Podcasts about godel escher bach

Today, we're pulling one of our best episodes from the vaults, featuring the brilliant Brian Christian. Recommend this show by sharing the link: pod.link/2Pages One thing I don't mention often is that the thesis I wrote for my law degree was an attempt to combine my interest in literature with a perspective on law. So I wrote about the phenomenon of plain English: that's trying to write law without the legalese. And I tried to write about it through the lens of literary theories of language. I honestly did not understand what I was trying to do. And also nobody in law school understood what I was trying to do. What I can see now, with the benefit of hindsight and some self-esteem and some marketing speak, is that I was a boundary rider. I've come to learn that the interesting things often take place on the edges, those intermediate areas where X meets Y and some sort of new life is born. Brian Christian is a boundary rider too. He's just way more successful and interesting than law school Micheal. He thinks deeply and writes about deep patterns of life through technology and AI and algorithms. He's the author of The Most Human Human, the Alignment Problem, and Algorithms to Live By. After the introduction I just gave you, you're probably going to guess that Brian isn't just a science guy. Get‌ ‌book‌ ‌links‌ ‌and‌ ‌resources‌ ‌at‌ https://www.mbs.works/2-pages-podcast/  Brian reads from Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. [Reading begins at 15:10] Hear us Discuss:  Metaphor can be one of the main mechanisms by which science happens. [6:20] | Rules that are delightful to break. [24:35] | “I have this deep conviction […] we are on to some philosophical paydirt here. There is a very real way in which we are building [AI] systems in our own image, and as a result they come to be a mirror for ourselves.” [28:40] | What is the heart of the human experience? [38:10] | “Humans are not so special.” [42.50]

Mark (@snapsbymap on Instagram) is a photographer, musician, wildlife educator, and writer (at work!). In this episode, we talk about creative choice energy and creativity at work, perfectionism, overwhelm, and forming a partnership with your brain. We mention:SAW workshop on climate drawing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fuDh_aOlm0Science fiction writers Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfus"I am a Strange Loop" and "Godel Escher Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter

In today's episode, Nat Neil and Adil discuss the Tao Te Ching by Laozi. We each picked a few of our favorite chapters from the book to read and discuss, resulting in a wide-ranging discussion of work, happiness, ambition, finance, philosophy, and all our usual favorite subjects.  Some of the topics we covered were: The importance of not over-extending yourself, being moderate and patient What does it mean to prioritize “inaction”?  The balance between short and long-term productivity Which parts of the Tao do we each struggle with the most What it means to seek a “middle path.”  Plus lots of tangents around fitness, entrepreneurship, work, other books, and more. Be sure to stick around for the end, where Nat and Neil discuss our new plans for the show and where it's going in 2023.  Remember to subscribe if you haven't, and leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify if you liked the episode! Timestamps (1:10) - How different drugs created different financial crashes & philosophies (3:22) - Background on the Tao Te Ching (11:15) - Variations in the translations of the Tao Te Ching (17:00) - What is the “real” version of old texts? (21:20) - The theme of finding the middle ground, and inaction. Chapter 64. “If you rush into action, you will fail. If you hold on too tight, you will loose your grip. Therefore the Master lets things take their course and thus never fails.” (27:00) - The importance of doing nothing. Chapter 48. “He who conquers the world often does so by doing nothing. When one is compelled to do something, The world is already beyond his conquering.” (33:50) - The difference between short-term and long-term productivity. Sometimes doing nothing in the short term is the best strategy for the long term.  (42:00) - Chapters 68, 24. The importance of being balanced, avoiding going to extremes. Avoiding the consequences of intense competition. “He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm.” (51:00) - What's something you're doing that's incongruous with the advice in the Tao? Neils: Shiny object syndrome. (54:00) - Nat's: Impatience with professional success. (1:05:00) - Adil's: Shiny object syndrome. (1:07:00) - The problem with the practical vs. the ideal, giving and receiving advice.  (1:15:00) - Unintuitive advice in fitness. (1:21:00) - Aiming at a specific goal vs. aiming in abstract. (1:24:00) - The power of having a good adversary for bringing out your best. (1:28:00) - Wrapup: Upcoming books, plans for the podcast Mentioned in the Show Byrne Hobart (on Lunar Society) (1:10) Analects of Confucius (two episodes from now) (4:51) Tao in You Website (11:15) ChatGPT (14:00) Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (25:00)  The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros (29:05) Tyler Cowen (31:50) Cal Newport on Sam Harris (33:40) John McPhee (34:00) Children of Time, Adrian Tzchaicovsky (Nat got the age wrong, he was 46) (56:00) Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter. Episode link (1:04:00) Antifragile, Nassim Taleb. Episode link (1:12:00) The Gibraltar skull (1:14:00) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Episode link. (1:15:00) Finite and Infinite Games. Episode link. (1:22:00) The Inner Game of Tennis. Episode link. (1:23:00) Robert Nozick (1:24:00) John Rawls (1:24:00) Huberman Lab Podcast (1:25:00) The Comfort Crisis (next episode!) (1:29:00)

One thing I don't mention often is that the thesis I wrote for my law degree was an attempt to combine my interest in literature with a perspective on law. So I wrote about the phenomenon of plain English: that's trying to write law without the legalese. And I tried to write about it through the lens of literary theories of language. I honestly did not understand what I was trying to do. And also nobody in law school understood what I was trying to do. What I can see now, with the benefit of hindsight and some self-esteem and some marketing speak, is that I was a boundary rider. I've come to learn that the interesting things often take place on the edges, those intermediate areas where X meets Y and some sort of new life is born. Brian Christian is a boundary rider too. He's just way more successful and interesting than law school Micheal. He thinks deeply and writes about deep patterns of life through technology and AI and algorithms. He's the author of The Most Human Human, the Alignment Problem, and Algorithms to Live By. After the introduction I just gave you, you're probably going to guess that Brian isn't just a science guy. Get‌ ‌book‌ ‌links‌ ‌and‌ ‌resources‌ ‌at‌ https://www.mbs.works/2-pages-podcast/  Brian reads from Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. [Reading begins at 15:10] Hear us Discuss:  Metaphor can be one of the main mechanisms by which science happens. [6:20] | Rules that are delightful to break. [24:35] | “I have this deep conviction […] we are on to some philosophical paydirt here. There is a very real way in which we are building [AI] systems in our own image, and as a result they come to be a mirror for ourselves.” [28:40] | What is the heart of the human experience? [38:10] | “Humans are not so special.” [42.50]

We fact check on our start at 360iDev and follow up on Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, and tech giants planning to make their own chips. Apple releases iOS 14.6 and macOS 11.6 to prevent the Pegasus spyware gateway. We discuss Alvy Ray Smith the genius who helped make Pixar possible. We review Apple's Califironia Streaming iPhone event and new items announced. Picks: Apple CloudKit samples, Xcodes: The best command-line tool to install and switch between multiple versions of Xcode, Draw Yourself as a Peanuts Character in Pages with a Snoopy Artist, Nomad Sculpt.

We discuss Douglas Hofstadter's book "Godel Escher Bach" as well as modern A.I. systems. We answer the question, "What is 'Intelligence' versus 'Intelligent behavior'?" --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/turingrabbitholes/support

MIT - Godel Escher Bach Lecture 1 GÖDEL ESCHER BACH LECTURE MIT LECTURE THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB PODCAST IMPORTANT! AMAZON DELETED THE LAST INEXPENSIVE BINDING. IT WAS TOO CHEAP! HERE IS ANOTHER VERSION FOR STUDENTS WITH HOBBES, LOCKE, ROUSSEAU AND THE US CONST. IN ONE BOOK: The Leviathan (1651), The Two Treatises of Government (1689), The Social Contract (1762), The Constitution of Pennsylvania (1776) in ONE BOOK for 30$: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/jean-jacques-rousseau-and-thomas-hobbes-and-john-locke/the-leviathan-1651-the-two-treatises-of-government-1689-the-social-contract-1762-the-constitution-of-pennsylvania-1776/paperback/product-782nvr.html

“A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena,  though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lighting, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world.” In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and Nat critically discuss the article What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel. This is the most famous piece on the mind-body problem. In it Nagel explores the mind-body issue, freedom, knowledge, meaning and value of human life. This article was penned down at an era where physicalism and materialism were prevalent, the idea that you can reduce all aspects of the mind to simply firings in the brain. However, Nagel was unpersuaded that physicalism of materialism gives an all-encompassing account of human experience. “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting with consciousness it seems hopeless.” We cover a wide range of topics, including The mind-body consciousness problem Creating an objective interpretations of reality. Learning skills to overcome reporters biases Consciousness in animals Artificial intelligence (AI) and hacking of consciousness And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our book episodes on consciousness like Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Sapiens by Yuval Harari, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett, and The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show The Beginning of Infinity on Wikipedia [04:52] (book episode) Pod Save America Podcast [19:20] HARO Help A Reporter Out [22:14] Fox News [23:30] CNBC [23:30] Turing Test [30:53] Chinese Room [31:13] Chess [32:00] Go game [32:40] Watson AI [39:53] Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk [47:34] The Man in the High Castle Television TV series [54:08] Hardcore History ep 62 – Supernova in the East I [54:42] Books mentioned What it is to be like a bat? By Thomas Nagel Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter [00:39] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Way of Zen by Alan Watts [01:02] (Nat’s notes) (Neil’s notes) (book episode) Homo Deus by Yuval Harari [01:06] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett [1:11] (book episode) The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch [01:16] (book episode) The Riddle of the Gun by Sam Harris [16:53] (article episode) How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff [24:30] The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson [36:08] (Neil’s notes) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [56:40] (Nat’s notes) (book episode part 1 & part 2) Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday [23:01] The Man in the High Castle Novel by Philip K. Dick [54:08] Plato's Republic [20:10] People mentioned David Deutsch [05:25] (Infinity episode) Daniel Dennett [08:25] (Darwin’s episode) Bobby McMullen – Blind Bike Rider [09:44] Donald Trump [12:23] Charles Darwin [30:15] Pepper the Poochon [33:40] Sam Harris [37:19] (Guns episode) Yuval Noah Harari [37:19] Douglas Hofstadter [43:36] Nick Bostrom [43:53] Karl Marx [46:02] Elon Musk [47:34] (on this podcast) Hiroo Onoda [55:17] Show Topics 01:00 – Consciousness. The article is about the theory of mind and consciousness, looking into the mind-body problem. Aspects of the mind can be linked to how the brain responds. 01:58 – Challenge to physicalism rather than refute reductionism. Reductionism and physicalism cannot be fully understood; thus, making these two theories flawed. “Every reductionist has his favorite analogy for modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain”. Nagel seems not to refute reductionism but rather exposing a big whole in it and saying you can't take reductionism seriously until you fill this hole. 03:43 – Mind-body consciousness problem. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting with consciousness it seems hopeless. “It seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective”. 05:27 – All problems are soluble given enough intelligence in time. 06:08 – Subjective filter for any information. Physicalism and reductionism create an objective interpretation of reality. Physicalism and reductionism in some ways rely on creating an objective interpretation of reality. All the thoughts human beings have are grounded from the subjective view of the world. 08:00 – Humans cannot understand a “what it is like aspect” because they are not in that very situation. A bat was used to demonstrate this concept. Human beings cannot comprehend how a bat moves and survives by echo-location thus this highlights human cannot understand subjective experience from human data. 09:04 – Humans can learn to echo-locate. An excellent example is Bobby McMullen, who is a blind mountain biker; he uses echolocation and his senses to mountain bike. 10:14 – However, according to Nagel, even if a human could echo-locate, that is still not equivalent to how bats echo-locate. 10:35 – Subjective interpretation of reality cannot be stepped out. This means something outside of one’s understanding cannot be fully grasped or comprehended. This concept applies to understand to someone who is totally different from you. You can never know exactly what they went through or understand what they do why they do some things; it is easy to judge someone thinking they are making irrational actions without viewing their actions from the subjective experience. 12:12 – How would look post-Trump era discussions. Urban Democrats have different interests and value systems than rural Republicans. Where to draw the line for life? Understanding pro-life people. Pro-gunners point of view. Having a gun in Texas is a must. 18:28 – Divided political sphere. Humans choose a side that will agree with their preconceived opinions. 19:58 – Decentralization makes it really hard to create a cohesive story and narrative for a population. 20:20 – Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Phenomenon where one will believe about something they know not about because it has been reported. Journalists are almost never trained to actually understand what they are reporting on, not confirming the authenticity of their sources and misunderstanding statistics. 24:00 – Learning how to read research articles is an important skill these days as we can't rely on media anymore. Famous bad reporters interpretations. Bacon is bad for you as smoking. Coconut oil is bad because saturated fats. 26:26 – Hanlon's Razor. Applying that to even news reporters, they are not doing it necessarily maliciously, they are doing it for one of two reasons- it works, people click on it and read it; the second thing is a lot of these sites are effectively content firms. This circles up to what Nagel is saying about subjective character of experience which we cannot step outside of and not understanding what it is like to be someone else. 28:20 – Test for consciousness. Mirror test for animal self awareness. 30:38 – AI discussion. What means a computer is conscious? Turing test is not enough. Reaching intelligence by brute force. Computers that don't want to play chess. 33:33 – Consciousness in animals. Every animal has a level of consciousness and awareness in the same fundamental way a human does. Dogs dreaming. 35:30 – The self is not necessarily an actual thing. Nagel is trying to keep the sense of self and the potential challenge to him is this thing you are trying to hold on to the mind, the sense of self is an illusion; there is not really anything special for what we think about this consciousness. 37:47 – Challenging reductionism. Nagel is challenging reductionism by pushing for a more helpful theory of mind that says it’s all mental- making it hard to comprehend any one’s mind. 38:43 – Subjective phenomena cannot be explained. Questions that arise with a conscious AI: can you unplug it? Can you reset it? Is it a slave? Riding horses and animals that work for humans. 40:26 – Artificial intelligence (AI) and consciousness. That will just reach a point where it is so competent that it is indistinguishable from interacting with another human. 43:05 – AI scare. An AI is sufficiently intelligent to be a threat to us all, it is sufficiently intelligent to know it shouldn't let us know it exists. AI that optimizes for paperclips can destroy the world. 43:38 – Use of the term is. E = mc2. Knowing that something is true without necessarily understanding why it is true. Consciousness and intelligence exist within its closed system. 50:10 – Knowledge is a justified true belief, based on theoretical understanding. “You can know that something is something without understanding what it means for it to be that thing.” 53:41 – Tangent. Japanese soldiers fighting after the war was over. 57:47 – Subscribe to Patreon to get our book notes, highlights, bonus material and support us without the need of ads. Sign up before october to participate to the next live hangout! Also, recommend us books (even via Instagram), and participate of our private community. Find us on Twitter @Neil Soni (@TheRealNeilS) and @Nat Eliason (@nateliason). Leave us a review on iTunes to get possible guests on the show. You can just write “Love this podcast! Neil and Nat are super fun.”. Check our supporters at madeyouthink.com/support. We are drinking delicious Lapsang Souchong tea from Cup & Leaf. If you want some tangent fuel, try the Mushroom Lemonade  Coffee and Chai Latte from Four Sigmatic. Perfect Keto Nut Butter is amazing. Try it frozen for an incredible texture. Check Kettle & Fire Mushroom-Chicken blend, now available on their site. Use our Amazon affiliate link to support the show effortlessly. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com.

An interview with Abed Halawi, Laracon EU speaker and Tech Lead at Vinelab Abed on twitter Abed's talk at Laracon EU 2016, "The lucid architecture for building scalable applications" VineLab Neo4j NeoEloquent Beirut Transcription sponsored by Larajobs Editing sponsored by Tighten Matt Stauffer: (music) Hi- Abed Halawi: Abed. Matt Stauffer: Abed, hello. All right, ah dang it. Welcome back to Laravel podcast, season three where I mispronounce everybody's names. Today I'm talking to Abed Halawi. I think that's right. He did lots of great packages and stuff, you'll learn more soon, okay bye. (music) All right, welcome back to another episode of Laravel podcast, season three where I mispronounce people's names. I actually got it wrong right before the intro, but then he corrected me. So it's, so the syllable its the emphasis on the wrong syllable. I'm talking to Abed Halawi. And I'm going to let him introduce himself, where he's from and I tell you guys all this every single time when I do this, but I'd like to switch it up between people that you have heard of before. You know, you know an Adam and you know a Taylor and you know whatever. And people who, within certain communities they're well known. They made an amazing package, they're a strong community leader or something, but the whole rest of the world might not know about them. So, the guy I'm talking to today, is a little more in that second one. So I want him to tell us a real quick bit about so who are you? Where do you live? Where do you work? And what are a few things that you are known for in your world? Abed Halawi: All right, so you got my name almost right, this time. Matt Stauffer: All most, I'll take it. Abed Halawi: It's Abed Halawi, in our language. In English usually it's Abed Halawi, so the emphasis is on the middle of that- Matt Stauffer: Wait so when you say it, the emphasis is on the last syllable of your last name, Halawi. Not Halawi. Abed Halawi: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Oh, okay. Abed Halawi: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: All right, I'm getting there. Sorry, go ahead. Abed Halawi: So, I live in Beirut. I was born here and always been here. I currently work here as well at a company called Vinelab. What we do is, focus on the influencer marketing, building a SAS platform to provide influencer marketing to brands. Basically our website says it all, so if you'd like to know more about that, go to vinelab.com and that will tell you everything about that. So I'm here because mainly about the Lucid Architecture which was first introduced in Laracon EU. The Lucid Architecture is about a collection of experiences that we went through, and we thought that certain ways would improve the ways we work together as a team. We thought that, well actually this is something very interesting and could help others solve their problems as well. The same problems that we've had and solved our way. So maybe our way could help others solve theirs as well. That's one thing, and the other thing is Neo Eloquent, which is the package for Eloquent, and Neo4j. Neo4j is the graph database, and we use that library as the core storage library in our products, with which we bridge between Laravel project and graph databases. Matt Stauffer: So, there's a couple things you said there. If anybody was at Laracon EU, you would have seen Abed give his talk, was it two years ago? 2017? Or that was one year ago I guess- Abed Halawi: Yes. Matt Stauffer: ... that and math is hard. But also make sure I put a link to that in the show notes. So you mentioned that and also you mentioned he maintains and created a package called Neo Eloquent which is kind of an Eloquent style wrap around types of Neo4j. If you ever heard anybody talk about graph databases, it's one of those things where, "Oh my gosh, graph databases are the new hotness." But I think a lot of people don't actually have a lot of experience working with them. Real quick, before we get into your back story, I'd love for you to give me a tiny little pitch on each of those. I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase elevator pitch, but it basically means, imagine you have 30 seconds on an elevator ride to convince a potential user, or founder or funder or something like that, of why your thing's great. Can you give me the elevator pitch, the 30 second pitch on Lucid Architecture, why is it different, what does it help you with? And then I want to get the same one for Neo4j and graph databases. Abed Halawi: All right, no pressure. Matt Stauffer: None at all. Abed Halawi: Okay, so Lucid, it's about eliminating legacy projects completely. You would never have to move to a project that you've worked on three years ago, and say where does this go? Where is this piece of code that I'm looking for? Where do I find this happening? How is this feature implemented? What's the structure of the code? All of these are eliminated with the Lucid Architecture, which basically takes over from where MVC leaves off. Matt Stauffer: What's the one biggest difference with how Lucid Architecture organizes its code relative to your normal MVC project? Abed Halawi: It compliments MVC projects. So it's not a replacement MVC, but basically with MVC, and the controller, you almost have everything. This is where things get a little confusing in controllers, I mean, if you have a project A and you have a project B to each by a different separate team, in the controller if you go there you will find things written differently. And this is where Lucid comes in. What Lucid says that each controller method, only has one line, only. This line is to serve a specific feature. A feature, specifically, is a class by itself. And within that feature, you would define the sequence of steps that accomplishes this feature and we call them in Lucid, jobs. So as each step in the feature is a job, and each job does only one things and is responsible for performing one thing only. You can share jobs between different features, but each job can do only one thing. And each feature serves one user story from the controller. That way you can achieve what we always dream about achieving with MVC, which is the thinnest controllers we can ever reach. Matt Stauffer: Is it similar to envocable controllers, or do your controllers have multiple methods but each of those methods only have one line? Abed Halawi: You can say it's close to what a command bus pattern is. So you can think of your controller as the command bus, and your just executing commands. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Abed Halawi: The commands take different forms. It could be a future or could be a job, so the same form repeats itself. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay, and if anybody wants to learn more, it's all written up in the, well it's both written up in the Github, which I'll link, but it's also in your Laracon EU talk, which is on YouTube, and I'll link that one as well. But since this is not an architecture podcast at the moment, it's a person podcast, let's move on real quick to talk about Neo Eloquent. So, Neo Eloquent I understand gives an Eloquent style interface to Neo4j. Let's, if you had to give the elevator pitch again, this time, can you give me a quick elevator pitch for graph databases, and what makes them a little bit different from traditional relational databases? Abed Halawi: Sure. So, with the graph databases, the way we store the data, and visualize the data, and manipulate the data is the same way we think about the data. So the first thing we do when we start a new project, or data modeling for a project. What we do is draw circles and connections between these circles, which later on gets translated and transformed into tables and foreign keys et cetera. But with graph databases, the way you draw the first data model with your hand, on a board, is the way it is stored right away. And you can manipulate that. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: You can also implement traversal and all the graph algorithms that we study about through out our computer science journey. So, you can apply all of these to the data that is stored. Matt Stauffer: And if anybody, like me, does not have a computer science background, when we're talking about graphs, the easiest way to think about that is when people talk about a social graph. They think about everything being based on relationships, on relationships, on relationships. Abed Halawi: Exactly. And a relationship is what we call a first class citizen in the database. Matt Stauffer: Right, where as with relational databases it's a little more second class, essentially- Abed Halawi: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: ... with foreign keys and everything. Okay cool. Well I'd love to talk more about those things, but today ain't the day for that. So, I want to know a little bit about you. So before we go into your backstory, I'd like to know, first of all, when you meet somebody at the supermarket and they ask you what you do, what do you tell them? Abed Halawi: These days I find it very easy to talk about these things, from how it used to be when I first started. Because, today, especially with today's generation, they take technology for granted. Right? They're born and growing up in the world where cloud is the normal. Right? So, if I were to explain this, I would maybe go to an example by saying, okay I'm a robot, and you tell me what to do. I will do everything you tell me. So this is how it first starts. So when they tell me to do this and do that, I would do them. Then I would say, this is exactly what I do with machines. I will give instructions to machines so that they run them when I am not there. So they keep doing that. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so what is your actual role, are you a developer, are you a tech lead? What's your official title? Abed Halawi: My official title is tech lead. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: But, we're a start up- Matt Stauffer: Okay, a little bit of everything. Abed Halawi: ... this is where things ... yeah exactly. Matt Stauffer: You can call yourself CTO if you want, right? Abed Halawi: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The thing is, with start ups, mostly, we get the opportunity to wear different hats. Which is interesting, so that we can get horizontal and vertical expertise. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Abed Halawi: So, by horizontal I mean, different technologies, different areas of technologies, say front end, back end, dev ops and everything related to that. And at each area we get to grow vertically where, we improve ourselves and our skills in each of these areas. This is the most interesting about being in a start up. Matt Stauffer: You mentioned having a computer science degree, so I want to hear a little bit later about the path you took from computer science degree up to being a part of a start up. Real quick, were you one of the founders of the start up or did you join in after it started? Abed Halawi: I'm not the founder, but I'm the first employee. Matt Stauffer: All right, so you're employee number one. So, we'll talk little bit later about your journey from graduating with a computer science degree to being employee number one of a start up. But real quick, when did you first get into computers? Abed Halawi: I was very young. Basically around, I was nine years old, maybe ten years old. And our neighbor had a computer, and I used to go there just to watch them play, they did not allow me to play. My brother used to play, he said. But later on I had my own computer at home, but with no internet, so encyclopedia was our way to go to search for information back then. And mostly gaming. So, we were kids, I enjoyed gaming mostly. [crosstalk 00:11:40] Matt Stauffer: What kind of games did you play? Abed Halawi: This was my introduction to ... mostly fight games, first person shooter. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Abed Halawi: Delta Force and you know these games. Also strategy, like Edge of Vampires, Red Alert, you know the early versions of those. Yeah. But then, later, the reason why I joined or took the computer science path was a bit of a coincidence- Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: ... kind of. Because at first, I was into medicine, so I wanted to be a doctor at first. I went to the university where I started studying that, for a year. But, after half of that year passed, I did not find myself there. I felt that I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And the thing is, I passed all my exams and passed everything, and I was doing good. Matt Stauffer: Sure. Abed Halawi: But then, later on, I couldn't feel it. It was just that thing you get at a later stage of doing a thing for a while. Then you say I don't feel like doing this my entire life. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Abed Halawi: Mainly because I was interested in neurology and everything related to the human brain and human mind. It has kind of a minor to psychology, that's a side interest. But at some point, I decided to shift majors, and I was looking at what universities are in the area that are close by. Saw a software engineering class, by mistake, basically because I was looking at the different area of courses. There was software engineering and I was like, what is software engineering. And didn't know what that was. I went in, I saw a lot of things that had to do with computers, and I though, well that would tell me how these games have always worked. What's interesting is that, I'm going to jump a little forward to say that, with computer science, I've found myself finding out about how humans operate, and psychology specifically. More than I think I could have with medicine, because the amount of people who are using technology today can tell you a lot about how it had changed the way we live. It's everywhere. And it has changed almost every industry. So when you're in technology, it's not only about the code that we write, it's not only about having programs that are written just for the machine to work, but it's more about satisfying the human need. This is the essence of these things. One thing that I had recently a small chat about that has to do with how designers can get to know more about technology, and how technology or developers get to know more about design and maybe do it themselves. The way I like to think about it is that, designers don't need to know technology or development, and developers don't really need to know design, and do it themselves. It's the bridge between them lies in a different area. It's philosophy, it's psychology, it's the bridge between those two. So if these two areas can learn more about these, I think this will close a huge gap between these two areas. Matt Stauffer: You're reminding me a lot of my favorite conference talk I've ever given, which was about empathy. And, I made a lot of the similar pitches, from a little bit different angle than you're talking about, but that understanding people and satisfying people is the best way to be a good programmer is not to know the code better than everybody else, it's to know the end user better than everybody else. And to empathize, both with end users and also, the other developers on your team and the designers and everything like that. I love where you're going there. I moved from working at a non profit where my job was about people, and understanding people, and helping people grow, to running a company. There's a lot more similarity than I expected between the two, because I'm still working with people and helping people grown and helping people do a good ... so I couldn't agree with you more about that and I love hearing you say that. Abed Halawi: Exactly Matt Stauffer: So, you're not the first person to say this. One of my most recent interviews, I can't remember exactly who it was, said the same thing of, "You know what, I wanted to figure out how the games work." So that's really fascinating to me, so, you got in, did you find yourself in there saying, "Oh this is amazing. I love this, this is so great." Or, did you get in there and did you have a moment of being kind of dissatisfied where you said, "Oh I thought it was going to be fun and games all the time and all I'm learning is math." What was your actual experience in those computer science classes? Abed Halawi: At first, I didn't know what to expect. I did not know what computer science was all about. So, with that in mind, and I started learning by myself on the side. Besides what I was being taught at the university. I was very interested in the field. I did not expect to learn everything all in the first day, right? So, with that expectation in mind, I started finding out that I'm good at this. It's all about recognizing patterns, right? I really did not care where I'm putting most of my effort, because I know that everything that is being taught and channeled to us as students is to orient us towards having a certain mindset, so that at some point in the future, we know where to use these techniques and methodologies. It was a bit later in my studies, maybe it was the second year of university that I've discovered that university will not teach you everything. Right? Maybe it was a little late for that, but I knew then that this is not a place that will teach you everything. But what they will do, is teach you how to think about problem solving. How to think about the computer science. And how programming works. It's just the basics and fundamentals, you don't really need to learn every computer language, and every technology out there from university. They just put you on the path and it's all up to you, in terms of where to go and how to take this further. Matt Stauffer: Yeah that's good. So, you did that. Were you having to choose to specialize in a particular type of programming and everything like that, or did you just you got a degree in software engineer or computer science and then you were out in the workplace and had to find something? What was the next big decision you had to make, after you'd made the decision to go into computer science? Abed Halawi: It was the second year also, where I joined the company where I used to work, as a support agent. You know, the regular things, tickets, answering tickets, forums and answering the phone and helping people get their job done on the platform. And at some point in there, as I was studying and working a full time job, the technical department had a certain problem they were trying to solve. I was overhearing, I wasn't very involved in their works, but as I was overhearing and it was in the kitchen where I spent most of my time- Matt Stauffer: Nice. Abed Halawi: ... I overheard this problem they were having that had to do with data storage and transferring data from a place to another. I don't really remember the details of that problem, but I remember, throwing out a word that helped them solve it. And then they were interested. So I was working on this Java project for the university and the head of the developers came into the room and saw me coding at work, which I was not supposed to do. So he asked me, "Why are you coding? This is not your job here." And I said, "Well, I enjoy this. I like to do this when I don't have anything else to do." It was then, when he asked for me to join the development team and start learning web development. It was kind of passive, the way I started learning about web development and the web technologies. But at the same time, I was enjoying doing it. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Abed Halawi: I enjoyed programming on my free time. And after moving there, the kind of choice I had to make was which area to fill? Because they had an area that had to do with software programming, installed software programming. And they had a web application programming, which was a portal that involved all the areas of the company. So this was the administration interface of everything that everyone does in the company. It was going through a revamp. And I had the chance to join the team who was doing this revamp, and I did not know anything about web development. So I started learning there. Right? It was very tough. That's the least I can say, because back then, I don't remember, there wasn't much courses online to learn from. It was mostly either books or CDs that I'm not proud to say this, but we had to get the cracked version, or the pirated versions of those, so that we can learn. This was basically my transition from being a support agent to starting to work in development. From there on, it was a regular journey where I continued exploring this realm of technologies. So sort of a front end development, doing a little bit of JavaScript here and there. It was, JQuery was booming, at the time. So I started learning that. I was very interested in animations, on ... so it was some kind of an interest between design and implementation of things. I like to see things move on an interface. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Abed Halawi: With JQuery, I had the chance to do it with very easy instructions. That was the catch for me to say, "Well, I'm glad I chose this major. I'm glad that I'm here today. That's definitely how I'd like to spend my time." Matt Stauffer: Nice. That's very cool. So you were still in school when you were doing all this stuff? Wow. Abed Halawi: Yes. Basically I- Matt Stauffer: Did you sleep? Abed Halawi: ... graduated ... I don't remember doing that no. Matt Stauffer: Sorry what were you saying about graduating? Abed Halawi: Yeah, so basically computer science to study it here, it takes three years, maybe four, with the regular courses. But it too me five plus, because I was working full time so I started understanding that work will teach me much more about practicality than the university will. But still, I was very interested in topics that were given at the university that had to do mostly with organizing work, anything that's related to diagrams, planning, software engineering, and how to organize the work. There was many non tech courses that I was interested in as well, that has to do with management too. So I was learning a bit of both types of programming. It was high level where I learned the web stuff, and it was low level, where I learned the theories and everything that had to do with how a computer works, behind the curtains. It was very interesting. And then I graduated after five years, with three years experience, full time. Which was at the time was, I was very happy to have done that. It was one of the best choices I've ever made. Matt Stauffer: Okay. And so, what was the road from there to being employee number one at your current start up? Was there a lot of different jobs in between there? Abed Halawi: No not much, actually. There was one failed start up that I founded in the university. They had this program where they opened what they called the innovation center. It was a room for people who would like to build their ideas in there. They bring some students together. And if one of these ideas make it, through certain specified competition that they do across universities here, you have to make it for at least the first three positions. If you did they would invest, not money, but they would invest in helping you push this further. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Abed Halawi: Which is what you need at the time, right? As a student that's all you need, a place to apply the work, and an idea to put all the code in place. And that's the first thing after the first job. Then there was a job for a year where I also did a lot of web programming. I learned a lot of Linux there, because I was handling also system administration. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: And then, after that, I was here where I am today. It was interesting because when you're joining a start up, there's merely any guarantee that this is going to work. Matt Stauffer: Right. Abed Halawi: There's merely an idea based on a certain gap in the market. And I can easily say that this has been almost six years. It will be six years in October. And I can easily say that we've pivoted a lot through out these six years, and it's been the best six years I've ever had. From personal and technical, it wasn't only technical, because when I first started there I was the only developer, and most of my time I was just coding. But then things started to grow. And as a company it started to scale. At the beginning we were doing services, so with services you get exposed to a variety of types of projects. There were mobile projects, there were web projects, and there were things in between as well. So this variety created a lot of needs for the team to grow. As the team grew, my role expanded as well. So I had to occupy a larger gap in the team, and cover not only technical and coding, but it was mostly organization and management to take over. This was a real, I don't know what's the biggest word than challenge. I would say more than a challenge. Because, as a developer all you like to be doing and spending your time doing is coding. But then, if you code and not know where this code is going, at some point these things get lost. So we need to organize things. And what's interesting is this led to creating the Lucid Architecture, because as much as there was chaos in the development process that we were implementing at the time, we had this huge need to organize things, not only from personal and communicational perspective, but also in the code itself. We had so many projects running at the same time and every time we switched between the project and another, it felt like going from one country to another. It felt like you were looking at something that's red and then you're looking at something that's yellow, and then that's white and then that's black. It's a huge difference between those. So, this was the inception of Lucid, where it tries and makes sure that all these projects are normalized. Matt Stauffer: So you felt some kind of chaos, you're switching contexts a lot, and the contexts were different enough that it felt too chaotic and you had to relearn each one. So you created something that applies more of a standardization across projects than what MVC provides. You said, "Now when I entered a new project, and obviously it's much more complicated than this but, I know that every single web request will be serviced by a single feature or job, basically." And you were trying to make it such that on every project it uses the same architecture. Abed Halawi: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Have you had the opportunity to use it on a pretty significant diversity of projects, or is it still something pretty new for you? Abed Halawi: We're currently using it, so we are implementing microservices, and with microservices, each service we have is a Laravel installation of the Lucid Architecture itself. We currently have around 48 services running at the same time, so you can easily say that we've implemented Lucid in 48 projects. Matt Stauffer: Right. Abed Halawi: So far and they're in production- Matt Stauffer: Are those 48 all serving the same primary product, which is the influencer related stuff, or is it a whole bunch of different products that are all offered to influencers? Abed Halawi: These 48 services are in the same product. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: It's the SAS platform that we're building. On the side we have some side projects that we use internally, that they're also based on Lucid. I would count two or three are currently running, and they are all in production in life. Matt Stauffer: I am going to ask- Abed Halawi: So we're pretty confident- Matt Stauffer: No, no, you're good. It's a little bit of lag. I'm going to ask you a few questions about Lucid. I can tell you're confident, I can see it in your face and hear it in what you're saying. So, since every single controller method, all it does is it just serves one of these features. A feature is then meant to specifically parse the request, which I assume it gets out of the application container, and also return results. Is it safe to say that a feature, or maybe a job, let's say a feature for now, is the same as a controller method in terms of its scope, in that it takes an HTTP request, and returns and HTTP response? Abed Halawi: It is exactly that. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so, it's obviously more complicated, but the simplest way to think about it is, when you're thinking about those 200 line long controller methods, pull that thing out and make it a class. That's the first step. Abed Halawi: One class. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so it's very interesting because I gave a talk at Laracon US that talked about, among other things, quite a few code patterns for how to simplify your 200 line long controller methods. I didn't talk about Lucid, but I talked about things you can extract, so that those things in there are pulled out into individual classes. What I kind of recommended more at that point was, well here's a way to simplify the response part, using a custom HTTP response, or something like that. Here's a way to simplify the input part, by using custom HTTP requests, or something like that. Here's a way to customize the database queries, using repositories or whatever else. So I'm super interested to take a look at this and try it out. Are there any open source projects that are using Lucid? Abed Halawi: I'm not aware of any. An open source project as in a full Lucid project that is currently operating and is online with it? Matt Stauffer: Yeah, like if somebody wanted to go see what it looked like, to use an actual functioning application using Lucid? Abed Halawi: There's definitely an example that is on the Github repo. There is work being put into having video tutorials that can teach Lucid in depth. But having a Lucid project online as an open source means, basically that you're exposing the whole project, so that's interesting thought. I'd definitely like to go in something like that. Matt Stauffer: At Titan, we have a whole bunch of ideas that would never make any money. But we just like to provide them as a service, and so we open source their code. So if you one say, "You know what I'd really like? I'd like a website that does X, Y, and Z for me." And you know only 500 people would use it. And those 500 people would never pay any money for it. Or, maybe they'd pay $10 a month for it, but it's not actually worth trying to do all the marketing. Maybe that might be an opportunity for you guys to actually have a real functioning website, that has real users, that has to service real user requests and everything is completely transparent. Because I think that's one of the most interesting ways to have these conversations, and to expose our internal ideas to the world around us. And really let them up to the light of criticism outside of our own organization. We have some ideas at Titan that sound good, until they get exposed to the outside air. And I'm not saying that's going to happen with Lucid, but that is something that has been super valuable for us. Abed Halawi: I would love if that would happen, actually. That's a lovely idea. I'll definitely invest into that. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Well if I ever have an idea I'll throw one your way. But I would say that would be a good selling point for you guys in Lucid to be able to have something like that, that people can really see. This isn't the Lucid interview, as much as I'm interested in these things, so tell me a little bit about your time working with start up. You said when you got started there, you did client services, what I assume by that is you were a consultancy, people hired you to build products for them. So I have a couple questions. The first question I want to ask is, what changes happened to your text stack over the years? When did you come across Laravel? And what aspects of Laravel made you most interested in using Laravel when you decided to use it? Abed Halawi: I first started using Laravel when it was Laravel Three, version three- Matt Stauffer: That's been a while man. Abed Halawi: Yeah, that's a long while. What's interesting is that the project that we built back then was shot down a few months ago, so it was still running until today. That's what makes it, yeah, makes it very interesting. The thing that got me about Laravel was, I can easily say it's the documentation at the beginning. When you read the documentation, you literally understand how much potential this framework has, and how much you can open up and build on top of that. It's easy to start with. We started this project, it took us two, three months and we were up with an administration interface for multiple websites that we had for different clients. That was when we first started Laravel. The text stack back then we Laravel, MySQL database with regular Apache web server, and later on we had this project where it was a publishing platform. This was the first pivot in the business model, so we stopped doing services and then we shifted into building our publishing platform. And with that, there was also ideas about user generated content, and actions that users can take on content published by celebrities. From our services that we've done, we've built a lot of the user network of celebrities that are A class in our region. And from there, we thought, let's build a platform and join them all together where they can have official news and posts that can also integrate with social media, and have people join that platform as well. This is where the first search for a database that can really mimic what the social network would be in data. That was where we discovered Neo4j. This is where we started building the outcome, so that we can build that platform, and we did, for a while and then we figured, that's not really the gap in the business. We were just doing that because we thought it was the point of entry into the entertainment business. But then we also pivoted that into a SaaS, a platform where we can gather data from social media, because if it was for marketing it was booming these days. Especially in the region, it came a little late than we predicted. So we knew this was coming very soon. We thought why not build a platform that can bridge all of this. This was the second shift. This was also the shift from a monolith, a single application, single code base, into microservices, which was a completely different set of challenges that we were facing. Things that we took for granted, like networks, and connections, and discovery services knowing about each other, and communicating between applications. This was taken for granted in a monolith because you don't really have these problems. But once we shifted to microservices, a huge new set of challenges just popped up. We never thought we would have these. And we had a lot of trouble getting around with these tools because we were not experienced in that area. So we had to learn a lot before we could do it, as we do it today. I wouldn't say it's the right way- Matt Stauffer: Sure, sure. Abed Halawi: ... it's just we're doing it and it's working right? Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I hear that. We're getting close to time and I want to make sure that I've asked all the questions I had. Oh, tell me a little bit about Lebanon, and tell me a little bit about Lebanon as a developers, and tell me about Lebanon as a Laravel developer. Abed Halawi: All right, so Lebanon in general, is this small country that you can barely see on the map, let alone Beirut, if you were able to spot that on the map. So it's a very small country, but it's faced a lot of political stuff happening, going around, wars and internal civil wars and then people not liking each other politically et cetera. So this is all going on, even though all of this is happening, the tech community managed to ... well the start up and entrepreneurship communities managed to rise from all of this that was happening. There are certain areas in Beirut where they are dedicated to provide as much as they can, have the humanities to run any idea you have, you can rent, just like any accelerator, or an incubator program. There's plenty of these here today where we can rent a small desk and do whatever you have to do from there. Internet connection was a huge problem, it's becoming much better now a days. If this was to happen a couple of years ago, we maybe couldn't have done this at all. Due to the internet connection, but now a days it's become much different. As a developer, there's plenty of talent in here. We enjoy sharing the knowledge, sharing everything we can get from abroad and from here, from each other. The only problem is that there isn't much people in here. So, it's a double edged sword, right? Everyone knows everybody, but it's the same people that they always see at the events. You don't really get to ... you know this networking time, that you get in conferences, you don't really get to network. We know each other. We try to go abroad for these, more than doing it locally. But at the same time, when we were first starting, there was no community. We did not feel that there's this connection, this circle of people that are trying to build something together. Build a hub of knowledge, hub of experience that they can share among each other. But now, what we're trying to do is tighten the, or strengthen the connections between these people so we can build the more full circle that can incubate everyone in the community as much as possible. And show whoever is starting to get into the technology or development that there is a place for them here. We don't really need to go and work abroad, we can do it from here. We're trying our best to do that. As a Laravel developer, there's plenty of people who are using Laravel nowadays. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: We gather, we talk a lot about what we do, differently in Laravel, and we talk a lot about how eloquent it is ... exactly. And the way that we can write code and we exchange a lot. We try to provide a lot of open source to each other, open source libraries, and tell each other, well I've written this small script, why don't you use it? Because we know each other, we know what we're working on, right? If we find a common interest, one of us would contribute that and provide it to the rest. So it's a very small community I would say, but it's very interesting because it's still sustaining. For almost six years now, it is sustaining and is growing. Matt Stauffer: That's really cool. Abed Halawi: So I find it, yeah, I find it really cool here to have, I mean for anyone who knows Lebanon and knows how many people there is here. To find this, that's amazing. That's all you need. You don't really need to have much more than this. The only issue in here, is scale. We cannot apply what we work on at scale. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Abed Halawi: And we cannot scale what we work on unless it's provided internationally. And to go international from here, it is really tough, unless it's a branch of an international company that is working here, but provides the business from abroad. It is really not much room for you to scale, compared to other places. That's the only drawback. Matt Stauffer: I did not realize how small it is, because Beirut has a similar population to the very small feeling town that I live in. And I used to live in Chicago, which has, I think it's two and a half million people. And Lebanon entirely has six million people. So I now understand what you're talking about, scale wise. Abed Halawi: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: How far of a drive ... I assume Beirut is kind of like the technical center. Are people coming into Beirut for a lot of meet ups and stuff like that? Is that even that far of a drive? Abed Halawi: It's not far. I mean, it's relatively far, because of the traffic, it is way too far man. But if you were to just measure the numbers you would say, well that's, to you, that's not even a drive. It's just a walk. Matt Stauffer: What's the furthest somebody comes into Beirut for a meet up or a conference who lives in Lebanon? Abed Halawi: No, they do. They do, they do come from- Matt Stauffer: Furthest drive, is it an hour, is it 30 minutes is it 5 hours? What's it look like? Abed Halawi: Five hours? You would be in a different country. Matt Stauffer: That's what I thought. Abed Halawi: But- Matt Stauffer: It's a couple hours max. Abed Halawi: ... it's a couple of hours drive. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: Well, what's interesting is that we have this, an institution, a small institution called SE Factory. SE standing for Software Engineering Factory, which where they teach Laravel to graduating students. Matt Stauffer: Really? That's really cool. Abed Halawi: Yeah. It is. The more interesting thing about this is that people come to Beirut to study this, on a daily basis from 9:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night, and going over two hours drive from their country towns. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Abed Halawi: Yeah, it's a long drive and you have no idea how draining to energy it is to go through all this traffic on a daily basis, to be able to learn this. Matt Stauffer: That's the first group I've ever heard of that is teaching Laravel as a part of a code school. I'll ask you for the link later and I'll put it in the show notes for everybody. SE Factory. That's really fascinating. Okay. Abed Halawi: It is. Matt Stauffer: I've one last question for you, and that is, what is the best book that you have ever read. It doesn't have to be about programming, just a book across the board. Abed Halawi: Oh yeah, that's a very interesting question because my favorite book is the one that was given to me by the Laravel community when I went to speak at Laracon, we had a dinner, before that. They gave us all books, and it was Godel Escher Bach, which is the book that bridges so many topics. It's between art, and science, mainly and music of course. This is a book that really manifests how I like to think about technology nowadays. Again, it's not about just coding. It's more than that. It's about understanding, well there's a lot of creativity in there to be put. There's a lot of potential and opportunity for someone to expend and to put their all into this and make something out of it. It's endless. The way that these areas were immersed together in this book is fascinating. You just get to see that philosophy, music, and science, they're all in the same place. And how they bridge and share the same fundamentals in terms of creativity, it was very interesting. Matt Stauffer: I'm reading through the preview on Amazon right now, and it's definitely triggering some ... I studied English Literature in school, there's a lot of philosophy in there, but I was as a technologist while I was there. It's definitely, just reading through some of the basic intro stuff here I'm going okay, this is both scary and exciting in seeing those things. But this is super intellectual though. Abed Halawi: It is. Matt Stauffer: At least it looks like it is, okay yeah. Abed Halawi: Yeah and you would feel, after you read this book you would feel like wow, that's a lot that's happening. I'm in a field that's much bigger than I thought it was. It's not the infinite statements that I've written. It's much more than that. That's what makes it more interesting. Matt Stauffer: This is fascinating. Okay, well I'm putting a link to the book in the show notes. It's Godel Escher Bach The Golden Braid, or A Golden Braid or something like that. Abed Halawi: Yes. Matt Stauffer: An Internal Golden Braid. Abed Halawi: An Internal Golden Braid. Matt Stauffer: I will link that in the show notes. Well thank you, I'm really happy. I'm very pleasantly surprised that it was not a programming book, and that was very good. Well we're past time, so I have to cut, which I hate doing, but I have to do. So if people want to follow you or if there's any other last thing you want to shout out or something like that, how do you want people to kind of, what's their one take away? Should they follow you on Twitter? Should they go try out some product? What do you want them to do? Abed Halawi: Sure, so on Twitter, that's one. On Github, that's two and it's the same identity all over the place. It's Mulkave, that's the username that I use everywhere. So if you look up Mulkave on Google, you'll get all my contact mediums and everywhere. There's also the tech blog of Vinelab, where you can find the introduction to also Lucid and stuff we do at work here. Which could be interesting also to look at. Matt Stauffer: Okay. And I'll link all those in the show notes. I do have to ask, what is Mulkave? Abed Halawi: Oh, well, I told you I was into gaming when I was young and there was this game, about vampires. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Abed Halawi: And there was this clan of vampires that are intellectual they're called the Malkavian. I found the introduction of this clan, and the people in this clan, to be very much matching my personality and character, so I thought well, I'll just choose that. One day I had to choose a user name, and so I was like Mulkave, whatever [crosstalk 00:51:18]- Matt Stauffer: The best user names are ones where you know that forever you're going to be able to get it on any social network no matter what. So I like it. Abed Halawi: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking your time to talk to me. Abed Halawi: Thank you very much. Matt Stauffer: People who don't know, we have never met before, and I asked around, I said hey I want to meet people in different communities, so Abed was recommended to me and we had a chat a couple weeks ago. I said yeah, this is definitely someone I want to talk to, and it was a total pleasure. I really appreciate it and thanks for your time man. Abed Halawi: Thank you very much for having me on this podcast, I really appreciate your time as well. Thank you. Matt Stauffer: (music)

Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and I discuss Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. In this book Foucault discusses the history of, and differences between, discipline and punishment. We find that, despite being one of the founding fathers of postmodernism, Foucault’s ideas are reasonable and well thought out. “In monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power.” We cover a wide range of topics, including: Freedom of speech vs. Freedom from offense Whether language is interpreted by the speaker or the receiver Hierarchy in modern society A gruesome public execution How obtuse writing is intellectual signalling by serious philosophers And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on The Riddle of the Gun about other types of Freedom, and Daily Rituals, about artists and geniuses that achieve great things because of their "discipline". Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show North Star podcast [12:30] Hardcore History podcast episode [14:15] Egalitarianism [26:28] Turnover in the richest people [29:15] The Panopticon [33:18] Nat Chat with Adil Majid [37:47] Machiavellism [38:35] Growth Machine [38:44] Self-driving cars [44:20] Slate Star Codex [46:56] Black Mirror [57:13] Unregistered podcast [58:00] UK man arrested for making offensive joke [1:08:56] V for Vendetta (2005)  [1:11:30] Students no longer support free speech [1:12:00] Kaepernick kneeling during anthem [1:13:32] Cognitive dissonance [1:21:36] Power Law distribution [1:23:40] Bruno Mars’ cultural appropriation [1:27:32] Books mentioned Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (Nat’s Notes) Daily Rituals by Mason Currey [5:47] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Stoics [7:16] The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault [9:26] Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician by Michihiko Hachiya [20:06] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) The Riddle of the Gun by Sam Harris [20:06] (book episode) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [21:12] (Nat’s Notes) Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb [28:32] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Sovereign Individual [30:21] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell [31:28] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Recession Proof Graduate by Charlie Hoehn [35:40] (on Nat Chat) Seeing Like a State by James Scott [40:00] Albion’s Seed by David Fischer [46:56] Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari [48:25] Godel Escher Bach [1:07:52] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Das Kapital by Karl Marx [1:20:05] People mentioned Michel Foucault Jacques Derrida [4:40] Immanuel Kant [5:20] Steve Jobs [5:25] David Perell [12:30] Emperor Hirohito [20:38] David Selverian [32:15] Charlie Hohen [35:40] Andrés, our Podcast Editor [36:37] Adil Majid [37:45] Eminem [39:58] Nietzsche [59:10] Aristotle [1:00:50] Stephen Fry [1:09:40] Ron Paul [1:09:55] Jordan Peterson [1:19:30] (12 Rules for Life episode) Karl Marx [1:20:05] Show Topics 00:55 - We broke a record! Up to now, every book we’ve done we’d recommend - this one we don’t recommend. We would not wish this book on other people. 01:20 - We’d intended to read a postmodernist book, having been so negative about them in the past, but it turned out this wasn’t so much about postmodernism. While it doesn’t have a lot of the key themes we see today in postmodernism, the ideas are still very relevant to the conflicts that are talked about. Big focus on power-dynamics. 02:35 - Foucault’s not really arguing for anything in particular, it’s more his interpretation of the history of punishment. The language is very verbose, it’s almost unreadable. Derrida and Foucault are both famous for being difficult to read. Intellectual signalling. There’s a temptation in philosophy to write like this. 05:30 - Fallacy of correlation: just because great people happen to have bad habits does not mean you must copy them to become great yourself. They were great despite the bad habits. 06:20 - The idea that if something is easily understood it’s not suitable for teaching at uni. 07:40 - Kept pushing this episode back because it was a slog to get through the book. There are interesting ideas in it, regardless. 08:20 - The evolution of the prison system. The book is a four part history of discipline and punishment. 09:16 - This is said to be Foucault’s best work. The writer was born in France and moved to Berkeley to teach, he was gay, and an early advocate for gay rights. He later moved to the San Francisco area to be around that scene. He eventually died of HIV/AIDS. 10:15 - Foucault’s book The History of Sexuality book is very supportive of the non-heteronormative lifestyle which is where the postmodernists get a lot of their ideas about sexuality from. 10:50 - Sign up for our email list, we send out what books we are going to cover ahead of time and because of that we feel obliged to always finish a book. Sign up to help pressure us, it’s a great email list. 12:00 - Possible follow-up episode for this that’s more about postmodernism in general. Would be interesting to see a pro argument for it. 13:30 - Let us know on twitter (@nateliason) (@TheRealNeilS) if you’d like us to try out a slightly different format for the podcast where we do more of a deep dive into a school of philosophy, find out where it came from and its key ideas. 13:50 - The history of punishment. A brutal public execution with fireworks. One of the last public executions in France. Very graphic, an all day event that people traveled to see happen, in the 1750s. It was gruesome and every part of it got botched. 16:00 - In this section, Foucault says that punishment was historically a warning to others. Punishment was a way of the sovereignty speaking to the masses, saying to them what would happen if they out-stepped their boundaries. 17:30 - Part of what Foucault is arguing is that in the transition to prison, society moved from pure punishment - in which the person who commited the crime serves as a broader example to society - to rehabilitation of the individual. 18:00 - There is a thread of humanism in the book. The idea of rehabilitation is linked to the idea of every person having a soul that can be redeemed. The idea of making a person pay in life so that God would judge them less harshly in the afterlife. 19:00 - Believing in the value of people seems to be a major shift in humanity in the last 2-300 years, but this could equally just be a function of telling history. Previous societies more communal than the modern-day, individualistic US. 22:55 - Foucault points out here that while punishment was confined to those who did wrong, discipline became a part of life. All elements of society were built around these disciplinary structures. 23:40 - Punishment started as crimes against the sovereign and shifted to crimes against others. An individual has a place, but a place also has an individual. Everybody is integrated but also interchangeable and expendable. 25:35 - The strict imposition of hierarchy in all parts of life. Before, people could be punished for breaking the law but now you could be punished for only breaking societal norms. Start of a class system. Foucault suggests these are all artificial constructs imposed on us but that we all go along with. The postmodernist idea that the patriarchy is an artificial manifestation of power rather than an emergent result of inequality. 28:32 - Taleb said in Skin in the Game that it’s not how close together wealth classes are that a society uses to measure its equality it’s how easily there is movement between those classes. In Florence, the same few families are at the top of society since the 1600s. 29:15 - 80% turnover in the richest people in the last 20 or so years. Also above 50% of people will have at least one year of being in the top 5 income. 30:26 - Possibilities of a return to city-states. 31:28 - Any idle time is a waste. Punishment punishes you for not being somewhere you’re supposed to be according to a timetable but discipline allows you to make a greater use of that time. Through discipline you can multiply your positive output, like negative reinforcement vs positive reinforcement. 32:15 - Apprenticeships are still around in the modern day only not codified as they were previously. Cold calling/emailing firms can work as a way in if you can offer them something valuable. Like Andrés, who puts together the podcasts. 39:58 - Some of Foucault’s sentences are so long you need Eminem’s lungs to read them out loud. 40:00 - Foucault says that buildings become designed to maintain control over the people within them. Cities that have emerged organically are very much unknowable from the top. So they are redesigned to zone them or make them into grids. 43:00 - Washington DC was designed from the top-down to be more organic feeling. Apparently they designed it to be hard to navigate to prevent invasions. In places like India, the cities have been constructed from the bottom up and so eCommerce is difficult as deliveries are really hard to do. 44:20 - Question of how self-driving cars will change the layouts of cities. 45:10 - There’s no great way to take skyscrapers down or even deal with them when they age, they were never planned to be taken down. In Munich there are a lot of pedestrianized areas with pop-up bars and cafes. 46:55 - There were a few main groups who founded America including the Puritans, the Quakers and Catholics, a lot of whose beliefs are codified in law, leading now to a more socially conservative country compared to much of Europe. 49:50 - Ranks and hierarchies play on our nature as social creatures and our in-built desire to know where in the hierarchy we fit in. This can be seen in the importance of titles in big companies, how it’s taken so seriously on the inside that from the outside it can seem almost funny. Titles are a cheap form of compensating somebody, like giving kids gold stars. 54:08 - Division is a big theme in the book. Among the Postmodernists the oppressor is like the entity that has the plague. Foucault calls out that humans have always had this distinction between good and bad, healthy and unhealthy. A tribal view. This is one of his ideas that we see the most in the modern day. 59:07 - Nietzsche was not a nazi, you can see how some of his ideas led to nazism but there is not a complete match up. 59:46 - There are a lot of things we think are normal now but were thought of abnormal in the past. 1:00:50 - Aristotle said that women can’t think well enough to vote; he wasn’t sexist, that’s just what people thought at the time. 1:01:10 - People take Foucault’s basic ideas too far when they say that all distinctions between individuals have to be disregarded. Foucault would say that it’s wrong to say one difference is abnormal where the other is normal but differences in themselves are fine. The difference can’t be argued but any judgement made on those differences is subjective. 1:03:00 - There was nothing objectionable in this book besides the writing style. 1:03:35 - The word “normal” is very loaded. Supermajority and outliers. Distribution judgements vs. value judgements. Gender normative views. It’s all about terminology. 1:06:32 - Words shape people’s thoughts, the use of words can change opinions and win arguments. People’s interpretations of language shapes their worldview. 1:08:00 - Postmodernism treats language as interpreted by the receiver whereas in most of life we have to treat language as interpreted by the speaker. 1:09:36 - You don’t have a right not to be offended. You can’t have freedom of speech and freedom from offense. Freedom of speech is not there so people can talk about the weather. 1:10:40 - Germany has so many anti-Nazi laws meaning that people can go to prison for things they say. It is thought of as a free country but the interpretation of freedom is very different to that in America. 1:11:50 - It’s strange that freedom of speech is something that needs to be defended. 1:13:44 - Virtue signaling with upper-middle class white kids feeling the need to do walkouts to defend minorities from being offended. Very patronizing and even offensive. 1:18:30 - Postmodernists say you have to not assume anyone’s gender because gender is fluid, and people who decide to change gender are now that gender. Logic is a patriarchal concept! These ideas are not from Foucault so the modern postmodernists must be getting them from somewhere completely different. 1:19:30 - Jordan Peterson and Foucault would get along. 1:20:00 - The issue a lot of philosophers have where their ideas get taken way further past where they themselves drew their conclusions. Karl Marx, towards the end of his life recanted some of the more extreme ideas of Das Kapital. 1:20:44 - If there is something we are missing about these arguments, please let us hear about it, tweet us (@nateliason) (@TheRealNeilS)! 1:21:36 - A lot of the most post-moderny kids on campus are the outcasts. 1:25:40 - Racial jokes used to be part of bonding but now it seems that people are too afraid to say things. 1:28:12 - Closing thought: anytime you see a modern philosophy it’s worth going to the original source. 1:30:00 – People that make this show happen: Perfect Keto is the one-stop shop for all your ketogenic diet needs. The ketogenic diet is really effective for weight loss. Perfect Keto’s exogenous ketones helps you get into ketosis. Use the 20% coupon mentioned in the episode or go to www.perfectketo.com/think. Kettle & Fire bone broth helps you warm in this winter. Theory says we were scavengers and sucked up the bone colagens. K&F bone broth is excellent to get all those nutrients we don’t get anymore. Also it helps combat modern diseases like small intestine bacterial overgrowth. The mushroom coffee from Four Sigmatic energizes you with less caffeine. Chaga mush, linesmain mush stimulants give a really nice buzz, and the Cordyceps elixir is a caffeine-free stimulant. They hot cocoas are instead relaxing and a good dessert They have a new matcha product. Finally, you can help the show for free shopping on Amazon through our affiliate link. Subscribe to the Mailing List to receive bonuses, giveaways, future episode links and more. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

  In reality, the way animals, including humans, react to danger occurs in the following order: freeze, flight, fight. If the reaction really were fight or flight, most of us would be bruised, battered, and exhausted much of the time. In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and I dissect What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro. In this book Joe shares his 25+ years experience conducting interrogations as an FBI agent, and reveals behaviors and reactions we can’t control under stress. He gives very actionable tips to understand if someone is lying, if someone is happy to chat with us, if we should close that business deal, or how to improve our public speaking skills. We cover a wide range of topics, including: Heuristics for understanding when others are uncomfortable or under stress. When we can confidently suspect on someone, and when not. How our body reacts when threatened. The human body reactions, explained part by part. Rips and warning when trying to unmask deception. And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro You can also listen on Google Play Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, or in any other podcasting app by searching "Made You Think." If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet, as many reactions to stress are innate and a byproduct of evolution, as well as our episode on Elon Musk, an article that analyzes how the man behind Tesla and SpaceX thinks on principles. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more.    Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show: Lie To Me TV Show [5:57] Tinder [58:11] Bumble [58:11] Peterson’s Podcast series on Abraham story [57:54] 27, 28, 30, Nat’s article on Easy Keto [37:57] Books mentioned: What every Body is saying by Joe Navarro Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet [3:36] (book episode) Godel Escher Bach [3:36] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Elon Musk [7:21] (on this podcast) The Way of Zen [15:59] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) (book episode) The Gift of Fear [18:13] Principles [56:45] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Antifragile [57:00] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Amusing Ourselves to Death [57:00] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Defining Decade by Meg Jay [58:59] The Denial of Death [1:03:27] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Origin of the Species [1:03:38] Mastery [1:03:38] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Why We Love by Helen Fisher [1:15:06] People mentioned: Joe Navarro Tai Lopez [0:33] Elon Musk [7:21] (on this podcast) Pepper the Poochon [43:17] Charlie Munger [1:03:38] Jeff Bezos [1:20:12] Show Topics 0:00 – “In order to ensure our survival, the brain’s very elegant response to distress or threats, has taken three forms: freeze, flight, and fight. Like other animal species whose limbic brains protected them in this manner, humans possessing these limbic reactions survived to propagate because these behaviors were already hardwired into our nervous system.” 1:13 – Looking at how the human body reacts to stress and using that to figure out if somebody is lying or better understand emotional and mental state of somebody. 1:38 – Why Nat read this book at college. How Nat, improved his public speaking abilities after reading this book, following a suggestion he received during college. 2:04 – About Joe Navarro’s background as an FBI agent for 25 years. How he was able to include all his experience interrogating and what was suspicious or not in the many cases presented in the book. Example of Joe trying to figure out accomplices of a suspect, that was betrayed by his pupils when put under stress. 3:54 – Reference to Darwin: evolution is the foundation for body unconscious reactions. Behaviors are involuntary because they drive from the limbic system instead than from the frontal cortex. Joe stresses that nobody can really detect lies, but what you can detect is discomfort, and discomfort  may lead you to find a lie or information that not being shared. 6:56 – The key to body reading is to look for behavioral changes, rather than specific behaviors. 7:56 – The book is organized in chapters: 1. Commandments (guidelines for body reading), 2. How to pacify ourselves, 3. Reading each part of the body, 4. Deception. 8:40 – First Commandment: Look at behavior in context. Example: we feel cold when we are uncomfortable. 9:32 – Second Commandment: The idiosyncratic behaviors. Body contradicting what one is saying. Example of nodding while saying no. Example where the suspect said went right while moving the left hand. 10:22 – Fifth Commandment: Establishing baseline behaviors. Nat rolling his eye example. Neil's example running hands on his head when sleepy. 12:45 – Sixth Commandment: Always try to watch people for multiple tells, clustering of different behaviors. A single tell is not determinant. Why body language is much more communicative than spoken language. 15:27 – Limits of spoken language. We can pick someone's emotional state even if we don't have words for that. 18:25 – Gut feelings when you meet someone. Neil's example of a guy being elusive about payment. Having negative intuitions just because the other is “tribally” different. How to handle intuition’s contradictions and why we should to prefer the negative one. 23:03 – Cues. Watching people's shoulders will reveal feet excitement. Core of the behaviours. Describing each part of the body’s possible reactions. Each reaction comes in the flavour of some interaction of: freeze, flight, or fight. Freeze is the first reaction. Flight examples: turtle effect, pulling shoulders up to try to protect your neck, smaller neck in fighting poses. 31:20 – Pacifying behaviors: we do a lot of things to comfort ourselves, to distress, to feel more calm. There’s no intentionality in these reactions. Why dating advice can go bad: shoulder touching example. Why we don’t pics of ourselves smiling. Examples of forcing these reactions and trying to make them pass as natural. 37:57 – Sponsor time. Sip a Mushroom Coffee together with Neil. The mushroom coffee from Four Sigmatic energizes you with less caffeine. Neil is drinking the Chaga and Lion’s Mane mush stimulants that give a really soft caffeine bump. It feels much more clear than coffee. If you want to keep the taste of coffee without the caffeine, mushroom coffee is you perfect ally.  If you want something else to taste like coffee, try some Perfect Keto coffee flavored exogenous ketones. Check Nat’s article about a easy ketogenic diet. Ketones make it a lot easier to get into ketosis, and is perfect for weight loss or its cognitive benefits. Don’t forget to shop through our Amazon affiliate link to help sustain the show. Lots of people get sick in this season, Kettle & Fire bone broth helps you warm in this winter. It’s nice, it’s warm, it’s tasty. Listen Neil’s and Nat’s recipes and variations. There’s one that’s better than Chipotle’s! Finally, subscribe to the Mailing List to receive bonuses, giveaways, and more. Most of our tangents and goofing off are going there now. 44:15 – Looping back on the baseline commandment, we should recognize reactions beyond the baseline, and understand the reason behind. Different pacifying behaviors can indicate different mental states. Pacifiers scale with the intensity of the discomfort. 49:34 – Heuristics: “weighting” different parts of the body: facial cues are the least reliable, the face is the most likely to lie. The feet are the most honest ones. Gravity defined behaviors. Colloquial phrases tied with actual behaviors: walking with a bit of a bounce on your step, walking on air, turning your back on someone. 52:17 – Tangent. Reactions of protection inherited by evolution and survival from predators. Evolution is a great first principle heuristic for understanding a large span of topics. 57:54 – Tangent. Optionality trap in dating. Sex in our generation. Optionality trap in jobs. Youthful tendency to sit around and wait for the best option. 1:04:17 – Details of different situations for legs, chest and arms. Leg crossing, nodding up or down, tilting our heads to the side, feet pointing, turning away our chest, crossing arms, etc. When it is easy to force subconscious behaviors. Importance of arms for protection. Problems of helmets in American football. 1:11:46 – Face. Fake smile. “Keep your chin up”. Keeping good posture to feel more confident. The nasal flaring. People that lose sense of smell have a hard time establishing deep relationships. 1:16:09 – Deception. Most people including FBI agents are not better than chance detecting deception. But we have some clues to be suspicious. Synchrony, if what a suspect speaks jives his body language. And emphasis: “I have never seen or heard a person who is lying yell affirmatively, “I didn’t do it,” while pounding his fist on the table”. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and I discuss  Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett (a guy with an amazing beard). In this book Daniel remind us we are not so special as we think, but just an ordered set of material refined by evolution. We cover a wide range of topics, including: Evolution as an amazing and super-simple algorithm for refinement Why we are not special but just a random result of a process Bottom-up “cranes” theories vs “skyhook” theories How memes are the cultural equivalent of genes Why it’s very unlikely that we will talk with aliens one day And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett! You can also listen on Google Play Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, or in any other podcasting app by searching "Made You Think." If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, a book that inspired several pages of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, as well as our episode on Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, another book that reshapes the importance of our existence. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show: Count in Binary with Your Fingers [11:22] Invisible Hand [21:08] Islam: A Religion of Violence Or Peace? [24:30] Street Food History [33:45] Kennin-ji – Oldest Temple in Kyoto [36:00] VCR [40:42] How Coffee Influenced the Course of History [43:40] Testosterone levels in the womb may determine how masculine your face is as an adult [51:47] 23andMe [53:11] Promethese [53:11] Rhonda Patrick – Found My Fitness Genetics [54:11] Perfect Keto [54:21] Fermi Paradox [1:17:01] Books mentioned: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet Godel Escher Bach [0:51] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Denial of Death [3:20] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Way of Zen [7:34] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) The Selfish Gene [22:26] Sapiens [38:40] (Nat’s Notes) Letters from a Stoic [38:45] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Newton’s Principia [1:12:15] Rare Earth [01:16:23] Emergency [1:21:55] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene [1:27:16] The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene [1:27:16] Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson [1:27:21] Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand [1:31:29] The Sovereign Individual [1:33:29] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) The Goal [1:44:02] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) What every Body is saying by Joe Navarro [1:46:13] People mentioned: Charles Darwin Daniel Dennett [0:32] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [0:51] (Antifragile episode) Douglas Hofstadter [0:51] Elon Musk [6:15] (on this podcast) Flatgeologists – Flat Earth Society [6:15] Pepper the Poochon [12:09] Adam Smith [21:08] Maajid Nawaz [24:30] Christopher Columbus [36:26] Lucius Annaeus Seneca [38:45] Rhonda Patrick [54:11] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [59:25] (Antifragile episode) Nicolaus Copernicus [1:08:03] Isaac Newton [1:12:15] Albert Einstein [1:12:40] Jeff Bezos [1:39:57] Show Topics 0:00 – “When you ask functional questions about anything –organism or artifact– you must remember that it has to come into its current or  final form by a process that has its own requirements, and these are exactly as amenable to functional analysis as any features of the end state.” 0:51 – Connections of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea with Godel Escher Bach book. Talebian writing style of the author. The author focuses one part of the book to refute other people’s ideas. 3:20 – Problems derived by bad wording and God directed evolution. Mind-first theories depending on a “sky hook” vs “cranes” bottom-up theories. Concept of things that can grow and organize spontaneously, without the need of an external influence. Application in markets. 10:02 – Numerals vs Quantity. Why humans prefer base-10 to count. Use of different numbering bases, like the Mayan base-20 numeral system. 12:14 – Darwin’s main idea. Evolution as a simple algorithm based on natural selection: random things happen, some of those things make the more fit to the environment, therefore those thing last. Explaining genes using energy harvesting and autonomous robots. 14:23 – What’s the point of sleeping? Sleeping is energy efficient. Being awake is the weird thing. An hypothesis on why our brain developed so much is because being awake we have to deal more often with threatening situations. Humans prefer to sleep by night because we are sight animals. 16:29 – About the danger of Darwin’s idea. We are not special, we are just another result of this algorithm, we have no meaning. Against "our mind is special" argument. Winning in evolution. Domesticated animals winning evolution over wild versions: "They are selected to be OK with us". 20:44 – About unfortunate naming and wording. “Knowledge”, “Natural Selection” and “Invisible Hand” example. Random-process-that-results-in-a-refinement concept. 22:26 – Memes genes analogy. Ideas spreading in cultures is like genes spreading in populations. There's nothing special with ideas, there are memes that caught on and last, natural selection applies to them too. Sacred texts interpretation in religions: texts are brutal, core ideas are valuable. 26:25 – Tribal doctors analogy. Nat's experience in the Amazon Jungle. 28:17 – Losing valuable bottom-up knowledge. Paleo diet as going back to this knowledge. How fetishizing technology made as loose knowledge. Golden Rule: the older something is the longer probably will be around because there is a reason that it lasted. 30:31 – Tangent. Why the Greeks seem to have invented so many concepts. Japan preserved as Galapagos. Asian cultures compared to the US . Why in Tokyo they don't have trash cans. Street food culture in Asian countries. 36:40 – Spreading of ideas and knowledge in animals. Whales teaching others to create bubble nets. Lions teaching cubs how to hunt. 38:40 – Myths. Writing as a better way to preserve ideas. Enhanced understanding and being able to abstract and comprehend relativity. 41:28 – Different types of understandings: design level, technical understanding, physical, intentional. Function of bones, appendix and pinky toes. 42:59 – Tangent. About raw water, beer and coffee. How coffee may have caused Renaissance. 45:53 – Aquatic ape hypothesis. The reason we differentiate from chimps is because at one point of our history we were at half way of being dolphins. Inclination to live near water bodies. 50:30 – Epigenetics. Why the author overlooked this topic. Genes and phenotypes. How modifying our diets and behaviors can bias our evolution in few generations. Keto diet reaction for different regions. Effect of testosterone on facial traits. 59:25 – Tangent. Food labeling. Labeling in beer as a marketing strategy . Sugar allowance and lobbies. Super high carb diet and avoiding mixing carbs and fat diets. Against Mediterranean diet. 1:03:55 – Concept of of speciation. We can analyze evolution going backwards but can’t predict it. Problems with too much forward planning. "Strong goals loosely held" (instead of opinions). Humans won because we cooperate, or, we survived some event. Traffic jam example. 1:08:03 – Retrograde motion. Geocentric orbit model. "God hides in the gaps." 1:12:15 – Intentional and unintentional creations. Scientific discoveries vs art creation. Library of Babel thought experiment: infinite library that has every possible human creation but there is only one random variation expressed, as an analogy for genetic expression. Example of horned birds. “Evolution can explain how whe are here, but can’t explain why”. 01:16:23 – Darwin's warm pool idea of how life could have formed. The chances that we find human-like life in other planets are very low. Possible branches of evolution and comfortable homeostasis. “If the astro hadn't hit, would we have stayed a dinosaurs' planet?” 1:18:46 – Misinterpretations of seeing humans as the end of evolution. Coin flipping contest example. "Winning" evolution. 1:22:37 – Connection with Godel Escher Bach. Our consciousness and our minds are not special. Parallel with ants. Evolutionary algorithms in Computer Science and AI. Against the “all of this constants are right for us to exist” argument. Relativity and clocks in space example. 1:28:53 – The Ethics problem and why we should stop trying solving it problems. Where we draw the line for human "soul"?. 1:34:40 – Subscribe to the Mailing List to receive bonuses, giveaways, and more. People that make this show happen: Perfect Keto is the one-stop shop for all your ketogenic diet needs. The ketogenic diet is really effective for weight loss. Perfect Keto’s exogenous ketones helps you get into ketosis. Use the 20% coupon mentioned in the episode or use this link! The mushroom coffee from Four Sigmatic energizes you with less caffeine. Chaga Elixir and Lion's Mane mush's are stimulants and give a really nice buzz, and the Cordyceps Elixir is a caffeine-free stimulant. They hot cocoas instead, are relaxing and work as a delicious night dessert. Kettle & Fire bone broth helps you warm in this winter. Theory says we were scavengers and sucked up the bone colagens. K&F bone broth is excellent to get all those nutrients we don’t get anymore. Also it helps combat modern diseases like small intestine bacterial overgrowth. Finally, you help the show for free shopping on Amazon through our affiliate link. 1:40:06 – Crypto tangent. Ethereum rise is not really a rise. Buying other coins. Opportunity cost and parallel with business: investing in client acquisition vs client retention. Invest in the bottleneck. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

Failures are just opportunities in disguise. In this episode of made you think, Neil and I revisit the previous books and topics discussed on the podcast. We delve into the most useful lessons that we’ve learned so far, and discuss how you, too, can apply these lessons in your own life. We also had some Irish Mushroom Coffee. We cover various topics from previous episodes, including: The most important lessons from the past twenty episodes Incorporating these lessons into your own life Breaking down the core concepts in each episode Becoming antifragile and resilient to failure Learning to focus solely on what's in your control Letting your intuition and unconscious mind guide you And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to check out all of our episodes here. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out a few of our most popular episodes: How to Think Like Elon Musk, A Crash Course In Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cryptocurrency, and Turning Chaos to Your Advantage: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more.   Mentioned in the show: Four Sigmatic’s Mushroom Coffee [0:40] All of Nat’s Notes [13:47] Programming for Marketers [19:43] Square Cash [37:20] Venmo [37:23] Paypal [37:37] Kevin Rose’s Podcast [38:24] Amy Schumer Gives You a Look Into Your Soul article [52:05] What The Health [52:30] Wall-E [55:08] Blast radius of bombs site [1:12:50] Doomsday Planning for Less Crazy Folk article [1:13:29] Made You Think’s amazon affiliate link [1:14:55] The Cook and the Chef [1:25:13] SpaceX [1:27:13] Dos Toros [1:33:39] Growth Machine [1:35:12] Unlimited Brewing [1:35:31] We Work Remotely [1:36:45] Tucker Max’s CEO hiring article [1:39:56] Tim Ferriss and Ray Dalio podcast episode [1:41:00] Xerox [1:50:58] Four Sigmatic’s Cordyceps Elixir [2:06:25] Perfect Keto’s Exogenous Ketones [2:07:22] Books mentioned: Antifragile [2:28] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Beer Bible [6:55] Letters from a Stoic [9:44] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Black Swan [13:25] (Nat’s Notes) Meditations [14:28] Mastery [15:40] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The 48 Laws of Power [18:53] (Nat’s Notes) The Art of Seduction [19:08] (Nat’s Notes) The 33 Strategies of War [19:11] The 50th Law [19:17] (Nat’s Notes) The Power of Myth [21:47] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Sovereign Individual [21:51] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) In Praise of Idleness [39:14] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Sapiens [40:16] (Nat’s Notes) Amusing Ourselves to Death [47:40] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Brave New World [54:52] Finite and Infinite Games [56:40] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Way of Zen [1:01:48] (book episode) (Neil’s Notes) (Nat’s Notes) Emergency [1:08:24] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Godel Escher Bach [1:17:45] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Goal [1:30:52] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Principles [1:37:28] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Hero With a Thousand Faces [1:40:34] The Inner Game of Tennis [1:43:22] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Psychology of Human Misjudgments [1:48:29] (book episode) Poor Charlie’s Almanack [1:48:42] Work Clean [1:56:07] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) The Denial of Death [1:58:17] (book episode) (Nat’s Notes) Influence [2:01:08] (book episode) People mentioned: Nassim Nicholas Taleb [2:28] Lucius Annaeus Seneca [9:44] Marcus Aurelius [14:28] Epictetus [14:45] Robert Greene [15:40] Ryan Holiday [17:20] Paul Graham [18:03] Justin Mares [19:43] Rapper T.I. [23:56] Kevin Rose [38:24] Bertrand Russell [39:14] Taylor Pearson [43:20] Adil Majid [43:20] Neil Postman [47:40] James P. Carse [56:40] Alan Watts [1:01:48] The Wright Brothers [1:05:11] Neil Strauss [1:08:24] Alex Jones [1:09:07] Douglas R. Hofstadter [1:17:45] Tim Urban [1:25:13] Ray Dalio [1:37:28] Tucker Max [1:39:55] Tim Ferriss [1:41:00] Timothy Gallwey [1:43:22] Daniel Kahneman [1:44:00] Charlie Munger [1:48:29] Dan Charnas [1:56:07] Tiago Forte [1:57:40] Sigmund Freud [1:58:21] Robert Cialdini [2:01:08] 0:00 - Some information on this episode, a bit on the unique beverage being drunk throughout the discussion, and a bit on how this episode is formatted. 2:20 - Book one, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. How Nat and Neil have applied this book to their own lives and some discussion on a few lessons from the book. Becoming more antifragile and noticing the fragile. Second major lesson at 6:40 on the unnecessary information filter. “You want to look for opportunities where you have really high upside and really limited potential downside.” 9:45 - Book two, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. How the book was written and some key takeaways from the book. Focusing on what’s in your control, forcing hardships on yourself, and a bit on the other stoic philosophers. 15:40 - Book three, Mastery by Robert Greene. A bit on the book being a must-read for college students, how the book is structured, Robert Greene’s other books, and how the book details important elements of mentor/mentee relationships. “If you want to get really good at something, Mastery is where you start.” 21:50 - Book four, The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. Discussion on the initiation rituals in the past, which were for boys to become men. Also, a bit on various systems which were passed down throughout time and their significance (e.g. praying for your sickness to go away, benefiting from the placebo effect). Discussion on praying for certain weather conditions back in the day, compared to manipulating it today and the fragility of that. 30:58 - Book five, The Sovereign Individual. Some information on the book, its predictions, a bit on cryptocurrency, and going off the grid. 39:14 - Book six, In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell. Some information on the book, discussion on working and productivity, and some thoughts on spending time on leisure. “You don’t always have to be working, and you shouldn’t feel guilty for not working.” 42:52 - Episode seven, the cryptocurrency crash course episode. What was discussed in the episode and a bit on cryptocurrency in general. 47:40 - Book eight, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Some information on the book and discussion on the negatives of the internet, media, and the news. Also, some discussion on the prevalence of false information in the media today. 56:40 - Book nine, Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. The impact of this book on your perspective and work-life, describing finite vs infinite games, a bit on goals vs systems thinking, and discussing finite playing vs infinite playing. 1:01:48 - Book ten, The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. A bit on the book itself, discussion on meditation, some thoughts on knowledge that’s not defined by explicit rules, and doing things without having the need to explain why. 1:08:24 - Book eleven, Emergency by Neil Strauss. Discussing prepper communities, doomsday survival, and making sure that you’re prepared for bombings, shootings, and other tragic situations. Also, what to do in certain dangerous situations to improve your chances of survival. “Start better preparing for things that might actually happen.” 1:17:45 - Book twelve, Godel Escher Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Some discussion on the wide range of topics found throughout the book and on the intellectual depth of the book. Also, a bit on the accurate predictions the book made and its ideas which are still relevant 50 years later. 1:25:13 - Episode thirteen, the Cook and the Chef article by Tim Urban. Breaking down how Elon Musk thinks. Thinking based on first principles and changing your perspective to force a new way of thinking. “What assumptions can I challenge that I haven’t challenged yet.” 1:30:52 - Book fourteen, The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Some information on the book and how it’s broken down. Describing the theory of constraints and using this to improve your companies efficiency and for optimizing bottlenecks. Also, a bit of discussion on management and business in general. 1:37:28 - Book fifteen, Principles by Ray Dalio. How the book is formatted, breaking down each section, and a bit on some of the wisdom found in the book. Living by these principles and tracking the decisions that you make. “You can have almost anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.” “Failures are just opportunities in disguise.” 1:43:22 - Book sixteen, The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallaway. Discussion on the concept of self-one (conscious, ego-based mind) and self-two (unconscious, automatic behavior mind) found in the books. Letting your intuition and your unconscious guide you, and some techniques for allowing this to happen easier. 1:48:29 - Book seventeen, The Psychology of Human Misjudgments by Charlie Munger. What the book was about, the twenty-five psychological failures and cognitive biases that we all fall into, and making better decisions. 1:56:07 - Book eighteen, Work Clean by Dan Charnas. Some information on the book, how you can benefit from it, the relationship between cleanliness and organization with improved productivity, and starting things so that they’re easier to pick up later. 1:58:17 - Book nineteen, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. How the book is written, a bit of discussion on Freud, and a bit on our own mortality. 2:01:08 - Book twenty, Influence by Robert Cialdini. A bit on how the book is structured, who could benefit the most from reading it, and some information on each of the chapters. 2:03:05 - Wrap-up, information on Nat’s book notes, the podcast episode, sponsors, and some last thoughts. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

Mise-en-place is not a crazy efficiency program. It is really a way of life for people who value themselves, people, eachother, and the planet. In this episode of Made You Think, we’re covering the book Everything in Its Place (originally “Work Clean”) by Dan Charnas, and for the first time on the podcast, the author is joining us for the episode! This book is all about the strategies and tools that culinarians often use in their work, and applying these strategies to improve your life and productivity. We cover a wide range of topics, including: The ten mise-en-place system techniques that you can use to improve your life The correlation between an organized space and an organized mind Using the mise en place system to reduce anxiety, improve work efficiency, and overall quality of life Building inner-discipline and being honest with yourself The importance of actually finishing the tasks that you start on Becoming a better manager and a few of the flaws in companies today And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Everything in Its Place and to check out Nat’s Notes on the book! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on How to Think Like Elon Musk, to learn how to emulate Musk’s way of thinking for extreme advantages in life, and our episode on The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, to learn how to use a simple theory to never stop improving. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more.   Mentioned in the show: Unlimited Brewing Company [1:12] Warner Brothers [2:03] The Eisenhower Matrix [4:29] School of Journalism [5:28] The Palm Pilot [5:54] NPR [12:06] Transcendental Meditation [22:22] Culinary Institute of America [25:35] Tisch [47:58] Saturday Night Live [48:29] Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee [1:01:37] Four Sigmatic Cordyceps Elixir [1:02:49] Made You Think support page [1:03:35] Perfect Keto [1:03:39] Kettle and Fire Bone Broth (20% off for listeners!) [1:03:41] Nat’s article on fasting [1:09:25] Keto Subreddit [1:12:13] Matcha MCT oil powder [1:17:04] Athletic Greens [1:18:04] Books mentioned: Work Clean (Nat’s Notes) (new version of the book) Getting Things Done [0:48] The Goal [3:14] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [4:02] First Things First [4:04] The Big Payback [4:37] The Making of a Chef [6:44] Kitchen Confidential [7:04] Heat by Beaufort [7:06] The Way of Zen [23:22] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) (episode on the book) Irrational Exuberance [1:00:25] Outliers [1:00:29] What Happened [1:00:45] Antifragile [1:04:04] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) Godel Escher Bach [1:10:27] (Nat’s Notes) (episode on the book) Daily Rituals [1:18:35] People mentioned: Dan Charnas Chris Sparks [0:33] Rick Rubin [2:05] Steven Covey [3:57] David Allen [6:08] Michael Ruhlman [6:44] Anthony Bourdain [7:04]] Wylie Dufresne [9:02] Jean-Georges [13:54] Thomas Keller [13:56] Alan Watts [23:22] Éric Ripert [25:28] Bill Buford [25:31] Lauren Michaels [48:29] Ernest Hemingway [50:23] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1:00:13] (Antifragile episode) Tim Ferriss [1:02:42] 0:00 - Introduction featuring the author himself, Dan Charnas. A bit on what made Dan write the book, how he got into organizational systems, and some background on his life. Also, Dan listing some of the most influential books that he’s read. 7:24 - Dan’s journey to becoming a chef and him describing the importance of mise en place. Also, a bit on applying the powerful principles that chefs live by to other areas of life. 11:30 - The beginning of Dan cotifying mise en place for the first time with Work Clean, some thoughts on how things sometimes need an outside perspective, and a bit on the discipline and commitment that’s required in the culinary world. “There’s a certain level of commitment to reality that culinarians have that I think we miss in the corporate world.” 17:02 - The thirty-minute daily commitment to setting your own mise en place, some discussion on the macro and micro levels of the system outlined in Work Clean, and the importance of having a system that involves both the mind and the body. 20:02 - Using mise en place as an effective anxiety reducing technique, the correlation between an organized space and an organized mind, and a bit on the zen-like aspects of the book. 24:20 - Breaking down the ten ingredients/techniques of mise en place that you can bring together for your own personal system. 27:55 - The main technique of the mise en place system that has positively impacted Dan the most and some discussion on the importance of doing the largest tasks in your day first. 34:58 - Certain things to do watch out for when managing people, some thoughts on management in general, and discussion on implementing systems into large-scale organizations. 42:20 - General discussion on corporate meetings and the flaws of these meetings. Also, a bit on a chef’s heavy responsibilities, finding balance between speed and quality, and improving efficiency within a company. “A meeting is about sharing ideas, resolving conflicts, and unblocking.” 48:48 - Going in depth on the importance of actually finishing your actions. Also, some discussion on taking an intentional break and the need to be honest with yourself about your work. “Ninety percent finished is the same as zero percent finished.” 54:07 - A bit more on having a system for both the body and the mind, and linking the system to your calendar. Actually taking the time to do things and scheduling the time to do them. “This is what I can do today.” 58:14 - Wrap-up, where to find Dan at online, and some closing thoughts. 59:03 - After-thoughts with just Neil and Nat. Some discussion on various products discounted for listeners, diet, health, fasting, and going into ketosis (ketogenic diet). Also, some discussion getting into ketosis and how to minimize the negative effects when transitioning into ketosis. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com Ultimately it is about cultivating our inner-discipline.

This is the wrap-up video for the sixth month of the book club. This month we read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and I discuss the book Principles by Ray Dalio. We’ve been fans of Dalio’s work since it was just a PDF floating around the Internet, and this massive tome delivers so many useful guidelines for how to live and work. We covered a wide range of topics, including: Using meditation to improve your clarity with decision-making Developing machines and software for tasks likely to be repeated Seeking out and accepting constructive criticism without your ego getting in the way Improving your life by being more radically honest and expressive Reflecting more upon pain to promote growth The two five-step processes for confronting your own weaknesses and for getting what you want out of life Improving your ability to effectively make decisions And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Principles here and to check out Nat’s Notes on the book! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on How to Think Like Elon Musk, to emulate Musk’s way of thinking for huge advantages in both work and life, and our episode on Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, to learn how to profit from chaos. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Mentioned in the show: Bridgewater [1:44] Futures [4:08] Morgan Stanley [5:20] Tim Ferriss’ interview with Dalio [9:23] Theranos fraud [11:56] Made You Think episode 13 - How to Think Like Elon Musk [14:27] Nat Chat podcast episode with Sebastian Marshall [16:59] The Lindy effect [22:16] The Daily Show [24:10] Growth Machine [26:35] Bookinabox [29:22] Dogfish [29:39] Carnegie Mellon [29:44] Biblical Series Podcast [31:36] Evernote [33:25] Calendly [38:24] Estee Lauder [40:19] Theory of Constraints [57:06] Neil’s article on the Lindy effect [59:49] Myers Briggs [1:10:42] Article on China rating citizens [1:12:06] Black Mirror [1:12:10] Chris Sparks article on Medium about rating life goals [1:18:12] Nat Chat podcast episode with Justin Mares [1:19:46] Article on Nat’s daily/weekly/quarterly review [1:23:07] Crypto Made You Think episode [1:26:50] Tucker Max’s article on paying celebrities to tweet about his book [1:29:17] Books mentioned: Principles (Nat’s Notes) The Way of Zen [13:04] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Godel Escher Bach [14:14] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars [15:48] (Nat’s Notes) Letters From a Stoic [21:58] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Antifragile [22:32] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Amusing Ourselves to Death [24:08] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Finite and Infinite Games [26:08] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) The Goal [27:04] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) The E-Myth Revisited [27:05] (Nat’s Notes) Hero With a Thousand Faces [34:54] Lessons of History [34:55] (Nat’s Notes) The Power of Myth [35:02] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Spiritual Brain [35:30] Steve Jobs Autobiography [37:45] The 50th Law [45:46] (Nat’s Notes) Mastery [46:17] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) The 48 Laws of Power [46:22] (Nat’s Notes) Extreme Ownership [54:50] (Nat’s Notes) People mentioned: Ray Dalio Adil Majid [1:18] Tim Ferriss [9:23] Elon Musk [14:25] (How To Think Like Elon Musk episode) Sebastian Marshall [16:59] Adam Smith [22:28] Colbert [24:11] Tucker Max [29:19] Dr. Jordan Peterson [31:37] Carl Jung [34:32] Joseph Campbell [34:36] (The Power of Myth episode) Will Durant [35:20] Dalai Lama [35:39] Steve Jobs [37:45] Robert Greene [45:59] (Mastery episode) Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1:00:41] (Antifragile episode) Euthyphro [1:14:31] Socrates [1:14:32] Chris Sparks [1:18:11] Justin Mares [1:19:46] Clay Matthews [1:22:47] Jocko [1:26:27] Taylor Pearson [1:26:57] Anna Kendrick [1:30:10] Chrissy Teigen [1:30:12] The Rock [1:30:28] Gary Vaynerchuk [1:30:38] 0:00 - Introductory quote and some information on the book and on the author Ray Dalio. Also, some of Dalio’s achievements and a bit on how he began with investing. 9:07 - Dalio leaving this company, some discussion on his meditation practice, meditation being a big factor in his success, and the emotional ups and downs that come with startups. 12:46 - Some more discussion on meditation drastically improving your decision-making skills and being more level-headed. 14:45 - Meditation on helping you systemize your thinking and some thoughts on the creation of these principles in the book. “It’s a very useful tool to have these decision-making criteria set-in-stone so that you know what you’re going to do and not let your emotions override you.” 17:34 - Journaling and writing out exactly why you’re doing things, then reflecting back on that later. Narrative fallacy with reflection, as well. 19:57 - Giving more attention to the history of what’s been happening instead of only what you notice in the current time period. Also, a bit on the persistence of certain problems throughout the time. 22:46 - Dalio beginning to improve his systems, develop understanding and principles, improve his reasoning, and more. Tangent at 23:36 on seeking out the smartest people to learn from them and how the opposite largely happens today. “Your arguments can’t improve if they’re only up against people who agree with you already or the weakest version of the other person’s argument.” 24:41 - The underappreciated aspect of constructive criticism, and how the ego can negatively impact this. How having someone much more skilled than you rip apart your work and give you blunt feedback on it can help you grow tremendously if you don’t let your ego get in the way. 25:48 - The destructive nature of college forcing you to put so much ego into your work and to not show your work until it’s perfect. How this negatively impacts the way that you handle feedback. 27:12 - Spending more time now to optimize and spend less time on things in the future. Building machines for tasks that will most likely have to be repeated in the future. Also, putting the machine first and yourself/ego second. 31:15 - Giving yourself the same advice that you would give to someone else in your position. Also, treating yourself the same way that you would treat someone else that you care about, which rarely happens. 34:16 - Some of Dalio’s influences, Nat and Neil’s favorite book recommendations from Dalio, and some discussion on his book recommendations in general. 36:09 - Delving into some of the principles from the book and how they develop. How a majority are simple rules for engagement in everyday encounters. Also, a bit on saving mental energy by making systems for daily activities and creating software for decisions where ever you can. 39:52 - Optimizing certain aspects of businesses, the importance of speaking up in a business if there’s something to optimize upon, memory and past decisions, and some discussion on improving upon group decision-making. 43:51 - The advantages of lowering your verbal filter and being radically honest with improving life, business, and relationships. “There are things that just go unsaid for so long, but everyone’s thinking them, and then they just blow-up at a certain point.” 45:11 - The first principle and a bit on taking action on problems now, and not waiting for them to improve. “Embrace reality and deal with it.”. Developing a reflexive action towards pain that causes you to reflect upon it, rather than avoid it. “Pain plus reflection equals progress.” 50:15 - The five-step process for confronting your own weaknesses. (#1 - 50:20) (#2 - 50:26) (#3 - 50:39) (#4 - 53:53) (#5 - 54:46) 54:53 - Taking ownership of things, even when they’re not your fault. There is usually always some way that you played into it (hiring the wrong person, training them wrong, a faulty machine you designed, etc). Also, how management can cause issues down the line, with the issues listed earlier. 56:55 - The five-step process for getting what you want out of life. (#1 - 57:31) (#2 - 58:26) (#3 - 59:03) (#4 - 1:02:46) (#5 - 1:02:55) 1:03:45 - How the principles are outlined and organized. Also, the third principle, to be radically open-minded and the two impediments to this. 1:06:45 - The two-step process for decision making. A bit on avoiding the first solution that you find which confirms your already held beliefs, as well. The confirmation bias. 1:10:35 - The fourth major principle on understanding that people are wired very differently and a bit on challenging other people’s perspectives to get to know certain aspects of them. Also, bringing up controversial topics to test them. 1:14:54 - The last major principle on learning how to make decisions effectively and some discussion on creating a decision plan, then reaching out to others in a field related to that decision and getting feedback from them. “The biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions and if you can systematize as much as possible, then emotions won’t get in the way.” 1:18:03 - Using the expected value calculation and using this with deciding which goals to currently go after. Also, making goals much larger and trying to reach for the inflated goal, eventually reaching beyond the original goal or at the original goal easier. 1:21:49 - The first work principle and how the life principles somewhat form the work principles in the book. Also, how you should go about reading the book and what may be of the most help to you. 1:23:52 - The last section on creating your own principles. Wrap-up and a bit of information on the newsletter and the episode outlines. 1:26:28 - Some fun closing thoughts and stories. (Tangents starting at 1:22:47 on Clay Matthews from the GB Packers and on other goodies.) If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

The strange loop phenomenon occurs whenever by moving upwards or downwards through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. Godel Escher Bach is one of the most complex books Neil and I have ever read. It will have you thinking about minds, intelligence, AI, and reality in an entirely new way. It weaves together insights from music, art, mathematics, ant colonies, Lewis Carroll stories, and more unexpected places into a new understanding of how our minds work and how we might program computers to emulate them. You don’t want to miss it. We covered a wide range of topics, including: What strange loops are and their presence in reality Unique perspectives on the strange loops of the mind, intelligence, and artificial intelligence The possibility of living in a simulation Defining intelligence and artificial intelligence Collective consciousness systems How art, music, and math relate with these strange loops Extra-sensory perception And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Godel Escher Bach and to check out Nat’s notes on the book! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, to learn about Zen Buddhism and improving your life with it, and our episode on Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, to learn ancient wisdom for a better life. Mentioned in the show: E-Mu systems [4:03] Principia Mathematica [4:58] Constant of recursion [5:50] Pulitzer Prize [7:35] American Mathematical Monthly [7:59] Godel Incompleteness Theorem [9:36] M.C. Escher paintings [15:15] The Never Ending Staircase [15:25] Inception movie [15:42] Man in an art gallery white space painting [16:20] Hands drawing hands [16:30] Turing test [39:06] Microsoft Twitter AI experiment [40:00] GoAI [41:03] Deep Blue program [42:03] Jung’s collective consciousness [58:18] Epimenides Paradox [1:09:24] Books mentioned: Godel, Escher, Bach (Nat’s Notes) Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence [2:08] The Way of Zen [3:15] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) (MYT episode) Atlas Shrugged [7:30] In Praise of Idleness [9:49] (Nat’s Notes) (MYT episode) Sapiens [51:14] (Nat’s Notes) The Power of Habit [54:16] (Nat’s Notes) Antifragile [55:00] (Nat’s Notes) (MYT episode) The Red Book [59:16] The Power of Myth [1:00:28] (Nat’s Notes) (MYT episode) Emergency [1:02:26] (Nat’s Notes) (MYT episode) Amusing Ourselves to Death [1:16:58] (Nat’s Notes) (MYT episode) People mentioned: Douglas Hofstadter Godel Escher Bach Elon Musk [2:05] Nick Bostrom [2:08] Lewis Carroll [6:06] Jeremy Bernstein [8:09] Bertrand Russell [9:49] Leonhard Euler [10:55] Isaac Newton [10:56] Charles Duhigg [54:16] Carl Jung [58:18] Dr. Jordan Peterson [59:54] Alan Turing [1:02:35] 0:00 - Introductory quote from the book, some information on the book, and some connections that the book makes. 3:24 - Some thoughts on the book, the logic and mathematics in the book, how it is constructed, and the exercises in the book. 7:49 - A couple of the quotes found on the back of the book and an in-depth discussion about the first section on Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Also, discussion on the strange loops with this theorem. 14:09 - The strange loop idea on making decisions, the incompleteness of all systems, and the strange loop from Escher with the never-ending staircase. Also, some other examples by Escher regarding loops. 18:18 - What defines an incomplete system, an example of this, paradoxes, and the multiple layers that define things. 20:19 - The strange loops within our own consciousness and relating these to death. Also, thoughts on the extreme complexity of the world.   22:28 - Discussion about creating artificial intelligence and how strange loops relate to that. Some discussion on a collective intelligence and some thoughts on us being a part of a collective intelligence, as well. 25:40 - Some examples of us being a collective system, like ant colonies or cells. Also, thoughts on our memory, data storage, and how it relates to constructing intelligence and consciousness. 30:25 - The idea of what intelligence exactly is, evolutionary pressures, and thoughts on whether technology will ever be able to experience emotion and gratitude. Some discussion on intelligence versus consciousness, as well. 33:20 - Thoughts on artificial intelligence and programming in intelligence and emotion into these artificial intelligence systems. 35:02 - How the book is more about a series of essays on these various topics, and how the author is just presenting his ideas and concepts for people to discuss. 35:39 - A quote from the book on recognizing another intelligence and the limiting perspective we each have. How we can never exactly know what another thing is experiencing or thinking. 37:22 - Thoughts on us living in a simulation and how we may never know since we cannot step out of the system and observe it as a third-party. 39:06 - Thoughts on the Turing test and it relating to intelligence in technology. Also, whether conversation and chess can be a suitable measure of intelligence, and thoughts on artificial intelligence beating us at certain things. 43:13 - How the Deep Blue program works and how excellent chess players don’t even see bad moves, they just know. Thoughts on intuition and intuition in artificial intelligence. 45:31 - Thinking computers and processing power, and lower level processes. Also, what core lessons can be learned from this book and some more thoughts on the simulation theory. 49:15 - Discussion on the sense of self, the evolution of artificial intelligence, the huge power of the internet, and how we’ve domesticated wheat. 53:27 - More thoughts on the collective consciousness and the correlation between termite mounds and us. Also, how many structures may exist that we can’t perceive due to not having the ability to, similar to termites and ants with their structures. 57:21 - How just creating the binary system isn’t enough due to cause intelligence and the strange loops with this. Also, the collective symbols that exist between one another and thoughts on these exist. 1:00:27 - How our fears may affect what mythological stories stick and persist. 1:02:32 - Alan Turing and extra-sensory perception, and thoughts on ESP being real. 1:06:10 - The strange loop of questioning our own sanity and how questioning our sanity creates this tighter and tighter vortex of uncertainty. Also, this relating to questioning living in a simulation. Thoughts on solipsism, as well. 1:09:09 - The necessity of strange loops and if a system is self-referential, it has strange loops. The Epimenides paradox and self-referential paradoxes. Also, discussion on our symbol pattern recognizing system. 1:15:15 - Stoicism’s perspective on thinking about death versus Zen Buddhism’s perspective on thinking about death. 1:16:30 - Wrap-up and some closing thoughts on the book. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

Every move that an infinite player makes is towards the horizon, and every move a finite player makes is within a boundary. After reading Finite and Infinite Games, you’ll never see the world the same. This simple dichotomy, finite and infinite, will rethink how you see business, life, love, goals, friendships, play, war, and everything you come across. Once you learn to think about the horizon… there’s no going back. We covered a wide range of topics in this discussion, including: Improving your life with new perspectives Promoting personal growth by defining your boundaries and pushing past them Improving your motivation with the infinite mindset Finding the balance between over-working and contented leisure Consciousness and illusory experiences Insights into our relationship with nature And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Finite and Infinite Games! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to listen to our episode on Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, to learn more about the negative impacts that technology has on us and on how to prevent these impacts. Also, be sure to listen to our episode on Mastery by Robert Greene, to learn how to become a master at your craft and improve your life. Mentioned in the show: Made You Think Cryptocurrency episode [0:22] Valve [27:57] Steam [28:07] Zappos [28:59] Wait But Why [31:16] Elon Musk’s Secret Sauce article [31:17] Fight Through the Suck article [33:25] Narrative Fallacy [34:12] Made You Think Antifragile episode [34:15] Made You Think The Power of Myth episode [39:15] The Philosophy of Mind [47:04] What it’s Like to Be a Bat paper [47:05] The Cartesian [48:58] All Natural Apple Meme [1:09:02] Made You Think Amusing Ourselves to Death episode [1:15:42] The Lincoln Douglas debates [1:15:42] Books mentioned: Finite and Infinite Games The Red Book [19:05] Bhagavad Gita [21:45] (Nat’s Notes) The Way of Zen [21:48] (Nat’s Notes) Sapiens [22:36] (Nat’s Notes) Valve Employee Handbook [28:19] The Dip [32:43] (Nat’s Notes) Antifragile [34:15] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) The Snowball [36:40] The Power of Myth [39:15] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) The Quran [39:20] The Art of Seduction [55:50] (Nat’s Notes) The Game [55:52] (Nat’s Notes) Astrophysics for People in a Hurry [1:03:38] The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels [1:10:40] Amusing Ourselves to Death [1:15:42] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind [1:16:35] (Nat’s Notes) The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up [1:26:00] (Nat’s Notes) 1984 [1:31:26] The Sovereign Individual [1:36:32] (Nat’s Notes) (Made You Think episode) Godel Escher Bach [1:36:34] People mentioned: James P. Carse Taylor Pearson [0:19] Carl Jung [19:05] Bruce Lee [20:23] Plato [21:23] Seth Godin [32:43] Justin Mares [33:25] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [34:15] Warren Buffett [36:19] Kyrie Irving [38:27] Thomas Nagel [47:05] Descartes [48:58] Robert Greene [55:50] Neil Strauss [55:52] Neil DeGrasse Tyson [1:03:38] Elon Musk [1:14:04] Charles Darwin [1:15:37] 0:00 - Intro to the book’s discussion, a thesis quote from the book, and talking about the unique writing of the book. 2:48 - The difference between a finite and infinite game, some powerful lessons, and some real-world examples. 8:01 - The distinction between life or death games and some advice on finding the balance between working too much and being content with not working at all. 11:38 - Some more detail on the finite games, thoughts on the past nature that titles have, and thoughts on achieving your goals and accomplishing things. 18:08 - Our social nature, how that affects these games, and the collective consciousness. 20:43 - Ancient philosophy’s timeless nature and the wide range of influence that these philosophies have had. Also, thoughts on the development of various philosophies. 23:27 - Thoughts on war from the book and the author’s perspective on war. 25:52 - The theory on titles and accomplishments in regards to large and small companies as well as bureaucracy. 29:55 - Bureaucracy in schools, the finite game that schools are, and the title theory applied to schools and degrees. 31:08 - Thinking of everything as a game and taking more risks. Also, some thoughts on how much time you have for major projects that you can accomplish in your life and being selective with those projects. 34:42 - Thoughts on the past nature of wealth, showing wealth off, and wealth in general. 37:33 - Discussion on the boundaries of these games, how successful people think in regards to these boundaries, and constantly striving for a larger goal that’s never achieved. Expanding your boundaries, looking through them, and reaching for the horizon. 42:46 - Defining your boundaries by noticing resistance, and pushing through that resistance or increasing it continuously. Pushing past your limits, living on your edge, and recognizing these artificially self-imposed boundaries. 46:03 - The section on what we know to be true, illusory experiences, consciousness, and thoughts on uploading our brains and consciousness to computers, and teleporting ourselves and consciousnesses. 54:52 - The translation of the game towards sexuality and the infinite and finite players within that. Also, thoughts on sexuality and social hierarchy and sacrificing love for other things. 58:32 - The thoughts of parents being like an abstract audience, where even if they aren’t there, you’re still trying to impress them. Also, more on finite sexuality and infinite sexuality. 1:00:57 - The nature of a finite game and the limits of a finite game. “It’s all the limits that you choose to play the game within”. Also, applying this to the universe, applying it to time, and to other real-world examples. 1:05:18 - Using the infinite mindset to become more motivated for your goals, to achieve more, and to keep doing more. 1:06:58 - The chapter on nature and its horizons. How everything that happens is natural and how nature just is. 1:10:39 - The morality of fossil fuels, some thoughts on fossil fuel usage, and some more thoughts on the game of nature. 1:14:08 - The author’s perspective on explanation and its relation to arguments. Also, the nature of arguments in general. 1:17:44 - Discussion on our control over nature and us versus nature. Also, the author’s thoughts on traveling and some discussion on different areas around the world. 1:21:45 - The chapter on nature and the machine world. The comparison of machines with gardens. 1:26:29 - Thoughts on all types waste and how we view waste. 1:27:48 - The book’s section on myth, and some discussion on myth and the relationship with infinite and finite players. 1:32:06 - Thoughts on how there is but one infinite game, and some interpretations of this thought. Also, the master player and how they play these finite and infinite games. 1:34:46 - Wrap-up and some closing thoughts. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com If you’re thinking about it from a more infinite standpoint, the goal is to simply keep building it, keep growing it, and keep making it bigger. There’s not really a clear end goal that you’re getting to.

This week, we’re talking about vibrating stomachs! The Like police! Under the Skin! The Santa Conspiracy! The first two calls on our new hotline! Godel Escher Bach! Jeffrey’s very literary 2013! Dirty clean ups on the holidays! With help from Golden Road’s Lead the Way IPA! Subscribe! iTunes | Stitcher