Crazy Wisdom

Joshua Morrison Cooper is the creative coordinator at Happiness and in this episode, we discuss gardening, the healing power of plants, how to get started with planting, how big agricultural practices deplete the quality of soil, government initiatives to help people interested in planting, and much more. We also spoke about Joshua's unique type of music, which you can listen to here: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/1QTKWSH9FVPks1M3A Enjoy. (1:53) Do you know you can make music with plants? Find out how (6:11) How working with plants helps you heal. Do you know that your body generates a certain kind of electricity, that under the right circumstances, can heal you? (10:49) How commercial farming techniques have depleted soil quality and nutrition (11:29) Some healthy alternatives to pesticides you can use in your home garden (21:00) What do you need to understand about plants and the planting process, if you want to work with them? (23:47) What are some things to be aware of in terms of how the government might be able to help you grow stuff if you’re interested? (25:55) What is vertical farming and how is it useful?  

Matt Parlmer is the founder of General Fabrications, a firm devoted to democratizing production and the supply chain across a lot of industries. In this episode, we discuss his company's products, fabs, and delve into how they're going to revolutionize the manufacturing system and the various ways and fields in which they could be applied, such as in homesteading, moulding, and so on, as well as the possibilities they could unlock for humanity. You can find Matt on Twitter as @mattparlmer and General Fabrications as @genfabco. Enjoy!

Rodney Gainous is the founder and CEO of Safe, a company dedicated to providing more easy-to-use privacy tools for individuals and businesses. In this episode, we discuss the changes Corona has wrought, the importance of sending cold emails, the importance of location for networking, and much more. Enjoy! You can reach Rodney on Twitter at Rg2official. (7:59) Do you need to move to the Bay area, or tech hubs in general, to be able to fully chase your dreams of working in tech? What are the merits of doing so? Can you run a tech startup from any location? (11:09) Even if you choose to run your tech startup from outside a tech hub, is an experience of the tech hub necessary or helpful to have? (15:01) The difference between knowing a lot about a place and actually living in a place. (16:56) How to build a network in today’s Post-Covid world, despite all the restrictions posed by lockdowns. (19:58) Why you should learn to reach out to strangers, founders and people you admire, online more often. (Hint: a lot of them are more open than you think) (20:41) What is the value of being open in the business world, especially as a founder? (25:15) Is it good to be upfront about what you want when interacting with a stranger you want something from or are you better off building a relationship first? Where is the line? What is the right way to go about it? (29:43) A tip to help increase the open rates for your cold emails.   (37:02) As a tech founder, how should you treat hype? Both hype of your company and external tech-related hype that generates FOMO? (47:51) Why is Miami receiving so much hype? Apart from it potentially being the new base for Silicon Valley.  

Bruna Paese is the CEO of Iubi, a social robot that helps people improve their health. We had a marathon of an interview -my longest ever- at three hours. And in this episode, spoke about language, decision making, learning, drug use in Brazil, Banks, health, poverty, wealth, and so much more. Enjoy! (1:55) The nuances of language, how different slang can develop among different cultures sharing the same language. Can AI learn to note the differences in accents across non-native speakers of English? Is this current inability of AI to account for accents a failure of technology or is it a result of cultural bias? If even humans can’t appreciate all the nuance that exists in spoken language (i.e., tonality, pitch, etc.) can computers be expected to do the same? (7:25) Why do people go to therapy? Are actions similar to thoughts? We understand how people act and react to stuff, but do we understand how they think? Why is it important to understand how people think? (9:29) Why is Big Tech so concerned with the exploration of Mars? (13:42) How does Brazil rank in the AI revolution? What does the AI scene look like in Brazil? How does it work? What are its rules? (16:39) Brazil has half the population of Latin America and is the country with the largest landmass in South America, yet Chile, a much smaller country, manages to accumulate the same number of yearly tourist visits as Brazil, why? (22:54) Brazil’s big advantage; what is Iubi about? What does it do? How Bruna got the idea to start? (40:34) Is Iubi a robot, a human being, or a combination of both? (45:40) Conspiracy theories. Was COVID manufactured? Did China have a game plan? How do conspiracy theories form? Are conspiracy theories the result of using particular modes of communication? Where did the term “conspiracy theory” come from? How human nature makes it easy for us to accept unverified information. (58:16) What tests or markers can you use as a measure of fitness? (1:08:18) The global asset that is in demand but has very little supply (1:08:56) Drug history in Brazil; the value of history and how it shows the connection between everything. (1:19:27) The general argument is that drugs are a means to escape reality, but what if the opposite can also be argued? What if drugs actually support reality? What would that look like? (1:32:18) Why does cannabis have such a negative association, compared to other plant-based substances, like ayahuasca or psilocybin? (1:39:54) Why Iubi is focused on children (1:42:39) The unseen impact of environment on health (1:46:03) Given the access to nature people in the United States have, why aren’t we as nature-centered, especially in the materials we use to produce medicine, compared to countries like Brazil and India? How does culture limit or improve the overall health of a population? (1:49:26) Why language is more about connection than discovering truth. (2:07:50) Is the impact of COVID-19 on poverty and thus crime rates universal worldwide? (2:10:27) What is the truth about mental health? Is it an inborn pathology or a result of the environment you grew up in? Does expecting a person diagnosed with mental health issues to act crazy make them act crazy? And thus, what are the ways we treat patients diagnosed with mental health issues that cause them to respond negatively? (2:18:20) What is the future of pharmaceuticals? Where will technology take it? (2:22:32) How to create an ecosystem for innovation to thrive. (2:26:13) What is Brazil’s take on cryptocurrency? How deeply is it integrated into their financial system? How international transactions between banks actually work. (2:38:55) Why is it still possible to transfer money illegally between countries? Is it all because cash runs everything? And the governments can't actually see everything happening? (2:42:44) The lines between corporations and the state are thinning in many countries; CEOs or megacorps are gaining greater ability to influence government policy; can this new system still be called capitalism?    

This episode focuses on self-sufficiency through living off the land and growing your own food, agroecology and restorative farming, escaping the control of governments worldwide, and basically living a life that allows you to thrive physically, all of these in light of the events of the pandemic. Enjoy! (2:50 - 3:40) The difference between city and rural life, and how that contrast, unwittingly, showed Gabriel the difference between learning about a course in college and actually living the reality of said course. (4:33 – 6:10) Now that the world as we know it has ended, what shifts in thinking and culture will have to be made to enable people thrive in the coming age? (7:42 - 8:34) The ethical, nutritional, and environmental benefits of oysters and growing oyster farms. (10:52 – 12:56) How Gabriel restored a portion of land that had been severely degraded from years of serving as pasture for horses and was unable to grow grass and made it rich, fertile farmland with more than a hundred varieties of plants, including fruit trees and cash crops, all within a year. (14:19 – 19:29) How human activities affect ecology; how pests and insects interact to contribute to nature’s ecology    (22:22 – 27:01) Will more people embrace retiring to the country to farm their own lands and grow their own foods? Will the events and fear-mongering by governments worldwide, during the pandemic, cause the shifts necessary to make people seek self-sufficiency? Brazil as an example of how culture, if strong enough, can influence government directives; Are we currently living in an Orwellian world or a Huxleyan world? (27:45 – 30:01) There’s nothing wrong with vaccines, but given everything we know about COVID, does everyone have to take it? Given that we don’t know the long-term effects, is vaccinating everyone, including those who have already had covid and those who haven’t had it, worth the risk? (30:37 – 37:19) Organic vs inorganic farming; given that there are harmful organic pesticides, is organic farming really all the PR surrounding it makes it out to be? How do practitioners of agroecology cope with abstinence from the use of pesticides? How does this affect their crop yield and their ability to make a living? How do we incentivize restorative agriculture on a large scale? (46:48 – 53:09) How some commercial farmers are implementing regenerative agricultural practices.  How money can help the incentivization of restorative farming. Are conscious consumers really making a difference or are they just being ripped off by capitalists trying to take advantage of their guilt? Does knowing the process of how food is made really change consumers’ relationship to food? Or is convenience the driving force?

In this episode, Isabelle and I discuss psychedelics, the differences between organic and synthetic psychedelics, the differences in how drugs are viewed in Brazil as opposed to the United States, psychology, the history of psychedelics, the death of God in the West, and the resultant coping mechanisms, her experience with Ayahuasca, and much more. Enjoy. (1:40-5:08) Unexpected differences between the laws governing drug and psychedelic use in the U.S. and in Brazil, and how funding is granted for the study of psychedelics in the U.S. and in Brazil. The intriguing methods Brazilian academics use in their study of psychedelics. (5:08-9:03) Should psychology be treated as an objective science? Some historical examples of what has happened when subjective metrics become taken for objective measures. Are there universalities in human behavior? Or is psychology a totally subjective endeavor? (9:18-15:39) The death of God in the west; the new wave of spirituality rising; the role psychedelics have to play in this rise; the danger inherent in throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to rejecting the nihilism of western scientific rationality; are psychedelic ceremonies really ancient? How did humans discover psychedelics? How have psychedelics been used across history? Is there a difference in the experience between trips on organic psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin, iboga) and trips on artificial psychedelics (LSD)? (18:50-21:21) Isabelle describes her experience with ayahuasca (23:02- 25:50) Are plants sentient? Are they agents? Is it possible that plants like psilocybin and the ingredients found in ayahuasca may have motivations of their own that are in conflict with the motivations human beings have for themselves? If they are sentient, can we really say they’re our friends? Or is it the other way around? Is civilization killing us and plants trying to rescue us? (29:03-33:08) Why the switch, by many Westerners, to the teachings of eastern philosophies may not be such a good idea and why Western society may need to come up with its own answers to life’s existential questions. (50:09) An interesting observation on the effects of cold on cognitive ability.

This episode is different! Here, I'm interviewed by Alex Levy for an episode for his podcast "Through Conversations" which I also decided to publish here. Enjoy! 3:30 - Stewart's approach to interviews 6:00 - How should we use Twitter? 7:30 - Are we curious by nature? 8:34 - "Question asking is one of the most courageous things we can do" 10:00 - Are we able to cope with uncertainty? 13:19 - The best thing we can do is to awaken. 15:35 - The benefits of living under uncertainty. 17:45 - The ego from the Eastern Tradition. 18:55 - There are no sufficient words to answer the question of "Who am I?" 19:55 - Facebook as a place to portray the idealized self 21:30 - Some of the consequences of the pandemic. 24:30 - Are our leaders the reflection of ourselves? 27:00 - THE MATRIX OVERLORDS INTERVENED IN OUR CONVERSATION. 29:45 - Does natural selection favors organisms that are truth seekers? 31:05 - Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues 32:00 - Is there something beyond conditioning? 34:15 - The Matrix: Red Pill or Blue Pill? 37:00 - Can we cope with our death? 44:25 - If we live for eternity, how long would it take for us to become crazy? 45:45 - Has the pandemic made us afraid of life? 48:16 - Are we in a meaning crisis, as John Vervake says? 50:30 - Exercise on awareness - pointing towards awareness. 52:32 - Why do I want to know the truth? 56:00 - Finding the truth may make you more antifragile. 1:00:00 - Technology, made by humans, is growing exponentially, why are we having a hard time coping with its repercussions? 1:03:00 - The paradox of paradoxes.

Zura Guerra is a digital nomad that’s building a startup. In this episode we discuss technology in Latin America, the pandemic, decentralizing currency, and much more. You can find her on Instagram at zuraguerra, and on her blog at apolune.com. Enjoy. (2:23 - 4:15) Surviving the pandemic in Argentina, the country with the record of the longest stretch of lockdowns. (8:21 - 13:02) What will the startup ecosystem in Brazil and Mexico look like in the next few years? Will there be more buyouts by larger, more established companies? Does Latin America have the systems and infrastructure for that type of evolution? (13:03 - 14:16) A year ago, the biggest opportunities for technological innovation were to be found in payments, online education, and healthcare among others. Is that still the case today? Why innovators should integrate cash into future payment solutions. (14:40 - 20:49) How rural Mexicans (which make up the majority of the population) have adopted and utilize cryptocurrencies in their day to day lives. How Brazilians use QR codes to send and receive money. (21:31 - 24:08) Will the evolution of technology and decentralized currency lead to the weakening of nation-states? Is it already occurring? Are there examples of this happening? (32:02 - 36:15) The biggest thing Zura has learned about startups, so far, on her journey to build one. (36:17 - 41:38) What needs to happen for crypto to be adopted in more countries? And what are the risks involved with these happenings? What is money really? Should you still trust the dollar? (41:41 - 46:12) Why crypto should be more about wealth establishment than actually breaking away from nation-states or establishing independence for a small group of people and how Etherium set an example for this. Why we should think of ourselves more as global citizens

Here are some other questions we discuss: What is alternate reality cinema? How did COVID19 change the usage of social media? How did the online world change the meaning of fiction? How did COVID19 change the way that cognition is distributed on the internet? How do you build habits to affect the structure of human society? How did social media change psyops from central governments? Did we forget the important lessons that the initial internet taught us? How does Facebook think about second-order engagement? Check out an event that Michael is hosting this Friday: https://www.facebook.com/events/238478103910064/

The second entry in my solo podcast detour! In this episode, I talk about my attempts to experience the cultures I encountered, in my travels across Southeast Asia, more deeply, and my quest to find cultures that had not been as thoroughly exposed to the internet and its effects, as the West and similar modern societies. In the course of my travels, I spent some time on an island called West Timor and participated in the most awkward custom I'd ever experienced up till then. Listen to hear more. Enjoy!