Podcast Notes Playlist: Latest Episodes

On the second episode of my educational podcast, I interview the CEO of the largest cryptocurrency company in the world, Brian Armstrong. I knew Brian years ago when Coinbase was a relatively humble startup and it's been mind blowing to see how far they've come in such a short period of time, managing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wealth in cryptocurrency. I admire Brian because he wakes up everyday determined to solve the 'meta-problem' of financial freedom using cryptocurrency, which he believes can indirectly alleviate poverty, increase entrepeneurship, and help reduce corruption in governments around the world. The President of the USA tweeted about Bitcoin and Facebook released it's "Libra" cryptocurrency, so it's an extremely exciting time in the space. I also ask him about his most ambitious ideas regarding the future of payments, and was pleasantly shocked by his answers. Enjoy! 

• Many games are designed to put users into a state of flow where things are challenging, but not too difficult
• There are 2.6 billion people who regularly play games on connected devices!
• Since many video games don’t come with manuals or tutorials anymore, they’ve become great self-esteem building tools as kids have to teach themselves how to play (and ultimately win) – this builds up their self-confidence
  • “It’s the ultimate learning simulator and you realize if you can teach yourself, you can learn anything”
• Create a bridge between video games and the real world and encourage kids to apply strategies learned from games to real-life situations
• To make a game more fun, don’t make it easier, make it harder!
  • You can experience growth, improvement, and flow by switching up even the most basic of tasks such as brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand
• Gaming to improve mental health:
  • If you have depression – play something like Pokemon Go (as an added bonus – it forces you to leave your house and get some exercise)
  • If you have anxiety – play small, focused, single-player games like Tetris

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems.

She is the Author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and is the inventor and co-founder of SuperBetter, a game that has helped nearly a million players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.

Our conversation is about how to design useful games, how games effect us and our kids, and what the future might hold. Please enjoy.

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Show Notes

1:22 - (First Question) – Her take on the history of gaming and studying the players themselves

3:44 – Where her passion for gaming really started

4:55 – Her take on flow states

7:47 – Kids and gaming

10:32 – Advice for parents when it comes to the role of games

            11:06 – SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient--Powered by the Science of Games

13:53 – Types of games that develop the right skills for kids

16:20 – Four things all games share in common

            16:23 – Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World   

20:50 – Her take on Carse’s theory about infinite gaming

            21:04 – Finite and Infinite Games

26:28 – How to understand gaming culture if you’ve never played a game before

28:28 – Amazon and gaming

31:18 – How fun makes anything more enjoyable

34:55 – How game designers calibrate feedback loops

39:14 – The good and bad of gamifying life

45:01 – What is the superbetter app

52:43 - Why powerups and bad guys are so important in games

57:03 – Secret identity

59:04 – Playing with boundaries

1:00:36 – Most worried about in the gaming world, and most exited about

1:07:32 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Jane

Learn More

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. 

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub

Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

• “People think that conflict is the issue in distressed relationships. Conflict is the virus, the inflammation is emotional disconnection.”
• Humans are meant to be monogamous 
  • People who report having the best sex and are most satisfied with their sex lives are those in long-term, stable, and exclusive relationships
• “The question in distressed relationships is always the same all over the world at every age: ‘Where are you? Do you care about me? Do I matter to you? Will you respond to me? Will you be there when I’m vulnerable? Am I safe with you?'”
  • “When the answer is ‘I’m here,’ you can deal with almost anything”
    • You don’t have to solve all your partner’s problems – just be emotionally present with them
• “Why do we, when a woman has a baby, leave her alone a in a little box called an apartment and take her away from all her social contacts? Often she doesn’t live in the same city as her mother and sisters… and her husband’s at work all day.”
  • “In most tribal societies, when a woman has a baby, it’s a signal for the community to come around and support her… We’ve totally lost that.”
• In healthy relationships, sex is a bonding activity
• The main thing that gets in the way of sex is emotional distance
  • When emotional connection gets lost, the desire to be erotic dissipates (you’re not wired to deal with threat and be turned on at the same time)
• People have affairs because they’re feeling emotionally disconnected and alone, not because of sexual frustration
• Rings seem to come off at milestones of independence for kids
• Relationships are living organisms
  • If you neglect the relationship in favor of focusing on a child, when the child leaves, it’s very likely the relationship will have died
• The very best thing you can do for your kids is to have a good relationship with your partner 

Dr. Sue Johnson is a researcher, clinical psychologist and the developer of EFT or Emotionally Focused Therapy. In this interview we discuss how to create, protect, and nourish fulfilling sexual and emotional relationships.

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For comprehensive show notes on this episode, including a full edited transcript, go to https://fs.blog/podcast/

Is your brain hungry for more? Don't miss out! Sign up for our weekly "Brain Food" at https://fs.blog/newsletter/

Follow @farnamstreet on Twitter for mind-expanding content. 

• On space exploration:
  • “I think it’s a thing that people need to do because they want to do it as opposed to there being a sound business argument for it”
• We’re currently living through the worst-case scenario of how social media might play out
• Good storytellers are capable of developing a sense of empathy and putting themselves in the shoes of the reader
• “Dystopia is an interesting idea because a lot of times, what science fiction writers are really doing is writing a kind of metaphorical story about the present. I think that we’re in a dystopia now in a lot of ways. A lot of things have gotten better, but what’s happening politically right now, what’s happening socially, is definitely trending in a dystopian way. That’s what we should be concerned about right now.”

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.

So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.

Transcript and links

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Kevin Rose is one of the most recognizable individuals in the startup world. As a founder, he and his team created the news aggregation site Digg, which became a household name, putting him on magazine covers around the world and creating an iconic brand in Silicon Valley — but it wasn’t a story that ended in champagne and ringing an IPO bell... As an investor, his list of angel investments is next to impossible to beat: Twitter, Facebook, Square, and NextDoor to name a few.  

He also was podcasting back in 2004 when the world was still just learning how to pronounce the word iPod... so suffice it to say, if he is into it, there’s a very likely chance it’s about to become a very big deal. He is not only incredibly honest and open about his successes and failures, but he’s enthusiastically trying to get others to share just as openly.  

We go below the line on what it’s like to build something to hundreds of millions of dollars to then see it crumble, on how we tend to overcorrect after failure, the necessary side of experiences that help us mature, spouses and their integral part in the equation as an entrepreneur, and more. Enjoy this episode with the incomparable Kevin Rose.

• “Reputation is what strangers think of you and character is what your friends know you are”
• “You can make a joke about race without being racist”
• “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”
  • In other words, too many opinions will result in a bad outcome
• Comedians say bad things that they don’t mean and get in trouble while world leaders say bad things they do mean and get away with it
  • More often than not, a comedian’s joke isn’t his real opinion and is very often an exaggeration of a belief
• “People don’t like their beliefs being made fun of so they try to give their beliefs humans rights”
  • The freedom to express ideas is more important than the freedom of not being offended by speech
• Media is supported by ads, ads want clicks, clicks come from outrage, so therefore – the media’s goal has shifted to create as much outrage as possible
• Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please
• Whenever you need to put things into perspective, remember – YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
  • Our time here is finite, spend it wisely

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Ricky Gervais. They discuss fame, the effect of social media, the changing state of comedy, offensive jokes, Louis CK, political hypocrisy, Brexit and Trump, the state of journalism, and other topics.

You can support the Making Sense podcast and receive subscriber-only content at samharris.org/subscribe.

• Look for life’s canonical structures (ways in which the world seems incredibly complicated but in fact reduces to a very small set of assumptions)
• Embrace being an impostor
  • Perhaps you faking it may be superior to someone else’s earnest attempt?
• “When you first make a decision to turn the boats and there’s no turning home… I think that’s when things get really exciting because it’s sink or swim. People become really innovative once they become isolated and terrified.”
• Most innovation comes from people who are written of as learning incapable 
• If you have a visible system that’s failing to behave normally or no longer makes sense, more likely than not, there’s some unseen force in the invisible world which is causing it
  • “The invisible world is discovered by the visible world’s failure to close”
• This one is a bit complex, so we’ll let Eric explain it:
  • “Whenever you have something that’s going to be beautiful, and it’s a very naive hope, almost always your hope will be dashed because it’s too naive. Instead of getting upset about it, the next thing to do is to measure the failure of your original hope… and once you have that, make it your centerpiece of a new theory and you’ll actually build something much more beautiful than the original theory every was.”
• Watch your robot (the automatic self which is prone to practicing bad habits)
  • Eventually, you’ll come to realize you can’t stand to let your robot take over the ship

Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard in mathematical physics. (Meaning, listening to him WILL make you smarter.) I asked him how he learned to think so clearly. Because too many of us are in a fog or sleep-deprived or on an emotional stress-induced roller coaster. So how do you get off? Eric explains: try being an imposter, look for the core principle of any given problem, let history be your reference in life, build reliable mental models and more. He explains how in this episode.

I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.

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