5-Bullet Friday — Book Recommendations, Joseph Campbell, A Short Video for Increasing Gratitude, and Tips for Finding Signal Instead of Noise

Hi All!

Here is your weekly dose of 5-Bullet Friday, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along if the spirit moves you.

This edition is brought to you by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Pump” app. Be sure to see the offer in the P.S.

What I’m watching (shorter)

​The Moth Presents — Stephanie Peirolo: Walking with RJ. This is an incredibly moving and brutal 12-minute video. It helps put things in perspective, and it made me reconsider my “stresses” as almost entirely absurd. Perhaps you also need a reset for this weekend? Watch the whole thing to feel it properly.

What I’m watching (longer)

​Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. This six-part series of one-hour episodes is simply incredible, and I found it profoundly calming. It might be my favorite interview series of all time, which is saying a lot. Here’s the description: “Forty years ago, renowned scholar Joseph Campbell sat down with veteran journalist Bill Moyers for a series of interviews that became one of the most enduringly popular programs ever on PBS. In dialogues that adroitly span millennia of history and far-flung geography, the two men discuss myths as metaphors for human experience and the path to transcendence.” Try the first episode and let me know what you think. Joseph is a one-of-a-kind professor of the timeless.

Audiobook I’m listening to

​Red Rising by Pierce Brown, narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds. This is the first book of six from Brown’s Red Rising series. Book One was originally recommended to me by a friend formerly of Special Forces, but then half a dozen other friends did the same, including soft-spoken women I never would’ve guessed would pick up a book like this. I was 100% wrong. The book has amazing characters across the board, and if you liked Ender’s Game, Dune, Braveheart, Man On Fire, Gladiator, or Taken—you get the idea—you’ll almost certainly enjoy this one. DO NOT read the book description on Amazon, as it gives away too much. Don’t rob yourself of great surprises. This has been my daily companion for a week now, and I wake up looking forward to it.

What I’m reading

“Psychedelics gave terminal patients relief from their intense anxiety” by Meryl Davids Landau (Washington Post). Alternate link if the former doesn’t work. This is one of the most beautiful articles I’ve ever read covering first-hand accounts and challenges related to psychedelics. It also offers helpful metaphors for anyone struggling with “partial completeness,” even if you never take any of these drugs. From the article:
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​In addition to his enhanced calmness, he remarked in November that taking the drug seemed to have deepened the connection he felt toward the friends and family who had streamed into his and Cheryl’s home following his worsened prognosis. “I have a way more sensitive outlook. I feel more love toward people,” Brian relayed at the time. Three weeks later, in a hospital surrounded by more than a dozen family members, Brian died. “He remained calm, peaceful and joyful” to the end, Cheryl said.
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​Reporting for this story was supported by the Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. If you’re curious about non-drug options for exploring multiple parts of the psyche, I suggest you check out my interview on IFS with Dick Schwartz, which includes a live demo on yours truly (yikes).

Passage I’m pondering

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio.
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And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations.
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But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.
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​— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile ​
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You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with my interview with bestselling author and journalist Michael Pollan, my conversation with fitness icon Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the latest supercombo podcast episode, featuring risk expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb and legendary comic-book creator Todd McFarlane.
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And, as always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all.
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Much love to you and yours,
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Tim

P.S. Deal of the Week — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Pump” app!

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is synonymous with fitness and transformation. I first met him through the podcast, and I got to see his systems and thinking firsthand. He does nothing half-assed. So when the man who popularized the phrase “progressive resistance training” launched his first app, I had to take a look.
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​The Pump isn’t overloaded with features. It’s training, habit tracking, and a positive community. We’ll come back to that last part, as I think it’s a big piece of the secret sauce and the results they’ve seen.

​The Pump has more than 20,000 success stories. There are stories from beginner users who’ve lost 50+ pounds and had their doctors give them a clean bill of health for the first time, and there are stories from advanced users who have deadlifted 500 pounds for the first time. How is this possible?
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Arnold doesn’t let you try a new workout every day. A lot of apps choose to give their members what they want—Arnold gives them what they need. Instead of making it easy to hop around, which would probably get him more users, Arnold insists on the power of sticking to a single well-designed routine. He offers options for all fitness levels and goals, whether you want fat loss or muscle gain, or whether you have access to a gym or only your living room. But once you’ve chosen your options, he asks you to focus on your customized program for the next 90 days and train with intensity and focus.

Trust me. If “Arnold Schwarzenegger will be your coach” doesn’t sell you, the results will. The community of The Pump is one of the most positive corners of the Internet I’ve ever seen. The world needs more of that.

​If you want to finally lose fat, build muscle, and create healthier habits, you can access The Pump app for just $6.42 per month with a yearly subscription. And if you buy a yearly membership, you’ll also receive a $100 gift card to Momentous and a $20 Pump Diet guide.