The Marriage of Dystopia and Utopia
Hi Everyone,
This will be the last newsletter we send out as, ‘Life Learning.’ This Friday we’ll be rebranding and moving in an exciting new direction. Our newsletter will continue, only under the new brand. Stay tuned for more details, including a special announcement on Friday morning. For now, I hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter of some of my favorite articles, podcasts, books, videos, and quotes of the week.
Articles
Dismantling the Myth of the Self Reliant CEO
The mainstream media is obsessed with the .0001% of scary, horrifying, or lottery-themed events. This story offers a reminder of the truth that no great achievements or companies are built by lone wolves. Every leader accomplishes things with the help of their spouse, friends, family, coaches, and a tight knit team. Mutually beneficial symbiosis is the way to go.
This New Neighborhood Will Grow Its Own Food, Power Itself, And Handle Its Own Waste, was a fascinating look at what a self-sustaining future community might look like. “ReGen Village, outside of Amsterdam, doesn’t need a grid or food systems. It’s a model for a future, fully closed-loop settlement.”
Planetary Resources’ asteroid miners focus on Earth observation with $21 million in new funding
“The Series A funding announced today will be used to deploy and operate Planetary Resources’ Earth observation program, known as Ceres.” This is one of the few times I’m elated to see a funding announcement in the news. Kudos to the lead investor, Bryan Johnson of The OS Fund for having the courage to make bold, long term bets.
The Ecologist Who Threw Starfish, on the surprising importance of predators, adaptation, and creating new forms of stressors. “The only species that can regulate us is us.”
Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Emotional Intelligence
Over the last year and a half, I’ve experimented with giving up both caffeine and alcohol, sometimes both at the same time. For a period of ~10 months, I gave up both completely. Since then, I’ve returned to the occasional tea, coffee, or glass of wine. I’m not sold on the idea of giving them up all together yet. Right now, I’m at a place where I respect these substances as powerful psychotropics/nootropics, that can be cycled on and off based on the current situations and demands of life. But I’m always looking forward to hearing about personal experiments, or any long term studies on the effects of caffeine or alcohol (which are surprisingly difficult to find). If you’ve experimented with giving up caffeine and alcohol for extended periods of time, I would love to hear about your experiences. Please feel free to click respond and write a response to share your story and any insights.
Podcasts
A few weeks ago, my friend Michael Solana mentioned he was working on a new podcast. My interest was piqued, and last week his creation was finally released into the wild. Anatomy of Next: Utopia is a mini-series that presents five science fiction dystopian scenarios in a new light (nuclear science, synthetic biology, robotic automation, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality).
Episode 1 focuses on nuclear science, and it includes guests such as scientist Aaron VanDevender and practitioners on the cutting edge of the nuclear field like Taylor Wilson (who at fourteen was the youngest person to ever produce a fusion reaction). AON: Utopia is by far my favorite new podcast this year, and the next episode should be released tomorrow, 06/21. If you like the podcast, be sure to let Michael and the team at Founders Fund know, or leave a review in iTunes.
Books
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (In Full Color) by William Blake
“Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”
No Boundary by Ken Wilber
“Beyond this, however, the aim of most so-called humanistic therapies is to heal the split between the ego itself and the body, to reunite the psyche and soma so as to reveal the total organism. This is why humanistic psychology — called the Third Force (the other two major forces in psychology being psychoanalysis and behaviorism) — is also referred to as the human potential movement. In extending the person’s identify from just the mind or ego to the entire organism-as-a-whole, the vast potentials of the total organism are liberated and put at the individual’s disposal.”
Videos
“Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball.” — Terence McKenna, Unfolding The Stone (one of my all time favorite McKenna talks)
Quotes
“We need not fear a future elimination of the book. On the contrary, the more that certain needs for entertainment and education are satisfied through other inventions, the more the book will win back in dignity and authority. For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulation in words and the handing on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and a continuing consciousness of itself.” — Hermann Hesse
“Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” — Neil Gaiman
That’s it for this week! Stay tuned for our announcement this Friday. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it or share with a friend who might like it.
