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

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 00:43:15

Episode Shownotes

This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This is a

special inbetweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can easily jump around to get a feel for the episode and guest.Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the first recap episode. For instance, listeners suggested that the bios for each guest can slow the momentum, so we moved all the bios to the end. See it as a teaser. Something to whet your appetite. If you like what you hear, you can of course find the full episodes at tim.blog/podcast. Please enjoy! *This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter that every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world.It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.*Timestamps:Start: 00:00Jon Batiste: 03:18Dr. Bruce Greyson: 13:47Andrew Roberts: 21:54Tim Ferriss: 32:29Full episode titles:#775: Jon Batiste — The Quest for Originality, How to Get Unstuck, His Favorite Mantras, and Strategies for Living a Creative Life#774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia #773: Andrew Roberts on The Habits of Churchill, Lessons from Napoleon, and The Holy Fire Inside Great Leaders#771: Productivity Tactics – Two Approaches I Personally Use to Reset, Get Unstuck, and Focus on the Right Things *For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In episode #779 of The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim reflects on notable discussions from October 2024, featuring guests like Jon Batiste, Dr. Bruce Greyson, and Andrew Roberts. The episode emphasizes the significance of mantras for emotional resilience, the dual nature of health challenges, and the transformative potential of near-death experiences. It also explores how obstacles foster personal growth and how creativity can provide clarity during chaotic times. Overall, the episode showcases a diverse range of insights from world-class performers that listeners can apply to their own lives.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#779: In Case You Missed It: October 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show") to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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00:00:12 Speaker_02
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00:00:28 Speaker_02
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00:00:39 Speaker_02
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00:00:51 Speaker_02
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00:01:06 Speaker_02
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00:01:13 Speaker_02
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00:01:27 Speaker_02
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00:01:44 Speaker_04
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

00:01:51 Speaker_03
Now would've been an appropriate time.

00:01:54 Speaker_00
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

00:02:07 Speaker_02
Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:02:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:18 Speaker_02
This is a special in-between-isode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month.

00:02:24 Speaker_02
It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes.

00:02:34 Speaker_02
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 wherever you press play in your podcast app.

00:02:47 Speaker_02
Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog.com slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

00:02:54 Speaker_03
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.

00:03:12 Speaker_03
You can find John on Instagram and Twitter, at John Batiste.

00:03:18 Speaker_02
What other mantras can you share? Oh, man, this is deep. You going in. I'm going in.

00:03:24 Speaker_00
I'm going in.

00:03:25 Speaker_02
Scoop a gear intact. Tim. 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 palate.

00:03:46 Speaker_02
I mean, there's so many different ways you can use mantras also, which is why this is as deeply interesting. I mean, it can be a concentration practice. It can be sort of an erasing practice to regain some equilibrium.

00:03:58 Speaker_02
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.

00:04:13 Speaker_02
So I'm very, very interested in this, which is why I'm asking.

00:04:16 Speaker_00
Yes, for sure. So two of the ones that 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 am God. It is this idea that, I'll give you a practice, so be still and know

00:04:35 Speaker_00
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 know. Be still. Be. Just this idea, I've sat with that, and each phrase has a different meaning. Even be still and, then breath, are.

00:04:58 Speaker_00
room tone, there's messages in that space, there's messages in the crevice.

00:05:05 Speaker_00
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 wronged or perhaps there's so many opportunities for us in this life to transmutate darkness.

00:05:25 Speaker_00
into light, or even darkness into perspective. Another one is thy will be done, which is one of surrender. Now, we believe there's a divine power, however you name it, whatever your relationship to it is.

00:05:40 Speaker_00
We've, for the most part, had an experience that's 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, thy will be done.

00:05:58 Speaker_00
Thy 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.

00:06:13 Speaker_00
There's so much that is allowed for you to be the culmination of so many things as led to you and there will never be another you. You're the only one. That specificity alone is something that comes to me when I'm in that I will be done.

00:06:29 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:44 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
It's very hard to know. And so many parables are always like, this happened. Such good news. Maybe. Right. Such and such happened. This is terrible. Maybe.

00:07:06 Speaker_02
It just depends on so many things outside of our sphere of knowledge that 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?

00:07:19 Speaker_00
There's so many things that happen to us. with our health. I talk about Tulika a lot. I love her, as you know. She's great. Yeah. Had her on the show. Yes. And I also borrow a lot of phrases from her.

00:07:34 Speaker_00
In particular, this idea of being between two kingdoms, this idea of the kingdom of the well, the kingdom of the sick. And we all exist

00:07:45 Speaker_00
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, the way she gracefully moves through this time with such grace, with such power, with such clarity.

00:08:05 Speaker_00
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.

00:08:17 Speaker_00
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.

00:08:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:08:44 Speaker_02
That will be done. That will be done. Yeah, this 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, he'd be like, all right, all that meditation you've been doing?

00:08:57 Speaker_02
Let's see it. Let's see it. Let's see, bro. Come on, bro. You've been rehearsing. This is game time.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
Let's see how it goes. Yeah. Tim, you know what I'm saying when you're in that moment.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:24 Speaker_02
a loved one but had a lot of sympathy for a challenging road and also really been 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.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
Oh man, it means a lot to hear that and it feels so much of the time as odd as it may sound, It feels like a privilege to go through it together in the way that we have seen it. It's shifted into almost the orientation of blessing.

00:10:05 Speaker_00
And that's not to say that the difficulties are any easier, right? It doesn't change the nature of hard things. They're hard, but there's something about life. There's a truth.

00:10:20 Speaker_00
There's something about going through the fire that 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.

00:10:39 Speaker_00
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.

00:10:57 Speaker_02
it would rob you in so many ways, which is, of course, easy for me to say sitting in this comfortable chair right now. But in the midst of it, it's sometimes hard to see.

00:11:05 Speaker_02
At the same time, there was an astrophysicist, Jan Eleven, who was on the podcast some time ago. And I'm going to butcher this quote, but it's more the concept for me that has really stuck

00:11:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:24 Speaker_02
The obstacles are the path through which you discover yourself, through which you learn, through which you grow. That is the path.

00:11:34 Speaker_00
Take those away.

00:11:36 Speaker_02
And then you're 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.

00:11:51 Speaker_02
I mean, I suppose that's helpful, but maybe it's delusional and it's overly optimistic, but it's deeper than that.

00:11:57 Speaker_02
And I think that misses the mark because given a longer timeframe, 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.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
So you might as well choose a blessing. That is the more enabling perspective. And since you can't know, it's a coin flip. Choose the side of the coin that is most enabling, it seems to me, at least. In the abstract, it's easy to say.

00:12:26 Speaker_02
Taxi runs over my foot. We'll see how I do later today, but.

00:12:30 Speaker_00
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 when they are there, right?

00:12:48 Speaker_00
We can all say, man, if that would have happened to me, I would slay the dragon. 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.

00:13:06 Speaker_00
It's 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 when I've embraced the discomfort and realized what I was made of through it.

00:13:20 Speaker_02
Let me just sit with that for a second.

00:13:28 Speaker_03
Next up, Dr. 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.

00:13:47 Speaker_02
So 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.

00:14:02 Speaker_02
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,

00:14:18 Speaker_04
Many people in the experience say that they encountered deceased loved ones in the experience and that can easily be explained as wishful thinking.

00:14:29 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:40 Speaker_04
The person having the near-death experience encounters 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.

00:14:51 Speaker_04
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 12 years ago, I wrote a paper that had 30 different cases from recent years. Jack was one of those. He had an experience.

00:15:05 Speaker_04
Actually, he was in South Africa back in the 70s. and he was a young technician at that time, and had very serious pneumonia, and he really stopped breathing, had to be resuscitated.

00:15:16 Speaker_04
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.

00:15:26 Speaker_04
He flirted 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 he wished her well, and she went off.

00:15:38 Speaker_04
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.

00:15:49 Speaker_04
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?

00:16:01 Speaker_04
So he 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.

00:16:15 Speaker_04
He didn't know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods, and then he woke up later in his hospital bed. Now, he tells me that back in the 70s, there were very few MGBs in South Africa, and he had never seen one.

00:16:29 Speaker_04
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.

00:16:38 Speaker_04
It turned out that she had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday, and her parents had surprised her with a gift of a red MGB.

00:16:47 Speaker_04
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.

00:16:58 Speaker_04
I don't see any way he could have known or wanted or expected her to have an accident and die. There's certainly no way he could have known how she died, and yet he did. And we've got lots of other cases like this.

00:17:10 Speaker_04
They're called Peak and Darien cases based on a book that was published in the 1800s with cases like these. where people encounter deceased individuals who were not known to be dead. Now, I don't know how to explain those.

00:17:24 Speaker_02
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 independently verify it with.

00:17:38 Speaker_02
But there are other cases, and for people listening, we're going to come back to some of the common questions, I would say, forms of discussion around these related to possible biological mechanisms or lack thereof.

00:17:50 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:05 Speaker_02
One that comes to mind that I've heard you discuss is related to the surgeon flapping like a bird. I was hoping that you could give a description of that particular case study. Before we get to that, how many near-death experiences

00:18:24 Speaker_02
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?

00:18:36 Speaker_04
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 this is what happened to them.

00:18:46 Speaker_04
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.

00:18:53 Speaker_04
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.

00:19:01 Speaker_04
That is actually maybe more true now, but back in the 70s and 80s, nobody wanted to talk about these things.

00:19:08 Speaker_04
And if you talk about things, you got ridiculed, you got referred to a psychiatrist, you were called crazy, you were shunned by people you knew, both materialists and religious folks. They didn't want to hear about these things.

00:19:21 Speaker_04
So people did not talk about these events.

00:19:24 Speaker_02
And what of this surgeon flapping like a bird?

00:19:27 Speaker_04
This was a fellow, Al, in his mid-fifties, who was a van driver, and he was out on his rounds one day, and he had chest pain. And he would do enough to stop his rounds and drive to the emergency room.

00:19:42 Speaker_04
And they did some evaluations and found that he had four arteries to his heart that were blocked. And they rushed him to the emergency room for urgent quadruple bypass surgery.

00:19:54 Speaker_04
So he's lying on the table, fully unconscious, the drapes over him, so forth. And he tells me that in the middle of the operation, he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw the surgeons operating on him.

00:20:08 Speaker_04
And he saw the chief surgeon, who he hadn't met before, flapping his arms like he was trying to fly. And he demonstrated for me. At that point, I laughed, because I thought, this is obviously a hallucination. Doctors don't do that.

00:20:22 Speaker_04
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.

00:20:32 Speaker_04
So I talked to a surgeon who actually had been trained in Japan, and he said, well, yes, I did do that. I have a habit of letting my assistants start the procedure while I put on my sterile gown and gloves and wash my hands and so forth.

00:20:49 Speaker_04
Then I go into the operating room and watch them for a while, because I don't want to risk touching anything with my sterile hands now. I point things out to them with my elbows.

00:20:58 Speaker_04
And he 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 50 years, and I've never seen anyone do that. So it's kind of an idiosyncratic thing.

00:21:12 Speaker_04
Is there any way Al could have seen that? Well, he was totally anesthetized. He had his heart was open. I don't think there's any way he could have seen that. And yet he did.

00:21:25 Speaker_03
Next up, Andrew Roberts, historian and New York Times bestselling author of 20 books, including Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, and most recently, Conflict, The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, co-authored with General David Petraeus.

00:21:47 Speaker_03
You can find Andrew on Twitter, at aroberts underscore Andrew.

00:21:55 Speaker_02
Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self-control in crisis?

00:22:01 Speaker_02
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 in any direction you'd like.

00:22:17 Speaker_01
Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war. They both went to military colleges.

00:22:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:22:37 Speaker_01
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 so on.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
They had an egotism to look at it in the negative way, but a self-confidence to look at it in the positive way that gave them the ability to take these shatteringly important decisions. So I think it's much more nurture than nature.

00:23:07 Speaker_01
And in both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire that they both had. There was a not holy in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at all religious.

00:23:19 Speaker_01
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 awake at night over even the death of friends. Death of friends that they were responsible for.

00:23:38 Speaker_01
CB.

00:23:38 Speaker_02
They were responsible for. In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names. I suppose using the royal we here, you could bring up other names.

00:23:46 Speaker_02
Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive, that they leaned on in some sense, that they found solace in? Were there particular minds?

00:23:58 Speaker_01
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 20s.

00:24:09 Speaker_01
He sat down and read the great philosophers as well as writers. And he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two great 19th century historians, English historians.

00:24:25 Speaker_01
And that affected his writing style and, of course, later his oratorical style, but also his outlook on life, philosophical outlook on life.

00:24:35 Speaker_01
With regard to Napoleon, he was even more literary, really, because he also wrote short stories and books and so on. And so he was very much affected by what he read, again, as a young man.

00:24:49 Speaker_01
And in both cases, they were reading so much that it slightly cut them off from their contemporaries. Napoleon didn't have many friends when he was in his early 20s.

00:25:04 Speaker_01
And Churchill, when the other people were off sleeping in the midday heat of India, his colleagues and comrades, he'd be sitting there reading Schopenhauer and Gibbon and Macaulay and so on.

00:25:17 Speaker_02
How did Gibbon and Macaulay inform his philosophical leanings?

00:25:22 Speaker_01
They made him into what was called at the time a Whig. 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 of... What is that? I'm sorry.

00:25:37 Speaker_01
Noblesse Oblige, it's 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.

00:25:51 Speaker_01
It's sort of like the knightly, chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages. And they very much believed in that, and so did Churchill. Let me ask about Napoleon.

00:26:02 Speaker_02
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?

00:26:13 Speaker_01
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. In the last three years of his military career, he's losing. But even then,

00:26:29 Speaker_01
Even when he had far fewer troops, when he was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories in seven days in the 1814 campaign. That's two years after the retreat from Moscow.

00:26:45 Speaker_01
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

00:26:56 Speaker_01
or left flank, or sometimes straight through the center, as at Austerlitz. He had that capacity, that mind for military conquest, but also, of course, the greatness that was required completely to revolutionize French society.

00:27:12 Speaker_01
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 19th century

00:27:24 Speaker_01
were things like the Code Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary concept. They were a Napoleonic concept.

00:27:32 Speaker_02
This may seem like 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.

00:27:47 Speaker_02
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?

00:28:02 Speaker_01
It was inspiration, but also perspiration. He really did put in the time, thinking about it and reading about it. By it, I mean warfare. And, of course, he'd been educated in it. He read the key books.

00:28:17 Speaker_01
There's a guy called the Comte de Gerbert who, in 1772, wrote a book about strategy and tactics. And he, 30 years later, put these into operation.

00:28:30 Speaker_01
And so he was able to spot the sort of best of the best when it came to modern thinking, and to, or in this case, 30-year-old thinking, in fact. That didn't matter because the weapons of war hadn't changed in the intervening period.

00:28:45 Speaker_01
And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use, the classic example being the core system. And when- What was it called? It's called the core system. C-O-R-E. C-O-R-P-S.

00:29:01 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:13 Speaker_01
And so one of your core would engage the enemy, and then he would use the other cores to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a brilliant concept.

00:29:25 Speaker_01
And 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.

00:29:43 Speaker_01
I mean, victory, obviously, is the best thing when it comes to exciting men. 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,

00:29:59 Speaker_01
was the way to electrify the men. And so he was able to do that.

00:30:05 Speaker_01
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, he wasn't interested in electrifying the soul of the men at all.

00:30:15 Speaker_01
He rather despised his ordinary soldiers. But nonetheless... You're talking about Wellington or one part of it? The Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his own soldiers. And he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat.

00:30:30 Speaker_01
But they loved him because he cared about how many of them died in battle, you know. And he never lost a battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander, needless to say.

00:30:41 Speaker_00
But he didn't try.

00:30:42 Speaker_01
He didn't go out. He would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men.

00:30:48 Speaker_01
Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hat and his gray coat and his way of taking off 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 1799, he said, 40 centuries look down upon you.

00:31:07 Speaker_01
And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier, you know, in Egypt, far away from home. He looks up at the pyramids and thinks, yeah, he's placing the events of that day in the long historical parabola.

00:31:20 Speaker_01
And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. In about 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there's some reference to history or the past. He too would summon up the idea that, yes, Britain is on its own.

00:31:36 Speaker_01
Britain and the British Commonwealth are on their own. And this, of course, was in the period before America and Russia were in the war. But we've been in terrible straits before. Look at Sir Francis Drake. Look at Admiral Nelson. And so on.

00:31:49 Speaker_01
And we came through those and won. He also brought up the First World War a lot. So yes, he too drew on history.

00:31:57 Speaker_01
And people knew that because he'd written history books and written biographies, including the biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, who was with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced.

00:32:09 Speaker_01
People trusted his view of history.

00:32:16 Speaker_03
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.

00:32:29 Speaker_02
A few years ago, a creature died in the walls of my home. It was disgusting. Now, to be precise, it gave up the ghost in the heating system, so the death fumes were conveniently pushed directly into my bedroom.

00:32:42 Speaker_02
My ex-girlfriend and I discovered this around 11 p.m. as we tucked 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.

00:32:55 Speaker_02
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 HVAC.

00:33:08 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:32 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:40 Speaker_02
And on and on it went, more and more clowns piling into the clown car for a shit show that lasted three to four weeks. It was just a 15-car pileup of nonsense. There are the rare times when I feel like I'm in the zone, and those are great.

00:33:56 Speaker_02
Those are fantastic. Then there are times when I ask myself, how in holy hell have I become the janitor of a mountain of bullshit? That happens more than you might think.

00:34:05 Speaker_02
Put another way, sometimes you're the boxer and sometimes you are the punching bag. We all get our turn as the punching bag. It doesn't matter who you are. As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how successful you become.

00:34:17 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:24 Speaker_02
Now during these periods of firefighting, 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 wears very thin, has never been my strong suit.

00:34:36 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:50 Speaker_02
This is particularly bad, catastrophic sometimes, when I try to sprint immediately upon waking up. The mantra that has saved me and saved me during that three to four week period I mentioned was very simple and it's this, make before you manage.

00:35:07 Speaker_02
Make before you manage, that's it.

00:35:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:23 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:38 Speaker_02
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 90 second video of calligraphy

00:35:51 Speaker_02
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 jumpstart my writing with an Instagram caption, right?

00:36:04 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:17 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:29 Speaker_02
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,

00:36:40 Speaker_02
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 minutia of life. And I think, at least personally, I do need that reinforcement.

00:36:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:37:12 Speaker_02
And now here are the bios for all the guests. This isn't just any episode, this one turned out really, really special.

00:37:22 Speaker_02
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 timferris, two R's, two S's to see

00:37:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:37:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:07 Speaker_02
I met him ages and ages ago, back when he was a mere incredible, incredible musician, composer, etc. But I've been able to watch him become the marquee lights John Batiste, and it has been a thrill to watch. We talk about it all.

00:38:22 Speaker_02
His eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues, is set for a November 15th release. When we are sitting in Jimi Hendrix's studio, there are pianos, guitars, you name it, and we don't just talk.

00:38:34 Speaker_02
We walk around, and he uses music to answer some of my questions. It's phenomenal.

00:38:40 Speaker_02
Beethoven Blues marks the first installment in his solo piano series showcasing Batiste's interpretation of Beethoven's iconic works reimagined, and that is an understatement. You're going to hear a lot of it in this episode towards the last 25%, so

00:38:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
The film depicts the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live's very first broadcast in 1975, underscored by Batiste's blending of jazz, classical, and contemporary elements.

00:39:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:34 Speaker_02
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 JohnBatiste.com.

00:39:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:59 Speaker_02
Stick around, listen to the whole thing, watch it a second time on video at YouTube.com slash Tim Ferriss. My guest today is Bruce Grayson, MD.

00:40:13 Speaker_02
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.

00:40:26 Speaker_02
He is 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.

00:40:37 Speaker_02
He has studied, documented more than 1,000 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.

00:40:59 Speaker_02
Today's guest, Andrew Roberts. Andrew Roberts has written 20 books which have been translated into 28 languages and have won 13 literary prizes.

00:41:08 Speaker_02
These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, A New History of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny,

00:41:18 Speaker_02
George III, the life and reign of Britain's most misunderstood monarch, and most recently, conflict, the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus.

00:41:30 Speaker_02
Lord Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society.

00:41:36 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:48 Speaker_02
You can find all things Andrew at andrew-roberts.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.

00:42:03 Speaker_02
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?

00:42:13 Speaker_02
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

00:42:24 Speaker_02
that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

00:42:32 Speaker_02
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.

00:42:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:42:59 Speaker_02
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.