Episoder
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Hi friends,
In this conversation, I talk with Hamish about the experiences have shaped his journey through life so far, and the societal problems he is trying to solve through developing Substack.
Hamish shares how connection with a special tribe when he moved to study at Dunedin was an important part of his journey, as well as his sink-or-swim move to Hong Kong, and then joining Tesla as Lead Writer.
Hamish is the author of Insane Mode: How Elon Muskâs Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil. He is a New Zealander living in San Francisco.
Enjoy our conversation and be sure to drop a comment about what you think. Please leave a review on Apple podcasts - it helps people find the show, and helps me out a ton too. Thanks.
If youâre a paid member, thanks for your support. I couldnât do this without you. Please consider becoming a paid member if you arenât already.
Cheers,
Sarb
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8.50am - Wellington City
It's Sunday morning and it's the moment of truth. I'm in Wellington CBD and I am about to go and do my supervised RAT. I need a negative test in order to get on my flight to LA and then on to London later on today. So this is one of the places in Wellington (Chemist Warehouse) that does it. I'm recording this on my Apple Watch so I'm hopefully this is still going to be audible for you but I'm going to go in now. I'm about 10 minutes early for my appointment and let's see how we go âŠ
8.56am
Iâve just done the test. You actually just do the test yourself - the pharmacist was there watching you and making sure your form is good. Just five twists in each nostril on the same swab and now I'm outside waiting. I will see if I just keep that one red line on the RAT - I am I'm hoping they donât see two lines. Actually pretty nervous now. If I am positive, I donât think I can fly for at least another 7 days. And that will screw a whole lot of arrangements up.
9.04am
I just got my passport back but I've been told I've got another 15 minutes to wait which is more than a little nerve racking âŠ
9.20am
Oh that's an absolute relief. I've just got my Covid negative test back and I've got all the documentation - everything that I need now to board my plane to Los Angeles and London later on today.
Gosh that was quite nerve racking but pretty simple. You do the test yourself but you are watched by the pharmacist to make sure that you're doing it correctly and they're the ones that do all the reagent stuff back behind the scenes whilst you're outside in the waiting. They see to all the paperwork for you - you do need to take your passport with you to confirm your identity and so that they can put that down on the documentation. Iâm assuming that can be cross checked when you're at the airport. Alright, I hope that's helpful. I'm just going to hang out with my family now for the rest of the day and in a much more a stressfree way before I head to the airport around about 4 o'clock.
3.30pm - Wellington Airport
I'm here at Wellington airport and I'm just going to try and check in and see everything that's involved with that. Wish me luck once again.
4pm
Reflecting back on that little experience, walking through the airport maybe about 30% of people are wearing masks here in Wellington. Check-in itself was pretty easy. I presented my Covid vaccination proof - the international vaccine certificate, the Covid negative supervised RAT I did this morning, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) form for the US was all signed and details completed, and the ESTA on my passport was all done. They did the usual thing with the passport and boarding cards and it was all pretty painless.
They had a fish through my stuff in security and had a little bit of an issue with a coin purse that is a little bit too jammed with the silver quarter dollars.
âMaybe take that out next time you go through securityâ, they said because I couldn't see through it.
Other than that, I am I'm here with a coffee. I'll probably just sort this podcast out and take a few photos on my way through from Wellington up to Auckland. When I get to the airport I've been assured that there will be extra security for people going through to the US and I'll await to see what that's like.
In the meantime, I'll guess I'll have that coffee - a decaf given it's so late at about 4 pm now.
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Manglende episoder?
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Listen above to an interview I did today with Bernard Hickey from the excellent The KÄkÄ Substack. It really is rather excellent and I can highly recommend you take a look if you havenât already.
Todayâs post is the latest in a series of deeper dives Iâll make into topics that come up in my curated weekly Noise Reduction newsletter, and / or public interest topics and other good stuff. I couldnât do this work without the support of my paid subscribers. Thank you. If youâre not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.
Financial insecurity tightly constrains how we experience the world. It also limits the trajectories of life that may be available to us.
This is not about personal responsibility and having the resourcefulness or energy to âchooseâ to do something about your situation. Many of these âchoicesâ are not available for us to make - not because we donât have money at the moment, but because our entire relationship with money and its inter-relationship with how we meet our most fundamental needs have become warped.
Financial precarity means this is not a level playing field
In modern society, money is very much tied up in our sense of self-worth. Iâm not talking about the amount of money you need to buy a flash car, or an iPhone.
Iâm talking about the basics.
Not just feeding, clothing and housing ourselves and our loved ones, but also not sticking out and being socially identified as impoverished. Not being that kid with the gaping holes in their uniform, or shoes that are leaky or donât fit. Or perhaps not having shoes at all.
A life of dignity, not unending shame.
And according to a report by the Child Poverty Action Group in 2017, over 1 in 4 children in New Zealand were living in relative income poverty. Itâs unlikely things have got much better, especially in these inflationary times.
We often think that mental health issues cause poverty. But this simplifies and misrepresents the relationship in all kinds of ways. The link between poverty and childrenâs mental health is well recognised in a range of international research. This relationship not only affects childhood experience, but also extends out into adulthood too. Not only does impoverishment cause mental health issues, it also means people who are financially insecure just donât have the bandwidth available, the luxury of being able to think about wide-ranging life issues and pleasurable pursuits in ways that people who are financially stable are able to do.
Scarcity âconsumes your mental bandwidthâ âŠ
It crashes your IQ by 13-points - that the equivalent to trying to think after being forced to stay up all night without sleep. Thatâs how powerful scarcity is.
Imagine that, day in, day out.
Financial insecurity corrodes your adaptive capacity
Think about it like this: when you have financial security, when you have money to deal with short-term stresses that need cash to solve them, you have a reserve of adaptive capacity that helps to smooth out the ups-and-downs of life. Sure, they may throw you off kilter for a while, and while money wonât solve everything, it can go a long way towards solving your problem. Other stresses that pop up during this time will be unpleasant, but are manageable.
People without that cash, without that financial security are going to not only feel that short-term stress a lot more because they know they donât have the financial means to deal with them, but it then cascades to how they experience further short-term stresses: much more acute, and far more disturbing.
Constant financial insecurity can also change how we process information
Have a comfortable buffer of cash means that youâre less likely to see the world as a threat all the time. Stresses come and stresses go, but being financially stable enables you not only to think strategically and creatively but also not to ruminate and obsess about how to get yourself out of a tricky situation. Money helps you to move on and think differently.
However, tight financial constraints and / or a history of finding it difficult to make ends meet means that we can be a perpetual state of apprehension, seeing threat everywhere. Food prices, overcrowded houses causing family strife, and living in houses that are hard to heat. Parents are working multiple jobs and are preoccupied with navigating their way through a tough world and not being able to spend enough time with their kids, even though they desperately want to.
âA person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they donât have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. Itâs the other tasks where they perform poorly.â
âThe fallout of neglecting other areas of life may loom larger for a person just scraping by... Late fees tacked on to a forgotten rent payment, a job lost because of poor time-management â these make a tight money situation worse. And as people get poorer, they tend to make difficult and often costly decisions that further perpetuate their hardshipâ - Eldar Shafir, Princetonâs William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs
The luxury of bandwidth
This is not a delusion: the world really is a harsher place when we are financially insecure. We have fewer choices available, and our minds are fixed on solving the problem in the here-and-now.
This is how the brain works. Creative, playful, sensitive and strategic thinking are luxuries our brains afford us when the threat has passed. If we are in a constant state of threat-management, we seldom experience these brain states. We are just focused on managing the latest in a long line of seemingly never-ending stresses. We can become both aggressive in trying to fight the latest threat, yet also feel helpless in the face of overwhelming odds.
Here is the plausible link to not only limited choices and seemingly âbad decisionsâ as they have been framed, but also to how these states can be passed on from one generation to another. Growing up in financial insecurity seriously impoverishes the time you get to spend in creative or strategic states that are playful or can focus on the long-term. You grow up in an environment of trying to manage the here-and-how, and how threatening this can be.
So we learn to solve, or most likely, try to live with, these problems, and the social stigma and impoverishment that comes with them. You canât take part in a ânormalâ life in a society like others all around you do. Or we get left behind by friends who carry on doing what ânormalâ people do. And we become more isolated, more alone, and we feel more stress.
This is the impoverishment funnel
This is not a âchoiceâ.
Itâs survival.
Itâs existing, not living.
As a society, we can decide on whether we want these inequalities, these distortions, to remain.
If we accept that financial insecurity is a key factor in what leads people down the impoverishment funnel, then what should we do?
Shouldnât we be able to live a life where we can access not only the bare essentials but also what enables us to live a public life with dignity?
Lack of income is a fundamental problem that needs to be fixed in a just society. A parallel approach might also be to remove the income requirement to access key services, such as making public transport and access to key social, health and cultural amenities free.
The situation is critical.
As a society, are we prepared to get out of threat-management mode and lift our head beyond the three-year parliamentary cycle of short-term fixes?
Can we think strategically and creatively for the long-term?
Because unless deal with the inability of people to meet their basic needs through adequate income and services, we are dooming them to âchoicesâ they have no control over, and wilfully impoverishing generations to leading diminished lives, and stripping them of their dignity.
It is that stark.
Will we choose to intervene?
We have the financial bandwidth to choose a national poverty reduction programme to improve lives and break inter-generational cycles of poverty, improve the social determinants of wellbeing and break the shackles of financial insecurity.
Imagine the pain it would diminish and the creative and strategic thinking it could unleash.
As far as policy programmes go, this is a no-brainer.
Thank you for reading Noise Reduction by Sarb Johal. This post is public so feel free to share it.
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Many people think that meditation can not only have an impact on stress and illness, but can also improve prosociality. But meditation and prosociality are multi-dimensional constructs: so what exactly are we talking about here?
Listen to my conversation with Dr Ute Kreplin at the School of Psychology, Massey University in New Zealand as we talk about her research examining this link, and how the way stadies are carried out can affect the sorts of results they report and how we need to be careful about how we interpret them.
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What is revenge? How can we understand this dark emotion? The sayings, ârevenge is sweetâ and that ârevenge is a dish best served coldâ are revealing.
Listen to my conversation with David Chester, Assistant Professor at the Psychology Department of Virginia Commonwealth University, as I talk with him about his programme of research over the past few years looking at dimensions of revenge and how we relate to this complex emotion. We also touch upon the idea of social pain and loneliness, how one of the worst forms of pain for a human is to be ignored, and how films often depict time slowing down when it portrays violence - believe me, its and interesting and wide-ranging conversation!
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Welcome to this special conference edition of Who cares? What's the point?
In January 2018, I traveled to Cardiff in Wales, UK for two days to participate in the British Psychological Society's Division of Clinical Psychology Annual Conference. When I was there, I was fortunate enough to talk with three researchers about the fascinating work they were doing. So, this show has not one, but three interviews and research topics.
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At some times in our lives, we might want to get support with our mental health and wellbeing. Perhaps we are struggling with a particular issue, or maybe we want to be proactive and take steps to make sure we are adopting healthy practices to keep us on top of things. This days, we have our smartphones with us almost all the time, and this is a natural place for many people to turn to for support or inspiration. But how do you go about choosing a mental health or wellbeing app? And do you know if it is a good one or not?
Listen to my conversation with David Bakker, a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at Monash University in Australia. We talk about his recent research reviewing mental health apps, and some evidence-based recommendations for future app development. Finally, we talk about his involvement in developing some if these apps as part of a team that is working to improve the choices for people using these apps, and the clinicians who might be working with them.
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Recent local and world events seem to have triggered, or perhaps have reflected and amplified increasingly polarised views. These views can be expressed online in ways that come across as angry and appear seemingly everywhere - so much so that many websites have turned off their channels for community participation because they have become too difficult to manage.
Against the background of verbal attacks becoming all too frequent online, join me as I talk with Ryan Martin, Psychology Chairperson and Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in the USA as we talk about his paper exploring the ways that anger is expressed and experienced on the internet, and our conversation about how this might apply to social media and our emotional development and processing.
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People usually tend to over-estimate their own capabilities and qualities compared to others. For examples, people tend to believe they are more intelligent, trustworthy, moral and happier than others, as well as making better leaders, and drivers. However, when it comes to thinking about our social lives, what little we know seems to indicate that we think other people have more rich, vibrant and satisfying social lives than we do ourselves.
Join me as I talk with Sebastian Deri - postgraduate researcher at Cornell University in the USA - as we talk about his paper about a series of 11 experiments designed to explore how we compare our social lives to others and where our pessimistic bias might come from.
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There are some commonly held misconceptions in the general public about how the brain works and how it affects how we learn - these are often called "neuromyths." We know that the general public can fall prey to these much of the time, but what about our educators? And if teachers believe in these neuromyths, what does it mean for how they teach, or how schools allocate their resources? And can we protect against falling for these neuromyths by better training?
Join me as I talk with Kelly Macdonald - doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Houston, and Asst Professor Dr Lauren McGrath at the University of Denver - both in the USA - as we talk about their paper exploring belief in neuromyths by educators and the general public, and how we can change things.
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For many of you listening to this podcast, taking photos of things and people in our lives has become much more common, as well as documenting our experiences of life. Understanding how the act of taking photos may get in the way of or increase our pleasure in these activities seems like an important topic for research. Implicitly, we may hear the message that we should stop taking so many photos and just be in the moment and enjoy our experiences without trying to record everything. But is this true? Does photography - especially using our smartphones - get in the way?
Join me as I talk with Asst Prof Alixandra Barasch, based in the Stern Business School, New York University, USA.
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There has been a lot of recent attention on gender pay equity, the re-emergence of racism in western societies, and how youth mental health has been an increasing concern in recent years. However, the way we talk about older people, and indeed, how older people view and talk about themselves is also revealing of deeper attitudes and biases.
Join me as I talk with Assoc Prof Dr Tracey Gendron, based in the Department of Gerontology in the School of Allied Health Professions at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.
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Most people will experience a relationship break up. They can be hard to get over. One way to manage this is to try to actively decrease the feelings of love you have for your ex-partner? But does this work? Do people believe they can control their feelings of love in this way? Can you actually do this?
Join me as I talk with Asst Prof Dr Sandra Langeslag, based at the Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri - St Louis. We talk about how she tested three strategies for regulating love feelings after a break-up and how successful they were, using brain activity and self-report data as her measures.
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You might be familiar with the often quoted statistic that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people experience mental health difficulties. What you might not be aware of is that is the answer if people are answering about what they are experiencing at that particular point in time. Long-term studies following the same people over time show that more than 4 out of 5 people (actually 87%) have experienced a mental health disorder by the time they reach age 38. This radically changes our understanding, meaning that mental health disorders are far more widely experienced than previously thought. In this show, I talk with Jonathan Schaefer at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University in the USA, and his work looking at the data generated by New Zealand's Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study and that research team. We talk about the idea of enduring mental health: that is, what is it about the 13% of people that defines those that do not experience a mental health disorder by age 38, and what this might mean for 'social investment' approaches and universal mental health care provision, amongst a range of other topics.
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In July 2011, Anders Breivik killed 77 adults and children in a bombing in Oslo and a subsequent shooting on a nearby island where the Norwegian Labor Party's youth organisation was having their summer camp. I talk with Dr Bertel Hansen of the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark about the impact of that event in Norway on the incidence of trauma- and stressor-related disorders in the neighbouring country of Denmark, and discuss this with respect to of the impact on that same population of the 9/11 attacks. We discuss the impacts of geographical proximity, cultural similarity, and the possible influence of the news media on the incidence of disorders following terrorist attacks.
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Learning to drive has been a rite of passage in many societies for decades. For many, it is a central part of their everyday lives, especially if they live in rural areas, or where other alternatives aren't as practical or appealing. But what happens if we become anxious about driving? How might that shape our lives and wellbeing?
In this show I speak with Dr Joanne Taylor, Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Massey University in New Zealand.
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Consciousness is a curious and complex phenomenon. There are many ideas about what consciousness means and how it comes about, but I came across a compelling and relatively simple argument when I attended TEDFest this year - where the TED2017 conference was livestreamed for TEDx conference organisers from around the world, all convened in New York.
In this show I speak with Dr Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK. He is also Co-Director at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. We talk about how the brain tries to make sense of the world outside, but also integrates information coming from inside the body to help us perceive the world and our place in relation to it. We talk about the origin of emotions, mindfulness, mental illness and possible applications for the framework he proposes.
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Worrying can be described as the process of unpleasant thoughts that keep coming back and cause us to be anxious or distressed. Although it's certainly true that worrying is often seen as a problem, there is increasing evidence that it can also be seen in positive ways too.
In this show I speak with Associate Professor Kate Sweeny from the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside in the USA.
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If you drink coffee and buy that in a shop, the barista might call out your name - which may be written on your disposable cup - when it's ready. Does the fact that your name is written on the cup have an influence on whether you choose to recycle it or not? Even if they spelled your name wrong?
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About 1 in 9 adult New Zealanders receive a prescription for antidepressants each year. Although we think they are generally helpful for people, we know surprisingly little about what it might be like to take them. This week I speak with Associate Professor Dr Kerry Gibson from the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand to find out more.
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