Thought Club with Percy Grunwald

Nathan Shaw is is a foreign policy and international relations expert and one of my favorite people in the world to talk to. Nathan hosts the [Envoy podcast](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/envoy-podcast/id1353502193) on which he rounds up and dives deep into world events from a foreign policy and international relations perspective. Nathan has always been my primary source of world news and I could literally talk to him indefinitely, asking more and more questions about what's going on in the world. Like my previous guests, Nathan is one of those people that seems to just have a bottomless pit of knowledge, with a well-informed and well-thought-out answer to any question I can throw at him.

If you're like me, over the past decade you've probably heard the terms "Euro Crisis", "Greek debt", "austerity measures", "EU" and "NATO". If you're also like me, you probably think you have some idea about what these terms mean, but if pressed, couldn't give a detailed explanation of what they are and why anyone should care. What was the "Euro Crisis" and what actually caused it? What are the "EU" and "NATO", how do they relate to each other and could one exist without the other? These are the two main questions I have been saving up for this episode of the podcast with Nathan. As I expected, Nathan dives deep into both questions in his usual way: precise, well-thought-out and entertaining. I really enjoyed this conversation with Nathan and I'm super excited to be able to share it with you today.

### Links

* [Envoy Podcast](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/envoy-podcast/id1353502193)

* [Envoy Website](http://envoyfpa.org/)

* [Envoy Facebook Page](https://www.facebook.com/envoyorg)

* [@envoyuwa on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/envoyuwa)

### Mini-transcript

* 1:40 - Intro to Nathan and the Euro Crisis

* 4:30 - What story were we sold by the news about the Euro Crisis?

* 11:00 - My personal play-by-play of the Euro Crisis

* 21:30 - Deeper dive into the Euro Crisis

* 1:40:00 - Deep dive into the origins, benefits and future of the EU and NATO

Thanks for listening, go to bed!

Love,

P

G'day and welcome to episode 4 of Thought Club. Do you know about genes? Are you curious how genetic services like "23 and Me" work? Maybe you've heard the terms epigenetics, GMO and CRISPR, but actually have no idea what they mean. Well, you're in luck, because my guest today is my good friend, neighbor and all-round boney man: Ronan O'Neill.

### About Ronan

Ronan is a biotechnologist, science communicator and budding medtech entrepreneur who I am lucky enough to have around to answer all my science questions. Ronan has a Master's Degree in biotechnology and is interested in synthetic biology.

* [Article by Ronan O'Neill: How blue light affects your brain and sleep](https://isolatednation.com/articles/2017/12/19/this-article-will-keep-you-up-at-night-how-blue-light-affects-your-brain-and-sleep)

* [Mini-podcast by Ronan O'Neill: Can MDMA be used to treat PTSD?](https://isolatednation.com/articles/2018/8/8/can-mdma-be-used-to-treat-ptsd)

* [Ronan O'Neill on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronan-o-neill-36279a16b/)

### Mini-transcript

* 3:00 - Reading of genes as it relates to mapping genomes, what mapping a genome actually means and how it's used by services like 23 and Me

* 30:00 - Epigentics: what it means and how it happens

* 45:00 - Writing or modifying genes: the history of GMO, what CRISPR actually is and what sort of genetic modifications modern science is actually capable of in 2018

### Interesting Links

* [23 and Me](https://www.23andme.com/en-int/)

* [Human Genome Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project)

* [CRISPR & CRISPR/Cas9 - Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR)

* [Cell Biology by the Numbers (book)](http://book.bionumbers.org/)

Thanks for listening, go to bed!

Love,

P

Today's episode is a conversation I had with my good friend Barnaby Nichols. I'm not really sure how to describe Barnaby in a way that will do him justice, but if pressed, I'd say he's an author, artist, philosopher and rewilding expert. Really enjoyed this one and hope you will too!

### Glossary

* Rewilding: "Rewilding is an attempt to bring back what ancestral ways of living you can within the modern context, for example more natural exercise, primitive skills, hunting and foraging"

* MovNat: Basically the concept of "Natural Movement", which I would define as an exercise philosophy that focuses on movements that our ancestors would have done as part of survival, but that we now consider "functional" or "practical" exercise. A quote-unquote MovNat session would include things like running, jumping, throwing and climbing: movements that our bodies are adapted to by virtue of having been the fundamental movements that contributed to our survival in pre-agricultural times.

* Leavers and takers: From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Quinn defines "leavers" and "takers" fairly early in the book as a way to refer people belonging to either of those two broad categories. The terms "leavers and takers" come from the phrase "to take it or leave it" with regards to an offer presented to someone. The offer in this case is agricultural society, the "takers" being the peoples that chose to "take" the offer, and the "leavers" the peoples that chose to continue living in their traditional non-agricultural ways.

* Sapiens and imagined order: From Sapiens by Juval Noah Harari. By "Sapiens" we mean "Homo sapiens", the species that refers to modern humans. "Imagined order" is a term used in the book to refer to the fundamental ideas of a hierarchy or society. An example would be the imagined order at the basis of a medieval feudal society in which people believe that people belonging to "noble" classes are more important than peasants and therefore entitled to power over land and peasants, an idea that is bought into by both nobles and peasants. The reason Harari uses the term "imagined" within "imagined order" is that they almost always have no basis in an objective truth, but have come completely out of human imagination.

* Flintstonization: From Sex at Dawn by Chris Ryan. Refers to the fallacy of projecting modern contexts back in time when looking at the peoples of history. An example of "Flintstonization" given in the book is 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes presuming that the life of ancient uncivilized peoples was "nasty, brutish and short", clearly a projection backwards of the plight of "uncivilized" people within the 17th century English society he happened to find himself in, rather than based on anthropological evidence of ancient peoples.

* Göbekli Tepe: Refers to an archeological site in southern Turkey that contains megalithic structures and is believed to date back to 10,000BC. The dating and location of Göbekli Tepe coincides with when and where humans first adopted agriculture.

* Dunbar's Number: Refers to the supposed limit of the number of close relationships that primates, which includes humans, can maintain. Close relationship in this case means that you know the individual, but also know how that individual relates to all the other members of the group. The number varies in different primates and manifests itself as varying average group size for different species. The number is correlated to brain size and for humans the number is around 150.

### Transcript

* 5:00 - Intro and why do you do cold water immersion?

* 10:50 - What does functional movement mean? Why should we do functional exercise?

* 11:50 - Functional vs practical exercise

* 13:50 - Did Paul Chek get it wrong?

* 14:30 - How did Barnaby progress from Paul Chek and MovNat to rewilding?

* 17:00 - How did the book Ishmael bring the disparate ideas of rewilding together?

* 21:50 - Do you think your way of living is one that everyone should follow?

* 23:10 - Do you think if people did what you do they would be happier?

* 23:50 - What's the payoff of discomfort for you? Benefits of cold water immersion

* 25:00 - Barnaby's framework for finding activities to do

* 26:20 - How do you put yourself back in time and think about how people lived in the past?

* 28:30 - Conspiracy theorists, critical thinking and contrarianism with respect to rewilding, veganism, etc.

* 31:20 - How are socialists, capitalists, monarchists all the same?

* 32:50 - What is rewilding?

* 34:30 - Do you think the rewilding movement has an agenda? Do you think rewilding is anti-civilization?

* 36:30 - Do you look down on people like DV who have capitalized on the rewilding movement?

* 36:35: What does adaptation to the environment mean in the 21st century?

* 38:20 - Do you have to be part of civilization? Couldn't you leave civilization if you don't like it?

* 39:00 - Could you leave society?

* 42:10 - If we're not able to go back to leaver way of life, is there something we can do within the taker culture?

* 43:10 - Is there a way to get back connection and kinship without rewilding?

* 48:00 - Were Sapiens connected to land as they were expanding? What does connection to land actually mean?

* 51:30 - Did agriculture cause our disconnection with land? What does it feel like to be connected to the land?

* 56:00 - Why would anyone want to be an agriculturalists? Why did it take over?

* 1:02:00 - Did societal stratification occur as a result of agriculture or the other way around?

* 1:08:00 - Is agriculture and civilization deterministic and innevitable? If you leave people alone for long enough, are they bound to happen?

* 1:04:00 - Tying it all back together with the idea of rewilding. Rewilding, not un-civilizing.

Thanks for listening!

Love,

P

Today's episode is a conversation I had with my good friend Barnaby Nichols. I'm not really sure how to describe Barnaby in a way that will do him justice, but if pressed, I'd say he's an author, artist, philosopher and rewilding expert. Really enjoyed this one and hope you will too!

### Glossary

* Rewilding: "Rewilding is an attempt to bring back what ancestral ways of living you can within the modern context, for example more natural exercise, primitive skills, hunting and foraging"

* MovNat: Basically the concept of "Natural Movement", which I would define as an exercise philosophy that focuses on movements that our ancestors would have done as part of survival, but that we now consider "functional" or "practical" exercise. A quote-unquote MovNat session would include things like running, jumping, throwing and climbing: movements that our bodies are adapted to by virtue of having been the fundamental movements that contributed to our survival in pre-agricultural times.

* Leavers and takers: From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Quinn defines "leavers" and "takers" fairly early in the book as a way to refer people belonging to either of those two broad categories. The terms "leavers and takers" come from the phrase "to take it or leave it" with regards to an offer presented to someone. The offer in this case is agricultural society, the "takers" being the peoples that chose to "take" the offer, and the "leavers" the peoples that chose to continue living in their traditional non-agricultural ways.

* Sapiens and imagined order: From Sapiens by Juval Noah Harari. By "Sapiens" we mean "Homo sapiens", the species that refers to modern humans. "Imagined order" is a term used in the book to refer to the fundamental ideas of a hierarchy or society. An example would be the imagined order at the basis of a medieval feudal society in which people believe that people belonging to "noble" classes are more important than peasants and therefore entitled to power over land and peasants, an idea that is bought into by both nobles and peasants. The reason Harari uses the term "imagined" within "imagined order" is that they almost always have no basis in an objective truth, but have come completely out of human imagination.

* Flintstonization: From Sex at Dawn by Chris Ryan. Refers to the fallacy of projecting modern contexts back in time when looking at the peoples of history. An example of "Flintstonization" given in the book is 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes presuming that the life of ancient uncivilized peoples was "nasty, brutish and short", clearly a projection backwards of the plight of "uncivilized" people within the 17th century English society he happened to find himself in, rather than based on anthropological evidence of ancient peoples.

* Göbekli Tepe: Refers to an archeological site in southern Turkey that contains megalithic structures and is believed to date back to 10,000BC. The dating and location of Göbekli Tepe coincides with when and where humans first adopted agriculture.

* Dunbar's Number: Refers to the supposed limit of the number of close relationships that primates, which includes humans, can maintain. Close relationship in this case means that you know the individual, but also know how that individual relates to all the other members of the group. The number varies in different primates and manifests itself as varying average group size for different species. The number is correlated to brain size and for humans the number is around 150.

### Transcript

* 5:00 - Intro and why do you do cold water immersion?

* 10:50 - What does functional movement mean? Why should we do functional exercise?

* 11:50 - Functional vs practical exercise

* 13:50 - Did Paul Chek get it wrong?

* 14:30 - How did Barnaby progress from Paul Chek and MovNat to rewilding?

* 17:00 - How did the book Ishmael bring the disparate ideas of rewilding together?

* 21:50 - Do you think your way of living is one that everyone should follow?

* 23:10 - Do you think if people did what you do they would be happier?

* 23:50 - What's the payoff of discomfort for you? Benefits of cold water immersion

* 25:00 - Barnaby's framework for finding activities to do

* 26:20 - How do you put yourself back in time and think about how people lived in the past?

* 28:30 - Conspiracy theorists, critical thinking and contrarianism with respect to rewilding, veganism, etc.

* 31:20 - How are socialists, capitalists, monarchists all the same?

* 32:50 - What is rewilding?

* 34:30 - Do you think the rewilding movement has an agenda? Do you think rewilding is anti-civilization?

* 36:30 - Do you look down on people like DV who have capitalized on the rewilding movement?

* 36:35: What does adaptation to the environment mean in the 21st century?

* 38:20 - Do you have to be part of civilization? Couldn't you leave civilization if you don't like it?

* 39:00 - Could you leave society?

* 42:10 - If we're not able to go back to leaver way of life, is there something we can do within the taker culture?

* 43:10 - Is there a way to get back connection and kinship without rewilding?

* 48:00 - Were Sapiens connected to land as they were expanding? What does connection to land actually mean?

* 51:30 - Did agriculture cause our disconnection with land? What does it feel like to be connected to the land?

* 56:00 - Why would anyone want to be an agriculturalists? Why did it take over?

* 1:02:00 - Did societal stratification occur as a result of agriculture or the other way around?

* 1:08:00 - Is agriculture and civilization deterministic and innevitable? If you leave people alone for long enough, are they bound to happen?

* 1:04:00 - Tying it all back together with the idea of rewilding. Rewilding, not un-civilizing.

Thanks for listening!

Love,

P

This episode is a conversation with my good friend Julien Klepatch. Julien is a French developer living in Taipei and currently working for an English blockchain startup called LendingBlock. Julien also has a YouTube channel and website called EatTheBlocks, which teaches blockchain development with a focus on Ethereum and the Ethereum programming language Solidity. Julien is also currently working on a learning course focusing on Blockchain for the well-known tech publisher Manning.

I met Julien though a friend a few years ago while I was living in Taipei. Ever since I first met Julien, I've always enjoyed talking deeply with him. It should be pretty clear from my description of Julien's life and work that he's an extremely entrepreneurial person and has no trouble learning new things or taking action in a new area. I really look up to these traits in Julien, and I always leave every one of our conversations with not only a huge amount of inspiration, but also many things that I can take action on immediately.

In this conversation with Julien we chat about podcasting setups, feature requests from customers of your online service, freedom of speech on Facebook and Julien's crazy sleep cycles working with the UK from Asia Pacific.

### Links

* [Julien's Twitter handle @jklepatch](https://twitter.com/jklepatch)

* [Julien's GitHub profile jklepatch](https://github.com/jklepatch)

* [EatTheBlocks website](https://eattheblocks.com/)

* [EatTheBlocks YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/eattheblocks)

* [LendingBlock](https://lendingblock.com/)

* [IndieHackers website/podcast](https://www.indiehackers.com/)

### Transcript

* 1:00 - Talking about the podcast setup in my home studio

* 2:00 - Talking about Julien's audio setup and microphone

* 3:00 - What's the difference between dynamic vs condenser microphones for different applications? + Boom arms and mic positioning.

* 6:30 - How did I choose the name "Thought Club" for the podcast?

* 9:00 - What's the approval process for Apple iTunes podcasts? + Apple iTunes Podcast Connect login loop bug

* 10:30 - Can you use S3 + CloudFront to host a podcast for iTunes, given that the certificate is not provided by an "approved" certificate provider?

* 14:00 - What's Indie Hackers all about? What's the best time/activity to listen to a podcast?

* 16:00 - What's the difference between feature requests between paid and unpaid customers of a web application?

* 18:00 - What's Facebook doing to control communication between people?

* 20:00 - What value does Facebook have moving forward? What happens post-Facebook?

* 22:30 - What types of users are targeted by SaaS companies?

* 24:00 - Can you sync your sleep cycles with a time zone significantly different to where you live?

* 29:00 - How long can you handle working from home as a developer?

* 30:00 - LendingBlock alpha release

Thanks for listening!

Love,

P

In this episode I have a discussion with my very good friend Chris Bellew. Chris is a software engineer, originally from England, but now living in Perth, Western Australia. Chris is the person who inspired me to become a programmer many years ago. We start by discussing how we both started down the path of software and what our goals were originally. The conversation moves into talking about Chris's first entrepreneurial venture and his most recent, looking at the commonalities and potential mistakes that were made in both. Along the way we cover a variety of philosophical questions about what one should choose to do with ones time.

If you're interested in following Chris, please check out [his Medium profile](https://medium.com/@cjbellew).

### Mini-transcript

* 1:00 - Amateur hour + interruptions by Barnaby

* 7:00 - Percy feels most capable now, but less optimistic

* 10:00 - What's an easy route to entrepreneurship?

* 12:00 - How did Chris get into programming?

* 14:00 - Why is C the introductory programming language in most engineering courses?

* 17:00 - Is programming like music? Or more like engineering? How much talent is required to be competent?

* 18:00 - Why can someone unskilled at music can tell who is a good musician, but the same is not true for programming?

* 19:00 - Is the point of programming to eliminate errors? What makes a good programmer?

* 20:00 - Did Chris have a goal in mind when switching to programming?

* 21:00 - How can a 17 year old make the decision to go to university and what to study?

* 23:00 - What if I had left school and just started programming at 17?

* 25:00 - How satisfied to you think people are with what they chose to study at university?

* 26:30 - Is it a good thing that we have so many choices? How do we choose what to do in life?

* 27:30 - What tools can we use to deal with infinite FOMO?

* 28:00 - What would the effect on satisfaction be if you were just told what job to do?

* 31:30 - What would cause someone to be unfulfilled in a particular job?

* 33:00 - Did you have a dream job?

* 35:00 - Could you determine someone's dream job from when they were really young?

* 39:00 - What did Chris and I start building when we first learned to program and make websites?

* 40:00 - How do startup people choose what to work on?

* 40:30 - What was Chris's first startup project?

* 45:00 - What happened to Chris's most recent entrepreneurial venture?

* 51:00 - What is the cost vs value of software?

* 53:00 - Did the team for Chris's most recent project approach the problem in an incorrect way?

* 55:00 - Where should validation live in the software product development cycle?

* 58:00 - What would Chris and I do differently if we were starting a business now?

* 1:02:00 - What rituals are necessary for starting a successful tech company?

* 1:07:00 - What does being around a start-up culture do to your psychology?

Thanks for listening!

Love,

P

Hi everyone! In this zeroth episode of Thought Club I give you a quick introduction to me and the podcast.

You'll hear a little bit about the podcasts that I'm inspired by and what we'll be talking about in upcoming podcasts.

The second half of this episode is a short dive into the principal of "ignoramus" and why I think it's valuable.

If everything works as expected with the various podcast aggregators around the internet, you'll see more episodes appear very soon.

Thanks for listening!

Love,

P