I'm going to learn one new skill each month in 2024.

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Podcast ep21 with Cody

Cody's science and art sites:
https://www.codymarkelz.art/
https://www.codymarkelz.com/

Our culture suffers from an impoverished imagination of possible futures. People assume that if you don't believe in Star Trek then you are a doomer. This is dumb. Allow me to clarify.

Bryan aka Jin+Guice runs his life so he can live aligned with his values and desires: pursuing curiosity, cooking, playing music, dumpster diving, and founding a record label that makes records for free to the artist with possibility of making money on the back end. He talks with me about freedom, semiERE, how to do what you want, optimizing for fucking around, and a theoretical cost of living of "idk, bike tubes I guess".

Cody Markelz aka mountainFrugal visited me here in Ft. Dirtbag for a few days. We explored the desert, cooked, talked, and recorded this podcast episode. I feel like I've just had a crazy intense masterclass in the art of living. The calm wisdom and stoke Cody embodies is inspirational. How to live like you're going to die, how to do only what you want to do, intuitive organization and planning, relationship advice, bushcrafting, academic and startup life, Epicurean Dinners, and much more.

https://www.codymarkelz.art/
https://www.codymarkelz.com/
His ERE journal.

Continuing the theme of Skills for Freedom! I dig into high leverage skills and how to run the numbers in order to forget the numbers.

In this episode I take a closer look at the concept of comparative advantage and how we can use it to think productively about polymathic skill acquisition.

A deep dive into several frameworks for approaching skill acquisition. Where to start? What skills to pursue first? How to even think about becoming a modern polymath?

Our internet has been broken for over a month, which gave me the idea to pretend like our internet will be broken... forever. Also updates on projects TTM5K, Dry 2023, Shipshape, PCT hike, and Write a Book.

When Matt emailed me out of the blue to tell me he thought I was pessimistic and that he disagreed with several of the things I’ve said on the podcast, I knew we had to talk. We discuss:

• pessimism
• xrisk, including AI, his interest,
• risk at the scale of the personal life, and why Matt chose to introduce risk into his life,
• the lifeboat flotilla,
• dissensus,
• and more.

By the way, we mention but don’t discuss much in depth the concept of dissensus. I was introduced to the word by JMG’s writing, probably this post from 2008. I recommend it. The concept is central to much of my thinking.

Chris tells me how he escaped a soul-sucking engineering career, hiked the ACT and then the PCT, turned his side hustle into his main gig, and is now able to face the big questions in life like what is life for? and What's the best way to live the rest of our lives? I think Chris' story has lots of great lessons for us as we build our own stories and I'm grateful to him for sharing with us.

Chris runs an online run coaching business which you can find at knightonruns.com. Check out a more in depth bio on Chris at tylerjdisney.com/blog/arepisode15