let's THiNK about it

Part 1: The Aggregation of Marginal GainsHabits are really about identity change. Behaviour change is simply the means to get there (the feedback loop).What are atomic habits? They are the smallest possible habits, tiny little things that you can begin doing easily for remarkable changes.Example: The British cycling team wasn’t doing so well until their new coach, Dave Brailsford, implemented very small, incremental changes: things like trying out different tires or massage lotions to increase recovery time.They did not see immediate results, but the gains accumulate over time. This known as the aggregation of marginal gains.The idea here is if you only get 1% better every day in a specific task by the end of the year you are 37% better. Which is great, but the real magic comes when you multiply the effect across years.“Small habits don’t add up. They compound.”James Clear Dave Brailsford and British Cycling, as of 2018, won 5 of the last 6 Tour de France events with 3 different riders, capturing dozens of gold medals, and setting many Olympic and World Records in the process. Their system works.Note: the optimization apparently continued outside of the parameters into the gray zones… and now it’s sort of Lance Armstrong all over again.Part 2: Slow Burnit’s not about getting what you want, the power of habits is the change who you are. Or who you want to become.James clear’s analogy for the challenge of change is the Ice Cube. If the Ice Cube is in a room at 23 degrees, and you heat up the room by 1°, nothing happens. This is like me being on a diet for one week. But you could heat up the room 1 degree eight or nine more times (and maybe you should consider that eight or nine years) but when it hits that magical 32° the ice begins to melt.The lesson that Clear and other authors articulate is that it takes between 5 to 8 years to become an overnight success. And during this time, pretty much no one will see a difference, but suddenly, there will be a state change.To describe this, he introduces The Plateau of Latent Potential & The Valley of Disappointment.We are getting 1% better every day. We expect that arrow on the chart to keep pointing up with steady lineal progress, but Clear says that it is actually more like a plateau before we rise exponentially.He cautions where you place your emphasis: outcome metrics will vary, but if your process is good, such as showing up every day and staying on a schedule, the results will show up. It just might take another 3 or 4 years… If my system is good.“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”James ClearHaving big goals is normal… everyone has a dream, but having big passion alone will not get us there. It is the daily systems we put in place that get us there.But to do this, we must also be aware.“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”James ClearDo you remember the story about the Elephant and the Rider? Where the rider (ego) thinks they are in control, but the unconscious is an elephant… and if it decides to walk left, we tend to pretend we (as the rider) are in control and rationalize the direction saying “yes, I always wanted to go that direction anyway.”To change your path, you must be aware of your unconscious patterns and behaviors.The insight here is that we tend to think our habits help us achieve a goal… but really, habits are behaviors that determine our identity.your identity feeds your habits, and your habits feed your identity, forming a feedback loop.So, this is not about just collecting hacks or forming odd habits: focus on the big goals, learn to embody your values.One thing you can do when looking for the path to manifest your values is to ask yourself: what kind of person writes a book? What kind of person has success in this space? You hear that Hemmingway started writing at 5:00 AM everyday and wrote for 3 hours no matter how hungover. If you take on this habit, your identity will change: you will become a writer (but hopefully not a heavy drinker.)One way to consider all of this is to both PUSH and PULL yourself.Set the goal and let it PULL you forward: let that dangling carrot inspire you and drive you. Let the habits PUSH you. It may feel odd to enact behaviors (copycat or mimicry) that you do not fully comprehend at first, but sometimes merely performing the action can lead you to the insight and benefits, which over time can manifest a change in interior motivations as well.Part 3: Habit Stackyour habits are just the automated solutions that solve the problems your brain faces regularly.James ClearWe can hack our environmental awareness to stack things together, making a mutually reinforcing chain of behaviors, or habits.To form a new habit, we have a cue that triggers craving, which prompts a response, and then we get our reward.But the “cue” can be developed, we can hack it, according to Time, location, or even by a preceding event, so you can trigger cues to link or stack habits together ~ potentially driving out old bad habits and replacing them with potentially good habits.Simple Habit Stack: Every time you close your laptop, do 10 pushups.Mental Habit Stack: In a more complicated version, [[Tom Bilyeu]] from[[impact theory]] says that after meditating you have just reduced a lot of cognitive distress and anxiety. During this kind of super open and calm state anything you do afterwards should be more focused and your brain should be more receptive. So for instance you would stack meditation and journaling future goals together. Or meditate, then read, allowing your mind to absorb the content without the typical daily cognitive anxiety.Physical habit stacks: When you workout your body becomes super absorptive of protein or anything else you put in your body… for about 20 minutes post workout. This is a peak window that you should take advantage of for gains and decreased soreness and inflammation.This “knowledge of knowledge”, knowing when you can maximize your efforts with a little stack allows habits to interlock and become routines.Part 4: Environment“Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.”James ClearBut what about bad habits, temptation, and will power? The latest science shows that will power is like a battery charge: if you use it all up, you have to go to sleep to re-charge and get more of it.I did an episode, Step 19: Breakdown of Will on a book by George Ainslie, where he shows how understanding temptation (and reward paths) can also lead us understanding how willpower functions.We need to change our thinking, we need to consider will-power and discipline as a limited resource, not a character trait. Then we can begin to set up your life to not only avoid temptation, like food or procrastination, but also we can make our environment serve us by limiting bad distractions, and planting good ones.Small behavior hack: if you don’t drink enough water, simply put bottles or glasses of water all around you when you start your day, so you no longer need the willpower to walk all the way to the fridge to get water every so often.This is modifying your environment, which can be part of a habit stack: when you enter your office gather the empty water bottles from yesterday and fill them all up again and disperse them, before you let yourself get a cup of coffee. Or if you need a reward habit stack, flip it: every time you drink a cup of water you reward yourself with a cup of coffee, or you get to check Instagram for 5 minutes. whatever your drug is, but be careful of these REWARD Stacks… at the end of the day we don’t want to train ourselves to be entitled to a reward for doing something so mundane as drinking water.Clear says, your environment is an “invisible hand” that guides your behavior.“What often looks like a lack of willpower is actually the result of a poor environment.”James ClearRight, but how do you do this? If you know you have limited willpower then early in the day (while you are still fresh and full of discipline vigor) you can set up your environment to aid that weak willed ninny that you become in the afternoons.If you suffer from checking social media, then early in the day you set a software to block it until after work.If you eat too much at lunch, pre-pack your lunch into a smaller Tupperware container. Like Odysseus tied to the mast, take the decision away from the future you.“Winners often win because their environment makes winning easier.”James Clear

Series overviewThere is a mystical power to self optimization, to becoming better. With all the Behavioral Science, behavioral economics, psychology, neurological studies, and FMRI tech we have figured out how to make you “better.” Yet, according to movies and myth, attempts at control or better living through science cascade into tragedy.From the 80’s man now considered toxic, to the perfect housewife now considered repressive, the timing of the societal idea of “better” shifts. And let’s not even get into the tragedy of eugenics and that deadly trap of “progress.”Optimization (for this series of podcasts) is along the lines of “better habits to make a better man or woman.” Woven into our bootstrapping cultural ethos and perpetuated in early sci-fi and dangerous stereotypes, the notion has a desperate appeal, especially in a society that creates insecurity. There is a dream of morphing into the Übermensch, of overcoming and maximizing potential.Optimization offers a formula of productive competence, and along with that comes achievement and self-confidence. For some this turns to the cockiness of being a bro, or bro-ette, yet equally that is something else cultural as well. But with this quasi-scientific-self-help-behavior-hack culture on the rise, we should look at not only why it is rising, but also look at the hidden downside: As Zander Nethercutt saysWe are optimizing ourselves to death… In a hyper-productive, work-obsessed world, we’ve become acutely aware of any opportunity for optimization.”Yes, we are obsessed due to our cultural precarity, due to the systemic fear-inducing threat of being left behind.Yet, there actually are some real benefits to having knowledge of how knowledge gets formed. Being able to retain information just a little bit better, or being able to sleep just a little bit better, or (most beneficial for me) working on a regular basis to prevent depression, rumination, and ennui are all goals worth pursuing… in moderation.The Lure of Self OptimizationWe all dream of the magic elixir of being “awesome-sauce amazing.” It is a mythological archetype to imbibe and thrive. It is a hope preyed on by snake-oil salesmen and sold to Kings as the Fountain of Youth. With modern science we have reduced the myth to pill form and invented conspiracy theories.However, there really is a modern science of chemicals that increase brain function: neurotropic drugs. The most popular example is Bradley Cooper in the movie Limitless, where are a neurotropic drug allows for increased focus, cognition, and neuroplasticity, which is of course like a superpower in a society the champions intelligence over anything else. Well, maybe we champion money more… or no, maybe it is beauty, or maybe power… anyway… I digress.One popular drug for focus and attention is Ritalin. or speed. Amphetamines are heavily abused today by students freaking out about taking exams. But most neurotropics are not speed or a silver-bullet: they offer you marginal gains at best, and often involve taking several pills several times a day to keep a lot of chemical levels at optimal Peaks.But, for such marginal gains, perhaps you could just as easily set up something more tangible and more measurable: adjust your workflow for Peak Performance to hit Flow State.JUST THE TIPSTIP 1: KanBanOne tip to help you achieve flow state is to set yourself up for success. By using multiple interlocking strategies that reduce stress and increase focus, it is easier to slip into flow state. One of the setups recommended is Kanban. The Kanban technique is really a productivity system: a list making technique that is the inspiration for the software Trello.One problem we suffer from is our brain is constantly remembering small nagging things we have to do, which keeps distracting us from complete focus.First, you write down everything you need to get done, all the goals, all the steps onto “cards”. Second, you organize them into #todo #active #paused and #compelte categories. Finally, with everything in easy to see visual system, you keep pull up one “card” from the active category and focus on that.This reduces the cognitive drag of your brain trying to multitask and worry, increasing productivity.Tip 2: FLOW STATENow that your workflow is more efficient through Kanban, you need the right frame of mind to hit flow state. This is different for everyone, but the right music helps and you can look up a list of “flow triggers” here to see what else might help youNote: the task must be sufficiently difficult but not too hard, hitting your ‘zone of competence’. Easy enough for you to see results and feel in control, but difficult enough to keep you fully absorbed and engaged.At this point, you lose identification with “self” or the ability to “self-monitor.” That’s right: you are your most productive self when you stop thinking about yourself.moths to the flameWhy would you want to be 5x more productive?I would hazard to say the lure of efficiency, habits, and productivity feed into a notion that you can take control of your life, find more agency and autonomy, and feel more secure in a precarious world.However, Schopenhauer may be right:A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.This begets the paradox of rational instrumentality, where we can rationally make a plan and we can follow that plan, but without asking if the our underlying desire (the thing we will) is in itself rational. Have we been considering greater productivity beneficial without considering why?Productivity is a tool. A very seductive tool, just like rationality, but productivity at its worst cases can lead to OCD and can become a supplemental crutch to actual living. You can be so busy being productive you forget to live. You are, at that point, an automaton protecting yourself from the ambiguity of living. Jurgen Habermas (whom we discussed previously on episode 12) says our rationality should be “communicative rationality” which would come out of successful communication… not our own demented echo chambers.In a healthy society you could choose to be hyper-productive just because, to test yourself, but it would not necessarily make you more secure or more valuable: your validation of yourself would be internal and through your connection to others, not as part of a competitive survival strategy.However, we live in a capitalist world leaning into oligopoly while consumerist extremism shapes our psychology into pathology. Due to the system we are in, and maybe our evolutionary nature, we desire external validation and wish to climb the social ladder. The lure of optimization is to provide rungs for our climb. The science of optimization allows self-bootstrapping through measurable efficiencies, thus offering a semblance of control and forward momentum or positive, constructive change.This is not bad, in fact, it is great. Perhaps it is even a vital survival strategy today. Given that our society preys on precarity, turning those that fall behind into serfs and wage slaves, maybe reshaping ourselves is the only option until our society ascends into a healthy utopia.My cautioning consideration is in terms of moderation: We must keep our priorities in sight, and hopefully they are beyond materialist consumerism. If we become hyper-productive what if we spent our remaining hours resting, relaxing, and bonding with friends and family?

IntroCheck Step 46 for a history of how money developed from sacred origins into “a force for evil.”Part 1: Separation and OnenessThis illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.” ~ Charles Eisenstein He goes as far as to say to bring forth generosity and love and all dimensions of life, “we must dismantle the systems of domination that perpetuate the illusion of separation. Most notably the neoliberal system of Economics but also religion and politics.”The difficulty is, we are perpetually bombarded and distracted by the reinforced narrative of individual sovereignty and freedom (liberty) with no discourse on social morality or what we owe each other.  Eisenstein says we must disengage from this system, not oppose it. To do this, we need a new story. Not the age of separation, but the story of Ascent. Part 2Systemically we need policy in place that align wealth with the sacred.  Eisenstein brings up negative interest. This is when money circulates and investment continues, but the original capital loses value. These would lead us to “value” the capital less than the products or services. With positive interest, there is an incentive to hoard money (pull it out of circulation) and be rewarded through stockpiling, which encourages stagnation, otherwise known as a recession. In 1906 Silvio Gesell proposed “ the natural economic order” where a stamp of a small percentage was periodically pasted onto paper currency, this maintenance was a fee on the currency.  If wealth is instead measured through happiness and well-being, it will be linked with intimate connections and communities, mutual benefit and attentiveness, which also provides emotional stability, and can generate it’s own economies.Part 3But what about land use, property, and ownership? The consumer citizen has increasingly been distanced from the means of production, and nature, to remain focused on the separated individual self. We become “rational actors” or “rational optimizers.”The tragedy of the Commons is an economic parable about how “rational actors” optimize individual wellbeing at the cost of the entire community, destroying the equilibrium to thrive for self-interest. Our current model exacerbates or encourages extraction, or commodifying the commons into private wealth, which leads to increase wealth consolidation and extractive damage. As the myth of perpetual growth become obvious, we need a support system, which is why Eisenstein recommends a social dividend: call it UBI or welfare. You may ask: where will the money come from, because with negative interest the money supply would continue to shrink?We will develop a “Commons backed currency” to generate new money and align it with preserving nature. If the land was in a public trust, a social shared resource that could be lent (leased) to corporations for a limited amount of time, the lease would be our social dividend, capital, and currency. This is a three-pronged attack torealign money with natural decay,alter the way land is used, letting it become the currency backing or capital as a communally shared resource, andletting pre-pollution taxing redirect innovation (and community) towards enriching a sustainable commons. 

Eisenstein asks “Why is money a force for evil in the world?” When did money, once a sacred promise and gift, become a means to separate individuals from each other and nature, to create competition, extraction, and hoarding? Key takeaways from Eisenstein's book "Sacred Economics" 1: We are ungrateful teenagers: the earth nurtured us into adolescence, but we won't become responsible adults. 2: The parable of the Eleventh Round. 3: Negative interest. Instead of money accruing value… what if it lost it? We discuss the origin of money, how it developed as a sacred trust and could enrich lives and community, but through Interest (usury) and the parable of the Eleventh round we see how it destroyed community and the environment through unsustainable growth (capitalism) built into it's design. We also discuss the Tunnel Effect, and how it leads to the problem of solving capitalism's problems with more capitalism. Primarily this is a doubling down into existing systems and ideologies when under stress, which -of course- is manufactured by capitalism. 0:00 Intro (Ryder's 3 takeaways) 8:23 Part 1: Getting stuck 11:47 Part 2: History of money (potlatch into trade) 18:09 Part 3: The Eleventh Round 28: 19 Part 4: Transition from The Hedonic Treadmill 31:36 Part 5: Outro  

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-45-free-guy/Part IThis week, we were offered a story of an NPC, non-player character, in a video game called Free City. And what happens when Guy, played by Ryan Reynolds becomes sentient. He is triggered awake by seeing a girl. Shocker right? He becomes a sentient algorithm, able to see his desires, take action, and even judge the relative value and merit of his actions. Well, the backstory is, the two programmers, a girl and guy, develop an AI, artificial intelligence engine, that allows characters to grow and change without human input or interaction. Naturally, the programmers are maybe in love, but are maybe too immature to know how to express it. A totally rad, bro capitalist buys the AI and scuttles their “pure and sweet dreams”, basically an AI “garden of eden” terrarium.NOTE: two young, awkward genius programmers, who can’t get out the words to get someone out of their pants, frustrated, make a petri-dish to grow life in… so, yeah, they made a baby making machine, because they couldn’t get past their emotional immaturity to make their own baby… so now, we have sentient NPCs crying in the garden to two clueless parent/gods. Long synopsis even longer: The female programmer falls for the NPC, of course, and eventually has to tell his creator he is simply “a love letter from the author.” Yuck. Gross. Bleh. FIRST THING: The moralRomance and Capitalism. The moral?  pursue Noble Passions, do not cave to the temptation of the base and mean, though it surrounds you. The reward is beyond money, and will reward you more deeply for longer, and who knows? maybe you will get the girl, or guy, or hunky algorithm… or the dopey, buff algorithm. SECOND THING: Work, Labor, ActionWhy do we need an AI? (This is answered at the end, but given “human idiocy” making anything like us is bound to be a failure.)To comment on the story and AI, we will borrow Hannah Arendt’s terms for WORK, in which she distinguishes between the drudgery of labor, the productivity work, and the self-becoming of action.Labor is the NPC without sentience repeating tasks over and over. This is like a robot making the same widget over and over or humans having to get food and eat it over and over… then poop over and over.While work is the effort to create a new AI engine, or make a factory, something that will outlast you and supersedes nature.And finally, action is to engage in the world in such a way that you create a story of yourself in the world. ~ SO, this is kind of the notoriety Guy receives in the movie, moving from repetitive, endless labor of the NPC into work to level up and get the girl, into being a Contender, which affects the world and alters other people’s understanding and actions.The AI is a challenge progression: from robot labor to creative work mimicking human behavior to self-aware action… to create something that can meta-cognate and make value distinctions.We are just attempting to leap the uncanny valley, and hoping the artificial grass is greener. RyderBut, what if we get past anthropomorphization?  If the AI can see that Goodness, Love, and Purity are really our Kryptonite… then when you dangle some lovey, attractive cuddly thing in front of us we go stupid. The best way an AI could get protection is to exhibit cutesy love. And, of course, this is the plot of many sci-fi books and movies, such as Ex Machina or Vivarium, where the true test for an intelligent machine or species is to prey on the human weakness of emotions and love. This is that ugly deep sea fish, the angler, with the little dangling light it uses to attract the other fish. The little light is the dangling Ryan Reynolds…  THIRD THING: DifferncePursuing Desire (once you have it, generally from discontent) takes work and action . To create your own story, where your actions effect the world is your will to power. A negative (discontent) moves us from our Contentment, that banal sameness that produces nothing new. however, difference… difference produces change.This where in Nietzschian terms we begin to move beyond good and evil, because the fascinating thing is, negative and positive are both forms of difference, they actually mirror and contain their contrariness in each other, they are just categorized by degree and distance. The more difference, the more transformative it becomes. Sameness, contentedness, can be when we are subservient to the same illusions… it is not really being alive, it is merely enacting historical, conservative values repetitively: these are phantasms. That’s what movie projectors and shadows on cave walls are… They are the flattened, inverted forms of life.To escape this flattened category is to increase the difference, negate the sameness, even if it is through radical repetition.We thought we had an identity before… but this big “D” Difference is beyond the lame-ass category of identity: by enacting such a difference, we break the category… we approach transcendence, we manifest the beautiful soul, and enter the Eternal Return. In Free Guy: The hapless coders produce an AI, the crooked capitalist produces douchery and employs tons of people, and the awestruck NPC levels up to get the girl, then transcends that ~ all of them go to extremes of difference, they power through, and to each there is an affirmation. We are talking about Action, and Difference… about being aware, being motivated and taking action. We are talking about breaking the script. At the end of the day, why are we trying to make an AI that is sentient or aware?Because we lazy humans would like to stay at the WORK level, never taking the  ACTION to become AWARE ourselves. We will build a machine, an AI, to achieve enlightenment for us.  Call now, and for a limited time we can get ship you three cans of Deleuzian Difference Spray. Stand out. Smell difference, be difference. and watch her eternal return to you….  Now, we mentioned caves and movie projectors… These are Representations of the world, the re-presentation of the same. These re-presentations mediate everything.Adding more, an infinite repetition of forms with infinitesimally tiny differences, keeps us trapped in the same point of view. It is the logic of the simulacrum, with no grounding, fractally expanding and dispersing with no purpose. Capitalism and the market feed us small consumable changes: over-valued, over-marketed. This incepts (or coopts) our desire to move beyond the sameness, feeding us infinite multiplicity as novelty. It is saccharin, artificial fulfillment.As Anthony DeMello says, “We must wake up.” Drop your illusions.As Deleuze says. Quit becoming the Representation, become an experience. (pg 51?) THING 4: LeviathanLet’s talk about the state, or the government. People set up these frameworks that are meant to serve the citizens, yet they are rife with contradictions: the state has coercive power over us, yet it allows us liberty. This is Isaiah Berlin’s Positive and Negative Liberty.Setting up an AI and a State have similar problems… namely intentions and the blind spots of the authors.The NPC in FREE GUY is constrained by the limits of the game… the limits of the state… and in this way, government limits and shapes us, because even when we enact our highest state of Action, self-actualizing within the community, that happens under an umbrella of the state, in response to the state, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The state is the story in which our story begins. It is our terrarium in many ways.Thomas Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan, is one of the earliest ideas of a modern state, a state that recognizes individuals wanting freedoms rather than a sovereign’s dictates determining people. It uses artifice, a bit of deception, to constrain and balance for human brutishness, but overall, it’s goal was to serve individuals. So… the key innovation here is individualism.Hannah Arendt, seeing what the Nazi regime perpetrated, despised Hobbes’s “mechanistic” reduction of the citizens turned into subjects… and the subjects turned into cogs. Because she saw the evil a cog, a bureaucrat like Eichmann, could perpetrate. Her notion of how the state could serve individuals was radically different.We now have Representative Democracy here in the US, and a fascinating idea is not to think of “Democracy” as the key point, but “Representation” as the key point. This points out that the founders were quite fearful of true democracy, the “tyranny of the majority” as Tocqueville says.When our founders built the political AI engine, that we call a constitution, it appears to be based on premises of “equality” and “liberty” that actually never allowed for equality or freedom. The contradictions within the system means that as it evolves, particular points increase in prominence and divergence. These points come, in part, from author bias.conclusionOne thing I have not discussed too much, but is key: for Arendt, to take ACTION is to manifest your story in public. Not private. The path should be open for you, but it often isn’t for many people. There is a friction here, often between the Story told (individualism and freedom) and what will be tolerated (reality, law). There exists an interstitial GAP between the story and the law, society and privacy, spaces that some people occupy and work to expand. As GUY found out in the game, as an “NPC” his actions were not explicitly denied, because they were new… never considered. He was not considered, because he was not a “he” or any type of human. This gets into some concepts I recently learned from Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, where colonizing imperialists saw indigenous people as “sub-human” thus not human.The logic is, someone like Kant, the Western world’s preeminent moral philosopher, could be extremely racist because his morality only applied to “civilized men” which were by default posited as “white men.” His categorization blinded him. So will it be with Artificial Intelligences. The NPC is a soft entry to this concept of how we treat the sub-human.In the movie, Guy the NPC, due to not being “seen” as sentient or intelligent was at first unrecognized, then written off by incurious system admins. This allowed a modicum of Freedom, wiggle room in that interstitial space, until his difference became so pronounced that people had to take notice.  As he took action, his “difference” became excessive, beyond the category of NPC, which at first is negative for the game but affirmative for him, and as Deleuze and Neitzsche may say, “The extremes of difference are productive.”And thus, we fall back into capitalism: Excess production is a value to be captured. Recognize, extract…. Love produces excess, and in this case, frustrated love produced a new type of sentient being, that is now not only producing love in the world but introduces a novel untapped resource to be colonized for the capitalist. Capitalism collapses love back into a category, rather than BEING. We tend to allow capitalism to stimulate and feed our DESIRE for Love: It multiplies and reflects back desire but without the Love itself. But, to wrap this up as a Hollywood Ending:The warmth of new love, in this story anyway, created something new in the world… the reciprocal feedback loop of difference between two people made something new rather than replicating suffering. And capitalism itself, with its infinite multiplicity of redundant permutations is really a shambling zombie, merely feeding on the products of frustrated love, but unable to produce anything itself.

PART IThe art world is a complicated place with diverse motivations, bizarre criteria and social norms, yet it also offers profound friendships and solidarity through community. Ryder speaks of the psychology that drove him to choose art as a form of self-help therapy versus a more stable career path,  but also his ridiculous tendency to apply "salvation through works" to his art practice. PART IIA story about farting in church, followed by Ryder's current drawing of business people asleep, levitating through farting. With lots of dumb humor Ryder also brings up the psycho-pathologies of cognitive capitalism that capture, shape us, and determine our existential ennui. For long-time listeners you will see the references to Max Weber, Robert Jackall, Michael Sandel, and even Baudrillard, Gamsci, Mark Twain, and William James. 

Our conversation ranges from daily routines, gut health and probiotics, taking supplements, being in therapy, meditation practice, physical fitness as part of a daily routine that produces chemicals to help our mind-body balance, and setting up structures that don't rely on willpower. Oh, and naturally, we talk about reducing our media intake, or at least not watching the news. The topics are a bit personal stories, a bit self-help, some wellness, and a lot of taking action, or "doing the work."Zack has asked a chapter in the book on mindset. He has graciously offered to send the chapter to anyone who request it. zacksrutledge@gmail.com

Given the recent news of Hong Kong's protests being squashed, the "China Question" looms larger. As no expert, the best way to learn is bring someone on the show who has been podcasting about the multi-facted and historical complexities involved as China pushes it's way center stage. Jason Szeftel writes and speaks on the politics and economics of China. His podcast "China Unraveled" covers in depth the complexities of Hong Kong, and other issues China faces today. 

Rutger Bregman’s book, Utopia for Realists, maps out how Universal Basic Income was nearly real in the 70’s. Coupled with increasing automation (robot uprising) and prospects of joblessness (along with a growing confusion of what is “work” without “labor”) we should also consider the role of humans in a world of plenty.Providing proof for that disarms our culturally conditioned biases, the text allows us to dream about ways to reverse the increasing inequality, pain of industrial age factory mindsets, and reminds us that not only is a utopic dream worth pursuing, but it might be the only way to save ourselves from the systemic psychopathologies of capitalisms.INTRORyder goes on a little rant about Christian values and “Make America Great Again.” His confusion is when Christianity is conflated with the Republican Party, causing a reversal into wealth and away from aiding the less fortunate. Ryder discusses them a values “captured by an apparatus” that puts them to an alternate use, an old historical trick that is 180 degree reversal from America in the 1970’s, in which we nearly had Minicome.And of course, the nostalgic right’s turn to the 50’s and 60’s often conveniently forgets to include that the highest wealth taxes were also during that period: less social and economic inequality that creates the utopia comes from minimizing economic inequality.Part 1: 15 hour work weekIn 1930’s Henry Ford reduced his employees work hours from 60 to 40 per week. He found them to be happier and more productive, not less.  In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we’d all be working just 15-hour weeks by the year 2030. With smart phones, there are studies showing people work an additional 8 to 11 hours a week, 6 or 7 days per week.“Yet nowadays are biggest challenges are not Leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.”Rutger BregmanFirst off, let’s talk about Robots and automation: Roughly half, 47% of American Jobs and 54% of European jobs, are at risk of being automated. So, in a society reliant on employment, we have developed technology to unemploy people.it will take a smaller and smaller number of elites to profitably and efficiently run society.David RicardoSo, we educate all these people so they can get jobs, then there are no jobs to get, because we are so smart we have developed technology to displace them. It is more than farming, it is also creative endeavors such as journalism.1- what are we going to do with the 50% of the population that becomes unemployed?This reminds me of the Milton Freidman story, where when touring China they employed people to build dams, not by using tractors (which they had), but by having people manually excavate with shovels.If it’s jobs you want to create, then take away their shovels and give them spoons!Milton Freidman2- what does it mean to “work?”What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? 42Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Douglas AdamsWe should de-couple labor from work, and focus on productivity (and cognitive work) now that robots can do labor and “brain-deadening work.”In a survey, ½ of the professionals say their job has no “meaning or significance.” While only 13% of people in 142 countries like their job, but perhaps we don’t care about what people “like.” It’s work. Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”Wesley, Princess BrideHowever, if you care about efficiency and productivity more than happy employees: then what about the 37% of people polled say their job shouldn’t even exist. So, we have unhappy people working pointless jobs, or jobs they despise, for what? To survive? or the opposite?  working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.Tyler Durden, Fight ClubPart 2All money is a matter of belief.Adam SmithTIME IS MONEY. Well, no, it’s not. Time is time/Space, while money is an abstraction that stands in place of promises. Time was money when it was based on factory labor, hand labor, and now on robot labor, but it is the best metric for cognitive, creative human labor. So, realistically, how long can your do “creative labor?”“Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.”Bregman is asked, “if we worked less, what would it solve?” He reverses that to ask: “Well, what wouldn’t it solve? “Bregman has examples of how it would solve stress, climate change by cutting pollution in half, accidents that lead to death or financial disaster, unemployment through work-sharing, emancipation of women and recalibration of men through paternity leave, an aging population could work again without the 40 hour drudgery, and economic equality since the rich tend to work more since their time is “more expensive.”In the 1800’s the wealthy worked less, now they work more as a status symbol_._ Work is entangled with hobby and identity. Even your leisure time is curated as work: Netflix time is now a type of cultural, social work, carefully curated and indulged to enable future conversations.There is a false narrative at play, or as Friederich Engels might say, “false consciousness” that traps the “proletariat.” For Engels, the working class was trapped in religion and nationalism, which kept them from seeing their value. Except now, the people at the top have had their Vision clouded: their consciousness is trapped by all the zeros on your paychecks. You feel you must be producing something of Great Value because you earn so much, right?For instance, let’s look at managers, what do they produce?I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people!We need to manage ATTENTION, not hours. If your boss says, “instead of 8 hours a day, if you complete your tasks in 4, and get everything done by Thursday, I will give you Friday off.” That’s a 16-hr work week, nearly our 15 hour work week. Would you, instead of socializing and wasting time on slack or email chats, would you knock out the vital tasks through optimal focus, peak attention, and flow state?Flow state is about 500 times more productive than normal state, but at max can only be maintained for about 5 hours. In experiments, an office reduced the work day to 9-3, implemented flow state practices, and saw no decrease in productivity.However, people liked to break the day up a bit more. Darwin spent two 90 min periods in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. Hunter/gatherer research suggests a 3-5 hour work day as well. So, really, this is not revolutionary: we are advocating a return to our biological norm. Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”Naval RivikantIt takes leisure, relaxation, and entering certain states to be highly functioning. This optimized self breaks apart the “time = output, or “time=money,” notion of continually staying busy.Can’t flow? how about the Pomodoro technique? The short breaks help you concentrate better and fight cognitive boredom, which also reduces errors and mistakes. It has been proven to cut a 40 hour work load into about 16 hours.The answer is not more hours, it’s less bullshit.”Jason FriedHowever, this kind of self-optimization towards productivity is a red-herring, a misplaced focus: arguments can be made that we have enough global resources and productivity to take care of everyone… and that the need to self-optimize just internalizes the factory practices of Taylorism. We have become the factory, going to work within ourselves, become the mental equivalent of Charlie Chaplin riveting faster and faster, lest the machine overtake us. If we extend Naval’s knowledge worker as athlete metaphor: only a few elite athletes ever make it to pro status. Most of us will not be knowledge workers in the upcoming utopia. We will not be the Lebron James or Stephen Hawkings, we will be something else.   Value ends above means, and prefer the good to the useful.”John Maynard KeynesPart 3: Be realistic, demand the impossible!This is not really about the 15 hour work week. It is about the illusion of scarcity we live under and have internalized, it is about the imbalances capitalism in our democracy has amplified, generating social inequities that demand revolution.  Throughout Bregman’s book he takes the Keynesian notion of wealth redistribution, mostly by taxation on financial transactions (like wall street speculation) and enforcing a progressive tax on the wealthy. These would be used to eradicate poverty, provide the stability of UBI, and open up our borders.  We have to save capitalism from the capitalists.Thomas PikettyFor an example, last podcast I mentioned Apple and Tax havens sheltering something like $15 billion, and overall not paying something like $26 Billion. This week, ProPublica scrutinized IRS data and tax returns, focusing on the 25 richest people. In 2018 they were worth $1.1 trillion.How many average wage earners does it take to match that $1 Trillion? 14.3 Million ordinary American workers.How much did the top 25 pay on their $1 Trillion in wealth? $1.9 billion. Or .2 %How much did those 14.3 Million workers pay on their $1 trillion? $143 billion. Or 14.3%The rich use their wealth to shelter their wealth… legally. Our government set this up for them, and continues to allow it. These 25 people, or almost anyone in the 1%, should pay 37%. Which, by the way, is $370 billion: enough to eradicate poverty twice over at Bregman’s $175 Billion estimate.Taxes are a kind of collective sacrifice. No one loves giving their hard-earned money to the government. But the system works only as long as it’s perceived to be fair.”ProbulicaOur state, enmeshed with capitalist values, seems more and more distant, closer and closer to collapse through injustice, inequity, and value vs. fact confusion. The wealthy tend to “pass on the costs to the consumer” or get bailed out (2008 recession) or can opt-out of pain in luxury (COVID Pandemic).People are now concerned with no one wanting to work, because the unemployment checks are “too big.” Have we just sustained an artificial market on wage oppression and enabled over-saturated markets for so long we think it is normal for people with a full time job to live in poverty? Even Henry Ford paid his employees more and gave them more leisure time, because how else were they going to buy and enjoy his cars? Paying people more also equals more spending, despite some costs rising, but perhaps what really bothers us is when we have to look up from our cheap goods and realize there is a person suffering on the other end. Our commodities and services are linked to people, money is just the abstraction that gets between us, that blinds us. Politics is the art of the possible.”Otto Von Bismark To go from ideal to real is the path of politics, but Bregman clarifies, and this goes back to the intro, we need a politics not of RULES, but of REVOLUTION.Not about the art of the possible, but about making the impossible inevitable.Rutger BregmanIt is not about reaffirming the status quo, but making todays unrealistic ideas tomorrow’s taken for granted and causally assumed rights. For example: Privacy is a fairly new idea, maybe 150 years old, and yet, we now think of it as an inalienable right. Let’s do the same with human welfare and thriving. Let’s make taking care of people tomorrow’s basic common sense.

We walk through the dreamland of Cockaigne, and our small utopic dreams. Bregman reminds us democracy was once a dream, and slavery was once unthinkably common. We nearly had UBI in the 70's, because all the data proves it works, but morality, economics, and conservatism have re-written our notions of what is possible or responsible in ways that only exacerbate wealth inequality. Bregman walks through programs on Minicome, the Cherokee nation, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the failures of large institutions and charities in attempting grand plans that fail. The proof is there: the only thing that makes poor people poor is a lack of cash. The easiest, most effective way to solve the problem is a direct influx of cash. Not expensive, misguided projects, celebrity endorsements, or more counseling. On a broader note, the US ranks highest in GDP, but is also highest in social ills. The Netherlands, by contrast, have equally high per capita income, without the social ills. Similar to other, poorer countries, like Portugal, the US has vastly unequal wealth concentration, which tends to lead to social disruption through violence and rebellion as a means of redistribution. But, at the top it is also problematic: the international monetary fund states that wealth inequality increases depression, paranoia, and unhappiness in the rich.