Monthly Rewind is a curated summary of the previous month's highlights at Infinite Loops HQ.
🎙️ Podcast Episodes & Deep Dives 🎙️
😵💫😵💫 This is the episode you are looking for. 😵💫😵💫
Earlier this month, we welcomed the Board Certified hypnotist Todd Goodwin to the show to discuss some common myths and misconceptions around hypnosis and explain how it can help us tackle the root causes of our problems.
We were particularly struck by Todd’s assertion that we enter hypnotic states all the time:
“If you've ever played a video game and lost track of time, or your body and your emotions are reacting to a video game, a movie, a TV show, that's a hypnotic state. If you get lost in a novel or a story, even long before books when people would sit around the campfire and tell stories about something, and ghost stories, and people would start feeling it, and in their mind they could picture it. Or if they close their eyes, it would feel like it's really happening, and they remember it vividly. Those are all hypnotic states.”
In many ways, this episode is a companion piece to our episodes on the mind-body connection and psychedelic therapy, which also explore alternative or supplementary treatments to those prescribed by the mainstream healthcare industry.
Click here for the full episode.
Chen Qiufan is the co-author of AI 2041: Ten Visions for the Future, which we included on our ‘Infinite Loops Canon’ list of 30 books that have shaped the podcast.
Part science fiction, part science forecasting, over ten short stories, AI 2041 imagines the different ways, good and bad, that AI will impact our society. The central thesis? AI will transform our lives, but we remain masters of our fate.
We loved the range of stories and possibilities presented in the book and had a blast chatting with Chen about how AI could affect our lives.
Here’s Chen on the need for “new narratives” to navigate us through our uncertain future:
“So I think this story reminds us the solution might not always only about the technology, but also beyond the technology. It's about the social construction, it's about the political system, it's about the redistribution mechanism. So it's how we design everything with running the world. But all of those was built upon our belief, our consensus, our value system. So those foundations are even more difficult to be challenged, to be changed because all of the story of capitalism have been told in the past centuries, and all of those challenges have failed. So we didn't come up with anything new, anything revolutionary. I think this is what we lack of here.
As storyteller, I always think that we imagine so many fascinating technologies, inventions, et cetera, et cetera, other species. But why couldn't we come up with some new social system, some new political system that might really inspire people to make the change? So I think we urgently need some voices here from economists and from maybe sociologist and anthropologist. So give us something new maybe from the nature, maybe from, I don't know, mathematics maybe can help us to get rid of this old trap. That's what we need, new narratives, new metaphor, new myth maybe.”
When innovation & entrepreneurship professorEthan Mollicklaunched One Useful Thing in November last year, he intended to discuss a different management paper in every post.
And then ChatGPT happened.
Overnight, Ethan transformed from“an AI-skeptic to an AI-believer.”
Since then, Ethan has transformed his Substack into the ultimate destination for individuals seeking practical and level-headed guidance on integrating AI into their daily lives.
In our conversation, Ethan provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of AI and explains how we can each use AI tools to transform our daily lives.
We also devoured 50 of Ethan’s essays and prepared a synthesis of his most insightful and actionable ideas. You can find our deep dive here.
Dr Pippa has done it all.
- Advised Presidents & Prime Ministers? Tick ✅
- Co-founded an award-winning company? Tick ✅
- Written four books? Tick ✅
She joined the show to discuss why modern leadership has gone wrong and how it can be fixed.
We particularly enjoyed Dr. Pippa’s take on humanity’s “two primary technologies for imposing order and chaos,” which reminds us of our episodes with friend-of-the-show Tom Morgan:
“One is numbers and the other is stories. Between the two, stories are much more powerful. We remember the oldest story of the universe from the Rig Veda. Stories stay with us, and we buy and sell and act on the basis of the emotional response to stories.
We're in a period of history since René Descartes, where we've separated the body from the mind and we've said, "Only science counts, so it's got to be numbers or it's not real." So we've dismissed everything we can't quantify, which I think is a tragic error in human history. We have learned a lot by saying what we do, what we can quantify has given us answers, that's true, but I feel we are on the brink of reintegrating the two. This is a profoundly different way of processing reality than what we've had since Descartes.”
The episode is available here. Click here for our pre-interview primer on some of Dr. Pippa’s most profound insights.
Finally, we welcomed back Brian Roemmele for his second appearance on the show.
Brian delivered what can only be described as a tour-de-force performance, taking us through the decline & fragmentation of wisdom in our society and explaining how his “wisdom-keeping” project will start a movement to bring it back.
Brian’s episode is available here. To say we were excited by his idea is an understatement. More to follow…
✍️ Essays & Articles ✍️
50 Inventions Lived Through By Jim’s Grandfather
Jim’s grandfather, I.A. O’Shaughnessy, was born in 1885 in Stillwater, MN, and died in 1973.
Over the course of his 88 years, he lived through an astounding number of world-changing inventions, from the airplane to email.
Check out the full list here. Prepare for 🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯.
Keep it Simple, Stupid
“The brightest people I have met share a superpower: the ability to make inherently complex things simple and understandable.
And yet, most humans naturally equate complexity with brilliance. Our HumanOS predisposes us to prefer the complex and artificial to the simple and unadorned. The more complex the explanation, the more likely we are to trust it.
But there is something to be said for simplicity.”
The HeyerScope
- What is real wealth, and how much do each of us have?
- How can we learn, think and do faster and better than ever?
- What are the laws of life that every living thing obeys - you included?
- Who we are, how did we get here, and where are we going?
- How can we set a course to create the future we desire?
- What can we learn from the Pi at the center of the universe?
Our friend Mark Heyer has launched a Substack, The HeyerScope: I Think I See, which intends to answer these questions and more.
Mark is one of the most unique and original thinkers we’ve come across. We highly recommend subscribing.
📰 News 📰
OSV Discord
A reminder: the OSV Discord is now open to the public. If you're interested in being part of a creative, supportive, and exciting community - look no further! Join using this form to access exclusive community events, opportunities for collaboration, regular competitions & giveaways, cohort courses & workshops, and more.
O’Shaughnessy Fellowships
June also saw the announcement of our tenth and eleventh O’Shaughnessy Fellowships.
Oghenekevwe Emadago will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to continue researching and developing eco-friendly and cost-effective sanitary pads in Nigeria.
Keshav Sharma will use his grant to continue building an AI & AR platform that enables users to create, edit, and demonstrate 3D models at scale.
Stay tuned for details of our final Fellowship, plus a surprise announcement that we’d originally slated for next year…🤫
🚀 What’s Next? 🚀
July’s guests include Numerai head honcho Richard Craib, LinkedIn provocateur-in-chief Jack Raines & Trapital founder Dan Runcie.
Following his appearance on the show, we will also be teaming up with friend-of-the-show Brian Roemmele to help you discover and capture your profound wisdom. More on that soon!
Here on our Substack, we’ll continue to deliver you the usual selection of deep dives and other ideas that make you go, “hmm…that’s interesting!”
Onwards! 🚀
"😵💫😵💫 This is the episode you are looking for. 😵💫😵💫"
Ha! 💚 🥃
Congrats, very well written and entertaining 🙂