in. But this is really a conversation that jumps around and we answer a lot of different questions and different topics. So if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of the Tim Ferriss Show with Ed Cook. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement

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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, make, increase the speed with which I make decisions. So if a, 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. Um, but in the case of the bus and the business, let's just say, or, uh, how do you balance do you balance the intuition, which at times can be an irrational exuberance, with the sort of prefrontal cortex calculation? Yeah, well, that's a question. That is the question, and it's not a question I have an answer to, but I assume it's something to do god damn it head why did i do this interview i'm just kidding yeah it's pathetic isn't it uh i said by the way before i i suppose we're quite far into this interview there are two things by the way we must come back to one of which is um how you think about merit because i think because how you think about

merit and the other one of which is burning man because I went to that this year and it is the most perfect example of any institution I've ever seen. And it's also a sublime exemplar of memory techniques put into the outside world. So anyway, so those are those two, two little sort of thoughts, which we must come back to.

But where were we? We were talking. So I've got no idea about the intuition thing but like um but i think um and i'm basically learning from um from my girlfriend who um is a more spiritual connected um uh intuitive person than I am by kind of disposition and native structure, so to speak, who can come to a discussion, you know, and this might get back to our kind of point about relationships, fundamentally with like calm, like with where normally your mind is like, oh, that where normally your mind is like oh that's normally your mind that's actually the best description of my mind i've ever heard

right there yeah and it's kind of rubbish isn't it because you kind of you know you know like well one wants to be kind of like a didgeridoo like but but you know unfortunately you. But, you know, unfortunately, you're just like, oh, fuck, oh, maybe I'm a lizard. Oh, no,

I should really, like, you know. But by the way, so one thing I quite enjoy about our friendship, Tim, is that you're

quite good at, like, coming up to rational conclusions and implementing them, and I'm not. So, earlier this week, I was like, Jesus Christ,

I smoke the whole time, I drink lots of wine, I should sort my act out. I'm going to start doing yoga. And yoga is even something which I find fascinating and interesting, you know, rich. I think it's like a fundamentally profound system of thought which, you know, connects autonomous rhythms with the body's capacity of movement.

I don't have enough good things to say about yoga, but I never fucking do it. And so I was like, okay, Jesus. I was like, Jesus, I need to be healthy. I said, I'm going to go do some yoga. So I went down to the yoga thing, and they had this big great deal, £25 for 10 days of consecutive sessions. And I was like, genius. This time I'm going to do 10 days of consecutive sessions. And I was like, genius. This time I'm going to do 10 days of consecutive sessions.

Then I went to the first one because I was there and did it. And it was great and felt fantastic, super pepped up and the rest of it. And that was five days ago. I haven't been in since. I'm just inept. I don't know what kind of consistency of perspective is required to actually implement worthy plans like that. And actually, that's why I quite enjoy chatting and just generally brainstorming with you

because you seem to have a capacity to sort of come up to a conclusion like that. It's like, oh yeah, yoga, really good. I should do some more yoga. And then actually do it. A capacity which I find mysterious and suspicious. Well, you know, it all comes down to black magic uh you have to get a dead cat preferably black swing it counterclockwise over your head before the next no it's honestly it's it's uh i find it endlessly amusing how

uh in particularly in some media pieces i'm played up to be to be this stalwart of self-discipline and systems thinking. And I function like Bishop from Aliens. I just have this incredible ability to execute, execute, execute. And at the end of the day, I'm just good at setting up incentives for myself that punish me and flog me if I don't do things. So the way that I would conquer the yoga has nothing to do with convincing yourself or rationalizing. I would take extremely unflattering photos of yourself and tighty whities front and center, give those to a friend who can keep an agreement, but who will also show no mercy and just say, if I don't, if I don't prove to you as my judge that I've gone to yoga for 10 days straight,

these are going to go on the homepage as a pop-up or something like that, or on Facebook. You know what this connects with? This is a bit like Goethe and his friends in the room. It's like externalizing beyond yourself the sources of the things you need for yourself. Yeah. A bit. Yeah, I mean, that'd be a pompous way of saying obviously but no but i think i think self-discipline is so overrated if you if you break it down you know self-discipline is actually it's kind of a poor label uh it's poorly defined at least it's overused to the to the extent that it's really lost any type of

clarity and its meaning so for me self-discipline it's really lost any type of clarity in its meaning. So for me, self-discipline, it's like, no, we're like rats in a lab. Put us in a Skinner box, which is life, and we respond to inputs that are punishment and reward, and we adjust our behavior accordingly. So it's like, all right, great. Well, make that external. You're not going to punish or reward yourself typically. It's usually not enough. And it's too easily reneged.

So you can externalize it. You can also put some money on the line. That's also very useful for people. But how the hell did we get this far? So we're going to talk about Burning Man. We're going to come back to your discussion with your girlfriend, which we left long ago. But we'll come back to that. The, the, then merit. So merit is merit. I'm still struggling with this and I'm, I'm a bit of a semantic pain in the ass is merit close to the, the, in your mind, sort of the Roman,

uh, or rate a, like this virtue, or is it just, uh just uh is can it be boiled down to sort of deservedly winning is that uh is that what so yes so i think virtue um of which i have none but virtue is is like i think is the correct is how we should think about merit so So, um, you know, in some sense, in some sense, like, um, the humanities in better commerce, I've had this nailed for like 2000 years.

What like the fundamental tendencies of a good human being are, you know, empathy, um, temperance, uh, generosity, uh,

kind of non-egotism. We sort of know what good human beings are. We have done for thousands of years. But that's not what we celebrate or immediately associate with merit, right? So we tend to associate merit with tangible outcomes in life path, which might include getting a Harvard law degree or, you know, being Bill Gates or whatever. an excellent concept regardless of how um how socially you perceive human action and existence because to improve yourself is to to improve the world it's to improve your interactions with others it's it's it's not a kind of lonely activity but um at the same time, you know, if you look at like, you know, Silicon Valley startups, which are in some sense the great drivers of human culture at the moment, besides like ISIS and whatever.

But like, anyway, but you know, the natural tendency in that way of thinking is to become personally more efficient. So it's to store files more effectively, get things done better, be quicker, optimize oneself. And this is a kind of merit thing in its way, but it's quite a selfish one. And goodness knows, for lots of subtle reasons, we're all selfish. But you can imagine an alternative culture of creativity and power of the kind that Tilika Valley has, which would all be focused on making communities better and institutions better and um hacking um not oneself

but um but the situations which comprise the world and you know i'll give you my go-to example about this is you go to san francisco unbelievably cool town, full of just the most magical people. So intellectually vibrant and open and fun and awesome and beautiful. And so rich. And there's fucking homeless people everywhere. And you're like, seriously guys,

that's Twitter HQ there. It's a $15 billion company or whatever. Everyone inside is being paid more than $100,000 a year. And this happens on their doorstep? Do they have no, like, conception, no, like, basic grasp over what, like, happy existence is? Because your existence would be happier

if you didn't have to, at a purely selfish level, walk past all these people who were clearly in a state of distress and maybe hassling you and whatever. And anyway, so I i think that's like uh that's one of the most interesting things about san francisco and it's kind of to me emblematic of a tendency of thought which looks to optimize the individual over the situations qua your like external stuff influencing the self rather than the self into himself rather than external, which are the things which actually make us happy, like the ability to play chess on the street and giving people things and whatever other. hole. But I think that the part of what makes San Francisco very fascinating in the Bay area in general is there are many divergent opinions on many different subjects. And some people think

Bitcoin is a fraud. Other people think it's the future and there's everything in between for every conceivable subject. Some people believe in long-term monogamous relationships, and then you have the whole polyamorous community, and there's everything in between. And simultaneously, for instance, I think that San Francisco could learn a lot as it relates to homeless people and other aspects of rejuvenating a city from New York City. I think Giuliani and Bloomberg have done just a phenomenal job with converting Manhattan into a pleasant place to walk. And it wasn't in the distant past that it was terrifying to walk in areas that are now very popular. The challenge, I think, is that in San Francisco, among many, there are many reasons for this, but one of the challenges is, I'm sure maybe you've heard the expression, a liberal is someone who doesn't know to take his own side in a fight that in san francisco there's

such a divergence of opinions no one can agree on fucking anything and uh that makes it very challenging to deal with systemic issues that involve a lot of people um but yeah, I agree with you. I wonder if that's really right, Tim, because there's lots of consensus in San Francisco in certain regions of life, right? So the whole kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem is so fluid and dynamic because everyone agrees how it should work. You know, you've got the venture capitalists, the entrepreneurs, the talented young guys,

the, uh, uh, the angel investors, and there's like a very kind of clear shared set of concepts about, and also a lot of generosity and consensus. Everyone's always helping everyone. You know, there's no overt selfishness at all, really. You know, it's like that's what I describe as like almost a perfect harmonious community where people are like doing amazing things, trying as hard as they can. But, you know, for instance, like Memrise, one of the rival sites to Memrise in some sense is this site called Quizlet. And I'm incredibly good mates with the CEO of Quizlet, this guy called Andrew Sutherland, who's a terrific character. And it's so striking on meeting him.

You know, we see each other. We have a wonderful time together. And we brainstorm together. And he helps me wherever he can and there's a kind of a sense of shared journey um which defies any notion of normal competition um and that's the kind of thing which is going on in the entrepreneurial community and yet there are these quite you know radical divisions between that and you know for instance that, I don't understand the history of the homeless people, but it is striking that there are so many of them and that these two worlds coexist spatially but have zero social or emotional or conceptual connection in a way no i i agree i think that that there are i think that it's very easy to succumb to the belief that sf is tech or that the bay area is

tech when in fact the that perception is because of the the prominence in the media and otherwise of outliers and that the, the sort of sexiness and romance of building multi-billion dollar companies in short periods of time, uh, has created a, a misperception, I think, of how much of the population, um, benefits from being employed at tech companies. The, um, but the, I think it brings up kind of an interesting, uh, question. Maybe we won't get into it right now.

I want to talk about burning that a bit, but that, that, um, there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley and in New York city and all over the world who struggle with the question of, should I give back now? Should I try to create positive karma in the

world and benefit others now? Or should I be completely selfish now so that I can be completely selfless later? So for instance, there are people I know, and this is going to sound crazy, who say, who would argue that, you know, Mother Teresa is a media hound and she should not be looked at as a saint and that it would be better to look at someone like Bill Gates who is not exactly the nicest kid on the block when it came to competition and ruthless capitalism for a long period of time, but who now with the stroke of a pen can wipe out ostensibly, you know, wipe out malaria or polio. Uh, and that we're, we're, we live in a culture where the former has been romanticized, um, because it's easier. Yeah. Perhaps it's comes back us to take this archetypal image of a saint in our mind as opposed to the more complex narrative of somebody who likes a Jobs, for instance, who's kind of a son of a bitch if we really look at it objectively, who's now being deified.

Yeah, it's tricky, isn't it? I mean, sorry to interrupt your question, but I think Gates is a really good example. If that was a question, that was the longest question of all time. I think it was just a rant, so go ahead. You know, I assume since it's probably past 3 p.m. in San Francisco that you've moved on to the gin and tonic. But I think Gates is a good example because Gates is considered a heroic figure because of this generosity after the fact of wealth accumulation. And I had quite big arguments with close friends about this because there's one perspective which says,

A, Gates, through personal merit, accrued $60 billion and so deserves to be able to spend it. And B, he's this hyper-competent character who's much better than some inept, internally strife-ridden charitable institution who aren't going to get anything done. This guy's got the competence and the rest of it to go and solve the world's problems unilaterally, and he'll get it done really efficiently. And I can kind of see the merit in that type of kind of perspective. But here's another perspective, which would be, so Gates exploited probably pretty illegally monopolistic practices to accrue from the population of the world immense undeserved wealth at the expense of their computing experience.

And now as a unilateral actor, he now has the opportunity to spend this on whatever he feels is right, where, in fact, it shouldn't be Bill Gates' decision what humanity's wealth gets spent on to sort out problems. That should be a democratic process. You know, Gates, you know, that old phrase, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, I think is kind of fundamentally psychologically real. That's actually kind of an aside, but,

but you know, I would like to see as an alternative history of 1980 to 2010, I'd have liked to have seen, um, um, Gates become very rich in the course of the eights and spend $50 million on its local community. And 1,000 people around the world, or everyone around the world have a opportunity to divide divert um their fraction of the great sum he has at his disposable disposal um to the situations in their local communities or in the broader world

which they judge to be meritorious um to to merit this sort of spending and um and you know so so and the extreme way of saying that is like like gates is basically the last person on earth you want spending this kind of resources because um he is um oh i think he's quite a likable character but but because uh because nobody should be spending 60 billion dollars there should be like 60 million people spending a thousand dollars um you know and there's something fundamentally wrong with our institutional structure and you know until the objection that it's just not as efficient as when you've got um like a big head honcho just like calling the shots that's probably true but efficiency on both sides of the of the equation i the charitable side and the wealth accumulation side seems to be

a very ambiguous good right well being more efficient yeah you know i i uh i don't want to beat the dead horse too too long but i one of, one of the, one of the, the ways my thinking has flipped in the last few years is related to judging, uh, prioritizing intentions or outcomes. So what I mean by that is as relevant to this conversation is, you know, would you, would you rather have someone who in their heart of hearts is, is pure i was going to say as pure as gold but that's not really doesn't make much sense but you get the idea someone who is truly altruistic who has the greater good in mind with a million dollars or someone who is uh at their core uh scrooge but who out of guilt to absolve themselves of guilt is going to behave as if they are

altruistic with a hundred million dollars, which would you, which would you prefer if they're of equal intellectual capacity, right? So their ability to problem solve is equal. And now I think I would probably opt if, if I'm just focused on outcomes, fixing aspects of the educational system, fixing, um, educational system, fixing healthcare, global literacy, whatever it might be, I'm happy to take the extrinsically motivated rich guy as opposed to the intrinsically motivated less rich guy. You know what I mean? If I'm just looking for outcomes, because I used to – and that doesn't mean don't give back.

I think there are many arguments that could be made and I wrote a blog post for people interested called The Karmic Capitalist about my thinking on this. But the – let me ask you just to sort of take us in a related but slightly different direction. Because I'm probably more, I'm not a Randian. By the way, this is the moment to bring in Burning Man, by the way. Okay, bring it in. Can I ask you one other question? And if it's going to be a long answer, we can come back to it. But I want to know what is financial security to you? And where does money fit into your life well i think it's very difficult to starve in northern europe

um you know meaning it's unpleasant when you starve or it's it's difficult to end up starving. It's just like, by 2014, people were of the opinion that starving in Northern Europe was actually quite unpleasant. In 2007, starving was great fun. I meant that I suppose that

we are blessed a bit with what the low bar is in terms of life outcomes. You know, starving doesn't really happen in Western countries, although, of course, there's lots of tricky kind of situations which get close to that but um but it's funny actually because um because i actually i'm not sure if i have a totally kind of honest internal perspective on this tip because a lot of me is like you know part of me is like um you know, to be honest, I'd be perfectly happy just schlepping around Europe, chatting to people, you know, having the odd espresso and just generally experiencing the world. But what I actually care about is conscious experience and understanding and, you know, blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, you know, I do enjoy a good party and uh um you know a nice home and so on and um i also quite enjoy like sitting you know in front of what what are

my dreams it's funny dreams you have dreams all the time in your life and you know when i was five i wanted to be a carpenter when i was six six, I wanted to be Beethoven. Whatever, some of them stick with you. And one of the ones that just stuck with me is a mixture of exactly this blend between, like, I don't give a crap about money. And I basically want to live in the kind of utopian situation which can only be sustained by enormous private wealth. And this dream is that I am, and I've had it since the age of 15, and it won't go away, which is that my idea for what I really want to do in my life is to have a philosophical academy in Greece. And basically what I'm seeing is like Mediterranean sunshine,

beautiful people in white robes, you know, people playing guitar on the beach, a kind of network of pavilions. You'd sit in one for a while, just contemplating the meaning of the color green for like six weeks. And then you kind of wander up the arcade of columns by the swimming pool with all the beautiful people and have scintillating intellectual conversation. And you'd somehow be apart from the world of ambition and trying to sustain progress. And you'd be sitting back and contemplating the concepts which normally drive our,

you know, our intentions. And, you know, you'd just basically be having a good old think about what the meaning of it all is. But also you'd be surrounded by beautiful people in great luxury and sunshine. So it's like right here is like a conflict and so so certainly like i hold in um contempt the idea of counting score in life through wealth and there's fairly small evidence to me in fact i just go with the accepted evidence that up to a certain point it's great to have some some resources because it allows a certain level of relaxation, comfort and kind of sustainable existence in the world. But beyond that, it's kind of vanity and stupidity to pursue worldly resources.

But, you know, funny enough, random thing. Aristotle is really funny as a moral philosopher and one of the reasons he's funny is that he doesn't really believe you can be happy if you're not beautiful. Which is kind of probably true, but we don't dwell on it.

Anyway, he's also got... Not a popular advertising campaign. Yeah, exactly. Which is kind of probably true, but we don't dwell on it. Not a popular advertising campaign. Yeah, exactly. He's also got a virtue which is only available to the rich. And his virtue system is about poles. For every virtue, there's an extreme exaggeration of that virtue, which becomes a sin or a vice. And there's a thing in the opposite direction so not enough of it and so uh one of his virtues only available to rich

people is magnificence and so he thinks that the correct use of the energy that is wealth is to be magnificent which is to say to throw amazing festivals and build awesome buildings and foster great artists and do this kind of thing and then that can go in its extreme form to ostentation and sort of vanity you know sort of like um the kinds of characters i think who are you know who occur wherever there's extreme well you know russian oligarchs being the classic contemporary example, or towards miserliness, where you have all this wealth, and you're not organizing any parties. What the fuck? You know, and I think that's probably like, you know, it's probably orthogonal, but it's probably a quite good way of thinking about wealth, which is that there is a responsibility to

create joy and there is a responsibility to and there's nothing inherently sinful about being wealthy or whatever. But anyway, going back to this academy, to which, by the way, Tim, you're going to be hugely welcome. I hope you're going to hang out there

very often. I think it's going to be really cool. We're just going to hang out there very often you know i think it's going to be really cool we're just going to sort of just hang about and chat about stuff yeah and you know green is also my favorite color so i've had i've a lot to ponder there okay good yeah interrogate yourself about that you know favor i mean uh i want so i think the the rich the use of riches is an interesting segue to Burning Man because there's a lot of discussion about this, of course. But tell me your impression of Burning Man. I'll leave it wide open since you brought it up.

Yeah, I did bring it up. So, I mean, I love parties. And so I wanted to go to Burning Man for a while. My best friend Al is often at Burning Man. So eventually we got it together. I go to Burning Man for a while. My best friend Al is often at Burning Man. So eventually we got it together. I went to Burning Man. And Burning Man is an absolute ordeal to get to,

especially if you're coming from the UK. So you've got to get to San Francisco. Then there's all this, like, you've got to purchase lots of objects and water and snacks and costumes and all this stuff. And then you've got to do an eight hour road trip. About four hours in the road trip, you're like, wow, this is getting pretty much into the middle of nowhere. And then you keep on stepping on it, whatever you get there. And then you spend four hours in a queue in a dust storm or whatever,

get to the gate. And then some like slightly sort of annoyingly kind of enlightened looking character says like, welcome, welcome home. And you're like, fuck off fuck off mate i live in hackney um i can't show you festival anyway like in between that and leaving burning man something happens where as you're leaving you're like well he was right this was my home and so what's happening between and so and what's interesting is that i was not indoctrinated into the quite sophisticated kind of moral conceptual framework around burning man all

their principles and so on um i was just sort of going along for a good party but um but here's like my kind of quick fire theory about why burning man is the most brilliant institution I've encountered and is the first evidence I've seen that, oh, not the first, whatever, but is a compelling case for why Silicon Valley is actually a culturally important place on a par with, say, the Renaissance in Florence or something, where if you look at the buildings in Silicon Valley, you're like, Jesus, these guys may build build good software companies but they sure don't know

how to live you know just like it's like it's like the car park you're like here you know anyway so why is burning man so good so there's no money which cuts out one fundamental aspect of your social relationship to the world there's basically no time because no one's got a watch on them and no one would care if they did. Although there is time, but it's a different quality of time. It's basically the rhythm of sun and night. And then there's no mobile phone. So no one is basically able to connect with their normal,

unbelievably banal set of preoccupations and as a result people are kind of stripped down so you've got no money no ambition no obsession with what you're supposed to be doing and there's basically no agenda whatsoever as regards what happens and it's long enough about a week that like unlike a kind of uk festival of which there are many great ones including things like the secret garden party at the secret garden party on the saturday you're like aware that on sunday you're gonna have to pack up and go home but at burning man the temporal horizon is just long enough that basically it might as well be

infinite you're just like i am here so that's the first thing it's like you're stripped away of a lot of the kind of tendencies of interaction, which normally kind of make you basically a fucking boring person. And then the second thing is that it's, that it, you kind of bounce around Burning Man and it operates, as far as I can tell, at four scales, which interweave in this kind of fractal way. So you've got like camps.

So you've been in wild west camp and you're there and well you know at one point i found myself playing a piano naked in a wild west bar surrounded by frenchmen singing the french national anthem you know it's sort of basically a quite undistinguished way to be spending 20 minutes of your life but anyway so you're in the wild west and you're feeling kind of like you're in the wild west and then you know an archive go past you wonder how you get on you're in the Wild West and you're feeling kind of like you're in the Wild West and then, you know, an art car goes past. You wonder how you get on the art car

and the art car buzzes you off somewhere. So the art car is kind of the second order of magnitude. You're in the Wild West, it feels like the Wild West, you're kind of open

because you're not thinking about money or time or what you're supposed to be doing or your career or like how you really want to achieve this

by next year but unfortunately this is getting all that's cleared out. And so, so you get on the archive archives one order of magnitude scale wise down and the archive might be like a fish or a boat or whatever get on the boat and then you're living on a boat you know and the whole vibe is boatist so you've

entered a different world and then you talk to a person on the boat sort of third scale of spatial organization down and the person is not does not have an agenda because they have basically completely forgotten about all the things which preoccupy them normally and so you get further in about five minutes of conversation than you do with a flatmate in about a year because you know just say how you're feeling it's like oh not so good because of the sort of thing which no one would ever tell you normally and then you know where are you from and then because you're really open because you're not thinking about your money or your time or your the things you have to do you're like oh well actually the fact that you're from wisconsin and a little farm is kind of interesting in a way which it wouldn't be

according to my normal filters and of course this is none of this is rational it's just a kind of intuitive flow but so you have very rich, and so people are their own worlds which you dive into. So we've had the camp where you're like in a world, and then you've got the art car, which is basically like kind of floating nightclubs. But anyway, you've got an art car, and that's kind of a world,

and then a person is the world. And then it's got this gift economy where the gifts are themselves their own world. So sometimes it's like a little object which expresses some profound story about this person's life or about the world or anything else. One person, and I should add, since we're on record, that I didn't indulge, was like, this, my friend, is one of only 10 DMT inhalers in the entire world so that would have been a world to dive into as a gift anyway so um and because of the lack of temporal horizon you kind of bounce between these spatial levels you're in a camp you're talking to a person you're like on an art car you're done and you cease to kind of track how they relate to each other so the whole thing becomes has the

character of a kind of an external hallucination where one fascinating piece of the world will pop up and dissolve into the next fascinating people of the world a bit of the world and there's no attachment and there's no nothing kind of thing you're just you're just bouncing around this extraordinary experience and as a result of that quite fundamental concepts change you know you're like um you know your relationship to um the distinction between a nightclub and a piece of art dissolves um your your concept of um what a friend is and what someone you don't know is blurs because everyone's kind of a friend. And of course, this all sounds quite pompous,

but you're also having a terribly good time. So anyway, this is really striking because I was not indoctrinated before going there. Right. And within two days i was living in this kind of magical invented thing where what was so striking was that it was all based on giving and generosity and openness and transient creativity and um the structure of the party, if that's what Burning Man is, is just of unbelievable genius.

I mean, I was staggered. I love parties. I studied it. I once tried to write a book about house parties, actually. It wasn't very good, and I never completed it. But, you know, I love parties. And I'd never imagined a party could be like a dance in the brain of a philosopher or something like that. And it's really like, it's a way of like,

it's a party which kind of gives you insights into totally different ways of relating to yourself and the world. And I love the fact that it's transient, because A, it means that only through the proactive participation of the people who are involved will it ever exist. But B, it means that the meaning has to go outside into the world in a way. So, you know, you don't go to Burning Man and you have your like isolated kingdom,

like my philosophical academy in Greece, for instance instance where you're kind of denying the world and then living your own private dream in a kind of onanistic kind of nonsense it's actually just like an opportunity to reconceive stuff and then go back to the world and then like think oh fuck well just like Man, the world is a consequence of the actions of everybody who's in it. Just like Burning Man, any form of relationship is possible. You know, whatever. And so it's fundamentally a mind-expanding thing. And although I have no knowledge of this whatsoever, it seems to me to be intuitively very um, the kind of genius of Silicon Valley, the kind of the fact that it's creating experiences and possibilities of life, which, um,

which genuinely touch upon, um, you know, the transformation of humanity in subtle ways at the moment and bit by bit and iterative, of course, I can only assume they are somehow connected. So I have a challenge for you. Well, the first is a recommendation. I think you'd really enjoy a book called Spectacle by David Rockwell and Bruce Mao, MAU. It's basically a visual compilation, essays and photographs that look at the phenomenon and history of massive public performances or events around the world, which is really just a phenomenal tome. The challenge is, and this is something I've thought about because I get, I wouldn't say

agoraphobic, but because I'm intrinsically quite introverted, I've been to Burning Man twice. I enjoyed it. Uh, but I, I ended up spending a lot of time in my own camp, uh, partially just to recharge. If you, if you were to, if you, if you were tasked with creating, uh, as much of the benefits that you derive from Burning Man with a group of 20 people on your own, so you're creating your own experience to provide many of the benefits of Burning Man for 20 people, what would you do? How would you do that? That's a super question.

Okay, so of course in some sense I'm just going to make up whatever I say. And no budgetary constraints. But let's just sort of do it with my little theory there about why Burning Man is so cool. Let's just apply that to 20 people. So a massive hero narrative road trip to get wherever you're going. So you're like spatially and experientially separated from your boring life. No phones, no money no motivation to talk about um your intentions in the world but more just sort of open thing um

a shared creative project where you um somehow like spontaneously democratically come up with a cool way of making everyone else happy, you know, perhaps collaboratively in, in this other space, and then enough time to be, to not be worried that it's going to end tomorrow. Um, and so just like riffing on this, just like thinking of it, you know, what we should do is, um,

you know, what we might do is collect the crew. Some, I think with 20 people to be good at food, like someone known to each other, but it was kind of a mixture of groups of friends or whatever. Um, agree on like some random distant point okay we're going to go to the hebridean island for a week i'll see you there on the 3rd of january next year whatever it's miles

away or what have you and then um and then um yeah then just go there minus mobile phone and just rejoice i guess in the fact that like people are so cool which is kind of thing which i'd oddly rather forgotten before very much just like our people are so annoying they're always like in the queue in front of me while waiting for the bus and like, you know, et cetera. Um, but like,

you know, of course this blends quite easily into sort of cults, right. Right. Which is why, why having a, uh, a participatory non, um,

um, yeah, non sort of not driven by concepts, yeah, non sort of, not driven by concepts experience is quite important. I mean, I suppose one of the paradoxes about it is that it is driven by concepts in a sense, like this concept of radical self-sufficiency and generosity and so on. But, you know, I've got a party in mind. I mean, I think that, I mean that you can hardly fail to have a good experience if you're with 20 generous, open people with loads of time away from your life

and you're feeling great about yourself because you're in the middle of a hero narrative because you actually successfully got there. And this could probably be done with two people as well. I feel like I've thought like um so i've thought about this i've thought about doing it in a wilderness setting primarily in my own head um sort of recreating the elements of your head's a lot of wilderness too yeah of burning man there's a project you might find interesting or people listening might find interesting called um well the guy the station's a station and there's a guy named doug Aitken, A-I-T-K-E-N, and he basically packed this, I think it's 11 cars.

I'm making up the numbers a bit, but 11 cars of a train full of musicians and artists and all sorts of craziness. City doing these pop, these massive pop-up performance or pop-up performances where they would take these, uh, abandoned buildings or old train stations and turn them into concerts for one night and then pack up and move on their way. Uh, which were called nomadic happenings, pretty cool stuff. Um, but, um, how do you take the experience of Burning Man and, uh, create more of those, um, peak, if you want to call them that, what are other ways of pulling your head out of the mundane bullshit and doldrums that constitute the vast majority of most people's waking existences? I mean, great question. And not one I've really successfully answered for myself,

but I'm more than happy to advise about it. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a fundamental question. And I think that many of our kind of you know tendencies are like this a bit you know like um one of the best parties i ever went to was like a moon celebration and it was kind of it was on a cliff um and the sea was like formidable and raging beneath and it was all night and um it was a full moon and the tide over the course of the night came up and there were kind of crazy ritual dances to celebrate it was pretty it was pretty eccentric but i tell you what i came out of that with was i kind of like was like oh fuck the moon and the tide are connected and of course like i'd learned that as a five-year-old school boy and not understood it in the interesting way the interesting way to understand it is to

perceive the moon and perceive its pull on the sea in real time to actually like feel in your bones the connection between these two things um and anyway, so that was kind of a really cool thing. And I guess it kind of gets back to, like, commonality, I guess, commonality between people, which is that being yourself is quite a fun thing, but it's not quite as nice as noticing that you are like an instance of humanity and that everyone else is kind of basically the same. And actually, so are the animals. And in fact, it's all matter and whatever. And, you know, there's a paradoxical thing that when you perceive in your bones your own insignificance, you feel better. Yeah.

You know, that's a really good way. That's an astute way to put it. That's very true. When you, when you're yes, when you're less concerned with all of the, just the minutia and bullshit in your life,

that is really at the end of the day, very trivial in the span of, of history and the scale, the scale of the world, you feel a lot better about it. It's weird, isn't it? Actually, when I was at school, occasionally I would lose a debating competition or discover that I was a loser in a more general sense.

And I had what you might call in a way a mind hack, which I'd be sitting on the loo or something, and I'd just think about, like, oh, everything feels terrible and awful, and it's all gone to shit sort of thing. And then I'd be like, but if you think about it, the stars are really far away. And then you kind of try to imagine the world from the stars. And then you sort of zoom in, and then you'd be like,

oh, there's this tiny little character there for a fragment of time, worrying about, you know, it's's just like just take a chill pill but you know like it's it's you know to your question how to put that into your life i don't really know it's really tricky but i guess um another thing is to to try and draw this back is to segment a little bit you know to make sure there's one day a week where your mobile phone's off and to make sure that you know with your best friends you find a time whatever once every three months to update them on just how stupid reality is

and to share that and that you and if you're in a relationship where you kind of your struggle of existence is kind of occluding the parallel magic of what could be happening there you at least occasionally find the time

to do that and of course the more fundamental suggestion would be to, like, stop trying so much. Right, right. Which, you know, I mean, like, tricky, you know, because, you know, one's got such an interesting project, you know. You know, but I've got this wonderful friend called Paul

who's, like, you know, one of the most kind of intelligent people but I got this wonderful friend called Paul, who's like, you know, one of the most kind of intelligent people I've ever met. And very, anyway, he lives, so when I was talking to him about the Academy, the Greek ideal of my kind of imaginary possible future existence, he was like, well, you know, why does it need to be in one place? And I was like, oh true it could just be you know in the world and then he was like why does it need to be with the same

group of people i was like oh that's true you know like updating the people is quite good fun and then he was like um and um you know why does it have to be in sunshine why can't it be in a mixture of things and i was like it's true like i quite like rainstorms and you know nordic climates and so on um and you know and then you know kind of almost went further just like you know why does it even um need to be outside of your life at all um and he lives a life which is very humble in a way um but quite profound in another, where he travels, he works an absolutely minimal amount. He's so clever that he can do five hours of translation a week and survive, whatever. And he learns languages, and he falls in love with people,

and he watches amazing music, and he has the most incredible network of friends. I mean, I feel he's one of my best friends, and he probably feels I'm one of about 100 because he spends 10 hours a day on friendship. You know, in the middle of that conversation, I was like, ah, Jesus Christ. I'm just like, you know, I'm just so guilty of grandiose fantasy where it's, you know,

the life I'm desiring through these concepts or whatever is actually just, it's right there. It's something which I could be living if I would only see sort of working 12 hours a day in a startup. Yeah, it's very hard that balance uh if and i even hesitate to use the word balance but the there is a there is a there's a um it's challenging to balance the appreciation of the present moment with the drive to build things because the people who tend to spend, uh, and this,

I mean, quite apart from that, we could debate the value of building different things, but the people who build the most very often have the least present state appreciation. And the people who have are entirely in the present moment don't build very much. Uh, so you, you could, you could you could argue um you could argue very strongly for both uh ends of the spectrum but trying to borrow the best practices from both is is challenging maybe the and maybe the answer is that you that you that you oscillate between the two i don't know but um yeah it's interesting i mean yeah i mean i think that's the kind of I think the question you alluded to is

a very interesting one which is like is it in some sense both you and I are enthusiasts for building so you know I've devoted the last five years of my life

obsessively to Memrise and you know, I've devoted the last five years of my life obsessively to Memrise. And, you know, you've produced a wonderful, like, collection of books and amusing and rich perspectives which you've shared with other people. And, you know, you've enriched a lot of people's lives, no doubt. And, you know, that seems inherently meritorious, right? It seems like that's got to be like a good thing to be doing, to be trying to do something, right? But on the other hand, like, you know, if nobody was trying to do things,

what would that be so bad? Or if, if everyone like tried to do quarter as much, um, I mean, there's, there's a great book by Bertrand Russell called in praise of idleness. Oh,

it's a great, great, great essay. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got this great quote in there which is like workers of two kinds moving objects at or near the earth's surface or telling other people to do so the first is ill-paid and unpleasant the second is you know great fun and rather well

remunerated and um anyway that kind of concept of moving objects at or near the Earth's surface, you'd have to update for the present day to like moving information at or near the Earth's surface. Anyway, in that essay, he's like, well, you know, a kind of classic economic insight, I guess, which is that, you know, we can make stuff twice as efficient and work half as much, or we can make stuff twice as efficient and work the same amount and make... And it's not clear to me that making stuff twice as efficient and then working the same amount is the correct response. Agreed, agreed. Well, Ed, I'd love to ask you a couple of bite-sized questions. I know to elaborate, but I'll try to, I'd love to, to sort of hit you with a couple of these before we come to a close. The first is one I don't usually ask, but I have to ask because you've used the words press up, which is push

up for you Yanks listening and other things. For instance, what is a what is the one stereotypically british thing that americans should really um appreciate or might get enjoyment of that's a good question i think um i love the ka-ching was that a toaster um that's that's a new subscription to oh nice Oh, nice. All right. Congratulations. Thanks, Ian. But, yeah, it was kind of comedy in the office. But I think the – because I've lived a bunch in Boston when I did textiles there, and I've seen it in America.

And the thing which always kind of really impresses and amazes me about Americans and which by contrast is different in the British people is that British people are like fundamentally embarrassed about the expression of intention

that it's almost like there's something like fundamentally vulgar in human in british life i suppose human life british life it's like american calling baseball the world series but anyway um there's something fundamentally um embarrassing about stating intentions. And what's so liberating about Kite America is that that embarrassment doesn't exist. But at the same time, going back to Britain, it's this terribly beautiful thing. And I think it's kind of connected a lot

to British humour, which is this basic consciousness of the absurdity of trying combined with actually still trying. What is a good gateway drug for British comedy for people who, for real dyed-in-the-wool Americans who perhaps, because I've seen some British humor I have a lot of trouble with. I just can't quite figure it out. And then there's other British humor or British-ish humor like Shaun of the Dead, which I find completely hilarious. So what is a good gateway drug if you had to pick one entry point?

Gateway? Why are you asking me about gateway? Can't you just ask me what i think is pure genius sure okay all right all right all right i'll let you upgrade my question what is what is pure genius i just don't want it to be pearls before swine i want the like to educate and i'm throwing myself in that right you know i'm i mean i think does the thick of it exist in America? Is there a kind of American version of it? Well, my favorite comedian is a guy called Armando Iannucci. So Armando, and then Iannucci is I-A-N-N-U-C-C-I.

And he had this show called The Armando Iannucci Show, which I think was a failure even on British TV. So this might not be brilliant for a gay re-douche. And I think part of the reason for that is that he's, personally, he's actually not a terribly charismatic performer. He's just an absolutely brilliant writer and conceiver of comedy. But The Armando Iannucci Show was, brilliant uh writer and conceiver of comedy but the amanda you need to show was um this brief had a brief appearance on tv and um somehow captured um

both like a wicked love of life and an absolute horror at everything which is going on through a kind of completely incoherent the um absurdist humor so for instance i'm trying to give a good example but um for instance there was one sketch which involves a guy driving his car really fast where a very very specific miles per hour about 157 miles an hour, he enters into a flawless state of perfect meditative perfection where he doesn't have to make any decisions. He just avoids all pedestrians and just disappears, but then has to get back down to zero miles an hour without killing people. Another one begins with a cityscape

where you see all the lights coming on in the morning and with each light you hear the audio of the person screaming about the futility of their existence as the narrator says, this man designs bacon packaging for a living. This person is in charge of Bedford Supporter Supply. Oh God!

This is the manager of Bewitched. Bastards! I hate it! Sorry, I'm... It's very, like, Kierkegaard. Yeah, that's such a poor advertisement for a genius comic. Yeah, yeah, no, no. It's always

a bit tricky. You know, I would recommend, I'd recommend to your original question, what's a good gateway? I think Monty Python's a great gateway still because you can't help but be delighted by their kind of cheeky enthusiasm, even as you're just tuning in to the humor.

And then in contemporary things, there's a thing called Alan Partridge, which is sort of written by Armando Iannucci as well, which is the story of a radio DJ from Norfolk who actually has shadows of David Brent from The Office but in a um in a kind of richer more amusing fashion um and um and it's his sort of um trials and tribulations so um so Alan Potridge would be my gateway drug perfect uh you're looking we were really looking for a one-line answer no no I love it you're you no, I love it. You have one of the most colorful vocabularies and cadences of anyone I know.

So I love your emails. I was going to actually read the sequence of emails that you had recently where you introduced me to one of your friends, now a mutual friend. It's just where most people are like, Joe meet John, John meet Joe. Take it from here. you introduced me to one of your friends, now a mutual friend. It's just where most people are like, Joe meet John, John meet Joe. Take it from here. You create these wonderfully. I'm not going to say they're not antiquated. That's not the word that I'm looking for, but they're very – they read like a Civil War love letter or something.

They're so eloquent, i'm like god damn like this guy i i wonder if the amount of effort you expend on that is the amount of effort that i would have to expend uh to create such a thing because you're you have very you're very prosaic and very entertaining in that way is is what did your parents do if you don't mind me asking professionally uh uh so my dad um was a coder um actually he refused to teach me to code by the way because he thought i should uh play in the garden which i still vaguely resent but you know i did i did enjoy playing the garden and my mom was a sort of teacher i guess i i did i did have an interesting education because i was in um we lived near

oxford and i ended up going to a school which had um lots of oxford academics children in it and i was um part of a a class you know maybe i was quite good at um my subjects as part of a class where the other people at this class were just sort of this amazingly colorful bunch of precociously intellectual characters. And so I guess I did have a bit of that. I still kind of laugh about the kind of situation that that represented, but it was in many respects quite unhealthy. Why was that unhealthy? Well, I don't think it's good to peak intellectually at the age of 13. Do you think a lot of them did, or do you think that it was... Well, I think that it was actually quite it was quite a magical time and it was um and um

i think that it's quite rare in life to be surrounded by um people who challenge you and who like you yeah yeah for sure um and so so it's quite for sure. And so it's quite a great experience. It's a wonderful experience to have. But I think a lot of the people who are in that situation in the school then went off to other schools, a variety of other schools, where that didn't exist. And so they ended up being quite, all of us ended up in some sense being quite nostalgic at the age of 14.

So just to give you an example, our favorite film as a group in our teenagers was With Nail and I. I don't know if you've seen With Nail and I. Have you seen the film With Nail and I? No. With Nail? Oh, my goodness. With Nail.

N-A-I-L? Actually, it's all one word, With Nail. So it's the name of a character in this film. So this is your gateway drug to British humour what's weird so it's basically a film about some washed up actors

but full of passion struggling their way on a kind of comedy road trip in their late 20s I feel like every like Netflix description of British comedy just makes me want to slip my wrists before I even get started. Oh my God. But,

but yes, with Nell and I. With Nell, oh yeah, please, please watch with Nell and I because it's a, it's basically a film made out of fragments of insanely quotable bits and bobs. Um, and it's, um, and it's, um,

I mean, it's intensely funny, incredibly romantic and, um, kind of like a profound narrative, I guess, about what it's like to have high hopes for life and then discover that it's not quite as easy as you think. Anyway, it's so charming. And, you know, it's about friendship. So it's a really wonderful film. Anyway, but it's also very nostalgic. And so, really, it's not not really a healthy age of 14. It's like, oh, gosh, I remember when I was 13.

Everything was so good. We used to use words like portentous, but now I just say spoon. Now, aside from it sounds like you had an intellectually stimulating schooling experience at that point, can you think of a specific defining moment of your childhood? Is there anything that stands out in terms of forming you into the person you are today? I think I can't think of something which I could honestly report as like a causal factor. But I do have a couple of favorite childhood memories um one of which was um which I think is like it's like this is like this memory is something which I would if I was held hostage and someone was about to delete this

memory I would pay if I I had them, hundreds of thousands of dollars to not delete. Because it was a moment in my childhood, maybe I was five, in the garden, looking out at some trees in the distance. And for whatever reason with my dad, I was discussing basically visual perception, but seeing. And he was saying, we must have been commenting on, I don't know how it began, but he was saying, we must have been commenting on, I don't know how it began, but he was saying, oh, the light bounces off the trees and goes into your eyes. And I found this incredibly confusing.

And I was like, no, no, no, but my eyes go out and touch the trees. My vision goes out and touches the trees. And he was like, no, no, no. The photons bounce at the tree from the sun, and they enter your eye, and that's how you come up with the picture. And I was like, and I remember just intensely the weirdness and the confusion. I remember getting to a point where I was happy to accept that my vision reached out to the halfway point to meet the light in between me and the trees.

But I just couldn't even conceive of how perception could be passive. And anyway, I bumped into this thing years later when studying psychology, where a lecturer mentioned the theory of an Arabic psychologist and philosopher called, oh my goodness, I'm not sure if I can remember his name, but Al-Hazen, I think his name is. And Al-Hazen was a guy who in the 12th century or something disproved the theory of exteroception, which apparently was really popular until like the year 1200, the theory that your eye went out and met the world rather than your eye just sits there passively and receives information. And then the second thing which amplified this memory, you know, beyond the family connection and just the preciousness of the virgin perspective on the world,

was that when I got intensely into the philosophy of perception as an undergraduate, um, I got into this guy called Morris Merleau Ponty, who's a kind of poetic, super cool cigarette smoking French philosopher who writes beautiful prose. And he, um,

he has this theory of perception where, where the activity is given back to perception, not because vision goes out spatially but because perception is this active probing question asking activity involving like a profound resonance between you and the world which is so far away from neuroscience as it's normally thought of where it's all like input processing representation experience this was um this really much more beautiful and and um and i'll come back to this in a second but much more true to experience theory of perception which is that we're in this kind of dialogue

or resonance with the world where our brains and the world um kind of voted residence which means that our brain changes and then the meaning of the stuff in the world is altered and it's a bit like dancing with somebody you know there's input there's output but it's the the pattern between you which makes the most sense in the end which is what's actually happening and so to wheel that back um the the core memory is incredible because it describes a naivety of perception which you can never get back you can never perceive the world with such a stupid idea of how perception works but at the same time you can never actually experience perception devoid of the concepts we have for what's happening to it. And the second thing is, is that it's true. That's what it feels like to perceive.

And we suppress that. So that's my favorite Toto memory. It actually only became significant later on, but I love it. Let me touch on some of the aspects of perception that you brought up. I think you and I, and if you're not comfortable talking about this, let me know, but I believe you and I were

chatting when we had some wine many moons ago in San Francisco about effectively augmented synesthesia. So using hardware, if I'm mixing people up, let me knowhesia so using hardware if if i'm if i'm mixing people up let me know but but using using hardware to uh to see smells or or uh have have these this type

of commingling of the senses and perception can you talk about that for for a second i don't know where that went or where it was but uh if you could explain what you were doing i think people would find it very interesting well yeah so um so after um i get a bit of biography i'll be as quick as possible here but i went to study under a guy called um kevin o'regan in paris and kevin o'regan i'd encountered when i was right up to my final exams at university i you know i was in this intense period of study partly because i've been drunk most of the rest of the time and so i had to really ram it in and so all these kind of ideas were new in my mind they're fusing together and i discovered this paper by this guy kevin o'regan um which um was in behavioral and brain sciences and was called a sensory motor theory of visual perception and in it he quoted a series of the most wonderful obscure experiments from psychology which um

one of which was this tactile visual substitution device created by a guy called paul buck e rita bark like the composer y like and and in Spanish, Rita like lovely Rita, poor barky Rita. And he was building devices for the blind to see through touch. So the tactile visual stimulation system, TVSS, basically would take a camera on your glasses and would transform that visual input into basically a highly pixelated sort of 100 by 100 array of vibrating pins. It'd hold against your back or your thigh or your leg or wherever. There was a nice surface on your body to touch. And the fascinating thing about this device is

if someone else is holding the camera and you have this, it just feels like random, totally patternless scratching. And when you are wearing the glasses and you first touch it to your skin, it also feels like that. But when you move around, you begin to track the correspondences between movement and sensation. And to cut a long story short, eventually you end up short-circuiting all the noise and you actually perceive through touch a visual like experience of space before

you so you feel looming objects you see things going past the side you you feel things approaching as you go to them and you have a feeling of space and the feeling of space is based not on input which is now like a totally different form of input but on the patterns and connections between your movement and the sensations which arise. And so this is like an incredibly profound thing about the nature of consciousness, which is, roughly speaking, Kevin's theory, which I basically roughly believe is that the quality of experience is like the pattern of movements you're able to make and the expected consequences of those movements. And so his metaphor was, if you're holding a bottle of wine in your hand, as I am now,

by the way, and I've nearly finished it, but you're holding a bottle of wine, you're only touching, you have your eyes closed, you're only touching part of the bottle of wine, but you kind of feel the rest of it, even though you're not feeling it. You know that if you move your hand upwards, it's not like, it couldn't be a tube or just like a little blocky sphere or something, even though the touch would be the same. Your perceptual experience extends beyond the current input, and it's based on expectation.

Okay, so that's the preamble. And as a result of that, I ended up doing a PhD, trying to do a PhD in philosophy of perception, where the output that year was to consider what the difference between color and smell is um and to do that i kind of did what that that tactile visual substitution system in a way describes the difference between touch and vision because it says touch feels totally

different but actually if touch is given the same sensory motor patterns as vision, it begins to feel like vision. So you can experience vision through touch by the patterns of interaction. And so I tried to come up with a theory of how color and smell feel like they do. And my God, they feel mysterious. You know, you smell cinnamon. What connection does that have with reality? You see any color color and particularly a

beautiful rich color in the azure blue of a morning sky or or green or whatever of a kind of rainforest canopy and it feels like inherently weird like what is the connection between your experience this rich uh intangible emotion in a way and reality it's very easy with vision because you're like oh the glass looks round it is round you know it's a very kind of military connection but with color you're like wow that orange i'm just looking at a kind of blinking light of an orange computer here and actually you tune into the orange it's like what the hell fucking relationship does that have to atoms bumping around space?

It seems like a totally different kind of quality. So anyway, Scott, I couldn't tell this. I think that any longer, sorry, Tim, sorry,

listeners, but if anyone's still here about seven hours, but anyway, so, um, um, the, if anyone is still listening,

I'm just going to interrupt. This is something that Kevin Rose, buddy, my pull by me. If anyone is still listening to this podcast just going to interrupt. This is something that Kevin Rose, buddy of mine, pulled on me. If anyone is still listening to this podcast, please let us know what you think. Shoot me or Ed a note on Twitter and put hashtag EdEdGoodGood.

This is an inside joke from a long time ago to let us know. But Ed, please continue. At Ted Cook on Twitter, by the way. Yeah. Anyway, so, so, you know, and so the thought experiment I came up with was like, let's imagine you you see in black and white.

So your basic vision is black and white. And then when you look at what is in fact in reality a green object, you experience a particular smell, say the smell of whatever leaves and then you look at what is a blue object and you experience um whatever the uh the smell of a fresh sea wind or something like that so arbitrary connections between things but look the first question like, could you experience those as qualities of the object? And the answer I came up with was basically, well, of course you would, because, you know, when I currently look at an orange object, I'm just especially looking at it, and then I'm having the experience of orange, and I look away, and I cease having the experience of orange.

And I look back, and I have the experience of orange. And so if that orange was being kind of put into my head by an evil goblin who just gave me the orange feeling every time I looked at the, in fact, orange hammock, which I see in black and white, well, then I would experience that color as being, which the color is just, in fact, a smell or a sound. It could be on the object. So the connection between movement I address with my perceptual organs i look at the hammer

and suddenly it's going jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing look away it's jesus do that i look back at it jing jing jing jing jing jing i look away it's history that after like doing that a million times you wouldn't think that the sound was coming from any other place than the surface of the object right and i i'm still of the kind of somewhat smug completely incoherent opinion that this is actually quite a fundamental insight into um into into like the mystery of sensations which is that we attribute to the cause of the sensation everything which comes with it emotionally and and we kind of project those projectors actually a poor word but it's an easy one to relate to we kind of project those onto the surface of the object when in some sense they come from us it's just that when we look at the object they're there um then you know in a way

this kind of goes back to the chats we were having earlier about um about our relationships with other people and even situations and aspects of ourselves which is that when we think about a particular thing if all the things that evokes in us are only evoked by that thing, we think that is a characteristic of the thing, not of our interaction with the thing or person. No, I love this. I want to ask you, have you experimented with removing different types of sensory input, going a period of time without sight,

going a period of time without hearing, anything like that? I have occasionally done, yeah, little games like that. Not to the heroic extent of a mathematician called Seymour Pappert, who trained himself to look through mirrors so the world was up, down, reversed for like months at a time so that it kind of righted itself. But anyway, I have had an experience with friends

where you walk around town blindfolded, led by another person. And that is so cool. So you just get a good friend, somebody you trust, and say, I'm going to be blindfolded or you're going to be blindfolded and I'm just going to lead you around town.

And that's magic because you can have the experience of perceiving the world, not visually, but just through sound. And, you know, it's fun in the obvious sense but it's also like oh wow like i actually can perceive the world through sound and what's more i perceive it in a different but in many ways richer fashion um since since by the way since occasionally you're citing some cool books um there's a book called Touching the Rock by,

Touching the Rock. I don't know if I remember the guy's name, but by John something or other, Holt perhaps, John Holt. But Touching the Rock, Google it. And it's the story of a guy who goes blind very,

very gradually for 20 years, and then finally becomes completely blind. And many interesting things about it, one of which is that he says that the difference between having a tiny crack of indeterminate light and nothing was as big as the difference between indeterminate light and full vision, because suddenly he was just in the abyss right and there was just no visual connection um but the second thing is kind of like that he has he's kind of theologian um but he has this wonderful reflections on how how he came to

enjoy the world being blind and one go-to example is um the rain is the best thing for blind people because you can hear the world in three dimensions because the pattering of the raindrops on the roofs and the pavements the lampposts and the and the buildings gives you because of the echo because of the particular it gives you a sense of 3d space where most of the time your 3D space only goes like a couple of yards in front of you and otherwise it's just the void. Stuff like that, which kind of cool way games for just enjoying your senses generally. So fascinating. I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just thinking that for anyone who's endured this long, that would be quite a valuable recommendation.

It's like drawing a few things together. Next time there's going to be a rainstorm, rather than thinking, oh, no, I'm not going to be able to go to Santa Cruz and sun myself or something, think get one of your best friends, go out in the rain blindfold them and allow them to perceive through the magic of hearing the world in all its mysterious awesomeness via audition oh it's a brilliant suggestion i um i also wonder you know at what point will we see and it could be done a couple of different ways

technologically but people using let's just say blind people using something like an oculus rift or it wouldn't necessarily be an oculus rift could just be some type of uh device that's attached where you can upload very accurate you know to the centimeter uh mapping 3d mapping of the world around them let's just say in a 10-mile radius. Or there could be some device for sensing all of this that provides them with auditory feedback or other types of feedback that tells them exactly where they are. And what this makes me think of, there's a – one of my favorite articles I've read in the last 10 years is an article in Men's Journal. I just looked it up. People can

Google the blind man who taught himself to see. And it's about Daniel Kish, K-I-S-H. And he's been sightless since he was a year old. He can mountain bike. He can navigate the wilderness alone. He can recognize a building as far away as a thousand feet. I'm just kind of reading the subtitle here, but he does it through echolocation, the same way that bats find their way around. He has the ability to click in a very, very methodical, precise way to determine exactly where things are and where he is. And, uh, I'll just give people a teaser with the first paragraph because this, this entire piece blew my mind. And the, the first paragraph is the first thing, Dan, this is the, the author speaking, Michael Finkel. The first thing Daniel Kish does when

I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California is make fun of my driving. You're going to leave it that far from the curb. He asks, he's standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glanced behind me as I walk up. I am indeed parked about a foot and a half from the curb. I mean, it's just so amazing. So amazing. And it also raises questions for me about, you know, when you just mentioned touching the rock and the difference between between having just a glimmer of light perception and none, how much of a phase shift it is often for people who will use psychedelics, for instance, and mushrooms and the difference between the sort of normal resolution at which we view the world and then the one step removed moving upwards where we have almost an enhanced HD perception of the world and how significantly that changes your perception of everything. And you're seeing everything with new eyes, even though it's really just one click of the dial in terms of resolution.

So fascinating. Well, we have a lot to talk about. I want to let you get to your night. You've been very generous with your time, and I always enjoy rapping with you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to, really fun. On that point, by the way, there's a, you know,

just to sort of pile up the reading list, there's Alan Watts, who's quite a kind of cheerful and wide-ranging and amusing kind of 20th century philosopher, hallucinogen taker. I think he described himself as a sort of spiritual entertainer. which examines in quite fascinating ways a little bit the, I guess, what you call the phenomenology of hallucination, where he talks about exactly that, like how it's even possible that perception can become much higher resolution and what it means that it is possible.

And so, you know, because I because i for instance as anyone else i think considers like the resolution of my perception to be a function of my perceptual organs and brain and it's it's not an easily accessible idea that i could perceive it twice the resolution basically by paying more attention um and and so anyway he's quite magic on this subject and he talks about hallucination as a as a terrible term for the phenomenon because hallucination implies distortion and unreality whereas this is hyper reality as he describes it um and anyways that's well worth the read The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts I love it

Ed where can people find more about you what you're up to on the internets or otherwise well in Hackney in the non-internets I hang out so come to Hackney and then

but yeah Memrise.com is worth a look. We have a website and an app, and we're trying to make learning joyful. If you're really into the questions about phenomenology and stuff, about the quality of experience, there's an article which can be found online um called is trilled smell possible um is what smell possible trilled in the sense of the musical note going right right right is trilled smell possible uh which is definitely

like um i mean it's probably one of the worst, most incoherent pieces ever published in a philosophy journal, but it's quite good. And yeah, I'm at Ted Cook on Twitter. And that is Ed Cook with an E at the end for exceptional. Is that right? That's exactly right. Although actually

on Twitter I'm Ted Cook because I'm twat at taking Ed Cook. You're at Ted Cook, really, with twat at taking Ed Cook. You're at Ted Cook, really, with a T at the beginning? Ted Cook. Timmy, you're not following me. Jesus Christ. I know, I should be following you. I have all this goodness. I have...

I'm in a bit of social media malaise. I have a bit of digital fatigue, so I've been taking a break of sorts, to the extent that I do. But do but ed i will let you get to your to your evening and your weekend thanks so much for jumping on and this has been a pleasure to really fun so we will we will grab some wine and get into some trouble next time you're in san francisco impeccable all right thanks bye Thanks, Ed. Take care. Bye. Take care. Bye.

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