ALL EPISODES

Humanity is inherently gullible. We imagine ourselves to be these independently thinking entities when in reality we're so easily shaped by the people around us and by the people that know how gullible we actually are. Our pension for belief and what the people around us are saying makes sense. It keeps us safe.

You are not just you, but rather you are the culmination of hundreds of lives that came before you. Your past is more than just a short life that you've lived because of your past. It's also made up of all the pasts of the people that made you who you are, as well as all the past of the people that made them who they were.

Few things feel better than knowing you got a good deal on something.  It's evidence of your superior negotiating abilities, but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. What do we really get out of a bargain? I've lived in the world of business for years now, and I've tried to get good deals from vendors and many, many people

Pain isn't really our enemy. We think it is, but it's not. It's a process that too often we try to run away from when we should be embracing it. As humans, we know how to feel pain like no one else. Not only do we feel physical pain, but we're experts in carrying pain over from our experiences. Our intelligence relative to other species on earth is not just a blessing.

It is hard to know what to do when you're with someone going through a really  hard time, at least for me. Maybe they're crying. Other times they might be yelling, and on occasion they may be hysterical. What's sad is that I think there have been a lot of opportunities I missed to take some of that pain from someone else.

If you really want to love a thing, sometimes you need to learn to hate it.  First, real love is when you can still appreciate something even after the shine has worn off. Imagine you're dating in person. Generally, you wouldn't decide to marry them after a day or two of fun, not because that person is a bad fit, but because you have no clue who that person is yet you haven't seen any of their flaws. The reason we try to date for a while is because no one can legitimately

It seems like there's some amount of value we assign to having the quality of being ambitious, at least in the United States. People advertise that they are ambitious on resumes and profiles and public forums, so apparently being ambitious is a good thing, but why? People say they wanna be successful because they are ambitious, but what does that even mean?

I've hated people deeply. And if you're being honest, so have you, anyone who says they've never hated someone is lying to themselves, but is our nature truly so constraining that there's nothing for us to do about that? The more I think on my enemies, the harder it becomes to hate them, even if I still am at odds with them. I have found in my life that everyone I have ever spoken to thinks they're in the right. They'll gimme detailed arguments for why someone else was ter

I think the vast majority of humanity's pursuits boiled down to an effort to escape pain, but pain built civilization.  We learned to use fire to keep the pain of the cold at bay. We drive cars and use computers to speed everything up so we can avoid the pain of having to wait so long. If pain is such a bad thing, then why is it so often the catalyst for so many good things in my pursuit of understanding?