Philosophy

We answer your Biohacking and Lifehacking questions in this Q&A podcast...

We recorded this while I was pepped up with PEMFs administered directly to my forehead with the IC Hummer, hopefully, it makes me a perkier podcaster!

I'll be answering some of the November Biohacking and lifehacking questions in the Q&A podcast below...

There once was a geek named Jonathan,
Whose philosophical thoughts were quite profound.
With Modafinil in his brain,
He answered questions with ease and disdain.

With Modafinil in his system,
Jonathan's philosophical thoughts were swimming.
He answered questions with wit and grace,
And left his listeners in awe of his embrace.

Is stoicism past its due date as a mindset?

The philosophy articulated by the embattled Marcus Aurelius as his personal life and empire threatened to collapse around him in 170 BC. It's over 2000 years old, and we are now living in a world utterly inconceivable to even the most imaginative Roman aristocrat in the midst of a psychedelic Dionysian fever dream. Modernity seems architected to conflict directly with every facet of evolutionary psychology and the philosophical values that have edified men and women for millennia. While new science, thinking, and practice from the fields of Biohacking and personal growth seem to offer pragmatic solutions in a world doing its damnedest to claw away our free will with digital talons.
In a world utterly corrupted by politics, big business, big government, and devouring ideology, is stoicism as a mindset an individualistic "cope" to keep your metaphorical hands off pitchforks that should be raised?
That's the question I'll be exploring today with Will R. Young, a behavioral finance strategist, philosopher, top-performing superforecasters in the Good Judgment Project, author of a new book, "The Enough Equation," and avid surfer - he knows a thing or two about dodging shark fins.

2025 Update: There is this dumb puritanical advice that older people often give to younger people: "You’ll PAY later in life for all that reckless fun you have in your 20s! I wish I hadn’t partied so much when I was young, now I have all these problems…"
It's dumb advice because it’s ineffective - I don’t think it convinces young people to live more responsibly. It also comes across as hypocritical - I was a hedonist, but you shouldn’t be. Instead, I encourage younger people (and everybody else, really) to be hedonists, but not the same kinds of hedonists those regretful old Gen Xers and Boomers were. Ethical hedonism is the philosophy of choosing the greater pleasure over the lesser pleasure.

This article will dive into the millenniums' old, yet rarely practiced, mindset of ethical hedonism along with exploring its biological implications.

Book review: Masterful magical realism!

I recently finished the third book in the compelling historical fiction series ”War God” by Graham Hancock, about the Spanish conquest of Mexico by Cortés and his band of conquistadors.

What captures your attention for hours on end and makes the novel such a page-turner is its descriptions of the scale and severity of violence. This book is a snapshot of probably one of the very most violent episodes in human history; when one of the most ambitious men in the world, Hernán Cortés, with a technologically superior force of several hundred conquistadors took on an empire of possibly as many as 30 million Aztecs and ultimately prevailed.

Yesterday someone reminded me of a thing I once said...

"I don’t believe in love."

Which might sound terrible. Or ridiculously nihilistic. Sometimes I intellectually have a deer-in-the-headlights moment when confronted with how my opinions and outlook on life have changed over time. We were slightly different people a year ago and we certainly were five or ten years ago. In the last year, I’ve experienced greater depths of and previously unknown dimensions of love, yet I resisted the temptation to just respond:

I was wrong. I now believe in love.

When I said that I didn’t believe in love I was grasping at a more nuanced point which is that “love” is a poor word to describe a very complicated aspect of human psychology and motivation that has both light and dark sides.

I've researched some Nootropics that you may not have heard of before; Bromantane, Cerebrolysin, Cortexin, Ladastan, Mildronate...

You can get these from a vendor I've vetted, RUPHARMA.com - based in that big, cold, scary country that the mainstream media wants you to hate. Check out their site and you'll see a number of Nootropics and performance enhancers that are maybe a bit foreign to you. To me at least these are European exotics, they are all branded and manufactured in either Russia or different European countries. I'll explain a little later why this is appealing to me as a veteran Nootropics user.

What do you think of the whole AI trend taking the internet by storm right now?

If you're like most people I've talked to recently, you're somewhat wary of it. But there's a lot of silver lining to the AI cloud steadily advancing over the internet that I want to point out and I thought I should let you know how I'm using it going forward in my work as an Applied Neuroscience Strategist.

Jacques Derrida was a philosopher (that I’m not a fan of) who you may have never heard of. Derrida is one of the architects of corrupt modern society and an intellectual vandal who brought a sledgehammer against civilization.

He created a very insidious virus — not a literal virus but a very viral idea; a mind virus, an intellectual contagion. And ideas are powerful, aren’t they?