Dead and alive

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode

1. How to spot when you’re alive.
2. How to manage uncertainty.
3. How to manage dread.
4. How to apply the Schroedinger-Pascal model for anxiety

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Sometimes I get a letter from the bank. It might just be a notification that a monthly overseas transfer went through. A lot of letters from the bank are just that, so there’s a good chance. On the other hand, it might be something unpleasant — some bad news. Perhaps I misjudged my budget and I’m too overdrawn to make a repayment.

To the lighthouse: the cult of souvenirs

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode

1. Learn to separate fact from fantasy.
2. Learn to favour now over then.
3. Learn to be at peace with the stories you tell yourself.
4. Learn to let cherished ideas go when you need to.

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In Moominpappa at Sea, the darkest and most troubling of Tove Jansson’s haunting Moomin books for children, Moominpappa falls under the spell of a classic mid-life crisis. At the root of it is a feeling of leisured ennui.

The games we play

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode

1. How to create alternative universes.
2. How to identify game players and the games they play.
3. How to identify what’s at stake in social transactions.

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Unpacking the last of my boxes I came across a selection of wooden spinning tops, brightly painted, carefully bubble wrapped. I placed them in a ceramic bowl I’d bought in Istanbul and the move was over. I looked at them for a little while. These were not my daughter’s spinning tops, they were mine. I had collected them over many years, bringing the original few to Paris a decade previously, returning now with an expanded collection.

Revenge of the imposters

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

1. How to be authentic
2. How to speak up and speak out
3. How to develop your sense of legitimacy
4. How to destroy robots from your past

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Did you ever sing into your hairbrush as a child and dream of becoming Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran? Or did you play air guitar to Smoke on the Water? I didn’t do either of these things but what I can say is that, for about a year, from roughly 1981 to 1982, my mate Simon and I genuinely believed we could make an impact on the robotic dancing scene.

Dawn of the imposters

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

1. How far you’ve come !
2. How to get the secret memo about how the world really works
3. How to change the dialogue about who and what you are
4. Learn to move in incremental steps toward your desired self

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Welcome to episode six. We’re half way though the first season now and I think it would be a great idea at this stage to have a brief recap of the progress you’ve made over the last two and a half hours. Because in an incredibly short time, you’ve accomplished an awful lot and you may not be aware just how far you’ve come.

Ammonites and divas

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

1. How to avoid zero-sum thinking
2. How to avoid setting impossible goals
3. How to liberate yourself from perfectionism
4. Learn to move in incremental steps toward your desired future

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Ammonite

Three hundred million years ago, in the carboniferous period of the paleozoic era, off the coast of the drifting microcontinent of Avalonia, a young ammonite died.

Triangles and giraffes

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

1. How what we think affects what we do and how we feel
2. How what we do affects what we think and how we feel
3. How our feelings affect what we think and what we do
4. How to command the above for happiness, using only triangles and giraffes 😉

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It was spring time and I was in Sophie’s kitchen in a suburb of Paris. In the grassless, shadowy garden, crocuses had begun to poke out of the damp soil. In the trees overhead, a battalion of ring-necked parakeets was amassing. Red beaks and green feathers, pointed wings and long tails. They gathered in dark tribes, squawking and chattering, as though willing something to happen. Or waiting.

Hamartia and the locus of control

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

1. Agency versus victimhood
2. Inside the motivations of controllers
3. Banish magical thinking
4. Pwn your locus 🙂

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Are you the agent of your own destiny or are you a Capricorn, damned by the cosmos at birth to be weighed down in all your best efforts by the constraining forces of Saturn?

Seaglass and the quieter mind

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

1. Find your true self
2. Pay attention and start noticing
3. Quieten the mind
4. Choose your focus

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I remember exactly where I was when Elvis died. I was sitting in the wide, open-plan kitchen of a log cabin on the Norfolk coast of England, anticipating a cooked breakfast. My godfather’s family and mine had come away to this place for the summer. Through the window I could see the broad, flatline of the North sea horizon, the steel-blue promise of the water, the waving of dune grass and teasel.

Rousseau and the power of reverie

30 mins

Script: Richard Lewis
Music: Richard Lewis
Producer: Oliver Feldman

In this episode:

• What 30 Walks is all about
• The value of reverie as a tool
• How to unlock the power of unconscious cognition to solve problems without trying
• How I discovered the idea for 30 Walks
• What you can expect over the course of our 30 Walks together

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Have you ever read a celebrity memoir that was so cringingly warts-and-all that you sort of wished they’d kept some of it to themselves?

How about this? Have you ever tried to do something, but failed over and over again and eventually given up in despair, only to try again a week later and succeed without effort?

How are these connected?