Exploring Kodawari

In this episode—especially since it has been so long since our last one—we decided to revisit the concept of kodawari and how it has changed for us over the three years of doing this podcast/blog.

Over time we encounter more knowledge and have more life experiences. And as we attempt to integrate those into a coherent life philosophy, our ideas about life change and update. I believe we have a duty to regularly bring a beginner's m...

“‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodsman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’” —L. Frank Baum

The topic of this episode is happiness and hedonic adaptation, otherwise known as the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic adaptation is a phenomenon of our psychology and physiology that keeps us at a stable level of happiness over time. This adaptation is like an imm...

In this episode, we explore the art of orchestral conducting with guest Chad Goodman. Chad is currently the conducting fellow of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, and he has also had fellowships at Festival Napa Valley and the Atlantic Music Festival. Since 2018, he has served as an assistant conductor to the San Francisco Symphony, and he also founded Elevate Ensemble in the Bay Area.

Chad is also a good friend of ours, and so...

"Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although “The Myth of Sisyphus” poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of...

“What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer.”                    —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

"Many of us have been persuaded that happiness is something that someone else, a therapist or a politician, must confer on us. Stoicism rejects this notion. It teaches us that we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness. It also teaches us that it is only when we assume responsibility for our happiness that we will have a reasonable chance of gaining it. This, to be sure, is a message that ...

"Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

This episode is our conversation with Katherine Bormann, a violinist with The Cleveland Orchestra since 2011. Katherine has degrees from Rice University and The Juilliard School and studied with Kathleen Winkler, Joel Smirnoff, and Ronald Copes.

She has made appearances at Strings Music Festival, Mainly Mozart Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and Tanglewood Music Festival, where she was also a member of the contemporary music ensembl...

We recently published a new page on our website organizing all of our mental models (aka mental frameworks) into one place. We explain what a mental model is and how you can use them to better understand the world.

• Mental Frameworks: Your Toolbox For Thinking More Clearly

In short, mental models are ways of thinking that help to simplify the world. They block out the noise so that we can better pay attention to the sign...

In this episode, we speak with author and motivational speaker Terry Tucker. Terry has lived all over the country and worked in many different fields. After playing NCAA Division I basketball in college, he worked in a marketing department and as a hospital administrator. After that, he worked as a police officer, both as a SWAT Hostage Negotiator and an undercover narcotics investigator.

But in 2012, Terry began a very different pa...

For this episode, we were joined by trumpet player Scott Moore, who has been principal trumpet of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra since 1988. He has performed with the Chicago Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the National Symphony, and the Toronto Symphony. He has also recorded and performed with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, and with I Fiamminghi, the Orchestra of Flanders.

As a teacher, Scott has served...

“At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others—the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual goal of appearing better than one really is.” —Robert Trivers

In this episode, I speak with author and intellectual Robin Hanson. Robin ...

"Any model of communication is at the same time a model of trans-lation, of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings [...] Thus a human being performs an act of translation, in the full sense of the word, wh...

Why do people do what they do? This fascinating question is the foundation of behavioral science, and in this episode, we speak about exactly that with behavioral scientist Dr. Kurt Nelson.

Kurt has a Ph.D. in Industrial & Organizational Psychology and is the founder of The Lantern Group, which uses behavioral science to help optimize companies and organizations. He is also the co-host of the podcast Behavioral Grooves where he—...

We are finally back! Sorry for the delay in getting episodes out—we just moved from New York to Florida and couldn't find the time to podcast. But we are settled in now, and for our first episode of 2021, we decided to tackle the psychology of new year's resolutions.

Why do we make new year's resolutions, and why do so few of us actually keep them? Statistically, 80 percent of people will drop their resolutions by February, and the ...

This bonus/end of the year holiday episode is a looser and more fun episode all about the psychedelic mushroom history of Santa Claus. According to this theory, our modern Santa is based on ancient shamans in the Scandinavian and Siberian regions who would pass out hallucinogenic mushrooms on the winter solstice.

While it is just a theory, it does explain many of the weird traditions around Christmas—the red and white outfit, putti...

In this episode, we speak with composer, arranger, and trumpet player Brandon Dicks. Brandon is currently pursuing a doctorate in Trumpet Performance at Arizona State University, but he caught my attention with his impressive videography skills on his Youtube channel.

Brandon arranges just about any type of music for trumpet ensemble—for example, he has arrangements of Vivaldi, Mozart, Super Mario, Zelda, Jurassic Park, etc—and then...

The answer to whether or not the self is an illusion is tricky—it really depends on what you mean by both self and illusion.

In this episode, we challenge the sense of self that we all feel from the first-person subjective experience. We all feel like we are riding around inside of our heads looking out at the world. We don't feel like we are identical to our bodies, but instead that we have bodies—we look down at them fro...