Kon'nichiwa! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special "Podcast" edition, where I tempt you to indulge your ears with four hours of delightful podcastery (is that a word?). This week's topics include a zen lens on the world, political factions, mental health app guidance, free speech in science, and finding meaning in life outside of KPI's. Enjoy!

• BLATANT FRIEND-PROMOTION -  THE SOUNDS OF L.A.
• PODCAST - On Being: The World Is Our Field of Practice with Angel Kyodo Williams by Krista Tippett
• PODCAST - EconTalk: The Suicide of the West with Jonah Goldberg by Russ Roberts
• RESOURCE - PsyberGuide
• ARTICLE - Quilette: The Scientific Importance of Free Speech by Adam Perkins
• PODCAST - Reboot #60: The Work of Your Life with Khe Hy by Jerry Colonna

• But for us to transform as a society, we have to allow ourselves to be transformed as individuals. And for us to be transformed as individuals, we have to allow for the incompleteness of any of our truths and a real forgiveness for the complexity of human beings and what we’re trapped inside of, so that we’re both able to respond to the oppression, the aggression that we’re confronted with, but we’re able to do that with a deep and abiding sense of “and there are people, human beings, that are at the other end of that baton, that stick, that policy, that are also trapped in something. They’re also trapped in a suffering.” And for sure, we can witness that there are ways in which they’re benefiting from it, but there’s also ways, if one trusts the human heart, that they must be suffering.
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• [Love] is is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are... And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. It’s bigness. It’s allowance. It’s flexibility.
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• We are running into the conflict between people that inhabit an inherited identity with the place that they are — coal-mining country, and the work that they do as a result of the place that they are — up against people that have values and ways of perceiving the world that have shifted because they are not identified by their place and the work that they do in the same way that location and a fixed place tells you who you are and how you be in the world. And that conflict, and the values that come from those two disparate locations, is the conflict that we are up against right now — in this country, in particular, but also in other places in the world.
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• Our teachers... are really the people, the situations that we confront moment to moment, day to day, month to month, year to year, that incite a sense of discomfort, dis-ease, awkwardness in us. And rather than seeing those moments as threats to who we are, if we could reorient, if we could center in our relationship to ourselves as evolving, fluid, ever-expansive creatures whose role is to be in observation of: What is that? What has that inspired? What has that called forth in me, that discomfort that is speaking to something that feels solid and fixed and is now challenged in its location? — if we could do that, if we could live our lives in a way in which we understand that our deepest learning, our deepest capacity for growth comes not from walling ourselves off from the things that make us feel a sense of threat or discomfort or out of alignment or out of sorts, but rather, figuring out what is speaking to us when we feel those things, and what do we have to learn from that teacher that is embodied in that situation, that moment — not so that we become something different than who we are, but that we’re evolving into a greater and greater sense of what it means to be fully human, to be radically, completely in the truth of the human experience and all of its complexities.

• The desire to live tribally, which we are all born with, starts to infect politics. And if you're not on guard for it, it can swamp politics. Virtually every form of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, whether you want to call it right wing or left wing doesn't matter, they're all reactionary. Because they are all trying to restore that tribal sense of social solidarity.
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• The reality is that we're all greedy, self-interest is built into us. Whenever people have a group self-interest, a common interest, they will conspire against the public good... It's what the evolutionary pscyhologist John Tooby calls the Coalition Instinct. We form around an interest, and then we defend it against all attacks, reasonable or otherwise. The founders understood this passionately, and the called this coalition instinct Faction.
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• [Tribalism] only becomes bad when you enlist the power of government to your side and pick one winner against other factions. And that's what the founders wanted to protect against. And that concern has just flown by the wayside in the political moment that we are in, where basically every faction claims that they have the right to use government force any way that they want.
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• For Lord Acton's quote "Power corrupts absolutely"... Acton's point in that [papal] context was not that absolute power corrupted the powerful, it corrupts the people around them... In the story of the emperor who has no clothes, the corruption is all the people who are willing to say that he has great clothes on.
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• For a long time now, the presidency has become more and more of a symbol in the culture wars. And when our guy is on the throne, that's a sign that our side is winning and we are heading towards the kind of America that we think we should be in. And when the other guy is on the throne, it is this sense that everything is coming unraveled.
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• More and more people follow politics like it's entertainment... The MacGuffinization of politics. In film, the MacGuffin is just the thing the hero wants... And the media, both right wing and left wing and main stream, they cover politics like public policy is the MacGuffin... Everyone is talking and thinking in terms of entertainment and drama and reality show, and in that universe, that romantic universe, arguments about the constitution [aren't the focus].
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• William Jennings Bryan had the best summation of populism, where he said, "The people of Nebraska are for free silver, therefore I am for free silver, I will look up the arguments later."
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• Democracy is supposed to be about arguments, disagreements... The ability to use reason and persuasion to convince people to come to your side... You can make a pretty good living talking to audiences that already agree with you... You convince the audience that purity is the highest ideal, not persuasion.
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• The founders never would have dreamed that the branches of government wouldn't be jealous guardians of their own power... There's this fascinating breakdown about the constitutional structure where no one could have anticipated the idea that political leaders wouldn't want to get as much power as possible... Part of it is the corruption of television and mass media, where these guys know they can keep their jobs by having a better media campaign than writing good legislation.

• Bill Hicks declared: “Freedom of speech means you support the right of people to say exactly those ideas which you do not agree with”.
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• We need free speech in science because science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes, or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives, in the vicious, no-holds-barred battle of ideas that we call “science”.
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• The existence of scientific debate is also crucial because as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman remarked in 1963: “There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.” The absence of an authority who decides what is a good idea is a key point because it illustrates that science is a messy business and there is no absolute truth.
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• When I accepted that I would always be wrong, and that my favourite theories are inevitably destined to be replaced by other, better, theories — that is when I really knew that I wanted to be a scientist.
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• When one side of a scientific debate is allowed to silence the other side, this is an impediment to scientific progress because it prevents bad theories being replaced by better theories.
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• ...the tendency to silence scientists with inconvenient opinions has been labeled Lysenkoism since it provides the most famous example of the harm that can be done when competing scientific opinions cannot be expressed equally freely. 

• I can't optimize my way out of the fear [of dying]... And the fixation on the prevention actually means I miss the very happiness and fullness and aliveness that the metrics are meant to deliver. In an effort to not die, I prevent myself from fully living.
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• I love life hackers. 'Cuz you all think that if you add coconut oil and grass-fed butter to your coffee, somehow you're going to smooth out the addiction of caffeine. You all think that suffering is just something that needs to be figured out. And then what - made to go away.
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• There are no metrics. That's the trick. That's the falsity. You don't measure your life's passage in metrics.
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• We wear all of those masks to protect ourselves... There comes a point when the unsorted baggage of our life knocks on the door, the bill collector comes, and the payment is in tears. The answer doesn't lie in figuring out what the metric is in order for you to be present for your wife, or present for your life, to stop pissing on the now. The clue is to understand what you're so damned afraid of... You're afraid of dying [after] an unlived life.
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• What are you not experiencing while you're so worried about not knowing what a meaningful life is? Your life, as it is, right now... There is no past, and there is no future, there is only the present.... In the pursuit of the metrics, you'll have missed the happiness that the metrics are designed to deliver.
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• The answer to being present is to stand still, and listen, and breath... There is no perfect place out there to get to, there is only here.
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• This is a great jiu-jitsu move. We substitute the pursuit of money for the pursuit of meaning. So money no longer becomes a defense against annihilation, meaning becomes a defense against annihilation... Tenpa Rinpoche coined the term "spiritual materialism" - I'm going to go through life collecting all sorts of namaste-like moments, because not me, I don't go through life collecting Mercedes Benz or Rolex watches. It's the same fucking thing. It's all a defense against annihilation.
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• There is an old Buddhist saying, "Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water." Life is chop wood carry water. There is no hacking our way from chopping wood and carrying water. There is only the present.