Startup Geometry Podcast

Jonathan Taplin is Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. he was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016. Taplin’s areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival five times. (via jontaplin.com)

Today, Jon talks about his new book, Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. It tells the story of how the Internet took a wrong turn from its early days as a source for innovation and wealth for individual creators and entrepreneurs, becoming a highly centralized set of monopolies and oligopolies that suck $50 billion a year in income away from content creators. This has hollowed out whole industries, leaving both producers and consumers less well off both economically and artistically. We discuss some of the history of the Net that led to this point, and some of the possible remedies for the problems we face.

 

Public Service Announcement: This week, the Senate released their version of the AHCA, which would cause 25 million people to lose their health insurance. Access to individual health insurance markets enables entrepreneurs, among others, to take the risk of leaving full time jobs with large corporations to build companies of their own. Without full funding for Medicaid, the cost of delivering healthcare to everyone rises. Please contact your Senators and representatives to tell them your position on this important issue.

Today on the podcast, Shava Nerad returns to talk about the ins and outs of political activism in the 21st century, how to make an impact as a technologically savvy organizer, and what you need to learn to be an effective citizen. Previously, Shava visited us to talk about her career as the founding Executive Director of the Tor Project and privacy activist.

 

Frederick Schilling loves chocolate. He is the founder of Dagoba Chocolate, AMMA Chocolate and Big Tree Farms. He’s made a career out of launching products that are not only delicious and luxurious, but also environmentally and socially responsible. When he founded Dagoba, he launched the organic chocolate category. When he founded Big Tree Farms and AMMA Chocolate, he changed the lives of farmers on two continents.

 

 

Today, we talk about:

* How he got interested in chocolate while a religion major at Ohio Wesleyan University.

* His first big breaks in product development, distribution, suppliers and media.

* Why cash and people are the scarce resources needed by any founder.

* Visionary experiences with the chocolate goddess. (The plants have an agenda, as Michael Pollan and Gordon White like to say.)

* Terroir of chocolate. Subtypes of cacao plants.

* Impact of witch’s broom disease on the chocolate industry in Brazil. (see also the phylloxera pandemic that hit the wine industry)

* Breeds of cacao trees: Criollo, Forestro, Trinitario.

* How cacao spread with colonization.

* Coconut nectar/coconut sugar.

* How coconut sugar improves the lives of coconut farmers.

* Fair trade and organic designations as an essential business advantage.

Sid Kemp is a coach, consultant and the author of ten books on business success published by McGraw-Hill and Entrepreneur Press. Until a decade ago, Sid worked with top Fortune 500 companies, government agencies like the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and think tanks such as McKinsey Consulting and Deloitte Touche. Then he took their best practices and wrote the best seller, Entpreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Project Management for Small Business.

 

 

Today, we talk about the ins and outs of the consulting business, working with the inner and outer goals of the client, and planning for the equally challenging crises of wild success and disaster.

Ben Joffe is a scholar of Vajrayana Buddhism, currently finishing his PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder. On this episode, we talk about his first career as a teenaged tarot reader, the question of how Vajrayana and tantra have been impacted by the Tibetan diaspora and encounter with the global monoculture, the role of the ngakpa (non-celibate yogi), and Ben’s translation of Dr. Nida Chenagtsang’s books on traditional Tibetan medicine.

We experienced some technical difficulties during the recording of this episode. While the quality of the sound may be poor in some places, it is more than compensated for by the high quality of the guest.

 

 

B. Alan Wallace

Today, I talk with B. Alan Wallace about his multiple careers as Buddhist contemplative and teacher, physicist and cognitive scientist, writer and translator. We discuss his road to becoming a monk and returning to laity, the meditative practices of Dzogchen, how to tell a good teacher (by the quality of their students), the remarkable career of Dudjom Lingpa, and how Buddhist contemplatives and neuroscientists can collaborate to effect a revolution in our understanding of the mind.

Bio

Dynamic lecturer, progressive scholar, and one of the most prolific writers and translators of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D., continually seeks innovative ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with Western science to advance the study of the mind.

 Dr. Wallace, a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, has taught Buddhist theory and meditation worldwide since 1976. Having devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, he went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford.

 With his unique background, Alan brings deep experience and applied skills to the challenge of integrating traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world.

Show Notes

Alan Wallace’s website

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Dudjom Rinpoche

Gyatrul Rinpoche

Dudjom Lingpa

A Clear Mirror: The Visionary Biography of Dudjom Lingpa

 

Neurophilosophy

The “hard problem of consciousness”

Max Gladstone

Today, I talk with Max Gladstone, author of The Craft Sequence, in which a magical post-Apocalyptic society turns out to be not a terribly bad place to live, thank you very much. He describes his novels differently depending on who he’s talking to. For businesspeople, lawyers, and consultants, he says, “It’s just like your job, only with wizards.” Like many writers, he’s held a number of interesting and out-of-the-way jobs, as you can see from his bio below.

Bio

Max Gladstone is a two-time finalist for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award, and a one-time finalist for the XYZZY Award. In July 2016

Tor Books published his most recent novel, FOUR ROADS CROSS. Other novels in the CRAFT SEQUENCE include, LAST FIRST SNOW, a tale of

zoning politics, human sacrifice, and parenthood.  LAST FIRST SNOW is  the fourth Craft Sequence novel, preceded by THREE PARTS DEAD, TWO

SERPENTS RISE, and FULL FATHOM FIVE.

Max studied Chan poetry and late Ming dynasty fantasy at Yale; he lived and taught for two years in rural Anhui province, and has traveled

throughout Asia and Europe. He speaks Chinese, can embarrass himself  reading Latin, and is a martial artist, fencer, and fiddler. He’s also

worked as a researcher for the Berkman Center for Internet and Policy Law, a tour guide for the Swiss Embassy, a go-between for a suspicious

Chinese auto magazine, a translator for visiting Chinese schoolteachers, a Chinese philosophy TA, a tech industry analyst, and an editor. He has

wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, sung at Carnegie Hall, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia.

We recorded this conversation at pretty much the exact moment the Trump/Russia dossier hit the Internet. Before the conversation began, I asked Max if he’d like to discuss politics or current events. We ended up not talking politics until after we’d ended the interview. Missed opportunities.

 

He’s also written a volume in the Bookburners project, currently available for free here:

Mitch Horowitz

Today on Startup Geometry, I talk with Mitch Horowitz, editor, voiceover artist, historian of alternative religion and the occult, and author of Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. We discuss the influence of experimental religions have had on American history, our favorite uncanny tourism sites, how the belief that “thoughts are causative” has affected the real world, and why having a Definite Chief Aim can help you achieve it.

 

Gordon White

This week I talk to Gordon White, former “weird kid”, proprietor of the popular Rune Soup podcast and blog. Gordon is also a documentarian, world traveler, digital strategist and practicing magician. He’s the author of three books that came out in the last year or so: Star.Ships, which we discuss in this podcast; The Chaos Protocols, which takes a heterodox view of how to handle the post-financial crash economy; and Pieces of Eight, a personal history of the Chaos Magic movement.

 

 

 

This interview has a twin over on Gordon’s podcast, where he interviews me about the Bruno books.You can listen to that over on Rune Soup or on iTunes.

 

 

Episode Outline, Notes and Links

 

 

* Being part of a traveling family, returning home to Australia

* “You don’t go to London for the snorkeling.”

* “A lot of people recycling Seth Godin’s slides at conferences.”

* Why podcasting is the new blogging: “It’s a return to the real.”

* Why “Were you a weird kid?” is a great first interview question.

* Being weird is the only way to break even in the global monoculture.

* Star.Ships discusses the prehistory of magical/religious/astronomical thought

* The Flood myth as a reflection of Southeast Asian post-ice age cultures

* How did they build Nan Madol on Pohnpei without modern technology?

* Materialism vs. Idealism

* Ancient aliens as a cultural mistake

* Gobekli Tepe as a “stone guitar” and early star temple

* Is it fair to compare modern animist hunter-gatherers to prehistoric ones? Yes, if prehistoric people were not stupid, which they weren’t.

* “Everything in a hunter-gatherer culture is valuable; they don’t accumulate junk.”

* Great Man Theory vs. Steam Engine Time

* Kenneth Ruthven, Critical Assumptions, on influence:

Our understanding of literary ‘influence’ is obstructed by the grammar of our language, which puts things back to front in obliging us to speak in passive terms of the one who is the active partner in the relationship: to say that Keats influenced Wilde is not only to credit Keats with an activity of which he was innocent, but also to misrepresent Wilde by suggesting he merely submitted to something he obviously went out of his way to acquire. In matters of influence, it is the receptor who takes the initiative, not the emitter. When we say that Keats had a strong influence on Wilde, what we really mean is that Wilde was an assiduous reader of Keats, an inquisitive reader in the service of an acquisitive writer.

* Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory

Gordon’s website

Gordon on

Robert Pool is a mathematician, science writer, and, together with Anders Ericsson, the author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Today, we talk about the use of deliberate practice to improve physical and mental performance, why the 10,000 hour rule isn’t what you think it is, the relationship between talent and success (it’s less important than you think, what good mental representations will do for you, and why taste is essential to the development of expert skills.