Your commute is not your time

I worked from home today. I'm lucky enough to have that option.

But more and more people don't. They're faced to endure a commute to work that they don't get paid to enjoy. More time of their day sucked away means less time for the essential.

The problem is larger than us. It's larger than cities. It's the way our society has been designed. We stretched our world far beyond one another. And we're getting further. The more people feel the need to cram into cities to work, the more commutes and the work day lengthen.

But Sebastian Yunger reflects on this trade-off in a much deeper way in his book Tribe:

“The question for Western society isn’t so much why tribal life might be so appealing - it seems obvious on the face of it - but why Western society is so unappealing. On a material level it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.”

Modern society is taking our time and somehow we don't really benefit. We might be comfortable but is that what we want?

How much you want to participate becomes a delicate balance and a striking decision.

Do you want to commute?
Do you want to wait on line?
Do you want to see screens and not people?
Do you want to react to everything right away?

Yunger continues, "Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society - despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology - is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down."

It’s the hard truth about time - you can’t get it back.

We lie to ourselves that it needs to be this way and that we’ll make due somehow. But Frank Bruni made the inevitable point in a New York Times Opinion piece years ago called The Myth of Quality Time:

“There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence.

We delude ourselves when we say otherwise, when we invoke and venerate “quality time,” a shopworn phrase with a debatable promise: that we can plan instances of extraordinary candor, plot episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineer intimacy in an appointed hour.

We can try. We can cordon off one meal each day or two afternoons each week and weed them of distractions. We can choose a setting that encourages relaxation and uplift. We can fill it with totems and frippery — a balloon for a child, sparkling wine for a spouse — that signal celebration and create a sense of the sacred.

[...]

But people tend not to operate on cue. At least our moods and emotions don’t. We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones. The surest way to see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting and ready for them.”

How to handle unfinished business

What is a day if not a list of things to get done?

And it's even easier to continue adding to the list. But naturally there are only so many hours in the day and some of them are best spent sleeping, preparing for that brand new day.

Author David Allen says the problem with all this juggling in the present is "the future never shows up." The present is everything, so we need to harness it. And every few months or so I ironically remember David Allen already figured this all out in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Allen created a system to keep the mind clear and attentive to the present while, ahem, getting things done.

“Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

Write things down. It's as idiot-simple as that.

“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”

It turns out the human mind likes to close those loops, whether or not we're consciously aware of them. Will Schoder tackles this phenomenon in the video This psychological effect controls your life... The Zeigarnik Effect is the human desire to close the loop on an unfinished task and the subconscious drain we experience when we don't. It's the reason we're drawn to cliff-hangers, clickbait, and everything else David Allen tried to warn us about.

And in the end, Schoder makes an interesting point that this might be the very reason we are who we are at all:

“If a desire for cognitive closure is one of our greatest motivators than it may be mystery itself that holds the greatest power over the human mind. A mystery by definition is something that defies explanation. And without an explanation there is no closure. Is the Zeigarnik Effect propelling us to answer life’s big questions? I don’t know, but if there is an open loop like “Why are we on this rock hurtling through darkness,” you can be damn sure we’ll try to close it.”

Are we running from the past?

I never really liked running. In high school, I tried to join track & field and after a few days of getting acclimated to cold evening laps, running in circles, my shins splintered so bad I was left limping to class for weeks. I quit a bit later.

It wasn't until I was old enough to afford living in New York City that I had enough of staving it off. I signed up for a 5k, one of those theme ones, where you can easily forget you're torturing yourself. It was the Epic Fail Challenge. And after getting into the swing of training, and realizing, “hey, I'm not so bad at this running thing” - they didn't even time it. But I did finish.

I dropped the chase again until years later when my best friend and I were living together in California, and he was running enough to make me want to join. It all culminated in the REI Bay Area Trail 10K after weeks of miles, sprints, and loops around the local high school track. Full circle.

Now, I find myself back on the East Coast wondering if I want to be the casual American jogger. But the more I run, the more I learn, and what I'm starting to notice is we weren't meant to do this. Or at least not like this.

"In Born to Run, his 2010 bestseller, Christopher McDougall pulls no punches in telling the story of how Nike essentially convinced a generation of joggers to ignore the evolved bio-mechanics of the human body and run in an unnatural, debilitating way that required the purchase of their overpriced, utterly unnecessary products," author Chris Ryan Ph. D. explained in his Psychology Today column, Civilized to Death.

Could be my body was trying to say something with those shin splints all those years ago.

And what if what we can call progress is really just running the opposite direction from what's helped us evolve after all these years too?

Janine Benyus would agree. Benyus is a biologist and a writer, and she coined the term biomimicry - the concept of design based on the functions of the biological world. In a Vox segment entitled The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps, Benyus drops this sick burn, "the people who design our world usually never take a biology class, believe it or not, so they're novices in how the world works."

We don't need to shed everything that's modern to live our best lives, but it might help to step back and recall that we've been around a lot longer than we can remember, and there is something to learn in our past.

Regard yourself as a cloud

“Regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh, because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or a wave, and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do. Because even if you do something that appears totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or another. Then through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition.”

— Alan Watts

Relying blindly

“Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other expertise, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.”

— Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens

Reality as a wall of coffee tables

“It is important that we question the nature of reality and how we regulate ourselves, the policeman in our own head.”

Russell Brand said those words, reflecting on, of all things, Kanye West's intriguing interview over the summer on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Ye has continued to mystify and frustrate America as of late, but I think, like Brand, it's worth taking a closer look back.

I learned about Kanye West when someone told me he rapped his first single, "Through the Wire" while his jaw was wired shut from a near-fatal car-crash. And, like plenty of others, I've been a fan since.

How could you not like an artist that gives Zach Galifianakis the spotlight in a cornfield for his music video "Can't Tell Me Nothing"? Or that samples Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory for the mega-hit "Niggas in Paris" with Jay-Z?

Kanye's hyper-aggressive Yeezus was something else. It was a record I'm sure our grandparents would say is the work of the devil. He was an artist pushing every limit.

Vox did an amazing piece of how Kanye West has changed the game of hip-hop and all sorts of music highlighting the most powerful element: the human voice.

And with all that being said, even before that fateful car crash and risk-taking debut, Kanye started making beats because he had a video game idea featuring a penis hero and vagina ghosts. That made me like him more.

But of course it's clear Kanye is not always making sense to everyone. How can he? He is an artist after all. And more and more we're noticing how his mental health affects that art.

Russell Brand of all people brought this to my attention with a YouTube segment he calls Trews: True News. Brand studies Kanye West on the late night talk show appearance, or as one YouTube commenter wrote, Brand "David Attenboroughed Kanye West".

Like Brand, the fact that Kanye endorses Trump interests me less than what he says about reality itself. Kanye says, "We get too caught up in the past and what everyone is saying and what everyone is tweeting and sometimes you just have to be fearless enough to break the fucking simulation." Russell Brand wonders if this is like The Matrix. Is Kanye seeing or questioning something we're not?

Kanye explains:

“Simulation: A 2 year old jumps on a coffee table and someone says ‘That’s a coffee table, don’t jump on that.’ So it went from something that makes him feel like Superman, he’s got his cape on. He’s 2 years old, he doesn’t give a fuck about a coffee or a table, and he’s starting to calculate all these things and by the time you’re 40 years old, you’ve got a wall full of coffee tables calculating you into traffic, calculating you into your career choice.”

The streets belong to the machines now

I took the bus home for the first time yesterday. I always thought it was way too complicated to find the right schedule, the right bus, and the right terminal, so I often opted for the last train home. All I needed was a nudge from a friend and the willingness to try. And it worked out even better than I thought it would!

If everyone knew it was this easy, would the world be different? I’m afraid so.

An episode of Adam Ruins Everything took a hard look at the car craze and taught me actually what I needed.

A century ago, when cars became something people could drive, the roads were already full of people walking about and streetcars for groups to go even further. But after a few unfortunate car-fueled fatalities, the auto industry knew they had to do something to keep selling. They ended up planting stories in local newspapers, labeling the poor souls that found themselves six feet under a car - jaywalkers. But back in the day, the term "jay" was an offensive slur akin to a stupid hillbilly, and no one wanted to be that.

And as we all know, cars took over the roads. Where the streetcar, much like the bus I rode this weekend, could carry a dozen or more people, cities were built over the last hundred years to accomodate everyone's personal death machine.

And some could argue it's done even worse.

Recognizing the laws of human nature

I've never had the patience or strength to finish one of Robert Greene's books. They're not only thick, the margins are filled with citations and extra stories to cement Greene's well-researched points. I know this from skimming through a number of them.

Greene has written, among others, the infamous The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and Mastery.

Hearing about his latest book, The Laws of Human Nature, I thought, it's about time I picked his work up. The description for The Laws of Human Nature is as follows:

We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose.

On the Aubrey Marcus podcast, Greene shares plenty about human nature but one bit particularly caught my attention:

“There are forces in you that go back hundreds of thousands of years from how we evolved as early humans, even as primates. We actually share a lot of qualities of primates that were not even aware of. But these forces are wired into your brain. They’re wired into your nervous system. They’re wired into your musculature. And they cause you to behave in certain ways and you’re completely unaware of it. And by not being aware of it, it controls you.”

It's the greatest mystery we can possibly know - what are we doing here?

On the taboo of talking toilets

Of our modern conveniences, "toilets still have one big problem, not everyone has them yet."

And in an episode of the College Humor sketch turned TruTV show, Adam Ruins Everything, host Adam Conover explains:

“While we’re taking our porcelain thrones for granted, worldwide, 2.5 billion people still have to use unsafe pit toilets. And another one billion still have to poop in the great outdoors.”

A big reason for the slow progress fixing this problem is that it's too taboo to talk about, despite the fact that everyone does it.

Not all heroes wear capes. But they do poop.

Enter Jack Sim, aka Mr. Toilet.

This dude made a bunch of money being a businessman in his younger years and then decided in his 40's that he wanted to change direction and give back. Sim became Mr. Toilet when he started to fight against the taboo of talking toilet problems. He began his crusade in Singapore and then collaborated with other world toilet organizations, founding the World Toilet Organization (WTO) in 2001. The WTO is "a global non-profit committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide."

But the advice Mr. Toilet gives on Adam Ruins Everything for everyone is that we need to start talking about this problem. If we don't talk about, we don't know about it. And if no one knows something is a problem, no one knows we need to fix it.

You might never go a day without a toilet but if you take a minute to imagine one day without them, you can see how things get dirty real fast. For billions of people on this planet, that's just everyday life.

How to start concentrating

How are we supposed to concentrate if no one really ever taught us how?

Who else would rattle that thought around my head but a Hindu monk turned entrepreneur with a single name - Dandapani.

He wears the robes and the garb. He has three lines painted on his forehead. And still he drops the knowledge that we all can use:

“If you want to be good at something you have to practice it. If you want to be really good at concentration, you need to practice it all day. People are good at distraction because that’s what they practice all day long. It’s not that they don’t have the ability to concentrate, they just practice distraction and become really, really good at it. So how do we concentrate? We concentrate by practicing one thing at a time and integrating this practice into our everyday lives.”

We know that the day has an end and so does life, but we keep on keepin' on like we'll handle it all tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes.

Right now is the time to do what matters.

Meditating on evolution

One book on evolution is enough to make me question my daily life. Reading two at once can make reality slippery.

As much as we think we know, we're still very much in the dark about our history. There are unsolved mysteries, particularly how we acquired these big brains and what we're meant to do with them. In the middle of reading both Terence McKenna's Food of the Gods and Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, I'm left scratching my head about everything. This morning, the itch was meditation.

Just five minutes of focusing on my breath is enough for my mind to run wild. All sorts of odd thoughts bubble up, challenging me to melt back into the everyday. It's like the faint whispers of my monkey ancestors urging me to open my eyes and stay alert.

What I don't quite understand is why meditation can be so beneficial now when it would most certainly make monkey me a target in the forest. It feels like we're trying to calm the eras of us being animals. Meditation gives us a moment before the snap decision to show our teeth or sprint in fear.

In Dan Harris' 10% Happier, he explained:

“What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react”. In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feeling what we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.”

Robert Wright, author of Why Buddhism is True, says we're rebelling against natural selection. He told NPR, "Natural selection is the process that created us. It gave us our values. It sets our agenda, and Buddhism says, 'We don't have to play this game.' "

He continues:

“We live in an environment so different from the environment that natural selection designed us for that we have these counterproductive feelings, like fear of public speaking. So evolutionary psychology gives a back story, explaining why it is that we so often are misled by feelings ... and then Buddhist meditation tells us what to do about that.”

With a monkey mind in a human world, we're left with only pieces of the ultimate puzzle. All we can do for sure is take a deep breathe and keep on searching.

Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips

We're not successful as a species because we were created perfect. In fact, if you couldn't tell, we're far from it.

Our understanding of evolution is never done, and, naturally, after I shared my thoughts on Ido Portal's training motivation, a friend shared a related article - Human Evolution: Gain Came With Pain by Ann Gibbons. In the article, Gibbons shares some notes from an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting on the haphazard nature of our evolution.

Like how anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva highlighted that 26 bones in the human foot is a bad design for pink monkeys not flying around in trees or grasping branches anymore. And anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva pointed out that our backs were meant to be stiff for climbing, but we transformed to this "S" shape with a big ol' head on top.

“‘This anatomy isn’t what you’d design from scratch,’ said anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva of Boston University. ‘Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips.’”

Gibbons concluded the article with this:

“The point of citing all these problems? Evolution doesn’t “design” anything, says anthropologist Matt Cartmill of Boston University, a discussant on the panel. It works slowly on the genes and traits it has at hand, to jerry-rig animals’ and humans body plans to changing habitats and demands. ‘Evolution doesn’t act to yield perfection,’ he says. ‘It acts to yield function.’”

Why we should move more

We don't move enough, but the world doesn't require it anymore. We've evolved so quick that sitting is giving us cancer. Our bodies are dying to rebel, and Ido Portal is trying to help.

A self-proclaimed life-long student of movement in all forms, Portal's practice and philosophy exploded a few years ago when UFC megastar Conor McGregor took notice. He added a unique bit to the fighter's training camp - crawling like lizards on the beach and swinging their arms around like orangutans to loosen up.

In the documentary Ido Portal - Just Move, he shares the idea behind the animalistic motivation with Brian Rose of London Real:

“We are animals. We are a product of that evolution and it’s inside of us somewhere. This system has evolved into where it is through all those stages, so a lot of possibilities to move your spine are still aquatic possibilities, old remains of that freedom that originated in the water. Then the quadrupedal movement, the walking on all fours, still exists inside our bodies so exploring those things is exploring yourself and exploring your history, exploring where you came from.”

We're fighting every instinct of our evolution by sitting on the couch, at the desk, and in the car, and wishing for more than six-pack abs but the ability to play like we did when we were children.

Why move? As Portal says, because we can.

Rule-breaking for fun

Spoilers ahead but it doesn't really matter.

Deadpool is my hero. Why? He stress-tests every rule by breaking it. For fun.

I finally sat down to watch Deadpool 2, and what I know about superheroes isn't much but Deadpool does plenty of things nerds wouldn't even dream of Superman or Wonder Woman doing.

Superheroes aren't supposed to die, or, worse, commit suicide. Deadpool tries to blow himself up laying on barrels of kerosene and flicking a cigarette five minutes into the sequel.

Superheroes aren't supposed to kill bad guys, unless necessary. Deadpool beats pedophiles with a brick and stabs one guy through the foot just to drive a semi-truck while standing on the hood, bent-over and looking down the street.

Deadpool has plenty of reasons to feel sorry for himself, but instead he uses every opportunity for fun. And that might be my favorite part. Almost nothing is sacred. Not even the story. When Cable explains that he can only time-travel once because it gets harder to do every time, Deadpool wastes no time calling that lazy writing.

And Deadpool wouldn't be much of a rule-breaker if he wasn't a dick. Or is that the other way around?

I might have laughed the hardest when Deadpool returns to the apartment of his elderly friend, Blind Al, to grab some drugs he stashed under the floorboards, and you can see he has the cure for blindness labeled and stashed away right below them.

Like the comic book nerd I'm not, I went searching for more information about Deadpool and found a Looper video entitled "What Marvel Wants You To Forget About Deadpool". And it made me like Deadpool even more.

In the comic book series, Deadpool apparently kills a lot, and not just bad guys. In a series entitled Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, you don't even have to guess where he went. Here's a hint: He shot Spiderman in the face.

And then Deadpool went even further - into the pages of history. In Deadpool Killustrated, he murdered famous literary characters, like Moby Dick and Bagheera from The Jungle Book.

In the end, it seems there is no end. No matter the rules, there is always someone to break them. For good or for evil. Why not make the most of it and have a laugh?

The misguided goal of laziness

We've been working to be lazy our entire existence. Now we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

It made sense to work toward laziness maybe 300,000 years ago when we started using fire. As Yuval Noah Hurari writes in the book Sapiens, "Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food." Using fire was literally a time management system. Plus, Hurari says some scholars think that this shift to a home-cooked meal could account for our bigger brains. Because both are intestines and brains are "massive energy consumers" and "it's hard to have both".

Fast-forward to the industrial revolution. Fast-forward to the internet. Work is being chopped up left and right. We've kicked back far enough to force machines to do all the heavy lifting.

Now we're too good at being lazy. Yes, we still go to work, but it's lazy work. We've gone from tilling the fields to typing with our fingers. We find the most efficient way to get things done and pass the time, so we can go home and be lazy in a different way. And it's not our fault, it's in our genes. It's what our ancestors always wanted - pad thai delivery to our warm sofa and a marathon of Game of Thrones, far away from real-life soldiers and predators.

But now our problems are different. Food is so quick and available, we're barely digesting. Entertainment is so addicting we're satisfied alone with our screens. Without purpose, we're losing people to suicide. We're threatening our own home with the way we live and the effect on the planet.

Laziness has been the dream all along, but it feels like it's time to wake up and go back to work.

Turning the control knob of your unconscious mind

We don't give enough credit to the unconscious mind. How could we?

Well, Maxwell Maltz, author of Psychocybernetics, said "It is conscious thinking which is the 'control knob' of your unconscious machine." Maltz believed we are gifted the machine between our ears, a "goal-seeking mechanism".

I started thinking about this concept again after watching Karsten Runquist's video essay about his favorite member of the Queer Eye Fab 5 - Deconstructing: Jonathan Van Ness. In the video, Runquist highlights how Van Ness often focuses on the solution more than anyone else on the show, rather than nitpicking the problem. He uses what works and moves forward. Some insight why comes from a Vulture interview clip with actor Justin Theroux:

Van Ness: My friend is like really mad about this thing that happened, like this thing. And they can't stop talking about The Thing. But I was, like, if you got more into the solution of that than rehashing the problem...

Theroux: Do we care about what The Thing is, or?

Van Ness: No [...] Just the idea that getting into the solution is cuter than me rehashing the problem because Eckhart Tolle talks about how our brains and our bodies, our bodies don't know the difference between reality and a thought, so if I'm replaying the state of the world right now and I'm not actively thinking about a solution, I'm just titrating on the problem, I think that just stresses me out.

Without giving credit to our unconscious mind, very rarely do we recognize the power it yields. We chalk it up to random thoughts bubbling up to the surface, but what if Maltz and Tolle and Van Ness are right? What if our minds can't tell the difference between our thoughts and our senses? What if each of us has a goal-seeking mechanism in our unconscious mind and we're just feeding it garbage?

After all, if you know the solution, why would you waste another minute on the problem?

Too busy to notice

Meditation is incredible. Or so I'm told.
I forget to meditate most mornings.

It's not a lack of time. I have plenty.
It's not that I don't want to. I do.

But the fact is most of us can't be bothered to sit still and breathe. We can't fathom not participating every waking second. We wouldn't dare forget to brush our teeth, but can we stand to try and silence our own mind? No thanks!

Everything around us says, "Keep this narrative going". We have responsibilities. Be in the office by nine. Meetings and deadlines. In between there are text messages and dates and exercise classes and food to hunt down. And so many good shows to catch up on.

Until our heads hit the pillow. Another day flies by.

We're afraid to notice just how wild our minds can be. It only takes five minutes to feel like you're crazy. Is this what my mind is doing all the time? A tornado of reactions in a kaleidoscope world? Never able to find your footing?

But the cosmic joke is it's worth it. There have been studies to suggest just sitting and breathing can reduce anxiety, depression, stress and even blood pressure. It can increase pain tolerance, improve memory and boost empathy for others.

Where everything around us forces us to pay attention, our mind just sits and waits for us to do the same. And, most of the time, we're too busy to notice.

Fighting our evolution

I've been trying to lose a few pounds lately. Summer makes it too easy to grab an ice cream or a beer whenever you want. And I thought the smoothest way to start the shredding would be to start weening myself off of sugar. I don't eat entirely too much but it's too easy to find a way to consistently reward yourself for surviving through another day. A little bit too much every day adds up.

To learn a bit more about the whole process, I found myself watching a short Slate documentary called A Brief History of Fat, and Why We Hate It. Biochemist and physician Stephen O' Rahilly dropped this bomb: "Nothing makes sense except through the prism of evolution."

Fat was never an enemy, it kept us alive. In times of scarcity, we needed fat as energy to keep our bodies active and awake. But in an ironic twist of fat, our ancestors helped create a world where we can easily get what they always needed, and we hate what it's doing to us. We're just living in a different world, fighting our own evolution at every turn.

Chasing whimsies

Just as the news burned out of Elon Musk smoking a joint on my favorite podcast, it was announced that Space X would send someone to the moon.

Elon Musk is a man among us literally shooting for the moon.

You have to admire the ability to chase what he wants to do. It was clear for me only minutes into the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. When Rogan asked Musk where he got the idea to sell a flamethrower, Musk did not fail to deliver:

“I’m a big fan of Spaceballs the movie and in Spaceballs, Yogurt goes through the merchandising section and they have a flamethrower in the merchandising section of Spaceballs and “the kids love that one”. That’s the line when he pulls out the flamethrower.”

When Rogan pushes him on liability and what kind of maniacs would want to buy a flamethrower, Musk joked, "Yeah, its a terrible idea."

But this terrible idea netted 10 million dollars in 4 days - selling 20,000 at $500 each.

Another terrible idea? Digging tunnels in Los Angeles. Musk said it might be one of the worst places to dig tunnels simply because of the paperwork. So why there? Because he lives there and because no one else is doing anything to solve the problem of L.A. traffic.

It's invigorating to watch someone unabashedly chase down their dreams. After all, the big question remains: why are we here?

I don't know if we can know the answer, but Rogan had another guest get close about five years earlier. - Jersey-born filmmaker Kevin Smith. It's still one of Rogan's longest podcasts to date at more than 4 hours. But a single eight-minute bit still continues to stick with me. Smith shares the uncomfortable truth that his father "died screaming" and what that means for his life philosophy.

I typed it here but it's worth hearing the whole story from the man himself:

“And the notion of my father dying screaming changed my life cause I was like, even a good man in this world - you play the game, you play it straight, you play it by the rules, you do everything you’re supposed to - you’re gonna die screaming.

And at that point I was like there is no point in not trying to accomplish every stupid fuckin’ dream I’ve got, even if it’s dumb shit, like, “Oh my god, I’ve always wanted to collect this many Wayne Gretzky cards in one fuckin’ binder” or if it’s like “I want to make a movie” or if it’s like “I want to put on a podcast” or “I wanna do a TV show now” or “I want to write a book”. Chase it all down. Chasing whimsies is what I’ve been doing for the last few years. Just smoking weed and chasing whimsies.

Any time I’m like back in the day I’d have a good idea, something I really wanted to follow through on, and all of a sudden you get scared you start thinking about what some motherfucker’s gonna say and be like, “Oh its stupid.” “Why would you fuckin’ do that, fuckin’ why why?” Lot of why people in this world. I try to surround myself with the Why Nots, motherfuckers who you’re like “I want to try this” and they’re like “Why not? Lets go. Lets give it a shot.”

You got to be game. People help you achieve your dreams and shit, so for me the last few years Ive just been trying accomplish every dopey dream. The big shit, the little shit, you gotta do ‘em all. You cant just do the climb every mountain shit. Sometimes lay the bar down and step over it and be like ta-da, so you feel accomplished. But chase it all and do it all cause we’re all gonna die screamin’.”

Is technology a good thing?

In a New York Times Opinion blog, We Are Merging With Robots. That’s a Good Thing, professor Andy Clark outlined some of the realities of this technological world. The first bullet point had me thinking:

“Artificial intelligences already outperform us at many tasks and are now able to train themselves to reach competencies (in restricted domains such as chess or Go) that we can barely comprehend.”

Artificial intelligence can be alarming because we can barely comprehend it. Our brains are magical in all sorts of ways but we just can't compete with artificial intelligence when it comes down to board games.

But most of the time we forget the world itself is more complex than us too. The world can outperform any individual person. We constantly create and use things we barely understand. Why isn't this alarming? Is it a good thing, always?