YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Cooke

lines on the record
83
first
2014-12-30
most recent
2014-12-30
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “This is really striking because I was not indoctrinated before going there. And within two days, I was living in this kind of magical invented thing where what was so striking was that it was all based on giving and generosity and openness and transient creativity. And the structure of the party, if that's what Burning Man is, is just of unbelievable genius. I mean, I was stagger. I love parties. I studied it. I once tried to write a book about house parties. It wasn't very good and I never completed it. But I love parties and I'd never imagined a party could be like a dance in the brain of a philosopher or something like that. And it's really like it's a way of like...”

    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. “That's kind of a world. And then a person is the world, and then it's got this gift economy where the gifts are themselves their own world. So sometimes it's like, you know, a little object which expresses some profound story about this person's life or about the world or anything else. One person, and I should add, since we're on record that I didn't indulge, was like, this, my friend, is one of only 10 DMT inhalers in the entire world. So that would have been a world to dive into as a gift. Anyway, so because of the lack of temporal horizon, you kind of bounce between these spatial levels. You're in a camp. You're talking to a person. You're like on an arc car. Blurs because everyone's kind of a friend. And of course, like, this all sounds quite pompous, but you're also having a terribly good time. So anyway, so like this kind 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

  3. “Sort of third scale of spatial organization down. And the person does not have an agenda because they have basically completely forgotten about all the things which preoccupy them normally. And so you get further in about five minutes of conversation than you do with a flatmate in about a year because you're just like, how are you feeling? It's like, not so good because of the sort of thing which no one would ever tell you normally. And then, you know, where are you from? And then because you're really open, because you're not thinking about your money or your time or the things you have to do, you're like, oh, well, actually, the fact that you're from Wisconsin and a little farm is kind of interesting in a way which it wouldn't be according to my normal filters. And of course, this is none of this is rational. It's just a kind of intuitive flow. But so you have very rich. And so people are their own worlds, which you dive into. So we've had the camp where you're in a world and then you got the art car, which is basically like kind of floating nightclubs. But anyway, you got.”

    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. “Wild West Camp, and you're there in Wild. At one point, I found myself playing a piano naked in a wild west bar surrounded by Frenchmen singing the French national anthem. You know, sort of basically a quite undistinguished way to be spending 20 minutes of your life. But anyway, so you're in the Wild West and you're feeling kind of like you're in the Wild West. And then, you know, an art car go past, you wander, I get on the art car. And the arch car buzzes you off somewhere else. So the art car is kind of the second order of maxims. You're in the wild west, feels like the Wild West, you're kind of open because you're not thinking about money or time or what you're supposed to be doing or your career or like how you really want to achieve this by next year. But unfortunately, this is getting all that's cleared out. And so I could get on the archive. Art Car's one order of magnitude of scale-wise down. And the art car might be like a fish or a boat or whatever. Get on the boat. And then you're living on a boat, you know, and the whole vibe is boatists. So you enter a different world. And then you talk to a person on the boat.”

    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 you've got no money, no ambition, no obsession with what you're supposed to be doing. And there's basically no agenda whatsoever as regards what happens. And it's long enough, about a week, that unlike a kind of UK festival, of which there were many great ones, including things like the Secret Garden Party, the Secret Garden Party on the Saturday, you're like aware that on Sunday you're going to have to pack up and go home. But a Budding Man, the Temporal Horizon is just long enough that basically it might as well be infinite. You're just like, I am here. So that's the first thing. It's like you're stripped away of a lot of the kind of tendencies of interaction, which normally kind of make you basically a fucking boring person. And then the second thing is that it's you kind of bounce around Burning Man and it operates as far as I can tell at four scales which interweave in this kind of fractal way. So you've got like camps.”

    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. “Is actually a culturally important place on a par with, say, the Renaissance in Florence or something, where if you look at the buildings of Silicon Valley, you're like, Jesus, these guys, they may build good software companies, but they sure don't know how to live. It's like, it's like the car park. You're like, anyway, so why is Burning Man so good? There's no money which cuts out one fundamental aspect of your social relationship to the world. There's basically no time because no one's got a watch on them and no one would care if they did. Although there is time, but it's a different quality of time. It's basically the rhythm of sun and night. And then there's no mobile phone. So no one is basically able to connect with their normal unbelievably banal set of preoccupations. And as a result, people are kind 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

  7. “To kind of moral conceptual framework around Burning Man, all their principles and so on. I was just sort of going along for a good party, but here's my kind of quick fire theory about why Burley Man is the most brilliant institution I've encountered and is the first evidence I've seen that, oh not the first evidence, whatever, but is a compelling case for why Silicon Valley”

    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. “I Burning Man is an absolute ordeal to get to, especially if you come from the UK. So you've got to get to San Francisco. Then there's all this, like, you've got to purchase lots of objects and water and snacks and costumes and all this stuff. And then you've got to do an eight-hour road trip. And about four hours into the road trip, you're like, wow, this is getting pretty much into the middle of nowhere. And then you keep on stepping on and whatever. You get there and then you spend four hours in a queue in a dust storm or whatever. Get to the gate. And then some slightly sort of annoyingly kind of enlightened looking character says like welcome home. And you're like, fuck off, mate. I live in hackney. I could have a music festival. And anyway, in between that and leaving Burning Man, something happens where, as you're leaving, you're like, well, he was right. This was my home. And so what's happening in between? And so what's interesting is that I was not indoctrinated into the quite sophisticated.”

    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. “Yeah, I didn't bring it up. So, I mean, I love parties. And so I wanted to go for Boeing Man for a while. My best friend Al is often a Burning Man. So eventually we got it together. We went to 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

  10. “And I think that's probably orthogonal, but it's probably a quite good way of thinking about wealth, which is that there is a responsibility to create joy and there is a responsibility to, and there's nothing inherently sinful about being wealthy or whatever. But anyway, going back to this academy, to which, by the way, Tim, you're going to be hugely welcome. I hope you're going to hang out there very often. I think it's going to be really cool. We're just going to just hang about and chat about stuff.”

    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. “Yeah, exactly. He's also got a virtue which is only available to the rich. And his virtue system is kind of about poles. Like for every virtue, there's an extreme Exaggeration of that virtue, which becomes a kind of a sin or a vice, and there's a thing in the opposite direction, so not enough of it. And so one of his virtues is only available to rich people is magnificence. And so he thinks that the correct use of the energy that is wealth is to be magnificent, which is to say to throw amazing festivals and build awesome buildings and foster great artists and do this kind of thing. And then that can go in its extreme form to ostentation. What the 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

  12. “So certainly I hold in contempt the idea of counting score in life through wealth and the fairly small evidence to me in fact I just go with the accepted evidence that up to a certain point it's great to have some resources because it allows a certain level of relaxation comfort and kind of sustainable existence in the world but beyond that it's kind of vanity and stupidity to pursue worldly resources but you know funny enough random thing Aristotle is really funny as a moral philosopher and one of his virtues he's one of the reasons he's funny is that he doesn't really believe you could be happy if you're not beautiful Which is kind of probably true but We don't dwell on it. Anyway, he's also not a popular.”

    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. “The color green for like six weeks, and then you kind of wander up the arcade of columns by the swimming pool with all the beautiful people and have scintillating intellectual conversation. And you'd somehow be apart from the world of ambition and trying to sustain progress. And you'd be sitting back and contemplating the concepts which normally drive our intentions. And you just basically be having a good old think about what the meaning of it all is. But also you'll be surrounded by beautiful people in great luxury and sunshine. So it's like right here is like a conflict.”

    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. “Sitting, you know, fun of one of my dreams. It's funny, dreams, you have dreams all the time in your life, and when I was five, I wanted to be a carpenter, when I was six, I wanted to be Beethoven, whatever. Some of them stick with you. And one of the ones that stuck with me is a mixture of exactly this blend between like, I don't give a crap about money and I basically want to live in the kind of utopian situation which can only be sustained by enormous private wealth. And this dream is that I've had it since age of 15 and it won't go away, which is that my idea for what I really want to do in my life is to have a philosophical academy in Greece. And basically what I'm seeing is like Mediterranean sunshine, beautiful people in white robes, you know, people playing guitar on the beach, a kind of network of pavilions. You'd sit in one for a while, just contemplating the meaning 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

  15. “It's funny actually because I actually am not sure if I have a totally kind of honest internal perspective on this, Tim. Part of me is like, you know, part of me is to be honest, I'd be perfectly happy just schlepping around Europe, chatting to people, you know, having the odso and just generally experiencing the world that what I actually care about is conscious experience and understanding and, you know, but at the same time, I do enjoy a good party. And, you know, a nice home and so on. And I also quite enjoy like...”

    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. “It's just like by 2014 People are of the opinion that starving in Europe was actually quite unpleasant in 2007. You know, in 2007, starving was great fun. I meant that, you know, I suppose that we, you know, we are blessed a bit with what the low bar is in terms of life outcomes. You know, starving doesn't really happen in Western countries, although of course there's lots of tricky kind of situations which get close to 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

  17. “Around the world or everyone around the world have a much better computing experience and a thousand or a million people around the world have the opportunity to divert their fraction of the great sum he has at his disposal to the situations of their local communities or in the broader world which they judge to be meritorious to merit this sort of spending. And the extreme way of saying that is like Gates is basically the last person on earth you want spending this kind of resources because he is I think he's quite a likable character but because nobody should be spending sixty billion dollars 60 million people spending $1,000. And there's something fundamentally wrong with our institutional structure. Until the objection that it's just not as efficient as when you've got Like a big head honcho It seems to be a very ambiguous good, right?”

    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. “He now has the opportunity to spend this on whatever he feels is right, where in fact it shouldn't be Bill Gates' decision what humanity's wealth gets spent on to sort out problems. That should be a democratic process. That old phrase power corrupts an absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think it's kind of fundamentally psychologically real. That's actually kind of an aside. But, you know, I would like to see as an alternative history of 1980 to 2010. I'd have liked to have seen gates become very rich in the course of the eighties and spend $50 million on its local community and a thousand people.”

    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. “Very efficiently, and I can kind of see the merit in that type of kind of perspective, but here's another perspective which would be so Gates exploited probably pretty illegally monopolistic practices to accrue from the population of the world immense undeserved wealth at the expense of their computing experience. And now as a unilateral actor”

    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. “Was just I assume since it's probably past 3 p.m. in San Francisco that you've moved on to the Gin and Tonics. But I think Gates is a good example because Gates is DeFi. It's considered a heroic figure because of this sort of this generosity after the fact of wealth accumulation. And I had quite big arguments with close friends about this because there's one perspective which says A gates through personal merit accrued 60 billion dollars and so deserves to be able to spend it and B he's this like hyper competent character who's much better than some like inept internally strife ridden charitable institution who aren't going to get anything done this guy's got the competence and the rest of it to go and solve the world's problems unilaterally and he'll get”

    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. “I wonder if that's really right, Tim, because there was lots of consensus in San Francisco in certain regions of life, right? So, you know, the whole kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem is so fluid and dynamic because everyone agrees how it should work. You've got the venture capitalists, the entrepreneurs, the talented young guys, the Journey which defies any notion of normal competition. And that's the kind of thing which is going on in the entrepreneurial community and yet there are these quite radical Divisions between that and for instance that I don't understand the history of homeless people but it is striking that there are you know so many of them and that these two worlds coexist spatially but have zero zero social or emotional or conceptual connection in a way”

    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. “Homeless people everywhere. And you're like, Susie guys, that's Twitter HQ there. It's a fifteen billion dollar company or whatever. Everyone inside is being paid more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. And this happens on their doorstep? Do they have no conception, no basic grasp over what happy existence is? Because your existence would be happier if you didn't have to at a purely selfish level walk past all these people who were clearly in a state of distress and maybe hassling you and whatever. And anyway, so I think that's one of the most interesting things about San Francisco. And it's kind of, to me, emblematic of a tendency of thought which looks to optimize the individual over the situations qua your like external stuff influencing the self rather than the self influencing self rather than external situations, which are the things which actually make us happy, like the ability to play chess on the street.”

    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. “It's quite a selfish one. And goodness knows, you know, for lots of subtle reasons we're all selfish, but you can imagine an alternative culture of creativity and power, of the kind that Silicon Valley has, which would all be focused on making communities better and institutions better and hacking not oneself, but the situations which comprise the world. And I'll give you my go to example about this, is you go to San Francisco, unbelievably cool town, full of just the most magical people, so like intellectually vibrant and open and fun and awesome and beautiful. And so rich. And there's fucking like...”

    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. “Which might include getting a Harvard law degree or being Bill Gates or whatever. And so the kind of concept of improving oneself is obviously an excellent concept regardless of how socially you perceive human action and existence because to improve yourself is to improve the world, it's to improve your interactions with others. It's not a kind of lonely activity. But at the same time, if you look at Silicon Valley startups, which are in some sense the great drivers of human culture at the moment, besides like ISIS and whatever. But anyway. But the natural tendency in that way of thinking is to become personally more efficient. So it's to store files more effectively, get things done better, be quicker, optimize oneself. And this is a kind of merit thing in its way.”

    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. “So, yes, so I think virtue of which I have none, but virtue is like, I think, is the correct how we should think about merit. So, you know, in some sense, The humanities in better commas have had this nailed for like two thousand years, what like the fundamental tendencies of a good human being are empathy, temperance, generosity, kind of non-egotism. We sort of know what good human beings are and we have done for thousands of years. But that's not what we celebrate or immediately associate with merit, right? So we tend to associate merit with like tangible outcomes in life path.”

    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. “As my judge, that I've gone to yoga for 10 to instraight. You know what this connects to? This is a bit like Goethe and his friends in the room. It's like externalizing beyond yourself the sources of the things you need for yourself. A bit. Yeah, I mean, that would be a pompous way of saying it obviously. But I think”

    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. “I'm just inept. I don't know what kind of consistency a perspective is required to actually implement worthy plans like that. And actually, that's why I enjoy Chadi and just generally brainstorming with you because you seem to have a capacity to sort of come up to a conclusion like that. Oh yeah, Yogo, really good. I should do some more yoga and then actually do it. A capacity which I find mysterious and suspicious.”

    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. “I was like, Jesus, I'm going to get to be healthy. I said, I'm going to go do some yoga. And so I went down to the yoga thing and then I played. They had this big, great deal, 25 pounds for 10 days of consecutive sessions. And I was like, genius, this time I'm going to do 10 days of consecutive sessions. Went to the first one because I was there and did it and it was great and felt fantastic, super pepped up and the rest of it. And that was five days ago.”

    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. “Yeah, and it's kind of rubbish, isn't it? Because you kind of like what one wants to be kind of like a didgery do. But unfortunately, you're just like, oh, fuck. Oh, maybe I'm a lizard. Oh no. You should really enjoy about Alfred Chip is that you're quite good at coming up to rational conclusions and implementing them. And I'm not Earlier this week, I was like, Jesus Christ, I smoke the whole time, I drink lots of wine, I should sort my act out. I'm going to start doing yoga. And even yoga is even something which I find fascinating and interesting, you know, rich. I think it's like a fundamentally profound system of thought, which connects autonomous rhythms with the body's capacity of movement and the mind. I don't have enough good things to say about yoga, but I never fucking do it. And so I was like, okay, Jesus.”

    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. “I think, and I'm basically learning from my girlfriend who is a more spiritual connected, intuitive person than I am by kind of disposition and native structure, so to speak. Can come to a discussion, and this might get back to our kind of point about relationships. Fundamentally with like calm. Like with where normally your mind is like, oh, That's normally your mind.”

    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. “Yeah, it was pathetic, isn't it? By the way, before I suppose we're quite far into this interview, and there are two things, by the way, we must come back to, one of which is how you think about merit, because how you think about merit, and the other one of which is burning man, because I went to that this year, and it is the most perfect example of any institution I've ever seen, and it's also a sublime exemplar of memory techniques put into the outside world. So those are two little sort of thoughts which we must come back to. But where were we? I've got no idea about the intuition thing, but...”

    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. “Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a question. That is the question, and it's not a question I have an answer to. But I assume it's something to do. God damn it, Ed.”

    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. “That was an example of where intuition was thwarted by a kind of banal kind of self recriminating rationality resulting in, I'm almost certain, a less interesting product and less fun. Now, look at 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