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

Part 2 of 2... Ed Cooke https://twitter.com/tedcooke is a dear friend and a Grandmaster of Memory. In 2010, he was interviewed by a journalist named Joshua Foer http://joshuafoer.com/. 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 http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/08/29/kevin-kelly/, Josh Waitzkin http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/04/22/tim-ferriss-podcast/, or Maria Popova http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, you'll love Ed. He's one of a kind.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  What you're about to hear is part two of a two-part conversation with Ed Cook, grand master 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 story is 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.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:40Ed Cooke?

  Now would have seemed appropriate timing.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

• 0:55Ed Cooke?

  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.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now, Cook, you bring up a really interesting, you bring up a really interesting set of questions. And this is, this is something that 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

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of cognitive burden and you're not sort of stuck up your own ass all the time.

• 1:57Tim Ferriss?

  But in the case of the buts.

• 1:59Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00Tim Ferriss?

  And the business, let's just say, or uh, how do you balance the in- the intuition, which at some, at, at, at times can be an irrational exuberance, with the sort of prefrontal cortex calculation.

• 2:16Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's, that's a question, that, that, that is, that is the question, and it's not a question that I have an answer to.

• 2:23Ed Cooke?

  But I assume it's something to do.

• 2:24Tim Ferriss?

  God damn it, Ed, why did I do this interview?

• 2:27Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, it's pathetic, isn't it? I, by the way, uh, before, I, I, 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 don't, because yeah, 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 are two, two little sort of um, thoughts which we must come back to. Um, but where were we? We were yeah, and so, so I've got no idea about the intuition thing, but like, um, but I think

• 3:10Ed Cooke?

  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, um 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.

• 3:48Ed Cooke?

  That's normally your mind.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's actually the best description of my mind I've ever heard, right there.

• 3:54Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, and it's kind of rubbish, isn't it? Because you're kind of, you know, like, well, one wants to be kind of like a didgy doo, like the wah wah wah wah, you know, whatever. But, but, you know, unfortunately, you're just like, oh, fuck, oh, maybe I'm a lizard. Oh, no, I should really like, you know. Um, but by the way, uh, so, so one, one thing I quite enjoy about Alfred Chitib is that, um, that you're quite good at like coming up to rational conclusions and implementing them, and I'm not. So, uh, earlier this week, I was like, Jesus Christ, I smoked the whole time. I drink lots of wine. I should sort my act out. I'm gonna start doing yoga. And even yoga is even something which I find fascinating and interesting, you know, rich.

• 4:36Ed Cooke?

  I think it's like a fundamentally profound system of thought, which, you know, connects autonomous rhythms with the body's capacity of movement and the mind, you know, I, I, I don't have enough good things to say about yoga, but I never fucking do it. And so I was like, okay, Jesus. Um, I was like, Jesus, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go do some, I'm gonna, you know, I, I need to be healthy. I said, I'm gonna go do some yoga. And so I went down to the yoga thing and then I paid, they had this big, great deal, twenty five pounds for ten days of consecutive sessions. And I was like, genius, this time I'm gonna do ten days consecutive sessions. Then went to the first one, because I was there and, um, and did it and it was great. And, you know, felt fantastic, super pepped up and the rest of it. And that was, that was five days ago.

• 5:19Ed Cooke?

  I haven't been since, I just, I just inept. I, I, I don't know what, what kind of consistency or perspective is required to actually implement uh, worthy plans like that. And, and actually, that's why I, um, why I, 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, a capacity which I find mysterious and suspicious.

• 5:45Tim Ferriss?

  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 this sort of stalwart of self-discipline and systems thinking. And I, I function like Bishop from Aliens, you know, I just have this incredible ability to execute, execute, execute. And at the end of the day, I, 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.

• 6:31Tim Ferriss?

  I would take extremely unflattering photos of yourself in 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, like, these are gonna go, you know, on the homepage as a pop-up for the, for the, for the, or something like that, or on Facebook.

• 6:55Ed Cooke?

  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.

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Ed Cooke?

  A bit. Yeah, I mean, that'd be a pompous way of saying it, obviously, but.

• 7:11Tim Ferriss?

  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 in its meaning. So for me, self-discipline is like, no, we, we, we're like rats in a lab. Put us in a Skinner box, which is life, and we respond to inputs, uh, 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 gonna punish or reward yourself typically. It's usually not enough. And it's, it's too easily reneged, uh, so you can, you can externalize it. Uh, you could also put some money on the line. That's also very useful for people, but, um. But how the hell did we get this far?

• 7:56Tim Ferriss?

  So the, the, uh, we're gonna talk about Burning Man. We're gonna 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, orate, like this virtue? Or is it just, uh, is, can it be boiled down to sort of deservedly winning? Is that, uh, is that what?

• 8:30Ed Cooke?

  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, um, you know, in some, in some sense, like, um,

• 8:49Ed Cooke?

  the humanities, inverted commas, have had this nailed for like 2,000 years. What like the fundamental tendencies of a good human being are? You know, empathy, um, temperance, generosity, uh, kind of non egotism. You know, we sort of know what good human beings are. We have done for thousands of years. Um, but that's not what we celebrate or immediately associate with merit, right? So we tend to associate merit with like, um, tangible outcomes in life path. Um, which might include like getting a Harvard law degree or, you know, being Bill Gates or whatever.

• 9:31Ed Cooke?

  Um, and, um, and so, and so the kind of, the concept of improving oneself is obviously 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, um,

• 10:04Ed Cooke?

  You know, if you look at like, you know, Silicon Valley startups, um, which are in some sense the great drivers of human culture at the moment, besides like ISIS and whatever. But like, uh, anyway, but you know, the, the natural tendency in that way of thinking is to become personally more efficient. Hmm. So, um, it's to like store files more effectively, um, get things done better, do you know, be quicker, optimize oneself. And, um, and this is a kind of merit thing in its way. But it's, it's quite a selfish one. Um, and goodness knows, you know, for lots of subtle reasons,

• 10:47Ed Cooke?

  um, we're all selfish, but, um, you can imagine alter, an alternative culture of, of creativity and power of the kind that, that Silicon Valley has, which would all be focused on, um, making communities better and institutions better and, um, hacking, um, not oneself, but, um, but the situations which comprise the world. And, you know, uh, I'll give you my, my kind of go to example about this is you go to San Francisco, unbelievably cool town, full of just the most magical people, so like intellectually vibrant and open and fun and awesome and beautiful.

• 11:31Ed Cooke?

  Um, but, and, and so rich. And there's fucking like homeless people everywhere. And you're like, seriously, guys, that, that's Twitter HQ there. It's a fifteen billion dollar company or whatever. Everyone inside is being paid more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. And this happens on their doorstep? Do they have no like conception, no, 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. Um, and anyway, so 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

• 12:14Ed Cooke?

  of a tendency of thought which looks to optimize the individual over. The situations qua your like external stuff influencing yourself rather than the self influencing self rather than external situations, which are the things which actually make us happy. Like the ability to play chess on the street and, you know, giving people things and whatever other.

• 12:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, I I agree. I think that just to not take us down too much of a political rat hole. But I think that the part of what makes San Francisco very fascinating and 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 the simultaneously, for instance, I think that San Francisco could learn a lot

• 13:14Tim Ferriss?

  as it relates to homeless people and other aspects of rejuvenating a city from New York City. I think Giuliani and Bloomberg did have done a just a phenomenal job with converting Manhattan into a pleasant place to walk. And that was not, it wasn't in the not in the distant past that it was terrifying to walk in areas that are now very popular. The 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 you or maybe you've heard the expression, you know, 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.

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  And that makes it very challenging to deal with systemic issues that involve a lot of people.

• 14:02Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah, I agree with you. The the.

• 14:05Ed Cooke?

  I wonder if that's really right, Tim, because like, you know, there was lots of consensus in San Francisco in certain regions of life, right? So.

• 14:18Ed Cooke?

  You know, the 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, talented young guys, the uh uh the angel investors. And there's like a very kind of clear, shared set of concepts about, and and also a lot of generosity and consensus. Everyone's always helping everyone. Um, you know, there's there's there's no overt selfishness at all, really, you know, it's like, that's that that would what I describe as like almost a perfect harmonious community where people are like doing amazing things, trying as hard as they can.

• 14:58Ed Cooke?

  But, you know, I I, for instance, like memorize, one of one of the rival sites to memorize in some sense is this site called Quizlet. And I'm incredibly good mates with the CEO of Quizlet, this guy called Andrew Southern, he's a terrific uh character. And it's so striking on meeting him, you know, we we see each other, we have a wonderful time together and we brainstorm together. And uh 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.

• 15:40Ed Cooke?

  And yet there are these quite, you know, radical divisions between that and, you know, for instance, that I I don't understand the history of homeless people. But it is striking that there are, you know, so many of them and that these two worlds coexist spatially. But have zero um zero social or emotional or conceptual connection in a way.

• 16:04Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 16:19Tim Ferriss?

  The prominence in the media and otherwise of outliers. And that the sort of sexiness and romance of building multi-billion dollar companies in short periods of time has created a misperception, I think, of how much of the population benefits from being employed at tech companies. But I think it brings up kind of an interesting question, maybe we won't get into it right now, I want to talk about Burning Man a bit. But that 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?

• 17:04Tim Ferriss?

  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,

• 17:15Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  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, you know, 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. And that we're, we live in a culture where the former has been romanticized because

• 17:56Tim Ferriss?

  it's easier, perhaps it comes back to like general mental functioning, it's easier to, for 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 is kind of a son of a bitch, if we really look at it objectively, who's now being deified. And

• 18:21Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, it's tricky, isn't it? I mean, Sorry to interrupt your question, but I think Gates is a really

• 18:28Tim Ferriss?

  If that was a question, that was the longest question of all time. I think it was just a rant, so go ahead.

• 18:36Ed Cooke?

  You know, I assume since it's probably past 3pm in San Francisco that you've moved on to gin and tonics. So that's, anyway, but I think Gates is a good example because the, because Gates is there by, you know, is considered a heroic figure because of this sort of, this generosity after the fact of wealth accumulation.

• 18:59Ed Cooke?

  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 like hyper competent character who's much better than some like 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 so 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

• 19:45Ed Cooke?

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

• 20:30Ed Cooke?

  But you know, I would like to see, as an alternative history of nineteen eighty to two thousand and ten, I'd have liked to have seen um um Gates become very rich in the course of the eighties and spend fifty million dollars on its local community. And um a thousand people around the world, or everyone around the world have a much better computing experience, and um a thousand or a million people around the world have the opportunity to 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,

• 21:15Ed Cooke?

  which they judge to be meritorious, um to to to merit this sort of spending. And um 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 but because uh because nobody should be spending sixty billion dollars. There should be like sixty million people spending a thousand dollars. Um and that there's something fundamentally wrong with our institutional structure. And you know, and and to the objection that it's just not as efficient

• 21:58Ed Cooke?

  as when you've got um like a a big head honcho just like calling the shots. That's probably true, but efficiency on both sides of the of the equation, either the charitable side and the wealth accumulation side, seems to be a very ambiguous good, right? Being more efficient.

• 22:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I I uh I I don't wanna beat the dead horse too too long, but I one of the one of the the ways my thinking has flipped in the last few years is related to judging.

• 22:32Tim Ferriss?

  Prioritizing intentions or outcomes. So what I mean by that is, as relevant to this conversation, is, you know, would you rather have someone who, in their heart of hearts, is pure, I was gonna say is pure as gold, but that's not really, it 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, at their core, 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 prefer? If they're of equal intellectual capacity, right? So their ability to problem solve is equal.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  And now, I think I would probably opt, if I'm just focused on outcomes, fixing aspects of the educational system, fixing healthcare, whatever, 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.

• 23:41Ed Cooke?

  I see the point.

• 23:42Tim Ferriss?

  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 a, just to sort of take us in a related but slightly different direction. Because I'm probably more, I'm not a Randian.

• 24:09Ed Cooke?

  By the way, this is the moment to bring in Burning Man, by the way.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, bring it in. Can I ask you one other question? And if it's gonna be a long answer, we can come back to it. But I wanna know, what is financial security to you? And where does money fit into your life?

• 24:31Ed Cooke?

  Well, I think it's very difficult to starve in Northern Europe.

• 24:36Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning it's unpleasant when you starve? Or it's difficult to end up starving?

• 24:44Ed Cooke?

  It's just like, yes, yes, by two thousand and fourteen, people of the opinion that starving in Europe was actually quite unpleasant. Whereas, you know, in two thousand and seven, starving was great fun. No, I meant that like, um, the, um, you know, that I suppose that, um, we, you know, we are blessed a bit with, um, with what the low bar is in terms of life outcomes, you know.

• 25:18Ed Cooke?

  You know, starving doesn't really happen in, 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 am not sure if I have a totally kind of honest internal perspective on this, Tim. Because part of me is like, you know, part of me is like, um, you know, to be honest, I, I'd be perfectly happy just schlepping around Europe, chatting to people, uh, you know, uh, having the odd espresso and just generally experiencing the world, but, but what I actually care about is, um, conscious experience and understanding and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

• 26:02Ed Cooke?

  But at the same time, you know, I, 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 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, I wanted to be Beethoven. Whatever, some of them stick with you. And one of the ones that's 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, um, I, I, and I've had it since I was fifteen and it won't go away, which is that

• 26:45Ed Cooke?

  my, my idea for what I really want to do in my life is to have a philosophical academy in, in Greece. Uh, and basically, I, what I'm seeing is like Mediterranean sunshine, beautiful people in white robes. Um, 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 colour green for like six weeks and then you kind of wander up the, um, The, you know, 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.

• 27:26Ed Cooke?

  And you'd be sitting back and contemplating the concepts which normally drive our, you know, our intentions and, you know, you 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, so it's like right here is like a conflict. And so, so certainly like I hold in 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 resources because it allows a certain

• 28:09Ed Cooke?

  level of relaxation, relaxation, comfort and kind of sustainable existence in the world. But beyond that, it's kind of vanity and stupidity to, to pursue worldly resources. But, you know, funny enough, random thing. Aristotle is really funny as a moral philosopher and one of his virtues, one of the reasons he's funny is that he doesn't really believe you can be happy if you're not beautiful.

• 28:41Ed Cooke?

  Which is kind of probably true, but like, you know, we don't dwell on it. And anyway, he's also got-

• 28:46Tim Ferriss?

  Not a popular advertising campaign.

• 28:49Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, exactly. He's also got like a virtue which is only available to the rich. And his virtue system is kind of, is about poles. Like for every virtue, there's an extreme exaggeration of that virtue, which becomes a kind of a sin or a vice. And there's, there's a thing in the opposite direction, so not enough of it. And so, one of his virtues is only available to rich people is magnificence.

• 29:14Ed Cooke?

  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 wealth, you know, Russian oligarchs being the classic contemporary example, or towards miserliness, where you have all this wealth and you're not organising any parties. What the fuck? You know, uh, and um, and I think that's probably like, you know, it's probably orthogonal,

• 29:59Ed Cooke?

  but it's probably a quite good way of thinking about wealth, which is that there is a responsibility to create joy, um, and there is a responsibility to, um, and there's nothing inherently sinful about being wealthy, whatever. Um, 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, you know, I think it's going to be really cool, we're just gonna sort of just hang about and chat about stuff.

• 30:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, green is also my favourite colour, so I've had, I have a lot to ponder there.

• 30:32Ed Cooke?

  Okay, good, yeah. Interrogate yourself about that. You know, favourite, I mean.

• 30:38Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I want, so, so I think the, the rich, the use of riches is an interesting segue to Burning Man, because there's

• 30:47Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:48Tim Ferriss?

  Discussion about this, of course. Uh, but tell me, tell me your impression of Burning Man, uh, just I'll, I'll leave it wide open since you wanted to, you brought it up.

• 30:56Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, I did bring it up, but uh, 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, I said, eventually we got it together, went to Burning Man and, um, and.

• 31:12Ed Cooke?

  I Burning Man is an absolute ordeal to get to, especially if you're going 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. And about four hours into the road trip, you're like, wow, this is getting pretty much into the middle of nowhere. And then you'll 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, welc- welcome home. And you're like, fuck off, mate, I live in Hackney. Um, I I I can't do it easy, first of all.

• 31:50Ed Cooke?

  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 happened in 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 quickfire 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 ever, whatever,

• 32:30Ed Cooke?

  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 like, if you look at the buildings in Silicon Valley, you're like, Jesus, these guys may they may build good software companies, but they sure don't know how to live.

• 32:51Ed Cooke?

  You know, it's like, it's like, it's like the car park, you're like, yeah, anyway, so why is Burning Man so good? So there's no money, which cuts out one fundamental aspect of your social relationships to the world. There's basically no time, because no one's got um 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. Um, and then there's um, 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.

• 33:34Ed Cooke?

  No obsession with what you're supposed to be doing. And there's basically no agenda whatsoever as regards what happens. And and it's long enough, about a week, that like, unlike a kind of UK festival, of which there were 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 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 um, that it, you kind of bounce around Burning Man.

• 34:17Ed Cooke?

  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, 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 undistinguishable way to be spending twenty 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 art car go past, you wander out, 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, 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 a little bit, but all that's cleared out.

• 35:02Ed Cooke?

  And so, um, so you get on the art car. Our car's one order of magnitude, scale-wise down. And the art car 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, you're just like, how are you feeling? It's like, oh, not so good because of, you know, the sort of thing which no one would ever tell you normally. And then, you know, where are you from?

• 35:45Ed Cooke?

  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 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 got our car and that's kind of a world and then a person is the world. And and then it's got this gift economy where the gifts are themselves their own world. So sometimes it's like, um, you know, a little object which um

• 36:28Ed Cooke?

  which expresses some profound story about this person's life or about the world or anything else.

• 36:35Ed Cooke?

  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 ten D M T 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 don't know. 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, bit of the world. And there's no attachment and there's no nothing kind of thing.

• 37:21Ed Cooke?

  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. 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. You're um. And yeah, and of course, like, this all sounds quite pompous, but but you're also having a terribly good time. Anyway, so um, anyway, so like this kind of. This is really striking, because I was not indoctrinated before going there. Right.

• 38:04Ed Cooke?

  And within two days, I was living in this kind of magical inventive thing, where what was so striking was that it was all based on giving and generosity and openness and transient creativity. And 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.

• 38:48Ed Cooke?

  It's like, and it's really like, it's a way of like,

• 38:54Ed Cooke?

  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, where you're kind of denying the world and then living your own private dream in a kind of oneristic kind of nonsense. It's actually just like an opportunity to reconceive stuff and then go back to the world

• 39:38Ed Cooke?

  and then like think, oh, fuck, well, just like Burning 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 plausible that,

• 40:03Ed Cooke?

  that the kind of genius of Silicon Valley, the kind of the fact that it's creating experiences and possibilities of life, which genuinely...

• 40:18Ed Cooke?

  Touch upon, 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.

• 40:30Tim Ferriss?

  No, so I have a, 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, M A U. It's basically a visual compilation, essays and photographs that look at the phenomenon in history of massive public performances or events around the world, which is, is really just a phenomenal tome. The challenge is, this is something I've thought about because I get, I wouldn't say goraphobic, but because I'm intrinsically quite introverted, I've been to Burning Man twice, I enjoyed it, but I end up spending a lot of time in

• 41:11Tim Ferriss?

  my own camp, partially just to recharge. If you, if you were to, if you, if you were tasked with creating 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?

• 41:36Ed Cooke?

  That's a super question. Okay. So of course, in some sense, I'm just going to make up whatever I say.

• 41:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and no, no budgetary constraints.

• 41:45Ed Cooke?

  But, but let's just sort of do it with, with that, 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 your intentions in the world, but more just sort of open thing.

• 42:20Ed Cooke?

  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 gonna 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 twenty people to be good if they're like, some are known to each other, but it was kind of a mixture of groups of friends or whatever.

• 43:04Ed Cooke?

  Um, agree on like some round of distant point, okay, we're gonna go to the Hebridean Island for a week, I'll see you there on the third of January next year, whatever, it's miles away, what have you, and then um, and then um, yeah, then just go there minus mobile phone, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just rejoice, I guess, in the fact that like, people are so cool. We started oddly rather forgotten before very much, just like, ah, people are so annoying, they're always like in the queue in front of me while waiting for the bus and like, you know, etcetera.

• 43:46Ed Cooke?

  Um, but like, you know, of course, this blends quite easily into sort of cults.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 43:53Ed Cooke?

  Which is why, why having a a participatory, non um, um, yeah, non sort of, not driven by concepts, experience is quite important. I mean, I suppose one of the paradoxes, by the way, that it is driven by concepts in a sense, like there's this concept of radical self-sufficiency and generosity and so on, but um, but you know, I've got a party in mind, I mean, I think that um. The, I mean, you can hardly fail to have a good experience if you're with twenty like generous, open people with loads of time away from your life. Um, and you're feeling great about yourself because you're in the middle of a hero narrative. You actually successfully got there.

• 44:38Ed Cooke?

  And um, and this could probably be done with two people as well.

• 44:42Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like, I feel 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.

• 44:51Ed Cooke?

  Your head's not a wilderness, Tim.

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, of Burning Man. There, there's a project you might find interesting or people listening might find interesting called, um. Well, the guy, Station to Station, and there's a guy named Doug Aitken, A I T K E N. And he basically packed this, I think it's eleven cars. I'm making up the numbers a bit, but eleven cars of a train full of musicians and artists and all sorts of craziness. I mean, think about it as, as sort of Burning Man on, on a train. And went from city to city doing these pop, these massive pop-up performances 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.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  How do you take the experience of Burning Man and, uh, create more of those, um, peak experiences? If you want to call them that. Uh, 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?

• 46:06Ed Cooke?

  I mean, great question, you know, and, and not one I've really successfully answered for myself, but, but I'm more than happy to advise about it. Um, yeah, I mean, I think it is a fundamental question and I think, um. I think that many of the, um. Our kind of inherited cultural, um, 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.

• 46:47Ed Cooke?

  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 them. It was pretty, it was pretty eccentric, but I tell you what I came out of that with was I kind of like, it was like, oh, fuck. The moon and the tide are connected. And of course, like I'd learned that as a five year old schoolboy 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 a kind of a really cool thing and I guess it kind of gets back to

• 47:28Ed Cooke?

  like a commonality, I guess, commonality between people, which is that being yourself is quite a fun thing. Um, but it's not quite as nice as noticing that you are like an instance of humanity, um, and that, um, everyone else is kind of basically the same and actually so are the animals and in fact it's all matter and whatever, you know, and it's kind of a paradoxical thing that when you perceive in your bones your own insignificance, you feel better.

• 48:06Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 48:25Ed Cooke?

  It's really interesting, isn't it? Like, I, I actually had this when I was at school, like occasionally I would like, I don't know, I would lose a debating competition or like discover that I was a loser in a more general sense. And I had like a, what you might kind of call in a way like a, a, a mind hack, which, you know, I'd be sitting on the loo or something and I just think about like, oh, everything feels terrible and awful and it's all, 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, this is tiny little character there for a fragment of time worrying about. It's just like, just take a chill pill.

• 49:09Ed Cooke?

  But you know, like it's, it's, you know, to your question of how to put that into your life.

• 49:15Ed Cooke?

  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 um update them on just how stupid reality is, and to share that. Um and you know, if you're in a relationship, uh where like you you kind of, you're um, you know, the the the struggle of like existence is kind of including

• 49:56Ed Cooke?

  the parallel magic of what could be happening there, you at least occasionally find the time to do that, you know, whatever. Um and of course, this is this, I suppose the more the more fundamental suggestion would be to like, stop trying so much. Right, right. Which, which, you know, I mean, like, tricky, you know, because, you know, one's got such such an interesting project, you know. Um, you know, but um, but. I thought I I got 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 um, he lives. So when I was talking to him about the Academy of the Greek idea of my kind of um imaginary possible future existence.

• 50:41Ed Cooke?

  He was like, well, you know, um, why does it need to be in one place? And I was like, oh, it's true, it could just be, you know, in the world, and then he was like, and why does it need to be with the same group of people? And 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 saying, that'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.

• 51:19Ed Cooke?

  A life which is very humble in a way, but quite profound in another where, you know, he travels, he works an absolutely minimal amount. He's so clever that he can sort of do like five hours of translation a week and survive, you know, whatever. And, you know, 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 a hundred because he spends ten hours a day on friendship, you know. And, you know, we're in the middle of that conversation.

• 51:57Ed Cooke?

  I was like, ah, Jesus Christ. I'm just like, you know, I'm just guilty of, of grandiose fantasy where it's, you know, the life I'm desiring through these, these concepts, whatever, is actually just, it's right there. It's something which I could be living if I would only see sort of working twelve hours a day in a startup.

• 52:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, it's very, it's very hard, that balance. If, and I even hesitate to use the word balance, but the, there is a, there is, there is a, it's challenging to balance the appreciation of the present moment with the drive to build things. Because the people who tend to spend, 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. So you could, you could argue, you could

• 53:06Tim Ferriss?

  argue very strongly for both ends of the spectrum, but trying to borrow the best practices from both is, is challenging. And maybe, and maybe the answer is that you, that you, that you oscillate between the two. I don't know. But.

• 53:20Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I, yeah, I mean, I think that's the kind of, and I think the, the, the question you alluded to is, is a very interesting one, which is like.

• 53:32Ed Cooke?

  Is it, because in some sense, both you and I are enthusiasts for building. So, you know, I've, you know, I've tried the last five years of my life obsessively to memorize. And, you know, you've produced a wonderful like collection of, of, of books. And, 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, uh, to, to be trying to do something, right?

• 54:16Ed Cooke?

  But on the other hand, like, you know, um.

• 54:22Ed Cooke?

  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.

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's a great, great essay, yeah.

• 54:44Ed Cooke?

  And he's got this great quote in there, which is like, work is 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-immuniated. And, um, anyway, that kind of concept of moving objects at or near the earth's surface. You'd have to update to the present day to like moving information at or near the earth's surface.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Ed Cooke?

  And, uh, 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 um that making stuff twice as efficient and then working the same amount is the correct response.

• 55:38Tim Ferriss?

  Agreed, agreed. Uh, well, Ed, I'd love to ask you a couple of um bite sized questions. I know that it's, I want to let you get to your, your proper Friday evening. Um, since I've, I've kind of got you under lock and key here in the, in the office. So I'd like to unleash you upon the world, but I'd love to ask you a couple of fast questions and you can feel free 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, you've used the words press up, which is push up for you Yanks listening and other things.

• 56:20Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, what is, what is a, what is the one stereotypically British thing that Americans should really um appreciate or might get enjoyment of?

• 56:32Ed Cooke?

  That's a good question. I think um.

• 56:36Tim Ferriss?

  I love the ka-ching. Was that a toaster?

• 56:39Ed Cooke?

  Um, oh, that's, that's a new subscription, Tim.

• 56:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, nice. All right. Congratulations.

• 56:45Ed Cooke?

  Thanks, yeah. Um, but um, yeah, the, it's kind of comedy in the office, but um, I think the, um, because I, I, I've, I've lived a bunch in Boston and I did textiles there and I say in America and the, the thing which was kind of really impresses and amazes me about um Americans and which by contrast is, is different in the British people is that British people are like fundamentally embarrassed about the expression of um, um.

• 57:22Ed Cooke?

  Intention. That it's almost like there's something fundamentally vulgar in human, in British life. I suppose human life, British life. It's like America calling baseball the World Series. But anyway, there's something fundamentally embarrassing about stating intentions. And what's so liberating about Cate America is that that embarrassment doesn't exist. But at the same time, I'm back to Britain. It's this terribly beautiful thing. And I kind of think it's kind of connected a lot to British humour.

• 58:03Ed Cooke?

  And which is this basic consciousness of the absurdity of trying, combined with actually still trying.

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  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 humour I have a lot of trouble with. I just can't quite figure it out. And then there's other British humour, or British-ish humour, like Shaun of the Dead, which I find completely hilarious. So what is a good gateway drug? If you had to pick one at three points?

• 58:44Ed Cooke?

  Gateway? Why are you asking me about gateway? Can't you just ask me what I think is pure genius?

• 58:49Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 58:58Ed Cooke?

  Right, you know, I mean, I think, does the thick of it exist in America? So a kind of American version of it? Well, my favourite comedian is...

• 59:15Ed Cooke?

  Guy called Armando Yanucci. Um, so Armando and then Yanucci is I A double N U double C I. And he had this show called the Armando Yanucci Show, which I think was a failure even on British TV. So this man will be brilliant for a gay joke. And 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 uh writer and concealer of comedy. But the Armando Yanucci Show was um this brief, had a brief appearance on British TV. And um somehow captured um

• 59:58Ed Cooke?

  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 don't think of 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 a hundred fifty seven miles an hour. He um 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 it has to get back down to zero miles an hour without killing people. Um, another one is a begins with a cityscape.

• 1:00:43Ed Cooke?

  Um, where you see all the 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's water supply. Oh, God, this is the manager of Bewitched. Bastards, I hate it. You know, this uh. So I'm uh.

• 1:01:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's very like Kierkegaard.

• 1:01:15Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, that's such a poor advertisement for a genius comic.

• 1:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no.

• 1:01:20Ed Cooke?

  But it's always, it's always a victory. But, um, you know, I, 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, um, because you can't help but be delighted by their kind of cheeky enthusiasm, even as you're just tuning into the humor.

• 1:01:46Ed Cooke?

  And then in, in contemporary thing, there's a, there's a thing called Alan Partridge, which is sort of written by Armando Iannucci as well, which, um, which is the story of a radio DJ from Norfolk, who is, um, actually has shadows of like David Brent from The Office, but in a, um, in a kind of richer, more amusing fashion. Um, and, um, and it is sort of trials and tribulations. So, um, so Alan Partridge would be my gateway drug.

• 1:02:18Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 1:02:20Ed Cooke?

  You're looking, you were really looking for a one line answer there.

• 1:02:22Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I love it. You're, you're, you're, I, you are, you have one of the most colorful vocabularies and, uh, cadences of any, anyone I know. So I, I, I love your emails. I was going to actually read the sequence of emails that you had recently where you introduced, uh, me to one of, uh, one of your friends, now a mutual friend. Uh, it's just where most people are like Joe me John, John me Joe, take it from here. You, you, you, you create these wonderfully.

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not going to say, they're not antiquated. That's not the word that I'm looking for, but they're, they're very, uh, they read like a, a civil war love letter or, or, or something. They're, they're so eloquent and I'm like, God damn, like this guy. I, 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?

• 1:03:24Ed Cooke?

  Uh, so my dad was a coder, actually. He refused to teach me to code, by the way, because he thought I should play in the garden, which I still vaguely resent, but you know, I did, I did enjoy playing in 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 lots of Oxford academics' children in it. And I was part of a, a class, you know, maybe I was quite good at my subjects. I was part of a class where the other people in this class were just sort of this amazingly colorful, um, bunch of precociously intellectual characters.

• 1:04:10Ed Cooke?

  And so I guess I did have a bit of that. I, I, I, I still kind of laugh about the, the kind of situation that, that represented. But it was in many respects quite unhealthy.

• 1:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  Why was that, why was that unhealthy?

• 1:04:26Ed Cooke?

  Well, um, I don't think it's good to peak intellectually at the age of thirteen.

• 1:04:33Ed Cooke?

  And, and I think that, um,

• 1:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think a lot of them did, or do you think that it was?

• 1:04:37Ed Cooke?

  Um, well, I think that, um, they, 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, people who challenge you and who like you.

• 1:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:05:03Ed Cooke?

  Uh, and so, so it's quite, it's quite, kind of, it's quite a great experience, it's a wonderful experience to have. Um, but like, I think a lot of the people who were in that situation in the school, then went off to other schools, we know of 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 fourteen. So just to give you an example, our favorite film as a group and our teenagers was With Nan and I. I don't know if you've seen With Nan and I, but it's a- Have you seen the film With Nail and I?

• 1:05:36Tim Ferriss?

  No, With Nail?

• 1:05:37Ed Cooke?

  Oh my god.

• 1:05:38Tim Ferriss?

  With?

• 1:05:38Ed Cooke?

  With Nail.

• 1:05:39Tim Ferriss?

  Space N A I L?

• 1:05:41Ed Cooke?

  It's 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.

• 1:05:47Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, alright.

• 1:05:48Ed Cooke?

  What's with the like, uh, so it's, it's basically a film about some washed up actors, um, um, but full of passion, struggling their way, um, on a kind of comedy road trip in their late twenties.

• 1:06:04Tim Ferriss?

  I feel.

• 1:06:05Ed Cooke?

  It's sort of.

• 1:06:06Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like every, like Netflix description of British comedy just makes me wanna slit my wrists before I even get started.

• 1:06:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my god, but, uh, but yes, uh, With Nail and I.

• 1:06:21Ed Cooke?

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

• 1:06:30Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 1:06:30Ed Cooke?

  Um, and, 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, um, 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, it's so charming, it's so, and you know, it's about friendship and, um, so it's a really wonderful film. Um, anyway, so it's, but it's also very nostalgic. I'd say, so, but yeah, really, it's not a healthy age of fourteen, it's like, oh gosh, I remember when I was thirteen, everything was so good.

• 1:07:11Ed Cooke?

  We used to use words like portentous, but now I just say spoon.

• 1:07:18Tim Ferriss?

  What, now, aside from, it sounds like you had, I mean, intellectually stimulating schooling experience at that point, what, can you, can you think of a, a, a specific defining moment of your childhood? Is there anything that stands out? In terms of forming you into the person you are today?

• 1:07:34Ed Cooke?

  Um, I think, uh, um, I, I can't think of, uh, something which I could honestly report as like a causal factor, but I do have a couple of favourite childhood memories.

• 1:07:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:07:47Ed Cooke?

  Uh, uh, one of which was, um, which I think is like, it's like, this is like, this memory is something which.

• 1:07:58Ed Cooke?

  I would, if I was held hostage and someone was about to delete this memory, I would pay, if 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 been, I must 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.

• 1:08:41Ed Cooke?

  That my, my vision goes out and touches the trees. And he was like, no, no, no. The, the, your eye, the, 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, 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. And, uh, uh, but I just couldn't even conceive of how perception could be passive. Um, and anyway, I, I bumped into this thing years later when studying, um, psychology, where a lecturer mentioned the theory of, uh, an Arabic psychologist and,

• 1:09:23Ed Cooke?

  um, 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, um, 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 passive and receives information. And then the second thing which amplified this memory, you know, beyond the family connection and. 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.

• 1:10:08Ed Cooke?

  Um, I got into this guy called Maurice 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.

• 1:10:47Ed Cooke?

  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 devoid of resonance, which means that our brain changes and then the meaning of the stuff from 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.

• 1:11:26Ed Cooke?

  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. Um, and the second thing is, is that it's true. That's what it feels like to perceive. And we we suppressed that. So that's my favorite. So that's my favorite. Didn't I can't. It actually only became significant later on, but um but I love it.

• 1:11:58Tim Ferriss?

  Let me let me touch on the the aspect, the aspects of some of the aspects of perception that you brought up. I think you and I, and if you if I am not, if you're not comfortable talking about this, let me know. But I I believe you and I were chatting when we had some wine uh many moons ago in San Francisco about effectively augmented synesthesia. So using hardware, if I'm if I'm mixing people up, let me know. But but using using hardware to uh to see smells or or have have this this type of commingling of the senses and perception. Could you talk about that for for a second? I don't know where that went or where it was.

• 1:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  But if you could explain what you were doing, I think people would find it very interesting.

• 1:12:47Ed Cooke?

  Well, yeah, so um so after I give a bit of biography, I'll be quick as possible here. But I went to study undergrad called Kevin O'Regan in Paris. And Kevin O'Regan I had 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'd 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 and they're fusing together. And I discovered this paper by this guy, Kevin O'Regan,

• 1:13:18Ed Cooke?

  which 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 Barky Rita. Bark like the composer, Y like and in Spanish Rita like lovely Rita. Paul 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

• 1:14:02Ed Cooke?

  into basically a highly pixelated sort of one hundred by one hundred array of vibrating pins that 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 you, 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.

• 1:14:47Ed Cooke?

  So you feel looming objects, you see things going past the side, 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.

• 1:15:31Ed Cooke?

  But if 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 will be the same. Your perceptual experience extends beyond the current input and it's based in 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 colour and smell is. And to do that, I kind of did what

• 1:16:14Ed Cooke?

  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 colour and smell feel like they do, and my god, they feel mysterious. You know, you smell cinnamon, how, what connection does that have with reality? You see any colour, and particularly a beautiful, rich colour, you know, the azure blue of a morning sky, or green, or whatever, of a kind of rainforest

• 1:16:53Ed Cooke?

  canopy, and it feels inherently weird. Like, what is the connection between your experience, this rich, 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 colour, you're like, wow, that orange, I'm just looking at kind of the 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, I couldn't tell this anecdote any longer. Sorry, Jim. Sorry, listeners. But if anyone's still here, about

• 1:17:35Ed Cooke?

  seven hours. But anyway, so, um, um.

• 1:17:40Tim Ferriss?

  If anyone is still listening, I'm just going to interrupt. This is something that Kevin Rose, buddy of mine, pulled by 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.

• 1:18:00Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, at Ted Cook on Twitter, by the way.

• 1:18:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Ed Cooke?

  Anyway, so, um.

• 1:18:07Ed Cooke?

  So, you know, and so the thought experiment I came up with was like, let's, let's imagine you um. 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 the things. But the first question was 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.

• 1:18:52Ed Cooke?

  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 ex- that colour as being. Which the colour is in fact a smell or a sound, it could be, on the object. So.

• 1:19:23Ed Cooke?

  The connection between movement, I address with my perceptual organs. I, I, I look at the hammock. And suddenly it's going ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding, look away, it's these two there. I look back at it ding ding ding ding ding ding, I look away, it's these two there. 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. But 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.

• 1:20:07Ed Cooke?

  Everything which comes with it emotionally and da da da da, and we kind of project those. Project is 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, and you know, in a way, this kind of goes back to the chats we were having earlier about um.

• 1:20:33Ed Cooke?

  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 a thing or person.

• 1:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  No, I, I, no, I love this. I, I want to ask you, have you experimented with uh removing different types of sensory input, going a period of time without sight, going a period of time without hearing, anything like that?

• 1:21:11Ed Cooke?

  I, I have occasionally done, yeah, little, little games like that. Um. Uh, not to the heroic extent of a mathematician called Seymour Papert. Who um, who trained himself to look through mirrors. So the world was up, down, reversed. For like months at a time, um, so that it kind of righted itself. But anyway, um, I, I have had an experience, when I was, um. I have had an experience with friends where you, you walk around town blindfolded, led by another person. And that is so cool. So you just get, get a good friend, somebody you trust and say, I'm going to be blindfolded, you're going to be blindfolded. And I'm just going to lead you around town.

• 1:21:52Ed Cooke?

  And that's magic. Um, because you can have the experience of perceiving the world. Not visually, but just through sound. And, 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. Um, by um, touching the rock. I don't know if I can remember the guy's name, but by John um, something like that.

• 1:22:33Ed Cooke?

  Holt, perhaps, John Holt. Um, but touching the rock, goo- Google it. And um, and it's a, it's the story of a guy who goes blind very, very gradually for twenty 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.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:23:06Ed Cooke?

  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, that 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 pavement, the lampposts and the, and the buildings gives you, because of the echo, because of the particular, it gives you a sense of three D space. Where most of the time, your three D space only goes like a couple of yards in front of you.

• 1:23:48Ed Cooke?

  And otherwise it's just the void. Um, stuff like that, which kind of um, cool way gains for just enjoying your senses generally.

• 1:23:58Tim Ferriss?

  So fascinating, yeah. I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:24:02Ed Cooke?

  Well, so I was just thinking that, you know, for anyone who's endured this long, um, that would be a kind of, I think quite a valuable recommendation. It's like, you know, we're drawing a few things together, you know. Next time there's G T B a rainstorm, rather than thinking like, oh no, I'm not going to be able to go to Santa Cruz and sun myself or something. Think like, 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.

• 1:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's a brilliant suggestion. I um.

• 1:24:40Tim Ferriss?

  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 Yeah. device that's attached where you can upload very accurate, you know, to the centimeter 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, one of my favorite articles I've read

• 1:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  in the last 10 years is an article in, 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 1,000 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, he has the ability to click in a very, very methodical, precise way to determine exactly where things are and where he is. And I'll just give people

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  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 glance behind me as I walk up. I am indeed parked about a foot and a half from the curb." It's just so amazing, so amazing. And it, it also raises questions for me about, you know, when you just mentioned touching the rock and the difference between having just

• 1:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  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, the, the one step removed, moving upwards where we have almost an enhanced HD perception of the world.

• 1:27:09Tim Ferriss?

  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 wrapping with you.

• 1:27:30Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. 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 is 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. He wrote an essay called The Joyous Cosmology, which examines in quite fascinating ways a little bit, I guess, what you call the phenomenology of hallucination, where he talks

• 1:28:10Ed Cooke?

  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, 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 not an easily accessible idea that I could perceive it twice the resolution, basically by paying more attention. And so, anyway, he's quite magic on this subject. He talks about hallucination as a terrible term for the phenomenon because hallucination

• 1:28:54Ed Cooke?

  implies distortion and unreality, whereas this is hikerality, as he describes it. And anyway, so that's well worth a read, The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts.

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Ed, where can people find more about you, what you're up to on the internets or otherwise?

• 1:29:17Ed Cooke?

  Well, in Hackney, in the non-internet, so I hang out. So come to Hackney and then go into that. But yeah, I'm... Memorize.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 called "Is Trilled Smell Possible?"

• 1:29:51Tim Ferriss?

  Is what smell possible?

• 1:29:53Ed Cooke?

  Trilled, in the sense of the musical note going...

• 1:29:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, right. Is trilled smell possible?

• 1:30:02Ed Cooke?

  Which is definitely like, 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, and I'm @TedCook on Twitter.

• 1:30:13Tim Ferriss?

  And that is Ed Cook with an E at the end for exceptional, is that right?

• 1:30:18Ed Cooke?

  That's exactly right. Although actually on Twitter, I'm TedCook, because I'm twatted, taken, EdCook.

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  You're @TedCook, really? With a T in the beginning?

• 1:30:28Ed Cooke?

  Yeah. Tim, you're not following me. Jesus Christ.

• 1:30:31Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I should be following. 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 Ed, I will let you get to your evening and your weekend. Thanks so much for jumping on.

• 1:30:51Ed Cooke?

  This has been a pleasure, Tim.

• 1:30:52Tim Ferriss?

  Really fun, so we will grab some wine and get into some trouble next time you're in San Francisco.

• 1:30:57Ed Cooke?

  Impeccable.

• 1:30:58Tim Ferriss?

  All right, thanks, Ed. Bye. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers, and I have used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge hit. And here's how it works. And you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, a car wrap, a web design, an app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt,

• 1:31:41Tim Ferriss?

  whatever, you go to 99designs.com, you describe your project, and then, within a week or less, you have tons of designers around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love, or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it. I have mentioned it before, including in the Four Hour Work Week as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So, check it out. And until next time, thank you for listening.