INTP Musings

Attention and curiosity

Revise your relationship with the unknown and change your life.

This is the final episode of season 1. Thanks for joining me on this journey. In this episode, we discuss a hypothesis about internet trolling and misinformation. I provide two pieces of evidence along with one personal anecdote supporting this hypothesis. These are given in the episode and are not provided here in the synopsis. Hopefully they are convincing for you. Time will tell if my hypothesis is ultimately correct. The hypothesis is that these phenomena (trolling and misinformation) are symptoms of the early internet that will improve over time. The idea is that every new power is abused in its early years as people adjust to it, but in time people learn to use it properly. Internet access represents a brand new type of power that we've never had before, and every day, more and more people are getting access for the first time. They are immediately sucked into fake news websites that proliferate everywhere, and participate in and are affected by internet trolls. As the decades go by and internet access becomes the rule rather than the exception, more people will be born with the internet as something that just exists. As this population of people born into the internet grows, the phenomena of trolling and belief in fake news will likely subside. More people will learn internet etiquette, having been taught about it from an early age, and the trolly, bullshitty corner of the internet will begin to shrink in relevance. As that happens, the best version of the internet will begin to grow in importance: the aspect of the internet that facilitates valuable contributions and learning: Wikipedia and GitHub come to mind.

One of the things I am learning as I go through life is that you can't binge on good behavior and expect a good life. What I mean by that is if your behavioral norms are corrupted, you can't do the occasional good or even the occasional VERY good deed and expect your life to improve significantly and sustainably. Good begets good, and daily habits do the begetting, not occasional acts that are out of character. This is true no matter how large the magnitude of your temporary good deed. A good deed will make you feel good for awhile, but eventually you will fall back to the baseline feeling that is the result of your standard behavior. Boring, small, daily habits are what matter, not gigantic heroic acts.

Are nihilists correct? Is there a point to anything? Are there any effective counterarguments to the nihilistic assertion that life is meaningless? There is little to be found in terms of solid logical counterarguments when it comes to arguing against a nihilist. It always requires a leap of faith, because the nihilist has the intellectual upper hand. The leap of faith involves building your own meaning and hoping that that's enough; chasing your own dreams tenaciously and hoping for the best. After a few decades, when your dreams unfold, the nihilist may still have the intellectual upper hand, but you'll have the better life after having shown that even though life may seem (or be) meaningless, it is still worthwhile to pursue something that you consider meaningful, as it leads to a better life, however temporary and fleeting, and that is really the most we can hope for when it comes to countering nihilists. Having the logical upper hand is not the holy grail of winning, necessarily. In the middle of the podcast, I provide a way to turn the nihilist perspective against them: the nihilist case for striving to pursue your own meaning.

In this episode, we discuss two different career types. In my view, all careers fall somewhere in this dualistic spectrum: knowledge-centric careers (minority) and task centric careers (majority). We discuss the dynamics between people on different ends of the spectrum, and how these can bring about a change in the times – ushering in a dark age or an enlightenment age, depending on how the dynamics play out.

The path to right wing extremism involves the extraction of men from society who don't feel useful or like their life has a point. Every man has the desire for meaning, and the chance to contribute and improve their world. The views and beliefs are extreme, but I would argue that the men themselves are not extreme at their core. It's a shame that our society has not harnessed this male desire to make meaningful contributions. Instead, we leave them behind to the detriment of society. ANY man can be radicalized if found in the right point in his life and if the conditions are right. Anybody. People are always surprised when they find out that that average Joe or that quiet kid they went to school with is a white supremacist. They can't imagine someone like that being radicalized. They imagine that only crazy people can be radicalized. But no, anyone can go down this path if they get sucked in by some predatory recruiters who make big promises. Some people are like leaves in the wind, and that leaf can land in the sweet spot if the wind is right. If they get caught in a rightward gust, however, they can end up being radicalized. Society should be more structured, and blocking these strong winds to ensure that these leaves end up in more desirable locations.

No summary today. You'll have to listen to the podcast.

Nothing is more oppressive than nature. We as humans spend a lot of time trying to correct the wrongs of others. We want to see justice and ensure fairness, so we have laws and things like that. This is a noble pursuit, BUT we spend far less time trying to decouple ourselves from the oppression of nature. We try really hard to correct human oppression, trying to keep people from doing horrible things to others to the best of our ability, but we spend a lot less time than we should trying to solve problems imposed upon us by nature. Nature just is, and sometimes the way nature is, is very very damaging for us. I would argue that nothing is more oppressive than nature, and the problems that nature imposes upon us are far more difficult to solve than human problems, but far more worthy of solving. The reason we don't spend as much time as we should on this, is because it doesn't have the emotional weight of a human problem. When a person is doing bad things, it incites anger in many people, and they rally to solve that problem. Natural events, on the other hand, just “happen”. There's no one to be angry with, so there isn't the emotional motivation to solve the problem. We need to overcome this dismissal of nature, and solve some of natures most pressing problems, like asteroids and cancer. The good thing about solving natural problems, is that there is no real enemy, and all of humanity can therefore come together to solve the problem together. In a sense, the problems of nature can be unifying for us in our attempts to solve them. As an example, we humans have the ability to prevent an asteroid the size of that which killed the dinosaurs from ever hitting the planet. If we detected it early enough, we could develop a technological solution which would steer it off course and prevented the collision entirely. These sorts of problems that don't have any emotional weight, but do have seriously grave consequences are the most worthwhile problems to solve. An asteroid has no evil intent. An asteroid can't trigger us emotionally. But an asteroid can easily destroy all human life.

In this episode, we discuss why everyone should be consuming more “boring” content and doing more “boring” things. Boring has a bad connotation, but boring is actually good, because when nothing is happening, then nothing bad is happening. Unfortunately, “nothing bad happened today” is not a newsworthy story. However, there are people in certain parts of the world that would love to live in a predictable and boring western society. Boredom is actually a luxury. We go on to talk about how people are getting more addicted to sensationalist media. They want something big going on, and they want to catch some bad guy redhanded and point the finger at him. The reality is though, that most of the pain and discomfort in the world is not due to some huge event or some grand conspiracy, but just a whole bunch of people making small decisions of low integrity over and over and over again, and these little decisions are very insidious, and they add up and accumulate, and things just slowly get worse and worse. So improvement of a society is really just a matter of tipping the scales, and slowly turning the boat in the more positive direction, and day-by-day making better decisions. It is really a boring a process, but it is a process that will get you where you want to go (a better/more positive world). When I say “consume boring media”, I mean “read textbooks, consume tutorials, learn how to do useful things to pick up skills you need to be valuable in society”. That's how you change your life, improve your financial situation, and ultimately, improve your little corner of the world. But when you get there, don't expect it to be some grandiose, heavenly event or accomplishment. It's going to also be boring. Once you improve your financial situation, you're still going to be bored, and that's okay. If that inherent “boringness” of existence bothers you, you can take up meditation, which allows you to see the vibrancy and beauty in even the most mundane aspects of life. You can have amazing experiences just by focusing on your breathing, and what could be more boring than focusing on your breathing? Every viable solution to real, systemic problems, involves a boring solution. There are no sexy, explosive, quick fixes to things like that. These problems have to be uprooted slowly, using dull, boring procedures day in and day out that improve things until you get where you want to be. And once you get where you want to be, that's also not going to be exciting. It's really about the journey. Think about the universe. It is mostly empty space. Seems pretty boring, but it's not. The universe is still awesome even though it's largely an uneventful place. There is lot more amazing content packed into this wonderful episode. I highly recommend.

Alphabet has a monopoly on SEARCH (Google) and VIDEO (youtube). This is bad. How much money will it take to bribe them to only show traditional media, or to give it preferential treatment in the search algorithm? Or perhaps a traditional media company bribes the government in their country to ban youtube if they fail to prioritize their stuff. Then youtube can either sellout or leave the country. If there were more viable alternatives, there would be more moving targets and it would be more difficult for video itself to be subject to corporate selling out. But instead, we have a monopoly; one company in charge of video, period. And that is bad, because it just takes one decision for video to go to shit (i.e. not be for the people anymore).

In this episode, we discuss the properties of power. Many people like to assign a value to power – power is bad, they say. Power is good, they say. Power is actually just a neutral property. It is a quantity that different people, places, and things have different amounts of. Power can be used for good or evil, but power itself is neither of those things. Power can be concentrated and intentionally acquired by people, and power structures organize themselves spontaneously. Sometimes, power structures become corrupted, and need to either be changed or destroyed by the people in them. But even when this is the case, changing it should be done in a cool, calm, and collected way, not in an angry and outraged way. Anger and outrage is useful only in the initial stage of becoming aware of problems and deciding to commit to solving them. But actually solving problems by implementing solutions is technically difficult and requires a clear mind. So power should be viewed objectively, even when it becomes corrupted. And if you need to improve a bad situation, do it calmly.

Most people growing up have at least one non-negotiable thing imposed by their parents, usually in the form of a belief about they way the world is, or about things they have to do if they want to be okay. This almost always leads to either the kids strongly opposing this non-negotiable thing for a large portion of their lives, or the kids falling in line, for fear of the consequences, and doing exactly what their parents want in this regard. In either case, these non-negotiable things are the things that people struggle with the most typically throughout their entire lives, and these things are often the cause of many irrational decisions and bad choices throughout that individual's life. It is like… the continuation of a generations-long cycle when a child decides to just go along with it, and it is the breaking of a cycle when the child decides not to. In either case, it is a difficult, lifelong battle for the child, because these heavy beliefs about reality imposed upon them by their parents are both hard to carry around and extremely difficult to let go of fully. The truth is, this is generational trauma they are carrying around with them, and releasing it takes time, and many people never release it.

Today we'll discuss how the same thing from different perspectives might as well be an entirely different thing, and how the possibilities of human experience are infinite, even for a person with a seemingly boring life. Most humans fall into the trap of thinking their experience is too small, or not enough, and this is unsatisfying to them. INTPs, on the other hand, see intricate complexities all around us, and our dissatisfaction comes from the sense of being overwhelmed by it all, and rather than having that sense of boredom or things not being enough, we get overwhelmed by how infinite everything is. We want to understand everything, but we know that is impossible in the span of a human life. The INTP perspective is valuable and unique in that way. We can help others see possibilities where they see nothing, and others can help us narrow our view a little bit so we can actually accomplish something concrete and tangible, rather than being scattered all over the place, jumping around between different technical issues each day that we happen to be interested in.

Which is worse? A dictator or a power vacuum? Both of these things have negatives. In a dictatorship, there is no freedom and everyone has to do what the dictator says or risk being jailed or killed. But, in a dictatorship, everyone knows who is in charge and what to expect. This is a form of stability and certainty, and human beings value stability, even if it takes a dangerous form like a dictator. In a power vacuum, you never know who's in control, power is constantly changing hands, and you're not sure who to put your allegiance with because you don't know if everyone who has allegiance to that group is going to be killed in a week or two. This leads to a lot of uncertainty, violence and chaos. The comfort of certainty is what leads people to elect strongmen who they feel is going to set things right by force. People would rather live in a dictatorship than a power vacuum, it seems. These are both not ideal scenarios, obviously. Democracy is far more ideal than both. Interestingly enough, ademocracy is essentially just a “controlled” power vacuum. Maybe that's why they're so unstable, unfortunately. Power vacuums are always waiting to be filled, by arguably almost always the wrong people. I go on to discuss the possibility of improving human society through the fusion of artificial intelligence and political systems, and I posit that sometime in the next 100 years, there will be at least one country that lets its government be run entirely, or almost entirely by AI. Likely a small country, like Estonia.

This is a controversial opinion episode and I don't necessarily stand by all the statements. This is one way to look at the way in which humanity grew, and it may or may not be correct. There are several other alternative perspectives that I touch on briefly at the end of the episode that are equally worth discussing.

People have a low threshold of evidence to belive/accept things other people believe, but they have a high threshold to accept things other people don't believe. All it takes for someone to change a belief isto meet a good number of people, that they consider kind and reasonable at a time when they are vulnerable, who believe in an alternate thing. In this episode, we talk about new ideas, how they occasionally spread, and the fact that they hardly ever do.

Everything looks easy and is easy to judge from far away. When people see someone else doing something, especially someone considered a professional, they assume the job is easier than it is, especially if they've dabbled in it a bit and are familiar enough to understand a few things, but not familiar enough to understand the emergent difficulty that arises when you scale that activity up to a business. Something might appear straightforward and obvious based on your initial observation, but there is actually A LOT going on behind the scenes to make that simple thing happen, like watching a skater do a kickflip and land it. Looks seamless, and the steps required to do it seem obvious. Just move your feet like this and you're good. Then when you get on the skateboard and try to do it, it's far more difficult, and you get injured. The second example I go into is generating electricity. This seems easy. You just have to turn a turbine. Why can't we turn more turbines and get the whole world on electric power overnight? But it's not JUST turning the turbines. Where are you going to turn them? In the air? In the sea? They might kill wildlife. How big will they be? How much do they cost to make? What is their lifetime and how much energy can you get out of them in that time? Are they worth that cost? Now what about storage? It's impossible to generate energy at exactly the same rate as it is used, so you need storage. Now what about transmission? How are you going to get that energy to the people that need it? It all gets exponentially more complicated when you factor in the human component. Who is going to be opposing you actively? Who is your competition? Who is paying politicians to pass legislation to ensure that you fail? Consider that the majority of the questions I've just asked are science questions, each with their own lines of research going on to make turning turbines for people more economically viable. Photovoltaics are even more complicated because you're not just turning turbines. That is the essence of why simple seeming things are difficult. You think that you just want to do one thing, but then you realize that to do that you need to address another thing, but to address that new thing you have to address a few other things, and it can explode exponentially into a tree-like structure. Eventually you get to a place where your solution is “good enough” and economically viable, and you release it, but nothing is ever perfect. And then when you do release it, people are going to be criticizing it harshly because it has flaw X or problem Y, and they'll ask “why don't they just fix that problem? It's just one thing. Just make it better. These guys are idiots. Hundreds of scientists and engineers developing this and they couldn't even prevent problem X? I could make a better project in my garage.” And these little seemingly simple problems that are actually very difficult to solve appearing before the public is what creates people who don't trust experts. INTPs are really good at seeing all of this technical nuance, and addressing it carefully, so they often find themselves at the receiving end of this type of harsh criticism. It's exacerbated by the fact that we like to burrow into our problems without communicating with people, so they think we're just screwing around, wasting their time, and not actually solving anything. This criticism can actually scare away INTPs from impactful careers in STEM. They might just say “screw that” and spend the rest of their days living in a small apartment, working at a grocery store, and developing their own personal projects at home alone on their computers, never showing the greatness of their work to the world. This is a bit of a loss for the world at large, and can be avoided if people make more of an effort to reach across the isle and understand these technical problems a little bit more, and be less quick to judge a person who is working on it.

Sloppy work is worth avoiding as it puts short term gains ahead of long term growth. In this episode, I discuss the value of doing things properly; crossing one's t's and dotting one's i's. It may seem like the slower, less efficient way to do something, but in the long term it is actually more efficient because it prevents having to go back and check one's work, and/or having to scrap a lot of work that was done to begin with. The negative impact of sloppy work may be imperceptible in the short term, but in the long term it brings progress to a halt. It is like eating fast food. It may give one a temporary energy boost. But over the years, it erodes away the health and causes disease. Doing things slowly and mindfully, on the other hand, is like eating healthy food. It builds one up day by day, slowly but surely, even though it may not be fun in the short term.

This episode is about things that can't be proven. This topic is explored from two different sides, and we'll answer three different questions about this topic from both sides. I believe these questions are worth asking because lots of people put lots of energy into things that are unproven and/or unprovable. All questions are binary yes/no type questions, and the answers are discussed in detail. 1.) Is it worth entertaining things that are yet to be proven? What about things that can't be proven? 2.) Is it worth having “faith” in things that are yet to be proven or can't be proven? 3.) Do unproven/unprovable things have inherent value in society? Net positive? Net negative? At the end, we discuss the value of being agnostic towards things that can't be proven; holding things with an open palm that says “maybe”, not a closed fist that says “yes! This is true!” or throwing that thing to the ground yelling “no! This is bullshit!” Just hold it with an open palm that says “Maybe. Perhaps. We'll see.” If something is unproven, that can be a useful attitude to have.

In this episode, I describe the benefits of taking a leap of faith and continuously coming back to something that you are learning that is completely new and alien to you. This is persistence. Even if you feel totally overwhelmed and ignorant every time you sit down to study that thing, the continuous exposure is valuable, and eventually you will begin to understand and get good at that thing. I use the example in my life of making a contribution on GitHub to a C++ code that I have been using for a very long time. At the time, I didn't know very much C++, but over the span of a few months, I developed this feature. At first I was completely overwhelmed and didn't know anything, but I kept coming back to it and doing my due diligence, and occasionally asking other developers for very specific help, and eventually, I was able to get the feature working. Persistence like that is how one becomes more well rounded and competent and confident. To not do this continually throughout ones life is to confine oneself to a subdomain of things that you know and things similar to things that you know. This can be okay, but I thinking expanding one's domain of competency is much more satisfying.

In this podcast, I define three domains of white collar work in the 20th century. In particular, white collar work where one makes $70k a year or more, or white collar work where you work for yourself and develop your own business. This type of work has 3 domains that need to be explored, and how to divide one's time between these domains is a bit of an optimization problem. The three domains are research, organization, and work itself. Work itself consists of the things you actually do: the code you write, the processes you engage in, tangible things like that. Research is the reading you do to gain knowledge to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your work. Organization is how you arrange you environment, which also makes your work more efficient and/or effective: keeping notes in a journal to track progress, having an organized file system, etc. Most people lean heavily towards work in a way that is not optimal, and need to allocate more time for reading and organization. Spending too much time in work is a self reinforcing feedback loop because, for example, when you're sipping your latte and just hammering away at the keyboard, people look up to you as a “hard worker”. They have no idea how efficient you are and how much you are actually accomplishing, which may well be very little. As an example of how rearranging your domain ratio may benefit you, consider this: Warren buffet spends 80% of his time reading (in the domain of research) and he is one of the wealthiest self made men on the planet. We have this bias towards work because of the way work has been done historically. The way things are now is completely unprecedented, and our brains aren't wired to work this way. Therefore, shifting away from work and more towards the other 2 domains needs to be done intentionally. NOTE: This was recorded BEFORE the COVID19 pandemic.

In this episode, I discuss how outliers are really the only ones doing interesting things. New, interesting things happen at the edges. Unfortuntely, human beings have a tendency to coalesce around the status quo, and dismiss, and even ostracize outliers. In this episode, I make the case for why outliers are good and why it may be a good idea to introduce outlying behaviors into your own life.

In this episode, I talk about diversifying your self worth. One's perceived self value should extend beyond one's job and family commitments, because these are areas that are not fully within one's control. One should try hard to get good at something completely unrelated to these domains; something that you have full and complete control over. That way no one can ever take that away from you. A job can easily be taken away due to market forces and many other things. Family commitments are inherently dependent upon other people. I have seen many people whose value lays in these things only become bitter or depressed in later life because things didn't turn out the way they wanted them to. This fate can be avoided by pouring a fraction of one's energy into an endeavor like exercise, yoga, meditation, or something else that depends entirely on one's own effort. As you continually engage this solo effort, you will begin to improve. As your skill level increases, you will gain a level of self respect and self worth that no one can take away from you, and that confidence will radiate into other areas of your life. If one has built this bedrock of diversified self worth, it won't sting so much when one loses a job. In fact, these extra skills may actually help one get another job more quickly. One example is if one started “upskilling” in one's free time and learning how to code, one could potentially find a job in the tech sector.

The way that the usefulness of knowledge accumulates is very similar to to that of compound interest in the sense that when you are a child, you learn so much information, and none of it seems to enable you to produce value for society and make money. You have to learn basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic. What you don't realize at that age is that you are building a bedrock upon which all your other capabilities will be built once you're older. It is these foundational skills that allow you to learn more profitable skills later on in life, like computer programming, mechanical engineering, sales, etc. Likewise, when one begins investing continuously into an account that compounds a few percentage points per year, the vast majority of the growth of the account comes from one's own contributions, and a very small amount of the growth comes from the accumulated interest. However, as one continuously invests over decades, eventually the value of the account reaches critical mass. At this point, the interest earnings start to catch up to one's own individual contributions, and eventually they surpass them. So the usefulness of knowledge and investing have that in common: they both take a very long time to pay off, but when they do, they pay off in a meaningful way, and they do so continuously. It is hard to trust that one's knowledge investments are going to pay off in a few decades, as humans don't generally think on decades-long timescales, so only a few people are able to reap the benefits of the compounding of the usefulness of knowledge: those with strict parents that force them to continuously engage in their education, and those who are very perceptive and can understand the value of learning. At the end of the podcast, I draw parallels between a useful knowledge base and an interconnected web of nodes. Each piece of knowledge is a node. It is the number of nodes and the number of connections between these nodes that are valuable. The compounding comes into play due to the fact that if you already have a large nodal network with n nodes, and you add another node (piece of knowledge) to the network, you can potentially get n new connections from adding only a single node. So basically you have a bunch of other knowledge by which to contextualize the new knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is not useful in a vacuum, but only in relation to other knowledge.

In this episode, I discuss “the benevolent dictator that people want”. Not limited to human form, this benevolent dictator can just as easily be a challenging life event that forces one to change and adapt as it can be a person that comes into one's life suddenly and without one's full consent, challenging one's assumptions and forever changing the person. Sometimes, people and events can enter one's life unexpectedly. This can be scary and they sometimes break things that one might have considered valuable. And they can even lead to one feeling powerless as everything they hold dear is seemingly destroyed. But oftentimes, these forceful people or events have an even more valuable lesson to teach one than the things that had to be destroyed for that lesson to be taught. I call these sorts of people and events benevolent dictators because they force positive change upon you, even if they have to drag one kicking and screaming. I go into a few examples from my own life and leave the line open for listeners to send me an email describing any of their own experiences with benevolent dictators, either as the person to be changed, or the one doing the changing. In spite of the value of a benevolent dictator, I point out that our civilization is going more towards individualism, leading to less opportunities to experience the phenomenon, but I conclude that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because life is inherently unpredictable and all attempts to isolate ourselves are foiled in the end regardless. Also, there are many other reasons (not discussed in this episode) why I think this trend towards individualism and personal sovereignty is a good thing overall. Nevertheless, it is valuable to surrender to the lesson that the benevolent dictator is trying to teach you from time to time.

Human societies always trend toward authoritarianism, or non-meritocratic hierarchical structures lacking in freedom and egalitarianism. I make several compelling arguments for how this is the end fate for every long lived, large human society in this episode. No matter how good they become at some point, all human societies trend in this direction in the long run. This trend seems to me to be impossible to counteract, given human nature and the sorts of dynamics that go on when human beings interact with one another. I conclude by saying that this usually ends up being a bad thing for many people, but it doesn't necessarily have to be bad for any given individual who is not at the top. This work around for the individual only works in certain cases.

In this episode, I talk about awesomeness, superiority, and how people respond to it. I define two different types of awesome and how people interact with those types of awesome individuals. The three types of people that awesome people will come in contact with are haters, admirers and admirer+'s. Each one of them brings a different kind of vibe to the awesome person's table, but ultimately, nothing any of these people bring matters, and it would behoove such an awesome person to keep that in mind. If one is not already awesome, then the best type of person to be when interacting with someone who is awesome is an admirer+. An admirer+ admires the awesome person, but it is more than just that. They aspire to be more like the awesome person. They view them as regular people with attainable lifestyles. As a result an admirer+ will go out of their way to understand an awesome person objectively, and use this systematically attained knowledge to better themselves. Additionally, they will try their best to provide value for the awesome person rather than bothering them. In the end, I conclude that being awesome and contributing value to the world is a thing worth striving for, regardless of the reward or potential positive outcome, as it leads to inherent self esteem and happiness.

In this episode, I delve into the concept of “purifying what sustains you”. It is essentially the act of leveling up what you do in your free time to be both better for you and for the world in the long term. Engaging in this act means different things to different people, because everyone is at a different level of development, and the goal is to become a slightly better future you. It is a slight adjustment today, for a slightly better tomorrow, and therefore, it depends on where you are today. The alternative is to simply stay where you are, and let the stagnation and degradation continue until you die. Purifying what sustains you is more sustainable (no pun intended) than simply trying to go from zero to one hundred, where one tries to make every aspect of their life better instantaneously, and then burns out and ends up right where they started or worse. Purifying what sustains you is a lifelong process of slowly improving one's habits and behavior to exist more in “the mode of goodness”.

In this episode, I explore the differences between freedom and constraint, or freedom and limitation, and talk about how, in many cases, constraint is more desirable than freedom, to the extent that some people would even pay for constraint in certain scenarios. Both freedom and limitation have their value in particular contexts. As much as I, and everyone else, love freedom, there are a lot of great things to say about being properly constrained. I provide several examples in this episode where people might choose limitation over freedom, and rightfully so.

In this episode, I talk about institutions: what I think their purpose is, the things that can go wrong with them and the severe harm they can cause, and ultimately, why human beings will continue to create them regardless. In the end, I conclude that institutions are necessary for human development and will continue to be improved as we go forward into the future.

In this episode, I argue that any resource that can be made public should be. This is a very liberal position to take. However, I make a conservative argument for this liberal position. I basically assert that public resources free up capital for industries where true innovation is occurring. Essentially, I posit that that innovation alone is for the private sector, and everything else that can basically be put on autopilot should be made into a public resource. These public resources will benefit the private innovation sector because they'll be able to get lots of things basically for free, and focus their capital where it really matters. One example I make of public resources benefiting the private sector is roads. In the US, most roads are public. If they were privatized overnight, that would be an extra expense for everybody, and it would drain capital from every innovating industry. Another example is internet service. That is something that can easily be made public, but is currently private in the US. It is draining capital from everyone. I do acknowledge that tax dollars are also a drain on capital, and nothing is truly free. However, things generally cost less when allocated to the public sector because the profit motive does not exist (no executives to pay, no shareholders, etc).

In this episode, I explain the importance of a concept that I refer to as "hyperconsent". The ideal thing to strive for when interacting with others in a give and take sort of way, hyperconsent occurs when both parties desire the interaction with 100% of their being. Oftentimes, people find themselves saying "yes" to things that they don't truly want, but feel obligated for one reason or the other. A simple yes, I argue, is the bare minimum, and we should all strive to provide the greatest amount of value that we can possibly provide, such that people want what we have to offer so much, that it would be impossible to imagine them not asking for it. On the other hand, one of the worst types of people to be without getting into trouble, is one one that goes around getting things from people in exchange for the bare minimum, leaving a "bad taste" in their mouth, so to speak. At the end of the episode, I talk about the importance of making sure that you yourself hyperconsent to the things in your own life, making sure that you are only saying yes to things that you truly, truly desire.

There has been a large, and successful push lately to increase interest in science. In this episode, I argue that, in order to create the most productive scientific community for the 21st century, we need to go beyond interest. There need to be people actively communicating what it means to be a scientist, the commitment to regularly utilize critical thinking needed to be successful, and the hard work and dedication needed to thoroughly take an idea from hypothesis to conclusion, and clearly communicate those results. Additionally, there need to be people communicating what the biggest open questions in science are, in a way that clearly highlights the real technical hurdles while simultaneously communicating to a broad audience. This is the tallest order of them all, but it would be very helpful in communicating to potential scientists the types of problems they would be solving and exactly what kind of work they would be engaging in. To summarize, in addition to creating interest in science, which has been done by many already, we need to emphasize and teach critical thinking, hard work, and dedication, and we need to clarify the open questions. These three tasks are not easily done, but if done, they would greatly enhance the scientific community in the years to come.

Someday soon, I think VR will be leveraged to facilitate empathic experiences for people. It will allow people to have an experience in VR that has likely been experienced by a person in history. Imagine being able to experience being black man in the Jim Crow south being chased by an angry white lynch mob after having done nothing but go through the wrong entrance in a store and not saying thank you respectfully enough after purchasing your goods. Imagine being able to experience being in hiding from the Nazis, etc. This technology may be primitive at first, but I think it may ultimately allow us to have more empathy for one another, and do a great service to society. Contact me at 3dandfree@gmail.com

There is an infinite array of questions that Google can't answer for a variety of reasons. I delve into this concept in depth in this episode. Reasons range from questions being obscure, technical, and oddly specific - too specific to possibly be on Google, and perhaps a trade secret somewhere, to being questions that humans can't know the answers to like "what does it feel like to be an insect being squished?"