#663: In Case You Missed It: February 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out 5 bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world.

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Matthew Walker (1:44)

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

John Vervaeke (1:54)

What if I did the opposite?

Tim Ferriss (2:07)

Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits and so on that you can apply to your own life.

This is a special In-Between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest. And then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blog.com/podcast and find all the details there.

Please enjoy.

SPEAKER_4 (2:57)

First up, John Vervaeke, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

John Vervaeke (3:07)

And then you move into philosophical fellowship. It's a thing I've derived from Randall Have's philosophical contemplative companionship, or I forget what he calls it. He and I have emailed. So what I'm doing is not the same, but it was inspired by him. So it goes something like this.

You pick a philosophical text, and you prime people into this. We're not going to be reading this text in order to get information from it. We're going to be reading this text in order to be transformed by it. We're going to use this text as a way of trying to presence a sage. It's almost like a secular seance, right?

You're going to presence a sage, right? Remember we talked about earlier, internalizing the sage.

You really can't do that unless the presence of the perspectival knowing of the sage is available to you. So what happens is, first of all, you read the text very slowly, and then the speaker will pick out a phrase that he or she thinks conveys it, and then everybody chants it in sequence, and they chant it, and they're trying to convey as much and also resonate with what they're sensing other people are conveying. So it's like jazz, and you do this, and then you move into simple speech. Everybody is allowed to say no more than three sentences about what is being provoked, invoked, and evoked in their interaction with the text. And the task is, I want you to convey as much as you possibly can in as few words as possible.

And so everybody does this, but you can't just do it atomically. You have to pick up on what other people have said when you do your simple speech, and you do that for several rounds. And what happens is people are also asked, try to sense how all of these different perspectives converge back to Spinoza, or Plato, or Brüber, or whoever it is. And then you're doing that, and then you move into extended speech. Everybody's now allowed to give three or four sentences, or a bit more, and open it up. And they can even relate it to some experience that they've had in their life. And then you move into free speech, where people just talk about it. And what happens is people get a sense of the text coming alive, and Spinoza being present, or Brüber being present. Obviously, not literally, but in this sense of there's something about the intersection in the we space that gives them a sense of what was the mind that generated or is the origin of all of this. And you resonate with it, and you pick it up, and it gives you an opportunity to internalize the sage.