Speaking Generally

Lockdown. Day 9313911309135097.

Here's how we're spending it.

Is it good to live in your own world?

Will you be happier and healthier if you just ignore all the things that annoy you: politics, irritating family/friends, people who don't "get" you, activities you don't care about?

We look at economist Bryan Caplan's case for living in your own bubble and discuss if it's a good idea for health and happiness.

Will coronavirus change the world?

It already has.

But where will we be a year from now? How will we behave when lockdown finally ends? And has the future of business, lifestyle, and relationships changed drastically following this once-in-a-lifetime "black swan" event?

Join us for the big chat. And wash your hands.

Stuck at home in the time of corona? Not much we can do about that unfortunately.

But what we CAN do is find ways to be productive when working from our desk, setting our own hours, and maximizing our output with simple habits and knowledge of what makes us most productive.

And now is a time like no other to learn practices of self-discipline and motivation essential to thriving outside the typical office environment!

Have a listen to our newest favourite productivity tips and let us know which work best for you! (Looks like we could all be at home for a while anyway, right?)

You may believe you make rational choices about what to eat, where to live, whom to date, and how much money to spend on chocolate.

But for all our intelligence, we humans make flawed decisions EVERY DAY due to common biases that trip us up if we're not conscious of them.

Here are 7 of the most common cognitive biases and what you can do to avoid them.

Career, love, social life: are all these things easier if you're socially gregarious and feel energized around people? Or are there hidden superpowers to being an introvert that go under-valued?

Join us as we wrestle with the pros and cons on introvert personalities, including:

- The struggle for introverts to get their needs met in love and relationships

- Dating apps as an asset for shy-types

- Friendships and offices for introvert vs. extrovert

- The increasing "indoorsyness" of modern life

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There are many reasons for you to want an Oscar: prestige, praise from your peers, ticket sales, sexual attention...

But are awards a good thing for everyone else? Or do they allow incompetent arbiters of taste to over-inflate certain kinds of art over other more deserving ones? And who the hell decided that awards should be so political?

We sink our teeth into the good, the bad, and the ugly of cultural awards, and try to decide what, if anything, makes them valuable.

Is it good to "stick it out" when things get difficult?

Sometimes.

But it can also be better to just quit!

Some pursuits waste our time, careers get stale, or we extract all the value out of a hobby and now see diminishing returns.

So in this episode, we talk about the biggest things we've given up, the benefits/struggles or quitting, and what makes it worth sticking with difficult projects.

Our culture tends to place ambitious people on a pedestal: Napoleon, Elon Musk, Kanye West.

And yet, ambition has also been the cause of many great tragedies and follies throughout history.

We question the value of ambition. What makes it noble? What does it cost in terms of love and friendship? And can you find a way to have ambition in your life without it going too far? Or is it simply the price one pays for worldly success?

We all know Hollywood is obsessed with taking valuable Intellectual Property and turning it into movies. And nowhere is this more common than turning books into films.

But adaptation is a medium as old as the hills. Many opera's are based on Shakespearean plays and epic poems, plays are based on histories, paintings adapt scenes from the Bible...

So in this episode, we look at the best and worst instances of adaptation in movies, and try to pinpoint exactly what gets gained and lost when going from film to screen.