Brian Wiesner

there is a third way, the Goldilocks Zone : we get increasingly smart and capable helpers without eliminating the need for humans, or birthing beings that have any desire to eliminate humans.

That is the implication of agreeing with Leopold’s curve but disagreeing with the mapping. It’s what you get when you believe in straight lines on a graph... See more

Instead it is an argument to get to work building that kind of social trust in as many places as possible, because we’re going to need it. We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t... See more

Spaniards are good at living close together – with around 90% of the population now squashed into less than 30% of the country’s territory, they’ve little choice. What’s more, 65% live in flats – almost half of all pisos measure between 60 and 90 metres squared.

There was a time where I could hardly even pay attention to the blooms, where I barely noticed they were there. There was a time where I felt agnostic to the seasons; where I thought that it was always time to work the earth, to pound the soil, to prepare for blooms—forgetting, of course, to appreciate them when they did appear.

It made me start to wonder just how much I’d been affected by the bubble of prosaic routine in the US, feeling the only path to success was rigidly linear. This was a gentle reminder that there were no straight lines on the path to success. Success became a universe of possibilities. Their energy imbued my world with new, limitless horizons.

Life... See more

Spain's fix for a lonely planet

Takeaways from Jerry Seinfeld on Tim Ferriss:

• To survive in comedy you have to be a writer

• “As any writer can tell you it’s 95% re-write”

• “I think I could solve just about anyone’s life, I don’t care what you do, with weight training and transcendental meditation” Jerry Seinfeld

• “If you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last

... See more

This is the backdrop of the whole phone as an extension of arm thing. The way that we experience time is completely warped now. Time has been compressed to the past and present and future all at once as we interact with everything all of the time across every time period, as Douglas Rushkoff discusses in his (very good book!) Present Shock .

People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape other people. We should be thoughtful about the kind of transformation we opt into.