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On Being Fruitful — On working well and being satisfied

• [audio] Meditation Isn't For Everyone — 30 May 2026
  Meditation can harm you, and it isn’t for everyone. Strip the branding and it’s just trained attention—half of what you already do—so the only real variable is what you point it at.
• [audio] The Scientific Ritual — 2 May 2026
  Science isn’t the opposite of belief. It’s a ritual—and like any ritual it misfires, which is how a method built to find truth becomes a machine for manufacturing exaggerations.
• [audio] Overengineering calming down — 4 Apr 2026
  Pop neuroscience is just “calm down” in a lab coat. The theories are scaffolding around trivial advice, attractive because they make your problems someone else’s fault, and the scaffolding hides what actually matters.
• [audio] Bias is Good — 21 Mar 2026
  Bias isn’t a flaw in your thinking. It’s a precision instrument. The brain trades variance for consistency because the world is noisy, so don’t fight the bias, find the belief driving it.
• [audio] The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre — 7 Mar 2026
  Your amygdala doesn’t decide your fear. You do. It’s not a fear centre, it’s an intensity detector, and calming it down is solving the wrong problem. Watch how you respond instead.
• [audio] Hydraulic Despotism — 21 Feb 2026
  You’re not coerced by malice. You’re coerced by convenience. Control the flow, control the people: the most discredited theory in political science describes social media, energy and compute perfectly. The alternatives exist. We just don’t use them.
• [audio] Atavism Isn't the Answer — 7 Feb 2026
  Seed oils, raw milk, cold plunges, tradwives—one template runs them all: name a modern ill, invent an ancestral past, sell the return as cure. It’s built on a fantasy we can’t verify.
• [audio] Stupid Questions: Consciousness — 10 Jan 2026
  The hard problem of consciousness isn’t a problem. It’s a beautiful argument with no stakes. Behaviour is what matters, not the ghost behind the curtain.
• [audio] Stupid Questions: Free Will — 27 Dec 2025
  Whether free will is real changes precisely nothing. The world’s too complex for the answer to bite, and behaviour bends the same way no matter which side wins.
• [audio] Stupid Questions: Nature/Nurture — 13 Dec 2025
  Nature is just nurture given time, and nurture is obviously the one in charge. The whole debate is Gladwell bait: superficially sexy, practically useless.
• [audio] Mundane Cults — 29 Nov 2025
  Cults aren’t the fringe. They’re the architecture of ordinary community, and not being in one usually means something’s gone wrong. The question is whether yours is one you chose.
• [audio] Stress is Good — 1 Nov 2025
  Stress isn’t broken by modern life. It’s a performance tool, and the line between fuel and harm isn’t the stressor. It’s whether you control it.