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

It has been appropriate time.

What if I did the opposite?

I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal skeleton.

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. 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 wet 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. Wherever you 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 Vervecki, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

And then you move into philosophical fellowship. It's a thing I've derived from Rand Lahav'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? So that, remember we talked about earlier, internalizing the sage, that 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 Bruber 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 Boober being present. Obviously not literally, but in this sense of there's something about the intersection in the Wi 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.

I would love to try that. Have any of those experiences been so memorable that to this day you remember a specific phrase from a text that helped to catalyze just an extraordinary experience? Are there any that you've seen really light things on fire in an interesting way?

I think one in Spinoza was God is related to the world the way the mind is related to the body.

Ooh, can you say that one more time? I'll have to marinate with that one.

God is related to the world in the same way the mind is related to the body. I forget where that's from. I think it might have been from the imendation of the intellect. I'm not sure.

Next up, Brene Brown, research professor at the University of Houston and author of six number one New York Times bestsellers, including Atlas of the Heart. This interview originally aired in February 2020.

What do you say to the people you meet who are on the third marriage? Their kids don't talk to them. And there are certain things that they have convinced themselves, subconsciously or otherwise, maybe through an abusive upbringing or trauma, whatever it might be, that it is unsafe to feel certain things. And you come in, they've asked for help, but they do not want to open Pandora's box. Right. They do not want someone to drag them into the deep waters of emotions that they've kept under lock and key for so long. How do you help someone like that? What do you suggest to them? Because it does get messy. It's going to get messy before it gets clean, at least in my experience. It's like, oh, you're going to do spring cleaning? Guess what? You got to take all the things that are up on the shelves, all the things in the drawers, all the things that are hanging on coat hangers, and you're going to put them in the middle of the room and it's going to be a mess. It's going to be a fucking mess.

Yeah. You're going to be pissed that you.

Did it, but you can't really get past go without that type of step. So for someone who's listening to this and says, you know what, I buy it, I get it. And yet what do I do? Because I've had on this armor for so long.

So I would say a couple of things. I mean, first thing I always feel like is really important to say is that I'm a researcher and so I'm not a therapist, that would be differentiate me and like, I don't see clients. If I go in and I'm working with ceos and this question comes up all the time, what I would say to people is, Pandora's box is closed right now, but are you under the impression that you're living outside of the box or in the box?

Yeah, I like.

Like you don't want to open Pandora's box because that's strange to me because you're living inside Pandora's box. And I feel like you've asked me to come here to open it up. We're not going to do this process without walking through some deep shit. There's going to be deep, swift water. And if the water is super deep and swift, you need to go through that with a therapist and get that settled before we work in the organizational way. But what I would say to people, what I always say is the same for me, and I'm sure the same for you, that we all grew up and experienced to very varying degrees. Trauma, disappointment, hard stuff, we armored up. And at some point that armor no longer serves us. And so what I think I would say to that person is, how is not talking about this serving you? Like, I've been sober for 23 years. So someone in AA would be like, how's that shit working for you? But I probably would put a softer spin on it than that over black coffee and a cigarette. But I would say that it's not serving anymore. And now the weight of the armor is too heavy. And it's not protecting you, it's keeping you from being seen and known by others. And so this is. I mean, just tell you quintessentially, this is the developmental milestone of midlife from late thirty s to through probably your 60s. This is the question. This is when the universe comes down