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

I'm excited to bring you a little taste test of a new show format that I've been working on -- The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. After 200 conversations with a variety of fascinating people, including Arnold Schwarzenegger http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Jamie Foxx http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Tony Robbins http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/08/10/tony-robbins-on-achievement-versus-fulfillment/, Maria Popova http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/07/24/maria-popova-starting-a-successful-blog/, Peter Thiel http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Marc Andreessen http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Amanda Palmer http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/30/amanda-palmer/, Malcolm Gladwell http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Rick Rubin http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Reid Hoffman http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Chase Jarvis http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/05/26/the-tim-ferriss-show-episode-8-chase-jarvis-master-photographer/, Sam Harris http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/07/08/sam-harris-on-daily-routines-the-trolley-scenario-and-5-books-everyone-should-read/, Rainn Wilson http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/11/30/rainn-wilson/, and so many others, I started to spot patterns. This is the premise of my new book Tools of Titans https://toolsoftitans.com, which is a compilation of all of my favorite habits, philosophies, and tools of world-class performers. This is where Tim Ferriss Radio Hour comes in. In each episode, we'll take a deep dive into one specific topic or tactic, bringing together the collective genius of past guests -- with some new insights from yours truly -- to help you become world class in your own right (if you aren't already). In this episode, we'll be exploring meditation and mindfulness. You'll hear from Chase Jarvis http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/05/26/the-tim-ferriss-show-episode-8-chase-jarvis-master-photographer/ as he explains his top priorities for feeling fulfilled. I talk transcendental meditation https://www.tm.org/ with Arnold Schwarzenegger http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/. I cover a wide spectrum with Sam Harris http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/07/08/sam-harris-on-daily-routines-the-trolley-scenario-and-5-books-everyone-should-read/, and ask him about everything from hallucinogens to meditation techniques. And then I wrap up with Rainn Wilson http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/11/30/rainn-wilson/, discussing how to handle life when you feel overwhelmed. Without further ado, let's jump into the first episode of The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now, this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now would be the appropriate time.

• 0:12Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I used 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy, or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys,

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:18Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind in the best way possible. It is mushroom coffee. What on earth is this? Well, it includes chaga mushroom, very powerful antioxidant, considered a superfood. I was introduced to chaga by Laird Hamilton, the king of big wave surfing of all things. And it includes another mushroom that is considered a nootropic, a smart drug, and this is lion's mane. In the entire packet, you just add it to hot water. It tastes like coffee. There is only 40mg of caffeine, so less than half what you would find in a cup of coffee. So I do not get any jitters.

• 2:03Tim Ferriss?

  I do not get any acid reflux or any type of stomach burn. And it put me on fire for it. An entire day and I only had half of the packet. So this stuff is really amazing. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. Right now, this is the answer. So it is legal. It will not give you visuals. That's something else. And you can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That is four sigmatic, S I G M A T I C. Foursigmatic.com/tim and use the code TIM to get 20% off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. Foursigmatic.com/tim.

• 2:49Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. Tim Ferriss here and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is always my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, tactics, breakfasts, or lack thereof, that you can then emulate, apply to your own life, test yourself, favorite books, whatever it might be. This particular episode, I am going to try to do one better. I'm excited to bring you a little sample, taste test, of a new show format that I'm working on. And this isn't going to displace the other. It would just complement it. And I'm calling it, for lack of a better name, for the time being, The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. And you'll see where this is going. After nearly 200 conversations with world-class performers

• 3:32Tim Ferriss?

  all over the map, including people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Tony Robbins, Maria Popova, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Amanda Palmer, Malcolm Gladwell, Rick Rubin, Reid Hoffman, and so many more, you start to spot patterns. Or at least when I'm reviewing all of the transcripts, I spot patterns. Sometimes they're months apart. But these are the shared habits, philosophies, tools, and more that are the common thread, or the common threads. And this is the premise, of course, of my new book, Tools of Titans, which is a compilation of all of my favorite patterns, all of my favorite routines. You can check that out everywhere. But that's also where The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour comes in.

• 4:13Tim Ferriss?

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

• 4:57Speaker 00

  I have found a sort of a new passion for sleep. I can't ever, not never, but I rarely get the eight, nine, 10.

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  I talk TM, that's Transcendental Meditation, with the Terminator, the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 5:10Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  And I would say within 14 days, three weeks, I got to the point where I really could disconnect my mind and also learn how to focus more and to calm down.

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  I cover a wide spectrum with Sam Harris and talk about everything, or ask him about everything, from hallucinogens to meditation techniques.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  The unique power of psychedelics is that they are guaranteed to work in some way.

• 5:33Tim Ferriss?

  And then I wrap up with Rainn Wilson, discussing how to handle life when you feel overwhelmed. And we all end up, at points, feeling overwhelmed, or at the very least, unclear.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  It was the key for me as an actor that kind of broke me open and got me out of my head and just got me in my body and in that place of kind of pure imagination and spontaneity that you really want as an actor.

• 5:58Tim Ferriss?

  We start our deep dive on meditation with Chase Jarvis, CEO of CreativeLive, which is an online learning platform that broadcasts live, of course, high-definition classes to more than 10 million students in 200-plus countries. Chase was also the youngest person ever to be named a Hustle Blood Master, Nikon Master, and ASMP Master. He is photographed for Nike, Apple, Columbia Sportswear, REA, Honda, Subaru, Polaroid, Lady Gaga, Red Bull, and many more. He's one of the most successful commercial photographers on the planet. So, without further ado, let's jump into the first episode of the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour. Enjoy.

• 6:40Tim Ferriss?

  What do you feel have become your top priorities in feeling happy or fulfilled? Like, what are the things, as you become wiser, that you've learned to prize more or prize less?

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Health.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  One's health and being active is incredibly valuable.

• 7:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  And these are, I feel like an old person saying this next one, which is sleep. I have lived on four to six hours of sleep for the last 10 years.

• 7:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  So just prioritizing sleep.

• 7:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  The third one is meditation.

• 7:13Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Meditation.

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes. We haven't talked about this in a while.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  Uh huh. You were on it for a good bit. You said you fell off the wagon a little bit.

• 7:20Tim Ferriss?

  I was. I fell off the wagon, but yeah, you're one of two people that I credit with finally kind of kicking me in the ass to take it seriously.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  It has, it has really been...

• 7:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, specifically TM, so Transatlantic Meditation, for those who don't know, or trademark.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:35Tim Ferriss?

  But it's, you know, I have my issues with almost every form of meditation. There are pros and cons. We've talked about them before, but tell me about, so tell me about your meditation practice.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  My meditation practice is not perfect and none, none are.

• 7:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  I just sit down between 15 and 20 minutes twice a day. Sometimes I only get one time a day. Sometimes those are a little compressed or they don't, you know, shit happens or you're on an airplane and the captain comes on and pulls you out of it or whatever.

• 8:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  But I make a conscious effort to just observe my thoughts and practice TM in the morning and the evening before dinner. And it has made, it's sort of the analogy that I can, you know, most simply put here on your show is, it's when you're in the zone, say, playing sports or playing music.

• 8:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  And things just seem effortless.

• 8:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  It's called a flow state. Stephen Kotler's new book, which is a good book, Rise of Superman. Check that out. A little plug for his book about creativity and flow states. But that sense of flow, it's when things sort of happen in slow motion. Now, you're not literally talking in slow motion, but you have the same clarity as if... You're going through life and everything's happening in slow motion. Instead of that, "I'm hyper-caffeinated, my boss is..."

• 8:53Tim Ferriss?

  I'm agitated and reactive, dodging bullets.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's like, "Eh eh eh." Instead, you're just like, "I'm driving the bus here. And we're gonna go here, and then I'm gonna do this." And there's just certain clarity that... And it's like magic, it's really weird. And it's... There's another thing, I don't know if you felt this, Tim, but it sort of aggregates. So, you get good benefit from one, two, three, four, then when you're on a good... On a roll, there's this sort of exponential, there's a little overdrive that it's like, "Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm just floating."

• 9:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I can't explain it either, but for me, and just for those people who might be thinking like I did for my entire life, like...

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Bullshit!

• 9:29Tim Ferriss?

  Bullshit, no, just like, I don't want people oming me and frickin', you know, all this, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, chakra, whatever," like, I'm not into it. Especially living in San Francisco, I've developed sort of an allergy to like sanctimonious... And I've been to Burning Man, but like sanctimonious burner types who like wanna lecture me about chakras, I'm just like, "Honestly, please, I can't handle another minute of this." So, I've had this aversion to meditation, but when it's very sort of... Non-dogmatic. Where it's just like, "Look, you're not trying to control anything, you're not trying to think of a candle flame, like, just observe your thoughts and be okay with them." And sit with good posture for this period of time, that's it. And even if you think it's a shitty job, and you're like running through your to-do list or thinking of the stock market, that's okay. Just make it part of your routine.

• 10:12Tim Ferriss?

  And what I found was, and some people who, well-known people who do TM, I mean, it's like Paul McCartney, Ariana Huffington.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  David Lynch.

• 10:21Tim Ferriss?

  David Lynch, I'm blanking on his name, for some reason, but Bridgewater Capital, largest hedge fund in, if not the world, the United States.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  Russell Simmons.

• 10:32Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred billion plus, Ray Dalio, that's it, Russell Simmons.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  The list is, I think, like Howard Stern, I mean, it's like...

• 10:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the list is pretty amazing, yeah, Seinfeld. And the... The physiological or psychological effects are so fascinating, like you said, because you'll do it for a couple of days and you're like, "Man, like, yeah, okay, whatever." And then you hit this, like, you hit this sort of inflection point where suddenly you just drop from like 200 RPMs to 150 and you're like, "Whoa, okay, this is different." And then the whole week, you're kind of zenned out. And then after, say, a four-week period, and I did my first retreat a few months ago, before I volunteered for the masochism that is television production.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  I can just hit you with a stick for a couple of weeks.

• 11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you could just like, yeah, if you could put a nail through it first, that'd be great. But really had this tremendous effect on me that oddly enough, and maybe this is getting too out there for some people, but very similar to my experiences post relatively high-dose hallucinogens.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:35Tim Ferriss?

  This like extended period of calm.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  Grace.

• 11:39Tim Ferriss?

  And ease, ease in decision-making.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 11:42Tim Ferriss?

  Like uncluttered, like you closed every browser on your computer and turned off the antivirus and rebooted the whole thing. That type of feeling.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I did fall off the train. A question for you, because I find the morning session, I usually find, pretty easy.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  Yep. Afternoon is hard.

• 11:57Tim Ferriss?

  Afternoon.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  I'm right now thinking of, "Okay, I gotta go from here to the thing to the thing and when am I gonna get my thing in?" Like, "Oh, shit."

• 12:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sometimes I'll try to do it in a car.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:05Tim Ferriss?

  Like Uber or whatever. But do you, when do you typically do it in the afternoon? I'm curious.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  I try and do it before dinner sometime.

• 12:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  Between work and dinner.

• 12:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  We're entrepreneurs who work.

• 12:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's tough.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Crazy, long hours. So I'll take it whenever I can get it. And it's usually a little bit more, a little bit less gracious than my morning one. Like you said, it's sort of like morning, it's like, "It's your time, you've got about 20 minutes." So my afternoon is often a little bit more piecemeal. But again, it's the act. I try not to judge the practice. The practice is the practice.

• 12:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Are you, when you meditate, are you sitting cross-legged? Are you sitting with your feet?

• 12:47Speaker 05

  I try and sit in a comfortable chair, flat on the floor, hands on my lap.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  And there's a mantra that if you, you know, learn sort of TM, you're given a mantra and say that word over and over and if some thoughts come in, they're like, oh, there's those thoughts, bye. And they go away and you just keep doing it over again. And then sometimes like, oh my God, that was 25 minutes. And sometimes it's like, oh my God, that was one minute. It felt like a week. Like a week. And again, but just not, not judging that. And it's without, you know, continue to talk about it because now it's getting weird because we're talking about it so much. But it's just a powerful tool that is so simple.

• 13:25Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just mind melding while you're talking right now.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  It's great. You're meditating. You're staring up at the space.

• 13:29Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't been listening to you for 20 minutes.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  For the listening people out there, Tim is staring into space right now. He's not paying attention to us.

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so let's, that is, I think, a huge takeaway for people. It doesn't have to be TM. It could be Vipassana. It could be just anything. Building in a pause, which is like a warm bath for your brain, even if it's 10 minutes a day, so that you're not in a reactive mode. It's really a game changer. And physiologically, it had a lot of effects for me as well.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:58Tim Ferriss?

  So like when my cortisol level dropped, I was able to lose body fat more easily in my abdomen, for instance. Really, I became very sensitive to alcohol and caffeine. So I dropped it, but they dropped them both significantly, not because I was getting judgmental about it, because I was oversensitized to it. I'd grown immune to the effect. So I can have like six cups of coffee a day, be like, eh. And then did, met TM for four or five weeks and it was like I had one cup and I'm like, wow. I didn't realize what my baseline was.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 14:26Tim Ferriss?

  So just maybe to wrap.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  Makes you a cheap day too, by the way.

• 14:30Tim Ferriss?

  I've always been a cheap day. So with that, I thought you might like to know about some of my current meditation routines or how I'm incorporating mindfulness into my day. First and foremost, upon waking, there are a few things that I do. I get up, generally take a cold shower, do some Wim Hof breathing, which is a whole separate podcast, and make my bed, etc. I have my five things that I do in the morning. There's a separate episode on this. But the meditation comes in right after. I've set the kettle to boil some water, or get it to 185 for tea. I sit down, I do 21 minutes of transcendental meditation, although I should say 21 minutes of meditation.

• 15:14Tim Ferriss?

  The first minute is really just to allow myself to fidget and get settled. I'm sitting on the couch in a effectively half lotus position. I don't think that's necessary at all. You could sit with your feet on the floor, I just happen to be comfortable that way. And for the first few minutes, I'm actually mimicking the format of Headspace, the app, in many ways. I'm really focusing on what is happening already, the sensations of, say, my legs against the couch, the feeling of my breathing, and you could look at it as a form, in some sense, of Vipassana meditation. Then I segue into the mantra-based TM. That is simply what I've found to work well for me, and oddly enough, it seems that a

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  high percentage of men gravitate ultimately towards TM, high percentage of women gravitate towards Vipassana. That is not true across the board at all. Sam Harris, for instance, practices a number of types of meditation, none of which are TM. Now, another guest who I asked about meditation was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 30th governor of California, seventh-time Mr. Olympia, and something perhaps a lot of people don't know, he was a Golden Globe winner in 1976 for his role in Stay Hungry with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. He has done everything, he's reinvented himself over and over again, and the other place that you might find mindfulness in my life is where Arnold also has it, and that is in the gym.

• 16:39Tim Ferriss?

  If we're trying to cultivate present-state awareness and less reactivity, you don't have to sit down and think of a mantra to do it, there are multiple ways. So, that all having been said, here we go, delving into meditation with none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 16:58Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard you mention transcendental meditation in passing briefly. Do you meditate?

• 17:05Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I don't meditate now, but I got heavily into it in the seventies. And I remember there was a time in my life where I felt like everything is just kind of coming together. And I did not find a way or couldn't find a way of keeping the things separate. So it was always when I was thinking about it, I was thinking about at the same time, my bodybuilding career, I was thinking about my movie career, I was thinking about the documentary Pumping Art that we're shooting right now and the movie Stay Hungry that we just finished shooting. And my investment in the apartment building and is this gonna, do I get the financing from the bank? And all of this kind of stuff was always coming together. And at the same time, I was training for the Mr. Olympia competition in South Africa. And I was training right here at Gold's Gym.

• 17:50Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  And I remember there was all the camera equipment around, five hours a day in my face. And then someone in the middle of squatting was trying to change the battery pack on my lifting belt and all this stuff. So I was like, you know, eventually I felt like I got to do something about it because I have such great opportunities here and everything is happening and everything is going my way. But I'm just clustering everything into one big problem rather than separating it out and having calm and peace and being happy. And so I, but total, you know, coincidence, I ran into this guy that I've run into many times on the beach. Very, very pleasant man who told me that he is a teacher in transcendental meditation.

• 18:34Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  And I said, well, it's interesting you mention that because I feel like I should do something because I feel like, you know, I'm just overly worried and anxieties and all this stuff. And I feel like certain pressures that I've never felt before. And he says, oh, says, Arnold, it's not uncommon. It's very common. Lot of people go through this. This is why people use meditation, transcendental meditation, as one way of dealing with the problem. And he was very good in selling it because he didn't say it's the only answer. He just is one of many. And he says, "Why don't you try it?" He says, "I'm a teacher there. I've been in Westwood.

• 19:16Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I would not be able to teach you since we have friends and... Maybe he says, "There will be another teacher there. They will give you a mantra and blah, blah, blah, and teach you how to do it. And then I can help you after that." He says, "Because I will be teaching up there. So why don't you come up on Thursday and I will be there. I will introduce you to the folks up there." Then I went up there, took a class, and I went home after that and then tried it. I said to myself, "I've got to give it a shot." And I did twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes at night. And I would say within fourteen days, three weeks, I got to the point where I really could disconnect my mind. And as they say, to find as few seconds of disconnection and rejuvenate the mind

• 19:59Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  and also learn how to focus more and to calm down. And I did that for... And I saw the effect right away, that I was much more calm about all of the challenges that were facing me. And I continued doing that then for a year. And by that time, I felt like, "I think that I've mastered this. I think that now I don't feel overwhelmed anymore." And I really felt kind of it was one of the things where, in the transcendental meditation, was kind of anxiety and pressure meeting around the corner tranquility. You know, this is kind of what it felt.

• 20:41Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  And so I was happy from that point. And even today, I still benefit from that because I don't merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem. I take on one challenge at a time. And when I go and I study my script for a movie, then that time, that day, when I study my script for a movie, I don't let anything else interfere in that and I just concentrate on that. So, and the other thing that I've learned is that there's many forms of meditation in a way. Because like when I study and I work really hard, where it takes the ultimate amount of concentration.

• 21:26Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I can only do it for forty-five minutes, maybe. Maybe an hour. But then I have to kind of run off and maybe play chess. And I play chess for fifteen minutes, then I can go back and I have all the energy in the world again and jump right back and then continue on with my work as if I have not done it at all today, right? It's like I'm fresh. And that's another way I think of meditation. And then I also figured out that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle and I have my mind inside the bicep when I do my curls. I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press.

• 22:09Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  So I'm really inside and it's like, again, a form of meditation because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time, but just that training that you do. And so there's many ways of meditation and I benefit from all of those and I'm today much calmer because of that and much more organized and much more tranquil because of that.

• 22:35Tim Ferriss?

  This whole conversation makes me want to go tackle the world. I love it.

• 22:40Tim Ferriss?

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

• 23:12Tim Ferriss?

  There's a quote here that is, quote, "There's nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have," end quote. Assuming that's true, and you and I have, of course, talked about altered states and you've written about altered states, I'd love to just dig into that expression, or that quote, rather, and look at the alternate approaches that you've perhaps explored or researched related to achieving some of these valuable states.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so in the beginning of my career, as you point out, I spent a lot of time criticizing religion and criticizing it for its obvious harms, but one of its harms that's not so obvious is that it keeps us talking about this positive end of human experience, the self-transcendence and highly normative states of consciousness in first-century or seventh-century terms, and most people, most of the time, think that the only way to capture, quote, "spiritual experience" and one's interest in it and the ways in which one would explore

• 24:29Speaker 04

  it is to, to some degree, indulge the myth, the myth-intoxicated language of the Iron Age. There's just no way to talk about it otherwise. Science hasn't given us the tools to talk about it. Secular culture doesn't give us the tools to talk about it, and so we're left talking about being Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and organize our lives around those really incompatible, the incompatible truth claims and doctrines that you find in those religions, and people, very smart people who are secular and every other way, think there's just no, there's no alternative to that, and so one of my main interests now is in articulating an alternative, because clearly there are extraordinary

• 25:14Speaker 04

  experiences that people have, and many of these experiences do lie at the core of many of our religions, and so, you know, to take Jesus as an obvious example, who knows who Jesus actually was and, you know, what is historically true in the New Testament, but let's just say, for argument's sake, that there really was a guy who loved his neighbor as himself and had this extraordinarily charismatic effect on the people around him and bore witness to this possibility of a kind of radical self-transcendence. Well...

• 25:49Speaker 04

  That, clearly, that whatever's true there is deeper than Christianity and it's not, it's not reducible to Christianity. In fact, Christianity has to be a distortion of that truth because, and we know this because Jesus isn't the only person who's had that experience. There's the Buddha and the many countless contemplatives through the ages have had, can attest to this experience of, for lack of a better phrase, unconditional love. And that has some relationship to what I would call self-transcendence, which I think is even more important. And so there's this phenomenon that's clearly deeper than any of our provincial ways of talking about it in the context of religion. And so it's

• 26:30Speaker 04

  the deeper truth of human psychology and the nature of consciousness. And I think we need to explore it in terms that don't require that we lie to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality and that we don't indulge this divisive language of picking teams in the religious, in the contest among religions. So, yeah, my next book that's coming out in the fall is called Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. And it's about the phenomenon of self-transcendence and the ways in which people can explore it without believing anything on insufficient evidence. And one

• 27:14Speaker 04

  of the principal ways is through various techniques of meditation, mindfulness being the, I think, the most useful one to adopt first. There's also the use of psychedelic drugs, which is not quite the same as meditation, but it does, if nothing else, reveals that the human nervous system is plastic in a very important way, which means you can, your experience of the world can be radically transformed. You are tending to be who you were yesterday by virtue of...

• 27:54Speaker 04

  Various habit patterns and physiological homeostasis and other things that are keeping you very recognizable to yourself, but it's possible to have a very different experience. And it's possible to do that through pharmacology, it's possible to do that through some kind of crisis, or it's possible to do it through a deliberate form of training like meditation. And it's, I think it's crucial to do because we all want to be as happy and as fulfilled and as free of pointless suffering as we can possibly be. And there's a, all of our

• 28:33Speaker 04

  suffering and all of our unhappiness is a product of how our minds are in every moment. And so if there's a way to use the mind itself to improve one's capacity for moment-to-moment well-being, which I'm convinced there is, then this should be potentially of interest to everybody.

• 28:55Tim Ferriss?

  So, a couple of quick questions on all of those subjects. So the first, the first I'd like to touch on, meditation, I think we can probably touch on this briefly, is something we've discussed before, you along with many other people who are high performers in their respective fields have recommended meditation. So I have been meditating, partially in thanks to your influence for some time now. Is it, is it safe to say that the meditation that you most frequently recommend to novices is Vipassana meditation, or is that...

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it. Why is that? I mean, I've, I've experimented with a number of different types of transcendental meditation, Vipassana of course, and have taken a number of courses. Why that selection? Why that...

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, it has a few obvious strengths that are actually not shared by, by any other technique I, I know of. The first is that it's...

• 29:57Speaker 04

  It doesn't, it needn't presuppose any belief about anything. I mean, you don't have to develop a fondness for the iconography of Buddhism. Uh, you don't have to care about the Buddha. You don't have to believe in rebirth or karma. Or, I mean, none of the doctrine of Buddhism need be adopted in order to get the practice off the ground and, and, and never need be adopted if, if, uh, it never makes any sense, which much of it doesn't. You don't have to become a Buddhist to do this and you don't have to add anything strategically to your experience as a mechanism by which to meditate. So you're not adding a mantra. You're not visualizing something that isn't there.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  You don't have to look at a candle flame or, or, or do anything to your environment to, to, uh, by way of artifice to, to create the, the circumstance of meditation. All you're doing is paying exquisitely close and, and non-judgmental attention to whatever you're experiencing anyway. So, a- a- and, and the first technique you use to, to be able to train that capacity is, is to focus on your breath, which you always have with you and, and is just an easy object to, to focus on. But you don't, it doesn't even have to be the breath. I mean, mindfulness is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations and, and even thoughts themselves, uh, without being

• 31:23Speaker 04

  lost in thought and without, without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away. It's just being wide open to the next sensory or emotional experience that comes, uh, careening into consciousness. That, that is mindfulness. And so there, it, in, in, in some sense, it's not even a practice. It's just, it is just the state of not being distracted. Uh huh. And being aware. And, and you have to, it, it feels like a practice in the beginning because... It's hard to do. We're so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to be having this conversation with ourselves, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep, we're just, there's just chatter in the mind and it's so captivating that we're not even aware

• 32:07Speaker 04

  of it. I mean, we are essentially in a dream state and it's through, it's through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environments, but we're just, we're just talking to ourselves non-stop. And until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness just arising and passing away, you can't even pay attention to your breath or to anything else with any kind of clarity. And so initially you have to develop some concentration and get mindfulness tuned up to, so that you can, you can pay attention. But once you can pay attention, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to. There's nothing in principle that is outside the

• 32:50Speaker 04

  meditation practice. There's nothing that's in principle a distraction. You don't need a quiet environment. You can have loud construction noises going across the street and that's just as good a circumstance for meditation as, as anything else. And so that's, that's the, those are the main reasons why I think it's, it's the, in terms of being designed for export outside of Buddhist culture or religious culture generally and, and becoming a tool for our intellectual lives in a secular scientific context, I think there's nothing, nothing like it.

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  What, what resources would you suggest for someone who wants to try to educate themselves or dive in as a novice in terms of books, resources, websites, uh, for, for mindfulness and meditation?

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I give a few on my blog. I wrote an article a couple of years ago entitled "How to Meditate." And if people Google that, they'll, they'll see I, I link to a few books and I tell people where they can go on retreats and, and so I, and I briefly describe the practice. I also have given a couple of guided mindfulness meditations I've, I've, I've put on SoundCloud, which are on my website as well.

• 33:59Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  So people can, and, and there are other guided meditations out there that people can, can use. And, and in the beginning, people find that very helpful to be, to have somebody's voice essentially reminding them to not be lost in thought every few seconds. I, it, it's because what happens in the beginning for people, and this, this happened to me in, in my practice. Uh, for at least a, at least a year, I think it was a year before I went on intensive retreat, silent retreat, I was just, you know, sitting for an hour a day or so, uh, just on my own, it's, it's, I was twenty or so, and essentially I was just sitting cross-legged and thinking, you know, it, it's, it's so hard to notice that you're lost in thought,

• 34:44Speaker 04

  but, but that by tendency, you're just not gonna notice it, and, and so in the beginning, people think they're meditating and they're really just lost in thought, and it wasn't until I did my first ten-day Vipassana retreat where I, I, I broke through and, and connected with the practice in a way that, where I realized, wow, that was, you know, all of that that has preceded this was really my thinking I was meditating and not meditating, and, and there, there are other, other landmarks along my journey that are like that, where, where there was a, it was a shift where I realized, wow, this, what I thought was happening really was not happening as I thought it was, and that's a very common experience, and,

• 35:24Speaker 04

  and so in the beginning, using a guided meditation can help cut through the chatter in a way that, that many people can't summon on their own.

• 35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Related to cutting through the chatter, people ask me, well, let me take a sidestep, which is, people ask me, what blogs do you read, and there really aren't many blogs that I read consistently, aside from a handful, uh, and partially, I read your blog, uh, and the posts you put up, because they're like feature magazine articles in many cases, and there's one you wrote in two thousand and eleven called Drugs in the Meeting of Life, um, and you've, you've written about this subject before. I have found, uh, certain hallucinogens in particular to be very therapeutically valuable for cutting through the chatter and sort of turning that off and bringing present state awareness to you in a very high-definition way, uh, when used, uh, you know, responsibly, and of course, you, as

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  you point out in this piece, it's not, not to say that everyone should, should take psychedelics, but... I'd be curious to know, you know, one of the lines here, it needs to be read in context, of course, but you know, I have a daughter who will one day take drugs, of course, I'll do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. And then you, then you obviously go through sort of the, how you might guide her to view these different subjects. And one of, one of the closing lines in this paragraph is, but if she does not try psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD, at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.

• 36:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I, I agree with this. I'd be curious to hear sort of what particular drugs or psychedelic substances you've found most therapeutically valuable in your own life, and how you suggest people think about this. Obviously, there are, I mean, putting, you have to put the legal, potential legal ramifications in perspective also, but what have you personally found most valuable and how so?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, again, you found another paragraph where I was happy to court controversy, saying that I'll be disappointed if my daughter doesn't drop acid. But the, so the caveat here, and it's, the caveat comes out several times in that piece is that-

• 37:41Tim Ferriss?

  Which everybody should be to inform. I'm not trying to pull anything out of context. I just don't want to read the whole thing to them now.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  I, I, I stand by every word, but there, there are a lot of words in there. And, and the, um, the caveat really is that, you know, I have, I have an increasingly healthy respect for what can go wrong on psychedelics, and wrong in a way that I think has lasting consequences for people. And so, I mean, there's a lot that can go right with psychedelics, and, and to some degree, I think they- They're still indispensable for a lot of people. They certainly seem to be indispensable for me. I don't think I ever would have discovered meditation without having taken, in particular MDMA,

• 38:27Speaker 04

  but MDMA and mushrooms and LSD all played a role for me in unveiling an inner landscape that was worth exploring. But for that pharmacological advantage, I think I was just, my consciousness was such that, you know, I looked inside, I saw nothing of interest, and that's sort of the end of the conversation. You tell me that there's something profound to witness about the nature of my own mind, I don't see it, you know? I just wanna, you know, get on with the next thing in the world that seems fun to do or seems likely to lead to my success. Or I just was, you know, a skin-encapsulated ego who was just trying to get on with life

• 39:12Speaker 04

  and succeed and thought he was very clever and didn't have the contemplative tools to see much of anything when, you know, he paid attention. And so that's a situation that many people are in and many smart people are in that position. So I'm constantly meeting scientists and philosophers and highly articulate people who spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the human mind. And when I talk to them about meditation or really any of these philosophical issues that for which an ability to pay attention to the nature of your own consciousness is an advantage, so something like free will or the nature of the self or the possibility

• 39:55Speaker 04

  of self-transcendence, I'm meeting people who have, as far as I can tell, no ability to notice their inner lives. These people who, some of them seem simply not to have inner lives, but these are people who are very much the way I was when I was, you know, eighteen and before I had had any experience with any of this. There's just, you're, you're lost in thought and you don't know it. And that phrase, "lost in thought," means nothing to you. And you don't have the tools by which to do anything with it, even if it had, if it meant something to you. And there's just nothing, you're, you're, you're cognitively closed to the data.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Uh, and the data are, uh, are, are there to be found, where the, the most important point of which is, the self you think you are is an illusion. This, this sense of being a self riding around in your head, uh, this feeling of "I," this feeling that we, everyone calls "I," uh, is an illusion that can, that can be disconfirmed in a variety of ways. It can be, uh, its boundaries can, can be transformed in ways, or it can be completely cut through and vanish for, for a moment, or a minute, or potentially for the rest of one's life. And so, so it is, it's vulnerable to inquiry, and that inquiry can take many forms.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  But, but the, the unique power of psychedelics is that, wh- whether or not they, I mean, this is, there's a, there's a unique power, there's a uni- unique liability. The, the, the unique power and liability is that they are guaranteed to work in some way. And this is a point that Terrence McKenna always made. Right. You know, Terrence McKenna was a huge booster of psychedelics and a, you know, very articulate one. And he, he poo-pooed any other spiritual methodology, meditation and, um, you know, chanting and, you know, yoga, anything else that, that people brought to him, saying, "Well, can't you get, you kind of get the same benefit without drugs?" And his point was, "Well, you, you, you teach someone to meditate, you teach them yoga,

• 42:01Speaker 04

  they, there's no guarantee whatsoever that something's gonna happen. You know, they could, they could spend a week doing it, they could spend a year doing it. Who knows what's gonna happen? They may just get bored, uh, and they're gonna wander away from this thing, not knowing that there was a there there. If I give you, you know, five grams of mushrooms, or three hundred micrograms of LSD, and tell you to sit on that couch for an hour, you are guaranteed to have a radical transformation in your experience. It's just, it doesn't matter who you are, this thing, this freight train of, of significance is gonna come bearing down on you. Uh, and we just have to watch the clock and know it's gonna happen. And that's a, that's a fact, but the, the, uh, so that's, that's the, the advantage because...

• 42:43Speaker 04

  You're guaranteed to realize at the end of that episode that it is possible to have a radically different experience than you tend to have. And if you have a good experience, you're gonna, you're gonna realize that, that, that human life can be just unutterably sublime, that it's possible to, to feel at home in the universe in a way that you, you couldn't have previously imagined. But if you have a bad experience, uh, and the bad experiences are every bit as bad as the good experiences are good, you, you will have just this, this har- this, this harrowing encounter with madness. And it's, it's, it's, you know, it's as pathological as any, you know, lunatic who's, who's wandering

• 43:26Speaker 04

  the streets, uh, you know, raving to himself and completely cut off from others. You can have that experience and, and hopefully it goes away and in, you know, virtually every case it does go away, but it's, it's still, um, it's still rough and it still has, has consequences for people. Um, some of the consequences are good. I happen to think that, that, that it, it gives you a basis for compassion, uh, in particular for, for, you know, people who are suffering mental illness that you couldn't otherwise have. But, you know, it's not an experience that I'm eager to have again. And so, I, I, so I haven't, you know, my healthy respect for the power of psychedelics has led me to not take many for many years.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  And it's been, it's been years since I've taken anything and my, my youth tapered off in my twenties when I, when I got into meditation and was spending more time on retreat and feel, beginning to feel that I was getting, kinda hitting the center of the bull's eye with meditation in a way that I was certainly not guaranteed to with psychedelics, that I, I basically stopped using everything and, and just practiced meditation. But there, there's no question that I, I wouldn't have become sufficiently interested in meditation but for the experiences I had on LSD and, and MDMA in particular.

• 44:45Tim Ferriss?

  To round out this deep dive into meditation, I wanted to relive a conversation that I had with Rainn Wilson, who is perhaps best known as Dwight on NBC's Emmy Award-winning The Office. He shared an incredible insight to a very simple question we all face from time to time.

• 45:03Tim Ferriss?

  When you feel overwhelmed, what do you do to improve the situation?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Um, well, you know, I have a spiritual faith that I rely on, that I use. So I use prayer and meditation as tools to center me and bring me back kind of into reality.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  I also find that, for me, like, acting is a wonderful escape. Because you get out of your own head and you get to go into someone else's head. And, you know, it was like that on The Office, too, and doing comedy, you know? And life was good and life was bad. There was something wonderful about coming to Dwight. And I could just put Rainn Wilson aside and just all of that bullshit and clear it out of my head and out of my heart and just beat Dwight Schrute. And sometimes it was just, just super, super fun to do that. So those are some of the tools. Acting is a tool. Prayer and meditation is a tool I use to kind of bring myself into the world.

• 46:11Tim Ferriss?

  And your faith, I know I'm going to massacre this because I've only read it and not heard it said, but is it bahai? Is that correct?

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, bahai.

• 46:19Tim Ferriss?

  Bahai, there we go, thank you.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Like, bahai, how you doing? Yeah.

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to come back to that, but what does your... When you meditate, what does that look like? And do you do it on a daily basis? What's the format of that?

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I try and meditate every day. There's no format in the Baha'i faith. It's just greatly encouraged to meditate. When you pray, you're communing with the Creator. You're communing with the universe. You're putting stuff out there. And when you're meditating, you're listening to the universe. But it's really pretty simple. I get a great deal of benefit. If I even do a 10-minute meditation, and out of that 10 minutes, if four of the minutes, my mind can be very still and very silent. There's great guided meditations. Now, there's apps. There's all kinds of things you can do for meditation. But for me, it's just about, I won't say silencing the mind, because that's impossible. The mind is, those thoughts are always going to pop up. But those thoughts pop up, you just notice them, you identify them.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  You let them float in front of your eyes, almost like, you know, one of those old-fashioned Wall Street ticker machines. And, and, and, and you find a tremendous, I find a tremendous amount of peace, serenity, and bliss in just being in consciousness. And consciousness is not thought. Consciousness is just being. I am this being. I am not separate from the giant being of Earth and the cosmos and the universe. And just being in that stillness is incredibly rewarding. I get a, I get really a ton of clarity, and I get a ton of energy from it.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  And these have been proven in scientific studies, by the way, in all kinds of things, from healing trauma, to giving you more energy, to giving you more focus in your work. It's, meditation is a pretty incredible tool.

• 48:16Tim Ferriss?

  And lowering cortisol. I've been spending time interacting with some researchers at Johns Hopkins, a gentleman named Roland Griffiths, and also a gent named Adam Gazalier, runs a neuroimaging lab at UCSF. And what's, what's been very interesting, and we don't have to go down the rabbit hole with this, but it appears that when you, if you look at experienced meditators... And brain activity, and I'm blanking on the particular area. I think it might be somewhere in the parietal lobe, but I could be off. In any case, there's a portion of the brain that is thought to contribute to the separation of self and other. So it's

• 48:57Tim Ferriss?

  associated with, let's just call it the ego, and that is inhibited both in the use of, say, psilocybin, which was found in magic mushrooms, but also you experience a similar type of pattern in experienced meditators, which is kind of cool.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Well, I know that they, oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 49:14Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, go ahead.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I heard a fascinating thing on the radio once where they did a study and they found the happiest man in the world. So they did a brain scan and they found the happiest person they could possibly find. And this guy was, I think he was an American, but he was living in Wisconsin, but he was a student of Tibetan Buddhism. And at the time when they did the brain scan, which charted out as the very happiest, he was in the process of meditating, and it was a meditation of kind of universal compassion. So it's a meditation where you're feeling at one with everyone and great compassion

• 49:58Speaker 00

  for everyone on planet Earth and all beings on planet Earth, not human, animal, plant, what they're going through. And in so doing, that achieved like the greatest happiness. That kind of goes along with what you're saying.

• 50:11Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely. And it's, I mean, there is a sort of, even if you are self-interested, there's a biological benefit to empathy and compassion meditation. And just to reiterate something you said, because I think it's so important, is that, you know, I try to meditate 20 minutes each morning, and like you mentioned, there are apps like Calm and Headspace that are very helpful for this. But even if I'm just violently, violently, excuse me, let me try English again, violently getting punched in the psyche by like my to-do list and worries and anxieties and thoughts for 15 or even 18 minutes out of 20, if I have two minutes where the mud kind of settles and the mind is clear, it has an incredible

• 50:56Tim Ferriss?

  impact on the entire day for me.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  And I feel exactly the same way. That's exactly my experience. Even out of a 10-minute meditation, if I can just get two or three minutes in there where I have Almost achieve thoughtlessness and just kind of a serene bliss. It's like getting, it's like taking a power nap. Yeah, and it helps you through your whole day.

• 51:19Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, and I had, I think it was Tara Brock who said this to me, but it might have been someone else. But they said, if you just come back to your breath or a mantra or whatever it is that you're focusing on, if you're doing concentrated meditation, it's the coming back that is the practice. So if you're just distracted and you're basically just bouncing off the walls mentally with your monkey mind for those 19 minutes, if you come back even once, you can consider it a successful session. I think for type A personalities, that's really important to keep in mind. You mentioned something I'd love to explore a little bit, which is that acting can be a wonderful escape, and I'm paraphrasing here, but from your own head. I was actually watching Amy yesterday, which is a documentary about Amy Winehouse.

• 52:01Tim Ferriss?

  And very sad story, tragic on many levels, but she produced some beautiful music from bad experiences. And so she was able to escape her own head by putting these poems, which became songs, on paper. Are there any particular exercises from, whether it's acting school or improv or otherwise, that you think could benefit non-actors who just want to help create new avenues of thinking or embrace some type of therapeutic effect of getting outside of their own head?

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, specific ones, I suppose I could go into, but I studied with a great teacher at NYU named Paul Walker. He died of AIDS, but he was an exquisite teacher. And he taught theater games. And for me, that was a real revelation because when I had tried acting early on, I was very stiff and very in my head and cerebral and kind of stuck and kind of like, it was very conscious, like, how am I going to say this line? And how do I best look when I'm turning this way? It was just a very self-conscious style of acting that was bad. It was sucking. So what Paul got us doing in acting school at NYU was just playing.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  And there's something incredibly freeing about playing like a kid. And that your impulses as an actor and your impulses as a kid at play are really the same thing. Like I said before, it's deeply pretending. So, you know, are there specific exercises? I mean, I suppose I could think of some, but you know, how much fun is it to play red light, green light and uh for 20 minutes or duck, duck, goose? And then to move from those exercises into more and more imaginative kind of improvisations. But where where you allow yourself to just play like a child. And sometimes children play and they're competitive. Sometimes they play and they're very serious.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Um, it's not all kind of this general like wee kind of stuff. And I found that so freeing and it was the it was the key for me as an actor that kind of broke me open and got me out of my head and just got me in my body and in that place of kind of pure imagination and spontaneity that you really want as an actor.

• 54:32Tim Ferriss?

  And and I think it seems to me also when you put yourself in that place, much like meditation, you have to be present state aware. You can't be worrying about something that you have scheduled two weeks in the future or

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:48Tim Ferriss?

  resenting something like some idiot who cut you off in traffic that morning. You have to be in that moment and be effective and to have fun. You just can't be distracted by those things.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, like we'll do a thing where you I just remembered because I did it recently at Soul Pancake. I did some sessions with the with the employees at Soul Pancake. I do kind of games and improv stuff where everyone has a number from one to 10. There's two teams of 10 on each side of the room. There's a stool in the center of the room with a shoe on it. The goal is you've got to get the shoe and then get back to your place in line. Right. It's pretty simple game. But then you also do this game called sexy nostril. You write down adjectives and you write down body parts. So it could be angry, sad, lonely, um energetic. Those are the adjectives and then body parts, you know, ear lobe, testicle, anus, shoulder, blade, you know, fingernail, whatever.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  And you draw one of each. And then you try and play a game manifesting those characteristics. So if you have sex nostril, and then you have to play that same game of getting the shoe and getting back to the line, but you're a person where their center of their energy is in their nostril and it's a very sensual, sexual energy. And you're just kind of, it helps you create a character and play as that character. And it's, it takes you out of your head and it just gets you in your body and gets you kind of feeling and responding and I love teaching that stuff. It's, it's, it's super fun. And for me, Tim, I'm in my head a lot and it's kind of sucks. So there's certain tools that I have to use to get by.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  So I've learned in my life, I don't remember every day, but there's certain things I have to do to just be out of my head and just to get to normal. I'm not talking about like being like really super effective. Just to get to normal, I have to do meditation. I have to do some exercise. If I, if I can get into nature, great. If I could play some tennis, better. And acting is that same way. Acting, rehearsing, playing characters. These are the things that get me out of my head and out of just analyzing every goddamn thing that comes down the pike and leaves me miserable and making really bad choices.

• 57:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there you have it, folks. My first episode of the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour with some of the superstars, some of the experts that I've spoken to over the past few years. And this is an experiment. As I said at the top of the show, I want to know, what did you like? What did you not like? How could it be improved? Do you want more of these or should we just skip it? That's totally fair as well. What topics would you like me to most explore or consolidate? What types of patterns? In other words, I just want your feedback. So please let me know, what did you like? What didn't you like? What should I do more of, less of?

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  And you can ping me on Twitter, at T Ferriss, T F E R R I S S, or on the blog at fourhourworkweek.com/blog. If you're a Facebooker. You love the Facebooks, you could go to facebook.com/timferriss with two R's and two S's. But generally speaking, Twitter is going to be the best means of communication for now, @T F E R R I S S. So, please let me know your thoughts and as always, and until next time, thank you for listening.

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 59:22Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind in the best way possible. It is mushroom coffee. What on earth is this? Well, it includes chaga mushroom, very powerful antioxidant, considered a superfood. I was introduced to chaga by Laird Hamilton, the king of big wave surfing of all things. And it includes another mushroom that is considered a nootropic, a smart drug, and this is lion's mane. In the entire packet, you just add it to hot water, tastes like coffee. There is only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so less than half what you would find in a cup of coffee.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  I do not get any jitters, I do not get any acid reflux or any type of stomach burn, and it put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. So, this stuff is really amazing. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. Right now, this is the answer. So, it is legal, it will not give you visuals, that's something else, and you can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That is four-sigmatic, S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C, foursigmatic.com/tim, and use the code TIM to get 20% off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.

• 1:00:49Tim Ferriss?

  Foursigmatic.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I used 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy, or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show

• 1:01:32Tim Ferriss?

  listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out.