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Just like your plate at Thanksgiving, these Premium Podcast Notes have a little bit of everything. Matt Ridley, the rational optimist himself, offers his perspective on the downfall of the UK, explores how the human brain is similar to a peacock's tail, explains why the US still has the edge in the tech race with China, suggests how ideas are destined to emerge irrespective of a great individual, and ponders how "God" can be relative in religion. And as the gravy on top, he gives a glimpse into his new book where he searches for the pathway to a prosperous future of civilization
Andrew Huberman and Dr. David Spiegel take a deep dive into self-hypnosis. They examine the role of clinical hypnosis for the treatment of chronic anxiety, chronic pain, trauma, stress – and even applications in cancer. Dr. Spiegel explains how to determine your level of hypnotizability (which you can try right away), how breathing, vision, and directed mental focus can modulate internal states and enhance performance, and much more
Adam Moskowitz is a third generation cheese importer who went from failed rapper to running one of America's biggest cheese operations. After hitting rock bottom at 32, he took a $13 an hour cheese counter job to honor his late grandfather and fell completely in love with it. Now he owns multiple cheese companies, founded the Cheesemonger Invitational, and hosts "A Cheese Course" where he interviews passionate people while serving world class cheese. In this episode, Jim and Adam discuss snobbery surrounding American cheese, the fight against industry gatekeepers, and the power of believing in yourself
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“I’ve never felt as pessimistic about my own country than as I do now” – Matt Ridley
The UK has not grown significantly in GDP per capita in the last 15 years
Overspending, overborrowing, overregulating, and bureaucracy have stagnated the economy
Economic problems cause national pride issues and cultural unrest
More people in the UK are arrested for social media posts than in China
Enormous numbers of migrants are entering and not assimilating
The UK Has the Highest Electricity Prices in the Developed World
Energy prices are “the absolute lifeblood” of growth and prosperity
Anti-fracking campaigns across Europe had Russian influence (they want energy dependence)
Norway has drilled 40+ new gas and oil wells in the last year, compared to zero in the UK
Brexit Was the Right Thing to Do, But...
...the country didn’t take advantage of it by...
“Where are the... companies in Europe? The joke is that Europe’s biggest innovation of the last few years is the non-detachable bottle top.” – Matt Ridley
Brexit didn’t remove the UK from Europe’s human rights courts
This enables judges to say that a man who committed a crime in the UK can not be returned to his home country because the...
China vs. U.S.
China has used bottom-up innovation in the past, but now uses... which is why Matt believes China will not overtake the US economically
China’s rise to success under Deng Xiaoping came from ... Under Xi Jinping, those same entrepreneurs now operate under far stricter...
“I’m a bit of a technological determinist. Innovations and technologies can have political implications, and it’s important to ...” – Matt Ridley
Reasons for Optimism: US & UK
“America has been written off before and wrongly so”– Matt Ridley
America has always come to the rescue of the West, both militarily and economically
America is “getting its mojo back” through...
America needs to continue criticizing the UK for “Non-Crime-Hate-Incidents.”
Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, like looking through a camera lens
Any experience that draws us in is a form of hypnosis
Hypnosis involved a narrowing of context and loss of self
An experience is not considered hypnotic if the physical reaction is distracting or makes you think about something else
Stage Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis Are Not the Same: stage hypnosis is mostly about making people look silly for entertainment (Spiegel is not a fan); self-hypnosis is a therapeutic tool used to enter a state of focused attention
Hypnosis Is Very Helpful for Sleep: people tell him they have not slept right in 15 years and now can finally sleep at night using...
Rates of Hypnotizability: about 1/3 of adults are not hypnotizable, 2/3 are hypnotizable – with about 15% extremely hypnotizable
Are You Hypnotizable? Try the Spiegel Eye-Roll Test
There’s a correlation between the capacity to keep eyes up and hypnotizability
Tilt your chin back so you’re looking up toward the ceiling
Direct eyes...
How to Try Hypnosis?
If you want to actually try this, you can use...
To find a serious clinical hypnotist, he recommends...
Look for someone who is licensed and trained in...
he was rudderless as a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, really burnt out by the internet and corporate America and bureaucracy and politics
“Cheese gave me passion and purpose. It became a north star for me as a salesperson.” – Adam Moskowitz
This was in 2007 when his father was selling his business but the deal fell through, so his dad offered him the opportunity to buy his business and he did
He launched a sister company in France in 2008, an import company in 2009, his event business in 2010, all cheese related
Recently he launched a cheese media company called A Cheese Course
The Limbic Connection to... Cheese?
“I’m convinced it’s related to our limbic system…our limbic system is where our memories and motivation are stored, but it’s also where our sense of smell lives.” – Adam Moskowitz
He thinks cheese is one of our first food memories, and milk is in fact our first food memory from suckling from our mother
The original meal plan of a child is grilled cheese, noodles with cheese, macaroni and cheese, pizza, so cheese is part of our diet DNA as a specific human
Cheese has been part of human diet DNA since 8,000 years ago in terms of epigenetics
Cheese is a main food sustenance that allowed humans to tip into civilization, it comes from the fertile crescent
Why Do So Many Europeans Look Down on ‘American Cheese’?
Yes there are 350 million people in America, obesity is a real issue and there is a lot of cheese in bags, but within that framework there is the 1% of artisan cheese makers who are world class and award winning
Europeans do not think there is raw milk cheese in America, they are shocked when they find out there is
Parmesan is raw milk cheese
They have raw milk cheese in America
Adam says the simple answer is why are they ignorant, but it is also great because he loves breaking stereotypes
Europeans always mention Velveeta or Kraft cheese slices when talking about American cheese
Adam does not mind being underdogs and thinks it is changing, an American cheese won at the World Cheese Awards within the last four years
“I’m short. I have been bullied my whole life. I thrive in that environment. Like, look down upon me and watch me roar.” – Adam Moskowitz
Adam’s 2 Ideas He Would Instill in the World: leaders lead and that leaders lead with love, because he thinks the world needs heroes who are not just perfect looking guys in capes but weird passionate people who care and take risks
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“Female health education should also include education about PCOS and endometriosis at a very young age.” – Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi
Tons of women listening either have these conditions or know someone who does, but they came through an education system where this was basically invisible, so they blame themselves instead of the disease
Since the system isn’t doing it, you almost have to treat podcasts and tools like this as your real health class and then advocate for yourself with doctors
The 3 Main Criteria for PCOS (you need to meet 2 out of 3):
clinical signs of high androgens (facial/body hair, acne, oily skin, male-pattern hair thinning)
ovulation dysfunction (irregular cycles, long cycles, fewer than about eight periods a year, cycles they can’t predict)
PCOS-looking ovaries on ultrasound or very high AMH / egg count
Her Advice to You if You’re a Parent: if your teen is constantly on acne meds, doing laser hair removal, has wild mood symptoms around their cycle, or is starting to obsess over food and weight because nothing seems to work, do not just treat it as a vanity thing; you push for a full hormone workup and PCOS evaluation
“PCOS is one of the very few conditions in medicine where supplements make a huge difference.” – Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi
She’s obsessed with supplements that actually move the needle for PCOS: inositol, vitamin D, chromium, curcumin, plant extracts like mulberry leaf, plus lifestyle basics like walking after meals, all specifically to attack insulin resistance and inflammation
Her Big Observation From 25 Years: over 50% of PCOS patients also have endometriosis, even though that’s not in the literature yet, and she has pathology reports and surgical findings to back it up
The Red Flag Checklist for Endometriosis:
period pain that makes you miss school or work
sex that hurts with deep penetration
bowel movements that hurt around your period
constant bloating
Repeated UTIs or bladder pain with negative tests
Fertility Is a Two-Person Project: sperm quality, motility, and count need to be checked just as seriously as egg count and tubes, but men often get evaluated last
For couples struggling, she is big on getting all the data early (you, partner, hormones, structure, immune) instead of losing years to guesswork and half-checked workups
She Gives a Super Clear PMDD Plan: use SSRIs like Prozac or Zoloft only for the luteal phase (about 10 to 14 days before your period), and in perimenopausal women, also consider hormone replacement on top
“If you use language, you’re not a Luddite in my eyes because language is a technology.” - Tinkered Thinking
Calling yourself a Luddite is kind of fake if you still use basic tools, because language, shoes, toothbrushes, and even desks are all technologies that just turned invisible because they are so normal
“Technology is anything that was invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.” – Alan Kay
People only call new stuff tech and forget that the alphabet is just as much a technology as a smartphone
We Normalize the Future Faster Than We Realize
He loves stories that show how quickly people adjust to insane new tech, like the Zipline drone project in Rwanda, where villagers went from awe at flying blood deliveries to complaining that the drone was 30 seconds late in about a week
There is a similar pattern with things like the iPhone or self-driving cars, where people go from “this is science fiction coming true” to “why is the battery so bad” in no time, which hides how wild the tech actually is
That ability to adapt is powerful, but it also makes it easy to miss how transformative something is and to underthink second and third-order effects once the novelty wears off
Why A Synthetic Limbic System Freaks Him Out...
A lot of the scary goals people worry about in AI (like malicious intent or ruthless single minded objectives), probably require something like a limbic system glued onto the intelligence
The problem is that our own limbic system is good for lizard world survival, but pretty dumb for a modern society, so porting that into a super capable system seems like a recipe for trouble
He worries someone will eventually try to bolt a limbic style goal system onto an LLM, and that is one direction he really does not want to see explored
Quantity First, Quality Emerges Later
“Quantity will eventually give you quality by default just from the law of large numbers.”
His whole creative philosophy is that quantity over time generates quality, so he focused on writing a lot and writing fast instead of polishing one perfect paragraph for years
