I'm the Centre of the World, You Know, It's Not an Evil Thing That We're Doing

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"It's trivially easy to start. It's the automatic way that i experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when i'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that i am the centre of the world," he says. "If you learn how to pay attention, at least you'll know there are other options and how to orient your perspective." 'You can choose to look differently at this fat, dead eyed, over made up lady who just screamed at her kid in the check outline,' writes Mr O'Neill. ''I think it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what’s in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?

Plus we ask the AI ethics program “Ask Delphi” some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we’re saving that argument for a future episode).