Deep Dish

If all you care about is avoiding the risk of ruin, New Zealand is a good place to be.

Nolan has stripped the ambiguity that makes Homer’s characters so interesting, and served up a cosy morality play with all the depth of warmed-over Marvel slop.

Almost all my adult life I've been an infovore obsessed with hoovering up all the knowledge.

YEAH SAME QUESTION AS OP.

In this last-ditch diptych, your crusty 89-year-old literary grandaddy completely changes tack, holding forth on the biggest philosophical and scientific questions of our age.

If you think you're a decent speaker of a second language, try spending a full hour narrating a simple suburban environment to a small child.

My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve.

At the exact same time we're seeing a real-life explosion in AI capabilities, I've become much less worried about the prospect of doom.

IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year.

Most apparent biases are, in fact, perfectly good heuristics, and people are far more rational than we have been led to believe.

One year ago my daughter was born.

What makes humans special?

Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across.

We don't talk much these days but we go way back.

What is optionality?

Nothing in this arena can be taken at face value, which makes it unusually fertile ground for battle-testing your own critical thinking skills.

No, not even at these apparently ridiculous prices.

Happiness is a greased pig chase: the harder you grab at it, the more it squirms away.

As many of you know, I've been working on a book project for the last few years.

Blogging is an endurance sport.

CLEARANCE SALE!

'Rise and grind' posts are cringe, but let's not toss the baby out with the essential oil-infused bathwater.

This is a GTD guide I wrote for the Roam Research team.

There are whispers that the efficient-market hypothesis is dead, or dying, or at least has a very nasty cough.

A self-experiment that doesn't generate obvious results, like taking tiny, sub-threshold doses of LSD, crosses the line into fiddling on the margin.

A black swan event unleashes destruction, but also opportunity.

Video games give you a clear pathway for leveling up into a muscle-bound hero, and impressing scantily-clad elven princesses with your Very Big Sword.

Our meatsack bodies slavishly plod along at the precise rate of one second per second.

Time for some Reverse Life Coaching: a shared ambition to become less ambitious.

The British philosopher speaks out on the curse of fame, the cruel expectations of self-help, and why we're all "hellish propositions".

What is optionality?

There’s no such thing as cosmic justice.

If you wear the same outfit over and over, nothing bad happens.

The history of finance is a history of brains splattered on the pavement.

The standard line is that market crashes just don’t matter a damn if you're a long-term investor.

As it turns out, hammocks are not ergonomically designed workspaces, and sand and electronics don't play nicely together.

The sleepy beach town of Da Nang is an underappreciated gem, but its star seems to be on the rise.

The idea that buying high-quality stuff saves you money in the long run is overrated, but there's a way to get the best of both worlds.

Something I’ve learned the hard way is that you can absolutely have too much of a good thing.

Maybe you have a voice in your head that whispers ‘jump!’

There’s a huge body of evidence that goal setting works, which is why everyone refuses to shut up about it.

If you convince yourself the Law of Attraction is true, maybe it will improve your life.

If you skip the top-tier or ‘must-do’ attraction, you will usually have a way better time at a fraction of the price.

Marie Kondo—queen of decluttering, bestselling author, empire-builder—hears voices in her head.

Developing broad interests and skills not only dovetails perfectly with the frugal life, but acts as a force multiplier that propels you towards your financial goals at blistering speed.

"Marry an accountant, but have occasional flings with rock stars."

I stretched out my bandaged hand, and this time the knife took a finger off.

Imagine your dad giving you a lecture about life, except your dad is Canadian, has an IQ of ~150, and is voiced by Kermit the Frog.

The 4HWW's unintended legacy is a groundswell of self-loathing in the digital nomad community.

Living off ramen in your mom's basement while you wait for your genius business idea or novel to hit the big time is a dead end.