Escaping Mediocrity

Today, I had a conversation with Fengzheng Gao. Fengzheng is a researcher specializing in Microalgal Biotechnology, and he holds two doctorates, one in Bioprocess Engineering and another one in Aquatic Product Processing and Storage Engineering. He has contributed to over 20 scientific publications. We talked about the potential of microalgae in optimizing the food chain in order to provide abundant food to the poorest at an accessible cost, how microalgae can supplement the iron intake of the people suffering from iron deficiencies better than conventional iron supplements, the vastly promising future of algae strains in solving any nutritional problem we might face, bioengineering as a solution to climate change and much more. Check Gao's Linkdn Google Scholar Profile⁠

Abel Abelson, a neurodivergent writer and YouTuber, has navigated the unique challenges of being distinct from the majority, on which our conversation focuses mainly. He was recognized by Mensa with an IQ of 133, which places him in the 98th percentile in terms of cognitive ability. Today we talked about whether every problem can be solved through further understanding, how one can be content with the fact that one will be discontent, the apparent incompatibility of acceptance and performance, how to define happiness, the need for enough similarities between two people to have a successful relationship, the pursuit of transcendent threads of logic, how the reason you like football has nothing to do with football and all to do with the fact that you are an ape, the huge variance among people in curiosity and intelligence and the best way to approach it, disgustingness of the anti-egalitarian nature of the massive differences in intelligence across the population, the leverage of your actions as a measure of your intelligence, the nature of trauma, the power of mindfulness, the self-fulfilling effect of believing that you have a problem, progressive voluntary exposure as a solution to fear and trauma, the incoherence of free will as uncaused behavior, the need for immediate regulation of our emotions after a dramatically negative event to avoid trauma, the need to update our knowledge faster than every 1000 years, the perpetual ability to establish dialogue if you criticize the antibodies of the incendiary ideas, and the incoherence of the Naturalistic fallacy. You can find Abel on YouTube Buy Abel’s books on Amazon

Today I am joined by my friend Abdi. In this conversation we talked about: that what causes suffering is the interpretation of the facts, not the facts themselves, framing free will as the ability to ditch a vice, how we don't choose to choose-proving the inexistence of free will as unconstrained decisions, how uncaused behavior is an incoherent concept as a round square, how 99% of the cost of vice is in the creation of future vice, the end of history illusion, how the misalignment between feedback and reality is THE civilizational problem, how we are drowning in information-related to the paradox of choice that emerges from more abundance than one can handle, the explore-exploit tradeoff, how we should be open to being surprised, how as Aristotle said the sweet spot is in the mean between the extremes, how morality is a navigation problem, how trying to falsify stereotypes can be extremely valuable, how we should treat others as if we could learn something from them, the need for both conservatism and progressivism, how blaming is mostly useless, how virtue is always in our hands.

Today I had a conversation with Lukas S, he is a personal coach that focuses on human performance and mindset training. Check him out on Instagram at ⁠⁠otokstrength⁠⁠ or online at ⁠⁠otokstrength.com⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠theprotocol.life⁠⁠ We talked about how complaining is useless but it feels good to us, how finding common ground with people who believe opposite ideas is what allows your or others' minds to be changed, the importance of self-awareness to not be fooled into the fake things that the status quo advocates for, distinguishing what furthers our long-term objectives and what does not, how getting rid of what does not contribute to the long-term objectives maximizes our potential, how we have agency but admitting so requires taking responsibility over our mediocre lives, how doing less is the key to perform more (via negativa), how enduring through long periods of time without positive feedback is what suck feels like and it is the thing that differentiates success from mediocrity, the importance of keeping promises to ourselves, and how all levels of well-being (like relationships, finance, and health) should be taken care of in order to have a good life and how it is hard to dismiss one without doing so with the others.

Today I had the pleasure to have a conversation with Harvey Silverglate, he is an American attorney, author, and civil liberties advocate. He is best known for his work in defending individual rights and freedom of speech. Silverglate has been involved in numerous high-profile cases and has written extensively on issues related to civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 1999, an organization dedicated to protecting free speech and due process rights. He has also written several books, including Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent⁠, ⁠Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse⁠ and ⁠The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses⁠. We talked about The similarities between free speech, the scientific method and traditional liberal values, How the decentralized marketplace of ideas is better at finding truth than centralized power, How interests are aligned in the long term, How intolerance to opposing ideas fuels censorship, The impossibility of China overcoming the US as the world's superpower due to the internal corruptness of its system, The primacy of freedom over material abundance even if they are complementary, The need for the smallest units to be subjected to a process of natural selection so that bigger ones can prevail as in ‘‘The purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die instead of us’’, How dogmatism forced Larry Summers to resign his position as president from harvard, Harvey’s marriage advice, That a Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his actions, How administrators drain colleagues' resources, The counter productive and racist nature of affirmative action, The role of freedom of speech in allowing non-mainstream opinions to be voiced, Meritocracy, And how we have nothing apart from dialogue as an alternative to violence.

Victor Dover is an innovator in city planning, neighborhood design and street design, he serves as president of the Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade and as a board member of the National Recreation & Parks Association. We talk about how the cost of car dependency is hidden from the individual by governmental subsidies, how the promised ‘’car freedom’’ in the 50s became car dependence which newer generations are rejecting, how maximum flow of cars occurs at medium speeds, the evil of minimum parking lots because it causes car dependence, that 0 is an absurd price for parking, that people will use the infrastructure that is built, the bankrupting nature of highways and the huge contrast of the big return on investment of bike lanes(both in financial and healthcare terms), how unbundling the price of apartments from that of parking spaces would make people realize how expensive cars are, the overprescription of both parking and opioids in the US, how reducing population density increases traffic due to increased kilometers driven, how new businesses like Uber and Cabify are diminishing the amount of parking demanded & how dynamic parking pricing according to demand is optimal. Buy his book Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns Check his web page at doverkohl.com Check his YouTube channel at @DoverKohl

Today I had a conversation with David E. Feldman, he is an author of mysteries, crime fiction and the occasional standalone novel, which might be called literary fiction, historical drama or family saga. David has overcome drug addiction, spinal problems that were heading for paralysis, 2 hip replacements, intestinal resection with colostomy and cancer. He is also a working musician and painter. We talked about the coexistence of the better and worse angels of our nature, the key for a successful marriage, our natural curiosity toward hidden plots or conspiracies, the interconnectedness of the world, spirituality, science, the massive magnitude of our ignorance, causality, that the conditions of something to exists have to be given in order for it to exist, if they do not, that thing does not exist, the nature of the mind, consciousness, panpsychism, rational tradeoffs, the need for compassion, the unjustified nature of being unkind to anyone, and much more! His most recent books include A Special Storm: Dora Ellison's Mystery Book 5 and The Neighborhood, which is about a Black family moving into an all white neighborhood. Check David’s webpage at davidefeldman.com Check David’s books at his Amazon page

I am joined today by my friend Emilio to discuss the inevitable end of our journey, the value of noticing your own mortality, the dichotomy between life and death, the process of appreciating things and people while they are around us, the need for acting in a virtuous manner while we can, how the Stoics dealt with death and whether developing an objective morality is possible.

Jeevan Matharu is a wealth management partner at True Potential LLP and transformational coach at Vanquish transformational coaching. We discussed limiting thoughts, imposter syndrome, unconditional commitments leading to deeper consequences(as in marriage, the externalization of justice through the legal system and not stealing organs) not foreseeable by a narrow analysis, how being rational requires taking into account other people’s irrationality, the origin of morality, the naturalistic fallacy, raw darwinism determining what exists at the level of moral judgment, the importance of realizing the difference between what feels good and what is good, the need for enjoying your craft to achieve top performance, the need for dialogue in avoiding violence, how it is not the most violent chimp that dominates but the most cohesive one, how bureaucracy is a system which conveniently separates people of the consequences of their acts, natural selection in relation to who rules a country and your mind and the difference between Real vs Deal friends. Check Jeevan’s Linkdin Jeevan’s Instagram Jeevan’s Webpage Check his book Become a Person of Value

My good friend Luca joins me to discuss the difference between what FEELS good and what IS good, a doughnut feels good but is not good(in the long term), our feelings fool us. We talk about the trueness and fakeness of different feelings which is in the bullseye of effective altruism’s principal flaw: that what feels the best when doing good is not what has the biggest impact, zero sum vs positive sum games, Intelligence singularity, utilitarian ethics reduced to the absurd with the repugnant conclusion, that we have trade offs all the way down, the high cost of nationalism, that for me to be rational requires taking into account your irrationality, the scientific method, that applying selection at a lower level allows higher levels to not be killed, Goodhart's law, and that Ideas being selected for in our minds in a natural selection way makes us unable to get away of the naturalistic fallacy in some way.

I am joined by my friend Patric for a second time (we discussed what failure is on a previous occasion)to discuss the limits of self-improvement and why everyone should try it. Improving yourself is actually worth the effort. We talk about how dopamine is the ultimate currency, that discipline is consistently doing what is known to be good even if it feels bad, the factors affecting Luck vs unluck, the difference between what you wish and what you wish to wish, the benefits of meditation and meta-cognition(being aware of being aware) in avoiding anger and suffering, the fact that our judgment is not perfect but our judgment of our judgment is better calibrated and that our inherent plasticity allows our character to be nudged in the direction of our acts.

Roman Mironov is a coach, he helps men get their act together by getting them out of their porn addiction, he himself wasted many years addicted to porn. You don’t have to make his same mistake. Roman and I talked about: 1: How porn is to sex as McDonald’s is to food. 2: That any male can now see more naked females in 1 day than kings did in their whole lives. The reward mechanism of males is hijacked by what seems to be ‘’evolutionary success’’(seeing many naked females) that in reality is a shallow pleasure that depletes them of their natural drive to improve themselves and their community. 3: The abyss between the female and male sexual psychologies. Not understanding the profound differences in the sexual psychologies between males and females leads to conflict and friction. The solution, as we propose, is to understand the biological basis and the evolutionary process leading to this difference, which emerges from the differing optimal strategy in terms of gene reproduction between males and females, a phenomenon that is seen among all classes of animals and even among plants! While what arouses females is predominantly a mixture of status, commitment and romance, what arouses males is sexual variety and cues of fertility, this is why Japanese anime titillate the male brain while paranormal romance is its match for the female brain. Check Roman’s web page Roman’s YouTube channel Roman’s Instagram

Brett Hoffstadt is an aerospace Engineer, Innovator and a prolific Author. His books are mainly focused in inspiring children’s curiosity in STEM fields, he has authored titles such as "Exploring Smart Cities for Kids","Goodnight Moon Base" and "How To Be a Rocket Scientist: 10 Powerful Tips to Enter the Aerospace Field and Launch the Career of Your Dreams". We talk about the fundamental role of the STEM disciplines in our society, the benefits of having a permanent inhabited base on the moon, the multifacetedness of engineering, the unity of knowledge, the inherent tendency of humans to explore what is outside of the known, the importance of people skills, the ethics of avoiding existential risks and much more. Check Brett’s LinkedIn Brett’s Amazon page Brett’s Blog

I explain in this bonus episode my views on how incompatible simultaneously stating that a public library and copyright laws are a good thing is. It is socially accepted for public libraries to exist so that in principle everyone has access to any book without paying for it in the moment, but this is not coherent with another belief that society simultaneously holds as unacceptable: downloading the ebook for free infringing the copyright law. I am not trying to argue against copyright law, I am just pointing my finger at a cognitive dissonance I believe to have found in the general public. The border between owning a book and not doing so is blurred when you take into account that 99% of the time we spend paying attention to a book is when we read it. If the objective was to 1maximize the revenue of authors and at the same time promote their books by giving them a showcase in which their work can get known so that we incentivize the production of books while 2making their books accessible for the general population, we would be incredibly lucky if the best tradeoff of these objectives were maximized by what we happened to stumble upon with our social conventions. There is clearly a diminishment in the amount of sales when someone reads a book from a public library, specially among the people with a lesser taste toward owning a book on a permanent manner, why should we subsidize people who happen to have this taste and not focus instead in the less well off people in our society? I would love to hear your opinions on the so please do comment them on the youtube video of this episode if you wish so.

Jan Goss is the Founder of Show Up Well Consulting, an Austin based firm specializing in personal and professional development. On this episode we talked about grief, the process of healing from it, how achieving success in spite of social pressure dragging you to mediocrity can happen if you have enough drive and know how to play your cards, what wisdom is, gratitude and the unfortunate fact that on many occasions we only value some things when we lose them, the value of the knowledge inherited from previous generations and more. Check Jan Goss' web page www.showupwell.com Jan's instagram Buy Jan's latest book Bedroom Etiquette: How to Show Up Well Behind Closed Doors

I am joined today by Dr. Jay Garfield, Jay is a professor in the humanities, philosophy, logic and buddhist studies at Smith College, he specialized in Tibetan Buddhism, the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics and hermeneutics, he is also a visiting professor for buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, and author of his latest book ''Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self.'' published in may 2022 on which our conversation focuses mainly. In our conversation we cover the topics of avoiding suffering, the self, free will, two experiments that prove the inexistence of either free will or the self, how these two illusions are the originators of a big part of the suffering of the human condition, the nature of consciousness, introspection and the meaning of the cosmos. Buy Garfield's book Losing Ourselves from Amazon Check Jay Garfield's Website jaygarfield.org

Victoria is an Internal Medicine Physician, she claims that medicine is how we eat, think, feel, our relationships and more, that there’s no one pill solution. During her first 6 months of residency she quickly realized that traditional medicine was not addressing the root of the problem. She became intrigued in addressing the root of the problem to prevent patients from frequently returning to the hospital and to ultimately help people improve their quality of life. We converse on the evolutionary maladaptation of our biology to our current environment in relation to the abundance of calories, sugar, fat and salt. The conflict of interests emerging from an asymmetry of information and a corrupt healthcare system between healthcare providers and receivers. How focusing on ''the basics'' such as improving your diet, the way you think and your relationships can make a major impact in your health that no pill could. How the problems we moderns face are a lot of times intercepted by profit seeking corporations that can do so because of a badly designed system of interests, which leads U.S. citizens to spend more than double on healthcare than the average european. Check Victoria's Web Page healthfulrootsmd.com You can also find Victoria on Instagram & Linkdin

On this occasion I chat with Chef Dennis over food, its omnipresence among all cultures due to the shared biology of the human condition, how the obesity epidemic could be ameliorated returning to the diet of our grandparents, the importance of taking into account personal differences when looking for the optimal diet, the unfortunate fact that the cheapest food that we can consume are junk foods, making eating healthily a difficult task in North America, the cultural and culinary differences in the west between North American and European countries among which both of our opinions converge in that the latter has the best food. Find Chef Dennis at askchefdennis.com Also on Instagram at @askchefdennis On Facebook at @askchefdennis On Pinterest at @askchefdennis

Mark Henick is a mental health activist and advocate, author, host and public speaker who has appeared on tv, radio and online podcasts on multiple occasions, he is especially well known for his popular TedX talk on YouTube which now has had more than 6 million views. We talk about: Suicide, why some people choose it and how to avoid it, the meaning of life, public policy measures relating to suicide prevention, how we have a common flaw of identifying ourselves with our feelings, the important differences between the collective and the individual and the remarkable similarities between the failed war on drugs and the suicide numbers that represents a social failure. Find more about Mark on: His Web Page, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube his podcast Living Well With Mark Henick Buy his best-selling book So-Called Normal: A Memoir of Family, Depression and Resilience

Julius H. Grey is a Canadian lawyer and university professor, he was born in Poland. He is particularly known for his expertise in constitutional and human rights law. He is a senior partner at the law firm Grey Casgrain, s.e.n.c. I talk with Julius about the importance of freedom of speech in correcting incorrect thoughts-opinions, the threats to freedom of speech that political correctness creates, the role of the government in supporting weak languages such as French in Quebec or Welsh in Wales and the conflicts of interests that arise in the law system when people who work in the law sector express themselves in a deliberately and unnecessarily complex and sophisticated way to maximize the business that they have. Check Juliuses web page greycasgrain.com Find Julius on Twitter