#779: In Case You Missed It: October 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/65a89b44701803f6

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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So now I'll do a personal question.
Now it's seen.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscal.
Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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. Feat 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 slash podcast and find all the details there.
Please enjoy.
First up.
John Batiste.
An Academy Award winning and five time Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, and composer.
His new album
Beethoven Blues.
Which showcases Batiste's interpretations of Beethoven's iconic works.
is out now.
You can find John on Instagram and Twitter.
Uh
John Battiste
What other mantras
Can you share?
Oh man, this is deep. You going in. I'm going in. I'm going in. Scuba gear intact.
Damn.

Yeah, you know.
Because I believe in the power of mantras.
Oh you I do in meditation, in repetition.
the ability to
in a sense end up with the mind of no mind.
to cleanse the the palate. I mean, there's so many different ways you can use mantras also.
Which is why this is as deeply
Interesting to me. It can be a concentration practice. It can be sort of an erasing practice.
To regain some equilibrium. There's so many different ways to use
Repetition. Could be drumming too. It doesn't have to be
Could be.
Instrumental.
There are so many different ways.
That you can enter unusual uncommon.
States.
Using repetition. So
I'm very, very interested in this.
Which is why I'm asking. For sure. So
Two of the ones that I I
Not for stage, but just more for crisis that I go to is be still and know, which is from the Bible. Be still and know that I'm God. It is this idea.
That
I'll give you a practice, so
Be still and know.
That I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
That I
Be still and know that.
Be still.
And no.
Be still.
B.
Just this idea.
I've said
With that.
And each phrase has a different meaning.
Even be still and
Then breath.
Uh.
Room Tone
This there's messages in that.
That space.
There's messages in the crevice.
So
I've done that.
And sat in that.
And it's changed my entire perspective on a crisis or
Something that
I felt
Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps
You know
There's so many.
Opportunities for us.
in this life.
to transmutate.
Darkness.
into light or even darkness into just
Into perspective.
Another one is thy will be done.
Which is
One of surrender.
Now
We believe there's a divine power. There's however you name it.
Whatever your relationship to it is.
We've
for the most part had an experience that something
Beyond explanation.
The universe is carrying us
In some way.
Thy will be done.
Is
Trusting that there's a divine logic to it all.
When there's nothing that you can do.
That will be done.
That will be done.
Thy will be done.
Because the belief
Of
This divine logic.
allows for you to understand.
That
There's a path.
And
You are accounted for
In that path.
You are accounted for. So much.
That is allowed.
For you to be the culmination of so many things is
led to you and there will never be another you.
You the only one.
That specificity alone.
Is something that comes to me.
when I'm in that s thy will be done. It's a revelation of so many other things.
Which is also allowing for
The right thing.
to occur and for me to be accepting of it.
Versus
For me to control it without knowledge of what the true right thing is.
So there's so much that you have to cleanse.
yourself of
from believing or from holding on to
that's not actually connected to the best outcome.
But you can't always know that.
Especially in crisis.
And so many parables are always like this this happened. Such good news, maybe. Right. Such and such happened. This is terrible.
Maybe.
It just depends on so many things outside of our sphere of
Knowledge that's
On so many levels can't be known.
When would you be inclined?
To say to yourself.
That last mantra.
When would you apply that in your life?
There's
So many things that happened to us.
With our health.
I talk about
To like a lot of lover.
As
You know she's great. Yeah. Had her on the show.
Yes, and I also borrow a lot of phrases from her.
In particular this idea of
Being between two kingdoms, this idea of the kingdom
of the will.
The kingdom of the sick.
And we all exist.
in this in between space.
And we have a passport for both.
Which is something that
She created this
understanding of that through the way she lives through it.
Where she
gracefully moves through this time.
With such grace.
With such power.
Such clarity.
I think about that.
I think about how
There's a certain
Surrender.
That's required of all of us in times when we deal with health challenges, whether it's us or a loved one.
And you find yourself in moments where there's literally nothing that
you can do to take away
Pain or to take away.
The unknown.
And the anxiety of waiting.
So
That's an opportunity for a great
Amount of growth.
That's an opportunity for
a lesson to be instilled in a way.
That
Almost nothing else that I can think of.
affords you.
The chance for
That will be done. That will be done.
Yeah, this uh coach I worked with for a while, he used to say, This is your pop quiz from the universe.
When something unexpected would pop up.
Let's see it.
J'ai.
Let's see, bruh. You've been rehearsing. This is game time. Let's see how it goes.
Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, Tim.
You know what I'm saying? When you you in that moment.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've had a lot of sympathy for watching you both go through that journey and I can only imagine what it's like. I mean I I have been, of course, and
Most people listening have been in a position where they feel powerless to help or they don't know how to help.
A loved one.
But
I had a lot of sympathy for a challenging road.
And also
Really
Yeah, um
In awe of how much growth both of you have
Exhibited through
The challenges and pain and so on.
In any case, I just wanted to say that.
Oh man. It means a lot to hear that and it feels so much
So much of the time.
As
Hard as it may sound.
It feels like a privilege to go through it.
Together.
And the way that we
Have seen it.
It shifted into
Almost
The orientation of blessing.
And that's not
To say that the difficulties are any easier.
Right.
doesn't change the nature of hard things.
They're hard.
But
There's something
About life.
There's a truth.
There's something about
Going through the fire.
That is
Is so required.
And
Something about suffering.
That is so essential.
This idea that we're
meant to
Run from
Pain.
Or run from difficult
Things.
And find the most
Leisurely
And
Completely
Frictionless.
Existence possible.
It's such a lie.
It's not
Just a lie because it's not possible.
But if it were possible.
That would kill you the most.
It would rob you.
In so many ways. Which is, of course, easy for me to say sitting in this comfortable chair right now. Yes, in the midst of it. It's sometimes hard to see at the same time.
There was uh
An astrophysicist Jen Eleven who was on
the podcast some time ago, and I'm gonna butcher this quote, but it's more the concept for me that has really stuck.
She said something along the lines of I used to look for the underlying path that would help me navigate around obstacles and then I realized there is no underlying path, like the obstacles
Are the path.
Through which
You discover yourself.
Through which you learn.
through which you grow.
Like that is the path.
That's the path. Take those away. That's it. And then you're just
Just a free floating
Essence of
Comfort that's just not the human experience.
Yeah. And also you're talking about blessings. So
I could imagine even an earlier version of me would say, like, Oh come on now. I mean
I suppose that's helpful, but maybe it's delusional and it's overly optimistic, but it's deeper than that. And I think that misses the mark because
Given
a longer time frame, given all the unknowns.
It could be a blessing, it could be a curse, but you can't know which it is over time, and it depends a lot on your perspective. So you might as well choose a blessing.
That is the more enabling.
Perspective.
And
Since you can't know.
Choose the side of the coin that
is most enabling.
It seems to me, at least.
In the abstract, it's easy to say, you know. Taxi runs over my foot. We'll see how I do later today, but
It's that and it's also
You only will know when you are there. You have to go there to know there.
You only know.
What it can be for you.
When you're in the fire.
Everybody can talk about what they would do.
Yeah.
When they are there.
Right.
We can all say.
Man
If that would have happened to me.
I would
You know, Slay the Dragon.
Yeah.
Uh I would, you know, whatever you think you would do.
Most often
is not what you would do.
And that's not because you're not who you think you are.
Is because
There's so many other factors.
You can't know.
And for many things in my life that I think about the things I've learned the most from are
Вона в ембраст
The discomfort?
And realize what I was made of through it.
Let me just sit with that for a second. Yeah.
Next up
Doctor Bruce Grayson.
A leading expert in near death experiences
And the author of
After
A doctor explores what near death experiences reveal.
About life and beyond.
You can learn more about Dr. Grayson.
at BruceGrayson.com
So I I want to
zoom in and out from the
clinical skeptical side to
The hopefully
And I think we'll get to quite a few of these, but examples that could be
corroborated in some fashion. And those may overlap with those that are described as out of body experiences. They might not
And we'll probably
Come back to that term as well.
But could you tell the story of the tell me if this is enough of a cue.
The red MGB.
Yeah, many people.
An India of the Spirits.
See that they
encountered deceased loved ones in the experience.
And that can easily be explained as wishful thinking.
Expectation. You know, you think you're dying.
And you would love to see your grandmother once more, so
She comes to you.
And there's no way to prove or disprove that.
However.
In some cases.
The person having the near death experience.
And capture someone who had died.
But nobody yet knew they had died.
So that can't be dismissed as expectation and wishful thinking.
This is not a new phenomenon. Pliny the Elder wrote about a case like this in the first century A D
But we're hearing about a lot of them now.
About twelve years ago I wrote a paper that had thirty different cases.
From recent years.
Jack was one of those
He had an experience actually it was in South Africa back in the seventies.
And he was a young
Technician at that time.
and had very serious pneumonia.
And he immediately stopped breathing, have to be resuscitated.
So he was admitted to the hospital with a severe pneumonia.
And he had one nurse who was constantly working with him as his primary nurse.
A young
Pretty girl about his age.
He flirt a lot with her when he could.
And one day she told him she's gonna be taking a long weekend off.
And there'd be other nurses.
Substituting for her.
So we
Wish you well and
She went off.
And
Over the weekend while she was gone.
He had another respiratory arrest where he couldn't breathe.
He had to be resuscitated.
And during that time he had a near death experience.
And he told me that
He was in this beautiful pastoral scene.
And there out of the woods came
His nurse, Anita, walking towards him.
And he was stunned because
He was in this different world. What's she doing there?
So we said, you know, what are you doing here?
And she said, You know, Jack.
You can't stay here with me.
I want you to go back.
And I want you to find my parents.
And tell them that I love them very much.
And I'm sorry, I wrecked the red MGB.
He didn't know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods.
And then he wake woke up later.
In his hospital bed.
Now he tells me that
Back in the seventies.
There were very few MGBs in South Africa.
And he had never seen one.
When the first nurse came into his room he started to tell her about his experience.
And seeing his nurse Anita.
She got very upset and ran out of the room.
It turned out that she had taken the weekend off.
To celebrate her twenty first birthday.
And her parents have surprised her with a gift of a red MGB.
She got very excited.
hopped in the car and took off for a test drive.
and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly.
Just a few hours before his near death experience.
I don't see any way you could have known or
wanted or expected her to have.
An accident and die.
There's certainly no way you could have known how she died.
And yet he did.
And we've got lots of other cases like this. They're called
Peaky and Darien cases.
based on a book that was published in the eighteen hundreds.
With cases like these.
Where people encounter
Deceased individuals who were not known.
To be dead.
Yeah, I don't know how to explain those.
Now just to put my skeptics hat on, I could say well.
If I were Jack, was it Jack? Let's just say it's Jack. That would make one hell of a story if there wasn't a third party to
sort of independently verify it with.
But there are other cases and for people listening, we're gonna come back to
Some of the common questions I would say forms of
discussion around these related to possible biological mechanisms or lack thereof. We're going to come back to that in a second. But there are then cases that are
Seemingly characteristically quite different.
And
Perhaps can be.
And I'd be curious to know if this has been done or not, but verified with third parties.
And one that comes to mind that I've heard you discuss is related to the
Surgeon flapping like a bird.
And I was hoping that you could.
Give a description of that.
particular case study. Before we get to that, how many
Near death experiences.
Have you documented
studied or otherwise.
Read about
put into the archives yourself. How many instances would you say?
you have encountered in one way or another. I've got slightly more than a thousand in my database at the University of Virginia.
Where we have validated as much as we can.
that they were in fact close to death and and this is what happened to them.
I've talked to many more people about their near death experience that I haven't included because I wasn't confident that they
really fit the criteria for being in the study.
But it's really much more common than you might think it was.
Because people don't talk about these things.
You mentioned people wanting the publicity of this
That is actually
Maybe.
More true now.
But back in the seventies and eighties.
Nobody wanted to talk about these things.
Yeah, you see me.
If you talk about things you got ridiculed.
You got.
Refer to a psychiatrist.
You were called crazy.
You were shunned by people you knew.
Both materialist and religious folks. They didn't want to hear about these things.
So people did not talk about these events.
And what of this surgeon flapping like a bird?
Yeah.
A fellow Al in his mid fifties.
Who was a van driver.
And he's out on his rounds one day.
Yeah, and he had
Chest pain.
And he knew enough to stop his rounds and drive to the
To the emergency room.
And they did some evaluations and found that he had four arteries to his heart.
That were blocked.
And they wish them today, where is the one for
Uh urgent.
quadruple bypass surgery.
So he's lying on the table.
Fully unconscious.
The drapes over and so forth.
And he tells me that in the middle of the operation
He rose up out of his body, and
And look down.
And so
The surgeons operating.
And he saw the chief surgeon who he hadn't met before.
Flappen his arms like he was trying to fly.
And he demonstrated for me.
At that point I left.
So I thought.
This is obviously a hallucination.
Doctors don't do that.
But he insisted that I
Check with the doctor, he said, This really happened. Ask him.
So he told me lots of other things about his near death experience, but that's the one that
I was able to verify.
So I talked to a surgeon.
Who w actually have been trained in Japan.
And he said.
Well yes, I did do that.
I have a habit.
Of
Letting my assistants start the procedure.
Well I put on my sterble gown and gloves and wash my hands and so forth.
Then I'll go into the operating room and watch them for a while.
'Cause I don't want to risk touching anything with my sterile hands now.
I point things out to them with my elbows.
And it pointed things out.
Just the way
Al was saying he was trying to fly.
I don't know any other doctor that's
Done that. I've been a doctor for more than fifty years now. I've never seen anyone do that.
So it's kind of an idiosyncratic thing.
Uh is there any way.
I'll could have seen that while he was totally anesthetized. He had his heart.
Was open.
I don't think there's any way you could have seen that.
And yet he did.

Next up
Andrew Roberts
Historian and New York Times bestselling author of twenty books.
Including
Napoleon Alife
Churchill walking with destiny.
And most recently.
Conflict.
The evolution of warfare.
From 1945 to Gaza
Co-authored with General David Petreus.
You can find Andrew on Twitter at
At A Roberts.
Underscore.
Andrew
Would you mind speaking to the importance of
Steady nerves or self control in crisis. It seems that that's
Something that recurs.
And
The reason I'm asking about it is
This would be, I suppose, a sub question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also?
But feel free to take that and
Any direction you like.
Both Napoleon and Churchill.
were educated in war.
No, they both went to military colleges.
So as their
level of command grew as they grew older. The
sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men essentially that they were controlling.
increased exponentially.
So they had
the intellectual background.
They had the training as well.
And
As young men in both cases.
They thought a lot about war about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and and so on. They had a
Ecotism.
to look at it in a negative way, but as self confidence to look at it in a positive way.
that gave them the ability to take these
shatteringly important decisions. So I think it's much more nurture than
The nature.
And
No, in both cases as far as they were concerned.
There was a
sort of holy fire.
that they both had. There was a not only in a in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense.
a belief that what they were doing
Was
so good and right and proper and had to be done that they were not kept up a awake at night.
over even the the death of friends. Mm-hmm.
Different friends that they were responsible for.
In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names, or I suppose when using the royal we here, you could bring up other names.
Were there particular philosophers or writers that they uh
found particularly instructive. They
leaned on in some sense that they found solace in, were the particular minds
Well certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive autodidact. He never went to university and so therefore when he was a young Subaltern in India in his early twenties, he he sat down and and read The Greats.
philosophers as well as um
as well as writers and he
was particularly influenced by
Gibbon and Macaulay.
the two great nineteenth century historians, English historians, and that affected his
writing style and of course later his oratorical style, but also his outlook on on life.
philosophical outlook on life. With regard to Napoleon, he was even more literary really, because he also wrote short stories and
Books and and so on.
And so he was very much affected by what
He read again as as a young man and
And in both cases.
It's slightly they were reading so much that it slightly cut them off.
from their um contemporaries. Uh Napoleon, you know, didn't have many friends when he was in his early twenties. And
Churchill when the other people were were, you know, off sleeping in the in the midday heat of India.
His colleagues and comrades.
He'd be sitting there reading, you know.
shopping out and giving them a coolie and so on.
How did Gibbon and McCauley inform his philosophical
Leanings.
They made him into what was called at the time a wig.
We don't have them today, obviously, but they were
In modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives.
who believed in noblesse oblige.
in the importance. N no bless oblige. It's a almost a
medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege, is to work for the greater good of the community, to protect widows and orphans, to it's a sort of like the knightly chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages.
And they very much believed in that, and so did uh Churchill.
Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about Napoleon, I'm embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about
Churchill as well, but
You've described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that?
There are lots of military leaders who can do
A lot of things. But he was the only one that I can think of who could do all of them.
Of course it helps if you're winning and he uh in the last uh three years of his uh of his military career he was losing. But even st
Then
Even when he had far fewer
troops when he was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the eighteen fourteen campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories in seven days.
in the eighteen fourteen campaign, that's two years after the retreat from Moscow.
It's quite extraordinary.
capacity.
And he was able to win
Whether he was advancing or retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the right.
or left flank, or sometimes straight through the centre, as at Austerlitz, he had that
capacity, that that mind for military conquest, but also
Of course the greatness that was required.
completely to revolutionize
French society. People think that the French Revolution
revolutionized society, you know, the clues in the name, as it were. But in fact the long lasting things that actually dragged
France into the nineteenth century, were things like the
Code Napoleon.
which were not a revolutionary um concept, they were a Napoleonic concept.
This may seem like a
A lazy question, but since I'm operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon.
What do you think it was that allowed him to be a decathlete of war?
as it were, being good at all of these different facets. And I think of
how we might analyze different athletes and what
Allows them to
Exercise the capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe
What enabled him to do that where others were unable.
It was inspiration but also perspiration. He really did put in the time.
thinking about it.
and reading about it by it I mean I mean warfare.
And of course you've been educated
in it. He read the key books. There's a guy called the um Comte de Gibert, who in seventeen seventy two wrote a book about
Strategy
and tactics. And he
Thirty years later.
put these into operation.
And so he was able to spot the
sort of best of the best when it came to
Um modern thinking.
And to or in this case thirty year old thinking, in fact, that didn't matter because the weapons of war hadn't changed in in the intervening period. And he was able to put those
of thoughts and ideas into practical use. The classic example being the core system.

And when it called? It's called the core system. It's basically
Sorry.
Uh C O O P S.
And what he did with them was to
create mini armies essentially.
Which were able to march separately, but converge and concentrate for the battle. And so one of your corps would engage the enemy, and then he would use the other corps to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelope the enemy. It was a brilliant concept. And uh actually the Allies didn't start beating.
Napoleon until
they had also adopted the core system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new
Concepts.
And
At the same time.
He had very old fashioned
views about how to excite the men.
And he uh I mean victory obviously is the is the best thing when it comes to exciting courage. Exactly. Not and nothing much works better than that. But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that to appeal to the soul.
was the way to electrify.
The men.
And so he was able to do that. And some people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general, being the classic example, who won the Battle of Waterloo against him, who wasn't interested in it.
Electrifying the soul of the men at all. He he rather despised his ordinary soldiers. But nonetheless, you're talking about Wellington, or the Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his uh about his own soldiers. And he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat, but they loved him because
he cared about how many of them died in battle, you know, and he never lost the battle as as well, which is a very um useful thing in a commander, needless to say, but he didn't go out. He th he would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men.
Whereas
Hm.
his choice of hat and his grey coat and his way of uh taking off medal his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders of the day, his proclamations
Before the Battle of the Pyramids in seventeen ninety nine, he said, Forty centuries look down upon you.
This is an extraordinary thing for a sold, you know, in Egypt, far away from home. He looks up at the pyramids and thinks yeah, I'm he's placing the events of that day in the long historical
Wrap it up.
And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. You in about ten percent of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in nineteen forty, there's some reference to history or the past.
he too would summon up the idea that, yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British Commonwealth are on their own,
And this of course was in the period before America and Russia are in the war. But we've been in terrible straits before look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral Nelson.
And so on. And we came through those and one.
brought up the first world war a lot.
So yes, he too
drew on history, and people knew that because he'd written history books and written
Biographies.
including the biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marbury, who was with Wellington the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his view of history.

And now
An excerpt from Tim's Solo Podcast Episode
Productivity tactics
Two approaches I personally use to reset
Get unstuck.
And focus on the right things.
Two years ago.
A creature died in the walls of my home. It was disgusting. Now to be precise.
It gave up the ghosts in the heating system, so the death fumes were conveniently.
pushed directly into my bedroom.
My ex girlfriend and I discovered this around eleven PM as we talked.
Into bed hoping for a good night's sleep.
We could turn off the heat.
And freeze. That was one option. Or we could bathe in the stench of what I assumed was a raccoon carcass.
And the whole thing.
Made my eyes itch.
It was horrible.
I imagined it downing its last meal, pig entrails, moldy socks.
fermented beans, who knows, before defiantly jamming its bloated body into my H vac. Don't worry, we are getting to some kind of lesson here.
But the kamikaze raccoon was just the first surprise guest. The opening act in short order.
My dog then got horribly sick, unrelated to raccoon.
Overdue paperwork started piling up.
popping out of nowhere and onboarding a bunch of new contractors ran into trouble.
Then I pulled out of a parking spot and scraped the entire side of my car and the car next to me.
Later that same afternoon, all these Christmas presents I had ordered somehow had run out of stock and were auto canceled, so I was sent scrambling. And on and on it went, more and more clowns.
piling into the clown car.
Fore should show
That lasted.
Three to four weeks. It was just a fifteen car pile up of nonsense.
There are the rare times when I feel like I'm in the zone. Those are great. Those are fantastic.
Then there are times when I ask myself why
How in holy hell have I become the janitor of a mountain of bullshit? That happens more than you might think.
Put it another way.
Sometimes you're the boxer and sometimes you are the punching bag. We all get our turn as the punching bag. Doesn't matter who you are. As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter.
How successful you become
You've always grabbed a number at the deli counter of
Just wait, eventually you're going to get your ass kicked by the universe.
Now during these periods of fire fighting, let's just call it when stuff is popping up, this whack a mole, I get fidgety and frustrated.
I feel like I'm treading water.
And patience where is very thin has never been my strong suit. That's true, especially with myself.
And my instinct is to try to fix things as quickly as possible.
And that's all well and good.
But I've realized that from a place of what the fuck
I often rush and create more problems.
This is particularly bad.
Catastrophic sometimes when I try to sprint immediately upon waking up.
The mantra that has saved me.
and save me during that three to four week period I mentioned was very simple and it's this.
Make before you manage.
Make before you manage. That's it.
What this means is each morning before plugging holes, fixing things, calling vets, answering text messages.
Delegating or yanking out dead raccoons.
Answering a million text messages.
This mantra was a reminder to make something.
You should read Paul Graham's essays and listen to Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art commencement speech for more on all of this.
But back to any given day and make before you manage.
Even the most time sensitive items can usually wait 60 minutes.
And by make something, I mean anything. It could be anything at all.
You just need to feel like you've pushed a millimeter ahead in some creative direction.
For me personally, even a ninety second video of calligraphy
could set a better emotional tone for the entire day.
Helping me to be more calm.
as I handle problems, as I execute all the rest of the stuff later. Or maybe I attempt to jump start my writing with an Instagram caption.
Right, or an email to a friend to take the pressure off.
It's practically nothing, but it's enough.
Even token efforts allow me to reassure myself with
Hey pal.
Don't worry, you did produce something today.
And the psychological difference between zero acts of creation and one act of creation, no matter how small
is really impossible to overstate.
It's binary.
Right. Zero to a little bit.
Those are two different worlds. If you're lucky, sometimes that one idea, that one sentence, or one shitty first draft can turn into something bigger. And that happens when you catch the wave. But the point is to be able to say to yourself,
Even for five minutes,
Hark, I am a creator.
Not just a janitor of bullshit.
Here's proof that I can and will do more than just manage the minutiae of life.
And uh I think, at least personally, I do need that reinforcement.
We all spend time on the struggle bus. Happens to everybody.
At the very least, this mantra has helped me to find a window seat when it's my turn.
So
As a reminder, when in doubt.
Try it out.
Make
Before you manage.

And now here are the bios for all the guests.
This isn't just any episode this one turned out.
Really, really.
Special.
And I really encourage everybody
To listen to this once.
As audio only if you are
Listening to this without
Any video.
But also go to youtube.com slash Tim Ferris two R's two S to see.
the video. We recorded this episode in the recording studio.
Designed by Jimi Hendrix, where he slept.
The acoustics, the surroundings, everything is gorgeous, and my guest was in the flow. We happened to mesh.
really well together.
And it's one of those episodes that I will remember for many years. My guest, John Batiste.
is a five time Grammy Award winning and Academy Award winning singer, songwriter, and composer.
I met him ages and ages ago.
Back when he was a mere
Incredible, incredible musician, composer, etcetera.
But I've been able to watch him become the Marquis Light's John Battiste and it has been a thrill.
to watch we talk about it all. His eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues, is set for a November fifteenth release.
When we are sitting in Jimi Hendrix's studio, there are pianos.
Guitars, you name it, and we don't just talk.
We walk around and he uses music to answer some of my questions. It's
Phenomenal.

Beethoven Blues.
Marks the first installment in his solo piano series showcasing Batiste's interpretation of Beethoven iconic works.
reimagined, and that is an understatement. You're gonna hear a lot of it in this episode towards the last twenty five percent. So
Buckle up and stick around. Beethoven Blues follows Batiste's studio album World Music Radio, which received five Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year.
As a composer.
He scored Jason Reitman's Saturday Night Now in Theaters. The film depicts the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live's very first broadcast in 1975.
Underscored.
by Batiste blending of jazz, classical, and contemporary elements.
He composed and produced the music live on set, capturing the intensity of the show's debut.
He also appears in the film as Billy Preston.
The show's first musical guest.
And certainly he has lived that out himself. Additionally, Batiste composed and performed music for the Disney Pixar film Soul, for which he won an Academy Award.
for best original score alongside Trent Reznor.
and Atticus Ross. You can find him at John Batiste.com. That's J O N B A T I S T E dot com on Instagram and socials at John Batiste.
And
Boy oh boy.
I love this.
I really think you guys are in for a treat. Stick around, listen to the whole thing, watch it a second time on video.
at youtube.com slash Tim Ferris.

My guest today is Bruyson MD. He is the Chester F. Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and Director Emeritus of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, where he has practiced and taught psychiatry and carried out research since 1995.
He's also a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and his most recent book is After.
A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life.
and beyond. He has studied, documented more than a thousand
Near death experiences.
And what made him appealing to me as a guest with this incredibly
unusual terrain is that he was raised with a secular
what we could call rational materialist worldview.
Today's guest, Andrew Roberts. Andrew Roberts has written twenty books, which have been translated into twenty eight languages and have won thirteen literary prizes. These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, A New History of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny,
George III, the life and reign of Britain's most misunderstood monarch, and most recently, Conflict, the evolution of warfare from nineteen forty five to Gaza, which he coauthored with General David Petraeus. Lord Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. The Bonnie and Tom McCloskey
Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. He is also a member of the House of Lords.
You can find all things Andrew at AndrewHenroberts.net online and he is also on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter at X.com slash A Roberts underscore Andrew.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out.
every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. Kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out,
Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.