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Why does calling a tree "her" instead of "it" change how you treat it? In this episode, I dig into Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and her idea that the way language personifies nature shapes how much we care for it.

Then I connect that to manifestation and prayer. If you set your intentions with "the universe," you're talking to an "it." What happens if you treat that force as a someone instead? I break down my nightly practice of gratitude journaling and requests, based on Philippians 4:6, and why making a request to a personified being might make you more likely to expect it, notice it, and act on it, whether you see that as spiritual, psychological, or both.

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Can the language you speak limit what you're able to see, and what you're able to get out of life?

This episode connects linguistics, neuroscience, and manifestation. It covers:

• Jim Carrey's graduation speech: the bike story and the "law of exchange" he says drove his whole career
• Synaptic pruning: why babies' brains take in far more of the world than adult brains, and what we lose as we grow up
• The Guugu Yimithirr of northern Australia: their language has no "left" or "right," only compass directions, and they almost never get disoriented
• The Himba of Namibia: their language has no separate word for blue, and it changes how they see color
• Arrival: how learning an alien language lets Amy Adams' character see through time

It starts with the research and then gets into speculation. If language filters what we can perceive, what else might be filtering what's possible for us?

Have ideas on how to open up those possibilities? Reach out: [email protected]

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In this episode, I take a look at the major weather and climate events of 2026, including severe wildfires, flooding, extreme hail, record ocean temperatures, and unusual weather patterns occurring around the world. I also discuss recent climate projections from the United Nations and what continued global warming could mean for sea levels, coral reefs, drought, food production, and extreme weather.

I also discuss current weather patterns associated with El Niño, including unusual storm activity and temperature extremes, before looking at some of the possible long-term implications of these changes. The episode considers where current trends could lead and the potential role of artificial intelligence in addressing future environmental challenges.

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In this episode, I break down Wu Wei, the ancient Chinese concept of “non-action” or effortless action. It sounds like laziness at first, but the idea is really about learning when to stop forcing things, letting go of rigid expectations, and moving with the circumstances instead of constantly fighting against them.

I talk about Wu Wei through examples from content creation, exercise, creativity, burnout, and everyday life, including the idea of asking “What would this look like if it were easy?” I also break down how viewing your life as an experiment and using an “effort scale” can make it easier to actually start things. The goal isn't to do nothing—it's to keep moving, but without constantly trying to force the outcome.

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In this episode, I read through Naval Ravikant’s famous “How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky” thread, one of the most concise collections of ideas on wealth, leverage, ownership, specific knowledge, and long-term thinking. Rather than overcomplicating it, I go through the ideas directly and let the framework speak for itself.

The thread covers why wealth is different from money or status, why ownership matters, how leverage compounds your effort, why specific knowledge is so valuable, and why building wealth is less about chasing shortcuts and more about positioning yourself around skills, judgment, and systems that scale. If you’ve heard quotes from Naval before but never gone through the full thread, this is basically the distilled version.

Also sorry about mispronouncing the name at the beginning.

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In this episode, I break down some of the latest developments in AI, including Grok 4.7, Meta’s new MUSE agent, and what the rise of easy-to-use AI agents could mean for the way we use the internet. MUSE can handle things like email, calendars, shopping, forms, travel and other online tasks, but the more interesting part is how quickly major companies are starting to react. Amazon has already blocked MUSE from accessing its shopping platform, raising a much bigger question about what happens when AI agents begin choosing where we shop, what we buy, and which services we use.

I also get into the idea of “agentic warfare” — a future where Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google and other major companies may each build their own agents while limiting competitors’ access to their ecosystems. That could create something similar to the streaming wars, except instead of fighting over movies and sports rights, companies are fighting over which parts of the internet their AI agents are allowed to use. At the same time, these agents could flatten a lot of the friction that gives huge online platforms their advantage and potentially shift more power back toward consumers and smaller sellers.

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In this episode, I look at the history of AI hype cycles to ask a much bigger question: are we actually on the verge of artificial intelligence transforming or even threatening humanity, or are we living through another period where expectations are running ahead of reality? I break down the major waves of AI development, from early symbolic AI and robots like Shakey, to 1980s expert systems, to today’s deep-learning and generative-AI boom, and look at what each cycle promised, what actually happened, and what survived after the hype cooled.

I also get into the enormous amounts of money being poured into companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, the expensive infrastructure behind modern AI, and whether today’s low consumer prices are actually sustainable. My overall take is that AI is already powerful enough to radically change work, software and the internet even if progress slows from here—but that the current fear of an imminent AI apocalypse may be getting mixed together with the same hype, investment incentives and over-extrapolation that have appeared in previous AI booms.

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In this episode, I break down some of the strangest and most interesting things I learned in a semester-long class on consciousness. We get into how tiny the truly high-resolution part of your vision actually is, why people once reported dreaming in black and white, how blindsight shows that your brain can process visual information without you consciously seeing it, and how the rubber hand illusion can literally trick your brain about what belongs to your body.

I also get into the controversial Ganzfeld experiments and the bigger question behind all of this: what actually is consciousness? We know a huge amount about how the brain processes information, but we still don’t fully understand why any of that processing produces a subjective experience at all. This episode is basically a collection of the experiments and ideas that made that mystery feel way stranger to me.

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In this episode, I try to compress a semester’s worth of the most interesting psychology into 17 minutes. We get into why your brain doesn’t actually show you reality directly, why you notice far less than you think, how memory can change every time you recall something, how conditioning shapes your behavior, what dopamine actually does, and why your brain is so good at protecting its existing beliefs.

I also break down conformity, cognitive biases, placebo effects, social influence, and neuroplasticity, and how all of these ideas connect to the way you experience everyday life. The bigger theme is that we like to think of ourselves as rational, objective people with accurate memories and complete control over our decisions, while psychology reveals a much messier and more interesting picture of how the mind actually works.

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I met this guy David on a plane.

He has cerebral palsy and narcolepsy. I was working on my video editor creating content and we got talking.

He is now my first paid user of NeuralBoard. Here is the brief story for those who are interested. 

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