YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Cooke

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83
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2014-12-30
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2014-12-30
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  1. “Which is definitely like, I mean, it's probably one of the most incoherent pieces ever published in a philosophy journal, but it's quite good. And yeah, and I'm at Ted Cook on Twitter.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Well, in hackney and non-internets, I hang out, so come to hackney and then get into that. But yeah, I'm Memrise.com is worth a look. We have a website and an app and we're trying to make learning joyful. If you're really into the questions about phenomenology and stuff, about the quality of experience, there's an article which can be found online called Is Trilled Smell Possible”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And so he's quite magic on this subject. And he talks about hallucination as a terrible term for the phenomenon because hallucination implies distortion and unreality, whereas this is hyco-reality, as he describes it. And anyway, so that's well worth read, the joyous cosmology by Alan Wat”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “He wrote an essay called The Joyous Cosmology, which examines in quite fascinating ways a little bit the, I guess what you call the phenomenology of hallucination, where he talks about exactly that. How it's even possible, the perception can become much higher resolution, and what it means that it is possible. And so, you know, because I, for instance, as anyone else, I think, considers like the resolution of my perception to be a function of my perceptual organs and brain. And it's not an easily accessible idea that I could perceive at twice the resolution, basically by paying more attention.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So fascinating Yeah, it's a pleasure to hear really fun. On that point, by the way, just a sort of pile up the reading list, there's Alan Watts, who's quite a kind of cheerful and wide-ranging and amusing kind of 20th century philosopher hallucinogen taker that I think he described himself as a sort of spiritual entertainer.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I was just saying that for anyone who's endured this long, that would be a kind of, I think you're quite a valuable recommendation. It's like drawing a few things together. Next time there's G2B a rainstorm rather than thinking like, oh no, I'm not going to be able to go to Santa Cruz and sun myself or something, think like get one of your best friends, go out in the rain blindfold them and allow them to perceive through the magic of hearing the world in all its mysterious awesomeness via audition.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And there was just no visual connection. But the second thing is kind of like that, he's a kind of theologian, but he has this wonderful reflections on how he came to enjoy the world being blind. And one go-to example is that rain is the best thing for blind people because you can hear the world in three dimensions. Because the patterning of the raindrops on the roofs and the pavement, the lamp posts and the buildings gives you, because of the echo and because of the particular, it gives you a sense of 3D space where most of the time your 3D space only goes like a couple of yards in front of you and otherwise it's just the void. Stuff like that, which kind of cool way games for just enjoying your senses generally.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “By the way, since occasionally you're citing some cool books, there's a book called Touching the Rock by Touching the Rock. I don't know if I can remember the guy's name, but by John something or other, Holt, perhaps, John Holt. But touching the Google it, and it's the story of a guy who goes blind very, very gradually for 20 years and then finally becomes completely blind. And many interesting things about it, one of which is that he says that the difference between having a tiny crack of indeterminate light and nothing was as big as the difference between indeterminate light and fill vision because suddenly he was just in the abyss”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I have occasionally done little games like that. Not to the heroic extent of a mathematician called Seymour Pappet, who trained himself to look through mirrors so the world was up down reversed. Like months at a time, so that it kind of rated itself. But anyway, I have had an experience. When I was had an experience with friends where you walk around town blindfolded, led by another person. And that is so cool. So just get a good friend, so you trust and say, I'm going to be mindful, you're going to be blindfolded, and I'm just going to lead you around town. And that's magic because you can have the experience of perceiving the world not visually but just through sound. Like, I actually can perceive the wealthy sound. And what's more, I perceive it in a different, but in many ways richer fashion.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “our relationships with other people and even situations and aspects of ourselves, which is that when we think about a particular thing, if all the things that evokes in us are only evoked by that thing, we think that is a characteristic of the thing, not of our interaction with the thing or person.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And I'm still of the kind of somewhat smug, completely incoherent opinion that this is actually quite a fundamental insight into the mystery of sensations, which is that we attribute to the cause of the sensation everything which comes with it, emotionally and we kind of project those projectors actually a poor word, but it's an easy one to relate to. We kind of project those onto the surface of the object when in some sense they come from us. It's just that when we look at the object they're there, then you know in a way this kind of goes back to The chats we were having earlier about.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “The connection between movement address with my perceptual organs, I look at the hammock and suddenly it's going, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, look away, it's thesis to there. I look back at it, jing, jing, jing, jing, I look away, it's history that. After like doing that a million times, you wouldn't think that the sound was coming from any other place than the surface of the object.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And then you look at what is a blue object and you experience whatever, the smell of a fresh sea wind or something like that. So arbitrary connections between the things. But the first question was, could you experience those as qualities of the object? And the answer I came up with was basically, well, of course you would because, you know, when I currently look at an orange object, I'm just especially looking at it and then I'm having the experience of orange and I look away and I see having the experience of orange and I look back and I have the experience of orange. And so if that orange was being kind of put into my head by an evil goblin who just gave me the orange feeling every time I looked at the infactor orange hammock which I see in black white, well then I would experience that color as being which the color is in fact a smell or a sound it could be on the object.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “At Ted Cook on Twitter, by the way Anyway, so So, you know, and so the thought experiment came up with was like, let's imagine you You see in black and white. So your basic vision is black and white. And then when you look at what is in fact in reality a green object, you experience a particular smell, say the smell of whatever, leaves.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Because you're like, oh, the class sticks around, it is round. You know, it's a very kind of military connection. But with color, you're like, wow, that orange. I'm just looking at a kind of the blinking light of an orange computer here. And actually, you tune into the orange. It's like, what the hell fucking relationship does that have to atoms bumping around space? It seems like a totally different kind of quality. So anyway, I couldn't tell this anecdote any longer. Sorry, Tim. Sorry, listeners. But if anyone's still here about seven hours. But anyway, so... If anyone”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “That tactile visual substitution system, in a way, describes the difference between touch and vision because it says touch feels totally different, but actually if touch is given the same sensory motor patterns as vision, it begins to feel like vision. So you can experience vision through touch by the patterns of interaction. And so I tried to come up with a theory of how color and smell feel like they do. And my God, they feel mysterious. You know, you smell cinnamon. What connection does that have with reality? You see any color and particularly a beautiful rich color, you know, the azio blue of a morning's sky or green or whatever of a kind of rainforest canopy. And it feels like inherently weird. Like, what is the connection between your experience, this rich intangible emotion in a way, and reality? It's very easy with vision.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And as a result of that, I ended up doing a PhD trying to do a PhD in philosophy and perception where the alpha that year was to consider what the difference between color and smell is and to do that I kind of did”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Like lovely reta poor Barki Rita and he was building devices for the blind to see through touch. So the tactile visuals to stimulation system TVSS basically would take a camera on your glasses and would transform that visual input into basically a highly pixelated sort of 100 by 100 array of vibrating pins hold against your back or your thigh or your leg or wherever. There was a nice surface on your body to touch. And the fascinating thing about this device is if you someone else is holding the camera and you have this, it just feels like random totally patternless scratching. When you are wearing the glasses and you first touch at your skin, it also feels like that.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Well, yeah. So after I give a bit of biography, I'll be as quick as possible here, but I went to study undergraduate Kevin O'Reagan in Paris. And Kevin O'Reagan, I had encountered when I was right up to my final exams at university. I was in this intense period of study, partly because I've been drunk most of the rest of the time, and so I had to really ram it in. And so all these kind of ideas were new in my mind, they're fusing together. And I discovered this paper by this guy, Kevin O'Reagan, which was in behavioral and brain sciences and was called a sensory motor theory of visual perception. And in it he quoted a series of the most wonderful obscure experiments from psychology, which one of which was this tactile visual substitution device created by a guy called Paul Buck E Rita, Bark like the composer Y like and in Spanish.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Devota residence, which means that our brain changes and then the meaning of the stuff in the world is altered. And it's a bit like dancing with somebody. You know, there's input, there's output, but it's the pattern between you, which makes the most sense in the end, which is what's actually happening. And so to wheel that back. The core memory is incredible because it describes a naivety of perception, which you can never get back. You can never perceive the world with such a stupid idea of how perception works, but at the same time, you can never actually experience perception devoid of the concepts we have for what's happening to it. And the second thing is that it's true. That's what it feels like to perceive. And we suppress that. So that's my favorite ton of memory. It actually only became significant later on, but I love it.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Kind of poetic, super cool cigarette smoking French philosopher who writes beautiful prose. And he has this theory of perception where the activity is given back to perception, not because vision goes out spatially, but because perception is this active probing question asking activity involving like a profound resonance between you and the world, which is so far away from neuroscience as it's normally thought of, where it's all like input, processing, representation, experience. This was really much more beautiful, and I'll come back to this in a second, but much more truer experience theory of perception, which is that we're in this kind of dialogue or resonance with the world where our brains and the world”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Psychology, where a lecturer mentioned the theory of an Arabic psychologist and philosopher called, I'm not sure if I can remember his name, but Alhazen, I think his name is, and Alhazen was a guy who in the 12th century or something disproved the theory of exteriorception, which apparently was really popular until like the year 1200, the theory that your eye went out and met the world rather than your eye just sits there passively and receives information. And then the second thing which amplified this memory beyond the family connection and just the preciousness of the virgin perspective on the world was that when I got intensely into the philosophy of perception as an undergraduate, I got into this guy called Maurice Merlo Pontin, who's a”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Of the Confucian. And I remember getting to a point where I was happy to accept that my vision reached out to the halfway point to meet the light in between me and the trees, but I just couldn't even conceive of how perception could be passive. And anyway, I bumped into this thing years later when studying”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “If I was held hostage and someone was about to delete this memory, I would pay if I had them hundreds of thousands of dollars to not delete, because it was a moment in my childhood, maybe I was five, in the garden, looking out at some trees in the distance, and for whatever reason with my dad I was discussing basically visual perception, but seeing. And he was saying we must have been commenting on, I don't know how it began, but he was saying, oh, the light bounces off the trees and goes into your eyes. And I found this incredibly confusing. And I was like, no, no, no, but my eyes go out and touch the trees. That my vision goes out and touches the trees. And he was like, no, no, no, the photons bounce to the tree from the sun, and they enter your eye, and that's how you come up with a picture. And I say, and I remember just intensely the weird...”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “I think I can't think of something which I could honestly report as a causal factor, but I do have a couple of favorite childhood memories, one of which I think is like, it's like, this is memory is something which...”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “With the oh yeah, please watch with R because it's basically a film made out of fragments of insanely quotable bits and bobs. And it's It's intensely funny, incredibly romantic, and kind of like a profound narrative, I guess, about what it's like to have high hopes for life and then discover that it's not quite as easy as you think you can. It's so charming. It's about friendship. So it's a really wonderful film. Anyway, but it's also very...”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “With that. Actually, it's one word with nails. It's the name of a character in this film. So, this is your gateway drug to British humour. What's weird? So it's basically a film about some washed up actors But full of passion, struggling their way on a kind of comedy road trip in their late 20s had sort of”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And so it's quite kind of a great experience. It's a wonderful experience to have, but I think a lot of the people who are in that situation in the school then went off to other schools, you know, a variety of other schools where that didn't exist. And so they ended up being quite all of us ended up in some sense being quite nostalgic at the age of 14. So, just to give you an example, our favorite film as a group in our teenagers was with Nell and I. I don't know if you've seen with Nell and I, but it's a Have you seen the film with Nail and I?”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Well, I think that it was actually quite a magical time and it was. I think that it's quite rare in life to be surrounded by people who challenge you and who like you.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So, my dad was a coder, actually. He refused to teach me to code, by the way, because he thought I should play in the garden, which I still vaguely resent, but I did enjoy playing in the garden. And my mum was a sort of teacher. I guess I did have an interesting education because I was in, we lived near Oxford and I ended up going to a school which had lots of Oxford academics children in it. And I was part of a class, you know, maybe I was quite good at my subjects. I was part of a class where the other people at this class were just sort of this amazingly colorful bunch of precociously intellectual characters. And so I guess I did have a bit of that. I still kind of laugh about the kind of situation that represented. It was in many respects quite unhealthy. Why was that?”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “It's always a bit tricky. You know, I would recommend to your original question, what's a good gateway? I think Monty Python's a great gateway still because you can't help but be delighted by their kind of cheeky enthusiasm even as you're just tuning in to the humor. And then in contemporary things, there's a thing called Alan Partridge, which is sort of written by Armando Yunichi as well, which is the story of a radio DJ from Norfolk who is actually as shadows of David Brent from the office, but in a kind of richer, more amusing fashion. And it is sort of trials and tribulations. So Alan Potrich would be my gateway drug.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Where you see all the lights coming on in the morning. And with each light, you hear the audio of the person screaming about the futility of their existence as the narrator says, this man designs bacon packaging for a living. This person is in charge of Bedford supporters apply. Oh This is the manager of bewitched.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Both like a wicked love of life and an absolute horror at everything which is going on through a kind of completely incoherent, the absurdist humor. So for instance, I don't think a good example, but for instance there was one sketch which involves a guy driving his car really fast where a very, very specific miles per hour, about 157 miles an hour, he enters into a flawless state of perfect meditative perfection where he doesn't have to make any decisions, he just avoids all pedestrians and just disappears, but then has to get back down to zero miles an hour without killing people. Another one is a begins with a cityscape.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Right, you know I mean, I think just the thick of it exist in America, so a kind of American version of it. Well, my Favorite comedian is a guy called Armando Yanucci. So Armando and then Yanuchi is IAN UCI. And he had this show called The Amanda Yunuchi Show, which I think was a failure even on British TV. Month, I'll be put in for a Gary Doe. A terribly charismatic performer. He's just an absolutely brilliant writer and conceiver of comedy. But the Amanda you need to show was this brief, had a brief appearance on British TV and somehow captured the”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “There's something fundamentally embarrassing about stating intentions. And what's so liberating about Kyoto Berger is that that embarrassment doesn't exist. But at the same time, back to Britain, it's this terribly beautiful thing. And I kind of think it's kind of connected a lot to British humour. which is this basic kind of consciousness of the absurdity of trying. Combined with actually still trying”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Thanks, yeah. But yeah, it was kind of comedy in the office, but I think they've lived a bunch in Boston when I did textiles there and as here in America and the thing which was kind of really impresses and amazes me about Americans and which by contrast is different in the British people is that British people are like fundamentally embarrassed about the expression of Intention That it's almost like there's something fundamentally vulgar in British life, I suppose human life. It's like American calling baseball the World Series. But anyway.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “He's got this great crater there, which is like workers of two kinds, moving objects at or near the Earth's surface or telling other people to do so. The first is ill paid and unpleasant, the second is great fun and rather well remunerated. And anyway, that kind of concept of moving objects out on near the Earth's surface, you'd have to update for the present day to moving information at or near the Earth's surface Anyway, in that essay, he's like, well, you know, a kind of classic economic insight, I guess, which is, you know, we can make stuff twice as efficient and work half as much, or we can make stuff twice as efficient and work the same amount and make it clear to me that making stuff twice as efficient and then working the same amount is the correct response. Agreed”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, it's interesting. I think that's a kind of, and I think the question you alluded to is a very interesting one, which is like, Is it because in some sense both you and I are enthusiasts for building? So I joined the last five years of my life obsessively to memorize. And you've produced a wonderful collection of books and amusing and rich perspectives which you've shared with other people. And you've enriched a lot of people's lives, no doubt. And that seems inherently meritorious, right? It seems like that's got to be like a good thing to be doing. To be trying to do something, right? But on the other hand, you know, If nobody was trying to do things, What would that be so bad or if”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “A life which is very humble in a way but quite profound in another where he travels, he works an absolutely minimal amount. He's so clever that he can sort of do like five hours of translation a week and survive, you know, whatever. And, you know, he learns languages and he falls in love with people and he watches amazing music and he has the most incredible network of friends. I mean, I feel he's one of my best friends and he probably feels I'm one of about a hundred because he spends ten hours a day on friendship. We're in the middle of that conversation. I was like, ah, Jesus Christ. I'm just like. I'm just guilty of It's right there. It's something which I could be living if I would only see sort of Working 12 hours a day in a startup”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “So, when I was talking to him about the academy, the Greek ideal of my kind of imaginary possible future existence, he was like, well, you know, why does it need to be in one place? I was like, oh, it's true. It could just be, you know, in the world. And then he was like, why does it need to be with the same group of people? And I was like, oh, it's true. Updating the people is quite good fun. And then he was like, and, you know, why does it have to be in sunshine? Why can't it be in a mixture of things? And I was like, it's true. Like, I quite like rainstorms and, you know, Nordic climates and so on. And, you know, and then, you know, kind of almost went further. Just like, you know, why does it even need to be outside of your life at all? And he lives.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Which, you know, I mean, tricky, you know, because, you know, one's got such an interesting project, you know. I got this wonderful friend called Paul who's like, you know, one of the most intelligent people I've ever met and very anyway, he lives”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “I don't really know. It's really tricky, but I guess another thing is to try and draw this back is to segment a little bit, you know, to make sure there's one day a week where your mobile phone's off and to make sure that with your best friends, you find a time, whatever once every three months to update them on just how stupid reality is and to share that. And that, you know, if you're in a relationship where you kind of the struggle of existence is kind of occluding the parallel magic of what could be happening there, you at least occasionally find the time to do that, you know, whatever. And of course, I suppose the more fundamental suggestion would be to like stop trying so much.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “It's what it is, isn't it? Actually, I had this when I was at school, like occasionally I would lose a debating competition or discover that I was a loser in a more general sense. And I had what you might kind of call in a way like a mind hack, which, you know, I'd be sitting on the loo or something. And I just think about like, oh, everything feels terrible and awful. And it's all, it's all gone to shit sort of thing. And then I'd be like, but if you think about it, the stars are really far away. And then you kind of try to imagine the world from the stars. And then you sort of zoom in and you'd be like, oh, this is tiny little character there for a fragment of time worrying about just like just take a chill pill. But you know, like it's you know to your question how to put that into your life.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “The Moon and the Tide are connected. And of course I'd learn that as a five-year-old schoolboy and not understood it in the interesting way. The interesting way to understand it is to perceive the moon and perceive its pull on the sea in real time to actually like feel in your bones the connection between these two things. And anyway, so that was a kind of a really cool thing. And I guess it kind of gets back to commonality, I guess, commonality between people, which is that being yourself is quite a fun thing, but it's not quite as nice as noticing that you are an instance of humanity and that everyone else is kind of basically the same. And actually so are the animals. And in fact, it's all matter and whatever. Anyway, and it's kind of paradoxical thing that when you perceive in your bones your own insignificance, you feel better.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “I mean, great question, and not one I've really successfully answered for myself, but I'm more than happy to advise about it. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a fundamental question. And I think that many of the Kind of inherited cultural tendencies are like this a bit. One of the best parties I ever went to was like a moon celebration and it was kind of on a cliff and the sea was like formidable and raging beneath and it was all night and It was a full moon and the tide over the course of the night came up and there were kind of crazy ritual dances to celebrate them. It was pretty eccentric. But I tell you what I came out of that with was I kind of like was like oh fuck.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Yeah, non sort of not driven by concepts experience quite important. I mean, I suppose one of the paradoxes bearing in mind that it is driven by concepts in a sense, like this concept of radical self-sufficiency and of generosity and so on. But I've got a party in mind. I mean, I think that you can hardly fail to have a good experience if you're with 20 generous open people with loads of time away from your life and you're feeling great about yourself because you're in the middle of a hero narrative because you're actually successfully got there. And this could probably be done with two people as well.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “You know, what we might do is collect the crew, some, I think with 20 people, it'd be good if some are known to each other, but it was kind of a mixture of groups of friends or whatever, agree on some random distant point. Okay, we're going to go to Hebridean Island for a week. I'll see you there on the 3rd of January next year. Whatever. It's miles away or what have you. And then And then yeah, then just go there minus mobile phone and just rejoice, I guess, in the fact that people are so cool. We try to oddly rather forgotten before Barry Marath. It's just like, oh, people are so annoying. They're always like in the queue in front of me while waiting for the bus and etc. But, like, you know, of course, this blends quite easily into sort of cults, right, which is why having a participatory”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Budgetary constraints. But let's just sort of do it with my little theory there about why Bernie Man Seko, let's just apply that to 20 people. So a massive hero narrative road trip to get wherever you're going. So you're like spatially and experientially separated from your boring life. No phones, no money, no motivation to talk about your intentions in the world, but more just sort of open thing. A shared creative project where you somehow spontaneously democratically come up with a cool way of making everyone else happy, you know, perhaps collaboratively in this other space. And then enough time to be To not be worried that it's going to end tomorrow. And so just like riffing on this, just like thinking of it, what we should do is”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Form of relationship is possible. And so it's fundamentally a mind-expanding thing. And although I have no knowledge of this whatsoever, it seems to me to be intuitively very plausible that the kind of genius of Silicon Valley, the kind of the fact that it's creating experiences and possibilities of life Which genuinely Touch upon the transformation of humanity in subtle ways at the moment and bit by bit and iterative, of course. I can only assume they are somehow connected.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “It's a party which kind of gives you insights into totally different ways of relating to yourself and the world. And I love the fact that it's transient because A, it means that only through the proactive participation of the people who are involved will it ever exist, but B, it means that the meaning has to go outside into the world in a way. So, you know, you don't go to Berry Man and you have your isolated kingdom, like my philosophical academy in Greece, for instance, where you're kind of denying the world and then living your own private dream in a kind of onanistic kind of nonsense. It's actually just like an opportunity to reconceive stuff and then go back and then like think, oh fuck, well, just like Burning Man, the world is a consequence of the actions of everybody who's in it, just like burning man.”

    2014-12-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 53: Ed Cooke (Part 2), Grandmaster of Memory, on Mental Performance, Imagination, and Productive Mischief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT