Seth: Is it humble to state the obvious, in this case your age? Humility is usually about more subtle characteristics, such as wisdom. Maybe Grant was humble in what he said next (which he doesn’t tell us), after the joke about being 12 years old.

Really looking forward to hearing more of your insights on it, Seth.

Seth: Was his audience “defensive” as you say? Not clear from Grant’s description. As for the “disarming” joke, the question is why was it disarming? Lots of jokes at the start of talks have roughly zero effect, as far as I can tell.

This is basic stuff – in ANY situation being sensitive to the ego of your audience will disarm potential mind-closing resentment and increase receptivity to the message.

Seth: You might be right. But it’s far from “extremely obvious”. Grant explains it quite differently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/magazine/is-giving-the-secret-to-getting-ahead.html

It’s a fascinating story…

Seth: I agree, a plausible interpretation and quite different than what Grant says.

I agree with you whole heartedly. We need to help those that truly care about good governance by getting rid of the monopoly of government, or rather, statism. This would enable those that truly care about others, through the free market, to help their fellow countrymen.

As we saw from Seth’s anecdotal story (which holds much truth) the monopolies don’t work, it is the individual who has interest in making a difference that does. Unfortunately monopolies only create bureaucratic entities that don’t care about their customers.

http://drgominak.com/

I also highly recommend her YouTube videos. I think she’s onto the real mechanism between Vitamin D and sleep.

This is also true of creative endeavors. Sometimes people who don’t like a given creative genre – say, country music – will still set out to write something in the idiom, thinking it is “easy.”

They invariably do atrocious work.

The audience for creative works – and perhaps for things like cities, phones, etc – is itself there in the hopes of loving the thing. So only through love does the creator have even a chance of creating a thing a user would love.

Love from creators is crucial yet undervalued. And the result on the audiences’ side is delight, which is also usually an afterthought.

A good case in point is New York’s repurposing of the disused elevated train tracks into a park. For years it was mocked as a foolish idea. Now cities all over the world are falling over themselves to create their own parks in the sky.

Seth: You might be right: people who dislike government will be bad at it. But the original claim is about the objects of governance.

Katie, do you see things like sauerkraut having an affect on your daughter? Have you stopped eating fermented foods and would you recommend that to others?

Seth: No, this work doesn’t change my mind. The benefits of fermented food are clearly huge. Maybe some people are more sensitive to glutamate than usual — perhaps for enviromental reasons, perhaps for genetic reasons. Sauerkraut is not fermented protein; only fermenting protein produces glutamate.