Is. To learn how to draw on in 3 or 4 total days to play hot blooded with foreigner and he sold out concert. That's right. Lead singer didn't make it any easier for me came up and stood on the drum kit put his foot on the drums put his hand on my head it was it was fun but it was very very stressful. That really happened but perhaps Tim's greatest challenge was teaching himself to swim and not only teaching himself how to swim but learning to do it in open water I grew up on Long Island right next to the water had a number of near drowning experiences very young and down water was not my friend and it was age 31 or so a friend of mine in assigned me a new year's resolution and I assigned him a new year's resolution his to me was it one kilometer open water swim and I tried lessons I tried everything which failed I quit all of these different attempts up until the very end of the year until I found something called Total Immersion top attorney Laughlin and with a book and access to a small pool trained and then before the end of that summer went out into the ocean and swam not just a climate of a mile open water parallel to shore and came out felt like Superman. It was one of the proudest moments of my entire life. It was just such a great example of how you can use a progression and find a method and certainly make an attempt to do just about anything that has played in the past. Ok here's the big high. About all this stuff which is. Why did you. Why did you test yourself like that well I think that one of the most empowering things that I've tried to systematically approach and teach is exposing oneself to discomfort so you can expand your actionable sphere of comfort and it's relatively easy to prove to yourself or to other people that something you might think is impossible is in fact possible like learning to go from discomfort with putting your face under water to open water swimming for a quarter to half a mile in 4 or 5 days that is entirely possible. And once you take a previously impossible feat and make it possible in a short period of time you start to wonder what other Impossibles in my life are entirely possible. On the show today comfort zone. Ideas about pushing ourselves in ways that may not always be comfortable or even successful but ways that allow us to grow from confronting our greatest fears to expanding our social circles to challenging the status quo and finding the courage to speak up. And for Tim Ferriss pushing out of his comfort zone not only conquered his fear of swimming but also affected how he ran his business and how he lived the rest of his life because it's very hard to achieve anything that you want to achieve certainly anything that you find intimidating if you have the emergency brake on and there are easy ways to at least take it for stuff that step for Tim was back in the early 2000 before he made a name for himself as an entrepreneur and writer and self experimenter at the time Tim was running a startup it was a sports nutrition company. Taking on a lot of responsibilities I was effectively one man show working long hours. Chasing time zones mostly by himself I felt trapped in a machine of my own making and that's when he realized something had to change I didn't know how to extricate myself from this so-called success and I felt like I was the absolute traffic jam at every intersection of every decision I just hated my life I was miserable and using stimulants to wind up using alcohol and other things to. It was all consuming enterprise. Picks up the story from the stage it was a disaster. And I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers and I did find a quote that made made a big difference in my life which was we suffer more often in imagination than in reality by Seneca the younger is a famous stoic writer that took me to his letters which took me to the exercise premed a touch Yoma Laura which means the premeditation of evils and in simple terms this is visualizing the worst case scenarios in detail that you fear preventing you from taking action so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis my problem was Monkey Mind super loud very incessant just thinking my way through problems doesn't work I need to capture my thoughts on paper so I created a written exercise that I called fear setting a goal setting myself. Took a notebook and sketched out 3 pages and on that 1st page he made 3 columns to find prevents and repair and the defined column was really in as much detail as possible listing the worst things that I thought could happen at the very top you'd have you know what if dot dot dot and in this case it was what's the worst that could happen if he finally took a month away from his business something Tim hadn't done in years so he wrote down all of the worst thing that could happen that ranged from I might miss a letter from the i.r.s. That would then lead to some type of audit and so on and so for that went on and on and on the 2nd column was the prevent column and that means what could you do to prevent each of these bullets from happening in the defined column but here's the thing as soon as I put it on paper I was like wait a 2nd I could change the addresses and so on so that everything and at the i.r.s. That everything goes directly to my account and state of my u.p.s. Store the solution in that case was just so simple and the last column is this repair that is for each of these bolts in the define if they have it what could I do to repair the damage even a little bit this is the damage control category and. Very often there are simple answers. So one question to keep in mind as you're doing this 1st page is has anyone else in the history of time less driven figured this out chances are the answer is yes the 2nd page is simple what might be the benefits of an attempt or a partial success you can see we're playing up the fears in really taking a conservative look at the upside so if you attempted whatever you're considering might you build confidence develop skills emotionally financially or otherwise what might be the benefits of say a base hit spent 10 to 15 minutes on this page 3 This might be the most important so don't skip the cost of inaction humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if we try something new say ask for a raise we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo not changing anything. So you should ask yourself if I avoid this action or decision and actions and decisions like it what might my life look like in say 6 months 12 months 3 years any further out it starts to seem intangible and really get detailed again emotionally financially physically whatever and when I did this it painted a terrifying picture of self medicating. My business was going to implode in a moment at all times but in step away my relationships were fraying or failing and I realized that you know action was no longer an option for me. So I took the trip and slated for initially 4 weeks in London and I was able to extricate myself from my business I was able to think clearly finally for the 1st time in so long without these demons chasing me from behind which were these nebulous fears that finally trumped up paper and I extended that trip for somewhere between 15 and 18 months I travelled around the world and that entire experience led to the 1st book for I work with that that decision I mean that the decision to test your comfort level to do something that was kind of risky that turned you into to I mean essentially turned you into the person that you are known for today this is that's exactly right and this is I should. Just so I don't sound Pollyanna ish It's not a panacea at least a handful of your fears will be well founded and that's fair but you shouldn't assume that to be the case until you've put those fears under a microscope using something like fear setting it is a trainable skill you can make yourself more resilient and you can expand your comfortable sphere of action but look we all start out the same way naked and afraid. And I was clothed but certainly afraid and had that as a dominant driver for 20 plus years. I didn't come in with different programming for anybody else in that respect but I've been very fortunate to find different exercises in means by which you can train yourself to be more comfortable with discomfort. Tim Ferriss His latest book is called tribe of mentors He's also the host. Of the podcast The Tim Ferriss show you can see all of his talks at ted dot com. On the show today comfort zone ideas about pushing past the things that come easy Stay with us and you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . So at of all of the comfort zones that we find ourselves in like you know the lazy boy chair that we are comfortably sitting in or the t.v. Shows we watch or the food we choose to eat or the places we live. Most common example is. Yeah I think that it's. Talking to people who are similar to us there's no threat in that they're not going to reject us this is organizational psychologist. I'm an associate professor at the high State University College of Business and her work is all about networks like the people we choose to surround ourselves with this is one of the most basic ideas in psychology that people form cliques but what's really fascinating is that any little tiny scrap of commonality we grab onto those as well so if you and I are the same height we just feel comfortable standing there talking to each other and even though it's really hard to force ourselves out of our social commerce we all have the ability to do it actually she sees this every year when she gets a new batch of business school students day one they're so. At that moment in their lives they're connecting with everybody they're in with all different kinds of people who are sitting with people but literally a matter of weeks crystallizes. Find their friends they find people who are usually looking just like them and they sit and cluster together and wonderful moment of openness and. All of those other connections with or away. Anthropologists call this limb anality. These moments in our lives were just opened we're living in a grey area we're between worlds we're out of the boundaries that normally constrain us. It's a few weeks later where they stop this. I mean time it it would make sense like from an evolutionary standpoint that we seek out a comfortable group of like minded people that like at a certain time you know 240000 years ago we found people like us who wouldn't kill us who we could build a community with like that it makes sense why we're like that here I think these basic tendencies that human beings have I think it's natural I think they're critical to our survival if we're not in trusting relationships with friends and family. Many of our basic functions would be impossible and so it's not a problem when we're looking to them for comfort and support it is a problem when we get stuck when we need a way out of the world that we're in. Whether it's if lost a job you want to change a career you want to do something different you're simply at a place in your life where your inner bright. Tiny Menin picks up this idea from the Ted stage this is when we really pay a price for living in a click Mark Gran of better the sociologist he had a famous paper called the strength of weak ties and he asked people how they got their jobs and what he learned was that most people don't get their jobs through their strong ties their father their mother their significant other they instead get jobs through weak ties people who they just met so if you think about what the problem is with your strong ties think about your significant other for example then that work is redundant your weed ties people you just met today they are your ticket to a whole new social world. The thing is people always tell me I want to get a new job I want to get a great opportunity and I say well that's really hard because your networks are so fundamentally predictable out your how bitch will daily footpath and what you'll probably discover is that you can started home you go to your school or your workplace you maybe go up the same staircase or elevator you go to the bathroom the same bathroom in the same stall in that bathroom you end up in the jam then you come right back home it's like stops on a train schedule it's that predictable it's a fish and but the problem is that you're seeing exactly the same people make your network lightly more inefficient to go to a bathroom on a different floor and counter a whole new network of people so the takeaway here is not just take someone out to coffee it's a little more subtle it's go to the coffee room simple change in planning a huge difference in the traffic of people and the accidental bumps in the network . So tiny I I hear you and I want to do this I want to follow your advice but because thing like I am also very introverted and it can be painfully difficult for me to get to do that in a group it's hard for me to do this so what do you do. What we've discovered is that it's often not introversion and extroversion what the researchers find particularly powerful is an idea called self monitoring your ability to adapt to other people to be a social chameleon so you could be this introvert who is very willing and open to hearing and adapting to people of all different kinds of experience only yes so the people who have these broad bridging networks they're what we call high self monitors the high self monitors are really skilled at connecting with people even if they don't agree with them you're simply listening to them without judgment without injecting your opinion into this it's like a muscle and we've just got to get good at exercising it. The minute we meet someone really looking at them with meet them where initially seeing your interesting you're not interesting you're relevant we do this automatically we can even help it and what I want to encourage you to do instead is to fight your filters I want you to take a look around this room and I want you to identify the least interesting person that you see and I want you to connect with them over the next coffee break and I want you to go even further than that what I want you to do is to find the most irritating person you see as well and an act with them what you are doing with this exercise is you are forcing yourself you're forcing yourself to see what you don't want to see to connect with who you don't want to connect to widen your social world here's my question for you what are you doing that breaks you from your social habits where do you find yourself in places where you get injections of diversity unpredictable divorces. So basically to step out of your comfort zone you're going to have to experience discomfort Yeah you have to experience discomfort and you have to know that feeling that is associated with it maybe it's you know she's I'm scared at this moment that you're going to reject me or I'm feeling really irritated right now because you and I don't agree with each other but there's tremendous benefits of being able to do this getting a new job is one thing people who have lots of diversity in their networks in this way they also and up being more creative they're more likely to be promoted rapidly and what you're actually doing is and bridging yourself checking your opinions forcing yourself to confront different ideas but how I mean how wide of a network can an average person handle and isn't isn't there like a limit to this absolutely we don't want to spread ourselves too thin right so we have so many connections with so many different voices speaking to us we don't know what to do with them the problem is we are usually so narrow we need a little injection of diversity and human beings are nature is just to find that in group find that similarity we sometimes need ways to push ourselves out of that habit and create new habits that's organizational psychologist Tanya you can watch her whole talk to dot com on the show today ideas about stepping outside your comfort zone and why it's sometimes so hard to do that to take risks and confront fears and speak up can you please introduce yourself Yes My name is Love e.j. You know I'm a writer I'm a speaker and I say a professional troublemaker because I'm the person who say what you're thinking but dared not to. For more than a decade Levy has been writing and blogging about things that are sometimes hard to discuss things like racism and privilege and why men and women are paid differently for the same job and levy feels it's her role to push people outside their comfort zones My goal is to kind of disrupt the status quo and at least point out what's absurd about the world so maybe people will be more willing to disrupt it in their area too. Is to speaking up and speaking out about truths ever challenge your comfort zone Oh absolutely every day that I'm speaking up about truth to heart challenges me those are the times the times of this really is when it's most necessary. Spoke about her own struggles leaving her comfort zone from the Ted stage. Let's talk about. Fear has a very concrete power of keeping us from doing and saying the things that are our purpose I'm not going to left fear rule my life I'm not going to let fear dictate what I do anything that scares me I'm going to actively pursuing how I went skydiving where gratify the plane I was like I've done some stupid things in life is one of them. And then we come falling down to earth and I literally lose my breath as I see Earth and I was like I just thought a perfectly good plane on purpose. What is wrong with me but then I look down at the beauty now is like this is the best thing I could have done this is amazing decision and I think about the times when I have to speak truth it feels like I have fallen out that plane it feels like that moment when I'm at the edge of the plane or I'm like you shouldn't do this but then I do it anyway because I realize I have to. City of edge of the plane and kind of stayed on that plane is comfort to me and I feel like every day that I'm speaking truth to get institutions and people who are bigger than me and just forces that are more powerful than me I feel like I'm for now that point but I realize comfort is overrated because being quiet is comfortable keeping things the way they've been is comfortable and all comfort is done is maintain the status quo so we've got to get comfortable with being a cuckoo by speaking these hard truths when they're necessary. Down on the syllabus and this idea of speaking truth right like yeah there's this famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People is written like the forty's you know it is bestseller and basically it's messages like just keep quiet you know mile and that can really cam work in a lot of cases but but it means that nothing changes it means nothing changes it's how we find ourselves 60 years down the line still dealing with the same problems we had 60 years ago yeah it's because we insist that comfort is better than anything when comfort typically means somebody else is somewhere suffering because of our comfort so I completely disagree with the idea of should just shut up and just be the wallflower because when you shut up because somebody else is Bernie Yeah what happens when you burning. Nobody calls no one for you. We can't afford to sit around and just wait for somebody else to do what we think is important to be done. When it's time to say these heart. I asked myself 3 things one did you mean it to. Defend it 3 did you say with love if the answer is yes to all 3 I say and let the chips fall like a time when I was asked to speak at a conference. And they wanted me to pay my way there and then I disagree so she found out the white men who spoke there got compensated and got their travel pay for the white women who spoke there got their travel paid for the black women who spoke there were expected to actually pay to speak there and I was like What do I do and I knew that if I spoke up about this publicly I could face national loss but then I also understood that my silence serves no one I got to do this I got to sit at the edge of this plane maybe for 2 hours and I did and I pressed publish and I ran away. And I came back to a viral post and people being like oh my god I'm so glad somebody found said this so many people have been the Domino when they talk about how they've been assaulted by powerful men and it's made millions of women join in and say me to. People in systems count on our silence to keep us exactly where we are. And in a world that wants us to whisper I choose to be. One of the I mean as we've discussed on this episode like. We can push out of our comfort zones by forcing ourselves to try new things or finding friends who are different than us but one of the one of the really hard things for many people to do one of the really one of the things that really pushes people are their comfort zone is talking about race yeah yeah. It's here's the thing it's like if you break your arm and they say just act like you didn't break it it doesn't heal the bone you actually have to go put something on the arm to grow the bone back we've got to look at racism like that so the discomfort in talking about race. I feel like if you hear it's basically the desensitizing of a topic. We have to talk about it more and more and more everyone realizes that it's something that you have to confront It's something that is actually moving us backwards do you think I was wondering I wonder like do you think people are some people are afraid to talk about race because in some ways it it starts to challenge the way they see themselves and their place in the world absolutely when you have to talk about race you actually have to acknowledge some of the problems in the you also have to kind of acknowledge the role that you might play whether subconscious or just by your. Existence as a member of a group that's not marginalized so it kind of is damning to talk about it because when you understand the reality of racism and you understand the reality of privilege then you actually have to start understanding that you're not just an innocent bystander in a system that you inherited that every single day you're benefiting from it in some way because then when you walk into a room you can be like Ok with this privilege what am I going to do with it see the problem is when people have the privilege and only use it to benefit themselves or people who look just like them or lived life just like them that's when is a problem how do you begin to make people understand that getting uncomfortable is good for them that show he's getting out of that. Whether it's talking about race or privilege or truth is is actually good for them and for everybody. Well here's the thing comfort come occasional same place Yeah like there's no growth not being comfortable the whole idea of chart a new territories and speaking up in just doing the thing that you had to talk yourself into it's a custom practice every single day if it doesn't matter if you wake up scared what happens is that Ok what are you doing with it like if if every decision making is based on the fact that you don't want to challenge yourself or you don't want to be afraid that's when you get really comfortable in then you don't grow Yeah I mean how do we do it like what's what's the road map to get out of our coverage but we're too afraid I asked was What are you most afraid of the 1st question 2nd question is what is the worst that could happen and then what if in 20 years. You ask yourself What if I had done that how my life be different. Because I think it's important to live a life that's more of a oh well I tried that. I wish I would've tried the. Book is called I'm judging you to better manual you can find her full talk at ted dot com show today ideas about comfort zones. And you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . Storytelling is a shared human impulse we all do it in one way or another and that's an incredibly inspiring thing that we all want to share our stories this is an Morgan RINGBACK and a couple of years ago and was in graduate school for journalism when she started a blog a year of reading women spent some time reading books by women writers because I realized at the time most of the books I'd read and indeed most of the books I'd studied on my degree course were written by men now when I was doing this blog I got a very few people reading it but this one guy who came he left a comment on the blog saying that there was a book he really wanted me to read by an Australian writer and it was Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and I was thinking Ok sounds great but I'll have to read it next year because obviously I'm meeting women this year and he's not a woman and so I thought well maybe I'll do a blog next year I haven't really thought about it but it would need to have some kind of angle say he said well what about books from different countries and my 1st response was what he does he think I am Doesn't he know that I'm an you know I'm a really cultured person what kind of a Philistine does he take me for and then I look to my bookshelves and I realized actually. I didn't read that but from that many different countries READY. In fact it's pretty much all the books on my bookshelves were written in English Shakespeare in Milton Austen takes on a page under some swift but not much beyond that and sent me very little to it being translated from other languages and that came as a real shock to me because I thought this is crazy in a there's this whole other world out there that I've placed my iced tea that I've not even realised was there and suddenly it was a sudden it switched on a light and all these invisible but shelves have been hidden in the dark lit up and stretched off as far as the eye can see and all the stories that I just haven't even. With their suddenly started to Klamath my attention and so I thought well what can I do. 2012 was shaping up to be a very international year for the u.k. Because we had the Olympics coming and the Queen's Jubilee and there was a lot of it excitement about people from all over the world coming to visit and so I thought well that would be a good year. Do a very international reading project so I thought why didn't I do reading the world and rather than simply reading books from different countries see if I can read a book from every country. And Morgan picks up the story from the stage. After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my projects I ended up going with a list of un recognised nations to which I added Taiwan which is 196 countries and after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about roughly 4 books a week around working 5 days a week I then had to face up to the fact that I might not even be able to get books in English from every country only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published here in the u.k. a Translations and the figures to similar much of the English speaking world although the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher 4.5 percent it's tiny enough to start with but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English language publishers So for example $100.00 books are translated from French published in the u.k. Each year most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland French speaking Africa on the other hand will rarely ever get a look. The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world the biggest challenge of all for me was the fact that I didn't know where to start having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Farsi lands I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia there was no hiding it I was a clean literary Santa Fe So how on earth with I get to reap the world. Yeah I mean as you start a little look for these books from around the world that were unfamiliar or challenging to you how did you. Get them because you can't. Just go to Arizona and types of these books and write so what did you would you do so I had because I had lots of people leaving comments initially I I sort of followed the leads the suggestions that people made but then when it came to countries that didn't have books that you could buy easily online or in bookshops I had to get creative the most challenging of all the countries when I was trying to find literature without I mean Prince pay which is a small African island nation of the west coast of Africa and Portuguese is the $1.00 of the official languages but although there are books published there was nothing that I could find by in English translation I really wasn't sure that I was going to manage to find anything from there and then one day my husband he said well why don't you see if you can get people to translate something for you and I thought he's going to want to do that and say that's a huge amount of work to ask someone to do but what was amazing was that within a week of me putting a call out on social media for anyone who could speak Portuguese he might be willing to volunteer some time I had more people than I could actually involve And I I found this collection of short stories by a woman he was born in sas him in. Prince pay and I bought enough copies to be able to send $1.00 out to each of the translators and divided it up asked each of them to take a few of the short stories on and they all stuck to their words and sent back their translations and in 6 weeks I had the entire days so I mean you were a very well read person but reading in a certain context probably a lot of the work took place in Europe against a European backdrop and landscape history so you could connection. More or less with you know with ease these books must have been really challenging for you a lot of these books must have really pushed you to your limit absolutely there were a lot of assumptions that we take for granted when we look at the world when we tell stories and assumptions that we we make about water passing on the other side of the story we'll think and these assumptions don't hold true when you're looking at stories from very different cultures where you're not the target audience say they can be assumptions that range from anything from morality and ideas about what's acceptable when it comes to sexuality 3 to religious beliefs 3 to gender roles we don't even necessarily realise this is some Chins are there because for example when I was reading stories from one of the 70 plus countries where homosexuality is still illegal I found myself coming up against assumptions that I didn't share and that was a challenge but vice a versa I found that by reading books that were built on very different ideas about what was normal and what was acceptable I started to see some of the narrowest is in the way that I looked at the world in the kind of stories that I was used to reading as well so it worked both ways. I mean you must have just become smarter about the world exposed to ideas even never even knew about it I think certainly more conscious of the complexity and the fact it's so easy to. Make assumptions about situations that we know very little about and particular speak English we have this tendency but I think everyone does we all think of ourselves as being at the center of Irene universe of course because we're all we're at the center of a new film you know we'll live in the middle of our in life but actually going out there and reading stories that are written by people who live in very different universes and live at the center of very different. Shows you how different the wilds out there are and how how your brain weld is. Small in a way that perhaps he didn't realize before. And more again her blog a year of reading The world is now a book it's called the world between 2 covers reading the globe you can see her full talk at ted dot com Do you ever kind of look at your life and say I am I need to shake things up it's too comfortable Yeah I do this is Dan plot and he's an author and activist Sometimes I look at my life and I think Wow I've stepped out of my comfort zone a lot and sometimes I think I need to venture into new ideas dance probably best known as the creator of multi-day charity events things like the aids ride bicycle ride and the breast cancer 3 day walk events that raised close to $600000000.00 for charities and Dan says today our society seems to have stopped dreaming big stopped moving outside its comfort zone to accomplish big things here's Dan's idea from the Ted stage I was 8 when I watched Neil Armstrong step off the lunar module on to the surface of the moon. Never seen anything like it before. And I've never seen anything like it since. We got to the moon for one simple reason John Kennedy committed us to a deadline and in the absence of that deadline we would still be dreaming about it Leonard Bernstein said 2 things are necessary for great achievement a plan and not quite enough time. Deadlines and commitments are the great and fading lessons of Apollo and they are what give the word moonshot its meaning. And our world is in desperate need of political leaders willing to set old deadlines for the achievement of daring dreams on the scale of Apollo again. If you go back and watch documentary footage of Gene Krantz who was the flight director at mission control or any of the astronauts talking about that time they tear up these engineers they cry openly at the beauty of what that was and it's the beauty of what we did and we don't have goals for anything we don't have a deadline for ending poverty going to have a deadline for ending hunger we don't have a deadline for curing cancer Apollo was the last time the United States as a nation put its you know what on the line for something daring and incredible and I think grown men and women yearn to weep at the sight of accomplishments on that scale again absolutely I mean I agree but that that's huge and ambitious Where do you even start I think the key is you start a small stepping out of your comfort zone doesn't necessarily mean you have to do something huge you could be something very little you know I read an article yesterday I can't remember who wrote the woman who wrote it and she said What if I don't want to end hunger in Africa but I just want to help people in my own community and like we grew up in this change the world age and sometimes I wonder if it isn't part of the problem if us all working on global issues in overlooking the local issues in neighborliness and you know we have an abundance of the word community and a deficit of actual community so I think that's when it's a lot of our problems stem so if I understand what you're saying correctly you're saying that these big dream. Might in a way come at the expense of like meaningful connections that we have with people in our communities or or even our personal relationships I think there's a dream deficit it's about the need to dream in 2 dimensions that we are kind of dreaming on the doing side of things self driving car and all kinds of I.P.O.'s for new dot com and where we don't dream is in the emotional side of our allies that we can't get any better at understanding one another and that's where I think the dreaming deficit is and and I think we're trying to solve too many of our problems in the domain of doing and thinking we can completely bypass the domain of being well if you really want to get to the root cause I think the root cause lives in our inability to be with one another mistake a part of what you're talking about is personal vulnerability right because for many of us show being vulnerable and showing vulnerability is as difficult as the race to the moon I mean that is a valid testing of one's comfort zone. Absolutely and you know like I remember at a young age I guess I was 18 or something and our next door neighbor had passed away and I was with my dad in the yard my dad to get was a construction worker is still living but he's no longer a construction worker and I I wanted to tell him that I loved him you know and I remember that took an enormous amount of courage to say dad and him say Look at me and say what. I love you and that was a big leap out of my comfort zone why because it it's sort of comes from completely out of left field right you used to talking to. A rundown of the hardware store and get me some p.v.c. Pipe for the plumbing work in every pair or or gossip or a you know that's the the level of conversation to elevate it to I love you it's just a whole different playing field in it's a risk or a because because he might say what's wrong with you there's something wrong with you. I mean don't talk like that he didn't say that you know he said I love you back to me and I want to have that kind of relationship with my dad and with my mom I didn't want them to die without them knowing at the deepest level how much I appreciated and felt about them. It is our inability to be with one another that gives rise to so many of the problems we are frantically trying to solve in the 1st place from congressional gridlock to economic in humanity we should not shrink from this opportunity simply because we don't really understand it and that is the very definition of being stuck in a comfort zone it is the dimension of our being itself that cries out for its fair share of our imagination. It's time for us to dream in multiple dimensions simultaneously. An honor to be with you thank you very much. Dan you can see his entire talk at ted dot com. You know. That was Guy Raz ending the Ted radio from n.p.r. That edition was 1st heard in 2018 production for the Ted Radio Hour was by Guy Raz Jeff Rogers said as Meskin poor Neva Grant Casey Herman rund Abdel-Fattah and Rachel full. Now David Attenborough has always been fascinated by fossils even as a boy he spent many hours exploring the local Corina his home in Leicestershire now and for extra In addition all of David Attenborough's life stories from 2011 he's about to indulge his passion once more Charles Darwin had one great problem when assembling his history of life on this planet he knew nothing about its very early stages he certainly didn't know how one in organic molecule became a living one was still wrestling with that problem but he also didn't know what were the very 1st organisms that anyone might recognize as an animal or plant. The place to look for answers to that question of course is in the rocks in Darwin's time the oldest fossils anyone had found or at least recognised came from rocks belonging to a period called the Cambrian which we now know to have been deposited around 540000000 years ago but these Cambrian fossils are remarkably complex Some are shells like small clams but others trying to bites look like the wood lice that we find in our gardens except that these are sometimes as big as rabbits but who could believe that creatures with complex eye is feelers and a dozen or so jointed legs beneath a coat of Shelley Arma like a trying to bite where the very 1st animals that ever existed there were a number of possible explanations of course of this lack of simpler fossils maybe animals before then didn't have any hard protections such as shells or Ramah but had naked general like bodies so that when they died they simply dissolved without leaving any trace or maybe the chemistry of the season those far distant times was such that it was not possible for an animal to extract the chemical compounds needed to build a hard shell or maybe it was simply that all the rocks that date from that unimaginably engine period have been so compressed buckled baked and mangled by the Earth's geological processes that they could not possibly retain any trace of an animal's existence. At any rate one thing was clear to Darwin and other scientists of his time the rocks that lay beneath the Cumbrian rocks the so-called Precambrian where without fossils of any kind so ideas about the very 1st chapter in the story of life could only be speculation and that was still the situation when I was a boy back in the 1930 s. I lived in Leicester in the middle of England and I was an enthusiastic collector of fossils to the east of the city there were a chorus from which came on rich Jurassic limestone it was formed around 175000000 years ago and it was full of spectacularly beautiful fossils coil shells like ammonites and things like bullets belum nights that one is part of the internal structure of squid like animals there were even $33.00 of marine reptiles in your saws that swam around in those Jurassic seas though I was never lucky enough to find one of those but the rocks to the northwest of the city were of no interest to me they were through very ancient indeed they were Precambrian but that meant by definition they didn't contain any fossils so I didn't waste my time looking them how misguided I was a mere 11 years after I'd left my Leicester grammar school a boy from the very same school named Roger Mason who was also interested in fossils was playing with a couple of friends in a Korean wood forest the rocks there are composed largely of thick deposits of ash from ancient volcanoes the now had become compressed in very hot house way up the face of the quarry imprinted on the rock he saw what looked like the impression of a front of bracken it was about 7 inches long with a series of branches sprouting on either side of the central rib. He told his father a local minister who in turn persuaded a geologist on the staff of Leicester University to go and have a look at his son's fine there could be no doubt it was a fossil and it was in the Precambrian he was named China Mason our China afterwards had been found and mace and I after the boy who had found it and it caused a geological sensation and not least on the other side of the world in a straight down there 10 years earlier in the grey hills or the battle laid geologists had found very similar fossils no one at the time had been able to ascertain the age of the e.t. Akron rocks they were certainly extremely ancient but people argued that the very fact that they contained fossils meant that they must be Campion now the Leicestershire find in rocks that were undoubtedly Precambrian that this training has to change their ideas and fossil hunters worldwide began to look more carefully and intensively in rocks that were so old they had assumed the 2 that they were devoid of life. In most areas that remain true they were without fossils of any kind but in just one or 2 places conditions on the sea floor had been like those when the child would rocks well laid down the animals living there had been buried under layers of volcanic ash that had preserved an impression of their dead bodies and the rocks that contain them unlike so many of their great age had remained largely unaffected by the Titanic movements in the earth's crust that had occurred in the millennia that followed last year I went to one of those very special places mistaken point that lives on the east coast of Newfoundland. It's called mistaken because in the old days ships sailing through the fog that so often shroud this part of the world mistakenly thought that they had cleared land and were heading for the open sea only to crash into the rocks of the point. On the day we were there the weather was glorious and the fossils Well amazing there are great flat areas of rock that though they're now tilted where once the horizontal floor of a sea that had been covered with a thick layer of volcanic ash and in one place on a flat surface about the size of a tennis court there weren't To my astonishment Charney is not one hundreds of them lying flat and roughly parallel to one another it seemed that ash in the water had swept in from one particular direction so that they were all more or less a mind you needed only a little imagination to conjure up a vision of that ancient sea floor as it must have been all those in arms ago it was in truth a thrilling sight the Leicestershire Charney I was perhaps a stray maybe it had become dislodged from its attachment to the sea floor and had been swept away but here in the rocks of Newfoundland channels where in their true home they were almost as thick as grew bells in a forest the time when they flourished was so early in the history of life that the difference between animals and plants had not yet become established and there exemptions to friends of bracken is only superficial in fact they grew in a very different way a way that resembles the one by which Frost forms patterns on a window pane It's called fractal one starts as a small blob after a little time that puts out a branch with a particular shape that branch in due course puts out 2 other similarly say branches. Each of them then puts out another 2 branches so that a structure grows which is based on one pattern repeated endlessly It's one of the simplest ways of increasing in size for it requires only a very simple genetic mechanism one of the scientists studying these fossils told me that he would only need to tap in about 8 commands into his computer to create a similar fractal pattern on his screen. No animal alive today grows in such a simple way it seems that the method doesn't allow enough variety to enable the organism that uses it to evolve such things as Miles and legs and in the end these fractal organisms were displaced by creatures with more complex ways of growing the could produce these more complicated organs since those discoveries the search for Precambrian life has spread and intensified that has been finds in Siberia the Ural mountains in southern Africa more kinds of animals have been found but China remains one of the very 1st living organisms of any size of which we have any knowledge part at least of their answer to the question that so trouble Darwin What were the animals that lived during the 1st stages of life on Earth. I asked one of the scientists working on these wonderful fossils in Australia if you knew why the animal he was studying was called China he confessed he didn't well I said it's after a patch of countryside far away in the middle of England where I spent my boy Lord and I told him the story but as I did so I couldn't help wishing that I hadn't paid so much attention to the accepted geological wisdom of the time and that I had been the school boy who'd found that key fossil in the Charmed board. David out in Brazil life stories was written and presented by said a view that brought the producer was Judy and Hector of the b.b.c. Natural History Unit. Is up next with some laughs to round off the day at the Comedy Club I'll be back in a couple of hours with Paul one of Erin Morgan students Deb you know the Night Circus. Reads this bewitching dark fantasy about love and magic set in a traveling circus Good night. Hello and welcome to the Radio 4 extra comedy club with satirist humorist and former receptionist Sarah count Bowl it is a peson a today. The 3 wise men arrived at the stable and said to marry some pressies. Also with what's on the jaw system on your maternity leave is over so are they about to worry measurable over the abouts welcome 11 it because your job is just announcing what programs are coming up and it distracts from much deeper and intractable crises in your life we've got comedy both current and Vincent age. 56. Coming up tonight at half past 10 it is on the Iowa just. Past the hour at 11 is the brand new series of The News Quiz at $1130.00 and Dennis are in full effect in front of a crime and at a quarter to midnight. The remarkable true history of rockets and the men women and animals behind them it is rocket science.
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