Random notes from podcasts, YouTube, tweets, and books

Here are notes in no particular order and with no particular focus, just random things I’ve learned and wanted to share, from all the content I’ve recently consumed.

David Perell with the mind bombs:

Ken McElroy on the Peak Prosperity podcast

  • Property taxes will rise; low hanging fruit and much needed revenue for cash-strapped governments
  • Plenty of opportunities during this recession: Airbnb and Uber were started in the last one
  • Believes campus real estate will be a great investment once universities begin to shutter or reduce their footprint

From the book Nature’s Mutiny:
The improvisational, free form of the essay, which Montaigne invented for himself, was the ideal vehicle for observations not only of the world around him but also of himself and his own thoughts, without pressing them into a fixed system or any grand thesis. For Montaigne, good questions were more important than good answers, and he was mainly interested in describing and understanding the fabric of his own life. “It is many years ago,” he wrote, “that I set myself as the only goal of my thinking and that I am not looking at anything or investigating anything but myself.”

I started using Quad9 as my primary DNS after reading this article:
The total winner of this test is Quad9. Blocking 96% of everything I tested in this review. All 12 phishing domains where block and only one malware domain did it let go through. Very impressive results!

Paul Stamets’s amazing YouTube talk on mycology and mushrooms:

  • Largest organism in world is mycelial network in E Oregon, 200 acres, 1 cell layer thick
  • Fungi generate soil
  • Stoned Apes theory: pre Homo sapiens 200k-2m years ago wandered plains hunting, found psychedelic mushrooms in poop of large mammals / prey, ate them, and stimulated neurogenesis
  • Takes psychedelic mushrooms 1-2x each year
  • Lions mane – stops / slows dementia, promotes neurogenesis
  • Interestingly low dose psilocybin led to faster behavior change in mice than high dose (the behavior change was to dissociate bells from shocks, to remove a learned fear response

From the BBC on why and how people disappear in Japan and start new lives:
In Japan, these people are sometimes referred to as “jouhatsu”. That’s the Japanese word for “evaporation”, but it also refers to people who vanish on purpose into thin air, and continue to conceal their whereabouts – potentially for years, even decades.

And finally, a great presentation for interested newbies on machine learning and the algorithms behind it.

…all mistakes mine! Til the next notes update!