Link to episode: https://overcast.fm/+D88LXtYzQ

• Emotions don’t happen to us, they are responses to things that happen to us. 
• In fact, we don’t respond directly to the things that happen to us, but rather we respond to our concept of what happens. We don’t directly respond to the outside world, we respond to our mind’s interpretation of the outside world. 
• If someone who has been blind from birth gets a cornea transplant, they don’t automatically see what we see. They see blobs of light and dark for days, weeks, and sometimes years, until their mind forms a conceptual understanding of what it takes in. 
• Everything around us (what we see) and inside us (what we feel) is a blob until we learn how to interpret it.
• Our brain has four basic reactions: pleasant, unpleasant, aroused, calm. Our brain then reacts to our concepts of what happens to us and makes meanings based on past experience. Those are emotions. 
• We can change our concepts of the outside world. 
• The consequence of this is that we can also change our emotions. This means we have control and responsibility over our emotions. 
• Emotions aren’t objective. Trauma isn’t the same as cells that have corrupted and turned cancerous. 
• It can be a long a difficult task to change our concepts. But it can be done. We control our experience of reality. 

Listening Notes for Venkatesh Rao on The Three Types of Decision Makers, Mental Models, and How to Process Information | The Knowledge Podcast

Link to the podcast: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/02/venkatesh-rao-decision-making/

Types of Decision Makers

• Evidence-based
• Moral (right vs wrong)
• Tribal (emotional/affiliation decision-making)

Staying grounded in reality by maintaining cracks in your mental models. (Note: I first need to codify my existing mental models)

From Wikipedia: Red Queen effect is an evolutionary hypothesis which proposes that organisms must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate not merely to gain reproductive advantage, but also simply to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing organisms in an ever-changing environment. The phenomenon’s name is derived from a statement that the Red Queen made to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in her explanation of the nature of Looking-Glass Land: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Venkatesh Rao only takes notes when he is doing academic research (for references and quotes). He optimizes normal reading for serendipity. Note taking, he thinks, interferes with that.

How do we structure organizations as we get more and more independent workers/free agents?

There are two ways of looking at the Uber situation:

1. Drivers not getting paid enough based on their being the necessary labor (drivers) (1920s labor style)
2. Drivers training an AI data set for self-driving cars, so being paid as researchers helping the tech transition.

Not picking a book that influenced you the most. Influence is difficult to measure. I read quite a bit and different books do different things for me at various points in my life. There are books that were important to me at a particular time that I wouldn’t even have finished the first chapter of at another time. There are books I reread every few years, but I think it has more to do with personal attachment and what I need, not necessarily what will work for someone else. This is what I like to tell people: Go read more. Read things that give you joy. Read things you are curious about.