Ep 52: Ed Cooke, Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief

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.

• 0:00Ed Cooke?

  Do you think, I'm sorry, I'm just doing an interview on the old Skype. Any chance you could not move the papers? At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:15Speaker 02

  No, we're seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:19Speaker 01

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

• 0:30Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show. 99designs, which is your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see the projects that I've put up, including the mock-ups and drafts of the book cover for The Four Hour Body. As always, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, and you can find all of the links and resources from this episode, as well as every other episode, by going to 4hourworkweek.com/podcast. Spell it all out, or you can go to 4hourworkweek.com and just click on Podcast. Feedback, if you have feedback, I would love your thoughts. Anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show. Ping me on Twitter, @TFerriss, that's twitter.com/TFERRISS,

• 1:15Tim Ferriss?

  or on Facebook, at facebook.com/timferriss with two R's and two S's.

• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is a conversation between yours truly, Tim Ferriss, and Ed Cook. Ed Cook is a Grand Master of Memory, based in Britain, Great Britain. A good friend, he's made a number of appearances in The Four Hour Chef. He helped improve my ability to memorize anything and everything. He's also very well-known for coaching a writer named Joshua Foer, from nothing, i.e. ground zero, to becoming US National Memory Champion, in I believe, a year or so of time. A really astonishing feat. And we'll get into what Grand Master of Memory means. This is a two-part episode, so you have two separate parts.

• 2:05Tim Ferriss?

  They are very, very dense, they are hilarious. If you liked the Kevin Kelly episodes, the Josh Waitzkin episodes, or any episodes that are similar to those, very in-depth, wide-ranging, you are gonna love this episode. I hope you enjoy it, so without further ado, here is Ed Cook.

• 2:25Tim Ferriss?

  Hello ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I have my dear friend Ed Cook on the line. I grabbed him last minute for reasons I shall explain and he is a grand master of memory among many, many other things. At the ripe old age of 23 is when he turned that corner. But Ed, where are you at the moment and what are you up to?

• 2:50Ed Cooke?

  So I am currently sitting in the office where I work, which is a converted Methodist chapel in Bethnal Green, London. And it's Friday night at 10:15pm. Here, so like, while people with adequate social lives are currently, you know, running around town and falling in love. Yeah, I'm here and I'm trying with you, Tim, and I'm delighted to be here.

• 3:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to actually share with people what we just talked about doing an audio check before we began recording, where you gave the best answer I've ever heard to a very mundane question, which is, what did you have? Tell me what you had for breakfast, or what did you have for breakfast? And feel free to improvise, but what was your answer, roughly?

• 3:35Ed Cooke?

  Well, it was a sound check, so I was allowing myself a certain embellishment. But yeah, I was just relating how I had a couple of potrages, a few sausages, some salmon.

• 3:46Tim Ferriss?

  Seven kippers, I think they were.

• 3:48Ed Cooke?

  There were kippers. There were peat smoked kippers, four boiled eggs and two poached eggs, that kind of thing. Yeah. I actually don't know the English king, but I had a friend who, it was an amazing friend, a sort of friend, who occasionally at breakfast, he'd just sort of chuckle on a can of beer and I'd be like, you know, what are you talking about? And he'd be like, I'm just thinking about what, you know, Henry VI had for breakfast every day.

• 4:16Tim Ferriss?

  And I should, no, I should give some background for folks who may not realize that you and I first connected several years ago. And you were tremendously helpful with The Four Hour Chef, since that was a book about accelerated learning disguised as a cookbook, which, surprise, surprise, ended up being very, very confusing to almost everybody in the universe who came across it. But there were aspects of it, including chapters focused on mnemonic devices and other types of memory techniques where you were incredibly helpful. So first of all, thank you very much for that.

• 4:53Ed Cooke?

  My pleasure.

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I was having trouble piecing together how we first came in contact. How did we first meet? And I should also, just as context for folks, point out that Ed is in the UK, I am drinking highly caffeinated tea, he is drinking wine, and this is intended to be like a pub conversation. So.

• 5:15Ed Cooke?

  So please filter any interpretation of any remarks in the context of a ripe old English pub, yeah. Well, we came into contact through my dear friend Greg, with whom I co-founded the company. And Greg was then a PhD student at Princeton. And I think you came to do a couple of talks. He got chatting with you. And it was through that that we met.

• 5:40Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. And so for those who are not familiar, Ed is co-founder and the office that he referred to is related to his company Memorize, memorize.com, which we'll come back to. And the, the concept of being a grand master of memory, it's not really a concept, the qualification, what is entailed in, in becoming a grand master of memory?

• 6:03Ed Cooke?

  So, yeah, so I think, I'll, I'll explain that first, and then we can discuss a little bit just how stupid a term it is, and what a marvelous device for kind of, you know, either ending a conversation or beginning one at a bus stop. But, yeah, so Grand Master of Memory, it's a kind of title given out by the World Memory Sports Foundation. And basically, you have to be able to remember a 1,000-digit number in an hour, a pack of cards in under a couple of minutes, and then 10 packs of shuffled cards in an hour. So it's, so it's, it's three parts of the World Memory Championships, which determine whether you can get this title.

• 6:45Ed Cooke?

  And yeah, I mean, it's it's a great title. I mean, I can't really.

• 6:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very compelling title.

• 6:53Ed Cooke?

  You know, just like the number of times, you know, I've been in the kind of losing situation in nightclub, you know, outdanced, um, you know, I'm not a symmetrical person, Tim. Um, and you know, sometimes my visual allure kind of understates the the value of conversation with me. Anyhow, uh, so this is sort of like, you know, just so what's your problem? It's like, sorry, I'm grandmaster of memory. It's like, okay. Well, you know, let me buy you some champagne and then we can talk further about this important qualification. Uh, but yeah, it's it's a very silly concept, but um, but you know, the the kind of the cultural context, if you want, from which it emerges, namely people doing competitive memory competitions, I think is awesome and fascinating.

• 7:35Ed Cooke?

  Because um, uh, because um, in nineteen ninety, the world record for memorizing a shuffle deck of cards was a hundred and forty nine seconds, which, you know, if you could memorize a pack of cards in under three minutes and show that to somebody, they'd be fairly astounded and would think you were cheating. And, you know, it it's not obvious to anybody that the human mind would be capable of that. Um, and I remember I was very proud, um, you know, ten years ago when I uh, first broke a minute. I was like, oh, my goodness, this is extraordinary. Anyway, the world record now is twenty one seconds.

• 8:09Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 8:10Ed Cooke?

  For the memorization of a shuffle deck of fifty two cards. And you sort of think, well, obviously, you know, people presumably um, haven't got like uh, four times faster brains than they did um, um, only twenty four years ago. But you know, the reason for it is, is that there's been this competitive culture in which um, there's an objective measure of mnemonic speed, if you like. And over the last ten, over the last twenty years. People have on each year done their best to outgun their rivals in the memory scene. And then very openly and freely shared the techniques and hacks they've used to be able to optimize these fairly arbitrary, but nonetheless kind of interesting processes of memorization.

• 8:53Ed Cooke?

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

• 9:32Tim Ferriss?

  Is that a function of prize money, prestige, social media? I'm very curious about the dynamic that has produced that progress because if you look at mixed martial arts, for instance, UFC, and you look at the first 10 UFCs, compare that to, compare the competitors to the competitors, say, 30 UFCs later, compare those competitors with those of today, as the prize money has increased, among other things, I think it's primarily the prize money, you see a very quick evolution in terms of whether it's selection bias or just a larger pool of competitors that has gone from, say, top 20% of athletes

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  in the United States to top 10 to top 2, and you're just looking at mutants in many cases now, not to detract from their technique.

• 10:28Ed Cooke?

  Not to diminish their fine manners and general affable.

• 10:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right, not to diminish their gentlemanly demeanor and technique and training, but is, what is, what are the contributing factors to the increases in speed?

• 10:49Tim Ferriss?

  And capabilities.

• 10:51Ed Cooke?

  Well, of the options you offered up there.

• 10:54Tim Ferriss?

  You can choose others. You can choose other ones. Yeah.

• 10:57Ed Cooke?

  It's certainly not social media. The total Twitter followers of competitors in the World Memory Championships is, yeah, twenty twenty five or something. But, um, yeah, the, um, and it's not money. There's no, there's no real money on it. I, I think it's, um, you know, I, I would, I would suppose that, you know, perhaps in a hundred years' time, if people did still care, the current state of memory sports would be considered still extraordinarily immature. Um, and so I think we're probably what's the kind of, it's like cricket in the nineteenth century in England, where people were kind of working out the basics of technique.

• 11:35Ed Cooke?

  In that case, historically, I believe it was the invention of the steam train, which allowed cricket to get good, because, uh, teams from further apart in the country could visit each other.

• 11:46Ed Cooke?

  The, uh, information and press was delivered, you know, uh, quicker. And so there was a sort of general, um, increase in the talent pool. We're competing with each other and, uh, and it was just possible to even travel and sort of compete. And it's the same thing there. So like people from all over the world can do it, you know? It's easy to hop on a plane. So that, that's a contributing factor. But I think fundamentally, the motivation is, um, it's just so cool winning or doing well in the World Memory Championships, that it's purely, uh, it's purely a kind of, um, slightly comic form of status, I think, which drives it, as well as the fact that, of course, it's, it's phenomenally interesting to, um, take something which every single person there would never imagine they were capable of doing,

• 12:32Ed Cooke?

  and push it and push it and push it to, to see how well it can be done. And it probably helps that it's quite precisely quantifiable, you know, like the hundred meters or whatever else.

• 12:44Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to, I wanted to grab, uh, something you mentioned and come back to it, which is what, what the average person is capable of doing, or what most people are capable of doing. And, uh, perhaps you could recount for folks the outcome of one of the experiments that, that you and I did, uh, also involving your team, which was related to the Four Hour Chef. So we wanted to incentivize people to try to memorize a shuffled deck of cards. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and the outcome, because. A lot of people listening will probably assume like a thousand digits, I could never even remember a phone number. I couldn't remember twenty numbers and they underestimate what they're capable of doing.

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  So I would love if you could just perhaps recount the results of the experiment that we did related to the book launch.

• 13:31Ed Cooke?

  Yes, that was a fun thing we did. So yeah, on memorize, we launched a competition with you, Tim. Yeah, at the same time as we launched the book and it was a ten thousand dollar prize. I believe munificently supplied by Utip.

• 13:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, that's right.

• 13:49Ed Cooke?

  I spent it on, yeah, anyway.

• 13:54Ed Cooke?

  So, yeah, we did this thing and we had this great engineer in the office called Tank who built this amazing system, which was basically a standard memorize course where you would learn to associate with each card in the deck, a person. And I'd actually propose like a group of fifty-two people, but there are ways of changing them to be people that you wanted to have in your set of images. And the basic technique underlying this is that, you know, cards are boring and unmemorable. Sequences are boring and unmemorable. How do you remember them? Well, you turn the cards into images which are more memorable. And so for instance, Tim, you are slightly more memorable than the three of hearts, say,

• 14:36Ed Cooke?

  because you have characteristics, you have a personality, I can imagine you in detail, I can imagine you interacting in situations. So you're inherently more interesting to my brain than a mea card or figure or anything like that. And so this is kind of incredibly incoherent explanation, but I'll keep going.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  I think you're doing great. The assumption that I have personality is a bit of a stretch, but besides that, you're doing fine.

• 15:05Ed Cooke?

  I didn't say that it was an adequate or admirable one. I just said there was one. Anyway, so, you know, the basics of memory techniques is that our minds love certain kinds of things. So we're very, very good at remembering spaces, we're very, very good at remembering things which attract our interest. And so, you know, a rule of thumb I like to use is that anything which would grab your attention if you were wandering down the street. Is the kind of thing which will grab your attention in your memory. So, you know, will something grey and um written in legal language grab your attention if you're uh walking down the street? No, but will a kind of a small elephant being attacked by lemurs attract your attention? Yes, you know, will a uh spectacular lissum naked woman attract your attention?

• 15:50Ed Cooke?

  Perhaps will um a um bollard do so? Probably not. And so it's the same thing when we kind of perceive within ourselves, which is to say when we remember the the vivid, interesting, emotion-grabbing things. Uh and again, Tim, I'd like to clarify that you don't evoke vivid emotions, particularly. I mean, I'm just taking you as an example. Anyway, uh but anyways, these things, these things grab our attention. So the art of memory is basically transforming information which is not interesting into forms of information which are interesting. And for a pack of cards, the technique which I um I use myself um and which is very popular in the memory community is to take each card and then rote associate a person with it.

• 16:34Ed Cooke?

  And and you know, if you go with personal association, you do this very quickly. It takes like an afternoon for a normal person to to associate with fifty two cards, fifty two people. And then having got that code, which is a bit like a language, really, you know, you think of it as a language. So, you know, if I say hola to you, you'll say, oh, hi, Ed. And you've just learned an arbitrary association between some letters, hola, and um a meaning, you know, hi there, sort of thing. Uh and it's just like that with the cards. It's like it's like a very, very small language, fifty two words. And so when you're going through the cards, you um you imagine the the people you've associated with the cards instead of the cards, and already it's massively more interesting. And the second thing you do to tackle the sequence, which is difficult to remember because it's just a bland sequence,

• 17:17Ed Cooke?

  is that you string these people who are standing in for cards into an amusing story. So you uh you might be getting your doorstep and, you know, there's Tim Ferriss and he's he's desperately, you know, trying to impress uh the Queen. She's not impressed. And then slightly down the road, we've got like the Pope and he's chatting with Ed Snowden. And and you know, these these people are standing in for cards. And because um Tim's trying to impress the Queen, it's kind of funny, you know, kind of there's a kind of colonial perverse humour vibe um or whatever. And it's just more interesting than three of hearts, seven of spades, kind of thing. Anyhow, so that's the basic setting. So going back to your original question, we we put together a course on Memos which helped people make these associations and so that, you know, people would play on that for an hour.

• 17:58Ed Cooke?

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

• 18:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I remember that. I remember that. I remember that very closely. Yeah. So people people would search for Ed Cook, Cook, Cook with a knee on the blog to find that video.

• 18:38Ed Cooke?

  Yeah. Uh, anyhow, so um, so we did the competition. Um, so people learn the technique and they can practice with this cool um system on the on the website. And um, what was astonishing was that, you know, a few thousand people entered. You know, most people um, like basically couldn't be bothered and gave up quite quickly, but but but basically anyone who did persevere and actually just learn the images and then start practicing. Um, many of them got really good, really, really fast. And um, the girl who ended up winning it, um, who whose name is Irina Zayats, she's a um fabulous young lady programmer who um, who uh lives in the Ukraine.

• 19:18Ed Cooke?

  I tried to recruit her for Memorize, actually. She was sort of only dimly interested. But anyway, she um, she um

• 19:27Ed Cooke?

  did it in about four days.

• 19:30Ed Cooke?

  So she just like sat on a computer and practiced a thing. And then within four days, she basically nailed it and could do it under a second. And and then at the Memorize Christmas party, um, that year, we we piped her in live on Skype to prove that she could actually do it and wasn't cheating. And so there's a party of about two hundred people cramming into the church, you know, and scenes of unbelievable debauchery, Tim. Uh, I uh, I shake as I.

• 19:54Tim Ferriss?

  Eyes wide shut, uh, one of the.

• 19:56Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, well, yeah, it was that. Yeah, it was that, but we'd better chat, you know, in better lighting. Uh, anyhow, um, yeah, so she just nailed it again, live on Skype. Um, under the pressure, we we told her, I think that that was how she could actually win the prize. And that's kind of just a nice example, you know, like it's, it is very doable. And I had a, I had a kind of another interesting experience with, where I met a, I, I, I went to the US memory championships, I think in two thousand and five with, with my friend. So, so this is a bit of a sort of diversion, but I'll tell the anecdote. So I, I got this friend called Lucas, who's from Austria and from Vienna, who is an absolutely hilarious and wonderful fellow, who, before we'd done this, we'd been contacted by Channel Four and they were like,

• 20:41Ed Cooke?

  we're just interested to hear how, how memory athletes train. And I, I, I've always been a bit suspicious, to be honest, of the concept of sort of self hacking. You know, I've never been quite, quite clear whether that's something I really want to do. But, but anyway, so I, I also said, well, you know, like, we like to go to high altitude and go into complete seclusion. And I was kind of channeling an image of Ricky Hatton, the boxer, you know, going into the mountains and sort of going through some, anyway, they were like awesome. So anyway, Lucas and I, we headed up into the mountains. So we, we, we put on as a sort of comedy show, and this can be found on YouTube actually, but a, a kind of image of what a mental athlete's training program would look like.

• 21:21Ed Cooke?

  Also sort of press ups involving claps and competitive boxing style, mutual recitation of binary numbers and stuff. Anyhow, so it was, it's, it's a kind of, it's a minor, for the sort of twelve or thirteen people who, in your, in your listenership, who, who think that, actually, well, fuck it, I'm going to, I'm going to an anecdote within an anecdote, I'm not going to follow. Okay, so we went to America and we went to the US memory championships and it was, it was quite hilarious. So, so both of us, at that point, non-American competitors were not really allowed to compete, but we were allowed to compete. And anyway, we came first and second by a margin of about

• 22:04Ed Cooke?

  times three, because at that point, the sport was not very well developed in the US. And um anyway, there was a journalist there and he was like, oh my god, you're a geek, you're a savant, the rest of it. And I was like, uh, no, mate, you know, we were two young lads who've got an enthusiasm for memory tennis. And so he was like, well then, but this is impossible. So I was like, no, no, no, no, I'll train you. So uh, so I trained him for a year and he wound up the next year. And by the way, I'm a pretty brutal coach. It's a kind of a way of um, it's a way for me to transcend my own insufficiencies is to criticize others. And so I trained him up for a year and yeah, he wound up winning the American memory championships. Um, and um, yeah, it was pretty cool and he wrote a book about it. Um.

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  That was Joshua, Joshua For.

• 22:51Ed Cooke?

  Uh, that's Josh. Yeah, that's Joshua, who's um, yeah, he's super cool.

• 22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Moonwalking with Einstein. Yeah, very, very uh, booked it very, very well. Had a great piece in Wired that introduced me to that uh, as well. Um, but uh, sorry to interrupt. Not my uh, not my intention.

• 23:13Tim Ferriss?

  Brought everything to a standstill.

• 23:16Ed Cooke?

  Now, by the way, Tim.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, perfect, perfect. Well, I was, I was, I was, I was taken aback by your sudden silence, which I mistook for, for uh, shyness. But I think it's just drunkenness. Uh.

• 23:28Ed Cooke?

  I was just sort of taking another slug on the, on the.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, nice, nice, nice, nice. I'll have to get you a camel for our next podcast. The, the uh, so, so, so the. So just to put, just to put things in perspective for folks with, uh, it was Arena, right? The Ukrainian woman?

• 23:45Ed Cooke?

  Um, yeah.

• 23:46Tim Ferriss?

  So she, she learned to memorize a, a shuffled or randomized deck of cards in less than a minute in four or five days. Uh, and the previous US record, I guess, a few years ago had been, what, a hundred and forty seven seconds or something along those lines?

• 24:06Ed Cooke?

  Um, yeah.

• 24:08Tim Ferriss?

  So she beat the US record with four to five days of training. I mean, granted, it was an older record, but I, I think that that just highlights what is possible for people. And uh, the, the.

• 24:23Tim Ferriss?

  The question I'd love to ask you is, I mean, what are some, some, uh, some perhaps, if, if people have an afternoon and, uh, they are not going to necessarily focus on the pack of cards, is there something else that they can do to prove to themselves that they have greater, uh, mental athleticism or memorization potential than they've ever thought possible? Is there something else that they can do?

• 24:49Ed Cooke?

  They can make love to a beautiful woman in their imaginations without moving a muscle.

• 24:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Why would you recommend that?

• 24:58Ed Cooke?

  Um, well, that was a joke, Tim.

• 25:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, you got me. You're so dry. It's just, it's just dry British humor. We're, we're still dragging our knuckles over here.

• 25:09Ed Cooke?

  That was actually just, that was a straight, straight out, not that funny. But I suppose the, the tinkle of a thought which underlies every joke there, uh, the tinkle of a thought which underlies a joke there is just that, um, that really, um, imagination is, um, and our capacity to form images just while talking, just while communicating is, um, is already extraordinarily potent and, and so, you know, you know, people, so the thing which confuses people is like, how can you possibly like, form an image in a second, which you then end up remembering five minutes later? And, um, the example I like to give is that that's what happens in conversation the entire time.

• 25:54Ed Cooke?

  So, you know, if I say to you, um, I might just describe my office to you, Tim, and we'll actually test your memory. I know, I know that you're sort of, um, getting on a bit and, um,

• 26:03Tim Ferriss?

  Getting, getting a little, a little long in the tooth, yeah.

• 26:06Ed Cooke?

  A little bit, a little bit sort of doddery, but, um, yeah, so if I describe the office, we've got quite a colorful office. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of, I'm gonna begin where I am and about, um, 15 seconds, I'm gonna describe to you the sequence of objects I'm gonna see and I'm gonna make it a bit more vivid by imagining myself as an amusing character kind of leaping around. So like, let's say that I am, um, can you, can you, why don't you name the amusing character, Tim?

• 26:31Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, amusing Mortimer.

• 26:34Ed Cooke?

  Mortimer, okay, so I'm Mortimer, and I'm yattering into a laptop, and then I take the bottle of wine right by me, and I fling it into the wall where there's a picture of twenty-five, I don't know what they are, I mean, they're just a Yakuza in sort of jock straps and tattoos, Japanese men, or a picture of them on the wall, and then I jump around, and there's a hammock, and in the hammock there are two lambs, this is not true by the way, but anyway, two lambs eating cheese, and then you jump over the hammock, and then suddenly there's a grand piano, and there's a young man playing Chopin, and he's chopping away at the piano, and then move over, and there there's a swing, so he goes from the piano to the swing, there's Mortimer, and the swing is covered in pink roses, and if you kind of trace up the swing of the rope, you'll see that at the very top there is

• 27:18Ed Cooke?

  a model of a rhesus monkey, just dangling from the top of the rope, jumping back down, you land on the kitchen table where four people, for unfortunate memoirist employees, are just trying to sort of have a quiet evening in, you know, reflecting on the vicissitudes of life, but there by the big ager, the big metal oven, and the metal oven is emitting heat, and on the ager there is a pot full of spoons.

• 27:45Ed Cooke?

  Okay, so that was an incoherent narrative lasting about forty-five seconds, I'm guessing, in which I mentioned Mortimer's little adventure, and, you know, the first thing I'd say to your listenership is that just merely by listening to that, you followed it, you formed the images at the speed of talk, which is, you know, one or two images a second, and you've strung that into a coherent mental concept, or incoherent one, you know, I'm drunk, come on, calm down, but anyway, you start getting into a coherent mental concept in a spectacularly small number of seconds, I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal if you think that it's even possible to follow that, but anyhow, Tim, we're now going to test you, so I'm on my laptop, Mortimer's there, and he's looking at the laptop, what happens next?

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  He grabs a bottle of wine, which is right next to him, throws it into a picture on the wall, which has twenty-five Yakuza in jock straps with tattoos, and then, I'm having a bit of recency primacy here, and then after that...

• 28:47Tim Ferriss?

  I wanna say there are two lambs in a hammock.

• 28:51Ed Cooke?

  That's correct, yeah.

• 28:52Tim Ferriss?

  And I don't recall what they're eating, yeah, that's what they're eating cheese, if I remember correctly. And then, uh, then jumping out of the hammock to a, uh, I believe it's piano after that. There's a gentleman playing Chopin and chopping away at the keyboard, which was a very clever view to use the C H twice, that helped. Uh, and then, um, uh, then from there, we, we, we get to a swing, which has, is covered in pink roses. And oddly enough, has a model of a rhesus monkey hanging at the very top of it. Uh, and when Mortimer jumps off the swing, he lands on a kitchen table where there are four memorized employees just trying to go about their business.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very disruptive, quite obviously. Uh, and there is, uh, then next to them, a... This is where I got tripped up a little bit. Um, the, the auger on the stove top, I don't know what an auger is.

• 29:51Ed Cooke?

  Uh, so this is this fantastic.

• 29:53Tim Ferriss?

  But there's a pot on top of whatever an auger is with spoons in it. And then that's the, uh, the curtain falls and that's the end of the Mortimer shows, I remember it.

• 30:03Ed Cooke?

  That's so, so well done, Tim. So, yeah. Uh, and just to sort of articulate what you've done there, so you've gone laptop, bottle of wine, Yakuza, twenty-five of them, jock straps. So we're up to about six items, hammock, lambs, cheese, piano, Chopin, chopping, swing, pink roses, rhesus. Jumping off, landing, kitchen table, memorized employees, auger, even though you didn't know what an auger was, it is, by the way, um, this mother marvelous kind of European oven. Which is basically a, um, a one-ton block of iron, permanently heated, um, which acts as central heating and as a cooking mechanism. Um, which is, I mean, on top of that, there was a pot with spoons. It says, you know, it's twenty things you've correctly remembered in sequence there.

• 30:47Ed Cooke?

  Just really by dint of understanding human language, which you have successfully recounted in order. Um, and for that, the, uh, the narrative helps, but it just kind of gives, gives one an insight into how these aren't, um, in the same way that say, for instance, firing an arrow through a, um, a blackbird, you know, which is flying through the sky is like... A skill you almost have to learn, you know, on the on the top of basic motor skills, but you have to learn it very, very specifically. These sort of memory techniques draw from quite fundamental cognitive capacities. They're quite, you know, it's quite, um. It's quite basic and, you know, I do this other thing where I I kind of I do these these called memory walks.

• 31:28Ed Cooke?

  Where you just get a bunch of random pedestrians, gather them together and say, okay, we're gonna learn whatever, you know, the US presidents, the first. Pharaohs of Egypt, whatever have you, and you just wander around a town for about an hour and you're like, oh, imagine, you know. George Washington there. I don't know who George Washington is. I'm English. Okay, but imagine jaws. The shark washing himself tons. So they go, okay, very good. They imagine that in the window over there. And you can wander around and with no prior training whatsoever, you can sort of. Unlock is too strong a word. You can just um make use of. The fairly phenomenal underlying kind of cognitive capacities that you have at your disposal all the time. So. So it's it's it's not a kind of elusive geek skill fundamentally.

• 32:11Ed Cooke?

  It's it's basically just a kind of cunning use of what the human brain does best, namely process real meaning. Imagine interesting things happening in space and um and kind of integrate narratives.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know. I it's it's something that I feel like, uh, and this this actually touches on um. A sort of a deeper, uh. I wouldn't say insecurity, but a conflict that I have, an inner conflict that I'm hoping you can help me resolve. Um, very, uh, I'm very, I'm very indecisive about my sexuality. No, that's not it. Um, I wanted to, uh, sexually ambiguous. It's caused me a lot of strife. Uh, no, that's that's also not it. The the question is related to utility of highly refining certain. Memory capabilities. So I I when I was in, when I was in college, I read. Uh, a number of books, uh, including, I think it's just called.

• 33:08Tim Ferriss?

  Your memory and how to improve it. It's like the most generic. I think that's it, Higby. Uh, most generic title imaginable for something that talks about vivid imagery.

• 33:19Tim Ferriss?

  But I remember becoming very fascinated by memorizing numbers. And I might be getting the terminology wrong, please correct me if I am. But the sort of number consonant system where you're converting the numbers into consonants, you convert those into words, into images, and that allows you to memorize long strings of digits. And I would place these images around typically my surroundings. And I think that might have been a weakness in my method. I would always use wherever I happened to be as opposed to a predetermined route. The only benefit to that method is that when I would play this game with people and I would typically have them pull out a five, a single, and a $20 bill.

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd have them pull out bills of different denominations and I'd memorize the serial numbers on those different bills.

• 34:11Ed Cooke?

  Let me show you the center of the party, Tim.

• 34:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. It was, I wasn't fast enough to make it really exciting. I was like, okay, cool, give me five minutes. And they're like, what? Okay, this is really boring. But what was really fun about it is I would memorize these numbers. They would, they'd be like, oh, wow, that's amazing. And then I'd do them backwards. Oh, my God, that's amazing. And then, but it only took really a week or two of practice to get to that point. And I'm so confident that almost anyone can do that. What was fun about having the loci, I mean, the locations, dependent on where I was sitting at the time, is that very often I could bump into that person a week later and say, hey, you still have that five or that single or that 20? I can give you the serial number.

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I could remember it because I had so many distinct locations, which was kind of a fun trick. But it took a decent amount of effort to get good at that. And what I'm wondering is, do you find that there are any particular mental exercises that have a high degree of carryover to other areas or that have more utility than others? Because there's so many different kind of party tricks that you could develop or competitive capabilities. If you had to pick one that you think people would get the most out of, is that even possible? Is that a good question? But I think about this because it does take time to sort of, for me, to maintain a high degree of proficiency with these things.

• 35:39Ed Cooke?

  Right. I think the, I mean...

• 35:44Ed Cooke?

  I wouldn't necessarily recommend to, you know, anybody with a rounded social life to get too deep into the the number memorization stuff, but I mean, for for me, um, the the interest in memory techniques kind of um is, I guess, you know, emerges out of a much more general um interesting consciousness and sort of um, yeah, the um, the curiosities of having a mind of the character that we have. And um, to the question, um, you know, what is the most generalizable, useful um, concept, not maybe requiring practice, that

• 36:28Ed Cooke?

  one can draw out of um, the the theory and sort of history of memory techniques, I think I'd give two answers. And the first is, um, you remember things which ignite your imagination. Um, and we all know this in our hearts, you know, you know, if you're really interested in soccer or football, as we call it here, you know, you might be a a a pathetic kid at school, but you might be able to remember something like, you know, if you actually added it up, twelve thousand distinct football results, the equivalent of a kind of medical degree, uh, in terms of scale of information, it's because you're interested. And so, um, I think a lot of people um are kind of embarrassed about um the characteristics of their mind,

• 37:12Ed Cooke?

  that, you know, about the things that they have a greater tendency to remember, uh, the things which they feel they need to do to really wrap their mind around a topic. And so the the first thing would just be like, the most, um, the things which, um, you find stimulating and interesting, other things you'll remember, and don't censor yourself in finding what those things are and allowing yourself to kind of uh experience information in that way. Um, and so I'll I'll try and make that concrete, you know, um, I think that um, a lot of people will be reading some nonfiction book about economics, and it will sort of ignite in the back of their mind the idea that this is actually a bit like their friend Al, um, and how he uh, how he beheld. behaves with with their mate Dan.

• 37:55Ed Cooke?

  Um. But it's actually officially about, you know, US-China relations. And, you know, that metaphor, that that way of comprehending things, that very kind of personal, perhaps trivial. Um. Manner of comprehending things through the filter of one's own experience. Gets suppressed, leading to kind of boredom and um. A a a lack of emotional engagement with the subject matter.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 38:18Ed Cooke?

  And so, you know, uh, yeah. Just to say it succinctly, like, just just back wherever your mind needs to go and endorse it. And ignite interest through kind of imagination would be one thing. God, that's a very uns succinct piece of advice. Uh. Second thing is more succinct, uh, which is just that, um. When two things are in the same place, either in your mind or on a diagram or um. In a semantic space, you they will get confused with each other. Um. And and I think the genius of the spatial techniques. Is the genius of having different contexts for different thoughts. And you touched upon this, actually. With um with your own um adventures with five and ten dollar bills.

• 39:01Ed Cooke?

  Which is that where thoughts, where experiences and thoughts are separated. Um. They stand alone, they don't interfere, and they can um, they can persist through time. But where they are um sort of spatially connected in, you know, actual experience. Or um or spatially connected kind of within the mind. So where um. Um. Where where two concepts just feel very, very similar and you kind of. When you're thinking about them, you're kind of thinking about them in the same way, they will tend to fuse with each other. And then fail to be distinct entities in their own right. So just literally separating stuff out in space is incredible. As a general cognitive tip for brainstorming, for resolving arguments, for clarifying emotions in a relationship.

• 39:46Ed Cooke?

  To, you know, anything. And, uh, you know, because, uh. Because of this, I I I discovered some quite interesting thing about how to design house parties. Um, so you know, I used to have these um, these moments where, you know, you have an incredible house party. Talk to twenty five really interesting people. It would be, you know, super thing. At the time, you're just flush with happiness. And then the next day, the whole thing would be in your mind, it would just be a kind of a blur. You'd just be like, yeah, I I recall being in the kitchen and there were some people there and we chatted about stuff. But but because all those kind of memories are on top of each other, because of the spatial constraints of a house party, you don't really remember all the things which happened. And if you can sort of take a house party, and this is true of any kind of experience, it could be true of um,

• 40:32Ed Cooke?

  an evening out with friends, it could be true with a, it's obviously true of road trips, um, it could be true even of um, of of a friendship or a romance or anything else. If things are kind of spread out through space, if if each kind of context or experience has its own place, then they can all live by themselves and you just get a much richer level of kind of autobiographic memory. Um, and so with with house parties specifically, I kind of recommend um, always having three or four phases to a house party. Uh, preferably with a different style, a different kind of music, um, a different fundamental focus, spatially. Um, and narrativize the transitions between them. So rather than just being like,

• 41:14Ed Cooke?

  there's a splurge of a house party and everyone's just getting drunk and trying to chat each other up. Instead, you have a kind of a phase where um, you're being quite posh and drinking champagne and listening to um, you know, listening to French music. And then um, a bunch of people arrive and you're like, okay, we're now gonna eat. And once more, we're gonna eat on one leg. And so you have a bunch of time hopping around, chewing on reindeer or whatever it is. And then uh, up onto the roof, it's a rave and you've got a different thing. And so by by creating a kind of artificial structure, you end up with um, You end up with much richer experience.

• 41:52Ed Cooke?

  Um, and yeah, so that would be, let's summarize it, Tim. Two pieces of advice are like, um, make stuff vivid and personally interesting and don't censor yourself. And then if you are relating to anything, it could be learning or even just personal experience. Um, find individual spaces for each thing. Um, because then they'll survive by themselves and not just kind of merge into the, um, into the kind of fog of similarity.

• 42:20Tim Ferriss?

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

• 43:00Tim Ferriss?

  Or maybe it's just getting a better understanding of your own subjectivity, but, uh, I wanted, I wanted to kind of dissect.

• 43:06Ed Cooke?

  Find a challenge, yeah.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to just unpack that a little bit. So how would, how do you think about clarifying feelings in a relationship?

• 43:16Ed Cooke?

  It's actually quite funny because, um, my girlfriend's called Clara and your accent does sound clarifying.

• 43:24Ed Cooke?

  I was like, I think about clarifying my relationship, my relationship with Clara. I'm not sure there's much more I can do, but, um, but anyway, so, um, I mean, I'm definitely not, Tim, a, uh, relationship guru, but I mean, I, I'm happy to freestyle on this subject because I think it is fascinating and is a lot of, it's a big source of pain. And you know, and it's also, and it's not just romantic relationships. It's also, um, you know, creative and personal relationships and relationships with friends. And, um, and, uh, you know, I've, uh, I've suddenly sort of, um, thought about this a bunch because one of the surprising features of adult life alongside like, um, Not being competent, as you always assume you're gonna become competent, whatever.

• 44:09Ed Cooke?

  And um, and the fact that sort of um, that you are actually gonna become an adult, which is kind of, you know, obviously when you're eighteen, you know, it's a pretty abstract thing. And you kind of, you know, aging is a kind of comic um, encounter with something you can conceptually deny with certain futility. But anyhow, so relationships would be the other thing where you kind of, um, where when you're looking at a person, you're, in some sense, you're experiencing the entire, or at least, um, that person is the focus of, and the undifferentiated focus of a whole like incredibly complex um, tissue of fundamentally distinct,

• 44:54Ed Cooke?

  you know, emotions and judgments and attitudes. Um, and so, you know, you find yourself in a relationship, you know, in an argument, say, and you're like, well, um, and you basically, you you come from an emotion, you come from emotion, which is like, you probably don't perceive yourself and you're thinking like, I don't um, feel very happy about what's going on, sort of thing. Um, and the tendency is to map that against basically whatever springs into your mind. Um, or whatever the person is, is telling you, or what the situation is. Uh, and so, you know, this is why, like, someone's late to a restaurant, and someone can get absolutely mental about it. And of course, it's got nothing to do with being late to a restaurant, it's

• 45:36Ed Cooke?

  part of a whole load of other stuff, which is not, not directly the same thing. Um, and so, yeah, so for instance, I'll I'll narrate um, an, an argument that, that I have had, which turned out to be um, amazingly stupid. Um, actually, I'm not sure, now I actually think about what this argument was about. I'm not sure your timorous readers really wanna, listeners, so uh, Oh, no, no, this is good, I wanna hear about it. So, um, so I had a, um, you're gonna have to cut this out of the final recording, so I'm just gonna have to pause and just sort of,

• 46:15Ed Cooke?

  Jumping to another topic, one of the fascinating things about language is that when you begin a sentence, even if you sort of have a intimation of how the sentence is gonna end up, you've actually got no knowledge of where, what the sentence, particular formulation is gonna be. So as you initiate a sentence, you have kind of like, oh, something interesting to be said with a particular kind of internal mental urge. And the words begin to come out and you kind of shepherd it in a slightly chaotic fashion to the end of the piece of meaning you had implicitly wanted to emit at the beginning of the sentence, but which is not like consciously before your eyes at the beginning. It just kind of, it's like a seed which becomes a tree. The seed contains the tree, but the seed doesn't look like the tree, whatever. Well, a similar thing with anecdotes.

• 47:00Ed Cooke?

  You know, I think, oh, this is a really good anecdote. Best tell Tim about this anecdote. And then, actually, the anecdote is not actually before your eyes. And so I have to take a quick time out just to see where this anecdote is actually gonna end up.

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  No problem.

• 47:18Tim Ferriss?

  I can give you, if you'd like, a respite or a pause. I can ask a few other, and I might forget to come back to it, so we can also do that. But I would like to come back to it, but I could hit you with a couple of rapid fire questions, if that would take the pressure off. Okay. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind? And why?

• 47:44Ed Cooke?

  So I think of the German poet Goethe, who, and so, actually, this is a good topic. And I am, by the way, very happy to return to the previous one because they're both interesting. But I'm quite suspicious of...

• 48:08Ed Cooke?

  The concept of merit. So like, it seems to be like one of the guiding, if you like, philosophical assumptions of, you know, and I think actually especially like Western American Californian culture, that merit is the correct thing to drive outcomes in humans' lives. So, you know, if you try hard and, you know, work your balls off and you're inherently really talented and you're not benefiting from saying, you know, inherited wealth or whatever, then the success and happiness and whatever else which might supposedly emerge from that is justified. And, and in fact, Tim, you know, you, you know, you write books in some sense and, you know,

• 48:52Ed Cooke?

  and you're, you're interested and you develop the concept of improving as a person, of, of finding kind of powers and talents and possibilities within yourself. And this is kind of inherently attractive idea, right? And it's very difficult on the face of it to say, well, actually, you know, there's a problem with this. But I'm not saying, not saying there is, but, but, you know, merit is kind of a fundamental assumption of, of goodness. And the merit is associated with effort? I guess I just want to define. Well, so I think the noble concept of merit is associated with effort. So it's like, if you do something really incredible and you tried really hard, that, that success is something you deserve.

• 49:37Ed Cooke?

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

• 50:16Ed Cooke?

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

• 50:57Ed Cooke?

  artistic expression and, um, other things which aren't kind of commercially valued. Um, and therefore aren't really culturally valued, except in extreme cases. Um, who are, you know, are earning like seven pounds an hour working in a cafe. Um, they have a mental world and range of learning and sophistication of perspective, you know, which is enormously rich and like obviously comparable with, and in most cases, in many cases, like, you know, superior to, according to a different perspective, someone who's like really good at coding and commands two hundred thousand dollars a year and has high status and so on and so forth. Um, and, you know, in that case, there's a kind of

• 51:37Ed Cooke?

  a, a kind of capitalistic, I guess, reason for ascribing merits to one person over, over another. Um, but, you know, you change the perspective even slightly and, um, the merit flips completely. And so the, the, the whole kind of concept of merit, um, does depend on these kind of background thoughts about, about what is valuable, which is kind of often problematic.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  How would you flip the, how would you flip the perspective with the artistic barista versus decoder?

• 52:06Ed Cooke?

  Also, one, one example, one different paradigm would be like, um, towards richness of experience. So, um, which, um, you know, which people's mental lives would?

• 52:20Ed Cooke?

  Make for a better novel.

• 52:24Ed Cooke?

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

• 53:09Ed Cooke?

  really exist. And they, they have no real influence on, you know, um, A, changes in behaviour, but B, you know, what as a society or culture we find easy to admire. So how did, how did Gutta make you think of merit?

• 53:27Ed Cooke?

  Just like, Jesus, man, I'm just asking a simple question. You've got a yattering on, sort of, sort of like, half-baked, left-wing nonsense. Okay, uh, well, Gutta was just like, uh... I know you, I know you hate Ayn Rand, it's fine. What do you think of Gutta? No, no. So Gutta, um, so Gutta's really cool. So he's like, um, at the age of 25, he, um, you know, a, a, as a teenager, he's sort of, um, falling in love the entire time and writing poetry to his friends and so on. At the age of 25, he, uh, writes a, um, novel, which kind of, uh, is, you know, extraordinary brilliance, called The Troubles of Young Verta. It's this wonderful, uh, story of a young man who, um...

• 54:11Ed Cooke?

  Who falls in love and it doesn't really work out so well. And as an aside, Goethe wrote this book by locking himself in a hotel room for three months, imagining his five best friends on different chairs and then discussing with his imaginary friends different possibilities, a plot and so on and so forth.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 54:31Ed Cooke?

  Which is an example, by the way, of that spatial separation I was talking about. Which is to say that in one's own mind, when it's somehow kind of inherently boxed in and constricted. And by like imagining in different spatial locations, different perspectives. And then kind of iterating an idea or or um or a novel in this case. Through those perspectives, he was able to kind of give himself five perspectives, separate it out. And and give himself a kind of multi-dimensional playground for creating the work of art, which by the way is an awesome creative technique. Anyhow, so he does that and then he starts writing, you know, the best poetry. He's already the best pro stylist in the history of the German language. And then um there's this like, Germany at that time was kind of broken, lots of little kingdoms.

• 55:15Ed Cooke?

  He's he got appointed in the Weimar Republic as a kind of poet in residence. But then just got really interested in those other stuff. So he started like redirecting the construction of the canal system and doing various other stuff and um and doing lots of kind of inventive things. And so then he gets into um um basically administrate administering uh human affairs. And he becomes incredibly good at that. And then at the age of thirty nine, um he basically falls in love for the first time truly. Uh or maybe that was something before, but anyhow, he just disappears one day. He's like, he's at this very prestigious, such an important position. He's kind of like the mayor of Weimar effectively. Uh and then he just pisses off to Italy, just leaving a small note.

• 55:57Ed Cooke?

  And then um basically runs around, you know, falls in love with lots of beautiful people. Writes some of the best sort of sexual erotic poetry ever written. Meanwhile, he's becoming crazy, you know, it comes back, becomes incredibly interested in um in Newton's theory of physics, which he thinks is appalling and like doesn't capture the mystery and beauty of colour at all. So he writes a theory of colour, um which is still like um. Uh, an amazing fount of incredible goodness for philosophers and stuff about the phenomenology of colour perception and how shade and context and meaning influenced the character of colour. Uh, and then meanwhile, he's writing Faust, you know, famous play, is the kind of greatest

• 56:42Ed Cooke?

  work, and he kind of completes that in his fifties, but but hasn't lost energy at all and goes through like three or four totally different styles of poetry. Um, you know, and by the time he dies, the age of eighty two ish, he um has become really interested in eastern culture. And and did I forget to mention that he he he's got this deep aesthetic vision of um of science and our relationship to nature and comes up with basically what's a theory of evolution. Um, and and and like studies plants and human and and he, there's this particular thing there, which uh at the time, a justification for humans differences from the animals, which I think was called the intermaximillary bone, some random bone in your jaw.

• 57:25Ed Cooke?

  And, you know, it's amazing how we try and distinguish ourselves, you know, a personable thumbs, language, humour, there's, you know, consciousness, intelligence, uh, and at that point, it was the intermaximillary bone. And he actually did some dissections of animals and young humans to show that this bone was present in both, it fuses later in life, and therefore is not the basis, you know, and so therefore it can be missed, but but humans and animals are fundamentally the same. And he talks about plants and and and the similarity of plant, um, the kind of efflorescence of a flower with the way the human cranium um kind of bends around and links up with itself. And so he's kind of, he's just cool, he's like expressive, he's incredibly independent.

• 58:09Ed Cooke?

  When Napoleon invades, um, I think he was living in Frankfurt at the time, when Napoleon invades Frankfurt, everyone else is like sheltering in their houses, and he was wandering the fields looking for evidence about the colour pink for his theory of colours. It's totally kind of transcending the local context. Um, and anyway, so he's just interested in all this stuff, he's um. Passionate and intuitive, um, he is a genius, which helps. Um, but he produces a kind of a body of work and a set of perspectives. Which um, which is just fundamentally life-affirming. And in a way, which kind of carries through the ages.

• 58:51Ed Cooke?

  And so like, I actually got into Goethe, I went, I was on my, on my get, yeah, I was travelling around at the age of eighteen, the world, which is what people in England do. And between school, high school and university. And um, in my coat, I just had Goethe's aphorisms, his short little thoughts in my pocket. And so I read and reread and reread this book. It's actually had quite a fundamental perspective on my life. Cause these are his like little snippets of wisdom on almost any imaginable topic. Um, and all of them are brilliant, you know, it's things like, the company of women is schooling in good manners. Or, oldness has genius power and magic, or, you know. Uh, and then there were ones you don't remember in um, in um, their precise form.

• 59:34Ed Cooke?

  But which nonetheless act as little microfilters for interpreting reality. Um, and uh, anyway, so they say he's had kind of a big influence on me. I mean, one of his quotes actually is like, uh, something along the lines of, there is nothing so depressing as um, someone who is heroic, um, being praised by somebody who isn't. Because when we praise people, we put ourselves on a level with them. Um, and so, so I was actually just trying to think of like a quote which related to this situation. And so here I am praising Goethe. And actually, as I'm describing Goethe, I'm kind of channeling a bit of his general awesomeness. I'm feeling a bit better about myself.

• 1:00:15Ed Cooke?

  And uh, yeah, anyways, so anyways, uh, and by the way, just as a general concept. That, that phenomenon of how a memory can influence perception. Is the fundamental reason why I think it's still worth knowing things, even though we can look them up. Because um.

• 1:00:35Ed Cooke?

  By looking everything up, we give away and divest of the kind of central flow of our consciousness, genuine um richness, you know, because it's by having, you know, it's by being able to recognize the difference between twenty different birds, that you don't just perceive a bird, you perceive, ah, you know, a particular variety of bird, and what on earth is it doing round here at this time of year? It must be lost, perhaps the migration pattern's been fucked up by global warming, whatever. It turns like pure data into connection with a meaningful world, and that's kind of what memory does. And um and so and that would be kind of my general justification for for for remembering things.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  No, I like that. Uh, the, this is something that I I also grapple with just as as I strive to be the master of this tool that is technology and not the tool of the master of the technology. The, you mentioned two things about gutta that I wanted to dig into a little bit. You mentioned

• 1:01:39Tim Ferriss?

  passion and intuition, and you can revise that, but those are two of the characteristics of gutta that you that you pulled out. And one of the reasons that I I reached out to you very much at the eleventh hour yesterday to see if you wanted to to chat and catch up and just record it, because I thought it'd be fun for people to listen to, is that I've been having a bit of a tough time with medical issues, like Lyme disease and other things, and have felt a little a little down, in a bit of a slump, and I find that you are always, you always strike me as very, and this could be an illusion, so feel free to disabuse me of this notion, but you know, very excited, very passionate, very uh energized, and I'm I'm wondering

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  If that is something that you feel you've you've you've always had intrinsically, or if it's something you've developed, and if if the latter, and maybe it's a combination, you know, how do you strive to to encourage that type of state? Um, you know, what are what are the things that contribute to your better moments? Those are a lot of fucking questions in one, but I don't know. I don't know. I don't have alcohol as an excuse, but.

• 1:02:53Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, no, I I do for for my slowing nonsense at this end of this cup call. But, um, well, first of all, sorry to hear about the the medical stuff and the dip of um, dip of enthusiasm. That's um, undoubtedly tough. And um, second thing, um, no, I'm not always really happy about stuff. I mean, I it's funny, like, doing a company has been um, an amazing journey of full of just like the highest highs and the most like execrable horrifying lows. You know, uh, you know, because it's sort of, uh, it's, you know, I guess it's just life really, but um, everything, you know, you start a company, everything turns, starts out, you know, like, oh, this is going to be absolutely incredible, you know, do something

• 1:03:37Ed Cooke?

  amazing, everyone's going to love it, and it's all going to be beautiful, sort of thing. And then um, and then it turns out to be just like a much more complex human process than that. And you have um, you know, you have breakdowns in relationships with people you love, and you have um, decisions you make where you subsequently realize that they were the wrong decision and it caused a lot of people's pain. And you have um, successes which are wonderful, but which are compromised by the fact that they weren't what they should have been, because, I think, anyway, so, so, I mean,

• 1:04:15Ed Cooke?

  of course, like anybody else, like, I'm um, I'm uh, a uh, you know, I have a access to the full range of of goodness and badness in a human experience, obviously. Um, I I am quite keen on life, though, Tim.

• 1:04:32Ed Cooke?

  Like I do, I do, um. And I, and you can say that, yeah, so I'm, I'm curious. I, I, I don't know where that, I mean, I, cause I mean, I guess I, I am, I suppose it's also that I get my energy from the world and other people. Rather than internally, like I'm, I'm, I'm very kind of um uninterested generally in um. Supposedly scientific assessments of, you know, personality and, and so on and so forth. I, I think the um. The reductive impulse is um demeaning to humans. I'm also probably quite worried about what I discovered if I really looked into it, but um, but um. But I am extrovert and I did read one thing uh in my studies of cognitive science, which struck me as fascinating piece of self-knowledge, which is that.

• 1:05:17Ed Cooke?

  You know, introverted people tend to have a much higher internal level of energy. So that a proactive, interactive in, interaction with their environment isn't so necessary to. Keep them rewarded and interested and for riches. And I am um undoubtedly extroverted, so I absolutely love. And gain huge energy from um interacting with people and, and so on and so forth. Um, and so, so that's, that, that's kind of a personality thing. Um. Regarding um, like, passion, I guess it's um. This kind of might connect with a few interesting issues, but I think that um.

• 1:05:58Ed Cooke?

  That I suppose I'm, I'm, I'm a dick and so I hate doing things which bore me. Wait, did you say you're a dick? Yeah, I mean, as in like, you know, mu- uh, almost everyone in life has to like, you know. S- slop it up and just get on with things, cause things are great, but like I have a kind of quite visceral. Emotional reaction against being bored. Right. And that does um, and that does influence things. Uh. The other thing you touched upon there, which I think is such a good subject, is intuition. Hmm. Because um, the.

• 1:06:37Ed Cooke?

  Process of rationally justifying to yourself your action is incredibly slow, um, full of like grayness and complexity and generally, um, like,

• 1:06:58Ed Cooke?

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

• 1:07:42Ed Cooke?

  you could sort of double question yourself to death on, on most things. And when, you know, when life is really, really good, one isn't like pissing around like going, oh, I really, you know, like, oh, you know, it's, you know, should I turn left or right out of the door today? You know, you, you end up as kind of existential Borden's ass stuck between a million possibilities and never really doing anything.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:05Ed Cooke?

  Whereas when things are going really well, you're just like, this feels right, might be wrong, don't give a shit, let's go. And that is so energetic. Uh, and this is actually something, I mean, I, I've really had a journey in this within the, uh, within memorize. Uh, because, um, because, um, like my intention with it actually isn't at all with, um, with helping people remember more effectively, which is the kind of thing you might do to a computer chip or, you know, you know, it's, that is a, an element in something much more interesting, which is like helping people feel like a genius or helping people love the world they're learning about, or helping people just get pleasure out of their minds and the richness of their consciousness and learning.

• 1:08:50Ed Cooke?

  Um, and, and there's the, uh, one of the things about like, as I think it's probably true in almost any profession with a startup, you've got this thing where you're like, You've got the push and shove between what happens in one month's time and what happens in 12 months' time. And so a lot of the time you're like, wow, yeah, this idea we've had would be absolutely incredible and would make people feel like geniuses. But on the other hand, it's not going to move any metrics for two months and it sounds a bit irresponsible. And whatever. And so in the early days, for instance, I had this idea that what we should, because you know, we're fundamentally like a language learning site. And I had this idea that we should all get on a bus, like a converted double-decker bus, and just go around Europe.

• 1:09:34Ed Cooke?

  You know, a lot of coders, designers, the whole team, and just go on a fucking road trip around Europe. And it would just be incredible. It'd just be the best idea ever, so to think. And, you know, we'd have learned so much about language and it would have been incredibly fun, diverse, interesting experience. And it would have been a wonderful way of getting PR and the rest of it. But on the other hand, and this is where rationality came in, you know, what the hell are you doing? You're supposed to be doing a startup, you're in a bus, you're driving around Europe. Where are you going to sleep? Exactly what function does this have for the product? You know, and so the million other things come in and you're like, well, and so that was, that was an example of where intuition was thwarted by a kind of banal kind of self-recriminating

• 1:10:17Ed Cooke?

  rationality resulting in, I'm almost certain, like, a less interesting product and less fun.

• 1:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  Now, look, 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

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:11:13Tim Ferriss?

  But, in the case of the buts and the business, let's just say, or how do you balance the intuition, which at some, at times can be an irrational exuberance, with the sort of prefrontal cortex calculation?

• 1:11:32Ed Cooke?

  Yeah, well, that's the question. That is the question.

• 1:11:41Tim Ferriss?

  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, whatever, you go to 99designs.com, you describe your project, and then, within a week or less,

• 1:12:23Tim Ferriss?

  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 Workweek 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.