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A conversation between Bayan Furutan and Alex Buxeda on whether an "ought" can be derived from an "is," whether free will exists, and what it would take to prove it doesn't. Alex argues, along Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky lines, that free will is an illusion: we are patterns of matter running a nested hierarchy of priors, from physics to biology to culture, and every choice is ruled by cause and effect. Awareness of the universe, on this view, collapses the is and the ought into one. Bayan holds free will as an axiom, accepted the way we accept that our senses reflect reality, and sets a high bar for disproving it: predict my behavior as reliably as we predict a planet's orbit. Between those poles the conversation ranges across the thermostat as the smallest unit of decision, natural selection and entropy, poker and game theory, the abortion debate as a case of "a spectrum matching a spectrum," the Mormons as a test of whether a false belief can still be fit, and whether you act as if you have agency, or watching yourself act? Chapters: 0:00 Can an ought be derived from an is? 1:51 The man hit by a car: same "is," different "oughts" 4:55 Every ought needs an "if": survival as the hidden premise 7:05 Paying back what it took to build you: entropy and natural selection 9:21 "What are you doing" vs. "why are you doing it" 11:53 Deriving the why from the what, and how bandwidth changes the answer 13:47 Co-evolution: black holes, universes, and turtles all the way down 16:16 Why criticism needs an alternative: the Enlightenment proposal 18:47 Free will as the real crux: is it required for an "ought"? 20:34 Hard determinism, Sam Harris, and "if you were Stalin" 22:15 Experience vs. proof: why Bayan holds free will as an axiom 27:43 Defining free will: what would non-free will even mean? 28:39 The thermostat as the smallest unit of decision 29:46 Is consciousness computational? Penrose and the counter 31:07 Poker, game theory, and modeling the other player 32:06 The real dividing line: can you act against your nature? 37:11 Zooming out: the lineage that never jumps into the street 40:19 Signal, noise, and why bigger samples reveal the laws of nature 42:04 Are you a set of instructions? The direct question 45:40 "Yes." Sapolsky and the nested hierarchy of priors 54:36 Diminishing returns toward 100%: chipping at the variance 1:00:07 A thought experiment: what correlation would settle it? 1:01:00 The god-of-the-gaps objection and spontaneous generation 1:03:43 Predictability across a lifetime: fetus, mid-20s, old age 1:07:16 At what point does free will emerge? The abortion parallel 1:10:42 A spectrum must be matched by a spectrum: the speeding-ticket model 1:18:17 Where does a human start having rights and obligations? 1:23:32 A reasonable hypothesis, but not proof: the high threshold 1:26:35 Markets, courts, and how truth is discovered collectively 1:30:11 The beehive: how a spectrum emerges from

I am joined by neuroscientist Karl Friston to discuss, from first principles, what trust is. The trust we put in others, and in our institutions, is a sociological feature emergent from biology. It is here that predictions first appear. This conversation inspired an article we co-wrote: ⁠https://schweizermonat.ch/trust-is-a-law-of-nature/ 0:00 What is trust, in active inference terms? 1:07 Trust in your own future: planning as inference 2:16 Confidence, precision, and the shape of a belief 3:45 Two ways to minimize surprise: seeking info vs. avoiding surprise 5:48 Epistemic trust: choosing where to get your news 6:24 Scale invariance: from eye movements to which institutions you trust 8:20 Trust as a meta-judgment of your past predictions 9:11 The statistician's view: estimating risk, not just reward 10:56 When second-order inference fails: hallucinations and neglect 12:50 Delusional institutions: the same mechanics in markets and geopolitics 13:45 Precision as attention: what you trust is what you attend to 14:56 Rediscovering natural selection from a different angle 17:20 Bayesian model selection is nature's way of selecting phenotypes 19:58 Why the free energy principle complies with itself 21:14 Donald Hoffman, mortal computation, and neuronal chauvinism 22:31 We are the substrate: predicting ourselves into existence 24:07 Everything is a hypothesis, including time and the self 25:10 Do we see truth? What can be ignored isn't true 26:13 There is no truth, only the best inference for me 27:33 Synchronization of chaos: coupling your brain to the world 28:45 A joint free energy solution: becoming mutually predictable 29:38 Aligned interests: why you trust the table, your liver, and me 31:52 Negative valence: trusting that a lion wants to eat you 32:47 Shorting the BBC: the cost of distrust 33:33 Fake news, epistemic trust, and the pillars of autocracy 34:15 Sharing a generative model: how we become predictable to each other 35:47 Defining yourself by the states you refuse to occupy 38:04 Is this source generated by someone like me? 38:36 Why echo chambers are Bayes-optimal until communities open 39:54 Too many choices: why it's awful for young people now 40:58 Friston: no phone, no social media, no awful uncertainty 41:15 Australia's under-16 social media ban, seen mathematically 42:06 Information like capital: who should handle how much 42:48 The pathology: social media attracts more capital when you lose 43:28 Markets are grown up, social media is pre-adolescent 44:11 Science as selection: theories as surviving hypotheses 44:35 Is religion "true"? The fitness of a simple generative model 46:03 Narrowing choice: why fewer options relieves angst 47:05 "You are your own existence proof" 48:07 Collapsing is and ought: first survive, then philosophize 49:08 "I am, therefore I think" 50:23 The relational aspect: no standalone measure of goodness 53:30 Hardware and software differ only in speed of change 54:33 The renormalization group: same rules at every scale 55:07 Separation of temporal scales: growing slow, learning fast 56:15 What we inherit is learnability, not a finished world model 57:40 Why foolishness was selected for: the reckless years 59:21 "Did evolution fool us?" The value of unsophisticated agents 1:00:24 Variance creates arbitrage: Pinker and common knowledge 1:01:25 Closing thoughts

Lukas Leuzinger and Alex Buxeda interview Cass Sunstein for Schweizer Monat. They dissect the mechanics of liberalism. Sunstein defines a tradition that encompasses Hayek and Burke. He counters the claims of Patrick Deneen. He argues that choice does not destroy faith or family. The dialogue shifts to nudges. Sunstein explains how choice architecture assists humans without it being manipulation. They analyze speech standards. They contrast the First Amendment with the laws of Switzerland and Germany. Sunstein outlines the divisions of power. He warns against the expansion of the executive. Buy Sunstein's latest book: On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom Check Sunstein's books here

Barbara Kolm, President of the Austrian School of Economics, joins Alex Buxeda to dismantle the myths of monetary nationalism, expose the political incentives behind inflation, and explain why trust collapses when money becomes a political tool. They explore Carl Menger’s legacy, why money is a discovery not an invention, how time and information shape economic order, and why Europe is quietly drifting toward central planning through the “law of rules”.From Bitcoin’s “don’t trust, verify,” to demographic decline, taxation traps, bureaucratic overreach, CBDCs, nudging theory, and the collapse of competitiveness in Europe, this episode is a deep dive into the institutions that shape freedom, responsibility, and prosperity.   0:00 Monetary nationalism and why debasing your currency backfires 1:54 What sound money is, and why states debase it 4:01 Menger vs. Knapp: money as discovery, not law 7:52 Time, value, and why information spreads slowly 10:01 Stability, the rule of law, and the "law of rules" 11:59 Brussels, central planning, and the lost subsidiarity principle 15:17 Europe's demographic collapse and falling productivity 17:46 Taxes on labor and why no one works more 20:03 The hidden costs in tax and social security 22:04 Capital flees to where it's best treated: Venezuela 23:31 Price tags on government: making the cost visible 27:08 Social justice, responsibility, and providing opportunity vs. redistribution 32:04 Fractional reserve, cash limits, and destroying property rights 34:35 CBDCs, self-sovereignty, and why cash is the ultimate settlement 38:11 Nudging as central planning: Spain's blackout and Germany's solar 41:52 Closing thoughts

In this episode, Tobe joins me to discuss how consilience collapses concepts, the nature of entropy, markets as anticipation machines, biology as a model of past environments that survives by matching the present and future, the division of labor freeing mental bandwidth, energy as the basis of value, and the provisional nature of all knowledge. 0:00 Defining entropy: not disorder, but the fall toward the probable 2:07 Local order vs. global decay: the zero-sum game 4:19 One model, and the case against synonyms 4:53 Is model-building epistemologically bankrupt? 6:37 "Your longing for capital-T truth is quasi-religious" 7:46 There's no way out of building a model 10:55 Why zero-sum can be rejected empirically 13:24 Entropy, time, and space as the same thing 16:07 Local order: life reversing the global trend 20:00 Big bang, heat death, and where life emerges between 21:23 The coffee and milk: beauty before mixing 23:24 Markets as anticipation machines: shorting the CEO 25:45 Short vs. portfolio: two different activities 27:54 Market makers set the price, not the uncertainty 30:57 Prediction as the wiring of the brain 34:09 Dispelling uncertainty and replacing it with control 36:26 Shepherd and sheep: does the shepherd choose his power? 38:16 Free will underlies entropy: escaping cause and effect 41:15 Dennett and why free will has been a distraction 43:46 Freedom from what? Coercion, violence, and flourishing 48:00 Switzerland's tax on labor and the myth of the simple rule 51:11 The hidden meta-tax of thinking about tax 53:31 Everything is simplification: the laptop and division of labor 56:37 Evaluating worthiness: marginal returns vs. speculation 59:04 The Microsoft vs. Apple mistake: looking deeper 1:01:09 You always build with tools you don't understand 1:04:42 Why complexity is manufactured: people want power over you 1:07:14 Obscure writing, French culture, and Dawkins 1:09:44 Free speech: the purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die 1:11:00 Energy as the basis of value: the 50,000-calorie meal 1:17:03 Why slavery isn't profitable in the long run 1:18:52 Did you arrive at a truth, or just short a bad strategy? 1:23:57 Is the economy zero-sum? Ingenuity as the ultimate resource 1:25:24 Marxism, surplus, and why a free market corrects it 1:29:52 The dot-com implosion: the market, or delusion? 1:33:36 Physics vs. models: the underlying and the error 1:36:00 Silly ideas: religion, Marxism, and the baby with the bathwater 1:39:16 "Isn't this just: knowledge is provisional?" 1:42:13 Two centuries of plummeting costs: the map must fit reality 1:44:04 The religious view vs. the Spinozan empiricist view 1:50:32 Is the heat death empirical, or a conjecture? 1:53:16 The alien who made your bed: the unfalsifiable claim 1:57:02 Bayesian priors and why the hypothetical adds nothing 2:03:28 Past and future as symmetrical in uncertainty 2:06:28 What a hedge actually is: the dangerous street 2:08:41 Managing downside vs. engineering the upside 2:11:46 Taleb's bet: knowing who goes bankrupt, not who gets rich 2:13:05 The engineer who touches reality vs. the abstracted manager 2:16:00 The mechanic and the manager: different data, not a hierarchy 2:19:16 An ever-richer prior, not an ever-simpler model 2:23:05 Wittgenstein: words have no meaning on their own 2:24:09 Why LLMs work: the latent space, not a simple model 2:28:04 Could we rebuild it if it broke? The blueprint survives 2:28:55 Is 10% a good test of importance? Tech, Nvidia, the limit 2:33:29 Subsidizing bad engineers so the good ones stay 2:34:09 Back to entropy: God is dead, humans just do their thing

Today, I had a conversation with Fengzheng Gao. Fengzheng is a researcher specializing in Microalgal Biotechnology, and he holds two doctorates, one in Bioprocess Engineering and another one in Aquatic Product Processing and Storage Engineering. He has contributed to over 20 scientific publications. We talked about the potential of microalgae in optimizing the food chain in order to provide abundant food to the poorest at an accessible cost, how microalgae can supplement the iron intake of the people suffering from iron deficiencies better than conventional iron supplements, the vastly promising future of algae strains in solving any nutritional problem we might face, bioengineering as a solution to climate change and much more. Check Gao's Linkedin Google Scholar Profile⁠ 0:00 Microalgae for iron deficiency: spirulina beats the control 1:26 Why microalgae could revolutionize food 5:22 100 times more iron than beef, and other valuable compounds 7:17 Concentration vs. absorption: bioavailability explained 9:14 Filling the gap between algae production and nutrition science 11:11 Why maximizing one number tells you almost nothing 13:03 A luminous cube of algae: the efficiency of photosynthesis 15:52 Selecting strains by natural selection instead of gene editing 20:00 Why lab-selected strains count as "wild type" and are allowed 21:52 Where spirulina came from: the lakes of Mexico and Africa 23:47 Why spirulina is a master food source 25:44 Iron deficiency affects two billion people 27:55 Why women and children suffer most 28:34 A speculation on epigenetic adaptation to blood loss 30:55 Human ingenuity as the last bottleneck 35:08 Iron as the growth bottleneck of the oceans 38:19 Iron dumping to fight climate change: a crazy idea 39:53 Algae, not rainforests, are the lungs of the Earth 41:00 Extreme strains: algae from a volcano at pH 1.5 42:56 Could a super-fit mutant take over the world? 46:36 Nature's balance and the MMA analogy 47:31 Closing thoughts

Abel Abelson, a neurodivergent writer and YouTuber, has navigated the unique challenges of being distinct from the majority, on which our conversation focuses mainly. He was recognized by Mensa with an IQ of 133, which places him in the 98th percentile in terms of cognitive ability. Today we talked about whether every problem can be solved through further understanding, how one can be content with the fact that one will be discontent, the apparent incompatibility of acceptance and performance, how to define happiness, the need for enough similarities between two people to have a successful relationship, the pursuit of transcendent threads of logic, how the reason you like football has nothing to do with football and all to do with the fact that you are an ape, the huge variance among people in curiosity and intelligence and the best way to approach it, disgustingness of the anti-egalitarian nature of the massive differences in intelligence across the population, the leverage of your actions as a measure of your intelligence, the nature of trauma, the power of mindfulness, the self-fulfilling effect of believing that you have a problem, progressive voluntary exposure as a solution to fear and trauma, the incoherence of free will as uncaused behavior, the need for immediate regulation of our emotions after a dramatically negative event to avoid trauma, the need to update our knowledge faster than every 1000 years, the perpetual ability to establish dialogue if you criticize the antibodies of the incendiary ideas, and the incoherence of the Naturalistic fallacy. You can find Abel on ⁠YouTube⁠ Buy Abel’s books on ⁠Amazon 0:00 Can everything be solved through understanding? 7:54 Suffering, acceptance, and via negativa 14:48 Happiness: wholeness vs. progress toward a goal 23:46 Curiosity, parochialism, and knowledge that travels 34:03 Intelligence, moral value, and the research on IQ 54:58 The mind is flat: perception, brains in jars, Feynman 1:21:08 Trauma, implicit memory, and the silent treatment 1:41:15 Pain, self-inflicted affliction, and the psychiatric industry 1:52:51 Evil, sadism, and the child who makes sense of abuse 2:14:50 The limits of rationality: always after the fact 2:29:57 The scientific method, religion, and the pork taboo 2:44:15 Peterson, atheism, and how to arrange society 2:51:52 The Nazi with the gun: dogmatism, fear, and dialogue

Today I am joined by my friend Abdi. In this conversation we talked about: that what causes suffering is the interpretation of the facts, not the facts themselves, framing free will as the ability to ditch a vice, how we don't choose to choose-proving the inexistence of free will as unconstrained decisions, how uncaused behavior is an incoherent concept as a round square, how 99% of the cost of vice is in the creation of future vice, the end of history illusion, how the misalignment between feedback and reality is THE civilizational problem, how we are drowning in information-related to the paradox of choice that emerges from more abundance than one can handle, the explore-exploit tradeoff, how we should be open to being surprised, how as Aristotle said the sweet spot is in the mean between the extremes, how morality is a navigation problem, how trying to falsify stereotypes can be extremely valuable, how we should treat others as if we could learn something from them, the need for both conservatism and progressivism, how blaming is mostly useless, how virtue is always in our hands.

Today I had a conversation with Lukas S, he is a personal coach that focuses on human performance and mindset training. Check him out on Instagram at ⁠⁠otokstrength⁠⁠ or online at ⁠⁠otokstrength.com⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠theprotocol.life⁠⁠ We talked about how complaining is useless but it feels good to us, how finding common ground with people who believe opposite ideas is what allows your or others' minds to be changed, the importance of self-awareness to not be fooled into the fake things that the status quo advocates for, distinguishing what furthers our long-term objectives and what does not, how getting rid of what does not contribute to the long-term objectives maximizes our potential, how we have agency but admitting so requires taking responsibility over our mediocre lives, how doing less is the key to perform more (via negativa), how enduring through long periods of time without positive feedback is what suck feels like and it is the thing that differentiates success from mediocrity, the importance of keeping promises to ourselves, and how all levels of well-being (like relationships, finance, and health) should be taken care of in order to have a good life and how it is hard to dismiss one without doing so with the others.

Today I had the pleasure to have a conversation with Harvey Silverglate, he is an American attorney, author, and civil liberties advocate. He is best known for his work in defending individual rights and freedom of speech. Silverglate has been involved in numerous high-profile cases and has written extensively on issues related to civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 1999, an organization dedicated to protecting free speech and due process rights. He has also written several books, including Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent⁠, ⁠Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse⁠ and ⁠The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses⁠. We talked about The similarities between free speech, the scientific method and traditional liberal values, How the decentralized marketplace of ideas is better at finding truth than centralized power, How interests are aligned in the long term, How intolerance to opposing ideas fuels censorship, The impossibility of China overcoming the US as the world's superpower due to the internal corruptness of its system, The primacy of freedom over material abundance even if they are complementary, The need for the smallest units to be subjected to a process of natural selection so that bigger ones can prevail as in ‘‘The purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die instead of us’’, How dogmatism forced Larry Summers to resign his position as president from harvard, Harvey’s marriage advice, That a Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his actions, How administrators drain colleagues' resources, The counter productive and racist nature of affirmative action, The role of freedom of speech in allowing non-mainstream opinions to be voiced, Meritocracy, And how we have nothing apart from dialogue as an alternative to violence.

Victor Dover is an innovator in city planning, neighborhood design and street design, he serves as president of the Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade and as a board member of the National Recreation & Parks Association. We talk about how the cost of car dependency is hidden from the individual by governmental subsidies, how the promised ‘’car freedom’’ in the 50s became car dependence which newer generations are rejecting, how maximum flow of cars occurs at medium speeds, the evil of minimum parking lots because it causes car dependence, that 0 is an absurd price for parking, that people will use the infrastructure that is built, the bankrupting nature of highways and the huge contrast of the big return on investment of bike lanes(both in financial and healthcare terms), how unbundling the price of apartments from that of parking spaces would make people realize how expensive cars are, the overprescription of both parking and opioids in the US, how reducing population density increases traffic due to increased kilometers driven, how new businesses like Uber and Cabify are diminishing the amount of parking demanded & how dynamic parking pricing according to demand is optimal. Buy his book Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns Check his web page at doverkohl.com Check his YouTube channel at @DoverKohl

Today I had a conversation with David E. Feldman, he is an author of mysteries, crime fiction and the occasional standalone novel, which might be called literary fiction, historical drama or family saga. David has overcome drug addiction, spinal problems that were heading for paralysis, 2 hip replacements, intestinal resection with colostomy and cancer. He is also a working musician and painter. We talked about the coexistence of the better and worse angels of our nature, the key for a successful marriage, our natural curiosity toward hidden plots or conspiracies, the interconnectedness of the world, spirituality, science, the massive magnitude of our ignorance, causality, that the conditions of something to exists have to be given in order for it to exist, if they do not, that thing does not exist, the nature of the mind, consciousness, panpsychism, rational tradeoffs, the need for compassion, the unjustified nature of being unkind to anyone, and much more! His most recent books include A Special Storm: Dora Ellison's Mystery Book 5 and The Neighborhood, which is about a Black family moving into an all white neighborhood. Check David’s webpage at davidefeldman.com Check David’s books at his Amazon page

I am joined today by my friend Emilio to discuss the inevitable end of our journey, the value of noticing your own mortality, the dichotomy between life and death, the process of appreciating things and people while they are around us, the need for acting in a virtuous manner while we can, how the Stoics dealt with death and whether developing an objective morality is possible.

Jeevan Matharu is a wealth management partner at True Potential LLP and transformational coach at Vanquish transformational coaching. We discussed limiting thoughts, imposter syndrome, unconditional commitments leading to deeper consequences(as in marriage, the externalization of justice through the legal system and not stealing organs) not foreseeable by a narrow analysis, how being rational requires taking into account other people’s irrationality, the origin of morality, the naturalistic fallacy, raw darwinism determining what exists at the level of moral judgment, the importance of realizing the difference between what feels good and what is good, the need for enjoying your craft to achieve top performance, the need for dialogue in avoiding violence, how it is not the most violent chimp that dominates but the most cohesive one, how bureaucracy is a system which conveniently separates people of the consequences of their acts, natural selection in relation to who rules a country and your mind and the difference between Real vs Deal friends. Check Jeevan’s Linkdin Jeevan’s Instagram Jeevan’s Webpage Check his book Become a Person of Value

My good friend Luca joins me to discuss the difference between what FEELS good and what IS good, a doughnut feels good but is not good(in the long term), our feelings fool us. We talk about the trueness and fakeness of different feelings which is in the bullseye of effective altruism’s principal flaw: that what feels the best when doing good is not what has the biggest impact, zero sum vs positive sum games, Intelligence singularity, utilitarian ethics reduced to the absurd with the repugnant conclusion, that we have trade offs all the way down, the high cost of nationalism, that for me to be rational requires taking into account your irrationality, the scientific method, that applying selection at a lower level allows higher levels to not be killed, Goodhart's law, and that Ideas being selected for in our minds in a natural selection way makes us unable to get away of the naturalistic fallacy in some way.